The Blood of the Lamb: A Novel

by Peter de Vries

  I learned later that day that what he had said was far from a figment of his imagination, but rather a scientific fact that appealed to it. I read, in the same morning paper he must have, a report of an astronomers’ convention at which a paper had been read making the point that the total gravitational force as calculated among the movements of celestial bodies needs, to account for it, nine or ten times more cosmic matter than we know about. Hence, ninety per cent of the universe is missing, at least from human computations, scattered through space or existing in dispersed forms beyond our ken. “We too may be dispersed, till we don’t exist,” my father said later, dilating on the matter. Knowing this fear to be shared by many reputable scientists, I felt a little easier. “Maybe that’s hell—what they can’t locate. Flung away from God, outer darkness. Black light! Antimatter! It’s all around us. We’re all headed for it!” Then he added, becoming more personal, “The only thing that keeps me from killing myself is the will to live.”

  This was from Doc Berkenbosch. Doc had, as noted, been grooming himself in at least the terminology of that profession into which his own now so often imperceptibly shaded. That was commendable. What was regrettable was that usually all he supplied was the terminology, and that flung about with no more precision than he had always accorded his own. He had a little modish information about the self-obliterative drive, which he explained existed in all of us in the form of a “blatant tendency,” that is to say, a hidden or potential one, held in check in the majority of us. I also had “functional” explained to me. “Means mental, originating in the mind rather than the body. The meaning of the word is widening rapidly. You hear of modern architecture being functional. In other words, crazy.”

  The job of spreading confusion on two fronts kept Doc Berkenbosch twice as busy as he had been in the old days of simple medicine, and he left to my solution the problem of finding a sanitarium for my father which was both nearby and not too larcenous in cost for what would be, at the very least, a period of observation. Doc gave me the names of several, which I investigated in such time as remained from my second, scarcely less urgent problem, that of repairing the apostasies among the customers on the garbage route—which of course I now took over in full as the family’s sole means of livelihood. I finally decided on one situated just beyond the city limits, five miles from home.

  That the choice was a mistake was hardly my fault. One’s search for such a place is always desperate and the investigation therefore superficial. They are all clean, all landscaped, all state-inspected. The inspections of the authorities in the case of Hilltop Haven, however, must have been as cursory as my own preliminary look. A few days after my father had been “admitted” (that fine institutional euphemism for arrivals which are usually forcible and sometimes police-assisted), I had a talk about him with the chief doctor. In the course of this chat, the gist of which was that the doctor would not be so irresponsible as to commit himself on the case on such short acquaintance, the doctor was called out of the office a moment, during which I had a chance to steal a glance at some charts on his desk. On one, after the word “Diagnosis,” was the entry: “Nervous wreck.” Still another of the reports I managed hastily to shuffle through contained the comment on a woman patient: “Seems crabbier than ever.” Later in the corridor I saw two orderlies, or possibly two functionaries of higher rank, talking about a new arrival who I was certain was my father. One of them raised his hand and with a forefinger executed a significant circular motion at his temple.

  I took my father straight out of that place (which by now I had learned was known among the neighborhood children as Chock Full o’ Nuts) and drove him to the institution operated by our church. We had wished to avoid that because it was in Michigan, too far for the frequent, indeed daily, visits on which my mother was determined. But the move turned out immeasurably for the best. Not only was the establishment well run by a staff of competent psychiatrists (as church institutions usually are), but it developed that repeated visits by the family were not in the best interest of the patient, at least in the early stages of confinement. So it was with a sigh of relief, through our tears, that we turned out of the hospital driveway onto the main road, my mother and I, and headed for what was left of home.

  There seems to be little support in reality for the popular belief that we are mellowed by suffering. Happiness mellows us, not troubles; pleasure, perhaps, even more than happiness. The sentimental saw belongs among those canards that include also the idea that wisdom comes with age. The old have nothing to tell us; it is more commonly we who are shouting at them, in any case.

