The Blood of the Lamb: A Novel

by Peter de Vries

  It was then, for the first time, that the suspicion struck me that I might be sick.

  seven

  This was a fear fostered in no small measure by the scope of the care to which I was now subjected. I was steered into the infirmary by a middle-aged nurse and put to bed with orders to remain there. I was given a thermometer, known affectionately here as a “temp stick,” and a chart on which to record four readings a day (early morning, noon, late afternoon, and evening) as well as my pulse on each of these occasions. The nurse left, to return with receptacles for specimens of more things than need be named, but one of which, blood, was drawn from a vein while I gazed negligently at the trees outside my window. “Your meals will be brought in. The doctor will see you sometime tomorrow or the next day or the next.” And so on. “Meanwhile, I repeat, stay in bed.”

  Thus were banished my visions of a sanitarium as a place where one sat on benches philosophizing in the sun, in the manner of The Magic Mountain, or contracted imprudent passions in the music room. I raised myself on one elbow and gazed out the window. Beyond a row of evergreens stretched a length of flagstone walk on which presently two codgers materialized conversing wildly, shaking their heads and with that maximum of gesture familiar to me as the pantomime of theological dispute. I dropped back on the pillow, emitting a long, baleful moan.

  Adhering to the ceiling, I now noted, were inspirational thoughts slanted to the shut-in. They were not the hospital’s idea of interior decorating, I learned later, but the work of a previous inmate whose principle had been that, to the bedridden, the ceiling bore the same relation that walls do to those privileged to live perpendicularly; therefore “wall mottoes” belonged properly overhead where their contents could be absorbed in prostration. These truths were pasted to the calcimine. Most were from the Gospels and St. Paul and therefore possessed literary merit, but a few appeared to be creations of the muralist’s own, being crudely inked on squares of what seemed to be shirt cardboard. One such effort read: “Flat on your back? Best way to see Heaven.” Another: “Maybe this will make you upright in heart.”

  I rolled over from supine to prone, half expecting to find similar maxims affixed to the floor, for moments of true despair. I thought moodily of home, of the University, of Greta…. Rolling up an eye, I took inventory of the bedside table. On a linen tidy were a Bible, the temp stick, and a small clock reading five-fifteen. Enthusiastically, I sat up and poked the thermometer into my mouth. Time for the afternoon reading.

  I improved the five minutes I had been instructed to leave the thermometer under my tongue by gazing out at the distant Rockies, seen today for the first time. I tried to guess which might be the celebrated peaks among those mantled with perpetual snow. One seemed to have a cross of white upon its side. The original of the Longfellow poem? “There is a mountain in the distant West that, sun-defying in its deep ravines, displays a cross of snow upon its side. Such is the cross I wear upon my breast these something years … something something changeless since the day she died.” As I tried to reconstruct the verse, and to analyze the failure of the range to flood my being with aesthetic awe, the door was kicked open by a young nurse with a face like an amiable sparrow who entered with my supper.

  “Well!” she said with that humoring air reserved for children and invalids. “Seeing the sights?” She set the tray down on the table and heaved her shoulders with a bright sigh.

  “Yes,” I mumbled, removing the thermometer. “Now, which is Mount McKinley?”

  “That is in Alaska. You mean Pikes Peak.” She leaned across the bed and pointed through the window. “There it is—the tallest one.”

  I jerked her into bed, tore the clothes from her back, and raped her, in spirit. When she had gone I consulted the thermometer, noting that my brow had become beaded with moisture as a result of these exertions. The mercury stood at ninety-eight point six. Normal. Avidly I made my first entry on the chart provided.

  After supper, I read a chapter or two of Ecclesiastes, then listened to a bedside radio equipped with earphones. My temperature at eight o’clock was the same. I fell into a deep sleep, from which I awoke with the certainty that I had been unconscious only an hour or two. The room was still dark, but I sensed some compulsion to look out the window. Above the gloom still overspreading the earth, the snowpeaks were a flaming scarlet in the first rays of the rising sun.

  The middle-aged nurse appeared in the course of the morning to say that the doctor would see me at eleven o’clock; meanwhile, I might sit for a few minutes in the easy chair and read the morning News, which she had brought me.

  I had the end room of this wing in the infirmary, so there was a single window at right angles to the main bay exposure next my bed. The sun was streaming through this window, and swinging the chair around, I sat in its rays stripped to the waist, the chintz curtains parted and the sash up. As I basked in the luscious warmth, the door opened again, following a short rap. An elderly man’s face was thrust into the room, wearing an expression of tentative cordiality which quickly froze into a violent frown.

  “Are you mad!” he said, rushing into the room and drawing the shade. “Who gave you permission to sit in the sun and with your chest exposed like that?”

  “Why, nobody, I … It felt so good to—”

  “To be alive? Well if you want to stay that way, keep out of the sun until you’re given permission. Worst thing in the world for most T.B. patients—can stir up trouble, reopen old lesions.”

  “I’m sorry. I naturally thought the sun—”

  “Common mistake. You don’t take it unless it’s specifically prescribed. Is that clear? I’ll examine you this morning, and then we’ll see whether you join the Sunshine Club. I’m Dr. Simpson.”

