Into the Night

They turned the corner still with this strange link of hands and came up to the church. Curved gray stone steps led up to its entrance apron, and from the carved niches on either side the blank stone eyes of saints looked sightlessly out upon the world.

The touch of the first step against her toe seemed to wake Madeline from her trancelike passivity, as though a switch had been flicked, turning off some flow of compulsive current, and she disengaged her hand and balked there, Mrs. Bartlett one step higher than she.

“I can’t go in here. Don’t ask me to.”

Mrs. Bartlett’s eyes were calm and unreproachful; above all else they seemed to hold an infinite understanding, the wisdom of old age. “Is it because of the creed? Is it because you’re of a different faith? Why, then we’ll go to your church. God’s houses are all God’s houses. Unitarian, Baptist—”

She thought: A killer is a killer in any denomination.

“I’ll go with you, and pray beside you,” the woman continued. “In my own way, but to the same God. And I’m sure both of our prayers will reach Him just the same. He is just one God, not a segregated God.”

Madeline averted her face, the way one does who is afraid of receiving a blow, of being struck. Not only turned it away, but turned it downward at the same time. Every slantwise line of her body, straining away from the church entrance, expressed aversion. Not the aversion of disgust, the aversion of fear. She began trembling violently all over, so that Mrs. Bartlett’s hand, upon her arm, trembled by transference.

“I’ll wait for you outside,” she said in a muffled voice. “I’ll wait here on the steps.”

Mrs. Bartlett was looking at her curiously. She released her hold upon her. “I’ll say two prayers, then,” she said quietly. “One for her, and one — for you.”

She turned and went slowly up the steps, and opened the door, and went in. It closed soundlessly after her, on its own massive springs.

Madeline stood there waiting, never moving. One foot on one step, the other on the next one down, in a position as of arrested entrance.

The door opened as some latecomers entered, and the music swelled out like a paean, then dimmed into a drone again. She turned her head, and caught a glimpse of taper beads twinkling like golden tears streaming down a wall, as if seen at the end of a long violet-dim tunnel. Then the door closed again, and the world was shut in two, this world and the other world.

At last the mass ended and the people came out, the women and children in their bright dresses, like flowers spilling down the steps all around her. Then when they’d all dispersed and the street was quiet once again, Mrs. Bartlett stood there alone at the top of the steps, last of all to come out.

She came down them slowly and turned aside, and though her eyes were on Madeline there was no recognition in them. Madeline wheeled and fell in beside her, but all the way back they were like two strangers who do not know one another yet unaccountably continue to walk abreast. The close communion of their walk to church was gone, had been destroyed.

When they reached the apartment house, Mrs. Bartlett entered first as her age entitled her to do, but she noticeably did not hold the door for Madeline, who had to catch and hold it in order to be able to make her way in. At the upstairs door, when Mrs. Bartlett took out her bunch of keys, her hand quivered so that she couldn’t manage to insert the right one in the lock. They jangled loudly in the silence of the hall. But when Madeline reached out to try to take them, in order to do it for her, she snatched them back out of her reach with an abruptness that almost suggested animosity.

When she finally had the door open, Mrs. Bartlett stepped in, but then turned around and faced Madeline coldly, standing there in such a way that Madeline could not enter herself. He face was gray with pain, pitted with it, the texture of a pumice stone.

“Why do you want to come in here? I have no more children.”

Madeline drew in her breath, sharp and cold as a razor cutting her throat as it went down.

“I had only the one. Find someone else’s house now to bring sorrow into.”

Madeline kept silent.

“You’re the one,” the bereaved woman went on. “You did it. I knew it when you wouldn’t come into the church with me.”

And little by little she began to close the door between them, still speaking as it narrowed.

“You did it. You.”

The door closed.

Madeline’s body gave a half roll-around of despair that brought her shoulders back against the wall, to one side of the doorway. She hung her head.

After a while she straightened, turned again, and knocked softly, entreatingly, on the door.

There was no answer.

After a while she went away.

At eleven the next morning the door opened and Mrs. Bartlett came out trundling a small wheeled shopping cart behind her. She saw Madeline standing there waiting, but didn’t speak.