(If this is your first visit here, this is the fourth chapter of a novel. You might want to start by reading the Prologue, Chapter 1: The Birthday Party, Chapter 2: Youth, and Chapter 3: The Labyrinth.)
There was no one to meet me at the airport when, after nine years traveling, I arrived at the train station in my hometown.
"Oh, it was tonight that you were arriving?" said my mother over the phone. "I must have gotten mixed up about the date, dear-- I was expecting you tomorrow...": And then, "I'm sorry, but would you mind terribly taking a cab, honey? I'm entertaining tonight."
I was a little crestfallen. Had I expected the fatted calf? Well, maybe, but anyway I would have thought that my mother would think the return of her only son was an occasion worth interrupting her evening for.
Something occurred on the way home that hardly seemed important at the time, but that has seemed more important ever since. I told the cab driver to stop by campus for a moment. He pulled over at Hightower Circle, where there was a view of the library, the quad, the dorms. It was still summer, and campus was dead except for a prof out for a walk. There were some new buildings. But the ivy still clung to Mason Hall, a flood of memories came back to me: friends, conversations, amours, echoes of an old restlessness that reverberated in a hollow place in the heart that it had left behind. It was only a moment. But it was the first throb of a feeling that has recurred since, more and more often with the years. It was a feeling like autumn, of things fading, coming to an end. I've come to notice every year, in the late summer, that there will be a certain day, a certain moment that seems to be the first day of autumn, it may even still be hot but there is something in the wind that anticipates the changing of the leaves, the harvest, the dwindling of the days, the frost. And it may be rich and beautiful, that time of autumn, of things being completed, coming to fruition, ending, the leaves may be gorgeous colors and the harvest crops delicious, but there is a sadness in it all the same. So it was, looking at campus that day, and now all of life is painted in that hue.
My mother opened the door upon a scene of unexpected merriment. A dozen people, mostly of my mother's generation but one or two younger people as well, were elegantly distributed over the floors and chairs of a living room I barely recognized, tastefully furnished, the tables decorated with appetizers and refreshments and wines. My mother gave me a cordial embrace, then I was greeted by the guests in succession, each guest accompanying the introduction with a few words to dispel the formality, but keeping it brief, to give the other guests their turn.
I sensed that that was just the way my mother wanted it. Somehow, she was choreographing the whole gathering by invisible signals. Her guests obeyed her out of admiration for their hostess and to stay in favor with her.
In an instant I saw that a word she had often put in her letters-- entertaining-- had far more meaning than I had understood. Entertaining was an art, a talent she had discovered late in life, after the four winds had blown away her restless sons. In her letters, she had written of "entertaining" casually enough. But that casualness was an artistic guise. Entertaining had become the thing she lived for. I felt happy and sad at the realization. I was happy in her happiness, and at the same time I realized, with shame, that for all those years I had treasured a belief, not fully recognized until now that it was disappointed, that there was one person in the world, my mother, to whom I was everything. That belief had been a burden. It had made me feel guilty for rambling and carousing, for rarely writing and never visiting. I had even, sometimes, resented her for the bond of obligation to her. But in spite of that, and quite unbeknownst to myself, I realized now that had been, at least in part, living my life for her eyes, and she had given it meaning. Now, watching her play hostess to the select company of charming guests, I realized that she didn't need me. She had risen above the menfolk who had worried and broken her heart for thirty years. She had found new life. She had not rejected us, or turned her back on us. But she had learned not to need us. Here I was, the returned son, and welcome home, to be sure. But I was simultaneously welcome and superfluous. I was like the tasteful furnishings of the room, like the refreshments and the wines: something to entertain her guests with.
I recognized the faces of most of the guests. They were neighbors, or colleagues, or friends from church. In my childhood, they had been the faceless "grown-ups" by whom the clockwork of the world runs, and who are defined by their social functions: the druggist; the math teacher; the woman who sells tomatoes at the county fair; the doctor's wife; the street sweeper; the church organist. But I could see now that my mother knew how to draw out their stories and delight in their personalities, to recognize the merit in them and to cultivate it. Mr. Hammond, the church organist, was the sweet man who would express tender sympathy for the victims and losers in any story. Mrs. McBride, the principal's widow, had the ribaldry and cynicism to say what others didn't dare, but delighted to hear and to laugh at. I noticed, too, that most of the people in the room had had hard lives. There was divorce, unemployment, poor health, even scandal and bankruptcy in the lives of those guests, but in that room, failure was forgotten. She turned them all into lords and ladies.
