The devil and daniel sil.., p.6
The Devil and Daniel Silverman, page 6
“Of course, we know that one way or another, lots of the kids get together for the kind of dancing our church once thought of as a temptation of the devil. We aren’t naive about that. There’s a bowling alley in Thief River where they play rock music, which is why some parents have put bowling off limits for their kids. It’s a struggle to protect our little universe from the outside world. Some of us think there’s no point in trying anymore. Syl and me, for example—we’re sure it’s time to stop being a holy huddle, and to start finding ways to fulfill our gospel aims as part of a greater fellowship.”
Mercifully, with his eyes concentrated on the dark, icy road ahead, Swenson stopped talking for the next few miles. Silverman had the uncomfortable feeling that the man was tensed at the wheel with fear. Were they lost, hopelessly lost? “We will get there tonight?” he asked as cheerfully as possible.
Swenson giggled. “The good old off-road Saab here can get through most anything. I’m just not all that familiar with this particular road—if it is a road. What do you think, Syl? Maybe we should have forked right instead of left back there.”
“I’m sure it’s left,” Syl answered. But she didn’t sound all that certain.
“Maybe we’re going in circles,” Silverman suggested, pointing to another blue-ox effigy ahead.
“No, no,” Swenson said. “That’s another one.”
Forty-five minutes later it turned out Syl had been right after all. They were in sight of the Swenson home. “We live across from the college,” Swenson told him, pointing off across a frozen lake. “Most of the faculty live on campus, but we like our privacy. It’s only a stone’s throw. You can see the lights of the school.”
While Swenson fetched his suitcase from the van, Silverman paused to look around. Frigid as the night had become, this was a sight not to be ignored. With a chill celestial light cast across it, the scene took on an austere beauty. The moon, drifting among high dark clouds, was ringed by a bright bow of frost. Where the covering snow had blown away to leave the dark ice clear, the lake—it was called Beaver Lake—stretched away like a tarnished mirror. Silverman stood on the front porch admiring the winter grandeur until he felt the cold reaching into him, searching for the bone. Then, click! he took a mental photograph, a snapshot to be used in some future story. In the basement of his mind he kept a storehouse of such snapshots: places, events, interiors, exteriors, above all people who might fit into a novel one day. Until he discovered that he was a writer, he never knew what to make of this strange childhood capacity to capture moments of living time like pictures in a secret album. Who could say? Maybe he would write a tale of the frozen north one day.
As far as he could tell in his depleted condition, the Swenson home had the feeling of a rustic cabin, small but cozy. His bed in a room on the second floor was wedged under a sloping knotted-pine roof. As soon as he saw the mountainous feather tick he would sleep under that night, he was ready to crash. But tired as he was, he couldn’t let himself sleep without phoning Marty. It would be nearly midnight in San Francisco, exactly the right time to call. There was one problem. The Swenson telephone was on a hall table outside the Swenson bedroom. Silverman stretched the cord as far as he could, but he knew he was still within earshot of his hosts behind their door. With so little privacy this wasn’t going to get very intimate.
“Everything’s okay,” he told Marty. “They’re good people, but,” he added in a whisper, “I’m calling from right outside their bedroom.”
“What?” Marty asked.
“I can’t get too loud,” he said seeking a discreet volume.
“Why not? Are they holding you prisoner?”
“It’s not too private. Talk for me.”
“For you?”
“Tell me what you know I’m thinking.”
“Well, you know how much I hate it that you’re there.”
“I do, I do.”
“And I hope you miss me like mad.”
“Like mad, yes. Go on.”
“And you’re thinking that missing our midnight kiss is practically a sin.”
“Yes, yes. Go on.”
“And that you’re going to make it up to me ten-million times over when you get home.”
“Absolutely. A million times ten-million times.”
“And that I have your permission to go to bed tonight imagining any wild thing I want about you, and it won’t be nearly extreme enough for what’s really going to happen when you get back.”
“Guaranteed.”
“And that I’m going to be the last thing you think about tonight.”
“And the first tomorrow morning.”
“And that we’re never going to let this happen again, not for millions of money. Promise?”
“I promise.”
“And—oh what the hell!—that I’m the love and the light of your life, and the vice is versa.”
“No truer words.”
“Love you.”
“Love you. I’ll call tomorrow.”
5
Breakfast with Richard and Syl
He awoke the next morning in the grip of a merciless hangover. He should have known better than to indulge so freely. He had neither the head nor the stomach for drinking. Too much booze set his ears roaring and his head pounding. It also tied his gut into a knot, which made it all the worse to wake up in a house filled with delicious kitchen odors. Wandering downstairs in bathrobe and slippers, he discovered that Syl had prepared a classic farmhouse breakfast for him. The table groaned with food, most of it the sort of industrial-strength cholesterol that Marty had spent years expunging from Silverman’s diet.
