The Promise (48 page)

Joseph and Sarah Gordon spent all of July and the first two weeks of August alone in their summer home by the lake. My father and I moved into our cottage in the first week of August and a few days later I went over to see them. I found Joseph Gordon on the dock with a new book about Hemingway and Sarah Gordon on the patio, flinging paint onto a canvas. I was with them for an hour or so and we had a pleasant enough time and they told me that Rachel and Danny were coming up to spend two weeks with them. Rachel had talked Danny into taking off for a while. They were expecting to see me, she said, daubing paint on the canvas and stepping back to gauge the effect. She would call me when they came.

Those early weeks of August were warm and quiet and restful. I was able to do some swimming and sailing, but mostly I sat with my father at the wooden table on the screened-in porch of our cottage. We were preparing our lectures for the classes we would be teaching in September.

Danny and Rachel came up in the third week of August. They looked the way all newly married couples look: radiant, somewhat shy, and filled with the quiet amazement of discovery. I asked Danny if he had heard from Michael and his parents, and he said yes, he and Rachel had received a card from them and they seemed to be enjoying their trip. He would be seeing Michael again in therapy when they returned. He was really only at the beginning of things with Michael. There was still a long way to go.

I found Rachel on the dock late one morning, sunning herself and reading a Hebrew book, and when I asked her what it was she handed it to me and I saw it was a Hasidic book about the concept of the holiness of the family. Danny came down and we sat on the
dock and talked, and later I watched Rachel trying to teach him how to swim and he was as awkward as a finless fish in the water. I took him out in a sailboat one afternoon but he could not get the feel of it and I did not take him out again. That was the afternoon Rachel asked if we might want to go to the county fair in Peekskill. She had checked it out and it was really a fair this time. Did it have a carnival? Danny asked. Yes, she said. But it was a very small carnival and we could ignore it and see the exhibits. Danny said he would feel uncomfortable in a place like that and did not want to go. But Rachel insisted and we went and the old man was not there and we had a good time.

A few days later Michael and his parents arrived for the weekend and on a warm and windy Sunday morning I crossed the back lawn and went past the old maple and through the woods and around the lake to the Gordon home. I found them playing volleyball on the lawn beyond the patio, Michael and his parents forming one team and Danny and Rachel and her parents forming the other, and I stood on the side for a while and watched. Danny was playing volleyball the way he had once played baseball, with an intense, hungry eagerness to win. He played wildly, his long body everywhere on the court, his small skullcap attached to his hair with a bobby pin so it would not fall off, one of his ritual fringes falling out of his polo shirt and flapping against his leg as he ran about.

Abraham Gordon saw me and called me over to join his team. “We need help,” he said.

“Nothing will help,” Joseph Gordon laughed.

I went over to Abraham Gordon’s side of the court. He was bare to the waist and sweating profusely. He shook my hand.

“Where did that Hasid learn to play ball like that?” he asked.

From the other side of the net came Rachel’s laugh and Joseph Gordon’s loud and happy challenge. “It won’t help. We’ll even use the Geneva Conventions. But it won’t help. We’ve got ourselves a powerhouse here.”

“How was Palomar?” I asked Michael.

“It was great,” he said, smiling happily. Then he said, “Can we go sailing in the afternoon, Reuven?”

“Absolutely,” I said. “This wind is perfect for sailing.”

“Your friend plays a rather frenzied game,” Ruth Gordon said.

“Yes,” I said. “Always.”

The three of them seemed rested and relaxed and I joined them and did the best I could, but with Danny on the other side we lost anyway and at the moment the final point was scored Rachel shouted with joy and in front of everyone planted a kiss on Danny’s lips. I saw his eyes above the curve of her cheek, wide, startled, and his face a sudden flaming crimson. He was going to have quite a time of it with Rachel’s twentieth century.

I went back to the cottage to have lunch with my father and later that afternoon I took a Sailfish across the lake to the dock and then Michael and I sailed toward the middle of the lake. There were many clouds in the sky but they were not blocking the sun. There was a strong wind and Michael held the tiller in one hand and the mainsail sheet in the other and I sat near the center board, balancing the boat. We sailed to the rhythm of the water and the wind and then Michael headed the Sailfish past the house and the dock toward the cove and I pulled up on the center board and felt it move smoothly through the slot and we tied up to the branch of a tree that lay in the water.

“Do you want to swim?” I asked.

“Sure.”

“I’ll race you to that rock.”

We swam for a while and then we lay on the Sailfish and I saw Michael looking up at the sky. He looked up at the sky a long time.

“Sometimes I still see faces,” he said.

I asked him what he was seeing now.

“Clouds,” he said.

“Memorable.… Profound in its vision of humanity, of religion, and of art.”
—The Wall Street Journal

MY NAME IS ASHER LEV

Asher Lev is a Ladover Hasid who keeps kosher, prays three times a day, and believes in the Ribbono Shel Olom, the Master of the Universe. Asher Lev is an artist who is compulsively driven to render the world he sees and feels, even when it leads him to blasphemy. In this stirring and often visionary novel, Chaim Potok traces Asher’s passage between these two identities, the one consecrated to God, the other subject only to the imagination.

Asher Lev grows up in a cloistered Hasidic community in postwar Brooklyn, a world suffused by ritual and revolving around a charismatic Rebbe. But in time, his gift threatens to estrange him from that world and the parents he adores. As it follows his struggle,
My Name Is Asher Lev
becomes a luminous portrait of the artist, by turns heartbreaking and exultant, a modern classic.

Fiction/Literature/1-4000-3104-4

ANCHOR BOOKS
Available at your local bookstore, or call toll-free to order:
1-800-793-2665 (credit cards only)