Happy Valentine's Day!
Here, as promised, are some more chapters from "The Baptized." Enjoy, and feel free to comment.
Chapter 1
“Mr. John Chaney. Mr. John Chaney the journalist.”
The voice was friendly, authoritative. He wasn’t asking if
he’d reached me, he was telling me he’d defined me. I immediately thought of
the word “bluff” for his tone, an old-fashioned term but an accurate one. It
sounded like the presumed heartiness of the chivalrous class, a class long gone
in the main.
“Well, you’ve certainly reached John Chaney widower.”
Now he sounded sympathetic. “Yes, I heard of the death of
your wife.” I would have called it “the death of my life,” but hey, that was
depressive me.
He went on. “In fact, there’s no getting around it, this
call is somewhat occasioned by your great loss.”
“Speaking of losses, and I really don’t like discussing mine
with totally anonymous voices over the phone, let alone with well-meaning
friends, you are....” I let my voice trail off.
The bluffness returned. “Oh, of course. I’m sorry. My name
is Alexander Walling. Alexander Reeman Holliday. Walling Enterprises? Walling
Construction? Several other family-owned corporations that include the name
Walling or my mother’s maiden name, Gavrinis? Does all this help?”
“Well, it certainly clarifies your income level and your
presumed social class. But why are you calling me, Mr. Alexander Walling?” I
was in no mood, anyway had a long-standing reputation as someone who believed
somewhat in the Christian concept of “just profits” but no more than that in
business, maybe even secretly admired the Koran’s injunction that believers
should not charge interest of other believers.
“Well, I’d like to talk to you, Mr. Chaney. About an
assignment I have in mind for you.”
“I haven’t accepted freelance work in quite some time.”
Actually, I was still trying to come up with a viable way to
write about coping with grief and loss, as suggested by a well-meaning
publisher who’d actually said to me, when offering me the assignment and
dangling a low six-figure advance in front of me, “who better than you now,
John?” Yes indeed, you sympathy-less shit who only wants to sell more pop
culture trash by way of booking me on daytime talk shows, who better?
“You do realize I remain a grieving widower, don’t you? And
that the last thing I need to do right now is write articles that nobody is
going to care about anyway? Is that fucking hell clear enough, Mr. Walling?”
Suddenly he was soothing. “I never said anything about an
article, Mr. John Chaney. And while I can understand your considerable grief, I
might go so far as to question its efficacy when it devolves into profanity
directed at someone you’ve never even met. I’m hardly a telemarketer, you
know.”
That made me laugh. . “Okay, I’m sorry I snapped at you, but
still….”
He interrupted me. “And I was led to believe by Van Nichols
that you might be willing to at least talk to me.”
Magic words, those. Van Nichols was someone whom I’d gladly
follow to the gates of journalistic hell. Was someone I would definitely do
serious favors for, rouse myself out of my self-piteous torpor. Van was, in a
sense, my main man, someone I owed big time. If I could have played Timothy to
Van’s St. Paul, I would have. Happily. But ours was a less-religiously based
relationship than that. Van had been, as every writer should have, the older,
more experienced editor who takes his young charge in hand, with whom he gets
drunk, rages against their mutual bosses, even whores around a bit when on, ho
ho ho, “assignment,” if one has a weaker bent towards marital fidelity. Which I
assuredly did not.
Van was a cliché straight out of the days of “The Front
Page,” but with him it was also all true. And the best days with him were so
long ago in truth, so far back that I remembered it all as fun, instead of the
dreary episodes of ambitious me sucking up to bibulous him that it probably
really had been.
And then Walling pressed home his advantage. “I was even
hoping you’d come see me, at my office in midtown. Perhaps we could have
lunch.”
“For Van, yes, I would probably do that.”
“Then why don’t you?”
I had to laugh. “Okay, then why don’t I? An address and a
mutually convenient time should get the process rolling.”
I thought about it, then added something fatuous, something
out of my own pain, I now imagine, my own needs. ‘But whatever this assignment
turns out to be,” Mr. Walling, I suppose I should warn you, I hardly come
cheap.”
His voice seemed to purr as he said “Who ever really does,
Mr. Chaney? Who really does if they have valuable services to offer? Surely,
however, you’re not priced out of the market? There are other…”
I jumped on this one. “Journalists?”
It was his turn to chuckle. “Yes. Journalists. I should add,
however, that I’m seeking one with a specifically investigative bent...”
I jumped in there, since his voice seemed to be trailing
off, with “I’m neither Woodward nor Bernstein, Mr. Walling.” Actually, I didn’t
believe either Woodward or Bernstein were the Woodward and Bernstein of
Watergate memory any more.
