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Which opened me up for another round of abuse led by Ms. Schanke. “Right, right. Now that the lab is finished torturing the poor beasts, you’re going to get rid of them.”

I explained in detail how we were placing and repatriating the chimps in the most humane way possible. What I could not admit to before the committee right then is the fact that I have profound misgivings myself about any kind of experimentation on animals, however humble their rank on the evolutionary ladder. I am privately very embarrassed by what happened to Bert during the trials for ReLease. Indeed the treatment of our animals is one area in the Genetics Lab where I am stickler for protocol.

The fact is that under Elsbeth’s gentle suasion, I have become far more sensitive to the rights and sufferings of our fellow creatures. We regularly have several “vegetarian” days a week now. But right then was not the time for a soul-baring confession.

As though sensing my thoughts, Father O’Gould held forth that the time had come in the moral evolution of our species to consider the possibility of moving beyond the use of animals for our food and fiber needs.

Near the end of the meeting Ms. Brattle announced that early next week there would be an executive session of the Subcommittee on Appropriateness regarding a very sensitive case that had arisen between two employees in Sigmund Library, which serves the Psychology Department. The subcommittee, on which I serve — another gesture of goodwill — investigates and arbitrates on sensitive issues dealing with ethnic, gender, dietary, class, language, olfactory, and sexual orientation conflicts arising among students, faculty, and members of the administration.

The meeting concluded in a muddle of inaction, good intentions, and declarative excess, the way most such meetings end. I simply stopped trying to explain anything. The pall of impending grief that I had held at bay all afternoon descended like a bleak cloud. How trivial everything before me seemed, how like shadows on a stage that had come and would go, leaving no trace. My dear, precious Elsbeth is under sentence of death.

Well, I must call it a day. Or a night. I must go home now and help, as much as I can, Elsbeth into that other, endless night that awaits us all.

8

I am upstairs in my study again. The night is cold, dark, and silent. I am not only staggered with a sadness beyond description, but I am in thrall to new and disturbing thoughts and feelings that I had never expected to contend with.

This afternoon I went out to our sophisticated little airport — it handles smaller passenger jets with alacrity — to pick up Diantha, Elsbeth’s daughter. The dear girl could scarcely keep from weeping when she saw me, falling into my arms, clinging to me, her wet face buried in my neck. I was glad to be of comfort and cared not one whit for the stares of passersby. I tried to reassure her as we waited for her luggage — three huge pieces — to come up the conveyer belt as though from Hades and start its clockwise stagger around the oval track of interleaved metal plates. I can tell from my prose that I am already equivocating.

To witness Diantha’s shock and pity at seeing her mother in such evident decline opened afresh my own wound. I stood with my eyes damp as mother and daughter embraced and cried and then, not so strangely, started to laugh, as though life, deep down, even at its tragic worst, is comic, the joke of a whimsical creator.

They spoke for hours, it seemed. I served as bartender, cook, waiter, and sommelier, uncorking one, then two bottles of a plangent Graves that Izzy recommended. It went brilliantly with the seafood lasagna that Elsbeth taught me how to make. (The touch of fennel and rosemary is the secret.) We all got a little tipsy, but I think it helped Elsbeth and Diantha heal any lingering rift between them. They both turned to me on occasion during the course of the evening, each time with something akin to surprise and not a little pleasure in their