Crazy for God Read online

  When Mom’s parents had come back to America in 1919, it was meant to just be for a one-year furlough. But my Mom’s mother had a heart condition that prevented her from returning to China. Mom’s parents lamented this and argued with the China Inland Mission board, who made that decision.

  When Mom got to America, she says that she felt like a displaced person, certainly not Chinese but not American either. My mother’s memories of her early childhood are remarkably vivid, even at ninety-two when she has forgotten so much else. Mom remembers arguing with children who knew she had lived in China, and who would taunt her with the ditty “Chinkychinky Chinaman sitting on a fence, trying to make a dollar out of fifteen cents!” Mom would counter: “And he could, too!”

  Mom pined for the life in the Chinese compound, at least as she thought she remembered it. Perhaps that longing shaped her fierce desire to found her own mission to recreate something her family had lost—that golden childhood time just beyond reach. In Mother’s nostalgic memories, life in China became a sacred time for her. Mom recalled life in a compound filled with friendly Chinese converts, the “needy” Chinese who came to her parents. Her memories were so vivid that at age eighty-three, Mom even wrote a lovely children’s book about her life in the compound, Mei Fuh—Memories from China.

  Mom’s older sisters Janet and Elsa had been dumped in mission boarding schools and hardly saw their parents until they moved back to America as young teens. A few years after returning home, Aunt Janet joined the Communist Party. Later, Aunt Elsa married a mental patient who tried to murder her. Janet left the Communists and hooked up with the Closed Plymouth Brethren, a sect so “separated” from the world that she stopped sleeping with her husband. And as the sect got crazier, she went right along with them, stopped “fellowshipping” with her two sons, wouldn’t eat in the same room, and finally moved out, because she couldn’t even be under the same roof as her family of “unbelievers.” Meanwhile, Aunt Elsa’s husband Ralph mistook her for a vulture and shot at her. (He missed.)

  Jessie, my mother’s mother, had been married and widowed. Mom told me that her mother said her first marriage was the only time she was in love, that she was fond of my mother’s father, my grandfather George Seville, but nothing more. I think my mother’s tremendous passion for life, for anything she did, came from a rebellion against her genteel parents’ lukewarm relationship. Perhaps Mom was determined to be hot where her parents were cool.

  Compared to Aunt Janet, my mother was sane. Compared to Aunt Elsa, she was lucky.

  When she was a teen Mom used to sneak out to dance. Mom’s professor father and blueblood mother were genteel to a fault and easily fooled by their daughter, whom they spoiled. Her dad made a point of always serving her as if she was an honored guest. Pictures of Mom when she was little show her exquisitely dressed and always posing, dramatically and with a secure sense of her own extrovert charm.

  My mother was raised as a devout fundamentalist Christian. But her parents’ version of fundamentalism was an educated and cultured fundamentalism. They read the Bible and believed it was literally true in every detail. But they also spoke several languages, and Bible reading was accompanied by plenty of P. G. Wodehouse, chunks of recited Shakespeare, funny limericks, amusing puns, and a deep interest in classical music and art.

  Mom was a “Mediterranean” beauty with dark eyes, a softly rounded nose, high cheekbones, and long waist-length black hair that she wore up in a bun. She was not tall, but her figure was perfect. She may have been partly Jewish.

  There was a family theory about her maiden name Seville. Mom’s father’s people came to America from England in the early nineteenth century. (Her mother’s people came over on the second voyage of the Mayflower.) It was thought that George Seville’s family may have been Jewish. There was a Seville family connection to Scotland. When the Spanish Roman Catholics were persecuting Jews, they made them take last names, and the Jews took the names of their cities. Then Spaniards were wrecked on the Scottish coast after the defeat of the Armada. And so—as our family theory went—maybe one of Mom’s ancestors was one of those Spanish/Scottish Jews. That would have suited Mom perfectly. She loved all things Jewish and in the 1970s wrote a book—Christianity Is Jewish.

