Messiah (16 page)

"You're a good friend," she said. "I made a fool of myself the other night. I wish you'd forget it . . . forget everything I said."

"I'll never mention it. Now, the problem is how I can leave here gracefully. Cave just asked me this morning to stay on and . . ."

But I was given a perfect means of escape. Cave came running into the room, his eyes shining. "Paul! I've just talked to Paul in L.A. It's all over! No heirs, nothing, no lawsuit. No damages to pay."

"What's happened?" Iris stopped him in his excitement.

"The old man's dead!"

"Oh Lord!" Iris went gray. "That means a manslaughter charge!"

"No, no . . . not because of the accident. He was in
another
accident. A truck hit him the day after he left the hospital. Yesterday. He was killed instantly . . . lucky devil: and of course we're in luck too."

"Did they find who hit him?" I asked, suddenly suspicious. Iris looked at me fiercely. She had got it too.

"No. Paul said it was a hit-and-run. He said this time the police didn't find who did it. Paul said his analyst calls it 'a will to disaster' . . . he
wanted
to be run over. Of course that's hardly a disaster but the analyst thinks the old way."

I left that afternoon for New York, leaving Cave jubilantly making plans for the New Year: everything was again possible. Neither Iris nor I mentioned what we both knew . . . each of us, in our different way, accommodating the first of many crimes, as we drove across the smoky hills to Spokane.

Six

1

"The tone, dear Gene, has all the unction, all the earnest turgidity of a theologian. You are perfect." Clarissa beamed at me wickedly over lunch in the Plaza Hotel. We sat at a table beside a great plate-glass window through which we could see the frosted bleak expanse of Central Park, dingy in city snow, ringed by buildings like so many mountain peaks, monotonous in their sharp symmetry. The sky was sullen, gray with more snow to fall. The year was nearly over.

"I thought it really quite to the point," I said loftily but with an anxious look at the thin black volume between us which was that day to be published. The hasty work of one hectic month released in record time by a connection of Paul Himmell's.

"It's pure nonsense, your historical part.
I
know, though I confess I was never one for the philosophers in those days . . . dreary egotistical men, worse than the actors and not half so lovely. Waiter, I will have a melon: out of season I hope. I suggest you have it too. It's light."

I ordered
pot-de-crême
, the heaviest dessert on the menu.

"I've made you angry," Clarissa pretended contrition. "I was only trying to compliment you. What I meant was that the sort of thing you're doing I think is nonsense only because action is what counts, action on any level . . . not theorizing."

"There's a certain action to
thinking
, you know, even to writing about the thoughts of others."

"Oh, darling, don't sound so stuffy. Your dessert, by the way, poisons the liver. Oh, isn't that Bishop Winston over there by the door, in tweed? In mufti, eh, Bishop?"

The Bishop, who was passing our table in the company of a handsomely pale youth whose contemplation of orders shone in his face like some cherished sin, stopped and, with a smile, shook Clarissa's hand.

"Ah, how are you? I missed you the other night at Agnes's. She told me you've been engaged in social work."

"A euphemism, Bishop." Clarissa introduced me and the prelate moved on to his table, a robust gray-haired man with good coloring and a look of ease.

"Catholic?"

"No, Episcopal. I like them the best, I think. They adore society and good works . . . spiritual Whigs you might call them, a civilizing influence. Best of all, so few of them believe in God, unlike the Catholics or those terrible Calvinist peasants who are forever saving themselves and damning others."

"I think, Clarissa, you're much too hard on the Episcopalians. I'm sure they must believe what they preach. At least the clergy do."

"Well, we shall probably never know. Social work! I knew Agnes would come up with something altogether wrong. Still, I'm just as glad it's not out yet. Not until the big debut tomorrow afternoon. I hope you've made arrangements to be near a television set. No? Then come to my place and we'll see it together. Cave's asked us both to the station, by the way, but I think it better if we not distract him."

"Iris came East with him?"

"Indeed she did. They both arrived last night. I thought you'd talked to her."

"No. I haven't been in touch with either of them since I got back to New York. Paul's the only one I ever see."

