CHAPTER ONE: ROOM AT THE INN
So there he stands, not five feet away from me. He looks almost unchanged
since the last time I saw him, ten years ago—fabulous, for a man now
in his nineties. His features are still sharply cut, his sardonic smile and
turquoise eyes as bright as ever. The only difference I notice is that both
his hair and his wiry body have thinned a bit. His trousers (probably the
same ones he was wearing a decade ago) are now so baggy he’s switched
from a belt to suspenders.
A Shakespearean phrase pops into my mind: “. . . a world too wide
/ For his shrunk shank.” From As You Like It, I think. That’s
something I seem to have inherited from this little old man in his shabby
pants: a tendency to produce random literary quotations, from memory, to
fit almost any situation. I don’t do this on purpose; it just happens
to me. The same way it happens to him. Despite the fact that we’ve
rarely had a significant conversation, I know that my father understands
the way I think, probably better than anyone on earth.
“Well, well, well,” he says heartily, opening his arms. Hmm.
This is new. Back when I knew him, my father wasn’t the open-arms type.
But, then, neither was I. I go forward and hug him. It does feel odd, but
I’ve been practicing hugging the people I love for years now, and I
get through it.
“Hello,” I say, and stop there, at a loss for words. I can’t
bring myself to say “Hello, Daddy,” but I don’t know what
else to call him. “Daddy” is the only title by which I and my
seven siblings ever addressed him. “Dad” would sound disrespectfully
casual, “Father” too formal, his given name completely bizarre.
I settle for repeating “Hello,” then gesture toward the easy
chair by the door. “Please, sit down.”
He sits, and I’m startled by another eerie jolt of familiarity: This
man moves just like I do. Nervous as I am, scared to death as I am, there
is something unspeakably poignant about the fact that my posture and carriage
are echoes of his. It’s been a long time since I encountered so many
of my own chromosomes in anyone besides my own children.
“I thought this day would never arrive,” my father says, still
wearing his most cheerful smile. “I thought you’d never come
to your senses.”
He assumes I’ve come to recant. He’s wrong. I’m here for
two reasons: to sew up the loose threads I left hanging when I fled my past
and to make sure, as far as I can, that my father isn’t afraid to die.
If his model of the universe is correct, there must be serious retribution
awaiting him in the afterlife, and in case this belief worries him I want
to tell him I don’t share it. The God to whom I pray is all parts unconditional
love, no part vengeance or retribution. I once read that forgiveness is giving
up all hope of having had a different past, and I reached that point a long
time ago. But forgiving is not the same as obliterating memory. As Santayana
wrote, “Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat
it.” This is something I do not want to happen. Not to my father, and
certainly not to me.
“Oh, I stand by everything I’ve said,” I tell my father
as I sit down on the sofa a few feet away from him. “That hasn’t
changed at all.”
His expression turns from cheer to scorn in a heartbeat. “Ridiculous,” he
says. “Utterly ridiculous.”
Those sky blue eyes flash toward the door and I feel my throat tense with
the fear that he’s noticed it’s slightly ajar, that someone is
listening. He’s used to people observing everything he says and does—so
perhaps his spider senses are tingling. The hotel room where we’re
meeting is decorated in tasteful, neutral earth tones, ridiculously bland
for a battlefield. But that’s what it is, and we both know it. We also
know it isn’t level; my father practically owns the turf and has the
advantages of age, gender bias, family expectation, psychological dominance,
and religious legitimacy. Which is why I’m making sure there are witnesses
to every word we say. Everything. Add secrecy to his other advantages, and
my father will win walking away.
“I know you say it’s ridiculous,” I tell him gently. “We’ve
established that. But there’s a lot of evidence that squares with what
I remember. Something happened.”
“Nothing happened to you,” he says firmly. “Nothing like
that. Never.”
“Well, then, nothing left an awful lot of scars.” He already
knows this. I told him about the scars a decade ago, when I met with him
and my mother in my therapist’s office. “It’s not the kind
of scar tissue a kid gets playing on the jungle gym. Someone put it there.”
“Oh,” says my father with a shrug, “that was the Evil
One.”
