Keeper of Dreams (89 page)

Usually, in such cases, my purpose is satire. In the classic sense: I am humorously and ironically calling attention to flaws in society with the idea that these flaws should be corrected. My book
Saintspeak: The Mormon Dictionary
has precisely that purpose—by defining terms that Mormons use in ways peculiar to ourselves, I can also comment on Mormon life and suggest ways that, as a people, we might do better.

So if you are not a Mormon, and you read these stories, you may find them boring, because the issues at stake mean little to you; or you may find them strange and vaguely exotic, like reading Alexander McCall Smith’s Botswana novels. Or you may recognize the similarities as well as the differences and find some value for your own understanding of the place of people within their culture.

“Christmas at Helaman’s House” was written many years ago and was intended to be the first chapter of a novel; it still may become that. Mormons have—or had, and in my opinion
should
have—a deep suspicion of capitalism and the markers of wealth. Too often in Mormon communities wealth is taken as a sign of God’s favor. But I’ve learned through many conversations and much correspondence that I am far from being the only one in the Church who thinks we’ve gone too far and need to recover Joseph Smith’s insistence that there should be—and is—a better way. So no matter how many Mormons you hear talking like free-market capitalists, remember that there are also a lot of Mormons whose loathing for the competitive economy is a tradition older than Marxism.

“Neighbors” was created as a retelling of the story of Christ, as if he had been born to a couple from a Mormon ward. On one level it’s an anti-gossip satire, but on another level it’s a take on the way we all safely interpret dangerous things in ways that don’t require us to change our lives.

“God Plays Fair Once Too Often” is probably too much of a parable to really work as fiction. I had intended it for publication in a Mormon
journal, but realized that it would probably be too offensively jocular for many Latter-day Saints. The problem is that I don’t take the book of Job seriously as doctrine or scripture. The account of God making a bet with the devil is not just ludicrous but offensive to me—it’s not how the universe works. And I find none of the explanations of why bad things happen to good people even remotely useful. So for me it’s fair game for satire, but many other Mormons are bound to think I’m making light of sacred things. As a result, the only publication this received was in the program book for a Dutch science-fiction convention in Rotterdam many years ago. What they made of it I don’t know, but they wanted to publish something that hadn’t been published before, this was all I had, and they accepted it.

“Worthy to Be One of Us” was created for an anthology of LDS fiction edited jointly by me and my friend David Dollahite (
Turning Hearts: Short Stories on Family Life
). Dave is a scientist working in family studies, particularly fatherhood studies, and we wanted to create an anthology of useful fiction that would show family life from a Mormon perspective. What I was dealing with in my story was the issue of status in the Mormon Church. The leaders of the Church fill important roles, and those I have known personally are usually very good men who can be trusted to fill those roles wisely and well. But surrounding them is too often a penumbra of social class derived from rank. In the Church Office Building they are surrounded, as often as not, by toadies and sycophants who are nauseating in a Uriah Heep kind of way; it makes me wonder how the Church leaders can bear it. I can only assume they are mostly unaware of how they are exploited, fawned over, misrepresented, and lied to by so many of their underlings.

A few generations ago, however, the social aspects of the situation were even worse. Salt Lake City high society was absolutely dominated by those who were called to be General Authorities of the Church, with social rank completely determined by the station and seniority of your family’s MRGA—Most Recent General Authority.

Early in Kristine’s and my marriage we ran into one of the surviving examples of this pernicious attitude. My great-grandfather (my father’s mother’s father) was George F. Richards, who for a while was the President of the Quorum of the Twelve, making him the senior Apostle and
the designated successor to the President of the Church. He died too soon and never succeeded to the presidency, but his ranking was very high.

Kristine and I were living in Salt Lake when the time for the annual George F. Richards Family Reunion rolled around. George F. and his wife had had fifteen children, twelve of whom lived to have children of their own, so the gathering would be huge. The reunion was to be held at Sugarhouse Park, and my grandmother asked Kristine and me, since we were living close by, to take charge of providing the name tags.

