Oval stepped back as a squarish little man in a silver-gray suit sprang lightly up the two steps to the low proscenium. His motions were all quick, his steps short. He stood beside the podium, arms akimbo, staring fiercely at the congregation, as if angry at them. Left, right, center, his head turned and precisely stopped. He let the silence last, so that his angry look could cause the proper wonder. He looked like someone’s middle-class uncle who happened to be angry, but by his stylized motions he also signified that this was to be recognized as a performance. When the silence could last no longer he accused them all. “Have we come here to grieve?” His high voice rang as though it came from a greater distance, like a shout through a culvert. “To grieve?” A long pause in which his face cleared, feature by feature, until it was happy, a little Up smile left as if he heard distant sounds that reassured. “Oh, no! Let us listen, in a vastly different spirit, to Isaiah: Give unto them beauty for ashes, the oil of joy for mourning, the garment of praise for the spirit of heaviness. For I have news of Thelma Forester! Yes! I have good tidings! I saw her last night, clear as a star…Oh, I was sad; I grieved. That sweet, afflicted soul, cut off in her seventeenth year. Can we not say, as Paul did in his Epistle to the Galatians, The fruit of the spirit is love, joy, peace, long-suffering gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness, temperance? Who will not say that our Thelma was, then, of the Spirit? Of the meek, a princess; of the long-suffering, a gracious queen; of love, temperance, peace, goodness, faith; yes, even joy, a soul royal to a fault…”
This went on until it might have been forgotten that he had said he’d seen Thelma last night. But just as his praise began to be repetitious he jumped, like a child playing hopscotch, to the edge of the stage. “I walked in a dream last night; I walked in the valley of the shadow of despair, asking, ‘Why? Why this child? What force caused her to be born in sacred innocence, blameless, yet cursed with her condition?’ Oh, people, in my sorrow I had fallen into the gravest of error: I doubted.
“But then, my very soul downcast, there came a light in the west. What was it?” Ozzie looked up over his shoulder, flinched as if he looked into a blinding light, raised his arm against it, his expression saying that it was the light of joy, joy too great to bear. “ ‘What is it?’ I asked, and a voice answered, ‘Do you doubt?’
“And I said, ‘Yes, Lord, because of the tribulations of a child.’ And the Lord said, ‘What are seventeen short years next to eternity? Would I forsake my own child? Behold!’
“And the mists of darkness parted and I was in a castle, in Florence, in a vast studio full of light, where there were easels and canvasses, and by a great window were the Master and his pupil. It was Leonardo, the great Leonardo, in a robe of rich velvet, his noble visage shining with genius and with admiration for the work of a young girl who modestly yet with great joy stood next to her easel and listened to the Master. She was blond, and tall, and richly dressed, and her eyes were of the purest blue through which intelligence shone warm and vivid as the sky on a summer’s day.
“ ‘Thelma!’ I cried. ‘Thelma Forester!’ but they heard me not. The quiet joy of that scene, in which genius and an apprentice of true talent were inspired, both, by the creation of beauty! The quiet joy, the lasting joy, the love of the valuable, the triumph! Yes, the triumph over pain and suffering, that is what the Lord showed me in my dream. What He has made is indeed marvelous and beautiful, but the final message is triumph itself and the literal transmigration of flesh and blood. Thelma is there, in rooms of light, as beautiful of mind and body as she was in this Vale of Tears beautiful of soul!
“And so I have come, as the Lord bade me, to give news not of loss but of triumph. Do we grieve? No! Do we doubt the Lord’s intentions? No! Oh, Thelma, dear, we are all so happy for you, though you can’t hear us, for we are, to you, but a fragment of a fragment of a dream, a wisp of forgotten pain, a fond, dim long-ago of loving friends, a blink of memory. Someday, perhaps, we will meet again, when we too are radiant and beautiful.”
“Oh, yeah,” Washington Johnson said.
