12

If we speak of absolute perfection, there has been but one being in our world … who, possessing our mortal nature, and tempted as we are, was yet without sin.

Reverend Barzillai Frost
Concord, 1856

Arlene Pott had persuaded her husband, Wally, to come to church because it was her birthday. But on the whole Arlene could have done without another birthday. “I’m fifty-eight now,” she told herself ruefully. “How old is Josie Coil? Not more than thirty-five, I’ll bet. I can’t compete. It isn’t fair. Fifty-eight! How can I be fifty-eight?”

In the balcony, Augusta Gill played a sprightly prelude by Orlando Gibbons. Pausing as she flipped the page of her music, she held one note past its time. Downstairs, sitting in her customary pew beside Homer, Mary Kelly wished the note would last forever, that eternity would happen, that they would always remain seated on these benches with the sun slanting in on Parker Upshaw, glowing on his left ear; that Joe Bold would forever occupy the pulpit, crouching behind the reading desk with bowed head; that his wife, Claire, would remain alive, poised on the edge of the grave but never falling in.

Across the aisle, Betsy Bucky was not frolicking with the Virgin Mary in her habitual Sunday-morning state of holy transport. She was meditating profoundly just the same. Betsy was composing in her head a letter to Confidential Chat, a page of anonymous letters in the Boston Globe. Chatters wrote letters about their personal problems, or they asked for recipes, and their letters were printed, and other Chatters replied. “Dear Chatters,” Betsy’s letter was going to say, “I have this problem with my husband, who is retired. He just mopes around the house and I can’t have my friends over. When I try to clean, he’s always in the way. Any suggestions, Chatters? Oh, I loved Bee-Zee-Q’s recipe for Tomato Soup Cake! Anybody want directions for a darling knitted bolero? Yours, Oatmeal Cooky.” (Oatmeal Cooky was Betsy’s nom de plume.)

Of course Betsy didn’t really need to write the letter at all. She was taking care of her husband problem every day in her own successful way. As a result, Carl Bucky was feeling distinctly ill this morning, even worse than usual. Sitting beside Betsy, Carl felt his heart bump in his chest. Before coming to church this, morning, he had really overstrained himself. Betsy had suddenly decided she wanted the big TV upstairs, and she wouldn’t take no for an answer.

Carl had tried to reason with her. “Oh, Jesus, Betsy, that TV isn’t what you’d call portable. It must weigh a hundred fifty, two hundred pounds.”

“Now, Carl,” Betsy teased, “a big strong man like you! Look at those muscles! Don’t tell me you’re not my big strong hubby anymore?”

“Honest, Betsy, I just don’t think—”

“Carl Bucky, I’m ashamed of you!” And then Betsy had rushed into the den and put her little scrawny arms around the television set and heaved at it as if she were going to drag it upstairs all by herself.

What could he do? “Oh, hell, Betsy,” Carl had said. “Wait a minute. Here, get out of the way.” And then he had lugged the damn thing upstairs for Betsy, shoving it up from step to step, gasping, “My God, oh my God, oh, Jesus Christ, oh, God almighty.”

Joe Bold sat behind the pulpit, waiting for the service to begin, looking out the window at the trees tossing in the sunshine. The new leaves were just spreading themselves open, responding to their first breezes, lifting and poising and falling, their delicate tissues sensitive to the lightest airs like the sails of ships at sea. It was surprising the way the sun always shone on Sundays, the rain confining itself to the other days of the week. It meant nothing, of course, that it should be so. There was no special blessing on the Sabbath, no singling out of one charmed and holy day of the week.

