Alexander Theroux - Darconville’s Cat

Then, there was Isabel. The flower-de-luce looked pale from little sleep but no less beautiful than ever, her hair pulled back à la vierge , her fingers playing high in a little resigned wave. She managed a small smile. The sun seemed to be shining out of her rather than onto her, a fact confirmed now in the semi-darkness as they entered the church. Isabel remarked the dry, punkwoody, almost tense smell reaching throughout the place. “Schism,” said Darconville.

There was no altar. It was a neo-funeral-home décor with faked stained-glass and buckets of ferns and tubs of cycads placed around the enormous stage up front in the middle of which was a high rostrum which held a gigantic red-leather Bible, its silk purple page-marker hanging out like a weary tongue. The two of them sat down immediately to find staring at them from the reserved seats at the side of the stage a group that looked less like the officials of a church synod than the botched supernumeraries from the Bosch Bearing of the Cross : a row of sour elders, civic schmalkaldics, and scowling proto-puritans swollen with the honor of wardenship. As the choir began its first hymn, “My Lord Our Pinkies Nice Can Tweak,” Darconville hoped he didn’t know what to expect but rather expected he did, only too well.

He recalled, for instance, one particular night the previous winter when, called upon for it, he had gone over to Dr. Dodypol’s house to cheer him up but, when he arrived, found that little fellow reeling around drunk as a lord, his lower lip hanging so low it looked as if he were wearing a turtleneck sweater. The Piggly Wiggly had been closed six hours or so and his wife hadn’t yet come home. It had grown later and later when Dr. Dodypol, fidimplicitary no more, burst into a crazy fit of laughter and with one low wheeple from the throat asked, “What does one need more than anything else in the world?” But when his visitor quite properly answered love, the poor poet, murderously squeezing his glass into a fist of bits, squawked, “For Mrs. Dodypol, I could make it air !”—and then passed out. Darconville had covered him with a blanket, he remembered, and, watching guard, turned on the television set. Network programming had just ended. At that instant, however, morning devotions—”Nitey Nite Necessities” or something like that — slotted in, a quiet organ Schlummerlied in the background supplying inspiration, when suddenly an aggrieved clerical demivir dropped, ripe as a medlar, into the nasty little orchard that was everyone’s life. Looking up from his busy ministerial desk, the evangelist swung off his glasses — candor — and immediately began gasconading about this here being the free-est country on earth and, friend, the most decent, an assertion he underscored with the unusually colorful heresies, explicitly implied, that Christ had signed the Declaration of Independence, personally translated Robert E. Lee’s horse, “Traveler,” to the reaches of heaven, and was temporarily living in Crozet, Virginia (not uncoincidentally the preacher’s hometown), where, carpentering a new church, He might be very, very pleased if one morning, you pick it, neighbor, He sauntered down the hill to find five dollars tucked into his R.F.D. mailbox just so’s He could see to that new weatherproof siding! And tenpenny nails! And heating ducts! And ten dollars would buy twice as much! And twenty, why, four times that! An address for mailing was flashed on the screen, not before, however, those out there in televisionland were sent scurrying for a pencil. The preacher then flipped open his Bible, raced through a text, kissed the page, and then with his head lowered— caught looking up, his eyes custodiously emended — he slowly metamorphosed into a flapping Old Glory upon which was superimposed a montage, in sequence, of cumulus clouds, a squadron of jets, grannies-at-prayer, the murmuring pines and the hemlocks, a towheaded tiny licking a raindrop from her nose, the fruited plains, and, finally, the Raising of the Flag at Iwo Jima, this accompanied all the while by the crescendo of an out-of-tune choir humming “I Love to Steal Awhile Away,” after which a thunderclap and then the basso profundo voice of God the Father demoting from on high, “ I Am with You Always, Even Unto the End of the World !” At which point, miraculously, Dr. Dodypol rose on a drunken elbow, claimed that was only the voice of a fat man bellowing into an empty keg, and then fell back again unconscious.

“May the Lord love you reeeeal good!”

