“Yes, I do, Robert.”
“She said no, and I knew she meant it. There’s something really screwy about her, you know. I knew she meant no and I didn’t stop.”
“It was her fault, too,” she said.
“I’ll tell you one thing, Dory. I better get married soon, or I’ll go crazy.”
She envied Robert’s leaving. She was so tired of Cascom Manor, of the constant repetitive tasks, everything undone, done and undone again. It was life but it was no way to have a life, and there were dangerous secrets among these people. If she could get Debbie and Cynthia and Dibley safely away, the season over—for all their foibles and odd habits, Cynthia, Debbie and Dibley were American, undevious, understandable.
24
A truck, by its sound, passed his window in reverse gear. He reached the window in time to see four men pick up his Indian Pony by main sinewy force and slide it into the truck, one long handlebar over the side of the bed like an arm.
“New Hampshire!” one of the men said. “He got pretty far at that!”
“Till he run into Rita Hayworth there.”
“Aw, shut up, George.” This last was meant, but said with tolerance, an admission of its possible humor. He supposed the last speaker was Phil, who was in the Church. The men got in the truck, a black Ford with no hood, the chromed engine meant to be seen gleaming behind its chromed radiator, and left, one man in the rear with the drably bent motorcycle.
Things were out of his hands, and the somewhat disrespectful reference to Bonnie Forester disturbed him in an interesting way, as though the rules here were subject to change, perhaps toward threat. It was as if he had believed her to be a sort of vestal virgin, and had taken her sweet openness for all of the truth, and now there was a doubt, a smirk somewhere upon the premises.
For the first time in a month he thought of a girl he’d last seen in front of her family’s tenement in Manchester, New Hampshire—Virginia Hadar, who, in the middle of his mild, friendly goodbye, suddenly leaned over his motorcycle’s gas tank and kissed him on the mouth. Dory had somehow caused Virginia to be wiped out of his thoughts completely, even that final kiss that was her declaration of love. She was Lebanese and looked Oriental, so much so that one of his friends had asked him if she was Japanese. She was firm-armed, and had such a narrow waist her hips and legs seemed bravely independent of the rest of her body. She liked Stan Kenton, and was a little ashamed of her father’s atonal folk records. He hadn’t known her for more than the last part of the semester, but this weekend she had him come to her home and that Sunday he’d gone to Mass with her, her father and mother, brother and sister. After the Latin, the sonorous litanies, the placing and raising of chalice and other objects, all of which he saw as emotionless repetition, the priest gave such a fulsome sermon upon the glories of mothers and families he’d wondered for a moment if it hadn’t been directed at him.
Then back to her house for Sunday dinner and her father’s twangy records, primitive strings and whistles too simple and immigrantish for her, and they’d gone to her room to hear her Stan Kenton records, her modern sounds. She’d never let him enter her, and didn’t then, but was so wise and sweet in saying no. She was lovely and impervious. But of course he’d gone away that afternoon to Leah, where Dory appeared through the young leaves, dirt on her forehead and a spade in her hands. And now he hadn’t even wondered how Dory was doing at Cascom Manor, or thought to send her a postcard from along the way. Perhaps he took after his father. He didn’t understand these things; he must know that others’ lives passed without his presence. It seemed to him that he wouldn’t always be like this.
Time passed slowly for him in the brown room, tropical green heat at the window. In the drawer of the night table beside the bed he found some literature, small folders and stapled pamphlets he read with a strangely erotic edge, as if he might learn here the secrets of Bonnie, whose saintliness had been called into question.
All aspects of our metaphysical Being are divine when motivated by love. Says Kahlil Gibran in his book The Prophet, “I would have you consider your judgment and your appetite even as you would two loved guests in your house. Surely you would not honor one guest above the other; for he who is more mindful of one loses the love and faith of both.” Be tolerant of yourself. Leave the door open wide between your physical and spiritual desires. Let them blend into One Desire. With love as your motivation, you can never do wrong.
