The Bonfire of the Vanities (19 page)

He sat there, riding a white china toilet bowl, beseeching the Almighty for a print.

Two young white men sat in a mansion in Harlem staring at a middle-aged black man. The younger one, the one doing the talking, was rattled by what he saw. He felt as if he had been removed from his own body by astral projection and was listening like a spectator to his own words as they came out of his mouth.

“So I don’t know exactly how to put it, Reverend Bacon, but the thing is, we—I mean the diocese—the Episcopal Church—we’ve given you $350,000 as seed money for the Little Shepherd Day Care Center, and we received a telephone call yesterday from a newspaper reporter, and he said the Human Resources Administration turned down your license application
nine weeks
ago, and I mean, well, we just couldn’t believe it. It was the first thing we’d even heard about it, and so…”

The words continued to come out of his mouth, but the young man, whose name was Edward Fiske III, was no longer thinking about them. His voice was on automatic, while his mind tried to make sense out of the situation he was in. The room was a vast Beaux Arts salon full of high-grained oak architraves and cornices and plaster rosettes and swags with gilt highlights and fluted corner beads and ogeed baseboards, all of it carefully restored to the original turn-of-the-century style. It was the sort of mansion the dry-goods barons used to erect in New York before the First World War. But now the baron of these premises, seated behind a huge mahogany desk, was a black man.

His high-backed swivel chair was upholstered in a rich oxblood-colored leather. There wasn’t a trace of emotion on his face. He was one of those thin, rawboned men who look powerful without being muscular. His receding black hair was combed straight back for about two inches before it broke into ruffles of small curls. He wore a black double-breasted suit with peaked lapels, a white shirt with a high starched spread collar, and a black necktie with broad white diagonal stripes. On his left wrist was a watch with enough gold to read a meter by.

Fiske became unnaturally aware of the sound of his own voice: “…and then we made—actually, I made—a telephone call to the HRA, and I spoke to a Mr. Lubidoff, and he told me—and I’m only repeating to you what he said—he said that several—actually, he said seven—he said seven of the nine directors of the Little Shepherd Day Care Center have prison records, and three are on parole, which means that technically, legally”—he glanced at his young colleague, Moody, who was a lawyer—“they are considered or accorded or, I should say, burdened with the status of an inmate.”

Fiske stared at Reverend Bacon and opened his eyes wide and arched his eyebrows. It was a desperate attempt to coax the baron into the conversational vacuum. He didn’t dare try to
question
him,
interrogate
him. The best he could hope for was to lay down certain facts that would compel him, through the logic of the situation, to respond.

But Reverend Bacon didn’t even change his expression. He just stared at the young man as if he were looking at a gerbil on a treadmill in a cage. The narrow mustache that outlined his upper lip didn’t budge. Then he began drumming the first two fingers of his left hand on his desk, as if to say, “And therefore?”

It wasn’t Reverend Bacon but Fiske himself who couldn’t bear the vacuum and plunged in.

“And therefore—well, I mean, in the eyes of the HRA—the way they look at it—and they’re the licensing authority for day-care centers—and you’re aware of all the furor—how sensitive they are about day-care centers—it’s a big political issue—that three directors of the Little Shepherd Day Care Center, the ones still on parole, they are
still in prison
, because people on parole are still serving a prison sentence and are still subject to all the…all the…well, whatever…and the other four also have records, which by itself is enough to…to…Well, the regulations don’t allow it—”

