Roger's Version (12 page)

“But that’s so
sloppy
,” the boy burst forth. “You’re thinking in impressions, without looking at the mechanism. To say that ‘Elvis lives’ proves ‘Jesus lives’ is hokum ignores the fact that one is a parody of the other and everybody knows it, even the Elvis worshippers. To say that evolution
more or less
fits the bill ignores the fact that trained biologists are disturbed by all that it doesn’t explain. There was a man called Goldschmidt, a geneticist. You ever heard of him?”

I shook my head. “The only Goldschmidt I know was the editor of a Danish magazine that attacked Kierkegaard.”

“My guy,” Dale told me, “fled Hitler’s Germany and wound up at Berkeley. The more he looked at fruit-fly mutations, the more it seemed to him they didn’t account for anything; you never got a new species or a really significant change. Point mutations—that is, single changes in the long strings of genetic code—don’t add up. They happen, and are swallowed by the next generation, and a species remains a species. Goldschmidt published a book in 1940 in which he listed seventeen features of the animal world and challenged anybody to explain how they evolved on a step-by-step basis of small mutations. Hair. Feathers. Teeth. Eyes. Blood circulation. Baleen. Poison fangs in snakes. Segmentation in arthropods. Mollusk shells. Interior skeletons. Hemoglobin. And so on, into some I didn’t understand. Well, who’s come forward since 1940 to explain them? Nobody. Nobody can. Even something you think you can picture, like the giraffe’s long neck, is much more complicated, more coördinated, than you think.” Dale seemed happiest with this example. His hands slid up and down the imaginary neck, quickly cupping and uncupping to explain matters of hydraulic pressure. “To pump blood eight feet up to the head the giraffe has to have such high blood pressure that when he bends down to take a drink he would black out, except there’s a special pressure-reducing mechanism, a network of veins, called the
rete mirabile
. Also, the blood in his legs would be forced out through the capillaries, so the spaces between the veins are filled with another liquid, also under pressure, and therefore his skin is terrifically strong and, what’s the word, impermeable. In whales—think of whales, Professor Lambert. They appear out of virtually nowhere in paleontology, and in less than five million years have produced eyes that correct for vision underwater,
and the tail we talked about, and blubber instead of sweat glands to regulate temperature, and even a complicated mechanism to enable the babies to suckle underwater without drowning. And then you take the ostrich. The ostrich has these calluses—”

“Mr. Kohler, I don’t doubt,” I interrupted, “that you could sit there and regale me with the wonders of nature for many hours. The wonders of nature are of course an ancient argument for God’s existence, as you can read in the Book of Job.”

“But it’s not
just
that they’re wonderful, it’s
how—
”

“Exactly what God asked Job. How? I don’t know, and Job didn’t, and you don’t, nor evidently did Mr. Goldschmidt, but there is surely more at stake in theology than this, this mechanical-statistical approach of yours. If God is so ingenious and purposive, what about deformity and disease? What about the carnage that rules this kingdom of life at every level? Why does life
feel
, to us as we experience it, so desperately urgent and so utterly pointless at the same time? There is a whole realm of subjective existential questions you are ignoring. Men disbelieved in God long before Copernicus, long before thunder or the phases of the moon were scientifically understood. They disbelieved for the same reasons men disbelieve now: the world around them feels uncaring and cruel. There is no sense of a Person behind the, behind this wilderness of ingenuity you say natural phenomena present. When people cry out in pain, the heavens are silent. The heavens were silent when the Jews were gassed, they’re silent now above the starving in Africa. These wretched Ethiopians are Coptic Christians, are you aware of that? They said the other night on television that the only noise you hear in the camps of the starving is that of hymns being sung, to the sound of drums and cymbals. People don’t turn to God because He’s likely or unlikely; they turn out of their extremest need, against all reason.”

“
All
reason?” Dale looked at me with an unpleasant light in those pale eyes, an optical glow many of our students bring to us: the missionary light, the will to convert, to turn the water into wine, wine to blood, bread to flesh—to convert opposition to allegiance, to flatten all that is non-ego into mirror-smooth pure ego. This perennial presumption of students wearies and disgusts me, year after year. “You really have a stake in this, don’t you?” Dale said. “You’re not just neutral, you’re of the other party.”