The guests dispersed around 10 pm. After that, my mother doted on me as much as I could have wished. She made me my favorite crepes and punch and plied me with so many questions that even I would have been embarrassed by how much I talked about myself if she hadn't been so brimming over with joy, and gotten me drunk with it. We never seemed to stop talking, and finally dragged ourselves to bed only at 2am, after what must have been a thousand embraces and a million laughs. It was good to be home again. But I did wonder as I fell asleep that night: if my mother was doing as well for herself as she seemed to be, why had she made such warm entreaties for me to come home? I would discover that soon enough.
The next day was my first day working with Mr. Card at the real estate agency. Mr. Card and I were both early risers, so we met up at 7:30am, before the secretaries arrived, and he gave me access to the files, so that I could acquaint myself with the agency's operations and financial position before we discussed the legal details of the partnership. We drew up an outline of the contract over lunch, and visited a lawyer and an accountant in the afternoon. I suggested a two-week trial period before we moved forward with the deal, to put him at ease.
At 4pm, we closed the office early to celebrate the new partnership and introduce me to the staff. Mr. Card provided the champagne. I was introduced to two young real estate agents, to a widow who owned a lot of rental properties, to the janitor of the building who came for the champagne, and to... Eileen.
Now "Eileen" was a familiar name to me. For the past two years, my mother's letters had been full of her: Eileen and I talked about this or that, Eileen and I went her or there, Eileen thinks such-and-such, etc. From explanatory notes that accompanied Eileen's name at first, then disappeared later, I knew that Eileen was a friend from work, but no biography of this suddenly-ubiquitous personage had ever been offered. I had pictured her as a woman a little younger than my mother, a veteran of long years of childrearing but now an empty-nester or with teenage children, probably with a husband who was absentee for some reason-- perhaps a mere drunk, like my father, perhaps some sadder reason like death or separation. I was just glad my mother had found such a good friend.
So you can imagine my surprise when, standing next to a table with grapes and crackers and champagne, lit from behind by the afternoon sunlight through the windows, my mother presented to me a tall, pale, pretty woman in her late 20s, with long brown hair, and said, "Michael, this is Eileen; Eileen, Michael..."
I looked at her with surprise, which she did not notice, and curiosity, which she seemed at once to desire and to shrink from. She looked at me with an emotion that was nothing less than adulation, and at the same time with an intensity and eagerness that amounted to terror...
And in a flash I understood everything. These two women had fallen in love with each other and plotted to marry me off to Eileen so that they could be mother- and daughter-in-law. It all made sense. There was Eileen, just old enough to begin to worry: Where is love? Weren't the young men supposed to fall in love with me and marry me at some point? What am I doing wrong? Do I dress right? Am I pretty enough? My friends have married, why not me? Is it getting too late? And in the back of the mind: Will I be an old maid? And I could imagine how my mother must have adored the girl, and thought: What a shame that such beauty (the young always look especially beautiful to the old) should go to waste! And how can the young men have been such fools as not to court her? And my mother longed to have a fine young man she could give to her friend to fulfill her heart's desire. And Eileen, for her part, heard my mother's sad story, her broken family, losing the men she loved, and began to dream how she, she, Eileen, could bring her friend's son home to stay, how she could give the son back to the mother by being the most loving of wives to him, and erase all those years of heartache. Probably, by now, my mother had completely forgotten that her scheme served her maternal instinct to get her son to settle down and make grandchildren. She was conscious only of her zeal for the happiness of her young friend. And Eileen, no doubt, had forgotten what part her own yearning for a husband and fears of being an old maid had played in shaping her dreams. She thought she was only trying to be of service to my mother. Secretly hoping to add the bonds of family to the affections of friendship, the two conspirators had loved each other more ardently than ever, and the energies of their love were channeled into their project. And the irony was that I doubted they had ever discussed any of this in so many words, and maybe didn't even know that the other knew it, and neither of them had any idea that I could look into their faces and read it all as plainly as the pages of a book.
