The only thing that seemed to lift him out of his numbness now, even if just momentarily, was the lingering memory of Kay’s last smile and her mysterious last words, radiant with hope and promise while grief was devouring him.
The summer inched on, pulling the dead weight of Stephan Pearson along behind it. He told me on his deathbed that he had spent most of that summer milling about aimlessly like a corralled steer, plagued by images from his past that wouldn’t go away, a collage of poignant scenes sometimes composed of elements widely separated in time. They often involved the interplay of his two angels. The sight of Kay’s last smile, for example, would merge for him into the feel of Cecilia’s first kiss, and then linger on and on. Or Cecilia’s bending down low beside the dead cardinal, tears copiously flowing, would blend into Kay’s heart-rending sobs at the mere suggestion of giving up her baby, and linger on and on. Or the feel of his hand pressed flat against Kay’s warm womb over their baby would become the feel of Cecilia’s warm body pressed against his shivering chest under the oak tree just minutes before she….
But invariably these scenes all eventually resolved into that last smile of Kay’s, which also lingered on and on.
What tormented Steve terribly that summer at his darkest moments was the recurring fear that the Kays and the Cecilias of this world, beautiful as they are, might be pure illusion, leaving sneering chaos as the only ultimate reality. Though he fought it all the way, there were long hours, even entire days, when he was overcome with grief and despair. He was in a continuous state of mourning for what felt to him like the demise of goodness itself, the death of everything worth living for.
The long late evenings of that summer often found him alone in the little fenced cemetery, an easy walk from their house, kneeling in front of the raw dirt of two of the three plots he had purchased, or leaning up against a nearby tree facing them. It was almost as if he was enviously eyeing the one unoccupied plot, barely able to contain his longing to fill it.
XXIV
Before the fall semester began, the president of Christiania College reminded Steve that he was entitled to take a sabbatical leave of a year and that, although this normally required a year’s previous notice, they were prepared to make an exception for him this year in view of the circumstances. But he replied that no, there was no way he felt he could profitably use such a year at this point. So the middle of September found him once again trudging up the hill each morning to spend most of the day in his turret, venturing out only to conduct his classes or to assist students in the laboratory or to attend chapel. It is quite possible that he would have spent the entire school year just going through the motions if something quite extraordinary had not occurred at the beginning of the semester.
Rolph Eriksen entered Christiania College in the fall of 1959 primarily because of Dr. Pearson. He had heard of the double personal tragedy that had struck his revered mentor, and this made him even more eager to be near him at this time. On the first day of class when he saw Dr. Pearson shuffle inertly into the room without so much as a glance at his students, he knew he was beholding a very different man. The renowned professor moved stiffly as if in pain. When he reached the lecture stand, he thumbed through the class cards without looking up. Absently he fastened the vest microphone around his neck, fiddling with it for a moment or two until it was comfortable. Then muttering between his teeth he said, “This is Physics 25, Lecture Section D. Please answer when I call your name.”
One by one he went through the alphabetically arranged stack of cards until he came to the E’s.
“James Edwards.”
“Here.”
“Harold Engquist.”
“Here.”
“Rolph Eriksen.”
“Here.”
“Donald….”
“Rolph Eriksen?” he repeated, puzzled.
Then, raising his eyes and removing his reading glasses, he said, “Rolph, would you please raise your hand?”
The lad, about halfway back on the right side, lifted his hand just high enough to attract the professor’s eye. A furtive smile played on his lips.
“Hello, Rolph,” Dr. Pearson said, warming up considerably. “I … I’m glad to see you.”
He nodded his head in the young man’s direction, replaced his glasses, and sank into the class cards once more. He had to clear his throat a few times before he could resume the roll call.
After four months of nonstop numbness, something had reawakened a bit of feeling in him. Something had found and touched a live nerve.
