28
The Principle of Separation
That very night, around 11, Sugar spotted Roger’s Pontiac parked up the block, in front of the Fredericksons’. Sugar and Ruth had turned in at ten-fifteen, after the news, but they couldn’t sleep, so they listened to the Troubadour, and then a car came slowly up the street, the headlights in their bedroom window making a bright square drifting across the ceiling, then stopped, and the lights went out but the motor was running. Sugar dressed and went downstairs and out to the yard to investigate. He recognized the Pontiac. He approached. The rear window was steamed up. He rapped on the passenger window, and heard rustling and snickering inside, and Roger opened the door and said good evening, and both he and Kate appeared disheveled and Kate’s blouse was misbuttoned. Sugar grabbed Kate by the wrist and hauled her out kicking and yelling, and he pointed a big finger at Roger and forbade him ever to see her again. “I will not tolerate you treating my daughter like a common tramp and trollop,” he said. He towed her to the house. On the front step she called him a name he hadn’t been called since his Army days. He cocked his arm as if he might wallop her and she called him one even worse. He let go. He cried, “Where did you ever learn words like those?”
She said, “I learned them by living! That’s how. I actually live life. Unlike some other people around here who I could name.”
“I forbid you to speak profanity in this house. I’m your father. And I forbid you to see that person again.”
She said, “Well, Roger’s going to be a father too. What about him?”
It was a restless night at their house. Kate threw some clothes in a suitcase and said she was going to run away at the first opportunity and flopped down on the couch to wait, and Ruth and Sugar made a pot of coffee and sat up until 4 A.M., weeping and reading from Scripture and arguing with her about the meaning of obedience, and Sugar even put the Mormon Tabernacle Choir on the hi-fi, as if this might clarify matters. Cranked it up loud and lit several candles, and the room was full of Mormons singing “Lead, Kindly Light” and “How Great Thou Art” while Ruth started making chocolate-chip cookies, and finally, exhausted, talked out, they fell into a fitful sleep until 11 when Sugar brought Kate over to us. Ours was the only house she would consent to stay in.
Sugar brought Kate over and she was put under house arrest in the older brother’s bedroom, among his old Science Fair projects including one about the development of the embryo chicken. Mother went upstairs to talk with her. I heard Kate crying. Daddy had stayed home from work. “I laid down the law,” Sugar said, “and she defied me and I have to kick her out of the house. What else can you do?” He looked beat-up, like he’d fallen down the stairs and had a lung removed. “I better go home and shave,” he said.
“I thought I’d seen everything,” said Daddy, “but this takes the cake.”
I asked him, “What’s wrong?”
“You know perfectly well.”
When Mother came down to the kitchen, she was a little weepy too. She said it was one of the longest days of her life and it wasn’t even noon yet. She said, “I don’t want you to talk to her. She needs to be alone.”
—Is she sick?
—Not exactly.
—Is she in trouble?
—I’ll tell you all about it someday.
I was only trying to get Mother or Daddy to say the word pregnant out loud.
—What’s wrong? I asked.
—Just never you mind.
I asked how long Kate would be staying with us, and she said, “Don’t ask so many questions.”
Which is par for the course for this family. We believe in secrets. Aunt Eva. A big dark secret. Was she ever normal? Did she have a boyfriend? Did he promise her the Milky Way and lead her down the primrose path and then, once he got what he wanted, fly the coop and leave her to pick up the pieces? And on Mother’s side, Aunt Doe, our family martyr. Married to Rex, a florist, and then he delivered a bouquet to a Cuban woman and a week later ran away with her. Drove to Florida, intending to catch a boat to Havana, and they were coming over a hill and the tailgate came loose on a truck ahead and it dumped ten tons of bananas on the road and Rex hit the brakes, the worst thing you can do when driving on fruit, and he skidded into a palm tree and killed himself and Consuela both. Once, at supper, Doe said, “Rex really likes creamed broccoli,” as if she were expecting him for supper. It was the first time I ever heard Rex’s name mentioned in our house. Everything I knew about him I got from Kate. To Mother and Daddy, he didn’t exist anymore. Some things are better left undiscussed and Rex was one of them.
