Museums and Women by John Updike Read Free Book Online Page A

dishonesty. His profession prepared him to believe that our minds, with their crackle of self-importance, are merely collections of electrical circuits. He saw nothing about his body worth resurrecting. God, concretely considered, had a way of merging with that corner of the church ceiling that showed signs of water leakage. That men should be good, he did not doubt, or that social order demands personal sacrifice; but the Heavenly hypothesis, as it had fallen upon his earsthese forty years of Sundays, crushes us all to the same level of unworthiness, and redeems us all indiscriminately, elevating especially, these days, the irresponsible—the unemployable, the riotous, the outrageous, the one in one hundred that strays. More like the ninety-five in one hundred that stray. Neither God nor His ministers displayed love for deacons—indeed, Pharisees were the first objects of their wrath. Why persist, then, in work so thoroughly thankless, begging for pledges, pinching and scraping to save decaying old buildings, facing rings of Sunday-school faces baked to adamant cynicism by hours of television-watching, attending fruitless meetings where the senile and the frustrated dominate, arguing, yawning, missing sleep, the company of his wife, the small, certain joys of home? Why? He had wanted to offer his children the Christian option, to begin them as citizens as he had begun; but all have left home now, are in college or married, and, as far as he can tactfully gather, are unchurched. So be it. He has done his part.
    A new job offer arrives, irresistible, inviting him to New England. In Pennsylvania the Fellowship Society gives him a farewell dinner; his squad of Sunday-school teachers presents him with a pen set; he hands in his laborious financial records, his neat minutes of vague proceedings. He bows his head for the last time in that dark sanctuary smelling of moldering plaster and buzzing with captive wasps. He is free. Their new house is smaller, their new town is wooden. He does not join a church; he stays home reading the Sunday paper. Wincing, he flicks past religious news. He drives his wife north to admire the turning foliage. His evenings are immense. He reads through Winston Churchill’s history of the Second World War; he installs elaborate electrical gadgets around the house,which now and then give his wife a shock. They go to drive-in movies, and sit islanded in acres of fornication. They go bowling and square-dancing, and feel ridiculous, too ponderous and slow. His wife, these years of evenings alone, has developed a time-passing pattern—television shows spaced with spells of sewing and dozing—into which he fits awkwardly. She listens to him grunt and sigh and grope for words. But Sunday mornings are the worst, stirred up by the swish and roar of churchward traffic on the street outside. He stands by the window; the sight of three little girls, in white beribboned hats, bluebird coats, and dresses of starched organdy, scampering home from Sunday school, gives him a pang unholy in its keenness.
    Behind him, his wife says, “Why don’t you go to church?”
    “No, I think I’ll wash the Dodge.”
    “You washed it last Sunday.”
    “Maybe I should take up golf.”
    “You want to go to church. Go. It’s no sin.”
    “Not the Methodists. Those bastards in Iowa nearly worked me to death.”
    “What’s the pretty white one in the middle of town? Congregational. We’ve never been Congregationalists; they’d let you alone.”
    “Are you sure you wouldn’t like to take a drive?”
    “I get carsick with all this starting and stopping in New England. To tell the truth, Miles, it would be a relief to have you out of the house.”
    Already he is pulling off his sweater, to make way for a clean shirt. He puts on a coat that doesn’t match his pants. “I’ll go,” he says, “but I’ll be damned if I’ll join.”
    He arrives late, and sits staring at the ceiling. It is a wooden church, and the beams