When I finished writing The Maeve Chronicles, I returned to a mystery novel, abandoned thirty years earlier. I was finally ready to write about the small town Episcopal Church where I grew up in the 1950s and 60s and to explore the points of view of characters based on my late parents. When I began seeing through my mother’s eyes, the intensity of her suppressed fury took me by storm. Trapped in the role of minister’s wife, Anne Bradley strikes me as an embryonic feminist. In the scene below, Anne is hanging up laundry when she is approached by a pesky parishioner who makes a veiled reference to the death of Anne’s son.
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“Hello there, Mrs. Bradley,” Mildred Thomson said, adding some obligatory remarks about the weather. “I was hoping to find Father, I mean *Mr. Bradley in today. Do you know when he might be back?”
Anne did not. In fact, she realized she did not even know where he was. Hospital calls? A diocesan meeting? Surely she would have remembered if he’d gone all the way to New York. He had probably told her, and she had probably not listened. He was not there most of the time, or if he was, he was not available, not to her or the children. He stayed in his study in the parish house where no doubt Mrs. Thomson had hoped to ambush him.
“I’m afraid I don’t, Mrs. Thomson,” said Anne, feeling for her cigarettes in her apron pocket. Hell’s bells. She must have left them in the back hall on the shelf above the washer.
Anne turned back to the clothesline. Three children meant a lot of laundry, though in the summer the load was a little lighter, shorts and short sleeves, not so many filthy elbows and knees. There were always Gerald’s shirts. Short or long-sleeved, they had to be ironed, something she could not even contemplate till the cool of the evening.
“Did you have an appointment with him?” Anne asked, hoping the question did not sound too much like a reproof.
“No, no,” Mrs. Thomson said vaguely. “I just happened by. I suppose I ought to make an appointment. I never did with Father Roberts. He never minded my popping in.”
That was definitely a reproach. Anne felt almost sorry for her husband, almost. But it was part of his job to listen to parishioners maunder on, as much as holding services on Sunday and galvanizing his congregation to do good works in the community.
“Mrs. Bradley, may I ask you a personal question?”
Could she say no, Anne wondered? Or at least, excuse me while I get a cigarette? But Mrs. Thomson took her hesitation for consent.
“Do you ever struggle with your prayer life?”
Anne bit back a bitter laugh. She could hear it in her head, a sound a dog might make, something between a yelp and a snarl.
“I suppose you don’t,” Mrs. Thomson said wistfully.
Feminism and Religion 