"Don't tell me you've given up atheism," I marveled.

"Oh, I've never been an atheist, you misunderstand. I've always been aware of G.o.d. My complaint has been that he hasn't returned the favor-not that I ask much, only an equal effort. It's G.o.d who's the real atheist," he protested. "He keeps denying himself by lack of action; he's turned his back on being G.o.d."

"I guess you want a mountain to smoke," I said.

"Or a bush to burn, I'm not particular. Mortals require signs; that's an axiom. And the truth of the matter is I've given G.o.d and your mother's money all the chance in the world to make a difference in me, and neither one has had any success at it. They don't speak to me. They can't influence. The void's in me maybe, but I blame them. They overestimate themselves. They think they dazzle simply by being, when what they ought to do is demonstrate."

"It seems to me money never stops demonstrating," I said, intending to leave G.o.d out of it and bring McGovern in. "Like just a little while ago, if you want an immediate example."

"You mean the easy way your mother sends her philistine on a tour of the bars of San Francisco? Oh, admittedly a demonstration, but only of power. Power is what we expect of G.o.d and money-but it's too ordinary, considering the source. And I'm not willing to give my devotion to a commonplace; of G.o.d and money I have a right to expect something extraordinary. Especially since power is really nothing more than a reward for this or that." He hesitated; he closed his eyes, the weaker lid minutely tremulous, like a clairvoyant antic.i.p.ating a signal from die beyond. But it was only his way of deliberating before a climax. "Faith in G.o.d rewards with the power of complacency, which is exactly why I find most piety obnoxious. And money rewards with the power of permitting or compelling, depending on one's temperament-though I ought to say that your mother's money, being permissive, manages to escape my entire disgust. well and good, but the world as it stands needs something holier than a reward for mere survival."

"You're talking politically now?" I wondered. "You're talking about the cold war?"

"I'm talking about the world," he reiterated. "It needs what neither G.o.d nor money can give it. It needs something extraordinary."

He appeared to insist on my understanding him. "You're waiting for the Messiah then," was all I ventured.

He strangely did not deny it. "Oh, I've been witness to crimes!" he said with a fierceness so quiet and even so civil that I was altogether startled.

"But that was years ago," I said. "You've had a clean job ever since."

"Clean," he echoed coolly, "that's your mother's language, not yours."

"Well, even if it is."

"Your mother thinks the State Department is a sort of sanitation squad marching with big brooms and led by an Amba.s.sador in a homburg," he said. "All singing Yale fraternity songs."

"Well, even if she does."

Perspiration sat in gilded globules on his melancholy lip. "The trouble is the brooms don't work. Nothing works," he said. "The brooms are cursed, the dustpans are full of spells. There's no possibility of cleaning up,"

I was suddenly impatient, and could not bear his talk. It was too abstract; it was too withdrawn; it was too esoteric; it was too hiddenly prophetic. It was Enoch's talk as Enoch always talked, but I did not like it: he was willing to give an hour to the problem of evil in the universe, but he would not surrender a single moment to speak to me of Tilbeck. And it was my father I wanted to hear about, and not the world.

"The world," he said; he would talk only of the world. "It's the whole world that's been dipped in muck, the whole world in the aftermath of crime. You can't clean murder away," he said; he cared for generalities of evil only: he would not talk to me of my father. "How do you clean murder away?" he brought out, rubbing away the sweat.

"By forgetting it," I promptly offered.

"I've heard that before," Enoch said. So had I; it was obscurely reminiscent but as yet had no place. "What's done is done," my stepfather recited in the singsong of disgust, and at once I recalled checkers and riddles, and the advocate of never going back.

"Time makes you forget," I added without sympathy, "anyhow," for I could now scarcely remember that shipboard face, and in spite of imagination's effort could see nothing more than the colonel's green sungla.s.ses filled with a meadow of ocean. "It was long ago, all that."

Nevertheless Enoch held back. "There are crimes which time chooses to memorialize instead of mitigate," he said stiffly.

"It seems like a hundred years already."

"There are crimes which can't be forgotten."

"Then," I sighed, not knowing what better to do, "for the sake of peace they ought to be forgiven."

"Ah, for the sake of peace," he said.

