Son of the Morning

by Joyce Carol Oates

  And of course doctors were badly needed in the country, especially in the more impoverished areas. Most of the young doctors wanted to live in the cities.

  In the meantime the furniture in his office and waiting room was becoming shabby; the walls needed to be stripped and repapered; the carpets were worn flat and colorless with age. Even his old hourglass, a gift from his father-in-law many years ago, no longer performed as it was meant to: grains of sand had stuck together in coarse clumps so that the opening between the two glass spheres was blocked. “Time” could not be recorded at all; it had simply come to a stop. And he desperately needed new equipment for his office. He leafed through professional journals and bulletins, studying the advertisements, baffled and dissatisfied. It was the effect of the war, perhaps, the effect of recent history: too much for anyone his age to absorb. The truths he believed in were those of the body, the body’s anatomy and its immutable laws; he had pledged himself to these truths at the age of twenty-five, and nothing else—certainly not glossy photographs of office equipment—seemed very significant.

  “Why am I here?” he asked himself. “Why here on earth? What purpose does my life have?”

  To give aid. To do no harm. To console, to attend, to stand beside.

  To help create the conditions for health.

  To acquire as much knowledge as is humanly possible.

  “There is no Thaddeus Vickery otherwise,” he said.

  HE HAD LOST his childhood faith in God one humid afternoon in the early twenties, in the cadaver room at the state medical school, and he had never regretted that loss—in fact he had hardly noted it. A doubtful allegiance to the “soul” had been purged by the stink of disinfectant and in its place Dr. Vickery had pledged a far more substantial, far more noble allegiance—an allegiance to the human body and its human, humbling laws, to the great law of Necessity itself. He believed not in Truth but in truths, in a universe of truths, and he believed these truths were available to human beings; they were not muddled or mysterious or forbidden, nor were they the possessions of gods—of wrathful murderous deities. What was God, in fact, except the not-yet-known, the not-yet-articulated? One acquired truths through the willful effort of one’s own human labor, not through the caprice of supernatural beings. And these truths were permanent, or as permanent as mankind required.

  All this he had explained to Mrs. Vickery many times. And she had understood him in the beginning. He felt she understood him even now but, for some inexplicable reason, she pretended not to understand—pretended not to be his wife, his Opal, his quick, bright, bold, audacious bride. She knew he spoke the truth and that his entire life had been dedicated to this truth, but she pretended to scorn it, and very nearly to scorn him; he would, in fact, have preferred her outright scorn to the sort of malicious, insufferable pity she showed for him—discussing him at great length with Reverend Sisley, praying for his eternal soul, whispering about him to their grandson. Certain sorrowful events of their shared life—the death of their second son, and Elsa’s rape and illegitimate pregnancy and her elopement, so-called, with another woman’s husband (a sailor who now worked in a factory in Youngstown), and Ashton’s estrangement since his discharge from the Army—were laboriously reinterpreted in the light of Thaddeus’s refusal to be redeemed, his refusal to accept Jesus Christ as his personal Saviour—the very vocabulary infuriated him! It was ludicrous, it was intolerable, yet it was so—and he lived with it, he even managed to live fairly happily with it. (Because, perhaps, he never quite believed his wife was serious. How could she be? Opal Sayer had too much good sense!) What had happened was not allowed to slip into the past but must be reexamined, reinterpreted, submitted to judgment. If Elsa went bad, if Ashton had drifted from them and they didn’t know if he was married or not, or even living with a woman or not, surely such misfortune must be their fault?—his fault? Surely it must be in response to certain acts, certain sins? His sins?

  “I happen not to believe in sin,” Dr. Vickery said contemptuously.

  “Yes,” Mrs. Vickery said. “Which is why you are so unhappy.”

  “I am not unhappy.”

  “So wretchedly unhappy.”

  “I am not unhappy.”

