Son of the Morning

by Joyce Carol Oates

  “He was wandering somewhere that looked like . . . like a lane,” Nathan said. He spoke slowly and reluctantly, disliking his grandmother’s agitation. If she carried on so, one of the nurses might appear. “. . . a cow-lane between fields. The old farm, I think. It was almost dark, so I couldn’t see well. But I saw him, I saw him before he saw me. He was waving his hands as if he was blind and asking where he was, as if he knew I was there though he couldn’t quite see me; he asked where the family had gone, what had happened, who was living in his house, what would become of him? He wasn’t himself: he’s lost some weight. His cheeks are sunken in. His hair is all gray. I wanted to come close to him but the Lord held me back because if I felt pity for him, if I ran over to him, I would be insulting the Lord by coming between Him and one of His souls. Pray to the Lord God for guidance, I said. Pray without stopping. Never stop! It’s what I tried to tell him in life . . . But he didn’t seem to hear.”

  “Then he isn’t dead!” Mrs. Vickery cried.

  “Yes,” said Nathan. “But he isn’t alive either.”

  NOT LONG AFTER his new eye was fitted into the socket and, in the hand-held mirror, acquired a steely black-brown authoritative gleam, a woman said to be Nathanael Vickery’s mother came to the hospital. She stood in the doorway out of sight and had to be coaxed inside.

  “If you’ve come this far, Elsa—!” Mrs. Vickery said.

  “But he doesn’t know me, he doesn’t want to see me—”

  “He certainly wants to see you.”

  “Is he awake? He isn’t? Oh, I’ll go away and come back tomorrow!”

  Nathan turned to her, squinting. The breathy girlish voice belonged to a full-bodied woman of about forty who stepped timidly into the room. She wore a polka-dot dress with long sleeves and carried a patent-leather purse. Her hair was brassy but rather attractive. “I’ll go away and come back tomorrow,” she said to Mrs. Vickery, blundering into the door frame.

  His mother?

  Had he believed it was so, he might have been speechless; but he did not believe it.

  And so he had the strength to welcome the woman into his room, to invite her to sit down. She stayed for an hour and forty-five minutes on the first day. Mrs. Vickery talked most, asking her questions about her husband, her children, her home. There were presumably two half-brothers of Nathan’s, and one half-sister. He smiled in response to such extraordinary news, though he did not quite accept it. His mother! His long-banished mother! Mrs. Vickery rarely spoke of Elsa except to allude to her in cryptic exasperated terms, but she was curious about the children, very curious about the husband. What sort of job did he have? What sort of salary? Had the children been baptized? Did she and her husband go to church at all?

  “It’s wonderful to see you,” the woman said, making a clumsy gesture with both hands. She might have been offering to take Nathan’s hand, but she stood too far away. “I was so, so . . . So shocked . . . Why, everybody was talking about it! I mean, you know, the accident . . . What you did . . . It was on all the radio news, I guess; it got carried on television two or three times in one day; I like to died, just hearing that name spoken like that! Never, never in my life . . . such a fright . . . Wesley came home and there I was sitting in the kitchen in the dark with the two youngest running wild around the house and none of the lights on and . . . and it was just the most awful shock of my life . . .”

  “I’m sorry,” Nathan said.

  “But here you are looking well,” she said, blushing. (For it was not true that he looked well; but the eye at least was in place. Suppose she had had to stare at an empty eye socket! Two drinks in a tavern just down the way had been necessary to get her to the hospital, and she would need another before she started back home.) “And they’re saying what?—another week or two and you’ll be discharged?”

  “Is that what they’re saying?” Nathan asked.

  He had not known so much time had passed.

  “Then we’ll have to see each other real often, now that we’re together again,” the woman said. She began to cry. Now she did take Nathan’s hand, both his hands, and Mrs. Vickery stood at the foot of the bed, crying also. Nathan gazed upon them both with love. His mother, his grandmother. Someone squeezed his fingers, and he squeezed her fingers in return. His mother? But what did that mean? He had no mother, strictly speaking; and certainly no father. He had been born of a woman, but the woman had been merely a vessel, a vehicle, wasn’t that understood?

