Catholic Church

The Catholic Church is presented in the first part of the novel not through its officials or institutions, but through the moral authority its teachings retain in the mind of a lapsed Catholic. After the wife has an abortion, her fear of damnation gives her husband a new opening in his plan to kill her.

Presence and Religious Authority

The wife is identified as Catholic, though lapsed. No priest, congregation, or formal church intervention appears in the account. Instead, the Catholic Church is present as an inward authority: the wife interprets her abortion through the possibility of sin, judgment, and Hell. The narrative does not establish what the Church itself says to her; it shows how she fears that it will judge her.

The Wife’s Crisis

The abortion is disclosed as the secret behind changes in the wife’s behavior that her husband has noticed but cannot interpret. When he learns both that she had been pregnant and that she has just had an abortion, he also learns that she has become obsessed with the thought that she is going to Hell. She has confided to her best friend that, in the eyes of the Church, she may be guilty of murder. Her distress is therefore not simply a response to the event, but a fear about its spiritual meaning and the judgment she believes may follow.

Role in the Plot

The husband converts this religious anguish into an opportunity. He had been planning to kill his wife during a second honeymoon in the Caribbean, but her fear of damnation seems to offer him a way to avoid the trip, the staged break-in, and the wait: he imagines that she now has a believable reason to take her own life. The Church does not cause or endorse his scheme; its perceived moral authority becomes material that he cynically uses. This episode makes the gap between the wife’s conscience and her husband’s predatory calculation central to the Church’s limited but consequential presence in the story.