  So they picked at each other, not quite quarreling. And the boy, hearing them, seemed embarrassed. By the age of eight he had developed a peculiar, almost alarming precocity, not so much of the intellect—though he was intelligent enough—as of intuition: an ability to sense the feelings of others, to register the emotions of others. “The boy can read minds,” one of the relatives said, breathless with exaggeration, and over at the Baptist church where he often taught Sunday school and occasionally gave a Bible reading and a brief sermon at the regular services, it was thought he was a “born preacher” and that God had “singled him out”—but Thaddeus knew such statements were absurd. The boy was precocious, unusually sensitive, rather too sensitive for his own good. Quiet, subdued, obedient, sweet, soft-voiced—a beautiful child, certainly, with lovely eyes and a pale, serious forehead and a slightly receding chin that emphasized his delicacy: a model child, any grandparent’s dream of a child. He was there to be marveled over, to be adored, and if he ever thought of his true parents—his mother and his father—he never said a word.

  “WHAT WOULD YOU like, then, for Christmas?” Thaddeus asked.

  The boy smoothed down a dog-eared corner of a page of the old medical encyclopedia.

  “You must want something,” Thaddeus said lightly.

  A tiny pulse throbbed in the boy’s forehead, near his left temple. Thaddeus found himself staring at it, thinking, The child is alive: look. (For he sometimes dreamed of his grandson in a childsized coffin, and himself doubled over in grief.)

  “A bicycle for next spring? A pony? An air rifle . . . ? But you don’t care for your cousin Davy’s air rifle, do you? So I don’t suppose you would want one of your own.”

  “No,” Nathan said.

  “No—?”

  “No thank you.”

  The boy spoke so softly, Thaddeus sometimes thought he must be going deaf. And when he asked the boy to repeat himself, his own voice sounded brusque and irritated; and it often seemed that he was scolding the child. Which he was not. But the boy blushed guiltily and became even more tongue-tied than before.

  “Your grandmother tells me you’ve been making excellent progress with your organ lessons,” Thaddeus said, “and one of these days I plan on dropping in . . . sitting in the back of the church, maybe, and just listening. You wouldn’t mind? . . . But we couldn’t get you an organ, now could we? I mean the real thing. They’re not like pianos, are they?—that you can haul around? Pipes and valves and pedals, a colossal instrument, not for a private home. So we couldn’t very well buy you that for Christmas.”

  “I don’t want any organ,” Nathan said. “I mean . . . Thank you, but there’s the one at church—that’s the only one I need.”

  “Yes,” Thaddeus said patiently.

  “I don’t know if I’ll keep taking lessons. I don’t know if it’s the right thing. It’s not clear . . . I don’t know . . .”

  His voice trailed off oddly, as if he were no longer addressing Thaddeus.

  “Well,” Thaddeus said, sighing, “whatever: whatever. You think about it, will you?”

  Nathan stared at a point several inches beyond his grandfather’s right shoulder, frowning; obviously thinking quite hard. But he came to no conclusion: his expression did not relax.

  Thaddeus was seated at his old, battered, enormous desk on a Sunday afternoon, a snowy Sunday in late November. It pleased him that his grandson had come into his study—had been sitting for the past forty-five minutes in the leather easy chair that faced the desk, leafing through a medical book of the 1920s. The child’s eyes were green-brown, ringed with hazel, and his fair, near-translucent skin had never looked more delicate. Though it was said of Nathanael that his voice changed considerably when he read aloud from the Bible or taught Sunday school, Thadd
eus had never heard this “voice” and could not quite believe in it. He saw only a child eight years of age, small-bodied, remarkably composed but obviously rather shy.

  What was there for them to talk about—grandfather and grandson? For they must talk, they must talk. Thaddeus loved the boy desperately and felt at times he would lose him—that something would happen and the boy would sicken and die suddenly and the enchanted period of Thaddeus’s grandfatherhood would be terminated—and he himself would die shortly afterward. It was nonsense, of course, for they were both in good health. It was nonsense. Yet he was obsessed with the thought, and wanted the boy with him as much as possible. But what was there for them to talk about? If he started to explain certain functions of the body, if he started to describe certain medical procedures, he soon heard his voice become pompous and impersonal, slipping into the rhythms of a long-dead professor at his medical school whom he had always disliked; even more disturbing was the fact that Thaddeus often got things mixed up, confused Latin words, sputtered and swore at himself and changed the subject . . . So he offered the child a twist of licorice, or he began to fuss with his pipe, which always took at least five minutes to prepare. Loving was one thing, talking another. Loving was a state of the soul; talking a mere activity. Loving. Talking. To express the one, he felt the need to plunge into the other. And why did the boy never seem to help? Perhaps—though Thaddeus did not wish to think so—his wife had poisoned the child against him.

