Michael Bishop - Ancient of Days

Well-loved Namer of our Son,

We are back, but are we home? My homes keep jumping around. Paradise Farm I love for there I met RuthClaire. For a while now it is the only one of all my homes that does not jump. Tiny Paul has just jumped into the world from my one home that stands somewhat still. You are like a fierce seraph that holds down the corners of my jumping Eden. Thank you, sir, for doing that.

I must say two more things and maybe a little else. First, thank you for bringing me books on your card about God and thinking on Godness. Some of these I have regotten on my Atlanta card, so much am I interested. Second, deeply sorry for throwing one book—even if it was my own—across your room in my bitter fit of not behaving right. It makes me laugh a little, with angry mirth, to say or see that title, THE PROBLEM OF PAIN.

I am also sorry for attacking the vile man Barrington. I should write to him to say so, but he should write me to say himself sorry a THOUSAND times. He should write Miss RuthClaire. He should write YOU. He should quit his name from the station that sends him forth. God and thinking on Godness should quiet my anger, but (too bad) they do not. Barrington needs better etiquette and also probably religion. So do I. But I have a long walk to get there.

This is my last “a little else” to ask you. One day this year Miss RuthClaire may ask you to come see about her seeing about me. Some doctors at Emory are plotting now a surgery to humanize me for this time and place. Do please come when she asks. We will reimburse—a pretty word—all losses. If both agree to the niceness of using one bed during my hospital stay, I have no argument or jealousy to put against that wish.

P.S. Miss RuthClaire has written my last a “little else” in some anger. I must learn, she says, that no married person except maybe an Eskimo has a right “to dispose of the other’s affections.” I am telling her that I knew THAT already, and that the words if both agree prove I am not indisposing, without consideration, her body self. Good etiquette. Moral integrity.

P.P.S. Tiny Paul does well. Sleeping at night very well. Making no noise. Good baby etiquette.

P.P.P.S. I would like—much—a pen pal on spiritual stuff, but you undoubted lack for time?

I reread this letter closely several times. What wouldn’t a reporter give to lay hands on it? I thought briefly of letting different outfits bid for it, but once I had rejected this course as vile beyond even my notorious reverence for the profit motive, I never looked back. Adam was no longer my rival, he was my friend.

I tried to imagine what sort of surgery the specialists at Emory were planning for Adam, but could adduce only such routine operations as appendectomy, tonsillectomy, molar extractions, and, forgive me, circumcision. Then it occurred to me that the doctors might be contemplating more exotic procedures, viz., rendering Adam’s thumbs wholly opposable, surgically removing his sagittal crest, or increasing his body height by putting artificial bone sections in his thighs or lower legs. The first and third options would perhaps make it easier for Adam to function among us, but the second was a potentially dangerous sop to his or RuthClaire’s (vicarious) vanity—for which reason I struck it from my catalogue.

What then? What were they going to do to Adam?

I folded the notes back into their envelopes, feeling good about having decided to consider Adam my friend. Now I must act on that decision and enforce it by framing a reply. I found a grungy 13-cent postcard and wrote on it the following message:

Dear RuthClaire and Adam: I will come any time you need me. Just ask. No sweat about throwing C. S. Lewis across the room. I was once tempted to do the same thing. I’m the wrong pen pal for discussion of God and Godness, grace and salvation, extinction and immortality, even good and bad etiquette in situations with a moral angle. For that reason—not lack of time—I can’t promise anything.

Kiss the kid for me.

Christmas came and went. In Atlanta, the circus had begun. I wondered if my postcard had passed under prying eyes, thereby triggering the Montarazes’ ordeal with the press. In the future, sealed letters only.

Early in February, RuthClaire wrote to say they had received Tiny Paul’s birth certificate. She included three dollars to cover the cost of the registration fee. I sent the money back. But with the bills and the note was a printed invitation to Adam’s first exhibition of paintings at Abraxas. A wine-and-cheese reception in Adam’s honor would precede the show, and I was also invited to that. On the printed card RuthClaire had written, “ You’d better be here, Philistine! ”

The reception was on a Tuesday evening. I closed the West Bank after our midday meal, gave Livia George and the others both that evening and Wednesday off, put a sign on the door, and set off for the Big City… just in time to collide with rush hour.

Dristle kept my windshield wipers klik-klikking, and it was almost completely dark when I finally made my way up Moreland Avenue to Little Five Points and the Montaraz house on Hurt Street. That house, how to describe it? Its silhouette oozed a jolly decadence suggesting Mardi Gras, shrimp creole, tasseled strippers, and derby-hatted funeral processionaires. A pair of lamps on black cast-iron poles shone on either side of the cobbled walk, their globes like spheres of shimmering, honey-colored wax. By their light, I saw two indistinct figures come out on the front porch, down the steps, and hand in hand through the mistfall to my car. I let them in.

RuthClaire and Adam, of course, in polished boots and fleece-lined London Fog trench coats. From their bodies wafted the smells of soap, cologne, lipstick, aftershave, winter rain, and something peculiarly oniony.

“Don’t I get to come in?” I squinted at my invitation. “This is a wine-and-cheese reception, not a dinner.”

Adam sat next to me, but his lady had slid into the back seat. “David Blau,” she said, leaning forward, “asked us to come a tad early, Paul. We’re letting you drive to throw the press off. They’ll be looking for our hatchback.”

“I thought they always had your place surrounded.”

“Until we got Bilker Moody, they usually did. Tonight, though, the majority’s already at Abraxas.”

I asked about my godson. He was with the sitter, Pam Sorrells, an administrative assistant at the gallery who had sacrificed her own attendance at the opening to free Adam and RuthClaire for the event. An armed security guard—the aforementioned Bilker Moody—was also in the living room to protect La Casa Montaraz from uninvited guests. Bilker was nearly always present. That was the way their little family had to live nowadays.

“Look, the show’s not officially over until eleven, Ruthie Cee. My stomach will be rumbling like Vesuvius by then.”

Adam reached into the pocket of his trench coat and withdrew a McDonald’s cheeseburger in its Mazola Oil-colored wrapper. It was still warm—warm and enticingly oniony-smelling. I glanced sidelong at this object of gastronomical kitsch.

“Dare we offer a five-star restaurateur a treat from the Golden Arches?” RuthClaire asked.

“Ordinarily, only at your peril. Promise not to tell anyone, though, and tonight I’ll discreetly humble myself.”

I ate the cheeseburger. Adam produced a second one. I ate it, too. For dessert, RuthClaire handed me a (badly needed) breath mint. Then off we drove. A nondescript pickup truck materialized about midway along the block behind us and tailed us all the way to the gallery.

The Encyclopaedia Britannica defines abraxas as “a composite word composed of Greek letters formerly inscribed on charms, amulets, and gems in the belief that it possessed magical qualities.”