“Of a specifically Christian investigative bent,” he added.
And that had me. Although I still call myself a Christian,
I’d have loved being able to investigate on site if the tomb had in fact been
empty, and apparently opened from within, on “that great gettin’ up mornin” in
the days of Pontius Pilate.
“You mean you’d wish me to put my claimed religiosity into
play on whatever this assignment is?” May as well play this one as skeptically
as possible, see if, for fun, I can jack up his planned-on price before I turn
him down altogether.
He made a sort of dismissal, British novelists of a certain
sort might have termed it a ‘pish.’ “I
mean this assignment I have in mind, for which Van Nichols assures me you’re
well qualified, calls for someone more than conversant with the staples of
traditional Christian belief. It also calls me for someone who will bring such
beliefs to bear during the course of the assignment, who will factor them into
his final report.”
Have you ever had, to quote from a song I once heard by a
female singer whose name I now forget, one proverbially clear moment? One where
out of the blue you all of a sudden want something so bad that you’ll jump
through hoops to get it? It’s like instantaneous addiction, the needle and the
spoon are all laid out in your mind, heated and ready to go. You aim yourself
at such moments, you aim yourself unerringly, at all manner of targets that
you’d normally discount as either out of your league or, worse, beneath you.
And that was how I felt when Walling said that about the importance of
Christian belief re whatever he had in mind. So I leapt at the opportunity.
“Mr. Walling, I like what you’re saying right now,” I told
him in my most forthright-sounding voice. “And if I do in fact turn out to be
your man here, I will do my damnedest on your little job.” Unfortunately for
me, I probably did just that.
Walling’s offices could hardly be described as “posh.” Here
I was expecting Donald Trump-like precincts, full of hard-edged and tush-tasked
chrome and plastic furniture to sit on and cut megadeals from and instead it
was more David Harum. It was a suite on the 5th floor of the club
building for an Ivy League university in midtown, with plaid rugs and leather
couches to sit on. There was even a calendar from a national chain of funeral
homes on the wall, and prints of hunting dogs and ducks, and what looked to my
admittedly untrained eyes like an authentic Stubbs portrait of some English
racehorse of the 18th century. Someone had clearly had the word
“tweedy” in mind when coming up with the decor scheme.
And the people working there were, well, old-looking. Not
wizened, exactly, but they lacked the go-go-for-the-groin style of so many
Manhattan offices, sensible shoes ruled on the feet of both sexes and there was
nary an above-the-knee length skirt in sight.
The receptionist even had her gray hair, which matched the shade of both
her stockings and her skirt, in a bun. So this was “old money?” I’d have added
that it was probably also effete money, a tired, worn-out family fortune. The
moral and cultural vampires who seemed to rule so much of Manhattan-based
commerce had not ever worked here.
Walling himself resembled the tycoon figure on “The
Simpson,” Mr. Burns. Beaky nose, scraggly hair, crooked smile. Like old-time
British actor Alastair Sim in a $3000 hand-tailored suit, white shirt and
proper reddish tie. It was the same basic outfit that Donald Trump seemed to
wear in every picture I’d ever seen of him on the job, but on Walling it looked
right, it looked fitting, it looked comfortable. And unlike Donny boy’s daily
work uniform, Walling’s suit was vested and sported a Phi Beta Kappa key.
“Van speaks highly of you,” he said. “Very,very highly. So
highly that he seems to think you should be doing more with your God-given
talent.” Months later I’d literally spend nights wondering if he’d stressed the
term “God-given,” but now it made no real impression. “And so he suggested
you.”
“And so..” I smiled at him. “And so here I am. But then Van
can’t understand why someone would be happy taking a buyout offer from the
newspaper he’s worked for, even if that buyout coincided with the death of his
wife from uterine cancer.”
“Even if.” Walling smiled back. “Even if it is probably a
sin to waste so much talent. Which is where my proposition perhaps comes in.”
He threw a book across his desk into my lap. It was the
paperback edition of “Promised To
Satan,” the mass-market Kmart-Shop Rite-Borders-Barnes & Noble edition as
opposed to the original hardcover and paper versions, with a different, more
theologically correct if stodgy-sounding title, from a Christian publishing
house. This was the one whose cover blurb said “The worldwide bestseller that
thrilled and horrfied millions!” The jacket artwork showed a rather stylized
version of a baptismal font, upon the side of which was painted in blood-red a
pentagram, and the cross at the rear of the font was the upside-down, “Satanic”
version. In the dim background were some robed figures, whose habits recalled
the Augustinians but probably were not intended as even remotely Roman
Catholic, one of whom held a blood-dripping dagger. And on the ground, in front
of the font, were what the old hymnals termed “swaddling clothes,” but stained,
as if whatever child had been “consecrated” in them had both bled, presumably
from the dagger, and fouled itself through its diaper. It was an effective piece
of cover art, the publishing industry was once again on top of things in terms
of giving potential readers a cheap thrill or two.