Hmm. It wasn’t that he didn’t honor the two guests, it was that the guests didn’t approve of each other. He read on. “We must open our hearts and pray that the Wayshower cleanse us and awaken us into our divine integrity…”
That was interesting, that bothersome though refreshing shower one was bound to run into along the journey. Then he came to “the day of at-one-ment,” and some readjustment in expectation occurred. Christ Mediator was the Wayshower, who didn’t shower but showed the way, obviously, that chastising rain not meant. As for the general message of the Church of the Science of the Way, Oval Forester wrote that Paul “took the torch from the Master and wrote: ‘Now abideth faith, hope, love, these three; but the greatest of these is love.’ ” The “science” part had to do with faith healing, a sort of Christian Science without going all the way. They believed in microbes and doctors.
But if the collection of literature he’d found in the drawer meant anything, they seemed to believe, or at least to tolerate, just about anything. Or else why did he find here the School Bulletin of the Prenatal Astrobiology Academy, of Monrovia, which “applied Solar System Energies as Natural Heliocentric Astrology as Science,” and taught, among other things, “Prognostification of Psychoeconomical Cycle Happenings” and “Marriage Compatibility Comparison Analysis”?
The analysis is based on mother’s conception of both partners. The conception status reveals all particular planets in their birthchart sections as well as all planetary angles in a given birthchart. For the women it is also important to know how her uterus will react in marriage relations. And the male partner must know something about his love ability because such facts are mostly ignored before marriage and bring disaster by finding out the disability of making love or to reproduce.
Well, there was marriage in a nutshell, he guessed. Ten lessons by mail for fifty dollars. There were also pamphlets from the Rosicrucians, AMORC, the Seventh-Day Adventists, the Church Ovarian Apocalyptic, a brochure on the lectures of one Prince Grégoire Ushant, who was ninety-five years old but had the body of a thirty-five-year-old and would reveal his secrets, and a picture of the Cathedral of Gladness, Church of Love and Triumph, Biosophic, Pastor: G. Oswald Rittheuber, D.D. The parking lot would accommodate one thousand cars.
Actually the literature of the Church of the Science of the Way itself was literate, clear, and contained a sort of Western directness, a humorless but unassuming candor unashamed of love, goodness, courage, goodwill, harmony—all such abstractions.
Late in the afternoon Bonnie came in and found him reading a magazine called Avatar: A Quarterly Devoted to Metaphysical Thought, and was pleased. “Oval has an article in that issue—did you see it?”
“Yes,” he said. The article was titled “Keep Your Eye Fixed on God!”
She’d changed into a man’s shirt and very short shorts, and tied her dark hair back as if she were going to do some kind of physical work, which he found she was. She put scissors, gauze, adhesive tape, a sponge and a towel on the bed, then went out and came back with a basin of water. Her beauty was more severe, ivory, tethered. “Now,” she said, “let’s find out how good a nurse I am!” She pulled down the sheet and looked closely at his knee, seeming very curious about what might be under the bandages. “I’m supposed to change this one. How does it feel?”
“Better,” he said.
“This might hurt a little.”
“Okay,” he said, falsely signifying bravery he knew there was no necessity for. She snipped the tape and gauze until she had everything loose except a tart-sized a
rea of red-yellow gore over his kneecap.
“Should I just sort of worry it off?” she said.
“Sure.”
“I don’t know if I can. I’m afraid I’ll hurt you.”
“What’s a little pain?” he said. He didn’t like pain at all but was anesthetized by his showing off, as he had been when he jumped into the cold lake in front of Dory.
“You’re very brave, John.”
“Aw, shucks, ma’am,” he said, and she laughed, then grimly and slowly peeled the scabby congealed gauze away from his knee. It hurt.
“There!” she said. “It looks awful but it doesn’t look infected. Actually it looks like the hole in a baked apple.”
“It does, at that,” he said.
She washed him gently around the wound, the water like cold fire, dapped him dry with the towel and redid the bandage. The bandages on his other knee and on his elbows seemed all right, so she didn’t change them. When he thanked her she moved impulsively to him, put her arms around his bare skin and kissed him on the cheek. “I’m so glad you weren’t killed!”
