Gospel (130 page)

“Operator, a collect call from Lucy Dantan, please.”

A pause.

“Mom? Yes, it's me, I'm…”

Lucy twirled her hair, a nervous gesture from childhood revived with each phone call home.

“I don't know my calling-card number. I know it's … no, could you listen to me? Mom…”

A discussion of the expense of a collect call.

“I don't care if it is cheaper, I can't read the number on this pay phone so you can't call me back … I'll pay you for the damn collect call when I'm home…”

Her mother began a disquisition on girls who say “damn” to their mothers. And speaking of home, young lady—

“I'll be there very soon. Can we not argue? I'll be up there in a week or so. Is Cecilia there, I'd really like to…”

Her father, you should hear her father. Speaking of Cecilia, Cecilia got her credit-card bill and someone has been running up expenses all over Africa, for God's sakes. That's why Cecilia canceled the card.

“That was me, I went to Africa.”

Why had she lied? Jerusalem's one thing, but Africa? It's lucky she wasn't killed by all the crazy niggers with guns—and if she gets some horrible African disease, don't expect them, nosiree, to foot the bills. For did she have health insurance? Noooo, ma'am, she certainly did not, spending her life in school, writing a thesis when other girls her age were raising families! Like her sisters. How God had cursed her to give her a daughter like this—

Lucy hung up.

I really am alone in this world, she thought lucidly. I really am all alone.

She walked back toward the hospital across the wide, hot parking lot, the countless specks of broken glass catching the sun, making the pavement appear embedded with diamonds. And she thought: is this pathetic collection of bickering, small-minded people and their grievances
my life?
Is that how it was before I left? I should have given Gabriel a call, she figured. At least he's sympathetic to people with problems, generating so many of them for himself. It began to bother her—Judy said Gabriel said it was urgent to call him. Might this be scroll-related?

Once in the staggering air-conditioning of the hospital, she made her way to a bank of pay phones and gave Gabriel a collect call. Noon, and he was still asleep.

“Gabe? It's me, Lucy.”

As he groggily came to consciousness, Lucy related how Judy planned to throw her out.

“Well,” said Gabriel mildly defending her, “you haven't been available to pay rent or anything for three months.” Yep, that was also typical Gabriel, always the reasoned spokesman for the other side, Judy's side. Lucy wondered when there'd come a day when someone was
her
champion, unthinkingly, automatically. Gabriel went on: “Hey, but can you believe it about her and Vito? Lucky girl. Vito's sorta dumb but what a hunk. You know, I'm real proud of her. She's come out of her shell and been able to empower herself, you know?”

“She can go to hell,” said Lucy. “I don't want to come home to find my furniture on the street.” Lucy pictured this, doubly depressed by the shoddiness of her used, thirdhand, St. Vincent de Paul thrift-shop collection of furniture. “Oh Gabe, I gotta go actually, but what was so urgent—the thing you needed to tell me?”

“It's going to take a while to get into the topic. I've really lost a lot of sleep over it. Are you ready?”

“What is it?”

“I've decided to get a master's in art history.”

*   *   *

The jowly, unsettlingly ignorant face of Oral Roberts disappeared and an ad began, pushing some forty-song record offer of some ancient man warbling the old Protestant standards. If you order now you got another album of contemporary Christian music. A choir of fifteen men and women, black and white, singing a bland, soothing wash of tuneless Jesus-music appeared. The camera panned their faces, wide-eyed, full of holiness, empty of everything else, singing the selection “His Love Is There for Me,” the elevator music of Christianity.

“Where once ruled Bach and Mozart and Beethoven,” sighed O'Hanrahan, “is now this. That's what saddens me more than anything about American Christianity. The lack of learning in the ministers, the clichéd sermons and backward politics, the shoddiness of the churches, the vapid emptiness of the music … With the wealth of this nation in which nine out of ten citizens claim to be religious, we could have a Sistine Chapel in every city, a Brahms
Requiem
composed each decade. But for our country's Christians, art and architecture and scholarship and music are the enemy camp.”

O'Hanrahan looked at Lucy, sitting in a vinyl chair across the room.

