Only Begotten Daughter Read online

  Praise for James Morrow’s

  This Is the Way the World Ends:

  “The only book in the last ten years that I’ve read twice…a remarkable achievement”

  —ARTHUR C. CLARKE

  “One of the most moving books I have read in years…Buy the book.”

  —Analog

  “If Kurt Vonnegut had collaborated with Jonathan Schell on an antinuclear novel, the result might be This Is the Way the World Ends.”

  —The New York Times

  “Astute, highly engaging, and finally moving”

  —Los Angeles Times

  ONLY

  BEGOTTEN

  DAUGHTER

  —————

  JAMES

  MORROW

  The Critics pulled out their entire arsenal of hyperbole to construct encomiums for James Morrow’s last novel, This Is the Way the World Ends. And the book was nominated for the Nebula Award by the Science Fiction Writers of America as best of the year. Combining the strategies of contemporary fiction with the heightened images of science fiction, Morrow’s novel established him as a major writer, confirmed this year when he was given the Nebula for short fiction for his story “Bible Stories for Adults, No. 17: the Deluge.”

  Now, in Only Begotten Daughter, he has surpassed his earlier works with a story of extraordinary wit and power, the chronicle of the life of God’s daughter. This is a novel that has something to offend everyone! Julie Katz, born in Atlantic City, New Jersey, in the last years of the twentieth century, the miraculous offspring of a solitary sperm donation, grows up wondering about her Almighty Mother: Why does God allow so much pain and suffering on earth? And what is Julie supposed to do about it?

  Julie’s dad, Murray, an eccentric who lives in a lighthouse on the coast, wants her to live a normal life, eschew miracles and avoid parallels with the life of her deceased brother, Jesus Christ. For instance, he permits her to walk only under water.

  And true to her twentieth-century upbringing, Julie avoids the hands-on approach—but does try long-distance, anonymous miracles as an advice columnist for a local supermarket tabloid (“Heaven Help You” in the Midnight Moon). Julie can cure cancer, restore sight to the blind, and sink effortless baskets from forty feet out, but desperately wants to talk to her Mother, who remains silent. Even when the Revelationists—a neo-Christian cult—invade Atlantic City prepared to burn it to the ground, killing everyone.

  Only Begotten Daughter is a novel that has something to amuse, stimulate, and intrigue everyone. It is imaginative, skewed, compassionate, horrifying—and funny as hell.

  NOVELS BY JAMES MORROW

  The Wine of Violence

  The Continent of Lies

  This is the Way the World Ends

  Only Begotten Daughter

  Copyright © 1990 by James Morrow

  Lyrics from “On the Boardwalk in Atlantic City” by Mack Gordon and Joe Myrow, copyright 1946 by WB Music Corp. All rights reserved. Used by permission.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the Publisher. Inquiries should be addressed to Permissions Department, William Morrow and Company, Inc., 105 Madison Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10016.

  Printed in the United States of America

  ISBN 0-688-05284-3

  BOOK DESIGN BY PATRICE FODERO

  For Jean

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

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  Throughout the writing of this novel, my companions included several extraordinary books dealing with the scientist’s search for God, the evolution of Christianity, and other pertinent topics. Let me here acknowledge my debt to Paul Davies’s God and the New Physics, Edward Harrison’s Masks of the Universe, Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time, Richard Dawkins’s The Blind Watchmaker, Thomas Sheehan’s The Second Coming, Hyam Maccoby’s The Mythmaker, Ian Wilson’s Jesus: The Evidence, Hans Küng’s Does God Exist?, and Edward Peters’s Inquisition.

  I am grateful to the wide circle of friends and colleagues who commented on the manuscript during its various systolic and diastolic phases: Joe Adamson, Linda Barnes, Michael Bishop, Jon Burrowes, Shira Daemon, Denali Delmar, Margaret Duda, Joan Dunfey, Alexander Jablokow, Ellen Kushner, Geoffrey A. Landis, Elissa Malcohn, Chris Monroe, Jean Morrow, Resa Nelson, Steven Popkes, Peter Schneeman, Brett Singer, D. Alexander Smith, Kathy Smith, Sarah Smith, James Stevens, Bonnie Sunstein, and Michael Svoboda.

