The Old Religion Read online

  “What if it is not the case, and he has truly chosen the wrong card? How humiliating: to spend the hours one must need in practice—practice to gain the approval of the crowd—and then to disappoint them. How terrible: to have one’s inner soul’s longings revealed—‘I burn to tantalize you. To manipulate you, to control and delight you. To lead you in my ways and at my leisure’—and then to fail. For what would obscure that personal revelation? Nothing but success.”

  He heard the crowd draw in its breath, and break out in laughter and exclamations.

  For, of course, the card had transposed. And Morris sat there, happy, confident, controlled, portraying the least—but a discernible—measure of humility withal.

  “Happy to please. Sorry to’ve taxed (if I did) your patience. Sorry to’ve manipulated you. I hope that you will find—as I found, for I did not act so without due deliberation—that the misdirection was worth the result; and that, finally, I have pleased.” That is what he projected, sitting there.

  Frank looked away and saw the waiter, who, similarly, had reconfigured himself, and whose posture now announced that he knew the trick was concluded; that though he did not wish to, and would not, appropriate any of the group’s enjoyment of the performance, he was quite cognizant—to the limits of the intelligence authorized to him—of its excellence. The waiter let the laughter and the semi-ironic applause begin to wane and, like an actor playing the laugh, came forward with the drinks.

  The evening passed.

  Morris and Frank sat by the rail of the veranda.

  “It is not cold,” Frank thought, “but it will soon be cold.”

  There was a mist on the lake. The lights behind them in the hotel were dimmed. They heard the clatter, once, for an instant, of the last cleanings-up in the hotel kitchen, then stillness.

  The breeze came through in one burst, across the porch. Then it was gone.

  “Yeaauh,” Morris said. He sucked at his teeth. “‘Waal, Jedge,’” he said, repeating the punch line, “‘if you was oncet a nigger on a Saady night, you’d never wan’ to be a white man ev’again.’”

  The backyard at night

  He believed in it as if it were a religion.

  For what was it but a mass of land, itself, an aspect of the imagination, really—for it stretched upon a piece of paper between here and there, and he said, “Evidently, all of it must belong to the person who sees that cohesion, who sees that it lies between two oceans. And the person seeing that should own it, and that person is me.”

  What did it mean, to own it—to possess or to belong to a country?

  He often thought of his house. And he delighted in his philosophical disquisitions on the nature of possession, and thought, “This is wealth. If I am unafraid to question my right in my home, then, surely, some merit should accrue to me, or, if not to me, to the act, an act of bravery. How far would I permit the inquiry to go? I do not know. But how many would have even dared raise the question?”

  He rocked in his favorite chair, on the screened porch, as he looked out at the lawn, where Ruthie was picking some sort of grass or flower.

  He’d had a mock fight with his wife: “We can never keep the girl out of the garden,” he said; and she’d said, “Well, let her go.”

  He’d said, “She’s a house servant, and what the hell is she doing out there when she should be working?”—both happy in the banter of no consequence about a minor foible of a family member.

  One had to be the Chief to have the Chief’s dilemma.

  And it felt good to him. It felt good to smoke his cigar, and let the breeze take it out, through the screen porch. “The good ones,” he thought. “When you stopped, you could hardly tell that there’d been smoking.” They were his well-made, good Havanas. And why not? Did he not deserve them?

  “Yes and no,” he thought.

  There were poor people in the world. There were those in pain and oppressed. And, yes, he had worked for the house, and still worked twelve hours a day, in a falling market; and who could say, God forbid, that the factory would not fold, or burn, or some …

  “You see,” he thought, “this is the point of it: There is no certainty. None at all. None. We clothe ourselves in rectitude to hide our shame. Our shame of our lack of worth. It’s all chance. All of it.”

  He faced the woman in the garden.

  “That grass is clean,” he thought. “And it’s dry, and I’m sure she’s not staining her dress. Lord. Look at her fat black ass.”

  He cleared his throat, and rearranged himself on the rocker.

  He tipped the cigar ash into the smoking stand.

  “You do not want to fidget with it, or tap it too often, as the ash cools the smoke—supposing always that you have a good cigar. But, on the other hand, why make a fetish of it?

  “… as some do,” another part of this dialogue ran, a small, interior portion of his mind speaking up. He chided it, gently, but with an authority. For was it not speaking to assess his response?

  Could he not as easily respond, “You’re damn right, and it’s affectation”? Yes, he could, and then the interlocutor would have got his instruction: “Yes. Yes. That is how we act, and that is the opinion we take. Of men who act that way.” But he did not so respond. He chided that voice, saying, “Well, I’m sure each acts as he thinks fit”; and another voice, a supportive judge, so to speak, added, “If they paid for the cigar, what business is it of anyone in the world how they smoke it?”

  But, in his colloquy, he silenced that voice, too, with an understanding but gently dismissive nod, saying, “I know that you do not take my part to curry favor; and, in fact, I may share your distaste. But it is to me to dispense reprimands.” He smiled to that voice, as if to say, “As if any were needed between us.” He paused. “And I will not,” he thought, “censure the other remark; I will not. For it is not mine to censure; but, as it may appear needful, only to ‘correct,’ which can only be done with kindness.”

