Let Me Count the Ways: A Novel

by De Vries, Peter

  What I thought was that he had probably just caught his death in the healing waters. Because forget your picture of a natural rustic spring in which pilgrims go to bathe. The water is now piped through the Grotto wall to a row of brass faucets in a bath house, where you queue up and are herded through by attendants passing out loin cloths which you slap around your naked middle prior to being grasped under the armpits by a couple of other devout muscle men and dipped backwards to your mouth and nose in freezing mountain water. You dress again sopping wet—no towels are provided—and leave. No cures are needed to prove supernatural intervention here: just not getting sick is miracle enough. That water sloshing perpetually around on the floor is never disinfected. Yet people not only immerse themselves in it but sometimes for extra measure scoop up a handful and drink it—with no harmful results. Tom changed all that. If that was it. We don’t know for sure what went on, but anyway it seemed he was to break new ground—or they would soon be breaking it for our poor Tom, judging by the look of him. He was green as well as hot.

  “The doctor is on his way,” I told him.

  “How about a priest?”

  “Oh, cut it out. Don’t act like a damn fool. Its probably something you ate.”

  Because not only are the baths modernized—the town itself is commercialized. So that besides the inevitable little shops selling religious articles the way they sell maple sugar in Vermont and alligator lamps in Florida, there are restaurants and wayside stands serving nothing better than the hamburgers and hotdogs you’d get in a similar tourist center in the U.S.A. None of this matters of course. What matters are the attested cures, on which the church itself keeps a strict and scientific eye and no nonsense. My description of the baths you know to be first-hand. You probably want my reaction to it too while I’m at it.

  Well, it’s an experience quite unlike anything you can imagine anywhere else. The chief sensation is not being submerged in water as such so much as in a terrific unifying emotion shared with a lot of other half-naked strangers you never saw before and will never see again. Its a profound feeling of being anonymous, or merging your little ego in a mystery that makes your own identity unimportant—or that elevates it to importance, whichever way you want to look at it. But I don’t want to go into all that here. I just want to add that I also experienced with Tom a few of those lousy French hashhouses, so I was relieved to find some digestive symptoms develop that collaborated my theory it was probably something he ate—if it wasn’t the water he drank.

  The doctor, who could talk a smattering of English, agreed it might be food poisoning, though the high fever and other symptoms pointed to something else, possibly a virus. He dosed Tom with something or other and told him to stay in bed. A caution hardly necessary, he couldn’t get up. Four days later he was still there, and getting worse, so I called the doctor back. He took some blood specimens for tests. None of them showed anything. It was very strange. This doctor was something of a gossip, and the story soon got around about a mysterious ailment striking one of the pilgrims, and one evening a priest did show up with the doctor. They were cronies.

  This priest was a plump, red-faced man, and the most cheerful and worldly character I ever met. Someone said he was straight out of Balzac. I’m not sure where thats located, but probably a town near by there. Forget what you hear about how you can always find someone who can speak fluid English everywhere you go. Its not true. But thank God this priest could, not that I could follow him much better than if he was talking French.

  “It’s undoubtedly psychosomatic in origin,” he said, kind of playfully poking Tom in the ribs. He sat on the bed kidding him about it. “That would seem to be since none of your symptoms are chemically verifiable. Yes, obviously psychogenic, the product of some deep emotional disturbance.”

  “Isn’t that in itself mysterious?” Tom says from the bed in his weak condition.

  “Tush tush. We are not going to canonize you yet. You need something to eat. We will have a little something sent up, the roast chicken perhaps, and a bottle of the white Burgundy they have here. It’s quite excellent.”

  “I’m not hungry.”

  “Well, your poor father is, and so are the doctor and I. And meanwhile my advice to all you Americans is, stop punishing yourselves. Leave that to God. He’s so much better at it.”

  The fever went down, but most of the other symptoms remained, with the addition of a sore throat and some mouth sores that broke out. Tom got weaker. The doctor came back, with the priest, around lunchtime again. We had some fish sent up and another bottle of the white Burgundy. Tom didn’t eat much and neither did the doctor, but the priest and me tied another one on. He carried his glass to the bed and sat down on it to cheer Tom up.

