Good-bye and Amen

  She got up and ran out of the room. Jimmy and I were just looking at each other. Here we were with our pads, our pencils, and our lists.

  We’ve seen enough of Mother rushing from the table in storms of tears to last a lifetime. If Monica’s going to start turning into Sydney, I don’t think I can take it.

  Finally Jimmy said to me, “Well, do you have any idea why she married Norman in the first place?”

  And what did that have to do with the price of eggs?

  Moral stages. We’re unclear who invented them. It’s amazing how much less we care here about things like who gets credit. Anyway, so useful. Stage one is infantile. I’m the center of the universe and everything flows to me or from me. Stage two: you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours. Or, I’ll be good if I can see what’s in it for me. Stage three: the group. I travel in a tribe, I want to fit in, I’ll go along with what the group thinks is right. Stage four: Pharisees, Sadducees, and lawyers. The hegemony of the Rule Book. I am saved because I follow the rules, and if you don’t, you’re not. Stage five: outside the box. Stage fives think for themselves and you can’t tell what they’re going to do. Saints, suicides, Hitler, the Buddha, and Jesus Christ are all stage five, unless they’re insane. Behaving without thinking doesn’t count as a moral stage, or else it’s stage one. Hard to explain perhaps, but to us it seems simple.

  Jeannie Israel Very tall men live longer. They run companies and countries out of all proportion to how many there are of them. A very tall man makes you feel safe, because unconsciously you remember a time in your life when people taller than you had to make all the hard decisions. I had a boyfriend once who was six feet five. He was very shy and always wondered why people looked to him when there was confusion or people needed a decision. Then he met a guy who was six seven and he said he suddenly understood.

  Kim Colwin I started dating Monica Moss when we were juniors in college. She was at Sarah Lawrence and I was at Princeton. Looking back, I think it was a little too easy for her. Our parents liked each other. The sociology was right. We looked great together. It was wonderful, like being in a bath that’s exactly the right temperature. I thought, What’s not to like about this? Slam dunk, you know?

  Jeannie Israel In college Nika and I didn’t see each other as much, but we wrote a lot, and saw each other every summer. I was very involved with campus politics, SNCC and SDS, and all that kind of washed right over Monica. I guess she had her own war going on the home front. But I thought Kim was great for her. He was maybe a little conventional, plus Monica’s parents liked him and Kim’s parents liked her. Nineteen sixty-nine wasn’t really the year for young people doing what their parents hoped they would. Monica’s sister Eleanor had eloped instead of letting Big Syd plan a fancy wedding for her. Jimmy, when he was home, had dirty hair down to his shoulders and was usually facedown in his soup plate, stoned to the gills, as Big Syd cooed and burbled about him. Monica’s style in those days was mostly black leotards, shiny clean hair, no makeup. My father once said to her that she looked like a Jules Feiffer cartoon, and she did not think it was funny. I don’t guess I would have either; we all felt very original. Monica’s hair was long and straight, which I envied. I had to iron mine. This all drove Sydney crazy. She thought if her daughters didn’t go to the hair parlor once a week like her and have permanents they were just wrong wrong wrong and people would talk behind her back about her. Sometimes Sydney would stop us at the door and forcibly paint her own lipstick on Monica. I don’t know how Monica stood it; but she’d stand there quietly, and when we were outside the door, she scraped it off.

  I’ll never forget that actually, what it was like to have Mrs. Moss bearing down on us, holding the uncapped red lipstick like a weapon. To this day I can’t wear Elizabeth Arden. It felt like assault, it really did.

  Leonard Rashbaum I first met Monica and Kim at Harvard Law School. Monica was taking an ed degree. She wanted to teach first grade. To teach people to read. She loved reading. One winter weekend right before our first exams, which was a really terrifying time for One Ls, Monica came and sat in the library with us. While we studied, she read Dickens. I think she read three novels in one weekend, two thousand pages or something. She sat with her chin in her hand and didn’t move except to turn pages. I’d never seen anything like it.

