The Promise (47 page)

“Come inside a minute,” Danny said. “I want to talk to you.”

We came into the office and sat at the desk.

“How do you feel?” Danny asked.

“I don’t know. Very tired.”

“Have you had lunch? I have a sandwich we—”

“I’ll eat at home.”

“Do you want some water? You look—”

“No,” I said.

He nodded. Then he said, “You should have been a psychologist.”

“Thanks,” I said. “You did it for me.”

“I didn’t do anything. I didn’t even know what I was saying.”

“No,” he said. “You knew what you were saying.”

I looked at him. There was a brief silence.

“I’m really tired,” I said. “I want to go home.”

“Do you understand what happened in there?” he asked.

“I—think so,” I said. Then I said, “You took quite a chance. He could have stayed catatonic. What would you have done?”

“Altman would have stopped the experiment. He would have come out of it.”

“Why didn’t Michael tell his parents what they were doing to him?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “We’ll have to work that out in therapy. I would guess that in a way he was enjoying his rage. Sometimes a person who feels helpless seeks power by manipulating the pain-giver into giving more pain. Or he acts erratically and causes the pain-giver pain as a way of avenging himself. He might even get
some kind of sexual pleasure out of his rages. Yes … Even that. I don’t know. Michael has a long way to go. But I think he’s ready now.”

“You knew all along,” I said. “You knew what it was about all the time.”

“I guessed.”

“You didn’t guess. You knew.”

“Yes,” he said quietly. “I went through some of that myself a while ago.” He closed his eyes and after a moment I saw him begin to sway back and forth behind his desk. Then he raised his hand and with his thumb and forefinger began to caress an imaginary earlock.

I left him there and closed the door softly behind me and went home.

For a very long time my father sat at his desk, staring at me in disbelief. Then he tried to say something but the words would not come out and he cleared his throat and coughed.

“I would not have hated you that way, abba,” I said. “We would have talked about it.”

“You are sure, Reuven?”

I nodded.

“You would have told me how you felt about me if the things that were most precious to me had ruined your life?”

“Yes.”

“Haven’t you hated me during these past months?” he asked softly.

I hesitated. “It wasn’t really—”

“Why didn’t you tell me, Reuven?”

I looked at him and did not say anything.

“What a chance we take when we raise children,” my father murmured. “What a terrible chance.”

Rachel called me later that day and we talked for a while. She and her parents had spent part of the afternoon with her aunt and uncle. They had looked shattered. Her aunt and uncle had just sat together on the couch, broken and shattered. But they were grateful to me. They wanted to see me again, she said. Especially her aunt. They hadn’t thanked me properly. They wanted to thank me. I told her they didn’t have to thank me. I had learned a few things myself, I said. They didn’t owe me anything. Bloom had his son back, I said. He didn’t need Dedalus. She was silent a moment. Would I see them anyway? she said. Yes, I said. I had the impression that she had been talking all along through tears.

I went over to their apartment the following evening. They had recovered somewhat, but they were both subdued. Abraham Gordon looked pale. He was trying to get back into his book, he said. Ruth Gordon said very little. But she cried easily and made no effort to conceal her tears.

I saw Michael a few times during the next weeks. They had taken him out of isolation and he was back in his old room. Danny was seeing him in therapy three times a week. They thought he might be able to leave the treatment center at the end of June, he told me. But he would have to continue in therapy for a long time. And they would be sending him to a special school next year, and if that worked out he could return to his regular school the year after.

We walked beneath the trees on a day in the second week of June and there was sunlight on the leaves and on the red and white pagoda. We sat on the circular white bench and looked through the trees at the sky. He had put on some weight but his hair was still uncombed and he seemed tense and a little dazed. I saw him take his eyes from the trees and look around at the pagoda.

“I think I might have killed him,” he said softly. “I remember—I remember I was so angry I wanted to hurt somebody.” He seemed frightened by his words. “But he said no one could take you away from me and I knew you were my friend and I didn’t want to hurt you by hurting him.” He was silent. A breeze stirred the leaves. Then he looked at me. “He’s a nice person. Even if he is so religious. I wish—I wish Rachel hadn’t fallen in love with someone so religious.”

