Gospel, page 95
“The adulterers shall burn!” pronounced Lila Mae, gawking maniacally at her husband. “Isn’t that right, honey?” Lucy wondered suddenly whether Mrs. Bullins was accusing her husband of this sin.
“Mama, calm down,” said Farley Jr.
“The central message of Christianity,” O’Hanrahan said, “is redemption. Yes, redemption for all those people Paul listed.” He looked down at his plate with no appetite. “My late son was a homosexual.”
This briefly brought conversation to a halt.
Lucy recalled some of the things O’Hanrahan had said in Khartoum about Rudolph. Oh, but here was the truth. She glimpsed a fraction of the struggle of Patrick O’Hanrahan, a man of his generation with a gay son … now a dead son.
“AIDS,” intoned Reverend Bullins, “is God’s vengeance upon those who would pervert God’s design. I’m sorry if that is how your son met his death. But vengeance is mine sayeth the Lord.”
O’Hanrahan stood up to leave the table in disgust … but wavered. Fell back into his chair, his eyes rolling up into his head. O’Hanrahan in steadying himself overturned his water glass, which had hit the edge of his plate and broke; a water stain spread under his plate.
“Sir!” cried Lucy, rising to her feet.
O’Hanrahan held on to the back of his chair but then he passed out, falling to the floor.
Lucy ran around to him. “My God, call a doctor!”
“The full quote is as follows. Do not be deceived,” quoted Reverend Bullins with a cold superiority before his fallen guest, not moving a finger. “Neither the fornicators nor idolators, nor adulterers nor homosexuals, nor the greedy, nor the drunkards—”
“For God’s sake, he’s having some kind of seizure!”
Camilla put down her tray and ran to the kitchen phone.
“Nor revilers, nor extortioners will inherit the Kingdom of God.”
Mrs. Bullins stood and pointed an accusing finger at O’Hanrahan, now groaning in pain on the carpet. “Satan has come upon him for his unrighteous works! I cast out the demon in the name of Jeeeezus, in the holy blessèd lovely…” She teared up, her voice cracked in the familiar way one can see several times a week on Bullins’s telecast. “… most beautiful saintly name of Jeeeezus! I say out, devil, come out of there!”
Lucy rounded on Farley, near tears herself: “He’s not drunk, for God’s sake, he’s had a heart attack or something!”
Camilla called out: “Ambulance on the way, miss!”
Lucy screamed to Farley, “Would you help me move him?”
Farley Bullins, Jr., scion to the $100-million TPL Empire, sat in his place stymied, one hand clasped in his raving mother’s hand. He glanced at his father for advice and his father looked back serenely. Farley gaped at Lucy, unable to know what to do.
* * *
As advertised, the TPL Medical Center was a large, well-equipped hospital in the tradition of a number of Baptist and Pentecostal hospitals through the South. Lucy was struck, traversing the lobby, with the Southern look of the people, the old heavy women, the obesity of the blacks, the scarecrow men out of Margaret Bourke-White ’30s photographs, the polyester shifts, dusters, pullovers, the anxious, over-madeup teenage girls with fire-red nail polish looking chunky in halter tops … As she arrived on the ninth floor in the Bullins Tower, O’Hanrahan’s floor, she saw a waiting room full of drawn Louisianans, smoking up a storm, a father sipping beer from a discreet paper bag, an overweight grandmother with hamhock arms all gathered for news of Grandpa.
“Patrick O’Hanrahan, please,” said Lucy at the desk.
She was informed she could visit him without accompaniment but not to tire him out. Room 923. Oh, she dreaded this. Maybe the old guy had at last played out his hand. She felt her breathing become more shallow as she determined not to pause but to go straight into the room.
“The vultures circle,” grumbled O’Hanrahan, looking, to her relief, like himself but bloodshot and jaundiced. His stomach, grotesquely, was notably swollen, rounded.
“Hello, sir,” she tried tentatively, before returning to their familiar form. “You look…”
“Like garbage, don’t lie to me. I suspect foul play, Sister Lucy. They’re poisoning me so they can walk off with the scroll.”
Lucy noticed that by his bedside on the rollaway table were stacks of photos of the Gospel of Matthias and several empty notepads. O’Hanrahan scrawled a message on one of them: The room may be bugged. Then another message: I figured out the gospel!