Ozzie paused, beatific with certainty as he looked over the heads of the people toward the rear of the church, where his Florentine castle was, or where God was, his gaze moving from one wonderful vision to another, each more glorious than the last. He said, “God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life. And also: Another book was opened, which is the book of life. And also: God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes; and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain: for the former things are passed away.”
After a meditative moment, Ozzie backed up, turned and came down the two steps to his place in the front row. Sitting with him were his mother and his niece, Hadasha Kemal Allgood and a high-backed, platinum-blond woman who may have been his sister or wife. These observations, too, were to John a defense against sentimentality and disgust. There had been his own vast, cold revelation as to Thelma’s fate, which had seemed chilling and grand, though he couldn’t quite remember why. But this costume fantasy of Ozzie’s left, after its initial surprise, a feeling of dilution. Thelma did die, all by herself. She did it. Don’t forget that.
And now Oval; what news would he have of Thelma and Urban? As he came forward to the podium John thought it an error, probably a typical error, for his father to follow Ozzie, a professional who delighted in performance. He’d never heard his father give any sort of presentation except for brief flows of sincere jargon. His father, he thought now, instead of Oval Forester: Sylvan Hearne, father of John Hearne and a failure at everything he had ever tried, including his frigid temple dedicated to Phaseolus lunatus. Wrinkled about the lap, tall and skinny, with a weak, sweet, outdated handsomeness, his tie already turning over inside its knot to show its folds, his eyes damp, bothered and shy, he stood there and tried to clear his throat. No one would ever call Ozzie a “saint,” because Ozzie was too clever, so they probably called his father a saint because he wasn’t too clever.
He was certainly nervous. “Thank-thank you, Ozzie, for your lovely and reassuring vision of Thelma,” he said, stuttering a little. John felt concern among the people. The voice was weak, as if there weren’t enough breath behind it; heads tilted slightly as the people tried to hear him. “We will now turn to hymn forty-five, ‘Lord of All Hopefulness,’ ” he said.
Bonnie pedaled the harmonium, and over its clunking the sweet whine of the reeds grew into another familiar melody. Again the voices soared until the church was full. He read the words inside a windstorm of voices.
Lord of all hopefulness, Lord of all joy,
Whose trust ever childlike, no cares could destroy,
Be there at our waking, and give us, we pray,
Your bliss in our hearts, Lord, at the break of the day.
At the end of the hymn, its conceit being that morning, noon, evening and night represented birth, maturity, old age and death, the voices hushed, then sang “Amen.”
His father looked at him across the church, over the people. “I would like,” his father said, “to speak…to say a few words about my friend Urban Stumms.” He could hardly be heard. He surely must have known that nothing failed like inaudibility, and that the act of trying to hear what could barely be heard was irritating. Maybe he just didn’t have the breath. He paused for a long time. There were things he must be expected to say, that he knew he had to say. He glanced at John again, and then away.
“Uh,” he said. “With us today are Urban’s widow, Maria, and her father, Mr. Dominguez. I’m not going to quote any scriptures and I don’t want to be sectarian in any way. We are all God’s creatures. Urban was going through a crisis of faith, not in his stern God but in matters of sect and doctrine. Maybe he was right, and his confusion necessary and right. Who are we to say? I see that many of you here once belonged to the church he led, the Church Ovarian Apocalyptic. You will all know that Urban could forgive anyon
e but himself. He was basically a kind and loving man disturbed by what he had to do during the war. He wanted to be purged of that guilt and all we gave him were honors and medals. I see there are members of the Legion Honor Guard here today because Urban was a brave and decorated airman. He had fifty missions. Over Tokyo his face was burned nearly to the bone and to the bone in some places. I just want to tell you these things if you don’t know them. There was no lightness or gaiety in his life. He loved his wife Maria and would have loved his child, but his own happiness was something he could never believe he deserved. Why should such a man…” Here the words faded into little sounds and edges of consonants. “…bowling and play golf, but he…trivial…forgive himself…”
John strained to hear the words, because his father looked at him. He could tell by the people around him that most had stopped trying to hear and merely accepted the dim sound of a voice as part of the ceremony. But his father looked at him and moved his lips as if audible, reasonable thoughts were being communicated. Speak up! John silently commanded. He pointed to his ear and shook his head. If the man had no voice he shouldn’t speak. This was impossible and embarrassing. It was senseless.
