The Blood of the Lamb: A Novel

by Peter de Vries

  We live this life by a kind of conspiracy of grace: the common assumption, or pretense, that human existence is “good” or “matters” or has “meaning,” a glaze of charm or humor by which we conceal from one another and perhaps even ourselves the suspicion that it does not, and our conviction in times of trouble that it is overpriced—something to be endured rather than enjoyed. Nowhere does this function more than in precisely such a slice of hell as a Children’s Pavilion, where the basic truths would seem to mock any state of mind other than rage and despair. Rage and despair are indeed carried about in the heart, but privately, to be let out on special occasions, like savage dogs for exercise, occasions in solitude when God is cursed, birds stoned from the trees or the pillow hammered in darkness. In the ward lounge itself, a scene in which a changing collection of characters are waiting for a new medicine that might as well be called Godot, the conversation is indistiguishable from that going on at the moment in the street, a coffee break at the office from which one is absent, or a dinner party to which one could not accept an invitation. Even the exchange of news about their children has often the quality of gossip. An earful of it would be incredible to an uninvolved spectator, not to its principals. Quiet is requested for the benefit of the other parents. One holds his peace in obedience to a tacit law as binding as if it were framed on a corridor wall with a police officer on hand to see that it was enforced: “No fuss.” This is all perhaps nothing more than the principle of sportsmanship at its highest, given in return for the next man’s. Even Stein had it in no small degree, for all his seeming refusal to wish me good hunting in my spiritual quest. Perhaps he was trying to tell me in as nice a way as he could that there was no game in those woods. His grim little jokes on the barricades were in their way part of this call to courage.

  But while human abilities to sustain this sportsmanship vary, none is unlimited. Twice I had the uneasy experience of witnessing a crackup in the ranks of those one comes to think of, not too farfetchedly, as one’s outfit—that moment when the thin membrane to which our sanity is entrusted splits and breaks asunder, spilling violence in every direction.

  There was a mother Carol and I saw in every hospitalization, taking care of a four-year-old boy who was by now a scarecrow. She lived in Ohio, and her husband came only on week ends, or when he could get off from work. Her name was May Schwartz, and her comely Jewish bulk, her ripe yolky warmth and vitality typified a certain order of female appeal, often irresistible to the Gentile eye. Though she was neither very young nor notably shapely any more, one always marked her passage down the corridor. Wearing high heels to offset her short height, rather than the “sensible” shoes that would certainly have eased her thousand marches to and from her vegetable, she would bounce along with a towel and wash basin or a glass of soda pop in her hands, and return any nod of greeting, as you passed her wheeling your own charge, by smiling and rolling her eyes up to the ceiling as if to say, “Gawd.” I heard her say it aloud when told in the lounge that a rabbi had arrived to call on Sammy, rolling her eyes again as she rose to receive him. I happened to see the rabbi go into Sammy’s room, where he put on a black skullcap and stood at the foot of the bed murmuring something, before thrusting the cap back into his overcoat pocket and hurrying away again, looking a little foolish. Mrs. Schwartz said that her husband arranged for these pastoral visits, in which she “saw no harm.”

