The Sixth Commandment (32 page)

“Welcome to the First Fundamentalist Church of Lord Jesus. My name is Irving Peacock, and I am first vestryperson of your church. Most of you I know, and most of you know each other. But I do see a few brothers and sisters who, I believe, are here for the first time. To these newcomers, may I say, ‘Welcome! Welcome to our family!’ It is our custom, at the beginning of the service, for each sister and brother to turn to the right and left and kiss their neighbors as a symbol of our devotion to the love and passion of Lord Jesus. Now, please, all kiss. On the lips now! On the lips!”

The congregation stood. I rose along with them, wondering what kind of a nuthouse I had strayed into. I watched, fascinated, as men and women turned right and left, embracing and kissing their neighbors. A great smacking of lips filled the room.

I was alone in the rear pew and figured I was safe. But no, a grizzly bear of a man in the pew in front of me kissed right and left, then turned suddenly and held out his arms to me.

“Brother!” he said.

What could I do—say, “Please, not on the first date?” So I kissed him, or let him kiss me. He had a walrus mustache. It tickled. Also, he had just eaten an Italian dinner. A cheap Italian dinner.

After this orgy of osculation, the congregation sat down, and Irving Peacock announced the offertory. Contributions would be accepted by vestrypersons John Millhouse and Mary Thorndecker, and we were urged to give generously to “support the splendid work of Father Michael Bellamy and to signify our faith in and love for our Lord Jesus.”

The two vestrypersons started down the center aisle. Brass trays, velvet-lined to eliminate the vulgar sound of shekels clinking, were passed along each pew, hand-to-hand, then returned to the aisle. I saw that Mary Thorndecker was collecting on the other side. I slipped across the aisle, into the empty rear pew on her side. I watched her approach, features still and expressionless.

She was wearing an earth-colored tweed suit over a death-gray sweater. Opaque hose and flat-heeled brogues. Her hair was drawn back tightly, pinned back with a barrette. No jewelry. No makeup. I wondered if she was making herself as unattractive as possible in reaction to Julie’s obvious charms.

She moved slowly down the aisle toward me, not looking up. Even when she took the brass tray from the pew in front of me, she still hadn’t seen me. I had time to note the plate contained a nifty pile of coins and folding money. Father Michael Bellamy was doing all right.

Then she was at my pew. Her eyes rose as she proffered the tray.

“Why … Mr. Todd!” she said, not quite gasping, her face flushing.

I looked at her. I may have smiled pleasantly.

“Thorndecker kills?” I said.

Down went the brass tray. Coins clanged, bounced, rolled. Bills fluttered to the floor. For a moment I thought she was going to cave. Her face went putty-white, then greenish. A pale hand fluttered up to her hair, and just hung there, waving futilely.

Then she was gone, dashing out the double-door. I thought I heard a sound: a sob, a moan. I let her go. I helped others gather up the spilled coins, the scattered bills. I added a fin of my own. Atonement.

The collection plates were returned to the first vestryperson; everyone settled down. A few moments passed while the congregation gradually quieted. Nothing happened. But I felt the expectation, saw heads turning toward the vestry door. Still nothing. A very professionally calculated stage wait. Tension grew.

Then the effete lad at the Hammond organ played something that sounded suspiciously like a fanfare. The vestry door was flung open. Father Michael Bellamy, clad in flowing white robes, swept into the nave, arms outstretched to embrace his followers.

“Blessings on my children!” he intoned.

“Blessings on our father!” they shouted back.

He stood before the altar, arms wide, head thrown back, eyes turned heavenward.

“Let us pray together a moment in silence,” he declaimed. “Let our souls’ voices merge and rise to Lord Jesus, asking love, understanding, and redemption for our sins.”

All heads bowed. Except mine. I was too busy studying Father Michael Bellamy.

A big man, maybe six-four. Broad shoulders and chest. I couldn’t see much more because of those robes, but got an impression of a comfortable corporation. A marvelous head of wavy, snow-white hair. If it wasn’t a carpet, it had enjoyed the attentions of an artful coiffeur. No one’s hair could be that white or that billowy without aid.

The hair was long enough and full enough to cover what I guessed were big, meaty ears. I reckoned that from the rest of his face, also big and meaty. A nose like a sausage, a brow like a rare roast, chin and jowls like beef liver. The man was positively appetizing. Stuck in all this rosy suet were glistening eyes, round and hard as black marbles.

