Lancelot

God wrought? Hm yes.
    Suddenly things became clear. The pornography of American life is not the work of evil men. No, it is the sensible work of clever men who have at last fathomed God’s design for man.
    By the way, it is not true that Americans are by nature the most pornographic people on earth. The Russians and the Chinese are simply behind times, busy catching up. Ha, wait till those buggers get the forty-hour week.
    THE GREAT SECRET OF LIFE
    God’s secret design for man is that man’s happiness lies for men in men practicing violence upon women and that woman’s happiness lies in submitting to it.
    The secret of life is violence and rape, and its gospel is pornography. The question is, Can we bear to discover the secret?
    Do we have to accept the verdict of evolution, that the omega point is sexual aggression, the giving of it or the taking of it?
    The Jews in the Old Testament knew the secret: that man is conceived in sin.
    Then what shall we do about it?
    You say we are redeemed. Look out there. Does it look like we are redeemed?
    The storm? You don’t like my theology. I see. Oh, you want to know what happened that night. Yes. Well, I can tell you that quickly. It doesn’t really matter now.
    When I woke, the eye had passed and the south wall slammed in with what must have been a line of tornadoes. Under the rising keening of the wind came a new sound as of a thousand diesel towboats rumbling down the river. Wind whistled through the holes of the pigeonnier like an organ loft. In a flash of lightning I saw Belle Isle. The oaks were turned inside out, white as birches, but Belle Isle stood steady and serene. I thought of the heavy old fourteen-inch attic timbers straining and creaking against their iron straps and bolts.
    The woman was still there. She stood up. I noticed without much interest that she looked different. Now she looked less like an obscure relative, a voluptuous middle-aged aunt who has survived some forgotten disgrace, than—my mother! Or rather a photograph of my mother which I remember studying as a child. She gazed at me with a mild, equable, even a slightly puckish expression. The snapshot showed some V.M.I, cadets and their dates grouped around, sitting in, leaning on, a 1925 Franklin touring car. It was after graduation and a military wedding. The bride and groom are facing the photographer. She wears a loose-fitting dress which comes exactly to her kneecaps and a wide lace collar. Her hair falls to her shoulders, where it curls up. The other girls’ mouths are painted in bows but my mother’s mouth is pale. Her wide brows are unplucked. In her prankish way she is proferring an unsheathed sword (her date’s? the groom’s?) to the photographer. The sword is upright, the blade held in her hands, the hand guard making a cross. Is she doing an imitation of Joan of Arc leading her army, cross borne aloft? Whenever my mother’s friends spoke of her, they used words like “wonderful sense of humor,” the “class clown.” “imp,” and so on. She had two close friends. They called themselves the three Musketeers.
    The woman stood. It was the same woman. She was saying something, her lips were moving, but in the storm I could not hear her. Her expression meant something routine and self-deprecating like: Thank you so much, but I don’t want to be a bother. She turned and tried to open the door, but it wouldn’t open. It was then she gave me the sword—
    The sword? Ha ha. It was the Bowie knife.
    Then she looked like my mother again, and when she gave me the Bowie knife, she picked it up from the desk and thrust it at me point first in the same insistent joking way my mother would bore her sharp fist into my ribs.
    Again she tried to open the door. It must be the wind, I thought, holding it shut. But when I tried to open it. I saw that an oak limb, a thicket of leaves and branches, had blown against it.
    Ah, she gave me the knife to cut the branches and free the door.
    You can’t go now, I yelled above the shriek of the wind and the roar of the diesels on the river. Her shrug and nod I took to mean: Very well, I’ll stay at Belle Isle.
    Very well, I’ll take you over. But then I thought of something. No, you stay here, it’s safer, there are fewer trees and it’s safer here under the levee.
    Yet all the while I was doing what she asked me to do, in the obliging way, you know, that you do