Origin of the Brunists (41 page)

“Yes,” she replied, reluctantly admitting him. He recognized a growing distrust in her, especially since his photographing Baxter's assault night before last. He knew his days were numbered, was a little surprised he had lasted so long—well, people accepted what they wanted to accept, and they wanted to think the city editor was on their side.

“How's Giovanni? Will he be able to go out?”

“He's doing well, but I don't think we'll risk it.” She sighed, rubbing her medallion. “It's a delicate business, Mr. Miller.”

He agreed with that solemnly, and they passed through the meeting room and dining room into the kitchen. Giovanni's door was closed, but he pushed away the thought that crowded in, accepting what he wanted to accept. Ralph Himebaugh was in the kitchen. Logs and papers were spread on the kitchen table. Ralph muttered a greeting. Another reason why Eleanor had come to distrust him, surely. Miller had always got along with the man, but, in the new context of the cult, Ralph could only hate him, whether he was being sincere or not. And now that Ralph had fallen victim, like the rest, to the informal harassment campaign on in town, he seemed to suggest he saw Miller as the man who had let the word out. A glance out the kitchen window into the backyard: Marcella was out there, mourning clothes off and now into a starchy yellow dress, bright as the bright day. She was working a small plot of earth, garden or something. When he glanced back at Mrs. Norton, he saw she was watching him. Himebaugh, too. Well, screw 'em. He smiled blankly, then, without excuses, walked out back to the girl.

The small yard was barren. Garbage pails by the back door. Small twisted fruit tree, fruitless, where Marcella sat now, back to him, on a stool. Wire incinerator in front of the alley. Fenced on one side, open to the neighbors on the other. This was his stage and something in the challenge from the kitchen, the warmth from the sun, the tug in his calves, the rumpled delicacy of her seated figure, made him shrug off caution and strut it like a cock.

The soft pulsing fine-boned feel of her shoulders—knew it, enjoyed it, even before his large hands wrapped them. The dress was fresh and crisp to the touch. She gazed up smiling—delighted, but not surprised. He had never succeeded in surprising her. Some way of divining his presence, split second of presentiment. He relinquished her shoulders, knelt to inspect her garden. They laughed at its seed-package keepers with dandelion heads, though Miller's perverse eye turned them right side up and saw something else there. His gaze traced the expressive tapering of her right forearm, resting on her crossed knee, the bone-bent turn of her wrist, the fragile fretwork of veins, fingers smudged with earth. They talked nonsense, but under that sun out on this stage with that fragrance in the soil, anything else would have sounded pretentious. Anyway, he was watching her, curious about himself. If his artless inspection troubled her, her poise and easy gaiety gave no sign of it. The poise, that was part of it. The gaiety. And her eyes, brown, doelike, yet bright and awake, and eagerness there, and love for him. But he'd seen that intense gaze, been loved before, and painlessly had turned his back. Still, there was something there, in her eyes. Sensitivity, yes, and intelligence, though he'd hardly challenged either enough to prove them. He felt then, watching her eyes and warmed by the sun, a flicker of exaggerated tones and comforts from a distant innocence of his own—yes, the innocence, the astonishing uncomplicated ingenuousness that gave her such a nice clean sphere to live in, all harmony, and with him at dead center, that must be it. And it was what had been troubling him all day, even in the heat of that frantic bull-like assault on the X-ray table: that his own motivations had become fragmented, that Marcella and Happy, the newspaper and dead buddies, West Condon and East Condon, baseball, sociology, saviors, and sex, all existed isolated under uniquely different legal systems; Ellie Norton's seven aspects hardly covered the field. And now, unexpectedly, he had knocked up against a simple yet all-embracing view whose every action was a direct manifestation of it. Purity. Saint's eyes. And, goddamn, he had a yearning to share it. He glanced down at the seed-package soldiers. Back to the garden. He had spent a decade rooting it out of himself, and here, happily in hell, he'd wandered right back to the gate.

He stood, feeling weak, and she stood to face him, sun bright on her upturned face. He realized that the decision was actually already made, had been made long before, and this was only a ritual: drawn to her sphere's center, he had long since agreed to stay. There now remained for him only to redescribe the sphere itself for her, make a few holes and let real air in; and relearn himself the integrity and continence that belonged to her view of him. He asked her to have dinner with him tonight, and she, radiant, accepted. The scene, the moment, called for an embrace, but the old cock was feeling himself public again. He was, too. A glance back at the house revealed Mrs. Norton and old Himebaugh posed rigidly in the window: stony-faced American Gothic. They had come for lunch, Marcella said, smiling apologetically, and she had to get it ready. Would he stay? Something told him he should, but he hesitated to face those two, couldn't run the risk yet of a direct showdown in Marcella's presence. He told her he had to get the paper out if they were to have dinner together, walked her to the back door.

