True Believers(11)

He got up again and went across the room to the filing cabinet. There was a small CD player sitting on top of it, his one personal indulgence. He opened the filing cabinet’s top drawer and took out his CD of the John Eliot Gardiner production of Bach’s St. Matthew Passion. It was the story of pain and destruction and despair, perfect for Lent, and perfect for the mood he had been in all week.

This was the part of active life he hated so completely: the desperateness of it; the feeling that everything mattered too much and even the smallest thing could destroy you. This was why he wanted to go back to Avery Point. At least there, silence was as absolute as the Fathers could make it, as anyone could make it, because only when one was silent could one hear the whispering voice of God.




5

It wasn’t true that Edith Lawton had moved onto this street just to be able to say that she was surrounded by churches, which was what her enemies said about her—but it wasn’t true that she had been dragged here by her fundamentalist Christian husband, either, which was what Edith said about herself. Lately, Edith had a great deal of trouble sorting out what was true about her life and what she had made up. There seemed to be two people living in her head. There was the Edith Lawton who had been Edith Hull back in high school, the one who had never finished college and married at twenty. That Edith Lawton was angry all the time, even in her sleep, and embarrassed, too. How could she have known that it would matter so much, in the long run, that she had never finished her education? She had been so sure that being a writer would be different. Being a writer was what she had had in mind for herself from the beginning. What she had imagined was that she would slave away for a few years in a back bedroom, getting rejection slip after rejection slip, until the day when her talent was discovered. Talent was something she knew she had had all along. She could still remember the stories she had read about writers when she was growing up: Hemingway and all those people going to Paris to learn how to really live; Somerset Maugham sailing to Asia on a tramp steamer; Truman Capote coming to New York at the age of eighteen and never looking back. Now, when she met real writers, they were nothing like that. They had multiple degrees. They could swear in Latin. They felt comfortable talking about the medieval roots of deconstruction or the effect of orchard farming on church history. Or some of them did.

That was because some of them were people like Bennis Hannaford.

The other Edith Lawton, the one she had invented, was a writer—of sorts. She didn’t make any money at it, and she didn’t get her pieces in magazines whose names would be recognized by the reader in the street, but she at least got published, which was doing better than most of the people she met at the “freethought” conferences she attended two or three times a year. “Freethought” was the word “the secular community” preferred to call atheism. The word “atheism” itself was supposed to have been tarred and feathered by the antics of Madalyn Murray O’Hair, and that might actually be true. God only knows, Edith thought—and then mentally crossed out the “God,” because she couldn’t say that aloud to the people she knew, not even as a throwaway expression. She had to be very careful around the collective population of “the secular community.” At the moment, they were her only claim to an identity. She was fifty years old, and she had the feeling that it had gone on too long. She had grown too old. She had made too many of the wrong decisions. She was never going to be the person she wanted to be. She was never going to be anything, really, except Edith Lawton, the class act of Free Thinking magazine and one of the distinctly more minor stars of The Secular Web. Even on The Secular Web, though, she wasn’t able to compete with the heavyweights, with people like Jeffrey Jay Lowder and Farrell Till. Those people put up detailed analyses of biblical scholarship and Roman Catholic theology. She put up short essays about whatever came into her head in the week before her self-imposed deadline, and far too often she seemed to get things wrong. Mostly she was just a picture on a page or on the Internet, an apple-cheeked woman with too much hair and eyes far too small for her face, trying too hard to look literary.

Now it was five o’clock in the morning, and the alarm had gone off, and she did not want to get up. The world outside her windows was dark. In spite of the fact that she got up at this hour every morning, she had no idea what time it began to get light. She closed her eyes and let herself experience her body, just so that she could reassure herself that she wasn’t getting fat. The last thing she wanted was to turn into one of those fat old atheist women who seemed to infest the movement like a plague of locusts. She sat up and swung her feet off the side of the bed onto the carpet. In the street below her, trucks rumbled endlessly and air brakes screeched. It was February. If she went to the window and opened it, she would be able to feel ice forming on her hand.