Anne Tyler - Saint Maybe

Ian invited his parents to a Christian Fellowship Picnic. “To a what?” Doug asked, stalling for time. (Who cared what it was called? It was bound to be something embarrassing.)

“Each of us invites people we’d like to join in fellowship with,” Ian said in that deadly earnest way he had. “People who aren’t members of our congregation.”

“I thought that church of yours didn’t believe in twisting folkses’ arms.”

“It doesn’t. We don’t. This is only for fellowship.”

They were watching the evening news — Doug, Bee, and Ian. Now Bee looked away from a skyful of bomber airplanes to say, “I’ve never understood what people mean by ‘fellowship.’ ”

“Just getting together, Mom. Nothing very mysterious.”

“Then why even say it? Why not say ‘getting together’?”

Ian didn’t take offense. He said, “Reverend Emmett wants us to ask, oh, people we care about and people who wonder what we believe and people who might feel hostile to us.”

“We’re not hostile!”

“Then maybe you would qualify for one of the other groups,” Ian said mildly.

Bee looked at Doug. Doug pulled himself together (he had a sense of struggling toward the surface) and said, “Isn’t it sort of early for a picnic? We’re still getting frost at night!”

“This is an indoor picnic,” Ian told him.

“Then what’s the point?”

“Reverend Emmett’s mother, Sister Priscilla, has relatives out in the valley who own a horse farm. They’re in Jamaica for two weeks and they told her she could stay in the house.”

“Did they say she could throw a church picnic in the house?”

“We won’t do any harm.”

Bee was still looking at Doug. (She wanted him to say no, of course.) The bombers had given way to a moisturizer commercial.

“Well, it’s nice of you to think of us, son,” Doug said, “but—”

“I’ve invited Mrs. Jordan, too.”

“Mrs. Jordan?”

“Right.”

“ Jessie Jordan?”

“She’s always wanting to know what Second Chance is all about.”

This put a whole different light on things. How could they refuse when a mere neighbor had accepted? Drat Jessie Jordan, with her lone-woman eagerness to go anywhere she was asked!

And then she had the nerve to make out she was being so daring, so rakish. On the way to Greenspring Valley (for they did end up attending, taking their own car which was easier on Bee’s hips than the bus), Mrs. Jordan bounced and burbled like a six-year-old. “Isn’t this exciting?” she said. She was dressed as if headed for a Buckingham Palace garden party — cartwheel hat ringed with flowers, swishy silk dress beneath her drab winter coat. “You know, there are so many alternative religions springing up these days,” she said. “I worry I’ll fall hopelessly behind.”

“And wouldn’t that be a shame,” Bee said sourly. She wore an ordinary gray sweat suit, not her snazzy warm-up suit with the complicated zippers; so her hands must be giving her trouble today. Doug himself was dressed as if for golfing, carefully color-coordinated to compensate for what might be misread as sloppiness on Bee’s part. He kept the car close behind Second Chance’s rented bus. Sometimes Daphne’s little thumbtack of a face bobbed up in the bus’s rear window, smiling hugely and mouthing elaborate messages no one could catch. “ What did she say? What?” Bee asked irritably.

“Can’t quite make it out, hon.”

They traveled deeper and deeper into country that would be luxurious in the summer but was now a vast network of bare branches lightly tinged with green. Pasturelands extended for miles. The driveway they finally turned into was too long to see to the end, and the white stone house was larger than some hotels. “Oh! Would you look!” Mrs. Jordan cried, clapping her hands.

Doug didn’t like to admit it, but he felt easier about Second Chance now that he saw such a substantial piece of property connected to it. He wondered if the relatives were members themselves. Probably not, though.

They parked on the paved circle in front. Passengers poured from the bus — first the children, then the grownups. Doug fancied he could tell the members from the visitors. The members had a dowdy, worn, slumping look; the visitors were dressier and full of determined gaiety.

It occurred to him that Bee could be mistaken for a member.

Carrying baskets, coolers, and Thermos jugs, everyone followed Reverend Emmett’s mother up the flagstone walk. They entered the front hall with its slate floor and center staircase, and several people said, “Ooh!”

“Quite a joint,” Doug murmured to Bee.

Bee hushed him with a look.

They crossed velvety rugs and gleaming parquet and finally arrived in an enormous sun porch with a long table at its center and modern, high-gloss chairs and lounges set all about. “The conservatory,” Reverend Emmett’s mother said grandly. She was a small, finicky woman in a matched sweater set and a string of pearls and a pair of chunky jeans that seemed incongruous, downright wrong, as if she’d forgotten to change into the bottom half of her outfit. “Let’s spread our picnic,” she said. “Emmett, did you bring the tablecloth?”

“I thought you were bringing that.”

“Well, never mind. Just put my potato salad here at this end.”

Reverend Emmett wore a sporty polo shirt, a tan windbreaker, and black dress trousers. (He and his mother belonged in Daphne’s block set, the one where you mismatch heads and legs and torsos.) He put a covered bowl where she directed, and then the others laid out platters of fried chicken, tubs of coleslaw, and loaves of home-baked bread. The table — varnished so heavily that it seemed wet — gradually disappeared. Streaky squares of sunlight from at least a dozen windows warmed the room, and people started shedding their coats and jackets. “Dear Lord in heaven,” Reverend Emmett said (catching Doug with one arm half out of a sleeve), “the meal is a bountiful gift from Your hands and the company is more so. We thank You for this joyous celebration. Amen.”

It was true there was something joyous in the atmosphere. Everyone converged upon the food, clucking and exclaiming. The children turned wild. Even Agatha, ponderously casual in a ski sweater and stirrup pants, pushed a boy back with shy enthusiasm when he gave her a playful nudge at the punch bowl. The members steered the guests magnanimously toward the choice dishes; they took on a proprietary air as they pointed out particular features of the house. “Notice the leaded panes,” they said, as if they themselves were intimately familiar with them. The guests (most as suspicious as Doug and Bee, no doubt) showed signs of thawing. “Why, this is not bad,” one silver-haired man said — the father, Doug guessed, of the hippie-type girl at his elbow. Doug had hold of too much dinner now to shake hands, but he nodded at the man and said, “How do. Doug Bedloe.”

“Mac McClintock,” the man said. “You just visiting?”

“Right.”

“His son is Brother Ian,” the hippie told her father. “I just think Brother Ian is so faithful,” she said to Doug.

“Well … thanks.”

“My daughter Grade,” Mac said. “Have you met?”

“No, I don’t believe we have.”

“We’ve met!” Gracie said. “I’m the one who fetched your grandchildren from school every day when your wife was in the hospital.”

“Oh, yes,” Doug said. He didn’t have the faintest memory of it.

“I fetched the children for Brother Ian and then Brother Ian closed up the rat holes in my apartment.”

“Really,” Doug said.

“My daughter lives in a slum,” Mac told him.

“Now, Daddy.”