In the Beauty of the Lilies by John Updike

dusty organ pipes. In reflex Clarence opened his mouth to say the customary words; but Stella’s voice rang out instead: “Yours, O Lord, are grandeur and power, majesty, splendor, and glory.”
    “All in the heavens and on the earth is yours,” the congregation dubiously rumbled, “and of your own we give you.”
    He was wondering now if he might not find it in him to pronounce the prayers, but Stella had firmly found her place in these familiar, inflexible procedures. “We praise you, God,” she sang out, with a swelling confidence, “for you are gracious. You have loved us from the beginning of time and remember us when we are in trouble.” The sound of a woman’s voice pronouncing the syllables of this litany was of course a blasphemous astonishment to most of its hearers, yet they had little choice but to respond, “Your mercy endures forever,” and to be led through the Lord’s Prayer and the morning’s final hymn, “O Daughters Blest of Galilee,” and to be sent forth into the world, “rejoicing in the power of the Holy Spirit,” and to be blessed. Stella had looked toward herhusband, asking with her eyebrows if he was up to pronouncing the benediction, but he shook his head impatiently, and so she melodiously, theatrically bid “The Lord bless you and keep you. The Lord be kind”—
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—“and gracious to you. The Lord look upon you with favor and give you peace.” He joined in the “Amen” but not the “Alleluia!”
    Miriam Showalter’s burst of postlude Bach sounded angry. Stella, seeing Clarence move to follow the choir in his robes, showed an inclination to process to the entrance ahead of him, as befit her role in the service; but he restrained her with a grip that sank deep into the fat of her upper arm in its sheath of summer batiste.
    “Go to the children,” he directed, hoarsely yet audibly.
    Her eyes flared; her mouth tensed in a little “o,” making wrinkles all across the arc of her slightly hirsute upper lip. “You can talk again! What on earth happened?”
    He shrugged helplessly, began a sentence with the word “God,” then waved it away, saying, “It won’t do.”
    “I would say not,” Stella responded, turning on him her broad rounded back. Her wifely ability to sympathize, he saw, had been curtailed by her liturgical triumph, her taste of forbidden fruit. Briskly maneuvering her corseted heft, in her voluminous dress trimmed with ivory Valenciennes lace, upon her small, button-shoed feet, she stepped down from the chancel, replaced her book of worship in the pew-back, and also her chromolithographed paper fan, and collected her parasol and black leather purse. “Well, that was an experience,” she sighed to her children. Their three children, all that was left of those who had witnessed Clarence’s disgrace, stared in amazement, even Jared, with his clever slant eyes and wised-up mouth, too stunned to mock the event.
    At the narthex door, next to the bell-ropes, Clarence foundhis voice sufficiently restored to function at a conversational level. “Mr. Proctor … thank you … yes, a catarrh … most inopportune, but it should pass … Mrs. Wharton … yes, another hot day … the lawns do need the rain.” Most of the several dozen churchgoers declined to mention the uncanny indisposition they had witnessed; but a greater-than-usual constraint hovered above their perfunctory courtesies and murmurous hurry to be off into plain daylight.
    The Sunday passed at first as if nothing unfortunate had happened. Clarence had never been physically strong, not even in his youth, and small nervous collapses and sudden disinclinations to do the usual were laid to his excessive learning and delicate earnestness. His father, Joshua Wilmot, had been an overbearing spade-bearded farmer who had developed a gravel pit at the rear of his ninety acres into a profitable sideline of supplying stone and sand to local builders, which he then had expanded into a