by Camille Roy
Of course I had. But I had put it in the magic box along with so many of Pearl’s stories—like the one about Pearl hurling herself over ski jumps for cash prizes. The repeating theme, with endless variations: poor girl but plucky, poor girl but so lucky. The ski jump story particularly puzzled me, it just didn’t square with the character of Pearl, who was not at all relaxed about falling. I didn’t exactly not believe it, either—I didn’t disbelieve any of Pearl’s stories. I was incapable of such concrete, restrained opinions. There was some essence shared by every fable told by Pearl, and I believed in that spacious combination of style and unreliability. The narrative gesture—that’s what I believed in. It swayed me. I believed in anything that swayed me.
Pearl landing in a powdery snow puff, having fallen or flown through hundreds of feet of sparkling air… This image in a repeating loop, with her face appearing, gathering gravity, creamy pink and blond and yet, with the square jaw, oddly butch. Her milkmaid skin, etched with a dazzling smile, becoming in that white fog—becoming what? I was caught in many such puzzles. Of these, Raymond and Aimee was possibly the least significant.
I’m talking now about Aimee Semple McPherson, the first Pentecostal monster of the twentieth century, and female. The first woman to cross the United States in an automobile (something she did fourteen times, with her mother and young son). It was a 1912 Packard touring car with ‘Jesus is coming soon, get ready!’ painted on the side in gold.
Not an ascetic. A minx, a woman made for worldly love. She drew crowds everywhere, preaching her words of fire in a low silky voice.
There are four major charismata (or gifts of the spirit) defined by the Pentecostalists: glossolalia (speaking in tongues), prophecy, interpretation of tongues, and the gift of healing. In the last, Aimee was prodigiously talented. She became a healer of such documented genius that a major church would be built upon it, a church which still stands. Invalids, cripples, the blind and deaf filled the streets by the thousands when she preached. Her ascent began in the early days of Hollywood and her temple was built there in 1924. She strode the pulpit like a star in robes, her hair pressed to her scalp in rolling blond waves, her voice palpitating the crowd. On August 7, 1925, she took up in her palm a field stone and called out in a booming voice,
A new heart also will I give you, and a new spirit will I put within you: and I will take away the stony heart out of your flesh, and I will give you a heart of flesh.
She was too sexy for God. Rumors swirled around her. She disappeared for weeks, and would later cover for these absences by claiming to have been mysteriously kidnapped. Lacerated in court and in the press about these stories, she would only say, “That’s my story, boys, and I’m sticking to it.”
For me, the only odd thing about the story of Raymond and Aimee was Pearl’s troubled gaze as she told it, as though she herself found it almost unbelievable. What kind of story would Pearl find unbelievable? That question I could barely pose, let alone answer. It didn’t invite inquiry. But that day in my kitchen, Sam told me he had investigated it in Winnemucca. The old gambling buddies of Raymond once again came through with the details. Apparently Raymond claimed Aimee had beach boys stashed in towns up and down the coast of California. Of all these men, Raymond used to brag, I was the one Aimee loved for his mind.
A joke rumbled along my synapses, tickled my tongue. Sam, we come from a long line of sluts of both sexes. But that’s pushing it, and it’s not even what I meant. I wanted to point to the heart of the story, a quality of perishing, or making another perish, for a romantic idea. Those painful yet pleasing sacrifices… A family pattern. Then, by the same gesture, we live perpetually in the melancholy aftermath, the empty house. Five years after Raymond left, Lydia and Pearl stood near as Mabel Margaret sat heavily down at the kitchen table, holding Raymond’s first letter. It would contain the divorce papers.
Meanwhile, excuse me, this word, ruthless, keeps flickering as I write this…a scorching little flame. Where did it come from? Sam, I want to say right now, You are wrong about me. I’m not ruthless! At least not today. I had to go back to my diary to discover he’d actually called me that. Well, sort of. What I wrote above is a misquote. Sam actually said, I could never be a writer. I’m not ruthless enough.
My cousin Sam: Floats like a butterfly, stings like a bee. Perhaps his words wouldn’t sting if they weren’t in some part true. Still it pisses me off. And I’m the writer, so vengeance is mine. Listen to this: Sam, in the midst of his speed addiction, used to claim he’d been invaded by alien space worms. To prove it, he took a match to one of his arm hairs—and before it burnt to the skin, it straightened, pointing up to the heavens. See, Sam would hiss, they’re alive.
