The moment he started talking, I recognized his voice. He had a thick New York Yiddish accent that sounded exactly like my father’s much beloved character Mr. Nat. Mr. Nat—that was the exuberant Coordinator of Interrelations who used to make my mother shudder with assimilationist horror every time he came on the air: “I wish you wouldn’t do that character!” I fancied my father must have modeled Nat’s voice on the voice of this man standing in front of me. The accent, the pitch, the tone—they were Mr. Nat to perfection.
As the man spoke, a whimsical thought occurred to me. I remembered how my father used to call home from the city sometimes with a disguised voice as a kind of prank on us kids. It occurred to me that maybe he was calling home again now, this time from that unseen city from which no traveler returns.
And just as that thought occurred to me, this old man, whom I didn’t know, and who didn’t know me, said in his Mr. Nat voice, “Your father wanted you to be a Jew. He was always afraid you didn’t want to be a Jew. He was always afraid you didn’t like being a Jew. He wanted you to be a Jew.”
Then he turned and wobbled away and moved out of sight among all the others.
My baptism was scheduled for the next evening.
I smiled sadly to myself and nodded. I knew what the old man said was true. Only my father’s death had saved me from breaking his heart by my conversion. But I knew also it couldn’t be any other way. I could not both journey to myself and stay here with him.
The next evening, I made my way to the Church of the Incarnation. The light of the spring day was fading when I arrived. The brownstone steeple was blending with the darkening sky. Inside, the scarlets and azures and bright yellows of the stained-glass windows along the wall were losing their vividness as the sunlight fell away from them. The vast, high spaces of the church seemed filled with an uncanny blue aura, a dusk that hung between the white columns and underneath the carving on the elaborate altarpiece: “And the Word was made flesh.”
As I mentioned before, the rector, my friend Doug Ousley, had indulged my penchant for privacy by opening the church after hours. When I first came in, the place seemed empty. Then I saw Doug and his family, down in the front pews, off to the left by the John the Baptist font. Doug was in his priestly regalia. Mary had now been brought down into a wheelchair by her disease. She managed to smile and murmur a few words of affection to me as I leaned over to kiss her. Her blue eyes still flashed, still showed traces of the loving and vivacious woman she had been when I first met her. She had only a few years left to live now. Tonight, she would serve as my godmother.
And, of course, the Ousleys’ grown sons John and Andrew were there, clowning around as always, making their usual sardonic jokes. John, only a year or two older than my daughter, was going to serve as my godfather. They thought this was hilarious.
“We will light a candle to symbolize the light of Christ in your spirit,” Doug explained to me. “And at the end of the service, the candle will be extinguished—”
“And your spirit will be snuffed out,” Andrew muttered.
I nearly fell out of the pew laughing. We were all in very good spirits.
These friends were there with me—but not my family, not my own wife and my own children. I had sent them home, back to California, after my father’s memorial. It was a decision I would come to regret almost immediately after the ritual was over. It was then I would realize that, all too typically of myself, I had made exactly the same mistake I had made nearly twenty-five years before at my wedding. As I had once believed Ellen and I were already essentially married and that our wedding was simply a formality, so now I believed my heart was already baptized and this was just a rite to symbolize the event. It was as if—as I would remark ruefully before the evening was over—as if I had learned absolutely nothing in all the intervening years.
Now that I have experienced this last decade of life in Christ—the peace and realism of Christ, the hope and truth—I think even this error was part of the story God was telling me. He was using my own foolishness as a parable, just the sort of satiric parable he knew I would appreciate and understand.
Because now I knelt at the baptismal font, beneath the upraised hand of the bronze boy John. Now Doug put the water on my head, the oil on my brow, and spoke the words: “I baptize you in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.” Now I climbed to my feet again and looked around me at the faces of my friends in the church’s mysterious gloaming.
And now I saw. I had been wrong—yet once more. I had been wrong about baptism as I was wrong about my wedding. It mattered. It mattered in ways I could not understand until the very moment I had done it. Of course. I should have known. Who more than me? Ritual and transition, symbol and reality, story and life—they are intimately intertwined forever. They are the language of the imagination, the language in which God speaks to man.
Well, mine is a stiff-necked people, slow to learn. Yet just as with my wedding, here I was somehow. Through my own foolishness and the foolishness of my times, through the fog of my egotism and stubbornness and insanity, God had sung to me without ceasing in the stories I loved and in my love and in my story. I, even half-blind with myself, had stumbled after that music to its source.
