The Blood of the Lamb: A Novel

by Peter de Vries

  “Mrs. Wanderhope has been troubled, she tells me, by certain doubts,” he began, losing no time after hanging his hat in the hall. Shades of my childhood! “Doubts arising from things you’ve been telling her. It is necessary that offenses come, but woe to him by whom the offenses come. It’s a serious matter to shake a person’s faith.”

  “Her faith hasn’t been shaken—just changed,” I said. “Wouldn’t you put it that way, dear?” I asked Greta, who was lying under a quilt on the living-room couch. She nodded. She seemed untroubled and in the best of spirits as she nibbled from a box of glazed fruit. She had aired developments with Reverend Tonkle because she felt she owed it to him after inquiries about her absence from divine worship. Still, I had a suspicion that she rather anticipated the pitched battle between the two men. She certainly listened to it with rapt interest. There is no need to reproduce it here, even in summary, since it was an almost literal echo of the one between Louie and my uncle with which these events begin. I leaned heavily on Louie for arguments. In fact, I had at one point the exhilarating feeling of Louie’s living once again in me as I flung out what I knew was an almost word-forword recollection of Louie’s climax to my uncle, for it was one of those childhood incidents branded deep into one’s memory:

  “If you want to believe in a God who creates us to be a land biped and then deliberately stuffs us with relics of a marine past and a four-footed past we never had, in order to confuse us or whatever, why go ahead. You’re welcome to Him!”

  “I shall pray for you,” Reverend Tonkle said.

  “All right, but not here.”

  “Please, Don. Please, both of you.”

  “You see what you’ve done? Now we’ll have no more of this excitement. I don’t want her to have any trouble.”

  By this time I had my college degree and was working in the Chicago branch of an Eastern advertising agency. By the time our daughter Carol was born we had been transferred to the main office in New York. Before we knew it Carol was a toddling three-year-old, and, my affairs having prospered within the modest range possible in that firm, we made the customary move into Westchester.

  Greta’s emotional sailing was far from smooth. Her attitude toward the child alternated between smothering bursts of affection and lapses into a kind of weary oblivion, when she would seem not to be aware that the girl was about, or that I was either. Her moods then ominously recalled that abstraction in which I had found her sitting on the bench on the hospital grounds that Sunday afternoon I had gone to visit my father.

  One day, after reading an article by an amateur anthropologist, Greta complained that the suburbs were stifling her. So we gave a party to which more people were invited than there was room for in the house, and in the course of which we picked up invitations for three more such functions on successive Saturday nights. On the third, Greta, whose liquor consumption had been rising steadily, drank so much I had to carry her into the house and put her to bed. The broad Congregational face of Mrs. Brodhag, the maid, who was hanging over the banister in a woolen bathrobe, did little to brighten the occasion. The classic miseries of the morning after were varied with accusations to the effect that I was the real culprit.

  “How do you figure that?”

  “You saw me drinking too much but did nothing to stop it. In fact, there you were gaily fetching me the stuff. You must have known I was going to make a fool of myself. Oh, some of the things I said!”

  “Nonsense. A good toot now and then does none of us any harm.” I spoke with that tremulous nonchalance of one who knows he is in trouble, deep in a psychological problem for which all the transparent ruses of “using psychology” are worthless. “Ventilates us, gets things out of our system. You’ve been so blue lately I figured it’d do you good. But now you must be quiet.”

  “So now you approve of drunkenness,” she mumbled. “You draw the line at nothing, do you?”

  It appeared to be in the throes of hang-over that she got things out of her system, at least in this case. She was lying on her stomach and spoke out of one side of her mouth, the other being mashed into the pillow. She now twisted around onto her back, groaning with fresh accesses of dizziness entailed by this change of position.

  “Your own wife making a spectacle of herself. I’d be ashamed.”

  “But darling, you looked nice there, dancing on the table with your skirts up.”

  “You have no shame whatever.”

  I went to the bathroom, where I dug an ice bag from the back of a shelf in the linen closet. I filled it with ice cubes in the kitchen, and when I returned I started to put it gingerly on her forehead. She took it from my hands abruptly, like Napoleon snatching the crown from Pope Pius at his coronation and setting it on his own head.

