“Listen, Peter could be a real ally for you and Ben.”
“Oh, I see. A go-between with God?”
“Stop, Ceel. You can shriek as loudly as you want, and I’m not going to sit here and talk about some pay-back God. It’s because
he’s going on the board of the state adoption agency.”
“God?”
“Shut up. Peter.”
“How do you know?”
“He told me. It isn’t public yet because his term doesn’t begin until next fall.”
Her eyes narrowed. “Why would he tell you?”
“Because . . .” I floundered. “Because we’re friends. Peter knows about Jack O’Connor’s history, finding homes for babies
all those years, thinks it was a good, decent thing to do, a kind of Christian mission no matter what the rest of Cullen thought,
and. . . if Peter can influence an adoption decision on your behalf, wouldn’t you want him to? He’d do that for you, for me.
He knows how close Daintry and I . . . were, and—” I meant to say it comically, but humor failed me: “I ought to get something
out of all those years of . . .” I heard my mother:
You were in thrall to that child.
“Did you tell him about Geoff?”
“No, I didn’t. I swear.”
Ceel turned her head. In the clear slashing winter light her profile was sharp. “You still think about him, don’t you,” I
said. “What he did to you?”
She wiped her eyes. “Geoff O’Connor hasn’t mattered to me in a long, long time. I know it’s no one’s fault. It’s just convenient
to blame someone, myself, God.”
I sat on the sofa, pulled the rumpled afghan over her bare cold feet. “You won’t give up, will you? Not now. You’re too close.”
She pulled her feet away from my clasp and drew her knees to her chin. “I’m reconciled, Hannah. You be reconciled, too. She’s
gone.”
“Who?”
“Everyone has a Daintry in their life. Let her go.”
* * *
“Asheville Academy is wrestling with whether there should be a full-time chaplain or a full-time librarian,” Hal said. “There
isn’t enough money for both.”
I looked over my book at the gridded Scrabble board, an unfinished crossword. “I vote for the librarian,” I said, and for
the third time flipped the tiny hourglass timer Mark had given us for Christmas.
Hal was unfazed. He lingered over his letters for so long that I read a book between moves.
“Faith has to be caught, not taught,” he said.
That.
I fingered the seven lettered tiles in my tray. “Isn’t seven the number mentioned most often in the Bible? Seven plagues,
seven tribes, seven something? Someone taught me that.”
He fit his word in a corner already cluttered with words:
jig,
and said, “You know what I’m talking about.”
We approached the game so differently. I hoarded valuable consonants, the M and B and J, until I could create words with substance:
JUMBLE, MERGER, MAYBE; words with
integrity,
I’d once explained to Hal. He’d laughed. He concentrated on the triple- and double-word scores to form intricate combinations
of three-letter words yielding forty points:
axe, jet, zoo.
Sender
I put down, points paltry but opening a quadrant, and said, “That’s a gift.” Prepared for a wait, I returned to my book,
one of the volumes I’d brought to Rural Ridge and vowed to read. It was a collection of John Updike stories, tales of overt
suburban infidelities amid subtle struggles with morality. “I get the impression everybody but us is jumping into bed with
their neighbors.”
“They’re just bored baddies looking for mischief.”
“The women or the men?”
Hal opened the dictionary. “You read too much.”
“Wait a minute. You can’t look up a word before you put it down.”
“What’s the big deal?”
“It’s against the rules. It’s cheating.”
“Are you getting your period? Do you have PMS?”
That.
Zero
Hal put down, sealing off the section I’d opened to benefit us both.
“There isn’t a spontaneous bone in your body,”
my husband had said.
“Quit following the rules,”
Daintry had said.
The reasons and the justifications tumble and accumulate and gain mass like a fist-size snowball rolled along the ground until
it grows too large to move and stops dead. Or hits an immovable wall of sheer desire. Then you get the bound-tos, forgetting
how you told him that the bound-tos are closely connected to the reand-res, regrets and remorses.
I hadn’t lied to Ceel, not entirely. Someone had inquired about making a gift to the columbarium, and he wanted to talk to
me about it. It had been a business meeting. Or begun that way.
