John was dreaming of summer at the Bishop’s house in the years when he used to go there, before everything in the middle chapter went wrong. The first chapter, he explained to himself in the dream, covered the time before his mother departed. The middle chapter stretched from that mangling hour until the day he met Meg at Cambridge. It encompassed the time he called his youth, the time he made it a rule never to review. Why, he asked himself, had his imagination trespassed into the middle chapter? He might be dreaming, but he had not entirely relinquished reason, else how could he so discourse with himself?
The air in the Bishop’s garden swarmed with pollen. The Bishop’s son, his former friend, played noisily just out of view. His own father lounged on the patio, his collar unfastened in the heat—but it wasn’t right, he insisted, his father was dead, and he had never unfastened his collar where anyone could see.
John was roaming the kitchen, and Mrs. Hallows was giving him a plum. The Bishop wanted to see him, she said. John, nervous but somehow eager, drifted up the paneled staircase to the Bishop’s study.
Inside, the Bishop bade him stand before the desk, as he always did when chastising John and Jamie. Only now John was alone, the Bishop’s son still playing loudly in the garden. The Bishop remonstrated with him about his decision to forgo confirmation. Didn’t he realize the error into which he was slipping? John tried to explain: it was a matter of conscience.
—Conscience my right foot! the Bishop protested. No conscience would instruct you in such a maneuver. That inkling is not the call of conscience, young man!
John tried again to explain: He couldn’t join the War because he couldn’t kill another person. To do so was murder. But he had helped as he could, he told the Bishop, who was growing bored with him and opening the window to call Jamie.
—Come here, boy! the Bishop barked at his son. I want a word with you.
Jamie jogged in from the garden wearing cricket flannels and a pajama top. He met John’s eye, and then, rather than coming into the study as he had been bid, he dashed away down the staircase.
John tried again: he couldn’t be confirmed because the light of God was in every person, and he couldn’t kill it, but he had driven ambulances, he had felt death in his hands, his very arms.
But the Bishop was standing in the downstairs hallway, addressing an assembly of John’s father, Jamie’s sisters, and the servants:
—I have given my life. My life. And cowards like this one—
He waved in John’s direction.
—break down what I have spent a life building up. By their fruits shall ye know them. They destroy. They mock.
John tried to protest, but his mouth made no sound. The Bishop pointed at him:
—This one is a double-dealer, a liar, and an apostate.
Everyone turned to look at him except his father. His father, as he had that terrible Christmas, turned his gaze away, turned his chest away, turned his entire self away and walked out the door, where the summer swallowed him up.
John ran after, but the air was filled with fireflies, dazzling him and pounding like the guns had, night after night. A trench was at his feet, and at the bottom lay Jamie, bloodied, groaning, gangrenous. John scrambled down to help him, and Jamie turned to him in agony and regret, his body now lifeless, wet with blood, heavy as mud. The body was still warm, but John knew he could not revive it. He knew the absoluteness of death, its sudden arrival and its silent, eternally silent, face—
* * *
Morgan turned over. His shoulder ached. He wanted to wake up. He needed to wake up. Something urgent was happening, something irretrievable that he needed to attend. Wake up. Even this tendril of thought spun like spirochete, spirit-chete, spirillum, Spitalfields, where Jack the Ripper cut those women, cut them up, cut them out of the fabric of life, the living coat of colors.
—Do you renounce Satan and all his works?
He had to wake up, or he would get it wrong, the things the bishop chap had asked him in S-K’s study that day.
—My godparents did promise three things in my name.
The bishop chap had come to the Academy so they wouldn’t have to go to York for the laying on of hands. He couldn’t go to York, for hands or anything. They didn’t live there anymore, and no hands lived in that minster, minister, sinister—
—How many commandments are there?
—There are ten.
—And can you say them?
One, one God; two, idolatry; three, blasphemy; four, Sabbath; five? Like the fingers on his hand, which he used to grasp himself, what was the fifth?
The bishop chap wore frock coat and gaiters like in picture books. They had to say the creeds, all of them, with the right words in the right order, but his throat was closing and he was swallowing to keep it open.
—Do you believe in the Holy Ghost?
If there was a Holy Ghost, it would open his throat and fill his lungs with wind. S-K said the Hebrew word meant spirit and also wind, but Morgan’s throat refused both. Something pumped blood through him, but his throat let nothing by, as if a fist had him, fit to strangle.
—Do you renounce—
Gasping …
—Do you—
Gasp …
—Wilber—
Gasping gas more foul than the sulfurs of hell. But he wasn’t in hell. He was on the bench outside S-K’s study as he had woken that day, Matron looming as she had. Like then, he was choking back to life, coughing dinosaur ooze, retching from the smell.
That day, he’d refused to go back into the room and face the bishop again. But now, this time, he could say a different thing. Spaulding stood in the window, the sun fell warm on his back, and Spaulding watched him learn to breathe again and waited to hear what he would say. Spaulding had come specially, not because he pitied him but because he believed in him. Spaulding knew what was true, and he was telling S-K he needed to see Morgan, it was a matter of life and death, and he was taking Morgan to the balcony where Hermes had gone as a boy, when he’d learned the secrets of the Academy and winepressed them into wish slips; Spaulding was opening the door, and there was nothing more to pretend, nothing more to resist, and he was wanted and wanting and reaching and reached for—
* * *
John inhaled and sat up in his bed. Dawn was breaking. He was exhausted from dreaming, and for what? It was all nonsense. The Bishop had taken him to task countless times—him and Jamie both for their adventures and misadventures, the tree, the pond, the canal after dark, what they’d seen in Flora’s bedroom, what they’d done to Lucy’s dolls, everything Jamie had lured him to and inducted him in—but never had John resisted confirmation; indeed, he’d been eager for the Bishop to prepare him. Later, the Bishop had not examined him over his pacifism as John was no longer visiting the Rectory. And Jamie Sebastian, so far as John knew, had not died in the War. John had neither seen nor heard from any of them in twelve years. Twelve years was nearly half his life. It ought not to feel like no time.
There were reasons—unassailable reasons!—why he made it a rule not to dwell on the middle chapter. To be assaulted by it in sleep, and in such a vexing time, was tremendously unjust.
He hurled himself from bed, stumbled into his other room, lit the burner, and singed himself. He was not the person from the middle chapter. He was the person from the current and final chapter, the Convinced Quaker, the man Meg had drawn into her family, when his own had—this time was not that time, and the last thing he needed was to wake drained of energy and morale by absurd dreams. Morgan Wilberforce was the confirmation refuser, not he. S-K accepted John’s pacifism and had from the beginning. No one was dead today, no one would be dead tomorrow, and in any case he lacked the time to discuss it with himself since he needed to get to the Academy as soon as possible on this already hectic Saturday in March. His dreaming mind could just consider what he said—mark, learn, and inwardly digest. That was all!