‘St John predicted a time?’ Steff asked, laughing.
‘Sure. Not exactly a calendar date, but he said it would happen “early in nineteen ninety-nine”. By the most liberal interpretation, that gives him until about June before he starts to look even more stupid than he did in ‘ninety-two. Maybe he grew inured to ridicule, doesn’t care no more. I mean, this is California he’s talking about, for Christ’s sake. I could understand what he was up to if he predicted a big quake. Odds are a lot better for being able to stand up and say, “I told you so.” But a tidal wave? It’s kinda sad, really. We shouldn’t be laughing at these people.’
Steff had another mouthful of darkish beer and a thought occurred to him in a rare moment of sensitivity. ‘Are you religious yourself, Jo?’
She shrugged, which said it all, really. Religion was not about shrugs.
Jo looked up at him and smiled. ‘I’m a Clippers fan,’ she said.
Which he took to mean ‘don’t ask’.
‘What about you?’
‘I don’t even watch basketball.’
Which meant ‘you don’t want to know’.
And Christ, he thought, you really don’t.
How could he begin to explain to her just what religion had meant to him throughout his twenty-eight years? What an enlightening and enriching impact Christianity had made upon the native life and broader culture of the West of Scotland? It was such a thing of wonder that he could not understand it himself, so how could a native of California possibly comprehend the spiritual mysteries of Glaswegian sectarianism?
Jo was able to make a sports reference to divert the conversation away from religion. Where Steff came from, the two were linked inextricably. He was a Motherwell supporter. As he came from Motherwell, this should not have been remarkable. But it was. Like the Hamilton dwellers who supported Hamilton, the Airdrieonians who followed Airdrie, or the Paisley punters who watched St Mirren, people from Motherwell who followed the home town’s team were dubious subversives displaying a perverse interest in football, rather than the important matter at hand, i.e. bigotry.
Where Steff came from, football was about religion and religion was about football. Kaffliks supported Celtic. Proddies supported Rangers. And they hated each other with heart, soul, flute and drum. Naturally, the clubs concerned occasionally professed their revulsion for this, but down the decades they had both well understood that it kept the turnstiles clicking during the times when the teams weren’t delivering anything to get excited about on the park. Rangers and Celtic weren’t known collectively as ‘the Old Firm’ for nothing.
Outsiders would ask whether the sectarianism was there first and attached itself to the football, or was it that the football created a focus and a stimulant for the sectarianism? The truth was that it was entirely symbiotic, the two blending into one another until they were barely distinct. The Catholics considered turning up at Parkhead on a Saturday as much a part of their religious identity as turning up at chapel on a Sunday, and there were as many Rangers jerseys worn on Orange Walks as there were sashes and bowler hats.
Nobody on either side would understand or even believe that you didn’t actually give a fuck – allegiance was assumed and presumed on your behalf, because of your ‘background’. Religion wasn’t considered a matter of beliefs, but a matter of ethnicity. Therefore Steff, an atheist who had not been inside a church in more than ten years, would nonetheless always be a Catholic, because he’d been ‘born one’. Thousands of Scots who barely knew the first thing about these ‘traditions’ (as they were euphemistically known) would be surprised and appalled to discover the complex prescription of stances and opinions they were firmly believed to hold by these bampots, according to which side of the fence they were thought to lie.
It wasn’t as heavy as in Ulster, of course. They didn’t actually go around blowing each other up. It was more like a hobby than a vocation, and their interest in events in Northern Ireland was as vicarious a thrill as watching their teams play football. It wasn’t political. They weren’t freedom fighters or loyalists. Just wankers. Sad wee wankers who’d never had an independent thought in their narrow wee lives, and who needed to associate themselves with a greater ‘cause’ to compensate for the desolate nothing that was their existence.
But then, Steff thought, remembering the Festival of Light, where would any religion be without a steady supply of those?
Six
‘Beginning our descent now, sir. We’ve received clearance from Brook Airfield and I’m told the chopper is fuelled and ready.’
Luther pulled up the screens over two of the windows on his left-hand side, sipped a glass of chilled water and watched the endless sprawl of Los Angeles scroll along below the Lear. It was a cloudless, clear day, and a brief rainstorm the previous night had flushed the air of the smog that built up in the vast conurbation because there was nowhere for the wind to blow it away to. The sight pleased him. It was a sign of how strong he felt that even the sight of Los Angeles pleased him. Sin-ridden as it was, it was still America. Still God’s country. Still his country.
He could look at anywhere in America, these days, and it would bring hope to his heart, now that he knew it could be saved. Now that he knew God wanted it to be saved. More than hope, pride. The pride and love Jesus described in the father whose prodigal son had returned to his bosom. True, America hadn’t returned to God’s bosom yet, but he knew it would, soon, and could already sense what that would feel like when at last it happened. The depths of Luther’s past despair and the reaches of his anger would be more than matched in the boundless joy of reconciliation.
It was an unusual thrill, a kind of ante-euphoria, an anticipation of emotions still to be felt. And the best of them would be loving America again. Not fearing for its future, not despairing of its follies, not resenting it for its infidelities.
