“Yes,” Nathan said.
“What did you say?—I couldn’t hear.”
“Yes.”
“If I got pregnant, you mean? Oh my God yes! What a fuss, what a catastrophe—and what a shame for you, Nathan, with such a career ahead! You’re only eighteen years old: you’re only a boy.”
“Yes,” Nathan said softly. “I understand.”
He wiped his face with both hands. He was both exhausted and edgy, jumpy. Leonie continued to talk, though she kept her distance from him and he could not make sense of her words on account of the clamoring in his ears. With a fist he rubbed his eyes, hard, first one and then the other, and he saw clearly a creature—a woman—struggling in mud, struggling to rise, as an enormous black snake wound itself around her body. Sin. Filth. Those whom God has abandoned. The snake’s teeth were fixed on one of the woman’s breasts and a trickle of blood ran down across her belly.
“I alone am the door,” Nathan whispered.
Leonie poured the rest of the gin in her cup. She had begun to cry.
“I just feel so sad now, I feel so broken-down—I’m so ashamed of us both! But it was my fault most of all.”
Nathan’s breath was still quick and shallow. He stared at the ground for a long, long moment, not knowing quite where he was.
“Harold is so sweet and patient, he said he’d wait till I made up my mind one hundred percent, but I’m not good enough for him, I feel so wretched and awful, and now I’ve hurt your feelings, and you know I cherish you over any living thing on earth except my daddy—why, I wouldn’t hurt you for the world, and look what I’ve done! It was my fault, it was all my fault,” she said, sobbing, “and now everything is ruined between us like there was a death or something between us and I’m so miserable I could just die . . . But you wouldn’t want me to get pregnant, would you, Nathan, and cause all kinds of grief to everyone? Because Harold really loves me, he really does, and wants me to be his wife, and Daddy is anxious for it to turn out well this time; he was surprised about Elias, and maybe a little angry because I didn’t tell him I had broken the engagement until days went by, and he said I was just irresponsible and I’d be lucky if any man would marry me at all! So—do you understand, Nathan? I’m so ashamed of myself—”
“It’s all right,” Nathan said thickly.
“It isn’t all right,” Leonie cried. “Everything is wrong, I hate myself, I wish I was dead—I wish God would strike me dead!”
Nathan’s head jerked back. He stared at her: and she drained the cup, her eyes shut and her forehead furrowed as if in pain. But nothing happened. God did not strike her dead. She finished the gin and stood for a moment with her eyes closed and her hair wild about her face, swaying.
“We’d better go back,” Nathan said.
“I don’t want to go back ever!” Leonie screamed. “Leave me alone!”
SHORTLY AFTER NATHAN had joined Reverend Beloff’s staff and came with his Grandmother Vickery to live in a northwestern residential section of Port Oriskany, there was a scandal in that part of the city: one of the wealthier members of the Anglican Church was indicted for his part in a complicated scheme involving the bribery of public officials so that certain areas of the city might be re-zoned for light industry, and at the height of the news media’s interest in the man and his associates he killed himself with a double-barreled shotgun in the basement of his enormous home. There was an investigation, more facts were released to the newspapers, and within a week Marian Miles Beloff made his way to the grief-stricken widow, insisting that she see him, insisting that she allow him to speak to her; for he had had a special vision sent by the Lord regarding the death of her husband and the part he must play in the widow’s future life. Though she was an Anglican, and a fairly religious woman, she agreed to see Reverend Beloff, and after several hours of intense conversation she emerged a totally changed woman—a convert, a saved soul, a new member of the Bethany-Nazarene Church of the Risen Christ. “In my previous life I saw through a glass darkly,” the woman said, “but now I see clearly—now I see clearly. Reverend Beloff has opened my eyes!”
