Cartesian Sonata: And Other Novellas (34 page)

Salvation, I learned in a letter from a friend living in Columbus, Ohio, where the cult had holed up, was to be achieved when, like Boy Scouts accumulating merit badges, you had sanctified a sufficient portion of your local world. Everything was to be—and would be—saved. Romulus had seen Juno, he said, in her nightdress, lonely as a broken broom straw, waiting for her Godman to return from the office, night drawing on like a finger through mist: mist, finger, act of drawing, night—divinities in their own small right. No less than the whitebud in bud like a fountain when its shower has begun to shower.

You, whoever “you” were, would be saved, it appeared, only when someone saved you by paying a saving attention. Under a lamp. Some sort of light? The light of a devoted eye? Here sexual problems rose—they always do—because the breast with its tempting suckle center was not to be eyed and prized as a source of solace or stimulation, but for its curvature, its design, its iconographic history, and this was a dish more easily ordered than eaten. Nudity was practiced (rumor said) so as to produce a matter-of-fact state regarding the body which could then become contemplative, detached, and redemptive.

I had to be seriously puzzled. I possessed the briefest, most scattered bits of news, fragments of this philosophy drifted to me like ash; and I could only make guesses based upon a past I increasingly feared was deceptive. Did Penner now pretend to believe that the world was a work of art? since simply being seen would alter nothing in sight’s subject—that was one virtue of vision, unlike tasting gazing didn’t take a bite—it could only alter the attitude of the perceiver to what was being perceived. Though of course Bishop Berkeley, whom we must all hold in
the highest esteem, believed quite otherwise:
esse est percipi
, he said—well—wrote. The principle is too silly to be said.

It occurred to me that to deprive objects of their instrumentality was to destroy their essence. It meant Penner was turning the world upside down: taking revenge by rendering the useful useless and the useless valuable.

Nor could I resolve the rather regular recurrence of urination as a revenge. Was this new cult going to make chamber music, as Joyce’s poems did, one level of meaning getting even with another?

Suppose Penner had been adopted? Would that explain his predilection for role reversals, for multiple guises, for passing himself off, or his periodic regressions? Never being what he seemed. Or was he just pretending to be pretending?

Again, I heard nothing from or about him for a long time. My own researches were hit-and-miss and mostly intermittent. I interviewed Aunt Spatz again with ambiguous results. I wasn’t in the neighborhood when Luther was born, she said. He’s got to be someone’s natural child, didn’t I think? she guessed. Luther bore no likeness to his parents, but that often happened, didn’t it, she offered. Had he, as a child, often wet his bed? Not that she knew, though it wouldn’t have surprised her, Aunt Spatz answered, admitting that much.

Claude Hoch, whom I returned to as well, admitted that after his humiliation, he had done some angry research on the expression “piss on you.” And while he was telling me the obvious, and calling Luther Penner a coward for substituting for Claude’s limb Claude’s innocent and hapless desk—and did I catch the symbolism of the drawer?—my thoughts wandered a bit until they encountered, vividly reenacted, Penner’s gesture: the slowly lifted leg.

Principal McDill, no longer in that capacity, had little to add.
Luther Penner was the sort of sniveling little squit who brought out the worse in people. Penner was, he thought, a born provocateur.

I obtained, from Harriet Hamlin Garland, of all people, further, and later, notebooks. These I received through the mail after a few preliminary inquiries and not a little haggling over their price. Some entries did not deal entirely kindly with me. As I had feared. Penner had sensed some skepticism. For me, he wrote, the cock had crowed half a dozen times. Then he ungenerously added: “until its throat grew raw with roosterizing.” Had he heard about and remembered one of my public jokes?

Many entries puzzled me. Penner had made a list of local churches, with jots, but why? The Saint Peter’s African Methodist Episcopal Church, for instance, and the note, Holy Ghost Headquarters. Or the Apostolic Pentecostal home Bible study center, then the exclamation: a book, a sacred! book! Or the Prince of Peace Baptist, then in parentheses, with a question mark, the words (Serene Queen?). The Vedanta Society. The Church of God International (sounds like a business, he wrote). The Saint Bartholomew, the John Knox, the Saint Mark’s, Saint Monica, the Saint Marcus United Church of Christ. Then underlined,
Lighthouse Free Methodist
. The Exciting First Baptist, fully graded choirs and orchestra. The Ethical Society, humanist of the year award (there’s a thought!). First Assembly of God. The Korean Presbyterian (really?). The Fellowship Church, its purpose—to know God, its mission—to make Him known (motto?). And the Emerson Chapel, “laughter holding both his sides.” Church of God Sabbatarian, the Concord Baptist, sun worship. And the Church of the Open Door (should be).

Finally, from Columbus, the tragic news came. The Society of Salvators (as it was now called) had been attacked by a gang
of thugs, and Luther Penner had been killed by a blow which had toppled him over a railing. His Society had apparently managed to accumulate funds sufficient to buy a small abandoned Catholic church in one of Columbus’ central slums. Members then began (using a mumbo jumbo I can only guess at) unnecessarily desanctifying the building (a priest had unfrocked it already, it was the custom) in order—when sufficiently secular—that it could be revivified, but now for pagan and polytheistic purposes. This program had been under way for some days, and news of the procedure and its aims had leaked out. Salvators of Serene Peace (as they called themselves) had gathered in the ex-choir of the ex-church to undefile a modest art-glass window depicting the previously blessed Virgin, in her customary blue robe, standing on a cream-colored cloud and gazing adoringly upward at still more sky, when a gang of Irish-type toughs (so early reports indicated) broke in swinging lumber, and in the melée Luther had been struck or pushed over a railing onto the chancel floor. Early indications were that his injury was a broken neck, not a bat in the back as might have been supposed.