“Hell, maybe Bullins is right, this easy-listening anesthesia is Christianity's future. Maybe people don't want to be elevated or have anything expected of them, they just want thoughts-for-the-day any idiot can appreciate. These new megachurches with 20,000-people congregations—they have day-care centers and medical programs and discount stores for the faithful but where … where is the reflected glory of Zion? Where is beauty and mystery, the incalculable, the incomprehensible? It is enough to make me run screaming for the Ethiopic Rite!”

Oral on TV was hectoring his viewing public—why hadn't they sent that check yet? They'd have to answer to God for it!

“Oral's on the way out, I hear,” said O'Hanrahan.

Oral Roberts, whose healing ministry of the 1950s got him in hot water—the Detroit woman who left his crusade convinced by Roberts she was healed of diabetes, who died three days later after throwing away those insulin shots. Recently, Roberts hit the airwaves, envisioning an 80-foot Christ who talked to him. His masterpiece was his prophecy that God would take him up if he didn't get 4.5 million bucks. A mystery donor coughed it up in the end, he claimed, but not before his antics lost him half of his viewers. As Richard Roberts, his son, ascended the stairs with the cameras to Oral's death-chamber to tell his father the good news, lightning hit the tower, zapping this spectacle into oblivion.

(We couldn't resist.)

Lucy at one time dismissed all this silliness as Bible-belt nonsense, but Oral's 80-foot Jesus she now filed as another of Christianity's never-ending surprises—Agnes's sheared breasts, visionary stylites, milk droplets from an ikon, Haile Selassie and his obedient Christian menageries, and Oral's Tower of Power. Only difference, she commented, is that the other lunacies reflect the beloved, treasured folklore of those countries.

“But, it's the same in the United States,” insisted O'Hanrahan. “Charlatans like Oral Roberts and Jim Bakker reflect America's trademark cultural obsessions as well: money lust and show biz.” O'Hanrahan thought aloud: “Reverend Ike who said ‘I can love the Lord a lot better when I've got money in my pocket.' Kenneth and Gloria Copeland and their ‘health and wealth, you name it you claim it gospel.' Robert Tilton, up to his eyeballs in tax-free money, $80 million some estimate—his private villa alone worth $5 million.”

The professor raised his head from the yellow legal pads to look squarely at the TV and the source of the bland wash of music. Richard Roberts was now pushing some cassette tapes for a $120 contribution:
“And if you plant your love-seed today,”
Roberts the Younger was saying,
“we'll rush to you this five-set cassette tape package of the New Testament dramatized. Just like being there!”

O'Hanrahan looked out of the corner of his eye at Lucy. “Get out your checkbook,” he said as Lucy punched the remote.

Someone on the next Bible station was hawking a checkbook folder with the TBN, Trinity Broadcasting Network, logo on it.
“When you write those checks,”
said a lively young man,
“you'll look down and have a little reminder of the TBN family when you send that love-gift…”

“Love-seed, love-gift,” groused O'Hanrahan, grappling for the remote control.

“Wait,” said Lucy, not wishing him to zap the TV.

It was the new and improved Praise The Lord Club, with Jan and Paul Crouch. Lucy thought for a moment that Tammy Faye Bakker had found her way back onto TV but it was Jan Crouch, a new and improved Tammy Faye, a good bit older, with even higher, whiter hair and the same charcoal-smudge eye makeup. Paul and Jan descended a pair of intertwining staircases, each descending a stairway to meet and kiss happily at the bottom. They settled into the talk-show set, a cozy, frilly, velveteen and velour collection like the worst thing in a furniture showroom.

Lucy: “I saw these guys last night with the bodybuilder guy.”

“I woke up at five
A.M.
and they were showing that. Almost called you, too.”

John Jacobs, who breaks cement blocks for God on TBN, does power lifts. Everybody prays and cheers him on and then God makes for a miracle and he breaks a record number of bricks. Not on the first try always, but eventually.

“I almost called you at the Bullinses',” O'Hanrahan confessed. “To make sure
I
saw it. The most fevered
delirio,
however, can't touch American TV.”

“You sure you're feeling all right, sir? If I'm tiring you I could leave—”

“Nahhh, that got me so doped up I don't know how I feel.”

“Making headway?” Lucy asked, referring to the legal pads filling up with Greek.

