9

Prayer is that Golden Key, which being oyled with Tears, and turn’d with the hand of Faith, will unlock the Cabinet of Promises.…

Reverend Joseph Estabrook
Concord, 1705

Next Sunday, Ed Bell sat beside his wife and daughter at the front of the church and was surprised to see that the sunlight was falling on the pews in the same way as before. It was as if nothing had happened to threaten the tranquillity of Old West Church. The red carpets still ran straight up the aisles, the red cushions on the benches were still faded to the same degree, the painted floor was the same remote and faraway blue. As the church filled, Ed saw Joan Sawyer sit down calmly beside Homer and Mary Kelly in the same place where she had sat before, and Joan too seemed the same, although her life had been wrenched out of shape and utterly changed. Even the broken latch of the pew door had been mended. George Tarkington’s work, guessed Ed.

In the rear pew on the south side, Mary Kelly talked softly with Joan Sawyer, while Homer sat with folded arms watching Geneva Jones thrust wands of forsythia into ajar in front of the pulpit. Geneva was kneeling on a small stool, and it occurred to Homer that she was the only person in the room whose knees were sore. For a moment he missed the ritual kneeling of the Catholic church in which he had spent so many reluctant hours as a boy. Would anything drive these Protestants to fall on the floor? What if God himself were to appear in the pulpit, God in glory with angels and seraphim, his countenance spreading its radiance into every corner of the chamber, would these good people prostrate themselves before him in awe and wonder? Well, no, they wouldn’t, decided Homer. It would be too awkward. There wasn’t room. They’d bump their heads on the backs of the pews in front of them. They’d have to wedge themselves sideways on the floor, and stick elbows in other people’s eyes and beg each other’s pardon. It wouldn’t work at all, and God had better confine his appearances to churches with kneeling benches embroidered by the ladies of the altar guild.

Jerry Gibby, too, was a lapsed Catholic. But Jerry wasn’t thinking about the dark candlelit interior of the Somerville church where he had once been an altarboy. He was shifting nervously on the bench thinking about something called “shrink.” Shrink was a decrease in store inventory for unknown reasons. Shrink, good God, it was going to destroy him. His customers were walking out with the entire contents of Gibby’s General Grocery. They were dodging past the cash registers with their stolen goods, and nobody was paying any attention. Yesterday, glancing down from the window of his office high above the courtesy booth, Jerry had seen a man push a cart full of frozen turkeys into the florist department and disappear. Racing downstairs, Jerry had rushed out into the parking lot, but the man was nowhere to be seen.

How many times had that thieving bastard pulled that trick? And he wasn’t the only one. The books showed a steady increase of unexplained outgo. There was pilferage at the front end, missing cartons of cigarettes, candy, chewing gum. “Shrink,” mumbled Jerry aloud. “Jesus.”

“Sh-h-h, dear,” whispered Imogene. Then she smiled at the woman who was sitting down beside her, a portly woman with a drooping face and dyed red hair. “Good morning,” murmured Imogene. “I’m Imogene Gibby. This is my husband, Jerry.”

“Arlene Pott,” said the woman. “Why, you must be the new people in my neighborhood. Aren’t you in the house with the columns? How do you do!”

“Oh, here comes the minister,” said Imogene, reaching out to squeeze Arlene’s hand as Joseph Bold opened the door beside the pulpit and entered, his robe swirling in the draft from the cold hall.

Remembering his tragedy, his parishioners grew solemn. But Joe was bringing up the matter himself. Leaning over the reading desk, he spoke about his wife, explaining her latest surgery. “Claire will soon be well enough to have visitors. I know she’d love to become acquainted with the members of this church. But of course her strength mustn’t be overtaxed. Mary Kelly has kindly offered to organize the visiting. Just call Mary, and she’ll arrange it.” Joe stared at his notes, and looked up again. “Mrs. Hill? You have an announcement?”

Rosemary Hill was a member of the parish committee on prison visiting. Standing up, Rosemary explained that a job and a temporary home were needed for a young inmate of the Concord Reformatory so that he could be discharged on early parole. She’ hoped someone in the congregation would provide either the job or the housing. Then Rosemary sat down, and the occupants of the pews around her sat silent, mulling it over, raising the question uneasily with themselves, trying to set it aside, not altogether succeeding. Ed Bell glanced at his wife and raised his eyebrows. Lorraine rolled-her eyes and made a face, meaning, we’ll talk about it later.

It was time for the first hymn, and everyone stood up. After the hymn they remained standing to recite the Lord’s Prayer. For Ed Bell it was like talking to an old friend. “Our Father who an in heaven, hallowed be thy name.”

“Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done,” said Rosemary Hill, thinking timidly about her appointment with a specialist in Boston, two weeks away.”

“… on earth, as it is in heaven,” said Betsy Bucky confidently, soaring upward, rollicking joyfully in the sky, while Carl stood silently beside her with sunken shoulders and gray face.

“Give us this day our daily bread,” said Parker Upshaw, speaking loudly and clearly, providing leadership as always, thinking that his daily bread was something like two hundred dollars a day, not counting Libby’s income. He smiled to himself, imagining how some rich old geezer in Biblical times would stare at his daily bread, if the old geezer could see it stacked up in gold Roman coins.

“And forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors,” muttered Jerry Gibby, adding a silent parenthesis: Oh, Jesus, Mother Mary, you hear that, God?

“And lead us not into temptation,” whispered Arlene Pott, thinking of Wally and Josie Coil, angrily transferring her prayer to her husband.

“… but deliver us from evil,” mumbled Joe Bold in anguish. Deliver my wife from her sickness. Spare her, O Lord.

“For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, forever. Amen,” murmured Joan Sawyer, for whom God was a once-powerful deity who had created the world and then turned his attention to other things.