Light While There Is Light: An American History

A Pilgrimage

I

I’ve read many stories of revenants and apparitions, but my ghosts merely disappear. I never see them. They haunt me by not being there, by the table where no one eats, the empty window that lets the sun in without a shadow.

Few memories give me a sense of my childhood—perhaps, later, more will surface. Among those few is the darkened room from which proceed my mother’s moans. This is not a particular moment that I remember; it is the background of many years, nearly all my early life. She moans for so many reasons that it will be difficult more than to suggest their range. Probably I am ignorant of her most exquisite pains. I know enough not to make light of lamentations.

Sometimes I could get her to play the piano. She sat at the battered old upright, her eyes shut, picking out what she could remember of a Chopin polonaise or some cheap waltz from 1920. And then—what really moved her—Brilliant Variations, by someone named Butler, on Pass Me Not or other hymn. I was fascinated by the way she kept her eyes closed. To glance at the music, just as to read a paragraph of print, gave her migraines.

I knew, of course, the words to the hymns she played, and, whether or not I sang them, they sounded in my inner ear, even through Butler’s brilliance.

Some day the silver cord will break

And I no more as now shall sing

Ghosts gather in such lines.

But O the joy when I shall wake

Within the palace of the King.

It is not for her that I write this. She is dead, safe at last, out of all relation. I can recall, still, what she looked like at particular times, how she moved in certain spaces. But little by little she fades, replaced by an unsubstantial description somewhere in the memory. Best to make it as definite as possible. All we remember, finally, is words.

I was always so weak, she said. My heart. She held her throat between thumb and index finger, which is how she took her pulse. When I was sixteen, the doctor said—an unaccustomed pleasure in her voice now—I shouldn’t ever have to work, I was made to sit on a velvet cushion.

She taught piano while still in high school. (How little I actually knew her, her life extending back into the blank before my time—when I was asked for details, after she died, I put down a wrong place of birth.) As my father studied law and then went to work on the railroad, so she went to the conservatory, graduated, but then, fleeing her parents, married and, as they say, had children.

It was not my father that she married—he came later. I have two pictures of her first husband. In both of them, the left arm is in a Napoleonic position, as if he were holding a glass in front of him, but the hand is empty. He posed that way, she told me. He was proud of his wrist watch. He showed up, years later, with a second wife named Bessie, a sad-faced, decent-seeming creature who apparently kept him with her, and under control, by means of small but frequent doles. He was then (I mean, at his re-entry) a barber in Hot Springs, Arkansas.

My mother’s favorite image was that of the church considered as a great speckled bird, which she took as a simple parable. Alien down here, humiliated and despised, the saints would eventually, at the Rapture, soar. Her favorite color was green, signifying restfulness. She maintained that a room with red wallpaper would drive one crazy.

She grew up in Missouri, an only child, but moved with her parents to Redmond, Oregon, where she went through high school. Whether she was in fact content there, I have no way of knowing, but certainly ever after she looked back to those days as a lost happiness and Oregon as paradise. Just a few years before her death, when she realized, not only that nothing had turned out right, but that there was no longer time for any good to come—no horizon left for any miraculous rescue—she began to retrieve what memories she could of Oregon. There were many eligible young men in Redmond, though her parents were watchful. If she stayed out too late, her mother in a fret sent after her. Her father, mild but dutiful, would seek her out, take her home. When her affections settled too firmly on a certain Lindsay, they took panic, packed up their things, and fled with her back to Missouri.

My mother’s high school graduation picture

(Redmond, Oregon)

At Nebraska Wesleyan Conservatory of Music

But Lindsay came again to mind, and one day she wrote him at his old address in Oregon—this must have been in 1972. He not only got the letter, but wrote back. And what he wrote was that he had never married but had waited for her. I was stunned when she talked, not altogether coherently, about going back to Oregon, to marry Lindsay.

My mother’s first husband, Charles

When did you actually last see him? I asked her. She had to think, to count it up.

Nineteen seventeen. She was too ill by now to go anywhere.

The history of my mother’s religious opinions should be told as the record of a pilgrimage. As I imagine most pilgrimages, it was less the struggle toward a given end than a continual flight from disappointment and unhappiness. Neither the joys of heaven nor hell’s worst prospects provide as forceful a motive as the mere emptiness of the world.

Before her first marriage, she played the piano for Methodist services. Probably at that time she thought little about religious doctrine or religious experience. It was, she said later, an old formal M.E. church. But once she married handsome Charles—under what circumstances I never heard—and was delivered of their first child, also a Charles, her relation to those early services must have changed. Ill soon after giving birth, she was kept awake one night by sounds of a party in the next apartment. Charles senior, his hair slicked like Valentino’s and his wrist watch gleaming, went to quiet them down, and joined the party.

