The Friend of Women and Other Stories Page 7

  I was born in Ayer, Massachusetts, the youngest, smallest, and by far the least strapping of a family that had produced three Dartmouth football stars in my three elder brothers. My father, a lawyer with a modest small-town general practice, died when I was five, and my mother, a stalwart and heroic woman, managed on a tight budget to raise and educate her brood with such success that my brothers in time became prosperous professional men—a surgeon, an accountant, and another lawyer. I was her single failure, at least until I began to grow a bit in mind and body at divinity school. Before then I had been hopeless in sports, poor in grades, and unpopular with my peers. My mother and brothers had always been moderately kind to me, but I was ever conscious of the condescension and disappointment behind their perfunctory encouragement. I had really only God to appeal to, for I was always intensely religious—what else had I?—until Hilda came to supplement the deity.

  She was an Ayer neighbor, a Vassar girl who loved poetry and hoped to write it; she was, like me, small, and, yes, I can say it, a touch on the plain side, but she also had the brave soul of a missionary, and she took it into her head early that she could make something of me. Could she succeed where my redoubtable mother could not? She thought so, anyway, and by the time we were secretly engaged, I was already enrolled at Harvard Divinity School. She had convinced me that I was cut out to be a priest and had pried out of my doubting mother the funds for my tuition.

  It was as a divinity student that I became interested—perhaps too intensely so—in the first three centuries of the Christian era, when it was torn by bitter conflicts between the different sects that bloomed like mushrooms in that primitive soil. I was fascinated by the variegated dogmas of religious dissent and spent so much time analyzing the distinctions between them that one of my teachers subjected me to a gentle reproach.

  “It will not be necessary, Percy Goodheart, for you as a pastor to instruct your flock in these ancient heresies. They are forgotten now except by the more erudite scholars. You would do better to concentrate on the church after it was united in faith by such councils as that of Nicaea.”

  This was true enough, but two hard questions continued to aggravate me. My teacher had spoken of the church as united, but could we Episcopalians see much truth in that? Had our forebears not split off from Catholic Rome, and were there not dozens of Protestant denominations today? And more every decade? And had not these alien sects had their own martyrs? Had so-called heretics not shared death in the arena with the orthodox? So that even a ghastly demise might not prove truth.

  The question of whether it was ever required by God to suffer death for His sake haunted me. I was terribly afraid that I would have funked it before the Roman police and abjured my faith. But would God have really cared so long as I retained it in my heart and mind, and saved my life to serve Him? This idea drew me to the Gnostics, who had made the same argument, affirming that if the spirit was all and the body nothing, it could hardly matter whether the body was tortured or not. And I was also attracted to their belief that the archons of the cruel Jewish deity of the Old Testament had held captive the spirit of man until the aeon Jesus had been sent to restore him to the divine knowledge, or gnosis.

  Similarly, Manichaeism had its lure. That the dualism that we sense in things around us may be true I could well imagine, for evil seemed quite as real to me as good. Manichaeans maintained that it was only matter that was bad: man did not suffer from the Fall but from his contact with matter—Eve ate of the apple. The asceticism, even the celibacy of this faith appealed to me. Had I not seen what the lust in my brothers’ big strong bodies had led them to, at least before they were happily chained in lawful wedlock? Was not the very weakness of my own physique evidence of my greater freedom from matter and even the probable cause of my being so able and willing to dedicate myself to holy orders? I love Hilda, of course, but our love was chaste, and we did not become one flesh until we were married.

  I also saw much to reflect upon in Arianism. Isn’t there more than a bit of that heresy in even the most orthodox of Episcopalians? When we think of a triune god, aren’t we thinking of three distinct deities? And didn’t the Arians have a point when they insisted that the Son had to have been born after the Father and therefore, if coexistent, couldn’t be coeternal?

  The doubts that these speculations aroused in my troubled psyche at length engendered grave misgivings as to whether I was qualified to be a minister, and eventually I found myself on the verge of a nervous breakdown. I don’t know what would have happened to me had not Hilda, my patient but sorely tried fiancée, who was always urging me to concentrate more on the ecclesiastical present than its past, finally persuaded me to lay my problem before the dean. That great wise and good man at once took me under his wing and straightened me out, to the extent, anyway, of my finishing school and becoming ordained. I recall what he said about the essence of evil.

  “You mustn’t be obsessed by it, Percy. We all know there’s plenty of it around for us to deal with, without wasting our days and nights philosophizing about its nature or origin. We know what atrocities are going on in the world; we need look no further than the Spanish civil war. You wonder why Christians once killed one another over creeds and why God allowed it. Because, as Saint Thomas Aquinas said, He gave us free will, and some men are bound to abuse the privilege. Would you rather He had made us robots? And don’t worry about hell, dear boy. There may be punishment in another life, but it cannot be eternal, for how could we be happy in heaven knowing that persons whom we perhaps may have loved were condemned to eternal torment?”

