The Blood of the Lamb: A Novel

by Peter de Vries

  I was sitting in the television room when Carol returned, carrying the kitten. She hadn’t much to say, or did I fancy that? There was a variety show on now anyway, on which a guest comedian was going strong.

  Straight man: “Lew, your comedy is too primitive. Times have changed. People don’t want that belly laugh and pratfall stuff any more, they want adult, intellectual amusement. The inward chuckle, the smile of appreciation.”

  Comedian: “Rolling ’em in the aisles is good enough for me.”

  “You missed a good program,” I said.

  She looked down at her plate, to which she had returned an uneaten segment of orange. “My gums sting again,” she said.

  “Well, fine! That’s what we want. Just enough soreness to show the medicine is taking effect, like last time.”

  “I think I’ll go to bed. Come on, kitty.”

  The nobility, the reticence and dignity of that royal child cannot always be reported of the father. Dead-drunk and cold-sober, he wandered out to the garden in the cool of the evening, awaiting the coming of the Lord. No such advent taking place, he shook his fist at the sky and cried, “If you won’t save her from pain, at least let me keep her from fear!” A brown thrush began his evening note, the ever favored, unendurable woodsong. I snatched up a rock from the ground and stoned it from the tree.

  Fear of leaving her to brood both on what she may have heard and on my absence, I went back into the house and to her bedroom. Each entrance there held its fear that a languid child would be found stretched out upon the bedclothes. I was glad to see her sitting up against the pillow, reading a book and stroking the puss for whom no name had as yet been found.

  “Who’s going to have a cup of cocoa with a man?”

  She raised her eyes from the book. She put it aside. “O.K.,” she said, getting up and into her pink robe.

  Fixing the hot chocolate in the kitchen, I was happy to hear the piano begin in the parlor. It was a Chopin Nocturne, high among the pieces she had polished to perfection. Anxious to get it on tape, I stooped as unobtrusively as I could, after setting her cocoa on the piano, to switch on the nearby recorder. She glanced down at it and went on playing. I nodded to the cocoa steaming on a stack of sheet music, before wandering off to a chair.

  After three months she reported headaches and trouble with her eyes. Here was noted also an increase in Dr. Scoville’s charm. The slight complication was meningeal. “The disease can be kept at bay in the system while proliferating in the meninges, where for some reason the drug doesn’t penetrate,” he explained. “Why, we’ll just leave her here in the hospital and take a spinal tap and see.” The specimen extracted showed the ailment to be swirling richly in that sanctuary, into which massive doses of the Methotrexate had now to be injected directly.

  So we were back in the Children’s Pavilion, and there was again the familiar scene: the mothers with their nearly dead, the false face of mercy, the Slaughter of the Innocents. A girl with one leg came unsteadily down the hall between crutches, skillfully encouraged by nurses. Through the pane in a closed door a boy could be seen sitting up in bed, bleeding from everything in his head; a priest lounged alertly against the wall, ready to move in closer. In the next room a boy of five was having Methotrexate pumped into his skull, or, more accurately, was watching a group of mechanics gathered solemnly around the stalled machine. In the next a baby was sitting up watching a television set on which a panel show was in progress. Three experts were discussing the state of the contemporary theater. I paused in the doorway to listen. “I think writers like Tennessee Williams exaggerate the ugly side of life, the seamy side, it seems to me,” observed a well-dressed female participant. “I fail to see what purpose is gained by that.” A mother keeping watch at the next crib rose from her chair and turned the dial. There was a squawk of protest from the baby, who was evidently fascinated by the speaker’s hat or the tone of her voice, or something else about the program, and the woman quickly tuned it back, making a comic face at me.

  Among the parents and children, flung together in a hell of prolonged farewell, wandered forever the ministering vampires from Laboratory, sucking samples from bones and veins to see how went with each the enemy that had marked them all. And the doctors in their butchers’ coats, who severed the limbs and gouged the brains and knifed the vitals where the demon variously dwelt, what did they think of these best fruits of ten million hours of dedicated toil? They hounded the culprit from organ to organ and joint to joint till nothing remained over which to practice their art: the art of prolonging sickness. Yet medicine had its own old aphorism: “Life is a fatal disease.”

