The Marriage Plot - Jeffrey Eugenides [52]
Again the sound of assent from the gray eminence above the desk blotter. The weather, the world outside, had ceased to exist for a moment. “So last summer I gave myself a reading list,” Mitchell said. “I read a lot of Thomas Merton. Merton got me into Saint John of the Cross and Saint John of the Cross got me into Meister Eckhart and The Imitation of Christ. Right now I’m reading The Cloud of Unknowing.”
Richter waited a moment before asking, “Your search has been purely intellectual?”
“Not only,” Mitchell said. He hesitated and then confessed, “I’ve also been going to church.”
“Which one?”
“You name it.” Mitchell smiled. “All kinds. But mostly Catholic.”
“I can understand the attraction of Catholicism,” Richter said. “But putting myself back in the time of Luther, and considering the excesses of the Church at the time, I think I would have sided with the schismatics.”
In Richter’s face Mitchell now saw the answer to the question he’d been asking all semester. He hesitated and asked, “So you believe in God, Professor Richter?”
In a firm tone, Richter specified, “I am a Christian religious believer.”
Mitchell didn’t know what that meant, exactly. But he understood why Richter was splitting hairs. The designation allowed him room for reservations and doubts, historical accommodations and dissent.
“I had no idea,” Mitchell said. “In class I couldn’t tell if you believed anything or not.”
“That’s the way the game is played.”
They sat there together, companionably sipping their iced coffees. And Richter made his offer.
“I want you to know that I think you have the potential to do significant work in contemporary Christian theological studies. If you would be at all inclined, I would see to it that you get a full scholarship to the Princeton Theological Seminary. Or to Harvard or Yale Divinity School, if you so prefer. I do not often exercise myself to this extent on behalf of students, but in this case I feel compelled to do so.”
Mitchell had never considered going to divinity school. But the idea of studying theology—of studying anything, as opposed to working nine-to-five—appealed to him. And so he’d told Richter that he would seriously think about it. He was taking a trip, a year off. He promised to write Richter when he got back and to tell him what he’d decided.
Given all the difficulties ganging up on Mitchell—the recession, his dubious degree, and, today, this morning’s fresh rebuff from Madeleine—the trip was the only thing he had to look forward to. Now, heading back to his apartment to dress for the commencement procession, Mitchell told himself that it didn’t matter what Madeleine thought of him. He would soon be gone.
His apartment, on Bowen Street, was only two blocks from Madeleine’s much nicer building. He and Larry occupied the second floor of an old clapboard tenement house. In five minutes he was climbing the front stairs.
Mitchell and Larry had decided to go to India one night after watching a Satyajit Ray film. They hadn’t been entirely serious at the time. From then on, however, whenever anybody asked what they were doing after graduation, Mitchell and Larry replied, “We’re going to India!” Reaction among their friends was universally positive. No one could come up with a reason why they shouldn’t go to India. Most people said that they wished they could come along. The result was that, without so much as buying plane tickets or a guidebook—without really knowing anything about India—Mitchell and Larry began to be seen as enviable, brave, free-thinking individuals. And so finally they decided that they had better go.
Little by little, the trip had come into focus. They added a European leg. In March, Larry, who was a theater major, had lined up the job as research assistants with Professor Hughes, which gave the trip a professional gloss and placated their parents. They’d bought a big yellow map of India and hung it on the kitchen wall.
The only thing that had nearly derailed their plans was the “party” they