ADVENT

 

 

 

The sky broken by the bare oaks and elms of New Prospect was full of moist promise, a pair of frontal systems grayly colluding to deliver a white Christmas, when Russ Hildebrandt made his morning rounds among the homes of bedridden and senile parishioners in his Plymouth Fury wagon. A certain person, Mrs. Frances Cottrell, a member of the church, had volunteered to help him bring toys and canned goods to the Community of God that afternoon, and though he knew that only as her pastor did he have a right to rejoice in her act of free will, he couldn’t have asked for a better Christmas present than four hours alone with her.

After Russ’s humiliation, three years earlier, the church’s senior minister, Dwight Haefle, had upped the associate minister’s share of pastoral visitations. What exactly Dwight was doing with the time Russ saved him, besides taking more frequent vacations and working on his long-awaited volume of lyric poetry, wasn’t clear to Russ. But he appreciated his coquettish reception by Mrs. O’Dwyer, an amputee confined by severe edema to a hospital bed in what had been her dining room. He appreciated the routine of being of service, especially to those who, unlike him, couldn’t remember one thing from three years ago. At the nursing home in Hinsdale, where the mingling smells of holiday pine wreaths and geriatric feces reminded him of Arizona high-country latrines, he handed old Jim Devereaux the new church membership face-book they’d been using as a prompt for conversation and asked if Jim remembered the Pattison family. To a pastor feeling reckless with Advent spirit, Jim was an ideal confidant, a wishing well in which a penny dropped would never hit bottom and resound.

“Pattison,” Jim said.

“They had a daughter, Frances.” Russ leaned over his parishioner’s wheelchair and paged to the Cs. “She goes by her married name now—Frances Cottrell.”

He never spoke her name at home, even when it would have been natural to, for fear of what his wife might hear in his voice. Jim bent closer to the picture of Frances and her two children. “Oh … Frannie? I remember Frannie Pattison. What ever happened to her?”

“She’s back in New Prospect. She lost her husband a year and a half ago—terrible thing. He was a test pilot for General Dynamics.”

“Where is she now?”

“She’s back in New Prospect.”

“Oh, huh. Frannie Pattison. Where is she now?”

“She came back home. She’s Mrs. Frances Cottrell now.” Russ pointed at her picture and said it again. “Frances Cottrell.”

She was meeting him in the First Reformed parking lot at two thirty. Like a boy who couldn’t wait for Christmas, he got there at 12:45 and ate his sack lunch in the car. On his bad days, of which there’d been many in the past three years, he resorted to an elaborate detour—into the church through its function hall, up a stairwell and down a corridor lined with stacks of banished Pilgrim Hymnals, across a storage room for off-kilter music stands and a crèche ensemble last displayed eleven Advents ago, a jumble of wooden sheep and one meek steer, graying with dust, with whom he felt a sad fraternity, then down a narrow staircase where only God could see and judge him, into the sanctuary via the “secret” door in the paneling behind the altar, and finally out through the sanctuary’s side entrance—to avoid passing the office of Rick Ambrose, the director of youth programming. The teenagers who massed in the hallway outside it were too young to have personally witnessed Russ’s humiliation, but they surely knew the story of it, and he couldn’t look at Ambrose without betraying his failure to follow their Savior’s example and forgive him.

Today, however, was a very good day, and the halls of First Reformed were still empty. He went directly to his office, rolled paper into his typewriter, and considered his unwritten sermon for the Sunday after Christmas, when Dwight Haefle would be vacationing again. He slouched in his chair and combed his eyebrows with his fingernails, pinched the bridge of his nose, touching a face whose angular contours he’d learned too late were attractive to many women, not just his wife, and imagined a sermon about his Christmas mission to the South Side. He preached too often about Vietnam, too often about the Navajos. To boldly speak, from the pulpit, the words Frances Cottrell and I had the privilege—to pronounce her name while she sat listening from the fourth row of pews and the congregation’s eyes, perhaps enviously, connected her with him—was a pleasure, alas, foreclosed by his wife, who read his sermons in advance and would also be sitting in a pew, and who didn’t know that Frances was joining him today.

On his office walls were posters of Charlie Parker and his sax, Dylan Thomas and his fag; a smaller picture of Paul Robeson framed alongside a handbill for Robeson’s appearance at the Judson Church in 1952; Russ’s diploma from the Biblical Seminary in New York; and a blown-up photo of him and two Navajo friends in Arizona, in 1946. Ten years ago, when he’d assumed the associate ministry in New Prospect, these artfully chosen assertions of identity had resonated with the teenagers whose development in Christ had been part of his brief. But to the kids who now thronged the church’s hallways in their bell-bottoms and bib overalls, their bandannas, they signified only obsolescence. The office of Rick Ambrose, him of the stringy black hair and the glistening black Fu Manchu, had a kindergarten feel to it, the walls and shelves bedecked with the crudely painted effusions of his young disciples, the special meaningful rocks and bleached bones and wildflower necklaces they’d given him, the silk-screened posters for fundraising concerts with no discernible relation to any religion Russ recognized. After his humiliation, he’d hidden in his office and ached amid the fading totems of a youth that no one but his wife found interesting anymore. And Marion didn’t count, because it was Marion who’d impelled him to New York, Marion who’d turned him on to Parker and Thomas and Robeson, Marion who’d thrilled to his stories of the Navajos and urged him to heed his calling to the ministry. Marion was inseparable from an identity that had proved to be humiliating. It had taken Frances Cottrell to redeem it.

“My God, is this you?” she’d said on her first visit to his office, the previous summer, as she studied the photo from the Navajo reservation. “You look like a young Charlton Heston.”

She’d come to Russ for grief counseling, another part of his brief and not his favorite, since his own most grievous loss to date was of his boyhood dog, Skipper. He’d been relieved to hear that Frances’s worst complaint, a year after her husband’s fiery death in Texas, was a sense of emptiness. At his suggestion that she join one of the First Reformed women’s circles, she flicked her hand. “I’m not going to coffee with the ladies,” she said. “I know I’ve got a boy starting high school, but I’m only thirty-six.” Indeed, she was sagless, pouchless, flabless, lineless, an apparition of vitality in a snug paisley sleeveless dress, her hair naturally blond and boyishly short, her hands boyishly small and square. It was obvious to Russ that she’d be remarried soon enough—that the emptiness she felt was probably little more than the absence of a husband—but he remembered his anger when his mother had asked him, too soon after Skipper’s passing, whether he might like another dog.

There was, he told Frances, one particular women’s circle, different from the others, guided by Russ himself, that worked with members of First Reformed’s inner-city partner church, the Community of God. “The ladies don’t coffee,” he said. “We paint houses, clear brush, haul trash. Take the elderly to their appointments, help kids with their homework. We do it every other Tuesday, all day. And, let me tell you, I look forward to those Tuesdays. It’s one of the paradoxes of our faith—the more you give to the less fortunate, the fuller you feel in Christ.”

“You say his name so easily,” Frances said. “I’ve been going to Sunday service for three months, and I’m still waiting to feel something.”

“Not even my own sermons have moved you.”

She colored a little, fetchingly. “That’s not what I meant. You’ve got a beautiful voice. It’s just…”

“Honestly, you’re more likely to feel something on a Tuesday than a Sunday. I’d rather be on the South Side myself than giving sermons.”

“It’s a Negro church?”

“A Black church, yes. Kitty Reynolds is our ringleader.”

“I like Kitty. I had her for senior English.”

Russ liked Kitty, too, although he sensed that she was skeptical of him, as a male of the species; Marion had invited him to consider that Kitty, never married, was likely a lesbian. She dressed like a lumberjack for their biweekly trips to the South Side, and she’d quickly asserted possession of Frances, insisting that she ride both ways with her, rather than in Russ’s station wagon. Mindful of her skepticism, he’d ceded the field to Kitty and waited for a day when she might be indisposed.

On the Tuesday after Thanksgiving, when a flu-like cold was going around, only three ladies, all widows, had shown up in the First Reformed parking lot. Frances, wearing a plaid wool hunting cap like the one Russ had worn as a boy, hopped into the front seat of his Fury and left the hat on, perhaps owing to the leak in the Fury’s heating system that fogged the windshield if he didn’t keep a window down. Or did she know how gut-punchingly, faith-testingly, androgynously adorable she looked to him in that hat? The two older widows might have known it, because all the way in to the city, past Midway and across on Fifty-fifth Street, they pestered Russ from the back seat with seemingly pointed questions about his wife and his four children.

The Community of God was a small, unsteepled church of yellow brick, originally built by Germans, with a tar-roofed community center attached to one side. Its congregation, mostly female, was led by a middle-aged pastor, Theo Crenshaw, who did the circle the favor of accepting its suburban charity without thanks. Every second Tuesday, Theo simply presented Russ and Kitty with a prioritized to-do list; they came not to minister but to serve. Kitty had marched with Russ for civil rights, but Russ had had to counsel other women in the circle, explaining that just because they struggled to understand “urban” English it didn’t mean they had to speak loudly and slowly to make themselves understood. For the women who got it, and learned to overcome their fear of walking on the 6700 block of South Morgan Street, the circle had been a powerful experience. On the women who didn’t get it—some of whom had joined the circle for competitive reasons, not wanting to be left out—he’d been obliged to inflict the same humiliation he’d suffered at the hands of Rick Ambrose and ask them not to come again.

Because Kitty had kept her glued to her side, Frances hadn’t been tested yet. When they arrived on Morgan Street, she left the car reluctantly and waited to be asked before helping Russ and the other widows carry toolboxes and bags of cast-off winter clothes into the community center. Her hesitancy set off a flurry of misgivings in Russ—that he’d mistaken style for substance, a hat for an adventurous spirit—but they were melted by a gust of compassion when Theo Crenshaw, ignoring Frances, directed the two older widows to catalogue a shipment of secondhand books for the Sunday school. The two men were going to install a new water heater in the basement.

“And Frances,” Russ said.

She was hovering by the street door. Theo sized her up coolly. “There’s a whole lot of books.”

“Why don’t you help Theo and me,” Russ said.

The eagerness of her nod confirmed his compassionate instinct, dispelling the suspicion that what he really wanted was to show off how strong he was, how skilled with tools. In the basement, he stripped down to his undershirt and applied a bear hug to the nasty, asbestos-clad old heater and lifted it off its seat. At forty-seven, he was no longer a tall sapling; he’d broadened in the chest and shoulders like an oak tree. But there wasn’t much for Frances to do but watch, and when the intake pipe snapped off flush with the wall, necessitating work with a stone chisel and a pipe die, he was slow to notice that she’d left the basement.

What Russ most liked about Theo was his reticence, which spared Russ from the vanity of imagining that the two of them could be interracial buddies. Theo knew the essential facts about Russ—that he didn’t shy from hard work, that he’d never lived far from poverty, that he believed in the divinity of Jesus Christ—and he neither asked nor welcomed more open-ended questions. About, for example, the retarded neighborhood boy Ronnie, who wandered in and out of the church in all seasons, sometimes stopping to do a peculiar swaying dance with his eyes closed, or to cadge a quarter from a First Reformed lady, Theo would only say, “Best leave that boy alone.” When Russ had tried to engage with Ronnie anyway, asking him where he lived, who his mother was, Ronnie had responded, “Can I have a quarter?” and Theo had said to Russ, more sharply, “Best just leave him be.”

It was an instruction Frances hadn’t received. Upstairs, at lunchtime, they found her and Ronnie on the floor of the community room with a box of crayons. Ronnie was wearing a cast-off parka recognizably from New Prospect, swaying on his knees while Frances drew an orange sun on a sheet of newsprint. Theo stopped dead, began to say something, and shook his head. Frances offered Ronnie her crayon and looked up at Russ happily. She’d found her own way to serve and to give of herself, and he was happy for her, too.

Theo, following him into the sanctuary, was not. “You need to speak to her. Tell her Ronnie is off-limits.”

“I really don’t see the harm.”

“Isn’t a matter of harm.”

Theo went home to his wife for a hot meal, and Russ, not wanting to discourage Frances’s act of charity, took his sack lunch up to the Sunday-school room, where the older widows had undertaken a wholesale reorganization. When you were sick in the body, you surrendered it to the touch of strangers, and when you were sick with poverty you surrendered your environment. Without asking permission, the widows had sorted all of the children’s books and created bright, enticing labels for them. When you were poor, it could be hard to see what needed doing until someone showed you by doing it. Not asking permission hadn’t come naturally to Russ, but it was the counterpart of not expecting to be thanked. Venturing into a back yard of bramble and shoulder-high ragweed, he didn’t ask the old lady who owned it which bushes and which pieces of rusting junk weren’t worth saving, and when the job was done, more often than not, the old lady didn’t thank him. She said, “Now doesn’t that look better.”

He was chatting with the two widows when they heard a door bang downstairs, a woman’s voice rising in anger. He leaped to his feet and ran down to the community room. Frances, clutching a sheet of newsprint, was shrinking from a young woman he’d never seen before. She was emaciated, filthy-haired. Even halfway across the room, he could smell the liquor on her.

“This my son, you understand me? My son.”

Ronnie was still on his knees with the crayons, swaying.

“Whoa, whoa,” Russ said.

The young woman wheeled around. “You the husband?”

“No, I’m the pastor.”

“Well, you tell whatever she is to stay away from my boy.” She addressed herself again to Frances. “Stay away from my boy, bitch! What you got there anyway?”

Russ stepped between the women. “Miss. Please.”

“What you got there?”

“It’s a drawing,” Frances said. “A nice drawing. Ronnie made it. Didn’t you, Ronnie?”

The drawing in question was a random red scrawl. Ronnie’s mother reached and snatched it from Frances’s hand. “This ain’t your property.”

“No,” Frances said. “I think he made it for you.”

“She still talking to me? Is that what I’m hearing?”

“I think we all need to calm down here,” Russ said.

“She need to get her white ass outta my face and not be messing with my boy.”

“I’m sorry,” Frances said. “He’s so sweet, I was only—”

“Why is she still talking to me?” The mother ripped the drawing into quarters and yanked Ronnie to his feet. “I told you to keep away from these folk. Didn’t I tell you that?”

“Dunno,” Ronnie said.

She slapped him. “You don’t know?”

“Miss,” Russ said, “if you hit the boy again, there’s going to be trouble.”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah.” She was heading toward the street door. “Come on, Ronnie. We done here.”

After they were gone, and Frances had broken down in sobs and he’d embraced her, feeling her fear expend itself in shudders, but also noticing how neatly her narrow form fit in his arms, her delicate head in his hand, he was close to tears himself. They should have asked permission. He should have kept a more protective eye on her. He should have insisted that she help the older ladies with the books.

“I don’t know if I’m cut out for this,” she said.

“It was just bad luck. I’ve never seen her before.”

“But I’m afraid of them. And she knew it. And you’re not, and she respected you.”

“It gets easier if you keep showing up.”

She shook her head, not believing him.

When Theo Crenshaw returned from his lunch, Russ was too ashamed to mention the incident. He’d had no plan for him and Frances, no specific fantasy, nothing more than a wish to be near her, and now, in his vanity and error, he’d blown his chance to see her twice a month. He was bad enough to desire a woman who wasn’t his wife, but he was also bad at being bad. How hideously passive a tactic it had been to bring her down to the basement. To imagine that watching him work could make her want him, the way watching her do anything made him want her, was to be the kind of man her kind of woman wouldn’t want. Watching him had bored her, and he deserved the blame for what had followed.

In his Fury, on the slow drive back to New Prospect, she was silent until one of the older widows asked her how her son, Larry, the tenth grader, was liking Crossroads. It was news to Russ that her son had joined the church’s youth group.

“Rick Ambrose must be some kind of genius,” Frances said. “I don’t think there were thirty kids in that group when I was growing up.”

“Were you in it?” the older widow asked.

“Nope. Not enough cute boys. Not any, actually.”

Coming from Frances, the word genius was like acid on Russ’s brain. He should have borne it stoically, but on his bad days he was unable not to do things he would later regret. It was almost as if he did them because he would later regret them. Writhing with retrospective shame, abasing himself in solitude, was how he found his way back to God’s mercy.

“Do you know,” he said, “why the group is named Crossroads? It’s because Rick Ambrose thought kids could relate to the name of a rock song.”

This was a scabrous half-truth. Russ himself had originally proposed the name.

“And so I asked him—I had to ask—if he knew the original Robert Johnson song. And he gives me a blank look. Because to him, you know, music history started with the Beatles. Believe me, I’ve heard the Cream version of ‘Crossroads.’ I know exactly what it is. It’s a bunch of guys from England ripping off an authentic Black American blues master and acting like it’s their music.”

Frances, in her hunting cap, had her eyes on the truck ahead of them. The older widows were holding their breath while their associate minister trashed the director of youth programming.

“I happen to have the original recording of Johnson singing ‘Cross Road Blues,’” he bragged, repellently. “Back when I lived in Greenwich Village—you know, I used to live there, in New York City—I’d find old 78s in junk stores. During the Depression, the record companies went out in the field and made amazing authentic recordings—Lead Belly, Charley Patton, Tommy Johnson. I was working with an afterschool program in Harlem, and I’d come home every night and play those records, and it was like being carried straight into the South in the twenties. There was so much pain in those old voices. It helped me understand the pain I was dealing with in Harlem. Because that’s what the blues are really about. That’s what went missing when the white bands started aping the style. I can’t hear any pain at all in the new music.”

An embarrassed silence fell. The last daylight of November was dying in crayon colors beneath the clouds on the suburban horizon. Russ now had more than enough to be ashamed of later, more than enough to be sure that he deserved to suffer. The sense of rightness at the bottom of his worst days, the feeling of homecoming in his humiliations, was how he knew that God existed. Already, as he drove toward the dying light, he had a foretaste of their reunion.

In the First Reformed parking lot, Frances lingered in the car after the others had taken their leave. “Why did she hate me?” she said.

“Ronnie’s mother?”

“No one’s ever spoken to me like that.”

“I’m very sorry that happened to you,” he said. “But this is what I meant about pain. Imagine being so poor that your kids are the only thing you have, the only people who care about you and need you. What if you saw some other woman treating them better than you were able to treat them? Can you imagine how that might feel?”

“It would make me try to treat them better myself.”

“Yes, but that’s because you’re not poor. When you’re poor, things just happen to you. You feel like you can’t control anything. You’re completely at God’s mercy. That’s why Jesus tells us that the poor are blessed—because having nothing brings you closer to God.”

“That woman didn’t strike me as being especially close to God.”

“Actually, Frances, you have no way of knowing. She was obviously angry and troubled—”

“And stinking drunk.”

“And stinking drunk at noon. But if we learn nothing else from these Tuesdays, it should be that you and I are not in a position to judge the poor. We can only try to serve them.”

“So you’re saying it was my fault.”

“Not at all. You were listening to something generous in your heart. That’s never a fault.”

He was hearing something generous in his own heart: he could still be a good pastor to her.

“I know it’s hard to see when you’re upset,” he said gently, “but what you experienced today is what people in that neighborhood experience on a daily basis. Abusive words, racial prejudice. And I know you’re no stranger to pain yourself—I can’t even imagine what you’ve been through. If you decide you’ve had enough pain and you’d rather not work with us right now, I won’t think less of you. But you have an opportunity, if you’re up for it, to turn your pain into compassion. When Jesus tells us to turn the other cheek, what is he really saying to us? That the person who’s abusing us is hopelessly evil and we just have to put up with it? Or is he reminding us that the person is a person like us, a person who feels the same kind of pain that we do? I know it can be hard to see, but that perspective is always available, and I think it’s one we all should strive for.”

Frances considered his words for a moment. “You’re right,” she said. “I do have a hard time seeing it that way.”

And that had seemed to be the end of it. When he phoned her the next day, as any good pastor would have done, she said her daughter had a fever and she couldn’t talk right then. He didn’t see her at services the following two Sundays, and she skipped the circle’s next trip to the South Side. He thought of calling her again, if only to resupply himself with shame, but the purity of the hurt of losing her was of a piece with the season’s dark afternoons and long nights. He would have lost her sooner or later—at the latest when one of them died, very probably much sooner than that—and his need to reconnect with God was so pressing that he seized on the hurt almost greedily.

But then, four days ago, she’d called him. She’d had a wretched cold, she said, but she couldn’t stop thinking about his words in the car. She didn’t think she had the strength to be like him, but she felt like she’d turned a corner, and Kitty Reynolds had mentioned a Christmas delivery to the South Side. Could she come along with them for that?

Russ would have been content to rejoice merely as her pastor, her enabler, if Frances hadn’t then asked if he might loan her some of his blues recordings.

“Our turntable plays 78s,” she said. “I’m thinking, if I’m going to do this, I should try to understand their culture better.”

He winced at the phrase their culture, but even he was not so bad at being bad as not to know what sharing music signified. He went up to the unheatable third floor of his hulking church-provided house and spent a good hour on his knees, selecting and reselecting 78s, trying to guess which ten of them together were likeliest to inspire feelings like the ones he already had for her. His connection with God had vanished, but this wasn’t a worry for now. The worry was Kitty Reynolds. It was imperative that he have Frances all to himself, but Kitty was sharp and he was bad at lying. Any ruse he tried, like telling her to meet him at three and then departing with Frances at two thirty, was bound to raise Kitty’s suspicions. He saw that he had no choice but to level with her, sort of, and say that Frances had suffered a small trauma in the city, and that he needed to be alone with her when she bravely revisited the scene of it.

“It sounds to me,” Kitty had said when he called her, “like you fell down on the job.”

“You’re right. I did. And now I need to try and regain her trust. It’s encouraging that she wants to go back, but it’s still very delicate.”

“And she’s a cute one, and it’s Christmastime. If it were anyone but you, Russ, I might be worried about your motives.”

He’d wondered about Kitty’s implication—whether she considered him uniquely good and trustworthy, or uniquely unsexed and unmanly and unthreatening. Either way, the effect had been to make his impending date with Frances feel more thrillingly illicit. In anticipation of it, he’d smuggled out of his house and into the church his final selection of blues records and a grimy old coat, a sheepskin thing from Arizona, that he hoped might lend him a bit of an edge. In Arizona, he’d had an edge, and, fairly or not, he believed that what had dulled it was his marriage. When Marion, after his humiliation, had loyally undertaken to hate Rick Ambrose, calling him that charlatan, Russ had snapped at her—lashed out—and declared that Rick was many things but not a charlatan, the simple fact was that he, Russ, had lost his edge and couldn’t relate to young people anymore. He flagellated himself and resented Marion for interfering with the pleasure of it. His subsequent daily shame, whether of walking past Ambrose’s office or taking a craven detour to avoid it, had connected him to the sufferings of Christ. It was a torment that nourished him in his faith, whereas the too-gentle touch of Marion’s hand on his arm, when she tried to comfort him, was a torment without spiritual upside.

From his office, as the hour finally approached two thirty, the page in his typewriter still blank, he could hear the afterschool influx of Crossroads teenagers buzzing around the honeypot of Ambrose, the pounding of running footsteps, the shouting of swear words that Mr. Fuck-Piss-Shit encouraged by using them incessantly himself. More than a hundred and twenty kids now belonged to Crossroads, among them two of Russ’s own children; and it was a measure of how focused he’d been on Frances, how mad with anticipation of their date, that only now, as he stood up from his desk and pulled on the sheepskin coat, did he consider that he and she might run into his son Perry.

Bad criminals overlook obvious things. Relations with his daughter, Becky, had been strained ever since she’d joined Crossroads, gratuitously, in October, but at least she was aware of how deeply she’d wounded him by joining, and he rarely saw her at the church after school. Perry, however, knew nothing of tact. Perry, whose IQ had been measured at 160, saw too much and smirked too much at what he saw. Perry was fully capable of chatting up Frances, his manner seemingly forthright and respectful but somehow neither, and he would definitely notice the sheepskin coat.

Russ could have used the detour to the parking lot, but the man who resorted to it wasn’t the man he meant to be today. He squared his shoulders, deliberately forgot to take the blues recordings, so that he and Frances would have a reason to return to his office after dark, and stepped into a dense bank of smoke from the cigarettes of a dozen kids camped out in the hallway. There was no immediate sign of Perry. One chubby, apple-cheeked girl was splayed out happily on the laps of three boys on the saggy old divan that someone, over Russ’s quiet objections to Dwight Haefle (the hallway was a fire escape route), had dragged in for kids waiting their turn to be confronted by Ambrose, with brutal but loving honesty, in the privacy of his office.

Russ moved forward with his eyes on the floor, stepping around blue-jeaned shins and sneakered feet. But as he approached his adversary’s office he could see, peripherally, that its door was halfway open; and then he heard her voice.

He stopped without having wanted to.

“It’s so great,” he heard Frances gush. “A year ago, I practically had to put a gun to his head to get him to church.”

Of Ambrose, through the doorway, only ragged denim cuffs and beat-up work boots were visible. But the chair Frances was sitting in faced the hallway. She saw Russ, waved to him, and said, “See you outside?”

God only knew what expression was on his face. He walked on, blindly overshot the main entrance, and found himself outside the function hall. He was taking on dark water through large holes in his hull. The stupidity of never once imagining that she could go to Ambrose. The clairvoyant certainty that Ambrose would take her away from him. The guilt of having hardened his heart against the wife he’d vowed to cherish. The vanity of believing that his sheepskin coat made him look like anything but a fatuous, obsolete, repellent clown. He wanted to tear off the coat and retrieve his regular wool one, but he was too much of a coward to walk back up the hallway, and he was afraid that if he took the detour and saw the dusty crèche steer, in the state he was in, he might cry.

Oh God, he prayed from within the loathsomeness of his coat. Please help me.

If God answered his prayer, it was by reminding him that the way to endure misery was to humble himself, think of the poor, and be of service. He went to the church secretary’s office and ferried cartons of toys and canned goods to the parking lot. Each passing minute deepened the late-dawning badness of the day. Why was she with Ambrose? What could they be discussing that was taking so long? The toys all appeared to be new or indestructible enough to pass as new, but Russ was able to survive further minutes by rooting through the food cartons, culling the lazy or thoughtless donations (cocktail onions, water chestnuts) and taking comfort in the weight of jumbo cans of pork and beans, of Chef Boyardee, of pear halves in syrup: the thought of how welcome each would be to a person who was genuinely hungry and not merely, like him, starved in spirit.

It was 2:52 when Frances came bounding up to him, like a boy, full of bounce. She was wearing the hunting cap and, today, a matching wool jacket. “Where’s Kitty?” she said brightly.

“Kitty was afraid she wouldn’t fit, with all the boxes.”

“She’s not coming?”

Unable to look Frances in the eye, he couldn’t tell if she was disappointed or, worse yet, suspicious. He shook his head.

“That’s silly,” she said. “I could have sat on her lap.”

“Do you mind?”

“Mind? It’s a privilege! I’m feeling very special today. I’ve turned a corner.”

She made an airy little ballet move, expressive of turning a corner. He wondered if her feeling had preceded or been caused by her visit with Ambrose.

“Good, then,” he said, slamming the Fury’s rear door. “We should probably get going.”

It was a subtle reference to her lateness, the only one he intended to permit himself, and she didn’t pick up on it. “Is there anything I need to bring?”

“No. Just yourself.”

“The one thing I never leave home without! Let me just make sure I locked my car.”

He watched her bounce over to her own, newer car. Her spirits seemed higher than his not only at this moment but possibly in his entire life. Certainly higher than he’d ever seen Marion’s.

“Ha!” Frances exulted from across the lot. “Locked!”

He gave her two thumbs up. He never gave anyone two thumbs up. It felt so strange he wasn’t sure he’d done it right. He looked around to see if anyone else, Perry in particular, had witnessed it. There was no one in sight but a pair of teenagers carrying guitar cases toward the church, not looking in his direction, perhaps intentionally. One was a boy he’d known since he was a second grader in Sunday school.

What would it be like to live with a person capable of joy?

As he was getting into the Fury, a single, floppy snowflake, the first of the multitude the sky had promised all day, came to rest on his forearm and dissolved in itself. Frances, climbing in from the other side, said, “That’s a great old coat. Where’d you get it?”

 

 

 

Resolved: that the soul is independent of the body and immutable. First affirmative speaker: Perry Hildebrandt, New Prospect Township High School.

Ahem.

Tempting though it may be, let’s not make the mistake of misreading the experience, familiar to any pothead worthy of the name, of being in one place, doing one thing—say, struggling to tear open a bag of marshmallows in Ansel Roder’s kitchen—and then, the very next instant, finding one’s bodily self performing an entirely different task in a wholly different setting. Such spatio-temporal elisions or (in common but misleading parlance) “blackouts” need not suggest a division of soul and body; any decent mechanistic theory of mind can account for them. Let’s begin, instead, by considering a question that may at first glance seem trivial or unanswerable or even nonsensical: Why am I me and not someone else? Let’s peer into the dizzying depths of this question …

It was curious the way time slowed, almost stopped, when he was feeling well: wonderful (but also not, because of the sleepless night it augured) the number of laps his mind could run in the seconds it took him to climb one staircase. The pulsing nowness of it all, body and soul in sync, his skin registering each degree of falling temperature as he approached the third floor of the Crappier Parsonage, his nose the mustiness of the cold air flowing down toward the door at the bottom of the stairs, which he’d left open in case his mother came home unexpectedly; his ears the assurance that she hadn’t, his retinas the slightly less gloomy December light in windows nearer to the sky, less shaded by trees, his soul the almost déjà vu familiarity of climbing these stairs alone.

He had once (only once) asked the higher powers if one of the third-floor rooms could be his, or really not so much asked as rationally pointed out the third floor’s suitability for the third child he ineluctably was, and when the answer had come down from on maternal high—no, sweetie, it’s too cold in the winter, too hot in the summer, and Judson likes sharing a room with you—he’d accepted it without protest or renewed entreaty, because, by his own rational assessment, he was the one child in the family with no rightful claim to a room of his own, being neither the oldest nor the youngest nor the prettiest, and he was used to operating at a level of rationality inaccessible to others.

Nevertheless, in his mind, the third floor belonged to him. Many a lungful of depleted smoke had been puffed out the storage-room window, many an ash smudged into the polleny dust on the outer sill, and the Reverend Father’s home office, which he now brazenly entered, had no secrets from him. He had read, partly out of curiosity, partly to gauge just how miserable a worm he could be, the entirety of his mother’s premarital correspondence with his father, except for two letters that his father himself had never opened. Searching, with little optimism, for Playboys, he’d exhumed his father’s stacks of The Other Side and The Witness, the fruit of minds so woody that not a drop of sweetness could be pressed from them, along with a year’s worth of Psychology Todays, in one of which he’d dwelled on the words clitoris and clitoral orgasm, sadly not illustrated. (Ansel Roder’s father stored his collection of Playboys in hinged archival cardboard boxes, labeled by calendar year, which was impressive but discouraged pilferage.) The Reverend’s jazz and blues recordings were so much mute plastic and moldering sleeve, and the old coats in the slope-ceilinged closet weren’t covetable, cut as they were for a man much bigger than Perry, who could feel, literally in his bones, that he would end up as the physical runt of the Hildebrandt litter, his growth spurt, the year before, having resembled the bottle rocket that goes off at a faltering angle and dies with a dull pop. The closet interested him only in December, when the floor of it filled up with presents.

A noteworthy fact, possibly bearing on the question of the soul’s immutability, was that a person named Perry Hildebrandt had existed on earth for nine Christmases, his consciousness alive and functioning on five of them, before it occurred to him that the presents that appeared under the tree on Christmas Eve must have been in the house, not yet wrapped, for some days or even weeks before their appearance. His blindness had had nothing to do with Santa Claus. Of Santa the Hildebrandts had always said, Bah, humbug. And yet somehow, long past the age of understanding that presents don’t just buy and wrap themselves, he’d accepted their sudden annual appearance as, if not a miraculous provision, then a phenomenon like his bladder filling with urine, part of the normal course of things. How had he not grasped at nine a truth so obvious to him at ten? The epistemological disjunction was absolute. His nine-year-old self seemed to him a total stranger, and not in a good way. It was a figure of vague menace to the older Perry, who couldn’t escape the suspicion that, although the cherubic face in photos from 1965 was identifiably his own, the two Perrys did not have the same soul. That somehow there had been a switcheroo. In which case, where had his current soul come from? And where had the other one gone?

He opened the closet door and dropped to his knees. The nakedness of the presents on the floor was a sad premonition of their naked future, after the brief, false glory of being wrapped. A shirt, a velour pullover, socks. An argyle sweater, further socks. A ribboned box from Marshall Field’s—pretty tony! Gentle shaking indicated a lightweight garment within, doubtless for Becky. Reaching in deeper, he uncrimped the paper bags of books and records. Among the latter was the Yes album he’d mentioned to his mother in a sideways conversation of the sort that gave them pleasure. (Transmitting a Christmas list without referring to Christmas was a very elementary game, and yet the Reverend Father couldn’t have managed it without winking, and Becky would have spoiled it altogether: “Are you trying to tell me what you want for Christmas?” Only his mother and his little brother had proper ludic faculties.) In hindsight, it was a pity he’d hinted at the Yes record before he formed his new resolution. Yes paired outstandingly with reefer, but he feared that its music might forfeit a certain luster if listened to with head unaltered.

At the back of the closet were heavier items, a small yellow Samsonite suitcase (for Becky, certainly), what appeared to be a secondhand microscope (had to be Clem), a portable cassette player/recorder (hinted at but by no means counted on!), and, oh dear, an electric NFL Football game. Poor Judson. He was still young enough that he needed to be given a game, but Perry had already played this particular game at Roder’s and nearly passed out laughing at its shittiness. The sheet-metal playing field vibrated electrically, with a sound like a Norelco shaver’s, beneath two teams of tiny plastic gridders with oblongs of plastic turf glued to their feet, the quarterbacks eternally frozen in he-man forward-passing posture, the halfbacks carrying a “ball” that was more like a pellet of pocket lint and frequently fumbling it, or becoming so disoriented in the buzzy scrum that they speeded toward their own end zone and scored a safety for their opponent. Nothing was more hilarious to the stupidly stoned than stupidly stoned-looking behavior; but Judson, of course, would not be playing it while stoned.

On the plus side: no sign of a camera. Perry had been fairly sure that only he knew what his little brother most wanted, because Judson was a superior human being, to whom it wouldn’t occur to engage in avaricious hinting with their mother, and the paternal style was so anti-materialistic that Christmas lists were never solicited. Still, there was such a thing as bad luck, intuitive guesses, and so he had to ransack the closet—a small infraction, smaller yet in the context of a greater good.

Because this was his new resolution: to be good.

Or, failing that, at least less bad.

Although his motives for so resolving suggested that the badness was underlying and perhaps intractable.

For example: the reluctance he now felt, as he stood up and headed back down the drafty staircase, to liquidate the asset. The liquidation was a sentence he’d passed on himself, a punitive fine he’d levied at the peak of his resolution, but now he wondered if it was really necessary. He had in his billfold the twenty-dollar bill his mother had slipped him for Christmas shopping, plus eleven dollars he’d managed not to spend on poisoning his central nervous system. The camera that he and Judson had admired in the window of New Prospect Photo cost $24.99, not including sales tax and rolls of film. Even if he could find a cheap used frame for his gouache portrait of his mother and bought paperbacks for everyone else—and his irritation at having to buy anything for Becky or Clem or the Reverend was already an ominous violation of his resolution—he was facing a shortfall.

And there was a cheaper way. Judson would also have liked to get the game of Risk, a new one of which cost less than half the camera, and to play it with Perry in their bedroom, which Perry would gladly have done as a further gift to Judson, being fond of the game himself. But along with every other game involving war or killing, any toy that shot projectiles or could be imagined to shoot them, any representations of soldiers, warplanes, tanks, etc.—in short, every thing a normal boy like Judson most wanted—Risk was forbidden in the house, owing to the Reverend’s violent pacifism. Perry did have an arsenal of rational arguments at his disposal: Wasn’t the object of all games a kind of warlike vanquishment? How come the virtual slaughter in chess and checkers didn’t run afoul of the ban? Was it truly obligatory to view the pleasing enameled lozenges of Risk as “armies,” rather than as abstract markers in a game of topological strategy and dice-rolling? If only it were possible to argue with his father without flushing and choking up with tears of anger and hating himself for being smarter, but also less good, than the old man! A fine gift to Judson a fight would be on Christmas morning.

Concluding, reluctantly, that there was no saving the asset, he shut the stairway door behind him and found Judson where he’d left him, in their bedroom, reading a book beneath the homemade reading light that Perry had rigged up for him above his captain’s bed. Judson’s corner of their room recalled the cabin of the Spray, the globe-circling vessel of his hero Joshua Slocum—everything in its place, clothes folded and stowed beneath the bed, fifty-cent paperbacks ordered alphabetically by title, Dinky cars parked on a little shelf at parallel diagonals, alarm clock tightly wound—outside which raged the sea of Perry, for whom folding clothes was an irrational waste of time and ordering his possessions a superfluity, since he remembered exactly where he’d left them. The asset was under his bed, in the padlocked plywood strongbox that he’d built as his final project in eighth-grade shop class.

“Hey, kiddo, sorry to bother you,” he said from the doorway. “But I need you to go somewhere else.”

Judson’s book was The Incredible Journey. He frowned elaborately. “First you tell me I have to stay here and then you tell me I have to leave.”

“Just for a minute. Unusual commands must be obeyed at Christmas time.”

Judson, not budging, said, “What do you feel like doing today?”

A sideways question.

“Right now,” Perry said, “I feel like doing something you need to leave the room for.”

“Later, though.”

“I have to go downtown. Why don’t you go over to Kevin’s? Or Brett’s.”

“They’re both sick. How long will you be gone?”

“Possibly until dinnertime.”

“I have a new idea for how to set the game up. Can I do it while you’re gone and we can play it after dinner?”

“I don’t know, Jay. Maybe.”

A bruise of disappointment in Judson’s face returned Perry to his resolution.

“I mean, yes,” he said. “But the game’s not coming out before then, you understand?”

Judson nodded and hopped off the bed with his book. “Promise?”

Perry promised and locked the door behind him. Ever since he’d manufactured a copy of Stratego, rather cunningly, out of shirt cardboard, his brother had been mad to play it with him. Because it was nominally a game of bombs and killing, it carried the risk of confiscation by the higher powers, and Judson had needed no telling to keep it a secret. There were many worse little brothers in New Prospect. Not only was Judson Perry’s best evidence of the reality of love, he was such an appealing and well-regulated youngster, nearly as smart as Perry and much better able to sleep at night, that Perry sometimes wished that he, Perry, were his little brother.

But what did that even mean? If the soul was merely a psychic artifact created by the body, it was tautologically self-evident why Perry’s soul was in Perry and not in Judson. And yet it didn’t feel self-evident. The reason he wondered if the soul might be independent and immutable was his persistent sense of how odd it was, how seemingly random, that his soul had landed where it had. Try as he might, altered or sober, he could never quite solve—or even properly articulate—the mystery of his happening to be Perry. It wasn’t at all clear to him what Becky, for example, had done to deserve being Becky, or when exactly (in an earlier incarnation?) she’d earned that privilege. She just found herself being Becky, around whom the heavens revolved; and this, too, confounded him.

A delicious faint skunk smell wafted off the asset when he opened the strongbox. The asset consisted of three ounces of weed, in double Baggies, and twenty-one Quaaludes, the remnant of a wholesale buy that, like every previous buy, had cost him nearly unendurable anxiety and shame. He stared at it in frank disbelief that he was going to part with it for nothing in return but the putative joy of Christmas giving. So very cruel, his resolution. He thought he might love being high a little less than he loved his brother, but he wasn’t sure that when his mind was racing and one night in bed felt like a month of nights he didn’t love two Quaaludes better. Aye, that was the question: whether to shove the whole fucking asset in the pocket of his parka and be done with it, or to sleep tonight. The weed alone would fetch him thirty dollars, more cash than he needed. Why not hold back a few ’ludes? For that matter, why not hold back all of them?

Eleven days earlier, in an eerie correlative of the cosmic lottery in which his soul had drawn the name Perry, he’d plucked the name Becky H from a pile of folded slips on the linoleum floor of the function hall at First Reformed. (What were the chances? About one in fifty-five—a hundred million times greater than the chances of being Perry, but still rather low.) As soon as he’d seen his sister’s name, he’d sidled back toward the pile, hoping to trade in his slip for a different one, but a Crossroads adviser was standing there to guard against this sort of cheating. Ordinarily, when it came time to choose partners for a “dyad” exercise, Rick Ambrose directed everyone to pick a person they didn’t know well or hadn’t shared with recently. The previous Sunday, however, one of the inner-circle twelfth graders, Ike Isner, had stood up and complained to the group that people were choosing too many “safe” partners and avoiding risky ones. In good Stalinist show-trial fashion, with a display of strong emotion, Isner confessed that he was guilty of this himself. The group immediately drenched him with approval for his courageous honesty. Someone then proposed a lottery system, against which another inner-circler argued that they ought to take personal responsibility for their choices, rather than relying on a mechanical system, but the proposal carried a group vote by a wide margin—Perry, as was his habit, waiting to see which way the wind was blowing before raising his hand in favor.

Becky had been one of the few people voting against. Seeing her name on the slip now, he wondered if she’d foreseen this very eventuality; had been, in this rare instance, sharper than he was. All across the church function hall, people were running up to their partners. Becky was looking around innocently to see who hers would be. As Perry approached her, he saw the situation dawn on her. Her expression matched his own. It said Oh, shit.

“All right, listen up,” Ambrose barked. “In this exercise, I want each of us to tell our partner something we really admire about them. First one of us, then the other. And then I want each of us to tell our partner something they’re doing that’s a barrier to getting to know them better. I’m talking about barriers, not character assassination. Everyone got it? Are we all clear on what comes first?”

The group was big enough that Perry and Becky had easily avoided each other since the night, six weeks earlier, when she’d shocked the world by joining Crossroads. He personally had been shocked because Becky was rather too obviously the Reverend Father’s favorite child and she knew very well how much their father hated Rick Ambrose; Perry’s own defection to Crossroads had merely deepened an existing chill between him and the Reverend, whereas Becky’s was a brutal betrayal. More universally shocking was the sheer sight of her face on a Sunday night at First Reformed. Perry had been there. He’d seen the heads turning, he’d heard the murmurs of astonishment. It was as if a Cleopatra had shown up at one of Jesus’s rallies in Galilee, a diademed queen sitting down among the freaks and the lepers and trying to blend in; because Becky, too, came from a different world—the social royalty of New Prospect Township High.

Perry as a boy hadn’t been a student of his sister’s doings. Along with Clem, with whom she was tight, she’d constituted a generic Older Siblings unit, notable mainly for always being more advanced than Perry, better with scissors, better at hopscotch, better (much better) at control of emotion and mood. Only when he started junior high did he become aware of Becky as a distinct individual, about whom the larger world had strong opinions. She was the captain of the Lifton Central cheerleading squad and could have won any other popularity contest she cared to enter. Whichever lunch table she sat down at filled up instantly with the prettiest girls, the cocksurest boys. Strangely, she herself was held to be very pretty. To Perry, the tall and bony girl with whom he impatiently shared a bathroom, and whose face twisted into something haglike when he corrected her on a point of fact or grammar, was more like vaguely disgusting, but the group of older Lifton Central boys he’d quickly fallen in with, Ansel Roder among them, assured him that he was mistaken. He was never able to agree with them, though he did eventually concede that his sister had something—an aura of singularity, a force at once attractive and unapproachable (no one had ever dared claim to be her boyfriend), a kind of expensiveness that had nothing to do with money (it was said that she wasn’t stuck up like the other cheerleaders, as if she didn’t even notice the attention she effortlessly commanded)—because he himself, Perry, the negligible sibling satellite, reflected a glow of his own from her preeminence.

In New Prospect the words Becky Hildebrandt were magical in the strict sense, their mere utterance sufficing to ensure massive attendance at a party or to induce self-reported boners in shop class (Perry regrettably within earshot for that one). As the sharer of half of her name, he’d found himself immediately noticed at Lifton Central, at least by the set of eighth- and ninth-grade boys whose parents’ high incomes and large homes accorded them a certain elevated status. He started as their runty mascot but soon proved himself their equal or better. No one could hold a pipe hit longer in his lungs, no one could drink more shots without slurring his speech, no one knew more words in the English language. Even his hair, being flax-colored and having natural wave and body, looked better than his friends’ at shoulder length. Roder had gotten so tired of brushing his lank, dull hair from his eyes that he’d finally cut it off; he was the biggest freak of them all and looked like G.I. Joe now.

It had seemed appropriate to Perry that his friends should all be older than he was. Becky might have provided the initial entrée to them, and they might never have forgotten whose brother he was, but in his own way he was singular, too. This became especially evident in ninth grade, when the last of his friends had gone on to high school. Surrounded by contemporaries of paltrier intelligence, and having no one to get him high at lunch hour, he felt like an astronaut who’d moonwalked too long and missed the flight home. This was when his sleeping troubles started. During a period of weeks between January and March, now blessedly largely lost to memory, he experienced his first nights of being 100% awake until dawn, other dawns when he felt physically incapable of raising his eyelids, a number of mornings when he crept back into the Crappier Parsonage and up the third-floor stairs and slept under an old throw rug until dinnertime, many incidents of falling asleep in his uniformly profitless classes, an excruciating conference with his principal and his parents at which he also briefly fell asleep, intermittent intense phobia of his mother, and level-voiced lectures from his father. Was it not impressive that he’d nonetheless maintained straight As that quarter? He had his sleepless nights to thank for that. There was also the psychic respite of seeing his friends after school and on weekends, but these get-togethers were shadowed, during the dark months, by his sense of wanting—of needing—larger quantities of whatever was being smoked or swallowed than the others seemed to need. To a man, his friends all could have afforded to buy more drugs. Only he, whose craving for relief didn’t peak until he was alone at home and facing another night on the rack, had a churchmouse for a father.

Right around the time he determined that he had no choice but to start dealing drugs, three of his best friends had joined Crossroads. For Bobby Jett it was a matter of a girl he was chasing, for Keith Stratton the allure of nine undersupervised days on the Crossroads spring trip to Arizona, and for David Goya, whose mother belonged to First Reformed, a not terribly punishing punishment for multiple curfew violations. Under Rick Ambrose, Crossroads had begun to undermine traditional social categories. Seemingly unlikely candidates for Christian fellowship drifted in, gave it a try. Among the ones who stuck with it, to Perry’s surprise, were all three of his friends. They still partied of a weekend, but their center of conversational gravity had shifted. Referring warmly to the Arizona trip, or more archly to the sensitivity training they did on Sunday nights, or more lubriciously to certain choice girls on the Crossroads roster, they made Perry feel excluded from a thing that sounded fun.

After a harrowing spring, followed by a summer of inhaling lawn-mower exhaust and getting wasted and rereading Tolkien, he proposed to Ansel Roder that the two of them check out Crossroads. Roder refused emphatically (“I’m not into cults”), and so Perry, on his first Sunday night in tenth grade, walked by himself into the vault-ceilinged third-floor room that Crossroads had appropriated in his father’s church. The air was blue with tobacco smoke, the walls and the ceiling vaults covered with hand-painted quotations from e. e. cummings, John Lennon, Bob Dylan, even Jesus, and with more inscrutable, unattributed lines, such as Why guess? Get the facts. DEATH KILLS. Before Perry knew it, he was being hugged by David Goya, physical contact with whom he’d heretofore naturally avoided. In the ensuing minutes, he was touched by—squeezed by, pulled into the exciting breasts of—twenty times more female bodies than he’d touched like that in his entire life. Very pleasant! After greetings and administrative business, the group marched downstairs, a hundred strong, to the church’s function hall, where the touching, male and female, in various formats, continued for another two hours. The only uncomfortable moment came when Perry, introducing himself to the group, alluded to his dad’s being the associate minister “here.” He glanced at Rick Ambrose and was pierced by a pair of burning dark eyes, slightly narrowed in puzzlement or suspicion, as if to ask, Does your dad know you’re here?

The Reverend did not know it. Since Perry seemed unable to argue with him without crying, he habitually concealed as much as he could for as long as he could. The following Sunday, to forestall any questions, he told his mother that he was having dinner at Roder’s, and he did stop in there, for a while, to consume freezer pizza and apparently quite a volume of gin and grape soda in front of the color TV in the Roders’ comfortably appointed cellar. Though he was noted for holding his liquor well, things started happening so fast when he arrived at Crossroads that he couldn’t remember them all later. It was possible he’d stumbled or lurched. He found himself confronted by two older advisers, alumni of the group, and informed that he was drunk. Rick Ambrose came wading through the crowd and led him out into a hallway.

“I don’t care if you want to be drunk,” Ambrose said, “but you’re not doing it here.”

“Okay.”

“Why are you even here? Why did you come?”

“I don’t know. My friends…”

“Are they drunk?”

Fear of punishment was killing Perry’s buzz. He shook his head.

“You’re damn right they’re not,” Ambrose said. “I ought to just send you home.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Are you really? Do you want to talk about that? Do you want to be part of this group?”

Perry hadn’t decided yet. But it was undeniably pleasant to have the full attention of the mustachioed leader about whom his irreverent friends spoke admiringly; to be in frank conversation, for once, with an adult. “Yes,” he said. “I do.”

Ambrose took him back into the smoke-filled room and interrupted regular programming for one of the plenary Confrontations that were at the heart of Crossroads praxis. The issues at hand were alcohol use, respect for one’s peers, and self-respect. Kids Perry barely knew addressed him as if they knew him very well. David Goya told him that he was an amazing person but that he, David, sometimes worried that he, Perry, used drugs and liquor to avoid his real emotions. Keith Stratton and Bobby Jett piped up in the same key. The thing went on and on and on. Although in some respects Perry had never experienced anything more horrible, he was also thrilled by the quantity and intensity of attention he was getting, as a sophomore and a newcomer, just for having drunk some gin. When he broke down in tears, weeping with shame, authentically, the group responded in a kind of ecstasy of supportiveness, advisers praising him for his courage, girls crawling over to hug him and stroke his hair. It was a crash course in the fundamental economy of Crossroads: public display of emotion purchased overwhelming approval. To be affirmed and fondled by a roomful of peers, most of them older, many of them cute, was exceedingly pleasant. Perry wanted more of this drug.

When the group headed down to the function hall for activities, Rick Ambrose held him back and collared him in a headlock evidently meant to be affectionate. “Well done,” Ambrose said, releasing him.

“Frankly, I’d assumed I’d be severely punished.”

“You didn’t think that was severe? They really let you have it.”

“I do feel a bit put through the ringer.”

“One thing, though.” Ambrose lowered his voice. “I don’t know if you’re aware of it, but there were some hard feelings when your father left the group. I feel bad about it, and I really don’t know what to do. But if you want to be here, I need to know your dad’s okay with it. I need to know you’re here for your own sake, not because of something going on with you and him.”

“He doesn’t even know. I wasn’t even thinking of him.”

“Well, you need to fix that. He needs to know. Are we clear?”

Perry’s conversation with the Reverend, later that night, was thankfully short. His father made a trembling steeple of his fingers and regarded them sadly. “I’d be lying,” he said, “if I told you that your mother and I aren’t worried about you. I think you need some kind of purpose in your life. If this is what you want it to be, I won’t stop you.” Perry’s analysis was that he was actually of such small concern to his father that his joining the enemy camp didn’t even merit anger.

By the time Becky joined Crossroads, he’d already mastered the game of it. The object was to move closer to the center of the group, to become an inner-circler, by following the rules exemplified by Ambrose and the other advisers. The rules required counterintuitive behaviors. Instead of comforting a friend with fibs, you told him unwelcome truths. Instead of avoiding the socially awkward, the hopelessly uncool, you sought them out and engaged with them (making sure, of course, that you were noticed doing this). Instead of choosing friends as exercise partners, you (conspicuously) introduced yourself to newcomers and conveyed your belief in their unqualified worth. Instead of being strong, you blubbered. Where his tears on the night of drinking gin had been cathartic, his tears later on came more easily and were a more fungible currency, redeemable for progress toward the inner circle. Because it was a game, he was good at it, and although intimacies achieved by game-theoretical calculation were hard to feel great about, he sensed that other people genuinely valued his insights and were genuinely moved by his emotional displays.

The person he feared he wasn’t fooling was the one whose approval really mattered to him, Rick Ambrose. He admired Ambrose for, among other things, his intellectually plausible faith in God. Perry himself had yet to hear from God; maybe the lines were down, or maybe there was simply no one at the other end. One boring summer afternoon, he’d gone through one of his father’s religious magazines with a ballpoint and replaced every reference to God with “Steve,” for the hilarity of it. (Who was Steve? Why were otherwise sane-seeming people going on and on about Steve?) But Ambrose had an idea so elegant that Perry wondered if there might be something to it. The idea was that God was to be found in relationships, not in liturgy and ritual, and that the way to worship Him and approach Him was to emulate Christ in his relationships with his disciples, by exercising honesty, confrontation, and unconditional love. Ambrose had a way of talking about this stuff that didn’t seem insane. He’d inspired Perry to devise a theory of how all religion worked: Along comes a leader who’s uninhibited enough to use everyday words in a new and strong and counterintuitive way, which emboldens the people around him to use this rhetoric themselves, and the very act of using it creates sensations unlike anything they’re used to in everyday life; they find they know who Steve is. Perry was altogether fascinated by Ambrose, and he felt that his own singularity entitled him to a place near his side, and so he was disappointed that Ambrose, after the night of gin, had seemed to shun him. He was forced to conclude that Ambrose detected the fraudulence in his playing of the Crossroads game and didn’t trust him. The other likely explanation—that Ambrose was sensitive about encroaching on the Reverend’s family—had been demolished by the visibly close attention he’d been paying to Becky since she’d joined the group.

And now the dangerous lottery system, for which Perry had unwisely voted, had thrown him together with her. Being a furtive and curious little worm, he knew every nook in First Reformed. In the function hall, behind a door that looked locked but wasn’t, was a spacious coat closet into which, as the other “dyad” partners dispersed around the first floor of the church, he led his sister. They sat down crosslegged on the linoleum beneath rows of empty wooden hangers. A bare overhead bulb lit a dusty punch bowl, packages of waxed-paper cups, two orphaned umbrellas.

“So,” he said, his eyes on the floor.

“Yeah, so.”

“We could use some sort of system of marking slips to avoid this.”

“Agreed.”

Grateful that she agreed, he looked up at her. She didn’t have a Crossroads wardrobe yet, no overalls, no painter’s pants, no army jacket, but she was wearing an old sweater that at least had some holes in it. He still couldn’t believe she’d joined Crossroads; it upset the natural order of things.

“I really admire how smart you are,” she said in a rote kind of tone, not looking at him.

“Thank you, sister. And I admire, I really do, how sincere you always are. You’ve got a lot of phony friends, but you’re not phony. It’s actually kind of amazing.” Seeing her mouth harden, he added, “That came out wrong. I didn’t mean to criticize your friends. I was trying to say something positive about you.”

Her mouth remained set.

“Maybe we should move right along to the barriers,” he said. “I suspect it’s more fruitful terrain.”

She nodded. “What is a thing I’m doing that’s a barrier to you getting to know me better.”

Perry realized that the wording of the exercise left something to be desired. It presupposed, for example, that he and Becky wanted to get to know each other better.

“I would say,” he said, “that the fact that you don’t seem to like me, and always seem vaguely pissed off with me, including right now, and haven’t tried to have a personal conversation with me in the last three or four years, at least not one that I can remember, despite our living in the same house, could be considered something of a barrier.”

She laughed, but in a shaky way, as if a sob had also been an option. “Guilty as charged,” she said.

“You don’t like me.”

“I mean the part about us never having a personal conversation.”

Her face, which he took this unusual opportunity to observe from up close, was faultless. One’s eye sought for a blemish (he himself had several raging) or some underlying feature that detracted, a thinness of lip, a squareness of jaw, a defect of nose, and found none. Same thing with her long, straight, shining hair, which was of a richer color than the slightly false-seeming yellow of his own: she had the platonic teen-girl hair to which other girls compared their own invidiously. Perry could see why the world considered Becky attractive, but also why it was wrong to. An absence of negatives wasn’t necessarily a positive. It could be a thing that merely offered no resistance to the eye, like an invisible balloon on a string. Maddened by the sight of a taut vertical string that ended in nothingness, people followed it around and concluded, from their following it, that it must be highly desirable.

He didn’t like her either.

“So it’s something I’m doing,” she said. “Is that the idea?”

“In this half of the exercise, yes. I’m naming what appears to me to be a barrier.”

“Well, one thing that’s kind of a barrier for me is the way you speak. Are you aware of how you sound?”

“Let the character assassination begin.”

“That’s what I’m talking about. The way you just said that. Like you’re an English aristocrat.”

“I have a Midwestern accent, Becky.”

The flaw of redness entered her face. “How do you think it feels to the rest of us to be around a person who’s always looking down on us, like we’re funny to him? Who’s always smirking like he knows something we don’t know.”

Perry frowned. To object that he didn’t look down on Judson, except in the most literal physical sense, would have conceded her larger point.

“Who acts like I’m mentally deficient because I got a B in chemistry.”

“Chemistry isn’t a subject for everyone.”

“But you’ll get an A-plus in it, won’t you. Without even trying. Without even giving a shit.”

“It could happen. But you could have done it, too, if you really wanted. I don’t think of you as dumb, Becky. That’s just false.”

He could feel himself becoming sentimental, and there were no points to be scored for it here, in the privacy of the coat closet, with his sibling.

“I’m talking about my feelings,” she said. “You can’t say a feeling is false.”

“Yes, true. So, you’re saying you feel that my being good at school is a barrier.”

“No. I’m saying I don’t feel like you’re even there. Like you’re a thousand miles away from all of us. I’m saying that doesn’t make me want to get to know you better.”

Despite having every conceivable social privilege at high school, Becky wasn’t just day-tripping in Crossroads, wasn’t just slumming—he had to grant her that. She was giving it a real go, being open about her feelings, exercising honesty and confrontation, if perhaps falling short with the unconditional love. She was in the initial phase of Crossroads fervor. He himself had advanced through this phase so rapidly that by the time of the group’s first weekend retreat, in October, at a lakeside Christian conference center in Wisconsin, he’d felt a kind of nostalgic pity for the fellow sophomore, Larry Cottrell, who solemnly approached him with a broken rock. Frost by the lake had cracked the pebbles there, and some inner-circler had been inspired to give somebody one half of a pebble and keep the other, as a symbol of their being two halves of one whole, and this had quickly become a thing. Perry, who didn’t know Cottrell well, was touched to receive a half pebble from him, followed by a hug, but not for the intended reason. What touched him was Cottrell’s naïveté. Perry knew it was a game and Cottrell didn’t yet. He might have been similarly touched by Becky’s fervor if he could only figure out why she, the undisputed queen of her senior class, had deigned to join Crossroads in the first place.

He was on the verge of asking her why—confronting her—when she launched into the most extraordinary diatribe.

“The barrier,” she said, “is that I don’t actually believe you’re a good person. Do you have any idea how crazy it’s been for me to be in Crossroads? The first night I was here, do you know what people kept telling me? How great my younger brother is. Emotionally open, easy to relate to, incredibly supportive. And I’m thinking, are we talking about the same person? I actually wondered if I’d been a bad sister. Like, maybe I never took the time to get to know the real you. Maybe I was too self-involved to notice how emotionally open you are. But you know what? I don’t think that’s it. I think I’ve been exactly the sister you wanted me to be. Have I ever said a word to Dad or Mom about what everybody else knows about you? I could have. I could have said, Hey, Dad, are you aware that Perry’s the biggest pothead at Lifton Central? Are you aware he hasn’t made it through a day unstoned all year? That he goes up to the third floor after you’re in bed and uses drugs? That his friends are all junior alcoholics and everybody in the high school knows it? I’ve protected you, Perry. And all you do is sneer at me. You sneer at all of us.”

“Not true,” he said. “In fact, I think each one of you is a better person than I am. I mean—‘sneer’? Really? You think I sneer at Jay?”

“Judson is like your pet. That’s exactly the way you treat him. You use him when you need him and you ignore him when you don’t. You use your friends, you use their drugs, you use their houses. And, I swear to God, you’re using Crossroads, too. You’re smart enough to get away with it, but I can see what you’re doing. That first Sunday, when people were telling me how great you are, I thought I was crazy. But you know who else agrees with me? Rick Ambrose.”

Although the linoleum floor was cold, the closet felt overwarm to Perry, short on oxygen, bathyspheric.

“He thinks you’re trouble,” Becky said relentlessly. “That’s what he told me.”

Perry’s mind started down the road of imagining the circumstances under which she’d heard this from Ambrose but stopped and turned back. It was as if he’d been born dispossessed, by his sister. No sooner had he found a game he could play well, a place where he was valued for his skill at playing it, an adult whom he could actually admire, than his sister came along and overnight turned Ambrose against him, claimed Ambrose for herself.

“So it isn’t that you don’t like me,” he said, his voice unsteady. “That’s not the barrier. The barrier is that you hate me.”

“No. It’s that—”

“I don’t hate you.”

“I don’t even know you well enough to have a feeling about you. I don’t think anybody really knows you. I think the people who think they do are wrong. And boy are you good at using them. Have you ever once in your life done something for another person that cost you something? All I’ve ever seen from you is selfishness and self-involvement and selfish pleasure.”

He slumped forward and surrendered to tears, hoping they might soften her toward him, elicit a redemptive hug. But they did not. He struggled to think of a thing he’d ever done to harm her, a thing more visible than the occasionally unkind thoughts he had about her, to explain her hatred. Unable to think of one thing, he was forced to conclude that she hated him on principle, because he was an evil, selfish worm, and that she was testifying now merely to redress the abstract injustice of his being praised by other people.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I know this must be hard to hear. I mean, you are my brother. But maybe it’s good you picked my name tonight, because I’ve lived with you my whole life. I can see you better than other people can. I … I do want to get to know you better. You’re my brother. But first I have to see that there’s a person there worth knowing.”

She stood up and left him in the closet like a city leveled by a hydrogen bomb. Out of the rubble, he painfully reconstructed the gist of what she’d said. She knew a lot more about his extracurricular activities than he might have imagined. (The only blessing there was that she didn’t seem to know that he sold drugs to seventh graders.) Ambrose thought he was “trouble.” (The only consolation there was the certainty that Ambrose would be angry if he knew she’d betrayed this confidence.) His seeming good works in Crossroads counted for nothing. (But at least she’d reported that people thought well of him.) He was a bad person. He merely used Judson.

Too ashamed and self-pitying to leave the closet, he listened to the group reassembling in the function hall, the glad buzz of dyad partners who’d successfully worked on their relationships, the barking of Ambrose, the skillful strumming of guitars, the sing-along of “All Good Gifts” and “You’ve Got a Friend.” He wondered if anyone noticed he was missing. Though not yet in the inner circle, he was among the sophomores most likely to get there, a fairly bright star in the Crossroads sky, and he certainly would have noticed if, say, one of the stars in Orion’s Belt went dark. As the meeting broke up, he waited for a tap on the closet door from someone—a remorseful Becky, a worried adviser, a reassuring Ambrose, a fellow member who valued him, or even just someone who saw the strip of light under the door when the function-hall lights were turned off. That no one came to him, not one person, seemed to him a damning confirmation of Becky’s judgment. He was not a person worth knowing.

It was partly to prove his sister wrong and partly to become a person whom Rick Ambrose ought to trust (and perhaps prefer to Becky) that he’d formed his new resolution that night. Not the purest-hearted of motives, surely; but one had to begin somewhere.

Leaving only two Quaaludes behind in his strongbox, as a tiny Christmas present to himself, he readmitted Judson to their bedroom and hurried forth in his parka, under snow-threatening skies, to Ansel Roder’s house. A peculiarity of the Crappier Parsonage was that, although more in need of razing than of renovation, it stood in a much tonier part of town than the senior minister’s house. All of Perry’s old drug buddies lived close by. In his reluctance to liquidate the asset, he’d dithered past the start of Christmas vacation and now couldn’t rely on finding any of his regular customers behind the Lifton Central baseball backstop, but Roder was always Mr. Liquidity. The stuccoed Roder manse had a round turret with terra-cotta shingles. Inside were beam-ceilinged rooms whose least-fine piece of furniture was finer than Perry’s family’s finest. Such was the heating situation that Roder came to the front door barefoot and shirtless, like G.I. Joe on a beach holiday. “Just the man I’m looking for,” he said. “I’m getting this weird fuzz tone in my speakers.”

Perry followed his friend up a broad staircase. “Both of them?”

“Yeah, but only with the turntable, not the tape deck.”

“That’s useful information. Let’s have a look.”

He had neither the time nor the inclination to play stereo doctor, but one of the ways he balanced accounts with his friends was by applying his manifold dexterity to petty problems of theirs, home-appliance puzzles, clogged aquarium hosing, calligraphy for signage, forgery of parental handwriting, interpretation of dreams, anything involving glue or tweezers. Upstairs, in his bedroom, Roder blasted a bit of “Whiskey Train” on his powerful stereo, and Perry readily diagnosed and fixed the looseness of the phonograph’s needle cartridge. Without ceremony, he drew the asset from his parka pocket and tossed it onto Roder’s bed.

Roder’s eyes widened. “That is a princely Christmas present, Perry.”

“I was hoping you might buy it from me.”

“Buy it.”

Between them, unspoken, the matter of Roder’s perennial largesse, and the question of why Perry invariably accepted it if he had drugs of his own and didn’t share them.

“I need funds,” he explained. “There’s something I want to get Jay for Christmas.”

“Really. And so you’re selling … It’s like that story—Gift of the Madgie?”

“Mā-jī.”

“Wouldn’t it be funny if Jay sold his, I don’t know, so he could buy you a water pipe? Et cetera.”

“‘The Gift of the Magi’ is a story about irony, yes.”

Roder poked at the asset, perhaps counting the pills. “How much money do you need?”

“Forty dollars would be good.”

“Why don’t I just loan it to you.”

“Because we’re friends and I don’t know how I’d pay you back.”

“You mowing lawns again next summer?”

“I’m supposed to be saving for college. There’s some oversight of my earnings.”

Roder shut his eyes, trying to make sense of it all. “Then how did you manage to buy this shit? Have you been stealing?”

Perry’s palms began to sweat. “That’s really neither here nor there.”

“But don’t you think it would be a little weird if you ended up burning this with me after I had to buy it off you?”

“I won’t do that.”

Roder made a skeptical sound. This was the moment for Perry to announce, per the terms of his resolution, that he wouldn’t be burning anything with anyone anymore. But, again, the reluctance.

“Look,” he said, “I know I can’t be as generous as you are. But if you consider it rationally, I don’t see why it matters who you bought from if the outlay is the same either way.”

“Because it does, and I’m surprised you can’t see why.”

“I’m not stupid. I’m looking at it rationally.”

