“This place is getting a little too wonderful for me,” Molly said. “Let’s go.”
I tried to pay with a twenty-dollar bill, which brought grumbles and delays from the bartender (as though the question of denomination were one that would always plague me here) and Molly had to fish two singles out of her own purse. I pushed back a fifty-cent tip for the bartender and we hurried out, skirting the theists as we made for the door. As it closed behind us, we heard the half-dollar hurled against it and go clanking away along the floor somewhere inside.
“Well, that was nice,” Molly said, hitching up her coat collar.
“Can I have another chance?”
She tiptoed through the snow to keep her slippers from filling up with it, clinging to my arm. She didn’t answer, and when we were sitting inside the bubble—made a snug igloo by the falling snow—I offered to kiss her. “We’re not at my door yet,” she said, drawing away, no small feat in those quarters. At the door of her home she did hold her face up to be kissed good night, and I asked, “How about some evening next week, or the week after that?”
“Well,” she said, digging into her bag for a key, “I’ll probably see you in church before that.”
I drew back to give her the full value of my grateful surprise. “When?”
“Like next Sunday? I’d like to find out what you do believe.”
Preaching my way into a woman’s heart was a new challenge to me and I met it eagerly. I was glad to see the worship area full, which put me in at least that good a light. I had no trouble spotting Molly toward the rear, wearing a blue tweed coat and a fetching blue hat of the sort that is known, I believe, as a pillbox.
The service had something special to it. Torrential storms had struck the state during the week and flash floods had all but wiped out a small river town a hundred miles from us, all this close on the heels of destructive windstorms farther down the coast. The Connecticut relief program included the donation of canned goods by members of various congregations, ours included. Offerings were to be laid on a table below the pulpit this morning in a kind of family processional just before the sermon. During the choir number my eye ranged round the audience, and I must say I was a bit taken aback by the foodstuffs some of the better-heeled commuting members of my flock were clutching: vichyssoise, artichoke hearts, smoked clams and even trout paté were visible among the more standard and more rational donations of canned beans and peas, and peaches and pears. Cocktail snacks for flood victims. One could not restrain the image of groups partaking of these essentials on the roofs of floating homes, nor repress an affectionate smile for the exurbanite givers in their pews.
My own simple outrage at the spectacle of senseless human destruction was so characteristically acute that I was hardly able to keep a civil tongue in my head when I rose to offer the invocation.
“Let us hope,” I prayed, “that a kind Providence will put a speedy end to the acts of God under which we have been laboring.” I cocked an eye open and saw Molly raise hers, as well as her eyebrows. But it was von Pantz I wondered whether the irony had gone home with. I looked his way and, sure enough, his shaggy head was lifted momentarily in surprise. Good. I realized how much I hated his woolly Mama Bear Reader’s Digest optimism. Good old Turnbull of course suspected nothing; he had heard two pious phrases used in rapid succession and that was good enough for him.
“We know thou hast a difficulty for every solution,” I went rather dryly on, “but also that the obstacles put in our way are in the end to our spiritual good—stumbling blocks which, if we cannot convert them into stepping stones, leave us unworthy to be called sons of God, much less to be saved, even by the skin of our teeth. But do give us relief from the troubles and calamities under which we have been groaning, for Christ’s sake!”
After the prayer we had the family procession with the canned goods—which piled up three feet high on the altar table, the Bon Vivant brand of vichyssoise looking just as good as the Del Monte peaches there, each playing its part in the whole—and after that came the sermon. I chose for my text a passage from Havelock Ellis in which he speaks of how flaws and faults increase our affection for one another, rather than the contrary. “He is thinking of the narrowly sexual sense, but I think we all agree it has its broader application to human relationships as such,” I said. “We often love people for their very frailties and absurdities.” As I was finishing, a jar of calf’s-foot jelly toppled off the altar and rolled into view in the aisle.
Afterward I hurried to the vestry to meet Molly and hear her opinion.
