Crossroads

She sighed so heavily that the windshield fogged. “I embarrassed you, didn’t I.”

“Not at all.”

“No, I did. I can see that now. I was trying to be Mrs. Fix-It.”

Russ glowed with pride. He, not Theo, had been right about her true nature.

“You didn’t do anything so wrong,” he said. “But the next time you see Theo, it wouldn’t hurt to tell him you’re sorry. A simple heartfelt apology goes a long way. Theo’s a good man, a good Christian. If you change your inner attitude, he’ll know it. It is so important to me, Frances, so very important, that you keep coming on our Tuesdays.”

This was the mildest of allusions to his pride in her, his hopes for a deepening of their intimacy, but he worried that it was still too much; and, indeed, the allusion wasn’t lost on her.

“Why, Reverend Hildebrandt,” she said. “The things you do say.”

Desire surged in him so powerfully, it felt like a premonition of its fulfillment. He thought of the blues recordings he’d left in his office, the excuse they would give him to bring Frances inside the church, the course that events might take in the dark of his office, if he kept up his nerve and didn’t get them back too late. Feeling one with the Fury, he urged it across Fifty-ninth Street, where the snow was heavily furrowed.

The furrows were deeper than he’d judged. They absorbed his momentum and deflected him into a sideways skid. For a very bad moment, neither steering nor braking had any effect. He clutched the wheel helplessly while Frances cried out and the Fury slid backward through the intersection. There was a bump and a bang and a crunch of metal on metal.

Resolved: that goodness is an inverse function of intelligence. First affirmative speaker: Perry Hildebrandt, New Prospect Township High School.

Let’s begin by positing that the essence of goodness is unselfishness: loving others as one loves oneself, performing costly acts of charity, denying oneself pleasures that harm others, and so forth. And then let’s imagine an act of spontaneous kindness to a previously hostile party—to one’s sister, for example—that accords with our posited definition of goodness. If the actor lacks intelligence, we need inquire no further: this person is good. But suppose that the actor is helpless not to calculate the ancillary selfish advantages accruing from his charitable act. Suppose that his mind works so quickly that, even as he’s performing the act, he’s fully aware of these advantages. Is his goodness not thereby fully compromised? Can we designate as “good” an act that he might also have performed through the sheerly selfish calculations of his intellect?

Returning to his room, where Judson was kneeling over the homemade Stratego board, Perry weighed the benefits and costs of taking his sister’s place at the Haefles’ reception. On the credit side were the goodness of this action, the satisfaction of adhering to his new resolution, the unprecedented look of gratitude with which Becky had accepted his offer, and the advancement of his self-interested campaign to secure her silence regarding his earlier bad actions. On the debit side, he now had to attend a reception for clergymen, with Judson.

“Listen, kiddo,” Perry said, sitting down across the board from him. “I need to ask you a favor. How would you feel about going to a party where there aren’t any kids your age?”

“When.”

“As soon as Mom and Dad get home. We’ll go with them.”

Judson’s brow creased. “I thought we were playing the game.”

“We can slide it under my bed. It’ll be there tomorrow.”

“Why do I have to go?”

“Because I have to go. You don’t want to be home alone, do you?”

A brief silence.

“I don’t mind,” Judson said.

“Really? You kind of freaked out, that time in the fall. It wasn’t even at night.”

Judson stared at the game board with an odd little smile, as if the boy who’d freaked out about some noises in the basement, though undeniably him, were an object of faint amusement; as if the shame of that time in the fall, when he’d been left home alone for too long, might pass over him and land somewhere else.

“The snacks will be good,” Perry said. “You can bring your book and find a place to read.”

“Why do you have to go?”

“It’s something I’m doing for Becky.”

Perry waited for the obvious question: Why do a good thing for Becky and not for his little brother? But this wasn’t the way a superior human being’s mind worked.