They do not know there is now a writer in the house.
My bedroom was next door to the brother’s, and when I put my ear to a certain spot high on my closet wall I could hear Kate’s voice. She was saying, “You never loved me. You say you do now but you never said it before, all you did was try to squeeze the life out of me, I don’t call that love. You may think it is but it’s not. Well, you won’t be seeing me again. I’m going away with Roger and have this baby, and if you don’t like it, you can stick it where the moon don’t shine. I’ll show you. I’d be perfectly happy if I never saw you again for the rest of my life.”
And then she put her face in her hands and wept long wrenching sobs. It was hard to listen to. Maybe I should’ve gone and offered her a hug, but it didn’t seem my place to do that.
Instead, I sat and wrote a story on my Underwood.
Twilight in August
It was twilight in August and the lady in the white satin dress took off her crown and set it on the bureau. Her hair was a fright, she was bushed, and there was a big grass stain on her dress from when she tripped over the shovel in the cemetery. She had traipsed from one end of town to the other, making appearances at the homes of the sick and the elderly, widows, children, blind people, backsliders, the lame and halt, the faint of heart, and her torch was all used up and so was she. She wanted to go to bed and sleep for a week. She had sung her song for every sad sack in this town and bestowed her light on them and all for what? Did anybody, anybody, get any good from it? Usually they just lay and gazed up at her with big watery eyes and winced when she blessed them and on her way out they told her to be sure to shut the door and not let the cat out.
The only food in the house was a can of beans. She had given everything else to the poor. She felt too tired even to light a fire and heat up her humble supper.
She sat on her front steps as the sun descended into the hills and she said, “Lord, I’ve done Your work and I’m bone-tired. I don’t know how long I can keep it up. I’m no spring chicken. Lord, I’m asking You now to give me a nice long rest.” She leaned back against the railing and put her hands in her lap and as she did she felt something kick her in the stomach. It was inside her. She held her hands over her belly and she felt the kicks again, hard ones. She asked Him for a nice long rest and He put a bun in her oven.
She wept.
“Thank you, Lord,” she whispered. She wondered how she should explain this miraculous event to her neighbors and then she thought, “Oh, what the hell. I’ll just go live with the blind for a while.”
It was a beans-and-wieners night, and Mother took a plate up to Kate and the rest of us ate in the kitchen. The big sister was secretly gleeful to have a major sinner in the house. I was small fry compared with a Girl in Trouble. A virgin sullied, a soiled dove, a fallen angel. The sister feigned sorrow and concern for Kate and shook her head over the tragedy of it, a young life cast away for a moment of carnal pleasure—but it was all a big play to her. “I don’t believe God sends any tribulation except to strengthen us in our faith,” she said devoutly, chomping on a wiener.
Mother and Daddy murmured agreement. Miss Priss was in her element. She said, “I really feel that this will draw us all closer to the Lord, especially those who may not have accepted Christ as their Saviour.” She herself had felt her own faith strengthened, she said. To see a loved one make a terrible wrong choice should confirm us all who had followed God’s Will in these matters. God has made these things clear, and God is not mocked, and those who willfully disobey must be left to God’s Mercy and to His chastening rod. It was astonishing to hear a 16-year-old girl talk like a grandpa, but this was Brethren language and we were all steeped in it. You could go around talking normal and suddenly the word vouchsafe would come out of your mouth.
