For Heaven's Sake

by HANNAH SMITH

1

MY FATHER’S church, the Truo Believers’ green stucco chapel, was just one block north of the Holy Roller tent. It was clear across town and on the other side of the tracks from all the nice churches, the plentiful Methodists, the respectable Baptists, the stanch, austere Presbyterians, and the exquisite, unattainable, mysterious Episcopalians.

While I knew, as did the other True Believers, that my father was preaching the only way to Heaven and that all the cold and worldly churchgoers over there on Naylor Street were on their way to a less desirable neighborhood, 1 still guiltily and constantly dreamed a single, rosy, beautiful daydream.

In this dream I was rarely a Methodist or Baptist, occasionally a Presbyterian, but most often an Episcopalian. Sometimes in the dream I was seated in a velvet and ebony pew behind a little gold door with my name on it. Since I had never been inside an Episcopal church (my father ranking such an edifice only slightly less dangerous than the Bijou movie palace), my mental picture of its interior was vague. More distinct was the dream in which I, like the languid Louise Antwill, brought a note to Miss Watrous, the sixth grade teacher, asking that I be excused early on Friday afternoons for a month to prepare for confirmation.

What confirmation was I hadn’t the slightest idea, but oh, what a lovely Episcopal sound the word had!

Every year at the beginning of the school term I’d be given a sheaf of cards to fill in. These information blanks were always intrusively personal. Inevitably every year the cards asked the same question: “Denomination?” Inevitably there was a struggle between my conscience and my desire to write “Episcopal” in the little blank. Once I tried to evade the issue by writing only initials, but my card with its alarming “T.B. ” brought an embarrassing personal interview with the teacher.

On Sundays, surrounded by the rows of the godly, listening to the rousing gospel songs, hearing my father preach with his usual dedicated intensity, I scourged myself for the carnal shame that haunted me during the week. After all, wasn’t this life only a short period, no longer than a breath, before the immeasurable span of eternity? Why should I mind having to wear long modest black stockings instead of delectably indecent pink half socks like Louise Antwill’s? I’d be spending an eternity in unimaginable bliss while Louise, not even a very good Episcopalian, would undoubtedly be turned promptly into that outer darkness my father mentioned so often with such gloomy relish.

Nevertheless, most of the time my thoughts, like Martin Luther’s, turned to church reform. If only the True Believers would sing songs like “Faith of Our Fathers” instead of “When the Roll Is Called Up Yonder”! If only Sister Beulah Hammond wouldn’t always “get blessed” at the second stanza of the second hymn every Sunday morning, rise from her seat, waving a handkerchief in her frail little hand, and walk across the front of the auditorium and back, eyes closed, tears running down her cheeks!

The bareness and smallness of the building bothered me only slightly. The Christian Scientists’ building was no better, although they did have rosebushes up their front walk and a handsome glass-encased bulletin board at the curb.

What I resented, in fierce high-church silence, was the noise — the loud amens, the hearty two-step hymns, the offertory performed on a trombone or musical saw. My aesthetic sense was not so well developed that I knew exactly what was wrong with “The Holy City” shimmeringly rendered by Joe Peluti on his rosin-smeared saw. I only felt vaguely that the saw would never replace the pipe organ at St. Cyprian’s over on Naylor Street.

Even more annoying was the fact that all the eccentrics and paupers were drawn inevitably into the True Believer fold. My father believed simply and honestly in the Bible injunction of “Whosoever will.” His handshake, infuriatingly, was as warm and hearty to old Mahan Priestley, the epileptic ragman, as to Miss Maclnness, my adored music teacher. Because of this abhorrent democracy, we had a colorful collection of True Believers.

There was Samuel Bridges, the balding, lugubrious bachelor, who rose in nearly every service to give a graphic pain-by-pain account of his latest gallstone attack.

There was the extremely modish-looking Mrs. Forbes Westfield, who testified broodingly on Wednesday nights that Jesus Christ was her lover, chum, and pal.