She described the scene. It was one of those that stuck with her, humiliating still after thirty, after forty years. She got up, the noise having increased after his leaving. In her housecoat she went to the next apartment and knocked and asked for her husband. Charles, embarrassed in his turn by the appearance of obligation in the shape of this frail form at the door, went with her, but explained the exit to his friends of an hour with a wink and a formula: She’s a Sunday School girl.

With their first child Charles, Jr.

I am convinced that, at that moment, the formula was wide of the mark. Probably poor Charles never in his life figured anything quite correctly. But this must have been one of the incidents pushing her toward the church as a refuge from the world as represented by old painted women (her colloquial old not referring to age) and by the routines of a loveless marriage. By the time I could remember anything, she was taking me to the Free Methodist church at the corner of South Avenue and Commercial Street in Emporia, Kansas.

The Free Methodists split off from their parent church (the old formal Methodists) about the time of the Civil War. It was one of the many groups preaching a return to Wesley’s doctrine of Christian Perfection. Sanctification, they teach, is a distinct act, subsequent to justification. To be justified, or saved, is to have one’s sins forgiven, but to be sanctified is to have the carnal nature, the taint of original sin, removed. They also call this state holiness and they are aware that the world dismisses them as Holy Rollers.

For they have also kept the ecstatic side of Wesleyanism. What I retain most vividly of the church in Emporia (which I attended until I was fourteen) is the way services were always rescued from dullness by what I learned to call the demonstration of the Holy Ghost. What in fact happened, Sunday after Sunday (and at Wednesday night prayer meeting), was that two women—I remember their names as Sister Eliot and Sister Faulkner, though it now sounds unlikely to me—fell under the influence of the spirit and began to behave in exactly opposite ways. They were opposites already: Sister Eliot was strawberry-blond, open-faced, outgoing, and when the spirit hit her she ran down the aisle, shouting. Sister Faulkner shrank back, twisted, moaned, and often sank to the floor, a small, swarthy woman, weeping bitterly.

My father, Arthur Waldrop, at the Santa Fe yard office

(Emporia, Kansas)

Their performance was joined in by the congregation in general, most of whom confined themselves to Amen’s, shouted or murmured, but they were the natural leaders. What, I wonder, would they have done, have become, if the church had not been there? Perhaps it is well to add that these services had nothing Erskine Caldwell about them. Powered by sexual energy perhaps (what other source is there?) they were chaste and even, I would say, dignified. And they gave some meaning to lives otherwise lost in weekday blankness.

My father thought all females in terrible league against all males, but the center of the plot was among the Free Methodist women, whom he pictured as the hags from Macbeth sitting in unholy assembly to pass judgment on him. He felt them sitting; their weight bent his shoulders.

Your mother, he would tell me, didn’t have a dime when I married her. He always started that way. She had one damn cardboard suitcase. If he were drunk enough, he would go on, getting louder. Not a pot to piss in. And those three brats. Charles, Elaine, Julian: before Julian was born, the elder Charles had taken off. Julian was born in Leeton, Missouri, at his grandparents’ house. My father had already two daughters and was close to twenty years older than his second wife. I have no idea how they met, let alone what drew them together. Now she runs off down to that damn church. They turn her against me.

The spookiest story I ever heard was told me by a friend, who may have written it down somewhere, but I know it from her directly.

She was in England, traveling with a boyfriend. At some point they found accommodations in one of those country houses where the family lets rooms to pay the monstrous upkeep on anachronistic grandeur. She and her friend were shown into the largest room they had ever seen, with high windows, oak paneling, huge four-poster, a room from what was to them a storybook era. A grandiose fireplace dominated the room, but there were none of the usual paraphernalia—screen, fire-dogs, bellows. Instead there was only, half in the great fireplace and half out, a cradle. They wondered at the cradle—of the old-fashioned kind, like the one Lillian Gish rocks in Intolerance—and went to dinner.

But later, when ready for bed, they could not quite manage to disregard it. They tipped it, finding that it rocked with a sort of bulky motion, soon coming to rest again. It had somehow a great weightiness to it, a dense heaviness that struck them both as incongruous in a baby-bed.

Perhaps what happened next was their effort to escape the fascination of the cradle there on the hearth (she never said so, made no attempt at explaining anything). In any case, they began horsing around and her friend, before she realized what was happening, picked her up and put her in the cradle. And then he ran across the room and turned the lights off.

And it was dark then, of course, but it was not a darkness that she recognized. It was as though there lacked not light, but the flow of time. It was not, across the black room, a distance in steps, that even the blind might feel their way, but a space of centuries, a loss total and immeasurable. And she could not get out of the cradle, which she felt rocking. She could not even struggle. With the utmost effort, she managed to form her friend’s name, but cried it so feebly that she knew it would never carry across the emptiness.

He meanwhile, as it turned out, was feeling much the same thing as she and was searching, terrified, for the light switch, which he could not find again. Finally his hand, groping blindly, hit the right spot and the room burst into light—the same room, with its paneling, its four-poster, its cradle in the fireplace, and her, clambering out of the cradle. They were both terror-stricken and refused to stay the night in that