Rebecca Goldstein - 36 Arguments for the Existence of God

“It’s not going to be traumatic for you to go back there?”

“No, not at all. I didn’t have to grow up there the way you did. I don’t have any trauma associated with the place.”

“Well, that’s good. I guess.” They both laughed. “Wait till I tell Jesse. He won’t believe you’re going with Klapper to New Walden.”

“How’s he doing?”

“Pretty well, I think. He’s got a job at the library. And he’s enrolled as a non-matric at Fairleigh Dickinson. I think the quiet time might be doing him some good. I’m hoping he’s reflecting.”

Jesse was living at home for the year, on a forced leave of absence from NYU for having been involved in a ring that sold term papers to other students.

“That’s good. Is he around now?”

“No, he’s out. I never ask him where. After all, if he were still at school, I wouldn’t know.”

“That seems right,” Cass said, though sometimes he wondered. His mother had strong scruples in regard to autonomy and self-determination. She had had to overcome so much external pressure-her parents, her community, the Valdener Rebbe-in choosing her own way through life that she was loath to exert pressure on anyone else. When it came to Jesse, pressure probably wouldn’t have made any difference anyway.

“I’ll give you a report on New Walden when I get back.”

“It won’t have changed much, that’s for sure. It’s a point of pride that if the Besht were resurrected and he made his way to New Walden…”

“Because, let’s face it, what else would he want to do with himself?”

“That goes without saying. Anyway, he’d get to New Walden and he’d speak to the Valdeners, ask them what they thought, what they knew, and he wouldn’t realize that a day had gone by since he’d walked the earth in the early eighteenth century. Nothing would have changed.”

“Better sanitation, though.”

“Marginally.”

His mother hated the place. But not Cass. As soon as they got across the bridge, he started looking out for landmarks.

They turned onto the Palisades Parkway toward Bear Mountain.

“This is it, this is the exit,” Cass said when he saw the sign for New Town.

They drove through New Town, down Main Street, and when they got to the T-junction where it ended, Cass surprised himself by knowing exactly which way to turn, the left-the other left, and then the right that brought the Lincoln Continental right there to the parking lot with the heap of buses that marked the entrance to New Walden.

The buses were the property of the New Walden Kosher Bus Company, owned by a Valdener Hasid who lived in New Walden. The bus company was the town’s biggest business, and the man who owned the company, Alter Luckstein, was New Walden’s richest man. None of the buses matched any of the others. They were different models, different sizes. Alter read the classified ads in the trade papers for any bus that had been in an accident or had caught fire. Then he bought it, fixed it up, and put it back on the road. Luckstein’s buses not only took the Valdeners back and forth between New Walden and Brooklyn or Manhattan, where many of them worked in the Diamond District or the large electronics-and-camera stores, but also were rented out across the wider metropolitan area by Orthodox Jewish day schools and other Jewish organizations. They even had some regular public routes from New York to nearby towns, competing well with Greyhound.

Just past the buses there was a sign: “Welcome to New Walden, America’s only shtetl. Please observe the custom of our ways and dress modestly. No women in shorts or pants or sleeveless tops.”

Otherwise, the place looked extraordinarily ordinary, at least at first blush, a nondescript tract of roads, little more than wending country lanes, that were lined with modest two-story houses, their front lawns strewn with plastic tricycles, slides, and toys.

They had an appointment to meet with the Grand Rabbi at four o’clock, and they were early.

“Let’s park and walk,” Roz suggested from the backseat. “Mingle with the natives, find some informants. You can’t do fieldwork from a car.”

“We are not here to do your fieldwork, young lady. If you want to get out and walk, please don’t restrain yourself. Mr. Seltzer and I shall console ourselves over the loss of your company.”

“Come on, don’t you want to stretch your legs after that long ride? And, Cass, you must want to check out your old haunts. Do you remember where your grandmother lived?”

“No, I do not wish to, as you say, ‘stretch my legs.’ ” Jonas Elijah Klapper shuddered.

It was too cold for children to be outside playing with the toys. They passed a few women pushing baby carriages, shepherding very young children, almost all of them seemingly girls, with long hair escaping from their hooded coats.

“The older kids are in school,” Cass said, as he drove around the neighborhood. “Sunday’s just a regular day for them.”

“So they go to school six days a week?” Roz asked.

“They get out early on Fridays. Especially in the winter, when the days are short, so the Sabbath, which starts at sundown, comes early. The Sabbath, Shabbes, is something to see. That’s when the men deck themselves out in these amazing fur hats called shtreimels and these long satin caftans, called kaputas . And they all wear high leather boots, almost like jackboots, with their pants tucked in.”

“Do the women get to wear amazing fur hats?” Roz asked.

“No, the women just dress dowdy, in a way guaranteed to call no attention to themselves.”

“I wonder if I’ll pass,” Roz said. She was wearing the same long crushed-velvet skirt that she’d been wearing when Cass had first met her. He’d warned her about the laws of modesty. She didn’t have to wear her hair covered, since she wasn’t married, but Cass and she had decided that the dreadlocks had best be concealed, so she’d bought a peacock-blue kerchief, and in a restroom at their last pit stop had looped her hair up in it in a sort of turban. For their part, Cass and Klapper had come supplied with white satin skullcaps in their pockets that Jonas Elijah Klapper had supplied, “Ronald’s Bar Mitzvah June 12 1977” embossed in gold on the inside.

“I think the goal is just not to offend them. At best, they’ll think you’re a stray that the Lubavitchers have converted.”

“The Lubavitchers. They’re the ones with the mitzvah-mobile, right? They used to come to Frankfurter when I was an undergraduate, lassoing boys to put on phylacteries and girls to light the Sabbath candles.”

Cass had driven past his bubbe’s house without announcing it, slowing down slightly-they were going less than fifteen miles an hour anyway- and trying to take it in. He’d always known it as his bubbe’s house. His grandfather had died before he was born. It was a modest tract house, and it made him happy to see the number of toys crammed into its front yard now. He hoped the children who owned these toys were enjoying better childhoods than his mother had in that house. He felt a stab of love for that unhappy woman, his bubbe, who had had such a fine eye for discerning the flaws in others, the slights to herself, reacting with gleeful contempt for the former and unstanchable rage toward the latter, but who had, for some mysterious reason, loved and always forgiven her little Chaim. One of his earliest memories-it might have been his first- was his bubbe’s collapsing at the sight of him when they’d come for a visit after he’d had his first haircut. She had shrieked as if slashed by an assassin’s blade, clutching at her chest, berating his mother. He’d never forget it, it had scared him so badly.

“Something else I remember from when I used to visit here as a kid is that they don’t cut the boys’ hair until a certain age, I think maybe three or four.”