by Matt Cardin
“Everyone,” Darby announced, “this is Todd Whitman, one of my oldest and dearest friends, and a long-time regular at these get-togethers.” So treat him with the proper damned deference, his tone seemed to imply. I liked that.
I smiled and introduced myself to a man and woman who appeared to be about Darby’s and my age. The man was dark-haired and somewhat overweight, while the woman was blonde and trim. And quite attractive. I imagined Darby must have his eye on her, if indeed he hadn’t already laid a bit more on her than that. They said their names were Barbara and Jim.
Next was another stranger, a professorial-looking gentleman who rose from a plush, velvet-covered chair near the window and offered me his hand while nodding vigorously. “Walter Snyder,” he announced himself.
Last was a familiar looking man, again Darby’s and my age, who stood blinking before the fireplace. When I introduced myself by name, he seemed puzzled. “I’m Mike,” he said. “Mike Dugan.” For a minute I drew a blank. Then the memory of our long acquaintance rushed back upon me. Ah, yes, Mike. Mike Dugan. The hanger-on. I apologized and shook his hand, and laughed and tried to make a joke of it. But even though he and the others laughed with me, I knew that my long-standing opinion of him—that he wasn’t worth remembering—had just been embarrassingly revealed.
“Well,” Darby said, “now that we’re all here, let’s enjoy some refreshments.” He walked behind the bar, rummaged through several cabinets and refrigerators, and in a matter of minutes produced an astonishing array of food and drink: cheeses and breads, cold meats and fruits, coffees and juices, and of course the perennial wines and liqueurs.
“You’ve outdone yourself this time, Darby!” I exclaimed as I examined a shockingly luscious out-of-season strawberry. No matter that he took credit for preparing this repast when I knew full well that his housekeeper and cook were responsible for it. What did I care if the others thought him a more competent host than he actually was? I was here to be intellectually stimulated, not to ruin my friend’s charade.
But alas, it soon began to appear that my desired stimulation was not likely to be forthcoming, and that the charade was the entire substance of the evening. The food, yes, was excellent. I drank my wine and nibbled my fruit and waited for Darby to begin the expected conversation in his usual masterfully underplayed way. But on this particular evening he seemed less interested in playing the role of Socrates than that of socialite. He laughed and joked with Barbara and Jim about some matter known only to the three of them. By eavesdropping, I gathered in a roundabout way that some relative of theirs had been friends with an uncle of Darby’s whom I had never heard of.
When this conversation grew boring to me in approximately thirty seconds, I crossed the room and tried to engage Mr. Snyder in a discussion of anything interesting. He had returned to his velvet-covered chair by the window and was eating a bit of chicken in silence. I asked him what line of work he was involved in and was disappointed to learn that he was not a professor but a librarian. Hoping at least to enjoy a discussion of good books, I mentioned several authors and titles chosen deliberately to impress him. But even though the man was courteous and pleasant almost to the point of artificiality, I soon realized that his close contact with books did not entail a healthy acquaintance with their actual contents. Apparently, his idea of good reading was to spend an evening grappling with the most recent issue of Reader’s Digest. I let him know in no uncertain terms what I thought of that particular rag, and the conversation was effectively ended.
As a last resort I considered striking up a conversation with Mike. But when I looked at him standing in front of the fireplace, gazing vacantly into the flames and swirling a half-empty glass of juice in his hand, I recalled far too many past attempts at extricating myself from gallingly inconsequential and interminable chit-chat with him. Better to risk a discussion of Reader’s Digest with the mousy Mr. Snyder than one of Mike’s ephemeral excuses for a dialogue. And yet I still couldn’t stomach the thought of such a wretched exchange.
Feeling blocked at every turn, I glanced past Mike to the bar and saw Darby still bantering with his wholesome new friends. When I heard the grandfather clock in the corner strike eight o’clock, I began to conspire how I might worm my way out of the situation and beat a hasty retreat. The jumble of ideas with which I had stocked my mind the night before was going stale with every passing moment. I began to feel sick at my stomach, and another headache seemed imminent.
