by Jane Langton
Lorraine Bell guessed the reason. Sitting beside Joe’s wife, helping to hold her erect, she recalled the text he had chosen from Isaiah: They that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings as eagles. The sermon was for Claire. Joe had been addressing the needs of his wife rather than those of his eager and inquisitive congregation.
But they were obviously gratified. Glancing discreetly at each other in satisfaction, they swung into the hymn Augusta Gill had chosen for the end of the service. The verses were by Milton, the music was Handel’s.
Let us with a gladsome mind
Praise the Lord, for he is kind;
For his mercies aye endure,
Ever faithful, ever sure.
It had been all right, decided joe Bold, walking down the aisle. The board chairmen and college professors had begun to look less formidable. He was no longer intimidated. Turning around at the door, he lifted his hand for the benediction.
But then there was another calamity. Instead of a solemn blessing from their minister, the men and women of Old West heard only a gasp. Joe Bold was running up the aisle. His wife had slipped off the bench. She was lying on the floor, with Ed and Lorraine Bell kneeling over her.
Alarmed, the congregation stood uncertainly, then fumbled out of the pews into the aisles. The service was obviously over. Looking back over their shoulders in concern, they drifted toward the doors.
Only Maud Starr took pleasure in the dread events of the morning. Pulling on her buzzard coat, she stared at the new minister as he stooped over his fallen wife. Soaring over them at ceiling height, Maud circled lower and lower, beak and claws extended.
7
While events of infinite importance have been of daily occurrence … it could hardly be expected that even a ladies Missionary Sewing Circle could pursue its work with accustomed interest and success.
Annual report, 1861
Missionary Sewing Circle
First Parish Congregational Church, Lincoln
On the steps of the church they stood in knots and clusters, wondering what had gone wrong with Howie Sawyer, asking each other about the illness that had so plainly brought the minister’s wife to death’s door.
“What about the reception in the parish house?” said Geneva Jones, thinking about the tray of elegant tidbits waiting in her car. “I suppose it will be called off.”
“Oh, too bad,” said Betsy Bucky, disappointed. Betsy had brought a batch of her special coconut squares, and she was eager to hear the little cries of pleasure as people bit into them.
Only Parker Upshaw knew what was the matter with Claire Bold. “Cancer, naturally,” he said grimly. “She’s had two operations already. She’s due for another mastectomy this week.”
“Oh, the poor darling,” said Imogene Gibby.
“Oh, I’m so sorry,” said Geneva Jones.”
Rosemary Hill said nothing, but she listened anxiously to Parker Upshaw, then hurried home to lie down with a heating pad over the place that hurt.
Deborah Shooky was distressed at the sight of her husband’s drawn face in the bright noonday light outside the church. “Phil, dear, are you all right?”
“Oh, sure,” said Phil. “Just sort of upset. It was terrible seeing Howie Sawyer like that. You know, out of his head like that.”
Hilary Tarkington was surprised to find her husband lying in the back seat of their fourteen-year-old Chrysler. “Oh, George, dear, I should have come out sooner.”
“It’s all right,” said George, pulling himself up. He sat in the back seat, wheezing, while Hilary drove home. Shifting the gears noisily, she told him about the minister’s wife. “Oh, George, you didn’t see her lying on the floor. Oh, the poor woman.”
It had been a shattering morning. Eloise Baxter rushed away for a dialysis appointment at Mass. General Hospital. Bill Molyneux suspected a return of his own peculiar symptoms. Agatha Palmer felt distinctly unwell. Thad Boland went home in a fit of nervousness and made himself a sandwich, but he couldn’t get it down. He took one bite and left the rest on his plate. The sickness in the church was catching. There was illness in the air.
Only a few parishioners were still gathered around the church door when Joe Bold and Ed Bell came out, carrying Claire between them on their crossed hands. Claire was sitting up with her arms around their shoulders, her face white and strained. But then Ed said something that made her laugh as they tucked her in the back seat of his car.
Homer and Mary Kelly hurried across the grass. “Is there anything we can do?” said Homer. “Mary knew Mrs. Bold at school.”
