Read Save Johanna! Online

Authors: Francine Pascal

Save Johanna! (9 page)

Pinky brings a chair in from the restaurant for me and asks if I would mind if she does some of the cooking while we talk.

“Fine, go right ahead,” I tell her, and she opens the middle drawer of the bureau and takes out a medium-sized metal bowl. I get a glimpse of the inside of the drawer, and it’s filled with pots and pans, all neatly stacked.

She mixes together a combination of pureed cooked vegetables, grains, milk, flour, and what seems to me an enormous amount of baking powder.

“These are our specialties. Vegetarian pancakes served with honey.”

I can’t wait to see her cook them; with all that baking powder they’ll probably rise up to her nose.

She tells me more about her mother, and her face tightens as she describes the constant criticism, the harping and nagging directed especially against the husband and the youngest daughter, the selfishness, the pretended humanitarianism, the phony religiousness, everything wrong and bad.

At the age of eleven Pinky suffered from nightmares and headaches, ailments that tortured my own teenage years, and her mother dragged her from one doctor to another and finally to a psychiatrist where she remained in analysis for almost two years.

Similarly, by fifteen we had both outgrown the headaches, but whereas I was beginning to settle into my life with some comfort she was starting to lose the little she had.

“Around that age,” she tells me, “I began to feel the loss of the one positive thing I did have—my faith. I was about to graduate from St. Agnes Junior High when I decided that I wanted to go to Music and Art. My mother fought the idea tooth and nail, but my father was all for it. It was one of the first times I can ever remember him winning. But Music and Art was a mistake anyway—empty and meaningless.”

I ask why her mother objected.

“Because it wasn’t a Catholic school and because she was jealous of my talent.”

I must look surprised because she repeats how her mother was always jealous and envious of her accomplishments, especially the ones that impressed her father.

“He and my mother could never get along together, but she couldn’t bear to see him respond to anyone else. Nobody could get along with her except possibly my sister Margaret.”

“Are you close to your sisters?”

“I haven’t seen Margaret in four years. She’s a nun now with one of those semisilent orders.”

“What about your other sister?”

“Edith dropped out of college and moved down to the East Village for a while, then got deeply involved with an antiwar group, married, and had a son. Steven must be twelve now. About six years ago she divorced her husband, and she and her son became Jehovah’s Witnesses. Last year she married a fellow Witness; now that’s her whole life. They live outside Los Angeles, and anytime she’s up near here she visits me. I dread the visits because all she does is proselytize.”

“Odd, isn’t it?” I say. “That all three of you have been drawn to such rigid, authoritarian religious groups?”

Pinky, frying the pancakes one at a time, has her back toward me, but I can see her take a deep breath and stop for a moment. She doesn’t like what I said.

She turns to me, a small, tolerant smile on her face. “There’s no comparison between what I’ve found with Avrum, and now with my family here in the temple, and the falseness both of my sisters have brought into their lives. I am at peace with the purpose of life. I have found the answer in the simplicity of God consciousness. Avrum was my first spiritual master. I can understand that now. He led me to the fulfillment I have found here. My sisters flounder in ignorance while I have found the absolute truth in life.” A strange, impersonal tone has come into her speech. “I need look no further.”

“They must think they’ve found the answers too.”

She smiles sweetly at me, but her words have a sharp edge. “They’re wrong.”

“You talk about peace and simplicity and truth, but Maheely is the antithesis of all that. He’s a murderer.”

“In your terms.”

“Not just in my terms. He killed those people. What other civilized judgment can be made?”

“The murder was a sacrifice—his and theirs—the cause was spiritual.” The words are Pinky’s, but the thoughts are Avrum’s. “It was the genesis of a new movement that needed a birth by explosion.”

“The people he murdered made the sacrifice, not Maheely.”

“He’ll spend the rest of his life in prison. That’s a sacrifice, isn’t it?”

“He never meant to get caught.”

“No, not in the beginning. But later on, when the movement had a footing, then he would have revealed himself.”

“I don’t believe that.”

“I know it to be true.”