  Once, when my mother was in her late sixties, I saw a man come up to her on an airplane and ask her if she was Audrey Hepburn. My mother didn’t really look like Ms. Hepburn, but she was so beautiful, and exuded such energy, that people assumed she had to be somebody.

  Mom was very aware that she was special. She would, from time to time, talk about what could have been, what she could have done if she had had less-strict parents, what she might have been if she hadn’t married Dad. What if she had finished college instead of dropping out to marry my father to work and put him through seminary? What if she had married money? “There were lots of wealthy and cultured young men, and not so young too, who wanted to have me.”

  Mom lived her life in tension between her unrealized ambition to be recognized for something important, refined, and cultured and her belief that God had called her to do Christian work that required her to sacrifice herself, not least her image of who she really felt she was when the cultural elites she admired, or at least envied, mocked fundamentalism.

  Mom sometimes stamped her foot (literally) if H. L. Mencken’s name was mentioned. And she would say of his anti-fundamentalist satires: “But we’re not like that! He would never have written those horrible things if he had ever met me!”

  My mother loved culture. I don’t know if this was because she loved books, art, and music for their own sake, or if this was part of her desire to not be mistaken for “just some fundamentalist” or “one of those American Christians,” as she sometimes called other believers.

  When we went on our vacations to Italy, Mom brought books and read out loud to us on the beach, in our rooms, even at dinner. Bertie Wooster, Huck Finn, Shylock, Aslan, Peter, Susan, and Lucy, not to mention Odysseus, Prince Caspian, or the Little Prince, got tangled up in many a Mediterranean sunset, accompanied us up to Mom and Dad’s bedroom, then lurked in the shadows as we sprawled on my parents’ bed for “just one more chapter, please, Mom!” before sleep.

  My mother was a great and expressive actress and read better out loud than anyone I’ve heard since. Every book she read lived. And Mom never said so specifically, but it was clear that reading was a necessity, not a luxury.

  When Mom and Dad traveled to England, Mom would visit Blackwell’s Children’s Book Shop and come home laden with Penguin and Puffin paperbacks. And since those included everything written by such luminary children’s authors as E. Nesbitt, who set her stories in Victorian England, I grew up knowing more about the monarchy, the difference between a scullery and parlor maid, hackney cabs, and how to make and serve tea properly than about American daily life, unless you count life on the prairie with Ma and Pa or life on the Mississippi as observed from a raft.

  Mom loved books. And my mother never read down to her children. She always was reading books “meant for slightly older children.” By the time I was nine or ten, Mom was reading me classics, from Wuthering Heights to Pride and Prejudice.

  Once I started to read for myself, I discovered that Mom had given me a flying start. The world was literally an open book. As I turned the pages, I met many familiar friends.

  Mom was a music lover, too. And she could not enjoy anything unless she shared it. If my parents were going to a concert, we children were taken along. Each year, Mom bought tickets to three or four concerts at the Montreux classical music festival. She also took our family to several ballets over the years, to several operas and many chamber orchestra concerts, and to all sorts of recitals. And she did this even back when we had very little money, when we were sometimes eating meatless meals for months if giving to the mission was down. We had no car and often couldn’t afford a taxi ride to the station after a concert. But my mother got us there somehow anyway.

  My first encounter
with opera was watching Don Juan, which my parents took me to at the Paris Opera House when I was seven and traveling with them on one of their speaking trips. We were in the cheap seats, what seemed like miles from the stage. But Dad handed me his binoculars and, though I fell asleep, I woke up in time to see Don Juan sinking into the flames of hell, singing his way into oblivion. I was hooked.

  There was a tension between what Mom believed and her wider interests in art, music, and culture. Mom could not ignore the sorts of people who were most certainly not fundamentalist: the artists, composers, and choreographers she so admired, or the sorts of secular people she might bump into at concerts and in museums. So I think my mother spent a lifetime trying to change the image of Bible-believing Christians. She decided she would be so wonderful in every way that her example would undo all the damage done to the image of what it was to be a Bible-believing Christian set by those other, all-too-ordinary Christians.

