He was a short man, not fat—but as they say around home, well fed—bespectacled, and with a great mop of unruly black hair. At times he reminded me of pictures I had seen of Einstein. His voice was somewhat gravelly, yet he used it in a way that got your attention and held it—perfect for a lecturer. “My father was a physicist,” he would say. “He worked on the Manhattan Project, I think, or something like that. I was really too young to grasp it. Anyhow, he left my mother when I was about four. Yeah. Or rather I should say my mother sent him away.”

He would put out his cigarette, sigh, and look to the side, at nothing in particular. “You know,” he would say finally, “people need a certain amount of somebody else. And if you’re not getting it from one place, you get it from another. That’s what my mother did. She was that kind of person. Not selfish, you understand, but she knew what she had to do to get what she wanted, and boy, did she go after it.”

That was really about as far along as he would get into an explanation of why he had renounced—if renounced he had—his traditional faith and taken up the Cross. His eyes would almost glaze over, not with tears, but with memories. All of which made me uncomfortable. He would smile a sort of resigned and detached smile, the way a person smiles after remembering a funny situation with a long-dead friend. I would be afraid to break the silence.

Were any other of his family members Christian?

No.

His wife?

Not married.

At this point I would give up for fear of seeming too ignorant. But it didn’t bother him in the least. It was just unimportant to him to discuss the whys and whens of his entrance into Christendom. Which struck me as odd, even though he made it clear to me, over time, that his conversion was a very personal thing to him. He was a scholar, not an evangelist; a theologian, not a proselytizer . . . except where I was concerned.