  He was being lifted from bed. Swung about in the air.

  A gigantic face drew near, he could feel its heartbeat, he began to tremble in expectation. His fingers flailed the air but could grasp nothing. How hungry he was, how terrifically hungry! His body was a tiny void that must be filled. A tiny universe that was empty and ravenous and must be filled.

  Something metallic and cold touched his mouth, prying its way in.

  That too was Your blessing.

  “I wasn’t a good mother to you,” someone was saying. Her sobs were coarse and anguished. “I wasn’t myself then!—I didn’t know! I was too young, I was just a girl. Will you ever forgive me—”

  The balloon face was wet with tears. It smelled of warmth, of blankets, of milk. A single eye was like the moon, fiercely glaring. Nathan could not determine whether all this had happened long ago or whether it was happening now; or would happen sometime in the future.

  He swung his legs, slightly stiffened from lack of exercise, out of the bed. His grandmother helped him with the terry-cloth bathrobe (one of the many gifts he had received) and he stood beside his mother, barefoot, anxious to comfort her. “Will you ever forgive me,” she wept.

  “The Lord forgives everyone,” Nathan said.

  His voice too was stiffened from lack of use.

  “If we could pray together,” Nathan said, “it might be that Christ would come into your heart—it might be that you are really a Seeker for Christ—which is why you were led here today—”

  The woman stared at him, uncomprehending. Except for faint lines about her eyes, she looked quite young, almost girlish. Was this person his mother? His? Her dark-pink pearlish lipstick was smeared and she was panting as if she’d just hurried up a flight of stairs.

  “Pray?” she said. Her voice lifted wildly, almost shrilly.

  “Pray to God. Now. Pray to Him. On our knees. Now. Here,” Nathan said urgently.

  She glanced at Mrs. Vickery but must have found no comfort or allegiance there.

  “But I—I don’t want to ruin my stockings,” she said with an embarrassed, despairing laugh. “If I kneel I’ll—”

  “Do as your son tells you,” Mrs. Vickery said.

  “Here? Right here on the floor? With that door open and people out in the corridor gaping in—?”

  “The Lord forgives everyone, everything,” Nathan said. He gripped his mother by the elbows as if to force her to lift her face upward, to listen. But he saw that she did not comprehend. She was frightened, even repelled by him. “You have only to ask forgiveness of Him,” Nathan said less certainly, “and He will . . . will respond.”

  “Elsa, do as he says. This is Nathan Vickery talking to you,” Mrs. Vickery said sharply. “Nathan Vickery. Why, he’s come to change the world, he’s been sent by God to . . . And you worry about your stockings! Isn’t that just like you, Elsa, after all these years!”

  Mother and son knelt on the cold hospital floor. Nathan clasped his hands together and lowered his head and began to pray in a low, soft, groping voice. That God would forgive, that God would bring them together again, that Christ would enter their hearts and make them truly kin to one another, that the Holy Spirit would descend upon them, that time and history and sorrow and shame and anguish would be annihilated and forgotten, that they should know each other in Christ, in Christ, not mother and son but Christ in each speaking to Christ . . .

  From a distance he heard again the hoarse, irregular sobs, which, after a time, no longer disturbed him.

  III />
  When Nathanael Vickery came out of seclusion in the autumn of 1961 it was to discover that his act of penitence had worked to greatly increase his influence; so much so, in fact, that he shrank from identifying himself as that person, and half-wondered whether he should change his name and journey to some distant part of the country and begin his service for God anew . . . The irony of the situation did not escape him, and allowed him to see Your design as it manifests itself in all things; nor did the irony of the situation escape Marian Miles Beloff, who had immediately and publicly dismissed Nathan from his staff.