“Do you know anything about this book?,” Walling said in
what I could only characterize in a demanding tone. “Do you? Have you read this
meretricious trash?”
I started to formulate an answer, but he was on me again,
asking “Do you? Do you?”
“No, I’ve never read
it, but I know enough about it to respect the kind of money it’s made all
across the great and probably gullible land of ours. And I also happen to know
that its original title, back when it was published by a small evangelical-type
publishing house before it got bought out by a larger one, was ‘Slave To The
Demiurge,’ which wasn’t quite as catchy a title.”
“But you haven’t read it.” He was serene again, pleasant.
“No, books like this one aren’t my usual cup of tea. This
kind of Christianity isn’t my scene, you could say, these people who read and
write this stuff, I don’t want to say they strike me as simple-minded, exactly,
but, I don’t know, their ‘textbooks’ aren’t up to the kind of intellectual
rigor I look for in religion…”
He broke in with “A search which of course led to your
Pulitzer.”
I nodded in mock-humble acknowledgement. “Yet I do know that
books like this one tap into something real, something urgent in modern
evangelical, fundamentalist Christianity which the folks who read them will
most assuredly never find in network TV or rock and roll music. It’s crap,
maybe, but then so is most of what you see and hear on, say, MTV. It’s crap for
the covered-up set, if you will, as opposed to the shithead young who can’t
wait to show off their piercings and tattoos to each other.”
He laughed along with me on that one.
“And I also know that books like this can have huge, huge
sales, far larger sales than the sort of boring novels that nobody ever really
reads, or anyway finishes, that nevertheless pop up on the New York Times’
bestseller lists. At least this is readable crap, you know? It probably has
color and drive and conveys a sense of absolute conviction, unlike most Times
fiction bestsellers, even if it’s probably woefully lacking in characterization
and anything approaching complex dialogue. And it sure as hell is fiction.”
Walling nodded approvingly.
“That said, they usually still won’t put something like this
on most bestseller lists, and one reason they’ll give is because they’ll claim
it isn’t purchased in conventional outlets. But you and I both know that’s
bullshit, that the real reason it’s not on the bestseller lists is because the
people who compile those lists consider the people who read books like this,
even if they happen to buy it at a ‘proper’ mall bookseller, religious cretins,
bigots whose grandparents probably wanted to burn both Charles Darwin and John
Scopes at the stake. That’s ridiculous, but there you are. You have a
bestseller that probably really has sold millions and millions of copies to all
the credulous out there. So it’s a genuine best seller and thus the truly outrageous thing is that
there are more liberally oriented and
media-savvy assholes out there who don’t care what the ‘opposition,’ so to
speak, is reading. They should but they don’t and won’t. They run from
conservatively-oriented morality.”
And with that I decided to step down from my soapbox, take a
deep breath and sip from the iced tea his secretary had suddenly set in front
of me on a small silver tray. The kind once called a “salver” in polite
society.
Walling held up another book in his hand, the original hardcover
edition of “Slave To The Demiurge.” I was impressed, since I gathered that when
its publisher was bought out, its gobbler had called in all outstanding copies
by way of re-packaging and re-titling it so that it could properly become a bestseller.
“The authors of this book, in any edition, are my niece
Marianne and her psychiatrist husband, and Marianne happens to be my principal
heir as my will is currently constituted. Her mother Josette was my
sister-in-law, her father Raymond was my younger brother…”
He held up his hand in case I was thinking of from
interrupting him.
“…and before I leave one red cent to the authoress of what
I’ve already described to you as a piece of meretricious trash, I have to know
something.”
I loved his archaic language, “authoress” wasn’t something
you heard much these days even if using it was a nice way of cutting certain
literary blowhards down to size.
“And what, pray tell, would said ‘something’ be?” I felt
eager, jumpy, interested, ready to maybe cast off my self-inflicted state of
torpor at last. And yes, it would also perhaps make Van Nichols proud of me.
“If anything in ‘Promised To Satan,’ or “Slave To The
Demiurge,’ or anything else you might call it, is even remotely true. I want
you to find that out for me, you’re absolutely the best man for the job, and
I’m prepared to pay you an obscene amount of money to do so.”
I dumbly ignored his use of the word “obscene.”
