THE FEAR OF INNOCENCE
809
all the whispers of cancer, and I would not confess that that Thing,
our Thing, that blob, ginder, scarcely organized excrement, lost like
a nosebleed, flushed with a wrist's flick from being, could be said to
have died.
Before that time, I had felt death only as a threat to myself,
my
defining predicament, and though in that alone there was pain
enough to make me cry out from my pillow or wince secretly in the
day's brightness, there was the ready metaphysical solace: for death
seen thus was its own defeat, would die with me. Beyond there were
only notions of hell to which I was not prepared to subscribe.
All who had meaning for me were living still, and so there had
been no decisive test for the ancestral taboo I exploited, the privilege
of the Jewish priestly line never to look upon the dead, inscribed
in the unread Law as a command, but for me a refuge, a device of
profane grace. I had seen an old man once plunge with a lost grey
face downward toward the ice, an arm's length before me, and when
I heard the mutter about him, "Dead!" I had changed my direction,
walked swiftly away, my eyes fixed on the motion of my own living
feet.
The bogus piety of the act, its fastidious selfishness distressed me,
but it protected me as well (and this at some level I knew was worth
great expense of spirit) from reconsidering the problem of birth and
fatherhood, from reading the other side of terror, its obverse of re–
sponsibility. It was a sort of virginity I chose, a connoisseur's virginity,
unnoticed by the laity.
And yet when I heard that Hal was dying I wrote to him, but
he was dead before my word reached him, leaving me with an un–
reasonable sense of having been rebuffed, a feeling of guilt and in–
completion-even a little anger.
"I never even saw your letter. I can't imagine what became of it,"
Carrie told us. We had gone at last to her apartment, Vivian and I
(Vivian I brought along thinking that she might inhibit to some
degree excesses of intimacy, displace any easy identification of Hal
and me on Carrie's part), hoping until the' last committal click of
the opening door that Carrie would not be at home. "I saw little of
his--or him toward the end." She sat with her hands neatly fallen into
her lap, will-less, patterned, as she had been since rising briefly to
