9

You Are Welcome

We don’t drink liquor or come near it:

The body is the temple of the Holy Spirit.

No movies, dancing, or libations,

We get our thrills from revelations.

The Lord will come, perhaps tomorrow,

Bring an end to all our sorrow.

We’ll rise to meet Him in the air

And you guys won’t be there.

Everything we say is reliable,

We have read it in the Bible.

Rapture’s coming in a minute,

Sorry but you won’t be in it.

EVERY SUNDAY MORNING, WE DRESSED up and drove to Meeting, passing the billboards—I had learned to read by saying Murray’s Silver Butter Knife Steak for Two and Ewald’s Golden Guernsey Milk—the heads of two light brown cows protruding from the sign—and came to the Gospel Hall in Minneapolis and walked up the steps, past the sign that said:

GRACE AND TRUTH GOSPEL HALL
    LORD’S DAY
Worship Meeting 10:30 A.M.
Sunday School 9:30 A.M.
Gospel Meeting 7:45 P.M.

YOU ARE WELCOME

Theoretically you are welcome, but as an outsider, you’d be an amazing phenomenon, like a blind man holding sparklers, and we’d have to figure out how to deal with you. Inside, past the cloakroom, was a large plain white meeting room, no imagery, no crosses or candles, with chairs arranged in six rectangles facing the little table in the middle with a pitcher of wine and a loaf of bread, covered with a white cloth. Men in dark suits, women in dark modest dresses and head coverings, no lipstick or jewelry, everyone sitting exactly where they sat every Sunday. Our family in a row behind Grandpa and Grandma Anabel, with Aunt Ina and Bill and Marion, and Aunt Margaret, Shirley, cousin Roger. Sun streaming in the big windows, long silences as the Saints wait upon the leading of the Spirit. We sing from The Little Flock hymnal—no musical accompaniment, because no pianos are mentioned in Scripture. (No cars or washing machines either, I point out, and Mother gives me a look.)

There used to be more of us. Our numbers shrank in 1947 with the split between the Anoka assembly and us over a question regarding separation principles, but the root of the split was a rivalry between two preachers, Brother Ames and Brother Booth, who couldn’t bear the sight of each other. Two male buffalo locked horns. We were Booth Brethren, and Anoka cut us off from fellowship and one Sunday morning, with some Anoka people in our midst, Jim and Dorothy Hunt and Florence and Harold and Rozel and David, our relatives, and people weeping, we sang, God be with you till we meet again. By His counsels, guide, uphold you, and we parted. Anoka thrived and grew, thanks to loving elders, and Minneapolis shrank, thanks to a blockhead elder whose bullying drove the younger members from the flock. But Mother couldn’t leave her family, and Dad couldn’t leave Mother. Aunt Eleanor was Dad’s best friend, and though they were on opposite sides they were even closer after the split. They never argued about it. They sat in her kitchen and laughed and laughed—he was a changed man around her, not the silent man he was with the Minneapolis people—and clearly, family was more important than correct doctrine. Years later, our assembly having dwindled to a handful, our Gospel Hall was sold to a charismatic Black church. Our mournful remnant disappeared and the Holy Spirit moved in, and there was rapturous singing and shouting, people crying out Alleluias and Amens.

After Meeting, the eight of us ride over to Don and Elsie’s for Sunday dinner, a big adventure because they have a TV and we do not. I’d seen TV—at school, we watched the inauguration of Dwight D. Eisenhower and the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II—but we couldn’t have a TV “because it’s Hollywood,” Mother explained. In 2005, when the movie A Prairie Home Companion held its premiere in St. Paul, Mother was given a seat of honor in the balcony. I sat behind her, and I could see she was enjoying the movie. I leaned forward and said, “I hope Grandpa Den-ham didn’t see you walking into this theater,” and she told me she had done it as a favor to me, but she laughed. Eventually, everything becomes humorous. Almost everything.

Uncle Don didn’t care about movies; he was a football fan, having played in high school in Wausau, and the Green Bay Packer game started around noon on Sunday, so the TV got turned on the instant they arrived home from Meeting, and Don took his place on the couch. He got intensely involved with the game and tended to move laterally with the play. Sometimes he crouched up close. If the Packer quarterback faded back to pass on third down, short yardage, Don threw himself at the screen: You gotta be kidding. When a ref called Holding on a Packer lineman, Don rose to his feet. “Holding! You call that holding? He stuck out his hand and the other guy ran into it. Open your eyes!” he yelled, and then he demonstrated to me how holding differs from sticking out your hand as the other guy runs into it. My dad sat quietly nearby, ignoring him: he cared nothing about football but was obliged to sit with us males in the living room; the kitchen was a sanctum of sisterhood. So he sat, looking at the paper, which didn’t interest him either. He liked Uncle Don but didn’t understand how a grown man could get excited about a game. I, on the other hand, was delighted to see a Brethren man in a state of excitation about anything. Grim solemnity was the standard, but here was Uncle Don, who an hour before stood up in Meeting and prayed a long Brethrenly prayer, now yelling at a referee on TV.

