City of God

by E. L. Doctorow

  “In the meantime, what is abhorrent is pride, this is the sin that is so disastrous, this is where the evil arises, in human self-aggrandizement that forgets how Jesus the Christ came down to us and in our form was broken on the cross.”

  —Okay, so what I’ve got: A preppie to begin with, on the hockey team at St. Paul’s—a big-shouldered kid—then four years at Trinity in Connecticut. The sixties going full blast, teach-ins, sit-ins, marches, ritual draft card burnings, and Pem spends a summer in Mississippi registering black voters, has his head cracked open and, fully accredited, joins the Yippies around the Pentagon. And what happens then is that he opts for seminary. The bishop wonders why. But as the son of a stalwart churchman, raised in rectories from Seattle to the Upper East Side, what else would Pem go up against if not his house?

  I will write of him that as vague and inherited as it may have been, the young man had faith. He may have been confused, but began to see in all that roiling madness of Vietnam and the agonies of the civil rights movement that the church was an institution of truth and sanity. There were clerics around—not just Bishop Pike—antiwar clerics, liberation theologians, models of principled civil disobedience getting themselves manhandled and thrown in jail. Martin Luther King, the Berrigans. . . what gave them such strength? What carried them? Faith was the redoubt. And raising hell was a matter of faith. So here was a reasonable program for a child of the sixties: He would take the Gospels for what they were, a manual for revolution.

  Every degree of religious belief from zero to three hundred and sixty, his needle wildly swinging—this is the truth of my friend Father Pem.

  —Also true that, after a year off for work in the Peace Corps, about which I will have more to say, he comes back to Yale to finish his degree and he meets the young woman he will marry, Trish vanden Meer. Smart-looking, poised, out of finishing schools in Switzerland. A major in political science. Dots her i’s with a circle. Kind of preppie woman he’s always avoided, so they fall in love.

  Trish likes his raspy baritone, the broad face with a shock of hair always over his forehead, his sexy mouth. He is not even six feet but appears larger, the size of a strong presence, a divinity student with a good name and no money to speak of, and manly as hell. This thing of his not appreciating how appealing he is, like a big shaggy dog. The heavy black-rimmed glasses he wears that tend to slip from the bridge of his nose and that he is forever pushing back up, which somehow to her typifies a certain disorder in his life. He will need taking care of. And this thing of his vulnerability, how a mere idea can take hold of him and shake him up, how concerned he is to share his thoughts with her, though she feels it is more that he relies on her to listen while he gives his brain a workout. She is fascinated that any man could live this hard.

  And her attraction for him? She is coolly sexual, a slim, athletic blonde, plays a good game of tennis, is fluent in French and Italian, makes Phi Bete in her junior year, and her father is a big deal in the Johnson administration Tom Pemberton detests.

  —Dear Pemby,

  I had to smile as I took up my pen and thought of the likely expression on your face when you found a letter from your faux pop in the mail. So you see you’ve already given me a good moment. These days they happen rarely, though I can usually rely on a few during a day’s sail, when the wind cooperates and I ratchet up a close tack and haven’t to do much more than hold the tiller and taste the spray on my face. I’ve gone back to the old wood Hereschoff, you remember her? Gaff rigged? I don’t know why. She’s a bit beamy, not terribly fast, but pretty enough and without airs, like a good first wife. I can work up the momentary illusion of peace. I hear that hiss and quiet slap of boat-going, the sibilance of the elements, as if the wind and light and water are the gods in quiet conversation, just as if the old pagan polytheists had it right in the first place, begging your pardon. I seldom go out farther than a mile or two, and keep to a shorewise course, I don’t know why, except that I feel a strong urge to do otherwise. Or maybe it’s this odd oceanic disgrace, if you want to know, that there seems to me more floating garbage, more oil slick and unnameable waste the farther out you go. And I am a prissy sort.

  I haven’t come promptly to the point, have I? Not like me. But I’ll assure you of one thing. I am not writing with the intent of getting you back together with your estranged wife. First of all I don’t think it’s possible, knowing both of you as I do, and second of all I see you in a new appealing light now that we are no longer faux son and faux pop. Frankly I can’t imagine what either of you saw in the other to begin with—the peculiar institution that was your marriage is something worth scholarly attention someday, though not by me. I have more demanding priorities. Priorities. Yes, you would be surprised at how even such aged p’s like me are still in this thing, very seriously in this thing.

