In the revival tent, I could feel the perspiration gathering along my hairline, streaming down my temples. The adults around me sang, their bodies swaying. They blocked a full view of the stage, but I saw glimpses of people in prone positions or falling under the influence of God, caught by big-shouldered ushers sweating through their suits. Speaker stacks blared what some of us might now call slow jams, while a minister—sometimes my uncle Jim, sometimes a guest pastor—prayed for diseases to be healed, for sadness and pain to be lifted, for debt to disappear. As people fell, others would rise, dazed and blinking into the stage lights.
Jim and my aunt Janet had invited us to this family camp—a revival, they called it—on the grounds of a former motel in northern Illinois. My father, my brother David, and I made the trip from our home in the suburbs of Pittsburgh, driving hours across the endless cornfields of Ohio and Indiana. My mother had died two years before, of breast cancer, and I imagine that Janet, my father’s older sister, was a balm to him in his grief. But I also knew that we’d have never gone had my mom still been alive.
My father was raised Christian. My mother was Jewish. He converted to marry her (though he later denied it, until I found his conversion papers at my grandmother’s house). When my mother was alive, my parents dropped us into each of their beliefs. We celebrated Hanukkah and Christmas, Passover and Easter, Rosh Hashanah and New Year’s Eve. We hid matzo and dyed hard-boiled eggs. We ate gefilte fish and left cookies out for Santa. We attended temple on Friday nights with my mother and church on Sunday with my father. Neither of them attended the other’s services. Religion was a backdrop in our lives, useful for forging community and filling a social calendar. Much later, my brother and I would see that it was also a cold war between the two of them, one that my mother lost by default.
My aunt and uncle’s Illinois church was very different from either of my parents’ staid places of worship in Pennsylvania. At the revival, people prayed in tongues, and preached that we must go forth and spread God’s word to save a world of sinners. There was something unbridled and terrifying to me about the shifts in emotional tenor: people wailed, burst into praise for Jesus, and fainted, possessed by what I was told was the spirit of God. I thought of the story in Luke in which demons, cast from the body of a man, enter a herd of pigs, who then jump to their deaths from a cliff. The people around me looked and sounded like how I imagined such madness.
My uncle’s church maintained that, in order to make it to Heaven, one had to become reborn, both symbolically and by claiming salvation aloud. The falling and rising on the stage at the revival stood for spiritual death and rebirth. It was called being “slain in the spirit.” One person would spout what sounded like gibberish into the air, and then, after a few awkward moments, another person would offer an interpretation. This call-and-response came from God himself. Tongues was the divine language, meaning that no earthly being could understand it. During the revival one afternoon, my uncle baptized people in a nearby lake, one after another—including me. I stood in my bathing suit beside him as he laid one palm atop my head and prayed. He asked God to watch over me; he called me a “lamb of God.” Then he covered my face with one hand and pressed me backward under the water. When I emerged, the attendees along the shore applauded. My dad came over and said, “Hallelujah.” He tossed me back into the water, and I laughed, because a lake in August came as a relief from that thundering tent.
These were the early days of American evangelicalism, the movement that preached health and wealth as a birthright for the righteous and that would soon give way to the megachurches we have today. This movement said that we deserved riches and, if we hadn’t received them, it was simply because our faith and commitment weren’t strong enough yet. It said that miracles could be ours if only we would have faith. It said that God wanted us to prosper and to be filled with joy. It was a message that must have had a particular resonance for my father—that all he’d lost would mean something someday.
For five years, he’d watched as my mother got sicker: one mastectomy, and then a second, and endless rounds of chemo. By the time he came home on the day my mom died, her body had been taken away, and he felt stripped of an essential ritual for widowers. But David and I had been there. We arrived home from school on that Friday to an ambulance in the driveway. I peeked into my mother’s bedroom. My grandmother Erma was on the bed on all fours, and my mom’s sister-in-law stood nearby. My mom was propped up in bed beside a macramé belt she’d been making, tubes from her oxygen tank snaking up her nose, her face rippling in pain.