  One night I was sleeping on the leather couch in the lounge, or trying to. I was too excited by the news, just acquired, that I might take Carol home tomorrow. I was staying overnight so that we could make an early start in the morning. Carol herself had been full of beans all evening, and I was still laughing over a story she had told me about Stein, one Rachel had related in confidence and over which I had been sworn to secrecy. One Sunday morning when Stein had been sleeping late, Rachel, then four, feeling sorry for her bald daddy, had decided to do something about it. From locks of hair snipped from old dolls and sewn together on a piece of oilcloth, she made a wig, or toupee, the underside of which she then generously slathered with glue and, stealing into the bedroom, affixed to her father’s pate. This naturally awakened Stein from sleep, and more particularly, according to accounts by which he tried later to explain his resulting behavior, from a bad dream he had been having. Perhaps the dream had been inspired by the intrusive sensation itself, in that split second of time in which we are told these things can occur. At any rate, he had kicked his legs out of bed and run wildly into the bathroom, there to be confronted by his image in the glass, newly patched with thatch of varying hues and textures. The picture of Stein blinking confusedly at himself, perhaps befuddled by some impression remaining from his dream that he had indeed sprouted fresh feathers, and then the sequel as he removed what he saw, had me in stitches. Delayed fatigue, together with the sudden release from the last round of anxiety, left me an easy prey to hysteria, and I lay there in the dark shaking with laughter. The fit of mirth prolonged itself uncontrollably, and I finally had to smother my convulsions in a handkerchief. There was a stir behind the thin wall separating the lounge from the next room, where Mrs. Schwartz spent her nights on a cot. Then I heard the door of that room open. The faint scuff of slippered feet followed, and Mrs. Schwartz herself stood in the open doorway of the lounge.

  She had on a flannel robe, under which could be seen the legs of a pair of pajamas. Her face was invisible since the lounge was dark, but against the faint glow cast by a corridor light I could see her arms go up and knew that she had her own hands to her face. From her motionless figure now issued a series of broken, muffled sounds very similar—I now sensed, as a chill went up my spine—to those that had a moment ago greeted her own ears. She had mistaken the nature of my hysterics and been moved to offer their echo in a passionate outburst of her own. She was, in any case, not the solid rock for which we had been accustomed to take her.

  As she came forward into the room I rose. She whispered for me not to do so, urging me back down onto the couch with a force that dropped me abruptly once more on the leather cushion. She sank to her knees and began suddenly to beat the arm of the couch with both fists, at the same time babbling incoherently. The words came out in a stream, English, Yiddish, oaths and imprecations, blasphemies and entreaties I could not hope to reproduce. “All they can do is kill mice!” she said in a kind of whispered scream. I grasped her shoulders, and, when this did no good, her wrists. Whereupon she wrenched her arms free and threw them around my neck, in a spasm of emotion that might have been mistaken, by someone glancing into the darkened room, for an amorous clutch. Which in a mad sort of way it probably was. For as suddenly as she had begun she stopped, went to a chair, blew her nose, and said, “It’s a funny thing about two people going through something like this. There are things husband and wife just can’t tell each other that they can a third person.”

  “Tell” each other! I thought, what in God’s name has she told me? As if sensing this, she immediately added, “I guess I mean do to each other. You have no wife, but I’ve got news for you. You think you could have shared this?” She shook her head, and though the illumination from the corridor was too dim for me to make out her face, I could imagine her shrugged mouth and closed eyes. “Two people can’t share unhappiness. You think probably if you had her, ‘Well, we could go through this together. It would bring us closer together. Leaning on each other.’” Again the headshake, with news for me. “They lean away from each other. Two people can’t share grief. In fact—” She broke off, as though momentarily debating the prudence of the revelation on the tip of her tongue, then making it anyway. “In some ways it drives them apart, an explosion between them. No, that’s not it either.” She lowered her head, and for a moment I feared a revival of hysterics. She went on, as though the paradox of what she was elucidating was an aid to objectivity, “When this first came to us, was fresh, the wound, there were times when I resented my husband. Because he, what’s the word I want?” She snapped her fingers. “Presumed. Pres
umed to share what was basically a woman’s grief. Horning in on a sorrow the woman is sole proprietor of. Isn’t that ridiculous? But there it is, a chapter in what’s this man’s name who writes about the war between the sexes. Can you beat it?” she softly cried, bringing her fist down ominously now on the arm of the chair, but only once, and that like a public speaker, or actor, well in control of his effects. I sat mesmerized in my own seat, transfixed in perhaps the most amazing midnight I had ever lived through, yet one possessing, in the dreamy dislocations of which it formed a part, a weird, bland naturalness like that of a Chirico landscape, full of shadows infinitely longer than the objects casting them. “And no doubt Schwartz has some of the same resentment as mine. Never is this stated between two people, but it’s there. Driving this—wedge between them, so that a woman can’t break down to her husband but she can very well fling herself for a moment on another man’s breast, while Schwartz at this very minute is probably with that … Well, never mind. Does this make sense to you?”

