The Promise (31 page)

My father slept all afternoon. I tried reading a Hebrew novel for a while, gave it up, studied some Talmud and gave that up too, roamed through the apartment, stared through the front window at the Hasidim walking along the street, and then found myself in front of the bookcase in my room, looking at the section
where I kept the English novels I owned. Then I was holding James Joyce’s
Ulysses
in my hands. Then I was on my bed, reading the Ithaca section. I read until it was time for the Afternoon Service. After praying the service, I brought my father his supper on a tray and sat in the kitchen over some food and continued reading. Then I prayed the Evening Service, and my father chanted the Havdalah—he came into the kitchen for that, then into the living room to light the Hanukkah candles, and then went immediately back to bed—and afterward I sat at the desk in my room and went on reading. I had never quite understood that part of
Ulysses
until I read it that Shabbat. I was almost done with it when the phone rang.

It was Danny. Was I going out tonight? he wanted to know. I told him I wasn’t going anywhere tonight, my father wasn’t feeling well and I was staying home. Was it anything serious? he asked. No, it was a cold. Why? He wanted me to come with him to the Gordons. My head had been full of Ithaca until then and I had been talking and not really listening to him. Now I caught the panic in his voice. What happened? I asked. Something happened with Michael? Yes, something happened with Michael. No, he hadn’t been hurt or anything like that. He would pick me up in a few minutes and we would go by cab to the Gordons. Rachel would be there with her parents. Could I be ready in a few minutes? Yes, I could be ready. He hung up.

My father was still coughing but he had no fever, so when I told him about Danny’s call and listened to him urge me to go I did not feel too concerned about leaving him alone. I shaved and put on a fresh shirt and was knotting my tie when I heard the honking of an automobile horn outside. It was a cab. I told my father I was leaving and went quickly out. There was a cold wind and the branches of the sycamores swayed wildly. I slid into the back seat and heard Danny give the driver an Eastern Parkway address.

He was unshaven and his eyes blinked repeatedly and he looked
as though he had not slept in a long time. He held a small overnight bag on his lap. He saw me looking at the bag.

“I went back to pick up my tefillin and some things,” he said.

“Went back?” I stared at him. “You weren’t home for Shabbat?”

“I’ve been at the treatment center since three in the morning.”

“You went to the treatment center on Shabbat?”

He spoke very rapidly as the cab took us through the dark asphalt-paved Brooklyn streets. I listened in dread and with a sense of too much happening all at the same time, too much—why everything all at once like that? The cab dodged through traffic and lurched around corners. It was an old cab and it rattled and trembled and wheezed noisily. But it possessed a singular virtue for which I was grateful: a silent driver. I listened to Danny.

It had taken most of the day to reconstruct from Michael’s disconnected words what had happened prior to Danny’s arrival. At a quarter of one in the morning, Michael had opened the door to his room and looked carefully up and down the corridor. The child-care worker on night duty was in his room. The corridor was empty. Michael closed the door softly behind him. He was fully dressed and had on his knee-length coat. He walked quietly through the corridor and stopped at four other doors, tapping on each softly. Four boys came out of their rooms. They too were fully dressed. The five of them walked very quietly to the end of the corridor away from the main stairway that led down to the living room and the foyer. They went through the exit door and down the back stairway to the thick wooden double door that opened into the dining room and the kitchen. The door was locked. There were small rectangles of opaque glass in the door. Michael removed one of his shoes and with the heel broke one of the panes of glass and reached through and opened the door from the inside. He cut his wrist doing that, but it was a superficial wound and there was little bleeding. The sound of the glass falling onto the floor of the dining room had been indistinct even to the five boys immediately outside the door.

The dining room was dark but they did not need light to find
their way into the kitchen; they ate in that dining room three times a day. In the kitchen Michael opened one of the drawers in the large wooden table on which meat was prepared. He distributed four long knives to the boys and took one for himself. They went quickly back through the kitchen and the dining room, then along the corridor past the offices and into the living room. The uniformed night watchman usually sat at the desk in the foyer. He saw them. He also saw the knives. He stood up very slowly. He was a big man, with a barrel chest and a heavy pink face and thick arms, but he moved slowly and carefully as the five of them came toward him with the long knives in their hands.