Sigh. A petty gesture, making Sam look ridiculous. Is that what you’re thinking? You weren’t at the table, you weren’t floating suspended in my peculiar family history. I remind myself of an oil slick, over deep and choppy waters. Comfortable it isn’t. Anyway, it occurs to me that by repeating malicious gossip I’m only spoiling my own case—in this manner discovering that I have a case, and that I want to present it to you, dear reader. Who knew! A little self-sabotage can go a long way.
But what could my case possibly be, given that the prospect of verifying any of these family stories is unbearable, as well as irritating? I’ve given up. That’s my “case.” I don’t care what the truth is—not enough to pursue it, anyway. I’m registering something more vague—a sort of cloud at the center of the story, which is where I’ve spent most of my life. That’s the first principle.
Then there’s the second, which is the net cast over my flowing perceptions, a.k.a. “aesthetics.” At one time, I envied and loathed the access gay men had into that word/world. Whereas lesbians seemed to occupy cultural space which was aesthetically null and void. I’m not sure how it changed, socially or personally. But now it seems that I just can’t get out. The urge to aestheticize, to edit and invent, is my urge to think. There’s inescapable falsity in my condition. If you believe what I write, watch your back. I can’t stand behind my stories because I don’t think that way. The power is in the filter—whatever my brain dishes up as the next thought, well, it feels like me, but it’s not.
Who hasn’t been lied to, constantly? Viewed from another angle, it’s a gift. I remember Pearl, eyeing me after a few vodkas with the closest thing that she possessed to wickedness, You, she snapped, can write. You’re like your father. I just can’t. Then stalking off into the remainder of her mysterious evening.
Pearl’s stories pulsed with desire, fantasy, and dread. They became me. Then they blurred, disappeared. I live in the aftermath. The snag, its lingering disturbance, feels muscular. It resides there, as I shove one foot ahead of the other, in all the sites of pleasure and aggression, intact as my confidence.
Still, realization is difficult. I mentioned something about this to Sam. Jewish, or not? Olympic, non-Olympic… He grinned in his loopy way (his lips are thin but his mouth is wide and stretchy) and told me this story about an Indian, whose name was also Sam. Sam met Sam during a forest fire, in the little town of Union Hill in the northeastern corner of California. The ridges were ablaze, and Sam was doing what he does, dropping fire-fighting chemicals possibly, or rescuing ranch hands. In between shifts, Sam holed up in the only hotel in town. You’d think that since he was rescuing people and livelihoods, the townsfolk might have been a little friendly. But not so. This was a High Sierra town which held on where the roads ended, and it had a particular psychology. To the east, hard granite ridges propped up the rim of the sky. The mountains were so rugged there were no passes over for hundreds of miles—and to the west, there was nowhere to go but down.
There were three vegetables in the Union Hill grocery store: a small pile of hard tomatoes, some withered carrots, and a single head of iceberg lettuce. This was distressing because Sam is a vegetarian. Everyone looked at him with hatred, except the other Sam, who wouldn’t stop talking. With every breath, he told my cousin the legends
of himself, and they were spectacular, if you appreciate rodeo. This Sam had been a champion many times over. There were stories of bulls and broncos, silver spurs, money that flowed. He was also a terrible drunk. Sam practically told these stories from the floor, or the gutter. Knee level at the highest. It all gushed unbelievably, the stories and the booze. Still, after the fires had worn themselves out, while the air was still smoky, Sam stopped at the local library and looked up the dates and stories in newspaper archives. Everything, it turned out, was true. Sam was so famous, his horse was famous too. Sam’s nickname had the word diamond in it.
2. Blur
Remember the class struggle? I do. The adults in my household were commies. When I was a kid, class struggle was a thing bigger, and more vivid. Bigger than what? Like Iron Mike, like Tyson. It’s what this essay is supposed to be about. In truth, I am slouching, ever so slowly, into that conversation. We’re in the post-communist era now. All that was reddish has fallen into a pit of silence—which is not particularly new or different. Pretty much everything falls in there.
