Strange Highways (59 page)

He blinked at me. “Grace who?”

It was my turn to blink. “What?”

“Who’s Grace? You mean Mrs. Grace Keever at the toy shop? What tool will she use to press me?” He giggled. “Will I be all mashed flat and on a hanger when she’s done pressing me? Daddy, you sure are silly.”

He was only a seven-year-old boy, after all, and I was solemnly discussing the oppressive nature of religious belief as if we were two intellectuals drinking espresso in a coffeehouse. Blushing at the realization of my own capacity for foolishness, I pushed aside the Uncle Wiggly board and struggled harder to make him understand why believing in such nonsense as guardian angels was not merely innocent fun but was a step toward intellectual and emotional enslavement of a particularly pernicious sort. When he seemed alternately bored, confused, embarrassed, and utterly baffled—but never for a moment enlightened—I grew frustrated, and at last (I am now ashamed to admit this) I made my point by taking Santa Claus away from him.

Suddenly it seemed clear to me that by allowing him to indulge in the Santa myth, I’d laid the groundwork for the very irrationality that I was determined to prevent him from adopting. How could I have been so misguided as to believe that Christmas could be celebrated entirely in a secular spirit, without risk of giving credence to the religious tradition that was, after all, the genesis of the holiday. Now I saw that erecting a Christmas tree in our home and exchanging gifts, by association with such other Christmas paraphernalia as manger scenes on church lawns and trumpet-tooting plastic angels in department-store decorations, had generated in Benny an assumption that the spiritual aspect of the celebration had as much validity as the materialistic aspect, which made him fertile ground for tales of guardian angels and all the other rot about sin and salvation.

Under the boughs of the cherry trees, in an October breeze that was blowing us slowly toward another Christmas, I told Benny the truth about Santa Claus, explained that the gifts came from his mother and me. He protested that he had evidence of Santa’s reality: the cookies and milk that he always left out for the jolly fat man and that were unfailingly consumed. I convinced him that Santa’s sweet tooth was in fact my own and that the milk—which I don’t like—was always poured down the drain. Methodically, relentlessly—but with what I thought was kindness and love—I stripped from him all of the so-called magic of Christmas and left him in no doubt that the Santa stuff had been a well-meant but mistaken deception.

He listened with no further protest, and when I was finished he claimed to be sleepy and in need of a nap. He rubbed his eyes and yawned elaborately. He had no more interest in Uncle Wiggly and went straight into the house and up to his room.

The last thing that I said to him beneath the cherry trees was that strong, well-balanced people have no need for imaginary friends like Santa and guardian angels. “All we can count on is ourselves, our friends, and our families, Benny. If we want something in life, we can’t get it by asking Santa Claus and certainly not by praying for it. We get it only by earning it—or by benefiting from the generosity of friends or relatives. There’s no reason ever to
wish
for or pray for anything.”

Three years later, when Benny was in the hospital and dying of bone cancer, I understood for the first time why other people felt a need to believe in God and seek comfort in prayer. Our lives are touched by some tragedies so enormous and so difficult to bear that the temptation to seek mystical answers to the cruelty of the world is powerful indeed.

Even if we can accept that our own deaths are final and that no souls survive the decomposition of our flesh, we often can’t endure the idea that our
children
, when stricken in youth, are also doomed to pass from this world into no other. Children are special, so how can it be that they too will be wiped out as completely as if they had never existed? I’ve seen atheists, though despising religion and incapable of praying for themselves, nevertheless invoke the name of God on behalf of their seriously ill children—only to realize, sometimes with embarrassment but often with deep regret, that their philosophy denies them the foolishness of petitioning for divine intercession.

When Benny was afflicted with bone cancer, I was not shaken from my convictions; not once during the ordeal did I put principles aside and blubber at God. I was stalwart, steadfast, stoical, determined to bear the burden by myself, though there were times when the weight bowed my head and when the very bones of my shoulders felt as if they would splinter and collapse under a mountain of grief.

