Faith and the Good Thing

5

Children, Fate put a terrible hurt on this sweet sister. So hungry was she before her first big break, in the form of the man called Barrett, that her backbone could have shaken hands with her stomach. Yeah. The soles of her shoes were so thin she could step on a dime, then tell you if it was heads or tails. She was so poor — you ready? — she couldn’t even pay attention.

Faith grew weak, and so thin her eyes looked as hungry and haggard as those in a kraken’s skull; her figure, once the rich color of café-au-lait, became ashen and harried from drugs, lots of gin, and the endless parade of people who appeared at her room in Hotel Sinclair. Before Barrett came she even tried religion and, failing in that, tarried there restlessly during the long rimy months of winter, her days not like days at all but akin, she fancied, to sausage links, each flat and bland and tasteless, arching away from her, and filled the day long with the interminable disquietude of her mind’s revolutions. At dawn Faith damned the day, and called on night; at dusk, she rued the night, and pined for day. “Perhaps,” she told herself at forenoon in her tiny room, “we can be what we think we are,” but by eveningtime she knew; “We are nothing, nothing at all.” There was no truth, no certainty save the fact of her life’s fall into bondage, no reality but that of the endless procession of unhappy humanity that arrived, by and by, at her door. How they came to know of her condition and exploit it, she knew not. They did. They knew. They saw — in her eyes, in the slow, uncertain way she gestured and spoke, that in her ethical pother they could, if they tried, place her at their behest. She walked the city’s winding streets, smoking reefers, thinking, and, before long, encountered on a lightless street corner, or in a tavern or club, soft raptorial eyes with swelling irises upon her. The struggle began. She saw a face, a human form, perhaps a smirk, and knew that he who watched her was, in some strange, inexplicable yet natural way, taking hold of her life. Looking away, back to her table or at a menu, she felt she was Faith Cross with such-and-such possibilities; but when those eyes fell upon her, imagining her reclining on the backseat of a car parked in the woods, or sprawled on the covers of a bed in some musty two-dollar-a-night hotel, she became that and was nothing more. What that other mind thought of her she was: you could not deny it — you railed, fought it, but those eyes saw you, in part, as what you were or might be. Faith fought back, denying this transformation, and — as always — lost.

It happened often. Every day before Barrett tried to set her straight. She was wholly herself only when alone, locked in her room, or traveling the quiet city streets. As soon as another appeared the struggle began anew: to Mrs. Octavia Beasley she was monthly rent, to Arnold Tippis, a huge car to hear his woe. Faith fancied that these folks found this pleasing; in a world wracked by the incessant war of billions of wills, it satisfied some ancient need to have completely, if only for an hour or an evening, a life in one’s power — the other’s, if not one’s own: to be no longer in bondage, the object of an alien will, and forever manipulated and ruled, but to be — if only in illusion — completely effective, to rule with suzerainty over their soft, compassionate, coffee-and-cream-colored Faith.

She laughed; really laughed. Because she’d learned, through many reversals and indignities, what she took to be a lesser secret of life. It was in no way profound, and certainly neither universal nor necessary — she had, in fact, heard it before: you are nothing. Yet what she had to be for others changed that for them. In her presence their worlds snapped somehow into perfect focus, it shaped itself around them, and they stood free and independent at its center, commanding, deigning, and having their wills obediently done. She accepted her bondage and bolstered herself the day long with denial: “I am not what I am,” for there was a fear, a nagging suspicion, if not a certainty, that what she did, through her own will or coercion, would not bring her a momentary descent into shame but make for her a destiny. Should she die tomorrow of a heart attack, or beneath the wheels of a car, people wouldn’t say, “Faith Cross, daughter of Todd and Lavidia, the quester for the Good Thing, has died.” No, they would smirk and say, “Death sneezed the whore.” She had suffered more beatings, near evictions, insults, and threats in four months than she cared to recall; but the worst, the most denigrating service her situation demanded she render was simply listening. Listening to the secret thoughts only one such as she could be called upon to bear. It gave her headaches so violent they seemed to sunder her mind into two equal, warring halves: one heavy with the amaranthine, inviolable awareness of her autonomy and unsullied faith; the other a consciousness caught within the mad swirl of a personal history over which she had no control. Others wrote it. It was etched in by each cramp of hunger in her stomach and, thence, sent her back onto the wintry city streets to eke out survival. There was no surcease to the struggle of feeding herself and fighting what others thought her to be. To survive, she sold them, not only herself, but her father’s stories of the South.

