As I drove west on Wilshire, Angel creepy-crawled her way over various hidden landscapes, offering the listener the use of a spiritual flashlight. No question about it: you had to be there. In a room full of believers she had seemed almost frighteningly potent. On tape she just sounded like an extraordinarily bright, highly articulate, and spiritually bent little girl.
But not quite. There was an odd, halting inflection in her voice, a kind of verbal limp, that I couldn't identify. It wasn't the hesitancy of someone trying to remember a long speech. Angel's trance had seemed real enough, and at the Revealing I'd attended with Skippy she'd stemmed the tide twice to respond to the audience. Her spiel wasn't memorized. The words were flowing through her in real time, and she could be spontaneous. Wilburforce had said that the first little girl was a channel. I didn't think I believed in channels.
Out of curiosity, I ejected Angel in mid-phrase and fished around in the plastic bag for the tape of poor little Anna. Jesus, even I was calling her poor little Anna. I slipped it in and turned up the volume.
Her voice was lower, more resonant, with a husky, dark edge of urgency to it and a natural, sinuous strength. Like Angel, Anna had been taped at a Revealing, in front of a large audience, and her listeners responded to her much more vocally than Angel's had. Compared to Angel she was a real spellbinder, a girl with revival-tent potential.
A phrase floated into my mind: the Burned-Over District. Something to do with revival. I put it on hold and refocused on Anna.
The front of the cassette box pictured an ordinary-looking little girl with long, straight brown hair. It would have been uncharitable, but true, to call her plain. She had the wishful, plaintive smile of someone who hopes that this is the picture that will finally turn out.
But there was nothing plaintive about her voice. It was as different from Angel's as a bassoon is from a flute. And much more persuasive.
I played parts of Anna's tape again and then parts of Angel's. Then, with Angel droning in my ears, I drove west, wondering what the hell the Burned-Over District was.
"The Burned-Over District?" Bernie said. "You've got to be kidding. You mean to tell me you don't remember the counties of the Burned-Over District?"
"No, Bernie," I said wearily. "What were they?" I inwardly gritted my teeth and groaned, hoping Bernie wouldn't use the question as a cue for one of his famous lists.
"Let's see, Chautauqua, Genesee, Wyoming," Bernie began. I settled in for a long winter's night. Once, in a liquor store, I made the mistake of asking Bernie why he was buying a bottle of vodka. Then I stood there, eyes glazing over and my life passing me by, while Bernie listed at least thirty drinks that boasted vodka as their elixir vitae. Lists are a weakness of graduate students.
"And the cities too," Bernie continued happily, holding up five more fingers and picking up steam. "Utica, Rochester-"
"Utica," I interrupted. "New York." Something was coming back to me.
"And New York, of course. Not at first, though."
"I mean, these are all in New York."
"New York State" Bernie corrected me. Like all born New Yorkers, Bernie only used "New York" to refer to the city. Everything else was a featureless landscape, fit only for pity and not too much of that.
"Bear with me, Bernie," I said. "It's been a long day. Why was it called the Burned-Over District?"
"The fires of revival," he said dramatically, tugging a hand through his coils of Brillo-like hair and taking some of it with him. "They burned there more or less nonstop in the early nineteenth century. Shame on you, with a degree in comparative religions. That's where it all started. Haven't you read Whitney Cross's book?"
"What's it called?"
"The Burned-Over District," Bernie said with a hint of disappointment. "You could have guessed that, you know. I think maybe you ought to come back to school." Bernie's school career had spanned almost two decades and five degrees, and he still hadn't found his major in life.
"Later," I said. "Eighteen-twenties, right? Early revivalists. A reaction against European Calvinism. Predestination."
"Predestination was a terrible idea," Bernie said. "Only a few will be saved. The rest will roast in hell through eternity, shriveling on the spit. It doesn't make any difference how you live your life, how many alms you give or prayers you pray. If you're gonna fry, you're gonna fry." Bernie manipulated his large hands as though marionettes dangled from them, and made a sizzling noise. "Not much of a religion for a country where all men and women were supposed to be created equal. Also, not much of a religion for capitalists." Bernie was ensconced happily several notches to the left of Chairman Mao.
"Why not for capitalists?"
"Nineteenth-century capitalists were highly result-driven. They hadn't been introduced to Japanese principles of management yet. They needed a religion that allowed them to get results. So anyway, as you probably remember, the American Methodists and Baptists junked predestination in favor of free-will doctrines, the New Light doctrines, that let people have a say in whether they were going to burn or not. You could just accept Christ as your savior, and, bang, you were born again. It didn't matter if you'd been predetermined for hell the first time around; when you were reborn, you started over. The spiritual equivalent of coming to the New World. A brilliant, simple concept. Perfect for an age of revolution."
"And the preachers of the Burned-Over District took the New Light doctrines and began cranking out new religions."
"Dozens of them," Bernie said with relish, holding up his fingers again. "It must have been something in the water. Lots of Arminian doctrines, Joseph Smith and the Mormons, Millerites and, later, Seventh-Day Adventists, Shakers, the Oneida Colony-real communists, by the way-"
"Yeah, and look where it got them. Making silverware."
"What, communists are supposed to eat with their fingers? They practiced free love, too, and controlled conception at the same time. Somehow. You want some wine?"
"I thought you'd never ask."
"I thought we might wait for Joyce."
"You wait for Joyce. Where is she, anyway?"
"Still at the hospital." He got up to go to the kitchen. "I can't tell you how nice it is to need a corkscrew for a change," he said. "Nothing worth drinking comes with a screw-off cap."
Bernie and Joyce were living in a standard student apartment on the fringes of Westwood, walking distance from UCLA, where she worked and he pursued his sixth degree, in a field seemingly completely unrelated to his previous five. The smell of baking lasagna floated in from the kitchen. I canvassed the books on the bulging rattan bookshelves from Pier One while Bernie fished noisily around in drawers and finally popped the cork. "Bernie," I called, "it wasn't all completely kosher Christian, was it? I seem to remember some fishier stuff."
"Mainly Christian," he yelled, clinking some glasses together promisingly. "There were some Swedenborgians rattling around, practicing mesmerism and phrenology on anyone who was willing to sit still, but they certainly thought of themselves as Christians. Lots of mediums, spiritualists popping up all over the place. They would have been horrified if you'd suggested they weren't Christian. Just because it's Christian doesn't mean it's not fishy, Simeon." He came in with a full glass in each hand and the bottle tucked under his right arm, and sat very carefully on the floor without being able to use his hands or to move his right arm from his side. Only then did he put the glasses on the table. Eighteen years of college, and he was still helpless. "What is it with you and the Burned-Over District?"
"Little girls," I said, sipping the wine. It could have used a few minutes to breathe but it wasn't going to get them. "Something about little girls and voices from beyond."
Bernie looked at me in a shrewd fashion and then turned to survey the bookshelves, one hand clutching a white-stockinged foot. Bernie had always worn white socks. "Little girls," he said, drinking deeply out of the glass in his other hand. "Two little girls. Knox or Fox or Pox or something, maybe Fitzgerald." He scooted over on his rear and reached up for a book with the hand that had clutched the foot. Bernie wasn't one to put down a glass.