Ed Bell was pleased. So was Joe Bold. Mary leaned down to the back window of the car and introduced herself. Claire’s face brightened. She grasped Mary’s hand. “Why don’t you come with us?” said Joe. “I know it will do her good.”
They took off quickly, the five of them in Ed Bell’s car, accompanied by Peter Terry in his police cruiser. It was Ed who had called police headquarters in the Town Hall, and he was glad that the man on hand was his old friend Pete, even though it was Sunday, and you would think the chief of police would be home Sunday morning with his wife.
Pulling the cruiser away from the curb, Pete Terry turned on his siren, thinking unhappily at the same time about his wife, Flo, and her crazy prophecies. Damn it, the woman was right again.
Arlene Pott was one of the last to leave the church. She was reluctant to go home. Not till everyone else had driven away did she walk around the green to her own car on Carlisle Road. Working her key into the lock, she felt the churchly aura of comfortable sanctity slip away, and all the excitement of the new minister’s appearance, and the sensational confusion of the two interruptions. As soon as she opened the door of her car, she was enveloped once again in the poisonous atmosphere of home. Her fear gripped her as she drove down Lowell Road. Wally was probably carrying on with Josie Coil right now.
Arlene’s suspicions were well grounded. No sooner had she driven off to church that morning than Josie had come running right over to be with Wally. Josie had known Wally was waiting for her. She knew how unhappy he was with Arlene. She knew his whole life had taken on new meaning since she had moved next door to take care of old Mrs. Hawk.
Wally Pott was a small-time insurance adjuster who spent his days arguing with the wrathful owners of wrecked automobiles and the survivors of accidents. Some of the survivors were damaged and crippled, some were not, but all were greedy and litigious. The work was infuriating, the pay was small. Wally’s salary was only a tenth of Arlene’s income, a monthly stipend left her by her father, who had been a wealthy contractor. Arlene’s father’s money had paid for their new house. His company had built it. Arlene never let Wally forget that the house was hers, and hers alone. “Take your feet off my sofa,” she would say. “Don’t walk on my grass.”
It was a bitter standoff. The weeks and months had come to seem more and more unbearable to Wally until the day Josie Coil came to work next door. They had been attracted to each other right away. Josie respected him. Josie admired him. Wally swelled in his own estimation. The dimples in Josie’s cheeks were invitations to a better life.
But this morning Josie was restive. “Look, Wally, how long can we go on like this? Honest to God, I’m really sick of it. You know what I think I’ll do? I’m going to take that job in the modeling agency in Watertown. This guy I met, this Victor, he says I can get a job easy. You know, doing ads for fingernail polish and panty hose.” Josie waggled her fingers and pointed her toes.
“What guy?” said. Wally uneasily.
“Oh, this big good-looking guy, I told you, his name’s Victor. I could tell he fell for me in a big way. So what good does it do to wait around while you make up your mind? It’s Arlene’s money, right? This whole house, it’s Arlene’s daddy’s money that built it? So if you divorce her, she gets the house and the alimony, right? So, listen, I’d have to go on working, wouldn’t I? Nursing old ladies like Mrs. Hawk, the way I am now, right? Giv
ing them baths in bed, emptying their bedpans? What good is that? Honestly, now, Wally.”
Wally glowered at her. “Listen, you just forget this Victor guy, you hear me? I’ll break his neck.”
Josie laughed, showing her dimples. “Oh, Wally, no wonder you’re jealous. You should see him. He’s really good-looking. You know, big and strong, with these heavy eyebrows that meet in the middle and this big cleft chin. And he’s really crazy about me, I can tell. So hurry up, okay, Wally? Do something. I mean, here I am”—Josie spread her arms and looked down at her plump breasts, her delicious tummy, her cozy thighs—”just withering on the vine.”
Josie stayed too long in the Potts’ pink-and-beige living room. Not until Arlene’s car door slammed in the driveway did she jump up and scuttle out the back door.
Arlene was no fool. She saw the bushes shake, she saw the white trousers scramble through them. And she couldn’t bear it. She was crushed.