On Saturdays, a Mr. Jonathan Crowell always punctual, appeared at her room. Faith, on his last appearance, opened the door and stood staring into Crowell’s sea-colored eyes, struggling to combat the wave of control overcoming her. Crowell, square-jawed and chubby with thin sienna hair, would smile — it overwhelmed her, as certain smiles are wont to do. Her will began to fold; Crowell entered and, after flipping back his blue coattails, lowered his weight onto her bed. He, she could tell, was like all the others: certain of their power over her, yet blind to the bonds that such power brought. He withdrew a billfold from his pocket, a dollar from the billfold, and laid it on her wrinkled pillow, thinking, as he pulled off his shoes and unbuttoned his shirt, that he was in control.

“Give me some sugah.” He pursed his pale lips.

Faith closed her eyes and kissed Crowell, contemptuous of him as he leaned forward, lowering his head to say, “Tell me. something nice. ” He always asked that; like the rest, he could not get his fill of her tales. Thus, her power in bondage. Though Faith hated selling her favorite stories so cheaply, she came up with one Big Todd told her when she was only three and always fighting with other children, always contesting her will against theirs, then wailing when, due to her frailty, the others won. “If you think there’s ever a winner or a loser,” he said “you’re dead wrong.” No, Faith thought, this tale is too dear to sell. But, looking at Crowell and seeing his self-confidence, it was evident he needed this. She began.

It was Sunday morning. Everyone was in church, or still in bed in that tiny Kentucky town where Big Todd Cross found himself meditating over a game of solitaire and rum in an empty saloon. He drank, feeling miserable for having wounded a young boy too full of piss and vinegar the night before. But his reputation was always getting him in trouble; besides, the boy had been caught cheating at cards. All around Todd this morning were chairs turned upside down on round wooden tables. A balding old Negro in coveralls drifted around the room with a wet mop and pail, scrubbing at the blood stains near the bar. He stopped, leaned on the bar, and said to Todd, “That was Jim Slaughter’s boy you shot — he’ll be coming after you ’fore long.” He shook his head soberly, said, “Slaughter’s mean; he’ll drive you like a flash o’ lightning through a gooseberry bush.” Before Todd could reply, the door behind him burst open: Slaughter stormed in. Todd tried to remain cool, tensing himself as still as a cigar-store Indian. He watched Slaughter from the corner of his eyes. Children, Jim Slaughter was a huge barrel-chested man, with a beard hanging to his belt. He had a shotgun; he shoved it straight into Todd’s back.

“Cross,” he shouted, “I’m going to send you straight to West Hell!”

“Damn,” Todd whispered, “why you want to come in here and make me look bad?” And Todd took another drink.

Click.

Todd began to sweat.

Slaughter, too, poured sweat. Really, he didn’t want to do this, but some vague sense of honor was at stake. “You’re a player, eh? A gambler?” he snarled. “Well, I wanna see you play fo’ your life, I wanna see you win it back from this gun barrel!” He motioned with a nod of his head to the terrified janitor to sit across from Todd. Said, “Willis, you’re gonna play this sonuvabitch and beat him, or I’ll blow your brains out!”

“Suh?” Willis stammered.

“And you,” Slaughter growled at Todd. “I’ll kill you if you lose.” He cut the cards with his free hand and returned behind Todd with the gun. “Play!” he shouted.

The plastic cards kept slipping from Big Todd’s trembling hands. Sweat blinded his eyes. But, by and by, he realized he was winning the game. He looked across the table at Willis. Todd’s heart sank. Poor Willis was pale; he clutched at his heart, and Todd could hear the old man whimpering and sobbing like a child. An emptiness filled Todd, a space so wide he felt himself fall therein and the gulf between himself and the old janitor evaporate like smoke. Todd misplayed his hand.

“What’re you doing?” Slaughter cried over Todd’s left shoulder. “Ya had that hand — ya had him beat!” Slaughter shuffled the cards again, and dealt another hand.

Todd sighed. He blew that one, too.

“Stop that!” Slaughter screamed.

Todd kept losing. Then he started to laugh, and big clear tears dropped from Willis’s eyes.

“You’re crazy,” Slaughter said.

“Yeh.”

“I got the right — the duty to kill ya now!”

“Sho.”

But he didn’t. Dazed, Slaughter lowered his gun to his side and stumbled, scratching his head, from the saloon. Todd and Willis, as soon as Slaughter was gone, broke into the whisky barrels in the basement and drank themselves blind.