  Finally, I must thank my agent, Merrilee Heifetz, for her continuing moral support, and my editors, David Hartwell and Susan Allison, who provided the kind of intense line-by-line attention most novelists only dream of receiving.

  CONTENTS

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  Part One:

  Signs and Wonders

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Part Two:

  Atlantic City Messiah

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Part Three:

  The Second Coming of Julie Katz

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Philosophy has succeeded, not without struggle, in freeing itself from its obsession with the soul, only to find itself landed with something still more mysterious and captivating, the fact of man’s bodiliness.

  —Friedrich Nietzsche

  PART ONE

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  Signs and Wonders

  CHAPTER 1

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  On the first day of September, 1974, a child was born to Murray Jacob Katz, a celibate Jewish recluse living across the bay from Atlantic City, New Jersey, an island metropolis then famous for its hotels, its boardwalk, its Miss America Pageant, and its seminal role in the invention of Monopoly.

  The abandoned lighthouse on Brigantine Point that Murray had taken over, claiming it for his own as a hermit might claim a cave, was called Angel’s Eye. It was wholly obsolete, which he preferred; as a sexually inactive bachelor living in the highly eroticized culture of late twentieth-century America, Murray felt somewhat obsolete himself. During its heyday, the kerosene-fueled lamp of Angel’s Eye had escorted over ten thousand vessels safely past Brigantine Shoals. But now Murray’s lighthouse was fired up only when he felt like it, while the business of preventing shipwreck passed to the United States Coast Guard’s new electric beacon on Absecon Island.

  Murray knew all about Angel’s Eye, its glory and also its shame. He knew of the stormy July night in 1866 when the kerosene ran out, so that the British brig William Rose, bearing a cargo of tea and fireworks from China, had smashed to pieces on the rocks. He knew of the foggy March morning in 1897 when the main wick disintegrated, with dire consequences for Lucy II, a private pleasure yacht owned by the Philadelphia ball-bearing tycoon Alexander Strickland. On the anniversaries of these disasters, Murray always enacted a commemoration, climbing the tower stairs and, at the precise moment when William Rose or Lucy II had pulled within view of Angel’s Eye, lighting the lamp. He was a devout believer in the second chance. To the man who asked, “What’s the point of closing the barn door after the horse has been stolen?” Murray would answer, “The point is that the door is now
closed.”

  At the time of his child’s conception, Murray’s sex life revolved exclusively around a combination sperm bank and research center known as the Preservation Institute. Its scientists were doing a longitudinal study: how do a man’s reproductive cells change as he ages? Murray, broke, signed up without hesitation. Every month, he drove to this famous foundation, housed in three stories of weatherworn brick overlooking Great Egg Bay, where the receptionist, Mrs. Kriebel, would issue him a sterilized herring jar and escort him upstairs to a room papered with Playboy centerfolds and pornographic letters mailed to Penthouse by its own staff.

  Not only did the Preservation Institute harvest and scrutinize the seed of ordinary citizens, it also froze that of Nobel Prize laureates, making their heritable traits available for home experiments in eugenics. As it happened, thousands of women had been waiting for this product to come on the market. Nobel sperm was cheap, reliable, and simple to use. After acquiring a turkey baster, you injected yourself with the rare fluid—the crème de la crème, as it were—and nine months later out burst a genius. The laureates received nothing for their donations beyond the satisfaction of upgrading the human gene pool. Murray Katz—retail clerk, involuntary celibate, Newark Community College dropout—received thirty dollars a shot.

  And then one afternoon a message arrived—a telegram, for like most hermits, Murray had no phone.

  YOUR LAST DONATION CONTAMINATED. STOP. COME IMMEDIATELY. STOP.

  Contaminated. The word, so obviously a euphemism for diseased, made a cold puddle in his bowels. Cancer, no doubt. His semen was riddled with malignant cells, STOP: indeed, STOP: you’re dead. He got behind the wheel of his decrepit Saab and headed over Brigantine Bridge into Atlantic City.

