In the Beauty of the Lilies by John Updike Page B

nervous indisposition whose exact symptoms and deeper causes could be comfortably left veiled with other female mysteries while he delivered a little gossip and offered up a brief prayer at her compliant, wistful bedside. Barnert Memorial, opened a mere two years ago far out on Broadway, to serve the immigrant masses in all their flourishing ills, was—like St. Joseph’s, Paterson’s oldest hospital, founded by a priest and five Sisters of Charity—rarely on Clarence’s rounds. Mr. Orr, however, lay near death in Barnert. He had been a manual laborer—a hod carrier to brickmasons, a crate-handler for grocers, a paid helping hand to those with heads enough to be tradesmen or entrepreneurs—and never able, somehow, to achieve the ease of a wife, home, and family. Yet he had been a tenaciously faithful attendant at church, always seated on the lefthand side of the nave, midway down the set of side pews underneath the painted-glass memorial windows presenting a sextet of Protestant martyrs and heroes—Wyclif, Huss, Calvin, Knox, Cromwell, Bunyan, all seen, save for the armored Protector, at pulpit or desk with expressions of dire resolve. Beneath their sternly rapt visages Clarence had missed, these last months, Orr’s small, dingy, beadily staring face, hanging on the sermon with an intensity that shamed the sermonizer, whose habit of dramatic hesitation frequently tempted his mind to wander even as his tongue proceeded. Today Mr. Orr, who bore as testament to his parents’ piety the Christian name of Elias, was poorly; Clarence found him asleep, his head on the starched pillowcase looking little bigger than a withered gray apple. Disease had thinned his russet hair unevenly, so it seemed patchy like a newbornbaby’s, and chronic pain had cut deep lines along his nose and between his brows. Clarence would have tiptoed away, but within Orr’s sunken sockets two wet dark gleams forced apart the crusty melding of his wrinkled lids; the man grunted in lieu of welcome and made a gesture at elbowing himself higher in the bed, before lapsing back into supinity.
    “Don’t bestir yourself, Mr. Orr. I didn’t come but for the briefest moment. How is your cure progressing?”
    “To say I’m fair would be saying too much, Reverend. I’m very weary of the pain. It won’t be long, I can feel it in my marrow. With all how hot it’s been these past days, the cold has not let go its grip on my feet, and trust my words it’s climbing higher.”
    “This unseasonable muggy spell has got us all down. My wager is you’ll be up and about within a week or two.”
    “Ah, don’t talk foolishness, sir, in trying to be kind. I’m nearing the end, and I’m ready to face the verdict. Reverend Wilmot, tell me true now. The time for soft talk is by. What do you think my chances are, to find myself among the elect?”
    The little face in the pillow emitted an odor of dental rot and stale mucus that afflicted Clarence’s nose six feet away, though the ward was perfumed with alcohol and ether. “In all frankness,” he said as gravely as he could, into the small monkeyish face, “I should estimate your chances to be excellent. Have you, in the course of your life as best you can remember, ever enjoyed a palpable experience of the living Christ?” Clarence’s mouth felt dry, dragging forth this old formula, with its invitation to hallucination and hysteria.
    Mr. Orr’s eyes had forced wider apart the enclosing folds of skin; the bleached circlets of his irises were aswim in yellowish rheum threaded with blood. “I cannot honestly recollect ever enjoying that. I’ve searched my heart, but it’s hard to say,now, isn’t it? Some of these women, they boast of the Lord as if He comes to pay court every night. I’ve had what you might call promptings, during prayer and on rare occasion in the middle of the day, while about business of another sort. But I wouldn’t want to make claims for them as palpable experiences. A palpable