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

was a livelihood, and his manhood’s foundation. There is no God, no foundation. The floor of his stomach chafed, overfull.
    Mavis and Stella brought in the dessert, two pies hot from the oven, a mince and an apple, the slices of apple laid one upon another as tidily as a fish’s overlapping scales, and heaped up high beneath a blanket of cinnamon and brown sugar and piecrust thumbed at the edges to a kind of baked spiral. He had often seen Stella’s plump hands do the trick, running around the rim of the pie in less than a minute. Mavis carried on her tray the pies and between them a crystal bowl of the season’s first strawberries and a side-dish of whipped cream twirled to a peak like a heterodox church’s white spire. In spite of the panic gnawing at his stomach, Clarence felt in his mouth a welcoming rush of saliva.
    The other members of the Church Building Requirements Committee arrived in time to be offered coffee and dessert ifthey wished. The late arrivals endeavored quickly to take on the conviviality of those elect who had dined together. The mingled, forcefully amiable faces and voices pecked at Clarence’s muffled awareness. Kleist merrily escorted the Caravellos out into the warm evening, where light still lingered on the streets; Stella and the two committee wives retired to the parlor while Clarence ushered his committeemen into his study, where chairs were grouped away from his desk. The meeting, after a prayer for guidance offered by the chairman, Mr. Dearholt, debated the wisdom of the new two-story Sunday-school and church-social wing, which could be built on an adjacent lot, extending through to Fair Street, prudently acquired in the wake of the 1902 fire against the possibility of just such an expansion. The cost would come to a mere nineteen thousand dollars, it was estimated by a reliable contractor known to Mr. Dearholt—indeed, his brother-in-law. Such an addition not only would relieve the gloomy cramping of the present basement Sunday-school rooms but would provide a well-lit and up-to-date upstairs space rentable to suitable outside groups for an amount whose pleasant effects on the budget would vary according to the renter’s means and worthiness. The space would accommodate fellowship dinners and educational events and musical evenings which would attract, in the competitive bustle of respectable Paterson, new young members. Young members are the lifeblood of any church if it is to serve the needs of coming generations. “Growth, growth,” Mr. Dearholt pronounced emphatically. “Any organization that is not growing is dying, though it may take years for it to realize the fact. The Congregational Church over on Auburn Street is an example. One day, to coin a phrase, it woke up dead!”
    A chuckle ran through the committee, which seemed inclinedto agree. Clarence found the prospect unutterably depressing. The unbuilt annex sat like a stone across his chest: the workmen, the excavations, the noise, the dust, the debt to be financed, the thousand details to be wrangled through, the disappearance from this section of the city of the pleasant little rectangle of green shade, with its stucco birdbath in a bed of impatiens, its signboard announcing the coming services and the week’s religious motto, its wrought-iron bench for the contemplative of whatever denomination. His face must have expressed dismay and discouragement, for all turned to him in expectation of having their enthusiasm checked.
    “It wearies me,” he confessed, “the thought of so much effort and expense directed to a merely material end. Nineteen thousand dollars: such a sum would support a score of families for a year, or would enable a foreign mission to relieve only Heaven knows how much misery in one of the Asian famines. I think of the interest, the running expenses, that will be with us far into the future, a burden upon our children’s children. The Psalmist admonishes, ‘Except the Lord build the house, they