The Day the Rabbi Resigned Read Free

him?”
    â€œWell … he’s not a very cheerful fellow; seems to be in a perpetual state of mourning.”
    â€œBut that’s because he’s lost his wife.”
    â€œThat was five or six years ago, before he came to Barnard’s Crossing. And I’ve heard from those who know him that he’s always been that way.”
    â€œWell, maybe your visit will cheer him up.”
    â€œWhat do you suggest, that I tickle him with a feather?”
    â€œOh, you. Go to bed.”

2
    Whenever Mark Levine, short, stocky, and balding, came up to Boston from his home base in Dallas, he always made a point of seeing his old friend Donald Macomber. They had been classmates in college, and in their senior year they had roomed together. After college, Mark Levine had gone to work in an insurance office in Dallas, had branched out for himself after a year or two, had made some shrewd investments, or as he would say, had been extremely lucky, and was now a very, very rich man.
    Donald Macomber, tall and slim, with piercing blue eyes and silvery gray hair, had gone on to take a doctorate in history, to a professorship in a good university, to a deanship where he had shown considerable administrative skill, and finally to the presidency of Windermere Christian College in Boston. When informed of the appointment, Mark Levine had written facetiously, “It was only a question of time; people who look like you are bound to become college presidents.”
    They had maintained contact over the years by an occasional letter or phone call, and on the occasion when business brought Mark to Boston, he always made a point of leaving one night free so that he could have dinner with his friend.
    It was after such a dinner that Macomber had asked, “How about joining our Board of Trustees, Mark?”
    â€œYou want me on the Board of Trustees of Windermere Christian College? You must be joking. Just what denomination is it?”
    â€œI’m not joking, Mark. And it’s no denomination.”
    â€œI mean originally.”
    â€œIt was never denominational. It started out as a ladies’ seminary back in the middle of the last century. You know what those places were: a place for girls to mark time for a couple of years after high school until they managed to get married. They couldn’t go out to work because in those days the only acceptable job for women of good family was teaching school. So the wealthy girls were sent to finishing schools with large campuses out in the country, with tennis courts and horses, where girls learned the things that aristocratic gentlewomen were supposed to know. But Windermere was for girls of the middle class. It was in the city, so the girls could live at home. It was called the Windermere Ladies’ Christian Seminary, not because it was religious in any sense of the word, but to convey the idea that it was a moral place, strictly supervised, and that no high jinks were permitted.
    â€œThen at the turn of the century, it became Windermere Christian College for Women because ladies’ seminaries and finishing schools were going out of fashion. It became a four-year college of liberal arts because—because, I suppose, things were beginning to open up for women and there were other things they could do besides teach school.”
    â€œOr perhaps because two years was not enough time in which to catch a husband,” Levine suggested.
    Macomber chuckled. “You may have something there,” he conceded. “In any case, they kept the Christian in the name, maybe with even a little more justification since the four-year girls’ colleges were a lot less supervised than the two-year seminaries had been. I don’t think anyone thought of it as a school with any religious orientation. In going over the names of some of the graduating classes, I noted a number of names that were almost certainly Jewish.”
    â€œIt doesn’t prove