Gospel (129 page)

“And it doesn't trouble you that Saddam Hussein is evil?”

Merriwether allowed a look of weariness to cross his face before regaining his polite affability. “Good. Evil. These are medieval terms of magic and superstition, words used by men who do not have sufficient perspective on the workings of the world. There are only plans that work, Mr. O'Hanrahan, and plans that don't work.”

O'Hanrahan nodded. “And buying up the Gulf of Mexico is your plan. So even if Merriwether Industries gives you the heave-ho, thanks to Bullins you still have the wherewithal to form another company, perhaps, start all over.”

Merriwether stood. “If only I could start all over—start everything over. New wife, new children.” He seemed distracted, looking at the window. “There's not enough time, of course, to father another heir, that … no, that's not a possibility, I suppose.”

“If you have your health.”

“I don't,” he said in cold simplicity. Merriwether looked to the window again. “Well, not for much longer.”

More interesting to O'Hanrahan than the mystery of Merriwether's schemings for oil profits was why Merriwether was here at all, telling him all this. But now Merriwether was to address this:

“I wanted to meet you, Mr. O'Hanrahan,” he said softly, approaching the bedside, leaving the cigar behind. “I followed your adventures secondhand all summer. I knew in addition to being a scholar and living a manly life of mild excitement, shall we say, travel and some degree of intrigue, I knew that you were a gourmand, a man of rich tastes, refined opinions, a man very much of this world. A man, if I may be so presumptuous, like myself. Though you have had a much different calling.”

O'Hanrahan examined his troubled soul … was he like this civilized, rational, charming villain? Had he not been as ruthless with his own family? Had he not preordained his son Rudolph a life like his own and withheld his love when things didn't go according to plan? O'Hanrahan thought back upon his office-politics schemes for getting to be department head, his lies and misrepresentations to get what he wanted out of Mordechai Hersch, out of Lucy. Why even now he would rather take the secret of the Matthias scroll to his grave than give it to someone else! If O'Hanrahan had been born with millions at his disposal might this not be the man he would have become, with a gospel of economics instead of an interest in gospels of theology. Of course I'm different, he insisted to himself.

“And so I have come to ask you,” Merriwether said seriously, bending over slightly, “an important question.”

O'Hanrahan unsteadily met Merriwether's steely gaze.

“My grandfather's religious hypocrisy, and my own father's dilettantish, bloodless Christianity never took with me. I have no interest, Mr. O'Hanrahan, in art, in music, in religious experience. It was my first premise, sir: that there was no God. All things followed from that for me, and as you see, I've done well for myself and well for my country. I find myself at this juncture, with this illness…” He slowed temporarily but resumed: “… I find myself alone, which is how I always was and how it will end. I do not mind the loneliness, do not mistake me, but that too followed from my first premise, that there was no God. Many things I've done to get where I am…” No, this was more of a confession than Merriwether had intended, so he changed directions. “Let us say, if I could bring myself to find some merit in the argument that there was a God, or failing this, that perhaps there was, as you quaintly think, merely good and evil … well, I might well have lived a different life.”

O'Hanrahan was surprised when Merriwether sat on the edge of his bed.

“You're sick like I'm sick. I had to meet you to ask you this: is there a God after all, Mr. O'Hanrahan?” As if embarrassed by the question, he rushed on: “You've given your life to this subject. You've prayed at Him, you've found Him in gospels and ancient texts, you've seen God in all His supposed variations beseeched and invoked around the world by millions of men. Now in all that time, can you honestly tell me…” Merriwether was all cold granite but his eyes, his eyes flashed the briefest vulnerability. “Do you think there's … there might be a God?”

O'Hanrahan averted his stare.

(Are you going to deny Us again, Patrick?)

O'Hanrahan reflected. He says we're the same, but we're not the same. If only it comes down to the answer to this question that distinguishes us! “Yes,” he said, meeting his visitor's glance, “I believe there is a God.”

