The Blood of the Lamb: A Novel

by Peter de Vries

  “I want you to know that everything is all right, Daddy. I mean you mustn’t worry, really. You’ve helped me a lot—more than you can imagine. I was digging around in the cabinet part at the bottom of the bookshelves for something to read that you would like. I mean, not something from your favorite books of poetry and all, but something of your own. What did I come across but that issue of the magazine put out by your alma mater, with the piece in it about your philosophy of life. Do you remember it? I might as well say that I know what’s going on. What you wrote gives me courage to face whatever there is that’s coming, so what could be more appropriate than to read it for you now? Remember when you explained it to me? Obviously, I don’t understand it all, but I think I get the drift:

  “I believe that man must learn to live without those consolations called religious, which his own intelligence must by now have told him belong to the childhood of the race. Philosophy can really give us nothing permanent to believe either; it is too rich in answers, each canceling out the rest. The quest for Meaning is foredoomed. Human life ‘means’ nothing. But that is not to say that it is not worth living. What does a Debussy Arabesque ‘mean,’ or a rainbow or a rose? A man delights in all of these, knowing himself to be no more—a wisp of music and a haze of dreams dissolving against the sun. Man has only his own two feet to stand on, his own human trinity to see him through: Reason, Courage, and Grace. And the first plus the second equals the third.”

  I reached the couch at last, on which I lay for some hours as though I had been clubbed, not quite to death. I wished that pound of gristle in my breast would stop its beating, as once in the course of that night I think it nearly did. The time between the last evening songs of the birds and their first cries at daybreak was a span of night without contents, blackness as stark as the lights left burning among the parlor furniture. Sometime towards its close I went to my bedroom, where from a bureau drawer I drew a small cruciform trinket on a chain. I went outside, walking down the slope of back lawn to the privet hedge, over which I hurled it as far as I could into the trees beyond. They were the sacred wood where we had so often walked, looking for the first snowdrops, listening for peepers, and in the clearings of which we had freed from drifts of dead leaves the tender heads of early violets.

  I looked up through the cold air. All the stars were out. That pit of jewels, heaven, gave no answer. Among them would always be a wraith saying, “Can’t I stay up a little longer?” I hear that voice in the city streets or on country roads, with my nose in a mug of cocoa, walking in the rain or standing in falling snow. “Pick one out and follow it to the ground.”

  How I hate this world. I would like to tear it apart with my own two hands if I could. I would like to dismantle the universe star by star, like a treeful of rotten fruit. Nor do I believe in progress. A vermin-eaten saint scratching his filth in the hope of heaven is better off than you damned in clean linen. Progress doubles our tenure in a vale of tears. Man is a mistake, to be corrected only by his abolition, which he gives promise of seeing to himself. Oh, let him pass, and leave the earth to the flowers that carpet the earth wherever he explodes his triumphs. Man is inconsolable, thanks to that eternal “Why?” when there is no Why, that question mark twisted like a fishhook in the human heart. “Let there be light,” we cry, and only the dawn breaks.

  What are these thoughts? They are the shadow, no doubt, reaching out to declare me my father’s son. But before that I shall be my daughter’s father. Not to say my brother’s brother. Now through the meadows of my mind wander hand in hand Louie and Carol and at last little Rachel, saying, “My grace is sufficient for thee.” For we are indeed saved by grace in the end—but to give, not take. This, it seems then, is my Book of the Dead. All I know I have learned from them—my long-suffering mother and my crazy father, too, and from Greta, gone frowning somewhere, her secret still upon her brow. All I am worth I got from them. And Rena too, and Dr. Simpson’s little boy, whom I never saw. What was his name? Stevie. “A dolphin boy,” the doctor had said, in trying to describe him to me. I sometimes see him when I’m out walking on my lunch hour in New York, wading through the pigeons beside the defunct fountain in Bryant Park, behind the library. “Can’t I stay up a little longer?”

