The Marriage Plot

  His loss had a monumental effect. Mitchell retreated into obscurity to lick his wounds. His interest in quietism had been present beforehand, and so, with this fresh defeat, there was nothing keeping him from withdrawing within himself completely.

  Like Madeleine, Mitchell had started out intending to be an English major. But after reading The Varieties of Religious Experience for a psychology course, he changed his mind. He’d expected the book to be clinical and cold, but it wasn’t. William James described “cases” of all kinds, women and men he’d met or corresponded with, people suffering from melancholia, from nervous maladies, from digestive complaints, people who had yearned for suicide, who’d heard voices and changed their lives overnight. He reported their testimonies without a shred of ridicule. In fact, what was noteworthy about these stories was the intelligence of the people giving them. With apparent honesty, these voices described in detail how they’d lost the will to live, how they’d become ill, bedridden, abandoned by friends and family until suddenly a “New Thought” had occurred to them, the thought of their true place in the universe, at which point all their suffering had ended. Along with these testimonies, James analyzed the religious experience of famous men and women, Walt Whitman, John Bunyan, Leo Tolstoy, Saint Teresa, George Fox, John Wesley, and even Kant. There was no evident proselytizing motive. But the effect, for Mitchell, was to make him aware of the centrality of religion in human history and, more important, of the fact that religious feeling didn’t arise from going to church or reading the Bible but from the most private interior experiences, either of great joy or of staggering pain.

  Mitchell kept coming back to a paragraph about the neurotic temperament he’d underlined that seemed to describe his own personality and, at the same time, to make him feel better about it. It went:

  Few of us are not in some way infirm, or even diseased; and our very infirmities help us unexpectedly. In [this] temperament we have the emotionality which is the sine qua non of moral perception; we have the intensity and the tendency to emphasis which are the essence of practical moral vigor; and we have the love of metaphysics and mysticism which carry one’s interests beyond the surface of the sensible world. What, then, is more natural than that this temperament should introduce one to regions of religious truth, to corners of the universe, which your robust Philistine type of nervous system, forever offering its biceps to be felt, thumping its breast, and thanking Heaven that it hasn’t a single morbid fiber in its composition, would be sure to hide forever from its self-satisfied possessors?

  If there were such a thing as inspiration from a higher realm, it might well be that the neurotic temperament would furnish the chief condition of the requisite receptivity.

  The first religious studies class Mitchell had taken (the one Bankhead had been in) was a trendy survey course on Eastern religion. Next he enrolled in a seminar on Islam. From there Mitchell graduated to stronger stuff—a course on Thomistic ethics, a seminar on German Pietism—before moving on, in his last semester, to a course called Religion and Alienation in 20th Century Culture. At the first class meeting, the professor, a severe-looking man named Hermann Richter, surveyed with suspicion the forty or so students packed into the classroom. Lifting his chin, he warned in a stern tone, “This is a rigorous, comprehensive, analytical course in twentieth-century religious thought. Any of you who think a little something in alienation might do should think otherwise.”

  Glowering, Richter handed out the syllabus. It included Max Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Auguste Comte and Positivism: The Essential Writings, Tillich’s The Courage to Be, Heidegger’s Being and Time, and The Drama of Atheist Humanism by Henri de Lubac. Around the room, students’ faces fell. People had been hoping for The Stranger, which they’d already read in high school. At the next class meeting, fewer than fifteen kids remained.

  Mitchell had never had a professor like Richter before. Richter dressed like a banker. He wore gray chalk-striped suits, conservative ties, button-down shirts, and polished brogues. He had the reassuring attributes of Mitchell’s own father—the diligence, the sobriety, the masculinity—while leading a life of unfatherly intellectual cultivation. Every morning Richter had the Frankfurter Allgemeine delivered to his department mailbox. He could quote, in the French, the Vérendrye brothers’ reaction upon seeing the Dakota badlands. He seemed worldlier than most professors and less ideologically programmed. His voice was low, Kissingerian, minus the accent. It was impossible to imagine him as a boy.