  He held out a hand of which the skin was loose as a glove, and which remained extended while we both despaired of my getting my own through my tangled pajama-sleeve in order that I might grasp it. He had a salt-and-pepper suit so natty, linen so fresh, and shoes so polished one read into them instinctively a meticulous and no doubt vain nature. An ironic smile encircled teeth too white to be his own, a smile echoed in deep-set brown eyes capable of all the forms of mockery, one felt, save self-mockery. He asked whether this was my first taste of the West, and hurried off before I could answer, as though the impressions of sight-seers were inherently tedious.

  It was a half hour later that I shuffled in pajamas and robe down the corridor to his office, which lay between the infirmary and the ambulatory wing. By that time I had learned that he was an old lunger in his own right, possessed Scotch Presbyterian origins, and preferred making the jokes himself.

  He was standing at the desk when I entered his consulting room, his head bent over a cardiogram. Fingering untidy festoons of this, he resembled a stockbroker surprised at the ticker tape. He finished his scrutiny of it before dropping it on the desk with a cryptic smile.

  His examination was brief. After an X ray by a woman assistant, he fluoroscoped me and then listened to my chest, instructing me first to cough into my fist and then to repeat “ninety-nine” monotonously as the bell of the stethoscope stalked my ribs. He dropped the stethoscope on the desk and told me I might get back into my pajamas.

  “Well, I can hear a little music in there, but I don’t think it’s playing ‘Nearer, My God, to Thee.’ Just the very tip of one side has any râles whatever. Very little activity. Next to nothing.”

  “How long—?”

  He arrested me with a hand. “Give me a chance to ask you not to ask that question.” He made a brief, no doubt set speech, to the effect that the longer he practiced the less confidently he could predict when anybody would go home, if ever; that he had seen people enter these gates with no very noticeable lesions six years ago who were still on hand, while others with craters you could have dropped billiard balls into left in as many months; that added to all the honored ministrations of rest, food, and fresh air was an imponderable which he would simply call mental attitude. He had evidentl
y drunk deep of the newly welling springs of psychosomatic medicine. “I used to think mental attitude half the battle, then seventy-five per cent of the cure; now I’m not sure it isn’t more like ninety-five. Or maybe I should say ninety-eight six.” The ironic grin conveyed the malicious implication not to be stated: that if one determined the prolongation of a disease, mightn’t one also have willed its acquisition? “I have more people in here than I can tell you, about whom I wonder what they’re running away from. You will no doubt make a game of picking them out for yourself.”

  “I wasn’t going to ask when I could go home,” I lied. “Just when can I go to ambulo?”

  “You pick up the slang fast.” He waved an indifferent hand. “Any time. Why don’t you give the infirmary another week, then I think we’ll have room for you in the ambulatory wing. There’s a man moving out of there back to the infirmary,” he added, with that sardonic gleam in his eye which was not to be confused with a mischievous twinkle.

  As he rose and shook my hand, I could not resist another question.

  “Not many go back there, do they? I mean Eugene O’Neill overcame it, and Gide, and didn’t Maugham once—?”

  “Ah, yes. We have some of those too, as you’ll find when you hear the typewriters starting up in ambulo.” He looked at me in alarm. “You haven’t brought one, have you?” I assured him he need have no fears on that score. “Good. Then why don’t you come to dinner at the house soon. Mrs. Simpson and I occasionally have people in on Thursday evenings, and we’re always especially glad to find someone who won’t read us the first act of something. In fact we collect discoveries—Young Men Who Don’t Write. You’re mine, remember. I saw you first.”

  Thus that circle of kindred spirits for which I had pined, that urbanity that I had loved long since and lost a while, was to be found right here where I had least expected it—in the bosom, however infected, of the church. What I had thought to take by storm fell into my hands as simply as fruit from a tree.

  On hand when I arrived at the good doctor’s house, a half-timbered Normandy cottage just inside the sanitarium gate, were most of the regulars currently composing the band of Elect whom the Simpsons—themselves apparently put to it for society in this eventless backwater—cultivated and maintained for their “Thursdays.” They all looked up from their chairs in speculation, even alarm, when I entered, a scrawny youth in a tweed coat which fit him too soon, in a torn pocket of which he clutched a cold pipe by no means to be lit under the doctor’s eye, a prospect definitely on probation. Mrs. Simpson, a plump, effusive woman the reverse of her husband, propelled me amiably before her for the round of introductions.

  First was a portly native of Amsterdam named Carl Horswissel, who wore a Norfolk jacket and a string tie. I had seen him from my window promenading, the grounds. He spoke with a thick Dutch accent and was said to be a ruined cocoa importer. The most formidably intellectual of the lot was Leslie Foyle, a Colorado mining heir whose family could well afford the fees exacted of Episcopalians. A clear-cut snob, his air of aloof languor was naturally aided by a pulmonary condition noted officially as “third stage, moderately advanced.” The blue nails in which his drooping fingers terminated recalled to mind the old term “phthisic.” Next were a voluble couple who were not patients at the sanitarium but neighbors of the Simpsons. Their name was Twitty, and I was surprised to learn they had domestic discord, which they freely aired. In fact, long stretches of these Thursdays were devoted to the ventilation of their problems, on the complexity of which they tended to preen themselves. They had tried to save their marriage by bicycling through the Palatinate, and it was to a travelogue of a spring so spent that much of this evening was given over. For the immediate moment, however, it was I who was subjected to note, rather like a fraternity prospect of whom as yet precious little is known.

