“Have you had any meatballs?”
Palming the cup against his hip, out of sight, he borrowed a concept from her husband. “Still working up an appetite,” he said.
Unilaterally, as if he were a toddler, or a dog, Mrs. Haefle loaded a plate for him. She was stout and rabbity and meddling, a poor advertisement for Swedish heritage. She handed him enough meatballs and Temptation to thwart formation of a buzz, and he had no choice but to take the plate. With a meddling hand, she turned him away from the fuming cauldron. “The other teenagers are in the sunroom,” she said.
As he walked away, he felt her following him, making sure he conformed to her patronizing wishes. Uninterested in teenagers in the sunroom, he weaved through the living room to a bookcase, set his plate on an end table, selected a volume at random, and pretended to absorb himself in it. Mrs. Haefle had been buttonholed, but she was still monitoring him. Her vigilance reminded him of certain teachers at Lifton Central whose lives were evidently devoid of every pleasure but the sadism of denying younger people pleasure.
Finally the doorbell rang. Mrs. Haefle went to answer it, and Perry darted back to the dining room with his cup. Two white-haired ladies were at the cookie station, but he didn’t know them, had no relationship with them, and brazenly filled his cup with steaming gl?gg. Hearing Mrs. Haefle’s voice, as she returned from the coat closet, he escaped through the kitchen and from there to the basement stairs, where he sat down. From below came the rattle of dice in the Yahtzee shaker, the brooklike patter of Judson’s voice.
In no time, again, Perry emptied the cup. As with every illicit substance he’d ever sampled, his thirst for gl?gg seemed inordinate, abnormal. It occurred to him that standing on the kitchen counter was a bottle of pure vodka. Since the accounting of what constituted “one cup” was already fubar, he went ahead and crept back into the kitchen, poured several ounces of vodka, and quickly downed it. He left the cup in the sink.
Now in possession of a satisfactory buzz, his spirits rising a little, his resolution affronted but arguably unviolated, he went to test his liquor-holding powers on the clergy in the living room. Beside the neglected fire in the fireplace, two men, one tall and one short, stood side by side as if they’d run out of things to say but hadn’t yet moved on to greener conversational pastures. Perry introduced himself.
The taller man was wearing a red turtleneck beneath a camel-hair blazer. “I’m Adam Walsh, from Trinity Lutheran. This is Rabbi Meyer from Temple Beth-El.”
The rabbi, who had hair only behind his ears, shook Perry’s hand. “Happy Hanukkah.”
In case this was a quip, Perry produced a laugh, perhaps overloud. From the corner of his eye, he could see Mrs. Haefle sourly watching him.
“Is your father here?” Reverend Walsh said.
“No, he’s on a pastoral mission in the city. He got stuck in the snow.”
There ensued talk of snow. Perry had not yet developed the fascination with weather that every adult seemed to have. After voicing his meaningless opinion that the snow was already eight inches deep, he broached the subject of goodness and its relation to intelligence. He’d come to the reception for selfless reasons, but he now saw that he might get not only a free buzz but free advice from, as it were, two professionals.
“I suppose what I’m asking,” he said, “is whether goodness can ever truly be its own reward, or whether, consciously or not, it always serves some personal instrumentality.”
Reverend Walsh and the rabbi exchanged glances in which Perry detected pleasant surprise. It gratified him to upset their expectations of a fifteen-year-old.
“Adam may have a different answer,” the rabbi said, “but in the Jewish faith there is really only one measure of righteousness: Do you celebrate God and obey His commandments?”
“That would suggest,” Perry said, “that goodness and God are essentially synonymous.”
“That is the idea,” the rabbi said. “In biblical times, when God manifested Himself more directly, He could seem like quite the hard-ass—striking people blind for trivial offenses, telling Abraham to kill his son. But the essence of Jewish faith is that God does what He does, and we obey Him.”
“So, in other words, it doesn’t matter what a righteous person’s private thoughts are, so long as he obeys the letter of God’s commandments?”
“And worships Him, yes. Of course, at the level of folk wisdom, a man can be righteous without being a mensch. I’m sure you see this, too, Adam—the pious man who makes everyone around him miserable. That might be more what Perry is asking about.”