Stella was waiting for him in their bedroom, awake. Shadows hung in the corners, away from the feeble electric bulb whereby she was darning a black sock; she was sitting upright in the mahogany fourposter, in a white cotton nightie and a frilled cap bulged by the containment of her hair. She explained that Mrs. McDermott and Mrs. Dearholt had taken the streetcar home, after a nice chat over the rest of the strawberries and cream. “How was the meeting?” she asked.
He removed his black coat, hung it tidily over the back of a ladderback chair, and with an upward strain of his jaw and grimace of difficulty undid his detachable celluloid collar. “Dearholt steamrollered for the addition, but I asked them if they weren’t wanting this just to keep up with the Methodists. It gave them a little pause, though I expect they’ll end up going ahead. I should just get out of their way, I suppose, but the Sabbath school is struggling to fill its classes now, with so many of our better families moving out to Clifton and Totowa.” He sat down on the cane-bottomed rocker to remove his black shoes and socks. “Oh, my, Stel dearest, what a weariness I feel! I wonder if I have energy for all this.”
“All what, Clarence?” From her voice she was still concentrating on the darning threads.
“All this church—all these good people, wanting something from me no mortal man can provide. All this simulation of zeal.” He could not tell her how even pronouncing words had become a heaviness, now that the true nature of reality was revealed. There is no God. Perhaps everybody, back to his professors at Princeton, had known it already.
“You’ll feel better after a good night’s rest. Little Teddy thought you looked tired.”
“I heard him, all the way to my end of the table. Poor child, he’s sensitive.”
“More so than Jared and Esther?” she asked, still squinting at the sock stretched on its wooden egg, picking her way among the black threads. “They’re the ones that get the marks at school.”
Even attempting to discriminate between his children was in his brain-weariness almost beyond him. “Maybe not. But they’re getting on in life. Both have jobs after school, and Esther has a beau. Teddy’s being left behind.”
“Not by us.”
“Ah, I hope not.”
She glanced up, and decided to ignore the enigma of that remark. “Dinner was spirited, I thought,” she said.
He had to laugh, even in his stupefaction. The world distracts us from its own ruin. “Spirited is one way to describe it; some might say it was a quarrelsome disaster. You never should have invited Kleist; he’s gone fanatic since they laid him off. He even had our demure Italian guests rallying to the red flag.”
“It’s healthy for people to exchange frank views,” she said. “It’s good to have the different sorts mix. If you let Paterson’s class factions divide the Christian church, there’s nowhere left where the sides can hear one another. Our Lord was never afraid of a good discussion.” As if fearful of seeming to know his business better than he, she subdued her tone. “That McDermott seems a sweet soul, and Mr. Dearholt means well—he just rubs you the wrong way.”
“He wants to take over Fourth Presbyterian as his own little business on the side, and the way I’m feeling tonight he can have it.”
“Why, Clarence, you’re sounding almost sinful! There’s nobody like you around, for learning and compassion.”
“Compassion! Isn’t that a sickly thing, when as Kleist said the millowners have all the swords? Aren’t these so-called Christian virtues just as Ingersoll and the radicals claim, an excuse for doing nothing, a way to keep the poor quiet while the rich get richer?”
Stella put aside her completed sock and told him, “I’ve never read a word of Ingersoll and don’t intend to. He mocked God yet went on living off the fat of a land made prosperous by God-fearing men and women. And you shouldn’t be reading him either—something’s troubling you, everybody noticed it tonight.”
“Really? I tried to hold my tongue and let the others talk.”
“You always do, dearest. It wouldn’t hurt for them to hear their minister speak his mind now and then.”
