Strange Highways (60 page)

* * *

The trucker who killed Ellen was trying to make more money to buy a boat. He was a fisherman whose passion was trolling; to afford the boat, he had to take on more work. He was using amphetamines to stay awake. The truck was a Peterbilt, the biggest model they make. Ellen was driving her blue BMW. They hit head-on, and though she apparently tried to take evasive action, she never had a chance.

Benny was devastated. I put all work aside and stayed home with him the entire month of July. He needed a lot of hugging, reassuring, and some gentle guidance toward acceptance of the tragedy. I was in bad shape too, for Ellen had been more than my wife and lover: She had been my toughest critic, my greatest champion, my best friend, and my only confidant. At night, alone in the bedroom we had shared, I put my face against the pillow upon which she had slept, breathed in the faintly lingering scent of her, and wept; I couldn’t bear to wash the pillowcase for weeks. But in front of Benny, I managed for the most part to maintain control of myself and to provide him with the example of strength that he so terribly needed.

I allowed no funeral. Ellen was cremated, and her ashes were dispersed at sea.

A month later, on the first Sunday in August, when we had begun to move grudgingly and sadly toward acceptance, forty or fifty friends and relatives came to the house, and we held a quiet memorial service for Ellen, a purely secular service with not the slightest thread of religious content. We gathered on the patio near the pool, and half a dozen friends stepped forward to tell amusing stories about Ellen and to explain what an impact she’d had on their lives.

I kept Benny at my side throughout that service, for I wanted him to see that his mother had been loved by others too, and that her existence had made a difference in more lives than his and mine. He was only eight years old, but he seemed to take from the service the very comfort that I had hoped it would give him. Hearing his mother praised, he was unable to hold back his tears, but now there was something more than grief in his face and eyes; now he was also proud of her, amused by some of the practical jokes that she had played on friends and that they now recounted, and intrigued to hear about aspects of her that had theretofore been unknown to him. In time these new emotions were certain to dilute his grief and help him adjust to his loss.

The day following the memorial service, I rose late. When I went looking for Benny, I found him beneath one of the cherry trees in the backyard. He sat with his knees drawn up against his chest and his arms around his legs, staring at the far side of the broad valley on one slope of which we lived, but he seemed to be looking at something still more distant.

I sat beside him. “How’re you doin’?”

“Okay,” he said.

For a while neither of us spoke. Overhead the leaves of the tree rustled softly. The dazzling white-pink blossoms of spring were long gone, of course, and the branches were bedecked with fruit not yet quite ripe. The day was hot, but the tree threw plentiful, cool shade.

At last he said, “Daddy?”

“Hmmmm?”

“If it’s all right with you …”

“What?”

“I know what you say ….”

“What I say about what?”

“About there being no Heaven or angels or anything like that.”

“It’s not just what I say, Benny. It’s true.”

“Well … just the same, if it’s all right with you, I’m going to picture Mommy in Heaven, wings and everything.”

He was still in a fragile emotional condition even a month after her death and would need many more months if not years to regain his full equilibrium, so I didn’t rush to respond with one of my usual arguments about the foolishness of religious faith. I was silent for a moment, then said, “Well, let me think about that for a couple of minutes, okay?”

We sat side by side, staring across the valley, and I knew that neither of us was seeing the landscape before us. I was seeing Ellen as she had been on the Fourth of July the previous summer: wearing white shorts and a yellow blouse, tossing a Frisbee with me and Benny, radiant, laughing, laughing. I don’t know what poor Benny was seeing, though I suspect his mind was brimming with gaudy images of Heaven complete with haloed angels and golden steps spiraling up to a golden throne.

“She can’t just end,” he said after a while. “She was too nice to just end. She’s got to be … somewhere.”