“You know, for a minute, I honestly thought you’d gotten me a present.”

Perry could see that he’d hurt his friend’s feelings; that they’d reached a crossroads. Are you willing to leave passive complicity behind you? The voice of Rick Ambrose in his head. Do you have the guts to risk the active witnessing of a real relationship? He hadn’t come to Roder’s intending to end their (passive, complicit, drug-using) friendship. But it was true that all they ever did together anymore was get high.

“How about thirty dollars, then?” Perry’s face, too, was sweating. “So it’s partly a present, partly a, uh…”

Roder had turned away and opened a dresser drawer. He dropped two twenties on the bed. “You could have just asked for forty dollars. I would have given it to you.” He scooped up the asset and put it in the drawer. “Since when are you a dealer?”

Outside again, as he made his way down Pirsig Avenue, Perry tried to reconstruct why, fifteen minutes earlier, he hadn’t thought to just ask Roder for the money, perhaps as a “loan” that both of them knew would not be repaid, and then flush the asset down a toilet, achieving the same result without hurting his friend: why he hadn’t imagined Roder reacting the way he had, which now made perfect sense to him. Never mind the nine-year-old Perry: the fifteen-minutes-ago Perry was a stranger to him! Did his soul change every time it achieved a new insight? The very definition of a soul was immutability. Perhaps the root of his confusion was the conflation of soul and knowledge. Perhaps the soul was one of those tools built to do exactly one specific task, to know that I am I, and was mutable with respect to all other forms of knowledge?

Whether it was the limitations of his intellect, vis-à-vis the mystery of the soul, or the difficulty of reconciling his new resolution with his thoughtless hurting of an old friend’s feelings, he felt a little downward tug inside him, the slipping of a gear, the first shadow of the end of feeling well, as he proceeded into the central shopping district of New Prospect. Ordinarily he loved the glow of commerce on a dark winter afternoon. Almost every store contained things he wanted, and in this season every lamppost was wound with pine boughs and topped with a red bow that spoke additionally of buying, of receiving, of things brand-new and useful to him. But now, although he didn’t quite have the feeling itself yet, he remembered how it would feel to be unmoved by the stores, unwanting of anything in them, and how much dimmer the lights of commerce would seem to him then, how dead the pine boughs on the lampposts.

As if the feeling could be outrun, he trotted on to New Prospect Photo. The camera he’d found for Judson was a mint-condition twin lens reflex Yashica. It had sat behind the window on a small white pedestal among twenty other used and new cameras, and Judson had agreed it was a beauty. As Perry entered the store, he almost didn’t glance at the window. But the white of an empty pedestal caught his eye.

The Yashica was gone.

Gift of the Fucking Magi.

The store smelled of acid from the darkroom in the rear. Its owner, a hinily bald man, had an air of irritable oppression, understandable at a time when drugstores and shopping centers were killing his business. It was clear that when he looked up from the lens he was cleaning and saw Perry, a long-haired teenager, his first thought was shoplifter or waster of his time. Perry put his mind at ease by wishing him, with the intonation that bothered Becky, a very good afternoon. “I was hoping to purchase the twin lens reflex Yashica you’ve had in your window.”

“Sorry,” the owner said. “Sold it this morning.”

“That is very distressing.”

The owner tried to interest him in a shitty Instamatic, and then some ugly older cameras, while Perry tried not to show how offended he was by the suggestions. They’d arrived at an impasse when his eye fell on a beautiful thing under the glass-top counter. A compact movie camera, European-made. Burnished solid-metal body. Adjustable aperture. He recalled the old movie projector in the storage room at home, the remnant of a more optimistic era, when the Hildebrandts might still have become a family that watched home movies as a close-knit group, and before the Reverend, set upon by wasps, had lost his camera over the side of a rowboat.

“That’s forty dollars,” the owner said. “It sold for twice that, new, in nineteen-forties dollars. It’s Regular 8, though. You have to load it in a bag.”

“May I see it?”

“It’s forty dollars.”

“May I see it?”

When Perry wound the mainspring and took a peek through the viewfinder’s luscious optics, he keenly wanted the camera for himself. Maybe Judson would share it with him?

Precisely the kind of thought that his resolution insisted that he banish.

And so he banished it. He left the store forty-eight dollars poorer but palpably richer in spirit. Imagining Judson’s surprise at receiving not the camera they’d ogled but something even finer and cooler, he was certain that, for once, he was glad for another person. Snow had started falling from the Illinois sky, white crystallizations of water as pure as he felt, himself, for having parted with the asset. His thoughts had slowed to a happy medium, no slower than that, not yet. He stood for a moment on the sidewalk, amid the melting snowflakes, and wished the world could just stand still.

From the street came the rumble of a familiar engine. He turned and saw the family Fury braking for the stop sign at Maple Avenue. The rear of the car was packed with cardboard boxes. At the wheel was his father, wearing an old coat that Perry hadn’t noticed missing from the third-floor closet. On the passenger side, angled to face his father, one arm draped over the backrest, was Larry Cottrell’s foxy mother. She waved to Perry gaily, and now the Reverend saw him. No attempt at a smile was made. Perry had the distinct impression that he’d caught the old man doing something wrong.

 

 

 

Becky that morning had awakened before dawn. It was the first day of vacation, in past years a day for sleeping in, but this year everything was different. She lay in the dark and listened to the tick and wheeze of the radiator, the struggling clank of pipes below. As if for the first time, she appreciated the goodness of being snug in a house on a cold morning. Also, no less, the goodness of the cold, which made the snugness possible; the two things fit together like a pair of mouths.

Until last night, she’d put make-out sessions in the category of non-obligatory activities. For five years she’d seen people making out all around her, and she knew girls who’d allegedly gone all the way, but she hadn’t felt ashamed of her inexperience. Shame of that sort was a trap girls fell into. Even the really pretty ones were afraid of losing popularity if they didn’t act the way boys wanted them to. As her aunt Shirley had said, “If you sell yourself short, that’s how the world will value you.” Becky hadn’t set out to be popular, but when popularity came to her she’d found she had a native instinct for how to manage and advance it. Being some athlete’s squeeze seemed like an obvious dead end. She wouldn’t have guessed how sweet it was to fall, and how much she would want to keep falling, and how altered she would feel in the aftermath, when she was by herself in bed.

Light grew in the windows half-heartedly, leaving monochrome the poster of the Eiffel Tower above her desk, the original watercolor painting of the Champs-Élyseés that Shirley had left her, the pony-themed wallpaper that she’d picked out for her father to hang for her tenth birthday, when she was too young to understand she’d have to live with it forever. In gray light, the wallpaper was more forgivable. An overcast sky was just the weather she would have wished for on the day after the night her life had become more serious. No sun to mark the hour, no change in its angle to take her out of the state of having been kissed.

When the alarm clock went off in her parents’ bedroom, one door over from hers, it wasn’t the usual cruel morning sound but a promise of everything the day ahead might hold. When she heard the faint buzz of her father’s shaver and the footsteps of her mother in the hallway, she was amazed she’d never noticed, until today, how precious ordinary life was and how lucky she was to be a part of it. So much goodness. Other people were good. She herself was good. She felt goodwill to all mankind.

If she nevertheless waited, before getting out of bed, until the family car had whinnied to life in the driveway and her mother had come upstairs to dress, it was because she wanted to prolong her aloneness in the aftermath. She knotted herself into the Japanese silk robe that Shirley had bought her and soundlessly, in her bare feet, went down to the first-floor bathroom. The person who sat down to pee was a woman a man had kissed. Afraid of finding the change as invisible from the outside as it felt momentous from within, she avoided the eyes of this person in the mirror.

The aftersmell of toast and eggs deflected her away from the kitchen and back up to her room. It seemed as if her stomach was fluttering because she had a thousand things to begin all at once, but the only thing she could actually think of doing was to tell someone that she’d been kissed. She wanted to tell her brother first, but he wasn’t home from college yet. She stood at her front window and watched a squirrel angrily send another squirrel scrambling up the trunk of an oak tree. Maybe it was a matter of a stolen acorn, or maybe her mind just went there because she herself had stolen. The nervousness in her stomach was partly a thief’s adrenaline. For a moment, the aggressor squirrel seemed content to let the matter drop, but then the conflict escalated—hot pursuit up the trunk, further pursuit horizontally, a flying leap into the bushes by the driveway.

She wondered if he was awake yet, what he was thinking about her, whether he had regrets.

Outside her door, Judson was afoot and speaking to her mother about sugar cookies. Becky didn’t enjoy the domestic arts and was grateful to have a brother who did, especially in December, when her mother had the burden of upholding certain traditions, like the manufacture of sugar cookies in the shape of Christmas trees and candy canes, that she’d invented for the family. As far as Becky could tell, the holidays to her mother were just another chore, and it appeared that her own new feeling of goodwill was somewhat abstract, because it would have been a kindness to go and sit in the kitchen, maybe help with the cookies, and she didn’t want to.

By way of compromise, she dressed in her best, faded jeans and took her application materials down to the living room (the only person she was actively avoiding, Perry, was unlikely to appear before noon) and set up camp in the armchair by the Christmas tree, whose decoration was another of her mother’s chores. Its scent recalled the frenzy that she and Clem as kids had whipped each other into when presents piled up beneath it; but now she was so much older. The light in the windows was somber, the sounds of cookie-making strangely distant. She might have been sitting in some far-northern place that smelled of conifers. In the kiss’s aftermath, she seemed to be watching herself from a point so elevated that she could see the earth’s curvature, the world newly three-dimensional and spreading out in all directions from her armchair.

She was applying to six colleges, five of them private and expensive. As recently as October, college catalogues had been objects of romance, variously flavored promises of escape from a family she’d outgrown and a school whose social possibilities she’d exhausted. But then she’d discovered Crossroads, which had lessened her impatience to leave New Prospect, and now, as she opened the folder of applications, she found that the kiss had foreshortened the future more drastically. Anything beyond the coming day seemed irrelevant.

Tell us about a person you admire or have learned something important from.

She removed the tooth-dented cap of a Bic pen and started writing in a spiral notebook. Her handwriting, its upright pudginess, struck her as childish this morning. She scratched it out and tried to make it leaner and more slanting, more forward, more like the woman she’d felt herself to be the night before, in the parking lot behind the Grove.

The person I most admire is

My family lived in Southern Indiana until I was eight. My father was the pastor of two small rural parishes. It was farm country but there were woods and creeks to explore with my brother Clem. Unlike most brothers, Clem never got angry if I followed him. Clem wasn’t afraid of anything. He taught me to stand still if a bee was bothering me. He liked all kinds of critters. He called animals “critters” and was curious about all of them. One day he scooped up a big spider and let it crawl on him and then asked if he could put it on my arm. I learned that spiders don’t bite if you don’t threaten them. There was a log over a deep creek that Clem ran across like it was nothing. He showed me how to cross the creek by sitting on the log and scooching along. I think most brothers would have been happy to leave their little sister behind, but not Clem. He had a baseball glove he

A weariness had overcome her. Her words seemed childish, too. She’d imagined that colleges would be charmed if she wrote about her brother, and that it would be easy to explain why she admired Clem, but she wasn’t feeling it this morning. For one thing, Clem had come home at Thanksgiving and told her, in strict confidence, that he had a girlfriend in Champaign, his first ever. She ought to have been purely happy for him, but in truth she’d felt a little bit left behind. Until then, despite being younger, she’d considered herself the more worldly and socially advanced one.

Clem’s friends in high school had mostly been slide-rule types, guys with dandruff-coated glasses, defiant body odor. She’d felt sorry that he couldn’t do any better than this, but he claimed to have no envy of her social position and only a “sociological” interest in her people. Coming home late on a Saturday night, she invariably saw light under his bedroom door. If she knocked, he set aside the book he was reading or the science problem he was cracking and listened, as only he in her family could, to her little tales of life in Camelot. He pronounced clear-eyed judgments on her friends, which she brushed aside in the moment (“Nobody’s perfect”) but privately recognized the justice of. He was particularly harsh about certain guys of her acquaintance, such as Kent Carducci, who wouldn’t stop asking her out on dates and who, according to Clem, tormented Clem’s friend Lester in the locker room. Still only a tenth grader, she’d walked up to Kent one day at lunch hour and spelled out, in front of his jock buddies, why she would never go out with him: “Because you’re a bully and a jerk.” Though Kent apparently continued to snap wet towels at Lester’s butt, Becky was keenly attuned to the hierarchy and detected a subtle new shunning of Kent by the highest tier. She was tempted to report this accomplishment to Clem, but she knew it was the hierarchy itself, more than any given member of it, that he disdained. And yet, as if he recognized it as the field of her own sort of excellence, he never pushed her to drop out of it. How grateful she was for that! It was one of a hundred ways she knew he loved her. Sometimes it happened that she dozed off on his bed and awoke to find herself tenderly covered with a quilt, Clem asleep on the rug by the bed. She might have worried that there was something weird about their friendship, that she felt close to him in an almost married way that maybe wasn’t healthy, that she wasn’t as physically repelled by his beanstalk body, his scarred and pimpled face, as a sister ought to have been, if she hadn’t been so sure that everything Clem did was good and right.

Even after he went off to college, he’d remained the star she navigated by. There were some fairly debauched, parentally unsupervised parties she found it necessary to attend because no sophomores and almost no juniors had been invited. In principle, Clem hated this kind of exclusivity even more than her parents did, but where her father gave her gentle lectures about remembering those less fortunate than her, and her mother worried aloud that she’d gotten pretty full of herself, Clem understood how important to her it was to be at the center of things. “Just be careful,” he said. “Don’t forget you’re better than the rest of that crowd put together.” She was protected at the parties, to an extent, by having been the leading vote-getter in the all-school cheerleader election, thus automatically a co-captain of the squad, despite being only a junior; if she raised her voice to wail that she hated the music, then, voilà, some unseen hand would lift up the needle and put on a Santana album. But the pressure to fuck up was still intense. She might not have been able to wave away the burning doobies she was offered if Clem hadn’t warned her that marijuana’s long-term effects on the brain were not well studied. At the infamous New Year’s party at the Bradfields’, where there was barfing in the back-yard snow and a disgusting truth-or-dare thing happening in the basement, she might have gone upstairs with Trip Bradfield, who was twenty and relentless, if she hadn’t been seeing him through Clem’s eyes.

The Bradfield party had been her last of that sort. Her aunt Shirley had passed away a few weeks later, and Becky had quit the cheerleading squad and applied herself more seriously to schoolwork. It was Shirley who’d taught her that staying home and reading a good book, letting people wonder where you were, could get you farther than chasing after every party. No longer exempted from family work rules by her cheerleading duties, she took an afterschool job at the florist shop on Pirsig Avenue. She’d been secure in her popularity for long enough to know she wasn’t in danger of being forgotten. Quite the opposite. By quitting the squad, she’d cast a diminishing light on all the girls who remained. Shirley had given her an ankle-length navy-blue merino coat, and when she walked in it on Pirsig after school, accompanied only by Jeannie Cross, her best friend and her loyal lieutenant since seventh grade, she could sense how the two of them looked to the cars full of peers driving by. Shirley’s word for it had been mystique.

She forced herself to take up her pen again. Her plans for the day were predicated on finishing an essay before lunchtime.

One warm hot humid summer afternoon Clem and I were out exploring near a farmhouse which had a large, vicious dog on a chain. Even Clem was a little afraid of that dog. Well, sSomehow the dog wasn’t on its chain that day, and it jumped over a fence and started chasing me. It bit my ankle and I fell down. I could have been very seriously injured if Clem hadn’t dove onto the dog and started fighting with it. By the time the farmwife came to the rescue, Clem was the one who was seriously injured. The dog bit his face and both of his arms, and he had to have thirty forty fifty forty stitches. He was lucky the dog didn’t cripple his arm or bite through an artery. To this day, whenever I see the scars on his arms and his cheek, I remember how he

Always does the right thing without caring what other people think of him

Sticks up for kids who get picked on        not afraid of bullies (just like dog)

He helped me realize there are more important things in life than being the

Why did her writing have to make her sound like such a nitwit? She ripped the offending page out of the notebook. From the kitchen came the smell of a preheating oven, the morning slipping away. She felt unfairly stymied by the badness of what was on the page, as if she weren’t, herself, the person who’d put it there.

And now came her mother, carrying a pitcher of water into the living room. “Oh,” she said. “You’re up.”

“Yes,” Becky said.

“I didn’t hear you get up. Have you had breakfast?”

Her mother was already in her exercise clothes, a formless sweatshirt, saggy synthetic knit pedal pushers. It was a look that encapsulated, Becky felt, the difference between her mother and her aunt, who’d been as trim as her mother was bulky and couldn’t possibly have owned such a sweatshirt. As her mother kneeled down to water the Christmas tree, Becky averted her eyes from the impending exposure of lumbar flesh. Another, more tragic difference between her mother and Shirley was that her mother was alive. Shirley had stayed trim by smoking two packs of Chesterfields a day.

Her mother asked her if she had any fun plans.

“Working on my applications,” Becky said. “Christmas shopping.”

“Well, just make sure you’re home by six, so you have time to get ready for the Haefles’ party. We’ll leave as soon as your father gets home.”

“I’m going to a party?”

Her mother stood up with the pitcher. “Dwight invited everyone to bring their families. Perry’s staying home with Judson, and I don’t know what time Clem is getting here.”

“Sorry—what is this party?”

“An open house for clergy. Clem came with us last year.”

“Did I say I would do this?”

“No. I’m telling you now that you will.”

“Well, I’m sorry, but I have other plans. I’m going to the Crossroads concert.”

She kept her eyes averted, but she could imagine her mother’s expression.

“Your father won’t be happy about that. But if that’s your choice, we’ll be home from the Haefles’ by eight thirty.”

“The concert starts at seven thirty.”

“There’s nothing wrong with being fashionably late. Missing one hour, to maintain some semblance of peace at the holidays, doesn’t seem like much to ask.”

Becky inclined her head mulishly. She had her reasons, but she wasn’t going to explain them.

“How’s it going with your essay?” her mother asked.

“Fine.”

“I can help you with it, if you want to show me what you’ve written. Do you want to do that?”

This in a more honeyed tone, intended as a peace offering, but Becky took it as a reminder that her mother was better than her at writing, she herself better at nothing her mother valued. “I’m thinking,” she said, by way of striking back, “that I might write about Aunt Shirley.”

Her mother stiffened. “I thought you were writing about Clem.”

“It’s a personal essay. I can write whatever I want.”

“True enough.”

Her mother left the room. The light in the windows had brightened a little, and Becky was pleased to find her goodwill still intact. It wasn’t as if her mother was a bad person. She just didn’t understand how much nicer Becky’s own plans were than going to the Haefles’ party.

After the dog attack in Indiana, when the bite on Clem’s face was iodined and stitched and his arms were in bandages, her father had come home from a church meeting and yelled at him. How did you let this happen? What on earth were you doing at that farm? I gave you responsibility for your sister! She could have been killed! It happens all the time—a child no smaller than Becky gets killed by a dog! What were you thinking? All this to a ten-year-old boy who’d been mauled while protecting her. And then came the edict: Clem was henceforth forbidden to take Becky beyond the lines of their property, except on the county road to and from their school. When Becky thought about her and Clem’s unusual friendship, her mind went back to the word forbidden. Things that were forbidden were often precisely what the heart most wanted. Things became more attractive because they were forbidden by some cruel or uncomprehending authority. As a teenager, when she saw the light under Clem’s door, late on a Saturday night, it was like the beckoning glow of a forbidden thing. She and Clem were united against the authority that wanted to separate them.

Following the edict, her father had undertaken to replace Clem as the person she went on walks with. For Clem, outdoors, everything was an adventure—vines to be swung from, old wells to be sounded with pebbles, terrible centipedes to be discovered under rocks, seed pods to be sniffed and broken open, horses to be lured with an apple. For her father, nature was just a glorious but unspecific thing that God had made. He talked to Becky about Jesus, which made her uncomfortable, and about the hard lives of local farmers, which was more interesting but maybe not so wise of him. The stories she could tell on the playground—the Boylans had a son in an insane asylum, Mrs. Boylan could only take nourishment through a straw, Carl Jackson’s mother was actually his grandmother—had given her an early taste of popularity. Shocking true facts about grownups were at a premium in grade school.

After the family moved to Chicago, her father had continued the “tradition” of taking her on walks on Sunday afternoons, usually a simple loop around Scofield Park. Declining his invitation was seldom worth the guilt trip her mother would have laid on her. Becky already felt guilty enough for caring little about the church and even less about oppressed people, and she did appreciate that her father treated her like a grownup, respected her like that, and kept telling her things he maybe shouldn’t have. She heard a lot about his dreams of a larger life of Christian service, his frustrations at being an associate minister in an affluent and mostly white suburb, and she took what she heard straight to Clem. (“He’s frustrated,” Clem said, “that he has a wife and four kids.” Or, more wickedly: “Mom likes you being the one Dad goes for walks with, because she knows he can’t run off with you.”) In return, despite being prodded, she told her father nothing about her own dreams and frustrations.

She uncapped her pen again with her teeth. The first batch of sugar cookies was baking.

On January 16, it will be one year since my Aunt Shirley passed away.

This was better already. It had gravity and created immediate sympathy for the bereaved college applicant.

She was alone in the world, having lost her one true love in World War II. I had the privilege of knowing her later in life and learning the importance of culture and elegance, belief in oneself, and bravery in the face of solitude and sickness from her. Whatever my mother may think, she didn’t buy my affection. I truly loved her. Every summer, starting when I was ten, I got to go and spend a week in her small but elegantly tastefully furnished apartment in New York City Manhattan.

It was true that Shirley had bought her a lot of stuff over the years. Also true that none of Becky’s brothers ever got anything. True that the new clothes she brought home from New York had to be cleaned before she even wore them, to get the stink of Chesterfields out of them, and that on her first visit, in 1964, she cried every night on her aunt’s sofa bed (Shirley called it a “convertible,” as if it were a car) out of homesickness for Clem and the eye-burning oppression of the smoke in the airless apartment, and that, ironically, it was her mother who insisted that she accept Shirley’s invitation again the next summer, as an act of charity. (Only later, after Becky had come to look forward to her New York trips, did her mother start using words like vain and unrealistic about her sister.)

Even early on, though, Becky had been dazzled by her aunt. On Shirley’s first and last visit to the Indiana farmhouse, she’d taken Becky by her seven-year-old shoulders, looked her seriously in the eye, and informed her that she was destined to be a great beauty. That was something. Unlike her mother, who was only ever a pastor’s wife, Shirley had had a career as a Broadway actress, never as a big star, apparently, but an actual career, and Becky had marveled at how imperiously she sliced through the masses of humanity at the World’s Fair, in 1964, and how, when a waiter or a salesperson referred to Becky as her daughter, she merely winked at Becky, who until then had followed Clem’s example and abhorred dishonesty. The difference between dishonesty and make-believe, Shirley said, was artistic imagination. Though it was obvious that Becky didn’t have this kind of imagination—in New York, she preferred the mummies at the Met to the European painters, the dinosaurs across the park to the mummies, and Macy’s to the dinosaurs—Shirley told her that this was just as well, because the world of art and theater was entirely controlled by cruel men, many of them literally, pardon her French, cocksuckers, and it was better for a woman to be the patron, the appreciator, than patronized and unappreciated. By which, though Shirley never quite spelled it out, Becky understood that she would be better off rich than talented.

How much money her aunt had and where it might have come from was long unknown to her. Shirley’s apartment was small, but she had charge cards for all the department stores. Her furniture looked inexpensive, but her shoes and jewelry weren’t. She took Becky out for a fancy dinner only once per visit, but she also never cooked a meal. Instead, she and Becky paged through a ring binder wonderfully populated with takeout menus, and anything else Becky needed (milk and cookies in the early years; later Fresca and tampons) was summoned for delivery by a phone call and paid for in cash at the burglar-proof front door. Shirley conveyed, through the way she shuddered at the recollection, her enduring horror at the Indiana farmhouse where she’d foretold her niece’s destiny; the convulsive Maytag in the mud room, with its age-fissured rubber rollers, seemed to have made a particularly traumatic impression. Her own linens arrived clean in brown-paper packages tied up with white string.

Along with the shopping, what Becky most enjoyed about her summer visits was not having to pretend she didn’t care about status and didn’t want a future life in which she had it. Shirley methodically interrogated her about the professions of her friends’ fathers and the size of their houses, and thereby made Becky aware that New Prospect Township wasn’t a Midwestern utopia where everyone was equal, as she might have supposed, but a place where money counted socially and only good looks or athletic prowess could make up for the lack of it. In tenth grade, using funds that Shirley had provided for the purpose, and over her mother’s sour disapproval, Becky had signed up for New Prospect’s monthly formal dancing school, Messieurs et Mesdemoiselles, which her friends all rolled their eyes at but nevertheless attended. Still Clem’s emissary, but also inspired by her aunt’s insight that snobs were insecure and the true aristocracy gracious, she didn’t avoid the greasier and clumsier dancers the way her friends did (although she did notice, and enjoy what it said about her status, that a clumsy boy became even clumsier when she astonished him by picking him as a partner). Inclusiveness, as she practiced it at M&M, was not only gracious but no less valuable than exclusivity was in building popularity—witness the results of the cheerleader election the following year. To be both feared and liked was its own kind of feat, and it struck, in her mind, a happy balance between the two very different people whose example mattered to her.

Between cigarettes, on Becky’s last visit to New York, her aunt had sucked on nasty-smelling medicated lozenges. Despite the July humidity, there was a frog in her throat that she couldn’t get rid of. In hindsight, Becky wondered if Shirley had known what it meant, because she couldn’t keep it in her head that Becky still had two years of high school left, not one. The next summer, Shirley said, just as soon as Becky graduated, she wanted to take her on a grand tour of Europe: London for theater, Paris for the Louvre, Salzburg for music, Stockholm for white nights, Venice for atmosphere, Rome for antiquities. How did that sound to her? “I think,” Becky said, “you mean two summers from now.” Sad to say, she didn’t share her aunt’s impatience. Seeing Paris sounded good to her, but Shirley’s favoritism wasn’t playing well at home, and a grand tour of Europe would be an entirely different level of expense. Also, as Becky got older, the seeds of criticism planted by her mother had grown into an awareness that Shirley was somewhat loony and didn’t have close friends. Becky still loved her and valued her insights. She understood, as her mother didn’t seem to, how much Shirley envied her younger sister for having a husband and a family; how lonely she was. But she and her cigarettes weren’t the companions Becky would have chosen, in an ideal world, for a trip to Europe.

Four days after she returned from New York, before she’d even written her thank-you letter, her mother had taken a phone call from Shirley and sobbed when it was over. Her tears were appropriate but still surprising, a lesson in the power of sisterly love to overcome sisterly dislike. Becky herself didn’t cry at the news that her mother then gave her; cancer seemed to her both terrifying and unreal. Her own tears came later, when she wrote the thank-you and tried to think of how to end it (Get well soon? I hope you feel better soon?), and again when Shirley sent her a copy of Fodor’s Europe filled with underlinings and annotations, along with a letter in which she went into great detail about European rail passes and spoke of beating her cancer and how important it would be, in the difficult months ahead, to have something to look forward to “next summer.”

That fall, Becky’s mother became real to her, as a person of independent capability, in a way she hadn’t been before. She made two long trips to New York, where Shirley was getting radiation. When Becky asked if she could go there herself, her mother not only didn’t discourage her but said it would be a wonderful gift to her aunt. But Shirley didn’t want Becky to come, didn’t want her to see her looking the way she did, didn’t want her to remember her like that. Becky could come in the spring, when the treatments were behind her and she was more like herself. If everything went well, the two of them would then have the trip of a lifetime in the historic capitals of Europe.

She died alone in a room at Lenox Hill Hospital. There was no funeral. It was like Eleanor Rigby.

When I was younger I thought her elegance was effortless, but when I got to know her better I saw it was anything but. Now I think about all the things she did every day to put a brave face on. All the makeup supplies in her bathroom, her Chanel No. 19 spritzer, the hose she threw out if they got the tiniest run in them, the old white gloves she put on to read the newspaper to keep the ink off her fingers, the gold-rimmed cup she drank her tea from with her pinkie raised like a lady. And for what. Just to maintain her dignity in a world where she went by herself to the theater or a concert. No wonder, I thought, her little routines meant so much to her. She gave me so many insights into my own life but, too, an insight into the lives of people who wake up alone every morning and find the courage to get out of bed and show their face. I was always blessed with having many friends. I was “popular” and sometimes conceited about it. All that changed when Shirley passed away. She gave me new admiration for people who are lonely in the world.

Becky’s mother had gone to New York, one last time, to have Shirley’s body cremated and to deal with her estate. She came home with an old wicker suitcase of Shirley’s that contained a mink stole, the watercolor painting, silver earrings, a gold bracelet, and other keepsakes, all of it for Becky, who wept when her mother showed it to her.

“I understand why you’re crying,” her mother said coldly. “But you shouldn’t romanticize your aunt. She made nothing but mistakes in life. In fact, mistakes may be too kind a word for it.”

“I thought you were sad,” Becky said.

“She was my sister. I couldn’t help feeling sorry for her.” Her mother seemed to soften, but only for a moment. “I should have known that people don’t change.”

“What do you mean?”

“Shirley was the kind of woman who has no use for other women. All she wanted was men. And she had plenty of them in her day. Funnily enough, though, none of them stuck around. The good ones figured out in a hurry what kind of person they were dealing with, the bad ones disappointed her, and she was vicious on the subject of homosexuals. I never met the man she actually married, but I gather he had some family money. He left her an annuity when he was killed in the Pacific, and it was a good thing he did, because she wasn’t an actress. She was a pretty face who could memorize her lines. By the time your father and I moved to New York, she was ‘between roles.’ She was still between roles when we left. She lived in a fantasy world where nobody appreciated her talent and the men all either exploited her or disappointed her, but maybe the next man wouldn’t. She was one of the most miserable people I’ve ever known.”

The coldness of this speech shocked Becky. “But it’s so sad,” she said.

“Yes, it is,” her mother said. “That’s why I didn’t mind you going out there in the summer. You have a good head, a good heart, and God knows she was lonely.”

“If she didn’t like other women, then why did she like me?”

“I wondered that myself. But people like her never change.”

Eight months went by before Becky learned the reason for her mother’s coldness. It happened that her birthday, her eighteenth, fell on a Saturday. Jeannie Cross had organized a blowout party that everyone who counted was coming to. Everyone wanted to see Hildebrandt get drunk, which was Jeannie’s stated object and, God help her, Becky’s private intention. Unlike her dissolute younger brother, she’d always been sensitive to her father’s position as a man of the cloth, the unseemliness of a minister’s daughter getting shit-faced, but now she was old enough to vote, and her social instincts told her it was time to mix things up a little. After working the lunch shift at the Grove—she’d quit her florist job and taken a less dorky one, waiting tables—she hurried home to shower and dress and have an early dinner with her family. The parsonage seemed curiously empty. There were October sunbeams in the living room, a fading smell of baked cake. She went up to her room and was startled to see her mother seated on her bed. “You need to come upstairs with me,” she said.

“I need to shower,” Becky said.

“You can do that later.”

On the third floor, they found her father waiting in his home office, his windows open, cool autumn air filtering into the attic-like stuffiness. He motioned to Becky to sit down. Her mother shut the door and stayed standing. Becky was quite alarmed. It was as if she were facing punishment for the heavy drinking she hadn’t done yet.

“Marion?” her father said.

Her mother cleared her throat. “As you know,” she said to Becky, “my sister named me as the executrix of her will. What I have to say to you, I’m saying as the executrix. Your aunt left you a great deal of money. Now that you’re eighteen, the money is yours. The will doesn’t specify that it be held in trust. All it says is—Russ, will you read it?”

Her father unlocked a drawer and took out a document. “‘To my niece Rebecca Hildebrandt I will, devise, and bequeath the sum of thirteen thousand dollars for a Grand Tour of Europe, to be taken in my memory.’ That’s all there is. No mention of trustees.”

Becky was smiling broadly; she couldn’t help it.

“I put the money in your savings account yesterday,” her mother said.

“Wow.”

“I was legally obligated,” her mother said. “The lawyer said we could wait until your eighteenth birthday, but no longer than that. Shirley’s intentions were clear.”

“Wow. That’s so nice of her.”

“It’s not nice,” her father said. “It’s a foolish bequest, and we need to talk about it.”

“Thirteen thousand dollars,” her mother said, “is almost the entirety of your aunt’s estate. There were a few odd thousands left over for various museums, but you’re the main beneficiary. If you’d happened to predecease her, the money would have gone to the museums.”

Now Becky saw the problem. In case she hadn’t, her mother laid it out for her: not only had Shirley ignored Clem, Perry, and Judson, but she’d stipulated that Becky use the money for something frivolous. She’d lived in a fantasy world to the end, and beyond. “And she knew very well how I would feel about it. That was part of the equation.”

So everything is about you, Becky thought.

Her father might have had the same thought, because he suggested that her mother leave the two of them alone. When she was gone, he shifted into his gentle dad-to-daughter tone. “I can’t believe you’re eighteen already. It seems like only yesterday that we brought you home from the hospital.”

How many times had Becky heard that it seemed like only yesterday?

“But now here you are, eighteen years old, and I want you to think hard about this money. You’re not legally bound by the wording of your aunt’s will, and thirteen thousand dollars seems to me an awful lot to spend on a trip to Europe. Unless you’re staying at the Ritz, you could travel for two years on that.”

Staying at the Ritz, Becky thought, was exactly what Shirley had had in mind.

“I can’t tell you what to do, but it seems to me that you could honor Shirley’s intention by using a small portion of the money to travel abroad next summer. If you wanted to do something nice for your mother, you could bring her along. Again, I’m not telling you what to do—”

Really?

“But there’s also a question of fairness. I know you had a special fondness for Shirley, and she for you, but I do think she may have been trying to hurt your mother with this bequest. Your mother and I love all of you kids equally, and we think you should all be treated equally. For better or worse, we’re not a well-to-do family. Your mother and I want all of you to go to college, and a quarter of the bequest would make a real difference to each of you. I can’t tell you what the right thing to do is—”

Really?

“But I hope you’ll think carefully about how you want to proceed. Will you do that for me?”

“Yep,” Becky said.

“I know it’s not easy. Thirteen thousand dollars is a lot of—”

“I get it,” she said. “You don’t have to say anything else.”

“I just want you to know that I’m very—”

“I said I get it. Okay?”

She jumped to her feet, ran down to her room, and jerked open the top drawer of her dresser, where she kept her savings passbook. The balance had indeed been updated. It was $13,753.60. Christening money, birthday money, paychecks for the hours she’d spent in a stupid green florist’s apron, and tips and paychecks from the Grove added up to $753.60. Dear Aunt Shirley! She’d known what Becky wanted, and it was all the better for being unexpected. Becky had never, not once, wondered if her aunt had left her any money; the little suitcase of treasures had been enough. Only now, as she imagined the figure in her passbook reduced to a sad nubbin, did her mind spring to life with greedy rationalizations. Maybe she wasn’t legally bound to follow the letter of the will, but wasn’t she morally bound to honor the spirit? Wouldn’t it be an insult to Shirley’s memory to submit to her father’s wishes? And why should she give anything to her pothead little brother, who could probably get a full scholarship to Harvard anyway? Wouldn’t there be more money for Judson in the future, when her father got his own church and there were fewer mouths at home to feed? The only person she felt at all inclined to share with was Clem.

At the party that night, she quickly downed two Seagram’s and 7UPs, after which it was possible to slow down without being noticed. The main effect of the alcohol was to create a powerful but hazy sense of importance; of being on the verge of a great, warm insight. As her buzz began to fade, the sense of importance faded with it, leaving behind a small, cold insight: she was bored. She didn’t care who had a crush on who, what kind of prank was played on Lyons Township before the football game. The world was full of better places.

It’s because of an inheritance I received from Shirley, following her tragic death, that I’m able to consider attending a private college. She herself never attended college, having been a noted actress in her youth and busy with her career, but she loved the higher things in life and knew more about art and theater and music and coteur than many experts anyone I’ve ever known. It was from her that I learned to dream big and really make something of myself. I’m blessed to have an opportunity to educate myself in a way she never could, and learn more about the world. I intend to seize this opportunity fully.

She read what she’d written and wrinkled her nose. There seemed to be no way back to the pure feeling she’d had for Shirley before her mother clouded it with criticisms. Or maybe the morning after being kissed was simply not a good time to experience admiration. Considering her state, she felt good about having written anything at all.

She closed her notebook and went to the kitchen, where Judson was applying colored sugar to a tray of cookies. Through the open basement door came the sound of laundry chores.

“These look great, Jay,” she said.

“I need a better tool. It clumps on the spoon.”

“Which one is your least favorite? I bet I can make it disappear.”

“This one,” he said, pointing.

She ate the cookie and immediately wished she could eat another. “Is there anything special you want for Christmas? Something you haven’t told anyone about?”

“Nobody asks.”

“Perry didn’t ask you?”

Judson hesitated and shook his head.

“I’m asking,” she said.

“Colored pencils,” he said, intent on the cookies. “With interesting colors.”

“Got it. This tape will self-destruct in five seconds.”

“If you or any of your I-enforcers are caught or killed, the Secretary will disavow any knowledge of your actions.”

“I think it’s ‘I.M. force.’ Impossible Mission.”

“I wondered about that.”

“You’re a good kid,” she said, brimming with goodwill.

“Thank you.”

Her mother was trudging up the basement stairs, so she fled to her room again. Seeing her unmade bed, she was drawn to lie down on it, as a way of falling back into the kiss. The day already seemed to have lasted longer than an entire ordinary day, and it had still barely started.

It was generally assumed, and specifically assumed by her father, in his jealousy, that Rick Ambrose was the reason Crossroads had exploded in popularity. According to Clem, though, there were two reasons, and the other one was Tanner Evans. Tanner’s parents belonged to First Reformed, and he’d come up with Clem through Sunday school and gone with Becky’s father on the first spring work camp in Arizona. Tanner was a nice person, from a nice family, but he was also a gifted musician and the coolest guy at New Prospect Township, one of the first to grow his hair long, a bell-bottomed dreamboat. In Clem’s telling, Crossroads had exploded when Tanner invited his music-playing friends, male and female, white and black, to come to Sunday meetings. Crossroads became as much a musical happening as a religious thing, Tanner’s coolness the counterweight to Ambrose’s intensity.

Tanner had postponed college to develop his skills and write songs. He had a regular Friday-night gig in the back room at the Grove, where liquor was served. He and his girlfriend, Laura Dobrinsky, who’d been his female counterpart in Crossroads, played together in a band called the Bleu Notes. Laura was short and somewhat chunky, but she had an impressive head of wavy hair and a face flattered by pink-tinted wireframes, and her voice, when she sang solo, made walls shake and hearts break. She was one of New Prospect’s original hippies, a walking yes to the question Are You Experienced? It was hard to imagine Tanner with anyone else, and so when Becky went to work at the Grove and started running into him, and he asked her how Clem was doing at college, and sent greetings to her parents, she assumed she was only a little sister to whom, being nice, he was being nice.

The night before she turned eighteen, after her shift ended, she stood in the doorway of the back room and listened to the last song of the Bleu Notes’ first set. Tanner’s voice and mustache resembled James Taylor’s, and he wore a fringed suede jacket. His hands were strong and lanky from playing guitar, his mouth full-lipped and fascinating when he sang. After the song ended and Becky had turned to leave, she heard him call her name. He came weaving through the bar tables and motioned to her to sit down with him. Laura Dobrinsky had disappeared somewhere.

“There’s a question I’ve been meaning to ask you,” he said. “Why aren’t you in Crossroads?”

Becky frowned. “Why would I be?”

“Um, because it’s an incredible experience? Because you’re a member of First Reformed?”

She was not, in fact, a member of the church. She was so obviously not a religious person that her parents hadn’t bothered to pressure her to join.

“Even if I wanted to be in Crossroads, which I don’t,” she said, “I wouldn’t do that to my father.”

“What does your father have to do with it?”

“The group kicked him out?”

Tanner winced. “I know. That scene was messed up. But I’m asking about you, not him. Why don’t you want to be in Crossroads?”

It was true that Clem had joined the youth group, before it was called Crossroads, and that he was even less religious than she was. But Clem enjoyed service to poor people, the Arizona trip especially, and was naturally generous (or willfully perverse) in his choice of companions. Becky was turned off by the Crossroads look, the painter’s pants and flannel shirts, and by the superior air of Crossroads people at their tables in the high-school cafeteria, their ostentatious closeness, their indifference to the hierarchy. Though Clem had dismissed the hierarchy himself, he’d never seemed smug about it. The Crossroads people did.

“I just don’t,” she told Tanner. “It’s not my kind of thing.”

“How do you know it’s not your kind of thing if you haven’t tried it?”

“Why do you care if I try it?”

Tanner shrugged, stirring his suede fringes. “I heard Perry’s been going. I thought, ‘That’s cool, but what about Becky?’ It seemed weird that you weren’t in the group.”

“Perry and I are very different.”

“Right. You’re Becky Hildebrandt. You’re the queen of the soshies. What would all your friends say?”

It was nice that he’d paid enough attention to know her social standing. But she’d always hated being teased. “I’m not going to Crossroads. I don’t have to tell you why.”

“It’s not because you’re afraid of what you might learn about yourself.”

“Nope.”

“Really? It sounds to me like you’re afraid.”

“I am what I am.”

“That’s what God said, too.”

“You believe in God?”

“I think so.” Tanner leaned back in his chair. “I think He’s there in our relationships, if they’re honest. And the first place I ever had honest relationships, and felt close to God, was in Crossroads.”

“Then why did it kick my dad out?”

Tanner seemed genuinely pained. “Your dad is great,” he said. “I love your dad. But people couldn’t relate to him.”

“I can relate to him. So I guess there’s something wrong with me, too.”

“Whoa. That is, like, textbook passive aggression. You wouldn’t get away with that for five minutes in Crossroads.”

“Perry’s a total bullshitter, and he seems to be doing great there.”

“When I look at you, I see the girl who’s got everything, the girl everybody wishes they could be. But inside you’re so scared you can hardly breathe.”

“Maybe I’m holding my breath until I can get away from this town.”

“You were chosen for bigger and better things.”

She wasn’t accustomed to being mocked. Everywhere at New Prospect Township, the mere threat of her disdain carried weight. “Just so you know,” she said, in a frosty tone she rarely found it necessary to use outside her family, “I don’t enjoy being teased.”

“Sorry about that,” Tanner said. “It just seems like a waste, to hold your breath for a year. You’re supposed to be living. That’s the way we honor God—by being present in the moment.”

As Becky tried to think of a tart comeback, Laura Dobrinsky reappeared. Her cumulus of hair reeked of pot smoked in chill autumn air, which had hardened the nipples clearly visible through the crepe of her blouse, beneath her unzipped biker jacket. She sat down backward on Tanner, straddling one of his thighs.

“I’ve been telling Becky she needs to go to Crossroads,” Tanner said.

Laura appeared only then to notice Becky. “It’s not for everyone,” she said.

“You loved it,” Tanner said, his beautiful hands clasped low on Laura’s belly.

“I liked the intensity. Not everyone does. There were people who got fucked up by it.”

“Like who?”

“Like Brenda Maser. She had a nervous breakdown on the spring retreat.”

“She had a freakout,” Tanner said, “because Glen Kiel dumped her for Marcie Ackerman the day before the retreat.”

Laura asked Becky if she could imagine someone bawling for twenty hours straight. “It started with a screaming exercise,” she said. “You scream and then you stop, except that Brenda didn’t. I was in Ambrose’s car with her on the drive home. You could hug her, you could leave her alone, it didn’t matter. We ended up just sitting there listening to her cry. Kind of wanting to strangle her to make it stop. We got to her house, and Ambrose took her inside and handed her off to her parents. Like, here’s your daughter, there seems to be a problem, uh, we don’t know anything else about it.”

Becky tried to imagine Clem on a retreat, screaming, and could not.

“It wasn’t a nervous breakdown,” Tanner said. “Brenda was in school the next morning.”

“Oh, well, then.” Laura gave Becky a funny overbright smile. “Only twenty hours of crying. What’s not to like?”

Another thing Becky had enjoyed about her aunt was her disdain. Shirley had exercised it constantly, often with salty language. After she died and Becky’s mother pronounced her judgment, Becky understood what a survival mechanism disdain had been for her aunt, who had few other defenses against an uncaring world. For Becky herself, disdain was more of an emergency measure, taken only when someone directly tried to make her feel bad. Leaving the Grove that night, rattled by an unaccustomed sense of inferiority, she tried to summon it, but there was nothing to disdain about Laura Dobrinsky except her shortness, which Becky, even in an emergency, could see wasn’t fair. Laura was the Natural Woman that Becky had heard her sing about being made to feel like, in her giant voice, and there was no disdaining Tanner for anything. She went to bed that night wondering if Tanner had been right about her—if she really was afraid of life. The boredom she felt at her birthday party, the following night, was another sign that she needed to start living.

If Shirley hadn’t left her thirteen thousand dollars, she might not have chosen Crossroads as the place to start. She did have an instinct that showing up at Crossroads would be a delicious kind of shock to those who paid attention to such things. If she happened to like it, Tanner would be more respectful of her, and if she thought it was stupid, well, then she would have something to disdain. But she knew how her father loathed Rick Ambrose. She wasn’t exactly forbidden to go to Crossroads, but she might as well have been.

Only after he’d lectured her about Shirley’s money did she decide to defy him. It wasn’t that she thought he was wrong. She got that her loony aunt had played favorites and that it was up to her to make things right, by sharing her money. And yet she felt betrayed, in a way that hurt no less for being childish. How many times had her mother told her how specially dear she was to her father? How many stupid walks had she taken on the assumption that the walks were super-important to him? If she’d known he was going to yank away her inheritance before she could even be excited about it, she would never have gone on so many walks. What was the point if all she got out of it was a sermon about fairness? He couldn’t even wait for her to find her own way to a generous impulse. It was wham, bam, share the money with your brothers. Who, speaking of fairness, had never done anything for Shirley, never written her, never sacrificed valuable days of summer vacation for her, never lain awake on her convertible with eyes and nose assaulted by smoke. If her father was so fond of her, shouldn’t he at least have acknowledged that?

She invited Jeannie Cross to come with her to Crossroads. Jeannie would have run through a hail of bullets for Becky, and might have preferred it to visiting a Christian youth group, but Becky explained that Tanner Evans had dared her to go. Jeannie was duly impressed. “You’ve been hanging out with Tanner Evans?”

“Just casually. We talk.”

“Isn’t he with what’s her face?”

“Laura, yeah. She’s cool.”

“So…”

“I said. It’s just casual.”

“Would you go out with him if he asked you?”

“He’s not going to ask me.”

“I can actually sort of see it,” Jeannie said. “You and him together.”

“You haven’t seen the way he is with Laura.”

“You know what I mean, though. You’re going to be with someone, sometime. And, Jesus—Tanner Evans? I can really almost see it.”

So, now, suddenly, could Becky. She had only to picture it as it would appear to people like Jeannie, as a crowning confirmation of her status, a punishing lesson to every lesser boy who’d imagined he could date her, and the thought became lodged in her head. Why, after all, had Tanner challenged her to try Crossroads? Wasn’t this evidence of interest in her? Even his teasing—maybe especially his teasing—was evidence.

From Clem’s involvement with the group, she knew enough to dress down for it, but she wasn’t Jeannie’s keeper. When Jeannie picked her up, in the silver Mustang her parents had given her, she was wearing dress slacks, an expensive brocade vest, and a lot of makeup. Becky felt sorry for her, but she didn’t mind having an overdressed friend to feel cooler than. The Crossroads meeting room was shockingly crowded with people she knew the names of, had given many a congenial smile to in classrooms and hallways, and would never have dreamed of seeing socially. In a far corner was a tangle of bodies like a collapsed game of Twister with her brother Perry at the bottom of it, fighting a battle of tickles with a fat girl in bib overalls, his face red with happiness, quite a bizarre sight. Becky and Jeannie sat down with two former friends from Lifton Central. One of them, Kim Perkins, a cheerleader who’d strayed into promiscuity and drugs, gave Becky a welcoming hug and petted her head as if it were she, not Kim, who had strayed. Kim tried to hug Jeannie as well, but Jeannie raised a hand to ward her off.

And so it went. Downstairs, in the function hall, Becky opened herself to the activities because Jeannie couldn’t. When people taped a sheet of newsprint to their back and wrote messages on other backs with felt-tip pens, Becky scrawled Looking forward to getting to know you! Becky on back after back, stopping only to be scrawled upon, while Jeannie, looking miserable in her dress slacks, stood to the side and frowned at her pen as if its workings were a mystery. The group then formed a circle of crosshatched bodies, everyone’s head resting on their neighbor’s belly. There was no obvious point to the exercise except to start laughing as a group and feel your head bouncing on a laughing belly and another head bouncing on yours, but to Becky, positioned between two boys she’d never spoken to, it seemed strange that she’d spent her life surrounded by bellies, all of them as familiar to their owners as her own belly was to her, all of them potentially touchable, and yet they were almost never touched. Strange that a possibility constantly present was so seldom acted on. She was sorry when the exercise ended.

“We’re going to break into groups of six,” Rick Ambrose said. “I want each of us in the group to talk about something we’ve done that was wrong. Something we’re ashamed of. And then I want each of us to talk about something we’ve done that we’re proud of. The point here is to listen, all right? Really listen. We’ll meet back here at nine.”

Not wanting to be in a group where she knew nobody, Becky pounced on the one Kim Perkins was forming and left Jeannie to fend for herself. A friend of Perry’s, David Goya, tried to join Kim’s group, but Rick Ambrose stepped in front of him and blocked him out. Becky hadn’t expected that Ambrose himself would participate in the exercise. She and the others followed him upstairs and sat down in the hallway outside her father’s office. At the sight of her father’s name on the door, her chest constricted with the consequence of what she was doing to him. She’d had every right to try Crossroads, but a betrayal was a betrayal.

Rick Ambrose was smaller than he loomed in her parents’ demonology. He was like a little black-mustached satyr with stack-heeled hooves. Following his own instructions, he listened intently while a tough kid Becky had known only by face told the story of breaking windows at Lifton Central with a slingshot after he’d gotten a D-minus in physical science, Kim Perkins the story of having sex with a summer-camp counselor whose girlfriend was the counselor in her cabin.

“And you think that was wrong,” Ambrose said.

“Definitely it was shitty of me,” Kim said.

“But I’m listening to you,” Ambrose said, “and what I’m hearing is more like bragging. Is anyone else hearing that?”

What Becky was hearing was more like statutory rape. Kim had long had a bad reputation, but at some level Becky hadn’t quite believed the rumors about her. Becky was three years older than Kim had been at summer camp, and she hadn’t even kissed anyone. What story could she tell when it was her turn? Behaving irresponsibly had never been her thing.

“I liked that I could have him,” Kim said. “Like, how easy it was. Maybe I was proud of that. But when I went back to my cabin and saw his girlfriend, I felt awful. I still feel awful. I hate that I was ever the kind of person who would do that to someone, just because I could.”

“That, I’m hearing,” Ambrose said. “Becky?”

“I’m hearing it, too.”

“Do you want to tell us something about yourself?”

She opened her mouth but nothing came out. Ambrose and the others waited.

“Actually,” she said, “right now I’m feeling bad about my friend Jeannie. I made her come with me tonight, and I don’t know where she went.”

She looked down at her hands. The church was very quiet, the other groups dispersed, their guilty disclosures a distant murmur.

“I think she might have gone home,” Kim said.

“Okay, now I’m feeling really bad,” Becky said. “She’s my best friend, and I … I think I’m a bad friend. Everywhere I go, I want everyone to like me, and this is my first time here—I want to be liked. But I should have been taking care of Jeannie.”

The girl next to her, whose back she’d scrawled on without learning her name, put a soft hand on her arm. Becky shuddered and sort of sobbed. It was more emotion than the situation perhaps called for, but something about Crossroads brought emotion to the surface. I want to be liked might have been the most honest words she’d ever uttered. Recognizing the truth of them, she bent forward and surrendered to her emotion, and now other hands were on her, hands of comfort and acceptance.

Only Ambrose held back. “What are you waiting for?” he said.

She wiped her nose. “What do you mean?”

“Why aren’t you looking for your friend?”

“Now?”

“Yes, now.”

The silver Mustang was still in the parking lot. As Becky approached the driver’s side, Jeannie started the engine and turned down the radio, which was tuned to WLS and playing “Save the Country.” She lowered the window.

“I’m sorry,” Becky said. “You don’t have to wait for me.”

“You’re staying?”

“Are you sure you don’t want to come back inside? I’ll stick close to you.”

Come on down to the glory river, the radio said. Jeannie shook her head. “I thought you were only doing this because Tanner dared you.”

“He dared me to try it. Not just go for one hour.”

“One hour was plenty for me.”

“I’m sorry.”

“You’re forgiven,” Jeannie said. “I swear to God, though, Bex. You’d better not go religious on me.”

To her own surprise, she went religious. It began with being bored and wanting to be liked, but even on her first night she was forced into interactions with kids less fortunate than she was, forced to listen to them, forced in turn to account for the person she really was, undefended by status, and thereby, just as Tanner had promised, forced to learn things about herself, not all of them flattering. Crossroads didn’t look religious—there was nary a Bible in sight, and whole evenings went by without reference to Jesus—but here again Tanner had been right: simply by trying to speak honestly, surrendering to emotion, supporting other people in their honesty and emotion, she experienced her first glimmerings of spirituality. She could feel herself vindicating Clem’s long-standing faith in her, as a person of substance.

A hundred and twenty kids were in Crossroads, and only one exciting leader. In two hours on a Sunday night, every member could hope for one minute of Ambrose’s attention. Becky, in the weeks that followed, averaged a lot more than that. Ambrose twice chose her as a dyad partner, praised her for her guts in joining the group, and called her out in larger discussions, praising her honesty. She would have been more self-conscious about hogging him if she hadn’t felt a natural affinity with him. She, too, had been a person other people measured and compared their time with; she knew the pleasure but also the burden of that. Plus she’d come painfully late to Crossroads—she had two years of lost time with Ambrose to make up for.

Her father, meanwhile, was barely speaking to her. She was theoretically sorry to have hurt him, but she didn’t miss the charade of closeness. He’d needed to be shown that she was eighteen years old and had a right to her own life. The ancient edict needed punishing as well.

The action that had truly taken guts occurred in the school cafeteria some weeks later. She’d already stopped putting on makeup in the morning and taken to wearing only jeans, never skirts, but she didn’t think she’d ever felt more glaringly visible than the day she plunked her sack lunch down between Kim Perkins and David Goya. They acted like it was nothing, but every eye at Becky’s usual table was on her, especially Jeannie Cross’s. Though Jeannie should arguably have been grateful to her, for vacating a rung on the ladder that she herself could then ascend to, Jeannie didn’t see it that way. She continued to give Becky rides to school in her Mustang, and Becky still enjoyed hearing her gossip, but a line had been crossed when she sat down at a Crossroads table. Jeannie referred to Crossroads as Kumbaya, which wasn’t funny even the first time she said it, and Becky, although she couldn’t prove it, sensed that Jeannie was no longer telling her every secret she learned.

Offsetting her self-imposed demotion was her rise in Tanner Evans’s estimation. Not only had the thought of her with Tanner not left her; after she publicly declared herself a Crossroads person, the thought had acquired new urgency. Certain people who thought less of her for going religious might think again if they saw her with Tanner Evans. This was a calculation, but her feelings had quickly fallen in line with it. She imagined holding one of Tanner’s hands in hers, touching the tips of his long fingers one by one. She imagined his hands clasped on her belly, the way she’d seen them clasped on Laura Dobrinsky’s. She imagined him writing a song about her.

At the Grove, on the Friday after her first Crossroads meeting, she resisted the urge to find him and tell him what she’d done. She’d enjoyed the meeting, and she planned to go to the next one, but as soon as she saw Tanner arrive with his guitars she wondered if she’d capitulated too easily. If she’d offered more resistance, he might have kept pressing her, and teasing her.

The Bleu Notes were playing without the Natural Woman that night. By the time their first set ended, Becky was putting chairs up on tables in the empty dining room. The urge was there but she resisted it. And was rewarded when Tanner came looking for her.

“Hey,” he said, “I saw Rick Ambrose. You know what he told me?”

“No.”

“You actually went! I couldn’t believe it. I thought I’d totally pissed you off.”

“You did piss me off.”

“Well, and apparently it worked.”

“Yeah, once. I’m not sure I’ll go back.”

“You didn’t like it?”

She shrugged, trying to maintain her resistance.

“You’re still pissed off with me,” he said.

“I still don’t see why you care if I’m in Crossroads.”

She hoisted a chair onto a table, feeling his eyes on her. She expected him to ask what she’d made of Crossroads. Instead he asked her if she wanted to stay for the second set.

“I’m not allowed in the back room,” she said, “except to get drink orders.”

“You work here. No one’s going to card you.”

“Where’s Laura?”

“She went to Milwaukee for the weekend.”

“Well, then, I don’t think I’d better.”

Tanner looked away, blinking. He had wonderful eyelashes.

“Okay,” he said. “That’s cool.”

All the way home and well into the night, she revised the evening in her head. Her chance had come and gone so suddenly, she hadn’t had time to think it through. Had she said no because she considered it unethical to sneak around behind Laura’s back? Or was it because the idea of being a temporary replacement, a second-stringer, was insulting? If only she hadn’t said no so quickly! Deflection of male advances had become a reflex, because until now the advances had always been deflection-worthy. But what if she’d stayed for the second set? And hung out afterward with Tanner and the band, and let him drive her home, and then seen him again the next day, and the day after that, while Laura was in Milwaukee?

She didn’t get a second chance. The following Friday, Laura was back at the Grove, playing with Tanner, doing harmonies with him and then a solo song at the piano, “Up on the Roof,” that Becky fled into the kitchen to avoid hearing even distantly. That Sunday, she almost didn’t go to Crossroads, since there seemed to be nothing further to be gained with Tanner by going. But when seven o’clock rolled around she experienced a pang of actual loneliness, not a feeling she was used to. She threw on her only halfway scruffy coat, a corduroy jacket that Clem had outgrown, and ran-walked down to First Reformed, arriving just in time to be chosen by Rick Ambrose as a dyad partner.

The instruction was Share something you’re struggling with that the group might help you with. Ambrose led her to his office, which he had the privilege of using for dyad exercises, and offered to share first. His dark eyes uncharacteristically cast down, rather than boring into hers, he spoke of being frightened by the size and intensity of the group he’d helped create, the power that so many kids had given him over their lives. It was hard for him to maintain humility, and he worried that his relationship with God was suffering, because the horizontal relationships within the group were so compelling. “It’s easier to pray when you feel weak,” he said. “It’s easier to pray for strength than for humility, because humility is what you need to pray in the first place. Do you know what I mean?”

“I haven’t really tried to pray yet,” Becky said.

“That’s the next step,” Ambrose said. “I don’t just mean for you. This group started as a Christian fellowship, but it’s taken on a life of its own. I’m a little worried about what we’ve unleashed. What I’ve unleashed. I’m worried that, if it doesn’t end up leading us back to God, it’s just an intense kind of psychological experiment. Which could just as easily end up hurting people as liberating them.”

Even by Crossroads standards, his disclosure seemed extreme to Becky. She was flattered by his openness with her, which she took as another token of their affinity. But she was only a high-school kid, not his spiritual adviser.

“I know it’s a sore subject,” she found herself saying, “but one thing my dad is good at is keeping religion front and center. It’s always made me uncomfortable. But maybe it was a good contribution he made to the group?”

Ambrose winced. “I hear what you’re saying.”

“I mean, it’s great, what you’re doing. I’m not a pray-er. I like that I don’t have to do that. But…”

But what? Suggest that her father be reinstated in Crossroads? She cringed at the thought of him and his Christ talk at a Sunday-night meeting. She would quit the group in a minute if he came back.

“And what about you?” Ambrose said. “What are you struggling with?”

To reciprocate his openness, she told him that she had feelings for Tanner Evans. That Tanner was the reason she’d joined Crossroads. That, if she was not mistaken, Tanner was interested in her, too. That she wanted to pursue a relationship with him, but she didn’t think it was right to get between him and Laura. What should she do?

If Ambrose was surprised, he didn’t show it. “I love Tanner,” he said. “I’m not sure anyone’s ever had a better experience in this group. If everyone were like him, I wouldn’t be worried about where we’re going. He really did find his way back to God, and he had a beautiful way of keeping it light.”

“But Laura,” Becky suggested.

“Laura gave me constant shit. And I respected that. If Laura’s got a problem with a person, the person’s going to hear about it.”

“Okay.”

“But Tanner is mellow, and that cuts both ways. I can’t tell you what the right thing to do is. But I can tell you my impression, which is that Laura was always the one driving that relationship. For Tanner it was more like the path of least resistance.”

Helpful information.

“But maybe,” Becky said, “I should just keep away?”

“If you want to be safe, yes. Do you want to be safe?”

She already knew that safety, like passive aggression, was a dirty word in Crossroads. Safety was the opposite of risk-taking, without which personal growth could not occur.

“It’s not your job to hide your feelings,” Ambrose said. “It’s Tanner’s job to deal with them, and with his own feelings.”

Like her father, Ambrose had told her what to do while claiming not to, but it didn’t bother her when Ambrose did it. The problem was how to show her feelings. She loved safety! Her entire life to date had been organized around it! But since she’d blown her chance with Tanner, it was now up to her to take some kind of initiative, and she didn’t like the image of herself coming on to him. It would be extremely unsafe, not to mention difficult to manage if Laura was in the vicinity, and she wasn’t sure she’d be good at it anyway. She decided instead, as a semi-unsafe measure, to write him a letter.

Dear Tanner,

I was lying when I said I was still mad at you. In fact, I owe you a big debt of gratitude for introducing me to Crossroads. After just three weeks I can feel myself expanding as a person and taking new risks. You were right that I was just holding my breath. Well, I’m not holding it anymore. I’m trying to be more forthright about my feelings, and one of those feelings is that I’d like to get to know you better. If you feel the same way, maybe we can meet up sometime and take a walk or something? I would like that very much.

Your friend (I hope),

Becky

The letter, which she rewrote and copied three times to get the tone right, terrified her. She sealed it in an envelope, tore open the envelope to read it again, and sealed it in a new envelope that she then hid in her dresser. It was waiting to be delivered to Tanner, in person, forthrightly, the next time she saw him, when Clem returned from college for Thanksgiving.

She was glad that her father was the one to bring her brother home from the train station, so that she could pointedly exclude him when she invited Clem to take a walk with her. Since the summer, Clem had grown a sort of beard, and let his hair go long, and somewhere acquired a black peacoat. He looked a lot more than just three months older. As they walked in the low afterschool sunlight, he in the peacoat, she in his corduroy jacket, she had an elated sense of her own imminent adulthood; of their new formidableness as the pair of older siblings. They were the next generation. They had to be reckoned with.

From their mother’s letters to him, Clem had learned that Becky had joined Crossroads. He approved, but he wondered why she’d done it.

“I was mad at Dad,” she said.

“About what?”

“I’m more interested in why you were in it. I mean, now that I’m there and I see what it’s like. Some of those exercises…”

“The exercises weren’t that big a thing until Dad left. I stayed in for the work and the music. The sensitivity training was just a price you had to pay. There were enough other guys like me that we could pick each other as partners and talk about books or politics.”

“Did you ever do a screaming exercise?”

“I didn’t mind that one. It was better than the hugging. You were supposed to go around the room and give people hugs. Which, A, there were kids that nobody wanted to hug, and B, how did you know if a person wanted a hug? You were supposed to ask if it was okay, and the answer was supposed to be yes. I remember walking up to Laura Dobrinsky and asking her, and her saying no. She told me she wasn’t into doing things unless she really felt them. And I’m thinking, thanks, Laura. Glad we got that straight. I’d really been worrying about whether you felt like hugging me.”

“What do you think of Laura?”

“She’s got a real gift for humiliating people. You wouldn’t believe the way she spoke to Dad. She was at the center of that whole mess.”

“I didn’t realize that.”

“It wasn’t just her, but she was definitely the ringleader.”

Though Clem had explained it to her at the time, Becky had only a sketchy sense of why their father had left Crossroads. Her understanding was that he’d preached too much, and that Rick Ambrose had asked him to leave. She wasn’t feeling very loyal to him, but she was offended to think of Laura hurting him. “What did she do?”

“The whole scene was horrible. I can’t even tell you.”

“I’ve been talking to Tanner Evans, at the Grove. He and Laura play there every Friday.”

“Good old Tanner.”

“I know. It’s kind of strange that he’s with Laura.”

“How so?”

“Well, I mean, they’re both musicians. But he’s so nice, and tall, and she’s so—midgety. You know what I mean?”

Clem spoke sharply. “Laura can’t help how tall she is, Becky.”

“No, of course not.”

“You shouldn’t be hung up on superficial appearances.”

Becky felt stung. She had made, she thought, an innocuous point—that Tanner’s superficial appearance was extremely pleasing, Laura’s less so. All she wanted was that Clem agree that they looked strange together.

Instead, he launched into a telling of how Tanner and his musician friends had doubled the size of Crossroads. She appreciated the confirmation of Tanner’s social status, but Clem seemed to have changed more than just physically. It wasn’t just the beard, the hair, the peacoat. It was that he seemed more interested in talking than in listening to her. As they sat on a picnic table in Scofield Park, watching tree shadows lengthen on the yellowed grass, she learned the reason.

The reason’s name was Sharon. She was a junior at U of I, and he’d met her in a philosophy class. As he related to Becky how he’d boldly asked Sharon on a date, and how, on that date, they’d had a heated argument about Vietnam, and how amazing it was to find a woman who could more than hold her own in an argument with him, Becky had the unprecedented sensation of not wanting the details. Of being, herself, less interested in listening. The antipathy she felt toward Sharon, the discomfort it caused her to hear about Clem’s happiness, was inappropriate. It seemed to confirm, retrospectively, the inappropriateness of other things about her and Clem’s friendship. When he went on to effuse about what a revelation it was to experience a powerful animal attraction for the first time, and intense animal pleasure, by which he apparently meant full-on sex, and what a revelation it would be for Becky, someday, when she was ready for it, to connect with her own animal nature, her ears started roaring and she had to walk away from the picnic table.

Clem hopped off the table and followed her. “I’m such an idiot,” he said. “You didn’t want to hear about any of that.”

“It’s okay. I’m glad you’re happy.”

“I just wanted to tell somebody, and you’re the person I always want to tell. You’ll always be that person, Becky. You know that, right?”

She nodded.

“Is it okay if I give you a hug?”

It took her a second to get the joke. She laughed, and things were right with them again, and so she told him about the money from Shirley and what their father had said. Clem’s response was “Fuck him. Fuck that guy.”