  I rejoined in time the endless promenade of visitors pushing their treasures in wheel chairs. Among these was a beatnik adolescent trundling his younger sister. They were both very gay; one knew from their manner that she was going home soon. The youth was dressed in jeans and a black sweater. The beard was no doubt intended to be Bohemian but recalled, instead, the traditional figure of the hayseed. The pleasant spirit given off by their companionship made us join them, wheeling along side by side, up and down, back and forth, until some countertraffic forced us to break ranks. In one of these oncoming chairs was black-eyed Rachel Stein, propelled by her mother. The two girls instantly renewed the friendship begun the first time in, and it was obvious that they preferred now to be left together in the recreation room, where in any case a birthday party for another patient was in full swing. Mrs. Stein excused herself to dart after a disappearing doctor, and I looked around for Stein. As I neared the main lounge I heard voices raised in argument.

  “These people who want to tell God how to run the universe,” a man with a brick-red neck was saying, “they remind me of those people with five shares in some corporation who take up the entire stockholders’ meeting telling the directors how to run their business.”

  I might have guessed who the object of the dressing down would be. Stein stood cornered behind the telephone booth, a carton of coffee in one hand and a smile on his face, obviously enjoying himself enormously. This was what he liked, proof of idiocy among the Positive Thinkers.

  “I suppose you’re going to tell me next I never met a payroll,” he said, throwing me only the faintest sign of greeting so as not to interrupt the debate. Several visitors, mostly parents in various stages of vigil and dishevelment, listened or chimed in.

  “You ought to be ashamed,” a woman in an Easter bonnet told Stein. “Your race gave us our religion. It’s a good thing the ancient prophets weren’t like you or we wouldn’t have any.” Stein drank from his carton and waited; she had not yet delivered herself into his hands. “From ancient polytheism, the belief in lots of gods,” the woman continued a little more eruditely, “the Hebrew nation led us on to the idea that there is only one.”

  “Which is just a step from the truth,” said Stein, and dropped his carton into a wastebasket.

  The woman began to show anger, squirming a bit on her leather chair. “We with our finite …”

  “What baffles me is the comfort people find in the idea that somebody dealt this mess. Blind and meaningless chance seems to me so much more congenial—or at least less horrible. Prove to me that there is a God and I will really begin to despair.”

  “It comes down to submitting to a wisdom greater than ours,” said the man who had been attempting to focus the problem in terms of a stockholders’ meeting. “A plan of which we can no more grasp the whole than a leaf can the forest of which it is a rustling part, or a grain of sand the seashore. What do you think when you look up at the stars at night?”

  “I don’t. I have enough to occupy me here.”

  “The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away. What do you think of that?”

  “I think it’s a hell of a way to run a railroad.”

  “You ought to be ashamed!” the woman repeated with a further rise in spirit, not noticing a four-year-old patient watching the argument from a tricycle in the doorway. “Have you ever read your Bible?”<
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  I nearly laughed. Where did she think he had got his pessimism? On what had he nurtured his despair if not on “Vanity of vanities,” “All flesh is grass,” “My tears have been my meat day and night,” and “Is there no balm in Gilead; is there no physician there?”

  Stein left his persecutors to join me in the hall, sending little Johnny Heard off on his tricycle with a pat on the head. We stood a moment comparing notes. Rachel was in for the very same thing as Carol, after all these months of solid remission on Methotrexate and the 6-MP still to go. We sought out the girls in the recreation room, where they were getting on beautifully together. They didn’t want any part of us. “How about a drink?” Stein proposed.

  In my present need Stein might seem the last company I ought to seek. Yet in another sense he was precisely what I wanted at my side, the Devil’s advocate off whom to bounce my speculations, the rock against which to hurl my yearnings and my thoughts, to test and prove them truly, an office that mealy-mouthed piety could not have performed. He was the goalkeeper past whom I must get my puck.