Worst of all, there were the Potters, thirteen of them, the city welfare department’s chief problem, as well as one of mine. Collectively, the Potters would hardly have been able to total a normal I.Q., and in one or two of the children this screw-loose state bordered on near-idiocy. To see the Potters approaching the chapel on Sunday morning was a sight not easily forgotten. The procession usually began with William, the vacant-faced eldest, pulling two or three of the smallest Potters in an ancient coaster wagon. Full of holy zeal, William speeded up as he came in sight of the sanctuary and often broke into a shambling run at the last lap. Behind the wavering old wagon trooped the little girls, noses running, stockings drooping, but splendid in raffish purple and pink taffeta and burgeoning with enormous hair ribbons. At the end of the cavalcade came Mama Potter and her two eldest daughters, faces heavily smeared with pink powder and cerise rouge, their rickety frames hung with spectacular cast-off evening dresses.

Even my father, usually completely myopic toward feminine finery unless it was pointed out to him by some soberly garbed sister, was a little shaken by the Potters’ ensembles. He suggested to the Women’s Prayer and Mission Band that they outfit Maybelle and Clarine and Mama Potter in something a little more suitable for church. Abandoning the undressed African for a month or two, the Band turned out three outfits that would have done credit to Evangeline Booth herself.

The Potters received the new’ wardrobes with tear-smeared happiness. The next Sunday morning and every Sunday thereafter, however, they still appeared in their floating veils, beaded chiffons, and dirty satins. My father’s doom-filled words on the subject of immodest, worldly dress often brought forth a shrill “Amen” or “Praise the Lord” from Mama Potter and once she even waved a long green, bead-encrusted glove as she crowed.

For the rest of the True Believer congregation, there was no such sartorial freedom. The Church Manual, which often seemed to outrank Holy Writ in authority, specifically forbade any kind of frivolous array. If an evangelist arrived festooned with gold watch chain, he was apt to find the faces in the Amen corner uniformly forbidding.

It seemed to me that these wardrobe restrictions fell with unfair heaviness on me. As the minister’s daughter, besides the no mean task of getting to Heaven, I also had to Set an Example to the other small fry in the church. This, according to my father, consisted of wearing my sleeves and skirts a little longer, my hair a little plainer, and my face a little shinier than any other True Believer, junior grade.

By the time I got to high school I had devised a complicated double life featuring a lipstick and powder puff in my school locker and a set of safety pins on the band of my skirt by which I could quickly lengthen or shorten it to suit my environment.

Not for me the fate of Lola Houser, a fellow True Believer, who took my father’s words to heart and went him one better. Lola swept through the halls of Greenleaf High in a middy skirt lapping her ankles and played volleyball in long black gym bloomers only slightly less roomy than the Graf Zeppelin. Greenleaf High received her delightedly. Her picture adorned a large illicit, poster reading “Five Thousand Dollars Reward! Suspected of Robbing the Males.” One of the cheerleaders nearly broke up the game with Lanson High by appearing between halves in a pair of ankle-length black Turkish trousers.

2

THOUGH I dealt in my own subversive Episcopal fashion with the complicated code of morals devised by those two difficult men, my father and St. Paul, there was nothing I could do about the revival meetings.

Informal as the regular services at our church were, there was at least a comforting familiarity about them. My father’s sermons possessed a certain fundamental strength and dignity. While the song service featured rollicking merry-go-round rhythms, there was the warm feeling of shared, hearty singing in them. When little Sister Morley prayed, she seemed nothing but frail bones and incandescent spirit. You knew that she was talking directly and beseechingly to an old and understanding Friend. At times on Sunday morning, I loved the True Believer chapel wholeheartedly.