  Kim was a really nice guy. Maybe not the sharpest knife in the drawer, but kind. Which you didn’t get a lot of at the law school in those days. Monica was living on Garden Street, in a rented room in some lady’s house, so she spent a lot of time with us. She’d bring her books over and study with us in the evenings at Langdell Hall. We’d go for coffee and talk about saving the world.

  We were all going to open storefront offices in Harlem or the East Village and rescue the downtrodden; that was how we justified taking elite degrees while denouncing elitism. Of course when the time came, the job offers from Davis Polk and Milbank Tweed were just so rich and flattering, we began to say maybe we could do more good by changing the power structure from within. But that’s another story.

  Kim Colwin One evening in October, Monica came into the reading room really upset. She’d been wandering alone in the law school quad, thinking her thoughts, enjoying the smell of fall, the way you do, and when she came into Langdell she let the door drop closed behind her. We were all still at the stage of being kind of knocked out to be in that building where so many brilliant men had taught and learned. So there she was in the marble halls, minding her own business, thinking about Justice Frankfurter or something, when this voice behind her booms, “That was incredibly rude!” It was some guy she’d never seen before, in the usual law school mufti, blue jeans, a tweed jacket, wire-rimmed glasses. Glaring at her. She was shocked.

  He said, “You knew I was behind you!” But she hadn’t, she’d had no idea. He said, “Of course you did. You deliberately dropped the door in my face. Where were you raised, in a barn?”

  Then he stomped off and Monica ran up to find us. She was undone.

  Leonard Rashbaum I wanted to know who he was. She kept saying, “I had no idea he was there!” as if we might doubt her. She’d never even seen him before. I pointed out that he knew her perfectly well, even if he didn’t know her name. Every guy who studied at Langdell knew the girls at least by sight. There weren’t very many of them. I said, “He’s probably in love with you.”

  We told her to tell us when she saw him again so we could tell him he was an asshole.

  Kim Colwin She was always watching for him after that whenever she came to study with us, keeping an eye out for the Manners Police. It was as if a total stranger had said to her, “You have no idea who you are. I know who you are, and the news is not good.” I’d never seen that side of her before. Why did she care?

  Finally, at Harkness one evening we were having coffee when she leaned across to us and said, “There he is.”

  I said, “Who?”

  She said, “The ‘Raised in a Barn’ guy. The tall guy at the cash register.”

  By the end of the week we knew his name was Norman Faithful, that he was a Two L, that he was married with children. He was supposed to be very smart on his feet, a hot litigator, but he lived off campus and no one seemed to know more about him than that. A cat who walked by himself.

  Jeannie Israel As I understand it, Monica was out in the sun one afternoon in the spring, waiting for Kim, when she saw Norman Faithful coming toward her. He always looked as if he’d gotten some special map of the universe at birth, that everyone else had to put together piecemeal. Once she knew who he was, she had seen him fairly often. They always pretended not to see each other. This time he walked right up to her. He said, “Excuse me. I think I owe you an apology.”

  Instead of thinking, I’ll say you do, asshole, she said she felt this wave of gratitude. He said, “Do you know what I’m talking about?”

  And she thought that seemed like a reasonable question. He hadn’t raped her or stabbed her or run over her dog. He’d spoken harshly t
o her when she didn’t deserve it. It had probably never had anything to do with her. She figured she might have forgotten all about it, especially if she hadn’t already been trained from childhood to expect to be suddenly found guilty and bad at the most random moments.

  So she said then she noticed he had these very beautiful eyes, like shards of blue and green glass.

  Kim Colwin They were sitting together over coffee in the Harkness cafeteria when I found them. Norman unfolded from the chair and towered over me. He introduced himself. I was seriously surprised. He said, “Join us?”

  I didn’t really think it was up to him to issue the invitation. I said I already had a caffeine headache, and he said, “Contracts exam coming up?” Which was kind of obvious, since I was holding the textbook and five pounds of notes. I said yes, and Norman said, “Good luck. You’ll need it.” Very pleasantly. I waited a minute to see if Monica would come with me but she didn’t move. So I left.