  “There is so much we don’t know,” I said as, walking down the street, we resumed the debate where we had left off last time. “Newton knew it, who told us so much we do know. We play like children on the shore—out there is the measureless sea. How do you explain—well, a thing like what happened on the road to Damascus?”

  “Do I have to explain every case of hysterical blindness? How do we know it happened, anyway? It’s related only in the Acts, which Luke wrote. Paul himself never mentions it, and him a man who talked about himself at the drop of a hat.”

  “He said Christ was revealed to him, as to a child born untimely. That may be what he’s referring to. I think it’s in Corinthians. And there’s the incident of the viper and the fire.”

  “I’m told Orientals walk barefoot across hot coals with no ill effects.”

  “So such things happen.” Something made me look up. I saw, her arms spread along the parapet of the second-story roof from which the mice were visible, the woman with the Easter bonnet, gazing up into the dirty spring evening. “Do you believe any of the miracles attributed to Christ?” I said quickly, perhaps because I had looked just in time to see her brush her eye, under the cheap pink veil.

  Stein gave his snort, this time somewhat more finely shaded than usual. He jerked his head back toward the hospital. “Who do you expect to see take up his bed and walk in there?”

  As we strolled along, for all the world like friends out taking the evening air rather than two men wringing each other’s hearts like empty dishrags, we encountered a phenomenon that under the circumstances could hardly be ignored. A street-corner evangelist was hurling plangent metaphors rapidly into space.

  “Would you like to call Heaven tonight? You can reverse the charges, you know. Oh, yes, brother, reverse the charges.” He swung from his audience, a girl with a jump rope and a Chinese laundryman pausing in the gutter with his pushcart to eat a candy bar, toward us as we approached. “Oh, yes, brother, reverse the charges. He’ll accept them. He’s paid for your call with the ultimate price—His Son Jesus Christ! It’s all paid for, all on the house, all for free! Just pick up the phone and tell the operator—that’s the Holy Ghost, you know—‘Get me Heaven, please. Put me through to God Almighty!’”

  We shuffled on in silence. Stein had the grace not to smile at the ally I had picked up along the way. I observed after a moment:

  “Someone has pointed out that nothing proves the validity of the Church so much as its ability to survive its own representatives. It’s got to be divine to stand up against them.”

  “I have never been convinced by that argument—it’s from one of the witty Catholics, isn’t it? You might as well say it about the Ku Klux Klan.”

  “That’s no analogy. In that case the members are no worse than the principles. In this, the principle is always supremely there for us to match up to or fall short of.”

  Stein shrugged and gave a grunt. I felt I had gotten past the goalkeeper and scored a point. We were passing a pushcart vendor selling sprigs of dogwood. I had brought plenty of that from the country this morning. I asked Stein, after another silence, whether he had ever heard the legend that the Cross had been made of dogwood and that supposedly explained the cross shaped vaguely into the grain of its heartwood, like that on the back of the Sardinian donkey for its having borne Our Lord into Jerusalem on his triumphal day. Stein said that he had never heard either of those things.

  In the bar, I chided Stein for what he had said to the woman in the Easter hat, on the ground that Westminster Hospital was no place to pull rugs out from under mothers. He agreed, with the assurance that he never did that to mothers, or even to men unless they could take it, but informed me that the woman in this case was not the mother but an aunt—the mother was on another floor in the same hospital, having a malignancy edited from her foot. This brought Stein perilously close to his role of clown, and I could feel my shoulders threaten to shake in preparation for the only response possible to this eager trowel work with the Absurd. It didn’t take much.

  “Was the man who talked about stockholders’ meetings the father?”

  “No,” said Stein, as though he had been waiting for me to ask that question, “the father is in a mental institution.”

  Stein watched me until my sobs of laughter had subsided, smiling uneasily as I gasped, “Have you no heart, man?” and brushing cigarette ashes from his horrible green sleeve.

