The Early Stories (114 page)

The woman next to him at the party is sipping ginger ale, though he knows her to be a devoted drinker of vodka martinis. He points at the sparkling beverage and says, “Lent?” She nods. Her eyes are calm as a statue's. He knows her to be a believer. So is he. Let us christen him Credo.

Credo is in the basement of a church. He is on the church Church Heritage Committee, along with four old ladies. Their problem is, they are going to move to a new church, of white plastic, and what shall they do with all this old religious furniture? It has been accumulating for centuries: box-pew doors and tin footwarmers from the edifice of 1736; carpeted kneeling stools and velvet collection bags from the edifice of 1812; a gargantuan Gothic deacon's bench, of pinnacled oak, from the edifice of 1885. It would sorely test and strain seventeen contemporary laymen to lift and move it; there must have been giants in those days, giants of faith.

One of the old ladies mounts up onto its padded arms. Puffs of dust sprout beneath her feet. She retrieves something—a kind of jewel—from the pinnacle of the ornate bench back. They pass it around. It is a little brown photograph embedded in cracked glass, of a Victorian child wearing a paper crown. “Maybe some church just starting up would like to buy it all,” the first lady says.

“One of those new California sects,” the second amplifies.

“Never,” says Credo. “Nobody wants this junk.”

“At least,” the third lady begs, “let's get an antique dealer to appraise the picture frames.” Behind an old spinet and cartons of warped hymnals they have uncovered perhaps forty picture frames, all empty. “People will pay a fortune for such things nowadays.”

“What people?” Credo asks. He cannot believe it. The basement seems airless; he cannot breathe. The ancient furnace comes on. Its awakening shudder shakes loose flakes of asbestos wrapping from the pipes; like snow the flakes drift down onto old hymnals, picture frames, piano stools, broken little chairs from the Sunday-school, attendance charts with pasted-on gold stars coming unstuck, old men's-club bowling-league bowling shoes, kneeling stools worn like ox yokes, tin footwarmers perforated like cabbage graters. God, it is depressing. God.

The fourth old lady has brought a paper shopping bag. Out of it she pulls dust rags, a bottle of Windex, a rainbow of Magic Markers, some shipping tags in two colors—green for preserve, red for destroy. “Let's make some decisions,” she says briskly. “Let's separate the sheep from the goats.”

Credo is visiting with his minister. The minister is very well informed. He says, “The Dow Jones was off two-point-three today, that's one less soprano pipe on our new Fiberglas organ.” The minister's wife brings them in tea and honey. The jar of honey glows in a shaft of dusty parsonage sunlight. The minister's wife's hair is up in a towering beehive; she is a voluptuous blonde. Credo's wife is a mousy brunette.
Buy now, pay later
, he thinks, piously sipping.

Credo surveys the new church. The glistening bubble-shaped shell of white plastic holds a multitude of pastel rooms. He served on the New Creation Committee, which worked with the team of architects; the endless meetings and countless blueprints have become reality. There are many petty disappointments. The altar spot has been rheostatted in sync with the pulpit spot. The pre-fab steeple weeps in a storm. The Sunday-school room dividers scrape and buckle when pulled into place. The organ sounds like Fiberglas. The duct blower blows down the wrong duct and keeps extinguishing the pilot light in the wall oven. The proportions of the boiler room do not uplift the heart. The foundation slab is already cracking. Credo follows the sinuous crack with his eyes. The earth, of course, slumps and shrugs; the continental plates are sliding. And yet, somehow one expects that it will hold firm beneath a church. And yet, by this pattern miracles would become everyday and a tyranny. And yet, it would have been nice had the Lisbon earthquake not occurred, and not given Voltaire a laughingpoint.

•  •  •

He reads St. Augustine. It is too hot, too radiant, blinding, and wild.
Is there indeed, O Lord my God, aught in me that can contain Thee? do then heaven and earth, which Thou hast made, and wherein Thou hast made me, contain Thee? or, because nothing which exists could exist without Thee, doth therefore whatever exists contain Thee? Since, then, I too exist, why do I seek that Thou shouldest enter into me, who were not, wert Thou not in me? Why?
It is too serious, frightening, and exciting; Credo has to get up and dull himself with a drink so he can continue reading. Augustine scribbles on a dizzying verge: he nearly indicts God for his helplessly damned infancy, for his schoolboy whippings; then pulls back, blames himself, and exonerates the Lord.
Let not my soul faint under Thy discipline, nor let me faint in confessing unto Thee all Thy mercies, whereby Thou hast drawn me out of all my most evil ways, that Thou mightest become a delight to me above all the allurements which I once pursued
.

It is too terrific, there is no relenting; Credo makes another drink, stares out the window, lets in the cat, asks a child how his day went at school, anything for relief from this whirlwind.
Is not all this smoke and wind? and was there nothing else whereon to exercise my wit and tongue? Thy praises, Lord, Thy praises might have stayed the yet tender shoot of my heart by the prop of Thy Scriptures; so had it not trailed away amid these empty trifles, a defiled prey for the fowls of the air. For in more ways than one do men sacrifice to the rebellious angels
. Credo cannot go on, he has waited four decades to read this, his heart cannot withstand it. It is too strict and searing, fierce and judicious; nothing alloyed can survive within it. He reads the
New York Times Sunday Magazine
instead. “China: Old Hands and New.” “The Black Bourgeoisie Flees the Ghetto.” “I Was a Marigold Head.” He flips through
Sports Illustrated, Art News, Rolling Stone
. He puts St. Augustine back on the shelf, between Marcus Aurelius and Boethius. The book is safe there. He will take it down again, when he is sixty-five, and ready.
These things Thou seest, Lord, and holdest Thy peace; long-suffering, and plenteous in mercy and truth. Wilt Thou hold Thy peace for ever?

