Acts of Faith

  “What?”

  “By my count, there were sixteen Princes of the Church—and not all Italian either. When the Cardinal Archbishop of Paris comes to raise a glass to you, I’d say that you’d get all the French votes without much problem.”

  “Was he really there?” asked Tim ingenuously. For by now, he had learned to ignore his rival’s caustic references to his ascent upon the ecclesiastic ladder.

  “You mean you didn’t see him? You probably were too busy staring at La Loren.”

  “What?”

  “Come on, you’d have to be blind not to notice glorious Sophia and her attentive consort Carlo. We’re allowed to look, you know. Who did you talk to, anyway?”

  Tim spread one hand across his throbbing temples and said, “George, I’m trying to remember everyone I met, but it’s impossible. And I’m not kidding. You can some up to my room and see the list I’ve written down—”

  “Now that’s an invitation I won’t pass up,” George reacted eagerly.

  Later, as they leaned over Tim’s wooden desk comparing scraps of paper, George remarked with undisguised awe, “This is a real honor roll. Are you still determined to go back to Brooklyn and hear adolescents and old ladies saying their confessions?”

  “I’m going to St. Gregory’s,” Timothy answered firmly. “That’s where I come from.”

  “Okay.” George shrugged. “But for someone with your gifts I wouldn’t think that was the best way to serve the Church.”

  “Well, what are your own plans?” Tim inquired.

  “No doubt an unwise career move,” George explained, “but I’ve requested a special assignment with the Jesuits in Argentina. I figure I’ll probably have a better chance of getting to Heaven if I do good for others and not just well for myself.”

  “That’s very commendable,” Tim commented sincerely. “To be honest, I never thought of you as—”

  “Altruistic?” George was not offended. “I know. I’m sometimes surprised myself by the growing strength of my Christian feelings.”

  The invitation came in the same near-parchment envelope with the Santiori seal.

  My dear Timoteo,

  The flowers you sent were both extravagant and unnecessary. For the real bloom at our little party was your extraordinary self. All my friends were captivated by your charm and wisdom.

  I know that you must be terribly busy in these final days before your return to America, but I wonder if you could spare the time to come to the Villa for lunch this Sunday. I will be entertaining one of my relatives whom I am sure you will enjoy meeting.

  It was signed simply Cristina.

  This time there were only four of them, seated at great distances from one another at the long white-linened table in the sumptuous Santiori dining room. The princess Timothy on her right, her sister Giulietta on her left—and, at the end, a handsome, gray-haired cleric in his midfifties.

  He was introduced as the principessa’s younger brother, Gianni, but Tim knew precisely how he was listed in the Pontifical Annuario: Monsignor Giovanni Orsino, Assistant Secretary of State for Latin America.

  The brother was no less courtly and charming than the sister.

  “If you do not mind,” he said, with a puckish apology to Timothy, “I would appreciate if we could converse in English. That is to say, if you could speak English, and I would try to make myself understood on something better than the primitive level that I now possess.”

  “Of course,” Timothy replied, politely adding, “But your English is very good.”

  “Please, senza complimenti. I would be more happy for you to correct me. I will take no offensive whatsoever.”

  “Of course, Monsignor,” Timothy responded, ignoring the cleric’s immediate malapropism. “But do you get to use much English in the Secretariat?”

  “Not in my current situation,” Monsignor Orsino replied. “The documents I deal with daily are of course in Spanish. And real Spanish, as they say, is merely Italian spoken with a lisp. But some day—”

  At that moment, from far down the table, his older sister interrupted portentously, “Very soon, Gianni, very soon.”

  Orsino seemed to blush and pointing at Cristina said to Timothy, “Well then, as my optimistic sister says, ‘very soon,’ I may receive a new assignation.”

  “I believe Monsignor means ‘assignment.’ ” Timothy smiled politely.

