Strivers Row (51 page)

Read Strivers Row Online

Authors: Kevin Baker

Tags: #Historical

Unlike his father, Jonah always enjoyed these rituals, liked hearing of all the births and the weddings, connecting the familiar names with the faces of the people they were praying for. Yet this morning he had begun to anguish over the fact that he wouldn't be delivering a sermon for Mrs. Roberts and her boy. He had introduced them to Amanda just before the service began, and they were seated next to her now, up in the first pew before the altar. The traditional seat for the preacher's wife, out there in front of everybody, where he could remember his mother sitting so proudly, and which he knew his wife hated. Nevertheless, she was there every Sunday, regal yet reposed, setting the perfect tone.
Always willing to do her duty.
Even from where he was, seated up by the side of the pulpit, he could see how attentive she was being now to Sergeant Robert Bandy, his mother, and his fiancée.

His father had been right, it had been the perfect marriage.
He couldn't help but notice, though, how the church had divided itself again. All of his good feeling from earlier this morning already snuffed out. The half circle before him split almost laughably into light skin, and dark.
How little he had done, in his ten years.
Even after all his Daddy's scheming, his best efforts to prop Jonah up having failed—

Up above my head I see

Trouble in the air,

Up above my head I see

Trouble in the air,

Up above my head I see

Trouble in the air,

There must be a God somewhere—

The choir reached the end of the old spiritual that his assistant minister had ordered up, after Jonah had called him late the night before and asked him to fill in. He introduced the man briefly, then sat down—trying to pretend that he hadn't heard the rustle of speculation that went through the congregation, the murmured agitation over why Jonah wasn't preaching again. The assistant minister—a large, well-fed man named Morgan, whose ambition was all but palpable—stood silent in the pulpit, pretending to arrange his notes until the muttering had run its course.
Letting the rising discontent in the church register clearly,
Jonah couldn't help thinking.

“There must be a God, somewhere,” Assistant Minister Morgan began at last, repeating the last line of the spiritual. Carrying the hymn on into his sermon, the song on into his words. A common enough beginning.
Down at the Angel Factory, in Pennsylvania, they had joked about the minister who started his sermon “A-men, a-men. But what do we mean when we say A-men?...”

Outside, the rain had stopped completely but the wind was still blowing, mild and warm, though with a force that was uncharacteristic of the season. Sending the clouds skittering across the stained-glass windows of the sanctuary. Turning the sweet Bible scenes there as sinister as the bats, and the scaly tail of the sea serpent, in the stained glass up at the O'Kanes' Mansion—

Jonah forced himself to turn his eyes and his attention back to his assistant minister, who was still working his way through the boilerplate.

“Brothers and sisters, I come to you today filled with fear,” he intoned, trying to sound weary, though he looked as if he were capable of plowing the north forty before breakfast.

“I am afraid that I do not have it within me to speak to you with strength, and power—”

The standard device—a way of lowering expectations. The preacher claiming that he was too heavy laden, or under the weather, to truly speak well on his own. Relying on the Holy Spirit to lift him up, offering up to God any success his sermon might have.
Shucking the blame off on Him, too, if it don't go so well,
Jonah remembered his father saying.

“—and then the Hebrew people asked themselves,
‘How shall we sing? How shall we sing the Lord's song, in a foreign land?'

Brother Morgan declared himself at last. Using the very same staple Jonah had tried to fall back on, the 137th Psalm, and the Babylonian captivity.

“ ‘By the waters of Babylon, where we sat down and wept, when we remembered Zion. On the willows there we hung up our lyres. For our captors there required of us songs, and our tormentors, mirth. Saying, ‘Sing us one of the songs of Zion—' ”

Jonah knew all the standard forms of it—he just hadn't been able to shape an answer that might convince himself. How were the Israelites to sing a song for their tormentors? The people who had murdered their brothers and sisters, and torn down the great temple of Solomon, and stolen them away from their land—the people who had enslaved them.
How were the Jews of today to sing such a song?
Shot down like dogs in the ghettos of Poland, exterminated like cockroaches in the camps Jakey's cousin had seen?
How are
we
to sing?

“Perhaps it is as Paul wrote in the Corinthians: ‘I glory in my infirmity, I have a thorn in my flesh.' Paul thought he had been given a thorn in his flesh on purpose, to keep him from being too elated by the abundance of his revelations, and he asked God to remove it but God told him, ‘My grace is sufficient for you, for My power is made perfect in weakness—' ”

But what did that mean? Just quoting other, random pieces of Scripture to answer the unanswerable. “Be content with your weakness, because God gave it to you.” But why? “Sing your songs to God, even though he has allowed your enemies to enslave and slaughter you.” And why? Because He says so?

It was the same old question, it seemed to Jonah, repeated over and over throughout the Bible, yet never really answered:
What kind of loving God would let His chosen people suffer so?

The other ministers he knew, the theologians he had studied under down at the Angel Factory, had all sought to respond to it in two, or three, basic ways. It was a punishment, for even the most righteous had sinned.
Like those little Jewish children, marched out of their Polish ghetto at gunpoint? Yes, they must have committed terrible sins—

Or the answer was that this world was all a test of faith, or— at the most modern, liberal congregations—part of the Grand Design. The world as a sort of great, literary metaphor. But it amounted to the same thing:
Job, suffering the death of his children to test his faith. The Apostles, butchered all over the Mediterranean. The endless slaughter of the innocents, everywhere—for what? A metaphor? A great, cosmic work of art? Or God as a concentration camp capo, putting everyone through sadistic little tests to show they had enough faith to march on through this world to death—

No
. In the end it was unknowable. The best ministers tried saying that, too—what they used to laughingly call the Confessatory Confession down at the Angel Factory, or Hands-Up! Theology.
I
confess it, I don't know! But you know God got to have a reason, He says He do—