  “Wanderhope here has so little wrong with him,” Dr. Simpson began in his most derisive vein as he poured me a sherry, “that he’s practically an impostor. I could hardly detect any râles at all. So I’m going to try out a pet theory of mine on him. Short doses of really awful exercise, to see if winding the patient has any curative powers. All this sitting in bed blowing up balloons!”

  “Yes, really, Horswissel,” Foyle interjected, “don’t you realize it’s all a mammillary obsession?” Horswissel, without having the faintest idea what had been said, nevertheless wriggled with pleasure at being the butt of so erudite a thrust. I learned later that he had squeaked into the Elect by the skin of his teeth, and that some among them openly considered his inclusion a mistake.

  “There must be a better way of exercising the lungs. Maybe deliberately getting the patient out of breath is it,” said the doctor, handing me my sherry. “We’re breaking fresh ground for you.”

  “Already?” I bleated humorously.

  This was best absorbed by the final member of the group, a chubby youth named Bontekoe who aspired to be its clown. Most of his contributions were puns, following each of which he would raise an arm to ward off an expected blow, at the same time sinking down in his chair in a display of guilt. He was from Detroit, and in his “sophomore” year here. He and Foyle were among those suspected of having abused the Simpsons’ hospitality by reading aloud selections from their works. Bontekoe observed now that Dr. Simpson had so many “pet theories” that he ought perhaps to set up shop as a veterinarian, and shrank into the depths of his wingback.

  In sharpest possible contrast to my social life with this band of the Elect, by whom I was tolerated at least on approval, was the roommate with whom I was paired in ambulo.

  He was a Kansas primitive named Hank Hoos. His hulking six and a half feet suggested an allegorical embodiment of Rustic Manhood to which the sculptor, perhaps due to an untimely death or loss of interest in the subject, had not put the finishing touches. His roughhewn good looks were crowned by waves of glossy brown hair which he spent hours at the dresser combing, sagging at the knees in order to keep his head in the glass. It was hard to think of Hoos as ailing, and he dealt a damaging blow to Dr. Simpson’s theories of self-invalidation since he had obviously only one thing on his mind: to get out of there and resume the womanizing this incarceration had interrupted. He had now done eight months of his “stretch,” as he called it, and gave warning that he could endure little more unless his sexual needs were met—criminally if no other means soon presented themselves. Before I had quite unpacked my things he asked me if I had any information as to whether saltpeter or any other antiaphrodisiac was put in the food. When I professed ignorance of this whole matter, he asked me to pledge myself to get to the bottom of it with him. Walking across the room to put a few shirts into a drawer, I murmured some evasive reply, not clear in my mind whether he considered such dietetic resorts desirable or to be opposed under conditions thus delineated as taxing. Outside on the porch where we slept, our beds standing foot to foot, he spent hours relating some of the amorous exploits he intended to revive. Then one night, after bouncing into position under the covers, he suddenly said: “O.K., now let’s hear about you. When was the last time you were with a girl?”

  This was all too easily recalled, of course. I told him about Greta and her family, withholding names to protect the innocent, as he had certainly not done in the case of his cornland friends.

  “Her father was a real estate contractor,” I narrated softly in the dark, for only frame partitions separated the porches and I could hear Horswissel breathing alertly twelve inches from my head. His Montaigne had already been heard in its nightly drop to the floor, like a third shoe. “We were so in love,” I said, wincing at the clichés by means of which I strove to gear my odyssey to my audience’s comprehension, and at the same time divorce myself in spirit from its rather shabby content, “but had a hard time getting together. We felt we had our right to happiness. Then do you know what happened? Her father put up a development with a Model Home in it. We went into that one night. It was completely furnished, hey.”

  “You we
nt to bed?”

  “You know it.”

  “Tell me everything that happened. Don’t leave out a thing.”

  It was a point he need not have pressed. In my eagerness to oblige, like those club members making “frank” revelations of amorous details not all of which have occurred, I thought I had an insight into the motives and techniques of the so-called “honest realists” of literature—honest to the point of mendacity.

  “Her father was fit to be tied,” I whispered when I reached the part having to do with our discovery. “He nearly killed me before he was hauled off bodily by two men. His wife stood there screaming bloody murder—a hysterical madwoman. She tried to bash my head in with the vanity stool,” I improvised. “But it was worth it. Ah, that hour before we were busted in on,” I said, hoping by such untypical descents in speech to invent a character who was “not myself,” to whom could be attributed the admittedly sordid lapse of which I was being guilty.

  “Tell me everything about it,” Hoos said. “What was she like?”

  “Now see here.”

  “What difference does it make? I’ll never see her. What kind of breasts did she have?”