“One thing does bother me,” I said. ‘What happens, just for
possibility’s sake, mind, if the book turns out to be absolutely, so to speak,
the Gospel truth?” I was confident there was no chance of that.
“Then my family is shamed forever and my niece inherits the
bulk of my estate. She’ll have more than earned it if her horrible accusations
are true.”
“And if it’s not true, just like everybody half-sane who
reads the New York Times probably already thinks?”
“Oh, she still gets something, since after all she is blood.
Even at my advanced age I can appreciate a good con. But the bulk will go to charities.
And either way, I have to know before I pass on. ”
That sounded okay.
“I have a thirst for knowledge,” Walling added. “Sometimes
the worst kind. I also have the resources with which to slake my thirst to
extreme limits.”
That was even better.
“Mr. Walling,” I said, “if things can be worked out here and
now in terms of price, I may just be your man.”
Chapter 2
Families, any kind of families, amaze me. I have had
colleagues, normal working stiffs at newspapers, whose backgrounds would have
appalled the Borgias. Maybe even the Kennedys. Domestic violence, seemingly
hereditary madness and alcoholism, drug addiction, generations of successful
suicides interspersed with “mere” attempts. And those were just the
Protestants, the Catholics, especially the Irish ones, usually had even better
stories to tell, stuff right out of James T. Farrell’s novels.
Hell, I’ve even known people like our drycleaner, his family
history sounded like a Chekhov play. Something to do with local gentry
someplace outside what was then, and is again, known as St. Petersburg
quarreling over the inheritance of a farm, with one side moving in protest down
to the Ukraine and then both factions hanging on for dear life come the
Revolution, one uncle even joining the Cossack armies who resisted Lenin. And
then there was a guy I knew in graduate school at Penn, his father and his grandfather
had both been coal miners someplace in western PA, the deep,
fist-slamming-on-the-kitchen-table-type of despair and beer-borne contempt for
each other among family members this guy had described was clearly generational
psychosis.
The Wallings, however, at least Alec’s side of them, seemed
depressingly normal. There were three brothers who came over from Glasgow in
the early 20th century, David, Charles and Arthur, Alec’s father.
They came because they didn’t want to work in the shipyards on the Clyde, felt
that their humble backgrounds in Scotland insured that they’d never progress up
the social ladder there.
Here, however, they’d prospered. Landed on the green shores
of Americay, split respectively for Boston, Pittsburgh and Newark, New Jersey.
Made their fortunes in three different industries. Then they’d gotten together
and reunited as a sort of early conglomerate. Even made “good,” post-success
marriages, wedded their fortunes to similar albeit smaller ones.
My focus, however, wasn’t on the numerous Walling progeny
out of David and Charles, all of whom seemed to live in places like
back-country Greenwich quietly and comfortably.
Arthur, with a wife he’d plucked from chambermaid status from a business
rival’s brownstone in what was then an upscale part of Newark, who was named
(of course) Bridget, remained in Jersey where they had Alec and then, three
years later, Raymond.
Alec, in turn, moved post-college to New York City and had
three successive wives, none of whom gave him issue. Raymond, happy - or anyway
happier - with one spouse - had a son who died very early in infancy
named Royal, followed by a daughter named Marianne. He’d lived in Clermont, a
Jersey suburb lately much beloved of media types and a town much filled with
good housing stock, one of those places I imagined as in both the cultural and
physical shadow of the Empire State Building. Both Raymond and his wife
Josette, part of a Newark brewery family that had long ago sold out to a larger
“national” brewer, had died about 10 years ago, Raymond just 3 months after
Josette. The sentimentalist in me would put it that Raymond probably died of a
broken heart after a long, devoted spate of wedlock, the cynic might guess that
with his wife’s death he’d lost the focus of his spite.
And according to
Alec, he hadn’t much contact with his sibling the last 25 or so years. While
he’d added to the family coffers and ended up managing the family trusts, a la
the Rockefellers, Raymond had apparently been content to clip coupons, live off
interest, the sort of thing that mere mortals can only dream about. But blood,
I suppose, always tells, which is why, over and above her agreed-upon shares of
assorted family trusts, Marianne Walling Lapotaire also happened to basically
be the sole beneficiary via his will of anything Alec had left over after
disbursement to said trusts, which was a hell of a lot. I chuckle at that
phrase now, but yes, approximately $200 million is a tidy sum whoever gets to
spend it, on this plane of existence or in the next.
So much for family history. It was a story of a great family
fortune, behind which possibly were, as Balzac might have said, even greater
crimes. But it didn’t sound like a particularly complicated story, especially
if you leave out the crimes. One probably perverted old cluck happens to be a
childless cluck, his comparatively more virtuous brother just has one child, a
daughter. Ergo, no matter rancor over the years, an heiress. Blood tells. Even
maintains a certain standard.
