Museums and Women by John Updike

have it all to himself. Warm air from a floor grill breathes on his ankles. Miles can see upward past the clock and the organ to the corner of the unused gallery where souvenirs of the church’s past—Puritan pew doors, tin foot-warmers, velvet collection bags, Victorian commemorative albums, cracking portraits of wigged pastors, oval photographs of deceased deacons, and unlabelled ferrotypes of chubby cross children lined up under trees long since cut down—repose in dusty glass cases that are in themselves antiques. All this anonymous treasure Miles possesses by being here, like a pharaoh hidden with his life’s rich furniture while the rain like a robber rattles to get in.
    Yes, the deacon sees, it is indeed a preparation for death—an emptiness where many others have been, which is what death will be. It is good to be at home here. Nothing now exists but himself, this shell, and the storm. The windows clatter; the sand has turned to gravel, the rain has turned to sleet. The storm seizes the church by its steeple and shakes, but the walls were built, sawed and nailed, with devotion, and withstand. The others are very late, they will not be coming; Miles is not displeased, he is pleased. He has done his part. He has kept the faith. He turns off the lights. He locks the door.

I Will Not Let Thee Go, Except Thou Bless Me
    A T THE FAREWELL PARTY for the Bridesons, the Bridesons themselves were very tired. Lou (for Louise) had been sorting and packing and destroying for days, and her sleep was gouged by nightmares of trunks that would not close, of doors that opened to reveal forgotten secret rooms crammed with yet more debris from ten years’ residence—with unmended furniture and outgrown toys and stacked
Life
s and
National Geographic
s and hundreds, thousands, of children’s drawings, each one a moment, a memory, impossible to keep, impossible to discard. And there was another dream, recurrent, in which she and the children arrived in Texas. Brown horizon on all sides enclosed a houseless plain. They wheeled the airplane stairway away, and Tom was not there, he was not with them. Of course: he had left them. He had stayed behind, in green Connecticut. “Now, children”—she seemed to be shouting into a sandstorm—“we must keep together, together.…” Lou would awake, and the dark body beside hers in the bed was an alien presence, a visitor from another world.
    And Tom, hurriedly tying up loose ends in the city, lunching one day with his old employers and the next day with representatives of his new, returning each evening to an emptier house and increasingly apprehensive children, slept badly also. The familiar lulling noises—car horn and dog bark, the late commuter train’s slither and the main drag’s murmur—had become irritants; the town had unravelled into tugging threads of love. Departure rehearses death. He lay staring with open sockets, a void where thoughts swirled until the spell was broken by the tinkle of the milkman, who also, it seemed, had loved him. Fatigue lent to everything the febrile import of an apparition. At the farewell party, his friends of over a decade seemed remote, yet garish. Linda Cotteral, that mouse, was wearing green eyeshadow. Bugs Leonard had gone Mod—turquoise shirt, wide pink tie—and had come already drunk from cocktails somewhere else. Maggie Aldridge, as Tom was carrying the two coats to the bedroom, swung down the hall in a white dress with astonishingly wide sleeves. Taken unawares, Tom uttered the word “Lovely!” to hide his loud heartbeat. She grinned, and then sniffed, as if to erase the grin. Her grin, white above white, had been a momentary flash of old warmth, but in the next moment, as she brushed by him, her eyes were cast ahead in stony pretense of being just another woman. He recognized his impulse to touch her, to seize her wrist, as that of a madman, deranged by lack of sleep.
    Drinks yielded to dinner, dinner to dancing. Gamely they tried to