Acts of Faith Read online

  Critical acclaim for the bestselling novels of Erich Segal

  DOCTORS

  “A superior story … A moving and compelling novel of doctors and their fears—how they confront them or are confounded by them.”

  —United Press International

  “Segal’s best work to date.”

  —New York Post

  “A page-turner all the way.”

  —Larry King, USA Today

  THE CLASS

  “First-class entertainment.”

  —Cosmopolitan

  “An absorbing page-turner.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “A panoramic saga.”

  —The Philadelphia Inquirer

  MAN, WOMAN, AND CHILD

  “A jewel … just about perfect … The instant emotion Love Story had.”

  —The Plain Dealer, Cleveland

  “Memorable.”

  —The Pittsburgh Press

  OLIVER’S STORY

  “Reading Oliver’s Story, you’ll forget everything else until you’ve finished the last page. What a rare storyteller.”

  —The Detroit News

  “Erich Segal has done it again. Mystery, sexual excitement and antagonism in the right mixture work their spell.”

  —St. Louis Globe

  “A very pleasurable and believable sequel to Love Story that every reader of the first book and every viewer of the film will enjoy.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  LOVE STORY

  “For someone who is in love, or was in love, or hopes to be in love.”

  —St. Louis Post-Dispatch

  “Not just a story—Love Story is an experience. The reader who responds to this little book will feel less like a reader than an unwritten Segal character, living it all out from the inside.… In this ‘love story’ you are not just an observer.”

  —The Christian Science Monitor

  “Funny, touching, and infused with wonder, as all love stories should be.”

  —San Francisco Examiner

  ACTS OF FAITH

  A Bantam Book 1 April 1992

  PUBLISHING HISTORY

  Bantam hardcover edition published April 1992

  Bantam export edition 1 November 1992

  Bantam paperback edition 1 April 1993

  All rights reserved.

  Copyright © 1992 by Ploys, Inc.

  Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 91-24206.

  No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  For information address: Bantam Books.

  ISBN 0-553-56070-0

  eBook ISBN: 978-0-8041-5320-1

  Published simultaneously in the United States and Canada

  Bantam Books are published by Bantam Books, a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc. Its trademark, consisting of the words “Bantam Books” and the portrayal of a rooster, is Registered in U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and in other countries. Marca Registrada. Bantam Books, 666 Fifth Avenue, New York, New York 10103.

  v3.1

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Epigraph

  Prologue

  Part I 1: Daniel

  2: Timothy

  3: Deborah

  4: Timothy

  5: Daniel

  6: Timothy

  7: Deborah

  8: Daniel

  9: Timothy

  10: Deborah

  11: Deborah

  12: Daniel

  Part II 13: Deborah

  14: Timothy

  15: Deborah

  16: Deborah

  17: Timothy

  18: Daniel

  19: Deborah

  20: Daniel

  21: Deborah

  22: Timothy

  23: Daniel

  24: Deborah

  25: Daniel

  26: Deborah

  27: Timothy

  28: Deborah

  29: Timothy

  Part III 30: Timothy

  31: Deborah

  32: Daniel

  33: Deborah

  34: Daniel

  35: Daniel

  36: Deborah

  37: Daniel

  38: Deborah

  39: Deborah

  40: Daniel

  41: Daniel

  42: Deborah

  43: Deborah

  44: Daniel

  Part IV 45: Timothy

  46: Timothy

  47: Timothy

  48: Deborah

  49: Deborah

  50: Deborah

  51: Daniel

  52: Deborah

  53: Daniel

  54: Daniel

  55: Deborah

  Part V 56: Timothy

  57: Timothy

  58: Timothy

  59: Timothy

  60: Timothy

  61: Deborah

  62: Timothy

  63: Daniel

  64: Timothy

  65: Daniel

  66: Daniel

  67: Deborah

  68: Timothy

  69: Daniel

  70: Daniel

  71: Timothy

  72: Timothy

  73: Deborah

  Part VI 74: Timothy

  75: Timothy

  76: Timothy

  77: Daniel

  78: Daniel

  79: Timothy

  80: Timothy

  Epilogue 81: Timothy

  82: Deborah

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Other Books by This Author

  About the Author

  Sero te amavi, pulchritudo tam antiqua et tam nova, sero te amavi! Et ecce intus eras.…

  St. Augustine, Confessions X.27

  Too late came I to love you, O Beauty both so ancient and so new! Too late came I to love you—and behold you were within me all the time.…

  PROLOGUE

  Daniel

  I was baptized in blood. My own blood. This is not a Jewish custom. It is merely a fact of history.

  The covenant my people made with God requires that we affirm our allegiance to Him twice each day. And lest any of us forget we are unique, God created gentiles everywhere who constantly remind us.

  In my case, the Father of the Universe placed an Irish Catholic neighborhood midway between my school and home. Thus at regular intervals, as I was walking to or from my yeshiva, the Christian Soldiers from St. Gregory’s would catch sight of me and hurl verbal abuse in my direction.