“Happy New Year!” Syl called to him as he entered the kitchen. “If you don’t see what you want, let me know.” She was holding the baby over her shoulder just as she had last night when he headed off to bed. Maybe she had never put it down. The kid was still sniffling and whining.
“That’s really sweet of you,” he answered. “But I’ll stick to black coffee. I think something I ate on the plane didn’t agree with me. Sorry.”
“Oh, that’s all right. I didn’t know what you liked, so I made a little of everything,” she explained almost apologetically.
Silverman had been too groggy to give the Swenson home any aesthetic attention the night before. Now he was beginning to register the charm of the house he was in. It was small, so lowceilinged in some corners and at the doors that its six-foot-plus residents had to stoop to move about. Cramped as it was, the house had a remarkable warmth and comfort to it; it also looked authentically old, a classic piece of prairie farmhouse Americana built of heavy wooden beams and hand-hewn stone. “This place is right out of a history book,” Silverman observed. “Is it as old as it looks?”
“You betcha,” Syl answered. “Of course it’s been patched and rebuilt here and there, but it dates way back—middle of the nineteenth century. It was the Olafsen place, first Minnesota farm this side of the Mississippi. The school owns it now, as well as this whole side of the lake.”
“Doesn’t look tall enough for you.”
“Oh, we’ve gotten used to that, though I used to take my lumps at first. Seems I’ve been stooping my way through life since I was twelve.”
Swenson, taking his seat at the table, frowned. “Well, for Pete’s sake, Syl, you might have guessed Professor Silverman can’t eat bacon,” he chided too severely.
“I can’t?” Silverman asked. “Why not?” Bacon was among his favorite weaknesses. It had been one of Marty’s proudest achievements to wean him off of it.
Swenson stared back in bewilderment. “Well, it’s not, well—”
“Oh, I see. But you forget: I am a Jewish Humanist.” And in order to offer Syl a small gesture of gratitude, he forked a crisp rasher of bacon onto his plate and proceeded to chomp it. God, that was good! He must have another. “Humanists are not kosher,” he reminded Swenson. “Or rather they are kosher in their own way, which means they can eat anything they want except for Brussels sprouts. Incidentally, I’m not actually, really a professor, you know.”
“I hope you won’t mind if I call you professor,” Swenson said, a clear pleading tone in his voice. “It’ll matter to a few of our more snobbish faculty. And you are, after all, university-connected.”
“In the sense that I sometimes teach in the university extension. That makes me about as professorial as I am kosher. But if you want, you can call me rabbi.”
“So you won’t mind about ‘professor’?”
“Suit yourself. I trust you to introduce me any way you please.”
“Well, perhaps we might talk about that a little,” Swenson answered, pulling his chair in closer to the table as if he meant to get down to important business. Silverman could feel the man’s nervous tension radiating across the table. “As I said last night, we hope to make some history here today. I guess I shouldn’t expect you to know all that much about the reformed evangelicals.”
“Not a thing. Do I have to?” A half-dozen rashers of bacon seemed to have migrated to Silverman’s plate. Must mean his appetite was returning. Yes, it was. He chomped.
“Just so you won’t be in for any rude surprises, it might help for you to know that there are some rather conservative elements in our church. Very conservative. You’ll be quite challenging for them. They may bring up some pointed questions.”
“As long as the points aren’t at the end of sticks.”
“They can seem rather narrow-minded.”
“Might that be because they are?”
Swenson laughed defensively. “Yes, you could put it that way. Our church—and I say this as a loyal member, both me and Syl—has a strong dispensationalist streak running through it.” Silverman’s face before him was a bored blank. “Not that I’d expect you to know what that is.”
“Right. I don’t.”
“Maybe a little theological background would help.”
Shit! Silverman might have said the word out loud, but his mouth was now deeply invested in a well-buttered biscuit which, at first bite, seemed to be superb.
“Our confession derives from the Doctrine of Inspiration,” Swenson began, “which, while deeply conservative, has never regarded other congregations as apostate. But there are those, well, like Mrs. Bloore for example, who are really quite rigid about the fundamentals. Whereas many of our younger parishioners want to move toward a far more ecumenical stance. Not that the Free Reformed Evangelicals will ever be liberals.”
Silverman gave Swenson a comic squint. “Am I supposed to know what you’re talking about?”
“Ouch!” Swenson said, stopping short and wincing as if he had made a great mistake. “I do carry on, don’t I? Sorry.”
“Remember,” Silverman continued, “I was raised among people who think the goyim swiped our holy book and turned it into Looney Tunes. If you don’t mind me saying so.”
Swenson suddenly looked worried. “Of course I understand. But I’d like to ask you to soft-pedal remarks like that.”
“Never fear, Richard. I can soft-pedal it to the point of silence.”
“Because I believe our faith can be significantly liberalized without compromising its basic tenets. Like it says in Matthew, 9:17 about the new wine in old bottles. Well, I believe that’s happening to our church right now.”