The words were gushing out in awkward spurts, while his mind rushed all over the room, trying to find an exit. Fiske was one of those superbly healthy white people who retain the peachy complexion of a thirteen-year-old until well into their late twenties. Just now his fine fair face was beginning to redden. He was embarrassed. No, he was scared. In a few moments he was going to have to get to the part about the $350,000, unless his sidekick over here, Moody, the lawyer, did it for him. God almighty, how had it come to this? After leaving Yale, Fiske had gone to the Wharton School of Business, where he had written a master’s thesis entitled “Quantitative Aspects of Ethical Behavior in a Capital-Intensive Corporation.” For the past three years he had been Community Outreach Director of the Episcopal Diocese of New York, a position that involved him in the diocese’s heavy moral and financial support of Reverend Bacon and his works. But even in the auspicious heartwarming early days, two years ago, he had been uneasy about these trips to this big old town house in Harlem. From the beginning, a thousand little things had snapped away at the ankles of his profound intellectual liberalism, starting with this business of “Reverend Bacon.” Every Yale man, or certainly every Episcopalian among them, knew that
Reverend
was an adjective, not a noun. It was like
Honorable
before the name of a legislator or a judge. You might refer to “the Honorable William Rehnquist,” but you wouldn’t call him “Honorable Rehnquist.” In the same way, you could refer to “the Reverend Reginald Bacon” or “the Reverend Mr. Bacon,” but you wouldn’t say “Reverend Bacon”—except in this house and in this part of New York, where you called him whatever he wanted to be called, and you forgot about Yale. The truth was, Fiske had found Reverend Bacon forbidding even in those early days when he had been all smiles. They agreed on practically all philosophical and political issues. Yet they were
in no way similar people
. And these were not the early days. These were what you might call the last days.

“…And so, obviously we have a problem, Reverend Bacon. Until we can get this straightened out about the license—and I wish we had known about it nine weeks ago, when it happened—well, I don’t see that there’s any way the project can go forward until we resolve it. Not that it can’t be resolved, of course—but you’ve got to—well, the first thing we’ve got to do, it seems to me, we’ve got to be very realistic about the $350,000. Naturally, this board—I mean, your present board—this board can’t spend any of those moneys on the day-care center, because the board will have to be reorganized, it seems to me, which, when you get right down to it, means a reorganization of the corporation, and that will take some time. Not a lot of time, perhaps, but it will take some time, and…”

As his voice struggled on, Fiske cut his eyes toward his colleague. This fellow Moody didn’t seem fazed at all. He sat there in an armchair, with his head cocked to one side, very coolly, as if he had Reverend Bacon’s number. This was his first trip up to the House of Bacon, and he seemed to regard it as a bit of a lark. He was the latest junior member whom the firm of Dunning Sponget & Leach had fobbed off on the diocese, an account they regarded as prestigious but “soft.” On the way up in the car, the young lawyer had told Fiske that he, too, had gone to Yale. He had been a linebacker on the football team. He managed to mention that about five different times. He had come walking into Reverend Bacon’s headquarters as if he had a keg of Dortmunder Light between his legs. He had sat down in the chair and leaned back, gloriously relaxed. But he said nothing…“So in the meantime, Reverend Bacon,” said Ed Fiske, “we thought the prudent thing would be—we talked this over at the diocese—this was everybody’s thought on the thing, not just mine—we thought the wise thing—I mean, all we’re concerned about here is the future of the project, of the Little Shepherd Day Care Center—because we’re still a hundred percent behind the project—that hasn’t changed a bit—we thought the prudent thing would be to place the $350,000—not counting the money that’s already gone toward leasing the building on West 129th Street, of course—we ought to put the other—what?—$340,000, or whatever it is, into an escrow account, and then when you’ve gotten the business of the board of directors straightened out, and you’ve gotten the licensing from the HRA, and there’s no more red tape to worry about, those moneys will be turned over to you and your new board, and, well, that’s…sort of
it
!”

Fiske opened his eyes wide again and arched his eyebrows and even attempted a little friendly smile, as if to say, “Hey! We’re all in the same boat here, aren’t we!” He looked at Moody, who continued to stare at Reverend Bacon in his cool fashion. Reverend Bacon didn’t even so much as blink, and something about that implacable gaze made Fiske decide that it was unwise to continue looking into his eyes. He looked at Reverend Bacon’s fingers as they did their paradiddle on the desk. Not a word. So he scanned the top of the desk. There was a large handsome leather-bound desk blotter, a gold Dunhill pen-and-pencil set mounted on an onyx pedestal, a collection of paperweights and medals imbedded in Lucite, several of which had been inscribed to Reverend Reginald Bacon by civic organizations, a stack of papers held down by a paperweight consisting mainly of the letters WNBC-TV in thick brass, an intercom with a row of buttons, and a large box-shaped ashtray with leather sides framed in brass and a brass grillwork over the top…

Fiske kept his eyes lowered. Into the vacuum came the sounds of the building. On the floor above, heavily muffled by the building’s thick floors and walls, the faint sound of a piano…Moody, sitting right next to him, probably didn’t even notice. But Fiske, in his mind, could sing right along with those rich crashing cords.