Crowell smiled at Faith and said, “I guess that was okay,” and gave her an extra five dollars. He slept with her until morning, but before drifting off, he flung his arm around her waist, whispering, “It’s a shame the world isn’t really like that, isn’t it?”

She could not sleep that night and hated him for saying that, for calling into question that which she longed to believe. This disquietude — it followed her day and night like a stray dog, a curse, or damnation. It bothered her so that Faith could not eat the following day, or rest, and, finally, withdrew in desperation from her purse a circular she’d found on a bus the week before:

Why is there suffering? Is there a possibility of rebirth and hope in this life? Are you tired of living apart from the Truth? Are you tired of asking questions like this? Let us answer them for you. Come to The Church of Continual Light, 64th and Stony Island.

She went, giving herself completely to the urge to again be, if not free, at least saved. Though married in her childhood to God, she’d been a bad wife, had taken another lover: the Good Thing. But Faith, as she rode the bus south, consoled herself with the cleanliness that penitence possibly could bring. She found the Church of Continual Light wedged between a crumbling old brownstone and a bakery. Outside, she stood in the snow, shivering and listening as the singsong chants within merged in a single dreamy hum; she closed her eyes until the lights from inside lulled her with images and cloudy shapes forced along her eyelids. Reverend Brown had spoken of that shadowy, senseless, Cimmerian world where groping things collided like blind, hungry moles: she was there. Suffocating in it. Lost.

“Hallelujah!”

The cry rang inside, again and again, driven by a belief, a security she longed to have. Faith cracked open the door; she timidly peeked in. The storefront church must at one time have been a delicatessen; it smelled of raw salmon and catfish. It was packed. Toward the rear where she stood, snow dripping from her coat, were old, old men in green and gray workclothes and, farther up, fat, chubby women who clapped their hands and stomped their heavy rectangular feet. They stopped, even as the wet-eyed women on the wooden moaning bench went still when a lean-fleshed man in black pounded his podium at the front of the room. In his right hand he held a Bible, in his left — a big fistful of thunder:

“I gave my heart to know wisdom, to know madness and folly,” he said, “and I’ve seen all the wonders under the sun and—behold—all is vanity. ”

Silently Faith stepped to the last row of chairs. The minister’s voice thrilled her; she felt safe again, at ease and acquainted with the anxious, sweating faces around the room.

Up front, the minister folded his hands. Intoned, “I know what’s in your hearts, brothers — I know, because I’ve been there, I’ve seen it myself. The whole world’s been there, because every one of us has to cross that deep sea of questionin’ by himself. You think you’re the center of the whole world at first, you think it whorls around you like the planets around the sun — don’t you?”

“Yes, Lord!” a woman shouted.

“But one day, you come across someone else who thinks just the very same thing. You’ve got to fight then, to do battle over who’s gonna be supreme, you or that other fellah, ’cause that’s the way we men are — strugglin’ against each other with our wills, our dreams. ” The minister’s mouth opened. Faith caught her breath. His mouth was bright red inside, the color of fresh blood. “And you both lose!” he boomed. “You both see neither one of you have anythin’ to do with what pushes the world along. What, then?” he said. “Where do you turn, then, brothers — sisters, what do you seek?”

Pensively Faith pushed forward in her seat. She bit her fingernails.

“You look beyond — both you and that other fellah, and see that the world’s moved by somethin’ bigger than either one of you — somethin’ more than you’ll ever be, but somethin’ you must know, must be like if you’re ever to be free—”

“Yes,” Faith whispered. Her nerves and brain hummed; she gave herself to the enchantment. “Yes—”

“And,” he said, “you go on lookin’ for it. You look all over the earth! You look to the South, to the East, some of you even came up North to find it, but you never do see it, do you?”

Faith wanted to stand up, raise her hand, and cast a question. Instead, she waited, certain he was talking to her.

“So, because God was so remote, so inaccessible, He sent his only Son, as flesh, blood, gristle, and bone, to show us how to get closer to Him — to seize the root of this thing greater than any of us can be.” He slammed his Bible on the podium. Raised his voice. “And even that wasn’t enough! It was still too far away. Can you imagine that gulf between man and his greatest goal? Can you see how horrible it is to be separated by all the universe from the thing we need most? Only one step remained: to look inside ourselves — to put it so close we don’t have to search all over the world no more!” The minister tapped his chest, then smacked it hard. “It’s in here! That’s the only place it is, or could ever be — in your hearts!”

