“That’s the precentor’s seat,” said Bethany, pointing to the painted title above the seat that hid the chalice carving.
“He’s not here to complain, is he? Besides, it’s the perfect seat for you to sit in to tell me your story.”
“What story is that?” asked Bethany, lowering herself onto the hard wooden seat.
“The story of you and the Grail,” said Arthur, sitting beside her and placing the candle in a holder in front of them.
“The story of me and the Holy Grail,” repeated Bethany quietly.
“Call it penance,” said Arthur. “For stalking me.”
“Fair enough,” said Bethany. “We’ll decide your penance later on.”
They sat in silence for a minute or two—a silence that seemed to weigh on Arthur’s shoulders. It was as if all the prayers ever spoken in that holy place were sitting on top of him—prayers he still believed, in his core, had been offered in vain to a God who did not exist. He found the weight both peaceful and horrifying, much the way he found the idea of faith itself. Bethany shifted slightly in her seat, and the very figures carved in the wood above them seemed to lean forward to listen for her words. Softly, she began.
“My great-aunt gave me the Arthur Rackham book for Christmas when I was nine. It was one of the few books my father would let me read. That and the Bible, of course. He said he liked it because all the characters were Christian and the men were in charge. Dad said that’s the way things were supposed to be. At first I wouldn’t read it—just because Dad said it was OK. I was kind of rebellious. It’s not the easiest thing to have your father be second-in-command at a church of two thousand people, to listen to him practicing sermons that will bring people to tears but that just sound to you like a criticism of everything you do. But eventually I started looking at the pictures. I loved the one of Tristram and Isoude right after they drank the love potion. I knew just enough about sex to find it suggestive and to suspect that there might be some things in this book my father wouldn’t approve of. So I read it.
“At first I wasn’t that impressed. I was never particularly interested in knights and sword fighting, and frankly the fact that the damsels were always in distress kind of pissed me off. . . . Oh, I’m sorry. I forgot we were in church. I shouldn’t have said that.”
“Don’t worry,” said Arthur, “the Bible is full of stories about God getting pissed off. I’m sure he’ll understand.”
“But then I got to the part about the Holy Grail,” said Bethany, “and I was just enthralled. It was the first time I’d ever read anything that I wanted to go right back and read again. And again. Now the damsels weren’t in distress; the women seemed to be in charge of the Grail. I liked that. And I liked that the Grail story mentioned Joseph of Arimathea—this minor little character from the Crucifixion narrative. That made it seem real to me, made it seem like the Grail could really exist. It also sent me back to the Bible and got me thinking—what about all those other people who have one little mention in the scriptures? What did they do then? I guess my father would have been happy, because in the end the Grail story made me think more deeply about the Bible. But it also seemed like a pretty good mystery. And then I was at a sleepover at a friend’s house a year or so later, and we saw the Indiana Jones movie where he finds the Holy Grail, and I loved the thought that maybe it was really out there.”
“So you believed in the Grail?” said Arthur.
“Not quite,” said Bethany. “Not yet. A couple of years later I was visiting my grandmother, my mom’s mother, in Alabama. She lived in this big white house outside of this little two-stoplight town. I always loved going to visit her because her house was full of stuff. Everything—collector plates with pictures of national parks, boxes of scraps for decoupage projects that never happened, jars of buttons and heaps of empty wooden spools, drawers full of rubber bands and paper clips and folded-up bits of wrapping paper. And magazines. Grammy never had any books that I saw, except for a Bible on her nightstand, but she had magazines in heaps all over the house and since I liked to read—”
“Wait a minute,” said Arthur. “You liked to read? You, the digital evangelist who scoffs at fiction and talks about bookless libraries, liked to read?”
“Yes, Mr. Smarty-pants, I liked to read. Oh, my God, right now I’m reading an edition of Malory printed in 1634 from the cathedral library. It’s amazing. I mean, can you imagine? 1634.”
“I know it well,” said Arthur, smiling. “But you were telling a story.”
“Right, my story. Anyhow, my aunt had been buying magazines for a long time. We’re talking Life, the Saturday Evening Post, but my favorite was Ladies’ Home Journal. On the cover it said ‘The Magazine Women Believe In,’ and since the only thing my family every talked about believing in was God and Jesus and all that, I thought it must be interesting. It had articles about celebrities and fashion and homemaking, but it had other stuff, too. Travel articles and short stories, and one day I found a copy in the basement with an article called ‘My Search for the Holy Grail.’”
“In a magazine called . . . what did you say it was called?”
“Ladies’ Home Journal.”
“There was an article about the Holy Grail?”
“Yes, Mister Antiquarian-Book, Illuminated-Manuscript Snob—the Ladies’ Home Journal had an article about the Grail. I must have read that article a hundred times. The man who wrote it had heard a story about a priest named Father Wharton, who had been cured of rheumatism when he drank water from this wooden cup. This was in 1958. And he wasn’t the only one. The house where the priest had found the cup had records of lots of cases of healing, going back over a hundred years. So the guy who wrote the article set out to find this cup, this scrap of wood that had healed so many people. Supposedly it was moved from Glastonbury when Henry VIII was about to dissolve the monastery there. The magazine story was written in 1971 and the man who wrote it interviewed the rector of Glastonbury. The rector said he had requested twice that the cup be returned—so he obviously believed there was something to the story.”
“And Glastonbury is one of the legendary resting places of the Grail,” said Arthur.
“I know that, of course,” said Bethany. “Anyhow, when the writer got to the house where Father Wharton had found the cup, it was gone. The family who had supposedly guarded the cup for centuries had sold the house and the current guardian, if that’s what you want to call her, had moved to a secret address.”
Arthur sat quietly listening to Bethany’s story, trying his best not to react in any way, but apparently his efforts were not completely successful.