He also, on occasion, told the joke about a man who complains to his doctor that his wife, when angry, gets historical.

“You mean hysterical,” the doctor says.

“No, historical,” the man says. “She lists the history of every wrong thing I’ve ever done!”

Still, the Reb knew that marriage was an endangered institution. He’d officiated for couples, seen them split, then officiated when they married someone else.

“I think people expect too much from marriage today,” he said. “They expect perfection. Every moment should be bliss. That’s TV or movies. But that is not the human experience.

“Like Sarah says, twenty good minutes here, forty good minutes there, it adds up to something beautiful. The trick is when things aren’t so great, you don’t junk the whole thing. It’s okay to have an argument. It’s okay that the other one nudges you a little, bothers you a little. It’s part of being close to someone.

“But the joy you get from that same closeness-when you watch your children, when you wake up and smile at each other-that, as our tradition teaches us, is a blessing. People forget that.”

Why do they forget it?

“Because the word ‘commitment’ has lost its meaning. I’m old enough to remember when it used to be a positive. A committed person was someone to be admired. He was loyal and steady. Now a commitment is something you avoid. You don’t want to tie yourself down.

“It’s the same with faith, by the way. We don’t want to get stuck having to go to services all the time, or having to follow all the rules. We don’t want to commit to God. We’ll take Him when we need Him, or when things are going good. But real commitment? That requires staying power-in faith and in marriage.”

And if you don’t commit? I asked.

“Your choice. But you miss what’s on the other side.”

What’s on the other side?

“Ah.” He smiled. “A happiness you cannot find alone.”

Moments later, Sarah entered the room, wearing her coat. Like her husband, she was in her eighties, had thick, whitening hair, wore glasses, and had a disarming smile.

“I’m going shopping, Al,” she said.

“All right. We will miss you.” He crossed his hands over his stomach, and for a moment they just grinned at each other.

I thought about their commitment, sixty-plus years. I thought about how much he relied on her now. I pictured them at night, holding hands on the edge of the bed. A happiness you cannot find alone.

“I was going to ask you a question,” the Reb told his wife.

“Which is?”

“Well…I’ve already forgotten.”

“Okay,” she laughed. “The answer is no.”

“Or maybe no?”

“Or maybe no.”

She walked over and playfully shook his hand.

“So, it was nice to meet you.”

He laughed. “It was a pleasure.”

They kissed.

I don’t know about forty days before you’re born, but at that moment, it wouldn’t have surprised me to hear two names shouted from the heavens.

As a child, I am certain I will never marry out of my religion.

As an adult, I do it anyhow.

My wife and I are wed on a Caribbean island. The sun is going down, the weather is warm and lovely. Her family reads Bible passages. My siblings sing a funny tribute. I step on a glass. We are married by a local female magistrate, who offers us her own private blessing.

Although we come from different faiths, we forge a loving solution: I support her, she supports me, we attend each other’s religious functions, and while we both stand silent during certain prayers, we always say “Amen.”

Still, there are moments: when she is troubled, she asks Jesus for help, and I hear her pray quietly and I feel locked out. When you intermarry, you mix more than two people-you mix histories, traditions, you mix the Holy Communion stories and the Bar Mitzvah photos. And even though, as she sometimes says, “I believe in the Old Testament; we’re not that different,” we are different.

Are you angry with me about my marriage? I ask the Reb.

“Why would I be angry?” he says. “What would anger do? Your wife is a wonderful person. You love each other. I see that.”

Then how do you square that with your job?

“Well. If one day you came and said, ‘Guess what? She wants to convert to Judaism,’ I wouldn’t be upset. Until then…”

He sang. “Until then, we’ll all get alonnng…”

Life of Henry

I couldn’t help but compare the Reb and Pastor Henry now and then. Both loved to sing. Both delivered a mean sermon. Like the Reb, Henry had been shepherd to just one congregation his whole career and husband to just one wife. And like Albert and Sarah Lewis, Henry and Annette Covington had a son and two daughters, and had also lost a child.

But after that, their stories veered apart.

Henry, for example, didn’t meet his future wife at a job interview. He first saw Annette when she was shooting dice.

“Come on, six!” she yelled, throwing the bones against a stoop with his older brother. “Six dice! Gimme a six!”

She was fifteen, Henry was sixteen, and he was smitten, totally gone, like those cartoons where Cupid shoots an arrow with a boinngg! You might not view a dice roll as romantic, and it may not seem a fitting way for a Man of God to find a lasting love, but at nineteen, when Henry went to prison, he told Annette, “I don’t expect you to wait seven years,” and she said, “If it was twenty-five years, I’d still be here.” So who is to say what a lasting love looks like?

Every weekend during Henry’s incarceration, Annette rode a bus that left the city around midnight and took six hours to reach upstate New York. She was there when the sun came up, and when visiting hours began, she and Henry held hands and played cards and talked until those hours were over. She rarely missed a weekend, despite the grueling schedule, and she kept his spirits up by giving him something to look forward to. Henry’s mother sent him a letter while he was locked up, saying if he did not stay with Annette, “you might find another woman, but you will never find your wife.”

They were married when he got out, in a simple ceremony at Mt. Moriah Church. He was slim then, handsome and tall; she wore her hair in bangs, and her high smile gleamed in the wedding photos. There was a reception at a nightclub called Sagittarius. They spent the weekend at a hotel in the garment district. Monday morning, Annette was back at work.

She was twenty-two. Henry was twenty-three. Within a year, they would lose a baby, lose a job, and see the boiler in their apartment burst in winter, leaving them with icicles hanging from their ceiling.

And then the real trouble started.

The Reb said that a good marriage should endure tribulations, and Henry and Annette’s had done that. But early on, those “tribulations” were drug abuse, crime, and avoiding the police. Not exactly Fiddler on the Roof. Both Henry and Annette had been addicts, who cleaned up once Henry came home from prison. But after their baby died and the boiler burst and Annette lost her job-and a broke Henry saw his drug-dealing brother with a fat bankroll of hundred-dollar bills-they fell back into that life, and they fell all the way. Henry sold drugs at parties. He sold them from his house. Soon the customers were so frequent, he made them wait on the corner and come up one at a time. He and Annette became heavy users and drinkers, and they lived in fear of both the police and rival drug lords. One night, Henry was taken for a ride with some Manhattan dealers, a ride he thought might end in his death; Annette was waiting with gun in hand if he didn’t come back.

But when Henry finally hit bottom-that night behind those trash cans-Annette did, too.

“What’s keeping you from going to God?” Henry asked her that Easter morning.