True Believers Read online

  That was because some of them were people like Bennis Hannaford.

  The other Edith Lawton, the one she had invented, was a writer—of sorts. She didn’t make any money at it, and she didn’t get her pieces in magazines whose names would be recognized by the reader in the street, but she at least got published, which was doing better than most of the people she met at the “freethought” conferences she attended two or three times a year. “Freethought” was the word “the secular community” preferred to call atheism. The word “atheism” itself was supposed to have been tarred and feathered by the antics of Madalyn Murray O’Hair, and that might actually be true. God only knows, Edith thought—and then mentally crossed out the “God,” because she couldn’t say that aloud to the people she knew, not even as a throwaway expression. She had to be very careful around the collective population of “the secular community.” At the moment, they were her only claim to an identity. She was fifty years old, and she had the feeling that it had gone on too long. She had grown too old. She had made too many of the wrong decisions. She was never going to be the person she wanted to be. She was never going to be anything, really, except Edith Lawton, the class act of Free Thinking magazine and one of the distinctly more minor stars of The Secular Web. Even on The Secular Web, though, she wasn’t able to compete with the heavyweights, with people like Jeffrey Jay Lowder and Farrell Till. Those people put up detailed analyses of biblical scholarship and Roman Catholic theology. She put up short essays about whatever came into her head in the week before her self-imposed deadline, and far too often she seemed to get things wrong. Mostly she was just a picture on a page or on the Internet, an apple-cheeked woman with too much hair and eyes far too small for her face, trying too hard to look literary.

  Now it was five o’clock in the morning, and the alarm had gone off, and she did not want to get up. The world outside her windows was dark. In spite of the fact that she got up at this hour every morning, she had no idea what time it began to get light. She closed her eyes and let herself experience her body, just so that she could reassure herself that she wasn’t getting fat. The last thing she wanted was to turn into one of those fat old atheist women who seemed to infest the movement like a plague of locusts. She sat up and swung her feet off the side of the bed onto the carpet. In the street below her, trucks rumbled endlessly and air brakes screeched. It was February. If she went to the window and opened it, she would be able to feel ice forming on her hand.

  What she did instead was to get her robe and go to the bathroom. She brushed her teeth. She took clean underwear and a clean nightshirt out of the linen cupboard and put them aside to put on after she had had her shower. Then she turned the water on as hot as she could stand it and stepped under it. This bathroom was the only completely apolitical place in the house. The bathroom downstairs had two bumper stickers on magnetic backs tacked to the side of the shower she never used. One said: GOD, PROTECT ME FROM YOUR FOLLOWERS. The other said: GOD IS JUST PRETEND. Soap got in her eyes, and she brushed it out. It was a terrible thing to say, but sometimes she thought the bumper stickers were the best thing about the freethought movement. At least they had something in the way of public support. Freethought itself seemed to be—invisible.

  She turned off the water and stepped out of the shower. She toweled herself off, although not quite dry. She let her hair hang over her shoulder in wet clumps of permanent wave curls. Then she put on clean underwear and a clean nightgown and her robe and headed down the stairs to the kitchen. She got to the landing before her stomach started to knot up.

  “Will?” she called, into the dark of the stairwell.

  There was no answer, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t there. She could hear him there, moving around between the sink and the kitchen table. She thought about going back to her bedroom and brushing out her hair, but that was stupid. It was worse than stupid. After twenty-five years of marriage, it was more like crazy. Then she realized she had said it, in her head: her bedroom, not theirs. Will had only been sleeping down the hall for ten days, and already she was taking it as permanent.

  She undid the belt of her robe and tied it again. She went very carefully down the last of the stairs, straining to hear whatever could be heard. The percolator was on. She could smell the thick scent of the French vanilla coffee Will liked to have for breakfast. He’d made toast, too. He’d even burned it.

  She went across the living room and down the back hall. It took everything she had not to stop on the way to brush her hair. Her big pocketbook was sitting on the coffee table in front of the hearth. She could have gotten the brush out of that and used it. The hall was narrow and claustrophobic. It was always what she had liked least about this house. She couldn’t remember now why they had bought it in the first place. Will had wanted to live out on the Main Line, or in Bucks County, or anywhere it was green. The thought of being stuck out in the suburbs had scared her to death.

  She got to the kitchen door and stopped. Will was sitting in his usual place at the table, his legs stretched out awkwardly in an attempt to make himself more comfortable. He was so tall and thin, anybody who looked at him could tell that he’d played basketball in high school—in much the same way, Edith thought, that anybody could tell he had once been an Eagle Scout. She cleared her throat. He looked up, impassive, and then looked down again. He was reading the Philadelphia Inquirer. His face was open and smooth, as if he had nothing on his mind this morning but the sports scores and that odd knocking noise the car had started to make on the way home from work yesterday. He had the face of someone who had never had anything but a clean conscience at every split second of his life.

  Edith came around to the other side of the table and got a coffee cup and saucer out of the cabinet. She put them down on the counter and reached for the coffeepot. The coffeepot was full, which made her feel suddenly and light-headedly relieved. At least he wasn’t trying to starve her. At least he wasn’t acting as if she didn’t exist.