But Arlene was tired of fighting with Wally. Walking across the grass, she unrolled the chicken-wire door of her vegetable garden and put her big purple pocketbook down at the end of the stretched white string that showed where she had planted her early peas. Squatting down on her high heels, she stared along the row, looking for some sign of life, tears running down her heavy cheeks.
Eleanor Bell and her mother were the last to get home from church that morning because they had to walk all the way. When they turned in to their driveway, Eleanor was astounded to see Bo Harris waiting for them on the front porch, looking at them anxiously. His bicycle was leaning against the porch steps.
“Mrs. Bell?” he said eagerly. “Did your husband tell you about me and my car? I mean, my name’s Bo Harris. Did he say anything about me?”
“Why, no, he didn’t,” said Lorraine.
“Hello, Bo,” said Eleanor, thrilled and excited.
Ignoring Eleanor, Bo followed her mother into the house, talking a blue streak. “It’s this car I just bought—my mother won’t let me fix it in our driveway. So Mr. Bell said maybe I could work on it in your backyard, if it’s okay with you. I mean, my mother cuts the grass with a pair of scissors, I mean, you know, she’s really fussy, but I noticed your grass isn’t exactly—”
Lorraine laughed. “I’m insulted, but never mind.” She sighed, picturing pieces of junk car littering the back yard. “Well, if Ed says it’s all right, I won’t say no.”
“Gee, thanks, Mrs. Bell.”
“Have something to eat, Bo?” said Eleanor, smiling eagerly, snatching off the cover of a chocolate cake her mother was saving for company. Eleanor’s hair was a riot of golden curls. Her nose and cheeks were pink. This morning in church her mother’s friends had gushed over her. “Oh, my dear, how precious.” “Oh, Eleanor, dear, how charming.” “Ah, youth! Darling Eleanor!”
But Bo Harris didn’t seem to see her. “So I’ll get my father to bring it over with the trailer hitch on his car. Okay with you, Mrs. Bell?”
8
I have been reflecting on the changes of life—its mutability and uncertainty.
James Lorin Chapin
Private Journal, Lincoln, 1849
Joe Bold sat in the waiting room of Emerson Hospital with Ed Bell and Homer and Mary Kelly, waiting for word from the doctor who had taken his wife in hand. Beyond the big windows of the waiting room, the white pines tossed their branches sorrowfully, as if they knew Joe’s trouble. Claire’s tragedy lay on the table with the magazines. It seeped out of the water fountain on the wall.
Down the corridor, the door to the examining room had stopped shuddering under the blows of Howie Sawyer’s fists. Howie must have been given a sedative. The reverberation of his shouting died away.
“What was he saying?” said Mary, puzzled. “Something about brass beds?”
“It sounded like brass beds,” said Homer, bewildered too.
“Howie buys furniture for a big chain of stores,” explained Ed Bell. “Brass beds, upholstered chairs, dining-room tables—that kind of thing.” Ed looked solemnly at the floor, suspecting that Howie Sawyer would no longer be ordering beds and chairs and tables, not ever again in his life.
Upstairs in Dr. Arthur Spinney’s office, Joan Sawyer answered questions about her husband. “Have you noticed anything different about him lately?” asked Dr. Spinney, looking at her mournfully. “Lapses of memory, anything like that?”
Joan’s eyes were dry. So was her throat. Her face felt dirty with haste and confusion. “Yes. Several times he’s seemed disoriented. And one morning he fell asleep in the middle of breakfast.”
“I expect it was a small stroke. He must have had another one, much more severe, this morning in church.”
“Do you think—” Joan clenched her fingers and tried again. It was a tremendous question, the only question, the only one that mattered. “Do you think he’ll come back to his senses?”
“I don’t know,” said Dr. Spinney gloomily. “At this point it looks an awful lot like multi-infarct dementia. I’m afraid—” Then Dr. Spinney shook his head and prevaricated. “It’s too soon to tell.” And he dismissed her with a sympathetic squeeze of the hand, too kind a squeeze, Joan knew, to accompany anything but the bitterest news.
