The road to Damascus for Grandma occurred on a hot Sunday morning in the church of St. Aloysius, Roman Catholic, ten-thirty A.M. Father Le Mesurier, the old French priest who normally conducted Mass in a thickly incomprehensible French accent, was away on holiday. In his place was Father James Hsien, newly graduated from a Taiwanese seminary.
Father Hsien was so short that nobody in the congregation realised he had streamed in until an admonitory reedy voice piped over the sound system, “Brothers and sisters in Christ, PLEASE STAND!” Startled, the congregation leapt to its feet. Over the top of the lectern, the beginnings of a crew cut and thick tortoiseshell glasses of a type not seen since the 1950s could be glimpsed. From what they could see of him, he appeared to be all of twenty-one years old. (He was, in fact, ten years older). He looked like an infant swaddled in sacerdotal robes for a joke.
In his opening remarks, he told the assembled throng there was much sin about and little grace and redemption. With this unpromising start, he steamed into a sermon that managed to antagonise everybody from the large expatriate American community (“America is a land of sin and fornication, plagued by crime, drugs and Aids”), to the society ladies who organised charity lunches and thought themselves remarkably benevolent (“And I say to you, think of how you treat your maids. For the gospel says that the meek shall inherit the earth, so how will your diamonds, your cars and your travels avail you?”), to Grandma (“And I know of old ladies who waste their last years playing mahjong and living from one meal to the next, instead of reflecting on their sins and the life that is to come...”). With that last salvo, Grandma came awake with a look of murder on her face. It was all the Tan family could do to prevent her from marching up the aisle and clouting Father Hsien around the head with her handbag. Quivering with indignation, she refused to go for communion; she wanted nothing to do with “that man.”
On the ride home, she fulminated against the Catholic Church, its bossy patriarchy and above all Father Hsien. “I should never have sent you to the convent,” she told her daughter, Mrs Tan. “I should have known that colonial institution would have you rushing into the church. What does that man know about anything? He’s still wet behind the ears. I’ve given birth to six children—”
“Mother,” said Mrs Tan, patiently, “I don’t think he was referring to you personally.”
“He was looking,” said Grandma, “right at me.”
Her grandchildren, Peter and Jonathan (good Biblical names) groaned. Mr Tan drove on with a long-suffering look on his face. He was thinking that if Father Hsien managed to wean his mother-in-law off her marathon nocturnal mahjong sessions, he would, like a good disciple, drop all and follow him. Not exactly drop all, of course, but he would certainly be a lifelong devotee. Mr Tan was an engineering lecturer with a propensity towards migraines who craved above all peace, quiet and tranquillity. There was very little of any with his mother-in-law around.
The next Sunday Grandma announced that she was a fully paid up member of the Renewal Charismatic Free Church for All Brethren. She had washed her hands of the Catholic Church.
• • •
“She’s joined what?” said Mr Tan.
Mrs Tan, close to hysterics and convinced her mother was doomed to hellfire, repeated the name of the church. Again, Mr Tan, good at engineering terms and bad at civilian discourse, missed it by a mile.
“Oh,” he said.
“It’s one of those fundamentalist Protestant groupings where they speak in tongues and insist that everyone pays ten per cent of their income.”
“She hasn’t got an income.”
“That’s not the point. The point is, she’s been led astray.”
“Oh, now really,” said Mr Tan. “We all believe in the same things in the end.”
“No, they don’t. They don’t believe in the Virgin Mary or acknowledge the Pope or—this is horrible.”
As it turned out, Grandma had very little idea what her new brethren did believe in. She had joined the renegades because her friend Mrs Sinnathuray was a member and because the pastor, the Reverend Michaels from Peoria, Illinois, was so handsome and so kind. Not at all like the vituperative dwarf at St. Aloysius. And she liked the rousing services, where there was a good deal of arm-waving, breast-beating and being born again. (“Everything short of Mardi Gras,” said a distraught Mrs Tan.) So very different from the Catholic Church, where people slumbered through Mass in an agreeable stupor and had only the foggiest notion of the Bible’s contents. Grandma, in a most moving personal testimony to a packed assembly, laid the blame for her years of waste and error squarely at the door of the Pope.
