Origin of the Brunists (31 page)

Marcella stood at his side, and in the moment they had together he asked her what exactly they were expecting tonight. “I don't know,” she said. “Perhaps … the coming of light.” Was that irony he heard? Was she, like him, having fun with all this? He wished to know what she meant, but feared to risk too much. Instead, he asked her why she had told him that tonight's password was designed “to keep out the Baxters.” Did Abner Baxter have something to do with it?

“He's the one who hates Mrs. Collins. He's the man who turned all her friends against her and made his own wife the president of Mrs. Collins' Evening Circle.”

“Was he here on the eighth?”

“Yes. He's a fat man with red hair and a furious temper.” She made funny puffing gestures of fatness and fury. “He made everybody walk out and leave her alone. He's with the enemy.”

“The enemy? Who are they?”

“Why,” she said with a smile, as though surprised he should ask, “the powers of darkness.”

He smiled in return, but it made her stop smiling, and that confused him. “Don't you think it's kind of funny,” he said to cover for his smile, “that a redheaded preacher should be the devil's advocate?”

“If you saw him, you wouldn't think so,” she said, and there was no smile at all.

Elaine Collins and Carl Dean Palmers had become engrossed in a quiet argument about religion. Colin Meredith, severed, walked over to join him and Marcella. Affected, the boy's walk, but not effeminate exactly. The nice child, the ever-willing friend, the shy young man who would fade into the shy old bachelor, fastidious, moody, kindly, especially toward small children. He explained that he had known Mrs. Norton for several months, that she had been helping him establish contact with superior spirits. He had introduced his friend Carl Dean to her, and although Carl Dean was skeptical at first, they had both come to have a lot of faith in her. She was extremely sincere and intelligent and unselfish, and she had done a great deal for him, not so much yet for Carl Dean maybe, but she had made a whole new person out of
him
, leading him away from the love of earthly things to love of things of the spirit. He had brought an end to all his bad habits, and had even discovered that sometimes he did attain to a kind of communication with the other world. Well, maybe not exactly a communication, but something very much like it. It took literally hours and hours of meditation and humility and self-searching and seeking without thought, but once in awhile something happened, something really unbelievable, it was like—like a light turning on inside. Afterwards, after this kind of terribly exhilarating experience, he couldn't explain it, or even describe it, it was beyond the capacity of human language, like Mrs. Norton always said. But, really, it was wonderful, a truly extraordinary experience—but then, Mr. Miller probably already knew what he meant. Beside him, Marcella nodded for him; she seemed pretty caught up in what this silly kid had to say. Also, Meredith said, he sometimes received—like Mrs. Norton, through his right hand—messages from his dead mother and father, but that was mainly thanks to another woman he had known a couple years before in the orphanage; Mrs. Norton didn't seem too excited about these writings from his parents, though of course she said they were surely true. She herself, she had told him, had received her very first communications from recently dead earth people, or spirits that assumed their parts. Now, with her help, he was learning how to achieve much greater things.

Willie and Mabel Hall came over, disrupting the boy's monologue. Marcella excused herself, left the room. “Well, as the Good Book says,” said Willie Hall, “‘the poor has good tidings preached to them!'” Hall looked at no one when he spoke, just gazed off and let fly.

“You know the Bible well?” Miller asked.

“And ‘somethin' greater than the temple is here!'“

Mabel Hall, though not too big, outweighed her husband by a good thirty pounds and had a couple inches on him, but Miller's first-sight estimate of her as the muscled tyrant proved far from the case. She was as submissive as Willie was impulsive, as mute and secretive as he was loquacious.

“Excuse me, Mr. Hall, but what do you think is going to—?”

“As the Good Book says, Mr. Miller, ‘in malice be ye babes, but in mind be men!' And ‘many are called, but few are chosen'!”

It was useless, so Miller gave it up.

“Watch ye, stand fast in the faith, quit you like men, be strong—” Marcella came in and announced that refreshments were ready. She smiled over at Miller, and he winked in return. Everyone stood and moved with polite gestures toward the dining room, sweeping Marcella in ahead of them. All but Giovanni, of course: he watched them exit, expressionless. His eyes were what you noticed: glittering, black, restless, the flesh around them sunken, making them seem to protrude abnormally.

