A BROOD OF VIPERS
One thing was certain: the mysteries and puzzles in my life were percolating with more oomph than they ever had previously. Yet I had the distinct impression that I wasn’t getting anywhere with them. At any rate, I now had two people to investigate: Deanna Schumacher, the fake Fiona, and Timothy J. Anderson, the dead bastard. If he was the dead bastard. He probably was. How many dead people could there be in this thing?
Things were pretty much back to business-as-usual between Sam Hellerman and me since he had come clean on the Dud Chart situation. I had hesitated a bit out of lingering resentment, but after he got pantsed in boxing for my sake I relented and decided to let him in on the Catcher code, mostly because I was so pleased with myself for having cracked it and I couldn’t think of anyone other than Sam Hellerman who would be at all impressed by it. And he was impressed, though he claimed he would have easily spotted the French angle—maybe he would have, though I doubt it. I wasn’t planning to include him in the fake Fiona arm of the investigation, but he was totally on the Anderson case and insisted we go to the library the minute I showed him Tit’s note.
The first thing we did at the library was to use a concordance to look up the biblical quotation about stones and children and Abraham. Sam Hellerman knew how to do that because of his long years of experience as the son of weird German vampire religious fanatics, I guess. It was from Matthew 3:9.
The chapter was kind of hard to understand. John the Baptist is telling some authorities (he calls them a “brood of vipers”) that they aren’t as powerful as they think they are, I believe.
Sam Hellerman thought it was a more or less generic “question authority” message. “Maybe they were trying to say that this Timothy J. Anderson was some kind of rebel.”
He had a point about the Q. A. theme, though it seemed to me there was also a warning of an impending swift and terrible revenge: it reminded me of the movie Carrie. J. the B. was saying, in effect, “Okay, guys, just keep dumping buckets of pig blood on introverted girls at proms, and see what happens—you have no idea what you’re playing with here.”
I was doubtful that the actual meaning of the quote would have much to tell us about Timothy J. Anderson’s character, though. It could be a question authority message, but it could also be about the generic power of God, or about the difference between earthly and spiritual reality, you know, stones versus heaven, earth as opposed to air. It could be all of them at once, or none of them. I hadn’t read enough to be sure, but I think the Seven Story Mountain guy was getting at the rocks/air thing; plus maybe he was thinking of the stone walls of the monasteries and cathedrals of Europe, which had inspired him as a child and which, I assume, were intended to foreshadow his eventual monk-ization. Who knows? The SSM guy chose it for whatever reason he might have had; maybe Timothy J. Anderson or his survivors had chosen it because they were under the influence of that book, or maybe for some other unrelated reason. All I’m saying is that as far as the content goes, the epigraph and the epitaph might as well have said “Have a Nice Day” or “I Heart Cats” for all the difference it would make. You can make something mean anything you want. And you can spend a great deal of time and effort choosing your words and allusions and quotations carefully and hardly anyone will even notice or get it anyway.
But, as usual, while I was giving myself this stern lecture on the meaninglessness of the data we’d just uncovered and how communication is pointless and we’re all doomed, Sam Hellerman was noticing the interesting part. I was jolted out of my daydream by the sound of his finger hitting the page of the Jerusalem Bible that lay open on the library table.
“Look,” he said in a library whisper.
I went “?” but I soon saw what he was getting at. Right after that quotation comes a kind of threat to the brood of vipers, a variation on the notion of clearing out dead wood:
“Even now the ax is lying at the root of the trees; every tree therefore that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire.”
If he is talking about the vipers, that’s kind of a mixed metaphor, if I’m not mistaken, but who am I to criticize John the Baptist on stylistic grounds? I’m sure it sounded very convincing at the time. You probably had to be there. Anyway, Tit, remember, had written in the uncoded part of his note: “The bastard is dead. Thrown into the fire.”
That sounded like it could possibly be a reference to the biblical passage, though it could also be coincidental. I couldn’t decide. But if it was an allusion, this passage from the Bible arguably linked Tit, Timothy J. Anderson, my dad, and the Seven Storey Mountain guy. I wasn’t sure how, exactly, or what it meant. Maybe it was a common, standard quotation that was used all over the place, though. And maybe “thrown into the fire” was just something people in the sixties used to say whenever a bastard died. You never know.
