Ancient of Days (25 page)

These paintings—the drab acrylics she’d hopefully entitled
Souls
—still seemed to me the least distinguished work of RuthClaire’s career: blatant mediocrities. Only a uxorious husband could love them. I scratched my head. Adam was not the uxorious sort, but his fondness for this series—when, for “remembrances,” he could have taken better examples of his wife’s art—truly puzzled me.

We got away from Atlanta shortly after noon. On our drive down, Adam read. He had a stack of hardcover titles on the floorboard, and he seemed to pick up and peruse a new one every fifteen minutes or so.
Does God Exist?
and
Eternal Life?
by Hans Küng,
God and the Astronomers
by Robert Jastrow,
God and the New Physics
by Paul Davies,
The Dancing Wu Li Masters
by Gary Zukav,
The Reenchantment of the World
by Morris Berman,
Mind and Nature
by Gregory Bateson, an anthology entitled
The Mind’s I
by a pair of editors whose names escape me. I don’t know what all else. I had the impression that Adam was sampling these texts, checking passages that he’d underlined in previous readings, rather than trying to devour each volume whole for the first time—but even this formidable intellectual feat had its intimidating aspects. Out of respect for his admirable focus, I kept my mouth shut.

At Paradise Farm, unloading, I broke my quirky vow of silence: “Adam, you know the story you told RuthClaire to tell the reporter about your reasons for separating?” He raised his eyebrows. “The one about entering the seminary this fall?”

“Yes?” he croaked.

“That alleged fiction came to you so quickly, I wondered if . . . well, if it might really be something you’d like to try.”

“Oh, yes,” he managed. “I. Have. Thought. About. It.”

Livia George, Hazel Upchurch, and our latest little waitress from Tocqueville Junior College did not jump for joy on my return. An hour earlier, a tour bus from Muscadine Gardens had dropped off forty people at the West Bank. These people had descended like a flock of crows, eaten a dozen different menu items, left a skimpy collective tip, and flown away in their bus with a rude backfire.

“Did you give them the substitutes they wanted?”

Livia George sat spraddle-legged at a table near the cash register. “Don’ I always, Mistah Paul?”

“Everybody was taken care of?”

She gave me a disgusted look. “We turned you a pretty profit, and we done been doin’ that the whole live-long week. You jes’ like a man runs up to put out a fire when it’s awreddy burnt down his house.”

“Livvy, you say the sweetest things.”

“How’s Mistah Adam?” she asked, sitting up straight to wipe her brow. “How’s Miss RuthClaire?”

“Fine,” I lied. “Fine.”

I made some noises about the apparent success of Adam’s operation, but beyond that partial truth I could not comfortably go. To prevent any further discussion of the matter, I helped clean up the restaurant and stayed on for the five-o’clock dinner crowd. Our receipts for the day were encouraging, and I drove Livia George home without once mentioning that I had a guest in my house.

Next morning, closer to noon than to sunup, the TV set downstairs awakened me.

I knotted my terrycloth robe at my waist and stumbled barefoot down the steps to find Adam cross-legged on the floor with a section of the Sunday
Journal-Constitution
strewn around him and my RCA XL-100’s screen flickering with ill-defined violet and magenta images of Dwight “Happy” McElroy’s
Great Gospel Giveaway
broadcast.

“
‘This is my story, this is my song,’
” sang the hundred-member choir behind McElroy. “
‘Praising my Savior all the day long!’
”

Shots of the choir alternated with wide-angle pans of the congregation in McElroy’s huge Televangelism Center in Rehoboth, Louisiana. This soaring, baroquely buttressed structure had been paid for by the four-bit to five-dollar donations of hundreds of thousands of low-income subscribers to the doctrinal guidelines of the Greater Christian Constituency of America, Inc. Despite the raddled colors on my picture tube, I could see that attending the service were more enraptured souls than you could usually find at the Omni during an Atlanta Hawks basketball game. Seven thousand people? Ten? However many there were, they must have converged on Rehoboth from every city and hamlet on the Gulf Coast, not excluding Baton Rouge, New Orleans, Biloxi, and Mobile. The blessed place rocked.

“Ah,” I said. “Your favorite show.”

Adam had already dressed: a pair of light brown bush shorts and an orange T-shirt celebrating the pleasures of River Street in Savannah. He handed me a section of the paper called “The Arts.”