Miller held back, let the others go ahead, and he saw, as he'd more or less anticipated, that Eleanor Norton was also delaying, fussing with her logbooks. When the others had filed into the dining room, she approached him. “I saw you were talking with Mrs. Collins.”

“Yes, for a moment. I must say, she seems very impressed by you. She says you have been a great inspiration to her.”

Mrs. Norton sighed, absently rubbed a small medallion that hung from her neck on a chain. “She's a sincere woman, Mr. Miller, but … a frightful amateur.” She smiled up at him, accepting the sympathetic smile he returned her. “Tell me,” she continued without transition, “do you believe in communication with spiritual beings at higher levels?”

Marcella had explained enough of what had happened until now to prepare him somewhat for tonight's experience, and he had even half expected this woman's very question, yet when she put it directly to him, he discovered he didn't have an answer for it. He reached again for his cigarettes, checked himself just in time. Chatter trickled in irrelevantly from the dining room. Giovanni looked on from his bed. “It's a subject,” he managed finally, “in which I have long had a serious interest, Mrs. Norton.”

“Good,” she said simply, apparently accepting that, lame as it was. “Oh dear, we really have
so
much to do!” She focused on some great distance, sighed. “I do hope we shall be ready!”

He ventured: “For what, Mrs. Norton?” All he had picked up so far was that she claimed to be able to receive messages, through writing and sometimes, in emergencies, through her voice, from superior spirits, spirits at what she called “higher aspects of intensity,” and that now she had reached the seventh such aspect, perhaps the last, whence she received periodic communiqués from a teacher known to her as “Domiron.” This Domiron presumably existed, not exactly in a different place or a different stellar system, but somehow in this same space, but at a different density level, as though his atoms were lighter or something.

“I don't know,” she said slowly, after a pause. “I hope …” But her voice trailed off. She glanced at her watch, and he instinctively checked his: 8:50. “Mr. Miller?” She looked up at him. He guessed her eyes to be gray or gray-blue, though in this dull flickering light he couldn't tell for sure. But they had that faded, indistinct, introspective quality of gray eyes. “Do you believe that Giovanni Bruno was miraculously rescued from the coalmine disaster?”

“Yes, I do.” No more hesitations, boy.

“I don't.”

“Really? But—”

“I am convinced, Mr. Miller—more than that: I have received specific information on the matter—Giovanni Bruno perished in that mine disaster!”

What could he say? From over her small graying head, Giovanni Bruno's eyes shone at them, as though … as though he were assenting, inciting her. “But then, how—?”

“His own mother has confirmed it. She said she saw him dead. And everyone has agreed on one thing: that this is a very different man now from the one they all knew as Giovanni Bruno.”

“Then you think—?”

“Not think, Mr. Miller! This kind of insight is never achieved by thinking!” She seemed suddenly angry. He realized that, for all her modest manner, there was something ever seething underneath. She frowned, as a mother might at a forgetful child, then continued matter-of-factly: “Giovanni Bruno died and his body is now inhabited by a superior being. This is the meaning of the … the vision of the white bird.”

At a loss, he replied, “I see,” and then, in the ensuing silence, added, “Well, I'm certainly learning a great deal!”

She assented. “We all have much to learn,” she said.

“And Mrs. Collins?”

A barely perceptible little sigh of exasperation, a pause. “We felt extremely fortunate that Mrs. Collins joined us three weeks ago. There is every reason to believe that the … the being, let us say, the being now struggling to establish communication with us through … through the body and person of Giovanni Bruno”—a thoughtful hesitation, a brief glance Bruno's way—“might originally have intended to utilize Mrs. Collins' husband.”

“But why do you think—?”

“The … the condition …”

“Ah. And does Mrs. Collins herself …”

Again the impatient sigh. “Grasp it? I don't know, Mr. Miller. I hope so. But she is slow to learn, is overemotional and impulsive. And she is too hemmed in, I am afraid, by her own … her own prejudices, if I may so speak.”

“Her Christianity.”