I flew across the hall and skidded to my knees at my bedside. I prayed to the Christian God, who provided miracles. The Christian God could do anything so long as I had enough faith, my father always said. I squeezed my palms together as tightly as I could, squeezed my eyes shut, begged God, and made promises of piety. Then I snuck back across the hall, peered through a crack in the door.
“I can’t breathe,” my mom said, hyperventilating, her face creased in panic. “I can’t breathe.”
And she stopped.
My grandmother Erma screamed, “Don’t you do this to me, Gail. Don’t you dare do this to me!”
A neighbor came over and took David and me for the night. In the morning, my father sat us each on one knee and told us that our mother went “to be with the Lord,” and then his body convulsed and he could barely hold onto us. I never told him what I had seen.
Now, at the revival, my dad stood beside me, his eyes closed, and his arms raised to God. I leaned toward him, away from the sweating stranger to my left. My father felt loved and supported at my aunt and uncle’s church, of that I am sure. But he must have also seen an opening, the chance to start over without the baggage that came from being a young male widower in nineteen-seventies America. Two motherless kids. The house, the very bed, where his wife had died. A neighborhood that maybe saw him differently than how he wanted to be seen.
Perhaps that August revival was a true overhaul for my father. The chance to free himself of bad memories and terrible associations. The chance, maybe, to expunge his grief.
My dad met Barbara at the revival that year, though he always maintained that he had met her there the year before. Perhaps he did. But it was in 1979 that he took note of her. She had two kids, whom I’ll call Holly and Aaron. Holly was fourteen; Aaron was eleven , just seven months older than I was. Barbara was alone. My dad was alone. She was a born-again Christian; he was becoming a born-again Christian. She was beautiful, with shiny brown hair in waves past her shoulders, wide green eyes, high cheekbones, and full lips.
She was a lot of things, but perhaps the most attractive was how different she was from my mother. She wasn’t educated like my mother had been. My mother had grown up in Boston; Barbara was from rural Nebraska. She worked in a factory called Burgess-Norton that made parts for internal-combustion engines; she was the only woman in her department, and she carried a clipboard, which I found extremely interesting. And she’d known some pain in the world: she’d gotten pregnant at sixteen, dropped out of high school, had a second child, and then got divorced. And, with all of that, she was surviving, raising her two kids in a small apartment. She was independent without being critical or questioning. She could hold a conversation but rarely started one. She was obedient, in a way my mother never would have been.
I remember just one conversation with my father in the days after we returned from the revival. I sat at the wooden table in our kitchen while he stood over me, and our cat, ABC, circled my ankles. My father told me that he’d made a decision. We were moving to Illinois. And, because he wanted me and my brother to start the new year at my aunt and uncle’s religious school, we were moving as soon as possible—in two weeks.
I told him that I wouldn’t go. I loved my home, my neighborhood. We’d just finished an addition to our house, two new bedrooms for David and me, and a new playroom in the basement. I didn’t want to leave my softball team, or my elementary school, or the woods behind my house. I told him that I’d live in the house alone with ABC. I told him that I’d take over David’s paper route to support myself. I bargained and pleaded. I ran down the hallway to my room and hurled myself across my bed, burying my face in stuffed animals. Not once during that conversation did he mention Barbara.
The wedding was two months after we moved to Illinois. My father walked me down to the basement of my aunt and uncle’s church. He slung one arm over my shoulder, and I thought that I could feel his tension. Or maybe it was mine. I had learned about this marriage only weeks earlier. In a far corner, Barbara sat in an ivory dress, pulling pantyhose over her shapely legs. She’d put hot rollers in her hair, which now hung to her shoulders in sweeping curls. I held a purple comb shaped like a fish in my hand and squeezed the teeth into my palm. They left savage little red indentations.
“Rachel,” my dad said, “meet your new mother.”
Something about my father’s sweeping declaration—your new mother—seemed to want to erase everything that had come before. My father believed in the power of positive thinking, the messages of men like Zig Ziglar. When my mother was still alive, he had taken her to the healing evangelist Kathryn Kuhlman, and he had asked her repeatedly to accept Jesus into her heart so that she could be saved. She refused. What must she have felt when Kuhlman herself died?