The Bible passage brought to mind my first response to the note, the Rosemary’s Baby/ Black Sabbath–influenced idea that it had something to do with burning witches. Was there something in that after all? I mean, maybe Tit was implying that Timothy J. Anderson had been some kind of heretic, through a (devil-head) oblique and maybe ironic reference to a biblical text about burning trees and vipers and questioning authority? I really wished I knew more about history, religion, the Bible, witches, the sixties, and so forth. My Academic Achievements were second to none, yet somehow I instinctively knew I wasn’t going to solve this particular problem by making a collage or appreciating ethnic food or putting on a skit. In fact, I felt severely handicapped by my lack of knowledge in general, which is not something that comes up very often in my day-to-day life. Or more likely it comes up all the time without my realizing it.
We had discovered something potentially meaningful, yet I didn’t get much satisfaction from it. Part of that was because solving one puzzle had simply opened a new set of puzzles, and vaguer ones at that, and I was more confused than ever. But mostly, it was because the whole thing gave me an uncomfortable, creepy feeling. Tit’s note was creepy. The Bible passage was creepy. It wasn’t what I had been going for with this cute little hobby of trying to investigate my dad’s teenage life through clues he had inadvertently left behind. I looked down at all of our research materials spread out on the table: Catcher, CEH 1960; the note from Tit; The Seven Storey Mountain; the Jerusalem Bible; the concordance; my French dictionary; my various notebooks—I could almost see and feel them morph from charming-exhilarating-profound to sordid-depressing-pointless. For some reason the phrase “brood of vipers” kept echoing unpleasantly in my head. I had this idiotic notion that the materials spread out on the table formed a kind of picture of the world, and that it wasn’t a picture I particularly cared for. And my dad’s role in this picture was maddeningly dim and indistinct.
I had once again been distracted from the investigation by my own fantasies and emotions. Not Sam Hellerman, though. He was a bespectacled teenage research machine, the dork Woodward and the geek Bernstein rolled into one diminutive, socially inferior package, loading the archives of the San Francisco Chronicle into the microfilm viewing machine.
I tried to shake the vipers out of my head. It seemed to me that the way to approach the Seven Storey Mountain/ Timothy J. Anderson problem was not so much through trying to understand the meaning of the text itself but through thinking of the quotation as a kind of object, an accessory. I wear a “Kill ’em All” shirt and it pegs me as a Guns-and-Ammo guy, even if I don’t literally want everybody to get killed and sorted out by God. Sam Hellerman’s black high-tops put him in this category made up of the kind of people who wear Converse All Stars; and if you notice that I, too, am wearing black high-tops, you could conjecture that I might have more in common with Sam Hellerman than just shoes. Perhaps, I thought, it’s the same way with quotations from the Bible as it is with shoes. So this freaky monk character has Matthew 3:9–11 on the title page of his book; Timothy J. Anderson had it on his funeral card. Maybe Timothy J. Anderson was a freaky monk, too. Clergy.
I had been thinking along these lines for a couple of days, since the Dr. Hexstrom session I described above, when I explained to her about how I ended up being called Chi-Mo.
Now, one thing you have to understand is that my conversations with Dr. Hexstrom involved very few spoken words. We had quickly reached the point where a great deal could be communicated through a series of facial expressions and meaningful looks. It would have looked a bit like telepathy to an outside observer, probably, though it wasn’t. We were like two slans, that Dr. Hexstrom and me.
She got the ball rolling, as usual, with a question: “So, in view of that, how do you feel about your father being Catholic?”
My look said “how do you mean, Catholic?”
She gave me a pretty complicated look, which basically meant “what part of Catholic don’t you understand?” but also implied “come, come, now, you’re a bright boy—surely such an obvious fact cannot have escaped you?”
Well, she was right, of course, as I realized when I thought about it. We had never gone to church as a family, that I could recall, and I don’t remember there being any talk of my dad’s going to church on his own, either. But my dad’s funeral had been in a Catholic church and he was buried in a Catholic cemetery, or rather in a Catholic marble filing cabinet for dead people. When I brought it up to Amanda later on, she looked at me as though I were as dumb as a bag of dry leaves and said of course he had been Catholic. She even knew the names of the Catholic schools he had attended: Queen of the Universe grammar school and MPB College Preparatory. That’s what I get for spending so much time in my own world. Humiliating ignorance of the obvious.
I guess I’d always figured my dad had had the same religious views as my mom. She thought organized religion was for unsophisticated simpletons. She wanted everyone to be “free-thinking” instead. So she embraced “spirituality,” which pretty much meant whatever happened to turn up in the Body and Spirit section of her organic cooking magazines.
