Thirteen crucifixions, 93

 

            The smell of good savoury cooking filled Glen’s little apartment.  Together Doris and Alice sat, side by side on the chesterfield, flanked by Stephen and Pierre, who still hadn’t moved.  Doris saw them both as awfully young.  But everyone seemed young to her, even Alice who wasn’t ten years her junior.  Where had the time gone?  She was almost sixty-four.  But she didn’t know her real age.  Almost no one knew this about her.  Beyond when she was a girl of twenty or so occupying a bed-sit in London while German bombs were being rained upon them, Doris had absolutely no memory, no childhood, no parents.  Had she simply sprung into existence, a fledged adult?  She didn’t know.  She had fabricated a simple story of her parents having died in an air raid when she was eighteen and nearly of age, leaving her no living relative.  For some reason she’d assumed that she was Jewish.

            She had been told that she was excessively virtuous.  She had never been anything but good, kind and unselfish.  She had never been exploited on account of her goodness. Whether no one had ever pulled it off or had never tried to she didn’t know.  She trusted others absolutely and she had therefore never experienced betrayal.  Her saintliness was nearly legendary.  She didn’t know how she’d ended up with the Quakers.  But the well-being of the planet had always been her great priority.  It seemed odd to her, this living without a shadow, with no concealed motive, no ambition towards her own self-advancement.  Everything she had ever needed had always come to her unbidden.  If she suffered, it was only because there was evil in the world and all of humanity and the planet had been already grievously wounded by this.

            Right now she suffered over Stephen and Pierre, whose lives she knew almost nothing about.  It wasn’t that she felt their pain—she knew their pain and suffered greatly over them both.  As she had often suffered over Alice, and especially over her own husband.  In Sam, Doris had become acquainted with the greatest mysteries of humanity—the mystery of suffering because of evil.  Even to her he had said little of his experiences during the war, the years he spent in the death camp.  He told her only what she needed to know.