  She put the coffee cup down in front of her usual place at the table, and then she saw it: the latest copy of Vanity Fair, open to that incredible two-page spread that was the start of the article on Bennis Hannaford. Edith brushed wet hair off her forehead. She had seen the piece before. Will had to know that. She had seen the piece and noted the obvious, which was that Vanity Fair had tried to make Hillary Clinton look glamourous and almost succeeded, but with Bennis Hannaford they hadn’t even had to try.

  She flipped the magazine shut and pushed it into the middle of the table. Then she sat down and said, “Well, that was nice of you.”

  Will looked up. Edith found herself wishing, uneasily, that he would let more emotion into his face. As it was, it was as if a rock were looking at her.

  “I thought you’d be interested,” Will said flatly. “She is a friend of yours. Or was. She was a friend of yours. Isn’t that the way it works with you?”

  Edith stirred the coffee in her cup, even though she hadn’t put any sugar or milk in it. “I don’t know what you’re doing this for. I really don’t. None of what happened here has anything to do with Bennis Hannaford.”

  “She went out of her way for you, do you remember that? She sent you books. She gave you advice. She suggested magazines that might be willing to take your work, real magazines, not that rag you have your face in once a month—”

  “Thank you very much for supporting me in my professional aspirations.”

  “She told you how to put together a book proposal. And it worked. You sold the book.”

  “To a freethought publisher. Don’t make it more than it was. To a freethought publisher, not to the mainstream.”

  “Well, Edith, she told you. You’re not going to make it into the mainstream writing about how God doesn’t exist.”

  “None of this is about Bennis Hannaford,” Edith said.

  “Right,” Will said. “This is about the fact that I came home early from work last week and you were in our very own bed in our very own house with our ve
ry own lawyer, fucking like a rabbit.”

  “Oh, for God’s sake,” Edith said.

  Will’s coffee cup was empty. He got up and put it—and his saucer, and his spoon, and his crumb-filled breakfast dish—in the big stainless-steel sink. Edith didn’t think she had ever heard Will use that word before. He didn’t use words like that. He almost never said “hell” or “damn.” He really was an Eagle Scout.

  Will turned on the water and rinsed off his breakfast things. He put them in the dish rack on the counter and wiped his hands on the towel they kept threaded through the handle of the refrigerator.

  “There’s a funeral on at St. Stephen’s today. Be careful when you go out. What’s-his-name will probably be there with his pickets.”

  “Roy Phipps.”

  “Whatever. I think you’re wrong, you know. I think this does have something to do with Bennis Hannaford. And with—who was it, before? When we had just started going out. That woman at the Foundation for Secular Studies, or whatever it was called. You’ve got this habit, do you know that, Edith? You always kill the ones you love.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  Will looked around—as if he might have something left to do, as if he’d forgotten that he’d done it all already. He wiped his hands one more time and put the dish towel back. Edith just wished that he’d get mad at her. He should be screaming, shouting, stomping around the house. He should have put his fist through a wall. She could still see him standing in the doorway to the bedroom last Wednesday afternoon, leaning against the doorjamb as if he were watching two cats play in the sun. They had been in the sun, too, she and the—the lawyer. She couldn’t make herself say his name anymore: Ian Holden. They had been lying, stark naked, on top of the quilt instead of under it, because they’d both been too damned hot and in too damned much of a hurry. She’d been sitting straddled on top of him and yelling “heigh ho, Silver!” at the top of her lungs every time she’d let her body rise and fall back down into the saddle she’d made of him. She’d been acting more like fifteen than fifty—but she had certainly looked fifty. She’d seen it in the stripe of light that had fallen across them from the opened door. Her hands were pocked and lined. Her breasts sagged.

  “Look,” she said.

  “I have to get to work,” Will said. “I’ve got a project deadline I’m not sure I’m going to make. I’ve been a little distracted lately.”

  “I’ve said I’m sorry. I don’t know what you want me to do except say I’m sorry.”

  “Annie Heston.”

  “What?”

  “The woman from the Foundation for Secular Studies,” Will said. “I remembered her name. I think it’s interesting you didn’t seem to.”

  “I don’t see why we can’t talk about what happened,” Edith said. “I don’t see why we have to go at this as if we were a couple of teenagers playing at how all love is such an agony we’re never going to be the same again.”

  “Right,” Will said.

  He walked out of the kitchen and down the long hall to the living room. Edith heard him open and close the front-hall closet. He would be getting the puffy down vest that was all he ever wore to work no matter how cold the winter. She got out of her chair and went after him, hurrying just a little. When she reached the living room, he was just opening the front door.

  “You can’t leave like this,” she said. “You can’t keep leaving like this. It’s been going on for days.”

  “You used to tell me you hated it, being on top,” Will said. “You used to say it made you feel too self-conscious to concentrate on the sex.”

  “Oh, for Christ’s sake,” Edith said.