  The princess assumed the privilege of rank and completed her brother’s thought. “Gianni is a very senior member of the Secretariat, and in eighteen months, when Bonaventura retires, the post of Apostolic Delegate to Washington falls open. And so …” With a delicacy uniquely Italian, the princess gracefully gestured the rest of her sentence, which seemed to indicate that she would see to it that her brother became Archbishop Bonaventura’s successor. Hence the need to buff his English to a diplomatic shine.

  “I wanted very much for you two to meet,” she continued, “especially since all American episcopal appointments are made through Rome. And Rome depends heavily on the advice of its Washington Apostolic Delegate.”

  “Cristina,” Tim protested, “I’m just going to be an assistant pastor. I don’t even see myself as a bishop in my dreams.”

  “But I do,” the principessa insisted.

  As he walked slowly away from the Palatine Hill in the glow of the late afternoon sun, Tim thought that the title Princess, when applied to Cristina Santiori, was no empty designation.

  Though her crown might not be visible, her power was.

  48

  Deborah

  During the second half of Deborah’s studies toward ordination, the focus changed from ancient law to modern life.

  The aspiring rabbis were taught psychology—how to respond to the many cries of the heart they would receive from members of their congregations. Marital pressures, divorce, illness, death. The full cycle of grief.

  “And here,” Professor Albert Redmont emphasized, “the rabbi differs from the psychotherapist. For most doctors nowadays are too busy to give their patient much more than a pharmacological evasion to be swallowed three times daily. Rabbis have more potent medicine.

  “Faith can lift the fallen. Even heal the sick, better than the scientist, whose powers are circumscribed by the frontiers of knowledge—which is where belief in God begins.”

  The future rabbis worked in hospitals, homes for the aged, and kindergartens. They learned firsthand how to confront an anguish that is even worse than death itself—the dying person’s fears of the unknown.

  “Hold my hand and repeat after me, ‘Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil. For Thou art with me; Thy rod and Thy staff they comfort me.…’ ”

  “Thank you, Rabbi Luria. Thank you for your kindness.”

  For Deborah, this human contact only magnified her love for the calling she had chosen.

  For the High Holy Days in her senior year, Deborah was posted to a nonexistent congregation in New England.

  That is to say, she would be temporary spiritual leader of a group of Jews who came together only on the so-called Days of Awe—the New Year and Yom Kippur—to expiate their sins and reinvigorate their faith.

  The congregants in question were scattered throughout an area of some three hundred square miles near the Canadian border in New Hampshire and Vermont. Each year they would gather in the town hall or Unitarian church of a different village, bringing the one Torah Scroll—guarded all year round by an orthopedic surgeon—and absorb enough solidarity from their coreligionists to survive yet another twelve months in a region so remote that they were outnumbered by the black bears.

  “Dean Ashkenazy,” Deborah said politely after she had been given her assignment, “I don’t want to seem as if I’m complaining, but most of my classmates have been sent to larger towns, even to colleges.” She pointed to her distant bailiwick on the map. “Why me?”

  “The truth?” the dean inquired.

  She nodded. “Please.”
br />   “The college jobs are easy. Anyone can speak their language. Besides, if those kids feel strongly enough about a holiday to cut their classes and worship, then you’ve got an eager audience.” He paused thoughtfully. “Deborah, the people you’ll be preaching to are losing touch. They spend the year—especially at Christmas—wondering why they should work so hard at being different. They’re a small group to begin with, but the rate of their attrition is alarming.

  “So,” he said, “I have to send the best we have.” He looked at her and concluded, “And that, Rabbi Luria, is you.”

  49

  Deborah

  Laroche, Vermont, lay so far north that even in late September the leaves were already gold and crimson.

  A sharp wind breathed a chilly greeting as Deborah stepped off the bus, her limbs stiff from the long journey, which had passed, it seemed, through all of Europe and the Middle East, as the Greyhound lumbered through such exotic towns as Bristol, Calais, West Lebanon, and Jericho.

  Laroche was the last stop, and Deborah was by this time one of only two remaining passengers.

