The Promise (32 page)

The boy sat very still and stared and did not move. Michael looked at Danny and laughed softly.

“You’ve come a long way in the past few months,” Danny said quietly. “You don’t want to slide back now.”

The boy licked his lips, looked down at the knife, then looked again at Danny. Slowly, he rose to his feet.

“No!” Michael said to him. “Stay with me!”

Danny did not look at Michael. “Come on, Jonathan,” he said. “Come down out of there and let me have the knife.”

“Don’t listen to that cheat!” Michael shouted. “He’s a liar and a cheat! Don’t listen!”

Danny would not look at Michael. “He’s using you, Jonathan,” he said softly. “He’s not freeing you. He’s using you.”

Jonathan stared at Michael. The hand holding the knife dropped limply to his side. He came forward, looking like someone who had just been saved from falling off a roof, and handed Danny the knife. One of the child-care workers came over and took him away toward the house.

“You bastard!” Michael was screaming. “You took away my friend! Just like you took away Rachel! You took everyone away from me! I don’t have anyone left! You bastard!”

“Please come down from there,” Danny said, and went up the steps into the pagoda.

“You stay away from me,” Michael said menacingly, and made a wide slashing motion with the knife.

“Give me the knife,” Danny said quietly, feeling the sweat and the panic, feeling Michael’s terror, feeling the wind on his neck, feeling the leaves blowing against his shoes.

“I’ll kill you!” Michael screamed, and made another slashing motion with the knife. His long, thin face was contorted with rage and his glasses were down on the bridge of his nose. His eyes bulged and his lips were stiff. “You took everyone away! I’ll kill you!”

Danny took a step into the pagoda. Michael backed away, moving
sideways, his legs against the white bench. The red beams and roof of the pagoda were dark in the artificial light.

“Give me the knife, Michael,” Danny said again, taking another step into the pagoda.

“You’ll take Reuven away too!” Michael screamed. The words echoed faintly through the darkness of the trees.

“No one can take Reuven away from you, Michael,” Danny said softly, coming directly up to him. “You know that.”

Michael stared. His shoulders twitched and a shudder went through his thin body and he lowered his head and broke into a sob and the knife fell from his hand and clattered dully on the wooden floor of the pagoda.

Danny bent slowly and picked up the knife. It was long and quite heavy, the wooden handle still warm from Michael’s hand. He put his arm around Michael’s shoulders. He could feel him trembling. “No one can take Reuven away from you,” he said again, very softly, and led Michael from the pagoda into the house and brought him to his room and helped him undress and get into bed. Michael said nothing. He moved automatically and was silent. Then his nose began to bleed. It was a while before the bleeding stopped.

Danny spent the night in a nearby room. In the early morning Michael’s parents were called. They came and sat awhile with Michael, who was awake but seemed dazed and would say nothing to them about the night. It was Shabbat, and Danny and the Gordons would not travel back to their houses, so they spent the day at the treatment center. Dr. Altman called, and a staff member relayed his message to Danny: an evaluation meeting was to be scheduled for nine o’clock Monday morning. Abraham Gordon was gray-faced with apprehension. Ruth Gordon somehow managed to convey an appearance of exterior calm. But once during the day she went off by herself and was gone a long time. When she returned, her eyes were red.

The story came out slowly during the afternoon hours the three of them spent with Michael. He had conceived the idea soon after
his therapy session with Danny on Friday morning. He had spent the afternoon convincing the four boys to join him. He had especially wanted Jonathan. No, he did not understand why he had wanted Jonathan. He had felt he needed him. What had he expected to do once they were outside with the knives? He didn’t know. He had just wanted to do
something
. Then he said he was tired, he wanted to sleep. They came out of his room and went downstairs.

It was Ruth Gordon who suggested that the family meet that night. And it was Abraham Gordon who requested that Danny call and ask me to join them.

They lived on the street floor of a five-story prewar apartment house two blocks from the Zechariah Frankel Seminary. There was a fenced-in lawn in front and plush chairs and gilt-edged mirrors in the lobby. We came through the lobby and climbed three marble steps and went down a carpeted hall. The nameplate on the door said, simply, Gordon. They were all waiting for us.

