The Old Religion Read online

  “… while the hare,” the man continued, “is another species. Beyond that I cannot say.”

  “Which brings up,” Morris said, “the rationality of the proscription.”

  “Yes, it might,” the other man said. “Yes. It might.”

  There was a pause.

  “… the hare,” Frank said.

  “… and there was a discussion,” the New York man said, “at one time, about various animals. The various animals. Why fish, for example, should be parve, or ‘neutral,’ if you will, while chickens should be classed as flesh.”

  “I find this ludicrous,” Frank thought. “Why do I pretend?”

  “… and the Rabbis,” the man said, “in the Talmud, discoursed on the goose, as there had been an observation, at one point, by travelers to some distant land, of geese, it was said, nesting in trees, and so they undertook to discuss if the goose could be classed as a fruit.” The man smiled slightly.

  “Distant from where?” Frank said.

  “Distant from where …?” The man sought to connect the question to the discussion. Then he nodded. “Babylon. Palestine, it would be, as it is in the Talmud, that the travelers would have been distant from. Which is in the present day Mesopotamia and in that day was Babylon, and in that year, where would they have traveled to,” he mused, “to see a goose in trees?”

  “I loathe this man,” Frank thought.

  “I hate the whole tradition. An amusement of slaves—calls itself philosophy. They might as well have chosen the advert on a pack of cigarettes and studied it four thousand years.” He looked down. “‘Costliest and most rare of tobaccos. Custom blended, selected, and cured for your smoking delight—a cigarette of distinction.’

  “How many times could we find the letter c in here?” he questioned himself. “And what might that reveal to us of the workings of the world?”

  “This idiot country,” he thought.

  “Though, on the other hand, what might it mean that the letter c …”

  “… the rules of … that land from which they came,” the New York man droned on.

  “… and how many times, in the course of the day, do we jerk, if I may, convulsively, and call it ‘reason’?” Frank thought.

  “But to give up hunting?” Morris said. “That is steep.”

  The other man shrugged.

  “All right, then,” Morris said. “Why is the fellow on the plate permitted?”

  The other raised one finger. Frank was filled with disgust.

  “Like a cartoon I saw,” he thought. “Judge on the bench. Old Jew in the dock. Judge says, ‘If you were so innocent, why did you not explain yourself to the arresting officer?’ Old Jew shrugs. ‘I was hendcufft.’”

  “Yahknehaz,” the visitor said. “An acronym, or mnemonic of the component parts of the Seder. ‘Y.K.N.H.Z.’ Letters, in Russian, each symbolizing one portion of the order—in Hebrew, the Seder—of the ritual meal.

  “Yahknehaz. I put it to you, a German speaker, does it not resemble Jagd den Hase—the Hunting of the Hare? It does, I say. It does.

  “And I say it is ingenious to translate the mnemonic not once but twice—don’t you think? Who could forget it?” He turned to address the table.

  “And I assure you,” he said, “having heard it once, you will never forget it till the day you die.” He raised his finger. “And that was the most excellent genius of the Rabbis.”

  Discussion of the

  Mortara case

  Life at the lake, of course, was easier.

  It was, in its own particular way, more formal than the life in town. There was more of what he had come to think of as “social intercourse,” which differed completely from the urban “visiting.”

  Most nights of the week the wives would sit out on one another’s verandas, or gather at the hotel porch. And Saturday night—Sunday was “Family Night,” sacrosanct to the reunion with the Husband up from Town—Saturday night and Sunday afternoons were given to the round of formal “Stoppings By,” a round of dinners, breakfasts, parties, and teas offered and returned.

  He loved the smell of breakfasts. The clean reek of coffee, as if it went direct to his bowels. That’s how it felt to him, an excitement. Sunday morning, rested, a day free of work, rising late.

  The road was still—the dirt road up from the lake. The townspeople were all at church, while he slept late and woke to the feeling of entitlement.

  What dearer sound than one’s own wife moving carefully, to protect one’s sleep, one’s late sleep—what greater endorsement?

