36 Arguments for the Existence of God - [81]

The story was beautiful, but he still wasn’t going to accept that Roz had proved anything by presenting him with Aldous Huxley’s fiction.

“I never would have pegged you for the Jewish-mother type.”

“Me, a Jewish mother?” She cocked her head in a considering sort of way, as if she were trying on an outlandish outfit and finding it didn’t look bad. “How do you mean?”

“You’re letting your imagination run away with you.”

“Was Huxley letting his imagination run away with him when he imagined that child jumping out of a window when he wasn’t allowed to study his Euclid?”

“Yes, that’s exactly what he was doing. Letting the imagination run away is what fiction writers do. A piece of fiction doesn’t make predictions the way a scientific theory does. You can’t cite a fictional Guido to convince me of the danger to the non-fictional Azarya!”

“Spoken like a true pre-med!”

Pre-med or not, he felt something like Roz’s prickling rising up over his surface as he took in what the Rebbe’s son was telling him. Goosebumps are a legacy from our furry ancestors, who could contract the muscles around each hair follicle to fluff themselves up when they were frightened, making themselves look more formidable. Were our quadrumanous grandparents also capable of awe? Did their fur rise as the wind of the uncanny blew cold over them?

The child put up his left hand and waved in the same infantile way he had that first time that Cass and Roz had met him, opening and closing his fingers. Bye-bye.

Henoch lived in a black-and-white two-family house; it reminded Cass of a Linzer torte. Cass had first rung the bell of the wrong side. Henoch’s in-laws lived there, Yocheved’s parents, who were Israelis. Yocheved, who was already the mother of quite a few children-Cass knew better than to ask how many-was the oldest child of her parents, and there were, between the two families, a massive number of interlaced children, who seemed to mingle so inextricably he wondered if the parents always remembered who belonged to whom. Certainly Cass never got it straight. Several of Henoch and Yocheved’s children were older than the aunts and uncles they played with.

“It’s late,” Henoch greeted him. He had looked harried and impatient the first time Cass had met him, at the meeting between Professor Klapper and the Rebbe, so it wasn’t surprising to find him looking harried and impatient now. He was a tall man, with a bony and intelligent face, his narrowed eyes looking like they were scanning the world for the details he had to record and rectify. “I’m already on my way to shul. Licht benching is in less than fifteen minutes, and there is a tish tonight at the shul. You and your professor will see something special. Berel”-and here Henoch indicated one of the gaggle of children gathered in the vestibule, ready to walk with their father, or their brother-in-law, to the synagogue; blonds and redheads preponderated, the little girls in plain dresses, their hair tied primly back with bands, and the boys in suits- “bleibt du. Ven dein cuzin wert zein zugegrayt nem im zu dem shul.”

Berel stepped obediently from the crowd and nodded to Cass to follow him. Cass was going to sleep in a bedroom that was off the living room and was already jammed with two bunk beds and four small dressers. There was a cot set up in a corner for Cass, with sheets and towels neatly folded on top. Cass washed up hurriedly and changed into the dark-blue suit he was carrying in a plastic bag from the cleaners. His mother had bought it for him for a cousin’s wedding on his father’s side. She skipped all family gatherings on her own side.

He hurried downstairs to Berel, patiently waiting at his post, and they walked quickly to the shul. As they got in sight of the vast white ornamented warehouse of a synagogue, Cass saw the last of the stragglers, hurrying in that distinctive walk he’d noticed: leaning precipitously forward from the waist, the straight back almost parallel to the sidewalk, taking furiously fast strides. “Scurrying” was the verb that suggested itself, but it carried the taint of the Nazi propaganda that had been shown in his pre-Bar Mitzvah classes in Persnippity, the disturbing film that showed swarms of rats pouring out of a sewer segueing into Jews who looked like the Valdeners scurrying down mazelike European streets.

The sun had just disappeared, spraying the sky with a rosy gold that spread itself thickly onto the white turrets and tablet-shaped windows of the synagogue, so that the awkward architecture seemed, in the few moments of its illumination, almost as beautiful as the Valdeners themselves probably thought it was.

“Tonight ist der tish,” Berel spoke for the first time to Cass. He was around twelve or thirteen, a somewhat pudgy redhead, with freckles and a sweet and docile manner. Cass couldn’t tell what Berel thought of him, a cousin who looked so different from the other cousins, who might not even know what a tish is. Was he intrigued, bemused, pitying, indifferent?

“Yes,” said Cass to him now, and added, “I’ve always wanted to be at a