He was still harping on Jephthah. “What I don’t understand about you Cath-olics”—he handed Lyman a glass tinkling with ice cubes—“is what you think the Bible is. If it’s God’s word, then isn’t the whole thing God’s word? Including the story of Jephthah? What do you think God means by that story?”
“St. Mark answers that question. Christ spoke to the multitude in parables. And without a parable spake he not unto them. Only alone with his disciples did he expound his full meaning. I’d say that the God who gave us the Old Testament was often speaking in parables, too. The story of Jephthah is a myth, like the story of Agamemnon and Iphigenia. They’re very similar stories. A father heading into battles makes an oath to kill his daughter, and does so. The main difference is Agamemnon kills his daughter before the war, and Jephthah waits till afterward.”
Judge made a hoot of derision. “Aga-memnon? Effa-genia? Those are Greek names, ain’t they? Brother Orson says all that Greek stuff is seck-ular humanist bullshit. Like that Oedipus we had to read about at school. Killed his father and married his mother, and then this psycho-analyst Sigmund Freud comes along and says we all of us are just aching to do the same thing. I knew that’s what Jews think, but I’m surprised to hear it from a Catholic priest.”
Momentarily, Lyman was stopped in his tracks. Could the son of a doctor, a prominent scientist, really be such a redneck ignoramus as this? He was tempted to call Judge’s bluff. But the gleam in the boy’s eye had grown brighter while they’d been talking, and Lyman doubted that was something that could be faked. Somehow, just by living in Florida and watching untold hours of evangelical TV cartoons, the boy had soaked up the essence of fundamentalist dementia. So, it wouldn’t do just to say, “Bullshit!” and take his leave. That might do for a liar; a madman deserved more courtesy.
It was the orange juice that gave him his cue. Ever since his four-year stint of missionary duty in Calcutta, he’d associated the color of orange juice with the garish robes of the priestly caste and with the garishness of Hinduism generally.
“Oh, Catholicism would have many surprises for you, and the religious world beyond Catholicism would have still more. It did for me. After my seminary years in Rome, I did mission work in Calcutta, and I found out what idolatry is at firsthand. Americans pick up the term from reading the Bible, but the actuality of idolatry would boggle even your mind, my boy. The most popular god of their vast pantheon is called Ganesh, who looks like a man except that he has the head of an elephant. How he came to look that way takes us right back to Jephthah, and to Oedipus. Originally Ganesh looked like any other god, that’s to say, human. But one day his father, Shiva, came home after a long absence and discovered a young man with his wife Parvati in her bedroom, and having a hot temper he cut off the young man’s head. Only afterwards did he realize it was Ganesh, and so to keep Ganesh alive he cut off the head of an elephant that was passing by just then and fastened it to the dead boy’s neck, in which form Ganesh has been worshiped for centuries.”
Judge looked at Lyman with genuine amazement. “But, that’s impossible. You can’t put an elephant’s head on a human being!”
“We don’t think so. But there have been billions of Indians who believe in Ganesh just as fervently as you believe in Brother Orson.”
“What’s your point? Are you trying to say Brother Orson is some kind of pagan idol?”
“No. My point is about the nature of idolatry. That its nature is to ascribe human attributes to God, and so every culture is liable to end up with myths that look alike, because human nature, as Freud pointed out, and St. Augustine pointed out much earlier, is the same in India as in Greece or North Africa or Minneapolis. Freud speaks of the Oedipus complex, Augustine calls it original sin.”
“And I call that bullshit!” Judge’s pallid face was flushed with anger. “Elephants! Aga-mem-non! Jesus Chrahst Almahty!” He got to his feet, and stood with his eyes fixed on Lyman as though he were considering hurling his glass of orange juice at him.
At that moment, in answer to the prayer Lyman had not yet thought to make, the phone rang.
Immediately Judge switched into his mode of high courtesy. “If you will excuse me just a moment, sir, I must answer the telephone.” He strode to the far end of the room and promised, as he went out the door, “I will try not to be long.”
