GOT IT RIGHT.'
Weekdays in Toronto: : A.M., Morning Prayer; : P.M., Evening Prayer; Holy Eucharist every Tuesday, Wednesday, and Friday. I prefer these weekday services to Sunday worship; there are fewer distractions when I have Grace Church on-the-Hill almost to myself-and there are no sermons. Owen never liked sermons-although I think he would have enjoyed delivering a few sermons himself. The other thing preferable about the weekday services is that no one is there against his will. That's another distraction on Sundays. Who hasn't suffered the experience of having an entire family seated in the pew in front of you, the children at war with each other and sandwiched between the mother and father who are forcing them to go to church? An aura of stale arguments almost visibly clings to the hasty clothing of the children. 'This is the one morning I can sleep in!' the daughter's linty sweater says. 'I get so bored!' says the upturned collar of the son's suit jacket. Indeed, the children imprisoned between their parents move constantly and restlessly in the pew; they are so crazy with self-pity, they seem ready to scream. The stern-looking father who occupies the aisle seat has his attention interrupted by fits of vacancy-an expression so perfectly empty accompanies his sternness and his concentration that I think I glimpse an underlying truth to the man's churchgoing: that he is doing it only for the children, in the manner that some men with much vacancy of expression are committed to a marriage. When the children are old enough to
decide about church for themselves, this man will stay home on Sundays. The frazzled mother, who is the lesser piece of bread to this family sandwich-and who is holding down that part of the pew from which the most unflattering view of the preacher in the pulpit is possible (directly under the preacher's jowls)-is trying to keep her hand off her daughter's lap. If she smooths out her daughter's skirt only one more time, both of them know that the daughter will start to cry. The son takes from his suit jacket pocket a tiny, purple truck; the father snatches this away-with considerable bending and crushing of the boy's fingers in the process. 'Just one more obnoxious bit of behavior from you,' the father whispers harshly, '' and you will be grounded-for the rest of the day.''
'The whole rest of the day?' the boy says, incredulous. The apparent impossibility of sustaining wnobnoxious behavior for even part of the day weighs heavily on the lad, and overwhelms him with a claustrophobia as impenetrable as the claustrophobia of church itself. The daughter has begun to cry.
'Why is she crying?' the boy asks his father, who doesn't answer. 'Are you having your period?' the boy asks his sister, and the mother leans across the daughter's lap and pinches the son's thigh-a prolonged, twisting sort of pinch. Now he is crying, too. Time to pray! The kneeling pads flop down, the family flops forward. The son manages the old hymnal trick; he slides a hymnal along the pew, placing it where his sister will sit when she's through praying.
'Just one more thing,' the father mutters in his prayers. But how can you pray, thinking about the daughter's period? She looks old enough to be having her period, and young enough for it to be the first time. Should you move the hymnal before she's through praying and sits on it? Should you pick up the hymnal and bash the boy with it? But the father is the one you'd like to hit; and you'd like to pinch the mother's thigh, exactly as she pinched her son. How can you pray? It is time to be critical of Canon Mackie's cassock; it is the color of pea soup. It is time to be critical of Warden Harding's wart. And Deputy Warden Holt is a racist; he is always complaining that 'the West Indians have taken over Bathurst Street'; he tells a terrible story about standing in line in the copying-machine store-two young black men are having the entire contents of a pornographic magazine duplicated. For this offense, Deputy Warden Holt wants to have the young men arrested. How can you pray? The weekday services are almost unattended-quiet, serene. The drumming wing-whir of the slowly moving overhead fan is metronomic, enhancing to the concentration-and from the fourth and fifth rows of pews, you can feel the air moving regularly against your face. In the Canadian climate, the fan is supposed to push the warm, rising air down-back over the chilly congregation. But it is possible to imagine you're in a missionary church, in the tropics. Some say that Grace Church is overly lighted. The dark-stained, wooden buttresses against the high, vaulted, white-plaster ceiling accentuate how well lit the church is; despite the edifice's predominance of stone and stained glass, there are no corners lost to darkness or to gloom. Critics say the light is too artificial, and too contemporary for such an old building; but surely the overhead fan is contemporary, too-and not propelled by Mother Nature-and no one complains about the fan. The wooden buttresses are quite elaborate-they are wainscoted, and even the lines of the wainscoting are visible on the buttresses, despite their height; that's how brightly lit the church is. Harold Crosby, or any other Announcing Angel, could never be concealed in these buttresses. Any angel-lowering or angel-raising apparatus would be most visible. The miracle of the Nativity would seem less of a miracle here- indeed, I have never watched a Christinas pageant at Grace Church. I have already seen that miracle; once was enough. The Nativity of ' is all the Nativity I need. That Christmas, the evenings were long; dinners with Dan, or with my grandmother, were slow and solemn. My enduring perception of those nights is that Lydia's wheelchair needed to be oiled and that Dan complained, with uncharacteristic bitterness, about what a mess amateurs could make of A Christmas Carol, Dan's mood was not improved by the frequent presence of our neighbor-and Dan's most veteran amateur-Mr. Fish.
'I'd so looked forward to being Scrooge,' Mr. Fish would say, pretending to stop by Front Street, after dinner, for some other reason-whenever he saw Dan's car in the driveway. Sometimes it was to once again agree with my grand-
mother about Gravesend's pending leash law; Mr. Fish and my grandmother were in favor of leashing dogs. Mr. Fish gave no indication that he was even slightly troubled by his hypocrisy on this
