"In Eretz Yisroel?"

"No, not Eretz Yisroel either, but another country."

"Which?"

"Venezuela."

"Venezuela." He repeated it carefully, and then he smiled, a bit impishly. "Will you draw me a map?"

"I don't think there's time now. It's almost Shabbes. Maybe after Shabbes."

The child nodded, understanding that time was short, and stood out of the way as Cass moved toward the open door.

"I can read English now."

Cass was already halfway down the sidewalk that led to the street. He turned back. The door was half open, and Azarya was inside, peeking around the side, his head at an angle, so that his side curl fell over the shoulder of his fancy white dress shirt, similar to the one Jonas Elijah Klapper was wearing under his kaputa.

"That's wonderful!" So much for Roz's hysteria. She was letting her pique over the Hasidic attitude toward women color her whole view. "Who taught you?"

"From the map. I learned from the map."

Roz had told Cass how she'd felt her scalp prickling as she figured out the meaning of Azarya's crayoned drawing. Cass had resisted her effusiveness. He understood that the child was uncommonly intelligent, but he knew better than to leap to the sort of wild romanticizing that his girlfriend was indulging in. Mathematical talent often shows itself early. Probably a good fraction of top-notch math professors at places like Harvard and Princeton and MIT and Caltech had seemed, when they were small children, like geniuses to their classmates and teachers, not to speak of their families. Not all of them-in fact none of them-had grown up to be a Gauss. The overwhelming odds were that Azarya fell into this category. He'd take the SATs when he was in sixth grade, which is how the Center for Talented Youth at Johns Hopkins tests for entrance into its summer program, and he'd score high enough to take the special classes designed for kids like him. Or, in any case, that's the kind of thing that would happen if he weren't a Valdener. Azarya might be at the extreme tail of the bell curve, but there were enough like him to make a program like CTY worthwhile.

Roz, pressing her case, had given Cass a short story by Aldous Huxley called "The Young Archimedes." An Englishman, who has rented a villa in the Italian countryside, discovers that a sweet-natured peasant boy, Guido, is an untutored mathematical genius. The Englishman, kind and cultured, alone understands the prodigious nature of Guido, but has to go away. The venal woman who owns the land the peasants work has seen the Englishman's interest in the boy and takes him away from his family, thinking she can make a performing musician out of him-Guido is musical as well-and become rich off his talents. The boy, missing his Euclid and his family, ends up leaping to his death. The conclusion has the Englishman walking back from the cemetery in Florence, where the child has been buried, the grief-stricken father beside him. They pause on a hill to look down at the inspired city laid out in the valley below. "I thought of all the Men who had lived here and left the visible traces of their spirit and conceived extraordinary things. I thought of the dead child."

The story was beautiful, but he still wasn't going to accept that Roz had proved anything by presenting him with Aldous Huxley's fiction.

"I never would have pegged you for the Jewish-mother type."

"Me, a Jewish mother?" She cocked her head in a considering sort of way, as if she were trying on an outlandish outfit and finding it didn't look bad. "How do you mean?"

"You're letting your imagination run away with you."

"Was Huxley letting his imagination run away with him when he imagined that child jumping out of a window when he wasn't allowed to study his Euclid?"

"Yes, that's exactly what he was doing. Letting the imagination run away is what fiction writers do. A piece of fiction doesn't make predictions the way a scientific theory does. You can't cite a fictional Guido to convince me of the danger to the non-fictional Azarya!"

"Spoken like a true pre-med!"

Pre-med or not, he felt something like Roz's prickling rising up over his surface as he took in what the Rebbe's son was telling him. Goosebumps are a legacy from our furry ancestors, who could contract the muscles around each hair follicle to fluff themselves up when they were frightened, making themselves look more formidable. Were our quadrumanous grandparents also capable of awe? Did their fur rise as the wind of the uncanny blew cold over them?

The child put up his left hand and waved in the same infantile way he had that first time that Cass and Roz had met him, opening and closing his fingers. Bye-bye.