“Believe as you please,” Silverman answered. “I don’t intend to say anything controversial. I’m here to talk about literature, not theology.” Now that was interesting. His fork was reaching for more food: a muffin and some hash-brown potatoes to keep all the bacon on his plate from looking so lonely. And, oh yes, might as well try some of Syl’s tempting, home-made jam.
“Of course. That’s good,” Swenson agreed. “But may I suggest—in case anything uncomfortable comes up—please feel free to circle round it as tactfully as you can and move along? If any of our more polemical elements seem to want to hold forth—and we do have a few, not many, but a few zealots on campus—I’ll try to steer you clear. Because it’s really the students I want you to reach. They’ve been preparing questions for you all last semester. Frankly, I think many of them are sincerely curious about the humanistic viewpoint. Especially our little Religious Humanism committee. They’re wonderful young people. And they want so much to meet you. We’d like to spirit you away for dinner this evening, someplace away from the school—weather permitting.”
“That’s sort of a litany around these parts isn’t it? Weather permitting. Like Jews saying ‘God forbid.’ Are you expecting bad weather?”
“Possibly. A bit of a blow this evening.”
“Well, as long as we get away on time tomorrow morning.” To his surprise, Silverman found his plate stacked with scrambled eggs, fruit, rolls, toast, and, yes, still more bacon.
“I think I can guarantee that,” Swenson assured him. “I want to make sure you’re prepared for a few, well, awkward questions.”
“Awkward for whom? Look, Richard, I’m going to make some good literary talk. Books, authors, scholarly judgments. I’ll answer all questions politely. Then I’m going home. That’s all I agreed to. If some of your zealots are unhappy, well, too bad. After I’m off the premises, make what you want of anything I said. If it helps punch a hole in some closed minds, good.”
“That’s fair enough,” Swenson agreed. But he still looked worried. Silverman decided this was the time to ask.
“What went wrong with Gore Vidal?”
Swenson looked stunned. “Ouch!” he winced again. “You heard about that?”
“Mm-hm. So what’s the story?”
Swenson’s face went red. He looked to Syl.
“A member of the trustees found one of his books offensive,” Syl said.
“Myra Breckinridge,” Silverman guessed.
“No,” Syl said. “It was the novel about Aaron Burr.”
“Burr? They thought Burr was offensive?”
“Well, there are some bad words in it,” Syl explained.
Silverman turned to Swenson. “I don’t get it. Why are you inviting novelists? I can’t think of a single novelist since Louisa May Alcott who doesn’t use ‘bad words.’ I sometimes think bad words have become the total American vocabulary. I’ve heard more bad words waiting for a bus with a gang of junior-high-school kids than I’ve used in all my books put together. Maybe what you want for your program are Sunday School teachers.”
Swenson hastened to explain. “There was simply so much resistance to Mr. Vidal. I do believe he was frankly too controversial to start our series with. I suppose if I had fought harder, I might have gotten my way, but that didn’t seem the smart thing to do.”
Silverman mulled this over, trying to make sense of what he was hearing. “So you invited me instead. Why? Because I’m good and safe? There are bad words in my books too.”
“I know, but see, you’re here as a Jewish Humanist.”
“And that’s why I’m acceptable?”
“You betcha. You connect much more smoothly with our program.”
As he began to pack away more food, Silverman felt a better mood coming over him. All right, then. He was more than a mere novelist. He had another string to his bow. He was a humanist of the subcategory Jewish. Didn’t that lend a certain breadth to his reputation? Why not make the most of his sojourn? Perhaps he could learn a thing or two, something that might work as comic relief in a future novel. “What was that about ‘disposabilism’? Never heard of that.” Whatever Swenson might answer, it would give Syl a chance to rustle up more bacon.
“Dispensationalism?” Swenson brightened at the question. “That’s the most rigid kind of evangelical faith. What it is, you see, is a sort of Biblical timetable that dictates exactly how God relates to man, with no interpretation possible—a straight, literal reading based on the belief that the word of God is totally true and trustworthy.”
“What a good feeling that must be,” Silverman commented, “knowing that something in the world is totally true and trustworthy. I have friends back in San Francisco who talk about the Internet that way. They believe everything they read there. Myself, I don’t think anything is totally true and trustworthy—except possibly loyalty between people.”
“That’s what makes you a humanist,” Syl suggested. She had a nice smile, a big, warm, toothy grin that glowed with good will.
“That’s a nice way to put it,” Silverman agreed.
“Well,” Swenson went on, “the dispensationalists believe that any deviation from the inspired and inerrant word is apostasy. And as they see it, all the major Christian congregations are apostate under the influence of Satan.”
“Really?” Silverman was savoring another of Syl’s biscuits. No doubt about it, these were the best he had ever tasted. “You people believe things like that, do you?”
