That Sunday morning was Altheah Meachem’s turn at the lectern. The pleasant buzz of the Psalter recitation had been succeeded by the booming announcement, “Hear the Holy Scripture as it is written in the such-a-chapter of such-a-book,” in penetrating tones designed to return wandering minds to their appropriate attitude and to wake the dozing. Katherine was in no need of shepherding, but she valued the direction just the same; the Presbyterians knew how to manage shared time and attention.
This week’s Old Testament reading came from Job. It was not one of the consoling passages, either, but came from the more obscure digressions about beasts and hooks found near to the end of the book. It included the section, “He saith among the trumpets, Ha, ha; and he smelleth the battle afar off, the thunder of the captains, and the shouting,” to which “Amen” hardly seemed like an appropriate reply.
Altheah briefly hesitated over “Ha, ha,” anxious to avoid the most obvious reading, which would have sounded like she was reading from the funny papers, before deciding on a declarative “Ha,” followed by a distinct pause, before the second, slightly more solemn, “Ha.” Then she hurried through the rest of the verse, as though she were slightly ashamed of God for resorting to such idiomatic dialogue, before sitting down and being replaced by the choir.
(“Although, of course it wouldn’t have sounded like a joke,” Altheah said later to Katherine, during the reception hour, “not at the time they wrote it down. It’s only an accident that it sounds that way now.”
“It is a tricky matter of interpretation,” said Katherine, by way of consolation. “I’ve often thought it must be very difficult for anyone putting on a Shakespeare play, too—all those Ha has, theres, and Ho-hos, which don’t sound right at all.”)
It was not every Sunday that Katherine could be found at the First Presbyterian Church—“Old First” to such residents of Greenwich Village who made a habit of attending holy services, which had for decades formed a shrinking but still prominent part of the population. She felt that any professionally minded person younger than middle age who chose to attend services was choosing to do something in the way of bestowing a patronage, and ought to be received with gratitude and careful attention when she did attend, since she might have just as easily taken herself to the movies or out to lunch. As it happened, Katherine very rarely spent her Sundays at the movies, but the Presbyterians had no way of knowing that. She was fully conscious of her power there, and exercised it gently but regularly. The Presbyterians understood the power of habit, which had been at least half her reason for choosing Old First over others in the city. Katherine did not choose to serve on either the nursery committee or the floral committee, nor did she attend the semiannual Young Person’s Pancake Breakfast, or the Presbyterian Women’s Wednesday circle, or the Presbyterian Women’s Sunday circle, for the Presbyterian women who worked on Wednesdays or had otherwise fallen out with the Wednesday crowd could no longer be trusted to sit through a meeting without resorting to spiritual violence.
This year the denomination had formed a Presbyterian Lay Committee to investigate the national decline in membership, and Katherine had not joined that either. Old First had not been so alert nor prone to stocktaking since 1855, when an unnamed trustee had proposed installing a pipe organ “for the attraction of young people and strangers.” The trustee had been successfully obstructed until 1886, so Katherine felt no urgency as far as the Lay Committee was concerned. The church had then enjoyed a substantial period of relevance and authority well into the twentieth century, with the congregation swelling to a height of 1800 in the twenties. Hardly a breath of doctrinal controversy had endangered it since Harry Emerson Fosdick entered into the modernist debate with a Sunday sermon entitled “Shall the Fundamentalists Win?” in 1922. After delivering it he was warmly praised and encouraged to resign, and thereafter threw himself into the welcoming arms of the Baptists uptown.
It was not as if the elders uniformly disagreed with the modernist position. In fact there were plenty of sympathetic members within the ranks, but the sermon drew an answer later that summer from Reverend Macartney in Philadelphia, in the form of “Shall Unbelief Win?: A Reply to Dr. Fosdick,” which moreover was printed and circulated for “15 cents the copy” throughout both cities and within For the Faith magazine. Macartney had additionally threatened him with a series of papers “in defense of the cardinal doctrines of the Christian religion,” which hardly anyone wanted. William Jennings Bryan got wind of the dispute and began making rattling noises about a formal resolution of confirmation of doctrine, at which point the trustees began to ask themselves, Had not Dr. Fosdick, though estimable in many respects, been after all ordained a Baptist, and might therefore be inherently susceptible to the sin of personal charisma? And while it could not be denied that Dr. Fosdick certainly knew how to pack them in, had not the marbling in the central aisle cracked under the weight of the additional rented pews, as sure a sign of hubris and rupture as anyone could ask for?
