Only Begotten Daughter (17 page)

“But that’s just what everybody’s
expecting.
”

“I know.”

“It’s bullshit.” She wished she hadn’t called him. “It’s Georgina Sparks bullshit.”

“It sells papers. Look, friend, you’re not exactly a runaway smash. A one-point-two percent rise in circulation, that’s all. And no more talk about God being deranged, okay? Those people lost a son, for Christ’s sake.”

The operator said, “Please deposit thirty cents for the next three minutes.”

“I came to wake up the world,” said Julie. Time to install a home phone, she decided. She had a job; she could afford it. “Not coo it to sleep.”

“We just want you to work harder on the spiritual end,” said Bix. “Is that asking so much?”

“I’ll see what I can do. Bye.”

“Promise?”

“Promise.”

“How about dinner next week? A lobster dinner, then we’ll go hear Vic Damone at the Tropicana.”

“This is my ministry happening now, boss. It’s not a time for personal pleasure. Bye.”

Click.

A ministry! Three hundred a week and a ministry! True, the launching of “Heaven Help You” had been marred by editorial tamperings. As someone who profoundly doubted the accessibility of heaven, Julie resented the title—almost as much as she resented the halo they airbrushed onto her photo. Equally distressing was the lurid kick-off story,
GOD’S DAUGHTER LANDS IN AMERICA
, its inaccurate text illustrated with an equally inaccurate sketch of the ectogenesis machine (miscaptioned
echogenesis machine
)
.
But: a ministry, a ministry, three hundred a week and a ministry!

With each letter she received, each wretch she helped, Julie felt a measure of remorse leach through her flesh and vanish. This was exactly the right vocation for her, the glorious middle road, modest enough to confound her enemies, grand enough to assuage her godhead. Indeed, when Phoebe asked to move into Julie’s temple—it was twice the size of her own bedroom—Julie immediately said “of course,” for she had no more need of temples, no more convulsions of conscience, no more free-floating guilt. “Tear down the clippings if you want.”

“I’ll leave that job to you,” said Phoebe.

“Uncover the window, at least.”

“I like the darkness.”

Dark Phoebe, Phoebe the troglodyte. Predictably, instead of stripping the temple bare, Phoebe continued to upgrade it, carrying it into the third dimension: a diorama of a jetliner crashing, a dollhouse consumed by paper flames, a plaster volcano spewing cotton fumes on an HO-scale plastic village, the cluster of nuclear-tipped missiles she’d created by gluing cardboard stabilizers to her stolen dynamite from the Deauville. “Why bother?” asked Julie one December afternoon as Phoebe scissored a baby’s corpse from
Time.
The cover story concerned the recent epidemic of child abuse.

“Because you still need this place. You haven’t figured out what it’s really saying.”

“Like hell I need it.” Julie followed Phoebe into the temple. “I have a ministry now. I’m out in the world.”

“An advice column isn’t a ministry. A word processor isn’t the world.” Phoebe slapped rubber cement on the clipping and centered it above her bed. “
This
is the world—parents wrecking their own babies.”

“Last week I printed the number of the national child-abuse hotline,” Julie noted.

“You and Ann Landers.”

An occasional word of support from your best friend—was that too much to expect? Praise for a well-written paragraph or for an astute suggestion—did it never occur to Phoebe to offer any? “That quadriplegic wrote back, you know. He said I gave him the will to live.”

“You gave him a stone.”

“More than he got from my mother.”

“These poor women write to you wanting to know about abortion, and you lecture them on Saint Augustine.”

“Abortion isn’t just emotional.”

“Their husbands are beating them.”

“In each case I mail out the address of the nearest shelter for battered women.”

“You should be
driving
them to the nearest shelter for battered women.” The centerpiece of Phoebe’s dresser was a portable liquor cabinet containing miniature bottles, the kind given out on airplanes; they seemed to Julie like toys—today’s the day the teddy bears have their cocktail party. Approaching, Phoebe snatched up a Bacardi rum. “Look, I know we’ve been through all this,” she said. “The world’s pain is endless, this room doesn’t even begin to tell the story. But still …” She emptied the bottle into a Smile Shop
DAMN I’M GOOD
mug. “A column is really the best you can do? You, who could part the Red Sea and patch up the ozone layer, and instead you’re content to be just another tabloid rabbi?” She consumed the rum in three rapid sips. “If
I
had your talents, honey …”

Obviously Phoebe hadn’t been reading “Heaven Help You” closely, or she would have understood that divine intervention and instant cures belonged in the past. “My mother wants us to live in our own time. When a species fixates on the supernatural, it ceases to mature.”

