The Cottrell house was a white brick Colonial, impressively large for a widow and two children. Larry was at home with his kid sister and invited Perry in from the snow.
“We have a problem,” Perry said when they were in Larry’s bedroom. “I just saw your mother with my father.”
“Yeah, they’re doing some church thing in the city.”
“Well, so, I have to ask again. Is our secret safe with you?”
Among Larry’s insecure tics was rubbing the sebaceous nodes around his nose and sniffing his fingertips. Perry, too, enjoyed the smell of his own sebum, but such sniffing was better done privately.
“You understand why I’m asking.”
“You don’t have to be paranoid,” Larry said. “The whole thing’s over, except that I can’t watch TV for another nine days. I’m going to miss the Orange Bowl.”
“No mention of my name, then.”
“I already swore to you. Do you want me to get a Bible?”
“No need. I just hadn’t imagined your mom going into the city with my dad. It was only the two of them. I have a bad feeling that we haven’t heard the last of this.”
“What did you expect? You’re the one who sells dope.”
“Exactly my point. My exposure is potentially far more serious than yours.”
“I’m already the one who got punished.”
“You’re the one who made the mistake, my friend.”
Larry nodded, touching his face again. “What’s in the bag?”
“A present for my brother. Do you want to see it?”
He was glad of the chance to let Larry admire the movie camera, to wind it up and shoot imaginary footage with him, before it became irrevocably Judson’s. After an hour, which was the minimum duration for his visit to pass as a friendly social call, rather than the targeted instrumentality it actually had been, he headed home through snow swirling down from a dark sky. He didn’t think Larry would break, even under renewed pressure, but the irony of getting busted now, when he’d resolved to be a better person, was persuasively vivid to him. He still feared mischief from Mrs. Cottrell, and there was another worrisome loose end. In the days since Becky had annihilated him as a person, in the coat closet at First Reformed, she’d seemed more pissed off with him than ever. He imagined a full-scale family Confrontation in which he insisted on his innocence—with a kind of retroactive honesty, since he’d now forsworn the use and sale of mind-altering substances—only to be undercut by his sister’s denunciation.
What providence it therefore was when, ensconced in his room with Judson, he’d heard Becky crying. His ensuing exchange with her had ended in a warm embrace, a sense of being rewarded for his resolution. This would have been entirely satisfactory if he hadn’t then felt so deliciously relieved of his worry about her. The relief, its selfishness, negated all the goodness he’d displayed, and it cast an unfortunate light on his feeling of being rewarded. Shouldn’t true goodness be its own reward? He wondered if an action, to qualify as authentically good, needed not only to be untainted by self-interest but also to bring no pleasure of any kind.
The parental alarm clock, which he knew to be two minutes slow, showed 6:45. His mother was now so bizarrely late that all bets on her arrival time were off. He considered a good action that would almost certainly bring him no pleasure: going to the Haefles’ without waiting for his mother. The action had only the faintest taint of self-interest, in the form of the credit he might get for ensuring that the Hildebrandt family was represented at the party. This credit would be too feeble to be fungible if he was accused of selling drugs, and so could be discounted.
He wrote a short note to his mother, on the scratch pad by the phone, and went to collect Judson. “Time for a walk in the snow.”
“I thought we were waiting for Mom and Dad.”
“Nope, just you and me, kiddo. We are the Hildebrandts tonight.”
A minor mystery of adulthood was that his parents referred to latex overshoes as rubbers. Even Becky, that vessel of purity, had been seen to suppress a snigger at the word. The parents surely knew its other meaning, and yet they persisted in using it, with a confounding absence of embarrassment: Make sure you wear your rubbers. Though Judson’s rubbers were innocent, Perry was ashamed of his. Ansel Roder and his moneyed friends wore alpine hiking boots in the snow.
It was still coming down heavily when he and Judson ventured out in their rubbers. Judson ran ahead, kicking up sheets and clumps of it, the interruption of Stratego forgotten in the excitement of a winter storm. Watching him fall down and pick himself back up, Perry mourned no longer being small enough that falling didn’t hurt. He no longer even remembered how it felt to have the ground so unthreateningly proximate. Why had he been in such a hurry to grow up? It was as if he’d never experienced the grace of childhood. As he watched his little brother frolic, he felt another downward tug in his mood, stronger than the tug he’d felt while shopping but also less painful, because it was occasioned by a feeling of metempsychosis. More surely than before, he sensed that he was going down, was irredeemably bad in the head, but this time it seemed to matter less, because his soul was connected to Judson’s by love and fraternity, at some mystical level interchangeable, and Judson was a blessed child, literally born on a Sunday, and would always be okay, even if he, Perry, wasn’t.
On the front stoop of the Superior Parsonage, between rows of bushes with Christmas lights dimmed by snow, he crouched to brush off Judson’s parka and help him with the buckles of his rubbers, which were encrusted with ice and difficult to undo.
