by Mark Dunn
“Oh, no. Although I do pray for our brave astronauts each and every day. No, I just—” She lowered her voice, though she really didn’t have to. It would have been difficult for the other woman to hear what she was leaning over to say to me. “Well, I just sometimes need a little time to myself. My life is very public, very hectic.”
“What was she saying to you—if you don’t mind me asking?”
“Something about—oh, I just couldn’t get the gist of it from the way she was rambling. Something about her daughter. Who knows?”
I nodded. I had an open in-flight magazine in my lap, and I now focused my gaze upon its pages so as to let Ms. Swearingen know that she didn’t have to keep talking to me. Seemingly grateful for her release, the televangelist returned to her own magazine, or to her nails—I wasn’t going to keep looking at her to know for sure just which it was. All was quiet for about a minute and a half, and then the other woman turned and said something to Ms. Swearingen seemingly right out of the blue that was delivered in transparent anger, and then she pushed her call button, unbuckled her seatbelt, and got up. Susie, now wearing an apron that matched her uniform, emerged from the front galley to meet the woman in the aisle as Ms. Swearingen and I (and even the gentleman of the graphs and flowcharts) looked up. The conversation between the woman and Susie the flight attendant was near enough that I could hear every word.
“Is something the matter, Ms. Smith?”
“I can’t sit next to this woman anymore. Can I move to that seat there?” The woman pointed to the empty seat right in front of me.
“I’m afraid that seat is occupied, Ms. Smith. The gentleman is in the lavatory. There are available seats in Coach if you’d like to go back there.”
“I suppose I have no other choice. I can’t sit here. My sister paid for me to fly First Class to see her, and now I’m coming home. You must do me a favor: please come get me when we land so that I can get off the plane with the First Class passengers, or my husband will worry that something’s happened to me. He’ll be waiting at the gate, you see.”
“Ms. Smith, I’m afraid I can’t do that. Once we land, the passengers generally jump into the aisles and there would be no way to get you past them without great difficulty. Won’t you reconsider and keep this nice seat?”
Ms. Smith thought for a moment. Then she said, indicating Ms. Swearingen with a presentational upturned palm, “This woman makes my skin crawl.”
“How horrible!” blurted the indignant subject of Ms. Smith’s sudden wrath. “I’ve said nothing unkind to this woman. Not a single word!”
“That’s right,” spat Ms. Smith, “and you didn’t say an unkind word to me when I phoned you last year either. You ignored my phone calls and didn’t respond to a single one of my letters.”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
Susie placed a calming hand on Ms. Smith’s shoulder. The shoulder was bobbing up and down as she gave in to a flood of tears. But she would not go back to her seat.
Ms. Smith pointed at Ms. Swearingen, and, choking back further waterworks, spoke in a voice that was both bitter and achingly plaintive: “My daughter, Cassie—last year she was seventeen. Last year she was very troubled, emotionally unstable. We were trying to get her help—to, to find her a doctor, because things were getting so bad. She was an avid viewer of your show, Ms. Swearingen. She watched it every night. Some nights she’d be on the phone with one of your prayer counselors for nearly an hour after the program was over.”
“I hope that we were able to help her.”
“You weren’t. Prayer wasn’t what Cassie needed. She needed a doctor, Ms. Swearingen—a doctor of psychiatry. She was cutting herself, burning herself with the lit ends of cigarettes. Your people told her that God would help her to stop if she only prayed hard enough.”
Tricia Swearingen took a deep breath and then blew it all out in one long exhalation. “Yes, I remember that girl. To be very honest, Ms. Smith, our lawyers advised me not to take your calls or to engage in any written correspondence with you. They anticipated that you might be considering legal action against my husband and me and thought that this was the best course to keep the situation from escalating.”
“But Hal and I aren’t like that. We never even thought about suing you or your show. Even after Cassie wound up in the emergency room.”
“I’m sorry, Ms. Smith, but you simply cannot blame my husband or me for whatever has happened to your daughter. Luke and I have always preached that the Lord helps those who help themselves. It is the lynchpin of our ministry.”