Aunt Elsie put the pies in the oven, apple and lemon meringue, and the pot roast came out, and she made gravy, and when dinner was ready, if the Packers were on the march, dinner might need to be delayed for a few minutes. Then we trooped in around the table and the TV sound was turned down as Uncle Don thanked the Lord for the food before us and for His death on Calvary’s cross, and we dug in, while Elsie quietly disparaged her cooking so as to ward off compliments. The potatoes were dry, she said, and the meat overdone, the creamed corn too salty, but of course the dinner was sheer perfection. If the Packers took possession, if they came within field-goal range, Don kept an ear out and was apt to slide over a few feet to where he could see the screen. He was a man besieged by conflicting forces. A perfect dinner, powerful Packer loyalties, his wife’s patient disregard of the game, the holiness of the Lord’s Day, and wretched officiating.

Once a month, Brethren gathered to mail gospel tracts to the survivors of people listed in the obituaries, telling them they should accept Jesus as their Savior or else wind up in the Lake of Fire. I pointed out to Mother that this seemed cruel, to suggest to the grieving that their loved ones had maybe wound up in hell, but she felt it was an act of mercy. I asked if we knew of any people who’d been converted by the tracts we mailed. “It’s not for us to know,” she said, “it’s for God to know.” Our next-door neighbor, Mr. Birk, was an atheist who said, “When you’re dead, you’re dead. They stick you in a hole and you don’t come out. Anything else is a fairy tale.” (Though when Mrs. Birk said she wanted a new couch for the living room, he said, “People in hell want ice water.”) Dad was friendly with him, but they only talked about carpentry and cars, not the Last Judgment. It was Mother who once went next door and testified to him about the Lord and he laughed at her. She stood in his doorway, hands on her hips, and told him that Jesus had died for his sins. I was impressed by her gumption. Mother was moved by Mrs. Birk’s having to endure her husband’s drunken tirades and wanted him to know that God was watching, and so was Grace Keillor.

One morning in late May, the phone rang in our upstairs hall and Mother set down her clothes basket and answered. There was a long silence and then she said, “Oh no.” My cousin Roger Hummel had drowned in Lake Minnetonka. He was seventeen, about to graduate from Central High that week, a tall boy with a crew cut, a sharp dresser with a sweet smile. He had rented a rowboat with a girl named Susan, whom he had a crush on, and she dove into the water from the stern and he dove after her though he could not swim a stroke. Perhaps he thought it would come to him as a natural reflex, but he sank and panicked, arms and legs thrashing. Susan grabbed him by the hair, but his crew cut was too short to get hold of and he pulled her under and she had to fight free. She called for help and swam to shore and Roger disappeared. A couple hours later, sheriff’s deputies dragged the bottom and brought his body up.

Thirty years later, a woman approached me at the airport and said, “I’m Susan. I was with your cousin when he drowned.” We stood and talked. That day was still vivid to her. She had taken a lifesaving course and there was Roger, terrified in the water, and nothing she had learned could save him in that horrific minute. She was shaken, describing his wild panic, her attempt to get hold of him, and also the fact that she felt responsible: he had a crush on her and that’s why they were there, but she was not attracted to him. She was starting to realize, way back then, that she was attracted to women, and didn’t know how to tell him. He died for unrequited love, of a mysterious kind.

The funeral was at Albin Chapel on Nicollet, a beige-colored room, draperies, perfumy, squishy organ music, his classmates weeping. We trooped in past the coffin banked with flowers where the body lay in a gray suit, white shirt, and tie, his prominent Denham jaw, his crew cut. Aunt Margaret and cousin Shirley sat in an alcove, behind a transparent curtain. Roger’s brother, Stan, was stationed in Korea and couldn’t get leave to come home. Roger’s father, Paul, had run off with the other woman when Roger was a baby, and the story was that Paul had almost taken the baby with him, and so we contemplated how the baby’s kidnapping might have saved his life. Some of my aunts wept, and we all sat in shock. Aunt Margaret sat, composed, silent. Mother wept at the grave-side and later I asked her why, since now Roger was in heaven with the Lord, and she said, “We don’t know that. He went to a dance at school.”

