Grist 01 - The Four Last Things (22 page)

“What did you do?”

“Went down there, naturally. What would you have done?”

“And what happened?”

“They wouldn’t let me see her. Like she’s the Queen of England. First I get these two weight lifters at the door, guys that look like they bench-press the Arco Tower on Saturday morning, and they ripple their muscles at me like their tailors got nothing to do but fix the tears in their cute little uniforms. So I make some noise and they take me inside after they figure I’m not going to shut up, and they put me in a room. And who comes in? My shithead lawyer.”

“Meredith Brooks,” I said.

“Meredith Fucking Brooks. Only guy in the world who polishes his face. Eight million bucks’ worth of clothes and he still looks like twenty pounds of cat shit. So what’s the first thing he says to me?”

“I give up.”

“He says, ‘Jesus, I wish you’d been here. The judge figured you’d run off, that’s why he gave her everything.’

“ ‘I had a lawyer,’ I said. ‘I thought maybe a lawyer, all that college, could manage to explain that I was in the Navy. I thought maybe “He’s on a boat” was something a well-trained lawyer could manage to say. And by the way,’ I said, ‘she fucks pretty good, huh?’ Sorry again, miss.

“Well, he got all grave-looking. You know how he rubs his chin?”

I said I knew.

“Guy loves to rub his chin. I figure when work is over he goes home, fixes dinner for his chin, and then the two of them sit around and watch TV. After Johnny Carson they go to bed and he rubs it different. Well, he rubs his chin and says I shouldn’t talk that way about Mary Claire. She’s the Speaker’s mother, you know? So I get up to murder him and the two weight lifters pick me up and smear me across a wall and hold me there with my feet off the ground. And I’m kicking and swearing a blue streak and Meredith Brooks gives me the world’s oiliest smile and tells me that I’d better be careful because all my Listenings are on tape.”

“What had you told them?” Eleanor asked unwillingly.

He leveled his brown eyes at her and blinked twice. “I might as well say it right out,” he said. “At least then I won’t have to worry about it anymore.”

“What was it?”

“That once, right after he was born, I’d tried to kill Ansel.”

Chapter 19

I
 had about four hours to kill before I was due to turn up at Bernie’s, bottle in hand, so I killed them by driving Eleanor back downtown. She was silent for the first twenty minutes or so, and when she spoke, all she said was, “That woman should be in jail.”

“When she goes,” I said, “she’s going to have a lot of company.”

Before dropping Eleanor at the
Times
, I parked around the corner from the Borzoi while she ran into the lobby to buy some of the books and tapes I’d seen on sale there. If anyplace in the Borzoi was safe, it was the lobby.

Nevertheless it seemed like a hell of a lot longer than ten minutes before she opened Alice’s door and slid onto the front seat, clutching one of those flimsy plastic shopping bags that the cheap supermarkets now give you, the ones that manage somehow both to break easily and to remain in the environment forever. It had a picture of Angel and Mary Claire on it. It was a new picture: Angel was holding her kitten.

“The collected works of Angel Ellspeth,” Eleanor said, “and one tape by the little girl called Anna. Eighty-one dollars and forty cents, if you can believe it. Who’s paying for this?”

“That’s a good question. For the moment, I guess you are.”

“I’d better get a story out of this. I can’t put all this wisdom on my expense account if I don’t write something.”

“Poor you,” I said. “I haven’t even got a client.”

“Sure, you do. Truth, justice, and the American way.” Eleanor spoke in series commas.

When she opened the door to get out at the
Times
she kissed her index finger and touched it lightly to the tip of my nose. “I’ll call Chantra,” she said. “It’s only for a week, right?”

“At the most.”

She gave me a long look. “So now who’s the optimist?” she said, sliding out. She crossed the crowded sidewalk and hurried into the building without glancing back, and I headed Alice around the block and back toward the Borzoi.

I found what I needed only about a block away from it: the Russell Arms. The Russell Arms had never been as fancy as the Borzoi, and it might never be home to a hot new religion, but the rooms were not dirty enough to be terrifying, the place was almost empty, and the desk clerk was willing to take cash. I booked myself in for the night, ignored the unspoken question about my luggage, grabbed the change of clothes I kept in Alice’s trunk, and went up to the room.

The stream of water from the shower was lukewarm and irresolute, and it took all the soap the Russell Arms was willing to provide before I stopped looking like a particularly slovenly anthracite miner. I pulled back the shower curtain and looked out twice before I finished. Nobody there but a cockroach. There was no singing in the shower.

Leaving the ring around the tub for the maid to swear at, I took the stairs down to the street and checked out the service entrances to the Borzoi again before popping Angel into Alice’s cassette player and hitting the thickening traffic for Westwood.

