by Anne Tyler
“You can go to Grandma and Grandpa’s church if you prefer,” Ian told her.
“Listen carefully, Ian, I’ll only say this one more time: I am not a believer.”
He wrapped an elastic around Daphne’s pony tail. “How about this,” he said. “You attend till you’re eighteen, and then you stop. That way, I won’t have to feel guilty you didn’t get the proper foundation.”
“You don’t have to feel guilty even now,” Agatha told him. “I absolve you, Ian.”
He drew back slightly. Absolve?
“Maybe she could go to Mary McQueen,” Daphne suggested.
Agatha said, “Mary Our Queen is for Catholics, stupid.”
“Agatha, don’t call her stupid. Let’s get moving. Thomas is already downstairs.”
They descended to the living room. Daphne clattering in the patent leather Mary Janes she liked to wear to church. The sound of Sunday morning, Ian thought. He told his parents, “We’re off.”
“Oh, all right, dear,” his mother said. She and his father were reading the paper on the couch.
“Take that business of the fig tree,” Agatha said as she let the front door slam behind her. “Jesus cursing the fig tree.”
“Where’s Thomas?”
“Here I am,” Thomas said from the porch swing.
“Let’s go, then.”
“Jesus decides He wants figs,” Agatha said. “Of course, it’s not fig season, but Jesus wants figs anyhow. So up He walks to this fig tree, but naturally all He finds is leaves. And what does He do? Puts a curse on the poor little tree.”
“No!” Daphne breathed. Evidently she hadn’t heard about this before.
“Next thing you know, the tree’s withered and died.”
“No.”
Ian knew that Agatha was just passing through a stage, but even so he minded, a bit. Over the years he had come to view Jesus very personally. The most trite and sentimental Sunday School portrait could send a flash of feeling through him, as if Jesus were … oh, one of those older boys he used to admire when he was small, someone he’d watched from a distance and grown to know and love without ever daring to engage in conversation.
Also, Agatha was seeding doubts in the other two.
“Doesn’t that seem petty to you?” she was asking Daphne. “I mean, doesn’t it seem unreasonable? If we behaved like that, we’d be sent to our rooms to think it over.”
“Agatha,” Ian said, “there’s a great deal in the Bible that’s simply beyond our understanding.”
“Beyond yours, maybe,” Agatha said. She told Daphne, “Or Noah’s Ark: how about that? God kills off all the sinners in a mammoth rainstorm. ‘Gotcha!’ He says, and He’s enjoying it, you know He is, or otherwise He’d have sent a few sample rains ahead of time so they could mend their ways.”
Picture how they must look from outside, Ian thought. A cleaned and pressed little family walking together to church, discussing matters of theology. Perfect.
From outside.
“Or Abraham and Isaac. That one really ticks me off. God asks Abraham to kill his own son. And Abraham says, ‘Okay.’ Can you believe it? And then at the very last minute God says, ‘Only testing. Ha-ha.’ Boy, I’d like to know what Isaac thought. All the rest of his life, any time his father so much as looked in his direction Isaac would think—”
Ian said, “Agatha, it’s very bad manners to criticize other people’s religion.”
“It’s very bad manners to force your own religion on them, too,” Agatha told him. “Shoot, it’s very unconstitutional. To make me go to church when I don’t want to.”
“Well, you’re right,” Ian said.
“Huh?”
“You’re right, I shouldn’t have done it.”
By now, they had stopped walking. Agatha peered at him. She said, “So can I leave now?”
“You can leave.”
She stood there a moment longer. The other two watched with interest. “Okay,” she said finally. “Bye.”
“Bye.”
She turned and set off toward home.
But without her it seemed so quiet. He missed her firm, opinionated voice and that little trick she had of varying her tone to quote each person’s remarks. No matter how imaginary those remarks might be.
“I the Lord thy God am a jealous God,” Reverend Emmett read from Exodus, and Ian could almost hear Agatha beside him: “Any time we act jealous, people have a fit.” He shook the thought away. He bowed lower in his seat, propping his forehead on two fingers. Next to him, Daphne tore a tiny corner off a page of her hymnal and placed it on her tongue. Thomas was sitting behind them with Kenny Larson and his family. A fly was crawling up the front counter.
