That’s what we thought—until we met some of those descendants. We called out to them, and they were the only people in the whole gathering to act rather huffish and snooty toward us when we explained what we were doing. “Which of George F.’s children are you descended from?” I asked.
The woman looked at me as if I were an idiot. “LeGrand, of course,” she said. The tone was absolutely clear: How could I have been so hopelessly ignorant as not to know they were of the sacred family of the Most Recent General Authority?
Kristine and I laughed over it (we still do) but I was also deeply ashamed of them. They were my cousins, after all, but they were also crushing snobs, and their status derived entirely, not from any achievements of their own, but from what one of their ancestors did—as if it made them a different kind or class of people from the rest of us. Except that every single person at that gathering was descended from a President of the Quorum of the Twelve—a higher status than LeGrand had ever achieved—and so it was ludicrous to pull social rank.
Even though they accepted the name tags we wrote for them, they didn’t wear them—we saw the tags lying atop the nearest garbage can only a few moments later. So at that family reunion, the way you could tell LeGrand and at least one branch of his family was by their lack of a name tag. They were just too cool for the rest of us.
Uncle LeGrand was a beloved Apostle—by me as much as anyone. And I still loved hearing him speak in Conference until he died some years later. But from then on, there was a little sad memory in my heart whenever I saw and thought of him. For all his many contributions to the Church (for instance, his missionary book A Marvelous Work and a Wonder), he had failed to raise at least some of his family with the humility expected of Christians. The lesson taught by the Savior when he pointed to his disciples and said, “These are my mother and my brothers,” was apparently lost on them.
I single them out only because I’m in that family and had occasion to see their behavior firsthand. But snobbery based on Church rank and prominence is a pernicious disease in the Mormon Church. Even though the doctrine is clear—children of General Authorities can go to hell just as fast and just as far as anyone else, if they so choose—snobbery is more the rule than the exception. I’ve heard it as recently as the priesthood session of the most recent General Conference (April 2007), when one of the speakers, in order to prove the “success” of a particular group of young men, listed how many had become mission presidents and temple presidents and General Authorities of the Church.
When the speaker said that, I turned to the man beside me and said, “I’m just a priests’ quorum instructor and a cultural arts director. I guess my youth leaders failed with me. I might as well give up and go have a beer.” He laughed, but he knew what I was saying and had also felt the sting. When Church ranking is used as a measure of “success” in raising faithful Latter-day Saints, it brands all the ordinary, hardworking, faithful fathers and mothers in the Church who have not reached those rare prominent offices as failures. It’s actually a rather shocking thing to do—but such snobbish insults happen all the time, without anyone batting an eye.
“Worthy to Be One of Us,” then, is a story of a particular family; but it’s also a story of what should actually matter in a family and in an organization that purports to be, and tries to be, the Kingdom of God on earth.
And if you’re not a Mormon, I can’t imagine why this would matter to you one bit. What do you care whether one Mormon is unkind to another because of who his or her family is or isn’t?
But then, the tendency toward snobbery is a human universal. So even if you’re outside the culture in which this story takes place, perhaps it will have some resonance for you. And for that reason, these four Mormon stories are included in a collection that is otherwise definitely not geared toward a religious audience.
CHRISTMAS AT HELAMAN’S HOUSE
There were times when he wanted to give up and live in a tent rather than fight with the contractors one more time, but in the end Helaman Willkie got the new house built and the family moved in before Christmas. Three days before Christmas, in fact, which meant that, exhausted as they all were from the move, they still had to search madly through the piles of boxes in the new basement to find all the Christmas decorations and get them in place before Santa showed up to inaugurate their new heat-trapping triple-flue chimney.
So they were all tired, weary to the bone, and yet they walked around the house with these silly smiles on their faces, saying and doing the strangest things. Like Joni, Helaman’s sixteen-year-old daughter, who every now and then would burst into whatever room Helaman was in, do a pirouette, and say, “Daddy, Daddy, I have my own room!” To which he would reply, “So I heard.” To which she would say, hugging him in a way calculated to muss his hair, “You really do love me, now I know it.”
Helaman’s old joke was that none of his children had ever been impossible, but they had all been improbable more than once. Twelve-year-old Ryan had already been caught twice trying to ride his skateboard down the front staircase. Why couldn’t he slide down the banister like any normal boy? Then at least he’d be polishing it with his backside, instead of putting dings in the solid oak treads of the stair. Fourteen-year-old Steven had spent every waking moment in the game room, hooking the computers together and then trying out all the software, as if to make sure that it would still work in the new house. Helaman had no evidence that Steven had yet seen the inside of his own bedroom.
And then there was Lucille, Helaman’s sensible, organized, dependable, previously sane wife, kissing all the appliances in the kitchen. But the truth was that Lucille’s delight at the kitchen came as a great relief to Helaman. Till then he had been worried that she was still having doubts about the house. When the movers left, she had stood there in the main-floor family room, staring at the queen-size hide-a-bed looking so forlorn and small on the vast carpet. Helaman reassured her that in no time they’d have plenty of furniture to fill up the room, but she refused to be reassured. “We’re going to buy a truckload of furniture? When our mortgage is bigger than the one on our first store back in 1970?”
