The Chosen by Chaim Potok

Author:Chaim Potok
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Publisher: Simon & Schuster

CHAPTER EIGHT

WHEN I GOT BACK to school the next morning, I found I had become a hero, and during the fifteen-minute morning recess my friends, and even some boys I did not know, all crowded around me, wanting to know how I was and telling me what a great game I had played. Near the end of the recess, I went over to the pitcher’s position and stood on the exact spot where I had been hit by the ball. I looked-—tried to look; the yard was crowded with students—at home plate and imagined Danny standing there, grinning at me. I remembered his grinning that way again yesterday, and I closed my eyes for a moment, then went over and stood near the wire fence behind the plate. The bench on which the young rabbi had sat was still there, and I stared at it for a moment. It seemed impossible to me that the ball game had taken place only a week ago. So many things had happened, and everything looked so different.

Sidney Goldberg came over to me and started talking about the game, and then Davey Cantor joined us and added his opinion about “those murderers.” I nodded at what they were saying without really listening. It seemed silly to me, the way they kept talking about the game, they both sounded so childish, and I got a little angry when Davey Cantor started talking about “that snooty Danny Saunders,” but I didn’t say anything.

I got out of school at two o’clock and took a trolley car over to the public library where I was supposed to meet Danny. The library was a huge, three-story, graystone building, with thick Ionic columns, and with the words BEAUTY IS TRUTH, TRUTH BEAUTY, THAT IS ALL

YE KNOW ON EARTH, AND ALL YE NEED TO KNOW—JOHN KEATS engraved in the stone over its four glass entrance doors. It stood on a wide boulevard and there were tall trees in front of it and a grassy lawn bordered by flowers. On the right-hand wall of the vestibule, just inside the doors, there was a mural of the history of great ideas, beginning with a drawing of Moses holding the Ten Commandments, going on to Jesus, Mohammed, Galileo, Luther, Copernicus, Kepler, Newton, and ending with Einstein gazing at the formula E = MC2. On the other wall there was a mural showing Homer, Dante, Tolstoi, Balzac, and Shakespeare engaged in conversation. They were beautiful murals, done in bright colors, and the great men in them looked alive. Probably because I had become so sensitive about eyes the past week, I noticed for the first time that Homer’s eyes seemed glazed, almost without pupils, as if the artist had been trying to show that he had been blind. I had never noticed that before, and it frightened me a little to see it now.

I went quickly through the first floor, with its marble floors, its marble pillars, its tall bookcases, its long reference tables, its

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