Chapter Excerpt
The Virtue of Heresy
:
Travels on the Margins of Christianity
By Patricia Hampl
Copyrighted material
From Chapter 1
It begins—an afternoon in late July probably—under the shade of a beechnut tree. The tree belongs to Mr. Kinney, the shade is ours. The year is 1953 because the Magnavox has just been delivered from McGowan’s. It is not only for watching Lucy, my mother says anxiously, already mistrusting it. “You’re seeing history.” She points to the first smudged image she allows us to see—the Koreans and the Americans signing their names in a big ledger-book. “Peace,” she says, settling in for an afternoon with history, cigs and the chipped blue cloisonné ashtray at hand.
History, it turns out, is boring. The names drone on from the glass-faced box, uniformed men, one after another, signing a big book at an ornate table, each one handing a dip pen to the next. I come here instead, outside to the back yard where the feathers of the beechnut sway and tilt. Their green filigree patterns the sky, it filters light on my face, and the grass cools my back. It is hard (the ground) and yet also soft, lofty (the sponge of grass). I’ve closed my eyes. Departed from one world into this other, better one, where there is much to see. Mr. Kinney, for starters.
Mr Kinney is a widower. His wife has been dead forever, my mother says. As a result and because he has money, he has a housekeeper. What is her name? Gone now, gone, but not her face which is pinched and pale and eternal. She does not like me. She always wears an apron and her designation—housekeeper—makes her slightly unreal. And sinister. Who has a housekeeper? Not normal people. Only Mr. Kinney, a widower without children but with money.
He sits in his glassed-in sun porch before dinner, drinking whiskey in a lowball glass. He drinks it after dinner too. He reads, his old head glowing under the floor lamp. He has decided against a television set, he has told my father who has inquired if, with the windows open in summer, the sound carries. We all notice the hollow racket of the laugh track, its unpleasant bark, nothing like real laughing. Mr. Kinney has decided to stick with books. He prefers the ball game on the radio. In the summer I hear—I think I hear—the metallic clink of the ice in his glass.
But maybe I make that up. It’s part of what I’m watching out here. When you close your eyes and do nothing that’s what happens: you see and hear all sorts of things you didn’t notice before, but they must have been there. They’re real, more real than most things, definitely more real than history in the living room where my mother sits in her Herbert Tareyton cloud, tapping her cig against the little saucer of the cloisonné ashtray.
Now, here, they come out, the real things. They’re mine. Or I belong to them. Anyway, they companion me. Under the shade of the beechnut, though flat on my back, I’m floating, hovering over it all, over the disapproving face of Mr. Kinney’s housekeeper, above Mr. Kinney himself, who swirls his oily drink alone in his sun porch night after night during my endless girlhood.
Ten years later, looking over from the Kinney sun porch to ours, Mr. Kinney’s housekeeper glimpses me roiling around on the couch with my first boyfriend and reports to my grandmother, who conveys this intelligence to my mother. She had a hippy boy out there. The vindicated face of a tattling teacher’s pet. Though at seven I don’t yet know the future holds boyfriends and clasping and kissing, I already recognize hers as the aggrieved face of the unloved. That sharp eye on the prowl, passing from the back door to the trash can with her bag of refuse, frowning at me lolling under the shade of Mr. Kinney’s beechnut tree. She recognizes me too: her natural enemy, a girl up to no good, lazing her days away. A time waster.
A daydreamer. Which is a problem: next year we will go to First Confession. We have reached the Age of Reason and now know the difference between Good and Evil. Sister has given us the buff-colored Baltimore Catechism and directed us to a helpful “Examination of Conscience” at the back to help us prepare. Each of the Ten Commandments is there with a list of possible sins. I have only located Disobedience (4) and Lying (8) as my territory. And then I reach the combined list of sins for 9 and 10. There, unbelievably, is the word— “Daydreaming.”
I pause—but so briefly. Daydreaming? This sin I must refuse. How can I say I believe I will be damned for engaging in that luscious sensation of lift-off. I cannot. I must simply decide—I do decide, it instantly becomes an article of faith—that a higher power is at work here, a power well beyond the artless tallies of The Baltimore Catechism. It resides within me, this certainty, just as I’ve been taught that conscience itself lives within. It is the deepest dogma of my arcane and baroque faith with its rules and regs, its impossible angelic spinners perched on the heads of pins. Boys and girls, you alone know the truth of your conscience. Listen to it. What’s inside is what’s real—this is faith, which is why it is certainty. Even Sisters says.
I throw my lot with the imagination which I already sense doesn’t make things up. The imagination just sees what’s there and says what it sees. Claims things, twirls them around, takes a good look. Possesses them. Makes something of nothing or of very little. The littler the better. Daydreaming. The imagination. I couldn’t care less what it’s called. But surely this is faith, this buoyancy, the way the mind leaves the plain old planet, rising out of itself into the blue sky of thought.
I have nothing to confess. I am guiltless, I who will be reminded all my adult life, whenever I express regret about anything, that it’s just my old Catholic guilt rising up again. Don’t they see, there never was any guilt? Not from this moment. It abides, the moment whose meaning I’m trying to retrieve and examine, an April afternoon on the hard edge of a Minnesota spring, nothing much blooming yet. Sister stands before us in the frank certainty of her black-and-white garment, we inventory our sins, each at our desks examining our consciences.
I stare at the deliciously treacherous word in the little book. Daydreaming. It offers a balloon ride out of dogma, out of the black-and-white framework of St Luke’s parish. It’s not the opposite of my conscience. It is my conscience. It is where God has placed me, where I’m supposed to be.
Though I don’t know it yet, this is the life of the mind. It is where I’ll spend the rest of my days.
Patricia Hampl
Patricia Hampl’s memoirs include A Romantic Education (Norton, 1999), about her Czech heritage and Virgin Time (Random House, 1993), about her Catholic upbringing and an inquiry into contemplative life. In 2000 her collection of essays about memory and autobiography, I Could Tell You Stories (Norton, 1999), was a finalist in the National Book Critics Circle Award in General Nonfiction.
Hampl is Regents' Professor and McKnight Distinguished Professor at the University of Minnesota where she teaches creative writing. She is also on the permanent faculty of The Prague Summer Program. Hampl is currently working on The Virtue of Heresy: Travels on the Margins of Christianity.