Spellbinder Read online

  “What’d you think, Bob?”

  Weston reflectively tapped his cigar ash into a crystal ashtray. “China, you mean?”

  “That’s what I mean.”

  “What do the Chinese say? Will they let us in?”

  “Why wouldn’t they? They’re letting in everyone else.”

  Somberly, Weston nodded, puffing thoughtfully at his cigar. At her end of the table, Teresa flapped a hand at the smoke and frowned.

  “If it works, it’d make history,” Weston said. “No one else has ever thought of it, so far as I know. Much less done it.”

  “Maybe there’s a reason,” Elton said. His heavy face, prematurely jowly, sagged skeptically as he spoke. His dark brown eyes, inherited from his mother, had narrowed. As always, Elton gave away nothing. Elton would await developments, keeping his options open, calculating his chances for gain—cutting his down-side risks. He’d always been devious, even as a child. Instead of snatching candy from his sister, Elton would discover where she’d hidden it, biding his time. He’d always had a plan.

  “There’ve been missionaries in China for years,” Teresa announced. When she spoke, even casually, her voice had a coloratura’s fullness and form. Everything Teresa said had the ring of authority, real or imagined. “Fifty, a hundred years ago. At least.”

  “We’re not talking about missionaries,” Flournoy said softly. “And, besides, the Communists aren’t exactly pro-Christian.” He looked straight ahead as he said it, giving no offense. Flournoy preferred to avoid arguments—so long as he got his way in the end. If Weston was carved from seamed, weathered wood, Flournoy was fashioned of thin, cruel steel.

  For the first time, Cowperthwaite spoke: “Do they have TV in China? Consumer TV, for the public? Is it widespread?”

  “Not really,” Flournoy said, still speaking softly. Now his gray eyes, cold as ice, remained fixed on the small spiral notebook that lay open on the table before him. At the end of the table, Teresa moved in her chair, shifting her massive buttocks for a better purchase. The signs were clear: a confrontation was coming, Teresa vs. Flournoy. Teresa would bluster and blow, running up and down the scale. Flournoy, with his slim, elegant dagger poised, would watch for his chance. Teresa would never feel the thrust. She always thought she won.

  Holloway rose heavily to his feet, leaned forward and pressed the “off” button on the small console that controlled the tape recorder. Still standing, arms braced wide on the table before him, he remained for a moment with head silently bowed, compelling their attention. Then, slowly raising his head, he looked at them each in turn before he began to speak:

  “I’m sixty-three years old. I’ve got more money than I’ll ever be able to spend. When I was a boy, I had to sleep with my brother until I was twelve years old. In the winter, we had to pile overcoats on our bed, to keep warm. And, winter or summer, we had to use an outhouse. We were almost the only family in town that didn’t have indoor plumbing.

  “Now I’ve got a house that has ten bedrooms and six bathrooms and a private projection room in the basement. I’m rich, and I’m famous. My name is in the papers, sometimes in the headlines. I’ve been to the White House. Every Sunday, coast-to coast, I preach for the people. I preach, and they listen. And we both profit.

  “But all of that isn’t really important. It’s nice. It feels good. I like to read about myself in the newspapers. I’d be a hypocrite if I denied it. But it’s not really important. What is important—what’s vitally important, to me—is the sure, certain knowledge that, ever since I was a young man, I’ve had the capacity—the God-given ability—to do whatever it is that I decide to do.

  “Now, to you, that might seem like a vain, shallow boast. And maybe it is a boast. But it’s also the truth. I wanted to build this Temple. I asked the people for money enough to do the job, and they gave it to me. I asked for money to go to Chile, and to the Philippines, and into Africa. And the money came—with some to spare, for all of us. Consequently, there isn’t anyone here who isn’t a whole lot richer than he was when he first came with me.