Michael told him to get out of the way. The guard asked him where they were going. Michael told him again to get out of the way. He couldn’t do that, the guard said. They knew he couldn’t do that. Why didn’t they let him have those knives and then turn around and go on back to their rooms? He couldn’t let them go out. They knew that. Why did they want to make trouble for him and themselves? The guard did not think they would do anything to him if he did not let them see how frightened he really was.

Michael turned to one of the boys, a short, dark-haired, thin-faced boy of thirteen with strange burning eyes and his tongue running constantly over his lips. Michael asked the boy if he thought the guard could keep them from going out. The boy looked at the guard and began to grin crazily. The guard then recognized the boy: a schizophrenic who was making excellent progress in therapy but had to be carefully watched. Certain kinds of schizophrenics are capable of doing anything with a knife if aroused. They can kill themselves or anyone near them; or they can go into a frozen panic and do absolutely nothing.

The guard moved slowly aside. Michael laughed in triumph. The boys unlocked the front door and ran from the building. The guard immediately called the child-care worker on night duty. Together they woke the rest of the staff, going quietly from room to room so as not to disturb the other children.

They could hear the five boys laughing and shouting and racing
through the grounds. The outside lights were turned on. Two of the boys were spotted immediately and came forward meekly and surrendered their knives and were sent up to their rooms, each of them accompanied by a staff member. A few minutes later, a third boy was found near the school building. They had a little trouble convincing him to give up the knife, but he did, finally, and went into the house. Michael and the schizophrenic boy were discovered in the pagoda. Michael laughed when they told him to give them his knife. He laughed loudly and shrilly and said he would kill anyone who came near him, they were all liars and cheats and he hated them and he would kill them or they would have to kill him if they wanted the knife.

The cottage parents and one of the single child-care workers stood near the pagoda. One of them suggested that they call the police. But that would mean headlines the next day and more fear and bad feeling in the neighborhood. The decision as to whether or not the police should be called would have to be made by the treatment center administrator. The staff member on night duty said he had better call Dr. Altman and Dan Saunders. But at that point the administrator arrived. He was a tall, gaunt, bald-headed man and he approached the pagoda and ordered Michael to give him the knife. Michael cursed him, loudly, shrilly, his voice breaking. The administrator went quickly into his office and called Dr. Altman, who said he would be over immediately and told him to call Daniel Saunders.

There were three phones in Reb Saunders’s house, all with the same number, one in Reb Saunders’s study, one in the hall of the second-floor apartment where Danny’s parents and Levi slept, one in the third-floor hall a few feet from Danny’s room. The use of the phone on Shabbat is forbidden by Jewish law except in circumstances that constitute a clear emergency, and so the phones in that house almost never rang on Shabbat. On the rare occasions when they did ring they were ignored, because everyone assumed that the person at the other end had dialed a wrong number.

The phones in Reb Saunders house began to ring at ten minutes
past two that morning. Danny was immediately awake. He lay in bed in the darkness of his room and listened to the ringing of the phones echo through the house. After the seventh ring, the phones stopped. Then they started again. Danny was out of his bed and going down the stairs to the second floor when the phones stopped ringing the second time.

He found his father and brother in the hall of the second-floor apartment, both of them in robes and skullcaps. They were staring at the phone. Reb Saunders was about to say something to Danny when the phone started to ring again. He let it ring twice. Then he said to Danny in Yiddish, speaking over the noise of the ringing, “You think it is for you?”

Danny stared down at the phone and said nothing. He felt as if the sound of the phone were coming from somewhere inside himself.

“Who would ring at such an hour?” Levi asked in Yiddish. He held the robe tightly to his body as though he were cold.

“You think it is for you, Daniel?” Reb Saunders asked again.