  When Murray Jacob Katz was ten years old, he’d begun wondering whether he was permitted to believe in heaven, as were his various Christian friends. Jews believed so many impressive and dramatic things, it seemed only logical to regard death as less permanent than one might conclude from, say, coming across a stone-stiff cat in a Newark sewer. “Pop, do we have heaven?” he’d asked on the day he discovered the cat. “You want to know a Jew’s idea of heaven?” his father had replied, looking up from his Maimonides. “It’s an endless succession of long winter nights on which we get paid a fair wage to sit in a warm room and read all the books ever written.” Phil Katz was an intense, shriveled man with a defective aorta; in a month his heart would seize up like an overburdened automobile engine. “Not just the famous ones, no, every book, the stuff nobody gets around to reading, forgotten plays, novels by people you never heard of. However, I profoundly doubt such a place exists.”

  Decades later, after Pop was dead and Murray’s life had been relocated to Atlantic City, he began transforming his immediate environment, making it characteristic of heaven. The whole glorious span of Dewey’s decimal system soon filled the lighthouse, book after book spiraling up the tower walls like threads of DNA, delivering intellectual matter to Murray’s mammalian cortex and wondrous smells to the reptilian regions below—the gluey tang of a library discard, the crisp plebeian aroma of a yard-sale paperback, the pungent mustiness of a thrift-store encyclopedia. When the place became too crowded, Murray simply built an addition, a kind of circular cottage surrounding the lighthouse much as three hundred noisy, enraged, and well-dressed Christians were now surrounding the Preservation Institute.

  Three hundred, no exaggeration, brandishing placards and chanting “It’s a sin!” Even the seaward side was covered; a flotilla of yachts lay at anchor just offshore, protest banners fluttering from their masts: PROCREATION IS SACRED…SATAN WAS A TEST-TUBE BABY…A GOOD PARENT IS A MARRIED PARENT. Murray crossed the sandy lawn using the cautious, inoffensive gait any prudent Jew might adopt under the circumstances, AND THE LORD STRUCK DOWN ONAN, declared the placard of a gaunt old gentleman with the tight, reverent carriage of a praying mantis, GOD LOVES LESBIANS, GOD HATES LESBIANISM, proclaimed a large-eared adolescent who could have starred in the life of Franz Kafka. Murray studied his goal, a ring of sawhorse-shaped barricades manned by a dozen security guards anxiously stroking their semiautomatic rifles. Protestors pawed Murray’s coat. “Please keep your sperm,” urged a pale, toothsome woman whose placard read, ARTIFICIAL INSEMINATION = ETERNAL DAMNATION.

  As Murray passed the barricades, a hand emerged from the mob and trapped his shoulder. He turned. A leather patch masked the protester’s right eye. To fight God’s battles, God had equipped him with massive arms, a body like a Stonehenge megalith, and a riveting glint in his good eye. “So what will your spilled seed get you, brother? Thirty dollars? You’re being underpaid. Judas got silver. Resist. Resist.”

  “As a matter of fact, my last donation wasn’t acceptable,” said Murray. “I think I’m out of a job.”

  “Tell those people in there it’s wrong—a sin. Will you do that? We’re not here to condemn them. We’re all sinners. I’m a sinner.” With a sudden flourish the protester flipped back his eyepatch. “When a man takes out his own eye, that’s a sin.”

  Murray shuddered. What had he expected, a glass orb, a fused lid? Certainly not this open pit, dark and jagged like the sickness he imagined gnawing at his gonads. “A sin.” He wrested free. “I’ll tell them.”

  “God bless you, brother,” muttered the man with the hole in his head.

  Shivering with apprehension, Murray entered the Institute and crossed the glossy marble floor, moving past a great clock-face with hands like harpoons, past spherical lamps poised on wrought-iron stands, at last reaching Mrs. Kriebel’s desk.