In here. Faith laid her right hand along her left breast. She held her breath and closed her eyes, searching for this truth but finding only a memory there. A bad one, at that. She remembered the spring evening eight years after her father’s death when Reverend Brown came visiting. No — he came to confess. She’d always wondered to whom troubled men of the cloth carried their cares when the Lord did not or could not answer their call. Brown took his to Lavidia. Why he did she could only conjecture: because Lavidia had known and transcended grief, because she realized in her flesh, in her blood, at the floor of a hot tent that summer night long ago, all Brown could know only in theory. And theory alone. He came. They saw his car roaring up the road before a cloud of crimson dust.

Brown parked it in the brown shade of an oak in the front yard, and slowly removed his bent straw hat. Said, “Evenin’, Sister Cross.” His voice cracked. Faith knew something was wrong; she could feel it in her throat. Especially when Brown looked irritably at her, winced, then turned to Lavidia. “Can I talk with you alone?”

Without waiting for her mother’s response, Faith fled into the farmhouse, creeping barefoot across the quiet front room to the window where, behind a drawn curtain, she heard Reverend Brown’s agonized voice.

“What’s troublin’ you, reverend?”—Lavidia.

Faith, her hand on the dry curtain, expected them to conceive yet another plan for her wayward soul’s salvation — some nocturnal trip to the river of another county where she would be baptized, or another riotous prayer meeting in a close tent on a sweltering summer eve.

“Jennie Scott just died,” Brown said.

“Lord have mercy,” Lavidia cried. Faith heard the scraping of her mother’s nails on her brow. “Reverend, she wasn’t but sixteen! It was that sickness she had, wasn’t it? Loo, looo—”

“Leukemia,” Brown sighed.

Through a crack in the curtain Faith could see Brown leaning as lifeless as a scarecrow against the porch railing.

“I prayed night and day for that gal,” he said. “Damn if I didn’t almost go down to the bogs to call on that crazy woman for her!” With his thumb and forefinger he squeezed his nose, so hard Faith felt the bridge of her own nose ache. “I told her parents — when there didn’t seem to be no hope — that sufferin’ was a teacher, that there was some lesson in it that we just couldn’t see. but what? Livvie, that child never hurt nobody!”

“I know, I know,” Lavidia moaned. “There ain’t no answer, I guess. It sure wasn’t your fault, reverend.”

“Wasn’t it?” Brown cried. His fingers tightened on the railing; his knuckles were white. Brown turned his back to Lavidia and hung his head out toward the yard. “It must have been me!” Then he turned around, openmouthed. Sweating. “Have you ever doubted the purity of your faith, Livvie — I mean, that’s a good reason for the Lord never answerin’ when you call, don’t you think?”

“No.” Lavidia’s voice trembled. “I don’t never doubt it—”

You could hear the floor of the porch cry under Brown’s heels. Faith imagined him breathing with irregularity, like an overworked horse, the sweat steaming at the curly roots of his sparse gray hair. “Haven’t you ever. doubted that what you were doing was right?”

“I do what the Lord wants,” Lavidia said.

The porch buckled again; the floorboards creaked as Brown moved closer to Lavidia’s rocker. “Some people — like you, ’way back when you got the spirit and heard Him talkin’ to you: you knew then, didn’t you? I mean, He touched you, rolled you around that tent floor with His big black toe. I saw it happen to you, Livvie! And you knew clearer than I’ll ever know what He wants.” The reverend’s voice went sharp, splintering like dry kindling split by an ax. “It never come to me that way. It don’t happen like that to most people. I’ve got faith and religion, but not like I seen it come to some people like you. It didn’t happen to me like that. I. decided to follow the Cross, ’cause what it stood for seemed to be everything I wanted to be like.” Brown looked away from her, as though he’d said too much. “I pray for understanding, Livvie. I look for some kind of sign. ”

Lavidia’s breathing was as loud as that of a cow.

“Nothin’ comes,” Brown groaned. “How do you really know what you’re doin’ and believin’ is right? Don’t mistake me now! I don’t doubt for a minute that He’s out there, but, from day to day, how do you really know?”

Faith suffered a long, long silence as Lavidia waited, puffing her best briar pipe. “You feel it, I guess,” she said. “You ought to know ’bout that better’n me—”

“Feelin’s ain’t certain!” Brown slammed something, perhaps his fist, against the wooden railing. It shook the house. “I feel Jennie oughta be alive!”

It seemed suddenly to Faith that the porch was empty. She heard the mindless prattle of chickens in the barnyard, the wind crackling, like the rustling of crumbling cellophane, in the trees. She peered from behind the curtain and saw Reverend Brown resting silently on his knees beside Lavidia, searching her face for a sign.