Reverend Emmett called for a hymn: “Blessed Assurance.” The congregation rose to sing, standing shoulder to shoulder. Everyone here was familiar to Ian. Or at least, semifamiliar. (Eli Everjohn and his wife were sitting with Sister Bertha, and Mrs. Jordan had brought her cousin.) “This is my story,” they sang, “this is my song …” Ian put an arm around Daphne and she nestled against him as she sang, her voice incongruously husky for such a little girl.
The sermon was on the Sugar Rule. Recently a committee had approached Reverend Emmett suggesting that the rule be dropped. It was just so complicated, they said. Face it, they were eating sugar every day of their lives, one way or another. Even peanut butter contained sugar if you bought it from a supermarket. Reverend Emmett had told them he would meditate on the issue and report his conclusions. What he said this morning—pacing behind the counter, running his long fingers through his forelock—was that the Sugar Rule was supposed to be complicated. “Like error itself,” he said, “sugar creeps in the cracks. You tell yourself you didn’t realize, you were subject to circumstance, you forgot to read the list of ingredients and anyhow, it’s everywhere and it can’t be helped. Isn’t that significant? It’s not that you’ll be damned forever if you take a grain of sugar; nobody says that. Sugar is merely a distraction, not a sin. But I feel it’s important to keep the rule because of what it stands for: the need for eternal watchfulness.”
The children—those who were listening—sent each other disappointed grimaces, but Ian didn’t really care that much. The Sugar Rule was a minor inconvenience, at most. So was the Coffee Rule; so was the Alcohol Rule. The difficult one was the Unmarried Sex Rule. “How can something be right one day and wrong the next?” Cicely had asked him. “And what’s done is done, anyway, and can’t be undone, right?”
He had said, “If I thought that, I wouldn’t be able to go on living.” Then he’d told her he wanted them to get married.
“Married!” Cicely had cried. “Married, at our age! I haven’t seen the world yet! I haven’t had any fun!”
He covered his eyes with his hand.
In his daydreams, he walked into services one morning and found a lovely, golden-haired girl sitting in the row just ahead. She would be so intent on the sermon that she wouldn’t even look his way; she had grown up in a religion very much like this one, it turned out, and believed with all her heart. After the Benediction Ian introduced himself, and she looked shy and pleased. They had the most proper courtship, but he could tell she felt the same way he did. They would marry at Second Chance with Reverend Emmett officiating. She would love the three children as much as if they were hers and stay home forever after to tend them. The Church Maiden, Ian called her in his mind. He never entered this building without scanning the rows for the Church Maiden.
After the sermon came Amending. “Does somebody want to stand up?” Reverend Emmett asked. But standing up was for serious sins, where you confessed to the whole congregation and discussed in public all possible methods of atonement. Evidently none of them had strayed so grievously during this past week. “Well, then,” Reverend Emmett said, smiling, “we’ll amend in private,” and they bowed their heads and whispered their mistakes to themselves. Ian caught snatches of “lied to my husband” and “slapped my daughter” and “drank pa
rt of a beer with my boss.” “Thursday I stole my sister’s new bra and wore it to gym class,” Daphne said, startling Ian, but of course he should not have been listening. He averted his face from her and whispered, “I was snappish with the children three different times. Four. And I told Mr. Brant I was sick with the flu when really I just wanted a day off.”
Unlike the other denominations Ian knew of, this one had nothing against sinning in your thoughts. To think a sinful thought and not act upon it was to practice righteousness, Reverend Emmett said—almost as much righteousness as not thinking the thought in the first place. Jesus must have been misquoted on that business about committing adultery in your heart. So Ian left unspoken what troubled him the most:
I’ve been atoning and atoning, and sometimes lately I’ve hated God for taking so long to forgive me. Some days I feel I’m speaking into a dead telephone. My words are knocking against a blank wall. Nothing comes back to show I’ve been heard.