  “The Pope is interested in your case,” he said, digging him in the ribs. “It’s just what the church needs. These cures get to be a little tiresome. What we need is a miraculous affliction. We’ll get you on the Calendar yet.” Some of them priests sure can be worldly Joes. You have to give them credit.

  Still it seemed to me this one wasn’t quite as jolly as the last time. He seemed to be trying to hide his anxiety for Tom’s sake. It was then that we moved him to the hospital, where he could better be put under observation. X-rays were taken that showed nothing. Other tests drew blanks too. At this point the priest suggested that the local vet be called in.

  I gave him a look of mingled incredulity and disbelief. “Is nothing sacred to you, Father?”

  “There is a disease of sheep—and goats—called ecthyma,” he said. “It has occasionally been known to affect human beings. It is highly contagious. One of the symptoms is a sore mouth. These lesions he has apparently got. I once saw them on a sheep of a parishioner of mine. It is worth giving a try, nest pa?”

  We gave it a try, and drew another blank. It turned out the priest was right about the complaint though. I got a little more confidence in him, and let him talk. He was obviously only too eager to get his teeth into the situation.

  “With everything organic ruled out, at least to the best of our poor human knowledge, the likelihood persists that he is suffering from some sort of trauma. An emotional upset. You say he’s married. Where is his wife? Why is she not traveling with him instead of his father?”

  I decided to get Marion on the transatlantic telephone. The connection was a poor one, but her consternation came through over the wire clear enough.

  “You mean he’s taken sick at Lourdes?”

  “As a dog. They can’t explain it. It baffles medical science. There’s got to be some other explanation they think. I wish you was here.”

  I described some of the symptoms. Then there was a silence, except for a long exhale at the other end, as of someone exasperated about something. Then she said, “What about temperature? Does he have any fever?”

  “Yes. It keeps coming and going. It’s up to a hundred and two and a half now again.”

  “I’ll be out on the first plane I can get.”

  Marion arrived two days later. I let her go in to see Tom alone. He was as white as he could be, and getting whiter. She was with him a good hour. I had no idea what went on between them. I knew by now something was amiss. On the way over from the hotel, she had let drop that they had had some kind of trouble—a surprise to me I can tell you, as those things often are. Though I should of tumbled that his going off alone on this Sabbatical had its disturbing side. But Marion looked in good enough spirits when she come out of the room. She said she wanted to go out for a bite to eat and to talk.

  “Now I want you to tell me everything that happened since you left home, and even before, for that matter,” Marion said. “Leave out nothing. I mean nothing. Did he eat pastrami at some delicatessen. Have you been in a room that was painted recently. Sprayed for insects. I once had a classmate with a toxic condition that they finally traced to some cosmetic she was using. Has he cut his finger. Could it be a tick. Anything. But it’s got to be something. It’s got to have some natural
explanation. It doesn’t seem to be viral, so it’s got to be toxic. Now you go ahead and talk. Tell me everything that’s happened and leave out nothing, no matter how trivial or ridiculous it may seem.”

  I rambled on for a good hour. I told her everything we’d done and every place we’d been since climbing into the limousine for the trip to the Chicago airport. Nothing I could recollect suggested anything. Not that that in itself meant anything. If you were bitten by a tick in the south of France how would you know it?

  Nothing came of my night thoughts neither. Marion and I had breakfast at which she again picked my brains, then the same kind of session at lunch at a very good restaurant. Eating my food I felt sorry for Tom, and said so. “Wonder what he’s having back at the hospital,” I said, “and whether he can eat all right with that tooth of his.”

  “Tooth? What tooth?”

  So I related a filling that had fallen out of his molar the night before we sailed, in New York. There was no chance to have a dentist take care of it, and he didn’t want to trust a ship’s dentist, if any. He remembered a friend who had patched himself up in similar circumstances by going into a Rexall Drug Store and simply buying a bottle of good old plain everyday glue. That did the trick so well that the friend didn’t need a dentist till it was time for his regular checkup. The filling stayed right in. Tom decided on the same kind of do-it-yourself.

