36 Arguments for the Existence of God - [69]

And here was Azarya Sheiner cavorting with maloychim. No wonder the whole village cooed and petted over this child, rigid-faced women almost bursting into reckless laughter at the mere sight of him. He wasn’t just the Rebbe’s son, the Valdener Rebbe-to-be, the heir apparent, the Dauphin of New Walden. He was that accident of genes that happens only once in a very long while.

And even then, when such accidents happen, there has to be a blessed confluence of factors. A Mozart born to a family of slaves in the antebellum South would have created excellent spirituals while he was picking cotton in the fields, but not sublime operas. A Gauss growing up before the Arabs had invented the zero wouldn’t have had a chance to carry mathematics into realms of infinite abstraction.

But when the alignment was right, then marvels ensued. If Azarya was discovering that the nth difference of xⁿ is n! at six years old, then what would he be doing at sixteen, at twenty-six? The Rebbe himself had put it well. “There are children who are born as if knowing.”

She wondered how much the child understood of what he’d drawn here. Had he discovered his theorem by playing with the numbers and noticing a pattern emerging, which would be astounding enough, especially since it would have required his discovering on his own the idea of raising numbers to a power-which he’d already spoken to them about- as well as factorials? Or had the child, even more astoundingly, discovered these patterns by seeing why they had to form? Did he see the reason for these patterns? Roz sure didn’t. To her it just seemed uncanny, though not nearly as uncanny as a six-year-old’s discovering it.

She looked over at Cass. He had put in a lot of driving miles, and under pressure, too, with that tyrannical buffoon breathing down his neck all day, oblivious to everything except his own obsessions-certainly oblivious to how emotionally complicated this trip back to New Walden must have been for Cass.

She gently swept the silky hair off of his high forehead, and the gesture of tenderness made her feel tender. Now she knew where that auburn hair came from. Redheadedness ran rampant in New Walden.

She shouldn’t wake him. She herself would have snarled like a trodden cat if she was woken in the middle of the night because somebody with something to tell her couldn’t control himself until the morning. But she couldn’t control herself.

“Wake up, you crazy Valdener Hasid,” she whispered in his ear. “Let me tell you about your next Rebbe.”

XIV The Argument from Inconsolable Solitude

Something jolts Cass into wakefulness at 2 a.m., and he can’t get himself back to sleep. He had conked out early, falling into a deep and dreamless sleep, but now he’s fully awake, groping around for provocations for feeling guilty, because that’s the normal behavior when you wake up in the middle of the night. You wake, you feel guilty, you search for reasons to justify your guilt. Anyway, that’s normal behavior for Cass.

It could be Shimmy Baumzer. Shimmy had served the salmon over guilt. The president had exacted a promise from him to think about “what sort of goodies you might like to see in a retention package.

“For example, I notice that you don’t own your own house but rent a place in Cambridge. I could call up the Comptroller’s Office right now, my friend,” and he gestured with his elegant hand toward the phone, “and have them cut you a check that would cover the down payment for a house in Weedham. Maybe even in Cambridge. Another idea for you to kick over is whether you’d like to have your own Center for the Psychology of Religion, with a discretionary fund at your disposal. I can be creative, Cass. Just promise me you’ll give it some thought.”

Could it be around Lucinda that his unease is congealing? Yes, definitely. He’s been holding back on her, not sharing the news about his offer from Harvard, and that’s a troubling thought in the middle of the night.

His conversation with her tonight had been brief. She had been anxious to go through her PowerPoint one more time before getting her seven and a half hours of sleep. Rishi Chandrakar, the unworthy keynote speaker, had been mentioned again.

This isn’t easy for her. She’s such a proud person, in the best sense of the word. She had lifted up her transformed face to Cass in the twilight as he held the door of Katzenbaum open for her, and she had laid bare her vulnerability. She had been so terribly betrayed, both by the despicable David Prentiss Cuthbert, chairman of Princeton’s Psychology Department, and by the system, and she’s still bruised and uncertain, though nobody but he knows. Mona, for example, for whom his affection has cooled, hasn’t a clue. Mona is very hard on Lucinda. Lucinda is right that she provokes irrational responses from envious people. It’s obviously ludicrous to complain of being both brilliant and beautiful, and of course Lucinda isn’t complaining, even when she sounds as if she is, but, still, she’s been hurt by the people she calls griefers. His darling girl! He wishes he could be more helpful, but she’s so beyond him. What can he say that will give her what she needs? He keeps trying.