IV

He Meant It When He Said, “God Bless and Keep You, Thomas”

It occurred to him, as he crossed Dock to Walter’s Drugstore and proceeded down Bay Street toward the post office, that he was walking under the umbrella of consciousness, which he recalled from his college reading of Bishop Berkeley’s philosophy. He had never returned to those pages to refresh his memory and now doubted that he ever would, but he still thought he had the whole thing straight. It was the Bishop’s contention, if he remembered rightly, that nothing could provably exist which was not within the immediate radius of an individual’s senses. Frequently this concept had given him considerable consolation. By its logic, for example, as he walked down Bay Street, Rhoda Browne, Laura Hopedale, Emily, Walter Price, Harold, and a lot of other people including Mr. Beechley in New York, were merely figments of the imagination and Bay Street alone was demonstrably real. For some reason difficult to explain, Bay Street had been the point from which the commercial impetus of the modern town had emanated. The first chain stores had opened on Bay Street. Warren’s Toggery Shop had been the first men’s store to handle nationally advertised sporting regalia. The Bijou Theatre opposite the venerable Congregational Church had been the first motion picture house in town. Pendle’s Notion Store, having changed its name to Chez Nanette, had been the first store in town to produce a window display of girdles and brassières, and right next to the old First Congregational Church. Tom Harrow had once walked each morning the length of Bay Street to reach high school and the street had given him many ideas. For instance, he had never seen a brassière until he encountered one in the window of Chez Nanette, and his knowledge of the Bible had been derived initially from Mr. Naughton’s Bible class at the First Congregational Church. A swinging sign had been placed in front of the church ending with the name of its present minister, Ernest W. Godfrey. A narrow strip of lawn separated the church from Chez Nanette on one side; an identical strip on the other side separated the church from a candy shop; but Sam’s Liquor Store (another first on the street, having been the town’s first package store after Repeal) was at a legal distance. Upon the strips of lawn were two identical billboards facing the advertisements of the Bijou Theatre across the street. This morning the church was advertising Mr. Ernest W. Godfrey’s sermon topic for the next Sunday. The topic was, “How Happy Are You Inside?” and the Bijou Theatre feature across the way was entitled Love, Honor, and Oh Baby. Tom Harrow read the signs just as he had reached the package store and it was a coincidence that he should meet Mr. Ernest W. Godfrey at almost that same moment.

“Well, well,” Mr. Godfrey said. “Welcome back home, stranger.”

The breezy greeting made Tom Harrow wonder what Mr. Naughton would think if his spirit still lingered by the old church door. Mr. Ernest W. Godfrey’s face had not a cracker-barrel but a quizzical expression, and it was too young to have many lines on it. In fact, he was not much older than Harold and his hair was done in a crew cut. There were heavy, crepe-rubber soles on his low shoes and he, too, was in gray flannels and a brown tweed coat. He was also vigorously smoking a straight-stemmed, straight-grain pipe. Trollope and Barchester Towers were no longer in the picture.

“Well, hello,” Tom Harrow said. “Am I blocking your way to the package store?”

It was just the sort of joke that anyone who was in there pitching should appreciate, and Ernest Godfrey laughed.

“Seriously, sir,” he said, “I can shake a pretty mean Martini, if you would care to come to the parsonage and try one some afternoon. There are a lot of things that I should like to get together with you about.” He waved a hand toward the church. “Seriously, we’re both in show business, Mr. Harrow.”

“I suppose that’s one way of putting it,” Tom Harrow said.

He looked at Mr. Godfrey more attentively now that his train of thought had been broken. As far as he could remember, he had met the young man only once before.

“But then, perhaps my line is more in the area of entertainment than yours,” he said.

Mr. Godfrey shook his head decisively.

“Well, now, I wouldn’t be quite so sure of that,” he said. “It always seems to me there is a kind of message in any good play—and in my experience, anyway, entertainment helps the message.”

