In the Beauty of the Lilies by John Updike
Patrick stepped in front of her and said, “All right, you vultures, enough. This is a frantic mother you’re dealing with.” To Alma, in private, he said, “My God, Essie. You don’t have to answer every crappy question. Your problem is and always was you’re too damn anxious to please.”
She had felt sorry for these media people; they looked so exasperated and weary, so underfed and overdrunk, stuck here at this standoff and supposed to send back a story a day, a little revelation or miracle every day, to feed everybody. Why should she mind being their tidbit for the moment? She might make the network news, unless Bush invaded Panama.
Rather roughly Patrick steered her through the news personnel, who were still shouting and murmuring questions and requests for a private interview at her convenience, up front to where Fred Dix was coping with his own beseechers. Dix reached above a reporter’s shoulder to shake her hand. He said, “These are terrible circumstances, Miss DeMott, but it’s a privilege to make your acquaintance. I’ve been adoring your films since I was a kid. Just about my favorite, if I can say so, was that Strawberry Blonde you did with Cagney.”
She thought of telling him it had been Crosby, the one with Cagney had been Rita Hayworth, but what did it matter? She had been mulched in—what had once seemed to her absolute immortality turned out to be a slow dissolution within a confused mass of perishing images like a colorful mountain of compressed and rotting garbage. “Thank you,” she said, and since Dix was momentarily too starstruck to continue, she added, “That was one of the most fun. Nobody makes musicals like that any more.”
“And a damn shame it is,” Dix said. “The world’d be a less violent place if they did. Tell me, Alma—if I may—what you hope to accomplish by being here?”
She didn’t know. Her agent had insisted she come. “Well, I thought m-maybe if I could see Clark face to f-face.”
“Face to face,” Dix said, something of a performer himself, of the dry macho variety. “Half the world wants to see those fools in there face to face, the investigation team foremost. Do you know”—and now he was including Patrick in his discourse, having sized him up as her protector or agent, and as a man more understanding of a man’s problems—“these various media keep telling us they’ll take us to court if we don’t let a crew approach the house at their own risk? First Amendment rights, they say. First Amendment, Second Amendment, it’s all I hear these days. And would you believe we got dozens of wackos showing up wanting to be let into the Temple so they can join up? We got food parcels pouring in from all over the country and Canada we’re supposed to take over on our choppers and drop. We got about ten different psychotics telling us Jesse Smith should be put in jail because they’re the real Jesus Christ, not him. Including some women—that’s a new one. The amount of human sickness a thing like this stirs up is enough to make you puke. I had to smile at that question about the same-sex marriages—I’m hardshell Baptist myself, and we’d never hold with that.”
Alma had been retaining her next line in her head throughout this long expository speech. “Mr. Dix, what can I do? I want my son to know I’m here for him.”
“He’ll see it. On the box. They’ve been dropped a couple Zeniths. Our Jesse over there’s become quite an addict, I understand. Their electric bill comes to us, and it keeps going up. Don’t mean to be flip about life-and-death issues, but you got to see the comedy of it now and then or you’d go crazy yourself.”
“Is it true that this man has said anybody who wants to can leave?”
“He says that, but keep in mind he’s got those people in there hypnotized. They have no wills of their own. They’re no more likely to run away than a whipped dog from his master. Also, they’ll have to face some outstanding charges.”
Something—the image of the whipped dog—pushed tears suddenly over her lower lids. “He’s trapped!” she blurted out.
Patrick put an arm around her and said to Fred Dix, “Suppose the boy wants to reach her, how will we know?”
“Esau—that’s what he calls himself—checks in with us three, four times a day. He’s having the time of his life. Handles it all like a real pro, I must say. Where shall we tell him she’s staying?”
“Bighorn Mountain, forty-five minutes from here. Let me give you the private number.”
Dix took it but felt the need of some ceremonial remark, some acknowledgment that a goddess had descended to be among them. Essie was afraid he would try to kiss her hand. He said, “A true honor, ma’am. I guess a thing like this shows the movies weren’t exaggerating, they were telling the simple truth.”
