The Thanatos Syndrome

by Walker Percy

  But Max has had enough of this, of both of us. “Let’s go, Doctor,” he says wearily, holding out one hand to the door, handing along Bob Comeaux with the other.

  10. ELLEN IS QUITE HERSELF.

  She’s given up tournament bridge—actually she’s not much better at it than I. We play social bridge with Max and Sophie Saturday and Sunday afternoons.

  It is pleasant to gaze out over Lake Pontchartrain from Max’s high-rise condo. The bright mazy sun whitens out the sky into a globe of pearly light into which the causeway disappears like a Japanese bridge into a cloud. Between hands Max goes out on the little balcony and focuses his telescope on a coot or a scaup bobbing like corks on the light, vapory water. Once, a memorable day, he put on the high-power lens and we saw a vermilion flycatcher perched on the bridge rail, pooped, taking a breather on the long voyage from Venezuela.

  Later Ellen experienced a religious conversion. She became disaffected when the Southern and Northern Presbyterians, estranged since the Civil War, reunited after over a hundred years. It was not the reunion she objected to but the liberal theology of the Northern Presbyterians, who, according to her, were more interested in African revolutionaries than the divinity of Christ. She and others pulled out and formed the Independent Northlake Presbyterian Church.

  Then she became an Episcopalian.

  Then suddenly she joined a Pentecostal sect. She tells me straight out that she has had a personal encounter with Jesus Christ, that where once she was lost and confused, seduced by Satan and the false pleasures of this world, she has now found true happiness with her Lord and Saviour. She has also been baptized in the Holy Spirit. She speaks in tongues.

  I do not know what to make of this. I do not know that she has not found Jesus Christ and been born again. Therefore I accept that she believes she has and may in fact have been. I settle for her being back with us and apparently happy and otherwise her old tart, lusty self. She is as lusty a Pentecostal as she was a Southern Presbyterian. She likes as much as ever cooking a hearty breakfast, packing the kids off to school, and making morning love on our Sears Best bed, as we used to.

  She loves the Holy Spirit, says little about Jesus.

  She is herself a little holy spirit hooked up to a lusty body. In her case spirit has nothing to do with body. Each goes its own way. Even when she was a Presbyterian and I was a Catholic, I remember that she was horrified by the Eucharist: Eating the body of Christ. That’s pagan and barbaric, she said. What she meant and what horrified her was the mixing up of body and spirit, Catholic trafficking in bread, wine, oil, salt, water, body, blood, spit—things. What does the Holy Spirit need with things? Body does body things. Spirit does spirit things.

  She’s happy, so I’ll settle for it. But a few things bother me. She attributes her conversion to a TV evangelist to whom she contributed most of her fortune plus a hundred dollars a week to this guy, which we cannot afford, or rather to his Gospel Outreach program for the poor of Latin America. I listened to this reverend once. He’d rather convert a Catholic Hispanic than a Bantu any day in the week.

  She has also enrolled Tommy and Margaret in the Feliciana Christian Academy, which teaches that the world is six thousand years old and won’t have Huckleberry Finn or The Catcher in the Rye in the library.

  At least it’s better than Belle Ame, and the kids seem happy and healthy.

  But I worry about them growing up as Louisiana dumbbells.

  I might have held out for the parochial school, which was good, but it folded. The nuns vanished. The few priests are too overworked to bother. Catholics have become a remnant of a remnant. Louisiana, however, is more Christian than ever, not Catholic Christian, but Texas Christian. Even most Cajuns have been converted, first by Texas oil bucks, then by Texas evangelists. The shrimp fleet, mostly born again, that is, for the third time, is no longer blessed and sprinkled by a priest.

  Why don’t I like these new Christians better? They’re sober, dependable, industrious, helpful. They praise God frequently, call you brother, and punctuate ordinary conversation with exclamations like Glory! Praise God! Hallelujah! I’ve nothing against them, but they give me the creeps.

