The Blood of the Lamb: A Novel

by Peter de Vries

  Who goes amid de greenwood

  Wit’ mien so virginal?

  This was Joyce, loosely remembered, from the treasures on Louie’s shelf of favorites, recited with the peak of my cap switched around, the better to pursue the erotic sequences with what the handbooks called “technique.” I breathed along the girl’s cheek what the manuals termed “olfactory kisses,” greatly exciting to the female as preparation for more ardent maneuvers. Nowadays when, as one gathers, literary criticism is exchanged among the Radcliffe and Harvard lovers along the Charles, I look back on our own preference for the originals as somehow healthier than practices that, however more cerebral, would, as a means of furthering romantic communion, have struck us as “against nature.”

  The girl I saw oftenest in my days as a high-school senior was named Maria Italia, whom guilt over our indulgence in the more Arcadian corners of the park kept from asking me in to meet her father, whose austerity had driven us there in any case. We sometimes finished our evenings on the swing on her back porch, when the house was dark and he was presumed in bed. Late one autumn night as we sat there bundled in sweaters, I raised her flannel skirt and contemplated what this action exposed with a regard both fervent and debonair. I French-inhaled the smoke from a cigarette held poised in the other hand. “Sometimes I think this leg is the most beautiful thing in the world, and sometimes the other,” I said. “I suppose the truth lies somewhere in between.”

  A noise made me turn and see in the kitchen window a mustached apparition watching us in clear moonlight, gesticulating with an air of detached, underwater suffering. I was off with the speed of a deer.

  I ran the half-mile home, where the counterpart in parental vigil awaited me. I carried my shoes up the inside stairway to the second floor of the frame two-flat where we lived, and hearing a noise behind the closed door, put them on again. I entered with my shoelaces tinkling.

  “Hello, Moeke,” I said, reaching for my cap, to find the peak still behind.

  “Waar ben je toch geweest?”

  “Park.”

  “What doing?”

  “Well, Moeke, you’re not going to like this. There’s a new discussion group that meets in the fieldhouse there, but we discuss current affairs, and God made them too. It’s perfectly all right. Go to bed now, Moeke.”

  After kissing her good night, I shot into the bathroom, there to find my father scrubbing his teeth with the washrag, as was his wont. He stood in his long underwear, and the spectacle made blaze anew my dream of high life: of standards and of suavity, certainly dedication to the arts.

  “Where were you?”

  “Well, Pa—”

  The violent application of the washrag to my cheek produced a crimson stain on the cloth. “Outsider?”

  “I don’t know her name. Well, I think it’s Italia.”

  “What nationality is that?”

  “I’m not sure. They’re nice people. Dark-complected but nice. Awful strict.”

  My father slammed the washcloth down into the bowl with a Dutch obscenity it would be folly to try to translate, and shook a finger in my face, being now midway a phase where traditional values were temporarily reaffirmed. “Any girl you go out with you take here, verstaan, because I want to see what Jesus would say.” He picked up the washcloth to slam it down with another splat. “First Louie, now you. No sleep, in bed till noon. One partner dead, another dying on his feet. I tell you I can’t stand no more.”

  I laughed softly as I hurried to my bedroom, a chuckle of affection for origins from which I would soon be gone, had already in spirit flown. I had a vision of polished doors opening, and myself in faultless tweeds in a party moving toward dinner across a parquet floor, under a chandelier like chiseled ice.

  Mr. Italia sat belching under a pair of oval-framed photographs of parents hairier, if possible, than himself. His wife was dead, but there was a picture of her, too, in her casket, gazing out at us with an eerie simulacrum of motherly love. Dark-complected Mr. Italia was indeed, with handle-bar mustaches of a size that might have made him topple forward out of his chair were it not for the posture seemingly aimed at correcting the leverage in his favor. He drank beer after thrusting into my hand a bottle of soda pop of marked but unidentifiable flavor, pale yellow in color, and lukewarm. (Back to your tents, O Israel!) On a table beside him was an open bottle of olives, from which he helped himself, at intervals tipping a little of the liquid into a flowerpot to keep its level below that at which he would stain his fingers when fishing for another. He offered the bottle to me, but I declined with a shake of my head. He had been quizzing me for an hour about my family—such standards!—and as he paused to reach for his stein I thought I had earned the right to a few questions of my own. In a small alcove beyond where Maria sat, impatient to be off on our date, I could see propped against the wall a hurdy-gurdy of ancient manufacture.