“The mil-len-ni-al rei-eign…

“Is going…to be…”

Huge chords.

“One thousand years of…e-ter-
ni
-tee…

“Lord of lo-ords…”

“Ho-ost of hosts…”

More chords. A whole ocean of chords. She was up there right now. When this thing first started, this business of the diocese and Reverend Bacon, Fiske used to play Reverend Bacon’s mother’s records in his apartment at night and sing along, at the top of his lungs, with ecstatic abandon—“The mil-len-ni-al rei-eiggn!”—a song made famous by Shirley Caeser…oh, he knew his gospel singers—him!—Edward Fiske III, Yale ’80!—who now had legitimate entry into that rich black world…The name Adela Bacon still appeared on the gospel music charts from time to time. Of all the organizations listed in the mansion’s entry hall down below,
ALL PEOPLE’S SOLIDARITY, THE GATES OF THE KINGDOM CHURCH, THE OPEN GATES EMPLOYMENT COALITION, MOTHERHOOD ALERT, THE LITTLE CHILDREN’S ANTI-DRUG CRUSADE, THE THIRD WORLD ANTI-DEFAMATION LEAGUE, THE LITTLE SHEPHERD DAY CARE CENTER
, and the rest of them, only Adela Bacon’s
MILLENNIAL REIGN MUSIC CORPORATION
was a conventional business organization. He regretted that he had never really come to know her. She had founded the Gates of the Kingdom Church, which was supposedly Reverend Bacon’s church but which in reality scarcely existed any longer. She had run it; she had conducted the services; she had uplifted the church’s Pentecostal flock with her amazing contralto voice and the cresting waves of her oceans of chords—and she and she alone had been the church body that had ordained her son Reggie as the Reverend Reginald Bacon. At first Fiske had been shocked to learn this. Then a great sociological truth dawned upon him.
All
religious credentials are arbitrary, self-proclaimed. Who originated the articles of faith under which his own boss, the Episcopal Bishop of New York, had been ordained? Did Moses bring them down in stone from the mountaintop? No, some Englishman dreamed them up a few centuries ago, and a lot of people with long white faces agreed to call them rigorous and sacred. The Episcopal faith was merely older, more ossified, and more respectable than the Baconian in white society.

But it was long past time to worry about theology and church history. It was time to retrieve $350,000.

Now he could hear water running and a refrigerator door opening and one of those hair-trigger coffee machines coming to a boil. That meant the door to the little service kitchen was open. A tall black man was peering out. He wore a blue work shirt. He had a long powerful neck and wore a single large gold earring, like a storybook pirate. That was one of the things about this place…the way these…these…these
…heavies
were always around. They no longer seemed like romantic revolutionaries to Fiske…They seemed like…The thought of what they might be caused Fiske to avert his eyes…Now he looked past Bacon, out the bay window behind him. The window looked out on a backyard. It was early afternoon, but the yard received only a gloomy greenish light because of the buildings that had gone up on the streets behind it. Fiske could see the trunks of three huge old sycamores. That was all that remained of what must have been quite a little piece of scenery, by New York standards, in its day.

The muffled chords. In his mind, Fiske could hear the beautiful voice of Adela Bacon:

“Oh,
what…
shall I
say
, Lord?

“And it
came…
to
pass…
”

Waves of muffled chords.

“A voice…from on high said…

“ ‘All
flesh…
is
grass…
’ ”

A whole ocean of chords.

Reverend Bacon stopped drumming his fingers. He placed the tips of the fingers of both hands on the edge of the desk. He lifted his chin slightly and he said:

“This is Harlem.”

He said it slowly and softly. He was as calm as Fiske was nervous. Fiske had never known the man to raise his voice. Reverend Bacon froze the look on his face and the position of his hands, in order to let his words sink in completely.

“This,” he said once more, “is Harlem…see…”

He paused.

“You come up here now, after all this time, and you tell
me
there are people
with prison records
on the board of directors of the Little Shepherd Day Care Center. You inform me of that fact.”