  “They may say what they like, Morris,” he said, “but the Mortrara boy, the matter of the boy is not a matter of state. Not,” he said, stilling correction, “not that I would not have it so. I would. But what state, what …” He spread the country honey on his toast and thrilled to the sound of his own voice, holding forth. So like a man. “So like a man,” Frank thought. “Assured—beyond assured. Didactic, yes, I’m proud to say it. And why not? At my own table, in front of my friends—who are guests. Yes. And I speak without apology. It may be truth itself, it may be trash, yes, though I do not think it is, but it may be … it cannot be both, but …” His thoughts were interrupted as he came to “my due and prerogative” and was about to proceed toward “the greater benefits of the Leader, in this case, the Father, and the Family Gathering, ruled or commanded or led by a Central Figure …”

  “Where, then, might be the other possibility?” Morris said.

  “More toast”? his wife said.

  “Yes,” Frank thought. “I have my place, and she has hers. Our happiness comes from the limits we impose, both on each other and on ourselves. Our …”

  Ruthie brought the platter in, and, as he did every week, he appreciated the old green platter and thought of it as “country crockery.”

  “So refreshing,” he thought.

  “… if you would do it at the factory,” Morris said.

  “Do what?”

  “What? Do what?” Morris said. “Do what?” And he looked across the table at his sister, to gather support.

  “If I would … Yes, yes, yes,” Frank said. “Yes. ‘Act in’ … well, Morris. Morris. Each of us has … don’t we? Each … wait a moment …”

  “How I love these discussions,” he thought. “And after breakfast I will have a nap.

  “Was ever a man in such a happy position as this? The coffee? The friends? The breeze from the lake, the breakfast? No. A man could live all the years allocated to the earth and not see a more lovely morning.”

  Soon they’d hear the boats, and the sound of their neighbors, returning from church, the rumble of the cars, and the quiet walk of the horses, and the voices of townspeople, talking low.

  They were back, of course, on the rear veranda of the cabin. On the lake side—why should they not be? “That’s where the breeze is,” Frank thought. “That is where the breeze is. And a man who works all week can stand a day of simple pleasure, away from the mass, the trouble, and the maintenance of the administration. Away from the inadequate strength of the last three shipments of cedar … now you’ve thought of it,” he thought. And, through it all, heard himself speaking.

  “… government of Spain, a sovereign body. But as they … wait: Morris. Wait a moment. Morris …”

  He sat, brooding over the indulgence due him, and deprived him, in the termination of his speech. He waited. Morris subsided.

  “Did, I say. Did ‘as they thought right.’” There was a momentary pause.

  “Subsequent events …,” he continued, and raised his hand to still his friend, who bore the look of one practiced upon. “Well, if he wanted to speak, he should have spoken,” Frank thought, and continued.

  All the while he was conscious of their position on the back porch, hidden from the road.

  “No, we have the right to be here,” he thought. “We are not ‘screened’ from them, for this is where the porch was built; and how could they take umbrage that we’ve not gone to church? W
e are not sequestering ourselves, for, surely, they can smell our breakfast, and that’s the end to it.”

  “Well,” Morris said, “I’m going to tell you something: They took that child, and the child’s gone. How do you deal with it? You deal with it. How you deal with it, that’s the meaning of philosophy. Fellow says, ‘Meaning of philosophy,’ you have to make your own. Now, generations: ‘How many angels dance on the head of a pin?’ One man comes along: ‘How big is an angel?’ Ah. This is a new philosophy. Ages go past. ‘Aha. Aha,’ so on. New man says, ‘How big is the pin?’ Mm?” He paused. “… hailed as a visionary.”

  Thoughts about advertising.

  “Wells Fargo Never Forgets”

  “‘Wells Fargo Never Forgets.’ Well, that’s a slogan, and all you need to know about that company. How could you forget it? And who would want to transgress them? To be outside the law?