XXV
Rolph Eriksen, the quiet one across the long table who had said grace; the one who “with no conception of social behavior” had read most of Dr. Pearson’s popular articles; the one who from his position of “strong mental and spiritual health” had apologized for his fellow students; the one whom Dr. Pearson had said he would be honored to have in class; this Rolph Eriksen was now in his class and in one of his laboratories, rubbing shoulders with him on an almost daily basis.
Who was Rolph Eriksen? In the days just before Dr. Pearson’s death, I got to know him quite well. And this is what I learned in those long moments of quiet time which we shared during the vigil we spent together in the Pearson home.
At the age of twelve, Rolph had discovered the Minneapolis Public Library with its awesome treasures of the wisdom of the ages. At the age of twelve, he had also had his first mature spiritual awakening, precipitated by a chance encounter with an atheist at the library that drove him into Sacred Scripture and into Blaise Pascal. In his young mind, this unlocked for him what he came to understand as the “Higher Realm” in which all those who are serious in their quest for truth and beauty are to be found. This included for him the likes of John Milton and Isaac Newton, Ludwig van Beethoven and Johann Sebastian Bach, St. Teresa of Avila and Florence Nightingale, Louis Pasteur and Stephan Pearson, among others. All of these had in common an understanding of life as an upward quest, inspired by God, however diverse may have been their particular means of expressing it.
In the process of absorbing these treasures in his most impressionable years, a unique universe of relationships took shape in his mind. Its characteristics were garbed for him in terms that might have struck others as abstract but which for him possessed a concrete and almost personal quality: quest, higher realm, truth, beauty, revelation, holiness, and above all perception. Perception was for him the key to our ability to relate to the whole order of things, an order independent of man and contingent only on the Divine Will. Perception was an inner sensitivity to expressions of the higher realm not immediately apparent to everyone. One man, for example, might perceive a sunset, bask in it, be drawn into its mysterious and fleeting glory, while another man might just notice it and move on.
One day when Rolph was in the tenth grade, he decided it was time to try to put words to this. The result was a highly metaphorical and turgid opus in which none of the few people to whom he showed it, with the exception of his parents, saw more than a jumbled version of Coleridge’s Kubla Khan, which is jumbled enough to begin with. Yet in Rolph’s mind it was all crystal clear, the perfect blending of the natural world, the world of the human mind, and the world of Holy Scripture. His chief sorrow in these formative years of his life was the enslavement he observed in most of his fellow students to the cheap and fleeting pleasures of the lower realm when God had equipped them so well for rising to the higher realm and savoring its exquisite joys. All they had to do to attain the higher realm was to allow Him to be their Guide.
The quest for truth and beauty was the “Blue Flower” of Rolph Eriksen’s adolescence, the vision that harmonized and sanctified everything for him. It led him early in life to attainments which for him were just the beginning, but for others already seemed like solid achievements. He soaked up everything he could lay his hands on in physics, chemistry, and mathematics, but he also devoured the complete works of Shakespeare, most of Calderon, Milton’s Paradise Lost, the Pensees of Pascal, sig
nificant sections of Aquinas, Kierkegaard, Ibsen, Goethe, and many others. In the privacy of his own room he lost himself in the Mozart and Beethoven symphonies and concertos, the great Bach choral works, much of Sibelius, Bruckner and Dvorak, and a smattering of many other composers, thanks to the long-play records he borrowed from the library. In all of these he discerned the outpouring of the souls of men who had been drawn by grace into the higher realm and were inspiring us and the whole human race to follow them there. All of this was for him an expression of the Gospel and he was not ashamed to say so.
In high school he fell in love with a girl from his church who respected him almost reverentially but found him a total enigma. His fascination with her began one night in a dream, his first of a tenderly romantic nature, and was fueled by his identification of her with the leading character in a historical novel he was reading at the time. At any rate, with the poetry he wrote to her, the short essays he submitted for her scrutiny, his social maladresse, his intellectual preoccupations, and his utter disinterest in the usual teenage activities, this two-year-long relationship was probably doomed from the start. Toward the end of their senior year in high school, she successfully killed it by telling him she was in love with someone else.
