Simple Simon

by William Poe

  “He’s planning a trip to Houston,” Derek offered. “He needs another operation.”

  “Father so sick?” Masako asked me.

  “He had heart surgery,” Derek explained. “He can’t work anymore.”

  That was news. I hadn’t heard about Lenny having to give up his job.

  On the drive to Sibley, no one said a word. I watched the familiar landmarks pass by with uncommon disinterest. When we left the freeway for the road leading to Sibley, I noticed a sign for a new catfish restaurant and another advertising pit barbecue. Except for those additions, the area hadn’t changed since my high school days.

  Connie took an emery board from her purse and filed her nails as we drove the last mile. When we neared the mansion, Derek spoke up.

  “We’re hoping you and Masako will go to church with us tomorrow morning. There’s going to be a sunrise service for Christmas.”

  “We don’t have much time,” I said. “I’d like us to spend as much of it with Lenny and Vivian as we can.” Then, with all the sincerity I could muster, added, “But thanks for the offer.”

  Connie pointed the emery board at me and said caustically, “It’s a shame you’re under the control of that false Messiah. You can’t even let yourself go into a church, can you?” She lowered the sun visor and took a rattail comb from her purse, using the long metal handle to scratch an itch through her bouffant.

  The charade was over.

  “Aren’t you worried about stirring up something in that beehive?” I asked.

  Masako dug her fingernails into my wrist.

  Connie gazed nonchalantly out the window as if she hadn’t heard me.

  Turning into the drive, I noticed a goat grazing near the house and a hog wallowing in a cage near the swamp. It surprised me to see how the kudzu had taken over since my last visit. The dead runners formed long braids that threatened to engulf the barn. Derek parked under the sweet gum tree whose spiked seedpod balls littered the ground.

  “This is where I grew up,” I told Masako, not mentioning that we parked in the exact spot where I had gotten into the One World Crusade van that last night at home.

  “So big house,” Masako said. “Like shogun castle.”

  “Didn’t you grow up in a large house?” Connie asked as she stepped from the car.

  “Japan no have large house,” Masako said politely. “Many people stay one room.”

  Connie charged toward the front door as if to escape being with us. Derek was more cordial, taking Masako’s suitcase from the trunk and carrying it to the front door. I slung my travel bag over a shoulder and followed. I felt Masako grab the back of my coat as we neared the porch.

  Lenny called out from the den as we entered. I stopped Masako from removing her shoes, a difficult custom for her to ignore. We went in to greet Lenny. He appeared thin and wasted sitting in his overstuffed recliner. He lifted the side handle to lower the leg rest and struggled to his feet.

  “Bubby,” Lenny said. Nothing remained of the gruff baritone that had characterized Lenny’s voice during my youth. This was the voice of an old man.

  “Hello, Lenny,” I said as we managed an awkward embrace.

  Before he could say anything to Masako, Vivian came down the stairs, dragging a brush through her hair. “I’m sorry, honey,” she said. “I must have fallen asleep. I only stretched out for a minute.”

  Masako trembled, but took Vivian’s hand when she offered it.

  Vivian bent down to hug her and said, “It’s okay, hun. We don’t bite.”

  Masako didn’t understand what Vivian meant, but the embrace put her at ease.

  Lenny nodded toward Masako, but didn’t shake her hand. At least he didn’t say anything rude.

  Suddenly, my niece Cheryl charged in from the backyard and leapt into my arms. “Uncle Simon!” she squealed.

  “Your hair is so curly,” I said and then swung her around. “Cheryl, I want you to meet Masako. She’s going to be your aunt.”

  Masako squatted to be at eye level with Cheryl. “We play outside?”

  Cheryl broke into a huge grin, revealing that she had recently lost two teeth. She took Masako by the hand and led her toward the back door. On the way out, I heard Cheryl exclaim, “We have a pig!”

  “She seems nice,” Vivian said, taking Lenny by the arm and leading him to the recliner.

  “Get away from me, woman,” Lenny barked.

