“Okay,” Pete said, nodding. “But let’s allow one wild card, dealer’s choice, since there’re only three of us.”
“Fine,” Dr. Abernathy said, as Pete walked off to get the deck and the box of chips. He drew a comfortable chair up to the table for Lurine Rae and then one for himself and at last one for Pete.
“And no chattering during the game,” Pete said to Lurine.
They were dealing a hand of five-card draw, jacks or better to open, when the cow-drawn cart of Tibor McMasters, battery-lamp sweeping ahead of it, pulled up at the door and tinkled its hopeful bell.
Studying his hand, Dr. Abernathy said thoughtfully in a preoccupied and abstracted way, “Um, I — uh — fold. So I’ll go.” He rose, to go to the door: to answer the presence of the well-known inc SOW artist.
On his cart, Tibor McMasters surveyed the progress of the poker game, and the conversation had that unique equal quality: everyone said as much as everyone else, although each player had his idiosyncratic mumble; and none of it, Tibor realized, meant anything — it was merely a noise, a banter, as their collective attention kept fixed on the play itself.
So only later, when a pause came, could he talk with Dr. Abernathy.
“Doctor.” His voice, in his ears, sounded squeaky.
“Yes?” Abernathy said, counting his blue chips.
“You heard about the Pilg I’ve got to go on.”
“Yep.”
Tibor said, aware and thinking out his words, knowing intensely the meaning of them, “Sir, if I became a convert to Christianity, I wouldn’t have to go.”
At once Dr. Abernathy glanced up and said, scrutinizing him, “Are you really that much afraid?” Everyone else, Peter Sands and the girl, Lurine Rae, also stared at Tibor; he felt their motionless gaze.
“Yes,” Tibor said.
“Often,” Dr. Abernathy said, and took a fresh deck and began to riffle and vigorously shuffle the cards, “fear or dread is based on a sense of guilt, not experienced directly.”
Tibor said nothing. He waited with the intention of lasting it out, however unpleasant and protracted it might be. Priests, after all, were generally odd, intense people, especially the Christian ones.
“You do not,” Dr. Abernathy stated, “in your Servants of Wrath Church, have either public or private confession.”
“No, Doctor. But –”
“I will not try to argue or compete,” Dr. Abernathy said in a harsh, absolutely firm tone. “You are employed by Father Handy and it is bis business if he wants to send you.”
“And yours,” Lurine added, “if you want to quit or go. Why not just quit?”
“And go,” Tibor said, “into a vacuum.”
“Always,” Dr. Abernathy continued, “the Christian Church is ready to accept anyone. Regardless of their spiritual condition; it asks nothing of them except their willingness. I would, however, suspect that what I can offer you — I acting as a mouthpiece of God, not as a man — is the opportunity for you to shirk your spiritual duty. . . or, put more precisely, the opportunity to acknowledge to yourself and to confess to me your deep desire to shirk your spiritual duty.”
“To a false church?” Lurine Rae protested, her dark red eyebrows raised in astonishment. To Tibor she said, “They have a club; they’re all members. It’s what’s called ‘professional ethics.’ ” She laughed.
“Why not make an appointment with me?” Dr. Abernathy asked Tibor. “I can accept your confession without your joining the Christian Church; it is not tied in, as the ancients put it.”
With utmost caution, his mind very, very rapid in its work, Tibor answered, “I — can’t think of anything to confess.”
“You will,” Lurine assured him. “He’ll assist you. Even further.”
Neither Dr. Abernathy nor Pete Sands said anything, and yet they seemed in some mysterious sense, perhaps by their mere passivity, to acknowledge what the woman said to be true. The father confessor knew his trade; like a good lawyer or doctor of medicine, Tibor reflected, he could draw his client out. Lead him and inform him. Find what was deep inside, hidden — not plant anything, but rather harvest it.