“You were very amusing,” she said.
“Thank you,” I said. “How about dinner?”
“Well—” The door opened and a little boy wandered in, crying and carrying a can of tomato aspic. Had he lost his way and been walking around the church building ever since the procession? It turned out that his parents had left their offering in the car and had sent him in after the service to put it on the altar. I took care of it for him, dried his tears and saw him to the side door where he had come in, and where his parents were waiting for him.
“Cute,” Molly said. “Why, Wednesday night would be O.K. I mean I won’t rest till I’ve got you figured out, and I certainly haven’t yet.”
“You mean what makes me tick?” I said, leaning back at the dinner table Wednesday night.
“Well, what do you believe? Don’t make it too long, and not too heavy on the theology. I’m no de Tocqueville.”
I was delighted. My first wife had been an intellectual, so I’d had that. I moved a hand impulsively toward hers across the table. She picked up her pack of cigarettes and smoked one.
“I mean you puzzle me—why you went into the ministry. It certainly can’t be for the money,” she said.
“No. There’s no jack in the pulpit.”
“Then why? What goes? You’re always knocking religious things. In fact they’re all I ever hear you knock. I know—two shades of the same color sometimes clash more than two different colors, and let’s clean house and all. But there must be more to it than that. You’ve got something in your craw. Always racing your motor. So let’s have it. What do you believe and why ever did you go into the ministry?”
A fair enough pair of questions, which have probably occurred to you too, so I’ll answer them here out of quotes, including for your benefit what I may not have told Molly Calico, at least not then.
I believe in belief. I believe that some binding ethic and some informing myth are necessary to any culture, the myth being to the morality what the wooden forms are to the concrete that is poured into them, in building construction. When the concrete is hard you can remove the forms (or they will rot away) and the walls will stand of their own. Has Western man reached the point where his ethical walls will stand without the forms of his faith? You tell me, after thinking a moment about our sexual, drinking and crime records, our political and business practices, and the present behavior of a crop of teen-agers raised without religious instruction. But I believe that a faith is a set of demands, not a string of benefits, that a man is under some obligation to better himself, not sit around as he is and wait for Jesus to save him. Thus my going after this billboard thing was an honest act of war, not just a dilettante beef, as Molly, and maybe you, too, thought.
Now as to why I became a minister.
I became a minister because my mother wanted me to. She made me promise on her deathbed that I would go to divinity school and become a clergyman. I promised her because there was nothing else to do under the circumstances. When I got into divinity school, I became genuinely interested in church history and religion, then fascinated by it, so that what began reluctantly continued agreeably. It took only Toynbee’s argument to convince me that ours is the religion. Of course the cleric I became is rather a far cry from the one my mother had in mind, but that’s something else again. After all, a Calvinist in Connecticut …
For I came of Dutch immigrant Calvinist parents. We lived in Chicago,
in one of several such communities which still dot that city, hermetically sealed from the American life around them and the Middle West at large. I was taught the Bible at home and in a parochial school, but my parents became a bit dismayed when I began to show signs of appreciating it as literature. They labored with me and prayed for my soul. To keep peace, I recanted the heresy that the Bible was literature, agreeing that it was just God’s word. The Dutch Calvinists thrived on schisms, being themselves, of course, the product of many. They were hairsplitters the like of which an ordinary human being in our time is totally unlikely to hear. “One Dutchman, a Christian; two Dutchmen, a congregation; three Dutchmen, heresy,” was the charge leveled at us by more Americanized people, who boasted, for instance, of belonging to denominations that hadn’t had a schism in a hundred years. To these my father always had a ready reply: “Rotten wood you can’t split.” We multiplied by dividing. The very thought of a new sect in the wind thrilled our folk. In my adolescence, when flarings of more genuine revolt began, I said to my father one evening, on hearing that a splinter of a splinter had split off again and started another church around the corner, “Instead of all this bickering and contention over nonessentials, why can’t people emphasize the central truth on which all Christians can unite?” My father took his pipe out of his mouth and said, “Stop talking like a crackpot.” After a screed on his pet subject, the Total Depravity of man, I exclaimed, “Oh, come now, people aren’t all that bad. Take you, for instance. You’re a good sort. In fact I think you’re quite a nice guy.” He looked at me and said, “You’re wearing me thin.”