None of which, of course, explains why about 10 years ago,
even as her mother lay dying, Marianne goes into therapy with Dr. Philippe
Lapotaire, an apparently happily wed and Harvard-educated (the two don’t
usually go together in my fairly wide experience) shrink with a wife and four kids,
during which as a result of recovered memory therapy she realizes that she was
“dedicated” at birth by her parents to a Satanic cult, which her parents and
others in suburban Jersey have belonged to for many years. And upon this
realization, she and “Dr. Phil” (I couldn’t resist this one) make goo-goo eyes
at each other, after which Dr. Phil leaves his spouse and kinder and weds the
fugitive bride of the Lord of the Flies. Marianne’s dad also conveniently dies
mid-therapy
Then they collaborate on a book about her experiences
growing up in the cult, her eventual break with it via the grace of our Lord
Jesus Christ. And the book, published at first under a more lurid but somewhat
obscure title in these non-literate times, builds slowly, becomes an underground
best-seller in more ways than one, gets so big a major publishing house buys
the rights for a huge chunk of coin. The couple goes on talk shows, pledge
eternal love to each other and to Jesus and dump on Satan. They seem happy as
clams, and rich to boot. It’s a great, purely American type of success story,
could never happen someplace like France or Germany or even Belgium no matter
that country’s own recent well-attested bout of child molestation under “cover”
of Satanism among its own clump of rich, beer-swilling and sausage-chomping
capitalist pedophiles. And millions of Americans apparently believed it.
And for $500,000, plus expenses, yours truly, bored to
tears, bored to literal tears, was suddenly being paid to address the truth or
untruth of Marianne Walling Lapotaire’s accusations about Beelzebub in the
closet, sort of the ultimate family skeleton. At least the ultimate I could
imagine.
What could I possibly have been thinking? Or ingesting? How
depressed really was I? How low were my psychic defenses when I accepted this
assignment?
On the other hand, even for someone as depressed as I was
over the death of my wife, $500,000 is a lot of money. A hell of a lot of
money. And I reasoned, along with whatever was left from my buyout from the newspaper
when I finally kicked off, that I’d be leaving most of it in trust to my
daughter, her husband and their own newborn daughter. I suddenly imagined
myself a marvelous, gimlet-eyed, steel-willed negotiator. I was going to clean
up, I told myself, might even have some fun for a change.
Chapter 3
“Satan is on the run! Yes, we have him on the run
tonight! He is fleeing from us even as I
speak. Clap your hands, scare him, make him get those scaly, sulphurous feet
moving. Come on, people, clap your hands and help scatter Satan and all his
pomps”
These people, amazingly, play a circuit. As vaudeville had,
and kind of like rock bands do today, places they tour, audiences they know
they can milk for all it’s worth in certain parts of the country. That is one
explanation. Another is that the Holy Spirit has moved these 3000+ souls here,
$35 a pop for the reserved seats up front where you can share in the spittle of
the speakers and $25 for general admission in the back where you’ll surely
appreciate that $15 King James Version Bible with the glow-in-the-dark letters
in gold upon the padded cover if only as a seat cushion, has gotten them to
show up and to enjoy it.
So here I was in Lancaster County, PA, in an auditorium off
the Pennsylvania Turnpike, in a part of the US where tourist brochures had
conditioned me to expect Amish buggies aplenty but where I’d learned RCs were
actually the fastest growing denomination, in a “Full Holiness Tabernacle”
where from 9-5 daily (except, of course, Thanksgiving, Christmas and Easter) I
could also pay $12 to see animatronic tableaux of the life of Jesus “and also
of daily life in the Holy Land from the reign of Herod to the creation of the
modern day state of Israel.” And I was curious what kind of tableau they’d have
for, say, the taking of Jerusalem by Godfroi de Bouillon and his fellow Normans
in the First Crusade. Or for Allenby’s entrance into Jerusalem with the British
forces in 1917. Or for the day the Stern Gang bombed the King David Hotel prior
to Israeli independence. I do so love what they used to refer to as “Bible
history.”
“Yes, Satan is on the run!”
The speaker’s voice was stentorian, maybe even oracular. It
came, however, out of a distinctly nerdy-looking little guy who, under his
baggy light blue three-piece suit - it
wasn’t Armani-type baggy, to get snippy about it, but mass-merchant or
catalogue-type baggy - clearly had on a
short-sleeved dress shirt, since I couldn’t see anything resembling a
shirtsleeve under those flapping jacket arms. But he also had a tattoo on his
right wrist, of a glowing cross with a snake cringing under it, and he conveyed
power and conviction.