  I could not decline the burden of resumption. The Western Gate is closed. That exit is barred. One angel guards it, whose sword is a gold head smiling into the sun in a hundred snapshots. The child on the brink of whose grave I tried to recover the faith lost on the edge of my brother’s is the goalkeeper past whom I can now never get. In the smile are sealed my orders for the day. One has heard of people being punished for their sins, hardly for their piety. But so it is. As to that other One, whose voice I thought I heard, I seem to be barred from everything it speaks in comfort, only the remonstrance remaining: “Verily I say unto thee, Thou shalt by no means come out thence, till thou hast paid the uttermost farthing.”

  I went inside and brewed some coffee. It seemed feat enough not to reach for another beverage, even at that early hour. The stars had paled and day was breaking. As I sat waiting for the pot to boil, I thought that later in the morning I would telephone the Steins in Trenton and ask about Rachel. I hoped the 6-MP would take her a long way, till school started again, at least. That was always the most important milestone among us parents, Going Back to School. More than making another Christmas, somehow. It didn’t take a wise man to understand why. That’s the one thing we never stop doing: Going Back to School.

  As I sat in the kitchen drinking the coffee, I set my mind to the problem of taking Rachel something of Carol’s without letting on anything. Down in the garden amid the lilacs’ wasted scent the bees hummed and the hummingbirds shot. It would be a clear morning. The sun had poured its first light through the trees below the garden, gilding the papered wall. The glance directed by the new owners at its ranks of yellow stripes and clumps of bruised fruit gave assurance that this paper would soon be coming down. Truth to tell, we had never liked it much ourselves. There were distant sounds of neighbors stirring, starting the day. An early riser called to someone in the farm below the trees. A wood thrush sang in the merciless summer boughs.

  Sometime later, there was a footstep on the path and a knock on the door. It was Omar Howard, come to say good morning and to ask if I had found the Egyptian scarab ring of Carol’s, which I had promised him. I had indeed, and, pressing it into his hand, received in return a volume I might find of interest—Zen: The Answer?

  I sat paging through it for a few minutes after he had gone, sampling what would be perused at more leisure later. “… detached attachment … roll with nature … embrace her facts so as not to be crushed by them … swim with the …” And of course the Chinese original of that invisible wall-motto in the hospital corridor: “No fuss.” On the jacket was a picture of the author, seen trimming a gardenia bush, his hobby. I boarded a train to California, in one or another of whose hanging gardens the wise man dwelt, and, bearding him there, asked whether there were any order of wisdom by which the sight of flowers being demolished could be readily borne. “Watch,” I said, and tore from a branch the most perfect of his blossoms and mangled it into the dirt with my heel. Then I tore another, then another, watching studiously his expression as I ground the white blooms underfoot …

  These thoughts were cut short with the reminder that I must write a letter of recommendation for Omar to a prep school he was trying to get into, for which I had also promised to kick in a little tuition money, if memory served.

  Time heals nothing—which should make us the better able to minister. There may be griefs beyond the reach of solace, but none worthy of the name that does not set free the springs of sympathy. Blessed are they that comfort, for they too have mourned, may be more likely the human truth. “You had a dozen years of perfection. That’s a dozen more than most people get,” a man had rather sharply told me one morning on the train. He was the father of one of Carol’s classmates, a lumpish girl of no wiles and no ways, w
hose Boston mother had long since begun to embalm her dreams in alcohol. I asked him to join me sometime in a few beers and a game or two at the bowling alleys, where one often saw him hanging about alone. He agreed. Once I ran into Carol’s teacher, Miss Halsey. “Some poems are long, some are short. She was a short one,” Miss Halsey had summed up, smiling, with the late-Gothic horse face which guarantees that she will never read any poems, long or short, to any children of her own. Again the throb of compassion rather than the breath of consolation: the recognition of how long, how long is the mourners’ bench upon which we sit, arms linked in undeluded friendship, all of us, brief links, ourselves, in the eternal pity.