My father must have been speaking aloud what he’d been praying to come true. My new mother. I sobbed throughout the entire ceremony, standing beside my new stepsister, Holly, at the altar, both of us in high-necked yellow bridesmaid dresses. My crying echoed through the cavernous sanctuary, loud enough for the guests in back to hear.
I spent most of the reception in the basement hallway. I had stopped crying, but I was embarrassed that I’d sobbed through the wedding, embarrassed at who we were expected to be, this new family, in our glorified symmetry. I was afraid that I’d be in trouble with my dad. I didn’t want to talk to anyone.
I was standing near the coatrack when my papa Chuck found me. He was my real mother’s father, amicably divorced from my grandmother Erma, and a vice-dean at the University of Pennsylvania. He sent me enormous books on my birthday that were far more advanced than anything I could capably read—histories of the English language, textbooks on grammar, a reference manual of Shakespeare—their titles impenetrable, their heft like that of coffee tables in my skinny arms. Of course, he must have known that the books were far beyond what I could grasp, but as a kid I only guessed that he thought I was smart enough for them.
Papa Chuck put his hand on my head. He’d always been gentle, erudite, charming. That he was here at all, at the wedding of his widowed son-in-law just two years after the death of his daughter, was a testament to the man I so adored. I felt his hand on my head. He didn’t say anything. What could he say? There was no way out of this for me. He just held his hand there on me, in stillness.
We lived, that first year, in a damp rental home in a Chicago suburb called Woodridge. We used powdered milk because we couldn’t afford bottled milk. We bought generic noodles, soup, bread, toilet paper, peanut butter. My father still wore a literal white collar to work, but our middle-class status had plummeted: our family had doubled in size, and he was still paying the mortgage on the house in Pennsylvania; it would take four long years to sell. Off and on for several years, I saw my father or stepmother use food stamps, though they tried to hide it.
In my new life, I was taught that Jesus offered salvation and fulfillment to those who followed him, that if people in the world only heard the good news, then their lives would have purpose. They would stop chasing after material things that could never fill their souls. Under this new version of God, rock and roll was banned. Television shows that my brother and I had loved—“The Monkees” and “The Partridge Family”—were also off limits. No secular movies without permission. No music unless it was Christian. Books were less of an issue, because no one in the house bought them, but we were encouraged to read “The Pilgrim’s Progress” and anything by C. S. Lewis. We were told that, if we befriended nonbelievers, then we might “backslide”—which is to say that we might become non-Christians.
One Friday night, I sat with my classmates in a spare room at Faith Center Christian Fellowship, my aunt and uncle’s church. We were watching a movie that we kids were told would “make believers out of men.” The movie, “A Thief in the Night,” follows a woman named Patty, who wakes up and finds that her husband has been raptured with millions of others. In the opening sequence, Patty runs to the bathroom, calling her husband’s name, but she finds only his electric razor, plugged in and still buzzing in the sink. She lets out a curdling scream. We see full grocery carts abandoned in aisles, cars left running and sitting on highways, planes zooming through the sky unpiloted. A global government put together by the United Nations forces those left behind to tattoo their bodies with something like a QR code; it’s meant to be the mark of the beast spoken about in Revelations.
The movie terrified me. In my diary, I wrote that I was going to believe in Jesus from now on, and soon after that I recorded being “slain in the spirit” at a Sunday morning service. I noted that I had feared the ushers wouldn’t catch me, but they did, and I declared the entire experience “okay.” I can’t say for sure whether I had the requisite faith in that moment; I might have been hedging my bets.
Patty had believed herself to be Christian because she went to church and read the Bible, but when the rapture came she discovered that she had not been Christian after all. This deeply unsettled me. If Patty had understood herself to be saved, and discovered too late that she hadn’t made the cut, what did that mean for the rest of us? If I said out loud that I accepted Jesus into my heart, as was commanded in John 3:16 (“For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life”), wouldn’t that do it? Christians claimed that this was legitimate salvation, but the movie put that assertion in sharp dispute.