  “Oh, you collect grind organs, do you?” I drawled urbanely. “They’re rather amusing, I think. A marvelous nostalgic quality quite unlike anything else, don’t you agree?”

  Mr. Italia laughed heartily at this, slapping a thigh encased in trousers tight as sausage skins. “That’s a good a wan! As though I gotta time for hobby. You think I gotta time for licka stamps or sticka coins in book after I cranka she all day?”

  Again the leap of getaway joy inside me, a vision of things other than those that obtained. Oh, definitely! I saw the tall polished doors through which a houseman carried cocktails on a tray difficult to set down amid the books littering this house of impeccable taste, where I would be such a frequent caller. But how much there was to escape from first! Two families suddenly instead of one. I cast an anxious glance at Maria, for we had been indiscreet. What a horror if …

  “Where do you keep the monkey?” I asked, resigned to the worst.

  “Down a the base. The janitor he’s a let me keep Jenny in the furnace room. Monkeys need to keep warm, you know—tropical animal. Jenny’s old now, I need another. But”—he sighed—“cost too much a da mon’.” It was now Mr. Italia’s turn to scrutinize his daughter, thinking in hope what I had in terror. Well, I would not take her off his hands! “Cost too much a da mon’,” I thought rather crudely to myself as Maria and I set off for the park.

  “I’m like you, Don,” she said, laying her fragrant head on my shoulder as she took my arm in her two hands. “We both want to get away from home.”

  “Why is the awfulness of families such a popular reason for starting another?”

  “Well, that’s a mute question.”

  It was clear that Maria and the other neighborhood girls I dated would have constituted an escape into a provincialism worse than that whose bonds I longed to break. They failed the selective principle now already so profoundly at work in me that there was scarcely a moment of reflection on the future but provoked some image illustrating this idea of worldliness. Girls like Maria did not measure up to my standards. Neither did I, but I would. Provided I steered clear of entanglements that might arrest, perhaps forever, my development in that direction.

  Fantasies of what might happen if I did not filled my mind by way of stern warning. I would stand before the windows of the numerous borax furniture stores that dotted the neighborhood and stare at the “parlor suits” and “kitchen onsombles” there, immersed in the most abysmal depressions as I evoked, from the patterns of tritely set tables and chairs, whole married lifetimes of banality. Some of my slightly older friends were already buying such furniture, in preparation for such lives. These glimpses were like visions of hell, of an intellectual and spiritual perdition into whose attendant quagmires of E-Z credit terms and twenty-years-to-pay I must at all costs avoid putting my foot. I decided to break off with Maria at once.

  “Don’t you want to do the right thing?” she asked.

  “I can’t.”

  “Why not?”

  “Religious reasons. Our faith doesn’t allow us to intermarry.”

  “But you say you’re rebelling agains
t all that.”

  “It would still kill my mother. And, Maria, it wouldn’t be fair to ask you to wait as long as you’d have to. I want to go to the University next year if there’s money.”

  We sat on a park bench, in observance of her wish that we shun the seclusion of the foliage till we had “come to an understanding.” She was a very nearly beautiful girl, grave, never silly like so many of her contemporaries, smiling oftener than she laughed. She was far from frivolous, her sexual freedom being the expression of a warm and spontaneous nature, not of any quality to be identified as “fun-loving” or “fast.” The familiar figure of O’Malley the cop went by, his stick dancing on its thong; then we had to move back from each other for an approaching couple. “Let’s go in here where we can talk,” I said hoarsely, drawing her toward the shadow of the bushes. Visions of the borax furniture stores vanished as she followed with little more than a sigh of protest. We sat down on my spread-out trench coat in a narrow clearing between the shrubbery and the railroad embankment. My conduct was not a calculated abuse of her favors but a surrender to temptation like her own, for I did not believe for a minute her story that I had been her first lover, though she was mine. She spoke of her father and his willingness to let us use the parlor provided we came to this “understanding.” “It’s your body to do with as you please,” I said, forcing her back down against a murmur of protests. When she sat up again abruptly, I knew that she was terrified at something glimpsed over my shoulder.

