by Mark Richard
Just before the Civil War some Episcopal clergy in the High Church tradition trekked up this mountain in eastern Tennessee and founded this college that Union soldiers subsequently dynamited into pieces that they carried home as trinkets and heirlooms. The event was depicted in the stained glass of All Saints Chapel when the church was rebuilt after the war. This is a good place to answer the Call. You begin to make little trips to the admissions office of the seminary on campus, and you quietly pick up some materials. One of your next-door neighbors is a middle-aged man with a wife and kids, and you look for him going out to his mailbox so you can “run into him” out there and float him a few questions.
The bishop is coming at Easter, those wishing to be baptized can do so at Easter vigil the night before, you tell Jennifer this is perfect timing for her. She says, Maybe later. You say, Now. Someone will need to present her as a candidate for baptism, and you tell her that you will do it. You have volunteered to read lessons from the Bible, and this time, because it is Easter and the bishop is coming, there will be a full choir and much pageantry and, of course, rehearsal. It is during a rehearsal that this thing happens to you.
You are sitting in a folding chair with your bit of the Old Testament to read in your hand, and a visiting Anglican bishop from the U.K. pulls up a chair and sits beside you. You have seen him around campus. It is a small college, and he has seen you as well. He has heard you are interested in entering the seminary, and this surprises you, but things like this happen at a place like this and you are the type of person that these types of things happen to. Yes, you are interested. Why? he asks, and you have a hard time articulating that you feel you have heard the Call. And do you know what is going to happen to you here? he asks, and you say you’ve been reading the catalog for the seminary, it looks good—theology, philosophy, literature, music … Yes, he says, three years of all that. Now, do you know what will happen to you once you leave here? Well … and you really don’t have an answer, but he does. He says, They’re going to farm you out to some little Podunk parish in Alabama, and over the course of your life you’ll reach maybe a hundred and fifty people. Okay, you say. Look, he says, you’re the writer in residence here, right? Yes, the Tennessee Williams fellow, you say. So you’re a pretty good writer? he asks, and you shrug, and he says, If you have the Call and you’re a good writer, you need to keep writing, you’ll reach many more people that way than if you go through seminary.
You can’t say that a weight lifts off of you or that a beam of light suddenly breaks through the stained glass and shatters something inside you. It is more like a knowing, like when you’re navigating a river upstream during a drought, it’s easier to navigate when you know to avoid the tributaries and stay to the main channel.
When Jennifer gets baptized, she has tears in her eyes when she leans over for the bishop to pour water from the baptismal font over her pretty red hair. Still emotional back in the pew, she accidentally sets her Book of Common Prayer on fire with her candle. A couple of weeks later she gets a letter from the Episcopal Diocese of East Tennessee. She reads it and says, Oh my God, look at this. It’s a certificate certifying her baptism, and it certifies that according to the ordinance of our Lord Jesus Christ, she was administered the sacrament of Holy Baptism with water in the name of the Father, Son, and of the Holy Spirit, and because you sponsored her, you are now her Godfather, she is now your Godchild. You find this exciting in a spiritual and a non-spiritual way.
When she goes back to California to work on her book about her father, you call the wife of her brother and tell her you would like to know the governor’s schedule in the coming months, as you will be needing to meet with him in order to ask for his sister’s hand in marriage.
YOUR FELLOWSHIP IS FINISHED. A Mississippi writer named Barry whose work you’ve always admired calls. He wants to know if you would be interested in teaching at Ole Miss. You drive down to Oxford, Mississippi. Your house is across the street from Rowan Oak, William Faulkner’s house. At night you walk your dog over there and look in the windows, but you never see a ghost. The banging against the window from the inside late one night was just the radiators coming on, and you leaped back, and your dog ran all the way ahead of you home.
It is a good town, a welcoming place where two of your favorite writers live. You leave the back door unlocked because you are in the South and people are always coming in without knocking, and that’s how you meet Larry, another Mississippi writer you admire, one night when you come in the kitchen and he’s sitting there smoking with a bottle of bourbon on the table and he says, Hey.
