The Blood of the Lamb: A Novel

by Peter de Vries

  eleven

  The world posed itself for the time being as a New Neighborhood rather than a teleological riddle, solvable or otherwise, and I saw ours through Carol’s eyes, not Mrs. Brodhag’s or even my own. The house was a colonial cottage with original beams and a pitch to its floors scarcely less acute than that of the back lawn, down which, the first thing I knew, Carol was tumbling with a playmate named Pidgie Harris. The two of them rolled side over side down its grassy slope, reciting the Pledge of Allegiance. Pidgie was our first overnight guest, and my next most incisive picture of those days is of the two of them playing a game called Hanging Down, which I believe they invented. You are put to bed but don’t want to sleep, so you hang over the sides of the bed like bats and look at each other from underneath it. The first one to get dizzy loses.

  “Aren’t you tired yet, girls?”

  “What time is it?”

  “Nine o’clock.”

  “No, not yet.”

  That thirst for the suspension of logic which children supply was well slaked by that pair! One night, shortly before a Saturday on which I had promised to take them in to the Planetarium, they hustled me out of my armchair for a study of the stars. When asked why a lecture on the heavens was so urgent, they said, “So we’ll understand the Planetarium when we go there.” Pidgie’s father had been to Europe, Asia, and Minnesota, her mother was half Republican, and I don’t know what all. Pidgie was physically more suited than Carol to the pastime known as Teapot, which consists in pantomimic recital of the rhyme:

  I’m a little teapot, short and stout,

  Here’s my handle [right hand on hip],

  here’s my spout [left hand so poised];

  When I get all steamed up, hear me shout,

  Just tip me over and pour me out!

  The tableau dissolves as the child collapses in hysterics on the ground, or the tortured bed.

  Pidgie was lost where found—in school. Just before the girls passed into third grade, rezoning took her out of Carol’s school into another, and though she stayed in town she vanished from our orbit as completely as if she had left. That was just as she was on the verge of snaring Carol for the Episcopal church, where you “curtsy before you sit down.” Any countercampaign would have been for Mrs. Brodhag to wage, my indifference to where Carol spent Sunday mornings (that is to say, my refusal to be bigoted about it) being responsible for my letting Mrs. Brodhag take her to the Congregationalists’ Sunday school. Of the single year in which she went, I remember two things chiefly. One was a Thanksgiving dinner enlivened by Mrs. Brodhag’s inclination to say grace. Having said it (she took most of her meals with us), she flapped out her napkin, and in a tone combining piety with the encouraging heartiness of a Girl Scout leader, said, “Now then! What have we to be thankful for?”

  “That we’re not Pilgrims” was Carol’s unhesitating reply.

  The other incident occurred during the Christmas holidays on an occasion when I was not present. In Sunday school, Carol created a mild crisis by her wish to include eight reindeer in the Nativity crèche, to which they had all been invited to contribute animals. She was indulged by the Sunday school teacher, who, I am sure, must have removed them later. Even so, the liberality made me wonder with a smile what my Sunday school teachers in bygone Chicago would have thought of this brand of improvisation. Any such Creative Play would have been given short shrift, I fear, with a rap on the head with a hymnal to boot.

  I was not coaxed into the house of God until Christmas afternoon, when Carol’s class appeared in the course of the Candlelight Service to sing “Go Tell It on the Mountain.” The cherubs fluting in their white robes of the birth of Our Lord, seen elsewhere dragging his Cross in stained glass or ascending to heaven amid clouds of glory; the smell of the church (that dim spicy pungency common to all churches and constituting, quite literally, the odor of sanctity) evoking almost more than the music the lost songs of my own childhood; the blue eyes of my daughter catching mine for a moment before returning shyly, and rather guiltily, to the conductor—all these things mingled into one aching jumble that touched the very nerve of nostalgia. Memories of flowerless services and grim interrogations in catechism class, of Sunday afternoons at home wreathed with the smells of coffee and of cigars brandished by uncles locked in eternal dispute, of Old World women, their fat knuckles wound in handkerchiefs soaked in cologne, listening respectfully while their menfolk gave each other chapter and verse, all returned to me now. These memories were like flowers themselves, long hidden in corners of my heart, made suddenly to unfold their petals and yield their essences in a white New England meetinghouse so far in space and spirit from the church in whose shadow I had lived my boyhood. “Too bad you don’t have more feeling for those things,” Mrs. Brodhag would again say! And I twisting in my pew while every known emotion blazed within me. I thanked God when, propelled by a last, deranging squall of organ music into the winter twilight, I felt the cold air on my cheeks and my daughter’s warm hand in mine.

