The Second Coming (19 page)

Ah, but what if there is another way? Maybe that was your mistake, that you didn't even look. That's the difference between us. I'm going to find out once and for all. You never even looked.

Is there another way? People either believe everything or they believe nothing. People like the Christians or Californians believe anything, everything. People like you and Lewis Peckham and the professors and scientists believe nothing. Is there another way?

He hefted the Luger. His father took it off an SS colonel, it and the colonel's black cap with its Totenkopf insignia and some photographs—his father: a captain in the 10th Armored Division, which joined Patton at Saarburg, where he, his father, had his picture taken standing up in the hatch of an M4 Sherman tank, which did not look at all like the snapshot of the SS colonel standing in the hatch of the Tiger tank taken in the Ardennes (even though I somehow know it was exactly what he, my father, had in mind when he had his picture taken: the Tiger in all its menacing beauty). Strange that he, my father, often spoke of the Ardennes and the Rhine and Weimar but never mentioned Buchenwald, which was only four miles from Weimar and which Patton took three weeks later, never mentioned that the horrified Patton paraded fifteen hundred of Weimar's best humanistic Germans right down the middle of Buchenwald to see the sights, Patton of all people, no Goethe he who said to the fifteen hundred not look you sons of Goethe but look you sons of bitches (is not this in fact, Father, where your humanism ends in the end?). Yet he, my father, never mentioned that, even though I read about it in his own book, a history of the Third Army, that the 10
^th
Armored Division was there too. Why did he keep the photographs of the SS colonel standing in the hatch of the Tiger tank which I found in the attic in Mississippi and not one word about Buchenwald? Why did he talk about the SS colonel so much if the Nazis were so bad and why did he think Patton not the SS colonel ridiculous with his chrome helmet and pearl-handled revolvers?

He talked about the SS colonel as much as he talked about Marcus Flavinius, the Roman centurion. He knew by heart the letter which Marcus had written his cousin Tertullus in Rome, where he, Marcus, had heard things were going badly what with moneygrubbings, plots, treasons, sellouts. He, Marcus, wrote:

When we left our native soil, Tertullus, we were told we were going to defend the sacred rights of the empire and of the people to whom we bring our protection and civilization. For this we have not hesitated to shed our blood, to sacrifice our youth and our hopes. We regret nothing. Please tell me the rumors I hear of treachery at home are not true and that our fellow citizens understand us, support us, protect our families as we ourselves protect the might of the Empire.

Should it be otherwise, Tertullus, should we leave our weary bones to bleach on the tracts of the desert in vain, then beware of the anger of the Legions.

Marcus Flavinius
Centurion of the Second
Cohort of the Augusta Legion
SPQR

Anger. That was it! His anger! You were possessed by anger, anger which in the end you turned on yourself. You loved only death because for you what passed for life was really a death-in-life, which has no name and so is worse than death. Is that what you envied the SS colonel, his death's-head?

Very well, perhaps you were right, but what if you were not? Did you look?

What if there is a sign? What about the Jews? Are the Jews a sign? And if so, a sign of what? Did you overlook something? There were the Romans, the Augusta Legion, yes. There was the Army of Northern Virginia, yes. There was the Africa Korps, yes. But what about the Jews? Did you and the centurion overlook the Jews? What did you make of what happened to them?

What to make, Father, of the Jews?

He smiled again.

What to make, reader, of a rich middle-aged American sitting in a German car, holding a German pistol with which he will in all probability blow out his brains, smiling to himself and looking around old Carolina for the Jews whom he imagined had all disappeared?

Somehow he had got it in his head that all the Jews had either been killed in the Holocaust or had returned to Israel.

The missing Jews were the sign his father had missed!

What would have happened if a bona fide North Carolina Jew had walked up to the car and introduced himself?

Now he was talking aloud to himself: Father, the difference between you and me is that you were so angry you wanted no part of the way this life is and yourself in it and me in it too. You aimed only to make an end and you did. Very well, perhaps you were right. But I aim to find out. There's the difference. I aim to find out once and for all. I won't have it otherwise, you settled for too little.

