Comfort and Joy

by Judith Arnold

  “I haven’t baked them yet,” she said, following him through the house. “The dough’s all ready. We’ll get them into the oven after we eat.” Jesse seemed to have brought her appetite with him. All of a sudden, she wanted to dive headlong into the box and stuff her mouth with oozing cheese and tangy tomato sauce.

  He put the box on the table and surveyed the counter, where she’d arranged the bowl of dough, her rolling pin, containers of red and green sprinkles and an assortment of cookie cutters. “You’ve been busy,” he observed, impishly plucking a dollop of dough from the bowl and tasting it.

  “You’re just as bad as Philip,” she scolded, slapping his hand away. “Wait till I bake the cookies. They taste much better that way.”

  Instead of responding to her playful teasing, Jesse abruptly grew tense, a cloud darkening his face. He tilted his head and frowned, listening. “What the hell is that?”

  “What? The music?” If Jesse didn’t like Christmas carols—especially carols performed so beautifully—then he’d just have to tough it out. Robin wasn’t going to shut off the television.

  His frown deepening, he spun around and stormed to the den. Robin raced after him, prepared to defend the music to the death. As soon as he saw the television screen he froze, then cursed. “You’re not watching this, are you?”

  “I’m listening to it,” she clarified. “Their singing is absolutely gorgeous.”

  “That’s the Grace Cathedral Choir.”

  “Is it?” She moved to his side and gazed at the robed choristers. They were now singing Oh, Little Town of Bethlehem, their voices sublimely blended and their harmonies pure. “They’re fantastic.”

  “This is the Grace Cathedral annual Christmas special,” Jesse said tautly, not at all moved by the spellbinding music. “Turn it off.”

  She hesitated before blurting out that she absolutely wouldn’t turn it off. For all she knew, the show might have been produced by Jesse’s former girlfriend. Maybe his sudden burst of anger was a result of some old heartache not yet healed.

  He had been so sensitive to Robin’s wretchedness lately. She owed it to be at least as sensitive to whatever was bothering him.

  She started toward the television, but before she reached the on-off button, the choir came to the final cadence of the song and was replaced on the screen by the Reverend Robert Shepherd. Robin recognized him only because she’d occasionally caught glimpses of his shows, and because his picture appeared in the newspapers every once in a while, often shaking a politician’s hand. He was a fine-looking man, with regally silver hair, dark eyes, a hawk-like nose and a sharp, square chin. For this Christmas special, he was dressed in a majestic royal blue velvet robe with gold satin trim, and he stared out from the screen with an almost unnerving expression of omniscience.

  “Brothers and sisters,” he preached in a rich, melodic baritone. “Thank you for joining us in this, our celebration of the birth of Jesus Christ.”

  Robin hesitated, unable to turn the television off. Something about the minister’s voice, about his towering height, his proud bearing, the piercing darkness of his eyes...

  “As you know,” Shepherd intoned, “Christmas is a time of giving. At this time of year, we remember what Jesus Christ gave to free us from our mortal ignorance. He gave that most valuable gift—his own life—so that we might know the Lord.”

  There was something eerily familiar about the man on the television. That smooth, sonorous voice...

  “Turn it off,” Jesse said softly.

  The quiet steel in his tone caused her to flinch. “Not yet,” she said. She didn’t know why she felt compelled to continue watching the show. She didn’t know what she was looking for, what she was sensing. All she knew was that she had to keep watching.

  “I can tell you what he’s going to say,” Jesse remarked. “It isn’t worth your time.”

  “Not yet,” she repeated, turning back to the screen.

  “...And so we mark this day by giving. We give to our loved ones, our families and friends, our co-workers and neighbors. The splendor of the Grace Cathedral Choir gives us their inspired music. In the spirit of Jesus Christ, we give.”

  “What’s wrong with that?” Robin asked. Shepherd hadn’t said anything she could take issue with.

  “He’s just warming up,” Jesse said, stuffing his hands into the pockets of his jeans and leaning against a bookcase, viewing the television from a distance. “Give him a chance—he’ll get to the point soon.”

