You Will Never See Any God: Stories (9 page)

“Has my God forgiven me?” he asked.

“Yes, God can forgive any sin.”

“And my wickedness, too?”

“Yes, and any wickedness—God loves you.”

“Will he take me to Himself?” Schwier asked. He had heard much of the church’s words, as “wickedness” and “to Himself,” and could repeat them.

“If you have fully repented,” the minister said.

“I do repent. I do love, and I feel His love.”

“Then He will take you.”

The time came in the fall. There were three heart attacks in rapid succession and the doctors came and the ministers, too. They did everything they could for him. The minister gave him the last communion, which Old Schwier understood. His mind was clear, the minister said, his sins were washed away. Afterwards Old Schwier called for Diedrich and he had the son read the will. Much went to charity and to the church but the bulk of the large estate went to the children, and Diedrich was to search for the others and if they could not be found within five years, he was to have it all.

“My son,” Old Schwier said when Diedrich had finished reading the will, “come and I will give you my last blessing.”

“You have no right to bless anyone,” Diedrich said.

“My sins are forgiven. I have repented. I am ready to see my God.”

“You will never see any God.”

“My poor child. You don’t believe. But I believe and I am at rest and happy. Come, let us pray together now. I know we cannot be together long.”

“We have never been together.”

“We can be now. My God has forgiven me my sins.”

“What kind of a God is that?”

“What do you mean?”

“A God that let you do what you have done and then let you by because you change your mind at the very last minute.”

“I have seen my error.”

“No one could forgive you.”

“Everyone has forgiven. The people who hated me love me now.”

“Only because you have money.”

“God has forgiven me.”

“How do you know?”

“Because I believe.”

“And I believe he has not. He is not so easily fooled as the stupid people of this town.”

“But he has, don’t you see? I have repented, and he has forgiven me.”

“I haven’t forgiven you, father, and neither have any of my brothers and sisters. We will never forgive you.”

“Oh, oh, oh,” the father wailed, and the tears ran down his ashen, lined cheeks.

“How can God forgive you if we do not? What kind of a God is that?” Diedrich almost smiled then.

“I believe. I do believe. He has forgiven.”

“Then we should all do what you have done and wait until God, if there is such a thing, comes to us out of the sky.”

“Don’t test me now, not now.”

“You could not live long enough to be forgiven, father. Forgiveness cannot come in the last second of eighty evil years.”

“There is no hope then . . .”

“For you there isn’t.”

“Get away from me. Get away.”

“Are you getting angry now, father? Anger may kill you.”

“I want to see the reverend. Let me see him.”

“Your sins are forgiven, you said.”

“They are. They are all washed away. I believe. I believe. I have repented.”

“Then why do you want to see the reverend? Are you still doubtful? Are you worried?”

“No! I know my God wants me. He loves me.”

“Good. Then die, father, before he remembers all you have done and changes his fickle mind.”

“You devil!” the father cried. “Go, you devil!”

“In a moment. I have much time.”

“I do not bless you. I take it back. Goddamn you!” The father sat bolt upright, shrieking and panting, his voice strained and loud. “Goddamn!” His eyes bulged, his face flushed scarlet and became ashen, and his voice choked on his scarlet phlegm. “Goddamn!” His voice weakened, and the door opened and the others came in, the doctors and the minister. “God . . . God . . . God.” Old Schwier choked and he reeled, staring at a place above Diedrich’s head. They caught him then and the needles came out, but it was too late. Old Rudolph Schwier was dead.

“He was crying ‘God, God!’” one of the doctors said, his voice hushed and a little awed.

“It’s as if he had seen Him,” the minister said. “He died seeing the God of his forgiveness.”

“Yes,” Diedrich said quietly, folding his hands when the minister began to pray.

Anniversary

Two years to the day, McDonald thought, two years since he had last come through Lincoln, Nebraska, in the dead of winter, going west to see his relatives during the Christmas let-out. Through the begrimed train window he saw the wood frame houses emerge frigidly from the somnolent snow-blown land, and the trees, like exposed fretful nerves, black against the gray December sky. He vaguely remembered the curve of the railroad track and the landscape from that time two years before, but now everything was very clear to him, chiseled there, as if he saw it all for the first time really, as if perhaps his eyes had altered in those two years. And still he felt an eagerness akin to that rush of the time before. There had been the quivering warmth in his body, the specific need, the hurry to get off the train, the push through the clusters of people to see her there, for they had written regularly and impassionedly that first fall. His face colored a little, the prickles of heat he felt were like a mirror to him, as he remembered those letters, the heart yearnings of a newly lonely man who had imagined that he had drunk deeply of unloneliness. And she, Wanda, replying, matched his passion almost word for word (a part of him thought
coolly of her at the time and wondered at that, and he had ascribed her parrotings of feeling to her lack of training in communication). McDonald smiled again, thinking of that misjudgment, he who had once thought he knew all of mankind, he, James R. McDonald, assistant professor of English at the University of Missouri, teacher of literature (Truth, Life, Humanity), and of composition.

