Aurora Dawn (6 page)

The lively quality of these confessions, which laid once for all the sentimental notion that sin is confined to the great
steaming cities, gained for Father Stanfield’s hour, in two months, a popularity unequaled in the annals of religious broadcasting.
The Father himself was no small asset to the program. After a twenty-minute opening of hymn singing and prayer he usually
launched into a brief talk on some topic of the day in a style of rustic good humor and Godliness that occasionally took on
a sharp edge of satire.

As Andrew trudged with his bag across the wide, dark, dewy lawn between the Tabernacle and the building known as the Old House,
he was aware of a tingling across his shoulders and down his arms, signs of tension and excitement which his easy disposition
showed rarely. The prospect of meeting the fabled Stanfield was partly the cause; much more than that, however, was the consciousness
of what these next hours might mean for him. Van Wirt was about to be promoted to a vice-presidency, and there were five assistant
sales managers available for his place, among whom Andy was junior both in years and service. Van Wirt had deliberately given
him this weighty mission with the intention of recommending him as his successor if he brought it off. There was more than
the single program at stake. Talmadge Marquis had four of his six soap programs with the rival USBS, and only two relatively
small daytime shows with RBC: “Meet Mother Murphy,” wherein homespun Irish charm furthered the cause of Aurora Dawn Energized
Soap Beads; and “Doctor Morris’s Secret,” a serial which had successfully advocated the virtue of Aurora Dawn Dubl-Bubl Shampoo
for four years without bringing its listeners one jot closer to the nature of the kindly old horse doctor’s secret. Now, Marquis
had originally begun his radio advertising with RBC and had been won over to producing his major shows on the rival chain
only by skulduggery, including relentless play on his weakness for tall, thin brunettes; there therefore lurked in the bosoms
of Van Wirt and his superiors at RBC an unflagging desire to win him back, like the burning Irredentism of a Balkan state
bereft of a border province.

Their great chance was at hand with the Father Stanfield incident. Marquis had originally ordered USBS to get the Faithful
Shepherd for him, and that unhappy corporation had met with a flat refusal from the preacher to appear under commercial sponsorship.
His reply to their clumsy representative–“The Saviour ain’t for sale, Mister, not since Judas’s little transaction, he ain’t”–had
circulated through radio circles with the speed of a sexy joke. Striking while the iron was hot, the executive director of
RBC had ordered Van Wirt to devise a clever scheme which would bring the Fold of the Faithful Shepherd into the broader fold
of Republic Broadcasting. (He had been vague on the details of the cleverness.) Van Wirt, equally vague, delegated the task
to Andrew, giving him the alternative of a leap close to the top of RBC’s executive hierarchy, in the thin, intoxicating ozone
of twenty-five thousand a year, or possible ignominy and dismissal. Andrew had a plan, perfect as plans could be; its chances
depended entirely on the correctness of his estimate of the character of Father Stanfield.

His heart quickening, Andrew mounted the steps of the broad farmhouse known as the Old House, and knocked loudly at the door.
It was opened by a thin, meek-looking girl, innocent of the benefits of make-up and wearing a cheap gray cotton dress and
a clean apron, who said, as Andrew stood blinking at the sudden rush of light, “You the young man from New York? Father expecting
you,” and motioned him to enter. She took the bag awkwardly from his hand, ignoring his murmured protest, while a hearty voice
boomed from within: “That the young feller, Esther? Bring him in, bring him in!” Andrew barely caught a glimpse of an old-fashioned
hallway with a full-length mirror near the door and faded green flowery paper on the walls, before he found himself in the
dining room. Ablaze with the light from a glass chandelier suspended over a long, laden table, a-clatter with the noise of
a dinner in full swing, the room seemed overflowing with food, people, and good humor. At the far end of the table sat a broad
man with fair, straight hair and protruding ears, dressed in black, who stood up as Andy entered and strode to him, waving
huge meaty hands in greeting. Andy was almost six feet tall, but Father Stanfield loomed over and around him; he was built
on a massive scale and the mass was working weight, as Andrew knew the moment he shook hands.

