Rick Moody - The Diviners

His wife, the forgiver and forgetter, yells to him that he should come down and have some breakfast, and she is right, of course, so he comes down. He’s been up since dawn, in his office. He asks, shouting as he descends the stairs, if there is any news on the answering machine. His wife says not. He asks if Annabel called again. She says not. He says he slept badly, and she slept badly, too, and yet there was no moment when they reached out for each other across the old lumpy king-size mattress. She asks what he will do today, though she knows what he will do today. And he knows what she will do, which is work on her textbook and then go to the office, where she has a couple of hours of private practice, and during these hours he agrees to be back at the house, to answer the phone and to keep an eye on Max.

“What’s the sermon about?” she asks.

“‘It is a dreadful thing to fall into the hands of the living God,’” he says. “Oh, and another section: ‘You sympathized with those in prison and joyfully accepted the confiscation of your property, because you knew that you yourselves had better and lasting possessions.’”

He pries a piece of burnt toast from the toaster, butters it without conviction. “Good news, if true.”

“Maybe if we told Max that his property would be joyfully confiscated?”

“He’ll come around,” the reverend says.

He doesn’t even sit at the kitchen table. He stands. The toast is a disappointment.

“I have no point of view,” he offers. “My angle is that I write this sermon at a dark moment in human history, and I am a mediocre man, and these are mediocre times. None of the gauzy apocalyptic promises will cover over all of this, the daily horror of people at their worst and most selfish. I don’t quite know what to say after that.”

His wife has a gentle expression of disapproval, which involves some mix of eyebrows and one corner of the mouth appearing to smile while the other frowns. This is her commentary on the sermon he proposes. He chokes down the toast in silence before banishing the crusts to the trash barrel. Then he rinses his plate and houses it in the drying rack.

“I wish you lots of inspiration,” she says, and excuses herself. Her office was formerly Annabel’s bedroom. It still has a few movie posters in it, as well as a radically sloping ceiling that would make it uncomfortable for the men in the household. His wife’s voice disappears into the living room, reminding him of various responsibilities, and there’s more, distantly, from upstairs. The telephone rings as soon as he has alighted at his own desk, and it’s the police from New York City. Wanting to know again if William has made contact with the Duffys. The reverend has the typewriter turned on. He has just written these lines:

If you believe the reports, Martin Luther King Jr. was not, when writing his dissertation, good at citing his sources. If you believe the reports, President Kennedy kept files on his opponents and had chemically enhanced romps in the White House.

When it is his turn, he tells the police what he knows, that his son appeared on Friday night and disappeared almost immediately, and they have not heard from him since. He says that his son did not perform the crime of which he is accused, and he says this as a matter of course. And he whites out some of his homiletic text by hand while he talks to the police. There is some back and forth with the detective on the other end of the line about the exact time that William appeared in the house on Friday, the time he left, and so forth. What was he wearing? “He was well turned out,” the reverend says, and the police ask if he would please call if William attempts to contact them, and the reverend says, “Of course.” Soon after, Annabel calls and offers to come and stay with them until it is ironed out, and she asks how the reverend can get any work done, and the reverend tells Annabel not to come. She has her job, her scripts, and she should have time for these things. His wife, who has by now picked up the other extension, agrees.

“Where’s Max?” Annabel says.

“In his room,” his wife says. “Where, for the moment, he belongs.”

“Did your mother —” the reverend says.

“She told me,” Annabel says. “I have a feeling he’s going to —”

“Good-bye, sweetheart, work hard,” the reverend says, and leaves the women to it.

Has he mentioned in the sermon yet that everyone needs to get their pledge cards in? Yes, it’s the time of year when every sermon features a hundred different appeals for cash money. ’Tis the season to remind the affluent that the First Congregational Church of Newton is a symbol of civic pride and that its upkeep is not inexpensive, since the building was constructed in 1721, after an earlier church was outgrown. It has been in continuous service ever since. It has had only twenty parsons in all those years, in part because of a pair of long-suffering types in the nineteenth century. It is worth reminding the congregation of this eminent history, and that the Reverend Duffy is now in fourth place on the all-time list in terms of duration of service. He scrawls on a notepad: Remember to ask for pledges.

In the middle of the afternoon, the reverend does what he never does, what he abominates as a pastor and an ethicist. He goes to watch television in the family room. Max is down there, wearing a pair of torn jeans and a T-shirt and an old mohair cardigan. Father sits next to son, on the couch, and neither says anything for a while, especially as the space of conversation is currently occupied by some kind of talk show featuring women of the plus sizes. The question is whether plus-size women are as sexy as women of regular sizes. What the reverend does believe, in the chatter of the indignant plus-size women, is that Max knows where his brother is.

“Do you know where he is? Because I think you know where he is. And I think your sister knows, too, and I wish you would tell me, so that we can make sure he is all right and isn’t making things worse for himself. This is not a matter for individuals. It is a matter for families.”

Max pretends to be watching the plus-size women.

“He didn’t tell me where he was going.”

“Your story is full of holes. It’s all going to come out eventually, and I don’t want you feeling worse for what you have done later. I’m offering you the chance to tell me what you know so that you won’t feel ashamed. Telling me will lighten your heart.”

Max gets up unceremoniously, goes upstairs. Slams his door. The Reverend Duffy is now alone with the plus-size women and he sits through several commercial breaks, always coming back to the talk show, and then he falls into a stuporous slumber that comes on like fever. There is a sick member of the congregation, Mrs. Milliken, but he forgets about her. There is the bereaved family, the Ericksons, whose son just died of lymphoma. The stupor wipes away the Ericksons. The great forgetting of afternoon television is upon him, and he is asleep, and the commercials are singing their jingles into his slumbering ears, and they are telling him about excellent medications that he should ask his doctor about, Lipitor and Nexium and Elysium, they are telling him about feminine products, and they are telling him various things that will help him with the family wash, and they are telling him about other programs that he might enjoy, and all of these things are much louder than the responsibility of the last Sunday of the church calendar and the manifold signs of the end of the age, and he hears of Lipitor and Nexium and also of the stars falling from the sky and the heavenly bodies trembling. Never have the End Times been more apparent than in the combination of ranting of plus-size women and the traumatic napping of an insomniac Reverend Duffy, and when he wakes a half hour later, with the television unaccountably turned off, he feels acutely the disgust of a violent waking. He’s nauseated and disgusted and hates the world, and hates himself for having watched the plus-size women when he should have been calling on the Ericksons, but instead of calling on the Ericksons, he goes directly upstairs to the office and to the typewriter, which still trembles and hums in the way that typewriters do: