Toward the End of Time

Now that April is here, Deirdre and I took Gloria’s mulch- buckwheat hulls and oak leaves, held down by boughs I hacked from a hemlock-off the rose bed, on the sea side, on a breezy Good Friday. Looking down the hill, toward the left of Mrs. Lubbetts’ house, we could see the spume of breaking waves on the beach, silently flashing up and drifting away. A seagull was suspended in mid-air, level with our eyes, its flight into the wind holding it motionless. Inside, our cheeks ruddy, we had rum in tea and felt more companionable than for days.

On Easter, she surprised me by wanting to go to church. She said it would be bad luck not to go. Thus Christianity, once an encompassing cathedral built on swords and crowns, holding philosophy in one transept and music in the other and all the humanity of Europe and the Americas in its nave, has died back to its roots of mindless superstition. We went to the nine o’clock service in the church of her childhood, a shabby United Something (Presbyterian and Methodist? Congregational and Reformed?) with windows that were half lozenges of clear glass and half sickly Biblical scenes from that furtive first-century world of violet and saffron robes and wistful, genteel Aryan faces wedded to the gesticulating poses of Jewish rabble-rousers. The high, airless space, with its creaking pews, smelled of camphor and beeswax and the gaseous excessive heat of a furnace stoked up once a week.

We had come to the children’s service, which was the one Deirdre remembered. Ten years ago she had been a girl of thirteen. Whereas I ten years ago was much as I am now, only with a thicker, browner head of hair and a five-days-a-week commuting habit. The children in the congregation rustled and prattled and squalled so that the voice of the young clergyperson, a woman with glossy Joan of Arc bangs and straight short sides, could hardly be heard. She read from Colossians 3 (“Set your affection on things above, not on things on the earth. For ye are dead, and your life is hid with Christ in God”) and prettily embroidered the Resurrection story in John 20 into a woman’s story-the adventures in feeling and relatedness of Mary Magdalene.

It was she who, before dark, found the stone taken away from the sepulchre on that first Easter, and the sepulchre empty “Then she runneth,” the Gospel tells us, and met Simon Peter and “the other disciple, whom Jesus loved…” These two competitively raced to the sepulchre and concurred in its emptiness, but for the neatly folded burial linens, and raced away again. Men! Always rushing on to the next thing! Mary stayed, and wept. While weeping, she stooped and looked into the sepulchre and saw two angels, one standing at the head and the other at the feet of the empty place where the body of Jesus had lain. They asked her, “Woman, why weepest thou?”

Why indeed do women weep? They weep, it seemed to my wandering mind, for the world itself, in its beauty and waste, its mingled cruelties and kindnesses. I once saw Perdita break into tears within, I believe, the Church of San Miniato al Monte in Florence. It was a lesser sight, on the far side of the Arno, with a barrel-vaulted interior of black and white stripes, receding mistily, as I remember it, up several levels toward the altar and choir. Shocked by her tears, I touched her and asked her why, thinking I was somehow to blame. “Because it’s so beautiful,” she got out. Gloria, a reluctant weeper, nevertheless was hard to console after the death of Lily Bart in The House of Mirth-Lily, the barren heroine of a barren authoress, imagining a child nestled asleep beside her as she dies. And there were tears in Gloria’s eyes when she came into the house a spring ago announcing that the deer had eaten all her tulips. My mother, mired in poverty and boxed in by my father’s limitations, cried often in my childish witnessing, over some domestic frustration or new manifestation of bodily decay. Her teeth gave her a lot of grief, first in their twinges-so keen they started tears- and then in the disfigurements of their piecemeal loss, pathetically patched by additions to a little pink partial upper plate she kept in a water glass in the bathroom. She had been, by the evidence of old photographs, a pert, fair, small-boned and freckled country beauty, the baby of the Kimball family from Cheshire. At the kitchen table during a quarrel-my parents’ quarrels were always about the same thing, it seemed to me, about there not being enough-she would fold her arms and hide her grief-reddened face in them, terrifying me, for her face was the face of life to me, and I could not bear to have it hid. I witnessed so many tears of anger and frustration and pain on my mother’s face, there in our bleak house on the shadowy northern side of the hill on the road out of Hammond Falls, that I wonder if my heart was not permanently hardened, to save me from a lifelong paralysis of grief. Stuck it seemed forever in latency and then the helpless middle teens, I would burrow away from the family sorrows into the warm corner of the kitchen behind the wood stove, or go upstairs in summertime and lie across my narrow bed, and read science fiction- Amazing, Astounding, those cheerful pulp monthlies costing only fifty cents in the Sixties-or popularized cosmology, by Asimov or Gamow, in plastic-wrapped volumes borrowed from the Pittsfield Library. Implausibly remote, radiant, exploding facts relieved the pressure of the immediate bare facts around me- the kitchen linoleum with its black-edged worn spots, the pine thresholds so often scuffed they dipped in the middle like tired mattresses, the thin painted doors with their black latches, the beer-blurred gleam of defeat, almost crazy, in my father’s eyes when he came home later than usual from work. Giant realities-God’s facts-lifted me a bit out of it all and out of my poor skinny claustrophobic self.

