The Marriage Plot (15 page)

This thought was interrupted by the ringing of the doorbell, and by the realization that it was graduation day and her parents were downstairs.

•

In the sexual hierarchy of college, freshman males ranked at the very bottom. After his failure with Madeleine, Mitchell had spent a long, frustrating year. He spent many nights with guys in the same situation, looking through the class directory known as the Pig Book and picking out the prettiest girls.
Tricia Parkinson, Cleveland, OH
had big Farrah Fawcett hair. In her gingham blouse
Jessica Kennison, Old Lyme, MA
looked like a dream of a farmer’s daughter.
Madeleine Hanna, Prettybrook, NJ
had sent in a black-and-white snapshot of herself, squinting into the sun with the wind blowing her hair across her forehead. It was a casual picture, neither calculated nor conceited, but also not her best. Most guys passed right over it, focusing on the better-lit and more obvious beauties. Mitchell didn’t alert them to their mistake. He wanted to keep Madeleine Hanna his little secret and, to that end, pointed out
Sarah Kripke, Tuxedo Park, NY
.

As for his own photograph in the Pig Book, Mitchell had mailed in a picture cut out of a Civil War history book, showing a lean-faced Lutheran minister with a white shock of hair, tiny spectacles, and an expression of moral outrage. The editors had obediently printed this above the caption
Mitchell Grammaticus, Grosse Pointe, MI
. Using the old man’s portrait relieved Mitchell of having to send an actual photo of himself, and of thereby entering into the beauty pageant that the Pig Book inevitably became. It was a way to erase his bodily self and replace it with a mark of his wit.

If Mitchell had hoped that his female classmates might see his joke photo and become interested in him, he was sadly disappointed. No one paid much attention. The boy whose photograph aroused feminine interest was
Leonard Bankhead, Portland, OR
. Bankhead had submitted a curious photo of himself standing in a snowy field, wearing a comically tall stocking cap. To Mitchell, Bankhead didn’t look particularly handsome or unhandsome. As freshman year progressed, however, stories of Bankhead’s sexual successes began to make their way into the zones of deprivation that served as Mitchell’s habitat. John Kass, who’d gone to high school with Bankhead’s roommate, claimed that Bankhead had made his friend sleep elsewhere so often that he’d finally applied for a single. One night Mitchell saw the legendary Bankhead at a party at West Quad, staring into a girl’s face as if attempting a mind-meld. Mitchell didn’t understand why girls couldn’t see through Bankhead. He thought that his Lothario reputation would decrease his appeal, but it had the opposite effect. The more girls Bankhead slept with, the more girls wanted to sleep with him. Which made Mitchell uncomfortably aware of how little he knew about girls in the first place.

Mercifully, freshman year finally came to an end. When Mitchell returned the following fall, there was a whole new crop of freshman girls, one of whom, a redhead from Oklahoma, became his girlfriend during spring term. He forgot about Bankhead. (Except for a reli. stu. course they were both in sophomore year, he hardly saw him for the remainder of college.) When the Oklahoman broke up with him, Mitchell went out with other girls, and slept with still others, leaving the zones of deprivation behind. Then, senior year, two months after the heating-gel incident, he heard that Madeleine had a new boyfriend and that the lucky guy was Leonard Bankhead. For two or three days Mitchell remained numb, dealing with the news and not dealing with it, until he awoke one morning swamped by such raw feelings of diminishment and hopelessness that it was as if his entire self-worth (as well as his dick) had shriveled to the size of a pea. Bankhead’s success with Madeleine revealed the truth about Mitchell. He didn’t have the goods. He hadn’t posted up the numbers. This was where he ranked. Out of contention.

His loss had a monumental effect. Mitchell retreated into obscurity to lick his wounds. His interest in quietism had been present beforehand, and so, with this fresh defeat, there was nothing keeping him from withdrawing within himself completely.