Phoebe opened a second Bacardi, swilling it straight from the tiny bottle. “How do you know that’s what God wants? How do you fucking
know?
”

Phoebe’s rebuke filled Julie with an odd amalgam of confusion and anger. All right, sure, maybe she couldn’t say for a fact that God was smiling on the Covenant of Uncertainty. But Phoebe had no right to harass her like this. “I have a strong intuition about it.” Shivering with dismay, Julie picked up the altar skull, working her thumbs into the eye sockets. “Believe me, if I start doing miracles, the wheels of progress will slip a thousand years.”

Like a furtive urchin stealing an apple from a fruit stand, Phoebe palmed a third Bacardi. “Hey, you’re right, Katz, you
don’t
need this temple anymore. You’ve got a much better rationalization now.”

Julie felt her brain shake like a plum pudding. “I’ll chalk that stupid remark up to rum.”

“Maybe I’m not living in my own time, but
you’re
not living in your own skin.” Phoebe polished off the third bottle. “And I’m not drunk.”

“After that much liquor, you should be.”

Phoebe winked spitefully. “Yeah, but tomorrow I’ll be sober, Katz”—she wobbled out of the room—“and you’ll still be the deity who doesn’t help people.”

“Get off my back, Phoebe. You’re not me, so just get
off!
”

In Julie’s fibrillating mind the altar skull acquired eyeballs. Its stare was unyielding, accusing. Had it owned a tongue, she felt, it would have spoken, saying, Phoebe’s right, you know.

I doubt that.

She’s right. “Heaven Help You” isn’t the answer.

It’s the best I can do.

It’s a cop-out.

Maybe.

Remote-control miracles, Sheila—that’s the way to go. Intervention-at-a-distance—try it. You wouldn’t have to expose yourself.

I wasn’t sent to do tricks.

Try it.

No.

Try it.

DEAR SHEILA
: Look at these snapshots and you’ll see why nobody’s willing to take my picture, not even my older sister, so instead I used one of those instant-photo booths at the amusement park.

It all began when my experiment blew up last year in chemistry class. Sure, my dad is suing the crap out of the school system, but that doesn’t keep my face from looking like a horror movie, does it? It wouldn’t be so bad if I were an old lady, but I’m seventeen, and when boys look at me I can tell they want to puke. Anyway, I’m hoping if you meditate on these snapshots, Sheila, the doctors will do a really good job next month with my operation.—
HIDEOUS, ILLINOIS

DEAR HIDEOUS
: Take heart. Reconstructive surgery is one of the most exciting frontiers of modern medicine. You can receive state-of-the-art treatment at the new DeGrazzio Institute in Chicago.

Also, yes, I’ve meditated on your snapshots, and I believe your admittedly distressing face will start looking better soon. If you know what’s good for you, you’ll never mention getting this reply, which is going directly to you and not my editor.

DEAR SHEILA
: I’m a proud man who hates writing to you, only I’ve been unemployed for three years, and the welfare checks hardly cover our food and rent. Forget Christmas for the kids. I don’t need to tell you a spot welder with rheumatoid arthritis and gout hasn’t got much of a future.

This probably sounds crazy, but if Emma and I had a truly large refrigerator we could save a lot of money buying our food in bulk and freezing it, so here’s an advertisement for a big Westinghouse monster that would be just perfect. Can you suggest any way we might afford a fine refrigerator like this?—
WOLVES AT DOOR

DEAR WOLVES
: For political reasons, I’m not allowing the
Midnight Moon
to publish this reply.

A set of catalogues from legitimate correspondence schools is on its way. You should consider such growing fields as public accounting, data processing, and Xerox machine repair.

This too: I’m returning the advertisement. Tape it to your present refrigerator and concentrate on it every day. Keep the results strictly confidential or, believe me, you’ll be sorry.

DEAR SHEILA
: It wouldn’t surprise me to learn I’m the loneliest person in the world. After my dead husband Larry passed away, things went nowhere but downhill. Aren’t there any men in Indiana who could appreciate a peppy little wife who’s only fifty-four and can cook to beat the band? The thing I’m enclosing is a Triple-A map of our county, because maybe you’ll jab your finger on it and, presto, there’ll be the location of somebody who’ll love me.—
SOUTH BEND WIDOW

DEAR WIDOW
: I’m not releasing this reply to the
Moon,
and if you ever divulge the contents you’ll be in trouble.

