A Creed for the Third Millennium Read online

  'Interesting,' said Dr Christian, feeling Patti Fane wanted some response from him at this point.

  'Then Candy Fellowes jumped up, and she started in on Daphne — who did Daphne think she was, what right had Daphne to criticize Gus Rome, who just happened to be the greatest President of all time — then she started shouting about how much she despised Bible-thumping Sunday hymn singers because they were all such hypocrites, wore holes in their knees praying then went out to do everybody down to make a buck or climb one rung higher on the social ladder — wow! I thought Daphne and Candy were going to tear each other's eyes out!'

  'And did they?'

  Patti Fane preened visibly. 'No! I stopped it! Me, Doctor! Can you imagine that? I shoved Candy and Daphne back into their chairs and I took the floor! I told them they were all behaving like kids and I was ashamed to call myself a Pat-Pat. That's about when it all came out that all of us were applying every year to the SCB. So I asked them what was the big disgrace about applying, and what for crying out loud was the big disgrace about being turned down? I asked them what right they had to take out their frustrations on poor Marg? Or on Augustus Rome or the religious leaders, for that matter? I told them to get it out of their minds once and for all that anyone can pull strings with the SCB, and I reminded them that even Julia Reece herself had never managed to get a second child permission. Why, I said, couldn't we just be happy for Marg? Then I told Marg not to cry, and I asked her if I could be the godmother.'

  Her concluding words were spoken triumphantly; she sat looking as if the degree of her pleasure in herself surprised her, and perhaps her strength in the crisis as well.

  'You've done wonderfully, Patti. In fact, so well that I don't think you need to see me any more.' Dr Christian sounded very sure, and very proud.

  He's so much more than other people, thought Patti Fane; I couldn't even begin to explain to the other Pat-Pats today what this man has done for me. Every time I tried to tell them, it came out all wrong. Ineffectual. He cares! And maybe that's something you have to experience in person. You can't see it, you can't repeat it, you can't spread it out for people's third-hand inspection. They have to discover it for themselves. And why oh why do shrinks like Matt Stringman feel it's so wrong of a psychologist to encourage his patients to lean on God? Do they think they're God? Or is it that they don't like Dr Christian's ideas about God?

  'I brought Marg Kelly with me,' she said out loud.

  'Why?'

  'I think she needs to talk, really talk. Not with good old Nathan, bless his heart, but with someone on the outside of her problem. Today was a terrific shock to her. I don't think she had any idea what the consequences of having a second child are. I mean, she really seemed to think we'd all be over the moon with joy for her!'

  'Then, Patti, she must be living with her head buried.'

  'She is! That's the trouble. She is the wife of the President of Chubb! She lives in a huge house, she has servants, they're allowed a car full-time and she had dinner at the White House last week and Gracie Mansion the week before. Her only contacts with the outside world are through the Pat-Pats, and we're — not in her economic league, maybe, but a hell of a lot better off than most of the rest of the world. So I thought if Marg could talk to you, it might help her.'

  He leaned forward. 'Patti, can you give me an honest answer to a hurtful question?'

  The seriousness of his tone cut through her elation. 'I'll try.'

  'If Marg Kelly were to ask you whether or not you thought she should actually go ahead and conceive this permitted second child, how would you answer her?'

  It was a hurtful question. But the days when she had sat in her room staring at the wall twenty-four hours at a stretch scheming to find a surefire way to kill herself were behind her now, and what was more, those days could never come again. 'I would tell her to go ahead and conceive.'

  'Why?'

  'She's a good mother to Homer, and in her world there's enough insulation to prevent much spite.'

  'Okay. What if it were Daphne Chornik rather than Marg?'

  Patti frowned. 'I don't know. I thought I knew Daphne like a book, yet today was a revelation. So — I just can't give you an answer.'

  He nodded. 'And what if the lucky person had been you? How do you think you might decide now, after going through your breakdown and seeing the reaction of the Pat-Pats today?'