God had always loved America. God had never feared or despaired or resented – that was the difference between Him and those of mortal flesh. Luther knew now that he had been weak to succumb to such faithless and selfish indulgences. However, God had been angered, so surely understood what trials Luther had endured to give rise to his despair.
There had been dark times, dark, dark times, like that father must have felt when hearing of his son’s remorseless profligacy. Times when he could not look at his country and feel any love, only fury and, at best, pity. And the worst of it was that he knew this was down to his own failure. In 1992 when he ran for President, he had failed himself, failed America and, saddest of all, failed God.
He had been naïve and, he would confess, vain back then. The growth of his empire, his fortune and his influence throughout the 1980s had been awesome, and he had been seduced by his own success into believing that he could achieve anything as it was surely God’s will. That was his vanity. His naïveté was in playing politicians at their own game, because he was always going to take a beating. He wasn’t just inexperienced and tactically unskilled – he didn’t even know the rules, far less the way those sons-of-bitches changed them as they went along.
He thought he could play it his way: tell America God’s word and God’s will, uncompromised by so-called modernisation and the we-know-best presumption that was political correctness. That’s what he had been selling all his life, so his success proved that America wanted to buy it. And that success had been built merely on his own radio and TV channels: once his hat was in the presidential ring, he’d get to spread the word over the mainstream networks, reaching out to millions of people who had never heard his message before.
Naïve, vain and not a little stupid. For one thing he had failed to anticipate how much harder it was going to be to convey the point and image he intended when he didn’t actually own and control the TV station he was appearing on.
The media ate him alive.
He was used to being under the spotlight. What he wasn’t ready for was the microscope. They picked up and magnified the tiniest little things, blowing them up into
grotesqueries, as though the viewer was Gulliver in Brobdingnag. It was like being in school again, where the other kids were always on the lookout for any little transgression of the social codes among their classmates. Wearing odd socks one day. Having the wrong colour lunchbox, something weird on your sandwiches, not cussing, not knowing cool slang.
His opponents were used to the microscope and knew that surviving it wasn’t about what you did, but what you didn’t. They knew what not to do, wear, eat, drink, smoke, touch, visit or meet under it that could ever be blown up for the repulsion of the voter. And most importantly, they knew what not to say. They knew how every last word could be twisted, stretched, decontextualised, recontextualised and wilfully misread, so they stuck tightly to a guaranteed foolproof script of opinions, policies and statements, and otherwise talked without saying anything.
Luther spoke his mind, spoke his beliefs, told it like it was. He was a lamb to the slaughter. Microscope? A dime-store magnifying glass would have been enough.
They got hold of a statement he made about the Bible forbidding miscegenation. Luther wasn’t a racist: he had nothing against black people, nothing at all. He wasn’t saying they were inferior, nothing like it. He was only pointing out that in the Bible, it says clearly that the races should not be mongrelised, and he was firmly of the belief that we shouldn’t be picking and choosing what parts of God’s Word it suited us to believe at any given time. We have to follow the rules as He has dictated, and if one of them seems strange or even wrong to us, we must have faith that its purpose will reveal itself in time, not abandon it because we think we know better than God Himself.
When the media were done he was looking like some Southern Good Ol’ Boy with a Klan costume and a noose in the back of his rusty pick-up. It was just one little issue, hardly the cornerstone message of his campaign, but once the microscope got to work it might as well have been. Practically everything else he said faded into the background behind it.
But even without that indiscretion, his political credibility was being rent and tom from every side as he quickly learned how ill-equipped he was for this kind of fight. When he’d stepped into the arena he’d thought it was for a gladiatorial contest – he should have known that was never the Christian’s role at the Circus Maximus. And the lions weren’t even his opponents, but the pundits: commentators, columnists, comedians, ‘satirists’, chat-show hosts, basically any smart-ass with a microphone or a by-line. That’s who was really out to destroy him. His opponents, he understood in retrospect, recognised he was out of his depth and therefore didn’t worry about him. But these guys, well, they were out for blood, and they had their motives too. These were the real godless: the so-called intellectuals and so-called artistic community. The fornicators, homosexuals, perverts, atheists. He’d always been their enemy and they didn’t spare the boot once he was down on the floor.
Amid such a frenzy of assault, the knock-out blow still came out of nowhere.
He hadn’t exactly taken any journalists into his confidence – he wasn’t that naïve – but he had been obliged to let some of them get a lot closer than usual when he was ’on the campaign trail’. It was a political necessity dictated by the Oscar Wilde logic regarding the only thing worse than being talked about. Gilda Landsmann was one of those working his campaign ‘beat’, he guessed for some doubtless unflattering candidate profile or election diary. He feared nothing worse: there were no Jimmy Swaggart-style skeletons rattling in Luther St John’s closet.
Then Landsmann approached him one day and presented an early draft of the story she was giving to Vanity Fair. Sure enough, it unearthed no secret that he was keeping from the world. Only a secret that the world had been keeping from him.