The voice was something; it made the electronic organ sound like a twopenny whistle. Orotund, booming, it not only filled the church but rattled the windows and, for all I knew, browned the ivy in the outside window boxes. That voice conquered me; it was an instrument, and if a good soprano can shatter a wine glass, this guy should have been able to bring down the Brooklyn Bridge.

“Children,” he said, and his praying family looked up, “tonight we shall speak of sin and forgiveness. We shall speak of the unutterable lusts that corrupt the human heart and soul; and how we may all be washed clean in the blood of our Redemptor, Lord Jesus Christ of Nazareth.”

Then he was off. I had heard the sermon before, but never so well delivered. The man was a natural, or practiced preacher. His magnificent voice roared, whispered, entreated, scorned, laughed, hissed, wailed. There was nothing he could not do with that voice. And the gesturings and posturings! Waves, flappings, pointings, clenched fists, pleading palms, stoopings, leaps, stridings from one side of the platform to the other. And tears. Oh yes. The eyes moist and brimming on demand.

Did they listen to his words? I wasn’t sure. I found it difficult to listen, so overwhelming was his physical performance. He was a whirlwind, white robes streaming in the tempest, and what he said seemed of less importance than the presence of the man himself. Behind him, on the wall, Christ bled and died on the cross. And Father Michael Bellamy, the white-haired prophet incarnate, stamped the boards before this image and mesmerized his trendy flock with a performance worth four Oscars, three Emmys, two Grammys, one Ike, and a platinum record. The man was a master.

As I said, the sermon was familiar. He told us that the human heart was a fetid swamp, filled with nasty crawling things. We were all sinners, in thought or in deed. We betrayed the best impulses of our souls, and turned instead to lechery, lust, and lasciviousness. (The Father was big on alliteration.)

He gave a fifteen-minute catalogue of human sins of the flesh, listened to attentively by the congregation who, I figured, wanted to find out if they had missed any. This portion of the sermon was all stern denunciation, a jeremiad against the permissiveness of our society which condoned conduct that in happier times would have earned burning at the stake, or at least a holiday weekend in the stocks.

And where was such lewdness and licentiousness leading us? To eternal damnation, that’s where. To a hell which, according to Father Bellamy’s description, was something like a Finnish sauna without the snowbanks.

But all was not lost. There was a way to redeem our wasted lives. That was to pledge our remaining days to the service of Lord Jesus, following in His footsteps. It was being born again, finding the love and forgiveness of the Father of Us All, and dedicating our lives to walking the path of righteousness.

Up to this point, the sermon had followed the standard revivalist pattern: scare ’em, then save ’em. But then Bellamy got into an area that made me a little queasy.

He said there was only one way to prove sincere relinquishment of a wicked life. That was by full public confession, acknowledgment of past sins, and wholehearted and soul-felt determination to make a complete break with the past, to seek the comforting embrace of Lord Jesus and be saved.

“O, my children!” cried Father Bellamy, throwing his gowned arms wide like a great white bat. “Is there not one among ye willing to stand now, this moment, and confess your most secret vices openly and honestly in the presence of Lord Jesus and these witnesses?”

As a matter of fact, there was more than one amongst us; several leaped to their feet and clamored for attention. What followed convinced me that this mob had come to church directly from a grass-uppers-LSD buffet, or was on leave from a local acorn academy.

A young woman, tears streaming down her cheeks, described, graphically, how she had been unfaithful to her husband on “myriad occasions,” and how she was tortured by the memories. During this titillating recital, her hand was held by the young man seated beside her. He was, I presumed, the betrayed husband. Or he could have been one of the tortured memories.

A young man, twisting his fingers nervously, told how he had been seduced by his aunt when he was wearing his Boy Scout uniform, and how the relationship continued until he was wearing a U.S. Army uniform, at which time the aunt deserted him, leaving him with a seared psyche and a feeling of guilt that frequently resulted in nocturnal emissions.

Three witnesses, in rapid succession, testified to how much they hated their mother/father/brother/sister, and wished them dead.

A woman confessed to unnatural sex acts with a dalmatian owned by her local fire company.

