The Best American Essays 2013 (17 page)

“Maybe he loved her all his life,” my mother said.

She looked hopeful, even though what she was saying was that the relationship that had consumed twenty-four years of her life had been a sham from the start, and I knew that somehow she had sensed what was behind all my questions.

“Maybe he always missed her,” she said. “Maybe all the other women in his life somehow fell short.”

I smiled. For a moment I’d been swept up by the story. But a high school crush that had lasted all his life—it was the stuff of movies. What she’d handed me was a Rosebud moment, and I was too earthbound to believe that my father could be explained by it. “I don’t know about that,” I said.

“You sure?” she asked, but the hopeful look was already fading. “Well, maybe you’re right. It’s hard to know anything about anyone, isn’t it?”

“Especially him,” I said.

She laughed. “That’s true.”

Looking up at her, I had a sudden urge to tell her everything. That I was guilt-stricken about never having returned my father’s last phone call to me, three weeks before his death. How shocked I’d felt when my father’s MIT friend said that Shoichi had believed manic depression ruined his life: perhaps I was naive or optimistic or in denial, but I hadn’t realized that he considered—that he knew—his life had been ruined. I wanted to confess to her how small I’d felt at the funeral home, when my own grief had proved a pale, flimsy thing next to Toshiko-san’s, and what I had just understood, that behind my research into my father’s relationships lay my own guilt and fear. Because if my father had never loved the wives and girlfriends who had loved him and nursed him and stayed by his side, what hope was there for me, the daughter who had fled his home and returned as seldom as she could? If I relayed these thoughts to my mother, perhaps she could untangle them and smooth them back into something less terrible.

Yet nothing she could say would explain my father. Whether because of his devotion to physics, his illness, or a deficiency deep inside him, he had never loved any of us, at least not in any way that mattered. Besides, she had suffered enough because of him; there was no reason to add to the guilt she felt for all the ways his life shadowed my sisters’ and mine. Far better to tell her the one definite conclusion I had reached after my two-month inquiry into my father’s life and loves: that he linked me to her, and for that I would always be grateful.

But the airport taxi was crunching gravel outside; with a sigh she was beginning to make her way down the stairs toward me. For now we were out of time.

So I squinted up at her instead. “Masako-san, huh?”

She shrugged. “It’s nice to think so, isn’t it?”

And I told her that it was, and I wished with all my heart that I could.

WALTER KIRN

FROM
The New Republic

I
DON’T REMEMBER
the missionaries’ names, only that one was blond and one was dark, one was from Oregon and one was from Utah. They arrived at our house on secondhand bicycles, carrying bundles of inspirational literature. They smelled, I remember, of witch hazel and toothpaste. The blond one, whose hair had a complicated wave in it and whose body was shaped like a hay bale, broad and square, wiped his feet with vigor on our doormat and complimented my mother on our house, a one-story, ranch-style affair in central Phoenix that never fully cooled off during the night and had scorpions and black widow spiders in the walls. The boys—because that’s how they looked to me that evening, when I was thirteen and my brother was eleven and my parents were in their mid-thirties—shook hands with us and sat down in the living room, where my mother had set out lemonade and cookies and my father had turned off the television so we could talk. They smiled at us. They smiled with their whole faces. Then they asked, softly, politely, if we could pray.

It was 1976, the Bicentennial, and not a good time for my family. We were sinking, mired in gloom, isolation, and uncertainty. We’d moved to Phoenix a few months earlier, driving a U-Haul truck from Minnesota that wouldn’t go faster than 50 miles per hour and didn’t have room for all of our furniture. We’d left the small river town where I’d grown up because my father, a corporate patent lawyer who loved to hunt and fish in his spare time, had soured on the Midwest. He felt bored there, constrained by dull conformity; a vision of fierce desert freedom had come over him. In Arizona, a land of opportunity, booming and unfenced, he planned to enter private practice and spend his weekends outdoors under the sky. He’d fly-fish in the mountains, he’d shoot quail, he’d buy a Chevy Blazer with four-wheel drive, and he’d take us deep into the red-rock canyons to hike and camp and hunt for rocks and fossils. We’d love it, he told us. Our fresh American start.

But it didn’t turn out like that. My father cracked. Too much longing and space, too little guidance.