He started to explain to her that those were 1970 dollars, but she just gave him that how-stupid-do-you-think-I-am look and said, “I took economics in college, Helaman. I was talking about how I felt.”
So Helaman said nothing. He had long since learned that when Lucille was talking about how she felt, none of the things he could think of to say would be very helpful. He couldn’t even begin to put into words what he felt—how proud he had been of this house he had caused to exist for her, how much he needed to know that it made her happy. After all their years of struggling and worrying to try to keep the business afloat, and then struggling and worrying about the huge debts involved in starting up the branch stores, he knew that Lucille deserved to have a fine house, the finest house, and that he deserved to be the man who could give it to her. Now all she could think about was the huge amount of money the house had cost, and Helaman felt as though someone had taken the very breath out of him.
Until she came into the kitchen and squealed in delight. It was exactly the sound his daughters made—an ear-piercing yelp that gave him headaches whenever Trudy and Joni got excited for more than a minute at a time. He had almost forgotten that it was hereditary, that they got that glass-shattering high note from Lucille. She hadn’t been surprised and happy enough to make that sound in years. But she made it now, and said, “Oh, Helaman, it’s beautiful, it’s perfect, it’s the perfect kitchen!” It made up for her reaction to the family room. If it hadn’t, he would have despaired—because he had worked hard to make sure that the kitchen was irresistible. He had kept careful track of everything she had ever admired in magazines or home shows; he had bought all new appliances, from the can opener and toaster to the microwave and the breadmaker; he had brought those all into the house himself and had his best crew install everything and test it so it ran perfectly. He had inventoried every uten
sil in her old kitchen and bought a brand-new replacement; they had chosen new silverware and pans and dishes for daily use, and he had arranged it as close to the way she had her old kitchen arranged as possible, even when the arrangement made no sense whatever. And he had kept her out of the kitchen—with tape across the door—all the time he was doing it, and all during the move itself, until that moment when he told her she could tear away the ribbon and walk through the door. And she squealed and kissed all the appliances and opened all the drawers and said, “Just where I would have put it!” and “I can’t believe there’s room for everything and there’s still counter space!” and “How did you get them all out of the old kitchen without my seeing you do it?”
“I didn’t,” Helaman told her. “I bought all new ones.”
“Oh, you’re such a tease,” she said. “I mean, here’s the old garlic press. I’ve never even used it.”
“Now you have two of them.”
And when she realized that he meant it, that he had really duplicated all her utensils and put them away exactly as she had always had them, she started to cry, which was a sign of happiness even more certain than the squealing.
So yes, they loved the house, all of them. Wasn’t that what he built it for? For them to feel exactly this way about it? But what he hadn’t expected was his own feeling of disappointment. He couldn’t match their enthusiasm; on the contrary, he felt sad and uncertain as he walked through the house. As if after all his struggling to cause this house to exist, to be perfect, now that it was done he had no reason to be here. No, that wasn’t quite the feeling. It was as if he had no right to be here. He strode through the house with all the rights of ownership, and yet he felt like an interloper, as if he had evicted the rightful occupants and stolen the place.
Am I so used to struggling for money all my life that when I finally have visible proof that the struggle is over, I can’t believe it? No, he thought. What I can’t believe is me. I don’t belong in a place like this. In my heart, I think of myself in that miserable three-bedroom tract house in Orem with the four makeshift bedrooms Dad built in the basement so all his six kids could have rooms of our own. Well, I’m not a wage man like Dad, and my kids will not be ashamed of where they live, and my wife will be able to invite any woman in the ward into her home without that look of apology that Mother always had when she had to bring chairs from the dining room just so there’d be enough places for her visitors to sit.
Yet even when he had told himself all these things, reminded himself of the fire that had burned inside him all during the building of the house, he still felt empty and disappointed and vaguely ashamed, and he just didn’t understand it. It wasn’t fair that he should feel like this. He had earned this house.
Well, what did he expect, anyway? It was like Christmas itself: The gifts were never as good as the preparations—the shopping and hiding and wrapping. He felt as he did because he was tired, that’s all. Tired and ready for it to be the day after Christmas when he could get back to running his little empire of five Willkie’s stores, which sprawled on their parking lots in choice locations up and down the Wasatch Front, beaming their cheery fluorescent lights to welcome people in to the wonderful world of discount housewares. This had been a record Christmas, and maybe getting the accountants’ year-end reports would make him feel better.
Then again maybe it wouldn’t. Maybe this is what it is, he thought, that makes all those lonely women come to see the bishop and complain about how they’re so depressed. Maybe I’m just having the equivalent of postpartum blues. I have given birth to a house with the finest view in the Darlington Heights Ward, I’m sitting here looking out of a window larger than any of the bathrooms, the twinkling lights of Salt Lake Valley on Christmas Eve spread out before me, with Christmas carols from the CD player being pumped through twenty-two speakers in nine rooms, and I can’t enjoy it because I keep getting the postpartum blues.