  “What does it mean to be outside the law?” Frank thought. “Might one not take extraordinary pleasure from it? What must it be to loose the constrictions of the daily life—to be bound only by those one chose to observe, all this offset by just one thing: that one was hunted.

  “If I could excise the conscience,” he thought, “all that would be left would be the fear—no, it need not be fear—no, the ‘fact.’ The ‘fact’ of being hunted. Like the dog.

  “That would be my life.”

  The dog had been coming to the porch of the hotel, nights.

  Some said it was a wolf; some said a coyote; but both terms signified only a wild canine, and what was the difference, he thought, between the terms and the dog, who lay there dead?

  Nothing at all.

  The dog’s domestication was an illusion. An illusion. He was as much a beast as the coyote or the wolf. There was nothing that he would not do—nothing he had not done.

  So, what did it avail to think of him as a “dog”?

  If he would come, as he came, night after night, and steal; if he would kill, as he had killed, the smaller animals around the hotel; if he would stand and, cornered, attack, as he had done, when trapped in the barn?

  And now he lay shotgunned, dead, in the kitchen yard, nothing about him domestic.

  He was wild. He had lived and died wild, and the rest was an illusion. Where he found it comfortable, necessary, where he found it convenient, or through lack of choice, he had lived in a house, and took scraps and obeyed masters who called it love.

  When he turned from them, when he escaped, when he left, the world was his for the one price: to accept being hunted.

  “Could I have as little conscience as the dog?” he asked.

  “And now, you see, he traded A for B,” Morris said.

  “And there you have it?”

  Morris walked through the dooryard with Frank. The women sat on the veranda.

  “What do they talk of?” Frank wondered. “And why has Morris seen fit to comment on the dog? Yes, to assert his superiority.”

  And now the dog was dead, and Morris was saying that, as the dog should have known, his was a losing battle, and that that not given in love would be redressed in blood.

  Was that true? That one’s only choice was to obey or die?

  “He would have died in any case,” Frank said.

  “I don’t get you,” Morris said.

  “Well,” Frank said, “it’s not deep.” They watched the dog lifted up with a shovel.

  A large black man was called out of the kitchen. He came wiping his hands on a filthy apron. Morris and Frank walked away

  He saw the groundsman gesturing to the dog, and the black man bobbing his head. He was handed a large coal shovel.

  He scooped the dog into it. As Frank looked back, he saw the man with the shovel walking toward the margin of the woods.

  “No. That’s the wrong tool for the job,” he thought, “if he intends to bury him.”

  Morris began to speak. “Yeaauh,” he said. “Abrams’s expanding.”

  “Is he?” Frank said.

  Morris nodded. “Boston. Providence. Philadelphia.”

  “I hope he does well.”

  “Well, if he does well we do well,” Morris said.

  “That follow?”

  “I think it does. To the extent that we are willing to go up against him.”

  “What does Jack say?”

  “Haven’t talked to Jack,” Morris said. “But I intend to. Next time I …” He stopped to light his cigar. He motioned “wait a moment,” and he bent over the cigar, shielding it, through habit, from a wind that did not exist that day.

  “Y’ever notice?” he said between puffs. “Y’ever notice, cup the match such that, were it to catch on the book, it would flare up in your face?” He sighed. “… the matchbook.

  “And as many times as I’ve remarked it, over the years, still I hold it in the selfsame way. Lighting the seegar.”

  “Well, you’re human,” Frank said.

  “Ain’t it the truth?”

  They walked on, and Morris glanced at him, to say, “Now what the hell was I talking about?”

  “Jack Fine,” Frank said.

  “Jack Fine. I said, ‘The lifeblood of trade’s competition.’ ‘I’ve always thought so,’ Jack said. ‘That being the case,’ I said, ‘’come you’ve never gone into New York?’”

  Here Morris paused. He raised his eyebrows to show that the point of the story’d come.

  “‘Because,’ Jack said, ‘I go into a place, I want to know I am the smartest Jew there.’” Morris shook his head and grinned. Frank grinned.

