Theresa Sowders stood stooped shouldered at the classroom door. Surprised to see her, Set hoped the twinge of nervous disappointment didn't register on her own face.
     She had wanted to make one last try to reach David at Shequonur, but this would make the fifth time at the office phone and Marigold, although she revealed no ruffle of interest or disapproval, seemed to be counting and considering. Set sensed it, and was uncomfortable with yet another attempt to reach Owen. With Theresa waiting here at the door for her, the matter was settled. Set had promised Lori for her mother. David would just have to return later with his journal. At least Set hoped beyond hope that he would.
      "O, Mrs. Sowders, I was just stepping out to the office for a minute, but it's not really necessary. Please come in." Set extended her hand, touching the arm of the bedraggled woman who, half-smiling with embarrassment, faced her. Here was the face of Lori, only older and softer. The crows-feet at her eyes were etched in leathered skin, skin that looked as if she had spent days in the sun. Like Lori, Theresa's hair was bleached but had grown out to a more disagreeable effect, and at the temples and spotted within shadowed patches of gray. She wore a wrinkled white uniform and white, bulky slip-on nurses shoes. Incongruously, a purple, green, and yellow sports jacket topped her attire. Its puffy, fiber-filled form could not hide the shallow body above, small. Below the waist her body developed into the shape of a lumpy pear. Theresa Sowder's rear end had rounded into too-large a mass for her diminutive top. When she was young, Set thought, her bottom was probably the tight, firm derriere of Lori.
      But the major difference between Theresa and her daughter was aggression. Behind Theresa's eyes lay no secret hold on internal power, the calculated strength of Lori. And of Nate. In this body before her, Set saw Lori-minus-Nate and she wondered what else was there.
      "I really must ask you to forgive me for bothering you at the last minute." Theresa's voice had a naive mountain sound. Maybe West Virginia or Kentucy, Set thought. "But, Miss Hunt, I had to talk to someone . . ." Here she paused and looked behind her down the steps into the entry. "To someone not so connected with, well, you know, those people so close to our family. Lori said you could be trusted and that you are kind. Understanding." Set cringed under the word "trusted" remembering her call to Darby after Lori's visit.
      "I'm happy you came. Please, why don't we sit in the room?"
     In the front row near her desk, Set pulled up two student desks facing one another, almost touching. "Can I take your jacket?"
      "I'll just keep it on," she said, apologetically, pulling the zipper down a bare two inches. "I don't want to take too much of your time." She paused. "I'm on my way to work. Third shift. Lori's probably told you I work at Mary Sutton." She looked at Set. "The hospital." She paused again and then brimmed with a lilting laugh. "I didn't have time to iron my dress. And look at you. What a really neat outfit. Lori talks about your clothes all the time." Set smiled with genuine gratitude toward this woman who appeared to have no ego, no jealousy, no ill will toward another woman who looked pulled together--on the surface. Then Set noticed the twitch, an involuntary movement in Theresa Sowder's left eye. Not to look, don't look. Set turned toward the windows.
      "Did you have any trouble on the roads?" Why did she have to ruin the snow with weather talk? Inane. Look back and don't rest on the eye. But when she glanced back to her companion, Set could not help but focus on the rapid, odd squinting that tormented the face on which it played.
      "Since Nate died I've had some real difficulty in adjusting," she began carefully.
      "Of course, grief takes it . . ." Set attempted.
      "No, I mean more than just the grief, Miss Hunt. Other things. You see, even before Nate died, life wasn't right. Between us and with Nate himself." She pulled down her jacket's zipper a few inches lower and then clasped her small hands together on the desk. "I wouldn't be here right now if I could help it. But I had to talk to someone who could understand and Lori says you helped her. She told me only several nights ago that she talked to you after. . . afterwards." Theresa's left eye made a violent spasm. "Lori's a good kid. She's been a real comfort to me."
      "Did she tell you about why she came, Mrs. Sowders? Theresa?"
      "Well, I don't know what all she said to you but I know she mentioned about the morning Dr. Owen talked to Nate." Set acknowledged this with a nod of her head. "That's the problem. I can't talk to any of the folks at Calvary. It's too close. Too involved. Too many lives could be damaged." Theresa laughed abruptly that soft, musical laugh. "Don't get me wrong. The congregation has been wonderful and with their prayers and support, the Lord will get us through." Set had to realign her thoughts momentarily, to remind herself that this was a pastor's wife. An innate calmness and clarity of purpose was lacking in this middle-aged woman who appeared at once too humble and yet too frivolous to have been the womanly vessel of strength needed to assist her intense, Bible-studying husband. She seemed more like a searching teenage girl, more innocent and young than her seventeen year-old daughter. "There's the thing about Dr. Owen, yes. But, please, can I back up and tell you what happened before David came--let's see, it's been three weeks ago, hasn't it?"
      "Theresa, you can tell me anything. Back up to wherever it's right for you." Set leaned forward in her desk and anticipating, relishing what would come next.
      "It started, oh, I'd say just over a year ago. I remember one night at supper. We had just said grace. Nate said it and then he told us to stop. I mean he told us not to eat. I thought he was kidding at first. He had a great sense of humor and he always teased Lori at supper." She smiled a sad smile and seemed to search for words and memories. "What he said was something like, 'Don't pick up your forks. We are being watched, maybe right now,' or, I don't remember exactly. But he said someone could be watching us out the window. Lori laughed, I remember, and then Nate became angry. Like I had never seen him. He pounded his fist on the table and ground his teeth. Literally ground his teeth together. I remember it because I had never seen anybody do that. He had been angry before."
     Theresa wrung her red little hands together, tight, released and twisted the gold ring on her left hand. "He had a right to be angry with me. I wasn't always what I ought to have been. For him--at Calvary. So he had been rightfully disturbed with me. But that night with his comment about someone watching, it wasn't about me. Or Lori. It seemed beyond us." Set thought about the description Lori had given, what she had heard that morning of Nate's strange angry conversation with David.
      "Nate went over to the drapes and pulled them closed, with a yank that nearly brought down the whole thing. I tried to say something to him, but he left the room and we heard him in the other rooms pulling the drapes. And then upstairs. All over the house. And we heard him muttering. Well, that was the first time. Lori, of course, was scared. And I was sick with worry. Because I didn't want to upset her, I held it in. Things went on for, oh, I'd say a week, and I thought Nate was alright. He preached on Sunday and, Miss Hunt, it was glorious. Nate was always an inspiration. He was always called to the ministry, but that Sunday he just gleamed from the pulpit. It was a series on Revelations and the End Times. I was relieved." Theresa zipped her jacket all the way down. "Boy, I'm warm."
      "Here, Theresa, take your jacket off. It's really getting uncomfortable in here. I think John is still trying to find the right coal formula for the furnace." Theresa's pear-shaped body now was in full view. "What happened after that week?"
      "That's when it really began. Lots of things. Lots of things Nate did. I can't even remember. It all became a nightmare. I do remember though that the next time he pulled the curtains, he did something else. Lori and I heard him rushing through the house again and then he returned. But this time he had a box in his hands. A big old wooden box with carved leaves and acorns. I think it had been his dad's, an old seed box. I don't know where the box had been. Attic, I think. Anyway, Nate just stood there in the doorway holding the box and shaking. Trembling in his upper lip. He said we were never to touch the box or try to open it. That the Lord knew our every move. And, then, Miss Hunt, he said the strangest thing. Something that made no sense. And he would say it every once in a while, clear up until . . . well, until he passed away." The word "dead" was uncomfortable for Theresa Sowders. "Nate said, 'He wasn't here.' And I said, 'Who wasn't here, Nathan?' but he just smiled."
      "Theresa, I heard your husband say that when we found him that night." Set tried to soften her speech to an appropriately solemn tone, but she found herself hurrying over the words. "I thought it a strange phrase. But that he said it before is . . . well, it's a little disturbing, don't you think? Do you have any idea who he meant wasn't here. And where is 'here'? Did you look in the wooden box?"