That day in October of Benny’s seventh year, as I sat beneath the cherry trees and watched him return to the house to nap, I did not know how severely my principles and self-reliance would be tested in days to come. I was proud of having freed my son of his Christmas-related fantasies about Santa Claus, and I was pompously certain that the time would come when Benny, grown to adulthood, would eventually thank me for the rigorously rational upbringing that he had received.

* * *

When Hal Sheen told me that he had returned to the fold of the Catholic Church, I thought he was setting me up for a joke. We were having an after-work cocktail at a hotel bar near our offices, and I was under the impression that the purpose of our meeting was to celebrate some grand commission that Hal had won for us. “I’ve got news for you,” he had said cryptically that morning. “Let’s meet at the Regency for a drink at six o’clock.” But instead of telling me that we had been chosen to design a building that would add another chapter to the legend of Fallon and Sheen, he told me that after more than a year of quiet debate with himself, he had shed his atheism as if it were a moldy cocoon and had flown forth into the realm of faith once more. I laughed, waiting for the punch line, and he smiled, and in his smile there was something—perhaps pity for me—that instantly convinced me that he was serious.

I argued quietly, then not so quietly. I scorned his claim to have rediscovered God, and I tried to shame him for his surrender of intellectual dignity.

“I’ve decided a man can be both an intellectual and a practicing Christian, Jew, or Buddhist,” Hal said with annoying self-possession.

“Impossible!” I struck our table with one fist to emphasize my rejection of that muddle-headed contention. Our cocktail glasses rattled, and an unused ashtray nearly fell to the floor, which caused other patrons to look our way.

“Look at Malcolm Muggeridge,” Hal said. “Or C. S. Lewis. Isaac Singer. Christians and a Jew—
and
indisputably intellectuals.”

“Listen to you!” I said, appalled. “On how many occasions have other people raised those names—and other names—when you and I were arguing the intellectual supremacy of atheism, and you joined me in proving what fools the Muggeridges, Lewises, and Singers of this world really are.”

He shrugged. “I was wrong.”

“Just like that?”

“No, not just like that. Give me some credit, Pete. I’ve spent a year reading, thinking. I’ve actively resisted the urge to return to the faith, and yet I’ve been won over.”

“By whom? What propagandizing priest or-“

“No
person
won me over. It’s been entirely an interior debate, Pete. No one but me has known I’ve been wavering on this tightrope.”

“Then what started you wavering?”

“Well, for a couple of years now, my life has been empty … .”

“Empty? You’re young and healthy. You’re married to a smart and beautiful woman. You’re at the top of your profession, admired by one and all for the freshness and vigor of your architectural vision, and you’re wealthy! You call that an empty life?”

He nodded. “Empty. But I couldn’t figure out why. Just like you, I added up all that I’ve got, and it seemed like I should be the most fulfilled man on the face of the earth. But I felt hollow, and each new project we approached had less interest for me. Gradually I realized that all I’d built and that all I might build in the days to come was not going to satisfy me because the achievements were not lasting. Oh, sure, one of our buildings might stand for two hundred years, but a couple of centuries are but a grain of sand falling in the hourglass of time. Structures of stone and steel and glass are not enduring monuments. They’re not, as we once thought, testimonies to the singular genius of mankind. Rather the opposite: They’re reminders that even our mightiest structures are fragile, that our greatest achievements can be quickly erased by earthquakes, wars, tidal waves, or simply by the slow gnawing of a thousand years of sun and wind and rain. So what’s the point?”

“The point,” I reminded him angrily, “is that by erecting those structures, by creating better and more beautiful buildings, we are improving the lives of our fellow men and encouraging others to reach toward higher goals of their own—and then together all of us are making a better future for the whole human species.”