  Thanks to this beneficent gentleman I was able, with Hilda, whom I married the very day after my ordainment, to undertake the pastorship of a small rural Massachusetts diocese in the neighborhood of the fashionable Averhill, a boarding school for boys. We were very happy there for a couple of years—somewhat innocently happy, as it now seems to me. I was able to get on with, and even to be liked by, my simple congregation of farmers and village storekeepers, and I hope that I offered them some spiritual edification. Hilda enjoyed her neighborhood visits to parishioners who were sick or lonely or in need of some consolation, and she had ample time for her poetry. In due course a dear little girl was born to us. All seemed well.

  Then fate intervened. Out of neighborly courtesy, the famous veteran headmaster of Averhill, the Reverend Rufus Lockwood, invited me to preach at the school chapel on a Sunday when he and his chaplain were to be at some ecclesiastical conference. It so happened that the sudden illness of Mrs. Lockwood—at first seemingly dangerous but soon proved innocuous—brought her husband home prematurely, and he found it possible to come to the service in time to hear my sermon. Fortunately (or perhaps unfortunately, as things turned out) it was one of my best, in which I offered the proposition that God did not expect us all to be martyrs or heroes and that even those who led the most ordinary and routine of lives were equal to the saints in His eyes if they were true to His precepts. A week later Dr. Lockwood invited me to lunch with him in the headmaster’s house, during which he questioned me in depth about my life and projects. It is notable that he never bothered to explain to me what right or reason he had to put me through such an examination. Before that gruff and stolid inquirer I might have been just another of his students, subjected to some disciplinary interrogation. Yet I found myself as submissive as one of his boys. The man certainly had what I believe is known in military circles as command presence.

  It appeared that his chaplain had received a sudden and challenging calling from a parish in the South, and Lockwood had to find his replacement by the start of the next school year. It was now May.

  Lockwood, as I soon realized to be his habit, made up his mind quickly, and I received his offer at the end of our meal. I pointed out that I could hardly leave my parish on such short notice.

  “Leave that to me” was his abrupt response. “I’ll speak to the bishop.”

  Hilda was excited by the prospect. Averhill was a famous sch
ool; it promised a bigger life. She brought up that it was a miraculous chance for a couple as obscure as ourselves and might never come again. When the bishop himself called me to stress the importance to the church of getting immediate support for an aging cleric as nationally known as Dr. Lockwood, my last misgivings about abandoning my dear parishioners were quashed.

  And so my life at Averhill commenced. Let me start by describing the headmaster, for he was everything at that school. He had founded it as a young man, developed it from an academy of twenty pupils to one of five hundred, and had ruled over it for almost a half century. To put it simply, he was Averhill.

  Just to look at him was to receive an impression of craggy strength. At seventy-eight he was short but stoutly built, with a plain square face, a gleaming balding pate, and large, staring green-blue eyes. His voice was like that of an old repertory actor: it could sink to a velvety softness or crescendo into a lion’s roar. He came of common stock, reputedly the son of a butcher, and had the strength associated with that calling.

  He had fought his way up the social ladder to the ministry and married a Boston Lowell. He reigned in Averhill like a despot, mostly, it was at least supposed, as a benevolent one. The boys were in awe of him; the faculty bowed to him; the trustees were his rubber stamp. It was rumored that when one of the latter had uttered something about retirement, Lockwood had gazed down the table and simply murmured, “I must be getting deaf—I thought I heard someone suggest that I should step down.” This was followed by a shocked silence, as all glared at the offending trustee. Even the parents, including the many fathers who were themselves alumni, hardly dared question his decrees. Only Mrs. Lockwood could oppose him, and she was largely preoccupied with charitable work in the neighborhood. But on the rare occasions when she did, he was the butcher’s son before a Brahmin.

  The school now boasted a magnificent campus of semi-Palladian buildings around a huge circular lawn dominated by a Richardsonian chapel as craggy as the headmaster and a splendid gymnasium designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. To pay for it all, Lockwood had twisted the arms of a multitude of tycoons, not ever bothering, it was said, to investigate the tainted sources of some of the fortunes he tapped. However a muscular Christian he proclaimed himself to be, the principle that the end justifies the means must have been engraved on his heart.

  There had even been, at least in the past, a good deal of gossip about his obsequious kowtowing to wealthy parents and alumni, his admitting some unqualified progeny of theirs to the ranks of his students, his support of a notoriously crooked Massachusetts politician who had taken the school’s side in a suit with the state, and his retainer of shyster lawyers who defended Averhill’s wobbly case in a bitter dispute with a neighboring town. But by the time I came to be his chaplain, all his fights had been won, and his reputation as a great teacher and silver-tongued orator had silenced dissent. When he raised his voice in passionate prayer in chapel, it seemed impossible that he was not being heard on high.

  I pause as I read the last sentence. Is there a note of levity in it? Have I taken from Lockwood himself the scurrilous habit of seeming almost to mock the very faith that is my mainstay? I must, however, as a part of this confession (or self-probing, whichever and whatever it may be), make explicit just what it was that troubled me most in my relationship with him. He seemed at once a Dr. Jekyll and a Mr. Hyde. Which role was he acting? Both?

  For in chapel, and in serious talks to the boys in his study, he was very open and articulate in the pronouncement of his faith. He spoke of God as if He were always present, always with us, in our most public or most private moments; Lockwood made one feel that God could be told anything, even one’s most disgusting fantasies. And it was obvious that many boys were inspired by him. In every sixth form, some became almost troublesomely devout and cultivated the headmaster’s company like so many disciples.