      "That's what has me really worried. The box. I did as Nate said after he showed Lori and me the box. I stayed out of it, although at first I wanted to know real bad. He had a little brass lock made for it. After that, it sat right out in plain view on his shelves. I thought about it every once in a while, but I was mostly worried about Nate's health. So the box just seemed secondary to the way he acted. There was more. He got worse. He wouldn't come home until two or three in the morning. Several times when he came home--I'd be waiting up for him--his shirt was torn and he had scratches on his face. When I asked what happened, he got violent--with words, you see-- and then he'd rush into his study and check the box. He'd tell me to go to bed, it was none of my business. He'd ask if anyone had called. When I'd say so and so called--say, someone from the church--he'd just sneer and question if I knew who I was talking to. If no one had called, and I told him, he'd accuse me of lying. Oh, Miss Hunt, I could go on and on, but you see how it was." Her diminutive topped breathed in a deep breath and her eye was still. "But what I was going to say about the box is that Sunday, just last Sunday after Nate died, we came home, and the back door was standing open. Enid and Bob Fout were there with us and Bob looked around first, but since he didn't see anything, we didn't think much about it that night. We generally leave our doors unlocked. Everything was so terribly upset then with the funeral. But the next day Lori came running out from Nate's office and said the box was ripped open, the little lock was torn off, and it was on the floor."
      "That's frightening, Theresa. Was there anything in the box?"
      "Nothing. It was empty and I don't know what had been there, or if anything had ever been there. Nate had been so, so sick before that Friday, that I had often wondered if the box was really anything. I mean, his other ideas were so strange and, just not right, that I thought he could be imagining something in the box, too. I don't know. I don't know. I hate to tell you, I hate to tell anyone about how it was for Nate. He was such a good person. He worked all his life for the people, to help them, to bring them to the Lord. How could it be like this for him?" Her eye twitched and looked red and wet. Water rinsed over her irises. Set reached out her hand and touched Theresa's tight fist.
      "But maybe all of that doesn't matter now, Theresa. Maybe it's best to put it behind you now that Nate's gone."
      Theresa pulled a wrinkled hankie from her jacket pocket, dabbed at her eyes. "You see, there's more. And this is what I must trust you with. Nate had been sicker than what I told you. Physically sick. For about seven months he's had a heart condition. We hadn't talked about it much. With the other things, delusions, I would call them, I didn't want to harp at him about this new problem. But he had it, arterial sclerosis. As a result, he had been taking a blood thinning drug. Wafarin." Her voice trembled. "I had an autopsy performed." Set waited with Theresa's pause. "Nate died from bleeding to death, from an overdose of wafarin."
     She blotted her eyes again, she looked up, and then the blood seemed to drain from her face. Moving her hand slowly to her pocket, Theresa returned the damp folded handkerchief. "I have to go," she said in a soft mechanical tone. "Thank you for your conference, Miss Hunt."
      Set, who had been reeling with the story, felt confused until she stood to pull back her desk. At the door loomed David Owen with a large black book in his hand. How long he had been there and what he heard Set did not know. She only could see Theresa's fragile stability, wrung from her small red hands, ruptured in fear. "Hello, Theresa," Owen said.
      "Hello, David," Theresa said almost whispering. Zipping her jacket, she kept her head down and moved passed him at the door. He did not make her way easier by standing clear of the doorframe, and Theresa had to scoot sideways. Owen held her arm as she tried to get past.
      "Are you alright, Theresa? I know Jim and Bonnie have been there with you all week, and so I've wanted to let you have the comfort of your family without my interference," Owen said. His manner was forthright, but his stance in the door and arm on her jacket went beyond openness into boldness.
      "I'm getting along fine," the weak voice returned, still in the door.
      Set reached her hand out to David to draw him out of the way. "I tried to reach you, David, at Shequonur, to tell you I would be a little late . . ."
      Owen moved into the room, allowing Theresa Sowders to slip by into the hallway. She did not turn back to Set who watched her down the steps. "Thank you, Mrs. Sowders, for coming. Feel free any time," Set called after her, but the jacket's tricolors, bright against the snow's white film, revealed that Theresa Sowders was already unlocking her car door.
      In the room Set found Owen leaning against her desk, arms folded, still staring at the door. "The Reverend Sowders certainly found a life's helpmate in that poor wretch," Owen said. He almost smiled. "That's probably what drove him to his sinful ways, his temptations with others in the flock."
      "Do you mean Sowders wasn't faithful to Theresa?"
      "He was faithful to himself and everyone suffered for it, including Theresa who was never quite holy enough to pull her weight in the spiritual marathon, the high Olympics of Fundamentalism." Owen was angular and cold, strikingly handsome and calm. "Since I couldn't find you at the caboose, I took a chance that you'd still be here. My journal and two books from Ivy," he said handing them to Set. "Ivy's books will no doubt be more entertaining for you."
      Set ignored the implication of his statement and took the books gratefully. She watched him walk about the room staring up at the literary posters she had collected and hoarded throughout the past fifteen years. Wordsworth and Coleridge, brown and beige, hooked noses and puffy eyes, Lord Byron in a turban, Shelley, small, fragile and young, a sketch of Tennyson by Rossetti, a young Dickens, cross-legged at a desk, a large photograph of Hardy country, and a soft, barely grown boy, Gerard Manley Hopkins. "O, Aunt Margory's books. The Boxcar Children, and how appropriate, The Caboose Mystery." She paused. "But your book, your sharing with me, I treasure. I will take care of it, David."
      "Don't be so dramatic, September. The Boxcar Children will be more purposeful and literary than my ramblings. But do take care. Keep my journal to yourself. No matter what it's worth, it's a rambling I share with only those I choose. I choose you." He stood looking up at Dickens. "So, do you read David Copperfield with your class?"
      Warmed by the inuendo of being his choice, Set was animated. "No, I have in the past, but not this year. Instead my seniors are going to perform A Christmas Carol for the last day celebration." Steering away from her teacher persona she asked, "When can I return your journal? I could drive it out to Shequonur whenever it's convenient for you."
      "No, Set, I'll pick it up at the caboose. I'd like to have it before you leave for your holiday. You are going home to . . . where did you say home was?"
      "North. A little town south of Toledo. Ludway." She winced inside with the sound of the name. Ludway. It was as bland as the space it named. "A good place," she lied. "But not quite the local color of East Worthy. It will be good to see Mother and Dad, though, and the rest of my family. I won't be leaving until eight or so. If you could pick it up any time before then. But really it's no trouble for me to run out to . . ."
      "I'll be by late afternoon. I'll be interested in your reaction to my journal. Don't question why I'm showing it to you. Just read it." He was at the door, but turned back. "Don't take too much stock in what Theresa said to you, September. She's been poorly used by Nate. She's trying to figure out a reason, and a pattern, but, poor soul, she will be figuring for the rest of her life. She's trying to find good in something that was not good. She loved Nate and she's trying to understand why. So the intimation that there was something irregular in his death is just a last thrust at sorting out his cruelty. And Theresa Sowders doesn't have the intellect to do that."
     He walked back to Set at her desk. "You on the other hand have the intelligence to see many things if you will." He covered her soft, manicured hand with his broad, dark palm. Turning her hand over, he gently rubbed the inside of her warm flesh. And then he leaned into her palm and kissed it. No one in Set's lifetime had ever performed that single, intimate, old-fashioned, courtly, sexual gesture. Not Radnor, or Whatley Taylor, or the several other males of her romantic past. Darby, once, had elegantly, dramatically kissed her gloved hand in a pseudo-swashbuckling move as they danced in the great frescoed ballroom at Shequonur.
     But that was Dar. This was real--David Owen's dark mood, his unapproachable intensity that bordered on pain and erupted in cruelty, his Oxford eyes, and his un-trackable motives. Perhaps he had killed a man. She could not move or talk. And then he was gone.

