“Just out of interest, where did Mom think you were all this time?”
“Ithaca, at first. There wasn’t a lot of communication going on, like I said. Also, by then we all had cell phones. Flip phones, not smartphones, but you could text on them. So she’d check in with me. Are you ok? And I’d text back, I’m ok. That was the extent of it for a while. Then I called in November or December and told her I’d taken a leave from Cornell, and she wanted to come rushing out to Utah to rescue me, probably with a deprogrammer or something, but I promised her I was fine, because I actually was fine. I went home on the anniversary for the next couple of years. Well, anniversary and our birthday. Very much an ordeal. But I wouldn’t stay. It was painful seeing any of them. Any of you.”
Lewyn had zipped up his jacket, to the chin, and now sat with his hands in his jeans pockets. It was starting to get cold and starting to get dark.
“Should we go?” he asked.
“Just tell me the rest, okay?”
“What rest? I came home. Obviously.”
“Come on, Lewyn. Something must have happened. Unless … you didn’t actually get baptized, did you?”
He shrugged. “Not quite. I did write an undergraduate thesis on four Mormon artists. I think that’s actually what ended it for me.”
“Mormon art? Made you not want to be a Mormon?”
He seemed to consider. “Actually, I would say yes. That was a big part of why. I’d always been curious about what divides ‘fine’ art from ‘commercial’ art. I think a lot of people are. Especially with an image that explores some aspect of religious faith, there’s an element of conveying or, to be crude, ‘selling’ the idea of a specific belief, presumably the artist’s own specific belief. But we’d put an Old Master annunciation in a very different category than a depiction of Joseph Smith visited by angels, painted in the 1960s. That might actually have been my topic if I’d stayed for my PhD, but it didn’t come to that. At BYU I got interested in these four artists. Friberg, Anderson, Lovell, and Riley. Between them they created the visual iconography of the modern LDS church. Their paintings illustrate the scriptures; they’re in every Mormon home, they’re on the walls of every visitors’ center at every Mormon site. I saw them for the first time in Palmyra, and then I saw them virtually every day for the next four years. They’re undeniably powerful, but when I started to study the work, and the artists, I learned that only one of the four was actually a member of the church. The other three were professional illustrators, for magazines and advertising, and the covers for pulp novels. When the companies they’d been working for started to replace illustrations with photographs, their work dried up and they all needed money, so one of them accepted a commission from the church, and then they kept handing the job off to one another when they could afford to stop doing it. But it was never even personal for any of those three, let alone spiritual. In fact, they were so uncomfortable with it that I started to think of the images as a form of dishonesty. And then it all began to feel dishonest.”
I nodded. “Okay. That makes sense.”
“And the bishop, like I said, was a very kind person, and he tried to bring me back, but I started to think I just wasn’t going to get there. And then one day I was sitting in a Starbucks in Provo, and these two missionaries came up to me, and I invited them to sit down. And they got out their pamphlets and the pamphlets had the Tom Lovell painting of Moroni Burying the Plates on the second page. Moroni’s on the Hill Cumorah, but it’s hundreds and hundreds of years ago, so the hill is covered with trees, and it’s winter and he’s dug this hole in the ground and he’s praying before he buries the plates, because he knows he’s about to die and he’s the last descendant, and this is the record of his people and how Jesus appeared to the Nephites, but it’s all going to be okay because someday God will send the right person to dig right here and that person will find the plates and translate them, and the Aaronic Priesthood will be restored and everything else.”
I made myself not say any of what I was thinking.
“And these two missionaries are getting to the point where they’re telling me I know this testimony is true, and You can know it too if you ask God sincerely, and I’d been hearing those exact phrases and looking at that exact same painting for four years by then, and I knew it wasn’t true. I knew it had never been true. And these poor guys are just staring at me because I’ve started to cry and laugh at the same time, right there in the middle of Starbucks with everyone looking at us, and I’m just crying and laughing and saying, I can’t, I can’t, I can’t. And they actually ended up calling an ambulance for me because they were so worried about me, and I got myself hospitalized for a couple of days, which was not something I would have asked for but frankly it was the right thing to happen, because I was a complete mess and very much not capable of handling what was happening to me. And after a few days, when I went back to my apartment, I realized there wasn’t a single thing from there that I wanted. So I went to the airport and I came home.”
He stopped. He looked past me, up toward the top of the street, where someone else was now heading in our direction. Someone without a dog.
“And that’s it. That’s all she wrote.”
“Oh my God. Lewyn. I’m so sorry.”
“For what?” He sounded surprised. “I had to find out what I believed. People need to. I learned that I cared more about art than anything else. And I met some truly good people. And I got my degree, only a couple of years behind schedule. I have no complaints.”
“I’m so glad you came home,” I told Lewyn. “I wouldn’t have made it without you.”
“My pleasure.”
The someone on the street was closer. I could hear the footsteps, and I turned to see. He was young, Black, carrying a Fairway bag. He was whistling. He was also, I realized, familiar.
“You know him?” Lewyn asked me. I had already gotten to my feet. I was already waving.
But he didn’t see me, not yet. He wore a blue parka over a blue shirt. The shirt had a ceremonial crest: yellow acorns on a shield of red and white. When he got closer I could read what it said underneath: Silliman College.
“Hi! Ephraim!”
Then he stopped. He pulled at one of his earbuds, then the other. He held out his arms. “Phoebe. Wow.” He scooped me up, somehow without letting go of his groceries.
“What are you doing here?”
“I live here.” He pointed to a house down the street from the warehouse, on the corner. “I live there.”
“That’s incredible! We own this building. I mean, warehouse. Neighbors!”
The young man, Ephraim, said: “Ah.”
“This is my brother Lewyn.”
“Hello,” said Lewyn, holding out his hand. They shook.
“Ephraim was a counselor for Children’s Aid last summer,” I told Lewyn. “He goes to Yale. What are you doing home?”
“Fall break,” said Ephraim simply. “I have a project I needed to work on, and my suitemates decided to spend the break watching every episode of Stargate in our living room. Besides, I wanted to see my mom.”
“That’s so sweet!” I said. “This is amazing! I thought you were going to keep in touch.”
He looked, I saw, abruptly uncomfortable. I wished I hadn’t said it. But we had been friends. And united in disdain for our boss, that awful woman who hated kids.
“Would you like to join us?” said Ephraim. “I’m making dinner.”
I declined, automatically. “No, no, that’s okay.”
“We can’t,” Lewyn said at the same time.
“Actually, we just ate,” I added.
“But just come in and say hello,” he insisted. “It’s time you met my mom.”
My brother and I exchanged a glance, and then, an instant later, a nod. Neither of us, we would later admit, had any idea that “It’s time you met my mom” was anything but a pleasantry, nor the slightest sense that some momentous thing might be about to happen. But we followed him anyway.
Chapter Thirty-Two