So why did he care, being only an observer? Maybe what the man wanted to say he shouldn’t say, so the compromise was a mumble, demonstrating another failure. Everyone in the church was upset, or John felt that everyone was upset. Maybe this was a form of speaking in tongues; instead of mad ecstasy a dribble of little sounds, parts of phrases, orphan words. Maybe the people in the front row could hear, but he didn’t think so. This disaster seemed willful. But fright, or any emotion powerful enough, could take away a voice. Maybe failure itself could do it, compounding itself.
No one moved. Finally the wounded man up there, his father, couldn’t seem to move his lips anymore. His jaws frozen slightly open, he stared as if in the power of some startling, final idea.
Bonnie began to pump and play another hymn. Ozzie Rittheuber went up on the platform and put an arm around the taller man’s shoulders.
“Our beloved friend and pastor is moved beyond words,” he said in a voice so clear it was refreshing, as if everyone had suddenly recovered from deafness. “Let us bow our heads in prayer,” Ozzie commanded, and immediately began: “Oh, Lord of joy who hath taken our two friends, Thelma and Urban, to live with Thee in radiant harmony, unconfused and guiltless, made beautiful and whole, how can we begin to thank Thee for Thy divine goodness? These are they which came out of great tribulation, and have washed their robes, and made them white in the blood of the lamb. We know there is unhappiness and cruelty in this world, but there is none in the next. Here we must struggle against the forces of evil, but in that fair land there is no evil. There was war in Heaven: Michael and his angels fought against the dragon; and the dragon fought and his angels, and prevailed not. Lord, we thank Thee for the comfort of knowing that our departed friends, though far from us now, will greet us in our turn, when we cast off our own earthly scars and flaws and are reunited in the vast light of Thy love. Amen.”
Bonnie played the harmonium, creating a mesh of incandescent little wires of sound that had in it a meant discordance. Some signal he didn’t catch, maybe the music, told the people that the ceremony was over. They all rose to their feet and the chief mourners, Maria and his father, came up the aisle. As they came toward him he looked at them, but they were blind. They were followed by Maria’s father, the three members of the Legion Honor Guard with their caps under their shoulder straps and then all the people who had been sitting in front. He watched them as they passed, waiting for his turn. Bonnie still played. He wanted to be gone from here but there were questions and responsibilities, so when the aisle opened to him he went instead to Bonnie and waited behind her, watching her arms under the cloth of her suit and how the padding in the shoulders rose and fell above her real shoulders. She seemed institutional and efficient, her haunches pulsing with muscle as she pedaled wind into the bellows.
When all the people had left she turned on her revolving stool and looked at him. She was bothered and unhappy but she tried to shake all that off. “You caused it,” she said. “I suppose it wasn’t all your fault, but you were the cause of it.”
“Me?”
“He’s afraid of you.”
“Nobody’s afraid of me,” he said quickly.
“Lots of people can be afraid of you. I’m afraid of you, for instance.”
“For God’s sake, why?”
“Because you’re judging all the time. Because you’re from the East and go to college and think we’re a bunch of crackpots out here. But it’s more than that, it’s the way you are. You never open up. We give you everything and you just sit there digesting it. It’s as if you think we’re all fixed and never have any doubts, which isn’t true at all, and you’re just sort of documenting us.”
“I’m sorry. I don’t know how not to…”
Hadasha came up to them. “Where was Oval going?” he asked.
“Going?” Bonnie said.
“The ladies are setting up the tables. Maybe he went downtown to get something,” Hadasha said, and left busily on some kind of errand.
