Third Time A Charm - Serial Divorces In Fly-By-Night America, The Saga Of A Good Catholic

Melanie Fallon grew up Catholic.  She received her first Communion, was confirmed, and went to Mass every Sunday.  She believed in the divinity of Jesus Christ, the Holy Trinity, and the eternal salvation of the Catholic faith. 

Observance and respect for the canonical principles of the faith were never questioned.  Priests after Ordination were the sanctified priests of the Church in a direct, unbroken line to the Pope and through him to Jesus Christ himself.  Baptism, Penance, and Extreme Unction were tenets of belief that could never be challenged. 

 

Holy Matrimony, the sacred bonding of man and wife was also a sacrament.  Divorce was not only permitted, it was a mortal sin, condemning the sinner to eternal hellfire. 

For a young girl like Melanie, soon enough after Confession and the Eucharist, the marriage contract with God was imminent.  She longed for a perfect union which would reflect the divinity of the Holy Family and the sanctity of all families, and hoped that a man worthy of such spiritual aspirations would soon appear. 

Spirituality and moral perfection are rarely items of an ordinary sexual life. Although the image of Mary, Joseph, and Jesus are always in the Catholic's mind at first, it is quickly forgotten in the heat of passion.  Good girls always marry bad boys.

Melanie was one of these girls who had an irresistible urge for the ragamuffins of her cohort - the boys who had none of the proprietary decency urged by Father Brophy, who had been called before the principal time and time again, for whom the possibility of reform school was real and imminent, and who had a desultory, but infinitely sexual allure that could not be denied. 

Never a tart, certainly not a 'loose woman', Melanie simply followed her heart's desire and that led her to bed with Archie Taggert, Billy Fitch, and Armie Bellini, all relationships quick, uncomplicated, and without consequence.  They were part of her own string theory, seemingly unrelated men linked in stochastic patterns. 

Melanie continued taking this train with its local stops until she was an adult, professionally employed and gainfully engaged in serious pursuits.  She was one of Scientists for Social Responsibility's attorneys, charged with aggressive legal action against racial discrimination and for the welfare of the black man. 

She was not enamored with the field of eligible men in her office or in The Movement as a whole. They were a rather diffident, uncertain lot, so trained in the 'No Means No' philosophy of Women are Precious that they were timid, fey, gayish  lovers; so she went out of bounds to continue her sexual escapades.  There was Harlan from Treasury, Axel from Commerce, and a host of others met at the Old Ebbitt Grille, the go-to singles bar for up-and-coming Washingtonians. 

Melanie was a practical woman with her feet firmly on the ground.  Her sexual adventurism was not reflective of her old, Catholic-inspired desire for marriage and family, so she soon turned her attention to vetting, triage, and sorting.  She was not looking for or expecting an arranged marriage, something calculated on the basis of economic stability, professional promise, and decent fatherhood, but something like it. 

A girl in her position was not about to choose a mate willy-nilly and suffer the consequences later.  God forbid she should end up with the throwback Philly Roberts, married to her colleague Fanny Macintosh who  married wrongly assuming that a patrician pedigree - Beacon Hill, Nantucket, Biarritz, and Gstaad - would carry her through.  After only a week or two of dungeonlike medieval Arab torture she realized that she had married a camel-driver. 

For Melanie Mr. Right No. 1 turned out to be sly and untrustworthy.  How he confected such a fictional but quite impressive pedigree was a thing for the record, but Melanie beat herself silly for the ignorance and bullheaded stupidity which led her to his bed.  Finding a mate was not worth the caricatured charade of a so-called marriage, she concluded, empty-handed. 

'Patience' she told herself.  'Patience', but her biological clock was ticking and approaching Doomsday so she had to 'get on her hurry stick' as her mother used to say, be quick about it, and find a suitable husband before it was too late. 

