“Have you had the shelter long?”
“We had it built in the spring,” said Mrs. Pastern. “That hedge is flowering quince. Over there is our little salad garden. Lettuce and herbs. That sort of thing.”
“I would like to see the shelter,” the bishop said.
She was hurt?a hurt that seemed to reverberate all the way back to her childhood, when she had been wounded by the discovery that the friends who came to call on rainy days had not come because they liked her but to eat her cookies and hog her toys. She had never been able to put a good countenance on selfishness, and she scowled as they passed the birdbath and the painted ducks. The gnomes with their mobcaps looked down on the three of them as she unlocked the fire door with a key that she wore around her neck.
“Charming,” the bishop said. “Charming. Why, I see you even have a library.”
“Yes,” she said. “The books were chosen for their humor, tranquility, and hopefulness.”
“It is an unfortunate characteristic of ecclesiastical architecture,” said the bishop, “that the basement or cellar is confined to a small space under the chancel. This gives us very little room for the salvation of the faithful?a characteristic, I should perhaps add, of our denomination. Some churches have commodious basements, But I shan’t take up any more of your time.” He strode back across the lawn toward the house, put his cocktail glass on the terrace wall, and gave her his blessing.
She sat down heavily on her terrace steps and watched the car drive off. He had not come to praise her, she knew that. Was it impious of her to suspect that he was traveling around his domain picking and choosing sanctuaries? Was it possible that he meant to exploit his holiness in this way? The burden of modern life, even if it smelled of plastics?as it seemed to?bore down cruelly on the supports of God, the Family, and the Nation. The burden was top-heavy, and she seemed to hear the foundations give. She had believed all her life in the holiness of the priesthood, and if this belief was genuine, why hadn’t she offered the bishop the safety of her shelter at once? But if he believed in the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come, why was a shelter anything that he might need?
The telephone rang, and she answered its ringing with a forced lightheartedness. It was a woman named Beatrice, who came to clean Mrs. Pastern’s house two days a week.
“This is Beatrice, Mrs. Pastern,” she said, “and there is something I think you ought to know. As you know, I’m not a gossip. I’m not like that Adele, who goes around from lady to lady telling that the So-and-Sos aren’t sleeping together, and that So-and-So had six empty whiskey bottles in his wastebaskets, and that nobody came to So-and-So’s cocktail party. I’m not like that Adele. I’m not a gossip, and you know that, Mrs. Pastern. But there is something I think you ought to know. I worked for Mrs. Flannagan today, and she showed me a key, and she said it was a key to your bomb shelter, and that your husband gave it to her. I don’t know whether it was the truth or not, but I thought you ought to know.”
“Thank you, Beatrice.”
He had dragged her good name through a hundred escapades, debauched her excellence, and thrown away her love, but she had never imagined that he would betray her in their plans for the end of the world. She poured what was left of the bishop’s cocktail into a glass. She hated the taste of gin, but her accumulated troubles had grown to seem like the pain of an illness, and gin dimmed this, although it inflamed her indignation. Outside, the sky darkened, the wind changed, it began to rain. What could she do? She couldn’t go back to Mother. Mother didn’t have a shelter. She couldn’t pray for guidance. The bishop’s apparent worldliness had reduced the comforts of heaven. She couldn’t contemplate her husband’s foolish profligacy without drinking more gin. And then she remembered the night?the night of judgment when they had agreed to let Aunt Ida and Uncle Ralph burn, when she had sacrificed her three-year-old niece and he his five-year-old nephew; when they had conspired like murderers and had decided to deny mercy even to his old mother.
She was quite drunk by the time Charlie came in. “I couldn’t spend two weeks in any hole in the ground with that Mrs. Flannagan,” she said.
“What are you talking about?”
“I took the bishop down to show him the shelter and he?”
“What bishop? What was a bishop doing here?”
“Stop interrupting me and listen to what I have to say. Mrs. Flannagan has a key to our shelter, and you gave it to her.”
“Who told you this?”
“Mrs. Flannagan,” she said, “has a key to our shelter, and you gave it to her.”
He went back out through the rain to the garage and jammed his fingers in the door. In haste and rage he stalled the car, and, waiting for the carburetor to drain, was faced, in the headlights, with the backstage of his wasteful domestic life which had accumulated in the garage. Here was a fortune in broken garden furniture and power tools. When the car started, he slammed out of his driveway and passed a red light at the first intersection, where, for a moment, his life hung by a thread. He didn’t care. Slamming up the hill, he clutched the wheel as if he already had his hands on her plump and silly neck. It was his children’s honor and peace of mind that she had damaged. It was his children, his beloved children, that she had harmed.
