Gravity's Revolt: Part Three: Part Three

GRAVITY’S

REVOLT

Part Three

William Guy

Copyright © 2000 by William Guy.

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Contents

INTERLUDE

VINNIE AND DR. BUTTRICK

CHAPTER FIVE

INTERLUDE

EDIE

For G., without whom absolutely nothing

INTERLUDE

VINNIE AND DR. BUTTRICK

It is of course Vinnie who ought to be writing this section, I’ve even asked her several times, in something close to seriousness, if she’d be willing to do so, i.e. fill in for me, become my collaboratrix—she has always declined my offer or my request—I can understand her disinclination to do my work for me, after all she doesn’t ask me to do her paintings for her (not that I could), but when (not quite with pad and pencil in hand) I’ve attempted more or less to interview her for what I am now intending to write, even then she hasn’t cooperated very much, she’s had no answers to my questions, she says she doesn’t or can’t remember, so that, left high and dry on the shoal of my own inadequate devices and of my own inadequate materials, I will have to do my best to depict, as I understood it, the relationship which evolved between her and Dr. Buttrick—

I think it might behoove me to begin back in (of all places) the year 1933, in the summer of that year, with Dr. Buttrick embarked upon the vacation between his second and his third year at Western Seminary and about to begin his job (for no pay other than his room and board) as the summer student assistant pastor at a Presbyterian church in East Liverpool, Ohio, a town which I have only been in once—Vinnie and I went there to visit a great aunt of mine who was 97 at the time, my mother had urged me in a letter to pay her this visit, she was the last surviving member of my grandparents’ generation, she had been married to one of my grandfather’s brothers, I had never really known this woman well,

I remembered her vaguely from family reunions I went to in my youth when a fair number of her coevals were still alive—the visit turned out to be a great success from a number of standpoints, it was fun to get to know at however late a date (quite near the end in fact) this great-aunt of mine, her stories of the old days amused and informed me, I learned a lot about my family from her, heard stories of my grandparents in their youth—it was also interesting for Vinnie to visit Liverpool (the locals’ name for it) inasmuch as it or towns like it along the Ohio River had inspired Charles Burchfield, a painter she has always had a great interest in, it was satisfying for her to get a look at Burchfield’s turf, at the eighty-or- so-year-old buildings of Liverpool’s main street, its business district, at the kinds of buildings which Burchfield liked to depict under the most depressing circumstances imaginable, in a squall of muddy looking sleet at three thirty on a December afternoon say, and Liverpool’s echt Middle American clapboard and brick houses back from the time when couples sang and played duets—

