Off the entrance there were two small chapels. One of them contained a marble sculpture of a Madonna that looked quite a bit like Queen Victoria. In the second chapel, though, was a wood carving of an angel that might already have been two or three hundred years old in Victoria’s time. Joanne went over to the angel as if she had expected to find it there. She knelt in front of it and closed her eyes. I blushed. The chapel was lighted by a couple of dozen white candles, and the candlelight and the angel stirred up some memories that converted my embarrassment to pain. I turned away and began to walk toward one of the narrow side aisles.
A clergyman of some kind was coming toward me. He was old, and he limped. I gave him the obligatory stranger-about-to-pass glance. And then I gave him the double take. It was Elliott Mason—but an Elliott whose sexual-spiritual charisma had vanished. The interesting thing was what had replaced it. Elliott didn’t look as though he had become either a saint or a burnt-out case; he just looked genially nondescript.
He gave me an unthoughtful smile and said hello. A few years ago he would have put his arm around my shoulder and ushered me into an overfurnished office. Now he settled for a suggestion that we sit in one of the dusty pews. He asked me what was on my mind.
A little wave of panic washed over me. What should I say? There were two problems: first, that I wasn’t sure what I wanted to say or to ask: and second, that I wasn’t sure that Elliott Mason would take me seriously. I was forced into the paradoxical situation of having to speak flippantly because what I had to say was so serious. “It’s really strong stuff, Elliott,” I said, in a loud whisper.
Elliott said, “When it’s serious, most people pretend they’re representing someone else. They start by saying, ‘I have a friend who has a problem.’ It doesn’t fool anyone, but it’s easier that way.”
“Okay. I have this friend who doesn’t believe in God, but who has a chance to allow his daughter to be murdered as a sacrifice to God.”
The Reverend Mason looked as if I had told him something that he heard about every day. “I assume the people who are offering you the chance are Christians.”
“Right,” I said. “Very devout.”
“They would have to be, wouldn’t they?”
“But remember, Elliott, it’s not me who got the offer. It’s my friend. And I almost forgot: there’s also a little cannibalism involved.”
Still no frowns or raised eyebrows. Elliott said, louder than I would have liked: “Except ye eat the flesh of the Son of man and drink his blood, ye have no life in you.”
I recalled that Josiah Golightly had quoted that passage in his journal. “Yes,” I whispered. “Some people have literal minds.”
“That’s seldom true of Christians. You could argue that the entire history of the Christian Church has been an elaborate attempt to avoid the literal; to pretend that Christ didn’t literally mean anything He said. We must arrange it so that grace is not a fact but a metaphor. And metaphors are made by speaking of a thing as if it is something other than what it is. Therefore, grace doesn’t really exist. It is just a manner of speaking.”
I suspected that Elliott wasn’t being as logical as he thought he was, but I wasn’t going to try to make debating points. “What bothers my friend the most is that it would be his daughter and not himself who would be sacrificed.”
“God sacrificed His only living Son. There are precedents, Jonathan.”
“I’m not talking about gods, though. I’m talking about ordinary people.”
“Instances of parents killing their children are fairly common. People literally sacrifice their children to their own selfishness or anger every day, I would imagine. If you count fetuses as children, it’s many times a day.”
I couldn’t argue with that, either, so I changed my approach: “Do angels exist?”
“You’d prefer them to be metaphors?”
“They’re not?”
“Not in the Bible, they’re not. They are a distinctive order of beings, but nowhere are they treated as imaginary. They perform definite functions.”
I supposed that was true. Messengers and wrestlers. I had forgotten I was in All Seraphim Church. I tried again. “Ghosts,” I said. “They’re not metaphors either?”
“Christ appeared after His death.”
I thought that might have been a special case, but I didn’t say so. I didn’t say anything. Elliott Mason was smiling. He said, “I think your friend has a rare opportunity.”
“I’m sure it’s rare,” I said. “But I’m not sure what kind of opportunity it is.”
“There must be something that has drawn your friend into this situation.”
“Love, I suppose.”
“But not love of God?”
“Not God. Definitely not God.”
“Then your friend is fortunate. Love is not the only—or maybe even the best—way to know God.”
“Cannibalism is better?”
“Jesus said: ‘As the living Father sent me, and I live by the Father; so he that eateth me, even he shall live by me.’ ”
“If you’ll excuse the expression, that seems a little hard to swallow.”
Elliott was taking me seriously now. “It is hard. According to John, what the disciples said was, ‘This is a hard saying; who can hear it?’ ”
“If it’s a hard thing to hear, then it’s almost an impossible thing to do.”
“No. It’s not impossible, Jonathan.”
“You’ve done it?”
“Yes.”
“You’ve eaten the flesh of Jesus?”
“No. I drank the blood of your dying wife.”