I’d been to his office before, when we’d moved the four urns from the columbarium for safekeeping while I was installing shrubs
and plants. I remembered the mission fondly, a lunchtime caper charged with hilarity and delicacy and secrecy as we hid the
urns inside a crawl space corner in Peter’s office where the paten and chalice had once been kept. Maude and the other staff
member had gone out for Chinese. The urns had been returned to the columbarium by now; by now Peter and I had a different
secret.
I opened the door. Walls on either side were filled floor to ceiling with shelves of books and the odd, haphazard object,
a pottery piece, a sketch of some nameless church. Opposite the door was a window above a cabinet ledge, looking over the
church courtyard. The office was a small square, and with his back to me, gazing out the window, Peter seemed too large for
the space. Hemmed in by the bookshelves, crowded by the single armchair pushed beneath a standing lamp on which he’d thrown
his coat. His energy was checked by the desk between us, but visible in those taut fabric wrinkles across his back. As though
the shirt were too small. As though he were straining against it.
“Peter.”
He swiveled. The shoulders slackened. “Come here. Around here with me.”
“Peter—”
“Please. I want to show you something.”
I eased by the narrow space beside the desk, by wastebasket and rolling chair, and stood beside him. He pointed out the window.
The day was gray and bone chilling, February to the core. “Acuba, euonymous, sasanqua, berfordia,” he said, tapping a pencil
on the sill, “and. . . and the tall skinny green bushes that grow fast and hide things.”
“Leyland cypress.”
“Leyland cypress. You taught me all that.”
Taptaptaptaptap.
“Give me that.” I managed a laugh and tugged the pencil from his fingers. “What is it?”
“I’m sorry.”
“That I took your pencil away? That I taught you?”
“For Daintry, with Mark,” he said. His voice was low. “Sometimes I think Daintry has, has worked so hard for what she has
and where she is in a male-dominated career that she forgets how to be with women. And I know she doesn’t understand what
it’s like to be a mother. I’m sorry.”
I looked down at the vents that topped the cabinet.
Dear God, don’t talk about Daintry.
“Forget it, it was weeks ago.”
“But I haven’t seen you alone in those weeks, to tell you so. Is he all right?”
“Yes.”
“Are you?”
Though warm air flowed through, the metal strips were cold. I looked at my hand spread across the horizontal metal slats,
amazed that it was still, not quivering. Not from cold, but from a coiled, high-strung tension his tender, genuine question
didn’t appease. Nervous tension, sexual tension. So distracted by it that I thought I might cry if I didn’t touch him. Or
bolt. “It’s so raw and gloomy,” I said desperately. “Will winter never end?”
“I thought you loved winter. I thought you wanted it to snow.”
What I wanted, at that moment, was to have someone taller and larger and stronger tower over me and cup me into his body.
To warm me, want me. He was all those things. “I don’t know what I want.”
He covered my hand with his. I pulled it away, utterly conscious of the metallic
tink
of my wedding band against the slats. I stepped around to the other side of the desk, pulled the chair to it. “Tell me about
the gift.”
His eyes were pained, but he sat, kneading his forehead, knuckling back the hair. “Someone wants to make a gift, as I said,
and I wanted to check with you to make sure you hadn’t planned on anything else, some piece of statuary, or a sundial, or.
. . ”
I shook my head.
“Just the bench.”
“Just the bench.” Just the bench where we’d kissed, held each other on a similarly bleak afternoon.
“I’ll tell them to go ahead, then.” Peter ran a finger between collar and flesh, the unconscious gesture I’d so often seen.
Suddenly, reaching behind his neck, he un-fastened the white band of collar and placed it on the desk blotter. “Maude ordered
a size too small. She thinks slow strangulation will get rid of me. Then she can go back to doing things the old way.”
The collar lay beside a small metal cross with lettering along the vertical length. “Sportsman’s Paradise,” it read, and I
knew the story behind it, that a prisoner in Louisiana had made it from a dented license plate.
I reached for the circlet, white against green. It was stiff, a cardboard rim sheathed in fine-textured fabric, linen, perhaps.
“I’ve never touched one.” I fingered the snaps at the back. “Just ordinary snaps.”
“Yes, ordinary. Just like I once told you.”
I looked across the desk at him. “Was there anything else you wanted?”
“Is that what you’re going to say, Hannah, talk to me like some employer?”
“What did you want me to say?”