The town we saw in 1973 couldn’t have differed too much from the town in which, on a hot day near the end of June of 1933, the sun smiting the back of the blue suit which he had been ill-advised enough to wear given the temperature, the rail-thin young Dr. Buttrick had arrived toting his beat- up grips from the train—having deposited them in the room of the boarding- house which he was going to live in that summer, he had gone off immediately to pay a call at the house of Dr. Latimer, the pastor for whom he was going to be working, and whom he had not yet met, only to discover that neither the pastor nor his wife was at home—only their daughter was, she had emerged, when Dr. Buttrick had rapped on the screen door, from the shadowy cool depths of the rather cavernous old manse carrying an infant in her arms—this young woman had invited Dr. Buttrick to take a seat on the front porch until her parents returned—they were out visiting sick parishioners, as they often did in the afternoon—the daughter had offered to make Dr. Buttrick some iced tea or lemonade, which offer he had declined despite feeling wilted from his journey and from the heat—he had in fact not stayed around long, preferring to come back some other time, but he had made it a point, when he had returned to the boardinghouse, to ask his landlady who exactly the young woman was whom he had talked with—strangely enough, from having first felt an intense jealousy at her for having gone off and gotten married before he’d ever even known her, Dr. Buttrick had passed to a sort of prophetic conviction that the minister’s daughter was in fact not married and that the baby she was holding was someone else’s—his landlady had been able to confirm this strange conviction: the young woman Dr. Buttrick had met was Margaret Latimer, the mother of the baby was Margaret’s sister Elizabeth, who had died giving birth to it, Liverpool still hadn’t recovered from the tragedy of that death— Telling us this story forty or so years later, Dr. Buttrick was of course able to add a lot to what he had learned this day, about Elizabeth especially—Elizabeth Latimer had been the bright particular star of Liverpool—she had been beautiful evidently from her pictures, though no more beautiful than Margaret Dr. Buttrick had felt—he had shown us pictures of the two girls growing up and even he was not sure at that point who was who, they looked so much alike—as I remember the pictures, a sort of otherworldly, vaguely Oriental solemnity had informed the features of both sisters, high cheekbones, somewhat slanty and strangely beguiling eyes—dark hair—Elizabeth was older and had perhaps been the dominant sibling (as Daphne dominated Becky), she had been an excellent pianist and an outstanding student—she had also been a poet, Dr. Buttrick showed us the then yellowing notebooks she had filled with her poems, I read them, I was stunned—not that they were of themselves quite at a level to outlive the gilded monuments of princes since in sounding about for her own voice, Elizabeth had fallen back perhaps a little too often on commonplace phrasings and forms, she had not always consummated some rather brave poetic beginnings, but still her promise had been considerable, East Liverpool had been harboring not a mute, inglorious but rather an embryonic Milton perhaps, till came the blind fury with the abhorred shears—there were so many things about Elizabeth that stayed with both Vinnie and me, that haunted us, not the least of which was her own uncanny premonition of her death: a week or so before the baby whom Dr. Buttrick had seen in Margaret’s arms had been born, Elizabeth had turned to Margaret and said with no apparent emotion: One out of every seven women who have babies die in childbirth—I’m that one—the heart stops at the thought of someone sensing her own demise this way—after Elizabeth’s death her distraught husband had asked Margaret if she would marry him and be the mother of Elizabeth’s child— Margaret had not wanted to succeed her sister in this fashion, had been unable to do so—for his part the husband had felt unable to remain in a place where he had suffered such a catastrophe—the Latimers, Margaret’s parents, had agreed to take care of the baby while he went west to try to set himself up in business with some relatives he had out there—eventually he did succeed in setting up some kind of store, his son went out to live with him in time, the father later re-married—it says something to me about the kind of people the Buttricks were that when this son of Elizabeth’s grew up and decided to study for the ministry at Western Seminary, the Buttricks insisted that he live with them, he became like another child to them—but that was twenty some odd years later of course, the year is still now 1933—

Having learned quite a lot about the Latimer family before he’d even met most of them, Dr. Buttrick had been looking forward to deepening his acquaintance with all of them, especially Margaret, that summer—therefore his dismay must have been great the next day when Dr. Latimer spoke of just having put his wife, Margaret, and the baby on a train heading for Michigan, where they were going to spend the summer with Mrs. Latimer’s family—the three did not stay away for quite the whole summer, they returned about a week before Dr. Buttrick had to leave to resume his studies at Western, and that week was enough time for Dr. Buttrick to confirm his prophetic insight, i.e. to become sure that Margaret was the woman he wanted to marry, but then there were obstacles to that ambition, the main one being that Margaret was all but engaged to one of her fellow students at Transylvania College—about this particular aspect of her life Dr. Buttrick might have been content to remain a little bit fuzzily informed, but here as in every other informational category his loquacious landlady was to say the least forthcoming—actually, the man whose ring Margaret was if not wearing then just about ready to put on (the landlady’s words) had just graduated from Transylvania and was bound for graduate school in philosophy at the University of Chicago, Dr. Buttrick had just missed him, he had spent about a week as a guest of the Latimers before Dr. Buttrick had arrived in town, Dr. Buttrick’s ever helpful landlady had in fact met him at the social hour after church the one Sunday he’d been in town, she had described him as a nice looking fellow—here was a dilemma indeed for Dr. Buttrick, his rival’s tactical advantages, his rival’s insurmountable lead, assuming that Dr. Buttrick could even consider such a latecomer as himself a candidate for the prize of Mar- garet—nevertheless, before leaving Liverpool for the summer, Dr. Buttrick had asked Margaret if he could write letters to her once they had both returned to school—Margaret had said that he could, and he did, he bombarded her with letters, he wrote one every day, proving among other things that he could move a pen across a page if properly motivated—knowing about his lifelong aversion to the physical act of writing, I had even expressed some disbelief when he had described this year-long feat of scribbling, but he assured me that it was true—he called this year of letter writing his leap of faith, he chose the Kierkegaardian phrase advisedly—he said that Kierkegaard had just begun to interest him at this point during his last year at Western even though at that time access to his oeuvre wasn’t all that easy to come by, one often had remain satisfied with mere descriptions of it, almost none of it had been translated into English—still, from what he knew of his work in filtered down form, Dr. Buttrick thought of Kierkegaard as his tutelary genius for that year in regard to his chances with Margaret—the man to whom Margaret had been all but engaged had been the absolute star student at Transylvania, an intellect, an athlete, a debater, the president of all the prestigious student organi- zations—Dr. Buttrick had felt that he had almost no chance of persuading Margaret to marry a stumblebum like him instead of a man of such myriad accomplishments, and yet he made the effort anyway, he made the wager against all odds—

