At dusk, Rena and I happened both to be gazing out the window when snow began suddenly to fall and the world to turn white under our eyes. Great feathery flakes descended in the windless air, weaving a veil of absolute white. Everything lost its outline. The mountains vanished; trees and houses were swallowed in a featureless void in which we watched mesmerized, not breathing a word. The room darkened slowly, and the monochrome outside took on here and there a golden glow as lights blossomed in every window but this. We hung suspended in a trance, an eternity of leisure. But mystic as the spell might have been said to be, it released desires long held in check. There could have been no errors now. When I drew near she averted her mouth with the gentle, rather rueful, movement with which she had always confined my kisses to her cheek, but my hand now grazed for the first time below her throat. I thought for a moment that encountering her own meant rebuke, till I felt her fingers at work undoing the buttons of her pajama blouse for me. Lying down, she offered up two small breasts as white as the snow. Bent to those, I heard her moan my name on the pillow. Beneath my journeying hand her slim body arched in a convulsion about which there could be no mistake.
“I won’t ask whether I’m a virgin any longer after that.”
“You know I love you.”
“Isn’t it wonderful? And we won’t say anything about how insane it is.”
“Everything else seems insane now. Except this.”
“Yes. Oh, my God, here comes the supper cart.”
Two days later, when I called, the room was empty. The bed had been stripped. Curtains blew at the open window. I found the superintending nurse at the linen closet at the end of the corridor. I imagined she had watched me emerge, then turned busily back to her work. She did not, at any rate, choose to withdraw her head from among the towels and linen while she answered my questions.
“Where’s Rena Baker?”
“Not back from surgery yet.”
“Surgery? What for?”
“Some ribs removed.”
This was the last resort for patients whom pneumothorax and other measures had failed: collapse of the lung. She had not told me any such thing had been scheduled, or even contemplated. Nor that she had had rheumatic fever as a child and that her heart was not all it might be. I learned it all from Cora Nyhoff, to whom I hurried in the hope of more information than the bare facts related by the nurse.
I could eat no dinner. Rather ironically, the dining-room matron called on me for grace, which I managed like everyone else from a common store of clichés. Then I hurried to the infirmary. Rena was not yet back from surgery. I bundled myself into boots and overcoat and went outside. Rena’s room was dark. Through the hospital windows, behind the infirmary, nothing could be seen but an occasional white apparition floating between the gaps in the draperies.
Tightening my scarf, I trooped around the sanitarium grounds with my gloved hands in my pockets. It was brutally cold, the snow hard as iron underfoot. The stars throbbed in the clear air. Jigging in the driveway ruts, I sorted out the constellations as taught me by Rena on our night walks; she was a country girl who had supplied my city-bred ignorance of the heavens, so that I could mark their mythological progress from my porch bed on wakeful nights. Orion, Cassiopeia … There were no Christians in that pagan congress. All the voyeurs were inside tonight. Some could be seen at their snug windows, watching. I went inside myself. After half an hour of hovering over a chess game in the lounge, and a few minutes in my room, I got into my clothes again and went out. As I neared the hospital, a courier came out and stumbled across the snow to the doctor’s cottage. Dr. Simpson stood a moment in his doorway with the light behind him, nodding, then shaking his head. Then the caller left, and the doctor went back inside, not to reappear. The rooms in the dormitories darkened one by one. I hadn’t heard the bell. Too late to make it now anyway. I walked to keep warm, wandering to the doctor’s cottage, then back to the hospital. I stood irresolutely at the back door, raised my arm to press the bell, and dropped it again as my courage failed me. I went back toward the cottage, aimlessly. A bird suddenly rose from the brush beside the brook behind me, flew into the trees, and was silent. Another sound drew my gaze toward the gate. Under its arch a black vehicle rolled across the frozen snow, stopped behind the hospital, and a scavenger in a Homburg entered it carrying a wicker basket.
