A month or so after my father died, I returned to New York for his memorial and for my baptism.
The memorial was a small gathering of family and friends in the outdoor courtyard of a Manhattan restaurant near my parents’ apartment. I hadn’t seen most of these people in years, in decades some of them. They were people I liked and who had loved my father and it was good to have them there. But seeing them after all this time was also a bittersweet reminder of how distant I had become from my parents and their lives and from the life of my childhood.
At one point during the memorial, as I found myself standing alone for a moment, an old man came toward me through the crowd. He was very bent and fragile, leaning on a cane, making his way unsteadily across the court. I didn’t know him. When we were face-to-face, he spoke to me. He said he had worked with my father at the radio station in the old days, near the beginning of my father’s New York career.
The moment he started talking, I recognized his voice. He had a thick New York Yiddish accent that sounded exactly like my father’s much beloved character Mr. Nat. Mr. Nat—that was the exuberant Coordinator of Interrelations who used to make my mother shudder with assimilationist horror every time he came on the air: “I wish you wouldn’t do that character!” I fancied my father must have modeled Nat’s voice on the voice of this man standing in front of me. The accent, the pitch, the tone—they were Mr. Nat to perfection.
As the man spoke, a whimsical thought occurred to me. I remembered how my father used to call home from the city sometimes with a disguised voice as a kind of prank on us kids. It occurred to me that maybe he was calling home again now, this time from that unseen city from which no traveler returns.
And just as that thought occurred to me, this old man, whom I didn’t know, and who didn’t know me, said in his Mr. Nat voice, “Your father wanted you to be a Jew. He was always afraid you didn’t want to be a Jew. He was always afraid you didn’t like being a Jew. He wanted you to be a Jew.”
Then he turned and wobbled away and moved out of sight among all the others.
My baptism was scheduled for the next evening.
I smiled sadly to myself and nodded. I knew what the old man said was true. Only my father’s death had saved me from breaking his heart by my conversion. But I knew also it couldn’t be any other way. I could not both journey to myself and stay here with him.
The next evening, I made my way to the Church of the Incarnation. The light of the spring day was fading when I arrived. The brownstone steeple was blending with the darkening sky. Inside, the scarlets and azures and bright yellows of the stained-glass windows along the wall were losing their vividness as the sunlight fell away from them. The vast, high spaces of the church seemed filled with an uncanny blue aura, a dusk that hung between the white columns and underneath the carving on the elaborate altarpiece: “And the Word was made flesh.”
As I mentioned before, the rector, my friend Doug Ousley, had indulged my penchant for privacy by opening the church after hours. When I first came in, the place seemed empty. Then I saw Doug and his family, down in the front pews, off to the left by the John the Baptist font. Doug was in his priestly regalia. Mary had now been brought down into a wheelchair by her disease. She managed to smile and murmur a few words of affection to me as I leaned over to kiss her. Her blue eyes still flashed, still showed traces of the loving and vivacious woman she had been when I first met her. She had only a few years left to live now. Tonight, she would serve as my godmother.
And, of course, the Ousleys’ grown sons John and Andrew were there, clowning around as always, making their usual sardonic jokes. John, only a year or two older than my daughter, was going to serve as my godfather. They thought this was hilarious.
“We will light a candle to symbolize the light of Christ in your spirit,” Doug explained to me. “And at the end of the service, the candle will be extinguished—”
“And your spirit will be snuffed out,” Andrew muttered.
I nearly fell out of the pew laughing. We were all in very good spirits.
These friends were there with me—but not my family, not my own wife and my own children. I had sent them home, back to California, after my father’s memorial. It was a decision I would come to regret almost immediately after the ritual was over. It was then I would realize that, all too typically of myself, I had made exactly the same mistake I had made nearly twenty-five years before at my wedding. As I had once believed Ellen and I were already essentially married and that our wedding was simply a formality, so now I believed my heart was already baptized and this was just a rite to symbolize the event. It was as if—as I would remark ruefully before the evening was over—as if I had learned absolutely nothing in all the intervening years.
Now that I have experienced this last decade of life in Christ—the peace and realism of Christ, the hope and truth—I think even this error was part of the story God was telling me. He was using my own foolishness as a parable, just the sort of satiric parable he knew I would appreciate and understand.
Because now I knelt at the baptismal font, beneath the upraised hand of the bronze boy John. Now Doug put the water on my head, the oil on my brow, and spoke the words: “I baptize you in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.” Now I climbed to my feet again and looked around me at the faces of my friends in the church’s mysterious gloaming.
And now I saw. I had been wrong—yet once more. I had been wrong about baptism as I was wrong about my wedding. It mattered. It mattered in ways I could not understand until the very moment I had done it. Of course. I should have known. Who more than me? Ritual and transition, symbol and reality, story and life—they are intimately intertwined forever. They are the language of the imagination, the language in which God speaks to man.
Well, mine is a stiff-necked people, slow to learn. Yet just as with my wedding, here I was somehow. Through my own foolishness and the foolishness of my times, through the fog of my egotism and stubbornness and insanity, God had sung to me without ceasing in the stories I loved and in my love and in my story. I, even half-blind with myself, had stumbled after that music to its source.
And somehow, once again, by the hilarious mercy of God, I had made my way to the great good thing.