And so, when Eloise got her tiny little portion of Gary’s sale of her father’s farm—twenty thousand dollars it was—she called Marla up and offered to invest in her French career—do not tell Janet—and she gave her two grand and bought her a one-way ticket to Paris. Marla was grateful but nervous; the only thing she said that was worrisome was that Reverend Jones thought that when nuclear war came, and you could be sure it would, Paris would go up in, not smoke, but radioactive gases. “No,” said Eloise, “it will not. Even Hitler wanted to preserve Paris.” And so she put the girl on the plane, and off she went.
Cat was harder. She had grown up in an all-black town in Texas and moved to California against her parents’ wishes. She had then done a few things she now regretted. But she was devoted to the Temple, and to Jones. She saw herself as Janet’s “sponsor,” and Jones had given her some responsibilities that she took very seriously, including looking after his small children two days a week. Cat was vague about who the mothers of these children were—“We are all their mothers” was what she said, “and Reverend Jones is their father, as he is our father.” When she wasn’t talking about the Temple—who was in and who was out, who was betraying and who was loyal—she loved to talk about cooking and jogging, two of Eloise’s hobbies. Cat also liked Janet very much, and did not like Lucas very much. Eloise could not understand why, but she thought it had something to do with the Temple.
Eloise loved Lucas. Of course, she loved Janet, too—Janet reminded her so much of Rosanna, though her hair was dark and she was five seven, not five two. She had some of Rosanna’s mannerisms: when she had said something she really meant, she stood up straight and flared her nostrils, and she always sat with her knees together and her feet together, never slouching. Eloise, who had spent years refusing to let Rosanna tell her what to do, but admiring her older sister’s looks and self-assurance, was always struck by the resemblance. When Lucas was onstage, she watched the women in the audience staring at him. He was like Cary Grant. There was a being inside of him that was a version of himself; that being was so charming that you could not help being attracted to it, but it had a separate existence from his everyday self. The question Eloise worried about was whether the Stalin from Indiana had noticed the charismatic Lucas, and marked Lucas as a threat or a rival. If so, Eloise thought, Lucas might be in danger, but when she said this aloud to herself, she laughed. Everyone else in town, it seemed, saw Reverend Jones as a powerful force for good in the community. His followers loved him, spoke well of him, reported over and over that their lives had changed under the influence of his loving congregation. They’d found friendship, self-discipline, hope. If they revered him, what was the harm in that? If race was the most important divide in America, then why should Eloise be suspicious of a man who had been more successful than any other in bringing black and white together under one roof, and making them comfortable and accepting of one another?
—
JANET WAS GLAD in spite of herself that she and Lucas didn’t own much, because she saw how difficult it was for some of the Temple members to turn over their possessions to communal ownership. There was one couple she was watching when they donated their house on Potrero Hill. The house was to be set up as a commune. The man had a look on his face like he was happy to get rid of the thing, but the woman cried. Janet watched her; she cried for a long time, and the man just glanced at her every so often, as though he was disappointed in her and waiting for her to stop. When children were turned over to communal care, there was a lot of crying; Janet didn’t think she herself would be able to take that so she was glad she and Lucas didn’t have children. She also didn’t agree with the paddling, but in that she thought she might be wrong, since just about everyone she knew had been spanked or whipped as a child by their own parents, so why not by their caretakers at the church? Reverend Jones was sympathetic but strict—you had to start the new world sometime; eventually, sometime became now. Didn’t those who worshipped Jesus suffer for their revelations? No one was asking the members of the Temple to be flayed alive, shot with arrows, or broken on the wheel (Reverend Jones laughed aloud). Only to share. Only to understand that there was plenty to go around, no matter what it was. Only to give up the onerous responsibility that was possession and take up the freedom that was connection.
