Only Begotten Daughter Read Free Page A

riveting glint in his good eye. “So what will your spilled seed get you, brother? Thirty dollars? You’re being underpaid. Judas got silver. Resist. Resist. ”
    “As a matter of fact, my last donation wasn’t acceptable,” said Murray. “I think I’m out of a job.”
    “Tell those people in there it’s wrong—a sin. Will you do that? We’re not here to condemn them. We’re all sinners. I’m a sinner.” With a sudden flourish the protester flipped back his eyepatch. “When a man takes out his own eye, that’s a sin.”
    Murray shuddered. What had he expected, a glass orb, a fused lid? Certainly not this open pit, dark and jagged like the sickness he imagined gnawing at his gonads. “A sin.” He wrested free. “I’ll tell them.”
    “God bless you, brother,” muttered the man with the hole in his head.
    Shivering with apprehension, Murray entered the Institute and crossed the glossy marble floor, moving past a great clock-face with hands like harpoons, past spherical lamps poised on wrought-iron stands, at last reaching Mrs. Kriebel’s desk.
    “I’ll tell Dr. Frostig you’re here,” she said curtly, arranging her collection jars in a tidy grid. She was a stylish woman, decorated with clothes and cosmetics whose names Murray didn’t know.
    “Have they decided what’s wrong with me?”
    “Wrong with you?”
    “With my donation.”
    “Not my department.” Mrs. Kriebel pointed across the lobby to a sharply angled woman with a vivid, hawkish face. “You can wait with Five Twenty-eight over there.”
    The lobby suggested the parlor of a first-class bordello. Abloom with ferns, Greek vases anchored the four corners of a sumptuous Persian rug. On the upholstered walls, set within gold frames, oil portraits of deceased Nobel-winning donors glowered at the mere mortals who surveyed them. Well, well, thought Murray, perusing the faces, we’re going to have Keynesian economics in the next century whether we want it or not. And a new generation of astrophysicists writing bad science fiction.
    Glancing away from a dead secretary of state, Five Twenty-eight offered Murray an ardent smile. Black turtleneck jersey, straight raven hair, scruffy brown bomber jacket, eye shadow the iridescent green of Absecon Inlet: she looked like a fifties beatnik, mysteriously transplanted to the age of sperm banks. “I don’t care whether I get a girl or a boy,” she said abruptly. “Makes no difference. Everybody thinks dykes hate boys. Not true.”
    Murray surveyed the lesbian’s offbeat prettiness, her spidery frame. “Was it hard picking the father?”
    “Don’t remind me.” Together they ambled to the next portrait, a Swedish brain surgeon. “For the longest time I was into the idea of either a painter or a flute player. The arts are my big love, you see, but with science you’ve got a more reliable income, so in the end I settled on a marine biologist—a black man, they tell me, one of their own staff. Mathematicians were in the picture for a while, but then they ran out. Actually, there was one. A Capricorn. No way. Let me guess—you look like a Jewish novelist, if you don’t mind my saying so. I considered having one of those, but then I started reading their stuff, and it seemed kind of dirty to me, and I decided I didn’t want that kind of karma in the house. You a novelist?”
    “Matter of fact, I have been working on a book. Nonfiction, though.”
    “What’s it called?”
    “Hermeneutics of the Ordinary.” Upon turning forty, Murray had resolved not only to collect obscure and profound books, but to write one as well. Within six months he had three hundred pages of ragged manuscript and a great title.
    “ What of the ordinary?”
    “Hermeneutics. Interpretation.” Through his employment at Atlantic City Photorama, where he collected exposed film and doled out prints and slides, Murray had discovered that snapshots afford unique access to the human psyche. A lawyer photographs his teenage