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the dinner table the night before.
    It was a glorious, cool, and sunny spring day, the trees in Central Park bursting into blossom. The people out on the crowded streets on this typically New York spring day had to experience the sun and cool air before it disappeared. His Aunt Ana, his mother’s widowed sister, had moved from her wretched hotel room into his mother’s apartment on West End Avenue. She could barely manage the rent out of her small trust fund and Social Security, yet she begged David to let her hold on to the apartment. It was not large; she had always loved it; and it had a single window from which you could see the Hudson River.
    â€œOf course you can have it,” David assured her. “And if you need money, you must let me know.” Although what help he might be in that area he couldn’t imagine.
    â€œYou’ll want the furniture,” she said wistfully.
    â€œAbsolutely not. Only the bed and the chest in my room. And perhaps some dishes and pots.”
    â€œI have plenty of those,” she said with relief. “That’s all in Martha’s basement.” Martha was the third sister. “But I sold my furniture. I was such a fool, such beautiful things. But tell me, David, I hear already you have a congregation and a synagogue. Isn’t that wonderful, just out of the army and it should happen so quickly. Your mother, may she rest in peace, would be so happy.” Ana was a small woman, with a round, pudgy face. Her eyes filled with tears as she spoke about David’s mother. “For her to walk into a synagogue and see her son on the bimah — a big synagogue, I’m sure. I hear the German Jews built wonderful synagogues there a hundred years ago.”
    â€œIn Hartford and New Haven, Aunt Ana. Not in Leighton Ridge. The congregation bought an old Congregational church.”
    â€œA church, David?”
    â€œIt’s a small wooden building. They didn’t buy the religion, Aunt Ana, just the building.”
    â€œIt’s a sin, David. It’s wrong.”
    â€œAunt Ana, believe me, it’s not a sin. You remember Rabbi Belsen. He’s a very important rabbi and scholar at the Institute. I’m going to telephone him and let you talk to him — just so that you won’t think I’m doing something pretty awful.”
    He watched his aunt as she had her telephone conversation with Rabbi Belsen. At a point, she began to cry again. “He’s a sweet man,” she told David. “He said such nice things about your mother.”
    David spent the rest of the day packing dishes and pots. One of the congregation, Moe Saberson by name, had a large appliance store in Bridgeport, and he had offered to send down his truck and his two large sons, age seventeen and age fourteen, to take care of moving the bed, chest, and dishes from New York to the parsonage. For all of the fact that he was being paid on the scale of an itinerant cotton picker in the most backward state of the South, David had the additional bonus of being surrounded by people who desired to solve his every problem. Of course, the only problems that had arisen so far were either financial or logistical, but at least some of them had been solved. And the day had been so wonderful, in terms of the weather, and he was so deeply in love with his new wife and so delighted with the challenge of Leighton Ridge that nothing could dull his exhilaration.
    And underlining everything every day was the enormous fact that the monstrous, unspeakable war that had gone on for endless years was over.
    He stayed with his aunt in his old bedroom that night, and the following morning he loaded the prayerbooks into the car and started off for Leighton Ridge. Just inside the Leighton line, a policeman in a patrol car waved him over.
    â€œYou’ve lost one of the screws off your rear license plate,” the officer said.
    â€œOh? Sorry. Will I lose the