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
God can't kill Arnold	Barbara discovers a man of real love for others and herself.

I had grown up in the gross and painful experience of casual anti-Semitism. By the time I was 15, I could no longer countenance it. I fell in love with a Jew. Arnold was my teacher—English 31J, New Utrecht High School. I occasionally visit that place just to look at it—a prisonlike building so bleak and unlikely that miraculously provided me with the essential person, the person who taught me how to love, and how to doubt.

If, before I met and loved Arnold, I felt that life was a tightrope, I felt afterward that my life was lived perpetually on a high wire with no safety net. I was obliged, by every tenet, to despise him. To be "yoked with an unbeliever," an atheist, and an intellectual . . . the pain was exquisite.

Arnold became interested in me because I was smart; he loved me because he thought I was good. He nourished and nurtured me. He paid me the irresistible compliment of totally comprehending me. He hated my religion, but he loved me. I had never before been loved unconditionally. He came, unbidden, to sit with me at every school assembly and hold my hand while everyone else stood to salute the flag. We were highly visible, and I was very much comforted. And this was during the McCarthy era. Arnold had a great deal to lose, and he risked it for me. Nobody had ever risked anything for me before. How could I believe he was wicked?

We drank malteds on his porch and read T. S. Eliot and listened to Mozart. We walked for hours, talking of God and goodness and happiness and death. We met surreptitiously. (My mother so feared and hated the man who was leading me into apostasy that she once threw a loaf of Arnold's Bread out the window; his very name was loathsome to her.) Arnold treated me with infinite tenderness; he was the least alarming man I had ever known. His fierce concentration on me, his solicitous care uncoupled with sexual aggression, was the gentlest and most thrilling love I had eve known. He made me feel what I had never felt before—valuable and good.

It was very hard. All my dreams centered around Arnold, who was becoming more important, certainly more real, to me than God. All my dreams were blood-colored. I fantasized that Arnold was converted and survived Armageddon to live forever with me in the New World, or that I would die with Arnold, in fire and flames, at Armageddon. I would try to make bargains with God—my life for his. When I entered Bethel, I confessed my terrors to Nathan H. Knorr. I said that I knew I could not rejoice in the destruction of "the wicked" at Armageddon (Arnold would be among them). I was told that being a woman, and therefore weak and sentimental, I would have to go against my sinful nature and obey God's superior wisdom—which meant never seeing Arnold again.

I did see him again. I had no choice. We never exchanged more than a chaste and solemn kiss; but he claimed me. (I never told him I loved him—I thought the words would set the world off its axis—but of course he knew . He said to me once, "You are so terribly unpossessive." I never knew what he meant.) When I was with him, I felt as if I were in a state of grace.

To say that our relationship was ambiguous is to belittle it; I know now that he loved many men and women, and all of them thought of Arnold as singularly their own. (It has not happened, as it often does, that his death clarified his life. For all of us who loved him, he moves still, mysteriously, enigmatically, through our imaginations, never defined, grieved for still, always loved.) I tell myself that he loved no one more than he loved me..

When I walked out the door of Bethel for the last time, one of my fellow workers said, "But why?"