So Fosdick had been gratefully returned to the Baptists, now burnished with the medal of honorable conflict, and replaced by a Dane called Moldenhawer, who dedicated a new chapel in 1938 and preached mildness until his death a decade later. Privately most of the Old Firsters considered themselves well out of a pretty near miss, since Dr. Fosdick later went on to appear on the cover of TIME magazine and publish vulgar, helpful little pamphlets with titles like The Power to See It Through and The Secret of Victorious Living, which were later republished in the Reader’s Digest. Now the pastorship was sensibly shared between two men, like the old Roman consuls, in order that the one might keep a check on the ambition of the other. They were both named John. One was called Macnab and the other Mellin, and each had very little to say on the subject of victorious living. If either of them might have been at times spiritually inclined toward progressivism, both knew better than to confuse preaching with pamphlet making, and together they set a comfortable walking pace for Old First’s portion of the body of Christ to follow.
Old First was ideally suited to Katherine’s tastes in many respects. Neither of its pastors preached using that casual, everyday tone that had come to infect so many other pulpits in the country, and if one of the Johns was sometimes liable to digress on the nature of cooperative education, at least he never pointed out individual members of the congregation—“And this means You, friend!”—which Katherine would not have believed any clergyman, regardless of creed, capable of doing until she had seen it with her own eyes at a Christian Brethren service downtown during her first year in Manhattan. Nor did either of the Johns try to show off his seminary German by quoting Ebeling or Bonhoeffer. The length of service never ran under fifty-five minutes nor over seventy. Some churches’ ideas about punctuality began and ended with the start of services, letting themselves get carried away during the Prayers of the People or extending the processional, but Presbyterians had just as strict a dislike of untimeliness at the end of things as they did at the beginning. Here the Spirit might be permitted to brim, but it never overflowed.
Katherine had intended to shed the dim Baptism of her troublesome youth upon her removal to New York, but it had taken some time to decide where next to fix herself. She spent her first year in the city on an irregular pilgrimage, running in a mostly clockwise spiral whose center began two blocks west from the Biedermeier. She had decided against an early inclination toward Episcopalianism, considering it too precipitous a social advancement to attempt in a single move. She kept in mind the old prompt that a Methodist was a Baptist who had learned to read; a Presbyterian a Methodist who had gone to college; and an Episcopalian a Presbyterian who had joined the Social Register. There would be hardly any point in attending church at all if she spent the whole service in a panic about the suitability of her shoes and her handshake, or worrying how to properly address a bishop if she was introduced to one. Besides which, it seemed to her that there was something cringing, possibly even un-American, about the idea of a bishop, so it had been the Presbyterians after all. There was a comfortingly square and in-the-road presence about the Presbyterians. They had a good hospital system a little further uptown and were well represented among senators and presidents. One might be born, shepherded along the passage of an orderly, useful life, and die, all within the same comfortable envelope of Presbyterianism.
The building itself was an unfortunate mishmash of architectural elements, as the original architect had attempted to pattern the building in Gothic Revival after the St. Saviour Church in Bath as well as the entrance to Magdalen Tower in Oxford. To this rather alarming jumble had been added a secondary complex in Prairie School style in the 1930s, as well as a fence along the southern border, half-cast-iron and half-wood. The sanctuary was ringed by a series of stained glass windows, some Tiffany and some Charles Lamb, and all of them garish in the extreme. Katherine was seated today underneath the St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre window, which featured a smiling Huguenot in pink tights, whose head was wreathed about in masses of purple and orange grapes.