“Turn first page,” he growled, but, overnight, his speech had become more fluid.

I obeyed. What greeted my eye on the inside page was this headline:

MARRIAGE OF WORLD-FAMOUS ATLANTA ARTISTS ON SKIDS

OWING TO HABILINE’S DECISION TO ATTEND SEMINARY

Beside the brief story was a file photograph of Adam and RuthClaire in “happier times,” namely, at the opening of his Abraxas show in February. My face was a smudge of dots among other ill-defined faces in the background.

“That was quick, wasn’t it?”

I read the story. It quoted RuthClaire to the effect that Adam’s pursuit of spiritual fulfillment had left him little time for either Tiny Paul or her. She still loved him, but that very love insisted that she give him what he most wanted, a chance to study at Candler without family encumbrances. She wanted to support him in his quest for a theological degree, but all he wanted was complete freedom. No one alive fully understood the habiline mind, but in some ways Adam’s outlook was that of a medieval ascetic with a calling for the priesthood. Had she not intercepted him on his northward trek through Georgia two years ago, almost certainly he would have discovered his spiritual bent without first marrying.

Adam grunted. “She does not add. That ‘almost certainly.’ I would have. Stayed a naked animal.”

“Never mind. You still end up looking like a horse’s butt, Adam.”

“‘
A horse’s butt?’
”

“What kind of man leaves his wife and son to study religion? Jesus.”

“I do not care. How I end up. Looking. To people who do not know me.”

“You just want Paulie back?”

“Yes.”

On
Gospel Giveaway
, the words of McElroy’s sermon rolled from him like Gulf Coast combers in hurricane season, powerful, dangerous, unrelenting. (Of course, there was also the ever-present inset of the woman interpreting the sermon for deaf viewers, her hands flashing like hungry seagulls.) Suddenly, though, McElroy held up a copy of the same section of the Atlanta paper now in my own hands.

“. . . a continuing assault on the American family,” he thundered, waving the newspaper at his auditors. “I’d planned to apologize today for my overzealousness last summer in castigatin’ the former RuthClaire Loyd for livin’ in sin with a male creature not her husband. Well, it’s long since become evident to everybody that this so-called creature is a man. He and Miss RuthClaire were in fact husband and wife at the time of their apparent illicit cohabitation. That bein’ so, they
deserved
an apology. Why, this past week I visited Adam Montaraz at a hospital in Atlanta, laid my hands square on his head, and baptized him into the everlastin’ glory and the ever-glorious communion of the Body of Christ. Say
Amen
!”

The people in the Televangelism Center roared, “
Amen!
”

“At the same time, I unburdened my spirit of its load of guilt and sorrow to
both
Montarazes, callin’ upon them to forgive me in the great and gracious name of Jesus Christ. And
did
they forgive me? I believe they did, and I went away fully convicted that here were two righteous human bein’s saved from sin and despair by faith in God and their humble devotion to each other.”

“To God give the glory!” a member of the audience cried.

“But this morning I read that this same couple, so concerned and carin’ only five days ago, has fallen to the epidemic of sundered relationships ravagin’ our country the way the plague once ravaged Europe! This story wounds me so bad because RuthClaire Montaraz has broken her marriage for one
incredible
reason—nothing more terrible than her husband’s desire to . . .
to study for the ministry
!”

The congregation groaned collectively.

Adam sprang up from the floor and punched the button turning the set off. “That. Son. Of. Bitch,” he enunciated.

“RuthClaire didn’t let him baptize T. P. He resents her for that, Adam. He’s trying to get back at her.”

“He has. Misread the story. I am the one. Who has deserted my family.”

“Adam, it’s all a fabrication. Everything in that story.”

Adam struggled to explain himself: “But he has misread, even, the fabrication. A person working for a Master of Theological Studies . . . is not preparing for the ministry. That is the degree of a lay person. Mr. McElroy should know that.”

“RuthClaire balked him. That’s all he knows.”

“So he blackens her name from his pulpit? For oh-so-many viewers? Is that what he does?” Adam stopped pacing, rubbed his lower jaw, and pointed a bony finger at the blank screen. “Dwight ‘Happy’ McElroy, you are a . . . very unpleasant . . . son of bitch.”