Six years before, he had come from the Air Force—two pleasant years as an officer at a base in England—armed with his
GI
bill and, as he now reflected, an empty-headedness, and made his way to the M.A. in one year in the company of ascetics. He, as those others apparently did not, had that perpetual yearning, that perpetual need of a woman, the impelling desire and want, for he was in his early twenties, in the prime of his life, and those two easy years in England had only confirmed his hunger. He had seen associates wed through the same desperation to have a woman (so confessed to him by the grooms in stolid puzzlement over beer glasses a few months following weddings), while he went sardonically and dilatorily on dates with birdy female graduate students—unsexed bodies like storewindow dummies and faces like parakeet beaks—evenings stiff with conversation and milked-out culture and the heady pronouncements of likes, dislikes, and logic, dredged from a convenient book or lecture, and nothing else, while his producing gonads cried to heaven for aid. In the coffeerooms the younger, married professors, affecting crew-cuts and virility, clucked approvingly over the vibrance of Dylan Thomas’s insanities, and sniggered with admiration at the dynamic sex allusions of the visiting literati; they huddled together in closet-like rooms like frigid children before a fireplace to simper at fleshy jokes told by transient linguists. They giggled over Chaucer, and vibrated over Fielding, and snickered over D. H . Lawrence, and perspired over John Updike (that Rabbit man); and the fairies in
the department looked him over and approached in sly, nuzzling, knee-touching familiarity and retreated before his somber stare.

He met Wanda Overson the summer he began work on his Ph.D. On a hot, bad night in July he had driven down to the roadhouses along the highway where there were unnerving attempts at jazz offered up by college students, and he saw her, a woman a little older than most of the others there, slender, fairly tall, hard smooth legs, and with black hair and dark eyes. They danced; she said she liked the way he danced, and they arranged to see each other again.

She was twenty-nine, a divorcee, with a boy nine years old—that first night he went to her house the child came up to him and shook hands, man-like, a frail boy, skinny, pale, with dark, deep-socketed eyes as if blackened by blows; he said his name was Trevor—and McDonald smiled carefully and affectedly at the boy, knowing this would please the mother. She did like that, talked about it in the car on the way to dinner that night, how kind he was, saying too that Trevor meant more to her than anything else in the world—her whole life was just lived for her son—and she would like anybody who treated her son well. She liked kindness, she said, she liked to be treated nice, that made more difference to her than anything else, money or anything. Of course she liked nice things too; she really had the tastes of a lady, she said, even if she was only a secretary. She had gone with a few very wealthy men, she said, lifting her eyes to look carefully at him, but of course none had meant a thing to her. She had gone with the owner of a ladies shoe store who had wanted to marry her, but his father who had the money didn’t like it, wanted him to marry a rich girl who wasn’t a divorcee, but she could have had him any time she wanted him, she said with a faint curl of upper lip. And there had been her boss, ex-boss rather, old Mr. Curtis who owned and managed one of the biggest department stores
in town and who had wanted her, he had been really very sweet to her and bought her very expensive things, and he was a lot of fun for an old guy, but she didn’t want any part of that, although he was the sweetest, kindest man and the best dancer in the world.

All small talk, McDonald had thought idly then, as he noted with hunger her healthy body, her hard legs, her crisp, clean movements, her bright, happy eyes as if she were on her first date.

They kissed that night and two nights later they went to bed.

“You want to make love to me, don’t you?” she said, turning to look down at him as he nuzzled her flaccid drooping breasts.

He, startled, forced a smile and then a look of sensitive want from his sweaty concentration and said, “Yes.”

“Why do you?” And she looked into his eyes, holding his head away—he finding out later that she believed a look directly in the eyes meant honesty.

“Because I like you very much, and you’re a beautiful woman.”

“You’re a handsome man, too, Jim,” she said, “and I’d like to go to bed with you but I really can’t. You’ll talk.”

“No I won’t . . . darling.”

“I’ve got my reputation to keep in this town. You don’t know how this town is. You’ve got to keep lily-white or every old biddy will keep after you till you can’t take this town anymore. Nobody has ever said anything against me yet, and I won’t give them the chance.”

“I could never tell anyone.”

“I know how men are after they’ve been to bed with a woman.”

“Not me, Wanda. I promise.”

“No. I can’t. I just can’t go to bed with you.”

“Wanda, I need you. I want to make love to you.”

“I know you do,” she murmured, letting tenderness come into her eyes. “And I want to make love to you.”

She went to see if her son was asleep and then they went to her
bedroom where over her feebling hesitation he undressed her and then himself.

“You’ve got something to put on?”

“Yes.”

She laughed. “I can tell you’ve been around,” she said, glad.

She reclined upon the sheets, waiting.

“God, but you’re wonderful. It’s been so long, so terribly long,” she cried, fastening upon him.

And afterwards, in a little-girl nasality, “What must you think of me? Knowing you only three days and then doing this?”

He held her tight and let the words out, darling, darling, you’re wonderful, I think you’re wonderful. Then they made love again.