We thought of the bright idea of color-coding the name tags to identify which of George F.’s dozen children each person was descended from. As people approached the reunion, we would ask their names, write them on the right color tag, and then everybody would know something about them. It was very genealogical, very Mormon, and rather fun, Kristine and I thought.

Until we ran into the LeGrand Richards problem. Uncle LeGrand was the only child of George F. who also became an Apostle, and since he was still alive at the time of this reunion, he was the only Living General Authority at the gathering. I had met him several times, and in fact he had performed Kristine’s and my wedding ceremony (though we did not expect him to remember). When he came near our table, we called out (as we had to everyone), “Come and get your name tags!” He waved us off, and, rather snappishly, remarked, “I don’t need a name tag.” Well, of course he didn’t. Everyone knew who he was. So Kristine and I laughed it off, though it would have been
nice
if his own descendants could have been visibly linked to him by the color-coded tags.

That’s what we thought—until we met some of those descendants. We called out to them, and they were the only people in the whole gathering to act rather huffish and snooty toward us when we explained what we were doing. “Which of George F.’s children are you descended from?” I asked.

The woman looked at me as if I were an idiot. “LeGrand, of course,” she said. The tone was absolutely clear: How could I have been so hopelessly ignorant as not to know they were of the sacred family of the Most Recent General Authority?

Kristine and I laughed over it (we still do) but I was also deeply ashamed of them. They were my cousins, after all, but they were also
crushing snobs, and their status derived entirely, not from any achievements of their own, but from what one of their ancestors did—as if it made them a different kind or class of people from the rest of us. Except that
every single person
at that gathering was descended from a President of the Quorum of the Twelve—a higher status than LeGrand had ever achieved—and so it was ludicrous to pull social rank.

Even though they accepted the name tags we wrote for them, they didn’t wear them—we saw the tags lying atop the nearest garbage can only a few moments later. So at that family reunion, the way you could tell LeGrand and at least one branch of his family was by their lack of a name tag. They were just too cool for the rest of us.

Uncle LeGrand was a beloved Apostle—by me as much as anyone. And I still loved hearing him speak in Conference until he died some years later. But from then on, there was a little sad memory in my heart whenever I saw and thought of him. For all his many contributions to the Church (for instance, his missionary book
A Marvelous Work and a Wonder
), he had failed to raise at least some of his family with the humility expected of Christians. The lesson taught by the Savior when he pointed to his disciples and said, “These are my mother and my brothers,” was apparently lost on them.

I single them out only because I’m in that family and had occasion to see their behavior firsthand. But snobbery based on Church rank and prominence is a pernicious disease in the Mormon Church. Even though the doctrine is clear—children of General Authorities can go to hell just as fast and just as far as anyone else, if they so choose—snobbery is more the rule than the exception. I’ve heard it as recently as the priesthood session of the most recent General Conference (April 2007), when one of the speakers, in order to prove the “success” of a particular group of young men, listed how many had become mission presidents and temple presidents and General Authorities of the Church.

When the speaker said that, I turned to the man beside me and said, “I’m just a priests’ quorum instructor and a cultural arts director. I guess my youth leaders failed with me. I might as well give up and go have a beer.” He laughed, but he knew what I was saying and had also felt the sting. When Church ranking is used as a measure of “success” in raising faithful Latter-day Saints, it brands all the ordinary, hardworking, faithful
fathers and mothers in the Church who have
not
reached those rare prominent offices as failures. It’s actually a rather shocking thing to do—but such snobbish insults happen all the time, without anyone batting an eye.

“Worthy to Be One of Us,” then, is a story of a particular family; but it’s also a story of what should actually matter in a family and in an organization that purports to be, and tries to be, the Kingdom of God on earth.

And if you’re not a Mormon, I can’t imagine why this would matter to you one bit. What do
you
care whether one Mormon is unkind to another because of who his or her family is or isn’t?

But then, the tendency toward snobbery
is
a human universal. So even if you’re outside the culture in which this story takes place, perhaps it will have some resonance for you. And for that reason, these four Mormon stories are included in a collection that is otherwise definitely
not
geared toward a religious audience.

