Due East
Mitcham, Carl
FOOTSTEPS THAT DID NOT FOLLOW DDE EAST Valerie Sayers Doubleday, $15.95, 237 pp. Carl Mitcham After the fall, and an angel with flaming sword stood "at the east of the garden of Eden"...
...331...
...It is a fictive study of our rejection of God, the motherhood of faith, and how both depend on and transcend our relationships with others...
...I believe in cancer cells.'' Yet when her companion in labor does call out in pain it is "Jesus cocksucker...
...My mother died of cancer...
...He owns the Plaid King gas station in Due East, a small town on the South Carolina coast, but is slowly going broke...
...If they all prayed, and most of the bodies shriveled up anyway, what did it matter...
...Although plot and tension keep one reading at a rapid pace, the point of view as indicated by the opening prelude is actually one of cool retrospection, and character development is minimal — precisely because what is really happening is doing so on a deeper level...
...while Mary Faith, despite herself, identifying with the cloud of pain enveloping her own mother at the end, finds herself saying simply "Jesus...
...The narrative voices shift and intertwine...
...Jesus...
...I don't know what to say," Jesse said...
...Following a series of miscarriages, however, she finally gives birth to a daughter, and then when her daughter is but twelve-years-old, Eve dies...
...He looks to his daughter who, he thinks, "should be jumping up to his side, this minute, telling these Jaggers that she meant to stay with her father...
...Your son is dead...
...That he was sitting, still, in the same pew where he had stretched his arm out around me, and that he would sit there until Dr...
...What would life have been like for a forty-year-old Adam and his teenage daughter...
...In their needs father and daughter once again silently betray each other...
...A month later in the same hospital as she goes into labor, Mary Faith repeats to another pregnant teenager who advises her to call on Jesus when it starts to hurt, "I don't believe in Jesus...
...Jesus...
...Didn't it occur to her that every relative who stepped through these intensive care doors prayed...
...But he doesn't say it...
...The key role played by silence or the inability to speak is emphasized by the occasion when Michael Jagger's parents try to convince Mary Faith to come to live with them...
...He just had his arm around me...
...it is also good spiritual reading...
...This is my daughter...
...This novel is not only a good story and good literature...
...Yet Mary Faith "kept her eyes lowered, her head bowed...
...The reader must be careful not to understand this novel too quickly...
...The trouble was, he did know what to say — he knew to say: Get out of here...
...That no one had stood beside me when I stood...
...The last chapter, entitled "Firstborn Son" — born on August 15, the feast of the Assumption — is an achievement that can be adequately appreciated only by one who has read the book...
...You live," still a third time...
...When her father has a heart attack and Mary Faith stands beside him in the hospital with the doctor and her aunt and a nurse telling her to pray, she says to herself, These Christians must be everywhere...
...He'd been in Due East all his life, probably.'' The force of that' 'probably" is only fully revealed when his mother eventually tries to befriend Mary Faith...
...In a certain sense, in fact, this is not a novel in the popular sense...
...For the first time, there is not just third-person Jesse Rapple or first-person Mary Faith, one or the other, but both...
...Pain of separation and distance and lack of communication is the fundamental reality of this novel, but it is a reality that is largely understated and often only indirectly expressed...
...Didn't it occur to her that I'd prayed when my mother died...
...You live," she said again...
...Beady calmly exhorted the crowd to remember forgiveness and to remember righteousness...
...The deepest silence, however, is not between Mary Faith and her father, but between Mary Faith and her mother — and between Mary Faith and God...
...There is a good deal of coming and going in the story, almost soap-opera twists and turns of plot and subplot (Jesse is having an affair with a fifty-year-old widow who gets pregnant, the teacher of the local GED program is breaking up with his wife, etc...
...Beady finished his sermon, until Dr...
...Mary Faith is disappointed her father wants to kill the baby when her own mother had such trouble in carrying a child to term and never gave her husband the son he desired...
...Here Eve's name is Faith...