Eleanor and Ralph were waiting for them. Marcella, smiling, slipped on by them. “Don't forget the wirecopy tonight,” Ralph snapped, drumming a metal rule on his knuckles. Himebaugh had decided the evening paper was neither soon enough nor comprehensive enough for his purposes, now demanded the teletype copy in its entirety every evening.

“And please, Mr. Miller, no photographs tonight,” said Mrs. Norton bluntly, fingering the gold disc.

“No, of course not,” he said. “I'm sorry about the other night. I thought I was being a help. But, if you like, I'll bring the negatives and turn them over to the group.”

“I'd appreciate that,” she said, but there was no melting there. He left before they could progress beyond these petty complaints to the real thing that was irking them. Off to Mick's. For charred hamburgers.

The blossoming spiritual affair between Ralph Himebaugh and Eleanor Norton was, to be sure, one of the more fascinating products of the cult. And it was odd, because under ordinary circumstances, they would probably never even have spoken to each other. Both avoided others, were excessively polite and formal when necessarily in public. She, childless and middle-aged, was a good teacher, but uncompromising and not a popular one. He, a bachelor a few years her senior, was a brilliant file cabinet lawyer who avoided cases that must come to court, and Miller could never remember having seen the guy do more than tip his hat and mutter a delicate “hello” to a woman. But a disaster had thrown them together, two innocents surprised in a fever, and now their logbooks, their respective systems, were drawing their timid souls together in holy intercourse. In fact, their two systems did fit together in the mating posture, one embracing from above, the other reaching up from below. The funny thing was, though, Ralph's system was the one on the bottom.

Because they were reading each other's logbooks—excitedly, voraciously, as though they were lovel-etters—Miller had to take what was for the given moment left over, jumping back and forth in time and between the two authors. The disrupted chronology was no problem in Eleanor's case, for behind her writings of fifteen years ago there was the same essentially whole ontology that governed her most recent messages; if there was a difference, it was one of gradual growth, greater profundity, a stripping away of early pseudoscientific imagery related to space travel and biological transmutations, and an approach to that kind of all-embracing mysticism that characterized the poets of all faiths. But, read out of order, it was hard to make any sense at all out of Himebaugh's schemata; their parts arose separately from their several points of origin, founded always in some concrete event in the world, discarded as they curved away from each other, altered, revised with each discovery of new data. Stylistically, Eleanor's writings changed as a young author's might, from an early awkward manner whose mystery was provided by broken phrases and harsh juxtapositions, through a florid “literary” period, acquiring finally her present mastery of vocabulary and syntax, a unique, albeit eclectic, style of her own. Himebaugh's writings, at least those Miller read, covered a much narrower time span, only about four years, though he had disaster clippings that were a lot older, and his writing ways were constant: pedantic, precise, and abbreviated. The only change of note was a gradual adoption of new symbols, shrinking yet more his ever-spare use of language.

There were enormous differences between them. While Eleanor was, essentially, a gentle mystic who found peace of soul in the denial of all dualisms, particularly that of life and death, Ralph was terrorized by a haunting vision of the worst half of all dichotomies, obsessed by the horror of existence
qua
existence. In Eleanor's messages from the higher aspects, Miller found, through all personal trials, an uncompromising rejection of constructive thinking: wisdom could only be intuited; contrarily, in Himebaugh's disaster scrapbooks and derivative graphs, one encountered a total commitment to the precision tools of logic, of science, of mathematics, the patient step-by-step addition of simple premises or single actions to arrive, hopefully, at complex totalities, the larger truths beyond phenomena.

So, what was it united them? Partly, to be sure, it was the lonely need for compurgators they both felt, and partly it was their mutual recognition of superior intellects. They both shared, as well, that extreme intensity in the private project that characterizes all introverts, and both had staked their lives on some unspecified but cataclysmic event to which they believed their own destinies linked—each lent credence, that is, to the other's central hope. And it was also true that, though Eleanor championed the intuitive life, her behavior was reassuringly rational, while Ralph's rationalism reached to the superreal, became a kind of rational advocacy of the irrational.