But back to the story of Pearl. How do we get from Nevada to anywhere else, ideologically speaking? It must come down to character. Picture this: Pearl, radiant & shining (but in a dumb way), as she stumbles down the center of a deserted road. Pale cracks at the horizon light the scene for sacrifice. Each pair of oncoming headlights flattens and drains a little more from her rosy charms. She’s fifty miles out in the desert with only a thermos of Bloody Marys. It doesn’t look good. But Pearl is too subtle for this particular disaster. I can guess from an assortment of possible scenarios: She’ll hitch a ride with a local Spanish speaking priest or, alternatively, with a chivalrous dyke mechanic who goes by the name Eddie, or perhaps the mild-mannered man pulling over in the burgundy Buick will turn out to be a Nobel prize-winning physicist driving to a conference in Taos. Whoever her companion happens to be, Pearl will persuade him or her to stop at a vista point to watch the sun rise over the desert and talk politics (Pearl will do most of the talking), while they slurp what’s left from the thermos. And Pearl will arrive home spouting a joyful music about decency, reliability, solidarity, community, etcetera.
Pearl is the most elusive person I have ever known. A genius of charm.
Pearl was also, as I haven’t explained, raised on a faith-healing religion, not the gloriously dramatic Temple of Aimee Semple McPherson, but the stubborn doctrines of Mary Baker Eddy. Christian Science. After Raymond took off, Mabel Margaret found respite in a reading room. Eventually she founded her own, in her living room, for herself, her two daughters, Pearl and Lydia, and an elderly bachelor named Ronald. This little group of four were the only Christian Scientists in town. During their evening studies, they mumbled and moaned and passed the book from lap to lap. Then, on weekends, Pearl and Lydia went door to door with pamphlets, two lovely girls with soft cheeks and shining hair. Never in need of medical care, the girls were implicit testimonies to the power of faith and prayer. But no one converted.
Faith, as a form of insistence, is an oddly stable construct, given that it brings in relation two contrary mental formations—pouring emotion (some form of religious exaltation) and an intellectual framework designed to provide stasis, as a necessary stabilizer. Its electrifying core can transition from religion to politics with little more than a change in vocabulary.
In a hypothetical marriage between a faith-healer and a hardcore leftie, the latter would seem a little like a dumb lug out of the movies. Part thug, but also oddly innocent, in the way that stupidity can seem comically blundering. You know how straight men can be innocent of themselves, their fantastical drives cloaked by pseudo-technical terminology? It’s so boring. The intellectual left has that problem. Anyway. In my scenario, Blanche DuBois rules simply because her drive towards emotional extremes wounds and confuses everything around her. Poor Stanley. He’s paralyzed by her spectacle, as well as his own befuddled desire to do right.
The covert fantasies which motivate the need to believe—these are the muscular terms in a language of transformation. That’s the burn. It’s the first spot in this essay where class explicitly slips in (look quickly or you’ll miss it). Fuck everything else. My mother’s side of my family teeters right on the edge of self-dramatization and self-destruction, and since everybody winds up dead, you know how the story ends.
Or perhaps it’s impossible to mark the ending of family stories. Too much clutter. I was intrigued to find in a recent biography of Aimee that one of her ‘kidnappers,’ a charming but unsuccessful prospector and gambler from Nevada, sounded much like Raymond. Receipts for food and dry cleaning (which were evidence in her perjury trial until they vanished under mysterious circumstances) showed Aimee and this man holed up in a hotel for several weeks. Hijinks of the spiritually gifted. It’s unverifiable but it feels like that warm trough in the bed next to Aimee was filled by Raymond—is that true enough?
Still, I have to insist on my argument. Can we stop piling blur on top of blur? As a goal, people. Of course, I’ve never told a story straight in my life (and in this essay, I haven’t tried). This is not hypocrisy, because consistency is not my point. I’m a seamstress of blur, performing nips and tucks on the empty center. But I need to know where it is. Is that just personal taste, like clean underwear?