I couldn’t decide whether to punch Elliott Mason’s face or to vomit. I punched his face. It wasn’t a very effective punch. Pews weren’t really designed to encourage fisticuffs. Then Elliott surprised me again. He put his arms around me; not in an embrace but a bear hug. He was amazingly strong. My arms were pinned to my sides, and his mouth was next to my ear. He started whispering: “It has brought me to God. It changed me from a clerical womanizer to what I am now.”
“A clerical creep?” I whispered.
“A shabby victim of a state of grace.” I had heard about enough on the subject of grace. I was beginning to think it was just another of those all-purpose excuses—like political belief—that people use to justify any kind of outrageous behavior they want to indulge in. Elliott’s hug was still strong, but his whisper was becoming a wheeze: “I watched her die. I was paralyzed, and I couldn’t do anything to help her. Her head was against my mouth. Her crushed head. I drank.”
Elliott relaxed his grip and moved away from me. I expected him to start weeping, but he just looked at me expectantly, breathing a little heavily. I was looking at him as if he were someone who had just asked me to do something unpleasant with him in a men’s room. “Why are you telling me about this?” I asked.
“You brought the subject up, Jonathan. You came here to see me. I’ve always known you would.”
“I didn’t come here to ask you about my wife’s death.”
“Then why did you come here? Weren’t you looking for a sign?”
“I don’t know why I’m here.”
“Exactly. You’re in a desperate situation. You weren’t looking for moderate reassurance concerning neurotic ennui. You’ve stumbled into the world beyond the metaphor. You’re not a man with a wafer in his mouth and biblical prose in his ears; you’re not even Orpheus singing in an opera-set Underworld; you’re a man with someone else’s blood in his throat. You’ve been invited to become a saint or a hero. That’s why you’re here.”
My anger had vanished. And my daughter had appeared. I Joanne sidled into the pew next to Elliott Mason. She stood on the seat and said: “I prayed for Gwendolyn.”
“I’m glad you did,” E
lliott said.
Joanne kissed the reverend’s cheek. “I like your angel,” she said.
“You’re a lucky young lady,” Elliott said. “Thank you for visiting the church.” He got up and moved into the aisle. “I have to get ready for a service now.” He looked at me in the same genial, commonplace way he had when I arrived. “God be with you,” he said. And he walked into the shadows.
Joanne and I went out into the rain. My legs weren’t as reliable as they had been on our way over, and I spent a lot of time waving at occupied and off-duty cabs. We were wet and tired when we got home, and I announced that it was nap time. When I got into bed, my teeth were chattering—something that seemed to have become a way of life with me. I couldn’t sleep, of course. The mental horror films began to show again, with some new sequences based on Elliott Mason’s scenario.
I was grateful when Joanne showed up and announced that she wanted to join me. I pretended to be annoyed, but I told her that since it was Christmas, I might allow it. She lifted the covers near the foot of the bed and scrambled in. There was a lot of muffled jabbering. She discovered my cold feet and lay across them long enough to raise their temperature to the comfortable level. Finally, her head appeared next to mine.
“Will I go to school in Childgrave?” she asked.
“Who said you were going to Childgrave?”
“Wouldn’t you like to live there, Daddy?”
“In a way, sweetie. But if we went to live there, something terrible might happen to you. You might die.”
“Like Gwendolyn?”
“Yes. Like Gwendolyn. I wouldn’t want that to happen to you. I wouldn’t want to lose you.”
“I would be special. People would remember me for ever and ever.”
“That’s nice, but I don’t want to remember you. I want to be with you.”
“I would come and visit you. I would be in your pictures.”
“Joanne, you think it’s like a game. You’re too young to know what it means to die. That’s one thing daddies are for—to let you know what is a game and what isn’t.”
“You’re afraid to die, aren’t you, Daddy?”
“I suppose so, but I’m more afraid for you to die. And besides, there are things you don’t know about Childgrave. Things that people who don’t live in Childgrave think are very naughty.”
“I know.”
“You know what?”
Joanne began to recite:
My mother has killed me,
My father is eating me,
My brothers and sisters sit under the table
Picking my bones,
And they bury them under the cold marble stones.
So Mother Goose, or the well-named brothers Grimm, or the street urchins of Britain had come through again—supplied the memorable verse for the unlikely occasion; reducing horror to a jingle. Our children don’t let us forget our potentialities.
Joanne said, “It’s all right, Daddy.” She snuggled up to me and immediately went to sleep. I tried to imagine my mind was a scribbled blackboard. I took an eraser from the dusty ledge and rubbed the board until the jagged inscriptions became a series of faint, cloudlike arcs.
I slept for a couple of hours. Joanne was gone when I woke up. I lay for a few minutes, looking at the molehill my feet made under the covers, and feeling calmer than I had felt in days. I wasn’t sure I knew what my future was going to be, but I no longer felt like a man faced with a dilemma.
Nanny Joy was back from church, and she was the one who made my decision for me. She cooked an elaborate dinner for us, featuring roast goose and pecan pie, and she was about as agitated as I had ever seen her. I got the feeling she wanted to scream, but I couldn’t be sure whether it would be a scream of delight or despair. As it turned out, it was a little of each.