Everyone was always interesting if you looked at him in a certain way. Mr. Godfrey’s obviousness was illumined by an enthusiasm and that would be destroyed by time. Mr. Godfrey made him remember his own somewhat hysterical discoveries of the obvious and the turbulence of his own enthusiasms. It seemed hardly credible but still it was barely possible that he had looked like Mr. Godfrey once.

“You mean it pays to sugar-coat the pill?” he said.

Mr. Godfrey shook his head again.

“Oh no,” he said, “not seriously, but how about the New Testament? The parables are entertaining, aren’t they?”

“Maybe you’re right,” Tom Harrow said, “but they were never presented to me in quite that way.”

“I know what you mean,” Mr. Godfrey said. “Black leather on the Bible and all that sort of thing. You’ve got to sell religion, don’t you agree, Mr. Harrow?”

Tom Harrow glanced at the theatre sign across the street and at the two-tone cars and at the liquor store and at Chez Nanette.

“We’ve got to face competition like everybody else,” Mr. Godfrey said. “Have you got enough time on your hands so you could step inside the church for a moment? I’d like you to see the swell new paint job we did this winter, incidentally, and we’ll be out of the noise there, and we might embroider on this salesmanship topic for a while. It’s been on my mind.”

He waved his hand toward the church invitingly, and Tom Harrow nodded. It was a new experience and he had never avoided experience.

“All right,” Tom Harrow said, “but if I go inside there with you, don’t try to convert me. Just remember you’re young and I’m a hardened sinner, will you?”

“Right,” Mr. Godfrey said, “not a conversion in a carload, sir.”

He took a key from his pocket and opened the wide church door.

The noises of the street died away to a murmur when the heavy door had closed behind them. In their place there was silence and the musty odor of pew cushions and hymnals. The interior was puritanically but theatrically impressive. Light flooded it without adornment impartially emphasizing the box pews, the carpeted aisles and the fluted columns suporting the balcony, and the tall pulpit with its double staircases. The vacancy around them made him feel very much alone, and as he stood in the aisle looking at the pulpit, he forgot for a moment that the latest incumbent of the First Congregational Church was with him, until Mr. Godfrey spoke.

“It’s a pretty big house for one man to play to, isn’t it?”

Although the remark was characteristic of some of Mr. Godfrey’s others, it was appropriate. It was a big house, indeed, a fragile monument in perishable wood, and yet there was eternity in the white light and the white woodwork. There was a defiance in the simplicity, a breaking-away from imagery and tradition that had itself become traditional. He felt closer to truth there than he ever had at Notre Dame or Chartres. The thing that was called the New England conscience was in the cool silence, not reproof, but conscience. He and Rhoda Browne had been married at the foot of that pulpit, but there was no rebuke, only a feeling that the cards were on the table, although that was not the religious way to put it.

“I use the small room under the pulpit for writing and thinking in warm weather,” Mr. Godfrey said.

Tom Harrow followed Mr. Godfrey without speaking.

There were some places that were better skipped, and the room beneath the pulpit was one of them. He had not seen it since the day he and Rhoda were married. “How Happy Are You Inside?” he remembered was the sermon topic for next Sunday. He did not feel happy inside. He could almost hear again the low, wheezy tones of the organ that had played when he had stood there waiting.

The small room itself, built directly beneath the pulpit, with its single window cut in the rear wall of the church revealing unimproved back yards beyond the lot, was so startingly unchanged that his last time in it might have been yesterday. The room was the place where, ever since the church was built, ministers had donned their black gowns, and then had waited until the moment arrived to march out the small door and ascend the pulpit steps. It could have been furnished by a Ladies’ Auxiliary shortly before the outbreak of the Civil War. At least the horsehair sofa and the two horsehair armchairs were Gothic rather than General Grant. The Boston rocker was older, but all those four pieces were indestructible, and the horsehair still shone like new in the light that was dim and gray because of the single window’s unwashed exterior. The pen rack and the iron inkwell, on the writing table that held the parish record book, had seemingly not moved an iota. The reddish carpet tacked down to cover the flooring had not faded. The glass in the mahogany veneer mirror above the writing table had the same smoky opaqueness as when it had reflected his wavering image in the last moments when he had waited for the strains of the wedding march. He could almost believe that Mr. Naughton was back there with him and Mort Sullivan, who had been best man. Tom Harrow pulled himself together. Given the time and place, he thought, it could be completely possible to believe in any doctrine of original, not to mention homemade, sin and of retribution. Instinctively he glanced in the mirror above the table and saw that he was fifty-four and not twenty-four. He was gray at the temples. His eyes were harder. His mouth was firmer; it had to be. But in the surface of ancient glass backed by its half-oxidized quicksilver, he could see traces of the young Tom Harrow waiting on the verge of his first great decision and wondering, as he wondered now, exactly how he had got there.