It would be interesting to know the mind of Margaret at this point—one assumes that she received letters from Dr. Buttrick’s rival during this year as well as the heap she was receiving from Dr. Buttrick—the man whom she did not marry went on to have an outstanding career as a philosophy professor, he wrote a number of books and articles (all of which Dr. Buttrick had read, all of which, in telling us the story of his courtship, he had praised highly as first rate pieces)—I have no reason to suspect that he was any less remarkable, any less versatile than Dr. Buttrick made him out to be—all the more reason then to admire Margaret’s decision, her discerning the rarer (should we perhaps call them the unprepossessing Pauline?) virtues of a Dr. Buttrick and preferring them to the conspicuous virtues of her other suitor—she got engaged to Dr. Buttrick the following summer, i.e. of 1934—Dr. Buttrick had graduated from Western and had gotten himself a paying job this time for the following year as the assistant pastor of a church up in Franklin, Pa.—his plan was to work at this job for one year and save up enough money to begin work on a doctorate the following year at Hartford Seminary, to which he’d been accepted— before beginning this job, he had visited Liverpool again and had asked Margaret to marry him, and she had graciously accepted— the stress on the word graciously was Dr. Buttrick’s in telling us this story, in using it he meant that Margaret’s acceptance of him felt like the unmerited outpouring of a divine gift upon him, it blinded him, he could not really believe it and yet (on a practical level) he had hurried off to the jewelry store to buy Margaret a ring that very day before the store closed—somehow this almost heartbreaking picture of Dr. Buttrick hurrying along the streets of

East Liverpool with that slightly shambling walk of his (the clownish knight of holiness again), of Dr. Buttrick worrying that if he didn’t move quickly enough Margaret might change her mind, is the quintessence of that divine foolishness of his which so endeared this same man to us forty years later—

Dr. Buttrick and Margaret set their marriage date for the following summer, Dr. Buttrick worked the one year at his job in Franklin, saving just about every penny he made—the year in Franklin turned out to be a very instructive one for him he felt in that it showed him how unfit he probably was for a lifetime’s work in a parish, he was too impatient, too agitated, too much of an agitator at least in his youth and at least in such a hidebound, somewhat xenophobic atmosphere—he had expected to light theological bonfires under everyone (shades of me forty years later at Old Eighth), but he had been defeated by the damp straw of the townfolks’ stolidity, by the congregational material he had to work with—it was better for him that he had spent most of his professional life in a seminary where there was some sort of scope for his radical vision, though he was glad to have returned to parish ministry at least at the end of his career at Old Eighth, it gave him a feeling of closure—