He had waited too long. The chaplain, leaving St. Mark's, spied him and caught him before he could start the Mercedes.

For a moment he was afraid the chaplain was going to get in the car but he leaned in the window. In the second his head was above the Mercedes there was time to put the Luger under his thigh.

“Will! I'm glad I caught you. I forgot the main thing I wanted to ask you.” He tapped his temple. “The mind is going.”

“Yes?”

“I'm giving a retreat at Montreat next week. It crossed my mind you might come along.”

“A what?”

“A religious retreat. It's our regular yearly number. And our regular gang. Actually a wonderful bunch of guys. A weekend with God in a wonderful setting. It's an ecumenical retreat. I'm double-teamed with a Roman Catholic priest from Brooklyn, a real character—he looks so much like Humphrey Bogart everybody calls him Bogey. What a card. They call me Hungry Jack. Hungry Jack and Bogey. Actually we're not bad together. Incidentally, the food's first-class. But the important thing's it's a weekend with God. That's the bottom line.”

“Leslie tells me I should do something else.”

“What's that?”

“Have a personal encounter. Leslie believes she has had a personal encounter with Jesus Christ and has been born again.”

“There you go.”

“There I go what?”

“There are many mansions and so forth. It's not my gig but if it's hers, more power to her.”

“What does that mean?”

“Why don't you come to the retreat and find out. We've got all kinds in our gang—Protestants, Catholics, Anglicans, unbelievers, Jews—all wonderful guys, the kind of guys you'd like to spend a weekend with or fishing or just shooting the breeze. We call ourselves the Montreat Mafia. They're darn good guys and I promise you'd like—”

“Did you say Jews?”

“Yes. Last year we had two Jews. One a judge, the other—”

“What kind of Jews?”

“What do you mean, what kind?”

“I mean were they ethnic Jews or believing Jews?”

“God, I don't know. I didn't inquire.”

“Where are they from?”

“Where are they from? One's from Florida, the other from New York, I think.”

“Yes, it must be.”

“What must be?”

“Nothing.”

“Will you join us?”

“Will you tell me something, Jack?”

“You better believe it.”

“Do you think the Jews are a sign?”

“The Jews?” Again the quick second look. He did say Jews. And he is smiling. Are we kidding?

“Marion thought the Jews, the strange history of the Jews, was a sign of God's existence. What do you think?”

“Oh wow. With all due respect to Marion, God rest her soul, hopefully we've gotten past the idea that God keeps the Jews around suffering to avenge Christ's death.”

“I didn't mean that. I meant the return of the Jews to the Holy Land. The exodus from North Carolina.”

Then it's a joke, said the chaplain's smile. But what's the joke? Better take out insurance against it not being a joke.

“Well, to tell you the truth, I'm less interested in signs of the apocalypse than in opening a serious dialogue with our Catholic and Jewish friends, and I can tell you we've gotten right down to some real boilerplate at Montreat—will you think about it?”

“I just thought about it.”

“We're leaving here next Thursday, by early afternoon hopefully.”

“I would hope that you would go in hope.”

“Eh?” said the chaplain cocking an ear. “Right. Well, anyway—”

“Do you believe in God?” Will Barrett asked with the same smile.

“How's that?” asked Jack quickly.

“You know, God.”

In the fading light the chaplain looked at him closely, smiling all the while and narrowing his eyes in an especially understanding way. But Jack Curl wished that Will Barrett would not smile. The chaplain's main fear was not of being attacked or even martyred—he thought he could handle it—but of being made a fool of. It was one thing to be hauled up before the Grand Inquisitor, scorned, ridiculed, tortured. He could handle that, but suppose one is made the butt of a joke and doesn't get the joke? He wished Will Barrett, who seldom smiled, would stop smiling.

In the fading yellow light he could see the chaplain eyeing him uneasily to see if he was joking.

“I'm trying to ask a serious question. That is difficult to do these days.”

“You can say that again. Fire away.”