  “Aren’t you the least bit sorry?” she murmured, that done.

  “Well, all right. I’ll never let it happen again.”

  “Promise?”

  “Promise.”

  “Because sometimes I wonder if I haven’t married beneath me,” she went on, in a manner causing me to question whether, in fact, she had yet reached the hangover stage. She gave her cap a last adjustment.

  “You have. But now I know your capacity, and I’ll watch it after this. Get some rest now. I’ve got to drive Carol to Louisa’s house. They have a new burro.”

  One summer when Carol was attending day camp, Greta had an affair with a man named Mel Carter. He was an Eastern publicity representative for a film studio, and often instructed dinner parties to which we went in those days with accounts of the movies’ coming of age. “We have a picture coming up,” he said once, “in which a character says ‘son of a bitch.’ Lots of other exciting things are happening. Still, it’s only a beginning. Much remains to be done.” His morals were the equal of his intelligence, and, his antennae having sensed in Greta a Discontented Woman, he made frank overtures to her at a luncheon in the city to which he had secretly asked her. She was then going into New York quite frequently, ostensibly to look for some part-time modeling work. The facts did not come to my attention till that fall, but when they did, I said that Mrs. Wanderhope was my wife, a claim I was prepared to substantiate with gunfire. I was accused of narrow-minded intolerance and outmoded standards. Greta implemented these charges by thrusting at me a book by Bertrand Russell setting forth the civilized view that marriage ought perhaps to be regarded as permanent if at all possible, but not as excluding other relations. This drove me to the extreme of pitching into the hearthfire a work by one of our more provocative contemporary thinkers. Her conduct, and especially the shrill manner in which she defended it, should have reminded me that I was dealing with instability rather than infidelity, and caused me to behave more responsibly myself. Perhaps my nerves were frayed more than my pride was wounded. In any case, my behavior had the effect of frightening Mel Carter away for good. That in turn speeded Greta’s erratic decline. At the height of one bitter altercation, she ran out of the house into the street, shouting imprecations. I went after her, feeling as though I had been sucked into a nightmare.

  “Everything is awful!” she exclaimed when I had overtaken her. I grasped her by the arm and drew her to a halt. “What’s the use? Why go on? What’s the good of it, what’s the point?”

  “Easy, now. We all ask that at times, it’s part of the human condition, but we all carry on.”

  “What for?”

  We stood on the sidewalk, under the shedding maple trees.

  “Think of Carol,” I said.

  “She’d be better off without me, and you know it.”

  “That kind of talk is begging the question. No child would be better off without a mother who thinks of it.”

  “That’s what’s so awful,” she went on, ignoring this. “Girls’ fathers mean more to them than their mothers.”

  This seemed to me so much one of those unsportsmanlike gambits for advantage by the self-pitying, the emotionally truant, that I said sharply, “Rubbish! I’ll not listen to any more talk like
that.” She seemed to deflate, as she often did at the peaks of these discharges, and allowed herself to be led back to the house, like a run-away animal.

  As we strolled grotesquely beneath the trees, I spoke to her quietly so as not to be overheard by neighbors or passers-by, though still grasping her firmly by the arm. “We have lots of good things ahead of us, lots to live for. And so you must pull yourself together, and go to someone who might help you, as soon as we can find one. Then shalt thou have thy summer’s lease, nor Death brag thou wander’st in his shade,” I said, turning to her with a smile.

  “What?”

  “Sonnet eighteen. Remember how we used to read them together, when you were pregnant and all? Let’s build a good fire tonight and read them over again.”

  Shakespeare! Surely one deserved better than that.

  The idea did not seem at first a very good one after we had begun to act on it. I read aloud for half an hour or more, during which she sat motionless in a chair and cried, the tears running uninterruptedly down her cheeks. When I stopped and laid the book aside, she nodded and smiled at me, and in one of those subtle shifts of mood that emphasize how much we live by one another’s variable weather, I sensed that she might be wooed.

