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?”
Either she did not know, or out of respect was waiting for him to say it.
“A child,” he announced. “So he takes the child’s side in this thing.”
“I see,” Fay said.
“Wait a minute,” Gabe said, “things are getting confused here. Maybe I wasn’t clear enough. I meant I respect the child’s right to live, and not the parent’s desire to kill it. I can’t have any respect for that. If you want to go ahead and be Freudian and pursue this thing all the way down—”
“Sure, sure, what? — go ahead—” Dr. Wallach said. “What?”
“Well, I don’t know. You might say that the parents are using what they see as moral and religious reasons for doing away with the child. You see, I don’t know anything about the case”—he motioned toward the floor, where the newspaper was—“the specifics of it, but it’s even possible that for some strange reason they want to kill the child. Look, we can’t begin to—”
“Now that’s an awful thing to say,” Fay told him, “even in jest. Parents give themselves up for their children. Look at all your father has done for you. Harvard, nice clothes, a car—”
“No, no,” said Dr. Wallach, silencing her, “let’s hear him. A theory is a theory. I’m very interested in his theories.”
“It’s not a theory,” Gabe said. “I just want to rule out this identification business. You’re not arguing on the issue then. You’re wanting to argue with me.”
Dr. Wallach pointed a finger at the boy, as though sharp thinking on his son’s part had caught him out, as though his lapse had been a deliberate point of strategy, a test of the young man’s alertness. “The old ad hominem — right,” he said. “Well, okay, I’ll give him that,” he told Fay.
“Fine,” Gabe said, and took a deep breath.