True Believers

by Kurt Andersen

  I continued making confession and attending Mass and receiving Holy Communion and enduring the daylong annual embarrassment of Ash Wednesday, and I kept my growing disbelief to myself. Because I saw how this was eventually going to end—several against one, serially wised-up kids and irreverent Dad versus eternally faithful, hopeful Mom—it seemed preferable to postpone the uncomfortable moment of truth as long as I could.

  Which came when I was thirteen. Not long after my mother performed her (successful) novena for peace during and after the Cuban Missile Crisis, I decided that I had to take my stand. It was a Saturday afternoon. My friend Mary Ann’s mom had just driven me home from the ninth of my twenty-two weekly confirmation classes. My parents were in the living room, reading. I sat down on the floor next to Curiosity, our cairn terrier. (As a puppy called Jake, he had played to death with one of the neighbor’s kittens, and my father renamed him Curiosity.)

  After rubbing the dog’s tummy for a minute, I announced that I wasn’t going through with my confirmation. My mother closed and put down the Christmas issue of Vogue very carefully and slowly. Her attempts to appear calm always had the opposite effect.

  “Don’t be silly. Of course you are, Karen. You are a fine Catholic. A ‘spectacular young Catholic,’ the archbishop himself said.”

  She was referring to the social studies paper I’d written about American poverty, in which I’d quoted from the Book of James—”Well now, you rich! Lament, weep for the miseries that are coming to you.” My mother sent a copy of my paper to Archbishop Meyer, who gave it an award.

  “I’m not like Saint Gertrude,” I said. I had been planning to take Gertrude as my confirmation name because as a young woman, seven hundred years earlier, before she saw the light and returned to the Church, Saint Gertrude had been a young intellectual and writer who rejected Christianity.

  “You don’t have to be a saint to be Catholic.”

  “But you have to believe in Catholicism to be one. It would be fake. It’d be a lie.”

  “Is this about your problem with the virgin birth and miraculous apparitions? Listen, sweetheart—”

  “And the Holy Ghost. Whatever that is.”

  “I’ve told you what Saint Augustine said about not taking Bible completely literally—and ‘doubt is but another element of faith.’”

  “And transubstantiation. I don’t believe that Jesus Christ was God’s son. I don’t believe he was resurrected.”

  “You can’t do this.”

  “I can’t be confirmed. I won’t defend the faith. I don’t want to be a soldier of Christ, Mommy.” I had long since phased out “Mommy” in favor of “Mom” and “Mother,” and she despised the phrase “soldier of Christ,” so now I was being shrewd.

  She looked at my father, who smiled wanly and shrugged, which made her angry.

  She closed her eyes and shook her head. At last my father spoke. “Karen,” he asked, undoubtedly knowing what my answer would be, “do you believe in God?”

  “I’m not sure. Probably not. But I know for sure I don’t believe that Helen is burning and suffering in hell.”

  My coup de grâce. Except there was no grace or mercy involved, just blood-tingling adolescent cruelty. Five years earlier, my sister Helen, the fourth Hollaender child, was stillborn. I’d assumed that her little soul flew from the Evanston Hospital delivery room directly up to heaven. But when I asked Father Linehan to explain how babies such as Helen, who die before they learn to speak, are able to communicate in heaven, he set me straight on Catholic doctrine. I never quite got over the shock. Babies suffering eternal damnation if they die unbaptized—or maybe, if such a place exists, Father Linehan wasn’t certain, spending eternity in limbo—seemed like the most ghastly injustice imaginable. Between Father Linehan’s laughter at my first confession and this information about God’s mercilessness, I felt that I’d glimpsed a deep satanic streak in the Church.

  Anyhow, when I played the baby-Helen card that afternoon in 1963, my mother said nothing but instantly crossed herself, stood up, put on her coat, grabbed her gloves and purse, walked out of the house, and drove away. I assume she went to St. Joseph’s and prayed for me.