Henoch lived in a black-and-white two-family house; it reminded Cass of a Linzer torte. Cass had first rung the bell of the wrong side. Henoch's in-laws lived there, Yocheved's parents, who were Israelis. Yocheved, who was already the mother of quite a few children-Cass knew better than to ask how many-was the oldest child of her parents, and there were, between the two families, a massive number of interlaced children, who seemed to mingle so inextricably he wondered if the parents always remembered who belonged to whom. Certainly Cass never got it straight. Several of Henoch and Yocheved's children were older than the aunts and uncles they played with.

"It's late," Henoch greeted him. He had looked harried and impatient the first time Cass had met him, at the meeting between Professor Klapper and the Rebbe, so it wasn't surprising to find him looking harried and impatient now. He was a tall man, with a bony and intelligent face, his narrowed eyes looking like they were scanning the world for the details he had to record and rectify. "I'm already on my way to shul. Licht benching is in less than fifteen minutes, and there is a tish tonight at the shul. You and your professor will see something special. Berel"-and here Henoch indicated one of the gaggle of children gathered in the vestibule, ready to walk with their father, or their brother-in-law, to the synagogue; blonds and redheads preponderated, the little girls in plain dresses, their hair tied primly back with bands, and the boys in suits- "bleibt du. Ven dein cuzin wert zein zugegrayt nem im zu dem shul."

Berel stepped obediently from the crowd and nodded to Cass to follow him. Cass was going to sleep in a bedroom that was off the living room and was already jammed with two bunk beds and four small dressers. There was a cot set up in a corner for Cass, with sheets and towels neatly folded on top. Cass washed up hurriedly and changed into the dark-blue suit he was carrying in a plastic bag from the cleaners. His mother had bought it for him for a cousin's wedding on his father's side. She skipped all family gatherings on her own side.

He hurried downstairs to Berel, patiently waiting at his post, and they walked quickly to the shul. As they got in sight of the vast white ornamented warehouse of a synagogue, Cass saw the last of the stragglers, hurrying in that distinctive walk he'd noticed: leaning precipitously forward from the waist, the straight back almost parallel to the sidewalk, taking furiously fast strides. "Scurrying" was the verb that suggested itself, but it carried the taint of the Nazi propaganda that had been shown in his preBar Mitzvah classes in Persnippity, the disturbing film that showed swarms of rats pouring out of a sewer segueing into Jews who looked like the Valdeners scurrying down mazelike European streets.

The sun had just disappeared, spraying the sky with a rosy gold that spread itself thickly onto the white turrets and tablet-shaped windows of the synagogue, so that the awkward architecture seemed, in the few moments of its illumination, almost as beautiful as the Valdeners themselves probably thought it was.

"Tonight ist der tish," Berel spoke for the first time to Cass. He was around twelve or thirteen, a somewhat pudgy redhead, with freckles and a sweet and docile manner. Cass couldn't tell what Berel thought of him, a cousin who looked so different from the other cousins, who might not even know what a tish is. Was he intrigued, bemused, pitying, indifferent?

"Yes," said Cass to him now, and added, "I've always wanted to be at a tish," to let Berel know that he knew what it was.

Tish is the Yiddish word for "table." In Hasidism, tish refers to the Rebbe's table, and, metonymically, to the public event of sharing a meal with the Rebbe, or in any case watching him and his family and closest associates consume a meal and then receiving the shirayim, or remains. The shirayim consists of small portions of food-of fruit or kugel, or a glass of wine-that are distributed from the hand of the Rebbe. It's a peculiarly Hasidic custom. There's nothing like it in mainstream Judaism, and it underscores one of the stickier arguing points that separate the two: the locating of the Rebbe on a different scale of being, as possessing both a soul and a body closer to the divine than that of other mortals. In mainstream Judaism, the position of intermediary between man and God is left conspicuously vacant. In Hasidism, it's occupied, and the major qualification is heredity.