I moved to put the collar back, and he reached across the desk and covered my hand with his. “I want you to say you’ll see
me.”
Noises amplified in the sudden profound silence: the tick of sleety rain against the panes, steps in the hall, the chug of
the basement furnace, the race of my heart. “I shouldn’t have come.”
Peter’s grip tightened, and the collar curled inside my palm. “Say you will. Please.”
Say you will come to my first sermon. Say you will take the job. Say you will see me, meet me. In the face of being wanted,
doubts dissolve. Being wanted is powerful, irresistible motivation. Being wanted is an aphrodisiac that generates its own
heat, often having nothing to do with love. And though I learned this fact late in life, I should have known already. His
wife had been a good teacher. “Yes,” I said for the third time. “When?”
Then the opportunity presents itself: the abracadabra of adultery.
I looked at my watch. Ellen was going home from school to spend Friday night with the admired and mercurial Jennifer Tomlinson.
Mark had an away wrestling meet and wouldn’t be home until after ten. Ben and Hal had left directly from school for a two-day
Independent Schools Conference in Winston-Salem, picking up Ceel on the way. The phone rang. I glanced at my watch again.
“What are you doing?” Ceel said.
“Checking the time.” The truth, if the last of it.
“I called to apologize again for that. . . attack of hysteria. Every now and then I need to blow someone out. You just happened
to be conveniently on hand. Usually Ben’s the unlucky target.”
“Better me than Ben. Besides, I asked for it. What are you doing at home? I thought you were leaving.”
“Supposedly. I’m waiting to be picked up, but I don’t know, I’m feeling fluey. Maybe I’ll stay. You can come over, we’ll make
hot chocolate from scratch.”
No,
I said to myself, mentally willing her to go. I couldn’t say no to Ceel’s invitation, but I’d already said yes to his. “Looks
like you’re finally going to get your wish.”
“What wish?” I answered too swiftly.
“Don’t tell me you haven’t heard the forecast.”
“Oh, that. I don’t believe it. It’s too close to Easter.” Not today. Not now. I looked at my watch again. It’s a well-known
fact that priests have scattered, unpredictable schedules. Even through the phone I could hear the horn honk.
“Oh well,” Ceel said. “There they are. Might as well go.”
And after dates and times are fixed, what do people think about as they wind toward liaisons? As they bank back-road curves,
pass steep-roofed homes and rusting farm implements and whitewashed tires outlining dirt driveways. Dogs tied to trees, metal
gliders on porches, fallow vegetable gardens with defunct pie-plate scare- crows. Are there as many humble whitewashed churches
that leap out from grass parking lots on journeys to illicit couplings, or was it only here, on my road, that Matthews Memorial
Baptist and Pathways Chapel lay in the same measured mile?
One time,
they think, recalling a dorm room avowal among Sissys and Charlottes and Megs.
Just one time he screws somebody else and that’s it, it’s over.
When we were so certain of our faithfulness and our futures.
And on past ramshackle roadside buildings with hand-lettered signs: G
ARDEN
OF
P
RAYER
A
POSTOLIC
C
HURCH
; C
HURCH
OF
THE
H
OLY
S
PIRIT
.
It would depend,
they might remember amending the avowal,
whether it was just a one-night stand or a long-term affair. It would depend.
Longevity counts for something,
they might remember deciding even later, an avowal’s reversal, when children and homes and years were part of the package.
You don’t throw everything away because of one mistake.
T
HE
D
EVIL
I
S
N
OT
A
FRAID
OF A
D
USTY
B
IBLE
, they might read on a roll-away rent sign parked outside some cinder-block structure.
“What are you doing with Peter Whicker?”
Ceel asked.
“Haven’t you ever heard your parents doing it?”
Daintry once bluntly asked me. Not having sex. Not making love. Doing it.
They must look the same everywhere: the stippled walls and pebbled carpet and cellophaned cups, a sense of squalor despite
sanitized strips. The blatant bed in the rented room, and there too the bedside Bible. The heater’s gushed blow did little
to permeate the thick chill. I waited for Peter and thought of Peter, longed for Peter, for his car to appear in the pitted
parking lot, imagined his arms finally around me, someone to hold me closely, closely, use his body to loosen the tightness
in my mind. A tightness that was both absolute desire and absolute fear.