36 Arguments for the Existence of God - [75]

Klapper placed the small suitcase he was carrying down on the sidewalk and stood beside the passenger door, his hands dangling helplessly at his sides, and the homunculus in Cass’s head broke off her laughter briefly enough to demand, “Why the hell doesn’t he open the door?”- which was enough of a cue to make Cass jump to action, leaping out of the car to scurry around and open the door for Jonas Elijah Klapper and place the bag on the backseat, taking care to keep his eyes away from the professor’s face, lest he see that the solemn expression he expected was there. But he did take a quick, furtive glance from close range, just to dispel any lingering doubts that his brain had been playing tricks on him, as when he was a child, lying on his bunk bed under Jesse, and the bathrobe hanging on the door had become an intruder approaching the bed, and Cass had known to pretend to be asleep but was terrified that his little brother would wake up and start screaming and get them both killed.

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