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accompanied their pretensions and scale, their dormers and chimneys, their pillared porticos and round-arched windows and gingerbreaded eaves. Aged domesticated trees—beeches and maples and locusts and oaks—fill the narrow yards to overflowing, their branches impinging on telephone wires and upstairs porch rails. At this time of year, late October, damp flattened leaves covered the sidewalk with a brocaded richness. My student conference, squeezed in at her importunity, had been with an exceptionally earnest, exceptionally unattractive female Master of Divinity candidate who has brought to her dissertation (“Helen and Monica: Two Women of the Early Church”) a complicated, challenging sexual politics it wearies me to thread my tactful way through. This would-be mistress of divinity’s face—squarish, mulish, with a distracting colorless wart near one nostril, and shy yet adamant words of protest perpetually trembling on her also colorless lips—hung depressingly in my mind as I scuffed along beneath the gold of the beeches, the rust of the oaks. I noticed at my feet, in a bright rag of light fallen between the shadows of two trees, a pink sugar-maple leaf like a small splayed hand clutching at the spilled wealth of beech leaves; and I knew that he, that tall waxy-pale intruder, had noticed this same strange emblematic leaf three hours earlier, on his way through my neighborhood to his dismal, distant own.
    These houses are occupied by university faculty members in the main, or else the spinster daughters of late classics professors, or sickly offshoots of families whose fortunes had been made so long ago the money has become abstract, amere matter of numbers and paper. There is a shady narcotic gentility to these blocks that becalms lives, instilling the notion that there is nowhere better to go, and my young man would be attracted and lulled by this quality, trying to imagine, as he walks along, from the glimpses of books and lamps and knickknacks that the curtained windows allow, the shape and taste of our lives, coveting our possessions before he passes out of the neighborhood. Perhaps Dale is not heading home but is going to visit my disreputable niece, Verna, in the prisonlike project where she and her eighteen-month-old daughter live. Grates on the lower windows. Graffiti in the entranceways and up the metallic, shuddering stairwell. Verna opens her door and greets Dale without enthusiasm. She knows him and knows what he can and cannot do (perhaps he is gay). But she acts pleased to see him. They talk, about me and my reaction to his plan to prove God by computer. I hear her say something like “Uncle Roger always was a prick. You should hear my mother talk about him.” She has a scratchy, wised-up voice almost still a child’s. Also Edna’s soft semi-fluid dull flesh, flesh with the pungent, sullen capacity to change the atmosphere throughout an entire house. Verna’s female tot, light brown in color, wobbles forward on darling little knobby-kneed legs and points at Dale, repeating the syllable “Da.” She does this until Verna screams, “That’s not Da, damn you!” and reaches down and with matter-of-fact brutality swats the child. Dale hangs there awkwardly, witnessing, planning his escape, into another part of the city, into his research.
    Really, what a preposterous glib hope, his of extracting God from the statistics of high-energy physics and Big Bang cosmology. Whenever theology touches science, it gets burned. In the sixteenth century astronomy, in the seventeenthmicrobiology, in the eighteenth geology and paleontology, in the nineteenth Darwin’s biology all grotesquely extended the world-frame and sent churchmen scurrying for cover in ever smaller, more shadowy nooks, little gloomy ambiguous caves in the psyche where even now neurology is cruelly harrying them, gouging them out from the multifolded brain like wood lice from under the lumber pile. Barth had been right: totaliter aliter .