A Tidewater Morning (12 page)

There was a pause. “I hate your abominable religion!” He halted again, then resumed more gently: “You both have been nothing but decent to me. I wish I’d gotten to know you better. But now I’d appreciate it if you all would leave this house. Do refresh yourself with a drink, though, beforehand. We can talk about other matters. I know you’re a baseball fan, Doctor. Who’s got the National League pennant this year?”

The silence was complete. The minister and his wife were not only struck dumb but made stiff, remaining motionless where they sat. While Papa had spoken, I had lingered at the edge of the lawn, at curbside, next to the sheriff’s quiet zone sign that had been put up a couple of weeks before. Now when Papa fell silent I moved away from the sign, out of the cool octagon of its shade, and walked across the lawn to the house. Yet I dared not yet go in. I hung back on the small front porch, watching the trio in the living room. Glimpsed in the morning shadows, they were like effigies: Papa, in his shirtsleeves, leaning against the mantelpiece with a drink in his hand, frowning down at the floor; on the sofa Dr. Taliaferro, looking as if he had seen the devil, a werewolf, a rabid bat; his wife seated next to him, her eyes seeking immediate rescue, holding an indrawn breath while her lips described an almost perfect round voiceless “O!”

Finally the minister spoke with a curious wheeze, without strength. “You’ve been a steadfast and dedicated man, Jeff. How can you say all this? Why?”

“Because I
execrate
God, if he exists.”

There was an aspirated hiss of air from Mrs. Taliaferro. I heard her whisper: “Oh, please, God.”

“Jeff!” exclaimed Dr. Taliaferro. “Oh, Jeff!”

“Please, God,” his wife whispered again.

“Nor do I have faith in his only begotten son, our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ.”

“Oh, no,” came the wife’s whisper again.

“Jeff. Jeff. Jeff.” I saw the minister tremble.

After a moment Papa spoke slowly. “An hour or so ago when that jewel whom you met, Miss Slocum, awoke me to tell me that Adelaide had fallen into a coma, I felt the greatest relief I've ever known. For several years there hasn’t been a day when she hasn’t felt pain. For the past few weeks that pain has been excruciating, despite the analgesics that modern medicine has designed to quell suffering like hers. And for the last few days that pain …” He halted, passed his fingers over his brow, went on: “What can I say? I never knew it was possible for a human being to endure such torture. There hasn’t been an hour during this past weekend when I haven’t longed to have a gun so I could put her out of all that.”

“Oh, God,” I heard Mrs. Taliaferro breathe.

“If the Lord giveth, which I heard you say at a funeral not too long ago, and if the Lord taketh away, which I also heard you proclaim with such sturdy acceptance, is not the Lord accountable for what happens in the time between the giving and the taking? Is he not, I ask you, accountable for Addy’s monstrous suffering?
Cursed
be the name of the Lord!”

“Please!” I heard Mrs. Taliaferro’s small, wild wail. “No more!” She was recoiling from my father now, recoiling back against the pillows of the chair as if from a reptile. “I can’t bear this!”

Dr. Taliaferro rose, put forth a hand. “Jeff, you're distraught! Please try not to say any more right now! For the love of God, no more blasphemy!”

Miserable, I wanted to stop my father—not for what he was saying but for fear he might become unpinned and fly out into space. But I didn’t know what to do. I couldn’t interrupt, yet neither could I stay to hear more. I was suddenly washed over by shivery fatigue, and I still felt a sandy clamminess from my swim. I longed to go upstairs and fall into bed, but for some reason I shrank from making my presence known in the midst of this hysteric ruckus. So I decided to walk somewhere until the Taliaferros left, and had already made a move to sneak away from the porch when my father’s voice—overlaid by a vaguely ominous accent I had seldom heard except when alcohol unlatched the closet where he stored his demons—jolted me, arrested me in mid-step, turned me like a top. For an instant I thought he had begun to clutch the lapels of Dr. Taliaferro’s beige Palm Beach suit. But my eyes were tricked. He had drawn so close to the minister, though—face to face—that I felt that they were surely exchanging breaths, and I saw a trickle from my father’s drink slide slowly down his wrist, leaking drop by drop onto the immaculate beige sleeve. I thought: That preacher looks like he’s going to pass out.

“Dr. Taliaferro, are you acquainted with Arthur Schopenhauer?” Papa said.

