Heaven's Harlots: My Fifteen Years in a Sex Cult (17 page)

I stayed up all night writing a proposal for my project, and I handed it in the next day. It included a design for a wooden container, about the size of a shoebox, that could hold learning tools for preschool-age children, such as counting rods, sandpaper letters and numbers, adding cubes, dressing frames, and anything else useful in learning how to dress oneself.

Jacob called me to his office a few days later. “Did Pearl give you something you like?” he asked.

“Well, I gave her a plan, and she said she would get back to me. “

“She will, soon. Meanwhile, I’d like to talk to you about the other problem you are having. Why don’t we go out for dinner and discuss this?” I had never considered going “out to dinner” to discuss a problem with a leader. Normally if we discussed something over dinner, it would be in the Family dining room or in the leader’s private office. This was different. Jacob took me to a good French restaurant, and told me to order anything I liked. Since I had never been to a restaurant of this category, I hardly knew what the menu meant, so he ordered for me with a self-satisfied sigh.

We talked over dinner about why I was unhappy in my marriage. One evening out led to another, and finally he invited me to his apartment.

I did not realize that leaders had their own apartments. I thought they all lived in another colony somewhere. By this time, I was beginning to suspect that Jacob had designs of his own on me, however, we had been taught that “God works in mysterious ways” and not to question how God does something—just accept it. I had prayed for a change in my life, and perhaps this was how God would answer my prayer.

Therefore, I followed Jacob’s lead, and instead of questioning why he was doing this, I reverted to my natural tendency to consider everything a grand adventure. He showed me into a small one-bedroom apartment with a cozy sitting room.

“Would you like a drink?” he asked.

“I’m not sure. Whatever you suggest.” He gave me a vodka with orange juice. It was the first time I had had hard liquor since joining the Family. His tongue loosened with each drink. He was having his own problems with his wives, he told me.

Esther, it was obvious, was no longer interested in him and had a young consort traveling with her. He thought Pearl had married him for his position. He seemed to be saying that he needed a sweet, tender woman who cared about him. I could not imagine why he thought of me as a sweet, tender woman. After all, I was trying to leave my husband.

“You know, Mo has every leader in this Family with new mates. It will probably be going around the whole Family soon, but he wants us to experiment with this one wife’ idea first. It is not as easy as you think to be in the royal family.” I could not believe he was talking so disrespectfully about our leader and prophet. It was scary and exciting. The alcohol had begun to numb my revolutionary training.

“Jeshanah, I am going to take care of you,” he said, kissing my neck awkwardly. “You won’t have to worry about anything in the Family again.” Though I was secretly repulsed and felt no desire for Jacob whatsoever, I let him lead me to the bedroom and have sex. The whole time, all I could think of was getting home to my safe colony. I felt ashamed and humiliated, but I could not understand why.

True to his word, Jacob gave me a big project in child care. Pearl was not happy about allotting one of the Show Group dancers such a responsibility, but she did what she was told. The project kept me busy and content. I felt useful now that I was doing something productive.

With the carpenter, I designed and put together a dozen Montessori kits for mothers in the field. Typical of communist bureaucracy, by the time news of the kits got out, the leaders’ wives wanted them. They ended up in the leaders’ hands, and few actually were given out to the mothers who really needed them.

To clean up my other problem, Jacob met with Cal and talked to him about having a trial separation from me. I don’t know what was discussed or how Cal initially reacted, but Cal began to stay in the main Show Group home located in Colombes, in northern Paris, and I moved to the home in Sceaux, a southern suburb of Paris. Thor began spending one weekend with me, and one with Cal.

Jacob took me to his apartment regularly, usually without the dinner prelude. I also began drinking periodically, and hoped that no one would find out about me and Jacob. But of course, everyone knew, even Cal. He bore the hurt and shame heroically, just as Micah and others had done before him. They all obeyed leadership like good revolutionaries. I am sure that Cal, like myself, took his grievances to the Lord. He could have complained, but against a leader as high as Jacob, it was almost useless. He could have left the group too, but I know he would never have left our son. I was ashamed of myself, but I could not see clearly what to do. I had started this, and I would have to see it through to its conclusion. Perhaps it was better to stumble ahead blindly than stop on a dark and unfamiliar road.