Merriwether stood up, his reverie broken. “Eh, what other answer could I have expected from you…”

Merriwether returned to the chair and reclaimed his cigar, reached for his light overcoat, replaced the nail file in his jacket pocket, picked up his
Wall Street Journal,
saying, “I don't know why I thought … why I thought I'd hear something different. You're just another believer, entranced by the medicine man before the fire, scared by the ghost stories, worried about the bogeyman.”

O'Hanrahan frowned. The bogeyman was not half so terrifying as rich men and their secret societies and their secret plans with other rich men, men with too much love of money and too much free time, the source of the better part of mischief in this world! But why had Merriwether asked about God if he hadn't wanted a positive answer?

(He is running from the answer. He has spent a life running from the voices.)

Merriwether stood in the doorway. “I wish you luck in your recovery, sir, and I hope you have the leisure to enjoy the cigars and bourbon one day.” He almost faltered, adding, “If you would drink to my health.”

O'Hanrahan gravely nodded.

Then Merriwether paused in the doorway, momentarily speechless.

“I suppose it makes no difference really,” said Merriwether, as if he really wished to stay but was being pulled away. “Whether my first premise was wrong, whether God is looking down, as we speak. How could I alter what's been done? How can I change this late in the game? Even if you could have proven God to me, I'm not sure I want to have anything to do with Him.” He looked for a last time out the window into the black of night. “Such an inefficient Deity, really. Wasteful, irrational, incompetent, to judge by His world.”

(Just wait until the next one, Charles.)

“Oh well,” sighed Merriwether. “Forgive this long imposition, Mr. O'Hanrahan. I see we are not like each other after all.”

And as he left, O'Hanrahan closed his eyes. No, not after all: I am not Charles Merriwether. Didn't miss it by much, perhaps, but those old masks of the shaman do obtain: good and evil. Maybe that is what it is to be in the Elect of God, to be able to discern a moral core in this chaos of the world, to have such things matter to one. But even to have evolved that far, to know of good and evil and know that a choice exists, how impoverished and irrelevant is our performance, how paltry our effort, what a dead weight we are, how even the good among us are worthless against the squalor of the whole.

(No, not worthless.)

O'Hanrahan turned on his side hoping to sink from this sadness into a rescuing sleep. If I only had more time to show there was good in me, to retrieve it from the soul I've submerged and diluted with the world's nonsense.

(There is time. But will you know what to do?)

A
UGUST
30
TH

Lucy awoke about 10:30
A.M.
due to some vacuuming in the house. A wretched night of sleep; even her exhaustion counted for nothing as stress and concern for Dr. O'Hanrahan marred her rest. She hurriedly got dressed, peeked outside of her guest room, and made her way to the stairs. She rounded the curved, antebellum stairway to the foyer only to see Farley, who must have been waiting for her.

Lucy: “Can you get me a car to the hospital?”

“I'll take you myself—”

“I'd prefer a taxi, please.”

But Farley drove the station wagon around to the front and Lucy hopped in, determined not to speak a word.

“My mother was just tryin' to heal him—”

“I don't have anything to say to you!” she spat out.

They concluded the trip in silence.

Farley Sr. was in the lobby signing autographs and being venerated by elderly people who had just emptied their life savings into his medical center or made a contribution to his ministries. Lucy slipped out of sight, walked out of the hospital to make a small pilgrimage to the shopping center across the six-lane boulevard not as yet named after Martin Luther King. There was a drive-thru bank and an automatic teller machine. She hadn't used her bank card in three months but if God was on her side she would be able to access her funds in her home account.

It worked. She checked her balance: $625.

Enough, at least, she thought darkly, for the fee at an adoption agency, if it comes to that. She withdrew $200, the limit. Suddenly she wondered, Do you even pay at an adoption agency?

This shopping center was circa 1959, long horizontal storefronts and outdated slanted, zippy lettering on the signs, big green-glass plate windows. Many stores seemed to be closed for good. Lucy spotted a pay-phone booth. There were numerous ordeals by phone awaiting her. She ought to call Judy and see how she'd managed roommateless for two more months than she'd planned.