  This afternoon he had brought up the subject of the impending holiday season. Which meant, for him, food and drink and presents—not presents for him, especially (though his patients could not be talked out of bringing him things: they were so superstitious), but presents for Nathan, who was after all only a child. But the boy had no interest in Christmas gifts, in the excitement of secret buying; he did not seem to understand it. (“Why, your own mother used to love Christmas! Used to be a silly little baby over Christmas!” Thaddeus wanted to shout in exasperation.) It meant for him the day of Christ’s birth. But that day was not to be singled out, evidently, from the entire matrix of events that constituted Christ’s life . . . and Thaddeus steered away from that subject.

  “I’m not going to argue theology with an eight-year-old,” he thought.

  He was a grandfather and he had a grandson, a remarkable child, and what was he to do with the child? As Nathan grew up, he reasoned, he would lose interest in his grandmother’s universe and gravitate toward his; there was no point in forcing the issue, no point in arguing. The “religious business” was a sham and a pretense and the child was caught up in it, helplessly, but he would have enough sense to snap out of it without Thaddeus’s direct intervention, wouldn’t he? That was obvious. In the meantime, however, how was Thaddeus to guide him? He made the books and magazines in his study available to the boy, and encouraged him to ask questions, and . . . And even read to him from Marcus Aurelius and Lucretius . . .

  Several years ago he had bought Nathan a small wagon, on impulse one day in Derby, for no special occasion—no birthday, no holiday—and when he’d presented it to the boy Nathan had thanked him sincerely enough, and then had clearly not known what to do with it. At the same time, Nathan had not wanted to hurt his grandfather’s feelings. And so he had made an effort to play with the wagon, pulling it back and forth in the driveway, in full view of Thaddeus’s study . . . Watching him, Thaddeus had felt a thrill of something close to dismay. For the child was behaving the way he believed a child should behave, yet somehow it was not convincing; it was forced, obscene. A lie. It was obvious Nathan wanted so much not to hurt his grandfather, how could Thaddeus help but love him?—pity and love him? “Look what you’ve done to him,” Thaddeus had said to Opal bitterly. “You and the Sisleys and the rest of them—! Bleeding him dry, aren’t you, so there’s nothing left for me?” Opal had seemed, surprisingly, to understand his bitterness. But she said only that it had nothing to do with her or the Sisleys—it was God Himself, Christ Himself, claiming their own child.

  “Shit,” Thaddeus muttered, not caring if she heard.

  But what was play? How did you explain to a child what play was? Other children in the neighborhood played, sometimes in Nathan’s presence, and sometimes Nathan made an attempt to play with them; but it was unconvincing.

  “Go outside,” Thaddeus often said. “Take Elsa’s old sled, go over to the Ackersons’ hill—coming home just now, I saw a bunch of kids there. Go and join them, eh? The fresh air will do you good.” If he was going to a friend’s or a relative’s house where there were small children, he offered to take Nathan along: it would be good for him, wouldn’t it? Opal would send cookies or brownies or fudge along with him. Opal too seemed to want him to do these things, to be a normal child; at least some of the time. At other times she interrupted Thaddeus rudely, saying the other boys were coarse and ignorant and brutish and Nathan was well rid of them. “You don’t understand your own grandson at all,” she said.

  But he tried. And failed. He tried often, and failed; and tried again, speaking jocularly, hoping to make the boy laugh. (How did you make a child laugh, Thaddeus wondered, when your life depends upon it?) His jokes called forth that solemn, contemplative stare, a half-twist of the lips that might have been pitying.

  “Even your grandmother will be disappointed,” Thaddeus said, “if you say you don’t want anything this year. She’s a woman, after all—she likes to fuss, she likes surprises. So if—”

  The child had spoken. He stopped short, fingering the edge of the encyclopedia.

