Chapter X.
Leaving: 1955
To some, the world has disclosed itself as too vast:
within such immensity, man is lost and no longer counts; and there is nothing
left for him to do but shut his eyes and disappear. To others, on the contrary,
the world is too beautiful; and it, and it alone, must be adored. - Teilhard, p.45
Everything possible to be believed is an image of
truth. - William Blake
I HAVE AN UNCLE who created a scandal
once by asking for three eggs for breakfast. He became a family legend. He was
often offered to me as an object lesson in extravagance and selfishness. I come
from a frugal family. In my childhood, everything was carefully measured out -
food, words, approval (even toilet tissue: when I got married, my mother's
advice to me was "Don't buy two-ply. People will use as much as if you
bought one-ply; they won't be able to tell the difference"). Everything
was carefully measured out - except tears. We are a family that cries a lot.
The women in my family were not ascetic and not, after the Depression, poor;
but they had a strong conviction that there were invisible boundaries you
didn't step over unless you wanted to join the company of the wasteful (who
were also slothful, bad), that everything had its appointed limits
("decent limits," the would have said); and goodness was equated with
restraint. It was always too cold in the houses I grew up in, and too dark. Conservation
was regarded not as deprivation or as dreary self-denial, but as a way to
enrich oneself. Love didn't, in their view, multiply and expand; it curled in
on itself, fed itself, was kept within "decent limits."
I once got a beating for telling "the
Jews next door" what we were having for dinner. That was the kind of
information you didn't give away: you hugged it to yourself; you didn't give
anything away. And if that was meanness, it wasn't calculated meanness: it was
like an Arab's not wanting to have his picture taken for fear that his soul
would be stolen away. We hoarded everything, so that we could remain inviolate,
so that nobody could steal our souls away, or know our souls; we kept
everything locked and secret and hidden. Maybe it was the centuries of Moorish
blood in our Southern Italian veins, and our second-generation fears that they
("the Americans") would find us out - find us wanting.
Frugal and insular and suspicious; the
outside world was full of menace. And
when I became a Witness, it was the same story all over again: frugality
and insularity and suspicion; the outside world was full of menace, and a
niggardly Jehovah kept us safe by keeping us from the light and the heat of the
world. He was a chilly and genteel God who didn't like ardent or extravagant
gestures (and I got Him and my mother all mixed up).
He was the kind of God who regarded
both Oxford and the Cathedral at Chartres as extravagances, the adoration of
the saints and the "pursuit of worldly knowledge" as vulgar excesses,
show-offy and flamboyant self-aggrandizing and uncircumspect, wicked. (I asked
Him to forgive me for loving stained glass and incense; I kept a copy of Letters
to a Young Poet hidden in my laundry bag.) Once someone gave me a
kaleidoscope. It was my favorite present.
One Sunday summer morning, as I left
Watchtower headquarters to go out preaching from door to door, a member of a
tightly huddled-together group of fellow Witnesses, I saw two young women and
two young men piling into a yellow convertible. They were all laughing. They
carried picnic hampers covered with red-and-white-checked cloths, very full.
One of the young men turned on the car radio - a Mozart quintet. I wanted to be
with them. I wanted to be them. I longed for their world of color and
light and sound. My longing was so acute it was like a physical pain; and it
was followed by an intolerable ennui: I didn't know what I was doing holding a
satchel of Watchtower magazines, or why I was going to preach, or what I
had to do with the Witnesses or they with me. I wanted to run away. I didn't,
but I knew at that moment that someday I would.
The
four young men and women had come out of a house on Pineapple Street, an
old wooden house, white, with a forest-green door and forest-green shutters and
dimity curtains and chandeliers that seemed to be lit even in the daytime. The
garden of the house, with its cherry tree that had blossoms like crepe paper,
was surrounded by a high white wooden fence, and set in the garden fence was a
lime-green door with no doorknob on the outside. For days I imagined that if I
knocked at that door, they would recognize me and let me in and we would sit in
the garden under the cherry tree and I would never have to go back to the
Watchtower Building again.
Later that same week, on an impulse, I
went alone to Birdland. Basie was playing, and Joe Williams was singing the
blues. I had two rye-and-gingers, and I
felt scared and exhilarated. I came back with my hair smelling of cigarette
smoke: "Dirty," my roommate said. It was the first time I had trouble
falling asleep.
On the Saturday of that week, a Witness
I knew and loved died. And the circumstances surrounding his dying made me
understand that when I left (as I knew I would), it wouldn't be because I
preferred yellow sports cars and summer picnics and Mozart or jazz to God; it
would be because God didn't live in my religion. If He lived at all, He lived
somewhere else (not in my heart).
Mike died at a party at a Witness'
house. Unlike most Witnesses, he never seemed to give a damn what impression he
created on other people. He was funky and loving and flamboyant. He was an
iceman; he drove an ice truck. When I was younger, I'd had a temporary job at
the UN bank. Mike used to drive me up to the Secretariat building in his truck.
We laughed at the incongruity of driving to the UN in a Sicilian-decorated
truck, and he never used the occasion to preach about the evils of the
"beastly United Nations" (which ranked second, in the Witnesses'
chamber of Satanic horrors, only to the Vatican). He may have accepted the
Witnesses' belief that the UN was the "desolation of desolations, "but
that didn't deter him from driving up gaily and irreverently to its portals.
The fear and loathing such "devilish" places inspired in the Witnesses'
hearts, and the repulsion and fascination, seemed entirely lacking in his.
But it was his heart that killed him.
He'd had two heart attacks; on morning of that party, he'd been out preaching
for the first time since his convalescence. He was talking about his delight in
being able to go from door to door again, talking with gusto about his pleasure
in "sharing" (other Witnesses might "give the truth"; Mike
shared), when he clutched his chest and began to gasp for air. He took the
diamond ring he wore off his finger and gave it and his wallet to his wife (he
knew he was dying; his thoughts were for someone else). A few Witnesses went,
spontaneously and generously and compassionately, to his wife to support her. A
respected elder from Watchtower headquarters launched-as Mike's gasps began to
sound, horribly, more like the final rattle of death-into an interminable story
about the people he'd known who'd been taken unaware by death (I knew someone
else who died like that," he said, looking at Mike). Three-quarters of the
Witnesses present set themselves to clean up the room in order to "give a
good witness" to the police when they arrived. Mike was pronounced DOA.
The cops were given a speech about our hope in the resurrection. Mike himself
was ignored (except by the police, whose attempts to resuscitate him were
heroic); grief was shelved (Mike's wife was sedated). The Witnesses
congratulated themselves on the way the police had seemed to be impressed by
their decorum and their calm; in their zeal to "give a witness," the
actual fact of Mike's death seemed almost forgotten. I can't remember anyone
crying out in love or horror - or praying.
