’d taken together. He said that he’d been impressed with a lot of things Mitchell had said in that class. From there, Bankhead began asking Mitchell about his own religious inclinations. He seemed jittery and listless at the same time. There was an air of desperation about his questioning, as strong and acrid as the tobacco from the cigarettes he kept rolling while they talked. Mitchell told him what he could. He provided testimony to his own specific variety of religious experience. Bankhead listened intently, receptively. He appeared eager for any help Mitchell might provide. He asked Mitchell if he meditated. He asked if he went to church. After Mitchell had said everything he could, he asked Bankhead why he was interested. And here Bankhead surprised him yet again. He said, “Can you keep a secret?” Though they didn’t know each other, though in some respects Mitchell was the last person Bankhead should have wanted to confide in, he had told Mitchell about an experience he’d had recently, on a trip to Europe, that had changed his attitude about things. He was on a beach, he said, in the middle of the night. He was looking up into the starry sky when suddenly he had the feeling that he could lift off into space, if he wanted to. He hadn’t told anybody about this experience because he hadn’t been in his right mind at the time, and this tended to discredit the experience. Nonetheless, as soon as the idea had occurred to him, it had happened: he was suddenly in space, floating past the planet Saturn. “It wasn’t at all like a hallucination,” Bankhead said. “I need to stress that. It felt like the most lucid moment of my life.” For a minute, or ten minutes, or an hour—he didn’t know—he had drifted by Saturn, examining its rings, feeling the warm glow of the planet on his face, and then he was back on Earth, on the beach, in a world of trouble. Bankhead said that the vision, or whatever it was, was the most awe-inspiring moment of his life. He said that it “felt religious.” He wanted to know Mitchell’s opinion of what had happened. Was it O.K. to think of the experience as religious, since it felt that way, or was it invalidated by the fact that he was technically insane at the time? And if it was invalid, why did it still bewitch him?
Mitchell had answered that, as far as he understood them, mystical experiences were significant only to the extent that they changed a person’s conception of reality, and if that changed conception led to a change in behavior and action, a loss of ego.
At that point, Bankhead lit another cigarette. “This is the deal with me,” he said in a quiet, intimate voice. “I’m ready to make the Kierkegaardian leap. My heart’s ready. My brain’s ready. But my legs won’t budge. I can say ‘Jump’ all day long. Nothing happens.”
After that, Bankhead had looked sad and had become instantly distant. He’d said goodbye and left the room.
The conversation changed Mitchell’s attitude toward Bankhead. He was no longer able to hate him. The part of Mitchell that would have rejoiced in Bankhead’s collapse was no longer operative. Throughout the conversation, Mitchell experienced what so many people had before him, the immensely satisfying embrace of Bankhead’s intelligent and complete attention. Mitchell felt that, under other circumstances, he and Leonard Bankhead might have been the best of friends. He understood why Madeleine had fallen in love with him, and why she had married him.
Beyond that, Mitchell couldn’t help respecting Bankhead for what he’d done. It was possible that he might recover from his depression; in fact, given time, that was more than likely. Bankhead was a smart guy. He might get his act together. But whatever success he achieved in life wasn’t going to come easy. It would always be shadowed by his disease. Bankhead had wanted to save Madeleine from that. He was a long way from working things out and he wanted to do it on his own, with minimum collateral damage.
And so the summer flowed on. Mitchell continued to stay at the Hannas’ and to take long walks to the Friends Meeting House. Whenever