‘I first met Mary St John in 1942,’ Roberts says on the porch of her Fredericksburg home, where she offers me a pitcher of ice-tea and hands me a photograph of herself and her wartime college room-mate. Mary St John smiles self-consciously from the frame, as if embarrassed but too shy to refuse the photographer. ‘She was a nice girl, but real quiet. She came from a pretty well-to-do family, real strict about religious matters, and I think Mary had always been on a pretty short leash. I think once she got used to being outside the family nest she started to open up a little, started acting a lot more like a regular girl instead of the little mouse who first turned up on my doorstep.
‘She was – I think the word I’d use is “giddy” about the whole idea of “boys”, probably because that sort of thing was never discussed in her home-life, and she’d gone to an all-girl school. Fascination with the great unknown, you know? The problem was her ideas about romance were better suited to Austen, Jane, than Austin, Texas.’
Roberts gives a regretful, almost apologetic smile, and looks out towards the corral where her two mares, Pliny and Ovid, are being groomed by her eldest grandson, Mark. She shakes her head and winces, then reaches for her glass. For a moment I fear she is going to cry.
‘I met my husband, Tom, at a dance hall. He was on leave – he and some buddies – before being shipped out to the European theater. You know what’s coming, don’t you? I had broken curfew to go along with my older sister and her friends. Us college girls weren’t supposed to be out unchaperoned, you know? Mary knew I was going to see him at another dance on his last night before he had to report for duty, and she threatened to put a spoke in it if I didn’t take her along. I admit it, I was a lot more interested in dancing with Tom than keeping an eye on Mary. She started dancing with this guy, and Tom vouched for him, so I guess I put her out of mind.
‘When I met up with her later she was distraught, sitting on a bench, crying. I asked her what had happened, but she wouldn’t tell me. All she said was, “Norma, I’ve done a terrible thing.”
‘I sat up with her in her room when we got back. I couldn’t ask her whether she had been raped because I wasn’t sure Mary would know what “raped” was. But what she told me didn’t sound like it. Not by 1944 definitions, anyway.
‘Tom’s friend and she had kept on dancing together. She said he was a nice guy: charming, polite, chivalrous enough to set Mary’s heart racing. He was probably also, like everyone else of his age and circumstances, horny as an old goat. He got her to come out and walk around the block “for some air”. Mary said there were couples necking in every doorway; she probably passed me and Tom without knowing it. She must have been like a kid outside a candystore, seeing all that canoodling right before her eyes. So when he kissed her it was dream-come-true time.
‘She started crying again when I asked her what happened next. It took some coaxing, let me tell you, but she eventually poured out the whole thing. “He started touching me,” she said. I pointed to my own chest and she nodded. I asked whether she didn’t ask him to stop, and her answer told me everything I needed to know. “I didn’t want him to stop,” she said.’
Ignorance, curiosity, hormones and a liberal dash of unaccustomed alcohol: what family-planning specialists would later refer to as ‘the prom cocktail’. Mary St John was neither the first nor the last young woman to discover how potent it was.
‘Mary was just ridden with guilt,’ Roberts continues. ‘And it’s pretty significant that her greatest concern at this point was what God would think of her, and not what every other girl who’d “gone too far” was worrying themselves sick about. Well, Mary was sick soon enough – every morning. When she finally got up the courage to tell her folks – I came with her – it was ugly in the extreme. I don’t care to repeat or even to remember what exactly was said, but I did feel that I’d fallen through a hole in time and come out in the Seventeenth Century. In Salem.
‘They didn’t abandon her, I’d have to give them that, but she was definitely disowned. They supported her financially but she had to give up her studies. They wanted her out of Austin, away from them and anyone who knew the family. She moved to Bleachfield, Arizona, where her brother, Nathan, was a preacher. I helped her move but she kind of cut me off after that. She had come u
p with a story for herself so that she wasn’t some shamed “woman with a past” moving to town, and I think she wanted to sever ties with anyone who knew the truth.
‘Ilearned that she was calling herself Mary Baker and wearing a wedding band, telling folks her little boy’s daddy had been killed in action a few weeks after they got married. It wasn’t a story that was likely to raise much suspicion – there were several like it in every town at the end of the war. And in Mary’s case it was true, apart from the being married part. Tom’s buddy got blown up by a land mine his third week in Italy.’
She had sat across the table from him and watched him read it, then had the nerve to ask what his reaction was and whether he’d known this before. His reaction was to throw her out of the office and call his lawyers, seeking an injunction that would prevent publication.
His lawyers came back with bad news. Landsmann had corroborative quotes from a retired obstetrician and from some cousin Luther had never met. She also had a photocopy of the appropriate entry in the Wightford County register of births. The story ran a couple of weeks later, further embellished and rounded off with a final up-yours.
I got a telephone call from Norma-Ann Roberts on the 28th of last month, September. I had never met her or even heard her name before. She sought me out, she said, because she’d read my articles on the Donna West rape trial last year, and thought I came across like someone she could trust. The question I had to ask though, and the question people will all be wondering right now, is why did she wait all these years to tell her story?
Not the End of the World Page 10