Bright Evening Star Page 2

  Yes, I was allowed to ask questions, but I would have liked to ask far more than I did. My parents ate late, at eight, or were out at the theatre or the opera, and I had a tray in my room. I knew I was loved and didn’t question our schedule which certainly was not the ordinary one. It was normal for me, because it was what it was, and I ate with a book in my lap, happy in my imaginary world, and didn’t understand that in many households story was not honored as it was in ours. My parents read aloud to each other every night. Story. They read all the Dumas stories about the three musketeers. They read Dickens. They read the modern novels.

  I was not part of these nighttime readings, but in the morning before breakfast I would beg my mother to tell me a story. “Tell me a story about when you were a little girl.”

  Her childhood was so different from mine it might have been on a different planet. My father’s family came from New York and Philadelphia, but my mother was a Southerner, and after the War Between the States (yet another war) all anybody had left was story. People were poor; many of their houses had been burned; many husbands and fathers had been killed. But they had stories, and they told them and probably embroidered them, and my mother never seemed to run out of reminiscences of her childhood. All her friends were cousins, growing up together in a small Southern town, trying to make a new world out of the defeated old one. I was fascinated and nourished by my mother’s tales, from the story of my great-great-grandmother who was the only friend of an African princess, to the cousin whose first job after graduating from law school was to find Stephen Crane’s mistress, the famous madam. Later, when he learned that no black person could be admitted to a hospital, he set about raising the money and built such a hospital.

  Because my mother grew up nourished and informed by story, she and her cousins were able to see needs ignored by those who had not been given the empathy that comes from the insights of story. Jesus told stories, and not everybody understood them. Why? If we understand the truth of story, we are more able to feel at home in the world of the Gospels, and to understand that the Good News is indeed good. Jesus’ stories start with what is familiar (a woman who has lost a coin, a shepherd who goes out into the night after a lost sheep), and as we think about the parables we understand that the simple stories have far deeper meanings than we realized; they are messages for us. And it is important that we read them in the order in which Jesus told them. They are not isolated anecdotes. They follow the pattern of journey.

  The messages of Jesus’ stories were important for me. My parents’ loving God was not sentimental; my father coughed his burned lungs; I was nearly eighteen before they burned away completely. Several times my mother was ill in bed with a nurse in a white starched dress tending her; I knew she was very ill but not what was wrong. I suspect it was yet another miscarriage; I was the only baby who made it through the nine months in the womb. But God was still a God of love who could be trusted.

  In the outside world things were different. I was unhappy in school. One of the teachers scolded me for telling a story and it took a while before I realized she thought I was lying. Story was a lie! No. Story was truth.

  I did not fit in at that school. I was shy and awkward; one of my legs was longer than the other and whenever I was tired my knee ached and I limped.

  I went home from the sterility of school to the real world of story, to my favorite books, written by George MacDonald and E. Nesbit and L. M. Montgomery and Louisa May Alcott and Frances Hodgson Burnett, books which cared about honesty and courage and truth. Books which affirmed for me that God is indeed love and came to live with us as Jesus of Nazareth because we are so loved. Children of God, God who didn’t mind if we limped, as long as we were truthful.

  One of my godfathers gave me a beautifully illustrated book of Bible stories. I read it and reread it, turning the pages carefully, reading the story of God’s love which is gloriously true. With us it may be impossible; with God nothing is impossible. I never tired of God’s stories. The truth of story was always fresh and, despite repetition, always new.

  As a child it was easier for me to understand that than it was later when I knew more. The story of Jesus’ birth has been oversentimentalized until it no longer has the ring of truth, and once we’d sentimentalized it we could commercialize it and so forget what Christmas is really about. It should be a time of awed silence, but it has become a season so frantic with stress that the suicide rate mounts alarmingly, and for some people death seems preferable to the loneliness and alienation of Christmas.

  Somehow we’ve almost managed to kill the story, but not quite. It was still there for me when I was a child and slowly turned the pages of my beautiful Bible book. I loved the story of Noah and all the animals. God wanted to save not only the people, but the animals, too, for God made all the animals. They were different from people, but because God had made them, it seemed to me that they, too, were children of God.

  I loved the story of Joseph and his wonderful coat and his jealous brothers and how, in the end, they all got together. But my most favorite story was Mary Magdalene seeing Jesus after the Resurrection and hearing him call her name and then knowing who he was.

  And I knew that Jesus calls us all by name.

  And Jesus was the God we call by name, God, a loving parent who transcends all our limited and limiting sexisms. In my Genesis trilogy I often use el (the earliest name by which the Hebrews called God) instead of him or her, he or she, and I find that helpful and, I hope, unobtrusive.

  2

  BEYOND THE SILVER HAIRBRUSH

  There was much to wrestle with as I was growing up in New York in the twenties. Survivors of the war played frantically. Another war was brewing.

  “Father,” I begged, “there’ll never be another war, will there?”

  My father would not lie to me. He explained the lineup of the nations as mistrust grew in the Balkans. I did not want to hear. But I felt the breath of war like wind from the dark clouds on the horizon.