  Through the branches parted with a rustle shone a large star, above which could be dimly discerned the moonface of O’Malley the cop, screwed into an expression of official perturbation. “What’s goin’ on here, my Oi ask?” As we scrambled to our feet he added, with a humor no doubt perfected by long practice in these circumstances, “Or maybe Oi should ask what’s comin’ off here?”

  We made out the case that we had sought the privacy of the shadows merely to pet. That itself was forbidden, however, in the quarters selected, giving rise to the fear that we would have to be run in to the precinct station and booked on a morals charge. We turned sick with fear. In a voice without timbre, I poured out a torrent of entreaties, begging O’Malley to think not of us but our parents. “It would kill my mother,” I said.

  “And my father will kill me,” said Maria. She wrung her hands and sobbed wildly. A few bystanders had collected on the walk beside the open grass on which the scene was enacted. “It’s because he’s so strict that we have to come here at all. Let us go, and I swear on the name of my dead mother that we’ll never come back here again.”

  Whether because his own Irish heart was plucked by this maternal reference or because the wish to play a role more magisterial than that of pounding the gravel was momentarily gratified, O’Malley relented. He pointed his night stick at us as we fled toward the gates of the park, a youthful Adam and Eve banned from a municipal Paradise by one of the lesser and more colloquial angels at heaven’s disposal. “Oi’m lettin’ you off with a warning this toim, but remember, next toim it’s booked ye’ll be.”

  The number and variety of accents and brogues to which I was early subjected seems notable now, though they were not untypical of that part and that period of Chicago. Beyond the horizons of our Dutch household—whose speech was Americanized at best into “dese” and “dem” and “de bot’ of us”—lay the vast crazy quilt of other European-born elements composing the Eighteenth Ward, in which we lived. Even today, after more than a quarter century of exposure to more cultivated societies, correct English still rings a trifle strangely on my ears, while the perfection of the educated Londoner is downright freakish—the ultimate in the foreigner.

  The problem with Maria was one the shattering episode in the park helped resolve. We never went back there again, and since neither the porch nor the parlor at Italian’s conduced to intimacy, our relationship became less and less one about which any “understanding” had to be reached, or our spirits racked. Too, a wedge of shame—like that of Adam and Eve—had been permanently driven between us. We had a few more dates at the movies (where the guardians of the morals were ushers playing flashlight beams among the entwined couples), and then Maria took up with a boy who seemed more “serious.” We had forgotten each other by the time I started life at the University, on money earned during the summer delivering telephone books and selling vacuum cleaners door to door, supplemented by what my father was able, rather more generously than had recently been hoped, to contribute. He had sold his ice route and gone into a far more lucrative line of work. It was, in fact, the business in which the better social element among our folk, at least the financially more snobbish, had amassed their means—garbage hauling.

  four

  It was not until my sophomore year that I achieved any foothold in the purlieus of sophisticated America, and by that time I had had a direct dose of my family’s new economic status, which stiffened my will to a degree that can be imagined. Summers, as well as Saturdays during the academic term, I had to help my father on the sanitation truck. It was while doing so that an incident occurred of the sort that are of no external consequence but serve to illustrate some private incandescence of spirit—in my case, this hankering for the fleshpots of Egypt.

  Our collections were of course commercial—restaurants and grocery stores with refuse in excess of what the city would take—and lay mostly in the fashionable Hyde Park district, now more than ever connotative of elegance for including the University Midway. The very names of the places we serviced—Coq d’Or, Luigi’s, the Balalaika—struck my heart with the resonance of gongs. How often I would pause in the kitchens in the act of removing barrels and tubs, to gaze a moment at those farther doors beyond which, at dusk, the scenes would unfold of which I dreamed in endless apotheoses: urbane men and women chatting across the crystal and linen of well-set tables, each of which was an island in a sea of glamour. Of that cavalier world I had no doubt I would in due course be a charmed participant.

