“And RuthClaire might like having another woman around for a while today,” I said. “It won’t be easy for her with Adam gone and only Bilker’s shoulder to cry on.”
Bilker snorted, in agreement rather than indignation.
And when the Montarazes came downstairs, RuthClaire and Caroline embraced like long-lost siblings unexpectedly reunited, and as they did, Adam and I carried his belongings out to my car for the trip to Beulah Fork. Bilker lent a hand. Even on its high-performance shocks, the rear of my Mercedes began to sag. Adam had added to his own luggage at least three dozen of RuthClaire’s more recent paintings. Although fairly small, the canvases were still affixed to their frames, and Bilker and I had to struggle to wedge them into the trunk between the suitcases and the pasteboard boxes.
“Adam, what’s the point of taking the paintings?”
“Remembrance,” he gargled.
Because it hurt for him to speak, I did not question him further—but it occurred to me that he was preparing for a long separation from RuthClaire. This was not a surrender to despair, though, but an act of faith. If he and his wife were to be reunited with their child, they would have to accede to and endure the stipulations of the kidnappers. With luck, the GBI might break the case, but there was no guarantee.
These paintings—the drab acrylics she’d hopefully entitled Souls—still seemed to me the least distinguished work of RuthClaire’s career: blatant mediocrities. Only a uxorious husband could love them. I scratched my head. Adam was not the uxorious sort, but his fondness for this series—when, for “remembrances,” he could have taken better examples of his wife’s art—truly puzzled me.
We got away from Atlanta shortly after noon. On our drive down, Adam read. He had a stack of hardcover titles on the floorboard, and he seemed to pick up and peruse a new one every fifteen minutes or so. Does God Exist? and Eternal Life? by Hans Küng, God and the Astronomers by Robert Jastrow, God and the New Physics by Paul Davies, The Dancing Wu Li Masters by Gary Zukav, The Reenchantment of the World by Morris Berman, Mind and Nature by Gregory Bateson, an anthology entitled The Mind’s I by a pair of editors whose names escape me. I don’t know what all else. I had the impression that Adam was sampling these texts, checking passages that he’d underlined in previous readings, rather than trying to devour each volume whole for the first time—but even this formidable intellectual feat had its intimidating aspects. Out of respect for his admirable focus, I kept my mouth shut.
At Paradise Farm, unloading, I broke my quirky vow of silence: “Adam, you know the story you told RuthClaire to tell the reporter about your reasons for separating?” He raised his eyebrows. “The one about entering the seminary this fall?”
“Yes?” he croaked.
“That alleged fiction came to you so quickly, I wondered if… well, if it might really be something you’d like to try.”
“Oh, yes,” he managed. “I. Have. Thought. About. It.”
Livia George, Hazel Upchurch, and our latest little waitress from Tocqueville Junior College did not jump for joy on my return. An hour earlier, a tour bus from Muscadine Gardens had dropped off forty people at the West Bank. These people had descended like a flock of crows, eaten a dozen different menu items, left a skimpy collective tip, and flown away in their bus with a rude backfire.
“Did you give them the substitutes they wanted?”
Livia George sat spraddle-legged at a table near the cash register. “Don’ I always, Mistah Paul?”
“Everybody was taken care of?”
She gave me a disgusted look. “We turned you a pretty profit, and we done been doin’ that the whole live-long week. You jes’ like a man runs up to put out a fire when it’s awreddy burnt down his house.”
“Livvy, you say the sweetest things.”
“How’s Mistah Adam?” she asked, sitting up straight to wipe her brow. “How’s Miss RuthClaire?”
“Fine,” I lied. “Fine.”
I made some noises about the apparent success of Adam’s operation, but beyond that partial truth I could not comfortably go. To prevent any further discussion of the matter, I helped clean up the restaurant and stayed on for the five-o’clock dinner crowd. Our receipts for the day were encouraging, and I drove Livia George home without once mentioning that I had a guest in my house.
Next morning, closer to noon than to sunup, the TV set downstairs awakened me.
I knotted my terrycloth robe at my waist and stumbled barefoot down the steps to find Adam cross-legged on the floor with a section of the Sunday Journal-Constitution strewn around him and my RCA XL-100’s screen flickering with ill-defined violet and magenta images of Dwight “Happy” McElroy’s Great Gospel Giveaway broadcast.
“‘This is my story, this is my song,’” sang the hundred-member choir behind McElroy. “‘Praising my Savior all the day long!’”
Shots of the choir alternated with wide-angle pans of the congregation in McElroy’s huge Televangelism Center in Rehoboth, Louisiana. This soaring, baroquely buttressed structure had been paid for by the four-bit to five-dollar donations of hundreds of thousands of low-income subscribers to the doctrinal guidelines of the Greater Christian Constituency of America, Inc. Despite the raddled colors on my picture tube, I could see that attending the service were more enraptured souls than you could usually find at the Omni during an Atlanta Hawks basketball game. Seven thousand people? Ten? However many there were, they must have converged on Rehoboth from every city and hamlet on the Gulf Coast, not excluding Baton Rouge, New Orleans, Biloxi, and Mobile. The blessed place rocked.
“Ah,” I said. “Your favorite show.”
Adam had already dressed: a pair of light brown bush shorts and an orange T-shirt celebrating the pleasures of River Street in Savannah. He handed me a section of the paper called “The Arts.”
“Turn first page,” he growled, but, overnight, his speech had become more fluid.
I obeyed. What greeted my eye on the inside page was this headline:
Beside the brief story was a file photograph of Adam and RuthClaire in “happier times,” namely, at the opening of his Abraxas show in February. My face was a smudge of dots among other ill-defined faces in the background.
“That was quick, wasn’t it?”
I read the story. It quoted RuthClaire to the effect that Adam’s pursuit of spiritual fulfillment had left him little time for either Tiny Paul or her. She still loved him, but that very love insisted that she give him what he most wanted, a chance to study at Candler without family encumbrances. She wanted to support him in his quest for a theological degree, but all he wanted was complete freedom. No one alive fully understood the habiline mind, but in some ways Adam’s outlook was that of a medieval ascetic with a calling for the priesthood. Had she not intercepted him on his northward trek through Georgia two years ago, almost certainly he would have discovered his spiritual bent without first marrying.
Adam grunted. “She does not add. That ‘almost certainly.’ I would have. Stayed a naked animal.”