She was sailing along full-steam and then Aunt Flo and Uncle Al walked in. Our relatives didn’t knock. You heard footsteps on the porch and suddenly there they were, right next to you. Flo and Al sat down, and you could tell it was not a happy social occasion. “You’re excused now,” Mother said to me in a pointed way. LeRoy and Lois came in. Lois looked weepy, LeRoy was his usual jovial self. “Nice lawn,” he said. “How much they pay you? We’ll pay more.” Sugar and Ruth arrived, their faces pale and drawn, walking on eggshells, whispering as if in a hospital, and Mother brought in folding chairs from the living room. She told me to please go to my room. “We’re having a family meeting,” she said. The big sister smirked at me with all her might. Evidently she was allowed to stay and perhaps talk about the chastening rod.
I went upstairs and crawled into the upstairs linen closet which was directly over the dining room. An old heating vent brought the voices up from below, like a radio show.
They were still for a while, and then Uncle Al opened the meeting with a prayer for wisdom and the courage to follow God’s Will as Thou hast so clearly revealed it to us, which indicated that Al himself was in no doubt about what action to take.
And then Al was talking about the principle of separation. Scripture makes clear we are to separate ourselves from evil and not let it contaminate us. Look at the Lutherans and Methodists: they tolerated false doctrine and loose behavior, like beer-drinking and smoking and card-playing and dancing and movie-going, and now they were no better than the Catholics.
“Most people in the churches don’t have enough faith to paint their toenails with,” said Uncle Al. “They go to church and sit there in the pews, hoping something will rub off, but they don’t have Jesus in their hearts. They don’t realize that God would prefer they were out-and-out atheistic communists than be lukewarm Christians like the Laodiceans. God hates a sham. God looks on the heart. God prefers an honest sinner to a make-believe believer. If you attend church just to go through the motions, God’d rather you get you a bottle of bourbon and a whore and go to a hotel and have you a good time.” He said that we couldn’t overlook Kate’s sins or we’d be making a sham of our faith. He read a chapter from Deuteronomy, about how disobedience might cause the Lord to turn His face from you and abandon you to your enemies.
“The Lord will hold Kate to account for her actions, and for bringing disrepute onto those gathered in His Name, but the Lord will especially hold us to account for our exercise of discipline,” he said, quietly.
Kate, he said, was 17 and no child and she knew what she was doing when she did it and now she would have to be sent away. There was a home for wayward girls in Indiana. He himself would drive her there if she wouldn’t go with Sugar and she would give birth to her baby there and it would be placed for adoption with a Christian family.
Mother said, “Why couldn’t we keep her here? We can decide about the baby when the baby comes. And then there’s Roger—”
Al didn’t like to be questioned once he had explained things and made them clear. He repeated, tersely, what he’d said about separation doctrine, and he added that Kate must show genuine contrition if she didn’t wish to be sent away. She must confess how she had rebelled against God’s teaching, and she should do it in writing. Immediately. Today.
Mother said, “We’re all sinners in God’s sight, and there is not so much difference between Kate and any of the rest of us, if you ask me.”
I could hear Daddy say, “Excuse me for a minute,” and get up from the table and Uncle Al say, “We need you here,” and Daddy say he’d be back in a minute and leave the room. Daddy could sense an argument approaching. He couldn’t stand to hear high-pitched emotion of any kind, he couldn’t bear it.
He shuffled through the kitchen, rattled a pan, opened the back door, and headed for the garage. I guessed he was trying to think of a good reason to be out there. Some urgent necessary thing. Maybe he’d start washing the snow tires or alphabetizing the paint cans by color.
Ruth said she was so upset she couldn’t think straight. Roger Guppy was no good and she’d known it since he was a child and threw rocks on the playground and almost put another child’s eyes out. She had tried to keep Kate away from worldly influences, a hard thing in this day and age, and the harder she tried, the more Kate resisted. She had searched Kate’s room this morning, top to bottom, and found cigarettes, empty wine bottles, books of all sorts—atheist poetry and worldly novels, Hemingway, Cummings, Steinbeck, Kerouac, that whole crowd—and this—she was showing them something—and there were low outbursts of disgust and then uncle Al said it out loud. “ ‘The Flaming Heart’? What sort of thing is that for a Christian to be reading?”