3. First Comes Love
Pearl met my father at a Communist Party meeting in the early fifties. I like to imagine the ardor of their first glance across a smoky room, crowded with people engaged in passionate political conversation. Youth being a plush velvet suit, deep and soft, yet lacerated with the rigorousness of all those sexual impulses. But this wasn’t Paris, with its aestheticized frenzies. It was the South Side of Chicago, a place that hangs you upside down and whacks the sentimentality right out. They moved in a community whose (exhausting) urgency came from the streets, the factories, the union halls.
My parents met at a C.P. meeting. That’s all I know. I never heard what they said to or thought of each other. No personal touches. Somehow that didn’t qualify as ‘material.’ (Is this a Marxist definition of material?) But I heard another story, over and over. It was a late night story, when the household temperament went from coolly intellectual to soft and sudsy. This one was a little drama with Pearl’s shrink. Before Pearl met my father, she had been sticking her toe into the murky waters of psychoanalysis. Introspection was not her style, but her boohoo intellectual friends were doing it, and since it was the fifties, the shrink was Freudian, and since she was broke, Pearl had an analyst-in-training who charged twenty five cents an hour. This man was fond of telling Pearl that her life was a fantasy. This was his response to everything she told him about her childhood, her first failed marriage, her political beliefs, her friends. When she came in with tales of my father (talldarkandhandsome, smart, communist AND social register), he calmly told her this was also a hallucination.
It was to be Dr. Cornfield’s last such pronouncement. With sweeping gestures Pearl described the wedding announcement that ran in the Chicago dailies. It took up a whole page. Why her wedding announcement took up ten times more space than anyone else’s was never specified, but the implications were clear enough—it had to do with the shock communism of a son of the ruling classes and his inappropriate divorcee wife-to-be, Pearl. In any case, Pearl didn’t go to her last session with her shrink. She snuck into his office and left the clipping on his desk.
Perfect moment of revenge, possibly invented. Any invention being possible, especially when we are sexually soiled, wild, fruitful, & poor. Being the wrong favor, yet being chosen, Pearl went adventuring. It poured out easily, warm companions found in the doorways of the city. I can picture my father’s mother, Ethel, watching my parents through the window of her elegant Gold Coast apartment, her green eyes half-closed as she lifts an ebony and ivory cigarette holder to her lips. A barely audible sigh as she releases a thin snake of smoke.
This I know is true: having chosen one another they believed they were free.
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br /> With a feeling like yearning but more vague, I used to check the wedding announcements in the Chicago papers. Everyday I’d sneak a glance at that page, looking for any announcement, just one, that was over-size. Not that I was fact-checking my mother—I only wanted context. I wanted to be located in relation to some other over-size wedding announcement. But they invariably looked the same: a small paragraph of copy under a mug shot of a bride.
Once a mug shot of Pearl did appear in the paper. It was because she was a pipe smoker. We all gathered round as she pointed to the excited caption: “No more Lucky Strikes: Pearl is a woman who swears by her small yet sturdy Norwegian pipe.”
Thomas married Pearl at City Hall. They exchanged gold bands in front of a judge named Bogan. It was early on a Friday, in order to avoid the worst of Chicago’s July heat. Still, the breeze off the lake was like a warm scarf. Pearl wore a blue suit of light crepe wool, but no hat or gloves.
There are no photos of this event. Due to my ignorance, I’ve made up every detail—stonewall being a shimmer that repulses. This was more my father’s response to questions than my mother’s. It sounds rather stiff, but it’s really a form of motion, like a fine breeze in the sails of a little boat. You don’t question the breeze; you just keep moving.
It’s not what is told, but what is withheld, that creates suspense, so storytelling is partly the art of not telling. My household was greasy with that kind of suspense—or is that something all children experience? It may account for the flatness of childish expressions, their diffidence, a wariness around adults. I, at least, remember that emotion parsing everything I said. It took effort to detach facial expression from the act of speaking, but as much as possible I blanked my own face. With that kind of carefully contrived innocence (which I felt guilty about, but which was, in fact, ignorance), I remember remarking to Pearl that I didn’t know anything about my father’s father, since he had died before I was born. I was perhaps eleven, and we were having dinner. The adults were a wee bit sloshy. Pearl seized my idea, exclaiming to Thomas that he must must must instantly entertain us with tales of Thomas, Senior. Thomas replied, “There is nothing to say.”
