In the Beauty of the Lilies by John Updike Page B

absent-mindedly. Her corset, though less cruel to the waist and unnaturally compressing than the hourglass fashion of her young womanhood, was confining; first she undid the attached garters, and then the hook-and-eye fasteners down the front, at last dividing and parting herself from the semi-elastic carapace, much as one splits the nubbled belly of a Maine lobster to get at the meat. Physical relief evident in her large face, she moved back and forth in the room in her thin chemise as one forgetful of her generousphysical endowment. Stella had had no great height of beauty from which to fall, and seemed little less comely now at forty-three than she had at twenty-six, her age as a bride. Though Clarence and his fellow seminarians had often talked of women, and not always in the most reverent manner, it had been a revelation to him that Stella not only had submitted to sex but in their early years had sought it, when a week or so of abstention had gone by, though he was tired and dragged down by the business of the dour little Missouri parish. It had been years since she, with certain touches of her hands and inflections of those lively lustrous eyes, dark as a gipsy’s, had requested her rights of satisfaction; on winter nights, however, the married partners were still a warmth and comfort to one another on the double-troughed mattress of their old mahogany fourposter, and she accepted him without complaint on those rare evenings when arousal came unbeckoned upon him. Tonight, unrolling her stockings and tucking them back in the corner of her top drawer and unpinning her upswept load of chestnut hair so it fell, only slightly marred by gray, slowly uncoiling down her plump back while she gave herself a stern squint in the oval dresser mirror, she seemed unusually vigorous and able; he decided at last to impart to her the burden he had for a month been carrying alone.
    “
My
faith, my dear, seems to have fled. I not only no longer believe with an ideal fervor, I consciously disbelieve. My very voice rebelled, today, against my attempting to put some sort of good face on a doctrine that I intellectually detest. Ingersoll, Hume, Darwin, Renan, Nietzsche—it all rings true, when you’ve read enough to have it sink in; they have not just reason on their side but simple humanity and decency as well. Jehovah and His pet Israelites, that bloody tit-for-tat of the Atonement, the whole business of condemning poor fallible men andwomen to eternal Hell for a few mistakes in their little lifetimes, the notion in any case that our spirits can survive without eyes or brains or nerves—Stel, it’s been a fearful struggle, I’ve twisted my mind in loops to hold on to some sense in which these things are true enough to preach, but I’ve got to let go or go crazy. I love you for feeling otherwise, and would never argue a man or child out of whatever they believe, but to me it’s all become relics, things left over from our childish nightmares, when there’s daylight now all around us—this is the twentieth century! I can’t keep selling myself and others the opposite of what jumps out at me from every newspaper and physical fact I see. The universe is a hundred percent matter, with the energy that comes in waves out of matter, and poor old humankind is on its own and always has been.”
    She had turned from the mirror to gaze at him. Her mannish, heavy face looked oddly seductive, her lids half-closed. Her low hairline gave it a brutish cast: her head’s gleaming bounty, with its chestnut highlights and buckling waves, sprang from a line straight across her brow, without a hint of widow’s-peak. “Clarence, have you tried praying?” She told him, “Reason isn’t everything. There are things beyond it. Believing isn’t supposed to be easy. What did St. Paul say? ‘We see through a glass darkly.’ ”
    Her tone of soft pleading, somehow sexual after these many years of their laying their bodies to one side, drew him closer