Only Begotten Daughter

by James Morrow

  “You know me?”

  The stranger grinned. His teeth were bright, bent, and slimy, like pearls made by a depraved oyster. “I was in the Deauville Hotel when you found that dynamite. Julie and I talked.”

  “You’re that friend of her mother’s?”

  “Andrew’s the name. Wyvern.” He reeled in his barren hook, began disassembling his rod. “I’ll be frank with you. I’m worried about poor old Julie.”

  “She’s not a happy camper,” Phoebe agreed. She didn’t like this Andrew Wyvern. He had the sleazy air of a casino pit boss. “Divinity’s no joke, I gather. You always feel like you’re not doing enough.”

  “Phoebe, sweetheart, I have something important to tell you.”

  Phoebe tapped her Girl Scout canteen. “Want a drink? It’s rum.”

  “Never touch it. Did you know you have a crucial role to play in Julie’s life?”

  “She’s never been very big on listening to me.”

  Wyvern picked up his fishing gear and, grinning luminously, started toward the Boardwalk. “You’re intending to give her some newspaper clippings,” he prophesied abruptly. “For Hanukkah. For her temple.”

  “Yeah. And on her birthday too.” Against her better judgment, she followed Wyvern to the carousel. “How’d you figure that out?”

  “Lucky guess.”

  Lucky guesses, no doubt, came easily to Katz’s mother’s friends.

  “Certainly you mean well. You aim to tell her she’s not obliged to end the world’s pain, there’s just too much of it. Fine.” Wyvern climbed atop a splintery, termite-infested lion. He smelled of honeyed oranges and guile. A pit boss? No, somebody even worse, Phoebe sensed. “But the thing could backfire,” he warned. “If we’re not careful, she’ll become obsessed, bent on repairing every little leak in the planet. Once she’s on that course, she’ll go mad.”

  “I used to believe that. Not anymore. Fact is, I want her damn temple to backfire, I want her to feel obliged.” Phoebe mounted a moldering unicorn held together with nails, bolts, and fiberglass patches. “Katz should be out helping people—curing diseases, making food appear in Ethiopia, ending the civil war in Turkey. She should be out…beating the devil.” The devil? Yes, it was he, surely. Phoebe uncapped the canteen, gulped; the magic fluid fortified her, a moat of rum surrounding her heart. A sensible girl would dismount and run now, she realized. She jammed her boots deeper into the stirrups. Sensible girls never got to rag the devil.

  “Julie can’t be bothered with earthly ephemera,” Wyvern persisted. “Her mission is much higher.”

  “There’s this blind kid who’s not blind anymore.”

  “Julie was sent to start a religion. It’s the only way she’ll know peace.”

  “Your friend God’s never told her that.”

  “Heaven communicates indirectly—through people like you and me.”

  “And we should tell Katz to start a religion?”

  “Exactly.”

  “What sort of religion?”

  “A big one. Apocalyptic. Like, say, Christianity.”

  “Know what I think, Mr. Wyvern?” Phoebe slid off her unicorn and, shielded by inebriation, staggered back onto the pier. “I think you’re so full of shit you’ve got roses growing out your ass.”

  The devil’s lips quivered like angry slugs. “If you knew who I am, you wouldn’t—”

  “I do know who you are.”

  Wyvern squeezed the lion’s reins until his hand went white. Slowly, relentlessly, like a crumbling corpse twitching to life in one of Roger Worth’s zombie movies, the carousel began to turn. Faster now. And faster still, spewing out dark, palpable winds like a spinning jenny making thread. “You’re a poor friend to Julie!” Wyvern called from the core of the tornado. Music slashed the air, a screeching rendition of “The Washington Post March” played on the carousel’s steam organ.

  “Screw you, mister!” The winds tugged Phoebe’s wiry hair. Caught in the gusts, paper trash scudded along the pier like tumbleweeds in a ghost town.

  “A terrible friend!” Twenty-four wooden animals, back from the grave, galloping in homage to the glory that was Steel Pier, the grandeur that was Atlantic City. Flies and locusts flew from the stampede like bullets. A squadron of bats zoomed out, each with a human face—men, women, children, their flesh sucked dry, drained of hope. “Julie deserves better!”

  “Screw you and the pig you buggered for breakfast!”