Dear God, forgive me for my mistakes, my selfishness. Always I was seeking to do Your will, that my talent not be hidden, that my light would shine forth. Forgive me if I could have done more for Clark. Save him from this sadness, this farce. Give him back to me as he was, helpless and so eager at my breast. Forgive me if I should have nursed him longer, as You know I had committed to Cream Cheese and Caviar and Newman wasn’t available later. Dear Lord, make me again the young mother I was; let me pour into him all the love his little being needed. Heal our lives and take us back and make us all perfect. Do the impossible, Lord, for him, as You have done for me. Rescue him from that terrible house. Reach down, so that none but I can see. I will not tell. Let me love You again. Amen.
It had been so long since Alma had prayed that she fell into the vocabulary and near-nonsense of the little girl praying with Mr. Bear clutched against her face. God had been her secret then and was still. She felt Him still on her skin, though His pressure had become less passionate. She stayed in her uncle’s condo a week, surrounded by blazing-bright snow, the rumble of the lifts, and the strange red-cheeked armies of young skiers, alien and mesmerized, but her son never called—just her husband, her agent, and her father, sounding amiably addled and maddeningly passive. He even said, “It’s in the Lord’s hands,” he who hadn’t spent a minute in a church except the time she was confirmed. A great number of respectful but inexorable news reporters somehow got her number and called, and a young British producer—passed on from Shirley’s office—wondering if she might be able to tackle a British accent for a television adaption of a novel called Memento Mori, all about these dreadful old artistic people, very clever and amusing. “We’re hoping for Maggie Smith for the lead. You’d just mainly have to roll your eyes and look vampish.” At night, Alma tried not to keep pace with Patrick’s drinking, to save on calories, but it was hard. He had a whole life’s grievances to recite. He had known her when she was nobody, and such people were fewer and fewer:
blessed islands in this acid sea of celebrity. He deserved some attention for this, but not as much as he wanted. He had become a pathetic fame-fucker, and wanted to fuck hers, her poor old tattered fame. One night as she went into her room, from the wet kiss he gave her you would have thought he was making a pass.
The year 1990 brought an inch or two of fresh powder every night. The routines within the Temple rarely varied. The main event of January, which they all prayed over and discussed for days, was Matthew’s defection. The big, puppy-like, near-sighted Hoosier had loved his mission work—the trips to Hawaii and Australia and even Israel and Thailand, where against all the odds he had created nuclei of converts back in the Eighties—and perhaps, so outward-turned, had been simply too lonely. He crept out in the night; the sound of the police car with its escort of news vans taking him away had woken some of those within the Temple. By morning a fresh fall had erased even his tracks in the snow. He was charged, television told them, with murder, conspiracy, attempted murder, and interfering with the duties of a police officer. In his jail cell he became, for a week or so, a great favorite of the press, and, his fervor for Jesse’s Word unabated, did continue to spread the gospel. But the media have a brief attention span, and soon he sat unattended in his cell, waiting out the yawning intervals in the legal process. Jesse took a mild view of the betrayal: “Well, I guess Matt was one of those seeds that without looking it had gone and fa
Toward the end of January and through February there was the lambing. Day and night, the bleating of new arrivals on this earth, and men and women coming and going into the barn with heat lamps and blankets, wearing bloody aprons and green Playtex gloves, to assist in the muddle of birth—the little black hooves outthrust through the woolly vagina, the slippery purple-yellow placental mess, the new lamb staggering to its feet with the umbilical cord still dragging in the straw. Coyotes smelled the afterbirth and, winter-starved, came close in skulking, howling numbers, so that the men armed against the armies of Gog turned their guns against a natural foe. Clark explained to the siege headquarters in Lower Branch that this shooting was not directed against the personnel manning the perimeter, and relayed Jesse’s refusal to let a team of veterinarians ski into the Temple. “Slick, that’s how they do with them airplane hijackers,” Jesse explained. “Send in a crew to take away the rest-room shit that turns out to be Israeli commandos. ‘The treacherous dealer dealeth treacherously.’ That’s Isaiah, twenty-one two.”
