Letting Go (82 page)

“Now this is quite a case we’re dealing with. This is strictly a case of morality …” The dining room, situated in a turret that extended off the old house, was alive with sunlight. The house itself had belonged, years ago, to a Sag Harbor whaling captain; it still was filled with objects from all parts of the world, many of them worn and chipped and frazzled, but as the doctor had told his fiancée, full of warmth and feeling. The pictures on the walls, old fishing scenes and nautical maps of the Sound, could hardly be seen for the strong light that bounced off the glass that encased them. Fay was holding a match to a cigarette that she had placed in her ivory holder. She looked nothing less than aristocratic in the surroundings, especially with the holder, which the doctor had bought for her because he believed it gave her substance. Gabe, in white trousers and a blue polo shirt, was settled back in his chair sipping coffee.

Breakfast had been a success—except that Dr. Wallach still had to do most of the talking. Fay, of course, had been busy serving, and Gabe had been busy eating. But now, with second cups of coffee on the table, the doctor felt the time had come to draw them out. The sparkle of the brass coffee pot, the light on the rosewood dining chairs, Fay’s ivory holder between her lips, Gabe’s crisp summery good looks, even the simple fact that his son’s hair was still damp, made Dr. Wallach feel more optimistic about his family situation than he had in a long while. When he reached up to scratch his nose, he could smell the salt from the sea on the back of his hand; this too produced hope and excitement in him.

“Here,” Dr. Wallach said, “is a man of no little education—” He was laying out his silverware as though each piece were the term in a syllogism. Hopeful as he was, he couldn’t keep his hands still. “A physician, a man of the community, a respected person—no doubt a man of means. Let’s say, for the sake of argument, not rich, but comfortable. He has what he wants, and then a little bit more. All that, and yet he takes his life and jeopardizes it. Now what will this poor fellow’s fate be? What was he up to? Was he right or was he wrong?”

Fay nodded; he supposed she thought he would now proceed to answer his own question. She continued with her smoking.

“Fay?” he said.

“Yes?”

“What do you think about this?”

“Well … it’s a very interesting predicament.”

It did not please him to hear her use a phrase that was a favorite of his own. But agreeably he said, “It certainly is.” He smoothed the edge of the white tablecloth. Then to be dramatic, to shake them up a little, he slapped the table so hard that the silverware jumped. Of late he was getting rather a kick out of thinking of himself as someone who was an unpredictable conversationalist. “What do you think, Professor?” He looked over at his son, who, thank goodness, was smiling. He could not say that the boy was not trying to be amiable. “Place yourself in the fellow’s circumstances. The child is brought to you near death. I won’t go into the medical nomenclature—the child simply needs a transfusion, that’s the gist of it. The parents are Seventh Day Adventists. They tell you they cannot allow the child a transfusion. You tell them the child will die without it. They say they do not believe in eating blood.”

There was a flicker of his son’s eyes toward the window. Bored? Did he want to go already? Or was he just back to his own problems? Well, what kind of problems could they be? Young, in good health, a respected position—what kind of problem was it to be at the very
brink
of everything?

“But, Mordecai”—Fay was shaking her head—“excuse me, but the child would take the blood in the veins. That’s not the same thing at all.”

“Ah-
ha
,” said Dr. Wallach. Irritation with his son faded as he felt a fish at the end of his line. Real interest had at last come swimming up out of a sea of silence—as expected. The little news item in the second section of the
Times
had caught his imagination, and he knew it could not help but do the same with the others. Though he had read it while Gabe was showering and Fay was beating the eggs, he had saved it until breakfast was over, so that they could converse without the distraction of food. Now for a good old-fashioned family discussion … “Ah-ha,” he said, “but we are enlightened, we are students of the eighteenth century.”

“Yes,” Mrs. Silberman said.

“You’re talking about reason, Fay, intelligence. But to them,” the doctor pointed out, “a transfusion is eating blood. Now, once again, what’s the answer?”

He tapped his fork on his plate. “Gabe? Fay?”

Gabe only shrugged and smiled. Something distressing moved across the doctor’s consciousness: was he being patronized?

“Education,” Fay announced. “There’s an area where we could certainly learn something from the Russians.”