But Grandma was nothing if not broadminded. She went right on reciting her rosaries and praying to the Virgin Mary. And her mahjong parties increased in bonhomie and amplitude, as her new church members took to her like ducks to water, in spite of her theological shakiness.
“So delightful!” they said to Mr Tan. “At her age, with her energy, her mind, remarkable!”
Mrs Tan resolutely stayed in her room during these proceedings. When she did appear, she drifted through, wraith-like, hollow-eyed. The Brethren left her alone, recognising that here was a woman who had closed her mind to the Message. Mr Tan’s chief emotion at these times was a wishful desire that his wife would stand up to her mother, but that, he knew, was beyond her. It was beyond him, for that matter. Grandma was an Act of God.
However, no matter how much the Brethren smiled, chirped and wolfed down the food in the refrigerator, they never shook off the air they carried with them of venturing into the home of infidels and pagans. Mr Tan recognised the familiar battle-light gleaming in the eye of the keen proselytiser as, one by one, they bore down on him.
“Don’t you want,” they invariably began, “to join a church where you feel you belong, where you know you’re at home?”
Mr Tan, a man of limited spiritual needs, felt his head beginning to throb. They wouldn’t leave him alone in the office and now they were invading his home as well. “I do go to church,” he pointed out.
They smiled disbelievingly. They never stopped smiling, but there was a range of meanings compressed into those smiles. This was the gently humouring smile. Did the secret of their success lie in those never ending, fixed smiles? Come to think of it, Catholics generally went around dour and indifferent, hardly beacons of light for their faith.
“We believe,” they said, “in a participatory church. Where you take part in a service that glorifies God. We don’t believe in passively following ritual.”
Mr Tan waved a feeble hand at his sons, returning noisily after football practice. It was a signal for help but they ignored him. “Gosh, hi, Dad, bye, Dad,” they said. “Got to rush, Dad.” They bolted themselves in their room.
Mr Tan was not a particularly religious man. It had to do with the fact, he sometimes thought, that he was a man of little imagination; the thought of death, the afterlife, the sense of a higher, divine being, seldom disturbed him. He wasn’t given to asking why. He was a Catholic by marriage and that, it seemed to him, was as good a reason as any. The histrionics, the sheer energy involved in becoming a born-again Christian, appalled him. And there were times when he told himself that if the Europeans hadn’t flooded Asia with their missionaries and their schools, he would still be a Buddhist, comfortably subsisting in the darkness where there was supposed to be weeping and gnashing of teeth. What if the so-called act of faith was nothing but a historical accident?—He realised, with relief, that it was time to go to bed.
• • •
Grandma’s rebirth was akin to lobbing a stone into a still pond: it created ever-widening ripples. One of its immediate effects was that Grandma became tremendously interested in the Apocalypse and the Antichrist.
“You will know the end of the world is nigh,” she reported, “when there are earthquakes, famines and volcanic eruptions.”
“They’ve always been around,” Mr Tan said dampeningly.
Grandma gave him a shirty look. “The point is,” she said, “that we always have to be ready, no matter where we are or what we’re doing. Imagine! If the Lord came to earth while I was in the bathroom, what would I do?” (Nobody could find a ready answer to this either.)
Then she discovered that the Proctor & Gamble trademark was thought by some to be depicting the Antichrist. She hot-footed it home, determined to eradicate all use of their products, but everything in the nature of a cleansing agent was apparently manufactured by P & G or a subsidiary. This struck Grandma as even more sinister. How could a single multinational have a monopoly on all the soap circulating in the world?
“I guess it’s a case of being clean or being pure,’ Jonathan said. The whole family soaped away, P & G-style, doing its best to boost capitalist exploitation and ignoring Grandma’s warnings.