Set decided that she would read his journal in the cupola, first because it was the place where David had told his tale of the letter, and, second, because it was the most extreme spot in the house, always echoing the weather. Taps and squeaks, tree limbs and snow--every element played off the fragile crown of the caboose.
      She sat with three books on her lap and then laid the two small ones on the seat beside her. As she opened the black, worn cover of the journal, Set felt an odd sensation--wanting to look and yet needing to back away. An approach-avoidance syndrome. She wanted to know, but if it should be intellectual jargon, she wanted to run. If she did not understand Owen's Oxford ramblings, as he called it, or, worse, if she should find it unavoidably dull, she could not bear it. David Owen had to remain her citadel of dramatic tension, her fire. So she was surprised, even shocked by what appeared on the first page--a sketch in black ink and water colors, pastel towers and roofs and chimneys, with a bright illuminated O marking the black "at Oxford." At the bottom of the page, in calligraphy letters, stood the words, "from my window." Across one of the roofs Owen had printed "July - August 1988." It was instead to be an illustrated Oxford, Set realized as she allowed herself to swish one time through the remainder of the book. She glimpsed slivers of color interspersed with small script. That David was an artist, too, made him more mysterious and desirable. It was almost too much for her already overburdened sense of self-deprecation, her belief that Owen combined too many worlds--he was worthy both inside and outside. He glittered with the power of a masculine bandbox, a contemporary exterior and he resonated with the mystery of intellect, an intellect that kept her at bay. Set turned the page.