  “But how can God let there be another war when war is so terrible?”

  “God does not cause the wars. We human beings do.”

  “But why doesn’t God stop it?”

  “We are creatures with free will; God refuses to interfere with our misuse of it.”

  Thus began the continuing question of God’s omnipotence and human free will. God gave away power when he made creatures with free will. That was a strange thought: God, who is all power, gave away power! And yet the ability to give power away, lavishly, lovingly, is greater than hanging on to power as human beings try to do. With us power is control. With God it is freedom.

  So, then, if God has given us freedom, and if freedom is good, why is there so much pain? If Jesus came to save us, why do we still turn around and kill each other?

  * * *

  —

  At bedtime my parents listened to the story of my day. If I had done something unloving or wrong I confessed it and was met with immediate forgiveness and hugs. Then, secure in their love, I would watch as they left for the theatre or the opera, my mother in an evening gown which smelled of her favorite fragrance, my father carrying his elegant top hat. They were glamorous as well as trustworthy. I learned more at home than I did at school, for I was not a successful schoolchild. I received little understanding from my teachers who did not like differences and who sided with the children who wanted someone to pick on.

  At home I read and wrote in the privacy of my little back room. It was a long time before I knew that my parents often quarreled, and that their arguments were almost always about me and my upbringing. It was even longer before I realized that my mother’s unconventional suggestions would have been better for me than my father’s conventional ones, but my father always won. He wanted me brought up like an English nursery child, occasionally seen but not heard. They agreed on the “best” dancing school, but not acrobatic lessons.

  Where was God in the twenties? War was on the horizon. My parents took tango lessons with a group of friends. My father coughed. My mother miscarried a little boy. The word cocktail came into the vocabulary. My father’s many elder sisters were invited to lunch, and if my father heard about it ahead of time he vanished for the day. He went to his office in the Flatiron Building and worked, writing short stories, articles, plays, movie scripts. He could no longer do the traveling which had been his work as a foreign correspondent. He went to church and I was too young to understand the expression of pain on his face.

  The world was uneasy. People worried about the drinking, the parties, the jazz, the changes the war had brought about. Things were not going to go back, be the way they were; earth time moves only in one direction. Prohibition was voted in as a countermeasure to the search for pleasure. I listened to my parents talking and asked what prohibition was. It’s a new law, I was told, to stop people from drinking alcohol.

  I had heard the word cocktail, but I had been blessed in never seeing the abuse of alcohol. My parents had one drink and one drink only before dinner. It was a ritual for them, a time when they sat quietly together after the tensions of the day, and talked.

  My father said, “Prohibition will make people drink more alcohol, and worse alcohol. Legalism does not make for moderation.”

  I learned later that his words were very true, but my parents were moderate. Jesus and his friends drank wine and I assumed that they were moderate, too. I still did not see very much of my parents, whose lives had a rhythm very different from a child’s, but when they came to say good night to me at bedtime, they gave me their full attention. When they punished me, I knew that I deserved it. I didn’t mind a smack with my mother’s silver hairbrush. I did not resent it. I had done something wrong and deserved a reminder that it was wrong and should not be repeated. I most certainly did not consider the smack child abuse.

  But a close friend of mine who was also smacked with her mother’s silver hairbrush did consider it child abuse. It took me a long time to figure out why she considered the silver brush child abuse and I did not.

  My parents were Episcopalians, but they lived in a wide world of the arts, theatre, music, painting. It bothered my mother that some of her favorite artists did not live exemplary lives, but that did not stop her from loving Mozart or George Eliot. When I did something that deserved spanking with the silver hairbrush I got a smack, followed by a hug and a kiss, and that was the end of it. What I had done was over and was not referred to again.

  My friend grew up with parents who belonged to a rigid evangelical church. It was far more important that you live a virtuous Christian life than that you might write Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. When my friend did something that was considered wrong and the silver hairbrush was brought out, she was told that she had hurt Jesus. What she had done was not left alone after the smack with the silver hairbrush, but she was reminded over and over what a terrible thing she had done.

  So, yes, in her case the silver hairbrush constituted child abuse. It is often not so much what we do as how we do it that makes the difference.

  The punishment that was terrible to me was being forbidden to read for twenty-four hours. Once during this discipline I confessed that I had forgotten for a moment and opened a book. My mother did not seem to hear me, and she did not lighten my sentence. She was, as it were, not there. I was forced to realize that something was wrong, but I was not sophisticated enough to know what it was, or that I was part of it.

  My parents fought over where I was to go to school. I had started in a small school that went only through third grade. My first little report cards were all that any parent could hope for. “As usual, Madeleine and Alexa lead the school”—Alexa, my first good friend, who has stayed in touch despite vast geographical distances.

  For fourth grade a new school was found for me. Surely my poor report cards, on both the academic and behavioral side, should have told my parents that something was wrong. I went from the top of the class to the bottom. Everything I did left something to be desired. Why was I understood and encouraged in my first little school, and misunderstood and criticized in the new, larger one?