There were a number of good reasons for attending services semiregularly, although not so often as to run the risk of being drafted onto committees. It was the likeliest way to begin a well-organized week. Sundays without church were apt to slide into untidiness, in Katherine’s experience. One always slept in too late to make any use of the morning, yet somehow without ever producing the feeling of being really well rested. This turned the afternoon into a panic as one attempted to make up for lost time, trying to squeeze together too many errands that had little or nothing to do with one another. This would be followed by a worn-out, empty sort of evening, surrounded by a lot of boxes and things that now needed to be put away, feeling quite unequal to the task of even going to bed, and wondering why she hadn’t made plans to go out with someone, as she realized she hadn’t spoken to a soul aside from a sales clerk, nor seen a friendly face all day. Church was a remarkably useful place to organize her thoughts, not to mention an opportunity to be quiet and yet still remain part of a crowd. If she had no close friends among the congregation, still she could count on being welcomed by name, and hearing her hair or her shoes warmly remarked upon. In church she could speak in unison without having to initiate conversation, privately judge the sermon, be stirred during the voluntary, weep a little in public without fear, reflect without the morbidity of her bedroom, wear something slightly uncomfortable and yet becoming, and set herself apart from her largely nonchurchgoing friends, all the while feeling that she was pushing the dark and unpleasant disheveled figure of Monday a little further back into the wings. There was also something about meeting occasionally with the same group to contemplate some particular aspect of a vast and alien consciousness that appealed to her. In spite of (or perhaps because of) this, Katherine remained suspicious of everyone’s motives for attending church except her own, and made sure to keep away at least one Sunday a month.
Besides this, Katherine had a dim yet definite understanding that between unattached women and church existed a powerful, slightly frowsy magnetization—unless one moved conscientiously in another direction, a future of committee work with other semiconscripted unattached women with no recognized leader among them became inevitable. If women in church were a dime a dozen, young women (which in church meant anyone under forty) were at least somewhat rarer and therefore presumably more valuable. Katherine thought it important to capitalize on value while one still had it, although how exactly she was capitalizing on anything by occasionally skipping church she couldn’t rightly have said. Possibly there was a connection between this slight religious skittishness and her impulse for hotel rather than apartment living, a desire to establish social connections rather than social ties, to be known enough to be greeted but not asked favors of, to be not without social recourse but neither to accumulate commitments. So Biedermeier girls who wanted to establish themselves as friendly “go-alongers” signaled friendliness by making themselves available during the same hours as the hotel and propping open a bedroom door in accordance with others, while those who wanted to signal independence kept slightly eccentric schedules, always preferring to plant small but easily readable indicators rather than state an open preference that might get in the way of someone else’s independence.
This line of thinking had led Katherine directly to a question she had been mentally putting off for some time, and she puzzled through it during the better part of both the invocation and the assurance of pardon: Why had Carol never treated her to lunch? Or if not lunch, then tea or some other little thing? Carol was not eager to collect favors and debts like Kitty, and in almost all things concerning others was rigorously fair, so that Katherine had scarcely realized just how unbalanced the scales between them had become. She herself had, from time to time and without thinking much about it, offered to treat Carol because it was easy for her to do so, or she was feeling particularly flush and wanted to transmit her happy state to another. There had been no great expense—matinees, sandwiches, cups of coffee, bus fare, once a cocktail—and they had been spread out over a year, maybe two, always offered spontaneously and at intervals sufficiently distant that no pattern would be noticed for some time. She had done this without, she thought, anticipating any immediate return of the same but trusting generally that Carol kept track of little social debts much as she, Katherine, did, making a note of it in her diary along with other incidentals before, without either urgency or dawdling, looking for later opportunities to discharge them. She resented the loss of those previously untroubled feelings about Carol more than she minded the cost of a movie ticket. Even more troubling was the spectral possibility of herself as an exacting, ruthless sort of person who scrupulously held everyone to account. In this light her usual habit of noting social costs alongside the affairs of the day (“Tuesday, lunch Anna [$2, hers], south elevator stuck at third floor, reply M, remember ironing, meeting 12th street 6, read Gardiner in PM”) looked shabby, even dismal. Was there something unusual in this? What did other people, besides Carol and Katherine, do in such cases? In what manner had Carol been raised, if she did not share Katherine’s habit, and had most other people been raised like Carol or like herself? Of course the characteristic feature of other people was that they could not have been raised by the same people who had raised you, so it should not have been so surprising to learn that her social anxieties, whichever details she believed essential in the written account of any given day, were not universally shared. Despite having come no little distance herself from her family home, Katherine found it difficult to think of people’s habitual routines as anything that was possible to choose or invent for one’s own purposes. She almost always attributed daily habits to inheritance rather than to deliberation.