“I still don’t see why we’re here.”
“Because Dad is stuck in the city and Mom is AWOL.”
“What is AWOL.”
Perry rang the doorbell. “It means absent without leave. Dad said it’s important that the family be here. By process of elimination, that leaves you and me.”
The door was opened by a very large white bunny, Mrs. Haefle, in a red apron embroidered with holly leaves. Perry quickly and cogently explained why he and Judson were there, but Mrs. Haefle seemed slow on the uptake. “Do your parents know you’re here?”
“They were unavoidably detained. I left them a note.”
She looked over her shoulder. “Dwight?”
Reverend Haefle appeared in the doorway. “Perry! Judson! What a nice surprise.”
He ushered them inside and took their coats. Functioning home insulation being a perk of senior ministry, the house was hot and steamy. Clergymen and their spouses filled the living room, obeying the obscure social imperatives of adult life, apparently enjoying themselves. Reverend Haefle led the Hildebrandts into the dining room, which was acridly scented with the combustion of Sterno cans beneath a copper-clad pan of Swedish meatballs, a tray of potatoes in a sauce of cream and onions, and a cauldron of something fumingly alcoholic, with blanched almonds and bloated raisins floating in it. Through the open kitchen door, Perry saw wine jugs and a vodka bottle on a counter.
“Take a plate and load up,” Reverend Haefle said. “Doris’s heritage is Swedish, and she makes a mean meatball—don’t forget the gravy. The potatoes are a dish called Jannson’s Temptation. It wouldn’t be a Swedish Christmas without a lot of heavy cream.”
Judson, though he must have been starving, politely hesitated.
“Don’t hold back, lad. We can use a young appetite. If you’d like some company your own age, our granddaughters are in the basement.”
Thinking of the Crappier Parsonage’s appalling basement, Perry pictured the granddaughters clad in rags and chained to a filthy stone wall. Yes, we keep them in the basement …
“And what is this?” he said, indicating the cauldron.
“That is a Scandinavian Christmas drink for grownups. We call it gløgg.”
Left alone with Judson, who evinced his native moderation by taking three meatballs, a spoon of potatoes, a quantity of raw carrots and broccoli florets, and, from a triple-decker stand laden with homemade cookies, two dry-l
ooking balls dusted with powdered sugar, Perry considered the incredible intensity of the alcohol fumes wafting off the cauldron. It was like sticking his nose in a bottle of rubbing alcohol. There was, he realized only now, some ambiguity in his resolution, some scenarios not explicitly addressed by its terms. To wit: Was he required to abjure alcohol? Perhaps one cup of gløgg, taken on an empty stomach to maximize its clout, might be permissible on a night when he had no other antidote to the sinking of his mood? With an unsteady hand, splashing a little, he ladled the wine-dark substance into a ceramic cup and glanced behind him. No one was watching.
Escaping to the hallway, he took a slurp of the most delicious drink he’d ever tasted. It was clovey and cinnamony, full of vodka. The ordinarily nauseating gastric sourness of wine was overwhelmed by sugar. His face went warm immediately.
“Where am I supposed to go?” Judson said, holding his plate and a fork.
At the end of the hallway, they found stairs leading down to a proper recreation room, shag-carpeted, paneled with knotty pine, and dominated by a pool table. Sprawled on the carpeting, near an empty but usable fireplace, was a pair of girls younger than Perry and older than Judson, playing Yahtzee. Perry as a boy, when asked to play with female strangers, had routinely been paralyzed by self-consciousness. He was impressed by how naturally Judson sat down with the girls and introduced himself. Judson truly was a blessed child, rightly sure that strangers would like him. Or maybe the lure of Yahtzee was so powerful that it simply swept away all shyness.
Somehow, though Perry hadn’t been conscious of drinking, his cup was already empty. He ate two sodden raisins from the bottom, extracting precious liquid. A thin line of spice scum marked the level of his tragically modest initial serving, and as he went back up the stairs he reasoned that, not having taken the entire “one cup” permitted by the loophole in his resolution, he was entitled to a refill. His face was flaming, but he hadn’t achieved a proper buzz yet.
Now standing by the food and drink were two men in lumpy sweaters and priestly black slacks, selecting cookies. Perry sidled up to them and waited. Before he could refill his cup, Mrs. Haefle came swooping toward him.
“Have you had any meatballs?”
Palming the cup against his hip, out of sight, he borrowed a concept from her husband. “Still working up an appetite,” he said.
Unilaterally, as if he were a toddler, or a dog, Mrs. Haefle loaded a plate for him. She was stout and rabbity and meddling, a poor advertisement for Swedish heritage. She handed him enough meatballs and Temptation to thwart formation of a buzz, and he had no choice but to take the plate. With a meddling hand, she turned him away from the fuming cauldron. “The other teenagers are in the sunroom,” she said.