But then Darby raised his voice and looked my direction, and I realized he meant for me to hear what he was saying.
“Why yes, I am interested in such matters. And so is my friend Todd.”
The hint wasn’t lost on me. “And what might that be?” I called, striding rapidly across the room.
“Barbara was just telling me about the church she and Jim attend,” Darby said. He turned to her and asked in his sweetest tone, “Now, what did you call it, dear?”
“The Temple of Jehovah,” she replied, turning to look at me with big brown eyes. I couldn’t help wondering what Darby might have said to her about me while I wasn’t listening. Good things, I hoped.
“Todd is a freelance writer,” Darby said as he refilled my glass with red wine. “He’s been published in some fairly well-known magazines. Where did you finally sell that piece on cats, Todd?”
My jaw tightened as I tried to speak in a voice calculated to reach only the three people in front of me. “Reader’s Digest.”
“A marvelous little story!” Darby exclaimed. “I don’t remember exactly what it was about. Something about cats. But that’s not why I thought Todd would be interested in your religious faith. You see,” he continued, stepping out from behind the bar to rest his hand on my shoulder, “Todd here is researching a book he plans to write on fringe religious cults in the United States, and I just know he would be fascinated to hear what you have to say about your own unique brand of Christianity.”
I stared helplessly at these two strangers and wondered how Darby could have managed to insult all three of us so thoroughly in just one stroke. Jim looked edgewise at Barbara and then back at me, while she simply stared at me with an expression of open suspicion. Darby walked behind the bar and poured himself another drink. I could tell he was immensely pleased with himself.
“Well,” I began, and my voice was so gravelly that I had to stop and clear my throat twice. “Yes, I suppose I would indeed be interested to hear about your faith. If you feel like talking about it, that is.”
“What kind of book are you writing?” Barbara asked. Her eyes were hard as stones.
“Oh, it’s nothing very special.” I hemmed a bit as I tried to formulate a response. What could I possibly say about my long-planned, much-bragged-about, never-written book? “I guess it’s just a layman’s look at the new sects cropping up outside the religious mainstream in this country.” I glared at Darby to emphasize the deliberately polite phrasing I had used, and he grinned back at me.
It was obvious that my careful description had not softened Barbara a bit. “Our church,” she said with more than a hint of haughtiness, “is not something that just ‘cropped up,’ Mr. Whitman. We have a history that stretches back over two thousand years.”
In spite of myself, I felt a tug of familiar annoyance at her all-too-trite appeal to a buried historical validation. It was something that I simply couldn’t let pass unchallenged. “Yes,” I said, “I’m sure that’s true in some form or other. But virtually all splinter groups claim a long history, as if they are the pure form of the parent religion. Surely you can point to a date, a founder, a place where the Temple of Jehovah got its name?”
Before she could answer, Darby clapped his hands together. The sound shot through the stuffy air of the great room like the report of a pistol, and I nearly choked on my drink.
“If we’re actually going to talk about this,” he said, “let’s move out by the fire where we can relax and the others can join in.” With that, he picked up a glas
s in each hand—one filled with cranberry juice and the other with red wine—and delivered them to Mike and Mr. Snyder, respectively. Barbara and Jim and I moved out by the fireplace while Darby returned to the bar for his own drink. Soon we were all seated in various expensive chairs, except for Mike, who perched on the hearth, and Darby, who stood directly in front of the blaze like a master of ceremonies.
“You were saying?” he asked me.
I cleared my throat again. “I was just asking Barbara about the immediate origins of their church.” I felt uncomfortably histrionic in my mannerisms and expressions, and I had the rotten suspicion that Darby had planned this scene from the beginning. I cursed him silently as I drained my glass. The last mouthful tasted so sour it set my teeth on edge.
“The ‘immediate origins’ are noble,” Barbara said. Jim sat mutely beside her, and I noticed for the first time that they were both drinking water. “In fact, Darby knows something about them. Or at least he should.” She looked to Darby for confirmation, and he nodded, still smiling.
“I know a bit about it,” he said, “but only a trifling amount. My uncle never really explained anything in detail. I’d love to hear your own account.”
