The Moviegoer

loftiest theosophical panBrahman sentiments. The sixth is still a Presbyterian.
    If I had to name a single trait that all these people shared, it is their niceness. Their lives are triumphs of niceness. They like everyone with the warmest and most generous feelings. And as for themselves: it would be impossible for even a dour person not to like them.
    Tonight’s subject is a playwright who transmits this very quality of niceness in his plays. He begins:
    I believe in people. I believe in tolerance and understanding between people. I believe in the uniqueness and the dignity of the individual—
    Everyone on This I Believe believes in the uniqueness and the dignity of the individual. I have noticed, however, that the believers are far from unique themselves, are in fact alike as peas in a pod.
    I believe in music. I believe in a child’s smile. I believe in love. I also believe in hate.
    This is true. I have known a couple of these believers, humanists and lady psychologists who come to my aunt’s house. On This I Believe they like everyone. But when it comes down to this or that particular person, I have noticed that they usually hate his guts.
    I did not always enjoy This I Believe. While I was living at my aunt’s house, I was overtaken by a fit of perversity. But instead of writing a letter to an editor, as was my custom, I recorded a tape which I submitted to Mr Edward R. Murrow. “Here are the beliefs of John Bickerson Bolling, a moviegoer living in New Orleans,” it began, and ended, “I believe in a good kick in the ass. This—I believe.” I soon regretted it, however, as what my grandfather would have called “a smart-alecky stunt” and I was relieved when the tape was returned. I have listened faithfully to This I Believe ever since.
    I believe in freedom, the sacredness of the individual and the brotherhood of man—
    concludes the playwright.
    I believe in believing. This—I believe.
    All my shakiness over Sharon is gone. I switch off my radio and lie in bed with a pleasant tingling sensation in the groin, a tingling for Sharon and for all my fellow Americans.
    12
    SOMETIME DURING THE night and at the height of the storm the telephone rings, a dreadful summons, and I find myself in the middle of the floor shaking like a leaf and wondering what is amiss. It is my aunt.
    â€œWhat’s that?” The telephone crackles with static. I listen so hard I can’t hear.
    My aunt tells me that something has happened to Kate. When Uncle Jules and Walter arrived at the hotel from the Iberia ball, Kate was not to be found. Nell Lovell, herself a former queen, told them that Kate had left abruptly sometime before eleven o’clock. That was three hours ago and she had not come home. But Nell wasn’t worried. “You know as well as I do what she’s doing, Cousin Em,” she told my aunt. “You remember my Christmas party at Empire when she took out up the levee and walked all the way to Laplace? That Kate.” But my aunt has her doubts. “Listen to this,” she says in a peculiar voice—it is the dry litigious way of speaking of closely knit families in times of trouble: one would imagine she was speaking of a stranger. “Here is the last entry in her diary: Tonight will tell the story—will the new freedom work—if not, no more tight ropes for me, thank you. Now you recall her tight rope.”
    â€œYes.” “Tight rope” is an expression Kate used when she was sick the first time. When she was a child and her mother was alive, she said, it used to seem to her that people laughed and talked in an easy and familiar way and stood on solid ground, but now it seemed that they (not just she but everybody) had become aware of the abyss that yawned at their feet even on the most ordinary occasions—especially on the most ordinary occasions. Thus, she would a thousand times rather find herself in the middle of no man’s land than at a family party or luncheon club.
    â€œNow I’m not really worried about her,” my aunt declares briskly. There is a silence and the wire crackles. Strange to say, my main emotion is a slight social embarrassment. I cast about for something to say. “After all the girl is twenty-five years old,” says my aunt.
    â€œThat’s true.”
    Lightning strikes somewhere close, a vicious bolt. The clap comes hard upon it, in the very whitening, and shakes