Sex, Mom, and God: How the Bible's Strange Take on Sex Led to Crazy Politics--And How I Learned to Love Women (7 page)

Jane’s father was rich and president of a railroad. Jane grew up in Roanoke. Mom said her father had once rented Carnegie Hall for Jane to sing in so she could have a New York debut.

L’Abri owned all the houses used in the work. Jane and her roommate, Betty, had their own place. And because Jane received money from her family, she heated their house with
oil that worked better than our coal furnace. So Chalet Le Chesalet was lovely and warm in the winter. And Jane ate lots of meat, chicken, and sometimes even roasts, and not just on Sundays. In our house, a wing was a big piece of chicken. Mom carved two or three little chickens up for thirty people, bulking out the meals with bread and margarine, rice and gravy, and, in the summer, mounds of vegetables from our garden. Sometimes I’d see a leftover chicken at Jane’s that she had shared with Betty, a whole chicken between just two people!

Jane drank wine with her meals. She wasn’t bothered by our taboos. At Jane and Betty’s house none of my family’s many rules seemed to apply. Jane was a L’Abri worker, but she seemed to have diplomatic immunity.

Jane never had guests stay with her but limited her ministry to serving meals twice a week to the guests and giving a monthly lecture on whatever was interesting her just then, from medieval art history to J. S. Bach’s theology. Sometimes other workers would complain that she didn’t share the workload of having students in her house, but of course no one ever dared to bring this up to her.

I would get a huge welcome from both Jane and Betty. Betty was a writer who had once written a column for a newspaper in Illinois and gave up writing for a worldly paper. Post salvation, she only wrote Christian articles for evangelical magazines and, in later years, several inspirational books.

Betty was diminutive, pale, and quiet and had very tidy hair; Jane was huge and flamboyant. Betty hovered at the edges of rooms; Jane filled rooms. Betty was incredibly kind and sympathetic and used to invite everyone to her birthday and give us all presents. And any time I had a problem, Betty would be the person to go and tell it to. She would make empathetic
little growling and clucking noises interspersed with many an “Oh, dear, aw, what a shame. . . .”

Together, Jane and Betty were as much a couple as any of the married workers in L’Abri. After meeting each other at L’Abri, when they were in their late twenties, they lived together for the rest of their lives. Betty once told me that the reason she stayed single was because she suffered from epilepsy and was worried that she might either pass it on to her children or not be a fit mother. Today it would be assumed that they were a lesbian couple, with Jane clearly the “husband” and sweet, retiring Betty the “wife.” But I don’t think they were lovers, just lifelong companions, and the notion that they could have been mistaken for anything but “godly single Christian ladies” living chaste lives would, I think, have shocked Betty and infuriated Jane.

When Jane would say something unusually outrageous, even for her—say, loudly offering the opinion that anyone who disagreed with her talk on the symbolic meaning found in the art of the Hebrews’ tabernacle and Solomon’s temple, thereby proved they were not Christians because “Only idiots would disagree with me, and I don’t care if they
are
L’Abri workers, and
you know who I mean!”
—Betty would offer a quiet “Jane, you don’t mean that.” And Jane would yell “Yes, I do!” and flush a deep scarlet but then begin to calm down.

Jane and Betty owned a mid-1950s Mercedes that they drove to Italy several times a year. The car loomed large: It was the only car in the L’Abri community. And between the fact that Jane had a
car
and wore a lot of diamond-crusted jewelry, inherited from her Southern-belle grandmother, not to mention got to eat lots of
meat,
I grew up sure that Jane was almost a royal personage.

“Are those real diamonds?” I’d ask while playing with her big glittering ring.

“Yes, honey, they are!”

“Why, you rich, rich person!” I’d say.

Jane would always laugh uproariously at this little ritual and hug me until I felt as if the breath of life was about to be crushed out of me.

Betty drove the car, and Jane’s job was to read out loud to her all the way to Italy and back. When they returned, they would sit me down and tell me about the art they had seen, food eaten, and books read, and would show me the art books they had bought. The way they talked about Italy was as if they had been to heaven.

