The Great Good Thing (24 page)

But there was no way to hide this from him. I was a writer. I lived a public life. There was barely a thought that went through my mind that didn't end up in print somewhere or get mentioned in some interview or other. My being baptized—a
secular, intellectual Jew accepting Christ: it was a good story. There was no chance I wasn't going to tell it. As painful as the news might be to my father, it seemed unfair—it seemed unkind—to let him read about it in the newspaper or hear about it from someone he knew.

Around Christmastime, my parents came out west to spend a few winter weeks in Los Angeles. I wrestled with the idea of telling them about my conversion when they came up to visit the grandchildren. How was I going to do it? What was I going to say?

As it turned out, I never got a chance to find the answers to those questions. During their first visit to my house, my father announced that they would have to return to New York at once. He had suddenly developed double vision and he wanted to go to his regular doctor at home for a checkup.

At first, I laughed this off. My father had a neurotic habit of ending trips abruptly this way. He was forever rushing home to deal with some emergency or other that turned out to be either overblown or downright imaginary. This happened so frequently—almost every time he traveled—that I just assumed this to be a typical case, typical to the point of comedy.

I was wrong. My parents returned to New York. My father went to the doctor to have his vision checked. He was diagnosed with a brain tumor.

We were told the condition was treatable. The tumor was a symptom of multiple myeloma, a usually slow-moving blood cancer. The doctors figured that, at nearly eighty, my father might well survive it long enough to die of something else.

Even so, there was, to my mind, no possibility of telling him about my baptism now. If he was dying, it could serve no purpose to break his heart and add fresh sorrow to his final days. If he lived and got better, there would be time to work the matter out between us.

Still, for myself, I needed to move forward. Now that I knew I was a Christian, I had begun going to church. Every Sunday I would walk down to All Saints-by-the-Sea, a lovely little place by the ocean, a few blocks away. I would sit by myself in a rear pew, pray the prayers and sing the songs and listen to the sermon, and then slip out—after the collection but before communion. It wasn't like going to church in the old days of madness, a blind groping after spiritual comfort of some kind. And I was no longer offended by the benign commonplaces of church life or the tuna casseroles. I remained what I was: a daydreaming artist with a woefully irrepressible sense of humor. But I had lost the arrogance of my eccentricities. I saw my own sin and suffering on the face of everyone who prayed, and I understood that tuna casseroles can also be part of the language of love.

In faith, I found the church services tranquil, affecting, and often transporting. But I wanted more. I wanted to be part of the body of Christ. I wanted to take communion. I wanted to be what I was, to live as what I was.

My parents had left Great Neck by now. When their children had grown, they had moved to an apartment in the city as my mother had always wanted. And since Doug Ousley lived in Manhattan, too, my life developed a strange duality.
Every few weeks, I would travel back east. I would go to see my father—to join him at the doctor's office when he went to have the tumor burned out, to visit him as he recovered, to sit and chat with him while he struggled with his failing health. Then I would leave my parents' apartment and walk downtown to the Church of the Incarnation. I would meet Doug at the rectory door and we would head out to some bar we liked and discuss my conversion over a drink.

I didn't need much preparation for baptism. That is to say, I had studied Christianity so much at this point, I could bypass the usual formal classes. I was ready within weeks. But the travel was hard to arrange—and by the time I could get back to the city, there was another delay: Lent. There's no definitive rule against baptism during these weeks of fasting, but most churches wait until after Easter to perform such a joyful rite, especially with adults.

So I waited—and during that Lenten time, my father's health collapsed. The multiple myeloma did not behave as the doctors expected. It wasn't slow at all. It swept through the old man like locusts and devoured him from within. About a week before Easter, I decided I should visit him again. Before I arrived, my older brother warned me with the very words my father had spoken about his own father so long ago: “Prepare yourself. He doesn't look good.”

The moment I walked into his apartment and saw him, I knew my father was dying. I had seen people die before and the shadow of the end was on him unmistakably. My mother and my brothers had been with him continually through his
decline. I don't think they had registered the full extent of it. I was returning to visit after an absence of several weeks, so it hit me all at once.

I visited with him for a while and then walked out, shaken. As I was heading away down the busy city avenue, my cell phone rang. It was my father's doctor calling . . .

After I found faith, coincidence looked different to me. I'm not saying I detected the hand of God in every odd occurrence or that I knew the meaning of even those events that seemed especially marked by God's presence. But what had appeared accidental to me in the past, now often seemed to bear the imprint of supernatural intent. Once you see it you can't unsee it: the supernatural is not supernatural; the ordinary world is suffused with the miraculous.

Here was an instance. Not long before my father's illness, his old doctor had retired and a new doctor had taken over the practice. It turned out, against every chance, that this doctor was an old friend of mine, a man I liked and respected very much. Our lives had first been bound together by a death—the death of his girlfriend, who was a close friend of my wife's. We were now bound together again by my father.