“You heal people on your show—right there in front of everybody. Cassie believed with all her heart that you and your husband, as instruments of God, could heal her—could make her stop wanting to hurt herself. She believed this. She prayed and prayed and waited for these terrible impulses to go away. They never did. She attributed this to the fact that Satan had taken hold of her. One of your telephone counselors told her that there was a battle being waged inside her for her soul. The counselor told her that she must be strong to force the Devil out. Cassie tried to force the Devil out of her one night. In the bathtub. She nearly ended up drowning herself.
“Your people aren’t trained to deal with people like Cassie. You’re playing with fire. You pretend to heal people who come to your revival services, and those watching—they substitute the wild-eyed faith they see on your program for the scientific care of doctors. And you take their money. You’re happy to take the money these people give you.”
For a long moment Ms. Swearingen didn’t respond. She was trembling. She pulled herself together, and then she said, “There is good that we do. Behind all the theatrics, my husband and I have made quiet differences in the lives of a great many people.”
“Whether or not this is true, all I see is the circus.”
“Where is your daughter now? What can I do for her?”
“She’s in a psychiatric hospital, Ms. Swearingen. She’s making progress. We hope that she’ll be released soon. They don’t let her watch your program there. They don’t let any of the patients watch your show. There is a man there. He thinks he’s the Messiah. He talks of wonders and miracles. He must be carefully watched. That man is no different from your husband, Ms. Swearingen. He is no different from you.”
The pilot announced that the plane would soon be experiencing a little turbulence and all passengers should keep to their seats and buckle up. Susie took this as an opportunity to once again request that Ms. Smith sit down.
“I’ll be serving the meal very soon. I’ve got a wonderful salmon and dill salad for you.”
Ms. Smith nodded. Indicating Ms. Swearingen with a tip of the head, she said to Susie, “‘Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies.’”
“Psalm 23,” said Ms. Swearingen numbly.
Ms. Smith nodded. “I neglected to mention that I’m a preacher’s daughter. My late father had a country church.” She smiled at the memory. “Just like the little brown church in the vale.”
Nothing else was said by either of the two women for the remainder of the flight. After deplaning, I remained at the gate and watched as several of Ms. Swearingen’s enthusiastic followers rushed toward her with flowers and balloons and signs that read “Welcome Home,” “Cincinnati Loves You, Tricia!” and “God Bless Sister Swearingen.” A couple of preteen girls shoved pen and paper at her, soliciting her autograph. I watched as Ms. Smith made her way over to a man I assumed to be her husband and the teenaged girl who stood next to him. I guessed that this was Cassie, and that she had just been let out of the hospital. The joy on Ms. Smith’s face at seeing her daughter all but confirmed it.
As Ms. Swearingen and her entourage swept past, Cassie looked over at her. At the same time Ms. Swearingen seemed to be making every effort not to acknowledge any of the Smiths—Cassie included. Cassie’s parents watched their daughter and then exchanged nervous glances. But their discomfort was quickly dispelled by Cassi
e’s loving smile for her mother and father and the double embrace that followed.
The Swearingens’ hold on young Cassie had, apparently, been broken.
A couple of weeks later, during my weekly visit with my grandmother at the nursing home, I asked her casually if she was still a regular viewer of The Hour of Faith. She shook her head regretfully. “They stopped healing people on the show last week,” she said. “It isn’t as much fun anymore. I watch Jim and Tammy Faye now. Tammy Faye’s a hoot. She’s a real scream, that one.”
1982
REUNITED IN MISSOURI
Okay, so it’s the end of June, and it’s hot and muggy, and I can think of a lot of other things I’d rather be doing this particular weekend than driving all the way down to Kansas City to attend my thirtieth high school reunion, though as secretary of our class, I’m pretty much expected to show up. For Pete’s sake, I live in southern Minnesota, not Iglooville, Alaska. I’ve really got no good excuse not to go.
So Vern and I pack our brand-new white 1982 Celebrity with Pringles and pop and all of our Peter, Paul, and Mary cassettes, and head down I-35. Vern’s always such a good sport about this kind of stuff, and that’s why I haven’t divorced him.
