The Lost Landscape: A Writer's Coming of Age Page 10

  If Helen could be urged to smile, her face lost its slack, sallow look, and so it was a challenge to me, to induce Helen Judd to smile. She appeared to be lonely, and miserable at school, and flattered by my attention. For “normal” students rarely sought out special ed. students except to tease or torment them. At first she may have been suspicious of my motives but by degrees, over a period of weeks and months, she became trusting. I saw her sitting alone in the cafeteria, and sat with her, when I might have sat with other girls, and she understood this, and must have been surprised as others were surprised. I thought of Nellie: trust shows in the eyes. I asked her where she lived now and she told me she lived on Niagara Street, but that she might be moving soon. I asked her about the house on the Tonawanda Creek Road, hadn’t she lived there with her family, and they’d moved out, and Helen blinked at me, and creased her forehead as an adult might do, and told me that she had not ever lived there but only stayed for a while, it had been her uncle’s house in Millersport. I said, “There was a fire, wasn’t there? How did it start?” and Helen said, slowly, each word like a pebble sucked in the mouth, “Lightning. Lightning hit it. One night in a storm.”

  I asked if she was living with her mother now and Helen shook her head vehemently, no. I asked her if she saw her mother and Helen shrugged and said she “wasn’t sure” where her mother was. I considered asking about her father but did not for I knew that Helen would lie about him, and I did not want her to lie, and to see in my face that I knew she was lying, for I wanted to be her friend.

  I asked about Dorothy. With a pained cringing smile Helen said that Dorothy was “somewhere else.”

  I told Helen that my mother had always liked her mother and missed her when they’d moved away. Helen continued to smile at me without seeming to hear me. She had a nervous habit of scratching at her arms, which she was doing now.

  (It did not go unobserved that each special ed. student had some habit, some mannerism, some tic or compulsion that set him or her apart from “normal” individuals. Helen Judd was one of the least conspicuous of these.)

  “We miss you. We wonder how you are. I wish—I wish you would visit me, Helen.”

  These words came spontaneously. I wanted to be Helen Judd’s friend. And then a kind of slow horror came over me, for I seemed scarcely to know what I was saying.

  Helen shrugged, and laughed. She gave me a sidelong glance, almost flirtatiously. Almost inaudibly she muttered what sounded like OK.

  “You will? You’ll come to visit? Sometime . . .”

  But Helen was distracted now. Vigorously she was scratching at her forearm in a way nearly to draw blood. If I’d scratched myself in such a way in my mother’s presence, Mommy would have leaned over to clasp and stop my hand. Honey, no. Don’t hurt yourself.

  Helen’s nails were polished a shiny peach color, but were badly chipped and even bitten. And her hair, that had always been brown, was streaked now with blond like an animal’s stripes.

  “It seems strange and sad, nobody lives in your house now. Why did you all move away?”

  Again Helen laughed. But there was no mirth or happiness in her face. Slowly she said, creasing her young forehead so that it resembled my grandmother’s forehead, a shocking succession of deep wrinkles, as if she’d come to a conclusion to a puzzle that had long vexed her, “They all just—went away.”

  I wanted to ask where. But the look in Helen’s face, the agitation with which she scratched at her forearms, dissuaded me.

  Another time, after pausing to sit with Helen at a cafeteria table at which a scattering of special ed. students were sitting, who stared at me with faint, hopeful smiles, I left a plastic change purse with a few coins in it on the table; and when I returned, only a few minutes later, Helen was gone, and the change purse was gone. I asked the others at the table if they’d seen it and vehemently they shook their heads no.

  Helen had stolen from me—had she? Or had this been a cruel test, and Helen had failed it?

  Just one more time, I suggested that Helen Judd come to visit us, riding home with me on the school bus to Millersport to have supper with me and stay the night; and in the morning, we would both take the bus to school. It was a bizarre suggestion for my mother would have been horrified and would have forced me to cancel the date; our upstairs living quarters were so small, we had scarcely room for our family; and the presence of any Judd would have alarmed and upset my grandmother. Helen seemed to comprehend this. All that I could not say, Helen seemed to hear. She was looking at me with a faint, wistful smile as if wanting to say yes, for such an invitation would have been an extraordinary event in the life of any Judd, but finally saying, firmly—“No. Guess not.”