  But, saying it all, he hated the men with their too-long cigar ash, for it invariably ended on their vest, or on the rug. There was a certain masculinity to it, but, given the eventual untidiness, he had to see it as a discourteous affectation.

  And he hated the fact of the Big Cigar being identified with The Jew. If ever there were an instance of unfairness, he thought, that must be it. And were there not two sides to every issue?

  He saw Ruthie begin to straighten up, one palm flat on the ground, as she pushed herself up from her knees, panting. “It must be difficult to carry that weight in this heat,” he thought, and was pleased that he found no admixture of superiority in the thought.

  “For, after all, I did not make myself thin. God made me thin,” he thought. And, “What is better than this breeze?” as the breeze wrapped her cotton dress around the front of her thighs. “Black Nubian columns,” he thought, “rounder than worked marble. Like stones washed in a tide pool.”

  She turned, carrying the little flowers, dwarfed in her left hand, and the breeze tricked the bottom of her hem into a peak.

  She started up the stairs.

  “I … I know, Mist’ Frank, I know …,” she said, and smiled.

  She opened the screen door and came onto the porch. She walked slowly past him, toward the door to the kitchen. “… I know,” she said.

  He felt that she felt his smile of indulgence, though he was not certain that it had broken through on his face. But he felt she knew it was there. He saw it in the quality or in the rhythm of her walk, in the timing of her opening of the door, in the way that she let it close. In a moment he would hear her in there, starting supper.

  The heavy woolen jacket

  But one is apt to spend a certain portion of one’s income on appearances—perhaps “driven” to spend. This operation, he thought, is no different than the laborer’s beer, or round of beers, at the saloon. No different at all. We need to establish ourselves, rich and poor. And the poor are always with us, as the Christians say. Is that not a quote fro
m the Bible?

  As he walked, he thought of the teaching of Christ: “It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of the needle,” and the struggle of the rich to understand this passage in a way not hurtful to themselves, he thought, “what a show that is.

  “Yes, well, it is said, I have heard it said,” he thought, “that it was said there was a gate in some old city, in Palestine, in Jerusalem, perhaps—for it is most probably just a story, and, as such, we’d just as well set it in the most prominent place … In Jerusalem, then,” he thought, “there was a gate, or a turn, or a passage, called ‘The Needle’s Eye,’ and so, and so, and so …”

  He walked, and meditated on the folly of man.

  “Deceive anyone but yourself,” he thought.

  “What is religion?”

  Then there was the allied question of the shirt.

  He wore it seldom, but thought of it often.

  It hung on a hook by the back door. A heavy woolen jacket-shirt, which he thought of as a “rough” or “outdoor” garment.

  It was gray, with light-green stripes at large intervals.

  A shirt for working in the yard.

  But he did not work in the yard. That work was done by Tom or Red, the friends (“common-law husbands,” as he thought of them) of Ruthie.

  He wore the shirt perhaps five times in the year, on the rare cool morning or evening when he’d choose to walk back into the yard to smoke his cigar. He’d take the metal chair from the group by the back door, on those occasions, and retreat the thirty-five yards to the live oak tree, and sit there and smoke, and there congratulate himself on what he felt was an almost bohemian behavior.

  Such occasions were always preceded by an inner dialogue in which he would adopt two basically conservative positions and, in yet a third guise, or voice, as “moderator,” bring them into a reasoned accord.

  “Why should I not simply walk back into the air—clothed, in fact, ‘however’—and there, unseen and unsuspected, enjoy my cigar? And if I am remarked, then, what then? Have I not seen men …”

  Here he nodded, in deference to imaginary listeners who might, absent this obeisance, interpret the coming phrase, “of my class,” as arrogant. He paused. “… men of my class,” he continued, “in similar, surely, in undress surpassing my adoption, or, yes, or say ‘affectation’ of the lumber jacket? Have I not seen such men, and that frequently, out ‘in their yards?’”

  Here the opposing voice suggested clothing designed for the lumber camp was best worn there. And so it went.

  And here, usually, the voice of inanition informed him that he was walking to his study to smoke, and so he did, in the sanguine mood. Happy to be possessed of a liberality sufficient to allow contemplation of the free-spirited art of philosophy.

  And on the rare times when he walked back to the live oak, that voice’s companion spirit spoke, and praised him for conservatism grounded enough to function healthily and secure in spite of appearances.

  He wore the shirt seldom, but it plagued him all year long.

  For, in his mind, he’d promised it to Ruthie.

  He and his wife regularly assembled their cast-off clothes and passed them to the maid.

  So he’d long wanted to give the shirt to her, as he felt it mean to hoard an article he used so infrequently.

  But when his wife assembled the used clothes—as she did once or twice a year—he hesitated before adding his shirt to the pile. He’d argue with himself and, finally, consign the hated shirt; and, as invariably, return to the pile later that day, to retrieve it and replace it on the hook by the back door.