I can feel myself blink, the way you do when the eye doctor sends that little
puff of air into your eyes to check for glaucoma. The Evil One? I’ve
heard a rumor that my family of origin thinks I was consorting with the devil
at the age of five, but I never believed they’d actually say such a
thing. Even my family can’t be that crazy, right?
I sit and stare for a moment as my mind frantically tries on several different
interpretations of my father’s statement. Does he actually think I
spent my childhood hanging out with Lucifer? Is the Evil One the name he
has for an aspect of himself? If he’s suffering from a split personality
or psychotic fugue states, is he aware of this intellectually or only at
some dark subconscious level? Is my father a calculated liar, or is he certifiably
insane, or could he actually be empirically correct? I have no idea. My mind
feels like a tar pit. We’ve been talking for less than a minute, and
already I feel the same blend of bewilderment, fear, and self-doubt that
flavored my early years. Wow. You really can go home again.
“The Evil One,” I repeat, squinting at my father, as if that
will make things clearer. “Well, I’m not questioning that.”
He taps the arm of his chair with his fingers. His hands are strong and
squarish, with prominent tendons. Like my hands. Like my children’s
hands. I feel a rush of tenderness and suddenly realize that he probably
thinks I’m recording our conversation in order to turn him over to
the authorities—either legal or (worse) religious. I want to reassure
him I have no such intentions. I have witnesses in place only because that’s
what I was trained to do in controversial situations, where every perception
is clouded by conflicting interests. Later, when my father claims this conversation
didn’t happen the way I will remember it, I’ll be able to check
several sources.
My desperate thirst for data in any area related to my father is a tribute
to his job skills. He’s ostensibly a retired college professor, but
his real life’s work, the area in which he’s built his reputation,
is as an apologist for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, otherwise
known as Mormonism. The Mormon Church, whose headquarters is in Salt Lake
City, Utah, is one of the few major world religions that traces its roots
to recorded history, leaving the claims of its leaders open to factual testing—and
the Latter-day Saint leaders, especially the religion’s founder, Joseph
Smith, have always been fond of making claims.
For instance, Smith taught that the American Indians are the descendants
of a small group of emigrants from Jerusalem, who arrived on the continent
in approximately 600 BC, and wrote their history onto a book of golden plates.
Smith said he was led to these plates, which were buried in New York State,
by an angel named Moroni (rhymes with “the phone eye”) in 1823.
Using a magical pair of spectacles buried along with the plates, Smith said,
he translated the plates, and later published them as the Book of Mormon
(Mormon was one of the original owners and authors of the golden plates).
The problem, from a Latter-day Saint perspective, is that when scholars set
out to test Smith’s version of reality, they tend to bump into a lot
of contradictory evidence (such as the fact that DNA analysis traces Native
American ancestry to Asia rather than to the Middle East). This is the time
for apologists to rush in, like white blood cells attacking a virus, to defend
Joseph Smith and the subsequent Mormon leaders. Nobody does this better than
my father.
In 2002, the year the Winter Olympics were held in Utah, the New Yorker
published an article on the state’s most prominent religion. The reporter
who penned the story, a writer named Lawrence Wright, referred to my father
as “the most venerable scholar in Mormonism, though he is little known
outside of it.” Wright interviewed the venerable scholar about some
problematic aspects of Mormon scripture. Why is it, he asked, that after
decades of archaeological work bent on verifying the Book of Mormon, “not
a single person or place named in it has been shown to exist”?
My father’s official published response, quoted in the New Yorker,
was: “People underestimate the capacity of things to disappear.” Wright
also recorded what my father told him during their interview—comments
tinged, according to Wright, “with some asperity.” I know exactly
the tone Wright meant: a stern, disdainful note my father adopts whenever
his assertions are under attack.
“Well, if it was all pure fiction, who on earth had ever done anything
like that?” my father said. “This is the history of a civilization,
with all its ramifications having to do with plagues and wars. The military
passages are flawless. Could you please tell me any other book like that?”
When I read the New Yorker article, several responses leapt to mind (for
one thing, the “flawless” military passages in the Book of Mormon
record battles waged between enormous populations who herded sheep and goats,
operated mines, smelted metals, and rode wheeled chariots drawn by horses,
none of which existed in North America prior to their introduction from Europe
several centuries after the people described in the Book of Mormon allegedly
arrived). But of course I knew that my father wasn’t actually requesting
input from Lawrence Wright. His response was rhetorical, a question that
really meant the guy should stop asking so damn many questions.
