During World War II, in a field sermon at the battlefield of Bataan, U.S. Army Chaplain William Thomas Cummings made the now-famous remark, "There are no atheists in the foxholes." Cummings apparently held that, in the face of death, nonbelievers invariably discover God.
My father, who was either an atheist or an agnostic depending on how he was feeling at the moment, explained it to me differently. "No atheists in the foxholes," he said, "means most people can't accept that one day they will cease to exist. So they invent a God who has the power to give them eternal life."
The atheists had adopted Chaplain Cummings' maxim for their own purpose, to support the view that belief in God is a reflex of human frailty and fear.
"Do you think you would believe in God if you were in a foxhole?" I asked my father.
"I don't know. I'm sure I would have a strong desire to believe," he said, emphasizing "desire" to assure me that any sudden conversion would be the result of wishful thinking.
My father turned out to be something of a prophet. In June 1987, his other, Helen, found herself in a foxhole of sorts, in the bedroom of her five-room apartment on Long Island. After 82 years of service her heart was giving out. The pains came nightly; she found it hard to sleep. She felt death slipping into bed beside her, laying is heavy head on her chest. Alone and terrified, she suddenly remembered God. After a lifetime of indifference, she wanted very badly to make his acquaintance. With the end near, Helen unexpectedly developed "a strong desire to believe."
The atheist smiles at this story, knowing that foxholes are found not only at the front lines, but in nursing homes, cancer wards, the cells of condemned prisoners and death beds everywhere. "Fear," says the atheist, jabbing a finger in your chest, "is the mother of God."
To me, she was inseparable from the place. For the last 40 years of her life she lived in menhaden, while there were still menhaden to be found.
Helen had grown up wealthy, with a hundred pairs of shoes in her closet and a limousine waiting at the curb to take her to school in the morning. But she married an alcoholic, a man of immense charm and very little character, who drank and gambled her out of all the money her parents had given her. Forced to work for the first time in her life, she took a job as a secretary at Time magazine in New York City, filed for divorce (at a time when divorce was far less common than it is today) and assumed the task of raising two children on her own.
Once the children had grown and left home, Helen moved to Greenport to become the secretary to a New York State Supreme Court justice, whose chambers were across from the Shelter Island ferry landing. She worked for The Judge, as she always referred to him, until she retired, at which point my father made repeated attempts to coax her to New Jersey. But Helen never considered leaving Greenport, where she had friends, a three-block walk to the water, a volunteer job at the Greenport Public Library and half a lifetime's worth of memories. She stayed put in her five-room apartment, thereby cementing my suspicion that Helen could not survive for long outside of Greenport. She was as much a town fixture as the World War I artillery gun perched on a concrete block in the little park behind the five-and-dime. Her visits to us were short and far between. If you wanted her company for more than a few days at a time, you had to go to her. For three weeks out of every summer, we did.
After a couple of hours on the Long Island Expressway, which is anything but, water would begin to close in on both sides. Long Island Sound to the north, Great Peconic Bay to the south. The air would turn to salt. Tiny oases of commercialism were separated by long stretches of quiet highway and an occasional vegetable stand. Thin strips of farmland fronted the road and reached to a distant line of trees. In those days Greenport seemed not to change at all. Every summer as we drove into town, the same aged tenants rocked in silence on the front porch of the boarding home for the elderly, watching everything that moved. Fifty yards down stood the immense furniture warehouse with its gables and broken fourth-floor windows, through which, every evening at dusk, a long black cloud of bats streamed out against the purple sky. Languid men and women sat on cane stools at the bar of Claudio's Restaurant, sipping colorful drinks: Greenport Theater, as always, advertised a film nobody had liked when it came out two years before; and Preston's Marina was crowded with sailboats, cabin cruisers and the occasional yacht.
I loved and admired my grandmother, but mostly from a distance, for she rarely let anyone get too close. A phone call to Helen disappeared into a dial tone before the conversation had really begun. Even when the distance between us was no more than the width of her kitchen table, the gap didn't narrow. You would never discover how she felt, for instance, when, as occasionally happened at a holiday meal, she sat across our dining-room table from her ex-husband. Her heart had become a dark place, almost entirely unexplored, even, I tend to think, by herself.
What I admired most about her, from whatever distance, was her energy, resilience and self-reliance, and her refusal to be intimidated by people or events — or by growing older. Once, after a typical ride in Helen's white four-door Rambler, my father, still slightly shaken, declared her the only 80-year-old woman in America who peeled out from a red light. Her life might have been approaching its end, but she wasn't about to slow down.
In Helen's view, life could not be trusted. She had eyed it doubtfully from the time her money trickled away. After the collapse of her marriage, she had begun standing vigil against catastrophe, preparing for disaster that might be lurking around the next corner. Experience had shown her that relying on others meant letting down your guard, the surest way to deliver yourself into the hands of your enemies. Trust no one, expect anything, maintain your line of defense.
This combative guerrilla-like stance served her well through most of her life, but in the end the walls she'd built to keep danger out served only to keep her in. As she slid into the foxhole and suddenly realized her predicament, Helen panicked. Religion hadn't figured in her life, but not because she scorned it. She'd merely decided it was one of the many comfortable traps she needed to avoid for the sake of her own survival. For the fist time, she sensed the extent of her self-created isolation. The very qualities I admired her for betrayed her now at the end. The autonomy she so fiercely cultivated opposed her will to submit to something higher. She'd lived as an outlaw too long to immediately turn herself in. She needed more time than she had.