Dr. Buttrick completed his assistant pastoral duties in Franklin early in July of 1935—before returning to his parents’ house in Little Washington to prepare for his wedding, which was set for early August, he attended a conference at Allegheny College in Meadville, Pa. on social issues confronting the Church—the conference was excellent, it had been as formative for his whole career in a positive way as the experience in Franklin had been formative in a negative way, many interesting and illustrious people had been present, most notably Norman Thomas, who had given one of the major addresses and to whom Dr. Buttrick had gotten to talk quite a bit at odd hours during the activities in Meadville—he had also gotten to meet and to exchange ideas with people his own age who’d been engaged like him in trying to puzzle out priorities and imperatives for the Church in the midst of social ruin—one of these people his own age had been Prudence Armitage—forty years after the fact Dr. Buttrick said he could still remember the thrill it had been for him just to meet a descendent of the great Armitage family which had produced so many great names in Christian scholarship, so many great books which Dr. Buttrick had read, especially those written on church history by Prudence’s grandfather and those on the New Testament written by her father—Prudence or Pru as she preferred to be called (there was a sort of wild irony in the full form of her name as will be seen, in her case Gertrude Stein’s idea that a name is everything in fixing a person’s character did not seem to apply or the wires had gotten crossed and the name had resulted in opposite rather than apposite character traits) struck Dr. Buttrick as in every way worthy of her great forebears— she had graduated from Bryn Mawr College with a double major, classics and philosophy, and had spent several years in Germany studying further in those two fields, she had been on archaeological digs in Greece and Palestine—Dr. Buttrick had not been able to figure out at first why she was attending this conference since she had let him know right away how little she respected the faith which her fathers had labored so arduously and so impressively to buttress—although Pru never admitted to such a motive, Dr. Buttrick finally concluded that she had come to the conference to act as a sort of self-appointed burr under Christianity’s saddle, that unable either to adopt Christianity or to fully renounce it, fascinated by it, she had come to the conference to goad Christianity on, to get it out of its safe and respectable bailiwicks, the stuffy church parlors and the libraries, and out into the realm of action on the streets, atop the barricades where she felt it belonged—Pru had reminded Dr. Buttrick of Delacroix’s painting of Liberty (in more ways than one ultimately), there was something almost furious and desperate about her dealings with the church, something which had to do with her feelings toward her father, whom she seemed to revere and to revile alternately—the church seemed to represent her father for her and she was furious at her father for having so long remained impassive, a sort of Deus absconditus—she was looking for a father who would get out and overturn the tables of the money-changers—

Dr. Buttrick said that up until that time he had never met anyone else like Pru—she was his match if not his superior as far as learning went, the two of them engaged in long philological and philosophical arguments over almost every meal during the conference—he had in fact found the focus of his days at Meadville migrating from the topics of the conference toward the three meals which he and Pru would eat together in the cafeteria although he finally decided that the concerns of the conference and the concerns of all his conversations with Pru were maybe not that different inasmuch as by battering both his head and his heart with her vision of what the church and through it the world ought to be, Pru was really only giving him an intenser version of the challenge which he had hoped to receive in attending the conference—she was the strength of the conference squeezed into one redoubtable wrecker’s ball—

Although she had been eating all her meals at the campus cafeteria, Pru hadn’t actually been living in one of the dormitories like most of the other delegates—she had instead been staying (no doubt in greater comfort) at the house of an Allegheny College classics professor, an old friend and college classmate of her father’s whom she herself had also known (along with his wife and his children) from one of the digs she’d been on—the last night of the conference Pru had asked Dr. Buttrick if he’d like to walk her back to this professor’s house—aware of an acceleration of the current which their acquaintance had so far constituted but unable (or unwilling) to descry any real rapids up ahead, Dr. Buttrick had acceded to Pru’s request for an escort, expecting that as an ancillary benefit of this excursion he’d get to meet the Allegheny classics professor, whose name he was familiar with from coming across it in journals—it came as something of a surprise, when they had reached this man’s house, to be told by Pru that the professor and his family were away on vacation, that Pru had been staying at their house by herself, but Dr. Buttrick had managed to factor this new situation in without too much anxiety—he accepted Pru’s invitation to come in for a moment—he assumed that he and she would talk for awhile and that he would then return to his room in the dorm—their talk had had to wait awhile since Pru had given him a concert first—in addition to being so learned, she too, like Margaret’s sister Elizabeth, was an accomplished pianist, she had bound Dr. Buttrick in a kind of spell, he said, by her intense playing first of some Bach partitas and then of Chopin—at the end of this concert Pru had declared that they needed refreshments, she had gone out to the kitchen to prepare these—Dr. Buttrick had remained behind in the living room to look through the professor’s amazing collection of books, the latest German editions of all the major and minor Greek and Latin authors—when Pru returned, he was maybe a little bit shocked (for the first time) to find that she was offering him a glass of wine—he did not drink alcohol, he declined the wine, but he did partake of the bread and cheese which she had brought out while the two of them desultorily discussed the speeches they had heard that day, which Pru dismantled as only she could dismantle anything and everything— in the meantime Pru had now drunk slowly but fairly steadily both the glasses of wine which she had brought back from the kitchen—not that this kind of intake really altered her behavior except that it seemed to elicit two rather remarkable scarlet circles, one on each of Pru’s two creamy-colored cheeks—