I do not find Luther Penner’s legacy to lie in the Serene Queen Salvation Society, which, as Romulus, he founded and, indeed, gave his life for, although it continues to grow in the slow small way of lichens over rock, empowered by the myth of a real Romulus and an unreal Remus, and gaining its little ground despite the enmity which attached itself to the group after the accident like the stink a skunk may spray on a dog (when one might have expected some sympathy, some understanding); nor, I think, can it be identified with Harriet Hamlin Garland’s organization, now ensconced in Missouri, Colorado, and lower Wyoming, though more or less in constant movement (since her doctrines tend to have their greatest impact on first hearing, when their repulsive character is most strongly felt, most abundantly cheered). Instead, I believe Luther Penner
presented us with a mordant yet magnificent metaphysics: life perceived not simply as if it were lived amid a maelstrom of conflicting and competing myths, but as if it were dressed up in illusions deliberately designed by those who have been previously misguided, and who are now getting even as only secret enemies secretly can. How many in one’s own home or neighborhood—to examine a small sample—have been betrayed by isms and ologies of one sort or other, have given money to nutcase causes, and squandered much of the precious time of their lives in vain spiritual pursuits?

I have no doubt that had Romulus lived, he would have sanctified the secular in a new way, produced an appropriate text, and, whether his vision was accurate or not, I believe his example, his doctrines, would have given many lost people something to follow, as well as the feeling of being found. The meek, like the sacristan who serves his church, elevated by sharing Penner’s vision of the beauty and possible purity of all things, will understand their value and find their vindication. I am reminded of the venerable philosopher Immanuel Kant, so high-minded a man he didn’t dare put on a hat, and his worship of the
Ding an sich
. I expect my Columbus researches will reveal to me the nature of those rites whereby even a stained soul might be bleached back to virtue and accorded its whiteness again. A convert told the press that, following the attack, she knelt where Luther lay so soft and pale he looked like lather.

Romulus, that is.

I envision at least one self-help book emerging from these recipes and operations. To reclaim for people now the pagan worship of the world—what a concept! dust a divinity! grease a God! the least leaf valued like a Lord! not the way a beloved body—a faint scar’s mystery, the eye’s lashes, the ear’s lobes—is kissed by its lover’s scrutiny, but with an artist’s marveling yet
detached attention. To administer to all of creation a purifying catharsis! like writing’s gray ghost on the washed wall.

Though at first I thought Juno a strange choice for the Society’s titular spirit (the sister of Jupiter as well as wife!), and the flashlight an even odder symbol (hung in functioning miniature around each faithful neck), Romulus’ world, unlike Luther Penner’s, was … rather is, let us hope … intended to be a radiant one, full of tender scrutinies and loving realizations.

This is revenge? Ah … yes. So secret. So severe. So complete. So pure. So benign. So transcendent. Now one may, any night, awake in a frightened sweat to say, even to the sleeping world: “I am a creature in a myth. I am unreal.” Even as the priest preaches, and the preacher prays, either may be under a Salvator’s light, losing, in the very instant in which the holy words are said, their allegedly sacred but actually worldly, profit-making use; yet these are the same symbols that will be admired anew once they’ve been well scrubbed (like golf balls going round and round in their little round washers)—and when at last clean of their claims to the Truth—thus redeemed—they can be safely admired for their wisdom, their rhetoric, the history they represent; because in a polytheistic world, such as Romulus proposed (I hope, proposes), dogmas are disarmed at the door, and welcomed like visiting friends, like other makes of car. Freshly struck coins will never feel spent, but will become immediately ancient as Roman ones, and like valued antiquities from the moment of their minting. Bills will be admired for their engraving, for Benjamin Franklin’s artfully rendered face, for the denseness of the money’s clothy weave, for the subtlety of shading among its many grayed greens; later, it can be loved for the pathos to be found in its folds, stains, and other signs of passage, if it’s undergone the disgrace of exchange. One of Luther Penner’s spoons, with which he used to put a spin on his
coffee and orchestrate his ideas, I forethoughtly pocketed after an evening at the Cow’s Lick Café. It is preserved, now, in a clear glass cup—a kind of reliquary—and leans there, in a peaceful tilt.

However … who knows, when a fire has been lit, where its wildness will take it? Who knows? It was a man named Romulus whose neck was broken; meanwhile Luther Penner may have a few astonishing trump cards still concealed among the ruffles of his buried sleeve; because, before his demise, he’d become not only the master of secret revenges, but an artful contriver of reversals, fine guises, and logical regressions as well.

A charge of manslaughter has been lodged against the goons who knocked Luther over the rail. Rumor has it, however, that these young toughs were incited by the Salvators, and it may be that Luther (Romulus, that is) miscalculated the consequences again; that he meant only to have a few of the faithful buffeted about, and a gratifying persecution, always so necessary in matters of faith and truth, profitably begun. Perhaps he did not count on more than a small fall, and hadn’t asked for martyrdom. Especially since the supportive and therefore holy text had been scarcely begun.

Luther Penner’s remains, following the obligatory autopsy, were returned to the home of his parents, who arranged a quiet cremation for them, and an even quieter scattering of ashes; most contrary to Luther’s wishes I am sorry to say, for I know he was hoping for a tomb which would invite and facilitate visits.

I shall always regret not having been asked to attend the ceremony, which I heard was small, sober, and simple, plain almost to a fault.