“He is on the run, brothers and sisters, Satan is leaving
the building. Right now, praise Jesus!”
He trilled the “s” in Satan, stretched it out so it sounded like purposeful
stuttering, as if he was spitting the very accursed name out, then softened the
comparable letter in “Jesus” to convey reverence. A neat trick if you can do
it, and most of us, I’m sure, can’t. Not in this skeptical age of Slick Willie
and Jay Leno and David Letterman. The speaker’s name was Reverend Almon Floyd
Fielding, his day gig was running a very successful farm equipment sales and
service business in the warehouse of which his flunkies under the direction of
a couple of former Disney employees built those tableaux of life in the Holy
Land and he’d invited me to be his guest tonight to see, and later meet.
Marianne and Philippe Lapotaire.
“And one big reason, one big reason indeed, that the worst
of the worst is on the run tonight is the presence amongst us of two very good
and holy and ever so dedicated people, Phil and Marianne.” I found the billing
interesting in this post-feminist era, since it was her purported Satanic cult
that made their millions, not his. “You know them by their best-selling book,
tonight you shall know them by their very words. Get thee behind this assembled
multitude, Satan, while the good folk gathered here tonight give it up for
God’s devoted servants!”
Somewhere off to the side a country band, a pretty kicking
one which had opened the evening with an hour’s worth of good cover versions of
Christian rock hits, began an incessant, bass and steel guitar-heavy tune that
sounded like a three-chord takeoff on
“Jesu, joy of man’s desiring.” I looked around, saw that the crowd
clearly loved it, they were clapping their hands to this Christian music
equivalent to “We Will Rock You” even as their outstretched hands clasped at
the baggy suit of Reverend Fielding. Even my own left foot was tapping, sucker
that I am for good, anyway infectious, country music.
And then the brilliantly golden curtains parted and there,
hand in hand, she looking a bit like Loretta Lynn if Loretta Lynn had shopped
at a Jersey mall Macy’s and he in a well-cut double-breasted suit that was
indeed designer baggy, stood Marianne and Phil. Or, depending on your sexual
politics, Phil and Marianne. And I knew, no matter anything else, and it
bothered me that I knew it, that these two were very much in love with each
other. They were directly under a big, translucent statue of a dove with
outstretched wings with a branch of neon “fire” in its mouth and I suddenly
hated them intensely for the joy they radiated.
Marianne had periwinkle blue eyes that said, especially if
you’re, say, a male under 25 with raging hormones, “Follow me loyally and
uncomprehendingly.” Said it
convincingly, too. And she had a trick, or habit or whatever, of lowering her
eyes when speaking to you, as if modesty became her like nothing else. I expected
her to refer to any man she met as “My lord,” she was certainly the closest
thing I could imagine to a modern-day Guinevere on the Christian lecture
circuit. The word “demure” occurred to me, if it could also convey sexiness.
And if her story was true - not that I thought that for one second - I could see a lot of cult members being
envious of Satan, whose pledged bride she’d been.
Philippe, however, was neither a gruffly adoring King Arthur
nor a studly and noble but somewhat dumb Lancelot or even a saturnine,
appraising and corrupt Mordred. Instead, the Arthurian figure that came to mind
when I saw him was Gawain, reliable, brave, trustworthy and much more able than
his pal Lancelot to keep it in his pants.
His brown eyes, well-trimmed beard and well-cut suit said “Trust me
professionally,” which is probably why from all reports he’d been a pretty good
shrink and a faithful husband until Marianne Walling had landed on his office
doorstep.
Post-presentation (and it had been a whiz-bang one full of enough
verbal brimstone that I was half-convinced my jacket would need to be treated
tomorrow for smoke damage) and after a good hour of handshaking and book
signings, we were sitting in a back room of the Full Holiness Tabernacle, under
one of those schlock pictures of Jesus where His Sacred Heart seems to burst
out all aglow through the very fabric of his, so legend says, famously
un-hemmed robe.
They’d readily agreed to an interview, somewhat to my
surprise, even when I decided to throw caution to the winds and, not at all
casually, threw out the reason I was there, that I was a paid minion of
Marianne’s uncle.
“I know of your writing,” Philippe said to me in a not
unkindly tone. “I know of it and think praise for it was well earned, based on
the columns of yours I read. Very well earned,” he added, in the same even
tones with which he’d probably recommended Prozac a few short years ago.
“Thank you. I thought the praise was well earned too.”