Lucy stepped into the booth. All over the glass at eye level were decals for some Satanic-sounding heavy metal rock band, which Lucy smiled to discover in the heart of Bullins's mission fields, and a 24-hour help line for depressed people. There was also a yellow decal for a women's center:

RAPED? PREGNANT AND ALONE? BATTERED?
NEED HELP? NEED COUNSELING? NEED MONEY?

And below that was the number in a suburb of Baton Rouge, twelve miles away.

Lucy lifted the receiver, dialing the number with false calm.

“Hello,” she said tentatively.

The woman on the switchboard was Ruby, who sounded like what one would expect from the name, a sensible black woman in whom all things might be confided. The center was a 24-hour women's hotline, a shelter, an abortion clinic—that is, until the legislators of Louisiana got their way any day now! Ruby insisted on a first-name basis.

“I think I'm pregnant,” said Lucy.

“You don't know, honey?”

“Well … okay Ruby, it sounds stupid when I say it but I'm afraid to do the test. I'm not married, I don't believe in abortion, so that means adoption and I'm not exactly thrilled about—”

“Hold it, hold it, child,” Ruby laughed. “You go test yourself with the kit and you call me right back, and then we're gonna talk.”

Lucy was widely relieved and soothed by this near-meaningless exchange. “And I can call back?”

“You sho' can, baby. I'll be here.”

Lucy gently replaced the receiver. She took a pen from her carpetbag and jotted down the Feliciana Parish Women's Center's number.

How much, she thought, I have needed to hear a comforting voice. She decided to call Judy, who ought to be in at noon … Of all things, Lucy had a bad hankering to talk over
everything
with Judy. They'd never had much success talking over events and crises in Lucy's life—Judy went into psychiatrist-mode with Lucy, threw around terms she used in her studies, took every opportunity to berate, belittle, or condescend to Lucy, the irrational basket case, before Judy's omnipotence. But then they had also never had a
real
crisis to deal with, like Lucy being pregnant. Maybe.

“Hello, Judy?”

Judy was excited to hear from Lucy, accepting the collect call. You're where?

“Louisiana, a place called Philadelphia.”

Judy began to talk and spew gossip mingled with news of people who had left messages on their answering machine for Lucy. Lucy was a little depressed by the slim recital of friends: Gabriel, over and over, screaming how urgent it was, her parents, her mom in a snit, her father in a snit, Cecilia her big sister calling for her parents who were in a snit, Gabriel again, Luke to say hi, Margery who wanted her notes from the summer-session seminars—Judy told Marge Lucy was away so you don't have to call her back—and Dr. Shaughnesy.

“That's it?”

Wait a minute, said Judy. Someone was over at the apartment and Judy was talking to her. No, it was a him.

“Is that Vito?”

Yes it was.

“I have something to talk to you about real important, Judy.”

So do I, she said, laughing. We may not even be roommates when you get back!

“What?”

Vito and she had decided they ought to move in together, things were going so well.

“It's a little soon, isn't it?” Lucy asked, wishing she hadn't called. In an avalanche of pent-up emotion, she could discern the greater waste of years with this woman, propping up a one-way friendship, the false declarations of solidarity. Lucy said at last, “Don't you wanna give this time, use our apartment as home base while you explore the future of the relationship?”

Judy wanted very much to use the apartment as home base.

“Well, Judy, there's hardly room for three of us there—”

Judy explained.

“I see.”

Judy did, after all, hold the lease in her name, and the phone, and the utilities. Lucy had for years felt relieved that nothing pragmatic was expected of her. But when it came to one of them moving out it also made Lucy the logical choice. Oh, said Judy, but this is nothing definite yet … Vito was tickling her or molesting her and she was giggling now. Stop it, stop it!

“Okay. We'll talk when I get back.”

Judy didn't even ask when that might be.

Lucy hung up the phone.

This new information mixed with the Louisiana humidity conspired to make her feel sickly. She almost called Ruby back—or maybe she ought to call the Depression Hotline … All she had really wanted, she now realized, was a reassuring sound of a friendly voice. Maybe one of her brothers or sisters would be home. In fact, the longer she let the call to home go untended the worse it would be. Maybe the voice of her mommy, if Lucy could just hit her on a good morning …