“Work and build, my sons, and build
a monument to love and joy,
to human worth, to faith we kept
for you, my sons, for you…”
Well, poor Ethel — let’s face it, she hadn’t had it easy either. I’d envied her her equanimity at the end: she’d died a death of almost unbearable beauty. In fact, it was unbearable — that was probably why we’d all fought our way up to the switch when the electrician bungled it. Ultimately anyway: I’d have to admit that wasn’t exactly what was on my mind at the time. I’d been thinking more about just getting the goddamn thing over with. I was hanging on then by the grace of one thought only: that the day had to end, it would all be got past. Had to. Time marches on. Shakespeare said that in some play, I believe. Some tomorrow would inevitably become today and we could start forgetting, that was the main thing. I’d never doubted this until that moment the doctors said she was still alive: then suddenly I’d felt like we were teetering on the brink of infinity. Scared the hell out of me. The rest was simple reflex.
Like the way I’d left the stage earlier on. When the lights went out, everybody had started screaming. It was terrible. Somebody was screaming wildly right where I was! It was me, I’d realized. Christ, I’d leapt completely outside myself! I’d pulled myself together as best I could, swallowed down my yelping panic, groped around in the dark for something to hang onto. What was awful was the terrible emptiness—it had felt like there was nothing holding anything together any more! I’d hit upon a chair and sat down in it. I’d felt safer. Thank God for gravity! I’d remembered my pants: I had to get them untangled before the lights came up again. I’d worked one shoe off. Then I’d felt the leather on my butt, the studs, and it had come to me suddenly where I was sitting. For one dreadful moment I’d felt locked to the chair, as though the leather of the seat and the skin of my ass had got interchanged somehow — then I’d ripped free at last, and the rest, as I say, was reflex. The momentum had carried me right off the edge of the stage and down with a bruising splat onto that sea of turbulent flesh below. Don’t know who I hit, but it had felt like Bess Truman. I’d pitched and rolled blindly through the turmoil, carried along by the tide. Everything was wet and slippery and violent, with high crests and deep troughs: like rape, I’d thought. I was afraid I was going to get seasick.
Then I’d opened my eyes and discovered I could see after all, even though everybody else in the Square had still seemed to be flopping about helplessly with glazed looks in their eyes, screaming about the darkness. I’d understood this. When I was very young, just a freshman in high school, my father took Harold and Don and me to Los Angeles to hear Dr. Paul Rader preach a revival sermon and give ourselves to Jesus. Mother did not go. I grasped, even then, that this was not her Jesus, not the Jesus I’d grown up with, the Jesus of little boys. This was a ferocious Jesus who lived in a wild place only grown-up men could go to. Or anyway this was the impression I got from my father, who seemed very serious, even frightened. My mother was sad to see us go and I felt sorry for her — it was like some kind of conspiracy against her. At the meeting, everyone became very emotional. My own father became very emotional, in a way I’d never seen before — he cried and seemed to lose control of himself, seemed to want to lose control of himself, as though the very firmness of his will — and he was always a very willful man — depended on this momentary release. Harold and Don cried, too. So did I, it seemed to be important to my father that I did so and I obeyed as I always obeyed. And like the rest of them, I walked down the aisle through that dark forest of wild emotions and pledged my life to that fierce Jesus. But all the time I felt as though I were walking in a dream, somebody else’s dream, not mine — I didn’t really quite believe in what I was doing. It was like being in a play and I could throw myself into the role with intensity and conviction, but inside I was holding something back. Even as I wept: later I was to recall this scene to help me to weep on cue in Bird-in-Hand, in the back seat of my Dad’s car with Ola, up at Wheeling — but that night I felt guilty about it. I worried that I had not been completely saved. Grace, I knew, was a matter of luck — after all, there were peoples all over the world who had missed out, who were still missing out, who’d never even heard of the name of Jesus, much less had a chance to be baptized, so grace wasn’t a blanket promise…and maybe I was not one of the chosen ones. I wept and knelt and prayed with the others, but I couldn’t really give myself to Jesus, not entirely, not the way the others did. Later, after I’d seen more of the world, I felt pleased with myself for not having given in. I was proud of my discipline — what my mother called Self-Regulation and Self-Restraint — and even though I envied my brothers’ ability to plunge uncritically out into Dad’s world, I nevertheless felt a notch above them. I felt singled out, touched by a special kind of grace, a unique destiny: I was God’s undercover agent in a secular world. For such a one, emotional release was a kind of debauchery. An impiety. My way was harder, but at least I could see where I was going.
And so it had been there in Times Square: the lights had been snuffed all right, the marquees and billboards now as dead as the old city trolleys, but though it had been like peering through pea soup, I could nevertheless make out what was happening, even if nobody else could. It was awesome to look at, of course — flesh, as far as you could see, engaged in every grab-assing obscenity imaginable, a frantic all-community grope that my own privates did not entirely escape — but the dimensions had taken the excitement out of it. In fact, if anything, it had been spooky, unnerving: all that desperate weakness, that frenzied vulnerability, everybody screaming and reaching out and plunging haplessly away in one another — it was like something out of Fantasia or The Book of Revelation. I’d bobbed along on the flood, longing for the old bell tower back home, some place of refuge where I could lock myself away, think things over, work out the parameters of this new situation, get my pants back up. Maybe, I’d thought, this is what hell will be like for me: endless self-exposure. This was a Self that was not in my mother’s lexicon. It was the toughest part about being a politician, the one thing I personally hated the most. I’m no shrinking violet, I’m not unduly shy or modest, but I’m a private man and always have been. Formal. When I have sex I like to do it between the sheets in a dark room. When I take a shit I lock the door. My chest is hairy but I don’t show it off. I don’t even like to eat in public and just talking about one’s personal life embarrasses me. And now all this today — Christ, I believed in touching the pulse of the nation, but this was going too fucking far! It was probably a good thing I was all washed up.