The doctor did not know I was in town. I hadn't told him I was coming. Yet there he was, calling just as I left my father's place.

“Have you seen your dad recently? How's he doing?” he asked.

“Well, you're the one who went to med school,” I said. “But to me, he looks like he's dying.”

When I hung up with him, I called my older brother and told him the same thing. My brother said he would go to my father's apartment and see how things stood.

A few hours later, I went to see Doug. We went to a tavern near Bryant Park to make final plans for my baptism. Just as the priest and I were settling into our seats by the window, my cell phone rang. It was my brother. He had taken my father to the hospital.

My mother and brothers and I gathered there at my father's bedside. We didn't think this was the end, not at first. The doctors still held out hope. I had been planning to fly home the next day, so I canceled my flight and rescheduled it for a day later—and then again, for a day later—and then for another day after that.

With the effortless symbolism of reality, we now entered both Holy Week and the week of Passover. Holy Week, of course, marks the end of Lent, and the prelude to Easter Sunday. The week commemorates Jesus' final days, his triumphal entry into Jerusalem, his last supper with his disciples, his arrest and trial and crucifixion. These events had originally taken place at Passover, the Jews' celebration of their great liberation from Egyptian slavery. Jesus came to Jerusalem to mark that celebration. His last supper was a Passover meal. Because both Easter and Passover are movable feasts, the holidays have broken apart from each other but continue to circle around the same few weeks of the calendar—separated but forever linked, like the religions they represent. This year, they came together as my father was dying.

Day by day, my father declined. Palm Sunday into Holy Monday, then Tuesday and Wednesday. At first he could speak to us a little, drawing down his oxygen mask with a trembling hand to whisper hoarsely. After a while, he was too weak to do even that. At one point, he seized my older brother's hand in his and drew it down to the mask to kiss it goodbye.

He died in the early hours of Maundy Thursday, the day of Christ's last Passover.

For twenty-five years, my father had been one of the most popular radio entertainers in the city, first with his partner Dee Finch and then for many years alone. His off-beat and antic sense of humor and his extraordinary gift for creating funny voices and accents made his show avant-garde and unique. It's still considered something of a classic among aficionados of the medium.

The show went off the air in 1977. I was twenty-three then. I was living in New York so I went over to the station to watch the final hour. Engineers and newsmen and other DJs had gathered in the studio for a farewell party. Early in the morning though it was, we were all drinking champagne out of paper cups.

As the show was drawing to a close, the crowd grew boisterous and noisy. The studio—usually hushed so as not to interfere with the performer on mike—was now loud with talk and laughter. Like most radio guys of that time, my father had a sign-on and sign-off line that he was known by: “Morning there, you.” As the clock hand reached the top of the hour, I moved close to him so I could hear him say it for the last time.
He did say it—but just before the news came on, he leaned in close to the microphone, and in a voice so low it was almost drowned out by the chatter around us, he whispered: “I love you, New York.”

He did love that city. Not its wealth or its high fashion or its halls of power. He loved the chaos of it. The obstreperous little-guy take-a-hike attitude of the individual tough guys and tough girls in the neighborhoods and warehouses and shops and subways and cabs. The Nazis were always on the march, remember, always coming for us, just beneath the horizon line, just around the bend, stomping in unison, black boots polished and brown shirts pressed, all in perfect order, bringing nothing but death. It was only city-street chaos and the little man's spit-in-your-eye that held those monsters at bay. Jews and Italians and Irish one generation; blacks and Asians and Arabs the next. Dad didn't care. Just so long as they kept the chaos going, passed it down to each other like the precious inheritance it was. The cacophony of the city's angry, unruly, and hilarious voices spoke to him, and one by one he spoke those voices back: his chaos to their chaos, their characters peopling the carnival of his mind.

I walked Manhattan's streets in the early morning of the day he died. From the East River, along Forty-second to Broadway and down to Herald Square. I felt his spirit hovering over the rising stone, loath to go.

I stayed in town another day to help my brothers with the death arrangements. I flew back to California on Saturday. The next day was Easter. My wife and I walked down to All
Saints-by-the-Sea. We sat in a pew near the back. I was mystic with exhaustion. The light through the stained-glass windows seemed to fall on the altar lilies with a strangely golden glow and the golden glow seemed strangely to envelop me.

I was glad to be here, where I belonged, glad to celebrate even in mourning this joy of joys: the resurrection and the life. My heart was weary but no longer sad and all around me there were hallelujahs.

A
month or so after my father died, I returned to New York for his memorial and for my baptism.

The memorial was a small gathering of family and friends in the outdoor courtyard of a Manhattan restaurant near my parents' apartment. I hadn't seen most of these people in years, in decades some of them. They were people I liked and who had loved my father and it was good to have them there. But seeing them after all this time was also a bittersweet reminder of how distant I had become from my parents and their lives and from the life of my childhood.