 

July 20th 1988

 Oxford. I am absolutely astounded. Oxford far exceeds my fantasies. This ancient city continues to function as a center for scholarship, layer upon layer of scholars, into this century. As Jude Fawley, a child, looked down on the "city of light," Christminster, and was emotionally transported at its promise of learning and ideas, I watch from my window on the fourth floor of Rathwell and am awed by the undulations of rooftop chimneys and Gothic spires and all that even this rooftop strata connotes.
     I am deeply affected by the architecture. Although I am barely familiar with the center of town I have a vague sensation of surrealism. The structures are large, powerful, and yet intimate. They are set at odd angles as if they had grown up like mushrooms. The color is carmel-gray, which produces a kind of deep parchment light everywhere I turn. The Sheldonian Theatre with its large heads, almost comic, bearing down on the pedestrian, is Druidic. Rocks, stones sculpted and piled, seem not too distant in spirit from Hardy's more southern landscape near Stonehenge. English dignity is made manifest by the rustic transmogrified into attempts at classicism. The Bodliean inner courtyard produced in me the same effect--the rustic remoulded into attempts at classicism with flourishes of Gothic. The intimate stones of Oxford.
     

Below this first entry was a pen and ink drawing of what looked like the back of a building facing out onto a small garden courtyard, and beyond buildings jumbled together with small-paned windows peeking out in odd places adjacent to a wall washed in brick-brown watercolor . Chimneys crowned with pipes sticking into the sky integrated with towers in the distance, towers bearing crosses and what looked like saw-tooth edges along their vertical lines. Owen had painted red flowers in pots and along the wall. Below the sketch, nestled in the flowers, were the words "the Dean's yard" and he had printed below that "the roses had the look of flowers that are looked at."

Set turned the page, allowing the words and color to do their work, carrying her into the small passages of the medieval city of learning. Oxford, and through David's eyes.
      The next entry was headed by another intricate drawing of a pastel interior. Books, purple, gold, and rose, lined high shelves and a large arched window dominated the sketch. Marked at the side, in sweeping black calligraphy was "angles at the Bodleian." He had mentioned "the Bodleian" in the first entry and Set surmised now that it was a library. And like the first entry there was a literary inscription included, although Set did not immediately recognize either of the inscriptions. "But the saints and the prophets in window-tracery, the paintings in the galleries, the statues, the busts, the gargolyes, the corbel-heads--these seemed to breathe his atmosphere."

Below, the entry began.

     July 21st Thursday

The "scout" stepped out and through the Arlosh Gate at Manchester College. She lit up a cigarette and flashed a smile at me. Her open lips revealed a line of broken teeth studded with black in two places where teeth were missing ,and her brassy blonde hair, colored from a bottle, drooped in the fine mist of early evening. She was going home, perhaps to some small crannied apartment; perhaps to squalling English children and a husband propped before the tely. I don't know. But all day long the scout--who poured the coffee and set out the orange juice, offered up the croissant, and tidied the rooms,--served the Idea. Or the Ideas. Abstract entities pushed along the halls and floors in the form of words, written and oral. I cannot help but think that she stepped around the Idea all day long with actual physical movements, offering toast and punching up pillows. The students and teachers stepped along the corridors and flowed into the rooms to discuss the Idea, the thought pulled from the air. The scout poured coffee at ten-thirty so that the students might rest from the Idea for half an hour. But again they assembled, the Idea silently but constantly drawing their attention.
     I hear her down the street jabbering something about a "bloody hell of a good time" and see her smash the small fire of her cigarette into the wet pavement. The golden spires rise over her and the gargoyles leer down at her. They know the Idea. They are in fact the physical manifestation of the Idea. The arches, the domes, the stones are the crystallized thought of a thousand years. At Oxford thought has translated into landscape through towers and bells, and the landscape must be served, must be tided, must be fed. A single ash flared red and faded into the damp stone walk and the scout disappeared down an alley in the shadow of a tower.