The task of telling Mike's young
daughter that he had died was delegated to me. As an elder drove me to her
house, he recited all the Scriptures I might use to comfort her. He might have
been reciting the Guinness Book of World Records. (The rest of the
Witnesses stayed behind; when I left, Mike's heavily sedated wife lay on a
couch while, around her, Witnesses talked about what a pleasant change it must
make for the cops to come into a "decent" house, how much nicer than
having to break up a drunken fight.) I looked at the elder in a vain attempt to
find some trace of sorrow or anger on his face as he continued to offer
memorized words of comfort. He had already buried Mike in some recess of his
mind; his concern was how to keep Mike's daughter from "going overboard
with immoderate grief" (his words - she was 12 years old). I have hated
very few people as much as I hated that man, then. "See if you can take
Mike's daughter out preaching with you tomorrow morning," he said.
"It'll keep her mind from selfishness.
Nobody had cried. Mike's daughter
cried, and I couldn't find it in my heart to read a single Scripture to her.
I came to live and work at Bethel -
Watchtower headquarters - in1953, when I was 19. I left early in 1956.
I had had over the years, since my
baptism in 1944, little niggles of doubt (and a constant conviction of sin). My
doubts terrified me.
Nobody ever told me that all believers
doubt, or that the logical consequence of the possession of free will is to
question, or that even mystics have at times felt abandoned by the God they
adore; what a lot of misery it would have saved me if someone had told me. But
the Witnesses couldn't tell me that, because they themselves didn't acknowledge
that it was true. To them, faith is total, unquestioning, uncritical,
unwavering, and undemanding.
I regarded my irritable intelligence as
a kind of predatory animal which, if not firmly reined, would spring on me,
attack me, and destroy me.
Since to doubt at all was intolerable,
the only solution that seemed possible was to submerge my doubts (to submerge
myself) completely. I wanted to be eaten alive, devoured by Jehovah, to spend so
much time in his service that my peevish spirit, humbled and exhausted, would
no longer have time for querulous doubts. Women are good at turning their
desolation to their advantage (or to what they think is their advantage); and what
I was doing by entering Bethel was making spiritual capital out of spiritual
despair, quelling my restlessness by giving it a death in a new life.
And I had other (baser) motives too:
There was, for a woman, great spiritual prestige in being admitted to Bethel.
It was both glamorous and holy. Men outnumbered women 10 to 1 at Bethel
(although, among rank-and-file Witnesses, women outnumbered men 3 to 1). I had
nothing against being surrounded by men. Part of the inner circle, circled about
by men; I thought that part would be nice.
And I wanted to please my mother, whose
standards I knew I never lived up to (I was never sure what they were) and
whose ambition for me was boundless, at the same time that her competition with
me was fierce. Simone Weil's mother is reported to have said once, with a
mixture of exasperation and tenderness, "Thank God you don't have a
daughter who's a saint." I had a mother who was thought to be a kind of
saint - the Bible Lady of Brooklyn, they called her. It was a foregone conclusion
that all my boyfriends would be more charmed by her than they would by me, by
her sacrificial gravity, her seductive saintly gaiety, which were all the more
alluring because she was beautiful, with wide blue eyes, a mouth that turned
down just slightly - just enough to suggest ineradicable sadness (which
everybody tried to eradicate). Viewing me as a spiritual extension of herself,
she would be pleased, I knew, if I went to Bethel; she would feel validated and
enhanced by my choice. And I would be making up to her for having failed to
make her happy. I believed, at that time, that I held the power to make her
happy. It was not a good thing, I know better in retrospect, to feel. I wanted
to make things good for her, to make up to her for all the things she didn't
have, for whatever it was she wept for in my bedroom every night. I wanted to
get away from that weeping, and from the acrimony that bound her and my
unbelieving father together more closely than the most enduring affection.
I wanted to allay her pain, and I
wanted her to stop passing her pain onto me. I really did believe that I was
the agent of her happiness. I don't know through what subtle instruction or
self-delusion I came to believe that. (But I do know that when, years later, I
read, in one of the works of the saints, that God wants us, obliges us,
to be happy, my first angry reaction was followed immediately by understanding:
of course He does, because if you're unhappy, all you can do is make someone
else responsible for your unhappiness and pass along your terrible pain. It
makes perfect sense to me that God forbids us to despair.)
And I wanted to get away from my
father, whose bewilderment took the form of rage, who wept for me (not for
himself), and whose tears I rejected and despised. I was in an alliance with my
mother against him - an unnatural alliance: my inclination, till my mother and
I joined forces against him, was to find him irresistible. It was an unholy
bonding; and while, at the time, I dismissed my father as negligible or feared
him as a monstrous "Opposer of The Truth," there must, I think, have
been part of my nature that recoiled against the pitiless, hard person I was
when I was with him. I wanted to get away from all of it - the fights, the
yelling, the tears, the recriminations, and the whispered secrets. I didn't
want to hear my mother's whispered secrets; I didn't want to be her girlfriend,
her "sister" (She signed her notes to me Connie. And when she
was mad at me she mailed her notes to me - though we shared not only the same
apartment, but the same bedroom - and then handed them to me when the mailman
came, with a hard suffering face that I feared more than I feared the judgment
of God.) If my mother insisted on going out preaching Christmas Eve, I didn't
want to be around to entertain my father's rages and then to defend her when
she returned. I didn't want to fight with my father with her holding my hand,
urging me on; I knew there was something sick and unholy about what we were
doing. (When she introduced herself to my friends, she said, "I am
Barbara's relative." She never called herself my mother.)
I took the only escape route I knew.
But if you had asked me then, I would have said, "I came to Bethel to
serve the Lord." And I would have meant it. Many of my motives were
obscure to me. But I did want to love God. (I didn't understand that the will to
believe is not quite the same as belief itself.)
I thought I loved God. I loved the idea
of loving Him. I knew I loved Arnold; I had loved him since I was 15,
when he was my high school Eng1ish teacher who had held my hand in school
assembly when I didn't salute the flag. Being at Bethel prevented me from
walking down his street every day, hoping for an "accidental" meeting.
But it didn't prevent me from fantasizing about him - from dreaming that he
would be converted that we would live together happily ever after in the New
World.
I told Nathan H. Knorr, then the
Watchtower Society's president, about Arnold - which was pretty stupid, because
I must have known what he'd tell me, and I must have guessed I'd disregard it.
He told me never to see Arnold again. If he had told me that I could never see
my mother or father I might have obeyed him; but Arnold was my mother and
father, and I couldn't not see him.
There were three public telephone
booths at Bethel, unventilated and airless and smelling of the sweat of 500
bodies; like all the doors at Bethel, these
had no locks; and I'd call Arnold from one of the booths when my craving
couldn't be denied, and we'd arrange to meet. Once I got to his living room and
I heard his beloved Schubert Trout Quintet or one of the Beethoven
quartets he always played for me, there was only joy. A guilt hangover the next
day took the form of headaches, a steel vise around my head. (And the guilt had
nothing to do with sex - there was no sex; I was guilty for loving him.)
So I carried all this baggage to Bethel
with me - my love for Arnold and my doubts; but I went, nevertheless (I really
believe this), in good faith. I meant to stay forever. Before I had been there
two years, I knew I would have to leave.
