Gore Vidal - Messiah

"That house over there, with the light in front, with the clock."

The house, to my surprise, was a large neo-Georgian funeral parlor with a lighted clock in front crowned by a legend discreetly fashioned in Gothic gold on black: Whittaker and Dormer, Funeral Directors . A dozen cars had been parked closely together in the street and I was forced to park nearly a block away.

We walked along the sidewalk, street lamps behind trees cast shadows thick and intricate upon the pavement. "Is there any particular significance?" I asked. "I mean in the choice of meeting place?"

She shook her head. "Not really, no. We meet wherever it's convenient. Mr Dormer is one of us and has kindly offered his chapel for the meetings."

"Is there any sort of ritual I should observe?"

She laughed. "Of course not. This isn't at all what you think."

"I think nothing."

"Then you are prepared. I should tell you, though, that until this year when a number of patrons made it possible for him" (already I could identify the "him" whenever it fell from her lips, round with reverence and implication) "to devote all his time to teaching, he was for ten years an undertaker's assistant in Oregon and Washington."

I said nothing. It was just as well to get past this first obstacle all at once. There was no reason of course to scorn that necessary if overwrought profession; yet somehow the thought of a savior emerging from those unctuous formaldehyde-smelling ranks seemed ludicrous. I reminded myself that one of the more successful messiahs had been a carpenter and that another had been a politician… but an embalmer! My anticipation of great news was chilled; I prepared myself for grim comedy.

Iris would tell me nothing more about the meeting or about him as we crossed the lawn. She opened the door to the house and we stepped into a softly lighted anteroom. A policeman and a civilian, the one gloomy and the other cheerful, greeted us.

"Ah, Miss Mortimer!" said the civilian, a gray, plump pigeon of a man. "And a friend, how good to see you both." No this was not he. I was introduced to Mr Dormer who chirped on until he was interrupted by the policeman.

"Come on, you two, in here. Got to get the prints and the oath."

Iris motioned me to follow the policeman into a side-room, an office. I'd heard of this national precaution but until now I had had no direct experience of it. Since the attempt of the communists to control our society had, with the collapse of Russian foreign policy, quite failed, our government in its collective wisdom had decided that never again would any sect or party, other than the traditional ones, be allowed to interrupt the rich flow of the nation's life. As a result, all deviationist societies were carefully watched by the police who fingerprinted and photographed those who attended meetings, simultaneously exacting an oath of allegiance to the Constitution and the Flag which ended with that powerful invocation which a recent president's speech writer had, in a moment of inspiration, struck off to the delight of his employer and nation: "In a true democracy there is no place for any disagreement on truly great issues." It is a comment on those years, now happily become history, that only a few ever considered the meaning of this resolution, proving of course that words are never a familiar province to the great mass which prefers recognizable pictures to even the most apposite prose. Iris and I repeated dutifully in the presence of the policeman and an American flag, the various national sentiments. We were then allowed to go back to the anteroom and to Mr. Dormer who himself led us into the chapel.

Several dozen people were already there, perfectly ordinary-looking men and women, better dressed perhaps than the average. The chapel was a nonsectarian one which managed to combine a number of decorative influences with a blandness quite remarkable in its success at not really representing anything while suggesting, at the same time, everything. The presence of a dead body, a man carefully painted and wearing a blue serge suit, gently smiling in an ebony casket behind a bank of flowers at the chapel's end, did not detract as much as one might have supposed from the occasion's importance. After the first uneasiness, it was quite possible to accept the anonymous dead man as a part of the decor. There was even, in later years, an attempt made by a group of Cavite enthusiasts to insist upon the presence of an embalmed corpse at every service but fortunately the more practical elements among the Cavites prevailed, though not without an ugly quarrel and harsh words.

John Cave's entrance followed our own by a few minutes and it is with difficulty that I recall what it was that I felt on seeing him for the first time. Though my recollections are well-known to all (at least they were well-known, although now I am less certain, having seen Butler's Testament so strangely altered), I must record here that I cannot, after so many years, so much history, recall in any emotional detail my first reaction to this man who was to be the world's, as well as my own, peculiar nemesis.

But, concentrating fiercely, emptying my mind of later knowledge, I can still see him as he walked down the aisle of the chapel, a small man who moved with some grace. He was younger than I'd expected or, rather, younger-looking, with short straight hair, light brown in color, a lean regular face which would not have been noticed in a crowd unless one had got close enough to see the expression of the eyes: the large silver eyes with black lashes like a thick line drawn on the pale skin, focusing attention to them, to the congenitally small pupils which glittered like the points of black needles, betraying the will and the ambition which the impassive, gentle face belied… but I am speaking with future knowledge now: I did not that evening think of ambition or will in terms of John Cave. I was merely curious, intrigued by the situation, by the intensity of Iris, by the serene corpse behind the banks of hothouse flowers, by the thirty or forty men and women who sat close to the front of the chapel, listening intently to Cave as he talked.

At first I paid little attention to what was being said, more interested in observing the audience, the room and the appearance of the speaker. Immediately after his undramatic entrance he had moved to the front of the chapel and sat down on a gilt chair to the right of the coffin; there was a faint whisper of interest at his appearance: newcomers like myself were being given last-minute instruction by the habitués who had brought them there. Cave sat easily on the gilt chair, his eyes upon the floor, his small hands, bony and white, folded in his lap, a smile on his narrow lips: he could not have looked more ineffectual, more ordinary. His opening words by no means altered this first impression.

The voice, as he spoke, was good, though he tended to mumble at the beginning, his eyes still on the floor, his hands in his lap, motionless. So quietly did he begin that he had spoken for several seconds before many of the audience were aware that he had begun. His accent was the national one, learned doubtless from the radio and the movies: a neutral pronunciation without any strong regional overtone. The popular if short-lived legend of the next decade that he had begun his mission as a backwoods revivalist was certainly untrue. Not until he had talked for several minutes, did I begin to listen to the sense rather than to the tone of his voice. I cannot render precisely what he said but the message that night was not much different from the subsequent ones which are known to all. It was, finally, the manner which created the response, not the words themselves, though the words were interesting enough, especially when heard for the first time. His voice, as I have said, faltered unsurely at the beginning and he left sentences unfinished, a trick which I later discovered was deliberate for he had been born a remarkable actor, an instinctive rhetorician. What most struck me that first evening was the purest artifice of his performance. The voice, especially when he came to his climax, was sharp and clear while his hands stirred like separate living creatures and the eyes, those splendid unique eyes, were abruptly revealed to us in the faint light, displayed at that crucial moment which had been as carefully constructed as any work of architecture or of music: the instant of communication.