  Mom wanted her children to know that she could have done lots more glamorous things than “just be a missionary.” And Mom never wanted to look like what she was: a pastor’s wife. She dressed with taste and style for every occasion. And Mom was never more animated than when she was talking about the cultured, wealthy, or important people she met. She would not just mention their names but would go into detailed stories of their lives, as if she was reading (or writing) a novel about them. I think Mom wanted to be one of them.

  My mother’s favorite people were those who were famous for some cultural achievement. She met the great violinist Yehudi Menuhin on the beach in Italy once and was more or less in a swoon for weeks while telling us in detail what he had said, what she had said. . . . And more than half a century later, when B. B. King gave her a backstage pass for a concert at the Montreux Jazz Festival, Mom—at age ninety—wore that laminated security pass around her neck for the better part of a year, as if it was priceless jewelry.

  My mother saw her mission as nothing less than repairing the image of fundamentalism. Sometimes this image-repair just involved serving exquisite high teas or reading good books. At other times it got complicated. For instance, in 1986, to launch her book The Gift of Music, Mom raised fifty thousand dollars—“To reach out to the kind of New Yorkers that no other Christians ever reach”—and rented Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center, hired the Guarneri Quartet, and invited her friends from all over the country to join her for a concert followed by a reception.

  When Mom met people, then told her children about her encounters, the story line was always the same: They were lost, and Mom saved them. Or at least she had changed them. Mom’s favorite phrase was “Before he met me, he said he never knew there were Christians who were so. . .”—fill in the blank—cultured, knowledgeable about art, music, food, clothes, compassionate, and refined.

  My mother took Dad to his first art museum, the Philadelphia Museum of Art. “Now Fran talks all about art, but when I met him he knew nothing, my dear, nothing!” Mom helped Dad “deepen his faith” after he became a Christian. Mom showed Dad how to have an always-use-real-silver-and-good-china-and-put-candles-on-the-table-at-dinner, cultured family, since his parents had been “so working class.”

  My mother became the basis of “Elsa,” the mother in my first novel, Portofino, and the rest of the Calvin Becker Trilogy (Zermatt and Saving Grandma). And I still see the world through her eyes. She was there at every stage, including mop-ping up my vomit—without recrimination—when I took some bad peyote buds after smoking pot when I was fifteen.

  Whatever I believe, or say I believe now, the shape of my life is defined by my mother’s prayers—whether these have actually been answered or whether the force of her personality was enough to make it so. In that quietest inner place, my mother is still young, beautiful, and present, leaning forward listening with rapt attention at a concert, or with a book on her lap, eyes sparkling and opening up the universe of Treasure Island, or as poor Oliver picks his way though the harsh Victorian urban underworld.

  3

  If Dad had been an actor, he might have been cast to play James Cagney’s little brother, maybe in some 1930s movie set down by the docks. But by the time I was a teenager, a lifetime of intellectual work had given Dad a craggy, bags-under-the-eyes Einstein look and softened his face.

  My father was my mother’s opposite. Born and raised in Germantown, Philadelphia, he grew up hard, in hard times. Dad was short and stocky. He had thick leg muscles and heavy forearms with strong wide-palmed hands. His legs just kept getting thicker as he hiked all over the Alps. His Moods—they deserve a capital letter—dictated everything about our daily lives. Dad suffered from bouts of fury punctuated by depression. All Mom needed to say was “Fran is in a Mood,” and we crept around trying to stay out of sight till Mom gave the all-clear.

  Dad’s brooding face reflected his early life as a working-class son of poor parents. He had a little scar on his cheek where he’d been stabbed in a street fight when he was delivering ice off a horse-drawn cart. When I was ten or eleven, Dad taught me to fight. He was very matter-of-fact and said: “You need to know how to defend yourself.” Dad’s idea of fighting was this: just get in close, break something, and run.