The stars swam in a mist of tears. The Rockies were invisible now, but I knew from memory where the mountain stood with the cross of snow upon its side. There was a cry from an animal down in the brush beside the icy brook, where nature was also keeping itself in balance. “Thou shalt not kill.” This was advertised as the law of someone who had also created a universe in which one thing ate another. Were not believers aware of the holes a single thought tore in their fabric? Perfect love did not quite cast out fear, but rage did grief, or nearly so.
I walked around to the other side, where the wheels grinding in departure could be heard but not seen. She was as dead as the moon, who had warmed me. The little creeks of blood were stilled, the breasts I had kissed as cold as stone.
Dr. Simpson was evidently a watcher too, or someone had reported a delinquent by phone, because his door burst open and footsteps crunched the snow behind me. He had thrown on a coat, and his face above an untidy loop of scarf was demented with anger.
“What the devil are you doing out here?”
“Letting the moon open old lesions.”
“Oh, for God’s sake! What kind of tenth-rate Rossetti …? Go to bed this instant! I order it! It’s an hour past Lights Out. What the devil do you think this is, a country club?”
“I’m sorry, Dr. Simpson.”
He came a step closer, scrutinizing me. “What’s the matter with you?”
“Rena’s dead, isn’t she?”
“She slipped away quietly. The doctor in charge of surgery assured me.” He hesitated, glaring toward the cottage. “Come inside. We’ll both freeze out here.”
The living room was empty. He kicked the remains of a fire into life and poured us brandies.
“Her heart gave out. Unexpectedly, because we checked it thoroughly, knowing she had a history of rheumatic fever. You can never tell about the heart—makes a fool of good cardiograms and bad. I have found women’s as capricious as the poets say. Ah well, it may be a mercy, because frankly she didn’t stand a chance. I doubt whether the collapse would have helped. It might have been a nasty third act.”
“I admire the objectivity of science,” I said, pacing helplessly about the room. “How they can—I had a brother once … Surely you no longer think this is a managed universe?”
“Why do you think you have anything to tell me, young man? I had a son once, whom I had to watch die of leukemia. He was seven. Stevie. He was such a boy as you see riding dolphins in the fountains in the parks. A dolphin boy. A faun. I watched him bleed to death.”
“What did you do then, sing ‘Come Thou fount of every blessing, tune my heart to sing Thy praise’?”
“Go on. I am an old man. I have shed my tears. Go ahead.”
He went over to the fireplace and kicked the embers again. Then he walked to the window, where he sent a kind of snort between the damask draperies into the black night. He padded back to his chair, into which he flopped once more. I saw that he was wearing house slippers.
“The thing I must say is a little hard on me now is the operatic type we occasionally get here. All this Liebestod, and going off into the night and one thing and another. I had a romantic a few years ago who went out for walks bareheaded in the moonlight. I’ll be glad to tell you where he is now. Wagner, Chopin …” He broke off his improvisation as fruitless, and after an audible swallow of brandy grunted apologetically and said, “Death is the commonest thing in the universe. What was this girl to you?”
“I was in love with her.”
He writhed about in his chair, like a man being strapped into it for execution. “Oh, dear.”
“I suppose you don’t lik
e to hear any more about these attachments than you have to, but they do develop. What are we supposed to do?”
“Where did you go, for heaven’s sake?”
“In the garage. The pickup truck.”
He sipped his brandy warily, as though on the lookout for emotional ambush everywhere. We faced one another in the wingbacks flanking the revived fire. I gathered that I had at least cleared myself of the charge of romanticism by admitting I was in love. It was realism he was up against. The old irony curled his lips as he said: “Did you kiss her?”
“Of course.”
“You may live to regret it. Or then again, you may not,” he added with one of his grim little jokes.
I set my brandy down and said: “Dr. Simpson, do you believe in a God?”
