The White Album by Joan Didion Read Free Book Online Page A

Santa Clara, for the freshly invented agnostic, there was U . C . L . A . , then U . S . C . , and finally the leap east . Back East . Yale Law . A job in Washington with the Securities and Exchange Commission . “You have to understand that he was very lonely in Washington,” his mother said after his death . “He really wanted to come home . I wish he had . ” And yet it must have seemed to such a western child that he had at last met the “real” world, the “great” world, the world to beat . The world in which, as the young man who started out a winner soon discovered and wrote to his mother, “practically every churchgoer you meet in our level of society is Episcopa li an, and an R . C . or straight Protestant is as rare as hen’s teeth . ”
    One thinks of Gatsby, coming up against the East . One also thinks of Tom Buchanan, and his vast carelessness . (Some 25 years later, in Santa Barbara, when the Bishop of California’s mistress swallowed 55 sleeping pills, he appears to have moved her from his apartment into her own before calling an ambulance, and to have obscured certain evidence before she died . ) One even thinks of Dick Diver, who also started out a winner, and who tried to embrace the essence of the American continent in Nicole as James Albert Pike would now try to embrace it in the Episcopal Church . “Practically every churchgoer you meet in our level of society is Episcopalian . ”
    It is an American Adventure of Barry Lyndon, this Westerner going East to seize his future, equipped with a mother’s love and with what passed in the makeshift moorage from which he came as a passion for knowledge . As evidence of this passion his third wife, Diane, would repeat this curious story: he “had read both the dictionary and the phone book from cover to cover by the time he was five, and a whole set of the Encyclopaedia Britannica before he was ten . ” Diane also reports his enthusiasm for the Museum of Man in Paris, which seemed to him to offer, in the hour he spent there, “a complete education,” the “entire history of the human race ... in summary form . ”
    In summary form . One gets a sense of the kind of mindless fervor that a wife less rapt than Diane might find unhinging . In the late thirties, as Communion was about to be served at the first Christmas Mass of James Albert Pike’s new career as an Episcopalian, his first wife, Jane, another transplanted Californian, is reported to have jumped up and run screaming from the church . There would have been nothing in the phone book to cover that, or in the Britannica either . Later he invented an ecclesiastical annulment to cover his divorce from Jane, although no such annulment was actually granted . “In his mind,” his biographers explain, “the marriage was not merely a mistake, but a nullity in the inception . ” In his mind . He needed to believe in the annulment because he wanted to be Bishop of California . “At heart he was a Californian,” a friend said . “He had grown up with the idea that San Francisco was it ... he was obsessed with the idea of being Bishop of California . Nothing in heaven or hell could have stopped him . ” In his mind . “Tom and Gatsby, Daisy and Jordan and I, were all Westerners,” as Nick Carraway said, “and perhaps we possessed some deficiency in common which made us sub tly unadaptable to Eastern life . ”
    In his mind . I recall standing in St . Thomas Church in New York one Monday morning in 1964 debating whether or not to steal a book by James Albert Pike, a pastoral tract called If You Marry Outside Your Faith . I had only a twenty-dollar bill and could not afford to leave it in the box but I wanted to read the book more closely, because a few weeks before I had in fact married a Catholic, which was what Bishop Pike seemed to have in mind . I had not been brought up to think it made much difference what I married, as long as I steered clear of odd sects where they didn’t drink at