What kind of a sucker do they take me for? I thought indignantly. I resolved that the two plotters would never have their way with me.
But I made lively conversation with Eileen for an hour, calculating that it would allow me plausibly to change the subject if my mother trying to bring up the issue later. And she did have a pretty face.
It was later that evening that I paid a visit to Lionel English. I pulled up to 55 Oak Street at dusk. I stopped for a moment to admire the house that Lionel built. Its turrets and gables loomed against the sky. Darkness looked down from the third-floor windows.
Along the sidewalk that led up to the front door from the street were newly planted trees, thin as bones and almost naked of leaves. It was clear what the trees were intended for. They were supposed to loom over the house with stately majesty, to dapple the grass with light and shadow, to cast a hush of solemnity, of dignity and awe-- something like what they do now, forty years later, if that's not a real estate agent talking. But at the time, this grand appointed purpose only made them look more pathetic, like children who have inherited great estates and are burdened with robes and crowns. I was impressed by the house Lionel built and its aura of success. But I felt sorry for those trees.
When the door opened, I bellowed out "Lenny!" and leaned in to give him a hug.
"Lionel," he corrected me. Then, catching himself, he murmured an unintelligible apology, something like "That's what they call me now," and made a phony self-deprecating grin. But I knew then that the old nickname made him uncomfortable. He offered me his hand. I shook it.
There was something that, in hindsight, seems as if I recognized the first moment I saw him in the doorway. Probably I actually realized it gradually in the course of the evening, and the moment in the doorway was only the first intimation of it, yet memory records the realization as something sudden. What I noticed was that Lionel's humility was gone. And I also understood that his humility had never been an essential feature of his character, as I had imagined. It had been a function of his station in life. He had had the humility of a lover, kneeling at the feet of his beloved; the humility of the student, living under the judgment of his professors and in fear of the exam; the humility of the son and the apprentice, fearing whether he could fill his father's shoes. Now that he was no lover, but a husband, now that he had claimed his birthright and succeeded in business, his old humility was obsolete, and with its passing, our friendship was destroyed, by no means permanently, but until it could be established on some other basis. I needed to learn to relate to this new, self-confident "Lionel." That was my task for the evening.
Mary was still cooking dinner, so we waited in the hall. Then David ran down the stairs. David was eight years old, and quite the miniature of his father. He walked up to me boldly, put out his hand, smiled brightly and said, "How do you do, Mr. Brewer?" We all sat on the couches, Lionel and I talked about business, and David, a little waist-high replica of his father, listened intently. He seemed to want desperately to understand, refusing to be discouraged. What an adorable boy!
A question filled my mind that was so obvious I wondered that I had never thought of it before. Why only one? The dark rooms upstairs deepened the mystery. What did they want so much space for if not for more children? Maybe they were planning on more. But Lionel was just telling me that they had been living in the house for three years. What were they waiting for?
Mary set the table and we sat down to eat roast chicken, green beans, and mashed potatoes, with ice cream for dessert. Conversation didn't come easy. College reminiscences didn't get us as far as I thought, so I started telling stories of the road. I saw David's eyes watch me with admiration as I told my tales of adventure. The meal went by fast. I praised Mary for the food, not because it was especially good, but because she had been cooking while Lionel and I had talked. That was different from our egalitarian college days and made me feel the need to be gracious. We went to the living room and watched TV for a while without talking, and then Mary said it was David's bedtime and left the room. Lionel and I looked at each other.
"What do you say to a game of chess out on the balcony?" asked Lionel.
"Just like old times!" I agreed with gusto.
Lionel still had the same old chessboard I had beaten him on so many times in college. We went out to the balcony, looking out over the lawn and the same sad, scrawny, naked trees. It was a warm, summer night. Chess finally started to bring back some of the old ease, and I started telling a few stories from college days... but that was because I was cocky, and thought it would be an easy win. I made a bunch of early mistakes and was surprised to find Lionel closing in on me with a well-woven trap of pawns, a knight, two bishops and a rook that didn't look so formidable at first, yet which I could never quite break through. I challenged him to best of three, and this time I stopped talking and concentrated. I'd never in my life played such a well-fought match. The opening left us well balanced, and in the mid-game we were counting strong and weak squares and entertaining a hundred possibilities for each move we made. Somewhere in the mid-game Lionel picked up some subtle positional advantages, and I gradually realized that all my strengths were eroding. Where were the errors I used to be able to count on? Several times I thought, if only he does that, I'm all right, but he never did it. My hope gradually faded, my brain was spent, finally I was just awaiting the executioner.