  It can be imagined, therefore, with what resentment I approached my first barrel of swill. Handling such barrels and, especially, heaving them up the sides of the truck required a skill not easily mastered, and any aesthetic resistance to the task made it for a beginner doubly arduous and even dangerous. There were then no conveyers into which the container could be tipped at convenient tail-gate height; it had to be swung up so that its middle landed precisely on top of the truck, as on a fulcrum, from which the contents could then be tilted out. Any mistiming could result in disasters of varying gravities: throw the can too far and it would itself land in the truck and have to be fished out, not far enough and it might slide out of control and empty itself in the alley or on oneself. More than once the apprentice in this case miscalculated, to find himself covered with coffee grounds and copiously festooned with fruit peels.

  My main fear was that as we neared the campus I might be recognized. At least that was so in the beginning. I soon saw that nobody ever looks at a garbage man, with whatever consolation the truth had to offer. Besides, if one of my classmates did glance in my direction he would never recognize the figure in the clown’s canvas gloves and pith helmet (worn as a safeguard against poor timing), and if he did he would not believe the testimony of his senses. Often it was toward noon that we approached the University, by which time food was uppermost in my mind. It was at midday, one Saturday in September, that the incident already alluded to took place.

  The whistles had just blown for lunchtime, a ritual to be observed as far from the truck as possible. We had finished picking up at Luigi’s, which had a garden behind, latticed off from surrounding courts and hung with Japanese lanterns, somewhat worn from a summer’s use but still swaying brightly in the breeze. My father wandered out to the street in search of a tree under which to open his lunchbox, but I, after a quick look around to make sure I was not observed, slipped into the garden with mine. Luigi’s was only open for dinner, so the garden was deserted and the tables not yet laid. I sat down and opened my
lunchbox on the bare surface of one in the farthest corner.

  As I munched my sandwich and sipped cold milk from my Thermos, I heard strains of piano music drifting across the backyards from a nearby house. I recognized one of Chopin’s Études, executed with a merit I felt I could appreciate. I drew a certain pleasure from the speculation that I might be the only one within range of the music on whom its nuances were not lost. When I had finished eating, I stowed my lunchbox in the cabin of the truck and went for a walk around the block.

  I passed my father snoozing under an elm, a bandanna over his face to discourage the flies, to which we were ever magnetic. I strolled on. I had made one right turn and then another when the sound of the piano became once more audible. It struck me suddenly, like a spray of sound, infinitely sweet on the summer air. It flowed from a red-brick Georgian house furred with ivy, its chaste design relieved by a burst of baroque over the doorway, where twin scrolls crowned a broken white pediment like a pair of swan’s wings beating valiantly in the cause of Romance. To this visual note the music seemed an answering echo from some pining ally, invisible yet near at hand. The beauty of it all, together with the mounting sense of myself as its keenest triumph—a commentary on our time—induced a kind of intoxication that made me recklessly steal up to the open window from which the music issued, where, partially screened from the street by a row of firs, I looked cautiously into the house.

  The room I saw was a tastefully assembled opulence of red velour chairs and landscapes framed in gilt, of Sèvres vases and damask draperies—between tasseled scallops of which I gingerly peered. The pianist was a spruce blond man of middle age with a clipped mustache, in a white linen jacket but no necktie. He sat with his back partly to me, his hands bouncing lightly off the keys in the manner of effortless virtuosos everywhere. Repetition of a single passage suggested a composition at which he had not quite attained a perfection suitable to himself. I presently saw that I was not his sole audience. A woman his own age sat in a silk dressing gown, listening with a frown that at first seemed a display of cross spirits but soon revealed itself as expressing critical concentration. When he finished, the woman looked over at him and nodded grave approval of a sort that conveyed more praise than a burst of applause would have done. The man rose and on his way to her picked up a box of matches in order to light a cigarette she had shaken from a pack. After performing this office, he blew out the match and then kissed the tip of her nose before walking out of the room altogether.