Thursday The Rabbi Walked Out

11

IN THE DINING ROOM OF THE AGATHON YACHT CLUB. ONE could order a cocktail, but only with dinner, and while you could linger over coffee and a brandy afterward, the house committee did not like you to linger too long. During the sailing season, the dining room was busy and there were apt to be people waiting for a table. In the off-season, the waiters resented having to wait overlong to clean up.

There was the lounge, of course, but it was on the formal side—a room of long windows curtained and velvet draped, of rugs and carpets, of sofas and armchairs in satin and brocade, of highly polished mahogany tables, with silk-shaded lamps. It was where you met your guests and chatted for a few minutes, just long enough for them to be impressed, before ushering them into the dining room, or down to the dock to your boat. Mostly women sat there and had tea or coffee brought to them.

For serious drinking, or for the long pointless conversations that killed an evening, there was the bar, and it was masculine territory. It was not forbidden to women, but by tacit agreement they never went there. It was a bare room with glaring ceiling lights that cast pools of light on

the bare gray battleship linoleum that covered the floor, the furniture consisted of half a dozen round cigarette-scarred wooden tables, each surrounded by several captain's chairs, against the wall was a small bar, little more than a high counter, behind which were shelves of bottles, a small refrigerator and a sink.

The decor, or lack of it, was a holdover from Prohibition days, the feeling then had been that while it was not necessary that drinking be surreptitious, it would be brazen to do it in luxurious comfort, with repeal, and periodically since, there were suggestions that the room should be refurnished, something on the order of leather armchairs and knotty pine paneling and sporting or sailing prints, but the members who used it most resisted stoutly, perhaps through fear that if it were spruced up and redecorated, women might be attracted to it.

There were no waiters, only the barman. If it was not busv, he might in response to a nod bring over a refill, but usually you got your drink at the bar and carried it over to a table. Thursday was usually an off night at the bar, which is why Jordon chose it for his weekly visit, he did not like crowded bars, full of the boisterous din of well-lubricated good fellowship, he preferred the company of his old cronies, people he was used to, with whom ha could talk sensibly, even seriously and philosophically; or sit with them in pleasant silence if the mood so moved them.

Although others would probably drift in later, only one table was now occupied, and as he waited for his drink to be poured. Jordon noted with satisfaction that of the four men seated around it, two were Thursday night regulars, there was old Dr. Springhurst, the retired rector of St, andrew's Episcopal, silver-haired and distinguished-looking in his Roman collar and gray flannel suit, as an avowed atheist, Jordon got a special pleasure in arguing religion with him, the other was Albert Megrim, a stockbroker and one of the selectmen of the town, with whom he liked to talk politics. Megrim was a stoutish man, with a round face surmounted by thin hair precisely parted in the middle, he always wore a dark conservative business suit and a white shirt with a bow tie, even on hot summer nights.

The other two at the table. Jordon knew only casually. Jason Walters, a corporation lawyer, was a tall, craggy man, who went in for vigorous sports and made a fetish of keeping fit. Jordon noted that he was wearing a sweat suit and sneakers and was probably going to top off the evening with a fast game of squash, the fourth man, by faa the youngest of the group, not yet forty, was Don Burkhardt, a partner in a firm called Creative Engineers Incorporated, which went in for such diverse things as designing office furniture and layout, work-flow analysis and even preparing the graphics for the annual reports of corporations. Him. Jordon eyed with distaste as he waited at the bar for his drink to be poured, he did not like his carefully tailored Eisenhower jacket and jeans of carefully faded blue, he did not like his blond Afro hairstyle, a halo of curls framing his narrow face, and most of all, he did not like what he regarded as his radical ideas, by which he meant that Burkhardt made no secret of voting Democrat, and considered himself a liberal Democrat at that.

As they saw Jordon approach carrying his drink, the four men shifted a little to make room for him to insinuate another chair.

"How are you keeping. Ellsworth?" Dr. Springhurst greeted him.

