The Promise (12 page)

“My God,” I said.

“Michael is that sick?” my father asked. “Yes.”

“I’ve been with him for weeks,” I said. “I never saw him that sick.”

“He’s very sick. He breaks things. He bums books. He shattered his telescope a week before he came up here. He’s a serious discipline problem in school. And he resists therapy. That’s always an indication of something very deep-seated and serious. They’ve been told he might harm himself. They’re very frightened. They thought the summer would help and he would change. They were deluding themselves, they realize that now. I’m going to talk to the administrator and my supervisor. There’s a procedure everyone has to go through. But they’re ready to start immediately.”

“I never saw it.” I felt my hands cold with icy sweat. “I never saw any of that in Michael.”

“Yes you did,” Danny said quietly. “But you didn’t know what you were seeing.”

He was moody and subdued all during supper. Yes, he would be in the same apartment next year, he said, in response to my father’s question. It was a good apartment. They had promised to replace the worn linoleum and to give it a fresh coat of paint. He would be going to school and working three full days a week at the treatment center. I told him I hoped he would be opening his window. He smiled bleakly.

I asked him if he had ever read any of Abraham Gordon’s books. Yes, he had read his books, he said. He couldn’t think of any books he disagreed with more.

“Abraham Gordon is a great scholar,” my father said.

Danny said he wasn’t questioning Abraham Gordon’s scholarship, only his theology.

“I understand how you feel, Danny,” my father said. “But Abraham Gordon has achieved something that is remarkable. To develop a theology for those who can no longer believe literally in God and revelation and who still wish to remain observant and not abandon the tradition—that is a remarkable achievement.”

Danny said he didn’t have that kind of a problem.

He left shortly after supper. He had not rested at all. He looked tired to the point of exhaustion.

I sat at the kitchen table with my father. He was working on the galleys.

“Why did they pick that treatment center?” I said.

He looked up from the galleys.

“Why did they pick the treatment center where Danny is working?”

“They know of Danny.”

“So what? Do you know how many good therapists there are in New York? What do they want with Danny?”

My father was silent a moment. “Reuven, did you ever mention to Rachel how Danny was raised?”

“Of course not.”

“She knows nothing of the silence?”

“Absolutely nothing.” From the time Danny was about six or seven until the end of his last year in college, Reb Saunders, Danny’s father, had deliberately created a barrier of silence between himself and his son, except when they studied Talmud together. He was frightened of Danny’s cold brilliance; he wanted to teach his son what it meant to suffer. Danny had suffered, all right. I did not understand what connection there could be between that and Michael, and I said so to my father.

He did not respond.

“This isn’t a coincidence,” I said. “You heard what Professor Gordon said. They were planning to talk to Danny anyway. What do they want with Danny?”

“I have no idea,” my father said. He looked at me curiously for a moment, then went back to working on the galleys.

Rachel called me later that evening. They had had a good talk with Danny. Her aunt and uncle were deeply grateful. Did I know what a kind and warm and sympathetic friend I had?

How was Michael? I wanted to know.

Moody, she said. He knew something was going on that had to do with him, but he had no idea what it was. “We had an awful time getting him out of the house,” she said. “He kept saying he wanted to meet Reuven’s friend.”

“When are they going to tell him?”

She didn’t know, she said. But Michael and his parents were going back to the city tomorrow. Her uncle was impatient now to start the procedure for getting Michael admitted. Danny had really overwhelmed them a little with his warmth and the patient way he had answered their questions. Where had I found such a friend? she asked.

“On a baseball field.”

I heard her laugh softly into the phone. “You should have
ducked,” she said. I had told her about the baseball game. She was imitating Danny’s faintly nasal voice. “Isn’t that what he said? You should have ducked.”

I told her she had a very good memory. “How come your mother took Michael?”

She had volunteered. There had been no one else to go.

“Why didn’t you go?”

“I wanted to meet Danny,” she said. Then she said, “My mother has an awful headache from that double feature.”

“ ‘Messengers for good deeds are never injured,’ ” I said in Hebrew, quoting the Talmud.

“Only in storybooks,” she said, and we said good night.

Abraham Gordon called early the next morning. My father spoke with him briefly, then gave me the phone. He had called to thank us again, he said. He and his wife were taking Michael home that morning. He understood I would be at the seminary library helping my father with the book. “Come up to my office and we’ll talk,” he said.

Ruth Gordon came on the phone. She wanted to thank me and my father, she said. She hoped we would have an opportunity to meet in the city. We had hardly talked yesterday, she said.

I heard Abraham Gordon calling for Michael.

“Hello,” Michael said, his voice thin and a little breathless.

“Hello,” I said.

“I didn’t meet your friend yesterday. They didn’t want me to meet him.”

I did not say anything.

“They’re out of the room,” Michael said. “We can talk. Why didn’t they want me to meet him?”

I asked him how he had liked the double feature.

The science-fiction movie had been great, he said. The other had been only so-so. “Why didn’t they want me to meet him?” he said. “I wanted to meet him because he’s your friend. I may never be able to meet him now.”

I told him there would probably be another chance for him to
meet Danny one day. I felt very cold telling him that, but I didn’t know what else to say.

“Reuven?”

“Yes.”

