Frances and Bernard Read Online Free

necessary, respectable fuss on holidays in order to feel part of the clan. That religion is part of the dues paid for respectability. My mother may feel the same. I’ve never asked either of them about it.
    When I was eight, my mother refused to take me to church any longer because I gave a ferocious pinch to the back of the neck of an old man who’d fallen asleep in the pew in front of us. I’d seen plenty of people fall asleep but this one was close enough for me to smite. I saw it that way: smiting. (I was a real brute of a child. I bloodied a dozen noses before I entered high school.) I was glad to not have to go anymore. Instead of listening to the sermons, I’d been reading the Bible—straight through to Revelation and then again—and I knew we were sitting in the kind of church that Jesus would have spit out of his mouth. Lukewarm, neither hot, nor cold. Massachusetts clapboard moribund.
    I did not like church but I wanted an absolute and I wanted its demands.
    I studied classics at Harvard partially because I wanted to know about the civilizations that cradled Christianity. The other part was because I was a pompous ass. Ted likes to say that I studied classics because I wanted to know where Western civilization came from, the better to conquer it through literature.
    So I was studying and speaking out against every triumph of the powerful over the powerless. I led demonstrations. Against conscription, against segregation, against McCarthy. I broke my arm while trying to climb up the side of Memorial Church at a protest against the bomb. I filled the
Crimson
with screeds on what I thought a so-called Christian democracy should look like. I led a hunger strike for a few days to protest the college’s hiring of a right-wing ideologue whose work was a tract against welfare. I passed out on the third day. My father threatened to stop paying the bills if, as he said, I pulled “a stunt like that again.” And I did all this thinking of Christ. I did not go to church, but I kept Christ in mind as I acted. Whatever you have done unto the least of my brethren, you have done unto me. Whoever helps one of these little ones in my name, helps me.
    Maria. Maria was in a class of mine when I was a junior. She was dark-haired, dark-eyed, pale—some great fire from within had consumed her and then expired, leaving her white and stark. Maria was Russian, from Brooklyn. She and I slept together quite a bit. I didn’t think that I loved her but I knew I liked sleeping with her. I thought she was beautiful, and I wanted to have something beautiful. But then I got the feeling I was an amusement for her. Like Babe the Blue Ox—some big strong dumb American animal who put its blind trust in what it believed, charging and snorting all over the place, rushing toward goals it would never achieve. Her grandfather had been put to death by Stalin and she thought that to be politically engaged was the height of naiveté. She once told me that she thought I might one day be great but that I had to stop thinking God was going to have anything to do with it. She thought that my belief in God made me a child, that only a spoiled child could think God existed. This was invigorating but it also drove me mad. I had started to believe that I might love her in some way. I came to her room late at night once when I was drunk, shouting, throwing myself at her because I wanted her to respect me more than I thought she did. I wanted her to want me more than she did—I mean, I didn’t want her to look at me as if I were a child, I wanted her to look at me with hunger. She tried to kick me out. I called her a whore. I woke up the next morning outside her door with blood crusted around my nostrils and over my upper lip—the remains of a bloody nose. She told me later that she’d pushed me away, and when she did my legs twisted up beneath me, which sent me crashing to the floor, which gave me the bloody nose. She told me she’d thought about calling