Earthly Possessions - Anne Tyler [43]
Well, I went. That first Sunday I left Selinda in the preschool room downstairs and sat in a pew between Julian and my mother. I wore a powder-blue suit, a pillbox hat, little white gloves. For the sake of the congregation, I tried to look as rapt as I was expected to. I tried not to show my shock when Saul came out in his robes like a stranger and read the morning’s scripture in a firm, authoritative voice. Older members of the congregation said, “Amen”; the others merely kept a hushed silence. Then we all stood up and sang a hymn. We resettled ourselves and Saul arranged various papers on his pulpit. “I have here,” he said finally, “a clipping from last Wednesday’s newspaper: ‘Dr. Tate’s Answer Column.’ ”
His words echoed slightly, as if spoken in a train station.
“ ‘Dear Dr. Tate: I am writing about this problem I have in talking with my physician. I mention this to show what I think of physicians and how much they expect of a person. Every Thursday my doctor has me come in to see him and he wonders why my diabetes is always getting worse. I tell him I just don’t know. Well, Dr. Tate, the fact is that I do eat quite a bit of pastry that I don’t admit to. I just get this urge to stuff sometimes. Also I overdo on the wine. I know that wine isn’t really liquor but I feel bad anyway drinking in the daytime and so I don’t tell him. Dr. Tate, my husband doesn’t love me any more and goes with someone else and my only son died of a bone disease when he was barely three years old. I weigh two hundred and thirty-one pounds and my skin’s all broken out though they say that stops at twenty and I am forty-four. Yet somehow I can’t tell any of this to my doctor and do you know why? Because a doctor sets himself up so and acts like he won’t even like you if you eat the wrong kind of nutrition. So how does he think I could admit all this to him? And what I want to ask anyway is, Where’s the fairness to this, Dr. Tate?’ ”
I was interested. I folded my gloves and looked up at Saul, waiting for Dr. Tate’s answer. But instead of reading it, Saul laid the clipping aside and gazed out over his congregation. “The woman who wrote that letter,” he told them, “is not alone. She could be you or me. She lives in fear of disapproval, in a world where love is conditional. She wonders what the point is. The only one she can think of to ask is a licensed physician.
“Is this what we’ve come to, finally? Are we so far removed from God?”
I yawned, and wove the fingers of my gloves together.
That was the last sermon of Saul’s I ever listened to.
Which is not to say I didn’t go to church. Oh, no, I showed up every Sunday morning, sitting between my mother and Julian, smiling my glazed wifely smile. I believe I almost enjoyed it; I took some pleasure in his distance, in my own dreamy docility and my private, untouchable deafness. His words slipped past me like the sound of a clock or an ocean. Meanwhile I watched his hands gripping the pulpit, I admired his chiseled lips. Plotted how to get him into bed with me. There was something magical about that pew that sent all my thoughts swooning toward bed. Contrariness, I suppose. He was against making love on a Sunday. I was in favor of it. Sometimes I won, sometimes he won. I wouldn’t have missed Sunday for the world.
I had a lot of foolish hopes, those first few years. I imagined that one day he might lose his faith, just like that, and go on to something new. Join a motorcycle gang. Why not? We’d travel everywhere, Selinda and I perched behind him. I would be hugging his waist, laying my cheek against his black cloth back.
Black cloth?
Oh, it was ingrained, by now: even on a motorcycle, he’d be wearing his seedy suit and carrying his Bible. He would never stop being a preacher. And even if he did,