This is the kind of thinking with which I grew up, the style of debate I
took with me when I ventured out of Utah, the conservative-value capital
of America, and off to a non-Mormon university in Cambridge, Massachusetts,
where liberal attitudes are practically manufactured for export to other
population centers. I still remember the immense relief I felt the first
time one of my Harvard professors ripped into a paper I’d written,
pointing out that my logic was circular, my language duplicitous, and my
evidence shadowy. Part of me felt that my skin was being flayed off by sheer
embarrassment, but a much larger part of me was practically screaming with
relief that someone was dealing with reality more or less the way I naturally
did, instead of reinforcing the way I’d been taught to think. “Thank
God!” I remember thinking, though at the time I was an atheist. “Thank
God, thank God, thank God!”
Thus began my love affair with evidence, which has ultimately brought me
here, to a hotel room I have carefully arranged as a kind of psychological
laboratory. Even after ensuring that I’ll have multiple eyewitness
accounts of our conversation, talking with my father still makes me feel
as though my brain is twirling slowly in my head. I’m very grateful
that my cousin Diane is parked next door, and Miranda is curled up in the
closet across the room. I needed this kind of backup to gather enough courage
to meet with my father at all, and though I feel weak and childish, there
is huge comfort in knowing that people who would never hurt either of us
are hearing this strange debate.
“Well, see, Dad,” I say carefully, “I find your reaction
to the scar thing kind of strange.” I notice his eyes widening a little,
perhaps because I’m openly disagreeing with him, perhaps because I
called him Dad. This suddenly feels right. It feels like rebellion. It’s
the harshest, most disrespectful word I’ve ever deliberately said to
him.
“If one of my daughters turned up with a lot of weird scars,” I
go on, enjoying the giddy, reckless feeling of saying what I actually think, “I
wouldn’t just blame the Evil One and drop the subject. I would want
to find out what had happened to her.”
“Nothing happened.” My father’s voice carries the ring
of absolute assurance, absolute finality, that has made him a safe haven
for so many Mormons whose faith is getting a little wobbly. The debate is
resolved, the balcony is closed, the fat lady has sung, the last dog is hung,
that’s all she wrote.
This dead-certain tone is characteristic of many deeply religious folk,
but Mormons are trained to use it about as thoroughly as any group of people
I’ve ever known. As soon as they can talk, Mormon toddlers are held
up to microphones in church meetings, lisping to hundreds of onlookers the
words their parents whisper in their ears: “I know the Church is true.
I know that Joseph Smith was a true prophet. I know our president is God’s
prophet on the earth. I know these things beyond a shadow of a doubt.”
Mormons tend to know a whopping lot of stuff beyond a shadow of a doubt.
I envy them. My whole life is shadowed by doubt. The only conviction I embrace
absolutely is this: whatever I believe, I may be wrong.
For a moment, looking at the stern pioneer conviction on my father’s
handsome face, I’m so disoriented that I feel my brain twirling even
faster—not in agreement but in familiar hopelessness, in the sickening
conviction that no one will ever take my word over his. Everything seems
to slither right off the hard drive in my head. He’s right: People
underestimate the capacity of things to disappear. At the moment, I can’t
even remember the chain of events that took me out of Mormonism, that have
made me “a hiss and a byword” not only to my father, not only
to my family, but to an entire religion.
Then I remember Miranda and Diane, just a few feet away, and my vision seems
to clear. The whole thing comes back to me, the journey that has taken me
out of religion and into faith. I recall its horror and beauty, the enormity
of the things I have lost and the incalculable preciousness of the things
I’ve gained. I wouldn’t give up the journey, not a moment of
it. On the other hand, I have no desire to live it again. If Santayana is
right, this means I must be willing to remember the whole story. I close
my eyes, take a deep breath, and force myself to go back to the beginning.
Copyright © 2005 by Martha Beck. Excerpted by
permission of Crown, a division of Random House. All rights reserved. No
part of this
excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from
the publisher.
The paperback edition of Leaving the Saints: How
I Lost the Mormons and Found My Faith is published by Three Rivers
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