Janet also knew that right now, for Lucas, giving up what he possessed was more difficult than it was for her. She didn’t say a thing about it—she didn’t even let a facial expression about it cross her countenance. When he said that the drums were his, they were. When he said that his money was his, it was. When he said that his recordings of his favorite music were his, they were. Whatever pressure Lucas was to feel, it was not going to come from Janet. One night, when they had something of an argument about the Temple, Lucas said that he wasn’t going to sign anything and he expected Janet not to sign anything, either, even a blank piece of paper. If she wanted them to attend like all of their friends, then they had to be free to come and go; he had to be free to do his gigs. There would be no signing. Lucas said that one woman, Joyce someone, had told him that the papers were confessions of child molestation that the reverend would then use against you if you were disloyal and tried to leave the Temple, but Janet and Lucas agreed that this was such a ridiculous and paranoid idea that the woman must be making it up. People made a lot of things up about Reverend Jones—that he called himself God, that he said he could cure cancer, that he kept all the money for himself, that he threatened one woman in a service with a poisonous snake—but Janet had never seen any of this, and neither had Lucas. There was a lot of pressure to go to services more than one day a week, but, after all, her mother sometimes went to AA meetings three or four days a week, and what was the difference, really? The 25 percent tithe was difficult in a way, but when Janet looked around the congregation at the smiling faces of old folks and some others, like Jorge, who had nothing, she could not think of what else to spend her money on, so why not hand it over?
Today she was all right, too. Last night, it had been difficult to stand there and be shouted at by Cat, by Lena, and by Reverend Jones, told that she was vain and foolish and selfish, that she thought only of Janet Langdon and never of others, that she seemed unable to learn any of the lessons the reverend was trying to teach her. She was evasive or stupid, take your pick—which was worse in the end? If she was really looking for the truth, what was she waiting for? Where was her purse? Hand it over. What were these silly things she kept to herself? Just vanity and childishness. No one was asking her to walk down the street naked, just penniless. What would be so bad about that? People all over the world did it all the time, and their souls thrived on it. To give is to receive—how long would it take her to learn that? If her boyfriend, Lucas, was holding her back, get rid of the fellow; it would be better for the both of them. Go ahead and nod and say yes; no one believes you; we all know you; we all know how hard-hearted and selfish you are; you deserve nothing until you have nothing, and then something will come of it. And so on. Until after midnight. Lucas had sat quietly, looking on, and then left at some point. Finally, when she was really crying, down on her knees with her hands over her face, Reverend Jones came over, took her hand, lifted her up, and put his arms around her. He said to cry it out—every tear was a drop of selfishness pouring forth, making room for the humility that was the true grace of God. Surely she didn’t want to remain as she had begun, the corrupt child of a corrupt world? No, he could tell that she did not; he loved her; he could see the precious light dawning in her eyes.
It was Cat who led her home in the rain, took off her soaking clothes, helped her dry her hair, put her to bed, and kissed her good night, and though she cried for a while, she was so exhausted that she did fall asleep. Now she was wiped out, almost hungover in a way; she knew she ought to get up and go to work, but she could not make herself do it.
—
THE PROBLEM Eloise had when Jorge came by and told her how enemies of the Temple were bent on
destroying it was that she believed him. Jorge was twenty-two; he never thought of the Kennedy assassinations, except as ghost stories. Nor, when she asked him, did he know what the CIA did, only what Jones said it did, which was to infiltrate peaceful organizations like his and destroy them from within. Eloise knew that was true, especially if that organization openly—you might say defiantly—professed socialist principles, which Jones did. When Jones said that J. Edgar Hoover had once called him personally and threatened to destroy or kill him, his wife, and his “rainbow children,” and told him that he had a dossier on him full of crimes “you and I know you didn’t commit, but that I can prove you did,” that was the first time Jorge had heard of Hoover, and he believed the reverend, who had been good to him, like a strict but loving father, and allowed him to work as an orderly in the Temple medical clinic. People came in pain and left in joy, because at last they had found treatment, but also love; Jorge was convinced that the latter was more effective than the former. Eloise remembered what Frank had said about that young woman—Judy was her name—that Hoover hated because she knew he was gathering every molecule of shit he could on everyone he knew in order to maintain his hold over them, and how unusual was that? Not at all, in Eloise’s experience.