It was a solemn meeting, utterly unlike the last time I had seen them together when they had talked of the cab drivers of Naples and the back alleys of Rome and the rooted, aristocratic loveliness of Cambridge and Abraham Gordon’s airsickness over the Alps and Molly Bloom recumbent and big with seed. I had not seen Rachel since the end of October, and her parents since they had left the resort area. Joseph and Sarah Gordon had not changed at all. But Rachel had let her auburn hair grow very long and there was a radiance in her face that made my heart turn over when I first saw her that night—and there was a sadness there too, a deep brooding sadness over Michael. She loved Danny. You only had to look at her as she gazed at him or listened to him talk to know how deeply she loved him. And Danny talked a long time that night. For they had all agreed within the first five minutes of their meeting that Danny’s experiment was the only possibility left to them; but they wanted to hear again, and in very careful detail now, the manner in which the experiment would be conducted.

Danny spoke for almost an hour, describing the experiment and answering their questions. We sat in their living room, a large, handsomely furnished room—Persian rugs on the floor, odd little pieces of modernistic sculpture in the corners, a Steinway piano near the heavily draped front windows—we sat in that room and Danny talked. Rachel shared the sofa with her aunt and uncle. Danny sat closest to the fireplace, leaning forward, speaking softly, intently, his faintly nasal voice filling the large room.

On the ground floor of the treatment center, directly below the foyer, there was a small room which was now being used for storage. It had been a maid’s room once when the building had been privately owned. It was about the same size as the foyer, perhaps a little smaller. The room had electricity and a small window set high in the wall facing the front of the house—high enough so that someone Michael’s size would be unable to see through it. They would clean out the room and have it repainted. They would make certain it was properly ventilated and heated. A mattress would be brought into the room and placed on the floor. Then Michael would be taken into the room and left there alone with the door locked. He would be given nothing to read or see or hear. If sounds filtered through the window from outside, the window would have to be sealed or even boarded up. Michael would have nothing to focus on, except the silence and the loneliness and the bare walls. He would be fed regularly by staff people. He would be seen regularly by Danny. He would be checked regularly by a pediatrician. No one except Danny would be able to speak to him. How would he get to a bathroom? Joseph Gordon wanted to know. There was a bathroom with a toilet, sink, and shower directly across a small hallway from the room. He would be taken there regularly by staff people. The idea was, quite simply and honestly, to break Michael down so that he would want to talk to Danny, to make him so sick as a result of this radical therapy that he would want to undergo normal therapy.

Danny went into considerable technical detail about how he planned to organize the staff for this experiment: schedules, flexibility,
contingency plans in case this or that occurred, the nature of his therapy sessions with Michael, what they would do in case Michael stopped eating, how they would handle possible hysteria, what their plans were in case he tried hurting himself in some way. Yes, Danny said in response to a question from Joseph Gordon. The chances were good that it would work.

Near the end of that hour, Ruth Gordon turned to me and said I had been so very quiet all night, what did I think, did I have any questions I wanted to ask Danny. I had a million questions, I said. It all seemed very strange to me, and I was sure it was a lot more technical and involved than Danny had indicated. But even if Danny gave us all the technical terms and the psychological theories that were part of this, would that really help us understand what this would do to Michael. The important thing was that I trusted Danny, I said. That was more important than anything else. I knew Danny for years, I said very quietly. We had grown up together. And I trusted him.

I had apparently given expression to their own deepest feelings. There were no more questions. Danny could go to the evaluation meeting on Monday morning and inform Dr. Altman that the Gordons favored going ahead with the experiment. Abraham and Ruth Gordon had canceled their sudden trip and would be home all week in case they were needed.

“If’s a hell of a thing,” Joseph Gordon said to me a little later, chewing on his pipe. The seven of us were sitting or standing around the room, talking quietly. “This is going to kill my brother if it doesn’t work. He would have quit writing that new book if it weren’t for Ruth pushing him to finish it. It’s a hell of a thing.” He gazed across the room at the couch where Danny and Rachel were sitting alone and talking. “That’s quite a young man,” he said, smiling faintly around the pipe. “Who would have figured Rachel falling in love with the son of a Hasidic rebbe? Rachel. My crazy, beautiful, sophisticated Rachel … Go figure it,” he said. Then he said, “We’re meeting his parents next week.”

I did not say anything.

“Go figure it,” he said again in a tone of wonder and walked away, shaking his head.

