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Show church during Sunday School and shut off the main power switch so that all the lights in the chape! went out and the organist began pulling and pushing stops trying to find what she had done wrong. Lorin was disappointed to hear that about the bishop. The jolt of having seen it, dressed in a white suit and lying in white satin with a lid about to close down over it, stayed with you, he realized, and gradually made you think you hadn't seen it after all. If you concentrated and closed your eyes, you could imagine the bishop sitting, with pink nails, in a comfortable room in the celestial kingdom, watching the funeral through a gentle haze with an indulgent smile on his face. The room and the building it was in overlaid the chapel and the parking lot and the street and the houses on both sides like a double exposure, cars parked across corridors and into walls, trees and chandeliers intersecting, faces merging into shrubbery. The ward choir sang "God Be With You Till We Meet Again" and the bishop looked up as a door opened and his own father and mother came in. He stood up and put his arms around his mother, who was crying, then shook hands with his father. The two men stood looking each other up and down in silence for a minute, then fell into an embrace. His mother asked him if there had been much pain at the end, and he said no, not very much, and turned to hide his smile because he had just caught the look in his father's eye that told him he was not fooling the old man. Lorin was not actually sure the bishop's parents were dead, but he could revise this part. He noticed his own mother had crushed a lace handkerchief against her mouth and was sitting with her eyes tightly shut. He glanced past her at his father, who had taken off his glasses and was rubbing his eyes with wet fingers. Lorin made his brother take his feet off the hymnal rack in front of him and straighten up. Then he sat back |