She has dug around and come up with all the earlier issues back to the April 8 special edition, the one that first broke the news about the cult and created such a furor: BRUNISTS PROPHESY END OF WORLD! across all eight front-page columns. Amazing horror-flick pic of a charred black hand. The Prophet in a contrasty iconic mug shot. Photos of helmeted coalminers. The mine hill with nobody on it. The burned ruins of a house. Squibs about other cults used as filler. The editor was clearly fascinated, as is she, by the long, weird, and often violent history of apocalyptic movements, nowadays known euphemistically as evangelical or fundamentalist churches, and there’s something in every issue, published without comment almost like contemporary news items: tales of millennialists, crusaders, ecstatics, flagellants, flat earthers and faith healers, naked adamists, hermits declaring themselves resurrected kings or sons of God, mystics, martyrs, messiahs, priestly rapists, ritualistic cannibals, visionaries (miraculous white birds flock past with the seasons), and other mythomaniacal eccentrics and criminals of the cloth. But also those who resisted these fantasies and the dire consequences they suffered, beheading the least of it. She sometimes thinks of herself as standing alone, breaking new ground. It’s easy to forget that atheism is as old as theism. And that the ratios haven’t changed much. Nor the power structure. According to the articles, end of the world gatherings seem to have happened several times a year over the centuries—some ending tragically, most comically. She learns, without surprise, that the Rapture idea was never mentioned in the Bible or in ancient times but was invented by a couple of religious charlatans in the middle of the nineteenth century and sold to suckers ever since. The Chronicle editor was obviously an atheist: to what extent was he St.-Pauling this crazy cult into a worldwide church with his deadpan epistles? Over her shoulder the Lutheran minister smiles, puffing on his pipe: God the Engineer at it again.
She also takes a moment to flick through the sports pages of the various editions until she finds a photo of the high school basketball team. Yes, he was cute. Wearing his hormones in plain view like another number on his shirt. Rascality written all over him. No wonder what almost happened at the ice plant almost happened…
After a prowl through the filing cabinets (“Street Repairs,” “Rotary Club,” “United Mine Workers,” “Bowling Leagues”), she comes eventually upon the Brunist folders, including notes about each of the early cultists—some dated, some not. Full accounts of Bruno; Clara Collins; her husband, Ely. In Marcella’s folder: a few typed scraps, photos, some job press proofs of her name in Old English, a couple of them with his name butting up against hers, rough sketch of the Bruno house floor plan. A handwritten background note speaks of her Catholicism, considers it to be more a kind of general mysticism—a thing of nature, not of doctrine. Therefore vulnerable to reinterpretation. To a change of heart. In one photo she wears a shawl or a light blanket as the Virgin often does in paintings, peering up at the camera with almost heartbreaking waif-like beauty. Already somehow looking martyred. Odd background structures. One print dated on the back that must have been taken out at the mine shortly after the disaster. Six different copies of this one. He put in some darkroom time.
Which probably explains that closet door with the small pane of glass. She looks inside: a small room, the cupboard-sized back half for development, plumbed and painted black with black curtains, the front, lit by a red bulb, for hanging wet prints. Lines and clips strung up just above eye level. A couple of curled prints still dangling there, including one of Angela’s father in front of the police station. Looking fierce. The face of vindictive law-and-order. Instead of leaving the room, she pulls the door closed, peers out through the little square window. The sofa. The exact angle of those photos. Somebody must have been in here, either unknown to the editor or arranged by him. She goes to get one of the photos with the shawl, sets it against the far armrest, returns to the darkroom, stares out the window at the dead girl staring back. Could she ever imagine the world as that girl saw it? Get into the head of an otherworldly Roman Catholic, the innocent daughter of aging immigrants, modest and sweet-natured and accepting, as she herself is not? Her poor, working-class family is accustomed to a punishing life. Her older brothers are dead already. Their lives are presumably continuing somewhere else. In the sky. As will hers? The girl doesn’t think about it. Like Reverend Dreyer’s divinity: thought, action, passion, all one. Her brother Giovanni is ill, but miraculously he is alive and needs her. Miraculously? Yes, it was a miracle. The girl believes that. God is mysterious and unknowable, but he is not absent or uncaring.
