The Borrower (6 page)

“Merry Christmas!” he shouted. He ran back up the stairs. His mother must have been waiting for him.

Baby Jesus sat on my desk until the next Saturday, when I was cleaning up. I unfolded the paper to put through the shredder for recycling, and saw that the inside was covered in typing. It was a printout of an e-mail from jmdrake68 to rita_mclaughlin. Of course I read it. After the heading, it said:

Dear Rita, I hope this is the kind of testimonial you were looking for, feel free to post it!!!

Friends,

We are the parents of a beautiful ten-year-old son, who is the joy of our lives. Around his eighth birthday, we became deeply concerned because of his manner and behaviors, which weren’t consistent with most boys his age. For awhile we were in deep denial. How could God’s gift to us have been handed such a burden? We asked over and over what we might have done wrong. But after many prayers we came to realize God’s greatest gifts can also be His greatest challenge for us.

We enrolled Ian last month in Bob Lawson’s
GHM
youth group, and Bob has been an inspiration. We drive over an hour to meetings, and we have so enjoyed our group time with other parents while the boys work with Pastor Bob. The veteran parents have given us such hope with their stories. One father said “Its like our son has been reborn.” And isn’t that what Christ Jesus asks of each of us, to be reborn in Him?

Life is a journey, and we don’t pretend there’s an instant answer. We have much work to do ourselves, and we need to press on in our relationship with God and each other, before our own healing can start.

We ask for your prayers in the coming months, and offer ours up for you.

In His Grip,

Janet and Larry D.

I ran upstairs and showed Rocky the letter. “Is this about what I think it’s about? And what is ‘In His Grip’?”

Rocky read it, laughing and shaking his head. “What are they, Pentecostal?”

“Fundamentalist, I think, of some variety. I get the impression it’s one of those big evangelical churches with a rock band.”

He read it again. “This is profoundly messed up,” he said, and I was impressed that I got that much of a reaction. The day before, I’d told him about an independent bookstore in Hannibal going under, and he’d said, “What do you expect? I’ve seen you use Amazon. It’s just the way things are now.” He was always willing to express anger, but surprise was usually beneath him.

“What should I do?”

He laughed. “Absolutely nothing. What, you’re going to call the police? I’d love to hear that phone call. ‘So I have this piece of origami . . .’ Nobody broke any laws. Except maybe you, by reading a private e-mail.”

“That’s not what I mean. I love how you pretend I overreact even when I don’t. But I could tell his school, right? His teachers would want to know if this is going on.”

“Don’t do it, Lucy. Don’t get involved. And you’re so big on privacy and the First Amendment, yeah? You weren’t meant to see this.” He folded the paper in quarters and held it out over the recycling. “Can I toss it? So you don’t do anything rash?”

“Sure. Of course.”

But yes, of course, I dug it out later and kept it.

It was easy to research, as there was a disturbing bounty of information on the Internet. Bob Lawson was the balding, red-faced founder of Glad Heart Ministries, an organization “dedicated to the rehabilitation of sexually confused brothers and sisters in Christ.” In the course of a five-hundred-dollar weekend seminar, “backslidden adults” could be returned to a natural and healthy state of heterosexuality, but would need additional weekly counseling to keep from slipping back into sin. Only five years after its founding, there were branches in six states, but Pastor Bob himself still ran the St. Louis branch. Ian was apparently enrolled in the youth group, in which children ages ten through thirteen whose parents suspected they were “headed down the wrong path” could learn, through prayer and workbook exercises, to lead “healthy, Godly lives” and to understand that “sexuality is a choice, not an identity.” The older teenagers were sent to “Reboot Camp,” but the stated point of the youth group was to “speak to our children before the secular media has reached them with its political agenda.”

“Pastor Bob Lawson,” read the biography page, “lived for seventeen years as a homosexual before coming to Christ, and learning that His abiding love could fill the vacuum he had felt for so long. Bob has been married since 1994 to DeLinda Reese-Lawson, a former lesbian, and the couple have three children. Bob and DeLinda’s marriage is a testament to the fact that it is Christ’s love that keeps a marriage and a family together, and that earthly love is only a manifestation of that higher love. When our relationship with God is pure, our relation with His other earthly servants shall be pure as well.”