  “Yessir,” Morris said, “lifeblood of trade.” They walked on.

  “Things the factory?” he said.

  Frank looked to gauge the intent of the question. He saw nothing, and shrugged. “Up six percent, twenty-seven months.”

  “… they say New York?” Morris said.

  “Lloyd?”

  “Mm.”

  Frank smiled. “Say very little.”

  “What have they turned, thankful?” Morris said.

  The two men walked on.

  “Wells Fargo Never Forgets,” Frank thought. And he could not forget his thought of the shovel and the dog.

  “Will I go to my grave,” he thought, “with this uppermost in my mind, each moment of the day?”

  In the courtroom, Frank heard the Judge drone on. And his eyes rested on the carved piece of denticulation in the cornice in the corner of the room. Soft, buttery wood, brown and, for some reason which he could not plumb but for which he was thankful, restful.

  His gaze slipped, more and more now, to that point on the wall. And each time it did, he expected its calmative powers to’ve dissipated; and each time, upon discovery that they had not, he was grateful. But he would not stop thinking of the shovel and the dog.

  “It was the wrong instrument,” he thought again. “Either to carry the dog or to dig a hole—or, still, to dismember it. It was a coal shovel,” he thought, “for God’s sake. Did the man not know that?”

  At the lake.

  Morris does card tricks

  He looked so serious.

  “No,” Frank thought, “I will not be taken in by it. No. It is all a ploy, capitalizing on my human instinct to respect the portentous. There is that in the ordering of his features which apes the solemn and momentous. So it is natural I would pay homage to it with still concentration.

  “All the same, I know that it’s a ploy and, all the while, his hands are busy while his eyes are still.”

  Frank lowered his eyes the minutest amount in, as he thought, a respectable counterfeit of attention or respect. And he saw the other man’s hands were, as he had seen them last, folded, still, plump, one over the other, and both over the red deck of cards.

  “But of course he moved them,” Frank thought. “He moved them in the instant in which he said ‘Now!’—when I lifted my eyes to his. I could observe him now forever and what difference would it make? The trick has been done.”

  Morris cleared his throat
and Frank raised his eyes. He saw Morris’s wife out of the corner of his eye—smiling, excited, and proud of the man holding the group’s attention.

  Behind them, by the door to the dining room, a black waiter stood, a tray of drinks on his palm. Frank saw the attitude of both respect and non-being in the man’s demeanor. “I am here only when and as you desire me to be,” it said.

  And “Poor man,” Frank thought. “It must grow tiring. To heft the tray, immobile on his palm, like that; though, perhaps, they grow used to it.”

  “I ask you now,” Morris said.

  “Perhaps it is just a question of balance,” Frank thought.

  “… to tell me the name of the card you had chosen.”

  Frank looked back, behind him.

  “The three of spades,” Molly said. Morris nodded.

  There were ten or twelve people on the porch, gathered before Morris, at his table. The men smoked cigars. The night wind took the smoke off the porch. Now and then the wind shifted, bringing back the scent of the trees and, once, the sound of paddles and high laughter on the lake.

  “So still …,” Frank thought.

  “Three of hearts. Here is the three of hearts!” Morris said.

  He lifted his hands from the pack and fanned the cards over the table. They were facedown, save the one card, the three of hearts, which he drew from the pack, displayed, delighted, to the crowd, and threw, facedown, on the tabletop.

  “No,” Frank thought.

  Morris looked at the faces on the porch. Two of the men coughed.

  “Yes. What … what?” Morris said.

  “I … Nothing,” Molly said.

  “What is it?”

  “My card was the three of spades,” Molly said. “Three of spades. Not the three of hearts.”

  Morris, then the rest, looked down at the solitary card, facedown, to the side of the spread pack.

  “… Your card was the three of spades …,” Morris said.

  “Oh, yes,” Frank thought, relieved. “Oh, yes. Now she will turn over the card, and it will have metamorphosed from the three of hearts to the three of spades. We will feel happy and relieved. Will we feel angry?