After the Montessori project was finished, I started writing. I had an idea to put some of the easy Mo letters in children’s story form. I thought that the children needed Family stories written especially for kids, so I made up a series of fantasy animal stories based on morals in the Mo letters. I did not talk about this project with anyone, but it kept me distracted from the more stressful areas of my life, such as my deepening relationship with Jacob.

I also stayed awake at night reviewing my life and actions in my mind.

Cal was definitely not a bad husband. He had always been kind and considerate, never having that demanding attitude that some of our men had with their wives. Since we were taught that husbands rule over their wives in the privacy of their “home” (we never had our own home, so this meant bedroom to me), he could have been a lot more demanding.

However, he wasn’t, and therefore I had felt more compelled to give him the sex he wanted. I didn’t want to discuss this with him, since it would hurt his feelings, and yet I was hurting him a lot more now.

One day, Jacob picked me up at Sceaux in his car. Only leaders were allowed private use of our cars, and the one Jacob drove was a modest vehicle I had seen before in our Family.

“I’m going to Switzerland for a few days,” he said. “When I come back, I’d like you to start living with me.” I had just finished my first children’s story, and I was feeling good about myself. I was as free and independent as one could be in the Family. I was able to be involved in child care, and I saw a future for myself there. I had open access to visiting my son at school during the week, thanks to Jacob’s influence. I was feeling a newfound joie de Pipre. Why would I want to live with Jacob? He already had two wives.

Why did he need me? And why would I again allow myself to be joined to a man I did not love?

“I don’t want to do that,” I blurted out, without considering what his reaction would be.

For a moment, he looked totally devastated. Then he quickly regained his composure.

“Jeshanah, you don’t have much choice. You either live with me, or you go back to Cal. I’ll be gone for about a week, but when I come back, I want your answer.” He dropped me off near the house without giving me time to think about what he said.

“Do you have ten francs?” I asked.

He smiled and reached in his pocket, perversely happy to grant my request.

I got out of the car and went to a local grocery store to buy a bottle of wine. There was a small park near our home, and since we never witnessed anywhere near where we lived, I could safely get drunk without worrying that I would be seen by someone who knew me. I had never done this before, but being with Jacob often, I had developed a taste for alcohol. Sitting on a park bench, I opened the bottle and started to drink away every thought that I had stored in my mind’s closet. I took out each feeling of guilt and every selfcondemning accusation, and shook it like the rumpled piece of old cloth it represented. I had left my husband, a major sin in anyone’s religion.

I had allowed myself to become involved in an adulterous relationship, one of the worst sins of all. Then I remembered that Jesus had prevented the crowd from stoning an adulterous woman. I wondered if that woman had also been obeying leadership and Jesus knew that? In my stupor, I cast my thoughts aside with the privilege enjoyed by those drunken individuals who claim that “nothing matters anymore.” Since I drank a whole bottle of wine on an empty stomach, I felt sick when I stood up to walk home. Entering our house while every one was around the dinner table, I passed by quickly, went to the bathroom, and threw up.

After cleaning out my conscience closet, I spent the rest of the week singing on the metro and visiting Thor. When Jacob returned, he called a meeting at the Colombes home. He had news from Esther concerning the Show Group, she had been in a hospital in Switzerland, deathly sick with a disease supposedly brought on by working too hard. We were all to have a prayer and fast for her, and try to get back into God’s-Word more.

Every time a big leader got sick, especially if it was Mo himself, part of the cause usually lay with the followers.

Jacob was waiting at the door when I came in the Colombes house.

“Well, what’s your decision?” he asked.

“I can’t do it,” I answered, and followed the others into the meeting room without looking him in the eye. I had hidden that dilemma in the back room of my mind along with other unanswerable questions, and my response had come straight from my heart. Later, Cal and I were called into Jacob’s temporary office upstairs.

Cal knew what had been going on, but like a loyal revolutionary, he was trying to take it as a test from the Lord.