"Isn't peace what everything's about?" I caught him up, thinking to match him generality for generality, vacuity for vacuity.

But he only smiled. "A while ago you said it was money," he truthfully reminded me. And into the whip of my chagrin muttered: "Murder fouls the peace-dove's nest forever. Or at least while people blather of money and peace and power and G.o.d, and that's as good as forever. The world will stay dirty until it gets what it needs."

"Don't keep saying the world," I objected. "It's the same as saying nothing at all."

"What the world needs," he said again, growing soft, "is vengeance. Is that nothing at all?"

"I don't know about the world," I began.

"Then that's the second thing so far you don't know about You said earlier you didn't know about G.o.d."

"The third thing, if you want to count. I said first of all I didn't know about my father."

"I don't know about him either."

"But you know about the world."

"Yes."

"And what it needs."

"Yes."

"I suppose my father's not in the world?"

"Your father's in a house on Town Island, I've told you. Locate that wherever you please." But having said this much, he made a sardonic retreat into the usual bramble of word-manipulation, a thicket he frequently inhabited. "As for anyone's being in the world, it's not the same as being of the world. One is a matter of existence simply, but the other has to do with att.i.tude-so to begin with it's too worldly a question." He paused to acknowledge his skill; I heard a weary exhalation or throat-tick. "Anyhow I'm not the one to answer, though I know it's meant to elicit all sorts of possible att.i.tudes. I have no att.i.tudes. I won't engage in personal things. Iq that sense I'm as unworldly as a nun."

On account of swift resentment I had not followed him all the way into these intricacies, and despised the lightness with which he juggled worldly and unworldly, in-the-world and of-the-world, like so many word-nettled wreaths; and moodily I was p.r.i.c.ked by his final glibness as by a thorn. I said in the thick opposite of haste, "If you were really unworldly you wouldn't talk of vengeance. You'd talk of mercy."

"Mercy!" he scoffed. "Mercy doesn't raise the dead; and that's the sign one waits for."

"Neither does vengeance."

"Oh, you're gullible," he look up immediately. "What else do you think will bring on a sign?-I mean something to show that Creation was a covenant and not a betrayal. You're very gullible," he said again, blinking down at the scratched dull globes of his shoe-fronts as though they were sudden oracles, "if you think vengeance belongs to men. Mercy belongs to men, but vengeance doesn't. We aren't allowed such a terrible capacity. It's not only that we wouldn't know how to apply it if we had it-it wouldn't work for us. We're allowed mercy, after all-we're more than allowed it, we're commanded to it-and yet we haven't applied it even when the f.a.ggots have wept for it with human blood. Mercy is human duty, but vengeance is too pure for our foul use-it's not something we're able to perform. It's too extraordinary for us even to conceive of properly: our notion would be to leave a corpse for a corpse, an obliteration for an obliteration." Slowly and vividly he displayed his square palms with their red wet centers, like puppets; he made them evenly meet and nod. "It would come to the same thing as Christendom's idea of mercy, a t.i.t for a tat-mercy granted in exchange for guilt confessed. Guilt is what feeds mercy-it's mercy's primary requirement," he said harshly, "that's the trick and pulse of it. And if there is no guilt to be given over as a unit of barter, then no mercy at all, then the stake and the oven instead. That's the way it would be with vengeance, can't you see it?-though it's not prohibited only on the ground that we'd abuse it. We abuse all our powers anyhow, we mutilate ourselves. Human crime is a bloated craw, there's no waiting for it to finish because no matter how full it seems to be it only stretches for more, it's tremendous, both in itself and c.u.mulatively, it's turned into an enormity of enormities-it's left the human dimension, it's vanished out of politics and gone to fertilize history, that's the thing!" And now my stepfather slapped the air, as though to erase what he read among the scribbles of gnats herding around our knees. I was astonished to see a tremor, all by itself, in his middle finger. At the same moment he noticed it himself. "You're watching that? It's the digit of dogma, that one-it gets bulls issued, it accuses and anathematizes, it beatifies. Only in my case the crucial nerve is weak. I can't dogmatize without trembling, because from a certain point of view all the world is on fire; the sky is on fire, having caught it from the sun-" He hesitated, a.s.sessing my bewilderment. "I mean," he said, "no matter what, it's already too late, even for right action. A merely human vengeance would be as out of proportion to evil action as a hoe is to a tank-no, that's too finite an image-as a wheel is to the sun then. A sun of fire in a sky of fire, remember! To exercise human vengeance would be indecent, that's what I'm getting at!-it would be obscene. n.o.body has a right to look at the ash and the bones and say: I am merciful, therefore I forgive this crime. So how much more perverted to look at the spared criminal nation and say: I am righteous, therefore vengeance on this seed is mine. No holy t.i.t for tat permitted, nothing liturgical, po ministerial exemptions, no hope, no expiation! You want to know why? Because the crime is too big for us, in our human littleness, to presume to forgive it or avenge it. The crime is the crime of crimes! It's too huge! too heinous! too foul! too fiendish and monstrous!-Too big! We don't dare spit on it with the presumption of human forgiveness or human vengeance-we're not big enough for that, we're too little, we're not G.o.d! It would be ourselves we would have to forgive or avenge, and who can avenge himself? who can forgive himself?"