The members of the planning committee are so cheap they decided to hold the main event in the high school gymnasium. I mean, what’s wrong with the ballroom of some nice hotel? Or renting out some slightly upscale restaurant in the Plaza? But they say the gymnasium is in keeping with the nostalgia theme. I ask you, what high school reunion doesn’t have a nostalgia theme? And besides, it isn’t even our gym. Our gym was torn down ten years ago along with the rest of the school. Most of us have never even set foot in this new building—a building that, incidentally, wouldn’t make a person nostalgic for much of anything unless she’s got a thing for bad 1970s architecture. And to make matters worse, they even changed the name. It isn’t Harry S. Truman High School anymore. Now it’s Bess Truman High School, because somebody on the Kansas City school board decided that the former first lady deserved to have a school named after her, even though she isn’t even dead yet (she’s ninety-seven and could very well live to be ninety-eight). And boy are they proud to be beating Independence to the punch for a change. Independence always had bragging rights to the Trumans and all those one-man-one-wife Mormons. Kansas City only has the Chiefs and the Royals (excuse me while I yawn.) And strip steak.
So here we are in a strange gym with big pictures of Patti Page and Eddie Fisher and the just-crowned Queen Elizabeth and Lucy Ricardo (holding that bottle of Vitameatavegamin and wrinkling her nose) and Gary Cooper and Julius and Ethel Rosenberg plastered all over the walls among the balloons and the crepe paper, and over the loudspeaker we can hear Frankie Laine and Connie Francis and Tex Ritter and even Walter Brennan singing “Do Not Forsake Me, O My Darlin’.” And suddenly it isn’t 1952 anymore. It’s High Noon and everybody’s feeling a little jumpy.
Right off the bat I start to notice some vaguely familiar faces. I say vaguely because—and I’m being kind—we have, as a class, not done a very good job of aging gracefully. Some of the girls I used to lead cheers with now look like their own grandmothers and half the boys on the newspaper staff I used to work with are cueball bald and a little hunched over and beaten down. (Ours was not a very wealthy neighborhood and there weren’t a hell of a lot of bootstraps to go around.)
I make the rounds with Vern in tow, and compared to most of the men I meet—some of whom I dated, others of whom I wanted to date, and still others of whom I wouldn’t have dated if we were the last man and woman on Earth and had to repopulate the species—Vern makes me proud. He’s a couple of years older than this bunch, but I swear he looks ten years younger. He’s trim and he’s nice looking and he has almost all of his hair. I say my hellos and make as much small talk as I can that doesn’t start with the phrase “Remember when we…?” and then I see somebody who makes this whole excruciating experience halfway worthwhile: it’s Candy Melcori.
Candy was my best friend in the ninth grade and the tenth grade and the twelfth grade, although we hated each other’s guts in the eleventh grade. What I’ve always loved about Candy is her ability to tell you exactly how she feels and not tiptoe around your feelings because, “You know, Yvette, life is too short, and patience and me: we just don’t play on the same team.”
Candy dated Rodney Tomasini during the 1950-51 school year (the year that Candy and I hated each other) and I told her (similar to the way she always told people exactly how she felt about things) that Rodney Tomasini wasn’t good for her because he came from a family of lunatics and was once caught trying to drop a puppy from a tree to see what would happen. Granted, he was six at the time (and he was stopped before he could commit caninocide on a Beagle pup), but there was always something just not quite right about him. Anyway, Candy broke up with him right before the summer vacation between our junior and senior years. And she agreed with me that it was probably a good thing.
But the main thing I can’t wait to talk to Candy about is Arnold Mordaunt, who I heard had just been released from prison only a few months before. In fact, I’m not the only person at the reunion with Arnold on her mind. I can hear quite a few conversations about his recent release being whispered all around the gym, which if nothing else has great acoustics. Arnold had been put in prison for the crime of manslaughter, though it was the opinion of most people who knew anything at all about the facts of the case that it was probably no accident at all; Arnold hated his ex-wife’s new husband, the brakes were in fine working order, and frozen custard trucks don’t just mow people down without some kind of murderous intent behind the wheel. The jury thought differently, though, and believed the expert witness’s testimony that brakes will sometimes malfunction even when everything seems to be in good working order, and even someone with the car-handling aplomb of an Eddie Rickenbacker couldn’t have avoided such an accident.