“So now you’re accepting my uncle Alec’s shilling to
disprove my and Phil’s story,” Marianne said. “That’s quite a jump from your
columns on, for example, doctrinal disputes among Presbyterians or the recent
willingness of the Catholic Church, if not some of the more traditional
Protestant denominations, to accept archaeological evidence that casts doubt on
literal interpretations of the Bible.”
Touche! The lady was a reader. “Not to prove or disprove,” I
said. “The deal your uncle and I actually struck centers on my seeking what he
considers an acceptable socio-historical framework which will allow him to keep
you as his primary heir. It’s more of a research assignment, if you will,
filtered, admittedly, through the consciousness of someone that Alec Walling
considers more qualified to make judgments or the lack thereof than your
average tabloid reporter.” I could sting back.
“You know that, in a sense, anyway, we’re looking forward to
Alec’s money when he dies, yes?” Philippe said. “To spending it well, wisely,
fully and charitably.”
Alec? Such familiarity. This rush to put the old fart into
his grave didn’t, somehow, strike me as totally ‘Christian” in the traditional
sense.
“The point is,” I stressed, “your book and your subsequent
career, in them you two make charges about Old Nick and his doings that a lot
of people have trouble accepting nowadays, a certain segment of the book-buying
public excepted. You’re a hit on the time that evangelists buy on cable
stations early mornings and late nights, but your ‘charges,’ and I use the word
neither loosely nor stringently at this point, have not been calculated to get
you on the better, anyway ostensibly more serious, run of TV shows. Alec and I
didn’t discuss this point, but one side effect of a favorable report from me to
him might well be that you could, as they say at racetracks, move up in class.
From Reverend So-and-So in his white polyester suit and matching patent leather
shoes to, oh, let’s be daring here, Matt Lauer and Katie Couric. Go directly to
the Today Show, in other words, without passing ‘Go,’ which for mid-level
purposes we may as well define as someone distinctly down-market like Maury
Povich or Jerry Springer.”
Philippe laughed, perhaps because in his worldview Ms. Perky
of NBC and all her envious rivals on other networks were already damned beyond redemption.
I might have agreed about Maury, would sure listen to arguments about Jerry.
“We think we’ve found the audience that God has deemed right
for us,” he said, “And we also know, we know from recent events in American
political history, that reporters from the supermarket tabloids, whether or no
they hold graduate degrees from the Medill School of Journalism or from
Harvard, often display more enterprise and commitment to the true reportorial
spirit than their less openly raffish and politically liberal brethren at
papers like the Times and the Boston Globe.”
“Well,” I started to say…
“No, no ‘well’ here,” Philippe said. “We stand by our
story.”
“But you have to admit, it sounds ridiculous in this day and
age, what with people dressing up as horned gods in goat masks, waving daggers
around, passing opium pipes and having orgies…”
This time Marianne interrupted, charmingly, with
“Drug-fueled orgies are beyond belief today?” I half-thought she was smirking.
“Threats of violence at gatherings? Weird costumes? Have you ever been to a
dance club? Even I have. And on a good night, those are probably the closest
public things we have to genuine sabbats. Greenwich Village, Haight-Ashbury,
the Sunset Strip, even Las Vegas and Atlantic City, these are all the sites of
our true modern equivalents to medieval Walpurgisnachts.”
“Okay, but you’re linking them directly to devil worship.
That’s not quite the same thing as a bunch of foolish people frying their
brains on club drugs.”
Philippe stared intently at me. “Isn’t it, Mr. Chaney?,” he
said in a reproving tone. “Isn’t it? Really now. Even before Marianne became my
patient, before she revealed in therapy so much of what had happened to her as
a child, I’d come in my practice to question how much of my patients’ bad
behavior could simply be dismissed as the influence of drugs and would-be
sybaritism, or even of lax parental upbringing. Perhaps you forget, I was
always a psychiatrist who worked out of a specifically Judeo-Christian
context.”
“Which I kind of doubt you absorbed from Harvard,” I
replied, playing smartass,
He shook his head. “Which I assuredly did not get from
Harvard. But I’m also Quebecois by descent, my parents moved to Massachusetts
from Chicoutimi when I was about 5. And to a part of Massachusetts where
incense, candles, the whole aura of an intense, old world-style Catholicism,
resonated in ways that it did not in the suburban New Jersey where Marianne
grew up. Put it this way: I share the moral concerns of someone with a similar
French-Canadian and Roman Catholic background, Jack Kerouac. And he went to an
Ivy League school too, although unlike me he didn’t finish.
“Yet if he had graduated from Columbia,” he continued,
“instead of consorting wastefully with a
lot of third-rate poets, perhaps he too would have had a more graduated, more
attuned sense of evil, of its sheer potential in a world seemingly gone mad.”