“Let it vanish now from our souls, Lord. In Jesus’ name, amen,” Reverend Emmett said. He looked radiant. Whatever had weighed on his own soul (for his lips had moved with the others’, this morning) had obviously been lifted from him.
They sang “Sweet Hour of Prayer,” in a tone that struck Ian as lingering and regretful. Then Reverend Emmett gave the Benediction, and they were free to go. Daphne shot off to join a friend. Ian wove his way through the other members’ greetings. He answered several inquiries about his mother’s arthritis, and politely refused Mrs. Jordan’s offer of a ride home. (She drove like a maniac.) Near the door, Eli Everjohn stood awkwardly by in a brilliant blue suit while his wife talked with Sister Myra. “Morning, Brother Eli,” Ian said. He started to edge past him, but Eli, who must have been feeling left out, brightened and said, “Why, hey there! Hey!”
“Enjoy the service?” Ian asked.
“Oh, I’m sure your pastor means well,” Eli said. “But forbidding ordinary white sugar, and then allowing your young folks to listen to rock-and-roll music! Seems like to me he’s got his priorities mixed up. I don’t know that I hold with this Amending business, either. Awful close to Roman Catholic, if you ask me.”
“Ah, well, it’s a matter of opinion, I guess.”
“No, Brother Ian, it is not a matter of opinion. Goodness! What a notion.”
That more or less finished the conversation, Ian figured. He gave up and raised a hand amiably in farewell. But then he paused and turned back. “Brother Eli?” he said. “I wonder. Do you think you could locate a missing person for me?”
“Why, I’ll do my best,” Eli told him.
He didn’t seem at all surprised by the question. It was Ian who was surprised.
“His name was Tom Dean,” he told Eli. “Thomas Dean, Senior. He was married to my sister-in-law before she married my brother, and he’s the only one who might be able to tell us who my sister-in-law’s family was.”
He and Eli sat on the couch in Sister Bertha’s living room. No doubt Sister Bertha was wondering what business Ian could possibly have here, but she stayed out of sight, ostentatiously rattling pans in the kitchen and talking to her daughter. Her house was a ranch house with rooms that all flowed together, and Ian distinctly heard her discussing someone named Netta who had suffered a terrible grease fire.
“I don’t know where Tom Dean grew up,” Ian said, “but sometime in the spring of ‘sixty-five he wrote to Lucy from Cheyenne, Wyoming. Or maybe he phoned; I’m not sure. Somehow he got in touch, asking her to send him his things.”
“How long had they been divorced?” Eli said.
“I don’t know. The kids were still small, though. It can’t have been too long.”
“And what state was this divorce granted in? Maryland? Wyoming? What state of the Union?”
“I don’t know that either.”
Eli surveyed him mournfully. He had taken off his suit coat and the armpits of his white shirt showed a faint bluish tinge.
“It was only mentioned in passing,” Ian said. “You don’t discuss your divorce in detail with the family of your new husband. So when my brother died, and then Lucy died, there was no one we could ask. She had left behind the three children and we were hoping some of her relatives could take them, but we didn’t know if she had any relatives. We didn’t even know her maiden name.”
Beyond the plate glass window, Sunday traffic swished along Lake Avenue. Sister Bertha said Netta had escaped unburned and so had her husband and baby and her dear, darling, wonderful, incredible little dog.
“Still,” Eli said, “your sister-in-law must have had some kind of document. Some certificate or something, somewhere among her papers.”
“She didn’t leave any papers. After she died my dad went through her house and he couldn’t find a one.”
“How about her billfold? Driver’s license?”
“She didn’t drive.”
“Social security card?”
“For Lucy Dean. Period.”
“Photos, then. Any photos?”
“None.”
“Your family must have photos, though. From after she married your brother.”
“We do, but my mother put them away so as not to remind the children.”
“Not to remind them? Well, land sakes.”
“My mother’s kind of … she prefers to look on the bright side. But I can find them for you, I’m sure.”
“Maybe later on,” Eli said. “Okay: let’s talk about your sister-in-law’s friends. You recall if she had any girlfriends?”
