Rebecca Goldstein - 36 Arguments for the Existence of God

“Is this Hebrew?” she demanded.

“Yiddish.”

“You know Yiddish?”

“No more than you.”

“I know mishegoss.”

“Me, too.”

“Craziness, right? That’s what mishegoss means? What’s it about?”

“I think he might be going off the deep end.”

“Might? Going?”

She was stark naked, having still not located the thong. She must have gone pretty skimpy in Venezuela, judging by her tan line.

“At least you’ve only wasted a year. Look at poor Gideon. He’s wasted almost thirteen. He lost his poetry. He’s probably going to lose his wife.”

“Lizzie?”

“She’s had it. All that elaborate exegesis about every cockamamie thing the Klap says or does. Lizzie’s poured her heart out to me.”

“Fuck.” Cass sat down on the bed, dazed.

“Wow. I’ve never heard you curse. It’s disturbing.”

“Fuck. Fuck.”

“Really, really disturbing.”

“I can’t believe Lizzie would leave him. He’s going to be devastated. Lizzie is the center of his world.”

“No, she isn’t. That’s the problem. Klapper is.” She paused, but Cass made no response. “Seven good minds gone bad, wasting themselves on trying to figure out the Kabbalist meaning for why Nut Boy switched offices with his secretary. How long do you think a woman can listen to that?”

“Six minds. Six minds going bad. There’s no way I’m writing a dissertation on the hermeneutics of potato kugel.”

Lunatic . That had been the word that had occurred to him in Klapper’s office. The Liminal, the Luminant, and the Lunatic. Cass had hastily disowned it.

But now the thought wasn’t just being thought.

Cass was thinking it.

The phone rings, and Cass is relieved. It must be a response to his desperate summons. But when he answers, he’s momentarily confused. It’s Lucinda. He calculates quickly. It’s 9 p.m. in Santa Barbara. Rishi must have given the keynote, and Cass hears the triumph restored to Lucinda’s voice. She had fanged the sucker. She had fanged him but good.

“And you’re not going to believe this, but you actually helped me out here!”

“Me?”

“Believe it or not! Or maybe your ne’er-do-well brother.”

“Jesse?”

“None other. You remember how I’d mentioned the Saint Petersburg Paradox to you, tried to explain that that’s what did Jesse in?”

His younger brother’s high-risk finance strategies had been responsible for Jesse’s briefly seeing the inside of a minimum-security federal prison for white-collar offenders.

“Yes.”

“Well, that had made me think through the SPP in a different way, and that’s exactly what I needed to squash that cockroach Rishi. I won’t go into the technical details, since you wouldn’t be able to follow. I’m not even sure how many at the conference followed. But Rishi did, and that was enough. He crumpled.”

“So it really was the anticlimax rather than the keynote.”

“It kind of was. Pappa told me if it had been any better he would have had to kill me!”

“And Pappa’s latent aggression makes you feel good?”

“Of course!”

“Okay,” he said, and then laughed, Lucinda joining in.

“You know, it was incredibly nice of you to devote all that time to the Saint Petersburg Paradox just to help me understand Jesse’s situation.”

“Don’t thank me. I was glad to do it. Fascinating stuff. And then there it was, come to my rescue. What goes around, comes around.”

Cass cringed at that saying, even coming from Lucinda.

“Rational self-interest is always what morality boils down to,” she continued in a reflective tone of voice.

“Do you think so?”

“Of course. I’ve always figured you must, too.”

“Why’s that?”

“Well, isn’t that basically the core of Jewish ethics?”

“I never thought of it that way.”

“The way I heard it, Judaism is the religion of rational actors. My father explained it to me. His grandfather was religious, so he knew all about it. The great rabbis had a saying: ‘If I am not for myself, then who will be for me?’”

“And?”

“And what?”

“That’s only part of it.”

“It is?”

“The rest of the quote is: ‘And if I’m only for myself, then what am I?’”

“Are you sure? That’s not the way I heard it.”

“I’m sure.”

“Well, that’s a disappointment.”

“You don’t mean that.”

There’s a pause.

“Lucinda?”

“I’m kidding, I’m kidding! Give me a little credit for complexity, will you! It was a joke!”

But she hadn’t laughed. Again, Lucinda hadn’t laughed.

It was the most painful and most exalted of his memories.

He had gone with his mother, the abandoned wife, to seek assistance from the rabbinical court on East Broadway. She had begged the attending rabbi to force her husband to grant her a get , a Jewish divorce. By Jewish Law, it is the husband’s power alone to grant a get , and a woman in Hannah Klepfish’s position inhabits a despised no-woman’s-land, not married but not not-married, wandering in desolation between two worlds. The rabbi had sat there in judgment of her, with his barbed beard of dirty red, like the rusted pads of steel wool that she used for scrubbing her pots. But the Pharisee would not be moved. The Law would apply. Until this day, Jonas could not recall his mother’s sobs without feeling that his body might split apart from the agony.

And it came to pass in that house of judgment, amidst the humiliation heaped upon them, that the decree had come down. As they were being shown out-Jonas, six years old, supporting his prostrated mother-an ancient rabbi, hardly taller than little Jonas, had placed his opened palms atop the child’s head, and had shouted out, in the voice of the prophet, “Hoy, hat der kleiner ein moah godol uneshomo niflo’o!” -“Oh, the little one has such a great brain and a wondrous soul.”

In an instant, the woman and her son had gone from being cast down to lifted aloft. Hannah Klepfish was the mother of a child of whom prophecies were foretold.

The prophecy had unfolded on a day of jubilation when the letter of acceptance from Columbia University arrived at the Tillie E. Orlofsky projects on East Broadway. His blessed mother had danced-yes, whirled around like a Jewish maenad-on the faded but spotless kitchen linoleum. In her faded blue flannel bathrobe and her terry-cloth slippers, the cream she skimmed off from the top of the bottled milk smeared onto her face as a moisturizer, she had kicked up her legs in some jig she must have learned as a young girl back in Kishinev, Bessarabia. A simple woman who had never mastered the English language, who had had to ask Jonas to write his own “Please excuse my son’s absence” notes to his elementary-school teachers, Hannah Klepfish held the acceptance letter in her right hand and offered a corner to Jonas, so that they had danced together like a bride and groom in a Jewish wedding, only not with a white handkerchief dangling between them but with the paper embossed with the blue shield and the Latin words In lumine Tuo videbimus lumen -“In Thy light shall we see light.”

She had lived to see her Jonas’s light spread throughout the world. He had become a professor at the great institution. Framed book jackets in every language papered the walls of her little apartment from floor to ceiling. He had never tainted her joy by disclosing the treachery of Great Britain.

Also never mentioned were the mortifications closer to home that Jonas underwent. As the decades passed, Columbia University had shown itself increasingly unworthy, finally assuming the proportions of perfidy in its failure to recognize the singularity of his achievements.