  Twice a week they met with Richter and looked unflinchingly at the reasons why the Christian faith had, around the year 1848, expired. The fact that many people thought it was still alive, that it had never been sick at all, was dismissed outright. Richter wanted no fudging. If you couldn’t answer the objections of a Schopenhauer, then you had to join him in pessimism. But this was by no means the only option. Richter insisted that unquestioning nihilism was no more intellectually sound than unquestioning faith. It was possible to pick over the corpse of Christianity, to pound its chest and blow into its mouth, to see if the heart started beating again. I’m not dead. I’m only sleeping. Stiff-backed, never sitting, his gray hair closely barbered but with hopeful signs about his person, a thistle in his buttonhole or a gift-wrapped present for his daughter protruding from the pocket of his overcoat, Richter asked the students questions and listened to their answers as if it might happen here today: in Room 112 of Richardson Hall, Dee Michaels, who played the Marilyn Monroe part in a campus production of Bus Stop, might throw a rope ladder across the void. Mitchell observed Richter’s thoroughness, his compassionate revelation of error, his undimmed enthusiasm for presiding over the uncluttering of the twenty or so minds gathered around the seminar table. Getting these kids’ heads in working order even now, so late in the game.

  What Richter believed was unclear. He wasn’t a Christian apologist. Mitchell watched Richter for signs of partiality. But there were none. He dissected each thinker with the same severity. He was grudging in his approval and comprehensive in his complaints.

  At semester’s end, there was a take-home final exam. Richter handed out a single sheet of paper containing ten questions. You were free to consult your books. There was no way to cheat. The answers to such questions couldn’t be found anywhere. No one had formulated them yet.

  Mitchell didn’t remember any strain in completing the exam. He worked hard but effortlessly. He sat at the oval dining table he used for a desk, surrounded by a scatter of notes and books. Larry was baking banana bread in the kitchen. Occasionally, Mitchell went and had a piece. Then he returned and started up where he’d left off. While he wrote, he felt, for the first time, as though he weren’t in school anymore. He wasn’t answering questions to get a grade on a test. He was trying to diagnose the predicament he felt himself to be in. And not just his predicament, either, but that of everyone he knew. It was an odd feeling. He kept writing the names Heidegger and Tillich but he was thinking about himself and all his friends. Everyone he knew was convinced that religion was a sham and God a fiction. But his friends’ replacements for religion didn’t look too impressive. No one had an answer for the riddle of existence. It was like that Talking Heads song. “And you may ask yourself, ‘How did I get here?’ … And you may tell yourself, ‘This is not my beautiful house. And you may tell yourself, ‘This is not my beautiful wife.’” As he responded to the essay questions, Mitchell kept bending his answers toward their practical application. He wanted to know why he was here, and how to live. It was the perfect way to end your college career. Education had finally led Mitchell out into life.

  Immediately after handing in the exam, he forgot all about it. Graduation was nearing. He and Larry were busy making plans for their trip. They bought backpacks and subzero sleeping bags. They pored over maps and budget-travel guides, sketching possible itineraries. A week after the exam, Mitchell came into the Faunce House post office and found a letter in his mail slot. It was from Professo
r Richter, on university stationery. It asked him to come and see Richter in his office.

  Mitchell had never been to Richter’s office before. Before going, he picked up two iced coffees from the Blue Room—an extravagant gesture, but it was hot out, and he liked his professors to remember him. He carried the tall covered cups through the midday sun to the redbrick building. The departmental secretary told him where to find Richter, and Mitchell started up the stairs to the second floor.

  All the other offices were empty. The Buddhists had left for summer vacation. The Islamicists were down in D.C., giving the State Department insight into the “frame of reference” of Abu Nidal, who had just remotely detonated a car bomb inside the French embassy in West Beirut. Only the door at the end of the hall was open, and inside it, wearing a necktie despite the sultry weather, was Richter.

  Richter’s office wasn’t the bare cell of an absentee professor, inhabited only during office hours. Neither was it the homey den of a department chair, with lithographs and a Shaker rug. Richter’s office was formal, almost Viennese. There were glass-fronted bookcases full of leather-bound theology books, an ivory-handled magnifying glass, a brass inkstand. The desk was massive, a bulwark against the creeping ignorance and imprecision of the world. Behind it, Richter was writing notes with a fountain pen.

  Mitchell stepped in and said, “If I ever had an office, Professor Richter, this is the kind of office I’d have.”

