The Outsider (6 page)

He closed his eyes for a few seconds, and when he opened them, the congregation had quieted and there was not even a rustle of sound from the children.

“I went to the Institute,” David continued, “not because I had a calling, as the Christians say, but because my mother, may she rest in peace, desired it so ardently. It was a good education, and my mother was a widow and quite ill. I had to face that fact, and I decided that after the seminary I'd put in a few more years of school and become a physician or a teacher, which was the way my thoughts went at the time.

“The war intervened. I enlisted and broke my mother's heart. But there are enough of you in this congregation wearing that funny little pin which we call a ‘ruptured duck' to understand what motivated me. Even today, so soon after the fact, it is becoming difficult to recall the nature of that cloud of horror that Adolf Hitler and his Nazi movement cast upon the world.

“I am not going to bore you with any account of my life in the United States Army. Suffice it to say that I was a chaplain in the Forty-fifth Division, Seventh Army, and a trail of horror and human suffering and courage and fear led us finally to a place outside Munich that was called Dachau. That was just about a year ago, on the twenty-ninth of April, nineteen forty-five. It was also an eternity ago in another world.

“I was with one of the first rifle companies that went into the place. I can't truly tell you what I saw there, as much as I might want to. There are bits and pieces of the horror, like standing at an open mass grave and staring at the stiff, naked bodies of those who had been murdered and cast there, and trying to breathe through the terrible smell of decaying flesh. Pieces of memory like that, and I still wake up at night, moaning and frightening my poor dear wife.

“But there is one part of the memory as clear and lucid as if it had happened only yesterday. With a couple of G.I.s, I was walking toward one of the prison buildings, when the liberated prisoners began to come out. They didn't come out running and leaping to greet their new freedom. They came out slowly, tentatively, as if they were afraid that this might be another grotesque trick. They were walking skeletons, inhabiting filthy striped and ragged suits, bearded, fleshless agony walking, dragging their feet, blinking.

“I stopped, and the two kids from the company who were with me, they stopped, and one of them was a Jewish kid from the Bronx who had gotten three commendations already, and he was one of those crazy, brainless kids who will go up against anything, a rifleman, and he began to cry, and through his tears, muttering, shit, shit, shit — and I say those words here in this house of God because if there is a God, he will understand that prayer, because it was a prayer — and we just stood, watching them and waiting. They came up to us and stopped, and we could smell the stale, unwashed odor of their bodies and clothes, and because we were what we were, American kids full of clean, we moved back away from them.

“And then one of them, a small man, skin and bones and bloodshot eyes trying to weep, pointed a shaking finger at the Star of David I wore on my blouse. He tried to speak, but couldn't. Then another said, ‘
Zeit yir a rebbe? Zeit yir a Yid?'
Are you a rabbi or simply a Jew? My Yiddish isn't very good, but my German is better, and I told them that I was a rabbi and an army chaplain. Then they gathered around me, close, these poor, emaciated people, touching me, calling a dumb, twenty-eight-year-old American kid
abba,
the Hebrew word for father. Goodman, the Jewish kid from the Bronx, was still crying, and the other kid with me, who wasn't Jewish, he was crying too, and then one of the men, one of the concentration camp men, he said to me, in Yiddish, ‘Please, Rabbi, please, will you say the
Kaddish
with us for the dead?' For the benefit of Reverend Carter and his friends here with us tonight, the
Kaddish
is an ancient prayer spoken for the dead. It is not easy for me to talk about this, so I will only say that I took out my
tallis,
put it over my shoulders, and I led them in the
Kaddish.
It was then that I put aside other things and became a rabbi. So if you will permit me, I will ask you to join me in saying the
Kaddish
— for the dead in Dachau, Auschwitz, Treblinka, and all the other places of killing that the Nazis made.”

•

PART TWO

1948

•

H
is first death in Leighton Ridge, his first funeral. It was a withered little lady of seventy-nine years, the grandmother of Alan Buckingham's wife, Dora. She had been a shy, silent creature. While Buckingham was one of the fourteen original organizers of the synagogue, he had never been active in synagogue affairs, and after the first few weeks of David's tenure, he ceased to come to Friday night or Saturday morning services. His wife, Dora, however, rarely missed one or another of the weekend services, always bringing the old lady with her, and now and then her children: Jed, who was eight, and Jonathan, eleven. Dora was a tall, slender woman with bangs across a round face and deep, dark blue eyes. The Buckinghams lived in a lovely old Colonial house, which they had restored, and which Dora had furnished with such love and attention to detail that to David it felt more like a museum than a home. Alan Buckingham worked for a burgeoning national magazine with offices in New Haven.