As I drove west on Wilshire, Angel creepy-crawled her way over various hidden landscapes, offering the listener the use of a spiritual flashlight. No question about it: you had to be there. In a room full of believers she had seemed almost frighteningly potent. On tape she just sounded like an extraordinarily bright, highly articulate, and spiritually bent little girl.

But not quite. There was an odd, halting inflection in her voice, a kind of verbal limp, that I couldn’t identify. It wasn’t the hesitancy of someone trying to remember a long speech. Angel’s trance had seemed real enough, and at the Revealing I’d attended with Skippy she’d stemmed the tide twice to respond to the audience. Her spiel wasn’t memorized. The words were flowing through her in real time, and she could be spontaneous. Wilburforce had said that the first little girl was a channel. I didn’t think I believed in channels.

Out of curiosity, I ejected Angel in mid-phrase and fished around in the plastic bag for the tape of poor little Anna. Jesus, even I was calling her poor little Anna. I slipped it in and turned up the volume.

Her voice was lower, more resonant, with a husky, dark edge of urgency to it and a natural, sinuous strength. Like Angel, Anna had been taped at a Revealing, in front of a large audience, and her listeners responded to her much more vocally than Angel’s had. Compared to Angel she was a real spellbinder, a girl with revival-tent potential.

A phrase floated into my mind: the Burned-Over District. Something to do with revival. I put it on hold and refocused on Anna.

The front of the cassette box pictured an ordinary-looking little girl with long, straight brown hair. It would have been uncharitable, but true, to call her plain. She had the wishful, plaintive smile of someone who hopes that this is the picture that will finally turn out.

But there was nothing plaintive about her voice. It was as different from Angel’s as a bassoon is from a flute. And much more persuasive.

I played parts of Anna’s tape again and then parts of Angel’s. Then, with Angel droning in my ears, I drove west, wondering what the hell the Burned-Over District was.

“The Burned-Over District?” Bernie said. “You’ve got to be kidding. You mean to tell me you don’t remember the counties of the Burned-Over District?”

“No, Bernie,” I said wearily. “What were they?” I inwardly gritted my teeth and groaned, hoping Bernie wouldn’t use the question as a cue for one of his famous lists.

“Let’s see, Chautauqua, Genesee, Wyoming,” Bernie began. I settled in for a long winter’s night. Once, in a liquor store, I made the mistake of asking Bernie why he was buying a bottle of vodka. Then I stood there, eyes glazing over and my life passing me by, while Bernie listed at least thirty drinks that boasted vodka as their
elixir vitae
. Lists are a weakness of graduate students.

“And the cities too,” Bernie continued happily, holding up five more fingers and picking up steam. “Utica, Rochester—”

“Utica,” I interrupted. “New York.” Something was coming back to me.

“And New York, of course. Not at first, though.”

“I mean, these are all in New York.”

“New York
State
” Bernie corrected me. Like all born New Yorkers, Bernie only used “New York” to refer to the city. Everything else was a featureless landscape, fit only for pity and not too much of that.

“Bear with me, Bernie,” I said. “It’s been a long day. Why was it called the Burned-Over District?”

“The fires of revival,” he said dramatically, tugging a hand through his coils of Brillo-like hair and taking some of it with him. “They burned there more or less nonstop in the early nineteenth century. Shame on you, with a degree in comparative religions. That’s where it all started. Haven’t you read Whitney Cross’s book?”

“What’s it called?”

“
The Burned
-
Over District
,” Bernie said with a hint of disappointment. “You could have guessed that, you know. I think maybe you ought to come back to school.” Bernie’s school career had spanned almost two decades and five degrees, and he still hadn’t found his major in life.

“Later,” I said. “Eighteen-twenties, right? Early revivalists. A reaction against European Calvinism. Predestination.”

“Predestination was a terrible idea,” Bernie said. “Only a few will be saved. The rest will roast in hell through eternity, shriveling on the spit. It doesn’t make any difference how you live your life, how many alms you give or prayers you pray. If you’re gonna fry, you’re gonna fry.” Bernie manipulated his large hands as though marionettes dangled from them, and made a sizzling noise. “Not much of a religion for a country where all men and women were supposed to be created equal. Also, not much of a religion for capitalists.” Bernie was ensconced happily several notches to the left of Chairman Mao.

“Why not for capitalists?”

“Nineteenth-century capitalists were highly result-driven. They hadn’t been introduced to Japanese principles of management yet. They needed a religion that allowed them to get results. So anyway, as you probably remember, the American Methodists and Baptists junked predestination in favor of free-will doctrines, the New Light doctrines, that let people have a say in whether they were going to burn or not. You could just accept Christ as your savior, and, bang, you were born again. It didn’t matter if you’d been predetermined for hell the first time around; when you were reborn, you started over. The spiritual equivalent of coming to the New World. A brilliant, simple concept. Perfect for an age of revolution.”

“And the preachers of the Burned-Over District took the New Light doctrines and began cranking out new religions.”