“My knowledge is only second-hand,” she said, turning back to the rest of us. “Grandfather died before he could tell us the story himself. He was a great man, a world traveler, a preacher: a man of God. He loved to see people come to a saving knowledge of the truth. Once when he was in the Holy Land, he met someone who told him things, certain forgotten stories from Christianity’s past. Grandfather thought and prayed about these things, and he received a revelation from Jehovah about the church. He had a new insight into the Bible, and he realized that the true church had almost been lost over the long years since our Savior ascended to His Father in heaven. When Grandfather returned to America in 1948, he founded the very first Temple of Jehovah in Fillmore.”
I knew of Fillmore, of course. It was a nonentity of a little town situated just thirty miles east of Terence. But how had I never heard of the Temple of Jehovah—a cult so geographically near and tantalizingly bizarre?
“Who was the mysterious Middle Eastern man, the one who spoke to your grandfather?” This unexpected question came unexpectedly from Mr. Snyder, who was listening to everything from the recesses of his great chair and watching us all with bloodshot eyes. I suspected his wine was going right to his head. He couldn’t have had more than a couple of glasses, but I would have bet money he was more thoroughly inebriated than he had been in many a year.
“I’m not sure of that,” Barbara said, smiling at him. “Grandfather never even mentioned his name. He was a member of some old church, an ancient Christian group located in Jerusalem. Or was it somewhere in Egypt?” She frowned slightly as her mind worked to dredge up the long-buried memory. “I really don’t know. Isn’t that odd?” She turned to Jim, but he shrugged and offered no help.
“Actually, the fabled theological interloper was from Cairo. Old Cairo. He was a member of an ancient sub-cult within the Coptic church that believed itself to be the inheritor of the one true Christian faith.” It took me a moment to realize these words were issuing from the mouth of my friend Darby. I stared at him dumbly, thunderstruck, but my own amazement must have been minuscule next to Barbara’s.
“How do you know that?” she gasped. Darby offered her another charmer of a smile, and a look of comprehension crossed her face. “Your uncle?”
“Yes, my dear. My uncle’s acquaintance extended not only to your grandfather, but to his Egyptian friend as well. In fact, my uncle was even present for the famous conversation that eventually proved to be the genesis of your church.”
Barbara’s eyes were all but glowing with excitement, but I simply couldn’t keep out of the conversation at that point.
“Darby,” I said, butting in as Barbara was already opening her mouth to speak, “what exactly did your uncle do in the Middle East? If memory serves, you were always vague about that.”
He nodded. “A fair question. He was involved in the oil trade. He made our family fortune.”
This answered a long-standing question for me. When I had first realized in college that Darby came from a fabulously rich family, I had asked him where the money came from, and he had answered simply, “Business.” Another probe or two had shown that no explanation was forthcoming, so I had dropped it. Strange that he would choose this particular night, all these years later, to reveal the source of his family’s wealth.
Barbara could contain herself no longer. “What was his name? What did he tell Grandfather? How did they meet?” She nearly tripped over her tongue in a desperate burst of enthusiasm.
“His name,” Darby said, “was Anwar. But before I elaborate on the famous conversation, why don’t you explain your church’s beliefs more fully to Todd and my other guests? I have the feeling this would be of great interest to them.” He fixed me with his eyes and then walked over to the bar for another drink. I recalled that he had always been able to put away alcohol like it was water. As for me, I was really beginning to feel my wine, and I knew that I would soon have to excuse myself for a visit to the restroom.
“We believe the true message of Christ has been distorted over the centuries,” Barbara said. She was still speaking rapidly, still charged with excitement from Darby’s revelation. “He never meant to start a religion that would leave behind his Jewish heritage. The church we see today is more pagan than Christian. It has forgotten the true nature of God. In the Temple of Jehovah, we recognize this truth and make a point of living up to the standard Jesus set when he said, ‘I came not to destroy the law, but to fulfill it.’”
I asked her, “And how precisely do you do that?” This part of her speech was wearisome. In fact, her whole routine was as old as Christendom itself, with all its long centuries of crackpot prophets and reformers ‘rediscovering’ the true faith.
