The Second Coming

woman.”
    â€œYes.”
    No. Marion was not lovely, even before she got “heavy,” never had been lovely except for her good gray eyes and heavy wide winged eyebrows.
    Why had he married her? It was not, was it? because she was Bertie’s sister and Bertie owned the firm and Marion owned forty million dollars?
    No, he married her, hadn’t he? because she was touching, with her not too bad polio limp, and even pretty in a gawky Yankeefied way—even now when he thought of her at Northport, he saw her in a blue middy blouse—middy blouse? was such a thing possible, was it in a photograph, or did he imagine it?—and her direct gray-eyed gaze a whole world removed from a Sweetbriar girl or a Carolina coed who had six different ways of looking at you and with all six had seen you coming before you saw her.
    No, he married her because he pleased her so much. It is not a small thing to be able to make someone happy so easily.
    No, he married her for the very outlandishness of it, marrying her in Northport being as far as he could get from where he had come from.
    No, he married her because she was such a good cheerful forthright Northern Episcopal Christian and wanted him to be one too and he tried and even imagined he believed it—again for the very outlandishness of it, taking for his own a New York Episcopal view of an Anglican view of a Roman view of a Jewish Happening. Might it not be true for this very reason? Could anybody but God have gotten away with such outlandishness, contriving to have rich Long Island Episcopalians who if they had no use for anything had no use for Jews, worship a Jew?
    No, he married her for none of these reasons and for all of them. Marry her for money and the firm? Yes and no. Marry her because he could make her happy? Yes and no. Marry her because she was as far away as he could get from Mississippi? Yes and no. And from you, old mole? Yes. And get Jesus Christ in the bargain? Why not?
    Yes, it was all of these but most of all it was the offhandedness and smiling secret coolness with which he did it, getting it all and even going the Gospels one better because the Gospels spoke of the children of this world and the children of light and set one against the other and he was both and had both and why not? Why not marry her?
    Wasn’t it possible to believe in God like Pascal’s cold-blooded bettor, because there was everything to gain if you were right and nothing to lose if you were wrong?
    For a while it seemed that it was possible.
    Then it seemed not to matter.
    In all honesty it was easier to believe it in cool Long Island for its very outrageousness where nobody believed anything very seriously than in hot Carolina where everybody was a Christian and found unbelief unbelievable.
    After he married Marion, she seemed happier than ever, gave herself to church work, doing so with pleasure, took pleasure in him—and suddenly took pleasure in eating. She married, gave herself to good works, heaved a great sigh of relief, and began to eat. She ate and ate and ate. She grew too heavy for her hip joint already made frail and porous by polio. The ball of her femur drove into the socket of her pelvis, melted, and fused. She took to a wheelchair, ate more than ever, did more good works. She spent herself for the poor and old and wretched of North Carolina. She was one of the good triumphant Yankees who helped out the poor old South. In and out of meetings flew her wheelchair, her arms burly as a laborer’s. Fueled by holy energy, money, and brisk good cheer, she spun past slack-jawed Southerners, fed the hungry, clothed the naked, paid the workers in her mills a living wage, the very lintheads her piratical Yankee father had despoiled and gotten rich on: a mystery. Another mystery: her sanctity and gluttony. She truly gave herself to others, served God and her fellow man with a good and cheerful heart—and ate and ate and ate, her eyes as round and glittering as a lover’s.
    It had been a pleasure for him to please and serve her. Only he, she said, had the strength and deftness to lean into the Rolls, take her by the waist while she took him by the neck, and in one quick powerful motion swing her out and around and into the wheelchair. Yamaiuchi was strong enough to do it but she wouldn’t let him. That’s why Yamaiuchi hates me, he thought. Had she promised him something in her will and hadn’t come through? To the A & P,