Elsewhere online I found testimonials, renunciations, and articles from the Christian and secular presses. Eight months earlier, Pastor Bob had been photographed leaving a gay nightclub, after which he stated that he had been “ministering to the sick.”

My blood pressure rose just looking at his fat-faced picture. If I weren’t at work, I might have actually yelled at the computer. I wondered if Ian even understood why he was going to the meetings—did they explain it all, or did they try to keep the kids in the dark, hoping the options would never occur to them?

What would happen to Ian, hanging on Pastor Bob’s every word? He was an only child, like me—he would latch on to any adult within fifty feet. No Chinese baby, no “reading saved my life.” He could turn into Pastor Bob himself.

I took Rocky’s advice and resisted the urge to tell Sophie Bennett, or anyone else at Hannibal Day, or anyone else at all. But I wanted to tell everyone I saw on the street, to write in to advice columns, to document it in my hypothetical file of weird bruises. Like a good Russian, I wanted to break into Pastor Bob’s house and poison him. Like a good American, I wanted to sue somebody. But like a good librarian, I just sat at my desk and waited.

T
hat same afternoon, Glenn the pianist called and talked me into making the drive the next day to Starr Hall, which turned out to be the theater of a community college. It was an afternoon performance—probably not a good sign for a premiere—and I’d told Loraine my father was in town so I could take off work. (“You remember about this afternoon, right?” I’d said as I headed out the door. “I reminded you at the benefit?” I was banking, as I often did, on her tendency to pretend full knowledge of any conversation she might have been drunk for. Rocky claimed he once got a raise this way.)

They were holding a ticket for me at the counter just under “Lucy,” and I found an isolated seat toward the back and started reading my computer printout program. Glenn was born in upstate New York, it said, and started composing at the age of nine. He was proficient on over twenty-five percussion instruments. I wondered what it took to be proficient on the triangle.

I was surprised when Glenn came out to conduct. I hadn’t read my program carefully enough. At least he didn’t look ridiculous up there, the way some conductors wave their arms around as if they’re trying to fly. He stood straight in his tux, the same tux I’d seen him in before, moving his arms in stiff little lines. The music was modern and mercifully jazzy. The main theme sounded familiar, but I couldn’t place it. I leaned back and closed my eyes.

Ian had told me a few weeks earlier about his idea for The Ultimate Symphony. “At the beginning, they bring this enormous grandfather clock on stage, and it would look normal, but really someone’s hiding inside. So then the clock plays Big Ben, and then the whole orchestra starts playing, and the main part of their song is the same as Big Ben. Do you know the Big Ben song?”

“Yes,” I’d said, and hummed it to convince him. He was leaning over my desk at the time, out of breath from the heap of science books he’d lugged all the way downstairs to return instead of shoving in the drop slot. Sonya was on the floor reading her daughter an Arthur book, glancing up occasionally to make sure Ian was still accounted for.

“And then they play for fifteen minutes, but if they take the wrong amount of time, the guy in the clock can speed up the gears. So just as they finish that movement, the clock strikes the fifteen minutes thing, where it plays just the very first part of Big Ben. Then they play again, and each movement is timed just right so the clock strikes, and then at the very end it’s been a whole hour, and this time when the clock plays the song, they play it right along with it, very loudly. But it would be
ritardando
, and that’s why you need the guy in the clock, to slow it down. It would be a very sad symphony, and it would be about World War II.”

“That’s great!” I’d said. “You should start composing that.”

He made a face. “I can’t. I have soccer on Tuesdays, and French on Mondays and Wednesdays, and this religion class thing every weekend, and science camp on Mondays after French, and piano on Thursday, and then even when I practice piano I can’t work on my symphony, because my piano teacher says the important thing is to work on left hand.”

“That’s absolutely tragic.”