“Saturday night’s a good night to come to the Old House, son,” cried the preacher, leading him by the hand to a vacant chair
beside his own at the head of the table. “Esther, bring some hot soup. That food on trains don’t do a man no good. We don’t
eat too bad here, son.” With this he pushed Andrew into the chair and sat down in his own, picking up a fork and spearing
a wide slab of fried steak from a metal platter as he did so. A plate of thick soup manifested itself under Andrew’s nose,
and its steam smote his nostrils like incense after the discouraging Pullman fish and the cold bus ride. Casting an appreciative
eye around the board as he ate, he decided that in truth they “didn’t eat too bad.” There were plates heaped with corn, squashes,
and baked potatoes; deep dishes filled with blocks of butter, halved lettuce heads, sliced tomatoes, peas, red beans, green
beans, celery, applesauce, and stewed rhubarb; platters of steak, platters of pork chops, and platters of fried quarter chickens,
all vanishing rapidly under the lunges of agile forks. Women rose from time to time with practiced dexterity to renew the
supply and to refill the two tin pitchers of coffee that seemed never to stop in their rattling career around the table.

Stanfield glanced with approval at the speed with which Andy fell to. “Young man is all right,” he commented, the comment
somewhat muffled by steak. “Meet the folks, but don’t reach to shake no hands.” Starting at the head of the table, he introduced
the men first, some as Elders, some simply by patronym, and, after he had made the round of male diners, he added, “The ladies
alongside are the missus” which for some reason was greeted with a universal giggle. The men ranged in age from a white-haired
farmer with seamed, blunt hands, seated at Stanfield’s right, to a stout, pale-faced young man with heavy black hair at the
foot of the table, who had been introduced as “Chico–he handles the machinery, and knows more about it than Hennery Ford.”
The men were all, it appeared, foremen or supervisors of various departments of the community farm, although the designation
of Elder indicated that some were also religious functionaries in Stanfield’s peculiar prelacy. Andrew was introduced as “The
young feller from Radio City, New York, who’s come down to see our meeting.” The dinner passed in lively conversation, incomprehensible
to Andy, aside from the jests of Elder Billingsley at the head of the table, who was the accepted wit of the synod. These
invariably took the form of broad flirtatious remarks addressed at various wives, and everybody invariably roared except the
twitted husband who invariably looked mildly surprised and foolish. There was a long discussion of a revised plumbing system
in the New House (which, Andy gathered, was a kind of dormitory where the eighty families of the Fold lived) and a heated
attack on the merits of a scientific cattle feed by Elder Comer, a very old man with a bald pate, and a back bent like a resilient
bow. As soon as the dessert was cleared, Stanfield led a prolonged prayer of thanks, at the conclusion of which he rose, saying
“Them folks a-waiting.” Thereupon there was a great stir and bustle as everyone filed into the hall, donned hats and coats,
and walked out across the dank lawn in the frosty March night to the Tabernacle.

The revival meeting was an unforgettable experience for Andy, tired and sleepy though he was. From his vantage point on the
stage in the row of the Elders he watched with growing wonder the strange mixture of tent-show and religious service that
was Stanfield’s way of worship. As he listened to him deliver a sharp, rustically humorous diatribe against the growing tendency
in the Fold to read popular magazines instead of the Bible–“Seems as how lately the Good Book is running a poor second to
Red Book: I reckon the main trouble with the Gospel is, they ain’t no part in it you can illustrate with a girl with her laigs
up in the air”–Andrew felt an accession of confidence in his sincerity. This lessened considerably when, after the community
singing and just before the confessions, Elder Pennington, a slight, gray man with a large fleshy nose and deep folds in the
skin of his face, who had said nothing at all during dinner except “Pass the beans” or “More coffee,” got up and made a desk-thumping
appeal in a shrill, emotional voice for money to continue “the Fold’s great work,” and ordered baskets passed among the hundreds
of tourists who crowded the Tabernacle to the last row of its narrow wooden-pillared balcony. The singing was real, and the
confessions were real: the music was sung with uninhibited heartiness by the mountain folk of the Fold as well as by many
of the visitors, the confessions came pouring straightforward from the people with directness of narrative, quaint turn of
local speech, and touches of unexpected detail almost impossible to contrive. Father Stanfield absolved them, sometimes with
gravity, sometimes with a rough jocular comment on their misdeeds, and evidently derived much pleasure from the showmanship
of the ritual with the robes.