  Alexa was in a different school, but one weekend I was invited to go with her to her family’s country “cottage.” Alexa came from a rich and notable family. The cottage was a mansion. But what I remember of that weekend was going for a solitary walk in the woods near the house. Alexa’s uncle was spending the weekend at the cottage, and he came to me and began talking kindly. He sat on a log and pulled me onto his knees. Then he began to kiss me wetly. All I knew was that this was not right, and I slithered out of his grasp, though he grabbed at me; I ran. At first I could hear him following me, but I ran faster, and evidently he did not pursue me. When I got home I was able to tell my mother what he had done. She was calm in agreeing with me that his behavior was wrong, and told me I would never again be allowed to go to Alexa’s for the weekend.

  Another time I was sent to spend two hot July weeks in the country with friends of my mother, two women, and the daughter of one of them, a girl a couple of years older than I. I was not made to feel part of the family. The two women were polite, but they excluded me.

  On the first evening I sat down at the table instead of standing and waiting for grace to be said, and was chillingly reprimanded. Since at home I ate alone on a tray in my room, my lapse was understandable. On Sundays when I ate with my parents after church we said grace. But my regular time to thank God was at bedtime when I said my prayers.

  I mumbled apologies, and was not hungry.

  At night in our bedroom the girl began to pinch me as a punishment for not being a good Christian and threatened terrible things if I screamed. Nevertheless, I told her mother, who said I was speaking nonsense and she would not listen to lies. The pinching continued, painful and incomprehensible. I was covered with bruises. When I got home after two weeks of misery, my mother certainly saw the bruises. I think I was reassured that I would never have to go back.

  These are mild examples of abuse, but they were abuse. My mother’s silver hairbrush was not abuse, but these were. They were abnormal. I was not permanently scarred by them, but I do remember them, and they give me a good idea of what abuse is like.

  Alexa’s uncle came from a secular society; the two women were “Christian.” What made that man, important in the world of art, want to touch my prepubescent body? Why were those two women judgmental and unwelcoming? Why did the girl enjoy giving pain?

  My childhood was full of ups and downs, insights and blindnesses. I did have more opportunity than many children for daydreaming, reading, writing my own stories. I believed in fairy tales and wee folk, and I knew that ultimately there had to be a happy ending. I clung to that because I knew that much in between was not happy. Jesus grew up in a small country where many freedoms had been taken away by the conquering Romans; if the Jewish people were not actively at war, they were still living in a country occupied by foreigners who had taken them over. I knew that there was something terribly wrong in a world of war, in Jesus’ day, in mine. Why was I given a book at school that showed the “Huns” impaling Belgian babies on their bayonets? It left a terrible impression of terror on me. It was like Herod ordering his soldiers to kill all the children under two because he was afraid that a new baby had been born who might take away the little power the Romans allowed him to have.

  It made even more terrible my father’s words that we were moving toward yet another war. Why didn’t Jesus stop war? Why did he allow people to hurt and hate? Even with these unanswerable questions I took Jesus and the love of God for granted, and it never occurred to me that this love did not cover the entire planet; God’s love was as great for those in strange countries who had never heard of Jesus as it was for me who went to the Episcopal church every Sunday. It did not occur to me that anybody could put limits on God’s love.

  All that was being discovered in the world of science simply emphasized the greatness of the Creator. Science was never, in my mind, a threat. It simply provided new ways of telling the story and glorifying God.

  I accepted mystery, and I knew that there was much I did not understand. That, of course, was one reason for growing up: to understand.

  * * *

  —

  One day I was in the bathroom, standing at the basin, washing my hands. And Jesus was there. In the bathroom with me. Telling me without words that it was all right and there was work for me to do. I did not question his presence. It seemed very strange and embarrassing to me that he would approach me in the bathroom, because I was a private and rather prudish child. Why didn’t he come to me in church? Or when I was saying my prayers? Or even in the park? Somewhere more appropriate.

  Certainly I didn’t tell anybody. I have never mentioned it before in all these years. But I didn’t forget.

  * * *

  —

  One day there was a strange silence. In the apartment, on the streets. The stock market fell, plummeting downwards, wildly out of control. The Crash had come, blowing the remainder of the postwar world to shreds, as devastating as a bomb.

  We were not as affected as many people, because we were neither rich nor poor. But everybody was affected. The entire Western world suffered. There were not enough jobs. There was not enough food.

  I was nearly twelve.

  * * *

  —

  When Jesus was twelve he slipped away from his parents and went into the temple and astounded the religious leaders by the depth of his questions and the answers he gave when they questioned him.

  I had stopped asking questions, even at prayer time. When life became precarious at home the questions were no longer safe. By refusing to ask what was wrong, I was holding the fragile bubble of my world in my hand, protecting it by not questioning it, keeping it from shattering into a million fragments. I put myself into a state of arrested development by staying a child. But questions were being asked by others. Decisions were being made. I was not consulted. If I wanted to stay a child, my parents cooperated with me. My most coherent prayer was, “God, please make it be all right. Oh, Jesus, help.”