This Is Not for You (8 page)

“Thank God for that.”

“Nobody likes my jokes but me.”

“They aren’t jokes,” I said.

“When are you going to walk me through the service? That’s more pressing. What a weekend it’s going to be, Sandy’s proficiency concert Saturday night and your sermon Sunday.”

“I haven’t seen Sandy lately.”

“Nobody has. I just caught sight of her between classes a couple of days ago and she said, ‘You and Kate are coming to my concert, aren’t you?’ It’s funny, but I think it matters to her a lot, our going. I do like her. Do you?”

“Yes,” I said.

It is hard to believe that anyone was important to Sandy on the night of her concert. When she came onto the stage, the black Grecian folds of her dress making her stiffness appropriate, her pale, triangular face was grave, preoccupied. She turned not away from the audience but toward the piano, which was what she had come to find. She sat down, making no nervous adjustments of bench or dress. She was perfectly still, waiting with perhaps no awareness at all that an audience waited with her. Then she began. The music she played was chosen to display the range of her skill, technical and interpretive. The professional critics were there because Sandy had already begun her career as a concert pianist. They could be picked out among the music students and faculty members, who also made occasional notes on their programs. This was as much an examination as a concert, and at first I found it hard not to listen with some anticipation of the criticism. She was precise, almost automatic, a perfect machine, the emotion there, but programmed in advance, memorized. Then first in Bach and again in Bartok, she played as if she were discovering rather than recalling, and the sound opened into the present, into the audience, new and requiring. There. There it is, whatever it is, the power.

“What will she do now?” you asked, as we waited for space in the crowd.

“You mean, tonight?”

“Well, there’s the reception.”

“But afterwards.”

“Do you want to be with her?”

“I’d be inadequate,” you said.

“For what?” Monk asked, suddenly at my elbow. She had been sitting with Robin a few rows behind us. “Are you going to the reception?”

“No,” I said.

“Of course, you have to be Jesus Christ tomorrow morning,” Monk said, and then she turned to you, “and you have to be Jesus’ little helper.”

“Sun beam,” you said. “I guess I won’t go, either. If you have a chance, tell Sandy it was just great, will you?”

I had none of Sandra Mentchen’s preoccupation with the performance itself. I felt very much the way I had on the morning I had stood at the edge of a pool waiting to disgrace myself. “Talent without discipline, courage without moral intent are deformities, not gifts,” I could hear my father say, and I agreed with him; yet I very much hoped that just those deformities would carry me through the hour that was about to begin. You waited beside me with a different kind of nervousness, which had to do with particular uncertainties: standing at the wrong time, mispronouncing a word, reading a prayer designated for me. But you weren’t worried about failing anyone but me. And there was something else for you, more important. Over your cherished black academic gown was the white surplice, “the life of the spirit.”

“Try it on for size, little dog,” I had said and helped you on with it, just as more recently you must have been helped into your second bridal gown by one of your sisters, who call you by God’s nicknames now.

Then, unconverted Jew and reverting half breed, we stood in the unorthodox costumes invented for essentially Episcopalian variations, about to conduct a service which would have a Hindu prayer or two along with the general confession and thanksgiving, in honor of the Brotherhood of Man: Cain and Abel. The choir was in place; the candles were being lighted; there were only a few people in the congregation still offering private prayers. When the organ began the introduction to the processional hymn, the congregation stood, and, as they began to sing “Once to Every Man and Nation,” we walked slowly down the aisle, seeing nothing but the familiar backs of heads until the procession parted before us and we stopped to bow to the cross, given to the chapel by my family in memory of my father. Then I had to face the congregation with the call to worship.

“Create in me a clean heart, O God, and renew a right spirit within me…”

But immediately I could kneel for the general confession, for the Lord’s Prayer, and, when I stood again, I could turn my back on them for “Glory be to the Father, and to the Son and to the Holy Ghost.”

The responsive reading, according to the printed program, was adapted from
The Just Vengeance
—mine, but you had to carry it out. You read out clearly:

“Brother, what is your name?”

“My name is Cain and Abel,” the congregation was forced to reply.

“Brother, what is your name?”

“My name is Cain and Abel.”

“Brother, what is your name?”

