I’ll move the modern collection here when I finish this one and dispose
of it.”
Hatch turned away from the painting and regarded the doctor with
professional interest. “You’re planning to sell?”
“Oh, no,” the physician said, returning his pen to his breast pocket.
His hand, with the long elegant fingers that one expected of a surgeon,
lingered at the pocket, as if he were pledging the truth of what he was
saying. “I’ll donate it. This will be the sixth collection of
religious art I’ve put together over the past twenty years, then given
away.”
Because he could roughly estimate the value of the artwork he had seen
on the walls of the medical suite, Hatch was astonished by the degree of
philanthropy indicated by Nyebern’s simple statement. “Who’s the
fortunate recipient?”
“Well, usually a Catholic university, but on two occasions another
Church institution,” Nyebern said.
The surgeon was staring at the depiction of the Ascension, a distant
gaze in his eyes, as if he were seeing something beyond the painting,
beyond the wall on which it hung, and beyond the farthest horizon. His
hand still lingered over his breast pocket.
“Very generous of you,” Hatch said.
“It’s not an act of generosity.” Nyebern’s faraway voice now matched the
look in his eyes. “It’s an act of atonement.”
That statement begged for a question in response, although Hatch felt
that asking it was an intrusion of the physician’s privacy. “Atonement
for what?”
Still staring at the painting, Nyebern said, “I never talk about it.”
“I don’t mean to pry. I just thought-”
“Maybe it would do me good to talk about it. Do you think it might?”
Hatch did not answer-partly because he didn’t believe the doctor was
actually listening to him anyway.
“Atonement,” Nyebern said again. “At…. atonement for being the son
of my father. ……. for being the father of my son.”
Hatch didn’t see how either thing could be a sin, but he waited, certain
that the physician would explain. He was beginning to feel like that
party-goer in the old Coleridge poem, waylaid by the distraught Ancient
Mariner who had a tale of terror that he was driven to impart to others
lest, by keeping it to himself, he lose what little sanity he still
retained.
gazing unblinking at the painting, Nyebern said, “When I was only seven,
my father suffered a psychotic breakdown. He shot and killed my mother
and my brother. He wounded my sister and me, left us for dead, then
killed himself.”
“Jesus, I’m sorry,” Hatch said, and he thought of his own father’s
bottomless well of anger. “I’m very sorry, Doctor.” But he still did
not understand the failure or sin for which Nyebern felt the need to
atone.
“Certain psychoses may sometimes have a genetic cause. When I saw signs
of sociopathic behavior in my son, even at an early age, I should have
known what was coming, should’ve prevented it somehow. But I couldn’t
face the truth. Too painful. Then two years ago, when he was eighteen,
he stabbed his sister to death-” Hatch shuddered.
“-then his mother,” Nyebern said.
Hatch started to put a hand on the doctor’s arm, then pulled back when
he sensed that Nyebern’s pain could never be eased and that his wound
was beyond healing by any medication as simple as consolation.
Although he was g of an intensely personal way, the physician was not
seeking sympathy or the link of friendship from Hatch.
Suddenly he seemed almost frighteningly self-contained He was about the
tragedy because the time had come to take it out of his personal
darkness to examine it again, and he would have spoken of it to anyone
who had been in that at that time instead of Hatch-or perhaps to the
empty air itself if no one at all had been present.
“And when they were dead,” Nyebern said, “Jeremy took the same knife
into the garage, a butcher knife, placed it by the handle in the vise on
my workbench stood on a stool, and fell forward, impaling himself on the
blade. He bled to death.” The physician’s right hand was still at his
breast pocket but he no longer seemed like a man pledging the truth of