A stuttering lad, desperately sincere, confessed to a secret passion for Madame Ernestine Schumann-Heink, who died in 1936. He had come across her photograph in an old magazine, and her image had haunted his waking hours and dreams ever since.

A wispy blond girl, eyes glazed and enormously swollen, said she had this “thing.” She could never get rid of this “thing.” She thought about it constantly and she wanted Lord Jesus, or at least Father Michael Bellamy, to exorcise this “thing.”

It went on and on like that: a litany of personal confessions that had me squirming with shame and embarrassment. I am, by nature, a private man. I could match anyone of them sin for sin, depravity for depravity, in dream or in deed, but I’d be damned if I’d stand voluntarily before a jury of my peers and spill my guts. It was just none of their business. I don’t think I could do it in a confessional booth either. I can’t even watch TV talk shows. Listen, if we all told one another what we really did, thought, and dreamed, the world would dissolve into mad laughter, helpless with despair, and then who would have the strength and resolve to plan wars?

So I rose quietly from the rear pew and slipped out the church door, just as an older, bearded man was describing how he had been abusing himself ever since he picked up a weight-lifting magazine in a barber shop and, as a consequence, had become a chronic bed-wetter.

I climbed into the dank cab of the pickup. I turned up the collar of my trenchcoat and slouched down. I lighted a cigarette and waited. I wasn’t bored; I had a lot of questions to ponder.

Like: were those idiots inside who were stripping themselves naked in front of friends and strangers really sincere about this confession and redemption jazz? Or was it just another kick like Zen or Rolfing?

Like: had any bright young sociologist ever written a PhD thesis on the remarkable similarities between bucolic American revival meetings and sophisticated American group therapy sessions? Both had a father-leader (preacher/psychiatrist). Both demanded public confession. Both promised salvation.

Like: where did Mary Thorndecker run after I jolted her? I figured she’d have to call me, that night or Saturday morning. I put my money on a morning call, after she had a desperate night wondering how I had fingered her as the author of the anonymous note.

Three cigarettes later, the service ended. The congregation of the First Fundamentalist Church of Lord Jesus streamed forth into the cold night air, presumably cleansed and rejuvenated. I had been right: there were bursts of raucous laughter and a great tooting of horns as they roared away from the parking lot. Kids let out of school.

Still I sat there in Betty Hanrahan’s broken wreck. The spotlight illuminating the steeple cross went out. The interior lights of the church went out. Only one car remained in the parking area: that impressive maroon Bentley. Of course, it would be his.

I got out of the truck slowly, being careful not to slam that tinny door. I made a slow circuit of the church building. Lights still burned in a side extension of the nave: the vestry. I went back to the main entrance. The double-door was still unlocked. I slid in, tiptoed up the aisle. Even in broad daylight a church is a ghostly place. At night, in almost total darkness, it can spook you. Don’t ask me why.

The only illumination was a thin bar of light coming from the interior door of the vestry. I heard laughter, the clink of glasses. I pulled down my tweed hat to shadow my eyes, stuck my hands deep in the trenchcoat pockets. All I needed was a Lone Ranger mask.

I shoved the door open with my foot and stalked in. I was thinking of a joke a cop had told me: this nervous robber goes into a bank on his first job and pulls out a gun. “All right, you mother-stickers,” he snarls. “This is a fuck-up.”

There were two of them in there. Father Michael Bellamy had doffed his pristine robes. Now he was wearing a beautifully tailored suit of soft, gray doeskin with a Norfolk jacket, lavender shirt, knitted black silk tie. I had time to eyeball his jeweled cufflinks: twin Kohinoors. He was seated behind a desk, counting the night’s collection. Piling the coins in neat columns, tapping the bills into square stacks.

The other gink was the limp young man I had seen playing the organ. He was a washed-out lad with strands of lank blond hair falling across his acned forehead. The acne was hard to spot under the pancake makeup. He was wearing a ranch suit: faded blue jeans and jacket. With high-heeled western boots yet. He looked as much like a Wyoming cowpoke as Joan Powell looks like Sophie Tucker.

There was a bottle of Remy Martin on the desk. Bellamy was taking his straight in a little balloon glass. The organist was diluting his cognac with a can of Pepsi, which is like blowing your nose in a Gobelin tapestry.