Moo (31 page)

Which Marly knew you could not, or, at least, you should not. It
was better for your soul to see the world of plants and animals as a hard, thoughtless place, and the man-made world as seductive but empty. She knew that.

The reason that it was harder for a rich person to get to heaven than for a camel to squeeze through the eye of a needle was simple—even the most well-meaning and guiltless rich person gave in every day to the temptation of creating his or her own world in his or her own image, and then, of course, came to love that very mingling of shapes, colors, textures, tastes, aromas, musical sounds. A careful soul had to prefer a drier, harder life, one more or less impossible to love. The trouble was, Marly was not sure she did prefer what it was prudent to prefer.

Helen invited them to the table. She had Ivar sit at the head, which Nils noticed, but which did not actually OFFEND him. She put Father at her right hand, and Nils and Marly across from each other. Nils strongly approved of Marly’s behavior on this occasion. She was soberly dressed, a little alienated, he thought, from Helen’s house, which he had always considered to be overdone. She was respectful of her father, about which, lately, Nils had found her a little lax. She was pleasant toward himself, but not talkative. He liked that. One of the ways Helen and Ivar had sometimes made him uncomfortable was how they would sit with their heads together, and you could see Helen doing most of the talking, and Ivar just nodding. That arrangement was cockeyed, Nils thought, and just the opposite of the way it had been with their parents, and the way it ought to be, period. Now that he was close to getting married, he had a lot of thoughts about the way things should be, and he had started writing them down in a little notebook.

A feast, Nils thought, was a good occasion to make some important announcements, and after dessert, he was going to make some. There would be some surprised faces around the table, no doubt about that. But a surprise attack was the best kind. You got your way while they were scrambling around trying to figure out how to react. Father, Ivar, Marly: throw ’em off balance now, Nils thought, and none of them would get (or manage to keep, in Ivar’s case) the upper hand. As the courses were served, Nils could barely taste them for the anticipation he felt.

Now this food, thought Father, was mighty strange. First there was some tomato soup, but it was cold and had green stuff floating in it. Then there were the sweet potatoes, but they turned out to be
regular mashed potatoes, even though they were yellow. The beans he recognized, but then beans gave him gas, so he didn’t have any. The turkey, which he thought he could rely on, was too rich-tasting, and the stuffing burned his mouth—it had chili peppers in it, who’d ever heard of that? Then instead of a nice cool cylinder of jellied cranberry sauce sliced into disks, there was some kind of cranberry junket. Then there was blackberry sherbet—that was okay—but after that there were two more desserts, pumpkin pie, but with a strange cornmeal crust, and chocolate cake, but with cranberries in that, too. Frankly, there was hardly a bite of food at this table that Father recognized, and he knew that he was going to get up hungry. Even so, he minded his manners and kept his mouth shut, and every time this woman who’d made the food looked at him, he smiled. He wasn’t blind. He knew the pale one who wasn’t marrying his daughter—good thing they didn’t dress alike, or he’d never tell them apart, every time they were all together, he had to ask Marly what Nils was wearing, and then memorize it—was fornicating with this woman, and he wasn’t surprised.

Fornication never surprised him, he had fornicated himself before truly accepting Jesus, and he had drunk intoxicating liquors, and he had laid blows upon some of his fellow men—he was a man, wasn’t he? You couldn’t be a man without knowing what a man was. Fornicating late in life surprised him a little, though. He always thought that fornicating was something you got through on the way to other, better things. But look at King David, a good man whose mind was set on fornicating. Father knew he wouldn’t be thinking about all of this if the food had been regular food—and then his son-in-law-to-be sat back in his chair and said he was going to say some things, so Father took his mind off King David and fornicating, and all the rest of it; afterward he always said he knew something was coming.

Marly herself liked the food, and tried not to show how unusual it was to her. What she didn’t like was the way Father grunted and snorted at everything, and every time Helen spoke to him, he leered at her like he was thinking about fornication—it was a good thing Helen didn’t know him as well as Marly did, and couldn’t read his mind the way Marly could. And then Nils cleared his throat in that way he had, and Marly knew that what he was about to say was important, and also that it was just for her, so she licked up the last bite of her pumpkin pie with some regret, and looked up at him.