Sally shakes off her spectral forebodings and stretches out on the sofa, staring up at the ceiling, the photo on her chest. White acoustic tiles. A kind of pocked movie screen. What did the girl see up there? Sally sees nothing. The blank face of the universe. Some cobwebs. She wishes she had a joint with her so she could relax into this. She feels big and awkward. The girl was small. With an enviable grace. Probably Marcella saw just what was in front of her: a strong handsome man who desired her. Whom she desired. What must he have seemed to her? God-like? No, but as one given her by God. What will happen next? It’s like there’s a force out there seeking to penetrate her. Not merely this naked man, but a transcendent force. As if she were uniting with something beyond either of them. She will accept it, for it is God’s way and it is good. So what went wrong? Never know. Something profound. Because God’s in the mix. A wholeness shattered. For now, he speaks her name. Like an endearment. Marcella. He’s crazy about her. Of course he is. Sally has the urge to take her clothes off. She’s a realist at heart. But she forgot to put the hook on the job room door. What the girl sees is the man’s searching gaze, which she meets, more prepared for this probably than he is. What Sally sees is his nakedness, the urgent ferocity of his erection. She sits up abruptly, her hand between her legs. Those cloven Pentecostal tongues of fire. They descended, the Good Book says, into laps. Root and core of the problem…
In Doc Foley’s downtown corner drugstore, picking up what her mother delicately calls her disposables, Sally runs into Stacy Ryder, the young intern at the bank. Sally knows her name because Tommy has remarked approvingly on the body the name belongs to. She introduces herself and Stacy asks what she’s carrying.
“It’s called a newspaper, an ancient human artifact, extinct in these parts.” The fellow running the print shop said there were plenty, she could have it. She tucked into its pages, unseen, a few other items as well, including a print of shawled Marcella, that sports page with the team photo, the Black Hand issue, other photos. She could have taken anything. Would never be missed. If anything, she was rescuing these things from oblivion. She shows Stacy the gaudy headline. “Last of its kind.”
“I’ve heard about that. Before my time here.”
“Sort of before my time, too. I was just a clueless high school kid. Still dialing up Jesus in those days, so I was a bit scared these guys might have God’s unlisted number.”
Stacy smiles. A pretty smile, easy and friendly. She’ll go far. “Pretty crazy. The world can be.”
“You’re not religious?”
“I gave up religion and the tooth fairy about the same time.”
“One of the five percent. Did you know that eighty-five percent of all Americans, including Jews, Hindus, Muslims, Buddhists and atheists, believe in the Virgin Birth of Jesus, but less than thirty percent believe in evolution?”
“Sounds about right. But I have to tell you, Sally, when I gave up religion, I gave up thinking about it, too.”
“Smart move. Not easy in this town, though. Sort of like not thinking about water when the ship’s sinking.”
“The main difference between religion and the tooth fairy was that at least I learned something from the tooth fairy. About money, marketing, the value of raw commodities. In the tooth fairy’s world, baby teeth are an instrument of exchange. Currency. The tooth fairy gave me coin bankable in my world, took the tooth. Probably thought she was getting a bargain.
”
“Like the guys who bought this country from the Indians. The problem with teeth, I guess, is sooner or later the mine’s played out…”
She flashes that easy smile again. Some are born with it, others aren’t. “Exactly. So, ahead of that eventuality, I went exploring. Found a friend who didn’t believe in tooth fairies and she let me have one of her teeth when it fell out, in exchange for a finger puppet. I put it under the pillow, waited for several days, but no one took up the option. I figured there must be some principle in play about rightful ownership. But I didn’t believe it. I still don’t. I knew there had to be a less scrupulous tooth fairy somewhere who would make an offer. So I kept the tooth. Still have it.”
They’re both laughing. Sally says: “That’s the best kids’ story I’ve heard since Grandma Friskin told me the one about the constipated Easter bunny.”
“That shouldn’t affect egg-laying.”
“It does for kids, who start by believing rabbits lay eggs. How’s the book?”