I’m not any religion myself, but for the record, I’m pretty sure I do believe in God. It’s just a feeling I have. I can’t prove it, but since when are you supposed to prove a feeling? God is the only situation where they expect you to do that. (Though I have to say, the universe seems so flawlessly designed to be at my expense that I doubt it could be entirely accidental.) Even if I didn’t believe in God, though, I’d probably say I did just out of spite. To irritate people like my mom who think believing in God is tacky and beneath them. They’re wrong about everything else; chances are they’re wrong about that, too. Plus, God embarrasses people. Which I totally enjoy.
Anyway, I couldn’t see how my mom could have handled it if my dad had been a full-on Catholic. She would have spent so much time ridiculing him that there wouldn’t have been any time left to ask which dress made her look fatter. Maybe, in fact, this method of avoiding that topic was the key to a successful marriage, but I couldn’t quite picture it.
I must have been looking puzzled, because Dr. Hexstrom’s face once again went: “you’re a bright boy—this is not really all that hard to get.” Then she added, in words, “many of those books are books Catholics used to read in the sixties.”
My look said: “Catcher and Slan and The Doors of Perception? Surely not.”
Her look was once again complicated: “some of the books are books young people read in the sixties,” it said patiently, “some are books Catholics read in the sixties, and some are books sixties people read in the sixties. Ergo: your father was young and Catholic in the sixties.”
“Plus,” she added in words, “your mother told me.”
Well, that seemed like cheating, but there was no arguing with it. My inclined head said, with what I hoped was a touch of class: “Touché.”
So back to the library research session with Sam Hellerman: there I was thinking about all this Catholic stuff, my nickname, and the notion that the stones/Abraham quote might be something Catholic clergy tended to associate with themselves. And I had pretty much reached the conclusion—in fact, I had little doubt—that what we were dealing with here was some kind of pedophile priest situation.
Timothy J. Anderson was a clergyman who had molested Tit and maybe others, maybe even my dad—a weird thought indeed. Tit and company had finally risen up to take some kind of elaborate revenge. Poisoned the Communion wine. Pushed him out of a bell tower. The bastard was dead at last, thrown into the metaphorical fire, as such a man was surely going straight to hell. Tit had hated him so much that he hadn’t even considered going to the funeral, but my dad had gone for some reason. To view the body, to make sure the b. was d.? Did such things ever really happen? Presumably so: if it can be thought, it can be done.
So when Sam Hellerman called me over to the microfilm viewer, I was expecting to read an obituary from around 3/13/63 noting the death (under mysterious circumstances, perhaps) of someone by the name of Brother Timothy J. Anderson.
“It’s a monk, right?” I said. “A dead monk. Possibly poisoned.”
Sam Hellerman stared at me.
“What in God’s name are you talking about?”
“Or a priest, a bishop, something like that.” I started to explain my theory, but he was already shaking his head.
Because here’s what he had found in the archives, or rather, what he hadn’t found: there was no obituary or death notice for anyone by the name of Timothy J. Anderson anywhere around that date.
“Priests,” he said, “are prominent members of the community. There’s no way a death like that wouldn’t be in the paper.”
I could see that he was probably right. Yet the card pretty clearly indicated a funeral in San Francisco at the time. Had the listing been suppressed because of the scandal? But if there had been a scandal, if the story was “out,” we’d have seen huge headlines about “Altar Boy Avengers” or something. (Which is not a bad band name, as Sam Hellerman replied when I mentioned it.) Anyway, I’m pretty sure that sort of thing is usually dark and secret and behind the scenes and only comes out after everyone involved has had years of therapy and/or Alzheimer’s.
Nonetheless, Timothy J. Anderson, whoever he had been, had clearly lived and died somehow. There were presumably official death records other than newspapers that could be checked somewhere, though the very thought filled me with fatigue and dread.
A moment earlier everything had seemed to fit together neatly, if distastefully. Now nothing fit, but the distastefulness remained. We tried looking up Timothy J. Anderson in every local reference book we could find: no result, not even close. Well, we could call up all the Andersons in the phone book to ask if any of them knew a Timothy J. who had died in 1963. Yeah, right.
“I’m sorry, dude,” said Sam Hellerman, because we had started to say dude recently. “He doesn’t exist.”
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