by William Poe
Vivian was the middle child of nine, and all her siblings were still living, with the exception of Wesley, who had died as a teenager and whom Vivian saw reflected in Simon’s every mannerism. Wesley’s portrait greeted Simon each morning as he left his bedroom, the most recent addition to the gallery of ancestors. A few cousins still lived within a few hours’ traveling distance of Magnolia, but the majority had departed long ago to seek work in areas less economically depressed, and with more for the men to do during leisure time than chew the fat with neighbors, or to fish, or to hunt—or to get into trouble with a neighbor’s wife or daughter.
A crowd of about thirty people stood around picnic tables and makeshift serving platforms in the field beside the house of Simon’s aunt. One platform was constructed of planks supported by cinder blocks, another fashioned from a discarded door, with broken hinges dangling from one side, set across corroded oil barrels. Steam rose from casseroles kept warm atop Sterno burners, a fryer sizzled with chicken wings, and aromatic smoke billowed from the grease dripping off a locally raised hog onto a bed of hot coals. Pies, made from scratch, vied for symmetrical perfection, none able to compete with the rhubarb prepared by Vivian’s oldest sister, Cassie, the entry easily identified by the burgundy filling that oozed from its lattice crust.
Vivian held Simon’s arm for support as she made her way to a row of folding chairs, easing into a seat beside Cassie and their youngest surviving brother, Jared. First and second cousins that Simon had not seen since his teenage years updated each other on recent events in their lives and, in one overheard conversation, railed about liberals destroying the country—“won’t even let kids pray together before a game any longer…Judgment Day is coming, that’s for sure.” None of the relatives acknowledged Simon when they greeted Vivian, though Simon caught the furtive glances cast his direction, darting away if their eyes met. Vivian asked Simon to fetch her a glass of punch from a bowl sitting precariously on a wobbly TV stand. As soon as Simon stood up, Jared (pronounced as if his named rhymed with scared) leaned close to whisper something into Vivian’s ear. Vivian’s lips pursed as her eyes fixed in the way Simon had always dreaded as a little boy.
When Simon returned with a paper cup brimming with sweet red punch, Jared voiced what was on his mind. “Why did you come here? Don’t you know how much embarrassment you’ve caused this family?”
Simon wondered what troubled Uncle Jared, unless Vivian had told them about Simon’s drug problems, which Simon was sure she hadn’t; they couldn’t know about his relationship with Thad, and Simon’s past association with Sun Myung Moon’s religion was a long time ago—at least from Simon’s perspective.
“Uncle Jared,” Simon began, “the truth is, I hardly know you or anyone else at this reunion—not since I was a child. How could I possibly be an embarrassment to you?”
Alerted to the confrontation, several cousins approached. Aunt Cassie gave up trying to conceal her disdain, looking Simon square in the eye; but it was Simon’s aunt Josephine, who had not greeted Vivian or Simon when they arrived, who marched over to say, “You turned your back on Jesus to follow that blaspheming Korean.”
Simon wondered if her disdain originated with his presumed rejection of Jesus or the fact that he had believed in the divinity of an Asian.
“Have you repented and asked the Lord’s forgiveness?” Jared demanded.
Simon began to understand. Just as it had been for Connie and Derek, Simon’s leaving the fold of Sun Myung Moon’s religion wasn’t enough. They expected him to profess faith in their beliefs.
Vivian leaned forward, covering her face, signaling her shame at the way family was treating Simon.
“See what you’ve done to your mother,” Jared accused.
Vivian straightened her back and through reddened eyes said with force and clarity that defied the symptoms of her stroke, “If you want to treat my son like he’s not family, I don’t know why I came.” She stood, appearing deceptively stable, and took a step forward as Simon extended his arm to assist.
As Simon and Vivian slowly walked toward the car, Simon noticed the adults’ attitude reflected in the eyes of his youngest cousins, taking the lesson to heart: those not like us should be driven away.