We’re at an impasse. Pinky looks so fragile, her voice is so soft you’d think she could be swept from her position with a few patient words, but there’s an inner rigidity that has made her implacable in her beliefs. If I want any relationship with this girl I must develop it along more personal lines. We must be women together. I go back to her early life and draw out more about her family, particularly her mother.

“My mother has never forgiven me,” she says, “for leaving what she insists is the right and the only church. Naturally she could never understand my relationship with Avrum, nor can she appreciate what I’ve found here.”

“Does your mother know about the baby?”

“Yes, she knows about Nami.”

“That he’s Avrum’s child?”

“No, and neither do you.”

“But I do. One look at him, at those eyes. I knew instantly.”

Pinky doesn’t answer me, but I can see she’s pleased that I recognized the resemblance.

She’s made at least fifteen pancakes, and despite the unappealing ingredients, they’re beginning to tempt me. She sees me watching her and offers me a pancake. Fry most anything in butter and drown it in enough honey, and it’s not going to be too bad. Actually these are pretty good. I’d try them on David, but we have enough trouble already. David despises the entire health-food genre with such a passion I sometimes think it’s more principle than taste.

“Are your parents still in New York?” I ask her.

“My mother is, but my father remarried and moved to Florida. They got divorced right after I left the house.”

She stops a second for my reaction, but of course I show none. One thing I do not want to do is alienate this young lady. “She drove him to it with all that nagging and picking all the time,” Pinky continues.

“Too bad.”

“Her own fault. If she’s suffering now it’s only because she deserves it.”

“You seem very angry at her.”

“Actually I’m not anymore. Now I feel sorry for her. But I don’t want to see her. I can’t forgive her.”

“Is this going to be enough for you?” I ask, looking around at the small kitchen. “Waiting on tables, living in this kind of a place?”

“Material things mean nothing to me anymore. I had the experience of overabundance for all those years, and my life was flat and empty. Now I have all the answers I want. I have Nami and through him Avrum.”

She describes her lapse from Catholicism at about fifteen and the year she had nothing. “It was a lost time for me, that year. I felt adrift, without balance and without purpose, scared and empty. For the first time in all my life I didn’t have a powerful faith to fall back on.”

I suggest to her that possibly the space reserved within for faith was larger and demanded a weightier belief because of her early religious training. It had happened to her sisters too. Both had a need for a strong and demanding philosophical regimen.

She thinks about it and agrees that, indeed, she may have a greater need, but that was so because she was being prepared for the eventual introduction of the true faith. The temptation to go on debating is almost overpowering, and I have to remind myself that not only is it probably too late to change her views, but it’s not important to my purpose. My purpose is to gain a deeper and clearer understanding of Avrum, and Pinky presents an incredible opportunity to do that. If I can get her to cooperate I can possibly find the key to his power and, through its effect on her, find its essence. I need the time to develop a comfort and trust between us. I think I can do it because I genuinely like Pinky. Her beliefs apart, she’s bright and sweet, and there’s an ingenuousness about her I find quite appealing.

Nami starts to whimper, and Pinky excuses herself and goes out to the porch to see to him. I follow her. Normally I think most babies are darling but with Nami I find myself looking for cloven hooves. She turns him over on his stomach and rocks him gently, humming softly for a few minutes until he falls back to sleep. Quietly we both tiptoe back into the house.

“Has Avrum seen the baby?” I ask.

“Of course, he delivered him.” She enjoys my surprise for a moment and then tells me, “There’s nothing Avrum can’t do.”

I ask her to tell me about Nami’s birth, and she smiles and says it was a beautiful experience.