  Ellen often invites me to a meeting of her Pentecostals, who hug and weep and exclaim and speak in tongues. She wants to share her newfound Lord with me, especially the Holy Spirit.

  “No thanks,” I say, after one visit.

  “Why not?”

  “I’m afraid Marva will hug me.” Marva, her mother, has converted too.

  “I’m serious. Why not?”

  “I don’t want to.”

  “Why don’t you want to?”

  “I can’t really say.”

  “I know why.”

  “Why?”

  “You’re still a Roman.” There’s nothing new in this. While she was an Episcopalian, she began calling Catholics “Romans.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “At heart you are.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “That that priest still has his hooks in you.”

  “Father Smith? Rinaldo? He doesn’t have his hooks in me.”

  “He got you to do Mass with him.”

  Do Mass? “That was back in June. It was my namesake’s feast day. I could hardly refuse.”

  “Namesake’s feast day. What does that mean?”

  “The feast of Sir Thomas More. June twenty-second.”

  “And he got you again last month.”

  “He didn’t get me. It was the fiftieth anniversary of his ordination. I was the only one he asked. You wouldn’t want me not to go.”

  “Do you know what he does now?”

  “Who, Rinaldo? What?”

  “When he calls you and I answer the phone, he won’t tell me what he really wants. He’ll make up another excuse like being sick and needing a doctor.”

  “He’s a sly one.”

  “And how about you taking the children to Mass last week?”

  “It was Christmas.”

  “We don’t think much of Christmas. The word means Christ’s Mass.”

  “Well, after all Meg and Tom are Catholics.”

  “I don’t care what you call them as long as you admit that neither you or Tom or Meg will be saved until you are born again of the Holy Spirit and into the Lord.”

  “Okay.”

  “Okay what?”

  “I thought I was born again when I was baptized.”

  “How can a little baby be born again right after it has been born?”

  “That’s a good question, Nicodemus.”

  “What did you call me?”

  “Nothing bad. Come over here by me.”

  But she keeps standing, hands on her hips.

  “Why don’t you go to the fellowship meeting with me tonight? The children are going.”

  “I think I’ll stay home. But right now—”

  “I know exactly what you’re going to do.”

  “What?”

  “Have five big drinks and watch another stupid rerun of Barnaby Jones.”

  “That’s so. But for now, why not come over here by me? You’re a very good-looking piece.”

  She sighs, but takes her hands off her hips, holds them palms up, looks up to heaven: what to do? Actually she’s quite content to have it so, as am I.

  “Come by me.”

  “All right.” She sighs again, comes by me—a wife’s duty— then smiles.

  We get along well. It is my practice which is shot.

  11. HUDEEN KEEPS WELL, still reigns, seated on her high stool, in her tiny kingdom bounded by sink, stove, fridge, counter, and stereo-V.

  She still keeps an eye on the soaps, mumbles amiably in a semblance of conversation, making sounds of assent and demurrer. But once she made herself clear.

  It was Thanksgiving. Ellen had quit her bridge tour and was home for good. The children had quit Belle Ame Academy. Chandra had landed her new job as weatherperson, and even as we watched, there she was! On TV! Slappi
ng the black Caribbean with her stick, she as black as the Caribbean.

  “Bless God!” cried Hudeen, who can’t believe it, a person, someone she knows, Chandra herself, up there on the magic screen. “Bless Jesus!”

  “It’s a good Thanksgiving, Hudeen,” I said.

  “And you better thank the good Lord!” cried Hudeen, clear as a bell.

  “We will,” said Ellen, who says a blessing indistinctly, speaking in tongues, I think.

  Hudeen is not speaking in tongues. “I say bless God!” said Hudeen, looking straight at me. “Bless his holy name!”

  “All right.”

  “You be all right too, Doctor,” said Hudeen straight to me.

  “I will?”

  “Sho now.”

  “How do you know, Hudeen?”

  “The good Lord will take care of you.”

  “Good.”