It was at this point, I remember, when Dr. Buttrick was telling us this story one day over at his house, that vinnie had asked him what Pru had looked like—Dr. Buttrick said that to picture her we needed to think of some of the photos that one could find in recent biographies of the young Eleanor Roosevelt, those pictures in which Eleanor looked rather beautiful as opposed to the ones in which she look rather homely—Pru had looked a lot like the swan Eleanor, not the ugly duckling, she had the same kind of long neck, the same kind of brown hair piled up on her head, she had had beautiful white skin which she was always very careful to keep shaded from the sun (how she had accomplished this feat on digs was somewhat hard to imagine)—the rimless glasses she wore had given her a somewhat stern appearance, the kind of appearance or look which it had interested Dr. Buttrick to see making a comeback among the hippies and other radical women of recent times, women in whom and of whom their beauty seems mainly to be a function of their intelligence, missionary women (i.e. women with a mission)—

Having disposed of the wine and of the speakers for that day, Pru now suggested a change of subject although without skipping a beat, as though the new subject she was introducing was commensurate with the others—it was the unflustered way she’d asked her next question which he had never forgotten—she had said I think people should be able to enjoy their bodies, don’t you and then begun to take her clothes off in the same calm way she had drunk her wine—Dr. Buttrick said that there seemed to be no deterring her, no pleas of his had had any effect—before long, toward the back of the living room, in the dark beside the piano, she was standing naked before him—her body was as beautiful and as voluptuous as it was possible to imagine a body’s ever being, its proportions seemed to be exactly those of the Venus de Milo, he had scarcely been able to believe what he was behold- ing—he had also been unable to turn his eyes away from such a mysterium tremendum et fascinans—Pru had dared him, she had taunted him to take his own clothes off—sweating profusely and scarcely able to speak from confusion, his mouth now parched, he had somehow begged off from doing so, and gotten himself away from the house uncaught though hardly unscathed—

The effect on Pru of such self-control as he had displayed was rather surprising to Dr. Buttrick: it seemed paradoxically to make Pru fall so madly in love with him that for awhile he feared he might not be able to shake her off—in the form of letters she pursued him back to Little Washington after the conference was over, even his confession that he was about to get married (a fact which he had not divulged to Pru, the one bit of disingenuous- ness, he felt, in his dealings with her) did not discourage her from pursuing him, her passion only roared more mightily—in response to (and in disdain of) his confession of betrothal, she posited a sort of metaphysical priority in her claim upon his person, arguing that her love for him abrogated all previous vows which either one of them might have made—vinnie asked Dr. Buttrick what had become of those impassioned letters Pru had sent—Dr. Buttrick said he had burnt each letter after reading it, afraid of leaving evidence around, he’d even made sure that he intercepted the mail every day once it became clear what a spate of letters he was in for from Pru, he didn’t want his parents wondering who this other woman was whom he was corresponding with on the brink of his wedding, the whole thing had become a sort of nightmare for him, he had been sure that it was going to cause the break-up of his marriage, he had told Pru nothing about Margaret even though as his self-styled soul-mate Pru had demanded a complete description as hers by right, but he would wake up in the middle of the night convinced that Pru had somehow managed to find out about Margaret anyway, that Pru would be turning up on the Latimers’ front porch in Liverpool, confronting Margaret with her (Pru’s) prior metaphysical claim—the cessation of the spate of letters from Pru, the sudden great calm which set in a few days before the actual marriage date struck him as, if anything, more ominous, he feared the hatching of some catastrophic scheme, some deus ex machina for the day of his wedding, Pru denouncing him from the belfry or from the balcony at that idiotic vestigial moment in the marriage ceremony, that opening for someone like Pru when objectors were invited to come forth and state their cases or hold their peace ever thereafter—

