“Correct me if I’m wrong, Reverend,” Caldwell says, “but as I understand it the difference is the Lutherans say Jesus Christ is the only answer and the Calvinists say whatever hap pens to you, happens to you, is the answer.”
In his anxiety and anger and embarrassment March reaches sideways and almost seizes Vera bodily to keep her with him during this preposterous interruption. “That’s ridiculous,” he says. “Orthodox Calvinism-and I count myself more orthodox than not-is fully as Christocentric as the Lutheran doctrines. Perhaps more so, since we exclude the saints and any substantive Eucharistic transformation.”
“I’m a minister’s son,” Caldwell explains. “My old man was a Presbyterian, and as I understand it from him there are the elect and the non-elect, the ones that have it and the ones that don’t, and the ones that don’t have it are never going to get it. What I could never ram through my thick skull was why the ones that don’t have it were created in the first place. The only reason I could figure out was that God had to have somebody to fry down in Hell.”
The Olinger High basketball team forges into the lead and March has to raise his voice furiously to make himself heard. “The doctrine of predestination,” he shouts, “must be un derstood as counterbalanced by the doctrine of God’s infinite mercy.” The crowd noise subsides.
“That’s my problem, I guess,” Caldwell says. “I can’t see how it’s infinite if it never changes anything at all. Maybe it’s infinite but at an infinite distance-that’s the only way I can picture it.”
March’s gray eyes are exploding with pain and irritation as the danger of Vera’s leaving him grows. “This is burlesque!” he shouts. “A basketball game is no place to discuss such matters. Why don’t you come and visit me in my study sometime, Mr.-?”
“Caldwell. George Caldwell. Vera here knows me.”
Vera turns back with a wide smile. “Somebody invoke my name? I don’t understand a thing about theology.”
“Our discussion of it has just been concluded,” Reverend March tells her. “Your friend Mr. Caldwell has some very singular adverse notions about poor abused John Calvin.”
“I don’t know a thing about him,” Caldwell protests, his voice becoming plaintive and high and unpleasant. “I’m trying to learn.”
“Come to my study any morning but Wednesdays,” March tells him. “I’ll lend you some excellent books.” He firmly restores his attention to Vera, presenting to Caldwell a profile as handsome and final as if stamped onto an imperial coin.
Make Nero look tame, small town aristocrats, Caldwell thinks, retreating. Heavy and giddy with his own death, sluggish and diaphanous like some transparent predator who trails his poisoned tentacles through the adamantine pressures of the oceanic depths, he moves along behind the backs of spectators and searches the crowd for the sight of his son. At last he spots Peter’s narrow head in a row on the right near the front. Poor kid, needs a haircut. Caldwell’s work tonight is done and he wants to go down and get Peter and go home. Humanity, which has so long entranced him, disgusts him packed and tangled like germs in this overheated auditorium. Even Cassie’s empty land by contrast would look good. And the snow is piling up outside. And the kid could use the sleep.
But beside Peter’s head there is a small round blondness. Caldwell recognizes the ninth-grade Fogleman girl. He had had her brother two years ago, the Foglemans were the kind who would eat your heart and then wash the rest down the sink. Brutal Germans, brrr. It dawns upon him that she and Peter are not sitting next to each other by accident. With that kid’s brains, can it be? Now Caldwell remembers seeing Peter and Penny paired here and there in the halls. By the drinking fountain giggling. Against the annex lockers leaning broodily. Framed, blotted together into one silhouette, against the milky light of a far doorway. He had seen these things but they hadn’t sunk in before. Now they do. The sadness of the abandoned wells up. A great shout arises as Olinger’s lead expands, and the powerful panic of it licks with four hundred tongues the lining of the teacher’s strained innards.
Olinger wins.
Peter rarely takes his eyes from the game but hardly sees it, so possessed is his inner eye by the remembrance of pressing his face into the poignant absence between Penny’s thighs. Who would have thought even an instant’s access would be granted him, so young? Who would have thought thunder would not peal and punishing spirits flap awake? Who of all those pressed into this bright auditorium would dream what brimming darkness he had, kiss-lipped, sipped? The memory of it is a warm mask upon his face, and he does not dare turn his face to his love for fear she will see herself there, a ghostly beard, and cry out in horror and shame, every pore on her nose vivid.
And when he and his lather at last leave the school and go into the snow the multitude of flakes seems to have been released by his profanation. In the pervasive descent an eddy of air now and then angrily flings a tinkling icy handful upward into his warm face. Peter had forgotten what snow is. It is an immense whispering whose throat seems to be now here, now there. He looks at the sky and it answers his eyes with a mauve, a lilac, a muffled yellow-pearl. Only after some moments of focusing does the downflow visually materialize for him, as an edge of a wing, and then an entire broadening wing of infinitesimal feathers, broadening into the realization that this wing is all about them and crowds the air to four hidden horizons and beyond. Wherever he looks, now that his eyes are attuned to its frequency, there is this vibration. The town and all its houses are besieged by a murmuring multitude.
Peter pauses under the high light that guards the near corner of the parking lot. What he sees at his feet puzzles him. On the whiteness that has already fallen small dark spots are swarming like gnats. They dart this way and that and then vanish. There seems to be a center where they vanish. As his eyes travel outward he sees dots speeding toward this center; the further away they are, the faster they speed inward. He traces a few: all vanish. The phenomenon seems totally ghostly. Then the constriction of his heart eases as the rational explanation comes to him. These are the shadows of snowflakes cast by the light above him. Directly under the light, the wavering fall of the particles is projected as an erratic oscillation, but away from the center, where the light rays strike obliquely, the projection parabolically magnifies the speed of the shadow as it hastens forward to meet its flake. The shadows stream out of infinity, slow, and, each darkly sharp in its last instant, vanish as their originals kiss the white plane. It fascinates him; he feels the universe in all its plastic and endlessly variable beauty pinned, stretched, crucified like a butterfly upon a frame of unvarying geometrical truth. As the hypotenuse approaches the vertical the lateral leg diminishes less and less rapidly: always. The busy snowflake shadows seem ants scurrying on the floor of a high castle made all of stone. He turns scientist and dispassionately tries to locate in the cosmography his father has taught him an analogy between the phenomenon he has observed and the “red shift” whereby the stars appear to be retreating at a speed proportional to their distance from us. Perhaps this is a kindred illusion, perhaps-he struggles to picture it-the stars are in fact falling gently through a cone of observation of which our earthly telescopes are the apex. In truth everything hangs like dust in a forsaken attic. Passing on a few yards, to where the lamplight merges with the general agitated dimness, Peter does seem to arrive at a kind of edge where the speed of the shadows is infinite and a small universe both ends and does not end. His feet begin to hurt with being cold and wet and cosmic thoughts turn sickly in his mind. As if leaving a cramped room he restores his focus to the breadth of the town, where large travelling eddies sway and stride from the sky with a sort of ultimate health.