"He keeps the whole thing going, I must say. One of those born organizers. Now! what about you and Iris?"

This came so suddenly, without preparation, that it took me a suspiciously long time to answer, weakly: "I don't know what you mean. What about Iris and me?"

"Darling, I know everything." She looked at me in her eager, predatory way: I was secretly pleased that, in this particular case at least, she knew nothing.

"Then tell
me
."

"You're in love with her and she's classically involved with Cave."

"Classical seems to be the wrong word. Nothing has happened and nothing
will
happen."

"I suppose she told you this herself."

I was trapped for a moment. Clarissa, even in error, was shrewd and if one was not on guard she would quickly cease to be in error, at one's expense.

"No, not exactly; but Paul who does, I think, know everything about our affairs assures me that nothing has happened, that Cave is not interested in women."

"In men?"

"I thought you were all-knowing. No, not in men nor in wild animals nor, does it seem, from the evidence Paul's collected, in anything except John Cave. Sex does not happen for him."

"Oh," said Clarissa, exhaling slowly, significantly, inscrutably. She abandoned her first line of attack to ask: "But you are crazy about Iris, aren't you? That's what I'd intended, you know, when I brought you two together."

"I thought it was to bring me into Cave's orbit."

"That, too, but somehow I saw you and Iris . . . well, you're obviously going to give me no satisfaction so I shall be forced to investigate on my own."

"Not to sound too auctorial, too worried, do you think it will get Cave across? the introduction here?"

"I see no reason why not. Look at the enormous success of those books with titles like 'Eternal Bliss Can Be Yours for the Asking' or 'Happiness at Your Beck-and-Call.'"

"I'm a little more ambitious."

"Not in the least. But the end served is the same. You got down the main line of Cave's thinking, if it can be called thinking. And your book, along with his presence, should have an extraordinary effect."

"Do you really think so? I've begun to doubt."

"Indeed I do. They are waiting . . . all those sad millions who want to believe will find him exactly right for their purposes. He exists only to be believed in. He's a natural idol . . . did you know that when Constantine moved his court to the East, his heirs were trained by Eastern courtiers to behave like idols and when his son came in triumph back to Rome (what a day that was! hot, but exciting) he rode for hours through the crowded streets without once moving a finger or changing expression, a perfectly trained god. We were all so impressed . . ."

I cut this short. "Has it occurred to you that they might not want to believe anything, just like you and me."

"Nonsense . . . and it's rude to interrupt, dear, even a garrulous relic like myself . . . yet after all, in a way, we do believe what Cave says. Death is there and he makes it seem perfectly all right, oblivion and the rest of it. And dying does rather upset a lot of people. Have you noticed one thing that the devoutly superstitious can never understand is the fact that though we do not accept the fairy tale of reward or punishment beyond the grave we still are reluctant to 'pass on' as the nuts say? As though the prospect of nothing isn't really, in a way, without friend Cave to push one into acceptance, perfectly ghastly, much worse than toasting on a grid like that poor saint up north. But now I must fly. Come to the apartment at seven and I'll give you dinner. He's on at eight. Afterwards they'll all join us." Clarissa flew.

I spent the afternoon gloomily walking up and down Fifth Avenue filled with doubt and foreboding, wishing now that I had never lent myself to the conspiracy, confident of its failure and of the rude laughter or, worse, the tactful silence of friends who would be astonished to find that after so many years of promise and reflection my first book should prove to be an apologia for an obscure evangelist whose only eminence was that of having mesmerized myself and an energetic publicist, among a number of others more likely perhaps than we, to take to a crank.

The day did nothing to improve my mood and it was in a most depressed state that I went finally to Clarissa's baroque apartment on one of the better streets and dined with her quietly, infecting her, I was darkly pleased to note, with my own grim mood. By the time Cave was announced on the vast television screen, I had reduced Clarissa, for one of the few times in our acquaintance, to silence.

Yet as the lights in the room mechanically dimmed, as the screen grew bright with color and an announcer came into focus, I was conscious of a quickening of my pulse, of a certain excitement. Here it was at last, the result of nearly a year's careful planning. Soon, in a matter of minutes, we would know.