The February snows were the heaviest of the winter and yet the sun strengthened each day, dazzlingly, burning bare margins of mud at the base of southern-exposed walls and outcroppings, with the first shoots, by the end of the month, of spring grass, and of snowdrops with their blue-green leaves and pearl-white hanging heads, and the probing pale tips of the avalanche lilies. Even on clear cold days a softening was felt in the air: the woodsmoke from the chimneys smelled stronger and sweeter; puffy broken cumulus replaced the leaden nimbus layers or bald steely blue of January; and the birds, the chickadees and juncos and finches, came out from the shelter of the spruces and hemlocks and peppered the air with excited twittering, sharing some news that electrified their densely programmed little brains. The tracks of small animals, squirrels and marmots and wood rats come to steal the sheep’s feed grain, multiplied in the barnyard, and in March, on an early morning when fog was lifting from the softening snow, two elk had moved past the house, migrating up from the valley into the mountains. The male was shedding his antlers, and by furiously rubbing them against the rough dry boards of the house he brought men scrambling from bed to the windows with their guns, thinking that the long-anticipated assault had begun. Ghostly in the fog, the elk couple hightailed it upward, into the shrouded vast realm of the mountain lion and grizzly bear, the horned lark and the white-tailed ptarmigan and bald eagle. With the stirring of spring, traffic along the road at the end of the snowbound dirt road had picked up, too, while Clark found the cops and agents down in Lower Branch and even his old friend Eddie, of the gray suit and bent spine, less and less communicative.
In mid-March, Tom and Jim’s wife, Polly, deserted, with Polly and Jim’s three-year-old girl, named Fidelity. It was not as adulterous as it seemed; they had begged Jim to come, and he had seemed to agree, but at the last minute had told them to go without him. From his bunk in the men’s barracks he explained it to Clark: “It’s simple math, in a way. You know about Pascal’s bet? The odds are long, but the rewards are infinite, so the bet is infinitely worth making. I’m betting Jesse’s the real thing. Some might say it’s mighty strange for the Lord to come again in the form of a limited, gun-crazy guy like Jesse, but that’s the Lord’s style, to work in mysterious ways.” Jim added, with a sly shrug and his cool slant smile, “If I’m wrong, Polly and Fidelity are safe, and my cousin will take good care of them. Tom’s a straight guy. Dumb but straight.” Clark knew he should like Jim, but something held him back, something fishy and too easy, as if life for Jim was like watching television. Clark felt he had come a long way from home and yet here was this man who kept slyly trying to engage him in the accent, the language, of the old country.
Not a week passed before—another miracle—their number was replenished; a party of four, who had come to Lower Branch months ago, shortly after the siege had become news, finally made it into the Temple, by snowshoeing at night through the weakest spot in the authorities’ ring, the steep rocky bowl to the northeast, having bribed the Hardens two hundred dollars to let them through on the Triple H land. “Jesse, we are yours,” they told him. “We are saved.” He bestowed upon them the names Benjamin, Medad, Mehetabel, and Elisabeth. They brought with them hundreds in cash and the certificates and passbooks to their life savings, but until the day when connections with the banks and merchants were reëstablished, they had brought mainly the burden of their bodies to the Temple, where the supplies were running low. The miracle solved nothing.