Poor Enoch! He halted; he sat blasted, stopped, blighted; his head was delivered into his open hands like a mourning bell or chained cannon ball; he was heavy and terrifying, a black burden to himself, with oil making sleek crescents in the sides of his nose and his mouth knitted up.

In the shock of this long turbulence I had nothing to concede. "The dead are dead," I said merely, but he hardly heard.

"Listen," he told me finally, hoa.r.s.ely, reluctantly. "I know what I know. It's because I don't have the gullibility of worldliness. When I can seize the seizable I admit to it. The point is there's nothing in politics. I don't believe in politics. I believe in history."

"You believe in vengeance," I said, but it was only in order to stop him short.

He moved on all the same. "Exactly," he said. "I believe in vengeance and history. Vengeance belongs to history and not to men. Vengeance is a high historical act."

"And history?" I wondered.

But he thought my tone too thick and too raw and he swelled against it. "History? What about history? You want to know what it is? It isn't what you think. It isn't simply what has happened. It's a judgment on what has happened!"

He uncovered his eyes to the saddening rim of sunset. The tugs were eating away at the river like larvae in a braid of old wool. It was half-dark below us, but the brows of buildings were notched with golden scars; their long windows flared. The last light yearned behind a far high gas tank, which took the horizon like a silver lung set poignantly afloat. In the house a sound ceased; the air-conditioning had been switched off; it had grown cool; too early it smelled of evening and of September. Suddenly a single cough of my mother's needled the dusk, as audible and sharp as an insect-sting. Enoch sat refusing, denying, maneuvering his rutted neck like a sultan or king awaiting in unbelief the nightingale's note.

"I think she's coming out here," I said.

He appeared for a moment to crane toward the possibility of my mother's step, attentive: but no, it was his own voice he was all at once singularly open to, and only that. He listened to it briefly without speaking.

"You don't know what I mean," he said at last. "A pity, a pity. You ought to know."

"I ought to know," I doubtfully admitted.

"You think history is a sort of bundle one generation hauls off its back to launch onto the next. Every twenty-five years or so the bundle gets heavier and heavier. n.o.body dares to throw it off and walk away and leave it behind. Even the heroes are afraid to stand naked without it; even the cowards think it somehow or other contains civilization. But those are not the facts. Those are not the facts." He raised the tremulous middle finger and stared it down until it steadied. "That isn't what history is. It doesn't keep on acc.u.mulating without conscience forever and forever-don't think the universe wouldn't choke on the glut of it all! It stops to clear away and begin again."

"Like Noah," I said. "Noah and the Flood."

His cautious eye took me in curiously: to see if I were on his side or not.

"That was vengeance," I said appreciatively. "But what about all those poor giraffes and donkeys and pigeons who hadn't done anything wrong and couldn't get on the ark and had to die all the same, just because it was a historical necessity for man to be wiped out?"

"A wicked generation," he observed. "Still, not so wicked as ours."

But I ignored his emendation and pressed for more. "The giraffes too? At least admit the giraffes were innocent."