  (Reverend Beloff had been unable to avoid newspaper reporters, and even network television reporters, who sought him out within minutes of Nathan’s act, and in the confusion and rage of the moment he had said certain things—that the young minister was insane, for instance, that he was willful and selfish and possibly even guided by the Devil, and needed psychiatric rather than medical care, and had, moreover, needed it for months—which he came to regret later. His personal anger came through with despairing clarity in the many articles and interviews, several of them in national magazines, and it was not only public opinion that swung violently against him but the sentiment of his own deacons and close associates, and the feeling of his own daughter, for where was his Christian love?—his charity?—his forgiveness? Local ministers were eager to preach from their pulpits in favor of the spirit of Nathanael Vickery’s act, if not in favor of the act itself; not perhaps because they truly valued martyrdom or even penitence, but because the situation gave them the opportunity to attack Marian Miles Beloff. It turned out that he had no friends or supporters at all among the religious leaders of Port Oriskany. One by one they condemned him and stood apart from him. It was even said he had no fundamental grasp of Christ’s message or of the meaning of his crucifixion; that he did not adequately comprehend the meaning of suffering; that he did not seriously believe in hell. He had had altogether too easy a time in his ministry, building that pretentious church, bragging of his followers’ devotion and their constant generosity, preaching a superficial, sentimentalized kind of Christianity that was an insult to Christ Himself. And he had long been notorious for seducing well-to-do parishioners from other churches, even upon occasion from the Roman Catholic Church itself: and then boasting of their gratitude. Rumors surfaced concerning his relationships with certain women, his expensive cars, his having been seen at the race track, in cocktail lounges in distant cities, in suspicious company . . . His television ratings fell off as a consequence of these rumors, or perhaps because Reverend Beloff seemed to have lost his old zest, his old amiable certainty about every word he uttered; attendance at the Bethany-Nazarene Church following the publicity rapidly declined, in a matter of weeks, when it became clear that Nathan Vickery would not return. For a while Reverend Beloff continued to preach and to be seen about the city in his handsome wide-brimmed black hat, carrying now an ivory-topped cane, and he gave the impression of being confident enough, defying some of the charges made against him by continuing to use his Rolls-Royce even for local trips; but it was understood, and he seemed in a way to accept it, that his day was over. He went into semi-retirement in the summer of 1960 and by the time Nathanael Vickery was beginning his ascent, in the years 1964–65, the old man was in complete retirement in Douay, Arizona, a senior citizens’ community in which he had a considerable financial investment.)

  “The Lord guides us in all things,” Nathan realized. “The Lord provides.”

  It had seemed rather unfair to him that Reverend Beloff should be considered so unchristian when, in fact, it was through Beloff’s agency that the hospital and doctor bills were paid—or by way of the shrewdly high insurance coverage he had on all matters concerning his church (since an extraordinary incident in the early fifties when an angry husband had attempted to sue him for alienation of his wife’s affections after she became a fervent convert to his church); and it was through Beloff’s son-in-law, Harry Dietz, that he and his grandmother acquired rent-free a hunting lodge on Wolf’s Head Lake where they could live in seclusion as long as they wished, responsible only for keeping the place in good repair. Had he been willing to talk to reporters or other inquisitive parties, he would certainly have stressed this aspect of Beloff’s behavior; but he shrank from all visitors, even the most devout, even Leonie herself, and by the time he was willing to allude to the situation, some years later, Marian Miles Beloff had left the Bethany-Nazarene Church for good.

  In his convalescence and in his seclusion he dwelled for the most part with You, in Your constant regard. He strengthened; he gained back all the weight he had lost, and more; he walked for hours by himself along the edge of the lake, or through the pine woods, contemplating Your being and what possible use You might find for him in this world. He read the Bible, drawn to the Revelation of St. John the Divine most of all. It seemed to him that here was a message, a riddle perhaps, for his own scrutiny . . . for him to meditate upon and decipher . . . He was given to know that it would not matter how long he took preparing his own gospel: whether it took months or even years: for You guided him in all things, according to Your design.

  IDLY I TURN the dial of my compact little radio, encased in its red plastic; though it’s past 2:00 A.M. the void is alive with sound—langurous dance music, jazz nearly lost in static, a man’s angry voice, a woman’s voice lifted in improbable melodic joy . . . Like Nathan, who was led to listen for long, tense hours to a floor-model radio in the hunting lodge, and who began to scrutinize newspapers and magazines, searching for Your meaning in them, I am continually astonished by the varied nature of the world: of even the human world, which no one can chart.