“But that’s just it, Benny. She
is
somewhere. Your mother goes on in you. You’ve got her genes, for one thing. You don’t know what genes are, but you’ve got them: her hair, her eyes …. And because she was a good person who taught you the right values, you’ll grow up to be a good person as well, and you’ll have kids of your own someday, and your mother will go on in them and in
their
children. Your mother still lives in our memories, too, and in the memories of her friends. Because she was kind to so many people, those people were shaped to some small degree by her kindness. They’ll now and then remember her, and because of her they might be kinder to people, and that kindness goes on and on.”

He listened solemnly, although I suspected that the concepts of immortality through bloodline and impersonal immortality through one’s moral relationships with other people were beyond his grasp. I tried to think of a way to restate it so a child could understand.

But he said, “Nope. Not good enough. It’s nice that lots of people are gonna remember her. But it’s not good enough.
She
has to be somewhere. Not just her memory.
She
has to go on. So if it’s all right with you, I’m gonna figure she’s in Heaven.”

“No, it’s not all right, Benny.” I put my arm around him. “The healthy thing to do, son, is to face up to unpleasant truths-“

He shook his head. “She’s all right, Daddy. She didn’t just end. She’s somewhere now. I know she is. And she’s happy.”

“Benny-“

He stood, peered up into the trees, and said, “We’ll have cherries to eat soon?”

“Benny, let’s not change the subject. We-“

“Can we drive into town for lunch at Mrs. Fosters restaurant—burgers and fries and Cokes and then a cherry sundae?”

“Benny-“

“Can we, can we?”

“All right. But-“

“I get to drive!” he shouted and ran off toward the garage, giggling at his joke.

* * *

During the next year, Benny’s stubborn refusal to let his mother go was at first frustrating, then annoying, and finally intensely aggravating. He talked to her nearly every night as he lay in bed, waiting for sleep to come, and he seemed confident that she could hear him. Often, after I tucked him in and kissed him good night and left the room, he slipped out from under the covers, knelt beside the bed, and prayed that his mother was happy and safe where she had gone.

Twice I accidentally heard him. On other occasions I stood quietly in the hall after leaving his room, and when he thought I had gone downstairs, he humbled himself before God, although he could know nothing more of God than what he had illicitly learned from television shows or other pop culture that I had been unable to monitor.

I was determined to wait him out, certain that his childish faith would expire naturally when he realized that God would never answer him. As the days passed without a miraculous sign assuring him that his mother’s soul had survived death, Benny would begin to understand that all he had been taught about religion was true, and he eventually would return quietly to the realm of reason where I had made—and was patiently saving—a place for him. I did not want to tell him that I knew of his praying, did not want to force the issue, because I knew that in reaction to a too heavy-handed exercise of parental authority, he might cling even longer to his irrational dream of life everlasting.

But after four months, when his nightly conversations with his dead mother and with God did not cease, I could no longer tolerate even whispered prayers in my house, for though I seldom heard them, I knew they were being said, and knowing was somehow as maddening as hearing every word of them. I confronted him. I reasoned with him at great length on many occasions. I argued, pleaded. I tried the classic carrot-and-stick approach: I punished him for the expression of any religious sentiment; and I rewarded him for the slightest antireligious statement, even if he made it unthinkingly or if it was only my
interpretation
of what he’d said that made his statement antireligious. He received few rewards and much punishment.

I did not spank him or in any way physically abuse him. That much, at least, is to my credit. I did not attempt to beat God out of him the way my parents had tried to beat Him
into
me.

I took Benny to Dr. Gerton, a psychiatrist, when everything else had failed. “He’s having difficulty accepting his mother’s death,” I told Gerton. “He’s just not … coping. I’m worried about him.”

After three sessions with Benny over a period of two weeks, Dr. Gerton called to say he no longer needed to see Benny. “He’s going to be all right, Mr. Fallon. You’ve no need to worry about him.”

“But you’re wrong,” I insisted. “He needs analysis. He’s still not … coping.”

“Mr. Fallon, you’ve said that before, but I’ve never been able to get a clear explanation of what behavior strikes you as evidence of his inability to cope. What’s he
doing
that worries you so?”