“You—” Lucy cut off her own enthusiasm. “You sure?” she whispered.
O’Hanrahan nodded. Yes, he looked gravely ill but his eyes held triumph! “Hepatitis A, they say,” he whispered to Lucy. “Survivable. But we need to work round the clock to finish this, in case I…”
Lucy didn’t supply the phrase.
“I will not have my best-selling edition of this gospel be posthumous. Sheer meanness and bile will keep me alive.”
(Those qualities you have in abundance.)
Lucy went to the windows. There was a playground down below and a large stadium-style light near it so kids could play after it became dark, which would be soon. She noticed a swarm of gnats, mosquitoes, moths darting and flitting around the lights.
“You missed Camilla’s Cajun meatloaf,” said Lucy.
He laughed faintly. “Didya get a load of that plantation house? I suspect if we’d made dessert we’d get to see three nappy-haired boys tap-dancing for our evening enjoyment and…”
Inconveniently, a black nurse appeared in the doorway, silencing O’Hanrahan to a mumble. Oblivious, she announced that this wing ceased visiting hours at nine P.M. and Lucy had to leave. Then the nurse removed the pen from O’Hanrahan’s hands and put his pad away. No more work now, Mr. O’Hanrahan, she requested in a gentle nurse-tone.
It was not until Lucy was walking down the chemical-lemony, antiseptic hallway that O’Hanrahan’s vulnerable condition registered. The great man reduced, debilitated. She wanted some time alone and decided to skirt the ever-present TPL limousine and the attentive Farley who loitered in the waiting room. She walked down the stairway, all nine floors, and let herself out an emergency-exit door in the parking lot, out into the orange-fluorescent-illumined rows of cars. She returned to the visitor’s entrance and got a taxi to take her back to the TPL Bible College campus. No sooner had the taxi deposited her than she realized that she could have asked the driver to take her into town and by a drugstore.
So she could buy that home pregnancy kit.
Lucy walked across the campus. It was a pleasant evening, seventy-five degrees, a little after 9:30 P.M. now, although it seemed to her it should be midnight, so much had happened these last two days, all of it suspended in a haze of jet lag and surreality.
“Excuse me,” she asked, stopping a Promised Land undergrad, “but can you tell me where a nearby drugstore is?”
The girl smiled warmly and gave directions, and even offered to come along by car since there was one tricky turn going into Philadelphia. It became obvious to Lucy it was really too far to walk.
“Something I can help you with?” the girl offered. “I’ve got a closet full of stuff back in the dorm.”
“No, I don’t think so,” said Lucy, “thanks anyway.”
“Is it a medical problem?”
“Uh, no, just hygiene things.”
“Are you a student here?”
Lucy suddenly found the friendliness encroaching. On the other hand, after months of old men and their crotchets it was tempting to make a female friend … in fact, in her tired, exasperated state, Lucy might well tell this girl with the friendly face everything. But imagine! The kindhearted, well-meaning pieties, the return visit to the Newlife Covenant Center, the prayers and earnest beseechings for God’s will.
“No, I’m a guest of the Bullinses.”
“Wow,” she smiled, tossing her long, straw-colored hair back, “at the White House—that’s what we call that big mansion.”
“Yeah, they’ve got me in there…” Lucy was aware she’d trailed off.
The young woman put forward her hand and touched Lucy’s arm. “Something’s wrong, isn’t it?”
Lucy stiffened. “No. I just wish the drugstore wasn’t so far away. It’s a small thing. Sorry to have bothered you.”
“My boyfriend Scott? He’s got a car and we can take you—”
Lucy broke away and turned resolutely to walk in the other direction. “No, that’s very kind, but no thanks. Good evening.”
The woman looked a little hurt, but also secure in the knowledge that something was wrong. “My name’s Patsy! Seeya around…” she added, hoping to backtrack to an introduction.
How did she know something was wrong? Lucy wondered as she walked away.
(Anyone could tell to look at you.)
Damn, these Christers sure can spot a lost soul.
(Patsy’s a sweet girl, and she could have helped you.)