  Wiping my eyes, I asked whether he didn’t think even aunts deserved to have their belief that those who mourned would be comforted, safeguarded from the scourge of intellect. Here I sensed a quiver of indignation as he launched a review of the Beatitudes aimed at finding one—“just one”—that held water when examined squarely in the light of reality. The poor in spirit would have to imagine for themselves any kingdom of heaven, as the pure in heart would any God for themselves; the merciful obtained no more mercy than the cruel; the meek would have to inherit anything they ever got, and so on. There was, however, one Beatitude with which one need not quarrel—could I guess which it was? It was not one of the official nine, having been delivered separately on the road to Calvary. I gave up. “‘Blessed are the wombs that never bare, and the paps that never gave suck,’” Stein said. “Could this be the Son of Man preparing himself for those final words against the black sky, the last, cosmic turn of the wheel of agony, the hoax at last seen through: ‘My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?’”

  “You mean you’re not sure? Why, man, that’s great! For the rest of us, who like to hug that little doubt we so desperately need today—what faith was to folk of another time—the ray of hope. Oh, how grateful we are for that uncertainty! Our salvation almost. Go thy way, thy doubt hath made thee whole. Bartender, two more!”

  My spirits began to rise—genuinely, not in another spasm of unstable mirth. From nowhere, I had suddenly that conviction that we would beat the rap, that Carol and Rachel would be among those who were around when the Drug came. Some would; why not they? My mood continued to ascend. The wall-motto moralists quite rightly call bottom the place from which there is nowhere to go but up, the floor against which the swimmer kicks himself lightly toward the surface once again.

  As we left the tavern, I remarked, “Well, we could go on arguing for hours, I suppose. As man has in fact for centuries about these things. There’s as much to be said for one side as for the other. Fifty-fifty.”

  “Not quite. One charge can be brought against your point of view that can’t against mine: wishful thinking. Believers believe what they want to believe. I would like to believe it, too, but deny that an honest man can. Unbelief is to that extent less suspect than faith.”

  We trudged along a moment longer, during which I debated with myself whether to say what I was thinking. I spoke up.

  “One doubts that you don’t enjoy thinking or saying what you do, at least a little, Stein. The side of man that loves to hate, to rub i
n the horrible, even revel in it. Psychiatrists have even got a name for it, I think. Algolagnia, or something like that.”

  We passed in due course the church of St. Catherine, from which a pair of people were contentedly emerging after their evening devotionals. Here a vibration of anger escaped Stein that was not put into words, but that I felt had given me a flash of illumination into his spirit—something that might even be held to confirm the theory of my friend to which I had been needled into giving audible expression. Stein resented the sedative power of religion, or rather the repose available to those blissfully ignorant that the medicament was a fictitious blank. In this exile from peace of mind to which his reason doomed him, he was like an insomniac driven to awaken sleepers from dreams illegitimately won by going around shouting, “Don’t you realize it was a placebo!” Thus it seemed to me that what you were up against in Stein was not logic rampant, but frustrated faith. He could not forgive God for not existing.

  When we returned to the Pavilion of Children, Mrs. Stein greeted us in the corridor. “You should see the two of them playing together,” she said. “Come look.”

  We stood in the recreation room doorway. In a pandemonium of television noise, piano music being thumped out by a volunteer as youngsters banged drums and shook tambourines to its rhythm, Rachel and Carol sat side by side at a table, twisting into being paper flowers for children less fortunate. Mrs. Stein had quoted us that bit as we came down the hall with a surprising minimum of rue. “Aren’t they just too sweet together?” she beamed in the doorway.

  “Lifelong friends,” said Stein, who gave, and asked, no quarter.

  My conversations with Stein are almost all I am recalling of my relations with other parents because they were vital to my concerns, not because they—and the brief skirmish I overheard in the lounge—were typical of human intercourse there. Far from it. Airing the absolutes is no longer permitted in polite society, save where a Stein and a Wanderhope meet and knock their heads together, but I do not think this is due to apathy or frivolity, or because such pursuits are vain, though one pant for God as the hart after water-brooks. There is another reason why we chatter of this and that while our hearts burn within us.