He just perceptibly raised his eyes, as if in entreaty to Heaven to spare him at least this. It took me some years to attain his mood and understand my blunder. He resented such questions as people do who have thought a great deal about them. The superficial and the slipshod have ready answers, but those looking this complex life straight in the eye acquire a wealth of perception so composed of delicately balanced contradictions that they dread, or resent, the call to couch any part of it in a bland generalization. The vanity (if not outrage) of trying to cage this dance of atoms in a single definition may give the weariness of age with the cry of youth for answers the appearance of boredom. Dr. Simpson looked bored as he ground his teeth and gazed away.
“Oh, one man’s opinion about these things is as good as another’s,” he said. “You believe what you must in order to stave off the conviction that it’s all a tale told by an idiot. You know, of course, you took a chance with that girl.”
“It was worth it,” I retorted, bitterly.
I finished my brandy and left the good doctor to his rest. A wind had come out of the north, and I hurried up the path through the cottage wood lot toward the dark hospital grounds, where winter clutched in his tight fist the flowers of May.
eight
The world, as has been noted, is full of a number of things, and while they may not suffice to keep us happy as kings, the troubles in which they mainly abound are diverse enough for one to distract us from the other. I had scarcely dried my tears for Rena when letters began to arrive from home indicating, at first in disquieting hints, then unmistakably, that my father was going out of his mind.
His first symptoms had been a worsening of his insomnia, and shortened patience with any breakfast-table assurances that he had dozed off once or twice during the night. Wakefulness was further vexed by a compulsive remembrance of things past; he would shake my mother to inquire the name of a landlord they had once had, or of a butcher whom they had long ago patronized. He would rout her from bed in the middle of the night to pore with him over road maps and atlases in search of some town they had visited years before, or merely stopped in for lunch. He literally racked his brains—as his headaches and head noises attested. Cajoleries and protests prompted by my mother’s own fatigue and eventual hysteria were met with vehemence, then threats of violence. Once she found him in the kitchen at three o’clock in the morning swatting cockroaches with her brassière. To the aforementioned, add what was happening on the route. There he had taken to picking up garbage from one stop and leaving it at another. I had often longed to do some such thing myself, as a kind of passionate outcry, or gesture, against the Way Things Are, but as it was, my father’s didoes, whether impromptu or deliberate, hardly amused the customers and were anything but good for business. Cancellations began to pour in as the peculiar “deliveries” continued. It was this development that brought a letter from Doc Berkenbosch.
That our family physician was himself trying to keep abreast of contemporary trends was amply reflected in this document, which suggested that guilt for his sins was what prompted the torments my father was inflicting on his fellow men. Scientific as the diagnosis sounded (and who could ask for a more consummate synthesis of Calvin and Freud?), I tended to doubt it. In any case Doc’s letter was troubled, even urgent, and his frantic “Are you maybe not now well enough to come home and handle Pa?” sent me into action. I left the sanitarium without asking Dr. Simpson’s permission, or even waiting for my next quarterly examination, due in a fortnight. I simply packed up and went.
Riding home on the Burlington Zephyr, I watched the scenery slip by and tried to remember happier days. The times my father took us all to the ice cream parlor; the characteristic cool, creamy smell of that place, so distinct from and yet so curiously similar to that in the saloons to which, in harsher hours, I was sent to fetch him home. Louie and I had often discussed these two smells, and decided that what they had in common was probably something picked up from the sawdust to be found on the floor in either haven. Sometimes it was nothing worse than a chili parlor in which I finally tracked Pa down, and then he would treat me to a bowl of it before coming along. Chili con carne was his favorite food, of which he often took a quart home to wash down with bottles of beer. My most vivid, if not tenderest, memory was of a night when he fell with his face in a plate of it.
