Miriam stood at the bulletin board waiting for it to sprout news, delaying the dust mopping to which she had been unjustly assigned. The Men’s and Women’s Work Distributors allotted Saturday-morning chores to all in the community unblessed with offspring and so still at risk for idling. This was the sort of information available on the bulletin board in the Meeting Hall vestibule:
“Peter Wyatt Maendel, 7 pounds 7 ounces, born to Adam and Siri in Gracefield, as yet unphotographed but represented here by a dear little blue-bootied illustration.”
“Please return all emptied birthday baskets to Stores.”
“Tom Kleiner seeks fellow rook enthusiasts to begin a weekly rook tally, for more information see Tom.”
Alan Lefebvre, lately returned to the Brotherhood after three years in experimental apostasy, joined Miriam in observing no news. He was purely medium in all physical qualities, although his name suggested the tan and musk of the Old World. As a woman who was not his mother, she lacked cause to speak to him, and so had communicated only silently and with perfect clarity since his appearance at Evergreen.
The Lefebvre family was a small node by community standards. Miriam knew that Alan’s parents, concerned about warmongering and private property, had joined from French Canada and produced five children. Only once before had she lived on the same Hof as a Lefebvre, when Alan’s youngest sister, Sophie, spent eight months in Evergreen failing to offend.
“Looks like I’ll be going on the El Salvador mission,” said Alan, still at the bulletin board. “Just found out today.” Miriam froze into a disguise of herself. “We’re supposed to get back before first advent.”
And though Logic, little dictator, indicated otherwise, she now knew when and whom she would marry.
“It seems,” wrote Miriam, alone on her word processor during snack, “that Protestants regard moral law as an unattainable standard toward which we must always strive and always inevitably fail—struggling to grasp infinity, we constantly perform the Fall simply by being ourselves.”
Opa and Oma had challenged her to put Christ at the center of her courtship correspondence to Alan Lefebvre, so here she wrote: “Consequently, the Protestants experience the law as punitive: for their sins, they suffer external or internal punishment, or both.”
In her previous draft, returned with Oma’s sparse marginalia, she had narrated the lively debate that had occurred at the last Shalom meeting, on the topic of the Iron Curtain. Personally, the matter compelled her to little more than consideration of metaphor—why was it called an iron fist in a velvet glove?—but to Alan she wrote of a God who knew no boundaries, the possibility of rehabilitation for secular communism, et cetera.
All licit courtship in the community was mediated by the elders. To an unwed, baptized brother confessing interest in a plausibly receptive sister, they might grant permission to correspond. To an unwed, baptized brother with only generalized desire, they might recommend writing to a slightly older sister on a different Hof. The elders then read, edited, and delivered the resulting letters, guiding the couple through the platitudes of Christian marriage, waiting until both parties promised never to love each other so much as they loved God. At this point, the couple might be allowed to take a walk together, unsupervised. Miriam knew she was far from such access to Alan.
Beside a digression on the Holocaust, Oma had inserted a free-floating red question mark. Clearly little could be rehabilitated from this draft.
“The Catholic understanding of law is more scientific, as a structure that organizes and hierarchizes values in accordance with the fact that God is good. To break the law is not to do evil so much as it is to misunderstand the principles on which the world operates—like how hurting yourself by touching a hot stove is not to malign the laws of thermodynamics, just to misunderstand them.”
Still she had failed to mention Christ, the person of Him and how He might roost in their marriage. The snack bell rang distantly.
“But I ramble and know not of what I ramble. What is on your heart, Alan the Craftsman?”
She unscrolled the sheet with a ruler as the office sisters returned in flock.
