background, slumped in his chair with an alcoholic beverage in one hand, observing the proceedings. I never caught him showing even the slightest interest in any of Rivka’s many girlfriends.
Hard to understand; I often had trouble controlling myself. What an effort it took to keep my hands off all those smart, well-spoken, shapely girls! But I restrained myself, because there’s a limit; I knew seducing my wife’s girlfriends was wrong. If only because it was just asking for trouble.
13 …
In addition to the complex problems we dealt with daily involving the insulin production and further hormonal research and production, it was important to drum up public support for our endeavors. The employment opportunities our meatpacking plant provided had made us well liked by the locals. But the growing range of drugs Farmacom was beginning to market had to be handled with caution in this Roman Catholic hinterland. For that reason, I actively sought to improve our relations with the local notables, and one of the most important players among these was, of course, the new parish priest.
I invited the man to my office for a meeting. The curate was a reedy, brittle-looking person. He was young, but his face was ageless; he had sparse, limp, and already receding ash-blond hair, a fuzzy little beard that hardly deserved to be called such, and an oily voice so soft that it was hard to believe that in church his sermons could be heard by the whole congregation. He spoke carefully, as if his every word might arouse the wrath of God. He had been sent to our town straight from the seminary, and he told me how much he enjoyed being the shepherd of his flock. When I asked him which aspect of his wide-ranging job he found most interesting, he replied, “The contact I have with the peoplein my parish, both young and old; that is a great blessing to me. They have so many problems, and it gives me great satisfaction to lend them a sympathetic ear, and to help them accept their heavy lot.”
That’s exactly the sort of platitude you’d expect from a priest, and it’s why I can’t stand the Church. If there’s one thing I’ve refused to do all my life, it’s to accept things as they are. I am not some lame believer who meekly bows his head and accepts the fate allotted to him from on high; far from it. I like to grab fate by the horns the way a butcher reaches for a slaughtered steer, and turn it to work in my favor. But it was important to have a good relationship with a cleric venerated by the majority of my workforce, in light of the fact that our company was planning to produce increasing numbers of drugs that might appear to fly in the face of Our Lord’s commandments. Besides, I’m never averse to buttering people up if I have nothing to lose by it.
“Father, would you mind describing to me the nature of their struggle? I suspect that a great many folks around here find themselves in straitened circumstances on account of having too many mouths to feed and insufficient means to take care of them; isn’t that the main problem?”
The black-frocked prelate looked at me pensively, as if weighing my interest. A mirthless smile split his face from ear to ear. He took a sip of the watery tea that Agnes had been instructed to make weak on account of his “delicate stomach,” and then he spoke. “Indeed, for many folks poverty is a tribulation, a terrible cross to bear. But it has always been so, has it not? No, the issue of greater concern to them right now is a more recent development: the fact that so many young people now troop off to work in the factories. Many of the parents are fearful about the young girls in particular—they are being exposed to crudebehavior and harassment at work, which they are often powerless to resist.”
I nodded gravely.
“I understand,” he continued, “that in your factory the men and the women do have separate changing rooms, and that the sexes are kept apart wherever possible on the
Hard to understand; I often had trouble controlling myself. What an effort it took to keep my hands off all those smart, well-spoken, shapely girls! But I restrained myself, because there’s a limit; I knew seducing my wife’s girlfriends was wrong. If only because it was just asking for trouble.
13 …
In addition to the complex problems we dealt with daily involving the insulin production and further hormonal research and production, it was important to drum up public support for our endeavors. The employment opportunities our meatpacking plant provided had made us well liked by the locals. But the growing range of drugs Farmacom was beginning to market had to be handled with caution in this Roman Catholic hinterland. For that reason, I actively sought to improve our relations with the local notables, and one of the most important players among these was, of course, the new parish priest.
I invited the man to my office for a meeting. The curate was a reedy, brittle-looking person. He was young, but his face was ageless; he had sparse, limp, and already receding ash-blond hair, a fuzzy little beard that hardly deserved to be called such, and an oily voice so soft that it was hard to believe that in church his sermons could be heard by the whole congregation. He spoke carefully, as if his every word might arouse the wrath of God. He had been sent to our town straight from the seminary, and he told me how much he enjoyed being the shepherd of his flock. When I asked him which aspect of his wide-ranging job he found most interesting, he replied, “The contact I have with the peoplein my parish, both young and old; that is a great blessing to me. They have so many problems, and it gives me great satisfaction to lend them a sympathetic ear, and to help them accept their heavy lot.”
That’s exactly the sort of platitude you’d expect from a priest, and it’s why I can’t stand the Church. If there’s one thing I’ve refused to do all my life, it’s to accept things as they are. I am not some lame believer who meekly bows his head and accepts the fate allotted to him from on high; far from it. I like to grab fate by the horns the way a butcher reaches for a slaughtered steer, and turn it to work in my favor. But it was important to have a good relationship with a cleric venerated by the majority of my workforce, in light of the fact that our company was planning to produce increasing numbers of drugs that might appear to fly in the face of Our Lord’s commandments. Besides, I’m never averse to buttering people up if I have nothing to lose by it.
“Father, would you mind describing to me the nature of their struggle? I suspect that a great many folks around here find themselves in straitened circumstances on account of having too many mouths to feed and insufficient means to take care of them; isn’t that the main problem?”
The black-frocked prelate looked at me pensively, as if weighing my interest. A mirthless smile split his face from ear to ear. He took a sip of the watery tea that Agnes had been instructed to make weak on account of his “delicate stomach,” and then he spoke. “Indeed, for many folks poverty is a tribulation, a terrible cross to bear. But it has always been so, has it not? No, the issue of greater concern to them right now is a more recent development: the fact that so many young people now troop off to work in the factories. Many of the parents are fearful about the young girls in particular—they are being exposed to crudebehavior and harassment at work, which they are often powerless to resist.”
I nodded gravely.
“I understand,” he continued, “that in your factory the men and the women do have separate changing rooms, and that the sexes are kept apart wherever possible on the
Similar Books