Barry and his wife, Susan, take you and your fiancée out to dinner and have you over to their house for Easter dinner. One of your favorite writings of Barry’s is the introduction to a pocketbook edition of the book of Mark, which includes a poem that you have taped to the wall of your office. Jennifer taught with Barry back in Bennington, and he is fond of her; when he hears you two are getting married, he sends a note to her reporting that he is crestfallen with the news, having always envisioned spending his later years as an old man watching the sunset from a condo balcony in Palm Springs while she combed Grecian Formula through his hair. He says he imagined he would be wearing a lot of turquoise.
You and your Godchild get married in California. During the wedding reception, Melvin presents you with a metal pot and a large metal spoon on the dance floor. Melvin is mindful of the time that he and his wife had gone with you and a blind date who you never saw again down to a biker bar to hear some live music and during a protracted drum solo you had gone into the attached restaurant kitchen serving fried fish and she-crab soup and had taken down a pot and a large cooking spoon and returned onstage to the biker bar and yelled Conga line! into an open mike and had led several tables of bikers and biker chicks conga-lining through the place. Melvin says it was one of the bravest things he had ever seen, its audacity the only thing keeping you all from getting shot, cut, or killed. You end your wedding reception banging on the pot with the spoon, conga-lining on a terrace overlooking the Pacific Ocean, leading your new wife and all of her friends and family and all of your best friends from all over the world, many of whom do not know each other, though later at a restaurant after the reception, standing and telling how they met you, for most, they met you in a bar.
Back in Mississippi, you start locking the back door, having just come back from your honeymoon, where you, after drinking an entire pot of coffee and taking some pain pills, hiked five miles across the floor of a volcano’s crater. You finish consummating your marriage in every room of the house, including the backseat of the Cadillac parked in your very own carport.
THERE’S STILL THIS MATTER OF THE CALL on your heart. You attend the Catholic church wondering if Walker Percy was right about the Church being the true church. You try to talk to the priest about personal ministries, but maybe you spook him, because he acts as if you are trying to sell him something he doesn’t want to buy. You’ve never read Kierkegaard, and now you do, and you’d like to talk to someone about despair, is it really a sin, and you go to the Episcopal church, but the priest there one Sunday says Dr. Seuss is one of his favorite writers, and he preaches a sermon while turning the pages of a Dr. Seuss book, and you don’t go back.
When your time is up in Mississippi, you are sad to go. You and your dog drive across the country to meet your wife in California, where she has gone ahead to find you a place for you all to live while she finishes her book. In Albuquerque you sneak your dog into a Holiday Inn Express, and in the morning two policemen are knocking on your door and wanting to talk to you. During the night, someone broke into every car in the parking lot except yours, they suspect a Mexican gang, but they’re curious about you. You don’t know what to tell them, but in your heart you’re sure it has something to do with the Texas tags and the Saint Christopher statue glued to the dashboard.
YOU AND YOUR NEW WIFE RENT A COTTAGE on the old Vanderlip Estate, begun in the 1920s as the Hamptons of the
West. Your cottage is a one-room studio with no heat, set amidst the overgrown gardens of the mansion, the Villa Narcissa. Teenage gang members from San Pedro jump the walls at night and roam the property to see the ghosts, particularly that of the Vanderlip daughter locked in a private asylum there after an illicit affair with a black man, and the glowing dogs. There is an old casino on the property, casitas, stables, and a gamekeeper’s house. There are scorpions and rattlesnakes, abundant peacocks, and hundreds of cypress-lined steps leading to a temple with an otherworldly view of the Pacific Ocean and Catalina Island. Elin Vanderlip, the grande dame, tells you of the many people who have visited since the 1930s, the actors, the heads of state, the writers, of whom you are just one.