  Sometimes I can get a gospel program from as far away as Chicago, late at night. With the volume turned as high as it will go, with my head inclined meekly, I can listen for minutes at a time to a man named Brother Reed, whose message is mainly the good news of Christ’s coming and the importance of the fact that Christians love one another and join in a great community able to withstand enemies arising on all sides, in Asia, in Europe, even in South America, even at home. Then the station suddenly fades and my ears are blasted by static. Or another station intrudes, drifting effortlessly across Brother Reed’s eager voice: once it was rock music, another time an uncannily beautiful harpsichord concerto that made me start and stare helplessly at the floor, for here was a language I could not comprehend and could not imitate, though it had the power to touch my very soul, as if You Yourself had returned to me. But then that too was lost: furious waves of static dominated the night; and I turned off the radio in despair.

  THAT TOO WAS a music. Jarring and discordant. Mocking. Blasphemous. The pitch and rhythm and message of the era as it was communicated to Nathanael Vickery by way of the radio, the newspapers and magazines, and certain people he befriended at the lake—older people, mainly, who lived at Wolf’s Head all year, and who complained with a cranky zestful patience about their children and their in-laws and the Government and the summer people and their neighbors and their own pastors who never seemed to take a stand on anything, who didn’t seem to know anywhere near as much as the young people claimed to know, or practically any news announcer on television, or any politician . . .

  They were angry. But why? The Holy Spirit in them had turned sour. Though they lived in peace in a remote and beautiful part of the mountains, though they were by no means as poor as people Nathan had known in the Marsena area, they were very angry. He was careful not to tell them anything that might identify him, and he never made any remarks about religion, and so they spoke to him with a bitter frankness and even a kind of energetic malice he had not experienced in people before. He reasoned that to their own pastors they spoke quite differently, if they spoke at all. And in church their expressions would be blank, or blankly benign. It was a small revelation to him that quite ordinary people, even the elderly, could be so passionately angry.

  He had never felt anger in his life. Could not remember
having felt it.

  “But why so much feeling, one person against another?” he asked his grandmother, groping for words. He felt in a way obscurely ashamed, as he’d been when arithmetic problems back in his old school in Marsena had baffled him. A hot coarse blush rose from his neck. “God is within everyone, so isn’t it God hating God? If you hurt another person, isn’t it you hurting yourself? There seems no point to it,” he said slowly.

  “I don’t know how to answer you,” Mrs. Vickery said. It rather unnerved her that her grandson who knew everything should appear to be so attentive to her words. She wondered if he might be testing her. “Isn’t there hatred in the Bible, Nathan, and cruelty and war and . . .”

  “Yes,” Nathan said.

  There was a long pause. He would have liked to tell her that the coming of Christ had changed everything; that His crucifixion had very much altered the world. And it had always been difficult for him to take seriously the hatred of man for man in the Bible, in the Old Testament especially, for many of the men involved seemed merely childish . . . to have belonged to a cruder, less evolved race. They were human; yet not human in the way Christ and His disciples were human.

  “It might be that you were shielded from things over the years,” Mrs. Vickery said falteringly, “but I didn’t see any point in emphasizing all that’s wrong . . . Nor did the Sisleys. There’s only so much time in the day, you know, and if you make room for the evil, for even knowing about it, why then . . . why then you are hurting your own self. Don’t you think so?”

  Nathan did not reply. It seemed to him quite reasonable, abstractly, that human beings should make war upon one another, for the nature of the world was fallen, and it was very likely that history was easing into the Final Days of which St. John the Divine spoke; none of this was surprising. The radio news was always disturbing, as were the newspapers, but it was not quite the same as hearing anger and hatred in the voices of people to whom you are speaking on an ordinary sunlit day, and seeing in their faces a certain mad gleefulness aroused by hate. He was impatient with himself often, and presumably he had hated the evil in himself that had so distracted him from God back in Port Oriskany, but it would have seemed to him pointless to direct this hatred against another human being. As for striking another person, evoking pain in another person . . . The very thought of it filled him with despair.