One afternoon, as I sat working in the
proofreading department of the Watchtower plant at 117 Adams Street, a sudden
black storm blew up, and two of the men with whom I shared proofreading tasks
raced to the plate glass windows and said, "Oh, boy! Maybe it's
Armageddon. Wouldn't it be wonderful if it was Armageddon? Do you think it's
Armageddon? Wow!" I laughed and laughed and laughed, because they sounded
so much more like Batman and Robin anticipating a caper with the Joker than
like decently awed men awaiting God's final judgment. And of course, my
laughter infuriated them. Their little-boy glee gave way to sententiousness and
censoriousness, and they silenced my hysterical laughter with glares, demanding
to know what, exactly, I found so funny. Perhaps my laughter had made them
aware of their own foolishness; I doubt it, though, because they took both
Armageddon and themselves very seriously (never for a moment doubting that the
Storm of Storms would leave 117 Adams Street, and them, unscathed). I quailed -
anything male and angry had the power to subdue me - and said in a voice I
didn't recognize as my own (it sounded like the voice of a petulant
9-year-old), "I don't want Armageddon to come."
It was the first visible crack in my
defenses.
I covered myself very quickly, and very
transparently (that was the kind of remark, I knew from experience, that was
not likely to go unreported to higher authorities): "I don't think enough
people are saved yet," I said. It must have sounded as hollow to them as
it did to me; and I felt hollow, as if the storm outside had blown through me,
leaving my soul as dry as a whistle.
Then I began to cry.
Margarita, the Spanish translator who
shared the room with us, gave me a grave and quizzical look. (Laughter is
threatening, tears are frightening when you are supposed at all times to
reflect the joy of the Lord and the modesty and the decorum of a woman. Grief
and raucous laughter are forms of aggression; they are the companions of doubt,
of "wrong thinking.") "I'm tired," I said. "Sometimes
when I think I'm going to have to get up for work at six thirty six days a week
for the rest of my life, I just don't think I can do it." "I do it one
day at a time," Margarita said sternly. "I do it because it would
kill my mother if I didn't," I said. Margarita thought that was a joke;
but the moment I said it, I knew it was true.
I stayed at Watchtower headquarters -
where I'd worked first as a housekeeper, then as a proofreader, for two and a
half years - six months after that outburst. It had been temperate compared
with what I was feeling; but it was the first time that I had revealed my
spiritual duplicity nakedly, or heard myself say something unguarded.
I had been frightened enough before,
for myself, when I felt that my faith, never entirely sure, was on the point of
breaking; now that I had exposed my feelings to others, judgmental others, I
was terrified.
(My diary for that day has one entry: I
am afraid, afraid, afraid.)
At night I went out preaching, or to
study classes in the Bethel residence. I smiled, talked, walked, sang hymns,
conducted myself like a real person in a real world. But I didn't feel real. I
felt as if everything were happening to someone else-as if I were both a
character trapped in someone else's story and the person who '~read" the
character; I was both inside and outside of my own life (which was someone
else's life). Nobody noticed. The most appalling thing of all was that I had
perfected my own part so well that nobody noticed.
At night I tried (as usual) to pray,
and (as usual) could not.
Somewhere I'd read of an order of
contemplative sisters who prayed till 5:30 every morning, to lessen the
violence done in those dark hours after midnight. I thought of them when I
couldn't sleep, which was most of the time. (I had traveled a long way in my
mind since I'd been taught that nuns were whorish, wicked representatives of
the Vatican - but nothing in the way I behaved reflected the way I was
beginning to think.) There was some comfort in believing that they were keeping
vigil during those long nights, when, for some reason, I always fell asleep at
exactly 4:10A.M. (I never knew why). I lay in bed picturing my body floating
above itself; and my skin felt thin and crusty, like something dangerous and
tender stretched across the mouth of a volcano. I felt as if my body were rent
with enormous fissures, and that my skin was inadequate armor, no armor at all.
(The best thing anyone could have done
for me then would have been to tell me I was going crazy. I envied crazy people
because they acted crazy, and because there were names for them. I could
not assign a name to the pain I felt. I smiled a lot. At one of my meetings with
Arnold, to whom I did not confide my troubles - I confided in no one - he told
me of a group of disturbed kids he was
working with who screamed and flailed around and blindly struck out at things.
I cried. He thought I was crying for them. But I was crying for myself. I
thought they were lucky. My screams never got screamed; my rage was neatly
contained.)
When I fell asleep, I dreamed. It was
always the same dream: I am a little girl in a walled garden, full of
old-fashioned flowers-freesias, sweet William, climbing roses, bachelor's
buttons, and (with no regard to seasons) white and purple lilacs. At the end of
the garden stands a creature of indeterminate sex, resplendent, dressed in
cloth of gold, who extends his/her arms to me in a gesture both maternal and
elegant, nurturant and magisterial. Will-less, I am drawn to the creature, who
calls to me in a voice that is at once supplicating and commanding. And as I
enter into its embrace, the voice, (which I yearn for and fear) becomes tactile
- it exists inside of me and outside of me; it becomes like molten silver
pouring through my veins. Paralyzed (bloodless), unable to resist, I am swept
away by the creature, who assumes various guises, some malevolent, some benign.
Held tight in that icy embrace, I am swept out and over the garden walls,
hurled into an empty sky, where, a Humpty-Dumpty of scattered parts, I hurtle
through the void-and nothing puts me back together again.
I
not know the meaning of the dream. The bells wake me at 6:30A.M. (they
are like an extension of the dream), and, pregnant with the dream, cold and
aching, I shower in the communal shower, while the voices around me intrude on
my nightmare. I put on the face and the demeanor I hope will see me through the
day, and I rundown three flights of stairs to the artificial light of the
yellow dining room, where I take my assigned place at a rectangular blue-metal
table, waiting for the Bible discussion that precedes our breakfast to begin. I
feel drugged; but even in this state - which is like sleepwalking through
someone else's dream - I will myself to have control. I try to behave like
other people - insofar as I can see other people: People lack definition at
this time; faces blur. But objects are harshly, clearly defined, like objects
in a hallucination. (I will never forget that dining room, its metal-topped
surfaces, cold and slippery to the touch.) I prepare myself to spend a day
among people who hate me.
New Yorker journalist Richard
Harris spent some time at Bethel in1955;he was later to write [June 16, 19561,
after sitting through a breakfast service, a description of "the women, a
number of whom resembled 4-H Club beauty queens, in simple cotton dresses. All
in all, they seemed a sprightly contented-looking group." I was one of
those women. So far from being contented, I had to resist the temptation to go
up to him and whisper (or shout), "Raise High the Roof Beam,
Carpenters!" I wanted to exchange a signal with an emissary from the
outside world.
I say that I spent my days among people
who hated me. I don't think that's a crazy perception (though, God knows, I was
not what could be called normal in those final six months). What was
crazy was that they would in a flash have said (did say) that they loved
me; and if asked why, they might have responded, "Because the Watchtower
Society says "We are a family and we must love one another." (Words
all lost their meanings: good, bad, crazy, love - they meant different
things in different mouths; and one was never sure whom to trust.)
