Visions of Glory - A Series

	Visions of Glory Series with Barbara Grizzuti Harrison vignettes of this famous author's life, as reviewed from her out-of-print book, Visions of Glory--A History and a Memory of Jehovah's Witnesses New York: Simon and Schuster, 1978
The Yellow Convertible, and Mike	Barbara discovers the lack of joy in everything.

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 little 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 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 a 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 ice 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 the 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 last 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.