  Richter did an amazing thing: he smiled. “You just might get the chance,” he said.

  “I brought you an iced coffee.”

  Richter stared across the desk at the offering, mildly surprised, but tolerant. “Thank you,” he said. He opened a manila folder and took out a sheaf of papers. Mitchell recognized it as his take-home exam. It appeared to have writing all over it, in an elegant hand.

  “Have a seat,” Richter said.

  Mitchell complied.

  “I’ve taught at this college for twenty-two years,” Richter began. “In all of that time, only once have I received a paper that displays the depth of insight and philosophical acumen that yours does.” He paused. “The last student of whom I could say this is now the dean of Princeton Theological Seminary.”

  Richter stopped, as though waiting for his words to sink in. They didn’t, particularly. Mitchell was pleased to have done well. He was used to doing well in school, but he still enjoyed it. Beyond that, his mind didn’t travel.

  “You are a graduating senior this year, is that correct?”

  “One week left, Professor.”

  “Have you ever given serious thought to pursuing a career in scholarship?”

  “Not serious thought, no.”

  “What are you planning to do with your life?” Richter said.

  Mitchell smiled. “Is my father hiding under your desk?” he said.

  Richter’s brow furrowed. He was no longer smiling. He folded his hands, taking a new direction. “I sense from your exam that you are personally engaged with matters of religious belief. Am I right?”

  “I guess you could say that,” Mitchell said.

  “Your surname is Greek. Were you raised in the Orthodox tradition?”

  “Baptized. That was about it.”

  “And now?”

  “Now?” Mitchell took a moment. He was accustomed to keeping quiet about his spiritual investigations. It felt odd to talk about them.

  But Richter’s expression was nonjudgmental. He was bent forward in his chair, hands clasped on the desk. He was looking away, presenting only his ear. Under this encouragement, Mitchell opened up. He explained that he had arrived at college without knowing much about religion, and how, from reading English literature, he’d begun to realize how ignorant he was. The world had been formed by beliefs he knew nothing about. “That was the beginning,” he said, “realizing how stupid I was.”

  “Yes, yes.” Richter nodded quickly. The head-bowing suggested personal experience with thought-tormented states. Richter’s head remained low, listening. “I don’t know, one day I was just sitting there,” Mitchell went on, “and it hit me that almost every writer I was reading for my classes had believed in God. Milton, for starters. And George Herbert.” Did Professor Richter know George Herbert? Professor Richter did. “And Tolstoy. I realize Tolstoy got a little excessive, near the end. Rejecting Anna Karenina. But how many writers turn against their own genius? Maybe it was Tolstoy’s obsession with truth that made him so great in the first place. The fact that he was willing to give up his art was what made him a great artist.”

  Again the sound of assent from the gray eminence above the desk blotter. The weather, the world outside, had ceased to exist for a moment. “So last summer I gave myself a reading list,” Mitchell said. “I read a lot of Thomas Merton. Merton got me into Saint John of the Cross and Saint John of the Cross got me into Meister Eckhart and The Imitation of Christ. Right now I’m reading The Cloud of Unknowing.”

  Richter waited a moment before asking, “Your search has been purely intellectual?”

  “Not only,” Mitchell said. He hesitated and then confessed, “I’ve also been going to church.”

  “Which one?”

  “You name it.” Mitchell smiled. “All kinds. But mostly Catholic.”

  “I can understand the attraction of Catholicism,” Richter said. “But putting myself back in the time of Luther, and considering the excesses of the Church at the time, I think I would have sided with the schismatics.”

  In Richter’s face Mitchell now saw the answer to the question he’d been asking all semester. He hesitated and asked, “So you believe in God, Professor Richter?”

  In a firm tone, Richter specified, “I am a Christian religious believer.”

  Mitchell didn’t know what that meant, exactly. But he understood why Richter was splitting hairs. The designation allowed him room for reservations and doubts, historical accommodations and dissent.

  “I had no idea,” Mitchell said. “In class I couldn’t tell if you believed anything or not.”

  “That’s the way the game is played.”

  They sat there together, companionably sipping their iced coffees. And Richter made his offer.

