THANKSGIVING WAS Helen’s favorite holiday, and for at least five years Nils and Ivar had spent Thanksgiving with her, along with an assortment of lonely, overworked, or impecunious faculty members who she happened to run across in the course of the fall. She tried to seat twelve or fourteen. This year, however, the lonely, overworked, and impecunious were out of luck, and she was preparing a rather small dinner for Ivar, Nils, Marly, and Father.
Small didn’t mean that she couldn’t go all out, but it did mean that most of her kitchen equipment, from her Bosch food processor to her Calphalon turkey roaster to her Viking oven, was just too big. The ingredients she measured out seemed to sit in little puddles at the bottom of large vessels, and there were things she would never use again that she actually had to go out and buy—an eight-inch pie plate, a three-quart casserole.
Ah, but her yard, her root cellar, and her freezer were abundant with provisions.
For Thanksgiving, Helen liked to pursue a western hemispherical theme. Banished from the table were some of the Italian and French flavors she loved—truffles and tarragon and crusty bread, lamb and pork roast, olive oil, lemons, oranges with cloves, pears poached in wine—but for Christmas, she always put on a large buffet with an Old World, semi-Mediterranean theme.
Everything about the preparations pleased her—the setting out of ingredients, the measuring and mixing, the trips to the root cellar and the freezer, the view out the window of her frosted garden under its winter mulch and all of chill nature alive in the wind, the darkness that because of thick November clouds never really lifted. Around her, in the kitchen, the bowls and pans glowed and auspicious fragrances rose and mingled. Dinner was scheduled late, at six-thirty, so that Helen could savor as much of the day as possible.
At noon, just as she was setting the cranberry mousse in the refrigerator to cool, Ivar showed up, and he followed her around the kitchen with a spoon, tasting a bit of everything. “Mmmm,” he said, “Mmmm,” in a reflective way that showed he would have said the same thing if she weren’t in the room. After he had savored all, he sighed and said, “Mind if I watch a little of the football game over here?”
“Of course not.”
“Did you hear from Tia?”
Tia Mathilde was Helen’s twenty-six-year-old daughter with her former husband. She was an archaeologist working in Greece. “She called. She’s spending the day with an American couple in Delphi.”
“Good. I should have stopped for a six-pack of beer.”
“You left two Heinekens in the refrigerator.”
“That’s a bonus.” He put his arm around her and pulled her solidly to him. She had pinned up her hair, but it was coming down, and she smelled spicy and delicious. She had a big French vegetable knife in one hand and a head of garlic in the other. He kissed her hungrily on the lips and let his hand drop to her large, firm buttocks, which he could feel in delightful detail through her silk slacks and her silk underwear. All the silk she wore was another thing he liked about her. Really, in fact, there was nothing about her that he didn’t like, including the innate independence that prevented him from ever approaching the marriage question, even the living-together question. Where would they live? He was a welcome guest in this world, but always a guest. It reminded him of the old saying “Take nothing but photographs, leave nothing but footprints.” He sighed.
“Nils?”
“Oh, I suppose.”
“Frankly, Ivar, I don’t think it’s going to work out the way he thinks it is.” She said this mildly.
“Well, since his heart is set on the marriage, one’ll be as bad as the other.”
“For him, maybe, but not necessarily for you.” She said this even more mildly. She always tried to uphold the fiction that Ivar and Nils really were two separate individuals, since she didn’t know, even now, how deeply the identification between them ran. Nils had always resisted any closeness to her, and that had been fine with her, since some instinct made her distrust him—his very good will and desire to do the right thing at all times seemed dangerous. He was a classic example of aggressive beneficence, which meant, in her opinion, that he often interfered when he might have more productively left things, or people, alone. And she had been around when he found religion and gave up all doubts (to be honest, he had had few enough to give up). She had, in fact, once known his Ceylonese wife, who had always seemed to be carrying the doubt load, who had, in fact, died of doubt. Her appendix burst because she doubted whether it was important enough to bother either Nils or the hospital emergency room about the severe pain in her side. Nils (this was when Helen was still married and didn’t care one way or the other, really) had hardly seemed to grieve, the woman seemed for him just another Third World development project that didn’t work out owing to the inherent frailty of the native stock. Not caring for Nils was just like not caring for your best friend’s husband—Helen was careful never to criticize Nils, never even to listen to Ivar’s occasional complaints with a sympathetic ear. When pressed, she defended Nils. That seemed to be fine with Ivar.