The Luger was hard under his thigh. Jack Curl's face loomed pale in the darkness.

“Do you believe in God, Jack?”

In the fading light he could see the chaplain look at him swiftly as if there were a joke to be caught. Then the crow's-feet suddenly ironed out, making him look white-eyed and serious.

“Well, if I didn't, I'd say I needed some vocational counseling, wouldn't you?” The chaplain's head loomed in the Mercedes, his face large and solemn. “Seriously—and you can check me out on this—I seem to be picking up on some vibes from you lately—that you might be thinking of entering the church—am I out in left field? I was lying a while ago when I said the one thing Marion wanted most was her new community project. No, what she wanted more than anything else was your coming into the church.”

“Ah.”

“Do you know where I've found God, Will?” The chaplain's round face rose to the Mercedes roof like a balloon.

“No, where?”

“In other people.”

“I see.”

“Don't you think you belong here in the church? With your own people. This is where you're coming from. Am I reading you right?”

“My people?”

“Weren't they all Episcopalians?”

“Yes.”

My people? Yes, they were Episcopalians but at heart they were members of the Augusta Legion and in the end at home not at St. John o' the Woods but with the bleached bones of Centurion Marcus Flavinius on the desert of the old Empire. They were the Romans, the English, Angles, Saxons, Jutes—citizens of Rome in the old Empire.

“Don't you think you belong with us?”

“Ah.” The Luger thrust into his thigh like a thumb. He smiled. Not yet, old Totenkopf. “You didn't answer my question.”

“What was the question?”

“Do you believe God exists?”

“Yes,” said the chaplain gravely. The chaplain's face, he imagined, went keen and fine-eyed in the failing light. Could it be? the lively expression asked. A God-seeker? A man wrestling with Doubt? (He, the chaplain, had never made a convert.)

“Why?”

“Perhaps he is trying to tell you something at this moment,” said the chaplain solemnly. (God, don't let me blow this, I've got a live one hooked.)

“What?”

“Grace is a mysterious thing,” said the chaplain.

“What does that mean?”

“Perhaps the answer lies under our noses, so to speak, in fact within ourselves. If only we would take the trouble to ask the question.”

“I shall put the question—as a matter of form—and I shall require an answer. But the answer will not come from you or me,” he said softly.

“What's that?” asked the chaplain quickly, leaning in. “I didn't quite catch—”

“I said only that the question can be put in such a way that an answer is required. It will be stipulated, moreover, that a non-answer, silence, shall be construed to mean no.”

“There you go,” said the chaplain uneasily. It made him uneasy to talk about religion. Marion Peabody Barrett had terrified him with her raging sarcastic attacks on the new liturgy and his own “social gospel.” There is a time to talk religion with women, to be God's plumber, to have solemn yet joyous bull sessions with men during a weekend with God, to horse around at a party. He was at home doing any of these but not when they were mixed up. The trouble with Barrett's queer question and peculiar smile was that you couldn't say which he was doing. The truth was Barrett was a queer duck. Rich, powerful, of one's class, but queer. Sly. What to do, then? Listen. Listen with all your might. Determine whether he's kidding or not. The chaplain narrowed his eyes and leaned several degrees toward Barrett.

“I think I know how to ask such a question,” said Will Barrett.

That was your trouble, old mole, you didn't even bother to ask and you should have, if only from Episcopal rectitude and an Episcopal sense of form—as one asks routinely of an empty house before closing the door and leaving: Is anybody home?

The question should be put as a matter of form even though you know the house is empty.

Then no one can complain of your leaving.

To his relief the chaplain pushed himself away, gave the Mercedes top a slap with both hands. “Why don't you put your question on the retreat?”

“I'll give it some thought.”

“Give it some prayerful thought.”

“Very well. I'll see you tomorrow. You deliver Mr. Arnold because Marion would want that and I'll try to deliver Leslie because that's what you want.”

“You got yourself a deal.”

When he moved his thigh and picked up the Luger between his legs, the metal felt hotter than his own body.