Molly smiled and nodded when I finished, and slowly relaxed the rather tense position I noted she had assumed while listening. She withdrew her forearms from along the table and leaned back. “That’s quite a story,” she said. “Quite a story.”
I now considered her with the same expression with which she had, when asking her questions, considered me. This was, roughly, the head-cocked-a-little-to-one-side expression with which one looks at a picture to see if it is hanging straight.
“Now that I’ve unbuttoned myself,” I said, “don’t you think it’s your turn?” I saw her look over her shoulder toward the kitchen door. There was a delay in our dessert, which was a Baked Alaska I’d ordered, and we had been drinking coffee without it. “There’s time. Anselmo won’t rush. So how about you? Where do you come from? What are you doing in that office? And so on.”
“I come from here,” she said, tapping the table top. “I was born in Avalon. I left home at the age of eighteen—ran away from there and business college—to become an actress. New York, of course. I’ve come back ten years later, which gives you my age too. And I guess you know how I made out.”
“Well, New York’s loss is our gain,” I said gently. “Didn’t you get anywhere in the theater?”
“Oh, sure. I’d get like second ingénue leads in plays that ran three weeks, or the maid in ones that ran three performances. Or I’d get like bottled-up as understudy in long runs. Nothing that encouraged Molly Calico’s belief that she had anything on the ball.”
“How did you live?” I asked, leaning forward with my elbow on the table and my chin in my hand, trying to purge from my heart the churlish possession of her failure.
“Radio and TV parts. Once in a while a commercial modeling job, and there I’d be in some magazine saying good-by to old-fashioned methods or cutting carpet costs in half. You’ve probably seen me. I got engaged to a guy who had a job in a publishing office, where he made like eighty dollars a week? Not the down-to-earth type. He’d sit in the dusk with the phonograph going, listening to like Berlioz’s ‘Harold in Italy’ and eating strawberries. His name, need I add, was Martin. After nearly a year of this, I asked him point-blank when this was going to end, if any, in matrimony, but it developed you weren’t supposed to ask him that. You were just supposed to come on him in the dusk eating strawberries and listening to ‘Harold in Italy.’ When pressed to name the day, he said we were all endearing mixtures of good and bad, and that he had a nervous sister in like Terre Haute whom he had to send money to every week, and so he couldn’t take on the financial burden of a wife just yet. So that was the end of that chapter and I pulled out.”
“And then what?”
She paused in the act of getting out another cigarette, to give me a slow burn. Very professional. When Molly looked at you like that you knew you were withered by the best. “You mean and then who, don’t you? You’ve got that look a man gets when he wants to know who he’s got to outshine. You’re like dentists in that respect, have to know who your predecessors were. All right, I’ll tell you All, on one condition. That your forever after hold your peace. Agreed?”
“Agreed,” I said, in some surprise, for a sexual dossier had been the last thing I’d had in mind. But I listened attentively to what she seemed so eager to have over and done with.
“There were three in all,” she said, lighting her cigarette from the match flame I extended, before getting back into my listening slouch. “Martin was the first. The second was a long-hair too, besides being bald to boot. But he had dazzling teeth, as so many men have who don’t have hair, if you’ve ever noticed. I often thought to myself, I’d give my eyeteeth for a smile like that. What are you laughing about?”
“Nothing. The idea of you envying anyone their smile. You have a lovely smile. Go on.”