“The last time I was here beneath this pulpit,” he said to Mr. Godfrey, “was when I was waiting to get married.”

“That’s funny,” Mr. Godfrey said, “I would have thought that you had been married in New York.”

It was time to get things straight with Mr. Godfrey.

“New York was my third time,” he said. “I was referring to the first time. It occurred here on the low platform in front of the pulpit. She was what I think you might call a local girl and she wanted to get out of town. We may both be in the show business, Mr. Godfrey, but you preachers seem able to work out your marital problems—with the exception of an occasional choir singer—better than actors and playwrights. I’m not going to mention actresses.”

It may have been a good idea that Mr. Godfrey had been called by the First Congregational, but at the same time, his easy laugh was startling when delivered beneath the pulpit.

“Now, Mr. Harrow,” he said, “please don’t act as though you think I’d be shocked. I haven’t been in this game as long as I might, but I’ve been in it long enough to know that every single one of us has his own problem and his own method of motivation as well as his own particular means of adjustment, and his own particular subconscious mind.”

“I suppose you’re right,” Tom Harrow said, “although it doesn’t seem to me that anybody knows very much about the subconscious. I am interested that you refer to your calling as a game, Mr. Godfrey.”

He had written dialogue so long that the problems of measure and compression of words often obtruded themselves in an ordinary conversation and he was aware that this was happening now. He and Mr. Godfrey were playing a scene, and the scene and its values and the horsehair furnishings as a background all meant more to him while they were talking.

“Maybe ‘game’ is a colloquial ward for the ministry,” he heard Mr. Godfrey say, “but it strikes me as about time that a little informality got into ministry. Only last week when I was thinking along these lines I happened to pull the American College Dictionary off my shelf so I could get the word ‘minister’ redefined. It’s funny how all of us deal with words without ever getting together on their meanings, and that wouldn’t be a bad sermon topic, come to think of it. Forgive me, will you, while I pull out the little black book and jot it down?”

It was a fair piece of business as done by Mr. Godfrey. First he pulled from his tweed coat a massive pair of horn-rimmed spectacles of a design which Tom Harrow had thought was indigenous only to the West Coast. The spectacles changed Mr. Godfrey. Combined with his crew cut, they made him resemble a skin-diver. It was a bit that was worth remembering; and so was the black notebook and the ball-point pen.

“When you get ideas, catch ’em,” Mr. Godfrey said. “That’s what one of the profs used to say back on campus. That’s how I got my idea for this Sunday’s sermon.”

It was time to break the continuity. Too long a speech never went well out in front. Tom Harrow coughed softly. It was time to break the speech.

“You mean, ‘How Happy Are You Inside?’” he asked.

“That’s it,” Mr. Godfrey said. “I like to personalize topics. However, I guess I’m a point or two off the beam and we were sailing another course. Let me see, where was I?”

Like Emily back at the house, he needed a gyroscopic compass, but then, the older you got, the less sure you were of latitudes and longitudes.

“You were taking down your American College Dictionary,” Tom Harrow said, “in order to refresh your memory of the definition of a minister, and not a bad thing to do at all, I’d say, for anyone in your game.”

Mr. Godfrey laughed. With the horn-rimmed spectacles, the laugh was also an effective bit.

