Rivers laughed to himself as he savored the memory.
“‘You kind of get used to it,’” he repeated. “Fifty per cent of the Consolations of Philosophy in seven words. And the other fifty per cent can be expressed in six: Brother, when you’re dead, you’re dead. Or if you prefer, you can make it seven: Brother, when you’re dead, you’re not dead.”
He got up and started to mend the fire.
“Well, that was my first introduction to the Maartens family,” he said as he laid another oak log on the pile of glowing embers. “I kind of got used to everything pretty quickly. Even to the asthma. It’s remarkable how easy it is to get used to other people’s asthma. After two or three experiences I was taking Henry’s attacks as calmly as the rest of them. One moment he’d be strangling; the next he was as good as new and talking nineteen to the dozen about quantum mechanics. And he continued to repeat the performance till he was eighty-seven. Whereas I shall be lucky,” he added, giving the log a final poke, “if I go to sixty-seven. I was an athlete, you see. One of those strong-as-a-horse boys. And never a day’s illness—until, bang, comes a coronary, or whoosh go the kidneys! Meanwhile the broken reeds, like poor old Henry, go on complaining of ill health until they’re a hundred. And not merely complaining—actually suffering. Asthma, dermatitis, every variety of bellyache, inconceivable fatigues, indescribable depressions. He had a cupboard in his study and another at the laboratory, chock full of little bottles of homeopathic remedies, and he never stirred out of the house without his Rhus Tox, his Carbo Veg and Bryonia and Kali Phos. His skeptical colleagues used to laugh at him for dosing himself with medicines so prodigiously diluted that, in any given pill, there couldn’t be so much as a single molecule of the curative substance.
“But Henry was ready for them. To justify homeopathy, he had developed a whole theory of non-material fields—fields of pure energy, fields of unembodied organization. In those days it sounded preposterous. But Henry, don’t forget, was a man of genius. Those preposterous notions of his are now beginning to make sense. A few more years, and they’ll be self-evident.”
“What I’m interested in,” I said, “is the bellyaches. Did the pills work or didn’t they?”
Rivers shrugged his shoulders.
“Henry lived to eighty-seven,” he answered, as he resumed his seat.
“But wouldn’t he have lived to eighty-seven without the pills?”
“That,” said Rivers, “is a perfect example of a meaningless question. We can’t revive Henry Maartens and make him live his life over again without homeopathy. Therefore, we can never know how his self-medication was related to his longevity. And where there’s no possible operational answer, there’s no conceivable sense in the question. That’s why,” he added, “there can never be a science of history—because you can never test the truth of any of your hypotheses. Hence the ultimate irrelevance of all these books. And yet you have to read the damned things. Otherwise how can you find your way out of the chaos of immediate fact? Of course it’s the wrong way; that goes without saying. But it’s better to find even the wrong way than to be totally lost.”
“Not a very reassuring conclusion,” I ventured.
“But the best we can reach—at any rate, in our present condition.” Rivers was silent for a moment. “Well, as I say,” he resumed in another tone, “I kind of got used to Henry’s asthma, I kind of got used to all of them, to everything. So much so, indeed, that when, after a month of house hunting, I finally located a cheap and not too nasty apartment, they wouldn’t let me go. ‘Here you are,’ said Katy, ‘and here you stay.’ Old Beulah backed her up. So did Timmy and, though she was of an age and in a mood to dissent from everything anyone else approved of, so, rather grudgingly, did Ruth. Even the great man emerged for a moment from Cloud Cuckoo Land to cast a vote in favor of my staying on. That clinched it. I became a fixture; I became an honorary Maartens. It made me so happy,” Rivers went on after a pause, “that I kept thinking uneasily that there must surely be something wrong. And pretty soon I saw what it was. Happiness with the Maartenses entailed disloyalty to home. It was an admission that, all the time I lived with my mother, I had never experienced anything but constraint and a chronic sense of guilt. And now, as a member of this family of pagan strangers, I felt not merely happy, but also good, also, in an entirely unprecedented way, religious. For the first time I knew what all those words in the Epistles really meant. Grace, for example—I was chock full of grace. The newness of the spirit—it was there all the time; whereas most of what I had known with my mother was the deadening oldness of the letter. And what about First Corinthians, thirteen? What about faith, hope and charity? Well, I don’t want to boast, but I had them. Faith first of all. A redeeming faith in the universe and in my fellow man. As for the other brand of faith—that simple, Lutheran variety which my poor mother was so proud of having preserved intact, like a virginity, through all the temptations of my scientific education…” He shrugged his shoulders. “Nothing can be simpler than zero; and that, I suddenly discovered, was the simple faith I had been living by for the past ten years. At St. Louis I had the genuine article—real faith in a real good, and at the same time a hope amounting to the positive conviction that everything would always be wonderful. And along with faith and hope went an overflowing charity. How could you feel affection for someone like Henry—someone so remote that he hardly knew who you were and so self-centered that he didn’t even want to know? You couldn’t be fond of him—and yet I was, I was. I liked him not merely for the obvious reasons—because he was a great man, because working with him was like having your own intelligence and insight raised to a higher power. I even liked him outside the laboratory, for the very qualities that made it all but impossible to regard him as anything but a kind of high-class monster. I had so much charity in those days that I could have loved a crocodile; I could have loved an octopus. One reads all these fictions of the sociologists, all this learned foolery by the political scientists.” With a gesture of contemptuous exasperation Rivers slapped the backs of a row of corpulent volumes on the seventh shelf. “But actually there’s only one solution, and that’s expressible in a four-letter word, so shocking that even the Marquis de Sade was chary of using it.” He spelled it out. “L-o-v-e. Or if you prefer the decent obscurity of the learned languages, Agapē, Caritas, Mahakaruna. In those days I really knew what it meant. For the first time—yes, for the first time. That was the only disquieting feature in an otherwise blissful situation. For if this was the first time I knew what loving was, what about all the other times when I had thought I knew, what about those sixteen years of being my mother’s only consolation?”