  Will went out the door and down the front steps. He did not close the door behind him. Edith went to it and stood in the draft it made to watch him get into his new Jeep Cherokee and get it started. He’d get out again any minute now to scrape ice off the windshield. Either that, or he’d waste a pile of gas letting the ice melt under the power of the defroster. Why was she thinking about the defroster? Why wasn’t Will parking the Jeep in back, where it would be off the street and safe from car thieves?

  Will did not get out of the car to scrape ice off his windshield. Edith found herself thinking of her first husband, the one she had married at twenty, the one who really had been a fundamentalist Christian of sorts. She looked up the street at St. Stephen’s, but nothing seemed to be happening there. Something was happening at St. Anselm’s, but then it always was. She looked into the St. Anselm’s parking lot and saw a man trying to get something large and bulky out of the passenger side of the cab of a pickup truck. The illuminated clock on top of St. Stephen’s said it was twenty after five.

  Edith stepped back into the house and shut the door. She went back across the living room and down the hall and into the kitchen. Her “office” was a sunroom off the kitchen that had once been a porch. Will had enclosed it for her when she had decided that she needed a private space to work in and that the upstairs bedroom was too airless and too isolated to suit.

  She turned on the computer and waited for it to get into gear. She looked at the wall where she tacked up the things that made her feel better, at the eight-and-a-half-by-eleven print of her author photo. Now that she’d seen the pictures of Bennis Hannaford in Vanity Fair, she knew it wasn’t a real author photo. It wasn’t what she would have if her book was being published by a real New York publisher, instead of by the Freethinker Press. She wondered what would happen to her, now, if Will walked out. She hadn’t had a regular day job in years. She didn’t make enough from what she wrote to pay the heating bill on the house, never mind to pay the taxes and keep it up. She couldn’t go back to being a secretary in a world where secretaries had to know things about computers that she was only able to guess. Most of all, she wondered if the fact that Will had walked in on them was going to mean that she and Ian would have to give it up. Then her computer desktop was in front of her, and she found herself clicking her way onto the Internet and onto the Secular Web.

  Sex was like a drug, that was the truth of it, but religion was an even bigger drug, and if it weren’t for religion, she wouldn’t be in the trouble she was in right now. She wasn’t quite sure how that worked out, but she kept it firmly planted in her mind, because it was going to form the theme of her next column, the one that she should have put up a week ago, but that she hadn’t because of Will.

  If there had really been a God, she would not be stuck here, in this converted back porch, while Will refused to talk to her and Bennis Hannaford was on the pages of Vanity Fair.

  6

  There were a lot of people out there who thought Roy Phipps was failing, that he was some kind of fringe fanatic whose only real accomplishment was to make himself look stupid on the six o’clock evening news. Roy Phipps knew better. Roy was, in fact, an expert on the subject of success and failure—not only about what they meant, but about how they happened. Sometimes it struck him, as nothing else did, what a very different life he would have led if he had done what everybody else wanted of him. In this case, “everybody” meant his advisers at Princeton, the men who had seen him through his four years of academic isolation, the ones who had thought they had, in him, a case study of a local boy making good. There had been times in those days when he had sat in one professor’s office or another and silently imagined the tape playing inside the older man’s head: poor boy, fine mind, great future. They were, Roy thought, right about all three things. Nobody could have been poorer than he had been when he had first come up to New Jersey from Millard’s Corner, West Virginia. He had come up early, at the beginning of the summer, because he knew that if he didn’t, he would never be able to save enough money to buy a set of clothes that didn’t have holes in it. Even the Negroes in Millard’s Corner had had more money than the Phippses, and most of them had had sense enough not to have eleven children in the bargain. Roy’s childhood had been a sink-or-swim nightmare in a sea of perpetual failure: his father, always ei
ther too sick or too drunk to work; his mother, so tired she spent most of her time sitting on what was left of their sagging front porch, staring out at the hill in front of their house, doing nothing; his older brothers, always drunk or crazy or banged up so badly they had to spend a week in the hospital. They had had no electricity and no running water. When they had wanted water, they had to go out to the yard and pump it by hand. They had had no money, either, because whenever money came into the house it went out again: for food, for milk, for used clothing at the St. Vincent de Paul Shop in the next town. Sometimes there was no money for weeks, and then the older boys brought back kill from the woods in the back or even from out on the highway. They would skin it and give it to their oldest sister, Loretta, who had been named after Loretta Lynn. Loretta would gut it and cook it in a big cast-iron pot that had never been cleaned very well in all the time that Roy had known it. On those nights, Roy had gone out back and lain in the grass rather than eat, because he hadn’t been able to stand it: the ersatz broth already crusting over with animal fat; the pieces of squirrel or racoon or muskrat floating to the surface. Sometimes the moon would rise up over him and fill him full of light. That was when he would know, for sure, that he was different than they were—better, and colder. He was so cold, he was a block of dry ice. Anybody who tried to touch him would get burned. When the day finally came to leave, he hitchhiked into Wheeling and got the bus at the Greyhound station without bothering to say good-bye. They wouldn’t have known where he was going. He had forged his mother’s signature on the papers that needed signing for Princeton. None of them knew he had ever applied to college. His mother didn’t even know that he had managed to stay in high school.