Free To Rise Again at a Decent Hour by Joshua Ferris Page A

it.”
    “What’s this doing in my bio?”
    She shrugged.
    “Is there anything like this on your bio page?”
    She shook her head.
    “Betsy’s? Abby’s?”
    “Only yours,” she said.
    “I’m not a Christian,” I said. “I don’t want a quote from the Bible on my website. Who did this?”
    She relieved me of the iPad. “Maybe you should talk to Betsy,” she said.
    Mrs. Convoy came to and from work with a floppy-eared Ignatius—highlighted, of course—with her name, Elizabeth Anne Convoy, inlaid in faux-gold lettering on the green pleather cover. It had been in her possession nearly half a century, since the day of her First Communion. There was nothing that so perfectly embodied my ambivalence toward Mrs. Convoy. First, because she was an expert in goddamned everything, and her authority and its imperious tone were bestowed upon her by that archetype of all knowingness, the Bible. But later, in a casual moment, when she was out of sight, I’d catch a glimpse of that totem resting faithfully inside her open purse, and Mrs. Convoy, head ballbreaker, would reincarnate into Elizabeth Anne Convoy, a perfectly insignificant, irredeemably homely creature who, I could easily imagine, thought so little of herself that to find her name engraved on God’s book would move her to tears. Conjuring that awkward, insecure girl, I wanted to tell her that God loved her. I did not want Betsy Convoy, or anyone else for that matter, believing that down deep they were ugly, worthless, unwanted, inconsequential, and unlovable. If God served no other purpose, I thought, this alone justified Him. Thank God for God! I thought. What work He did, what love He extended, when mortal beings failed. The travails of lonely people, of the disfigured and the handicapped, need not seize the heart of the sympathetic observer with suicidal pity, because God loved them. Because of God, even the imperious ballbreakers, moralizing windbags, and meddling assholes may know love.
    “I already told you,” she said when I confronted her. “It wasn’t me. Do you think I would lie to you?”
    “I don’t know what to think, Betsy. First I find somebody’s gone against my express wishes and made a website for my practice, and then I find a bunch of biblical gobbledygook on my bio page. And you’re somebody who knows the Bible.”
    “Oh, for heaven’s sake, that doesn’t mean I know how to make a website.”
    “I’m not suggesting you made it personally.”
    “I did not make that website any way at all,” she said. “I am not responsible for it, and I did not put quotes from the Bible on it. And if I had, that’s certainly not the passage I would have chosen.”
    “What passage is it?” I asked.
    She looked again at the iPad. Whenever Mrs. Convoy read something to herself, the small contracted hairs around her pursed lips went wiggling up and down with the consumption of every word, as if she were a caterpillar working through a leaf.
    “ ‘If thou makest of me a God,’ ” she said, reading aloud the last bit slowly, “ ‘and worship me, and send for the psaltery and the tabret to prophesy of my intentions, and make war, then ye shall be consumed.’ I don’t think Jesus ever said anything like that,” she said.
    “So where’s it from?”
    “The Old Testament would be my guess,” she said. “It’s a very stern, Jewish thing to say.”
    She handed the iPad back to me.
    “Maybe you should talk to Connie,” she said.
    I would be less annoyed to be portrayed as a Jew online than a Christian. Still annoyed, because I was not Jewish, but it would be better somehow. You could be a nonpracticing Jew, and while I was not a nonpracticing Jew, because I had not been born a Jewand converting to Judaism just to persist in nonpractice would have been pointless, I could not be a nonpracticing Christian in any respect. You either believed or did not believe in Christ the Savior and all His many miracles and prophesies. It was ironic, I