In the ensuing pause I summoned up the memory of the Mrs. Rivers who had sometimes come, with her little Johnny, to spend a Sunday afternoon with us on the farm, nearly fifty years ago. It was a memory of black alpaca, of a pale profile like the face on Aunt Esther’s cameo brooch, of a smile whose deliberate sweetness didn’t seem to match the cool appraising eyes. The picture was associated with a chilling sense of apprehension. “Give Mrs. Rivers a big kiss.” I obeyed, but with what horrified reluctance! A phrase of Aunt Esther’s came up, detached, like a single bubble, out of the depths of the past. “That poor kid,” she had said, “he just worships his mother.” He had worshiped, yes. But had he loved her?
“Is there such a word as ‘debellishment’ ?” Rivers suddenly asked.
I shook my head.
“Well, there ought to be,” he insisted. “For that’s what I resorted to in my letters home. I recorded the facts; but I systematically debellished them. I turned a revelation into something drab and ordinary and moralistic. Why was I staying on at the Maartenses? Out of a sense of duty. Because Dr. M. couldn’t drive a car and I was able to help with the fetching and carrying. Because the children had had the misfortune to strike a pair of inadequate teachers and needed all the coaching I could give them. Because Mrs. M. had been so very kind that I felt I simply had to stay and re
lieve her of a few of her burdens. Naturally I should have preferred my privacy; but would it have been right to put my personal inclinations before their needs? And since the question was addressed to my mother, there could, of course, be only one answer. What hypocrisy, what a pack of lies! But the truth would have been much too painful for her to hear or for me to put into words. For the truth was that I had never been happy, never loved, never felt capable of spontaneous unselfishness until the day I left home and came to live with these Amalekites.”
Rivers sighed and shook his head.
“My poor mother,” he said, “I suppose I could have been kinder to her. But however kind I might have been, it wouldn’t have altered the fundamental facts—the fact that she loved me possessively, and the fact that I didn’t want to be possessed; the fact that she was alone and had lost everything, and the fact that I had my new friends; the fact that she was a proud Stoic, living in the illusion that she was a Christian, and the fact that I had lapsed into a wholesome paganism and that, whenever I could forget her—which was every day except Sundays, when I wrote her my weekly letter—I was supremely happy. Yes, supremely happy! For me, in those days, life was an eclogue interspersed with lyrics. Everything was poetry. Driving Henry to the laboratory in my second-hand Maxwell; mowing the lawn; carrying Katy’s groceries home in the rain—pure poetry. So was taking Timmy to the station to look at engines. So was taking Ruth for walks in springtime to look for caterpillars. She took a professional interest in caterpillars,” he explained, when I expressed my surprise. “It was part of the Gloom-Tomb syndrome. Caterpillars were the nearest approach, in real life, to Edgar Allan Poe.”
“To Edgar Allan Poe?”
“‘For the play is the tragedy, Man,’” he declaimed, “‘and its hero, the Conqueror Worm. In May and June the landscape was fairly crawling with Conqueror Worms.”
“Nowadays,” I reflected, “it wouldn’t be Poe. She’d be reading Spillane or one of the more sadistic comics.”
He nodded his agreement.
