“Then you were saying?” Dr. Wallach asked.
“I was only asking,” Gabe said, “what right, as a physician, you would have to allow the death of a child, a patient, whose life you could easily save. That’s all, really.”
“And I told you. People have a firm religious belief, a way of life they cherish, then I leave them alone. I myself am an atheist—”
Mrs. Silberman bestowed upon him a motherly look.
“I am, Fay, please, and I have a perfect right to be. The same with these parents. Each man knows what’s best for himself. You’ll get older,” he told Gabe, “you’ll see you can’t rule the world.”
“Don’t people trick themselves ever?”
“That’s their business. What looks like a trick to you may not be a trick to them.”
“Well …” Gabe said, and he stood up.
“Well what?”
“Nothing. I just believe you’re talking theoretically. If you pulled a tooth, and the patient was bleeding unduly and a transfusion was necessary — well, you’d give it. At least I think you would.”
“I would not,” Dr. Wallach said in a loud voice. “I absolutely would not.”
“Well,” said Gabe, closing his hands slowly, “okay.”
“You see, this is a perfect example of an inability on your part to recognize somebody’s beliefs. You don’t know why people do what they do, believe me.”
“True. I simply said that if one were to let somebody die needlessly, that would be wrong.”
“To you what I do is wrong. Not to me!”
“I didn’t say you were wrong. I said I felt the position was wrong!”
“I’m the positon.” Dr. Wallach was trembling. “I have my set of beliefs, you have yours—”
His son was leaning toward him, his hands on the back of a chair. “Please, I didn’t mean to raise my voice. I guess we just don’t agree about the transfusion. I’m willing to accept that.”
Fay was trying to absorb herself in smoking, but it wasn’t working. She had gone pale. “Sure, it’s only a game,” she said. “I know people who scream at each other over Scrabble.”
“It’s not a game.” Dr. Wallach lifted his napkin and threw it on the table. His eyes were burning and he looked at neither of them. “This actually happened … in … in …” He picked a section of the paper off the rug. He cleared his throat; he found it necessary to clear it again. “In Texas. Here.” He handed the paper across to Mrs. Silberman. “There, in black and white, what could happen to any of us. This man is going to lose his license, he can go to jail. It’s a historical fact — go ahead, read it. I didn’t make it up.”
Mrs. Silberman looked at the paper, then handed it to Gabe.
Dr. Wallach began stacking the breakfast dishes. “People’s lives, you don’t go fooling in them. You let people be themselves — you can ruin a life like that. Your own mother, on her last night, that’s what she talked about. That’s what she regretted above anything else. Don’t interfere—”
He set the dishes down and left the room.
In a few minutes the door opened and someone walked over to the bed. He did not open his eyes.
“Mordecai?”
“Yes.”
“Are you all right?”
“I just became overexcited.”
He felt her sit lightly down beside him. He could sense that she was afraid. She had reason to be. He wanted to open his eyes and tell her that he could not marry her. Youthful and trim as he had tried to keep himself, abreast as he had tried to stay of current affairs, he was an old man and he had had his life. Anna had been more than he could handle or understand, but he had asked her to marry him; maybe that was why he had asked her. He did not know. He had thought at the time and he thought still that he had loved Anna. He could no longer tell; he had never really been good at figuring people out. All he knew now was what he felt, and what he felt was no love for Fay. And no love for his son either. What was the use of loving him any more? He had sat there like a stranger, never once saying the right thing.
Fay was speaking. “Let him think what he wants, Mordecai.”
“I’m not telling him what to think.”
“Everybody’s entitled to his own opinion,” she said. “The individuals involved know what’s best.”
“Absolutely,” he said.
There was a knock on the door. Fay got up from the bed and opened it a little. Dr. Wallach heard his son ask if everything was all right.
“He’s resting,” Fay answered. “I think his swim tired him out.”
“Tell him I’m sorry.”
“Look, young man, you’re entitled to your opinions.”
“Please, just tell him that I didn’t mean to raise my voice.”
She closed the door and came back to the bed. “When they grow up,” she said, “they think they know more than their parents. He says that he’s sorry. Now he says it.”
“Fay,” Dr. Wallach said, “take my hand.”
“Of course, darling. He had no right, Mordecai, it was only a game—”
“Just take my hand,” he said. “Please, don’t say anything.”
4
That morning, when Cynthia rolled over, she found that her brother had climbed the ladder of the double-decker bed and crawled into the upper bunk beside her. Barely awake, she felt she must be floating in the hollow of a bad bad dream, and suddenly, furious, confused, she pushed with violence at the sleeping little boy. He rolled only once and fell from the bed. There was the thud of his head against the wooden floor, then no further sound. It appeared that Markie was going to sleep right through it; he did not even cry.
But when Cynthia leaned out over the top bunk, she noticed something more. At first it seemed to be a red string wedged in the crack between the floor boards — only it was moving toward the wall. Trembling, she waited for her father or June to come through the door and see what she had done. When time passed and no one had entered, she thought she had just better try to fall back to sleep again. And then it became clear to her that it could not be a bad dream she was having, for if it were, she would be trying to wake herself up rather than fall asleep. She rolled toward the wall anyway and closed her eyes. It was then that she began to scream.
Later in the morning her father telephoned from Southampton Hospital. Cynthia sat in the sunny living room turning the pages of a large picture book of statues, while in the hallway June whispered into the mouthpiece. Her stepmother hung up the phone and came in to tell her to put on her bathing suit. They would go to the beach; was that all right? The child turned another page, and then June was kneeling down and holding Cynthia to her. She allowed herself to be held. Her stepmother’s hair, a sunnier shade than her real mother’s hair, was swept up at the back of her head; Cynthia could imagine the way it looked from the way it felt against her cheek. Soft, fine, whirled up — Markie said it was candy. She could see her brother stiffen with pleasure when he drew in his breath and lowered his face right down into the swell of June’s hair. June was very thin, and when she wore a bathing suit or a summer dress, all silky and flower-smelling, Cynthia could see that she had no breasts; there was just skin over bone, like a man. All a child could really push his face into was her hair; and though Markie might amuse himself in this way, Cynthia did not think that it was suitable for her. Not that June had ever favored Markie; it was only that her hair had somehow seemed his property from the start. Certainly June had never scolded her when she spilled her milk — and she had spilled it often during the first month she had come to live in New York City. Nor had June ever once been as cross as her real mother had been to her so many times. Even now June’s first impulse was not to blame Cynthia for what had happened, which was surely what her old mother would have done. No one, in fact, had had a chance to ask questions or make accusations. Only minutes after she had begun screaming, her father had carried Markie down to the car wrapped in a big towel, and driven him away in the station wagon. Though it had looked comical for a grownup to be backing a car out of a driveway wearing pajamas and a bathrobe, she had managed not to laugh. When the car swerved down into the road, there had been a flash of blood on the front side door, and then any hint of a smile had vanished completely from her face. She had walked back to the house, taken a sculpture book she liked from the shelf, and settled into a chair by the window; she pretended to be absorbed in the book, while above all she was absorbing herself in being quiet. A blind person could not have heard her turn the pages, and her respiration was as silent as the shifting of the tides of her blood — a shifting that seemed to be taking place in the hollow of her throat.