Keeping Faith: A Novel (10 page)

I mention the quote from Genesis that Faith sang like a nursery rhyme, the chapter in the Bible. I tell him of my drowned kitten, the story that no one else ever knew. When I’m finished, Rabbi Weissman asks, “Has God given your daughter any messages? Any suggestions for rooting out the evil in the world?”

“No, she hasn’t.”

The rabbi pauses. “She?”

“That’s what Faith tells me.”

“I’d like to speak to her,” Rabbi Weissman says.

A half hour after I leave the rabbi sitting with Faith in the sanctuary, he joins me in the entryway of the temple. “Maimonides,” he says, as if we have been in the middle of a conversation, “tried to explain the “face” of God. It’s not a real face, because that would make God no better, really, than a man. It’s a presence, a sense that God is aware. Just as God makes us in His own image, we make Him in our image, too–so it makes sense in our own heads. According to the Midrash, there were several incidents when God was revealed in form. At one,

the Red Sea crossing, God appeared as a young warrior and hero. At Sinai God appeared as an elderly judge. Why did God look like a judge at Sinai and not at the Red Sea? Because at the Red Sea the people needed a hero. An old man would not have fit.” He turns to me. “Of course, this is something you’re familiar with.”

“No. I’ve never heard it before.”

“Really?” Rabbi Weissman scrutinizes me. “I asked Faith if she could draw a picture of the God she sees.” He hands me a sheet of paper, crayoned on one side. I prepare to be unimpressed–after all, I’ve seen Faith draw this imaginary friend before. But this picture is different. A woman dressed in white sits on a chair, cradling ten babies in her arms, babies that are black, white, red,

and yellow. And although the artwork is crude, this mother’s face looks something like my own.

“Are you saying she thinks God looks like me?” I ask finally.

Rabbi Weissman shrugs. “I’m not saying anything. But other people might.”

Dressed as he is in a slick Italian suit, with his neatly combed hair and his crisp manners, Dr. Grady De Vries, expert on childhood schizophrenia, does not look like the kind of man who would spend the better part of three hours down on the floor beside Faith,

playing with the bald Barbie. And yet I’ve been sitting at the observation window watching him do just that. After some time he and Dr. Keller come through the adjoining door to the psychiatrist’s office.

“Mrs. White,” Dr. Keller says, “Dr.

De Vries would like to speak to you.”

He sits down in a chair across from me. “You want the good news or the bad news?”

“Good.”

“We’re taking Faith off the Risperdal.

Your daughter is not psychotic. I’ve studied psychosis in children for over twenty years. I’ve published books and papers on it and have been an expert witness at trials and–well, you get the idea. Faith is, in all manners but one, a mentally healthy and reasonably content seven-year-old girl.”

“What’s the bad news?”

Dr. De Vries rubs at his eyes with a thumb and forefinger. “That Faith is hearing something,

and talking to someone. There’s too much knowledge there, that’s age- and situationally inappropriate,

to chalk it up to a figment of her imagination. But it’s not a physical illness, and it doesn’t appear to be a mental one either.” He glances at Dr. Keller. “With your permission, I’ll ask Dr. Keller to present this case next week at a psychiatric symposium, to see if our colleagues might have some answers.”

Through the observation glass I watch Faith launch a Sky Dancer into the air. When it hits the fluorescent lights, she laughs and tries to do it again. “I don’t know … I don’t want her to be some kind of spectacle.”

“She won’t be present, Mrs. White.

And the case will be presented anonymously.”

“If you do this, will you figure out what the problem is?”

Dr. De Vries and Dr. Keller exchange a look. “We hope so, Mrs.

White,” he says. “But it may not be something we can fix.”

Keeping Faith

FOUR

There lives more faith in honest doubt,

Believe me, than in half the creeds.

–Alfred, Lord Tennyson September 27, 1999 When Allen McManus is assigned to cover symposiums, he looks upon it as an extra six hours of sleep. From time to time enough highbrow doctors congregate at the Boston Harbor Hotel to warrant sending out a stringer from The Boston Globe. No matter that most of the time Allen McManus writes obituaries–he’s the one who gets sent. Obviously his editor-in-chief realizes the connection: Most of these godawful conferences are enough to bore a person to death.

Allen slouches in the rear of the auditorium.

He’s already written down the name of the symposium, which he figures is enough for the two lines of type it deserves. He’s ready to cover his face with his hat and take a nap. But then an attractive woman walks up to the podium. That sparks Allen’s curiosity. After all, in spite of his profession, he’s not dead yet. Most of the speakers at these symposiums are crusty old turds who remind him alternately of his father and the priest from his childhood in Southie who used to rap his knuckles when he didn’t quite measure up as altar boy. He sits up, interested in his surroundings for the first time that day.

