“Hello, I’m Johanna Morgan. Imogene Winters told me about you.”
“Yes.” She acknowledges my statement, but that’s all. No questions, nothing. She goes back to feeding the baby not rudely, naturally. The baby sucks fiercely, drawing deep gulps with anxious hunger, its fingers pressing white circles into the soft breast. All the while Pinky caresses him, gently running her hand along his arm from his shoulder almost to her own breast.
“Perhaps it would be better if I came back after his feeding.”
“Well, if you wouldn’t mind waiting a few minutes. He’s almost finished.”
“Certainly. I’ll wait outside if you’d be more comfortable.”
“No, that’s all right. I enjoy the company.”
It’s a quiet wait, broken only by the sounds of the baby sucking. For the most part Pinky seems unaware of my presence. I try to find something to study. Except for a cradle and our two chairs the porch is empty, and the small backyard is covered with weeds. I end up watching her feed the baby.
The sight of a mother nursing her baby is filled with love. Perhaps it’s the way she watches her child or the angle of her head, tilted slightly to the side and tucked against her shoulder, or her expression, gently involved with just the smallest hint of a smile catching up the corners of her mouth. A lovely picture, but a touch off. Not in the baby, even though it’s an obvious mismatch, but at least the baby is there. You know it. You can feel his weight, his substance. He takes up an intensely solid place on this porch, this very hour, this day, in this world. But his mother is only a wisp, not just because of her physical delicateness, but more importantly because, like the others, these people whose minds have been captured by cults, she keeps a distance from the very spot she occupies, a tolerance so complete that it wipes out her own personality, an airiness, an incompleteness. This is only 60 percent of a person. The other 40 belongs to the brown-rice people.
The baby takes another ten minutes and then falls asleep at her breast. She carries him to the far end of the porch and puts him into a charming old wicker cradle.
“Miss Morgan?”
“Johanna.”
“Johanna, are you a friend of Imogene’s?”
“Not exactly. I’m a writer, and I’m doing a book that deals with cults, specifically leaders like Avrum Maheely. I interviewed Imogene in prison this morning, and she mentioned you and said that you might be able to help me.”
She smiles, saying nothing. I have the feeling that if I start to ask about Avrum straight off I’m going to get rote answers. I have to establish a line of communication with this young woman that’s more personal. And for that I need a little time. At least a couple of days.
“Do you think you could have dinner with me tonight?” I ask.
“I think so. Why don’t you come here, though? It’s easier with the baby.”
“Certainly, if that’s more convenient.”
“Or stay now if you like. I have free time until dinner hour.”
I expected reluctance, but she seems genuinely happy to talk to me. I must call David because I can’t make that plane this afternoon.
I get out my cell and dial David’s office. Ida, his secretary, tells me he’s in a meeting, and I take the coward’s way out and start to leave a message that I’m delayed and will call tomorrow, but when she hears that I’m calling from California she insists on telling David that I’m on the phone.
“Jo?” It’s David. “How’s it going?”
“Terrific. I really feel I’m into something fabulous, a wonderful new break for me.”
“You are in San Francisco, aren’t you?”
“No, in Sausalito.” And I tell him about Pinky. Damned if he doesn’t start getting that little irritation in his voice, well controlled because there must be people in the office, but enough to make me feel slightly uncomfortable. It’s as if I’m a little kid making up some excuse for staying out past curfew.
His irritation has deepened to petulance. “What you’re trying to say is that you’re not making that plane this afternoon, right?”
I try to stay sweet. “I can’t, darling, I have to spend at least a day or so with Pinky. It’s a fantastic opportunity. This is the kind of person I think I can talk to. She’s different from the others.”
“How long are you staying?”
“I don’t know. A couple of days, I guess.”
“What about the dinner?”
“Oh, I forgot. But I’d better not take the chance. It could take me a little longer. I’m sorry, David. I’ll call your mother right now and explain.”
“Forget it. I’ll do it.”
“David, I’m really sorry. . . .”
“It’s OK.”
Obviously it’s not, but I’m not about to change my plans. If David doesn’t realize how important this connection is I can’t help it. It’s a decision I have to make myself. But I hate the position he puts me in. “You make me feel so pressured. Why are you doing that?”
“I said it’s OK. Forget it.”
“What would you like me to do?”
“Nothing. Look, I’ve got some people here. Why don’t you give me a call when you get back.”
“You don’t want to pick me up?” Where did I get that little-girl voice?
“Sure. If you want me to. Give me a call when you decide what you’re going to do.”
“You don’t have to pick me up.”
“Whatever you want.”
“I’ll grab a cab.”
“OK. I’ll talk to you in a few days.”
“I love you. . . .”
There’s a pause, and he says he’ll talk to me later, and we both say strained good-byes, and I hang up feeling lousy. These last few weeks with David have been more difficult than all the four years before put together. I don’t know whether it’s the book or the wedding or a bad combination of both. All I know is that for the first time I’m beginning to have uneasy feelings about us.