  12. THE LITTLE CEREMONY which was supposed to celebrate the reopening of the hospice turned out to be a fiasco.

  Father Smith, who I had understood from Max to have come down from the fire tower in his right mind ready to take over St. Margaret’s, behaved so strangely that even I, who knew him best, could not make head or tail of what he was saying. To the others he appeared a complete loony, or, as Leroy Ledbetter put it, crazy as a betsy bug. To make matters worse, he also managed to offend everyone, even those most disposed to help him and the hospice.

  It was doubtful at first that the hospice was going to succeed, after all.

  Local notables gathered to welcome the staff, a civic and ecumenical occasion, not only other priests, ministers, and a rabbi, but many of my fellow physicians both federal and local—good fellows who were ready to donate their time and services—the mayor, a representative from United Way and the Lions Club. Even our Republican congressman showed up and promised his support of legislation to divert at least some of the federal funding of the Qualitarian program to the hospice movement.

  Chandra had even arranged for a NewsTeam-7 remote unit to tape the highlights for the “People and Places” segment of the six o’clock newscast. It was one of those occasions, Chandra assured me, which has “viewer appeal,” like helping old folks, flying in kidneys and hearts for dying babies. Americans are very generous, especially when they can see the need in their living rooms. And NewsTeam-7 had 65 percent of the market in the viewing area.

  It, the hospice, couldn’t miss.

  There was to be a Mass in the little chapel at St. Margaret’s, a few words from Father Smith, followed by a televised tour of the facility, with perhaps short interviews with a malformed but attractive child, a spunky addled oldster, and a cheerful dying person.

  It couldn’t miss.

  But one look at Father Smith as he comes up the aisle of the crowded chapel and I know we’re in trouble.

  He’s carrying the chalice, but he’s forgotten to put on his vestments! He’s still wearing the rumpled chinos and sneakers he wore in the fire tower for months, plus a new sweatshirt. It is a cold January day.

  People turn to watch, as a congregation watches a bride enter church for her wedding. I am sitting in the front row with Max. There is a stir and a murmuring at Father Smith’s appearance. But it is not his clothes I notice. Something else: a certain gleam in his eye, both knowing and rapt, which I’ve seen before, in him and on closed wards.

  The chalice is held in one hand, properly, the other hand pressed on the square pall covering, but there is something at once solemn and unserious about him, theatrical, like my daughter, Meg, playing priest.

  Oh my.

  Well, at least he is going to say Mass, where it’s hard to get in trouble. Perhaps the friendly crowd will take his old clothes as a mark of humility, albeit eccentric—but you know what a character he is!—or maybe they’ll see him as a worker-priest or a guerrilla priest.

  But instead of mounting the single step to the platform of the altar, he turns around in the aisle, not two feet from me, exactly between me and Max, and faces the little crowd, which is still well disposed if somewhat puzzled.

  “Jesus Christ is Lord!” he says in a new, knowledgeable, even chipper voice. Then: “Praise be to God! Blessed be his Holy Name!” A pause and then, as he looks down at the upturned faces: “I wonder if you know what you are doing here!”

  Well then, I’m thinking, what he’s doing is what Catholics call pious ejaculations, which are something like the Pentecostal’s exclamations—Glory! and suchlike—that plus a bit of obscure priestly humor.

  But no. They are uttered not as pious ejaculations but more like a fitful commentary, like a talkative person watching a movie.

  All is not yet lost. Sometimes priests say a few words before Mass, especially on a special occasion like this, by way of welcome.

  No one is as yet seriously discomfited.

  Father Smith begins to make short utterances separated by pauses but otherwise not apparently connected, all the while holding chalice and covering pall in front of him. They, the utterances, remind me of the harangues delivered by solitary persons standing in a New York subway or in the ward where I was committed by Max and later served as attending physician.

  But his remarks, though desultory and disconnected, are uttered in a calm, serious voice. During the pauses he seems to sink into thought.

  “The Great Prince Satan, the Depriver, is here.”

  Pause.