Sugar said, “It’s about a tornado or something. The boy is the son of Broadway actors. He’s carried away by a high wind and dropped among Brethren. He stays only because the dog tells him to.”
“How can a dog tell him to stay?” says Lois, never too swift.
“It’s fiction,” said Flo.
“Certainly doesn’t seem too complimentary to Brethren,” noted Al.
“That isn’t Kate’s,” said the big sister. “That′s Gary’s. He wrote it.”
It sounded as if Ruth were paging through it. “It’s silly. Get it out of here. Burn it or something.”
“It’s just been one thing after another,” said Uncle Sugar. “I can’t tell you what we’ve been through.” His voice shook. He said that Kate had broken his heart in two and that if she couldn’t mend her ways it’d be better for everybody if she left and never came back. There was a period of liquid sobbing and shoulder-patting then. And a long honk into a hanky.
Uncle LeRoy spoke up. He said we should be calm and take the long view and not act precipitously in anger, lest we do harm that can never be repaired. People sometimes haul off in a big huff and do more harm than good.
Al said, “I’m not in a huff and it isn’t precipitous to insist that Scripture teaching be followed.”
LeRoy said, “You are too angry, look at you.”
Al said sharply that anger was the farthest thing from his mind. “Anger has nothing to do with this.”
Al and LeRoy were often edgy around each other. Al was top dog in the Brethren, the leader of Bible reading, the teacher, the explainer, and LeRoy liked to pretend not to notice him.
Flo asked LeRoy what he thought should be done. LeRoy said, “I think the boy ought to marry her.” There was silence. Ruth said she could not even imagine such a thing.
I snuck out of the linen closet and knocked on the brother’s door and opened it. Kate sat on the bed. I said, “I’m sorry you got caught with my story.” She said, “It doesn’t matter. That’s the least of it.”
—They’re talking about sending you to Indiana.
—I’d like to see them try.
—They want you to make a statement of contrition. In writing.
—Let em write it themselves.
—If you don’t, they’ll send you away and you can’t come back.
—Who said I wanted to?
I wanted to know how it felt to be pregnant. Could she feel the baby inside? What happened? Where was Roger? Did he know about this? What did he say?
I said, “I could write it for you. I’m a writer.” I said, “Just tell me what happened.”
She lay back on the bed and pulled the quilt over her. “What do you mean, what happened? I got pregnant, that’s what happened.”
I said, “But how? When did it happen? Where were you?”
“I was with Roger,” she said. “It’s nobody’s business.”
She lay looking into thin air, thinking. Faraway, like ocean surf, the murmur of voices downstairs, our family, trying to piece the world together. She said, “Do you think I’m pretty?” I said yes. She said, “I mean, really pretty?” I said yes. She said, “Do you still like me?”
I took a deep breath. I looked into the air above her head. I told her that I loved her and that I meant it. She put her hand on mine and we sort of hugged sideways, a quick one, a shy hug. I told her that when this all blew over, I’d take her to Joe’s Bar and buy her a Martini and we’d dance to the “Hyena Stomp.”
I had her confession sort of worked out in my mind, how she had fallen among evil companions and wasted her inheritance of grace and now was throwing herself on the mercy of those who loved her, though she was not worthy of their love. It was a good confession, contrite but not too abject, leaving certain questions open, and I was all set to type it up, and the next night Roger, who had gone to visit his uncle in Millet and figure things out, called up Kate from a tavern at 10:30 P.M. and asked her to marry him. He said, “I think we should do it. There’s no reason why not.”
She said, “Have you been drinking?” and he said, “Sure.”
She said, “Roger, this is for a lifetime, you know.” He said, “Hey. You’re telling me.” But he told her he loved her and that next spring they’d be in New York City probably and none of this would matter anymore.
