Ashes to Ashes by Emma Lathen

Author:Emma Lathen
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: -
Publisher: Simply Media
Published: 2017-03-23T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter 12

THE LIBERAL SOUL

Man proposes, God disposes.

For many centuries it was widely accepted that the course of human events was shaped by this division of labor. Then one of the bolder spirits of the Middle Ages put faith to the test. Does man propose? Hundreds of succeeding years were spent debating the proposition.

Then, probably because Charles Darwin and Sigmund Freud between them made man uninteresting, attention was returned to the second member of the partnership. How can God dispose, somebody wondered in print, when God is dead? The subsequent outpouring of intellectual thought strained library facilities throughout the world.

But the man in the street (and the man on the steppe) had better things to do with his long winter nights than speculate about free will, the categorical imperative or the natural law. Unnoticed, the population of the world grew by leaps and bounds. Finally, an unbiased witness could have made the following observations: all traffic in London had ground to a three-hour halt, airplanes were stacked up over Frankfurt airport for ninety minutes awaiting landing space, and three overburdened mountainsides in southern California were sliding inexorably into the Pacific Ocean.

Between man, whatever he is, and God, if He exists, there had erupted a new and frightening entity—the crowd. Flensburg, New York, was about to bear witness to the consequences of this interposition.

A long and unprofitable meeting with Father Doyle had convinced Monsignor Miles and Dick Unger that affairs had moved beyond their control.

“Nor,” said Monsignor Miles, “is there any reason to believe that Mrs. Kirk will prove the worst of our trials.”

Father Doyle, who comfortably believed that archdiocesan officials were protected from the hurly-burly of parish life, was alarmed at gloom surpassing his own.

“Isn’t it bad enough?” he growled as they emerged onto the porch of the rectory and waited for the car. As he spoke he waved a disgusted hand.

Oblingingly Miles surveyed the scene. Mrs. Kirk and her determined band were still pacing up and down:

AS MANY CHILDREN AS WE CAN CARE FOR

THE RHYTHM METHOD HAS NO REASON

CHILDREN ARE TO LOVE

There were a dozen of the ladies. Watching them with lackluster eyes was a lone policeman, courtesy of the New York Police Department. Behind him, parked at the curb, was a Volkswagen minibus, bright red, with professionally painted identification: METROPOLITAN COUNCIL OF CONCERNED LAYMEN. The side doors were open to reveal a table, piles of literature, and a fat man ready to instruct any member of the parish bold enough to approach. Since it was three o’clock in the afternoon, the street was otherwise quiet. Occasional shoppers emerged from Degnan’s Bakery. There was even some activity at Parents League headquarters. But on the whole, it was, to Monsignor Miles’s way of thinking, a placid scene.

There were, he knew, other interpretations. For Father Doyle and, if scores of telephone calls meant anything, for many parishioners, this was the façade of sin rampant and the collapse of civilization. And to Precinct 38, this unexciting tableau represented an acute embarrassment. On the one hand, there was the right of Americans to demonstrate peaceably.

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