No. 2 was little better than No. 1 and she not only was beginning to doubt her judgment and ability to sift the grain from the chaff, but kept having niggling thoughts of Father Murphy, the harbinger of the good tidings of happy marriage, the union of man and woman in the sight of God.  Two divorces, compounding her mortal sin and classifying her as a single woman desperately afraid of spinsterhood. 

The third time was a charm.  Bentley Adams was an ideal husband - attentive, respectful, kind, and considerate - and it took Melanie little time to find out that he was a crook worse than Bernie Madoff, Jefferey Skilling, and Rudy Kurniawan combined. Before the ink was dry on the marriage contract, he was hauled off to federal prison for a 20-year sentence for fraud, embezzlement, and intellectual property theft. 

'Where have I gone wrong, Father'. Melanie asked her confessor, Father Murphy, her old pastor who now in his nineties refused to give up the confessional, the consecration, and the fight for Christian salvation.

The old man, now barely able to see over the prie-dieu in the confessional, across the screen and into the life of the penitent before him, listened with equanimity to Melanie's confession of moral dissolution but abiding faith.  Hearing perhaps every third word, he only surmised sexual deviance, serial divorce, and a repentant desire.  

That was enough, he thought, but the penitent across the screen wanted more. 'What should I do now?', she begged, but the old priest who had only a string of love affairs with altar boys and seminarians in his past and with no clue whatsoever about the va et vient of normal heterosexual life, demurred. 

'Jesus loves you' was all he could manage, instructing her to say five Our Fathers and five Hail Marys before he shut the screen and closed up shop for another Saturday afternoon. 

Now, Melanie was one in a thousand - a woman who actually wondered about the supposed sanctity of marriage and the admonishments of the Church.  How could the Catholic Church so obstinately harp on the divine nature of marriage and the hellfire damnation of divorce when marriage was nothing more than a cosmic crap shoot?

She had screwed every Tom, Dick, and Harry who had shown her any interest but had not given up on the hope of a good marriage, a home in the suburbs, children, school science fairs, barbecues, and neighborliness. 

America was a sinkhole of depravity, she concluded, a viper's nest of dangerous liaisons, and women were their victims.  Where was the determination, courage, and devil-may-care challenge of Eve in Paradise? 

Melanie, like most women, was caught between the Scylla of propriety, duty, responsibility, and good will and the Charybdis of horniness and assertive female sexuality. 'Fuck 'em', she wanted to say to all men, but somehow was constantly and ineluctably corralled by the likes of Father Murphy. 

There was no No. 4.  That was beating a dead horse. She had tried her best to serve God and Man and had come up empty on both counts.

So be it, no one is perfect.  At least she tried at existential harmony, and that was something. 

She was last seen on a Tampa Bay beach on a chaise lounge with a sundowner, alone but far from unhappy.  Once one unpacks the trunks and gets rid of the detritus, life is a pleasure.   

Amulets, Grigris, Charms, And The Evil Eye - The Voodoo Of American Democracy

Amy Stall was a frequent traveler to Haiti - that is, before the country's descent into social chaos and during the quiet time of the Duvaliers, five star Petionville restaurants, all night dancing in Carrefour, and the African markets of Duvalierville. 

 

Amy did not go to Haiti for the restaurants, the music, lambi creole and the tropical beaches of Les Cayes, but for something else - the dark spirits of voodoo, zombies, and the Baron Samedi. There was something both frightening and potent about the ceremonies in the hills above Kenscoff, the savagery, the possessions, the invocations, and the ecstatic revelations that were irresistible.

 

For Amy religion in America seemed tame, ordinary, predictable, unimpressive, and unmoving.  The closest it came to real power was the consecration of the Catholic Mass - the mystical transformation of bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ but only a metaphor. Real sacrifice was held on the Mesoamerican plains where virgins were sacrificed to the immanent gods of the surrounding mountains in a plea for sanctuary. 