What if you lived a life of earthly pleasures, a life full of sin, but then made sure that you accepted Jesus on your deathbed? Perhaps more to the point for me, what if you were a young Jewish woman and you’d never claimed Jesus, but then, with your last breath, you whispered his name, as my father had always told me my mother had done? She was up there in Heaven, he’d say, watching me every day. For years after she died, I was scared of the dark, scared that her image would appear in the corner of my bedroom, smiling, telling me that she missed me—a ghost mother, without body or soul. At night, I would whisper into the hollow of my room, beg her not to show herself if she were there, and keep my eyes squeezed shut.
To hold my fear at bay, I created an image in my mind of her sitting with a group of ancestors. They were her new neighbors, maybe, each of them in a mansion of their own. She was happy. Life—or whatever life was called after mortal death—moved slowly and without ruptures.
But in that image I was missing. What did it mean that she could be so happy without me? Was I selfish for wishing her to be in my world still, with all its suffering and emptiness? What I never dared think about until I saw Patty screaming in horror was how my mother could possibly be in Heaven if she hadn’t accepted Jesus into her heart. Why would God make an exception for this one solitary mother?
For my father, language was paramount. He never dared speak aloud what he feared, lest he give power to it and make it come to pass. This also meant he never spoke about anything that was unpleasant. If we were sick, or scared, or hurt, he would tell us “not to claim it.” I once attended school with strep throat for a whole week, until Barb accidentally brushed up against me in the kitchen and exclaimed that I was “burning up.” If we worried about anything, my father would say not to claim it. Once, when I went in for outpatient surgery on my thumb after a rollerblading accident, I told my father I was scared that I might not have the same dexterity. He told me not to “claim it” and met me in recovery with a sixty-four-piece automotive-maintenance repair kit to encourage my motor skills.
On the way home from “A Thief in the Night,” I steeled myself to talk to my father. I had to know what he wasn’t telling me, how he was so sure that my mother was in Heaven. Patty—who’d read the Bible and gone to church and believed herself to be saved—turned out not to be a Christian and got left behind. So what, I asked him, did that mean for people who’d done none of those things but hardly seemed worthy of eternal Hell? I pictured my Jewish family—my grandmother Erma and papa Sam in Boston, my papa Chuck in Philly.
We four kids sat in the back seats of the brown conversion van that my father had purchased to fit our new family. Barb, whom my brother and I had been instructed to call “mom,” sat quiet in the passenger seat.
“Jesus can read your heart, Rachel,” my father said. God would know if we meant it when we accepted him.
“What about . . . our relatives?” I asked. I meant my real mom, but I wouldn’t dare say this with Barb and her kids in the car. We never spoke of my mother now that we had a new family. No one ever said that we couldn’t; it just seemed like the expectation.
“They’ll all be in Heaven,” he said. “If they accept Jesus.”
My dad had maintained that my mother had accepted Jesus with her final whisper. For years, he insisted on this version of events. But, that night, I felt my stomach go cold. My father hadn’t been there. I had.
I can’t breathe, she had said. I can’t breathe.
“All of them?” I pushed my father. “I mean, even the distant ones?” By distant, I meant dead, but he did not pick up on this.
“Knock it off, Rachel,” he said. He seemed to think that I was goading him. Usually, I was. But, on this night, I saw that buzzing razor in the sink, heard Patty’s chilling scream. The people I loved would be left behind on a cold and sunless earth and then sent to Hell. And what of me? I knew that I hadn’t meant it when I’d accepted Jesus. I knew that I’d just been following the directive of a parent I no longer understood, a parent whose loyalties seemed to me to be shifting. The church told us that nonbelievers were unsettled, constantly searching, wandering. Was this my inevitable destiny? How would I survive in such a world? How would I eat? My mother had not seemed to me a person who’d been unsettled or searching. She was sick, and then she was gone.
“I mean Grandma Erma and them?” I said. But of course I did not mean Grandma Erma and them.
He told me that he prayed for them all the time. I believed him. Of course he prayed for them. But then there was also what I didn’t tell him: I had prayed once, too. ♦
This is drawn from “Women We Buried, Women We Burned: A Memoir.”
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