Simon remembered why he had adopted the persona of an alien from Zenon, a being who could observe the prejudices of his relatives without being affected by them. Now, considering his many transgressions since leaving Sun Myung Moon’s religion, Simon mused, If they only knew!
Vivian and Simon drove away from the reunion in silence. Vivian’s tears had dried, the look on her face hardened into one of firm resolve.
“What brought that on?” Simon asked.
“It must be Connie’s doing. She and Derek filled everyone with stories about how you were following the Antichrist. But Lordy mercy, I would have thought that wouldn’t matter anymore. Hon, I’m sorry about today. I sure never expected anything like that, or I wouldn’t have asked for you to take me.”
“If I had known how they felt, I would have dropped you off and come back when the reunion ended.”
“I would never let you do something like that. I’m not ashamed of you, and I’ll be damned if anyone is going to condemn you, family or no family.”
Simon marveled at Vivian’s use of a curse word, unable to recall any other example of Vivian using such language. Passing Uncle Jared’s house on the north side of town, Vivian turned toward Simon. “Simon, what you believe is your own business.”
It had not occurred to Simon that Vivian thought he still believed in Sun Myung Moon, but in her mind, he knew, a person must believe in something, and Simon had not responded to Jared’s question about repentance, nor had he attended church when invited by Connie and Derek.
Vivian’s beliefs were constant and straightforward: she believed that Christ died for her sins and that though she might fall short of God’s expectations, Christ forgave her. Vivian had learned long ago not to insist that the family attend church. Though she never knew why, Simon’s tantrums after being molested by the baptism attendant ensured that he’d never go, and Lenny had rarely attended services after the pastor of the church during World War II refused to let husbands and wives meet together for prayer, strictly enforcing a church prohibition against mixing the sexes outside Sunday sermon. In Lenny’s mind, this was an idea that violated the spirit of worship and led him to settle on his one article of faith: once saved, always saved.
If Simon had proclaimed himself agnostic, Vivian would never have accepted it. Belief in God was natural, like breathing. Doctrines might err, but everyone knew that God existed. They needed only to open their hearts to Christ in order to experience him fully.
“I wish your grandmother was alive,” Vivian said as they entered a stretch of highway shaded by oak and walnut trees. They had to slow down as they approached trucks transporting logs to the lumber mill in Warren.
“Why’s that?” Simon asked, though he too missed his grandmother.
“Mother would never have let your uncle Jared get away with challenging you about your faith. She followed the example of Jesus and let people be. When did the Lord ever condemn anyone?”
“I’m afraid Christians don’t try very hard to act like Jesus,” Simon cautiously noted, realizing that his words might give Vivian more reason to assume he still held his prior beliefs.
“Judge not lest you be judged,” Vivian insisted. “That’s the plain truth.” She nervously tugged the hem of her dress as she considered her words. “I sure wish you and your father had learned to talk to each other. You are so much alike.”
Without meaning to, Simon laughed. “Lenny and me? Alike?”
“More than you know. At least it’s not too late for you.” Vivian reached for a Kleenex, carefully balancing her purse on a knee, and, with the elbow of her bad arm as leverage, unclasped the lock. She dabbed beats of sweat from her hairline, where perspiration always formed when Vivian felt nervous. “You enjoyed drawing so much when you
were little. Remember how I used to bring home construction paper and boxes of Crayolas? You loved the red one best. You’d spend hours sitting in front of the TV on that dog pillow drawing the craziest pictures I ever saw.” Vivian smiled, thinking about them.
Simon remembered the drawings, attempts to visualize his home planet of Zenon, the imaginary world where he felt welcome, where no ancestors followed his every move, and where Lenny never criticized his attempts to find friends or engage in his favorite pastimes, whether it was learning to play piano or drawing pictures of spacemen.
“And those paintings in your room,” Vivian recollected. “You had such an imagination. I don’t know where you got it from.”