  “...And while you’re giving, you must ask yourselves, what am I giving to the Lord? What am I giving to those who do His work, who spread His word? You’ve just spent forty dollars on a bottle of perfume for your mother, fifty dollars on a toy for your son, eighty dollars on Barbie’s dream house for your daughter, a diamond for your wife, golf clubs for your husband...and where, in that, is your gift to those who do the work of the Lord? Where is the true gift, the gift that will bring Jesus to those who need Him most?

  “Think about it, my friends. Think about what you can give, and then give it. We at the Grace Cathedral have seen with our own eyes the miracles that God can perform, and we ask you to help us. In the spirit of Christmas, in the spirit of Jesus, we ask you to give. Call the toll-free number that appears on your screen, and make a pledge. Or send a check to the address that appears above the phone number. Or donate through our web site. Whatever you can afford—five dollars, ten, twenty, a hundred—every little bit helps us to do our work, to bring God to millions of people around the world, people who need Him as much as you do.

  “And now, I’ll turn you back to our choir. Let their spirit awaken the spirit within you, the spirit of giving.”

  The address, website URL and telephone number continued to flash on the screen as the camera cut back to the choir. They began a lush arrangement of The First Noel, but Robin hardly heard them. Closing her eyes, tuning out her ears, she pictured the Reverend Shepherd as he’d appeared on the screen, his stunning eyes, his mellifluous voice.

  His plea for money had been a bit heavy-handed, sure. But it wasn’t what he’d said that so unnerved her. It was how he’d said it, how he’d sounded, how his dazzling, thickly lashed eyes had reached out to her.

  She glanced at Jesse, inexplicably fearful of what she would see. He was staring not at the television but at her. Reaching to her with those same dazzling, thickly lashed eyes. “Well,” he said in his distinctive voice, a voice uncannily like Shepherd’s. “Now you know.”

  Chapter Eleven

  “WHAT?” Robin asked frantically. “What do I know?”

  Jesse’s expression was inscrutable. “Don’t tell me you didn’t notice the resemblance.”

  She couldn’t help but notice it, with the two men so closely juxtaposed, their faces confronting her from opposite ends of the same room, their voices merging in the air around her. That she hadn’t noticed the likeness between Jesse and the TV evangelist before was only because she’d never paid much attention to the Reverend Robert Shepherd. “Are you related to him?” she asked, realizing at once that it was a stupid question.

  “He’s my father.”

  “Your father!” For no good reason, Jesse’s revelation made her feel even more stupid. “But—his name is Shepherd.”

  “His stage name,” Jesse explained. “He legally changed his name to Shepherd when he took the job with Grace Cathedral. In fact, he changed all our names.”

  “Why did he do that?”

  Jesse chuckled dryly. “Shepherd,” he said. “What could be a more suitable name for someone leading the flock?”

  Robin shook her head, amazed that she’d never made the connection before. “And your name is Lawson because you’re a lawyer,” she guessed. “Is that some sort of a family thing? You all take last names based on your professions?”

  “No,” Jesse replied. “The family name was Lawson before my father changed it to Shepherd. I decided to change mine back right after I finished law school. In my case, it was
just a coincidence.”

  “Why did you change it back?” Robin asked, totally at sea. “I don’t understand any of this, Jesse.”

  He stared at her for a minute, his eyes glittering enigmatically, his mouth curved in a humorless smile. “It’s a long story,” he alerted her. “And the pizza’s getting cold.”

  “Then we’ll eat and you’ll tell me.” Robin left the den for the kitchen. Her appetite had fled her again, but she hoped that if she ate something she would stop feeling so light-headed and confused. She covered the cookie dough with plastic wrap and placed the bowl in the refrigerator—the last thing she could cope with right now was baking—and then gathered plates, glasses, napkins and a bottle of cola and set the kitchen table. Jesse pulled two wedges of pizza from the box, arranged them on the plates, and sat across from Robin.

  Ignoring the food in front of her, she watched him while he bit into his slice. She was unnerved by the steady force of his dark eyes, so similar to Shepherd’s, and equally unnerved to find herself picturing Jesse thirty years from now, when his thick shock of black hair would turn silver, when time would deepen the laugh-lines radiating from the corners of his eyes and the creases bracketing his lips. If he took after his father, his voice wouldn’t change with age. It would remain low and silky and persuasive.