It was the heartfelt, if ungrammatical, wish of welcome boomed over a microphone — and suddenly waking Darconville to where he was — by a jug-eared rapscallion wearing a string-tie, a raspberry shirt, and a woefully carpentered hairstyle. Clamor flew with huge flapping wingclaps from wall to wall. The service was ready to begin.

“I come up here”—he wiped his nose on his sleeve and, snuffling, grinned—”I come up here in front of all you good folks and feller Christians to welcome you to our sixth-in-a-row doorbuster revival Sunday, is what it is, with the world-famous man, evangelist, and pastor of the Wyanoid Baptist Church, Dr. W. C. Cloogy, who you gonna see in jess a minute, but first—”

Doctor? Doctor ? Darconville was surprised, but then understood: for what preacher, teacher, or sinister minister could ever course among his flock peddling his scriptural exta and exegetical guesswork without the security of some kind of honorific, unfurled over him like an umbrella? Doctor was the favorite. Reverend would do. Saint was too pretentious, Kalokagathiate not true. Arch-Rabbi was impossible. Misters just abound. And, finally, Metropolitan had a European sound.

The interlocutor, meanwhile, asking for everyone’s undivided attention, went straight into the preliminary segment of the program. Darconville looked around him to see people knuckling into their pews, snorting for excitement, ready to be entertained. Revival fires, burning, somehow recapitulated the klieg-lights of the Grand Ole Opry. It was a land of revue !

Miss Gelda Lou Glikes, a girl of excessive beribbonment, blew out on her trumpet the old winner, “He Touched Me,” blushed, and skipped into the wings. An ex-football star from the Cincinnati Bengals (30” neck, 5½” hat) mesomorphically loped to the podium and said that it may sound corny but he was lonesome for Jesus, a remarkable heresy, thought Darconville, contravening the orthodox argument that He is everywhere, but there was little time to reflect on this, what with the swift entrance of The Marvy Twins, male regulars, who swayed and harmonized to the favorite, “The Flame on My Wick Is Bright Tonight,” the last chorus of which one hummed while the other narrated a poem about motherhood from an anniversary greeting card. Then a former dipsomaniac second-grade schoolteacher, choking back the tears—”witnessing”—told her story, God help her, about a spinfit she once threw after drinking only one highball, God forgive her, when she forced an unruly seven-year-old to eat a whole jar of mucilage and two pink erasers. And then a high-school boy in a wheelchair, waving the Confederate Battle Flag, was pushed out on stage to recite a snatchet from “The Conquered Banner”:

”. . Keep it, widowed, sonless mothers,

Keep it, sisters, mourning brothers,

Furl it with an iron will,

Furl it now, but — keep it still;

Think not that its work is done. .”

The showcase opened even wider. An octogenarian, garbed out in an American Legion uniform, was led out to wave just before what was clearly imminent cardiac arrest, one that would nevertheless proudly enroll him among the Army of Heaven. A dwarf named Larry appeared and spoke in tongues, the supernatural aspect of his delivery not untransvalued for strangeness by his harelip. And the last act belonged to one Roy LeRoy, billed as, and generally recognized to be, W. C. Cloogy’s “best friend,” for the evangelist, like the King of the Cowboys, always keeps such a foil: it implies a disposition to gregariousness, Roman amicitia , and cuts down for the ensainted preacher on the inevitable speculation the presence of wives causes. A kind of swagman, stooge, and jovial boy-friday, he sang in one of those parodically classical, out-of-fashion voices a medley of laxatives touching on the Jordan; chariots swinging low; Rolls Being Called Up Yonder; Loving Mysterious Strangers (age 33!); golden slippers; and Columbia, the Gem — as the famous mixed metaphor has it — of the Ocean, these being interspersed, narratively, with a didactic mess of “Why, Daddy?” stories; criminal-sons-and-saintiy-moms stories; the Worm Turns stories; instant conversion stories; money-can-never-make-you-happy stories (always a signal for the collection), and, testantibus actis , a whole rosary of patriotic yarns.