The Blood of the Lamb: A Novel

by Peter de Vries

  “Look” she cried with the ritual clap of delight. “How pretty.”

  “You like it?” I asked, looking up with a dog’s eyes. My gaze was evidence that I thoroughly understood what Carol meant by “that attitude.”

  “Why, it’s beautiful. How do you like to part it, dear, middle or side?”

  “Side.”

  “That’s perfect for you. So make sure Daddy does it right. Dad-dy,” and she made off with a pedagogical scowl at me. She pretended to have forgotten the pigtails or had actually forgotten them, in adherence to that sacred hoax to which we were now one and all committed down to the gates of death: the hoax that Everything Was Fine.

  This trust was hardest to uphold in the visitors’ lounge, where parents, in respites from their vigils, found themselves comparing troubles in chats into which the subjects might at any moment walk or bolt in wheel chairs or tricycles. That was where I met Stein. I had just seen Carol settled in bed for an after-luncheon nap and had gone into the lounge for a cigarette. A short man with a bald bullet head, wearing a suit of brutal green, was standing at the window looking out. He turned around when I entered, and gave a snort of welcome.

  “What are you in for?” he asked in a tone suggesting that our communications be henceforth conducted as parodies of those between men unjustly imprisoned. I told him and asked what ailed his little one. “Same thing. They all got some form of it here. The infinite variety of Nature.”

  “How long has she had it? He or she?”

  “Rachel. This is her first time in.”

  The job of describing his attitude as one of assertive hopelessness is nothing to that of portraying his effect on me, which was that of a repulsive man to whom I was instinctively drawn. He should better always face the world with his back, Stein, than have to turn around and show that face. Corners may be cut by evoking the snuffed outlines and aspiring tusks of a pug dog, although his nose was not blunted, but rather a small replica of the rocket bestowed on him for a head. He was Cerberus, welcoming newcomers to those infernal shades which they might never leave, whose exits he would bar as conscientiously as he greeted their arrivals. After a few moments of conversation he suddenly said, “Come here,” and led the way through a glass door onto a roof terrace.

  There through a grilled window we looked into a research laboratory filled with caged mice. An attendant was cleaning the cages and putting fresh food and water into the cups. To one side of another window, using the sill for a work counter, sat two technicians busy at a task. A girl was taking mice one at a time from a hamper and holding them while a man measured tumors on their undersides with a pair of calipers. Measurements were noted in a book, as was also the weight of the mouse, which was put on a scale before being chucked back into the hamper and another extracted for the same procedure.

  Seeing they had an audience, the two scientists became grave and efficient, then changed this attitude into one of humor. They both began to laugh about something. In the midst of it all, a mouse got away and had to be retrieved. After this had been done, the girl reached down and for our benefit hilariously displayed a baited trap: they had mice! Stein and I strolled away eventually toward the roof’s edge, where we stood at a parapet looking down into the street two floors below. A few hundred feet away, directly across from the research wing on whose edge we stood, was the church of St. Catherine.

  “Quite a juxtaposition,” I remarked. “Science versus religion.”

  Stein seemed to have been expecting this cliché, to have, in fact, been impatiently awaiting its utterance. The bitterness of his answer suggested that he may even have lured me out onto the terrace in order to feed him the line.

  “We get about as much from the one as the other,” he said with a snort that was a finely shaded variation of his welcome in the lounge. I had not been prepared for such a range of nuance in the human grunt.

  “Oh, come now.”

  He shook his head. “They’ll never get it, cancer. They’ll never conquer it. Do you know what it is, that sluggishly multiplying anarchy? A souvenir from the primordial ooze. The original Chaos, without form and void. In de beginning was de void, and de void was vit God. Mustn’t say de naughty void,” he finished in a sudden spasm of burlesque that could only have revealed a man so full of hate that he is prepared to turn it on himself.

  I was not without spirit of my own.

  “I’d say that was a hell of a way to talk to a parent around here if I didn’t remember why you were here yourself.”

  “Sorry.” He laid a hand on my shoulder and led me back to the door. The Cerberus had better features of our lonely sojourn to suggest. “Had lunch? I found a swell bar and grill around the corner. Might as well get to know the points of interest.”