And somehow, once again, by the hilarious mercy of God, I had made my way to the great good thing.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Before I began this memoir, I would have said, if asked, that my work was my life. Having finished, it now seems to me that, in fact, my life was my work: a work assigned to the author by his Author, the work of journeying to a true faith. As I wrote the scenes of my biography, I was startled—stunned sometimes—to discover how often God had been openly present in those scenes and yet invisible to the man he was beckoning, guiding, and guarding. It was a story I didn’t know I was telling until I told it. I was grateful to God before. I’m doubly grateful now.
There was another aspect of the story I did understand from the beginning. If this memoir sometimes reads like a love letter to my wife, Ellen, it’s because it is. For nearly forty years, she has been my muse, my song, my soul, my only-ever love. I could not have survived the troubles detailed here, nor have experienced the joys, without her.
And I could not have written this book. The first draft was a sloppy monster, twice as long as this. I’d never attempted a long-form non-fiction work before, and I guess I threw in everything I could think of. My wife, always my first reader and editor, went through it and told me, “Half of this is the best book you’ve ever written.” She then took nearly two weeks out of her busy life to show me, page by page, how to cut it down to its present size. In doing this, she made the book half as long and twice as good. And yes, I noticed she didn’t cut out any of the encomia to herself, but what would have been the point? I only would have put them back again.
My thanks to her, as always.
My thanks also to Webster Younce, my editor at HarperCollins, who patiently talked the book through with me before I began writing, helped me as I worked along the way, and then edited the final version. I should also thank HarperCollins Christian Fiction publisher Daisy Hutton, who listened to my story over dinner one evening and said, “You should tell that story to Webster.” I’m glad I did.
Thank you, too, to Don Fehr, my non-fiction agent at Trident Media, for taking on a stranger from the fiction department and representing him so well.
Thank you to my son, Spencer, for reading a draft, discussing some of the ideas with me, and guiding me on matters of Greek translation and culture.
And finally to my friend Father Douglas Ousley, rector of the Church of the Incarnation in Manhattan: thank you for some timely enlightenment on Christian doctrine. And for the baptism.
NOTES
Chapter 2: Addicted to Dreams
1. Bizarrely enough, the house eventually attracted a real-life horror. About ten years after I left town, a family of child molesters moved in, the subject of a famous documentary film entitled
Capturing the Friedmans.
Chapter 4: A Christmas Carol
1. Comedian Jon Lovitz would later create a similar character with the same name on the TV show Saturday Night Live, but my dad beat him to it by about a quarter of a century.
Chapter 5: Tough Guys
1. Some articles say Vertigo was never aired. I think they’re wrong. But my father sometimes brought home movies and showed them on a projector in our basement. It’s possible I saw it that way. In any case, I saw the film when I was young.
2. Raymond Chandler, The Big Sleep (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1939).
3. Raymond Chandler, The Simple Art of Murder (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1950).
4. Raymond Chandler Speaking, ed. by Dorothy Gardiner and Kathrine Sorley Walker (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1962).
Chapter 7: Experience
1. In developing this technique, I was ahead of my time. I suspect many university English professors and newspaper literary critics are using it today.
Chapter 10: Going Crazy
1. M. H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature (New York: Norton, 1971).
Chapter 11: Five Epiphanies
1. John Keats, “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” poets.org. This poem is in the public domain.
2. Marquis de Sade, Philosophy in the Bedroom (New York: Grove Press, 1971).
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Andrew Klavan is the author of internationally bestselling crime novels such as True Crime, filmed by Clint Eastwood, Don’t Say a Word, filmed starring Michael Douglas, and Empire of Lies. He has been nominated for the Mystery Writers of America’s Edgar Award five times and has won twice. He has also won the Thumping Good Read Award from WH Smith and been nominated twice for the Bouchercon’s Anthonys. His Young Adult novels include the bestselling Homelanders series. His books have been translated around the world. As a screenwriter, Andrew wrote the screenplays for Shock to the System, starring Michael Caine; One Missed Call, starring Ed Burns; and the award-winning movie-in-an-app Haunting Melissa. He is a contributing editor to City Journal, and his essays have appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, the LA Times, and elsewhere. He also writes and appears in several popular series of satirical online videos, including Klavan on the Culture and The Revolting Truth. He lives in Los Angeles with his wife, Ellen.
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