Next, Grandma took it into her head that Ronald Reagan was the beast himself; 666 was the number of the beast, was it not, and there were six letters in each of his names. ‘That only makes 66,” Mr Tan pointed out; in spite of himself, he was becoming quite interested in all this.
‘This is totally infantile,” Mrs Tan declared. “Numerology under the guise of Christianity—honestly!”
There was nothing she could do, however, to stop Grandma from giving a delicious shudder every time the avuncular features of Mr Reagan appeared on the screen, or to prevent the boys from yapping and howling in dire imitation of a werewolf whenever his name was mentioned. Mrs Tan, who was supremely rational in every area outside Catholicism, told anyone who would listen that it was simply mind boggling that the man who had acted with Bonzo the Chimp could in any way be associated with the forces of evil. She was discovering the labyrinthine and peculiar byways of Christianity and they appalled her.
The next Sunday, Peter Tan, fifteen, electrified his family by announcing that he had became a Buddhist and wouldn’t be attending Mass any longer. After a heated argument about transport convenience (the family usually went for lunch after Sunday Mass) he sulkily accompanied the rest to church.
Later, in his room, they discovered a book called Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. “Have you been corrupted by this book?” Mrs Tan demanded.
Peter shrugged sleepily. He was tall for his age, slender, and surreptitiously growing his hair whenever his parents didn’t notice. Dreamy and dissociated, his parents feared he might never become the lawyer/doctor/accountant/banker they wanted him to be. Jonathan, sixteen and aloof, said, distantly, “Don’t ask me,” when cornered. He was going through a family-phobic phase and his whole manner implied he was not his brother’s keeper.
“Why are you doing this?” Mrs Tan asked her son, with a sort of petrified tranquillity.
“I just happen to find Buddhism a lot more compatible, Mum.”
“Compatible!”
“Catholicism is a patriarchal and bureaucratic religion, Mum. It’s drifted away from its roots. Sure, maybe it was a good idea in its time but Jesus would be horrified if he came down now and saw what his followers had done.”
Mrs Tan made a gurgling, semi-strangled noise.
“Buddhism doesn’t require any structures. That’s the beauty of it. It’s inner-directed. It’s not egocentric. You can be a force for good wherever you are—”
“Wah, his language improve so very much, one, hor, when he become Buddhist, so funny, what, what,” said Jonathan. His father told him not to be sarcastic. Ostentatiously, he joined the choir at St. Aloysius as head choirboy.
Meanwhile, Peter said that animals were as worthy, if not more worthy, of respect than old Homo sapiens and he was becoming a vegetarian. He prowled the neighbourhood collecting stray cats and dogs; he even launched a Stop Killing Flies campaign. At mealtimes, he lectured his family on the unsavoury practices of the meat industry, and one choice anecdote about veal in particular had Jonathan rushing to the bathroom. The odour of sanctity carried about him, the family felt, was positively sickening. “I hope you’re reincarnated as a cockroach, so I can step on you,” Jonathan told his brother; Peter flew across the room and landed on him—it took both their parents to tear them apart. The situation, it seemed, was rapidly approaching West Bank flashpoint level.
“This is all your fault,” Mrs Tan said, between gritted teeth, to her mother. These days she went around in a frozen calm, a self-willed deep freeze which was rather alarming.
Grandma had the grace to look a trifle disconcerted. “I don’t know what you mean.”
“Yes, you do, Mother! You started a revolution! You’re breaking up my home!”
“Such melodrama,” said Grandma, briskly. She skipped out, nimbly, with a little stack of pamphlets titled, Get On The Nearest Hotline To God! (blue covers for non-Christians, red covers for Catholics). She was going to the City Hall MRT station to distribute them to the uninitiated.
“If she gets picked up by the police and spread all over the front pages, I’m renouncing her as my mother-in-law,” Mr Tan said.
“This is not funny,” said his wife.
Just then, the Reverend Michaels arrived.
