Читать книгу Runagates in Scarceness - O.C. Edwards - Страница 8

The ten o’clock news had begun, recounting the latest statistics on American troops withdrawn from Vietnam, Biafrans starved, and PLO members who had come into Israel from Lebanon. The Chinese and the Russians were accusing one another of preparing for war. France had agreed to help stop the manufacture of heroin in Marseilles. There was still no real lead about who had murdered Yablonski and his wife and daughter.

All these alarms and excursions were enough to rouse Seth from his uneasy sleep in the armchair in front of the set. He had sat down after coming in from Evensong and discovering another note from Sheila. She would be late, it said. Even though a TV dinner had been left with instructions for its preparation, he decided to have a drink and look at the news, hoping she would return in time to eat with him. But after he had finished the second drink, and she still was gone, he was too agitated to eat. He thought he could study. He knew he wasn’t up to attempting Braudel’s French nor to following Tillich’s arguments, but he could make a stab at finding out what Raymond Brown had to say about John’s gospel. The print proved so tiny and the book so thick that he wondered if he could ever finish all of it, or why anyone might want to. Every car door’s slam, every footstep on the sidewalk, every creak of the old Army building was enough to get him off his feet and peering out the window into the empty darkness outside.

Unable to focus on the page, he finally turned on the tube. In Vietnam, especially while in prison, he believed there was no greater luxury on earth than sitting in a comfortable living room with one’s family after a hard day’s work and watching television. Arriving home only in time to enter seminary in the fall, his study needs crowded out this delayed gratification. Now, like other aspects of his life, the television experience was failing to measure up to anticipation. Finally, the warmth of the room, the effect of the bourbon, and the banality of what he was watching caused him to doze off into an agitated sleep.

Just as he was rousing himself, he heard the doorknob turn and saw Sheila coming in on tiptoe. Switching on the table light he had turned off when he had abandoned his study plans, he looked up at her. “Where have you been? I worried about you.”

“You look like you’ve been worried, boozing again and passed out in front of the TV,” she said, removing her tam and scarf and hanging her coat in the closet. “Fine seminarian you make.”

“I only had two, and I was not passed out, just asleep.” He arose and moved toward her. “I still want to know where you’ve been.”

“I told you in the note. I went to make my meditation.”

“And it took you five hours. I knew you were getting very holy, but I didn’t know that like Paul you had been ‘rapt up to the third heaven.’”

“Why do you always have to put down anything that you don’t understand? You know that I’ve been receiving instruction in meditative technique from Sebastian. We were talking about it afterwards. He says that I am making phenomenal progress.” Her face tilted up, her blue eyes glistening and looking into space. With the blue highlights gleaming in her black hair, she looked as beautiful as she had when she was crowned at the state fair competition.

“What does that creep know about it?”

“You’re jealous. All you husbands are. You can’t stand the idea that there is one student here who is going to be a real spiritual leader. I don’t know why he is here; he already knows more about spirituality than any of the faculty. He hasn’t merely studied Christian asceticism—he is deep into the meditative techniques used by ancient cultures all over the world. He has advanced beyond the petty confines of Christianity into the real spirituality that lies behind all religions.” She stalked into the bathroom and slammed the door behind her.

Seth continued to talk through the door. “You know what the other students call him? ‘The Little Bastian.’ Nobody can stand him. Even those peaceniks hate him, and they are supposed to love everybody. If you want to know my opinion, the guy is crazy. And probably queer as well. Did you ever notice the way that he walks?”

Emerging from the lighted bathroom into the unlit bedroom, Sheila stood framed in the doorway. Her model’s stance with pelvis thrust forward was backlit, and the shortie nightgown she wore hardly hid her shape. There could be no doubt why she had won swimsuit at national.

“I’m glad one of the men around here is not carnal. The rest of you are a bunch of animals. All of you look at me as if I were naked. Sebastian says that sex is disruptive of the spiritual life.”