The woman is slender and fine-boned, her no-nonsense hair sluiced behind her ears as she settles her notes on the podium. “Good morning, I’m Dr. Mary Keller.” Allen watches her eyes flicker over her notes,

hesitate. “Ladies and gentlemen,” she says, “given the unorthodox subject I’m about to present, I’m not going to read my prepared paper. Instead I’d like to tell you about two case studies. The first is a current patient, seven years old, whose mother brought her in for treatment. The subject has developed an imaginary friend, one that she refers to as her God. The second case study occurred over thirty years ago.” Dr.

Keller tells of a child at parochial school,

forced to kneel for long stretches as penitence. She talks of a day when this five-year-old felt something stir beside her, something warm and solid, only to turn and see nothing at all.

“The question I place before you today is this,” Dr.

Keller says. “If there is no physical component to a delusion, if there is no diagnostic framework in which to fit the behaviors as a generally accepted mental illness, what are we left with as a diagnosis?”

Allen can feel the doctors in the row before him subtly shifting. Holy cow, he thinks,

guessing where she’s headed. This woman is committing professional suicide.

“If physical and mental illness is ruled out, is it within the realm of a psychiatrist to authenticate the behavior? To say that,

possibly, the delusion is really a vision?”

She slowly runs her eyes over the entire disbelieving audience. “The reason I am asking you this is that I know for a fact that at least one, if not both of these subjects, is telling the truth.

I know this because the child kneeling in the chapel, and feeling … something indescribable … was me.

And because thirty years later, in my own office with another child as a subject, I have felt it again.”

Allen McManus tears his eyes away from Dr. Keller, slips out the back of the auditorium, and places a call to his editor.

At the departure gate Colin watches Jessica check their tickets for the hundredth time. She looks like any other business traveler, with her tailored suit and laptop case–she looks like Colin himself. To see her,

no one would know that at the end of this ten-day sales conference in Las Vegas, she plans to get married in a drive-through church and gamble her way through a weeklong honeymoon.

“Are you excited?” she purrs, leaning into him.

“Because I am.”

“I, uh, need to hit the bathroom.” Colin gives her a smile and walks off, ostensibly toward the men’s room. He does not know how he feels about getting married in Las Vegas.

Performed by a hack justice of the peace, with an Elvis impersonator serenading them and bargain bouquets available for five dollars a pop, it will be considerably different from his wedding to Mariah.

It had been Jessica’s idea. They were headed to Vegas anyway for the conference. “Besides”–

she had laughed, rubbing her abdomen–“imagine the stories we can tell him.”

He wonders now if his marriage to Mariah might have lasted, had he married her at the Light of the Moon chapel in Vegas instead of at St.

Thomas’s in Virginia, with more pomp and circumstance than a royal wedding. If he’d been willing to do–what was it called? the hora!–

or break a glass beneath his foot, if he hadn’t just assumed that his way was the right way, maybe their differences wouldn’t have been so pronounced. As it is, Colin blames himself for what happened to his ex-wife. He asked her to bend to his wishes so much that she actually broke.

Instead of entering the men’s room, Colin sits down in a narrow phone cubicle and calls his former home. “Mariah,” he says when she answers.

There is a moment’s pause. “Colin.” Even though he tries not to, he can hear the thread of delight wrapped around her voice. It makes him uncomfortable; it always has. Who in his right mind wants to be someone else’s savior?

Colin presses his forehead against the metal wall of the booth and tries to find the words for what he must say. “How’s Faith’s back?” he asks instead.

“Much better. She’s wearing shirts now.”

“Good.”

In the silence that follows, Colin suddenly remembers how uncomfortable Mariah once was with spaces in conversation. She’d rush into sentences,

chatter about nothing, rather than sit through the delay.

Yet here she is, closemouthed, as if she is trying to hold in a secret just as much as he is.

“You’re okay?” she finally asks.

“Yeah. Headed to Las Vegas for a conference.”

“Oh,” she says softly, flatly, and he knows what she means with that one word: How is it your life has gone on? “I guess you’re calling for Faith, then.”

“Is that … would it be okay?”

“You’re her father, Colin. Of course it’s okay.”

There is a shuffle of static, and before Colin can say anything else to Mariah, Faith is on the line. “Hi, Daddy.”

“Hey, cupcake.” He wraps the metal snake of the phone line around his arm. “I wanted to tell you I’m going away for a few weeks.”

“You always go away.”

It strikes Colin that she is right. With the amount of travel he does for his job, his memories of Faith–and presumably hers of him–almost always involve good-byes or reunions. “But I always miss you.”

“I miss you, too.” Faith sniffs and hands the phone back to Mariah.

“Sorry,” she says. “She’s a little unpredictable these days.”

“Well. It’s understandable.”

“Sure.”

“She’s just a kid.”

“I know. I’m sure she appreciates that you called.”