  I took her by the hand and drew her upstairs where we crept past Mrs. Brodhag’s closed door, looked into Carol’s room long enough to draw up the covers kicked back in her sleep and to restore to her pillow a favorite animal fallen from her embrace to the floor, and thence into the harbor of our own bedroom. There were some prolonged and pleasant shenanigans, in the course of which Greta paused to appraise herself critically and ask whether she wasn’t getting too heavy. Didn’t I think the bit of modeling with which she had hoped to help pay for Mrs. Brodhag was now out of the question? I answered that thank God it was; that anyone who wanted the two-dimensional spooks to be seen in Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar was welcome to them, but I preferred the Rubensian ideal, at least in a wife. “Oh, you Dutchmen,” she said. “For a woman to satisfy you at home she has to be a disgrace in public.” Then she wet her finger and touched her hip, the way women test the heat of a flatiron.

  She refused to see a psychiatrist, seeing no need of one in her ups and resisting the idea during her downs, so that I wondered how her parents had managed this problem in bygone times. Then perhaps the matter had been less critical, and she herself more pliable. She became now steadily more unpredictable, sometimes disappearing for hours on a tour of the local and outlying pubs, once remaining away overnight, to be located, finally, in a highway motel in a room bearing evidence of other occupancy than her own.

  What, one may ask, is the effect of such things on a child?

  Our inability ever to guess with any confidence when children are hurt, and when not, by such emotional tests as we subject them to leaves them in somewhat the category of the human eyeball, that wonder about which doctors are said to be still theoretically undecided whether it is the tenderest or the toughest of human substances. I had no idea what impression we succeeded in making on our little girl, who was five at the time these troubles came to a head and six when her mother made good her threat forcibly to resign from human affairs. Late one night, when Greta had been fetched home from her bars and was permitting herself to be soothed and stilled in a kitchen embrace, I heard a stir behind the door to the dining room, which was swung back to the wall. Through the crack between the hinges I saw Carol smiling guiltily out at us while she lipsticked her mouth with a piece of scarlet crayon. “Aren’t you in bed?” The tableau restored everyone’s sanity for the time being, and we laughed, the three of us, as we drank hot chocolate at the kitchen table.

  Carol had a charming habit of saying “Hi” every time she saw you in the house, even if she had so greeted you in another room five minutes before. You could not run into her often enough. What else? She said “You’re welcome” to the grocer when, having counted out your change after a purchase, he said “Thank you.” She universalized other courtesies in which she had been instructed, such as not pointing in public. She once accused me of not practicing what I preached when I indicated some artistically disposed gourds and maple leaves in the autumn window of Mr. Hawley’s dry goods store; I thought better of explaining that the amenity was not intended to include natural or inanimate objects, but only people. It is amazing how much parental love is embodied in laughter at the object. Carol’s mother and I had to leave the room on the occasion of her fourth-birthday party when we saw her lean toward a celebrant in a dress with a colossal bow behind and say, “If you’re going to be sick, may I have your orange slices?” Within a few years Carol was able to laugh in this way herself about other children. She told me this story about a neighbor boy named Merton Mills. Merton had promised his parents a telephone stand for Christmas which he would make with his own two hands in manual training. After some weeks he was asked how it was coming along, and he said fine, though slowly. As the holidays neared, he said in response to further inquiries that he had run into some snags but would have the handiwork in time; in addition to the construction, of course, there would be finishing touches, such as a coat of lacquer and some decalcomania trim. Things like that. When Christmas itself rolled around and there was still no telephone stand, he explained that they would have to be disappointed. “Someone stole the materials,” he said.

  What, I thought to myself as I gazed at Carol, if anything should happen to that creature? Looking back, we seem to detect clairvoyance in certain moments of apprehension, but mine were no more than pass like a chill over the heart of any parent watching his treasure asleep in bed or taking off down the road on a bicycle, which we call premonitions by hindsight if our fears materialize. A neighbor had been robbed by the Fates of a nine-year-old boy whom I will unabashedly describe as hyacinthine-haired, and a year later was still inconsolable to the point of unfitness for human society. I reminded him sharply that he had three other children, and he turned on me with clenched fists. “There aren’t enough children in the world to make a dent in grief for one,” he said. I had little suspicion then that I would be crying foul myself, under terms more final than his own. This being then foreshadowed, I can say, like the narrator in Our Town, “I reckon you know what the third act is about.”

