John D MacDonald - One More Sunday

by One More Sunday(Lit)

  "I believe in God. I believe in some of the doctrine of the Eternal Church of the Believer. I don't take the rest of it too seriously. The rules of the Church that are made by men and not by God can be imperfect, just as men must be imperfect."

  "Don't you think that seducing my daughter is a vile and horrible sin that will send you to the lowest pits of hell?"

  "I'm not convinced it will. But let's continue with the consequences, if you don't mind. We are constantly subject to close and careful inspection by the media. So many newspaper, television, radio and magazine people come here that news conferences by the Reverend Doctor John Tinker Meadows occur frequently. Did you know that?"

  I know that they all want to tear the Church down. They are the Antichrist. Socialist rabble. That's what Matthew Meadows always calls them."

  "I do not really believe you can expose me and take your daughter away without the media people hearing about it."

  "Why would they? Are you saying you'd tell them?"

  "Of course not. You said you couldn't control your husband if you told him about this. Violence usually gets press attention. The Church is always vulnerable, you know. Coverage of this sort of thing could only hurt the Church. And as I've told you if Doreen leaves here and goes back into depression, she could kill herself. You know how the Eternal Church feels about suicide. And that would hurt you and your husband and all the friends she's made here. It would hurt me too, desperately, but that is of no importance in your considerations. Even if it doesn't come out, if I am forced to resign, that too would hurt the Church. I say that without arrogance. I know what my contribution is."

  She rocked slowly forward and back, eyes closed, arms folded across her middle.

  "You could be an agent of Satan," she said. She looked at him in that disconcertingly direct way- "Tell me how it began. That's what I can't understand at all."

  "I knew her history, of course. It was all in the restricted section of the detailed data base. I'm in charge of that, so when I found that one of the Angels assigned to Communications seemed dreadfully depressed, I learned her name and took a look at the file on my terminal."

  "Why would that be any of your business anyway?"

  "It wasn't, I guess. I have a lot of curiosity about people. I really like people. When I was a kid, I thought I might become a psychologist or psychiatrist. A year and a half ago we had one of the students at Meadows University kill herself. I always thought it could have been prevented if somebody had talked to her about her listlessness and depression."

  "So this whole thing was just to cheer Doreen up? I mean that's really some kind of big sacrifice for you, Rev'ren'."

  There's really no need to be sarcastic. Whether you can believe it or not, we are both, you and I, troubled people who have Doreen's best interests at heart. After I read the file, then I began to understand why she was so down. Why her hair looked so lifeless and her skin was grainy, and why she moved in such a listless way. I found myself worrying about her. If there is one thing I do well, aside from my work in computers, it is getting people to talk. It took a long time with Doreen. I moved her to my own department, without permission, I might add. She was suspicious of me. She was suspicious of everybody. She mourned her lost child and her dead boyfriend, and she was lonely here. Finally the dam began to break. I did a lot of listening. It all came tumbling out. There is a strange thing about talking your troubles out. As you talk them out, just the act of thinking of the right words gives you a different slant on your misery. I am a-good listener. I really listen. To be truthful, I had thought she would be a dreary young girl. Her troubles were actually trite. I did not expect any special kind of intelligence. But I found she is a bright child. I call her a child, but eighteen is hardly that anymore. She is a woman who has had some blows which could have proved mortal. She could have been on that cycle with her friend when it slid under the truck, you know. She told me how close she had been to being with him on that ride that night. She didn't go because she was sick to her stomach."

  "She never told me that."

  "I don't think she told anyone until she told me. And she told me she had decided there was no God. If there was, He would not let such terrible things happen. There is no God. Life is accidental. A God worth loving would not have killed Mike.

  Her loss of faith was tormenting her. I talked to her about God's plan being too complex for the mortal mind to comprehend. We talked often, and she seemed to become more willing to listen. She began to come out of depression. We took long walks in the early morning. It was a slow process. She began to depend upon me and she began to trust me."

  "That was a mistake, wasn't it?"

  "Annalee, you keep asking me how it all started, and I wonder if you really want to know, or if you want a chance to make snide remarks. If that's what you want, we can call it quits right now. Do whatever you please. Strike out at everybody." He stood up.

  He had spoken harshly. All games have stakes, he thought.

  And you can bet a little here and a little there, and dribble away any capital you might have. Or you can pick a number and bet everything on it. And do a little praying.

  He had almost reached the door when she said, "No. I'm sorry. I really think it was a terrible mistake she made, learning to trust you. I think you were after her from the very beginning.

  But please come back and sit down and tell me. Please."

  He returned to the chair and smiled sadly and said, "None of this is easy for me either. Just bear in mind that I was not after your daughter from the very beginning. You have to realize that. And if you are expecting some kind of peep show, Annalee, I am not going to oblige you."