"All right, the giraffes were innocent. So were the donkeys and pigeons, if that's what you want."

"Then it was a mistake," I said complacently. "The whole Flood was a mistake."

"A mistake," he a.s.sented.

"G.o.d's mistake," I noted. "A historical error."

"But an acknowledged one. G.o.d acknowledged it," my stepfather insisted, "when he swore there would never be another Flood in all the rest of history."

"There!" I exclaimed. "And he's stuck to his word. That proves you're wrong."

Enoch said, "I'm not wrong."

I had another try at dialectic. "But if there hasn't been another Flood since, it means that G.o.d has taken vengeance out of history, doesn't it?"

"No. It means he's put it in. He took vengeance away from man when he punished Cain; and he took it away from himself when he covenanted against making more Floods. And instead he gave it to history. Believe me, G.o.d doesn't have that power any more! It used to be 'Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord,' meaning man had no right to it, but now it isn't even G.o.d's. G.o.d has abdicated-it's what I said, G.o.d's become an atheist. It's history that's the force! It's history that avenges and repays! It's history that raises the dead! And when we talk of redemption it's history we mean!"

He stopped; my mother stood on the threshold.

"Then you are waiting for the Messiah," I murmured once more.

He looked at his wife and answered without consciousness of any irony. "The Messiah and I wait together. The Messiah waits too."

"Waits for what?" I had to say; plainly it was what he wanted.

His reply was quick. "Revenge," said my stepfather. "Revenge on Europe. We wait for that."

"And if it doesn't happen soon?"

He nearly smiled. "Well wait anyhow."

"Then you'll wait till the conversion of the Jews!" my mother threw in with unprovoked perturbation, shaking the loosened tail of her shawl: two or three of the Taj Mahals curled round her neck. "You'll wait till the dead come running out of their graves!"

"Why not?" he said, calmly enough. "Haven't you come running out of your bed?"

"I had to hear," she confessed. "I had to hear what you were saying."

"We were talking about Noah's ark," I volunteered, and since this was the precise but incredible fact, suddenly laughed. "There's a riddle about that," I finished obscurely, not sure I remembered it: but even if I had, my mother would have interrupted the telling of it. And then I felt foolish at having wanted, childishly, to tell it.

"My eye you were!" she said. "You were talking about the Messiah. I distinctly heard Enoch say the Messiah. I suppose it was some sort of blasphemy." Her teasing was half merry and half grim. "When it comes to the Messiah you won't find Enoch any different from all the other Jews. They won't admit the Messiah's already come."

"Evangelist Allegra," Enoch said.

"Jews are a very stiff-necked people. -That's a Bible phrase, you know," said my mother. "They always want religion their way." She swung round the cactus pots and stationed herself behind Enoch's chair, encircling his head. Her fingers scratched along his jowl. "Ouch, you haven't shaved. You never shave when you don't work. You're simply too lazy. Grow a beard and you'll be a patriarch, you know that, Enoch? I mean you would if you had any descendants."

"It's quite enough for me to have had ancestors," he said.

"You see!" she cried. "Racial pride! You're all alike!" She turned to me to pursue her odd comedy more emphatically. "Next thing he'll remind me how my ancestors were running around in the forest primeval with their bodies painted blue when his were-were I don't know what."

"Writing the Commentaries on the Commentaries," he mildly supplied.

"Well, what did it get you anyhow?" she sniffed. "The ghetto, that's all."

"The ghetto," he said in a voice familiar with its lines.

"That's why you talk of revenge on Europe. All those beautiful cathedrals! All those saints! And for the sake of a single little misplaced tribe, you'd throw the whole thing over!"

"A pogrom against the gentiles," he summed it up. "Try to live till that day; it's as good as immortality."

But her good humor was inexplicably thick with danger. "Now you're talking like a Jew. Don't talk like a Jew, Enoch."

"How shall I talk?"

"I don't know. Not that way."

"Was I muttering from the Zohar all unawares?"

"Not that way," she said again. "You sound-" She gave a great calloused sigh. "You sound separate."

He pulled her round to him. "Well, not from you, Allegra."

"What I mean is, don't talk religion."

"I never talk religion. I only talk metaphor."