  To get to it we passed the church, and through the open doors I could glimpse the high altar and the muted blaze of rose and gold all around it.

  “You don’t believe in God,” I said to Stein.

  “God is a word banging around in the human nervous system. He exists about as much as Santa Claus.”

  “Santa Claus has had a tremendous influence, exist or not.”

  “For children.”

  “Lots of saints have died for God with a courage that’s hardly childish.”

  “That’s part of the horror. It’s all a fantasy. It’s all for nothing. A martyr giving his life, a criminal taking one. It’s all the same to the All.”

  “I can’t believe that.”

  “Congratulations.”

  We fell into a gloomy but curiously companionable silence. I changed the subject by jerking my head once more toward the research building before we turned the corner out of its sight. “We’ve got that to be grateful for, maybe even pious about. Ten years ago our children wouldn’t have stood a chance.”

  “So death by leukemia is now a local instead of an express. Same run, only a few more stops. But that’s medicine, the art of prolonging disease.”

  “Jesus,” I said, with a laugh. “Why would anybody want to prolong it?”

  “In order to postpone grief.”

  What enabled me to bear Stein’s apothegms through the highly bibulous luncheon that followed was the knowledge, serenely hoarded, that I would have my sweet home in a day or two. The steroids for which solemn guarantees had been given were already surely hurling their magic against the foe. The assurance that the same was true of Stein and his Rachel helped me further through the interlude of chomping and snorting that passed for his noonday meal. Over his pilaf, he recalled a horse breathing into its oats. Of course he was enjoying himself; I was on to that. I had him taped. He was not pure intellect so much as a crock of soured emotions. I liked him.

  Returning to our post of vigil we passed again the church of St. Catherine, this time on the other side of the street. From there could be read a bulletin announcing a novena to St. Jude a month hence. Several gray pigeons fluttered about the crucified figure over the central doorway.

  “Have you ever noticed pigeons never soil that statue?” I said.

  “Naturally the parish keeps it clean.”

  “No, I mean the birds themselves don’t alight on it. Everywhere around it, but not there. Strange.”

  What else seemed strange was that Dr. Scoville never called that day nor the next. I was ready for words with him, but when I saw him enter the ward on the third afternoon he looked sixty years old, rumpled and unshaven, scarcely able to hold the dispatch case he was dragging in one hand. He had flown to five cities in a series of research conferences, with a dash to Washington to bludgeon loose some funds for an experimental drug costing fifteen thousand dollars a pound, and he had not slept in a bed, he told us cheerfully at the foot of Carol’s, for thirty-six hours.

  “Neither have I,” said Carol, “with all the noise around here. It sounds like a pet shop.”

  Dr. Scoville raised her gown and studiously palpated her spleen. Not felt, his satisfied nod told me. The enemy had receded from that critical outpost. Nasal me
mbrane still a bit friable but nothing to worry about, since the latest blood report showed the platelet count to be zooming back well up over a hundred thousand from a troublesome low of sixty-five thousand. And the roses in the cheeks told us all we needed to know about the hemoglobin. “Take her home tonight if you want.”

  She was dressed and ready with her valise long before I had paid the bill and was through the rest of the red tape of discharge. By that time the sun had set and a thunderstorm broken. Carol sprang down the stairs and into the car with squeals of laughter, and off we shot for the country and home.

  “Will I be able to go to school tomorrow?”

  “Of course! So when you get home, young lady, first thing you do is call your friends and get the homework you’ve missed. You’ve got to get back into the groove again, and no kidding.”

  “I wonder what Mrs. Brodhag will have for dinner.”

  “I talked to her on the telephone. Fried chicken and dumplings, mashed potatoes, and ice cream with hot fudge sauce. And for me, baby, a nice cold bottle of beer.”

  “Oh, Daddy, you and your beer! It’s so common. Nobody drinks beer.”

  The burst of laughter had to be explained.

  “‘Common’ means that everybody does something, so if nobody does it, it’s exclusive.”

  “Oh, Daddy, you’re so technical. Anyway it sounds like a good dinner.”

