He felt another moment of sleepiness.
Across the room, Herb Lundgren, slumped majestically in his La-Z-Boy chair, stared at the doctor impolitely. There was a clear division of labor in this marriage: talking would be Mrs. Lundgren’s job, while her husband examined the guest for visual clues.
“I wonder,” Elijah said, “if you could turn the music down? I can’t quite hear you.”
“Of course,” Mrs. Lundgren said, advancing toward the audio system and fiddling with the dial. The sound dropped to a nearly inaudible hush, like an orchestra of mice playing inside the walls.
Mrs. Lundgren remarked on the weather, how cold it was getting. Her church, she said, worried about the homeless at this time of year. While she talked, the doctor surveyed the opposite wall above the sofa, where the Lundgrens had hung a cross-stitched Last Supper. Looking closer, the doctor suspected that the piece had been made from a mail-order hobby kit. Hours had been spent putting it together, in mad devotion. The mouse orchestra inside the walls continued to play Tchaikovsky while the doctor nodded in agreement to something Mrs. Lundgren had said that he actually hadn’t quite heard. Over in the corner, on a bookshelf, was the Oxford English Dictionary. What was that doing here? Talk about clues: you must never underestimate your opponent. Someone here did a lot of reading.
Now Mrs. Lundgren was talking about Somali refugees, and the terrible conditions in the Sudan, and the shocking treatment of women in sub-Saharan Africa, clitoridec
tomies and the like. “And that’s not the half of it,” she said. The doctor nodded. “It makes you wonder sometimes about those people, how they think,” she continued, as the doctor squirmed and closed his mouth, through which, he realized with embarrassment, he had been breathing. “We’ve been there, after all,” she said. “We saw it with our very own eyes. We worked in a refugee camp. We know what we’re talking about, so.”
“Where was this?”
“The Kiziba refugee camp in Rwanda! Very inspiring!”
Mr. Lundgren glumly shook his head while he studied his hands. “But very hard work,” he muttered.
Very hard, his wife repeated, but God expects us, she said, to help take care of the less fortunate, didn’t the doctor agree? He did. Time passed. Global troubles were mentioned and disappeared into the conversational haze as if they were items of gossip. Suddenly the doctor remembered something his son had told him: Donna’s mother worked as a middle school world history teacher. As teachers do, she continued to drone on: they, the Lundgrens, had tried to give all their extra money away to the poor for the sake of justice, and they had assembled a little scrapbook with photographs of children whom they had sponsored. “It’s over there. We could show it to you. You can’t go into heaven carrying bags of money!” Mrs. Lundgren said, shaking her head and laughing mirthlessly over the comic irony of it all. Every life was sacred, she said, didn’t he agree? You could walk into heaven accompanied by the souls to whom you had lent a helping hand. That was possible. He that dwelleth in the secret place of the most High shall abide under the shadow of the Almighty, she said, confabulating.
No wonder Jupie had turned out the way she had.
The doctor rose to his feet and approached the plate of cookies, taking three for himself. Rarely in his life had he felt so hungry or so sleepy. He was starving in every possible way. He needed a nap, right now, and his hunger felt like an embrace of emptiness hugging him pitilessly, stifling him. His hunger, he suddenly thought, was empirical. In his mind arose an image of a man drinking a six-pack of air, one empty bottle after another. In rapid succession he ate the cookies and took three more, while Mrs. Lundgren lectured him on the holiness of all human existence and how existence was not a choice but a gift. Well, at least he knew where this was going. The lowest and highest hold the same rank in God’s eyes, she was saying, tapping her finger on her knee. Of all the democrats, God was the greatest democrat. Status meant nothing to Him. He cared nothing for trinkets or the glittering machines of success. Before Him, we are all the same. The doctor felt himself growing impatient at all this moralizing and its transparent intentions. Everything she said sounded like a practiced speech, prepared and canned, like tomatoes in the basement. What did he, the doctor, think would save him?
“Excuse me?”
“Well, we were wondering, what will you do to be saved?” She leaned back and smiled. “We were wondering about that.” She reached over for a Ritz cracker and popped it into her mouth. The doctor watched her chew. She ate like a peasant.
“Isn’t that a very private matter?”
“Yes, it is,” Mrs. Lundgren said, keeping her gaze on him, and suddenly he knew whom she resembled in both appearance and manner: Margaret Thatcher. “But you are the father of the young man who caused our daughter to become pregnant, aren’t you? We wondered what values you had instilled in him. It may be a private matter, but it’s ours now. Our matter.”
“It’s a father’s job to instill values,” Mr. Lundgren said, from his corner. “That’s what a man does, so.”
“I have tried to teach him to love the world,” Elijah said. “And to treat everyone with respect. And to fight for what is right.”
“Well, that’s not enough,” Mrs. Lundgren said, and the doctor intuited that she was a skilled tactician in argumentation and probably coached the high school debate squad. “If the world were enough, being worldly would be a virtue, wouldn’t it? But it isn’t. Does the world include our grandchild, yours and ours, the one who died?”
“You should take this up with your daughter,” the doctor said.
“But we have,” she told him. “And she seems to have been converted by your son. Converted to oblivion.”
“Don’t lecture me.” The doctor spoke, but it was Gerald who had spoken up. Elijah seemed to be turning into his wife’s fictional creation. Okay, fine.
“I’m not lecturing you. We’re just asking questions and offering an opinion. We want to know what sort of man you are. As if we were all family here. Which we sort of are. Whatever did you teach Raphael? If I may ask?”
“Well,” the doctor said, “first of all, we’re not a family. What I taught Raphael, that’s my business. And as for what I am, I’m a pediatrician.”
“Yes, we know that. That’s what you do. You care for children, which is quite admirable. But I asked you what you are.”
“By what right do you ask me such a question?”
A rather long air pocket of dead silence followed, accompanied by the music. The doctor had never heard such a silence, with music in it.
Finally Mrs. Lundgren said, “The right of one parent to another. We have blood on our hands. All of us. And our children have blood on their hands. They have snuffed out a life, those two. They have caused suffering.”
“Oh, for shit’s sake,” Gerald blurted out. “A woman has a right to choose. We all know that.” Neither Lundgren flinched, as he had hoped they would. “I have to leave now.”
“I don’t think so,” Mr. Lundgren said, and the doctor felt a chill.
“Do you think the happy choices of our children should depend on the suffering of fetuses? Is that the ticket? Is that the ticket to the universe? To its meaning? You should read your Dostoyevsky,” Mrs. Lundgren said, a mild frenzy in her voice. “Don’t you think a father should protect his infants and not kill them?”