Like Madeleine, Mitchell had started out intending to be an English major. But after reading
The Varieties of Religious Experience
for a psychology course, he changed his mind. He’d expected the book to be clinical and cold, but it wasn’t. William James described “cases” of all kinds, women and men he’d met or corresponded with, people suffering from melancholia, from nervous maladies, from digestive complaints, people who had yearned for suicide, who’d heard voices and changed their lives overnight. He reported their testimonies without a shred of ridicule. In fact, what was noteworthy about these stories was the intelligence of the people giving them. With apparent honesty, these voices described in detail how they’d lost the will to live, how they’d become ill, bedridden, abandoned by friends and family until suddenly a “New Thought” had occurred to them, the thought of their true place in the universe, at which point all their suffering had ended. Along with these testimonies, James analyzed the religious experience of famous men and women, Walt Whitman, John Bunyan, Leo Tolstoy, Saint Teresa, George Fox, John Wesley, and even Kant. There was no evident proselytizing motive. But the effect, for Mitchell, was to make him aware of the centrality of religion in human history and, more important, of the fact that religious feeling didn’t arise from going to church or reading the Bible but from the most private interior experiences, either of great joy or of staggering pain.

Mitchell kept coming back to a paragraph about the neurotic temperament he’d underlined that seemed to describe his own personality and, at the same time, to make him feel better about it. It went:

Few of us are not in some way infirm, or even diseased; and our very infirmities help us unexpectedly. In [this] temperament we have the emotionality which is the
sine qua non
of moral perception; we have the intensity and the tendency to emphasis which are the essence of practical moral vigor; and we have the love of metaphysics and mysticism which carry one’s interests beyond the surface of the sensible world. What, then, is more natural than that this temperament should introduce one to regions of religious truth, to corners of the universe, which your robust Philistine type of nervous system, forever offering its biceps to be felt, thumping its breast, and thanking Heaven that it hasn’t a single morbid fiber in its composition, would be sure to hide forever from its self-satisfied possessors?

If there were such a thing as inspiration from a higher realm, it might well be that the neurotic temperament would furnish the chief condition of the requisite receptivity.

The first religious studies class Mitchell had taken (the one Bankhead had been in) was a trendy survey course on Eastern religion. Next he enrolled in a seminar on Islam. From there Mitchell graduated to stronger stuff—a course on Thomistic ethics, a seminar on German Pietism—before moving on, in his last semester, to a course called Religion and Alienation in 20th Century Culture. At the first class meeting, the professor, a severe-looking man named Hermann Richter, surveyed with suspicion the forty or so students packed into the classroom. Lifting his chin, he warned in a stern tone, “This is a rigorous, comprehensive, analytical course in twentieth-century religious thought. Any of you who think a little something in alienation
might do
should think otherwise.”

Glowering, Richter handed out the syllabus. It included Max Weber’s
The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism
,
Auguste Comte and Positivism: The Essential Writings
, Tillich’s
The Courage to Be
, Heidegger’s
Being and Time
, and
The Drama of Atheist Humanism
by Henri de Lubac. Around the room, students’ faces fell. People had been hoping for
The Stranger
, which they’d already read in high school. At the next class meeting, fewer than fifteen kids remained.

Mitchell had never had a professor like Richter before. Richter dressed like a banker. He wore gray chalk-striped suits, conservative ties, button-down shirts, and polished brogues. He had the reassuring attributes of Mitchell’s own father—the diligence, the sobriety, the masculinity—while leading a life of unfatherly intellectual cultivation. Every morning Richter had the
Frankfurter Allgemeine
delivered to his department mailbox. He could quote, in the French, the Vérendrye brothers’ reaction upon seeing the Dakota badlands. He seemed worldlier than most professors and less ideologically programmed. His voice was low, Kissingerian, minus the accent. It was impossible to imagine him as a boy.