"I've never actually seen a tish," his mom had told him. "It's so important, the most intimate connection between the Rebbe and his Ha-sidim, that of course the Valdeners reserve it only for the men and boys. My bratty little cousins were taken, but I never even could get anybody to tell me what went on there. Except that my father once told me that, back in Hungary, the Hasidim would actually grab for the food on the Rebbe's plate when he was done, scrambling belly-first over the tish top in a free-for-all for farfel."

"Tish-tish."

"My impression is that things are a bit more civilized now, with food given out instead of grabbed from the plate. But first it's all passed through the hands of the Rebbe to get some of his holiness in it. It's all part of the primitive folk biology mixed in with the dubious theology." Deb Seltzer, the former Devoroh Sheiner of New Walden, delighted in describing the Valdeners in antiseptic, clinical terms. "The food that goes into a holy man must itself be holy, seeing how it's going to become the Rebbe's own flesh. It's got sparks of the divine essence, which got misplaced in the great commotion that accompanied the creation of the world, little bits of God that got trapped inside matter the Rebbe tries to return to the heavens by ingesting-I kid you not. So the Rebbe shares his food, spreading the holiness around."

"So luckshen are holy?"

"Well, not as holy as potato kugel. I bet there are tracts written on potato kugel."

As soon as they entered the doors of the synagogue, Cass heard male voices massed together in the sumptuous folds of song. The strains of melody didn't prepare Cass for the sensory assault as they now entered the vast room where the Hasidim were gathered for prayer. For the second time that day, the neuronal circuits of his "What" system were overloaded, transposing sights, sounds, smells, so that the melody struck his nostrils with spices he couldn't identify, and he heard beneath it the contained roar of the vast boiling sea of black, which gradually individuated into discrete men, hundreds rising steeply to the rafters in tiered waves from the small cleared center, dazzlingly white, a rectangle of gentle foam floating in the blackened sea. It was the homogeneity of the Valdeners' appearance and the synchronization of their motion that liquefied them, the individuating features smoothed away by the identical beards and the payess and kaputas and shtreimlach, undulating waves made up of Valdeners swaying in unison in great sweeping arcs in time to the powerful surge of their song, though now Cass could see that the four banks of tiers splayed outward and upward from a pure white platform, and that lining its perimeter were evenly spaced artifacts, ceremonial perhaps, and wavering ripples of glossy air drifted over and blurred the white rectangle, the mirage of scorching summer days, so that Cass had to peer a little longer before he could make out that the ceremonial objects were just regular plates and glasses and silverware, and now he saw it wasn't a platform but a table, and the foam was a linen tablecloth, and those were men seated round the table, each aligned with a plate of food.

The tish! Of course! This was the famous tish! Cass had a better view of it now, pulled onto a tier by a stranger's hand-though for all he knew the man could be a cousin, since those payess had red highlights. His arm was linked into that of the next Valdener, who was linked with the next, and he felt himself assimilated into the row and so into the room and so into the mystique of fellowship, and slipped, too, into the powerful hold of the male voices fused into a strength that was somehow also delicate, carrying the haunting melody, the niggun, that was like large hands gently carrying a fragile being, and the melody was haunting Cass not only because of the depth of its beauty but also because of its eerie familiarity, Cass knew it immediately, intimately, like a newborn knowing the voice of his mother, and he softly began to sing with the others.

From his tier he could look down on the tish, where now he could discern the Rebbe-a lone spot of color in the vastness of black. The Rebbe was resplendent in his unique kaputa-a tish bekeshe-blue velvet shot through with gleaming gold, and his shtreimel may not have exceeded all others-the one on the head of the Hasid next to him rivaled it in luxuriance-but the gold from the kaputa emanated outward with a quickening glow, so that everything about the Rebbe seemed more vibrant. The Rebbe's chair, too, was magnificently regal, a throne of elaborately carved wood the soft brown of a pecan and upholstered in red velvet.