“Not close ones,” Ian said. “Just a couple of women she waitressed with, back before she married Danny. One of them we never tracked down, and the other my mother ran into a year or so after Lucy died but she said she really didn’t know a thing about her.”
“Didn’t no one ever ask this Lucy anything?”
“It does sound peculiar,” Ian said. This was the first time he’d realized exactly how peculiar. He was amazed that they could have been so unaware, so incurious, living all those months alongside another human being.
Eli said, “Tell what was in her desk.”
“She didn’t have a desk.”
“Her topmost bureau drawer, then. Or that ragtag drawer full of string and such in her kitchen.”
“All I know is, my dad went through her house and he didn’t find anything useful. He talked about how people don’t write letters anymore.”
“So: no letters.”
“And no address book, either. I remember he mentioned that.”
“How about her divorce papers? She couldn’t have throwed them away.”
“Maybe after she remarried she did.”
“Well, then, her marriage certificate. Her marriage to your brother.”
“Nope.”
“You know she would’ve kept that.”
“All I can say is, we didn’t find it.”
“She must’ve had a safe deposit box.”
“Lucy? I doubt it. And where was the key, then?”
“So you are trying to tell me,” Eli said, “that a person manages to get through life without a single solitary piece of paper in her possession.”
“Well, I realize it’s unusual—”
“It’s impossible!”
“Well …”
“Had her place been burglarized recently? Did the drawers look like they’d been rifled?”
“Not that I heard of,” Ian said.
“Was anybody else living in the house with her?”
“No …”
But a dim uneasiness flitted past him, like something you see and yet don’t see out of the corner of your eye.
“Anyone suspicious hanging about her?”
“No, no …”
But wary, suspicious Agatha pushed into his mind—her closed-off face with the puffy lids that veiled her secret thoughts.
“Now, I don’t want you to take this wrong,” Eli said, “but you are about the most unhelpful client I ever had to deal with.”
; “I realize that. I’m sorry,” Ian said. “I shouldn’t have wasted your time.”
Eli shook his head, and his cowlick waggled and dipped. God’s arrow with no place to go, Ian couldn’t help thinking.
Monday noon, he told Mr. Brant he was eating at home today. He drove home and let himself into the house, announcing, “It’s me! Forgot my billfold!”
“Oh, hello, dear,” his mother called from the kitchen. Then she and his father went on talking, no doubt over their usual lunch of tinned soup and saltine crackers.
He climbed to the second floor and onward, more stealthily, to the attic, to Daphne and Agatha’s little room underneath the eaves.
Girls tended to be messier than boys, he thought. (He had noticed that in his college days.) Agatha’s bed was heaped with so many books that he wondered how she slept, and Daphne’s was a jungle of stuffed animals. He went over to Agatha’s bureau, a darkly varnished highboy that had to stand away from the wall a bit so as not to hit the eaves. The top was littered with pencil stubs and used Kleenexes and more books, but the drawers were fairly well organized. He patted each one’s contents lightly, alert for something that didn’t belong—the rustle of paper or a hard-edged address book. But there was nothing.
He knelt and looked under her bed. Dust balls. He lifted the mattress. Candy-bar wrappers. He shook his head and let the mattress drop. He tried the old fiber-board wardrobe standing at one end of the room and found a rod of clothes, half Daphne’s and half Agatha’s, packed too tightly together. Shoes and more shoes lay tangled underneath.
He bent to poke his head inside the storage room that ran under the eaves. In the dimness he made out a dress form, a lampshade, two foot lockers, and a cardboard carton. He crawled further inside and lifted one of the carton’s flaps. The musty gray smell reminded him of mice. He dragged the carton toward the door for a closer look: his mother’s framed college diploma, a bundle of letters addressed to Miss Beatrice Craig … He pushed the carton toward the rear again.
Turning to go, he saw a faded, fabric-covered box on the floor—the kind that stationery sometimes comes in. He flipped up the lid and found a clutter of barrettes and hair ribbons and junk jewelry. Agatha’s, no doubt. He let the lid fall shut and crawled on out.