As it was, alas, for Kate the librarian, who, had she still been alive at the time of little Mikey’s miming of the town photographer at John’s Pioneers Day barbecue that summer, might have remarked on the way that parody and performance focus the attention in a way that the everyday realities of existence cannot. “One drifts through daily life as in a dream,” she once remarked to her friend Harriet, also, sad to say, deceased, “waking up only when things turn nightmarish, otherwise being carried along on a free association of images, faintly erotic maybe, faintly fearful, all of it blurring into a half-remembered past that’s more like an imaginary space than some aspect of time.” She had made this remark while sitting with Harriet and John’s mother Opal on a bench in the old city park, not yet razed back then, and Opal remembered it to this day for precisely the reason that it did seem to parody the very moment in which they sat, dappled by the sunlight filtering through the leafy branches above as though sprinkled by that gold dust they sometimes used in the movies to indicate a magical moment isolated from the implacable flow of time. Since Opal was not one much given to such flights of fancy, she supposed the image had popped into her head because of Harriet’s earlier remark that “Sometimes I feel more alive at the movies or in the middle of a good novel than I do on the streets of this damned town.” Harriet had had a romantic past, she was probably just feeling restless as she often did, her restlessness making her the insatiable moviegoer and devourer of popular novels that she was. Kate now went on to say that while all novels lied about the past, simply by being things whose pages turned in sequence, life, as kept more loosely in the memory, was not a random shuffle either, but more like a subtle interweaving of mysteriously linked moments whose buried significance in effect defined the rememberer. Poor dear Kate, ever the one for the mind-boggling aphorism. She once, while at one of John’s parties, described them as “cyclic rituals whose purpose was to deny the incorruptible innocence of time,” though what Kate meant by that Opal could not even guess. Opal thought of her son’s parties as themselves altogether innocent, not to say generous and spontaneous and celebrative, and she always looked forward to them, but she did understand how much more went on at them than any one person could know, each person’s experience of such tangly gatherings being so different from all the others, until someone like little Mikey came along to give them all something at the center to share, even if that something was so frivolous as the playacting of a child.
For Reverend Lenny, another witness of Mikey’s masque that afternoon in John’s backyard, nothing in the world was frivolous, least of all a child’s enactment of the adult world, or else it all was, which he also accepted of course as a strong possibility. Lenny, yet another member of John’s old college fraternity present that day and better known to his brothers up at State as Knucksie, sometimes Ob-knucks or Noxious to the pledges he mastered in those long-gone days, mostly happy, give or take a toga party and beer bust or two he’d rather not think about, and rarely did, had come here with his family — his wife Beatrice and their children Philip, Jennifer, and Zoe — nearly a decade ago, thanks to brother John’s timely intervention, and, though not without some adjustment difficulties and unremitting ambivalence and self-doubt, Lennox had over the years come to accept his new vocation as a moral and spiritual leader of the community, and indeed to embrace it. When he first arrived and took up his new mission among, except for John, these total strangers, nothing was easy, but what was hardest were the Sunday sermons. It was like writing term papers all over again, something Lennox had always hated and rarely managed to accomplish without a little help from his friends. Now, suddenly, he had to do one every week, no friends at hand, and for a while he fell back pretty heavily on stuff he stole out of books. Eventually, though, once he discovered that no one was grading him, or even for the most part listening, it became his favorite task. His own special thing, as his wife Beatrice (who strode past now in her fringed leather jacket, pleated skirt, and bright red boots, bearing a large plastic bowl of potato salad like the Holy Graiclass="underline" she blinked at him as though in wonderment and smiled) liked to say. What amazed him was how everything worked; God — or the gods, any would do, Reverend Lenny was not a fundamentalist — was wonderful. Lennox found he could take any experience, news item, anecdote, whatever, abstract its essence (the fun part), link it metaphorically to some general aspect of the human condition (always plenty of opportunity for pathos, humor, compassion, rue), weave in any images that freely came to mind, toss in a Biblical passage or two (Second John, for example: “And now I beg you, lady, not as though I were writing you a new commandment, but the one we have had from the beginning, that we love one another … for he who abides in the doctrine of Christ has both the Father and the Son”: that one was so brilliant it had caused John’s lawyer cousin’s wife to faint dead away), speak with conviction, gravity, and intensity, and shazam! another brilliant spellbinding supersermon. So much fun was it, he soon found himself testing God’s limits, as it were, by attempting to convert the most unlikely material — a golf game, rock lyrics, a visit to the barbershop or a bellyflop at the country club pool, Saturday morning TV cartoons, dirty jokes, shopping at the malls, even the holes in doughnuts or the repairing of a clogged stool in the church basement — into Sunday morning classics of spiritual uplift and moral wisdom. Certainly he was uplifted if no one else was. It was nearly as good as turning on (and he had used that, too, only lightly veiled: John had winked at him from the front of the congregation). So, while John’s son was aping the town photographer at his parents’ Pioneers Day garden party, Lennox was doing what he always did at such events: gathering images. He had decided it was time to take advantage of the hot topic of the day and preach on the doctrinal meaning of a “civic center”: What was it and why was it (in theory) so significant to us all? What did it mean that the beloved park with all its natural Edenic beauty had to be sacrificed so that that center of our civility could be, not found, but fashioned? He envisioned a link to the great themes of the settling of this nation, the New Jerusalem dream and all that, and thus (his wife’s costume suddenly delighted him) to this weekend’s celebrations: hey, genius, right on! He watched John’s little boy with his taped-junk “camera,” bobbing about frenetically with a kind of despairing enthusiasm, a hopeful anguish, and thought: a paradigm for our piteous effort to focus upon the real, to find that center. What was the real, and why was it so elusive? As though in reply, John’s wife passed in her knee-length shorts and crisp cotton shirt, all eyes in the backyard upon her, and Lennox thought: whatever it is, it has substance. Form. Body. And bodily parts. For God so loved the world that he eschewed mere abstractions. But to accept the fleshly real (he was watching his old fraternity brother, once known as Loose Bruce, put his arms around his little pubescent daughter, Jennifer’s face flushed with puppy love) was to accept pain and (his son Philip — or his wife’s, anyway — and John’s daughter Clarissa came out of the garage together, looking guilty) paradox. Irony. Was that not, in point of fact, the very message of the Cross? Yes, it was taking shape, the main themes were all there. All it lacked was a little spark and pop, a final kicker, a quote from the Good Book maybe, something with which to say: “This, my friends, this, this is real!”