  While Mom was being served breakfast in bed by her Chinese servants, then later by her genteel parents, who cut her toast into buttered “ladyfingers” and boiled her “a perfect three-and-a-half-minute soft-boiled egg each morning,” Dad was eating corned beef hash warmed over, being beaten with a strap by his mother, and selling ice from the time he was ten or eleven off a wagon.

  Dad’s father ran away from his home when he was twelve years old. My grandfather served in the Navy in the Spanish-American War, when, as he told Dad, “The ships were made of wood but the men made of iron.” And while raising Dad, his father worked as a “stationary engineer” in a large office building maintaining the heating and electrical plant. He got this job even though he only had a third-grade education. Dad told me about getting into the huge boilers and chipping out the lime deposits with his father.

  My father heard his first classical music when the Boy Scouts took his troop to a concert. He loved it, and from then on Dad would argue with his mother to let him listen to broadcasts of symphonies when she wanted to hear popular music, played on the old crystal set Dad’s father built.

  Dad got “saved” in 1929 in a tent revival; he was seventeen. This was after reading the Bible. Sometimes Dad said he got saved “just reading the Bible.” Other times he said it was in that tent revival. Other times he would explain to the students that it was while he was studying Greek philosophy and at the same time giving the Bible a “last chance” by reading it, and that it occurred to him that the Bible answered the philosophical questions raised by the Greeks.

  About two years after Dad got saved, he met Mom when he stood up in a church meeting to challenge a “liberal” pastor who was questioning the literal truth of scripture. Judging by my mom’s account, Dad’s real salvation was when he met her. Dad’s reward for accepting Christ was to get a saint for a wife, a sexy saint.

  Dad’s newly converted zealot heart twined with Mom’s zealot heart, though Dad was but a mere “newborn babe in Christ.” And Dad became a pastor, called by God, or pushed by Mom, or both.

  By the time I came along, Mom and Dad were thriving and making a living on propagating their ideas and defending them. And the verbal images they spun out of thin air had to be strong. They were describing a world you can’t see, the invisible link between mortality and immortality. They were bringing alive the biblical epoch to twentieth-century young people, competing with modernity by talking up a storm, convincing smart people that the spiritual world is more real and essential than the evidence of one’s eyes. And they were good at it.

  Dad had one big idea: God has revealed himself to us through the Bible. And he spent a lifetime trying to fit everything into that one idea, and explain away anything that didn’t fit. Dad’s apologetic method—combining scripture, theology, and cultu
re—became his trademark, a kind of rationalist approach to the mysteries of faith, as instantly recognizable to his millions of evangelical followers as a Rothko is to anyone who has seen more than one canvas painted after he hit his blocks-of-color stride. (“Apologetics” being defined as the method and means and content of one’s argument for the faith, a way of reasoning, one’s method of evangelization.)

  Dad was also a dedicated hiker and camper, a starter of campfires “even with wet wood,” and a man who could fix and build things. Dad always kept his father’s tools handy. His father’s hammer, plane, and chisel were like sacred objects in our home, along with his father’s old Lionel train set.

  Dad passed on one saying of his father’s to me. It related to how to survive working high in the rigging of a wind-tossed sailing ship. “Keep one hand for yourself, boy!” Dad would often exclaim, applying his father’s wisdom to all sorts of situations in life, from how to argue, to hiking and tree-climbing safety rules.

  Dad had a reverence for the way his father had done so much with so little. Everything my grandfather learned was something he taught himself—the engineering knowledge needed to run a building’s heat and electrical generating plant; how to wire his house, which he did with Dad helping; how to build his first radio. You never called the repairman in the household Dad grew up in; you did it yourself.

  My father kept his old Boy Scout manual, his father’s tools, and his father’s Navy shaving mug next to his bed on a little shelf behind a curtain. It was like a little shrine. As a child, I often looked at my father’s precious mementos, but I never took them out of Mom and Dad’s bedroom. Dad also kept his own metalwork “exam pieces” from high school shop class behind that curtain. They included a stained-glass monogram of the letter “S” and several pieces of beautifully crafted wrought iron. “I made those,” Dad would say.