  What new appealing light? you ask, fixing immediately on what interests you most. Well first of all, that for all the difficulties of your life, one of which has actually hit the papers, you dwell in innocence. These are such sweetly normal things, a broken family, a lost crucifix, people on line for their dollop of mashed potatoes or whatever else it is that fills your busy days. I’ll grant you it’s a kind of tortured innocence, and I don’t mean to patronize your well-nursed angst, but troublewise, I would change places in an instant. It is such an enviable employment, God’s. Not that I’ve not always known that, but I do see it in this new light. Given that you’re obligated to tell us what we already know and don’t want to hear, consigning yourself to a role in life both ineffective and tiresome, I have come to see you as the unwitting, perfect surrogate for every righteous gentleperson who has ever stood up in an audience and demanded an apology of me, or written me a tear-stained letter about the brother, son, or husband whose death I was responsible for, or spammed my E-mail with every manner of vile imprecation, or booed me at a book-and-author luncheon, or stood and turned his back as I was given an honorary degree. You are their prophet, Father Pemberton. For your entire generation of cowardly, namby-pamby, self-involved, gutless unregenerate hippies who enjoy the good life of the American hegemony without wanting to shoulder the burdens of it.

  My reasoning is thus: If I learn how to communicate with you, perhaps I can actually reach the others. Much the way an anthropologist in the field, or jungle, studiously learns the language and mores of the natives in order to gain their trust. What do you say? I am thinking, of course, of my country. Will you as well, finally, think of your country? If so, here is our first problem:

  A legless longhaired man in a wheelchair has taken to picketing my house here in Alexandria. Each morning he arrives in one of those disabled-people transport vans and is deposited at my gate, where he simply sits staring up at the house. At noon, he is carted away for lunch, I presume, but is back in the early afternoon, and does not leave until darkness falls. I have watched from an upstairs window through my binoculars: the person who deposits him and takes him away is a young woman, a daughter or a wife, and very obviously devoted to him she is. He himself appears to be in exceptionally good health, strong, broad-shouldered, his chest, biceps, and triceps well displayed in a tight T-shirt with the sleeves rolled to the shoulders. Lower-class macho, or should I say machee. Probably has a good disability entitlement, too, which is perhaps what he celebrates with the small American flag pennoned on the frame of his wheelchair. I have after a couple of weeks of this called the police. But when they tell him to move along, he does, rolling himself for a walk along the winding tree-shaded streets with the same legal standing as a person with legs. When they leave, he of course comes back to his station. I have thought of sending out lemonade, but that could be read as a kind of mockery, couldn’t it? I have thought of inviting him in, risky though that may be and in any event a stratagem to be saved until the press takes notice, as it undoubtedly will, and itself begins to appear at my gate. I have thought of leaving, I can always go abroad, but expect that would be seen as running. But whatever I do the game is hi
s, Father. How would you handle this? What counsel do you offer me, a man not without his own medals and somewhat poorer for having given his postwar services for small pay year after year in the interest of his country’s welfare? Shall I picket him? Shall I order a wheelchair of my own and roll down the driveway with a lance at the ready?

  Hoping to hear from you, and with warmest personal regards,

  As ever,

  Your Faux Pop

  —Author’s Bio

  You remember how my father, Ben, a young naval officer out of his element

  survived one awful night of the Great War

  by shouting out orders in Yiddish, a language created in the teeth of European history,

  to the German soldiers pouring through the trenches.

  This was a gutsy, ironic, purely American expedient, was it not? It saved his life.

  At war’s end, he sailed home with Pershing’s troops,

  left the navy, and married his sweetheart Ruth in Rockaway Beach, Long Island, New York,

  and went into the record player business, as a distributor of soundboxes.

  The soundbox for the wind-up record player of that day

  was a shallow open-faced cylinder the diameter of a silver dollar

  threaded to the end of the playing arm

  and with a screw holding the steel needle

  that wobbled along in the grooves of the 78 RPM record delivering the impulses to the resonating oil paper membrane inside the soundbox

  that produced the tinny voices of Rudy Vallee and Russ Columbo

  for the American people to dance to.

  In 1922 my brother Ronald was born

  and in 1926 he was held aloft on a windowsill

  of my father’s office in the Flatiron Building

  so he could see the Lindbergh parade passing by on Broadway.

  The cheers of the crowd below resounding through the hail of ticker tape

  My four-year-old brother swayed and would have swan- dived into the maelstrom

  except that my laughing father’s sure hands gripped him and pulled him back inside

  where my mother, Ruth, not one to make light of life, turned pale and nearly fainted.

  In 193- I was born

  and the family achieved its finished composition

  Mother, father, and two sons

  Bronx apartment dwellers through the Great Depression.

  I won’t go into that except to say,

  by 1941 my father, Ben, who had managed until then

  to support us with a radio and record store that he had opened with a partner, finally went under and became a salesman working for other people.

  By 1943 the young ensign of World War One

  was my worried portly father sitting in an armchair by the radio

  listening to the news of World War Two while at the same time reading of the war in the evening paper he held out like a tent

  because his older son, my brother, Ronald, was in England somewhere

  flying with the Army Air Corps as a radioman,

  My family being disposed to communication

  and my brother being disposed since the age of four to diving through the air.

  So, not to put too fine a point on it,

  the family was back in Europe helping out again.

  My brother toured the skies of Europe at the radio table of a B-17

  the so-called Flying Fortress

  because it lumbered along with its load of bombs turret gunners in its tail and nose and a third gunner in the dorsal position above and behind the pilot.