But to Parker Upshaw, sitting smack in the way of the sunlight, the sun did indeed seem to have a pedantic purpose in flinging itself ninety-three million miles through the darkness and cold of outer space to illuminate his own particular face. Is it really you, Parker W. Upshaw, upon whom I have the honor to shine? The heat warmed his ear, his scalp, his lean jaw, the pimple he had bloodied with a razor that morning. Singled out as a chosen vessel, Parker basked in the sunlight as the service worked its way from opening hymn to the recitation of the covenant, to the offering, to the prayer, to the lesson from Scripture. To one in his exalted state, the lesson really struck home. It was a verse from the Gospel of Matthew: Therefore be ye perfect, even as your Father in heaven is perfect, one of the trickier passages in the New Testament. What would Joe Bold make of it, Parker wondered. But then, stroking his sunlit ear and pondering the notion of perfection as a philosophical ideal, he stopped listening to the words from the pulpit and drifted off into contemplation. Perfection! There were of course any number of kinds and categories. On the one hand, there was physical perfection, to be achieved by continuous exercise, by sprinting down the road every day for a mile, two miles, five miles, just a little farther every day. Parker was already an accomplished jogger. He congratulated himself that every time his feet hit the ground his cardiovascular system was strengthening, his lungs were inhaling more deeply, his legs and arms were putting on more muscle.

And as for moral and spiritual perfection, that too was attainable. One could move from perfection to perfection. All it took was the will and drive to achieve a more perfect life-style.

After all, Parker had been lucky so far. He had been born to the right parents. (Parker’s father was an ophthalmologist in New Haven.) He had gone to the right institutions of higher learning. He had married the head of college government at Vassar. His son and daughter were enrolled in the most costly private schools in Concord, their teeth were being straightened by the most expensive orthodontists in Boston. And Parker’s job at General Grocery was a rung on the ladder of infinite future advancement. Just last week he had accomplished a coup by getting rid of that idiot Will Daly. Sooner or later, Parker W. Upshaw would occupy a spacious office in the tall glassy high-rise on State Street, along with the rest of General Grocery’s top management. Parker closed his eyes and pictured his new office, longing for it as John Bunyan’s pilgrim had hungered for the Celestial City.

Joe Bold was preaching on and on. Dreamily, Parker turned his attention away from his own little orgasms of the ego to stare out the window at the perfect trees. No, the trees were not perfect this morning, after all. Gypsy-moth caterpillars were spinning webs from branch to branch. The perfection of the created universe left something to be desired, compared with the upward progress of one truly dedicated human being.

Once again Imogene and Jerry Gibby had been seated by the usher next to Parker and Libby Upshaw. It made Jerry uncomfortable, but Imogene didn’t care where she sat. There were new friends all over the church, Arlene Pott and Betsy Bucky and Ethel Harris and Lorraine Bell and Rosemary Hill and Geneva Jones. The quilting group was going to meet at Imogene’s house this week, and Imogene was on the nooning committee. The Gibbys had been asked to usher next Sunday. Poor Jerry, he was being a little grumpy about ushering. He didn’t want to do it. Poor darling boy, he worried so. Why didn’t he leave his problems at work? That was what Imogene always said.

But Jerry couldn’t leave his problems at work. Jerry’s problems had come right into the church with him in the shape of Parker W. Upshaw. Last Wednesday, Will Daly had passed along the bad news.

They had been lunching together at the Colonial Inn, an old building on Monument Square in Concord, one of the places where Henry Thoreau had lived. Jerry Gibby didn’t care about Thoreau, and neither did Will Daly. Leaning forward over their Boston scrod and chopped beefsteak, they talked intently about matters of grim importance.

Will had started the conversation by dropping a bombshell. He told Jerry he had just been fired.

Jerry had stared at him in horror. “Oh, Jesus, Will, I’m sorry.” Then it hit him. “Oh, Lord, if you’re not there, who’ll be in charge of my franchise from now on?”

Will looked back at him morosely. “Guy named Upshaw.”

“Upshaw?” Jerry choked. “Oh, no. Oh, God, no. Not Parker W. Upshaw? Oh, my God, Will, say it isn’t so.”

“It’s so, all right. It’s Upshaw. Up-the-Ladder Upshaw.” Will was seething with outraged innocence. “I’ll tell you what happened. He moved in on me. I mean, I could tell from the start he was bad news, as soon as he came into the office last spring and took over Benjie’s job. Remember Benjie Shapiro? The next thing I knew, Archie Pendelton was out. Then it was Henry Garber. Pretty soon I could feel Up-the-Ladder’s hot breath on my own neck, you know?” With angry playfulness Will put his hand on the back of his collar. “Well, he got a little too close. They fired me last Tuesday.”