  “Why, I think I can see where …”

  “Well then make room in your head for the exact opposite explanation. That we keep outbursts from one another because we owe it to the other person. Out of a feeling for the other party. We owe it to them not to wish on them what they keep from us in their own moments. All this you’re learning about marriage,” she went on, like a chiropractor manipulating his subject’s head in a series of violent, though supposedly salubrious, contrasts. “So your wife,” she went on in a manner suggesting that she absorbed as much gossip as she dispensed in these watches of the night, “would never have come to you in the way I just did. To somebody else maybe, yes, but to you, no.” She brushed at her cheeks and rose. “So now how about a cigarette?” She turned to switch on the light, glancing then at the electric coffee urn always standing on a table there, to see if it was connected. “Let’s plug this thing in and heat up what’s in it.”

  As we smoked a cigarette and drank our coffee, she told me something about her husband’s work. He was publicity director for an Akron shoe factory, much prized by the firm though beset by envious rivals waiting to ambush him. She hoped we would get a chance to meet when next he came to the hospital. We would probably have a lot to say to each other.

  The second drama was of a different sort and by no means as instructive, except on a more elementary level.

  Off the main corridor was a room in which the doctors held daily consultations among themselves on all the cases then on the floor, and into which individual ones sometimes drew parents for a word in private. One day as I walked past its closed door, I heard behind it a shrill man’s voice upbraiding somebody. “Then why didn’t you switch to the other drug sooner, you——” The epithet, if such it was, was drowned out by the scraping of a chair. This became immediately an unmistakable scuffle, in which shouts and overturned chairs mingled in equal measure. I froze, wondering whether to rush in. I had heard that crazed parents on rare occasions physically attacked their children’s doctors, and indeed had once noticed an armed guard unobtrusively but watchfully haunting the ward. I could understand this behavior as an exaggeration of a normal reaction, perhaps even a normal irrationality, from a disquieting sensation that had suddenly gone through me the evening Dr. Cameron had come to the house with his news. I had hated him physically. I had wanted to bash his teeth in. The vituperation continued, varied only by counterprotestations and pleas to “control yourself” in a voice now recognizable as that of Dr. Scoville. When an especially alarming thud was heard, I opened the door and ran in.

  Dr. Scoville, in his white coat, was standing behind a desk, which he had evidently been circling to keep between himself and his client—a man I recognized as an out-of-town father whom I had seen wheeling a child in a perambulator. He had red hair and bulging blue eyes that gave him a look of subdued frenzy the best of times. Now his face resembled a pot of tomatoes about to boil over. There was an X ray on an illuminated panel, whose portents the doctor had probably been trying to interpret when the man had gone out of control. In a blaze of deprecation now broadened to include the hospital, to which he should never have removed his child from the one in New Jersey, he shouted, “—progress! I understand you can now induce malignancies in normal tissues!” I stepped in at this point and tried to calm him. This made him turn on me, perhaps in a kind of escape; he may have sensed by now that he was making a spectacle of himself, as we sometimes do in outbursts, and welcomed an adversary against whose intrusions he had a more legitimate complaint. I was frankly scared, and noticed with relief that two male residents were trotting through the open doorway, attracted by the commotion. They succeeded between them in quieting the man down, and I left all four of them trying to settle down again to a more sober discussion of matters.

  I saw Dr. Scoville later in the day and, itching with curiosity of course, mentioned the incident. But he refused to discuss it beyond a word of thanks to me for stepping in. “I quite understand those things,” he said, and, opening a metal chart folder, turned to my problems.