  These somewhat cynical observations may themselves be taken as possessing a selfish root, for they are prologue to the admission that suffering had certainly not mellowed me, and that I took precious little of my elders’ advice about what to do with my life at this stage of it. I might better justify myself by pleading simply that I was still young at the time, of which it must be said that Rena was soon forgotten in my pursuit, resumed where it had been left off, of girls. I cannot honestly find it in my heart to say that her death or my father’s disintegration “taught” me anything, or sobered me much. That remained for a more shattering bereavement still far off in time.

  The trials under which I now labored were not unmixedly such, since they absolved me from the obligation to court with marriage in view. No girl could reasonably expect a man to add to the expenses under which I groaned those of a wife and family. My parents “came first.” Too, I now had the advantage of a tainted heritage uppermost among those elements working for me as factors calculated to discourage husband hunters. Thus the intimacies I did contract—in which these drawbacks were “paid out” little by little as need required—I was free to enjoy, much as I had always liked to, without the onus of threatening entanglements. Any hopefuls not sifted out by these considerations were confronted with my ace in the hole: “I am a garbage man.” Naturally this fact was held in reserve until absolutely necessary, when its disclosure was usually terminal: the scraping up of new acquaintance was contingent on its concealment, of course. Claim could also in a pinch be laid to a slight history of tuberculosis, though new X rays revealed the ailment to be completely arrested, if it had ever existed as anything more than a slight surplus of the bacillus known to exist in all of us at one time or another.

  There was one environment in which this background was not stigmatic, but there no defense against the shibboleths of morality were needed since they were never invoked. This was the world of intellectuals who had become “Marxist-oriented” in a time which was now the Great Depression.

  I did not return to the University, but I did now and again seek out the company of old friends in and around the campus, where, as I say, times had changed. A social conscience was requisite to even the most elementary pretense to a mental and artistic life. Writers and painters marched in parades demanding jobs, not, to be sure, for themselves, but at least for others; students attended political rallies and sometimes addressed them. There lived, in an obscure South Side street not far from the Midway, a group of artists who maintained close touch with those on the North Side, where the backbone of Chicago Bohemianism lay, whose roots went back to the days of Ben Hecht and Maxwell Bodenheim and the old Dill Pickle Club. The club was gone now, but Bughouse Square, where the soapbox rebels foregathered, lived on, and it was thither we repaired every Saturday night to express and further the new iconoclasm.

  In this milieu, of course, my immigrant and proletarian origins were a badge of honor, while my working on a garbage truck made me a downright hero. And well it might, for I was the only one in the bunch who had ever done an honest day’s work in his life. Everyone in it was a fellow traveler of the Communist party, and some were members of it. I was once asked soon after my admission to the group whether I “carried a card.” The term was new to me, and in my innocence I thought it was being used in the traditional salesman’s sense, that is, of commercial cards carried on the person for purpose
s of identification and to drum up trade. “No,” I said, “but I may have to get some printed if business gets any worse.” I was serious, but the laughter which greeted my reply established me instantly as a wag of great promise.

  Benefits were often held for worthy causes, such as the New Masses or some ex-convict folk singer or indigent poet, usually in the form of a party at which admission was charged and some hope of entertainment held out, generally a performance or reading by the artist himself. On more occasions than might have been thought possible this was Maxwell Bodenheim, though on neither of the two on which I went to hear him read from his verses did he show up, at least in the living room. “He’s still out,” a girl announced to us once after returning from a bedroom into which she had slipped to check on the guest of honor. I dropped my dollar into the hat anyway with a smile; I was seeing life.