"Checkmate," said Lionel.
I knocked over my king. "Yup... Wow... You're better than you used to be."
"I think harder than I used to. I'm more careful. I don't let my desires get the better of me. I think it's habits of minds I picked up as a businessman."
We were silent for a while. The neighborhood was asleep. Behind the row of houses opposite was the orange glow of a few streetlamps. Overhead, a full moon shone halfway up the sky. The wind rustled in the leaves.
"Mike, can I ask you something?" said Lionel.
"Sure, go ahead."
He waited for a while and looked at me.
"Do you believe in God?"
"Wow..." I murmured in surprise. I waited and thought about it for a long time. And then I took the theist position. I wonder if I'd do that now. Of course I don't remember exactly what I said after all these years. I do remember that it seemed at the time like I spoke very well. Of course, I was saying partly what I thought would please Lionel. Not that I wasn't sincere. I meant what I said. But Lionel had always been the churchgoer among the two of us. I thought the reason he asked the question was because he was afraid that his friend was an unbeliever. I thought he wanted to save my soul. I didn't want to toe any line, didn't want to affirm doctrines I wasn't sure I understood. I had never been one to believe something just because I was told to. But I also wanted to make him think that I was all right, to reassure him as best I could. I won't be able to repeat what I said after all these years, I've forgotten some of it I'm sure, and I'll get it all mixed up with some stuff I thought later. But I think what I said is something like this:
"Do I believe in God? Well, you know me, I've never been a praying man or much of a churchgoer. But that doesn't mean I disbelieve in anything. I mean, it doesn't mean I disbelieve in what people pray to or what churches teach about. I guess if so many people believe in it, that's one reason to believe there's something in it. It doesn't seem likely that so many people are wrong. And there's some people in particular that I don't think are likely to be wrong about it. There was one pastor I knew down in Oklahoma, Reverend Coleman. It was amazing the way he knew not just the Bible but it seemed like just about every book I'd ever heard of. He believed in God, completely. So that's one reason I believe, I guess. I figure if a guy as smart as that believes in God, he's probably right.
"And then there's holiness. Reverend Coleman knew how to fill that church with the spirit. He would give such stirring sermons, he could bring the old women to tears every time. I felt exalted listening to him. I felt like he was speaking a language I'd never learned, yet that was more natural to me than my native tongue. It wasn't just his sermons, it was the hymns and the people and the love and the stained-glass windows and everything. I could walk out of that church and the sun would seem brighter, and every tree and every blade of grass was worth more than it had been before. I call that holiness. They say that holiness is about God. I don't know, myself. Maybe holiness could bear witness to different things. But it's about something. Something different than just the daily grind, something from beyond all that, with the power to transfigure it, to lift it up into itself. That's hard to explain, and hard to understand. And I don't understand it very much. But it exists, and it bears witness to something. And again, people who are holier than me say that what it bears witness to is God. I don't want to deny that.
"And then there's another reason that's totally different... A few years back I was driving westward through Tennessee. I had just left a small town where there was a girl I was in love with, and I was sad at first, but soon I felt happy again, because I loved the road in those days. After kicking up dust for a few hours and watching the fields and forest roll by, I was feeling good. And then, when night fell, I lay out in the back of my truck to sleep under the stars. And there I was, looking up at all the sparkling stars and the Milky Way, so many of them, like jewels, and... and I was all alone, but I wasn't alone. There was Someone there with me, some Presence...