Things were right with them again.

“Seriously, Becky, that is so fucked up. That money is yours. You totally earned it, Shirley loved you. You can do whatever the hell you want with it.”

“What if I want to give you half of it?”

“Me? Don’t give it to me. Go to Europe, go to a great college.”

“But what if I want you to have it? You could transfer to a better school next year.”

“There’s nothing wrong with U of I.”

“But you’re smarter than I am.”

“Not true. I just never had a social life.”

“But if U of I is okay for you, why isn’t it okay for me?”

“Because—I don’t mind farm kids. I don’t care what kind of room I’m in. You should be at Lawrence, or Beloit. That’s the kind of place I picture you.”

That was the kind of place she pictured herself, too.

“But with sixty-five hundred dollars,” she said, “I could still go there. And you could save your half for graduate school.”

Only now did Clem get that she was offering him thousands of dollars. In a calmer voice, he explained that she had two choices, either to keep all of the money or to share it equally. Singling him out was hurtful to Perry and Judson; it looked bad. And since three thousand dollars wasn’t enough money to make a difference to anyone, whatever the old man might think, she should keep the entire sum.

His analysis made perfect sense—he was, in fact, smarter than she was, also more considerate of other people’s feelings, also less greedy—and she was undeniably happy to think of keeping all the money. But her gratitude made her even more inclined to share it with him.

“I can’t do it,” he said. “Don’t you see how bad it would look?”

“But Dad’s going to kill me if I keep all of it.”

“Let me talk to him.”

“You don’t have to do that.”

“No, I want to. I’m sick of this pious shit.”

Night had fallen when they returned to the parsonage. Clem marched straight up to the third floor, and it was strange to be Becky then, sitting on her bed one floor below, hearing him and her father fighting over her. She didn’t know Sharon and didn’t want to, but it seemed to her unlikely that Sharon fully understood how good a person Clem was. He came back downstairs and appeared in her doorway.

“I set him straight,” he said. “Let me know if he bothers you again.”

Her passbook, which had been radiating unease in its drawer, settled down as soon as its five figures were secure. She had the money, and this seemed right to her, since she was the sibling who most wanted money and had the clearest idea of what to do with it, and now Clem, the only judge who mattered, had certified that it was right. Her father couldn’t be any colder to her than he already was, and when her mother expressed her own unhappiness Becky threw her off balance by inviting her to join her in Europe the following summer, and by promising to spend the remaining money on education. Though not originally her idea, the invitation was a brilliant stroke. Her mother had no great selfish interest in seeing Europe, but family life was like a microcosm of high school. Her mother wasn’t popular, and Becky’s invitation was gracious.

The night after Thanksgiving, she took her frightening letter to the Grove and put it in the pocket of her apron. All nerves, she proceeded to mix up orders, twice bring the wrong salad dressing to the same diner, and get stiffed on her tip by a red-faced father who’d had to track her down to get his check. Why was she even still working at the Grove? She had thirteen thousand dollars. If she could just deliver the letter, she thought, she might quit. But the back room was jammed with friends and fans of Tanner’s home from college, and when the first set ended, a mob of well-wishers blocked her way to him.

From her blind side, as she hesitated on the margins, came the voice of Laura Dobrinsky. “I hear you’re in Crossroads.”

Becky looked down and flashed hot. The pink-spectacled shorty she meant to steal from was putting a match to a cigarette.

“Tanner convinced you, I gather?”

“Well, it is my church.”

Laura shook the match and frowned. “You go to church?”

“You mean, on Sunday?”

“I wasn’t aware that you’re a churchgoer.”

“I guess you don’t know me.”

“Is that a yes?”

Becky didn’t see why it mattered. “I’m saying you don’t know me.”

“Yeah, and maybe I don’t know Crossroads, either. Kind of makes me glad I got out when I did.”

Again Becky flashed hot. “I’m sorry—do you have a problem with me?”

“Only in a general way. I hope it’s a good experience for you.”

Leaving Becky trembling, Laura plunged into the oily ponytails and embroidered denim surrounding Tanner and dispensed some of the hugs she hadn’t felt like giving Clem. Only in a general way? So far, at least, Becky had done nothing more threatening than join Crossroads. It was almost as if the Natural Woman had smelled the letter she was carrying.

Seeing no chance of catching Tanner alone, she went home with the letter. It now had a spot of salad oil on it, but she couldn’t bear to open it again. She also couldn’t bear to keep it for another week. She thought of mailing it, but she didn’t know if Tanner still lived with his parents; she had only the dimmest sense of his life outside the Grove. She was at the point of looking for his name in the phonebook when she recalled the word churchgoer.

In the morning, she asked her mother if she ever saw Tanner Evans at Sunday services. Her mother conveyed, with a look and a pause, that her curiosity about Tanner had been noted. “Not the nine o’clock,” she said. “I think I have seen him on Sunday, though. You can ask your father.”

It was none of her father’s business. On Sunday morning, when Clem and Perry were sleeping and her parents and Judson had left for the early service, she put on a demure full-skirted dress and walked down to First Reformed with the letter in her purse. Except for “midnight” Christmas services (which, like all things Midwestern, happened an hour early), she hadn’t gone to a service since she finished Sunday school. The faces of older parishioners brightened with pleasure and surprise when she crossed the sanctuary’s carpeted parlor. Her mother, in a church dress, and her father, in his vestments, were chatting with some nine o’clockers who’d lingered at the inter-service coffee hour. Judson sat in a corner reading a book, waiting to be taken home. When her mother saw Becky, it was clear from the slyness of her smile that she knew why she was there.

Taking a program from the greeters, she sat down in the last row of pews and waited to see if she’d guessed right about Laura’s peculiar question. Might Laura come here, too? From the way she’d said churchgoer, Becky doubted it. The organist started up, playing something that her aunt could have named the composer of, and the late crowd began to fill the pews. With each new arrival, she turned to see if it was Tanner, until she became self-conscious about turning too often. She smoothed her skirt, folded her program into a small triangle, and fixed her eyes on the huge wood-and-brass cross hanging behind the altar. The longer she stared at it, the odder it seemed. The fact of its being manufactured somewhere, with the same kind of tools that made useful cabinets and furniture. Cross maker: what a weird nine-to-five to have. And paid how? With the money that people unaccountably, in exchange for nothing, dropped into wood-and-brass collection plates, possibly made by the same worker.

The Tanner who entered the sanctuary, by himself, just after eleven, was hardly the Tanner she knew. He was wearing a dopey plaid sport coat and an actual necktie, albeit loose-knit and lumpily knotted. He slipped into the pew across the aisle from her, and she returned her eyes to the altar, where her father and Reverend Haefle were entering through a side door, but her skin knew precisely when Tanner turned and saw her; she felt it go hot. The music stopped, and Tanner, half standing, crossed the aisle and sat down by her.

“What are you doing here?” he whispered.

She shook her head to shush him.

“Heavenly Father,” her father prayerfully intoned from the pulpit; and that was all she heard before her ears went deaf. He was a tall and handsome man, but to Becky the black robe he was wearing and the devout sincerity of his delivery more than negated any standing he had as a man in the world. She sat frozen but squirmed inside, counting the seconds until he shut up. It came to her now, with a clarity brought by her return after long absence, how much she must have always hated being a minister’s daughter. The fathers of her friends designed buildings, cured illness, prosecuted criminals. Her father was like a cross maker, only worse. His earnest faith and sanctity were an odor that had forever threatened to adhere to her, like the smell of Chesterfields, only worse, because it couldn’t be washed off.

But then, when the congregation rose to sing the Gloria Patri and Tanner, at her side, in his ridiculous sport coat, sang forth in a clear, strong voice, unlike her own self-conscious murmur, and when she tried raising her own voice accordingly, As it was in the Beginning, is now and ever shall be, she caught a strange flashing glimpse of a desire, buried somewhere inside her, to belong and to believe in something. She wondered if the desire might always have been there; if it had only been her father, the shame of him, that repelled her from pursuing it. If maybe the fact of the brass cross, its manufacture, wasn’t so dumb. Maybe it was more like amazing that two thousand years after Jesus’s crucifixion people were still filling collection plates to make crosses in his honor.

In a further flash, she saw that Laura did not like Tanner’s churchgoing; that it might be a fault line between them; that she, Becky, if she opened herself to the possibility of belief, might gain an unforeseen advantage; and that it therefore might be wiser, after all, not to put her letter in Tanner’s hand now, since this would suggest that delivering it was the only reason she’d come to church, but instead to keep coming on Sunday mornings.

They shared a hymnal for the singing of “For the Beauty of the Earth,” Becky’s hair touching Tanner’s shoulder as she leaned in, and then Reverend Haefle gave the sermon. During the one year she’d been obliged to attend entire services, Becky had sat still for her father’s sermons, for fear of making other congregants restless with her restlessness, which would have embarrassed her as a Hildebrandt, but Dwight Haefle’s interminable slabs of lyrical abstraction had defeated her. Listening to him now, hoping greater age might bring greater understanding, she followed him only as far as Reinhold Niebuhr before losing herself in admiration of Tanner’s hands. She had to will herself not to touch them. In his jacket and necktie, he looked like a boy dressed up for church by his mother. Haefle had moved on to the importance of humility, not Becky’s favorite subject, though one she would need to work on if she got more serious about religion, and it occurred to her that, for Tanner, leaving his fringed jacket and his Frye boots at home was exactly what Haefle was talking about. All but one hour a week, Tanner’s coolness was beyond question, but he humbled himself for church, and this struck her as extremely dear.

Rising with him to recite the Lord’s Prayer, she might already have been his girlfriend, not to say his wife of many years, and the trespass for which she asked their Father’s forgiveness her theft of him from Laura.

“You’re here,” he said, when the service was over.

“Yeah, everything’s changing. I’m trying new things.”

He was looking at her as if he couldn’t figure her out. This was good.

“I owe you a big debt of gratitude,” she said. “For making me try Crossroads. I’m learning to be more open with my feelings. And—” She faltered, her face hot. He kept looking at her. “Will you be here next Sunday?”

“It’s what I do.”

She nodded, too vigorously, and stood up. “Okay, I’ll see you then.”

On her way out through the parlor, she paused to be noticed by her father, hoping to take some free credit for having come to a service, but he was engaged with Kitty Reynolds and a petite blond woman whom Becky didn’t recognize. Her father was smiling, and the blond woman was apparently a magnet for his eyes. When they flicked up to Becky, his smile faded. When he returned them to the woman, it came back to life.

The message was unmistakable. He’d written her off and moved on. As she left the church, the word asshole popped into her head. Clem had uttered it, blasphemously, but it was new to her. Her growing interest in First Reformed, which ought to have pleased her father, was clearly of less consequence to him than his grudge against Rick Ambrose. And he a Christian minister.

“Yes Tanner was there,” she announced to her mother when she got home, before her mother could annoy her by asking.

“That’s nice,” her mother said. “He’s spoiling Rick Ambrose’s otherwise perfect record of turning young people off church services.”

Becky declined the bait. “I’m sure Tanner would be thrilled to know he has your approval.”

“I imagine he’d rather have yours,” her mother said. “As I’m gathering he does.”

“Not talking about it,” Becky said, leaving the room.

A few days later, she was felled by a cold so bad that she had to call in sick at the Grove and couldn’t go to church on Sunday. As soon as she recovered, she took the new step of hanging out at First Reformed after school, joining the girls outside Ambrose’s office, who kindly explained the stories behind their Crossroads gossip, helping her understand what was funny and what was appalling. When she tired of being the newcomer, she wandered down to the function hall and found a team of three boys, led by her own brother, silk-screening posters for the Christmas concert. In theory, she should have lent a hand, because she needed to start accumulating “hours” toward the Arizona trip—to be eligible for Arizona, you had to perform at least forty hours of service or paid work for the group—but Perry was the one thing about Crossroads she didn’t like. Perry was the brother who was brilliant at everything, including art (the poster design bore the mark of his hand), but lately the mere sight of him had made her scalp tighten and prickle, as if she were a dog in the presence of the occult; as if she shared a house with a psychopath whose brilliance was undergirded by all manner of dark doings. She knew about some of those doings but not, she suspected, all of them. He looked up from the silk screen, red-handed with Christmas ink, and smirked at her. She turned and fled.

When she finally gained admittance to Ambrose’s office and he asked her how things were at home, she found herself saying that she was worried about her mother. Even two weeks ago, she would have considered it treasonous to pass family information to her father’s enemy. Now she positively relished it.

“My mom keeps up a good front,” she said. “But underneath I get the sense she’s falling apart, and meanwhile Clem is convinced that my dad is going to leave her. It could just be an idea in Clem’s head, but he really harps on it.”

“Clem is smart,” Ambrose said.

“I know. I love him so much. But I’m worried about my mom. She’s so dependent on my dad, and the only time she ever stands up to him is when he criticizes Perry. She thinks Perry is a genius. Which, I mean, he is sort of a genius. But he does all this bad shit that she doesn’t have a clue about.”

“Are you sure about that?”

“She doesn’t know anything from me, that’s for sure.”

“You protect him.”

“It’s not him I’m protecting. I feel bad for her—she’s having a hard enough time already. But I also don’t want Perry to hurt her.”

“Do you think we can help him?”

“Crossroads? I think he only joined because his friends were in it, and then suddenly he’s like Mr. Gung Ho. I don’t know—maybe that’s good?”

Ambrose waited, his dark eyes on her.

“It’s just,” she said, “some part of me doesn’t believe it.”

“Me neither,” Ambrose said. “The minute he walked in the door, I said to myself, ‘That kid is trouble.’”

Becky felt breathless. She couldn’t believe Ambrose trusted her enough to say that. For a disorienting moment, her heart confused him with Tanner. His honesty with her was like an eighty-proof version of Tanner’s gentler brew. There was no wedding ring on his dark-haired hand, but she’d heard he had a girlfriend at the seminary where he was nominally still a student. It was a little like hearing that Jesus had a girlfriend.

A burst of female laughter outside his door reminded her that she was one of many. As if to preempt a rejection, to save her dignity, she excused herself hastily and ran from the church, reorienting her heart.

The following Sunday, after the service ended, she and Tanner sat in the rearmost pew and talked for more than an hour. When someone turned off the sanctuary lights, and the last distant voices died away, they stayed on in the more solemn light of the stained-glass windows. Becky was relieved that she did not, after all, need to do the Crossroads thing of telling Tanner she wanted to get to know him better.

An exchange of past impressions yielded the interesting fact that Becky, even as a sophomore in high school, had seemed to Tanner impossibly unapproachable. When she countered that, no, he had been that person, he laughed and denied it, as befit his unconceited nature, but she could tell that he was pleased. While they skated around on the subject of Crossroads and the friends of Tanner’s who now served as advisers in the group, her mind worked furiously below the surface. It ought to have followed logically, even irresistibly, that two such singularly unapproachable-seeming people were meant to be together. But what if being together only meant being friends?

She saw that she had no choice but to take a risk. In a studiously offhand tone, she asked Tanner why Laura didn’t come to church with him.

“She was raised Catholic,” he said, with a shrug. “She hates institutional religion.”

Becky waited.

“Laura’s way more radical than me. She was ready to split for San Francisco as soon as we finished high school. Sleep in the van, be part of the scene.”

“Why didn’t you?” Becky said, barely breathing.

“I don’t know. I guess I’m not that into the scene—going back to someone’s house and staying up all night. That’s okay once a week, or if you’re into drugs, but I’d rather be sleeping and getting up early to practice. I’ve still got so far to go as a musician.”

“You already sound amazing.”

He looked at her gratefully. “You’re not just saying that?”

“No! I love listening to you.”

She watched him take this in. It seemed to go down well. He squared his shoulders and said, “I want to cut a demo album. That’s my whole focus right now. Twelve songs good enough to record before I’m twenty-one. I was afraid, if we hit the road, I’d lose sight of that.”

“I understand that.”

“Really? I’m not sure Laura does. She’s so gifted, but she doesn’t care about being a professional. If it were up to me, we’d be doing three or four gigs a week. Blues, jazz, Top Forty, whatever. Putting in the hours, developing an audience. The only thing bar owners care about is making money, and Laura hates that. If somebody asked her to do Peggy Lee, she’d just laugh in their face. But me…”

“You’re more ambitious,” Becky suggested.

“Maybe. Laura’s got a lot going on, she’s working the crisis hotline, she’s got her women’s group. For me, it’s enough to work on my music and try to feel closer to God. You know, I really like going to church. I like seeing you here.”

“I like seeing you, too.”

“Truly? I was starting to worry that you didn’t.”

She looked into his eyes, wordlessly telling him he had nothing to fear. God only knew what might have happened if they hadn’t heard footsteps in the vestry, the reverberant bang of metal. Dwight Haefle, no longer in his robe, had popped the release on one of the sanctuary doors. “You don’t have to leave,” he told them. “The doors open from the inside.”

But Tanner was already on his feet, and Becky stood up, too. Their moment had been too fragile to be reassembled now. As they left the sanctuary, he told her how Danny Dickman and Toby Isner and Topper Morgan had smoked grass and drunk whiskey in the sanctuary on the night before the third Arizona trip, and how Ambrose, in the church parking lot, beside the idling and fully loaded trip buses, had led the group in reaming out the miscreants and debating whether they should be barred from the trip. The confrontation had lasted two hours. Topper Morgan had cried so violently he burst a blood vessel in his eye. And the church had started locking the sanctuary doors.

Becky went home frustrated by her failure to get a clear statement on Tanner and Laura. She needed to be more than just his experiment. She was, admittedly, inexperienced in love, but her pride and her ethics and her basic sense of tidiness insisted that, before she consented to be added, Laura be explicitly subtracted. The only useful nugget she’d gleaned in this regard was that Tanner still lived with his parents. Since he wasn’t shacked up with Laura, there was no decisive action he could take. But this made a formal renunciation all the more necessary. She considered this requirement absolute, and so it was with a confusing sense of self-betrayal, of observing a person she morally disapproved of and didn’t understand but nevertheless was, that she let Tanner kiss her before he’d satisfied it.

At the Grove, five nights after their seemingly crucial conversation in the sanctuary, she’d seen Laura Dobrinsky standing on tiptoes to press her face to Tanner’s, and him letting himself be nuzzled, a contented smile on his face. Becky had felt stabbed in the gut. She’d fled to a bathroom stall and shed her first tears on account of a man. In her ensuing misery, she’d skipped both Sunday service and Crossroads, which she felt had failed to warn her that the risk in risk-taking was stabbing pain, and dragged herself through the last days of school before vacation.

And then, last night, she’d subbed at the Grove. It wasn’t her usual night. When Tanner walked into the restaurant, alone, it shouldn’t have been with the expectation of finding her there. Assuming it was just wretched luck, she asked a veteran waitress, Maria, to take his table. She could feel him looking at her, but she didn’t look at him, not once, until the last of the other diners were leaving. He was slouched low, the picture of composure, an emptied dessert plate on his table. He waved her over.

“What,” she said.

“Are you okay? I looked for you in church on Sunday.”

“I didn’t go. I’m not sure I’m into it anymore.”

A taste from childhood was in her throat, a horrible self-spiting taste that she couldn’t help wanting more of.

“Becky,” he said. “Did I do something? You seem pissed off with me.”

“Nope. Just tired.”

“I called your house. Your mom said you were here.”

There was no law against just walking away. She walked away.

“Hey, come on,” Tanner said, jumping up to pursue her. “I came here to see you. I thought we were friends. If you’re pissed off with me, you could at least tell me why.”

Maria was watching them from the table she was wiping down. Becky continued on into the kitchen, but Tanner wasn’t afraid of the kitchen. She turned on her heel.

“Figure it out,” she said bitterly.

She knew her worth. He was required to say that he was done with the Natural Woman. Nothing less would do.

“Whatever it is,” he said, “I’m sorry.”

“Thank you for being sorry.”

“Becky—”

“What.”

“I really like you.”

It wasn’t enough. She picked up a rag and returned to the dining room to wipe down tables. It wasn’t enough, and then she heard how hard he slammed the front door behind him. She heard the hurt of his having called her house and come looking for her, only to be treated so meanly, and suddenly the person she was but didn’t understand was running out into the night. Tanner was slumped against the side of his Volkswagen bus, his head bowed. At the sound of her feet, as they outran her better judgment, he looked up. She ran straight into his arms. A breeze from the south had risen, more springlike than autumnal. The hands she’d dreamed of were on her head, in her hair. And then, just like that, in the most unplanned and unconsidered way, it had happened.

She was awakened by the telephone. She’d fallen asleep on her back, crossways on her bed, and opened her eyes to a gray sky framed by her window and broken by black branches. Her mother was tapping on her door.

“Becky? It’s Jeannie Cross.”

She went to the phone in her parents’ bedroom and waited for her mother to hang up downstairs. Jeannie was calling about a party that night at the Carduccis’. Becky appreciated that Jeannie was still including her, and she might have liked to accept the invitation for friendship’s sake. But she was going to the concert.

“There’s a concert?”

“Crossroads,” Becky said.

A silence.

“I see,” Jeannie said.

“You know what, though? I’m going with Tanner.”

“Tanner Evans?”

“Yeah, he’s the headliner, and he’s taking me.”

“Well, well, well.”

Becky was tempted to say more, but she might already have said too much. Tanner didn’t quite know yet that he was taking her to the concert. In her mind, their very long kiss had been definitive, but much had been left unspoken, and she wouldn’t feel secure until the world had seen her walk into First Reformed on his arm. She asked Jeannie if she wanted to go shopping with her. It was almost funny how eagerly Jeannie said yes, after all these weeks of distance. But Jeannie wasn’t free until three thirty.

“Shoot,” Becky said. “I’m meeting Tanner at four.”

“Wow, Bex. Too busy with a guy.”

“I know,” she said happily. “It’s weird.”

“Tomorrow, though? I’m not doing anything all day.”

Becky took a long shower and performed delicate work at the bathroom mirror, applying makeup that was enhancing without, she hoped, being noticeable. Perry banged rudely on the locked door, offered some commentary which she ignored, and went away. Dressing, too, she labored to strike a balance between elegance and Crossroads. She had to look good for at least the next ten hours, beginning especially at four o’clock. By the time she went down to the kitchen, her mother was bundling herself into a frightful old coat.

“I’m late to my class,” her mother said. “Can you make sure you’re home by six?”

Becky filled her mouth with a sugar cookie. “I’m not going to the Haefles’ party.”

“I’m afraid that’s not negotiable.”

“I’m not negotiating.”

“You can discuss it with your father, then.”

“There’s nothing to discuss.”

Her mother sighed. “You know, honey, it’s not the worst thing in the world to make a young man wait. I know it doesn’t feel that way to you, but there is always tomorrow.”

“Thank you for your input.”

“I take it he managed to find you last night?”

“I thought you were late for your exercise class.”

Her mother sighed more heavily and turned away. Becky was sorry to have to freeze her out. Her goodwill was boundless, but her mother was wrong. Tomorrow was too late for the work she had to do. Tanner wasn’t headlining the concert, he was co-headlining it with Laura Dobrinsky. Becky needed every minute she could get with him before it started.

 

 

 

The time had come to take action. A dull red gash had opened and closed below the clouds on the eastern horizon, over the fields of broken cornstalks distantly visible from the window of Clem’s room, while he typed the last sentences of his Roman history term paper. His desk, in the uneasy light, was stubbled over with red eraser morsels and cloud-colored ash. His clean-living roommate, Gus, had already decamped to Moline for the holidays, and Clem had seized on his absence to smoke heavily all night, powering himself forward with nicotine and with rage at his primary sources, Livy and Polybius, for contradicting each other, rage also at the dwindling of his hoped-for hours of sleep from six to three to zero, and rage, most of all, at himself for having spent Monday seeking pleasure in his girlfriend’s bed, allowing himself to believe that he could research and write a fifteen-page paper in two twelve-hour workdays. The pleasure he’d experienced on Monday now amounted to nothing. His eyes and his throat were on fire, his stomach on the verge of digesting itself. The paper he’d produced, on Scipio Africanus, was an ill-argued tangle of repetitive phrases for which he’d be lucky to get a B-minus. Its badness was the final confirmation of a thing he’d known for weeks.

Without giving himself time to think, without even standing up to stretch, he rolled a clean sheet of erasable onionskin into his typewriter.

December 23, 1971

Selective Service Local Board

U.S. Post Office Building

Berwyn, Illinois

Dear Sirs,

I write to inform you that as of today I will no longer be enrolled as a student at the University of Illinois, thus no longer eligible for the student deferment that I was granted on March 10, 1971. I am prepared to serve in the U.S. Armed Forces if I am called upon. My date of birth is December 12, 1951. My draft number is 29 4 13 88 403. Please advise if/when you would like me to report for induction.

Sincerely,

Clement R. Hildebrandt

215 Highland Street

New Prospect, Illinois

Unlike his paper, the letter had the clarity of extensive forethought. But did typing it constitute an action? The words were barely more substantial on paper than they’d been in his head. Not until they’d been received and replied to would they attain power over him. At which point, exactly, could he be said to have taken an action?

He gazed for a while at the ceiling of cloud above the distant cornfields, the ground-level haze that industrial agriculture seemed to generate in winter, a smog part dampness and part nitrates. Then he signed the letter, addressed an envelope, and applied one of the postage stamps he’d bought for writing to his parents.

“This is what your son is doing,” he said. “This is how it had to be.”

Feeling less alone for having heard a voice, if only his own, he ventured out to the bathroom. Its eternally burning lights seemed all the brighter now that everyone else had gone home. Some departed hall mate’s whiskers adhered to the sides of the sink at which he splashed water on his face. He considered taking a shower, but his core body temperature was at a low ebb and he thought he might convulse with shivers if he undressed.

As he left the bathroom, the hall telephone rang. Its loudness was extraordinary and jolted him with dread, because he knew that only Sharon could be calling; she’d already called at midnight for a progress report and a pep talk. With regard to Sharon, his typing of the letter most definitely constituted an action. He stood outside the bathroom, immobilized by the ringing, and waited for it to stop. After the debacle of his wasted Monday, he no longer had a shred of faith in his power to resist the pleasure he took from her. The only safe plan now was to pack up his things, catch the first available bus to Chicago, and inform her of his action from New Prospect, by letter.

To his surprise, a door at the end of the hall flew open. A hall mate in gym shorts stomped out and answered the phone. He saw Clem and shook the receiver at him.

“Sorry,” Clem said, hurrying to take it. “I didn’t think anyone else was here.”

The hall mate slammed his door behind him.

“Did you finish?” Sharon said eagerly.

“Yeah. Ten minutes ago.”

“Hurrah! I bet you could use some breakfast.”

“What I really need is sleep.”

“Come have breakfast. I want to take care of you.”

A wave of light-headedness washed over him. The mere sound of her voice was rushing blood to his groin. Change of plan.

“All right,” he said. “But there’s something I need to tell you.”

“What is it?”

“I’ll tell you when I come over.”

His room, when he returned to it, was like a lidded charcoal fire. He opened the window and put on the peacoat that Sharon had chosen for him. The tissue-swelling elevation of his blood pressure was surely related to sex, but also perhaps to what he had to tell her. The letter he’d written had elements of aggression, and aggression was known to induce erections in men. The letter could lead to his going to Vietnam, where, although there was nothing arousing about being killed, he might be called upon to defend himself with a weapon. In his rational mind, he knew that killing was morally wrong and psychologically devastating, but he suspected that his animal self took a different view.

Letter and term paper in hand, he left his building through the rear stairwell, which had never lost its smell of fresh concrete. The damp morning air penetrated straight through his coat to his core, but it was a relief to be free of the smoke-filled tunnel that sex and all-nighters had made of his existence since regular classes ended. In the hush of the emptied campus, he could faintly hear the mightiness of Illinois, the rumble of a freight train, the moan of eighteen-wheelers, coal transported from the south, car parts from the north, fattened livestock and staggering corn yields from the middle, all roads leading to the broad-shouldered city on the lake. It did him good to find the larger world still extant; it made him feel less crazy.

Down the lane from the Foreign Languages Building, after he’d slipped his paper under the door of the classics department office, he came upon a mailbox. The next collection time was eleven a.m., and today was not a holiday. He faced the mailbox and considered his existential freedom to act or not to act. The strong thing to do was to drop his letter in the box. He might curse himself in the future—however wretched he felt now, army life was bound to bring worse—but if an action was morally right, a strong man was obliged to take it in the present. If he didn’t mail the letter now, he would arrive at Sharon’s with only the intention of mailing it, and he’d been down the intention-paved road before.

He closed his eyes and fell asleep in a heartbeat, reawakening in time to catch himself from falling over. In his hand he found a letter to his draft board. The throat of the mailbox made a rusty-jointed gulp as the letter went down it. He turned away and broke into a sprint, as if he might outrun what he’d done.

In the philosophy course he’d taken the previous spring, there was a curly-haired little mouse who sat in the same row he did, often wearing a pleated velvet French-style cap, and kept looking at him. One afternoon, when the bearded and beaded professor was holding forth on Sartre’s Nausea, extolling the idea that what we make of existence has nothing to do with what existence rawly is, Clem raised his hand to disagree. Reality, he said, operated according to laws discoverable and testable by scientific method. The professor seemed to think this proved his larger point—we impose our laws of science on a stubbornly unknowable reality. “But what about math?” Clem said. “One plus one will always equal two. We didn’t invent the truth of that equation. We discovered a truth that was always there.” The professor joked that they had a Platonist in their midst, and the hippies in the lecture hall turned to look at the square who’d challenged him, and the little mouse moved over to sit by Clem. After class, she praised his independence of mind. She adored Camus but couldn’t forgive Sartre for his communism.

Sharon was an Honors student, the first person in her immediate family to attend college. She’d grown up on a farm outside the downstate town of Eltonville, where communists were held in very low esteem. For the rest of the semester, she and Clem had sat together in class, and when she asked him for his home address he was happy to provide it. He’d never had a female friend besides Becky. In the letter Sharon then sent him, while he was at home in New Prospect, doing shovel work for the local nursery, she wrote about the heat and desolation of her family’s farmhouse in the summer. Her mother had died when she was twelve, her brother Mike was in Vietnam, her father and her younger brother made the farm run, and a hired Croatian woman did the cooking and housework. Her father had always excused Sharon from chores, and in her boredom as a child and her sorrow as a teenager she’d found refuge in reading. Her ambition was to be a writer or, as a fallback, to teach English in Europe. She’d already vowed never to spend another summer in Eltonville.

Clem wrote back to her and received a second letter so long she’d put three stamps on the envelope. It began with questions, devolved into stream of consciousness, short on punctuation, devoid of capital letters, and ended with a passage from Camus she’d copied out in French. He kept intending to take an evening and reply, but he never found the evening. He hung out with his friend Lester or watched TV with Becky, who’d cut back on her social life. Only when he returned to school and saw Sharon, walking by herself on the Main Quad, did the wrongness of his inaction come home to him. She threw him a hurt look, and this wasn’t right, he wasn’t a hurter, and so he pursued her. She greeted his apology with a shrug. She said, “I think I had a wrong idea about you.” Whether it was the challenge implicit in this, or the thing that people called guilt but was actually just a self-interested wish not to be thought ill of, he was moved to ask her out for pizza.

What had started their fight was the olive-drab jacket he wore to the pizzeria. For an antiwar protest the previous spring, he’d fashioned an electrical-tape peace sign for the back of it, and Sharon didn’t like it. She couldn’t stand the college peaceniks. Every morning, she said, she woke up afraid of hearing that her brother had been killed or maimed in Vietnam. Mike wasn’t a reader, he enjoyed hunting and fishing and had no ambition beyond inheriting the farm, but he was the kindest and most honorable person she’d ever known, and the peaceniks had only contempt for him. Who were they to spit on a person like her brother? They all had their student deferments, they got to smoke pot and have sex while people like her brother were dying, and they weren’t even grateful. They thought they were morally superior. Lucky white kids from the suburbs flashing their peace signs while other kids fought a war for them: it made her sick.

Clem’s first response to her tirade had been condescension. Being female, and sentimental, Sharon didn’t seem to realize how grotesquely immoral the war was, or that her brother had been free to refuse to serve in it. He, Clem, in her brother’s place, would have refused to serve. But Sharon wouldn’t budge. Her brother loved his country and was a real man; when duty called, he reported. And what about all the boys from Black slums and Indian reservations her brother was serving with? They didn’t even know that not serving was an option. The result was that people like Clem got to be both safe and self-righteous.

“What was your lottery number?” she asked him.

“Terrible. Nineteen.”

“So somebody right now is in the jungle because your parents sent you to college.”

“But I wouldn’t have gone anyway.”

“It’s the same thing. Somebody is there because you’re not. Somebody like Mike. You’re all about the ‘grotesque immorality’ of the war. What about the grotesque immorality of making poor people and uneducated people and Black people be the ones to fight it? Why isn’t that equally grotesque? Why aren’t you protesting that?”

“It’s kind of implied, don’t you think?”

“No. I never hear anyone here talk about it. All I hear is contempt for the military.”

She was little, and female, but her thoughts were original. In Arizona, on his church group’s spring trip, he’d worked for a Navajo man, Keith Durochie, who’d lost a son in Vietnam. Only seventeen, uncomfortable in the presence of a parent’s loss, Clem had tried to sympathize with Durochie by lamenting how unjust it was to die in such a war, and Durochie had gone morose and silent. Clem had said the wrong thing, but he hadn’t known why. Listening to Sharon, he understood that, far from consoling Durochie, he’d dishonored his son’s death. What an ass he’d been.

“I’m really sorry I didn’t write back to you,” he said.

Her dark brown eyes were on him. “Walk me home?”

Already, that first night, he’d had the heart-fluttering sense that he would have to take action; that he’d glimpsed a moral truth which there was no going back and unglimpsing. He might have been spared if he’d had a higher draft number, but lottery ball 19 had followed an incalculable (“random”) trajectory to pairing with his birthday, and his heart went out to the uneducated kid who was serving in his rightful place. He didn’t want to be like his father, who merely professed to have sympathy for the underprivileged. Giving up his student deferment was an insanely steep price to pay for being more consistent than his father, but by the time he and Sharon reached her house, on one of the shabbier side streets of Urbana, his moral intuition was telling him to pay it.

At the top of the stairs to her front porch, she turned around and kissed him. He was one step below her, the stairs compensating for their rather extreme height difference. The kiss was the beginning of a long reprieve from the judgment he’d passed on himself. When he finally tore himself away from her, with a promise to call her the next day, the thought of Vietnam had been banished by the sweetness of her mouth, the welcoming scent of her skin, the parting of his lips by her bold little tongue, the great surprise of it all.

Her house was a clapboard wreck with a hippie-run bicycle store on the ground floor, hippie common rooms on the second floor, hippie bedrooms on the third, and Sharon, who detested hippies, in the only habitable room on the fourth. She looked to the world like a harmless small creature, but she had a way of getting what she wanted. The year before, after her sorority had expelled her for violating its rules, the hippies had given her the best room in their house. Among other things, it was the perfect room for uninterrupted sex. Clem would later come to see the wisdom of parietal regulations, which, outmoded norms of behavior aside, served to keep undergraduates from falling into a pit of pleasure and neglecting their studies, but on his second visit he’d gone up to her room in all innocence. After some hours of necking on her bed, in their clothes, Sharon went to the bathroom and returned wearing only a terrycloth robe. It transpired that she’d got impatient with the necking, also sore of chin and nose. She pushed Clem onto his back and undid his belt buckle. He said, “Wait, though.” She said it was okay, she was on the Pill. She’d lost her own virginity when she was seventeen, an exchange student in Lyon, France. The family she’d boarded with had an older son who went to the university but lived at home and was her lover for two and a half months, until they were detected. The ensuing shitstorm had resulted in her being sent home to Eltonville. A monumental embarrassment, she said, but worth it. After exchanging letters for a year, her lover had found someone else and she’d had further adventures on which she didn’t care to elaborate. Clem, supine, his belt unbuckled, was still trying to slow things down, to extend a discussion that seemed mandatory, when she took off the robe and lay down on him. “It’s easy,” she said. “I’ll show you.” In short order, he found himself looking up at the naked entirety of a girl he might have expected to uncover part by part, with much asking of permission, over a span of weeks or months. Seeing her altogether was such a visual overload he had to shut his eyes against it. She moved up and down on his erection until there was a cracking rip in the fabric of the universe. She fell forward and kissed him with her indeed very abraded mouth. He needed to know if she’d liked what had just happened. She said she had, very much. But, he persisted, had she…? “All in good time,” she said. “I’ll show you.”

For a twenty-year-old farm girl from southern Illinois, Sharon knew a lot about sex. Some of it she’d learned in France, the rest she knew from reading books. To Clem the most shocking thing she knew was that she really, really liked to have her vulva licked. Licking a vulva hadn’t been on his most distant radar; the Latin word for it, although he’d seen it in a dictionary, had only been a word. If pressed, he might have guessed that it was a technique for seasoned lovers, a sort of hard drug to which ordinary intercourse was a gateway. He certainly couldn’t have imagined doing it with a girl who was still confusing the names of his two brothers. Still less could he have imagined loving it. The only thing better than seeing and smelling and tasting her vulva was the moment when he got to put his penis in it; and therein lay the problem.

He now saw that his supposed self-discipline, the outstanding study habits his parents and his teachers had always praised, had not been discipline at all. He’d excelled at school because he’d enjoyed learning things, not because he had superior willpower. As soon as Sharon introduced him to more intense forms of pleasure, he discovered how hopelessly undeveloped the muscles of his will really were. He found himself skipping organic chem lab for hardly any reason, just to take a long walk with her, not even to have sex, just to be near her. He had his first experience of fellatio on a morning when he should have been in Roman history. He failed to prepare for his cellular biology midterm because putting his penis in Sharon’s vulva had offered more pleasure, in the moment, than studying did. What this said about his self-control was bad enough. Worse yet was how it undermined his best moral argument for keeping his deferment—the idea that he could better serve humanity by working diligently at school, becoming a leader in the field of science, than by serving as a grunt in Vietnam. If he couldn’t keep his grade point average above 3.5, he truly had no right to a deferment.

Sharon, for her part, was wonderfully untroubled. She couldn’t be drafted, and she only took the kind of courses where a gifted writer got an automatic A. She could outline a paper just by talking it through with Clem, whereas he needed to study hard, by himself, to memorize organic radicals. She was a true reader, accustomed to solitude, and preferred having no friends to having friends less remarkable than she was. Clem didn’t have good friends at U of I yet himself, but one of his science study mates, Gus, had asked him to room with him, clearly hoping to deepen their friendship, and now Gus was barely speaking to him, because Clem had hurt his feelings by spending all his time with Sharon. She was every bit as hungry for pleasure as he was, but it didn’t seem to derail her life the way it did his. She was never in a hurry to be somewhere, and he’d come to crave what she did to his sense of time, her serene indifference to the clock, nearly as much as he craved her body. As long as he could stay curled up inside her neatly ordered life, as if it were his own life, and never leave her room, he felt all right. Only when he left her room was he engulfed by anxiety, and only by returning could he relieve it.

Though he would have denied it, vehemently, if she’d asked him, another reason he preferred to be in her room was that he felt awkward with her in public. The difficulty, such as it was, lay not in what she was in herself. He was proud of her intelligence, proud of her pretty face and prettier figure, proud of her limpidly unaffected manner. The difficulty lay in what she was in relation to him, namely, fourteen inches shorter. She had never, not once, made reference to their height difference, and he hated himself for even being aware of it. The way the world judged people by their physical appearance, which they had no control over, and which had nothing to do with their mind or their personality, was totally unjust. In theory, he was happy to be so much taller than Sharon, because it demonstrated his commitment to equality and to the marriage of true minds, irrespective of physical impediment. In practice, too, when they were alone in bed, the almost illicit littleness of her naked body was an added turn-on. But in public, try as he might, he couldn’t help feeling that people were staring at them and drawing conclusions about him.

At Thanksgiving, when he went home to New Prospect and saw Becky, who was now a fully grown woman, his discomfort had become acute. Becky and her friends, especially Jeannie Cross, were so resplendent that they might have been a different species, and Becky had made an uncharacteristically cutting remark about the height difference of Tanner Evans and Laura Dobrinsky. Although Clem had looked forward to telling his sister that he had a girlfriend, he sensed right away that Becky had no interest in Sharon—didn’t want to meet her, didn’t want to hear about her, wouldn’t approve of her. When he proceeded to gush about the beauty of Sharon’s mind, and to describe the extremity of her allure, the depth of the sensual pit he’d fallen into, his words sounded hollow and abstract. The whole conversation was deeply embarrassing. He came away from it ashamed of his sexuality, ashamed by extension of Sharon herself, and more painfully aware of their dimensional incongruity. Their relationship, which until then had seemed open-ended, now felt temporary, as if Sharon were merely his “first girlfriend,” the sweet but dimensionally unsuitable person with whom he’d lost his virginity. Intentionally or not, Becky had caused him to scrutinize his feelings for Sharon, and he found them lacking. They weren’t rugged enough for him to declare to his sister, “I don’t care about your superficial judgment, she’s the person I love,” and they weren’t powerful enough—didn’t strongly enough suggest an enduring future of togetherness—to serve as an argument against giving up his student deferment. They were more like an escape, a reprieve, from his moral duty.

He’d returned to school with a strict plan for himself. He would see Sharon only two evenings a week, and not stay over at her house at all, and he would study ten hours every day and try to ace every one of his finals and term papers. If he ran the table with A-pluses, he could still keep his GPA above 3.5—the figure which, though basically arbitrary, was his last plausible defense against the action he would otherwise be called upon to take.

His plan was sensible but not, it turned out, achievable. When he stopped by Sharon’s house, it was as if they’d been apart for five months, not five days. He had a thousand things to tell her, and as soon as he took down her corduroys it seemed mean and silly to have worried about their height difference. Not until he returned to his room, the following afternoon, did he lament his lack of willpower. He recalibrated his plan, assigning himself eleven hours of daily study, and stuck to this schedule until Friday, when he treated himself to another evening with Sharon. By the time he left her, on Sunday afternoon, he would have had to study fifteen hours a day to make the numbers work. He told himself that he was living in the moment, like an existentialist, and savoring their togetherness while it lasted, but he sensed something darker going on. Something almost spiteful—as if, by surrendering to Sharon’s elastic sense of time, and thereby ensuring that his grades would suffer, which would leave him no moral choice but to drop out of school, he were secretly preparing to punish her. She had no inkling of what the figure 3.5 signified to him, but she would understand it soon enough, and rue that she hadn’t insisted that he study.

What had made the coming punishment crueler was that Sharon was giving signs of loving him in an old-fashioned, romantic, totalizing way. Despite having presented herself as a free spirit, a Colette-reading sexual adventurer, and despite being too sophisticated to use mushy language, she seemed to have a longer-range vision for the two of them. No sooner had he told her about his conversation with his sister at Thanksgiving, the bequest from their aunt, than she’d become fixated on going to Europe with him. She respected him for refusing the money Becky had offered, but why not at least accept a free vacation? Wouldn’t it be amazing to be together in France? The two of them visiting the same places as his sister and his mother, but doing their own thing? Whenever she returned to the idea, to add or subtract some stop on their mythical itinerary, Clem simply closed his eyes and smiled. In his secret heart, he already knew that he would write to the draft board. The overriding reason to do it was that it was morally correct. He had further important reasons relating to his father and to Sharon, to whom he wanted to prove how seriously he’d taken her ideas, and who he hoped would admire the rightness of his action and compare him favorably with her brother Mike. And yet, ridiculously, in the waning days of the semester, as the reality of his academic failures had sunk in, the most salient attraction of forfeiting his deferment had been to avoid going to France with his girlfriend and his sister.

The morning sky was growing darker, not lighter, when he reached her house. He had a key he never used—despite a recent bicycle theft, the hippies refused to lock their back door. He let himself into the murk of their kitchen and hurried past the cheese-crusted crockery piled in and around the sink, which existed in a kind of hippie equilibrium, a steady state in which new dirty dishes were added at exactly the same rate that someone bothered to wash the older ones. Most of the hippies were too placidly self-absorbed to even know his name, but he’d received many a knowing smile in passing, and he was glad not to encounter anyone as he made his way upstairs. He sensed that the sum of his identity, in that house, consisted of being the dude who was boning the little chick on the fourth floor, which was uncomfortably close to a fair summation.

Sharon, in flannel pajamas, was mixing something at the plywood counter of the makeshift kitchenette outside her room. Clem stooped to kiss her curls and put his arms around her from behind. In his disordered mind, he was already halfway a soldier, arriving to do what soldiers did with a woman, but she shrugged him off playfully. “I’m making toast with sugar and cinnamon.”

“I’m not sure I can face food right now.”

“When was the last time you ate?”

“Sometime yesterday. I had a tuna-salad sub.”

“You definitely need food. But first—” She crouched to open her little refrigerator. “I bought champagne.”

“Champagne.”

“To celebrate.” She handed him the cold bottle. “You didn’t believe me, but I knew you could do it.”

Typing out fifteen pages of C-level work in sixty hours didn’t seem like such a feat to Clem. “Champagne, Urbana,” he said.

“Exactly.”

Drinking anything alcoholic, at nine in the morning, in his condition, was ill-advised, but Sharon had definite ideas about how things should be done, and he didn’t want to disappoint her. He peeled the foil off the bottle and popped the cork.

“To us,” she said when he’d filled two jelly glasses. “To Scipio Africanus!”

“Don’t even say that name. I spent all night typing Scipoi and having to erase it.”

“Just to us, then.”

She stood on tiptoe for a kiss that he bent down to give her. He caught an exciting, catfoody whiff of degraded semen from his several deposits of it in her on Monday. She took her glass and the bottle into her bedroom, and he followed her like a dog. She sat propped against the pillows on her bed while he pawed her feet, massaging her bare soles with his thumbs. The champagne was making her exceedingly lovely. Far from easing his announcement to her, it was inviting him to calculate when he would have to leave her house to intercept the postal worker emptying the mailbox and get his letter back. On the theory that his brain cells needed readily absorbable glucose to regain higher function, he drained his glass.

She immediately refilled it. “You said you had something to tell me?”

He fell back onto the bed and looked up at the canted ceiling, his vision spinning. The light coming in through her dormer seemed detached from any specific hour, by its grayness and by his body clock’s confusion, the feeling that today was still yesterday and morning had followed afternoon without an intervening night.

“I have something to tell you, too,” she said.

It occurred to him that he’d never kissed her feet. They were tiny and high-arched, their soles soft and cool, a balm to his fevered cheeks. She laughed and pulled them away.

“Sorry,” she said. “That tickles.”

He had no basis for comparison, but it was possible to worry that not all girls—perhaps very few girls—were as sweetly direct as Sharon about what they liked and didn’t like. Possible to worry that few girls could have been more generous, more forgiving of his blunders, more tolerant of his incessant wish for intercourse, more interested in having it herself, less given to tears or pouting, less emotionally demanding, than Sharon had been. Possible, indeed, to worry that the three months now ending had amounted to a little Eden, an earthly paradise that he’d been stupid-lucky to land in and was a fool to be destroying. He thought of the November morning when he’d watched her hobble to the bathroom, like an old woman, and had understood how miserably sore he’d made her in his pursuit of one last, negligible orgasm. He remembered how she’d hobbled back to bed, how he’d castigated himself and begged her forgiveness, and how she’d simply laughed it off, C’est l’amour. He’d been living in an inverse Eden, whose Eve had eaten the apple and shared her delicious knowledge with him. Why, oh why, did he have to destroy it?

He reckoned that he could leave her room as late as 10:45 and still be back at the mailbox before a postal worker got there. For that matter, he could spend the whole morning with her and write a second letter to say he’d changed his mind and was keeping his deferment.

“Are you falling asleep?” she said.

“Not at all.”

“Let me make you some toast.”

“No, I’m okay. Champagne is like a glucose bomb.”

He pressed his palm between her legs, testing the spring of the curls beneath the flannel. He moved up for a closer view while he pulled down her pajama bottoms. Oh, the beauty of what he uncovered! The inexhaustibleness of its invitation! It was true that, if he’d been as forthright in his preferences as she was in hers, he might have asked her to leave her pajama top on. He was on friendly enough terms with her breasts, but he’d gained access to them so early on that he hadn’t had time to become properly fascinated with them, as a treasure to dream of uncovering, and they’d seemed a bit irrelevant ever since. He liked them better in a bra. Best of all would be to have her top-clad and bottomless, like a collegiate female faun, Honors student above the waist, creature of his wettest dreams below. But he’d never found a way to express this preference uninsultingly, and she seemed to prefer being fully naked.

She shed her pajama top and tugged on the shoulders of his shirt. She liked him naked, too—considered it especially bad form to leave one’s socks on—but this morning he didn’t feel like undressing. He’d had a taste of aggression and felt like doing what he wanted, even if he couldn’t tell her what to do. He had an image of a soldier fucking in his boots, defended by his clothes. When she tugged again on his shirt, he resisted.

“Are you cold?”

“No.”

He set about the only work for which he’d lately had ambition. Spread out before the horizon of her rib cage, sloping into the valley of her navel and up to a grove of wiry curls too close to be in focus, were the mobile white plains of her belly. Her hands, to either side, gripped the bed as she regulated contact with his tongue. He was amazed by his body’s reserves of energy; it spoke to the primacy of reproductive function to an organism. No matter how he’d lashed his brain cells with cigarettes, they’d been too spent to pull weight in his final pages on Scipio Africanus, and yet here were the muscles of his neck and tongue, indefatigable, soldiering forward on the promise of a reward accruing not even to them but to his penis. His neck postponed its aching, his temples their pounding with champagne, his eyes the resumption of their burning, until he could obey the deeper animal imperative and release its boiling madness.

She gave a sharp cry. For a moment, rocked by its own galvanism, her body seemed to dismember itself. He lingered to push his tongue as far into her as it would reach, to taste what his penis couldn’t, and then moved up to look into her eyes. They were beady, the darkest of browns; her smile was lopsided, as if he’d broken it. He put a pillow under her butt, the way she liked it, and pulled his pants halfway down. It bordered on miraculous how completely her little person accommodated him. He lowered his full weight onto her and lay still, trying to etch into his memory the feel of total penetration. He wondered how many months or years it would be before he next felt it with someone.

“Are you all right?” she said.

“Yeah. Just pausing.”

“You know what I was imagining? That we were together in Paris. That we got caught in a thunderstorm and went back to our hotel room soaking wet. I was imagining you making me come while the rain came down harder and harder on the boulevards.”

Even the word come could not overcome the turnoff of picturing them in Paris. The four of them standing in line to get inside the Louvre. Becky tall and clean and radiantly good-natured, his mother studying a guidebook and making some wry comment about it—he hated to imagine Sharon in that picture. He hated to imagine himself, condemned every morning to lie in a heavily fucked-upon French bed where everything was hot and red and sleep-depriving, with crusted semen on the sheets, condemned to wishing he could be wherever Becky was instead, maybe downstairs in a breakfast room with fresh napkins and baguettes, she and their mother having some lively conversation that he would have liked to be a part of. Becky he never regretted being near, because nearness was all he wanted from his sister. When he pictured himself and Sharon entering that Parisian breakfast room, stinking of après-sex cigarettes, their eyes red and puffy-lidded, the glowing image of Becky receded and faded like an angel’s. Even in the real world, he was losing her—had been losing her ever since the night in September when Sharon had taken off her bathrobe. The more Sharon was in the picture, the less Becky could be. His penis was deflating.

“Oh, baby,” Sharon said. “You must be so tired.”

He nodded, glad to let her think that.

“I have an idea, though,” she said. “I was thinking we could both come back here right after Christmas. Do you want to do that? We could spend all day reading ahead for classes and be together every night. I don’t want you to feel like you’re falling behind with your work because of me.”

He’d burned through all his glucose. The imperative had dwindled to nothing.

“But that’s not the thing I wanted to tell you.” She repositioned herself to look into his eyes. “Can I tell you something important? I’ve been wanting to say it for weeks now.”

He waited with dull dread.

“I’m in love with you,” she said. “Am I allowed to say that?”

It was exactly as he’d feared.

“I am so in love with you, baby.”

It was exactly as he’d feared, but somehow the effect was the opposite of what he might have expected. A wave of masculine well-being was sweeping through his body. The knowledge that he fully possessed this person, the thrill of that conquest, and something more savage, the sudden enhancement of his capacity to inflict pain on her: it was hitting him like a full-bore shot of testosterone. The imperative stormed back to life, and he unthinkingly obeyed it, with a thrust. It was astonishing how different it felt to be inside a woman he’d caused to fall in love with him, how comprehensively his genital nerves now felt connected to her. It was almost as if, until this moment, he’d never had sex. He gave another thrust. The pleasure was outrageous.

“So, what do you think?” she said.

“I think you’re amazing,” he said, humping away.

“Okay.” She faintly nodded, as if to herself.

He paused and lowered his face to kiss the mouth that had spoken the magic words. She turned her face away from his.

“Why didn’t you want to take your clothes off today?”

“I don’t know. It seemed like it might be exciting, somehow.”

Again the dubious little nod.

“Sharon,” he pleaded. He knew that a conversation needed to be had, and that it would not be a good conversation, but his very strong preference was to have it just a little bit later. By way of expressing this preference, he shut his eyes and moved his hips again. The pleasure was undiminished, but she immediately spoke again.

“I want you to say you’re in love with me, too.”

He opened his eyes. As far back as September, when the needle of his mind had stuck in a groove playing Sharon, he’d had the impulse to say he was in love with her. He’d suppressed it because he was following her lead in everything and had gathered that romantic declarations weren’t comme il faut. It was true that, after his crisis at Thanksgiving, he’d been glad he’d kept his mouth shut earlier. But now he could feel, in his own nerves, how transformative it might be for Sharon to hear the magic words from him. It was so transformative, in fact, that he felt he could speak them with some honesty.

“You don’t even have to mean it,” she said. “I’m just curious how it feels to hear it.”

He nodded and said, “I’m not in love with you.”

It took him a moment to realize that his tongue had slipped. He truly hadn’t meant to say that. He was aghast.

“Say you are, though,” she said.

“I was trying to. It just came out wrong.”

“To put it mildly!”

He extended his arms, looked down at their furry point of contact, and shook his head against a bitter truth in him. “I … I don’t know what I am. I don’t think I can say it.”

Her face twisted up as if the truth had scalded it.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

“It’s okay.” She managed a wry smile. “I tried.”

“God, Sharon, I am so sorry.”

“It’s really okay. You can go ahead and finish.”

She was generous to the last, but even in his supremely inflamed state he understood the wrongness of taking more pleasure from her now. He started to withdraw.

“No, do it,” she said, trying to pull him back in. “Just forget I said that thing.”

“I can’t.”

She was weeping. “Please do it. I want you to.”

He couldn’t. He remembered the sex talk, or what had passed for a sex talk, that his mother had given him before he left for college. Whatever else he might hear on campus, she’d said, sex without commitment was empty and ruinous. This was the ancient wisdom. As with the parietal rules, he was realizing too late that old people weren’t entirely stupid. Beneath him was a weeping girl to prove it.

Getting out of bed made him conscious of the obscenity of his erection. While Sharon lay and wept, he yanked up his jeans and put on his peacoat. In the hippie bedroom below them, a familiar bass line started up, the same Who album they’d been hearing for weeks. He shook Sharon’s pack of cigarettes, pulled one out with his lips, and struck a match. Back in September, he’d tried one of her Parliaments and liked it. By the time he’d realized that smoking, like sex, did not in itself confer manhood, he was wretchedly addicted.

“Can I make you some toast?” he said.

No answer. Sharon had pulled the bedspread onto herself and was facing the wall, her crying detectable only as a faint shaking of her curls. Her bed was a double mattress on a box spring, her desk a hollow-core door on sawhorses, her bookshelves pine one-by-tens with cinder-block supports. He remembered his first sight of her books, the great quantity of French-language paperbacks, the austere whiteness and uniformity of their spines. Back then, three months ago, he couldn’t have imagined anything sexier in a woman than high intelligence. Even now, if he and she had been all mind and genitals and nothing else, he might have imagined a future for them.

He wondered if he should simply leave now—whether this would be the kind thing to do or the cowardly thing. He’d planned to break up with her by letter because he wanted to speak to her mind-to-mind, rationally, well clear of the inviting pit. But now he’d hurt her, and she was crying. Maybe the situation spoke for itself? Maybe further talk would only be hurtful? He sat down on the edge of her bed, drew smoke into his abused lungs, and waited to see what he would do. Again the existential freedom, to speak or not to speak. Beneath the floor, the Who continued their thumping.

“I’m not coming back next semester,” he heard himself say. “I’m dropping out.”

Sharon rolled over immediately and stared at him, her cheeks wet.

“I’m giving up my deferment,” he said. “I’m going to do whatever they want me to do, which probably means Vietnam.”

“That’s insane!”

“Really? You were the one who said it was the right thing to do.”

“No, no, no.” She sat up and hugged the bedspread to her chest. “It’s already unbearable that Mike is there. You can’t do that to me.”

“I’m not doing it to you. I’m doing it because it’s right. My lottery number is nineteen. It’s just like you said—I should have gone already.”

“God, Clem, no. That is insane.”

In the year of his childhood when his genius brother had been old enough to play chess and young enough to be beaten, Clem had always, before moving to checkmate, asked Perry if he was sure about the last move he’d made. He’d considered this a gracious question for an older brother to ask, until one day Perry had choked up with tears—as a little kid, Perry had always been crying about one thing or another—and told Clem to stop rubbing it in. It was unclear to him now why he’d imagined that Sharon’s response would be any different.

“Vietnam won’t kill me,” he said. “We’re out of ground combat.”

“When did you start thinking this? Why didn’t you tell me?”

“I’m telling you now.”

“Is it because I said I was in love with you?”

“No.”

“It was a mistake to say that. I don’t even know if it’s true. It’s like there are these words, they’re out there in the world, and you start wondering what it would be like to say them. Words have their own power—they create the feeling, just by the fact of your saying them. I’m so sorry I tried to make you say them. I love that you were honest with me. I love—oh, shit.” She slumped, crying again. “I am in love with you.”

He took a last puff on his cigarette and carefully mashed it out in her ashtray. “It wasn’t anything you said. I already sent the letter.”

She looked at him uncomprehendingly.

“I mailed it on the way over here.”

“No! No!” She began to beat on him with her little fists, not painfully. The sex scent rising off her and the aggression of his speech act inflamed him afresh. He thought of the time he’d staggered around her room with her impaled on him, how her smallness had made this excellent thing practicable. Fearful of falling back into the pit after so nearly breaking free of it, he grabbed her wrists and made her look at him.

“You’re a wonderful person,” he said. “You’ve totally changed my life.”

“That’s a good-bye!” she wailed. “I don’t want a good-bye!”

“I’ll write to you. I’ll tell you everything.”

“No, no, no.”

“Can’t you see this isn’t equal? I love who you are, but I’m not in love with you.”

“Now I wish I’d never met you!”

She threw herself onto the foot of the bed. The pity he felt was infinitely realer than the idea of being a soldier. He pitied her for being so small and loving him, and for the logical bind in which he’d put her, and for the irony of her having made him the person who would leave her, by introducing him to more existential forms of knowledge. He wanted to stay and explain, to talk about Camus, to remind her of the necessity of exercising moral choice, to make her understand how indebted he was to her. But he didn’t trust his animal self.

He leaned over and pressed his face into her hair. “I do love you,” he said.

“If you loved me, you wouldn’t leave,” she replied in a clear, angry voice.

He shut his eyes and was instantly half asleep. He forced them open. “I’ve got to go pack up my room.”

“You’re breaking my heart. I hope you know that.”

The only way out of the pit was to stand up, be strong, and walk away. When he opened her door and heard her cry out—“Wait!”—it nearly broke his own heart. Shutting the door behind him, he was seized by a spasming that he was surprised to recognize as sobbing. It was wholly autonomic, as uncontrollable as vomiting but less familiar—he hadn’t cried since the day Martin Luther King was assassinated. In a salty blur, he ran down a damply carpeted flight of stairs, past a thudding mass of Who sound in which the treble now was audible, down through a sharp smell of morning pot ignited in the common rooms, and out into cold, gray Urbana.

Five hours later, at the bus station, where snow had begun to fall, he handed over his duffel bag and his mammoth suitcase, the lugging of which across campus he’d taken as a foretaste of basic training, and claimed one of the last free seats on the Chicago bus. It was an aisle seat deep in the smoking section, with a baby shrieking in the seat directly behind it. Clem was missing Sharon so much, was aching so steadily at the lost hope of any future meeting, was feeling so persistently close to further tears, that he might as well have been in love with her. Though greater concentrations of smoke than were already in the bus could hardly be achieved, he took a cigarette from his peacoat, flipped up the lid of his seat’s ashtray, and tried to suppress his emotions with nicotine. The monstrous job of breaking Sharon’s heart was behind him, but there was still more work ahead of him today.

Camus was wholly admirable, and his thinking made sense when Clem and Sharon discussed it. When Clem was alone, though, he could see a problem with Camus. Perhaps because he was French, Camus was a closet Cartesian—he assumed the existence of a unitary consciousness that rationally deliberated moral choices, when in fact a person’s real motives were complex and uncontrollable. Clem, borrowing from Sharon, had a good moral argument for giving up his student deferment. But if the moral argument were all he’d had, he might not have written to the draft board. Other strong choices were available. For example, he could have worked to raise public awareness of the immorality of deferments; he could have broken up with Sharon simply because their relationship made it hard for him to study. The particular choice he’d made was aimed squarely at his father.

For the longest time, for more than sixteen years, Clem had admired his father precisely for his strength. In the beginning, in Indiana, where the parish house had been decaying faster than his father could keep up with its maintenance, Clem had been awed, even frightened, by the roping and contraction of his father’s large muscles when he swung a pickax or drove a nail; by the torrents of sweat that ran off him when he scythed weeds on a hot August day. The sweat had a unique, indefinable scent—not stinky, more like the smell of a young toadstool or fresh rain, but still upsetting to Clem in its intensity. (It was a revelation, much later, when he worked for the nursery in New Prospect, to catch the exact same smell from his own soaking T-shirts. As far as he knew, no one in the world except him and his father produced that smell. He wondered, indeed, if anyone else could smell it.) One push from his father at a swing set had sent him so high that he clutched the chains in fear of falling off. One mild flick of his father’s wrist, and a baseball came at Clem so hard it stung his palm through his glove. And the yelling. His father’s voice, raised in anger (always at Clem, never at Becky), was a sound so blasting that a spanking, which his father did not believe in giving children, might almost have been preferable.

In Chicago, he’d come to appreciate his father’s moral strength as well. When he read To Kill a Mockingbird, in junior high, he recognized Atticus Finch and felt proud. His political views were a perfect replica of his father’s, and they must have been authentic, because they survived his mother’s praise of them. He shared his father’s abhorrence of the Vietnam War and his belief that the struggle for civil rights was the defining issue of the day. During his father’s campaign to desegregate New Prospect’s public swimming pool, he went ringing doorbells by himself, handing out literature and repeating verbatim his father’s words about racial prejudice. Although he didn’t have his father’s scope of action, didn’t have a pulpit to preach from, didn’t ride a bus to Alabama, he followed his example in smaller ways. The jocks at Lifton Central who persecuted the faggots, the wussies, soon learned to keep away from him. When he saw someone weak being picked on, he became so hot with anger and so numbed to pain that he could hold his own in a fight. He mostly wasn’t friends with the kids he defended—they were social pariahs for a reason. He was just doing what his father had taught him was right.

The only sore points between them were religion and Becky. Nothing metaphysical made any sense to Clem, neither God the Father nor, still less, the absurd Holy Spirit, and something had gone wrong from the start regarding Becky, some jealousy or overprotectiveness on his father’s part. Being alone with Becky made Clem aware of a peculiar duality in himself. He would have had a fistfight with anyone who said a word against his father, but he couldn’t stop trying to undermine his sister’s respect for his father’s Christianity. What made this even stranger was that his own ethics were basically Christian. He admired Jesus greatly, as a moral teacher and a champion of the poor and the marginalized. But there was an imp of perversity in him, a sarcastically dissenting alter ego, and being alone with Becky brought it out. He walked her through the absence of evidence for immaterial forces, the lack of hard corroboration for the stories in the Bible, the unprovability of the proposition that God existed, the imperviousness of “miracles” to scientific experiment; and it worked. He made a junior atheist of Becky, and this became another thing that united them, another thing to love about his sister—the way her lip curled whenever God came up at the dinner table.

If he was more circumspect with his own atheism, it was partly out of respect for Jesus and partly because he and his father worked so well together. His father was patient in teaching him to use tools, and Clem, no matter how tired he got, refused to be the first to quit when the two of them were moving earth or raking leaves or painting walls. He wanted his father’s approval, for his work ethic no less than for his politics, and he appreciated how frequently and warmly his father expressed it—he couldn’t have asked for a better dad in this regard. When he started tenth grade, and his father had the inspiration of reorienting his church’s youth fellowship toward a work camp in Arizona, Clem saw no reason to let metaphysics stand in the way of joining it.

Rick Ambrose had come aboard at the same time. During the first year, when he was a full-time seminarian and only a part-time fellowship adviser, Ambrose had worn his hair short, shaved his face, and deferred to the associate minister. But after the political tumult of the following summer—Clem had campaigned for Eugene McCarthy, working alongside his father, who in August had his lip split open while trying to intervene between cops and protesters in Grant Park—Ambrose returned to the fellowship with long hair and a Fu Manchu. Some of the boys from the church, notably Tanner Evans, had adopted the same look. There was a new rowdiness on Sunday nights, a new impatience with authority, as long-haired kids from other churches, or from no church at all, started showing up at meetings, but it never occurred to Clem to worry about his father. Who cared if an ordained minister still carried a Bible and started every meeting with a metaphysical prayer? MLK had been devout, and no one had admired him any less for it. Clem didn’t know a man who worked more passionately for social justice than his father, and when you really loved someone, the whole person, you simply accepted the little things you might have wished were different. He could see eyes being rolled when his father waxed religious at a fellowship meeting, but Becky herself rolled her eyes like that. It didn’t mean she didn’t love him.

By the spring of 1969, the group was so large that two chartered buses were waiting in the church parking lot on the first afternoon of Easter vacation. Two separate work camps were planned for Arizona, and it would have made sense to divide the group by destination. Instead, as quickly became clear, there was a cool bus—identified as such when Ambrose dropped his luggage next to it; promptly mobbed by the Tanner Evans crowd—and an uncool bus, with Clem and his father and the squarer kids from First Reformed. For Clem, a bus was only a means of transport to the thin air of the mesa, the smells of pinyon pine and frybread, the chance to haul rocks and pound nails for a people his country had robbed and oppressed. The whole notion of coolness was puerile. Nobody in New Prospect was more socially desirable than his sister, and he knew for a fact, from the stories Becky had told him, that popular kids had no more substance than unpopular ones. Because he had Becky, he’d never gone out of his way to make friends at school, and the few good friends he did have were not in the fellowship, but he was on friendly enough terms with many of the square kids. Even the sour fat girl, even the compulsive punster, even the immature blurter had interesting things to say if you put them at ease and took the time to listen. This was what Jesus would have done, and Clem felt good about doing it.

