Free The Great Good Thing by Andrew Klavan Page A

diamonds and other precious gems.
    I’ve never worn much jewelry. I don’t like the feel of it against my skin. For decades, I never wore even a wedding band or a wristwatch. So a lot of these baubles weren’t actually useful to me. But I was absolutely dazzled by the worth of them. It was the first wealth that ever belonged entirely to me. Before that, I had once saved my allowance for months to put together forty dollars to buy a rare stamp. This, though, this was—who knows how much?—thousands and thousands of dollars’ worth of precious metals, gems, and legal tender. Riches beyond my imagination, and it was all mine.
    I collected the haul in an elegant leather box that was itself one of the gifts. I stored the box in a toy cabinet built into my bedroom wall. In the days and weeks that followed, I would take the box out of the cabinet sometimes. I would sit on my bed and hold the box on my legs and open the lid and gaze down at the contents. I would run my fingers over the chains and pens and watches. I would sort them in the box’s various compartments and try to guess at their value. It seemed a sparkling treasure to me, like the contents of Aladdin’s cave.
    I don’t know how long my enchantment lasted. Six months maybe, maybe eight, summer into spring. But slowly over that time, a deep misgiving grew in me. I would open my treasure box and find my delight in my wealth had become intermingled with a sense of self-reproach. There was something wrong with this, wasn’t there? At first, I couldn’t admit to myself what it was. But then I could, and my guilt soured to anger. I would sit on the bed and stare down at the open box on my legs. I would stare down at the gold and the silver and the gems and the bonds. I would run my fingers over them and hear them clink and rattle. And I would think, Why did you do it? Why did you let them make you do it? Why did you say those things that you did not believe in front of everyone? Why did you sing those prayers you did not even understand?
    I didn’t think this then but I think so now: if deep down I had not believed in God, it would not have troubled me as much as it did. If you had asked me the question at the time, I probably would have come out with some pseudo-sophisticated agnostic blather about the unknowability of the infinite. But I’d have been conning you—posing, parroting the adults. I believed, all right. It was in my nature to believe. I felt God there. Why else would I have been so distressed? If it had not mattered to me that I had lied in a temple, at an altar, with the Torah open under my hands—if it had not mattered, I mean, in some essential spiritual way—I think my guilt and shame would have been less intense. I think they would have faded away in time.
    But they did not fade. As the months went on, they grew stronger. I grew angry at myself. I grew angry at my parents. I grew angry—not at Judaism specifically but at religion in general. I resented the whole machinery of godless ritual and mindless tradition. I resented its authority without integrity, big people wielding their power over small. With great pomp and sacred ceremony, they had made me declare what I did not believe was true—and then they had paid me for the lie with these trinkets! I felt that I had sold my soul.
    Now, when I opened the leather box, when I looked down at the gold and silver and gems and US Bonds, it was a bitter, bitter thing. Even the pleasant chill of metal seemed to have faded from the stuff. It felt warm and clammy under my fingertips. I took the box out of its cabinet less and less often and finally not at all; I just left it in there. I pushed it to the back of its shelf, stacking old board games in front of it. Even so, even with the cabinet door shut, I felt its presence, a weight, a sorrow, an accusation.
    Finally, one night, after I’d gone to bed, I forced myself to stay awake. I waited in the dark for more than an hour. My father had to go to