Downstairs in the waiting room, Ed Bell, too, took Joan’s hand. Mary and Homer Kelly asked her about Howie, and Ed introduced her to Joseph Bold. Joan looked curiously at the new minister, feeling an unhappy sense of connection between them, as though they were rats caught in the same trap. But they were not the same kind of rat. It was apparent that Joseph Bold was stricken with fear about his wife’s illness. He wanted her well, he wanted her back—while Joan wanted her husband to die. Let Howie die, she had prayed to herself upstairs when Dr. Spinney had squeezed her hand. Let him die, let him die.
Appalled at herself, Joan shook hands with the minister and listened to his polite wishes for her husband’s recovery. Then she said goodbye and walked out of the hospital, reflecting that the Reverend Bold’s courteous words were merely professional good manners. Even so, they affected her powerfully. For a moment Joan Sawyer was swept far out to sea.
9
Prayer is that Golden Key, which being oyled with Tears, and turn’d with the hand of Faith, will unlock the Cabinet of Promises.…
Reverend Joseph Estabrook
Concord, 1705
Next Sunday, Ed Bell sat beside his wife and daughter at the front of the church and was surprised to see that the sunlight was falling on the pews in the same way as before. It was as if nothing had happened to threaten the tranquillity of Old West Church. The red carpets still ran straight up the aisles, the red cushions on the benches were still faded to the same degree, the painted floor was the same remote and faraway blue. As the church filled, Ed saw Joan Sawyer sit down calmly beside Homer and Mary Kelly in the same place where she had sat before, and Joan too seemed the same, although her life had been wrenched out of shape and utterly changed. Even the broken latch of the pew door had been mended. George Tarkington’s work, guessed Ed.
In the rear pew on the south side, Mary Kelly talked softly with Joan Sawyer, while Homer sat with folded arms watching Geneva Jones thrust wands of forsythia into ajar in front of the pulpit. Geneva was kneeling on a small stool, and it occurred to Homer that she was the only person in the room whose knees were sore. For a moment he missed the ritual kneeling of the Catholic church in which he had spent so many reluctant hours as a boy. Would anything drive these Protestants to fall on the floor? What if God himself were to appear in the pulpit, God in glory with angels and seraphim, his countenance spreading its radiance into every corner of the chamber, would these good people prostrate themselves before him in awe and wonder? Well, no, they wouldn’t, decided Homer. It would be too awkward. There wasn’t room. They’d bump their heads on the backs of the pews in front of them. They’d have to wedge themselves sideways on the floor, and stick elbows in other people’s eyes and beg each other’s pardon. It wouldn’t work at all, and God had better confine his appea
rances to churches with kneeling benches embroidered by the ladies of the altar guild.
Jerry Gibby, too, was a lapsed Catholic. But Jerry wasn’t thinking about the dark candlelit interior of the Somerville church where he had once been an altarboy. He was shifting nervously on the bench thinking about something called “shrink.” Shrink was a decrease in store inventory for unknown reasons. Shrink, good God, it was going to destroy him. His customers were walking out with the entire contents of Gibby’s General Grocery. They were dodging past the cash registers with their stolen goods, and nobody was paying any attention. Yesterday, glancing down from the window of his office high above the courtesy booth, Jerry had seen a man push a cart full of frozen turkeys into the florist department and disappear. Racing downstairs, Jerry had rushed out into the parking lot, but the man was nowhere to be seen.
How many times had that thieving bastard pulled that trick? And he wasn’t the only one. The books showed a steady increase of unexplained outgo. There was pilferage at the front end, missing cartons of cigarettes, candy, chewing gum. “Shrink,” mumbled Jerry aloud. “Jesus.”
“Sh-h-h, dear,” whispered Imogene. Then she smiled at the woman who was sitting down beside her, a portly woman with a drooping face and dyed red hair. “Good morning,” murmured Imogene. “I’m Imogene Gibby. This is my husband, Jerry.”
“Arlene Pott,” said the woman. “Why, you must be the new people in my neighborhood. Aren’t you in the house with the columns? How do you do!”
“Oh, here comes the minister,” said Imogene, reaching out to squeeze Arlene’s hand as Joseph Bold opened the door beside the pulpit and entered, his robe swirling in the draft from the cold hall.
