Rebecca Goldstein - 36 Arguments for the Existence of God

There was no delusion now. The shtreimel was the shape of a layer cake, large enough to feed a Hasidic family. Klapper had it pushed down on his high forehead so that it rested above his turbulent eyebrows and ascended to at least six inches above his head, making a man of five foot nine tower over a man of six foot two.

Cass got back in the car and buckled himself in. Klapper was having trouble with his seat belt, but Cass didn’t trust himself yet to lean over and help, so he sat quietly, staring down at his hands, and waited. Finally, he heard the click of success and turned on the ignition, carefully pulling away from the curb, trying to concentrate on his breathing like a woman in labor-no, like a Zen practitioner. He’d had a girlfriend in college, Felicia Lebowitz, who had been a yoga practitioner, and she used to say, when she was teaching him how to meditate, “If a thought comes to you, observe it and let it go,” or “Instead of thinking the thought, just let it be thought,” which he thought sounded pretty close to what was usually going on in his head, and it certainly had never led to any nirvana, and in all likelihood it wasn’t going to help him now.

He maneuvered through the traffic of Harvard Square, and there was silence in the car, but it was a thin silence, which couldn’t be trusted, and Cass realized that the thoughts in his head, the ones he was letting be thought without thinking them, came from a song he’d learned in first grade that was sung to a waltz with a Viennese lilt, the kind they play on the organ at ice-skating rinks-he and Jesse often went on Saturday mornings, and Jesse had been on a local hockey team until there had been an incident and he was asked to leave-and whose words were:

Ice-skating is nice skating

But here’s some advice about ice-skating

Never skate where the ice is thin

Or else it might break and you’ll fall right in

And come up with icicles under your chin

If you skate where the ice is thin!

They were across the Larz Anderson Bridge now, heading for the Massachusetts Turnpike, and Cass was finding that his meditative techniques had not improved since the days of Felicia, and Roz’s laughter was still dangerously coiling in the dark water beneath the thin ice, and he decided to visualize the cover that Time magazine had had a few months before, emblazoned with the word “FAMINE” and asking the question “Why are Ethiopians starving again?” with the picture of a mother staring down with eloquent sorrow at the dying child on her lap, his head bulbous compared with the shrunken body, the match-thin arms prematurely wrinkled, and his eyes filled with the precocious knowledge of his own doom. It was surely immoral to use an image of others’ tragedy to counteract the painful urge to laugh, but he was a poor meditator and a desperate man.

Somewhere around the Natick/Framingham exit, Jonas Elijah Klapper broke the silence.

“You are probably wondering how I procured these garments.”

Cass nodded, not glancing over, knowing that Klapper would understand and heartily approve his taking his driving so seriously.

“I had Ms. Cutter arrange for a car service to pick me up and drive me to Williamsburg, Brooklyn, to a store that specializes in Hasidic vestments. I was able to purchase the kaputa” -Klapper indicated his caftan with a flourish of his hands-“and the shtreimel -”he gestured upward to his fur piece-“at one place. I had to go to another establishment for the boots.”

Cass nodded his head again, his eyes fixed on the road. He had questions, but he wasn’t sure he could trust himself to ask them. For example, was it Marjorie Cutter who had located a store selling fur hats shaped like giant hockey pucks? Did they have his size of kaputa in stock, or did they need to special-order? Had the money for the car service to and from Williamsburg come out of the discretionary funds that Frankfurter had conferred on Jonas Elijah Klapper? And what species of dead animal was it that was perched on Professor Klapper’s head?

The professor removed the shtreimel , laying it carefully on his lap.

“It is toasty warm. I could have used such a defense against the elements back in frore February.”

Cass had a bad moment as the image came unbidden to him of Jonas Elijah Klapper clambering over the snowdrifts of Plotnik Quad dressed like a Valdener.

“Please be so good as to pull over at the earliest convenience.”

The Charlton Full Service Rest Stop was coming up, and Cass pulled off the turnpike and into the parking lot and turned off the ignition.

“In the zippered pocket at the side of my satchel you will find a large blue plastic bag. Please take it out and place this within it, and then carefully deposit it on the backseat. I know I needn’t tell you, Reb Chaim, that this shtreimel , which is Russian sable and made out of thirteen tails, represents an expenditure in the thousands.”

There was an answer to two of Cass’s questions, and to one that he hadn’t thought to ask.

“As long as we have stopped,” said Professor Klapper, when Cass got back behind the steering wheel, “I would like to use the facilities. I don’t know why they have chosen to make it such a trek to get from the parking lot to the rest stop. Please drive up to the building and wait for me in front.”

A young woman who was heading inside held the door open for the sad-eyed fat man in the splendid black robe and boots. Even though he waddled, you could see he had a great deal of dignity, and she thought he must be a religious dignitary, maybe a Greek Orthodox priest or a Wiccan. He passed through without acknowledgment.

As soon as Jonas Elijah Klapper disappeared into the building, Cass let the laughter that had been pushing up through his trachea come gushing out, gaining a new understanding of the cliché “to laugh so hard it hurts.”

When Roz’s laughter had finally expended itself, he found that he urgently needed to use the facilities himself, but he was nervous about leaving the car. It would be a disaster if Professor Klapper came out and the Lincoln Continental was nowhere in sight. Could Cass leave it illegally parked here and just dash in? But he’d have to leave it unlocked so that Klapper could climb in and wait, and he’d just been informed that the thirteen tails of Russian sable curled up in the blue plastic bag on the backseat represented an expenditure in the thousands. He compromised and left the locked car parked right in front, so Professor Klapper would see it when he got out.

By the time the professor exited, carrying a cone with a double twist of vanilla and chocolate ice cream-there was a Baskin-Robbins in the plaza-Cass was sitting in the car, fully composed. He popped out and held the cone for Professor Klapper while he settled himself into the car, struggled with the buckle, and then reached out his hand for the ice cream. He tiled several paper napkins across the expanse of his lap and tucked one into the collar of his kaputa and proceeded to lick.

They spoke little on the way. Cass had gone from resisting the awful attack of laughter-a sort of Zen laughter demanding to be laughed even if Cass didn’t want to laugh it-to being overcome by a despondency that was like feeling sick before any of the symptoms had appeared.

He thought a lot about Gideon. He thought about that first night at The View from Nowhere, when Gideon had told him to go back to pre-med. How would Gideon react if he were to see Jonas Elijah Klapper now? Would it matter as little to him as the remarks of a random philosophy student in The View from Nowhere? “Wovon man nicht knows the first fucking thing, darüber muss man schweigen?” That was pretty powerful stuff, and it hadn’t shaken Gideon in the least. Gideon was brilliant, and he had seen fit to study with Jonas Elijah Klapper for the past twelve and a half years, and he was as convinced as the rest of them that Klapper was on the verge of a breakthrough of epochal proportions. Who was Cass to challenge that view? Was he so influenced by the sight of Klapper looking ridiculous-but why more ridiculous than the Valdeners themselves? why more ridiculous than the Rebbe?-that he was ready to throw up his hands and agree with Roz?