I calmed Adam down and got him into the kitchen where, remembering the orders of Dr. Ruggiero, I prepared him a plate of soft scrambled eggs and a bowl of oatmeal. Adam ate ravenously, polishing off his eggs before turning his spoon to the still steaming, cinnamon-sprinkled oatmeal.

The West Bank was closed on Sundays, not so much to honor the sabbath as to acknowledge the mores of the townspeople who honored it. And, like God, I myself was not opposed to twenty-four hours of uninterrupted rest every seven days. At any rate, that afternoon Adam and I entertained ourselves preparing a makeshift gallery display of RuthClaire’s paintings
Souls
in her old studio. We organized them by dividing them into five groups of seven canvases each, scrupulously assigning different background colors and frame sizes to each group—after which we either hung them or propped them on shelves or tables where they would show off to best advantage.

Warm afternoon sun came through the dusty Venetian blinds in zebra stripes of marmalade and shadow. Then, when I hoisted the blinds, the same light flooded the entire studio. Prismatic dazzle bounced around the room, and our placement of the canvases, along with the sunlight streaming in, transformed them from muddy, earthbound mistakes into oddly spectacular affirmations of their creator’s talent.

“My God,” I said.

Adam pointed at this canvas and then at that, daring me to note how the finishes that had once seemed flat and monolithic now had depth and intricacy. Under the mute pastels lay eloquent patterns of shape and line, iridescent commentaries on the otherwise commonplace surfaces in which they were embedded.

“I never saw any of this before. It’s hard to believe.”

“I know,” Adam said.

“Is this the way
you
always see them?”

“Of course not.”

“But the other way, they’re inexcusably ugly . . . hardly worth keeping.”

“Sometimes they might seem so. I have heard Miss RuthClaire admit the same.”

“A desire to undo them? A desire to destroy them?”

“Yes. But only when she has got . . .
beyond
them.”

Above Paradise Farm, summer clouds pushed in from the west, mounting one another like amorous sheep. The light in the studio changed. Someone had swaddled the sun in gauze.

“They’re ruined,” I said, meaning the paintings. “They’re back to normal.”

Adam gave me a funny look. Then he patted my shoulder: Don’t fret, Mister Paul.

A golden glory poured through the summer clouds. Only a little less dazzling than before, sunlight pirouetted through the studio. I looked again at RuthClaire’s paintings. No transcendence. The infinitesimal change in the light had somehow leached them of magic. And no matter how hard I tried over the next few days, I was never able to enter the studio at a time when the light slanted in at the necessary angle and chromatic intensity to bring the canvases back to life.

On Monday morning, Adam and I each tried to disguise from the other our individual senses of expectancy. Today RuthClaire was supposed to receive from Craig a letter stipulating the groups—charities, political organizations—to which the Montarazes must write their ransom checks.

At 10:01, I began to get ready to drive into town for my luncheon business. Niedrach should have called, I told myself. But I withdrew that thought, doubting the security of Beulah Fork’s telephone lines. Craig did not need to know where Adam had gone, only that he’d moved away from the big cupola’d house on Hurt Street. As for Adam, he was walking barefoot through my pecan grove, contemplating his and RuthClaire’s misfortune. I went down my sundeck steps to talk to him. “If anything happens here, keep me posted. Call me at the West Bank. Even if Livia George answers the phone, she won’t recognize your voice. She’s never heard it before.”

Before Adam could reply, a vehicle crunched through the gravel on the circular drive fronting the house. Who? Friend, foe, or unsuspecting Avon lady?

“Get inside,” I said. “I’ll check this out.”

Adam obeyed. In the sweltering midmorning heat, I trotted around the house beneath the studio loft and turned the corner in time to see a male figure climbing down from the cab of a glossy violet pickup. The truck was jacked up so high on its oversized wheels that the man’s final step was a low-level parachute jump. He saw me the moment he landed and stood staring at me with a resolute skepticism. “You Mr. Loyd?”

“Depends on who I’m talking to.”

Neither clean-shaven nor bearded, neither a Beau Brummell nor a hobo, the man closed the distance between us. “A chameleon, huh? Well, so am I, I guess.” He halted about five feet away, his outfit that of a pulpwood worker: khaki pants, blue work shirt, rope-soled shoes, and a ball cap with a perforated crown.