Jesse appeared disheartened and distracted. His spirit had fattened on the publicity of the winter, but the convergence of thousands of converts and untold numbers of angels, ushering in the new Heaven and Earth that Revelation promised, had not come about. Now he felt an approaching famine in things, an unease of coming change. Satellite City was almost a ghost town. The foreign networks and major papers had pulled their correspondents, and then the national newsmagazines had shifted to local stringers, and the smaller-budget and remoter radio and television stations had faded away. A reporter population once numbered in the hundreds—so vast that the Salvation Army had set up a meal truck on the Menéndez brothers’ tent-covered rise of land—had shrunk to representatives of the major networks, the Denver Post, and a few local papers and stations within commuting distance. Jesse’s tapes had been played to audiences of millions, his onrolling voice had huskily twanged through any number of recorded interviews, his pamphlets of exegesis and prophecy had been publicly quoted, ridiculed, and psychoanalyzed; and yet nothing, in any cosmic sense, had happened. The world remained insufficiently perturbed. It rolled on, untransformed. Heaven expected yet more of him, and under this demand his spirit writhed, sleepless. The fringe of hair falling to his collar had whitened; his wire glasses were worn awry, or absent, so his golden eyes stared without a focus. He spent days at a time among his women, but—claimed a rumor that crept out through his bedroom walls—impotently. Meeting Esau in a corridor or before Bible study, he would ask, “How goes the battle, Slick?” and not wait for any answer. Once, as Clark was hurrying to bed after dinner so he could rise for the sentry watch before dawn, Jesse, who had not been at the table, materialized on the tilted loose boards leading up to the men’s dormitory. He looked through his disciple and in a tranced voice recited, “ ‘And then if any man shall say to you, Lo, here is Christ; or lo, he is there; believe him not.’ Mark, thirteen twenty-one. Ha! Believe him not! Those old Gospeleers told it like they saw it, didn’t they, Slick? Here’s another puzzler: ‘Neither shall they say, Lo here! or, lo there! for, behold, the kingdom of God is within you.’ Tell me what that means.”
“Well, I think—”
“No thinking now, Slick. None of your clever PR bullshit. Too late. Too late, boy. He’s got us by the balls. Gog. Ever crush a big black ant under your thumb? That’s us right now—feel it? Feel it?” He squeezed Esau’s arm like a drowning man dragging down his rescuer. Esau gasped and squirmed away, obscurely, illicitly pleased to see Jesse brought low, tasting what Clark himself had tasted those empty early L.A. mornings when he had returned from one of the clubs with a burned-out buzzing brain and gazed down the grid of lights receding over this total velvety blackness until it seemed an angelic cage door was rising up to lock him in.
Jesse’s Bible-study sessions had moved from Revelation and the Old Testament prophets, with their rageful violence, to the Gospels, as if he were looking for his own story there. “ ‘O my Father,’ “ he read, “ ‘if it be possible, let this cup pass from me.’ “ His audience sat in their white robes of used sheets, holding dry stalks of high-country wheat instead of the Biblical palms prescribed by Revelation 7:9. “Now, dear friends, what’s this all about? This is a man in agony talking. ‘If it be possible.’ ‘With God all things are possible,’ Jesus has said earlier in the Gospel of Matthew. So He knows God could remove the cup if He wished. But God does not wish. Jesus looks up there from praying at His rocky cold table in the Garden of Gethseman
“ ‘And they crucified Him’! The Roman officials of Judaea and the high priests and elders of Judaism and the social workers and the FBI agents and the murderous agents of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, they crucified Him, for bringing perfection down from Heaven to earth. They crucified the perfect Lamb. And what did His disciples do? Believe it or not, my dearest friends, they slept, they pretended they didn’t know Him until the cock crowed, they ran this way and that like sheep when the coyotes carry off one of the little lambs. And Jesus up there on the cross cries out ‘My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?’ And the people on the ground taunt Him, saying, ‘Save Thyself. If Thou be the Son of God, come down from the cross.’ And the thieves crucified next to Him join right in, razzing Him in the midst of their own agony, you can see why, for if He hopped down from that cross He just might bring them with Him, His new buddies and sidekicks. And the folks hanging around poke a sponge full of vinegar in His face, and have themselves a laugh, and He cries out with a loud voice, a loud voice”—and Jesse made his own voice here so loud that it cracked painfully, over all their heads, including those of the children, the youngest of whom whimpered at the noise, while those older stared, trying to see through this man’s shouting into what the world had in store for them—“and yielded up the ghost. No ‘Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do’ in this version—that’s in soft-hearted Luke. No friendly aside to the thief on the cross beside Him that ‘Today shalt thou be with me in Paradise’—that’s in Luke, too. In Matthew, He takes the cup neat, like a bolt of bitter, bitter whiskey, that makes you cough, and makes the tears come to your eyes, so you swear you’ll never take another drink as long as you live.