His father, however, seemed restless and distracted on the square bus. Their driver was a little slower than the other driver, and his father sat directly behind him, ducking his head to peer down the road, as if he were anxious about falling behind. Clem went to sleep early. When he woke up in the night and saw that his father was still peering through the windshield, he put it down to excitement, anticipation. The real situation didn’t become clear until morning, when their bus caught up with the Ambrose bus, at a Texas Panhandle truck stop, and his father made Ambrose trade places with him.

Theoretically, there was nothing wrong with this. His father was the leader of the group, and it was arguably correct to share his ministerial presence with the other bus. But when Clem saw how eagerly his father bounded onto it, without a backward glance, something shifted inside him. He sensed, in his gut, that his father hadn’t switched buses because it was right. It was because he selfishly wanted to be on the other bus.

That evening, when they rolled into the town of Rough Rock, Arizona, Clem’s instinct was confirmed in the awfulest of ways. In the dark, in a dust cloud lit by headlights, there was a melee of baggage handling as the group sorted itself into the half that would stay in Rough Rock, with his father, and the half going on to the settlement at Kitsillie, up on the mesa, with Ambrose. Weeks earlier, when everyone signed up for one location or the other, Clem had chosen Kitsillie because its primitive conditions suited him, but most of the kids boarding the Kitsillie bus had chosen it because of Ambrose. Among them were Tanner Evans and Laura Dobrinsky, their musician friends, and the group’s cutest girls. The bus was fully loaded and ready to go, missing only Ambrose, when Clem’s father climbed aboard with his duffel bag.

There had been, he said, a change of plan. It would be better, he’d decided, if he led the Kitsillie contingent and let Rick stay in Rough Rock, where there was dormitory housing. After a moment of stunned silence, the bus erupted with cries of protest from Laura Dobrinsky and her friends, but it was too late. The driver had already closed the door. His father took the aisle seat by Clem and clapped him on the knee. “This is great,” he said. “You and I get to spend a whole week together. It’s better, don’t you think?”

Clem said nothing. From farther back in the bus came urgent, angry female whispering. His father had trapped him in the window seat and he thought he might die if he didn’t get away. The shame of being the son of this man was new to him and searingly painful. It wasn’t that he cared how he personally looked to the cool kids. It was how weak his father had made himself look to them, by abusing his petty authority to commandeer their bus. And now his father was using him, being all fatherly, so as to pretend that he’d done nothing wrong.

The pretending continued on the mesa. The old man seemed willfully blind to how much the Kitsillie group resented him for taking Ambrose’s place. He didn’t seem to realize that he was nearly fifty, twice as old as Ambrose, not interchangeable. Yes, he was stronger and more skilled than Ambrose, and, yes, he was full of energy—returning to the mesa, reconnecting with the Navajos, walking the land he loved, always fired him up. But every morning, when he organized the work crews, no one volunteered to be in his. When he went ahead and selected a crew, and busied himself with tools and supplies for the day, a funny thing happened: every girl in his crew who was friends with Laura Dobrinsky traded places with someone from a different crew. He had to have noticed this, and yet he never said a word about it. Maybe he was too cowardly to make an issue of it. Or maybe he didn’t care what the girls thought of him. Maybe all he’d wanted was to prevent them from spending the week with their beloved Ambrose.

Clem was a crew leader himself, the only non-adult to whom his father gave responsibility. A year earlier, this expression of trust would have thrilled him, but now he was merely grateful that he never had to be in his father’s crew. During the day, hard physical labor dulled his fear of returning to the schoolhouse where the group was camping out, but the shame was always waiting there at dinnertime. He felt obliged, by his principles, to eat with his father, who was otherwise shunned, and to submit to his fraudulently hearty talk about the trench he was digging for a septic line. Seeing his peers all laughing and eating together, Clem felt uniquely cursed and isolated. He wished he were the son of someone—anyone—else.

It was a fellowship tradition to gather as a group around a single candle after dinner and share thoughts and feelings about the day. Every night at Kitsillie, there was a wall of stony silence from the cool girls. Late in the week, his father went so far as to ask the prettiest of them, Sally Perkins, if she had anything to tell the group. Sally just stared at the candle and shook her head. Her refusal to speak was so pointed, the tension around the candle so high, that it ought to have triggered a full-on confrontation, but Tanner Evans knew exactly when to strike a chord on his twelve-string and lead the group in song.

If Clem’s father was relieved to avoid a confrontation, he shouldn’t have been. The explosion that followed ten days later, at the first Sunday meeting after the Arizona trip, was more violent for having been suppressed. The evening was unusually hot for April, the fellowship meeting room as airless and rafter-smelling as an attic. Everyone was in a hurry to get downstairs for activities, and most of the room quieted when Clem’s father stepped forward to deliver his opening prayer. He glanced at Sally Perkins and her friends, who were continuing to talk, and raised his voice. “Heavenly Father,” he said.

“This room could sure use an air conditioner,” Sally remarked, loudly, to Laura Dobrinsky.

“Sally,” Rick Ambrose growled from a corner of the room.

“What.”

“Be quiet.”

After a pause, Clem’s father tried again. “Heavenly Father—”

“No!” Sally said. “I’m sorry, but no. I’m sick of his stupid prayers.” She jumped to her feet and looked around the room. “Is anyone else here as sick of them as I am? He already ruined my spring trip. I’m literally going to throw up if he keeps doing this.”

The contempt in her voice was shocking. Whatever might be happening in the country at large, however angrily authority was being questioned, nobody could speak like this at church.

“I’m sick of it, too,” Laura Dobrinsky said, standing up. “So that makes two of us. Anyone else?”

En masse, the rest of the cool girls stood up. The heat in the room was suffocating Clem. Laura Dobrinsky addressed his father directly.

“The younger Navajos don’t like you, either,” she said. “They’re sick of being ministered to. They don’t want a white guy condescending to them and telling them what his white God wants them to do. Are you even aware of how you sound to other people? Maybe you had a good thing going with the elders, way back when. And maybe they’re still cool with that. But they’re elders. The missionary bullshit won’t cut it anymore.”

Rick Ambrose was glowering at his boots, his arms tightly crossed. Clem’s father’s face had gone white. “May I say something?” he said.

“How about trying to listen for a change?” Laura said.

“If I can do nothing else, Laura, I believe I do know how to listen. It is my job to listen.”

“How about listening to yourself, then? I don’t see much evidence of that.”

“Laura,” Ambrose said.

Laura turned on him. “You’re defending him? Because he’s, what, the ordained minister? That’s a strike against him as far as I’m concerned.”

“If you have an issue with Russ,” Ambrose said, “you should take it up with him directly.”

“That’s exactly what I’m doing.”

“One on one.”

“Fuck that. I have no interest in that.” Laura addressed Clem’s father again. “I have no interest in a relationship with you.”

“I’m very sorry to hear you say that, Laura.”

“Yeah? I seriously don’t think I’m the only one here who feels that way.”

“I don’t either,” Sally Perkins said. “I don’t want to have a relationship with you. In fact, I don’t even want to be in this group if you’re in it.”

More than half the group was on its feet now. Over the tumult of voices came Ambrose’s bellowing. “Sit DOWN. Everyone SIT DOWN NOW and SHUT THE FUCK UP.”

The mob obeyed him. Though Ambrose was technically subordinate to Clem’s father, everyone knew who the group’s real leader was: who was strong and who was weak.

“We’re going to skip the prayer tonight,” Ambrose said. “Is that okay with you, Russ?”

The older man nodded meekly. He was weak! weak!

“You’re not listening to us,” Laura Dobrinsky said. “You don’t get it. We’re telling you either he goes or we go.”

There were shouts of agreement, and Clem couldn’t stand it. However ashamed he’d been of his father in Arizona, he couldn’t stand to see a weak person beaten up. He raised his hand and waved it. “Can I say something?”

Immediately all eyes were on him. Ambrose nodded with approval, and Clem stood up unsteadily, his face burning.

“I can’t believe how mean you guys are being,” he said. “You’re going to walk away because you don’t like a two-minute prayer? I’m not into it, either, but I’m not here for prayers. I’m here because we’re a community committed to service to the poor and the downtrodden. And you know what? My dad has been committed to that for longer than anyone here has been alive. He’s more committed than anyone in this room. I think that ought to count for something.”

He sat down again. A girl next to him touched his arm supportively.

“Clem is right,” Ambrose said. “We need to respect each other. If we don’t have the guts to work through this as a group, we don’t deserve to call ourselves a community.”

Sally Perkins was staring at Clem’s father. She seemed to take cruel satisfaction in his inability to look at her. “No,” she said.

“Sally,” Ambrose said.

“Let’s put it to a vote,” she said. “How many people want to stay in this group if he’s in it?”

“We’re absolutely not doing that,” Ambrose said.

“Then I’m leaving.”

She stood up again. More than half the group stood up. Clem’s father’s eyes were wide with pain. “I’d like to say something,” he said. “Hear me out, all right? I’m not sure where all this is coming from—”

Laura Dobrinsky laughed and walked out of the room.

“I’m sorry if I’m not the person you want me to be,” the old man said. “I guess I still have a lot to learn from you guys. I care about this group, deeply. We’ve been doing great work, and I’d like to help us continue to do that. If you want Rick to lead the prayers, or Rick to lead the group, I’m okay with that. But if you care about personal growth, I’d like the chance to experience it myself. I’m asking you to give me that chance.”

Clem experienced a petrification so literal it seemed as if his body might shatter if tapped with a hammer. His father was begging. And not even to any avail. Sally Perkins had walked out, and half the group was following her, crowding the doorway in their eagerness to side with her. The old man watched them with dumb animal bewilderment.

Ambrose, whose position was unenviable, suggested that Russ lead a breathing exercise while he went and reasoned with the defectors. Again the old man nodded submissively. Among the church kids who remained when Ambrose was gone, Clem was surprised to see Tanner Evans.

“I want us all to breathe,” the old man said, a tremor in his voice. “I’m going to lie down—we’re all going to lie down and shut our eyes. All right?”

He was supposed to keep speaking, to lead the group in a visualization, but the only sound was the buzz of the defectors downstairs. As Clem lay in the heat and tried to breathe, his mind went back to Becky: how his father had always wanted her to be his special friend, and had seemed to resent that Clem was also her special friend, had tried to separate her and Clem and have a private relationship with each of them, and how peculiar it was that he’d singled them out, since Becky was popular and Clem could take care of himself. Neither she nor he needed extra attention the way, for example, their younger brother did. Perry was rich in gifts but poor in spirit, and their father, who in public made such a big deal of attending to the poor, found nothing but fault in Perry. And now the same thing had happened in the fellowship. Instead of ministering to the socially needy, his father had tried to separate the popular kids from Ambrose and take them for himself. He wasn’t just weak. He was disgusting—a moral fraud.

Hearing footsteps, Clem sat up and saw his father following Ambrose out of the room. No one was even pretending to do the breathing exercise now. Tanner Evans looked at Clem and shook his head.

“You know what?” Clem said. “I don’t want to talk about it. Can we just not talk about it?”

There were murmurs of relief. His peers understood.

“I’m not quitting the group,” he added. “But I think I might go home now.”

He tottered from the room and down the stairs as if he’d been excused for medical reasons. Back at the parsonage, he went straight to his room and locked the door, picked up an Arthur C. Clarke novel he’d borrowed from the library, and absorbed himself in someone else’s world. Two hours disappeared before he heard a tap on his door.

“Clem?” his father said.

“Go away.”

“May I come in?”

“No. I’m reading.”

“I just want to thank you. Clem. I want to thank you for what you said tonight. Can you open your door?”

“No. Go away.”

The pain his father’s weakness caused him was like an illness, and it persisted in the weeks that followed. At the next Sunday meeting, he reminded himself of Tim Schaeffer, a boy from the group who’d had surgery for brain cancer and returned to meetings for two months before he died. Everyone wanted to be Clem’s partner in trust-building exercises, no one gave him shit if he didn’t feel like opening up with his feelings. Rick Ambrose told him, privately, that he’d witnessed few acts of greater strength and courage than Clem’s standing up to defend his father. Ambrose proceeded to confide in him, ask for his help with logistical decisions, and make an affectionate running joke of his atheism. Never referred to, but obvious to Clem, was Ambrose’s recognition of his need for a new father figure.

He no longer respected the old man. Having glimpsed his fundamental weakness, he now saw it at every turn. Saw him exploiting Becky’s politeness to drag her on their Sunday walks, saw him distancing himself from their mother at church functions and chatting with other men’s wives, heard him blackening Rick Ambrose’s name because young people liked him, heard him reminding people who didn’t need reminding that he’d marched with Stokely Carmichael and integrated the swimming pool, saw him gazing at himself in the bathroom mirror, touching his shaggy eyebrows with his fingertips. The man whose strength Clem had admired now seemed to him a raw blot of egregiousness. Clem couldn’t stand to be in the same room with him. He was giving up his student deferment to show his father what a strong man did.

The smoke in the Chicago-bound bus and the weather outside it were enforcing an early twilight. Snow falling on the cornfields dimmed and smudged the furrows and stubble, the distant cribs. The baby in the seat behind Clem had invented a word, buh, and fallen in love with it. Each time she said it—Buh!—she squealed with fresh delight, at intervals timed perfectly to keep him wide awake. Without his taking any action, the bus was carrying him forward, toward the task of telling his parents that he’d written to the draft board, away from the violence of what he’d done to Sharon. The depth of the violence was becoming ever more apparent, his aching more grievous. The only relief he could imagine was Becky’s blessing.

 

 

 

Disgusted with herself, the overweight person who was Marion fled the parsonage. For breakfast she’d eaten one hard-boiled egg and one piece of toast very slowly, in tiny bites, per the advice of a writer for Redbook who claimed to have shed forty pounds in ten months, and whom Redbook had photographed in a Barbarella sort of jumpsuit, showing off her futuristically insectile waistline, and who had also advised pouring oneself a can of a nationally advertised weight-loss drink in lieu of lunch, engaging in three hours of vigorous exercise each week, repeating mantras such as A moment on the lips, a lifetime on the hips, and buying and wrapping a small present for oneself to open whenever one succeeded in losing x number of pounds. Excepting a decade’s supply of sleeping pills, there was no present that Marion wanted enough to serve as a reward, but she’d duly been going to Tuesday and Thursday morning exercise classes at the Presbyterian church and would have gone there today if Judson hadn’t been home. Deprived of the proper half sandwich, with mayonnaise, to which an hour of Presbyterian calorie-burning would have entitled her, she’d lunched on two stalks of celery with cream cheese in their grooves. These had almost got her out the door, into the chute of an afternoon without temptations, but one of the cookies she’d baked with Judson had broken in half. Seeing it broken on a cooling rack, among its whole fellows, she’d felt sorry for it. She was its Creator, and to eat it was a kind of mercy. But its sweetness had unleashed her appetite. By the time her disgust caught up with her, she’d eaten five more cookies.

In her tennis shoes and her oft-mended gabardine overcoat, she proceeded past trees whose bark was darkened by the moisture their frozenness had condensed, past residential façades no longer promising the marital stability they had in the forties, when they were built. Her gait felt more waddling than striding, but at least she didn’t have to worry about being noticed. Unless it was to pity her for not owning a car, no one gave a thought to a pastor’s wife out walking by herself. As soon as people had met her and identified her position in the community, situated her at the Very Nice end of the all-important niceness spectrum, she became invisible to them. Sexually, there was no angle from which a man on the street might catch a glimpse of her and be curious to see her from a different angle, no point of relief from what she and time had done to her. She’d become invisible especially to her husband in this respect. Invisible to her kids as well—rendered featureless by the dense, warm cloud of momminess through which they apprehended her. Although she considered it possible that not one person in New Prospect actively disliked her, there was no one she could call a close friend. However short on money she was, perennially, she was even poorer in the currency of friendship, the little secrets that friends shared to build trust. She had plenty of secrets, but they were all too large for a pastor’s wife to safely betray.

What she had instead of friends, on the sly, was a psychiatrist, and she was late for her appointment with her. She detested jogging, the thudding downward flesh-tug of her heavy parts, but when she turned onto Maple Avenue she started running with short and shallow steps, which conceivably burned more calories, per unit of distance, than walking did. The houses along Maple were a free-for-all of competitive decoration, their shrubbery and railings and rooflines infested with green plastic vines bearing fruits in dull colors. It wasn’t clear to Marion that the charm of Christmas lights at night was enough to offset how ugly the hardware looked in daylight hours, of which there were many. Nor was it clear that the excitement of Christmas for children was enough to make up for the disenchanted drudgery of it in their adult years, of which there were likewise many.

At Pirsig Avenue, she slowed to a marching pace. The only person in New Prospect who knew she was seeing a psychiatrist was the receptionist at the thriving dentistry practice of Costa Serafimides, in a low brick building near the train station. Dr. Serafimides’s wife, Sophie, saw her psychiatric patients in a small, unmarked room between identical rooms in which plaque was scraped and cavities filled. Anyone who noticed Marion in the waiting room would assume that she was there for such work. Once she was in Sophie’s office, she could hear the squeak of rubber-soled comfort shoes, the whine of motive cords on pulleys, and smell the pleasant antiseptic peculiar to dentistry. The office contained two leather chairs, shelves of reference works, framed certificates (Sofia Serafimides, MD), and a deep-drawered credenza full of drugs. It was like a modernized confessional box, a not greatly secluded place to have the inside of one’s head scraped, with payment exacted not in future Hail Marys but in cash on the spot.

Marion in her early twenties had been a seriously practicing Catholic. She’d believed, at the time, that the Church had saved her life, or at least her sanity, but later on, after she’d met Russ and made herself a level-headed Protestant, she’d come to see her youthful Catholicism as another form of craziness, more sustainable than the form that had landed her in a hospital at the age of twenty, but morbid nonetheless. It was as if, in her Catholic phase, she’d lived under a vault that made the sunniest day dark. She’d been obsessed with sin and redemption, prone to being overwhelmed by the significance of insignificant things—a leaf that fell and landed at her feet, a song she heard playing in two different places on the same day—and paranoid with the sense that God was watching everything she did. When she’d fallen in love with Russ, and had received the wonderfully concrete blessings of her marriage to him, one healthy child after another, each one of them precious enough to have sufficed, she’d closed a mental door on the years when the sun had been dark and her only friend, if one could call an infinite Being a friend, had been God. The incessantly praying girl she’d been at twenty-two signified mainly as the person she was blessed not to be anymore.

Not until the previous spring, when Perry had had his sleep troubles, his problems at school, had she opened the mental door again, to compare his symptoms with what she remembered of her own, and not until her first visit to Sophie Serafimides, in the clinically scented little room, did she experience real nostalgia for her Catholic years. She remembered how soothing the transactions of the confessional had been and how she’d loved the immensity of the Church’s edifice, the majesty of its history, which had made her sins, grievous though they were, feel like tiny drops in a very large bucket—richly precedented, more manageably antique. Christianity as Russ preached and practiced it laid very little stress on sin. Marion had long been inspired, intellectually, by Russ’s conviction that a gospel of love and community was truer to Christ’s teachings than a gospel of guilt and damnation. But lately she’d begun to wonder. She loved her children more than she loved Jesus, whose divinity remained something of a question mark, and whose resurrection from the dead she basically didn’t believe in, but she absolutely believed in God. She could feel His presence inside her and around her all the time. God was there—no less now, when she was fifty, than when she’d been twenty-two. And to love God even a little bit, even only when she happened to ask herself if she did, was to love Him more than she could love any person, even her children, because God was infinite. She wondered if good Protestant churches like First Reformed, in placing so much emphasis on Jesus’s ethical teachings, and thereby straying so far from the concept of mortal sin, were making a mistake. Guilt at First Reformed wasn’t all that different from guilt at the Ethical Culture Society. It was a version of liberal guilt, an emotion that inspired people to help the less fortunate. For a Catholic, guilt was more than just a feeling. It was the inescapable consequence of sin. It was an objective thing, plainly visible to God. He’d seen her eat six sugar cookies, and the name of her sin was gluttony.

As she marched through the Pirsig Avenue business district, she tried not to look at the store windows, whose displays of merchandise reproached her for the gifts she was giving her kids. It was true that Russ opposed the commercialization of Christmas and had set a meager budget for it, but this was hard on the kids, especially Judson, who was growing up in such a prosperous suburb. She’d bought him a football game that a toy-store salesman had assured her every boy wanted but Judson was probably too bright to enjoy for long. For Becky she’d bought a cute suitcase that had been marked down in price, probably because it was the wrong size to be useful. For Clem, as a token of his scientific ambitions, she’d bought a secondhand microscope that was probably obsolete in comparison with the ones at his school. And for Perry—oh, Perry wanted so many things, and would have made creative use of all of them, and was so considerate of her, so much on her wavelength, that he’d hinted only at presents he knew she could afford. She’d bought him the cheapest of cassette recorders, the kind of thing that an appliance store displayed to assure the buyers of other cassette recorders that they weren’t getting the worst one. And all the while, at the back of her hosiery drawer, all the while she’d had an envelope containing the eight hundred dollars in cash she hadn’t yet spent on her sessions with Sophie Serafimides, whom she was paying to be her friend.

Beneath this selfishness lay deeper circles of guilt. She lied and she stole, and once upon a time she’d done far worse than that. She’d lied to her husband from the moment she met him, and she’d lied to her daughter not fifteen minutes ago, on her way out the back door—“I’m late for my exercise class.” She was late, all right. Two hours late for a one-hour class! The dollars in the pocket of her gabardine coat were twenty of the fourteen hundred she’d received from the Wabash Avenue jeweler to whom she’d taken the pearls and the diamond rings she’d set aside when she emptied her sister’s apartment in Manhattan. At the time, as the executrix, she’d told herself that she was redressing an injustice perpetrated by her sister; that Becky already had too much money coming to her and didn’t need costly jewelry. The theft might still have been forgivable if Marion had followed through on her intention to spend the money on Perry and Clem and Judson, to whom Shirley had left nothing. But after her first “hour” with Sophie, in June, when Sophie had suggested that weekly counseling would be more valuable than a sleeping-pill prescription, and had explained her sliding fee scale and asked Marion if she could afford, say, twenty dollars a week, and Marion had replied that she did, in fact, have a small personal fund at her disposal, there was no more denying the evil of her theft.

Thanks to her running on Maple Avenue, she arrived at the dental office just five minutes late. The parking lot was emptier than usual, the waiting room occupied only by a mother and a boy reading Highlights for Children, apparently unconcerned about the oral discomforts awaiting him. That the mother and her son were Black spoke to the liberalism of the Serafimideses, whose educations had taken them not only to the suburbs but also, as Marion knew, because she’d asked, out of the Greek Orthodoxy of their childhoods; they belonged to the Ethical Culture Society. The receptionist, a paragon of discretion, sixtyish and Greek herself, gave Marion a silent nod of permission to go straight to the sanctum.

Sophie Serafimides was a chair-filling dumpling of a woman with beautiful olive skin and a great volume of crinkly white hair. Although Marion had been struck by her angelic surname when she found it in the Yellow Pages, she’d chosen Sophie for her given name. The attending psychiatrists who’d treated her in Los Angeles had been men of such insufferable male condescension that it was surprising she’d recovered her sanity at all. To have found a female clinician in New Prospect was something of a miracle, and if she’d “transferred” onto Sophie any of her issues with her unloving, reality-avoidant mother, who’d died of liver disease in 1961, fully estranged from Marion, she had yet to become aware of it. Sophie Serafimides was all about reality. She radiated—exemplified—Mediterranean warmth and good sense, which itself could be insufferable, but not in a way for which Marion could blame her.

Nothing pleased the dumpling more than to be brought a fresh dream, but Marion didn’t have any dreams for her today and preferred confession anyway. After hanging up her coat, she sat down and confessed that she was wearing her exercise clothes because she’d had to lie to Becky about where she was going. She confessed that she’d gobbled up—crammed into her mouth, stuffed herself with—six sugar cookies. Sophie smiled pleasantly at these confessions. “Christmas comes but once a year,” she suggested.

“I know you think I’m too obsessed with this,” Marion said. “I know you think it’s beside the point. But do you know what I weighed this morning? A hundred and forty-three pounds! I’ve been starving myself since September, doing my knee bends and my sit-ups, avoiding sweets, and I’ve lost six pounds in three months.”

“We’ve talked about counting things. The way we use numbers to punish ourselves.”

“I’m sorry, but, for a person my height, a hundred and forty-three pounds is objectively a lot.”

Sophie smiled pleasantly, her hands folded on her belly, the ampleness of which didn’t seem to embarrass her. “Eating cookies is an interesting response to feeling overweight.”

“Well, Becky was being a pill—she’s suddenly unbearable. I could handle it if it was just a matter of being irritable and secretive, but Tanner Evans called the house last night, trying to find her, and I didn’t hear her come home until after midnight, and this morning she was up bright and early, which is unusual. She isn’t telling me anything, but it’s obvious how happy she is. And I was thinking about the sweetness of being in love for the first time—how nothing in the world is sweeter.”

“Yes.”

“Tanner is a great kid. He’s talented, he goes to church, he’s really quite beautiful. When I think about my own adolescence, what a disaster it was … Becky is the total opposite. She’s a good person who makes good choices. I’m proud of her—I’m happy for her.”

Sophie smiled pleasantly. “So proud and happy, you had to eat six cookies.”

“Why not? I could starve myself for a year, it still wouldn’t make me eighteen again.”

“You really want to be eighteen again?”

“If I could go back and be like Becky? Unlive my life and do it over again? Absolutely.”

The dumpling seemed to resist an impulse to argue the point. “Okay,” she said. “And what else?”

She already knew the answer. The what-else was always Russ. Marion, in the waiting room, had seen patients emerging from the clinic with expressions more distraught than dental work could account for, and every one of them had been a middle-aged woman. From this she’d gathered that Sophie’s clientele consisted mainly of wives, depressed wives, wives whose husbands had left them or were about to, as the epidemic of divorce ravaged New Prospect. Given a clientele like this, it was understandable that Sophie would view all husbands as a priori suspect. To a hammer, everything looked like a nail. During their first “hour” together, Marion had sensed that Sophie disliked Russ sight unseen. In subsequent “hours,” she’d tried to explain that her marriage wasn’t the problem, that Russ wasn’t like other husbands, that he’d merely been shaken by a humiliating career crisis, while Sophie, in her pleasantly smiling way, had asked Marion why, if she wasn’t worried about her marriage, she kept showing up on Thursdays to talk about it. Finally, in August, Marion admitted that something had come over Russ—he was standing up straighter, taking better care of himself, while seeming acutely repelled by her and snapping at every little thing she said—and that she was no longer so sure what he might do. To Sophie, this represented a “breakthrough” on Marion’s part, and she’d graciously allowed that her marriage might be worth fighting to keep. She suggested that Marion put herself out into the world more, develop more of an independent life, give Russ a new context in which to see her. Maybe, since money was an issue anyway, she could take a half-time job? Or a university-extension course? Marion’s own plan of action for her marriage was to lose twenty pounds by Christmas. Sophie, who was far heavier than Marion, and yet apparently still attractive to her wiry little dentist husband, had approved her plan reluctantly. If she wanted to lose weight, she should do it for her own sake, as a way of taking control of her life.

“I think Russ lied to me at breakfast,” Marion said now, to please her paid friend, who took each fresh complaint about Russ as a sign of progress toward—what? A realistic recognition that her marriage was dead? “The minute he came downstairs, I could tell he was excited. His legs kind of waggle when he’s happy, he’s like a little boy. Or like Elvis—he can’t keep his hips still. He was wearing the shirt I got him for his birthday, which I knew would look nice on him, the blue in it picks up the blue in his eyes, and that seemed strange, because all he’s doing today is pastoral visits and a delivery run to the church in Chicago and an open house tonight, which he would have changed his clothes for anyway. So I asked him if he had any other plans, and he said no, and I started wondering about the delivery, because Frances Cottrell is in that circle. Frances—”

“The young widow,” Sophie said.

“Exactly. She’s going to wreck someone’s marriage, and now she’s in the service circle Russ leads in the inner city, and so I asked him who else was making the delivery with him. And it was like he was expecting the question. He practically interrupted me to answer. He said, ‘Just Kitty Reynolds.’ Kitty’s in the circle, too. She’s retired now—she used to teach at the high school. The thing was how quickly Russ answered. And then the shirt, and his legs waggling, so.”

“So.”

“Well, he never mentions her. Frances. I happened to see her in the parking lot one day when they were leaving for the city. The only time he’s ever referred to her was when I asked him about her that night.”

“She’s young.”

“Younger. She has a boy in high school.”

“Young is young,” Sophie said. “Costa likes to talk about the first warm day of spring, when the young women all come out in their summer dresses. It lifts a man’s spirits to be around attractive younger women. There’s nothing necessarily wrong with that. I like seeing those summer dresses myself.”

It was interesting how Sophie, who played the prosecutor when Marion defended Russ, turned around and argued for tolerance when Marion impugned him. She wondered if this was a subtle therapeutic strategy or just a way to keep her coming back every week with twenty dollars.

“I guess I haven’t reached that higher plane,” she said irritably. “You know what I think made me eat the cookies? I think Becky was one too many happy people to handle in one morning.”

“You preferred it when Russ was suffering.”

“Maybe. Yes. Did we somehow determine that I’m not a bad person? If we did, I must have missed it.”

“You feel you’re a bad person.”

“I know I’m a bad person. You don’t have any idea how bad.”

Sophie’s smile gave way to a more censorious expression. The timing of her therapeutic frowns was comically predictable. Marion felt infantilized by it.

“I could have eaten the whole batch of cookies,” she said. “The only reason I didn’t was there wouldn’t have been any left for Judson. But I definitely could have eaten all of them. Six pounds in three months of starving myself, and it’s not as if anyone has noticed. It’s not as if I deserve to be thin. The disgusting thing I see in the mirror every morning is what I deserve.”

Sophie glanced at the spiral-bound notepad on her little side table. She hadn’t written on the notepad since the summer. There was a hint of threat in the glance.

“It’s not just me, by the way,” Marion said. “I think everyone is bad. I think badness is the fundamental condition of humanity. If I really loved Russ, shouldn’t I be rejoicing to see him happy again? Even if it meant him being with the fair young widow and lying to me about it? I don’t really want him to be happy. I only want him not to leave me. When I saw him in that shirt this morning, I wished I’d never given it to him. If suffering is what it takes for him to stay married to me, I’d rather that he suffer.”

“You say that,” Sophie said, “but I’m not sure you believe it.”

“Also, for your information,” Marion said, her voice rising, “I’m paying you money I can’t afford to be here, so I don’t really care to hear about how well adjusted you and your husband are.”

“You may have misunderstood what I was saying.”

“No, I understood you very well.”

Sophie glanced again at her notepad. “What did you hear me to be saying?”

“That you’re not depressed. That you have a happy marriage. That you have no idea what it’s like to look at a girl in a summer dress and wish a terrible life on her, a life as terrible as your own. That you’re lucky enough not to know how lucky you are. That you’ve never had to find out how selfish all human love is, how bad all people are, and how the only love you can be sure isn’t selfish is loving God, which isn’t much of a consolation prize, but it’s all we’ve really got.”

Sophie drew a slow breath. “You’re giving me a lot today,” she said. “I’d like to understand better where it’s coming from.”

“I hate Christmas. I can’t lose weight.”

“Yes. I’m sure that’s a disappointment. But I’m sensing something else here.”

Marion turned her face toward the door. She thought of the money in her hosiery drawer and the ugly cheap cassette recorder she’d bought for Perry. It wasn’t too late to go out and get him a set of good stereo components, or a really nice camera, something he would truly enjoy having, something to atone in some tiny way for the blackness she’d put in his head by being his mother. The other kids would be all right, but she was very much afraid that Perry wouldn’t, and it was unbearable to know that the instability she could sense in him had come from her. If she kept seeing Sophie, the money would be gone by summer, and all she’d have to show for it would be the biweekly moments when Sophie, with an odd backhanded motion, without looking, reached behind her and opened a credenza drawer to fish out another handful of free physician samples of Sopor™, methaqualone, 300 mg. The samples were the one indisputably useful thing Marion got for her twenty dollars a week. A prescription would have been cheaper, but she hadn’t wanted to be a woman with a prescription. She’d preferred to pretend that her anxious depression was temporary and the drug samples were an ad hoc way of managing it. Perry’s most worrisome symptoms had abated, and in the fall he’d joined the church’s youth fellowship, and she’d allowed herself to believe that Sophie was right—that the problem was her marriage. She’d believed that Sophie could help her get better. But she wasn’t getting better. The Sopors did help her sleep more soundly than being confessed once had, but at least in the confessional she’d been able to speak the worst truths about herself. She could be as crazy and unhappy as she wanted without being expected to fight to save her marriage, which she now believed there was no saving, because she’d never deserved it in the first place, because she’d obtained it by fraud. What she deserved was punishment.

“Marion?” Sophie said.

“It’s not working.”

“What isn’t working?”

“You. This. Me. None of it.”

“The holidays are very hard. The end of the year is hard. But the feelings that get stirred up can be useful to work with.”

“A breakthrough,” Marion said bitterly. “Are we having another breakthrough?”

“You feel you’re a bad person,” Sophie prompted. Twenty dollars was the bottom of her fee scale, but it evidently still bought Marion the right to be hateful, as she never allowed herself to be with anyone else, and to receive pleasant smiles in return.

“It’s a fact, not a feeling,” she said.

“What exactly do you mean by that?”

Marion closed her eyes and didn’t answer. After a while, she began to wonder what would happen if she continued to say nothing, stayed silent for the rest of their “hour,” and then left the office without another word. She had enough Sopors to last another week, and she was very tempted to refuse to give Sophie anything more to work with, to make the dumpling just sit there and look at a patient whose eyes were closed, to punish her for not having helped her get better, to drive home how little she was better; to be the person who was withholding, not the wife and mother being withheld from. Each potentially therapeutic minute she stayed silent was another forty cents wasted, and the deliberate waste of minutes was tempting in the same self-spiting way that eating cookies had been. The only waste more evilly satisfying than to say nothing for the rest of the “hour” would have been to be silent from the moment she sat down. She wished she’d done that.

After several minutes of silence, marked only by the whir of dental equipment down the hall, she gave Sophie a half-lidded peek and saw that her eyes, too, were closed, her expression neutral, her hands loosely clasped on her lap, as if to demonstrate her powers of professional patience. Well, two could play at that game.

In the summer, in the early rush of their paid friendship, Marion had told Sophie the truth about certain things she’d outright lied to Russ about, or had omitted to mention and now could never tell him. The principal facts were that she’d spent fourteen weeks in a mental hospital in Los Angeles in 1941, following a severe psychotic episode, and that, contrary to what she’d told Russ in Arizona, soon after she’d met him, she had not had a brief, failed marriage to an unsuitable man in Los Angeles. There really had been a man, who really had been married, albeit not to her, and she’d felt obliged to warn Russ that she was previously used goods. She’d made her “confession” in a legitimate storm of tears, fearing that her having been “married” and “divorced” would cause her beautiful good Mennonite boy to recoil in horror and refuse to see her again. Thankfully, Russ’s forgiving heart and his sexual attraction to her had carried the day. (It was his more sternly Mennonite parents who later recoiled.) She’d believed that she’d become a new person in Arizona, firmly grounded in reality by her conversion to Catholicism, and that the ghastly events in Los Angeles no longer mattered. By the time she gave Russ half the truth of half her story, she’d stopped going to confession.

It wasn’t until she found her way into Sophie’s box, more than twenty years later, that she realized how much she’d needed to unburden herself. Because patient confidentiality was as strict as the confessional’s, she could have safely gone ahead and told the dumpling everything, but some things were only for her and God (and, once upon a time, in Arizona, God’s priestly intercessor) to know. The absolution Sophie had given her was not of her sins but of her fear that she was manic-depressive. Apparently, she was merely chronically depressed, with obsessional and mildly schizoid tendencies. Compared to manic depression, these terms were a comfort.

Up to a point, the story she’d told Sophie in the summer, while Sophie jotted on her notepad, was the same story she’d told the young Russ. It began with her father, Ruben, the capable son of a German Jewish widower in the San Francisco shoe-repair trade, who’d attended Berkeley around the time of the great earthquake. Rooting for Berkeley’s football team, the Golden Bears, Ruben had gotten the idea of starting his own business to manufacture athletic uniforms. The nation had gone crazy for high-school and collegiate sports, and after he finished college he had some success selling uniforms to high schools. The universities, however, were controlled by men from old California families who conducted all their business in the same Jew-excluding milieu. Marion reckoned it was partly cold business calculation, partly social ambition, and presumably some modicum of sexual attraction that led Ruben to pursue an “artistic” young woman from that milieu. Marion’s mother, Isabel, was a fourth-generation Californian from a family whose once-extensive property holdings, in the city and Sonoma County, had largely been squandered—poorly husbanded, inopportunely liquidated, charitably donated to garner status points, inadvisably divided among shiftless offspring—by the time she met Ruben. One of Isabel’s brothers ruthlessly managed what was left of the family’s land in Sonoma, the other was a landscape painter of scant means and little note. Isabel herself had vague musical aspirations, but all she actually seemed to have done with herself was appreciate culture in San Francisco, ride around in the cars of richer friends, and spend long weekends at their country houses. How exactly Ruben found his way into one of those houses, Marion never learned, but within two years he’d parlayed an advantageous marriage into contracts with the Stanford and Cal athletic departments. By the time Marion was born, he was the largest manufacturer of athletic gear west of the Rocky Mountains. He built Isabel a three-story house in Pacific Heights, and it was there, as a rich girl (for a while), that Marion had grown up.

In her memory, the house was darker than a Catholic sky. Thick curtains further dimmed the fog-enfeebled daylight falling on the heavy, stained-oak furniture then in style. Her mother seemed to view both her and Shirley as aberrations that her body had unaccountably twice housed for nine months, their births a regrettable interruption of her social life but otherwise a relief on the order of passing a kidney stone. Her father’s heart might have had room for two daughters if the first one, Shirley, hadn’t filled it inordinately. His obsessionality (the dumpling’s word) served him well in his business, Western All-Sport, to which he devoted sixty and seventy hours a week, but at home it served to make Marion feel invisible. Ruben’s darling was Shirley. When he happened to look at Marion directly, it was often to ask, “Where’s your sister?” Shirley was the really pretty one, even as an infant, and took his adoration as her due. On Christmas morning, she didn’t tear through her immense haul of presents with a normal child’s greed. She unwrapped them like a wary retailer, carefully inspecting each of them for flaws of manufacture, and sorted them by category, as if checking them against a mental invoice. The repeated chiming of her voice—“Thank you Daddy”—was like the chinging of a cash register. Marion took refuge from the excess by absorbing herself in a single doll, a single toy, while her mother yawned with open boredom.

Christmas for her mother was an enforced separation from the four friends with whom she did everything. The friends were from old families with less depleted fortunes, and, although three of them had husbands and children of their own, all five were in love with themselves as a unit. They’d been the marvelous fivesome of the Class of 1912 at Lowell, where they’d jointly decided that, if the world had a problem with their marvelousness, it was the world’s problem, not theirs, and for the rest of their lives they never tired of lunching together, shopping together, attending lectures and theater together, reading books together, advancing worthy civic causes together. Marion came to see that her mother’s place in the fivesome had always been the most precarious—she’d begun with the least money and then married a Jew—and therefore the most fanatically defended. Isabel lived in fear of being the fifth wheel, and at Christmas she fretted about the three friends whose husbands were also good friends, the non-fivesome gatherings that might be happening without her.

Spoiling Shirley wasn’t the only thing her father couldn’t stop doing. Beginning when Marion was six or seven, he never seemed to sleep at all. Awakening at a small hour, she could hear him playing ragtime, self-taught, on the piano two floors below. He was also a self-taught architect and spent other nights alone with his drafting tools, forever redesigning an even bigger house. At work, he bought businesses above and below him—his obsessive goal was to open a nationwide chain of sporting-goods stores—and he made more speculative investments as well, employing his special insight as a stock picker, his special gift for well-timed margin purchases. He smoked enormous cigars and wore a coonskin coat to Cal football games, sometimes taking Marion to sit with him in his fifty-yard-line seats, since Shirley and her mother had no interest. He talked nonstop throughout the game, in a technical language mostly beyond a seven-year-old’s comprehension. He knew the name of every Golden Bear player and carried a little notebook in which he drew Xs and Os to show Marion how a play had worked, or to design new plays that he intended to show Cal’s head coach, Nibs Price, whose job, he confided to her, he could have done better. He never behaved rudely, but his voice was loud and excited, and Marion was uncomfortably aware that other fans kept looking at him.

How like a mental illness a nation’s economy was! She later wondered how much longer, if the stock market hadn’t crashed when it did, her father’s manic period might have lasted, and whether, if his illness had set in later, he could have managed to be manic in the midst of a depression. These hypotheticals were hard to entertain, because the coincidence of the market’s crash and her father’s crash seemed so inevitable in hindsight. In the weeks following Black Tuesday, he duly scrambled to salvage what he could of his highly leveraged holdings, but his voice, on the phone in his study, from which he communicated with New York before going to the office, sounded the way it had when he’d made funeral arrangements for his father. Marion came home from school and found him in the parlor in his shirtsleeves and suspenders, staring at the cold grate of the fireplace. Sometimes he spoke to her about the singular misfortune that had befallen him, and the little she understood of margin purchases and mining futures, as an eight-year-old, was still more than her mother and her older sister cared to know. Her mother was scarcer than ever, and Shirley was coldly disappointed by the diminished flow of goods to her, the meagerness of Christmas in 1929, the vaporization of the Larkspur weekend house in whose pool she’d been assured she would be swimming the following summer.

It was a testament to her father’s abilities that, even when the light in his eyes had gone out, he not only saved the house but put meat on the table and continued to pay for Shirley’s dancing and voice lessons. He now worked as the sales manager for Western All-Sport, which he’d sold, for less than its book value, to cover his other losses. In a mental state like the one for which Marion was later hospitalized, if not worse, he dragged himself out of bed every weekday morning, dragged a razor across his cheeks, dragged himself to the streetcar, dragged himself through meetings for a company he had no hope of making his again, and then dragged himself home to an unforgiving wife, a favored daughter whose disappointment tortured him, and Marion, who felt responsible for what had happened. Because she was invisible, she’d noticed things the other three of them hadn’t. She’d known that something wasn’t right.

As her father, too, became invisible—a gray-skinned ghost who slept in his study, spoke in a murmur, shook his head when asked to repeat himself—she did her best to be his caretaker. She met him at the streetcar in the evening and asked him how his Golden Bears were doing. She tapped on the terrible closed door of his study and braved the bad smell in it to bring him a piece of fruit she’d cut up. He’d always loved fruit above all other foods, the Californian freshness and variety of it, and even now a light flickered in his eyes when she urged a cut-up pear on him. He didn’t smile when he ate it, but he nodded as if it had to be admitted: the pear was good. And Marion, at ten and eleven and twelve, was already aware of how inextricably mixed up good and evil were. When she got her father to enjoy a piece of fruit, there was no telling if the glow she felt was purely love or also the satisfaction of being a better daughter than her sister.

Like the Great Depression, the dark years seemed to have no end. In the fall of 1935, Shirley boarded an eastbound Pullman sleeper, as happy to be escaping San Francisco as Marion was glad to see her go. With something of his old financial magic, her father had come up with a semester’s tuition money for Vassar College, thereby fulfilling a long-standing promise to Shirley. But the effort seemed to have finished him. Within weeks of his darling’s departure, nothing could induce him to dress and go to work. Isabel, who for six years had occupied herself with such threats to her way of life as the rage for contract bridge, a game which, horribly, only four women at a time could play, now finally was forced to reacquaint herself with reality. She obtained a small loan from her Jew-hating brother in Sonoma and persuaded the owners of Western All-Sport to grant her husband a short furlough. Although Marion always felt that she and Shirley had drawn very poorly in the mother lottery, she had a grudging admiration for Isabel’s resourcefulness in a pinch. Isabel’s self-preservative instincts, her ultimately successful battles to maintain her standing in her fivesome, were both laudable and pitiable in their way. And so, as ever, Marion blamed herself for what her father did.

The problem was that she’d discovered theater. Shirley had been the family’s presumptive talent, Marion the invisible one, but as soon as her sister left for Vassar, Marion and her best friend had tried out for their school’s fall production of The Five Little Peppers. Aided, perhaps, by the fact that she was short, she’d landed the part of the smallest and most adored Pepper, Phronsie, and discovered that she, too, had talent. With a familiar sense of ambiguity, uncertain if she was doing something good or something bad, she became a different person in rehearsals, became visible to the other players, entered a kind of trance of not-herselfness. Because the school theater was where this happened, she was smitten with the wobbly paint-smelling flats, the great thunking toggle switches of the light board, the backstage hanging sheet of tin that was endlessly fun to make thunder. After school, instead of going home to look after her father, she stayed to rehearse and paint flats.

In early December, during the play’s first dress rehearsal, she was being Phronsie, preparing to charm a real audience, when a gray-braided school administrator entered the theater and called her down from the stage. It was a rainy afternoon, already dark at four thirty. The administrator silently walked her to her house, where all four of her mother’s friends had already gathered. Her mother was sitting by the cold grate, her expression blank, a folded sheet of stationery in her lap. There had been, she said, an accident. Perhaps embarrassed to be mincing words in front of her friends, she shook her head and corrected herself. Her expression still blank, she told Marion that her father had taken his own life. She spread her arms, beckoning Marion to come and be embraced, but Marion turned and ran from the room. To get to her father’s study, to find him there and show them they were wrong, she had to run up two flights of stairs, but it seemed to her that she was going down, hurtling down a tunnel of guilt toward her punishment. She could hear, strangely distant, the screaming of the girl being punished.

A boat captain that morning had seen a man pulling a child’s red wagon on a pier below Fort Mason. When the captain looked again, too soon for the man to have gone back up the pier, the wagon was standing at the end of it. Two hours later, when a body was raised from the water, the police deduced that the wagon had contained the heavy chain the man had locked around his neck and shoulders before jumping. The wagon, a well-made toy of solid steel, its red enamel still bright, had once been a Christmas gift to Shirley, later a stand for potted geraniums behind the house. Marion never read the note that her father had left behind while her mother was out breakfasting with her friends, but it was apparently not an apology or a farewell but simply a confession of the financial situation he’d hidden from her. The family’s debts were hopeless, there were liens on everything, multiple liens, a tissue of fraud and bankruptcy. The last conceivably leverageable dollars had been spent on Shirley’s first semester at Vassar.

In the story Marion told Sophie about herself, a story she’d worked out in the hospital and in her years of Catholic introspection, her guilt was inextricable from her ability to dissociate. Two nights after her father’s death, with the definitive thunk of a light-board switch, she turned herself into Phronsie Pepper, telling herself that the show must go on, and proceeded to be adorable onstage for two hours. After each of the show’s three performances, she returned to her grief and her guilt. But now she knew that a switch inside her could be flipped at will. She could turn off her self-awareness and do bad things for the momentary gratification of them. The trick of dissociation was the beginning of her own illness, although she didn’t know it yet.

She and Shirley were allowed to finish the semester at their respective schools, but the house was about to be repossessed, its furnishings sold at auction. Her mother crisply informed her that she, Isabel, was going to stay for a while as a houseguest of the richest of her friends. Shirley, who hadn’t bothered to come home for the funeral, which some previously unseen cousins of her father had materialized to pay for, intended to find work and lodging in New York City. But what to do about Marion? Her maternal grandmother was senile, and Marion would be one houseguest too many at her mother’s friend’s. The only people who might take her in were her mother’s brothers. If her mother had sent her to her uncle in Arizona, James, the landscape painter, Marion still might have been saved from herself. But Isabel believed that Jimmy was a homosexual, unsuitable as a guardian, and so her younger brother, Roy, in Sonoma, had agreed to house Marion until she finished high school.

Roy Collins was a man of many hatreds. He hated his forebears for pissing away money that should have been his. He hated Roosevelt, labor unions, Mexicans, artists, fairies, and socialite phonies. He especially hated Jews and the socialite phony sister who’d married one. But he wasn’t one of those weak men, like his fairy brother or his suicide brother-in-law, who shirked a man’s family duties. He had four kids of his own whom he supported by working hard at the farm-machinery distributorship he’d started with the pittance his grandparents had left him. Although his wife and his children were too cowed to disagree with him, he liked to remind them, at nearly every meal, how hard he worked. Marion didn’t find Roy especially suitable as a guardian, but he did have money. He was the opposite of her father, a lot richer than one might have guessed from the plainness of his house in Santa Rosa. He’d kept his business solvent through the heart of the Depression, and, as the sole trustee of the family orchards and vineyards, he’d borrowed from himself so heavily, on the trust’s behalf, that his own name ended up on the titles to the land. Marion didn’t learn about this until she went to Arizona, but it went some way toward explaining why Roy had fed and clothed her for three and a half years, and why he so hated his sister and his brother. It would have been harder to rob them if he hadn’t.

Until she was fifteen, Marion had been the mild daughter, the easy daughter, but to live with Roy Collins was to flip the switch in her. The two of them fought about the cigarettes she’d started smoking. They fought about the way she wore her socks, the friends she brought home from Santa Rosa High, the lipstick he couldn’t prove she’d stolen from the drugstore. Once she flipped the switch, she hardly knew what she was shouting. At her new school, she gravitated toward the theatrical girls, the fast girls, and the boys who chased them. Her own fast credentials were in order because she came from the city and her father had killed himself. She smoked fiendishly and used the suicide to upset people. She thought that if she was bad enough, hateful enough, Roy might give up and send her somewhere else. But he knew what she wanted, and he sadistically refused to give it to her. Much later, she had the thought that he’d been sexually attracted to her; that people were cruel to what they were afraid of loving.

Her best friend, Isabelle Washburn, was prettier and taller than Marion, a shining blonde with a sharp little nose that drove the boys wild, but Marion was smarter and more daring and made Isabelle laugh. Isabelle fancied herself an actress, but she couldn’t be bothered to join the Thespian Society. She preferred going to the movie house, where the ushers, in deference to her nose, would often let in her and Marion for free. Marion’s former self was now mostly a memory, but to her the theater was still the place that had distracted her from her father, a place of guilt, and so, although she might have ruled the thespians, she never tried out for another play. She threw herself instead into the real-life drama of discussing boys, provoking boys, and, finally, falling in love with a boy, Dick Stabler, who lived down the street from the Collinses.

Dick was beetle-browed and husky-voiced, with a mild congenital lisp that made her weak in the knees; he looked and sounded the way she imagined Heathcliff. His parents rightly distrusted her, and her senior year was a serial drama of subterfuge and secret outdoor locations where she could be alone with Dick and kiss him and let him touch her breasts. She’d determined that she was “oversexed”—at times, she was literally cross-eyed with her urges, ill with them, dying of them. She was ready to do whatever Dick wanted, including marrying him, but he was bound for college and a higher grade of wife. In the spring, there came a night when his parents heard a noise in their parlor, well after midnight, and his father crept downstairs to investigate, switched on the most glaring light in all of Santa Rosa, and discovered her and Dick on the parlor sofa, clothed but fully horizontal. After this embarrassment, and under the steady pressure of his parents’ disapproval, Dick’s passion for her faltered. She was left feeling dirty and bad. Her uncle, in one of his rages, went so far as to use the word slut, and instead of shouting back at him, as she’d done so many times, she collapsed in tears of self-reproach.

Her mother, in San Francisco, was still a houseguest. In her infrequent letters to Marion, she claimed to miss her baby, but she couldn’t impose on her hosts by inviting her baby to stay with her, and she wouldn’t subject herself to Roy’s hostility by coming to Santa Rosa. When Marion took a bus to the city to meet her for lunch at Tadich’s, a month before she finished high school, it was eight months since she’d last seen her. She was there to discuss her future, but her mother, whose hair had turned white, and whose cheeks offered red evidence of morning drinking, had exciting news of Shirley in New York. After some difficult years at a Gimbels perfume counter, Shirley was now on Broadway—in a small role, to be sure, but launched as an actress, with prospects for larger roles. Isabel’s maternal pride, a quality hitherto absent in her, might have seemed poignant to Marion, suggesting as it did a woman desperate to keep up with friends whose sons were Ivy Leaguers, if Marion hadn’t felt so enragingly effaced by the news. She felt that someone, probably she herself, ought to murder both Shirley and her mother, to avenge what they’d done to her father. Her “talented” sister in particular needed murdering. When a waiter brought her a plate of fried sand dabs, a Tadich specialty, she ashed her cigarette on them.

At home, in Santa Rosa, Roy Collins had been wearing her down, preying on her shame and self-reproach, and had just about convinced her that she would, indeed, be very lucky to start work as a clerk in his distributorship after she graduated. An earlier dream, which was to head to Los Angeles with Isabelle Washburn and try to break into the movies, had gone dormant in the months of her obsession with Dick Stabler. She’d seen less of Isabelle and become more realistic. Although she’d smoked her way to weighing one hundred and three pounds at the doctor’s office, careful attention to the calves and ankles flashed onscreen at the California Theatre had led her to suspect that her legs were too peasanty for Hollywood. Isabelle, however, whose legs were better, still intended to go to Los Angeles, and she’d never retracted her invitation to Marion. Sitting in Tadich’s, her cigarette ends soaking up melted parsley butter while her mother nattered about the doings of the Francisca Club musical committee, evidently too repelled by the scowling of her baby to broach the subject of her future, Marion experienced a rage so murderous that her decision made itself. She was going to go to Los Angeles and flip the switch and see what happened. She would make herself visible, and she was definitely going to murder someone. She just didn’t know who.

Isabelle had a plan for being discovered by Hollywood, involving a cousin who was William Powell’s physician, and although she gamely allowed that Marion could be a part of it, she seemed unthrilled that Marion was going with her. In Los Angeles, at the Jericho Hotel, to which they’d retreated after learning that the homes for aspiring actresses all had waiting lists, Isabelle no longer laughed at the things Marion said. When her doctor cousin asked her out to lunch, she decided it was better, after all, if she met him alone. Getting the picture, and adding Isabelle to her list of people in need of murdering, Marion moved into a ladies’ rooming house on Figueroa Street. She went to some of the agencies that advertised in the newspaper, but there were a million other girls like her. When she’d exhausted the three hundred dollars that Roy Collins had given her, with an angry vow never to give her anything else, she took a job in the back office of Lerner Motors, which was the largest General Motors dealership in Los Angeles. With her first paycheck, she bought a stack of old plays for a nickel apiece and read them aloud in her room, trying to recapture the feeling of not-herselfness, but she needed a theater and had no idea how to get into one. How had Shirley done it? Had someone discovered her at the perfume counter?

Her first Christmas alone wasn’t so bad that it didn’t later seem good. A girl in the Lerner back office had invited her to dinner with her family, but she’d had enough of other families’ Christmases. In the afternoon, she rode the streetcar to the end of the line in Santa Monica and sat by herself on a bench by the water, parceling out her cigarettes, writing in her diary. She read the entry from exactly one year earlier, when Dick Stabler had given her a silverplate chain and she’d given him a leather-bound volume of Khalil Gibran and her longing for his touch had colored every minute. The weather in Santa Monica was fine, the far snow-capped peaks floating bodyless above the winter haze. Everything seemed more or less in balance. A breeze from the east kept the marine layer offshore, and the sun’s downward progress was made tolerable, less alarmingly a reminder of life escaping from her, by the timeless repetition of the waves, their breathlike breaking on the wide, flat beach. The pressure that was lately always in her head, the loneliness and something less definable, a low-grade dread, was balanced by her outward composure. She was a girl interesting enough to herself to sit alone, pretty enough to draw glances from men walking by with their families, tough enough that no one bothered her for long, and smart enough to know that being discovered while sitting on a bench was just a daydream. When the sun finally sank into fog, she walked to the first diner she found open and ate pressed turkey with canned gravy, potato puree, a slice of cranberry jelly.

“Marion?” Sophie Serafimides said.

One of Marion’s hips had gone dead and prickly. She was used to an arm or a foot going to sleep, but not a hip muscle, not since the last time she was pregnant. She suspected she had her heaviness to blame for it.

“I’m afraid our time is almost up,” Sophie said.

Marion shifted her weight, allowing blood back into her hip, and opened her eyes. Snow was falling on the rail tracks outside the window. The white flakes seemed speeded up by the half-closed slats of the venetian blinds.

“I’d like to know what you mean with your silence,” Sophie said. “If you think you might tell me, we could do a double session. I had some cancellations—you’re my last patient today.”

“I only brought twenty dollars.”

“Well.” Sophie smiled pleasantly. “You can think of it as a Christmas present, if you want.”

Marion shuddered.

“The holiday seems to have a particular association for you,” Sophie said. “Will you tell me what it is?”

Marion shut her eyes again. The Christmas she’d spent alone in Santa Monica later seemed like the last day that she and the outside world had been in balance. In the first weeks of 1940, storm after chaotic storm dumped rain on Southern California. The streets were black and oily with it on the evening she stayed late at Lerner Motors to type up papers on the preposterous sale that Bradley Grant had made. Sideways rain was slapping the window of her boardinghouse room long after midnight, when she wrote in her diary, Something awful has happened and I don’t know what to do. It must never, ever happen again.

Bradley Grant was the star salesman at Lerner. Although Marion was lonely, she’d taken to eating her lunchtime sandwich in an unused room in the parts department. There, she at least had the undivided companionship of a book, until Bradley Grant began intruding on her. Bradley was fifteen years older than she was, but he had the fatless body of a teenager and a face whose handsomeness was hard to judge; there was something cartoonlike about the stretchiness of his features, especially his wide mouth. When he saw Marion with a volume of Maupassant stories, he invaded her lunch-hour sanctuary to hold forth on Maupassant. He was an avid reader, a literary man by training. He struck her as being most interested in himself, so overflowing with words that he had to troll the parts department to find an outlet for them, but one day he brought her his own copy of Homage to Catalonia, by the English writer George Orwell. He was distressed about the rise of Fascism in Europe, about which she knew essentially nothing. She duly read the Orwell and began to pay attention to the front page of the newspaper, in order to seem less ignorant to Bradley. One day, he remarked that a girl as intelligent and pretty as Marion ought to be in the front office, and the very next day she was transferred to the front office. At Lerner, the lesser salesmen were rank perspirers, changing their undershirts at midday, afraid of the pink slip every Friday, but Bradley Grant was so valuable to the dealership that only the owner, Harry Lerner, could overrule him. After her transfer, Marion continued to eat her lunchtime sandwich in the back. Becoming a front-office typist and file fetcher was hardly her idea of being discovered.

On the day a person was born, only one date on the calendar, her birthday, was significant, but as she proceeded through life other dates became permanently exalted or befouled, the date her father killed himself, the date she married, the dates her children were born, until the calendar was densely checkered with significance. On the evening of January 24, a young man in a dripping fedora walked into the Lerner showroom shortly before closing time. A lesser salesman sidled up to him and got the brush-off. At Lerner, they called any man who came inside to flaunt his automotive knowledge, or to be fawned over for a couple of minutes, or just to get out of the weather, with no intention of buying, a Jake Barnes. Bradley Grant, who’d coined the name, and who’d already closed three sales that day, strolled up to Marion’s desk with an apple and ate it carefully while he studied the young Jake Barnes. “I like his shoes,” he said, dropping the apple core in her wastebasket. “Is there somewhere you need to be?” There was never anyplace Marion needed to be. Within a minute, on the floor, Bradley had a hand on the Jake Barnes’s shoulder and was helping him into a brand-new Buick Century. She watched Bradley’s features stretch into cartoons of astonishment, indifference, compassion, stern admonition. With a gliding tread that let him hurry without seeming to hurry, he returned to her and told her to keep the showroom open and a manager on duty. “Jake and I are making a little cash run,” he said, gliding away again. An hour later, he and the young buyer were back on the floor and Marion was typing up the paperwork.

“How easy was that?” Bradley exulted when the buyer was gone. He was bumping one fist on the other like a dice roller. “What do you want to bet I can’t move another car today?” His energy reminded Marion of her father’s in the pre-crash years. They were the only ones left in the office, and he couldn’t sell a car without authorization from a manager. “There’s a T-bone steak in it for you,” he said to Marion. “What do you want to bet?” Before she could answer, he grabbed an umbrella and ran out of the showroom. From the front door, smoking a cigarette, she saw him working the cars braking at the corner of Hope and Pico, saw drivers rolling down their windows, saw him gesturing at their vehicles and then at the dealership. It was insane, and she didn’t know who he was doing it for, himself or her, but watching him brought her latent dread to the surface. Later, in Arizona, she came to think that the sight of Bradley in the rain, with his umbrella, had been a premonition of pure evil. People who weren’t seriously Catholic didn’t understand that Satan wasn’t a charmingly literate tempter, or a funny red-faced devil with a pitchfork. Satan was pain without limit, annihilation of the mind.

“This gentleman has come to the sensible realization that he no longer wishes to drive a Pontiac,” Bradley said, ushering into the showroom a heavyset bald man who smelled of drink. It had taken him less than half an hour to find a customer, but he was soaked with sideways rain and street spray. He asked Marion to get the gentleman a cup of coffee while—he winked at her—he had a word with his manager, and then he asked her to pull the keys for the cherry-red ’35 Oldsmobile coupe for which the gentleman wished to trade in his Pontiac. The gentleman, he added, would be paying by personal check. The two men returned to the back lot, where the red car was parked. Marion might have walked out and let Bradley close the sale by himself if Roy Collins hadn’t made her such a rule-breaker. When the sucker drove away in his Oldsmobile, Bradley produced a flat pint bottle of whiskey and two clean coffee cups. Perched on a seat warmed by the sucker’s fat butt, at Bradley’s desk, she could see a small studio photograph of Bradley and his wife and their two little boys. She wondered if the T-bone steak was still coming or if he’d forgotten. She lit another cigarette and sipped the whiskey. “I sure hope that check doesn’t bounce.”

“It won’t,” Bradley said, “but I’ll cover it if it does. Even without it, we did better than break even.”

“His car was worth more?”

“It’s one year old! I could have offered him a straight swap, but then he would have started thinking, ‘Hey, wait a minute…’ So I made up a number and let him take me down to half of it.”

“That was mean,” she said.

“Not at all. Half the fun of owning a superior brand of car is knowing you could pay for it.”

“You were doing him a favor.”

“It’s psychology. This job is all psychology. My problem is I’m so damned good at it. Did you see me in the street? Have you ever seen anything like it?”

She shook her head and took another sip of whiskey.

“It’s like a compulsion,” Bradley said. “I’m in it and I can’t get out of it, because I’m so damned good. People know they’re being suckered and they let me do it anyway. They come in here, they’ve made a solemn vow to themselves, they’re going to be strong, they’re going to drive a hard bargain. But they only buy a car once a year, or once a decade, or maybe they’ve never bought a car, and here’s me who sells cars day in and day out. They have no chance! I’m going to make them weak, and they’re going to go home and lie to their wife. They’re going to tell her they got a great deal. There’s only one red car on the lot, and the guy’s got to have it because it’s red and, goddamn it, there’s only one of them, and what are we going to do tomorrow morning? Get another red car out there. I swear this job is killing my soul.”

Marion set her cup on his desk, intending to drink no more. She wondered if she should mention food, or simply go home to bed hungry, but the words kept pouring out of Bradley. In college, in Michigan, he said, he’d written plays and published poems in the college magazine, and then he’d come to Los Angeles to break into the movies as a writer. His soul was still alive then, but he’d met a girl who had dreams of her own, and one thing led to another, and now he was just another member of the goddamned middle class, suckering people for a living. Ideas came to him in the night, original script ideas—like, during the Spanish Civil War, the daughter of Hitler’s ambassador to Spain is secretly in love with a Republican intelligence officer, the Fascists are holding the officer’s wife and children hostage, he asks the daughter to help them escape from Spain, and she can’t be sure if he really loves her or if he’s only using her to save his family—he had a million ideas, but when was he supposed to work on them? At the end of a day, his soul was too deadened. The only shred of human decency still left in him, the only way he knew he wasn’t the worst person in the world, was how much he loved his boys. They were a weight on him, yeah, a drain on his creative energy, but the responsibility was the only thing standing between him and perdition. Did Marion understand what he was saying? The boys weren’t negotiable. His marriage wasn’t negotiable. He was never leaving Isabelle.

There was an upsurge in Marion’s dread. “Your wife is named Isabel?”

The woman in the studio portrait actually looked a little like Isabelle Washburn. She was older and thicker but similarly blond and small-nosed. Marion stared at the picture, and Bradley stood up and came around his desk and crouched at her feet.

“There’s so much soul in your eyes,” he said. “Your soul is so alive, I see you and I feel like I’m dying. I’m—God! Do you have any idea how much soul there is in you? I look at you and I think I can’t live if I don’t have you, but I know I can’t have you … because … Or unless. Because. Unless. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

No amount of whiskey could have overcome her dread, but she drank what was left in her cup. The view from the street was obstructed by shiny floor models, but there were angles from which a person walking by could see Bradley at her feet in the showroom lights.

“Say something,” he whispered. “Say anything.”

“I think I should go home.”

“Okay.”

“And maybe find someplace else to work.”

“God, no. Marion. I’d die if I couldn’t see your face anymore. Please don’t do that. I swear I won’t pester you.”

It was strange to think that the man crouched at her feet had been having such thoughts about her. He was a fascinating person, but in the end, even if one discounted that he was married, he was just a car salesman. She’d weathered the upwelling of dread with her good sense intact. She made a move to stand up, but Bradley caught one of her hands and held her in place. “I wrote something about you,” he said. “Can I tell you what I wrote?”

Taking her silence as consent, he recited a poem.

A woman walks, her name is Marion

Her hair is dark but smells of bright

Sun piercing clouds with clarion splendor

Her eyes downcast but full of light

And darkness both, her mind a wide sky

Both serene and threatening: untouchable

“Who wrote that?” she said.

“I did.”

“You wrote that.”

“It’s the first thing I’ve written since I don’t know when.”

“You wrote that about me?”

“Yes.”

“Say it again.”

He recited it again, with a bashful sincerity that made him definitely handsome. She was having a delayed reaction to the whiskey, an opening of certain floodgates. The apparent tilting of the showroom floor seemed to prove that the cars had their parking brakes set. Despite having seen Bradley persuade a stranger, twice in three hours, that the stranger wanted something he shouldn’t have wanted, she wondered if he really might have talent as a writer. The subject of his poem was specific, not interchangeable. She herself had felt herself to be dark and light, sky-wide, and he’d made a rhyme with her name.