“Ah, Stella, I don’t half know what my mind is any more.” He went in his suspenders and black trousers into the bathroom, to spare her the sight of him naked as he changed into his nightshirt. He did not want to come any closer to confessing his secret, the still-raw sore of Godlessness within him. He brushed his teeth with baking soda and took a swig of Mrs. Winslow’s Soothing Syrup to ease his throat and help him sleep. When he came out, Stella was already unconscious, in the sudden way of a healthy animal. The brown-shaded light burned directly into her sagging face. She had never been beautiful but there had been a square-jawed compactness that was loosening and bloating with age. She was looking more and more like an overfed man. He thought of slender little Mavis asleep in her corner of an airless room down in Dublin, her hard-working small hands curled against her chin, her fresh crop of freckles fading into the milk-soft skin. He pulled the chain on the lamp so gently his wife would not waken and slithered into a dark space beside her that might as well have been his tomb, except that the heat of this June day followed him in, and the whine of mosquitoes, and the desolate stir of his mind, and the muttering noise of the city putting itself to rest. The clatter of horseshoes and iron-tired wheels on cobblestones was mixed with the receding friction of a Broadway trolley car and the occasional snuffling crescendo, punctuated by sharp coughs of frustrated combustion, of the horseless carriages, or motorrigs—Ford Model Ts and Oldsmobiles in the main—which the more advanced citizens of Paterson were inflicting in ever greater numbers upon the old uneven, dung-strewn streets. The young century was thronged with a parade of inventions that amused Clarence when little else did, and the presumptuous, ragged, hopeful sound of a doughty little motorrig brought a ray of innocent energy, such as messenger angels would ride to earth, into his invalid mood. The hoarse receding note drew his consciousness to a fine point, and while that point hung in his skull starlike he fell asleep upon the adamant bosom of the depleted universe.
His next day’s duties, thick-headedly enacted while an underlying fever of confusion sought to repel the virus of atheism, included calls upon the sick of his parish. Clarence walked the two blocks to the mews behind Hamilton Street and took out the parson’s buggy. Betsy, a compact old gray Morgan, had a blood spot in her left eye and greeted him by rotating her little white-fringed ears. He flicked the reins listlessly, settling his eyes on her heavy croup and agitated tail as she tugged the lightweight box, with its spinning slender wheels, along the polished cobbles of Parks Boulevard. Mrs. Van Scoyk was at home recuperating from her fifth difficult accouchement. The baby could be heard squalling in the next room, as a nurse vainly cooed and crooned. “As soon as I hold the cunning little angels in my arms,” Mrs. Van Scoyk told her visitor, “the agony flies right out of my mind, as if it never happened!” Miss Harriet Bartle, active in his altar league, was for an indeterminate stay abed on a floor in Paterson General, originally “Ladies Hospital,” in Wayne, suffering from a siege of nervous indisposition whose exact symptoms and deeper causes could be comfortably left veiled with other female mysteries while he delivered a little gossip and offered up a brief prayer at her compliant, wistful bedside. Barnert Memorial, opened a mere two years ago far out on Broadway, to serve the immigrant masses in all their flourishing ills, was—like St. Joseph’s, Paterson’s oldest hospital, founded by a priest and five Sisters of Charity—rarely on Clarence’s rounds. Mr. Orr, however, lay near death in Barnert. He had been a manual laborer—a hod carrier to brickmasons, a crate-handler for grocers, a paid helping hand to those with heads enough to be tradesmen or entrepreneurs—and never able, somehow, to achieve the ease of a wife, home, and family. Yet he had been a tenaciously faithful attendant at church, always seated on the lefthand side of the nave, midway down the set of side pews underneath the painted-glass memorial windows presenting a sextet of Protestant martyrs and heroes—Wyclif, Huss, Calvin, Knox, Cromwell, Bunyan, al
l seen, save for the armored Protector, at pulpit or desk with expressions of dire resolve. Beneath their sternly rapt visages Clarence had missed, these last months, Orr’s small, dingy, beadily staring face, hanging on the sermon with an intensity that shamed the sermonizer, whose habit of dramatic hesitation frequently tempted his mind to wander even as his tongue proceeded. Today Mr. Orr, who bore as testament to his parents’ piety the Christian name of Elias, was poorly; Clarence found him asleep, his head on the starched pillowcase looking little bigger than a withered gray apple. Disease had thinned his russet hair unevenly, so it seemed patchy like a newborn baby’s, and chronic pain had cut deep lines along his nose and between his brows. Clarence would have tiptoed away, but within Orr’s sunken sockets two wet dark gleams forced apart the crusty melding of his wrinkled lids; the man grunted in lieu of welcome and made a gesture at elbowing himself higher in the bed, before lapsing back into supinity.