  “Yet, over the years, around this table here, there’ve been doubts. When we started the dial-a-prayer program, some of you thought we’d lose money on it. And we did lose money, for a while. We lost almost a million dollars before we got the bugs worked out, and got it showing a profit. The same was true of everything else we tried: the recorded sermons, and the book program, and the regional Bible school franchises. They all cost us money, to get them started. But within a year, they were all making money. Every one of them. But they were all a risk, going in. At first, each and every one of those programs started off in the red, like any business venture does, getting started. But eventually they worked. They showed us a profit. And, what’s more, they’re still showing us a profit. Every single one of them.

  “Now, let’s look at Chile, and the Philippines, and Africa. And China, too—” As he spoke, he pushed himself away from the table, and sank down in his chair. Suddenly his knees were trembling. And, across his chest and down each arm, the pain was beginning: a persistent, ominous presence, come back to claim him. He paused, blinked, waited for the pain to pass its first cruel crest. In a moment it would recede. The pain was his constant companion. He knew its habits; he could calculate the malevolence of its mood, and therefore its intention. They lived as one, inseparable. Constant enemies, sharing the same death struggle.

  Finally he could speak in the same slow, solemn voice he’d always used, talking business around this table:

  “When you think about Chile and the Philippines and Africa,” he said, “you’ll realize that they’re different from the other things we do. They’re different in one very important, very fundamental respect.” He paused, looked at them each in turn, then said, “If you’ll think about it, you’ll realize that the difference is—” Another short pause, the last one, for final emphasis. “The difference is that, with these crusades, we don’t lose money. They’re not like the book program, or the dial-a-prayer program, or even the franchises. Because they don’t require any risk capital—not one red cent. We simply make the appeal, and see what kind of a response we get. When we’ve got enough money to start, we start. If it does well—if the money keeps coming—we expand the program. If it doesn’t go as hoped, we chop it off. And, of course—” He permitted himself a small smile. During that session, it would be the first and the last time he would smile.

  “Of course, if it does very well—much better than expected—why, then, we declare a dividend.”

  Around the table, one at a time, he looked into their faces, and saw his small smile answered.

  It was settled, then. The Council had decided.

  He reached forward, switched on the tape recorder, and asked for discussion.

  Two

  LYING ON TOP OF the covers, Denise lifted a bare foot, closed one eye, sighting, and moved her big toe until it covered first her father’s face, then her brother and her mother, holding hands for the camera, stage left. From the small portable TV set her father’s voice rang with righteous fervor, evoking God the Father and Jesus the Son, proclaiming a new crusade aimed at some unsuspecting race of contented non-Christians. This time, he planned the invasion and conquest of China, his most ambitious scam to date. The faithful, rapt in their seats and ripe for the plucking, stared with mindless adoration at the man in the doubleknit suit, wired for sound, wearing a real-hair toupee and cufflinks presented to him in the Oval Office.

  As the voice faded and the music swelled and The Hour came to an end, she remembered the day he’d come home from Washington, wearing the cufflinks. He’d arrived in a chauffeured limousine. She’d been in an upstairs window when the black limousine turned into the circular driveway. She’d been gazing out across the low, odious layer of hazy yellow smog that had covered the Los Angeles basin like poison gas settling down on some vast battlefield. The year had been 1969. She’d been nineteen; her father had been in his middle fifties. Because he admired the
President, and supported the Viet Nam war, her father had been summoned to Washington to pick up his reward: a presidential handclasp, a hand-lettered scroll and the cufflinks, gracefully inscribed. Because of the prestigious occasion, the satrap Council had rubberstamped her father’s decision to charter a Lear jet for the trip to Washington. He’d debated taking the whole family: the mother, the daughter, the son. But, at the appointed time for departure, the mother had been too drunk to stand. And the daughter, protesting the war, had deliberately waited until the last moment, then announced, wickedly, she remembered, that she wouldn’t go to the White House unless she could spit in the President’s face.

  So the father and son—the king and crown prince—had embarked for Washington, escorted by a handful of barons and dukes. And Sister Teresa, with her Valkyrie’s body, her sock-it-to-’em style and her beehive hairdo, towering one layer higher than usual for the occasion.