“He’s praying,” I said. “He prays to God to keep his mother safe and happy. And he talks to his mother as if he’s sure she hears him, talks to her
every
night.”

“Oh, Mr. Fallon, if that’s all that’s been bothering you, I can assure you there’s no need to worry. Talking to his mother, praying for her, all that’s perfectly ordinary and-“

“Every night!” I repeated.

“Ten times a day would be all right. Really, there’s nothing unhealthy about it. Talking to God about his mother and talking to his mother in Heaven … it’s just a psychological mechanism by which he can slowly adjust to the fact that she’s no longer actually here on earth with him. It’s perfectly ordinary.”

I’m afraid I shouted: “It’s not perfectly ordinary in
this
house, Dr. Gerton. We’re atheists!”

He was silent, then sighed. “Mr. Fallon, you’ve got to remember that your son is more than your son—he’s a person in his own right. A
little
person but a person nonetheless. You can’t think of him as property or as an unformed mind to be molded-“

“I have the utmost respect for the individual, Dr. Gerton. Much more respect than do the hymn singers who value their fellow men less than they do their imaginary master in the sky.”

His silence lasted longer than before. Finally he said, “All right. Then surely you realize there’s no guarantee the son will be the same person in every respect as the father. He’ll have ideas and desires of his own. And ideas about religion might be one area in which the disagreement between the two of you will widen over the years rather than narrow. This might not be
only
a psychological mechanism that he’s using to adapt to his mother’s death. It might also turn out to be the start of lifelong faith. At least you have to be prepared for the possibility.”

“I won’t have it,” I said firmly.

His third silence was the longest of all. Then: “Mr. Fallon, I have no need to see Benny again. There’s nothing I can do for him because there’s nothing he really needs from me. But perhaps you should consider some counseling for yourself.”

I hung up on him.

* * *

For the next six months Benny infuriated and frustrated me by clinging to his fantasy of Heaven. Perhaps he no longer spoke to his mother every evening, and perhaps sometimes he even forgot to say his prayers, but his stubborn faith could not be shaken. When I spoke of atheism, when I made a scornful joke about God, whenever I tried to reason with him, he would only say, “No, Daddy, you’re wrong,” or, “No, Daddy, that’s not the way it is,” and he would either walk away from me or try to change the subject. Or he would do something even more infuriating: He would say, “No, Daddy, you’re wrong,” and then he would throw his small arms around me, hug me very tight, and tell me that he loved me, and at these moments there was a too apparent sadness about him that included an element of pity, as if he was afraid for me and felt that
I
needed guidance and reassurance. Nothing made me angrier than that. He was nine years old, not an ancient guru!

As punishment for his willful disregard of my wishes, I took away his television privileges for days—and sometimes weeks—at a time. I forbade him to have dessert after dinner, and once I refused to allow him to play with his friends for an entire month. Nothing worked.

Religion, the disease that had turned my parents into stern and solemn strangers, the disease that had made my childhood a nightmare, the very sickness that had stolen my best friend, Hal Sheen, from me when I least expected to lose him,
religion
had now wormed its way into my house again. It had contaminated my son, the only important person left in my life. No, it wasn’t any particular religion that had a grip on Benny. He didn’t have any formal theological education, so his concepts of God and Heaven were thoroughly nondenominational, vaguely Christian, yes, but only vaguely. It was religion without structure, without dogma or doctrine, religion based entirely on childish sentiment; therefore, some might say that it was not really religion at all, and that I should not have worried about it. But I knew that Dr. Gerton’s observation was true: This childish faith might be the seed from which a true religious conviction would grow in later years. The virus of religion was loose in my house, rampant, and I was dismayed, distraught, and perhaps even somewhat deranged by my failure to find a cure for it.

To me, this was the essence of horror. It wasn’t the acute horror of a bomb blast or plane crash, mercifully brief, but a chronic horror that went on day after day, week after week.

I was sure that the worst of all possible troubles had befallen me and that I was in the darkest time of my life.