In the years that followed she gave an undisclosed amount of money to the Bethany-Nazarene Church, and nearly one hundred acres of pine woods in the foothills of the Chautauqua Mountains, and miscellaneous items including a large freezer unit for the church’s kitchen, and several chairs and sofas in good condition for the Bethany-Nazarene Rest Home, and some priceless Royal Doulton china for the Reverend Beloff’s own use, and a 1958 Cadillac, in excellent condition, also for the Reverend Beloff’s own use. The Cadillac was a stately black with extravagant chrome trim and Reverend Beloff accepted it gratefully, though in fact it was to be only his second-best car, since he already owned a Rolls-Royce—also a gift from an enthusiastic convert to his church.
So the car became Leonie’s, and Leonie loved it and drove it for the most part with care; but she was in no condition to drive it back to Port Oriskany on this Sunday afternoon. While Nathan tried to hold her shoulders to comfort her, she stooped over, gagging, finally vomiting, and afterward she nearly fainted, for she had never been so sick in her life—had never been so wretched in her life.
“I don’t care if I die! I hope I do die!” she sobbed.
Nathan found the car keys in her purse and led her to the car, his arm around her waist. She was so sick! The poor girl was so sick! He would drive them back himself.
“But you don’t know how to drive,” Leonie whimpered.
He put the key in the ignition and turned it on. A sudden strength gripped him: he could drive the car if he wished: he could do anything if he wished.
“Nathan, you don’t know how to drive, you’ll get us both killed,” Leonie said. But she half-lay in the seat beside him, the back of her head against the window. Her legs were all in a sprawl, the skirt of her dress was stained with vomit and hiked up above her knees. And her lipstick was smeared messily across her face and even on her throat: Nathan hardly dared look at her.
“Jesus will guide me,” Nathan said.
“Nathan, honey, please—please don’t get us killed—Maybe you better—”
“I said Jesus will guide me,” Nathan repeated, pressing on the gas pedal.
“Oh but honey—Wait—I—”
The sound of the powerful motor encouraged him, the quick response when he pressed the pedal excited him. He felt a thrill of certainty; he could not make a mistake.
Leonie mumbled a feeble protest as the car rolled forward.
Nathan gripped the wheel hard. He sat erect, his head slightly inclined in an attitude of watchful reverence. Was it a sign of the Lord’s grace that he could take control of this powerful automobile, that he would be able to drive it back home without any real difficulty?—without danger? (For he had no doubt, he really knew beforehand, that there would be no danger.) His pulses throbbed. He could do no wrong. Once on the open highway he pressed on the accelerator until the car was moving at sixty miles an hour and he felt not the slightest tremor, not the slightest pinch of alarm. Leonie moaned and hiccupped and muttered to herself and fell asleep.
“There’s no danger,” Nathan said. He was feeling quite elated now; he had forgotten the humiliation of his raging, thwarted body and his burning skin. “No danger. How could there be danger? We can’t die. I can’t die. Not yet. Anyway, Jesus will guide me safely back home, seeing as how He was responsible for bringing me out here in the first place: one of His tricks and temptations! Isn’t that so?” he said. But there was no one to note the ironic edge to his voice.
VIII
Though Marian Miles Beloff had been called by the Lord to do His work on earth when he was only a boy, it was not really until his mid-thirties that he hit his stride: at which time he resigned his position with the First Baptist Church of Indian Springs, Minnesota, and founded his own church, based primarily on the Doctrine of Constant Baptism. (Beloff’s church incorporated, and went beyond, the fundamental Protestant rules of repentance, sal
vation, baptism, communion, and charity.)
In a dream the Lord revealed Himself to Beloff, teaching that a man, after his initial baptism (which should be total immersion, and no adulterated, anemic ceremony consisting of the mere sprinkling of a few drops of water), must continue to will his own baptism and to be washed in the Blood of the Lamb every morning of every day, and every moment of every day if possible; so that he lived in an eternal “present tense” with Jesus Christ as his Saviour. All his worldly hopes and ambitions and fears and anxieties he must surrender to Christ, and as much of his personal possessions and income as was practical, so that he lived like a child, pure and innocent and without regard for the world, neither for its pleasures nor pains. To neglect baptism was to court disaster, Beloff warned; but to practice it faithfully was to be guaranteed salvation. “So long as a Christian lives in the eternal ‘present tense,’ he has no past at all,” Beloff explained in his sermons and in his numerous pamphlets, “and therefore he accumulates no sins. He is like the lilies of the field and the birds of the air, totally without sin—he cannot miss being taken up by the Lord God into His Kingdom under these conditions!”