She began to feel a kind of fleshly eagerness for Ivar to leave her kitchen domain, and stepped out of his embrace. She turned and brought the handle of the knife down sharply on the head of garlic. It fell apart into cloves. “Would you like a sandwich?” she said.
“No, not right now.” He slapped her gently on the buttocks and strode into the living room invigorated. When he turned on the TV, the football game was just beginning. His beer opened with a satisfyingly effervescent crack. He settled into one of Helen’s leather recliners. It was easy, when he was with her, just to sink into the present moment, the physical moment. When he was not with her, it was nearly impossible.
As soon as they walked into Helen’s house, Marly could tell that Father was offended. She could see his eyes flick from chair to painting to flower arrangement to oriental rug and stamp each, “Worldly pride, worldly pride, worldly pride, worldly pride.” Almost immediately, he sat down in the plain wooden chair beside the front door and reached into his pocket for his worn Bible. Marly said, “Please don’t embarrass me,” but he just let the Book flop open and then began moving his lips. She said, “I know you can read without moving your lips, so please stop making this fuss.” He didn’t look at her.
Nils walked right in, past Father as if he weren’t there. This seemed to be Nils’ strategy for dealing with Father, and Marly rather admired it, or at least envied it. She herself thought the house was beautiful.
That didn’t mean that it didn’t make her mad. Almost everything did, these days, starting with Father, going directly to Nils, and then expanding outward to encompass family, church, work, her car, the weather, passersby, everything on television, including the Christian Broadcasting Network, and nearly every encounter that involved the smallest amount of money. It was as if, for the past decade, she had been storing her anger rather than, as she thought, disposing of it, and now the storage tank had sprung a leak and turning away with a soft answer just didn’t cut it anymore.
The beautiful house made her mad because she hadn’t ever been anywhere like it before, hadn’t even imagined that houses like this existed. It was not ornate and enormous and movie-like, the sort of house anyone could buy with enough money, it was the sort of house that you loved to be in, but could never have or reproduce, unless you were Helen herself, and since you would never be Helen herself, you were cut off forever from inhabiting this house, and from feeling, moment to moment, the pleasures of these colors and shapes and aromas. She said to Father, “Oh, for goodness’ sake. Get up and be polite.” He threw her a warning look, but he got up and moved to an unpleasantly comfortable sofa near the fireplace.
She sat next to him, entertaining herself with the idea, which of course she would never act upon, of pinching him hard in the leg the first time he annoyed her. She stared across the room out the big back windows overlooking Helen’s yard.
Except that it was hardly what you would call a yard. The thick hed
ge enclosed a deep double lot. To the left, the black leafless limbs of neatly pruned fruit trees twisted in a sort of Japanese-type sculpture, like those little bitty trees in dishes, only full-size. To the right was the garden, but it wasn’t square like most people’s—it ran here and there in curves. Right now it looked from the house like a big mound of leaves and dead grass. In the middle of it was a little screened building, and she could also see, near the building, a little bridge. In back of the garden and the fruit trees was a wilder-seeming spot, with some dark evergreens and the white trunks of birches curving gracefully against them. This was not a yard with some tomato plants and a deck like most people had, it was an outdoor extension of the house, as if the house represented the world that people made, and the yard represented the world of nature, and with windows and doors and terra-cotta patios and paths and stepping-stones, you could easily move between them.
Which Marly knew you could not, or, at least, you should not. It was better for your soul to see the world of plants and animals as a hard, thoughtless place, and the man-made world as seductive but empty. She knew that.
The reason that it was harder for a rich person to get to heaven than for a camel to squeeze through the eye of a needle was simple—even the most well-meaning and guiltless rich person gave in every day to the temptation of creating his or her own world in his or her own image, and then, of course, came to love that very mingling of shapes, colors, textures, tastes, aromas, musical sounds. A careful soul had to prefer a drier, harder life, one more or less impossible to love. The trouble was, Marly was not sure she did prefer what it was prudent to prefer.