“Don’t bestir yourself, Mr. Orr. I didn’t come but for the briefest moment. How is your cure progressing?”
“To say I’m fair would be saying too much, Reverend. I’m very weary of the pain. It won’t be long, I can feel it in my marrow. With all how hot it’s been these past days, the cold has not let go its grip on my feet, and trust my words it’s climbing higher.”
“This unseasonable muggy spell has got us all down. My wager is you’ll be up and about within a week or two.”
“Ah, don’t talk foolishness, sir, in trying to be kind. I’m nearing the end, and I’m ready to face the verdict. Reverend Wilmot, tell me true now. The time for soft talk is by. What do you think my chances are, to find myself among the elect?”
The little face in the pillow emitted an odor of dental rot and stale mucus that afflicted Clarence’s nose six feet away, though the ward was perfumed with alcohol and ether. “In all frankness,” he said as gravely as he could, into the small monkeyish face, “I should estimate your chances to be excellent. Have you, in the course of your life as best you can remember, ever enjoyed a palpable experience of the living Christ?” Clarence’s mouth felt dry, dragging forth this old formula, with its invitation to hallucination and hysteria.
Mr. Orr’s eyes had forced wider apart the enclosing folds of skin; the bleached circlets of his irises were aswim in yellowish rheum threaded with blood. “I cannot honestly recollect ever enjoying that. I’ve searched my heart, but it’s hard to say, now, isn’t it? Some of these women, they boast of the Lord as if He comes to pay court every night. I’ve had what you might call promptings, during prayer and on rare occasion in the middle of the day, while about business of another sort. But I wouldn’t want to make claims for them as palpable experiences. A palpable experience, I guess you’d have no doubt—isn’t that so?”
He had struck a note of sly wheedling that brought home to Clarence the cruelty of a theology that sets us to ransacking our nervous systems for a pass to Heaven, even a shred of a ticket. “You’re too modest, Mr. Orr. Anyway, some among us teaching elders hold that there can be no palpable experience—just the impalpable experience of existing in God’s grace, won anew by His Son Jesus Christ.”
The silence that greeted this was perhaps longer than Clarence imagined it. Then Orr said, “Well, if I’m not to be among the saved, it was laid down that way at the beginning of Creation, and what can a body do? Tell me, sir. What can we poor bodies down here do?”
Clarence was taken aback; dying was making the man conversationally ruthless. “What we can do, Mr. Orr, is to do good to our fellow man and trust in the Lord and enjoy His gifts when they are granted to us. I don’t see how any deity can ask more of us than that.”
Orr closed one eye, as if to sharpen his vision from the other. “You don’t. Is that right? You talk like it’s six of one and a half-dozen of the other. We’re not dealing here with any deity, we’re dealing with the true and only God. He asks the world and then some.”
Clarence thought to respond, but his voice was slow to come, and the withered little laborer, opening both eyes, went on challengingly: “Reverend Wilmot, my life’s been hard. I never had advantages. I never thought I had enough to spare to take a wife, though there were several that were willing, when I was young and able. Having put up with a hard life for sixty-six years, without much comfort in it but hope of the next, I’m not afraid to face the worst. I’ll take damnation in good stride if that’s what’s to come.”
“Oh come now, Mr. Orr!—there can be no question of your damnation.”
“No, sir? No question. And why would that be?”
Clarence weakly gestured, unable politely enough to frame his impression that Mr. Orr was not worth the effort, the effort of God’s maintaining and stoking and staffing an eternal factory of punishment.
The man’s suspicions were aroused; he repeated the scrabbling effort of his elbows to raise himself in bed. “Damnation’s what my parents brought me up to believe in. They were regular pious folk, from Sussex County. There’s the elect and the others, damned. It’s in the Bible, over and over, right out of Jesus’ mouth. It makes good sense. You can’t have light without the dark. How can you be saved, if you can’t be damned? Answer me that. It’s part of the equation. You can’t have good without the bad, that’s why the bad exists. That’s what my parents held—pious folk, good people, lost their pig farm to the banks in the Panic of ’73, never got their heads above water since. Every night, before supper, we used to sing a hymn. Even nothing on the table, we used to sing a hymn. ‘Now the day is over, night is drawing nigh.’ That sort of thing. So tell me, Reverend Wilmot, where’s the flaw in my reasoning? You’re a learned man—that comes across real clear, Sunday mornings.”