I didn’t need convincing that Italy was the place any sane or lucky person would be if they had a choice. My favorite time of the year was the Schaeffer family holiday we took in Portofino.

A stranger observing my visits to Jane and Betty would have thought I was a long-lost family member returned from war instead of the little boy who lived across the street dropping by for the second or third time that week. Jane told me that her flamboyant manner, her loud—“It’s Frankie! Come in! Come in!” greeting—was “Southern hospitality,” that she wasn’t “cold like you Yankees.”

Jane would beam a huge ice-melting smile at me and bellow “MY, HOW WONDERFUL TO SEE YOU!” Her smile would linger and always seemed amplified by very red glossy lipstick.

Mom wore lipstick, too, but she would dab it off with a tissue right after applying it so it was never glossy or red, just pale pinkish, a modest hint of beauty, never an open invitation to stare at her mouth. But with Jane, everything was vivid. She
welcomed me with her big greeting while somewhere in the background Betty hovered, making little humming welcoming noises and murmuring, “Now, Jane, invite him in. I’ll bet you’d like something to eat. How nice you came to see us.”

“I have something to show you!” Jane bellowed one morning as soon as I walked in.

“Oh?”

“Come upstairs and look!”

“Now, Jane, do you really think he wants to see that silly thing?” murmured Betty.

“ ‘Silly thing?’ It is NOT silly! Of
course
he wants to see it! Don’t you?” I nodded and followed Jane up the creaking stairs to the chalet’s narrow upstairs hall. Sitting at the end of the hall in Jane’s tiny office was a strange contraption that looked like the scales in a doctor’s office, only it had a thick leather strap hanging in a loop where on a scale the balance bar would be that the nurse moves the marker back and forth on till it tips the scale and shows your weight.

“It’s my new exercise machine! Isn’t it marvelous?” bellowed Jane; then she threw her head back and screamed with laughter.

“How does it work?”

“Look!”

Jane stepped up on the little platform, unhooked the strap, and looped it around the tight black skirt that was clinging to her tree-trunk thighs. The strap slipped neatly under the cheeks of her bottom. She then flipped a switch and the machine began to buzz like a giant mixer and the floor shook under my feet. The strap vibrated violently, and Jane’s bottom and hips began to quiver like a big bowl of Jell-O placed on a jackhammer.

“It is going to reduce the size of my terribly fat
huge
bottom!” Jane yelled delightedly. “Come and try it!”

Jane led me to the contraption, strapped me in, and flipped the switch. My vision blurred, my teeth rattled, and my bottom instantly went numb.

“It just shakes the fat right out of you!” Jane yelled. “I’m supposed to stand here one half hour a day, and if I do, I won’t need to wear a girdle any more and still be able to fit into my skirts! Have you ever worn a girdle?”

“N-n-n-n-n-o!” I said, as I tried to find the switch to turn off the wildly jiggling belt.

“Well, you are
so
fortunate! A girdle is like being wrapped in concrete! And you should see how many layers I have to peel off to even
think
of going to the bathroom! But when your thighs are like
huge
Virginia hams, what choice do you have? Without a girdle, I just
bulge!”

“Jane, I think that’s quite enough,” murmured Betty.

“Oh, all right!” snapped Jane, and she flounced back downstairs after giving Betty an angry you-spoil-all-the-fun glare.

After the machine was installed, sometimes when I visited and Betty would come to the door, the whole little chalet would be vibrating and humming as if we were on a ship standing just above the engine room. Jane was upstairs on her machine. Betty would hand me a cookie, smile, and roll her eyes upward in a silent comment about what she thought of “Jane’s contraption,” while we waited for Jane’s exercise to end and the socializing to begin.

Jane was my introduction to American History. She said that the North was the aggressor in the Civil War and that her family had fought for the “dear old Confederacy.” I didn’t know anything about the Civil War or America, but I could tell
that whatever this was about upset Jane. She took “The War of Northern Aggression” so personally and made her vivid declarations about it so passionately that I assumed that this war had been fought when she was a little girl.

Jane would string a whole series of declarative statements together about many subjects. The South, opera, “colored people,” all got mixed into the short sermons she would preach to me. Jane was loyal to the South and to opera and said her family’s “colored people” had been happy and well cared for way back when “my family owned slaves,” before “everything was stolen and burnt down by those damned Yankees!”