 

Set was mesmerized by this view of a city she knew only by the hypnotic word "Oxford." That word had been a concept, rather than a real place, but to hear it described with fleshy people, like the scout, made it, for this moment, her city. Yet there seemed little of David in these entries, nothing personal to allow her some intimate understanding of his ways. She wondered if this journal had been a personal diary or written with some publishing purpose in mind--it seemed so directed toward an intellectual audience.

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Skipping ahead over several entries Set began again. This time the page was illustrated in blacks and grays, a sketch of the top of a building from whose windows three classical looking busts stared. The scene was marked, "Even now he did not distinctly hear the freezing negative that those scholared walls had echoed to his desire."

 

July 27th

If "cold" cannot be fully realized by its signifier the word COLD and can only be approximated by relying on its "differences," its opposition to "hot," then to name is to destroy. Therefore, in TESS, when the rape/seduction scene is not explicitly spelled out by Hardy, the less becomes more. "Beautiful feminine tissue," "gossamer," and "trace" are metaphorically mysterious, leaving the reader to fill in his own experience, thereby making the scene more realized in the reader's psyche. If something is powerfully suggested, if an outline of experience is provided by an author, the reader is obliged to forage for his own vocabulary. In doing this the reader is engaged with the literature. If the suggestive language is beautiful, mythic, common to all humankind, the suggested moment becomes (and I know I am here dangerously subjective) great literature. Thus, it seems to me that all "great" writers, those appealing universally to readers, have anticipated "la difference" of Derrida. They have suggested, consciously or unconsciously, rather than named, realizing somehow that to name is to lose. Like a frightened bird the concept is scared further and further from the hand that feeds it. To feed it, to name it, pushes it away, confusing the reader with . . .
     

Here Set looked up, believing that she had waded in over her head; it was the illusive intellect she had feared she would find. Skipping down the page and then turning to the next, she tried to attach herself to something, anything warm, human in David Owen's thought.

"To mean" suggests an attempt at signifying a concept. "To be" suggests that "signifaction" is no longer needed and the concept is simply apprehended or experienced by the reader. He does not need the bridge or the word to transport him, with the potential to lose him, on the way to the meaning.
      With this line of reasoning I eventually end in the world of the plastic arts. Perhaps this . . .

Set closed the black book and sighed, watching a tree branch tap the cupola's window. Glancing to the seat, she saw Aunt Margory's books and took one up with relief. She ran her hand over the title embossed in the cover: The Boxcar Children and below, GERTRUDE CHANDLER WARNER. Inside the cover on the title page was a black and white silhouette illustration of several children, a Forties illustration that awakened the clean-cut feelings of early reading in Set. "Run, Jerry," said Alice. "Jump, Spot." It was strange that a page could bring these memories to the mind's front, all there buried in the folds. Turning to the first story page, she read, "One warm night four children stood in front of a bakery. No one knew them. No one knew where they had come from."

An hour later Set closed the last page. She had read it all, allowing herself the pleasure of her child's eye. She thought about Aunt Margory's care for this story of children making a runaway home in an abandoned boxcar. A refrigerator made from rocks in the stream, old cups and broken bowls found in a trash pile in the woods. It was domestic, simple, enticing. The ethic was clear. The characters spoke in clear forthright statements; their tasks were simple, much attention was given to preparing meals, and, although there were some fears and some mysteries that seemed at first to have no answers, the characters went on, only mildly ruffled, making right choices.
     Grandfather Alden was rich and rambled out with the children for adventure at any time of the day; no one fought or had dramatic needs beyond the focused need of the immediate mystery-dilemma; all the settings seemed black and white forties pictures--girls with windblown ties at the back of their dresses, boys with tousled hair, all bending to pet a silhouetted dog. All black and white, clear and clean, and ruffled with the paper wind on the day's paper adventure. Set compared this with real life, where she was always trying to drum up a little action, a little drama, where things moved slowly, and where she found a barrage of fear, jealousy, and self-castigation in the long moments. Reality was at the same time more unmanageably painful and depressingly dull and long in duration. And there was no Grandfather Alden at the end, in his big mansion, with his accepting, stilted, paper voice.
      Set wanted to read the second Warner book but felt ridiculous when she recognized her own enthusiasm. Instead, in an act verging more on intellectual duty than curiosity, she picked up Owen's journal again. Flipping through the pages she found the illustrations. One with a round building skirted by pillared busts was marked "The Sheldonian Theatre-Oxford." A pencil sketch of reclining classic figures, marked "The Elgin Marbles at the British Museum," gave her courage, for she recognized these as Keats' inspiration. But she was intrigued even more by a color-washed drawing of an interior wall buttressed by several high arches, and two wall-sconced candelabrum. "The chapel of Little Gidding" he had printed at the bottom of the page, which was entirely filled by the illustration. Although there were no flowers or organic matter of any kind in the sketch, it was strong and held her interest.