  The ceremony in the Oval Office had rated almost five minutes on the local TV newscast. But, despite the best efforts of Clifton Reynolds, her father’s flack, the item hadn’t made the network news. For that small favor, she’d been grateful.

  Flying home from Washington, Elton had ordered the pilots to circle the Grand Canyon, so he could take pictures. The delay, he’d calculated, had cost two hundred dollars.

  She lowered her foot, swung her legs over the edge of the bed and crossed the small bedroom to switch off the television set. From the kitchen came the clatter of crockery counter-pointed by the sound of cool jazz. Listening to FM, Peter was making breakfast. Eggs scrambled with green onions and sautéed chicken livers, he’d promised. His specialty.

  Wearing a shorty nightgown and bikini bottoms, she turned to the window, looking across the rooftops to her own personal patch of San Francisco Bay, blue and sparkling this morning. The Oakland hills were purple in the background, with a scattered fleece of clouds clinging to the crests. In the foreground, huge cylinders of gas storage tanks combined with mantislike shipyard cranes to make a montage that could have come from a Diego Rivera mural. Overhead, a pair of jet fighters flew low over the Bay Bridge, coasting down for a landing at the Alameda Naval Air Base, across the Bay.

  “Two minute warning,” Peter called.

  “Two minutes,” she repeated. She pushed the bedroom door closed, slipped off the shorty nightgown and stepped before the full-length mirror. Feet together, arms at her sides, she took the inventory: eyes a little too small and close set, nose a little too uptilted, chin a trifle too sharp. At best, it was a heart-shaped face—at worst, an asymmetrical triangle. But the honey-colored hair falling naturally to her shoulders softened some of the angles, and the arch of dark blond eyebrows beneath a broad forehead was certainly a plus. With only a trace of makeup, the flare of the eyebrows balanced the close-set eyes. Altogether, it was a B-minus face. Sometimes, when she was rested and happy and working well, she rated the face a “B.”

  The slope of her shoulders was marginal, but her breasts were acceptable, round and still firm, with small nipples centered on the swell. Her waist was narrow, with only the suggestion of a midriff bulge. But her hips were a little too wide, especially seen full front. And, from the same view, her thighs were a little too skimpy, a little too hollow on the inside curve.

  “One minute.”

  “I hear you.” Quickly she took a maroon sweatshirt from the chair beside the bed, slipped it over her head, finger-combed her hair, then reached for her blue jeans, hanging on the same chair. After breakfast, she would shower and put on fresh clothes.

  In the kitchen, Peter was pouring orange juice into stem glasses. English muffins were stacked on a plate in the center of the table, buttered and steaming. He hadn’t told her about the muffins, or the strawberry jam beside them. He’d bought both at the corner store, along with the Sunday paper.

  She kissed him on the tip of his left ear, quickly stroked his Sunday-stubbled cheek and slipped into her chair, reaching for the paper. According to their custom, she would read the comics and the magazine section and the supplements while he read the main news section, the sports and the business sections, and the editorials. Then they would switch. Across the table, he was spreading strawberry jam on an English muffin.

  “What’s with the Hour of Power?” he asked. “Did I hear him say he’s planning to convert the Chinese hordes to the blessings of Christianity—with ‘Onward, Christian Soldiers’ playing in the background, for good measure?”

  “It’s not the Hour of Power. I keep telling you that. The Hour of Power is someone else’s.” She tasted the first forkful of scrambled eggs and livers. “This is delicious. Better than last Sunday’s.”