  Yet all this was in constant contrast to his iron rule, the harshness of some of his punishments, his habit of raucously laughing at anything that smacked of a pathetic ignorance or a too prim propriety, his savage jokes and take-offs, his occasional monumental shrug at some of the very precepts he enforced. He could be, when the mood seized him, the bluff actor who cried, “All the world’s a stage!” There were moments when I seemed to see a devil hiding behind him. Which of us was crazy?

  My job, formally, was to assist him in chapel services, to conduct them in his absence, and to teach sacred studies to the younger classes. But these relatively simple tasks paled beside the much more arduous one of being a kind of personal assistant to the headmaster, drafting his letters to parents, donors, and other school heads, checking references in his sermons and public addresses, carrying messages to staff members he was sometimes too busy to see, touring the school grounds to inspect reported malfunctions of the infrastructure, and at times even acting as a valet, robing him in chapel, driving him to Boston if his chauffeur was indisposed, and assisting Mrs. Lockwood on “parlor night,” when certain privileged boys were invited to her house for games.

  It was tiring work, for Lockwood was always unpredictable. I never knew when he was going to be gravely impassive, as if I were not even present, or when he would shout at me and call me an ass, or when, if my little daughter was ailing, he would be wonderfully sympathetic, almost paternal. It was again the repertory: Tamburlaine one day, Falstaff the next.

  One thing, however, was certain. He was always observant; he missed nothing. He spotted all my vulnerabilities, and he could play with me as a cat does with a mouse. There must have been a touch of sadism in his makeup. Why should he, a great man, take any notice at all of such a microbe as myself? Because he couldn’t keep his hands off anything within his reach. He always had to be creating something of something.

  My real trouble was with Hilda. She was soon disillusioned with the life of a master’s wife, particularly a master so low in the faculty ratings at Averhill. She found the other wives, all considerably older than she, both dull and condescending, and there was little for her to do. In my parish she had had the sick and senile to call upon, and others in for tea, but Averhill operated perfectly without her, and she had no duties but to sit on my right at a long table of boys in the big dining hall for Sunday lunch. But worst of all were the constant inroads into our domestic life made by the ever demanding headmaster. He would telephone at all hours, usually with some peremptory demand that I come straight over to him, and not hesitate to make hash of any little plans Hilda and I might have had for our theoretical free time, such as playing bridge with neighbors or going to a movie. And it galled poor Hilda that I was so submissive; she accused me of lying supine before him, which I’m afraid I did. But then it has never been in my nature to assert myself; I have always bowed to authority.

  “You’re under his spell!” she warned me. “The devil himself is in that man! I actually believe he’s trying to take you from me!”

  “Why would he want such a poor thing as myself?”

  “Do devils need motives? They collect souls. Even poor souls!”

  Of course, Hilda didn’t really mean what she said, but the unfortunate (or fortunate?) result of her colorful imagery was that it stirred up all my old divinity school speculations on early Christian heresies and, in particular, the stubborn clinging of some dissidents to the notion that if good is real, so must be evil. They had argued that, as it seems impossible that a benevolent deity could have created evil, it must have come into being on its own, and it must therefore oppose God with an independent identity. If we posit God, must we not do the same for Satan? Did I really believe this? Do I now? How much of the truth, anyway, do we know?

  As it happened, the day after Hilda had put the idea of the devil in my turbid mind, I was standing behind the headmaster after the Sunday service in the garth by the chapel, where he received the visiting alumni and parents who had lined up to greet him and compliment him on his sermon. But when he spied a little old brown-clad woman in the crowd, a humble contrast to
the smartly dressed mothers, he hurried over to her with outstretched arms, exclaiming, “Oh, Mrs. Tomkins, I’m so happy to see you up and around after your bout with flu. Come, let me introduce you to some of our illustrious trustees who have come up for a board meeting.”

  Now, I knew that Mrs. Tomkins, a simple farmer’s widow of small means, happened to be one of the handful of members of the tiny parish comprising the Averhill grounds, and that she was not connected in any way with the school. Lockwood was demonstrating to the crowd that he was not above giving to the few poor and lowly under his care the same attendon that, as a headmaster, he accorded to those of his institution. Poor Mrs. Tomkins, who wanted only to take herself home, had to have her thin fingers squeezed in the firm grasp of stalwart moguls. It was Lockwood the repertory actor again. I was put in mind of the scene in Richard III where the duke of Gloucester, anxious to impress upon the visiting mayor of London and his suite that he has no wicked designs on the crown, parades piously before them, arm in arm with two bishops, an open prayer book in one hand, apparently oblivious to everything but his contemplation of God.

  I was startled, the following Monday, as I was preparing in my classroom for the approaching hour of sacred studies, to receive a visit from Lockwood, who wanted to discuss the very heresies that had recurred to my mind. I had even forgotten that I had once asked his opinion on Gnosticism. Needless to say, he never forgot anything.

  “I think, Goodheart, that you might share some of your expertise on the early church with your students.”