  “Yes? What? I didn’t quite hear,” Thaddeus said, leaning forward.

  “. . . many things already,” Nathan said softly.

  Thaddeus cupped his hand to his ear. “Eh?”

  “We have too many things already,” Nathan repeated, blushing.

  “Too many things already . . . !” Thaddeus laughed. “Us? Us? Why, Nathan, we’re practically paupers; if this upcoming year is anywhere near as bad as last year . . .”

  Nathan was shaking his head slowly.

  “That isn’t true, Grandfather,” he said.

  “Not true . . . ?”

  Blustery, buffoonish, Thaddeus let his pipe fall and exclaimed softly. “Goddam.” Out of the corner of his eye he believed he could see, still, the tiny blue vein in the child’s forehead. Which was proof, wasn’t it . . . ? Proof that the child’s heart was beating . . . ?

  “Why are you shaking your head, my boy?” he asked, taking care not to show his annoyance. He was the doctor, after all, and in this part of the country he was never challenged. Though he might play the fool when he wished, he was never seriously challenged; and never in his study. “You know nothing about my financial affairs, about the mortgage payments I owe on the house, the property taxes . . . Do you? You know nothing.”

  Nathan stared at a point in the air somewhere between his grandfather and himself, frowning. It occurred to Thaddeus suddenly that the boy had come to him this afternoon with a deliberate plan in mind; he wasn’t a youngster lonely for his grandfather’s company. (It was possible that Mrs. Vickery had something to do with it. She had been awfully quiet since coming back from church that noon, had hardly spoken throughout dinner.)

  Thaddeus waited, stiffly, uneasily, knowing the boy was going to speak. He could feel the child’s anxiety: the very air tensed. How strange it was, how uncanny! To keep his gaze from straying onto Nathan he cleaned the old stale tobacco out of his pipe and tamped down new, grateful for the stark strong fragrance, its pungency, its reality.

  Speaking softly and not very coherently at first, Nathan began by saying again that they owned too many things. The house, the land, the car, money in the bank . . . (At this point Thaddeus guffawed: money in the bank!) There were people who had nothing, Nathan said; people who hadn’t even places to sleep. Yet they were all related, they were all brothers and sisters, all God’s children. And . . .

  “All related . . . ?” Thaddeus said strangely. He lit his pipe and
sucked noisily at it. Nathan took no notice of the interruption but continued, speaking distractedly of the “poor” who are always with us, the meek in spirit, the brokenhearted, the captives . . .

  There was a catch in his voice, a clicking in his throat. He sucked for air, seemed to swallow air, and sat for a moment utterly still.

  “Nathan?” Thaddeus said softly. “Are you all right?”

  “Jesus told us that if we want to be perfect,” Nathan said more firmly, “we should go and sell what we have, and give to the poor; and we will have treasure in heaven. Jesus said that. He said it plainly, you can’t mistake it, how can anyone mistake it? I’ve heard Jesus’s voice. I’ve heard Him say those words and I’ve heard Him say them to me, to us. It was Vickerys He had in mind!”

  Thaddeus continued sucking at the pipe. His thoughts raced, he felt rather dizzy and dispirited. He wanted to laugh, to wave away the child’s hysteria, but at the same time the air felt too heavy to part. “You seem a little peaked,” he said uncertainly. “Every Sunday exhausts you, getting over there at nine o’clock and staying as long as you do, and now on top of everything playing that goddam organ . . .”

  “I’ve heard Jesus’s voice,” Nathan said. “Over and over again the same words. If thou wilt be perfect, go and sell that thou hast, and give to the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven: and come and follow me—”

  The boy’s voice rose shrilly at the end, almost plaintively. Thaddeus could hardly bear to look at him—there was something about the child that jarred, that hurt; it was as if Thaddeus’s very soul were being hurt.

  “Nathan,” Thaddeus said sharply.

  “Grandfather,” the boy said at once, blinking.

  Thaddeus felt a wave of sheer dislike pass through him. Again he wanted to laugh, but he dared not even smile; it was best to keep his face rigid, neutral.