“Yes—yes,” the minister stammered, “I believe so. An atheistic philosopher. I heard about him when I was studying at the seminary, years ago.”

“Lucretius? Voltaire? Montaigne? Bertrand Russell? Nietzsche?”

“Yes. All atheists. Especially that last fellow.”

“I only want to say this, Doctor, before I ask you once again to leave. I want to say that during the eight or ten years that I’ve served as one of your deacons I’ve spent countless hours upstairs in the little cubicle I call my study reading the words of these men. I’m a poorly educated person, trained for engineering, but I’ve wrestled with these thinkers, trying to puzzle out their understanding of human existence. I’ve learned to read a little French, and German fairly well, that’s how much some of these men have meant to me. Not a one of them really offers much hope for mankind; they see the course of human destiny as an inexplicable one full of strife and suffering. Or filled with random vicious energies utilized mainly to stave off boredom. A wretched view. But this is the truth as they’ve seen it. Ha!”

Papa faltered for a moment, took a sip of his drink, and then, still glaring at the minister, said: “Meanwhile your deacon here with the twinkly eyes has been helping to officiate at Holy Communion, passing up the aisles with little lozenges of Wonder bread and thimble-fuls of Welch’s grape juice in the service of the Lord’s Supper, although if truth really be known, my only anticipated pleasure, really, was to eye the bare knees of a few of the prettiest members of the congregation. You have no idea, Dr. Taliaferro, how carelessly provocative have been the possessors of some of those knees. Absolutely true, Delphine.” He cast a glance at Mrs. Taliaferro, whose face was as bloodless as a peeled potato, rigid, and rather wild-eyed. “But when not up to such skullduggery,” he went on, “I have been tormented by perpetual doubt. I have so often questioned my own integrity, wondering how a man of my skepticism could serve an institution and subscribe to a belief that offers such false promises of bliss, here now and in the hereafter. Now I have no more doubt about my doubt. In the incomprehensibility of my wife’s agony I have found a terrible answer of sorts. If there is a God, he cares nothing for humankind. I will not believe in such a God! If such a God exists, then I abominate him! Please go away now. I must go upstairs and be with Addy.”

“Jeff, oh, Jeff,” the minister exclaimed, “you’re not the first Christian to doubt God’s wisdom and the inscrutable mystery of his ways in the face of bitter grief. But always there is this wondrous return to faith—”

“Enough!” my father cried. “Enough! Please get the hell out of here! Vain and silly quack anyway!” The glass fell from between his fingers and soundlessly collided with the carpet, missing by a hair one of Dr. Taliaferro’s brown-and-white wing-tip shoes. “Nietzsche said it in a word about men like you. You make me want to wash my hands!”

I fled. I fled running at top speed. Anything to get away from that discord. I ran in a seizure of fright, wanting to escape from the little house that I loved, shrouded with its dark calamity. I ran down a sycamoreshaded street, listening to the
pop-pop
of my sneakers against the sidewalk, running in the windless heat until the heat itself, thick as fur, slowed me down to a listless walk. The village was coming awake. Those sentinel radios had begun to blare from the open windows. I heard hallelujahs as some evangelist got down to work. The air was starting to bloom with the Sabbath’s twitter and cacophony—Sunday school choruses, pipe organs, Baptist hymns, the croon of preachers. I scuffed along aimlessly up one light-dappled street, then down another, a somnambulist; never had I felt so tired. As they did every Sunday, Flying Fortresses in formation from the Army airfield droned low over the village, the engines a massed mutter at first, then swelling into a racket that hurt the eardrums, deafened. For a long moment the planes darkened the sun and the sycamores quivered beneath a torrent of vibrations. I stopped and stood still, peering upward through the shadows cast by the wings, waiting for the flight to pass. In a quick hallucination, vivid and unalarming, I saw the planes transformed: a flock of Nazi bombers dumping their cargo over the village, then vanishing like birds.

I’m not teasing, Jeff You will want to marry someone like Martha Flanders. She’s a great beauty.

Not as beautiful as thee, my darling. But let’s not talk about that
—

She has an eye for you, I know. She has gorgeous legs. I've seen her in a bathing suit A very naughty divorcee. I’m sure she’s going to want you.

Addy, dear, let’s not talk about that

I resumed walking and saw Bruce Watkins coming down the far side of the street, a fishing pole over his shoulder. He had changed from his paper-route trousers into swim trunks and T-shirt, and his face had a look of worry.