“One more time,” she said.

She thought a third hearing might tell her, for sure, if he had real talent. In fact, it told her nothing, because all she could hear was that he’d written a poem about her. She leaned back in the chair and let the whiskey shut her eyes. “Hoo-eee,” she admitted. The switch in her was in the Off position, which was another way of saying she didn’t care. Her father with a chain around his neck, dead on the bottom of the bay. Her sister uncatchable no matter how Marion might run. She didn’t care.

When Bradley drew her to her feet and kissed her, it was as if her body were picking up at exactly the oversexed point it had left off with Dick Stabler. It was horrifying how much a man wanting her was what it wanted. She felt she couldn’t press herself against Bradley hard enough, she needed harder pressing, and Bradley gave it to her. He backed her against the immovable weight of a gleaming Cadillac 75 and pressed her where Dick Stabler hadn’t dared to. There was a thing that her hips were capable of doing but hadn’t ever done. To let them do it, to fully relax them, even upright, even in a dress, with Bradley between her knees in his still-damp trousers, felt momentous. Roy Collins, on the eve of her departure from Santa Rosa, had predicted what would happen if she wasn’t careful in Los Angeles. Roy hadn’t used the word slut again, but he’d made it very clear that if Marion got in trouble she could expect no further help from him. And now here she was, opening her legs for a married man. Over Bradley’s head, when he happened to lower it to her neck, she saw the uneven steps the office wall clock was taking toward eleven o’clock, the hour at which she’d be locked out of her rooming house. She was feeling ill with hunger as the whiskey wore off.

As if putting a bookmark in a novel, she pushed him away and wordlessly moved to get a cigarette. He, too, said nothing while he turned off the bright lights, locked the front door, and led her to his ’37 LaSalle. By the time they reached her house, they had only ten minutes to talk before the night manageress threw the deadbolt.

She put out the third of the cigarettes she’d chain-smoked. “I don’t see how I’m going to go to work in the morning.”

“Same as you always do,” he said.

There was a problem that needed solving before it worsened, but she suspected that the problem had no solution—that she was no stronger than the man who came to Lerner and saw the only red car. Rather than waste her last minutes on pointless talk, she slid over and put her arms around Bradley. The car shook in the gusts of wind and she with it. Inside the house, as soon as she’d shut her door behind her, she touched herself the way she’d learned to in the frustrated aftermath of making out with Dick Stabler. But those had been more innocent days. Now she felt too lonely to concentrate on dispelling her sexual urge, too scared of her badness to surrender to it. She needed to cry instead; and this was the first time the slippage occurred.

It was one in the morning and she couldn’t account for two hours. Her sad little room, with its nicked and peeling furniture and its smoke-saturated fabrics, its lamp overbright but wrongly positioned for reading in bed, presented itself as a collection of random places that she thought she might have stared at, pushed her face into, banged her forehead against. Her bedspread lay in a heap in a corner. There was no fresh smoke, but her ashtray was upended on her bed, a dirty avalanche of old butts and ashes at the base of the pillow. Her impression was of a person who’d frantically defended herself against evil spirits beating on the window in the form of sideways rain. Now she was painfully hungry, but she appeared to be uninjured. No one in the world is more alone than I, she wrote in her diary.

The next morning brought a break between storms. She ate a big plate of eggs before she went to work, and the sky above the city, the startling blue gaps between the rushing clouds, was an encouraging reminder of more innocent San Francisco winters. She thought she might be all right if she changed her routine, ate her lunch with the other office girls, and made sure never to be alone again with Bradley Grant. But when she arrived at Lerner and tried to say good morning to her manager, she discovered that the slippage hadn’t left her uninjured.

Her condition was that she could barely speak. The impulse that should have led to speaking was diverted into swallowing and blushing, a clotted sensation in her chest, an involuntary recollection of opening her legs. All morning, on and off the floor, her mind was so scrambled with self-consciousness that when she opened her mouth her mind lagged behind and then dashed forward, propelled by the anxiety that what she was saying was unintelligible. Each time, she found that she’d spoken halfway appropriately, and each time this seemed like amazing luck.

At lunchtime, in the lounge with some other girls, she sat in a posture of friendly attentiveness and tried to listen to their conversation, but her eyes refused to look at whoever was speaking.

“… on sale at Woolworth’s, you wouldn’t think they’d…”

“… an inch too wide to fit, how on earth do you measure it three times and get…”

“… me to the premiere last Thursday, he knows the guy who…”

“… but then your hands smell like orange all day, even if you wash them…”

“… Marion?”

Without raising her eyes, she turned toward the girl, Anne, who’d said her name. Anne was the one who’d invited her to Christmas with her family. Anne was kind.

“I’m sorry.” Despite great effort to breathe, Marion’s voice was choked. “What did you say?”

“What happened last night?” Anne repeated with a kind smile.

“Oh.” Marion’s face burned. “Oh.”

“Mr. Peters said Bradley was still selling at nine o’clock.”

She thought her head might explode. “I’m so tired,” she found that she had said.

“I bet you are,” Anne said.

“What … do you mean?”

“I don’t know where that man gets his energy. He’s like a selling fiend.”

The lounge was a minefield of female eyes on her. She tried to say more but quickly realized it was hopeless. All she could do was stand up and go back to her desk. Behind her, in her imagination, there ensued an appalled discussion of her sluttiness.

Although she’d spent an inordinate amount of time alone in Los Angeles, she didn’t consider herself shy. The way her new condition felt to her was that every person who spoke to her was somehow Bradley Grant; every exchange of words, no matter how trivial, a rehearsal of the dire conversation she feared she would be having with him. A year later, in the hospital, one of the psychiatrists asked her if she wouldn’t rather be like other girls, not always so deathly serious—there was nothing wrong with small talk—gaiety was attractive in a girl—wouldn’t it be nice to escape from her thoughts in the flow of a light conversation? Marion wanted to file a criminal complaint about the psychiatrist. She happened to know that not all men required gaiety. She wondered how many other women on the ward had encountered the kind of man excited by morbid taciturnity: the literary kind of man, for whom craziness was romantic, or the sensualist kind, to whom still waters betokened sexually churning depths, or the chivalrous kind, who dreamed of saving someone broken.

Bradley was all of those kinds of man. At least two other unmarried girls at Lerner were prettier than Marion, and Anne was as much a book reader as she was, so something else must have attracted Bradley. He’d detected craziness in her before she’d sensed it herself. Without her knowing it, her new condition made her more interesting to him, not less. On January 31, another fateful date, she returned from a protracted afternoon bathroom break and found, on her desk, an envelope with her name typed on it. Bradley was outside on the lot with a customer while the lesser salesmen stood at the windows, watching their lives go down the drain. It seemed likely to her that she’d been pink-slipped, and she opened the envelope to make sure. Seeing a typewritten poem, she ought to have thrown it in her wastebasket or at least waited until evening to read it. Instead, she took it back to the bathroom and locked herself in a stall.

SONNET FOR MARION

I dream I’m at the wheel and I’ve forgotten how

To drive or never learned. I’m dreaming I’m

Nineteen again. The car is young and powerful,

It seems to drive itself, and by the time

I find the brakes I’ve gone into a spin,

A blur of storm-tossed palms and traffic lights.

And you are at the wheel, not I. Within

You a calm capability, as on that night—

Oh, that night, when I was spinning and you

Were speed and safety both. Did I only dream

That, too? In your sustaining arms I knew

What I had doubted: I’m younger than I seem.

To dream of happiness, wake up, and walk on air

Is to know the chance of happiness awake is there.

Sitting in the stall, she tried to read past the sheer fact of the poem and understand what he was saying. The word that made no sense to her was capability. She was hardly even capable of speaking! It didn’t occur to her that Bradley might simply have used a faulty noun. She wondered if he’d meant that she was capable of saving him: if somehow, in the showroom of a car dealership, she’d been discovered after all, by a man of sufficient talent to fulfill his dream of writing for Hollywood, a dream his marriage had smothered but Marion might be capable of reviving and might yet join her own dream with. Wasn’t that what the poem was saying? That some dreams were so vivid that they became reality?

She returned to the floor feeling elated, incipiently capable, and was disappointed when she could barely decipher her manager’s words to her. Now it was elation, not shame, that scrambled her mind, while the more general and important fact—that there was something diseased about a mind so easily scrambled—continued to elude her. When Bradley came back into the showroom with his customer, he was like a powerful magnetic field and she a charged needle. The field repelled her when she turned in his direction and attracted her when she turned away.

In the evening, as closing time approached, the field approached her desk. “I’m such an ass,” he said.

The manager, Mr. Peters, was standing within earshot. Bradley sat down sideways on a desk. “I promised you a T-bone steak last week,” he said. “You’ve probably been thinking, yeah, another salesman’s promise.”

“I don’t need a steak,” Marion managed to say.

“Sorry, doll, I’m a man of my word. Unless there’s somewhere else you need to be?” It was clever of him to approach her in the presence of Mr. Peters, who was older and sexually blind to her. It made the invitation seem innocent. “I thought we’d go to Dino’s, if that’s okay with you.” Bradley turned to Mr. Peters. “What do you think, George? Dino’s for a steak?”

“If you don’t mind the noise,” Mr. Peters said.

The rain outside was hurling itself down vertically, the car lot a shallow lake with currents rippling in the showroom lights and cresting at the storm drains. Marion sat in Bradley’s dark LaSalle with him, facing a fence in an unlighted corner of the lot, while the rain made a warlike sound on the roof. In her head, she rehearsed a short sentence, I’m actually not hungry. Even in her head, she stumbled over the words.

Bradley asked her if she’d read his poem. She nodded.

“It’s a tricky form, the sonnet,” he said, “if you’re strict about the rhyme and meter. In the old days, the word order was more flexible, you know, In me thou seest, where late the sweet birds sang, but who talks like that anymore? I wonder if anyone ever really said In me thou seest.”

“Your poem is good,” she said.

“You liked it?”

She nodded again.

“Will you let me buy you dinner?”

“I’m not actually … actually not I’m—not hungry.”

“Hmm.”

“Maybe just take me home?”

The rain came down harder and then abruptly let up, as if the car had gone under a bridge. When Bradley leaned toward Marion, she shied from the magnetism.

“This is wrong,” she said, finding the voice she used to have. “This isn’t fair.”

“You don’t like me.”

She didn’t know if she liked him. The question somehow wasn’t pertinent.

“I think you have talent as a writer,” she said.

“On the basis of two little poems?”

“You do. I could never write a sonnet.”

“Sure you could. You could make one up right now. Da-duh, da-duh, da-duh, da-duh, rhyme A. Da-duh, da-duh, da-duh, da-duh, rhyme B.”

“Don’t ruin it,” she said.

“What?”

“Don’t ruin what you wrote for me. It’s so beautiful.”

He tried again to kiss her, and this time she had to push him away.

“Marion,” he said.

“I don’t want to be that kind of girl.”

“Which kind is that?”

“You know which kind.” Her face cramped up with tears. “I don’t want to be a slut.”

“You could never in a million years be that kind of girl.”

She pressed on her face to stop the cramp. “You hardly know anything about me.”

“I can see into your soul. You’re the opposite of that kind of girl.”

“But you said your marriage is not negotiable.”

“I did say that.”

“Do you write poems for your wife?”

“Not since a very long time ago.”

“I don’t mind if you write poems for me. I like it. In fact, I love it. I wish—” She shook her head.

“Wish what?”

“I wish you’d write a play, or a movie, and I could star in it.”

Bradley seemed astonished. “That’s what you want?”

“It’s just a dream,” she hastened to say. “It isn’t real.”

He put his hands on the wheel and bowed his head. He could so easily have opened the door a crack and said he wasn’t sure about his marriage. He must have sensed that she wasn’t well. Perhaps he felt that lying to a nutty girl wasn’t sporting.

“What if I did,” he said. “What if I wrote a part for you. Maybe the daughter of the German ambassador—I almost think I could do it, as long as I could picture you in the role. That’s what I’m missing, something beautiful to picture instead of all the ugliness I bring home. I don’t get any support at all from Isabelle. She doesn’t even like it when I read a book. She’s jealous of a book! And boy does she get angry when I try to tell her about a new idea. It’s like she’s Dr. Freud and I’m the patient, just because I have ideas for a screenplay. ‘Oh dear, the patient is displaying symptoms again. We thought we’d cured him of ambition, and now he’s had a relapse.’ She’s so bitter about her own dreams, she can’t stand the fact that I still have my own.”

“Do you love her?” Marion said. Hearing herself ask this question made her feel older and wiser: capable.

“She’s good with the boys,” Bradley said. “She’s a good mother. Maybe a little too anxious—every little sniffle is a sure sign of whooping cough. But you wouldn’t believe how quickly the most interesting person in the world can turn into the most boring person you’ll ever meet.”

“She used to be interesting.”

“I don’t know. I don’t know. She sure as hell isn’t now.”

Marion could simply have offered him friendship and inspiration. She wasn’t yet nutty enough to believe she could star in a movie he’d written. His stroke of genius salesmanship was to describe a person she felt like murdering. He didn’t know that his wife had the same name as Marion’s mother and her faithless school friend, but as soon as he gave her a more detailed Isabelle to hate, the door was open for nuttier thoughts to rush in. The thought that she, Marion, really was more capable than he. The thought that he was too kindhearted to face the obvious truth. The thought that only she could save him from unhappiness, only she could rescue him as a writer, by believing in him and helping him face the truth about his loveless marriage. What kind of vengeful witch got jealous of a book? Isabelle needed murdering for that, and the way for Marion to do it was to move over on the seat. She was short enough to kneel on it, slender enough to fit between him and the steering wheel, and once she was in his arms the dimension of moral significance disappeared.

Bradley Grant took her virginity on the seat of a 1937 LaSalle Series 50 with fogged-up windows, on the lot of Lerner Motors. The act hurt less than certain girls in Santa Rosa had led her to suppose it would, but later, in the bathroom at her rooming house, she discovered more blood than she expected. The white porcelain ran red as she rinsed her underlinens. Only in the morning did she realize that her monthly period had started.

There wasn’t much room for her condition to worsen, but in February it worsened. She felt trapped in a metal cube that was filling up with water, leaving only a tiny pocket of air at the top to breathe. The air was sanity. At every turn, she encountered constriction, most cruelly in how little time she had alone with Bradley. All day, she worked within a hundred paces of him, but he said they had to be very careful. At lunchtime she pressed him into a corner of her old sanctuary in the parts department, but the room had a window through which their corner was obliquely visible. Harry Lerner had forbidden further selling of cars after closing time, and Bradley kept finding reasons he had to go home in the evening. They finally resorted, again, to the seat of his LaSalle. Although it seemed a lot riskier on a moonlit night, without fog on the windows, she kept him there until 10:45. The following week, on his day off, he took her to a motel in Culver City, but even there she felt constricted, because it wasn’t enough to make love. They needed to discuss the future, because surely Bradley now understood that he couldn’t stay married to Isabelle, and their lovemaking left no time for talk. Not until they were back in his car did she ask him if he’d started writing again.

“Not yet,” he said.

It was a reasonable and honest answer, but it greatly upset her. The distance to her house was diminishing as he drove, their time for talking dwindling, the cube filling up with water.

“I don’t know if I can do it,” he said.

“Have you tried?”

“All I can think about is you.”

“That’s all I can think about, too. I mean—you.”

“I just don’t know if I can do it.”

“I know you can.”

“Not writing,” he said. “This. I don’t know if I’m cut out for loving two women at the same time.”

Less than a mouthful of air was left in the cube. All Marion was able to say with it was “Oh.”

“It’s tearing me in two,” he said. “I’ve never met anyone I’ve wanted like you. Everything about you is exactly right. It’s like I was born with your face imprinted on my brain.”

She didn’t have the same feeling about him. If she’d passed him on the street a year ago, she wouldn’t have looked twice. For a moment, as if from outside herself, she could glimpse the outlines of the thing inside her, the obsession that was growing in her, and recognize it as an object foreign to a normal person’s desires. But then, in a blink, she was inside it again.

“Let’s go back to the motel,” she said.

“We can’t.”

“It wasn’t enough. I need more time with you.”

“I want more, too, but we can’t. I’m already late.”

Late meant Isabelle. The prospect of relinquishing Bradley felt so life-threatening to Marion that if she murdered Isabelle it would be an act of self-defense. She began to hyperventilate.

“Marion,” he said. “I know it’s hard for you, but it’s even harder for me. It’s tearing me in two.”

He said more, but her breathing drowned it out. Black cars and white buildings, winos with paper bags and women in sheer stockings, loving two people and tearing me in two. Either she breathed so hard she passed out or another slippage was occurring. The hand that Bradley put on hers, in front of her rooming house, was burning cold. She still couldn’t hear what he was saying, she only knew she had to get away.

The second slippage was worse, the number of hours unaccounted for greater, and afterward she found scrapes on her knuckles, a red bump on her forehead. She was an hour late for work the next morning and wept disproportionately when Mr. Peters mildly chided her. At lunchtime, fearing suffocation if she stayed inside, fearing death if Bradley tried to speak to her, she fled the dealership and walked randomly on named and numbered streets. Snowfall from the storms extended down the spectral mountains, but the March sun was strong, spring already in the air. She was beginning to breathe more freely when she caught sight of a familiar face. Coming toward her, in the crosswalk at Grand Avenue and Ninth Street, was Isabelle Washburn. Marion lowered her head, but Isabelle stopped her by the arm.

“Hey, kid. Aren’t you even gonna say hi?”

Underneath a light coat with a sheen both lavender and green, Isabelle wore a green-on-white polka-dot dress, not cheap. She’d side-curled her hair and adopted a slack-jawed way of speaking that sounded copied from the movies. It transpired that she blamed her nincompoop cousin, rather than her utter lack of acting talent, for the failure of her plan for being discovered, but she was making okay money as a photography model and living with some other gals in a bungalow behind the Egyptian Theatre. It could have been Marion’s imagination, diseased by her own wantonness, but Isabelle’s repeated references to her landlord gave her the impression that he was more than just a landlord. Her artificial new way of speaking suggested a heart hardened by rough experience. “So anyways, that’s me,” she said. “Whatcha been up to yourself?”

“I’m well,” Marion said, which was so funny to her she almost laughed.

“Landed on your feet and all that?”

“Fine, fine. Yes. I have a steady job. Which I should probably get back to.”

Isabelle frowned. “Whadja do to your head?”

“I couldn’t tell you.”

Isabelle dug in her purse. “Lemme put some powder on that.”

Right there on the street corner, Marion let her erstwhile friend apply makeup to the bump on her forehead. The casual sisterliness of the ministration choked her up. Isabelle raised her chin with her finger and inspected her with a professional eye. “That’s a little better,” she said, closing her compact. “You know, we really ought to get together sometime. You used to crack me up so much. Remember Hal Chalmers and Pokie Turner? Dick Thtabler? You ought to just drop in if you’re ever out my way. I’m literally right behind the Egyptian, on Selma, it’s a bright-red house, you can’t miss it.”

Isabelle seemed to have forgotten that she’d dumped Marion nine months ago. Her life in the meantime had been so crowded with event that high school was already historical to her, and indeed it did now seem remarkable that Marion had ever imagined their remaining friends after graduation. But she no longer felt like murdering Isabelle. Instead, she felt sad about what life was doing to her. Nine months later, when life had done even worse to Marion and she had no one to turn to, she not only remembered Isabelle’s sloppy kindness at the corner of Ninth and Grand. She remembered that Isabelle lived in a bright-red bungalow behind the Egyptian Theatre.

She’d become—had made herself—a problem Bradley had to manage. A few days after her second slippage, a blond customer in her thirties had come to the showroom. Nearly all the customers at Lerner were men, and Marion hadn’t seen Bradley work his magic on a woman since she’d become obsessed with him. Suddenly the cartoonish plasticity of his features seemed grotesque. After the woman left, without buying, Marion’s hatred of his wife came to a screaming boil and blew a gasket in her head. When he went to the men’s room, she followed him into it and threw her arms around his neck, tried to climb him. Her question was when they could make love again. She desperately needed to make love with him again, and in his fear of being caught in the men’s room he agreed. They went back to Culver City that very evening. The pleasure sex gave her was increasing exponentially with each encounter. Bradley avowed that, until that night, he’d never understood what passion was. He avowed that he was absolutely mad for her. When he drove her home, he told her she had to quit working at Lerner and find a better place to live.

She went to work in the steno pool at a property-management company where a former Lerner salesman, a friend of Bradley’s, worked. The friend found her an efficiency apartment in Westlake, and Bradley paid three months’ rent in advance, peeling bills off the stack he kept folded in his front pocket. Technically, this made her a kind of prostitute, but to her the bills represented so many dollars that wouldn’t go to his wife and his boys, dollars rightfully hers, redeemable against a future in which she’d be his wife. Her surety was their rightness for each other. Through April and May and June, she experienced the rightness on the apartment’s Murphy bed, among the cigarette burns on the carpet, on the checkered oilcloth that covered the little dining table. After sex, the words she struggled to speak elsewhere came easily. Bradley brought her new books to read, and she now followed the war in Europe avidly, because it interested him. Most thrilling to her was his Spanish screenplay, for which she was acting out the character of the German ambassador’s daughter. As their joint idea for the story emerged in detail, she made shorthand notes on it in bed, a nude stenographer. Working on the story excited her extremely and excited Bradley, too. When he took the pad and pencil from her and set them aside, she lay back for him in a state of not-herselfness, imagining herself as the ambassador’s daughter, as if she were the actress playing her. At work, it wasn’t hard to find an idle hour for typing out the story notes, sometimes adding new ideas of her own. The unattached young men in the office might have known about her situation with Bradley—she seemed to be invisible to them. She was the taciturn girl who was proficient in Gregg and didn’t misspell words.

In July, Bradley took Isabelle and his boys on a car trip to Sequoia and Yosemite. Marion had begged him to use his vacation to get started on the screenplay, which she’d now completely outlined for him, but he said he owed the vacation to his boys, and off they went. As long as she hadn’t had to go more than four days without seeing him, as long as their rightness for each other was regularly confirmed, she’d avoided further episodes of slippage. But a weekend alone, after a week with no hope of seeing Bradley, was endless. The very sun seemed evil to her in the way it dawdled in her windows, took its insolent time in going down. She couldn’t read a book or go to the pictures. The passage of time needed vigilant monitoring. She sat perfectly still, trying not to even blink, until the fear of relaxing her vigilance became apocalyptic, as though the world might end if she so much as flexed a muscle in her foot. She was very, very low. For some reason, she was especially averse to bathing, the sensation of water on her skin.

Bradley was due back on the night of Saturday the 27th and had promised to come and see her on Sunday. She spent Saturday night on her back with her eyes open, because to close them was to picture him in bed with his Isabelle, to consider the countless hours that Isabelle had had to undermine his confidence as a writer, and to entertain the suspicion that Isabelle was right: to see him as he really was and see herself as she really was, a lonely girl trading her body for a fantasy. Time was the enemy when she was alone, because the fantasy required effort to sustain and her strength was finite. In the morning, unslept, unbathed, she boiled and ate two eggs and lay down again. The sun had an evil new trick of changing its position suddenly, jumping forward, as if to mock her for Bradley’s non-arrival. It was setting by the time she heard a tapping on her door, the turning of a key. How she must have looked when he saw her on the bed! Flat-haired, puffy-eyed, parched-lipped, mad. He kneeled on the floor and kissed her cheek. She didn’t feel a thing.

“I’m sorry I didn’t come sooner,” he said. “We had a mouse problem. Mouse poop all over the kitchen. I finally found a nest of them in the space behind the phonebook drawer. Four little baby mice in chewed-up phonebook paper. I tried to ladle them out with a metal spoon, so I could let them go outside, but they started crawling away—it was horrible. I had to crush them with the spoon, which turns out to be pretty hard when you’re reaching inside a cabinet and you can’t see what you’re doing and your wife is screaming in your ear.”

How many times did you fuck her? someone said loudly. The atrocious word argued against its having been her, but who else could it have been?

“I wanted to be here earlier,” Bradley said, as if he hadn’t heard the question, “but everything was such a mess. The boys were fighting, they had too much time together in the car, and, Jesus, the mice. The parents are still in the cabinets somewhere. I can’t stay long.”

“Why stay at all?” she definitely said.

“I’m sorry. I know it was hard for you, but it was hard for me, too.”

“You don’t know what hard is.”

“Marion. Honey. I do know.” With a mouse-butchering hand, he brushed hair from her eyes and stroked her head. “I’ve done a bad thing—a bad thing to you. You’re so beautiful, so fragile, so serious. Oh God, you’re serious. And I’m just a goddamned car salesman.”

She began to cry, hysterically. It ate into the little time they had, but it was a release from the desiccated paralysis she’d suffered for two weeks. It restored her to sensation again, and by and by it had the added cruel benefit of making Bradley stay far longer than he’d intended to—of complicating the lies he’d have to tell when he got home—because he couldn’t resist her fragility. Her tear-wet face compelled a rough undressing of her, and she was serious, all right. As he had his way with her, she focused intensely on his face, alert to any subtle sign that his pleasure in her had diminished. Her own pleasure had become incidental. The only thing that mattered was Bradley.

Three nights later, he surprised her by showing up at her office and asking her out for a hamburger. As he drove to a Carpenter’s, her feral intelligence, which was warning her that no good could come of surprise changes to their routine, was at war with the hope that he’d finally found the courage to leave Isabelle. Her feral intelligence was correct. In his car, at the drive-in, after eating his burger in nervously wolfing bites, while hers sat untouched on her lap, he licked a bit of bloody ketchup from his finger and said he’d done some hard thinking on his vacation. He said—oh, what was it he was saying?—find my way to putting them through the pain of made my bed and now I’ve got to lie deserve a man who’s worthy of your one-hundred percent not fifty percent because fifty percent is not be alone with you again because you’ll never stop being the person not fair to you isn’t fair to I’m never going to be a realistically realistic it’s just not fair to I should have known worst thing terrible realistically so terrible get over it never get over it … While Bradley’s rubbery features stretched expressively, she could feel the varieties of redness surging in her own face, tomato, scarlet, crimson, garnet, beet, as if she were a chameleon. Imagining how comical she looked, she started laughing.

He stared at her, and the worry in his face was even funnier to her. She waved a limp hand, as helplessly laughing people did by way of apology, and tried to control herself. “I’m sorry,” she said. Another mirthful snort escaped her. “I was thinking about the baby mice.”

“Jesus. Why are you laughing at that?”

“Because—poor you. Having to mash them with a spoon.” She giggled and then laughed harder, caving forward with it. Perhaps she was aware that Bradley couldn’t very well abandon her while she was acting crazy, but she was legitimately in the grip of her hilarity. He would certainly think twice before he took her out in public again. This thought, too, was hilarious to her.

“Should I be worried about you?” he said when she’d finally regained control.

“You should worry about yourself,” she said. “I’m a lot bigger than a mouse.”

“What does that mean?”

“What does it sound like it means?”

He glanced at the Ford coupe parked to his left, the uniformed backside of a female carhop leaning in the passenger-side window.

“I need you to believe that I will never get over this,” he said, his expression very serious. Marion adjusted her own expression correspondingly, but her attempted severe frown felt so ridiculous that she giggled at it.

“Please, please, please,” he said.

“I’m trying to be serious, but maybe you had me wrong.”

“We have to stop,” he said.

“Oh. Why?”

“I told you. It was the very first thing I told you. I’m not going to destroy my family. I’m not going to leave the mother of my children.”

“You also said you’d die if you couldn’t be with me. Does that mean you’re going to die now?”

He covered his face with his hands. If she’d ever really liked him, she definitely didn’t now, but the matter of liking was more irrelevant than ever. She could clearly perceive the contours of her obsession with him. It would have been sensible to tear it from her skull, but the object had grown too large to be removed without splitting her head open. Despite its sick enormity, it was also too beautiful to her.

“I’ll probably die if I can’t be with you,” she said, in a factual tone.

“No, you won’t. You’re going to find somebody who’s better for you.”

“Do you see what I’m saying, though?”

“Honestly, I’m not following all of it.”

“You’re wrong,” she said, opening her door. “That’s all. I know you’re wrong.”

As she made her way home, past Westlake Park, she didn’t feel low. She felt nervously elated, like a general on the eve of a decisive battle. She and Bradley were in a crisis that she needed all her wits to navigate. To have walked away from the drive-in voluntarily, to not have made a screeching scene and begged him to reconsider, seemed in hindsight an inspired tactic. Now she just needed to be patient. Between his job and his family duties and his attentiveness to her, Bradley had been too overstretched to exercise his talent as a writer. The fantasy of him returning to her apartment, unannounced, in the middle of the night, after a month of separation, fired up by the screenplay he’d written and desperate to get her opinion of it, the fantasy of their reading the pages together and her finding them magnificent, was so compelling to her, so enjoyably repeatable and refinable, that she hardly slept that night. In the morning, she felt like skipping on her way to work. Instead of burying her head in a newspaper, she chatted with the other typists and smiled at the unmarried men.

For a number of weeks, she was sustainedly elated—uplifted by her certainty that her strategy of not pestering Bradley, of letting him wonder about her and feel remorseful, of leaving him alone to write, would bring him back. Imagining that he could somehow see her and be jealous, she let one of the young men from the office take her to dinner and a movie. Afterward, she couldn’t remember the man saying anything at all, which led her to wonder if she’d talked nonstop about Hitler and Ribbentrop and Churchill. Perhaps she had. The man didn’t ask her on another date, and this was fine with her, because he barely existed. The edges of existence more generally had begun to fray, her lack of sleep taking its toll. Finally, one evening in September, she decided to leave work early and go and see Bradley at Lerner Motors. The date, 9/9, was irresistibly auspicious.

Bradley was drinking coffee with Mr. Peters and blanched at the sight of her. Nervous but residually elated, she greeted the other girls as if they’d been great friends of hers. One of them had an engagement ring, another was expecting and about to quit, a lesser salesman had been fired. To reconcile her urgent need to speak with her utter lack of personal things to speak about, Marion expressed strong opinions, derived from the newspaper, about the situation in Europe and the necessity of American intervention. One by one, the girls excused themselves, until only Anne remained. Anne remarked, kindly, that Marion didn’t seem well, and Marion allowed that she’d been having trouble sleeping. Anne asked if she’d like to come home with her and have some soup.

“No, I’m here to see Bradley,” Marion said. “He still owes me a T-bone steak.”

Anne’s expression became grave.

“He’s a man of his word.”

“Why don’t you come home with me instead,” Anne said.

“Another time,” Marion said, walking away. Her head was pounding and her body felt made entirely of chalk. She might have preferred to be asleep if sleep had been a possibility. Bradley was standing by the still-unsold Cadillac 75 with a red-haired man, an obvious Jake Barnes, and listening with cartoonish raptness. He had a way of making every customer feel astonishingly interesting. Marion walked up to the Jake Barnes and said, “I’m very sorry, but I believe I was here before you.”

Bradley’s gaze looped all around her without alighting on her. “Marion,” he said.

The Jake looked at his watch. “It’s all right.”

“No, no.” Bradley placed a hand on her back and turned her away. “You need to wait,” he told her, as if speaking to a child.

“Is that not what I’ve been doing?”

“Just—wait. All right?”

She waited, prominently, smoking a cigarette, on one of the leather couches for customers. The inside of her mouth was chalky, too. Her lack of sleep had broken the formerly continuous world into sharp fragments. The worried looks of Anne and Mr. Peters, at their desks, glanced off her like arrows off a thing of chalk.

Without knowing how she got there, she found herself outside with Bradley, on the sidewalk around the corner from Lerner. The tops of the street-shadowing buildings blazed in the setting sun. The air was acrid with motor exhaust.

“Oh, honey,” he was saying. “You look so tired.”

“I’m sorry.”

“I didn’t mean it in a bad way. Just—have you been eating enough?”

“I eat eggs. I like eggs. I’m sorry.”

“You keep saying you’re sorry when it’s me who should be sorry.”

“I’m sorry.”

Bradley squeezed his eyes shut. “Oh, God.”

“What?” she said eagerly.

“It’s killing me to see you again.”

“Will you come home with me?”

“It’s better if I don’t.”

“You don’t have to stay long.”

He sighed. “There’s a PTA meeting I promised Isabelle I’d go to.”

“Is it an important meeting?” she said, genuinely curious.

The long wait was over. She stood patiently outside a phone booth while he lied to his wife. She was patient in his car with him, too. It was he who was impatient—as soon as they were inside her building, he pushed her against the wall by the mailboxes and kissed her savagely. She still felt chalky, but apparently to him her flesh was pliable, and that was enough.

Except that it wasn’t. The goal of her waiting had been achieved, but the waiting had stretched the connection between her obsession and its object past the breaking point. Their lovemaking, repeated several times before he left her apartment, delighted her only in what it signified. The actual person on top of her, the panting car salesman with coffee breath, was a stranger to the world she lived in now. Although she clearly signified something to him, too, she was beyond trying to imagine what it was.

Later, in Arizona, she couldn’t remember why she’d told him he didn’t need to be careful. Maybe, being confused about so many things, she’d been confused about her time of month. Maybe, knowing that Bradley didn’t love the alternative to being careful, and not daring to diminish his pleasure in their reunion, she’d simply hoped for the best. Or maybe, although she definitely didn’t remember wanting to be pregnant, her feral intelligence had disastrously miscalculated without her being aware of it. But there was also the fact that, despite her obvious unwellness in the head, Bradley had believed her when she said he didn’t have to be careful. Was it possible that he, too, without being aware of it, had wanted to make a baby? In Arizona, in the absence of any clear memory, she concluded that her pregnancy had been God’s plan for her, His way of testing her: that His will manifested itself in the actions of His children, regardless of their reasons. This settled the question.

When she told the story of her crack-up to Sophie Serafimides, it wasn’t hard to omit the pregnancy, because more than enough other things had happened to explain her landing in a locked ward. There was the late night, a week after the first reunion, when Bradley showed up at her door with a half-emptied whiskey bottle. There was the second night of that sort. There were the two weeks in which she didn’t see him, and then the dreadful letter he sent her. There was her second visit to Lerner Motors, which didn’t go well, and her third visit, when she tried to make Bradley smell her hand, with which she’d touched herself privately, and was hustled out the door by Mr. Peters. There was her ensuing catatonia at the property-management company, which resulted in her being fired. There was the stretch of days that she mostly couldn’t account for, interminable days in an apartment on which rent would soon be due. Finally, there was the warm November afternoon when she went to Bradley’s house, whose address she’d found in the phonebook, to have a word with his wife.

The neat, nearly identical houses on Keniston Avenue looked to her like toy houses or a movie set. She was very frightened when she rang Bradley’s doorbell, but she couldn’t think of any other way to show him he was wrong. Paradoxically, she needed to enlist his wife’s help. When Isabelle learned that Bradley was in love with someone else, namely Marion, whose face had been imprinted on his brain at birth, she’d understand the folly of her marriage. Imagining Bradley divorced was more pleasurable and less strenuous to Marion than wondering why she hadn’t had her monthly period. She hoped it was only because she was malnourished and emotionally stressed—she’d heard of such things—because her chances with Bradley depended on her being his liberation. A baby would make him feel trapped and disgusted, and she could never play the German ambassador’s daughter if she was fat with one.

To her great surprise, a blond boy of seven or eight opened the front door. In her thousand imaginings of the scene, no one but Isabelle had ever come to the door.

The boy stared at her. She stared at him. The moment seemed to last about an hour.

“Mom,” the boy shouted over his shoulder. “There’s a lady here.”

He went away, and Isabelle Grant appeared with a dish towel in her hands. She was thick in the middle, not as tall as Marion had pictured her. Like Isabelle Washburn, she seemed more pitiable than murderable. This, too, was unexpected. “Can I help you?” she said.

In Marion’s face the chameleoning reds, not the least bit funny to her now.

“Miss?” Isabelle said. “Are you all right?”

“Your, uh, your husband,” Marion said.

“Yes?”

“Your husband doesn’t love you anymore.”

Now alarm, suspicion, anger. “Who are you?”

“It’s very unfortunate. But you bore him.”

“Who are you?”

“I … well. Do you see what I’m saying?”

“No. You must have the wrong house.”

“You’re not Isabelle Grant?”

“Yes, but I don’t know you.”

“Bradley knows me. You can ask him. I’m the person he’s in love with.”

The door slammed shut. Feeling that she hadn’t made herself sufficiently clear, Marion rang the doorbell again. From inside she heard children’s pounding footsteps. The door sprang open. “Whoever you are,” Isabelle said, “please go away.”

“I’m sorry,” Marion said, with real remorse. “I shouldn’t have tried to hurt you. But what’s done is done. You just don’t satisfy him. Maybe, in the long run, it’ll be better for you, too.”

This time, the door didn’t slam, it just clicked shut. She heard the deadbolt turning. After some unaccounted-for minutes, she found herself still standing on the welcome mat. It was all so disappointing. For days, she’d imagined that speaking to Bradley’s wife would entirely remake the world; that her mental pain, which had been growing steadily since he sent his dreadful letter to her, would cease in an instant and she would be in a world where decisions were easy. But the pain was still there. It now took the form of not knowing what to do next. She would have liked to simply stay standing on the welcome mat, but she was sane enough to recognize the badness of going to Bradley’s house—all she’d accomplished was to cause Isabelle pain without relieving her own. She turned and walked back to the sidewalk. Coming to a small park, she saw a box hedge behind which she could discreetly lie down. She rested her cheek on a tussock of grass between bare clods of earth. Although there was dog poop close enough to be smelled, she lay there until darkness fell.

When she got back to her building, Bradley’s LaSalle was parked in front of it. He could have let himself into her apartment, but he was sitting at the wheel. He jerked his head to indicate that she should get in with him. She was frightened, but she did it. She cowered against the passenger door, trying to make herself smaller.

“What do you want?” he said angrily.

“I’m sorry.”

“No, seriously. What do you want? Tell me what the hell you think you want.”

“I’m sorry.”

“It’s too late for sorry. I’ve got an unholy mess on my hands now. I swear to God, Marion, if you go anywhere near my wife again, I’m calling the police.”

“I’m sorry.”

“The same goes for Lerner. We’ll call the police, and you know what they’ll do? They’ll put you in a hospital. You’re not right in the head. It kills me to say it, but you’re not.”

“I’m throwing up a lot,” she agreed. “It’s hard to keep food down.”

He sighed in frustration. “For the last time: We can’t see each other again. Never, ever. Do you understand?”

“Yes. No.”

“No contact of any kind. Do you understand?”

She knew that it was important to say yes, but she couldn’t say it honestly.

“What you need to do now,” he said, “is get yourself home. Can you do that for me? I want you to go back to San Francisco and let your family take care of you. You are the sweetest thing. It’s killing me to see what’s happened to you. But what you did today was just beyond the pale.”

Her chest clotted up with a new worry: that she’d finally liberated Bradley but was now too wrong in the head for him to want her. The irony surged up and strangled her like stomach acid. She retched out five words. “Will she divorce you now?”

“Honey—Marion. How many ways do I have to find to say it? We can’t be together.”

“You and I.”

“You and I.”

The hyperventilating set in, and he reached into his jacket. The stack of money he put between them on the seat was thick. “I want you to take this,” he said. “Buy yourself a first-class ticket north. And then, as soon as you get to San Francisco, I want you to see the best psychiatrist you can find. Somebody who can help you.”

She stared at the money.

“I am so sorry,” he said. “But there’s nothing else I can give you. Please take it.”

“I’m not a whore.”

“No, you’re an angel. A sweet angel who’s in very bad trouble. I mean it—if there were anything else I could give you, I would do it. But this is all I’ve got.”

She finally understood that she was nothing to him but his paid slut. The money on the seat seemed to her a dangerous, loathsome reptile. She found the door latch and half fell, backward, from his car. With a loathsome hand, he extended the money toward her. “Please, Marion. For God’s sake.”

When she came out of her slippage, some morning or another, probably the very next one, she felt inexplicably better. It was as if her hatred of the man trying to pay her had made a crack in her obsession with Bradley Grant. The obsession was still in her, but it was weakened now, more readily observable for what it was. Inside her front door, wrapped in an advertising flyer and slipped under the door, she found the stack of money. She methodically cut each bill into tiny pieces and flushed them all down the toilet. This was a terrible mistake she had to make to ease her mental pain.

In the first days of December, less distracted by pain, she was capable of reading the newspaper again, taking an interest in Mussolini’s attack on Greece, and venturing forth to seek work. Her employer references weren’t in order, but she still had her looks. She found a job as a greeter at a big Safeway supermarket, offering customers bite-size samples of featured food products, and was surprised by how little she minded it. She liked having only one thing to say and saying it over and over. Repetition calmed her fear of the thing she was now able to admit was inside her. But the smell of certain foods, meat products especially, was revoltingly intense to her, and her fear was growing with the thing inside her. One day, when she was sticking toothpicks in miniature canned franks, her fear impelled her to walk out of the store, run home, and obey the commands of her feral intelligence. She hit herself in the stomach and jumped up and down violently. She swallowed a mouthful of ammonia and couldn’t keep it down. When she tried again and blew the ammonia out her nose, the explosion in her head was so extreme she thought she was dying.

In her narrative to Sophie, a straight line led from Bradley’s offer of money to the night she wandered the streets of downtown Los Angeles in the rain, raving on themes of sluttiness and murder, barefoot, her blouse soaking and unbuttoned, until she was picked up by the police. But the line hadn’t been straight. It had led through an eviction notice; a tearful scene with her property manager; telegrams to her mother and to Roy Collins, asking both of them for emergency money; and a phone call to Bradley at Lerner Motors. The property manager gave her until the end of December to pay her overdue rent. Her mother, it later turned out, was on a ski vacation with her friends. Roy Collins wired her twenty dollars of travel money, along with a terse offer to employ her. Bradley hung up the phone as soon as he heard her voice.

Definitely pregnant and definitely not interested in carrying his baby, she took a streetcar out to Hollywood. The streets were dry and dusk was falling, the holiday tinsel and ribbons in store windows emerging from the cheapening glare of daylight to glow and beckon. She was able to entertain rational thoughts and ordinary feelings—resentment of her mother, the thought of the darkness that had fallen on Europe, hatred of Bradley and his wife, appreciation of the fender lines of a custom-body Cadillac passing the streetcar, curiosity about her sister in New York, the question of Shirley’s own sexual experience or lack thereof—for no more than a few seconds before the terror of her situation welled up in her afresh and scattered them. When she saw the Egyptian Theatre, she stepped off the streetcar and asked a newspaper seller where Selma Avenue was. Her main hope now was Isabelle Washburn. Even if Isabelle couldn’t give her money, she could provide sisterly advice and sympathy, which Marion was very much in need of. In the dark, it was hard to tell the colors of houses, but eventually she found a distinctly red one. Dim, warm light was in the curtained front windows. She walked right up to the door and knocked. Almost immediately, the door opened; and there stood Satan.

She didn’t know it was Satan. The man was short, almost elfin, with a full white beard and suntanned cheeks, a large shiny tanned bald spot on his head, and kindly wrinkles around his eyes. “Come in, come in,” he said, as if he’d been expecting her. Marion said she was looking for Isabelle Washburn. “Isabelle no longer lives here,” the man said, “but come in. Please.”

“Are you the landlord?”

“Why, yes, I am. Please come in.”

In the living room were comfortably weary chairs, framed soft-focus head shots of young actresses or models, also a framed poster for King Kong. A bottle of red wine and a stemmed glass of it stood on a coffee table. “Let me get you a glass,” the man said, disappearing.

Farther back in the house, water was splashing in a bathtub, skin squeaking resonantly on porcelain. The white-bearded man returned with a glass, sat down, and filled it. He seemed very happy to see Marion.

“I just need to find Isabelle,” she said.

“I understand. But you’re shaking like a leaf.”

This was undeniable, and the wine looked good to her. She sat down and drank some. It was much weaker than the whiskey she’d drunk with Bradley. By the time she’d explained how she knew Isabelle and had come to the red house, her glass was empty. When the man moved to refill it, she didn’t stop him. The wine helped her rise with the upwellings of her fear, like a buoy on deep ocean.

“I’m afraid I don’t actually know where Isabelle is at present,” the man said, “with respect to her street address and so forth. But I know one girl who might.”

“That would be good,” Marion said, drinking.

“You’re a very comely young woman,” he added for no obvious reason.

Marion reddened. The wine was both weak and not so weak. She heard a door open, water draining from a tub, the soft stepping of bare feet, a door closing.

“So the girl,” she said. “The person who knows where she lives.”

“Oh, dear, you look terrified,” the man said. “Are you frightened? Marion? Why are you so frightened?”

“I just want to find Isabelle.”

“Of course,” he said. “I can help you with that.”

There was a kindly light in his eyes, a sort of gentle mirth.

“I’m a helpful person,” he said. “You wouldn’t be the first girl to come here in trouble. Is that what it is? Are you looking for Isabelle because you’re in some kind of trouble?”

She couldn’t answer.

“Marion? You can tell me. Are you in trouble?”

Her trouble was too large to be spoken. To emerge from her in words, it needed to be broken into smaller pieces and arranged in a coherent sequence, and even if she’d been capable of the breaking and the arranging she would have been telling a total stranger that she was carrying a married man’s child. As the stranger waited for her to answer, she noticed a different, less kindly sort of light in his eyes. She noticed that his shirt was untucked and that he had quite a potbelly. She must have been mistaken about Isabelle’s romantic interest in her landlord.

“It’s man trouble, isn’t it,” he said.

She couldn’t breathe, and she had no intention of answering, not even with a nod.

“I see,” he said. “And is your man still in the picture?”

Had she nodded? Apparently she had. She went ahead and shook her head.

“I’m very sorry,” the man said.

“But the girl you mentioned. The one who knows where Isabelle is.”

“Would you like me to telephone her?”

“Yes. Please.”

He left the room. Marion’s glass was empty, as was the bottle. While she waited, a series of small noises culminated in a clicking of heels, a woman entering the room. She stopped when she saw Marion. She was dressed in a narrow skirt and a matching jacket with padded shoulders. Her mouth, crimson-lipsticked, had a hard set to it. “You here about the room?”

“No,” Marion said.

“Good for you.”

The woman turned and left the house. The man returned with a corkscrew and a second bottle of wine. Marion waited in suspense while he opened it.

“No luck,” he said, pouring. “Jane hasn’t seen her since before Thanksgiving. She thinks she might have gone back to Santa Rosa. Apparently she’d talked about doing that.”

Isabelle’s returning to Santa Rosa seemed strange to Marion, but everything seemed strange to her. She wished she hadn’t already spent the travel money Roy Collins had wired her. Imagining Isabelle in Santa Rosa made her homesick for the place.

“We’ll have to think of something else for you,” the man said.

“I think I’ll go to Santa Rosa.”

“Yes, that would be one plan. Although, of course, we’re not sure that Isabelle is actually there. She could have gone anywhere. She could still be right here. All Jane said was that she hadn’t seen her in a while.”

“But it sounds like … I’ll bet she went home to Santa Rosa.”

“Mm.”

He took a sip of wine, possibly to hide a smile. Why would he be smiling? Marion stood up and thanked him for making the call.

“Sit down, dear,” he said. “You don’t want to go back to Santa Rosa. It’s a Podunk town—people talk. You’re much better off in the big city. We can arrange things here that would be difficult, if not impossible, in Santa Rosa. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

She did understand. Bradley had once asked her exactly the same question, and she was fast. Sitting down again, accelerated by the wine in her, she landed unexpectedly and tilted sideways.

“You don’t have to be embarrassed,” the man said. “I’ve had this house for fifteen years, and there’s nothing I haven’t seen. So why don’t we speak frankly, you and I.”

The thing was growing in her, and it was Bradley’s. This was the fact she couldn’t get around. She didn’t want to have the thing inside her. It reminded her of the boy who’d answered the door at his house, the horror of Bradley having children, the horror of his marriage, the horror of what she’d done to herself.

“Perhaps you’ve missed a monthly,” the man said. “Perhaps more than one?”

She affirmed it with a whimper.

“How many?” he said. “Surely not more than two—you’re skinnier than a post.”

She shook her head.

“I like a skinny pretty little girl,” he commented in a throatier way. “And you are definitely that.”

She could sooner have recited the Koran than raise her eyes to Isabelle’s former landlord. Except for the ticking of a clock on the mantel, the house was silent. She was certain that no one but the two of them was in it.

“Luckily for you, I can help you,” he said. “I happen to know just the man—he’s very good. Tip-top hygiene. Nice office. Complete discretion.”

She was breathing either far too fast or not at all. The man’s words came from a distance and receded further as he spoke them. “Do you have a hundred fifty dollars? That would include the twenty-five for me. And, let’s see, today is Thursday, isn’t it. We could have you good as gold again by Saturday night.”

She heard wine being poured.

“Do you have a hundred fifty dollars?” he said.

The question came through clearly. She indicated that she didn’t.

“How much money do you have?” He waited for a response and got none. “Marion, do you have any money at all?”

The answer must have been obvious. She heard him leave the room and return, felt the heat of him as he crouched by her. “I know how frightened you are,” he said. “You’re terribly frightened. Understandably frightened. You’ll feel better if you take these.”

He opened one of her clenched hands and pressed two tablets into it.

“It’s only Seconal. It’ll help you sleep.”

She felt the heat of his hand on her knee.

“I imagine you’re wondering if I can really solve your problem. I suppose I could give you references, but the other girls I’ve helped may be reluctant to talk about it. The way I see it, you’ll just have to trust me. I’ve run an honest business here for fifteen years. I never take anything I haven’t paid for, and I never give a girl anything she hasn’t paid for. That’s the rule in this house. Everything here is quid pro quo.”

By bodily reflex, she removed the hand that was creeping up her leg. As soon as she let it go, he put it back.

“I’m going to Palm Springs for the holidays,” he said. “If you’ll stay with me until then, we’ll have you good as gold by Christmas. That is a solemn promise. A mere eleven days. If I may say so, the terms are rather advantageous to you. Luckily for you, you’re just my kind of girlie. Very, very much my kind of girlie.”

Her feral intelligence understood perfectly well what he was proposing. To agree to it, all she had to do was not stand up and leave. She raised her hand and put the two pills in her mouth. Her arms felt too short to reach for her glass, so she chewed them.

Her mental illness, compounded by a Seconal fog, spared her from remembering much from her eleven days in the red house. She did remember listening for footsteps outside her door, the landlord’s and the other tenant’s, the latter even more dreadful than the former. She thought she would die if the other woman’s gaze so much as brushed her, she cowered at the clatter of high heels in the hallway, she let the landlord bring food to her room. Disgusting things were visited on her, but they rarely seemed to last long. As long as she stayed in the house, she remained entirely a victim and would have had nothing to confess to her priest in Arizona—in fact, she might have had grounds for going to the police. The Satanic thing about the landlord was that he’d struck a deal with her. Satan was a stickler when it came to contracts, and by following through with his side of the bargain, punctiliously delivering her to the doctor and paying for the abortion, he deprived her of her victimhood. By keeping his word, he made her submission to his lechery one half of a transaction, a quid pro quo, in which she was complicit. She couldn’t claim ignorance or innocence. She’d knowingly committed adultery with Bradley Grant, and then she’d knowingly sold herself to pay for the murder of her baby.

Satan was gone, vanished seemingly for good, when she emerged from the scene of the crime, a few blocks from Lerner Motors. It was late in the afternoon of December 24. The leading edge of a storm system had crept across the city sky, scalloping it with cloud. The last Seconal she’d swallowed, in the morning, was wearing off. She was light-headed, and the pain in her belly, though not severe yet, felt evil in its novelty. In place of her specific dread, now put to rest, a more general dread was creeping across her sky-wide mind. She still had six dollars and change in her purse, but she couldn’t bring herself to board a streetcar. Weaving a little, pausing to rest against the sides of buildings, she made her way toward her apartment.

It wasn’t more than twenty blocks away, but traversing that distance finished her off, because she couldn’t get away from him. His elfin face loomed up in window after window. Twinkling-eyed. White-bearded. Dressed in a bright red suit with ermine trim. Posters and greeting cards and cookie tins and life-size manikins all advertised his pawing, wine-breathed malice. She needed more Seconals to get away from him. He was watching her from every direction. His penis was short and fat and tan, like a miniature him. He stood potbellied on a corner, in a red suit, and rang a bell beside a red can into which passersby dropped money. Everywhere, red. She couldn’t get away from red. It was the color of his house. It was how he signaled that wherever she turned he was already there. Red bows, red ribbons. Red-striped candy canes. Shiny stars and crescent moons of metallic red cardboard. The red house. The red car. The red in the sink at her old rooming house. The red wagon. The red wagon. The red wagon. The red wagon. Evil had pursued her all her life, and now the world was exploding with the color of it, and nowhere was there refuge. It found her in her bathroom, the bathroom of her apartment. Red was inside her, too, and it was coming out. She was nothing but a thin-skinned bladder bursting-full of red. Her hands were red, her things were red, there was red on the floor, red on the walls she wiped her hands on. Red annihilated her mind. Merry Christmas.

“So here’s a memory,” she said. “It’s the best memory I have of Christmas. Do you want to hear it?”

“I would,” Sophie Serafimides said. “If you’re sure you’re done punishing me.”

Marion opened her eyes. Out on the rail tracks, snow was falling heavily. The tracks already had a thick coconut frosting.

“You needed punishing,” she said.

Sophie didn’t smile. “Tell me your memory.”

“It was 1946, in Arizona. Russ and I had been together for the better part of a year—we were already a couple in every way except marriage. He still had his alternative service to finish, even though the war was over, but things had gotten very lax at the camp. He could get some days off almost whenever he wanted, and that was nice for me. I’d invited him to Christmas at my uncle Jimmy’s, but he said he had a better idea. There was an old Willys truck that the camp director was willing to let him borrow, and Russ wanted to see more of the Southwest. Jimmy gave us some money as a Christmas present, and off we went. It was a huge deal for Russ, because his parents didn’t know about me, and everywhere we went we had to pretend that we were married. It was a huge act of defiance for him, and I was in love with him. It was heaven to have him all to myself, driving wherever we felt like going. We spent a day in Santa Fe, and then we were in Las Vegas—Las Vegas, New Mexico—when the snow came. Do you know Las Vegas?”

“I don’t.”

“It’s an old, old Spanish colonial town up by the Sangre de Cristos. The Willys had bad tires and we got stuck there by the snow. There was only one hotel where people like us could have stayed, and that’s where we had our Christmas. Our room was probably terrible, but we had each other, so I thought it was wonderful. The hotel was on the old town square, with a dining room on the ground floor, and that’s where we ate on Christmas Eve. To be there with Russ felt like a reward beyond anything I deserved. There was frost around the edges of the windows, and actual cowboys—real cowboys in long coats were coming in to have their dinner. There was also a little family, maybe stuck by the snow like us, an Anglo family with two little girls. And it was like those little girls were the family we were going to have. Like we were looking at ourselves in the future, and then the most amazing thing happened. Outside on the square, there was a big truck that somebody had rigged up to look like Santa’s sleigh. There were two reindeer sticking out in front of it, above the hood, and they’d rigged up lights to make it look like they were flying. They’d also lit up the sleigh on the roof of the cab. From a distance, you couldn’t see the truck. All you could see was the reindeer and the sleigh and a cowboy in a Santa suit waving his hand while the truck went around and around in the snow. And—I, uh.”

Marion faltered, avoiding Sophie’s eyes.

“I never liked Santa Claus. I thought he was scary and creepy. I had a problem with him. But the look on those two little girls’ faces, when they caught sight of the reindeer and the sleigh—I don’t think I’ll ever see more pure wonder and joy. The girls’ eyes were just huge. One of them said, ‘Oh! Oh!’ And they ran to the window and looked out, and they were saying, ‘Oh! Oh! Oh!’ It was just pure joy and credulity. Their utter belief in what they were seeing was just the most beautiful thing. And all the … all the … I’m sorry, but all the shit I’d been through in California, it just got washed away. It was like I was being reborn, just by watching those girls and their reaction.”

“That does sound beautiful.”

“But what does this have to do with anything?”

The dumpling inclined her head suggestively.

“Russ didn’t see it the way I did,” Marion said. “He didn’t get it at all. And I couldn’t tell him what it meant to me, because I couldn’t tell him what I’d been through.”

“It’s never too late to tell him.”

“No, it’s definitely too late. That Christmas Eve would have been the time to do it. ‘I had an affair with a married man, I tried to break up his marriage by telling his wife, and I got so crazy they had to lock me up on Christmas morning.’ There was no way that story was going to fly, not with Russ.”

“You were institutionalized on Christmas?”

“Had I not mentioned that?”

“You hadn’t.”

“Well, there you go. That’s how the leopard got his spots.”

“Meaning?”

“Now you know why I hate Christmas. We can call it a breakthrough, and I can go home and eat some more sugar cookies. Tra-la-la, tra-la-la. I can live happily ever after.”

Sophie frowned.

“We had a horrible fight that night,” Marion said. “Russ and I, in New Mexico. It was our first real fight, and I promised myself we’d never have another one. No matter what it took, I wasn’t going to raise my voice with him again. I would love him and support him and keep my mouth shut. Because he saw something very different when he looked at those two girls. He said he was disgusted by the parents—that they were encouraging their children to worship a false idol. That they were lying to their kids and neglecting the true meaning of Christmas, which had nothing to do with Santa Claus. And I went out of my mind again. I felt like I’d experienced a kind of magical rebirth—something truly Christian, by the way, which was to forgive, oh, not forgive, but to get over … well.”

She felt herself going red. The dumpling’s eyes were on her.

“It was … I’m not explaining it right. Santa was … Santa wasn’t … I could see that it was only an illusion. It was just some cowboy in a Santa suit, not … And somehow that, plus the girls—I was sharing in someone else’s joy and wonder. I knew it was only an illusion, but because it was only an illusion I could be an innocent little girl again myself. And that mattered so much to me, and Russ didn’t get it. I was screaming at him, just out of control. I hated him, and I could see I was scaring the daylights out of him, and I said to myself, nope, never going to do that again, ever. And you know what? I never did. Tomorrow will be exactly twenty-five years that I’ve been keeping my mouth shut.”

The dumpling seemed preoccupied. She glanced over her shoulder at the falling snow. “I’m sorry if this is a difficult question,” she said. “But I feel I have to ask again. Is there something important you’re not telling me?”

A coldness surged in Marion. “What kind of thing.”

“I’m not quite sure. There was just—something in your tone of voice. I’ve thought I might have heard it once or twice before, and just now I heard it again, very clearly. I’m not saying I’m a world-class practitioner. And, by the way, in case you didn’t know, I don’t believe in Just So stories. I don’t believe there’s a single key that unlocks everything. But when I’ve heard that particular tone of voice in the past, it often turns out that the patient has experienced a particular kind of trauma.”

The dumpling was relentless.

“My father killed himself,” Marion said. “My mother didn’t love me. I lost my mind. Is that not enough?”

“No, that’s a lot,” Sophie said. “And I definitely hear that in your voice, too. But that’s the funny you. That’s the you who survived a rotten childhood and the aftermath of that and made adjustments, made a good life for yourself, found a way to cope with the turmoil in your head. That’s the survivor in you. What I was hearing was something else, and I’m not saying I’m right. I’m just asking.”

Marion looked at her watch. She was two minutes past the end of their second “hour.” As if the little office were the living room of a certain red bungalow, she stood up hastily and took her coat off the hook. She jammed one arm and then the other into its sleeves. She still had time to run home, raid her hosiery drawer, and buy something nicer for Perry. For twenty-five years, she’d believed that her life with Russ was the blessing she’d received from a forgiving God, a blessing she’d earned by her years of Catholic prayer and penance, a life she continued to earn daily by suppressing the badness in her and keeping her mouth shut. It was true that she’d lately hated Russ at least as much as she still loved him; there was little reason to keep pretending for his sake. But she loved Perry more than ever. His suffering, for which her side of the family was responsible, was the punishment that God had waited three decades to inflict on her.

“You don’t have to leave on my account,” the dumpling said from behind her. “Costa and I are here until five.”

Marion faced the door, her hand on the knob. The office was godless, and she knew what God expected of her. She needed to devote herself to Perry and begin atoning for her sins. And yet to leave the office was to relinquish all hope of getting better.

“Maybe you should tell me about Santa,” Sophie said.

 

 

 

“Oh, there’s Perry,” Frances Cottrell said, waving. “Speak of the devil.”

Seeing the pale yellow locks of his son at the corner of Maple Avenue, not twenty seconds after he and Frances had made a clean getaway from First Reformed, Russ was tempted to drive through the stop sign, but the township police station was right across the street. He braked and made himself turn and look where Frances was waving, so as not to seem guilty. Perry was standing on the sidewalk, all-seeing, a plastic bag in his hand. Russ held his gaze for a moment and stepped hard on the gas.

Speak of the devil?

“He’s an impressive kid,” Frances said. “I think Larry’s got a little crush on him.”

Beyond Maple, the speed limit on Pirsig Avenue could safely be broken. Luckier snowflakes were blindly evading the Fury while others met their end on the windshield. If Perry had been standing anywhere but at the stop sign, he might not have seen that Russ’s only passenger was Frances. Now Russ could only hope that Perry would forget; and there was little chance of that.

“So here’s an awkward question,” Frances said.

Russ eased up on the gas. “Mm?”

“Since I have you all to myself today, this is kind of like private counseling, right? Even though we’re not in your office? It’s still confidential?”

“Absolutely,” Russ said.

Frances had been bouncing and repositioning her limbs ever since she got in the car. Her left foot, on the bench seat, was currently no more than an inch from his leg. “I’m wondering,” she said, “how old you think your kids should be before they try marijuana.”

“My kids?”

“Yes, or any kids. How young is too young?”

“Well, marijuana is illegal. I don’t think any parent wants to see his children breaking laws.”

Frances laughed. “Are you really that square?”

The coat he was wearing, the coat she’d admired, wasn’t the coat of a square. The blues 78s he’d brought for her and left in his office weren’t the records of a square. The thoughts he had about her weren’t a square’s thoughts.

“I’m not against breaking the law,” he said. “Gandhi broke the law, Daniel Ellsberg broke the law. I don’t think rules are sacred. I just don’t see that breaking drug laws serves any meaningful purpose.”

“Wow. Okay.”

He could hear that she was smiling, but the dichotomy of square and hip, the unfairness of it, was offensive to him.

“There’s nothing wrong with being a square,” she said. “I think it’s cute. But I gather you’ve never tried pot yourself?”

“Ah, no. Have you?”

“Not—yet.”

There was a twinkle in her voice. He took his eyes off the road and saw that she was watching him for a reaction. She seemed very activated, very happy with herself; seemed ready to play. He, too, had come to play, but his game wasn’t flirting. He had no faith in his skills there.

“Your question,” he said. “Were you asking about your son?”

“Yes, partly. But also partly about yours.”

“My son? You mean Perry?”

“Yes.”

His son? Using drugs? Well, of course. It made such perfect sense, Russ couldn’t believe he hadn’t suspected it before. God damn Marion.

“Can I tell you some things?” Frances said. “Since we’re having a confidential session?”

The white flurry on the road ahead of them was thick and disorienting. He kept his eyes on it, but he could feel her leaning toward him in her hunting cap.

“Do you remember,” she said, “when I came to see you last summer?”

“I do. I remember it very well.”

“So, I was in a bad place, but I wasn’t very honest with you. Actually, I wasn’t even a little bit honest. You were so nice about Bobby, about losing a husband, but that wasn’t really why I was there. I was upset because I’d just found out that the man I’d been seeing was also seeing someone else.”

The brittle rubber of the Fury’s wipers shuddered on the windshield. Russ wanted to ask a clarifying question, to confirm that seeing meant what it seemed to, but he didn’t trust his voice. A day that had begun well was now conclusively terrible. As stupid as he’d been about Perry, he’d been even stupider about Frances. It had never occurred to him that another man might already have swooped in on her. Last summer, she’d been widowed for barely a year.

She leaned back into her corner of the front seat. “It was one of those things that seemed too good to be true because it was. One of my old girlfriends set us up on a date, and it just immediately felt right—we clicked right away. Philip’s a surgeon, and he’d been in the service. He’d served on one of the same bases Bobby had, so we had that in common, and heart surgery is like the medical equivalent of being a fighter pilot—not for the faint of heart. Philip’s got a gorgeous apartment in one of the high-rises on the lake, just north of the Loop, with an incredible view. As soon as I saw it, I thought, ‘Okay, sign me up!’ In hindsight, it was way too early for me to be thinking that way, but I just wanted everything to be right again. I wanted there to be four of us, not three.”

Russ tried to imagine the scenario in which Frances had been in the heart surgeon’s apartment and not had intimate relations with him.

“I wanted Larry and Amy to meet him,” she said. “I thought we could all have lunch and go to the Field Museum. I kept pushing until finally one night he tells me, in the spirit of full disclosure, that there’s something I should know. Apparently, the entire time I’ve known him, he’s been seeing someone else. A nurse, of course. Younger than me, of course. So that’s where my head was when I came to see you. I really was missing Bobby, but not for the right reasons. I’d kind of had my heart broken.”

The black exhaust of a dump truck in front of Russ was soiling the snow before it even reached the ground. “I see,” he said.

“But here’s something else I didn’t tell you. Things hadn’t actually been so wonderful with me and Bobby. I was only twenty-one when we got married. He was my brother’s best friend, he was piloting planes that broke the sound barrier, he was awesomely good-looking, and I was the girl who got to marry him. He was gone a lot, but I didn’t mind that—I was an officer’s wife, which had its privileges. He was stationed at Edwards when the kids were born, and I would have followed him anywhere—it wasn’t me who made him quit the air force. But he wanted the kids to grow up in one place, in one school district, and the pay was a lot better with General Dynamics. And then as soon as we were there in Texas he decided he’d made a mistake. He missed the military, and I could tell he blamed me, even though it wasn’t my fault. Year after year, I watched him get more angry. Everyone knew he was a stud, and it wasn’t like I was giving him an argument, but he kept making me pass these loyalty tests. If I laughed too hard at something a neighbor said, it meant I was flirting with him, and Bobby wouldn’t let it go until I admitted that the neighbor was less of a man than he was. If I watched the news and made some comment about the war not going well, he’d start interrogating me. Didn’t I agree that America was the most powerful country on earth? With the best economic system? Weren’t we morally obliged to keep the Communists from expanding their blah-blah-blah? He honestly believed the reason so many troops were getting killed was that the protesters at home were undermining their morale. I was getting boys killed, by having doubts about the war. And Larry, he wanted to be an astronaut, but he wasn’t exceptional at sports, wasn’t a straight-A student, and Bobby was constantly yelling at him. ‘Do you think you get to be an astronaut by not sliding hard into second base? Do you think John Glenn ever got a B on an algebra test?’ Larry was just a dreamy kid who was interested in space, and he was so proud of Bobby, so desperate to please him, his disapproval was a torture. Have you ever seen the cockpit of an F-111?”