  Life unfolded, for so footloose a youth in a time so out of joint, as a series of romances as inconclusive as I could have hoped and as unsatisfying as might be guessed. There was Lucia, who passed the hat—a girl always remorselessly dressed in black, and with black hair and eyes herself, a resulting monochrome which perhaps devisedly emphasized her beautiful clear white skin. There was Peggy Shotzinoff, a dancer in a local ballet troupe. Not the classic ballet, but that species of calisthenics executed in tight jeans and bare feet and addressing itself to contemporary problems such as soil erosion or the installation of high-tension wires through valleys in which people have hitherto lived in peace. There was … But why go on with the recital of what were no more and no less, no better and no worse, than the next youth’s wild oats: a series of entr’actes in search of a drama. I mention them at all merely to suggest that I went through the normal pursuits of profane love before entering upon the sacred.

  I use the term loosely, as should be, since any sanctity into which my foolish years at last emerged, or to which I—or any man—may validly lay claim, is not fleshly, but paternal. But that is getting ahead of the story. The marriage comes next. I met the girl who was to become my wife in the most unexpected place.

  nine

  I was visiting my father one Sunday afternoon in late spring when, the intermittently shining sun having appeared to come out to stay, he rose from the window chair in which he had been dejectedly slumped and said, “Let’s go for a walk.” I bundled him into a coat, and we were released into the open air by an orderly with a set of keys.

  I was pleased to find this turn of mood in my father, who had for months been so steeped in depression that no show of interest in anything could be excited in him, least of all a walk. The sanitarium grounds were pleasant, cool in the shadows but warm enough in the sun to which we kept, and as we coursed among the glimmering shrubbery he began to brighten further, even to the extent of greeting a few of his cronies, likewise promenading in the company of dear ones.

  The novelty of the walk having worn off, my father resumed those protestations and complaints which were often all that ever broke his silences. They came on in familiar waves, to which one need not lend more than half an ear. His head ached, there was this “sour feeling” in his legs, his back killed him. He had a chest cold for which nothing did any good; cough medicine made him cough. Racking his memory for names was more than he could bear. My own back was killing me, truth to tell, after two nights in a motel with beds that were nothing to brag about. “I’ve got spots in front of my eyes,” he said.

  “I can see them,” I answered, which was not as heartless as it may sound.

  As we traversed what remained of a lane leading toward the women’s building, looking for a vacant bench in the sun, I saw, a short distance ahead, a couple whom I recognized. They were Mr. and Mrs. Wigbaldy. I had not seen them since my return from the West, since I neither attended church nor frequented any other circles where our paths might cross. The meeting was rather awkward. As they inquired about my father—receiving no dearth of answers for their pains—I appraised them, wondering who was visiting whom. While both had aged a little, neither visibly bore the scars of disturbance or hospitalization. As we talked, my father spotted an inmate who had recently left his ward and whom he was eager to see, and he darted over to greet him. I took the moment to ask:

  “What brings you two here?”

  They turned simultaneously and indicated a solitary figure seated on a bench behind them. It was a moment before I recognized Greta, or acknowledged that I did. She had lost considerable weight, and her face wore the expression of utter listlessness that one often encounters in such an environment, not to be confused with more aggressive depression such as my father’s. She had on a kind of housedress, over which was an unbuttoned coat. One hand lay, palm up, in her lap. She squinted into the sun as we made our way over to her.

  “Hello, Greta.”

  “Hello, Don.” She answered indifferently, not extending her hand or otherwise moving on the bench. I myself therefore sat down on it beside her, as did her mother. Wigbaldy remained standing a few steps off.

  “How long have you been here?”

  “About a month,” Mrs. Wigbaldy answered tersely for her. She seemed to have collected herself in an assertive readiness to answer any questions I might have, which I found disquieting.

  “In for a little rest, are you?”

  Greta nodded. “So they say.” She smiled faintly. “How are you?”

  “I’m all right. O.K.” There was a pause, during which I gazed rather inanely down at two or three pigeons strutting about on the gravel path. “How long will you be here? Do they give you any idea?”

  Here her vague manner changed abruptly. She spoke in a rapid whisper, looking around her as she did. “It depends. If they’d only stop it—the men. I’d run away, but where would I go? It would always be the same, the men looking at you everywhere. Their eyes, you can feel them, crawling over you like bugs.”