“This? It’s pretty silly, I’m afraid. A friend at the bank loaned it to me. Listen. ‘The smile in his green eyes contained a sensuous flame. His open shirt revealed a muscular chest covered with crisp brown hair. His stance emphasized the force of his thighs and the slimness of his hips. She wondered if his broad shoulders ever tired of the burden he was carrying.’ Do you think he’s the right guy for the girl?”
“If the girl’s who I think she is,” Sally says, “it should be the perfect match. She also has crisp chest hairs.” That cracks Stacy up, but even at full throttle her laughter’s of a wistful sort, her green eyes still melancholy. “Ever read Madame Bovary?”
“No. Is it good?”
“Well, it’s about a woman who reads too many romance novels.”
“I probably just said something stupid. It’s a famous novel, right? I’m not much of a reader, I guess. Mostly I read stock reports and spreadsheets. When I read books like this, I tend to read them like financial statements, in terms of risks, margins, potential returns. Emotions as intangibles, collateral, character as intrinsic value. Winning the love game is knowing when to hazard your resources, take the plunge, make the crucial investment decision. Some win. Most lose.”
“Is that how you play it, Stacy?”
“Me? No, I’m a spendthrift gambler. After a drink or two I’ll bet the house on the next roll.”
“Well, you can always pull back and reload. The emotions aren’t finite.”
“Yes, they are,” she says sadly, and looks away.
Sally believes she’s just heard something true. Straight out of one of those ladies’ novels perhaps, but nonetheless true. But she doesn’t understand it. “I guess I don’t know much about the love game. I mostly throw snake eyes,” she says. “Or the money game either, for that matter. What little I have from allowances and carhopping and babysitting you guys have in an account there. Every month you give me a few pennies of interest, which doesn’t cover the resoling of my shoes from the walk to the bank and back. I suppose the bank is making a lot more than I am out of it.”
“Yes, it is. Come in and see me some time and we’ll see if we can’t work out something better. Come soon, though, while I’m still here.”
“Thanks. What’s in that account won’t last long enough to matter. But are you leaving town?”
She sighs. “I’m afraid I’ve already stayed too long. Oops,” she adds glancing at her watch. “I’ve stayed too long on my lunch break, too. Have to get back and save the bank, which according to my boss is the same thing as saving the world.”
“I’ll walk you there. I’m going that way.”
On this balmy mid-May early afternoon, after being buried all morning in an airless dead-paper morgue (more suffering, more love), that way was at first any which way, but now, sitting on a playground swing with her notebook on her lap, her Chronicle memorabilia on the swing next to her, Sally realizes, or discovers, or decides (who’s running this life?) that she’s on her way to the Royal Castle to visit the Dying Queen, as her mother has often asked her to do. She has not had to deal with a lot of death and has held back because she doesn’t know what to say to a dying person. Probably she’ll tell a lot of well-intentioned lies like everyone else. And how will she herself face such a moment when it’s her turn? Better not to think about it. Not on a day like this.
She doesn’t remember noticing the weather much as a kid, but this lush sexy day has reminded her of innumerable unspecific others, going all the way back to her childhood parks and playgrounds. Certain patches of sunshine. The smell and pale summery glow of a dusty sidewalk on which she was playing jacks, even the weedy grass growing in the cracks. The red dot on a spider. On a certain raggedy leaf. While she was squatting behind a bush. Because? Hide and seek? These memories, if they are memories, don’t arise by trying to think about them consciously but bubble up spontaneously out of the unconscious the way dreams do and may have just as little to do with the real world. Probably stored and cooked in the same curtained niches of the mind. She has the feeling these are the sorts of memories useful to writers. Vivid, but imprecise and totally unreliable composites of a possible past, not that literal past itself. She wanted to write down these thoughts, but there was nowhere to sit. At college she’d have found a bench somewhere where she could jot notes, have a smoke, read a page of something. This town has no benches. Then she passed this empty playground offering her a swing. What from this scene will sink into her memory bank to return, unbidden, years down the road? The coaltown cinders underfoot maybe. Remember when…when she could rock on a swing and write to the world and still believe it was something meaningful to do…
She pushes off and swings back and forth a few times, a cigarette bobbing in her lips, her notebook in her lap, but finds she doesn’t like it as she once did. She feels heavy, unbalanced. Her feet scrape the ground, even when tucked under. Didn’t used to. She remembers how the boys would wander nonchalantly in front of the swings, hoping to get a glimpse under girls’ skirts as they swung, thinking they were stealing something, not realizing that, for the girls, having their skirts fly up was fun, though you had to pretend you didn’t see the boys out there. Is nostalgia about the past or only the past self? Whatever, she feels little of it, wants to leave this place, does not expect to miss it.