Russ should have been glad that she was opening up to him, but all he could hear was that she commanded the attention of test pilots and heart surgeons. He was an associate minister with a wife, four kids, and no money. What had he been thinking?

“It’s incredible,” she said. “The amount of instruments they have. They give you the sense that you’re utterly in control, and that’s the way Bobby was with us. We needed his approval, and he controlled us by making it conditional. Larry had to be a star athlete, and I couldn’t have a little fun talking to a neighbor. For me, the most terrible thing about the crash was imagining him losing control of the aircraft. He must have felt so furious.”

The sky was darkening, the traffic slow. How many millions of dollars did an F-111 cost? How could a nation that called itself Christian spend billions of dollars on weapons of death? The instrument panel of Russ’s Fury consisted of a speedometer and three gauges, one of them broken. The car urgently needed new brakes and new snow tires, but Marion had asked for two hundred dollars for Christmas shopping. The sum had struck him as excessive, but he’d been mindful of how little else he’d given her lately, mindful of the four hours alone with Frances that he’d contrived to give himself for Christmas. He’d imagined that the four hours would fly by all too quickly. Now he wondered how he could survive another minute of hearing about the kind of man she loved. There was a hard, sour knot in his throat.

“I’ve been talking a lot to Kitty about this,” Frances said. “I’m never going to be a bra-burner, but she’s given me some books that make a lot of sense to me. It’s not that Bobby was physically abusive. He was just cold, cold, cold. In a way, though, that was almost worse. I was the little wife, and the only thing that mattered was that I do everything exactly right. It was the opposite of a marriage of equals. When I look back now, I realize that our neighbors all thought I was married to a jerk. The only people who didn’t think so were his pilot buddies, and they were jerks, too. I mean, obviously, it’s terrible, the way he died—I feel so sorry for him. But sometimes I almost wonder if I’m better off without him. Is that bad of me?”

“Marriage is difficult,” Russ said.

“But does it have to be difficult? Is yours difficult? Or—sorry, maybe I can’t ask that.”

If Russ had had the nerves of a test pilot or a heart surgeon, now would have been the time to open his heart and declare that his marriage was a miserable thing, held together by habit and vow and duty. Now would have been the time to make his pitch. But his complaint with Marion was that she was heavy and joyless, unexciting to him, dulling of his edge. He didn’t see how he could voice this complaint without sounding like a jerk.

“Anyway,” Frances said, “you did me a huge favor, putting me in touch with Kitty and getting me into the Tuesday circle. It’s exactly what I needed. I’ve been taking a class at Triton College, and that’s been good, too. All in all, I was having a pretty good fall. But then—”

“I know,” Russ said. “I want to apologize again for what happened with Ronnie. That was my mistake.”

“Oh, yeah. Thanks. You don’t have to apologize. What happened was that Philip got in touch with me again. He called me out of the blue and said his mind was clearer now. He’d broken things off with the nurse, and could I find it in my heart to forgive him? I didn’t think I could, but he sent me roses and called me up again. He really turned on the charm, and things just kind of clicked. The weekend after Thanksgiving, after the thing with Ronnie, I went in to the city and had a whole afternoon and evening with him.”

The snow was still melting when it hit the pavement, but the forecast called for as much as eight inches. If Russ and Frances got stuck somewhere, it would mean additional hours with a heart surgeon’s girlfriend.

“Everything felt different, though,” she said. “It was partly the books I’ve been reading, but it was partly—it was partly what you’ve given me. I mean, the Tuesday circle, and, I don’t know, just the example of a different kind of man. Philip took me to Binyon’s, and when the waiter came he took the menu out of my hand and ordered for me. The old me would have liked that—it would have made me feel safe. But—and then we were in his apartment, with the amazing view, and I was looking at the family pictures on his piano. I picked one up, and I must have set it down wrong, because he came over and moved it, like, one inch further back. He came all the way across the room to move the picture one inch. Which probably makes him a great surgeon, but I thought to myself: Uh-oh. Here we go again. You know what I mean?”

Russ was feeling whipsawed, despairing one moment, daring to hope the next.

“It was like I’d wanted to replace Bobby with someone like Bobby. I guess that’s the kind of man I’m attracted to, or one kind of man. Bobby could be charming, too, when he’d been a jerk to me and I was mad at him. I realized that if I stayed with Philip I’d probably have another kid or two—I think he wants his own kids—and that would be the end of me. He’d be controlling everything. But so, anyway, I didn’t get home till nearly midnight—”

After having intimate relations with the surgeon? Russ had no grasp of contemporary dating protocol.

“And I found Larry in the family room by himself, watching TV. He’s old enough to babysit for Amy, but he seemed a little weird. I bent over to give him a kiss, and I couldn’t believe it. He smelled like pot and mouthwash. He’d gotten high after Amy went to bed! I couldn’t believe it. I knew he’d had a hard time after Bobby died, and starting a new school in ninth grade wasn’t any picnic, but he’s a good kid, and he’s doing a lot better this year, thanks to Crossroads. He still has bad posture, he still hides his face with his hair, but he seems to be maturing. When I realized he was high, my impulse was to feel guilty about leaving him and Amy alone for so many hours. I told him I was disappointed that he’d taken a stupid risk while he had responsibility for his sister, but I wasn’t going to punish him. I just needed to know some things, such as where he got the marijuana. But his hair is hanging in his face, he won’t look at me, won’t answer. I ask him if there’s marijuana in the house. He still won’t answer, and that’s when I kind of lose it. I demand that he show me where his pot is, I march him up to his room, and you know what? He’s got a whole bag of it! I take it away from him, I ask him again where he got it, and you know what he says? He says, ‘I’m not a nark.’ It made me so angry, I took away his TV privileges for a month.”

Russ had an uneasy sense of where her story was heading. The coin had dropped when she mentioned Perry.

“So, like I said, this is awkward,” she said. “But I thought you should know.”

“You think Larry got the marijuana from my son.”

“I don’t know for sure. But the two of them are together a lot, and Larry—it’s sweet—he’s obviously smitten with Perry. They come home from school and go straight to his room. Larry builds models, and I can smell the glue and the paint when they’re up there. I don’t care if they spend their time building models. I’m not sure I even care if they smoke pot. Larry says half the kids at school have tried it, which is probably an exaggeration, but I gather it’s pretty common. But to have a whole bag of it, a good-size bag—that didn’t seem like Larry.”

God damn Marion.

The previous spring, when the gross extent of Perry’s misbehavior had come to light, Marion had thrown religion in Russ’s face—had accused him of an Old Testament fixation on commandments, accused him of forgetting the New Testament forgiveness he preached on Sundays. According to Marion, Perry needed love and support, not punishment. He’d skipped a total of eleven days of school and had forged Russ’s handwriting on notes explaining his absence, but Marion insisted that his problems were psychological, not moral. The boy was hypersensitive and moody and couldn’t sleep at night. Marion, pleading for compassion, had proposed psychiatric counseling for him (as if they had the money for that). In Russ’s view, Marion herself was the problem. From the very beginning, she’d indulged Perry in his moods and his whims, his incessant whining and crying as a toddler, his pompous superiority as he got older. Although Russ was aware that all four of his kids, to varying degrees, preferred Marion to him, because she was always near them, always at home while he was away serving others, Perry’s preference for his mother was the most glaring and exclusive. Russ might have felt jealous of their closeness if he’d liked Perry better and Marion still excited him. He’d chosen to leave them to each other, and now, as a consequence of her coddling and his indifference to it, Perry had embarrassed them in front of the junior high school authorities.

He’d clearly sensed moral fault in Perry, and he should have suspected drug use, but he’d been led astray by Marion’s story of a gifted, sensitive child who only wanted to get some sleep. Summoning Perry to his office in the parsonage, where he had a stack of handwritten notes addressed to the junior-high principal and penned in a hand that he had to admit was uncannily like his own—Perry was undeniably a boy of many talents—Russ had undertaken to impose, on his girly-haired son, the discipline that Marion had failed to.

“You can’t be sleeping in the daytime,” he’d said. “You need to sleep at night like the rest of us.”

“Dad, I would love to,” Perry said. “But I can’t.”

“There are plenty of mornings when I don’t feel like getting up and going to work. But you know what? I get up and do it. If you just make yourself do it, one day, you’ll be so tired at night you’ll go to sleep. And then you’re on a normal schedule again.”

“With all due respect, that’s easier said than done.”

“You’re very bright, and I’m sorry if you’re not challenged enough at school. But part of growing up is learning to be disciplined. All I ever see is you reading a book or messing around with your art supplies. You should be outside, tiring yourself out. I wonder if you should join an intramural softball team.”

Perry stared at him with insolent incredulity. Russ tried to contain his irritation.

“You need to do something,” he said. “Starting this summer, I want to see you working. That’s the rule in this family: we work. I want you to set a goal of earning fifty dollars a week.”

“Becky didn’t have to work in tenth grade.”

“Becky was involved in cheerleading, and she’s working now.”

“She hates that job.”

“Well, that’s what self-discipline is. You may not like it, but you work anyway. I’m not trying to punish you, Perry. I’m doing this for your own good. I want you to start looking for work tomorrow. That way, you’ll have it lined up when summer comes.”

To Russ’s disgust, Perry began to weep.

“Frankly,” Russ said, “I’m letting you off very lightly. I should be taking away all your privileges for what you did.”

“This is punishment.”

“Stop crying. You’re too old to be crying. This is not punishment. You can always mow lawns if you can’t find anything else. If mowing lawns was good enough for Clem, it’s good enough for you. I guarantee you’ll sleep at night if you’ve been mowing grass all day.”

Marion had complained to Russ, in her mild but stubborn way, that mowing lawns was a senseless waste of Perry’s talents, a painful assault on his sensitivities, but Russ had been vindicated by the ensuing improvement in Perry’s habits. In the summer, Perry had slept from midnight to late morning, normal for a teenager, and in September, on his own initiative, he’d joined Crossroads. Aligning himself with Rick Ambrose was probably his idea of revenge for having been forced to mow lawns, and Russ had refused him the satisfaction of disapproving. The truth was that he’d felt increasingly repelled by Perry, vaguely nauseated by his adolescent body. The afterschool hours that Perry spent in Crossroads, the entire weekend he was away on a Crossroads retreat, had been a relief from the corporeal affront of him.

But now Russ wondered if what had repelled him was simply Perry’s bad character, his smug enjoyment of the secret of his drug use. It was all the goddamned fault of Marion. She wouldn’t hear a word against her precious son, and Perry had exploited her trust in him, and now, in the eyes of Frances, who’d become the source of delight in Russ’s life, Perry had reduced him to an unsuspecting square whose son had lured her Larry into drugs. God damn Marion. He could already taste the cruel pleasure of informing her that Perry was a drug user, of rubbing her nose in what her coddling had wrought: of making her pay for the humiliation of his learning it from Frances. He would make Perry pay, too.

But if Perry turned around and made insinuations? If he asked Russ, in Marion’s presence, where he’d been going with Mrs. Cottrell and a car full of boxes? Russ, God help him, had felt compelled to lie to Marion at breakfast—to tell her that he was delivering the food and toys with Kitty Reynolds.

“Don’t you want to take the turn here?” Frances said.

Skidding a little, rattling toys in the rear cargo area, he veered across two slushy lanes to make the turn onto Ogden Avenue. Horns blared behind him.

“You shouldn’t feel bad,” she said. “Rick Ambrose says a lot of other parents are dealing with the same thing.”

Street-credible Rick Ambrose, his finger on the pulse of contemporary youth.

“You were talking to Rick about Larry?” Russ managed to say.

“Yeah, but don’t worry—I didn’t nark out Perry. I mean, I just did, to you. But not to Rick. I only wanted a little guidance on how to think about fifteen-year-olds smoking pot. Rick said the one thing I don’t have to worry about is Crossroads. Apparently they have very strict rules against drugs and drinking on Crossroads time. Against sex, too. Although, poor Larry, I don’t think I have to worry about that one yet. I’ve never even seen him look at a girl. The person he has a crush on is Perry.”

Russ struggled to think of something wise to say, something to compete with Ambrose’s special insight into young people.

“Coming home and finding Larry high,” she said, “was a real eye-opener. I came down with a wretched cold, and when I finally got over it I felt like I’d turned a corner. Like I needed to get my life on a different kind of track—be more involved with my kids, stop chasing the fantasy second husband. I want to roll up my sleeves and get my hands dirty. I want to get more involved with you and Kitty and your work, and I asked Rick if there’s a way for me to get involved in Crossroads, too. Part of it is feeling I have to be a kind of father for Larry and Amy, not just a mother. But part of it is just—do you ever feel like you were born too early?”

“You mean, do I wish I were younger?”

“Yeah, I guess we all end up wishing that. But I’m talking about what’s happening now. I mean, the simple fact that girls can wear the same clothes as boys now—I missed all that. I missed the Beatles. I missed living with a guy before I decided if I should marry him, which wouldn’t have been a bad idea in my case. I feel like I was born fifteen years too early.”

“But what you’re describing,” Russ said, “was already happening in the early fifties. The spirit in New York, in Greenwich Village, when I was there, was everything you’re describing, except, in a way, it was purer.”

“In New York, maybe. It sure wasn’t happening in New Prospect.”

“Well, personally, I’m not sure I wish I’d been born any later.” He warned himself not to oversell Greenwich Village, since he and Marion had lived there for only two months, following two years in seminary housing on East Forty-ninth Street. “What galls me about so-called youth culture now is that people seem to think it came out of nowhere. The kids today think they invented radical politics, invented premarital sex, invented civil rights and women’s rights. Most of them have never even heard of Eugene Debs, John Dewey. Margaret Sanger, Richard Wright. When I was in Birmingham in 1963, a lot of the protesters were my age or older. The only real difference now is the fashions—different music, different hair. And that’s just superficial.”

“You really think that’s the only difference? If there’d been a group like Crossroads when I was in high school, I would have joined it in a heartbeat. If I’d read Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem when I was twenty, my whole life might have gone differently.”

Russ frowned. He’d known that Ambrose was a menace, but the gravity of the threat from Kitty Reynolds was unanticipated.

“I’m only saying,” he said, “that civil rights and the antiwar movement and, yes, feminism are the fruit of seeds that were planted a long time ago.”

“Okay, noted. But can I tell you one other terrible thing?”

She repositioned herself again, putting her back against the passenger door and one of her feet against his seat belt. He felt a tug in the belt, across his groin.

“I still have Larry’s bag of pot,” she said. “Can you believe it? I went to flush it down the toilet, so he could hear me doing it, but somehow I didn’t do it. I hid it in my bedroom.”

Everything Russ had just said about his youth was hogwash. The age he wanted to be was exactly the age of Frances.

“I’m waiting, Reverend Hildebrandt. Are you going to tell me I did a bad thing?”

“Legally, I suppose there is some hazard.”

“Oh, come on. No one’s going to kick my door down.”

“Still. What are you planning to do with it?”

“Well, um—what do you think I’m going to do with it?”

He nodded. He felt some pastoral responsibility to steer her from the path of iniquity, but he didn’t want to seem like a square. “In that case,” he said, “I suppose my concern would be that it complicates your message to Larry. If you’re telling him that drugs are bad for him—”

“That’s why I asked you how young is too young. Because I’m not too young. I’m trying to start my life all over at thirty-seven. I’m curious to try new things, and I had this image … I was thinking, you know, maybe I could invite Kitty, and you could invite your wife. The four of us could do a little experiment together, to see what all the fuss is about. If we’re forbidding our kids to do something, shouldn’t we know what we’re forbidding?”

“I don’t need to jump off a cliff to know that children shouldn’t be jumping off a cliff.”

“But what if it turns out to be great? What if it helps us understand our kids better? Or, I don’t know, just generally expands our minds. I was thinking, if you were there with me, it would be okay to try it. You’re a man of God, and you’re not a fearful person. You’re the opposite of the usual kind of minister.”

She could hardly have said anything more warming to his heart and loins. An early dusk was gathering, snow whitening the metal surfaces along the road, slush mottling the sidewalks. It was the best of days again.

“I don’t think my wife would be interested,” he said.

“Okay. Just you and me and Kitty, then.”

While he groped for a plausible reason to exclude Kitty as well, Frances gave him a playful little kick on the hip.

“Unless you don’t think we need a chaperone,” she said.

 

 

 

Among the revelations of the night before, in the front seat of Tanner’s VW bus, had been the excellence of lips. In the past, Becky’s lips had mostly just annoyed her, by being chapped or by wearing off her lipstick unevenly, their sensitivity in spin-the-bottle situations a matter of ticklishness and grossness. Only when they found their way to Tanner’s lips, which mirrored hers but had their own unpredictable volition, did she discover their connection to every nerve in her body. His mustache was at once plushy and sharp-bristled, his tongue shy at first but then less so, his teeth unexpectedly close to the action. Every sensation was a novelty, every angle of contact subtly different. The reality of kissing Tanner Evans was shockingly much better than the idea of it. She could have done it for hours, insensible of the discomfort of twisting sideways on the passenger seat, if they hadn’t been interrupted by noises in the parking lot.

“Hey, that’s Tanner’s van,” they heard a girl say.

In the imperfect darkness, he pulled away from Becky and cocked an ear. The voices of the girl and a second girl receded, presumably heading into the back room of the Grove.

“We should get out of here,” he said.

Having thrown herself at him, Becky understood his not wanting to be caught with her, but to her the hazard of being caught was thrilling. She drew him close and kissed him again. Moments later, the voices were back.

“Tanner?” the girl called, approaching the bus. “Laura?”

Tanner jerked away and peered out the window. Catching his panic, Becky bent over double and tried to hide her face in her hair, but it was obviously insufficient cover. She groped behind her, felt the Navajo blanket that was draped over the passenger seat, and pulled it over her head. From under its dusty woolenness she heard Tanner rolling down the window.

“Sally, yeah, hey,” he said.

“Are you guys coming in?”

It was Sally Perkins, Laura Dobrinsky’s good friend.

“Yeah,” Tanner said. “Yeah, I’m just helping a friend here for a second.”

Through the wool, Becky could feel Sally Perkins’s eyes on her ridiculous blanketed form.

“Laura’s not here?” Sally said.

“Uh, no.”

“Marcie and I are celebrating, if you felt like joining us. She just turned legal.”

“Yeah, um. That sounds—yeah.”

“See you inside?”

When Sally was gone, Becky sat up giggling and shrugged off the blanket. “Oops,” she said. This would have been a natural moment to ask about the status of Tanner and Laura as a couple, but he was giggling, too. For now, Becky thought, it was enough to share a secret with him, to be his partner in crime. She already had a sleepless night’s worth of new sensations to process and relive, and it seemed unwise to overstay her welcome. “You should go inside,” she told him.

“I don’t even like Marcie Ackerman.”

“It’s okay.” She leaned over and kissed his cheek. “You do like me?”

“Yes! Why do you think I came down here?”

“So maybe I’ll see you tomorrow.”

“Definitely. We could—” He slumped. “Actually, tomorrow’s not so great.”

“I don’t have anything all day until the concert.”

“Yeah, that’s the thing. I have to work until four, and then we’ll be setting up.”

By we he meant his band. He meant the Natural Woman. Becky’s nerves, hypersensitized by kissing, were defenseless against her disappointment.

“I’m really sorry,” he said. “What about Friday?”

“Friday’s Christmas Eve. Clem’s coming home. I’ll be busy with my family.”

“Right.”

“So I guess I’ll just see you when I see you.” She reached for the door latch. “Maybe in church, if I decide to go again.”

“Becky—”

“It’s okay. I understand. You’re really busy tomorrow.”

As she opened the door, he grabbed her shoulder. “I don’t have to be at the church until five thirty. I could meet you somewhere before then.”

“You don’t have to.”

“No, I want to.” His expression was pleading. “I want to.”

Satisfied that she had power over him, unsure only about the extent of it, she declined his offer of a ride and left him to Sally and Marcie. As she walked home, alone, the image of herself cowering beneath the Navajo blanket became less funny, more troubling. She was now officially the kind of girl who stole another girl’s boyfriend. She couldn’t tell if she sincerely felt guilty or was just scared of being confronted by the Natural Woman.

They’d agreed to meet at Treble Clef, the music store where he worked. As the appointed hour approached, Becky forced herself to linger at New Prospect Books, leafing through European travel guides, until she was a few minutes late. It was Tanner’s job to be eager now, not hers. In her shoulder bag she had the colored pencils that Judson had requested, a velveteen-boxed pen and mechanical pencil for Clem, and a Laura Nyro album so desirable to her she didn’t care if Perry wanted it himself. She’d stuck to her usual Christmas budget, despite the thirteen thousand dollars in her savings account, and had postponed the last of her buying until she could ride to the shopping mall in Jeannie Cross’s Mustang in the morning. The cellophane-wrapped newness of the items in her bag, which was the thing about Christmas presents—that they passed unused through the hands of the giver, were wonderfully new-feeling and new-smelling when the recipient unwrapped them—was of a piece with the freshness of the snow beneath her feet, the world’s rebirth in whiteness, when she finally walked around the corner to the music store. Being kissed had made her feel like a brand-new person, a just-opened present whose life was imminent but unbegun. When she saw Tanner standing in the snow by his bus, outside the store, he seemed equally new to her, because she had an actual date with him. She recognized his fringed jacket, the dark fall of his hair on his shoulders, but what a difference there was between wishing for a thing and finding it yours on Christmas morning.

Instead of embracing her, he helped her—not to say hustled her—into the bus and ran around to the driver’s side. Wet snow on the windows had made an ice cave of the interior, private but dreary. The rear of the bus was piled with amps and instrument cases that seemed impatient to be unloaded. After Tanner had started the engine and turned up the heater, Becky waited for him to lean over. She’d made the first move the night before, so now it was his turn. Her entire self was poised to open itself up to him as soon as he kissed her. But he was nodding to himself, drumming his fingers on the steering wheel.

“I just got some news,” he said. “It’s pretty far-out.”

She turned to him and presented her face, to suggest that his news could wait.

“Do you remember that time we were talking in the sanctuary?”

“Do I remember it?”

“Well, it got me thinking,” he said. “You got me thinking. I realized it was time for me to take the next step.”

In Becky’s mind, his next step was to make a definitive break with Laura Dobrinsky. If the news was that he’d done it without her having insisted on it, she was happy to hear it.

“So, you know Quincy, right?”

Quincy Travers was one of Tanner’s black friends, the drummer for the Bleu Notes.

“So Quincy’s been playing with this guy from Cicero whose cousin is an agent. A really good agent—he gets his acts into clubs all over Chicago. And you know what? He’s going to be there tonight. I just got a call back from him.”

Becky shivered in the long coat her aunt had given her. The seat of the bus was much colder than it had been the night before. “That’s great,” she said.

“I know. This is our biggest crowd of the year by far. It’s the perfect showcase.”

The VW’s little vents were blowing nothing but freezing air.

“Congratulations,” Becky said.

“I only made the call because of you.” Tanner took her gloved hands in his bare hands and squeezed them, as if to infuse her with enthusiasm. “Just knowing you understood what I’m trying to do—that made a huge difference.”

Only abstractly did she appreciate being thanked. She didn’t like sitting in an ice cave, talking about his music career and not about the night before. She didn’t like imagining him and Laura and the Bleu Notes playing more gigs around Chicago.

“What’s wrong?” he said.

“Nothing. That’s great news.”

He tenderly put two fingers on her cheek, but she averted her face. The lumpy, shadowy snow coating her window was like the cellulite pictured in her mother’s Redbooks. Tanner rested his chin on her shoulder, his mouth near her ear. “When I see you, I feel like I can do anything.”

She tried to speak, shivered, tried again. “And Laura?”

“What do you mean?”

“I thought she was your girlfriend.”

He sat up straight. Outside the bus, teenaged boys were bellowing in the snow.

“I’m just wondering where I stand,” Becky said. “I mean, after last night.”

“Yeah.”

“I mean, shouldn’t we talk about it? Or is that too Crossroads?”

“It’s pretty Crossroads.”

“I only joined because of you. I thought you loved it.”

“Yeah. I know. I have to have a conversation with her. It’s just—here’s the thing.”

A snowball hit the frosted windshield. It stuck there, a darker blurry mass, and now a red-fingered hand was swiping snow off Becky’s window. Through the cleared glass, she saw a junior-high kid packing a snowball. He fired it across the street, and another one slammed into the side of the bus. Tanner popped open his door, shouted at the kids, and shut the door again. “Stupid juvies.”

Becky waited.

“So, it’s hard,” he said. “Everybody sees Laura as this intense, scary person, but there’s a side of her that’s really insecure. Really vulnerable. And—well, here’s the thing.”

“Who you want to be with,” Becky said firmly.

“I know. I know what I need to do. It’s just—tonight is not the night to have that conversation. Laura doesn’t even care if we get an agent, but the rest of us do, and she’s so radical, I can see her just walking out. Which—there go our keyboards, there go my harmonies. Even if she plays, and she’s up there pissed off with me, it’s going to be a mess.”

Realistically, Becky knew there wasn’t any rush. The fact of their having kissed, the fact of her sitting in his bus with him now, the fact of their having this conversation, was evidence of the inroads she’d made on his heart. If only she hadn’t set her own heart on going to the concert with him! It was too late to undo how fervidly she’d imagined walking into the church on his arm, showing the world that he was hers, and telling Jeannie Cross about it in the morning.

“Aren’t there other agents?”

“There are tons of agents,” Tanner said. “But this guy, Benedetti, he’s supposed to be really good, and this isn’t like playing the Grove. Darryl Bruce is home from college, he’s sitting in on lead guitar, and Biff Allard is bringing his congas. We’ve got a really full sound tonight, and the perfect audience.”

“I thought the main thing was your record. Your demo, with your songs.”

“Yeah. It still is. But you were right—I need to think bigger. I need to be playing four times as many gigs, building up an audience, making contacts.”

Becky hoped he couldn’t see, in the dreary cave light, that she was clenching her face muscles to keep from crying. “But so … if Laura’s in the band … and you’re playing gigs … how does that work?”

“I can find someone to replace her. I just can’t do it in the next three hours.”

An embarrassing squeak escaped from Becky’s throat. She cleared it loudly. “So,” she said. “You’re breaking up with her?”

When Tanner didn’t answer, she looked and saw that his eyes were closed, his hands pressed together between his knees.

“It’s kind of important for me to know,” she said. “After what happened last night.”

“I know. I know. It’s just hard. When you’ve been with a person for so long, and she’s still so into you. It’s hard.”

“Or maybe you just don’t really want to.”

“That’s not it. I swear to God, Becky. This is just a bad night to do it.”

The need to cry could be as urgent as the need to pee. She picked up her shoulder bag. “I should probably go.”

“You just got here.”

“It’s all right. There’s a reception I told my mom I couldn’t go to because I was going to the concert. I can at least make her happy.”

“I’m not saying you can’t go to the concert.”

“You want me to go there and act like nothing happened? Or, what, I’m supposed to put a blanket over my head again?”

He filled his fists with his hair and pulled on it.

“It’s almost like you’re ashamed of me,” she said.

“No, no, no. This is just—”

“I know, a bad night. I was really looking forward to it, but now— I’m not.”

Before he could stop her, she jumped out of the bus. Leaving the door hanging open, she narrowed her eyes against the stinging snow and ran up the alley behind the bookstore, where the bus couldn’t follow her. She could only hope that she was disappointing him as much as he’d disappointed her. She’d felt so certain of how their date was going to go: a delicious resumption of their kissing, followed by testimonials of amazement that they’d found their way to each other, followed by lengthier kissing, followed by her triumphal entry into the church with him. Now even the snow was unromantic, a painful hindrance. Everything had gone to shit.

She could feel wetness creeping into her only decent boots, which she was probably damaging irreparably, as she trudged the long blocks home in slanting snow. It was getting too dark to see well, and the physical effort of not slipping and falling kept her tears at bay until she reached the parsonage. She’d held out hope that Tanner might be waiting in his bus there, waiting to apologize and beg her to come to the concert with him, the consequences be damned. But except for a forlorn distant scraping of a shovel and a pair of unrecent tire tracks, nearly refilled with snow, her block of Highland Street was desolate. The only light in the parsonage was in Perry and Judson’s room.

Inside, there was no sign of her mother. Was she still not back from her exercise class? Becky now felt ashamed of having been so unforthcoming with her, so certain she knew better how to handle Tanner. Her mother seemed to her the one person with whom she might safely share her disappointment. She brushed snow out of her hair and hurried upstairs, past the closed door of her brothers’ room. At the sight of her bed, where just a few hours earlier she’d innocently dreamed of going to the concert, her disappointment came bursting out.

As she lay on the bed and wallowed in her conviction that Tanner was still in love with Laura, that he cared more about Laura’s feelings than he did about hers, she thought she was crying not too loudly. But after some minutes there came a gentle knocking on her door. She went rigid.

“Becky?” Perry said.

“Go away.”

“Are you all right?”

“Yes. Leave me alone.”

“You sure?”

She wasn’t all right. An anguished sound came out of her, the disappointment erupting again. It must have been audible to Perry, because he entered her room and shut the door behind him. Her irritation stopped her tears.

“Go away,” she said. “I didn’t say you could come in.”

Increasing her irritation, he sat down beside her. Skin-crawling repugnance was probably a normal response to a pubescent brother’s proximity, the abnormal thing her lack of a similar response to Clem, but the badness she sensed in Perry made the repugnance especially intense. She scooched away from him and wiped her face on her pillowcase.

“What’s going on?” he said.

“Nothing you would understand.”

“I see. You think I lack empathy.”

She did suspect that he lacked empathy, but this wasn’t the point. “I’m upset,” she said, “about something that has nothing to do with you.”

“I’m sensing a barrier to our getting to know each other better.”

“Get out of my room!”

“Joke, sister. That was a joke.”

“I got the joke. Okay? Now please get out of my room.”

“There’s something I need to say to you. But I have the distinct impression that you’ve been trying to stay away from me.”

It was true that she’d been avoiding him, even more than usual, since the night he’d drawn her as his partner in a Crossroads dyad exercise. During the exercise, she’d felt proud of confronting him with his selfishness and self-involvement; excited to think that Crossroads was empowering her to become the family truth-teller. She’d guessed that she was hurting him, to the extent that an amoral brainiac was capable of being hurt, but she’d hoped that her honest witnessing might foster his own personal growth. Ever since that night, though, the sight of him had troubled her. No matter how on-target her assessment of his faults had been, no matter how much the truth had needed airing, she felt that somehow she, not he, had done a wrong thing.

“Here’s what I’ve been wanting to say,” he said. “To put it very simply, you were right. In our coat-closet conversation, which you’ll no doubt remember. I’ve come to the conclusion that you were right.”

His highbrow intonations were repellent. She reared away from him and stood up. “Where’s Judson?”

“Judson is mulling the Stratego board. He luxuriates in the planning aspect.”

“And Mom? Did she come home?”

“I’ve seen neither hide nor hair all day.”

“That’s weird,” Becky said, heading to the door.

“Excuse me?” Perry jumped up and blocked her escape. “Did you not hear what I just said to you?”

“Please get out of my way.”

“I think I’m entitled to two minutes of your attention, Becky. You said you wanted a relationship with me. You said, ‘You’re my brother.’ That is a direct quote.”

“That was Crossroads. You’re supposed to say you want a relationship with everybody.”

“Ah, so, in fact, you don’t want a relationship with me.”

“Will you give me a break? I’m having a really shitty day.”

“And that’s your response? Just walk away?”

Walking away was a well-known Crossroads no-no. Becky rolled her eyes and said, “Fine. Thank you for saying I was right. I’m not sure I was, but thank you for saying it. Now can I please go blow my nose?”

Perry stepped aside but followed her into the bathroom. For no fathomable reason, its Depression-era tub and sink had been installed in one cramped corner, leaving a needlessly large expanse of floor tiles, now cracked and discolored. Perry shut the door and sat down on the laundry hamper while Becky blew her nose.

“When I say you were right,” he said, “I mean that you were right that I’ve never taken you seriously enough. We can skip over my reasons for that—they do me no honor. Suffice it to say I’ve never given you the credit you deserve. You were right to call me on that.”

“Perry, come on. You don’t have to do this.”

“I need to say it. I’ve been unjust to you. And you were honest with me.”

She threw up her arms in frustration. Wrong time, wrong place for a Crossroads dyad.

“I need you to believe,” he went on, “that I’m trying to become a better person. That I’ve taken everything you said to me to heart. I won’t bore you with every detail, but I’ve made some changes. I’ve sworn off intoxicants, for one thing.”

She narrowed her eyes. “Is that what this is about? Were you afraid I was going to nark on you?”

“Not at all.”

“You sure about that?”

“Yes!”

“Well, good. I’m glad to hear you’ve done some thinking. I’m glad my criticism was constructive.”

“I need your help, though. I need—”

He broke off, his face reddening. She prayed that he wouldn’t start crying on her. The one time she’d seen him cry at Crossroads, a hundred other people had been there to perform the task of touching him. It was strange that a person so visibly emotional, so ready to cry, both in public and in private, should persistently give her the impression that his emotings were detached from any real thing inside him. It made her feel as if something were wrong with her head.

“It’s hard enough,” he said, “to be in the same house with you and feel like I’m your enemy. But if we’re going to be together in Crossroads, too, we need to find a way to have a better relationship.” He took a deep breath. “I want to be your friend, Becky. Will you be my friend?”

Too late, she saw that she’d been cornered. She well knew, as did he, that the biggest of all Crossroad no-nos was to reject a person’s offer of friendship. You had to accept the offer even if you didn’t really mean to spend time with the person. If she spurned Perry’s offer, and then went to Crossroads and practiced unconditional love, accepted the unqualified worth of everyone else in the group, became “friends” with whoever asked her, he would know she was a hypocrite. She would be a hypocrite. Craftily or not, he’d cornered her.

Overcoming her natural repugnance, the way Jesus had done with lepers, she went and crouched at his feet by the hamper. “I have a lot of trust issues with you,” she said.

“For good reason. I am so sorry.”

“You’re right, though. We should try to get to know each other better. If you’re willing to try, so am I.”

Now he did let out a sob, but only one, a kind of gulp. He slid off the hamper and put his arms around her. “Thank you,” he said into her shoulder.

Returning his hug wasn’t so bad. Whatever precociously illicit things he might have done in secret, he was still a human being, still basically just a boy. He was small for a Hildebrandt, truly her little brother. At the feel of his narrow shoulders in her arms, something maternal stirred in her. He tried to cling to her when she stood up.

“I wonder where Mom is,” she said. “Are you sure she didn’t come home?”

“Jay said he hadn’t seen her. It’s conceivable she went straight to the Haefles’.”

“Not in her exercise clothes.”

“Good point.”

She had to admit that in the wake of their embrace she felt slightly more at ease with him.

“It’s weird,” she said. “She made such a big deal about me being home by six.”

“What for?”

“So I can go to the reception.”

“What are you doing that for? You’ll miss half the concert.”

Disappointment welled up in her again. She turned away to hide it from him. “I’m not going.”

“What?”

“I don’t want to talk about it.”

“Is that what you were crying about?” He jumped up and put a hot little hand on her shoulder. “Do you want to tell me what happened?”

She almost laughed. “You mean, now that we’re friends? That’s pretty slick, Perry.”

“I guess I deserve that, but you have me all wrong.”

“Part of being a friend is respecting a person’s boundaries.”

“Fair enough. I just wish you’d give me a chance. I know I haven’t earned your trust. I haven’t earned anybody’s trust. But when I heard you crying, I thought, ‘She’s my sister.’”

“Judson’s probably wondering when you’re coming back.”

“I’m going right now. Unless you want to tell me—”

“I don’t.”

“Okay, but listen. If you change your mind about the concert, I’ll be here with Jay. You and I can walk over together when you’re back.”

Returning to her room, lying down on her bed, she tried to make sense of Perry’s sudden kindness to her. Ordinarily, she would have assumed he had some hidden selfish motive. But in hugging him she’d caught a glimmer of the unqualified worth of every human being. Perry had no choice but to be his hot-handed, overly articulate little self, and the vulnerability he’d revealed to her hadn’t seemed like just an act. Walking to the church with her pothead little brother, being together in the snow with him, was the bizarrest of scenarios, but the chance of their becoming friends was exciting in its very slenderness. She’d always had, in Clem, the only brother she needed, but now Clem was far away, preoccupied with his evidently fascinating girlfriend. The biggest barrier to Becky’s relationship with Perry had been her feeling that he disdained her for her lesser intelligence. Maybe all she’d needed was some sign that he respected her and was interested in her as a person. Now that he’d given her such a sign, maybe they really could be friends. Maybe her whole family could be happier, beginning with the unlikely duo of her and Perry.

The feeling of goodwill with which she’d awakened in the morning, before losing it in the ice cave of Tanner’s bus, was coming back. She felt a particular glow of gratitude for Crossroads, which had taught her to take risks. The risk she’d taken with Tanner had brought her pain, but in the glow of her goodwill she could see that she might have overreacted, might have pushed him too hard on the wrong night, might have set too much store on the outward appearance of going to the concert with him. Meanwhile, the risk of confronting Perry, in the coat closet at church, had encouraged him to take his own risk, by offering her his friendship. For better and for worse, but mostly for better, Crossroads was making her more alive.

At six o’clock, though there was still no sign of either of her parents, she got up to make herself presentable. The spectacle of blotch reflected in the bathroom mirror discouraged her, but she brushed her hair, reapplied her makeup, and went and knocked on Perry and Judson’s door.

“Who is it?” Perry answered sharply.

“The war-game police. I’m coming in.”

Opening the door, she saw Perry reclining on one elbow and Judson kneeling over their homemade board game, his ankles crossed beneath him in a position that would have excruciated anyone older than ten. With a subtle movement of her head, she beckoned Perry into the hallway. He hopped right up.

“Do you have any eye drops?” she asked him in a low voice.

“Yes, as it happens, I do.”

She waited while he ran upstairs to the third floor, thereby betraying where he’d been hiding his paraphernalia. The complicity in their transaction, like the complicity of being in on the secret of his and Judson’s war game, was giving her a sense of what life might be like in a happier family, with her at the center of it.

“You can keep this,” Perry said, returning with a bottle. “My eye-drop-using days are over.”

“Are you worried about Mom? The fact that she hasn’t even called?”

“You think she’s lying frozen in a snowdrift.”

“It’s just weird.”

Perry frowned. “What time does the reception start?”

“Six thirty.”

“So here’s an idea. Why don’t you go to the concert and let Jay and me go to the Haefles’? Admittedly, I’m judging only by appearances, but I have the sense you don’t actually want to miss the concert.”

“I don’t think the Haefles want little kids there.”

“Assuming you don’t put me in that category, I think you’re underestimating Jay. He has an old soul.”

Becky considered her long-haired brother. To feel allied with his brainpower, rather than mocked and threatened by it, was a strange sensation. “You would do that for me?”

 

 

 

It was painful to recall, but Russ had loved Rick Ambrose.

Once upon a time, in New York, at the seminary on East Forty-ninth Street, Russ and Marion had been the It couple, into whose married-student apartment other young seminarians crowded three or four nights a week to smoke their cigarettes, listen to jazz, and inspire one another with visions of modern Christianity’s renaissance in social action. Twiggy, pretty Marion, more deeply and eclectically read than anyone else, wearing snug pedal pushers and bulky sweaters that evoked the Welsh countryside of Dylan Thomas, was the envy of Russ’s fellow seminarians. Whatever she and Russ did was ipso facto the hip thing. Even pulling up stakes and relocating to rural Indiana, which he’d felt obliged to do when Marion became pregnant and his applications for more exotic postings were rejected, had seemed like an edgy move. Only when Marion withdrew into motherhood, grew heavier and wearier, and Russ needed to come up with fifty sermons a year, rewritten by Marion and delivered in two churches with a combined flock of fewer than three hundred, at eight thirty and ten o’clock every Sunday, did the life she’d once made large for him begin to feel inescapably small. Whenever he contrived a respite from the Indiana farmhouse, by begging favors of pastors from nearby churches, and attended conferences in Columbus or Chicago or protested for civil rights, he was bittersweetly reminded of the edge that he and Marion had lost.

In prosperous New Prospect, although he continued to agitate for social justice, the political sleepiness of First Reformed had just about defeated him when Rick Ambrose arrived to wake it up. Where Russ came by his alienation from the suburbs honestly, by virtue of his Mennonite childhood, Ambrose’s was adopted. He’d been the causeless young rebel in the otherwise happy family of an endocrinologist in Shaker Heights, Ohio. On the night of his high-school graduation, he and his girlfriend had ridden his motorcycle down the main drag of Shaker Heights and straight out of town. A month later, on a highway in Idaho, he and the girl had been passed by four teenagers doing a hundred miles an hour in a Chevy that broadsided a rancher crossing in front of them in his pickup. Beside the road, staring at teenaged death, Ambrose had heard a bell-clear calling from God. Seven years later, as a minister in training, he felt called to work with troubled young people. When he came to Russ’s office to accept, in person, the job of director of youth programming, he flattered Russ. A congregation in Oak Park had offered him a position with better pay, but he’d chosen First Reformed because, he said, he admired Russ’s vocal commitment to peace and justice. He said, “I think we’ll make a great team.”

Warmed by the sense of being recognized, and taken with the simmering charisma of his young associate, imagining they might become friends, Russ repeatedly invited him to dinner at the parsonage. When Ambrose finally accepted, and lingered at the table after the kids had been excused, he paid so much attention to Marion that Russ felt uneasy about the scant attention he’d lately given her himself. Marion had never been a flirt, but she seemed enjoyably energized by Ambrose’s intensity. After he left, Russ was surprised to hear she hadn’t liked him. “That glower of his,” she said. “It’s like a mind-control trick he picked up somewhere and fell in love with. It’s a car salesman’s trick—making people afraid they don’t have your approval. They’ll do anything to get it, and they never stop to wonder why they even want it.”

It was true that, for all his foul-mouthed forthrightness, there was something unknowable about Ambrose, and Russ never quite shook the awareness of his affluent background, in contrast to his own. But Russ had an eager and generous heart, which suited him well to the ministry, and Ambrose had been right: they made a good team. Their mentoring styles were complementary, Ambrose’s psychological and streetwise, Russ’s more political and Bible-oriented, and he was grateful that Ambrose took charge of the stormier kids in the youth fellowship, leaving him to lead the others by example.

After hearing Russ’s stories of his time among the Navajos, Ambrose had proposed that the fellowship refocus itself on a spring work camp in Arizona. Russ loved the idea so much that he soon forgot it hadn’t been his. Arizona was his place, after all. Arriving on the arid reservation, landing in waste and privation beyond what anyone else on the bus had experienced, he felt forty pairs of suburban teenage eyes looking to him for courage and guidance. It transpired that Ambrose, though he had the swagger of a tough who didn’t shy from manual labor, couldn’t so much as drive a clean nail without first bending two of them. Time and again, he came to Russ, or even to Clem, for help with seemingly elementary tasks. Although his ineptitude later became a real issue—was arguably, indeed, the catalyst of Russ’s humiliation—on the first spring trip it served to highlight Russ’s capability.

By the following October, so many teenagers were thronging to the fellowship that Russ worried about a surprise inspection by the fire marshal. Beyond the sheer numbers, what excited him was the kind of kids who were joining. There were long-haired musicians, there was a raft of blond girls from the Episcopal church, there were even some Black kids, and they weren’t just seeking spiritual renewal. They wanted to invite guest speakers from the inner city and the peace movement, they wanted to examine their suburban affluence. For six years, in his sermons, Russ had tried to awaken the adult congregation of First Reformed to the implications of its privilege. Now, suddenly, for the first time since New York, he was at the center of the It place. He knew he had Ambrose to thank for this, but he also knew that reports of the Arizona trip had set the high school afire, and that the promise of a second trip was driving the rise in membership numbers. In November, after a rollicking Sunday-night meeting, Ambrose, who so rarely smiled, turned to Russ with a cockeyed grin.

“Pretty wild, isn’t it.”

“Incredible,” Russ said.

“I counted fourteen kids who weren’t here last week.”

“Absolutely incredible.”

“It was Arizona,” Ambrose said, more seriously. “That trip completely changed the dynamic. That’s what made this whole thing real.”

Russ, already giddy, felt even giddier. Arizona was his place. He, no less than Ambrose, had changed the dynamic. In his giddiness, through the winter and into the early spring, he plunged into the spirit of the times. He took the risk of rapping about his feelings, he opened himself to new styles of music. He found that shutting his eyes and raising a clenched fist, while speaking of Dr. King or Stokely Carmichael, whose hand he’d once shaken, had a powerful effect on the young people. Though it never sounded quite convincing, he took to using curse words such as bullshit. He let his hair grow over his collar and started a beard, the latter lasting until Marion remarked on his resemblance to John the Baptist. He was stung enough to shave the beard, but he felt that Marion was becoming a drag. He preferred the excitement of the attention he was getting from the new breed of girls in the fellowship. They swore as bluely as the boys did, they were loud and gross in the sexual innuendoes they traded with the boys, and yet, being suburban, their naïveté was even greater than his had been at their age. None of them had decapitated a chicken or seen a bank seize a man’s ancestral farm. Russ believed he could offer them a depth of authentic experience lacking in young Ambrose. He put more thought into his Sunday-night prayers than he put into his Sunday-morning sermons (Marion did much of that thinking for him anyway), because the dream he’d once had in New York, the vision of a nation transformed by vigorously Christian ethics, was alive in the blue-jeaned throng in the First Reformed function hall, not in the sleepy gray heads in the sanctuary.

Among the new converts to the fellowship was a young woman, Laura Dobrinsky, who was tight with Tanner Evans and thus instantly popular. At her first meeting, Russ had greeted her with a hug that she did not return, and at subsequent meetings he’d been unsettled by the openly hostile way she stared at him. It seemed strangely personal, unlike anything he could remember being the object of. Per the discussions of adolescent psychology he’d had with Ambrose, Russ hypothesized that Laura had a problem with her father and was seeing him in Russ. But one afternoon in March, ten days before the Arizona trip, he emerged from the church library, where he’d been consulting references for a sermon, and heard Laura Dobrinsky uttering the words That dude is such an unbelievable fucking dork. From the silence that fell as he rounded a corner and saw half a dozen girls seated in the corridor, and from the glances the girls then exchanged, the smirks they imperfectly suppressed, he conceived the hurtful suspicion that Laura had been referring to him. Especially hurtful was that one of the girls smirking was the popular, blond Sally Perkins, who a few weeks earlier, after school, had come to his office and opened up to him about her unhappiness at home. Most of the popular kids preferred to go to Ambrose with their troubles, and Russ had been surprised and gratified that Sally had come to him.

Returning to his office, he tried to cheer himself with the thought that Sally Perkins wouldn’t have come to him if she thought he was a dork, and that, even if Laura Dobrinsky did think so, it was silly to let himself be hurt by a girl with wildly unresolved anger issues, and also that maybe she hadn’t been referring to him, maybe the dork in question was Clem, which would explain the girls’ embarrassment when they saw Clem’s father; but he was still in distress when Rick Ambrose came knocking on his door.

Taking a seat, his expression pained, Ambrose told Russ that he’d been hearing some complaints—or not complaints, concerns—about Russ’s style of ministry. Some of the kids seemed uncomfortable, in particular, with Russ’s weekly prayers. Ambrose himself was fine with them, but he suggested that Russ consider “toning it down a bit” with the scriptural language. “Do you know what I mean?”

He could hardly have found a worse moment to criticize Russ. “I put a lot of thought into those prayers,” Russ said. “When I cite Scripture, it’s always in direct relation to the theme that you and I have chosen for the week.”

Ambrose nodded judiciously. “Like I said, I don’t have a problem with it myself. It’s just something you should be aware of. Some of the kids we’re drawing don’t have any religious background. Obviously, the hope is that everyone will find their way to an authentic faith, but people need to find their own way, and that takes time.”

Because of Laura’s remark, Russ felt angrier than Ambrose’s tactful words merited. “I don’t care,” he said. “This is a church for believers, not a social club. I’d rather lose a few members than lose sight of our mission.”

Ambrose pursed his lips and blew a silent whistle.

“Who are the people complaining?” Russ said. “Is there anyone besides Laura Dobrinsky?”

“Laura is definitely the most outspoken of them.”

“Well, and I would not be sorry to see her leave.”

“She’s a handful, I agree. But the energy she brings is really valuable.”

“I’m not going to change my style because one angry girl is complaining to you about me.”

“It’s not just her, Russ. This is something we need to deal with before we leave on Spring Trip. I wonder if you’d be willing…” Ambrose glowered at the floor. “I wonder if we should open up part of the meeting on Sunday and talk about where we stand, as a group, with expressions of Christian doctrine. You could hear Laura, she could hear you. I think it could be a really valuable conversation for the group to have before we all get on the bus.”

“I’m not interested in a public shouting match with Laura Dobrinsky.”

“I’ll be there to make sure it doesn’t get out of hand. I promise, I will back you up. I just—”

“No.” Russ stood up angrily. “I’m sorry, but no. That does not sound right to me. I’m happy to let you do your thing, but I would ask that you let me do mine.”

Ambrose sighed, as if to suggest a withholding of approval, but he said nothing more. Russ was left with the impression that much whispering was being done behind his back, and that he would do well to strengthen his relationships with the group’s rowdier element. At the next Sunday meeting, the last before Arizona, he made friendly forays into that element. Whether the negative vibe he got from it was real or just the product of his paranoia, it gave his movements a marionette-like clumsiness; a dorkiness. Sitting in the huge group circle at the end of the meeting, he sought the eyes of Sally Perkins, hoping to exchange a warm smile, but she seemed determined not to look at him.

On the Friday afternoon before Palm Sunday, aware of the emotional bonding that occurred on long bus rides, he stationed himself between the two interstate buses in the First Reformed parking lot and waited to see which of them would be preferred by the kids with whom he needed to bond, so that he could board it. But the normally visible forces of teenaged social physics were scrambled in the parking lot. Parents stood chattering among haphazard piles of luggage, preteen siblings ran on and off the buses, latecomers arrived with tooting car horns, and everyone kept pestering Russ with logistical questions. He was loading five-gallon drums of paint into a bus’s luggage bay when, behind his back, the hidden social forces resolved into a mob of long-haired kids outside the other bus, which Ambrose had chosen.

Too late, he saw that he and Ambrose should have discussed their bus assignments—that he should have insisted on having a chance to repair his rapport with Laura Dobrinsky’s clique. Riding west into the night, in the unpreferred bus, he felt exiled. Even when he succeeded, the next morning, in trading places with Ambrose, the scene on the other bus was unsatisfactory. The kids had been awake all night, laughing and singing, and now they only wanted to sleep. Tanner Evans kindly sat down with him, but soon Tanner, too, was sleeping. By the time they reached the reservation, Russ had become afraid to look over his shoulder at the kids behind him. It was a relief to know that most of them were going on with Ambrose to the demonstration school at Kitsillie, up high on the mesa.

Waiting in the settlement of Rough Rock was Russ’s Navajo friend Keith Durochie. The back of Keith’s Ford pickup was heaped with new and scavenged plumbing supplies. He informed Russ that he and the other elders were expecting him to install a septic line and put a sink and toilet in the school. When Russ replied that Ambrose, not he, was leading the Kitsillie contingent, Keith didn’t hide his displeasure. He’d seen, the year before, the kind of skills Ambrose had.

Russ waved Ambrose over and explained the situation. “How would you feel about doing some plumbing work up there?”

“I would need help,” Ambrose said.

“This is the job at Kitsillie,” Keith said to Russ. “This is what we have for you this year.”

“Shoot,” Russ said.

“I kept the equipment safe all winter.”

“I’m willing to give it a try,” Ambrose said. “Between Keith and Clem, we’ll probably be okay.”

Keith threw Russ a look—Clem was seventeen—and turned to Ambrose. “You stay here,” he said firmly. “Let Russ go to Kitsillie.”

“That’s fine.”

“Rick,” Russ said. He didn’t want to be the white guy arguing with a Navajo, but the kids going to Kitsillie had counted on being with Ambrose. “I think we should talk about this.”

“I’m no kind of plumber,” Ambrose said. “If that’s the job, I’d be more comfortable trading places with you.”

Keith walked away, satisfied that the matter was settled, and Ambrose hurried off to the kids with whom he was unexpectedly spending a week in Rough Rock. Russ could have pursued him and made him speak to the Kitsillie group, made him explain why he’d chosen not to join it, but instead he placed his trust in God. He thought that God’s will might be at work in Keith, guiding the course of events, offering Russ a providential chance to forge better relationships with the popular kids. Submitting to His will, he shouldered his duffel bag and boarded the Kitsillie bus; and there it was instantly clear that God had harsher plans for him.

The week on the mesa was torture. Everyone, even his own son, thought he was lying about why he’d replaced Ambrose, and to tell them the full truth—that Keith Durochie had a low opinion of Ambrose—would have been unfair to Keith and unkind to Ambrose. Russ was still stupid about Ambrose, still considered him a friend worth protecting. But he wasn’t stupid otherwise. He saw how acidly the group resented him for being there. He saw the lengths to which Laura Dobrinsky and her friends went to avoid working with him, he felt their hatred at every nightly candle talk, and he knew he had a pastoral responsibility to raise the issue. He tried repeatedly to have a private word with Sally Perkins, who not long ago had trusted him enough to confide in him, but she kept eluding him. Afraid that terrible things might be said to his face in a group confrontation, he chose to endure his misery in silence until Ambrose could confirm the reason he’d stayed behind in Rough Rock.

By the time the two groups reunited, Russ was too low to beg Ambrose to make a clarifying statement. He waited for Ambrose to do it voluntarily, but Ambrose had had an amazing week in Rough Rock—had wowed the half of the group that still related to Russ; had gained ground on Russ’s own turf—and he seemed oblivious to Russ’s misery. Witnessing the pointedly joyous hugs with which the Kitsillie group greeted Ambrose, Russ lamented his heart’s generosity. He rued that he hadn’t heeded Marion’s warnings. Only now could he see that he and his young associate had been engaged, from the beginning, in a competition of which only one of them had been aware.

And even then, even knowing that Ambrose was not his friend, had never been his friend, he was shocked by the audacity of Ambrose’s betrayal of him. At the first Sunday meeting after Arizona, when Laura and Sally stood up to lacerate Russ’s heart and hurl their teenaged acid in his face, Ambrose did nothing to stop it—just stood in a corner and glowered with disapproval, presumably of Russ himself—and when the majority of the group walked out of the fellowship room, which was baking in an April heat wave, Ambrose sided not with his colleague, not with the well-mannered kids from the church that employed him, but with the rabble from outside the church, the hip kids, the popular girls, and left Russ to ask God what he’d done to deserve such punishment.

He got the answer, or at least an answer, some endless minutes later. Ambrose returned to Russ and asked him to come downstairs. “I tried to warn you,” he said as they descended the stairs. “I really think this could have been avoided.”

“You said you would back me up,” Russ said. “You said, quote, you wouldn’t let it get out of hand.”

“And you refused to have the conversation.”

“I’d say this qualifies as out of hand!”

“This is serious, Russ. You need to hear what Sally just told me.”

The air was scarcely cooler on the second floor. Ambrose led Russ into his unventilated office, where Laura and Sally were seated on his sofa, and shut the door. Laura gave Russ a cruel smile of victory. Sally stared sullenly at her hands.

“Sally?” Ambrose said.

“I don’t really see the point,” Sally said. “I’m done with this church.”

“I think Russ has a right to hear from you directly.”

Sally closed her eyes. “It’s just that I’m totally creeped out. It’s just what a nightmare Spring Trip turned out to be. It was like my worst nightmare when he walked onto that bus. I couldn’t believe it.”

“There was a reason Russ and I traded places,” Ambrose said. “He was better at the work that needed to be done up there.”

“Yeah, I’m sure. I’m sure he found some reason. But the way it felt to me was that I couldn’t get away from him.”

The office was unbearably hot. Russ was appalled and frightened and perplexed. “Sally, look at me,” he said. “Please open your eyes and look at me.”

“She doesn’t feel like opening her eyes,” Laura said in a righteous tone.

“I just wanted him to leave me alone,” Sally said. “I got a really creepy feeling, that time in his office. And then, I couldn’t believe it, he followed me to Kitsillie.”

Worse even than her refusal to look at Russ were the words he, his, him. They reduced him to the It in an I–It relationship.

“I don’t understand,” he said to Sally. “You and I had a good conversation in my office, and it would have been wrong of me not to follow up. That’s what I do as a minister. I don’t know why you think I’m somehow singling you out.”

“Because that’s how it feels to me,” she said. “How many ways do I have to find to tell you to leave me alone?”

“I truly wasn’t aware of trying to push you. I just wanted you to know that I’m available. That I’m a person you can trust and open up with.”

“That’s the thing,” Laura said. “She doesn’t trust you.”

“Laura,” Ambrose said. “Let Sally speak for herself.”

“No, I’m done,” Sally said, jumping to her feet. “He ruined Spring Trip for me. He gives me a bad feeling about this whole group. I’m done.”

She fled the office. With a withering glance at the It that was Russ, Laura stood up and followed her. It seemed to Russ, in the silence that ensued, that only he was sweating. When Ambrose leaned back in his desk chair and clasped his hands behind his head, the underarms of his denim shirt were enviably dry.

“I don’t know what to do here, Russ.”

“I was only trying to help her.”

“Really? She says you complained to her about your sex life with Marion.”

Sweat flowed from so many of Russ’s pores, it felt like a skin he was shedding. “Are you out of your mind? That is simply a lie.”

“I’m just reporting what she said.”

Blindsided by the accusation, Russ tried to shake his head clear, tried to remember his exact words in his conversation with Sally.

“That’s not correct,” he said. “What I said to her was—I said that marriage is a blessing but can also be a struggle. That the enemy in a long relationship is boredom. That sometimes there’s not enough love in a marriage to overcome that boredom. And then—you have to understand, there was a context to it.”

Ambrose waited, glowering.

“We’d been talking about her parents’ divorce, how angry she is at them, and I thought we were close to a breakthrough. When she asked me if I was ever bored in my marriage, I felt I had to share something honest with her. I thought it was important for her to know that even a man of the cloth, even a pastor she respects—”

“Russ, Russ, Russ.”

“What was I supposed to do? Not answer honestly?”

“Within reason. There’s a certain art to it.”

“She asked me, ‘Are you bored in your marriage?’”

“I’m sorry to say that’s not how she remembers it. As she understood it, you were coming on to her.”

“Are you out of your mind? I have a fifteen-year-old daughter!”

“I’m not saying that’s what you were doing. But can you see why she might have perceived it that way?”

“She came to see me. If anyone was doing the coming-on, it was—do you know what I think happened? It was Laura. As soon as she saw Sally getting closer to me, putting her trust in me, Laura turned her against me. The person with the dirty mind here is Laura. Sally was perfectly comfortable with me until Laura got ahold of her.”

Ambrose seemed unexcited by Russ’s theory. “I know you don’t like Laura,” he said.

“Laura does not like me.”

“But take a step back and look at yourself. What were you thinking, talking about your sexual boredom to a vulnerable seventeen-year-old? Even if she was coming on to you, which I don’t believe, you had a clear responsibility to shut that down. Hard. Right away. Unambiguously.”

It didn’t matter if Ambrose’s glowering was just a trick. Under the pressure of it, Russ stepped back and was mortified by what he saw: not the sexual creepiness he stood accused of (the girls of the fellowship were taboo to him in umpteen ways) but the fatuousness of thinking he could ever be as hip as Ambrose. More than once, he’d heard Ambrose confess to the group that he’d been an arrogant, heartless prick as a teenager, and Russ had seen how thrilled the group was, not only by Ambrose’s honesty but by the image of him breaking female hearts. Made giddy by attention from a popular girl, Russ had imagined that he’d mastered the skill of honesty himself and could somehow erase his own timidity as a teenager, retroactively become a boy at ease with the likes of Sally Perkins. In his giddiness, he’d confessed, at least by implication, that Marion no longer turned him on. He’d felt the need to shed Marion, break free of her, in order to be more like Ambrose; and now his vanity stood shamefully revealed. His only thought was to get away, find fresher air, and seek comfort in God’s mercy.

“I guess I need to apologize,” he said.

“It’s too late for that,” Ambrose said. “Those kids aren’t coming back.”

“Maybe you should tell them why you weren’t in Kitsillie. If they heard it from you—”

“Kitsillie’s not the issue. Didn’t you hear what they were saying? The issue is your style of ministry. It’s simply not compatible with the kids I’m trying to reach.”

“The groovy kids.”

“The troubled kids. The ones who need an adult they can relate to. There are plenty of other kids who appreciate a more traditional style, and you’ll be fine with them. The numbers should be small enough for you to handle by yourself.”

“What are you saying?”

“I’m saying I can’t keep working here.”

Ambrose’s eyes were on him, but Russ felt too loathsomely sweaty to raise his own. The trip he’d been on since October had been the fantasy of a dork freeloading on another man’s charisma. Picturing the sorry little rump group that would remain after tonight, he could see only shame. Even the kids who stayed would never respect him after what they’d witnessed.

“You can’t leave,” he said. “You’re still under contract.”

“I will finish out the school year.”

“No,” Russ said. “It’s your group now. I’m not going to fight you for it.”

“I’m not saying you should quit. I’m saying I will find another church.”

“And I’m saying take it. I don’t want it.” Fearing he would cry, Russ stood up and went to the door. “You didn’t say one goddamned word in my defense up there.”

“You’re right,” Ambrose said. “I’m sorry about that.”

“The hell you are.”

“It’s unfortunate that the whole group got pulled into this. I know that was brutal for you.”

“I don’t want your compassion. In fact, you can shove it up your ass.”

Those were the last words he ever spoke to Ambrose. He left the church that night with a shame so crippling that he didn’t see how he could set foot in it again. His impulse was to resign from First Reformed and never again have anything to do with teenagers. But he couldn’t put his family through another move—Becky especially was having a splendid time at school—and so, the next morning, he went to Dwight Haefle and asked that Ambrose be given full charge of the youth group. Haefle, alarmed, asked why. Embracing his shame, not going into detail, Russ said he couldn’t relate to high-school kids. He said he would still run Sunday school and confirmation classes, would happily do more pastoral visitation, and might like to start an outreach program in the inner city.

“Hmm,” Haefle said. “Perhaps a few more sermons, too?”

“Absolutely.”

“More committee work.”

“Definitely.”

Haefle, who was sixty-three, seemed to weigh Russ’s failure against the agreeable prospect of working less. “Rick does seem to be doing a bang-up job,” he said.

From the senior minister’s office, Russ went to the church secretary and asked her to instruct Ambrose to direct any future communications to him in written form. Later that day, after getting the message, Ambrose came and tapped on Russ’s door, which Russ had locked. “Hey Russ,” he said. “You in there?”

Russ said nothing.

“Written communication? What the fuck?”

Russ knew he was being childish, but his hurt and hatred had a horizonless totality, unrelieved by adult perspective, and beneath them was the sweetness of being thrown upon God’s mercy: of making himself so alone and so wretched that only God could love him. He refused to speak to Ambrose, either on the day following his humiliation or ever after. While he performed his other duties vigorously, starting a women’s circle in the inner city, reaching new heights of political eloquence in his sermons, earning his paychecks and proving that everyone else still valued him, he avoided Ambrose and lowered his eyes when they accidentally met. By and by—Russ could sense it—Ambrose began to hate him for hating him. This, too, was sweet, because it gave Russ company and helped sustain his own hatred. Though he had some hope that the congregation was unaware of their feud, there was no hiding it in the church offices. Dwight Haefle kept trying to broker a peace, calling meetings, and the shamefulness of Russ’s refusals, the knowledge of how childish he appeared to Haefle and the secretarial staff, even to the janitor, compounded his wretchedness. His grievance with Ambrose was like a hair shirt, like a strand of barbed wire he wore wrapped around his chest. He suffered and in his suffering felt close to God.

The torment for which there was no reward came from Marion. Never having trusted Ambrose, she blamed him entirely for Russ’s humiliation. Russ ought to have been grateful for her loyalty, but instead it made him feel all the more alone. The difficulty was that he could never tell her the real story of the shaming that Ambrose and Sally had inflicted on him, because the story hinged on his having admitted to Sally, in a fit of admittedly poor judgment, that he and his wife very rarely made love anymore. This had obviously been a terrible betrayal of Marion. And yet, by a curious alchemy, as the months went by, he came to feel that Marion herself had been the cause of his humiliation, by having become unattractive to him. In the illogic of the alchemy, the more Marion was to blame, the less Sally was. Finally there came a night when Sally appeared to him in a dream, wearing an innocent but breast-accentuating argyle sweater, and meltingly gave him to understand that she preferred him to Ambrose and was ready to be his. Some unsleeping shred of superego steered the dream away from consummation, but he woke up in a state of maximum arousal. Creeping from the bed, his self-awareness attenuated by the darkness of the parsonage, he paid an onanistic visit to the bathroom. Into the sink came concrete substantiation of Sally’s complaint with him. He saw that it had been inside him all along.

Every man seeking salvation had a signature weakness to remind him of his nullity before the Lord and complicate communion with Him. Russ’s own weakness had been revealed to him in 1946, in Arizona, where his susceptibility to female beauty had aggravated a crisis of faith in the religion of his brethren. The image of Marion’s dewy dark eyes, her kiss-inviting mouth, her narrow waist and slender neck and fine-boned wrists, had come buzzing, like a huge and never resting hornet, into the formerly chaste chamber of his soul. Neither the imagined fires of Hell nor the very real prospect of breaking with his brethren could still the buzzing of that hornet. Although the result had been a permanent estrangement from his parents, he’d resolved his spiritual crisis by adopting a less stringent but still legitimate form of Christian faith, and he’d solved the problem of his weakness by lawfully wedding Marion.

Or so it had seemed. In the wake of his taboo-upending dream, he saw that he hadn’t actually overcome his weakness—that he’d merely repressed it from his consciousness. Now the dream had opened his eyes. Now, at forty-five, he saw beauty at every turn—in the forty-year-old women who turned to him with startling friendliness on Pirsig Avenue, the thirty-year-olds he glimpsed in passing cars, the twenty-year-old candy stripers at the hospital. Now he was beset not by a single hornet but by a chaotically swirling swarm of them. Try as he might, he couldn’t shut the windows of his soul against them. And then along came Frances Cottrell.