  Going to the bowling alley together was rather better. Mrs. Brodhag usually came along, if I shouldn’t again say it was we who accompanied her. She was equally a crusader for this bodily exercise, and had discovered Claney’s Lanes on the West Highway. We visited them, the three of us, almost every Friday night for a long time during the year Carol turned eleven. I encouraged this incorporation of Mrs. Brodhag into the family out of a feeling that Carol should be supplied some substitute for a maternal influence. Even after this passage of time, there was little sign that she would be acquiring a mother more formally. That partial solitude in which I saw one year pass into another was often acute, but not enough so to bring to imprudent fruition any of the few companionships I did contract in my rather limited social rounds—attachments that would have entailed in each case, at any rate, complications as great as my own. And, too, there was always a portion of my emotions assigned to Greta; a high fee exacted for all memories of our happy times, of which there had been many, and possessing an intensity all the more to be prized for the troubles with which they had been intermixed.

  There is something about a bowling alley that is marvelously invigorating, quite apart from the physical exercise. The continual reverberation of the pins is tonic in itself. It stirs the blood, wakes up sluggish corners of the nervous system, puts one into a new element. Being plunged with others into a world of pure muscular revel, of hurled balls and shattered targets contributing one’s own thunderclaps to the orgy of racket, of hotdogs and beer and gleaming wood and metal—all are part of the intoxication of the public bowling alley. I found the pastime a sure way of “forgetting,” of worming myself of nerves and misery, of discharging long days of static melancholy and boredom and regret.

  I was fair, Mrs. Brodhag was good, and Carol—she Was in a class by herself. She had originally come along only to watch, but for her that was impossible. Everything was a challenge: the piano, the bicycle, the choir, dancing, roller skating, ice skating—and now that black ball propelled not only by grownups but by slips of girls like herself, girls of fourteen and twelve, so why not a girl of ten, going on eleven?

  The spectacle of her taking her turn was something to behold. The ball, even the children’s weight, was almost too heavy for her, but she carried it in two hands to the foul line. There she would drop it with just enough force to send it on a ride the length of the alley. It took quite a while to complete its journey, and she would stand there waiting patiently, shifting from one foot to the other as she watched, sometimes inclining her head to one side in a way that dropped all her gold hair onto one shoulder. Sometimes, resting an elbow on a palm, she would lay her hand against her cheek, waiting. With just enough momentum to roll the last few inches, the ball would sort of jostle the pins aside, rather than knock them down, but over they would go, here one, there two or three. Sometimes players in neighboring alleys would pause to watch too, smiling. In this fashion she often got a spare, several times a strike, and, one evening, a score o
f a hundred and sixty-two.

  twelve

  I once spent an evening with several companions in the last branched hours of which we got to debating the question, “What is the greatest experience open to man?” There we sat trading anecdotes like fictional clubmen, not too inappropriately since we encircled a corner table in the lounge of the Gotham Club, where we had dined, eight strong, as guests of Frank Beerwagon, to celebrate his accession to power at the agency for which we all worked.

