Baptism in Blood(74)

Maggie put the Aristotle back in its slipcase and back on its shelf. She didn’t want to leave a volume like that lying around. She had even taken the three leather volumes with her on the day of the hurricane, so that no matter how hard the store got hit, they wouldn’t get damaged. Of course, she could have fallen and dropped them and landed them all in the mud, but she hadn’t thought of that at the time. It was like mothers taking babies with them into a storm. You took them because you wanted to be sure. You took them because you didn’t trust anyone to protect them as well as you.

Maggie went back to the loft stairs and then down. Stephen was sitting in the big armchair next to the front window, one of four Maggie had scattered around for the convenience of her customers. This was the kind of thing they were always recommending at seminars at the Inde­pendent Booksellers’ Association convention. The idea was that small bookstores had to make up in service for what they couldn’t provide in the way of discounts. Maggie didn’t know if it actually worked. She could remember her­self when she first got to New York, dirt poor and always scrambling for money. If there hadn’t been discounts she wouldn’t have been able to buy books.

“Here I am,” Maggie said when she got to the ground floor. “Do you actually want a book today, Stephen? Sometimes it seems like nobody in the world wants books between October and March, except David Sandler, and I don’t think he counts. He isn’t usually here this time of year.”

“Does David Sandler come in here a lot?” Stephen sounded politely interested. “I don’t think of him as really being here, if you know what I mean. As being part of town.”

“Well, usually he isn’t.”

“That’s true. He isn’t.” Stephen shifted in his chair. He was much too thin, almost skeletal. The hard surfaces of the chair seemed to hurt him.

“I wonder what it’s like sometimes,” he said, “being an atheist. I can’t really imagine it. I had a professor once who said you could never make yourself not think some­thing, and it’s true. I can’t make myself not think of God as real.”

“I can’t make myself not think of God as fake,” Mag­gie said. “It all depends on where you’re starting, Stephen. I don’t think it’s that big an issue.”

Stephen shifted in his chair again. “No, no, I don’t suppose you do. I don’t suppose anybody does unless they’re in my position. Lisa thinks I might as well be an atheist. Did you know about that?”

“No.”

“She says that I don’t believe in any of the things that were supposed to be Christian when she was growing up, and she’s right, in a way, or she would have been. I went to a very rationalist seminary.”

“What’s a rationalist seminary?”

“Oh, it’s a kind of theological orientation. I can’t be­lieve I’m talking to you about this. You must find it so boring. The men who taught me—and it was all men at the time; that wouldn’t be true now—the men who taught me believed that Christ was a man like any other man, that he wasn’t divine, that he didn’t rise from the dead. In fact, they believed that nobody would ever rise from the dead, at least not bodily. All that sort of thing in the Bible—the story of the resurrection, the parts in Revelation that tell of the Second Coming and the return of souls to their bod­ies—all that is just symbol, metaphor. A way of explaining what religion does for us psychologically if we use it rightly and without fanaticism.”

“Good God,” Maggie said. “Is that what Methodists believe these days?”

“Some Methodists do. Some Presbyterians do, too. The most famous American theologian of that kind is an Episcopalian bishop named Spong. I have all of his books.”

“I suppose I don’t understand why you would have gone into the seminary at all if that was what you thought was going on,” Maggie said. “Why bother to be a minis­ter? What did you think you were going to be ministering to?”

“But I didn’t believe in all that when I entered the seminary.” Stephen’s voice was suddenly intense. “I be­lieved in—well, all the things you believed in. What Henry Holborn believes in, mostly, except that I had an exegesis that let me accept Genesis and Darwin at the same time, which was a good thing because as far as I could tell, the evidence for evolution was conclusive.”

“I think it’s conclusive,” Maggie said. “Most sane people think it’s conclusive.”

“Henry Holborn says that evolution is the thin edge of the wedge. Once they get you believing that the Bible is wrong about how the world was created, then they can go after everything else the Bible says, too. I used to think Henry was nuts. I’m beginning to think he was right.”