In Eudora Welty’s story, “The Key,” Albert picked up a key on the floor of the train station and placed it in a pocket by his heart.  Albert associated the key with happiness.  Albert “knew,” Welty wrote, that happiness “is something that appears to you suddenly, that is meant for you, a thing which you reach for and pick up and hide at your breast, a shiny thing that reminds you of something alive and leaping.”

It is hard to sustain that belief, what Albert “knew” about happiness and life, in an age when we “know” that nothing is meant for us, when we know that everything has a cause, but not a purpose, and that where order appears it has not been designed.

A red-haired man accidentally dropped the key that Albert picked up believing it was meant for him.  At the end of the story, the red-haired man placed another key in the hand of Albert’s wife Ellie, and then “did not wait to see any more, but went out abruptly into the night.”

I think the red-haired man is a God-figure in the story, not the God of our ancestors, but a contemporary theologian’s God.  Welty wrote, “you felt a shock in glancing up at him,” and “you felt some apprehension that he would never express whatever might be the desire of his life … in standing apart in compassion, in making any intuitive present or sacrifice, or in any way of action at all – not because there was too much in the world demanding his strength, but because he was too deeply aware.”

The red-haired man is something like God, or, rather, what is left over of God, when what we know is that natural selection is the giver and taker of life, when what we know is that nothing is meant for us.

About the red-haired man, Welty wrote, “You could see that he despised and saw the uselessness of the thing he had done.”