“Feelings belong to the flesh,” he said. “I can feel the wind comin’ up, I can feel it gettin’ cooler, ’cause the sun’s goin’ down.” He pointed a finger at his temple. “But my mind ain’t at ease with that. It wants to be absolutely sure!” Brown pressed the heels of his hands against his wet forehead. “Sometimes I ain’t even certain if Father Divine or Prophet Cherry knew what was right all the time!” He touched Lavidia’s bony wrist. “When it happened to you — what was it like, Livvie?”

For reasons she could not describe, Faith felt a wave of uneasiness. It was like he’d asked for a description of the way Lavidia and Todd made love.

“It was kinda soft, like the way you’re touchin’ me now,” Lavidia said. “But it wasn’t like the touch of no livin’ man. It was like He put His hand across my breasts, and they exploded, and shot out into the tent, and carried somethin’ inside me through the air, clear up to some dizzy spot above the world. I was kinda dead, but alive, too, because I couldn’t stop shakin’ on the ground. I saw myself shakin’—it was like I was lookin’ at myself from far, far away, right beside Him, or maybe all alone in some dark place like a cave. And I was watchin’ what was left of me the way you look at the wigglin’ of a chicken with its head wrung off. It didn’t matter none. That thing on the ground wasn’t me. I knew that, reverend. It was like a box I’d been kept in all these years—”

Reverend Brown nodded. Water fell from his eyes. “And you knew the soul was immortal; you knew it brought you ’cross that wide sea between man and God. That was the sign he gave you. ”

“I reckon,” Lavidia said. “I try not to think ‘bout it too much. It’s like you said at the last meetin’: the best thing in the world is inside us.”

“I said that?” Brown looked at her quizzically, then snapped his fingers. “Yes!” he shouted. “I did say that!” He jumped to his feet, stood still for a moment, then spun on his heels. “That is what I said, isn’t it?” A smile split his mouth; he slammed his palms together and laughed. “I wasn’t thinkin’ right! That child, Jennie, is in a better world — she’s saved. She’s thrown off that box she was trapped in, and there ain’t nothin’ separatin’ her from the most real thing of all!” Brown straightened his coat, regaining himself, happy now. He smiled at Lavidia, and touched her arm. “That space between Him and us ain’t so flamin’ wide after all, is it?” He said, “Thank you, Sister Cross,” and took his leave. As for Faith,

She jumped, stupefied, to her feet. Shouted, “There’s nothing there!” They were looking at her now; she’d shattered the mood of sanctity and peace in the Church of Continual Light. She didn’t care. Her thoughts rose as a veil before her vision, recalling her times spent walking across the city at the blackest pitch of night before the break of dawn, at that time so like a sick man’s momentary slumber. State Street, parallel to the lakefront and glistening with melted snow, was silent. There she would walk, then along the misty, moonlit beaches, thinking, inuring herself to this life in the depths of the cave, but always certain that something about her remained vernal, clean, and beyond it all. It was a transparent time, akin to the great space between a gremlin’s hourly heartbeats, or between a zombie’s outstretched arms. Inner and outer worlds flowed back and forth beneath the integument of her skin like water in a pipe. She remembered sitting on the hard Civic Center benches beneath Picasso’s wraithlike statue, feeling that flow and sensing for the first time that what was outside — in the world, on its streets, and behind its façade of buildings — stole within her at times, and was balanced by her own soul’s emanation, altering that world with compassion, her father’s legacy of mythopoesis and love. But in this church,

She leaned against the empty wooden seat in front of her, and made a witness to the truth: it was a one-way street. Warmth did not burst outward from her, filling the world with dreams, but the city, strangely like a burial place at that odd, half-remembered hour, had invaded her, made her, shaped her wholly, because there was nothing in here as the minister up front and Reverend Brown maintained. All was out there. Faith looked at the minister. He awaited an explanation for her outburst. She saw through him to the wall behind. He, too, was nothing — life was a play of shadows and mist on the marmoreal wall of a cave.

“What is your name?” he said sharply.

“Name?” Faith wondered — should a thing as transitory as a human life have a name? It was a stupid convention, but she decided to play the game. “It’s Faith Cross.”

“And what will you tell us, child?”