Helen invited them to the table. She had Ivar sit at the head, which Nils noticed, but which did not actually OFFEND him. She put Father at her right hand, and Nils and Marly across from each other. Nils strongly approved of Marly’s behavior on this occasion. She was soberly dressed, a little alienated, he thought, from Helen’s house, which he had always considered to be overdone. She was respectful of her father, about which, lately, Nils had found her a little lax. She was pleasant toward himself, but not talkative. He liked that. One of the ways Helen and Ivar had sometimes made him uncomfortable was how they would sit with their heads together, and you could see Helen doing most of the talking, and Ivar just nodding. That arrangement was cockeyed, Nils thought, and just the opposite of the way it had been with their parents, and the way it ought to be, period. Now that he was close to getting married, he had a lot of thoughts about the way things should be, and he had started writing them down in a little notebook.
A feast, Nils thought, was a good occasion to make some important announcements, and after dessert, he was going to make some. There would be some surprised faces around the table, no doubt about that. But a surprise attack was the best kind. You got your way while they were scrambling around trying to figure out how to react. Father, Ivar, Marly: throw ’em off balance now, Nils thought, and none of them would get (or manage to keep, in Ivar’s case) the upper hand. As the courses were served, Nils could barely taste them for the anticipation he felt.
Now this food, thought Father, was mighty strange. First there was some tomato soup, but it was cold and had green stuff floating in it. Then there were the sweet potatoes, but they turned out to be regular mashed potatoes, even though they were yellow. The beans he recognized, but then beans gave him gas, so he didn’t have any. The turkey, which he thought he could rely on, was too rich-tasting, and the stuffing burned his mouth—it had chili peppers in it, who’d ever heard of that? Then instead of a nice cool cylinder of jellied cranberry sauce sliced into disks, there was some kind of cranberry junket. Then there was blackberry sherbet—that was okay—but after that there were two more desserts, pumpkin pie, but with a strange cornmeal crust, and chocolate cake, but with cranberries in that, too. Frankly, there was hardly a bite of food at this table that Father recognized, and he knew that he was going to get up hungry. Even so, he minded his manners and kept his mouth shut, and every time this woman who’d made the food looked at him, he smiled. He wasn’t blind. He knew the pale one who wasn’t marrying his daughter—good thing they didn’t dress alike, or he’d never tell them apart, every time they were all together, he had to ask Marly what Nils was wearing, and then memorize it—was fornicating with this woman, and he wasn’t surprised.
Fornication never surprised him, he had fornicated himself before truly accepting Jesus, and he had drunk intoxicating liquors, and he had laid blows upon some of his fellow men—he was a man, wasn’t he? You couldn’t be a man without knowing what a man was. Fornicating late in life surprised him a little, though. He always thought that fornicating was something you got through on the way to other, better things. But look at King David, a good man whose mind was set on fornicating. Father knew he wouldn’t be thinking about all of this if the food had been regular food—and then his son-in-law-to-be sat back in his chair and said he was going to say some things, so Father took his mind off King David and fornicating, and all the rest of it; afterward he always said he knew something was coming.
Marly herself liked the food, and tried not to show how unusual it was to her. What she didn’t like was the way Father grunted and snorted at everything, and every time Helen spoke to him, he leered at her like he was thinking about fornication—it was a good thing Helen didn’t know him as well as Marly did, and couldn’t read his mind the way Marly could. And then Nils cleared his throat in that way he had, and Marly knew that what he was about to say was important, and also that it was just for her, so she licked up the last bite of her pumpkin pie with some regret, and looked up at him.
Helen was passing the coffee around, a nice Colombian blend that she thought they would like, when Nils cleared his throat and said, “Well, this has been a lovely dinner, thank you, Helen, for your effort, as always it’s a true occasion for thanksgiving here, and I remember the bounty of the Lord and the way our ancestors came onto this continent, and I feel thankful for that. This is a good day for me, because I feel that on this day, our national life is truly joined to the Lord the way it was in the early days, and of course that gives me hope for our national future. In my earlier life I devoted myself to exporting not only our know-how and our technology, but also our national ideals.”