In the back garden, tables had been set up with white tablecloths, and women were bringing pitchers, covered platters, crustless sandwiches under cellophane, silver, paper cups and napkins. At one side people were lined up to sign the guest books, and a few had begun to help themselves to the food. He and Bonnie could see that the ’40 Buick was gone.
They went to the parsonage to see if there was any explanation, and found a note on the kitchen table:
Dear Bonnie,
I’ll be back in time to take
Johnny to the airport. Driving.
Love, Oval
“Driving?” John said.
“He drives, that’s all. When he gets really upset he just goes off alone and drives and listens to the gospel station.”
That information given in her usual bright, teaching manner, Bonnie’s eyes grew wet. “That’s what he says. I don’t know.” She took a Kleenex, pressed her eyes and blew her nose. “I want him to be happy. He saved my life. How can I help him, John? It’s so frustrating!”
“I don’t know,” he said. In a way he couldn’t imagine how she could be so taken up with a man as old as his father. No, it wasn’t just the age, but the fact that the man was his father, who had lived his life and gone into history, prologue to John Hearne, whose story this was.
“Are you all packed?” Bonnie said. “Do you have Thelma’s pictures she drew for you?”
“Pretty much. Yes.”
Bonnie looked in the refrigerator. “The freezer’s all full of guess what,” she said. “Lima beans. You want one of your beers?”
“Sure. You have one, too.”
“Of course he failed with that lima-bean machine. He was a machinist’s mate in the Navy, so he thought he was an engineer.” She opened two bottles of his Pabst and poured them into glasses. “Did you hear anything he mumbled today?”
“Some of it,” he said. “What I heard sounded pretty good.”
“ ‘Pretty good,’ ” she said. “See what I mean? That’s a judgment.”
“I mean he didn’t go on about meeting in heaven and all that crap.”
“Crap! Why is it crap to want Thelma and Urban to be happy? Don’t you want to be happy?”
“Yeah, but do you believe all that stuff?”
“I believe it’s beautiful and it made me cry!” And she began to cry.
“Bonnie…”
“Well, I don’t care! No, I don’t—we don’t—exactly believe in the resurrection of the actual body the way Ozzie does, but it’s still beautiful to think so, isn’t it? How can you be so cold and so superior?”
“I don’t think I’m so superior. I just don’t believe all that stuff. I don’t think it’s true, that’s all.”
“What’s true or not got to do with it? Who cares about that? It’s how people feel that matters! Do you think we
should have told Thelma she was going to die, period? Just turn into nothing? Would you have told her that?”
“No,” he said.
“See? It isn’t much fun, is it? None of it!” She began to hiccup and click her teeth, a kind of sobbing.
“I’m not cold, either,” he said. He felt that she was good and so, cause and effect, he grew unhappy over her unhappiness. Cause and effect; he never trusted his own tears because he suspected they were there to congratulate him upon his nice sympathy and generosity—at least partly, but a taint was still a taint. Her lips gleamed and were slack, so he took two steps and put his arms around her.
“Oh, John,” she said. “I’m sorry I said you were cold. You’re warm and good, I know.” She kissed him on the mouth, her unhappy lips wet as mucilage. In her shoes she was taller than he was, so she bent toward him, a beautiful, aromatic continent of woman.
They stood holding each other for a while, but because there didn’t seem anything to do next, they finally sat down at the kitchen table.
“My face is a mess, I know,” Bonnie said. “I’ve got to put in an appearance out there. Then I’ve got to go to Maria’s for a while.” She stood up to go fix her face.
“I’ll go with you if you want,” he said.
“Why would you want to?”
“Because you might want me to.”
“That’s so sweet, John.”
After the affair in the garden, run by the ladies of the Healing Echelons, they went to Maria’s, the apartment connected to Urban’s church, where her relatives ate and talked and seemed very polite and careful, as if confused by the cultural aspects of it all. All the men wore narrow mustaches. There seemed no grief; it was Bonnie the men all looked at, quickly and then away. Maybe they had been less careful before she arrived.
The Moon Pinnace Page 39
