Bodies and Souls Read Online Free PDF

passed, she not only remained a mystery to him but grew even more mysterious. When she first started attending church, Peter had considered her really just a pretty, pleasant woman. Suzanna taught first grade in the public school, and to his mind she looked the way a first-grade teacher should look. She had short, curly brown hair, pink cheeks, blue eyes, and a slightly plump, good-natured figure; her attractiveness made no demands. Then one morning about two years ago, Peter had looked down into the congregation to see Suzanna sitting there looking absolutely disheveled, even though her clothes were perfectly tidy. She had been grinning at her hymnal; then she had blushed, then covered her mouth with her hand, and finally shaken herself a little, as if trying to settle her body back down. Well, Peter thought, perhaps she’s fallen in love. But the months passed, and Suzanna came to church and parties and meetings alone, and Peter had heard no rumors of any love affairs. But surely something was going on.
    Every Sunday morning, Suzanna brought the children to church, and they sat together in the pew, whispering to one another, a normal, family group. After the Children’s Story, when her son and daughter and all the other children left the main sanctuary for their various Sunday school rooms in the basement of the church, Suzanna Blair would recompose herself in her pew in such a way that she gathered in the very space around her and made it private. Peter had gotten pretty good at judging whether a parishioner was listening to his sermon or daydreaming, and Suzanna seemed almost always to be daydreaming. In the midst of a most serious sermon, Peter would see an absolutely beatific smile pass over her face. To her credit, she immediately covered her mouth with her hand and shook her head slightly to reprove herself. Peter did not know just what aroused his curiosity more: those smiles of Suzanna’s or the equally intenseexpressions of sorrow which often during the hour overcame her so completely that her body seemed to sag under the weight. In spite of her daydreaming, she was the person who more than anyone else looked up at him during the course of a sermon as if beseeching, as if searching, as if asking him for an answer. Clearly something was wrong in her life; she was harboring some secret that caused her both joy and pain. But how could he help her when he did not know the cause? It had something to do with the children; of that much he was certain, because of the way she watched them walk away as they left the main congregation for Sunday school. It seemed as though each Sunday she were watching them leave her forever.
    But how could he help her? She would not come to him. Now Peter stared down at Suzanna Blair’s unassuming head as she bent over her hymnbook, singing her “Amen” with the others, and for one still moment he felt a cold metallic shaft of anger rise within him, as if a sword had struck his heart. For he had to look down upon her each Sunday in her suffering and fail to give her aid, because no matter how he spoke to her, she did not seem to hear, and no matter how he placed himself before her, she did not seem to see. And he wanted to smite her down, because she made him feel he was a failure and she lured him to despair.
    The air was filled with shuffling, rustling noises and then expectant silence as the congregation settled back into their pews. As a body, they looked up at him, waiting for him to begin the unison reading of the Common Prayer of Adoration and Confession. Necessary stage presence brought Peter’s thoughts away from the troubled woman, and he began to read aloud, leading them all.
    “Most merciful Lord, in whose kingdom the lion and the lamb lie down together—”
    Now he was working: performing, teaching. He thought no more about individual members of his church, but only of leading everyone through the sturdily constructed phrases of prayer. The intermingling of human voices,