Evangelists and revival meetings, however, were something else again. I was sure that St. Cyprian’s never had revivals. Undoubtedly there was something not quite refined about conversion. I had once passed the Presbyterian church about nine in the evening and instead of “Are You Ready for the Judgment Day?” or “Almost Persuaded,” the Presbyterians were happily singing, “Safely Through Another Week.” My theology was weak but I hud a misty idea that Episcopalians and Presbyterians were probably born converted. It was only the True Believers who must kneel at an altar rail and wrestle with their sins.

The True Believers seemed very well satisfied with my father’s stern, loving, but unspectacular messages for everyday fare. However, when time came to cal! an evangelist, they wanted something a little more spicy. They wanted Manning Smith, the Hell-fire Preacher, who could describe the tortures of the damned so convincingly that the janitor was usually kept busy tiptoeing around opening windows.

They wanted Betty and Bill Austerhold, the husband-and-wife team who enlivened the song service by playing on at least ten different musical instruments, some of which were peculiar only to the Austerholds — the mandoharp, for instance, and the trombolin.

Evangelists possessed varying professional standing in the Church. As in the theater world, there were the top stars, the Broadway performers, whose slates were full for three or even four years ahead. They preferred a certain financial guarantee if they consented to minister to the morals of your community and they expected accommodations in the best hotels. Below them, corresponding perhaps to the better road shows, were the lesser known brethren who would come for a tree will offering and a bedroom and meals at the parsonage. Still farther down the ladder were earnest but unknown exhorters, the Amateur Night boys, who sent out hopeful letters or prospectuses, describing their abilities and hinting that only through their services could authentic converts be gathered into the local True Believer fold. They didn’t mention money at all; what they wanted was an audience.

The chapei went without a new coat of paint one year and engaged the services of Jonathan Cuppy, the Ozark Oriole. Brother Cuppy was a big, florid man built on the general lines of William Jennings Bryan. He cultivated the same manner and wore his hair in the same flowing mane. His biggest drawing card was his life story. On the night it was scheduled, the church was invariably packed to the doors. With lip-licking fervor, the good brother described in detail how sinful he had been, how unutterably wicked; how he and his pals had drunk gallons and gallons of liquor, gambled, thieved, and caroused. The story of his conversion, dealt with briefly in the closing ten minutes of the service, definitely came as an anticlimax.

The majority of the evangelists were sincere. They might use vaudeville tactics; they might have developed a certain professional interest in souls as statistics; but they were straight, honest men, Sinclair Lewis to the contrary.

Occasionally, however, a charlatan would slip into the exhorters’ ranks. He would usually be uncovered as a faker before many meetings had passed, but since the Devil can deceive the very elect, the True Believer chapel had its share of these mountebanks.

There was “Caruso” Scottston, a former grand opera star who could sing you straight to the gates of Heaven and preach you to the black doors of Hell. Unfortunately, the sheriff from a neighboring county caught up with him to discuss some devious financial deals he’d left behind him.

Then there was Sister Helen Brinson, referred to by the irreverent as Hell an’ Brimstone. Sister Helen hit the chapel with a primitive vitality that nearly shook the grayish plaster from the walls. All the old men nodding sleepily in the middle pews sat up, blinked their eyes, adjusted their earphones, and moved to the front seats. Their fervent “Amens” had all the enthusiasm of the baldheaded row in a burlesque house.

My father, usually so obtuse about hypocrisy among his flock, could be observed squirming uneasily after the first night of the buxom blond evangelist’s campaign. Sister Helen’s clothing was modest, long, dark, and demure, as became a True Believer. Perhaps it was only accidental that the sober silk clung so lovingly to breast and thigh or that the sister’s gestures had such a feline, sinuous quality.

Sister Brinson’s meeting had been scheduled to run for two weeks but it ended abruptly the first Sunday night after a service in which she had left, the platform and roamed chummily up and down the aisles while she preached.

Perhaps the revivals were not as frequent as it seems now, looking back. I always picture the chapel, however, with a broad white sash of canvas across its middle, reading “Revival Meeting Tonite 7.30. Everybody Welcome.”