  “You need your oxygen,” Vivian said firmly, standing beside his chair with her hands planted on her hips. “Tomorrow’s Christmas. You want to be rested, don’t you?”

  It was shocking to see Lenny so debilitated, with an oxygen tank standing on rollers beside his chair. Despite that, cigarette butts filled an ashtray on the side table. Chances were good that, on his deathbed, Lenny would partake of a final smoke.

  “Where we gonna be t’morrah?” Lenny said after Vivian placed the oxygen tube around his neck. “Y’all make up your minds yet? Gonna be here or over at Connie’s?”

  “Lenny,” Vivian said firmly, “I told you, they’re coming over here. You don’t need to be going outside. It might start sleeting, and all we need is for you to catch pneumonia.”

  “Is that a fresh tree I smell?” I asked, desperate for them to stop bickering.

  Vivian beamed. “Derek and I went to a Salvation Army lot and picked out a Scotch pine. It’s been years since we decorated a real tree. And I thought it would be cheerful for Lenny. The family ornaments are on it, the ones we used to use. They’ve been down in the basement since that year you were in high school and we had a fresh tree. Some of them are a hundred years old.”

  I recalled the light in the shape of a white dove we always hung in the upper left corner of the tree. Lenny said his father had bought it when Christmas lights first went on sale.

  We went into the front room to see the tree.

  “You did really well,” I praised. “Makes me think about the times we decorated the trees when I was a kid. You even found the little bird!”

  “I was so happy it still lit up,” Vivian said, turning away so I wouldn’t see the mist forming in her eyes.

  That night, I stayed in my old room. Masako took the spare, which had been Mandy’s room. No one knew that we were legally married, so sleeping in separate rooms raised no questions.

  The last time I had slept in my bed was when I came for Ernie’s wake. That was a difficult night, after having kissed Ernie in his coffin. This time, I thought about Mandy, waking up periodically, sure I heard her shuffling down the hall and expecting to hear the familiar pecking on my door and that breathy voice calling out, You’ll remember, Bubby. You’ll remember when I’m gone.

  What am I supposed to remember, Mandy? That I never surrendered to your all-consuming need for attention? That I didn’t provide confirmation that you were a better mother than Vivian? You tried to be something to me you could never achieve. You weren’t my mother.

  Memories refused to let me rest. Ernie dead, my paintings burned, Virginia probably an alcoholic, Tony most likely still with the Jesus People. Who knew what had become of Darsey? Vivian said he didn’t teach any longer. She had no other information, but it wasn’t difficult to figure out that he had seduced the wrong student at some point. Jake and Jewell had gone their separate ways. Jewell went into nursing, and Jake followed his father to the Yukon, but now worked on the Trans-Alaska Pipeline. Dot still lived in the same house. She’d gone back to school to study art history. Mojo had set up a head shop on the road to Tulip, Arkansas, selling tie-dyed T-shirts and drip candles long after all that was passé.

  I was grateful when daylight pierced the curtains and brought me back to the present.

  At seven o’clock, Derek and Connie arrived with Cheryl. Vivian had been up for an hour arranging presents under the tree and stuffing trinkets into the stockings. Everybody had one. Something given to each of us at birth, they were homemade and embroidered with our names on the white felt at the top. The tradition was as old as the
mansion. Vivian had hastily sewn one for Masako before we arrived. There hadn’t been time to embroider, so she wrote Masako’s name on the cuff with a black marker.

  Masako knew little about Christmas traditions. Most of her knowledge came from watching It’s a Wonderful Life on Japanese television. I refused to dispel that fantasy by telling her that it could be a day of bitter disappointments and family arguments.

  Cheryl’s wealth of gifts included a walking, talking doll that peed after drinking chalky water from a plastic bottle and a playhouse large enough to stage a party with her new stuffed animals.

  Masako and I gave Vivian and Lenny a set of Japanese figures wearing kimonos in a glass display case that we’d bought in San Francisco’s Japantown.

  After the exchange of gifts, Connie and Derek took Cheryl to have Christmas with Derek’s parents.

  “Are you going to be here when we come back?” Connie asked.