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She found below "July 29th" an entry beginning with the phrase "Little Gidding."
  

I hesitate to write about this experience; to name is to destroy. But words are what are left to me so they must suffice. We did leave the "rough road" and wander "behind the pig-sty" to the chapel at Little Gidding. Many of us laughed and talked loudly as we drifted rather aimlessly toward the "dull facade" of the tiny chapel set behind a woods and opening out onto pasture. But when the heavy wooden doors were pulled opened and we stepped inside it was as if a deep-toned bell tolled. The moment began.
     The moment was this: diffused light through stained glass, a soft gleam from brass candelabrum mounted on the dark wooden walls, cello and oboe and Benedictine nuns filling the high arched ceilings with music, and words; the words of T. S. Eliot delivered to us by the strange and kind community of Little Gidding. The words were spoken roundly, they were rich and sonorous; they rolled through the chapel and washed over us. They were complete and we were completed in this moment.
     I was completed in this moment, but I have asked myself why such a moment should be affecting me in this way. I am not religious; that is, I have cast off years of Calvinsim thrust on me by well-meaning parents; years of Bible prophecies and frightening altar calls, horrendous for a sensitive child. I have turned my back on institutional religions of all kinds. I have gone with Blake to the "garden of love" and found it filled with thorns and dark-robed priests making their rounds. But now I find in Eliot the embracing of institution and specifically the instituion of the High Anglican Church; and I accept this in him. I am moved by his poetry which centers itself on this very concern--the acceptance of dogma developed by two thousand years of institutionalized Christianity. But this is not my conversion. At least not to Christianity. This is praise for the beauty created out of the aesthetic of institution. Eliot the poet, in clothing himself in the creed of High Anglicanism, in taking on the liturgy and the Eucharist, is answering a great need in himself to find a center that holds. Eliot "holds" through the church and his search for the center is magnificently recorded through language that appeals to our own great needs.
     But the question remains for me: why at this spot, a nondescript pocket of land in a pasture in England, should the experience of Eliot's words be so intensely moving? Eliot writes that here at Little Gidding "prayer has been valid." But prayer, Christian prayer, has been valid, in Eliot's sense, for two thousand years and in as many places. Nicholas Ferrar's prayer for an unjust and short-sighted king, Charles I, might, in fact, have been among the least valid prayers ever offered if prayer can be rated for equanimity. But, never-the-less, Eliot found the chapel and its accoutrements a symbol for discipline and resolve; for dedication to a power that could hold the "center" the poet so desperately desired. This chapel then is more than just a place where prayer has been valid.
     If I came then not for spiritual enlightenment but for biographical detail I should be disappointed. Eliot came once to Little Gidding; I believe the years was 1936. So this pilgrimage to find biography has little reward.
     What then is the moment at Little Gidding? It is Need answered by Beauty. It is a symbol with layers of meaning. It works upon itself to become increasingly powerful with time's passage. The landscape is, of course, the landscape of Eliot's mind. We seek with the poet the center that holds. We come to the physical landscape, which was at first simply a poignant metaphor for the poet's search, and we hear the poetic language which signifies the search. All of this attends us as we are literally wrapped up in the physical manifestation of the search, a small stone chapel. To hear the mind of the poet audibly uttered while we are embraced by his symbol is mind become matter. Perhaps a kind of incarnation, spirit become body. When this moment is enhanced by ethereal music, by the arts, by the other avenues of the mind that illustrate and read out our most hidden and unspeakable longings; when this moment includes other persons, diverse and needy--a tall, plain, gawking woman with a deep English voice, a squat woman with crisp articulation, a gray-haired man, serious and compassionate under the arch, a round-faced elderly woman with a crippled hand--and with all of us, Americans sensitive to one cause and searching for the landscape that compelled the poet to compose such language, language that has brought us on a thousand mile journey to rest in a small chapel in a field--this is the comfort of Little Gidding. One common need has brought us together; we are bonded for all human time by our intimate knowledge of a crystalized moment in England. Perhaps all will be well.

Set felt she had seen David for a moment in the chapel and she wondered at his analysis of one moment. But what stayed with her was his outright repudiation of Christianity. She knew that he was torn by what had occurred to his parents. It was on his face and in his tone when he spoke of Nate. But he didn't even believe. Not at all. Yet he was carrying forward at Calvary Chapel, running an entire series on Christian epiphany. She knew he had been intensely emotional when he had described his father's connection with the church on the road that night. But he seemed also to rebound from his painful descent into memory. And he always rallied with a smile. Granted, she did not understand the mystery of his rallying or the source of his smile, but she had believed him honest, truthful to himself, to his code--whatever that was--unafraid to speak his own rendition of morality, universal structures. But from his journal she understood that his presentation on epiphany was a sham.
      Set had remembered his appearance at the pulpit on the three nights she had attended the conference. At first, just as always, she calculated the outer person and that, of course, had been spectacular in its subtle, east-coast cast--shirt, tie, suit, handkerchief tipped discreet and silken at his breast. His shock of dark hair, just uncontrolled enough to be heart-rending, fell on his forehead. When he opened his mouth, there was no mark of East Worthy, no twang, no straining against Ohio enunciation. Just words, pronounced with the sound of no place except his mind. All of the crowd that first night had entered David Owen's mind and did not notice the sound of his voice after he had spoken for several minutes. Pulling them in, he had reached them with concern and sincerity, with a passion that could not be counterfeited. Or, if it had been staged, what then could be assumed by Owen's ability to deceive? And if his message to the crowd was false, could he not then be entirely cunning about his relationship with Nate?
     

