Walker Percy - The Second Coming

No, he married her for the very outlandishness of it, marrying her in Northport being as far as he could get from where he had come from.

No, he married her because she was such a good cheerful forthright Northern Episcopal Christian and wanted him to be one too and he tried and even imagined he believed it — again for the very outlandishness of it, taking for his own a New York Episcopal view of an Anglican view of a Roman view of a Jewish Happening. Might it not be true for this very reason? Could anybody but God have gotten away with such outlandishness, contriving to have rich Long Island Episcopalians who if they had no use for anything had no use for Jews, worship a Jew?

No, he married her for none of these reasons and for all of them. Marry her for money and the firm? Yes and no. Marry her because he could make her happy? Yes and no. Marry her because she was as far away as he could get from Mississippi? Yes and no. And from you, old mole? Yes. And get Jesus Christ in the bargain? Why not?

Yes, it was all of these but most of all it was the offhandedness and smiling secret coolness with which he did it, getting it all and even going the Gospels one better because the Gospels spoke of the children of this world and the children of light and set one against the other and he was both and had both and why not? Why not marry her?

Wasn’t it possible to believe in God like Pascal’s cold-blooded bettor, because there was everything to gain if you were right and nothing to lose if you were wrong?

For a while it seemed that it was possible.

Then it seemed not to matter.

In all honesty it was easier to believe it in cool Long Island for its very outrageousness where nobody believed anything very seriously than in hot Carolina where everybody was a Christian and found unbelief unbelievable.

After he married Marion, she seemed happier than ever, gave herself to church work, doing so with pleasure, took pleasure in him — and suddenly took pleasure in eating. She married, gave herself to good works, heaved a great sigh of relief, and began to eat. She ate and ate and ate. She grew too heavy for her hip joint already made frail and porous by polio. The ball of her femur drove into the socket of her pelvis, melted, and fused. She took to a wheelchair, ate more than ever, did more good works. She spent herself for the poor and old and wretched of North Carolina. She was one of the good triumphant Yankees who helped out the poor old South. In and out of meetings flew her wheelchair, her arms burly as a laborer’s. Fueled by holy energy, money, and brisk good cheer, she spun past slack-jawed Southerners, fed the hungry, clothed the naked, paid the workers in her mills a living wage, the very lintheads her piratical Yankee father had despoiled and gotten rich on: a mystery. Another mystery: her sanctity and gluttony. She truly gave herself to others, served God and her fellow man with a good and cheerful heart — and ate and ate and ate, her eyes as round and glittering as a lover’s.

It had been a pleasure for him to please and serve her. Only he, she said, had the strength and deftness to lean into the Rolls, take her by the waist while she took him by the neck, and in one quick powerful motion swing her out and around and into the wheelchair. Yamaiuchi was strong enough to do it but she wouldn’t let him. That’s why Yamaiuchi hates me, he thought. Had she promised him something in her will and hadn’t come through? To the A & P, then push her by one hand and the cart by the other while she snatched cans off the shelves, Celeste pizzas, Sara Lee cream pies, bottles of Plagniol, brownies, cream butter, eggs, gallons of custard ice cream. For her the pleasure came from the outing with him and from her “economizing” by doing her own shopping.

Twice a week he took her also to St. Mark’s Home, where he wheeled her down the halls and she knew every resident by name and visited, wheelchair to wheelchair. Looking down, he could see her welted forehead and cheeks foreshortened and her burly forearms, resting now, while he pushed.

She ate more. She grew bigger, fatter, but also stronger. She ate more and more: Smithfield hams, Yamaiuchi’s wife’s shirred eggs, Long Island ducks. Cholesterol sparkled like a golden rain in her blood, settled as a sludge winking with diamonds. A tiny stone lodged in her common bile duct. A bacillus sprouted in the stagnant dammed bile. She turned yellow as butter and hot as fire. There was no finding the diamond through the cliffs of ocherous fat. She died.

Both Marion and Leslie his daughter were religious in ways which were both admirable and daunting. He could not disagree with them nor allow himself the slightest distance of irony. How could he disagree with them? Both seemed to be right or at least triumphantly well-intentioned. It was odd only that though he had no quarrel with them, they quarreled with each other.

Marion had been an old-style Episcopalian who believed that one’s duty lay with God, church, the Book of Common Prayer, family, country, and doing good works.

Leslie, his daughter, was a new-style Christian who believed in giving her life to the Lord through a personal encounter with Him and who accordingly had no use for church, priests, or ritual. She believed this and Jason believed a California version of this. They got along well together, did good works, and seemed to be happy. How could one find fault with Leslie?

Leslie was leaning forward, speaking slowly to Mr. Arnold. She was helping him with his speech. She was a speech therapist. When he tried to say something, his lips on the slack side blew out like a drape. Leslie grimaced impatiently.

Now Leslie was arguing with Jack Curl, the minister. The three Cupps stood by silent and agreeable, tall as trees. The argument was not disagreeable, there were smiles and laughter, but it was an argument nevertheless. He could tell by the arch of Leslie’s back and by Jack Curl’s terror. Serious arguments, especially theological arguments, terrified Jack. They were probably arguing about the wedding. Marion had wanted a traditional ceremony. Leslie and Jason wanted to write their own ceremony.

Marion had been a conservative Episcopalian and had no use for the changes in the church.

Leslie and Jason were born-again Christians and had no use for anything, liturgy or sacrament, which got in the way of a personal encounter with Jesus Christ.

Ed and Marge Cupp were Californians.

Jack Curl, the minister, had no strong feelings about woman priests or the interim prayer book. He had been terrified that Marion, who had found him through her search committee and who considered the interim prayer book an abomination, would fire him. He attended ecumenical councils in the Middle East and Latin America. He had even visited a Russian bishop in Odessa and had started a collection of ikons. He wore jump suits.

Kitty believed in astrology.

Yamaiuchi was a Jehovah’s Witness. He believed he was one of the 144,000 who would survive Armageddon and actually live in their bodies on this earth for a thousand years — and reign.

Yamaiuchi’s wife, the cook, was a theosophist, who believed in reincarnation. She believed she had once been a priestess on Atlantis before it sank.

Is this an age of belief, he reflected, a great renaissance of faith after a period of crass materialism, atheism, agnosticism, liberalism, scientism? Or is it an age of madness in which everyone believes everything? Which?

The only unbelievers he knew in Linwood were Lewis Peckham and Ewell McBee, and they were even more demented than the believers.

Leslie, who was sitting bolt upright on the couch, legs folded under her, took off her glasses to clean them, a habit she’d always had, leaving her eyes naked and hazed. Looking at her, his daughter, he found himself thinking not about her or the wedding or the argument but, strangely enough, about how the girl in the woods might see her. In her nutty way with words, she would have seen Leslie in her name Leslie and now he too could see her, had always seen her as a Leslie, the two syllables of the name linked and hinged and folding just as her legs folded under her and the stems folded against her glasses, the whispering of her panty hose and the slight clash of the glasses connoted by the s in Les and the Leslie itself with its s and neuterness signifying both prissiness and masculinity, a secretarial primness which indeed Leslie had and which was all the more remarkable what with her being born-again. It was impossible to envision her personal encounter with Christ as other than a crisp business transaction.