Sometimes she ran her fingers lightly through his hair, sometimes she leaned close to him, suddenly, and blew in his ear. Though other people were around, she thought nothing of lifting his hair and kissing the back of his neck, so that he gave a start and cried aloud; and of course she laughed at him then.
Nathan could not help staring at her. He could not help thinking about her. She meant nothing by her behavior; she was almost as impulsive and playful with one of her father’s organists as she was with him, yet he could not keep his thoughts from drifting onto her. Only when he was totally absorbed in studying the Bible or preparing his talks or meditating was he freed of Leonie, and in her presence he became increasingly nervous, so that it seemed to him everyone must know: must be whispering and laughing about him.
Why must a man be attracted to a woman, Nathan wondered. Why must it be . . . ? It should not have stirred his blood so violently, that she pinched him or kissed his cheek or squeezed his hand, running her thumb lightly across his palm; it should not have mattered in the slightest. Yet he could not help his feelings and there were times when he could not stop himself from staring at her, frankly and openly. A kind of knife thrust seemed to jolt him through the eyes when she appeared: he simply could not control it. Leonie in her pink-and-white cotton dress that fitted her tightly across the breasts and was cinched in at the waist . . . Leonie with several loops of grape-sized imitation pearls around her neck . . . Leonie with her ridiculous rattling bracelets, her gardenia perfume, her square-cut diamond engagement ring, her open-toed shoes with the amazing spike heels . . . A glistening, pulsating, heedless life shone through her; it seemed to leap into him from her, without her awareness. Almost from the start of their acquaintanceship Nathan began to dream about her, waking in horror as every nerve-end in his body fused to a scalding needle point, and broke, and spilled: though he groaned aloud for deliverance, there was none. And he came to see that she was unclean, that her playfulness was really the Devil’s work, and that God Himself must have wished for Nathan to be confronted with her so he might triumph over the temptation of the flesh she represented.
He puzzled over the situation for days at a time. Why must a man be attracted to a woman, or to any manifestation of the world at all? For the friendship of the world is enmity with God. And the exterior, physical aspect of another human being is the least significant part of that human being. He puzzled over the riddle, he meditated upon it, he knelt and put the question to Christ Himself. God is: acts through: fills all of His creatures completely. Wasn’t that so? There was a kind of aura around people that Nathan sometimes saw clearly, and this aura rendered the physical aspect of their being inconsequential, for it suggested that only the interior, only the spiritual, was genuine. He did not care what others looked like—he did not really see them. Nor did he think of himself in visual terms. (After meditating for hours he lost all awareness of himself as a physical creature and could not have said who, or what, he was: his existence was reduced to a pinpoint of consciousness that seemed to be floating in a lightless, colorless void.) Since all are God, and all is God, there should be no attraction of one aspect of God to another, but only the brotherly affection of like for like. Nathan was well aware of the vulgar jokes that circulated about revivalist preachers and their attraction to young converts—young women whom they touched and embraced sinfully while the women were transported by the joy of the Lord; to his astonishment, Reverend Beloff himself sometimes made such jokes. But Nathan truly felt no differently toward those converts who were attractive young women than he did toward men, or toward the elderly, or the crippled, or sick, or dying: his hours with God had allowed him to know that one soul was as another, that God was all in all. Even the commonplace sentiment that we are all brothers and sisters in Christ was finally irrelevant, since the soul possessed no sexual differentiation.
The several incidents of Nathan’s “healing” had occurred when his vision was obliterated and he seemed to be somehow within the sufferer’s consciousness, in complete union with the other’s soul. Like a man standing in a darkened cave with a flashlight in his hand, Nathan was able to penetrate the darkness surrounding the other person, and to discern the cause of sickness. A gluey black substance, vile and clotted, squidlike, sluglike: an element foreign to the other’s nature: which he was able to drive out, as if it were something living. (Was it in fact a living creature, a devil? Were such things, which seemed to Nathan rather more like thoughts, snarled and ugly and deathly thoughts, what Christ had seen as devils and had driven out of the afflicted?) At such times Nathan was carried far out of himself, in a kind of trance, no longer conscious of his actions; nor did he have any real wish to know what he did, for fear it would lessen his effectiveness in the future. He did not care to stress this side of his ministry, since it didn’t seem to him that God had called him to it in any clear way. And Reverend Beloff was uncharacteristically cautious: “I’m fearful of introducing anything so controversial in our campaign for souls, Nathan, at least at this time, on account of the competition, for one thing, and for another the risk of law suits—do you know about that two-million-dollar suit pending against Sister Price out in Kansas for allegedly contributing to the death of a diabetic child?—and right here in the state that snake-handling preacher who was arrested and sentenced to a prison merely because some idiot squeezed a rattlesnake too tight and it bit him and he fell over dead!—as if that was the preacher’s fault, when it must have been ordained from all time! It’s a touchy, highly specialized area of service, Nathan, and you have got to do an exhaustive amount of screening before you let the afflicted onto your program . . . Christ Himself, now: you only hear of His successful cases, right? And you don’t know how long the lepers remained cured and the dead stayed above ground and the devils kept their distance from those they were driven out of.”