“I knew the first time I saw you, Mr. Harrow,” he said, “that you would have the lovely sense of humor which sparkles in your plays. Well, I wanted to look up the word ‘minister,’ not the noun, but the intransitive verb. Wait, I can give you the direct quote.”

The black book came out again, confirming the old rule that you could always successfully do the same thing about twice.

“Here it is. Definition number seven, verb intransitive. ‘To give service, care or aid. Attend, as to wants, necessities, etc.’ Well, there I am, and that’s what I’m here for, Mr. Harrow.”

Tom Harrow thought of the last time he was in this room, and the associations were so vivid that it was difficult to give his whole attention to Mr. Godfrey. He was not really listening; instead, his attention was focused on the silence of the church outside, and subconsciously at least he was waiting for the organ to strike up its commanding notes.

“Say,” Mr. Godfrey said, “I’ve been so intrigued by our conversation that I must have forgot to ask you to sit down. Pardon the inhospitality and have a seat. Or maybe in my position I ought to say, have a pew. I suggest the rocker instead of the horsehair ones.”

“Why, thanks,” Tom Harrow said.

The Boston rocker groaned arthritically and its instability fitted with his mood. Mr. Godfrey, carefully pulling up his gray slacks to preserve the creases, perched himself on one of the Gothic chairs. It was as though Mr. Godfrey were not quite sitting down and not quite standing up and at any moment he might do one or the other. As it was, he was almost doing both. He was a long way from the aging and gentle Mr. Naughton who, as Tom Harrow recalled, had entertained him in that room with nothing but earnest silence. The room had been so still, in fact, that you could hear the rustling of the wedding guests above the muted organ notes. Perhaps Mr. Naughton had believed that those last minutes should best be spent in meditation, although he might have known that meditation was too late.

“Now my idea,” Mr. Godfrey said, “is that the modern church ought to be a sort of spiritual service station where people can get the impetus to dedicate themselves anew.”

Tom pushed out his legs hastily to catch his balance.

“Do you really think it’s possible, Mr. Godfrey, to dedicate yourself anew?”

Mr. Godfrey laughed and rubbed his hands together.

“Why, say,” he said, “if it weren’t so, I wouldn’t be out here in my coveralls with First Congregational embroidered on the back. You ought to drive up to the pumps sometime and try my octane, Mr. Harrow—some of Godfrey’s special. But, seriously, you’ve got to be on your toes these days to service all the new models of psychological cars coming to the pumps.”

Tom Harrow was only half listening. He was thinking that his image of Mr. Naughton had never been so clear, but there was no doubt that Mr. Godfrey had a point. The spirit which had raised the spire of the First Congregational had been militant and not gently somnolent like Mr. Naughton, and yet he would have preferred Mr. Naughton’s company.

Now that Mr. Godfrey was started, it was like listening to Emily in that little further effort was required. Mr. Godfrey, perched on the Gothic chair, had rested his elbows on his knees, cupped his chin in the palms of his hands and stared bemused across the small room.

“This ministry business is more of an eye-opener than you’d think,” he said. “Say, I wish I could write, and of course I could if I ever had the leisure. I owe a little time to Mrs. Godfrey and our children, but if I could write, believe me, I could tell a mouthful about psychological interrelationships. That line of mine about new modern psychological cars driving into the filling station has more significance than I thought when I first turned it off. I wish I had more time to write and more time for quiet meditation. Frankly, the way things are going, there’s no place I can get away by myself, what with Mrs. Godfrey and the children. Actually, when I put on my thinking cap, I like to crawl in here below the pulpit, but it’s mighty cold in winter, that is, weekdays.”

Tom experienced a faint surge of relief. A second or so before he had been almost positive that Mr. Godfrey was going to come up with an idea for a play or an offer of collaboration.

“Isn’t there any way of heating this room?” he asked.

“Not unless you heat the whole church along with it,” Mr. Godfrey said. “I’m an idealist; but I’m practical, and I couldn’t ask for that.”

