In the fading yellow light he could see the chaplain eyeing him uneasily to see if he was joking.
“I’m trying to ask a serious question. That is difficult to do these days.”
“You can say that again. Fire away.”
The Luger was hard under his thigh. Jack Curl’s face loomed pale in the darkness.
“Do you believe in God, Jack?”
In the fading light he could see the chaplain look at him swiftly as if there were a joke to be caught. Then the crow’s-feet suddenly ironed out, making him look white-eyed and serious.
“Well, if I didn’t, I’d say I needed some vocational counseling, wouldn’t you?” The chaplain’s head loomed in the Mercedes, his face large and solemn. “Seriously — and you can check me out on this — I seem to be picking up on some vibes from you lately — that you might be thinking of entering the church — am I out in left field? I was lying a while ago when I said the one thing Marion wanted most was her new community project. No, what she wanted more than anything else was your coming into the church.”
“Ah.”
“Do you know where I’ve found God, Will?” The chaplain’s round face rose to the Mercedes roof like a balloon.
“No, where?”
“In other people.”
“I see.”
“Don’t you think you belong here in the church? With your own people. This is where you’re coming from. Am I reading you right?”
“My people?”
“Weren’t they all Episcopalians?”
“Yes.”
My people? Yes, they were Episcopalians but at heart they were members of the Augusta Legion and in the end at home not at St. John o’ the Woods but with the bleached bones of Centurion Marcus Flavinius on the desert of the old Empire. They were the Romans, the English, Angles, Saxons, Jutes — citizens of Rome in the old Empire.
“Don’t you think you belong with us?”
“Ah.” The Luger thrust into his thigh like a thumb. He smiled. Not yet, old Totenkopf. “You didn’t answer my question.”
“What was the question?”
“Do you believe God exists?”
“Yes,” said the chaplain gravely. The chaplain’s face, he imagined, went keen and fine-eyed in the failing light. Could it be? the lively expression asked. A God-seeker? A man wrestling with Doubt? (He, the chaplain, had never made a convert.)
“Why?”
“Perhaps he is trying to tell you something at this moment,” said the chaplain solemnly. (God, don’t let me blow this, I’ve got a live one hooked.)
“What?”
“Grace is a mysterious thing,” said the chaplain.
“What does that mean?”
“Perhaps the answer lies under our noses, so to speak, in fact within ourselves. If only we would take the trouble to ask the question.”
“I shall put the question — as a matter of form — and I shall require an answer. But the answer will not come from you or me,” he said softly.
“What’s that?” asked the chaplain quickly, leaning in. “I didn’t quite catch—”
“I said only that the question can be put in such a way that an answer is required. It will be stipulated, moreover, that a non-answer, silence, shall be construed to mean no.”
“There you go,” said the chaplain uneasily. It made him uneasy to talk about religion. Marion Peabody Barrett had terrified him with her raging sarcastic attacks on the new liturgy and his own “social gospel.” There is a time to talk religion with women, to be God’s plumber, to have solemn yet joyous bull sessions with men during a weekend with God, to horse around at a party. He was at home doing any of these but not when they were mixed up. The trouble with Barrett’s queer question and peculiar smile was that you couldn’t say which he was doing. The truth was Barrett was a queer duck. Rich, powerful, of one’s class, but queer. Sly. What to do, then? Listen. Listen with all your might. Determine whether he’s kidding or not. The chaplain narrowed his eyes and leaned several degrees toward Barrett.
“I think I know how to ask such a question,” said Will Barrett.
That was your trouble, old mole, you didn’t even bother to ask and you should have, if only from Episcopal rectitude and an Episcopal sense of form — as one asks routinely of an empty house before closing the door and leaving: Is anybody home?
The question should be put as a matter of form even though you know the house is empty.
Then no one can complain of your leaving.
To his relief the chaplain pushed himself away, gave the Mercedes top a slap with both hands. “Why don’t you put your question on the retreat?”
“I’ll give it some thought.”
“Give it some prayerful thought.”
“Very well. I’ll see you tomorrow. You deliver Mr. Arnold because Marion would want that and I’ll try to deliver Leslie because that’s what you want.”
“You got yourself a deal.”
When he moved his thigh and picked up the Luger between his legs, the metal felt hotter than his own body.
The glass doors of St. Mark’s closed behind the chaplain. Closing the door for the last time. That was it. That’s why everything looked so clear. He knew he would not come here again. When you leave a house for the last time and take one last look around before closing the door, it is as if you were seeing the house again for the first time. What happened to the five thousand times between?
2
He had not known who the girl in the greenhouse was until Kitty told him twice, once before the girl ran away from the sanatorium and again afterwards. But even when he found out and at the same time saw that Kitty did not know where her daughter was, he could not bring himself to pay close attention. Something else engaged him even as Kitty and her grinning dentist husband and grinning Jimmy Rogers pressed in upon him. They wanted something from him. It was clear but not from what they said. They were telling jokes and saying something about property, Arabs, money, state laws about guardianship and inheritance, developing an island. An island? Though he was not listening closely, there was the unmistakable feeling in the back of the neck when someone wants something and is casting about for a way to ask. Not finding a way, they move closer, heads weaving like a boxer’s, looking for an opening.
What did they want? Money? Free legal advice? Both? It seemed to be Kitty who wanted it most. At least she came closest, touched, hugged, kissed, poked, jostled, swayed against, jangled, shimmered.
What did she want?
Though he faced the husband, now not three feet away, it was hard to take in more than the grin, white teeth, styled hair, pink clothes.
Instead he gazed past them, past the white wicker and stuffed linen furniture, the lacquered ivory-colored tables, blue porcelain lamps — it was Marion’s Chinese Export blue-and-white room, what in the South used to be called a sun parlor — to Leslie and the Cupps and Jack Curl, past Lewis Peckham the golf pro listening politely to Bertie, Bertie making grips on an invisible golf club; past the others, guests and waiters, past the huge Louis XV secretary with its doors open to show the decoupage panels, to the bank of windows broad as a ship’s bridge opening onto a short steep yard dropping off to the gorge and the valley beyond.
A gazebo perched on the lip of the gorge.
A twist of cloud, thick as cotton, rose from the gorge behind the gazebo and a small scarlet oak he had never noticed before. It was stunted and lopsided and black. The few leaves that hadn’t fallen hung straight down as if they had been tied on by a child. The white gazebo was almost whited out by the cloud.