• • •
It was with some difficulty that Mrs Tan could be dissuaded from slamming the door in his face. She considered him the author of, the perpetrator behind, her mother’s behaviour. This large, corn-fed American with the very blue, porcelain eyes and the very white teeth, who did he think he was, leaving America to spread mayhem and dissension in once united families? She looked at him with the sort of defiance that the Catholic Mary Queen of Scots must have brought with her to the gallows, or was it the executioner’s chopping block? She couldn’t remember.
“Ah, Mrs Tan,” said the Reverend Michaels. He took both her hands in his. It was the first time she had met him face to face since she had hitherto assiduously avoided him. He had a long, slow drawl, and a brilliant smile. He wore a short-sleeved, open-necked shirt, undone to the second button, above which tufts of luxuriant chest hair could be seen, and a pair of Levi’s 501 chinos. He was very good-looking—this knowledge slowly filtered through the haze of indignation with which she regarded him. (Also the fact that his size twelve feet draped all over the front doorstep made it impossible to dislodge him.)
“It’s so varry, varry nice to meet you, Mrs Tan,” said the Reverend Michaels.
“Your mother has told me so much about what a wonderful daughter you are, Mrs Tan,” the Reverend Michaels added.
By this time, he had somehow insinuated himself into the front hall and seated himself in an armchair in their living room, legs crossed, beaming in response to a somewhat dazed offer of a drink from Mrs Tan.
“Just water, if you please, ma’am. The religious life is such thirsty work.”
Left alone, the Reverend Michaels and Mr Tan contemplated each other’s knees. Mr Tan had met him before and had found the charisma somewhat overpowering, like musk. “Do you—er—often wear jeans?” he asked feebly.
The Reverend Michaels laughed genially. “They’re my disguise,” he confided, “for slipping in behind enemy lines, you know. Folks see a guy in jeans, they figure he can’t be a minister and that lowers their guard. The only problem,” he said thoughtfully, “are the girls. Young girls, especially.”
“Have to beat them off with a stick, eh?”
The Reverend Michaels dug him in the ribs and grinned. “Exactly.”
Mrs Tan returned with a glass. “What can we do for you?” she asked, somewhat abruptly; in the kitchen she’d had time to recover from the impact of the gaze from those eyes. “I’m afraid my mother’s not in.”
“Wa-al, actually, I was rather hoping she wouldn’t be. You see, it’s like this.” He leaned forward, clasping his hands earnestly. “Your mother wants to donate a large, antique lacquered table to our church, to function as an altar. Now, under normal circumstances, I’d be more than happy to accept it—more than happy. As you know, we’re desperately in need of what businessmen call startup capital.” Flash of teeth. “We’re a fledgling church and we welcome all the donations we can get—”
“Wait a minute,” said Mr Tan. He turned to his wife. “Isn’t that the antique table she promised to leave us in her will?” (They’d had it valued some years ago: the expert had put it at a conservative estimate of $10,000.)
Mrs Tan nodded, distracted by the slender golden hairs, glistening in the sunlight from the window, on the Reverend Michaels’ wrists.
“Are you aware,” demanded the Reverend Michaels solemnly, “that it has an emblem of a Chinese dragon on the surface? In gold leaf?”
“Yes, of course. It’s a very good example of the art flourishing in that period...” To think of the legacy, which they had always taken for granted, going to this man made Mr Tan feel faint. Not for the first time, he thought his mother-in-law ought to be certified.
“But we can’t accept it,” said the Reverend Michaels sorrowfully.
“Oh,” said Mr Tan, taken aback.
From the depths of his armchair, the Reverend Michaels rose to a rhetorical splendour. “How can we start a church, sir, tainted with symbols of a pagan culture? Of a pagan civilisation? Our mission is to rid the world of superstition and fear and let the light flood in. To accept such an object would be the sheerest of bad luck.” He realised what he had just said and laughed, uproariously. “Oh my, I’ve cooked my own goose, haven’t I? Wa-al, you know what I mean.”
“My mother will be disappointed,” said Mrs Tan. Her husband looked at her, wondering; she was speaking in a peculiar, constricted tone of voice.
