The Marriage Plot - Jeffrey Eugenides [200]
And then the train slowed and stopped. Leonard was still there, waiting for it.
Madeleine reached him. She called his name.
Leonard turned and looked at her, his eyes vacant. He reached out and placed his hands tenderly on her shoulders. In a soft voice edged with pity, with sadness, Leonard said, “I divorce thee, I divorce thee, I divorce thee.”
And then he pushed her back, not gently, and jumped onto the train before the doors closed. He didn’t turn back to look at her through the window. The train began to move, at first slowly enough that it seemed Madeleine might be able to stop it with her hand—stop everything, what Leonard had just said, his shoving her, and her lack of resistance, her collaboration—but soon accelerating beyond her power to arrest it or to lie to herself; and now all the litter on the platform was swirling and the train wheels were screeching and the lights inside the car were blinking on and off, like the lights on a broken chandelier, or the cells in a dying brain, as the train disappeared into the darkness.
The Bachelorette’s Survival Kit
There were a lot of things to admire about the Quakers. They had no clerical hierarchy. They recited no creed, tolerated no sermons. They’d established equality between the sexes in their Meetings as early as the 1600s. Just about every American social movement you could think of had been supported and often spearheaded by the Quakers, from abolition, to women’s rights, to temperance (O.K., one mistake), to civil rights, to environmentalism. The Society of Friends met in simple spaces. They sat in silence, waiting for the Light. They were in America but not of America. They refused to fight America’s wars. When the U.S. government had interned Japanese citizens during World War II, the Quakers had strongly opposed the move, and had come out to wave goodbye as the Japanese families were boarded onto trains. The Quakers had a saying: “Truth from any source.” They were ecumenical and nonjudgmental, allowing agnostics and even atheists to attend their Yearly Meetings. It was this spirit of inclusiveness, no doubt, that led the small group of worshippers at the Friends Meeting House, in Prettybrook, to make room for Mitchell when he began to appear on hot July summer mornings.
The Meeting House stood at the end of a gravel road just beyond the Prettybrook Battlefield. A simple structure of hand-laid stones, with a white wooden porch and a single chimney, the building hadn’t changed from the date of its construction—1753, according to the plaque—save for the addition of electric lights and a heating system. The bulletin board outside bore a flyer for an antinuke march, a plea to petition the government on behalf of Mumia Abu-Jamal, convicted of murder the previous year, and assorted pamphlets on Quakerism. The oak-paneled interior was filled with wooden benches set in opposing sections, so that worshippers faced one another. Light issued from masked dormers above a beautifully carpentered, curved ceiling of gray wooden slats.
Mitchell liked to sit in the rear set of benches, behind a pillar. He felt less conspicuous there. Depending on the Meeting (there were two First Day Meetings, one at seven a.m., the other at eleven), anywhere from a handful to three dozen Friends took their seats in the cozy, cabin-like room. Most of the time the only sound was the distant hum of Route 1. An entire hour might pass without anyone saying a word. On other days, responding to inner promptings, people spoke