“They’re hee-eere!” sang out Trudy. So the new love of her life (the second in December alone) must be at the door. At eighteen she was their eldest child and therefore the one nearest to achieving full human status. Unlike Joni, Trudy still spelled her name with a y, and it had been more than a year since she stopped drawing the little eyes over the u to make it look like a smile in the middle of her signature. At church yesterday she had fallen in love with the newly returned missionary who bore his testimony in a distinctly Spanish accent. “Can I invite him to come over for the hanging of the stockings?” she pleaded. In vain did Helaman tell her that it would be no use—his own family would want to have him all night, it was his first Christmas with them since the 1980s, for heaven’s sake! But she said, “I can at least ask, can’t I?,” and Lucille nodded and so Helaman agreed, and to his surprise the young elder had said yes. Helaman took a mental note: Never underestimate the ability of your own daughters to attract boys, no matter how weird you think your girls have grown up to be.
And now the young elder was here, no doubt with so many hormones flowing through him that he could cause items of furniture to mate with each other just by touching them. Helaman had to get up out of the couch and would play father and host for a couple of hours, all the time watching to make sure the young man kept his hands to himself.
It wasn’t till he got to the door and saw two young men standing there that he realized that Trudy had said they’re here. He recognized the elder, of course, looking missionary-like and vaguely lost, but the other was apparently from another planet. He was dressed normally, but one side of his head was mostly shaved, and the other side was partly permed and partly straight. Joni immediately attached herself to him, which at least told Helaman what had brought him to their door on Christmas Eve—another case of raging hormones. As to who he was, Helaman deduced that he was either a high school hoodlum she had invited over to horrify them or one of the bodacious new boys from the Darlington Heights Ward that she had been babbling about all day. In fact, if Helaman tried very hard he could almost remember the boy as he looked yesterday at church, in a lounge-lizard jacket and loosened tie, kneeling at the sacrament table, gripping the microphone as if he were about to do a rap version of the sacrament prayer. Helaman had shuddered at the time, but apparently Joni was capable of looking at such a sight and thinking, “Wow, I’d like to bring that home.”
By default Helaman turned to Trudy’s newly-returned missionary and stuck out his hand. “Feliz Navidad,” said Helaman.
“Feliz Navidad,” said the missionary. “Thanks for inviting me over.”
“I didn’t,” said Helaman.
“I did, silly,” said Trudy. “And you’re supposed to notice that Father said Merry Christmas in Spanish.”
“Oh, sorry,” said the missionary. “I’ve only been home a week and everybody was saying Feliz Navidad all the time. Your accent must be good enough that I didn’t think twice.”
“What mission were you in?”
“Colombia Medellín.”
“Do I just call you Elder or what?” asked Helaman.
“I’ve been released,” said the missionary. “So I guess my name is Tom Boke again.”
Joni, of course, could hardly bear the fact that Trudy’s beau had received more than a full minute of everyone’s attention. “And this is my first visitor to the new house,” said Joni.
Helaman offered his hand to Joni’s boy and said, “I know a good lawyer if you want to sue your barber.”
Joni glared at him but since the boy showed no sign of understanding Helaman’s little jest, she quickly stopped glaring.
“I’m Spencer Raymond Varley,” said the boy, “but you can call me Var.”
“And you can call me Brother Willkie,” said Helaman. “Come on in to family room A and we’ll tell you which cookies Joni baked so you can avoid them and live.”
“Daddy, stop it,” said Joni in her cute-whiny voice. She used this voice whenever she wanted to pretend to be pretending to be mad. In this case it meant that she really was mad and wa
nted Helaman to stop goading young Var.
Helaman was too tired to banter with her now, so he pried her off his arm, where she had been clinging, and promised that he’d be good from now on. “I was only teasing the spunky young lad out of habit.”
“His father is the Spence Varley,” Joni whispered. “He drives a Jag.”
Well, your father is the Helaman Willkie, he answered silently. And I’ll be able to get you great prices on crock pots for the rest of your natural life.
The family gathered. They munched for a while on the vegetables and the vegetable dip, the fruits and the fruit dip, and the chips and the chip dip. Helaman felt like a cow chewing its cud as he listened to the conversation drone on around him. Lucille was carrying the conversation, but Helaman knew she loved being hostess and besides, she was even worse than the girls, waiting to pounce on Helaman and hush him up if he started to say anything that might embarrass a daughter in front of her male companion for the evening. Usually Helaman enjoyed the sport of baiting them, but tonight he didn’t even care.
I don’t like having these strangers in our home on Christmas Eve, he thought. But then, I’m as much a stranger in this house as they are.
By the time Helaman connected back to the conversation, Joni was regaling her fashion-victim boyfriend with the story of the marble floor in the entryway. “Father told the contractor to lower the floor in the entryway or the marble would stand an inch above the living room carpet and people would be falling down or stubbing their toes forever. And the contractor said he wouldn’t do it unless Father accepted the fact that this would make them three days late and add a thousand dollars to the cost of the house. And so Father gets up in the middle of the night—”
Keeper of Dreams Page 66