“The Devil’s party, you mean? Not at all. I have my own style of faith, which I don’t propose to discuss with you or anybody else who comes wandering in here looking like a cowboy. But my faith, poor thing or no, leads me to react with horror to your attempt, your
crass
attempt I almost said, to reduce God to the status of one more fact, to deduce Him! I am absolutely convinced that my God, that anybody’s real God, will
not
be deduced, will
not
be made subject to statistics and bits of old bone and glimmers of light in some telescope!”

I do not like myself when I become engaged. Passion of an argumentative sort makes me feel sticky and hot, caught in a web of exaggeration and untruth. We owe the precision of things, at least, a courtesy of silence, of silent measurement. I wished I could relight my pipe, but there really was no time for the ceremony. My hands, I noticed, were pathetically trembling. I clasped them together and rested them on the desk. In the pulpit in the old days they would tremble like this, when I fingered the lectern Bible for the page holding the day’s text. Damnably thin, those big Bible pages.

Somehow this odd young missionary had gotten the better of me. I could tell from just the calm, cool way he stared, above his lopsided smile and flecked long jaw, and made no hurry to reply. He had got me to make a profession of faith,
and I hated him for this. “Your God sounds like a nice safe unfindable God,” he mildly observed.

“How’s Verna?” I asked him, gathering up my notes.
Pelagius not a strict Pelagian. Offended by Augustine’s tendencies toward antinomianism, Manichaean pessimism. Sin passed down from Adam as part of reproductive process? Corruption distinguishable from helplessness, in P. view
.

The boy, seeing my retreat from the debate, slouched back cockily into his university chair, and even slung one leg over a cherrywood arm. “Yeah. She said you came by last week.” The look he gave me, from someone less high-minded, might have been called sly.

“I wanted to see her setup,” I confessed. “Not so bad as I’d thought.”

“As long as she stays right in her apartment, it’s not so bad. She goes outside, she gets hassled.”

“By—?”

“By the brothers. A white girl that age with a black child has laid herself wide open.”

“Do you think she should move?”

“She can’t afford to.” Was his curt answer a challenge, for me to give her enough money to move? He perhaps knew that I had given her sixty dollars already. How much, I wondered, was my pious young visitor part of a team, himself and Verna, bent on bilking me? This Eighties generation is capable of all sorts of self-righteous criminality along with their deficit-sponsored otherworldliness. Buddha says
Non-attachment
, Jesus says
Do unto others
, and the goods of others start getting detached. Well, who can blame them? Television goads them into begging for junk from the moment they open their eyes. The educational system keeps them as dependent as babies into their fourth decades. It’s a throwaway world, all service
industries and bubble wrap. The genius of Calvinism had been to make property an outward sign and a sacred symbol; in my old-fashioned way I was trying to gauge the extent of this young man’s proprietorial claims upon Verna. I coveted his access to that messy overheated apartment with its captive girl all rosy from her bath. I had not quite believed her assurances that their relationship was sexless. Again old-fashionedly, I could not imagine two young people of the opposite sex locked in the same room and not copulating, or at least laying hands on each other’s sensitive places.

I contemplated my visitor as he sat there athwart the shaft of light pouring in the neo-Gothic window at my back, and tried to sort out my feelings toward him. They consisted of:

(a)  physical repugnance, at his waxiness, and the unreachable luminescence in his eyes, steady as a pale-blue pilot light burning in his skull;

(b)  loathing of his theories, which couldn’t have anything much to them, though some would need an expert to refute;

(c)  envy of his faith and foolish hope that he could grab the hoary problem of belief by a whole new tail;

(d)  a certain attraction, reciprocating what seemed to be his sticky adherence to me, since this second visit to my office served no clear purpose;

(e)  a grateful inkling that he was injecting a new element into my life, my stale and studious arrangements;

(f)  an odd and sinister empathy: he kept inviting my mind out of its tracks to follow him on his own paths through the city. He had mentioned, for instance, that he worked weekends in a lumberyard, and I had merely to think of this fact and the holy smell of fresh-cut spruce was in my nostrils, and the rough-smooth weight of newly planed and end-stained two-by-fours was thrusting against my palms, with a palpable threat of splinters.

I smiled and asked him, “Am I my half-sister’s daughter’s keeper? How much should I attempt to intervene?”

He surprised me by saying emphatically, “Not much. At least at first. This is her life, she’s cooked it up, you have to let people have the dignity of their choices. The important thing, I would think, is for her to get out a little, and get some education.”

