Son of the Morning

by Joyce Carol Oates

  He arrived at Port Calmar in late afternoon. It was already growing dark: a light, cold rain was falling. He had not thought of bringing an umbrella. He had misplaced his gloves, or had forgotten to stick them in his pocket; distracted by the excitement of this adventure, he had worn the trench coat he’d been wearing all fall, instead of his warmer overcoat. The wind off Lake Oriskany was rather strong and he had no curiosity about the city, so he remained in the Trailways bus terminal, sitting in a secluded corner beside an unattended shoeshine stand, reading V. W. Slosson’s The Millennial City and taking notes in the loose-leaf notebook he carried everywhere with him. From time to time he glanced up quizzically, as if he had forgotten where he was. With his small frame and his fair, boyish face and his slightly harassed manner he looked like a student preparing for an exam; he looked a decade younger than his age.

  At first it appeared that time would pass slowly in this drafty, unattractive, noisy place, then he became engrossed in his reading and glanced up to see that it was six forty-five, and then a quarter after seven; and then he realized he had forgotten about eating. The Seekers Convocation was scheduled to begin at eight o’clock. He had no idea where the Port Calmar Civic Arena was located. He got to his feet, suddenly panicked, and opened his suitcase—which was filled for the most part with books—and threw the Slosson book inside and wondered if he should store the suitcase in a locker or take it with him. It was too late to find a restaurant. “God, You see?—what a fix! It’s always the same,” he said half-cheerfully.

  He decided to get rid of the suitcase, and bought a ham-and-cheese sandwich in an automatic vending machine and ate it as he walked along. Rain was falling more steadily now. While William Japheth was painfully shy in the company of people he knew, he was sometimes rather assertive with strangers, so he did not hesitate to ask directions to the Civic Arena, though people looked at him oddly: it might have been the sandwich, it might have been his prim schoolboy eagerness, or his impatience with people who seemed not to know what he was talking about. (His accent was substantially different from theirs. Their accent was for the most part nasal and drawling and twangy, faintly ludicrous.)

  There were two civic arenas in Port Calmar, one in the old downtown, one in a northern suburb. William Japheth decided his man must be booked for the old one so he made his way there, following darkened streets, crossing one enormous but nearly empty boulevard, his head bent against the wind from the lake. The adventure was so absurd, so pointless, what did it matter that he was miserable with the cold and rain?—journeying eighteen hours in order to hear a revivalist preacher whose name was unknown, faced with the prospect of turning around and taking the eleven-thirty bus back home (for he dared not miss Tuesday morning: he had to present a seminar on the Jewish apocalypse of Baruch), and enduring another sleepless and hallucinatory eighteen hours. It wasn’t altogether clear to him why he was here, though it had pleased him enormously to irritate certain of his classmates by speaking of the evangelist Nathanael Vickery, of whom no one had heard. Nor did they seem to recall the incident that had taken place six years earlier involving Vickery: his melodramatic blinding of one eye on Good Friday, before a church of horrified onlookers and a television audience. (Still an undergraduate at Princeton at the time, William Japheth had been struck by the news-wire photographs of Vickery and the accompanying stories that, though they were brief and had the air of being confused and misleading, seemed to him fascinating: ghoulish and ridiculous and fascinating. To take Christ’s parabolic remarks literally!—and to act upon them, as if one’s life were in some vital way connected to those remarks!)

  Quite by accident he had come across an announcement of Vickery’s “return” in one of the smudgily printed tabloid publications—Gospel News, or Good Times, or the Christian Brotherhood—the Divinity School subscribed to and that were rarely read, except for amusement. Nathanael Vickery. The Seekers for Christ. Who the Seekers were, William Japheth had no idea, though he suspected he knew well enough, across a distance of many hundreds of miles, exactly what they believed and even why they believed it. The name Nathanael Vickery had sounded familiar. Had he ever listened to the man, had he seen him on television? Had he met someone who had heard him preach? It was a surprise to discover that Vickery was so young—two years younger than he, in fact—when his name was so vaguely, so teasingly familiar.

  Nathanael Vickery?