The black-clad men around the tish held hands and swayed, the Rebbe bisecting the ring so that both sides swayed inward toward him. The Hasid sitting to the right of the Rebbe, the one with the rivaling shtreimel, was as eerily familiar to Cass as the haunting song that he was singing. Like the niggun, Cass knew that Hasid with an immediacy and intimacy that defied explanation.

No, it didn't defy explanation. There in the seat of honor beside the Rebbe was Jonas Elijah Klapper.

The singing changed to a different melody, slower and sadder, and the Rebbe's eyes were closed. He gestured expansively, shrugging his shoulders, his palms facing upward and then downward, then pointing an index finger out toward the Hasidim, and then upward into the heavens, as the tune slid out of its mournful key and ascended into a soaring, ecstatic scale, bursting the constraints of mere sound, and the rows and rows of Valdeners were jumping, like one large organism they rose upward and returned to earth in perfect unity, it was a rapturous intermingling of melody and movement, the heat in the room, the density of all the people, only driving the exultation further in its ascent, and Jonas Elijah Klapper, too, had his eyes closed, there beside the Rebbe swaying, and his own shoulders also doing a dance of little shrugs and rolls, and his lips moving as if he knew the words, as maybe he did, the capacious repository that was his mind would continually astonish, two visionaries, side by side, emanations of the extraordinary, so that even when the singing subsided, and the room stopped bubbling with ecstatic men, and they quieted on a single sustained note and took their seats in unison, as if by unvoiced command, the silenced melody still hung in the air as the Rebbe began to speak.

He was speaking in Yiddish, loud enough so that each syllable could be heard by the Valdeners up in the rafters, in the very last tiers, and Cass was pressed not only by the men on either side of him but from behind as well, the Hasid behind him placing his hand on Cass's shoulder, leaning forward, so that Cass, too, leaned forward, placing his hand on the Hasid in front of him, the entire room of Valdeners were fused into one and pressing down toward the tish, where the Rebbe spoke his words that were somehow so penetrating in their pronunciation that Cass, who knew only a few words of Yinglish, felt that he could somehow understand what the Rebbe was saying, and the longer the Rebbe talked, sometimes slapping his hand on the tish for emphasis, the more it seemed to Cass that he was getting it, until he was seamlessly understanding everything, but only, he realized a few seconds later, because the Rebbe had switched to English.

He was speaking of the week's Torah portion, which spoke of the strange fire, the alien and foreign fire-aysh zarah-that Nadab and Avihu, the two sons of Aharon the High Priest, brought into the Holy Tabernacle, the Mishkan, that the Hebrews carried with them as they wandered the desert, and on which the presence of der Aybishde, the Eternal, rested in a cloud of glory. Aharon was the first of the descending line of High Priests, and he was the brother of Moses the Lawgiver, Moshe Rabenu, Moses our Rabbi, our Teacher. Nadab and Avihu were High Priests as well, since the priesthood is hereditary, passed down from father to son until this very day, and Nadab and Avihu went with their father into the Mishkan. The Torah tells us, "Each took his fire pan, put fire in it, and in it laid the incense. And they offered before Him a strange fire, aysh zarah." And fire came down from above, and, in a flash, consumed them, before their father's eyes.

"The Torah tells, 'And Aharon was speechless.' His silence was not only of words but of all reaction. Not a single tear crossed his cheek. Not a groan or a wail escaped his lips. Was he speechless from horror? From grief? Maybe from self-protection, afraid to cross a line when, at that moment, the Judgment from On High had descended? Or was Aharon's the silence of an understanding that has answered its own question? Had the High Priest, wearing his vestments of purity, wrapped himself in the purity of his understanding? And what could a grieving father of two princes like Nadab and Avihu understand that would silence him? They stood beside him in their holy service, and-in an instant-snatched! What could have kept him from crying out after them?