  “What about a little party over the week end? All the friends who’ve missed you. How would you like that? We’ll discuss the whole thing with Mrs. Brodhag tonight.”

  Note on the doctrine of relativity: The happiest man in New York that night was a father heading for home through flashes of lightning and gusts of blinding rain, with a doomed child on the front seat beside him.

  Stein was almost right but not quite. The future was a thing, not of the past, but of the present. Now began that time of living to the hilt, or of which one sometimes thought in terms of squeezing from each day what the frugal Mrs. Brodhag did from an orange—everything. I must make sure Carol missed absolutely nothing while giving no hint of this tormented aim. Nonchalance is called for in the unlikeliest places. Who would in all the labyrinth of parenthood ever have dreamed he would find frivolity a sacred trust?

  First was a wish of mine to make Carol understand, and enjoy to the full, the exact texture of my bond with Mrs. Brodhag. This involved going back to Mrs. Brodhag’s first appearance at the house when Carol had been three and her father sick in bed as the New Woman walked in. She had been sent from the agency “on approval,” and the green gaze turned on the man with the medicated cloth around his throat and the cocktail shaker full of fruit juice on the littered floor indicated just who would be approving whom. “I’ll clean around you” were her first words.

  With propped head I watched order brought out of chaos. The human woodchuck burrowing through disorder came at last to a book which had to be picked up off the floor and laid on a desk. Her frown when she paused to read its title suddenly recalled the agency woman’s remark over the phone that the prospect had “once worked in a library.”

  “You don’t like Mr. Hemingway?” I whispered from the bed.

  For answer, she carried the volume gingerly between thumb and forefinger by a corner of its cover, so that its open pages hung down like the filthy rag it was judged to be.

  Thus began that chain of literary criticism which so far as Mrs. Brodhag’s end of it was concerned was conducted solely in pantomime. She seemed to accept the challenge of communicating exclusively in that vein, so that each author I “gave her” was an assignment for a charade. “What do you think of Thomas Wolfe?” I asked. She swung an imaginary mop about the floor: it was what he used for a pen. Faulkner? She wiped her feet of what could well be imagined in the barnyard evoked by the very name. I once mentioned a writer of popular novels more known for quantity than quality. Without hesitation she did this: She laid one hand alongside her nose, flung the other outward at arm’s length, brought it back to her nose, and flung it out again, several times. This seemed to me as cryptic as some of the Higher Criticism, till I remembered the old-fashioned method by which yard goods were measured out by dry goods clerks. It was how the novelist turned the stuff out year after year, you see. Mrs. Brodhag had worked in a dry goods store as she had also a grocery store, before getting that part-time job in the local library. There the authorities had not been up to her graphic pronouncements, nor to her use of a “Grab-All” (the long-handled pincers with which things are taken down from upper shelves in grocery stores) on books. She was soon dismissed as too rich for everyone’s blood.

  Having filled Carol in on all these things that I had learned along the way, it remained for me to see that she got a demonstration of Mrs. Brodhag’s technique. By now Mrs. Brodhag and I had reached a tacit agreement that we were playing a sort of game together, and that each artist I posed for her was a challenge to which to rise. I say artist because the field had widened to include painting, sculpture, music, and everything else aesthetic. One night I had a recording of Delius’s Sea Drift going on the phonograph, and as Mrs. Brodhag, who always ate with us now, was clearing the dinner things away, I caught Carol’s eye as if to say “Watch,” and asked, “Mrs. Brodhag, what do you think of this?” The promptness with which she wrung out an imaginary handkerchief expressed an opinion all too long stored up: “sentimental slop” was her verdict on this choral work and on Delius. She winked at Carol as she went out, in conspiracy of their having Daddy’s number as to musical taste. I was delighted to see this for its great value in reaffirming for Carol the enfolding unity and integrity of the household. Imagine my surprise at having the whole thing blow up in my face.

  “Why do you poke fun of her?” Carol asked me when I looked in on her as she sat reading in bed preparatory to going to sleep that night.