“So is he coming?” I ask Candy, while taking a sip of the punch that Vern has gotten for me so I won’t have to interrupt Candy’s detailed report on everything that’s happened to the more interesting fraction of our 161-member class, both the terrible things that were undeserved and the terrible things that people clearly had coming.
“Mary Ellen said he RSVP’d yes. She said he paid both for tonight and for the farewell breakfast buffet tomorrow morning.”
“So where is he?” I say, looking around. Almost everyone who’s supposed to be here has already arrived.
“He’ll be here,” says Candy. “But I’m still surprised they even invited him. I mean, he’s lived almost half his life in a jail cell. That has got to mess you up even if you didn’t already possess a criminal brain.”
“Do you think he has a criminal brain, Candy? Vern, honey, go make me a plate with the little chicken legs on it, and get me some broccoli with the garlic dip. The garlic dip, not the French onion dip.”
After Vern leaves, I draw close enough to Candy to smell her Charlie perfume and the faint whiff of Aqua Net she sprayed on her hair like she was Doris Day and it was still 1961. “Did you go to bed with him?”
“When?”
“In high school. When you were going to bed with every guy on the varsity football team and in the Key Club, and somebody said one week you even stooped to the chess club when you got even hornier than usual.”
Candy considers the question for a moment as if weighing whether or not she should dignify it with an answer, when, in fact, she’s only counting up her conquests. “Arnold was number six. I thought I loved him. But he was dangerous. I could see it in his eyes, that cold-blooded killer look. You really could tell—even in the darkness of his truck when he’s all over you with his hot hands. Killer eyes glow in the dark. Did you know that?”
“No, I didn’t know that, Candy.”
“I was sure that he was capable of committing murder one day. It ended up being his ex-wife’s husband, but it could have been anybody who rubbed him the wrong way. Did you know that
he used to throw custard cones at people who gave him a hard time when they put in their ice cream orders? What if he’d decided to remove Rodney Tomasini from the picture? To have me all to himself?”
“Did Rodney know you were going to bed with those other boys while the two of you were together?”
“Oh, I don’t know. Ooh. Look at Patricia McCloud, or whatever she goes by now. You could set little tchotchkes on that ass shelf of hers, it’s so—”
But I’m not looking at Patricia Last-Name-That-Probably-Isn’t-McCloud-Anymore. My gaze is directed, instead, at the ex-con himself: Arnold Mordaunt. He’s just walked in and is standing at the registration table. And I’m not the only one looking at him. I’d say the eyes of half of the members of Harry S. Truman High School’s Class of 1952 are throwing looks in that direction, as if no one has ever seen a convicted killer before, and why on earth is he wearing that vertical blue-striped shirt, which only serves as a visual reminder of all the years he’s lived behind bars as a hardened criminal?
What’s he going to do, I wonder. We’re all wondering. Why has he come to the reunion? Does he seek revenge on those of us who ignored him in high school because of his limited wardrobe and the fact that his hair always smelled of unwashed scalp, or because his poor grades and lack of motivation relegated him to 155th place in a class of 161? Or is it because we’re intimidated by his hot-blooded temper—a temper that ignited several altercations with teachers and coaches and got him suspended on at least three different occasions during our senior year alone?
I picture Arnold behind the wheel of that frozen custard truck, trundling over his ex-wife’s brand-new husband—a man who had done him no wrong except that he dared to marry the woman Arnold could no longer possess—and then backing up and running him over again to make sure he was good and pancaked. (That was the story we heard, but it wasn’t the one that the jury got.)
Candy and I exchange looks of only slightly veiled apprehension. My stomach does a somersault as he starts to make his way toward us. Why? Why is he coming over here?