  Slowly, like a child’s top succumbing to gravity, the carousel ground to a halt. Wyvern was gone, his lion riderless.

  The devil. The actual, goddamn devil.

  Alone on the pier, Phoebe gasped and shivered and, after taking a bracing swallow of Girl Scout rum, quietly resolved that—one day—somehow—she would make Julie Katz fulfill her potential.

  “The heart is a pump,” Julie wrote in her diary the day after she and Howard Lieberman broke up, “weak and fickle as any other machine, and sometimes an embolism of indifference stops affection’s flow.”

  The affair had ended as abruptly as it had begun. They were in his apartment, eating breakfast in bed—they’d been shacking up since April—when suddenly Howard was babbling about their presumed upcoming trip to the Galapagos Islands, laying out his plans as if that were the place she most wanted to visit.

  “Why would I want to go there?” Julie asked, daubing cream cheese on a bagel.

  “Why? Why? It’s the Jerusalem of Biology, that’s why.” Howard slid her nightgown upward and kissed her belly button, the tough nutlike stub that had once plugged her into God. “It’s the Holy City of Natural Science. At Galapagos, the mind frees itself from the illusion of divine guidance.”

  “Gets pretty hot, I hear.”

  “So does Philadelphia.” Suspicious, he reclothed her navel.

  “Rains a lot too.”

  “Julie, what are you saying?”

  “I’m saying I don’t want to go to the Galapagos Islands with you.” She bit into her bagel. “I’m saying I don’t…want to.”

  At which point Howard had flown into a rage, accusing her of everything from laziness to vampirism. She’d exploited him, he asserted. Pretended to care while sinking her fangs into his intellect, drinking his mind. “Know what you said right before I asked you out? You said you believed in God.”

  “I do believe in God. I’m sorry, Howard, but I couldn’t take a whole summer of hearing you whine about creationism.”

  “I made you, dammit. I taught you how to think.”

  “To think your thoughts.”

  “Without me, you’d be just another scientifically illiterate girl.”

  Whereupon Julie had risen from the bed, pushed her cheese-coated bagel against Howard’s forehead—it stuck like the mark of a buffoonish Cain—and, after throwing on her clothes, fled the apartment and marched down Spruce Street to the University Museum, where she spent the afternoon contemplating embalmed Egyptians.

  Men.

  The next day she hauled her junk out of Howard’s place and returned to Angel’s Eye, home now to Phoebe and Georgina, whose landlord, a Revelationist, had booted them out of their Ventnor Heights apartment upon sensing the pluralism of their sexual inclinations. Good old Phoebe, good old Georgina. What formidable nurses they made, Georgina especially, forever mixing up bizarre potions to strengthen Pop’s heart, forever feeding him the robust vegetables she’d somehow coaxed from the sandy soil.

  Julie bought a diary, writing in it obsessively, hopeful that by projecting her mind, movielike, onto the creamy paper, she might glimpse who she was.

  Her temple proved the ideal writer’s den, a monk’s cell complete with Smile Shop candles. Odd how Phoebe was always updating the place. Odder still how the images no longer soothed Julie reliably. It seemed as if her conscience were becoming raw and friable; her superego felt ready to bleed. As each new apartheid victim or traffic fatality appeared, she grew ever more certain that Phoebe wanted the images to cut both ways: Katz, you have nothing to do wi
th this; Katz, you have everything to do with this.

  “God didn’t send me to perform a lot of flashy tricks,” Julie insisted to her diary. “If Phoebe can’t see that, too bad. Besides, she drinks too much.”

  Indeed, there was simply no point in taking Phoebe seriously these days. They now occupied two entirely different planes: Julie the Ivy Leaguer and nascent prophet of empiricism, Phoebe the high-school dropout and joke-shop clerk. What did Phoebe know of the Chandrasekhar limit? Of Planck’s constant, Seyfert galaxies, Hilbert spaces? Poor girl. She should get out of South Jersey and learn about the universe. Perhaps, as Howard had tutored Julie, she should now tutor Phoebe, infusing her with the thrill of cosmogenesis.