  The topic is one of those conducive to everything but conclusion. There was no want of diversity in the answers that night. Of course there were the usual depositions for fleshly ecstasy. George Winrod favored us with a reminiscence of an Eastern queen possessing talons so long she could have torn the flesh from your back with a slash, but with which she bestowed, instead, extraordinary caresses. Andy Biddle recalled a select Neapolitan wallow where till morning … Kimberly, breathing smoke, broke in on this poppycock to remind us that the highest human experiences were not sensations but emotions. Since the mystic raptures of the saints must be a closed book to a company so minded, he went on, with a sardonic glance around it, and the same probably went for those next in glory, the aesthetic ones of the poets, we must be content with comparing notes in the more mundane scale of episodes. “I have no doubt this is one of the great nights of Frank’s life,” he said, with a flourish of his cigar at our host. “Not a peak of ecstasy, but a rich, deep-down happiness. Eh, Frank?”

  This was for Beerwagon himself to say. Tapping an inch of ash from his own cigar, he smiled and allowed that it was certainly one of the climaxes of his existence. The only thing that topped it that he could think of was the night, eleven years ago, when he had nearly perished in the drifts of a mid-Nebraska blizzard but survived to tell it. Tell it, of course, he did.

  “I was driving home for my sister’s wedding, and believe you me, I thought they were going to get a funeral thrown in with it,” he began. “The snow was just dumped out of the sky. I had to abandon my car in a foot of it before I knew it had started, and make my way toward the lights of a—well, I thought it was a house till it turned out to be a trailer truck, also abandoned. No haven or refuge in a blizzard, because it happened to be a refrigerator truck hauling dressed beef from Omaha.” Here a snicker from Andy Biddle imperiled a pregnant pause in what was, after all, a quest for the sublime. The rest of us knew better where our bread was buttered, or to put it more fairly, had nervous systems slightly stabler than that possessed by the poor devil who had just demonstrated the reverse of his failure to laugh at the Boss’s jokes. “Go on, Frank,” said Kimberly softly.

  “Well, sir, I like to never reached a decision what to do,” continued Frank, who enjoyed throwing in reminders of his Midwestern roots now that he had made the grade in the East. “To stay in my car or in the cabin of the truck might have meant freezing to death. Legging it toward town with no precise knowledge where the nearest human habitation was might have meant meeting the same end in a ditch. It was now dusk, and I could see nothing—nothing but white. I remembered from a sign I’d just passed that I was inside some town limits. How close to the town proper? Well, the driver of the truck must have thought or known he was close to houses, or a gas station or something, so I decided to follow in his footsteps. Don’t take that literally, my hearties, because they were now obliterated. I set out with an apprehension that soon became fear, and that panic. I floundered in drifts to my waist. My eyes were plastered shut by flakes like wet goose feathers. A wind howled in my ears—which, incidentally, began to freeze. I had no earmuffs. Darkness descended.”

  We sat forward on the edges of our chairs, except for the luckless Andy Biddle, who, head in hand, was trying to conceal the effect on him of the image of his lord slogging through an Alpine hell sans earmuffs. Or perhaps he was still thinking of those beeves hanging in the trailer, which the raconteur had bade fair to resemble by morning, to hear him tell it.

  “Then just as I was sure it was only a question now of how I would go—collapse or freeze—I saw—only a few feet ahead since that was as far as you could see in that howling waste—the lights of a farmhouse. My sensation as I stumbled over that cottage threshold, wet, blind, and deaf—”

  Here poor Andy Biddle gave way. The squeal strained through a mouthful of handkerchief told us that his days with the firm were numbered. We watched him draw the cloth from that troubled aperture like a conjurer performing an act of legerdemain. Oh, he was through, all right! A chill had fallen on Beerwagon’s narrative of his most memorable experience, but he concluded it with dignity.

  “My sensation as I stumbled into that warm kitchen can be imagined by any sensitive person. Yes, I can honestly call that the greatest moment of my life.”

  In the silence we now watched Kimberly nibble a single nut in thought. It would be a pity if this adventure did not meet his standards as posed in the brief remarks that had preceded it.

  “You see, Frank, I disagree with you that it was a sensation you experienced. It was an emotion. But even if it was a sensation,” Kimberly continued, exacting the maximum in office politics from the demurrer by turning to some of the others as he added, “it was not a mere animal pleasure. I would even venture to call that experience mystical, Frank. No, I won’t take that back. It was mystical. You were restored to the human race. You were Saved.”

