“It is I who should apologize,” said the old man, “for dozing intermittently during such an illuminating and entertaining conversation. But at my age the line between sleep and wakefulness is a tenuous proposition at best. One is increasingly uncertain whether one is dreaming or awake, and past and present become hopelessly entangled. I close my eyes and lose myself in thought, and all at once I am a boy. I open them and I am an old man.”
“Ah,” said the doctor, and the others nodded in assent.
“And while I am apologizing,” the old man said, “I should add a word of apology for my bowels. I seem to have an endless supply of wind, which in turn grows increasingly malodorous. Still, I’m not incontinent. One grows thankful in the course of time for so many things one took for granted, if indeed one ever considered them at all.”
“One keeps thanking God,” the priest said, “for increasingly smaller favors.”
“Greed,” said the old man. “What a greedy young man I was! And what a greedy man I stayed, throughout all the years of my life!”
“No more than anyone, I’m sure,” the policeman said.
“I always wanted more,” the old man remembered. “My parents were comfortably situated, and furnished me with a decent upbringing and a good education. They hoped I would go into a profession where I might be expected to do some good in the world. Medicine, for example.”
“‘First, do no harm,’” the doctor murmured.
“But I went into business,” said the old man, “because I wanted more money than I could expect to earn from medicine or law or any of the professions. And I stopped at nothing legal to succeed in all my enterprises. I was merciless to competitors, I drove my employees, I squeezed my suppliers, and every decision I made was calculated to maximize my profits.”
“That,” said the soldier, “seems to be how business is done. Struggling for the highest possible profits, men of business act ultimately for the greatest good of the population at large.”
“You probably believe in the tooth fairy, too,” the old man said, and cackled. “If I did any good for the rest of the world, it was inadvertent and immaterial. I was trying only to do good for myself, and to amass great wealth. And in that I succeeded. You might not guess it to look at me now, but I became very wealthy.”
“And what happened to your riches?”
“What happened to them? Why, nothing happened to them. I won them and I kept them.” The old man’s bowels rumbled, but he didn’t appear to notice. “I lived well,” he said, “and I invested wisely and with good fortune. And I bought things.”
“What did you buy?” the policeman wondered.
“Things,” said the old man. “I bought paintings, and I don’t think I was ever taken in by any false Vermeers, like the young man in your story. I bought fine furniture, and a palatial home to keep it in. I bought antique oriental carpets, I bought Roman glass, I bought pre-Columbian sculpture. I bought rare coins, ancient and modern, and I collected postage stamps.”
“And cigars?”
“I never cared for them,” the old man said, “but if I had I would have bought the best, and I can well appreciate that builder’s dilemma. Because I would have wanted to smoke them, but my desire to go on owning them would have been at least as strong.”
They waited for him to go on; when he remained silent, the priest spoke up. “I suppose,” he said, “that, as with so many desires, the passage of time lessened your desire for more.”
“You think so?”
“Well, it would stand to reason that—”
“The vultures thought so,” the old man said. “My nephews and nieces, thoughtfully telling me the advantages of making gifts during my lifetime rather than waiting for my estate to be subject to inheritance taxes. Museum curators, hoping I’d give them paintings now, or so arrange things that they’d be given over to them immediately upon my death. Auctioneers, assuring me of the considerable advantages of disposing of my stamps and coins and ancient artifacts while I still had breath in my body. That way, they said, I could have the satisfaction of seeing my collections properly sold, and the pleasure of getting the best possible terms for them.
“I told them I’d rather have the pleasure and satisfaction of continuing ownership. And do you know what they said? Why, they told me the same thing that everybody told me, everybody who was trying to get me to give up something that I treasured. You can guess what they said, can’t you?”
It was the doctor who guessed. “You can’t take it with you,” he said.
“Exactly! Each of the fools said it as if he were repeating the wisdom of the ages. ‘You can’t take it with you.’ And the worst of the lot, the mean little devils from organized charities, armored by the pretense that they were seeking not for themselves but for others, they would sometimes add yet another pearl of wisdom. There are no pockets in a shroud, they would assure me.”
“I think that’s a line in a song,” the soldier said.
“Well, please don’t sing it,” said the old man. “Can’t take it with you! No pockets in a shroud! And the worst of it is that they’re quite right, aren’t they? Wherever that last long journey leads, a man has to take it alone. He can’t bring his French impressionists, his proof Liberty Seated quarters, his Belgian semi-postals. He can’t even take along a checkbook. No matter what I have, no matter how greatly I cherish it, I can’t take it with me.”
“And you realized the truth in that,” the priest said.
“Of course I did. I may be a doddering old man, but I’m not a fool.”
“And the knowledge changed your life,” the priest suggested.
“It did,” the old man agreed. “Why do you think I’m here, baking by the fire, souring the air with the gas from within me? Why do you think I cling so resolutely, neither asleep nor awake, to this hollow husk of life?”
“Why?” the doctor asked, after waiting without success for the old man to answer his own question.
“Because,” the old man said, “if I can’t take it with me, the hell with it. I don’t intend to go.”
