Absolution

by Alice McDermott

big dogs, three or four, I think, but maybe more, who seemed to circulate through the rooms in a constant state of joyful anticipation, tails wagging, nails clicking on the worn floors. The place smelled of warm sunlight on old books, and of dog.

“Easy enough to live with this when you’re old like us,” he went on, “but when you’re young,” and he paused to run his hand over his bald pate, his little apostolic flame of white baby hair. “When you’re young, it’s fuel to the fire of a sympathetic heart.” He smiled at Stella again. “Tikkun olam,” he said. “Go forth and do likewise.”

Repair the world

And then she looked at me with her smarter-than-everyone smile. “But don’t you know, Tricia,” she told me, “the Buddhists say, ‘Mend yourself.’”

A pact with the Devil, as Peter saw it, that nevertheless would have saved so many lives. I guess you could say that the miraculous, portentous, historical alignment of the stars that had so inspired my husband before we got to Saigon—two Catholic presidents standing together to defeat the march of communism, to fulfill Our Lady’s promise at Fátima—had become in retrospect the very thing that sent our good intentions all awry. They never saw the hand of God in it, Peter later said of his superiors in Saigon. “But they made useful fools of those of us who thought we did.”

She took off her cat’s-eye glasses, left them to dangle over her décolletage. Without them, her eyes seemed palely innocent, undressed, but in a sweet, even childish way. “There’s a real danger here,” she said, and paused to let that sink in. I wasn’t sure if she meant here at this table or in the country at large. “There’s a real danger in the bestowing of gifts upon the hopeless only to inflate the ego of the one who does the bestowing.” She paused, as if to admire the way she’d put this.

After she’d let that sink in, she added, “It encourages self-righteousness in the one even as it destroys self-determination in the other.”

she did not let that stupidity pass. When her husband belittled her, good-naturedly, of course—it was the way all husbands belittled their wives in those days—she replied silently; she ducked her head demurely but managed nevertheless to make the gesture seem as defiant as a raised gun. She was not, in short, a saint.

Wally shook his head at this. “That can’t be true,” he said, in English. Poetry, he said, is in the world well before a poet finds it. Its source is the unspoken. The unspoken is always translatable.

open. I’m sorry I keep using that word, but it seems the one that suits him best: open-hearted, open-faced, open-handed, no guile, no self-consciousness or pride. I’d already noticed this about him in the children’s ward, that he had no sense that he was watching himself, admiring himself, as he went about being a good and generous guy—that kind of clawing self-consciousness that I’ve observed over the years in many an altruist: priests, missionaries, ACLU attorneys, the leaders of certain charities, or all the well-dressed elites at black-tie global fundraisers. Performative bonhomie. Self-congratulatory demonstrations

She is not free to put herself in danger.” Her shoulders fell. She seemed, once again, genuinely sorrowful. “I know you girls want a heroic life. You want to show your courage. But self-sacrifice is never really selfless. It’s often quite selfish.”