Jorge insisted that there was nothing at all wrong with Cat, Janet, Lucas, and Jorge himself going to Guyana—the piece of property there was beautiful, rather like Marin County, fertile and well watered. The medical clinic was already up and running, and it was no less healthy than family farms in the Midwest had once been.
“That’s not a good recommendation to an old farm girl,” said Eloise, but Jorge said, “I would rather work in my own communal field than a field owned by United Fruit.”
Eloise said that she hadn’t known that United Fruit owned fields in the United States. Jorge scowled but pressed on. All they needed was some money for transportation. Janet had let it out that the family farm had been sold somehow, or split up, and there was money. Just a few hundred dollars was all they needed. No one, not Lucas or Janet, knew he had come over to ask.
“Cat?” said Eloise.
Jorge didn’t answer, just smiled and said, “We know that, deep down, you are in sympathy with socialism and with our experiment. You gave Marla money.”
Eloise, who was sitting on the sunporch in her favorite rocker, pushing herself back and forth with her toe, said, “Who told you that?”
“Marla is unhappy in Paris. She might join us.”
Marla’s last letter had been full of news about how she had been taken up by a group of feminists who adored the self-referential profundities of her inscriptions. They wanted to do a street play on the corner of the Boulevard Saint-Michel and Boulevard Saint-Germain, not even translating the plays into French, but acting them out as a reflection of the pedestrians going by, especially, since summer was at hand, of American tourists. Her funds were holding out fairly well, but she was getting tired of hummus and baba ghanouj. Eloise said, “I can’t imagine such a thing.”
Jorge, who was sitting on the couch, drinking the chamomile tea Eloise had given him, said, “Well, she didn’t write to me, but Reverend Jones has the letter.”
Eloise said, “If Reverend Jones wants my money, then he’ll have to come and ask for it, because I learned long ago never to discuss finances with anyone but the boss.”
She expected Jorge to laugh at this, but he shook his head very seriously. He said, “Now that Rupert Murdoch is financing his assassination and the destruction of the Temple, he dare not go anywhere. His life is in too much danger.”
“Who is Rupert Murdoch?” said Eloise.
“He’s like that Hearst man.”
“William Randolph Hearst?”
“Something like that,” said Jorge. “Anyway, Rupert Murdoch had one of our members killed last fall, as a warning, and now he has bigger plans, which means that our members are only safe in Guyana. We thought we were safe in California, but that isn’t the case. The coming Nazi takeover will happen everywhere, and when it does, people like me and Lucas will be sent to camps. It happens every thirty years or so. We think, for Janet’s and Lucas’s safety, you should—”
Eloise found herself rocking rather furiously, and made it a point to stop.
“We’ve already applied for our passports and visas, though Janet’s passport is still valid.”
Eloise said, coolly, “What don’t you know about her?” She thought, Or me, for that matter.
“Janet has been pretty open about her feelings and thoughts.”
“And her assets?”
Jorge smiled.
Eloise thought, I used to like this kid. She said, “When are you planning to go?”
“We understand that the visas will come in early August, so we ought to buy the tickets pretty soon.” He looked her right in the eye. “Four tickets—Janet, Lucas, Cat, me.”
“How much are the tickets?”
“Three fifty apiece. One-way.”
Eloise pretended to think for a moment by gazing out the window, but what she really did was note the two men walking down her street; they had been walking the other direction a few minutes before. She said, “You want a check?” She thought that seven hundred dollars, for Janet’s and Lucas’s tickets, was not too high a price to pay to get Cat and Jorge out of the country. She said, “What about Lena?”
“The reverend is taking care of her. He likes to have her with him.”