As he walked away, he felt her following him, making sure he conformed to her patronizing wishes. Uninterested in teenagers in the sunroom, he weaved through the living room to a bookcase, set his plate on an end table, selected a volume at random, and pretended to absorb himself in it. Mrs. Haefle had been buttonholed, but she was still monitoring him. Her vigilance reminded him of certain teachers at Lifton Central whose lives were evidently devoid of every pleasure but the sadism of denying younger people pleasure.
Finally the doorbell rang. Mrs. Haefle went to answer it, and Perry darted back to the dining room with his cup. Two white-haired ladies were at the cookie station, but he didn’t know them, had no relationship with them, and brazenly filled his cup with steaming gløgg. Hearing Mrs. Haefle’s voice, as she returned from the coat closet, he escaped through the kitchen and from there to the basement stairs, where he sat down. From below came the rattle of dice in the Yahtzee shaker, the brooklike patter of Judson’s voice.
In no time, again, Perry emptied the cup. As with every illicit substance he’d ever sampled, his thirst for gløgg seemed inordinate, abnormal. It occurred to him that standing on the kitchen counter was a bottle of pure vodka. Since the accounting of what constituted “one cup” was already fubar, he went ahead and crept back into the kitchen, poured several ounces of vodka, and quickly downed it. He left the cup in the sink.
Now in possession of a satisfactory buzz, his spirits rising a little, his resolution affronted but arguably unviolated, he went to test his liquor-holding powers on the clergy in the living room. Beside the neglected fire in the fireplace, two men, one tall and one short, stood side by side as if they’d run out of things to say but hadn’t yet moved on to greener conversational pastures. Perry introduced himself.
The taller man was wearing a red turtleneck beneath a camel-hair blazer. “I’m Adam Walsh, from Trinity Lutheran. This is Rabbi Meyer from Temple Beth-El.”
The rabbi, who had hair only behind his ears, shook Perry’s hand. “Happy Hanukkah.”
In case this was a quip, Perry produced a laugh, perhaps overloud. From the corner of his eye, he could see Mrs. Haefle sourly watching him.
“Is your father here?” Reverend Walsh said.
“No, he’s on a pastoral mission in the city. He got stuck in the snow.”
There ensued talk of snow. Perry had not yet developed the fascination with weather that every adult seemed to have. After voicing his meaningless opinion that the snow was already eight inches deep, he broached the subject of goodness and its relation to intelligence. He’d come to the reception for selfless reasons, but he now saw that he might get not only a free buzz but free advice from, as it were, two professionals.
“I suppose what I’m asking,” he said, “is whether goodness can ever truly be its own reward, or whether, consciously or not, it always serves some personal instrumentality.”
Reverend Walsh and the rabbi exchanged glances in which Perry detected pleasant surprise. It gratified him to upset their expectations of a fifteen-year-old.
“Adam may have a different answer,” the rabbi said, “but in the Jewish faith there is really only one measure of righteousness: Do you celebrate God and obey His commandments?”
“That would suggest,” Perry said, “that goodness and God are essentially synonymous.”
“That is the idea,” the rabbi said. “In biblical times, when God manifested Himself more directly, He could seem like quite the hard-ass—striking people blind for trivial offenses, telling Abraham to kill his son. But the essence of Jewish faith is that God does what He does, and we obey Him.”
“So, in other words, it doesn’t matter what a righteous person’s private thoughts are, so long as he obeys the letter of God’s commandments?”
“And worships Him, yes. Of course, at the level of folk wisdom, a man can be righteous without being a mensch. I’m sure you see this, too, Adam—the pious man who makes everyone around him miserable. That might be more what Perry is asking about.”
“My question,” Perry said, “is whether we can ever escape our selfishness. Even if you bring in God, and make Him the measure of goodness, the person who worships and obeys Him still wants something for himself. He enjoys the feeling of being righteous, or he wants eternal life, or what have you. If you’re smart enough to think about it, there’s always some selfish angle.”
The rabbi smiled. “There may be no way around it, when you put it like that. But we ‘bring in God,’ as you say—for the believer, of course, it’s God who brought us in—to establish a moral order in which your question becomes irrelevant. When obedience is the defining principle, we don’t need to police every little private thought we might have.”
“I think there’s more to Perry’s question, though,” Reverend Walsh said. “I think he’s pointing to sinfulness, which is our fundamental condition. In Christian faith, only one man has ever exemplified perfect goodness, and he was the Son of God. The rest of us can only hope for glimmers of what it’s like to be truly good. When we perform an act of charity, or forgive an enemy, we feel the goodness of Christ in our hearts. We all have an innate capacity to recognize true goodness, but we’re also full of sin, and those two parts of us are constantly at war.”
“Exactl
y,” Perry said. “How do I know if I’m really being good or if I’m just pursuing a sinful advantage?”
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