As a child she had filed into St. Maurice's church and suffered through the bells and incantations of the Mass, the Kyrie, the Offertory, the Confiteor, and the blandishments of old Father Murphy whose voice trembled and trailed off and his hands shook as he gave communion, 

She had left the Church, its canon and its pale belief, and for years, searched for something more meaningful, more heart-throbbing - that is what women were supposed to feel when seeing Christ on the Cross - something more spiritually rendering. 

She turned to Protestant fundamentalism and its charisma.  Jesus Christ visited the Ebenezer Baptist Church every Sunday in Aberdeen, Mississippi but he never offered to be her personal savior.  He was just as remote and fictional as the Jesuits' God. 

It was much later, when she was a traveler to Africa did she have her first glimpse of real religion - the tribal, animist religion of the forest, the savagery described by Conrad in Heart of Darkness, the descent of man into his most primitive, but thereby bringing him closer to divinity.  Not the congenial, welcoming, loving divinity of Christianity, but something far more essential.  This was fundamentalism, not the stage version of Pastor Isaiah Phillips. 

She began wearing the amulets and grigris given to her by African priests whom she sought out in the same Congolese forests where Kurtz thought he had found his salvation.  She had been an observer of the same inchoate, primitive rituals that Conrad had seen, a privileged visitor because of some animal sense felt by the Africans or because she was a white woman, a goddess in the forest myths of Ngomo

This forest odyssey was just the beginning, for it was Haiti and voodoo which had captured her interest.  Somehow there she would realize her longstanding evolutionary passion - to see God. 

She always fell short.  These ecstatic revelations belonged only to natives, those who were born and raised within the spirit of the gods, djinns, and evil spirits. The Turkish nazar would not protect her from the Evil Eye no more than the shrunken ear of a Congolese devil could.  She sniffed at the hems of limitless power, the primeval forces of the jungle, the heart of darkness and divinity, but could never be embraced by them. 

Amy was a seeker, a person of heightened sensibilities, optimism, spiritual hope, and endless patience. God was there somewhere, and with deliberateness and single-minded virtue, she would find him. 

Tolstoy was such a seeker and explored every avenue which might lead to God without success. History, mythology, science, philosophy all failed him.  Either God did not exist or he was ineffable.  He ended his search exhausted and dispirited but calm.  If tens of millions of his fellow men believed, and if hundreds of millions had believed before them, then perhaps there was something there. 

Such religious seekers are often secular ones.  The transference of inescapable passion for truth from the divine to the secular is not uncommon, and has been extensively chronicled.  The phenomenon is particularly American wrote Professor Amadeus Wilson historian and social biologist who wrote in the Duke Medical School Journal of Forensic Psychology:

The American Seeker is a person of emotional febrility - burning with eschatological passion and secular reformism who sees no distinction between the primal energies of religious ecstasy and the achievement of practical goodness.  He does not see, he feels.  The world is very much the territory of djinns, spirits, and the daily incarnation of the gods.  He is just at home in a revolutionary meeting to change the world as he is walking up aisle to embrace Jesus Christ.  Both sides of his brain emit the same irresistible energy.  In psychiatric terms, he is doubly troubled

Amy Stall was the poster girl for Professor Wilson, for she had joined the progressive movement not as a substitute for her religious hejira but as a complement to it.  When she was amidst a crowd of true political believers, all were filled with passion for the climate, for social equality, for economic justice, and expressed their ecstatic passion in ways no different than the peasants of the Kenscoff hills or the tribal faithful of the Congolese jungle. 

As importantly, these political seekers see evil in the world, real, palpable, and incarnate.  There is such a thing as the devil and he, not the sentient, calculating Devil of Milton, but the horrific demon of the Amazon and the Central African jungle is here now and everywhere. 

It wasn't the political progressive canon per se which was the fuel for her passionate embrace of social reform. It was the almost mythical communal ecstasy of true belief.  The impending climatic doom mattered less than the embrace of the idea as a path to epiphany.  As Amy stood amidst an almost hysterical crowd of climate activists, all who unquestionably believed in the coming Armageddon, she was filled with the same ardor, the same soul-filling happiness of revelation. 