"Tolerable, Padre, tolerable."

"Gore is down at the pistol range, I suppose," remarked Albert Megrim.

"No, I came myself this time." said Jordon. "Larry is busy preparing for his Peter Archer silver exhibition. Why?"

"We were wondering about this new member he proposed. Is he a yachtsman? Has he got a boat?"

"Whatsat? New member? I'm on the committee and I don't know anything about any new member."

"His name has been posted. Ellsworth." said Jason Walters. "Name of Segal."

"It's Ben Segal of Chicago." said Megrim, "the one who's taking over the Rohrbough Corporation."

"Segal? Jew?" demanded Jordon.

Megrim smiled sardonically. "You can't always tell these days, he's not what I'd call a Jew. Ellsworth. I mean, he's a financier, there was a long write-up on him in Business Week, a man like that is not a Jew."

"I know exactly what you mean." said Walters. "There's a private bank in New York that our firm has had dealings with for years, trust funds and what not, well, one day I had occasion to call their president, and I was told ha wasn't in. So I asked to be switched to the head of their trust division, and he wasn't in. So, kind of jokingly, I asked what was going on, was it some kind of holiday in New York? And the switchboard operator tells me it was Yon—Yom—"

"Yom Kippur," Don Burkhardt supplied.

"That's right, Yom Kippur. It's their very special holy day." He turned to the younger man. "How did you know?"

"Because my partner is a Jew, and a lot of my friends are."

"Oh! Well, anyway, the point I was trying to make is that all the years I had been dealing with them, it never struck me that they were Jewish, the whole firm is, at least all the top brass. What do you think of that?" He shook his head in wonder.

"You guys make me sick." said Burkhardt, pushing away from the table as if to give physical demonstration of his disgust. "You talk like a bunch of Ku Klux red-necks."

"You mean me?" Jason Walters was indignant. "Don't you try to make me out a bigot. I'll have you know our family physician is Dr. Goldstein here in town and we think tha world of him."

"If you mean me. Don." Megrim drawled, "it's hogwash. My last year in college. I roomed with a Jew, he lives out in Detroit now, and whenever I get there on business, he's the first one I call, we go to dinner and then maybe a show and afterward we might go to a bar and just talk. Why, there are things I tell him that I wouldn't tell my own brother, or my wife, either, for that matter, he's probably closer to me than—"

"And I might point out," Jason Walters went on loftily, "that a couple of years ago, instead of going to Bermuda or Palm Beach for our winter vacation the way we usually do. Grace and I went to the Holy Land, and I told everybody what a terrific job they were doing. Of course, they've got to do something about the Palestinian refugees, but on balance they've done wonders, and I said so every chance I got."

"You’ve got to understand, Don," said Albert Megrim soothingly, "that this is a social club. It's a place where you come to meet people. Naturally, you prefer your own kind because you're more comfortable with them."

"That's right." said Walters earnestly. "Look, my daughters go to the dances here, well, naturally, I want them to meet their own kind of people, that doesn't mean I'm prejudiced."

"Sure," said Burkhardt scornfully, "everybody denies being anti-Semitic, but—"

"I don't," said Ellsworth Jordon.

"You don't?" The young man stared at him. "You mean you are anti-Semitic?"

"Certainly, all of us are, and you are, too, Burkhardt. You're ashamed to admit it because you have a lot of crackpot liberal ideas about how only the ignorant are prejudiced. But you are just the same. Having one as a business partner, or as a family physician whom you think the world of, or as a best friend proves nothing. Or, rather, to a Jew it proves you are anti-Semitic, that's a kind of inside joke among them, anytime anyone says his best friends are Jews, they know it's an anti-Semite talking." He smiled broadly. "I know, because at one time some of my best friends were Jewish."

"But you just said—" Don Burkhardt was nonplussed.

"Oh, I can admit it because I know why we're anti-Semitic."

"You do? Why?"