When David and Lucy first met the Buckinghams, Lucy was of the opinion that Dora was not Jewish at all. “She doesn't look Jewish,” Lucy decided. “She doesn't even diet, and she has to be at least five feet ten.”

Through his laughter, David tried to tell Lucy that she didn't look very Jewish either.

“Don't laugh at me. And even he doesn't look a bit Jewish. I'll bet they're passing.”

David stared at her, his mouth open. “That's wonderful. That's positively wonderful.”

“I don't like to be laughed at. Hey, that
would
be wonderful, two of these classy Leighton Ridge Wasps trying to pass as Jews. Infiltrating.”

“Infiltrating what, Lucy? Did I ever tell you about Father Joey Mulligan?”

“No.”

“Funny, I should think I would have. Anyway, he was a Catholic chaplain, and the two of us were together a great deal and we became wonderful friends. He was given a parish in New Mexico, but I'm sure he'll turn up here one day. Well, the way it happened, one of the kids, a G.I., was looking for the rabbi — I think he was from the field artillery — and I tell him that I'm the rabbi, and he says that I don't look Jewish. Joey Mulligan is standing there, and he grabs this field artillery kid by the arm and says, ‘I want to tell you a little story, sonny.' The kid is maybe eighteen and Joey is twenty-six, but in that army it was quite a gap.

“‘There was this Jewish feller,' Joey tells him, ‘and he liked to travel, and wherever he went, he looks for the local synagogue. This time he's in Tokyo, and it takes a little time but finally he finds the local synagogue, and after the service, he goes up to the rabbi and says to him — that is, he says it to the little Japanese rabbi — “Rabbi, I'm an American Jew and I really enjoyed your service.” Then the rabbi looks at him carefully and shakes his head. “You don't look Jewish,” the rabbi says.'”

“That's a nice touch for Mulligan,” Lucy said. “What did the kid do?”

“He asked Mulligan what he meant.”

“There you are. That's why all those nice parables Jesus kept dropping around don't do Christians much good. I finished the Old Testament. I'm on the New Testament now.”

Nevertheless, Lucy became quite fond of Dora Buckingham. Dora's family had come to America from Germany in the great migration of 1848. Her husband, Alan, was from an old Virginia family, Episcopalian, his marriage regarded with anger and contempt by said old Virginia family. A bad heart had kept him out of the service, and he bore this as a heavy burden of guilt and remorse, and while he had not formally become Jewish, he pressed Dora to raise their children as Jews.

It was he who approached David about his mother-in-law's impending death, and it was then that he made his position absolutely clear. “Rabbi, I'm not Jewish. I know your wife is friendly with my wife, so you probably know that, but I specify it just in case you didn't know. My wife is Jewish, so, according to Jewish law, the children are Jewish.”

“You didn't have to tell me that. I did know, as a matter of fact.”

“Well, that's only in passing. The main reason I am here is that my mother-in-law is dying. The doctors tell us another few weeks at the most. She knows, and she desires to be buried in the consecrated ground of a Jewish cemetery. She also knows there is no Jewish cemetery here, but she desperately wants to be buried here, close to her children and grandchildren.”

“I can understand that,” David agreed. “But you know, Alan, we have a very high water table here on the Ridge. You've seen what happens in a heavy rainstorm. The ground fills up like a sponge, and that's no good for a cemetery. We need a place where the water table is at least twenty feet below the surface and stays that way, and it has to be a fairly flat field — not easy to find in Leighton Ridge. Well, we found a place like that, adjoining the Episcopalian cemetery.”

“Oh, yes. I know the place.”

“They don't need it. They have enough burying space for the next two hundred years, and all we want is eight acres, and we're ready to pay a very good price.”

“But?”

“But we're Jewish. You know, Alan, I have seen such monstrous anti-Semitism in Germany that it's hard for me to adapt to the kind of genteel dislike for Jews that I meet here.”

“Like hell it's genteel.”