“We aim,” said the Reverend Michaels, “not to please, but to do the right thing.” He spread his hands, disarmingly. “We need an altar table, ma’am. Just not one with a dragon. You will let her know? Thank you.—And have you thought of joining your mother, and coming down to one of our gatherings?”
“Not exactly.” Desperately, she focused her eyes on a point beyond him; she had the sensation of drowning.
“I understand you’re a Catholic, but, please, don’t be put off, we welcome everybody. As I said, we’re a new church, but we’re dedicated. Dedication is the word. We demand a huge commitment but we also give a lot back...”
When he was gone, an hour later, Mrs Tan rushed to her bedroom and sank to her knees. For once, praying had little effect, however; instead she splashed water on her temples and paced about angrily, telling herself to calm down and not to behave like an infatuated schoolgirl. For she had a weakness for terribly good-looking men in the old fashioned mould, which forty-odd years of living had failed to dampen. One would have thought that at her age, with two teenage sons, she would get over these attacks, which left her suffused with confusion and a burning sense of embarrassment, but no, here she was flushing again. She tried to invoke the image of her husband, placidly going through the Sunday papers in the next room, but she could only dredge up a blank. He was the ideal husband: he was safe, steady, constant and never caused her the slightest anguish. Truth to tell, he was rather dull. She smacked her forehead in despair. “Jesus, Mary, Joseph,’ she said aloud.
“Where are you off to?” queried her husband, as she tore through the sitting room, jangling the car-keys.
“I’m going to Mass.”
He grunted. He was used to his wife’s piety. As far as he was concerned, all that mattered was that the legacy was safe.
• • •
Grandma returned with Mrs Sinnathuray at ten P.M., victorious. They had pinned various quivering youths to the wall of the station and had refused to let them go until they promised to attend the next service at the Free Church. “I tell you, I’m having more fun every day since my husband died,” Mrs Sinnathuray declared.
“Oh, the Reverend Michaels was here today,” said Mr Tan.
Grandma sat up straighter. “Really? What for?”
He told her.
Grandma’s eyes snapped. “We’ll see about that,” she said. She strode to the telephone and called the church; it was true. Grimly, she replaced the receiver. “Oh, darling,” said Mrs Sinnathuray despondently. She recognised all the familiar warrior symptoms in her old friend.
“Mother, you promised that table to us,” Mrs Tan protested.
“Yes, I know, but it’s a question of who has the greater need. You and the children are comfortably off. The church is just starting. I can’t tell you how exciting it all is.”
“Mother, the Reverend Michaels has said he doesn’t want it.”
“That’s what he thinks.”
“Mother, why are you doing this?”
“The Greeks called it hubris,” Jonathan informed everyone. “We did it in literature.”
Grandma launched herself into a flurry of activity. She decided that the thing to do was to get signatures for a petition urging the inclusion of the table, but she ran into some unexpected opposition. A few people—unbelievably—shared the Reverend Michaels’ reactionary views on Chinese dragons. “Philistines,” fumed Grandma. “What about St. George and the Dragon? I’ve never heard anyone objecting to that.”
That, it transpired, was because St. George’s Dragon was impeccably English, a well established part of myth and folklore and the traditions of the early church. But, in any case, the Free Church frowned upon St. George and his unfortunate Dragon, seeing that the pair of them were so bound up with the fossilised structures and rigidity of High Church Anglicanism, which, after Catholicism, was Public Enemy Number Two in the Free Church’s impressive canon of objects of vilification.
“It’s just a dragon,” insisted Grandma. The table, after all, would be covered with a clean white cloth during the service and nobody would have to view the offending beast. In Grandma’s opinion, this refusal to accept her table was nothing less than a personal insult. Her weekly mahjong parties for the faithful lost some of their sparkle, as members took sides for and against the issue; there was a positively un-Christian tinge of rancour in the atmosphere.
“Hell hath no fury like that of one Christian loathing another,” Jonathan said sagely.