  “WHERE HAS GOD GONE”

  1.

  THE FIRST TIME I saw an adult man cry.

  The shock of it! A man does not cry. A man does not behave like this.

  The Methodist minister Reverend Bender was addressing the small congregation in his usually impassioned voice, at the pulpit of the Pendleton Methodist Church in Pendleton, New York, in the spring of 1950. His subject may have been the abiding nature of Jesus Christ’s love, or the mysteries of God’s harsher and more demanding love, or the temptations of the material world, or the grim choice we must make between Heaven and Hell—these were topics about which Reverend Bender often spoke, and to which I only half-listened, though turning to the man a rapt, attentive face; but suddenly, Reverend Bender had begun to cry, and was choking back sobs. His face was flushed and streaked with bright tears and appeared contorted like a crying infant’s. His eyes that were usually so alert and kindly had lost their focus and seemed to have gone inward. Out of surprise and sympathy, and unease, many in the congregation began to weep with him; others, like me, were too shocked to react, and sat in stunned and baffled silence. A sensation of faintness came over me, almost terror. I had not seemed to know that a man could cry and the realization was a profound shock, as if our minister had shouted obscenities at us, or torn at his clothing.

  Afterward I would learn that Reverend Bender was disappointed and agitated, that his efforts during the past week in the community to bring more people to our church had been “a failure.” For what seemed like long minutes, though probably it was less than a single minute, Reverend Bender had been unable to continue, wiping his face with a handkerchief, while the congregation stared at him. Reverend Bender’s wife and young children, seated in the first row in front of the pulpit, must have been mortified and frightened.

  (I was not seated among the congregation but at a small foot-pump organ near the front of the church; on the bench, I had to twist about to see Reverend Bender at the pulpit. It is one of the curious facts of my life that, at twelve, and very new to the Pendleton Methodist Church, I had been asked by Reverend Bender to be their “organist” though I had only been taking piano lessons for a few years and had no training at all on the organ.)

  Each Sunday I came to church in Pendleton with a friend from school named Jean Grady, who lived in Pendleton and whose mother my mother had known when they were girls. Jean was slightly older than I was, in eighth grade when I was in seventh grade; we sat together on the rowdy school bus that brought thirty students from the “north country” into Lockport, and had become friends of a kind. (Oddly, both Jean and I were outstanding badminton players at the junior high: when we played together, Jean beat me perhaps three times out of five, but each of us could beat any other girl opponent in the school.)

  Unlike Helen Judd, Jean Grady was not from a disgraced family, or even from a “poor” family; she appeared to be from a family not unlike mine, except perhaps more prosperous than mine since Mr. Grady owned a small grocery store in Pendleton with a riveting sign above the door that contained the red-scripted word Sealtest. To all who knew her, stout plain-stern-faced Jean Grady was enviable; we could scarcely imagine the privilege of entering the grim little Pendleton store to select a Mars bar, a Coke from the refrigerator, an orange Sealtest Creamsicle fro
m a freezer unit, without paying.

  Most wonderfully, it sometimes happened that Jean Grady could select treats for a friend, too.

  So it had happened, one afternoon on the school bus Jean Grady invited me to come with her to church the following Sunday, at the small white clapboard Methodist church our school bus routinely passed, and somehow, I seem to have said yes.

  In fact I was eager to say yes. Any invitation put to me at that time in my life was welcome, and flattering; I was always eager to be included in virtually anything, if I didn’t think that my parents would disapprove; if indeed, I would tell my parents. Like Alice, I was tirelessly curious.

  (Yet, as a corollary to this eagerness, which is a kind of impulsiveness, or heedlessness, it should also be noted that after my acceptance I was usually repentant, and filled with doubt; I was ambivalent about nearly everything that had initially excited me. My childish eagerness to say yes was in refutation of my fear that saying no would be a terrible mistake.)

  Jean Grady told me that she’d been going to Sunday and Wednesday evening services at the Methodist church for almost a year. In a thrilled voice she boasted that she’d been asked to help the minister’s wife Mrs. Bender teach Sunday school. No one else in the Grady family went to church—“Mrs. Bender says I will be an example for them.” She had an “extra Bible” for me, which I was grateful to be given for any book was of value to me, and there was no Bible in our household. Jean told me that she thought I would like the church very much and that it would “make a big change” in my life.