I’m scared of these born-agains, thought Lucy, keeping her head down as she passed an auditorium that was emptying scores of students holding Bibles and talking impassionedly about Isaiah, prophecy, yes—she heard it—the End Times, being announced even in Philadelphia, Louisiana. There’s something wrong with them around the eyes, Lucy decided. Patsy was living in a dream world. Christian innocence plus monthly contributions to Reverend Bullins’s evangelization machine.
(You find that less substantial than the saints and rosary routines of Roman Catholicism, do you?)
How close she came to being taken back to Patsy’s suite and crying and confessing everything, being prayed over and counseled and … Oh, God, how close I came to that kind of circus. To be beholden to Patsy, that twenty-year-old goody-goody with no life experience, no concept of anything but her suburban, comfortable God—
(Sounds like you a few months ago.)
Lucy leaned against a bus-stop sign. After what she had seen in Ethiopia, after all the disease and suffering she had beheld—and surely there was no shortage of it here in Louisiana—how could all these people pour millions into this feel-good, self-indulgent medicine show of Reverend Bullins’s delusions of grandeur … Actually, it was no different, though infinitely less beautiful and lasting, than St. Peter’s in Rome and the gaudy, gold-encrusted palace of the Vatican. It was all so goddam irrelevant, really, to what Jesus would have wanted.
(What are you going to do about it?)
Look, I’d leave this world in a second, leave academia, leave my life in Chicago as well, for Africa to stand beside that nurse, to stand beside people who really might need me instead of what I have here: no one who needs me. Except Dr. O’Hanrahan. And damn it, he’s dying.
Lucy returned to the mansion and was let in by a black servant at the side entrance. Camilla in the kitchen was up making Reverend Bullins’s favorite pastry for tomorrow morning’s breakfast, yes she was, she told Lucy in a languorous Louisiana accent. Bet he pays her shit, thought Lucy, climbing the stairs. This TPL empire, despite a smattering of black students, is just one more White Fantasyland, Lucy decided, another luridly compelling production from the part of the world that gave us Scarlett O’Hara, Graceland, Mardi Gras, “Way Down Upon the Suwannee,” and the Confederacy.
Lucy found her way to the bedroom and shut and locked the door before Farley or any late-night prayer vigil could descend upon her. She crawled into the guestroom bed, which was deeply comfortable—surely the first really comfortable bed since … well, since she left Chicago in June. A digital desk clock was the only light, with a cobalt blue TPL and a cross centered above the time.
I suppose, she sighed, I could march over to the Newlife Covenant Center or some such equivalent. Go home to my folks before my child started showing, do some song and dance about working on the Matthias scroll in Louisiana, have the kid, give it up, go back to my life and allow him or her to be brought up—
Her thought stopped there: him or her. It was the first time she had given the it in her body that much of an identity. No matter, she thought stoically, it will have to be given up. Don’t even like kids that much, and my sister Cecilia’s monsters drive me crazy, the bawling, the whining, the selfishness that has to be tamed with loving caution. But here they would make me write that letter. That letter the child could read at eighteen when Lucy would be … let’s see, well into another unrecognizable, uncharted life at 46. Dear Daughter, or Dear Son. You’re probably wondering why I gave you up …
No.
You must know that if things were different I would not have given you away …
No.
You will never understand, perhaps, why I felt it best to give you away but since you’re eighteen maybe you can see how much having a child would change your life, or maybe you’re the kind of woman who welcomes that, but, dear daughter—or son—whoever and however you are, with your Southern accent and your mother’s bad Irish skin through adolescence, can you believe just one thing? That, trust me, I did you a big favor. And forever after this letter you must know that somewhere your one-time mother loves you, wanted the best for you, which was not me, but hopes you’re very happy with the wonderful, mystifying life before you as it once was before me …
Better the silence than such a letter! My God!
* * *
O’Hanrahan awoke to dull pain. He blearily focused on the room and saw that it was dark outside the window and only one light in his room, a table lamp, was on at its lowest wattage.
The nighttable clock said it was nearly midnight.
It was, he surmised, a homey little room, probably the Bullins Center’s best luxury suite. To his side was a bedstand with a variety of medical gadgets and between him and this table was his IV tree with three full bags of something-or-other filtering into him. He raised his left arm, which was straightened against a lightweight splint so he wouldn’t bend his elbow and disrupt the IV drip. Imagine getting poked with all those needles and being so out of it you had no idea, he considered.
