“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.”
“She makes less money than I made during the Depression and then she gives it all to this Church of the Second Rate.”
“Second Chance! And I do not; I tithe. I don’t have to do even that, if I don’t want to. It’s all in secret; we don’t believe in public collection. You act like they’re defrauding me or something.”
“They’re a church, aren’t they? A church’ll take its people for whatever it can get,” Mac said. He glanced at Doug. “Hope that doesn’t offend you.”
“Me? No, no.”
“Want to hear what I hate most about churches? They think they know the answers. I really hate that. It’s the people who don’t know the answers who are going to heaven, I tell you.”
“But!” his daughter said. “The minute you say that, you see, you yourself become a person who knows the answers.”
Mac gave Doug an exasperated look and chomped into a drumstick.
Bee was sitting on a chaise longue with her legs stretched out, sharing a plate with Daphne. She was the only guest who seemed to have remained outside the gathering. Everyone else was laughing, growing looser, circulating from group to group in a giddy, almost tipsy way. (Although of course there wasn’t a bit of alcohol; just that insipid fruit punch.) Reverend Emmett was holding forth on his inspiration for this picnic. “I felt led,” he told a circle of women. He had the breathless look of an athlete being interviewed after a triumph. “I was listening to one of our brothers a couple of weeks ago; he said he wished he could share his salvation with his parents except they never would agree to come to services. And all at once I felt led to say, ‘Why should it be services? Why not a picnic?’ ”
The women smiled and nodded and their glasses flashed. (One of them was Jessie Jordan, looking thrilled.) An extremely fat young woman threaded her way through the crowd with a plastic garbage bag, saying, “Plates? Cups? Keep your forks, though. Dessert is on its way.”
What could they serve for dessert if they didn’t believe in sugar? Fruit salad, it turned out, in little foil dishes. Thomas carried one of the trays around. When he came to Doug he said, “Grandpa? Are you having a good time?”