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difficult to explain. Of course by now maybe they've seen the articles in
the papers and magazines. I don't know, that's not important. Dora
cried for her mother, yes. But after that big lie I told her when she
was twelve, she never asked about anything again."
"But Terry's devotion to Dora had been as perfect as that of any
mammalian mother! Instinctive; nurselike; antiseptic. She'd feed
Dora from the four food groups. She'd dress Dora up in beautiful
clothes, take her to dancing school, and sit there and gossip with the
other mothers. She was proud of Dora. But she rarely ever spoke to
Dora. I think they could go for days without their eyes meeting. It
was mammalian. And for Terry, probably everything was like that."
"This is rather funny, that you should get mixed up with a person
like this, you know."
"No, not funny. Fate. We made Dora. She gave the voice to Dora,
and the beauty. And there is something in Dora from Terry which is
like hardness, but that's too unkind a word. Dora is a mixture of us,
really, an optimum mixture."
"Well, you gave her your own beauty top."
"Yes, but something far more interesting and marketable hap-
pened when the genes collided. You've seen my daughter. My
daughter is photogenic, and beneath the flash and dash I gave her, there is
the steadiness of Terry. She converts people over the airwaves. 'And
what is the true message of Christ!' she declares, staring right into
the camera. 'That Christ is in every stranger you meet, the poor, the
hungry, the sick, the people next door!' And the audience believes
it."
"I've watched. I've seen her. She could just rise to the top."
He sighed.
"I sent Dora to school. By this time I was making big, big money.
I had to put lots of miles between me and my daughter. I switched
Dora among three schools overall before graduation, which was hard
for her, but she didn't question me about these maneuvers, or the
secrecy surrounding our meetings. I led her to believe I was always
on the verge of having to rush to Florence to save a fresco from being
destroyed by idiots, or to Rome to explore a catacomb that had just
been found."
"When Dora began to take a serious interest in religion, I thought
it was spiritually elegant, you know. I thought my growing collection
of statues and books had inspired her. And when she told me at
eighteen that she had been accepted to Harvard and that she meant to
study comparative religion, I was amused. I made the usual sexist
assumption: study what you want and marry a rich man. And let me
show you my latest icon or statue."
"But Dora's fervor and theological bent were developing far
beyond anything I had ever experienced. Dora went to the Holy
Land when she was nineteen. She went back twice before she
graduated. She spent the next two years studying religions all over the
world. Then she proposed the entire idea of her television program:
she wanted to talk to people. Cable had made possible all these
religion channels. You could tune in to this minister or that Catholic
priest."
"'You serious about this?' I asked. I hadn't known she believed it
all. But she was out to be true to ideals that I had never fully
understood myself yet somehow passed on to her.
"'Dad, you get me one hour on television three times a week, and
the money to use it the way I want,' she said, 'and you'll see what
happens.' She began to talk about all kinds of ethical questions, how
we could save our souls in today's world. She envisioned short lec-
tures or sermons, punctuated by ecstatic singing and dancing. The
abortion issue she makes impassioned logical speeches that both
sides are right! She explains how each life is sacrosanct yet a woman
must have dominion over her own body."
"I've seen the program."
"You realize seventy-five different cable networks have picked up
this program! You realize what news of my death may do to my
daughter's church?"
He paused, thinking, then resumed as rapid-fire as before.
"You know, I don't think I ever had a religious aspiration, a spiri-
tual goal, so to speak, that wasn't drenched in something materialistic
and glamorous, do you know what I mean?"
"Of course."
"But with Dora, it's different. Dora really doesn't care about ma-
terial things. The relics, the icons, what do they mean to Dora? Dora
believes against impossible psychological and intellectual odds that
God exists." He stopped again, shaking his head with regret.
"You were right in what you said to me earlier. I am a racketeer.
Even for my beloved Wynken I had an angle, what they call now an
agenda. Dora is no racketeer."
I remembered his remark in the barroom, "I think I sold my soul
for places like this." I had known what he was talking about when he
said it. I knew it now.
"Let me get back to the story. Early on, as I told you, I gave up
that idea of a secular religion. By the time Dora started in earnest, I
hadn't thought about those ambitions in years. I had Dora. And I had
Wynken as my obsession. I chased down more of Wynken's books,
and managed through my various connections to purchase five differ-
ent letters of the period which made clear mention of Wynken de
Wilde and Blanche De Wilde and her husband, Darnien, as well. I
had searchers digging for me in Europe and America. Rhineland
mysticism, dig into it."
"My researchers found a capsule version of Wynken's story in a
couple of German texts. Something about women practicing the rites
of Diana, witchcraft. Wynken dragged out of the monastery and pub-
licly accused. The record of the trial, however, was lost."
"It had not survived the Second World War. But in other places
there were other documents, caches of letters. Once you had the code
word Wynken once you knew what to look for you were on the
way."
"When I had a free hour I sat down and looked at Wynken's little
naked people, and I memorized his poems of love. I knew his poems
so that I could sing them. When I saw Dora for weekends and we
met somewhere whenever possible I would recite them to Dora and
maybe even show her my latest find."
"She tolerated my 'Burnt-put hippie version of free love and mysticism,'
as she called it. 'I love you, Roge,' she'd say. 'But you're so
romantic to think this bad priest was some sort of saint. All he did was
sleep with these women, didn't he? And the books were ways of
communicating among the others . . . when to meet.'"
"'Ah, but Dora,' I would say, 'there was not a vicious or ugly
word in the work of Wynken de Wilde. You see for yourself.' Six
books I had by then. It was all about love. My present translator, a
professor at Columbia, had marveled at the mysticism of the poetry,
how it was a blending of love of God and the flesh. Dora didn't buy it.
But Dora was already obsessed with her own religious questions.
Dora was reading Paul Tillich and William James and Erasmus and
lots of books on the state of the world today. That's Dora's obsession,
the State of the World Today."
"And Dora won't care about those books of Wynken's if I get
them to her."
"No, she won't touch any of my collection, not now!" he said.
"Yet you want me to protect all these things," I said.
"Two years ago," he sighed. "A couple of news articles! No
connection to her, you understand, but with her, my cover was blown
forever. She'd been suspecting. It was inevitable, she said, that she'd
figure out my money wasn't clean."
He shook his head. "Not clean," he said again. He went on. "The
last thing she let me do was buy the convent for her. One million for
the building. And one million to gut it of all the modern desecrations
and leave it the way it had been for the nuns in the 1880s, with chapel
and refectory and dormitory rooms and wide corridors..."
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