  He had fallen asleep very late one night only to wake abruptly a few minutes afterward, a jabbing pain in one eye. Ah yes: yes. His dream had provided the answer. His body—a coward’s body, eager to acknowledge pain before pain became a reality—had provided the answer. Of course he knew about Vickery, he had read about Vickery years ago, he had been shaken and amused and contemptuous of that If-thine-eye-offend-thee performance. He had thought Vickery was finished, as indeed Vickery seemed to have thought. Quite obviously the young man had gone mad. But the ways of Pentecostals are not our ways, William Japheth thought wryly, and so the evangelist has returned . . . and so I must make a pilgrimage to Port Calmar to hear him.

  The Civic Arena was an aged, soot-blackened, foursquare building only a few blocks from the waterfront district. It appeared to be the only building in sight that was still in use: directly across the street was a partly gutted warehouse, its walls torn violently away to expose stairways leading nowhere and wires that had the look of veins; down the block was a boarded-up building that had once been the Seaview Tavern: Dine & Dance.

  A number of people were approaching the arena, however. William Japheth crossed the street to join them, the collar of his coat turned up, his glasses streaming with rain. He felt unaccountably excited, even exhilarated. It must have been the effect of the hurried walk against the wind and his memory of Nathanael Vickery of six years before. And the sight of the marquee, advertising wrestling matches on Fri. & Sat. nites, and Seekers Convo Sunday at 8 P.M.

  Admission was a “suggested donation of one dollar.”

  Immediately inside the arena William Japheth saw someone familiar—a middle-aged woman and a girl of about twelve who had boarded the bus a few miles outside Port Calmar.

  Half the arena had been roped off. In the center was a raised platform covered with what appeared to be linoleum tile. A few technicians were setting up the microphone and the speaker system, and a stocky, bald man in his fifties, in a blue serge suit with a vest, was giving orders nervously. He looked, Japheth thought, like a fifth-rate minister of some sort: dechurched for drinking, probably: Vickery’s manager?

  What a dreary place! Someone had pulled a canvas tarpaulin only partway over an unsightly pile of equipment beneath the platform. The ceiling was remote, splotched, above glaring lights; the windows were protected by grills; there was an odor of chill and stagnation, the stale distress of innumerable bodies. A potbellied man with a fringe of white hair, clad improbably in a uniform, stood chatting with an elderly couple who were taking their seats in the very first row. Japheth saw that he wore a gun belt and a holster—he was armed!

  Fifteen minutes to eight. Ten minutes. The steeply banked rows of seats were not filling up quickly. Japheth cringed as he looked about, fearing he might see someone he knew, someone who knew him. But that was unlikely, wasn’t it? Music began. Organ. Someone was playing chords heavily, pompously. The notes were overloud and wheezing faintly about the edges. “Rock of Ages” played as a military tune. An organ with foot pedals, played inexpertly but with a certain degree of audacity. Someone excused himself, as he passed Japheth to sit a few seats away. A solitary individual, a man of about thirty-five, in a gabardine suit with a white shirt and no tie, and a profile that struck Japheth as demented. The man began to sing in a low, quavering voice. Let me hide myself in . . . Let the water and the . . . Two rows ahead, a group of five or six young girls filed in. Two had bleached their hair an identical shade of bone white. One wore a bright red coat with an imitation leopard-skin collar. They were shopgirls, Japheth reasoned, opening his notebook and fu
mbling for a pen, or perhaps factory workers . . . Wasn’t there a textile mill in Port Calmar? Several mills? Canning factories?

  He must take notes tonight.

  Or write a letter to Audrey—who did not understand why he’d left her this weekend.

  (They were not engaged because they didn’t believe in engagements, but they hoped to be married in a year or two; and in the meantime, since Audrey was teaching French at a girls’ private school in Quincy, Massachusetts, they had only weekends to be together.)