  “Kike!”

  “Sheenie!”

  “Christ-killer!”

  I could have run when they were still several dozen yards away. But then I’d have to drop my books—my prayer book, my sacred Bible. And that would have been a desecration.

  So I would stand there, book-laden and afraid to move as they swaggered up to me, pointed at my skullcap, and continued their ritual.

  “Look at this guy—how come he’s wearin’ a hat and it ain’t even winter?”

  “He’s a Hebe. They need their hats to hide their horns!”

  I just stood there, helpless, as they encircled me and started shoving.

  Then came the punches, raining from all sides, hammering my nose and lips, reverberating in my skull. After all these years, I can still feel the pounding and taste the blood.

  With time I learned a few defensive tactics. For example, it is better if the victim in a brawl does not fall down (lean against a wall, if possible). For if you are prostrate, your attacker can employ his feet as well.

  Furthermore, big books can serve as shields. Not only
does the Talmud hold the most important comments on religious matters—it is large enough to fend off any kick aimed at the groin.

  Sometimes I think my mother lived her life waiting behind the front door, for no matter how quietly I stole into the house after one of those encounters, she would be there waiting.

  “Danny, my little boy—what’s happened?”

  “It’s nothing, Mama. I just fell.”

  “And you expect me to believe that? It’s that bunch of Irish cossacks from the church again, huh? Do you know the names of those hooligans?”

  “No.”

  I lied, of course. I could remember every pimple on the sneering face of Ed McGee, whose father ran the local tavern. I had heard that he was training for the Golden Gloves or something. Maybe he was only using me for practice.

  “Tomorrow I’m going to have a talk with their superior mother or whatever she’s called.”

  “C’mon, Ma, what can you possibly say?”

  “I’ll ask her how they would have treated Christ himself. She could remind those boys that Jesus was a rabbi.”

  All right, Mama, I thought to myself, have it your way. They’ll just come at me with baseball bats next time.

  I was born a prince—the only son of Rav Moses Luria, monarch in our special kingdom of believers. My family had come to America from Silcz, a small town in Carpathia, which at different times had been a part of Hungary, then Austria, then Czechoslovakia. External rulers changed, yet one thing remained unaltered: Silcz was the home of the B’nai Simcha—“Sons of Joy”—and every generation saw a Luria honored by the title, Silczer Rebbe.

  Several months before the Nazis would have annihilated his own community, my father led his flock to yet another Promised Land—America. Here they recreated Silcz in a tiny corner of Brooklyn.

  The members of his congregation had no problems dealing with the customs of this new land. They simply ignored them and continued to live as they had for centuries. The frontiers of their world did not extend beyond an easy Sabbath walking distance from the pulpit of their spiritual leader.

  They dressed as always in lengthy coats of solemn black, with beaver hats during the week and round shtreimels trimmed with fur on festive days. We boys wore black fedoras on the Sabbath, grew sideburns down in ringlets, and looked forward to the day when we could also grow a beard.

  Some of our clean-shaven and assimilated coreligionists felt embarrassed to have us in their midst: we looked so odd—so conspicuously Jewish. You’d hear them mutter, “Frummers,” under their breaths. And while the word simply means Orthodox, their tone betrayed their scorn.

  My mother, Rachel, was my father’s second wife. Chava, his first, had borne him only daughters—two of them, Malka and Rena. Then she died in childbirth, and the little boy she had been carrying survived her by a mere four days.

  Toward the end of the prescribed eleven months of mourning, a few of Father’s closest friends discreetly started to suggest he seek another wife. Not only for dynastic reasons, but because the Lord decrees in Genesis that “it is not good that the man should be alone.”

  Thus it was that Rabbi Moses Luria wed my mother, Rachel, who was twenty years his junior, and the daughter of a learned Vilna scholar who was deeply honored by Rav Luria’s choice.

  Within twelve months a child was born to them. Yet another daughter—Deborah, my older sister. But to my father’s great joy I was conceived in the following year. My first cry of life was regarded as a direct response to a pious man’s most fervent prayers.

  The next generation was assured that the golden chain would not be broken. There would be another Silczer Rebbe. To lead, to teach, to comfort. And, most important, to be an intermediary between his followers and God.

  It’s bad enough to be an only son—to see your sisters treated almost as invisible because they aren’t brothers. Yet, the hardest part for me was knowing how much and how long I had been prayed for. From the beginning, I could sense the burden of my father’s expectations.

  I recall my very first day of kindergarten. I was the only child whose father took him. And when he kissed me at the schoolroom door, I could feel tears upon his cheeks as well.

  I was too young to realize that this was an omen.

  How could I have known that I would someday cause him to shed far more bitter tears?

  Timothy

  Tim Hogan was born angry.

  And with good reason. He was an orphan with two living parents.

  His father, Eamonn, a merchant seaman, had returned from a long voyage to discover his wife pregnant. Yet Margaret Hogan swore by all the saints that no mortal man had touched her.