It was about ten o’clock, and he was sitting at the kitchen table considerably the worse for several whiskeys which had, in this instance, preceded the beer and the chili standing ready for him, the one cold and other hot. He was in something of a daze, indeed on the verge of falling asleep over his dinner. It was nerve-racking to watch his eyes droop shut and his head nod each time an inch closer to the plate before snapping back. Feeling compassion for him, I looked away. If I removed the plate of chili he would land with his head on the hard table; if I shook him he would strike out blindly as he always did when roused in this condition and possibly do me bodily harm, which he would later regret. To counterbalance his drinking and his doubts he was doubly strict with himself about denying us the pleasures forbidden by the church, so that we were barred absolutely from the movies; but I had caught enough snatches of the cinema through open fire-escape and lobby doors to know that what we had here was the classic suspense of the short subject—a man swaying ever more perilously on a column of crates, or careening progressively farther over the edge of a cliff. With each foggy nod my father’s face came closer to the plate, in which predestined goal it finally did land with a splat that sent beans and juice in all directions across the table top. The impact made his next galvanized awakening conclusive, and, revived, he sat up and ate like a trencherman, after using his bandanna at some length. But the incident satisfied fully the intellectuals’ definition of the grotesque as a blend of the tragic and the comic.
I do not remember whether or not that was in one of his deeply pious intervals, hence whether grace was said over the hastily reassembled supper. Prayers at table were, among us, of a length usually encountered only in church among folk of more tepid faiths, for blessings invoked were by no means restricted to the food but included the church itself, its missions and the heathen they served, and a wide variety of secular matters. Thus in my father’s devout periods, when he outdid the longest-winded clergymen, guidance was besought for the President and his Cabinet, legislatures both state and federal, as well as emissaries engaged on diplomatic undertakings then in the news, while the food itself grew cold in its bowls. I cannot remember eating anything but cold roast beef and cold chicken when my father was in one of his revivals. I once proposed that the dinner be kept in the oven until grace had been said, or if custom required that we encircle it formally while commending it to divine care, that we gather around the stove to say it, and was given a sound clap on the head for my impertinence.
The day after the chili con carne episode, I asked my father for half a dollar to go bowling, which remorse for his spree of the night before made him roundly deny me. We were one happy family dedicated to each other’s welfare in mutual faith, and he was not going to compound a lapse into his cups by the sinful expenditure of money on frivolities and bodily exercise, which, as St. Paul had said, “counteth for little.” My father w
as nothing if not thoroughgoing; superficiality was a charge that could never be brought against him. He heeded literally the injunction that one’s religion ought to embrace all walks of life; he never brought us home anything flippant, and remembered his family but sparingly at Christmastime, and his friends not at all, on the ground that crass commercialism should not envelop the birth of our Lord. His habit of striking blows for the original meanings of things included Halloween, when we would at divine worship commemorate the origins of the Reformation, not squander money on masks and costumes. My father himself always stoutly denied that his conversion had any economic root, laying it rather to the direct intervention of a Providence who often spoke to us through narrow escapes. An example was to be found in an explosion in a garage at a time when my father normally, but not that day, passed through the alley there with his truck. “If I’d been fifteen minutes earlier I’d been blown to pieces, thank God,” he said.
I thought of all these things in my train seat and while lying in my berth at night, and I was still thinking of them as I climbed the stairs with my luggage to the second-floor flat where we lived, the familiar smell in the hallway coiling about my vitals like a reptile.
Pa was waiting for me at the head of the stairs, ready to give me some idea of the nature and scope of his suffering. He wore incompatible slippers and, for a bathrobe, an old topcoat, under which was a black turtle-neck sweater. “You look awful,” I said, to please him, and also to stem the tide of exposition, at least temporarily. It was after I had greeted him and kissed my mother, and we were settled once again in the old cold parlor, that he crossed his legs, gazed at the electric heater glowing on the floor nearby, and plunged into an account of some of the things that were troubling him.
“Ninety per cent of the universe is missing,” he said, after a rehearsal of perturbations more familiar to me, which I paid no more heed than one does complaints one has heard for years like an old phonograph record played over and over. This was a new note, at which I pricked up my ears and glanced at my mother.
The Blood of the Lamb: A Novel Page 10