Lyman set down his sweating glass of orange juice on a rosewood end table, careless of the stain it might take. He intended to be out of the house and on the road before Judge had finished on the phone.
But as he stood up, there was another sound from behind the couch, faint as the rustling he’d heard a moment earlier, but not such a sound as any pet might make. It was a woman’s voice, which whispered a single word, “Please…”
He knelt on the edge of the seat and bent over to look into the shadowy recess behind the couch. A woman’s body was wedged into the narrow space, one arm twisted over her head and pressing the side of her face into the flowery upholstery.
Their eyes met.
“Don’t say anything,” she whispered. “He may hear. Just go…”
“Did he—”
“Now! He’s very… dangerous. Go to the police.”
“And leave you here, with him?”
“I’m safe if he thinks I’m dead.” She smiled a smile of desperate entreaty. “Please…”
“You’re his mother, aren’t you.”
In answer she only closed her eyes.
Lyman got to his feet, but before he was halfway to the door, Judge appeared and, with the quick perception of paranoia, understood the priest’s intention. He grabbed a large ceramic vase from one of the rosewood tables and hurled it at Lyman, aiming low. The bowl struck his knees and shattered.
Lyman retreated back into the living room, and Judge positioned himself some feet in front of the door.
“There’s a body behind that couch,” Lyman said. “A dead woman.”
Judge looked about for another missile.
“That’s your mother, isn’t it?” Lyman took refuge behind the wingback chair, and the second vase struck the chair’s arm without shattering.
“I am sorry,” Judge said in a normal conversational tone. “I didn’t mean things to work out this way. She just appeared, like you did. I suppose in a way it must be a sign.”
Lyman did not think he would be a match against the boy in a physical struggle. His only hope was escape, but the boy stood between him and the only way out of the room. Except the large picture window that faced the couch. If he broke the window and vaulted through it…
He took a firm hold on the back of the wingback chair, lofted it, and had begun to swing it round toward the glass when Judge’s knife struck him in the back. The chair crashed into the coffee table in front of the couch, sending up a spray of orange juice, shattering the rosewood.
Lyman, on his knees, felt the knife being drawn from his flesh, and a final flash of astonishment as the blade slid between his ribs and pierced his heart.
78
“Do you realize,” Madge marveled, “how long it’s been since I’ve had a drink? Since I’ve been drunk!” She held up the stemmed wineglass and gave a little spin to the liquor store’s most expensive French wine so that its swirling vein-red contours caught the last brightnesses of the solstice sunset and threw them back like a little liquid chandelier. Lovely. “More than two decades,” she answered herself with a sigh, “and closer to three.”
“That’s a lot of water,” Launce agreed, “that never went under the bridge.”
Madge laughed immoderately and went on to marvel at her own laughter. “And jokes! I used to joke all the time. Though Henry was the real stand-up comic. He could tell jokes all night long, one after another without repeating himself once. God, I don’t think I could remember one of those jokes now.”
“Oh, I remember one he must’ve told. It was a real popular joke in the sixties. The one about the three Jews pissing in the snow in Wisconsin was how I first heard it. A
nother time it was three Norwegian farmers. Remember?” Launce leaned forward to empty the last of the third twenty-four-dollar bottle into their glasses, filling his own right to the brim, then lifting the filled glass to his lips without a drop spilled.
“I think so. The third one spells out the president’s full name—is that the joke?”
“That’s the joke. He writes ‘Lyndon Baines Johnson—President of the United States of America’ in foot-high letters.”
Madge felt a flow of nostalgia that was also, without any contradiction, the glow of the burgundy as it smoothed its way down her throat. “I can remember Henry telling that one. We were in a bar on Snelling over toward Marshall that isn’t there anymore, and there were a bunch of us all at one table. But I can’t remember why it was funny.”
“What’s funny is that the third guy, the Jew or the farmer, the one who writes so much, has to have someone else to hold his pecker to do it.”
Madge considered this for a while and then had to ask, “Why?”