  The next morning at Mass, as we stood up to recite the Lord’s Prayer, a little boy in the pew just behind me said in a loud whisper, “Mommy, that girl got hurt.” Somewhere around lead us not into temptation but deliver us from evil, I felt a rivulet dribble between my underpants and the top of one of my stockings. I’d gotten my first period, and blood had stained through the back of my dress. As the priest prepared the Eucharist and I knelt in the pew, imagining myself about to eat the body and sip the blood of Christ at the altar with my stained bloody backside exposed to the entire congregation, I decided I couldn’t endure the nightmare.

  As mother and Peter and Sabrina filed out of the pew and turned right, without a word, I turned left and walked down the aisle and then down the stairs to the ladies’ room. I waited forever outside in the cold by our car in the lot. As my mother approached, glaring at me, the December wind whipping hair around her face, I thought she looked like the witch in Sleeping Beauty. Sabrina was trying not to smile. After I explained what had happened and lifted my coat and turned around to prove it, my mother hugged me, and we both started crying. That was the last time I attended Mass, apart from Sabrina’s confirmation, and funerals.

  7

  Whenever I drop off someone I really care about at an airport, I choke up the moment I drive away. (I sometimes think that if I’d driven Jack to JFK and La Guardia for his weeks-long composing residencies in New Mexico and Norway and India during the ‘80s, I’d have realized sooner how much my love for him had shriveled. But he always took a taxi.) And my new electric car is so eerily quiet as it accelerates that the extra sonic space gives my emotions more room to roil. So I’m crying, a tear or two running down each cheek, as I wave back at Waverly on the sidewalk and start to concentrate on escaping LAX.

  The woman reading the news on Morning Edition is black, I learned not long ago from a friend who works at NPR. I’d had no idea, because there’s nothing identifiably African-American about her voice. NPR has a bunch of black on-air talent, but because they all sound white, my friend told me in an embarrassed whisper, and it’s radio, “nobody realizes it. We get no credit. What we’d kill for are some first-rate journalists with, you know, African-American names. Kadisha, Jameel.”

  The NPR newsreader introduces a report from Denmark, where four Jews have been killed and twelve more sickened in a poisoning plot carried out by Islamic terrorists. The terrorists coated the mezuzahs affixed to the front door of at least fifty Jewish households in Copenhagen with botulinum toxin. The Danish prime minister promised that “the full resources of the nation are focused on apprehending the perpetrators of this fiendish plot.”

  In Danish, I happen to know, “fiendish” is djævelsk. As children, when we did amusingly naughty things, snapping Polaroid pictures of my parents as they stepped from the shower or eating entire sticks of butter coated in brown sugar, my father, who rarely resorted to Danish, would call us lille djævel, little devils, little fiends. Otherwise, “fiends” and “fiendish plots,” like “dastardly deeds,” existed only in comic books and Looney Tunes, as antiquated and self-parodying hyperbole.

  These murders in Copenhagen are, of course, like something from James Bond, a scheme devised by a grinning Blofeld or Drax for his henchmen to carry out.

  The one time I met George W. Bush, at a dinner in New York before he was governor, when we were both in our forties, I immediately thought of him as Felix Leiter, Bond’s Texan CIA helpmate. Life was surrealized for everybody on September 11, but a week after the attacks, as I sat alone in our new apartment on Desbrosses Street in lower Manhattan, burning dogwood-scented votive candles to cover the stench of smoldering rubble and flesh wafting up from Ground Zero, I was talking on the phone to my Washington friend in the intelligence community. He was angrier than I’d ever heard him, talking about all t
he squandered opportunities to kill bin Laden—”six months ago we had the prick literally in our sights, from a drone I was watching him on a monitor.” When I hung up and turned on my TV and saw live coverage of Tony Blair’s visit to Washington, I felt like I was tripping: Felix Leiter was president of the United States, talking about “Wanted: Dead or Alive” posters, with a somewhat fey British prime minister James Bond committing himself to join in the free world’s war against crazed foreign evildoers.