I stood there, looking at Danny and Rachel. They were sitting close to each other, not quite touching, and Danny was saying something and Rachel was leaning toward him, and I had the impression they were sealed off in a world of their own and had been talking only to themselves for all their lives. I looked at them and felt a rancid darkness inside me—and I turned my head away.

Sarah Gordon came over to me, looking handsome and slender—a lovely middle-aged version of Rachel. I ought to go into the marriage-broker business, she said. Then she said, seriously, “Tell me about Danny’s parents. What are they like?” I told her Danny’s mother was a gentle, sickly woman and Danny’s father was—well, Danny’s father was an experience. But the fact that he had consented to meet with them was a very good sign, I said. I thought there would be trouble over a Gordon-Saunders alliance, I said. She grimaced. There had been trouble, she said. There had been a great deal of trouble. Rachel had made some—compromises. I looked at her. No, Rachel would not cut off her hair and wear a Hasidic-style wig, she said. On that point Rachel had been adamant. But there were other things … I nodded and we let it go at that.

Danny was talking quietly with Abraham and Ruth Gordon, and Rachel was alone on the couch. I went over to her and sat down.

“It is as obvious as an Aristotelian syllogism that you have a slight crush on my good friend Daniel,” I told her.

She smiled radiantly.

“It’s good to see you again,” I said. “It’s good to see you like this.”

She thanked me.

“Tell me something, my lover of county fairs and James Joyce. Why did you pick the Ithaca section of
Ulysses
to do a paper on?”

She looked at me curiously.

“Was there a special reason?”

“No,” she murmured.

“I reread it today. No special reason?”

“No.” There was a faint pink flush on her cheeks.

“Danny is contagious,” I said with a smile. “Or am I reading something into it that isn’t really there?”

She said nothing. But her eyes were moist.

“I’m very happy for you,” I said quietly. “I really am. I mean that, Rachel.”

She leaned forward and right there with everyone in the room kissed my cheek.

“Aha!” Danny said, grinning, as he came over to us and sat down on the other side of Rachel. “My friend. My best friend. I turn my back and suddenly my best friend reminds me I’m in the twentieth century.”

“I’m practicing for the wedding.”

“That’s not the kind of wedding it’s going to be, best friend.”

“A Hasidic wedding,” I said in a tone of mock despair. “I will have to dust off my caftan and fur-trimmed cap.”

Danny and Rachel laughed.

“I will have to dust off my caftan and practice some dances and songs. It’s been a long time.”

“Yes,” Danny said, suddenly serious. “For you. But it’s my world, best friend. And I haven’t seen anything outside that’s better.”

“Nothing?” I said.

“Nothing I can’t use and still stay inside.”

“As long as you take some of the good things.”

“I’ll see to that,” Rachel said softly.

I left them there quietly together in the private world they were creating with their new dreams.

I sat down on an easy chair and was alone for a moment and found myself thinking of my father and his book and Rav Kalman and felt suddenly drained and hollow with the realization that the months of seesawing between the two worlds had finally ended for me this night with nothing but an awareness of how deep the
separating chasm really was and how impossible it seemed to bridge it—unless you were a Danny Saunders and were rooted deeply enough in one world to enable you to be concerned only about the people of the other and not about their ideas. I was in between somewhere on a tenuous and still invisible connecting span, and I did not know how to make that span tangible to myself and to the inhabitants of both those other worlds. Maybe it could not be done. Maybe Rav Kalman was right. Maybe one had to take a stand and abandon one or the other entirely. I would enter Abraham Gordon’s world if I was forced into taking a stand. The world of Rav Kalman was too musty now with the odors of old books and dead ideas and Eastern European zealousness. But it would be an unhappy choice. I did not think I could ever be comfortable with Abraham Gordon’s answers. I found myself envious of Danny’s solid-rootedness in his world—and discovered at that moment to my utter astonishment how angry I was at my father for his book and his method of study and the tiny, twilight, in-between life he had carved out for us. That awareness left me so frightened and shaken that it was a moment before I realized that Abraham and Ruth Gordon were standing in front of me and trying to get my attention. I got quickly to my feet. They were inviting me and my father over to dinner a week from tomorrow night. I accepted gratefully for myself and told them I would talk to my father and call them tomorrow.