  Good luck—you’ll need it? What kind of thing is that to say?

  Eleanor Applegate I think the first thing I learned about Norman was that he had been a child prodigy, like Jimmy. It interested Monica a lot. Monica had asked about his name, since she’d never heard of anyone named Faithful except that English singer who slept with Mick Jagger. It’s a made-up name. His father was an evangelical preacher in the Midwest somewhere. Little Norman had the gift too. He was calling people to repent when he was six; he could make grown men weep and open their wallets.

  Of course Jimmy could do the same thing at the piano. Jimmy could hear a piece of music and play it back by ear when he was way too small to reach the pedals with his feet. Papa wanted him to slow down, learn to read, learn to play with understanding before he played in public, but Mother couldn’t help herself—she loved an audience and this was sort of a Munchausen prodigy by proxy situation.

  Monica Faithful Jimmy was such a gorgeous little boy. I think he actually liked it for a while. I guess anyone would like the applause and stuff, and he probably liked being taken out of school. He looked very cute in his little gray flannel jacket and shorts and his little bow tie. But one day he was supposed to go into New York with Mother to play at some fund-raiser, and he just refused to come out of his room. That was the end of it.

  Eleanor Applegate Just wouldn’t open the door until Mother left the house. Of course that wasn’t the end of it…Mother tried a couple of more times, and she wanted Papa to make him do it, but Papa wouldn’t. He thought the whole thing was weird, like grinding a hurdy-gurdy. I’d have given an arm and leg to have Jimmy’s gift. Would things have worked out differently if he’d been allowed to grow into it? To feel it was something that belonged to him, instead of to his mother?

  So Norman had been like Jimmy. He had had this astounding ability in early childhood. He gave sermons, he did healings, then one day he refused to do it any more. Monica thought it was such an amazing coincidence, I sometimes wondered if it was true. Maybe Norman’s gift isn’t that he was a child prodigy; maybe it is that uncanny ability he has to sense exactly where the crack in your head is, and use it.

  Jeannie Israel I never heard Jimmy play a note. He had already quit by the time we started going to Dundee in the summers and Nika and I fell in with each other. I asked him once what it was like for him to listen to music, to be around musicians. He spent some time in his twenties as a roadie for a band called Raging Biscuits or something. He said it was like listening to a language he used to speak but couldn’t remember.

  Monica Faithful The first thing that seemed to interest Norman about me was Jimmy. He wanted to meet him. I was about two-thirds fed up with Jimmy at the time, but I did see him now and then. He’d been up to Dundee the summer before, after Mama and Papa had left. He’d come out sailing with El and Bobby and me, and when we brought the boat in after a long day, and everyone was struggling to furl wet sails and clean out the galley, Jimmy stood on the deckhouse doing yoga with his eyes closed, as if he were just a child of God and couldn’t be expected to do grunt work when the sunset was beautiful. Calling Harold Skimpole. I didn’t think Norman and Jimmy were going to have a lot to talk about.

  Leonard Rashbaum I’d always had a sneaker for Monica. One day in the spring of 1971, I ran into her on the T. I remember it was stinking hot and I was wearing a suit, coming from a job interview. Monica was the only person on the train who didn’t look like she was melting. She had that pretty dark hair all on top of her head, and a barrette thing made of a piece of leather with a stick through it. She said she was student-teaching. She said she loved it. And she said she was getting married.

  I said, “That’s great, anyone I know?” I’d been thinking of going looking for her myself, but I don’t know, I didn’t think Kim was over her. I guess I waited too long.

  She said, “Norman Faithful.” I had a good laugh, then I looked at her face. I stopped and said, “Oh my god. You’re not kidding.”

  Eleanor Applegate Maybe she did want the Rolling Stone. Oh dear. But Charlesie is the real sailor in the family. He spent the last two summers as Papa’s boat boy, taking him out to the Stone every day to run the engine and pump the bilge, and talk him out of leaving the mooring. They’d get down in the engine compartment and look at things for hours. Charlesie loves that boat and he understands it. He can chart a course and do celestial navigation.