Clarence had had such conversations before, but usually they were abstract, amiable disputes among professionals of the faith; laymen on their deathbeds he had generally found modest and mannerly, anxious not to embarrass the minister of God come to offer rote comfort, their thoughts absorbed by their bodily upheavals and their final arrangements with loved ones. He sensed that Orr was terrified, and he knew that even as recently as yesterday he would have had stronger answers for him. But he forced out the words. He said, “You’ve left God’s infinite mercy out of the equation, Mr. Orr—there’s the flaw. Jesus spoke of Hell and outer darkness but He only condemned devils to it for certain, and who of us can claim to be a devil? Who would be so proud? God showed Man His love twice—when He created him out of clay and when He gave His only begotten Son to redeem him from Adam’s sin. In the Old Testament, we read how He loved Israel, His chosen people, even when they strayed. Don’t bother yourself about damnation, I beg you, my good friend, but think instead of the glorious Resurrection and life everlasting. Think of the thief on the cross, to whom Jesus said, ‘Today shalt thou be with me in paradise.’ Not that the state of your health is comparable to the thief on the cross. You’ve got a peck of years left in you, I can tell by your argumentative spirit. You’re on the mend. You’ll be back in your pew under the Reformers’ windows before we know it.”
The dying man turned his ashen, shrivelled face to study his comforter. “Don’t you believe in damnation at all?” he asked.
“Me myself? Absolutely I do. Without a doubt, absolutely. But not for you, Mr. Orr. Not for as hard a worker and as faithful a churchgoer as you. Certainly as a matter of abstract doctrine there has to be a state of non-election. And—who knows?—there may well be in the world men wicked enough to be eternally damned.”
“Them Oriental potentates with all the jewels and wives,” Mr. Orr offered.
“Exactly.”
“And all the Jews.”
“I can’t go along with that, I fear. Our Savior was a Jew. One of the most outstanding men in Paterson, Nathan Barnet, is a Jew.”
Mr. Orr closed his repulsive pained eyes, and sang in a voice surprisingly high and true, “ ‘Shadows of the evening, steal across the sky.’ ” Clarence imagined, with relief, that his presence had been forgotten, but Orr’s eyes opened again and h
e announced, “I never heard enough damnation from your pulpit. Many mornings I had to strain to take hold of what you were saying, Reverend. I couldn’t figure it out, and got dizzy listening, the way you were dodging here and there. A lot of talk about compassion for the less fortunate, I remember that. Never a healthy sign, to my way of thinking, too much fuss and feathers about the poor. They’re with us always, the Lord Himself said. Wait till the next go-around, if the poor feel so sorry for themselves on this. The first shall be last. Take away damnation, in my opinion, a man might as well be an atheist. A God that can’t damn a body to an eternal Hell can’t lift a body up out of the grave either.”
“Mr. Orr, to relieve your mind—”
“Young man, don’t worry about relieving my mind. I told you, I can face it. I can face the worst, if it was always ordained. God’s as helpless in this as I am.”
“Well, now, that’s just it, isn’t it? How can a God be considered helpless—”
“If He’s made His elections at the beginning of time, He is. He can’t keep changing His mind. I guess that’s something He can’t do. Well, in a few days I’m going to know what His mind was and is. I’d promise to tell you from the other side, but I’m no Spiritualist. There’s this side, and then there’s the other, just like there’s saved and not saved. You take counsel with yourself, Reverend Wilmot, and see if you can’t think a bit more kindly of damnation. To tell a man he can’t be damned has logical consequences you haven’t taken into account. There have to be losers, or there can’t be winners. That’s what the Bible tells us, and Mr. Herbert Spencer too.”
“That’s an arresting connection,” Clarence said, startled for the moment out of his profound discomfort.