You write a novel about an orphan who is raised by a religious prophet, and the orphan turns to a life of crime, becoming a counterfeiter and switching identities with a black-sheep scion of a faded-money family, and narrowly escapes being murdered by a crooked family lawyer dressed in a Santa Claus costume. Nan Talese calls you and tells you it’s gorgeous, beautiful writing, and she has absolutely no idea what is going on in the book, and, come to think of it, neither do you.
You go to Louisiana for Uncle James’s funeral, and while you’re there, you see five shirtless crew-cut boys who look a lot like you did when you were their age, you watch them climb up on a picnic table and jump off over and over and over and over again and you think, We should have children, and when you get home, you find Jennifer skinny-dipping in her mother’s pool, and she gets out and stretches on a towel in the sun and tells you she’s pregnant.
So your wife is pregnant and you’re broke and your novel is a disaster. You take your first edition of Mark Twain’s Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court and a rare print of Stonewall Jackson’s last meeting with Robert E. Lee into Santa Monica to sell, and you run into one of the students who had been studying with Barry at Ole Miss. She’s Robert Altman’s script supervisor and Altman has told her to write a script for him and she’s stuck. So you help her break a movie she calls Cookie’s Fortune, and she says she can’t pay you or give you credit, but she can introduce you to Altman, and that’s good enough for you, and you meet Altman, and one of his readers has put one of your short stories in his hands to read, and he thinks it would make a good movie—ensemble cast, strong female leads—would you be interested in adapting it for him? So you adapt your story in about two weeks, and he reads it and says it’s good, it’ll be his next movie, and you think, That wasn’t so hard.
Except Altman always has several next movies, and through the grace of Ron Carlson you are offered a teaching job at Arizona State. It’s a big campus and hot, and one day as you are walking across, you realize you can’t walk. You have to sit down and it’s 113 degrees and you can’t move. Despite the white Arizona sun, all you can see is the color of your pain, and the color of your pain is black.
The time has come to amputate the femoral head of your left hip, hammer in a titanium spike with a Teflon ball, rebuild the pelvic cup, sew you up, send you home. You interview several orthopedic surgeons and you learn that surgeons do not like to be interviewed. The best people who can tell you about a surgeon’s handiwork are anesthesiologists and surgical nurses, but they are reluctant to talk, though one anesthesiologist you happen to run into in a bar waves you off a highly recommended orthopod, saying he had just seen the doctor butcher some kid’s knee. The next best people are the physical therapists, and several you interview give you a name—Ted Firestone. Firestone is young, strong, and aggressive, your wife says he has the bearing of a quarterback. He guesses your surgery will take a couple of hours, but when it lasts for six, your wife gets worried. In addition to the replacement, he has to chisel out the old hardware, drill out the old screws, chip away the old growth, and repair your femur where it has cracked. He had warned you that something like this might happen. When he first looked at your X-rays, he said two things: your situation is beyond the abilities of most surgeons, and that surgeons in your past did you no favors.
You have recently seen one of your old surgeons, the doctor who hammered in your first nail, the doctor who told your father that with or without surgery, you would probably end up in a wheelchair by the time you are thirty anyway. It is the seventy-fifth anniversary of Crippled Children’s Hospital, and they ask you to come speak. The doctor is old, old, old. In your speech you talk about the first time you came to the hospital, and then you single out the doctor, and give a list of things his nail survived; the car accidents, the years at sea, a body-slamming dance craze, a spectacular fall down a marble staircase, a crash landing in a realtor’s plane, and in the end, you never mention those terrible words he said to you and your father that day, instead you thank him that soon you will be able to walk your sister down the aisle on her wedding day, the same little baby your mother sat in the car nursing the day you arrived for admittance to Crippled Children’s.
While you are recovering, your hospital phone rings and it’s some Hollywood producers. Apparently, the script you wrote for Altman has been circulating, and they want to know if you want to write for their TV show. You have to tell them that you don’t watch TV and are unfamiliar with their show, and they say, Perfect. Come to Beverly Hills tomorrow for the interview if you want the job. You call an agent, and she says you should take the meeting, she tells you how much a job like that pays, and you misunderstand, you think the pay is what you make in a month, when in fact it’s what you would make every week. You tell the agent there’s no way you can get from the hospital bed in Scottsdale, Arizona, to Beverly Hills, you’d have to go into the meeting pushing a walker, and the agent screams, For God’s sake, don’t go into the meeting pushing a walker!