  "I don't know what you..."

  "The details of this so-called seduction are personal and private. No one has the need or the right to know them."

  "But why did it happen?" she pleaded.

  "How could she let you do it?"

  "She was grateful to me for starting her back on the road to being alive once more. She respected me, I guess. I think that she wanted to find some way of showing her appreciation and her... affection. And, God help me, I gave her a way to show it."

  "Where did it happen?"

  "At my little house in the Settlements. Late at night."

  "What was she doing in your house late at night?"

  "We had been having what I guess you would call theological arguments, about the existence of a deity, and life after death.

  She walked up after the evening meal, after dark. I had asked her to come there because I wanted to show her something I had purchased. I have an IBM Personal Computer at home. I had bought a program called "The Word". I paid about two hundred dollars for it. It came on seven five-inch disks which contain the entire King James version of the Bible. It is marketed by Bible Research Systems in Austin, Texas. There are four and a half million bytes of information in the Bible, so it lends itself to a useful program. The disks are double-sided, double-density. The information is very tightly compacted on the disks. Best of all it has a data base management system on one disk."

  "I can't understand all that."

  "Sorry. What it means is that you can order the program to search through the whole text, very rapidly. I had been playing with it the previous evening. There is an index of two hundred subjects. For example, I would ask it to search for every reference that had to do with "Forgiveness" and print that out on the little Epson printer I use. It is very fast. I knew of her awareness of sin and her conviction that if there was a God, He would never forgive her. So I asked her to come up and she did, and I had the program search the Bible for references to "Loss of Faith." She was really fascinated. And the performance of the program was impressive. At about nine-thirty we had one of those violent June thunderstorms. As a precaution I turned the IBM off, and it was a good thing I did, because not five minutes later the electricity failed. I found the candles and lit them. She pored over the printout about "Forgiveness." I was sitting beside her. She was so lo
vely in candlelight I felt as if my heart turned over in my chest. I am a silly man and a weak man.

  It is despicable to take wicked advantage of a vulnerable young girl. I suspect I have more than my share of masculine urges, and that is one of the crosses I bear. God help me, I reached for her, put my arms around her. She was very startled. She resisted for a moment, looking into my eyes, and then she let out a long sigh and moved closer and I kissed her."

  After a long silence she said, "All right. So it happened once.

  It started with a moment of weakness. I can understand that.

  And she's impressionable. But that's no reason for it to go on and on, is it? Did it have to keep on happening?"

  "Mrs. Purves, Annalee, I just hope I can explain this to you."

  "I hope you can too."

  "I am not going to go into any intimate detail. That wouldn't be fair to you or to Doreen."

  "Are you going to tell me she didn't want it to stop there?"

  "Not at all. She didn't care one way or the other."

  "You can't mean that! She had to care."

  "I mean it. I was astonished in the light of her personal history to discover she was sexually very inhibited, very ignorant. There was absolutely no pleasure in it for her. She was like a mechanical doll, going through the motions she learned from that boyfriend, Mike. He was her only previous relationship. He was impatient and brutal and ignorant, and he had destroyed her chance to have any pleasure out of physical love. Do you understand that?"

  "Yes," she said in a barely audible voice.

  "And, my dear woman, you see before you a man who succumbed to the Pygmalion syndrome."

  "What is that?"

  "Did you see My Fair LadyT "Three times. It wasn't on the forbidden list."

  "An older man can find himself under a terrible compulsion to teach a young girl important things. It is a kind of arrogance masking itself as generosity and kindliness. I happen to think that kind of physical pleasure is the closest thing to heaven we ever find on earth. And so I fought the terrible temptation to see if I could help her find that kind of pleasure. I fought it and I lost."

  "You're rotten! You're really a rotten person."

  "Guilty. Rotten, licentious, wicked. A libertine, seducer of ignorant young girls. Bound for hell in a basket. Anything you want to call me, I'm guilty."

  "But don't you even ' "Now let's look at the other side of this crazy coin, Annalee.

  It is a custom these days to talk of scenarios. What would the scenario have been had Patsy Knox never sent you that note?

  Doreen and I would have continued our relationship for a time. We would have continued to be very discreet. And then, little by little, I would have loosened any hold I might have over her. Right now she thinks she loves me more than life itself. But it isn't love, of course. It's a physical infatuation, the by-product of a healthy young body and a lot of care and gentleness and patience and understanding. She feels great guilt, because she has found her way back to the Eternal Church and she knows we are sinning. However, she knows she found forgiveness for the sins in her past, and I am certain she will find forgiveness for what is happening now. She is healthy and alive and her eyes sparkle. She has learned to enjoy physical love, and that will help her in the marriage she will make one day. I love to hear her laugh. I love the funny little jokes she makes up. She believes that we are both deep in a sin we cannot help and cannot stop committing, and that we will go on like this forever. Not so. On many bases we have far too little in common. In my own time, with utmost kindness, I am going to push her away. I will do it, I swear, in such a way it will become her idea. I cannot really believe I have harmed her in any way. Can you understand that?"