The afterfeel of her teasing little kick was persisting in his hip as he piloted the Fury through heavy snow on Archer Avenue. Three cars ahead of him, an orange truck was flashing yellow lights and strewing salt, but he had yet to see a snowplow. Frances had fallen silent, and he felt obliged to say something, if only to defuse the charge of her having foot-prodded her pastor in the vicinity of his genitals, but the Fury’s tractionless tires were palpably shimmying. If he got stuck in the snow, significantly delayed, the outing would become a misadventure that Marion, the next time she saw Kitty at church, might naturally remark on and thereby learn that Frances, not Kitty, had come along with him. As if he were one with the Fury, he willed himself to keep a grip. It was vital to avoid hard braking, but the momentum of events was frightening—Perry’s giving drugs to Frances’s son, the painful conversation that Russ was now obliged to have with him, Frances’s invitation to smoke marijuana with her, and the risk that if Russ declined her invitation she would look elsewhere for company on her youth quest; the upsetting fact that she’d already been looking elsewhere, not more than an hour ago. She’d sat chatting away with Rick Ambrose, against whose hipness Russ had abundantly demonstrated he could not contend.

“So, ah,” he said, when he’d safely braked for a stoplight. “You had a good talk with Rick?”

“I did.”

“I don’t suppose he mentioned that he and I are not on speaking terms.”

“No, I already knew that. Everybody knows that.”

So much for his hope that their feud wasn’t universal knowledge.

“Why do you ask?” she said. “Am I not allowed to talk to him if I want to be friends with you?”

“Of course not. You can talk to whoever you like. Just be aware that everything with Rick Ambrose is always about Rick Ambrose. He can be very seductive, and you might think he’s your friend. But you’d better watch your back.”

“Why, Reverend Hildebrandt,” she said with a lilt. “I do believe you’re jealous.”

The traffic light turned green, and he nudged the gas pedal. The rear wheels squealed and fishtailed a little.

“I mean jealous of Crossroads,” she said. “Rick’s got a hundred and fifty kids adoring him every Sunday. You get eight old ladies twice a month. I’d be jealous, too, if I were you.”

“I’m not jealous. There’s nowhere I’d rather be right now than here.”

“That’s nice of you to say.”

“I mean it.”

“Okay. But then why the hard feelings about Rick? I guess it’s none of my business. But if he’s great at what he does and you’re great at what you do—I don’t see the problem.”

Even on a straight stretch of road, the car was subtly bucking, wanting to spin.

“It’s a long story,” Russ said.

“In other words, none of my business.”

Russ’s refusal to forgive Ambrose, which for nearly three years had organized his interior life and received daily support from Marion, seemed silly when he imagined explaining it to Frances. Worse than silly: unattractive. He saw that, to have a chance with her, he might need to let go of his hatred. But his heart didn’t want to. The loss would be huge, would waste a thousand days of nursing his grudge, would render them meaningless in retrospect. There was also the danger that, if he made peace with Ambrose, Frances would feel even freer to admire Ambrose, and that he, Russ, would end up with nothing—neither his righteous pain nor Frances as his private reward for bearing it. He and Ambrose would still be competing, and he would lose the competition.

“Not to be all Mrs. Fix-It,” she said, “but Crossroads has been so good for Larry, and you’ve been so good for me. It seems like there ought to be some solution.”

“Rick doesn’t like me, and I don’t like Rick. It’s just a natural antipathy.”

“But why? Why? It goes against everything you say in your sermons. It goes against what you said to me about turning the other cheek. I can’t stop thinking about that. It’s the reason I wanted to come along with you today.”

The spot on his hip where she’d kicked him was still buzzing. He understood her to be saying that she was attracted to his goodness, and that, in order to do a very bad thing, to break his vows of marriage, he was now required to practice goodness.

“It means a lot to me,” he said. “That you came along today.”

“Oh, pooh. It’s an honor.”

“You mentioned getting involved in Crossroads yourself.” A tremor in his voice betrayed his anxiety. “Were you serious about that?”

“God, you really are jealous.”

Again—again—she prodded his upper leg with her toe.

“My only job,” she said, “is being a mother. I only get to work with you and Kitty twice a month, so, yes, I asked Rick if I could work in Crossroads as an adviser. He didn’t seem too enthusiastic, but they always take a couple of parents on the Arizona trip, and he put me on the list for that.”

“For the spring trip,” Russ said, aghast.

“Yes!”

Arizona was his place. The thought of her being there with Ambrose was atrocious.

“I’m sorry,” she said, “I know I shouldn’t try to save the day. But you should be going on those trips yourself. You obviously love the Navajos, you lived there for however many years. If you and Rick could patch things up, we could all be there together. Wouldn’t that be fun? I would love that.”

She bounced on the seat, so lovely in her energy that Russ became confused. Lo, I bring you tidings of great joy—peace on earth among all men. The opposing headlights on Archer Avenue were tightly bunched, in every car a stewing driver. There was nothing of Christmas in the mess the weather was making. The joy of the season was in Frances, in her childlike questioning of the strife between Russ and Ambrose, and a tendril of her joy was reaching into Russ’s hardened heart. Was it possible? Might he finally forgive Rick Ambrose? If his reward on earth were Frances? A week in Arizona in her hopeful, playful, eye-delighting presence? Or maybe more than just a week—maybe half a lifetime? Was she the second chance that God was giving him? The chance to entirely transform his life? To joyfully make love with a joyful woman? He’d been hating himself and Ambrose for a thousand Marion-darkened days, imagining that he was close to God, while all along, every second of every day, a simple turn of his heart toward forgiveness, which was the essence of Christ’s message to the world, the true meaning of Christmas, had been there to be freely chosen.

“I’m going to think about that,” he said.

“Please do,” she said. “There’s no earthly reason you and Rick can’t get along.”

In medieval romances, a lady set her suitor an impossible task to perform, the retrieval of the Grail, the slaying of a dragon. It seemed to Russ that his fair lady, in her hunting cap, was requiring him to slay a dragon in his heart.

Mayor Daley didn’t plow Englewood until the streets of white neighborhoods were cleared to bare pavement. Russ zigzagged through side streets, where the snow was more powdery and gave better traction, and maintained his momentum by rolling through stop signs. By the time the Community of God came into view, the hour was approaching five o’clock. To get home by seven, so that the trip didn’t become a thing that Marion might comment on to Kitty Reynolds, he needed to unload the Fury quickly.

The door to the community center was locked, the light above it off. Russ rang the bell, and they waited in the invisibly falling snow, Frances stamping her feet against the chill, until the light came on and Theo Crenshaw opened the door.

“I’d almost given up on you,” he said to Russ.

“Yeah, pretty serious snow.”

An impression that Russ had had before—that Theo was reluctant to acknowledge Frances’s presence—deepened when Theo turned away and kicked a wooden wedge under the door.

“I’m Frances,” she said brightly. “Remember me?”

Theo nodded without looking at her. He was dressed in a saggy velour pullover and ill-fitting stretch trousers. He seemed immune to the vanity that had led Russ to wear his favorite shirt and his sheepskin coat for Frances. The poignancy of an urban preacher, beloved on Sundays to the women of his congregation but otherwise so very alone in his church, with no support staff, no associate, his annual salary paltry, his primary sustenance spiritual, was especially keen on a raw December evening. Russ thought there might be no one he admired more than Theo, no one he knew more authentically Christian. Theo made him feel as privileged as Rick Ambrose made him feel disadvantaged, and he could imagine how Frances, showing up in her suburban blond loveliness, might be an unwelcome apparition to Theo.

He was pleased to see her pitch right in and hustle boxes into the community center. He hoped that Theo, seeing her cheerful industry, might better acknowledge her in the future. As always, the delivery of food and toys was a straightforward transaction. Russ expected no thanks for the donations, and Theo expected no lingering for sociability. When all the boxes were inside, Theo put his hands on his hips and said, “Good. Some ladies will be here in the morning for anybody who wants to stop by.”

“And we will see you here again on Tuesday,” Russ said. He clapped his hands and turned to Frances. “Shall we?”

He saw that she was holding a small, flat package. It was wrapped in Santa Claus paper and red ribbon.

“Will you do something for me?” she asked Theo. “Will you give this to Ronnie tomorrow? Tell him it’s from the lady he made the drawings with?”

Russ hadn’t seen the package in any of the boxes. She must have had it in her coat pocket. He wished she’d mentioned it to him earlier, because Theo was frowning.

“I don’t think that’s a good idea.”

“It’s just a set of Flair pens. They’re great for coloring-books.”

“That’s nice,” Theo said. “Some little boy or girl be happy to get that.”

“No, it’s for Ronnie. I got it specially for him.”

“All well and good. But I think you should put that with the other toys.”

“Why? He’s such a sweet boy—why can’t I give him a little present?”

She seemed innocently surprised, innocently hurt. An instinct to protect her welled up in Russ so strongly, he thought he might really be in love with her.

Theo wasn’t similarly moved. “I was given to understand,” he said, “that you and Ronnie’s mother had some words.”

“It’s a gift,” Frances said.

“I already asked you once to leave that boy be. Now I’m asking you again, politely.”

Frances’s hurt was turning to anger. It was an emotion Russ had never seen in her, and the sight of it turned him on. He imagined her angry at him, the full womanly range of her emotions bared to him, in the kind of spat that lovers sometimes had.

“Why?” she said. “I don’t understand.”

Theo rolled his eyes toward Russ, as if she were his woman to control.

“Frances,” Russ said, moving toward her. “Maybe we should trust Theo on this. We don’t know the situation.”

“What is the situation?”

“The situation,” Theo said, “is that Clarice, the boy’s mother, doesn’t want you talking to him. She came and complained to me about that.”

Frances laughed. “Because why? Because she’s such a perfect mother?”

Her derision, too, was sexually exciting to Russ, but morally it was unattractive. He placed a hand on her shoulder and tried to turn her away. “You and I can talk about this later,” he said.

She shrugged off his hand. “I’m sorry, but how is it right for a boy who should be in a special school, getting special attention—how is it okay for him to be wandering around the neighborhood during school hours, cadging quarters?”

“Frances,” Russ said.

“I appreciate your concern,” Theo said evenly. “But I suggest you head home. It’s a long drive in the snow.”

“We really should be going,” Russ agreed.

Frances now did direct her anger at him. “Does this seem right to you? Why isn’t someone calling social services? Isn’t this something the state should know about?”

“The state?” Theo smiled at Russ as if they were in on a joke. “You think the State of Illinois has a functioning child-protection system?”

“What are you smiling at?” Frances said to Russ. “Did I say something funny?”

He erased his smile. “Not at all. Theo is just saying it’s not a perfect system. It’s understaffed and overwhelmed. We can talk about it in the car.”

Again he tried to steer her toward the door, and again she shed his hand. “I want to know,” she said, “why I can’t give a needy boy one tiny little Christmas present.”

The time on the community center’s wall clock was 5:18. Each passing minute deepened the trouble Russ would be in with Marion, and he knew he should insist that they leave. But again his lady was asking him to perform a difficult task—to side with her against an urban minister with whom he’d painstakingly cultivated a relationship.

“I take your point about the gift,” he said to Theo. “But I’m kind of with Frances here. It doesn’t seem right that Ronnie’s on the street by himself.”

Theo threw him a disappointed look and turned to Frances. “You want to take charge of that boy? You want to take that on? Retarded South Side nine-year-old? You ready for that?”

“No,” she said. “That would be a lot for me to take on. But I can’t help—”

“He’s already been in foster care once. Are you familiar with that system?”

“Not—no. Not really.”

“We’re here to learn,” Russ said—managing, in one breath, to patronize Frances and sound idiotic to Theo.

“You got to go pretty far down the list,” Theo said, “to find the family that will take a boy like Ronnie. That’s going to be a family collecting checks for half a dozen kids—to see any profit, you need volume. And how do you handle half a dozen kids?”

“You lock them in a room,” Russ said, to sound less stupid.

“You lock them all up in a room. You don’t spare the rod.”

“That’s a bad system, I agree,” Frances said.

“Then work on changing it, if you want to try to help. Clarice isn’t all bad, she was just too young when she had Ronnie. When she gets herself together, she takes him to the school in Washington Park. That’s on a good day. On bad days he falls through the cracks. He knows to come here when she’s strung out, and sooner or later she always comes to find him. The problem is the men who give her drugs. She gets lost in that, and the only thing that gets her out of it is mother’s pride. If she didn’t have Ronnie, I reckon she’d be dead by now.”

“I can understand that,” Frances said. “I just want to give him something he might like.”

“That’s right. That’s what you want. What I want is for Clarice not to up and tell Ronnie to keep away from a church where he’s safe.”

“Well, so, let me write her a note. Is there a piece of paper I can write on?”

“Frances,” Russ said.

“She needs to know I’m not trying to take Ronnie away from her. Theo can give her the note with the present.”

Theo made his eyes very wide, suggesting a limit to his patience.

“Look,” Russ said. “This is silly. If you want Ronnie to have colored pens, Theo can take off the wrapping paper and give them to him. I don’t think writing a note is a good idea.”

“I wanted him to have a present to unwrap on Christmas.”

Theo, his limit reached, shook his head and walked away. Russ snatched the gift from Frances and hurried after him, into the sanctuary.

“Do me a favor and take this,” he said, pressing the gift on Theo. “She means well. She really does care about Ronnie. She’s just…”

“I was surprised to see her,” Theo said. “I assumed you were coming with Kitty.”

“Yeah, ah. Change of plan.”

The single fluorescent light burning above the altar, behind an old upright piano and a freestanding organ, seemed to intensify the sanctuary’s chill.

“Your private affairs are none of my business,” Theo said. “But I’d appreciate it if you’d take the log out of your eye and tell her to keep clear of that boy. If she won’t do it, she needs to find someplace else to go with her good intentions. I don’t need that kind of thing here.”

Two years of bridge-building with Theo were in jeopardy. Russ knew exactly why Theo was impatient with Frances. He himself had been impatient with other First Reformed ladies who’d joined the circle, Juanita Fuller, Wilma St. John, June Goya. They’d spoken to people in the neighborhood, including Theo, with a treacly sort of maternal condescension, partly a product of fear, partly racism repackaged in self-flattering form. He’d had to ask each of them to leave the circle, and if Theo had now been complaining about anyone but Frances, Russ would have deferred to him and kicked her out. He did believe that the flavor of Frances’s offense was different, more a matter of high spirits and irreverence. But it was possible that he only believed this because he was falling in love with her.

“I’ll speak to her,” he said.

“All righty,” Theo said. “You get yourself home safe.”

An inch of fresh snow had fallen on the Fury’s windshield. The lightening of its rear load made its handling even more floaty as Russ steered it homeward. Frances was now sitting in normal passenger posture, her feet on the floor, and seemed coldly aggrieved with him.

“I don’t suppose I can ask,” she said, “what the two men had to say about me behind my back.”

“Yeah, I’m sorry,” Russ said. “Theo can be stubborn. Sometimes you just have to defer to how he wants things done.”

“I’m sure the two of you think I’m a dunce, but it wouldn’t have killed him to give Ronnie my present.”

“Your gesture was lovely. I’m all for it.”

“But apparently there’s just something about me that makes black people hate me.”

“Not at all.”

“I don’t hate them.”

“Of course not. It’s just…” He took a deep breath, for courage. “It might not be a bad idea,” he said, “to step back and think about how you’re coming across. It’s one thing to be in New Prospect, in your own milieu, with people like yourself. You can be as outspoken as you want. You can openly disagree with people, and they’ll take it as a sign of respect. But that kind of spirit comes across differently when you’re a visitor in a Black community.”

“I’m not allowed to disagree with them?”

“No, that’s—”

“Because it’s not like every black person is so perfect. I’m sure they do plenty of disagreeing among themselves.”

“I’m not saying you can’t disagree with Theo Crenshaw. I disagreed with him myself today.”

“I didn’t see much sign of that.”

“I’m talking about an inner attitude. The first thing I do, when I feel myself disagreeing, is acknowledge my own ignorance. Maybe there’s something in Theo’s experience that leads him to think the way he does, something I can’t immediately see. Instead of just shooting from the hip, I stop and ask myself, ‘Why does he feel differently about this than I do?’ And then I listen to his answer. He and I may still disagree, but at least I’ve acknowledged that a Black man’s experience in this country is profoundly different than mine.”

Frances offered no rejoinder, and Russ dared to hope that he was getting through to her. He had selfish reasons to keep her in the Tuesday circle, but they didn’t make his message less sincere.

“You have a good heart, Frances. A wonderful heart. But you can’t really blame Theo for not immediately seeing that. If you want him to trust you, you need to try to cultivate a different attitude. Begin with the assumption that you don’t know anything about being Black. If you make that adjustment, I guarantee he’ll notice the difference.”

She sighed so heavily that the windshield fogged. “I embarrassed you, didn’t I.”

“Not at all.”

“No, I did. I can see that now. I was trying to be Mrs. Fix-It.”

Russ glowed with pride. He, not Theo, had been right about her true nature.

“You didn’t do anything so wrong,” he said. “But the next time you see Theo, it wouldn’t hurt to tell him you’re sorry. A simple heartfelt apology goes a long way. Theo’s a good man, a good Christian. If you change your inner attitude, he’ll know it. It is so important to me, Frances, so very important, that you keep coming on our Tuesdays.”

This was the mildest of allusions to his pride in her, his hopes for a deepening of their intimacy, but he worried that it was still too much; and, indeed, the allusion wasn’t lost on her.

“Why, Reverend Hildebrandt,” she said. “The things you do say.”

Desire surged in him so powerfully, it felt like a premonition of its fulfillment. He thought of the blues recordings he’d left in his office, the excuse they would give him to bring Frances inside the church, the course that events might take in the dark of his office, if he kept up his nerve and didn’t get them back too late. Feeling one with the Fury, he urged it across Fifty-ninth Street, where the snow was heavily furrowed.

The furrows were deeper than he’d judged. They absorbed his momentum and deflected him into a sideways skid. For a very bad moment, neither steering nor braking had any effect. He clutched the wheel helplessly while Frances cried out and the Fury slid backward through the intersection. There was a bump and a bang and a crunch of metal on metal.

 

 

 

Resolved: that goodness is an inverse function of intelligence. First affirmative speaker: Perry Hildebrandt, New Prospect Township High School.

Let’s begin by positing that the essence of goodness is unselfishness: loving others as one loves oneself, performing costly acts of charity, denying oneself pleasures that harm others, and so forth. And then let’s imagine an act of spontaneous kindness to a previously hostile party—to one’s sister, for example—that accords with our posited definition of goodness. If the actor lacks intelligence, we need inquire no further: this person is good. But suppose that the actor is helpless not to calculate the ancillary selfish advantages accruing from his charitable act. Suppose that his mind works so quickly that, even as he’s performing the act, he’s fully aware of these advantages. Is his goodness not thereby fully compromised? Can we designate as “good” an act that he might also have performed through the sheerly selfish calculations of his intellect?

Returning to his room, where Judson was kneeling over the homemade Stratego board, Perry weighed the benefits and costs of taking his sister’s place at the Haefles’ reception. On the credit side were the goodness of this action, the satisfaction of adhering to his new resolution, the unprecedented look of gratitude with which Becky had accepted his offer, and the advancement of his self-interested campaign to secure her silence regarding his earlier bad actions. On the debit side, he now had to attend a reception for clergymen, with Judson.

“Listen, kiddo,” Perry said, sitting down across the board from him. “I need to ask you a favor. How would you feel about going to a party where there aren’t any kids your age?”

“When.”

“As soon as Mom and Dad get home. We’ll go with them.”

Judson’s brow creased. “I thought we were playing the game.”

“We can slide it under my bed. It’ll be there tomorrow.”

“Why do I have to go?”

“Because I have to go. You don’t want to be home alone, do you?”

A brief silence.

“I don’t mind,” Judson said.

“Really? You kind of freaked out, that time in the fall. It wasn’t even at night.”

Judson stared at the game board with an odd little smile, as if the boy who’d freaked out about some noises in the basement, though undeniably him, were an object of faint amusement; as if the shame of that time in the fall, when he’d been left home alone for too long, might pass over him and land somewhere else.

“The snacks will be good,” Perry said. “You can bring your book and find a place to read.”

“Why do you have to go?”

“It’s something I’m doing for Becky.”

Perry waited for the obvious question: Why do a good thing for Becky and not for his little brother? But this wasn’t the way a superior human being’s mind worked.

“Can we finish the game first?”

“Probably not.”

“You promised we’d play tonight.”

“We started it tonight. We’ll finish it tomorrow.”

Absorbing this sophistry, Judson stared at the board. “It’s your move,” he said.

Each player had forty pieces whose identities were concealed to his opponent. The object was to capture your opponent’s flag, via the slaughter of lesser pieces by pieces of greater rank, while avoiding deadly collisions with your opponent’s bombs, which were immotile and removable only by your very low-ranking miners. In classical strategy, you planted your flag at the rear of your forces and surrounded it with bombs, but Judson had apparently now grasped the weakness of this strategy: as soon as your opponent could advance a miner, unscathed, to the protecting bombs, your flag was helpless and the game was over. Observing Judson’s guileless excitement about his new idea, Perry could have pretended to be surprised by it and let him win the game. Instead, anticipating Judson’s more freewheeling placement of bombs, he’d deployed his own miners in more forward positions. It was plausibly good to beat Judson again and again, teaching him to not betray his strategy, forcing him to develop his skills, until he was able to win fair and square. Wouldn’t Judson’s happiness then be all the greater for being hard earned? Or was this merely the rationalization of an intelligent person who selfishly hated losing, even to his little brother?

Becky in her boots had clattered down the stairs, bound for the Crossroads concert, and Perry had defused the third of Judson’s bombs, at the nugatory sacrifice of a miner to a captain, when the telephone rang. He went and picked up on the extension in the parental bedroom.

“Yeah, ah—Perry?” his father said. His voice sounded strained and metallically distorted. There was street noise in the background. “Can I speak to your mother?”

“She’s not here.”

“She already went to the Haefles’?”

“No. I haven’t seen her all day.”

“Ah, okay, so. When you see her, can you tell her not to wait for me? There’s a problem with the car—I’m still in the city. Can you tell her she should just go on without me? It’s important that one of us be there.”

“Sure. But what if she—”

“Thanks, Perry. Thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you.”

With notable haste, his father ended the call. Likewise notable had been the guilty look he’d given Perry some hours earlier, when Perry spotted him and Mrs. Cottrell in the family car.

Perry placed the receiver in its cradle and pondered what to do. Mrs. Cottrell was, without question, a fox—not only in the salacious sense of the word but in her slyness. In his encounters with her since Larry Cottrell had made the dumb mistake of getting high while babysitting, Perry had detected a sharpening of her interest in him, a glint of mischief in her eyes. Larry had sworn to Perry that he hadn’t narked him out, but his mother obviously suspected who’d sold him the dime bag. And now Perry had discovered, by accident, at the corner of Pirsig and Maple, a dangerous liaison between Mrs. Cottrell and the Reverend Father. To be busted by the Reverend now, after forming his resolution and liquidating the asset, would be the height of irony.

Impelled by worry, after watching his father speed away on Pirsig, he’d postponed the rest of his Christmas shopping and walked to the Cottrell residence for a word with Larry. If all Larry’s mother had was a suspicion, and if she happened to voice it to the Reverend, Perry could simply deny everything. The worry was that Larry was weak. If he’d fingered Perry by name, despite swearing that he hadn’t, denials would not avail.

Larry could have been Exhibit A in Becky’s contention that Perry merely used people. For a while, Perry had dodged him at Crossroads meetings and inventively deflected his invitations to hang out. Larry was immature, a squeaker, a newcomer, and thus of scant utility to Perry in his quest to reach the center of Crossroads. But Perry couldn’t baldly reject him without running afoul of Crossroads precepts. One day, after school, Larry attached himself to Perry and Ansel Roder as they made their way to Roder’s house. Roder was in a magnanimous mood that day. Learning that Larry had never tried pot and very much wanted to, he included him in the passing of the bong, whereupon Larry embarrassed Perry. With ear-grating giggles, he offered a running play-by-play of his mind’s reaction to chemical insult, and when Roder finally told him to shut the fuck up he gigglingly explicated his insulted mind’s reaction to it. He giggled, too, when he bumped into Roder’s turntable and harmed the LP that was playing. Roder took Perry aside and said, “I don’t want that kid here again.” Perry was of similar opinion, but Larry, serenely unaware of how uncoolly he’d behaved, proceeded to pester him to be included in future festivities. He was a poignant figure, messed up by the recent death of his father. To sell him drugs would have been a pure kindness if it hadn’t also made rationally self-interested sense: here was a loyal customer, a known quantity, whose mother gave him a handsome allowance. To then smoke with him the pot he bought might likewise have been construable as charity, an act of friendship, if it hadn’t accorded with Perry’s strategic desire to be less dependent on Roder’s generosity, and with certain other benefits. It was proving pleasant to Perry to have an adoring acolyte in Crossroads, pleasant to see his foxy mother up close, in her den, pleasant to exercise his dexterity on the model airplanes that Larry could afford with his allowance, pleasant to dip brushes into the nifty square bottles of paint he’d long coveted at the hobby shop. Not until Larry got himself busted by his mother—semi-deliberately, as a self-destructive way of defying her, Perry suspected—did the costs of their friendship outweigh the benefits. Larry had promised his mother he wouldn’t buy more pot, and Perry, despite having lost him as a customer, was obliged to remain friends with him, lest he be hurt and nark him out.

The Cottrell house was a white brick Colonial, impressively large for a widow and two children. Larry was at home with his kid sister and invited Perry in from the snow.

“We have a problem,” Perry said when they were in Larry’s bedroom. “I just saw your mother with my father.”

“Yeah, they’re doing some church thing in the city.”

“Well, so, I have to ask again. Is our secret safe with you?”

Among Larry’s insecure tics was rubbing the sebaceous nodes around his nose and sniffing his fingertips. Perry, too, enjoyed the smell of his own sebum, but such sniffing was better done privately.

“You understand why I’m asking.”

“You don’t have to be paranoid,” Larry said. “The whole thing’s over, except that I can’t watch TV for another nine days. I’m going to miss the Orange Bowl.”

“No mention of my name, then.”

“I already swore to you. Do you want me to get a Bible?”

“No need. I just hadn’t imagined your mom going into the city with my dad. It was only the two of them. I have a bad feeling that we haven’t heard the last of this.”

“What did you expect? You’re the one who sells dope.”

“Exactly my point. My exposure is potentially far more serious than yours.”

“I’m already the one who got punished.”

“You’re the one who made the mistake, my friend.”

Larry nodded, touching his face again. “What’s in the bag?”

“A present for my brother. Do you want to see it?”

He was glad of the chance to let Larry admire the movie camera, to wind it up and shoot imaginary footage with him, before it became irrevocably Judson’s. After an hour, which was the minimum duration for his visit to pass as a friendly social call, rather than the targeted instrumentality it actually had been, he headed home through snow swirling down from a dark sky. He didn’t think Larry would break, even under renewed pressure, but the irony of getting busted now, when he’d resolved to be a better person, was persuasively vivid to him. He still feared mischief from Mrs. Cottrell, and there was another worrisome loose end. In the days since Becky had annihilated him as a person, in the coat closet at First Reformed, she’d seemed more pissed off with him than ever. He imagined a full-scale family Confrontation in which he insisted on his innocence—with a kind of retroactive honesty, since he’d now forsworn the use and sale of mind-altering substances—only to be undercut by his sister’s denunciation.

What providence it therefore was when, ensconced in his room with Judson, he’d heard Becky crying. His ensuing exchange with her had ended in a warm embrace, a sense of being rewarded for his resolution. This would have been entirely satisfactory if he hadn’t then felt so deliciously relieved of his worry about her. The relief, its selfishness, negated all the goodness he’d displayed, and it cast an unfortunate light on his feeling of being rewarded. Shouldn’t true goodness be its own reward? He wondered if an action, to qualify as authentically good, needed not only to be untainted by self-interest but also to bring no pleasure of any kind.

The parental alarm clock, which he knew to be two minutes slow, showed 6:45. His mother was now so bizarrely late that all bets on her arrival time were off. He considered a good action that would almost certainly bring him no pleasure: going to the Haefles’ without waiting for his mother. The action had only the faintest taint of self-interest, in the form of the credit he might get for ensuring that the Hildebrandt family was represented at the party. This credit would be too feeble to be fungible if he was accused of selling drugs, and so could be discounted.

He wrote a short note to his mother, on the scratch pad by the phone, and went to collect Judson. “Time for a walk in the snow.”

“I thought we were waiting for Mom and Dad.”

“Nope, just you and me, kiddo. We are the Hildebrandts tonight.”

A minor mystery of adulthood was that his parents referred to latex overshoes as rubbers. Even Becky, that vessel of purity, had been seen to suppress a snigger at the word. The parents surely knew its other meaning, and yet they persisted in using it, with a confounding absence of embarrassment: Make sure you wear your rubbers. Though Judson’s rubbers were innocent, Perry was ashamed of his. Ansel Roder and his moneyed friends wore alpine hiking boots in the snow.

It was still coming down heavily when he and Judson ventured out in their rubbers. Judson ran ahead, kicking up sheets and clumps of it, the interruption of Stratego forgotten in the excitement of a winter storm. Watching him fall down and pick himself back up, Perry mourned no longer being small enough that falling didn’t hurt. He no longer even remembered how it felt to have the ground so unthreateningly proximate. Why had he been in such a hurry to grow up? It was as if he’d never experienced the grace of childhood. As he watched his little brother frolic, he felt another downward tug in his mood, stronger than the tug he’d felt while shopping but also less painful, because it was occasioned by a feeling of metempsychosis. More surely than before, he sensed that he was going down, was irredeemably bad in the head, but this time it seemed to matter less, because his soul was connected to Judson’s by love and fraternity, at some mystical level interchangeable, and Judson was a blessed child, literally born on a Sunday, and would always be okay, even if he, Perry, wasn’t.

On the front stoop of the Superior Parsonage, between rows of bushes with Christmas lights dimmed by snow, he crouched to brush off Judson’s parka and help him with the buckles of his rubbers, which were encrusted with ice and difficult to undo.

“I still don’t see why we’re here.”

“Because Dad is stuck in the city and Mom is AWOL.”

“What is AWOL.”

Perry rang the doorbell. “It means absent without leave. Dad said it’s important that the family be here. By process of elimination, that leaves you and me.”

The door was opened by a very large white bunny, Mrs. Haefle, in a red apron embroidered with holly leaves. Perry quickly and cogently explained why he and Judson were there, but Mrs. Haefle seemed slow on the uptake. “Do your parents know you’re here?”

“They were unavoidably detained. I left them a note.”

She looked over her shoulder. “Dwight?”

Reverend Haefle appeared in the doorway. “Perry! Judson! What a nice surprise.”

He ushered them inside and took their coats. Functioning home insulation being a perk of senior ministry, the house was hot and steamy. Clergymen and their spouses filled the living room, obeying the obscure social imperatives of adult life, apparently enjoying themselves. Reverend Haefle led the Hildebrandts into the dining room, which was acridly scented with the combustion of Sterno cans beneath a copper-clad pan of Swedish meatballs, a tray of potatoes in a sauce of cream and onions, and a cauldron of something fumingly alcoholic, with blanched almonds and bloated raisins floating in it. Through the open kitchen door, Perry saw wine jugs and a vodka bottle on a counter.

“Take a plate and load up,” Reverend Haefle said. “Doris’s heritage is Swedish, and she makes a mean meatball—don’t forget the gravy. The potatoes are a dish called Jannson’s Temptation. It wouldn’t be a Swedish Christmas without a lot of heavy cream.”

Judson, though he must have been starving, politely hesitated.

“Don’t hold back, lad. We can use a young appetite. If you’d like some company your own age, our granddaughters are in the basement.”

Thinking of the Crappier Parsonage’s appalling basement, Perry pictured the granddaughters clad in rags and chained to a filthy stone wall. Yes, we keep them in the basement …

“And what is this?” he said, indicating the cauldron.

“That is a Scandinavian Christmas drink for grownups. We call it gløgg.”

Left alone with Judson, who evinced his native moderation by taking three meatballs, a spoon of potatoes, a quantity of raw carrots and broccoli florets, and, from a triple-decker stand laden with homemade cookies, two dry-looking balls dusted with powdered sugar, Perry considered the incredible intensity of the alcohol fumes wafting off the cauldron. It was like sticking his nose in a bottle of rubbing alcohol. There was, he realized only now, some ambiguity in his resolution, some scenarios not explicitly addressed by its terms. To wit: Was he required to abjure alcohol? Perhaps one cup of gløgg, taken on an empty stomach to maximize its clout, might be permissible on a night when he had no other antidote to the sinking of his mood? With an unsteady hand, splashing a little, he ladled the wine-dark substance into a ceramic cup and glanced behind him. No one was watching.

Escaping to the hallway, he took a slurp of the most delicious drink he’d ever tasted. It was clovey and cinnamony, full of vodka. The ordinarily nauseating gastric sourness of wine was overwhelmed by sugar. His face went warm immediately.

“Where am I supposed to go?” Judson said, holding his plate and a fork.

At the end of the hallway, they found stairs leading down to a proper recreation room, shag-carpeted, paneled with knotty pine, and dominated by a pool table. Sprawled on the carpeting, near an empty but usable fireplace, was a pair of girls younger than Perry and older than Judson, playing Yahtzee. Perry as a boy, when asked to play with female strangers, had routinely been paralyzed by self-consciousness. He was impressed by how naturally Judson sat down with the girls and introduced himself. Judson truly was a blessed child, rightly sure that strangers would like him. Or maybe the lure of Yahtzee was so powerful that it simply swept away all shyness.

Somehow, though Perry hadn’t been conscious of drinking, his cup was already empty. He ate two sodden raisins from the bottom, extracting precious liquid. A thin line of spice scum marked the level of his tragically modest initial serving, and as he went back up the stairs he reasoned that, not having taken the entire “one cup” permitted by the loophole in his resolution, he was entitled to a refill. His face was flaming, but he hadn’t achieved a proper buzz yet.

Now standing by the food and drink were two men in lumpy sweaters and priestly black slacks, selecting cookies. Perry sidled up to them and waited. Before he could refill his cup, Mrs. Haefle came swooping toward him.

“Have you had any meatballs?”

Palming the cup against his hip, out of sight, he borrowed a concept from her husband. “Still working up an appetite,” he said.

Unilaterally, as if he were a toddler, or a dog, Mrs. Haefle loaded a plate for him. She was stout and rabbity and meddling, a poor advertisement for Swedish heritage. She handed him enough meatballs and Temptation to thwart formation of a buzz, and he had no choice but to take the plate. With a meddling hand, she turned him away from the fuming cauldron. “The other teenagers are in the sunroom,” she said.

As he walked away, he felt her following him, making sure he conformed to her patronizing wishes. Uninterested in teenagers in the sunroom, he weaved through the living room to a bookcase, set his plate on an end table, selected a volume at random, and pretended to absorb himself in it. Mrs. Haefle had been buttonholed, but she was still monitoring him. Her vigilance reminded him of certain teachers at Lifton Central whose lives were evidently devoid of every pleasure but the sadism of denying younger people pleasure.

Finally the doorbell rang. Mrs. Haefle went to answer it, and Perry darted back to the dining room with his cup. Two white-haired ladies were at the cookie station, but he didn’t know them, had no relationship with them, and brazenly filled his cup with steaming gløgg. Hearing Mrs. Haefle’s voice, as she returned from the coat closet, he escaped through the kitchen and from there to the basement stairs, where he sat down. From below came the rattle of dice in the Yahtzee shaker, the brooklike patter of Judson’s voice.

In no time, again, Perry emptied the cup. As with every illicit substance he’d ever sampled, his thirst for gløgg seemed inordinate, abnormal. It occurred to him that standing on the kitchen counter was a bottle of pure vodka. Since the accounting of what constituted “one cup” was already fubar, he went ahead and crept back into the kitchen, poured several ounces of vodka, and quickly downed it. He left the cup in the sink.

Now in possession of a satisfactory buzz, his spirits rising a little, his resolution affronted but arguably unviolated, he went to test his liquor-holding powers on the clergy in the living room. Beside the neglected fire in the fireplace, two men, one tall and one short, stood side by side as if they’d run out of things to say but hadn’t yet moved on to greener conversational pastures. Perry introduced himself.

The taller man was wearing a red turtleneck beneath a camel-hair blazer. “I’m Adam Walsh, from Trinity Lutheran. This is Rabbi Meyer from Temple Beth-El.”

The rabbi, who had hair only behind his ears, shook Perry’s hand. “Happy Hanukkah.”

In case this was a quip, Perry produced a laugh, perhaps overloud. From the corner of his eye, he could see Mrs. Haefle sourly watching him.

“Is your father here?” Reverend Walsh said.

“No, he’s on a pastoral mission in the city. He got stuck in the snow.”

There ensued talk of snow. Perry had not yet developed the fascination with weather that every adult seemed to have. After voicing his meaningless opinion that the snow was already eight inches deep, he broached the subject of goodness and its relation to intelligence. He’d come to the reception for selfless reasons, but he now saw that he might get not only a free buzz but free advice from, as it were, two professionals.

“I suppose what I’m asking,” he said, “is whether goodness can ever truly be its own reward, or whether, consciously or not, it always serves some personal instrumentality.”

Reverend Walsh and the rabbi exchanged glances in which Perry detected pleasant surprise. It gratified him to upset their expectations of a fifteen-year-old.

“Adam may have a different answer,” the rabbi said, “but in the Jewish faith there is really only one measure of righteousness: Do you celebrate God and obey His commandments?”

“That would suggest,” Perry said, “that goodness and God are essentially synonymous.”

“That is the idea,” the rabbi said. “In biblical times, when God manifested Himself more directly, He could seem like quite the hard-ass—striking people blind for trivial offenses, telling Abraham to kill his son. But the essence of Jewish faith is that God does what He does, and we obey Him.”

“So, in other words, it doesn’t matter what a righteous person’s private thoughts are, so long as he obeys the letter of God’s commandments?”

“And worships Him, yes. Of course, at the level of folk wisdom, a man can be righteous without being a mensch. I’m sure you see this, too, Adam—the pious man who makes everyone around him miserable. That might be more what Perry is asking about.”

“My question,” Perry said, “is whether we can ever escape our selfishness. Even if you bring in God, and make Him the measure of goodness, the person who worships and obeys Him still wants something for himself. He enjoys the feeling of being righteous, or he wants eternal life, or what have you. If you’re smart enough to think about it, there’s always some selfish angle.”

The rabbi smiled. “There may be no way around it, when you put it like that. But we ‘bring in God,’ as you say—for the believer, of course, it’s God who brought us in—to establish a moral order in which your question becomes irrelevant. When obedience is the defining principle, we don’t need to police every little private thought we might have.”

“I think there’s more to Perry’s question, though,” Reverend Walsh said. “I think he’s pointing to sinfulness, which is our fundamental condition. In Christian faith, only one man has ever exemplified perfect goodness, and he was the Son of God. The rest of us can only hope for glimmers of what it’s like to be truly good. When we perform an act of charity, or forgive an enemy, we feel the goodness of Christ in our hearts. We all have an innate capacity to recognize true goodness, but we’re also full of sin, and those two parts of us are constantly at war.”

“Exactly,” Perry said. “How do I know if I’m really being good or if I’m just pursuing a sinful advantage?”

“The answer, I would say, is by listening to your heart. Only your heart can tell you what your true motive is—whether it partakes of Christ. I think my position is similar to Rabbi Meyer’s. The reason we need faith—in our case, faith in the Lord Jesus Christ—is that it gives us a rock-solid basis for evaluating our actions. Only through faith in the perfection of our Savior, only by comparing our actions to his example, only by experiencing his living presence in our hearts, can we hope to be forgiven for the more selfish thoughts we might have. Only faith in Christ redeems us. Without him, we’re lost in a sea of second-guessing our motives.”

Perry was enjoying his ability to converse on the level of men three times his age, enjoying how well he’d calibrated his alcohol intake, enjoying the easy but unslurred flow of his words. But now Mrs. Haefle, as if she’d smelled a pleasure in need of immediate stamping out, was approaching them. He repositioned himself, squaring his back to her.

“I understand what you’re saying,” he said to Reverend Walsh. “But what if a person isn’t able to have faith?”

“Not everyone finds faith overnight. Faith is rarely easy. But if you’ve ever done a good thing, and felt a glow in your heart, then that’s a little message from God. He’s telling you that Christ is in you, and that you have the freedom and capacity to pursue a closer relationship with him. ‘Seek, and ye shall find.’”

“It’s approximately the same if you’re a Jew,” the rabbi said, “although we tend to emphasize that you’re a Jew whether you like it or not. It’s more a matter of God tracking you down than of you finding God.”

“I don’t think our positions are so dissimilar in that respect,” Reverend Walsh said stiffly.

Perry tried to ignore the hovering of Mrs. Haefle at his shoulder.

“But so,” he said, “what if I feel the kind of glow you’re talking about, but it doesn’t lead me to God? What if it’s just one of the feelings that any sentient animal might have? If I never find God, or He never finds me, it sounds like you’re saying that, basically, I’m damned.”

“In principle, I suppose that is the doctrine,” Reverend Walsh said. “But you’re very young, and life is long. There’s a near infinity of moments when you might receive God’s grace. All it takes is one moment.”

“In the meantime,” the rabbi said, “I think it’s enough to be a mensch.”

“Perry?” Mrs. Haefle said, pushing her way in. “I want you to come meet Reverend Walsh’s son Ricky. He’s a junior at Lyons Township.”

Her voice was syrupy. Perry’s irritation was more intense than any feeling of goodness he’d yet experienced. “Excuse me?”

“The young people are in the sunroom.”

“I’m aware of that. We’re in the middle of a conversation here. Is that so hard to grasp?”

Evidently, though it hadn’t slurred his speech, gløgg was very disinhibiting.

“I think we’ve touched on the main points,” Reverend Walsh said. “Is anyone else ready for cookies?”

Perry appealed to the rabbi. “Was I boring you? Did my questions seem childish? Should I be consigned to the sunroom?”

“Not at all,” the rabbi said. “These are important questions.”

With a vindicated gesture, Perry turned to Mrs. Haefle. Open animosity had now replaced her phony sweetness. “Gløgg is not for children,” she said.

“What?”

“I said gløgg is not for children.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“I think you do.”

“Well, I think you should mind your own business.” The disinhibitions of gløgg were an unfolding surprise. “Seriously, do you not have anything better to do than follow me around?”

In proportion to the rising of his voice, the living room was quieting.

“What’s going on?” Reverend Haefle said, looming up.

“Nothing at all,” Perry said. “I was in the midst of an interesting conversation with Rabbi Meyer and Reverend Adams when your wife interrupted us.”

Mrs. Haefle whispered something in her husband’s ear. He nodded gravely.

“So, Perry,” he said. “It was good of you to come. But—”

“But what? It’s time for me to leave? I am not the one at social fault here.”

Reverend Haefle placed a gentle hand on Perry’s shoulder. More roughly than necessary, Perry shook it off. He knew he needed to calm down, but the heat in his head was extraordinary.

“This is what I’m talking about,” he said very loudly. “No matter what I do, it’s always me who’s in the wrong. You’re all saved, but apparently I’m damned. Do you think I enjoy being damned?” A sob of self-pity escaped him. “I’m doing the best I can!”

The living room was now completely quiet. Through tears, he saw twenty pairs of clerical and spousal eyes on him. Among them, near the front door, to his shame and dismay, were his mother’s.

 

 

 

Along streets so muffled she could hear the faint collective hiss of snowflakes landing, and then Pirsig Avenue, where cars with snow-blurred headlights proceeded at a funereal crawl, Becky moved as fast as she could in her long blue coat. She felt late for a date that half an hour ago she hadn’t even meant to keep. She had an urgent need to see Tanner again, to give him a chance to redeem himself. Failing that, she needed to make a show of not caring—to plunge into the concert, let Tanner see that other people valued her, and let him wonder where he stood with her.

Outside First Reformed, three Crossroads sophomores were shoveling snow with a zeal that suggested their work was voluntary. Becky was pleased to be able to greet each of them by name; to be developing the same inclusive popularity in Crossroads that she enjoyed at school. She also knew the names of the girls manning the cash box in the function-hall foyer. The concert wouldn’t start for another half hour, but the hall was filling with alumni and other paying guests, the air already smoky. Amp lights glowed in the shadows of the elevated stage. Current Crossroads members, earning “hours” toward Spring Trip, were lugging crates of pop bottles and arranging tables of desserts and festive breads, whose bakers had likewise earned hours.

Becky was uneasily reminded that she had to start earning some hours herself. Forty were required, she currently had zero, and Spring Trip was only three months away. It wasn’t an attractive thought, but she wished that an exception could be made for her.

Crossing the hall to meet her were Kim Perkins and David Goya, who’d recently become an item. Horsey of face, weirdly thin of hair, David was no one Becky would have liked to kiss, but she could imagine him seeming like a safe harbor to Kim. Previous heavy pot smoking had erased all traces of harm in him.

“The lunatics have taken over the asylum,” he said gravely.

“Yeah,” Becky said. “Is there anybody over twenty-one here?”

“Ambrose is hiding in his office. Otherwise, we appear to be unmonitored.”

“Speaking of which,” Kim said, with a pointed clearing of her throat. Kim had lately gained some pounds, as if to reduce the looks differential between herself and David. Her face was barren of cosmetics and she was wearing bib overalls.

“Yes, maybe you can help us,” David said to Becky. “We’re having a little disagreement. Kim seems to feel that the concert is a public event, not a Crossroads activity. I would argue that it’s clearly a Crossroads activity—just look at the posters. I’m guessing you don’t have a dog in this fight, so I wonder which one of us you agree with.”

“Sorry,” Becky said. “What dog? Which fight?”

“Rule Number Two. No drinking or drugs at a Crossroads activity.”

“Oh.”

“I probably shouldn’t have told you that. It could bias your answer.”

“I don’t know if you smelled it, coming in,” Kim said, “but the alumni are all totally lighting up in the parking lot. Like they’d do for any public concert. Which is what this is.”

“It’s a gathering at the church,” David said. “To raise funds for the group. I rest my case.”

“Gosh, guys.” Becky was happy to be trusted as their arbiter. “I guess I’m kind of with David here.”

“Oh, come on,” Kim said. “It’s Friday night.”

“Thursday night,” David corrected.

“I’m just giving you my opinion,” Becky said.

“Okay, but here’s another question. What if we did some partaking earlier, in the afternoon, not on church property, and we’re still the tiniest bit high when we show up here. Is that against the rules?”

“You’re on a slippery slope,” David said.

“Let Becky answer.”

“I guess it depends,” Becky said, “on what the purpose of the rule is.”

“The purpose of the rule,” David said, “is to not have parents pissed off with Crossroads.”

“I disagree,” Kim said. “I think it’s that you can’t have an authentic witnessing relationship if one of the people is high.”

“But then why forbid sex? Rule Number One. This is clearly about the group’s reputation.”

“No, it’s the same as with drugs. Sex messes with the kind of relationship we’re supposed to be developing at meetings. It’s the wrong kind of intensity.”

“Hmm.”

“It could be for both reasons,” Becky said.

“My point,” Kim said, “is that we’re not doing any activities tonight. We’re not trying to relate to each other. We’re just listening to music. If we happen to smoke a little pot on our way here, when we’re not on church property, what difference does it make?”

David gestured to Becky. “Agree? Disagree?”

Becky smiled.

“I personally am beginning to think Kim’s point has merit,” David said.

Still smiling, Becky looked out across the hall. Through a clearing in the crowd, in a cluster of alumni, she glimpsed the back of a suede jacket. She knew it was Tanner’s because the stumpy one, the Natural Woman, had her arm around him, her wild-haired head against his ribs. It was a posture of secure possession. The smile dropped from Becky’s face.

“I think you should do whatever you want,” she said.

“Permission from Hildebrandt!” Kim exulted.

“Reassuringly untainted by self-interest,” David said. “Or so I presume?”

Tanner’s suede-fringed arm was now around the Natural Woman. Becky saw that coming to the concert had been a bad mistake. She liked Kim and David well enough, but they weren’t core friends of hers. Nobody in Crossroads was. The best she could hope to demonstrate to Tanner was a skin-deep popularity. Fearing a return of tears, she wondered if she should turn around and leave. But Kim and David were looking at her expectantly.

“What?” she said.

“Just wondering,” David said casually, “if you’d care to join us.”

It occurred to her that they were worried about Rule Number Three: Any failure to report a rules violation was itself a rules violation.

“Are you saying you don’t trust me?”

“Not an issue,” Kim said. “You said it yourself—we’re not doing anything wrong.”

“Just extending a friendly offer,” David agreed.

Long ago, Clem had scared Becky off marijuana, telling her that the human brain was an instrument too delicate to mess with chemically, and she’d never been much tempted. But now, although she could see other friendly faces in the function hall, she felt she had only two choices—either leave and go home, or go along with her new friends. Wasn’t safety the enemy? Hadn’t she joined Crossroads to become less fearful? To take new risks? It could hardly be worse than standing and watching Tanner be clutched by Laura Dobrinsky. At least her friends were offering to include her.

“No, sure,” she said to David. “I mean, yes, thank you. I’d like to.”

Her assent was a bigger deal to her than to David. He simply turned to follow Kim, who was already moving toward the fire exit by the stage. Reacting to some invisible signal, two other senior girls, Darra Jernigan and Carol Pinella, peeled away from the crowd and joined her. By the time Becky and David caught up with them, her brain was already feeling altered, by the rush of blood in it.

Beyond the exit door, off a hallway leading to the church’s attic stairs, was a second door, dangerously difficult (from a fire-hazard perspective) to push open against the snow. Outside was a narrow alley, lit only by Chicagoland sky, against a retaining wall that marked the boundary of church property. In a nod to the rules, everyone climbed up onto the snow-covered grass above the wall. Becky stuck close to David, feeling safest with him; he was one of Perry’s best friends.

“For the record,” Kim said to the others, “Hildebrandt gave her okay for this.”

Becky chuckled in a voice she didn’t recognize. “Put it all on me, why don’t you.”

“I think her presence here speaks for itself,” David said. From a neat metal case, he produced a doobie smaller than the ones Becky had seen at parties, and Kim reached over to light it with a Bic. The smell of pot smoke was autumnal. Holding it in, David offered the doobie first to Becky.

“Sorry,” she said, taking it. “How do I do this?”

“Long, slow breath and keep it in,” Kim said kindly.

Becky took a puff, coughed, and tried a deeper breath. It was as if she’d swallowed a burning sword. Smoke was deadly—people died from inhaling it—she wondered if this thought was the first sign of being high or just an ordinary thought, and then if wondering this was itself a sign of being high—but she managed, with watering eyes, to hold it longer than David had held his. After Kim and Darra and Carol had taken their turns, the doobie came back to David, who offered it again to Becky.

“Um,” she said. Her throat was full of scorch. “Is it okay?”

“There’s more where this came from.”

She nodded and filled her lungs again. She was smoking marijuana! Either the drug itself or the excitement of smoking it was flooding the same nerves that kissing Tanner had lit up the night before. Suddenly her life was changing fast. She was being initiated into sensations she’d barely been aware were possible.

When David grabbed her arm, she understood that she was fainting from too conscientiously holding her breath. She let out smoke and took in winter air. What had been a dark alley seemed almost daylit in the whiteness of the sky and snow, as if the darkness had only been her starting to pass out. The taste in her mouth was Octobery. The heat surging in her face and behind her eyes was like molten fudge. She felt walled off by the heavy hot sensation, not at all connected to the other miscreants, who were expertly snapping drags off the dwindling doobie. Which now came back.

Again a foreign-sounding chuckle, hers.

“Okay,” she said. “Why not.”

Her third hit hurt her throat less, not more, than the first two. This had to mean that she was getting high. The molten-fudge sensation seemed to be receding, boiling off through the top of her head, fizzing away through her skin. For a moment, she felt entirely poised, entirely present in a winter wonderland, safe with friends. She wondered what would happen next.

From inside the fire door, right below her, came a shout and a thud. The door swung open and stuck in the snow; and there stood Sally Perkins.

“Aha!” she cried.

A hairy mass in the dimness behind her resolved into the shape of Laura Dobrinsky. Becky violently coughed.

“Jesus Christ, Kim,” Sally said, clambering up onto the retaining wall. “What ever happened to sisters sharing?” She extended a hand to Laura and yanked her up.

“I didn’t see you,” Kim said.

“Ho-ho-ho, right.”

Becky was definitely high. She seemed to be standing next to herself, wondering where to place herself. She took a step backward, away from Laura. Her foot came down in a hole of some sort, which sent her falling back into a snow-laden shrub. The shrub embraced her and held her unsteadily upright.

David had taken out his little case again. “You and Sally have such keen noses,” he observed to Laura, “you could be of service to law enforcement.”

“Not true,” Laura said. “I can only smell the high-grade stuff.”

“Well, isn’t this your lucky day.”

He lit up a second joint and handed it to her.

“Jesus,” Sally said. “Is that Becky Hildebrandt?”

“The very one,” David said.

“My, how the mighty have fallen.”

Laura exhaled smoke, turned toward Becky, and pierced her with a terrifying look.

“Becky’s like her father,” she said. “She doesn’t know when she’s not wanted.”

Becky extricated herself from the shrub and brushed snow off her coat. It seemed important to keep on brushing, down to the last flake, to make herself presentable. Then she found that she’d lost interest in it.

“Hey, Sally,” she said. “Hey, Laura.”

Laura tossed her head and turned away. Now no one was actually looking at Becky, but it seemed as if the entire world were examining her. It seemed as if she’d said the wrong thing and had been somewhere else, not present, in the moments since she’d said it. There was no telling where she’d been or what she’d done there. She only knew that she’d broken the law, poisoned her brain, destroyed her mystique. She wanted to run away and be alone, but if she ran away the others would know she was having a less cool experience than they were, which would be even worse than staying. She needed to be cool, but there wasn’t a particle of coolness in her. She didn’t like being high. In fact, getting high was the most horrible thing she’d ever done to herself. She wished she could undo it, but she could feel that, if anything, she was getting higher. In her mind’s eye, her thoughts were laid out like snacks on a lazy Susan. They weren’t evaporating the way thoughts were supposed to. They just sat there, going round and round, available for second helpings. Why had she had to take a third puff on the doobie? Why even the first? Some evil thing in her, whose presence it now seemed she’d always sensed in herself but done her best to ignore, some vain and greedy and sexual thing rooted in a deeper self-loathing, had seized control of her and made the worst decisions.

But then, unaccountably, came another moment of clarity, another brightening. She saw herself as one of seven young people standing just over the property line of First Reformed. Carol Pinella and Darra Jernigan and Kim Perkins were giggling uncontrollably. David Goya and Laura Dobrinsky were discussing different grades of pot. Sally Perkins, indisputably the prettiest girl in her graduating class, three years ahead of Becky, was staring at Becky with narrowed eyes.

“It was you,” Sally said.

“What?”

“Last night, in Tanner’s van. That was you. Wasn’t it.”

Becky tried to answer, but all she produced was a fatuously guilty grin. It seemed to spread through her entire body. Kim and Carol and Darra were still engaged in their gigglefest, but Tanner’s name had attracted Laura’s attention.

“I saw Tanner last night at the Grove,” Sally explained. “There was somebody in his van with a blanket over her head. She looked totally busted. And you know who it was?”

“The Grove is Becky’s workplace,” David affably remarked.

“It was you,” Sally said.

“I don’t think so,” Becky croaked, aflame with guilt.

“No, I’m sure of it. You were sitting there trying to hide from me.”

There followed a wordless moment. The giggling had stopped.

“You think I’m surprised?” Laura said, her voice flat.

Becky’s gaze had become glued to the stone flank of the church. Everything she was hearing, including I don’t think so, was staying in her head, but in a jumble. She tried to latch on to the words and arrange them in a sequence, but they just spiraled around a central pit of horribleness.

“Hey, you,” Laura said. “Prom Queen. I asked you a question. Do you think I’m surprised?”

The sound of landing snowflakes was oceanic. Every eye was on Becky, even the eyes in the house behind the shrub, the eyes in the trees above it, the eyes in the sky. Anything she could say would be catastrophically revealing.

“What a fucking family,” Laura muttered, jumping down from the ledge.

“Hey, now,” David said. “That’s not cool.”

Some interval of time later, there were still six of them in the snow. Becky found herself consumed by a feeling of intolerable exposure and impending punishment, but each direction she considered turning was the wrong one. Her mind was damaged, she’d messed with its chemistry, and, oh, how she regretted it. She bent forward as if to vomit but instead put her hands on the edge of the ledge and awkwardly, sort of sideways, whoopsie, rolled off it and righted herself. She hurried through the fire door, which Laura Dobrinsky had left wide open.

To her right lurked a hall full of eyes, so she ran up the stairs to the church attic. For a while, in the dark, after the door had fallen shut behind her, she groped along a wall for a light switch, but then she forgot about doing this, only to remember and be struck by having forgotten—it’s because I am horribly stoned. She groped forward sideways, whimpering, an arm stretched out ahead of her. She collided with something sharp and metallic, a music stand, but nothing crashed. In the distance was a glimmer of bluish light. She tried to navigate by it but lost sight of it and questioned its reality. The next thing she encountered was cool and edgeless, extensive, hollow-sounding. It ended in a curving tapered tube. Apparently a hollow horned cow. It proved to be quite an impediment to her progress. An incalculably huge amount of time had passed since she entered the attic, and she had the sudden, clear insight that time couldn’t be measured without light. This seemed to her a crucial realization. She made a mental note to remember it, although she’d already lost her grip on what it meant. If she could just remember the words time can’t be measured without light, she might recapture their meaning later. But into her mind’s eye came an image of quicksand, a hideously vivid image of sand crumbling and sucking itself downward, the instability and insolidity of thinking. Terrified again, she shoved past the hollow cow and thought she was free until it caught her from behind, one of its horns snagging on the pocket of her beautiful merino coat and audibly ripping a seam. Fuck oh fuck oh fuck. She stumbled over a smaller hollow animal, got a lungful of dust, and dropped to her hands and knees. The bluish glimmer had reappeared. It was coming from beneath a door, and she crawled toward it.

Beyond the door, lighted by a round stained-glass window, was a staircase narrowed by stacks of hymnals. She followed it down to a wood-paneled space behind the sanctuary altar. As she pushed open the “secret” door behind the pulpit, she experienced another insight: the sanctuary was a sanctuary. A single warm light illuminated the hanging brass cross, and all the other doors were locked—she knew this.

With a shudder of deliverance, she traversed the altar and sat down in the first row of pews. Safe for the moment, she shut her eyes and surrendered to the waves of awfulness welling up in the blackness of her head. Between each of them was a space for regretting what she’d done and wishing it could be undone. But the waves kept coming. They wore her down until her only recourse was crying.

Please make it stop, please make it stop …

She was praying, but nobody was listening. After the next wave of stonedness, she addressed her plea more specifically.

Please, God. Please make it stop.

There was no answer. When she returned to herself again, she thought she saw the reason why.

I’m sorry, she prayed. God? Please? I’m sorry I did what I did. It was an evil thing and I shouldn’t have done it. If you make it stop, I promise I’ll never do it again. Please, God. Can you help me?

Still no answer.

God? I love you. I love you. Please have mercy on me.

When the next evil wave welled up in her head, she peered down and saw, beneath it, not a bottomless blackness but a kind of golden light. The wave was transparent, the evil insubstantial. The golden light was the real, substantial thing. The more deeply she peered into it, the brighter it got. She saw that she’d been looking outside herself for God, not understanding that God was in her. God was pure goodness, and the goodness had been there all along. She’d glimpsed it in the early morning, in her feeling of goodwill, and then more intensely in Perry’s kindness to her, the glow of forgiveness she’d felt. Goodness was the best thing in the universe, and she was capable of moving toward it—and yet how utterly awful she’d been! Mean to her mother, uncharitable to Perry, competitive with Laura, greedy with her inheritance, sneering with Clem at other people’s faith, conceited, selfish, God-denying, awful. With a sob more like a paroxysm, an ecstasy, she opened her eyes to the cross above the altar.

Christ had died for her sins.

And could she do it? Could she cast aside the evil in her, cast aside her vanity and her fear of other people’s opinions, and humble herself before the Lord? This had always seemed impossible to her, an onerous expectation with no upside. Only now did she understand that it could bring her deeper into the golden light.

She ran up to the cross, dropped to her knees on the altar carpeting, closed her eyes again, and put her hands together prayerfully.

Please, God. Please, Jesus. I’ve been a bad person. I’ve always thought so highly of myself, I’ve wanted popularity, and money, and social standing, and I’ve had so many cruel thoughts about other people. All my life, I’ve been selfish and inconsiderate. I’ve been the most disgusting sinner, and I am so, so sorry. Can you forgive me? If I promise to be a better and more humble person? If I promise to serve you cheerfully? I’ll take the worst kind of jobs to earn hours. I’ll be more loving to my enemies and more open with my family, I’ll share everything I have, I’ll live a clean life and not care what other people think of me, if only you’ll forgive me …

She hoped for a clear answer, Jesus speaking to her in her heart, but there was nothing; the golden light had faded. But she also felt delivered from her stonedness, at peace again. She’d glimpsed the light of God, if only for a moment, and her prayers had been answered.

 

 

 

The public library was a tall-windowed brick building, built in the twenties and seated on a lawn enclosed by dog-proof hedges. It stayed open until nine on weeknights, but it was desolate at the dinner hour, a single librarian holding down the circulation desk amid the silence of books waiting to be wanted.

Into it, through its little-used front door—most patrons arrived by car and parked in the rear—walked a disturbed person stinking of wet gabardine and cigarettes. Her face was shiny, her hair matted with melting snow. She shook herself and stamped her feet on an industrial rug that had been rolled out for the storm. From numberless hours of waiting for her kids to choose their books, she knew exactly where to go. In the reference room, behind the circulation desk, was a cabinet that housed the White Pages of major American cities and minor Illinoisan ones. Tax dollars at work, the phonebooks were all more or less current.

She crouched down in front of them, pulled out the thickest of them, and opened it on the floor. After the Gordons and Gowans, before the many Greens, was a short column of Grants. She was prepared to be disappointed, called back to reason, but her state of mind was so intense that the world seemed likely to fall in line with it. Sure enough, beside a drop of snowmelt that had hit the page and puckered it, was one of the most erotic things she’d ever laid eyes on.

Grant B. 2607 Via Rivera.….….……962–3504

She produced a kind of humming sigh, like the first note of a cello that had sat for decades in an attic. How much a phonebook entry could suggest! The hours and days and years of being B. Grant, alive in a specific house on a specific street, reachable by anyone who knew his dear number. She couldn’t be sure it was Bradley, but there was no reason it couldn’t be. All the weekly visits to the library, all the idle browsing of its shelves, and she’d never once thought to look for him. A key to her heart had been hidden in plain sight.

She took a pencil and a card from a wooden tray, copied the address and the number, and put the card in her coat pocket with her cigarettes. In her rush to escape the dental office, after three-plus hours with Sophie Serafimides, she’d neglected to hand over her twenty-dollar bill. The money, ill-gotten in any case, had come in handy when she passed the town drugstore and recalled a more effective means of losing weight and managing anxiety. She’d procured the means, and now she had a motive, too. In her mind, she’d already lost thirty pounds and was writing a chatty, warm letter to Bradley, letting him know that she was very well, telling him something specific and vivid about each of her four children, tacitly assuring him that she’d made the fullest of recoveries, had built an ordinary good life for herself, was no longer a person he had to be afraid of hearing from. And you? Do you still write poetry? How is Isabelle? How are your boys? They must have families of their own now …

Outside the library’s rear entrance, on a patch of snow made mangy by unevenly scattered salt, she lit another cigarette. It turned out that she’d been wanting one for thirty years. Making her confession to Sophie had rolled the stone from a tomb of emotion, inside which, miraculously intact, she’d found her obsession with Bradley Grant. Describing it to Sophie in proper detail, reliving the sins she’d committed in its grip, had brought her back into contact with its contours, and she’d remembered how perfectly they fit the shape of who she was. If anything, her desire for Bradley felt stronger for the thirty-year rest she’d given it, stronger than any over-flogged sentiment she had for Russ. Bradley had excited her at levels deeper than Russ ever could or ever would, because only with Bradley had she been her entire, crazy, sinning self. Standing in the snow behind the library, inhaling smoke on a cold Midwestern night, she was carried back to rainy Los Angeles. She was a mother of four with a twenty-year-old’s heart.

As she’d recounted to Sophie the events leading up to her destruction of the unborn life in her, the filthy bargain she’d struck with Isabelle Washburn’s former landlord, she’d had a growing sense of dumpling–patient disconnect. She might have imagined her story emerging with much guilty gasping, much reaching for Kleenexes, but confessing her worst sins to a psychiatrist was nothing like her Catholic confessions. There was no terror of God’s judgment on her puny self, no pity for her sweet Lord’s suffering on the cross for what she’d done. With Sophie, a female layperson, a maternal Greek American, she felt more like very naughty. The mental switch she’d flipped as a teenager was still there to be flipped Off. She told her story crisply, her spirits rising with the resurrection of the reckless girl who’d loved Bradley. Sophie’s expression, meanwhile, grew ever sadder, to the point of amusing her. The satisfaction of showing the dumpling how bad she really was recalled the pleasure of taunting her guardian uncle, Roy Collins, with her misbehavior. By the end, as she related how a Los Angeles police officer had been obliged to tackle a raving girl in pouring rain, she went so far as to snicker at the memory.

Perhaps it was the snicker that brought out the dumpling’s frown.

“I’m very sorry for what you went through,” Sophie said. “It explains so much, and it makes me even more impressed with your resilience. But there’s still something I’m not understanding.”

“We both know what that means, don’t we.”

“What does it mean?”

Marion caricatured the therapeutic frown. “You disapprove.”

“By your own account,” Sophie said, unamused, “you were seduced by a married man when you were very young. Then you married a man you weren’t allowed to be yourself with. And now you tell me that you were atrociously abused by a sexual predator. Doesn’t it seem—”

“I knew what I was doing,” Marion said proudly. “In every case. I knew it was wrong, and I did it anyway.”

“I’m sorry—what did you do to Russ?”

“I lied to him. And now he’s lying to me. So what?”

“You offered him your life and he took it. Now he’s tired of it and wants something new.”

“I admit I’m not very happy with Russ at the moment. But you’re way out of line if you’re comparing him to that landlord. Russ is like a little boy.”

“I’m not comparing them. That landlord—”

“And you’re even more out of line if you’re comparing Bradley. Bradley was honorable—he wanted the same thing I did. We fell in love, and he never lied to me. It wasn’t his fault I went crazy.”

“Really?”

“Yes, really. I hated him when I was falling apart, but as soon as I was sane again I wasn’t angry at him. I was only sorry for what I’d put him through.”

“You felt guilty.”

“Definitely.”

“Why is it that, every time a man injures you, you respond by feeling guilty?”

Marion, flying, was impatient with Sophie’s slowness. “Didn’t I just explain this to you? I’m not a good person. I wanted to kill my baby, and I did it the only way I could. I didn’t even hate that landlord, I was just insanely afraid of him. I mean, yes, he was evil. But I was seeing my own evil nature reflected in him. That’s what made him so frightening.”