  Had I expected too much or too little of childhood? Carol had not yet graduated from the forthright loves and mads and jealousies of little girls to the perceptive malices and flavored affections of maturity. Why try to force this bloom? Why try to make her more sophisticated than there might be time for? In place of the normal parent’s wistful “Why must they grow up?”, so recently mine too, was now the reverse: “How old will she get to be?”

  I wasted no time clearing myself of the charge of patronage. I did not point out that I was a “fan” of Mrs. Brodhag’s, that I thought her “wonderful” (that sorry tatter of sophistication). I simply said to the long lashes concealing from me the blue eyes bent to the book, “Oh, come now. The fact that we laugh at people doesn’t mean we’re making fun of them. You laughed at her in the car when she spelt kohlrabi’ with a ‘c.’”

  The book was plunked face-down on the counterpane. “Oh, Daddy, you dope, she knows perfectly well how to spell ‘kohlrabi.’ We came across it a couple of days before in a book we were reading together. That’s why she used it. She knew I knew it. It was just to add a little extra joke to that old game. So I laughed.”

  “Well, I’ll be damned.”

  It was only by remarking that it was nine o’clock and time to put out the light that I recovered anything like the offensive.

  “Well, that gives me another fifteen minutes. Because I’m bathed and in my nightgown.”

  “So?”

  “So Mrs. Brodhag knows that takes fifteen minutes, so if I do it all beforehand, why, I get the extra time. Maybe it’s time you started seeing her through my eyes.”

  I awoke her gently in the dusk of dawn.

  “Have you ever seen a deer?”

  She smiled and sleepily raised an arm to draw me down for what must be another of her voracious father’s good-night kisses.

  “I just saw one on the lawn,” I whispered. “I think he’s a young one.”

  I carried her into my bedroom, from the window of which I had a moment ago glanced out and glimpsed the dark shape moving past the hedge toward the woods beyond. Together we peered into the fresh gloom of morning. A late moon flooded the slope of
grass, and a few stars were tangled in the old catalpa tree.

  “There, isn’t that him?” I said, pointing. “His head and antlers above the brush?”

  “Oh, Daddy, you’re probably seeing things.”

  “Well, no matter. We’ll go to the zoo Saturday.”

  After the (as it turned out) false move in the Mrs. Brodhag business, I made a doubly conscientious effort to understand the precise tone and content of Carol’s relation with her best friend, Omar Howard.

  Omar was the oldest child in a neighbor family of numerous apple-eating sisters and brothers who had wandered down the road to Carol’s house without profit or encouragement for years. Only Omar made any dent in her unwavering self-sufficiency and restrictive tastes. He had all the brains in the family and all the looks, though there was rather too much of him from the neck down. Plump cheeks stated a theme systematically repeated by a tummy which his parents, perhaps rightly, thought it amusing to encase in a Tattersall vest. Sitting with his thumb hooked in a pocket of it he recalled photographs of Henry James, whom he would certainly in later years read if he hadn’t already—one put nothing past him. This Tom Thumb quality made him look a miniature version of a solid citizen. Being fourteen, he was in the local junior high, whose academic seams he was bursting, and on his way to prep school, Harvard, and God knew what all. He had been friends with Carol since a time when the two years’ difference in their ages meant a lot more than it did now.

  Instead of such a party as I had proposed, Carol just wanted Omar to dinner. After we’d had him, he called to ask Carol to a movie. His father did the chauffeuring in the family Chevrolet sedan, into the front seat of which the movie-goers had to crowd, the back being taken up with a wheelbarrow which Mr. Howard had bought secondhand somewhere, put in to drive home, and been unable to get out. Endless jimmying and juggling had failed, so far, to reverse its insertion. Now it was all impossibly twisted around, its position like a fetal “presentation” for Mr. Howard to contemplate, like an obstetrician contemplating a hopeless delivery. He was a bumbler of the first water who had enriched our domestic life more than he would ever know. Carol and I often saw him bouncing around town with his absurd burden behind him, its handles sometimes pointing back, sometimes nudging his neck, as they now did Omar’s riding to the movie. Once we had driven past the Howard house and seen him in the driveway, scratching his head with his cap in his hand as through the open car door he pondered his puzzle for another try.