“My name is Cain and Abel.”

“God send justice! The blood of Abel cries out from the ground.”

I had put into your mouth all that I didn’t dare to say or could no longer say. You read the St. Paul passage: “Who wilt not suffer you to be tempted above that ye are able, but wilt with the temptation also make a way to escape, that ye may be able to bear it…” and “for thou madest us for thyself, and our heart is restless, until it find rest in thee….”

I read the sermon quietly enough, except inside the voice of Judas:

“Can anything clear me in my own eyes? or release me from the horror of myself? I tell you, there is no escape from God’s innocence.”

And on into the last paragraph:

“We are Cain and Abel, we are the betrayer and the betrayed, gaining, with an awareness of our double nature, humility and—perhaps—salvation. Let us pray.”

Yours was the prayer before the benediction.

“O life-giving sun, offspring of the lord of creation, solitary seer of heaven!… By the path of good lead us to final bliss… Deliver us from wandering evil…”

After all these years, your voice is what I remember more than my own. They were the last prayers I ever offered. And you offered them, your own and your first. If I had not so certainly turned away from the Church then, would your own detour have taken so many years? Probably I had nothing to do with it.

“What a performance,” Sandy said, as she shook hands with both of us after the service. “I wish I wanted to be saved. What I ought to do is write a couple of hymns. I could get along without ‘Once to Every Man and Nation.’ When you’re ordained, Kate, that’s what I’ll do.”

“A safe promise,” I said, being pleasant, waiting for some reference to my other talents.

“That was a great concert last night,” you said.

“Well, I passed,” Sandy said quietly, “on the strength of Bach and Bartok. I wish you’d both been around for a drink afterwards, but I knew you had this to do this morning.”

“Why don’t you come drinking with us after my show?” you suggested.

Sandy looked at me, and then she said, “I’d like that, but I’ve got to go to Los Angeles. Maybe some time before it’s all over…”

That night I went to find Sandy. She was in the living room of her dormitory, talking with a couple of friends.

“Hi,” she called. “We were just arguing about your sermon. These people don’t want Cain and Abel one nature. They want the sheep and the goats separated.”

“You’re really a Zoroastrian, aren’t you?” one of them asked.

“No,” I said. “Just a bad Christian. Have you got an hour or so, Sandy?”

“Sure.”

We excused ourselves.

“Where do you want to go?” she asked.

“Anywhere that’s private.”

“Let’s drive then.”

After we had left the campus and the town and were driving in the hills above the city, I was not sure I could or would say anything. Perhaps I had never intended to.

“What do you want from me, Kate… anything?”

“Just this probably… getting out. That was bad this morning.”

“So was the night before, mostly You can’t mind much about that. “You did what you thought you had to, didn’t you?”

“I think so.”

“Well, that’s enough. I’m glad you came. There’s something I wanted to say to you, and I couldn’t have unless you’d come. I’ve been trying to figure out ever since that night what it was between us that made everything so bad, even what was good. I sat there in chapel this morning, ready to be furious, you two all dressed up in tents, going down the aisle like a couple of newlyweds, and I thought what a mucked-up fucking waste it was. I still think so. But that’s not it. While you were up there doing it, it was like me the night before: no mistakes, but nothing else either, except once or twice. And I thought, ‘I know what’s wrong between us. We’re friends, and I didn’t know it.’ Then afterwards, when you were just waiting for me to take a crack or try to make time with Esther, I saw that you didn’t know it, either. So I think you’re out of your head, and you think I am. It doesn’t matter. I could have a drink with you and Esther. It would be okay. Yes?”

“Yes,” I said, but I felt just a little the way I did when all those glasses began to fall, sad, helplessly sad.