  A big change in my life was a very exciting prospect. I could not imagine what this big change might be.

  It had long seemed strange to me, though not particularly upsetting or significant, that no one in my family seemed to be “religious”—at all. Not my parents, and not my grandparents. (Though I knew that my Hungarian grandparents had once been Roman Catholic, in Budapest, Hungary; crossing the Atlantic to the new world they seemed to have sloughed off their old religion.) Later I would learn that my mother had been baptized Catholic in a church in Black Rock, and that my father’s father Joseph Carleton Oates had also been baptized Catholic. The word for such Catholics was lapsed—an intriguing word I would not know for some years.

  It was curious to me, I’d become a “Protestant” by joining the Methodist church—whatever that meant.

  Soon after I’d joined the church with Jean Grady as my sponsor, I realized, from Reverend Bender’s remarks in the pulpit, that Jean had invited me to join as part of a general campaign by the church to acquire new members; there were extra Bibles for this purpose, to be given away. I felt somewhat chagrined but told myself it was still flattering, that of the numerous other girls she knew Jean had invited me.

  The congregation was small, probably less than one hundred people. Less than eighty people? When I shut my eyes I can’t seem to see much of anything of the interior of the plain, white-walled church except the pulpit, the five-foot wooden cross at the front of the room, the pump-organ against the wall, the narrow windows and pinewood floor; I have no idea how many pews there were, or how many people could fit comfortably into a pew. But I remember the urgency of Reverend Bender’s remarks—the need to bring more visitors to the church, to introduce more people to the church, to fill the pews and to “bring souls to Jesus.” I remember Reverend Bender’s claim that God wanted him to know—“‘You have not worked hard enough last week.’”

  These words, uttered passionately at the pulpit, in front of the hushed and discomforted congregation, made a strong impression on me. I did not think—But what delusion, to think that God cares about him! What impressed me most were the condemning words—You have not worked hard enough.

  As Reverend Bender continued to speak, wiping at his eyes with his handkerchief, coughing, clearing his throat, it became clear that there was a pressing need also in the church for money—“Funds for the upkeep of our beloved church.”

  Just before I’d joined the congregation, a team of volunteers (male) had repainted the church, which had become badly weatherworn. On a bulletin board in the church foyer were snapshots of this team effort, with a broadly smiling Reverend Bender himself in work clothes wielding a paintbrush dipped in white paint. And now, it seemed that the shingle-board roof needed repair.

  You do not normally think of a church as an organization desperately requiring money—you do not think of a church as a property, a building, that has to be paid for, and has to be maintained, as a house or a barn is maintained; at least, I did not think of “church” in such a material way. (Naively I must have thought that churches simply existed. You should not have to pay to worship God—should you?) And so it was a surprise to me, a true revelation, to hear Reverend Bender speak frankly of the need of “our church” for money, like the need for new members; it was painful to hear how Reverend Bender came close to pleading, begging. Each Sunday service when the wicker collection basket was passed from hand to hand along the pews I was deeply embarrassed to leave such small change—a quarter, a few dimes, nickels—amid bills.

  Weekly I was given some money by my mother as an “allowance”—payment for the numerous chores I did. I don’t even want to think how modest this allowance must have been—possibly, a single dollar.

  Yet, giving most of my money, or all of my money, to the collection basket seemed necessary. I could not reasonably expect Jesus to come into my heart if I held back. Jean Grady did not give much more than I did, or so it seemed to my (sharp, envious) eye.

  What has this to do with God—I asked myself.

  Also, when I was alone and not with others, such questions haunted me—Where is God? Does God see us?

  An eye distant and large as the sun. An eye that would never close. An eye without an eyelid.

  He sees you wherever you go. Nowhere to hide.

  Yet, I did not really believe this. If there was a God—if there was Reverend Bender’s “God”—why would He care about me? It was common to discover, in fields, in the woods, the shrunken and desiccated bodies of animals, from which life had departed; our flock of Rhode Island Reds was always being stricken with illness, mutilation, sudden death. It was not likely, I had to think, that any eye, any invisible presence, took note of such small deaths. You learned from trespassing into abandoned places and the silence of such places that no one took note of anything—fundamentally. Wasn’t this the implicit lesson of war, those terrible photographs in Life at which I could not look, yet found myself looking, staring—memorizing . . .

