outlet, and helped me buy a navy pantsuit and matching loafers. I
didn’t own a handbag so Robin lent me hers.
Two weeks before the interview my parents came to BYU. They had
never visited me before, but they were passing through on their way to
Arizona and stopped for dinner. I took them to the Indian restaurant
across the street from my apartment.
The waitress stared a moment too long at my father’s face, then her
eyes bulged when they dropped to his hands. Dad ordered half the
menu. I told him three mains would be enough, but he winked and said
money was not a problem. It seemed the news of my father’s
miraculous healing was spreading, earning them more and more
customers. Mother’s products were being sold by nearly every midwife
and natural healer in the Mountain West.
We waited for the food, and Dad asked about my classes. I said I was
studying French. “That’s a socialist language,” he said, then he lectured
for twenty minutes on twentieth-century history. He said Jewish
bankers in Europe had signed secret agreements to start World War II,
and that they had colluded with Jews in America to pay for it. They had
engineered the Holocaust, he said, because they would benefit
financially from worldwide disorder. They had sent their own people to
the gas chambers for money.
These ideas were familiar to me, but it took me a moment to
remember where I’d heard them: in a lecture Dr. Kerry had given on
The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. The Protocols, published in 1903,
purported to be a record of a secret meeting of powerful Jews planning
world domination. The document was discredited as a fabrication but
still it spread, fueling anti-Semitism in the decades before World War
II. Adolf Hitler had written about the Protocols in Mein Kampf,
claiming they were authentic, that they revealed the true nature of the
Jewish people.
Dad was talking loudly, at a volume that would have suited a
mountainside but was thunderous in the small restaurant. People at
nearby tables had halted their own conversations and were sitting in
silence, listening to ours. I regretted having chosen a restaurant so
near my apartment.
Dad moved on from World War II to the United Nations, the
European Union, and the imminent destruction of the world. He spoke