“Dozens of them,” Bernie said with relish, holding up his fingers again. “It must have been something in the water. Lots of Arminian doctrines, Joseph Smith and the Mormons, Millerites and, later, Seventh-Day Adventists, Shakers, the Oneida Colony—real communists, by the way—”

“Yeah, and look where it got them. Making silverware.”

“What, communists are supposed to eat with their fingers? They practiced free love, too, and controlled conception at the same time. Somehow. You want some wine?”

“I thought you’d never ask.”

“I thought we might wait for Joyce.”

“You wait for Joyce. Where is she, anyway?”

“Still at the hospital.” He got up to go to the kitchen. “I can’t tell you how nice it is to need a corkscrew for a change,” he said. “Nothing worth drinking comes with a screw-off cap.”

Bernie and Joyce were living in a standard student apartment on the fringes of Westwood, walking distance from UCLA, where she worked and he pursued his sixth degree, in a field seemingly completely unrelated to his previous five. The smell of baking lasagna floated in from the kitchen. I canvassed the books on the bulging rattan bookshelves from Pier One while Bernie fished noisily around in drawers and finally popped the cork. “Bernie,” I called, “it wasn’t all completely kosher Christian, was it? I seem to remember some fishier stuff.”

“Mainly Christian,” he yelled, clinking some glasses together promisingly. “There were some Swedenborgians rattling around, practicing mesmerism and phrenology on anyone who was willing to sit still, but they certainly thought of themselves as Christians. Lots of mediums, spiritualists popping up all over the place. They would have been horrified if you’d suggested they weren’t Christian. Just because it’s Christian doesn’t mean it’s not fishy, Simeon.” He came in with a full glass in each hand and the bottle tucked under his right arm, and sat very carefully on the floor without being able to use his hands or to move his right arm from his side. Only then did he put the glasses on the table. Eighteen years of college, and he was still helpless. “What is it with you and the Burned-Over District?”

“Little girls,” I said, sipping the wine. It could have used a few minutes to breathe but it wasn’t going to get them. “Something about little girls and voices from beyond.”

Bernie looked at me in a shrewd fashion and then turned to survey the bookshelves, one hand clutching a white-stockinged foot. Bernie had always worn white socks. “Little girls,” he said, drinking deeply out of the glass in his other hand. “Two little girls. Knox or Fox or Pox or something, maybe Fitzgerald.” He scooted over on his rear and reached up for a book with the hand that had clutched the foot. Bernie wasn’t one to put down a glass.

“Knox or Fox or Fitzgerald?”

“Frances Fitzgerald.
Cities on a Hill
. Got a terrific summary of the Burned-Over District.” He flipped through the end of the book. “Fox,” he said triumphantly. Margaret and Katie Fox. About twelve and fifteen, I don’t know which was which, farmer’s daughters, famous for their ability to communicate with the spirit world through the ghost of a dead man who haunted their family’s house.”

“Now I remember,” I said. “They had double-jointed toes.”

“They had toes like tympani,” Bernie said. “If they’d been born in this century they would have played them in a band. They popped their toes like mad under the table and interpreted the noises as rappings from their friendly ghost. They were very big in Rochester.”

“I’ll bet they were a hit in Utica too. Who was running the show?”

“Must have been their parents. Raking it in, too. I think the little girls came up with the trick themselves. Mommy and daddy just handled the receipts.”

“I don’t think my little girl came up with her trick herself.”

“And which little girl is this?” Bernie poured some more wine. His glass was already empty.

I told him about the Revealing.

“I’ve seen posters,” he said promptly. “Big color shots of mother and daughter. Mostly ripping off Raphael for composition. You know, those circular Madonnas and Child. How did the Revealing work?”

“That’s sort of a new twist.”

“ The only thing older than the old story is the new twist.’ That’s F. Scott Fitzgerald. What is it?”

“She’s supposed to be a channel.”

“Spare me,” Bernie said. “There are enough dull people in the world without millions of equally dull disembodied spirits popping up and putting in their two cents’ worth every time some actress closes her eyes. What are the criteria for becoming a disembodied spirit, anyway? Do they get degrees? Does some panel certify them? How do we know we don’t get the worst of the bunch? How do we know they haven’t been disembodied because they were bores and liars? Being disembodied doesn’t sound to me like something you get for good behavior. And if they’re so terrific, how come they’re hanging around waiting to get a chance to talk to
us
? It sounds sort of like spending eternity at a pay phone, waiting for some change to drop out so you can dial a number at random. And only knowing one area code, and not a very good area code at that.”

“Bernie,” I said, “I’m only giving you the party line.”

“Campus is full of these jerks,” he said. “It used to be you could go over to Kerckhoff, get your synapses jangled on coffee, and talk about Kierkegaard or something. Now it’s all these bananas with clear eyes and turbans listening to New Age music on nonanimal headphones and humming along.”