“That’s the other thing about my symphony. All the piano parts would just be for your right hand.”

I opened my eyes and tried to concentrate on Glenn’s music. I scratched a leg with my right hand, and my back with my left. The more I scratched, the more I itched. The xylophone was taking a turn at the theme, echoed by the woodwinds, and suddenly I recognized it. It was almost exactly the jingle from the Mr. Clean ads, the one you know by heart if you’ve ever stayed home sick on the couch and watched daytime talk shows: “Mister
CLEAN
, Mister
CLEAN
, da da DA da, da da DA da . . .” I leaned my face on my hands to keep from laughing, as if anyone were watching me.

Afterward, I wandered into a hallway that looked like it might lead backstage, and after three steps, Glenn was in front of me beaming. The front of his tuxedo jacket was covered in white lint.

“Trying to escape,” he said, “or coming to find me?”

“Looking for the booze,” said Daisy Buchanan.

He stuck by me at the party and laughed at himself and told me a story about trying to build the world’s longest golf ball racecourse when he was eight. I found him very charming, although that might have had something to do with the fact that I couldn’t remember my last date that didn’t involve Rocky and a Hitchcock revival.

Leaning in a corner, where the other guests had abandoned us to each other, I told him the story of my truncated last name, and I told him about my apartment, and I tried to explain about the late-night photo shoot. “I don’t get it,” he said.

After my fourth glass of wine, I told him how I could hear the plays with the window open, and he said he didn’t believe me, that he’d have to hear it himself. And even though I recognized it as an excuse, a fairly lame one, I told him sure, he could come hear for himself. It was only just after seven, and
Vanya
started at eight. In my building, he insisted we take the ancient elevator because he thought it looked fun, with its iron gate and its “last inspected on” sheet deftly covered by Tim with an “I Brake for Corgis” sticker. He laughed at my piles of books, and we pulled chairs over to the open window to watch the crowd trickle in from the little restaurants across the street. We wore our coats and shared a blanket. The buzz of voices in the lobby came straight up, and then we could actually hear all the people move slowly from under my living room to under my kitchen and bedroom as they found their seats, the chairs creaking open, the audience dropping their post-dinner bodies onto the ancient springs.

One night that previous summer, as they drifted in, I was sure I heard Ian’s voice from down below. I’d had a long day with him—it was Saturday, and he camped out from nine to four—and I must have had his voice stuck in my head. It was just some woman, I realized, calling out to her friends and talking about the Indian place across the street. I remember wishing—even then, before things started to happen—that Ian could have been there, front row or backstage, watching Shakespeare and falling in love and seeing the universe open up for him. I could put a book in his hands, but I couldn’t take him by the ankles and dip him headfirst in another world. And for some reason, I knew even then that he needed it.

Glenn and I sat there through most of the first act, just listening to the warped but mostly intelligible voices. He smoked three cigarettes and kept grinning at me. I put my head on his shoulder, sleepy from the wine.

When Glenn got up to use the bathroom, I had to stop him. “This is embarrassing,” I said, “but you can’t flush during the show.” He laughed and kept walking. “No, I’m serious. The pipes go right above the stage. You can
go
, if you have to, but you can’t flush. They’re done by eleven most nights.”

“You’re kidding.”

“No, there’s a schedule in the bathroom. Tim prints one up for me, and one for his partner, Lenny.”

“Is that legal, for them to make you do that?”

“I don’t know, but my rent is three hundred dollars, so I don’t really care.”

“But I can flush it in the morning, right?” he said.

“That’s very presumptuous.”

But it wasn’t really, and he had good breath and beautiful eyelashes, and later he showed me how his forearms were stronger than his biceps from playing the piano, and truth be told, Mr. Clean is a little dirty.

I
f you give a librarian a closet, she will probably fill it with junk.

If she fills it with junk, some of the junk will be books in need of repair.

If some of the junk is books, and the closet is off of a back room anyway, she will hide more books there, books that she thinks are crap like the Stormy Sisters series, but which her boss thinks the library should keep.