  There was the problem too of where God was. The Methodists believed in Heaven—(and in Hell)—as actual, literal places; even at twelve, I could not think that this was likely.

  Yet, at the same time, with no sense of how contradictory such thinking was, I would have identified myself as religious; more importantly, spiritual. I was a new member of the congregation, who had not yet been “baptized.” (That would come later, though soon.) It was natural to suppose that I would become more like the others, in time. It had not escaped me as a twelve-year-old who avidly read adult books (which I could now withdraw from the Lockport Public Library) that there was an intense consciousness of “religion” and “spirituality” that imbued the world beyond Millersport; in any library, there were shelves of books on the very subject of God, Jesus Christ, “Christianity.” If I could not quite comprehend this consciousness, let alone believe in it, yet I could certainly appear to believe in it, I could emulate the behavior of those who believed. I did not want to be a shallow person, but a person of depth.

  Waiting for God to take notice of me. Waiting for Jesus to come into my heart.

  In his sermons Reverend Bender posed questions which he then answered. As if he were speaking for those of us who could not speak for ourselves.

  How are our prayers answered?

  In ways we can’t always know.

  It was not possible, following this logic, to know that prayer did not work; even when prayer seemed futile, as many o
f Reverend Bender’s passionate prayers evidently did, the prayers might well be answered in some oblique, elliptical way—in the future.

  My feeling for “religion” was not unlike my father’s feeling for flying. Though I certainly would not have considered this at the time, it seems likely now, in retrospect. To fly, to be borne aloft, to transcend—this is the motive, and the goal. As Lear tersely remarks, “Reason not the need.”

  But my religious yearnings were wayward and indefinable. Like those creatures who take on the protective camouflage of their surroundings in order not to be devoured by predators, instinctively I adapted to whatever was around me, and to whatever was told me; though I might not believe what I was told, I would give the impression that I did. My fear was that I had not a deep enough soul for Jesus to acknowledge. My efforts at prayer seemed to me self-evidently insincere, like one who is pretending to be swimming but is only flailing her arms about, in shallow water; praying was too much like begging, and could arouse only contempt. At school I was an ardent student, and rarely received any grade lower than A; quizzes and tests, anathema to other students, were thrilling to me, like playing badminton, indeed any activity in gym class where I was excited by competing with the other girls; in church, I was an ardent worshipper, or gave that impression, for badly I wanted to believe—something. I wanted to be perceived by the others as one of them, blessed. I did not want to be perceived as an outsider. I did not want to be perceived as damned.

  To the Methodists in the little church “Jesus Christ” was not a distant historic or mythic figure but a living presence. It seemed to be believed by them—(by us, for I was now one of them)—that Jesus was close beside us at all times. Jesus was our companion, and our closest friend. Jesus was our brother who knew much more about us than we knew or would acknowledge about ourselves, and Jesus had forgiven us for what he knew of us, for Jesus loved us. Though Jesus was the Son of God, yet the Son of God could be “hurt” by us, His heart broken if and when we failed to live up to His ideals. The essence of Jesus was love and we had only to love Him without question, as He bade us: “Except as ye become as little children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven.” God, who was Jesus’s father, was a living presence too, though invisible as the wind, and never illustrated in Bible pictures (except as a fiercely burning bush, appearing to Moses in the Book of Exodus) as Jesus was many times illustrated; God the Father was unpredictable and wrathful, devoted to punishing the enemies of the Israelites, and less inclined to forgive than Jesus, perhaps because God knew us more thoroughly than Jesus did. Never having been human, still less crucified, God had little patience with human weakness and hypocrisy. Reverend Bender spoke with grim satisfaction of God, though with warmth and affection of Jesus; God was a “jealous” God while Jesus was “forgiving”; Jesus was needed to intercede between God and man, bringing salvation to mankind after our first parents Adam and Eve committed “sin.” Of course, just accepting this wasn’t enough—prayer, good works, a constant welcoming of Jesus Christ in our hearts and a resistance to sin were also required.