Sympathetic political observers say that this ecstatic expression of political belief and commitment is a good thing, for without passion, ideals founder.  The warriors of the Crusades marched across Europe to Jerusalem under the flag of Christianity.  Their mission was holy, their purpose divine, their war sanctified.  Modern progressive activists are no different, infused with passionate belief, with complete faith in the rightness of their cause, and an undying fidelity to the holy canon of reform. 

Professor Wilson wrote further on secular religion:

The political True Believer is a person apart, detached from rational exegesis, logic, understanding, analysis, and reasoned conclusion.  He is no different than the Mesoamerican peasant ecstatic as the blade pierces the breast of the inviolate virgin, or the Salem burgher filled with God himself as the apostate goes up in flames, the African who dances around a fire in an invocation of tribal spirits, or the voodoo priest holding the headless body of an eviscerated animal. 

More telling, he went on, passion becomes hysteria and hysteria becomes viral.  There is no stopping it once it gains currency and traction. 

Any Stall never read Professor Wilson or gave a thought to such academicism. 'I am The Movement' she said, 'And The Movement is Me!' and with that she finally fulfilled her expectations, her dreams, and her desperate religious needs.  God and Jesus Christ disappeared, supernumerary distractions from the real purpose of being - making a difference, doing something, doing good. 

Professor Wilson concluded in this way:

Just like the mental patient interned at St. Elizabeth's' the True Believer loses all sense of touch, feel, sound, and smell of the real world and inhabits a much happier, elegiac, and ecstatic place.  Both are happy in their own way, unable perhaps to function in the real world, but for them social accommodation is the farthest thing from their minds. 

For the True Believer just like the religious saint, there is no opting out; and Amy Small continued in her march to a Utopian progressive future without fail or fatigue. She was and would be a soldier in the crusade for a better, verdant, and more compassionate world forever.   

 

Senior Living - Better An Epitaph And A Plot Of Grass Than A Sad Repository Of Old Memories

Melrose Potter never thought of herself as old, but as she looked in the mirror, she was shocked at what she saw.  Had she always looked in the mirror every morning brushing her teeth or before work combing her hair, she might not have been so shocked and surprised; but because she hesitated - well, refused - to look at what she knew was an older image, the sight of the gray, the lines, the hollows, and the sags was horrific. 

She had seen her friends and colleagues age ungracefully.  Nips and tucks, cosmetics, and makeovers were not part of her solidly patrician ethos, and so one by one the daughters of New England deteriorated before her eyes. 

 

Not her, she convinced herself.  Aging would not be so unkind to a woman who went daily to the gym, did Pilates and hot yoga, walked to and from the Metro on her way to work every morning, ate the healthiest offerings of organic farmers' markets, got routine checkups and went to bed at a reasonable hour.  

Of course aging could be unkind, and as that one revelatory, incidental look in the mirror showed, it did so with a vengeance. St. Laurent and Armani, thousand-dollar hair stylings, hours of massages and holistic spa treatments, Cartier jewelry, and the finest French cosmetics were only cover stories for what was the steady march to the grave. 

 

'Don't be so melodramatic', she said to herself as she prepared for the day ahead. 'I've got many good years ahead of me', but her words were unconvincing.  Just yesterday her closest friend, Sylvia, moved to Ingleside, the high-end senior living complex on Military Road to join Marfa Potter, Ileana Fox, and Muffy Deloitte. 

All these ladies had lived alone since their husbands died and decided that the facilities and community at Ingleside would be far more preferable than Doordash take out and lone walks on the C&O Canal. 

Melrose - Mellie to her friends - was not in this exact situation.  Yes, she was resorting more to Doordash and Wagshal's deli; and yes, she found herself staring at some indifferent painting in the West Wing of the National Gallery, but she never had a husband. She had remained determinedly single all her life, enjoyed serial lovers, had turned Sapphic once or twice, and never looked back...until now. 