At one point during the memorial, as I found myself standing alone for a moment, an old man came toward me through the crowd. He was very bent and fragile, leaning on a cane, making his way unsteadily across the court. I didn't know him. When we were face-to-face, he spoke to me. He said he had worked with my father at the radio
station in the old days, near the beginning of my father's New York career.

The moment he started talking, I recognized his voice. He had a thick New York Yiddish accent that sounded exactly like my father's much beloved character Mr. Nat. Mr. Nat—that was the exuberant Coordinator of Interrelations who used to make my mother shudder with assimilationist horror every time he came on the air: “I wish you wouldn't do that character!” I fancied my father must have modeled Nat's voice on the voice of this man standing in front of me. The accent, the pitch, the tone—they were Mr. Nat to perfection.

As the man spoke, a whimsical thought occurred to me. I remembered how my father used to call home from the city sometimes with a disguised voice as a kind of prank on us kids. It occurred to me that maybe he was calling home again now, this time from that unseen city from which no traveler returns.

And just as that thought occurred to me, this old man, whom I didn't know, and who didn't know me, said in his Mr. Nat voice, “Your father wanted you to be a Jew. He was always afraid you didn't want to be a Jew. He was always afraid you didn't like being a Jew. He wanted you to be a Jew.”

Then he turned and wobbled away and moved out of sight among all the others.

My baptism was scheduled for the next evening.

I smiled sadly to myself and nodded. I knew what the old man said was true. Only my father's death had saved me from breaking his heart by my conversion. But I knew also it
couldn't be any other way. I could not both journey to myself and stay here with him.

The next evening, I made my way to the Church of the Incarnation. The light of the spring day was fading when I arrived. The brownstone steeple was blending with the darkening sky. Inside, the scarlets and azures and bright yellows of the stained-glass windows along the wall were losing their vividness as the sunlight fell away from them. The vast, high spaces of the church seemed filled with an uncanny blue aura, a dusk that hung between the white columns and underneath the carving on the elaborate altarpiece: “And the Word was made flesh.”

As I mentioned before, the rector, my friend Doug Ousley, had indulged my penchant for privacy by opening the church after hours. When I first came in, the place seemed empty. Then I saw Doug and his family, down in the front pews, off to the left by the John the Baptist font. Doug was in his priestly regalia. Mary had now been brought down into a wheelchair by her disease. She managed to smile and murmur a few words of affection to me as I leaned over to kiss her. Her blue eyes still flashed, still showed traces of the loving and vivacious woman she had been when I first met her. She had only a few years left to live now. Tonight, she would serve as my godmother.

And, of course, the Ousleys' grown sons John and Andrew were there, clowning around as always, making their usual sardonic jokes. John, only a year or two older than my daughter, was going to serve as my godfather. They thought this was hilarious.

“We will light a candle to symbolize the light of Christ in your spirit,” Doug explained to me. “And at the end of the service, the candle will be extinguished—”

“And your spirit will be snuffed out,” Andrew muttered.

I nearly fell out of the pew laughing. We were all in very good spirits.

These friends were there with me—but not my family, not my own wife and my own children. I had sent them home, back to California, after my father's memorial. It was a decision I would come to regret almost immediately after the ritual was over. It was then I would realize that, all too typically of myself, I had made exactly the same mistake I had made nearly twenty-five years before at my wedding. As I had once believed Ellen and I were already essentially married and that our wedding was simply a formality, so now I believed my heart was already baptized and this was just a rite to symbolize the event. It was as if—as I would remark ruefully before the evening was over—as if I had learned absolutely nothing in all the intervening years.

Now that I have experienced this last decade of life in Christ—the peace and realism of Christ, the hope and truth—I think even this error was part of the story God was telling me. He was using my own foolishness as a parable, just the sort of satiric parable he knew I would appreciate and understand.

Because now I knelt at the baptismal font, beneath the upraised hand of the bronze boy John. Now Doug put the water on my head, the oil on my brow, and spoke the words: “I baptize you in the name of the Father and of the Son and of
the Holy Spirit.” Now I climbed to my feet again and looked around me at the faces of my friends in the church's mysterious gloaming.

And now I saw. I had been wrong—yet once more. I had been wrong about baptism as I was wrong about my wedding. It mattered. It mattered in ways I could not understand until the very moment I had done it. Of course. I should have known. Who more than me? Ritual and transition, symbol and reality, story and life—they are intimately intertwined forever. They are the language of the imagination, the language in which God speaks to man.

Well, mine is a stiff-necked people, slow to learn. Yet just as with my wedding, here I was somehow. Through my own foolishness and the foolishness of my times, through the fog of my egotism and stubbornness and insanity, God had sung to me without ceasing in the stories I loved and in my love and in my story. I, even half-blind with myself, had stumbled after that music to its source.

And somehow, once again, by the hilarious mercy of God, I had made my way to the great good thing.