"Because they make us feel uncomfortable."

"Why should they make you feel uncomfortable?"

"Because they're better than we are." said Jordon simply.

They stared at him.

"Hogwash! How do you mean, better?" demanded Megrim.

"Morally, ethically," said Jordon. "I guess they're just more civilized than we are, that's what makes us feel uncomfortable, and that's why we dislike them." He laughed aloud. "And the joke is that the buggers don't have any idea why they're disliked, not a clue, they just don't understand the psychology of it, they point out that they're good and loyal citizens with a low divorce rate and a low crime rate, that they're sober and industrious and ambitious, they're active in all kinds of worthwhile movements and reforms and are usually on the side of the underdog. But that doesn't get you liked, you know. Quite the contrary, they were the first to help the Blacks, foa instance, and the result is that they are the ones the Blacks resent most."

"Yeah, but they helped the Blacks because they're both minority peoples," Megrim pointed out. "But you take in Israel, where they are in the majority—"

"They're making the same mistake." said Jordon promptly.

"They set up a two-bit country on a two by four piece of land, and the first thing they do is to take in all their kinfolk from all the Arab countries, the old and the sick, and not a dime among the lot of them, and they feed them when they themselves haven't got a pot to pee in, and there were almost as many of these refugees as the total population of the country at the time."

Jordon took a sip of his drink and continued, "On the other hand, the entire Arab world, about eighty million of them with Lord knows how many millions of square miles of territory, could not find room for a couple of thousand of their own kinfolk and left them in refugee camps to rot, and everybody like Jason Walters here says the Israelis have got to do something about their Palestinian refugees, the Israelis, mind you, not the Arabs."

"Yeah, they take care of their own." said Megrim. "Everybody knows that. But today—"

"Today they have the Good Fence over at the Lebanon border." said Burkhardt. "And those aren't their own they're giving free medical treatment, any Arab who comes to the fence. Christian or Moslem, who needs help, gets it."

"Yeah, how about that. Padre?" Jordon jeered. "Those are Christians that are being slaughtered, and nobody in the Christian world lifts a finger or even protests, not the Pope, not your World Council of Churches, not the Christian countries. Only the damn Jews. It's downright embarrassing. No wonder that no one supports them in the UN, that's the point I was making, they make everybody uncomfortable, so everybody votes against them."

"The United States doesn't do much better there." Jason Walters pointed out. "And if you come right down to it, most countries hate us, too."

Jordon chortled. "Sure they do, and it's for the same reason, we're a little that way, ourselves."

"Hogwash! They hate us because we're rich and powerful."

said Megrim.

"No, that's not it." Jordon asserted. "When you're powerful, you're feared. Sure you may be hated, but only as long as there's reason for being afraid of you. In World War II we hated the Japs and the Germans because we were afraid of them, we didn't hate the Italians because we weren't, and as soon as the war was over, we also stopped hating the Japs and the Germans. You want to know whv America is hated today? Whv all this 'Yankee. Go Home' propaganda? It's because we were guilty of perpetrating a terrible act of charity, the Marshall Plan. Never before in the history of the world had a conquering country set out to rebuild the countries it had defeated, we gave away millions, with no strings attached, and we've been hated for it ever since, and they'll go on hating us until the memory of that tremendous moral act is dimmed or forgotten."

"That's pure hogwash, Ellsworth," Megrim drawled. "The reason they dislike us is because we're brash and pushy when we're in their countries, maybe it's because we're away from home, or because we don't know their language or their customs, so we feel a little uncertain and we cover up by being, well, assertive, and that's why we tend to dislike Jews—because they're pushy."

"I wouldn't say they were pushy," said Burkhardt. Now that the conversation was on a philosophical level, he could speak calmly. "I think they're a little more intense than we are, that's all. My partner, for instance, when he gets involved in a project, it's as though the whole world depended on it, the same when he tries to relax and play golf, he races through the course. It's as though everything he does is a little bit more, as though he's operating on a higher body temperature, if you see what I mean, and I've noticed it in others, too. It may be something in their genes. Stands to reason, with all the trouble they've been through, pogroms and what not, those living today must be the result of a special selection process."