  'Do you know, I think I might advise myself to tear up the SCB papers? I'm not so badly off. I've got a good husband, and a son who's doing real well in school. And — I don't honestly know if I could take the grief. There are a lot of Daphne Chorniks out there.'

  He sighed. 'Take me to Margaret.'

  'But she's already here!'

  'No, I mean come down to the waiting room with me and do the introductions. She doesn't know me, she knows you. So she can't trust me, where she does trust you. Be her bridge to knowing and trusting me.'

  It was a very short bridge, however. Patti Fane's hand in his, he walked into the waiting room and went straight across to the pale, pretty woman drooping in a corner chair.

  'Marg, honey, this is Dr Christian,' said Patti.

  He said nothing, just held out his hands to Marg Kelly. Without volition she put hers into them, then seemed astonished to find this physical union was an accomplished fact.

  'My dear, you don't need to talk to anyone,' he said, smiling at her. 'Go home and have your child.'

  She got up, smiling back at him, and clasping his hands quite hard for a moment. 'I will,' she said.

  'Good!' And he released her.

  The next moment he was gone.

  Patti Fane and Marg Kelly let themselves out the back door of 1045 and began the two-block walk to where Elm Street intersected with Route 78, and the buses and trolley cars tootled along. However, they just missed the North Holloman bus, and reconciled themselves to a five minutes' wait; in winter one rarely waited longer.

  'What an extraordinary man!' said Marg Kelly as they sheltered in the lee of a ten-foot-high wall of frozen snow.

  'Did you feel it? Did you really feel it?'

  'Like an electric shock.'

  Dr Christian beat his team into 1047, and was back standing by the stove talking to Mama again when his three siblings walked into the kitchen, two of them accompanied by their wives.

  Mary, his nearest, and his only sister. A spinster still at thirty-one years of age. So very like Mama to look at, and yet — not beautiful at all. She's out of whack, thought Dr Christian. She has always been out of whack. Maybe having a genuinely beautiful mother does that to a girl? Look at Mama and then look at Mary, and it's like gazing at Mama's reflection in a subtly warped mirror. A sour sharp enclosed girl, Mary. Always had been, probably always would be too. And yet with his patients (she acted as the clinic secretary) she was wonderfully kind and gentle, nothing was too much trouble.

  James was properly the middle child, since Mary was the only girl, and therefore had the distinction of her sex to free her from this handicap. He too looked like Mama, but in Mary's way, blurred and indistinct and neutral. His wife Miriam was a strapping zestful girl stuffed with energy and brisk, cheery pragmatism; the group's occupational therapist, she was a tower of strength in the clinic and a happy match for James, all considered.

  Andrew was the beauty, fitting in the youngest. Mama in a masculine mould, fair as an angel and hard as a rock. Why then was he so self-effacing? His wife Martha, the clinic psychological testing technician, was seven years younger than he, and such a mouse that Mouse was her nickname. Coloured like a mouse, sweetly pretty like a mouse, timid like a mouse, twitchy like a mouse. Sometimes in one of his more whimsical moods Joshua Christian would imagine himself not a cat but a gigantic pair of hands, poised to deliver the clap that would stun the girl dead on the spot.

  'Lamb shanks, Mama? How absolutely super!' Miriam was English, very upper-crust in speech and manner. She rather awed the Christians, for not only was she accredited the best occupational the
rapist in the world, she was also a very gifted linguist. Her most oft-repeated jest was to the effect that she spoke not only French, German, Italian, Spanish, Russian and Greek, but American as well, and so much did the Christians love and esteem her that they never had the heart to tell her how thin that particular joke had worn.

  Mama had done it all, of course. Mama had tailor-made this remarkably efficient and self-sufficient little group to complement him, her eldest and her most beloved. Whatever he might have chosen to do for his life's work, he knew Mama would have driven James and Andrew and Mary to espouse it as well, so that they might help him. The measure of her success in brainwashing her younger children to this end could best be seen in James's and Andrew's choice of wives; they had both married women superlatively qualified to join the family business and family group. The clinic had lacked an occupational therapist, therefore James married one. The clinic had needed a psychological testing technician, so Andrew married one. By nature both women were genuinely content to take a back seat to Mama and content that their husbands took a back seat to Joshua. And Mary his sister had never once fought against her rather menial office destiny, even after Joshua had gone to her many years ago and offered to fight the battle with Mama on her behalf.