"I remember another time. Some friends and I had rented an apartment by the seashore for the weekend, and more people came than we planned and we ran out of beds, so I slept on the balcony. There were palm trees, and the air was warm, and all night I heard the surf crashing on the beach, and a restless wind stirred the branches of the palms. That wind. It whispered in my ears and stole into my dreams, and when I woke up in the morning I lay there for a long time listening to it as it evoked those wild, restless, half-remembered dreams... That wind was no mere movement in the air. There was a spirit in it, a Presence. Something was at play, with a mirth so enormously, wildly, terribly free that it had to keep its voice to a whisper, lest it shatter a world too weak and shadowy to bear it... But with my ears and my half-remembered dreams I could feel that mirth, I felt myself drawn into it, and I wanted to dance with the Wind. I felt this feeling of infinite regret that I couldn't follow it. Yet at the same time I felt that merely to be present while that Spirit was at play was a greater honor than all the kings and conquerors of the earth had ever enjoyed.
"Was it God? Here's where I get confused. Looking at the stars, or listening to the wind in the palms, I felt a presence, but whose presence? Maybe it's what people call God. And yet what does this God have to do with the God the churches talk about, the one who revealed the Ten Commandments, who took human form and was born in a manger and died on a cross? What does a church service have to do with a feeling I usually get when I'm out in the midst of Nature? And so I guess I don't understand God. Anyway, I guess I don't think about God very often. But if you ask me, do I believe in God, I'd say yes-- but why, what do you think?"
I blurted out the last question because of a growing awareness of something strange in Lionel's face. The whole time I had been talking, I had been watching his face for signs of approval. I had hoped he would be worried at first, then satisfied. I had feared that he would look judgmentally on a theism that might sound a bit too vague and heterodox for a man of the church to be comfortable. At first, I interpreted his face to show what I had expected to see there, but I felt from the beginning that that interpretation didn't fit. What I saw was, first, a heightened, conspiratorial interest, then, quite quickly, a look of boredom and inattention, a superciliousness, almost a contempt, which he scarcely bothered to conceal. This was so unexpected that for a long time I doubted my own eyes. Finally, the irritation of that unreadable face had forced me to demand an answer to the riddle.
As soon as I had asked the question I wished I could have taken it back because I was terrified of his impending answer. What he was going to say seemed, contrary to nature, to cast echoes before it had been said. The words that were about to be spoken seemed both inevitable and impossible. My mind cast about for some means to prevent their being uttered and found none, yet at the same time it seemed as if it was against the nature of things for those words to be spoken, just as a man about to be hanged finds it inconceivable that now he lives, and ten minutes from now he will live no longer. Yet the words came, nonetheless.
"There is no God."
As strange as it may sound, that was the most shocking moment of my life. In a moment the world lost the mystery that had given it life. The musical rustling of the wind in the leaves became a dry rattle. The fat, jolly moon became a pale disk. A crazy fear dashed through my head that it was merely taped to a wallpaper sky and might fall and smash to smithereens at any moment. By some confusion of the mind, Lionel's abolition of God also dispelled my belief that there were living, breathing people in the houses around us. They became tombs. Lionel and I were alone, anomalously alive in a dead universe, irrelevant and meaningless. And yet why should it have affected me that way? It's not as if I hadn't met atheists before. I had met young disputatious types who found that atheism was strong ground from which to win arguments. I had met scientists who regarded materialism and atheism as a professional obligation. I had met Marxists who fulminated against the Church as an ally of oppression and for whom God was just another of its lies. I had met cynics who amused themselves by rejecting everything lofty, from patriotism to poetry to God. I had met Hollywood starlets for whom sex appeal was the pinnacle of civilization, and a Yahweh who frowned on fornication was a barbarous bogey, and the obvious reason for the widespread belief in this grim goblin of a God was that the botched and bungled masses who lacked sex appeal wanted a moralistic mask for their envy of those who had it. I hadn't held atheism against anyone. If anything, I had admired a lot of atheists for their independence of mind, and regarded them as peculiarly honest and interesting. Yet at that moment it seemed that none of the atheists I had met had been serious. As if they had just been playing games with themselves. But Lionel was not.