It was enough, almost, to push him to his father's brand of benevolent atheism.
But then there was the Christ.
That sacrifice, His words—striking too deep a chord for Jonah to simply dismiss it all, to say it was all a lie. That irrational, spontaneous love, resonating a thousand million times, every day. Just the way he felt watching the people make their way through Harlem this morning—watching his wife, sitting so proudly in her pew now. Proud for him—

But what did it all mean, then?
Even if it were true, there was still only faith. And God was still so far away—farther away than ever, it seemed to him. Leaving them only these few, all but indecipherable traces of His Will—

The assistant minister was wrapping up now, concluding with another, lame exhortation to blind faith. Wiping his forehead busily with his handkerchief, to remind the less-than-moved congregation that he
had
been weak today, after all, and had relied on the Spirit to help him.
One more failure to lay at God's feet,
Jonah thought, stepping up to smile and shake his hand, and sing along with the choir the sermon-closing hymn—

There is a balm in Gilead,

To make the wounded whole—

As Jonah sang he glanced down again at his wife, her face perfectly composed, staring up lovingly at him. Their guests looking up at him with nearly equal reverence as they sang—Mrs. Roberts, and her daughter-in-law-to-be, and Private Bandy. Jonah scrutinizing his open, credulous face, wondering if he was as trusting and obedient in the belly of that great beast, the army.
We all be fine
.

It occurred to him that they were probably all of the congregation that believed in him now. Remembering what it had been like that morning when he had first ascended to the pulpit. The Easter Sunday when he had looked down and seen not the broad, trusting face of Private Bandy but that of Howard Marsden, coming through the doors of the New Jerusalem.

From the moment he spotted them, he knew that it was over. Unable to forget, even now, fifteen years later, the looks of horrified, rueful recognition on their faces. He hadn't tried to call out, or to signal them in any way. Sometimes wondering what might have happened if he
had
chased after them—if he had strode openly down that aisle, hand extended, broad Stepin' Fetchit grin on his face before they had time to back on out. Booming out, “
My friends,

my friends, do come in!
” Pulling them on back up the aisle to the altar with him and announcing them to the whole awed, adoring church—“
My friends from college!
” Imagining them carried along by a forest of black hands—like heroes hoisted off the football field— to his father's house for the celebratory dinner to follow. Feigning incredulity there, if any of them still dared to ask him.
“But—didn't you know I was colored?”

It would have put the finishing touch on the day—and it was his suspicion that they would have remained his friends for life, or at least until graduation. Jack Leonard, the only one he ever confided his speculation to, the only one of them who would still have anything to do with him afterward, had chuckled painfully over it with him one night.

“I think you're right. They would all have been too damned polite to tell you off if they thought it was really their mistake,” he had told Jonah. Adding:

“But they never would have forgiven you anyway.”

He remembered hearing his friends planning to meet up in the City over the spring break—Howard Marsden the instigator, as usual. Jonah had begged off—but he had forgotten about the freshman directory, the guide the college published, complete with the pictures, and names and addresses, of all the new undergraduates. Howard had said what a great prank it would be to go over and surprise Jonah, the pastor's son, on Easter Sunday, and they had looked him up.

Even then they hadn't figured it out immediately, none of them being that familiar with the City. Simply assuming, once they saw the uptown address, that it must be one of those crumbling white neighborhoods still fringing Harlem—some stranded, low-church parish, squeezed between the blacks, and the Jews and the Italians. Getting dressed up in their finest clothes, chortling to themselves over how much fun it would be to embarrass him. Thinking they would just slip into the back pews, maybe try to catch his attention during the service. Hoping to catch him in nothing more mortifying than giving a particularly unctuous prayer—

It was only when the Checker cab had dropped them off that it had finally begun to dawn on them what was what. The hack insisting that this was the place, and offering to wait for them. Listening to the soaring, unmistakable Negro hymns pouring through the open windows, staring at the black, stained-glass Jesus that Jonah's father had always loved, in the window just above the front doors. Howie Marsden himself, Jack remembered, saying as he stepped down from the cab's running board—

“This has gotta be a mistake. Or the old son of a gun's having
us
on—”

And then, pushing open the heavy wooden doors, tumbling in past the startled ushers, they had walked right into the sanctuary and seen—him. Jonah at the moment of his greatest triumph, sitting like a prince before a sea of colored faces.

He hadn't pursued them. He had even delayed his departure back to school, taking the night train in order to give Howard Marsden more time for what he knew he would do. His parents delighted, thinking he was staying on to savor his triumph. Seeing him off at the train, along with a coterie of loyal members of the diaconate and the board of elders. A little tipsy at Penn Station from the couple of glasses of bootleg wine they had each had to celebrate— still deliriously happy. His Daddy squeezing him in a bearhug, his mother tearful again. And Jonah only glad the whole, long way back to school that he had said nothing to them about a boat.

He hadn't been surprised by what he'd found when he got back to their room—only, perhaps, by the thoroughness of it. Howie had moved out everything, absolutely everything he owned, in just the few extra hours Jonah had given him. There was not a trace of him remaining—none of his exquisitely tailored clothes in the closet, or in the chest of drawers they shared. None of the wonderful implements on his desk that Jonah had secretly coveted, the beautiful set of Waterman fountain pens, the blotter and the circular typewriter erasers that looked like little medals; the gorgeous, streamlined Smith-Corona portable on which he insisted on pecking out his own papers, a matter of constant amusement among them all. None of the books on his shelves; the fine old beat-up first editions of the classics, with their cut pages, and their cracked bindings and covers that his father—the father Jonah would never meet, now—had given Howard as a going-away-to-school present, and that Jonah just loved to smell for their scent of musty libraries, and ancient knowledge.

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