  “What kind of glue did he use?”

  “Oh, some kind of model airplane glue he picked up in a store in the hotel arcade.”

  “The kind it’s dangerous even to sniff?”

  She got him out of bed and to a local dentist, who took the filling out, cleaned the cavity and refilled it properly. The next day he was feeling a good deal better. But Tom’s story was—he’d been beginning to perk up before he went to the dentist, or he’d never been able to drag himself out.

  So there you have it. The upshot of it is that the issue has remained forever in doubt. Would he of continued to improve if the tooth hadn’t been taken care of? And if he had, what would that prove? Was the toxicity wearing off of its own accord, or he beginning to develop a resistance to it? Was toxicity the basic cause? The doctor we had called said it could be, another we asked doubted it, a third shrugged. The priest was completely skeptical. He said the glue probably had something in it that was poisoning him, and that was that as far as he was concerned, a man of faith.

  Marion prefers to let Tom think he was singled out for some mysterious affliction “somewhere on the shadowy border between mind and body,” as he put it, because it’s good for him to think so for a variety of complex reasons she doesn’t even want to go into. That he got sick from drinking the curative waters he rejects—that would be a naturalistic explanation. I’ve heard the word allergy used. To what? Something he ate or something that was eating him? He seemed to me to pick up damn fast at the sight of Marion. But if you then begin fiddling with the idea that his symptoms were concocted to fetch her, you are then faced with having to explain how an organism can behave in such a miraculously complicated fashion—which leaves you back where you started.

  My own principle is never to look a gift horse in the mouth. I went on to Poland, but Tom insisted on flying back with Marion. Which was just as well. I didn’t know what shape they were in, but it looked good on the surface. And it looked good when I got back home after a tour of parental birthplaces and visits to Warsaw and Cracow. Like I say, Tom prefers not to talk about it, but once in a while the subject comes up and he’ll quote something, like Hamlet to the effect that there are more things in heaven and earth than we dream in our philosophies. Or a poet I never heard of named Ezra Pound. The lines from him that Tom likes to quote are:

  For God, our God is a gallant foe that playeth behind the veil. Whom God deigns not to overthrow hath need of triple mail.

  Whatever that means. We get two deliveries a day, which seems enough for anybody, and what thats got to do with it I don’t know, like I say. Not that those two claim to understand quite what they’re talking about half the time either, with all their education. But its better left that way. Open. Maybe the whole thing is neurotic, maybe true faith. Certainly its better than Nothingness. Oh give us the hand of God, if only the back of it. That general idea. But in the end you do get weary of trying to dope things out that you can’t. Then we cry with Shakespeare, “For God’s sake leave us sit upon the ground and tell sad stories of the death of kings.” That’ll do it for a while. Then back you come to flogging your brain over matters again.

  If you want my final opinion on the mystery of life and all that, I can give it to you in a nutshell. The universe is like a safe to which there is a combination. But the combination is locked up in the safe.

  About the Author

  Peter De Vries (1910–1993) was born in Chicago to Dutch immigrant parents. His father wanted him to join the clergy, but after attending Calvin College and Northwestern University, De Vries found work as a vending-machine operator, a toffee-apple salesman, a radio actor, and an editor at Poetry magazine. His friend and mentor James Thurber brought him to the attention of the New Yorker, and in 1944 De Vries moved to New York to become a regular staff contributor to the magazine, where he worked for the next forty years.

  A prolific author of novels, short stories, parodies, poetry, and essays, he published twenty-seven books during his lifetime and was heralded by Kingsley Amis as the “funniest serious writer to be found either side of the Atlantic.” De Vries was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1983, taking his place alongside Mark Twain, Dorothy Parker, and S. J. Perelman as one of the nation’s greatest wits.

  All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright 1965 by Peter De Vries

  Cover design by Mauricio Diaz

  ISBN: 978-1-4976-6968-0

  This edition published in 2014 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.

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