Museums and Women by John Updike Read Free Book Online

altar, his suit is revealed as the pants of one suit (gray) and the coat of another (brown). He is too much at home here. During the sermon, he stares toward a corner of the nave ceiling, which needs repair, and slowly, reverently, yet unmistakably chews gum. He lingers in the vestibule, with his barking, possessive laugh, when the rest of the congregation has passed into the sunshine and the dry-mouthed minister is fidgeting to be out of his cassock and home to lunch. The deacon’s car, a dusty Dodge, is parked outside the parish hall most evenings. He himself wonders why he is here so often, how he slipped into this ceaselessround of men’s suppers, of Christian Education Committee meetings, choir rehearsals, emergency sessions of the Board of Finance where hours churn by in irrelevant argument and prayerful silences that produce nothing. “Nothing,” he says to his wife on returning, waking her. “The old fool refuses to amortize the debt.” He means the treasurer. “His Eminence tells us donations to foreign missions can’t be applied to the oil bill even if we make it up in the summer at five-percent interest.” He means the minister. “It was on the tip of my tongue to ask whence he derives all his business expertise.”
    “Why don’t you resign?” she asks. “Let the young people get involved before they drop away.”
    “One more peace-in-Vietnam sermon, the old-timers will be pulling out anyway.” He falls heavily into bed, smelling of chewing gum. As with men who spend nights away from home drinking in bars, he feels guilty, but the motion, the brightness and excitement of the place where he has been continues in him: the varnished old tables, the yellowing Sunday-school charts, the folding chairs and pocked linoleum, the cork bulletin board, the chatter of the children’s choir leaving, the strange constant sense of dark sacred space surrounding their lit meeting room like Creation upholding a bright planet. “One more blessing on the damn Vietcong,” he mumbles, and the young minister’s face, white and worriedly sucking a pipestem, skids like a vision of the Devil across his plagued mind. He has a headache. The sides of his nose, the tops of his cheeks, the space above his ears—wherever the frames of his glasses dig—dully hurt. His wife snores, neglected. In less than seven hours, the alarm clock will ring. This must stop. He must turn over a new leaf.
    His name is Miles. He is over fifty, an electrical engineer. Every seven years or so, he changes employers and locations.He has been a member of the council of a prosperous Methodist church in Iowa, a complex of dashing brick-and-glass buildings set in acres of parking lot carved from a cornfield; then of a Presbyterian church in San Francisco, gold-rush Gothic clinging to the back of Nob Hill, attended on Sundays by a handful of Chinese businessmen and prostitutes in sunglasses and whiskery, dazed dropout youths looking for a warm place in which to wind up their Saturday-night trips; then of another Presbyterian church, in New York State, a dour granite chapel in a suburb of Schenectady; and most recently, in southeastern Pennsylvania, of a cryptlike Reformed church sunk among clouds of foliage so dense that the lights were kept burning in midday and the cobwebbed balconies swarmed all summer with wasps. Though Miles has travelled far, he has never broken out of the loose net of Calvinist denominations that places millions of Americans within sight of a spire. He wonders why. He was raised in Ohio, in a village that had lost the tang of the frontier but kept its embattled narrowness, and was confirmed in the same colorless, bean-eating creed that millions in his generation have left behind. He was not, as he understood the term, religious. Ceremony bored him. Closing his eyes to pray made him dizzy. He distinctly heard in the devotional service the overamplified tone of voice that in business matters would signal either ignorance or