“Because he says he can piss all right but he doesn’t know how to spell.”
Madge spluttered wine joyfully all over her lemon-yellow blouse. The joy of the joke and of the blouse’s ruin were a single pleasure, which was one with the burning of the wine that had gone up her nose.
She had forgotten what it was like to be so thoroughly sloshed, the way the edges disappeared from things and at the same time their clarity deepened. The wonderful insights she’d probably forget by tomorrow. The recklessness! For what could be more reckless than having sex with someone who had ARVIDS, which Launce almost certainly did, though they’d avoided discussing it. They’d been as awkward and greedy as teenagers. Lovely.
But loveliest of all the way the sunlight gilded everything with its own beauty, the leaves on the trees and their shadows on the white siding of the house. The ant crawling along the wooden armrest of the lawn chair. The leaves that had fallen mysteriously at midsummer from the elm above them and which now decorated the unmown grass at geometric intervals. Even the blotches of the wine on the yellow of her blouse were like the blood-red speckles on the pale petals of a flower she could see in her mind’s eye though she couldn’t think of its name. Cineraria?
She laughed—not a laugh that would spill more wine but a laugh that felt like her own body’s form of sunlight, a glow deep inside.
“It wasn’t that funny,” Launce said, leaning back in the aluminum lawn chair and looking up into the leaves of the tree.
“No, I was thinking how we aren’t sinners.”
“Aren’t we? I thought we gave it a pretty good shot.”
“No, we’re still husband and wife. The Church doesn’t recognize divorce. So if we make love it’s not a sin. We’re entitled.”
“Ah, but the Church also doesn’t recognize oral sex.”
“Even if you’re married?”
“Nope. Father What’s-His-Name made that real clear. So we’re sinners, after all. If that’s what you want.”
“Well, it would make Mother feel better, I’m sure. She just about blew a gasket when she saw me kissing you on the stairs.”
“I’m amazed she’s got any gaskets left to blow.”
“Don’t look now, but I think she’s watching us through the blinds. See, where there’s that little crack?”
Launce lifted his glass to salute the crack in the venetian blinds, which instantly winked shut. “That was her all right.”
Madge giggled. “She was in such a state this morning when I came down to make breakfast.”
“It was more like noon when you made breakfast. That’s probably why she was in a state.”
“No, it wasn’t that. It was her hair.”
“What’s wrong with her hair?”
“It’s growing back. Her real hair, that is. What you’ve seen is just her wig. She had an accident at a beauty parlor years ago, and all her hair fell out, and now it’s growing back. She says the itching drives her crazy. Also it’s coming back the wrong color. Carroty red. She’s in a tizzy.”
Madge sipped the St. Emilion, and this time it had the taste of philosophy. “You know, it’s strange. It seems the best way to get anything done is to stop trying.”
“How do you mean?” he asked, and the wonderful thing was he wasn’t just being polite, he was genuinely interested in what she had to say. Madge couldn’t remember the last time anyone had paid her that particular compliment.
Out of sheer gratitude, she tried not to be vague. “For instance. At the clinic. Yesterday, and again today, I get these reports. Patients are actually getting well. One in particular, Corning, bed 38. One aide says she actually saw him smiling. Of course, you never know, sometimes you see what you hope to see. I can’t tell you how many times I could have sworn I thought I saw Ned start to say something to me. And now, the way he’s been crying… Of course, that’s possible without any kind of miracle—a speck of dust gets under his eyelid… But God, just think, if he should snap out of it after all this time. He’d be an eleven-year-old in the body of a thirty-seven-year-old man.”
Launce laughed sharply. “That’s better than being what I am—a thirty-seven-year-old man inside of this body.”
Madge smoothed his feathers: “Would you rather have the mind of an old person? Like Mother? Old people get set in their ways, they get to be like robots. Or like when they warned you as a kid how if you made a face it would freeze into that expression.” She crossed her eyes and stuck her tongue out of the corner of her mouth to show what she meant—
And at just that moment around the corner of the house came Judge Winckelmeyer, who reacted to her mugging with the most delightful double take.