Jane gave me a Confederate flag and a replica muzzle-loading flintlock pistol and talked about the magnolias in her front yard “back home” with tears streaming down her cheeks. And Jane told me about her “mammy,” the “dear, dear colored lady who raised me.” She said that her mammy was a saint, the best person in the world, and that she was in heaven now. And to hear Jane tell it, her father, Robert Hall Smith, was the greatest and probably the most important man who ever lived, and his presidency of the Norfolk and Western Railway was the major event of Southern history. He was at his office at eight each day, seven days a week. No matter how much he traveled, he always came home to go to church. When a lady who lived along the tracks wrote to Robert Hall Smith that the train whistle was waking her grandchild, Robert Hall Smith made sure that it was never sounded again near that woman’s home. And at the annual Railroad Night dinner in 1958, the president of the Pennsylvania Railroad said that “The Norfolk and Western is one of the best-managed railroads anywhere.” As I understood it, these were the main points of American history, and I’ve never forgotten them.

Almost every time I visited, Jane played me parts of Bellini’s opera
Norma.
She showed me black-and-white photographs of herself in costume holding a spear, as well as many other glossy black-and-white photos of herself in other roles.

“Why don’t you sing any more?” I asked.

“I sing in church every Sunday!”

“You know what I mean.”

“I gave it up for the Lord! The world of opera is a wicked place! You have NO IDEA about the TEMPTATIONS I faced!”

“Was it terrible?”

“NO! It was marvelous! THAT was the problem! I LOVED those temptations!”

Then Jane would launch into descriptions of her opera adventures, about how a tenor’s beard was coming unglued in a performance in the Palermo opera house, and how she saved the day by slapping him during their duet so the beard stuck back on. And she told me all about how Maria Callas was evil, how she would bend other singer’s hands when they all went out to take a bow and held hands in front of the curtain, so only Callas could raise her head and smile at the audience. Jane told me how in Venice she was taken from her hotel to the Venice opera in a gondola, while in full costume for the role of Tosca. And she had pictures to prove it.

I spent hours trying to imagine what those temptations had been that had made her leave such a wonderful life. Once I drummed up the courage to ask, and Jane snapped, “Never you mind, honey, never you mind!” and glared at me. Another time, I said, “Will you please sing some opera for me?” Jane answered, “No, honey, I won’t. My voice is too big for this little chalet living room! Why, if I was to sing in here so close to you, it would probably kill you!”

When the Chalet Les Mélèzes living room got too small to hold our church services in, or rather when L’Abri grew too big, and we built a chapel, Jane gave the money for the construction from the sale of her costumes. She also had a Flentrop organ built for us in Holland, a “genuine baroque instrument” so that when Bach was played, it was on the “right kind of organ.” And of course Jane had a bronze plaque screwed to the side of the organ dedicating it to the memory of her father.

Jane gave me apple juice and cookies and hot chocolate and all the other “Southern hospitality” that made me see that what she said was true: Southern hospitality
was
best. And I came to believe that she was right: it really was “a tragic shame” that the North won the Civil War. I agreed that Jane’s colored people must have been happy, seeing as how she was so welcoming and seeing how if her slave-owning ancestors had shown their “dear negroes” this kind of hospitality, it must have been really nice for them.

Jane would conclude every history lesson with “So don’t you go believing all those lies those Northerners tell!”

“I won’t, Jane.”

“Now we’re coming to the Casta Diva, the greatest aria Bellini ever wrote. And in this recording, Joan Sutherland is singing the role. Maria Callas was more famous, but Joan’s voice is far, far better! So don’t ever believe anyone who says Maria Callas could sing!”

“I won’t, Jane.”

“Hush! Just listen!”

“Yes.”

“Isn’t that
marvelous?”

“Yes.”

“She will die in the flames! She will go to the pyre and DIE!”

“Yes, Jane.”

“Would you like some more hot chocolate?”

“Yes, please.”

“So you go on back up there to all those Yankees in Chalet Les Mélèzes and tell them you have seen REAL Southern hospitality!”