A third of the way through Gilead—from the moment, on Page 91, when Ames confronts Jack Boughton face-to-face and his wife is "visibly surprised" at his name—I felt the undercurrent of a completely different kind of story at work beneath the Reverend's reflections. It suddenly occurred to me that the secret Robinson was teasing out did not concern only Jack. It also involved Ames' young second wife, who appeared in the small Iowa town out of nowhere, after travails that Ames deliberately does not probe. ("I think she experienced a good deal of sorrow in those years," he notes. "I have never asked.")

That Ames himself senses a connection between Jack and his wife is clear as he worries repeatedly about whether he should be warning his wife and son about this interloper, "not a man of the highest character." He betrays jealous inklings that a romance may be blooming between his wife and Jack, only a few years older than she is and so much younger than he, Ames, is; selfishly, he can't face the thought of being usurped when he dies. But Robinson nudges us toward a very different, less-conventional possibility that never occurs to Ames: that Ames' young wife just might be, unrecognized by her husband, the poverty-stricken girl whom Jack not only impregnated but abandoned 20 years earlier—the crowning crime of his wayward youth. She is the wronged soul—whose child ended up dying and who was herself left to wander, kinless and alone—for whom Jack did not even try to make amends, his unforgivable sin.

The hints are deliberately—tantalizingly—inconclusive, and the possibility hovers as too contrived a fictional coincidence for a story as subtle as Robinson's. (Two details might also make you wonder, as I did the second time through. First, the girl wronged by Jack is described as much younger than he—which was part of the scandal—whereas Ames' wife is only three years younger; second, Ames and some of the Boughton family went to visit her a few times back then, eager to help her and the baby, so how could her identity remain a mystery?) Still, it beckons to that plot-hungry reader in all of us, adding to the suspense: Will Jack ever tell him? Will Ames ever see? Is she really that girl? (You can explain away both of the above difficulties without too much strain: 20 years have elapsed, so no wonder she isn't recognized—especially since her furious father kept emissaries from Gilead at a distance decades ago. It seems telling, too, that when Ames' wife is given a rare chance to speak directly in the novel, she defends the possibility that people can undergo radical change in their lives.) There is no ultimate revelation, of course. And if there were one, the spell of wondering would be broken, the mind and the world that Robinson has brought to life would turn to dust. For the author, as for her Creator, intimations of Providence at work must ultimately be a matter of faith.