With this she went to the bed, pulled back the covers, climbed onto her side, and, facing the edge, she pulled the covers around her neck. “I have to work tomorrow, so I can’t lose sleep by arguing with you all night. Please don’t read in bed—it keeps me awake. Goodnight.”

The next morning between classes Canon Bothwell stopped in the office and told the Dean’s secretary that he would like to examine the folder of one of the Juniors, Sebastian Seymour. Unlocking the file cabinet and removing a folder, she said, “Here’s Mr. Seymour’s file. You will find it all here except the psychological, Dr. Bothwell. The Diocese requires us to return that as soon as the Dean has read it.”

“I understand, Mrs. Simmes. I’m sure the time will come when the law is much stricter about student files in every way. I only look at one when I have a real need to know something about the student. May I sit at this table while I look through this?”

Sorting through the documents, Bothwell saw that Sebastian was older than he thought, having spent about five years between his graduation from Butler and his arrival at the seminary. He had grown up in the Indiana town of Lebanon, in a working-class family, discovering a larger world in high school, where he was active in dramatics and debate and had been a cheerleader. He had attended Butler on a scholarship, and his grades there had been fairly good. His Graduate Record Exam score was higher than Bothwell had expected. His main activities were in theatre, but he was also active in a campus group sponsored by a church in the ghetto. That congregation was connected with a mainline denomination but was almost completely identified with its intense pastor, Bob Smith. Bothwell knew Smith himself had grown up in Indianapolis’ inner city in one of its poor white sections, and he completed college and seminary by taking jobs on the night shift and finding every scholarship available for ministerial students. Smith’s combination of ecstatic experience with social action was not typical of the denomination with which his congregation maintained a tenuous identification, and from which it received a good bit of financial aid.

Smith’s church had carried on an aggressive recruitment program on the campus, looking especially for the excluded and the alienated among the student body. The combination of tongue speaking and association with blacks was enough to give a sense that, even though one was excluded from the social life on campus, those who belonged to the fraternities and sororities were the ones who were really left out. This group offered a natural sphere in which Seymour could develop his flair for leadership, and by the time he graduated he had established himself as Smith’s right-hand man. After several years something must have happened to sour the relationship, because Sebastian had dissociated himself from the congregation. He set himself up in the neighborhood as an unofficial social work agent, and after a few months had started to attend the small Episcopal mission nearby. Smith had returned the seminary’s reference form with a scrawl across it that said, “If he had been one of us, he would not have gone out from us. We turn him over to Satan.”

Sebastian had soon made himself invaluable to St. Cyprian’s mission. He became choir director and, having mastered the liturgy in a few months, a lay reader and director of acolytes. In January he was elected to the Mission Council, and by spring he was recommended as a postulant. All this information was from his autobiographical statement and references from members of the congregation. The documents also revealed that he had been approved over the opposition of the Rector of All Saints, from whose parish most of the social agencies in the Diocese operated, and who was the Episcopalian with the most credibility among the city’s blacks.

After his eleven o’clock class Canon Bothwell was descending the steps in front of the School when he heard a pleasant feminine voice call, “Rod, wait up, and I’ll let you walk a lady home.” Turning around, he saw with satisfaction that he had been hailed by Chase’s newest and only female faculty member, Angela Price-Mansfield. Her being hired surprised everyone, but from the entire group of candidates she was the best qualified in quite a strong field. Her dissertation at Duke showing the superficiality of Situation Ethics had been accepted for publication by Westminster without revision. Perhaps the most surprising aspect of her selection, however, was her acceptance of Chase’s invitation, since she had a number of more attractive offers. But her husband Tony had been offered a job teaching Renaissance history at Wabash, and the package deal seemed to extend to the two of them more of the opportunities they were seeking, so Chase was able to hire above itself. Since the pay package at Chase was figured on the formula for clergy and included housing, while Wabash had only a few houses that it could make available to faculty at below-market rent, the Price-Mansfields lived at the seminary and were Roderick Bothwell’s next-door neighbors.

