Denial

16

I found a space in the library parking lot. The library is less than ten years old. It is big, white and has pillars that look like they came out of a soft-serve ice cream machine. I’ve never been inside the building but Ames tells me it’s bright, has a nice pair of staircases, is easy to use, contains computer stations and has far fewer books on its shelves than he would like.

Ames was a reader. He always had a stack of four or five library books on the single table in his small room at the Texas, less than three blocks away. He also had a five-level bookcase filled with paperbacks and hardcovers he had picked up at garage sales. Most of the books were biographies of historical figures, but there were even a few poetry books and a novel or two.

Ames, Darrell and I crossed the street and went into the lobby of the Opera House. The Opera House was and is really an opera house. This was the first time I had entered it but I knew that much and more from Flo, who, when her husband, Gus, was alive, had been a donor, not out of a love of opera but as a tribute to a social system she and Gus had been part of.

I’d grown up with opera, Saturday’s Texaco broadcasts from the Met. My grandmother listened to the opera on Saturday more often than she went to church on Sunday. She heard them all, but her heart was only really into the Italian operas, particularly ones she had gone to when she was a girl in Italy.

For a long time the Opera House had been a movie theater. Flo told me that DeMille’s The Greatest Show on Earth, which was shot in Sarasota, premiered at the Opera House with Charlton Heston onstage after a circus parade including some of the actors in the movie. But now it was an opera house again, about one thousand seats, boxes at the rear of the main floor, carpets, paintings of donors on the walls, nice brass fittings in the toilets.

We were purposely late. It was just after three. I was hoping Welles wouldn’t spot me in the audience. I was hoping the lights would be turned down. I was hoping there would be a big crowd to hide in. I was wrong on all counts, though it took him a while to find me.

The lights were up though not bright. Fewer than two hundred people were scattered on the main floor. The balcony was closed.

There was a podium on the broad stage in front of a blue curtain that looked like velvet. A woman stood at the podium. Behind her sat John Wellington Welles. Ames, Darrell and I sat behind four women about twenty rows from the stage. In front of the stage was a table with two stacks of books.

The woman, lean, green suit with a glittering red jeweled pin on one lapel, was at the podium reciting Welles’s writing and teaching credentials. Welles sat to her right on a folding chair trying to pay attention or at least pretending to pay attention. He was doing a bad job either way.

His eyes wandered but not toward the audience, not yet. Then his head bowed as if he were listening to a eulogy. He sat with his legs apart, hands folded almost in prayer. His hair needed brushing. His eyes needed Visine. His tie needed adjusting and his jacket needed to be donated to Goodwill.

“They gonna show a movie?” Darrell whispered.

“I don’t think so,” I said.

“They got popcorn, candy? Some shit like that?” he asked.

“No,” I said.

One of the women in the row in front of us turned. I was sure she was going to tell us to be quiet. That was her plan but when she saw us she changed her mind. When she looked at me, I took off my Cubs cap. When she looked at Ames, he ignored her and adjusted his yellow slicker. When she looked at Darrell, he glared back at her.

The woman turned forward again.

The audience, what there was of it, was divided into three groups-college students, older women, and me, Darrell and Ames.

“And following his lecture, Dr. Welles will answer questions and sign any copies of his book you wish to buy. And now it is my great pleasure to introduce you to Dr. John Welles.”

The applause was dusty polite. This was no rock music sensation, no rising star in the Democratic or Republican party, no best-selling author of an apocalyptic novel.

Welles slouched to the podium, adjusted the microphone, leaned toward it and said, “The destruction of moral definition.”

It was the same voice I had heard over the phone, the same person who had threatened, pleaded with me to stop my search for him.

There was a glass of water in front of him. He picked it up and drank and then looked out at the audience, his hands clutching the sides of the podium. The pause was long. There was shuffling in the seats. The woman who had introduced him and who now sat where Welles had sat in the folding chair held a benevolent hopeful smile.

“What is moral?” he asked. “The question is more than rhetorical. It is the essence of what I have to say. Before we can address its destruction or decline, we must first know what we mean. To even hope for success, all conversation must contain a common agreement of the meaning of the words we are using.”

He paused again and shook his head as if someone invisible had just whispered a truth in his ear.

“Morality,” he went on, “in its most simple and most illusory sense means a code of conduct. There are those who assume a universal morality, a universal code of conduct based on humanistic principles, often elusive humanistic principles. Where would such principles come from? Are we born with them? Are they simply common sense? If we follow this path, we are caught in a never-ending maze in search of definitions. For what is common sense?”

He looked to the audience as if he expected a challenge or question. There was none. He drank more water.

“And then there are specific moralities,” he went on. “Christian morality and Nazi morality differ at their very core conceptions.

“Nazi morality was based on simple principles, monstrous principles. Aryans were superior beings. Because they were superior, they deserved to rule. All others are inferior. Because they are inferior, they do not deserve to exist. This was a given, a supposedly undisputable truth. What is Christian morality based on? Doing good, following the golden rule because it is just and moral and obvious? No, the basis of Christian morality is not that people will behave with a benevolent God-given moral sense, but that they will display a moral sense because there is a reward for doing so.”

A hand shot up in the audience. Welles ignored or didn’t see it. He went on.

“The reward: eternal life, heaven. Christianity is not built on the principle that moral behavior is to be engaged in simply because it is right, but because God wills it and will reward those who practice it. And when one fails to do what the community and they agree is right, they can still gain entry to heaven by a quick repentance and a belief in salvation through Jesus.”