The Reverend Michaels tried to reason with Grandma. He sat her down in his office, fed her biscuits and turned on her the full blast of his charm. He showed her pictures of himself as an angelic little boy in Peoria, Illinois, and of his favourite spaniel, Pooch. He told her she was invaluable, invaluable, in the church.
“But do you remember, ma’am,” he said, earnestly, “the day you testified that you had become a new person? When you promised to sublimate your will to that of the Holy Spirit?” He was walking back and forth across the carpet, fists clenched to emphasise his point. Grandma nodded, mesmerised.
“Far be it that I should try to tell you what to do. I can’t do it; only you can decide for yourself what action to take. The Good Lord gave us free wills to distinguish us from the animals so that we might exercise them. But there are ways and there are ways of using our talents.” He perched on the arm of her chair, smiling beatifically down at her.
At this point, Grandma’s resolution wavered a little. But then she caught sight of the good-humoured look in those cornflower-blue eyes, the serene conviction that he, Edward Danforth Michaels (a man to whom no one, and certainly no woman, had ever said no), would prevail. And the contrariness that coursed through her veins as surely as blood ever did led her to whip out the petition once again, and draw his attention to the two hundred and fifty signatures. The Reverend Michaels, his smile fading, stood, and pressed the tips of his fingers together, unavailingly. He pursed his lips; he was vexed, most vexed, and he made the mistake of saying so. They parted burgeoning enemies.
Finally, Grandma hit on a brainwave. She would hire a furniture removal company to transport the table to the church and install it while the Reverend Michaels was out fulfilling his pastoral duties. Presented with a fait accompli, he could hardly object, could he? She confided her plan to her supporters, a militant group who wanted the Reverend to take a more aggressive approach towards proselytising, and were exasperated by his high-charm, low-ferocity tactics. They saw this as a good way of registering disapproval.
So it happened that on a cloudy Friday afternoon, while the Reverend Michaels was conducting an infants’ class at the home of a member, a large furniture truck rolled up to the front entrance of the church, Grandma ensconced in the front seat beside the driver, to whom she recounted the whole affair in high-velocity Hokkien. She felt like a military leader commanding a convoy. A dozen or so of her supporters milled around, hindering rather than helping in the unloading of the table. Grandma’s mood was triumphal, imperial—first the table, then ... the possibilities were endless.
“What is the meaning of this?”
The drawl, the lilting cadence, was the same, but the geniality was gone. The Reverend Michaels hove into view, blond, Nordic, towering. There was a stunned silence. A frisson ran through the assembled rebels; what was he doing here? (They discovered later that he had dismissed the infants’ class early.) As he came towards them in a furious rush, the thought that was uppermost in their minds was that he looked as if he were the wrath of God personified. They fell back on either side to let him through—someone remarked later that it was eerily reminiscent of the parting of the Red Sea. He stood before the table, heaving; out of nowhere, it seemed, he produced a stick and—everyone gasped—thrashed the delicate curved legs of the table. With an almighty, ominous CRACK, it settled down with a thump, a good five inches shorter. Then the Reverend Michaels, without so much as a backward glance, vanished, leaving a distinctly post-apocalyptic flavour in the air.
• • •
Grandma took to her bed for a week. (The table, sent to the workshop, cost several thousand dollars to repair; the bill was duly despatched to the Renewal Charismatic Free Church for All Brethren.) The Tans, victorious but feeling it unseemly to crow, wore the mantle of quiet dignity as they tiptoed through the house. The mahjong parties ceased; the Brethren scattered their spiritual largesse elsewhere. Peter met a Catholic girl from the convent school down the road, and thought, perhaps, that Buddhism, well, wasn’t exactly meant for him. The next Sunday, the whole family was back at St. Aloysius, Grandma barely blinking an eyelid while Father Hsien expatiated on the theme of spiritual pride. Her spirit was broken, her flesh subdued.
“I told you there was no need to panic,” Mr Tan said to his wife.
That’s what you think, she thought privately, though she did not answer. Absently, she fingered the crucifix around her neck. One needed a very strong faith to get through life.