He smiled, in a way that a 19th century novelist like Anthony Trollope would
have described as “slyly.”
I would happily have discussed the true value of the Beat
Generation’s best-known writers right then and there with him, it would have
been fun, we weren’t that far apart. But we were interrupted by the Reverend
Almon Floyd Fielding and his wife Pat; they carried in trays piled with
sandwiches and tubs of potato salad and cole slaw. The trays looked like the
standard offerings of caterers for backstage fare, wrapped in blue and
pink-tinted plastic wrap, save that the wrapping was dotted all over with the
“Chi Rho” sign so important to Christian iconography. Live and learn; there
turns out to be such a thing as a specifically fundamentalist caterer somewhere
in central PA.
And the roast beef and Swiss on rye was good, hearty,
filling, with a sharp, seedy mustard. The potato salad was fine, too, made from
red bliss potatoes, and the cole slaw, interestingly, used fresh blueberries.
The Lord made sure His servants noshed well tonight.
Finally, of course, it was time for us all to get down to
brass tacks. I’ve never understood the usage
- I’ve always believed tacks, even the colored thumb version you pull
off a little perforated pad, are something you avoid sitting on - but I’d
hemmed and hawed with this hatefully happy couple for the better part of an
hour already and two heaping servings of that great slaw.
“So what is it, finally, you want of us, Mr. Chaney?”
Marianne inquired, in a tone I imagined she used when she asked Philippe if he
wanted to ‘fool around,’ to specifically Christian specifications, of course,
on a Saturday night.
“What do I finally want of you? Well, I want you, whatever
you make of my own skepticism with regard to the true existence of the devil
and the gospel truth of your story, to agree to clear the way with people who
might be able to help me make my final report to your uncle. I want to be able
to go back to New Jersey and to tell people there that I’ve got, if not exactly
your imprimatur, at least your nihil obstat to delve a little more deeply into
your story than has yet been done.” The Latin was a bit of a dig at Philippe,
actually, but his eyes registered none of the choking choler I’d hoped for
here.
“And I want you both, over and above tonight’s meeting, to
also make yourselves available, probably more on the phone than in person since
I know you have touring obligations, for back-up questioning. Whenever my
research requires it.”
“What will this do for the cause of Jesus?,” the Reverend
Almon Floyd interjected. “How will this help raise consciousness about the
spread and influence of Satan in this all-too modern world of ours?” The hand
with the cross and snake tattoo was shaking, as if he suddenly wanted very
badly to punch me with it. His wife leaned over and took both his hands in
hers, steadying them. I hadn’t expected any threat of violence tonight. Maybe
they’d have kicked Satan in the ass and kneed him in the infernal groin if he’d
shown up in corporeal form, but I imagined myself safe by contrast.
“It most certainly won’t do a damn thing,” I replied as
evenly as possible under the now strained circumstances, focusing my gaze on
Philippe and Marianne. “But it will, quite possibly, insure that Marianne’s
status as Alec’s primary heir is iced, locked in, cemented in surrogate’s
court, so to speak.”
They nodded in agreement.
Or, I thought to myself, I could also wind up exposing you
two as sanctimonious, Bible-thumping frauds hiding behind a very discredited
form of therapy. And adulterous swine as well, given that you, Marianne,
disrupted and destroyed a marriage which had resulted, prior to Philippe choosing
you as his true soulmate, in four children as legitimate issue of what I have
to assume, based on what you, Philippe, previously said about your
Judeo-Christian orientation, was a bona-fide Christian marriage entered into in
the sight of God.
“It could go either way,” I continued. “But if you believe
in what you say and have written, it’s a kind of win-win situation, as the
business books always say. You’d be gaining credence even if I simply conclude
that there’s no way, short of absolute and all-encompassing atheism, there’s no
way of completely dismissing your story. At least not until the Day of
Judgment.”
“That’s smug and arrogant on your part,” Philippe saw fit to
observe.
“You sumbitch,” the Reverend Almon Floyd Fielding added, throwing
his wife’s retraining grasp off. “You blasphemous, probably idolatrous,
modernist, cynical sumbitch, you poor, sorry excuse for a human being.”
“I think you have a deal, Mr. Chaney,” Marianne said. She
turned to Philippe and he nodded, and even a less cynical sumbitch than me
would have guessed right then and there who really had control of the checkbook
in their household.
“Good. Then I’m glad I made the trip out here to meet with
you.”
“Are you? Are you really? Will you be able to say the same thing
months from now?” This came from Pat Fielding, who until now had sat utterly
silent, and as she said it her husband visibly relaxed. She smiled at me ever
so sweetly.