“I agree,” I said, pleased that our minds, on less than cosmic matters, could run along the same lines.

“Verna comes on very rejecting when you first put anything to her,” he said, “but then the next time you visit her she’s shifted around a hundred eighty degrees.”

We were making of her, I noticed, a distant object of reverence, of wary speculation. This nineteen-year-old truant from Cleveland, with not a thing in her head but what pop music put there. I took a plunge. “One avuncular gesture I thought of making,” I said, “was to have my wife invite her to have Thanksgiving with us and our son. We’d be happy to have you, too, if you have no other commitments.” I rather assumed he did: a communal dinner, perhaps, at long tables in a big church basement, with a babbling, colorful host of dogooding born-agains and demented street people.

His uncanny eyes widened. “That would be real nice,” he said. “I was going to just eat in a cafeteria, they put on these turkey specials that are really pretty good, and I like the no-fuss atmosphere. Frankly, sir, holidays tend to freak me out. But that would be terrific, to meet your missus and your boy.” Away from the urgencies of scientific explanation, his speech lapsed into a Midwestern folksiness.

And he was certainly less organized-religion-oriented than I thought proper for one of his fervor. Thanksgiving in a cafeteria? Christmas in a brothel? Of course, the Church has always been recharged unorthodoxly. Augustine was a pagan,
then a Manichee. Tertullian was a lawyer. Pelagius himself had no ecclesiastical status, and may have first come to Rome as a law student. If the salt lose its savor, wherewith indeed? Jesus Himself, John the Baptist: raggedy outsiders. Insiders tend to be villains. Like me, I would smilingly tell my incredulous, admiring students.

ii

Dale Kohler’s distaste for holidays formed yet another secret bond between us; in my childhood, bumpy monoxious car rides out into the rural Ohio flatness, along what was too aptly named Kinsman Pike, were my prime association with American Christendom’s tribal feasts. My deserted, husbandless, pitiable mother and I would visit her “people,” the men horsefaced and leathery and placidly sexless but the women wide sloping mounds of fat trembling on the edge, it seemed to me, of indecency, with their self-conscious shrieks of laughter, their hands at each shriek darting to cover their mouths, their little teeth decayed and crooked, and the steaming food they were copiously setting on the table a malodorous
double-entendre
, something that excited them, served up in an atmosphere heavy with barnyard innuendo as well as lugubrious piety.

In my great-aunt Wilma’s house a praying Jesus, its colors sick and slippery, hung in the kitchen, against deeply yellowed wallpaper, behind the black stovepipe too hot to touch, and in the parlor the only book, with a little knobby table all to itself, was the family Bible; its spine had ridges as of cartilage beneath its terrible hide, creased like the skin of a slaughtered animal, with that same soft stink of the tannery, and a faded
lavender bookmark, like a wide, forked tongue, protruded from its gold-edged pages. There was a smell of coal oil and, tracked in on the men’s shoes, a musty scent of mash, of livestock feed. These country outings depressed me for days on either side, in anticipation and in memory; and during the actual event my depression was such that I seemed to sink beneath the table, so that my visual memories focus on the embroidered tablecloth fringe and the knees and fat ankles and creased shoes hidden and shuffling in the strange dim cave beyond. When very young, I may actually have crawled in there, among the shoes and knees.

On the Fourth of July, the dismal holiday tableau was repeated, in a temperature ninety degrees higher, and sometimes outdoors, on rough tables set up beneath the back-yard tulip poplars, pyramids of corn-on-the-cob shining with butter and platters of pork chops arriving charred from the grill amid cries such as might have greeted a Turkish belly dancer or the crucified Messiah.

The opaque, shy, menacing silence of the farm animals they tended had rubbed off on my country cousins, and like these beasts they tended to bump against things, as a way of perception. Dressed in sun-faded cotton, they bumped against me, and I feebly fought back, or hid, or else on rare occasions was lulled into a desultory game of quoits or a futile visit to some watercress-choked rivulet with a pole and hook and pinkish earthworms, to whose torments, impaled, my bumpkin playmates were placidly blind. The fish never bit. The afternoon, as the grown-ups grew more and more hilarious beneath the tulip poplars, never ended, but tailed into the blanched summer evening and at last the darkness of the Pike, my fragile, wounded mother at our old Buick’s wheel, complaining of a headache and night blindness.