“I looked at the town records. The Episcopalians own about nineteen acres, apart from what they use for their cemetery, and our estimate is that eight acres should see us through the next hundred years. So I took it to their rector. Do you know him?”

“Bradshaw? Yes! I have the misfortune of knowing him. That misbegotten horse's ass has been over to the house three times, trying to bring me back to the church. Oh, he's all right, I guess. He just doesn't have a brain in his head.” He paused to stare at David. “He's putting you off?”

“Not so much him as the vestry. They have a treasurer, name of Sudbury, and a secretary, name of Hornblower.”

“Tall, skinny cadavers with no lips — oh, yes, I know them. Always had a sneaking suspicion that Hornblower was a lapsed Jew — what is it my mother-in-law calls them?”

“
Geshmat' Yid
?”

“That's it. He hates Jews with a passion — deep down in the belly. Hornblower. Ten to one that was not his father's name. Sell to Jews? Over his dead body. Sudbury is something else — believes he has a mission from God never to give up an inch of church land. What does the rector say? Would he sell us the land if the vestry agreed?”

“I think so. But you said there's no way to move Sudbury and Hornblower.”

“Not for ordinary mortals like you and me, Rabbi, but there are ways. My father was a very dear friend to Charley Gilbert.”

“And who was Charley Gilbert?”

“Bishop Charles Gilbert, and he is. I mean he's alive and ambulatory, and top man at the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine — which sits at One hundred and tenth Street in New York and which happens to be the largest Episcopal cathedral in the world, and which thereby has a very large measure of clout. Tomorrow morning I shall drive down there, exercise charm and pleading, and bring the bishop back with me.”

“You're kidding.”

“Oh, no. I'm absolutely serious.”

“I mean, why should Bishop Gilbert come?”

“He loves this kind of thing. Also, there's the simple matter of decency. He's a decent person. He'll come.”

He came; he let a few words drop here and there; and he had a pleasant dinner with Sudbury and Hornblower and Alan Buckingham. Votes were changed; the papers were drawn up; and there was a Jewish cemetery at Leighton Ridge. And now, he, David Hartman, was presiding over the funeral of Flora Schultz, the first death, the first hole dug six feet deep into this windswept Connecticut hillside. Somehow, strangely, inexplicably, this passing away of an old woman of seventy-nine years, a passing that was like a blade of grass gently picked up and cast away by the wind, reached into him more deeply than all the deaths by violence that he had witnessed overseas. Perhaps it was the total absence of violence, the coolness and beauty of the afternoon, the trees just breaking into their first yellow-green froth of spring — whatever it was, it gave him a moment of grace, so deep and true and painful that he felt the tears well into his eyes, not for grief but simply because the universe was true at that moment. So should a person go, in the fullness of years. As it was meant to be. But that too was an illusion. The world went on outside Leighton Ridge.

And when he intoned the mourner's
Kaddish,
the moment of grace washed away and he was back at Dachau, with the skinny, starved, hollow-eyed Jewish prisoners.

At home later, Lucy said, “You did very well.”

“At what?”

“I mean the funeral service, of course.”

“Oh? Well, I don't know. It's not a contest, is it? You look around at the circle standing by the grave, and you wonder who is pleased and who is agonized.”

“Pleased? I never knew you to be cynical before.”

David shrugged. “I guess I never thought much about old. Old is a sort of nasty word in our society. Oh, what in hell am I talking about? Not with Dora and Alan. They loved the old lady.”

He turned away abruptly and went up the narrow staircase to the tiny room under the eaves that he called his study. Directly outside his window was a splendid copper beech, which legend held had been planted a hundred years before by Abraham Stanford, the great Abolitionist leader and agitator, who was parson here at Leighton Ridge before he removed to Boston to head up the antislavery movement there. His presence had made Leighton Ridge briefly famous during the middle decades of the nineteenth century. Beyond the beech, two fine, high white pines framed a view across the Ridge and into the far distance. David sprawled in a chair, staring through the window and thinking thoughts that led nowhere. One old lady dies, like cut grass blown in the wind. He had been witness to a war that left fifty million human beings dead. No mind can grasp it, not the gas chambers of Adolf Hitler, not the atomic victims of Hiroshima, the burned flesh falling away from bones while they spelled out the logic of an eye for an eye with their Japanese screams of pain.