Rebecca Goldstein - 36 Arguments for the Existence of God

“Ah, so that’s Hannah. I wondered who that was.”

“Of course you wondered. Who can help wondering at those haunted eyes, lit by the unmistakable lambency of lunacy? Hannah Klepfish, the extraordinary woman to whom Jonas Elijah Klapper owes it all.”

“Why’s that?”

“It’s his mama, Mr. Seltzer, that’s why. Hannah Klepfish is our very own Jonas’s mother, which makes her, in some sense, the mother of us all. And as one of the last of the thinkers who take Freud seriously enough to allow their own psychology to be dictated by him, Jonas is required to have a chronic case of mother fixation. Of course, she was no common mother. She had the gift of prophecy. While she was carrying Jonas, she was vouchsafed the divination-the mantikê in ancient Greek, the nevua in ancient Hebrew-sorry, you develop these tics when you’ve been with Jonas as long as I have-that she was destined to die in childbirth, but that she was carrying a boy child who would survive and be a great light unto the nations. As Jonas tells it, she heard a great voice declaring that it had been decreed.”

“So she died in childbirth?”

“Oh, I’m sorry, had I implied that? No, the old girl pulled through. Jonas is the youngest, but all his siblings-there are four or five of them-are girls, and Hannah had been a bit long in the tooth when she at long last gave birth to the prophesied son, just like the matriarch Sarah, a comparison of which Jonas himself is quite fond. So the divination had been two-thirds accurate. And to Hannah was born a son, and the child was unlike any other, growing in knowledge from one day to the next, from one hour to the next, so that what he did not know upon waking he could teach to others upon going to sleep.”

“Meaning he was exceptionally smart?”

“Did you have any doubt?”

“No, of course not.”

“No, of course not,” Gideon Raven repeated. “As for poor old Hannah, not even the late-life glories of such a son as hers were able to save her from the howling hounds of madness.”

“What?”

“Rumor has it she was as gaga as she looks.”

“So what you’re saying is that she was actually crazy.”

“Certifiable. Jonas, being the proverbial doting son, refused to send her away. He was forced to keep her locked up in the attic with a caretaker named Grace Poole.”

“You’re kidding, right?”

“I’m not capable of making this stuff up. They had a big estate called Thornyfield on the banks of the East River, and one night Grace got stinking drunk-unfortunately, she was often what they call ‘in her spirits’- and Hannah escaped the attic stronghold and set fire to Cornyfield, plunging to her death amidst the flames. The Daily News headline was ‘Hindenburg Mom Lights Up New York Skyline.’ You can well imagine the effect on a soul like Jonas’s. He’s never quite recovered his senses, which is why he’s apt to fly into a homicidal rage if you answer one of his bloody obvious questions in the bloody obvious way, instead of somehow retrieving the mess of oblique associations he’d had in mind. ‘No, no, no, that’s not what I was thinking of at all! I’d meant how would Matthew Arnold have responded to Sophocles’ intimations of eternal sorrow had he read Schopenhauer’s response to Hegel, as he anticipated Adorno’s necessary observation that there is no poetry after Auschwitz? That’s what I’d meant by querying the “long, withdrawing roar.”’

“I see,” Cass said quietly. Now he wasn’t sure whether Gideon Raven was taunting him or consoling him. Both, he suspected. He had already decided that, whatever his motive, Thomas Nagel’s The View from Nowhere had no part in it. “So it isn’t true about Hannah being crazy.”

“Well, I wouldn’t go that far.”

“But she didn’t burn down the house.”

“I’m not capable of making that stuff up, but Charlotte Brontë was. Jane Eyre . Sorry. I thought you’d get the reference right away. Grace Poole and all.”

“I was pre-med.”

“You were pre-med?”

“Yes.”

“Permit me to be vulgar, but wow . How did you end up working with Jonas?”

“My senior year, I took ‘The Manic, The Mantic, and the Mimetic.’ It changed my life.”

“As you no doubt told Jonas? Not in so many words, of course. Or maybe yes, in so many words?”

“Yeah, I guess.”

“Cass, I don’t really know why I’m telling you this, since there’s really nothing in it for me. But just because there really is nothing in it for me, you should take what I’m saying extremely seriously. I want you to concentrate hard and try to understand what I’m going to tell you. It’s been a long, hard day, you look like you’re ready to collapse, but I want you to listen closely. Are you listening?”

“Yes.”

“Go back to pre-med.”

Cass was silent for a while.

“I guess what you’re saying is that I can’t make the grade, that I’m just not good enough to work with Jonas Elijah Klapper.”

“You’re not getting it, Mr. Seltzer. The un-Adorno-ed truth: if I had any chance to go to medical school, I’d be out of here so fast the back draft would blow the foam off this beer. I’ve sunk twelve years into Jonas Elijah Klapper. You haven’t lost anything yet. Just walk out of here and never look back, Billy Budd.”

Yet another classic Cass had never read.

“Baby Budd, Jimmy Legs is down on you.” Gideon was again impersonating someone or other.

“I don’t know what you’re referring to.”

“You’ve never read that either? Well, no matter. You won’t need Melville in medical school. Medical school! God, what I wouldn’t give for the chance to go to medical school! The humanities are finished, dead so long they’re long past stinking. Jonas is the Shakespearean gravedigging clown. Medical school! Could you imagine the joy and jubilation on the part of Lady Lizzie! To have a real doctor as a husband, instead of a gravedigging clown-in-training whose only acquired skills are appeasing and impersonating Jonas Elijah Klapper.”

Gideon fell into a gloomy silence, and Cass had no inclination to disturb it. At some point, Gideon had replaced the pitcher with another, and they were nearing the bottom of that one, too.

“You had any dinner tonight?” Gideon asked, and on being told that Cass hadn’t, he went to get some sustenance, bringing back “the house special,” a saucer plate with some tubules of beef jerky.

Cass thought about getting up and leaving-he’d probably be doing Lizzie a favor-but he was pretty sure that he no longer had access to the muscles controlling his limbs. If you have to think about it, it’s not a good sign. He wasn’t altogether certain either whether he could find his way back to his bleak room on Canal Street. He was dissolving into oblivion for the third time that day, and only the middle time had been edifying.

From some unlit level of his mind, a submerged question, vaguely menacing, swam to the surface. A slippery, eel-like thing, with a long poisonous ray-he struggled to get a grip on it.

“Why isn’t he Klepfish?”

“Hmm. What’s that, young Billy?”

“Klapper, not Klepfish, why?”

“He changed his name.”

“Another book, or for real?”

“For real, Baby Budd.”

“Klepfish.” Cass was staring down at the table, shaking his head, unable to assimilate the enormity of the fact, repeating the name softly.

“Time to get you home, Billy boy. Come on. Upsy-daisy.” And Gideon Raven, all five feet eight of him, helped the towering Cass to his feet with surprisingly tender solicitousness, which is how he delivered him to his room. Cass couldn’t quite remember, but he had a vague memory of Gideon’s actually helping him get his shoes off and into bed, murmuring, “Fated boy. What have you done?”