“I’m sorry I acted that way at the carnival. I was terrible. I was terrible afterwards too. I was even a little terrible the first time we went sailing. But I liked the sailing.” He paused. “Will I see you in the city, Reuven?”

“Sure,” I said.

“You can come over and I’ll show you my new telescope. My father is going to help me build a new telescope.” He paused again. “They’re planning something. I can tell they’re planning something. We weren’t supposed to go home today.” He sounded a little panicky.

“I’ll see you in the city, Michael.”

“I don’t know what they’re planning. I wish they would tell me what they’re planning.”

Rachel called me about half an hour later. Michael had gone home with his parents. Her father was driving them home. Could I come over in the afternoon and keep her company? She was not feeling too well, she said.

We spent the afternoon together. The next day my father finished checking the galleys. For the first time that summer he went down to the beach and spent an afternoon in the sun.

On the Sunday before Labor Day my father and I went over to Rachel’s house. The five of us were together on the patio most of the afternoon. Sarah Gordon had set up her easel on a corner of the patio and was filling a large canvas with a blinding mixture of colors. She wore a pair of old shorts and a paint-encrusted blouse, and she daubed energetically at the canvas, the palette in one hand, a brush in the other. My father and Joseph Gordon talked gloomily about Senator McCarthy. Rachel and I watched Sarah flinging colors onto the canvas. It was good to be painting again, she said. She hadn’t painted all summer. She hadn’t quite been herself all summer. It was very good to be able to paint
again. Later, there was a barbecue. Joseph Gordon stood away from the smoke pouring from the white coals, his pipe between his teeth, tending zealously to the steaks and all the while continuing to talk with my father. It was a very friendly day. We did not once mention Michael.

That night Rachel and I swam together off the dock. It was a warm night and the sky was black and jeweled with stars. We swam in the bright light of the outdoor spots that illumined the stairway and the dock and a hundred yards of water. The water too was warm and we swam for a long time and later we sat on the dock and let the night dry us off and there were the pulsing sounds of frogs and crickets and the vaulting darkness overhead and the sense of the summer ending.

“Is Danny really very religious?” I heard Rachel ask.

“Yes.”

“Does he wear a skullcap in the treatment center too?”

“I’ve never asked him.”

“I don’t know anything about Hasidism,” she said.

We were silent awhile. The lake lapped gently against the shore.

“Reuven,” Rachel said quietly.

“Yes.”

“What have we learned about ourselves this summer?”

“That we’re good friends.”

“Yes,” she murmured.

“Very good friends.”

“Yes.”

“And that Molly Bloom is big with seed.”

She laughed and softly, very softly, kissed my cheek.

The next afternoon Rachel and her parents closed up the house and went home. My father and I spent the evening packing our bags. By noon the next day we were back in the city.

Williamsburg was stifling, narcotized by the heat. Our first-floor brownstone apartment felt drained of air. I went quickly through the rooms, opening windows. The apartment seemed suddenly strangely small.

Manya, our Russian housekeeper, returned the next morning. She gave me a hug that left my ribs aching and kept telling me in broken English how wonderful I looked, I had gotten so tan; but why was my father so pale, why hadn’t he been out in the sun more? Her graying hair was combed straight back from her forehead and braided into a large bun on the top of her head. She talked excitedly with my father in Russian for a few minutes. Then she put on her apron. I could hear the sounds of her man-sized shoes as she moved about, cleaning the apartment.

The heat continued. Williamsburg baked and broiled in it; the asphalt-paved streets softened in it; the sycamores on my block drooped in it; the Hasidim walked in the shade alongside the houses and stores of Lee Avenue in vain attempts to avoid it.

That Friday morning I traveled to the Zechariah Frankel Seminary and began to work on my father’s galleys. Ten days later, on a Monday, I returned to school.

I called Rachel almost every day during September. There was a great deal of trouble convincing Michael to enter the residential treatment center, more trouble than anyone had anticipated. His parents went through all the preliminary interviews and were told by the staff people at the center that Michael ought to be admitted. An interview was set up for Michael with the chief of clinical services for the fourth Monday in September. On the afternoon of the Shabbat before the interview his parents told him what they were planning. He was terrified. He became hysterical. He would not go. He screamed that he would not go. They called the chief of clinical services and he talked to Michael over the phone.

Michael went for the interview. He was calm, polite, responsive. Once back in the house, however, he became hysterical again. He would not go. He wasn’t crazy, he screamed. He would not go to a place where people were crazy. What were they trying to do to
him? He would never go to a place like that. Abraham Gordon called the chief of clinical services. They talked a long time over the phone. Then Abraham Gordon told his son that an interview would be set up between him and Danny Saunders, Reuven’s friend. Yes, Reuven’s friend worked there. Would Michael see Reuven’s friend?

Michael and Danny spent almost two hours alone on a morning in the first week of October. In the second week of October, two days after Yom Kippur, Michael entered the residential treatment center.

BOOK TWO

—And who do you think is the greatest poet? asked Boland, nudging his neighbor
.

—Byron, of course, answered Stephen.…

—
You don’t care whether he was a heretic or not? said Nash
.

—What do you know about it? shouted Stephen.…

—Here, catch hold of this heretic, Heron called out
.

In a moment Stephen was a prisoner
.

JAMES JOYCE