3

I MIGHT earlier have become an out-and-out rebel against all this if it had not been for the shining white sainthood of my father’s life, through the constricted confines of his theology gleamed the impeccable radiance of his mighty faith. Hearing my father preach or pray and seeing his selfless life at home and in his parish, I could not doubt that he did know the true and only path to Heaven.

Because of him, I tried valiantly to fight down my secret Episcopalianism and be a bona fide True Believer. I even tried once to be a Christian Worker. During the closing minutes of a revival service, I stepped across the aisle and spoke to a fluffyhaired, flirty-eyed classmate of mine, known to be a regular attendant at the Bijou and the Starlight Roller Rink.

“Wouldn’t you like to be saved, Maurine?” 1 quavered doubtfully, my face redder than her Djer Kiss lipstick.

She gave me a single withering, superior glance. “Ilmph!” she said, and looked wearily away.

Ignominiously, I stole back across the aisle to my scat. That was the end of my evangelistic career.

For my father I stood, Saturday nights, with wavering knees and crimson face on a busy street corner four blocks from Grcenleaf High School sharing a hymnbook with Brother Mahan Priestley and squeaking miserably through “Throw Out the Lifeline” and “Brighten the Corner Where You Are.” Any light that I shed voluntarily on the corner of Main Street and Colman Avenue would have had to be located by radar.

After listening to my father preach, I went through intensive and agonizing soul-searchings. When he talked one Sunday morning from the text, “Every idle word must be accounted for at the day of judgment,” I spent the next week muttering careful, squeezed-out monosyllables.

My father, in his own spiritual strength and grandeur, never seemed aware of my attempts at righteousness. In fact, I knew that he regarded me as a rather light-minded, frivolous creature more interested in making divinity fudge on Wednesday night than in attending prayer meeting. He looked upon my hysterical, last-ditch fight for flesh-colored silk stockings as a form of incomprehensible feminine carnality.

As I grew into an obnoxious, belligerent, argumentative adolescent, constantly bringing home from school questions regarding companionate marriage, social dancing, and — horror of horrors — evolution, he found it necessary with increasing frequency to take me to the Lord in prayer. I was required to be present at these conversations. My father, always a gentleman, did not believe in discussing me behind my back, even with God. I knelt beside him, full of inward rage, frustration, and misery, while his impassioned voice mounted confidently toward the Throne.

With repentant tears trickling down on the seat of the splintery golden-oak rocker, I still thought irrationally how much easier and pleasanter it would be to have been born an Episcopalian.

Long after, when I was grown and married, I achieved my goal. I attended an Episcopal church, one of the oldest, most venerable, most respectable in America — the Bruton Parish church in Williamsburg, Virginia. Black-hatted and white-gloved I sat, in the very chair the royal governor had once graced two centuries before. In my hands was a real Book of Common Prayer. I stood rapturously for the responses. I knelt, facing forward, on a real velvet hassock. Down the carpeted aisle, through the chastely beautiful sanctuary, came the robed processional, chanting in celestial antiphonies. All those rich ecclesiastical phrases I’d treasured for so long floated dreamily through my mind — chancel, lectern, font, and liturgy. Even the air seemed to have a faintly Episcopalian scent, compounded of burning candles, sandalwood, and the very best mink coats. I sighed a long, fulfilled happy sigh.

It was somewhere between the reading of the Whitsuntide lesson and the second anthem that I began to feel restless. A sense of indefinable ennui was creeping over me. I squirmed a little in the defunct governor’s red velvet chair. I found myself looking around, missing something, someone.

Then I knew. I had been listening for Sister Hammond’s frail little shout, watching for her waving hand. The service all at once seemed stilted, foreign. I felt a wild, heady desire to open up strong and clear with, “I remember when my burdens rolled away.”

I would never, never he an Episcopalian.

“I PERSONALLY” AWARDS