It was in the early forties that Beloff took to the road, addressing crowds in rented halls, in high-school auditoriums, in sports arenas, and occasionally in Baptist or Methodist or Congregational churches whose pastors were friendly enough to allow him the use of their buildings in return for a share of the collection; he was not too proud to appear at county fairs and volunteer firemen’s picnics, and even at carnivals. Stocky, exuberant, with his smallpox-pitted cheeks and his broad, warm smile and his voice that had, in public, the timbre and the dexterity of an auctioneer’s, he was soon able to amass enough capital to make a down-payment on a church of his own and to settle there for ten months of the year. (Until his early fifties Marian Miles Beloff always spent a fair amount of time on the road, bringing his doctrine to the multitudes.)
It was in 1946 that he acquired the church, and by 1950 he had a congregation of nearly two thousand. By 1955 he was forced to move to a new church, since his congregation had doubled. His radio and television work brought him into contact with additional tens of thousands, some of whom were remarkably generous with their donations. (Donations were of two general kinds: cash and material goods. There were the regular weekly offerings and love-offerings and sin-deflectors, a concept unique to the Beloff church; and from time to time large and usually unexpected gifts and inheritances.)
“The American people are not tight-fisted and suspicious,” Beloff said often. “They are naturally charitable; they want to give. But where are the organizations worthy of their generosity? The pity is, there are so very few.”
The Bethany-Nazarene Church of Jesus Christ Risen sponsored the Christian Teen Ranch and a local rest home for elderly, indigent invalids, as well as a young men’s and women’s Bible class, a missionary society, and a fairly large Sunday school. From the very first there was a special emphasis placed on music: Reverend Beloff hired a professional organist and a professional choir director, and outfitted his choir in robes of wine-dark velvet. Though he had no singing voice himself, he was powerfully moved by song and believed that through music of a particular sort the souls of the unregenerate could be awakened to Jesus.
Christianity is a religion of joy, the Gospel is uniquely ours—why therefore must we live in terror of the future? Marian Miles Beloff stressed joy, thanksgiving, the forgiveness of sins, the spontaneous giving of gifts, the assurance of salvation. As a young man he had tried anger and righteousness but found it extraordinarily hard work—like reeling in a thirty-pound catfish with no help. Pacing about platforms in shabby rented halls or beneath tents, he had called sinners forward to be saved in a passionate, impatient voice, pleading, begging, threatening, bursting into tears of relief as the first of the converts stumbled forward; he had sometimes shouted at the Devil as if he had sighted him in the audience holding back sinners in his grip. At his most excited it seemed he could preach for minutes at a time without drawing breath.
But his competition on the road was even angrier, and possessed what must have been an even greater loathing of alcohol and tobacco and immoral behavior; so Beloff couldn’t keep pace. As he grew older he relaxed, his doctrines softened, he was willing to content himself with a moderate local success and to leave nationwide fame to others. By the time he took on Nathan Vickery he had developed a friendly, winning, even rather puckish personality. It was true that in general his followers were aging, as he himself was aging, but they were wonderfully faithful and their generosity increased year by year.
As he had hoped, Nathan Vickery pulled in a younger audience; but curiously enough, he attracted the middle-aged and the elderly as well. His painful sincerity, his raw shameless childlike emotion, the uncanny Biblical intonations of his speech, which seemed, in him, altogether natural: all were extraordinarily successful. Reverend Beloff could not have predicted the degree of his success.
“You have a shrewd eye for talent,” he was told by the owner of the local television station.
“The Lord directs my judgments,” Reverend Beloff said, frowning.