  “I’ll tell Dr. Frostig you’re here,” she said curtly, arranging her collection jars in a tidy grid. She was a stylish woman, decorated with clothes and cosmetics whose names Murray didn’t know.

  “Have they decided what’s wrong with me?”

  “Wrong with you?”

  “With my donation.”

  “Not my department.” Mrs. Kriebel pointed across the lobby to a sharply angled woman with a vivid, hawkish face. “You can wait with Five Twenty-eight over there.”

  The lobby suggested the parlor of a first-class bordello. Abloom with ferns, Greek vases anchored the four corners of a sumptuous Persian rug. On the upholstered walls, set within gold frames, oil portraits of deceased Nobel-winning donors glowered at the mere mortals who surveyed them. Well, well, thought Murray, perusing the faces, we’re going to have Keynesian economics in the next century whether we want it or not. And a new generation of astrophysicists writing bad science fiction.

  Glancing away from a dead secretary of state, Five Twenty-eight offered Murray an ardent smile. Black turtleneck jersey, straight raven hair, scruffy brown bomber jacket, eye shadow the iridescent green of Absecon Inlet: she looked like a fifties beatnik, mysteriously transplanted to the age of sperm banks. “I don’t care whether I get a girl or a boy,” she said abruptly. “Makes no difference. Everybody thinks dykes hate boys. Not true.”

  Murray surveyed the lesbian’s offbeat prettiness, her spidery frame. “Was it hard picking the father?”

  “Don’t remind me.” Together they ambled to the next portrait, a Swedish brain surgeon. “For the longest time I was into the idea of either a painter or a flute player. The arts are my big love, you see, but with science you’ve got a more reliable income, so in the end I settled on a marine biologist—a black man, they tell me, one of their own staff. Mathematicians were in the picture for a while, but then they ran out. Actually, there was one. A Capricorn. No way. Let me guess—you look like a Jewish novelist, if you don’t mind my saying so. I considered having one of those, but then I started reading their stuff, and it seemed kind of dirty to me, and I decided I didn’t want that kind of karma in the house. You a novelist?”

  “Matter of fact, I have been working on a book. Nonfiction, though.”

  “What’s it called?”

  “Hermeneutics of the Ordinary.” Upon turning forty, Murray had resolved not only to collect obscure and profound books, but t
o write one as well. Within six months he had three hundred pages of ragged manuscript and a great title.

  “What of the ordinary?”

  “Hermeneutics. Interpretation.” Through his employment at Atlantic City Photorama, where he collected exposed film and doled out prints and slides, Murray had discovered that snapshots afford unique access to the human psyche. A lawyer photographs his teenage daughter: why the provocative low angle? A stock broker photographs his house: why does he stand so far away, why this hunger for context? Snapshots were an undeciphered language, and Murray was determined to crack the code; his book would be the Rosetta stone of home photography, the Talmud of the Instamatic. “It’s about my experiences serving Photorama customers.”

  “Oh, yeah—I’ve seen that place,” said the lesbian. “Tell me, is it true people are always shooting each other screwing?”

  “A few of our clients do that, yes.”

  “That confirms my suspicions.”

  “It gets even stranger. We have this real estate agent who does nothing but animals who’ve been…well, squashed.”

  “Gross.”

  “Squirrels, skunks, groundhogs, cats. Roll after roll.”

  “So you can really get into human nature by seeing what everyone brings to Photorama? I’d never thought of that. Heavy.”

  Murray smiled. His book might have a readership after all. “I also run that lighthouse on Brigantine Point.”

  “Lighthouse? You really run a lighthouse?”

  “Uh-huh. We don’t light it much anymore.”

  “Could I let the baby see it sometime? Sounds educational.”

  “Sure. I’m Murray Katz.” He extended his hand.

  “Georgina Sparks.” She gave him a jaunty handshake. “Tell me honestly, do I strike you as insane? It’s insane to try raising a kid alone, everybody says, especially if you’re a dyke. I was living with my lover and, matter of fact, we split up over the whole idea. I’m real big on babies. Laurie thinks they’re grotesque.”