  A number of obese people in the audience, Japheth noted. One woman barrel-shaped, in fact shapeless, her hair remarkably pert and shiny—or was it a wig—orange-red wig—obviously not her own hair: how monstrous she was, and yet how placid, how hopeful! Staring at the door through which the evangelist would appear; mouthing the words to a too-familiar hymn. Japheth bent over his notebook, writing in a crude shorthand of his own invention. Though he was the son and grandson of scholars and certainly intended to be a scholar himself, in fact could not take seriously any other profession—for what other profession gave a man such knowledge, and hence such power?—he liked to play at being a writer at times, a poet, even a sociologist intent upon taking careful note of the obvious, for fear that no one else would care to preserve it: and so he scribbled descriptions and impressions in his notebook, hunched over in the cramped seat, his fingers working furiously: and he realized, not for the first time, that the act of writing in so alien and confusing an atmosphere was a comfort to him. And there was given me a reed like unto a rod: and the angel stood, saying, Rise, and measure the temple of God, and the altar, and them that worship therein.

  The obese woman with the orange-red wig. The man beside her, not very clean-shaven, looking like a caricaturist’s idea of a poor farmer. Jacket with sheepskin lining, a plaid shirt, no tie, cheap lightweight trousers . . . Eyes sunken in his face yet curiously alert: Japheth noted uneasily that the man appeared to be looking at him. (But how could he know William Japheth Sproul III was an outsider, a mere observer?—that he had come not to participate, not even to be a witness in the strict sense of the word, but merely to observe with a clinical objectivity?)

  “It’s filling up, isn’t it?” a woman exclaimed close beside him.

  Japheth looked up, startled.

  “Five minutes to eight and it’s filling up and looks like a real nice crowd, a real nice friendly crowd,” the woman said excitedly.

  “Yes,” Japheth said, trying to smile.

  A woman of about thirty-eight or forty. Alone. In surprisingly good clothes—a cloth coat of some high-quality material, shoes that were not scuffed and run-over but looked new and fashionable, as far as Japheth could judge such things (for his mother and her sisters, being economically well off, had made it a point to dress themselves with care and discretion); small-boned hands, the nails manicured but not painted; the hair neatly arranged, not bleached or stiff with hair spray; the accent clear enough, not nasal and drawling. She might have been a schoolteacher. Probably was a schoolteacher.

  “Is this the first time you’ve heard Nathanael Vickery?” Japheth asked shyly.

  “Oh no! Heard him in Flambrugh last spring, and before that in a real little church in White Springs where my brother-in-law’s the pastor,” she said. “I don’t belong to the Seekers. I’m still holding off, I guess, tarrying, as they say,” she said breathlessly. “I don’t know. Do you?”

  “Know—?”

  “Those people close to the front, all those people—and the ones standing in the aisle, you see?—where that boy is holding a placard—they’ve all made their decision for Christ, they’ve been baptized, they’re Seekers. Brother Nathan intervened for them. The Holy Spirit came into them and they know—it’s said you either know or you don’t, there’s no hesitation at all. I haven’t eaten since eight o’clock this morning and would have gone longer except I get so dizzy; why, coming down these steps here I felt so lightheaded for a second I was almost frightened,” she said, leaning close to Japheth so he could hear her over the organ’s noise, and possibly so that she could, with a shrewd sideways glance, see what he was writing—was he a reporter, maybe?—with his glasses and trench coat and fastidious squint he looked like someone not-usual. (He managed to shield his notebook with one arm—unobtrusively, he hoped; he had a naïve childish fear of offending strangers.) “But I haven’t had time to study the Bible like I should. I work all week, five days a week. It isn’t like I sit home, you know, and have hours with nothing to do . . . Have you come to join them tonight, do you think?”

  “Join them—?” Japheth said.

  “The Seekers. Nathan’s people. Sometimes you have a feeling that the Holy Spirit will come into you, and sometimes you are taken completely by surprise. I just don’t know,” she said, giggling nervously, fussing with one of her earrings. “I can’t sort out my feelings from what might be—oh, I don’t know—going without eating or the music here or the nice people here—And wait till you see Nathan—he’s a true man of God, no doubt about it—It’s maybe the case that the Holy Spirit has led me here this evening because just the other morning I woke up with a sore throat and I thought Oh no! not again!—because I had a terrible case of the flu last spring—and there was the Convocation tonight in my own home town and I felt so brokenhearted if I had to miss it—and—And anyway this morning I woke up feeling all well: the sore throat and the cold had gone away: and I went to church and just gave thanks and it’s maybe the case that the Holy Ghost is preparing me for something tonight, but I just don’t know.”