“Remember those books that arrived every year as part of our Funk & Wagnalls encyclopedia? I never told you, but one year I cut out images of modern art with a razor blade and taped them to my headboard.”
“I wondered where those came from.” Vivian sighed, an old mystery having finally been solved. “You never told me what you did with the paintings you had in your room when you joined those people.”
Vivian had always characterized Unification Church members as those people, asking, on visits home, when he planned on returning to those people; or, when challenging Simon about things he said during attempts to explain his beliefs, saying that those people had put crazy ideas in his head.
Simon dreaded Vivian asking what he had done with the paintings. She knew how important they were to Simon, even if she didn’t understand why he’d painted them. From Vivian’s point of view, the paintings had vanished into thin air—and, in fact, they had.
“Do you remember the Bible story about Abraham sacrificing his son Isaac?” Simon began.
“But the angel of God stopped him,” Vivian said, anticipating his story.
“In the church that I belonged to, we believed that new members should dedicate themselves to God by sacrificing the thing they loved the most.”
“Oh, son, all those paintings?”
A pain shot through Simon’s chest as he considered what he had done those many years ago. While Vivian and Lenny were at work, Simon had collected his canvases and taken them into the woods, built a bonfire, and watched them go up in flames on a bier of dry leaves, dead branches, and wadded-up drawings.
“An angel might have stayed Abraham’s hand, but no one stopped the fire I set in the woods. Everything burned to ashes.”
Vivian started to say something but hesitated, having no words to express the sympathy she felt for provoking such a painful memory.
“We ought to buy some dahlia bulbs on the way home,” Vivian suggested as if the prior conversation never happened. “Snider’s Feed has the best ones. The pictures on the boxes looked so pretty when Connie and I were up there the other day.”
“Planting for next spring sounds like a good idea,” Simon agreed, recognizing Vivian’s desire for a happier future.
“You really are a lot like your father,” Vivian again insisted. “When he was a boy, all he cared about was animals.”
Simon had seen pictures of Lenny as a teenager in his backyard holding a baby raccoon, surrounded by geese and chickens.
“Lenny would go into the woods to look for animals that needed care,” Vivian continued. “He rescued foxes and rabbits that got caught in those awful traps that broke their legs. He’d nurse them back to health and then let them go. Lenny wanted to be a veterinarian. That was all he talked about when we first met.”
Vivian and Lenny were young when they began dating. Vivian’s mother had departed Magnolia with Vivian and the younger siblings and moved to Little Rock, an event that forever shaped Vivian’s emotions. Vivian met Lenny two years later, and they married as soon as they turned eighteen. The answer to why Vivian’s parents had separated depended on whom Simon asked. Vivian claimed that her father had gone into a rage and beaten her brother, Wesley, whose memory, if not his ghost, haunted Simon’s childhood. Simon had been born on the same day as Wesley, and, as Vivian pointed out when she noticed Simon separating the vegetables on his plate, ate his food like him. Wesley was left-handed like Simon, and Wesley loved art. One of Vivian’s dearest possessions was a leather notebook etched with images of 1930s cartoon characters surrounding a World War I biplane. Simon often wondered if Vivian thought he was her brother’s reincarnation—one of those doctrinal errors she might think God would forgive.
“Couldn’t Lenny have gotten a GI loan and gone to veterinary school after he came home from the war?”
“He sure wanted to do that,” Vivian confirmed, and then said in a tone of deep melancholy, “but I caused trouble by getting pregnant. We met when he was on leave. I drove to where he was stationed in Alabama.” Vivian sighed deeply, thinking of Connie. “I wanted a child so much.” A tear formed in Vivian’s eye, and she reached for another Kleenex. “We didn’t have much money. You know we lived with Mandy and Bart in Little Rock. Mandy never worked a day in her life, and of course, Bart lost the mercantile store when the Depression hit.”