Set turned ahead in the journal and read more of the entries, but most of these did not hold her long, although she forced herself over long passages about language, multiple meanings, allegory versus non-allegorical passages in Wordsworth's Prelude, Existentialism, John of the Cross, and Juliana of Norwich. Finally, she came to the last entry, marked August 10th, and resolved to read it thoroughly, if for no other reason than to be able to say something involved and profound with David when she returned his book.

Although our seminarians could not possibly know what they have stirred in me, today's discussion caused me to writhe under my emotional burdens. Certain class inquiries came too close to my experience to allow me to write openly, clearly, or perhaps even accurately "in the general mess of imprecision of feeling." The topic is too painful, filled with innuendo and gradations of feeling, slivers of intensity, thoughts that shake my body with my increased pulse. Column A and column B from the Cruthwell book may have been Seventeenth-Century for most persons in my class, but not for me.

 

At this point, Set had difficulty in reading, for David's neat hand developed into a loose script and progressed to weak scrawls with extended letter ends. Now she had to make her way slowly over the disjointed and grotesque characters.
   

  
Taken from my church by parents when I was eleven; they needed more Fundamentalism, more adherence to Scripture. My old church had stained glass windows. Church held in basement of our house until my father built new church, blocks and bricks. My old church had stained glass windows. Guilt, fear, altar calls; arguments by deacons resulting in the removal of formal "Amen" from the end of hymns. Intellect suspect; Roman Catholics damned; Preysbyterian and Methodists on the fringe, probably lost. Beauty suspect and reformulated into blonde woodwork and straight lines. My old church had stained glass windows. Forced to severe and perpetual perusal of relationship with Christ. The desert blooms like a rose; the Second Coming. Be ready; be happy. Do not be unequally yoked together with unbelievers; the mark of the Beast. You may come home some day and find your parents gone. The Rapture. John Kennedy is the Anti-Christ. Two will be working and one will remain in the field. Your mother may not be there when you return home if you have not truly accepted; pray for the non-believers when the bell rings in the hall; suspect. For me to live is Christ; to die is gain. What does it profit a man if he should gain his life and lose his own soul?
     What does it profit a boy if he should gain despair and lose the Beautiful? Second preacher left suddenly. Dead. Franklin, the blood is on your hands. My old church had stained glass windows. To dispute: predestination, the chosen. Parents excommunicated from the church my father built; strangled by the snake they unwittingly invented. Franklin, the blood is on your hands. If God does not allow poetry and art, then he can die. If he will not allow the whole world, then he can burn. My old church had stained glass windows.
     What do you do with it? Column A--the revolutionary, single-minded strength of the puritan; the fearlessness of differing; the introspection. Column B--the "monarchist sympathies; the hierarchal view of society." To be an American is to be predicated, whether you like it or not, on puritanism, Column A. Eliot sought Form in British tradition, political, literary, and religious. Column B--to wrap around the formlessness and unadorned needling introspection of his early St. Louis--Massachusetts life. He made a bold leap with his embrace of Anglo-Catholicism. But probably what gave him the strong-headed will to leap was his American boldness. The will of an American joined with the spirit of the Old World. Perhaps he accepted Anglo-Catholicism simply as a traditional form, one of many forms, to settle on; a place to build his art, for it carried many of his requirements--beauty, drama, commitment, acceptance. I am very interested in his choice but finally believe that the choice of form falls second place to the ability of the artist to apply this form to universal concerns. The great artist finds a way to join private experience with public concerns.

 

At the bottom of this page, its final letters running almost vertical and then off the paper, was scribbled, "My old church had stained glass win--." The letters "dows" were missing. Set felt the immediate pain of the adult hand that had allowed this child-like scrawl, the boiling hurt running out of his repeated phrase about these long-ago church windows. The section on Eliot left her uninvolved, but she returned again to the stream of consciousness passage. Owen's god had died because the boy could not be kept from beauty. And to him Calvary Chapel was a snake created by his own parents. She wasn't sure about Franklin's identity. But she did know that David had willingly offered her these violent passages from his own hand. None of the content mattered at all compared to the fact that Owen had shared himself with her.