  In September 2001, real life abruptly and completely flipped into full Bond mode. A wealthy freelancing supervillain in a secret underground lair, four hijacked American jetliners, the Pentagon struck, iconic 110-story Manhattan skyscrapers vaporized—this was precisely the kind of absurd, baroque scheme that Commander Bond trotted the globe trying to prevent. Since then, half our politics and news have concerned fiendish, nihilistic masterminds in their hideouts, charismatic and stateless psychopaths who dream of committing spectacular mass murder for its own spectacular sake, with the battle against them fought by daring, steadfast agents of MI6 and CIA and special ops equipped with fantastic gadgets and licenses to kill. Afghan guerrillas in the heroin business and Colombian guerrillas in the cocaine business, a world-famous Pakistani physicist selling nuclear secrets to rogue states, an American-born Colorado State grad in a beard and turban brainwashing killers by remote control from Yemen, Mexico commandeered by psychopathically depraved drug lords, entranced suicide bombers, proud videos of beheadings? A global confederacy of disparate madmen and terrorists? In the Bond novels, it was called SPECTRE. The director of the National Counterterrorism Center under Presidents Bush and Obama was a young former naval officer named—yes—Leiter. Truth is not stranger than fiction, it’s exactly like the pulpy fiction I loved in junior high.

  As I turn off Wilshire onto Westwood toward campus, I’m thinking about the Danish mezuzot botulin murders. I remember the first mezuzah I noticed in L.A., right after I moved. Waverly, visiting me at age ten, spotted it. It was pewter, affixed to the doorjamb of Dr. Benjamin Silverstein, a make-believe Jewish physician with a make-believe old-timey office on Main Street in Disneyland.

  “Morning, Professor,” the UCLA parking garage guy says as I pause to let the little latticework of red laser beams read my card. “Fantastic day, huh?” He means the weather. It’s the greeting he gives me almost every day.

  “Beautiful,” I reply.

  The life of a tenured university professor is rather grand in a way that barely exists elsewhere anymore. Every job exists along a spectrum according to how frequently one is required to lie and to act like a jerk, from many times a day at one end of the chart to maybe once a year at the other end, and my current job is way toward the pleasant side. Unlike at a law firm, at a university almost nobody seems perpetually on the verge of panic or keeps track of your hours, and unlike when you’re a litigator or a prosecutor or a judge, you don’t really have the opportunity to wreck people’s lives.

  I didn’t hate corporate litigation, but I rarely reveled in it, as most of my colleagues did. I worked hard and became a partner on schedule. People talk about how relentless and stressful it is working in a big New York firm, especially for women, especially for mothers, and that’s true. But I’d manned up at age nineteen, reconciled myself to a life unnaturally twisted by stress.

  So I was not overwhelmed by the exhausting hours and travel; the breathtaking wastefulness and meaningless triumphs; or the clients whose arrogance and mediocrity—guys suffering from a kind of MBA Tourette’s, unable to speak for two minutes without saying “mezzanine financing” or “basis points” or “reps and warranties,” and who actually display the little Lucite monuments to each of their deals—more than justified the five and ten and finally almost twenty dollars a minute I was charging them. But without the teaching—first at NYU, then at Yale—and the book writing, I think I would’ve been bored out of my mind.

  Life at a university, on the other hand, I find nearly qualmless. We think and talk and write without heart-attack-inducing schedules, and we try to sharpen fine young minds. We’re paid well but not lavishly. We are the Establishment flaunting its kindly and humane side, The Man doing penance for being The Man—our Institute on Sexual Orientation Law & Public Policy, our Native Nations Law & Policy Center, our Center on Climate Change & the Environment.

  I like it here, and most people seem to like me. Last spring, when my name started to appear on the lists of possible nominees to the United States Supreme Court, my star rose dramatically. People smiled at me more and paid closer attention to anything I said. After I removed my name from consideration for the seat, people seemed even more delighted to be in my presence. Maybe because envy had been removed from the mix.

  This afternoon I have a department chair meeting where I’ll announce higher cost-of-living pay increases than they’re expecting and listen to a proposal for a new course on the law of transgenderedness. Then I have a meeting with a Hollywood attorney whom I think I’ve convinced to donate $2 million to the school. Then I teach my constitutional law seminar. And then I’ll be home on Wonderland Park Avenue before six-thirty. A day’s work, done. Like I said: sweet.