It seemed to Nathan obvious that the only reality was interior and invisible, and that the senses—particularly the sense of sight—lied, and when he was most himself, most united with God, he knew this to be so. But the rest of the time he was baffled, even a little chagrined: even a little angry.
Leonie Beloff! Noisy, gleaming with perspiration and good health and high spirits, hurrying about in her absurd high heels, her hair flying; kittenish, spoiled, insolent, crude, utterly charming. The Devil peered at Nathan through the young woman’s pale green eyes. The Devil smiled and winked at him. Nathan would have liked to shield his own eyes, to turn away in alarm. Or he would have liked to seize Leonie by her plump shoulders and shake her until her teeth rattled. Stop! What are you doing! Why are you tormenting me! She was unpredictable as a small child, and as outrageous. At a banquet in the basement of the Bethany-Nazarene Church, a creamed-chicken-on-biscuits supper in honor of a visiting missionary, Leonie tapped her father’s artificial hand with a spoon, playing on the fingers (which gave off an eerie hollow sound, vaguely musical); another time, only a few seconds before their television show began, she let loose an enormous yellow butterfly in the studio, saying it was the Spirit of Creation; her costly engagement ring was returned to Mr. Carroll inside a chocolate cupcake she had baked herself. Nathan noted, and was disturbed by, the fact that she deliberately won over his Grandmother Vickery—who by all odds should have detested her—by presenting her with little gifts: ceramic birds she had made herself in the church’s Arts and Crafts class, handkerchiefs with Mrs. Vickery’s initials embroidered on them, pots of African violets, Fanny Farmer chocolates, rhinestone brooches. “She’s a little flighty but goodhearted,” Mrs. Vickery said. “The important thing isn’t whether a girl has a loud, raucous laugh or not, but whether she’s generous and considerate of others.” (As Nathan’s position with the Beloff troupe became more secure, and his reputation grew, Mrs. Vickery became increasingly gracious; she wore long dresses of dove gray or magenta or dark brown with full sleeves, dresses that resembled party gowns, and her iron-gray hair was bleached to a lovely snow-white, and waved every Friday afternoon at a
downtown hairdresser’s, and she spoke calmly of the probability of the coming of Christ within her grandson’s lifetime: since it was clear to anyone with eyes and ears that the world was in the Final Days and the Apocalypse was close at hand.)
Leonie said of Mrs. Vickery that she was a sweet old girl, tough as a buzzard, exactly the kind of mother—or was she his grandmother—that Christ Himself would have preferred. “She’ll protect you from the multitudes, hon, the women especially,” Leonie laughed. “Or don’t you maybe need to be protected from the women . . . ?”
Nathan blushed and tried to change the subject.
He could not have said if he loved Leonie or hated her; or whether, in his deepest self, he had any feelings for her at all. The Devil was only using her, he knew, and she could not be blamed for Nathan’s own failings—he tried to make himself remember that important fact. Even the Devil had no power, no reality, except what Nathan allowed. Sin sprang only from the will, the refusal to cleave to God and turn away from the world: sin was more a matter of weakness than misdirected strength.
Nevertheless he feared sleep, and knelt by the side of his bed for hours, hoping to summon God to him. It had been years—many years—since God had manifested Himself to him. The command to humble himself, the agony and the nausca, and the long bout of illness that followed: terrifying at the time but now, he saw, a sign of God’s blessing. He would have welcomed even another frightful visitation if it would strengthen his soul, if it would annihilate Leonie Beloff in his sight . . .
VII
How long will You keep Yourself apart from me, O Lord? How long will You hide Your face from me? How long shall I take counsel in my soul, having sorrow in my heart daily?
The loneliness.
Empty of mind, empty of heart.
Now it is December and very cold indeed and there is nothing to say about my craving for You that I have not already said a hundred times. Early in the morning, before dawn, I walk outside in the snow in my bare feet, hoping to feel pain; hoping to feel something. Overhead the stars are fading. The sky is coarse and curdled. Sparrows awake in a tumult, in the straggly hedge outside my window, and their frantic chirping mocks the despair of my soul.
I am no longer ill, it is said. But neither am I well.
Why do You continue to forsake me, seeing that I am broken in body and mind and spirit these many long months! The cruelty of Your disregard, the remorselessness; the indifference. For out of the south comes the whirlwind, and cold out of the north, and by Your breath is frost given to the earth.
And that is all.
LONG AGO THERE was Nathanael Vickery and he dwelled with You in the blissfulness of utter peace. On the surface of his being there was agitation, as the surface of a body of water is pricked and disturbed and appears to shudder and to disintegrate, yet is constant and whole. Long ago he dwelled with You while he established himself firmly in the world of man, achieving a success in that world that ordinary men might bitterly covet, and he had no care for money, no care for fame, or the high regard of men and women; for it was given unto him to see heaven open, and the angels of God ascending and descending upon the Son of man, and though his body exerted itself in this world his spirit triumphed elsewhere, being of the same substance as Your nature. Why should he have taken thought for his life, for what he might eat or drink?—for the comforts of his body? He inhabited a body but was not of it. Take therefore no thought for the morrow: for the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself. So it is written, and so Nathan believed.