  “We leave tomorrow morning,” I said.

  “Well, you should have come to the sunrise service. We need to remember that it’s the birthday of our Lord.”

  “Thank you, but I have my own.” I bit my tongue to keep from saying more.

  Before they left, Cheryl slipped a card to Masako. She opened it after they were gone. On the card, Cheryl had drawn a picture of a man and a woman holding hands. At the bottom, in scrawling letters, she had written, Uncle Simon and Aunt Masako. Masako laughed when she saw that Cheryl had drawn my face with big round eyes and that hers were almond shaped.

  Vivian went to the kitchen. Masako followed. Together, roasting the turkey, preparing cranberry salad, and baking the sweet potato pie, they spent the entire day together. I occupied myself inspecting the barn and checking on the goat and pig.

  Sparky’s grave, near Lenny’s now defunct beehive, was easy to find. The tree I planted there had grown to twenty feet. Sitting with my back against Sparky’s tree, memories again flooded my thoughts: Lenny and the train set; Lenny selling my horse’s colt and then Bride herself; in the dim mist, a vegetable garden, Lenny’s words as he scolded me for pulling up a bell pepper plant that I’d mistaken for a weed, I’m ashamed of you, Bubby; and resounding somewhere in the back of my mind, Damned faggot. Queer as a three-dollar bill.

  Storm and Bracelet had both succumbed to old age, and when I joined the church and he realized I was serious about my decision, Lenny sold the gelding that Vivian had gotten me after Lenny disposed of Bride. Lenny kept a swaybacked mare in the corral. She bolted from me as I approached, racing to the far side of the enclosure and back again. I heard the goat braying, hungry again and wanting someone to move the post to a fresh patch of winter grass. The pig rooted in the muck at the corner of the cage built for him near the corral. Just beyond a line of trees, I spotted a small hill, half carved out by young Ernie and Simon, sure that treasure lay in its depths.

  What dreadful sadness this place represented!

  Connie, Derek, and Cheryl came back in the evening. They had stopped by the grave of Cheryl’s brother, the child Connie had been pregnant with when Derek heard the conclusion lecture. The baby died before his first birthday.

  As we sat at the table in the rarely used dining room, we said little. Connie was in too solemn a mood for banter. Lenny may have wanted to disapprove of my marriage, but he clearly liked Masako. He told her tall tales about our ancestors. She listened intently, but I knew she didn’t understand much of what Lenny said. Later, she asked me to tell her the stories again so she could mention them on future visits. Vivian rarely looked up from her plate. She wanted to pretend, because no one was arguing, that we were having a happy Christmas.

  The next morning, Lenny fell asleep in his chair before Masako and I were to leave for the airport. Derek offered to drive us. I let Lenny rest, not waking him to say good-bye.

  Derek was unusually silent during the drive, no doubt still affected by thoughts of his lost child. Perhaps he associated his son’s death with my pushing him to listen to lectures and almost submitting to the person he would later decide was the anti-Christ. I had not considered that this might have been the reason he had become so virulently negative about Reverend Moon.

  Our flights transferred in Dallas, mine to San Francisco and Masako’s to New York.

  In parting, Masako said, “Your family is not happy, but Vivian wishes it happy.”

  “You catch on quickly,” I said.

  “Are you okay?” Masako had been studying my expression.

  “Not really.”

  “I will be a good mother when the time comes,” she whispered. “And you be good father.”

  I kissed her on the cheek, but wasn’t sure she was right about my ability to be a good father. The trip home had done little to convince me.

  CHAPTER 32

  The witnessing task force that I led in San Francisco proved successful compared to many of the state centers. Of course, there were no statistics from our main competitors, the secretive San Francisco family. Potential guests, who met a member of my witnessing team after encountering a San Francisco family member, didn’t even realize we were the same group. When pressed about it, I invoked the analogy of Christian denominations. Coptic, Orthodox, Roman Catholic, Anglican Communion, Society of Friends, Baptist, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Christian Science, Methodist, Mormon, and Nazarene, among endless others, all claimed to be Christian, but the connection would not be obvious to an outside observer.