  He smiled at her, then turned to the newspaper, folding the front news section and propping it against the pitcher of orange juice. He was wearing a Japanese karate coat she’d given him for Christmas. Held together only with a belt, the heavily quilted coat was opened down to the waist. The hair of his chest and torso, exposed by the coat’s V almost to his naval, was thick and dark and curly, almost a caveman’s pelt. With his dark, longish hair uncombed and his face unshaven for the day and his eyes a dark, snapping brown beneath a thick bar of eyebrows, he could have been an Italian peasant, called in from the fields and incongruously dressed in the quilted white coat—perhaps to tryst with the honey-haired foreign visitor, overbred and neurotic, sexually unfulfilled, come from another country to meet him secretly, her forbidden lover. The place could be a villa that she’d taken for the year, her retreat from the constraints of her other life, a secret from him. She might be a young Englishwoman, upper middle class, trapped by marriage and convention—and by two beautiful, loving children, a boy and a girl. The time would be the years between the two World Wars—D. H. Lawrence’s era. And the heroine, too, would be Lawrence’s: previously unawakened and incomplete, made whole by the erotic love she shared with this dark, intense, exciting man.

  His looks fitted the fantasy, and so did the family name, Giannini. And so did his ancestry: Southern Italian, and proud of it.

  “Whose is the Hour of Power?” he asked.

  “The Reverend Schuller’s, I think. He’s really a reverend, too. Ordained and everything. He started out in Los Angeles, giving services in drive-in movie theaters.”

  “At night?”

  “No,” she answered. “During the day. Sunday.”

  “Does his flock sit in their cars and eat popcorn and listen through loudspeakers hooked to the windows?”

  “That’s right.” She leafed through the California Living supplement, skimming a story on hang gliding. Suspended in the sky, with cliffs and hills for a background, the multicolored gliders were perfect: bright, adventurous shapes, man-made, each a brilliant geometric contrast to nature’s bright blue of the sky, and the soft, green growth of the seaside cliffs, and the rolling white of the surf breaking against the massive black rocks of the shore.

  “Drive-in movies, and drive-in banks, and drive-in, plug-in campgrounds. And now drive-in churches.” He shook his head, drank coffee, banged the mug down on the oak-slab table. “Taking communion in the family car, probably with the windows rolled up and the air conditioning on, is the perfect symbol of this society, you know that? And then there’s your father, who’s got the gall to think that a pop evangelist can teach the Chinese something. Someone should tell him that the Chinese had a culture and a religion while our forefathers were still scratching fleas.”

  She put the California Living section aside and helped herself to an English muffin. “I’d be interested to see you debate my father sometime.”

  He snorted. “To have a debate—an intelligent debate—you’ve got to have some common ground. And I doubt that we could find much common ground.”

  “You might be surprised. He’s a charlatan, but he’s no dummy. He’s no monster, either. He believes what he’s saying, I’ve decided.”

  “You didn’t always think so.”

  “I know,” she answered slowly. “People change, though
.”

  “Is that why you’ve been tuning him in, the past few Sundays?”

  Spreading the muffin with strawberry jam, she considered. Then: “I’m not sure. Maybe it’s because I’m twenty-eight years old. I can’t stay mad at him forever. And, besides, I find myself thinking about my mother lately.”

  Across the table, his mouth came to a thoughtful set as he watched her for a moment before saying, “Worrying about her. Is that what you mean?”

  She shrugged. “I suppose it is. She’s fifty-six years old. She’s been drinking for a long, long time. I—” She hesitated, bit into the muffin, sipped her coffee, looked thoughtfully beyond him. Pepper, Peter’s dignified standard poodle, lying on the kitchen floor, caught her eye and amiably twitched his tail. “I think about her, that’s all. I wonder about her.”

  “You should call her, then. Or write her.”

  Still staring at Pepper, she didn’t reply. Peter was letting the silence lengthen, sharing it with her. It was characteristic of him. One minute he could be bombastic, the next minute pensive. And always, no matter how loudly he pounded the table, he was attuned to her mood.

  “How long has it been, since you’ve seen her?” he asked quietly.

  “Five years, at least.”

  “She calls you on your birthday and at Christmas.”

  “You said ‘seen.’” She realized that the correction had been sharper than she’d intended. She glanced at him, searching for a reaction. Whenever they talked about her parents, the conversation often veered, lost its balance, sometimes tipped toward quiet contention. Neither of them wanted it to happen. But it did.