The silence, though, the calm had proved definitive, Pru had spent her fury evidently, though the end of any further words from her continued to worry Dr. Buttrick almost as much as the earlier volubility had, he worried that Pru, who at some stage of her educational career had written a dissertation on sappho, might now emulate the great Lesbian artist in a suicidal love-leap—he received reassurance at least on this point in time since he came upon articles by Pru in certain quarterlies he read, some of these articles attacking what Pru referred to as the religious impulse— the notes on the contributors to these quarterlies always described Pru as professing philosophy at some college or other, where she was no doubt also agitating her environment—for awhile Pru continued moving, then finally articles (more strictly philosophic, less polemical) began to appear signed by Prudence Armitage plus her married name, whatever that was, I can’t remember it—

There is a codicil to this story—one September in the 1960’s (Dr. Buttrick had not been able to remember the exact year), at the end of a talk he had given to the Society of Biblical Literature at a meeting in New York, a young man, a minister, had come up to him and said that he was Pru’s son—he said that he had been visiting his mother a week or two before out in Minnesota or some place and had been carrying in his suitcase the program for the upcoming Biblical conference—his mother had looked the program over and been amazed to see Dr. Buttrick listed as one of the speakers, she had commissioned her son to see if it was the same Dr. Buttrick she had once known—the amazement had been no less for Dr. Buttrick of course, first just at the thought that this was Pru’s son standing before him, but even more at the thought that Pru’s son had become a minister (though as a return to his roots as it were, to his family tradition, and as a needed way to set himself off from his rather formidable mother, this decision had in time come to make rather more sense, seem more plausible to Dr. Buttrick), but most of all, finally, at the message that Pru had asked her son to deliver if he met Dr. Buttrick and if it was the right Dr. Buttrick, that message being one of thanks to Dr. Buttrick for all he’d done for her at a difficult moment in her life, a message no less cryptic than, as tough to decipher in fact as a communication from the Delphic oracle he felt—

Now a reader may have wondered why I’ve been telling this story except for its own intrinsic interest perhaps—

The first answer would be that telling it is my delivery on a promise which I made many pages back when I postponed explaining what Dr. Buttrick had meant when, over the phone, in response to Vinnie’s blasting my infidelity (which at that point was not even consummate yet) by saying that Dr. Buttrick would never have treated his wife in such a fashion, Dr. Buttrick had told her not to feel so sure that she knew what he would or would not have done—I related how Dr. Buttrick had declined to elaborate on his remark at the time since he had wanted to stay focused on the subject of how vinnie was feeling about me, but vinnie had not forgotten to pursue him soon thereafter with her questions— it was her tenacity along this line which had elicited the first telling of the Pru story, though there had been several others, the subject had interested both of us, we had asked for elaborations— vinnie had actually been quite contemptuous of the comparison which Dr. Buttrick had wanted to make between the infidelity which he claimed to have committed and the infidelity I had committed, she claimed that Dr. Buttrick hadn’t done anything in the case of Pru’s attempt to seduce him whereas I had done a great deal in regard to Becky, but Dr. Buttrick had insisted that he had in some sense broken his vows to Margaret by letting another woman undress in front of him and thereby introduce him to the mysteries of the female body, he had felt that that privilege, that revelation should have been Margaret’s to grant—it was in this conversation or in some others that followed from it that vinnie had grilled Dr. Buttrick hard on whether or not he had ever strayed with other women, all those women he’d counseled for instance, those women pouring their souls out and no doubt falling in love with him too—he had evidently not strayed,