“Anything, however bad, provided it has some death in it. Death,” he repeated, “preferably violent, preferably in the form of guts and corruption—it’s one of the appetites of childhood. Almost as strong as the appetite for dolls or candy or playing with the genital organs. Children need death in order to get a new, disgustingly delicious kind of thrill. No, that’s not quite accurate. They need it, as they need the other things, in order to give a specific form to the thrills they already have. Can you remember how acute your sensations were, how intensely you felt about everything, when you were a child? The rapture of raspberries and cream, the horror of fish, the hell of castor oil! And the torture of having to get up and recite before the whole class! The inexpressible joy of sitting next to the driver, with the smell of horse sweat and leather in one’s nostrils, the white road stretching away to infinity, and the fields of corn and cabbages slowly turning, as the buggy rolled past, slowly opening and shutting like enormous fans! When you’re a child, your mind is a kind of saturated solution of feeling, a suspension of all the thrills—but in a latent state, in a condition of indeterminacy. Sometimes it’s external circumstances that act as the crystallizing agent, sometimes it’s your own imagination. You want some special kind of thrill, and you deliberately work away at yourself until you get it—a bright pink crystal of pleasure, for example, a green or bruise-colored lump of fear; for fear, of course, is a thrill like any other; fear is a hideous kind of fun. At twelve, I used to enjoy the fun of scaring myself with fantasies about dying, about the hell of my poor father’s Lenten sermons. And how much scareder Ruth could get than I could! Scareder at one end of the scale and more rapturously happy at the other. And that’s true, I’d say, of most young girls. Their thrill-solution is more concentrated than ours; they can fabricate more kinds of bigger and better crystals more rapidly. Needless to say, I knew nothing about young girls in those days. But Ruth was a liberal education—a bit too liberal, as it turned out later; but we’ll come to that in due course. Meanwhile, she had begun to teach me what every young man ought to know about young girls. It was a good preparation for my career as the father of three daughters.”
Rivers drank some whisky and water, put down the glass and for a little while sucked at his pipe in silence.
“There was one particularly educative week end,” he said at last, smiling to himself at the memory. “It was during my first spring with the Maartenses. We were staying at their little farmhouse in the country, ten miles west of St. Louis. After supper, on the Saturday night, Ruth and I went out to look at the stars. There was a little hill behind the house. You climbed it, and there was the whole sky from horizon to horizon. A hundred and eighty degrees of brute inexplicable mystery. It was a good place for just sitting and saying nothing. But in those days I still felt I had a duty to improve people’s minds. So instead of leaving her in peace to look at Jupiter and the Milky Way, I trotted out the stale old facts and figures—the distance in kilometers to the nearest fixed star, the diameter of the galaxy, the latest word from Mount Wilson on the spiral nebulae. Ruth listened, but her mind wasn’t improved. Instead, she went into a kind of metaphysical panic. Such spaces, such durations, so many worlds beyond improbable worlds! And here we were, in the face of infinity and eternity, bothering our heads about science and housekeeping and being on time, about the color of hair ribbons and the weekly grades in algebra and Latin grammar! Then, in the little wood beyond the hill, an owl began calling, and at once the metaphysical panic turned into something physical—physical but at the same time occult; for this creeping at the pit of the stomach was due to the superstition that owls are wizard birds, bringers of bad luck, harbingers of death. She knew, of course, that it was all nonsense; but how transporting it was to think and act as though it were true! I tried to laugh her out of it; but Ruth wanted to feel scared and was ready to rationalize and justify her fears. ‘One of the girls in my class’s grandmother died last year,’ she told me, ‘And that night there was an owl in the garden. Right in the middle of St. Louis, where there never are any owls.’ As if to confirm her story, there was another burst of distant hooting. The child shuddered and took my arm. We started to walk down the hill in the direction of the wood. ‘It would absolutely kill me if I was alone,’ she said. And then, a moment later, ‘Did you ever read The Fall of the House of Usher?’ It was evident that she wanted to tell me the story; so I said, No, I hadn’t read it. She began. ‘It’s about a brother and sister called Usher, and they lived in a kind of castle with a black and livid tarn in front of it, and there are funguses on the walls, and the brother is called Roderick and he has such a fervid imagination that he can make up poetry without stopping to think, and he’s dark and handsome and has very large eyes and a delicate Hebrew nose, just like his twin sister, who’s called Lady Madeline, and they’re both very ill with a mysterious nervous complaint and she’s liable to go into cataleptic fits…’ And so the narrative proceeded—a snatch of remembered Poe, and then a gush of junior high school dialect of the nineteen twenties—as we walked down the grassy slope under the stars. And now we were on the road and moving toward the dark wall of woodland. Meanwhile poor Lady Madeline had died and young Mr. Usher was roaming about among the tapestries and the fungi in a state of incipient lunacy. And no wonder! ‘For said I not that my senses were acute?’ Ruth declaimed in a thrilling whisper. ‘I now tell you that I heard her first feeble movements in the hollow coffin. I heard them many, many days ago.’ Around us the darkness had deepened and suddenly the trees closed over us and we were engulfed in the double night of the wood. Overhead, in the roof of foliage, there was an occasional jagged gleam of a paler, bluer darkness and on either side the tunnel walls opened here and there into mysterious crevices of dim gray crape and blackened silver. And what a moldy smell of decay! What a damp chill against the cheek! It was as though Poe’s fancy had turned into sepulchral fact. We had stepped, so it seemed, into the Ushers’ family vault. ‘And then suddenly
,’ Ruth was saying, ‘suddenly there was a kind of terrific bang, like when you drop a tray on a stone floor, but sort of muffled, like it was a long way underground, because, you see, there was a huge cellar under the house where all the family was buried. And a minute later there she was at the door—the lofty and enshrouded figure of the Lady Madeline of Usher. And there was blood on her white robes, because she’d been struggling for a whole week to get out of the casket, because of course she’d been buried alive. Lots of people are,’ Ruth explained. ‘That’s why they advise you to put it in your will—don’t bury me until you’ve touched the soles of my feet with a red-hot iron. If I don’t wake up, it’s O.K. and you can go ahead with the funeral. They hadn’t done that with the Lady Madeline, and she was just in a cataleptic fit, till she woke up in the coffin. And Roderick had heard her all those days, but for some reason he hadn’t said anything about it. And now here she was, all in white, with blood on her, reeling to and fro on the threshold, and then she gave the most frightened shriek and fell on top of him, and he shrieked too and…’ But at this moment there was a loud commotion in the invisible undergrowth. Black in the blackness, something enormous emerged on to the road just in front of us. Ruth’s scream was as loud as Madeline’s and Roderick’s combined. She clutched my arm, she hid her face against the sleeve. The apparition snorted. Ruth screamed again. There was another snort, then the clatter of retreating hoofs. ‘It’s only a stray horse,’ I said. But her knees had given way and, if I hadn’t caught her and lowered her gently to the ground, she would have fallen. There was a long silence. ‘When you’ve had enough of sitting in the dust,’ I said ironically, ‘maybe we can go on.’ ‘What would you have done if it had been a ghost?’ she asked at last. ‘I’d have run away and not come back till it was all over.’ ‘What do you mean “all over”?’ she asked. ‘Well, you know what happens to people who meet ghosts,’ I answered. ‘Either they die of fright on the spot, or else their hair turns white and they go mad.’ But instead of laughing, as I had meant her to do, Ruth said I was a beast and burst into tears. That dark clot, which the horse and Poe and her own fancy had crystallized out of her solution of feeling, was too precious a thing to be lightly parted with. You know those enormous lollipops on sticks that children lick at all day long? Well, that’s what her fear was—an all-day sucker; and she wanted to make the most of it, to go on sucking and sucking to the deliciously bitter end. It took me the best part of half an hour to get her on her feet again and in her right mind. It was after her bedtime when we got home and Ruth went straight to her room. I was afraid she’d have nightmares. Not at all. She slept like a top and came down to breakfast next morning as gay as a lark. But a lark that had read her Poe, a lark that was still interested in worms. After breakfast we went out caterpillar hunting and found something really stupendous—a big hawk-moth larva, with green and white markings and a horn on its rear end. Ruth poked it with a straw and the poor thing curled itself first one way, then the other, in a paroxysm of impotent rage and fear. ‘It writhes, it writhes,’ she chanted exultantly; ‘with mortal pangs the mimes become its food, and the angels sob at vermin fangs with human blood imbued.’ But this time the fear-crystal was no bigger than a diamond on a twenty-dollar engagement ring. The thought of death and corruption which she had savored, the previous night, for the sake of its own intrinsic bitterness, was now a mere condiment, a spice to heighten the taste of life, and make it more intoxicating. ‘ “Vermin fangs,” ’ she repeated, and gave the green worm another poke, ‘ “Vermin fangs…” ’ And in an overflow of high spirits she began to sing ‘If you were the only girl in the world’ at the top of her voice. Incidentally,” Rivers added, “how significant it is that that disgusting song should crop up as a by-product of every major massacre! It was invented in World War I, revived in World War II and was still being sporadically warbled while the slaughter was going on in Korea. The last word in sentimentality accompanies the last words in Machiavellian power politics and indiscriminate violence. Is that something to be thankful for? Or is it something to deepen one’s despair about the human race? I really don’t know—do you?”