Also on his bedstand were three Dom Perignon cigars in individual humidors. Surely Lucy didn’t leave those … or Bullins, maybe?
“Cigars, Mr. O’Hanrahan,” said a gravelly, assuring voice from across the room.
O’Hanrahan raised his head weakly. Sitting by the lamp was a gentleman in his sixties with full silver hair styled as for a politician, a sturdy but not heavy man dressed impeccably in a conservative dark suit. He was half-attentive to an article in a neatly folded Wall Street Journal on his lap. A bottle of some kind of whiskey was beside the stranger on the tabletop, shrouded in a brown paper bag.
“Dom Perignons, as you no doubt recognize,” said the man. It was a cigar-smoker’s tenor voice given a false bass rasp.
“Thank you,” said O’Hanrahan, distressed at how feeble he sounded. “I take it then you’re not a doctor.”
He set aside his Wall Street Journal. “No,” he said, volunteering no new information. “This bottle here is a Kentucky Bourbon I thought you’d enjoy. Special Reserve, Old Confederate—private stock, only a few barrels of the stuff ever made. They tell me you’ve got hepatitis and a number of complications, but when you get better I thought you’d appreciate it.”
“Maybe I won’t get better.”
The gentleman examined his fine, manicured hands. He stood, picked up the bottle and walked closer to put it down on O’Hanrahan’s bedside table. O’Hanrahan noticed the youth of the man’s hands, like a teenager’s, not a liver spot or a crease. The man stood at the bedside and they both looked at each other a moment. “Well, my friend, if indeed the end is near, it wouldn’t hurt to drink it. Our vices, Mr. O’Hanrahan, support us in our old age; they are the guardrails we cling to, our constants in an impermanent world.” He paced back to the easy chair. “Vice is endangered in this country in this era.”
O’Hanrahan smiled faintly. “I agree.”
After a pause the man opened a cigar case and motioned, “Do you mind?”
“Not at all.” O’Hanrahan wondered if he would have to answer to the head nurse for the lingering cigar smoke in his room.
“You’re sure?”
O’Hanrahan lifted his splinted arm and gestured a be-my-guest as well as he could.
“A man my age is defined by his vices. To the club for a dinner of high-cholesterol prime rib, port in the library, cigars with the fellows, a warmed brandy by the fire, a bit of gambling from time to time, cards. A visit to the mistress, much younger—you see what I mean.” He barely smiled, raising a hand gracefully. “They have become the sum of me.”
It occurred to O’Hanrahan, still struggling with the sensation of having seen the man before, who his visitor was. “You’re Chester Merriwether, aren’t you?”
The gentleman lit his cigar and availed himself of a paper cup as an ashtray. “I’m Charles Merriwether, Mr. O’Hanrahan. But you’ve got the right idea. Merriwether Industries, chairman of the board.”
O’Hanrahan felt fevered and weak, relieved his guest was up to doing the talking.
“Chester was my father. Or Chester the Second, I should say. My grandfather, founder of the original steel enterprise, was Chester the First.” He paused, puffing on his cigar.
“Chester the First was a man of God. Led the factory in collective prayer, each Sunday. Mind you, his workers would work for pennies until an industrial accident did them in, children and women too, inhuman hours, unspeakable conditions. Before my grandfather’s eyes was a sea of laboring-class misery that he alone was responsible for, but in all those prayers, in all that piety, in all that talk of…” He said the name with distaste: “… of Jesus, he never could perceive a contradiction. With men of God like Chester the First, unions became inevitable—and our nation pays the price for this now. Chester the Second, my father, was a lover of fine things. Art, old masters, porcelain from China, suits of armor from the Middle Ages, and scrolls, collectibles, antiquities.”
“He once owned the Gospel of Matthias,” O’Hanrahan said.
“A prized possession. We had, in fact, a falling-out over my selling it to another collector. My father paid more attention to his hoarding and rapine than to our family’s corporation, which funded his dilettantish pursuits. When I got power of attorney over my father, I began selling off the bric-a-brac. It was easy capital and rendered unnecessary our outrageous insurance payments to protect a bunch of old paintings and potsherds. My retired father became estranged. Never forgave me.”
