A Jest of God - Margaret Laurence [13]
Calla smiles so thankingly that I feel I ought to say No, don’t, or to warn her. When she has gone, I’m left with this helplessness. I can’t go. I can’t not go.
I’m to meet Calla at the Tabernacle. I told Mother we were going to a movie. If I had said Calla’s place, she might have phoned.
I’m not sorry it’s raining this evening. It means that hardly anyone is out. That’s stupid – even if I did meet someone I know, how could they tell where I’m going? What about at the door of the Tabernacle, though? That’s what bothered me most the last time. If anyone sees, it is certain to be one of Mother’s bridge cronies, and the information will be relayed back at sonic speed, and there will be the kind of scene I dread, with Mother speaking more in sorrow than anger, as she’s always claimed she was doing.
Japonica Street is deserted. The sidewalks are slippery and darkly shining like new tar with the rain, and the leaves on the maples are being pulled and torn like newspaper in the wind. The lawns have that damp deep loam smell that comes with the rain in spring.
This raincoat is the only new thing I’ve bought this season. I’m glad I got white. It looks quite good, and I thought that on a black night such as this it would be almost luminous, more easily seen by a driver if I’m crossing a badly lighted street.
Reaching River Street and passing the locked and empty stores, I can see myself reflected dimly, like the negative of a photograph, in the wide glass of display windows. The white coat stands out, but not as handsomely as I’d hoped. To my passing eyes it looks now like some ancient robe around me, and the hood, hiding my hair, makes my face narrow and staring. As in the distorting mirrors at a fair, I’m made to look even taller than I am. I have to pass myself again and again, and see a thin streak of a person, like the stroke of a white chalk on a blackboard.
At the foot of River Street, past the shopping part and down the slow curve of the hill, the old olive-green house stands, high and angular, encrusted with glassed-in porches, pillars with no purpose, wrought-iron balconies never likely to have been used except in the height of summer, a small turret or two for good measure, and the blue and red glass circle of a rose-window at the very top. It was built by some waistcoated gent who made good, and then made tangible his concept of paradise in this house. Whatever family once owned it, they’ve moved now, shrugged it thankfully off their shoulders, I expect. The sign extends the full width of the house, and is well lighted. The crimson words are plain to see.
Tabernacle of the Risen and Reborn
People are going in, knots and clusters of them. I haven’t seen a soul I know, thank God. But I can’t go in. I won’t. Now I want to turn and run. But Calla is beside me.
“You’re looking very smart tonight, Rachel, in spite of the rain.”
“Oh – thanks. I’m glad you think so.”
“Well, c’mon,” she says encouragingly, taking my arm, “let’s get inside. I feel like a drowned rat. What a filthy night, eh? Never mind, we’ll soon be in the warm. This way, kiddo.”
The room is larger than I remember it, almost as large as though the place had been a proper church. The chairs are in semi-circular rows, the same straight, thickly varnished chairs one used to find in every school auditorium, but replaced there now with lighter ones which can be stacked up, and the old ones probably sold to establishments such as this. The painted walls are heavy with their greenish blue, not the clear blue of open places but dense and murky, the way the sea must be, fathoms under. Two large pictures are hanging, both Jesus, bearded and bleeding, his heart exposed and bristling with thorns like a scarlet pincushion. There is no altar, but at the front a kind of pulpit stands, bulky and new, pale wood blossoming in bunches of grapes and small sharp birds with beaks uplifted. The top of the pulpit is draped with white velvet, like a scarf, tasselled with limp silver threads, and on the velvet rests a book. The Book, of course, not jacketed