There were times when he wanted to give up and live in a tent rather than fight with the contractors one more time, but in the end Helaman Willkie got the new house built and the family moved in before Christmas. Three days before Christmas, in fact, which meant that, exhausted as they all were from the move, they
still
had to search madly through the piles of boxes in the new basement to find all the Christmas decorations and get them in place before Santa showed up to inaugurate their new heat-trapping triple-flue chimney.

So they were all tired, weary to the bone, and yet they walked around the house with these silly smiles on their faces, saying and doing the strangest things. Like Joni, Helaman’s sixteen-year-old daughter, who every now and then would burst into whatever room Helaman was in, do a pirouette, and say, “Daddy, Daddy, I have my own room!” To which he would reply, “So I heard.” To which she would say, hugging him in a way calculated to muss his hair, “You really do love me, now I
know
it.”

Helaman’s old joke was that none of his children had ever been impossible, but they had all been improbable more than once. Twelve-year-old Ryan had already been caught twice trying to ride his skateboard down the front staircase. Why couldn’t he slide down the banister like any normal boy? Then at least he’d be polishing it with his backside, instead of putting dings in the solid oak treads of the stair. Fourteen-year-old Steven had spent every waking moment in the game room, hooking the computers together and then trying out all the software, as if to make sure
that it would still work in the new house. Helaman had no evidence that Steven had yet seen the inside of his own bedroom.

And then there was Lucille, Helaman’s sensible, organized, dependable, previously sane wife, kissing all the appliances in the kitchen. But the truth was that Lucille’s delight at the kitchen came as a great relief to Helaman. Till then he had been worried that she was still having doubts about the house. When the movers left, she had stood there in the main-floor family room, staring at the queen-size hide-a-bed looking so forlorn and small on the vast carpet. Helaman reassured her that in no time they’d have plenty of furniture to fill up the room, but she refused to be reassured. “We’re going to buy a truckload of furniture? When our mortgage is bigger than the one on our first store back in 1970?”

He started to explain to her that those were 1970 dollars, but she just gave him that how-stupid-do-you-think-I-am look and said, “I took economics in college, Helaman. I was talking about how I
felt
.”

So Helaman said nothing. He had long since learned that when Lucille was talking about how she
felt
, none of the things he could think of to say would be very helpful. He couldn’t even begin to put into words what
he
felt—how proud he had been of this house he had caused to exist for her, how much he needed to know that it made her happy. After all their years of struggling and worrying to try to keep the business afloat, and then struggling and worrying about the huge debts involved in starting up the branch stores, he knew that Lucille deserved to have a fine house, the
finest
house, and that he deserved to be the man who could give it to her. Now all she could think about was the huge amount of money the house had cost, and Helaman felt as though someone had taken the very breath out of him.

Until she came into the kitchen and squealed in delight. It was exactly the sound his daughters made—an ear-piercing yelp that gave him headaches whenever Trudy and Joni got excited for more than a minute at a time. He had almost forgotten that it was hereditary, that they got that glass-shattering high note from Lucille. She hadn’t been surprised and happy enough to make that sound in years. But she made it now, and said, “Oh, Helaman, it’s beautiful, it’s perfect, it’s the perfect kitchen!” It made up for her reaction to the family room. If it hadn’t, he would have despaired—because he had worked hard to make sure that the kitchen was irresistible. He had kept careful track of everything she had ever
admired in magazines or home shows; he had bought all new appliances, from the can opener and toaster to the microwave and the breadmaker; he had brought those all into the house himself and had his best crew install everything and test it so it ran perfectly. He had inventoried every utensil in her old kitchen and bought a brand-new replacement; they had chosen new silverware and pans and dishes for daily use, and he had arranged it as close to the way she had her old kitchen arranged as possible, even when the arrangement made no sense whatever. And he had kept her out of the kitchen—with tape across the door—all the time he was doing it, and all during the move itself, until that moment when he told her she could tear away the ribbon and walk through the door. And she squealed and kissed all the appliances and opened all the drawers and said, “Just where I would have put it!” and “I can’t believe there’s room for everything and there’s
still
counter space!” and “How did you get them all out of the old kitchen without my seeing you do it?”