  I offer these two vignettes of human collapse, not for their own sakes, or even as necessarily vital links in the narrative, but as preliminaries to describing the moment—not a very pretty story itself—when I reached the end of my own tether.

  fifteen

  One time in that criminal winter, when the lights of Christmas sprouted in a thousand windows and the mercies of Methotrexate were drawing to a close, we went in for our fifth hospitalization. Now we were to have our horizons widened. Anterior bleeding is not so bad, but posterior calls for cauterization, as well as packing, back into the throat. “Oh, Daddy, I can’t stand it,” said my spattered burden as I carried her from the treatment room back to bed. It is one of the few cries of protest I ever heard from the thoroughbred, of whom I bear true and faithful witness. The stigmata were fresh: the wound in the breast from a new aspiration, the prints in the hands from the intravenous and transfusion needles to which the arms were once again spread as she watched television with a reassembled smile. On the screen were unfolding again a few reels of the dear old clowns. The comic for whom rolling ’em in the aisles had been sufficient was doing the narrating, only this time on the side of the intellectuals.

  “You see, Daddy? How they wait for the pie, then take their time wiping it off and all? A ritual. He calls it that too.”

  Stein and his Rachel were not here this time, but the Great Debate went forward between two voices now scarcely for a moment silent in my brain.

  “I ask, my Lord, permission to despair.”

  “On what grounds?”

  “The fairy is now a troll. The spine is gone. She supports herself on her breastbone.”

  “Do you do as well?”

  “Do you exist?”

  “If I say yes, it will only be as a voice in your mind. Make me say it then, and be quiet.”

  “Are God and Herod then one?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “The Slaughter of the Innocents. Who creates a perfect blossom to crush it? Children dying in this building, mice in the next. It’s all the same to Him who marks the sparrow’s fall.”

  “I forgive you.”

  “I cannot say the same.”

  I awoke from a doze in the bedside chair that night remembering, for some reason, the occasion a few weeks before when I had taken Carol to the Blood Bank at the school she attended.

  Wanderhope was being siphoned by the Red Cross, and she was watching, peeking through the curtain screening off the double line of donors. “Opium den,” she said, exaggerating the words so as not to have to speak above a whisper. The conceit amused me no end. I finished out my gift in fantasies of myself and Mrs. Baldridge in the next bed, and the minister’s wife next to her, lying in an opium trance, haggard devotees of the fix, lost in debaucheries beyond belief.

  Seeing she was asleep, both arms spread to the trailers from the bottles overhead, I stole out to the lounge for a smoke. I had hopes of a drink from
the flask I now carried regularly on my person, but I found a three-hundred-pound woman pacing there in a rumpled housedress, a cigarette with a sagging inch of ash hanging from her mouth.

  “Boy, dis place,” she said. “When me and my little girl come in here, she di’n’t have nuttin’ but leukemia. Now she’s got ammonia.” I listened, unbelieving. “Ammonia. Dat’s serious. She’s in a oxygen tent, and I can’t smoke there. It’s a tough break for her because, like I say, at first she di’n’t have nuttin’ but a touch of leukemia. I don’t believe I ever heard of dat before. What is it?”

  “… Now have I permission to despair, my Lord?”

  “How do you mean?”

  “That woman. How ludicrous can grief become?”

  “What else?”

  “That birthday party in the playroom this afternoon for Johnny Heard. Leukemic children with funny hats. How slapstick can tragedy get? Is nobody seeing to the world? Is it run on no principles whatever? The children and next door the rats …”

  “They are one to the Good Lord, who loves them all.”

  Here a burst of mocking laughter suffices to express its alternative: the Voiceless Void, the bland stupor of eternity.

  The Meticorten did only a third as well this time around, but home we went with the marrow only thirty per cent of normal, and a pocketful of a new drug. Glad we were to get out too, because an epidemic of staphylococcus was raging through the ward and half the innocents lay in oxygen tents. Two or three of the more fortunate had died, and the fat woman’s girl, too, was released from harm by her pneumonia—the old man’s friend, as we used to call it.