Saint Maybe - Anne Tyler [78]
“Quite a joint,” Doug murmured to Bee.
Bee hushed him with a look.
They crossed velvety rugs and gleaming parquet and finally arrived in an enormous sun porch with a long table at its center and modern, high-gloss chairs and lounges set all about. “The conservatory,” Reverend Emmett’s mother said grandly. She was a small, finicky woman in a matched sweater set and a string of pearls and a pair of chunky jeans that seemed incongruous, downright wrong, as if she’d forgotten to change into the bottom half of her outfit. “Let’s spread our picnic,” she said. “Emmett, did you bring the tablecloth?”
“I thought you were bringing that.”
“Well, never mind. Just put my potato salad here at this end.”
Reverend Emmett wore a sporty polo shirt, a tan windbreaker, and black dress trousers. (He and his mother belonged in Daphne’s block set, the one where you mismatch heads and legs and torsos.) He put a covered bowl where she directed, and then the others laid out platters of fried chicken, tubs of coleslaw, and loaves of home-baked bread. The table—varnished so heavily that it seemed wet—gradually disappeared. Streaky squares of sunlight from at least a dozen windows warmed the room, and people started shedding their coats and jackets. “Dear Lord in heaven,” Reverend Emmett said (catching Doug with one arm half out of a sleeve), “the meal is a bountiful gift from Your hands and the company is more so. We thank You for this joyous celebration. Amen.”
It was true there was something joyous in the atmosphere. Everyone converged upon the food, clucking and exclaiming. The children turned wild. Even Agatha, ponderously casual in a ski sweater and stirrup pants, pushed a boy back with shy enthusiasm when he gave her a playful nudge at the punch bowl. The members steered the guests magnanimously toward the choice dishes; they took on a proprietary air as they pointed out particular features of the house. “Notice the leaded panes,” they said, as if they themselves were intimately familiar with them. The guests (most as suspicious as Doug and Bee, no doubt) showed signs of thawing. “Why, this is not bad,” one silver-haired man said—the father, Doug guessed, of the hippie-type girl at his elbow. Doug had hold of too much dinner now to shake hands, but he nodded at the man and said, “How do. Doug Bedloe.”
“Mac McClintock,” the man said. “You just visiting?”
“Right.”
“His son is Brother Ian,” the hippie told her father. “I just think Brother Ian is so faithful,” she said to Doug.
“Well … thanks.”
“My daughter Grade,” Mac said. “Have you met?”
“No, I don’t believe we have.”
“We’ve met!” Gracie said. “I’m the one who fetched your grandchildren from school every day when your wife was in the hospital.”
“Oh, yes,” Doug said. He didn’t have the faintest memory of it.
“I fetched the children for Brother Ian and then Brother Ian closed up the rat holes in my apartment.”
“Really,” Doug said.
“My daughter lives in a slum,” Mac told him.
“Now, Daddy.”
“She makes less money than I made during the Depression and then she gives it all to this Church of the Second Rate.”
“Second Chance! And I do not; I tithe. I don’t have to do even that, if I don’t want to. It’s all in secret; we don’t believe in public collection. You act like they’re defrauding me or something.”
“They’re a church, aren’t they? A church’ll take its people for whatever it can get,” Mac said. He glanced at Doug. “Hope that doesn’t offend you.”
“Me? No, no.”
“Want to hear what I hate most about churches? They think they know the answers. I really hate that. It’s the people who don’t know the answers who are going to heaven, I tell you.”
“But!” his daughter said. “The minute you say that, you see, you yourself become a person who knows the answers.”
Mac gave Doug an exasperated look and chomped into a drumstick.
Bee was sitting on a chaise longue with her legs stretched out, sharing a plate with Daphne. She was the only guest who seemed to have remained outside the gathering. Everyone else was laughing, growing looser, circulating from group to group in a giddy,