“No,” he said.

“Well, then, what are you so mad about? Why are you looking at me as if you hated me?”

“I don’t hate you,” Tom said.

“Then talk to me! Tell me what I’ve done that’s wrong. Tell me why you’ve shut yourself away from me and all our friends. Tom—I love you, and I want to do what’s right. But I can’t do it by myself. I need your help.”

Peculiarly, Tom McDaniel found himself remembering, as his wife spoke, a time when he was nineteen years old and how, although he’d long since given up belief in God and Heaven, he could not keep from crossing himself whenever he passed a church. He knew that it was merely an extension of the childish habit of stepping on cracks in the sidewalk, for magic reassurance, for luck, still he could not stop, for to do so would be to admit, irrevocably, that he was an atheist. Eventually, however, Paul Strauss caught him and asked what he was doing and then asked, point-blank, whether or not he was a Christian. And he had to answer, voicing it for the first time: “No.”

“All right,” he said, looking at his wife. He saw the urgency and love in her eyes and knew, as he had known with Paul, that there could be no more hiding, no more fence-walking, no more comforting self-deception. “I haven’t talked with you,” he said, “because I’ve been afraid. Afraid of what I’d say and of what I’d hear. I don’t think it’s something new, either, because”—the thoughts formed as he spoke—“we’ve never really talked about this.”

Ruth nodded. “I know,” she said.

“We didn’t have to, before. It wasn’t necessary, nothing depended on it. But now all that is changed. It’s come too fast, I guess; or we went too long avoiding it, or something. You say it’s important. It’s more than that. Maybe I’m afraid we won’t be able to stand up under it. And maybe we won’t. After tonight, we may be so far apart, Ruth, that we’ll never get back together again. Do you want to risk that?”

She nodded her head slowly. “Yes.”

He loosened his tie and watched a car roll past and disappear into the darkness.

“Tell me first,” he said, “what you think about the question. I mean the whole question.” His heart was beating fast; his palms were perspiring.

“I’m not sure what you mean.”

“About integration,” Tom said. “And—be honest.”

Ruth appeared to be confused, nervous; but, he sensed, also somewhat relieved. “Well, I—I think it’s a terrible thing,” she said.

And it was said, and there was no turning back now.

“Why?” Tom asked.

“Why?” She stared at him wonderingly. “Because it isn’t right, that’s all.”