His eyes flashed in triumph, then closed abruptly as he slumped in his chair. The others glanced at one another, alarm showing in their eyes. “A wonderful exit line,” the doctor said, “and a leading candidate for the next edition of Famous Last Words, but do you suppose the old boy took the opportunity to catch the bus to Elysium?”
“We should call someone,” the soldier said. “But whom? A doctor? A policeman? A priest?”
There was a snore, shortly followed by a zestful fart. “Thank heavens,” said the doctor, and the others sighed and nodded, and the priest picked up the deck and began to deal out the cards for the next hand.
SPEAKING OF LUST
“I dealt, didn’t I?” the soldier said. He looked at his cards, shook his head. “What do you figure I had in mind? I pass.”
The policeman, sitting to the dealer’s left—East to his South—nodded, closed his eyes, opened them, and announced: “One club.”
“Pass,” said the doctor.
The priest said, “You bid a club, partner?” And, without waiting for a response, “One heart.”
The soldier passed. You could tell he was a soldier, as he wore the dress uniform of a brigadier general in the United States Army.
“A spade,” the policeman said. He too was in uniform, down to the revolver on his hip and the handcuffs hanging from his belt.
The doctor, wearing green scrubs, looked as though he might have just emerged from the operating room. He was silent, looking off into the middle distance, until the priest stared at him. “Oh, sorry,” he said. “I pass.”
“Two spades,” said the priest, with a tug at his Roman collar.
“Pass,” said the soldier.
“Four spades,” the policeman said, and glanced around the table as if to confirm that the bidding was over. The doctor and priest and soldier dutifully passed in turn. The doctor studied his cards, frowned, and led the nine of hearts. The
priest laid down his cards—four to the king in the trump suit, five hearts to the ace-jack—and sat back in his chair. The policeman won the trick with the ace of hearts from dummy and set about drawing trump.
Play was rapid and virtually silent. A fire crackled on the hearth, and the clock on the mantel chimed the quarter hour. Smoke drifted to the high ceiling—from the doctor’s cigar, the priest’s cigarette, the soldier’s stubby briar pipe. Books, many of them bound in full leather, filled the shelves on either side of the fireplace, and one lay open in the lap of the room’s only other occupant, the old man who sat by the fire. He had been sitting there when the four began their card game, the book open, his eyes closed, and he was there still.
“Four spades bid, five spades made,” the policeman said, gathering the final trick. The priest took up his pencil and wrote down the score. The policeman shuffled the cards. The soldier cut them, and the policeman scooped them up and began to deal. He opened the bidding with a diamond, and the doctor doubled. The priest looked at his cards for a long moment.
“Lust,” he said.
The others stared at him. “Is that your bid?” his partner said. “Lust?”
The priest stroked his chin. “Did I actually say that?” he said, bemused. “I meant to pass.”
“Which made you think of making a pass,” the doctor suggested, “and so you spoke as you did.”
“Hardly that,” the priest said. “I was thinking of lust, but I assure you I entertained no lustful thoughts. I was thinking of lust in the abstract, the sin of lust.”
“Lust is a sin, is it?” said the soldier.
“One of the seven cardinal sins,” the priest said.
“Lust is desire, isn’t it?”
“A form of desire,” the priest said. “A perversion of desire, perhaps. Desire raised to sinful proportions.”
“But it’s a desire all the same,” the soldier insisted. “It’s not an act, and a sin ought to be an act. Lust may prompt a sinful act, but it’s not a sin in and of itself.”
“One can sin in the mind,” the policeman pointed out. “On the other hand, you can’t hang a man for his thoughts.”
“Hanging him is one thing,” said the doctor. “Sending him to Hell is another.”
“The seven deadly sins are all in the mind,” the priest explained. “Pride, avarice, jealousy, anger, gluttony, sloth, and lust.”
“Quite a menu,” the soldier said.
“Sin is error,” the priest went on. “A mistake, a tragic mistake, if you will. Out of pride, out of anger, out of gluttony, one commits an action which is sinful, or, if you will, entertains a sinful thought. Thus any sinful act a man might commit can be assigned to one of these seven categories.”
“Without a certain amount of lust,” the doctor said, “the human race would cease to exist.”
“You could make the same argument for the other six sins as well,” the priest told him, “because what is any of them but a distortion of a normal and essential human instinct? There is a difference, I submit, between the natural desire of a man for a maid and what we would label as sinful lust.”
“What about the desire of a man for a man?” the doctor wondered. “Or a maid for a maid?”
“Or a farmer’s son for a sheep?” The priest sat back in his chair. “We call some desires normal, others abnormal, and much depends on who’s making the call.”
The discussion was a lively one, and ranged far and wide. At length the policeman held up a hand. “If I may,” he said. “Priest, you started this. Unintentionally, perhaps, by voicing a thought when you only meant to pass. But you must have had something in mind.”
“An altar boy,” suggested the doctor. “Or an altered boy.”
“Nun of the above,” the soldier put in.