Helen realized he considered this a self-evident good, and shifted in her seat, trying to maintain her smile. She vowed not to say anything just now about her view that Americans took a great deal too much credit for creating wealth, when most of the time they had really just been living off natural bounty unprecedented in the history of the world. She glanced at Ivar. He was looking up at the ceiling.
Nils went on. “Frankly, I thought my life was over, or at least winding down. I’m fifty-five now, and I was looking forward to a future of watching others do what I used to do, or what I didn’t think I would ever have the chance to do. But”—he beamed down at Marly—“I was wrong. I see my life starting over now, with a special, good, Christian woman, a woman with all the womanly virtues of kindness, care, selflessness, Christian love, trust, faith, modesty.”
Marly smiled, Helen thought with some embarrassment. And what a prescription, anyway. She glanced at Ivar, who was looking at her this time. His eyes rolled discreetly upward and he gave a little shrug.
“You may not know that Marly and I plan to have six children—”
Ivar’s gaze landed on Nils with an almost perceptible thud. He said, “No, I did not know that!”
Nils went smoothly on. “I have never been one to reject the marvels of technology. Best to accept them and turn them to the Lord’s purposes. Right, my dear?” He beamed at Marly.
Father said, “You’re going to saddle my daughter with six kids at your age?”
Nils, in accordance with his new policy, ignored this interruption. He did say, though, “The Lord has revealed his plan to me piece by piece. Lately he has revealed another important piece, and that is our future in Eastern Europe.”
“Excuse me?” said Marly.
“Yes,” said Nils, “the Lord has borne it in upon me that as His Word comes as a revelation to those unfortunate sufferers, in exactly that way there will be a great need for experts such as myself to show them the way to a more secure agricultural destiny.”
“You should have asked me first,” said Marly, pushing her chair back from the table.
“The Lord didn’t ask me,” said Nils. “He told me.”
Father said, “Let me get this straight. You’re planning on having six children and moving to Poland or someplace? What about me?”
Nils beamed upon Father. “It isn’t always comfortable to do what the Lord asks, but I have no doubt that as we all pray over these changes, we will all see how positive they will be. Marly and our children and myself will be an example to people over there of all facets of righteous and productive living.” He cleared his throat, a touch embarrassed at the personal defeat he was about to reveal. “My, um, failures in certain overseas endeavors were due, in part, I’ve come to believe, to the pressures to, as it were, go native. Although I loved my wife, of course.”
There was a long, uncomfortable pause.
“A family such as ours will be is the best model and, perhaps, the best protection against, ah, temptations of all—”
Father came to the nubbin. He said, “I don’t want to move to Poland.”
Nils’ smile broadened. “I never thought that you would want to.”
Father and Nils looked each other right in the eye.
Ivar said, “Nils, maybe you’re going too fast on this. I think one step at a time is a better bet.”
Nils intoned, “The Lord didn’t ask me. He told me.” Then, after a weighty pause, he said, “A vision is a whole. You can’t take it apart and choose to act on bits of it and not act on other bits of it. It doesn’t work that way.”
Helen said, “Nils, you can’t just do what you want and say that God is telling you to do it—”
“With all due respect, Helen, and I do recognize we are guests in your home, this is really not your business.” He beamed. He said, “The Lord has returned my youth to me for a reason. I have prayed over and pondered what that reason might be. The fall of Godless Communism in Europe is the answer. I have wandered in a wilderness of meaningless activity for all of my adult life. I studied to bring enlightenment to developing nations, but people who were supposedly on my side worked against me, and the people I was trying to help failed to see the light. My wife died. I fell into despair. Only then did I find the Lord, and only then did I find Marly and our future together. Only NOW do I understand what I was sent here to do. The Lord’s message can come through CNN as easily as in a glorious cloud.” He fixed his gaze momentarily on each member of the party, then said, “If you pray ardently and earnestly, you will understand that we will not be balked, and that for all of us here, embracing this vision rather than resisting it will lead us forward into the light.” He sat down, grinning.