“Yeah,” he said glumly. “And you've got to keep smuggling this out to a safe place.”

“Why don't you give me the key to the code, sir—”

“Forget it. This baby's my last hurrah and I'm not dying just so you can make your career on it.”

Lucy was offended, but chalked it up to his usual bluster. Maybe he had to talk that way to convince himself he wasn't all that sick.

Jan Crouch on TV was in one of her periodic near-hysterical retellings of her daddy's deathbed scene: “…
and I turned to him and held his leetle head in my hands, my leetle poppy in his leetle pajamas, and I said oooooh my leetle poppy, I love you so very very much and we will be united in heaven, poppy, my leeeeeetle tiny poppy
…”

“Jesus,” muttered O'Hanrahan, flicking the channel.

It was the ACTS Network, the Association of Christian Television Stations. And they were showing a movie. You can always tell one of these Protestant born-again movies, thought Lucy, because of the woodenness of the villains, the appearance of the one strong holier-than-everyone young teenager who won't have a sip of beer because he is saved. There was a scene where the young Christian man was having to persuade his girlfriend not to have a can of Budweiser with her cool friends. The hairstyles, Lucy figured, suggested 1975 or so.
Everyone else is doing it,
the girlfriend inveighed.

O'Hanrahan: “Would you bring me the brown paper bag nearby my satchel there … there, in the chair.”

Lucy found a crumpled bag and looked inside it. There was Merriwether's gift of Old Confederate. “I think I ought to pour it down the drain, sir.”

“Just a little medicinal sip, I'm not going to turn up the whole bottle.”

No, she said, having her brief revenge on his crass accusation of her ruthless ambitions the moment before.

The Christian TV movie had progressed and the ex-girlfriend of the Christian boy was now in extremis, ready to do anything to get someone to buy her some liquor at a convenience store.
You'll do anything?
the old man asks greasily, leering and evil.
Yes,
she breathes, all shame and misery.

“See, sir?” said Lucy. “That's where you'll end up.”

“Getting sex from teenage girls in return for bottles of alcohol? Sounds great. Now give me the bottle.”

Lucy returned it to the bag, not quite nervy enough to pour it down a drain. O'Hanrahan saw the bottle was safe and so he didn't make an issue of it, for fear she might do something rash. Lucy stared at him with concern.

“I'm
fine,
” he said. “I've felt exactly this lousy for the last three months. Give me my Percodan and a drink and I'm good as new. They're keeping me here for nothing. No, worse than that, Luce, it's part of their plot. They're going to keep me drugged and on the verge of death so I can't escape and they'll get the scroll translated.”

That was almost believable, thought Lucy. But he looked horrible, deathly ill, his face transformed in color and tiredness.

A nurse came in with an orderly and so Lucy left him, hypnotized with the Contemporary Christian rock videos, and went in search of the white-haired doctor she had talked to briefly the other night. Lucy found her at the floor's reception desk looking down a clipboard and scowling, turning to walk away—

“Dr. Stewart?” Lucy asked, hoping to arrest her escape. “I wanted to ask you about Patrick O'Hanrahan.”

She professionally smiled, stopping to talk. “His fever is still with him, his blood has every chemical imbalance known to man, his blood pressure is through the roof, his cholesterol level is off the scale, and last night after the paramedics brought him in, he was in such pain in his hands and feet, which even his high blood pressure can't supply with blood, that we had to give him morphine.”

“Oh,” said Lucy. “Is it … very bad?”

She said firmly in a lower voice, “It is after all hepatitis A.”

Lucy nodded nervously. “That's the good one, isn't it?”

The doctor set down her clipboard, with a faint smile. “Neither A nor B is exactly good, but yes, A is more easily curable with rest and antibiotics. But getting well depends on having a liver that can pull you through, dear. And I … I am led to believe his liver is pretty much gone.”

Lucy blanched and wished she'd poured the liquor down the drain. “I have another question,” she added slowly. “A friend of mine has missed her period. I mean…” Lucy suddenly had cold feet. The doctor might be born-again and maybe premarital sex was verboten down here in Bullinsland. “… but she's missed this period and I just wondered. She's traveled all across Europe and Africa and had strange food and different climates and lots of stress…”