Jerry had lost his appetite. He put down his fork and looked at Will, his eyes hollow. “I know Upshaw. He wears these J. Press suits, right?”

“Right, that’s Upshaw. What he did to me was, he went to the big boss, told him I’m letting some of my accounts go overtime on their monthly payments. You know, like yours, Jerry.” Will took another mouthful of chopped beefsteak and chewed slowly, looking meaningfully at Jerry.

“But, my God, Will, I’m going to pay up soon, doesn’t he know that? I mean, I can’t go wrong, can I? People have to eat.”

Will waved his knife. “That’s what I told him. Breakfast, lunch, supper, every day of the year, three hundred million people gobble, gobble, gobble, every single day, they all got to eat. But Upshaw, he was thinking about the interest on the loans. That money belongs to General Grocery, he says, only those franchise guys are hanging on to it, so we can’t invest it and get interest on it, so we lose big, he says. And the big boss on State Street agrees with him. State Street! He went over everybody’s head to State Street! That’s Up-the-Ladder for you. The only thing higher than State Street is the board of directors. Maybe he’ll try the board of directors next. No, even Upshaw wouldn’t have the gall to do that. Anyway, can you feature a creep like that? The bottom line is, I got fired, and they moved Up-the-Ladder into my spot on the chart, plus a bunch of other spots. The dirty, rotten rat.” Vengefully, Will chased his last piece of beefsteak around his plate and plunged his fork into it. “That’s what I get for being Mr. Nice Guy.”

Jerry turned white and pushed his plate away as the implications of Will’s story sank into his digestive tract. “But, my God, Will, that means he’s going to be after me to pay up. Christ, Will, I can’t pay now. I’m overextended. There’s no way I can catch up until I’ve had a year in the store. Oh, God, Will, it’s going to be all right. You know it’ll be all right, if I can just have a little more time. You should see the way people pour in there and fill up their carts with ninety, a hundred dollars’ worth of stuff, and then in three or four days they’re back for twenty or thirty more, and they just came in for a loaf of bread. It’s going good. Will, honest. I mean, people have got to—” Jerry clutched at a straw. “We go to the same church. Maybe as a fellow church member he’ll give me a few months of—what do you call it, grace?”

“Upshaw goes to church, does he?” Will guffawed bitterly. “He ain’t no Christian, believe me. They don’t teach theology at the Harvard Business School.” Will’s eyes brightened as he turned metaphysical. “Well, maybe, sure, yes, they do, only their god is Money. And the angels, flap, flap”—Will flapped his arms like wings, and a waitress had to skip out of the way with her carafe of coffee—”they’re certified public accountants, and the prophets are these big important stockholders and trustees. And the Bible!—the Bible is this big account book with everybody’s credits on one side and debits on the other, and, you know, like they keep track of your sins up there in the sky. And heaven is this big, gigantic”—Will made a vast embracing gesture with both arms, and a busboy had to dodge backward, nearly dropping his tray of glassware—”multinational syndicate, and St. Peter is chairman of the board, and they don’t let you in the pearly gates without you’ve got this big roll of bills. And hell is—hell is—”

“Okay, okay,” said Jerry. “I get the message.”

“Dessert?” said a waitress, whipping out her notebook. “Indian pudding? Apple pie à la mode?”

“Oh, no, thanks,” said Jerry, putting his hand pathetically on his churning stomach.

Joe Bold’s sermon was coming to an end. Jerry hadn’t heard a word. He stood up with the rest and moved his lips while Augusta Gill played a canon by Thomas Tallis and the congregation sang about the guardianship of almighty God:

He shall with all-protecting care
Preserve thee from the fowler’s snare;
When fearful plagues around prevail,
No fatal stroke shall thee assail.

Show me, thought Jerry Gibby, caught like a trapped bird in the fowler’s net. Go ahead and show me.