Reserving judgment, Andrew grew more and more positive that the man was accessible to the scheme he had in mind, and his prize
of twenty-five thousand a year seemed drifting within his grasp. Momentarily his mind wandered from the strange pageant before
him. He saw an apartment on Park Avenue in the Seventies, richly furnished, saw himself and Honey moving graciously among
a gathering of radio and advertising executives, his guests; he smelled the hors d’oeuvres, he tasted the wine, his eye lingered
on the clever matching of the dark maroon satin drapes with the Turkish carpet. He exchanged a casual word or two with a couple
of his guests in a quiet corner of a room–just the word or two necessary to win a huge new account, doubling his income at
a stroke and paying for the party ten times over. The apartment was cramping, after all. The house in Sands Point owned by
Chester Bullock, of Bullock and Griffin, with the veranda facing sunsetwards over the blue Sound, was much more to his taste.
Now he could afford to build one like it and start working toward his real aim, an advertising agency of his own. The first
requisite, of course, was a home where he could do the large-scale entertaining which would open the golden gates. An aureate
haze enveloped his thoughts. They lost coherence and became a series of broken images of luxury: a white motor yacht with
a beautifully sheered bow, himself as skipper resplendent in a yachting uniform; Honey in mink, Honey and he in a box at the
opera, bowing to the grand Davidoffs in the central box and being invited to join them for supper afterward; a two-month vacation
at Colorado Springs, playing golf (he would always keep in shape, of course), being very gracious to his old friends and even
to Curran, the flinty course manager who had gouged him so mercilessly in his caddie days; Honey the center of all eyes when
they walked into the long, elegant dining room at night–except that Honey unaccountably was shorter and had black hair and
thin, tense, active little hands like cats–but that was impossible–

He was roused from his dozing by a burst of music, the closing song of the repentance period, a lively air:

Their sins they were as scarlet,

They are now as white as snow;

Their sins they were as scarlet,

They are now as white as snow—

Their souls are back with ]esus

And the devil hides below—

For they’re washed in the blood of the Lamb.

The meeting broke up, following a benediction by Father Stanfield. With a rich noise of cheery converse the crowd went outside,
where buses waited lined up to take them back to town. The people of the Fold melted into the gloom of the lawn. Conducted
to a high, deep feather bed in a room in the Old House by Elder Pennington, Andy fell asleep almost immediately, to renew
his visions of riches in the more brightly glowing hues of deep dreams.

Not being of the school of literature which deals analytically with the phantasms of slumber, this history makes no effort
to follow our hero into the land of Nod, although doubtless the whole truth about him could thereby easily be laid bare under
a skillful probe.

In which the reader, by a magic older

and blander than that of the X-ray,

is permitted a glimpse into

the soul of Father Calvin Stanfield.

I
T MAY BE
, as Henry George said, that all religions (except yours and mine, friend) seem like the variously distorted apprehensions
of a primary truth. Let us say here at once that the Faithful Shepherd’s intimations of his Creator occasionally shaded into
the grotesque; for such observations are not amiss in a history of plodding truth. Your novelist affects impartiality in order
to lend verisimilitude to the phantoms of his brain, but a historian’s allotted task is to blacken black, whiten white, force
facts into his own view of them, and make enlightening comments along the way; for true life accurately retold would be a
formless succession of accidents and follies, no more entertaining or improving than is your daily life, dear reader. So I
say at the outset, Father Stanfield’s cosmogony was bizarre; you may draw, from the events, your own conclusion as to whether
this unfitted him for his post in the world.