True Believers(14)

“Oh, for Christ’s sake,” Edith said.

Will went out the door and down the front steps. He did not close the door behind him. Edith went to it and stood in the draft it made to watch him get into his new Jeep Cherokee and get it started. He’d get out again any minute now to scrape ice off the windshield. Either that, or he’d waste a pile of gas letting the ice melt under the power of the defroster. Why was she thinking about the defroster? Why wasn’t Will parking the Jeep in back, where it would be off the street and safe from car thieves?

Will did not get out of the car to scrape ice off his windshield. Edith found herself thinking of her first husband, the one she had married at twenty, the one who really had been a fundamentalist Christian of sorts. She looked up the street at St. Stephen’s, but nothing seemed to be happening there. Something was happening at St. Anselm’s, but then it always was. She looked into the St. Anselm’s parking lot and saw a man trying to get something large and bulky out of the passenger side of the cab of a pickup truck. The illuminated clock on top of St. Stephen’s said it was twenty after five.

Edith stepped back into the house and shut the door. She went back across the living room and down the hall and into the kitchen. Her “office” was a sunroom off the kitchen that had once been a porch. Will had enclosed it for her when she had decided that she needed a private space to work in and that the upstairs bedroom was too airless and too isolated to suit.

She turned on the computer and waited for it to get into gear. She looked at the wall where she tacked up the things that made her feel better, at the eight-and-a-half-by-eleven print of her author photo. Now that she’d seen the pictures of Bennis Hannaford in Vanity Fair, she knew it wasn’t a real author photo. It wasn’t what she would have if her book was being published by a real New York publisher, instead of by the Freethinker Press. She wondered what would happen to her, now, if Will walked out. She hadn’t had a regular day job in years. She didn’t make enough from what she wrote to pay the heating bill on the house, never mind to pay the taxes and keep it up. She couldn’t go back to being a secretary in a world where secretaries had to know things about computers that she was only able to guess. Most of all, she wondered if the fact that Will had walked in on them was going to mean that she and Ian would have to give it up. Then her computer desktop was in front of her, and she found herself clicking her way onto the Internet and onto the Secular Web.

Sex was like a drug, that was the truth of it, but religion was an even bigger drug, and if it weren’t for religion, she wouldn’t be in the trouble she was in right now. She wasn’t quite sure how that worked out, but she kept it firmly planted in her mind, because it was going to form the theme of her next column, the one that she should have put up a week ago, but that she hadn’t because of Will.

If there had really been a God, she would not be stuck here, in this converted back porch, while Will refused to talk to her and Bennis Hannaford was on the pages of Vanity Fair.




6

There were a lot of people out there who thought Roy Phipps was failing, that he was some kind of fringe fanatic whose only real accomplishment was to make himself look stupid on the six o’clock evening news. Roy Phipps knew better. Roy was, in fact, an expert on the subject of success and failure—not only about what they meant, but about how they happened. Sometimes it struck him, as nothing else did, what a very different life he would have led if he had done what everybody else wanted of him. In this case, “everybody” meant his advisers at Princeton, the men who had seen him through his four years of academic isolation, the ones who had thought they had, in him, a case study of a local boy making good. There had been times in those days when he had sat in one professor’s office or another and silently imagined the tape playing inside the older man’s head: poor boy, fine mind, great future. They were, Roy thought, right about all three things. Nobody could have been poorer than he had been when he had first come up to New Jersey from Millard’s Corner, West Virginia. He had come up early, at the beginning of the summer, because he knew that if he didn’t, he would never be able to save enough money to buy a set of clothes that didn’t have holes in it. Even the Negroes in Millard’s Corner had had more money than the Phippses, and most of them had had sense enough not to have eleven children in the bargain. Roy’s childhood had been a sink-or-swim nightmare in a sea of perpetual failure: his father, always either too sick or too drunk to work; his mother, so tired she spent most of her time sitting on what was left of their sagging front porch, staring out at the hill in front of their house, doing nothing; his older brothers, always drunk or crazy or banged up so badly they had to spend a week in the hospital. They had had no electricity and no running water. When they had wanted water, they had to go out to the yard and pump it by hand. They had had no money, either, because whenever money came into the house it went out again: for food, for milk, for used clothing at the St. Vincent de Paul Shop in the next town. Sometimes there was no money for weeks, and then the older boys brought back kill from the woods in the back or even from out on the highway. They would skin it and give it to their oldest sister, Loretta, who had been named after Loretta Lynn. Loretta would gut it and cook it in a big cast-iron pot that had never been cleaned very well in all the time that Roy had known it. On those nights, Roy had gone out back and lain in the grass rather than eat, because he hadn’t been able to stand it: the ersatz broth already crusting over with animal fat; the pieces of squirrel or racoon or muskrat floating to the surface. Sometimes the moon would rise up over him and fill him full of light. That was when he would know, for sure, that he was different than they were—better, and colder. He was so cold, he was a block of dry ice. Anybody who tried to touch him would get burned. When the day finally came to leave, he hitchhiked into Wheeling and got the bus at the Greyhound station without bothering to say good-bye. They wouldn’t have known where he was going. He had forged his mother’s signature on the papers that needed signing for Princeton. None of them knew he had ever applied to college. His mother didn’t even know that he had managed to stay in high school.