  She began to hallucinate, babbling to the world that she had been blessed by a visit from a holy spirit. Her outraged husband simply sailed away. Rumor had it that he found another “wife” in Rio de Janeiro, by whom he had five “mortal” children.

  As Margaret’s condition worsened, the pastor at St. Gregory’s arranged for her to be given shelter in a sanitarium run by the Sisters of the Resurrection in upper New York State.

  At first, it seemed that Timothy, flaxen-haired and cherubic with his mother’s porcelain blue eyes, was also destined for an institution. His aunt, Cassie Delaney, already burdened with three daughters, did not think it possible to feed another mouth on what a New York cop brought home each week.

  Besides, Tim had arrived just after she and Tuck had decided, despite the dictates of their religion, to have no more children. She was already exhausted from years of sleepless nights in the penitentiary of diaper changing.

  Tuck overruled her.

  “Margaret’s your own flesh and blood. We can’t just leave the lad with no one.”

  From the moment he entered their lives, Tim’s three sisters did not disguise their hostility. He reciprocated fiercely. As soon as he could lift an object, he would try to strike them with it. His trio of antagonists never exhausted their plans for persecution.

  On one occasion, Aunt Cassie walked in just in time to stop them from pushing three-year-old Tim out the bedroom window.

  After this hairsbreadth rescue, it was Timothy she slapped for provoking her daughters.

  “Nice boys never hit girls,” she chided, a lesson Tim might have better assimilated had he not on several Saturday evenings overheard his uncle roughing up his aunt.

  Tim was as anxious to leave the house as they were to be rid of him. By the time he was eight, Cassie had given him a key threaded on a braid of yarn. Worn around his neck, this talisman gave him the freedom to roam abroad and vent his innate aggression in appropriately masculine activities like stickball and street-fighting.

  He was not faint of heart. In fact, he was the only boy who dared to challenge muscular Ed McGee, the undisputed leader of the grade-school pack.

  In the course of their brief but explosive battle in the playground, Tim caused extensive damage to Ed’s eye and lip, although McGee had managed to unleash a mighty left, which nearly broke Tim’s jaw before the Sisters pulled the pugilists apart. The nuns’ intervention, of course, made them fast friends thereafter.

  Though an officer of the law, his uncle nonetheless took pride in Tim’s fighting spirit. But Aunt Cassie was livid. She not only lost four days’ work in Macy’s lingerie department, but had to make endless ice packs for her nephew’s jaw.

  In the Delaney family album, Tim had seen his mother, Margaret, and could discern a pale reflection of her in Aunt Cassie’s face.

  “Why can’t I go and visit her?” he pleaded. “I mean, just say hello or something?”

  “She wouldn’t even recognize you,” Tuck asserted. “She’s living in another world.”

  “But I’m not sick—I’d know her.”

  “Please, Tim,” his uncle insisted. “We’re doing you a kindness.”

  Inevitably the day came when Tim learned what everyone else in his world had been whispering for years.

  During one of their Saturday night bouts, he heard his aunt shouting
at her husband, “I’ve had just about all I can take of the little bastard!”

  “Cassie, watch your language,” Tuck upbraided her. “One of the girls might hear.”

  “So what? It’s true, isn’t it? He’s my slut of a sister’s goddamn bastard and some day I’m going to tell him myself.”

  Tim was devastated. In one blow he had lost a father and acquired a stigma. Trying to control his rage and fear, he confronted Tuck the next day and demanded to know who his real father was.

  “Your Mom was very strange about it, lad.” Tuck’s face had turned crimson and he refused to meet Tim’s eye. “She never mentioned anyone—except this holy angel business,” he said. “I’m really sorry.”

  After that, Cassie continued to find fault with whatever Tim said or did and Tuck simply avoided him whenever possible. Tim began to feel as if he were being chastised for his mother’s sins. How else could he describe his life with the Delaneys, except as perpetual punishment.

  He would try to come home as late as possible. Yet when darkness fell, his friends would all disperse for dinner and he was left with no one to talk to.

  The playground was dimly illuminated by a soft kaleidoscopic haze from the stained-glass windows of the church. Careful to avoid detection by the likes of Ed McGee, he would go inside. At first it was merely to warm himself. Gradually he found himself drawn to the statue of the Virgin and, feeling abandoned and lonely, he would kneel in prayer, as he had been taught.

  “Ave Maria, gratia plena—Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee, blessed art thou among women … Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now …”

  But even Tim himself could not fully understand what he was seeking. He was not old enough to comprehend that having been born in a web of questions, he was asking the Virgin Mother to deliver him from ignorance.

  Why was I born? Who are my parents? Why doesn’t anybody love me?

  Late one evening, as he wearily looked up, he thought—for a single fleeting instant—that he saw the statue smile as if it were saying, “One thing must be clear in this confused life of yours. I love you.”

  When he went home, Cassie slapped him hard for being late for supper.