  Had any symptoms of discontent ever shown themselves, Dr Christian would have ridden roughshod over Mama for the sake of these people he always felt more as his children than his siblings; much though he loved and admired Mama, he knew her shortcomings well enough to recognize that she was not wise, not farsighted. But his family had defeated him without a battle; neither friction nor faction had ever marred the unmistakably joyous satisfaction the Christians got out of their work and each other. So, bewildered but grateful, Joshua Christian had accepted the position Mama cut out of his eminently suitable cloth, of family head and family-business head.

  They sat down to eat in the dining room, Mama at the foot of the elliptical lacquer table and therefore closest to the kitchen door, Joshua at the head of the table gazing at her, Mary and James and Miriam down one side, and Andrew and Martha down the other. Mama had long ago issued the dictum that no shop might be talked until the coffee and cognac were served after the meal itself was concluded, a rule they all respected scrupulously; but it did tend to leave large chunks of silence hovering while the food was consumed, for everyone save Mama worked next door in the clinic and saw little of any environment beyond 1045 and 1047 Oak Street. Positivity was the keynote of their code, which meant that for most of the time any discussion of world or national or state or urban affairs was impossible, too depressing unless the day had seen some happy milestone reached on the long road back to World Human Population Energy Equilibrium, always referred to as whoopee.

  They all ate well, for the food was as good on the tongue as it was on the eyes; Mama was a culinary artist, and had reared her small flock to appreciate what finer things of life were still readily available. Her hardest battle in this respect had been Joshua, who had always shown a distressing tendency to indifference about his own bodily needs, let alone comforts and indulgences. Not that he was masochistic, or even monastic; he was just not terribly interested.

  Coffee and cognac were dispensed in the living room, a big apartment which communicated with the dining room behind it through a wide and graceful archway. And it was here, sitting in a three-quarter circle about a round palest-pink lacquer coffee table, that the full effect of the first floor of 1047 Oak Street could truly be appreciated.

  The walls were satin-white, and of the window apertures there was no sign beyond the thinnest of dark lines bordering the sheets of wallboard cunningly inserted over the windows like covers into manholes; the architraves had been entirely removed, reminders of what lay sightless between them for half of each year. The floor was tiled in white plasticeramic, and this was covered in the sitting areas by white synthetic replicas of sheepskin rugs; everyone agreed that real skins would have been much nicer, but with all the water that got spilled each Sunday, real sheepskins would have been too liable to rot. Upholstered in palest pinks and greens, the sofas and chairs reflected the same colours in the lacquer tables.

  And everywhere there were plants, tubs and pots and baskets of lushly healthy plants, mostly green, but red and pink too, and purple. They stood on white pedestals of differing heights, trailing down in foaming cascades, sticking stiffly up like bayonets, branching delicately sideways and all around. And every leaf, frond, blade, bract and tendril shimmered in the brilliant white light diffused through a milky plexiglass ceiling. Ferns, palms, bromeliads, proteas, orchids, shrubs, vines, cacti, creepers, bulbs and corms and tubers and rhizomes, bonsaied trees. In the spring much of the growth burst into flower, long spikes of cymbidium orchids arching between spindles of hyacinth and clusters of daffodils, twenty different sorts of begonia massed with blooms, cyclamens and gloxinias and African violets; a mimosa in a tub smothered its entire eight feet of branching height in tiny powdery golden balls; and the house was redolent with the perfume of orange blossom, Sweet Alice, stephanotis, jasmine and gardenia. In the summer the hibiscus began to flower and continued through the autumn into early winter, joined by a copper-pink bougainvillaea that rioted across a trellis on the living room's front wall. Only in the depths of winter were the flowering things quiescent, but then they continued glossy and green amid the more colourful leaves of the nonflowering plants that seemed to feel they had no need of further glory.