"Hear, then, what the holy Arizal said of the sons of Aharon! In the last dr'ash that the Arizal gave before his death in the sacred city of S'fat, the Arizal spoke of Nadab and Avihu. The Arizal compared them to the fawns of the gazelle. Just as the gazelle, as it is written in the Zohar, requires the serpent's bite in order to give birth, so Nadab and Avihu were korbanim, sacrifices, to hasten the coming of Moshiach.

"The gazelle is the Shechinah, the indwelling Presence; the snake is the snake; the child being born is, if the moment is right, the Moshiach of the line of David, but otherwise just another Moshiach of the line of Joseph, doomed himself and not yet capable of returning Israel from its exile.

"The strange fire, aysh zarah, was not avodah zarah, not idol worship! Not at all! Do not make the mistake of thinking that, chas ve-shalom, heaven forbid, Aharon's sons, Moshe Rabenu's own nephews, succumbed to idolatry!

"The strange fire was the redemptive fire that leaps out to purify the world, consuming the innocent only to return them back again into the holy service, as it will always be, the gilgul turning round and round until the redemption of our days, may it be in our lifetime, Amen."

A thunderous "Amen" answered the Rebbe's own.

The Rebbe switched back to Yiddish now, and Cass found that his knowledge of Yiddish was really as limited as he'd remembered. He didn't understand another word. Still, he enjoyed listening to the Rebbe's words, watching the expressions on his face and the dance of his hands.

When the Rebbe stopped speaking, a little commotion started up beside him-not on Professor Klapper's side but on the other side. Cass hadn't noticed the tiny figure of a child sitting there, who now was being lifted up onto the tish, placed beside gigantic bowls of apples and oranges.

Unlike all the other unmarried males, he was wearing a fur hat, smaller than those of the grown men but still enormous on his tiny head, and he was wearing a shiny little kaputa of pale blue.

It was a strange sight, the child standing on the table. In his little shtreimel, he resembled an oversize mushroom displayed beside the fruit. The disturbing thought of child sacrifice came to Cass's mind. He knew that the idea had been, from the earliest days, anathema to the Hebrews. The prophets had ranted about the child sacrifices of the neighboring tribes. They had denounced as abominations the pagan practice of burning children at altars to the cruel gods of Baal and Baal-zebub. But there was also that horrific story of the binding of Isaac to set off a chain of unwanted associations, of the father, Abraham, rising early in the morning to heed Yahweh's terrible command to offer his son as a burnt offering on a mountaintop. Like Aharon the High Priest, Abraham, too, hadn't cried out in protest or grief, but wordlessly prepared for the sacrifice.

"I give my dr'ash in the honor of the visitor, Rav Klapper," the child announced in his chimelike voice, and the black sea of men drew in toward the tiny figure standing poised on the foam. Cass could feel the irresistible undertow straining toward him, the prodigious child and future Rebbe, whose lineage of chosenness traced back all the way to the holy Ba'al Shem Tov.

"The beauty of the maloychim comes down on us. The maloychim are above. But also they are here, everywhere, in everything." He patted the air down in front of him, and then he turned his hands over and gestured with them in the classic Hasidic gesture of explanation. "As they are, it must be.

"The maloychim are in everything. They are even in some of the maloychim!" And now he smiled, and all the Valdeners smiled. "They are there, side by side, and above and below and in the center.

"Here at the tish, we are sitting, and the maloych 36, lamed vav, also sits, and in lamed vav is sitting 2, beys, 2 times, and that 2 times 2 is sitting 3 times, gimel, and that 2 times 2 times 3 is sitting 3 times. There in the maloych, lamed vav, the maloychim beys and gimel are sitting at a tish. Their tish sits here with us at our tish!

"But there are differences between the maloychim. Beys and gimel are not like lamed vav. Beys and gimel are more simple and more beautiful. You look and look, and each is one maloych. In them there are no other maloychim sitting above and below and to the side. These are the prime maloychim. They are in all the other maloychim, and they are in them exactly so. As they are, it must be."

And again he paused to let the Valdeners admire the sight before him.