Helen kept many secrets, for reasons that were themselves often secret. One secret she kept almost to the end had to do with my half-sister, Lisa, whom I'd never met. She was my father's daughter by a previous marriage and I was told, whenever I asked about her, that she lived in Montreal with her mother. Once or twice I pressed my grandmother for Lisa's address, but each time she'd lightly change the subject. "I found a starfish on the beach in East Marion," she'd say. "Let me show it to you."
Shortly before Helen's heart went bad, she told me that Lisa had lived in Montreal only briefly before returning to her family home on Shelter Island. She and Lisa, Helen confessed, had been fast friends for several years. After moving back to Shelter Island, Lisa met and married a man named Tom who, for a while, earned his living by scraping rust off the hulls of the Shelter Island ferry boats. Lisa and Tom, both devout Christians, once in a while would invite Helen to join them at Sunday service. Helen always politely declined.
Lisa got a phone call the day before Helen died. Helen wanted to know if Lisa could come by and keep her company. She said she was in some pain and feeling lonely. When Helen asked Lisa if she would bring along her Bible, Lisa became alarmed. She got on the next ferry to Greenport.
Half an hour later, Lisa was sitting on Helen's bed. Helen looked shrunken against the clean white pillowcase. She took Lisa's hand and in a shaking voice told Lisa she felt close to dying and very afraid. She asked if it was too late to become a Christian. Lisa said faith can come at any moment. She reminded Helen of the story of Saul on the road to Damascus. Secretly, she was hoping that Helen was just having one of her spells of hypochondria.
Helen asked Lisa to read her something from the New Testament, something that might help her. With her free hand, Lisa opened to a familiar passage and began to read: "‘For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish, but have everlasting life.'"
Lisa read into the blue dusk, read as the sky went purple and the bats, like a great moving shadow, swept out of the warehouse down the street and flitted above the dim trees. Helen listened, painfully alert and strangely attentive for a woman of her restless nature, her eyes raised expectantly, as though waiting for someone to call her name. Sweat formed on her forehead. The dull ache in her chest would not go away.
A little past nine, Helen sent Lisa home, making her promise to return the next morning. Late that night the bunker boats, streaming back from the black Atlantic, bellowed news of their return across the mild waters of Gardiner's Bay. Their foggy baritone voices rumbled down the Shelter Island shore, a sound Helen had always heard as meaning "all's well with the world." But that night Helen was not comforted. She felt herself being carried out by some irresistible tide toward the blackest sea of all. What was there to buoy her?
Lisa arrived the next morning and once again sat down on the edge of Helen's bed and took her hand. From the circles under Helen's eyes, Lisa could tell she hadn't slept much the night before. "Please keep reading, dear," Helen said. "I'm very interested."
Lisa took up where she had left off. "‘He that hath ears to hear, let him hear.'"
She read for several minutes, holding Helen's hand and looking up from time to time to measure her reaction. Helen's face remained impassive. Her eyes had turned cloudy.
"‘And there arose a great storm of wind, and the waves beat into the ship, so that it was now full. And he was in the hinder part of the ship, asleep on a pillow: and they awoke him, and said unto him, Master, carest thou not that we perish? And he arose, and rebuked the wind, and said unto the sea, Peace, and be still. And the wind ceased, and there was a great calm. And he said unto them; Why are ye so fearful? How is it that ye have no faith?'"
Looking up, Lisa saw Helen wasn't watching her anymore, but staring out the window into the brightly lit street. A boy ran past, bouncing a basketball. Lisa held the book open in silence. After a minute, Helen turned back from the window, her eyes full of tears.
"I want to believe, I so want to believe," she said, squeezing Lisa's hand. "But I don't think I know how."
Lisa made Helen's dinner that night and sat with her while she ate what she could. Helen said very little. Fear had robbed her of everything, even her love of conversation.
She fell asleep as night came on. Lisa stood by the bed for several minutes, listening to her breathe. The moon rose. In the next yard a dog barked at the wind. Lisa turned off the light and went out, locking the front door behind her. The bunker boats did not come in that night. Sometime around one o'clock in the morning Helen's heart stopped beating.
"All right," says the atheist, "maybe you will find a few atheists in the foxholes. But that simply means fear doesn't work on everyone. My argument still holds. Fear creates the need to believe in a delusion. Sometimes the need is fulfilled, sometimes not."
Atheists worship at the altar of logic. They use it to fill the void left by the absence of religious feeling. But logic is a poor substitute and leads nowhere. A friend of mine in graduate school, who was working on a dissertation about David Hume, liked to refer to his occupation as the "beautiful dead end of philosophy." Of course, deists are often fond of philosophical games, too. Saint Thomas Aquinas set down 12 proofs for the existence of God. But argument alone cannot bridge the chasm of unbelief. Neither can fear. Chaplain Cummings was wrong. Fear is simply not a reliable route to God.
As a boy, I once walked for miles in the woods near our house, on a path that forked in many places. Absorbed in my thoughts, I paid no attention to the turnings. At last the light started to fail and I decided to go back. Turning around, I suddenly saw that nothing about the woods was familiar. I had no idea how to get home.
Helen, too, had suddenly found herself lost. In her last hours, all of her usual touchstones — the smell of salt water, her bright collections of shells, the bunker boats' nightly refrain — had lost their power to console. The vigil she kept against life's unforeseeable disasters had confined her to the periphery of herself. Helen had lived courageously and aggressively, but not deeply. She found safety in the surface of things, afraid to cherish the spirit for fear of leaving the flesh unguarded. At a late hour she decided to change course and make for a port she'd heard of obscurely, like the conversation at a distant table that comes to you mostly in murmurs. She struggled to call up the direction home, but like anyone who has for many years disregarded the sky, she had forgotten how to read the stars.