Credo is in a motel. He has brought a shaker of vodka and vermouth and ice, and a can of ginger ale, just in case. The woman with him cannot be tempted. It is still Lent. She sips from the can, and he from the shaker; they take off each other's clothes. Her body is radiant, blinding, strict, serious, exciting. They admire each other, they make of one another an occasion for joy. Because they are believers, their acts possess dimensions
of glory and of risk; they are flirting with being damned, though they do not say this. They say only gracious things, commensurate with the gratitude and exaltation they feel. To arouse her again, he quotes St. Augustine:
If bodies please thee, praise God in occasion of them, and turn back thy love upon their Maker lest in these things which please thee, thou displease
.

Credo is in a hospital. He has had an accident, playing touch football, and then an operation, reattaching with a screw his tibial tuberosity. As the drugs in his blood ebb, pain rises beneath him like a poisonous squid rising beneath a bather floating gently in the ocean. It seizes his knee. It will not let go. By the luminescent watch on the night table it is two hours before he can ring the nurse and receive his next allotment of Demerol. A single window shows a dead town, lit by streetlights. Credo prays. Aloud. It is a long conversational prayer, neither apologetic nor dubious; his pain has won him a new status. He speaks aloud as if on television, giving the dead-of-the-night news. Abruptly, his chest breaks out in a sharp sweet copious sweat. He miraculously relaxes. The squid lets go, falls back, into unknowable depths. The nurse when she comes finds Credo asleep. It is morning. Up and down the hall, rosary beads click.

He is sitting on the Boston–Cambridge subway, jiggling and swaying opposite other men jiggling and swaying. Back to work, though he limps now. He will always limp. The body does not forgive; only God forgives. Between two stops, the subway surfaces over a bridge, into the light. Below, a river sparkles as if not polluted; sailboats tilt in the shining wind. Credo is reminded of that passage in the Venerable Bede when, arguing for conversion to Christianity, an ealdorman likens our life to the flight of a sparrow through the bright mead-hall.
Such appears to me, king, this present life of man on earth in comparison with the time which is unknown to us, as though you were sitting at the banquet with your leaders and thanes in winter and the fire was lighted and your hall warmed, and it rained and snowed and stormed outside; and there should come a sparrow and quickly fly through the house, come in through one door and go out through the other.… So this life of men appears save for but a little while; what goes before or what follows after we do not know
.

In this interval of brightness Credo notices a particular man opposite him, a commonplace, weary-looking man, of average height and weight,
costumed unaggressively, yet with something profoundly uncongenial and
settled
about his mouth, and an overall look of perfect integration with the heartless machine of the world. Credo takes him for an atheist. He thinks,
Between this innocuous fellow and myself yawns an eternal abyss, because I am a believer
.

The subway, rattling, plunges back underground. Or, it may be, as some extreme saints have implied, that, crushed beneath the majesty of the Infinite, believers and non-believers are exactly alike.

Eclipse
 

I went out into the back yard and the usually roundish spots of dappled sunlight underneath the trees were all shaped like feathers, crescent in the same direction, from left to right. Though it was five o'clock on a summer afternoon, the birds were singing goodbye to the day, and their merged song seemed to soak the strange air in an additional strangeness. A kind of silence prevailed. Few cars were moving on the streets of the town. Of my children only the baby dared come into the yard with me. She wore just underpants, and as she stood beneath a tree, bulging her belly toward me in the mood of jolly flirtation she has grown into at the age of two, her bare skin was awash with pale crescents. It crossed my mind that she might be harmed, but I couldn't think how.
Cancer?

The eclipse was to be over ninety percent in our latitude, and the newspapers and television for days had been warning us not to look at it. I looked up, a split-second Prometheus, and looked away. The bitten silhouette of the sun lingered redly on my retinas. The day was half cloudy, and my impression had been of the sun struggling, amid a furious knotted huddle of black-and-silver clouds, with an enemy too dreadful to be seen, with an eater as ghostly and hungry as time. Every blade of grass cast a long bluish-brown shadow, as at dawn.

My wife shouted from behind the kitchen screen door that as long as I was out there I might as well burn the wastepaper. She darted from the house, eyes downcast, with the wastebasket, and darted back again, leaving the naked baby and me to wander up through the strained sunlight to the wire trash barrel. After my forbidden peek at the sun, the flames dancing transparently from the blackening paper—yesterday's
Boston Globe
, a milk carton, a Hi Ho cracker box—seemed dimmer than shadows, and in the teeth of all the warnings I looked up again. The clouds
seemed bunched and twirled as if to plug a hole in the sky, and the burning afterimage was the shape of a near-new moon, horns pointed down. It was gigantically unnatural, and I lingered in the yard under the vague apprehension that in some future life I might be called before a cosmic court to testify to this assault. I seemed to be the sole witness. The town around my yard was hushed, all but the singing of the birds, who were invisible. The feathers under the trees had changed direction, and curved from right to left.

Then I saw my neighbor sitting on her porch. My neighbor is a widow, with white hair and brown skin; she has in her yard an aluminum-and-nylon-net chaise longue on which she lies at every opportunity, head back, arms spread, prostrate under the sun. Now she hunched dismally on her porch steps in the shade, which was scarcely darker than the light. I walked toward her and hailed her as a visitor to the moon might salute a survivor of a previous expedition. “How do you like the eclipse?” I called over the fence that distinguished our holdings on this suddenly insubstantial and lunar earth.