  “I want you to know that I think you have the potential to do significant work in contemporary Christian theological studies. If you would be at all inclined, I would see to it that you get a full scholarship to the Princeton Theological Seminary. Or to Harvard or Yale Divinity School, if you so prefer. I do not often exercise myself to this extent on behalf of students, but in this case I feel compelled to do so.”

  Mitchell had never considered going to divinity school. But the idea of studying theology—of studying anything, as opposed to working nine-to-five—appealed to him. And so he’d told Richter that he would seriously think about it. He was taking a trip, a year off. He promised to write Richter when he got back and to tell him what he’d decided.

  Given all the difficulties ganging up on Mitchell—the recession, his dubious degree, and, today, this morning’s fresh rebuff from Madeleine—the trip was the only thing he had to look forward to. Now, heading back to his apartment to dress for the commencement procession, Mitchell told himself that it didn’t matter what Madeleine thought of him. He would soon be gone.

  His apartment, on Bowen Street, was only two blocks from Madeleine’s much nicer building. He and Larry occupied the second floor of an old clapboard tenement house. In five minutes he was climbing the front stairs.

  Mitchell and Larry had decided to go to India one night after watching a Satyajit Ray film. They hadn’t been entirely serious at the time. From then on, however, whenever anybody asked what they were doing after graduation, Mitchell and Larry replied, “We’re going to India!” Reaction among their friends was universally positive. No one could come up with a reason why they shouldn’t go to India. Most people said that they wished they could come along. The result was that, without so much as buying plane tickets or a guidebook—without really knowing anything abo
ut India—Mitchell and Larry began to be seen as enviable, brave, free-thinking individuals. And so finally they decided that they had better go.

  Little by little, the trip had come into focus. They added a European leg. In March, Larry, who was a theater major, had lined up the job as research assistants with Professor Hughes, which gave the trip a professional gloss and placated their parents. They’d bought a big yellow map of India and hung it on the kitchen wall.

  The only thing that had nearly derailed their plans was the “party” they had thrown a few weeks ago, during Reading Period. It was Larry’s idea. What Mitchell hadn’t known, however, was that the party wasn’t a real party but Larry’s final project for the studio art course they were taking. Larry, it turned out, had “cast” certain guests as “actors,” giving them directions on how to behave at the party. Most of these directions involved insulting, coming on to, or freaking out the unsuspecting guests. For the first hour of the party, this resulted in everyone having a bad time. Friends came up to tell you that they’d always distrusted you, that you’d always had bad breath, et cetera. Around midnight, the downstairs neighbors, a married couple named Ted and Susan (who, Mitchell could see retrospectively, had been ridiculously costumed in terry-cloth bathrobes and fluffy slippers, Susan with curlers in her hair), burst angrily through the door, threatening to call the cops because of the loud music. Mitchell tried to calm them down. Dave Hayek, however, who was six-four, and in on the hoax, stomped across the kitchen and physically threatened the neighbors. In response, Ted pulled a (fake) gun from the pocket of his bathrobe, threatening to shoot Hayek, who cowered on the floor, pleading, while everyone else either froze in fear or rushed for the doors, spilling beer over everything. At that point, Larry had turned on all the lights, climbed onto a chair, and informed everyone, ha ha, that none of this was real. Ted and Susan took off their robes to reveal street clothes underneath. Ted showed everyone that the gun was a squirt gun. Mitchell couldn’t believe that Larry had failed to inform him, the party’s co-host, about the party’s secret agenda. He’d had no idea that Carlita Jones, a thirty-six-year-old graduate student, had been following the “script” when, earlier in the evening, she had locked Mitchell and herself in a bedroom, saying, “Come on, Mitchell. Let’s do the nasty. Right here on the floor.” He was greatly surprised that sex offered openly in this way (as it often was in his fantasies) proved in reality to be not only unwelcome but frightening. Yet despite all this and how enraged he was at Larry for using the party to fulfill his course requirements (though Mitchell should have been suspicious when the art professor herself had shown up), Mitchell knew even later that night, after everyone had left—even while he screamed at Larry, who was getting sick over the balcony, “Go on! Puke your guts out! You deserve it!”—that he would forgive Larry for turning their house and party into bad performance art. Larry was his best friend, they were going to India together, and Mitchell had no choice.