To my surprise Paul Himmell was introduced by the announcer who identified him perfunctorily, saying that the following half hour had been bought by Cavite, Inc.

Paul spoke briefly, earnestly. He was nervous, I could see, and his eyes moved from left to right disconcertingly as he read his introduction from cards out of view of the camera. He described Cave briefly as a teacher, as a highly regarded figure in the West. He implied it was as a public service, the rarest of philantrophies, that a group of industrialists and businessmen were sponsoring Cave this evening.

Then Paul walked out of range of the camera leaving, briefly, a view of a chair and a table behind which a handsome blue velvet curtain fell in rich graceful folds from the invisible ceiling to an imitation marble floor. An instant later, Cave walked into view.

Both Clarissa and I leaned forward in our chairs tensely, eagerly, anxiously: we were there as well as he. This was our moment too. My hands grew cold and my throat dry. Cave was equal to the moment. He looked tall: the scale of the table, the chair was exactly right. He wore a dark suit and a dark unfigured tie with a white shirt that gave him an austereness which, in person, he lacked. I saw Paul's stage-managing in this.

He moved easily into range, his eyes cast down. Not until he had placed himself in front of the table and the camera had squarely centered him, did he look up, look directly into the lens. Clarissa gasped and I felt suddenly pierced: the camera, the lights had magnified rather than diminished his power. It made no difference now what he said. The magic was working. Clarissa and I sat in the twilight of her drawing room, entirely concentrated on that vivid screen, on the dark figure upon rich blue, on the pale eyes and the hands which seldom moved. It was like some fascinating scene in a skillful play which, quite against one's wish and aesthetic judgment, pulled one to it, became, at least for that short time beyond real time, a part of one's own private drama of existence, all sharpened by artifice, by calculated magic.

Not until Cave was nearly finished did those first words of his, spoken so easily, so quietly, begin to come back to me as he repeated them in his coda. His voice increasing a little in volume, yet still not hurrying, not forcing, not breaking the mood which his first glance had created and which voice and eyes together maintained without once letting go. The burden of his words was, as always, the same. Yet this time it seemed more awesome, more final, undeniable . . . in short, the truth. Though I'd always accepted his first premise, I had never been much impressed by the ways he found of stating it, even though I always responded to his particular power. This night, before the camera and in the sight of millions, he perfected his singular art of communication and the world was his.

When he finished, Clarissa and I sat for a moment in complete silence, the chirping of a commercial the only sound in the room. At last she said: "The brandy is over there on the console. Get me some." Then she switched off the screen from her chair and the lights of the room brightened again.

"I feel dragged through a wringer," she said after her first mouthful of brandy.

"I had no idea it would work so well, like this, on television." I felt strangely empty, let down. There was hardly any doubt now of Cave's effectiveness yet I felt joyless and depleted, as though part of my life had gone, leaving an ache.

"What a time we're going to have." Clarissa was beginning to recover. "I'll bet there are a million letters by morning and Paul will be doing a jig."

"I hope this is the right thing, Clarissa. It would be terrible if it weren't."

"Of course it's right . . . whatever that means: if it works it's right . . . perfectly simple. Such conceptions are all a matter of fashion anyway. One year women expose only their ankle; the next year their
derrière
. What's right one year is wrong the next. If Cave captures the popular imagination, he'll be right until someone better comes along."

"A little cynical." But Clarissa was only repeating my own usual line. I was, or had been until that night on the Washington farm, a contented relativist. Cave, however, had jolted me into new ways and I was bewildered by the change, by the prospect ahead.

2

That evening was a time of triumph, at least for Cave's companions. They arrived noisily. Paul seemed drunk, manically exhilirated, while Iris glowed in a formal gown of green shot with gold. Two men accompanied them, one a doctor whose name I didn't catch at first and the other a man from the television network who looked wonderfully sleek and pleased and kept patting Cave on the arm every now and then, as if to assure himself he'd not vanished in smoke and fire. Cave, still dressed in his dark suit, was mute. He sat answering questions and replying to compliments with grave nods of his head. He sat in a high brocaded chair beside the fire and drank tea which Clarissa, knowing his habits, had ordered in advance for him.