“Yes, but to what end?” he pressed. “If there’s no afterlife, if each individual’s existence ends entirely in the grave, then the
collective
fate of the species is precisely that of the individual: death, emptiness, blackness, nothingness. Nothing can come from nothing. You can’t claim a noble, higher purpose for the species as a whole when you allow no higher purpose for the individual spirit.” He raised one hand to halt my response. “I know, I know. You’ve arguments against that statement. I’ve supported you in them through countless debates on the subject. But I can’t support you any more, Pete. I think there is some purpose to life besides just living. And if I didn’t think so, then I would leave the business and spend the rest of my life having fun, enjoying the precious finite number of days left to me. However, now that I believe there is something called a soul and that it survives the body, I can go on working at Fallon and Sheen because it’s my destiny to do so, which means the achievements can be meaningful. I hope you’ll be able to accept this. I’m not going to proselytize. This is the first and last time you’ll hear me mention my religion, because I’ll respect your right
not
to believe. I’m sure we can go on as before.”

But we could not.

I felt that religion was a hateful degenerative sickness of the mind, and I was thereafter uncomfortable in Hal’s presence. I still pretended that we were close, that nothing had changed between us, but I felt that he was not the same man as he had been.

Besides, Hal’s new faith inevitably began to infect his fine architectural vision. Vaulted ceilings and arched windows began to appear in his designs, and everywhere his new buildings encouraged the eye and mind to look up and regard the heavens. This change of direction was welcomed by certain clients and even praised by critics in prestigious journals, but I could not abide it because I knew he was regressing from the man-centered architecture that had been our claim to originality. Fourteen months after his embrace of the Roman Catholic Church, I sold out my share of the company to him and set up my own organization, free of his influence.

“Hal,” I told him the last time that I saw him, “even when you claimed to be an atheist, you evidently never understood that the nothingness at the end of life isn’t to be feared or raged against. Either accept it regretfully as a fact of life … or welcome it.”

Personally, I welcomed it, because not having to concern myself about my fate in the afterlife was liberating. Being a nonbeliever, I could concentrate entirely on winning the rewards of
this
world, the one and only world.

* * *

The night of the day that I took Santa Claus away from Benny, the night that Ellen told me that she wanted to kick me in the ass, as we lay in our moonlit bedroom on opposite sides of the large four-poster bed, she also said, “Pete, you’ve told me all about your childhood, and of course I’ve met your folks, so I have a pretty good idea what it must have been like to be raised in that crackpot atmosphere. I can understand why you’d react against their religious fanaticism by embracing atheism. But sometimes … you get carried away. You aren’t happy merely to
be
an atheist; you’re so damn eager to impose your philosophy on everyone else, no matter the cost, that sometimes you behave very much like your own parents … except instead of selling God, you’re selling godlessness.”

I raised myself on the bed and looked at her blanket-shrouded form. I couldn’t see her face; she was turned away from me. “That’s just plain nasty, Ellen.”

“It’s true.”

“I’m nothing like my parents. Nothing like them. I don’t
beat
atheism into Benny the way they tried to beat God into me.”

“What you did to him today was as bad as beating him.”

“Ellen, all kids learn the truth about Santa Claus eventually, some of them even sooner than Benny did.”

She turned toward me, and suddenly I could see her face just well enough to discern the anger in it but, unfortunately, not well enough to glimpse the love that I knew was also there.

“Sure,” she said, “they all learn the truth about Santa Claus, but they don’t have the fantasy ripped away from them by their own fathers, damn it!”

“I didn’t
rip
it away. I reasoned him out of it.”

“He’s not a college boy on a debating team,” she said. “You can’t reason with a seven-year-old. They’re all emotion at that age, all heart. Pete, he came into the house today after you were done with him, and he went up to his room, and an hour later when I went up there, he was still crying.”

“Okay, okay,” I said.

“Crying.”

“Okay, I feel like a shit.”

“Good. You should.”

“And I’ll admit that I could have handled it better, been more tactful about it.”

She turned away from me again and said nothing.

“But I didn’t do anything wrong,” I said. “I mean, it was a real mistake to think we could celebrate Christmas in a strictly secular way. Innocent fantasies can lead to some that aren’t so innocent.”

“Oh, shut up,” she said again. “Shut up and go to sleep before I forget I love you.”