Let Me Show You the House of Prayer

My dad’s twenty-fifth high school reunion was held in Vincennes, Indiana, at a Holiday Inn. For the first time, my sister, brother and I were left in the room unsupervised. I recall wandering to the lobby to see a bunch of intoxicated old people calling my dad “Ronny,” recounting how he once drove around the town square backwards. I wondered exactly how one did this, drove backwards. My mother explained later that it did not mean my dad drove with his back to the road, but that Ronny had driven his car around town square in reverse.

It was not something I could imagine my dad doing, anymore than I could imagine him as “Ronny.” That so many people thought of my no-nonsense, careful dad as hilarious or crazy was astounding. At the reunion, in that hotel lobby, my parents transformed. Mother was red-faced and laughing, stroking my hair in an absent way, introducing me to people I was pretty sure I’d never see again. We quickly lost interest and retreated to our room where we ate junk food, jumped on the bed, and watched naughty television.

That was, of course, only the beginning of the transformations my parents would make in the next thirty years. I couldn’t possibly know, for instance, that in a matter of three years, we would move away from Ronny’s hometown. This wasn’t uncommon. It was a  refinery town; kids came and went in two year stints while their dads served tenures in the plant. I never knew how or why that happened, only that they had their own neighborhood, maybe their own real estate agents who recycled their houses. We did not live there, were not part of the refinery, so I figured we’d never move away. But we did.

What I also didn’t know was that Ronny would not live to see my twenty-fifth class reunion. He would not, in fact, see my tenth. We buried him in his hometown, in the shadow of that refinery, as was his wish. That seemed significant to me; though we lived in Tennessee almost ten years—some formative years for me—it was as if he had never really left. He loved Tennessee, took walks in the national park almost every evening in my memory, but he still belonged to his old town.

This year, as my twenty-fifth reunion rolled around, I had to choose: mark it in the same place he did, the place I left when I was sixteen, or in east Tennessee. Like him, I loved Tennessee. While I could write a dissertation on the differences between the two places, suffice it to say that I feel a certain level of schizophrenia. I was shaped by one, and then the other shaped me some more. In some ways the regions are polar opposites. Loyalty had very little to do with the decision. Attending a high school reunion after 25 years was not something I ever dreamed I’d do. I’d have bet heavily against it. But this one crept up. I went to kindergarten with those kids over thirty years ago. I’d seen them all on Facebook, friending each other. All those lines that seemed permanently established in high school had fallen away. Jocks and geeks, bullies and wimps, all were friendly now. I missed that, the gradual erasure of clique boundaries, the gentle emergence of adults.

Thus, in early August I found myself, my twin sister beside me,  driving a rental car south from Chicago along hilly, rural Illinois Route One. The crispy, withered cornfields reminded us of the summertime rhyme: Knee high by the Fourth of July. If it wasn’t, you were probably in for losses. We looked for the massive arms of pipe irrigation so common out west. Later, my uncle told us they don’t use it here, relying instead on the rain. This year, it didn’t come.

The town was a shock. The high school was gone; the 1920s building where we had sweated our butts off climbing up to third floor Spanish, just like our dad did thirty years before us, had been replaced by a nondescript brick edifice that might have sat in Anywhere, America. Even the gym, with its magnificent shiny floor, massive stage, and art deco design.

Town square was the same, though mostly home to offices and banks rather than restaurants or shops of any kind. No cute cafes here;it seemed they missed the whole ten-dollar-coffee movement. No high end shoe store, either. Not for the first time, I became aware that my current town exists in a kind of economic bubble. Famous rock singers move here; people seem to have excess cash. I’m not knocking it; our downtown feels quaint and thriving. It’s just not the way a lot of America lives.

Though we never meant to, my sister and I drove by our old church. As it turned out, the Presbyterian church was only a block from the house where the writer James Jones grew up. I wanted to see that, to stand across the street from it and imagine him there, growing up about fifty years before I did on the same streets, in the same high school, then moving away, living though the war and finally sitting down to write books. Big books, like From Here to Eternity, and Some Came Running. I find that remarkable, that somebody who grew up looking at the same horizon as I grew up looking at, went on to write books and live a celebrated literary life. It’s not impossible.

There was our old church. No longer a church, but a House of Prayer. I jumped out, alive with a memory of my Sunday school classroom window. I wanted to show my sister the place from which we once spoke to a classmate, who was at Sunday school  in his church, one that shared the building with us. They were a floor below, with the window open. He wasn’t really a friend, but that day was so thrilling, to see him and open the window and speak to him while we were both in Sunday school. It takes so little, when you’re young.