There was the secondary question of whether Carol was herself aware of this lopsidedness, or whether (as Katherine had herself been until the present moment) she was unconscious of it, the answer to which must surely be teased out before Katherine could tackle the third question—namely, what was to be done about it. But she found it a decidedly unpleasant prospect, pawing over every recent interaction in the hope of discovering some small detail, either in Carol’s expression or look or turn of phrase, that would suffuse a moment which had until today seemed unremarkably friendly with an unpleasant, subterranean layer of new significance. It felt like replacing the friendly light of a good candle with a flash of cold lightning. If Carol was conscious of it, was it because she was worse off than she had been willing to admit? In that case perhaps Katherine had, without ever meaning to, made things even harder for her. It was difficult to imagine how a person might politely refuse an offer to treat, Katherine realized. Or perhaps it was because Carol liked Katherine well enough as a part of the machinery that kept the Biedermeier operating, but didn’t want to encourage an outright friendship between them, in which case Katherine had failed to notice not just one but a series of graceful hints in her rush to establish her generosity. In this version of things she was guilty not just of being intrusive but also tasteless, trying to use money to buy what only conversation and mutual inclination could purchase. That Carol might be a chiseler Katherine felt safe in dismissing. Carol neither dropped hints nor picked them up. Either she was unaware of what she was doing, or she had private reasons for keeping herself at a distance.
What did it mean, then, that Carol accepted treats in such a placid, dispassionate way, seemingly unconcerned with whether she might be able to reciprocate in future? And what could she, Katherine, do about it? She could ask Carol outright, but she didn’t like to. You might ask a man friend, “Why don’t you take me out to eat?” (only if he had already taken you out to dinner, and you were sure that he knew how to take a joke from a girl in the right spirit), but it felt somehow impolitic to ask it of a fellow woman. It was a confining sort of question, much too much like “Are you free Thursday?” for Katherine to consider asking it with a clear conscience. She could stop treating Carol until or unless she noticed and offered to treat her, but that felt cheap, even deceitful, and what if Carol never noticed the change? She seemingly hadn’t noticed the pattern to begin with, so it was hard to take as an article of faith that she’d notice any variation in such an incidental practice.
Or Katherine could carry on as she had been doing, every so often paying for Carol’s inclusion in some event or other, only this time with the uneasy awareness that she was doing so out of obligation, with no expectation of return. Katherine did not consider herself an essentially timid person but if backed into a corner preferred to stay there rather than behave badly, according to her own reckoning of bad behavior, which included even the appearance of stinginess, grudge nursing, itemization, and unsportsmanlike behavior. Perhaps in that case she ought to stop keeping a written record of small favors between friends. It might prove unsportsmanlike after all. One kept count of the score during a game publicly, for everyone to see, not privately in a diary.
It was only when one of the Johns declared, “The Lord bless to us the reading of His Holy Word,” that Katherine realized her own mind had been wandering (and after congratulating herself on her steadiness and focus, too). She had scarcely enough time to leap to her feet and join the rest of the congregation in the answering hymn, “Let all mortal flesh keep silence,” and that jumping-jack maneuver still preoccupied her thoughts afterward in the coffee hall.
“There really isn’t enough time between the readings and the hymns,” Altheah agreed. “And I do think you’re right about Shakespeare, because those filler words always stand out a great deal more than any of the thees or wherefores—at least to me they do—but at the same time one doesn’t like the idea of walking back from the lectern and just standing either, not while everyone else is still sitting down. It feels too close to loitering. Is it very ridiculous to worry about this sort of thing? You’ve got to tell me if I’m boring you terribly.”