  “I’m waiting,” she reminded him as he swallowed a mouthful of pizza and reached for his soda.

  He drank, then lowered his glass. “I was nine years old when he got the job at Grace and changed our last name. Before that, he was a minister at a small Baptist church in Oroville, up in the mountains in Northern California. He had developed a reputation for being a passionate speaker with a lot of charisma, and he was approached by Grace and asked to audition for the opening they had. They were a local operation then. They broadcast a half-hour show on an independent station every Sunday morning, but they were thinking of expanding. They had hired another guy for the position, but he wasn’t working out well and they intended to fire him. His name was Larsen. When they hired my father, they asked him to change his name from Lawson so viewers wouldn’t confuse him with Larsen.”

  “And he chose Shepherd,” said Robin.

  Jesse nodded. “Not exactly subtle, but then again, standing in front of a national audience and pressuring them to send you their hard-earned dollars isn’t subtle, either. The guys running the church and producing the TV show didn’t care about subtlety. They cared about effectiveness. And my father’s very effective. He raised the money to build that obscene cathedral. He gave Grace clout. He gave its broadcast the ratings to enable it to go national. My father’s an emcee, an entertainer and a businessman rolled into one.”

  “He’s also a minister,” Robin pointed out before taking a bite of her pizza. It tasted good enough to stimulate her appetite a little.

  “Right. A minister. How could I forget?” Sarcasm infused his tone.

  “Granted, a big, gaudy cathedral filled with television cameras isn’t the same thing as a cozy white clapboard church on the town green, but still...that doesn’t mean you have to reject the religious part of it.”

  “I was having problems with the religion long before we moved to Los Angeles,” Jesse told her. He rolled up the sleeves of his flannel shirt and helped himself to a second slice of pizza. “My best friend in Oroville was a kid named Mickey Santangelo. He lived down the street from me, and we did everything together. We were inseparable. My parents told me he wouldn’t go to heaven because he was a Roman Catholic.”

  “That’s ridiculous.” That parents would say something so cruel—and so untrue—to an impressionable young boy shocked Robin, and she laughed. “Roman Catholics believe in heaven.”

  “Not the way my parents do. They’ve got a strict, narrow-minded view of God and faith. Anyone who doesn’t do things their way is condemned. I began to have my doubts when my parents warned me that Mickey and his family were doomed to eternal damnation, and then again when my father changed our name to Shepherd. I never got used to that. My two younger sisters didn’t care—they hadn’t spent so many years being Lawsons. But Marybeth and I had real problems with the name change, and the move, and being taken out of public school and sent to a private Christian academy. And then, two years after we arrived in L.A., Marybeth got sick.”

  He fell silent, submerged in a memory of his sister’s illness and death. Robin’s curiosity about his childhood was far from satisfied, but if it hurt Jesse too much to talk about his sister, she wouldn’t press him. She brushed her fingers comfortingly over the back of his hand and murmured, “Jesse...”

  Shaking off his sadness, he pulled his hand from hers and took a bite of his pizza. “Marybeth understood,” he said. “She had the same doubts I did, the same questions. But once she was diagnosed, she returned to the fold. She kept telling me that she had no choice, that she was too weak to fight it and so she may as well trust in prayer. It was such a betrayal, Robin—it was like losing Marybeth twice, losing her to my parents’ church and then losing her to death. If only she had trusted herself, maybe she would have beaten the cancer. Maybe she would have pulled through. Some leukemia patients do. But she gave up. She stopped fighting and prayed for God to put her out of her misery.”

  “Jesse.” Robin shook her head. “You can’t blame her for that. None of us know how we’d react to such a horrible disease unless we’ve been through it ourselves.”

  “I know that,” Jesse agreed contritely. “I don’t blame her, I don’t judge her. All I know is that, once she was gone, what little faith I had was gone as well. My father threw himself even more vigorously into denouncing sinners and raising money for the cathedral, and my mother—well, she’s just a simple God-fearing woman, a clergyman’s wife out of her depth. Whatever my father tells her to do, she does. After Marybeth died, Mom turned our home into a domestic cathedral, with prayer corners and iron-clad rules. She spent most of her time hosting fundraising luncheons and leading parents’ groups protesting textbooks that mention evolution or sexual equality.”