“Cal, I want to apologize,” said Jacob, without glancing at me. “Like you, I thought I could help Jeshanah, but it seems she does not want my help either. I want you to take her back. She’s yours. Take good care of her. She needs a strong husband.” Cal looked tentatively my way, trying to catch my eye. Jacob had offered no clue that he was going to give me back so heartlessly. I had no choice in a matter that concerned with whom to share my life. I stared at the floor while anger, shame, and confusion played havoc with my heart. I could say nothing. Only large, uncontrollable sobs were piling up at the back of my throat, like a huge tidal wave waiting to flood everything in its path.

“Well, I will leave you two here to talk this over. Cal, you can move to Sceaux, or Jeshanah can move here, whatever you like.” Jacob got up and left the room.

“Why don’t you love me?” asked Cal, clearing his throat. “I think I loved you.”

“I don’t know,” I cried, letting the torments of my soul transform into tears. “I don’t think I know what love is. I hate myself, and I hate what I have become.” I returned to the meeting with a tear-stained face. It seemed to me that everyone must know what had happened because no one asked me anything. Maybe they were just better revolutionaries than I was.

Cal moved to Sceaux. We set up a room in the basement of the home, and I spent many hours downstairs by myself, reading letters or writing new stories. Cal tried to get to know me, but I was a closed person. I had too many questions and not enough answers, and nobody I talked to could supply any. Cal had secretly brought a copy of Watership Down, by Richard Adams, into our room, and I read it like a soul starving for food. When I asked him where he got it, he replied,“I got contacts, baby,” imitating James Cagney. I would have liked to read more, but since we were really not allowed to have books in the home, Cal did not bring any more.

A few weeks after Cal and I were reunited, our home leader asked to speak with us. From the look on his face, I could see that I was in trouble.

“Jeshanah, we just got this new letter from Mo, and you’re mentioned in it.” By the tone of his voice, I knew that this was not an honor.

“Do you want me to leave?” asked Cal.

“No, I think Jeshanah is going to need all the help she can get for this one. I am going to leave this letter here for you to read. When you are finished, please bring it to me, Cal. I need to read it with the whole colony.” We sat down, heavy in silent apprehension. Cal read the new Mo letter called “The Uneager Beaver” out loud. It was about the children’s story I had written. In the story a beaver, looking for a name, learns a lesson on moderation. It seems that the editors at our publication unit had liked it so much, they gave it to their best artists to illustrate.

They created a large coloring book for children, and then sent it to Mo as a surprise, for his approval. Mo sent them back this letter, which he also sent to the worldwide Family.

The editors were berated for spending so much of God’s time and money on such a worthless story. They were fired from their special positions and sent to some obscure country to be missionaries, supposedly to learn discernment. Then Mo publicly humiliated me in the letter. He said I was foolish, a bad writer, and probably plagiarized the whole story. He said that I must not be in the Word to write such nonsense, that I probably had been overly influenced by ungodly fairy tales as a child, that my story had nothing to do with his Mo letters, and I did not understand the spiritual message of his revelations. He suggested that the whole Show Group get back into the Word and spend less time practicing and singing and dancing.

I could tell it was hard for Cal to read this to me. He knew that I had written a pretty good story, so good that our editors made it into a bigger production than anything they had ever done with a Mo letter.

That had been their mistake. They offended Mo by taking someone else’s writing and making a larger, more detailed publication. Ironically, they thought that Mo would be impressed, after all, the story was supposed to be based on one of his letters. However, he was furious, and the whole worldwide Family now knew never to put anybody’s writings above Mo’s.

I accepted this humiliation as punishment for all the horrible things I knew I had done, which Mo did not mention. Mo was a figure as distant and all-encompassing as God himself, and just as I have never seen God, I had never seen Mo. In the beginning I thought I might like to meet him sometime, but as he wrote more and more letters rebuking the faults of everyone near him, of anyone who got in his way, I thought that I’d just as soon be out-of-sight, out-of-mind. Of course, since he was a God figure in our group, any big mistakes would surely reach his attention and be dealt with severely. Just like God does! It’s all there in the Bible. I sent a long letter of apology to Mo, and he personally replied, writing “Amen” in red ink at the parts of my letter he evidently agreed with and then adding a few words at the end. These were the parts of the letter to which he wrote “Amen”,