"I believe in David's rage. Let's just say it's an article of faith with me — and with me dead, that rage will logically get pinned on Pert, don't you see? Loathing, envy, spite, you name it — and all of it susceptible to even greater intensity when David actually finds out what Pert is. I mean, what I see happening, when I'm gone, when all the rest of us are gone, Margaret and you and Mom and me and that woman — Buddy, I just can't say her name, not even now — I see a world with just the two of them in it — an openness named Rupert, who owns all my heart, and a man named David with a heart with such a lot of hate in it. What would Rupert ever know of what his brother must feel for him? How could Rupert ever imagine? No boy could — no boy like Rupert — and, Buddy, you know what Rupert is like. He is all light — a lightness, this one diaphaneity.
"Pert would never guess even. But I can. More than that — I know. David will wait, he will wait his time — like his mother, he will be patient, deliberate, a fury waiting for his chance. All right, perhaps I'm imagining too much. Perhaps it will never come to this — something violent, an injury, a killing, who knows? Perhaps instead it will be a civilian act, but decisive, devastating — David sitting on some committee that Rupert happens to be petitioning, David behind the interviewer's desk for some job Rupert must have, David installed at a judicial bench before which Rupert pleads his case, David standing with gloved hands while Rupert lies beneath him, chest swabbed and bare to the scalpel — hell, I don't know, Buddy, but I know it'll be something. Some way none of us can predict, my firstborn will stalk my second, find a way to hurt him because my death robs him of chance to hurt me.
"Look, there's nothing fishy in this, but I don't want to talk anymore — and besides, I'm calling from home and, with Maggie in the house, it's making me jittery — and I right now can't risk being jittery. I'll telephone tomorrow — around noon — so, for Christ's sake, be there. Because I gave Scharfstein my promise I'd come in and see him in the morning — the jerk thinks he can teach me how to die — and I plan to fly up to Hanover in the afternoon. I guess Mom wrote you that David started Dartmouth this fall — all the way from Texas to my brother's backyard! Buddy, he writes these letters to his grandmother that I cannot believe and do not believe — like a geometer, as if a geometer made them. It gives me the willies to see them, but Mom always makes sure I do. He writes to her! Does he write to me? Does he answer one goddamn letter? Anyway, that's where he is and that's where I'm going tomorrow to get it taken care of. Jesus, man, I've got to choose, don't you see — and I choose Rupert!"
YOUR FATHER HUNG UP, Chap, with the delivery of that declaration. I didn't wait until the next day, though. I called him back right away — and this time I did get a piece of paper and a pencil — for no good reason, actually, but in moments of this kind one sometimes does things like this. I didn't say much. I didn't try to argue with him. I don't think I then knew what arguments to argue with—and I am not certain I know that even now. All I did know was that I had to try to stop him — not because there was in me a conviction that held him wrong—but only because there was a will in me to keep him from doing what he said. He did not answer right away, but when he did lift the receiver I immediately said, "Me again," and then I heard him say, "Mags, I've got a call and I need to talk in private. I'm sorry, but I need to," and then there was a moment's quiet and then my brother said, "Yes?" and I knew there was no arguing, nothing to do but state the livable range marked off by the mad logic of his assumptions.
"I have one thing to say," I said, "and that's this. Let it rest for three months. They've guaranteed you three months, at least three months, so you can wait that long and then do it. Not saying you shouldn't do it — just saying you can wait the three lousy months. Not that I think you'll change your mind — or that I'm sitting here trying to get you to — but just that you're in this position where you can add three months to Chap's life with no danger to Rupert. The minimum they've given you is the minimum you can and therefore must give Chap."
I was writing the numeral 3 again and again across the paper that I had pressed with the heel of my hand up against the wall. But the plaster, if that's what you call it, was making them all come out crooked, no matter how carefully I tried to control the pencil.
Chap, your father said, "Yes," and then he hung up the phone. He hung up without one other word. But the word he had uttered left no doubt — it was said so I would know there was no doubt. My brother knew that I knew he would do it — that your father would give you all the life he could.
That was the fourth of November.
I began writing these sentences that night, last night — and as I write this sentence now, it is morning.
I PROMISED A COURTESY, and this is it. I make this gesture to exist in the place of all the gestures I have not made. I am keeping every promise I have not kept. I am leading along to this courtesy everyone I have loved and ever misled.
There is an American writer, a woman, the only American writer I read. She has not written many stories, so it is no great undertaking to read everything she has written, which she has let have a life in print, that is. I take it that her public, unlike mine, is very, very small. This, I believe, is because she is unwilling to mislead, as I have so very often done and then tried to undo by my silence and now am trying still harder so desperately to undo by this last speaking-up.
It is a great undertaking to understand even one of her stories, such as the one she brought forth into the world about two years ago. It is a story that begins as a story that this writer has stolen from another writer — but only because he had earlier stolen it from her. It was her story, she says, and it has to do with magic and with miracles and with many, many things. I think it has to do with everything.
Near to its infernal conclusion, the story happens on the writings of a very wise man, a man now in prison for knowing too much — about the weakness of man and about the terrible power of God, never more terrible than in the performing of His justice.
Among these writings, as the story calls the wise man's diaries, there is a tale the criminal has recorded.
Here is the tale.
A father is in a concentration camp. He learns that the list for the next day's gassings includes the name of his son, a boy of, say, twelve. So the father bribes a German (a diamond ring, he promises) to take some other boy instead — for who will really know which boy is taken? But then the father is uncertain of the rightness of his design. So he goes for guidance to the rabbi in the camp. And the rabbi will not help him. The rabbi says, "Why come to me? You made your decision already." And the father says, "But they'll put another boy in my son's place." The rabbi hears this, and he says, "Instead of Isaac, Abraham put a ram. And that was for God. Whereas you put another child, and for what? To trick the devil."