  Howard. Ah, yes, Howard. “In his relentless crusade, Howard missed something,” Julie wrote. “Quantum mechanics and general relativity do not explain the universe, they portray it, as did Aristotle’s crystalline spheres and Newton’s clockwork planets.” She reread the paragraph. Howard missed, she’d written, not misses. So: it was truly over, she’d exiled him to the past tense. Fine. Good riddance. “Howard took the model for the reality,” she continued, “the metaphor for the meat. An authentic cosmic explorer, I believe, gleans a tacit moral from ΔχΔρ≥h/4π, Heisenberg’s famous uncertainty relation. At the heart of all truth lies a radiant cloud of unknowing, a glorious nugget of doubt, a shining core of impermanence.”

  Pop entered. Each day he seemed to get a bit smaller, a bit more stooped. Life followed the statisticians’ famous bell-shaped curve: you grew, you peaked, you ungrew. His outlook, too, was shrinking. He’d simply drifted in, brought by the wind.

  “Whatever form my ministry takes,” Julie wrote, “I shall forge only a covenant of uncertainty. I shall declare only a kingdom of impermanence.” She shut her diary violently, as if crushing a stray spider in its leaves.

  “I’m lighting the beacon,” said Pop, cinching the sash of his awful tartan robe. “Exercise is good for cardiac patients.”

  “Which is it?” she inquired through locked teeth. With age, his eccentricities had become decidedly less charming. “Lucy II?”

  “William Rose, I think. Is this July?”

  “You know it is, Pop.”

  “If it’s July, it must be William Rose.”

  “Take your Inderal yet?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Your Lanoxin? Quinidine?”

  “Sure, sure. And some kiwi juice from Georgina.”

  He shuffled off.

  “The tragedy of my species,” Julie wrote, “is that it does not live in its own time. Homo sapiens is locked on history’s rearview mirror, never the road ahead, bent on catching some presumed lost paradise, some alleged golden…”

  She paused. Pop was climbing to the beacon. Exercise was good for cardiac patients, but…a hundred and twenty-six stairs?

  “The human race is destroying itself with nostalgia,” Julie wrote.

  The pen fell from her hand. A hundred and twenty-six stairs.

  She left without closing her diary.

  Above all, Pop’s stare: frozen, upside down, twice normal size. Julie hadn’t seen a gaze so extreme since that Timothy kid got his eyes. He lay on the third loop of the staircase, hands pressed against his chest as if trying to massage his own frozen heart back to life.

  She ran.

  Girl Scout camp, 1985. Take the cardiopulmonary resuscitation class, earn the merit badge. She slammed his chest, exhaled into his lungs. Such a grotesquely detailed corpse he made—the black hair flourishing in his nostrils, the gaping pores of his cheeks. Slam, slam, slam, breath. Slam, slam, slam, breath. When she was eleven, he’d started bringing home snapshots from Photorama, and they would set them out on the kitchen table. The women with emotional problems, those who photographed dismembered mannequins or teddy bears buried neck deep in mud, were automatically disqualified, ditto those candidates whose developed film revealed lovers, husbands, or hordes of offspring. Slam, slam, slam, breath. “How about her, Julie?” “Kind of grumpy-looking.” “Here’s a pretty one.” “Nah.” Slam, slam, slam, breath. Nothing came of it. Of the dozen or so women they found appealing, not one had been willing to commit to Pop. Slam, slam, slam, breath. And yet he was so sincere about it, so well meaning: yes, he’d wanted a companion for himself, but mostly he’d wanted a stepmother for his child.

  Gradually her instincts, her maternal heritage, claimed her. Resting her palm atop his sternum, she made his heart go thump. And why not? Nobody would see her intervene, no baby bank aborters would ever know. Thump again. And thump. And—

  Think it through, he’d told her. True resurrection was no childhood game, no simple matter of goading a dead crab with your crayons. Repair the heart, obviously. And by now his central nervous system was gone, blood-starved, a jumble of unraveled synapses, a stew of desiccated dendrites. Fix all that too.

  Then what? Clean all the crust out of the veins and arteries? Yes, only it just started up again, didn’t it? Pop was right: at some point you had to remake the world, at some point you had to be God.

  And yet—she must try. Thump. And thump. And thump and suddenly something came into being, a creation half Pop, half not, a palsied parody of life, blinking fitfully.

  “Ga-ga-ga-ga,” her creation rasped.

  “Pop? Yes, Pop? What?”

  “Ga-ga-ga-go. Go.”

  “Go? Go where?”