“Anyway, he had the idea that life is for the discerning few? That what we have to develop in this country is an aristocracy of taste? So he’d go out and buy some liquor and throw a party, and you’d get there and there’d be like Cole Porter and Ida Lupino and maybe one or two others, and after that it would dwindle away to just people talking. There’d be little groups discussing like Kierkegaard and herb cooking and which were the places to go in the Touraine. These parties would last till like three o’clock in the morning, with the place looking like the Aeolian stable. There’d always be an aristocrat of taste or two to carry home. It was four o’clock before you got the place cleaned up.”
“Did you live with these men?” I asked, burning in the fires of hell.
“Well, I mean it’s all a question of semantics really.” She waited while the waitress refilled our coffee cups, announcing that the Baked Alaska would be a minute yet. “All he ever did was talk, but he did that in great detail. My breasts were two brioches, warm and steaming from the oven. And so on. But he never did anything about it. Just talk. When he saw me with my clothes off he’d launch a violent attack on surrealism or go cook something. He’d whirl up a batch of shish kebab, denouncing everything under the sun and waving the skewers around. I saw no woman was safe in there, and got out. He never did anything—just weave poetic compliments by the hour. My two—”
“Who was the third?”
She smiled ruefully and drank a little coffee.
“The third,” she said, “was the opposite extreme. This guy was your pipe-knocking globe-trotting man of action. Literary, but the active sort? He fancied himself the foreign correspondent and went around in a dirty trench coat chewing a match? But all he ever wrote was those ‘as told to’ articles for sensational magazines. Articles with titles like ‘I Had Myself Committed’ and ‘I Profaned a King’s Tomb.’ The idea was that he would one day settle down and write novels flecked with French, and any woman smart enough to stick with him would end up at the rail of an ocean liner holding a pair of dogs and wearing a mink coat. I brought in a little money with what bit parts I could get, meanwhile enrolling at an actor’s lab which was like the Studio, only more so. I went to the meetings with a friend who was also an actor. Mike was sweet, in that mad Rumanian sort of way? He loved to ride with the top of his convertible down so much that he’d do it in cold weather too, so that we’d be riding around with the top down and the heater turned on both. You’d love him. Cocky with everybody because he lacked confidence?”
“Well, now, wait a minute,” I said. “You said there were three. This makes four alre
ady, doesn’t it?”
“Well, I mean it’s a matter of mood, actually. Sometimes he’d be dark and glowery and you couldn’t get near him. I had a string of slave bracelets I used to like, and he’d look up from a brown study and say, ‘Pliz don’t wear so many bracelets at once. It gives me a sense of shower curtains.’ He wasn’t anything in my life. We just went to Ivan’s Lab and around town and into the country looking for dear little inns and all, but getting back to Analysis—this ‘as told to’ journalist was a Greek named Analysis, though actually only his parents came from Greece, he was born in like Omaha or Salt Lake City or somewhere around in there. Months passed and he wasn’t getting to his serious work. He brooded about it a lot but that was all. Couldn’t get started for fear of failure? At that, he was better than Robert, painting his damned unicorns, with flies on them for realism. He was so hard to get along with that periodically you’d blow up and tell him off, and always get the same answer. That defects were basic to the artist’s make-up, and it was by the tarnish that you could tell it was silver? At such times you were better off alone in the flat with Terwilliger.”
“Who was Terwilliger?”
“His dog. A foxhound who clattered all around the place chewing things up, but very devoted. And Robert was devoted to him. Robert would get down on all fours and play with him. He’d take the dog’s bone in his teeth, and the dog would take the other end of it in his teeth, and they’d tussle around the room together, trying to get it away from one another. Robert did that a lot, that sort of thing, to show that he could be warm and human. But getting back to Jack Analysis. One day he wrote an article entitled ‘I Got Women For Stalin,’ and when that came out with both the man who told it to him and him anonymous (to protect the innocent or something), when I saw that, I knew there was no future with him either, and I packed my things and cleared out. And that’s the story of my life up to now.”
The Mackerel Plaza: A Novel Page 3