It began when his own father died of lung cancer after a horrifying, swift decline. When my father returned from the funeral in Ohio, his legal practice was failing for lack of clients. Some mornings he didn’t bother to go to work, just sat on the bench at his bus stop and browsed the paper, waving on the bus drivers when they pulled over. He started talking to himself in public, while eating in restaurants or buying shotgun shells. The tone of his ramblings was punitive, exasperated, like that of an angry coach. Addressing himself as Walt, in the third person, he charged himself with foolishness and weakness. “Walt, you pathetic idiot,” he’d say. “Walt, you ridiculous stupid little ass.” Sometimes strangers heard him and turned to stare.

The story of how the Mormons came was this: Headed home from a job-hunting trip to Blackfoot, Idaho, while changing planes in Salt Lake City, my father suffered a breakdown in the terminal. His haunted mind attacked itself, nearly paralyzing him at the gate. He pulled himself together and boarded his flight, where he found himself seated beside a handsome young couple who radiated serenity and calm. They sensed his despair and started talking to him about their church, the center of their lives, and about their belief that the family is eternal, a permanently bonded sacred unit. (One reason he listened to them, he later told me, is that there had just been a terrible flood in Idaho—the deadly Teton Dam disaster—and he’d heard stories of how thousands of Mormons had immediately dropped what they were doing and convoyed in from states across the West to perform acts of cleanup and reclamation.) The next morning, in his bed at home, he woke up thrashing from a nightmare. My mother threatened to leave him; she’d had enough. Flashing back to the couple on the plane, he opened the phone book, found a number, dialed it, and said he needed help. This minute. Now.

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints must have been used to fielding such distress calls. They dispatched a rescue party instantly: another couple, retired, in their seventies. Within an hour they were at my father’s side. They talked to him all morning behind closed doors and convinced him to go to church with them that Sunday. The service soothed him, lightening his mood. My mother saw this, grew hopeful, and didn’t leave him. The bicycle-riding missionaries showed up a few nights later.

“Dear Heavenly Father,” their prayers began. They sat hip to hip on our sagging old blue sofa, and milky beads of talcum-powder sweat ran down their temples and their cheeks. They blessed our family, our home. They blessed the lemonade. They asked that we hear their message with open minds. On the first night, they showed us a movie about a boy, Joseph Smith, who, one day in 1820, prayed in the woods behind his parents’ farm and found himself face to face with God and Jesus. The lessons that followed described what happened next, from Smith’s translation of a golden scripture that he found buried in a hillside to the trials of his early disciples. Seeking peace to practice their new faith, they traveled west from settlement to settlement, harassed by mobs of brutal vigilantes, who finally murdered Smith in Illinois. His people stayed strong, though. Under a brave new leader, Brigham Young, they undertook a 1,000-mile trek that brought them to Utah, their Zion in the wilderness.

The missionaries kept coming for six weeks, always at night, always hungry for our cookies. On Sundays they sat next to us at services, one on each side of us, like gateposts. And then it was time; they told us we were ready. Standing in a pool of waist-deep water, dressed in white robes, we held our hands together as if to pray, let the missionaries clasp our wrists, leaned back, leaned back farther, and joined the Mormon Church.

Last winter I sat drinking coffee in my living room, watching Mitt Romney speak on television after narrowly winning the Michigan primary. The speech was standard Republican stuff, all about shrinking the federal government and restoring American greatness, but I wasn’t concentrating on Romney’s rhetoric. I was examining his face, his manner, and trying—if such a thing is possible—to peer into his soul. I was trying to see the Mormon in him.

My motives were personal, not political. I’d never been a good Mormon, as you’ll soon learn (indeed, I’m not a Mormon at all these days), but the talk of religion spurred by Romney’s run had aroused in me feelings of surprising intensity. Attacks on Mormonism by liberal wits and their unlikely partners in ridicule, conservative evangelical Christians, instantly filled me with resentment, particularly when they made mention of “magic underwear” and other supposedly spooky, cultish aspects of Mormon doctrine and theology. On the other hand, legitimate reminders of the church hierarchy’s decisive support for Proposition 8, the California gay marriage ban, disgusted me. Deeper, trickier emotions surfaced whenever I came across the media’s favorite visual emblem of the faith: a young male missionary in a shirt and tie with a black plastic name badge pinned to his vest pocket. The image suggested that Mormons were squares and robots, a naive, brainwashed army of the out-of-touch. That hurt a bit. It also tugged me back to a sad, frightened moment in my youth when these figures of fun were all my family had.