Because it hurt so bad Faith set it free. “I came to Chicago looking for the one true Good Thing, the one thing that would end everyone’s bondage, and would bring us all out of the dark!” Tears dropped from her eyes and made her cheeks shine, and she felt herself hovering again between the wish and its impossibility. “I believed in it — I was devoted to it, just like you said. I looked for it, because I knew it had to be! Don’t you see? Wasn’t it possible that there were all kinds of things around us that we never knew about until we looked for them? Wasn’t there a purpose just waiting to show itself to someone who looked?”

The minister’s brow knitted with deep lines and furrows as thick as a well-plowed field. “It’s within you, child—”

“I looked there, too!” Faith cried. She sensed the weight, saw the horror of her realization. “That’s too easy. You all stopped looking in the world because it was too hard. You tricked yourselves!” Something solid and stiff seemed to flip over in her stomach, fell to the floor of her stomach, and lie there like a log. “There’s nothing inside, and there’s nothing outside—”

A curl stiffened the minister’s lower lip. He screwed his mouth to the right side of his dark face, the edges of his white teeth visible as he frowned. “When people see things the way you do, we say they’ve got the Evil Eye. It’s a false way of seeing life — it’s like wearing dark glasses that blind you to the truth of things. You’ve got it, child — a belief that’s an argument for the Pit.” He scratched his cheek nervously and glared at her. “And if thine eye offends thee—”

“What?” Faith said coolly. Her composure returned, creeping in beneath her fatigue. “Should I change my glasses, or tear out my eyes, or pretend the Good Thing was always inside me, or—” She stopped, looking around the room at the drawn, startled faces. They were drained and almost the color of unleavened bread. Faith stepped into the aisle, drew her coat close around her, and turned to the minister. “Or should I use this darkness and suffering to get what I need?” It didn’t matter that he failed to understand. Faith saw him step down from the podium and start after her when she reached the door.

“Sit down on the moaning bench,” he called. “Fawn, if you confess—”

“It’s Faith,” she said. Her thoughts were sharp and clear. “My name is Faith Cross.”

“Fawn or Faith,” he said, his arms open to her, “does it matter?”

“Yes.” She pulled shut the door, returned to the bus stop, and rode to State Street and Washington where she walked for a while. Thinking: this is home — a strangely ordered city seething beneath its veneer of rigidity and regulation with growing pockets of anarchy, theft, murder, a death every day, and crimes which the authorities suppressed quickly, like a finger dousing a candle’s flame. All night the city’s lamps were lit, all night the borders of order buckled and receded and were reinstated before day. A losing battle. The truth would steal into this and every city like a Mongol horde, turning dreams into nightmares, incrusting even the most brilliant, self-certain careers with the dust and decay of time. Walking through the garment industry, along the obscure, reeking canal, then in and out of the weaving maze of curio shops, wax museums, and opium dens that was Old Town, Faith considered the possibility of release. There could be nothing good, or true, or beautiful when inner and outer worlds were as empty as she divined. There could only be small comforts, the solace of bittersweet illusion that her customers seemed to enjoy. She walked on, stopping to sit on the rocks near the frozen lake, and feeling, as she remembered the window displays in the Loop, anger strong enough to slay a troll in its tracks. One had to be independent of fortune, to be comfortable in the cave. To wear those fine furs she saw draped over manikins in store windows and on the slim shoulders of the haughty women who paraded down the streets: this is what she wanted, what she swore to achieve. She looked toward the apartment buildings rising above Chicago’s skyline, imagining how those women, less nice-looking, less cute than she, lived — in the sky, warm, well fed, as free as one could be in the endless mad flux of things. “The Good Thing,” she said. All bitterness. The sound of it made her sick. The minister had, in a small sense, been right: you had to bring your goals closer. Call them by another name. It was too hard to look, to suffer frustration, and keep searching in the face of probable defeat. It was true: you had to settle on something, to make your peace with your dreams and take, when the chance came, what you could get. Peace of mind. What else mattered? Inside her, the waves resounded. She looked at the sand beneath her feet, at the small impressions the thin soles of her shoes had made. Before dawn the wind would have erased them. None would know she’d sat there; in time, she would slip out of the world like a shadow. It reinforced her conviction, giving her strength to start back to the hotel, planning, vowing that, if nothing else, she would trample if need be the heads of thousands, and their ridiculous theories as well to get what she needed. She would number her days, but only to squeeze from each whatever comfort could be secured.

Faith hurried, star-shaped snowflakes melting in her hair, trying to beat a snowstorm already clouding the morning, obscuring it with just the slightest tinge of mystery. She entered the lobby of Hotel Sinclair and found a folded note, scrawled in the large, nearly arthritic script of Mrs. Beasley, in her mailbox: you have a visitor.