“Hellfire, Paul!” he said. “Where you been? Old Man Quigley’s about off his rocker trying to figure out where you went to.”

“I don’t care,” I answered.

“What happened?”

“Nothing,” I said. “I got tired.”

“What happened to your papers?”

When I didn’t reply and walked on, Bruce said: “Old Man Quigley’s in a real fit. First he was mad, then he got kind of scared. He was saying, ‘Think of the hell to pay, one of my employees gets kidnapped—’ ”

“I don’t care,” I said. I turned around. Something impelled me homeward. Bruce called to me again, but I didn’t hear the words. His cry trailed me through the phantasmagoria of the morning, a landscape made more strange because of my jittery exhaustion and my scratchy, unfocused eyes, which changed the known into the bizarre: a spaniel panting on a stoop into a leering zoo carnivore, flower beds into a blur of Technicolor, lawn sprinklers into grandiose fountains. Once in my near-trance I stumped my toe against the sidewalk’s upthrust warp and came close to sprawling on the grass.

Then, just as I reached the house and took a step onto the lawn, I heard my mother singing. I stopped. Chill after chill coursed through me at the sound of that anthem, soaring clear and jubilant in the still air, undiminished in strength and certitude, incantatory as ever in the way it voiced its utterance of loving praise. Mother is going to live, I thought feverishly. She’s risen from bed. She’s singing. She’s going to be well like Florence said she’d be.

Ist auf deinem Psalter, Vater der Lie-be
…

Yet the moment of astonishing joy into which I had been freed was, like the voice itself, an illusion, and this I realized almost immediately, sensing the foolishness of my expectation and the mistake. For why would a chorus of men be accompanying my mother, as it was now, and an orchestra too? Hope evaporated, disappeared. I went into the house, passed through the living room and down the hallway to my mother’s sanctuary, from which the music was coming, and then heard the familiar
tick-tick
of the worn record, spinning on the turntable of the phonograph. I crept into the music room, trying to make no sound. There my father stood with a hand propped against the wall, brooding on the sun-drenched lawn and the flower beds while the steel needle tracked its way across the sizzling shellac grooves and let the room fill with this final passage of Brahms, turned up to the highest volume, so that the hymnal sonorities of the music, enveloping all—the busts of Schubert and Brahms and Beethoven, the portraits of the great virtuosi, the image of my mother herself, captured in a flicker of bygone merriment—shook me again with such ferocity that for an instant I thought I could see her there, seated at the piano by the window, her voice raised exultantly as it had been long before. But then the record came to an end and Papa removed the needle.

“Paul, son,” he said, “where have you been? You look so tired. You all right? Do you have a fever? You must go to sleep.”

“I was staying down at the pier, Papa,” I replied. “I didn’t want to come home right away.”

“Yesterday she wanted me to play this for her,” he explained, “but I couldn’t. I guess I forgot. I wanted to play it for her anyway. It’s Lotte Lehmann. Her favorite singer, you know.” His voice was clotted with the feeble huskiness of immense fatigue. He tottered and he raised his twitching fingers to his face, alarming me. But then he ran his fingers nervously over his lips as I had seen him do before in these seizures, a pantomime both sly and clumsy, trying to mask the odor of alcohol. He shouldn’t be drinking, I thought again, even now in all of this. Dreading such moments as I did, I shrank from him not through any threat or fear of disorder but because in his new disguise, that of a stranger, he was unpredictable and unfatherly, a freak. And at that instant, as if to demonstrate the outlandish behavior that cowed me and made me want to flee him, he fell to his knees on the floor in front of me and crooked his arm around my waist, pulling me close and pressing his head against my shoulder. The impetuous, almost savage, embrace—his furious gust of emotion—took me off guard and made me give an inward groan. Kneeling, he clung to me as a drowning man would, and for long seconds he felt as if he might pull me down; but then he let go of me, and in the buoyant release I drew back and beheld his rage and pain.

“Paul, son,” he blurted, too loud, “remember this morning! Remember what I have to say! Remember this morning!” And once more he grasped me tightly.

Numb with despair, I could say nothing.

“Repeat these words after me. Are you listening?
Although earth’s foundations crumble and the mountains be shaken into the midst of the seas
... Are you listening? Say them after me!”