On Tuesday night, between stacks of quizzes over Behold the Land, Set read The Caboose Mystery. Again, she felt the pleasurable release of rising and falling with the fictional, simplistic Aldens who in this story lived with their well-suited wealthy grandfather. And this time Grandfather Alden created the adventure himself, suggesting a glorious journey in two cabooses--one for the boys and one for the girls--during which the happy family involves themselves in the perils of a sad circus clown. And the disappearance of a diamond necklace once owned by the clown's wife.
      Set delighted in the details Warner had chosen to expand her story--a passage about a cornfield where the family picks sweet corn to roast for their evening meal; a rural character called Beaver Man who, in his hermit's life, immerses himself in beaver lore and allows the children to watch the industrious creatures build their dams; and bunk beds in the cupola where Benny watches the stars when the train, nightly, pulls off the main track. The unraveling of the mystery, the lost necklace, occurs when Benny finds the necklace sewn into the stuffing of a mattress in the cupola. The cupola.
      The contained world of a boxcar or a caboose must have fascinated Gertrude Chandler Warner, and then Aunt Margory, Set thought. It was a little world full of confined domesticity; it was a world of forced limitations, small sinks, diminutive beds, discreet feints at interior decor, nothing ostentatious or above its station. And yet it released one to life. The whole thing rolled. A tiny portable world that journeyed through natural environs, weeds and trees, like a river, that removed itself from fields and towns, that passed through life in adventure, contained and safe in its ability to nurture because it was always the same, and yet wild and adventurous because it moved through the landscape. And the caboose was the superior car of all the cars for it wore its jeweled crown of light, the cupola that glistened from within and without. Set thought a scene at that moment. She would go beyond that. She would take her Aunt Margory a step beyond Alden's image by bejeweling the very heart of the jewel--language and color.
      Set joined intimately those two women in that moment. She felt herself connected--a kind of triumvirate of caboose women. "That's ridiculous," she said aloud. But after she had laid the book into the folds of her bed's comforter, she ducked her head under the low door from the sleeping room to the caboose, and climbed into the cupola.
      Set tried to think on some appropriate Wordsworth lines and landed incongruously on "Let the misty mountain winds be free to blow against thee." But acknowledging that there were no mountains in sight, only the soft, sporadically wooded hills rising beyond the fields east of town, she directed her thoughts toward Owen's Oxford. Since there were, however, no gray towers in sight, she could only call up water-colored pages from the journal and these seemed now to be cold and uninviting. In her mind's ear she retained only the words, "My old church had stained glass windows."
      What she could not erase from her imagining was the Alden caboose and she glanced around her own space, her pseudo tower, with new appreciation. Set had not spent much time in the cupola during the past three years, although she enjoyed its concept, because it was the one space Margory had not finished. Or she perceived that her aunt had not completed the tiny, high box. There were no illuminations, no words, no attempts to paint or highlight the potential splendor of this area, like the remainder of the caboose complex had been uniquely overlaid with color. As Set ran her hand over the slick, tacky naugahyde, she wondered why Marjory had not approached this area first. Its potential for fantasy seemed unlimited.
      The sky, murky slate now, with no light, lay without the surrounding windows. Usually stars sparked and studded the night, like diamonds, yes, like the diamond necklace Benny Alden found in the mattress in his paper world. Set wished she had a simple, defined mystery with an insured ending, a diamond necklace stuffed into the folds of the ugly naugahyde, some family jewels that only Margory knew of, something she had hidden away forty years ago.
     "Well, why not?" she said aloud, making a decision. Then she attempted to lift the boxy rubberized seat. Although she had cleaned the wooden platform and the humps of plastic pillow thoroughly with Pinesol when she first came to the caboose, she had not turned the heavy upholstered masses. The seats had seemed permanent, fixed, and she had been swallowed up in the great rush to prepare lesson plans for her new teaching position. Below the pillows were platforms, storage areas with little doors that opened out, and Set had carefully explored these dark caverns in the beginning, but found only several worn board games, Monopoly and Parcheesi. Set detested games, but left them in the cupboard, believing that to toss them aside was a palpable hit against the imaginative mind who had created the walls below. Maybe these seats were just that, seats, unweildy plastic, wire, and board, but still, at that moment, with the Aldens walking in her thoughts, she could not allow this little feint at drama to go unrealized.
      The dull, green plastic rectangle thudded heavily against the wooden box that was the cupola's platform seat. Set leaned low, ran her hand along all the surface of the pillow, but found only two small tears that were not long enough to admit a necklace, or a box, or anything vaguely interesting. She sat on the new side of the pillow and looked at the matching seat facing her, where David had sat to tell his story. Deciding that she would not perfect her search unless she was thorough--and she loved perfection--she tackled the other side, heaving the seat's cover over in one swing. Here there were no tears at all. But there was a darkened area , an offensive stain in the thick plastic, where the material was cracked and brittle. It had to be reversed and Set, after a brief examination, slung the seat to its original side. Stooping, she opened the platform's doors and peered in, but only the aged game boxes sat where she had left them. She slammed the doors with disgust, acknowledging that she had allowed too much time for a child's fantasy, a nonexistent mystery.
      At least twenty more 10R quizzes loomed up at her from below. And tomorrow she had some packing to do for the journey home. No, not home, to Ludway, her parents' home. If she could not enjoy the stilted, mechanical exchanges with her brother and parents, or the angry, inescapable, fomenting moments with her sister, she could at least look good. She would pack three full outfits, belts, scarves, just the right earrings, small and gold, and her dangling, simple metal drops; in addition, her toiletries--make-up, shadows, pencils, creams--all had to go. One day or one year--it took the same amount of preparation.
      By the time Set had climbed out of the perch, she had fully composed the scene--her knickers and argyles touching down on the blacktop driveway at home. The appropriate, eccentric touch. She did not find the dirty, wrinkled envelope until the next morning.