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 relieve 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