“Not at all,” Katherine said. “I think I know just what you mean. That is, you know that of course it isn’t the most important moment of the service, but it is the moment you’ve got to worry about as you go from being part of the service back into being a congregant again, which almost no one else has to do except the readers. You don’t want to look like you’re in a hurry, or as if you were trying to prompt everyone else to stand on your say-so, which standing by yourself might very well do. It is difficult. And of course it’s important. It’s not the most important thing, of course, but it still matters. You’re shaping the direction of the concerted attention of about five hundred people. That’s something, after all.”
“That’s precisely it,” Altheah said, with real warmth. She was the best type of lay reader, Katherine thought, because she was eager to avoid the appearance of self-importance that so often came with the office, without ever forgetting that it was her duty, in the manner she moved and spoke, to contribute to the general graciousness and solemnity of worship.
Katherine briefly considered saying something to that effect, but decided against it on the grounds that sympathy was already flaring up between them to a dangerous degree, and she risked inviting excessive interest. There was a distinct art to good after-church talk. Instead she murmured something tactful and nodded vaguely, and then after trading a few less keenly felt remarks about the weather, which was fine and seasonable, and the sermon, which had to do with whether Paul’s taking-up of Eutychus in Acts should properly be considered a resurrection from the dead, in the manner of Lazarus and Tabitha and the daughter of Jairus, or whether it should be considered instead a revival and therefore merely a simple healing miracle, like that of the beggar at the Gate Beautiful, Altheah drifted away.
Katherine had sometimes wondered why attending church seemed to prepare one so inadequately for encountering one’s fellows only a short while afterward. The best and highest goal that after-church talk could aim for was not to damage the feeling that church had wrought in someone else. Possibly it was too jarring and immediate a change to ever be really free from awkwardness, to go from singing the Doxology in four parts, shoulder to shoulder with the body of Christ, to being crowded into a stifling reception hall, drinking coffee from an urn in mismatched china and trying to talk softly about small things to half a dozen different people at once. But perhaps they felt it jarring, too.
Of course there was another excellent reason for not wanting to come to church so often one began to be expected there, and it was ridiculous not to have considered the Alcoholics Anonymous meeting that met every Friday evening in the Old First basement and which, except for the first three months after her arrival there, Katherine had faithfully attended for nearly all of her ten years in New York City.
If Katherine was not ashamed to call herself a woman alcoholic, still she was not proud of it, nor did she consider it an accomplishment worth bringing up in ordinary conversation. It would have, in fact, made ordinary conversation impossible with the Sunday congregation, and not because they were too unyielding either. It was an admission that by its very existence cut off the possibility of further discussion. One’s companion could not say anything in response that was not either intrusive or censorious, and thus feel correspondingly censored, and besides which might now feel additional pressure to disclose something personal, even disgraceful in exchange, to even out the imbalanced sense of exposure. It may have been no longer unacceptable to acknowledge the alcoholic, but even these days it did not do to invoke him in the present. One might admit to having an alcoholic in one’s family tree, or somewhere in the hinterlands of one’s more distant acquaintances, or even say, “Such-and-so goes to AA,” if his drinking career had been particularly remarkable, and expect to hear in response “That’s the boy!” or “Good for him.” But it was never a socially correct answer to everyday questions like “What will you have?” or “Join me for a drink,” which was not even a question and could not politely be demurred.
And Presbyterians, Katherine had learned, just as often drank sherry after church as they did coffee. They also used real wine for Communion, a revelation that had shocked her almost as much as the fact that they celebrated Communion every month. After that first jarring experience Katherine made sure to avoid church every fourth Sunday, rather than risk a scene. Katherine had grown up in a teetotal church, which considered Communion a very special occasion indeed, celebrating it no more than four times a year, and always with little thimbles of grape juice so tart that the inside of one’s cheeks tingled unbearably after. And of course she had almost never been drunk on Sundays, Westerville not only having been a dry city for nearly one hundred years but additionally serving as headquarters to the Anti-Saloon League after it was driven out of Washington, DC. The town still kept Prohibition, as did a number of other Ohio river towns, in as cheerful, placid, and determined a fashion in 1955 as they had in 1929.