  And on that sublime note the evening ended.

  Next morning Frank Beerwagon dropped into my office to apologize. “Whatever for?” I asked in genuine bafflement. Because I, alone, had not been given a chance to relate my most unforgettable experience. I told him to forget it, and that, come to think of it, Kimberly hadn’t really obliged either. He had contributed a brief homily laying down standards for the rest to meet, but on any illustrative private anecdote, he had fudged. “Hmm, you’re right,” said Frank, taking his thoughtful leave.

  I should have fudged too. I should have been frankly stumped for a nomination from my private life. Because of this, I continued for some days to mull over the precise significance of the question as I reviewed the evening itself. There had been what critics always call, in reviews of anthologies, a few notable omissions. Nobody had cited his wedding night as the pinnacle of experience, perhaps because of an unwritten agreement to keep wives out of these stag affairs. Why had Kimberly not mentioned his having been aboard the Andrea Doria the night she collided with the Stockholm? Undoubtedly, because it might have topped the Boss’s contribution to the literature of escape. Included in that literature must surely be George Winrod’s recent realization that he had not, after all, gotten a certain office secretary in trouble. The bliss of deliverance from that hell I knew damn well to have exceeded the pleasure that had precipitated him into it, or even any the Burma girl with the red claws could have conferred. On a par with the Boss’s story, as far as having that convincing ring was concerned, had been only Fred McQuarrie’s account of his rescue from a foxhole on Iwo Jima.

  I made a tentative conclusion. It seemed from all of this that uppermost among human joys is the negative one of restoration: not going to the stars, but learning that one may stay where one is. It was shortly after the evening in question that I had a taste of that truth on a scale that enabled me to put my finger on the specific moral for which we had, in all our rambling camaraderie, been groping.

  My daughter Carol, then eleven, fell ill. An undulating but persistent temperature, pains in her back that recurred like the fever, in time ruled out the flu, for which the doctor has dosed her with the antibiotics that are the profession’s first fusillade at whatever puts anybody to bed in the winter nowadays. This was in the late winter, around the middle of March. The trouble continued, with enough letups for nothing conclusive to have been thought or done by early April. Then Dr. Cameron, pulling a jowl over the back pains, which now seemed focused in the lower spine, hospitalized Carol “for X ray and so on.”

  My heart sank at the specters that raised their heads. Rheumatic fever, cripp
ling arthritis … This was a dream of a child. Hair like cornsilk, blue bird’s-wings eyes, and a carriage that completed the resemblance to a fairy sprite. One would not have been surprised to see her take off and fly away in a glimmer of unsuspected wings.

  The week in the hospital was a long and exquisitely serialized course of suspense. Nothing in the X ray, nothing in the blood tests, nothing in the other examinations. There remained a report on a throat culture that had had to be sent to the state laboratory. That turned up some streptococcus infection.

  “So that’s it,” Dr. Cameron said, greeting me at the elevator. “Her temperature’s been normal now for two days, so it’s probably let up. She’s just walked in the hall without any pains. She feels a lot better. Give it another day and you can take her home. But anyhow, we’ve eliminated everything serious.”

  That was the happiest moment of my life. Or the next several days were the happiest days of my life. The fairy would not become a gnome. We could break bread in peace again, my child and I. The greatest experience open to man then is the recovery of the commonplace. Coffee in the morning and whiskeys in the evening again without fear. Books to read without that shadow falling across the page. Carol curled up with one in her chair and I in mine. And the bliss of finishing off an evening with a game of rummy and a mug of cocoa together. And how good again to sail into Tony’s midtown bar, with its sparkling glasses, hitherto scarcely noticed, ready to tilt us into evening, the clean knives standing upended in their crocks of cheese at the immaculate stroke of five. My keyed-up senses got everything: the echo of wood smoke in Cheddar, of the seahorse in the human spine (the fairy would not be a gnome!), of the dogwood flower in the blades of an electric fan, or vice versa … But you can multiply for yourself the list of pleasures to be extorted from Simple Things when the world has once again been restored to you.