“Yes. I have had to employ all the frightfully dull simplifications and bumbling writings to which she is accustomed in order even to communicate—I hope I don't offend you …?”

“Not at all.”

“Righteousness and salvation, the so-called Second Coming, the terribly overworked parable of the Cross, angels and devils and sin—
sin!
Good heavens! Finally, Mr. Miller, we are all of us emanations of the world soul, are we not? Ultimately we all partake, like it or not, in what is commonly called the divine, and the only conceivable sin in such a case is to be willfully ignorant of one's proper condition. Isn't that so?”

He assented, remarking privately that that was not unlike the line by which he often made out with the reluctant.

“But what can I do? And I simply
cannot
share—that is,
we
cannot share—her morbid expectations. I admit, it is possible, at least another thing somewhat like the disaster she expects is possible, but, well, there is a logic to everything, Mr. Miller, even the irrational, don't you think?”

“By all means.”

“I have received no single message to confirm such an extreme interpretation, though it is true, there have been hints implying
something
of cosmic importance….” She gazed off, her mind momentarily elsewhere, bit her lip. She seldom let go her grip on the medallion. “Mr. Miller, I cannot believe that my … my sources …”

“Domiron, I think you—”

“Why, yes! How did you know?”

He perceived an answer that would really bowl her over, but he passed it by. “Marcella mentioned …”

“Oh, yes. Of course.” She looked up at Miller, her schoolmistress sternness melting for a moment. “She's a truly marvelous pupil, so kind and sincere, the finest in all my years as … as a teacher. We're deeply fond of her, Wylie and I. And she is making such extraordinary progress!”

Inwardly, he frowned at that but said, “She's a wonderful girl.”

“Yes, yes, she is.” Fadeout again.

“Mrs. Norton, I'd like to arrange for, sometime at your convenience, of course, some private instruction, too, if I may.”

“Of course, Mr. Miller,” she said, then added gravely, “It is my duty for those who ask.” She cast a glance toward Bruno, then turned to enter the dining room.

“Oh, and Mrs. Norton, what do you think, what do you believe Giovanni Bruno—or the voice within him—meant by ‘the coming of light'?”

“I'm not sure,” she said, looking at him quizzically. “But we shall know tonight. Shouldn't we go in? I'm afraid there'll be no cake for us.”

The coming of light! Do none of them perceive it so well as she? So plain! Her knife licks into the cake
, his
cake, light dances on the blade, on the frosting's glaze, spoons reflect it, eyes sparkle with it, light decorates her laughter, her motions flow in it. Are not their pasts so shadowed as hers? Does not a storm blow through their present? Do not their morrows flash with promise? Is not this very room
bursting
with light? Are they blind? Are they all so old? Need they their terrors? Must they distort it? Oh
, come!
she cries. Yes, there is plenty for all! for seconds!
take more!
Gaily, she serves, pours, helps, hands, gives
… gives!

Around the table a cheerful tumble of voices, forks clicking plates, compliments on the cake, modest pasts in halting revelation, the boys talking basketball and animal care with Wylie Norton: could be a party anywhere. Willie Hall, his jaws in motion as always, but now with cake damming the sound, listened, eyes asquint, to Eleanor Norton. Mrs. Wilson and Mrs. Hall sat fatly on chairs, overlapping the edges, nibbling at the cake, Mrs. Hall whispering furtively into Mrs. Wilson's ear. Miller located Marcella behind the broad shoulders of Clara Collins, delivering cake to Elaine. He maneuvered so as to catch her eye, showed her his empty hands. She smiled, stretched over the dining room table, starched blouse snapping taut, under the yellow—almost amber—glow of the chandelier, sliced him a wide wedge, laid it neatly on a plate. He knew it was unwarranted, but he couldn't rid his mind of the idea she had baked the cake especially for him. Anyway, why not think of it that way? Watching her was a feast in itself. More than anything, it was her poise, her unfailing delicacy of movement, her radiance, open smiles, frank gazes, all without visible effort, operating on some internal principle of—well, he was tempted to say
Joy
. But maybe that was merely an instance of transference. Certainly
he
felt like blowing the goddamn roof off. She brought him the cake and a cup of coffee. “I don't suppose you take cream or sugar.”