  “A l-life.”

  “Life?”

  “G-go h-have…”

  A shrill, watery whistle shot from her father’s mouth, as if he had the Steel Pier steam organ for lungs. And then, for the second time that evening, he died.

  “Pop! Pop!”

  No pulse. No breath.

  “Pop!”

  Pupils fixed and dilated.

  So instead of resurrection, instead of Lazarus II, there was merely this tearful climb to the beacon room. Go have a life. Very well—she would. She hadn’t been sent to contradict death; rebirth was not her business. She would eschew the rearview mirror, lock on the road ahead, live in her own time.

  The matches, she knew, were in a tin box under the lamp. Raising the lens, she wound the clockwork motor. Enough kerosene? He always kept the tank full, didn’t he?

  She struck a match, twisted the knob. The central wick rose like a cobra from a basket, meeting the little flame and catching. “Hello there, William Rose,” she gasped, the words falling from her lips like rotten teeth. “This time…you’ll…make it.” She restored the lens. The lead piston descended, squeezing kerosene into the wick chamber.

  Somewhere beyond the blur of her tears, the beacon glowed brightly, she was sure of it.

  And now came her penance, the agony that all who fail their fathers must endure. Did you see our lamp, old ship? Reaching out blindly with her right hand, she wrapped it tightly around the hot mantle. Impossible pain—uncanny, unprecedented pain—yet she held on till she smelled burnt flesh, screaming till she felt her throat might rip. Did you find your way home? Weeping, she pulled her smoking, blistered, martyred palm away. Did you?

  By some miracle she got through the rest of the day and its obscene details. Calling the undertaker. Calling the undertaker a second time when he failed to show up. (He had confused Brigantine Point with Brigantine Quay.) Hauling herself down to Atlantic City Memorial, where they greased and bandaged her hand, put her on antibiotics, and admonished her to avoid kerosene lamps. The notification list was not long—Phoebe, Georgina, and, from the fire station, Freddie Caspar and Rodney Balthazar, Herb Melchior having died six years earlier of lung cancer.

  “The dumb bunny wanted to marry me,” Georgina sobbed over the phone. “Sounds like the premise of a bad TV show, huh? That’s right, Bernie, this aging bookworm and his dyke friend move in together. He doesn’t expect her to give up women, though secretly he’s jealous, and they’ve got these two kids, and…you mean you just let him die? You didn’t do anything?”

  “I tried.”

  “Try again! Run over to
the fucking funeral parlor this very minute and raise him up! This very minute!”

  “He wouldn’t want it.”

  “I want it. You want it.”

  Julie’s stomach became a well of ice water. Her burned palm itched ferociously. “I’m supposed to have a life, Georgina—that was his big goal.”

  For an entire minute Georgina grieved, so much weeping that Julie imagined tears dripping from the receiver and splashing onto the phone-booth floor.

  “Listen, Julie, we’ve got to do this right. I think we’re supposed to rip our clothes, and then we sit on these little stools till next Monday. Hey, I’d be happy to do that, honey. For him, I’d put my ass to sleep for a week.”

  “I don’t think that’s for Pop.”

  “We’ve got to do something. How are you, baby?”

  “Lonely. An orphan.”

  In the end they simply had him cremated. The small, solemn procession—Julie, Phoebe, Georgina—carried the urn across the lighthouse lawn and down the length of the jetty. After Julie said Kaddish, Georgina took out a peanut-butter jar filled with a second set of ashes, specially prepared by incinerating Pop’s copy of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Phoebe opened the urn and dumped in the contents of the jar, mixing everything together with a kitchen knife, merging Murray Katz with his favorite book.

  “I always liked him,” Phoebe said, closing the urn and passing it to Julie. “He was the kind of dad I’d have wanted for myself, even if he thought I was a bad influence on you.”

  “You were a bad influence on me.” With her burned hand Julie uncapped the urn, glancing briefly at the dark ethereal flecks of her father. “Oh, Pop…”

  Phoebe and Georgina melted into the dusk, leaving Julie alone with the monotonous and unfeeling surf. Was it a proper funeral? Had the un-Jewish procedure of cremation offended him? “Too late now,” she muttered as she tore her black dress—tore it, and tore it again, and again, until she stood naked on the rocks. She snugged the urn under her breasts and climbed into the sea.