'Your eyes look bloodshot,' I told him.
'They are bloodshot,' he said.
'Your eyes look as if you've been reading Freud: 'Ha – ha,' Danny said.
'What does Freud say about an ordinary thing like bloodshot eyes?'
'He says to rest them.'
'A genius,' I said.
'You know, my brother's a good kid,' Danny said. 'His sickness is quite a handicap, but everything considered he's a good kid.'
'He's quiet, I'll say that for him. Does he study at all?'
'Oh, sure. He's bright, too. But he has to be careful. My father can't pressure him.'
'Lucky boy.'
'I don't know. I wouldn't want to be sick all my life. I'd much rather be pressured. He's a nice kid, though.'
'Your sister's pretty nice, too,' I said.
Danny didn't seem to have heard me – or if he had, he chose to ignore my words completely. He went on talking about his brother. 'It must really be hell to walk around sick all the time and have to depend upon pills. He's really a sweet kid. And bright, too.' He seemed to be rambling, and I wasn't sure I knew what he was trying to say. His next words jarred me. 'He'd probably make a fine tzaddik,' he said.
I looked at him. 'How's that again?'
'I said my brother would probably make a fine tzaddik,' Danny said quietly. 'It occurred to me recently that if I didn't take my father's place I wouldn't be breaking the dynasty after all. My brother could take over. I had talked myself into believing that if I didn't take his place I would break the dynasty. I think I had to justify to myself having to become a tzaddik.'
I was frightened and said tightly, 'Your home hasn't blown up recently, so I take it you haven't told your father.'
'No, I haven't. And I'm not going to, either. Not yet.'
'When will you tell him? Because I'm going to be out of town that day.'
'No,' he said quietly. 'I'm going to need you around that day.'
'I was only kidding,' I told him, feeling sick with dread.
'It also occurred to me recently that all my concern about my brother's health was a fake. I don't have much of a relationship with him at all He's such a kid. I pity him a little, that's all. I was really concerned about his health because all along I've wanted him to be able to take my father's place. That was something all right, when I realized that. How am I doing? Are you bored yet?'
'I'm bored stiff,' I said. 'I can't wait until the day you tell your father.'
'You'll wait,' Danny said tightly, blinking his eyes. 'You'll wait, and you'll be around, too, because I'm going to need you.'
'Let's talk about your sister for a change,' I said.
'I heard you the first time. Let's not talk about my sister, if you don't mind. Let's talk about my father. You want to know how I feel about my father? I admire him. I don't know what he's trying to do to me with this weird silence that he's established between us, but I admire him. I think he's a great man. I respect him and trust him completely, which is why I think I can live with his silence. I don't know why I trust him, but I do. And I pity him, too. Intellectually, he's trapped. He was born trapped. I don't ever want to be trapped the way he's trapped. I want to be able to breathe, to think what I want to think, to say the things I want to say. I'm trapped now, too. Do you know what it's like to be trapped?'
I shook my head slowly.
'How could you possibly know?' Danny said. 'It's the most hellish, choking, constricting feeling in the world. I scream with every bone in my body to get out of it. My mind cries to get out of it. But I can't. Not now. One day I will, though. I'll want you around on that day, friend. I'll need you around on that day.'
I didn't say anything. We sat in silence a long time. Then Danny slowly closed the Freud book he had been reading. 'My sister's been promised,' he told me quietly.
'What?'
'My father promised my sister to the son of one of his followers when she was two years old. It's an old Hasidic custom to promise children away. She'll be married when she reaches eighteen. I think we ought to go over and visit your father now.'
That was the only time Danny and I ever talked about his sister.
A week later. I went up with my father to our cottage near Peekskill. While we were there, America destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki with atomic bombs, and the war with Japan came to an end.
I didn't tell my father about that last conversation I had with Danny, and I had many nightmares that year in which Reb Saunders screamed at me that I had poisoned his son's mind.
That September Danny and I entered Hirsch College. I had grown to five feet nine inches, an inch shorter than Danny, and I was shaving. Danny hadn't changed much physically during his last year in high school. The only thing different about him was that he was now wearing glasses.
Book Three
A world is worth one coin; silence is worth two.
– The Talmud
Chapter 13
By the end of our first week in college, Danny was feeling thoroughly miserable. He had discovered that psychology in the Samson Raphael Hirsch Seminary and College meant experimental psychology only, and that the chairman of the department, Professor Nathan Appleman, had an intense distaste for psychoanalysis in general and for Freud in particular.
Danny was quite vocal about his feelings toward Professor Appleman and experimental psychology. We would meet in the mornings in front of my synagogue and walk from there to the trolley, and for two months he did nothing during those morning trolley rides except talk about the psychological textbook he was reading – he didn't say 'studying', he said 'reading' – and the rats and mazes in the psychology laboratory. 'The next thing you know they'll stick me with a behaviourist.' he lamented. 'What do rats and mazes have to do with the mind?'
I wasn't sure I knew what a behaviorist was, and I didn't want to make him more miserable by asking him. I felt a little sorry for him, mostly because I had found college to be exciting and was thoroughly enjoying my books and my teachers, while he seemed to be going deeper and deeper into misery.
The building that housed the college stood on Bedford Avenue.
It was a six-story building, and it occupied half a block of a busy store filled street. The noise of the traffic on the street came clearly through the windows and into our classrooms. Behind the college was a massive brownstone armory, and a block away, across the street, was a Catholic church with a huge cross on its lawn upon which was the crucified figure of Jesus. In the evenings, a green spotlight shone upon the cross, and we could see it clearly from the stone stairs in front of the college.
The street floor of the building consisted of administrative offices, an auditorium, and a large synagogue, a section of which contained chairs and long tables. The entire second floor was a library, a beautiful library, with mazelike stacks that reminded me of the third floor of the library in which Danny and I had spent so much time together. It had bright fluorescent lights that didn't flicker or change color, I noticed immediately the first time I walked in – and a trained, professional library staff. It also contained a large reading room, with long tables, chairs, a superb collection of reference books, and an oil painting of Samson Raphael Hirsch which was prominently displayed on a white wall – Hirsch had been a well-known Orthodox rabbi in Germany during the last century and had fought intelligently through his writings and preachings against the Jewish Reform movement of his day. The third and fourth floors had whitepainted, modern classrooms and large, well-equipped chemistry, physics and biology laboratories. There were also classrooms on the fifth floor, as well as a psychology laboratory, which contained rats, mazes, screens, and a variety of instruments for the measuring of auditory and visual responses. The sixth floor consisted of dormitory rooms for the out-of-town students.