  With all that armament, by today’s standards it was a not very large plane

  though large enough in the sights of the anti-aircraft guns or the attacking Messerschmitts

  flying circles around it.

  Later, the B-17s were flown at night,

  There being no deeper darkness than Europe’s at war.

  They were lit underneath by the fires of their own bombs

  ten thousand feet below them, and drew tracer fire as a magnet draws nails

  And though there was the terror of going down in darkness

  the crews felt the odds were better flying in it than in daylight,

  a view only partly shaken by the heavy losses they were taking.

  At particularly bad moments, flak exploding the aircraft seeming to jump with fright,

  or a new wheezing sound from the engines, smoke pouring through the cabin.

  My brother dearly loved the equipment in his charge the numbered dials, the needle gauges and, through the seams of the black metal cabinetry, the reliable glow of the radio tubes.

  With bombs away the plane seemed to drop upward and the chatter on the intercom

  homeward bound, of these boys, the oldest of them maybe twenty-five,

  was feisty, verged on braggadocio, till at dawn

  they saw their landing field and grew quiet,

  having come back alive for one more day.

  After a dozen missions, my brother was given a leave

  a weekend pass, actually, which he spent—

  by invitation tendered through his squadron HQ

  which meant it was more or less an order—

  at a small English castle in the Cotswolds.

  His host was a general, Lord Something or Other

  who lived there with his widowed daughter

  and a small staff of very slow moving ancients.

  My brother offering his credentials

  primary among them his father’s service in the First World War,

  The general, a frail blue-eyed man of Great War vintage,

  responded in kind by conducting his guest on a tour through his ancestral portrait gallery breezily dismissive of what he was so proud of,

  the generations of mustachioed mutton-chopped bearded bemedaled officers from whom he was bred.

  The general sported a dab of dried egg yolk on his tie,

  His morning shave had missed a chin spot of stubble.

  What class, my brother thought, and was about to write off the weekend

  when the general’s daughter made her entrance, a fair-complected tall outdoorsy woman the young widow of a British tank commander killed in battle against Rommel’s forces in North Africa.

  As he told me about her, my brother called her Miss Manderleigh:

  Her widespread eyes were large, her full lips red.

  She wore her dark hair in the pageboy style, a modest blouse and skirt and low-heeled shoes.

  Her hand which she placed in his was soft and warm,

  and her smiling easy hello made it clear in not so many words

  she understood his plight.

  He had some time alone to walk about.

  He didn’t understand how these people

  could live in this crenellated manor of yellow Cotswold stone,

  apparently unaware that it was going to ruin inside and out.

  It stood unattached to the acreage, not rooted to the land

  but set down upon it, with no trees, but dead bushes in urns

  and an indolent stone animal or two to express its distinction.

  Out back, a walled half-acre was given over to a Victory garden,

  And beyond this was a long slow-rising upland to which Miss Manderleigh pointed as she brought out a picnic basket, and a heavy portable radio

  Like a hostess determined to see to the fun of her guest.

  He still had no idea, he hadn’t even thought of it,

  except perhaps as his own fantasy, though

  it was just the two of them, my brother told me

  Trudging up the long hill road that was like a church aisle

  between the hedgerows bowing like deferential courtiers

  in the sharply rising wind.

  Oh dear, Miss Manderleigh said

  The sky a weird green vault, the first drops falling,

  And then this rainy blow was upon them,

  a very un-English rainstorm />
  And by the time they reached the shelter of a barn

  they were soaked to the skin.

  Birds had been barnthwacked by the wind.

  Two or three of them in the tall whipped grass flapped in circles around their broken wings.

  Inside, in the darkness, the portable radio my brother held like luggage

  had somehow switched itself on and suddenly

  They were listening to a shortwave speech of Hitler’s

  Sounding like the spillage from an upended toolbox of nails and nuts and bolts,

  The crisis of the world war rudely denying any pastoral exception

  and probably accelerating the two young people’s

  instinct to make love while it still was makeable.

  She turned the radio off, he lit a lantern

  and warmed himself in the sight of Miss Manderleigh

  her wetted pastel picnic outfit, all the over- and undergarments pressed like a single sheer wrap against her newly apparent person.

  Amused to be so flummoxed, Look at this, she seemed to say

  With her lips pressed together dimpling her cheeks in comic self-denigration, her eyebrows raised, the lantern light shining from her eyes

  This surprising strapping girl with fleshy pink shoulders

  the upper back rounding as she crossed her arms

  over her breasts, a curious glance at her raised foot in his hand

  As if the undressing were being performed on someone else.

  Not that my brother reported the details

  —he is given to reticence in all matters sexual—

  But I embellish his account

  with horse blankets to burrow under

  a bottle of wine from the basket,

  the cork popping, the wine in two glasses

  the cucumber sandwiches and deviled eggs neglected

  the wind whistling through the siding