Helen was passing the coffee around, a nice Colombian blend that
she thought they would like, when Nils cleared his throat and said, “Well, this has been a lovely dinner, thank you, Helen, for your effort, as always it’s a true occasion for thanksgiving here, and I remember the bounty of the Lord and the way our ancestors came onto this continent, and I feel thankful for that. This is a good day for me, because I feel that on this day, our national life is truly joined to the Lord the way it was in the early days, and of course that gives me hope for our national future. In my earlier life I devoted myself to exporting not only our know-how and our technology, but also our national ideals.”

Helen realized he considered this a self-evident good, and shifted in her seat, trying to maintain her smile. She vowed not to say anything just now about her view that Americans took a great deal too much credit for creating wealth, when most of the time they had really just been living off natural bounty unprecedented in the history of the world. She glanced at Ivar. He was looking up at the ceiling.

Nils went on. “Frankly, I thought my life was over, or at least winding down. I’m fifty-five now, and I was looking forward to a future of watching others do what I used to do, or what I didn’t think I would ever have the chance to do. But”—he beamed down at Marly—“I was wrong. I see my life starting over now, with a special, good, Christian woman, a woman with all the womanly virtues of kindness, care, selflessness, Christian love, trust, faith, modesty.”

Marly smiled, Helen thought with some embarrassment. And what a prescription, anyway. She glanced at Ivar, who was looking at her this time. His eyes rolled discreetly upward and he gave a little shrug.

“You may not know that Marly and I plan to have six children—”

Ivar’s gaze landed on Nils with an almost perceptible thud. He said, “No, I did not know that!”

Nils went smoothly on. “I have never been one to reject the marvels of technology. Best to accept them and turn them to the Lord’s purposes. Right, my dear?” He beamed at Marly.

Father said, “You’re going to saddle my daughter with six kids at your age?”

Nils, in accordance with his new policy, ignored this interruption. He did say, though, “The Lord has revealed his plan to me piece by piece. Lately he has revealed another important piece, and that is our future in Eastern Europe.”

“Excuse me?” said Marly.

“Yes,” said Nils, “the Lord has borne it in upon me that as His
Word comes as a revelation to those unfortunate sufferers, in exactly that way there will be a great need for experts such as myself to show them the way to a more secure agricultural destiny.”

“You should have asked me first,” said Marly, pushing her chair back from the table.

“The Lord didn’t ask me,” said Nils. “He told me.”

Father said, “Let me get this straight. You’re planning on having six children and moving to Poland or someplace? What about me?”

Nils beamed upon Father. “It isn’t always comfortable to do what the Lord asks, but I have no doubt that as we all pray over these changes, we will all see how positive they will be. Marly and our children and myself will be an example to people over there of all facets of righteous and productive living.” He cleared his throat, a touch embarrassed at the personal defeat he was about to reveal. “My, um, failures in certain overseas endeavors were due, in part, I’ve come to believe, to the pressures to, as it were, go native. Although I loved my wife, of course.”

There was a long, uncomfortable pause.

“A family such as ours will be is the best model and, perhaps, the best protection against, ah, temptations of all—”

Father came to the nubbin. He said, “I don’t want to move to Poland.”

Nils’ smile broadened. “I never thought that you would want to.”

Father and Nils looked each other right in the eye.

Ivar said, “Nils, maybe you’re going too fast on this. I think one step at a time is a better bet.”

Nils intoned, “The Lord didn’t ask me. He told me.” Then, after a weighty pause, he said, “A vision is a whole. You can’t take it apart and choose to act on bits of it and not act on other bits of it. It doesn’t work that way.”

Helen said, “Nils, you can’t just do what you want and say that God is telling you to do it—”

“With all due respect, Helen, and I do recognize we are guests in your home, this is really not your business.” He beamed. He said, “The Lord has returned my youth to me for a reason. I have prayed over and pondered what that reason might be. The fall of Godless Communism in Europe is the answer. I have wandered in a wilderness of meaningless activity for all of my adult life. I studied to bring enlightenment to developing nations, but people who were supposedly on my side worked against me, and the people I was trying to help
failed to see the light. My wife died. I fell into despair. Only then did I find the Lord, and only then did I find Marly and our future together. Only NOW do I understand what I was sent here to do. The Lord’s message can come through CNN as easily as in a glorious cloud.” He fixed his gaze momentarily on each member of the party, then said, “If you pray ardently and earnestly, you will understand that we will not be balked, and that for all of us here, embracing this vision rather than resisting it will lead us forward into the light.” He sat down, grinning.