“Me, too,” he said. His arms had come around her, and were slow to disengage themselves. This reluctance made her blush, and she sat on the bed with her hands demurely in her lap.
“How come you’re not married?” he said, not changing the subject and feeling a little brash about it.
“Oval asks me that, too. I don’t know. It isn’t anything I ever decided.”
“You’re so beautiful they’re afraid of you.”
“Beautiful!” she said.
“You are, you know.”
“I’m too big! Anyway, this is a ridiculous discussion,” she said, but she wasn’t displeased by the subject.
“I’m not exaggerating,” he said, feeling shy, his voice constricted. She blushed, the skin below her eyes darkening, her breasts seeming to rise.
Part of him had also risen, but the sly host, anticipating that obstreperous guest, had already pulled the sheet back up to his waist. “I’ll be able to walk by tomorrow,” he said. “I’m healing up pretty fast.”
“That’s youth, as the nurse kept saying,” Bonnie said. “Oval won’t be back till Sunday, so I won’t allow you to leave till then, no matter how well you can walk. You’ve got to meet Oval. Until then you’re my prisoner! Anyway, I called Phil and they’re looking for parts for your motorcycle and it won’t be fixed before next week at the earliest.” She kept talking, and as she talked she glanced quickly at his eyes and away, again and again, so he knew the idea had grown that he might not be just a boy. That thought had infected her, and made her keep talking. “I had a beau once, a long time ago. We were going to be married, I think, but then I won the contest. He was Prom King…”
“And you were Prom Queen.”
“That’s right. Everything was so simple and nice then.” They were silent, she thinking of the departed past.
He said, “Oval has a job so he can support the Church?”
“Yes. It’s a shame because it tires him so. He has this machine he built to freeze things, but it isn’t exactly perfected yet. He’s gone to Seattle to get some aluminum trays he needs ’cause the others broke, and pretty soon the lima beans are going to start coming and they’ve simply got to be frozen. Mostly they put them on pushcarts, but that’s not enough and too slow.”
“He runs a freezer?”
“He works for the Tulaveda Produce Co-op, where they freeze food, you know. Everything. Orange juice, beans, spinach, everything that grows, practically. But it’s the lima beans that take so much out of him because they come in all at once, and he’s no longer young, you know. He’s nearly fifty.”
His lack of real curiosity about Oval Forester had to do with the dread of meeting this saint, this teacher, and her insistence that he meet him. That, and having to be the man’s guest. Oval Forester could not be pleased with the situation. And what had John Hearne, the sinner, to do with saints, anyway? The whole idea of saints made him itch. Even lima beans, coming up like that, out of nowhere, made him feel vaguely defensive, like a child trying not to swallow, or trying to swallow when he couldn’t.
“I wish Oval were here,” Bonnie said. “I can’t help worrying about Urban tomorrow morning. He depends on Oval a lot more than he thinks.”
“I’d forgotten about the world coming to an end,” he said.
She smiled, then was ashamed of smiling at Urban’s expense. “It’s very real to him. We mustn’t laugh.”
“Maybe he’s right. He came and sort of preached to me about it.”
“Did he? I hope he didn’t disturb you. He does get angry when people doubt him, but he’s not as bad as he used to be, and all because of Oval. That’s why I wish Oval were here.” Bonnie looked around the room and noticed Thelma’s new drawing on the bureau. “Thelma!” she said. “So she did come and bother you!”
“She just brought me the drawing,” he said.
Bonnie got up to look at it. “Isn’t that sweet. And so good! Do you mind her, John? I know some people are…sensitive that way. It’s just one of those things.”
“I’m not proud of it,” he said.
“No, of course not. You’re good. I know.”
“Well…”
“No, I mean it. Do you know the kind of men I have to deal with in my line of work?” Her face turned bitter, revealing the planes and contours of its non-beautiful distinctiveness, so that it seemed ordinary and knowable. The end of her nose seemed to grow into an asymmetrical bulb, flushed and white-edged. For a moment it was a face capable of ugliness, but just for a moment.
“You mean acting and modeling?”