  That’s one big reason I’ve managed these last seven years to finish my biography of Chief Justice John Jay (The 7th Founder), which the Times said “proves Americans’ appetite for thick workmanlike books about Founding Fathers is insatiable”; to write my first novel (Objection, Your Honor), which the Times called “an arch but surprisingly tough-minded aging-chick-lit confection, Rumpole meets Scott Turow”; and a cover story for The Atlantic (“The Trouble with the Constitution”), which the Times said “seems to be upsetting Ms. Hollander’s friends at least as much as her enemies.”

  Anther boon to my productivity was becoming single. A gradually failing marriage is a whole lot more time-consuming than either a happy one or a viciously rotten one. It was like living on a leaky old boat I spent half my waking hours bailing out. And then at around sixty, I got a second wind. Maybe it’s the equivalent of the endorphinated final burst of speed that Jack talked (and talked and talked) about feeling in the last few miles of his best marathon runs. For my previous nonfiction books, Hating Lawyers and Shouting Fire in a Crowded Theater, as well as the Jay biography, I methodically gathered all the facts before I wrote a sentence. That’s what lawyers do. But with this one, it felt as if a fuse had been lit, and I had no choice but to go, get it done before I lost my nerve.

  I have most of the information I need. It’s in my head, or else in the scrapbooks and journals and papers crammed into the soft, dusty old corrugated Kellogg’s Corn Pops boxes next to my desk at home. But not all of it. There are large gaps in my knowledge, a few important things I don’t know.

  I’m not certain where those missing pieces are. I suppose that’s true of most people. Who knows what secrets other people—family, friends, enemies, lovers, husbands, bosses, colleagues, acquaintances, strangers—have kept from us? We don’t know what we don’t know.

  Unfortunately, I have no subpoena authority or rights of discovery, only my archive and memory and powers of persuasion and inference. And the Freedom of Information Act, which lets you ask the government for copies of any records they may have about you. I mailed my Freedom of Information requests to five different federal agencies a month ago. So far I’ve heard nothing back.

  Maybe my FOIA letters are drifting among bored and clueless GS-5s and GS-9s, clerks who’ve never heard of me and don’t regard my requests as more or less remarkable than any of the dozens that come in every day. Or have I risen, possibly, to the attention of some GS-14 who takes her mission or her civil service career seriously? Has she passed a photocopy and covering memo to a member of her agency’s senior executive service, maybe an SES Level 4, a general counsel, a serious keeper of secrets? Maybe there’s a meeting scheduled to discuss my case with a Level 3 or Level 2, a deputy director, an undersecretary. And will someone with a well-known name, a cabinet secretary, a Lev
el 1, finally be asked to decide what, if anything, his underlings will be permitted to tell me about my past? In other words, how steaming hot are any of my potentially hot potatoes?

  When I worked for the federal government in the late ‘90s, it once took me a month to dredge up a file about an historical incident on an Indian reservation. The record keeping is very twentieth-century, a lot more Brazil than Bourne. The information I want may be classified. Or it may have been evanescent, contained in a few sentences uttered by some official several decades ago and never written down. Each of the other agencies to which I’ve sent my inquiries—the Department of Homeland Security; the Army Intelligence and Security Command; the Central Intelligence Agency; and the Federal Bureau of Investigation—keeps its own special troves as well. Depending on whether someone decided sometime that the information I seek might cause “exceptionally grave damage” or “serious damage” to the national security, it could be categorized, respectively, as Top Secret or Secret.

  In the ‘90s, my baby-boomer president signed an executive order to declassify classified information more than twenty-five years old, and to forbid officials from declaring a document Confidential or Secret or Top Secret in order “to prevent embarrassment.” There’s a famous song from Hair that has a relevant lyric: A dying nation of moving paper fantasy / Listening for the new told lies / Let the sunshine in! It did occur to me when Clinton signed his executive order that the new sunshine might one day result in damage, serious or even exceptionally grave, to my life and career.