Helen realized that when he used the word “we,” he meant himself and his coconspirator, the Lord.

E
VERY DAY
, Dean Jellinek had to dig a little deeper to haul up the remaining glow from his courtship by the Final Four corporations who had vied for the privilege of granting him not exactly, or even close to, the million dollars everyone on the campus thought he had gotten. It was a habit he got into—when he sat down at his computer in the morning, the first thing he did was run his hands over the keyboard (it was a new computer, one he had bought with much of the first installment of the money, a computer powerful enough to crunch all the numbers he was contracted to generate in the next year, five months, two weeks, and four days). Running his hands over the keyboard reminded him how enthusiastic all four corporations had been, and that reminder gave him enough confidence to call up the program he was modifying to receive his data. He did not have any data yet, which was okay, because he hadn’t perfected his program. He spent many hours every day perfecting his program. Had it not been for that remaining glow, Dean Jellinek would have been in despair: As a longtime computer nerd, he knew that, for him, perfecting programs was what watching television was for others—a mindless activity that promised pleasure, lasted for hours, and left him feeling like an old cigarette butt. He knew this because when he went home at night, he watched everything on the TV from the nightly news with Tom Brokaw to David Letterman almost without looking away from the screen.

Dean Jellinek was a hard-working, hard-playing, hard-driving sort of guy, outwardly balding but possessed of an internal crewcut stiff as the bristles on a wire brush. Only once before in his life had he endured a period like this one, and that was in the early months of his marriage to Elaine Dobbs-Jellinek, when he was beset by second thoughts and he knew she was, too. The signs were all the same: Every morning, sometimes late, sometimes early, but always whenever he could no longer resist, Hal Samuels, the R and D man from
Western Egg and Milk Commodities, would call him up and ask him how it was going, and he would say that it was going fine. “Give me some idea,” Hal would say, “something I can tell the board,” and Dean would give him some idea—zero to sixty in five seconds, a line drive to deepest center field, a sky hook from the center line, a double eagle over the water hazard, a seventy-yard touchdown run, a slap shot between the goalie’s legs. After trading enough sports analogies, Hal and Dean were both reassured, and both felt, in some obscure way, that information had been exchanged. But really it was just the same as it had been with Elaine—honey, I’ve been thinking about you, honey, how are you, honey, have you been thinking about me, honey, last night was great, didn’t you think so, too, to which he would answer, good, fine, yes, and yes, as warmly as he could.

Ah, but, as with Elaine, how had he gotten himself into this? Ah, but, as with Elaine, how had he invested so much—the computer had, in fact, cost as much money as that house they’d bought—so quickly? Ah, but, as with Elaine, how was he going to, day after day, month after month, year after year, endure this commitment? Ah, but, as with Elaine, how was he going to find some breathing room, with Samuels clinging to him all the time, his expectations, like Elaine’s had been, unvoiced but ever-present? The great irony was that he had been priding himself on what he’d learned about relationships—one of the reasons he was drawn to Joy, one of the reasons he’d pressed her to move in with him, was that she didn’t give him that breathless, closed-in feeling. He’d heard somewhere that one thing about horsewomen as girlfriends was that they almost didn’t have time for you. That had suited Dean right down to the ground.

The frightening thing was that a corporation wasn’t like a girlfriend or wife, or like the federal agencies he’d gotten earlier grants from. This time he’d signed a contract. There would be no going to Samuels and saying, “Gee, honey, it hurts to say this, but I just don’t think it’s working out.” This time he had to learn to live with that suffocating feeling of commitment. He had to renew his faith in calf-free lactation, faith that had faded another degree with every step toward realization. These days calves looked GOOD to him. How else could a farmer so cheaply replenish his herd? What farmer would go for a life of dairying without calves? But he had to embrace Samuels, Western
Egg and Milk, and those Holsteins anyway, without reservation, with desire and enthusiasm and hope and joy. He soothed his doubts with the same arguments he would use to soothe Samuels’ doubts, should Samuels express them: “Hey, marketing is YOUR end. I’m just here for the technical breakthroughs.” All things considered, it was easier to perfect his program.