“Let me think this over,” Tibor said. He felt entirely hesitant now. His intentions, his decision to do this as a solution to his horror at the idea of the soon-coming Pilg, seemed swamped with the second guesses of severe and fundamental doubt. What had seemed a good idea had been, to his disbelief, returned as unacceptable by the man who stood to benefit most — at least most after Tibor McMasters, who stood at the head of the line. . . for obvious reasons: reasons palpable to everyone in the room.
Confession? He felt no burden of guilt, no sting of death; he felt instead perplexed and afraid; that was all. Admittedly, he feared to a morbid and obsessive degree the proposed — in fact ordered — Pilg. But why did guilt have to come into it? The Gothic convolutions of this, the older church. . . and yet he had to admit that it somehow seemed appropriate, this interpretation of Dr. Abernathy’s. Perhaps merely the unexpectedness of it alone had overwhelmed him; possibly that accounted for it.
Since he had nothing to say, the girl friend of Pete Sands naturally spoke up. “Confession,” Lurine said meditatively, “is strange. You in no way feel free in the sense that you can sin again with license. Actually, you feel –” She gestured, as if they all really understood her — which Tibor did not. However, he nodded solemnly, as if he did. And took the opportunity — were they not discussing giddy, interesting subjects such as sin? — to scrutinize for the millionth time her sharply amplified breasts; she wore a shrunk-by-many-washings white cotton shirt and no bra, and in the shaded light of the living room her nipples cast a far, huge shadow on the far wall, each one in the process becoming enlarged to the size of a flashlight battery.
“You feel,” Pete Sands declared, “your evil thoughts and deeds articulated. They take form and assume shapes. And are less fearsome because they become just words, suddenly. Just the Logos. And,” he added, “the Logos is good.” He smiled, then, at Tibor, and now all at once the powerful thrust of Christian meaning struck at Tiber’s mind. He in return felt soothed; he felt the healing rather than the philosophical quality of the older church: its doctrines admittedly made no sense, but neither did very much else in the world. Especially since the war.
Once more the three persons at the table, like a mundane and bisexual trinity, resumed their game. The discussion on the vital topic which he had come here for — vital at least to him — had terminated.
But then Dr. Abernathy said abruptly, lifting his eyes from the hand he held, “I could all of a sudden have three adults in my religious-instruction class. You, Miss Rae here, and the rather odd fellow currently attending, whom I know you all have met at one time or another, Walter Blassingame. Practically a renaissance of the primordial faith.” His expression and tone held no evidence of his feelings — perhaps as a direct result of the game spread across the surface of the table.
Aloud, Tibor said, “Erbarme mich, mein Gott.” By speaking in German he spoke to himself; as far as he knew, anyhow. But, to his amazement, Dr. Abernathy nodded, obviously understanding.
“The language,” Lurine Rae said acidly, “of Krupp und Sohnen. Of I. G. Farben and A. G. Chemie. Of the Lufteufel family all the way back to Adam Lufteufel — or, more accurately, Cain Lufteufel.”
Dr. Abernathy said to her, “Erbarme mich, mein Gott is not the language of the German military establishment nor the industrial cartels. It’s the Klagengeschrei of the human being, the human cry for help.” He explained to her and Peter Sands, “It means ‘God save me.’ ”
“Or ‘God have mercy on me,’ ” Tibor said.
“Erbarmen,” Dr. Abernathy said, “means ‘to have mercy,’ except in that one phrase; it is an idiom. The suffering is not from God; therefore God is not asked to be merciful; He is asked to rescue you.” He all at once, then, threw down his cards. “Tomorrow morning at ten, in my office, Tibor. I’ll see you privately, explain a little about the act of confession, and then we’ll go into the chapel where the Reserve Sacrament is; you will of course be unable to genuflect, but He will not hold that against you. A legless man cannot kneel.”
“All right, Doctor,” Tibor agreed. And felt better, strangely, even at this point. As if something had been lifted from the sagging grasp of his combined manual extensors, a load which overstrained the metabattery and made the ominous black smoke rise from the transformer, gear box, and bank of selenoids of his cart.
And up to now he had not even known of its existence.