The old face in the mirror and the personality behind it were solitary entities.  She had no memories of a husband and no children or grandchildren to add substance to her increasingly weary life.  She didn't exactly regret her past decisions, but was forced to reconsider them by the face in the mirror. 

Melrose Potter was a privileged child, having grown up in a world of wealth and status - the Park Avenue, Biarritz patrician kind, not the arriviste bourgeoisie of so many.  Summers were spent on Nantucket, winters on the slopes of Gstaad, high school at Miss Porter's and college at Wellesley; but that elite upbringing was not enough to condition - or rather tamp down - her sexual and social recklessness. 

 

She was a whirling dervish of sexual affairs, political protest, unencumbered engagements, and travel adventures to the unexplored regions of the world.  She was tornadic, a devilishly powerful, almost frighteningly aggressive woman out to pick every rose and climb every mountain. 

The tales of her escapades at La Coupole where she joined the Paris underground in their sexual bacchanals after midnight were legion as were  those of her Eyes Wide Shut black mass sexual exorcisms.  She was known from Paris to Monte Carlo, from Tangier to Pretoria.  She was a free spirit, a woman of limitless ambition and agency, a party-goer, and intellectual, a carouser. 

And then before she knew it she found herself childless, alone, and facing the prospect of early interment at Ingleside.  Yes, it was all it was touted to be, its advantages limned in the attractive, glossy brochure sent out to wealthy zip code 20016 and its aging residents. 

Ingleside is a community of progressive, wealthy neighbors who have chosen to spend their golden years with likeminded people; a communal, respectful, congenial place to share, to stimulate, to excite, and to be happy

Yet despite its chat rooms, seminars on the influences of Babylonian mysticism on the Pentateuch, and classes in chess mastery, and despite its glowing publicity, Ingleside was a repository of old memories, an ill-lit place of regrets.

A recent Yale class reunion, thinned out because of 'early retirement' as the class chronicler wrote in his elegy to the Class of 19___was still vital, and the docket was full of important political inquiry.  The class, liberal to a man it seemed, could not get enough parsing of the state of the world and their influential place within it. 

'Leaving something behind' was the unwritten theme of the Reunion, a paean to university which counted a number of Presidents, Senators, financiers, and men of rectitude and high purpose.  These alumni might be in the last decade of their lives, but they were still working hard for a better world.  Although they might not be at the barricades of their youth, they could still fight the good fight from the podium. 

 

There were a number of these Yale men at Ingleside when Melrose's friends had moved there; but age had taken its toll and banked the political fire.  The more one stayed, lived, survived at Ingleside, the more one regressed. It was no longer 'back in ought four', but reminiscences far more treacly and airy. Even men of power and influence babbled when it came to Ingleside. 

Melrose resisted the pull of Ingleside Senior Living.  There was something fitting about a woman whose best years were young ones and whose achievements and accomplishments were merely addenda to the experiences of her youth.  Given that, the last thing in the world she wanted was to blabber about it, share it with total strangers, give in to the cloying demands of senior living. 

'Aging in place' was the euphemism for dying in place and holding on for dear life before it happened.  Melrose never thought of her insistence on staying at 4903 Burlington Road as anything more than an eventuality she chose and was not chosen for her.  

Vladimir Nabokov in his memoir Speak, Memory wrote of himself as a memorist, someone for whom the past was not just an assemblage of random memories, but an existential point de repere. The present was a matter of micro-seconds, the future only a possibility; but the past was as real as the memories of it retained. 

 

There was something in Nabokov's perspective that appealed to Melrose.  It was her past and no one else's and better to die in her traces caretaking those memories than quacking on about them to indifferent strangers. 

True to her principles, she died in her favorite armchair, found there by the fire department who had been alerted by accumulated mail and leaves on the walk.  A fitting end.  What in fact could be more fitting than the solitary death of a truly independent, defiantly unique woman?