Madge burst out laughing and lofted her glass and called out, “Judge! Come join us. We’re having a picnic.”
“I didn’t think you drank,” he said in a reproving tone.
“I didn’t. I couldn’t. But Launce brought home a bottle, and all of a sudden I knew I could. And I can! Isn’t that wonderful?”
“Well, no, I wouldn’t say so.”
“Oh, you would if you had some of this. Twenty-four dollars a bottle, you’re sure you’re not tempted? Just so you’ll know what kind of temptation you’ve been resisting all your life?”
The boy stood, confounded and blushing, on the narrow concrete path that bisected the lawn. He was dressed in his usual killjoy uniform of dark suit, white shirt, and black tie.
“Madge,” Launce said in a stage whisper, “don’t be a tease.”
“Launce is right, I’m being a tease. There’s some Coke in the icebox if you’d like a Coke.”
“Thank you very kindly but no.”
“Why don’t you introduce us?” Launce hinted.
“Of course, where are my manners. Launce, this is Judge Winckelmeyer. He’s the son of Judith Winckelmeyer, who is William’s stepsister in Florida, but now you’re officially Judge Michaels, yes? William adopted him when he came here, what was it, two years ago?”
Judge nodded. “I was paroled into his custody.”
“And this is Launce Hill. Launce is Ned’s father.”
“I’m pleased to make your acquaintance, sir.” He stepped across the grass and leaned forward so Launce could shake his hand without rising from his lawn chair. “I was just about to ask if I might go upstairs and say hello to Ned.” He turned to Madge. “With your permission, ma’am?”
“Of course, Judge, any time, that’s very thoughtful of you. Did you come here with Lisa? Or William? Are they in the house?”
“No, ma’am. I’m here by myself. But I expect my father to be arriving later. I said I’d meet him here.”
“That’s nice.” She sighed resignedly. “I suppose I should be getting up. It’ll be dark soon. It’s amazing we haven’t already been bitten to death by mosquitoes.”
“Don’t stir yourself on my account. I noticed that the screen door was open and I know where Ned’s room is. After I’ve seen him, I will say hello to your mother, if she is f
eeling like a visitor.”
“Well then perhaps we’ll enjoy the breeze here a little longer.”
When Judge had gone out of sight around the side of the house, and they’d heard the screen door bang closed, Launce remarked, “That’s one weird kid.”
“I was thinking myself he seemed a little strange tonight, but I suppose that’s how he usually comes across. Mother likes him.”
“It figures.”
Madge gave the wine in her glass one final swirl of admiration and drank it down. At just that moment, the lights went on behind the venetian blinds in her mother’s room.
“You remember in the sixties when we’d go to Lake Calhoun in the summer after work?”
“And rent a canoe. Oh yes, I do.”
“Do they still rent canoes there?”
“I have no idea.”
“Wouldn’t that be fun? Get another bottle—”
“We couldn’t, not with that boy in the house, and William on his way over.”
“Why not? The kid’s not going to steal anything, or murder your mother, more’s the pity.”
“Launce!”
“What’s the use of getting drunk if it doesn’t give us the excuse we need to do what we’d like to do?”
This seemed so unassailably logical that Madge could think of no reply. “You mean just drive there?”
“If you think you’re too drunk to drive, we could take the bus, like we used to.”
Madge took umbrage. “I’m not that drunk.”
Launce struggled to his feet. “Think about it. Meanwhile, if you want to plump for another bottle of vin extraordinaire, I’ll walk over to the liquor store on Pillsbury.”
“You know where my purse is.”
Launce nodded and went into the house.
The leaves of the elm made a hushing sound, and an unseen car on Calumet whooshed by in front of the house. Bats flittered out from the eaves and past the higher branches of the elm, and at that distance (and at this degree of mellowness) even the bats seemed beautiful.
THE M.D. A Horror Story Page 48