I had that all over me again, the thrill of a chilly fall day, being spoken to by the Sunday school teacher for letting in the cold air. My sister followed me out of the rental car, walked up the path with me, though she didn’t remember the incident. I must pause to say: it is such a delicious stroke of luck to have a brave double with whom to compare notes. Not a lot of people get that,  somebody on whom to test their memories.

As we stood there pointing, a woman appeared on the sidewalk in the front of the building. She beckoned to us. I was so taken aback by the sight of this elderly woman curling her finger on a hot August day that I ignored her, thinking she would vanish. But she came closer. “Come on in,” she was saying. “Let me show you the House of Prayer.”

We tried to get out of it, but she kept saying it in her scratchy voice. Suddenly, I did want to see it. I wanted to go in there and see where we went to preschool, where we performed Christmas pageants, where, in order to join the church, I was forced to sing, along with my sister and Justin Opiela, a fruity song in front of the congregation, including the older Buchanan boys. We followed her inside.

The tour took us through the sanctuary,  with its domed, polished wood ceiling. The magnificent organ had been removed, and the slanted floor leveled. A stage had been constructed, and on it a woman played an electric piano, singing softly to herself.  “This is our main room,” she said, “where we worship.”

Through the minister’s door was the hall to the reception room where we would socialize and eat frosted cookies on greenish brocade furniture. I could see my mother dressed in a long skirt, several bracelets clinking along her wrist, the smell of her perfume, her heavy earrings swinging. I hurried down the hall to the nursery, moving ahead of our guide, who was still speaking in her feathery voice. When I swung open the door, something inside me crashed. The little cribs were gone, as were all the toys my brother was sometimes left to play with, to my great envy. The carpet was threadbare; it was just a dusty, disorganized storage room, walls peeling, broken light fixtures piled in a corner.

I can’t explain why this was so devastating.  There were a million other things changed about the town. There was Dad’s grave to see. There were the twenty-two  acres of woodland that we grew up romping over, a property where we built fires, fished, cooked hotdogs and roasted marshmallows deep into the night, now parceled with houses on it, a sight that reduced me to a paralyzed, blubbering mess. So why should I stand speechless in this church nursery, feeling a baseball size lump in my throat? Not the Sunday school rooms upstairs that were changed into “healing rooms,” or the large basement where we made ornaments with the church elders, now a coffee bar for the House of Prayer. It was that nursery.

I don’t even go to church.

Once we were back on the street, the woman began telling us about the renovations and the plans for the House of Prayer. My sister and I silently determined that we’d have to be rude to end this.  “Uh, thanks,” she said. “We’ve got somewhere to be.” And we both headed for the car. She called out “Thanks for stopping by!”As we drove out of town to my aunt and uncle’s house for lunch, I

could still hear her tell us about how difficult it was to move that massive organ, how the man who moved it hurt his back. How offended I felt, wondering why in the world anyone would want to remove such a thing.

I got better once we hit the road for Palestine. I was glad for my aunt and uncle, glad my cousins were there, that there would be children, and food. We both agreed that there was only so much of revisiting old places, the house you were born in, the school, the playground, the parks, site of your first kiss, your geometry teacher’s house, only so many places you could see without making human contact. The open arms, the huge spread of food, the excited talking, stories, photo taking, all of that offsets the weird empty feeling of twenty year’s time.

What a thrill to walk into the pizza parlor where our classmates held the first event,  hearing people cry out in delight at the sight of us! Hugging people like the girl who taught me to love Tom T. Hall, country singer, in second grade. Suddenly the past, my childhood, which for decades had felt like it was something I read in a book—not a best-selling page turner, but still, a pretty good book—suddenly it all jumped into animated,  laughing, breathing real life. Later, I drank too much and showed a few friends a dance move I call the ass-slapping horse rider, only to turn and find the entire reunion, including the band, watching, cheering and whistling. I was mortified, hysterical, and happy. For it was real! I didn’t read it. Christy went to first grade! There I am in the photograph of the bi-centennial wearing my Martha Washington dress and puffy bonnet, mildly confused in the back row. There I am.

We did find his grave. Using a map the caretaker had dropped off for us, we turned into the cemetery across the highway from the SuperWalmart, at the foot of the oil refinery chugging its black smoke like breath. There rests my father, where he has been for eighteen years, where I keep a little bit of myself.