* * *
It had been on the ninth of September, 1955, that Katherine Heap had been driven from Westerville to Chillicothe by her mother, where she boarded a bus for Cincinnati, departing from it on the Ohio State Limited, which arrived in New York City at 9:30 the next morning. She might have departed from Dayton on the same line, but whichever train she chose, it still meant she had to begin her journey east by first traveling west for several hours. She wore a tightly woven gray woolen suit she reserved for long-distance travel, and stout shoes. People who did not walk often ought to wear thick shoes with heavy soles for a long journey, she had once read, but those who intended to make a business of walking should be as lightly shod as possible, in order to let the ankles toughen. She did intend to make a business of walking once she had settled in New York, but stout shoes were all she had in the meanwhile, and it seemed backward to buy a new pair before leaving home until she had worn out this one. In her pocketbook were a pair of Crescendoe gloves, an appointment book, her father’s watch, an envelope of traveler’s checks, and a letter of introduction to the Peabody accounting firm, from a cousin who had worked there two years ago as a junior bookkeeper.
“When you’re settled,” her mother said, “you might write and let us know what you need. We can send it by freight. I don’t like to think about what can happen to good furniture in a boxcar, but there’s no point in sending it before you’ve found something that’s fixed.”
“All right,” Katherine said.
“I hope you’ll take care of Mr. Heap’s watch,” her mother said. She had kept the old-fashioned habit of referring to her husband as Mr. Heap even to her children. Katherine was distinctly aware of an inner wrench; she was not likely to hear anything so homespun for quite some time. Mr. and Mrs. Heap displayed their considerable affection for one another through various ambassadorial devices. Whenever one was absent, the other spoke for them in the most respectful and ceremonial of terms. “It’s worth the keeping of.”
“I will,” Katherine said. She did not like making promises to her mother; she was only too aware that her record on that score was dismal. It would have been much better to treat the watch casually, and just as casually display it in excellent condition years from now, without drawing attention to it.
“I’ll wait until you’re on the train to leave,” her mother said, “but I’ll do my waiting inside the lounge, where I can look out the window, and say goodbye to you here. This is for the steward, and this is for the porter. You ought to tip them both. Good luck to you.” She quickly pressed Katherine’s hand and then withdrew back inside the station.
Katherine was then twenty-two years old and three months sober. Ohio being the original headquarters of Alcoholics Anonymous, the first group in Akron having started meeting together in 1935, meant that even a small village like Westerville supported several meetings a week, one at the hospital, one at the Methodist church, one at the Kiwanis club, and one held in a member’s private home twice a month that was just for women alcoholics. Katherine’s drinking career had not been especially long, lasting only a little over four years, but its progression had been swift and the final drop abrupt; she was then the youngest member of the Westerville fellowship by several decades.
The Heaps were an old family, at least by Midwestern reckoning, having established a branch in Westerville by the time of its incorporation in 1858. But even the very oldest families rarely outlive three oaks. Certainly neither of Katherine’s parents ever seemed conscious of having to steward anything like a family character outside of what was generally owed to children by right of birth. Like most parents of their era, they hoped for the dispersal, rather than the consolidation, of their legacy, mentally settling their offspring in every far-flung corner of the country. The Westerville Heaps were by and large a dry family. Even a careful examination of their lineage, traced as far back as it was possible to go, would have produced no more than two or three suspected drunkards, none of them after the nineteenth century, and the last of whom, a bachelor uncle graciously donated to the railroad in the 1880s, had turned into a remarkably steady citizen upon his removal to Arizona, where he was in later years elected twice to local government. Those Heaps who remained in Westerville practiced a mild form of religion, some worshipping at the Church of the United Brethren in Christ and others with the Methodists. In neither case was their attendance regular, and both sides were eccentrically born high-minded Victorian atheists, of the sort who tirelessly cataloged the whole world from top to bottom during that most frenetic and middle-class of centuries, who became botanists, geologists, and ornithologists, and delighted in any scientific pursuit that required one to go about with a logbook and a miniature hammer. The family had more regularly produced at first orchardists, who cultivated excellent apple trees of golden Pippins (which they valued all the more highly for having once drawn the ire of the visiting Johnny Appleseed, who as a Swedenborgian objected to grafting on the grounds that it hurt the trees, which the Heaps at once dismissed as religious quackery and enjoyed as notice from a celebrity), and later schoolteachers, principals, and headmasters, and especially prided itself on the education of its women.