  Edith Faithful I always thought Charlesie expected to get the boat, since he’d spent all that time keeping Grandpapa from going onto the rocks, or sailing off toward Spain, but it’s not as if he did it for free. It was a job. I’d have loved to do it, but no one offered it to me.

  Josslyn Moss Adam and Edith and I made lunch. That wasn’t easy…it was Eleanor’s kids who did the last grocery run and they bought cereal full of sugar and dyes, and whole fat milk, and supermarket cheese, already shredded. The only vinegar in the house you wouldn’t douche with. I found an eggbeater with only one beater. The tea bags were Lipton. I wonder if Mr. and Mrs. Moss gassed themselves on purpose. I would, if I ate like this.

  We opened cans of soup. We made toast, and a salad with iceberg lettuce. Nobody starved. We ate in the sunroom.

  Jimmy didn’t get any of the silver. He took the piano. Why? I didn’t show how disappointed I was. It’s their stuff. I could buy some secondhand. But my mother never had silver and I liked that it was in the family.

  Bobby Applegate Norman and I cleaned up after lunch, and he dropped the other shoe. I told Eleanor he would. I washed, he dried. We’ve learned, over the years, that if Norman washes he talks the whole time about what Saint Augustine meant or where Thomas à Becket’s bones are really, and doesn’t notice what he’s doing and the next thing you know, you’re taking clean plates out of the cupboard with strings of asparagus stuck to them. He said, “Can I ask you something? Did Eleanor show you her copy of the will?” I said, Of course. He said, “Nicky told me that when Jimmy was in his twenties, he asked for his share of the estate in advance. Is that true?”

  I said it was.

  “And they gave it to him?”

  I said they did.

  “Well then, why was the estate split three ways in the will?”

  I said, “I was going to ask you. Don’t you guys have a story about a prodigal son?”

  At this point, I don’t know where his towel is, but if these dishes are going to get dry they’ll have to do it by themselves. He says, “We do, of course, but the Parables…well, you know there’s almost no evidence that there was a historical figure called Jesus. No physical evidence, hardly any documentary evidence. Josephus mentions him, after the fact. There probably was a Jewish rabbi named Jesus put to death by Pontius Pilate, but the authentic Jesus, the only evidence we really have is his voice, you hear a voice in the Synoptic Gospels that no one could make up. I call him Jesus the Asshole.”

  I said I imagined that woke up the parishioners.

  “No, not from the pulpit, of course not. But it’s exciting, that voice.” It was clearly exciting to Norm
an. He was revving up. “He says outrageous things. Like, Leave your parents and children. Give away all your money. The kingdom of heaven isn’t fair, get over it.”

  “The prodigal son, Norman?” He’s like a train running off track when he gets going.

  “Yes. So, obviously, that parable is a classic example of Jesus the Asshole. It’s an upsetting story. But you’ll notice, the prodigal son is welcomed by his father. He is loved and celebrated and given honorable work. But it doesn’t say he gets another share of the inheritance.”

  I said, they weren’t my parents, it was never going to be my money, and I didn’t think it was my business. But I got the impression that Norman thought it was going to be his money.

  Carla Lowen I remember the time Monica first took Norman home to meet her parents. Not to Connecticut, she was taking him to Maine. It was August. They’d only been dating for a few months, but I knew it was serious, because she stayed in Cambridge most of that summer, even though she didn’t have classes. She got a job doing research for some professor. Boston is beastly hot in the summer, and the house we lived in didn’t have air conditioners. We had window fans. It was miserable.

  Norman had left his wife and was living in Somerville. He was a very compelling guy, very tall, thick hair, beautiful eyes. It was fun to listen to him talk, because he had a great memory and his mind worked fast. Though sometimes after he was gone you’d wonder, What was that all about? He had a summer job with some white-shoe law firm in Boston. Monica was excited that she and Norman were going to hitchhike to Maine. That would drive her parents crazy…My boyfriend had a little two-stroke motorcycle, an Indian, so I had a leather jacket. She borrowed that and wore blue jeans and she looked really cute, like an elegant teddy boy.