Twice a week they met with Richter and looked unflinchingly at the reasons why the Christian faith had, around the year 1848, expired. The fact that many people thought it was still alive, that it had never been sick at all, was dismissed outright. Richter wanted no fudging. If you couldn’t answer the objections of a Schopenhauer, then you had to join him in pessimism. But this was by no means the only option. Richter insisted that unquestioning nihilism was no more intellectually sound than unquestioning faith. It was possible to pick over the corpse of Christianity, to pound its chest and blow into its mouth, to see if the heart started beating again.
I’m not dead. I’m only sleeping
. Stiff-backed, never sitting, his gray hair closely barbered but with hopeful signs about his person, a thistle in his buttonhole or a gift-wrapped present for his daughter protruding from the pocket of his overcoat, Richter asked the students questions and listened to their answers as if it might happen here today: in Room 112 of Richardson Hall, Dee Michaels, who played the Marilyn Monroe part in a campus production of
Bus Stop,
might throw a rope ladder across the void. Mitchell observed Richter’s thoroughness, his compassionate revelation of error, his undimmed enthusiasm for presiding over the uncluttering of the twenty or so minds gathered around the seminar table. Getting these kids’ heads in working order even now, so late in the game.

What Richter believed was unclear. He wasn’t a Christian apologist. Mitchell watched Richter for signs of partiality. But there were none. He dissected each thinker with the same severity. He was grudging in his approval and comprehensive in his complaints.

At semester’s end, there was a take-home final exam. Richter handed out a single sheet of paper containing ten questions. You were free to consult your books. There was no way to cheat. The answers to such questions couldn’t be found anywhere. No one had formulated them yet.

Mitchell didn’t remember any strain in completing the exam. He worked hard but effortlessly. He sat at the oval dining table he used for a desk, surrounded by a scatter of notes and books. Larry was baking banana bread in the kitchen. Occasionally, Mitchell went and had a piece. Then he returned and started up where he’d left off. While he wrote, he felt, for the first time, as though he weren’t in school anymore. He wasn’t answering questions to get a grade on a test. He was trying to diagnose the predicament he felt himself to be in. And not just
his
predicament, either, but that of everyone he knew. It was an odd feeling. He kept writing the names Heidegger and Tillich but he was thinking about himself and all his friends. Everyone he knew was convinced that religion was a sham and God a fiction. But his friends’ replacements for religion didn’t look too impressive. No one had an answer for the riddle of existence. It was like that Talking Heads song. “And you may ask yourself, ‘How did I get here?’ … And you may tell yourself, ‘This is not my beautiful house. And you may tell yourself, ‘This is not my beautiful wife.’” As he responded to the essay questions, Mitchell kept bending his answers toward their practical application. He wanted to know why he was here, and how to live. It was the perfect way to end your college career. Education had finally led Mitchell out into life.

Immediately after handing in the exam, he forgot all about it. Graduation was nearing. He and Larry were busy making plans for their trip. They bought backpacks and subzero sleeping bags. They pored over maps and budget-travel guides, sketching possible itineraries. A week after the exam, Mitchell came into the Faunce House post office and found a letter in his mail slot. It was from Professor Richter, on university stationery. It asked him to come and see Richter in his office.

Mitchell had never been to Richter’s office before. Before going, he picked up two iced coffees from the Blue Room—an extravagant gesture, but it was hot out, and he liked his professors to remember him. He carried the tall covered cups through the midday sun to the redbrick building. The departmental secretary told him where to find Richter, and Mitchell started up the stairs to the second floor.

All the other offices were empty. The Buddhists had left for summer vacation. The Islamicists were down in D.C., giving the State Department insight into the “frame of reference” of Abu Nidal, who had just remotely detonated a car bomb inside the French embassy in West Beirut. Only the door at the end of the hall was open, and inside it, wearing a necktie despite the sultry weather, was Richter.

Richter’s office wasn’t the bare cell of an absentee professor, inhabited only during office hours. Neither was it the homey den of a department chair, with lithographs and a Shaker rug. Richter’s office was formal, almost Viennese. There were glass-fronted bookcases full of leather-bound theology books, an ivory-handled magnifying glass, a brass inkstand. The desk was massive, a bulwark against the creeping ignorance and imprecision of the world. Behind it, Richter was writing notes with a fountain pen.

Mitchell stepped in and said, “If I ever had an office, Professor Richter, this is the kind of office I’d have.”

Richter did an amazing thing: he smiled. “You just might get the chance,” he said.