After Joanne was in bed for the night, I helped Joy get the dishes cleaned up, and we sat down with some cognac. I waited for the scream. While I was waiting, we listened to the present I had given Joy. It was an apparently legendary private recording made by Charlie Parker at a party on the Christmas before his death. Technically, the recording was primitive. It was an unaccompanied solo improvised around the melody of “O Holy Night.” It was a long, plaintive solo in which little quotations from every Christmas carol and song I had ever heard were interwoven. In the beginning of the recording, there were background sounds of conversation and the clinking of ice in glasses. But gradually the party noises died down, and there was just the distant statement of an inventive, impassioned musician. Joy began to weep about halfway through the performance and she was sobbing during the final phrase, which—oddly—was a quotation from Billie Holiday’s song “God Bless the Child.”
As the record turntable clicked off, Joy put her hands over her face and made a sound that seemed like a continuation of the piercing tone of Parker’s alto saxophone. I went to Joy’s chair and knelt in front of her. She put her arms around me and said, “I’m going to leave you, Jonathan.”
I let Joy sob for a while and then asked, “Why?”
“I’m getting married.”
Without thinking, I said: “That’s all right, Joy. So am I.” My decision was made.
We had another cognac and let our emotions thin out. I thought a little clumsy humor might help: “Who would want to marry you, Joy?”
“My minister.”
Oh, no. I was beginning to think maybe the Catholics had the right idea about that sort of thing, but I didn’t say so.
Joy said, “You’re going to marry Sara?”
“Right.”
“And where are you going to live?”
“In Sara’s hometown.”
“Oh, shit, Jonathan. Don’t live in that creepy town. Live here.”
“Sara won’t live here. And how do you know her town is so creepy?”
“Joanne tells me things. She says she might die there.”
Thanks a lot, Joanne. “Don’t believe that,” I said. “Joanne makes things up.”
“She didn’t make up the pictures you took there, Jonathan.”
“That’s a different thing. There’s nothing harmful in that. And anyway, this isn’t the time to talk about that. It’s Christmas, and we’re both getting married. We ought to be celebrating.”
“You’re right. How do we do that?”
“We could invite some people over and have a little party. Do you think your minister might be able to drop by?”
“He’s usually ready for a good time.”
I decided I’d end another little bit of anxiety and phone Harry and Lee and apologize for my recent petulance.
So we had a party. Joy’s husband-to-be, the Reverend Wesley Gunther, was a man of informal dignity and lightly concealed passion. Harry and Lee seemed glad to see me again and were pleased to hear about the various marriage plans. It was after midnight before the party got started, and it only lasted a couple of hours. I did my best to enjoy myself, but every five minutes or so I thought about Sara. I wondered what her Christmas Day had been like. I imagined her listening to the rain, thinking of Gwendolyn Hopkins, and sipping cold water. Not a festive picture. And yet I would rather have been in Childgrave with her than in Manhattan without her. For a while I tried to tell myself that what I really wanted was to have Sara with us at the apartment, but I began to realize that things could never be like that. Sara was a part of Childgrave. And my love for her had made me a part of Childgrave.
Joy and our guests seemed to figure out pretty quickly that I wasn’t really in the mood for jollity, and at one point, when I returned from the kitchen with some ice, I found them in a solemn conference that they broke up in embarrassment when they saw me coming. They didn’t look like conspirators, but they didn’t seem to be telling one another how happy they were for me. When the pa
rty broke up and my guests left, I got the idea they were consoling, rather than congratulating, me.
I didn’t worry about it, though. I sat down and wrote to Sara, telling her that I wanted to marry her and that I wanted to live in Childgrave with her. I added, feeling as if I were drawing up some kind of legal document, that Joanne and I would adopt the customs of Childgrave.
I wondered whether there were any customs that I didn’t know about. That didn’t really make much difference, though. Knowledge is beside the point in an act of faith or an act of love.
Chapter 14
For the next week, I was concerned not so much with faith or love as with the practicalities of cutting the strands that tied me to the city. I spent a lot of time on the telephone making dry-mouthed, hesitant statements to real-estate brokers, my accountant, and customer-service representatives.
Surprisingly, I felt no urge to make a farewell tour—no great need to visit the public library, Central Park, museums, movie houses, concert halls, or theaters. I had no compulsion to walk the streets, visit stores, or ride the subway. My thoughts were occupied with Childgrave—with what had happened to me there in the past and with what might await me there. And although those thoughts did not always lead to delight, I felt remarkably little apprehension. In retrospect, I realized that Childgrave was a place of singular beauty. The buildings and their setting had an honesty and rough simplicity that I was sure I would not tire of. And the chances were strong that among the couple of hundred inhabitants I hadn’t yet met there would be at least a few whom I would enjoy being with.
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