Colin marvels at how strange they both sound: Mariah’s words had once rifled over him like waves on the beach, continuous patter about dry-cleaning tickets and school conferences and sales at the grocery store that he never really listened to, never noticed, until they stopped and he saw with surprise that he was buried up to his neck in the sand of this marriage. He wonders how you can go in the blink of an eye from speaking words that are as thoughtlessly dropped as pocket change to this,

where even the most benign conversation wrings you dry.

“So … was that all?” Mariah hesitates just the slightest moment before asking, “Or did you want to talk to me?”

There are so many things to discuss: the wedding, how Mariah’s faring, how odd it seems to be miles apart and still feel as if there is a high, deep wall he is peering around. “That was all,” Colin says.

September 29, 1999 Ian pays three people just to read the newspapers from around major cities in the United States and Europe. Every morning at eight o’clock these assistants are expected to report to his office with two dubious mystical events. On a morning two weeks into his Grassroots AntiRevival Campaign, they sit in the tight quarters of the Winnebago. “All right,

now.” Ian turns to David, his youngest employee. “What did you dig up?”

“Two-headed chicken and a seventy-five-year-old who gave birth.”

“Get out,” scoffs Yvonne. “The record’s that Florida woman.”

The story doesn’t particularly move Ian either. “What have you got that’s better?”

“Crop circles in Iowa.”

“I don’t want to get mixed up with that.

Believing in God and believing in aliens are two completely different ruses. Wanda?”

“There’s a bizarre source of a light at the bottom of a Montana well.”

“Sounds like radioactive waste. Anything else?”

“Well, as a matter of fact, yes. In Boston there was some excitement at a psychiatric symposium.”

Ian grins. “There’s an oxymoron.”

“Yeah, I know. It seems some doctor tossed out the idea that if a delusion can’t be disproved, it just might be real.”

“That’s my kind of shrink. What delusion,

exactly?”

“The psychiatrist has a patient–a girl –who she thinks might be seeing God.”

Ian’s body begins to hum. “Is that so?

Who’s the kid?”

“I don’t know. Psychiatrists don’t release names at these symposiums.

They’re just “the subject.”" Wanda fishes in her jeans pocket. “I did get the psychiatrist’s name, though,” she says, handing Ian a piece of paper.

“Miz Mary Margaret Keller,” Ian reads. “She couldn’t disprove a delusion, huh?

She’s probably had the kid studied by fifty people just like her. What she needs is someone like me.”

When there is a knock on the door, Rabbi Weissman looks up from his books. Groaning,

he realizes it’s ten o’clock. Time for another counseling session with the Rothmans.

For the briefest of moments he considers pretending that he’s not there. There is nothing he dislikes more than sitting while the Rothmans sling insults at each other with such vitriolic force that he fears being caught in the crossfire. He understands the role of the rabbi when it comes to helping members of his congregation, but this? Marital therapy? The rabbi shakes his head. More like target practice.

With a sigh, Rabbi Weissman fixes a smile on his face and opens the office door,

momentarily stunned by the sight of Eve and Herb Rothman kissing in the hall.

They break away with a flurry of embarrassed apologies. Rabbi Weissman watches with disbelief as the couple pulls the two armchairs closer together before sitting down. Surely this isn’t the same man who last week called his wife a scheming cow bent on milking him of his hard-earned money. Surely this isn’t the same woman who last week said that the next time her husband came home smelling like a harem she would slice off his baytsim in the middle of the night.

“Well,” he says, raising a questioning brow.

Eve’s fingers tighten on her husband’s. “I know,” she says shyly. “Isn’t it wonderful?”

“It’s better than wonderful,” Herb enthuses. “It’s not that we don’t love you,

Rabbi, but Evie and I aren’t going to be needing your services anymore.”

Rabbi Weissman smiles. “That’s the kind of rejection I like. What brought this about?”

“It was no one thing,” Eve admits. “I just started feeling differently.”

“Me, too,” Herb says.

If the rabbi recalls correctly, he had to separate the couple like two prizefighters at the last meeting, to keep them from physically assaulting each other. The Rothmans talk for a few more minutes, then wish the rabbi well and leave the office. Rabbi Weissman stares after them, shaking his head. God has truly intervened. Even He would have laid down odds that the Rothman marriage was too far gone to fix.

It certainly wasn’t anything that he said–he would have clearly remembered a breakthrough in this case. He would have marked it down on a Post-it,

left a note to himself on his calendar. But there’s no record from last week in the datebook,

nothing at all.

There’s just the time of their meeting, and recorded beneath it, at 11:00 A.m., the name of little Faith White.

In the middle of the night Faith wakes up and curls her hands into fists. They hurt enough to make her whimper, just like the time Betsy Corcoran had dared her to hold on to the flagpole on the coldest day of last winter and her skin had nearly frozen right to the metal. She rolls over and stuffs her hands beneath her pillow, where the sheets are still cool.