Lara, the pretty girl who sat next to
me at table, hated me. (The eight men who sat at the same table more or less
ignored me, but I felt no ill will emanating from them; the worst they could do
was make me feel lonely, and I was lonely already.) The first day I sat at that
table, one of the men said, "Pass the coffee cream." So later I asked
Lara to "pass the coffee cream." She said, her fork moving without a
pause to her disdainful mouth, "It isn't coffee cream, it's
milk." Maybe she thought I was trying to endear myself to the brother whose
remark I'd parroted (and maybe she was right: I was a great mimic, of
necessity, in those days; I thought the way you invented a life for yourself
was to copy bits and pieces from other people). She chose from that moment to
dislike me. The only other sentence I can remember her saying directly to me in
the three years we sat together was "Your perfume makes me sick."
We were 450 men and 45 women at that
time, and only a handful of the women were under 35; so to be intensely
disliked by one young woman (who was herself cool and pretty and popular) was
no small thing. I never knew exactly what I had done, what I was, to
have incurred her displeasure. I could not believe anyone could be so unbending.
I almost admired the constancy of her aloof and critical disdain. My gratitude
was always there, waiting, ready to spill over her if she ever once smiled at
me. She never did. I could only imagine, from the way she looked at me, that
she believed I was always on the point of committing some outrage (and perhaps
her instincts were right). "Too smart for her own good," I learned
later she had pronounced me; "too goody-good." What an irony! I am
so ignorant, I wrote in my diary at night; and if she knew how bad I felt
myself to be, I doubt if she'd have liked me any better. I did the worst
possible thing anyone can do under these circumstances: I tried to model my
personality on those of successful people - a most unprofitable and ridiculous
undertaking.
I can't think of many things more awful
and more corrupting than having to wake up each morning to the sure knowledge
that you will be spending your time in intimate association with people who
despise you. Every day was like the first day of nursery school, knowing you
had some invisible deformity that would make everyone shun you. (When my own
children went to school for the first time, and were immediate social
successes, and casual successes at that, I said seventeen Hallelujahs; I'd
seen, in my imagination, their schoolrooms populated with Laras. I felt
triumphant - and also vindictive: I recited a vengeful litany. I hoped
everybody hated Lara's kids; hoped they picked on them; I hoped they were the
most unpopular girls in school; I hoped their stomachs ached every day from 9
to 3; I wanted Lara to know what it felt like. It is corrupting to be hated; I
didn't know I could bear so much malice for so many years.)
Lara; and Stan Russell and Tom Whiting,
who both felt that I had usurped their place in the printing plant and never
let me forget it. They snickered and gossiped with each other and came all over
pompous when I tried to talk with them. I deferred and deferred and embarked on
long windy paragraphs to justify my putting a comma into copy they had edited.
Which did me no good at all; they just muttered about women who had unbecoming
ambition, and laughed at me for trying. I always felt as if I were the object
of obscene teasing.
Stan punished me according to the means
he had at hand: he had me dismissed from the small preaching cell of which he
was the elder, because, he said, I didn't spend enough hours preaching. It was
a great humiliation to be dismissed from a preaching cell; and Stan saw to it
that my shame was bruited about. Whiting contented himself with telling me how
the "brothers" thought I was becoming sick with pride, that they
preferred the housekeeping sisters who made beds to me; and once, when someone
in the proofreading department left Bethel abruptly, with no explanation, he
said it was because I had "unmanned" him by red-penciling his copy
and that I might be responsible for his loss of faith. (Satan had used women
before to undo good men.) The man who left had later, Whiting alleged, tried to
hold up a bank I was given to understand that if I hadn't told him he'd let a
dangling participle go by, he might still be hale and hearty in the faith.
Actually, it strikes me as funny now:
Could I really have prayed to Jehovah to forgive me for being presumptuous
enough to undangle a brother's participle? I did. No wonder I'm superstitious
about words: I spent two years thinking my eternal salvation depended on my
approach to commas and split infinitives and dangling participles. It wasn't
funny at the time.
The truth is, there were people who
loved me, too. (Well, I say love: is it love if it can be - as it was,
the moment I left - so easily aborted?) There were women who loved me. There
were men who asked me to marry them. I never entertained the idea of marrying a
Bethelite. I must always have known, on some unconscious level, that I was
going to leave someday, that I would not stick it out. The men I was attracted
to were not the men who cared for me; I denied physical attraction (if a man
kissed me and it felt good, I immediately found reasons for not loving him). I
chose men who hadn't the remotest inclination to choose me - which is not so
uncommon; women do it all the time. My perversity, however, was extreme:
the impossible object was always the
adorable object. Some of the men who sought after me were sweet and kind. I
think about them sometimes; I want to call them up in the middle of the night
and ask them if they still remember me with affection (I remember them with
affection). But I tried that once, and I felt as if I were being rejected by a
computer printout; he quoted the Bible at me, with special emphasis on Gehenna,
Judas, and dogs returning to their own vomit. He had run his hands up my thighs
once, and introduced me to his mother, and confessed his own doubts; but he was
still in and I was out, and "What is there to talk about?" he said.
"You've divorced yourself from Jehovah's organization; you
blaspheme."
(My friend Peggy, an ex-Witness who has
survived, keeps telling me, whenever I announce my decision-usually late at night
and after several glasses of wine - to call someone who once said he loved me,
that I might as well go on a rescue mission to the Snow Kingdom. They can't
allow their hearts to thaw out, she says; and she's probably right. Peggy knows
my secret - which is that in my heart of hearts I believe that anyone who was
nice enough to love me then might be good enough to like me now. Having once
been cherished, however meagerly, I entertain the illusion that I will be
cherished still. It's hard to believe that everything is lost: it would be good
to believe that people can still connect.)
I'm talking about my life at Bethel as
if it were one of unrelieved gloom; and that isn't true. There were times when
I felt absolutely high - stoned on God-talk (which, as it happens, can be a
powerful aphrodisiac, among other things). Walking across the Brooklyn Bridge
with my friend Walter, holding hands and talking about God; learning to dance
the tango with Walter and Peggy and Walter's roommate, Norman; dancing all
night on the Society's missionary yacht in New York harbor; picnicking under
the George Washington Bridge - there were easy, good times. And the best times
were when we were in other people's homes, teaching them the Bible, and they
offered us the intimate details of their lives and we felt enhanced and enriched and part of a loving community
serving a higher cause.
But in the end, none of that was
enough. In the end, my decision to leave had very little to do with people who
loved me and people who didn't, with good times and bad times. In the end, it
had everything to do with my feelings about the world, which I had been taught
was reserved for destruction and which I nevertheless obdurately loved, though
my ignorance of it was profound. It had to do with my feeling cramped and
lonely and frightened; leaving was survival.
