doubt? Owen was a natural in the belief business, but my appreciation of Mr. Merrill and my contempt for Mr. Wiggin were based on common sense. I took a particularly Yankee view of them; the Wheelwright in me was all in favor of Lewis Merrill, all opposed to Dudley Wiggin. We Wheelwrights do not scoff at the appearance of things. Things often are as they appear. First impressions matter. That clean, well-lit place of worship, which was the Congregational Church-its pristine white clapboards, its tall, clear windows that welcomed the view of branches against the sky-that was a first impression that lasted for me; it was a model of purity and no-nonsense, against which the Episcopal gloom of stone and tapestry and stained glass could pose no serious competition. And Pastor Merrill was also good-looking-in an intense, pale, slightly undernourished way. He had a boyish face-a sudden, winning, embarrassed smile that contradicted a fairly constant look of worry that more usually gave him the expression of an anxious child. An errant lock of hair flopped on his forehead when he looked down upon his sermon, or bent over his Bible-his hair problem was the unruly result of a pronounced widow's peak, which further contributed to his boyishness. And he was always misplacing his glasses, which he didn't seem to need-that is, he could read without them, he could look out upon his congregation without them (at least not appearing to be blind); then, all of a sudden, he would commence a frantic search for them. It was endearing; so was his slight stutter, because it made us nervous for him-afraid for him, should he have his eloquence snatched from him and be struck down with a crippling speech impediment. He was articulate, but he never made speech seem effortless; on the contrary, he exhibited what hard work it was-to make his faith, in tandem with his doubt, clear; to speak well, in spite of his stutter. And then, to add to Mr. Merrill's appeal, we pitied him for his family. His wife was from California, the sunny part. My grandmother used to speculate that she had been one of those permanently tanned, bouncy blondes-a perfectly wholesome type, but entirely too easily persuaded that good health and boundless energy for good deeds were the natural results of clean living and practical values. No one had told her that health and energy and the Lord's work are harder to come by in bad weather. Mrs. Merrill suffered in New Hampshire. She suffered visibly. Her blondness turned to dry straw; her cheeks and nose turned a raw salmon color, her eyes watered- she caught every flu, every common cold there was; no epidemic missed her. Aghast at the loss of her California color, she tried makeup; but this turned her skin to clay. Even in summer, she couldn't tan; she turned so dead white in the winter, there was nothing for her to do in the sun but burn. She was sick all the time, and this cost her her energy; she grew listless; she developed a matronly spread, and the vague, unfocused look of someone over forty who might be sixty-or would be, tomorrow. All this happened to Mrs. Merrill while her children were still small; they were sickly, too. Although they were successful scholars, they were so often ill and missed so many school
days that they had to repeat whole grades. Two of them were older than I was, but not a lot older; one of them was even demoted to my grade-I don't remember which one; I don't even remember which sex. That was another problem that the Merrill children suffered: they were utterly forgettable. If you didn't see the Merrill children for weeks at a time, when you saw them again, they appeared to have been replaced by different children. The Rev. Lewis Merrill had the appearance of a plain man who, with education and intensity, had risen above his ordinariness; and his rise manifested itself in his gift of speech. But his family labored under a plainness so virulent that the dullness of his wife and children outshone even their proneness to illness, which was remarkable. It was said that Mrs. Merrill had a drinking problem-?*r, at least, that her modest intake of alcohol was in terrible conflict with her long list of prescription drugs. One of the children once swallowed all the drugs in the house and had to have its stomach pumped. And following a kind of pep talk that Mr. Merrill gave to the youngest Sunday school class, one of his own children pulled the minister's hair and spit in his face. When the Merrill children were growing up, one of them vandalized a cemetery. Here was our pastor, clearly bright, clearly grappling with all the most thoughtful elements of religious faith, and doubt; yet, clearly, God had cursed his family. There was simply no comparable sympathy for the Rev. Dudley Wiggin-Captain Wiggin, some of his harsher critics called him. He was a hale and hearty type, he had a grin like a gash in his face; his smile was the smirk of a restless survivor. He looked like a former downed pilot, a veteran of crash landings, or shoot-outs in the sky-Dan Needham told me that Captain Wiggin had been a bomber pilot in the war, and Dan would know: he was a sergeant himself, in Italy and in Brazil, where he was a cryptographic technician. And even Dan was appalled at the crassness with which Dudley Wiggin directed the Christmas Pageant-and Dan was more tolerant of amateur theatrical performances than the average Gravesend citizen. Mr. Wiggin injected a kind of horror-movie element into the Christmas miracle; to the rector, every Bible story was-if properly understood-threatening. And his wife, clearly, had not suffered. A former stewardess, Barbara Wiggin was a brash, backslapping redhead; Mr. Wiggin called her 'Barb,' which was how she introduced herself in various charity-inspired phone calls.
'Hi! It's Barb Wiggin! Is your mommy or your daddy home?'
She was very much a barb, if not a nail, in Owen's side, because she enjoyed picking him up by his pants-she would grab him by his belt, her fist in his belly, and lift him to her stewardess's face: a frankly handsome, healthy, efficient face. 'Oh, you're a cute-y!' she'd tell Owen. 'Don't you ever dare grow!'
Owen hated her; he always begged Dan to cast her as a prostitute or a child-molester, but The Gravesend Players did not offer many roles of that kind, and Dan admitted to thinking of no other good use for her. Her own children were huge, oafish athletes, irritatingly 'well rounded.' AW the Wiggins played in touch-football games, which they organized, every Sunday afternoon, on the parish-house lawn. Yet-incredibly!-we moved to the Episcopal Church. It was not for the touch football, which Dan and my mother and I despised. I could only guess that Dan and my mother had discussed having children of their own, and Dan had wanted his children to be baptized as Episcopalians-although, as I've said, the whole church business didn't appear to matter very much to him. Perhaps my mother took Dan's Episcopalianism more