"Rav Klapper asks: How many prime maloychim are there? How long does this go on?" He cast his smile on the honored guest who stared back at him. "Ayn sof! Without end! Just as, with all the maloychim, there are always more, so it is also with the prime maloychim. Not one of them is the biggest. How long do they go on? Forever! L'olam va-ed! The prime angels are singing their own niggun, and they are singing that they are always more!"

He looked around at the room full of his father's followers, whose faces told him that they were as joyous to hear this niggun as he was to sing it for them.

"Here is how they are singing. This is their niggun. Find the biggest prime maloych. Call it Acharon, for the last, and stand him at the end of a line, with all the prime maloychim that came before him. Here is 2 and 3 and 5 and 7 and 11 and 13 and 17 and 19 and 23 and 29 and 31 and 37 and 41 and 43 and on and on, all of the prime maloychim up until Acharon, the last. Do to them like this. Take 2 three times and then take that number five times, and then take that number seven times, and then take that number eleven times, and if the Cambridger Rebbe asks me how long this goes on, he knows what I will say: take it each time by another, the next in line, all the way up to the last and biggest of the prime maloychim, Acharon. And then ..." He threw his arms out and up into the air, a little Valdener in ecstasy. "Add one more to Acharon! That is a new maloych. His name is Acharay Acharon, the One Who Comes After the Last. And Acharay Acharon can't be! You see! If there is Acharon, there is Acharay Acharon, and it can't be, so there is no last, l'olam va-ed!"

He stood stock-still, an extraordinary expression on his face, entranced with what he was seeing. The look was replicated around the tish, up and down the bleachers, all motions stilled, snuffing the last blink and breath.

His father broke the silence with a question: "Do you know the niggun of the prime maloychim? Can you sing it?"

"That was the niggun, Tata. I tried to sing it."

"A beautiful niggun. But now sing us one of yours, tateleh."

The child began to sing. The dense room pressed itself forward, trying to get as close as possible, even if they didn't outwardly move, the lines of invisible force drawing them down to the foamy rectangle on which the Rebbe's small son floated. His singing was beautiful, as could have been guessed from his speaking voice, and his pitch was perfect. He raised his little hands and gestured like his father, turning his palms up and then over. The Valdeners let him sing the pretty melody through once, and then, when he began it again, they joined in.

Ever since the Ba'al Shem Tov, the master of the Good Name, rebelled against the intellectualized strain of Judaism prevailing in his day, the Hasidim have cultivated a worship of the divine that is experiential, sensual, ecstatic. This is why they dance. This is why they sing. But the Valdeners of New Walden possessed a path to ecstasy that was theirs alone, and it was obvious on every face up and down the tiers. The Rebbe's son was their ecstasy. They understood little of his words, but the melody they could understand, and they knew that they were in the presence of the divine. Their arms were linked again as they swayed, and many had tears overrunning their eyes, trickling down faces as enraptured as Azarya's own face had been, a few moments ago, while he was contemplating the beautiful proof that there is no largest prime number.

He hadn't bothered to go through the last steps of the proof. He had taken them far enough and pointed and expected that they all would see the wondrous thing that he was seeing.

Assume that there is a largest prime number. Give it a name, as Azarya had. Call it P. And now take all the prime numbers that precede P and multiply them together, just as Azarya had said: 2 times 3 times 5 times 7 ... times P. Take that product and add 1 to it. Call that new number Q. Is Q a prime or not? Since P has been assumed to be the largest prime number and Q comes after P, Q can't be a prime. But then Q must be divisible by a prime number, because all non-prime numbers, or composites, are divisible by a prime. As Azarya had seen, composite numbers are all the products of primes. So there must be, at least, one prime number that is a perfect divisor of Q. None of the prime numbers less than Q can be a divisor of Q, because 1 had been added to the product of all of them in order to construct Q. So there has to be a prime number larger than P to be Q's divisor, which contradicts the statement that P is the largest prime number. And so there cannot be a largest prime number.