Riding the Hood, a.k.a. Raggedy Red, steps out of the forest, a.k.a., the dark night of the soul, leaving mother, grandmother, wolf, and woodcutter behind. Let them duke it out with each other.
Soul. As a slapstick comedian? Soul clowns it up: pratfalls of the dead image. Soul and Body as a comic duo on the vaudeville circuit? The vaudeville circuit: a.k.a., the self.
Something Dreyer said: We possess nothing but selfhood and that is on loan, as it were; the whole point in life is to realize this self wholly in the world. (She agreed. They shook hands on this note.)
But what about the little girl who thought the forest was her friend and was devoured by wolves? The Hood will remember her and show others how to avoid her fate. Thus, she too is an abuser of innocence.
History. Memory. Nostalgia for the dead past. Its illusions, falsifications. Documentations of the dead past. Their illusions, falsifications. Themes of the day. Here, it’s Tommy’s mother’s photo albums. What she has of the life she is leaving. Her own bonneted childhood accompanied by doting parents and relatives, her transitions through carefully costumed adolescence and young womanhood, her European travels, her young family. Never doing much of anything, really—just being. Some photos gone astray from their tiny black corner pockets like memory lapses, others torn asunder. A kind of editing going on. A paring down. When Sally asks to see the wedding photos, Mrs. Cavanaugh waves her frail hand dismissively, gazes about absently, as if the album might be hiding somewhere. There are some photos of when she and Tommy were little. Sometimes his brother and sister are in them too, as well as other children and their mothers—but she and Tommy are never far apart. There’s one picture of them i
n front of a bed of flowers holding hands. Two little kids, the girl taller than the boy. She doesn’t remember that, but she feels it now as if it were happening. In another, Tommy is bawling, holding his arms up to the photographer, she off to one side with a guilty half-smile on her face. What has she done to him? Bad girl.
She wasn’t sure what she’d say when she arrived, but what came out was, “I’m so sorry you’re so sick, Mrs. Cavanaugh.” Plain and from the heart. To which Mrs. Cavanaugh replied, her voice unfamiliarly harsh and gravelly: “The worst has been losing my hair, dear. I hate it. I’d rather have died sooner than to go through that awful treatment. And what good did it do? It made me awfully sick for a while and added at best a miserable month or two. Still, we do so desperately hate to give it up, don’t we?” She sighed, looked up at Sally, looked away again. “I try not to cry, but sometimes I cry.”
Most of her mother’s friends, such as Aunt Debra and Emily Wetherwax, are like part of the family, people you joke with and call by the first name, but Mrs. Cavanaugh, though she’s not that much older than her own mother, has always been either Mrs. Cavanaugh or Tommy’s mother. And not just because of the man she’s married to and how he runs everybody’s life here, but because she has always been, though seemingly unassuming, such a person of quiet power herself—elegant, serene, president of just about everything at one time or another. It has been something of a shock to see her now in her plastic shower cap, scrunched up with her disease and melting into her bedclothes, her eyes dark and beady, spectacles on the end of her pinched nose, lips thin and unpainted, hands like tender claws. Her home care nurse, Concetta Moroni, Moron’s mother, a happy round-faced lady widowed by the mine disaster, was here when Sally arrived and she brought her a glass of ice tea, then took advantage of Sally’s visit to dash off to pick up a prescription and some fresh fruit. Tommy has told her that Concetta is turning his mother, after her crazy evangelical episode, into a Roman Catholic, and, sure enough, she crossed herself when Mrs. Moroni waved goodbye from the bedroom door.
The Brunist Day of Wrath: A Novel Page 53
