In the Beauty of the Lilies by John Updike Read Free Book Online

long-lashed eyes sideways toward Jared, now spoke up, claiming her American rights. “I like America,” she said, in an English scarcely accented. “It is a hard country but you are free. Back in Italy, Papa used to say, there were three tyrants—the
padre
, the
signore
, and
il tempo
, the weather. Here there is only one tyrant, money. And a man with money can belong to himself.” She faltered, alarmed by the circle of silent attention she had commanded and perhaps uncertain if her last sentence had been grammatical. “In the old country others always owned you; there was always fear. They used God to make fear.”
    “
Silenzio
, Sophia,” her sister hissed.
    “I think that’s very well said,” Stella announced, in a voice so syrupy and complacent that Clarence doubted she had been listening. In a sharper voice she called, “Mavie. It’s time to clear, dear.” To Clarence their young Irish maid loomed, in the muddy rainbow glow of the Tiffany lampshade, as an angel, pallid and meek and neutral, above the garish faces of his guests, her childish fumbling fingers floating the disgusting plates away, stacking them on the oval serving tray on its folding stand. Surely the loaded tray would be too heavy, with its thick plates and ponderous pronged accompaniment of silver, for her to lift. But she did it, with a pained wince of asaintly pale-lipped smile that only he observed; with stiffened back she bore off the tray through the swinging kitchen doors, to its fate of hot suds and, for the silver, Parlor Pride polish. The table talk, having inflicted in its clash so many cuts to heal, had fallen quiet, and Clarence dismally perceived that it was his hostly duty to start it up again, upon an innocuous topic. He cleared his throat and said, “I read in the
Evening Times
where young Teddy Roosevelt and his bride won’t be returning, after their honeymoon, to the East. He’s going to take up residence in San Francisco, where he’s to be the district manager for the Hartford Carpet Company.”
    “My lands,” Stella said, rising to assist Mavis in bringing the dessert but wishing to help her husband revive the conversation. “They might get swallowed up by another earthquake.”
    “Disasters are everywhere, Mrs. Wilmot,” Dearholt assured her, “as your good husband has earlier stated. Even in our own proud city we have suffered, since the turn of the century, a fire gutting the entire downtown, two furious floods, and an actual cyclone! Still, Paterson prospers as never before. Two hundred silk plants, over five hundred manufacturing establishments in all, producing upward of sixty millions in annual product value!”
    “And forty thousand men and women paid starvation wages for the privilege of being slowly worked to death,” Kleist interjected, his eyes narrowing in amused expectation of protest from the representatives of ownership and management. He had turned his radicalism, it seemed to Clarence, into a social trick. A performing monkey on a string of ready indignation.
    With painful seriousness McDermott rose to the bait: “Starvation wages, far from it, for the skilled workmen. Agood loom-fixer, or a Jacquard-card puncher, or even a broad-silk weaver, they’re up another level or two from your average dyer fresh off the boat from Genoa.”
    “Bosses’ toadies, twice as bad as the bosses,” Kleist hissed.
    Well, Clarence reflected, of God’s existence or non-existence, what did it all amount to but the paper-thin difference between death as the end of it all, no worse than a long untroubled sleep, the end of desire as well as capability, and death as the beginning of fresh adventures, a life beyond imagining, full in God’s sight, and grotesque to picture—the scramble of Resurrection, the open-mouthed monotony of eternal choral praise? For most men this was all religion was, this gamble at the back of their minds, with little to lose but an hour or so on Sunday mornings. But for him, alas, it