Eloise thought, I’ll bet he does. Then she thought that Lenin may have been a pig but he was not a religious, lecherous pig.
She said, “Let me find my checkbook.” Then she said, “Do you know those two guys who keep walking back and forth in front of my house?”
Jorge glanced out the window. He said, “That’s Zeb and Vic.”
“What are they doing?”
Jorge said, “We are all in danger. It’s better to travel in groups.”
Eloise, who had lived in Oakland for years without a second thought, had a second thought.
—
CAT KEPT URGING Janet to up her tithe, especially since “we don’t have the reverend’s golden tongue to help us raise funds anymore, at least for now.” She acted as though Reverend Jones’s flight to Guyana and the article in New West magazine meant nothing—of course Reverend Jones had made enemies, and those enemies were glad to talk. Cat kept going to the Temple, kept chatting about whom she saw there and what they did. And then, right on schedule, on August 16, she disappeared from her room. When Lucas called the house where Jorge was living, he got no answer. He went over to the house, in the Mission District. It was empty, the back door unlocked. Janet kept taking out her ticket and putting it away again. When she looked at the destinations—Georgetown, Guyana; change at JFK, New York—the very words made her nervous, but she didn’t know which affected her more.
Lucas was at first happy. He came over three days in a row, but then it was Friday, he had to play, and he didn’t invite her to come watch. After he, too, disappeared—this was the part that she thought she should have noticed—she had watched him onstage so many times, smiling and waving his sticks, leaning into the drums and staring intently as the beat got faster and more complicated, then, when the song ended, throwing his arms in the air and grinning. Would she ever see that again? Not if he had gone to Guyana. Maybe he had changed his ticket, taken a later flight, used this opportunity to leave her behind because he saw that she was a bourgeois materialist after all. It was a mystery. But she pulled herself together. She went to work, she said that she would take the manager’s job at the branch her restaurant was opening on Fulton Street, she said that she would move across the bay, find a room in the Castro, or, because she would be making a little more money, maybe a one-bedroom apartment. Maybe communal living was not for her. Maybe she needed some boundaries, and boundaries started with a locked door. Nor did she hear from Marla. Jorge had told her that Marla had gone to the agricultural paradise after all, had decided that Paris was corrupt and sha
llow, had turned over a new leaf. So they were all there; they had all left her behind.
She did not run out the back of the restaurant when she saw Aunt Eloise in her section. After being prodded by the maître d’, she went over and set the menu in front of her aunt and said, “Would you like to hear today’s specials?”
Aunt Eloise looked up at her. “I really did wonder whether you had gone.”
“I didn’t.”
“Thank God! I read the article. I was appalled.”
Janet was about to say that the article was all lies and everyone was out to get Reverend Jones, but she said, “I was, too.” Then, “You should try the risotto. It’s rice cooked in broth with mushrooms, garlic, and Parmesan.”
“I know what it is.”
Eloise stared at the menu as if she couldn’t help herself, then said, “What about Lucas?”
“He went.”
Janet sat down in the chair beside Eloise at the table and put her head in her hands. Her hair fell in a dirty curtain around her, and that made her all the sadder, somehow. Aunt Eloise gently pushed it back, looked her in the eye, took her hand. Then she whispered, “Honey, do you want to leave here and go back home?”
Janet nodded.
—
THERE WERE no kids Minnie had ever seen who had been improved by adult influence, and she thought this in spite of all the conferences over the years in which she had said, “Perhaps if you took Billy in hand,” or “Perhaps if you helped Janie attend more closely to her homework…” Janet, she thought, would have said her parents wrecked her, but Minnie thought she was a strange combination of daring and alert, strong and brittle, overprepared, too smart for her own good, and never ready. Minnie liked her. You could run down the list of what Frank and Andy and Lillian and Arthur and Tim and this mysterious boy Lucas had done to her, and you could imagine how these cruelties (whether intentional or not) had affected her, but she was the same girl she had always been.