Don DeLillo - Americana

Whenever I saw my mother go through the house with the can of air-freshener I knew the Reverend Potter was expected. They had informal discussions every few weeks. She had known him since she was a girl in Alexandria. She talked of him often. She would run through the litany of his credits as if he were a make of automobile that had competed successfully in the various economy runs and endurance trials. The Boston Latin School. Harvard. The Protestant Episcopal Theological Seminary in Alexandria. Holy Trinity Church in Philadelphia. St. Bartholomew's in New York. Rector of Calvary Church in Old Holly. Added to the resonance of the man was his full name, William Stockbridge Potter; that Stockbridge was perfect, implying great girth and distinction, and it did not disappoint, for he was big, hearty and companionable. So I would see her spraying all the rooms with lavender sachet and I would find an inconspicuous chair in the living room and duck my head behind a copy of Treasure Island or the favorite sports stories of Bill Stern.

"Ann, this tea is delightful. You know how carefully I choose my words and I say this tea is delightful."

"What about the Judeo-Christian ethic?" she said.

"What about it, Ann?"

"I came across it in a magazine. I said to Clinton I must ask William Potter about this."

"Correct."

"Well, what about it?"

"I suppose it refers to certain common elements in our heritage and theirs. I suppose it distinguishes these elements from those of the Moslem ethic, if there is such a thing."

Reverend Potter sat in titanic splendor, slouched elegantly in the armchair, legs high and crossed at the knees, hands joined just beneath his lower lip, fingers barely touching. I was fascinated by the length of his fingers and by the small gray hair-fields above and below the joints of each finger. I had never seen such long fingers, nor fingers with so much hair growing on them. His black shoes gleamed. His hair was long and gray. He had harsh blue eyes and his voice seemed like steel struck on rock in a deep cave. The sight and sound of him filled me with fright and pleasure. To me, he could not have been more striking if he were an Abyssinian chieftain. But despite the beauty of his voice, there was something odd about the way he spoke. He often inserted long pauses between sentences and even words. Sometimes he would not respond to my mother's simplest question without a full minute's pause. Listening to him had its own measure of suspense. I used to imagine words tangled up in his throat and I would silently encourage them to spring out. There were times, the longest pauses, the slow hinging and unhinging of his jaw, the tentative sound echoing up his larynx, when he appeared to be on the verge of a torrential belch. It was part of his fascination. When he did speak finally, there seemed to be a curious disparity between the sounds he made and the movement of his lips; somehow they did not quite mesh. Perhaps the long pauses, the expectation, created an illusion of imbalance, but it seemed real enough then. It wasn't until years later, when I joined the network, that I found a term which perfectly described the way his words issued from an unrelated mouth. William Stockbridge Potter was out of sync.

"What about death?" she said.

"Ah."

"I don't think I could bear it. What can people do who are afraid to die? I saw my father die. It was slow and agonizing."

"This is one of the basic questions of our time," he said. "If we knew how to make a good job of death, it wouldn't be so frightful, would it? The famous prizefighter Joe Louis has been quoted as saying that everybody wants to go to heaven but nobody wants to die. I've used that in many of my sermons. Laughter, ah, is a great catalyst. It eases tension and helps clear the atmosphere. I'm a great believer in the power of laughter. People think High Church is drab and humorless. This is nonsense."

"But what are we to do?" she said.

"We must draw up a blueprint for dying."

"I think it's all so stupid, this high-low business."

"Will I see you at evensong? And the boy?"

"By all means."

"I must be going."

"Next time I want to hear about the Oxford Tracts."

"I have plenty of ammunition on that subject. I've just been reading up on the great Alonzo Potter; no relation incidentally, although I admit to you in confidence that I cherish the happy coincidence of our names, the serpent of vanity notwithstanding."

"You haven't touched your cookies."

"I really must be going."

"And I want to hear more about death."

"I'll be ready," he said. "Now then, shall we stroll out through the garden?"

"There is no garden."

"Ah."

"Say goodbye, David."

"Your mother is a smart little gal, young man. She was one of the great young beauties of Virginia. And her generosity to the church knows no bounds. You're a very fortunate boy to be so tall and straight. He has your eyes, Ann. What do you want to be when you grow up?"

"A soldier," I said.

"He speaks out directly. I like that. Not a hint of equivocation in his voice. He's a fine-looking boy."

"We share each other's secrets," she said.

"Well done."

"Goodbye," I said.

"A soldier," he said. "I like that. No nonsense about this boy. If I had not become a minister of Christ, I would have become a soldier myself. They're not so very different, you know."

At Leighton Gage College I wanted to be known as Kinch. This is Stephen Dedalus' nickname in Ulysses, which I was reading at the time. But I soon learned that nobody at Leighton Gage had a nickname, except of the most disparaging kind. There were no athletic teams there either. There were no grades or formal examinations. There were no traditions. The faculty was good but somewhat lazy and I suppose the reverse could be said of the students.

At the beginning I became friendly with a boy named Leonard Zajac, who was known to the wits in the poetry society as Young Man Carbuncular. We had several classes together and I was impressed by his nervous high-speed humor, his iconoclasm, the way he turned familiar ideas around and gave fresh meaning to them without necessarily believing his own version more than the original. Leonard was a fat and lonely boy with furious purple inflammations all over the back of his neck. People spoke to him only when necessary and even the faculty tried to ignore him. His obesity, his poor complexion, his heavy ghetto clothing seemed tragically out of place in the sleek setting of southern California. Leonard spent a good deal of time in the library. He and I got along well. With his help I felt I could develop my mind into a fine cutting instrument. Kinch. The knife-blade. Leonard was generous with his time and ideas. It wasn't long before I began to imagine him as a brilliant satirist and social critic, a personage of Swiftian eminence, a post-Renaissance phenomenon, a bonfire around which we would all huddle for lessons and warmth. To me, at eighteen, there was a certain attraction to Leonard's kind of life. Chronic boils and obesity eliminate all possible illusions; snuggle up to loneliness and make the library your womb-home and chapel. Then it all crumbled. Leonard told me he was in love with Page Talbot. She was a Kansas girl with long blond hair, the kind of woman who looks absolutely stunning at a distance of ten feet; within closer range, however, Page's green eyes seemed washed out, her skin sallow, and the lack of expression on her face suggested lifelong bereavement over the death of a pet rabbit. But coming toward you or moving along in front with a barely manageable sway, in salt-bleached blue jeans and faded blue farmgirl shirt, Page could make you feel she was worth following, on foot, all the way back to Kansas City. In the library one day Leonard told me about his fantasies. He imagined making love to her underwater, on horseback, on top of professors' desks, inside phone booths. Then he said he wanted to be like me; he would give anything, he said, to be like me, trim, good-looking, popular. His confession forced some strange shift in the sheer balances of my mind. That night I visited Page Talbot in her room. I wore tan chinos, the closest I could come to the fresh creased suntans of the United States Army. I stood in the doorway and thought of Burt Lancaster standing in the rain waiting for Deborah Kerr to open the door. My career as an intellectual was over.