“YOU AND I could marry,” Leonie said lightly. “You’re how old?—eighteen?—why, eighteen’s old enough for anything! First time I saw you, you were only a boy, skinnier than you are now and edgy as a weasel and your voice the strangest, hauntingest sound I ever heard—it just went through me, went through me in waves, and the thought came to me that I already knew you: that we’d met before and would certainly be meeting again.”
“Then you played that trick on me,” Nathan said slowly.
“Oh no, honey! You were just a boy that first time, no more than twelve or thirteen. It was a few years before Kincardine, I forget where—Rockland, maybe, or the outskirts of Yewville. Which? I just sat there and tears came into my eyes because you were the sweetest, most controlled child-preacher I ever heard in my life—like you weren’t a child at all, but mature as you’d ever get in this lifetime. No, hon, that wasn’t Kincardine and it wasn’t the night we met. I just slipped away that first time . . . I didn’t come forward to bother you at all. Because I knew we’d already met, and that we’d be meeting again soon.”
“Maybe you ought not to have come forward at all, ever,” Nathan said. “Maybe you should have slipped away that second time too.”
“But why do you say that!” Leonie cried, hurt.
Nathan wrapped the rest of his sandwich in a paper napkin and sat immobile, staring at the littered picnic ground.
“Why do you say that,” Leonie said, snatching the sandwich from him and throwing it away. “You’re just spiteful, you’re just mean. And anyway my daddy would have sought you out within the year—he’d been hearing about you and he needed a new assistant and it’s always been in his head, you know, to get himself a boy protégé because he was so young himself when he started out: and my daddy always gets what he wants.”
“He wanted you to marry Mr. Dietz but you aren’t marrying him,” Nathan said.
“Well, I might just marry him! I don’t know. I haven’t decided.”
Nathan saw that she had drained her cup again—was it the second or third—and wondered if he should take the bottle away from her. She glanced at him, seemed to be reading his thoughts, and sloshed some gin into the cup he had set down by his feet. “Go ahead and drink it! Drink it right down! You’re not going to sit there like a goddam Methodist or something watching me get drunk and casting me down to hell in your narrow little mind! Go on.”
Nathan’s fingers were trembling so, he could barely grasp the cup handle. Must not let her see. She was staring at him, waiting for him. Impatient. Tearful. “I really don’t want—” he began.
“I said go on.”
He sipped at the gin. An astonishing sensation—something flame-like darting up into his nose, into the cavities of his skull. His eyes watered. He began to cough and could not stop coughing.
“. . . avoiding me like I was some nasty contaminated woman,” Leonie was saying in a child’s perplexed voice, “when all I wanted . . . all I intended . . . Christmastime, when I gave you that nice sweater I spent two damn months knitting, and you just gawked at it in the box and wouldn’t even soil your fingers by taking it out—!”
Nathan wiped at his mouth, confused. He stared at Leonie but could not make sense of what she had just said. Her face was so flushed, her eyes so bright and angry!—it frightened him just to look at her.
“Just mumbled some kind of embarrassed thanks, and that was all! That was all!” Leonie cried.
“I didn’t—”
“You didn’t! Didn’t what?”
“I didn’t mean—”
“Didn’t mean what?”
In her exasperation she kicked out one long gleaming-smooth bare leg. She was wearing a black-and-white flowered sundress with a halter top that showed her lovely, olivish-tanned shoulders and her plump chest and even the pale tops of her breasts. Nathan narrowed his eyes against the magnificent glare of her and tried to recall the subject of their conversation. He had not wanted to accept Leonie’s invitation of a ride in her father’s second-best car out along the shore of Lake Oriskany; he had known from the bright, cool, rather sardonic tone of her voice that she would soon become emotional, yet he had heard himself accept with alacrity—for he was unable to refuse Leonie when she truly wanted something from him. I need counsel about my future, she had said mournfully, and I have no one to talk with except you.
“Didn’t mean what?” Leonie repeated impatiently.
He was staring at her bare leg
s, at her slender ankles, at her small pretty feet. Each toenail had been carefully painted a rich orange-red. The color of ripened peaches. The taste of sweet ripened peaches. And her fingernails also. And her lips. Nathan took another swallow of the gin and managed to stifle a cough. “. . . didn’t mean to be rude,” he gasped.
“Oh! Oh well,” Leonie laughed without smiling.
“At first I didn’t know, did I, whose present it was . . . I looked all through the wrapping paper and the tissue and . . .”
“Oh yes, you had to search out the name of the mysterious person: oh yes,” Leonie said, “you couldn’t possibly have known . . .”
“Everybody was looking at me,” Nathan said, blinking rapidly, “and I felt like a fool, and . . .”
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