Rochelle, Lewyn could see, was struggling to process this information.
“It’s quite a production,” she said, truthfully enough.
“It is! It is! Hey Susie!” he called out to an extremely pretty girl who was walking past with a partner, each of them holding a Book of Mormon and a handful of cards and pens. “It’s my friends from school I said were coming.”
Susie and her friend stopped and turned. They were both so tall, Rochelle had to peer sharply upward.
“Hi,” said Susie. “This is Eliza, my friend from home.”
“Where’s home?” asked Rochelle.
“Provo, but I’m at BYU. We both are. You go to Cornell with Jonas?”
Rochelle had likely never before thought of herself as someone who “went to Cornell with Jonas,” but she nodded.
“Are you studying to be a vet, too?” said Eliza, the friend. She had light-brown freckles all over her nose and cheeks. Her blond hair was woven with beads, now glinting in the light from the retreating sun.
“Uh, no. Lawyer. What about you?”
“Oh, marketing, I think,” said Susie. “Are you a member of the church?”
Rochelle shook her head. “I am not. Full-blooded Jewish atheist here.”
Eliza’s eyes widened. Which was it, Lewyn wondered: the atheist or the Jew?
“Cool,” said Susie. She looked as if she were trying very hard. He felt a pang of sympathy for her.
“Maybe, if you have questions after the pageant, we can talk about them.”
Rochelle looked briefly at Jonas. She was wondering, Lewyn knew, how she had come to merit this special honor.
“That’s kind,” she said, after a moment. “I must say, everybody’s so colorful. What are you supposed to be?”
“We’re all Lamanites,” said Jonas. He leaned forward and said, conspiratorially: “We’re the bad guys.”
“Well, sometimes the Nephites went wrong, too,” Susie said, very seriously. “I mean, everyone wanders from the righteous, I think that’s the point. What are you two studying?” she asked Lewyn and Mark.
Mark, it turned out, was going into finance. It had never come up in conversation. Lewyn said he was thinking about majoring in art, which sounded downright strange when said aloud.
“Like, painting?”
“Uh, no. I don’t paint. Other people’s paintings.”
“Did you see the painting of Moroni in the Welcome Center?” Susie asked. “It makes you feel, like, the pain and the loneliness of being the last one of his whole line, and the faith that one day Heavenly Father would bring the right person to dig the plates up. Right there,” she said, turning to the great gray stage behind her.
Lewyn didn’t know what to say, though he was already sure he knew the painting she meant. He had seen it at the Smith farm.
“I love that one,” Eliza said. “And the one of the angel next to Joseph Smith’s bed, and the one of Joseph in the Sacred Grove. They were in all the books, and the sacrament meeting presentations. It’s a beautiful thing that Heavenly Father uses his gift of art to sustain our faith.”
Lewyn was about to say that this wasn’t the purpose of art, but the exact truth of that notion had just then struck him for the very first time: For centuries, for millennia, hadn’t this been precisely the “purpose” of art? “I must go back and have a look at those pictures,” he heard himself say.
The three of them found seats far back on the right. Again and again, cast members and missionaries approached, always with the same general script—Where you folks from? Is it your first time here?—till Rochelle started heading them off at the first intake of breath: Ithaca. Our first time, yes. Yes, we are looking forward to it. Nice to meet you. Did they have any questions? Would they like to fill out a card because missionaries could come visit them at home to talk about some of the messages in the pageant. Rochelle declined for all three of them, as Mark remained brutally silent. They seemed to have found an unspoken mutuality, and a determination to keep these eager, insanely dressed people moving on to the next mark in the next seat. When it was finally dark, a tall missionary with a buzz cut led an invocation—Mark, on Lewyn’s left, bowed his head and Rochelle, on his right, did not—and then swarms of actors raced for the stage, coiling up hidden stairs or ramps onto the many levels, filling the hillside with hundreds of now tiny bodies, a vast needlepoint of color.
The people on the stage were so far away from even the nearest audience members that they could not possibly “act” as Lewyn had always understood “acting”; instead, they gestured in great, exaggerated movements as the recorded dialogue, music, and narration washed over the field from massive overhead speakers. He tried to follow what was happening, but it kept jumping around from ancient Jerusalem long before Christ to someone’s vision of a future crucifixion. A ship was assembled onstage to take a righteous prophet and his sons to a new world, but once the first protagonists disappeared there were new characters with unfamiliar names, and generations of Lamanites (who were mainly bad) continued to fight generations of Nephites (who were mainly but not always good). Volcanos exploded and violent storms sprayed water all over the stage, and each new prophet called for the wayward to repent and remember the promise of Christ.
Then, suddenly, there he was: the savior himself! He was dangling from a slender cable high above the enormous stage, lit in brightest light with only a bit of the moon, dull behind clouds, in competition for the eye, and the rest of the world of the play and the rest of the real world suddenly still.
Christ stayed with the Nephites (or Lamanites, Lewyn wasn’t sure) for three days, then left to return to the story he already knew: the tomb in Jerusalem with its stone rolled aside. Then, the end of the pageant became a metanarrative about the golden plates: containing this very story, buried right here on the crest of the Hill Cumorah. The music soared and the voices of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir rolled over the audience as that same Joseph Smith Lewyn had seen hours earlier, talking to a pretty girl in a BYU Rugby shirt, became a tiny action figure up there on the stage. Behind him, the first faithful took their places, radiant with belief.
Rochelle, on his right, was rolling and unrolling her program between her hands. Mark’s eyes were shut in furious prayer. Then Lewyn looked past them down the long row of people: all glowing, many in tears, reaching for one another. Everywhere around him families embraced, scrums of bodies pressed together in celebration, and he was mystified. When, in our own family, had we ever held one another this way? When had any one of us, apart from our mother, reached out with love, and when had any of the rest of us not pulled back? The faintest hint of affection, the palest expression of warmth, was enough to make each Oppenheimer triplet recoil; this Lewyn understood, with deep sadness, for the very first time in his life, as the waves of applause and the shining faces and the powerful evidence of roiling human love surged all around him. Was it God, after all? Not one of his own relatives believed that the God of Abraham and Sarah and Moses knew them personally or took any special interest in their welfare, or imagined they would someday enter a Jewish paradise and embrace as a family, for all eternity. Embrace? As a family? For all eternity? How had we been made so differently from these people? Lewyn wondered, with dismay. Were we even capable of feeling what they felt? These thousands, weeping and cheering and swaying in their unfathomable ecstasy, had crossed some great divide from the place he was and had always been to some other place where people were at peace with one another and themselves, and at that moment, and for many years to come, he would have done nearly anything to be there with them.
Chapter Twenty-Three
Summer Lovers
In which Sally Oppenheimer discovers her brother’s snakeliness,
and contemplates the entire baffling mosh pit of adult life