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PARTISAN REVIEW
a calculus ofaccident. One could offer assent to such mathematics, since one's
assent was beside the point. Both believers and nonbelievers were powerless
to change the way things were.
Over the next ten years, I corresponded with Michael's parents. And I
heard news of Michael as I heard news of their other children. Once a
Christmas card from Michael himself arrived. He offered his warmest wishes
on the back of a photograph showing him sitting in an oversized armchair,
misshapen legs jutting out from under him, surrounded by wife and two small
children.
Each
of them
is
smiling.
Although he was, like me, a nonbeliever, Michael's father wrote to tell
me that his son was minister of a small congregation in the Northeastern
Netherlands. With a "normal" father's pride, he noted that Michael's sermons
were more literate than his small-town congregation could know. He took
pleasure, as I took pleasure, in the knowledge that Michael was getting on in
the world.
In 1981, when I was again living in Europe, I visited Michael's parents
in the small town on the Cote d'Or where they now had a summer home.
Michael, I learned, had separated from his wife. But his parents believed that
they might yet reconcile their differences. And Michael and his wife did rec–
oncile. But I lost touch with his parents until this past February, when they
wrote that they were coming to America for a few weeks. In April, they
spent three days with us in New York. And it was then that I heard the
story that rekindled the primary terror of my imagination - the threat of
helpless isolation imposed by someone one loves.
As
I listened to Michael's parents, I felt anger, then rage. And then I
felt something stronger than anger or rage, a naked throbbing fear that came
from somewhere so deep inside me that it threatened sanity. Pathologies are
bred in the bone. In literature, as Susan Sontag reminded us in
Illness as
Metaphor,
illness is usually appropriate as an image. In life, however, it sets a
cripple against his weakness and his strength.
Michael hadn't complained. He must have wondered sometimes what
other fate might have been his. But that is not complaining, as anyone who is
crippled knows. Perhaps as he lay in that room, imprisoned by the woman he
had loved and the sons he had fathered, his mind entertained itself by con–
juring up alternative lives. But the Michael I remember always focused not
on what the world owed him but on what he owed it. I suspect he assumed
responsibility for any suffering he had endured. He had, after all, "allowed"
himself to be conceived during that war-ravaged winter of hunger. And I
wonder whether, as he lay on the floor of that room, he saw himself as
having been created in the image of God. Perhaps as a giant slug. Or as the
leavings on the plate. Visions abound. The fate that had been meted out was
the fate he somehow deserved. Michael would live with it. Life had taught
him
that he had no choice.