Your surgical nurse hears all this, and she is a big fan of the show, so she brings in some crutches, and your wife brings you a khaki suit, and they dope you up and get you on a plane. You are met by a special medical station wagon that takes you to the Beverly Hills address. Unfortunately, you have to climb about a hundred steps of exquisite, hand-cut, mossy California quarry stone from the curb so that by the time you get to the door, you have sweated completely through your khaki suit, and you have popped so many pills you don’t remember the interview, but the producers hire you anyway, and that is your first job in Hollywood.
You have your other hip replaced right before you begin work on a medical drama. The showrunner is making a movie about F. Scott Fitzgerald, and your offices on the Fox lot are in the same building where Fitzgerald had his office long ago. The showrunner brings Fitzgerald’s aged secretary in one afternoon, and she walks around telling you and the showrunner the history of the place. Toward the end, she passes your office and says, And that was Billy Faulkner’s office.
BY THIS TIME YOU HAVE TWO SONS, the older of whom has a glitch in his spine. You are now the parent your father was, driving him to special clinics, watching as the doctors make him run, walk, stand on one foot. No one seems to know what the condition is. They think it’s developmental and not degenerative, but they’re not sure.
You tell your mother that you need some prayers sent your way. Your mother has been employed at the same hospital these last thirty years. She has worked her way up from switchboard operator to one of the managers in a terminal care ward of the hospital. People bring her their loved ones who are dying, and she sees that they are comfortable to the end, sees that they have what they need. Your mother has developed a network of prayer warriors at the hospital, mostly black women and a few black men who meet informally in side hallways and unused rooms to hold hands in a circle and offer up prayers. Your mother attends Bible study classes in the black part of town. On Sunday mornings, she attends her small white Episcopal church, and in the afternoons she attends her black friends’ church, House of Prayer No. 2.
The situation with your son is a test of your faith. The platitudes you hear don’t help. You do not offer platitudes to people in their times of need. You have learned that the only platitude you c
an offer others in a time of need is to tell them that you love them. You also do not offer prayers in the hopes of changing things. You have come to believe that those types of prayers are dangerous, especially when the word “if” is used. Those types of prayers are a type of negotiation, and you are beginning to believe that negotiation with God is sinful.
Your mother does not offer a platitude about your son. She recounts all the years of trials and suffering she says she watched you endure, and she says maybe all of that was necessary for you to be the parent of this boy who has his own difficulties. If that is true, then it is a kind of God’s redemptive grace that you can finally accept.
ABOUT THIS TIME YOU GET A CALL FROM BEN, the priest at your church when you were a boy. Ben is retired and is a circuit rider to small country parishes that don’t have their own priests.
Ben tells you that your father is dying in a small hospital down in North Carolina and he wants to see you. It’s been about twenty years since your last communication with him, a single-spaced fifteen-page hand-printed letter dated New Year’s Eve, in reply to a letter you had written months earlier. His letter is in the form of a multiple-choice questionnaire. Sample questions include “At what point in time did God die and you took his place?” and “Where in the Bible is it written that there is no place in Heaven for non-writers?” It is an angry questionnaire and your father closes it with a quote from A Covenant with Death, an out-of-print novel about a man accused of murdering his wife—If you cannot love, pity. If you cannot pity, have mercy. That man is not your brother, he is you. Your wife says you must go see your dying father, and she is right.
It’s a small hospital in a small mill town like the one in which you grew up, and when you see the house where your father and his second wife live, it’s the same three-bedroom brick rancher that is in your hometown where your mother still lives, the same bushes and trees and flowers planted in the same configurations. When you walk into your father’s hospital room, he shoos everyone out and tells you to pull up a chair, he’s ready to make his confession.