...So much does she feel supported that Mary Faith is emboldened to stand and walk out in the middle of the sermon, expecting her father to follow — expecting it so much that only in the vestibule does she realize that no footsteps had followed me down the aisle, that no arm had brushed against my shoulder to hold me back or go with me...
...But in the dark, after telling her unconscious father that she is not going to go live with the Jaggers and how she has only wanted for him "to take notice of me, just to know I was around,'' as she is leaving she blurts out, "You live, Daddy...
...and some moderately florid sexual scenes, but the real action of the novel takes place not in heated discussions or emotional outbursts...
...Adam is Jesse Rapple (as in the father of David and Isaiah 11:1-2, and as in "rotten apple" and Psalm 17:8...
...It can help us ask questions about our own lives and come to know better both ourselves and God...
...The disjunction in narrative voices mirrors a deeper failure to bridge the gap between them, Jesse is upset that Mary Faith has gotten pregnant and wants her to have an abortion...
...One Wednesday prayer meeting, as Mary Faith is being chastised by the Baptist preacher (whose "version of Jesus made him sound like a right-wing dictator"), she feels her father's supporting arm...
...I had never felt that sensation before, the sensation of being borne up by him...
...It is the simple touching between a forty-year-old man and his rebellious teenage daughter for the first time since his wife and her mother died, in the birth not just of a son named Jesse after his grandfather but of a tentative new life...
...At one point Mary Faith is remembering how "Michael Jagger's voice sounded like a foreigner's to me, and I didn't get it...
...The voice that speaks for her father, Jesse, is equally laconic...
...The story of the nine months from fall 1980 to summer 1981 of Mary Faith's pregnancy — a pregnancy that is, on many levels, a response to the death of her mother, Faith — is told in alternating chapters of Mary Faith's first-person narrative and a third-person description of what is happening with her father...
...The voice of Mary Faith is not (and is not meant to be) the real voice of a fifteen-year-old, but a kind of restrained third-person first person, if you will...
...Each reaches out for the other and reacts to what are perceived as failures of love...
...Indeed, this too is part of its character...
...Mary Faith hates her mother for her saccharine piety, and for dying and leaving her alone at age twelve...
...I haven't made up my mind,' she said quietly...
...She has discovered prayer even when she rejects it...
...But for Jesse Rapple, humiliated and re329 fusing ever again to return to the church, the experience is one of his daughter permanently cutting him "off from his religion, or Faith's religion anyway, the one rope that had kept him from floating away all through her sickness and dying and now through Mary Faith's trouble...
...she further hates herself for having such feelings, and God for not 330: answering her prayers first to let her mother live and then, as she was suffering, to let her die...
...The father is actually Michael Jagger, a seventeen-yearold Catholic dropout who reads Dostoevsky and once painted black breasts on the Virgin Mary statue in front of Our Lady of Perpetual Help and who, out of guilt for having allowed himself to be seduced by Mary Faith, overdoses on Quaaludes before he even finds out about the pregnancy...
...In a spare twelve pages, with not a merger but a shift back and forth between narrative voices, a rapprochement is realized between father and daughter, one that is both real and yet devoid of any easy solutions to the life ahead...
...it happens at a deeper level, below the surface...
...That my father had not followed me...
...His daughter, Mary Faith, who has quit singing in the Baptist choir because she no longer believes in God, becomes pregnant at fifteen and claims she "doesn't know how it happened," that it must be a virgin birth...
...Jesus...
...Carl Mitcham After the fall, and an angel with flaming sword stood "at the east of the garden of Eden" to bar Adam and Eve's return, imagine that "the mother of all living'' had been unable to bear children...
...I am taking care of things...
...Indeed, despite its southern gothic facade, this work of fiction is subtly enough told that the most minor remarks often have a depth of significance belied by the superficial lucidity of the text...
...Valerie Sayers's novel — at once richly realistic and a bricolage of religious allusions after the manner of many other Southern writers — is one response to such a question...
Vol. 114 • May 1987 • No. 10