  The air was always sweet. Dr Christian's plants were half of a symbiotic respiratory relationship, the human beings its other half; carbon dioxide fed the plants, oxygen the human beings, and each inhaled what the other exhaled. This bottom floor was always many degrees warmer than the bedroom floors higher up, for the plants produced heat, as did the ostensibly cool fluorescent lighting that was never turned off. To this floor had gone almost all their precious ration of electricity, and literally all their minute allowance of gas for heating, hoarded for the stretches when it was so cold only radiant energy could keep the plants alive. On this floor the family lived all of its waking leisure hours; the two upper floors were used for actual slumber, nothing else.

  Each Sunday the entire Christian clan devoted its day to the plants, watering and feeding, washing and pruning out dead growth, anointing wounds and eliminating pests. They all enjoyed this change of pace enormously, not inclined to call it a chore when the rewards were there all around them. On Sundays too the hardier plants which had spent a week in the clinic next door were carried back to the bottom floor of 1047, and other plants were carried to the clinic for temporary duty.

  This day had constituted the most distasteful day of Dr Joshua Christian's month; it was the day when all the forms had to be filled out and mailed to Holloman and Hartford and Washington to satisfy the bureaucratic appetite for paper, paper, ever more paper; the day all the bills had to be paid and the books brought up to date. Normally he didn't visit the clinic on what he called his Day of Atonement, but the Pat-Pat crisis had come deliriously late in it, and now he wanted to see how the others felt about the events which had occurred in Pat-Pat Five's living room.

  Mama gave him his coffee, James his brandy balloon; food was something Dr Christian could take or leave, even Mama's food, but there was no doubt, he thought, eyes closed to savour the fumes of Bisquit Napoleon, that the combination of truly excellent coffee and cognac warmed a man from belly button clear through to backbone. The best prelude to bed in these times, which was probably why consumption of strong spirits after meals had gone up in recent years, where pre-dinner drinking had declined.

  Their great-grandfather and their grandfather on the paternal side had both been wholesalers in French wines and brandies, and drinkers of them too, so in those times imposing cellars had been laid down. Of course with the passing of the years the wines had long perished, especially after it became impossible to keep bottles at the cool constant temperature they needed; a cellar that was too cold had just as deleterious effect as a cupb
oard that was too hot. But the brandies had survived, and though the glaciers were creeping down across Canada and Russia and Scandinavia and Siberia at a heart-chilling rate, France in most years still managed to produce cognac and armagnac, so the Christian stocks were kept replenished. The family did not drink very much wine these days; cognac was better value.

  'Our Patti Pat-Pat did very well today,' he said.

  'Bloody well!' said Miriam proudly.

  'I discharged her from the clinic'

  'Good! Did she tell you she and her husband were going to apply for relocation? Apparently Texas A & M has been after Bob Fane for a long while, but he's hung on at Chubb for the usual reasons — rats deserting sinking ships, fear of the unknown, once a Chubber always a Chubber, Yankee mistrust of any part of the country other than New England — and Patti's horror of being the first Pat-Pat to leave Holloman and thus break up the group.' This came from Andrew, spoken in measured tones which sat oddly on his youth and beauty.

  'The Pat-Pats fascinate me,' said James. 'It's rare outside of blood ties for an association of women to take precedence even over marriages. Thank God one of them has finally managed to stand outside herself successfully enough to see the group for what it is. And permanent relocation is the perfect way to break free. I'm surprised a husband or two hasn't thought of relocation as a way out of the Pat-Pat dilemma long since.'

  'Relocation is a very big step,' said Mary heavily. 'I don't blame anyone for hesitating. And these are all Chubbers, tenured and entrenched at that'

  Dr Christian refused to be sidetracked, so he ignored James and Mary, homing in on Andrew's news. 'No, Drew, she didn't tell me they'd applied for relocation. Good for her! It's high time she put the needs and welfare of her family ahead of the Pat-Pats. Did she admit she'd been afraid of being the one to break up the Pat-Pats?'