“It’s the wrong signal,” Danny said. He had arranged an emergency telephone signal with the staff member on night duty: three rings, then stop, then ring again. That signal was to be used on Shabbat in case of an emergency with Michael. But the staff member did not know the treatment center administrator was calling Danny, and the administrator had no way of knowing the signal.

The phone stopped ringing. They stood there in the hall that had a single dim night light set in a wall socket, and waited. Almost immediately it began to ring again.

“It must be for you, Daniel,” Reb Saunders said. “They are calling you.”

Danny stared at the phone.

“Answer the phone, Daniel,” Reb Saunders said.

Danny looked at his father.

“Answer,” Reb Saunders said. “If it is a mistake, let the sin be on my head.”

But Danny remained still. The phone continued to ring.

“Daniel,” Levi said. “Our father tells you to answer the phone.”

Danny lifted the phone and put it to his ear. He listened as the administrator, who of course knew of Danny’s Orthodoxy, thanked him for answering and told him what was happening. Danny said if he did not call him back in five minutes it meant that he was on his way over, and hung up. He looked away from the phone and saw his father and his brother staring at him. Danny’s face was white and he had to lean on the phone stand to steady himself.

“What is the matter?” Reb Saunders asked. “Daniel, what has happened? Levi, bring a glass of water. Daniel, tell me what is the matter.”

Levi started out of the hall toward the kitchen, but Danny called him back. The three of them stood around the phone, Danny explaining, his father and brother listening. He spoke rapidly, in Yiddish. Had it been any other night of the week, he would have told them nothing. But this was Shabbat. He would be traveling on Shabbat. He had to tell them.

Reb Saunders listened until he understood enough to enable him to make a legal decision. Then he broke in on Danny’s words. “Go!” he commanded. “Go quickly! Pickuach nefesh. Quickly! Quickly!”

“Take a taxi,” Levi said urgently in Yiddish. “You will find one on Lee Avenue. And take money with you.”

“Quickly!” Reb Saunders said again. “Quickly!”

Danny dressed and his father and brother accompanied him to the front door and he raced along his block beneath the naked sycamores and found a cab almost immediately on Lee Avenue. He told the driver it was an emergency. He was at the treatment center in less than half an hour.

He went directly to the pagoda. He found Dr. Altman and the administrator and a group of staff people standing among the trees, shivering in the cold and watching Michael and the other boy, who were sitting on the bench in the pagoda. He and Dr.
Altman held a brief conference. The administrator listened, all the time keeping his eyes on the two boys in the pagoda.

“Michael has obviously hooked onto Jonathan’s psychotic aggressions for his own needs,” Dr. Altman said. He was a medium-sized, portly man in his late fifties, with a kindly pink face, rimless glasses, and a graying mustache. Jonathan was the name of the boy in the pagoda with Michael. “He will continue manipulating Jonathan. We must get Jonathan to decathect from Michael.”

Danny said, speaking calmly and professionally and trying to keep from trembling with the fear inside him, that Jonathan was probably looking to be protected from Michael’s hostility.

Dr. Altman nodded soberly. “I will bet that with all his aggression coming to the surface, Jonathan is terrified of going any further and wants the stops put in. He is beginning to sense what the reality risks are.”

Danny said he would try to get through to Jonathan and break the aggression-fear-hostility cycle. He came over to the pagoda. The outside lights shone through the trees and cast soft, broken shadows across the ground and onto the pagoda. Michael and Jonathan sat close together on the circular white bench, their faces ghostly in the light of a nearby spot. The long knives glistened in their hands.

Michael rose quickly as Danny approached. Jonathan remained seated, watching Danny, his tongue running over his lips, his eyes bright and burning.

Danny stopped in front of the steps to the pagoda and looked at Jonathan. About fifteen feet behind him the staff people, the administrator, and Dr. Altman stood bunched together, waiting.

“Jonathan,” Danny said. His voice came out thin and weak. He could feel the palms of his hands sweating in the cold wind. “Jonathan,” he said again, a little louder.

The boy stared at him and said nothing.

“You know you want to come down out of there,” Danny said. “Come down and give me the knife.”