But yet it was more than that, for there was a structural objective bond between them, too, as Miller had begun to perceive in conversations with each of them separately and in watching their behavior at the nightly meetings. Requisite to any understanding of either of them, of course, was an acceptance of their canonical faith in their own private ways to truth. It was all too easy to see Eleanor's self-styled divine dispatches as mere responses, conscious or unconscious, to her own psychic needs of the given moment, and forget that she herself never doubted that they truly came to her from higher forces in the universe—by way of her gift of “extrasensory perception,” as she described it. Her transports were real, and though the envisioned truth was too grand for memory to contain it, she was convinced she had brought back with her from ecstasy partial images of it, and these she and the dense world possessed forever in her logbooks. If she did not live in perpetual communion with those mighty souls of the seventh aspect, it was only because of a fault in spiritual discipline. In like manner, while composed of what looked like arbitrary first principles, founded upon ambiguities he did not see as such, flawed by the confusions of the numerologists, and limited by his emotionally derived specter, “the destroyer,” Ralph's system was nevertheless for him a new science, and if he did not yet embrace the whole truth of the universe, it was only because he still lacked all the data, lacked some vital but surely existent connection—in short, had not yet perfected his system. They shared, that is, this hope for perfection, for final complete knowledge, and their different approaches actually complemented each other, or at least seemed to. Eleanor's practical difficulty, after all, was in relating her inexpressible vision of the One to the tangible particulars of in-the-world existence, and it was here where Himebaugh's constructions and proofs, founded on the cold data of newspaper reports, seemed to be of value, providing her shortcuts, as it were, to the relevant material within the impossible superfluity of sense-data, and enriching her own vision with new and useful kinds of imagery. Similarly, Himebaugh's major frustration, as he had explained it some time ago to Miller, was that his additive process never seemed to end, it was apparently impossible ever to ascend to that last telling sum, and he had welcomed this final figure, so-called, toward which he could more accurately direct his computations.

Moreover, for Ralph Himebaugh, the One, if his universe of screaming particles could be so described, was the mindless spreading blot of death—the emptiness was not beautiful but black—and Eleanor, the mystagogue, had provided Ralph, the belovèd disciple, a new kind of hope: if that blot, what she called “density” or the “force of darkness,” were indeed mindless and random, how did he account for the very mathematical system he himself employed? If all were haphazard, where did order, however tenuous it might seem, come from? If all were irrational, how explain reason? As day, she covered and penetrated his night. Couldn't he see that there must be an affirmative, an ascendant, a disciplining force in the universe? That if there were darkness and density, there must also be light?

Light: not the image but the substance radiates within her, from her. These weeks she has dutifully cloaked it in black to hide it from the mourners, from Mama, from Rosalia and the prying dark-eyed neighbor ladies, from the old priest, from the fearful many who congregate now at her brother's bed. Papa died and she could not weep, for sheer joy had overwhelmed her. The wailing widowed women omen the end, but for her it is a magnificent commencement. Only Eleanor has understood. “Love,” she has told her, “is not a goal, Marcella, it is a given. Love
is
the soul and the soul
is
love. It is our irreducible portion of the Divine, of the One, of Light.” Gaily, she prepares their lunch. His eyes today: how they opened! how they touched her! how they laughed! She smiles at Eleanor's gloom, impulsively kisses her cheek. “It's
spring!”
she whispers. Poor Mr. Himebaugh, irascible with his flu, eats without appetite. When he walked in on her this morning—the second time it's happened now, poor man—he was clearly in pain: how strange that common illness should travel with them to the end! Her Mama, she knows, kneels still in St. Stephen's, befuddled and bleak, her troubled old head bowed to her gnarled and knotted hands, the pews sullen and musty and empty, and would, untended, kneel there to her death. So Marcella eats hastily, her own appetite undone by excitement, by love, and rises to go bring Mama home, her daily midday ritual. Eleanor trails her to the door and there says a strange thing, so strange and unexpected Marcella cannot at first believe she has heard it: “Take care, Mana, for his mouth is the mouth of a cruel man!” Over the gentle lady's shoulder, Marcella sees the old lawyer, nodding paternally. Light flashes golden off Eleanor's medallion and compassionate tears mist her eyes
. “Listen!”
Marcella, though afraid, waits. “There is known to be one among us,” Eleanor whispers hoarsely, “sent by the powers of darkness!”