Tom Harrow smiled his most sympathetic smile and half closed his eyes. He was enjoying this conversation with Mr. Godfrey, partially, and the best of it was he could think his own thoughts. It may have been that Mr. Godfrey’s prof on campus had taught him to phrase things simply. You simply could not make too many points at once, and the filling station and the new model cars represented an effort that impinged upon everyone’s daily life. He had a vision, himself, of two-toned cars with blended upholstery and plastic instrument panels to match—shocking pinks and baby blues and chartreuse and violets.

“Yes, sir,” Mr. Godfrey said, “this stress and strain of modern civilization creates some pretty mixed-up people. It’s a wonder to me sometimes how some men and women in this town can put up with each other the way they do, but a lot of them can’t afford not to. No wonder that a lot of folks need a new spark plug or a turn or two on their distributors now and then, or a realignment of the wheels. No wonder the treads don’t wear the same on everybody’s tires. We were speaking of that sermon topic, weren’t we? ‘How Happy Are You Inside?’ It gave me a real thrill when I discovered it caught your attention, Mr. Harrow.”

Mr. Godfrey’s voice had broken his train of thought and Tom Harrow moved uneasily.

“Now that you mention it,” he said, “I don’t know exactly why it did attract my attention. Maybe because it was such an obvious question.”

“You got that, did you?” Mr. Godfrey said. “Well, that makes me feel happy inside myself, because I deliberately wanted it to be obvious.”

Mr. Godfrey nodded brightly and sat up straighter.

“You’ve got to hit them where they belong. That’s another thing my prof said when we were back on campus. I wanted to hit on something that everyone thinks about at some point. Don’t you think about how happy you are inside, Mr. Harrow?”

“I used to,” Tom Harrow said, “but lately I’ve put the question out of my mind. I seem to have learned pretty well to know exactly how I’m going to feel inside each day without thinking about it.”

Mr. Godfrey’s forehead wrinkled.

“Now that sounds fine,” he said, “but I don’t quite get it. You mean by what you say that you are always happy inside?”

“No, no,” Tom Harrow answered. “I only said I know how I’m going to feel. If you want my opinion, I have a deep suspicion of anyone who always feels happy inside, as you put it.”

“You mean there must be something wrong with him?” Mr. Godfrey asked.

“Either that,” Tom Harrow said, “or he hasn’t learned much from living. And if we want to get personal, let me ask you the topic question: How happy are you inside?”

Mr. Godfrey was silent for a moment.

“Pardon me,” he said, “while I do a little soul-searching.”

The small room was beautifully quiet, and once again Tom had the impression of the silent church outside, and then the illusion of people waiting, and then he had the memory again of the muted organ.

“No,” Mr. Godfrey said. “Naturally I am not always. And you’re right, it would be euphoria or something like that, wouldn’t it? I am not recommending feeling happy inside all the time. I am merely recommending making the effort. I am merely recommending being at peace, at peace with the world and God.”

It had taken a very long time, but there He was and Tom Harrow was very glad of it. The mention of God had brought back the memory of Mr. Naughton. It was safe to assume that Mr. Naughton had not studied social anthropology at the Harvard Summer School; but at the same time, Mr. Naughton had mentioned the name of the Divinity more frequently and more convincingly than Mr. Godfrey. On that day when he and Mr. Naughton had sat in silence, prosperity had reached a new plateau similar to the more fantastic one which was unwinding itself now outside on Bay Street. It had seemed that automobiles would never be brighter or larger, that electronics and automation had reached an acme of perfection, that girls could never conveniently show more of themselves than in those days, but how wrong those convictions had been. In retrospect, times were quiet before the crash and before Roosevelt and it was easier to mention God.

Mr. Naughton was looking in the mirror above the writing table, adjusting his academic gown.

“God bless you and keep you, Thomas,” he said. “I shall go first, then you and your friend.” He was referring, of course, to Mort Sullivan. Then music had entered the pulpit room. The organ was playing the wedding march.