Go to Parkview Terrace Apartments, Building G, Number 32. Alex Filippone is a sixty-year-old motorcycle salesman, never married. He’s enthusiastic about Cole Porter, duplicate bridge, and the Indiana Pacers basketball team. I strongly suspect you two will hit it off.

Because Ruined in Newark or Anguished in Camden might be waiting to abduct Sheila and force her to perform miracles, Julie never picked up her mail at the
Moon.
She likewise refused to have it forwarded to Angel’s Eye: the postman might be a follower. Instead she received her letters under conditions suggesting a cocaine transaction, donning dark glasses and meeting her editor inside the moist, dismal, abandoned aquarium on Central Pier.

“Want to see a movie tonight?” Bix asked, lurching out of the shadows, the canvas mailbag teetering on his shoulder. Each week, his infatuation grew more annoying and adolescent: the brushed tit, the patted butt, the raunchy valentines he planted in her mail.

“I already told you—I don’t date these days.”

“One crummy movie.”

“No.”

Julie upended the bag and, guided by the return addresses, divided the envelopes into two stacks: regular readers versus beneficiaries of her remote-control miracles. Barely ten percent of the letters Sheila got could be accurately termed hate mail—the people who wrote calling her a communist, a humanist, the Whore of Babylon, the Whore of Reason, the Antichrist, or the devil incarnate. Her gender had proven particularly galling—an Oklahoma City man once sent her a cigar box containing a dog’s penis (“The Bible says God is male, so you’re going to need this”)—though by far the largest subcategory of hate mail came from those who resented Sheila’s policy of no visits.
Dear Sheila: My (wife, husband, girlfriend, boyfriend, child) is (sick, addicted, insane, suicidal, dying). Please come over right away.
Sheila’s form letter was curt, but it did the job.
Dear Grieving: If I start making house calls, I won’t have time for anything else.

She nabbed an envelope from the first pile, slit it. “Look, Bix, this sexually molested teen in Albany says that, thanks to me, she finally got the courage to run away … and here’s Reconciled in Duluth saying that, because of ‘Heaven Help You,’ he now accepts being a dwarf. Maybe you don’t take me seriously, maybe Phoebe doesn’t, but
these
people do.”

“I’ve never taken anybody more seriously in my life. This is Bix Constantine talking, the Voltaire of Ventnor Heights, and you’ve got the bastard sending valentines.”

“That last one was so
sweet.
I’d never seen porcupines humping before.” She ripped apart a cushy envelope, and a blindingly red, home-knitted scarf fell out. Her greatest fan, that ninety-year-old grandmother in Topeka, had come through again.

“Valentines are a big step for me.” Bix rested his plump hand on her shoulder, where it remained like an affectionate parrot. “Listen, friend, Tony’s getting really itchy about the circulation figures. Let’s tear a couple of lobsters apart next Saturday and talk about some ways to boost your appeal.”

She removed the presumptuous hand. His fulsome demeanor did nothing for her, though she conceded his eternal nihilism had a certain glamor, his steadfast fatalism a definite panache. “
I
don’t eat seafood. When I was a kid, my friends were flounders and starfish.”

“Order steak then. The Moon’s treat.” Bix knocked on a deserted fish tank, producing a glassy
bong.
“Dante’s lobby at eight. Okay?”

“Dinner, Bix. Just dinner. Not the first act of a
shtup.
”

“Sure.” He slung the gutted mailbag over his arm. “Who knows—you might even have a good time.”

As her boss waddled down the pier, Julie opened the letter from the unemployed spot welder.

“Dear Sheila: The Westinghouse refrigerator arrived on Sunday morning. There it was, standing on the back porch like a hobo looking for a handout. At first we weren’t bothered it came with no guarantee, but then we plugged it in and this weird sort of green fog came pouring out the bottom, and before we knew it our wallpaper was peeling away and our houseplants had all died, and then Emma and I both threw up for about six hours straight, plus getting the runs, and we ended up taking the thing down to the dump. Anyway, if somebody else asks you for a refrigerator, Sheila, we suggest you give them a different kind.”