DURING THE THREE decades of Beloff’s ministry many hundreds of sinners had come to him, many suffering souls had knelt before him, brought to true repentance. There had been a dairy farmer who wept in Beloff’s arms not a minute after his tearful conversion, confessing he had drowned his younger brother when he was eleven and had hardly given it a thought since, until that very evening; there had been a highly articulate woman of middle age, a public school principal, who had gone into hysterics at one of Beloff’s prayer meetings, accusing herself of not having loved her mother enough during the mother’s lifetime; there had been, and continued to be, men and women violently repentant of their adulterous behavior and desperate to be saved; there were church deacons and members of the Ladies’ Aid Society who confessed in terror that they had never really experienced God, and wouldn’t He know their claims to love Him were fraudulent? There were widowers who half-believed they had killed their wives, and widows who half-believed they had killed their husbands. There were young husbands jealous of their own babies, regretting they had ever been born; there were young wives and mothers who wished to run away, to disappear; there were elderly women who confessed, sobbing, that they had stolen from their dying relatives in anticipation of inheriting, or in anticipation of not inheriting. Beloff’s own wife, who had left him in 1937, two years after giving birth to Leonie, confessed to him on the evening of their first meeting that as a child she had gloated over her elder sister’s death by scarlet fever—and it was her conviction that Christ would never forgive her, that He would never find it in His heart to forgive such a loathsome sin. (Beloff had fallen in love with the girl’s desperation; he had believed, not altogether wrongly, that only he could assuage it.)
But one of the most puzzling sinners in Beloff’s long experience was Nathan Vickery himself.
From time to time the boy alluded to sinful and unclean thoughts, and Reverend Beloff naturally told him not to be disturbed: such thoughts were all very normal. “The flesh is a temptation we all encounter,” he said frankly. And laid his right hand, his good hand, on Nathan’s shoulder to comfort him—for weren’t they both men, weren’t they both flesh? He would have liked to tell Nathan about his own early sexual experiences and particularly about his years of anguish before these experiences, but something in the young man’s face discouraged him. (He sensed that Nathan Vickery could not possibly be consoled by having his sins swallowed up in a vast anonymous sea of others’ sins: for was he not altogether different, one of the Lord’s chosen?) Once, after Leonie had been teasing him more mercilessly than usual, Nathan followed Beloff around for an entire afternoon, too shy to say anything other than the fact that he was “troubled” about something, about someone: and taking his burden to Christ didn’t seem to help very much. “That’s understandable,” Beloff said, wishing only to escape the young
man’s tense, ascetic, somehow alarming presence, “I mean it’s understandable that you’re troubled. But I’m confident that Christ is helping you, whether you know it or not.”
“Are you?” Nathan asked.
Beloff stared at him but could not determine if he was being sarcastic or merely naïve.
One Friday morning in early September, when Beloff had hoped to spend several uninterrupted hours going over his financial records preparatory to a meeting with his accountant, which had been set for that afternoon, Nathan knocked at the door of his study and was so agitated that Beloff could not send him away.
“Yes—all right—of course, of course!—you’re welcome—welcome at any time, as you know,” Beloff said heartily.
Nathan sat stiffly on the edge of a chair facing Beloff, and for several painful moments he said nothing at all. He had never learned, Beloff saw with pity and a certain measure of irritation, to make the small, pointless, kindly social remarks necessary in the world of man. Now eighteen years old, grown to a height just over six feet, he was curiously childlike and adult at the same time: his manner was without guile, uncalculated, but his features had grown stark, even severe, and his eyes appeared in certain lights to be absolutely colorless. They had a quality of remorseless antiquity about them, like stone or glass or ancient coins. His hair fell past his collar, shaggy and uneven—Leonie must be neglecting him now. And unless Beloff was imagining it, there were actually two or three gray-white hairs in an untidy strand that had fallen over his forehead.
Beloff tried to make him relax, tried to joke in his usual bluff manner—inconsequential remarks about staff members, or last week’s visiting missionary and his penchant for apple cobbler, or the weather—but Nathan merely sat there, staring at the floor. His features were unsoftened by humor and his chin seemed less fragile than usual, perhaps because his lips were pushed slightly forward, as if he were pouting or trying not to speak too suddenly.
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