  The San Francisco family brought people to dinner and might not even get around to a lecture on the first or second visit; we attracted newcomers by offering insights into the reasons people suffer. Not once did the San Francisco family invite us to visit. Requests that their leaders visit our center went unanswered.

  During the first year, my center brought in twenty-five new people. I was able eventually to count Bruce among our members. When he moved into the Little Rock center, Randall and Mary understood that he was gay, but had not confronted him about it, and he never seemed to grasp the deeper meaning of the Fall of Man lecture, no matter how many times he heard it.

  Church centers all over the country faced similar situations as the civil rights movements of the 1970s gained traction in society. The gay liberation movement had even reached Arkansas. Theologically unequipped to deal with an openly gay convert, Mary called me and suggested that I take responsibility for Bruce, since he was my spiritual son. She had no idea what she was asking of me.

  My immediate reaction was to scream, No! Bruce had aroused feelings in me at our first encounter in the Albertson’s parking lot. Leading the center in San Francisco with our many gay guests was a challenge that took endless hours of prayer to manage. Bruce’s presence could be my undoing.

  Every single day, I wanted to embrace the good-looking men whom I would meet in Golden Gate Park, where we did most of our proselytizing. Often, the person’s spiritual life was the last thing on my mind as I stopped to talk about the lectures.

  Then there were the gay bathhouses and pornography theaters south of Market Street. They were enticing—but the one time I paid to go into a theater, I felt so sickened by what I saw onscreen, I rushed to the sidewalk and threw up. By that time, conditioning against sexual feelings was so complete that the merest attraction would make me start shaking—seeing full-fledged sexual acts on screen was more than I could process. The encounter with David was the only sexual act I was unable to purge by feelings of guilt or shame. My initial reaction, to scorch my hand in an attempt to expiate the sin, had been for naught. Despite my deep and growing affection for Masako, David was the person Dionysus met during nighttime fantasies.

  I convinced myself that God had sent me to San Francisco because I needed to confront my sexuality head-on, putting me in the midst of the culture most accepting of the very sin for which I needed to repent.

  One of the church’s tenets explained that we help ourselves by serving others. As leaders, we learned that our own problems find expression among the members. By helping members approach God,
we were helping ourselves. So be it, I thought. No church leader understood the struggle better than I did. I agreed to have Bruce join my witnessing center.

  As I had expected, keeping my attraction to Bruce under control was a monumental task. He admired me and wanted to go witnessing with me. Fortunately, I had my own room at the center and was able to keep myself sequestered during the night.

  Slowly, Bruce began to understand that the Divine Principle didn’t condone sexual relations with one’s own sex, but somehow, he never seemed to apply that understanding to himself. On a few occasions, he even went so far as to suggest that Father’s understanding of human nature might itself be evolving and that perhaps the blessing would include same-sex couples one day. I wondered if he had been sneaking off to visit the San Francisco church, as that sounded like something their leaders would say!

  I was relieved when, at the next call for volunteers, Bruce decided to join the MFT. It was ironic. Here I was, sending one of my own members from San Francisco to training so he could get a clearer understanding of the Divine Principle. I wondered how Bruce would manage at the workshop. The recent lecturers in New York strongly emphasized the need for celibacy and purity of mind while working on the fundraising teams.

  Kawasaki assigned Bruce to Texas. Within a month, he wrote me a letter of appreciation. The note ended with a postscript:

  My captain, David Jetter, says that you made a lasting impression. He’ll never forget you.

  God was behind the coincidence, surely. Whatever happened, God was in control. I simply could not allow myself to think about David and Bruce talking to each other or the possibility that they might out me one day.

  On New Year’s Day—God’s Day—I took the members to a special place in Muir Woods, just north of San Francisco. We sometimes went there to pray, sing songs, and give testimonies. When we returned to the center late that evening, I found a message from Mitsui on the answering machine. It said that I should come to New York immediately to attend a meeting at Belvedere. Church leaders from around the world would be there. Mitsui spoke with urgency, saying that I should catch the next plane out.