Thus when he enrolled in Christiania College, he had two compelling forces at work in him—his quest to live in and from the higher realm and his need to heal from the loss of the young woman he adored.
Now, Rolph was not a tinkerer who enjoyed fooling around with unknowns just to “see what would happen if….” In fact, his patience could wear thin in the laboratory. But he thrived on controversies surrounding such issues as the “what” and the “why” of the atom, the relationship of chemistry to biology, the whole field of quantum mechanics, and the like. He thrilled when he was in the presence of a mystery to be solved. Like the youthful Stephan Pearson, he was never sated with knowledge about anything because it was always leading him into more questions. He was in a virtually constant state of awe at the grandeur of God’s creation.
Dr. Pearson observed him with mixed feelings. How would the God who was so very alive in him now survive in the face of the cold realities of life? He saw a forty years’ younger version of himself in Rolph, and the sight quite frankly made him very uneasy.
Dr. Pearson’s encounter with Rolph certainly succeeded in drawing him back at least partway into the stream of life. Because he cared for the lad so much, he had a decision to make: Should he encourage him to follow his quest, or would it be more charitable to dissuade him from it? Should Rolph be warned that he was probably heading for bitter disillusionment? Would such a warning do any good? And what if, in spite of everything, the lad was not all wrong?
There were moments, plenty of them, when the professor could barely stomach the blind enthusiasm of his pupil. Through him he was reliving his own days of blind enthusiasm. And look where they had taken him! He knew only too well where that special spark in Rolph came from and how easy it was to identify it with God’s Will. Working shoulder to shoulder with the boy in the laboratory, he sensed in him the same awe which he too had once taken to be of divine origin. But he never had the courage to turn to him and say, “Be careful, Rolph.”
Instead he let Rolph’s budding genius grow and blossom out unchallenged. He let it open like a flower, delicate, exquisite, and quivering with life. He let it bathe in the sunlight and wave in the gentle breezes. He let its fragile petals unfold to the world, wondrous to behold. He could not bring himself to warn him that someday that flower would fall to the ground, those petals would scatter in the wind, and even that stem would be trampled into the dirt. He couldn’t bring himself to do it even though he greatly feared that Rolph was setting himself up to be crushed as he had been.
It would be wrong to say that Steve had totally abandoned his faith in the goodness and ultimate victory of God over evil, but it would be correct to say that this faith was badly shaken. The prospect for him that Rolph in all his youthful faith and enthusiasm might well be on a collision course with calamity haunted him and expressed itself in some strange behaviors. Sometimes, while working side by side with him in the lab, he would suddenly turn his back on him and attend to another student. Or he would avoid him altogether, whether in class or in lab or anywhere else. They did have some good moments together, but Dr. Pearson’s personal burden of sorrow and his anxiety for Rolph were never far from the surface.
Things went on like this until Christmas vacation arrived. He was at his wit’s end over Rolph. He couldn’t bring himself to come right out and disabuse the boy of his beautiful but hollow ideals, but he had to find some way to put him on guard. He decided that he would work this out in detail during the Christmas vacation, and then do what he needed to do for Rolph’s sake first thing in the New Year.
Christmas itself was sheer torture for Steve. Mary offered to go with him to the Midnight Candlelight Carol Service, but he declined.
“I can’t face it.”
She understood.
Instead he spent almost the whole night of Christmas Eve slouched down in the loveseat where Kay had given him her present just one year ago, facing the tree and its soft lights which Mary had set up and decorated for him when he was away at work.
Pressing himself down into that hallowed spot where Kay had trapped him in the overflow of her love one year ago, now on that very same Holy Night one year later, Steve’s grief overpowered him. The irony of Kay’s last smile—could it have been caused by something as simple as her not knowing about their son’s death, or was it caused by the wonder of what she was experiencing at that very moment?—this irony was altogether too much for him now, and in tandem with her final words, it broke him down into a night of anguish and nonstop tears.