I wonder if the reason so many adolescents love Fitzgerald is that he never outgrew that kind of sadness. It takes some measure of innocence to mix honor and depravity that way, and a setting is also necessary—the heavy night scent of eucalyptus, for instance, and the far, small, bright towers of a city He would have remembered the tune playing on the car radio. I don’t, but it might have been “You’ll Never Walk Alone.” Those were the days before privately financed good music stations, which we would have felt required to listen to. They were also the days before it was popular to support persecuted minorities, better still to belong to one. Neither Sandy nor I knew that we were making an emotional investment which fifteen years later would give us almost Negro status with very little Negro pain. The attitudes we were developing and the decisions we were making were based on an older morality for populating those coastal hills and inland valleys. Though the Jews had already been burned and the smog already sometimes smarted in our eyes, we were still prepared to be the victims rather than the heroines of a population explosion so violent, its fallout of conformity so deadly that even the conservative Church would begin to question its doctrines of moral sickness and health. What a waste all Sandy’s angry aggressiveness now turns out to be. And how many silly years it took me to discover that I was playing my game of hide-and-seek mostly by and with myself. But we didn’t know then. Sandy still doesn’t.

Last year, when I had a drink with her after a concert, she asked me to send money to another of those amateur little magazines she has been supporting for years.

“Isn’t it time that people with freckles stopped forming leper colonies?”

“Is that why you live alone?”

It’s not as easy as that. Once, briefly, not even true. Habit. Like not going to church. I gave it up on that Sunday as people give up smoking, and, though I have been occasionally since, I am not a practicing Christian. The second Sunday I missed chapel I had a phone call from the chaplain. Would I like to have sherry with him and his wife that afternoon at five? Certainly I would not, but I went. And after the sherry was poured, the chaplain’s wife arranged to be in the kitchen attending to supper.

“I didn’t really have time to tell you,” he said, “what a fine service that was, not just the sermon, the whole service. The president said he was going to write you a note. Did he?”

“Yes,” I said. “It was very nice of him.”

“But something went wrong for you,” the chaplain said.

“I’m frantic about my other work,” I said. “It took more time than I had.”

He started to say something and then stopped, but he wasn’t waiting for me to say anything more. He was testing the bridge he was going to try to walk.

“I have left the Church twice,” he said finally, “to sin in peace. I didn’t come back frightened. I came back tired, tired of myself.”

Tiredness of myself is what’s driving me away, I might have said, but I didn’t. I let his offer lie between us. We talked around it about my work, about plans for next year, about your show which was scheduled for the middle of the week.

“Performances and occasions,” I said. “Robin Clark told me a story the other day about a youngster just out of reform school. He’d been sent to the Catholic farm. When Robin asked him how it was, he said, All day long we dug potatoes, eight hours a day, and what did we get at the end of it? Communion. Starving to death and nothing to eat but communion.’ ”

“Which is what this spring is for you.”

“Pretty well,” I said.

He had the kindness and good sense to leave me alone after that. I meant to go to call on him and his wife at the end of term, but I never did find or make the time to do it.

It was easy enough for you to find no time for chapel when I didn’t. For the week before your show, you rarely attended lectures, and often Monk or I would take both lunch and dinner to the studio for you. I didn’t confess then to a mild envy of both Monk and you, for you both had places for work, tools, and props. I liked the studio better than the theater, which always seemed to me a little seedy, too crassly make-believe. The studio was a simple shack by the creek, always either too hot or too cold, corners filled with rags, half a dozen dusts pooling and sifting under the wrapped-up work of the day, all in a strong glare of critical light. Occasionally after dinner, if no one else was in the studio, I’d stay a while with a book, liking your absorbed company, the occasional fragments of conversation. In this way I had seen stages of most of your work. I did not expect your show to surprise me, but it did.

There I saw the four years I had known you gathered together in one place, beginning with the figures whose heads were the right size for their hands and feet in postures our bodies have learned only from their clothes, idealized bulk of matriarchal virgins naked at a movie. Then what you called the shrunken head series, which were all very small, military, naked lead soldiers marching off to war. Next came the mythical animals with Miltonic morals, gargoyles ready to brush their teeth and be put to bed. Surely, you were the one who should have disproved the existence of evil. Then came what Monk called donuts for Henry Moore, circles and figure eights whose loose ends sometimes flowered into faces. I had seen them all, and I had known that resemblances were sometimes strong. What I hadn’t seen was the progress your concept of yourself had made against my static face. Whether my face was perched on top of a young body already stiffly suffering vaginal senility, was a death’s head in the mouth of a gargoyle, or bloomed at the end of a fragile stalk, it was the same serene mask.