The next week, Mother enrolled me in swim class at the YMCA downtown. It met daily for three weeks; Monday morning I waited on the highway by Mrs. Fisher’s asparagus field and caught the bus into town, disembarked at the Public Library on 10th Street and walked over to the Y on LaSalle and through a side door down the steps into a locker room reeking of chlorine where an old man handed me a key and told me to take my clothes off and put them in a locker. I stripped down to my undershorts. “Those too,” he said. I grew up in a proper home and when I stepped out of my shorts, I crossed a line I’d never crossed before. He pointed me to a large dank shower room and turned on the water and I stepped under it. Cold. He pointed me to a steel door marked Pool and I went through. Forty other boys, all naked, sat around the long pool, feet dangling down into the water, and I joined them. A couple of fat ones, the others spindly like me. The instructor strode in, holding a clipboard. He was lean and muscular and wore black swim trunks. He called off our names and we answered Here except one boy said Present. The instructor glared at him. And he told us to jump in the water, hold onto the side of the pool, and kick our legs. Then he told us to float by pushing away, take a deep breath, facedown in the water, hands at our sides, as he stood on the side, holding a long pole for us to grab onto if we started to sink. I tried to do what he said but it was so strange, an act of faith, and I got scared and tried to stand up but the pool was eight feet deep, and then I got really scared and he jabbed me with the pole and I grabbed it. “What’s the matter with you that you can’t follow simple directions?” he yelled. “Try again!” I clung to the pole, trying to lie back in the water as he’d told me to do. “Let go!” he said. “We don’t have all day.”

I was scared of water, and the instructor was a sadist. He enjoyed his superiority. He strode around behind us and explained swimming as if this were as simple as walking and then sent us into the water, five at a time, and told us to swim, and belittled those who couldn’t. “Come on, ladies, put your faces in the water,” he yelled. “What are you scared of? Follow directions!” I stuck it out for two days and on the third I could not make myself go down those steps and strip naked. I turned around and went to the library instead. Spent two hours looking at books, then went to the WCCO studios on Second Avenue to watch Good Neighbor Time with Bob DeHaven and Wally Olson and His Orchestra, a live show at 11:30 with a studio audience. Ernie Garven played the accordion, Burt Hanson sang, and Cedric Adams came in and read the news at noon. My mother read his daily column in the Minneapolis Star and loved his reminiscences of boyhood in his hometown of Magnolia. After the news, I got on the elevator and there he was, smiling, in his blue pinstripe suit and shiny brown shoes, and I stood next to him and felt the greatness of the man, fame exuding from him, and smelled his cologne. He was the most famous man in Minnesota. Airline pilots reported that when Cedric said good night at the end of his 10 p.m. newscast, lights dimmed all across Minnesota. Occasionally he substituted for Arthur Godfrey on his CBS morning radio show in New York, a native of Minnesota heard nationwide, and there I was standing next to him on an elevator, a profound moment, a corn picker from the sticks brushing up against a national celebrity, and then the door opened and we stepped out together and I heard his gravelly voice and famous chuckle up above. Mother admired him because he made her laugh.

Every morning I boarded the bus to downtown, intending to be brave and instead went to the library and then to WCCO for a brush with greatness. I didn’t imagine Cedric Adams was afraid of water. I imagined him diving off the stern of a big yacht and swimming to shore and shaking himself like a dog. He was a great man, and I was a sneak and a coward and a liar. And every day downtown was a fresh lie—“How was swim lesson?” Fine. “What did you learn?” We learned to float. “I really want you to learn to swim.” I will. “You’re not afraid of water, are you?” No. “Are you sure?” Yes.

I asked Mother why the Y required nudity in swim class and she asked the Y, and they told her it was so the instructor could better observe the boys’ leg movements. This satisfied her. To me, it felt like pure humiliation. I spent the next three weeks traversing between the library and WCCO, and at the end of July, one day at Twin Lakes, when Mother asked me to swim for her, I walked out in water up to my armpits and pantomimed swimming and that satisfied her.

I did not bother my parents with my problems—did not complain about the Darwins or the tormentor who made fun of my green teeth— didn’t ask permission to ride my bike into the city—never ever confessed to feeling sad or troubled—I kept my troubles to myself. Mother had the little kids to worry about without me adding to her problems. This did not strike me as peculiar. It still does not. Shut my mouth; put a lid on it. This worked pretty well for me. Keep moving. If you feel sad, get on your bike and ride. Don’t get fascinated by your problems. Tomorrow is a new day. I still feel this way.