Pinky isn’t on the porch where I left her, but the baby is still sleeping in the cradle. I find Pinky out front in the restaurant. The last customers have left, and she’s setting up the tables for dinner. She does everything in a very precise, nonrushed manner. I watch her carefully arranging the silverware and folding the napkins into a graceful bird-shaped design. She doesn’t notice me.
“Can I help?” I ask, and she turns and smiles and says, “Thanks, but I look forward to doing this.”
“That’s pretty, that thing you do with the napkins.”
She’s pleased and tells me that she used to do origami.
“That always looked impossible to me.”
“I know, but once you get the trick then the only limit is your imagination.”
Her personality seems to sharpen as the talk explores different art forms, and she loses some of that remoteness. It turns out that she studied art at Cooper Union, an excellent art school in New York. I had the feeling from the beginning that Pinky was different from the other drifter types in Maheely’s following.
She describes an affluent background with a strong religious strain that included church every Sunday and Catholic schools until high school when she was able to convince her parents to allow her to go to Music and Art High School. She graduated from there at sixteen and went straight into Cooper Union. At seventeen—feeling deadened, disappointed, and lost—she dropped out, floated around for six months, and then ran off to join Maheely’s group.
“You sound like you’re from New York too,” she says.
“I am. Right now I live on Central Park West.”
“I did too.”
“Really? Where?”
“You know the Dakota?”
“Of course.” Change that to very affluent. The Dakota is one of the most elegant buildings on Central Park West, in fact, in the entire city. Now I’m very curious. I don’t think she’s the daughter of a celebrity or it would have come out at the trial. Newspapers are brilliant at uncovering things like that. I ask if she
would tell me her real name.
“I’d rather not,” she says, “but it’s not a name you would know anyway. My father is very successful in the food business but not well known.”
I question her about her family, and it turns out she has two older sisters, and, like me, there’s a great difference in age. In her case they’re fourteen and sixteen years older. What with familiar neighborhoods, strong religious and lonely childhoods isolated from our siblings, some of the barriers between Pinky and me break down, and she becomes warmer and more trusting. “When I think back on my childhood it seems my mother was always busy doing good—anyplace but home.” When she talks about her father she’s loving and understanding, but when her mother does the same things it’s all wrong. The terrible bitterness she feels toward her mother sits awkwardly on her sweet face.
To hide her discomfort she walks over to check on the baby. He’s fine. She motions me into the empty kitchen. It’s 1930 preserved intact, scrubbed and neat but very worn with large holes showing in the brick-colored linoleum, a clean but ancient refrigerator and stove, and an uncovered bulb with a chain that becomes a string hanging low in the center of the small, narrow room. Two old Salvation Army–looking bureaus take up one entire wall where a kitchen table might have been.
Pinky brings a chair in from the restaurant for me and asks if I would mind if she does some of the cooking while we talk.
“Fine, go right ahead,” I tell her, and she opens the middle drawer of the bureau and takes out a medium-sized metal bowl. I get a glimpse of the inside of the drawer, and it’s filled with pots and pans, all neatly stacked.
She mixes together a combination of pureed cooked vegetables, grains, milk, flour, and what seems to me an enormous amount of baking powder.
“These are our specialties. Vegetarian pancakes served with honey.”
I can’t wait to see her cook them; with all that baking powder they’ll probably rise up to her nose.
She tells me more about her mother, and her face tightens as she describes the constant criticism, the harping and nagging directed especially against the husband and the youngest daughter, the selfishness, the pretended humanitarianism, the phony religiousness, everything wrong and bad.
At the age of eleven Pinky suffered from nightmares and headaches, ailments that tortured my own teenage years, and her mother dragged her from one doctor to another and finally to a psychiatrist where she remained in analysis for almost two years.
Similarly, by fifteen we had both outgrown the headaches, but whereas I was beginning to settle into my life with some comfort she was starting to lose the little she had.
“Around that age,” she tells me, “I began to feel the loss of the one positive thing I did have—my faith. I was about to graduate from St. Agnes Junior High when I decided that I wanted to go to Music and Art. My mother fought the idea tooth and nail, but my father was all for it. It was one of the first times I can ever remember him winning. But Music and Art was a mistake anyway—empty and meaningless.”
I ask why her mother objected.
“Because it wasn’t a Catholic school and because she was jealous of my talent.”
I must look surprised because she repeats how her mother was always jealous and envious of her accomplishments, especially the ones that impressed her father.
“He and my mother could never get along together, but she couldn’t bear to see him respond to anyone else. Nobody could get along with her except possibly my sister Margaret.”
“Are you close to your sisters?”
“I haven’t seen Margaret in four years. She’s a nun now with one of those semisilent orders.”
“What about your other sister?”
“Edith dropped out of college and moved down to the East Village for a while, then got deeply involved with an antiwar group, married, and had a son. Steven must be twelve now. About six years ago she divorced her husband, and she and her son became Jehovah’s Witnesses. Last year she married a fellow Witness; now that’s her whole life. They live outside Los Angeles, and anytime she’s up near here she visits me. I dread the visits because all she does is proselytize.”
