outskirts of Newark. Slowing its pace, the train clacked diagonally over the Passaic River and entered upon a glorious stretch of the Meadows—tall tawny cattails and saltwater grasses still as green as spring, flickering with white butterflies and red-winged blackbirds—before crossing the Hackensack into the city of his destination. The presbytery kept its modest offices on the sixth floor of an eight-story building a healthy little walk from the station. A creaking birdcage elevator lifted Clarence to a hall lined with carefully lettered doors half of frosted glass. The presbytery was hardly to be distinguished from Spitz and Quinlan, Legal Attorneys, or I. H. Levine, Expert in Chiropractics. The waiting room was equipped with well-worn, uncushioned oak furniture and an overweight receptionist-secretary. When she sighed and heaved up from her desk and went into a room whose ajar door revealed shelves of archives arrayed in boxes of marbled cardboard, theaction was performed with the aid of a cane, her massive hips seesawing with a strenuousness painful to see. Clarence spied in a gap between her long skirt of navy serge and a black shoe that seemed less creased than the other some inches of drab brown stocking covering what he took to be a prosthetic leg. Yet her amber hair, in whose uniform bright tint some artificial rinse was implicated, gleamed a glossy pompadour, and a smile dimpled her plump cheeks with a quicksilver coquettishness.
When thou makest a feast, call the poor, the maimed, the lame, the blind:
thus does the church, built upon the stone which the builders rejected, declare its mercies to a ruthlessly selective world. Clarence meekly returned her smile and for fifteen minutes’ wait shared with this other maimed person a companionable silence. He would miss, he thought, all such nooks in the ecclesiastical maze, wherein a blameless quotidian industry concealed and overarched the essential unreality. His journey had taken over an hour and left his summer suit of cream-colored linen wrinkled. Through the room’s one window he enjoyed a view whose foreground consisted of tarred flat rooftops burdened with wooden water tanks and chairs and even weather-soaked couches for residents escaping the swampy heat, and whose middle ground was a green waste of marsh grass and cattails brutally bisected by railroad tracks on a built-up embankment, and whose hazed distance held lower Manhattan, its granite-girded skyscrapers bristling like a conglomerate horn on the nose of a rhinoceros whose body could only be guessed at. Faded white letters on a nearby building advertised BEECHAM ’ S PILLS and elsewhere his eye picked up advertisements for WEINTRAUB BROS . HIGH CLASS TAILORS and SHINOLA and DR . WERNET ’ S POWDER FOR FALSE TEETH and DREAMLAND , a dance hall or moving-picture theatre, presumably.
His perusal of the cityscape was interrupted by the emergence of the moderator of the presbytery from his office. Thomas Dreaver had been recently elected to the post; like Clarence a clergyman, he was younger than expected, younger than his petitioner. Pale and rounded in feature, with short fair hair brushed away from a central parting, he wore a single-breasted, slate-blue business suit and was businesslike in manner, save for an extra smoothness, a honeyed promissory timbre to his voice that marked him as an executive of Christian business. For some perverse theatrical reason Clarence had, for this fateful encounter, dug into Stella’s cedar chest, packed with clothes from their past, and found his one surviving rebato, worn in his Missouri days to distinguish himself in dignity from the shirtsleeved Baptists, and a black rabat vest. Though Calvinist thinking had always shied from these Roman appurtenances, they had never been officially proscribed, and the Princeton approach had tended to be playfully “high,” not even abstaining, in chapel celebrations on major holy days, from colored stoles decorated with the
When thou makest a feast, call the poor, the maimed, the lame, the blind:
thus does the church, built upon the stone which the builders rejected, declare its mercies to a ruthlessly selective world. Clarence meekly returned her smile and for fifteen minutes’ wait shared with this other maimed person a companionable silence. He would miss, he thought, all such nooks in the ecclesiastical maze, wherein a blameless quotidian industry concealed and overarched the essential unreality. His journey had taken over an hour and left his summer suit of cream-colored linen wrinkled. Through the room’s one window he enjoyed a view whose foreground consisted of tarred flat rooftops burdened with wooden water tanks and chairs and even weather-soaked couches for residents escaping the swampy heat, and whose middle ground was a green waste of marsh grass and cattails brutally bisected by railroad tracks on a built-up embankment, and whose hazed distance held lower Manhattan, its granite-girded skyscrapers bristling like a conglomerate horn on the nose of a rhinoceros whose body could only be guessed at. Faded white letters on a nearby building advertised BEECHAM ’ S PILLS and elsewhere his eye picked up advertisements for WEINTRAUB BROS . HIGH CLASS TAILORS and SHINOLA and DR . WERNET ’ S POWDER FOR FALSE TEETH and DREAMLAND , a dance hall or moving-picture theatre, presumably.
His perusal of the cityscape was interrupted by the emergence of the moderator of the presbytery from his office. Thomas Dreaver had been recently elected to the post; like Clarence a clergyman, he was younger than expected, younger than his petitioner. Pale and rounded in feature, with short fair hair brushed away from a central parting, he wore a single-breasted, slate-blue business suit and was businesslike in manner, save for an extra smoothness, a honeyed promissory timbre to his voice that marked him as an executive of Christian business. For some perverse theatrical reason Clarence had, for this fateful encounter, dug into Stella’s cedar chest, packed with clothes from their past, and found his one surviving rebato, worn in his Missouri days to distinguish himself in dignity from the shirtsleeved Baptists, and a black rabat vest. Though Calvinist thinking had always shied from these Roman appurtenances, they had never been officially proscribed, and the Princeton approach had tended to be playfully “high,” not even abstaining, in chapel celebrations on major holy days, from colored stoles decorated with the
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