  We had for a few months then an old dog, left us by a family who had moved to Florida, on which Carol doted, and which she stoutly defended as “part pedigree.” By moving a table morsel from side to side in mid-air, she could make the mesmerized beast shake his head in the negative as she asked it, “Do you like Mommy? Do you like Daddy?” and by swinging the tidbit up and down as she asked, “Do you like me?” cause it to nod yes. She turned six that winter, becoming more than ever Tuesday’s Child, so full of grace, so poised that, as a friend of ours remarked, you could hold her on your outstretched palm and she would balance perfectly. There is a point when life, having showered us with jewels for nothing, begins to exact our life’s blood for paste. That was the point I had now reached.

  One Saturday in June, after Greta had been drinking heavily for two days, I found her slumped over the wheel of the car in the closed garage with the motor running. I rushed to open the door, which stuck as my fingers clawed at the handle and my head burst with a lungful of held breath. I got it open at last and raced to the nearby hospital, fortunately in time. Why say “fortunately”? After six months in a sanitarium under the care of a psychiatrist who could do no more than apply a poultice of polysyllables to a wound he could neither see nor understand any better than the next man, Greta came home and, shortly thereafter, succeeded in the act on which she had resolved. This time she made sure her departure was swift and certain.

  There was nowhere to look but into my daughter’s blue eyes, from which she managed to withhold whatever she may have thought or felt, in the tradition of childhood. No one seems to know whether that vacancy is innocence or guile. No one can seem to remember from his own childhood. We walked in dreams of sunsets, looking for violets and daisies beside
the road, cutting switches to flick in the summer air, watching sparrows dip among the dusty reeds, greeting neighbors. Once we saw Mrs. Grundy coming toward us. We agreed she was one of those people who always ask you whether you’re doing what you’re doing. “Mowing the lawn?” “Shining the car?” “Doing your Saturday shopping?” In whispers we hastily anticipated Mrs. Grundy’s greeting: “Out walking together?” It was so accurate that when Mrs. Grundy was again out of earshot, Carol shook her head deploringly and said, “We really shouldn’t make fun of her. She always gives us kids things when we play around her house.” The girl’s impish streak was clear but had its limits; it stopped short of those to whom she was loyal or who were loyal to her. Thus she took exception to the boy in second grade who explained that he had put a wad of chewing gum on the teacher’s chair “because it doesn’t hurt as much as a tack,” not because of the non sequitur in the testimony which delighted a grownup, but because she liked the teacher more than she did the boy.

  I took Carol on my knee one day and said, “I’d like to move a little farther out into the country. How would you like that?” She didn’t like it too well, but she didn’t object either, no doubt understanding her father’s wish to leave town. Mrs. Brodhag came along, after ascertaining that the house I bought was near a Congregational church. The human mechanism was breaking down everywhere, she said, and it was time we all began worshiping our Maker.

  As we left town behind the truck carrying our furniture, we passed the house of the man who had lost the hyacinthine-haired boy. He was standing in the front yard, and I waved as we went by, but he didn’t see me. He was in the middle of the lawn, looking up, with his hand over his mouth, as though he had been surprised by something in the summer sky. I wanted then to stop the car and rush back and tell him what nonsense I knew it had been to remind him that he had three other children. But of course I never did, and as we lurched past the van loaded with our belongings I looked straight ahead, refraining from any further sight-seeing until we were out of this town and heading through open country toward our new one, a scant fifteen miles away. Before we reached it, Carol fell asleep with her favorite doll in her arm, a circumstance of which Mrs. Brodhag, who was riding with us in the front seat, took advantage by gathering the girl in her own sturdy arm and, in gentle tones, resuming her sermon concerning the need for human faith.