Free Only Begotten Daughter by James Morrow Page B

parted, and there stood a boy in a bathing suit, looking lost and frightened. “Study this boy’s face. One day you’ll meet him.”
    “I’ll meet him? When?”
    “Soon enough.”
    The boy in the mirror blinked rapidly. “What’s his name?”
    “Timothy. Notice anything strange about him?”
    “His eyes …”
    “Yes, Julie. Totally blind. The doctors couldn’t cure him. But you could.”
    “Pop says no miracles.”
    “Yes, I know, and your father’s very smart. However, in this one case, we must make an exception. ‘Ask Julie to cure Timothy’—your mother’s exact words.”
    “My mother said that?” It seemed as if the beer were back, scuttling along her tongue and into her throat. “But they’ll take me away.”
    “Not after just one miracle—no.”
    “You sure?”
    “Your mother’s best friend wouldn’t lie to you.” Mr. Wyvern smiled. His teeth looked like shiny new pennies. “One more thing. Don’t tell your father about our little meeting. You know how frantic he can get.” The cigarette case clacked shut. “Don’t forget—the boy’s name is Timothy. Watch for him. Our special secret.”
    And then he was gone.
    Julie blinked. Gone. The man, his book, tea, cigarette case—replaced by a wispy white cloud drifting above the lounge chair.
    “Mr. Wyvern?” Maybe she’d been dreaming. “Mr. Wyvern?” A soft wind, nothing more.
    Julie dashed across the gym and down the stairs, her heart pounding like a basketball being dribbled.
    Phoebe was in the lobby, tossing bricks at the chandelier.
    “This amazing thing just happened! I met somebody who knows my mom!” Her friend, Julie noticed, had a bundle of fat red sticks tucked under her arm. “Hey, what’re those? ”
    “What do you think? Dynamite, Katz, as in kaboom. It’s all over the place. They must be planning to zap this building tomorrow.”
    “Dante’s Casino is taking over,” Julie explained. “You’d better return them.”
    “Return them? You crazy?” Phoebe slipped the dynamite into the army backpack. “So, how about it? Do I win the Krumpets? You find any neat stuff?”
    “Not really.” A ghost. A magic cigarette case. A message from heaven. “No.”
    “ Who knows your mom?”
    Julie shrugged. “Nobody special. He smells like oranges.”
    “Look, I’ll give you one of the Krumpets anyway. Maybe we’ll even try some more beer.”
    “Because of Phoebe, I got my first taste of pink lemonade,” Julie concluded her fourth-grade essay. “All in all, a person couldn’t ask for a better best friend than Phoebe Sparks.”
    Andrew Wyvern baits his hook with a Lumbricus latus, the twenty-four-foot worm hell’s surgeons routinely implant in the intestines of the damned, and tosses his line off Steel Pier. Halfway across Absecon Inlet, the Atlantic caresses his schooner, lifting it up and down on its hawser like a mother rocking her baby. The line tenses, the bobber goes under. Wyvern yanks on the rod, savoring the lovely pizzicato of the hook tearing through the fish’s cheek.
    But he is not happy. Everywhere he looks, Christianity is in decline. It no longer burns Giordano Bruno for saying the earth moves past the sun, or Michael Servetus for saying blood moves through the lungs. The slaughter of the Aztecs is a mute memory, the fight against smallpox inoculation a vanished dream, the Index Librorum Prohibitorum a forgotten joke, the Malleus Maleficarum out of print. From pole to pole, Christians are feeding the hungry and clothing the naked. Just last week, Wyvern heard a Baptist minister say it was wrong to kill.
    True, the sect called Revelationism holds some promise, but the devil doesn’t trust it. “Revelationism,” he tells the snagged fish, “is a flash in the pantheon.” No, there must be a new religion, a faith as apocalyptic as Christianity, fierce as Islam, repressive as Hinduism, smug as Buddhism. There must be a church of Julie Katz.
    With a sudden tug Wyvern pulls his catch from the