Disappointed, the doctor could nevertheless not help but be braced by her good will. She was going to flatter his son. All right. At least her interest had moved beyond the question of his posture.

“Well, perhaps,” Dr. Wallach said. “But I don’t know that you’re quite on the point. You’re not a teacher, you see, you’re a doctor. What do you do? Does he respect what the people want, or does he give them what they don’t want, what
he
thinks is best for them? Gabe, go ahead. You’re an intellectual person—this is an exercise of the intellect, I’d say. I’m interested in differing opinions on this subject.”

“Yes, I’d like to hear his thinking on this too,” Fay said. “The academic approach.”

“Well,” Gabe said.

“Your honest opinion,” said the doctor, excited.

“Well, I think it could probably be explained to them—”

“You see, Mordecai,” Fay said, “edu
ca
tion—”

“Shhh …” he said.

Gabe started again. “I think it could probably be explained to the parents. That is, the doctor could make a distinction for them—”

“Go ahead, go ahead,” Dr. Wallach said, “very interesting this distinction business.”

“That there are rules on the one hand, but that there’s the essence of the religion too. That the rules can be suspended sometimes in the name of what’s most essential. The child’s life, living, is more crucial than the breaking of the commandment, or the law, not to eat blood.”

Dr. Wallach saw Mrs. Silberman clicking her tongue. He did not know whether to interrupt before she said something not quite worthy of herself, or to let the conversation he had worked so to initiate, go its own way. He tried relaxing as she said, “Well, I just can’t see it. I mean they are
not
eating blood. I can’t agree to that. A transfusion just isn’t eating blood, not to my way of thinking.”

Gabe mumbled something and turned his attention back to his coffee cup.

“Wait a minute, just a minute,” the doctor rushed in. “This isn’t a dispute. Actually I don’t think that’s quite the point Gabe was making, Fay. If I have it right, Gabe, what you’re saying—”

“We just disagree, I suppose,” she said with a tinkly laugh. “Because to me, you see, you can’t even begin to call a blood transfusion eating blood. Our veins are one thing, and our mouths another.”

Gabe simply sighed.

“Please,” said Fay, waving a hand and turning to face him, “I’m not asking you to give in. Everybody’s entitled to their own opinion.”

“True,” the young man said.

Oh no—was Fay going to carry a grudge? The boy no longer objected to her; he had made that clear on the beach. Couldn’t she let by-gones be by-gones? But then she didn’t know they were … He could not decide whether to give up on the conversation or to try to smooth things over.

“Well,” he said, “I think that threw some light. I think, however, Gabriel, I think I might agree you were side-stepping a little. These, after all, aren’t people who can be reasoned with.”

“Of course they aren’t. They’re ignorant,” Fay said.

She spoke so forcefully that the doctor nearly became frantic. “See, that’s his approach, Fay. That’s just one approach—this is an intellectual exercise, we’re simply working out the kinks in our minds.”

“Still—”

But he raised his palm at her, a policeman halting traffic; he could feel his eyes hardening. And it worked—she shut up. What they should do now, he thought, was get into their swim suits, take the umbrella and chairs, and go down to the beach for the rest of the day. Surely, however, the three of them could conduct an adult conversation; he was not suggesting that they should all learn to live forever in the same house. To ask for a little respect and understanding was not, to his way of thinking, to ask for too much.

Gabe had set down his empty cup on the table; he seemed waiting for permission to leave. Well, he could just stay where he was! The father was still the father, and the son the son! “So what would you
do?
” Dr. Wallach asked.

“I—” Gabe rubbed his hands along his trousers. “I’d give the child the transfusion.”

“You realize the law now,” said the doctor, instantly impassioned again. “You realize the law says no minor can be operated on, given a transfusion or whatever, without permission of the parents. You understand that now?”

“I’d give the child the transfusion.” Gabe had spoken in a very soft voice.

“All
right
, all
right.
” Dr. Wallach took his spoon and crossed it over his knife. He leaned back in his chair and tilted his head so that all the loose skin of his throat was drawn upwards. He addressed the fancy chandelier. “I wouldn’t,” he said.

“Mordecai!” Fay said.