The clerical collar gleamed white on the slender girlish throat of our sermonizer. It seemed a provocation, like the forms of mutilation, nipple and tongue rings and livid tattoos, with which the young scorn their own flesh and announce their scorn for us, the unpunctured and tattoo-free. Above the rustle and whining of the children I heard her preach, “Mary answered the angels that she wept because they had taken away her Lord and she did not know where they had laid him.”

One can see Mary Magdalene, over the gap of a decade less than two full millennia, giving way to a fresh gust of tears with this confession of confusion. They were young, all these disciples and camp followers of the youthful Messiah-younger than many a contemporary rock group.

Then the question was repeated, by a new figure, a man standing behind her. “Woman, why weepest thou?”

Supposing this new presence to be the gardener, in this garden near the place of crucifixion, Mary said- steadying herself now into a certain dignity, drying her streaked cheeks with the backs of her hands, not really looking at this man-“Sir, if thou have borne him hence, tell me where thou has laid him, and I will take him away.”

This carnal passion of hers for the body, though a dead body, our female exegete glides over, her little hands gracefully flitting from the sleeves of her robe.

“The strange man, whom she has mistaken for the gardener in this disorienting place, says her name: ‘Mary.’ She turns and says, ‘Rabboni,’ which is to say, ‘Master.’ At this point, she must have reached out in the joy of recognition, for He says, ‘Touch me not.’ Noli me tangere, Jesus spurns her instinctive attempt at contact. Why?”

In her expectant silence we could hear the children squirming in the creaking pews and one infant whimpering against the pressure of his mother to keep him quiet.

Superposition, I thought. Before Christ ascended, He was in what quantum theory calls superposition-neither here nor there, up nor down. He was Schrodinger’s cat.

“A little later in the same chapter,” our inquisitor preached, “Jesus invites His disciple Thomas to touch Him, to ease Thomas’s doubts. Thomas has said he will not believe in the risen Jesus unless he sees in His hands the print of the nails, and puts his own hand in the wound of sword-thrust in Jesus’s side. Jesus obliges. He lets Himself be intimately touched to ease the other man’s doubt. It is a guy thing. For Mary Magdalene, seeing must be believing. Jesus tells her not to touch Him because He is not yet ascended to the Father. He is in a fragile in-between condition. Still, He has some orders for Mary: she should go tell the disciples that He is risen. Mary obeys. Like so many women in the Bible, she accepts her subservient role and obeys. But because she needed to weep, to stay at the tomb and come to terms with her feelings, it was she and not Peter or the other disciple, whom Jesus loved, usually identified as John, son of Zebedee-it was not these but Mary who first sees the risen Christ and who hears her name pronounced by Him: ‘Mary’ For the people of Biblical times, spoken language was as good as a touch, each word lived in their ears. They didn’t have TV, they didn’t have MTV or animated holograms, for them the spoken word was the hottest entertainment around. ‘Mary.’ ‘Rabboni.’ ‘Touch me not.’”

The child in the pew ahead of me, a toddling male with: runny nose and hair much the same translucent lemon color as his snot, had become fascinated by me, and distracted me from the minister’s concluding peroration, her parallel between Mary’s confusing Easter experience and the way in which Christ sneaks up on all of us, in the morning mists, in the semblance of a gardener. Amen.

As we bowed our heads in the post-sermon prayer I was intensely conscious of the body beside mine, familiar and yet not, Deirdre’s meekly bent back sheathed in a stiff purple dress I had never seen before. I moved my elbow