As for Romney himself, the man, the person, I empathized with him and his predicament. He no more stood for Mormonism than I did, but he was often presumed to stand for it by journalists who knew little about his faith, let alone the culture surrounding it, other than that some Americans distrusted it and certain others despised it outright. When a writer for the
New York Times
, Charles Blow, urged Romney to “stick that in your magic underwear!” I half hoped that Romney would lose his banker’s cool and tell the bigoted anti-Mormon twits to stick something else somewhere else, until it hurt. I further hoped he’d sit his critics down and thoughtfully explain that Mormonism is more than a ceremonial endeavor; it constitutes our country’s longest experiment with communitarian idealism, promoting an ethic of frontier-era burden-sharing that has been lost in contemporary America, with increasingly dire social consequences. Instead, Romney showed restraint, which disappointed me. I no longer practiced Mormonism, true, but it was still a part of me, apparently, and a bigger part than I’d appreciated.

Sometimes a person doesn’t know what he’s made of until strangers try to tear it down.

A few months after our baptism in Phoenix, having recovered the basic power to function, my family moved back to rural Minnesota, to a town about 40 miles from St. Paul where Mormons were few, and we promptly began to lapse. My little brother got all caught up in sports, my father resumed drinking wine and beer with meals, and my mother immersed herself in a new job as a nurse at a famous addiction clinic devoted to the gospel of the twelve steps. I remained faithful, however. I hung on. To abandon my family’s deliverers so quickly seemed risky to me, not to mention impolite. What’s more, I’d become a believer.

The teaching dearest to my young heart related to the transit of the soul through time and space and beyond them. The version of heaven familiar from my childhood, instilled in me by occasional attendance at a Lutheran Sunday school, had always struck me as sterile and impersonal—a cavernous amphitheater of clouds where rank upon rank of stranger-angels sang the praises of a seated wizard—but the Mormon afterlife seemed homier, a sort of family reunion among the stars. Like Dorothy waking from her dream of Oz, I would find myself resurrected with my close relatives, all of us smiling and at the peak of health.

One evening at church, a participatory play was staged to help us envision this reassuring place. Following a simulated plane crash that involved cutting the lights throughout the building and broadcasting sounds of chaos on the PA system, the congregation was ushered down a dark hallway into a room where the bishop and his wife stood dressed in white garments, illuminated by spotlights. Their arms were extended in welcome. Soft music played. Behind them were posters of galaxies and planets and a banner that read,
THE CELESTIAL KINGDOM
.

Another source of uplift was my new status as a deacon of the Aaronic Priesthood, a junior spiritual order open to all faithful adolescent males. Chief among my duties as a deacon was the ritual shredding of loaves of Wonder Bread into little sacramental chunks. Every Sunday my teenage pals and I would file down the aisles of our modest chapel distributing this holy meal, which also included paper cups of water filled from a tap concealed behind the pulpit. In my powder-blue suit and shiny brown clip-on tie, I felt handsome, useful, and respected. I also felt included, a new sensation for a kid worn-out from changing schools. As I moved through the congregation with my tray, the grateful faces in the pews, male and female, young and old, dissolved my chronic feeling of separation and convinced me I’d found my place.

The strongest force binding me to the church, however, wasn’t religious but hormonal. I found the girls of my ward more attractive than the girls at school. Perhaps because Mormon custom encourages young folks to marry permanently and early, often when they’re barely out of their teens, the girls were precociously skilled at self-enhancement, favoring leg-slimming, grown-up-looking shoes and eye-catching, curling-iron-assisted hairstyles. They also permitted discreet erotic contact that stopped just short of actual intercourse. The girl I liked best of all was Carla H., a hell-raising cheerleader two years my senior. Carla had sinful menthol-cigarette breath and a scandalous reputation. A couple of months before I fell for her at one of the ward’s monthly Saturday night dances, she’d run away from home, the story went, and shacked up with the married manager of the franchise restaurant where she worked. The better-brought-up boys avoided her because of this, but I, a new convert, was undeterred.