“You should show the cloth a measure of respect,” the priest said. “But I did have something in mind, as a matter of fact. Something that came to me, though I couldn’t tell you why. Rather an interesting incident that took place some years ago. But we’re in the middle of a game, aren’t we?”
A gentle snore came from the old man dozing beside the fire. The four card players looked at him. Then the policeman and the doctor and the soldier turned their gaze to the priest.
“Tell the story,” the policeman said.
* * *
Some years ago (said the priest) I came to know a young couple named William and Carolyn Thompson. I say a young couple because they were slightly younger than I, and I was not quite forty at the time, which now seems to me to be very young indeed. Let’s say that he was thirty-six when I met them, and she thirty-eight. I may be off slightly in their ages, but not in the age difference between them. She was just two years the elder.
They were an attractive couple, both of them tall and slender and fair, with not dissimilar facial features—long narrow noses and penetrating blue eyes. I’ve noticed that couples grow to resemble one another after they’ve been together a long time, and I suspect this is largely the result of their having each learned facial expressions from the other. The same thing happens on a larger scale, doesn’t it? The French, say, shrug and grimace and raise their eyebrows in a certain way, and their faces develop lines accordingly, until a national physiognomy emerges. Have you observed how older persons will look more French, or Italian, or Russian? It’s not that the genes thin out in the younger generations. It’s that the old have had more time to acquire the characteristic look.
The Thompsons had been married for a decade and a half, long enough, certainly, for this phenomenon to operate. And, spending as much time as they did together (living in a small house in one of the northwestern suburbs, working side by side in their shop) they’d had ample opportunity to mirror one another. Still, the resemblance they bore was more than a matter of shared attitudes and expressions. Why, they looked enough alike to be brother and sister.
As indeed they were.
William and Carolyn attended my church, though not with great regularity. I’d heard their confessions from time to time, and neither of them disclosed anything remarkable. I didn’t really get to know them until Bill and I were brought into contact in connection with a community action project. We got accustomed to having a few beers after a meeting, and we became friends.
One afternoon he turned up at the rectory and asked if we could talk. “I don’t want to make a formal confession,” he said. “I just need to talk to someone, but it has to be confidential. If we just go over to Paddy Mac’s and have a beer or two, could our conversation still be bound by the seal of the confessional?”
I told him I didn’t see why not, and that I would certainly consider myself to be so bound.
The tavern we went to, a busy place in the evening, was dark and quiet of an afternoon. We sat off by ourselves, and Bill told me his story.
He grew up in another city on the other side of the country. He had an older sister—Carolyn, of course, but that revelation was to come later—and lived with her and his mother and father in a pre-war brick house in one of the older suburbs. He and his sister took after their mother, who was tall and blond. Their father was tall, too, but dark-complected, and heavily built.
His sister taught him to dance, took him shopping, and clued him in on all the things a young boy was supposed to learn. She comforted him, too, when he got a beating from their father. The man was a drinker, he said, and sometimes when he drank Bill would piss him off without knowing what he’d done wrong. Then he’d catch it.
One night when he was thirteen years old he said or did something to upset the man and got a few whacks with a belt as punishment. Afterward, his sister came to his room. He had been crying, and he was a little ashamed of that, too, and she told him he’d had a punishment he hadn’t deserved, so now he was going to get a reward. Just as she’d taught him how to dance, now she would teach him how to kiss.
“So you’ll know what to do when you’re out with a girl,” she said.
She sat next to him on his be
d and they kissed. They’d kissed each other before, of course, but this was entirely different. Do you know how an unexciting activity may be said to be “like kissing your sister”? This was not like kissing your sister.
Over the next several months, the kissing lessons continued. She always initiated them, coming into his room when he was doing his homework, closing the door, sitting on his bed with him. This was very exciting for him, especially when she let him touch her breasts, first through her clothing, then with his hand inside her blouse. When she would leave his room, finally, he would relieve himself.
He was so occupied one day when, having recently left his room, she returned to it, opening his door without knocking and catching him in the act. He covered himself at once, but she had seen him, and she asked him what he had been doing.
“Nothing,” he said.
“You were touching yourself,” she said. “Right? But you shouldn’t have to do that, Billy.”
He said he couldn’t help it. He knew it was wrong, but he couldn’t help it.
“I’m not saying it’s wrong,” she said, “but you shouldn’t have to do it yourself.”
She did it for him. And, from then on, that was how their sessions concluded, with her hand doing what his hand had previously done, and making a far more satisfying job of it. When they hadn’t had time together during the day, she would make a point of slipping into his room at night after he’d gone to bed. He would usually pretend to sleep, and without a word she would satisfy him with her hands and return just as silently to her own room.
One night she used her mouth. The next day he asked her if she would do that again, and she said, “Oh, you mean you weren’t really sleeping?”
Their play continued, and over time she led him on a veritable Cook’s tour of sexuality, which eventually included every act either of them could think of short of actual coition. Their pleasure was hampered only by the fear of discovery, and on more than one occasion they narrowly escaped having a parent walk in on them. Thus they limited themselves to relatively brief encounters, and had to avoid crying out in fulfillment. Quick and quiet, that was the nature of their coupling.
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