“Odd, isn’t it?” I say. “That all three of you have been drawn to such rigid, authoritarian religious groups?”
Pinky, frying the pancakes one at a time, has her back toward me, but I can see her take a deep breath and stop for a moment. She doesn’t like what I said.
She turns to me, a small, tolerant smile on her face. “There’s no comparison between what I’ve found with Avrum, and now with my family here in the temple, and the falseness both of my sisters have brought into their lives. I am at peace with the purpose of life. I have found the answer in the simplicity of God consciousness. Avrum was my first spiritual master. I can understand that now. He led me to the fulfillment I have found here. My sisters flounder in ignorance while I have found the absolute truth in life.” A strange, impersonal tone has come into her speech. “I need look no further.”
“They must think they’ve found the answers too.”
She smiles sweetly at me, but her words have a sharp edge. “They’re wrong.”
“You talk about peace and simplicity and truth, but Maheely is the antithesis of all that. He’s a murderer.”
“In your terms.”
“Not just in my terms. He killed those people. What other civilized judgment can be made?”
“The murder was a sacrifice—his and theirs—the cause was spiritual.” The words are Pinky’s, but the thoughts are Avrum’s. “It was the genesis of a new movement that needed a birth by explosion.”
“The people he murdered made the sacrifice, not Maheely.”
“He’ll spend the rest of his life in prison. That’s a sacrifice, isn’t it?”
“He never meant to get caught.”
“No, not in the beginning. But later on, when the movement had a footing, then he would have revealed himself.”
“I don’t believe that.”
“I know it to be true.”
We’re at an impasse. Pinky looks so fragile, her voice is so soft you’d think she could be swept from her position with a few patient words, but there’s an inner rigidity that has made her implacable in her beliefs. If I want any relationship with this girl I must develop it along more personal lines. We must be women together. I go back to her early life and draw out more about her family, particularly her mother.
“My mother has never forgiven me,” she says, “for leaving what she insists is the right and the only church. Naturally she could never understand my relationship with Avrum, nor can she appreciate what I’ve found here.”
“Does your mother know about the baby?”
“Yes, she knows about Nami.”
“That he’s Avrum’s child?”
“No, and neither do you.”
“But I do. One look at him, at those eyes. I knew instantly.”
Pinky doesn’t answer me, but I can see she’s pleased that I recognized the resemblance.
She’s made at least fifteen pancakes, and despite the unappealing ingredients, they’re beginning to tempt me. She sees me watching her and offers me a pancake. Fry most anything in butter and drown it in enough honey, and it’s not going to be too bad. Actually these are pretty good. I’d try them on David, but we have enough trouble already. David despises the entire health-food genre with such a passion I sometimes think it’s more principle than taste.
“Are your parents still in New York?” I ask her.
“My mother is, but my father remarried and moved to Florida. They got divorced right after I left the house.”
She stops a second for my reaction, but of course I show none. One thing I do not want to do is alienate this young lady. “She drove him to it with all that nagging and picking all the time,” Pinky continues.
“Too bad.”
“Her own fault. If she’s suffering now it’s only because she deserves it.”
“You seem very angry at her.”<
br />
“Actually I’m not anymore. Now I feel sorry for her. But I don’t want to see her. I can’t forgive her.”
“Is this going to be enough for you?” I ask, looking around at the small kitchen. “Waiting on tables, living in this kind of a place?”
“Material things mean nothing to me anymore. I had the experience of overabundance for all those years, and my life was flat and empty. Now I have all the answers I want. I have Nami and through him Avrum.”
She describes her lapse from Catholicism at about fifteen and the year she had nothing. “It was a lost time for me, that year. I felt adrift, without balance and without purpose, scared and empty. For the first time in all my life I didn’t have a powerful faith to fall back on.”
I suggest to her that possibly the space reserved within for faith was larger and demanded a weightier belief because of her early religious training. It had happened to her sisters too. Both had a need for a strong and demanding philosophical regimen.
She thinks about it and agrees that, indeed, she may have a greater need, but that was so because she was being prepared for the eventual introduction of the true faith. The temptation to go on debating is almost overpowering, and I have to remind myself that not only is it probably too late to change her views, but it’s not important to my purpose. My purpose is to gain a deeper and clearer understanding of Avrum, and Pinky presents an incredible opportunity to do that. If I can get her to cooperate I can possibly find the key to his power and, through its effect on her, find its essence. I need the time to develop a comfort and trust between us. I think I can do it because I genuinely like Pinky. Her beliefs apart, she’s bright and sweet, and there’s an ingenuousness about her I find quite appealing.
Nami starts to whimper, and Pinky excuses herself and goes out to the porch to see to him. I follow her. Normally I think most babies are darling but with Nami I find myself looking for cloven hooves. She turns him over on his stomach and rocks him gently, humming softly for a few minutes until he falls back to sleep. Quietly we both tiptoe back into the house.
“Has Avrum seen the baby?” I ask.
“Of course, he delivered him.” She enjoys my surprise for a moment and then tells me, “There’s nothing Avrum can’t do.”
Save Johanna! Page 9