“We call God by His true name, for one thing,” she said, flaring at me. “When God told Moses His name was ‘I Am That I Am,’ this revealed His true nature. The God of the Jews is our God as well, and we should address Him by the name He gave.”
“Well,” I said, “I’m afraid you’ve bought into a long-standing misconception. The ancient Jewish name for the deity is written Y–H–W–H in the Hebrew scriptures. There are no vowels in written Hebrew, just consonants. And since the Jews believed ‘the Name’ was so sacred that it could only be uttered by their priests, and then only once a year on a high holy day, the exact pronunciation has been lost to the ages.”
“The name is Jehovah,” Barbara asserted with confidence. “That’s what Grandfather learned from the Egyptian man. From Anwar.”
“Most scholars think it’s probably pronounced ‘Yahweh,’” I continued, “but nobody’s sure. The word ‘Jehovah’ is artificial, the result of arbitrarily interpolating the vowels from another Hebrew word—‘Adonai,’ meaning Lord—into the tetragrammaton.”
“The what?” Mike asked. I had almost forgotten him. He was sitting on the hearth to the side of Darby, looking bored and sleepy.
“The tetragrammaton,” I repeated. “That’s the technical term for the four-letter Hebrew name for God.” I smiled inwardly. This was turning out to be more pleasant than I had expected.
Barbara was staring at me with an expression of intense dislike. A pity. But she was married anyway.
“You’ll have to forgive Todd.” Suddenly there was Darby, riding gallantly to the rescue. “He really doesn’t mean to insult you. He’s just passionate about certain matters when he knows a little bit about them. And believe me, he knows a little bit about a lot.” He looked at me and smiled, and I winced at what I knew was coming.
“The ‘Whitman Sampler,’ I used to call him.” He said it with obvious relish. There was a ripple of laughter across the room, and I felt my face flush. Damn him, anyway.
Somehow the conversation stalled at that point, and everyone returned to the small talk that had so marred the ea
rly evening. Darby asked Mike if he would “be a chum” and add more wood to the fire, which Mike cheerfully did. I figured he was probably thrilled to have a task on his own level. The logs were old and dry, with rough pits and holes marring their surfaces, and as I watched him pitch them into the flames, I wondered idly what might have happened to cause this rather grotesque appearance.
Mr. Snyder spoke up and began describing some upcoming event at the Terence public library, and I took the opportunity to excuse myself. Down the hall, first door to the right, yes, Darby, I remember. When I flipped the light switch, one of the bulbs above the vanity flashed, gave a delicate pop! and went dark. As I relieved myself in the remaining half-light, I examined the room and found that nothing had changed. Same gold-trimmed, pearl-handled faucet controls. Same decorative soap dishes, same candlesticks, same expensive thick towels. I almost had the feeling that I was urinating in the middle of a museum gallery.
When I returned to the great room, Barbara, Jim, and Darby were all promising to attend the upcoming library event, whatever it was. Barbara, I noticed, deliberately avoided looking at me as I retook my seat. This at least allowed me the luxury of looking more closely at her rather full breasts—as they appeared beneath her tight pink sweater—but, other than that, I had no desire to stay any longer. For me, the party was over.
I tilted my head back and stretched my arms and shoulders. The firelight threw writhing shadows up the walls and into the high recesses of the vaulted ceiling. Darkness licked hungrily at the flickers of golden-brown luminance on the taupe paneling. As I watched, the darkness seemed to gain ground. Hadn’t Mike just added more wood to the fire?
I knew I had had too much to drink. It was high time to head home, before I had to stay the night. But then, unexpectedly, Barbara and Jim were rising from their chairs and bidding everyone goodnight. Hadn’t Barbara wanted to hear more about her grandfather’s famous conversation with the Egyptian? I rose unsteadily and bade them farewell. They barely acknowledged me. Darby saw them out while Mike, Mr. Snyder, and I stared at each other with nothing to say. I dropped heavily into my chair and strove to clear my mind of the moist fog that was rapidly filling it.