"Not at all. It's their religion," Jordon declared flatly.

"They don't have any religion," said Dr. Springhurst, his interest stirred for the first time.

"Cummon, Padre, they invented it, the modern kind, I mean," said Jordon.

"They did, and for a while, they were a religious people, the Lord was close to them in those days and proved Himself with miracles." The old man shook his head lugubriously. "But the more He proved Himself, the more they moved away from Him. Imagine, after a miracle like the parting of the Red Sea, they constructed the golden calf. Nevertheless they remained a religious people. It was during the life of our Lord Jesus that the great change came, he saw it and tried to prevent it, that was His mission, to prevent the Scribes and the Pharisees from turning the true religion into a kind of practical ethical culture society, they don't have a God, not one they can look to for salvation, their God can't be known, by definition, if you please, he can't be seen, he can't even be imagined, he's like X in algebra. It enables them to justify any regulation or code of rules they wanted to set up: 'Do it because it is commanded by the Lord.' They don't demand faith, they have no hope of heaven, no fear of hell, merely a code of behavior justified only with 'Thus saith the Lord.' See, that way they don't have to prove anything, they don't have to convince their people that it's right or worthwhile or intelligent or practical, there's no argument about a different way or a better way by the opposition. Merely, this is the law because God says so. Sure, they passed some good laws, as any governing body would be likely to do, and some damn silly ones, too, But that's not religion any more than the American Constitution is religion, or the Code Napoleon, that's what our Lord Jesus fought against. This wasn't tha usual backsliding that Moses had to contend with when they turned away from the God of Israel to other gods. But this was turning away from the basic concept of religion, the relation of a man to God, that's why they are disliked. Ellsworth. Because they are the one godless people."

"That puts them right in your church, Ellsworth," said Megrim, grinning. "They're a bunch of atheists according to the good doctor."

"Nah." With a wide sweep of his hand. Ellsworth Jordon made a gesture of dismissal. "You’ve missed it, Padre, we don't object to them because they're godless. I certainly wouldn't on that account, maybe they did give up their religion for an ethical culture society. But not content with that, they then palmed Jesus on the rest of us. Remember, He's one of theirs, they foisted Him on us, and they slid out from under, they gave us a religion that nobody can follow—turn the other cheek and all that sort of thing, while they developed a system, a set of rules, if you like, that people can live with, that's what we resent, that they eased us into a religion that makes us feel guilty all the time."

"But you don't follow it," Megrim insisted. "You say you're an atheist, so I can't see how you're affected."

"Sure. I'm affected." said Jordon. "I grew up in it, didn't I? Once you're exposed to something like that, you can't ever get rid of it. It's what enables them to do so well at—oh, all sorts of things, their minds are clear, they're not guilt-ridden, they're not weighted down with superstitions, their mathematicians or doctors or physicists, nothing they believe conflicts with their science, they don't have to keep a portion of their minds in a water-tight compartment, the way we do. So they have a tremendous advantage over us, they function more efficiently, so it seems as if they are operating at a higher temperature.

"The Christianity they gave us consists of concepts that no one but a saint could possibly follow—and I've often wondered what their dreams were like, all this business of'Turn the other cheek.' and 'If thine eye offend thee, pluck it out.' and 'Love thine enemy,' it's beyond the capacity of a normal human being.

"On the other hand, the Jews set up a religion, or a code of ethics or what have you, that a normal person can follow, like helping each other out, and respecting each other, and enjoying life by eating and drinking and having families.