“He said he wanted to keep a purity about the pregnancy and the birth. Only he had put his seed within me, and only he would bring it to life. In all the time I was with Avrum I never made love with anyone else. In fact, I had very little to do with the others. He kept me almost isolated. He prepared a daily regimen for me, what to eat, what exercises to do, and every day we spoke together privately for at least an hour. It was in those times that he took me into his deepest thoughts and I began to feel a part of him. I could lean into him the same way I had been able to put myself in Christ’s hands as a small child. But it was closer. In Christianity I was only a worshiper, but with Avrum I went within the magic circle and became part of it. Through Avrum’s power the actual birth of Nami became a spiritual experience for me, exquisitely combined with heights of joy and passion I will never reach again. From the very first he stayed with me, talking to me, wiping my face with wet cloths, absorbing all the pain and anxiety from me. He became physically part of the birth, breathing my deep breaths, knotting in contraction and pressing in release, and always leading the way. I felt a trust in him so strong it was almost tangible, in the sound of his voice, his touch, even the way he watched me!”

Pinky’s face glows as she speaks, and the deeper she relives the birth the more emotional she becomes until tears run down her cheeks as she describes the moment when Avrum, with a slow and steady pull, eased the baby from the grip of her body and placed the wailing infant on her stomach.

Now she tells me how he called in the others, and one by one they came silently and looked down at the baby and at Pinky and without a word backed away and disappeared. All her earliest memories of Madonna and Child came back to her as she lay there naked and bloody with her child and felt at peace and at one with Avrum.

Watching and listening to Pinky I know that there’s no way for me to bring any kind of reality into this experience so I let it pass silently, without any questions. When she pulls herself together I ask her about Nami; is she being fair to him, bringing him up here in this cultural and intellectual isolation where most of his options are closed out before he even knows they exist?

“I have found the true way,” she says. “Can I withhold it from him?”

“How can you be so certain?”

“If you had found it, you would know there is no room for doubt. It’s as positive as the sun.”

“No, it isn’t. The sun is right there for all of us to see. But what you’ve found is only a feeling inside you.”

“You’re wrong, Johanna, it’s not some small private feeling, it’s not based on a narrow religious faith. It’s another existence that’s as true and certain as the sun, and anyone can see it if they know where to look. The sun is part of it. Everything on earth is part of God’s consciousness.”

She seems to possess a deep serenity I almost envy. Nothing now troubles her. Will I ever know such peace? I study her. How alike we are, I think, how similar our early lives. I took one turning, she another, and yet, I reflect, there but for the grace of God—or blind chance—sit I. Possibly like Pinky, the mother of Avrum’s baby. The thought is disturbing.

There is almost a condescension in Pinky as she speaks of her beliefs with such perfect certainty. And in a short time my reaction becomes one of impatience, touched with compassion because she’s so badly misguided.

With cult people I know it’s a mistake to attack their faith head-on. In order to make any inroads, you have to arrange it so that they themselves ask the questions. I’d like to help Pinky, and I’m tempted to try because I feel a kind of alliance with her. She’s more like me than Swat or Imogene, and we’re both involved with Avrum. Of course, my involvement is peripheral, objective, only as an observer. Nonetheless, he is an influence in my life right now, and that gives me some small understanding. I think the best approach is to try to get her to parade everything right out front so that she can get a clear, clean look for herself.
 

In the next three days I spend many hours with Pinky, and a surprisingly strong relationship begins to build. The book and the research seem at times almost obscured by the friendship that has taken hold. So much honesty comes out of both of us that I feel it must work. And then it does begin—slowly. Within Pinky small doubts starting as hairline cracks grow until they’re too big to avoid, and when we talk about them, I feel an excitement. There’s a power to truth that’s inspiring. Little by little Pinky begins to feel that power, and by the end of the third day I know I’ve started something inside her, and I can sense a small change. That night I hate to leave because I feel she could be on the brink of self-discovery, and I want to be there to direct it and reinforce it. But I can’t insist or I risk upsetting the delicate balance. She has to take the steps herself or it becomes just another kind of enslavement.

She walks me to the street, and we feel great warmth toward each other. A feeling that no one else can be a part of, not the Gurus or Avrum or even David. We kiss good night like the loving sisters neither of us had.

I’m especially early this morning. I had a good night last night, no pills, nothing, just went straight to sleep. I feel filled with energy and anticipation for the day. Obviously it’s a latent minister’s daughter’s compulsion to save souls. It’s an enormous high to pluck a creature from darkness and bring her out into good strong sunlight.

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