  For a moment this caused some confusion, since a pair of middle-aged men bundled in parkas and scarves were waiting for “Rabbi Luria.” Neither the eighty-year-old farmer nor the young woman in camel’s-hair coat and briefcase seemed to fit their preconceived notion of a Jewish man of God.

  The senior citizen was greeted by his family in the joual dialect of Quebec. By an uncomfortable process of elimination this left Deborah.

  “Didn’t they tell you I was a woman?” Deborah asked, as she noted the continuing uneasiness of Dr. Harris and Mr. Newman, the official welcoming party.

  “Well, I’m sure they probably did,” the doctor replied. “But I was so busy setting things up—not to mention setting broken bones—that I guess the whole notion didn’t sink in. To be honest, HUC has usually sent us men.”

  “You mean so they could help you chop down trees and build the sukkah after Yom Kippur?”

  “No, of course not,” Mr. Newman said with an embarrassed smile. He opened the door to his station wagon for her. “I just wonder what the wives will think.”

  “I would have thought they’d be pleased to see a woman on the pulpit.”

  “Oh, of course,” Newman mumbled. “It’s just that you’re so—”

  “Young?” Deborah offered.

  “Yes, there’s that,” he conceded, and almost involuntarily added, “And you’re also pretty.”

  “Is that a plus or a minus?” Deborah asked.

  Newman had painted himself into a conversational corner. The physician stepped in to rescue him. “Please, Miss Luria—I mean Rabbi—don’t take offense. It’s just that we’re so isolated up here. These gatherings are our only connection with what’s happening in the Jewish world.”

  “Well,” said Deborah lightheartedly, “I guess you might say I’m what’s happening.”

  The Unitarian church was filled with people Deborah would never have thought of as Jews. It was as if their appearance had been altered by the strange clime and, compressing years of evolution, they had come to look indistinguishable from their gentile neighbors.

  As the church organist struggled through the music Deborah had brought for him, and she rose to the podium in her white robes and square canonical hat, there were murmurs of wonderment from the worshipers and an uneasy tension Deborah could feel.

  “Shana tova.” She smiled. “As you can see, you’re getting something new for the New Year.”

  The laughter of relief that filled the church testified to the success of her tactic.

  “We’ll begin our service on page one thirty-one of your prayer books.”

  The organist struck a chord, and Deborah stunned her congregation with the beauty of her voice, as she sang in Hebrew, “How goodly are your tents, O Jacob,” and then led them in the reading of the English translation. “Through the greatness of Your Love, I enter Your House. In awe I worship before the Ark of Your Holiness.”

  She continued. “In the twilight of the vanishing year, we turn to You as our parents have done before us in their generation. We come into Your Presence together with all other holy congregations of Your people.…”

  Her fervor united these scattered enclaves of people, who gathered twice a year to renew their identity and their faith. She, too, was swept up in the feeling of cohesion.

  “May the sound of the ram’s horn echo within us and awaken our longing for goodness and new lives in our souls.”

  By the time the service had reached the reading of the Torah from Dr. Harris’s single precious scroll, Deborah had touched them all.

  At the reception afterward, it seemed as if every congregant wanted to speak to her, not merely to shake her hand, but to take advantage of her presence for a kind of public pastoral consultation.

  “You can’t believe how much this means to us, Rabbi,” said Nate Berliner, an orthodontist from a town near the Maine border. “My family drove a hundred miles to these services. And if next year you’re a thousand miles from here, we’ll drive there too.”

  “Why doesn’t your seminary send people like you up here more often?” several worshipers asked. But most of the conversations were expressions of loneliness. How hard it was for them—as one man put it—“to keep our religious batteries charged. A jump-start twice a year just isn’t enough.”

  “I’ll speak to the dean,” Deborah answered. “Maybe he can arrange for a rabbi to come up on a monthly basis.”

  “Then we could have a Sunday School for our kids,” added another congregant.