“Oh my Kay, my angel, my love! Pray for me! Pray for me!” he sobbed all through that holy night.
XXVI
It wasn’t easy for Dr. Pearson to sit down and figure out what to say to Rolph. The initial spadework was easy enough. It involved some data gathering, some attention to current events, some research into trends in history, and some reflection on the mystery and nature of evil. He saw it as his duty to present as balanced a picture as he could to Rolph and to let him take it from there.
But elements from his immediate past kept distracting and confusing him. Many of them inhabited the very house he was living in! They lurked in the Christmas tree and in the ornaments Kay had carefully chosen for it. They were hiding in the loveseat where Kay had revealed her secret. They were sprinkled all over the kitchen floor where she had dropped the two dishes. They mocked him from the kitchen table where they had shared devotions and prayer. They even nestled up to him at night in their bed of love.
By New Year’s Eve, Steve was no closer to putting pen to paper than he had been at Christmas. He was starting to wonder if he had it in him to do it at all. Then it crossed his mind that someone in the early 1950s had given him a news magazine that had impressed him with its keen analysis of the trends of the time. He’d saved it with similar material somewhere in the attic. One more piece of data to consider before he’d have to get down to business! So he climbed the steep narrow staircase and crawled through the trapdoor into the attic. He rummaged through stacks of old material—journals, magazines, even newspapers. It was cold in the attic, so he went back downstairs to fetch a sweater. This whole exercise was starting to feel futile to him. It left him as cold in his heart as he was in his body. On his knees on the dusty floor, his fingers numb and stiff, he sorted through the last remaining stack of magazines in search of the article he was looking for.
He was about to turn and leave when he spied a tattered old briefcase in the corner, encased in cobwebs. He stared at it for a few moments. A faint smile of recognition played with his cheeks. This old friend had gone through college with him and accompanied him to Germany and to the institute in Boston. It had sat in his truck all through World War II and all during his time in Pittsburg. And now it had lain in the attic
for some eleven years gathering dust. Fondly he reached for the handle and pulled the ragged object toward him across the rough timbers of the floor. His numb fingers fumbled to release the catch and open the flap. Dipping into the body of the case, he slowly retrieved one picture frame containing a yellowed page of manuscript music. The ink was fading on the paper and the frame was cracked and split. Steve set it down gently and drew out the next and the next until all of them were arrayed before him in a row. Then he reached into the side pocket and withdrew another frame. And there, suddenly, was his Cecilia, beaming at him across the years and through the veil between earth and Heaven. Trembling, he set it down carefully on top of the music frames at his knees.
Now he had his wallet in his hands and was fumbling with the picture section. He removed one of them, his favorite photo of Kay taken two years after they were married, and set it down next to the portrait photo of Cecilia.
The low sun was sending two dust-laden shafts of light gliding almost horizontally through the dim attic from the small west windows. They were intercepted by the form of a shivering old man hunched over some objects on the floor, sobbing his heart out.
That evening, pages from a small lined tablet flew in all directions. The scrawl on them is at times almost illegible, and their order is not always clear. I found them stuffed into the top drawer of an already stuffed desk. Rolph may have been the motive behind this outpouring, but he tells me that he never saw those pages until I showed them to him after Dr. Pearson’s death.
This is what was on them, as best I could reconstruct it:
XXVII
Dear Rolph,
I am writing this to you because I care about you very much and I wish to spare you some of the agonies that have been my lot in life. I do not pretend to have all the answers. In some ways there are more questions in my life now than ever. It is almost as if the grace of God is forcing me at long last not to jump to conclusions too soon. Turmoil accurately describes my present state of mind, though I have come to some clarity about a few things. I am a man torn between the loves of my life that seem so Heaven-sent and the disasters in my life that seem to have come straight from hell. I am presently struggling hard to make sense of it.
A Grain of Wheat Page 38