Rebecca Goldstein - 36 Arguments for the Existence of God

“My congratulations.” Auerbach gives his mirthless laugh.

A thin young man with a ponytail and a ring piercing his eyebrow yells “Cass-man!” as they walk past, and Cass gives a lopsided smile and a halfhearted wave.

“I heard a rumor you were once his student,” Auerbach is saying.

“True.”

Auerbach chuckles softly.

“Remind me to tell you a story about Klapper someday.”

Cass will never remind him. He’ll remember not to remind him.

They pass the chancel and enter the chaplain’s office, tonight being used as the greenroom.

Five people are gathered there, and Cass’s eye is drawn first to a tall-ish man who has the kind of conical build that gives the impression of taking up more volume than it actually does, with broad shoulders and an expansive chest. His hair is silvered and elegantly sheared, falling silky to the finely stitched collar, but his eyes are hard, glinting pebbles and his mouth is a firm line, no give at all in the upper lip. There’s a suggestion of brute force as he stands there with a stillness that suggests reserves of strength that he is straining to hold in check. With an impassiveness that manages to be aggressive, he’s listening to a man who is addressing him with a desperate affability. The setup has the look of a psychological experiment, a verbal analogue to the dollar auction that Lucinda had used to fang Harold Lipkin. The speaker has already doled out so much in trying to win this man’s approval, and if he stops before getting anything at all, any flicker of humanity from those unblinking eyes, then he’ll have nothing to show for his efforts, and there’s no natural way to stop at this point, and Cass bets that the man behind the pebbles probably knows about the dollar auction, but then he commits an error, he glances over at Cass and Sy, which gives the desperate talker an excuse to stop talking as he rushes over to greet them. He’s Lenny Shore, the spiritual leader of the Agnostic Chaplaincy of Harvard, the sponsor of tonight’s event, and he’s a slight man who looks as if he would bend easily, surprisingly young, with long lank brown hair and a fidgety mouth that isn’t quite able to hold down an expression. He’s wearing a corduroy jacket and black jeans over cowboy boots, and he’s telling Cass-whose attire is the arithmetic mean between Fidley and Lenny, a dark wool jacket bought in France, a green silk tie-how much he admired The Varieties of Religious Illusion , and what a great day this is for the Agnostic Chaplaincy of Harvard, and how we are going to be at capacity crowd tonight, which means somewhere in the vicinity of eleven hundred, and how he feels that tonight the Agnostics of Harvard have really arrived, and is there anything that Cass needs or that Lenny or anybody else can do for him, and the crowd is just overwhelming, and Cass is smiling and nodding and trying to give the chaplain whatever he’s needing so that he’ll calm down and meanwhile also stealing sideway glances at the still and powerful man in the corner, who is standing next to an equally handsome and silver-haired woman-clearly his property and almost certainly responsible for the civilizing touches of his elegant haircut and clothes- and who has settled the tempered blade of his gaze onto Cass Seltzer.

Lenny Shore brings Cass and Auerbach over to make the introductions, and it is just as Cass has feared. The man sucking the energy out of the room is Felix Fidley, looking as if his manicured hands might be forming fists beneath his monogrammed shirt cuffs, a sense of menacing potency radiating out from the kind of man to have that kind of wife with that kind of cold beauty that ages so well, not so unlike Lucinda’s, whom Cass desperately wishes he had beside him to give him some ballast, but instead he has Sy Auerbach, who brings ballast enough for any man, though Cass has never felt it as particularly steadying, not when it’s this close, though he certainly appreciates it when it’s representing his interests, it’s made him rich, it’s made him famous, it’s brought him here, to this unlikely moment, about to face off with this man who is several times over more than his match.

Fidley extends his hand and shakes Cass’s, and the grip all but crushes three metacarpal bones, and nothing is said, Cass feels that Fidley is daring him to open his mouth and offer up some drivel that he can then subject to his impassive stare that will put any inanity that’s there-and there’s always inanity there-up on vivid display. But when it comes to saying nothing, Cass has never had a problem, and sly Sy, too, is keeping his own counsel, and only pastoral Lenny feels compelled to soften the brutal wordlessness with patter.

Now there’s an usher at the door, and Lenny rushes over, and gives a signal, and they file out of the chaplain’s office back into the nave, Fidley and his wife following after Lenny. Fidley, when he sees the packed church, turns his head to give Cass a measured smile, mutually shared congratulations for having drawn such a crowd, it’s a moment approaching almost warmth, or at least that flickering recognition of shared humanity that Lenny Shore had been desperately seeking.

There’s a respectful hush as they take their seats up on the dais, their nameplates set out on the table together with glasses and pitchers of water, Cass on the left, Fidley on the right, Lenny Shore in the middle. There’s a lectern on either side of the table, where each will stand when his turn comes.

Cass looks out at the filled pews, and he’s searching for the fan with the ponytail, whom he finds after a few moments, talking animatedly to a girl who looks familiar, though he can’t place her, and then he lets his eyes travel along the other rows, and he’s startled to see Mona sitting front and center. She must have gotten here early to have nabbed that seat. She gives him two thumbs-up, and her gesture is immediately duplicated by a tall young woman sitting next to her who resembles Roz, and Cass looks again, and it is Roz. They both blow him kisses, and he leans forward in his chair and squints to make sure that his eyes aren’t deceiving him, and Mona and Roz are laughing together, and how like them to have found each other.

Lenny Shore has risen and is at the lectern near Cass, welcoming the crowd for “this historic debate,” and Cass is still struggling to get his neurons to line up in a way commensurate to the task at hand, but he’s having trouble even paying attention to what Lenny is saying, as he launches into the history of the Agnostic Chaplaincy of Harvard, which was formed in the 1960s and whose intellectual roots go back to some of the most eminent minds of Harvard, like Ralph Waldo Emerson, who urged us to “take the bandages of doctrine off of our eyes and live with the privilege of the immeasurable mind,” and William James, who observed that “rationality does not lie on one side or the other. It is a contest between our fears and our hopes, and both the scientist and the religious believer take a gamble,” and who authored a book he had presciently entitled The Varieties of Religious Experience , as if he could foresee that a century later another psychologist of religion would write a book he’d call The Varieties of Religious Illusion (big laugh), and Lenny is finally getting a reaction, and his bendable body is weaving with the excitement, and Cass remembers where he’s seen that girl before, she’s the one who had asked him whether he signs body parts.

“The Agnostic Chaplaincy is here to serve the spiritual needs of the questioners and doubters, those who enjoy the journey more than the arrival. Our only doctrine is the open mind, and our ethics stresses tolerance for all points of view, which we practice by trying to see things all possible ways.