  "I'm trying to."

  "Does she know you're here?"

  "Oh no! I didn't want to see her until after I found out for sure what's been going on."

  "So the ball is in your court, as they say. You can destroy a lot of people, and probably lose your daughter and your husband, or you can have a nice visit with Doreen, and say nothing about our talk, and tell her you came up to see how she's getting along. Then you can go back home and pick up your life and you have my word this will end."

  "When? How soon?"

  "That will depend on how much she resists breaking off our friendship. Anyway, it shouldn't last past Christmas."

  "Christmas!" she said, in agitation.

  "But it's only four months off," he said.

  "All right then, but there's something I have to know."

  "I don't know what you mean. What sort of thing?"

  "I was going to ask you if you have other women too. But I guess I don't want to know that."

  "While the affair continues, Annalee, I am faithful to Doreen. I could profess my great and undying love, but that would be another lie. I have a lot of affection for her. She is a pleasant person and she is not intellectually demanding. After a full day of the kind of work I do, I find her sweet and restful."

  "But if... if I just let it keep going on... then I am committing a sin too. Like being in a conspiracy. Like sitting out in the car when somebody is robbing a bank. Oh God. I don't know. I don't know what to do."

  She put her hands to her face and began rocking from side to side, sobbing aloud.

  He went quickly to the bed and sat beside her and took hold of her wrists, pulled her hands down from her face. She fought him for a few moments and then went slack, her face turned away, while she made snuffling, choking sounds.

  "Annalee, please. I want to recite something to you, something I memorized when I was young and I've never forgotten it. It was written a very long time ago. This is it. Such, he said, O King, seems to me the present life of man on earth in comparison with that time which is unknown to us, as when you are sitting at supper with your warriors and counselors in the season of winter, the hall being warmed by a fire blazing on the hearth in the center, the storms of the wintry rains or snows raging without; and then a sparrow entering the house should swiftly flit across the hall, entering at one door and quickly disappearing at the other. The time that it is within, it is safe from the wintry blast, but the narrow bounds of warmth and shelter are passed in a little moment and then the bird vanishes out of sight, returning again into the winter's night from which it has just emerged. So this life of man appears for a short interval; but of what went before or what is to follow, we are utterly ignorant."

  She had controlled her sobs in order to listen, and before he had finished it she had turned to him, frowning, her face blotched, eyes still streaming her tears.

  "B-but," she said, 'that is all so... cold and empty. You think life is nothing more than that? It's so scary. How can you stand going on if you think that's what we are? Just kind of... nothing."

  She had ceased any resistance. The back of her right hand rested in the palm of his left hand and, by accident, his thumb pressed against the pulse in her wrist. He felt the soft steady pump of her heart against the ball of his thumb.

  From its hiding place in the thicket, the ancient one-eyed beast awakened and lifted its head slightly, testing the forest breeze for the familiar scents, listening for the crackle of a twig as the prey approached.

  Oh no, he thought. You talk about wickedness and contemplate this act. And even as you contemplate it, you are telling yourself, in a kindly tone, like an uncle, that this would be an absolutely certain way of sealing her lips. She's been readied by all the talk, by all the churn of emotions, by her own fears and uncertainties. In a matter of minutes it could begin, and all her protestations would be listless, her voice small, her body slack with only token resistance.

  He remembered when he was little his uncle had a brown Studebaker, and on the dashboard was affixed, by a suction cup, a red rubber head of the devil, bounding about on a spring. It was always facing forward, through the windshield, but it turned around easily and whenever he rode with his uncle at some point in the trip he would turn the devil head around. It bobbed on the sprin
g, grinning its devil grin, jaws agape, revealing the red rubber tongue. The eyes were tiny glass marbles, milky white, with black spots for pupils. He remembered his uncle saying one day, "If you play with your dink, Joey, that there is the fellow who's going to come get you and take you away."

  He felt new tension in her hands and wrists and he saw from her widened eyes and suddenly compressed lips that she had sensed what he was thinking about. Looking into her eyes, he knew that she knew that it could probably happen, right here, right now, on this narrow motel bed in the sacred ambience of the Meadows Center, close enough to the Tabernacle to hear the electronic chimes on the hour and half hour.

  Her mouth made the shape of a soundless 'no'.

  He released her and stood up and went to the window and looked out.

  "The point is our utter ignorance," he said.

  "What?"