Read Online The Outsider by Howard Fast - Free Book Online

course.”
    â€œOh? Well, I don’t know. It’s not a contest, is it? You look around at the circle standing by the grave, and you wonder who is pleased and who is agonized.”
    â€œPleased? I never knew you to be cynical before.”
    David shrugged. “I guess I never thought much about old. Old is a sort of nasty word in our society. Oh, what in hell am I talking about? Not with Dora and Alan. They loved the old lady.”
    He turned away abruptly and went up the narrow staircase to the tiny room under the eaves that he called his study. Directly outside his window was a splendid copper beech, which legend held had been planted a hundred years before by Abraham Stanford, the great Abolitionist leader and agitator, who was parson here at Leighton Ridge before he removed to Boston to head up the antislavery movement there. His presence had made Leighton Ridge briefly famous during the middle decades of the nineteenth century. Beyond the beech, two fine, high white pines framed a view across the Ridge and into the far distance. David sprawled in a chair, staring through the window and thinking thoughts that led nowhere. One old lady dies, like cut grass blown in the wind. He had been witness to a war that left fifty million human beings dead. No mind can grasp it, not the gas chambers of Adolf Hitler, not the atomic victims of Hiroshima, the burned flesh falling away from bones while they spelled out the logic of an eye for an eye with their Japanese screams of pain.
    His mind was traveling that path as Lucy entered the room. She stood at the door and asked, “What is it, David?”
    â€œWhat is it? Me? The world? Leighton Ridge?”
    â€œCome on. You’re so low you could eat off your shoe tops without bending.” She dropped into a chair. “Maybe I can help.”
    â€œMaybe, but not likely.” He managed a smile. “You were never cut out to be a rabbi’s wife.”
    â€œ Rebbetsin. I hate that word.”
    â€œWhy ever did you marry me?”
    â€œDumbbell. I loved you.”
    â€œAnd now?”
    â€œPushy, aren’t you? Now I’m settled in. We have a child who has begun to walk very nicely, and I’m knocked up again. And I’ve become a prime Sunday school teacher. David, what has gotten into you?”
    â€œI want to go to Israel.” There it was, out and said.
    â€œWhat?”
    â€œA Jewish state has come into being. A Jewish army is at war with five Arab countries that outnumber them ten to one. Lucy, can you sit here in this damned Leighton Ridge and pretend that the world doesn’t exist?”
    â€œI don’t pretend that it doesn’t exist. I know it exists. I also know that we’re connected with it, Leighton Ridge or any other place.”
    â€œYou haven’t heard a word I said.”
    â€œEvery word. You give up your job here, leave your pregnant wife and son to scrabble as best they may — and off to Israel. Another rabbi is just what they need.”
    â€œYou can be just lovely when you put your mind to it.”
    â€œWhy don’t you call me a nasty bitch? No one here except the two of us, and nobody lived with the United States Army as long as you did without learning a few proper Anglo-Saxon words.”
    â€œYou can’t understand one damned thing that happens inside of me, not my dreams, my hopes, my agonies.”
    â€œHave you ever tried to understand what happens inside of me, David? A fetus is happening inside of me. And incidentally, what would be your mission there? Join the Haganah? Fight? Kill people?”
    â€œYou know better than that.”
    â€œThe strange thing is, I do. You’re the gentlest man I ever met. I think that was the most important thing that made me want to marry you. War may bring out the best in some, but when you spend three years with the U.S.O., you can bet your bottom dollar that it brings out the worst in most. You really want to go to