  She looked off in the direction of the women’s building, in the doorway of which a nurse in a white uniform was beckoning her over for something. The Wigbaldys and I watched her go, till the glass door had closed behind her and the nurse both. Mrs. Wigbaldy now turned back to me. We were both on our feet again.

  “Well, now you can see what you’ve done. I hope you’re satisfied.”

  Wigbaldy said something indistinct, little more than an apologetic clearing of his throat, as he shuffled a few more feet away on the path. He was openly miserable.

  “I had no idea …” I shook my head in pained confusion. “You mean that …”

  Mrs. Wigbaldy nodded, her mouth a tight seam.

  “She never got over the experience. It dirtied her. It dirtied her foul.” Mrs. Wigbaldy faced me squarely now, wringing every drop from every word. “It dirtied her good, what you started her out on.”

  “Why didn’t she write me?”

  “She did a few times, but all the good it did her.”

  “I didn’t answer regular letters, no—it wouldn’t have been fair to her. But nobody told me about this.”

  “It only just come up,” Wigbaldy threw in over his shoulder.

  “And she had more pride. Anyhow, now you know what can happen to a girl when she gets mixed up with a—tramp!” Mrs. Wigbaldy turned on her heel and marched into the building.

  Wigbaldy shook his head, as though deploring crime and punishment alike. He seemed to be prodding something in the grass with the toe of his shoe. “Don’t judge yourself too hard, boy. We all know it takes two.” In his awkwardness he seemed to me a symbol of eternally cheated mankind, of all betrayed decency. This estimate was slightly more than the facts warranted, since it turned out I was being railroaded and he knew it. All the same, he may have felt, without too much casuistry in his heart, that I had that coming to me. We often deserve our injustices; after all, we get away with murder.

  Feeling that facts rather than hysterical charges were what I needed, I went in to see the psychiatrist in charge of Greta as soon as I had returned my father to his ward. This doctor shrugged a great deal, not
as a man declaring ignorance of the answers or shirking the questions, but as if pleading the eternally constant, eternally elusive human element that makes everything unique and unpredictable. He accompanied each shrug with a gesture of spreading his hands above his shoulders, as though with each question I were “holding him up” for answers he had not truly in his possession.

  “She’s been in a sort of funk as a result of a mess with a man. She felt, oh, not defiled by the experience. Well, yes, defiled. We’re often too quick to use the medical word ‘ego.’ Why not say her pride was shattered? Her woman’s self-respect.”

  “Can it be restored?”

  Now he really did “put ’em up” and, in keeping with the rules of his profession, declined advising directly. “All I will say is that I don’t think it’s too deep-seated, or necessarily permanent. Just a bad emotional tailspin that given the right circumstances she could pull out of. Or that someone could help pull her out of. Obviously a good relationship would be better than any medicine of ours.” The nature of my questions emboldened him to ask one of his own. “Were you involved with her?”

  “Could it be family standards that came down on her like a ton of bricks, rather than the so-called sin itself?” I asked, declining to answer.

  “Just what do you mean?”

  “Could Mama be at the bottom of the trouble? Coaching her into shame?”

  This was so completely a stick-up that he flung his arms wide with a laugh. “That’s a large order, especially since Greta’s only been here a few weeks and I haven’t even met the mother.”

  “Don’t break your neck.”

  I may very well have spared the doctor the pleasure. I saw Greta on each of the four successive week ends I ran up there to visit my father. I received, I sensed, some unobtrusive co-operation from Wigbaldy, who saw to it that our talks on the green grass were not hampered by the presence of Mama. Each time Greta seemed a little better, a little rosier of cheek, brighter in spirit. She became her old self—a description not to be left unqualified by the reminder that she had always had a pensive and even somber side. Indeed, it had been her kind of brooding voluptuousness that had first attracted me to her. At last I asked her to marry me.