Lenny’s father, Bartholomew “Bart” Powell, had lost his store in downtown Little Rock because he’d allowed the store’s debtors to default on their bills, never suing any of them to recover his money on the feed he was providing through credit. As a child, whenever Simon questioned Bart’s wisdom, he was told to respect his deceased grandfather because Bart had demonstrated his nature as a good Christian. The family motto became deeply entrenched through repeated telling: Better that one family suffer than for others to go without. As a follower of Sun Myung Moon, Simon had believed in the motto as a message from his ancestors as a way of preparing him to receive the new messiah and to agree to the sacrifices that discipleship required. Now Simon wondered if Bart’s attitude had been a wise one. The farms failed anyway, and if he had taken even a few cents on the dollar, he might have secured a future for his business and a livelihood that Lenny might have inherited, allowing him to attend veterinary school after the war.
“Your father took responsibility for the care of his parents,” Vivian explained. “We both worked, but it was hard to make ends meet. If Lenny had gone to school, we couldn’t have managed.”
“Then I came along. He must have loved that.”
“That might have added to his bitterness—one of the reasons you and your father didn’t get along. I know he loved you, but he didn’t want more children. Your sister was enough for him. I was the one who wanted a large family.”
“And I can see from the reaction at the reunion what a blessing family can be.” Simon immediately regretted his sarcasm.
“Don’t think badly of them,” Vivian consoled. “If only Momma was alive. She didn’t judge people because of what they thought. She cared about how people behaved themselves. She knew you were a good person.”
The last time Simon had gone to a reunion of Vivian’s family was during his time as a leader of the church’s fundraising activities in Texas. His secretary at the Dallas headquarters had driven with him to Magnolia. Vivian knew it might be the last opportunity for Simon to see his grandmother and had insisted that he come. Many of the same relatives had attended that reunion, but they had mostly held their tongues. Only one person, a cousin by marriage, couldn’t hold back. “Are you as brainwashed as that son of Vivian’s?” he rudely asked the secretary. “What kind of person follows a man who thinks he’s Jesus? That Moon fellow should be sent back to wherever he came from.”
For her part, the secretary, a woman in her fifties who had never endured abuse from anyone, who had bravely raised her children on a commune in Northern California, turning her back on the whole of American society, replied calmly and eruditely, “If you took some time to study our philosophy, you might come to understand that Sun Myung Moon does not think he is Jesus.”
The cousin by marriage had no interest in debating theology. “Ain’t readin’ none of your crap,” he said, steadfast in his conviction that people did not have a right to their own beliefs.
Simon sto
od near his grandmother, who, overhearing the exchange, took his hand and pulled him close, overcoming the debility of a recent stroke, a malady suffered by all the elderly members of Vivian’s family. “Don’t you listen to them,” she had said. “You are family. If we start chasing away people because of what they believe, what kind of people will we be?”
As Vivian had feared, that was the last time Simon saw his grandmother. Driving home from the recent reunion, Simon wished her children had inherited his grandmother’s personal convictions instead of the ones taught at their church.
“Your mother was a decent person,” Simon assured. “It’s not easy to accept people’s differences the way she did.”
“I miss her,” Vivian said. “It’s not the same anymore when the family gets together. That was the last picnic I’m attending. If they want to see me, they can come to Sibley.”
“I wouldn’t count on that, not while I’m there with Thad.”
“Well, I’m sorry for them, then,” Vivian said resolutely. “Thad is welcome to stay as long as he wants. I hope you know that.”
“I know,” Simon responded.
He really did know.
CHAPTER FIVE
“What are we going to do?” Thad asked, lying awake with his head on Simon’s chest, enjoying the comfort of luxuriating in a lover’s arms.
“Breakfast,” Simon responded.
“You know what I mean.” Thad reached under the covers, turned Simon on his side, and playfully slapped him on the butt.
“Okay, I do know what you mean,” Simon admitted. “It isn’t like I haven’t thought about it. Vivian has said we can stay at the mansion as long as we like. I could take over the place after Vivian’s gone, though I hope that’s not anytime soon.”