All of this is in the diary I kept the
last six months I was at Bethel. When I read these diary notes now, they seem
to me grossly self-conscious, not to say narcissistic (but I was, after all,
writing as if God were peering over my shoulder-and it's hard to know how to
play to that audience); and they are full of Nichols-and-May 1950s joke words,
like "evolve" and "aware" (I was reading Camus, and I was
feeling like Columbus, discovering new continents of thought and hoping against
hope that the way West was the way East - and that I would blunder my way out
to the riches of the world). They sound like the writings of arrested
adolescence (I was an arrested adolescent).
When I read these diary notes now, they
seem not only florid and naive, but coy as well: I was afraid of revealing
myself even to myself; I played mind tricks. Words that were too heavily
charged for me to commit to paper - words like leaving religion - I
wrote in shorthand (under the assumption, I suppose, that neither my roommate
nor Jehovah knew Pittman). The diaries abound in sentences, I'm sorry to say,
like "I believe" -or, "I don't believe" - "in
happiness"; "I think I can love spring again." I'm leaving them
out; as, for the sake of this record, I'm leaving out all sentences of the
"I - feel - I - can - stand - on - tiptoe - and - embrace - the -
sun" variety.
They were, at the time, deeply
felt-which is, unfortunately, no guarantee that they sound authentic twenty
years later. (Authentic is another 1950s word; I suppose that if I had
left the Witnesses in the '60s, I would have fallen in love with geodesic domes
or used a political vocabulary in which to couch my despair. As it was, I
borrowed from the existentialists - which may not have been a bad thing. I
still love Camus, Salinger, Brando-the-wild-one, and the rakish skinny Sinatra
who faced the world, or so it seemed, with showy grit more than I love Abby,
Jerry, Tom, Rennie.)
I can barely decipher these notes, they
are written in such a wild, erratic hand; and the urgency and pain that are
missing from the words are in the handwriting. (There are, as a friend of mine
says, no inanimate objects.) It looks like the handwriting of three different
people; and I won't labor the reason for that.
God can't kill Arnold. How can God kill Arnold? Arnold
sends pepperoni to all the New Utrecht High School hoods in jail. The other day
he bought three bikes for the kids of the Chinese laundry-man. He spends his
evenings listening to Beethoven quartets. (I wish he would kiss me.) He used to
excuse us from English homework if we went to see a Marx Brothers film. Also he
brought us chocolate-covered ants when we wrote good compositions. (Does Jehovah
have a sense of humor? Why doesn't God ever laugh?) Once Arnold read an
Archibald MacLeish poem to me in class. To me:
'Not with my hands' strength nor with difficult labor
Springing the obstinate words to the bones of your breast
And the stubborn
line to your young stride and the breath to your breathing
And the beat to your haste
Shall I prevail on the hearts of unborn men to remember
(What is a dead girl but a shadowy ghost
Or a dead man's voice but a distant or vain affirmation
Like dream words most)
Therefore I will not speak of the undying glory of women
I will say you were young and straight and your skin fair
And you stood in the door and the sun was a shadow of
leaves on your shoulder
And a leaf on your hair
I will not speak of the famous beauty of dead women
I will say the shape of a leaf lay once on your hair
Till the world ends and the eyes are out and the mouths
broken
Look! It is there!'"
And why, for that matter, should God kill Archibald
MacLeish? How come all the people I love are going to be killed at Armageddon,
and I'm going to have to live forever in the New World with Russell and Tom
Whiting and Lara - who are mean? Brother K. says I'm presumptuous
because I'm making myself out to be more compassionate than Jehovah. Is it
presumptuous to like people who like you? And to want them to be saved? If I
were God I'd want everybody be saved. (And if I were God I guess I could love
Stan and Tom and Lara, but I don't - so maybe I am presumptuous, after all.) I
don't have the energy to be an apologist for things it's difficult for me to
accept or understand: Why were the Israelites so merciless? Why did they
stone sex-offenders and delinquent children? (Poor Onan.) Why - as my father
keeps asking - did Jehovah send bears to rip apart the children who mocked Elijah's
baldness?
I love going out on Bible studies and teaching people. It
feels so good, I feel so elevated. But does this mean that this is the Truth? It
may mean only that when people are not dignified by exclusive devotion to a
cause that demands more than their normal natures can supply, they are not
extraordinary. And I'm afraid of ordinariness. At Bible studies we meet on the
highest plane - we see each other in the most sympathetic light, as humans
admitting our frailty and striving for beauty and order (for good? for the
Divine?). But the relationship deteriorates when the mutual search is ended and
we resume our daily lives. Then everything becomes flat. And off I go to new
relationships, drawing strength from them. I feel like a parasite, battening on
other people's needs and living off their hunger (I love their hunger); and
teaching what I don't even know to be true. I don't feel lonely when I'm
preaching. This wonderful thing that sometimes happens between me and another
person, this interchange of love, this empathy-like hands held out in the
darkness of our common suffering . . . I wouldn't have it any more if I left. I
have a terrible fear that I would go around begging people, asking them to
share their suffering and their need, to let me see them. Is it because I love
them? Or am I using them? to enrich myself? I don't know the difference between
giving and taking any more . . . I'm not a successful proselytizer. I can't
credit myself with victories for the faith, or even, lately, with propagating
the faith. If I have victories at all, they're personal and human victories. They
don't have much to do with God, and they have lessto do with Judgment. I'm
successful in establishing beautiful relationships, not often in gaining
converts. One time a companion brought to my attention that I'd remarked to a
couple with whom we were concluding a study, "We have to feel free to talk,
to share. We can't be afraid of offering our feelings. We can be friends. Our
religion doesn't matter." This was heresy. I hadn't even been aware that
I'd said it.
Their only reality is otherworldly reality. They deny the
world, and that denial is contrary to my nature. I can love Christ. but not
Jehovah, and not the end of the world. Is that possible?
I can't judge or condemn - or be God's agent for condemnation.
I can't bear to belong to a group that considers itself favored. I can't accept
the destruction of a child. I can't exclude from my love all the people who
cannot believe. "He who loves the world is an enemy of God." I love
the world. I will not allow my friends to be chosen for me: "We must love
one another and die."
Brother K. came back from a round-the-world trip today.
Told us about it at meeting. Said he was bored on airplane - not enough
magazines
to read. I'd be bored on airplane too. But I'm not a spiritual leader. Isn't
God's spirit supposed to un-bore you? If you were really full of the Holy
Spirit, would you be bored? Why couldn't he think? Or pray? Or meditate? Or
contemplate? What would he do on a desert island? How can I trust a spiritual
leader who would be bored on a desert island . . . Why am I so harsh? . . .
(Can a spiritual leader of limited intelligence and compassion be qualified to
lead the starved and suffering to God and to shepherd the flock of God?) Also
told us that he sat behind Brando on airplane. (I.e., Brother K. travels
first-class. So how can he rant at priests' "living off the fat of the
land"? I don't see him practicing poverty.) Said Brando "behaved
well." Suppose he expected him to wear torn tee-shirt and scratch armpits.