The hand shot up in the audience again. This time Welles saw it and wearily paused, nodding at the young woman, who stood and said, “In your book you say-”

“Forget the book,” Welles said, waving away the young woman, his stack of books on the table below him, the past. “A. A. Milne, in addition to creating Winnie the Pooh, once said that if Jack the Ripper was ever caught, his defense would be that he was only behaving according to the human nature dealt to him.”

“I don’t see-” the young woman said loudly.

“No,” Welles said. “You do not see. Morality is based on the assumption that he who commits an immoral act will be aware of and troubled or plagued by his own guilt. But what if he doesn’t recognize his act, the rape, slaughter or torture, as immoral? Is there such a thing as a moral monster?”

He paused for the young woman to answer, but she was clearly confused and sat down.

“What’s he talkin’ about?” Darrell asked me.

“His conscience,” said Ames.

“All of our consciences,” said one of the women in front of us, turning to face Ames.

“No, ma’am,” said Ames. “Just his own.”

“Exemplo quodcumque malo committitur, ipsi Disclicet auctori. Prima est haec ultio, quod se Judice nemo nocensabsolvitur, ” said Welles. “Juvenal in the Satires. Whatever guilt is perpetrated by some evil prompting is grievous to the author of the crime. This is the first punishment of guilt, that no one who is guilty is acquitted at the judgment seat of his own conscience.”

“But,” came the shout of a young man in the audience, “what if the guilty person is a sociopath or a psychopath and doesn’t believe he is guilty of anything?”

“Then he is fortunate,” said Welles. “He is protected by his own madness. Punishment will never come, only retribution.”

“Do you believe in the death penalty?” someone shouted.

“I’m living it,” Welles said.

“What does that mean?” asked the man who had shouted.

“What does that mean?” Welles repeated, as if asking himself the question for the first time. “It means that the consequence to a person with Judeo-Christian moral principles who violates those principles knowingly is accepting his inevitable punishment.”

“And,” called another voice from the audience, “are there times when a person should knowingly violate those principles, break the law?”

“Yes, if he is willing to accept the consequences,” said Welles.

There was murmuring in the audience. Welles drank some more water and looked around the audience for the first time. His eyes met mine as he scanned. His eyes held mine as he said, “The guilty, those with a conscience, very often seek their own punishment. But sometimes, not often, but sometimes, something transcends simple morality, simple guilt.”

“What?” asked a young woman.

Welles was still looking at me.

“Responsibility for others,” he said.

He forced his eyes from my face, sighed deeply, closed his eyes and said, “Ladies, gentlemen, I’ve been speaking nonsense from the same kind of heat-oppressed brain as that of the Bard’s Macbeth. I’ll stop here and had you paid to enter this theater, I would gladly refund your money. As it is, I suggest that those of you who were considering the purchase of my book, keep your checks and cash in your pockets and handbags and go out and buy yourself a trinket or a good dinner.”

Welles turned to his right and headed offstage. The audience was murmuring in confusion. The woman who had introduced Welles stood up, bewildered.

“He’s drunk,” said one of the women in front of us.

“Let’s go,” said Ames.

The three of us rose and sidled down across the seats to the aisle. We moved to an exit door near the stage and pushed through in time to see Welles go through a courtyard next to the Opera House and turn right.

“I’ll get him,” said Darrell.

Ames grabbed Darrell’s shirt and pulled him back. “Man’s got a gun,” Ames said.

“You sure about that?” asked Darrell.

“Sure enough,” said Ames.

“How we gonna stop him then?” asked Darrell.

Ames pulled back his slicker, showed his sawed-off shotgun and said, “I’, ve got a bigger one.”

“You gonna shoot it out with him?”

“If I have to.”

It was a strange chase. We ran across the street, got into my rental car and I pulled out of the space with a screech of tires, almost colliding with a very large white Cadillac.

I tore out of the entrance, made a right and ran a light going in the direction Welles had run. I made another right but didn’t see him or his damaged Taurus.

“Lost him,” said Darrell. “I knew I should have chased him. I would’ve tackled him like Warren Sapp.”

I slowed down.

“What’re you slowing down for?” asked Darrell. “Let’s find him.”

“I know where to find him,” I said. Dixie had given me Welles’s address. “I’m taking you home.”

“No way,” said Darrell from the backseat. “I’m goin’ with you.”

“Not this time,” I said.

“This is shit, man,” Darrell said, leaning back in the seat, arms folded, scowl on his face. “This is shit.”

Darrell and his mother didn’t live far away, and it was on our way to Bradenton. The building was a low-rent public housing building that had once been middle-class apartments and was now a step up from the streets.

Darrell got out of the car at the door. A quartet of old black men sat in front of the building in folding chairs, talking. They watched as Darrell said, “You gonna shoot the sucker?”

“Not if we can help it,” I said.

“He’s some kind of crazy. You know that?”

I wasn’t sure if he was talking about Ames or Welles.

“Yes,” I said.

“Hell,” said Darrell, who turned and started to walk toward the old men.

“Next Saturday?” I called through the open window.

“Yeah,” said Darrell, his back turned. “Whatever.”

We drove away.

“What do you think of Darrell?” I asked.

“Like the boy,” said Ames.

After that speech, we drove in silence up Tamiami Trail toward Bradenton.