Katherine’s own mother had been granted a degree in sociology from a ladies’ seminary in 1928, and as she was herself the eldest of six (of which all but one survived infancy), the family had long cherished a dream of sending Katherine back East for college. She had exhibited a modest talent for languages as a girl and was considered by her parents and her own teachers a largely tractable child, reasonably studious, prone to no more than the gentlest of wanderlust. Her daydreams tended to run shallow, and if her attention was not always easily held, it was at least easily recalled, and she had in fact been on track to receive admission both at Elmira College in New York and at the Pennsylvania College for Women after graduating high school, when suddenly and without any serious prior indication of trouble, Katherine began to exhibit signs of near-total collapse and, almost without knowing how, having seen so little of it in her young life, to drink.
She “began to drink”—a phrase that communicates nearly nothing except an automatic progression of cues, that calls up the meaningless image of some indistinct and general figure, never an individual, pounding the bar in rumpled shirtsleeves, heedless of the speeding train bearing down on him from just off-screen. Katherine’s drinking more than baffled her mild and even-tempered parents; it overturned them. There had been no new stressors added to her life, no social loss or rupture that might have added undetectable forms of pressure eventually leading to a breakdown; the scales of her days remained as evenly balanced as they always had been. She had not acquired any recent dangerous acquaintance, was not a hard liver, demonstrated no marked or new interest in men, music, and dissipation, demanded no new terms out of life, and made no statement of independence or rebellion that they might have either tolerated or forbid.
From one day to the next and in all other respects Katherine’s life looked very much as it always had, except she drank. In a family of near teetotalers, in a dry city, in a semidry state, as a young woman of seventeen, whose sex and background and class none of which should have predisposed her to such a thing, seemingly happy with her lot in life, and with both limited funds and opportunities to procure liquor, she swiftly progressed from friendly drinks at a small party to dizzying, incomprehensible bouts of near annihilation, which she herself neither understood nor could scarcely be said to enjoy, except for that very first night when, deep in her cups, she thought madly to herself, This then is life—and they have kept it from me—they knew this was life and they kept it from me.
* * *
“Are you leaving, Katherine?” Altheah had rematerialized by her side after some interval. “Can’t I persuade you to stay a little longer? Only what you were saying about the order of service was so helpful, and the Overtures Committee is meeting in the Alexander Chapel this afternoon.”
How nice it was, to be wanted to stay! But it would not do at all. “Possibly another time,” Katherine said guardedly. “I’m afraid I’m wanted at home.”
Later discussion with her AA sponsor, Arthur, determined that this counted as a promise made, regardless of the “possibly” hedge, and that Katherine was in fact honor bound to keep it at the first opportunity.
“You can always say no when people ask you something,” he reminded her, “but if you don’t say no, you’ve got to live up to it. You make an awful lot of promises, even by alcoholic standards, Katherine.”
“I know it,” Katherine said. “I can’t help liking Altheah, and wanting her to like me; I just wish she liked me without wanting to see any more of me.”
“You do realize, of course,” Arthur said, “that everyone on the Overtures Committee is responsible for presenting requests to the General Assembly, too?”
“How often does the General Assembly meet?” Katherine asked, horrified.
“Only once a year,” Arthur said. He was a cradle Presbyterian himself, although situated much further uptown at the Brick Church on Park and Ninety-First Streets. “Of course, it’s being held this year in West Virginia.”
Katherine groaned.
“Yes, it’s very difficult to attend church and avoid church life at the same time,” Arthur said. “I wonder when you’ll stop trying to do both.” Not for the first time, Katherine thought that Presbyterians must belong to a particularly unfeeling limb of the body of Christ.