Said he mentioned Brando because he'd heard one of the sisters had a crush on
him. He meant me. Nobody knew whether to laugh or not, because nobody knew
whether I was being reprimanded for having a crush on Brando, or whether
Brother K. thought it was funny. So there was an embarrassed silence. (Anyway, I
was embarrassed - nobody looked at me.)
I can't give myself to a religion unless it is completely
and without reservation. (I may not.) This religion demands complete
dedication, submission, acceptance. I have reservations. I have always had.
Fromm says that the story of Jonah and the whale shows
that Jonah had a strong sense of order and law, but no love. But we say Jonah
did not do his duty, was not obedient to God, because he didn't go to Nineveh,
where he was sent. We stress duty and obedience to authority rather than love
for man. Fromm says the whale was a symbol of the isolation and imprisonment
that results from lack of love and solidarity: the whale is hell, the hell of
not being able to love. I don't want to live my life in the belly of the whale.
. . . I don't want to be contemptuous of weakness (including my own).
I've been sneaking into guest rooms to read, late at
night: Emerson. Thoreau. Dead men are my comfort.
Why should intellectual curiosity be condemned and feared,
and intelligence be regarded as an obstacle to overcome?
This is what I want: To be able to follow my thoughts
wherever they lead me. Not to accept ready-made answers, easy, all encompassing
solutions, panaceas. To be able to make my own connections. to read my own
significance into relationships, to make my own meanings . . . no fetters. Not
somebody else's ideas of what god's will is for me.
We escape the anguish of making decisions. We don't have
to feel guilty or responsible when we see people starving because we are part
of a movement that tells them how to escape their condition. We discharge our
responsibility by offering a road to salvation they may - but probably won't -
take advantage of. For those who turn our brand of salvation down, we have no
pity. They reject the way of happiness; but we can tell ourselves we've done
our part.
I can understand the nature of the Living Being without me
only through the Living Being which is in me.
They despise everything they can't understand. I cannot
comprehend their inability to feel for those in anguish and doubt, who are
seeking to understand - through means other than theirs - man's condition. They
are ignorant of that which they condemn: "Philosophy is of the Devil."
They are so ignorant, and so repulsively arrogant in their assertion of
superiority over the "worldly wise." They are proud of not knowing.
How dare they?
I can't accept their rationalization for segregation:
"It might offend people of good-will if we integrated." Cowardice. Is
a loss of membership worth this wishy-washy approach? They can accept bigots,
but condemn activists. Even JWs who are Negroes accept it because the whole
religion denies the freedom of the individual, and stresses the submergence of
the individual for the good of the glorious whole.
I can't love only those whom God loves.
Last night at meeting, talk about the symbolic meaning of
Deborah's camels. More energy brought to bear on the symbolic
meaning of Deborah's camels (I fell asleep) than on capital punishment. I can't
accept capital punishment or their reasons for espousing it. Also: Refuse to be
told what I must feel and believe about artificial insemination, intermarriage,
etc., etc., etc. Can't follow a party line.
I could never marry someone who has never had a doubt. It
would have to be someone who has not arrived at a fixed state of mind, someone
without an attitude. I will never be; I will always be going toward. But
it really isn't important whether I marry or not. I think - feel, which is more
reliable - that I won't.
What scares me is how good I am at dissembling. I've
learned to give back to others the view of themselves they ask for. I keep a
central core of disbelief, but I act as if I believe. I don't know what
to do, how to stop.
Sometimes I do love them. They transcend themselves.
That's beautiful. But then they become rigid and dogmatic. The love they
inherit from the teachings of Christ is narrowed and limited by their rejection
of the world. Many of them were attracted by love and goodness to a life of
giving. But their goodness is contradicted by their hatred of the world, their
relegating all who will not listen to destruction - the "goats" who
are against them. Their work satisfies the need to express themselves, and to
give. It is better to give than to receive, and their need to give is fulfilled
in their preaching work. But so stern and inflexible. (Why do I say they?
If I say they, what am I doing here? They think I am one of them. Them.)
I'm here; I go to meetings; I preach - and a lot of it
gratifies me. How can it gratify me if I reject all their (our?) premises? Find
myself thinking almost constantly in alien patterns of thought. Do I do what I
do because I am carried away by momentum (inertia)? terror? habit? Can't think.
Very tired. Mind is paralyzed. Can't carry thoughts to their logical conclusion
- afraid to. Escape in daydreams - dreams of a life completely different from
mine, lovely lovely dreams. I can't accept any of the old answers. I seem
unable to find new ones that satisfy me. I don't know what to think anymore. I
don't know who I am anymore.
I don't remember where I copied this from (Nietzsche?):
"The human being who does not wish to belong to the mass must merely cease
being comfortable with himself; let him follow his conscience which shouts at
him: 'Be yourself! What you are at present doing, opining, and desiring, that
is not really you.' " My roommate found it written on an index card;
handed it to me without a word.
This is what I think about good acts: They're like
sandbags piled up on the shore against waves and waves of evil. And every time
somebody does something good - even if it goes unnoticed, or seems futile -
it's another sandbag added to the barricades that stop evil from overcoming us;
so the evil never completely conquers the good. Nothing is futile. (Sandbags.
Or beanbags? Tossing beanbags against the Monster, so the Monster is always
bruised by one good act - which can be a playful act, play is good.) But the
Witnesses think everything has to be measured in terms of its immediate success.
(Prefer the mentality of people who went off to the Spanish Civil war,
myself.) And it has to be a total success: Armageddon, the new World.
There are good, beautiful, anguished people out there; I
know there are. I can't despair. I know they are there. Their strivings
maybe futile; but they are beautiful. . . . Anne Frank: "I know it's
terrible trying to have any faith . . . when people are doing such horrible . .
- But you know what I sometimes think? I think the world may be going through a
phase. It'll pass, maybe not for hundreds of years. but some day . . . I still
believe, in spite of everything, that people are really good at heart."
Everything must be questioned. No complacency, no repose.
I'd like to see things clearly, for what they are - like a
child, or a poet. Yesterday, out preaching with C.H., passed a
fruit-and-vegetable stand, which prompted a homily on God's abundant harvest in
the New World, Israel's jubilee, on and on - he never even looked at a
single peach. Saw nothing. Everything exists in the future, or exists as an
object lesson; no delight in the present. . . . The other day, some visitors
came to Bethel, made some remark about the harbor view and the skyline (Oh, I love
it: What kind of King Kong God would want to gobble it up?). L.F., who was
shepherding them around, said (with that smile that's supposed to be
razzle-dazzle, actually it's more phony than the smiles on pink-plaster
Madonnas), "Oh, we keep our eyes firmly on God's New World; we just don't
have time to admire worldly scenery." I was mortified. (Not supposed to be
mortified.) Then L. pointed out all the furniture in the lounge that had been
made in our carpentry shop, which, even I can see, is ugly. Something
has to be done about the plastic flowers. Is good taste an attribute of the
Devil? Is it a mistake to want God to have some class? I know that the people
in Brooklyn Heights laugh at us, and I know I'm not supposed to care, but I do
care. . . . Like when Arnold said Awake! mag. sounded as if it were
written by reasonably intelligent junior high school students.