  “It is not your fault that he, the Great Prince, is here. But you must resist him.”

  Pause.

  “I hope you know what you are doing here,” he says.

  Pause.

  “The fellows at Fedville know what they were doing.”

  Pause.

  The audience is trying to figure out whether the pauses are calculated, as some preachers will pause, even for long pauses, for purposes of emphasis. They listen intently, heads inclined, with even a tentative nod or two.

  “True, they were getting rid of people, but they were people nobody wanted to bother with.”

  Pause.

  “Old, young. Born, unborn.”

  Pause.

  “But they, the doctors, were good fellows and they had their reasons.

  “The reasons were quite plausible.

  “I observed some of you.

  “But do you know what you are doing?

  “I observe a benevolent feeling here.

  “There is also tenderness.

  “At the bedside of some children this morning I observed you shed tears. On television.

  “Do you know where tenderness leads?”

  Pause.

  “Tenderness leads to the gas chamber.”

  Pause.

  “This is the feast day of my patron saint, Simeon the Stylite.

  “Simeon lived atop a pillar forty feet high and six feet in diameter for twenty years.

  “He mortified himself and prayed for the forgiveness of his sins and the sins of the world below him, which was particularly wicked, being mainly occupied by the Great Prince Satan.

  “I don’t see any sinners here.

  “Everyone looks justified. No guilt here!

  “Simeon came down to perform good works when his bishop asked him to, but when the bishop saw he was willing, he let him go back up.

  “I’d rather be back up in the tower, but I do know what I’m doing here.

  “Do you think it is for the love of God, like Simeon? I am sorry to say it is not.

  “I like to talk to the patients here.

  “Children and dying people do not lie.

  “One need not lie to them.

  “Everyone else lies.

  “Look at you. Not a sinner in sight.

  “No guilt here!

  “The Great Prince has pulled off his masterpiece.

  “These are strange times. There are now two kinds of people.

  “This has never happened before.

  “One are decent, tenderhearted, unbelieving, philanthropic people.

  “The other are so
me preachers who tell the truth about the Lord but are themselves often rascals if not thieves.”

  During one of the pauses Chandra and the NewsTeam-7 crew turn off their lights, fold their cameras, and quietly creep out.

  “What a generation! Believing thieves and decent unbelievers!

  “The Great Depriver’s finest hour!

  “Not a guilty face here!

  “Everyone here is creaming in his drawers from tenderness!”

  Long pause.

  “But beware, tender hearts!

  “Don’t you know where tenderness leads?” Silence. “To the gas chambers.

  “Never in the history of the world have there been so many civilized tenderhearted souls as have lived in this century.

  “Never in the history of the world have so many people been killed.

  “More people have been killed in this century by tenderhearted souls than by cruel barbarians in all other centuries put together.”

  Pause.

  “My brothers, let me tell you where tenderness leads.”

  A longer pause.

  “To the gas chambers! On with the jets!

  “Listen to me, dear physicians, dear brothers, dear Qualitarians, abortionists, euthanasists! Do you know why you are going to listen to me? Because every last one of you is a better man than I and you know it! And yet you like me. Every last one of you knows me and what I am, a failed priest, an old drunk, who is only fit to do one thing and to tell you one thing. You are good, kind, hardworking doctors, but you like me nevertheless and I know that you will allow me to tell you one thing—no, ask one thing—no, beg one thing of you. Please do this one favor for me, dear doctors. If you have a patient, young or old, suffering, dying, afflicted, useless, born or unborn, whom you for the best of reasons wish to put out of his misery—I beg only one thing of you, dear doctors! Please send him to us. Don’t kill them! We’ll take them—all of them! Please send them to us! I swear to you you won’t be sorry. We will all be happy about it! I promise you, and I know that you believe me, that we will take care of him, her—we will even call on you to help us take care of them!—and you will not have to make such a decision. God will bless you for it and you will offend no one except the Great Prince Satan, who rules the world. That is all.”