  His unspoken vow occurred to him with regularity sufficient to suggest, when he did think about it, that it was never out of his thoughts—that he, at any given time in his life, was involved in two simultaneous occupations: the matter of the moment, and his battle with self-loathing over his inability to honor his vow and dispose of the shirt.

  “It stands for all I hate in myself,” he thought.

  “Another man would burn the cursed thing, and, so be done with it.”

  So it was with the other matter of the couch.

  “We are plagued,” he thought, “with possessions. Those who have them not yearn for them. Those who have them yearn, at once, for more and for their freedom from them.

  “But there are those,” he thought, “worse than I—for they are not even conscious of the mechanism. They, in short, live like poor, driven beasts.”

  The Confederate flag

  Now the breeze took the water from the garden hose as the boy lifted it, the breeze took it, for one brief moment, into a roostertail in the air. Then the boy brought it down. What had moved him to lift the hose? “Exuberance, certainly,” and, “What a miracle,” Frank thought. “What a blessing the water was.”

  The flag, however, was heavier. The breeze moved it hardly at all. Of what material was it? Almost certainly a canvas. Not new. Weathered, how many years old? He could not remember when they’d first put it up. Had they hung it every year? Stars and Bars. The reds faded to a sort of purple. “Well, the sun will do that,” he thought. And he thought back to the other flags.

  “Rags, really. Battle ensigns. If,” he thought, “that is indeed the correct style.”

  Battle flags, carried in the Confederate Memorial Day celebration.

  “Old men, now. Old men. How could they not be? So proud. As the town was proud. And why should they not be?” It was good to have tradition. Who was he to say it was wrong?

  Yes, slavery was wrong. But the War had been fought over more than slavery. If, in fact, it had been fought over slavery at all—was it only the Jews who had that earnest discussion? The rest of the world seemed to’ve accepted this received notion of History. Why should they not? They’d fashioned it, and moved on.

  But the Jews, as the Jews said, the Jews would worry it to death, and love the sad irony of the Southern side.

  There were the Jews, celebrating exodus from Egypt, and free to use the full play of their intellect to probe the causes, the cures, of the Institution.

  “There was economic servitude,” as Morris said, “as severe as bodily indenture. And the position of Southern merchants, in thrall to the North, unable to …”

  Every year—it was a family joke—he would start his speech, and every year he was laughed to a stop, and he would stop, appreciating the affection in which he was held. But he would shrug, to say, “However, there is some merit in my case, which you may see someday,” and someone would say, “Government intervention is damned meddling, unless we need them, when we call it Humanity,” or some such, and they would play their ritual out every year. For it assured them that they were home.

  And was that not the point of ritual? For what was going to be settled at the Seder table? At any family conclave? The point of worth was the liberty to discuss, and, beyond that, below that, the solidarity—the joy of being the same as everyone there, which joy was only underlined by their playing at differences.

  The argument was their ritual. Others had their observances, he thought, which defined them, which assured them, for the savagery they feared was not in the world, as they thought, but in their minds. And who could grapple with that?

  In the kitchen, behind him, were the sounds of supper being cleared away. The last sounds.

  Who could grapple with it? he thought. A factory. Why? Workers. Why? The Wage System. Why? Slavery, freedom.

  Across the way, the Confederate Flag hung in the heat. “It drapes down but is not defeated,” he thought. “It hangs stiffly.”

  And he thought it hung too stiffly—that the material, fashioned for wear, did not allow the flag to loft: as he phrased it to himself, to “wave like a banner.”

  On his walk to work tomorrow he would see thousands of them. On the homes, in lapel pins, on cars, the thousand banners in the parade, certainly. And he wondered about the business of the flags. “For any business,” he thought, “protected by sanctimony should prosper.” He n
odded.

  “Flags … funerals …” He searched for a third example.

  Behind him he heard Ruthie putting the last dishes away, and the clink of the latch of the pantry. Now she was done. Now he would hear her padding to the stairs out back, where she would sit and catch her breath.

  Now his wife was upstairs. Sitting in bed. Reading. Now he should go to bed. Now he should lay his cigar down in the smoking stand to let it go out, and get up and go to bed.

  There was work to do tomorrow. The problems of the world would keep. And what were they, finally, but a diversion? We could not know them, he thought. We spoke of them, if we knew it, simply as entertainment, he thought, and sighed, and smiled with affection at his gentle folly.

  The new couch

  At some point it had become important to him to have a new couch. He had first ignored and then pretended to ignore his wife’s hints about redecorating.

  When she raised the subject openly he had resisted and explained to her that the circumstances of their life were comfortable and correct, and, in fact, lavish if compared to the median state of man at any time, and at this particular time in any place that she might mention.

  As he spoke on that first occasion, he both knew and did not know she would eventually prevail. As he became more comfortable with the duality, he explained it to himself in this way:

  “Though she is wrong, it is fitting that there be certain aspects of life in which she can prevail.

  “In most of married life she follows my command. Now equity and common sense—even were there no affection—suggest that I occasionally recognize her claims. How galling, in fact,” he reflected, “to have no part in life in which one can prevail.”

  He reminded himself, then, to be gracious, and to find it in himself truly to ratify her claims, rather than merely to appear to do so.