Self-denial without a self: If I am to deny myself, I must
first have a self to deny.
Reading Fromm on the distinction between universal ethics
and "socially immanent ethics." Love thy neighbor is a
universal ethic and valid for society today and for us all. But Jehovah also
commanded the Israelites to stone sex offenders and disobedient children
without compassion. Maybe that was a social ethic necessary to perpetuate the
society and cultural structure of that time. (Tho you'd think God could have
found a better way.) So I don't have to accept that as good, or justify it. But
the witnesses make no distinction-they accept both the loving and the stoning
as equally valid, both issuing from God. I'm not sure I can love such a God. .
. I wish there were someone I could
talk to. Someone who loves God.
Courage is the result of calm consideration of what I risk
and what I am after.
Lord have mercy, Christ have mercy. We never pray for mercy, we always
pray for justice. Perfect justice-what a horror. In the name of the Father
and the Son and the Holy Ghost, Amen. I'm not supposed to say that. I can't
hate the Catholic Church. Maybe my Catholic baptism "took." I don't
know if I believe in God. I love Jesus. Nothing I say or feel makes sense.
When we go from door to door, we urge Catholics and Jews
to "read for themselves" what JWs have to say, not to take someone's
word for it. ("Investigation never hurt anyone. Read our
literature.") Yet JWs are warned on threat of spiritual death not to read
the "poisonous" literature of other religions, or secular literature
that advances another point of view. Which stems from conviction that we have
the only truth. (Or from fear?) Everything I know about other religions, I know
from them. Everything I know of God I know from them.
Brother Knorr wears terrible suits. . . . Also ties. . . .
I got my $60 yearly clothing allowance today. Spent it on books and plants. So
now will have to darn stockings, or ask my mother for money for clothes. Stupid,
stupid, stupid thing to do. (Don't regret it.) Also bought tickets to Death
of a Salesman. Three. Don't know whom to take.
If "The Truth" is so overpowering, why should it
not be able to withstand the attacks of higher education?
Took Esther and Mike to see Salesman. A mistake.
They wanted to leave. . . . Bro. Franz says all "worldly
entertainment" is equally bad - My Fair Lady just as
"distracting" as Death of a Salesman, therefore just as
"obscene." Told Arnold this; first time I've heard him curse: Said to
tell Franz to get a copy of Hamlet and shove it up his ___. Which, he said, was
already accommodating his (Franz's) head, and, speaking of heads, when was I
going to start to use mine? Said a little brute force would do me good,
unfortunately he wasn't the man to apply it.
Went for a walk in Greenwood Cemetery. Very comforting.
The dead are very nice, like children, they can't do anybody any harm. Wouldn't
mind being dead.
I believe that doubt is an indispensable part of the
search for truth. I do not believe there is anything greater than I am; except,
perhaps, all men. And I know how to serve all men only by respecting
myself, fulfilling myself, being true to the truth within me. I am part of all
men. . . Is God more important than man? Is reason ridiculous? Logic may have
its drawbacks, but it's still the best thing we have. Isn't it?
I can't be bent by laws that others have made.
My mother cowers before life - just as she turned her back
and ran up the subway steps when my brother walked dangerously near the tracks.
She draws life from this religion. Negative meets negative (= positive?). Life
overcame her. This gives her power over life.
I may be mediocre all the rest of my life. My whole life
may be mediocre. But that's the chance I take, and I think it's worth taking.
I've been living a split-level existence. Can't. I've been telling people for
over ten years what life means, but I don't know myself. (And what is the meaning
of my own existence, and are those two separate questions?)
My favorite sentences in the Bible: "What is
truth?" (Jesus never said.) And, "Jesus wept."
I am so ignorant. My father should have stopped me. He
tried. Not hard enough. Arnold, too. The men I love never force me to do
any thing. I wish they would. I wouldn't thank them if they did. I want
somebody to make this stop. Afraid.
Clearly, something had to give, break,
bend: me. Inaction had become intolerable (I couldn't, in honor, stay). Action
seemed impossible (I was as afraid to leave as I was afraid of the psychic
consequences of not leaving) - physically impossible, as in those dreams
where you try to escape and your legs refuse to carry out your commands; you
are all motion and no movement, stuck. I couldn't tread water any more without
eventually drowning in my own contradictions. I was very, very lucky (what I
mean to say is, Providence was divinely good. But that understanding came
later; I'm anticipating): I shuddered and shook and cracked, but slowly and
quietly, and not explosively; I broke down in stages, not all at once. And
picked up the pieces as I went along. Everything that happened was terrible,
but the terror went on for so long, I learned to live with it familiarly; I made
pain my ally. Like an amusement-park horror-house ride: every time you turn a
corner, you say, Well, that one wasn't so bad, and you steel yourself for the
next one and think that maybe that one will be easier, and you know there's an
end somewhere, if only you can hang on.
The first thing that went was my voice.
Which probably got sick of itself: it had told so many lies; it was so many
voices, all fighting for equal time. Toward the end, when I rang doorbells to
preach, I opened my mouth and nothing came out. Nothing. As effective a
paralysis as if God Himself had severed my vocal cords. Out of everything wrong
and terrible and bad, something good: I stopped going from door to door. The
decision had been made for me; I had been rendered mute. Long, lazy Sunday
mornings in bed: for the first time in almost fifteen years, Sunday mornings in
bed. Doing nothing. Looking out at the harbor. Waiting. The passivity that is
supposed to be woman's greatest enemy, a boon: too passive even to feel guilt.
Then, next, the thing with the stairs.
I was still going out in the evenings to Bible studies. Only I didn't talk to
would-be converts about the Bible anymore. I don't remember what we talked about
(everything here gets blurred); I remember being fed a lot, plates of food
and cups of tea, and holding children on my lap. (How good people were! I wish
I could remember who they were, to repay them. This is the part of the horror
ride where the tunnel is dark; I remember only their kindnesses. I don't know
what they made of me. Did they think I was sane?)
But that, too, ended. First, I couldn't
walk down stairs. Every house had stairs; the stairs were always narrow. After
the doors were shut and the voices and the warmth were over, I hugged the
banisters and edged down sidewise like a crab. Sometimes it took me an hour to
negotiate a flight of stairs. Stood paralyzed and nauseated at the top of the
stairs - a void at the bottom of the stairs. Once, this is funny, I bumped my
way down three flights on my ass; couldn't trust my legs. (No; not funny.) Then
(this is funny), I couldn't walk up stairs. The paralysis was spreading.
(I told Arnold, making light of it. He said, "Fear of going down
stairs is a death wish. Fear of going up stairs must be a life wish. You're
making progress.") I stopped going out at night to Bible studies. (I never
said goodbye to any of those people. I forgive myself for this. I can't regret
any thing anymore.)