  “And you became a lawyer for your father’s church,” Robin remarked.

  Jesse nodded. He tossed a crescent of crust onto his plate and shifted in his chair, hooking one arm over the back of it and gazing at Robin, apparently trying to read her reaction to what he was telling her. She wasn’t yet certain of her reaction, other than bewilderment and surprise—and relief that, at last, she was learning what she had to know about Jesse.

  “You talk about the importance of family traditions,” he said. “Well, this was ours: you finished your schooling and went to work for G.C.E. Or, at least, that’s how it went for me. My sisters didn’t take jobs with the company—good church ladies are supposed to marry and stay home and raise families. But they both married G.C.E. people. Catherine is married to the musical director of the choir, and Martha’s married to one of the accountants. And I became a lawyer and signed on.”

  “But first you became ‘Jesse Lawson’ again,” Robin pointed out. “Didn’t that upset your father?”

  Jesse glanced skyward and groaned. “My father’s spent almost as much of his life being upset at me as raising money and praising the Lord. He knew I was a rebel. He was always punishing me for it. When he found out that I was sneaking to the public library after school to read some of the books that were banned in our house, he locked me into my bedroom for a week. The only time the door was unlocked was to pass in a tray of food. When I met a Jewish girl one summer at the beach and asked her out for a date, I got locked up again. And again, when he found out I’d smoked pot.”

  “You smoked marijuana?” She smiled in spite of herself.

  “Once,” Jesse admitted with a chuckle. “It didn’t do much for me. Even beer was better than that. But it was summertime, and my friends and I were at the beach, and we ran into friends of friends, and they were smoking. So we sat down and joined them. My father found out about it, and I was sentenced to solitary for another week with nothing but the Bible to keep m
e company. When I was in college, we had some ferocious debates about politics. I kept asking my father why he wasn’t preaching more sermons on peace and aid to the poor. He kept telling me that fighting against our enemies was the same thing as fighting for Jesus, that our side was God’s side and he was doing his part by praying for the lives of our soldiers. And we were aiding the poor by bringing them to Jesus. By the time I told him I was going to law school instead of divinity school, he had all but given up on me. Changing my name back to Lawson was anticlimactic.”

  “But after all that, you still went to work for him.”

  Jesse reached for his glass and settled in his chair. He watched the bubbles rising through the soda, drank a bit, and shrugged. “He was my father, and that was the way things were done.”

  Robin eyed him skeptically. “I don’t buy that,” she said. If he could have stood up to his father so many times on so many issues, why couldn’t he stand up to the man when it came to his career?

  Jesse sighed. His attention remained on the fizzing bubbles in his glass, and his words emerged slowly, falteringly. “I wanted to believe,” he explained. “Even after all the rebelling, all the questions...I wanted to. It was so much easier for them, having that structure, having answers to everything, knowing exactly what to do and how to do it, what to embrace, who to avoid. They belonged to something, and… I wanted to belong, too.”

  He looked so bereft, his yearning nearly palpable. It was almost tragic, this man whose mind refused to accept what his heart longed for. At one time, she’d wished that he would bend in his views, but now she comprehended how hard bending must be for him. He’d spent his entire life trying to bend, aching to bend for his family—and discovering that he couldn’t.

  “Then why did you change your name?” she asked gently.

  He set down his glass and sighed again. “I had to,” he insisted. “I had never gotten used to being Jesse Shepherd. It never felt right to me. I was so anxious to figure out who I was—I couldn’t believe in anything until I was sure of that. And I was sure that I was Jesse Lawson, not Jesse Shepherd.” He smiled pensively, his eyes momentarily losing focus, growing distant. Then they zeroed back in on Robin. “Ultimately, my father decided that changing my name was a wise idea from a business standpoint. If I was going to be negotiating contracts for him, he thought it would look better if we didn’t come across as some hokey family project. He wanted people to think he had lots of outside advisors—it gave him an image of strength and professionalism.”