“Yes, all that. You can’t believe what they take for granted. Even the sissy boys want something from you. No, they’re not scared of pretty girls—not out here. Pretty girls are a kind of…produce. You begin to think it’s the rules or something. But then I found Christ through CSW, and Oval’s teaching, which revealed my Christed self. We are all one with the Divine Spirit, John! It’s so beautiful!” She had smoothed again into a simpler form. Beauty as simplicity, he thought, or purity of emotion, the way we wanted it in our fantasies. But the religious spirit wasn’t his fantasy, and his baser guest couldn’t help wondering if Oval Forester, the fifty-year-old saint, wasn’t getting something more tangible from this beauty than abstract love and emulation.
“Well,” he said as a form of confession, “you’ve got me all wrong, I’m afraid.”
“Oh, no, I haven’t!” she said as if teasing him. “When we are one with Him we perceive the soul-forces of the innermost being wherein God’s harmonies, the celestial symphony of Truth and Love, are heard. I see all of you, and you are good. Maybe you don’t think you believe, but that’s just background noise. Deep down, you believe.”
He believed she was a nice person, but anyone who could stomach all that jargon couldn’t be too bright. That was what he believed, even as his green eyes gazed levelly into her beautiful blue ones. What he was thinking was that if it were at all possible, without making a lot of trouble and unhappiness and embarrassment for everyone concerned, he could fuck her, that would be marvelous. Did she not perceive that in his soul-forces? Did she perceive the blue-steeler he tried to disguise by having raised his knees against a lesser pain?
“I believe you’re beautiful,” he said, the shy constriction in his voice again. “Beyond that everything is fuzzy as hell.”
“Oh, John!” She laughed, kissed him swiftly on the cheek, gathered up her nursing equipment and left.
Something swirled in her wake, a soft film of color in his vision of this place where she lived. Even that quick look at bitterness, and a disdain for her theology, couldn’t clear the rainbows of infatuation. He could say she was too big, as she’d said of herself, and therefore not for the likes of him. Also too old, too this, too that. He could think “fuck,” that diminishing word, all he wanted, but still he saw her through the prismatic haze of a lens.
She came back later
, Thelma peering contritely around the doorframe behind her, and asked if he needed help washing up for supper. He said he was healing fast and could make it, thanks to the Healing Echelons. This bantering tone came from their new near-intimacy and the mention of his belief or disbelief, and she recognized it for what it was, an invitation to further efforts at discussion and conversion, now that they knew where they stood.
They ate supper in the large kitchen, grace said by Bonnie, words like “Lord” and “thankful” passing through his ears. Thelma’s spoon was like a dowsing wand, never wanting to turn where she wanted it to, pieces of macaroni and cheese slipping out of it in a way that made his wrist ache for her thick wrist. Hadasha Kemal Allgood said hello enthusiastically, but during the meal he read a small, flexible, leather-bound book as he chewed each piece of macaroni separately, like a Fletcherite, ten times or more before swallowing what was left of it, his fork, always in his left hand, primed with one more segment. There was something pelicanish about his head and the foreign object of his larynx.
After supper Hadasha Kemal Allgood went away and Bonnie washed while Thelma wiped, seriously concentrating on her task. The dishes were plastic, though Thelma didn’t drop one. He sat at the table and could hear her moist breath. She had the habit of turning her head as if she had to see something up in the corner by the ceiling, and he wondered if she actually looked up there, or if the movement itself was all she was impelled to do.
When the dishes were done the three of them went into the brown living room, he stiff-legged but without a crutch. Tomorrow he would be able to walk even better, once the morning stiffness had been worked out. This thought gave him the ease of his coming freedom but also the bother of its choices. Bonnie snapped on amber lights in brown sconces around the walls, over the heavy furniture, also illuminating a portrait of a handsome Anglo-Saxon-looking Christ. Over the oak mantel of a small fireplace was a brass cross. The cabinet radio, which Thelma turned on, was of brown veneer, with a small amber dial, its loudspeaker defined by a Gothic arch. Crooning music grew slowly out of it, to which Thelma bounced, her parts out of sync with each other.
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