“What did you expect? You’re the one who sells dope.”
“Exactly my point. My exposure is potentially far more serious than yours.”
“I’m already the one who got punished.”
“You’re the one who made the mistake, my friend.”
Larry nodded, touching his face again. “What’s in the bag?”
“A present for my brother. Do you want to see it?”
He was glad of the chance to let Larry admire the movie camera, to wind it up and shoot imaginary footage with him, before it became irrevocably Judson’s. After an hour, which was the minimum duration for his visit to pass as a friendly social call, rather than the targeted instrumentality it actually had been, he headed home through snow swirling down from a dark sky. He didn’t think Larry would break, even under renewed pressure, but the irony of getting busted now, when he’d resolved to be a better person, was persuasively vivid to him. He still feared mischief from Mrs. Cottrell, and there was another worrisome loose end. In the days since Becky had annihilated him as a person, in the coat closet at First Reformed, she’d seemed more pissed off with him than ever. He imagined a full-scale family Confrontation in which he insisted on his innocence—with a kind of retroactive honesty, since he’d now forsworn the use and sale of mind-altering substances—only to be undercut by his sister’s denunciation.
What providence it therefore was when, ensconced in his room with Judson, he’d heard Becky crying. His ensuing exchange with her had ended in a warm embrace, a sense of being rewarded for his resolution. This would have been entirely satisfactory if he hadn’t then felt so deliciously relieved of his worry about her. The relief, its selfishness, negated all the goodness he’d displayed, and it cast an unfortunate light on his feeling of being rewarded. Shouldn’t true goodness be its own reward? He wondered if an action, to qualify as authentically good, needed not only to be untainted by self-interest but also to bring no pleasure of any kind.
The parental alarm clock, which he knew to be two minutes slow, showed 6:45. His mother was now so bizarrely late that all bets on her arrival time were off. He considered a good action that would almost certainly bring him no pleasure: going to the Haefles’ without waiting for his mother. The action had only the faintest taint of self-interest, in the form of the credit he might get for ensuring that the Hildebrandt family was represented at the party. This credit would be too feeble to be fungible if he was accused of selling drugs, and so could be discounted.
He wrote a short note to his mother, on the scratch pad by the phone, and went to collect Judson. “Time for a walk in the snow.”
“I thought we were waiting for Mom and Dad.”
“Nope, just you and me, kiddo. We are the Hildebrandts tonight.”
A minor mystery of adulthood was that his parents referred to latex overshoes as rubbers. Even Becky, that vessel of purity, had been seen to suppress a snigger at the word. The parents surely knew its other meaning, and yet they persisted in using it, with a confounding absence of embarrassment: Make sure you wear your rubbers. Though Judson’s rubbers were innocent, Perry was ashamed of his. Ansel Roder and his moneyed friends wore alpine hiking boots in the snow.
It was still coming down heavily when he and Judson ventured out in their rubbers. Judson ran ahead, kicking up sheets and clumps of it, the interruption of Stratego forgotten in the excitement of a winter storm. Watching him fall down and pick himself back up, Perry mourned no longer being small enough that falling didn’t hurt. He no longer even remembered how it felt to have the ground so unthreateningly proximate. Why had he been in such a hurry to grow up? It was as if he’d never experienced the grace of childhood. As he watched his little brother frolic, he felt another downward tug in his mood, stronger than the tug he’d felt while shopping but also less painful, because it was occasioned by a feeling of metempsychosis. More surely than before, he sensed that he was going down, was irredeemably bad in the head, but this time it seemed to matter less, because his soul was connected to Judson’s by love and fraternity, at some mystical level interchangeable, and Judson was a blessed child, literally born on a Sunday, and would always be okay, even if he, Perry, wasn’t.
On the front stoop of the Superior Parsonage, between rows of bushes with Christmas lights dimmed by snow, he crouched to brush off Judson’s parka and help him with the buckles of his rubbers, which were encrusted with ice and difficult to undo.
“I still don’t see why we’re here.”