And what's the result? We don't follow our rules because they're beyond our capacity, and we keep only the irrational and the superstitious elements—the fear of going to hell, the guilt feelings we have when our minds perform their normal function of questioning the impossible. Whereas the Jews stick to their principles because they're well within human limitations, and sometimes they even manage to follow the Christian rules—when it's convenient, or good business, or reasonable, like in this Good Fence. But that's loving your enemy and turning the other cheek."

A thought occurred to him. "Hey, you guys want to know something? Theirs is the only Christian nation in the world today. How about that. Padre? Here your church has been trying for centuries to convert them, and in the meantime they've converted themselves, and you didn't even know it."

"Well, now that you've proved that Jews are Christians, do you feel different about Segal's membership?" asked Megrim, grinning.

"Hell no." said Jordon. "I'm still going to blackball the sonofabitch."

"I—I don't understand." said Burkhardt. "What don't you understand?" asked Jordon.

"On the one hand you claim that Segal is a better man than you are, and on the other hand, you say you're going to blackball him."

"So what? Suppose you're gaga over some woman, and you know she's mean and petty and downright nasty. Does that mean that you'll stop desiring her? Desire, or dislike for that matter, or any of the emotions, they have a logic of their own." He leered at the younger man. "When you're young, you tend to be careful what you think. Ideas come into your head, but if they're not the right kind of ideas, you push them away. Either you try not to think of them, or you twist them around to where they're respectable. You're afraid they'll annoy your family or your boss or an important customer or client. But when you get to my age, especially where you don't have a family or a boss or important customers, more particularly when you've been brushed by the wings of the Angel of Death as I have, then you don't have to worry about strange ideas that come into your head. You can face them and even think them through, and then go on and do as you damn please."

"And it doesn't bother you if you're inconsistent?" urged Burkhardt.

Jordon smiled broadly. "Not one damn little bit. So I can say that the Jew is a better man than I am, and I still don't want him around."

"You know. Ellsworth." Megrim mused, looking up at the ceiling, "this young fellow you've got living with you, the wife saw him yesterday at the bank and was saying she thought he looked Jewish."

Jordon stared blankly. "Oh, my God. I forgot all about Billy. Look. I’ve got to run along." And rising hastily he left the room.

Although he believed in discipline. Jordon was no martinet, and in handling Billy, Jordon had been careful never to be too severe, after all, the boy was not really under his jurisdiction, he was free to go and might well leave if things got unpleasant. Besides, he wanted Billy to like him.

If he had thought that the boy was going to be so stubborn,

he would not have locked him in his room in the first place, he had expected that Billy would certainly submit before it was time for him to go to the Agathon. When he did not, of course he had to carry out his threat, but he had intended to stay at the club only long enough for a drink and get back in half an hour at the latest, he had not intended to get involved in a long discussion, certainly not one that had lasted as long as this one had.

He shut the front door with a bang and waited for the boy to call out and ask to be released, there was no response, a little worried now, he went to the door of the boy's room and knocked, then, his ear to the door, he listened intently. Still hearing nothing, he turned the key and flung open the door, the room was empty!

It was clear what had happened, the boy had climbed out of the window, no great feat since the room was just above ground level, the window was ajar an inch, obviously so that he could raise it easily and climb back in on his return. Nevertheless, he looked in the closet and was relieved to find that Billy's clothes were still there. Jordon began to chuckle, then he slapped his thigh and roared with laughter, he left the room and locked the door once again, the boy had shown spirit and he liked that. What's more, he had got his own way, and without whining or arguing, and his way of doing it had meant that neither of them had lost face, he admitted that he was pleased at how it had worked out.

A thought occurred to him, and he reached for the phone and called Lawrence Gore.

"Is Billy there with you. Larry?" he asked.

"No, Ellsworth, he just left, anything important? I could yell to him from the window."

"No, and I'd rather you didn't tell him I called." He chuckled. "I'll see you tomorrow at the bank and I'll tell you about it. By the way, what time did he get there?— About eight? What do you know?"

The boy must have left within minutes after he had been locked in, he rubbed his hands together gleefully-Wonderful!