The Promise (33 page)

“We’ll want to see more of you from now on,” Abraham Gordon said quietly.

“We’re
very
grateful to you, Reuven,” Ruth Gordon said. “Michael feels he knows you so well. We would like to know you too.” She said it without any trace of hesitation or embarrassment. I did not know what to say to that, and so I said nothing.

“Perhaps we’ll have an opportunity to talk about those answers of mine you say you don’t care for,” Abraham Gordon said with a smile.

“I’d like that,” I heard myself say.

“We would all like that,” Ruth Gordon said.

A few minutes later, Danny and I were putting on our coats and hats. Rachel and her parents were staying on awhile. There were some plans and things they still had to discuss, Rachel said. I noticed that Danny neither kissed her nor touched her when we left.

The night was bitter cold and I felt the wind through my coat. We hailed a cab and rode for a while in silence. Danny sat slouched against the back of the seat, his coat looking bulky around him, his face faintly luminous in the night light of the streets.

“Can a son hate a father and not know it?” I asked.

He was so startled by the question that I thought he would cry out. He became rigid on the seat and gaped at me. It was a moment or two before I felt him begin to relax.

“Yes,” he said in a very tight voice.

“What would it do to him?”

“That depends,” he said softly.

“Suppose he were all mixed up about a lot of other things. What would it do to him?”

“That still depends,” he said, very quietly, looking at me, his eyes glittering behind his horn-rimmed glasses.

“Suppose he had just become an adolescent with all that that implies and had absolutely no one his age he felt he could trust and talk to and was afraid to talk to adults. What would it do to him?”

“Exactly what it’s doing to Michael,” he said.

We were silent the rest of the way home. I found my father asleep.

The church bells rang, and Rav Kalman entered the room. I sat in my seat, watching wisps of cigarette smoke spiraling slowly in the sunlight that fell across my Talmud—and thought about Michael.
Rav Kalman did not call on me. But a moment before the end of the class he asked me to remain behind.

We were alone. He stood behind his desk, smoking and gazing down at me, a small chunky man, all of him dark, his clothes, his face, his eyes.

He said bluntly, “You are angry at me, Malter. Yes?”

The question took me by surprise and I did not respond.

“Tell me, Malter, who else should I have gone to in order to have your father’s book explained to me? I did not want to attack your father for things he did not say. I wanted to understand clearly what he wrote. I went to his son because the son of David Malter understands his father’s writings, and I know the son.”

I stared at him and did not say anything. I wanted to get out of there. I was finding it almost impossible to be physically close to him. I had never in my life come across a man who was so zealous a guardian of Torah that he did not care whom or how he destroyed in its defense. I had never thought Torah could create so grotesque a human being.

“You have thought of what we talked about, Malter?”

I nodded.

“And?”

I told him I would prefer to discuss it another time.

“Another time,” he said. “When?”

I told him soon.

“We have a lot to talk about, Malter. It should be very soon.”

He dismissed me. At the doorway, I glanced over my shoulder and saw him sitting behind his desk, his head in his hands. I went out of there utterly despising him and took a bus home.

The following Sunday morning Danny and two child-care workers brought Michael into the small room below the foyer of the residential treatment center. Danny had told Michael only that they were going to let him stay alone for a while in a special room
because they felt it would help him get well. Michael screamed that he hated to be alone in a room and fought them. They locked him in. Danny stayed outside the door for a while, listening to Michael’s curses and screams, then went upstairs to his office.

Rachel was there with her parents and her aunt and uncle. Danny sat behind his desk and spoke to them reassuringly. Ruth Gordon wept quietly, making no sound, the tears flowing down her face. Abraham Gordon sat alongside her, his tall body bowed and his face ashen. Danny grew silent. Then—as Rachel described it to me later—a strange thing happened. As if suddenly taking on a life of its own, Danny’s right hand rose slowly to the side of his face, and with his thumb and forefinger he began to caress an imaginary earlock. His eyes were closed and he sat behind his desk, swaying faintly back and forth, and the thumb and forefinger moved against each other and then the forefinger lifted and made small circular motions in the air and then lowered and met the thumb again, moving across it, caressing the invisible hairs, softly, gently. Ruth Gordon stopped crying. The five of them sat there, staring as if hypnotized at the slow movements of Danny’s fingers. Then Danny opened his eyes and became aware of his hand alongside his face and drew his fingers away and let his hand fall slowly to the pile of monographs on top of his desk.

BOOK THREE

All beginnings are difficult
.

THE MIDRASH

And again there were the twilight weeks, a length of dark winter between January and March when I was unable to see Michael but could not stop thinking of him alone in a bare room on a mattress with only hate and rage for companions. The leaves were all gone from the streets now, blown away by the winds or reduced to dust beneath trampling feet, and there was the cold sun or the gray skies and only an occasional ghostly memory of the lake and the Sailfish and the water against the shoreline and the dock.

Michael haunted my dreams. They were dreams of horror, filled with distorted visions of him screaming his fears to the unheeding walls, and I would wake in the night trembling, with the sound of his thin voice still echoing in the darkness of my room. To convince myself of the scientific feasibility of the experiment, I spent most of January reading the literature I had seen in Danny’s possession and a great deal of other material I had not seen earlier but which he felt I might want to read. I understood enough to realize that the experiment had a sound theoretical base. But it made no difference. Michael continued to scream in the dark nights of my room.

Others were screaming too in those twilight months of waiting.

Rav Kalman wrote nothing else about my father’s book. After his second attack there were days when the synagogue where we prepared for our Talmud classes seethed with noisy arguments as students debated the various points he had raised. To my surprise and anger most of the students agreed with much of what he had
written: the method of study used by my father
was
dangerous to all religions; it
was
a threat to the sanctity of the Talmudic text; it
did
endanger the structure of religious law; it
did
make possible the specter of biblical emendation. There were students who sought to defend the method: it was intended to
better
our understanding of the text; it was
not
a threat to religious law because once this or that law had been decided upon it became independent of any specific text; a clear and logical line
could
be drawn between the Talmud, which had not been revealed and therefore could be altered by scholars, and the Pentateuch, which had been revealed and therefore must remain untouched. But those students were few in number and were invariably shouted down by the others. After a few days I was no longer surprised and angry. This was a yeshiva. I could not expect anything else from the student body of a yeshiva.

On the Tuesday morning following the second attack there was a sudden raging argument between Rav Kalman and Rav Gershenson in the corridor outside the synagogue. We heard their voices as we sat at the tables and we came away from our studies and crowded the doorways of the synagogue and listened in stunned amazement to what was going on. They stood in the middle of the corridor, their faces pale with rage. I had never seen Rav Gershenson angry; I had never heard him raise his voice. But he was angry that morning. His long, pointed gray beard quivered; his voice, which in class was often barely audible, was now loud and rasping. And Rav Kalman, looking quite small next to Rav Gershenson’s tall frame, stood his ground and shouted back, his eyes glittering with almost uncontrollable fury.

“You want too much!” Rav Gershenson was shouting. “You want to make them all into saints! You are destroying the Torah!”

“What do you say?” Rav Kalman almost screamed. “I am destroying the Torah? I?” He stood on the tips of his toes, his head tilted back, his dark beard jutting outward almost level with the floor, and I saw his hands clench into fists. He shook a fist in Rav
Gershenson’s face. “It is you who are destroying the Torah!” he shouted. “You!”

“It is a different world here! You cannot—”