Well, that was bizarre. Better that they had come into the house and said, Would you care to join our church? We don’t breathe oxygen! Or drink water! Or eat food!
The men accepted scones, at least. Aldine held up the jar of Silver Shred, but Cooper shook his head a little more vigorously than seemed polite, so Leenie laughed and said she agreed completely. Too perfumy, the Silver was, like something you’d rather wash with than eat. Only Aldine had ever liked it.
A gate clanged on the street and Leenie wondered if her aunt could possibly have taken an earlier bus back from Troon.
“It probably sounds strange,” Cooper said. “Well, it must. I’ve been in your country one year, eight months, two weeks, and one day and not one person has believed me yet.” He swallowed and summoned a voice from somewhere in his chest. “But I testify,” he said, his eyes on Aldine’s, then Leenie’s, pleading with them, “that it’s the truth.”
Aldine swallowed a sip of tea and looked at the carpet, as if not sure how to greet such an exposure of the soul. She was embarrassed, Leenie saw.
After a pause, Aldine looked at both men in turn and asked, “Are you sure it’s not due to the tea business?”
“What?”
“The not drinking tea. Maybe people think, Oh, I could never.”
“I don’t see how it could be that,” Cooper said. He walked to the window and gazed at the wet glass and the wet street, the soaking wet stones of the conjoined houses, and something about him tugged at Leenie’s being.
“Do you ever hear from your family at all?” she asked.
He drew something from his pocket and unfolded a picture that was unremarkable: a sun with lines sticking out of it, two figures, small and big, holding hands, the word lov, some squarish shapes. Each week, he said, his youngest sister, Sarah, who was three, drew him a picture, and his mother sent it to him, and he carried one with him at all times in case he got discouraged, which happened a fair amount.
He said that when he was eighteen he’d been fed up because there were so few Mormons where they lived in New York, and he was tired of the rules his mother and father imposed on him—no drinking, no smoking, scripture study every single evening around the table—and their irrational disapproval of a Catholic girl who was achingly good in every way except that she was not Mormon. They wanted him to go on a mission, too, but he didn’t want to go. He was planning to leave them all—the church, his family—when one day Sarah was sick and he had to stay home with her while his parents went to a funeral. She was hungry, so he put a plate of food before her, went to get something, a magazine, and when he returned, her face was bright red. “She choked for the longest time. I didn’t know what to do. I really had no idea.” He prayed that if God would let him save her, he would do it. He would go on a mission like his parents wanted.
Leenie waited.
“I pressed on the right part of her chest somehow. It came out—it was a clump of bread.”
“Ah,” Aldine said.
“I made an effort to believe after that. And more and more I found that I did believe, that it was all true, and I could keep my promise.”
Aldine sat very stiffly in her chair, the thick Bakelite bracelets gleaming on her arm as she held the teacup unnaturally still.
“Could we—would you mind—if we come again next Saturday?” Elder Cooper asked.
“Certainly,” Leenie said, not giving Aldine a second to interject, her whole being calm and steady. “For tea,” she added, and then remembered the men didn’t drink it, and that she and Aldine would have to ask Aunt Sedge for permission to entertain two unmarried missionaries from America, and of course Aunt Sedge would say absolutely not. “We’ll have more sandwiches next time,” Leenie said hopelessly, “and cakes.”
“Could we say a prayer before we leave?” Cooper asked, a question no one had ever asked Leenie before, but the situation had no precedent from start to finish, so she just nodded.
“Our Eternal Father,” he began.
Aldine ducked her head but kept her eyes open, staring hard at Leenie. Probably she was wondering if this was how people got into cults and such.
Leenie, for her part, went on feeling a stillness inside herself as she listened to Elder Cooper’s deep, sure American voice. A change was beginning, she felt.
3
Our Aunt is not well please meet us 2 o’clock Monday, The Cream Pot, High Street.
That was the dishonest note they had to send Cooper and Lance. It gave things an illicit thrill, in Aldine’s opinion, though Aldine was more than a little alarmed to read the inscription Elder Cooper had written in the blue hardback copy of the Book of Mormon he gave them:
For Aldine and Eileen McKenna, Ayr, Scotland, April 13, 1929
We believe all things, we hope all things, we have endured many things, and hope to be able to endure all things.
Endure? That was the new church’s promise? What more might they have to endure beyond their father’s death, their mother’s death, and the possibility of living to middle age without a single interesting thing happening to them? Had it not been for Cooper’s adorability, which seemed to have destroyed Leenie’s limited common sense, Aldine would have mislaid the Bible-ish book on a seawall.
“Why are you going on with this?” Aldine asked.
“I don’t know.”
“You loved that story about his sister and the bread lump.”
“You didn’t? You don’t like a person who prays to save his little sister?”
“I don’t dislike it. I wouldn’t join a religion for him, though.”
Leenie took to reading the Bible-ish book, which looked more like a Jane Austen novel than a holy testament, in their bedroom every night. “Try reading it aloud with me,” Leenie said. “See if you get the calm feeling.”
“I never get calm feelings,” Aldine said. Religious talk made her qualmish.
“Oh, just read a bit. How do you know?”
“I, Nephi,” Aldine said, annoyed already at the unfamiliar names. “Having been born of goodly parents. Is it ‘Nee-fie’ or ‘Neffy?’”
Leenie smoked while she listened. “‘Neffy,’ is how I say it. Go on.”
“Therefore I was taught somewhat in all the learning of my father; and having seen many afflictions in the course of my days, nevertheless, having been highly favored of the Lord . . .”
After a whole page of that business, Leenie asked if she felt it. The Calm Feeling. Aldine said only if the calm feeling was a wish to off herself. Leenie was still smoking, and as usual she looked like a child playing a role, and that’s why she liked it. She thought a tarry matured her. “I’ll bet we’d feel it more,” Leenie said, sighing, “if Elder Cooper were reading it.”
“You would, anyway.”
“I love the way his voice goes all rich and chocolatey.”
Aldine eyed her. “What about George? Where’s he in all this?”