Meanwhile, during the day, nothing had
changed. (Everything had changed.) Except that I kept falling asleep. Every
time I sat down, alone in my room, my eyes closed, and I slept, for what seemed
to be five or ten minutes. Small blackouts. I didn't resist them. Delicious
little secret deaths.
Then, one night, I was in the subway.
(I don't remember what I was doing there, where I was coming from. My diary
doesn't tell me. I'd stopped making notes in my diary, too enervated to write.)
It was late ay night. There were tracks on either side of me that seemed to
stretch into black infinity. Marooned. I remember the subway walls-blistery
with ugly wet patches - and a dim, sick light. A train pulled in, and I
couldn't walk to it. And then another, and another - and I couldn't make myself
walk. Will didn't enter into it at all. If I thought of anything at all, it was
rats. In the damp, underground, there are rats. Waves and waves of nausea. I
began to think I was hallucinating this. But the sweet-sour smell of vomit,
mine, was real. (As was the unlovely fact that I had wet my pants.) At 6 A.M.,
as if a spell had been broken, I walked to a train. I had been standing there
for seven hours.
I got to Bethel in time to shower.
Doused myself with perfume (Lily of the Valley). I remember the morning text
for that day: "What are these wounds in thine hands . . . Those with which
I was wounded in the house of my friends."
That night, I began to write in my
diary again. I began to rehearse the speech I would give Brother Knorr when I
told him I would leave:
Dear Brother Knorr: I am not equal to demands, fatigued in
mind and body. Can't think. Don't have proper motivation. No go-power. Need
renewal, refreshment, need to overcome my own moods and sensitivities. Not fair
to Jehovah, his organization, or myself if I stay. Feel close to breaking.
They will think this is the easy way. To them it means no
responsibility, no doorbells, not having to submit to authority. I know it is
the hard way. To fight my way to my own truth, accepting nothing easily, to
make my own decisions, to accept my aloneness and my loneliness and to have no
one at night to thank for joy or to ask respite from pain, never to be really
sure-always struggle and uncertainty.
They'll say rest is the answer. I know it isn't. I know
this instinctively, just as I know I must leave. I know if I am ever to become
whole again, it must be in my own way. They'll tell me to work at the
Watchtower farm - they send cuckoos to the farm. But I know that if I'm going
to find God again, it has to be myself - not fourteen hours of work a day and
cows for two weeks and no time to think. Different fetters. I need a broad
margin to my life now - room to think under circumstances that make thinking
possible. Slowly. I can't afford to get lost in a world of rushing and whirling
and falling exhausted into bed every night, waking up knowing that everything
is dry and gone.
I must leave a spiritual vocation because I have lost my
spirituality. I know that I must leave to find myself. If I do not, nothing
will ever be right again. In destroying myself, crushing myself, submerging
myself, I am destroying my faith. In finding myself, I may find God. If I can
just have the courage to take one step at a time. I must not panic. If life is
mean, then I must accept it on my own. No artifice, no illusions. What is there
left to bear? Mediocrity, futility, the nothingness of life without God? If
that has to be my daily bread, so be it.
And still I couldn't leave.
Now this is where the fairy Godmother
(God/Father?) steps in. In the guise of a balding optometrist (charlatan or
scientist or saint, he may have saved my life), in Greenwich Village, across
the street from St. Joseph's Church (where now I sometimes go to Mass). Why did
I go to Greenwich Village to which I had never been, for eye glasses? The Lord
knows. (I assume, so much have I changed, that He does.) I don't remember the
name of that eye doctor; his shop is no longer there.
He took an inordinately long time
examining my eyes. He said: "I don't know your life or who you are or what
you're doing. But whatever you're doing, you have to stop it. I've never seen
anybody so rigidly controlled, and I've never seen so much strain. You're
seeing things that aren't there, and you're not seeing things that are there.
You may last six days or six weeks or six months, but you're headed for a
breakdown, and it won't be pretty when it comes. "Then he said, with a
flash of insight that frightened me with its acuity, "I sometimes have to
tell priests to take six months off. I'm telling you to take the rest of your
life off, if that's what you have to do. If you want to live."
It was all I needed.
I ran down the subway steps. No terror.
Somebody had finally told me I was crazy, or as close to it as made no
difference. I told my roommate not to wake me up for breakfast, overriding her
protests almost gaily (the release!): "The doctor says I'm killing
myself." Also slyly (and merrily): "He thinks I'm cracked."
All I'd needed was someone to tell
me. Another voice, a voice outside my own head.
I slept, on and off, for three days.
The resident chiropractor stuck his head in once in a while and offered me cans
of soup. (I was not particularly enchanted with the resident chiropractor: his
main approach to all physical ailments was a vibrator, which he applied to body
parts we weren't even supposed to know the names of.) He sat there with his lap
full of Campbell's, urging me to get out of bed to receive it. I nodded my
thanks. I didn't want to get out of bed. I didn't want soup or voices or vibrators
or sympathy.
My roommate looked frightened and
didn't ask any questions. She prayed ostentatiously. The only complete sentence
I can remember saying in those three days is "Mary, for God's sake, stop flopping!"
Margarita came in once to ask me if I wanted anything. "An apple
turnover," I said.
When the three days were over, I made
an appointment to see Brother Knorr. I was taking in great greedy drafts of
air; I felt buoyant.
Brother Knorr thought I needed a rest.
He suggested that I transfer the Society's farm in upstate New York: manual
work to bludgeon my brain cells into acquiescence. He addressed all his remarks
to the Statue of Liberty. Or so it seemed: he sat with his broad back toward
me, facing New York Harbor. His enormous desk between us. More than that
between us. Worlds (the world) between us.
I said No, no rest. I didn't trust
myself to say anything more.
He swiveled around in his chair (made
to order in the carpentry shop.)
"Weren't you high school
valedictorian?"
"No."
"But you were smart."
"Yes."
"That's your trouble."
I was dismissed.
(I was glad he didn't offer to shake my
sweaty hand. I thought, on the way down in the elevator, how long it had been
since anybody had held me or touched me.)
I packed my suitcase. I called my
mother. She came with a friend to collect me, my suitcase, and a driftwood lamp
(my only possession. I dropped off my key at the front desk. It was snowing. We
drove back to Bensonhurst in silence. Back to the bedroom I shared with my
mother and to a silence that has remained unbroken between us: she has never
asked me why I left.
I would like to be able to say that
that was it - clean and finished and a final door slammed; courage exercised
and rewarded. But I was back in the bedroom with my mother's weeping; and
another charade began.
(I was 22; 1 had no money and no job. I
could have gone to Arnold, perhaps, but I was afraid to ask. I didn't want to
go to him as a waif and a stray; and suppose he refused to take me in? And I
was in love with him. I always had been. I didn't want him to bring me chicken
soup. I was beginning to think about sex, and about his sexuality, which was
ambiguous, and I felt stubbornly that I had to do what I was going to do alone
- and that in any case, my passion and my pain were beginning to frighten him.
He would always be there to offer me his hand; he would never really take me
on. I wanted him, however, to ask. He didn't.)
I went to local congregation meetings with my mother. I didn't know how to tak