Free The Promise by Chaim Potok

him sailing again. The dock was deserted. The house seemed empty. There were tall white clouds in the sky. I tied up to the dock and climbed the stairway and knocked on the door to the kitchen. No one answered. The door was locked. I realized they had probably all gone to the airport. I took the sailboat back across the lake.
    Later that evening I called Rachel. The phone rang a long time before I hung up. I came out to the back porch. My father had completed his revisions of the last part of the manuscript that afternoon and had sent it off to his publisher. Now he was checking the galleys. The wind moved loudly through the branches of the maple near the edge of the back lawn. I sat for a while and watched him. Then I went inside to my room.
    I talked to Rachel early the next morning. They had gone into New York to meet Michael’s parents at the airport. The plane had been an hour late. Yes, Michael’s parents were at the house now. They were resting. No, it wasn’t a good idea for me to come over on Shabbat. The family wanted to be alone. They had a lot to talk about. Her voice sounded subdued. How were Bloom’s thoughts about Stephen’s thoughts about Bloom? I wanted to know. Bloom was alone in the cold of interstellar space, she said. “That’s cold,” I told her.
    She was about to hang up. Then she asked me to wait a moment. The phone went silent. Then I heard a loud, deep voice. I had been holding the phone close to my ear. The voice made my ear tingle.
    “Reuven Malter,” the voice said.
    “Yes.”
    “This is Abraham Gordon.”
    A lot more than just my ear began to tingle. I gripped the phone tightly.
    “Yes, sir,” I said.
    “Is your father in?”
    “Yes.”
    “Let me talk to him.”
    I called my father in from the porch. He took the phone. They talked briefly. “Sunday morning at ten,” my father said. “Yes. It will be good to see you again, Abraham. You were shown the Dead Sea Scrolls? We must talk about that. How is Kaufmann? I am glad to hear it. Yes. Sunday. Fine. Shabbat shalom.”
    He handed me the phone and went from the room.
    “Reuven,” I head Abraham Gordon say.
    “Yes, sir.”
    “ ‘Verbal fraud is worse than monetary fraud.’ ” The words came out in a rapid Sephardic Hebrew. “Is that statement familiar to you?”
    “Shimon ben Yochai in
Baba Metzia
,” I said, giving the Talmudic source of the quote he had used.
    “You are David Maker’s son, no doubt of that. You experienced both kinds of fraud last Sunday night, I understand. We’ll discuss it on Sunday. Michael enjoyed sailing with you. Shabbat shalom. What?” He spoke away from the phone. “Yes.” He came back on the phone. “Michael says to tell you Shabbat shalom for him.”
    His voice echoed inside my head for quite a while after I hung up the phone.
    The next morning my father and I prayed at the small synagogue a few blocks from the cottage, then returned to the cottage for our Shabbat meal. We studied Talmud together for a while after the meal, and then my father went into his bedroom to rest. I took a blanket out to the back lawn and lay in the sun reading an Agnon novel in Hebrew. Clouds drifted overhead, huge balls of white cotton moving against the brilliant blue of the sky. A cardinal disappeared into the maple and for a while it seemed the leaves were singing. I fell asleep on the blanket in the sun. I thought I heard a deep voice call my name. I opened my eyes. The grass shivered faintly in the warm breeze. I was alone on the lawn.
    Rachel called that night a few minutes after the end of Shabbat. They had had a good Shabbat, she said, sounding very subdued. They had talked last night until two in the morning and all of today. Was Danny still due up tomorrow? Yes, I said. He hadn’t called to say he wasn’t coming and I hadn’t called to withdraw the invitation. How had James Joyce fared during Shabbat? I asked her. “He rested,” she said.
    The call from Danny woke me at seven thirty the next