Cass recognized the proof from Men of Mathematics. It was Euclid who first discovered it, though his proof had been slightly different, more geometrical than Azarya's. And the Alexandrian giant had not been six years old.

The angels pour their beauty down on us, Azarya had said. They are above, yes, but also here, in everything. 36 descends from on high to sit at the Rebbe's tish. It carries the beauty of its own composition, and of its invisible bonds with the immaculate others of its realm, transporting this beauty down to us to grace our humble table. As it is, so it must be, and that is the nature of the beauty. In every row, in every tier, in the whole assembled crush of Valdeners, carried on cantillated waves of explosive love, blasted with their gratitude for having been born Valdeners, there are numbers, and this very room, filled with so much shifting strangeness, which before had been an undifferentiated black and bubbling sea, and then had resolved into individual men, now yields its surface again so that Cass can glimpse the silent presence of Azarya's angels conspiring with one another to bring about what is, because as it is, then so it must be, and this is the nature of the beauty.

The room is reeling for Cass with Azarya's angels, beating their furious wings of diaphanous flames, this is what it must be like for the child, what he must see out of those luminous blue eyes, only Cass knows that for Azarya there is infinitely more to be seen, even now, at six years old, and this is all the divine that we need, this is the strange fire that is worth almost anything, the angels within angels in their infinite and necessary configurations, a fleeting glimpse, let it last a little longer, let me savor this tiny bit tossed from the shirayim, the remains, of the infinite that is ayn sof, without end, emanations of the extraordinary that burst on us in rapture, and look how that small boy is laughing and clapping his hands, riding up on top of his adoring father's shoulders, and Cass thinks that he can hear a child's laughter rippling like water over the din.

The melody continued. The Valdeners were deep into their ecstasy. They loved their Rebbe's son, the Dauphin of New Walden, heir to the most royal of all lineages, necessary to the continuity that made their lives worth living, this small, laughing boy who was bouncing on his dancing father's back, with the Valdeners kissing their prayer shawls and reaching them out to touch him as they do when the Torah scroll is paraded among them. The wonderful child was to them a proof more conclusive than Euclid's of all that they believed. They couldn't know who it was they were loving. But Cass knew, and his face was as wet with tears as any in the room, his trance as deep and ecstatic as that of any Hasid leaping into dance.

XX.

The Argument from Tidings of Destruction Cass's cup of tea has grown cold while he was speaking with Lucinda, and he is going back to the kitchen to put the kettle back on when the phone rings again.

It's Roz.

"So how did it go down with Shimmy?"

"Not so great. He's pretty upset."

"Over your leaving?"

"That, but also that whole fraternity-fracas thing you helped to stir up on Tuesday."

"You're kidding me, right?"

"There are posters, protesters, banners hung from the dorms, petitions. Shimmy called it a tinder keg, a powder box."

"The slim edge of the wedgie!"

"Don't laugh, Roz." She's laughing. "He made me feel so sorry for him that I promised him I'd think about what kind of retention package would tempt me to stay."

"Oh, Cass. He's playing you for a shlemiel, using that Saturday Night Live sketch of a protest to guilt you into staying. What an ox-shit artist."

"Well, maybe. But Shimmy really did seem shaken."

"I can imagine. It's Gamma Gamma Gamma, or he can just forget about his yes indeedee." As an alum, Roz has kept abreast. She even knows the name of the expert doctor that Deedee and her sorority sister Bunny share.

"His weak spot is that woman."

"Isn't it always?"

"I could feel his pain. He kept talking about being squeezed."

"That Southern belle of his can probably squeeze them like they were limes for mint juleps."

"Ouch."

"Oh, Cass! I'm sorry, but this is one beautiful hoot!" She breaks off a spell to demonstrate just how beautiful a hoot she thinks it is. She's a bit breathless when she returns. "I guess I might have contributed some to this kankedort."

"Don't start getting a swelled head."

"Did any of the kids use my motto?"