  “Just one thing,” said Mrs. Harris, who had initially been outraged to see a woman on the pulpit. “They’d have to send somebody as wonderful as you.”

  When she told Danny about her experiences, he volunteered to return with her for the Day of Atonement.

  It was not merely curiosity. Disenfranchised Jew though he was, Danny still trembled at the thought of God’s Judgment. He wanted to observe this most solemn day in the company of the person he loved most in the world.

  Deborah put him to good use, persuading him to chant the Torah portion to an admiring audience who could see he knew it practically by heart. At the very end of the long day of fasting and prayer in which the congregation stood in front of God’s open gate, praying to be inscribed in the Book of Life for another year, Danny sounded the ram’s horn.

  He blew it with such vigor that Mr. Newman later remarked that he believed that it could be heard by God Himself.

  During the long ride home Danny could barely contain his enthusiasm.

  “Now I understand the phrase ‘God Who watches over the remnants of Israel,’ ” he said. “Those people live in the opposite of a ghetto. It takes three hundred and sixty-five days to round them up. If you want a real challenge as a rabbi, Deb, why don’t you apply to be stationed there when you graduate?”

  “Sure, then Eli could go to a different school every day. Why don’t you take the job?”

  “May I remind you that I’m not a rabbi.” He smiled evasively.

  “That can easily be remedied, you know,” Deborah countered. “I mean I don’t have to tell you that it’s not like becoming a priest. Any rabbi can say the words and ordain another Jew. So next year when I graduate—”

  “I’ll think about it,” said Danny, trying to pretend she had not struck a chord. After a pause he asked, “When you said ‘priest’ just then—in fact, whenever you say that word—do you still think of Tim?”

  Deborah answered quietly. “Yes. He’s always somewhere in my thoughts. Especially on the Day of Atonement.”

  “It wasn’t a sin,” Danny asserted, gently putting his hand on hers.

  She was silent for a moment and then said, “I keep wondering when the hell I’m going to tell Eli. I owe him the truth.”

  Danny nodded. “Speaking of full disclosure, have you thought how you’re going to tell Papa you’re going to be the next Rabbi Luria?”

  “This w
as a good night to ask me,” Deborah responded. “I made an oath during the closing prayers that I’d stop lying this year.”

  “When?”

  “When I get the guts.”

  50

  Deborah

  As an elective course for her senior year, Deborah had chosen Modern Hebrew Poetry, telling herself she should make up for not completing Zev’s course back in Israel.

  By happy coincidence she found his name on the cover of the text they would be using: The New Jerusalem Anthology of Modern Hebrew Verse, translated and edited by Z. Morgenstern.

  “What differentiates this new collection from all the others,” Professor Weiss declared in his opening lecture, “is that Morgenstern not only knows the language, but he’s a poet in his own right.…”

  I never knew that, thought Deborah to herself. He never let it slip in class six years ago. Was it ego on his part—expecting all of us would know? Or maybe—as she thought more likely—he was simply shy. So shy, in fact, that he had waited one week too long to invite her for a cup of coffee.

  Her attention refocused on the Professor’s words just in time to hear, “Matter of fact, Morgenstern’s reading some of his own verse at the Y next week. It’s sold out already but if any of you care to go, I think I can arrange it—since he’s staying at my house.”

  She wondered what to do. Not whether she would go or not, for that was far beyond the slightest doubt. Her only quandary was whether she should ask for a seat in the first row, if that were possible.

  Would he be pleased to catch sight of her, smile, and therefore read with more emotion? Or would she embarrass him and throw him off balance?

  Or, worst of all, would he not even remember her?

  The night of the reading Deborah came home after her last class, had dinner with her son, and since Danny was out of town, left him under Mrs. Lamont’s supervision before going out, explaining to Eli that she was going “to an important lecture.”

  The auditorium of the Ninety-second Street YMHA was filled to capacity as Professor Weiss walked to the podium to introduce the poet. The hall was so crowded she had to squeeze into a seat in the back row.