He spread two hands on the tablecloth—the hands of a murderer, he thought, feeling a strange excitement—and left them there, palms down. “That’s right. I wouldn’t give the child a drop of blood.”

“That’s not a bit like you,” Fay said.

How did she know? Perhaps Anna had known what he was like … but then having known, she had dealt with him. At least Fay didn’t simply
deal
with him; she admired him. Worse—she sentimentalized him, she misunderstood and overvalued him. All of which he had encouraged. He had chosen this house for her with a taste he pretended was his own; but he knew he really had no taste. The furnishings were of a kind that his dead wife would have liked for a summer place, and so he had said to Fay, “Take it.” And she had.

He kept two strong hands on the table anyway. “It’s a matter of respect,” he said, “that we’re dealing with. You see? The parent is the father to the child.’ Wordsworth?” he asked, turning to Gabe. Then he realized his mistake. But it was only one of several misquotations and malapropisms that had lately passed his lips. And though inaccuracy—pretension—was one thing when the audience was Fay, it was another when it was his son—or Abe Cole. It was not, he suddenly recalled,
Recollections of Things Past
, but
Remembrance!
And
Oedipus
was not by Socrates—it was by Sophocles! Christ! Under the umbrella yesterday, what an ass he must have seemed. What was he up to, passing himself off as something he wasn’t? Was this his fate at the age of sixty, to be a fool?

Gabe was saying, “I think it’s ‘The child is the father of the man ’—but I know what you mean.”

It did not help the doctor’s condition any to know that his son now felt the need to be kind to him. “I believe in the depth of belief,” Dr. Wallach said, raising his voice. “If the other fellow’s got a belief, I honor that belief. We have to have more respect for the other fellow’s wish; he wants what he believes in. Who am I to tell him differently?”

“You’d let the child die?” Gabe asked.

“Absolutely!” He had not felt so sure before as he did now.

“Well,” Gabe said, “I don’t know …”

“Don’t know what?”

“I don’t know if you really would do it, faced with the situation.”

“Then you don’t know me.”

Apparently no one could think of what to say next. Dr. Wallach piled some silverware on his plate; then he turned and asked Fay her opinion. “Go ahead,” he said, “this is still a discussion as far as I’m concerned, not a dispute.”

She put out her cigarette in the ash tray. The grainy look around her dark eyes gave her an air of knowingness—until she spoke. “This is certainly a case of morals,” she said, and the doctor heard his own words once again. “Morals certainly enters into it …”

“Exactly,” he said, and quickly he turned to his son. “What do I seem to you here, Gabe, too—too Nietzschean?”

“No, no, I don’t think that.”

“I’m telling you, if the chips were down, if I had been this poor fellow in Texas, that’s what I would have done.”

Gabe seemed at last to have run out of patience. “Why? So you wouldn’t lose your license?”

“Absolutely not!”

“Then it’s still a mystery to me.”

“You believe I’d do it though?”

“Yes, yes, I suppose I do.”

“All right, all right. The why, I’ll grant you, is the crux all right.”

Mrs. Silberman flicked open the initialed gold case that had been her engagement present, and put a new cigarette into her holder. Since she had stopped drinking, she smoked all the time. Did that serve to blur the image of her first husband too? If it was such a difficult image to blur, if it wouldn’t just
stay
blurred, then why was she even thinking of another man? Was he simply to be a convenience?

“All right, why then?” Gabe asked.

“Because,” said Dr. Wallach, his thoughts turning with difficulty back to the issue at hand, “I respect people.”

Mrs. Silberman momentarily withdrew the match from the end of the cigarette. “Mordecai loves people,” she said, then she held very steady while she lit her cigarette.

“And I don’t?”

Dr. Wallach did not know to whom Gabe had directed the question. Immediately he said, “Well, you don’t respect the parents to disobey their wish that way.”

“I respect the child,” Gabe said.

The doctor moved one finger around in a circle just in front of his chin; he circled, he circled, then he saw the light. “Ah
that’s
something,
that’s
curious.” He turned to his fiancée. “You see that?
That’s
identification that I was telling you about. You see, he’s never been a parent, so he can’t understand the parent’s position. But what has he been? What?”