LITMIR.BIZ

      The Ceremony of Innocence

      In my library is a single-volume collection of works by the Marquis de Sade, a book that I obtained for scholarly purposes long ago and read in a strange way: I skipped the dirty parts and followed the amoral, rationalist philosophy that stitched the episodes of pornography together (and that, undoubtedly, in the fertile, fetid mind of the Marquis, justified the Sadism—philosophy as rationalization). I don’t claim that I didn’t here and there sample the sodomite extravagance and frigid cruelty, for I am, after all, humanly curious.

      * * *

      Some years ago, my wife and I, clinging to one another in the security of our bed, protected by our down comforter, watched Al Pacino as “Scarface,” lurid curiosity and disclaimers about the horrors of the film overcoming our repugnance at the brutality. We shared a huge bowl of popcorn, and as the machine guns rattled and the chain saws snarled, we abstemiously, delicately, one by one, crunched the kernels. Looking down on us from above the bed were portraits of my wife’s parents, righteous and undefiled, innocent, in their Mormon youth: lovely Marcella glancing slightly away from the scene beneath her in the bed and in front of her on the television screen, a rose held delicately in her hand; Maitland smiling enigmatically, his high starched collar unfamiliar to a farm boy and clearly uncomfortable.

      * * *

      My elder son is an omnivorous reader. When he was in high school, he grazed prodigiously through my library, sitting under the lamp in the family room until all hours, devouring book after book: Conrad and Mailer, Dickens and Tom Wolfe, Iliad and Odyssey—and his own Rolling Stones and other arcana about which we still don’t chat since at the farther reaches of his literacy he explores landscapes as alien to me as the mythical planet Golob, on which, our Mormon legend tells us, God lives.

      One night—actually a very early morning—I needed my “sleeping pill,” an orange, to provide energy for another period of serious log-sawing. Stumbling through the family room on the way to the kitchen, I discovered my son reading, though it was not really a discovery, but a certainty that he would be there.

      “So what’s interesting enough to keep you up so late?” I groggily asked.

      “De Sade,” he replied, and pored on through the volume.

      I proceeded to the kitchen, peeled my orange, ate it section by section, and returned to bed.

      Under the down comforter, beneath the portraits of Grandma and Grandpa, beside my softly breathing wife, I fell peacefully asleep and awoke at seven, for tea and toast and another orange, completely refreshed.

      * * *

      Next June, my grandson will attend the family reunion, his first meeting with that huge, fertile tribe of Grahams that are his heritage. They’re a righteous, prayerful, joyful, wonderful bunch who eat Jell-o salad, drink root beer, read the Good Books, send their sons and daughters on missions for the Church, and believe that family is more important than state or nation. In the park, as the kids—the best looking, brightest bunch of offspring that any clan could hope for—play their games, and as the older folk bring one another up to date and pour root beer, slice the ham, shoo the flies from the cake, and do just a bit of boasting about this Graham who’s finishing an M.A. at BYU and that one who is completing a mission, I’ll be thinking about our little boy, whose father, in the wee hours some years ago, read de Sade.

      * * *

      Santa Cruz is the punk capital of the world. When we were there a few months ago, my wife and I saw this: A teenager with pink and purple electric hair was restraining a rat, which crawled on his shoulder, by holding its tail between his teeth. Not a white laboratory rat, but one of those inevitably associated with sewers.

      * * *

      Our younger son is a theologian, a Presbyterian pastor. Not a tub-thumping ranter or a Jesus freak, but a young man who believes, as I do, that the problem of knowing involves texts. At dinner he, his mother, and I endlessly debate questions about books and the Book.

      He’s quite a remarkable guy, caught in the dilemma of enjoying the good life and realizing how antithetical those values are to his commitment. He’s too serious about his beliefs to imagine himself as a society clergyman, giving witty prayers at country club breakfasts, too dedicated to envision himself as the star of a crystal cathedral, televising easy salvation.

      He has not read de Sade, never will. But he watched Miami Vice.

      * * *

      My wife and I take prodigious satisfaction in our sons, both of whom are clean cut, wholesome, bright, responsible—yes, cultured and poised. With the disinterested objectivity of parents, we say to one another (particularly when the intimacy of a long flight prompts airplane talk about our past and our increasingly brief future), “The boys are all we could ever have hoped for.” And then we pause, a bit misty, I suppose, and I take another sip of my preprandial wine as Norma increases the speed of her knitting. Another sip. The needles clink, epées flashing in the gleam of the reading lamp. “And our blessed little boy, Christopher Ross,” says Norma, even more mistily.

      In the pause that follows, I know her thoughts, and they’re mine. How will our glowing little boy work his way through the Cretan maze of cultures and countercultures; of mayhem and murder; of drugs and mindless revolt. What price must he pay to survive the terror of the bomb and of terrorism? Will purchasing a container of aspirin take daring when he’s old enough to patronize drug stores? Is he of the generation that finally will have no civility?

      Suppose, fifteen years from now, we took Christopher Ross to the Graham family reunion at Saratoga resort on the shore of Utah Lake—and he wore his hair in a pink and purple Mohawk, his pet rat crawling on his shoulder, its tail in his mouth.

      Life is clearly too perilous to be lived.

      The flight attendant brings our trays of steamed, soggy chicken and watery vegetables.

      “It’s not too bad,” says Norma, who daringly has made the test run. “And the bread is really quite good.”

      * * *

      In our park, a group of young children play “war.” We know that they come from caring families, for their camouflage Ranger outfits are clean and pressed, and their plastic M-16’s must cost fifteen or twenty dollars each.

      * * *

      My family and friends always accuse me of having a weird sense of humor. Perhaps they’re right. For his first birthday, I wanted to surprise Christopher Ross with a camouflage outfit, combat helmet, and M-16.

      My wife, who obviously has no sense of humor, vetoed the idea.

      * * *

      “Sade, de \’sad\ Comte Donatien Alphonse Franois 1740–1814 Marquis de Sade Fr. soldier & pervert”

      —Merriam-Webster Collegiate Dictionary

      * * *

      When I was nine, my mother took me to San Francisco for the World’s Fair, an unbelievable sacrifice for a Depression family. Father stayed at home, working as a roofer.

      Concurrent with our visit to San Francisco was the international convention of the CIO, the Congress of Industrial Organizations. My mother introduced me to John L. Lewis, then and now one of the great Winterowd heroes. He shook my hand, patted my head, and gave me a quarter. (If I, now a glamorous senior citizen, could choose between Lewis’s thick, silvering hair and his furiously bushing eyebrows, I’d take the eyebrows every time.)

      One night, Mother had been invited to a banquet, with John L. She gave me a dollar, and I took the cable car from the Hacienda Hotel on O’Farrell Street,