“An honor and a pleasure, ma’am.” Bothwell’s formal gallantry was partly facetious because he had already come to have a great deal of affection and respect for his attractive young colleague; but it also came naturally to one whose youth had been spent in the South four decades before, and who had never been married.

“I don’t know that I would have realized it was a lady I was waiting for, with your cloak so much like those the rest of us wear around here. I suspect, however, that it is we who have appropriated feminine fashions rather that you who have borrowed ours.”

“Cloaks are the only outer garment the fashion designers have come up with that can cover the multitude of hem lines they have left us to choose among,” she replied, falling in step beside him. The top of her head came only to the height of his earlobe, although Bothwell was of average height. Her face was narrow, but in profile her lightly made-up features were chiseled gracefully enough to have adorned a cameo.

“Still, they do come in handy for protecting books and papers from the weather when you don’t like to carry an attaché case. From the point of view of the history of religions, I expect you’re right about clerical vesture. The shaman is outside the conventional roles of male and female. Sometimes the way that is shown is for him to adopt feminine clothing.”

“Speaking of the history of religions, how is the course going?” Bothwell queried. Angela, like several of the Chase faculty, had to double in brass and offer the seminary’s few courses in an academic field other than her specialized area of ethics and moral theology.

“I like doing it. I had done a good bit of work in the field at Duke because anthropology offers so much evidence for the sociology of knowledge, which, as you know, is my main methodological interest. Still, something happened in class today that I found a little disturbing.”

“What was that?”

“As is usual at the beginning of the semester, we were talking about assignments and appropriate topics for term papers. Sebastian Seymour wanted to do a paper about the use of hallucinogens to induce religious experience.”

“I don’t find that too surprising in the light of the interest of young people today in drugs.”

“No, that’s not the point of my concern. I made some of the obvious bibliographical suggestions: Castaneda and Meyerhoff’s book on the peyote cult, that sort of thing. But he said that he wasn’t interested in merely reading a lot of books. He wanted to move the whole issue to a much more scientific basis with controlled experiments. Apparently he subscribes to that new journal that Timothy Leary has started and was hoping to do something that could be published there.”

“I see. That certainly should be discouraged.”

“Yes. I’m afraid I sounded very much like an ethicist and talked about the morality of experiments on human beings using substances the impact of which we know so little. I know that LSD in light doses is not supposed to do any permanent psychological damage to emotionally healthy people, but we don’t always know how stable someone is. I’ve seen people on bad trips, and I wouldn’t wish that on anybody. And we don’t really know about chromosome damage. Not to mention the legal issue.”

“Yes, I can imagine the Dean’s reaction if he thought it might get into the papers that seminarians were using drugs. And, as pleasant as it is to contemplate his apoplexy, I would have grave concerns myself over the effect on the students. Nor would it be to our advantage to offend those who support us financially.”

Angela continued, “To make matters worse, it wasn’t other students Sebastian was thinking of experimenting on. I had the distinct impression that he had in mind using some of the student wives who have accepted him as a spiritual director. And I don’t think that I am the only one who got that impression. Some of the students began to look grim, especially those whose wives could be involved. Our Mr. Seymour could be playing with fire. I would not want someone like Seth Clarke, for instance, to have it in for me. How many ways do they say Green Berets are taught to kill with their bare hands? Thirty-one?” Bothwell had no answer, and they walked on in reflective silence.

By this time they had walked beyond the block of the seminary’s public buildings and into the next block devoted to faculty housing. Pleasant frame dwellings representing the architectural styles of Indiana farm houses in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries faced to the inside of the block so that they shared a long open court instead of having separate lawns between them and a street. The block was enclosed on the south by the Charles Addams deanery, which faced the chapel across a long mall. Coming to her sidewalk, Angela turned to Bothwell and said in parting, “I’ve got to fix myself a sandwich, and I’m sure that Katrina has something scrumptious for you.”