Whether there was a long silence after that, or whether Lionel kept speaking, I can't remember. It was forty years ago, of course... but then, I have a feeling I could not have remembered what happened two days later much better than I can remember it now. I have a vague sense that he might have started talking and I wasn't listening at first, and also that he didn't seem to be talking to me, but had simply become indifferent to whether the monologue of his own thoughts vocalized itself. I had the sense of eavesdropping on a conversation with himself which had been going round and round in tedious circles for years, a prisoner in the cold grey cell of his mind. And yet I managed to distill a coherent narrative from it, or at least memory distills one. There was something about his pre-atheist youth: "... I took things on faith. My beliefs were not my own. I was a parrot..." Then there was a moment of epiphany: "... It dawned on me that all of it was just play-acting and semantics, that no one really meant anything by it, and the only difference was between those who were confused and kept looking for meaning in the old conventional phrases and those who had outgrown that..." Part of his evidence was that no one seemed to really live what religion taught: "... Think about it. If people really believed that the soul lives forever and that God gives infinite rewards in heaven to those who believe in him, if people really believed that faith could move mountains, would they live the way they do? A few people do that and we think they're crazy. But most of us know better..."
He used a little of what is sometimes called the God-in-the-gaps argument. "... There's no need for God anymore. There used to be a lot that we didn't know, and instead of saying we didn't know it we found it more satisfying to say 'God does that.' The more we know, the less God does. God was also a tool to frighten ignorant people into obeying the laws, back when it was more difficult to enforce them by the power of the state. So priests and rulers had to encourage confusion among the people, to give the word we used to express our ignorance about the forces of nature a personality, and a scary one. Maybe we still need God for that purpose, at least as far as the lower classes are concerned, although we can enforce the laws much better now. But we don't need to dress up our ignorance in theology anymore. Everything makes sense. The whole order of things fits together, and we see how it fits together..."
Sometimes he got indignant. "... I don't know how they can keep talking about God. We still talk about Santa Claus and Jack and the Beanstalk. But only to children. I'm sure all these pastors and priests know that they're just making stuff up, or repeating stuff somebody else made up. They make a decent living at it. They figure they're providing a public service, a social gathering, some nice music, some stories, some public speaking. Maybe they are in a way. But how can they go on telling these stories to grown-ups? Doesn't the act get old? A clown sometimes takes off the suit and the rubber nose and the face paint and dresses normally and doesn't tell jokes. Don't those guys ever want to take off the mask and tell the truth? Do they do it among themselves, I wonder?"
There were even some confused moments where his words hinted at some hoped-for heroic age of atheism. "Think what we could accomplish if we could just be open about things, just tell it how it is. We wouldn't need all the mystery. A simpler world. What you see is what you get. Why do the skies need to be haunted by these old myths? We'd just tell people they have to figure things out for themselves, they don't need to open their Bibles. Think of what we could build, if only the energes we waste on religion were devoted to science instead! I'll bet we could build buildings a mile high, or travel in space..." Somehow, belying the words, these were the most despairing moments in the whole of his rambling speech, so that I felt he feared rather than desired the worlds he was conjuring.
He spoke restlessly and irritably. You couldn't have pinned him down at any point and argued with him. The speech was a sort of meandering grumble that sometimes lapsed into eloquence or tight rational argument, but ultimately didn't make much sense, nor seem to want to. I remember thinking that I was seeing the real Lionel, and the householder, the businessman, the friend, the man who had greeted me at the door a few hours before, was just a facade. I liked the facade better than this churning, haunted man within.
Finally I asked him: "Does Mary know about any of this?"
He froze like a rat in a trap. I saw that I had touched a knot of guilt and agony at the center of his life. "No," he said. "No, I can't tell her. She wouldn't understand."
"She believes in God?"
"Like a child," he said with admiration and pain. "I have to go through the motions for her sake. Sit in the pews at church every Sunday, thinking thoughts like these."
I felt at the time I should feel sorry for him, but I didn't. I felt a vague disgust. Looking back on it, now I do feel sorry for him. He'd fallen into a trap and he didn't have the courage to get out of it. What courage he had had, had been sapped away by success. He had too much to lose. I wasn't even happy that I'd given him some relief by having someone to talk about it to. I just wanted to leave. As he came to himself he too felt ashamed. I realized with a pang that he had longed for this, that even perhaps the frequency of his correspondence had been a bid to secure an opportunity to confide in the one friend his terrible secret, but now the moment had come and had failed to give him relief.
There were awkward goodbyes, and then the door of the dark, looming house, closed behind me. For some reason-- I had some sort of presentiment of danger-- I waited in my car, thinking and watching, until the lights went out. That evening, that conversation, has haunted me ever since.
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