The following Sunday I received my Master’s degree in philosophy and a week later, in a long and joyous ceremony attended by dozens of rabbis and a variety of dignitaries from all over the country, I was given smicha. Later, sitting in my seat during a particularly lengthy speech, I unrolled the parchment and read the words and saw his signature alongside that of Rav Gershenson. It was a strong, spiky scrawl. The letters stood out sharply, his title, his name, and the name of his father. They seemed to glitter in the bright lights of the huge auditorium.

I was standing with my father at one of the tables in the reception hall when I saw him come toward us, looking small but stately in his tall black skullcap and starched white shirt and dark knee-length jacket. He shook my hand and I felt the misshapen fingers against my palm.

“Your son has chutzpah,” he said to my father. “I have never had a student with such chutzpah.” Then he smiled thinly. “And with such derech eretz.” “Derech eretz” is the Hebrew term for respect and good manners.

I watched as the two of them shook hands, coldly, guardedly. Then he walked off and disappeared into the crowd and I saw my father grimace and shake his head. They would be opponents all their lives. I did not for a minute think he had heard the last of Rav Kalman. For that matter, I did not think I had either.

Danny and Rachel were married on the last Sunday in June. It was a lavish, tumultuous, Hasidic wedding in a hall in Williamsburg. Men and women sat separately. There were Hasidic musicians. There was dancing and singing and the radiant face of Rachel and Danny’s eyes shining as he danced and Abraham Gordon standing against a wall and watching and Ruth Gordon’s face cold and contemptuous and Joseph and Sarah Gordon looking distressed and uncomfortable and totally unable to reconcile themselves to the world their daughter had forced into their lives. Reb Saunders danced briefly with my father and a group of tzaddikim and there were lengthy discourses on passages of Talmud and at one point as an old rebbe wound his way tortuously through a labyrinth of Talmudic reasoning I remembered a Yerushalmi and solved his problem for him with a variant text but I sat there listening anyway, fascinated by the look on his aged face and by the gestures of his hands. Then Danny spoke and he was very good and I did not need to do anything to the text he used. Sometime during that wedding Abraham Gordon came over to me and told me he had finished his book and he and Michael and Ruth were going off on a vacation for a while, and Joseph Gordon chewed on his pipe and asked me how in God’s name anyone could think in all this noise, and Rachel, beautiful Rachel, told me she and Danny had found a small apartment near Columbia and she would be going to graduate school for a degree in English literature until—she stopped, and I said, Until Rachel became big with seed, and she blushed and laughed and went off. From time to time I glanced over at the table where Michael was sitting with his father and saw him staring at the dancing Hasidim, his face pale, his eyes wide. Then he was gone from the table and I looked around and found him standing near the door and I came up to him and asked him how he was feeling. His nose had begun to bleed a little, he said. But he was all right now.
Then he looked at me through his glasses. “We’re going away for a few weeks,” he said. “The doctors told my parents it was all right. We might see the observatory in Palomar. Have you ever seen that observatory?”

“No.”

He was silent for a moment, gazing moodily at a circle of dancers. “I really hurt my parents,” he said. “I really hurt them.”

I did not say anything.

“They’re not over it yet,” he said. “I can feel they’re not over it. I wish it hadn’t happened. I wish you hadn’t made me do it. I wish—I wish—” His thin body sagged slightly. “I’m tired,” he said. “I want to sit down.”

He went off in the direction of his table.

Danny came over to me and said, “You’re not dancing.”

“I’m resting. I don’t have the strength you Hasidim have.”

He laughed.

“Will I see you this summer?” I asked.

“I’ll be working on my dissertation this summer.”

I asked him what the topic was.

“Michael,” he said.

I looked at him.

“It was Altman’s idea.”

“I think it’s a fine idea.”

“We may come up to see you in August.”

“I’d like that.”

“Come and dance with me, Reuven. I want you to dance with me.”

He took my hand and we broke through a circle and did the handkerchief dance and I heard them singing and clapping and stamping their feet and the room shook to the rhythm of the music. The whole wedding was like that. It was—it was a splendid wedding.

I did not see any of them again until the middle of August.