  A man and a woman and three children stumbled past Japheth’s legs and took their seats immediately to his right. The man was surprisingly young to be head of a family—he wore a leather jacket badly cracked about the elbows, and his straight black hair, stiffened with grease, was combed harshly back from his face. He glanced at Japheth, and Japheth at him, but their eyes did not meet. Ordinarily Japheth would have felt intimidated by such a creature—there had been one on the Trailways bus, in fact, an unsmiling young man in his late twenties, tattooed on one wrist, cruel and reptilian about the eyes: one of the unemployed, Japheth thought, one of the unemployable. (Though possibly he was a factory worker or a gas station attendant. But even these jobs were now said to be scarce.) The man’s wife was hardly more than a girl, twenty-two at the most. She wore shoes with spiked heels and pinched toes, no longer fashionable so far as Japheth knew, and sheer black stockings, and a royal blue dress that looked rather festive; her pretty face was heart-shaped, her lips darkly pink (she was one of the few women in the place who wore makeup), her voice as she scolded and chattered was bright and quick and inflectionless. On her left hand she wore a wedding band and an engagement ring with a ludicrously small diamond in an outsized setting—which her young husband was probably still paying for, Japheth supposed.

  Now they were singing “What a Friend We Have in Jesus”: a smiling woman in a white wool dress was leading them, standing at the microphone and moving her hands in wide, awkward, enthusiastic motions. The glaring ceiling lights dimmed abruptly. Japheth thought I can’t escape now and felt a flicker of panic, for perhaps it had been a mistake, he would go away exhausted and disgusted and confirmed in his contempt for people, and Audrey would quarrel with him (“If you don’t believe in Christianity why on earth are you a seminarian—why write a dissertation on something you think is wild nonsense—is it just to be stubborn?”) and cry angrily, as she sometimes did, because he sat there mute and guilty, unable to defend or even to explain himself, and he would drag himself through the day, and at ten in the evening hurry to the telephone to call her to beg forgiveness: because he did love her and could not bear her scorn. (And what was more troubling to him was the fact that he was known as Billy among his friends, and William among his professors, but when he was on his own, among strangers, he fell into the habit of calling himself William Japheth, and tonight he realized he’d been thinking of himself simply as Japheth for some time, an endear
ingly foolish name, not really his at all: an inheritance from his great-grandfather, a minister in Edinburgh many years ago. As far as Audrey knew, as far as he wished her to know, the name Japheth was never used at all, reduced to an initial on his official papers.)

  The arena was fairly crowded now. There were still empty seats at the very rear, and half the seats had been wisely roped off (for an evangelist of only moderate local notoriety could not hope to draw as many people as wrestling matches), but Japheth was surprised that so many people had bothered to come out on this dismal night. He tried to make an estimate. He’d never been good with figures—nor had simple arithmetic been one of his father’s skills—but if there were approximately twenty-five rows of seats—or were there more?—or less?—he began counting again, badly distracted by the enthusiastic singing and handclapping all about him—if there were, say, thirty rows of seats and there were four separate sections of seats and in each section approximately fifteen—twelve?—twenty?—seats—minus those that were unoccupied, of course, an average of two or three—might there be—he made a reckless stab—five hundred people here tonight? Or eight hundred? Or four hundred? But he had overlooked an entire section in the balcony, he realized. The balcony. Or was that a balcony? He turned clumsily in his seat, twisting his neck around, peering up. But he was sitting in such a position that he could not really see . . . No, he thought irritably, it isn’t a balcony: this isn’t a theater but a sports arena: it’s just part of the ceiling.

  A cheerful ruddy-cheeked man in a dark brown suit with a handkerchief showing its corner in one pocket was at the microphone now, introducing Nathan Vickery. He was, Japheth gathered, a local minister: Baptist, maybe, or Church of God, or Pentecostal. He seemed to be quite well-known. Pentecostal? But they were strong in this area, and throughout the state. (And in Japheth’s own home town of Boston they were doing exceptionally well in recent years, strange and distressing as it seemed: imagine, Pentecostals in the year 1965 in America!) This smiling gentleman might have been a small-town druggist, or an automobile salesman, or a chiropractor, but he was by his own definition a man of God, and hundreds of people seemed willing to take him at his word.