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.
'Knox or Fox or Fitzgerald?'
'Frances Fitzgerald. Cities on a Hill. Got a terrific summary of the Burned-Over District.' He flipped through the end of the book. 'Fox,' he said triumphantly. Margaret and Katie Fox. About twelve and fifteen, I don't know which was which, farmer's daughters, famous for their ability to communicate with the spirit world through the ghost of a dead man who haunted their family's house.'
'Now I remember,' I said. 'They had double-jointed toes.'
'They had toes like tympani,' Bernie said. 'If they'd been born in this century they would have played them in a band. They popped their toes like mad under the table and interpreted the noises as rappings from their friendly ghost. They were very big in Rochester.'
'I'll bet they were a hit in Utica too. Who was running the show?'
'Must have been their parents. Raking it in, too. I think the little girls came up with the trick themselves. Mommy and daddy just handled the receipts.'
'I don't think my little girl came up with her trick herself.'
'And which little girl is this?' Bernie poured some more wine. His glass was already empty.
I told him about the Revealing.
'I've seen posters,' he said promptly. 'Big color shots of mother and daughter. Mostly ripping off Raphael for composition. You know, those circular Madonnas and Child. How did the Revealing work?'
'That's sort of a new twist.'
' The only thing older than the old story is the new twist.' That's F. Scott Fitzgerald. What is it?'
'She's supposed to be a channel.'
'Spare me,' Bernie said. 'There are enough dull people in the world without millions of equally dull disembodied spirits popping up and putting in their two cents' worth every time some actress closes her eyes. What are the criteria for becoming a disembodied spirit, anyway? Do they get degrees? Does some panel certify them? How do we know we don't get the worst of the bunch? How do we know they haven't been disembodied because they were bores and liars? Being disembodied doesn't sound to me like something you get for good behavior. And if they're so terrific, how come they're hanging around waiting to get a chance to talk to us? It sounds sort of like spending eternity at a pay phone, waiting for some change to drop out so you can dial a number at random. And only knowing one area code, and not a very good area code at that.'
'Bernie,' I said, 'I'm only giving you the party line.'
'Campus is full of these jerks,' he said. 'It used to be you could go over to Kerckhoff, get your synapses jangled on coffee, and talk about Kierkegaard or something. Now it's all these bananas with clear eyes and turbans listening to New Age music on nonanimal headphones and humming along.'
'It's been a while since I've seen any animal headphones. What are they? Little imitation dog ears?'
'You know what I mean. Not even any real rubber, it's like those little faucets hurt the trees or something. And the way they dress, Simeon. Remember how hard we used to work to look a little sloppy? These kids dress like actuarial tables. Put a bunch of them together and they look like a graph illustrating the contents of the typical middle-class airhead's closet.' Bernie had somehow managed to convince himself that he wasn't middle-class.
'Well, so what?' I said more quarrelsomely than I had intended. 'We wore blue jeans as a uniform of nonconformity and learned to meditate. I remember saying a one-syllable word over and over until I fell asleep, and when I woke up, trying to convince myself that I'd had a mystical experience. It was the religion of the month, and the smart ones wore it out in three weeks. Now we've got channels and fire-walking and Shirley MacLaine. I'm not sure there was a new religion every fifteen minutes in the fifties, but there have been a couple of thousand since.'
'You know the theories,' Bernie said. 'New religions tend to arise in times of transition, when old values are being challenged or are wearing out. That leaves out the fifties. Christianity was first a Jewish response to the oppression of Rome, and then, centuries later, a Roman adaptation to the decline of the empire. Luther arose as the political systems of Europe began to fall apart. Et cetera. It's all too neat for me. I take a messier view of history.'
'And the Burned-Over District?'
'Society in transition with a vengeance. The Revolution only fifty years old, immigrants streaming in from Europe, people still worried about violence in the streets every time a president's party lost the election, and the country beginning to fall apart at the seams over slavery. People talk about two hundred years of American stability, the peaceful transference of power and all that, as though it actually happened. This country wasn't even a hundred years old when it self-destructed. It wasn't until Lincoln appropriated what he called War Powers and turned the presidency into a functioning kingship, and then sent Grant to crush the South, that things settled down.'
'Bernie,' I said, 'you can't sympathize with freedom and the pre-Civil War South at the same time. Don't get sidetracked. You're being very helpful.'
He sat back, a little surprised. 'I am?'
'So where do all the new religions go? And don't say heaven.'
It was the kind of question he loved. He drank a full glass of wine for lubrication while he gathered his thoughts. I poured for us both.
'As we said, they tend to arise in times of social change, when people have begun to doubt that the world will automatically continue to obey the million or so rules that keep them safe in their dinky little houses. Cults usually either fervently embrace the values that are being threatened- like, say, the Muslim and Christian fundamentalists do these days-or fervently challenge them, as did the original Christians and the Oneida Colony, to choose a couple of examples.
'Most religions are founded by a single charismatic individual. He or she, as Anthony F. C. Wallace says, has an experience, a hallucination, a moment of divine inspiration, an encounter with a greater force. Moses and the burning bush, Muhammad and the voice, Joseph Smith and the book of gold. The leader is changed by the experience and communicates it. Some of his listeners become converts.' He picked up the book and flipped back a couple of pages to an underlined passage: 'Listen, here's Fitzgerald paraphrasing Wallace: 'Some of these converts