They danced to the ancient tune; for three years they made love at their convenience.

After he studied and taught and graded papers and after her work, in the evenings they bucked to the old rhythm, in his apartment or hers, on beds or on couches, in his car, and he liked it, he remembered, he thought it was great, and she liked it too, she enjoyed his love-making, his love and enjoyment of her. The bed was their meeting ground, the sheets their conciliation and pleasure, the pillows their love.

He liked the idea that she was a kind of mistress, one he could not afford to keep, to be sure. He was proud, too, of the easiness and confidence he felt now that a woman was his.

They were sophisticated and casual about their other dating, as they liked to call it, he going with the bird-faced women instructors to affairs of the department and she going dancing with old men friends who called her up occasionally. He brushed shoulders and moments with bland-faced businessmen and gross-faced sergeants from the air base, and he believed he knew but did not question too much. Once, when he had protested her desire for a visitation to Omaha to see an old friend of hers, a man, he sur
mised, she had screamed at him, “Go to hell then, we’re not married, you don’t own me, you can’t tell me what to do,” and she had swept up her coat and flung out of his apartment, where she had ten minutes before lain on his bed. There had been a compensation: the next day the always inevitable hotly breathing splendid reconciliation.

They had talked with the word “love” upon their lips constantly, indeed it seemed every third word was “love”: “I’d love to go with you,” and “I love this steak,” and “I love it like this,” and “I love to do it with you,” and “I love the way you look,” and “I love you.” In those last few months, after he got the job offer from Missouri, after she came to witness the Ph.D. getting and the handshake with the university chancellor, after the kiss upon his cheek she talked of love and marriage, how they could live on his salary and she could work too and save some money, and she never thought after all the trouble with her ex-husband (that bastard, as she usually called him) and the way he had treated her that she would ever be interested in marrying somebody else; “but I really love you, Jim,” she said with a soulful look up into his eyes (that look denoting honesty).

He, well used to her by then, felt the loneliness of those first few months in Columbia, and they wrote often and feelingly, he pouring out his desire and that something akin to love to her; and thus he had rushed to her two years before.

The warehouses glided by, the sooty station emerged and slowed as the train clicked in with painful metal sounds.

There was a gleaming brightness to the sky and to the snow where the sun gave back diamond-hard glints of light.

McDonald descended with the herd of people and in an open space he set his suitcase down and opened it and took out one slender package wrapped in a Christmas paper with red bells and a red bow. He slipped the package into his topcoat pocket
and checked in his bag at the lockers in the station. He looked around for a phone booth, his hand pleasantly playing with the package in his pocket, the package holding a pair of tan suede gloves, quite expensive, that he knew she would like, for she liked expensive things, gifts of any kind really, but especially expensive ones.

He called but there was no answer at her number, so he took a try at the office.

Her voice was unmistakable, and he felt again that queer little stir in his chest, a palpable motion of that which felt good, whether he might want it to feel good or not.

“Hi,” he said. “This is Jim . . .” and in the fragment of the pause that followed, thinking that she would not know which Jim, “. . . McDonald. Hello, Wanda.”

“Why, Jim!” she said, her voice coming to him pleased. “How are you?”

“Fine.”

“It’s been a long time since I’ve heard from you, stranger.”

“About two years, Wanda.”

“Has it really been that long?” (She was not much for remembering dates, he thought.)

“Yes, that long. I’ve thought about you a lot.”

“And I’ve thought about you. You’re here in town, aren’t you?”

“Yes, at the train depot.”

“Wonderful. You going to be here long?”

He hesitated, not quite expecting that question. “Just tonight, I guess. I’m on my way home.”

“Sort of passing through then?”

“Yes,” he said.

“Can you get away from work? I’d like to see you tonight.”

“Oh,” she said, “I really have a date tonight.” She paused, and in the moment of her silence he heard muted telephonic clicks
and buzzes and voices as from far distant places. “But I’ll break the date,” she said.

“Good,” he said with greater relief than he could have thought possible.

“I’m really busy right now,” she said. “So I’ll come pick you up in about an hour. I have a car now you know.”

“A car! Really? You must be prosperous these days,” he said, and they laughed without knowing why. “Pick me up at Hermie’s, can you?”

“Sure thing,” she said sweetly.

He went out into the clean December air. The cold was sharp but he didn’t mind, for the sun was bright and the sky a magnified blue. He walked up the street to the little tavern and had a beer and two cigarettes. Nobody knew him there, not even the corpulent gray bartender who had cashed his personal checks freely in the time before. He felt it again, the old unease of loneliness, and how bitingly it came upon him, speaking past chills and emptiness, and a woman could lift that all from him, a woman, a love, a connection. The little Falcon pulled up in the slush outside the blue bar windows, and McDonald went out without finishing his second beer. He felt good because she was his woman again, everybody could see that if they wanted to look, that she was there waiting for him. He thought he could see through the darkened window that she was still a good-looking woman, and the men in the bar would surely notice that, those lonely men would see that he was not lonely any longer.