Sophie briefly shut her eyes. Evidently the impatience was mutual.

“Try to see what I’m seeing,” she said. “Try to picture a sweet, vulnerable girl not much older than your daughter is now. Think about how frightened and helpless she is. And then imagine a man whose first thought, when he sees a girl like that, is to take out his penis and abuse her. That’s the person you think that girl resembles?”

“Well, I don’t have a penis, so.”

“But your first thought would be to exploit someone vulnerable?”

“You’re forgetting what I did to Bradley’s wife. I went to her house and deliberately hurt her. She was vulnerable, wasn’t she?”

“My understanding is that Bradley was the person you were actually angry with.”

“Only because I was out of my mind.”

“Anger strikes me as quite a reasonable response to how he’d treated you.”

Marion shook her head. No sooner had she refound a treasure than the dumpling was trying to take it away from her.

“You’ve told me a horrific story,” Sophie said. “In your own words, you met Satan himself. I wouldn’t expect a self-described believer to be so forgiving of Satan.”

“That’s because you’re not a believer. I might as well be angry at the rain for falling on me. I knew perfectly well who he was. I let him into me anyway, and I got the punishment I deserved.”

“You blame yourself, not him.”

“What’s wrong with that? There’s a reason why anger is a deadly sin. I was full of anger when I was young—I felt like murdering people. If I hadn’t been so angry, I might have made better decisions. I know you think it’s sick to blame myself, but spiritually I think it’s healthier.”

“Maybe,” Sophie said. “As long as you’re happy with where it’s gotten you.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning anxious and depressed. Unable to sleep. Hating your body. I have a hard time believing that any religion would condemn an emotion as natural as anger. Think about the civil rights movement. Do you think Dr. King wasn’t angry when his people were murdered by Klansmen? He may have preached nonviolence, but sometimes, when a problem is intractable, only anger can change things.”

“I would never compare my situation to a Black person’s in Alabama. That’s really almost offensive.”

Sophie smiled pleasantly. “I didn’t mean to be offensive.”

“I was lucky to find someone to marry me at all, after what I’d been through. And even then I married him under false pretenses. I can hardly go complaining that I’m oppressed by him now. Even the business with his widow friend—I didn’t blame Bradley for losing interest in his wife. Why should I blame Russ for losing interest in me? I’m a lot older and fatter than Bradley’s wife was.”

“Anger is an emotion,” Sophie said. “It doesn’t have to be logical. Right now, for example, I’m feeling very angry at your abuser. I’m also a little bit angry with you.”

“What for?”

“Listen to your assumptions. You were lucky to find someone to marry you? Why? What was so wrong with you? You were sexually experienced? You’d had a nervous breakdown? Would that have been a problem if you were male? Would you have been lucky to find a wife? And why was it so important to be married in the first place? Because a woman isn’t really a woman if she can’t find a husband and procreate? Because she—”

Sophie stopped herself and shook her head, as if she’d said too much. And Marion indeed was disappointed in her. The dumpling was so soft and slippery in her manner that her underlying conceptual program, whether Freudian or medical or political or what, had been hard to pinpoint. Now the program stood revealed. Marion guessed that it applied to every one of the neglected or discarded wives who came here—One Size Fits All. Was she supposed to be delighted that it fit her, too?

“You must get tired of it,” she said, not kindly. “All the ladies coming to you and complaining about their men. Week after week, men men men. It must be frustrating for you—that we can’t talk about something else. That we can’t see how oppressed we are.”

Sophie, who’d regained her composure, smiled pleasantly. “It’s interesting that you assume my other female patients only talk about men.”

“Are you telling me they don’t?”

“It doesn’t matter if they do or don’t. What matters is how you imagine them. Do you think I think you talk too much about men?”

“I think you do,” Marion said. “You keep telling me I need to develop more of an independent life. I think what you’re really saying is ‘Enough about men already—go liberate yourself.’”

“You don’t care for the idea of women’s liberation.”

“If that’s your program, I don’t object to it. If it works for your other patients, more power to them.”

“But it’s not for you.”

“That landlord was a sicko. I never saw my friend again, I never saw Isabelle, but I’ll bet you he’d found a way to have sex with her. She got behind with her rent, or she needed a professional favor, and he used his power to take advantage of her. He was fat and repulsive, and he only ran that house as a way to have sex with lots of girls. I was one of them, and what he did to me was sick. Even the part that was normal sex wasn’t normal. It was all happening in his head—I was just a thing.”

“Exactly.”

“But let’s say he went to a psychiatrist: Sir, you’re making me a little bit angry. Isn’t it time you developed a more independent life? All you ever talk about is girls!”

Sophie drew a slow breath and slowly let it out. “A good psychiatrist might have helped him identify the trauma he felt compelled to reenact.”

“Ah, there we go. What am I reenacting?”

“What’s your guess?”

“I don’t know. Guilt about my father’s suicide. Is that the idea?”

“If that’s what you say.”

“I’ve stopped feeling guilty about Russ. I certainly don’t feel guilty about the landlord. I was guilty, but that’s different from a feeling. That’s an objective fact. The people I feel guilty about are Perry and the child of Bradley’s I killed without telling him. They were innocent, and I’m responsible for them.”

The dumpling looked down at her pudgy hands. Darkness had fallen outside the window. Elsewhere in the dental office, late units of pain were being manufactured with a drill.

“Your mother,” Sophie said. “You said she was skiing with her friends when you needed help with your pregnancy. Did you feel angry about that?”

“My mother was a self-centered alcoholic nightmare.”

“I’ll take that as a yes. You’ve also told me about your anger at your sister. But it was your father who bankrupted your family—”

“Shirley and my mother made him do it.”

“He committed fraud and lied to you. Then your car salesman takes advantage of you, despite knowing how sensitive you are. A sexual deviant does unspeakable things to you. You support your husband for twenty-five years, and now he’s chasing someone else. And yet the only people you seem to be angry with are your mother and your sister. Do you see what I’m not understanding?”

“I guess I’m not a women’s libber.”

“I’m not asking you to be one. I’m asking you to try to see yourself.”

“The person I see isn’t good.”

“Marion, listen to me.” The dumpling leaned forward. “Do you want to know a thing I really am getting tired of hearing? That particular refrain of yours.”

“But it’s true.”

“Really? You’ve raised four great kids. You’ve given your husband as much as any man could deserve. You did everything you could for your father. You even took care of your sister when she was dying.”

“That wasn’t me, though. It was me playing a role. The real me…” She shook her head.

“Tell me about the real you,” Sophie said. “Besides being a ‘bad’ person, how would you describe her? What is she like?”

“She’s thin,” Marion said emphatically.

“She’s thin.”

“She feels everything intensely. She’s a sinner, and she’s honest with God about that. She hopes He understands that sinning is inseparable from feeling alive, but she doesn’t care if He forgives her, because she’s not really capable of regret. She’s probably an actress—she wants attention. She’s fairly crazy, but not in a way that hurts anyone. She was never suicidal.”

The dumpling seemed unimpressed.

“Your sister was an actress,” she remarked. “You’ve also described her as nutty and thin.”

“Oh, thanks for that.”

Sophie gestured suggestively, not retracting her remark.

“Shirley was spoiled and bitter,” Marion said. “She wasn’t a real actress.”

“Okay.”

“The person I’m describing is the opposite of bitter.”

“Okay. Let’s say that’s the real you. What do you think is stopping you from being that person?”

“Isn’t it obvious? I’m fifty years old. Being divorced would be a disaster. Even if I found a way to make it work, I’d still be responsible for my kids, especially Perry. There’s no escaping the consequences of the life I’ve made.”

“Not to nitpick,” Sophie said, smiling pleasantly, “but if the real you is incapable of regret, why does she care about the consequences?”

“You asked me for my fantasy.”

“No, I asked you for the opposite. It’s interesting that you interpreted me to mean a fantasy.”

The dumpling’s endurance was extraordinary. Marion could talk to her forever, going around and around, and never get anywhere. It was nothing but a waste of money.

“I wonder if it has to be an either-or,” Sophie said. “Maybe there’s a way to feel truer to yourself and still be a good mother. What if you started with the local theater? Tried getting involved and seeing where it leads.”

This was the kind of suggestion—moderate, sensible, incremental—that Marion might have made to one of her kids, but waddling around on a stage with other middle-aged suburbanites held no appeal. She needed to be the intense, skinny woman smoking a cigarette at the back of the theater, watching the actors fail and finally losing her patience, striding up to the stage to show them how to do a scene. A fantasy? Maybe, but maybe not. Once upon a time, on a Murphy bed in Los Angeles, her acting had mesmerized Bradley Grant.

“What are you thinking?” Sophie asked.

“I’m thinking I’m going to let you go home.”

“Yes, in a few minutes. I feel we’re—”

“No.” Marion stood up. “Russ and I have to go to the open house for clergy. Doesn’t that sound fun?”

She went to the door and took her gabardine coat off its hook.

“I guarantee you,” she said, “it won’t be fun for Russ unless one of the wives is good-looking. Otherwise it’s just another occasion for his insecurity, and I’m no help with that. I’m the fat little humiliation he’s married to. His only consolation is how good I am at playing nice, remembering the name of every wife, making sure they all get greeted by a Hildebrandt. Later on, he’ll tell me how bad it felt to be the oldest junior minister at the party, how frustrated he is, and I’ll tell him he deserves his own church. I’ll tell him how much better his sermons are than Dwight’s, how much harder he works than Dwight, how much I admire him. That’s another role I’m insanely good at. Except then, if the party was hard enough for him, he’ll complain that his sermons are only good because I write them for him. Ha!”

Batting her eyelashes, exaggerating her role, she turned back to Sophie.

“Oh that’s not true at all, honey. The ideas are all yours, I just do a little tidying up to help you express your ideas more clearly. I couldn’t do anything without you. I’m just an empty vessel who knows how to write a clean English sentence—Ha!”

Her audience of one was watching her with somber compassion.

“You wanted mad?” Marion said to her. “I can do mad.”

She meant mad as in angry, but the way she exited the office, jerking open the door and closing it too hard, was mad in both senses. She was mad at herself for using the word fantasy, mad at Sophie for pouncing on the slip. The self she’d unearthed was only a fantasy? They’d see about that. The important thing, she told herself, as she sailed past the Greek receptionist and out into the weather, was to not eat one more goddamned cookie, ever again. To properly starve herself; to see food as the enemy it was; to glow white-hot with the burning of her fat, false self. If it was mad to be obsessed with her weight, then let her be mad. Her fat-loss program in the fall had been a feeble thing, born of a dumpling-sanctioned hope of rekindling Russ’s interest in her, of avoiding a split from which she stood to lose far more than he did. Her heart hadn’t been in it, and now she knew why: she’d never gotten over Bradley. The man in whom she’d invested herself had been a second choice—as insecure as Bradley was confident, as clumsy at writing and tentative at sex as Bradley was magnificent. Maybe, at the time, in Arizona, she’d needed a man she could manage and be more brilliant than, but the marriage had long since dwindled to a mere arrangement: in return for her services, Russ didn’t throw her to the wolves. She still had Christian compassion for him, but when she thought about his penis, vis-à-vis Frances Cottrell and the other pretty women of New Prospect, it wasn’t quite true that there was no comparing him to her long-ago abuser. That much the dumpling had been right about.

The old corner drugstore had been Rockwellian when the Hildebrandts moved to town, but the owner had since remodeled it with ugly laminates, covered the wooden floor with linoleum, and installed fluorescent lighting. In the same improving spirit, the Christmas tree inside the door was artificial, its needles silver, not even fake green. Behind the front counter, doing the Sun-Times crossword with a pencil, was a large-eared man in his late twenties, too old to be working as a clerk if it wasn’t a career path he’d somehow, heartbreakingly, chosen. Marion stepped up to the counter and surveyed the candy-bar display with militant loathing.

“I need cigarettes,” she said.

“What kind?”

“Strangely,” she said, “the only brand that comes to mind is Benson & Hedges. It’s because of that TV commercial, the one with the elevator door.”

“‘They take some getting used to.’”

“Are Benson & Hedges any good?”

“I’m not a smoker.”

“What’s a popular brand these days?”

“Marlboro, Winston. Lucky Strike.”

“Lucky Strike! Of course! I used to smoke them. One of those, please.”

“Filter, no filter?”

“Good Lord. I have no idea. How about one of each?”

Handing over her money, she was tempted to explain that she hadn’t had a cigarette in thirty years; that she’d quit smoking after being released from a locked ward and moving in with her uncle Jimmy in Arizona; that cigarette smoke had aggravated Jimmy’s asthma and tasted wrong to her at high altitude; that she’d filled the hole of her missing habit with rosary beads and daily visits to the Church of the Nativity, a walk of two thousand four hundred and forty-two steps (habitually counted) from Jimmy’s front door; that she’d discovered Nativity when, eager to be helpful, she’d accompanied Rosalia, the mother of Jimmy’s man, Antonio, to a Sunday mass, because the men were late sleepers and Rosalia kept forgetting where she was going; that Marion, whose state of mind was like the high country in spring weather, strong sunlight snuffed by clouds and breaking out again, over and over, all day long the alternation, brightsummerwarm, darkwinterchilly, had thrown her soul open to every single thing she encountered, because none of these things was a locked ward, and that the presence and majesty of God, revealed in a womblike little Catholic church where her uncle’s lover’s senile mother received Communion, had happened to be one of them; that God had become a better friend to her than cigarettes. It saddened her to think that the big-eared young man had no larger ambition than working in retail, and she would have liked to enlarge his evening by sharing some of the high-country vividness with which, all of a sudden, she was recalling her life pre-Russ. But the clerk had already picked up his crossword again.

Heedless of the slush in her shoes, she ran across the street and took shelter beneath the awning of a travel agency. She wasted two matches before she got a filterless Lucky lit. Her first drag was reminiscent of losing her virginity—painful and awful and excellent. She knew very well that cigarettes had killed her sister. She also knew, from reports in the paper, that the risk of cancer was proportional to total lifetime exposure. Shirley had erred in not taking a thirty-year break from her exposure. Marion didn’t intend to smoke forever, just long enough to regain the figure of the girl who’d given her virginity to Bradley Grant.

A measure of her disturbance was that, although she felt light-headed, the Lucky didn’t make her sick. It made her want another one. She walked only two blocks, jumping at the sound of every passing car, jangled and buffeted by the snowy mayhem of it all, before she sat down on a bench outside the town hall and lit up again. Had cigarettes always been so delicious? She gladly noted her lack of hunger. The thought of Doris Haefle’s Swedish meatballs—how many of which Marion had eaten, exactly a year earlier, she’d enjoined herself to keep count of, before losing count—turned her stomach. Snowmelt was seeping through her coat beneath her butt. The boughs of the town hall’s ornamental hemlocks sagged under heavy loads of white. She was smoking the second Lucky faster than the first one; an elation long lost to her was building in her chest. To do something with it, she spoke aloud a word she didn’t think she’d used since the morning the police picked her up in Los Angeles. She said, “Fuck!”

Oh, it felt good.

“Fuck Doris Haefle. Fuck her meatballs.”

A hatted commuter, briefcase in hand, head lowered against the driving snow, paused on the sidewalk to look at her. She raised the hand with the Lucky in it and waved to him.

“Everything okay?” the man said.

“Never better, thank you.”

He continued down the sidewalk. Something about his gait, the determined slant of his body, reminded her of Bradley. Bringing her Lucky to her lips, she saw that its coal was about to burn her fingers. She frantically shook it into the snow.

Bradley would be sixty-five now. Old, but not so very old, not in a preservative clime like Southern California’s. Did he still think about her? Or had he, like her, entombed his memories and tried to make himself a different person? It would be terrible if he’d forgotten her. But even worse if he remembered her only as the girl who’d behaved unforgivably: if their months of bliss had all been blotted out by the day she’d gone to his house and spoken to his wife. Why had she had to do that? Why had she had to hurt an innocent third party? Everything might be perfect if she hadn’t.

The matches were damp now—she scorched a fingertip lighting one. To make an informed guess about which version of her had stayed with Bradley, whether the good might outweigh the very bad, she tried to summon her memories of his passion for her. The memories wouldn’t sit still, one bled into another, but she had the impression of a great many instances of passion. Even when she’d lost her mind and frightened him, he’d had to struggle to keep away from her. Later, yes, surely, he’d hated her for going to his wife. But so what? She’d hated him, too, for rejecting her. The hatred had quickly faded. What remained in her memory was the thrilling rightness of being with him. Maybe, with the passage of time, he’d come to feel the same way?

She imagined abandoning Russ before he could get around to abandoning her. Wouldn’t that be a surprise. The fantasy of losing thirty pounds and ditching Russ was so satisfying that she might have been content to keep indulging in it, sitting on her bench, if it hadn’t occurred to her that the library had a collection of phonebooks …

In the mangy snow behind the library, she flicked the end of her fourth cigarette into the parking lot. The facts of the world had submitted to her state of mind. She now had good reason to hope that Bradley was alive in Los Angeles; she had an address and a phone number. Electrified by nicotine, she wondered what to do next with her disturbance. Low on the list of options was smelling the meatballs of Dwight Haefle’s nasty wife. For a moment, she worried that Becky might be waiting at home to go to the open house; that her sense of duty had prevailed over her need to be with Tanner Evans. But this seemed unlikely, and Becky, if it came to that, could go by herself to the open house with Russ, who’d be happier with that arrangement anyway. He was proud of Becky’s beauty and preferred parading it in public, every Sunday afternoon, to being seen with his wife.

“Fuck you, Russ.”

Remembering how it felt to want to murder someone, she thought she might yet become a women’s libber. But she was done with the psychiatric dumpling. No imaginable breakthrough could leave her more broken through than she was now. She felt like going home and emptying her hosiery drawer of its remaining cash, to forestall any temptation to crawl back to Sophie, and spending it on an extravagant present for Perry, but the stores were all closing.

She saw what she had to do next. She had to confess to Perry, too. Confiding in Sophie had only been practice, a warm-up. Someone in her family needed to know what she’d done, and it sure as fucking hell wasn’t Russ. Perry was the person most like her, the person in danger of disturbance like her own, the person she had to warn. Wherever her disturbance might lead her, whether back into Bradley’s arms or merely to a divorcée’s career in local theater, she would have to bring Perry along with her. Her responsibility for him would keep her from flying too dangerously high. This would be the deal she made with God.

Insulated by her fatness, she went around the side of the library, pushed through a weak spot in its hedge, and made tracks across its front lawn, which she’d never seen one person set foot on. New Prospect was lovely in the snow but not as beautiful as Arizona, because it was already shadowed by a tomorrow of gray slush-puddles, of salt-corroded snowbanks blackened by the exhaust pipes of cars gunning their engines, spinning their wheels. In Arizona, the white purity had persisted for weeks.

Fighting uphill against the wind on Maple Avenue made her aware of nicotine’s poisoning of the heart. At the corner of Highland, she stopped to catch her breath and check her watch. It was nearly seven o’clock. With all the snow, Russ might only now be getting home himself. She could always say to him, “Fuck the reception—I’m not going.” But a sweeter way to punish him would be to let him wonder why she hadn’t come home. She was pretty sure he’d lied to her at breakfast, pretty sure he was with his widow friend. And there was, she realized, an easy way to be certain. Kitty Reynolds, his putative companion for the outing in the city, lived in one of the little houses farther up on Maple, near the high school.

Decisions being simple for a person unafraid of consequences, Marion crossed Highland and proceeded up Maple, into the wind. Her feet were frozen, her fingers getting there. She couldn’t quite picture Kitty’s house, but she recognized it when she came to it. There was light in every downstairs window, a sports car with a Michigan license in the driveway, no wreath on the door, no lights on the bushes. Marion marched up the front walk, noting that it had been shoveled perhaps an hour earlier, and rang the doorbell. For a heart-clutching moment, she confused what she was doing with the thing she’d done to Bradley’s wife, as if she were reenacting it. Then clarity returned. Her situation now was exactly the reverse.

An elderly man in a thick cardigan opened the door. She was afraid she had the wrong house, but he identified himself as Kitty’s brother. “She’s just draining the spaghetti,” he said.

“Oh, I’m so sorry to bother you at dinnertime.”

“Who can I tell her is here?”

“I—it’s not important. I should have stopped by earlier. Was she here in the afternoon?”

“Yep. Trouncing me at Scrabble. It was the perfect day for sitting by the fire. Would you like to come in?”

“No, I, no,” Marion said, turning away. “Thank you. I’ll see her in church on Sunday.”

“And you are…?”

She raised a hand and waved it as she walked away. As soon as she heard the door close, she took out her Luckies. One of her match packs was sodden, the other still usable. Suspicious though she’d been that Russ had lied to her, it had taken conclusive proof to make her furious about it. His lie had been stupid, easily found out, the lie of a little boy, and this made her even angrier. Did he think she was stupid? Probably not even. She’d barely registered as a person at all. She’d been little more than an inconvenient object at the breakfast table, an annoying vase in the way of his sugar bowl, not even worth telling a decent lie to. Soon enough, when she’d lost her fat, she would have more ways to make him pay. For now, the sweetest punishment would be to say nothing, let him think she knew nothing, let him damn himself by telling further lies.

It was nearly seven thirty when she got back to the parsonage. There was no sign of the car, no car tracks in the driveway. Inside the back door, she took off her shoes and coat and ran her fingers through her slushy hair. On the kitchen counter were sugar cookies whose allure she could no longer fathom. Everything in the kitchen seemed lusterless and alien. She might have been entering the house of someone recently deceased.

“Perry?” she called. “Becky?”

Climbing the stairs, she called their names again. Maybe the boys had gone out sledding? Their bedroom was dark, the door ajar. She turned on a light in her and Russ’s room. On the foot of the bed was a note in Perry’s artistic hand.

Dear Mom,

Dad is stuck in the city, so I’m taking Jay to the Haefles. Becky waited for you. I told her to go to the concert.

Perry

Now came, without warning, the tears she hadn’t shed in her confession. Whatever Russ might mean or not mean to her, however poorly he and Perry got along, he would always be the person Perry called Dad—would forever be his father. And how unjust she’d been to Becky, imagining that she wouldn’t come to the open house. How poignant Perry’s striving to behave like an adult, how generous his mentioning that his sister had waited; how dear and real her children were, how lucky she was to have them; what a difference there was between proclaiming her badness to the dumpling, the abstract fact of it, and experiencing it in relation to her children. She’d let them down. Becky had obediently waited for her, and Perry had made the best decision he could.

Clumsy, her eyesight teary, she tore off her exercise clothes and rubbed her hair with a towel. She truly was a bad person, because along with love and remorse, no less strongly, she was feeling self-pity for having been wrenched from the vividness of memory and fantasy; resentment for the interruption of her disturbance. Also hatred of the sack of a dress in which she was now obliged to encase the sausage of her body. In the bathroom, after brushing her hair, she forced herself to step onto the corroded old scale by the toilet, to establish a new baseline. Counting clothes, she weighed one hundred and forty-four pounds. It was almost enough to make a person cry again. When she went back to the kitchen for her cigarettes, wearing her good winter coat and her good fur-trimmed boots, the sugar cookies had regained their allure.

Eating cookies is an interesting response to feeling overweight.

“Really?” she said aloud, to the dumpling in her head. “Is that really so goddamned fucking hard to understand? Have you never in your life felt sorry for yourself?”

After a fortifying smoke on the front porch, she set out for the Haefles’. The snow was still coming down heavily, but the air’s flavor had turned Canadian as the cold front gained the upper hand. Her only consolation for having let her children down was that Russ was letting them down even worse. Whom she felt more like murdering, him or the slender widow with whom he was stuck in the city, was a toss-up.

Leaving the Haefles’ house as she approached it were two priests in identical sable-collared overcoats. Her fear of priests outside a church, which dated from her Catholic years, was related to an atavistic fear of all things monstrous, even the ostensibly laudable monstrosity of being half human and half divinely anointed: of being celibate. She lurked on the sidewalk until the priests had climbed into a Country Squire station wagon. That it looked brand-new was itself vaguely monstrous.

She knew the Haefles well enough to let herself inside without knocking. Smelling meatballs, blessedly also cigarette smoke, she took her Luckies from her coat before she hung it in the closet by the basement stairs. From the basement came the sound of Hollywood violins and then a familiar little voice, Judson’s.

Downstairs, in the rec room, she found him on a sofa between two girls in whose faces the unfortunate lineaments of Doris Haefle were discernible. They were watching Miracle on 34th Street on a portable Zenith. On the screen, Kris Kringle was seated on the bed of a little-girl character whose mother, as Marion recalled, saw nothing wrong with leaving her alone with strange men and their penises. As the camera framed Santa’s face, her chest tightened. Not her favorite movie. She went behind the TV to avoid it.

“Hi, Mom,” Judson said.

“Hello, dear. I’m sorry I’m so late. Did you have some dinner?”

“Yes, but now we’re watching this movie.”

“I’m Judson’s mother,” Marion explained to the girls.

They mumbled hellos. Judson was slouched low on the sofa, the girls inclining toward each other, their bodies touching his. Although he was a happy child in general, Marion was struck by the heavy-lidded dreaminess of his expression. He seemed to be enjoying more than just the movie. He looked like a cat transported by petting. She had the uneasy sense that she was interrupting something.

“Well, I’ll leave you to your movie,” she said. “Perry is upstairs?”

Judson’s gaze stayed on the screen. “Presumably,” he said.

There was an edge of sarcasm in his voice, as if he were performing for the girls. Marion went upstairs feeling like no better a mother than the one in the movie. Judson was nine years old. She knew it was time for Becky to have a boyfriend, past time for Clem to have a girl in his life, but she was not remotely ready for Judson to lose his innocence.

In the hallway, standing with her back to the party and popping a whole cookie into her mouth, was the Lutheran pastor’s wife—Jane. Definitely Jane Walsh, not Janet. On her dessert plate were four more cookies, and she was even heavier than Marion.

“Hello, Jane. Marion Hildebrandt—Russ’s wife.”

One greeting down, a million to go.

“This party is a lovely tradition,” Jane said, “but Doris’s cookies are not what I need at this time of year. I always seem to overdo.”

Marion herself preferred the meatballs. The cookies here, though impeccably Swedish, were dry and flavorless. She was on the verge of expressing this judgment, on the theory that she was done with censoring herself, when the sociable din in the living room died down suddenly. She wondered if Dwight Haefle might be making a little speech. Instead, she heard another familiar voice rising. It was Perry, shouting something about … being damned?

She hurried past Jane Walsh and pushed through the party’s margins. Perry was standing by the fireplace, his face extremely red, a Haefle to either side of him. Everyone else in the room was watching them.

“What’s going on?” Marion said.

Perry swallowed a sob. “Mom, I’m sorry.”

“What is it? What’s happening?”

“Son,” Dwight Haefle said, putting an arm around Perry. “Let’s, ah. Let’s take a little walk.”

Perry bowed his head and let himself be led away. Marion tried to follow, but Doris Haefle arrested her. Her expression blazed with triumph. “Your son is intoxicated.”

“I’m very sorry to hear it.”

“Hm, yes, this is what happens when children aren’t supervised. Did you only get here now?”

“A few minutes ago.”

“It’s quite unusual that your children came without you.”

“I know. The weather is just … Perry was trying to do a good thing.”

“You didn’t tell him to come?”

“God, no.”

“That’s good, then, dear.” Doris patted Marion on the shoulder. “You didn’t do anything wrong. You just need to take him home now.”

Doris Haefle had a grossly inflated sense of the importance of a pastor’s wife, was sensitive to every slight to it, and therefore, because the world didn’t share her regard for the role, existed in a state of perpetual grievance. Among the crosses she bore was being married to a pastor who ironically deprecated his own role. For Marion, the miserable thing was that she, too, was a pastor’s wife and thus, in Doris’s view, worthy of the highest respect. She had to endure not only Doris’s unsolicited suggestions on how to comport herself, in her exalted role, but the unfailingly tender manner in which she offered them. It was awkward to be called dear by a person you felt like calling insufferable bitch.

Perry was slumped forward on a chair in the dining room, his hair draping his face. Dwight came over to Marion and spoke in a low voice. “He does seem to have been drinking gløgg.”

“I’ll take care of it,” she said. “I apologize for this.”

“Should we be worried about Russ?”

“No, he’s on a date with Frances Cottrell.”

The widening of Dwight’s eyes amused her.

“They’re delivering toys and canned goods in the city.”

“Ah.”

“But listen,” she said. “Judson’s in the basement watching Miracle on 34th Street. Would you mind if I left him here and came back later?”

“Not at all,” Dwight said. “If you don’t want to come back, I can run him home.”

How often a marriage consisted of nasty paired with nice. If her own marriage didn’t strike people this way, it was only because they’d never met the real her. She needed to go down and tell Judson that she was taking Perry home, but the scene in the basement had left an unsettling aftertaste, and so she asked nice Dwight to do it. When he was gone, she went to Perry and crouched at his feet.

“Sweetie,” she said. “How drunk are you? A lot, or not very?”

“Relatively not very,” he said, his face still hidden. “Mrs. Haefle overreacted.”

The word relatively didn’t surprise Marion. She herself had done her first drinking when she was his age. Then again, look how she’d turned out.

“What were you thinking?” she said. “You brought Judson here. You were responsible for him—did you not think of that?”

“Mother. Please. I am very sorry, all right?”

“Sweetie, look at me. Will you look at me? I’m not angry with you. I’m just surprised—you’re always so considerate of Judson.”

“I’m sorry!”

The poor boy. She took his hands and kissed his head.

“Jay was fine,” he said. “He was playing Yahtzee, and I wasn’t that buzzed. Everything was fine until…”

“You picked the wrong woman’s house to get drunk in.”

He gave a little snort. Her opinion of Doris Haefle was known to him. She’d told him all sorts of things she didn’t tell the other kids. And now she had new things to tell him. The hotness of his hands, the reality of the boy she so especially loved, was burning a hole in the tissue of her fantasies of Bradley. “Let’s get you home,” she said.

When she returned from the closet with their coats, Perry was eating from a plate of meatballs. They were tempting, but so were cigarettes. The old cycles of nicotine, of hunger and its suppression, of anxiety and relief, were coming back to her. Leaving Perry to get some food in him, she stepped out onto the front stoop.

She was only halfway through the Lucky when he opened the door. She had a red-handed impulse to drop the cigarette, but it was important that he see her as she really was.

He goggled in cartoonish astonishment. “What, may I ask, are you doing?”

“I have my own contraband tonight.”

“You smoke?”

“I used to, a long time ago. But it’s a terrible habit and you must never try it.”

“Do as I say, not as I do.”

“Exactly.”

He shut the door and stepped into his rubbers. “Can I try one anyway?”

Too late, she realized her mistake. At some point, she was sure of it, he’d take her smoking as permission to smoke himself, and it would be yet another thing to feel guilty about having done to him. To quell this new anxiety, she sucked hard on the cigarette.

“Perry, listen to me. There’s one thing you can do that I will not forgive. I will never forgive you if you become a smoker. Do you understand?”

“Honestly, no,” he said, buckling his rubbers. “I don’t think of you as being a hypocrite.”

“I started smoking before anyone knew how dangerous it is. You’re too intelligent to make the same mistake.”

“And yet here you are, smoking.”

“Well, there’s a reason for that. Would you like me to tell you what it is?”

“I want you not to die.”

“I don’t intend to die, sweetie. But there are some things you need to know about me. How are you feeling now?”

“The buzz no longer buzzeth. Buzzeth buzzeth buzzeth—see?”

In the story she began to tell him, as they made their way home, there was nothing of Bradley Grant, nothing of any man except her father. The snow, deep on the ground and still falling, gave her voice a curious distinctness while dampening its carry, as if the world were an enlargement of her skull. Perry listened in silence, wordlessly offering her a hand where the snow had formed drifts. Until now, she’d kept the suicide a secret from her kids. Even to Russ she hadn’t spoken of it in many years; she had the sense that it frightened him, or embarrassed him; as did, for that matter, everything else related to her innermost self. Perry’s face was hidden by the hood of his parka, and as she proceeded to describe her own mental disturbance, following the suicide—the dissociation, the episodes of slippage, the months of insomnia, the weeks of catatonic lowness—she had no idea what he was making of it.

They reached the parsonage before she’d finished. In the driveway were two sets of recent footprints, one coming, one going. Guessing that they were Clem’s, she called his name as soon as she and Perry were in the kitchen, but the house was obviously empty.

“I wonder if he went to the concert,” she said. “You probably want to get down there, too. We can talk more in the morning.”

Perry was eating a cookie. “If you have more to say, let’s hear it.”

She retrieved the Luckies from her coat and opened the back door for ventilation.

“I’m sorry, sweetie. This is hard for me to do without smoking.”

Her hands were too shaky to get a match lit. Perry took the matches and flared one for her. She was feeling somehow younger than he was; more daughter than mother. She gratefully inhaled the smoke and tried to blow it out the door, but the wind pushed it in.

“Put that out,” he said. “I have a better idea.”

“The front porch.”

“No. Third floor.”

In the gloom of the front hall, she was surprised to see two massive pieces of luggage. For a moment, as in a dream, she thought that they were hers—that she was leaving tonight, perhaps for Los Angeles. Then she understood that they were Clem’s. Why had he brought so much luggage?

Perry had run up the stairs. Huffing, with poisoned heart, she followed him to the third-floor storage room. No guilty secrets were buried here. She’d arrived at her uncle Jimmy’s with only one suitcase, and before she married Russ she’d burned her diaries in Jimmy’s fireplace, destroying the last evidence of the person she’d been. The oldest relics now were from Indiana—a crib and a high chair last used by Judson, an old movie projector, a cedar chest of blankets and linens not worth keeping, a wardrobe of fashions unlikely to return, a mildewed army-surplus tent that Russ had wrongly imagined the family might camp in. It was all just sadness.

Without turning on a light, Perry opened the mullioned dormer window. “The house has some kind of chimney effect,” he said. “Even with the door closed, there’s always a draft going out.”

“You seem to really know your way around up here.”

“You can use the outer sill as an ashtray.”

“Wait a minute. Are you telling me you smoke?”

“Finish your story. I thought you had more to say.”

There was indeed an outflowing draft. She could put her head out the window and still be in relative warmth—in the snow, feeling the flakes on her face, without being of it. Smoking but not in smoke.

“So, well, so,” she said. “I ended up losing my mind. I got picked up by the police when I was wandering around on Christmas morning. Thirty years ago tomorrow. They took me to the county hospital, and then I was committed to the women’s ward at Rancho Los Amigos, which is not the kind of place you ever want to be. Obviously, they couldn’t let me back out on the street, but to be locked up in a place with bars on the windows, surrounded by women even crazier than me—I still don’t really understand how I got better. The psychiatrists told me that my brain was still adolescent. The word they used was plastic. They said it was possible my hormones would settle down—that I’d stressed them by spending too much time alone, and by … other things. I didn’t really believe them, but there was a list of behaviors I had to exhibit before they’d let me leave, and I was so desperate to get out that I eventually exhibited every one of them. So. That’s another important fact about me. I was institutionalized for mental illness when I was twenty.”

She crushed her cigarette on the outer sill.

“Do you see why I was so worried about you in the spring? We’re so much alike—we’re not like the others. Your trouble sleeping, your mood swings, I think that’s something you get from me. From my side of the family. I feel terrible about it, but it’s something you need to know. I don’t want you to ever have to go through what I did.”

It was hard to turn away from the window, but she did it. The room seemed brighter now that her eyes had adjusted. Perry was sitting on the cedar chest, his own eyes on the floor. When she sat down in his line of vision, he lowered his chin to his chest.

“Your father doesn’t know about any of this,” she said. “I never told him I’d been in a hospital—because I got better. I’d been better for a number of years when I met him, and I want you to remember that. The psychiatrists were right. It was something I outgrew.”

This was to some extent a lie, so she repeated it.

“You don’t have to worry about me, sweetie. But I am worried about you. You’re still a teenager, and you’re so precious to me. You need to tell me what’s happening in your head. If there’s a problem, we can work on it, but you need to be honest with me. Will you do that? Will you tell me what you’re thinking?”

His breath was hot and she could smell the liquor on it. To have named, aloud, to him, the thing for which she felt guiltiest made it larger; realer; inescapable-seeming. She thought of her earlier hesitation at the door of the dumpling’s office—her sense that she had only two choices, either submit to God’s will and devote herself to Perry, or godlessly devote herself to herself. It was cruel how mutually exclusive the choices seemed to be. In the heat of her son’s breath, she could feel her elation evaporating, her longing for Bradley escaping her grasp.

“Sweetie? Please say something.”

With a breathy sound, almost a laugh, he sat up straight and looked around the room as if he didn’t see her at his feet. “What’s there to say? It’s not like this is any great surprise.”

“How so?”

He was smiling. “I already knew I was damned. Right?”

“No, no, no.”

“I’m not saying it’s your fault. It’s just a fact. There’s something bad in my head.”

“No, sweetie. You’re just intelligent and sensitive. That doesn’t have to be a bad thing. It can be a very good thing, too.”

“Not true. Here, you want to see?”

He stood up with surprising energy and stepped onto the cedar chest. From the top of the wardrobe, he took down a shoe box. He wasn’t reacting at all the way she’d expected. There was no distress on her behalf, no fear on his own. It was as if a switch had been flipped and he wasn’t reacting at all. And she knew that switch. It was the worst sort of punishment to see her son flipping it.

He removed the lid of the shoe box and held up a clear plastic bag that appeared to be filled with plant matter. “These,” he said, “are the seeds and stems from what I’ve smoked up here. They correspond to maybe ten percent of my total intake, counting other locations.” He rooted in the box. “Here we have my papers. Here’s the pipe I thought would be great but didn’t quite work for me. Trusty Bic lighter, of course. Roach clip. Miniature mouthwash bottle. And this—” He held up a gleaming apparatus. “You might as well know about this, too. This is a more or less serviceable hand scale. Useful if you’re in the business of selling pot.”

“Holy Mary.”

“You asked me to be honest with you.”

He put the lid back on the box. All business, no emotion. It occurred to her that the Perry in her head had been nothing but a sentimental projection, extrapolated from the little boy he’d been. She didn’t know the real Perry any more than Russ knew the real her.

“How did this all happen so quickly?” she said, meaning his becoming a stranger.

“Three years isn’t quick.”

“Oh my. Three years? I must be very stupid and very blind.”

“Not necessarily. It isn’t hard to hide a drug habit if you’re sedulous about the protocols.”

“I thought we had a close relationship.”

“We do, in a way. It’s not like I thought I knew everything about you. As, indeed, I’m now learning, I didn’t.”

“If you’re selling drugs, though. That is not at all the same kind of thing.”

“I’m not proud of it.”

“You mustn’t sell drugs.”

“For the record, I no longer do. I’ve been trying to turn over a new leaf. You can thank Becky for that.”

“Becky? Becky knows about this?”

“Not the selling part, I don’t think. But otherwise, yes, she’s pretty well apprised.”

At the vista that was opening, the image of her children conspiring to exclude her, Marion felt a dizzying resurgence of her disturbance. Evidently, she was anything but the indispensable, confided-in mother she’d imagined herself to be. She’d fooled Russ, but she hadn’t fooled her kids, and her feral intelligence was quick to recognize a kind of permission in this: if she ever managed to walk away, she might not be so missed.

“I’m going to have one more cigarette,” she said.

“Permission granted.”

She went back to the window and lit up. There was still some juice in her; the old organs of longing still functioned. Either-or, either-or. It was almost comical to watch her mind flip back and forth between irreconcilable contraries, God-fearing mother, unregretting sinner. She leaned as far as she dared out the window, trying to escape the house’s leaking warmth and feel the winter air on her skin. She leaned out even farther and caught a little gust of wind. Snowflakes were melting on her cheeks. Everything was a mess, and it was wonderful.

“Whoa, Mom, careful,” Perry said.

 

 

 

The amplified harmonies of “Leaving on a Jet Plane,” stripped of reverb by the density of the crowd inside the function hall, came through the open doors. Two girls in mittens and pom-pommed stocking caps were at a table in the vestibule. They wanted three dollars.

“I’m not here for the concert,” Clem said. “I’m looking for Becky Hildebrandt.”

“She’s here. But we’re not supposed to—”

“I’m not giving you three dollars.”

Inside, the heads of taller concertgoers were silhouetted by stage lights. Seated in a half circle, with dreadnought guitars, behind cantilevered mics, were the Isner brothers and a statuesque girl, Amy Jenner, whose hair was longer than her torso. Clem remembered Amy well. Two years ago, in a Crossroads exercise, she’d given him a note that said You’re sexy. The assertion was so absurd that he’d taken it to be a joke, but seeing Amy now, having learned from Sharon what the world was made of, he understood it differently. The prettiness of Amy’s voice, as she sang of hating to see her lover go, salted the wound he’d inflicted on himself in Sharon’s bedroom.

On the bus to Chicago, he and the baby behind him had finally slept, but it hadn’t been worth the cost of waking up. Returning to his consciousness of the actions he’d taken, to his aloneness with the knowledge of them, was like the reverse of awakening from a bad dream. After a brutal portage to the train station, he’d caught the 7:25 to New Prospect, where a good Samaritan had offered him a ride. He’d dropped his bags at the parsonage and charged back out into the snow, lashing himself forward. He was determined not to sleep until he could wake up knowing he wasn’t alone.

He moved into the crowd, looking for Becky, but the concert was also a reunion. He was immediately pounced upon by a mature edition of Kelly Woehlke, a girl he’d grown up with at First Reformed. They’d never been friends, and on any other night the hug she gave him might have seemed unwarranted. Tonight the touch of a warm body nearly made him cry. His few real Crossroads friends were too anti-sentimental to bother with a reunion, but other alumni were crowding around him, and despite how peripheral he’d felt in the fellowship, how unwowed by the trust-building exercises and the rhetoric of personal growth, he received their hugs gratefully, as if they were the condolences of family. He wondered what Sharon would make of all the hugging. Then he wished he hadn’t wondered, because every specific thought of Sharon, no matter how innocuous, triggered another wave of guilt and hurt.

By the time he’d circled through the crowd, not finding Becky, the Isner brothers and Amy Jenner were rousingly singing of what they would do with a hammer at various times of day. Clem’s energy was spent, and the loudness of the scene had become somewhat hellish. He’d run aground by the stage, stalled out in front of a stack of speakers, when his friend John Goya’s little brother Davy approached him. Not only was Davy no longer little, he looked strangely middle-aged. “Are you looking for Becky?” he shouted.

“Yeah, is she here?”

“I’m worried about her. Did she go home?”

“No,” Clem shouted. “I just came from home.”

Davy frowned.

“Did something happen?” Clem shouted.

The singing mercifully stopped, leaving only a low hum in the speakers.

“I don’t know,” Davy said. “She’s probably just lying down somewhere.”

Into Clem’s ear came the amplified mellifluence of Toby Isner, the elder of the two musical brothers. “Thank you, all. Thank you. I’m afraid we only have time for one more song.”

Toby paused for expressions of disappointment, and someone in the audience politely moaned. Toby had an unctuous sensitive-guy sincerity, a self-pleasuring way of smiling when he sang, that never failed to make Clem’s skin crawl. Now he’d grown a dark beard of biblical dimensions.

“You know,” Toby said, “I love that we’re all gathered here tonight, so many amazing people, so many wonderful friends, so much love, so much laughter. But I want to get serious for a minute. Can we do that? I want us all to remember there’s still a war going on. Right now, right this minute, it’s morning in Vietnam. People are still getting slaughtered, and, man, we gotta put a stop to that. Stop that war. We need America out of Vietnam right now. You dig me?”

Toby was such a preening asshole that Clem almost pitied him. And yet quite a few people were clapping and whooping. Toby, encouraged, shouted, “I want to hear it from you, people! All together now! What do we want?”

He cupped his ear with his hand, and a smattering of voices, mostly female, obliged him. “We want peace!”

“Louder, man! What do we want?”

“We want peace!”

“What do we want?”

“WE WANT PEACE!”

“When do we want it?”

“RIGHT NOW!”

“We want peace!”

“RIGHT NOW!”

Although Davy Goya, God bless him, was coolly inspecting his fingernails, it seemed to Clem that every other person in the hall had taken up the chant. He’d done his share of chanting at various protests, before he met Sharon, but the sound of it now was so alienating that he felt ashamed of himself, ashamed of his weakness, for having hugged the other alumni. Not only were they safe and self-righteous, they weren’t appalled by Toby Isner. If they’d ever been Clem’s people, they definitely weren’t now.

Toby lowered his fist, which he’d been pumping to the rhythm of the chanting, and hit the opening notes to “Blowin’ in the Wind.” A shout went up from the audience, and Clem couldn’t take it anymore. He pushed through the crowd and escaped into the church’s central hallway, where the bathrooms were. He opened the ladies’-room door a crack. “Becky?”

No answer. He checked the other rooms along the hallway—also empty. He could still hear Toby Isner’s voice, could picture him simpering through his beard, when he reached the main church entrance. Sitting on the floor inside the door, smoking a cigarette, was a girl in a biker jacket. It was Laura Dobrinsky.

“Hey Laura, good to see you. I wonder—have you seen my sister?”

Laura took a sideways puff as if she hadn’t heard him. She looked like she’d been crying.

“Sorry to bother you,” he said. “I’m just looking for Becky.”

Between him and Laura was the social ease of having long ago established that they didn’t like each other. She took another sideways puff. “Last I saw her, she was stoned off her ass.”

“She was—what?”

“Stoned off her ass.”

His vision swam as if he’d been punched. Now he understood why Davy Goya was worried. Leaving Laura to her private woe, he ran up two flights of stairs to the Crossroads meeting room. In the dimness of it, from the doorway, he saw a girl supine on a sofa, beneath a skinny boy. Both of them were clothed, and thankfully the girl wasn’t Becky.

“Sorry. Have either of you seen Becky Hildebrandt?”

“No,” the girl said. “Go away.”

As he descended the stairs, he was hammered by his lack of sleep. He would have sat down for a smoke if he’d believed it would make him feel anything but worse. His eyes were fried, his head full of rottenness, his shoulders aching from carrying his luggage, his mouth sour from the cookies he’d grabbed on his way out of the parsonage, and the complication of Becky made it almost unbearable. He knew Perry smoked pot, but Becky? He needed her to be her shining, clearheaded self. He needed her on his side before he told his parents what he’d done.

The second-floor hallway was dark, but the door of Rick Ambrose’s office was ajar. Clem had always appreciated Ambrose for understanding his ambivalent relationship with Crossroads, and he appreciated him now for wanting nothing to do with the concert. On the chance that his sister might be in the office, safe, Clem peeked inside. Ambrose was slouched in his desk chair, reading a book, and appeared to be alone.

Farther up the hallway to the sanctuary, Clem noticed a strip of light beneath the associate minister’s office door. Evidently his father, who would now be at the Haefles’ annual party, had forgotten to turn out the lights. As he walked past the door, he heard a laugh that sounded like Becky’s.

He stopped. Did she somehow have an office key? He tapped on the door. “Becky?”

“Who’s there?”

His blood pressure jumped. The voice was his father’s. Clem hadn’t expected to see him—had counted on not seeing him—before he’d talked to Becky and gotten her blessing.

“It’s me,” he said. “It’s Clem. Is Becky in there?”

There was a silence, long enough to be unnatural. Then the door was opened by his father. He was wearing his old Arizona coat, and his face was strangely pale. “Clem, hi.”

He seemed not at all happy to see his son. Behind him, in a hunting jacket and a matching cap, stood a clear-skinned boy who was, in fact, Clem realized, a short-haired woman.

“Is Becky here?”

“Becky? No. No, ah, this is one of our parishioners, Mrs. Cottrell.”

The woman gave Clem a little wave. Her face was very pretty.

“This is my son Clem,” his father said. “Mrs. Cottrell and I were just, uh—actually, maybe you can help us. Whoever shoveled the parking lot blocked her car in. We need to dig her out. Would you mind?”

Mrs. Cottrell came over and offered Clem a hand. It was cool and firm.

“Frances, don’t forget your records. I think—oh, Clem, I think I saw a couple of shovels by the front door. Mrs. Cottrell and I were late getting—we were down at Theo’s church and. So, and, yes, we had a, uh. Little accident.”

Whatever it was that Clem had interrupted, his father couldn’t have been more nervous.

“I don’t think I’m up for shoveling snow.”

“You—? It won’t take any time at all with two of us. Shall we?” The old man turned off the overhead light and said, again, “Don’t forget the records.”

“If it takes no time at all with two people,” Clem said, “how much time can it take with one person?”

“Clem, she really needs to get home.”

“But if I hadn’t happened to knock on your door.”

“I’m asking you a favor. Since when do you mind a little work?”

His father held the door for Mrs. Cottrell, who emerged with a stack of old records. Everything about her was delicate, desirable, and it gave Clem an ill feeling. Even though he’d warned Becky that men like their father, weak men whose vanity needed stroking, were liable to cheat on their wives, it was hideous to think that it might actually be happening—that his father, having failed to be as groovy as Rick Ambrose, had gotten his hands on someone closer to his age. Couldn’t she see how weak he was?

In the parking lot, in less densely falling snow, clusters of alumni were enjoying intermission cigarettes. While Mrs. Cottrell cleared the windows of her sedan, he and his father hacked at the mountain of snow in front of it. To get the car over the layer of hardened slush they uncovered, they had to push it from behind—just like the old days, dad and son working side by side—while Mrs. Cottrell rocked it with the accelerator. When it finally broke free, she drove a short distance and lowered her window.

Out of the window came a delicate hand. It beckoned with one finger. Not the typical gesture of a parishioner to a pastor.

The finger beckoned again.

“Ah—one second,” the old man said. He trotted over to the car and bent down to the open window. Clem couldn’t hear what Mrs. Cottrell was saying, but it must have been fascinating, because his father seemed to forget that Clem was there.

He waited for at least a minute, sickened by the spectacle of their tête-à-tête. Then he walked back toward the church with the shovels. He’d already noticed the family station wagon parked outside the main entrance, but only now did he see that the back end of it was maimed, the bumper missing, a taillight smashed. The bumper was inside the car.

There was a squeal of tires, and his father came hurrying up behind him. “This is something else you can help me with tomorrow,” he said. “If we hammer out the dent, I think we can reattach the bumper.”

Clem stared at the damage. His chest was so full of anger that speaking was an effort. “Why aren’t you at the Haefles’ party?”

“Oh, well,” his father said, “you’re looking at the reason. Frances and—Mrs. Cottrell and I were badly delayed in the city. I also had to change a tire.”

Clem nodded. His neck, too, was stiff with anger. “I wonder,” he said, “what she was doing in your office. If she was in such a hurry to get home.”

“Aha. Yes. She was just picking up some records I’d … borrowed.” His father jingled his car keys. “I’d offer you a ride, but I’m guessing you want to stay for the concert.”

Bumperless, the Fury’s rear end resembled a face without a mouth.

“She didn’t strike me,” Clem said, “as being in any hurry to get home.”

“She—just now? She was—it was just some business about the Tuesday circle.”

“Really.”

“Yes, really.”

“Bullshit.”

“Excuse me?”

A cheer went up inside the function hall.

“You’re lying,” Clem said.

“Now, wait a minute—”

“Because I know what you’re like. I’ve been watching it my whole life and I’m sick of it.”

“That’s—whatever you’re imputing, you’re—that’s not right.”

Clem turned to his father. The fear in his face made him laugh. “Liar.”

“I don’t know what you’re thinking, but—”

“I’m thinking Mom is at the Haefles’ and you’re falling all over a woman who isn’t her.”

“That’s—there is nothing wrong with a pastor attending to one of his parishioners.”

“Jesus Christ. The fact that you even have to say that.”

A drum intro, congas, drifted from the function hall, followed by another cheer. The last of the alumni smokers were heading inside. As if music ever solved anything. No more war, man. Gotta put a stop to that war. Clem’s disgust with the hippie-dippie Crossroads people intensified his disgust with his father. He’d always hated bullies, but now he understood how enraging another person’s fear could be. How the sight of it incited taunting. Incited violence.

His father spoke again, in a low unsteady voice. “Mrs. Cottrell and I were making a delivery to Theo’s church. We got a bit of a late start, and then there was—”

“Yeah, you know what? Fuck that. I don’t care what your story is. If you feel like going and boning some other woman, it’s a free country. If it makes you feel better about yourself, I don’t fucking care.”

His father looked at him in horror.

“I’m out of here anyway,” Clem said. “I wasn’t going to tell you this tonight, but you might as well know it. I quit school. I already sent a letter to the draft board. I’m going to Vietnam.”

He dropped the snow shovels and stalked away.

“Clem,” his father shouted. “Come back here.”

Clem raised his arm and gave him the middle finger as he went into the church. The entry hall was empty. Laura Dobrinsky had left two butts and a mess of ashes on the floor. He paused to consider where else to look for Becky, and the door behind him burst open.

“Don’t you walk away from me.”

He ran up a flight of stairs. He still hadn’t checked the parlor or the sanctuary. He was halfway down the hallway when his father caught up with him and grabbed his shoulder. “Why are you walking away from me?”

“Take your hands off me. I’m looking for Becky.”

“She’s at the Haefles’ with your mother.”

“No, she’s not. Becky is sick of you, too.”

His father glanced at Ambrose’s open door, unlocked his own office, and lowered his voice. “If you have something to say to me, you could pay me the courtesy of not walking away before I can answer.”

“Courtesy?” Clem followed him into the office. “You mean, like the courtesy of leaving Mom at the Haefles’ while you entertain your little lady friend?”

His father turned on the light and closed the door. “If you would calm down, I would be happy to explain what happened tonight.”

“Yeah, but look me in the eye, Dad. Look me in the eye and see if I believe a word of it.”

“That’s enough.” The old man was angry now, too. “You were out of line at Thanksgiving, and you’re very much out of line now.”

“Because I’m so fucking sick of you.”

“And I am sick of your disrespect.”

“Do you have any idea how embarrassing it is to be your son?”

“I said that’s enough!”

Clem would have welcomed a fight. He hadn’t thrown a punch since junior high. “You want to hit me? You want to try me?”

“No, Clem.”

“Mister Nonviolence?”

There was Christian forbearance in the way his father shook his head. Clem would have loved to at least shove him against the wall, but this would merely have fed his Christian victimhood. The only thing Clem could hit him with was words.

“Did you even hear what I said in the parking lot? I quit school.”

“I heard that you were very angry and trying to provoke me.”

“I wasn’t being provoking. I was conveying a fact.”

His father sank into his swivel chair. A blank sheet of paper was in his typewriter. He rolled it out and smoothed it. “I’m sorry we got off on such a wrong foot. Tomorrow I hope we can be more civil to each other.”

“I wrote to the draft board, Dad. I mailed the letter this morning.”

The old man nodded to himself, as if he knew better. “You can threaten me all you want, but you’re not going to Vietnam.”

“The hell I’m not.”

“We have our differences, but I know who you are. You can’t seriously expect me to believe you intend to be a soldier. It makes no sense.”

The complacency of his father’s certainty—that no son of his could be anything but a replica of himself—inflamed the bully in Clem.

“I know it’s hard for you to imagine,” he said, “but some people actually pay a price for what they believe in. You and your little parishioner can go and be the nice white people at Theo Crenshaw’s church. You can pull some weeds in Englewood and feel good about yourself. You can march in your marches and brag about it to your all-white congregation. But when it’s time to put your money where your mouth is, you don’t see any problem with me being in college and letting some Black kid fight for me in Vietnam. Or some poor white kid from Appalachia. Or some poor Navajo, like Keith Durochie’s son. Do you think you’re better than Keith? Do you think my life is worth more than Tommy Durochie’s? Do you think it’s right that I get to be in college while Navajo boys are dying? Is that what you’re saying makes sense to you?”

It satisfied the bully to see his father’s confusion, as it dawned on him that Clem was serious.

“No American boy should be in Vietnam,” he said quietly. “I thought you and I agreed on that.”

“I do agree. It’s a shitty war. But that doesn’t—”

“It’s an immoral war. All war is immoral, but this one especially. Whoever fights in it partakes of the immorality. I’m surprised I have to explain that to you.”

“Yeah, well, I’m not the same as you. Dad. In case you hadn’t noticed. I don’t have the luxury of being born a Mennonite. I don’t believe in a metaphysical deity whose commandments I have to obey. I have to follow my own personal ethics, and I don’t know if you remember, but my lottery number was nineteen.”

“Of course I remember. And you’re right—it was an immense relief, for your mother and me, that you had a student deferment. I seem to recall you feeling the same way.”

“Only because I hadn’t given it any thought.”

“And now you’ve thought about it. Fine. I understand why student deferments seem unfair to you—you raise a legitimate point. I also understand feeling obliged to serve your country, because of your lottery number. But to go and serve in that war, it makes no sense.”

“Maybe not to you. To me there’s no alternative.”

“You already waited a year—why not wait one more semester? Most of our troops are already home. Six months from now, I doubt they’ll even be taking new recruits.”

“That’s exactly why I’m doing it now.”

“Why? To make a point? You could do that by giving up your deferment and conscientiously objecting. The son of a CO, from a family of pastors—you’d have a very strong case.”

“Right. That’s what you did. But you know what? The man who took your place in 1944 was probably white and middle-class. That’s a moral luxury I don’t have.”

“Luxury?” His father banged the arm of his chair. “It wasn’t a moral luxury. It was a moral choice, and the fact that most Americans supported the war made it harder, not easier. They called us traitors. They called us cowards, they tried to run our parents out of town—some of us even went to prison. Every one of us paid a price.”

Recalling the pride he’d once taken in his father’s principles, Clem felt the reins of his argument going slack in his hands. He gave them a savage tug. “Yeah, luckily for you, plenty of other people were willing to fight the Fascists.”

“That was their own moral choice. I grant that, under the circumstances, their choice was defensible. But Vietnam? There’s no defense whatsoever for our involvement there. It’s senseless slaughter. The boys we’re killing are even younger than you are.”

“They’re killing other Vietnamese, Dad. You can sentimentalize it all you want, but the North Vietnamese are the aggressors. They signed up to kill, and they’re killing.”

His father made a sour face. “Since when do you parrot Lyndon Johnson?”

“LBJ was a fraud. He signed the Civil Rights Act with one hand and sent ghetto boys to Vietnam with the other. This is what I’m talking about—moral hypocrisy.”

His father sighed as if it were pointless to keep arguing. “And you don’t care how I might feel as your father. You don’t care how your mother might feel about it.”

“Since when do you care about Mom’s feelings?”

“I care about them very much.”

“Bullshit. She’s loyal to you, and you treat her like garbage. Do you think I can’t see it? Do you think Becky can’t see it? How cold you are to Mom? It’s like you wish she didn’t exist.”

His father winced. The punch had landed. Clem waited for him to say something else, so that he could knock it down, but his father just sat there. He was defenseless against Clem’s superior reasoning, his intimate knowledge of his failings. Into the silence, through the door, through the floor, came the pulse of a distant bass guitar.

“Anyway,” Clem said. “There’s nothing you can do to stop me. I’ve sent the letter.”

“That’s right,” his father said. “Legally, you’re free to do as you please. But emotionally you’re still very young. Very young and, if I may say so, very self-involved. The only thing that seems to matter to you is moral consistency.”

“It’s hard work, but somebody’s got to do it.”

“You seem to think you’re thinking clearly, but what I’m hearing is a person who’s forgotten how to listen to his heart. You think I don’t understand you, but I know how devastated you would be, how utterly shattered, if you had to see a child burned up with napalm, a village bombed for no reason. You can do all the rationalizing you want, you can try to reason your way out of having a heart, but I know it’s there in you. I’ve been watching it grow, my God, for twenty years. You’ve made me so proud that you’re my son. Your kindness—your generosity—your loyalty—your sense of justice—your goodness—”

His father broke off, overcome with emotion. Until this moment, it hadn’t occurred to Clem that he could be anything but an adversary to his father; that his animosity might not be reciprocated. It seemed unfair to him—intolerable—that his father still loved him. Unable to think of a rejoinder, he jerked open the door and ran out into the hallway. For relief from the remorse that was rising in him, his mind went reflexively to the person who validated his reasoning, who shared his convictions, who freely and wholly gave herself to him. But the thought of Sharon only deepened his remorse, because he’d broken her heart that very day. Broken it violently, with merciless rationality. He’d shot her down with her own moral arguments, and she’d said it in so many words: “You’re breaking my heart.” He could hear the words so clearly, she might have been standing next to him.

 

 

 

There was no telling how long Becky might have stayed in the sanctuary, exploring what it meant to have found religion, if she’d eaten anything but sugar cookies since the night before. As God’s goodness routed the evil of marijuana, leaving only a fluish hotness in her eyes and chest, stray wisps of strange thought, she was beset by images of the baked goods in the function hall. She recalled a moist-looking chocolate layer cake, a loaf of cheese-and-chive bread, practically a balanced meal in itself, and a tray of lemon bars—she’d noticed lemon bars. She was so famished that she finally gave up on praying. By way of apology, she stood up and kissed the brass of the hanging cross.

“I’m your girl now,” she told it. “I promise.”

Hearing her own words, she felt a quake in her nether parts, as if her promise were romantic. It was akin to the shudder of ecstasy with which she’d beheld the golden light inside her. She wondered if the satisfaction of accepting Christ, becoming his girl, might enable her to renounce more worldly pleasures, such as kissing Tanner. The wrongness of kissing him before he’d broken up with Laura was clear to her now. So was the wrongness of her behavior in the ice cave of his van. Instead of celebrating the news that an agent was coming to hear the Bleu Notes, instead of sharing in his joy, she’d selfishly pressured him to dump Laura, and now God had shown her what to do. She needed to apologize for pressuring him. She needed to tell him that if he just wanted to be friends with her, see her in church on Sunday, explore Christianity with her, forget they’d ever kissed, she would cherish his friendship and be glad of heart.

First, however, she needed to see if any chocolate cake was left. It was nearly nine thirty and the concertgoers would be hungry. Letting the sanctuary door lock itself behind her, she paused in the front hall to collect herself. There was a scraping rumble from a snowplow in the street, a nasty rip in her beloved coat. She pulled on the loose threads, wondering if it could be repaired. She’d reentered a mundane world in which it wouldn’t be so easy to stay connected with God. For the first time, she understood how a person might actually look forward to Sunday worship in the sanctuary.

She must still have been lingeringly stoned, because her torn coat pocket had absorbed her for quite a while, without her reaching any conclusions, when she heard footsteps in the church parlor. Into the front hall came an older man with permed-looking hair and thick sideburns. He wore a wide-lapelled jacket of apricot-colored leather. His face brightened as if he knew her. “Oh, hey,” he said. “Hey.”

“Can I help you?”

“Nah, just looking around.”

She waited for the man to leave, so she could proceed to the baked goods, but he approached her and extended a hand. “Gig Benedetti.”

It would have been rude not to shake his hand.

“Sorry, didn’t catch your name,” he said.

“Becky.”

“Nice to meet you, Becky.”

He smiled at her expectantly, as if he had nowhere else to be. He was an inch or two shorter than she was.

“Are you … here for the concert?” she asked.

“That was the plan. Although, a night like this, it really makes me question. They already canceled the other show I wanted to catch out here.”

She was definitely still a bit stoned. There was a delay in her processing. Then sudden clarity: “Are you a music agent?”

“In my own little way.”

“Tell me your name again?”

“It’s Gig—Guglielmo, for the adventurous. Gig Benedetti.”

“You’re here to see the Bleu Notes.”

He seemed delighted with her. His eyes darted down to her body and back up to her face. “Either you’re a very good guesser, or you’re the person I’m hoping you might be.”

“Which person is that?”

“The one with the voice. I’m told it’s gotta be heard to be believed.”

There was another delay in her comprehension and then a clutching fear. The voice could only be Laura’s. Until this moment, Becky hadn’t given one thought to her encounter with Laura behind the church. It was like a drunk-driving accident she’d fled the scene of and forgotten.

“You must mean Laura,” she said.

“Laura, yeah, that sounds right. Obviously, if you’re Becky, you’re not Laura.”

“Definitely not Laura.”

“You had my hopes up for a minute. There’s ten freaking inches of snow out there. The only reason I’m waiting around is to hear that girl sing.”

Now there was no delay in Becky’s comprehension—she was immediately offended. Gig ought to have been waiting to hear Tanner, who was at least as talented as Laura and was the one with the ambition. Laura didn’t even care about getting an agent.

“It’s really more Tanner’s band,” she said.

“Tanner, right. Talked to him this afternoon. Nice guy. Friend of yours?”

“Very good friend, yes.”

Again his eyes went up and down her body, lingering at her breasts. It was a thing older men had been doing more and more often, especially at the Grove. It was gross.

“So, his girlfriend?” Gig said casually.

“Not exactly.”

“Oh, well then. How would you feel about grabbing a drink with me?”

“No, thank you.”

“I thought, they’re playing a church, how late can this thing go? I thought I’d be outta here by nine, nine thirty at the latest. But, no, we gotta hear from Peter Paul and Betty Lou. We gotta hear from Donny Osmond Santana and the Lilywhites. I’m not hitting on you, Becky. Or, like you say, not exactly. I just happened to notice a little tavern down the street. It could be an another freaking hour before we see your headliners.”

“I don’t drink,” she said, as if this were the issue.

“Pfff.”

“Also, I’m pretty much with Tanner, so.”

“Good, good. We’re up to pretty much. But that’s all the more reason you should get to know me. I’m praying to God these guys are—wait. Are you in the band?”

“No.”

“More’s the pity. My point is, if I can’t sign them, I suffered through Peter Paul and Betty Lou and drove eight miles in a blizzard for no reason. I’m already favorably predisposed, if you take my meaning, and if they end up signing I’ll be seeing you around. Why not start things off with a little drink?”

“I can’t. In fact, I should be—”

“Follow-up question: Why aren’t you in the band?”

“Me? I’m not musical.”

“Everybody’s musical. Have you tried the tambourine?”

She stared at him. There was a gold chain around his neck.

“The reason I ask,” he said, “is your presentation is extremely classy. I could really dig seeing you on a stage.”

She tried to unfog her brain and calculate whether being nice to Gig would further incline him to sign the Bleu Notes, or whether she should even want him to be Tanner’s agent, given his apparently icky character. Deeper in the fog was the upsetting news that he was there to hear Laura.

“Ugh, listen to me,” he said. “I totally sound like I’m hitting on you, although I bet you get that all the time. You’re a seriously good-looking girl. If I may say so, it’s good to see you dressing like you know it. I don’t think I ever saw a dowdier crowd than what’s downstairs. Clodhoppers and overalls and thermal underwear—is it a religious thing?”

“It’s just the style of the youth group.”

“Which you don’t want any part of. I get it. I presume that’s why you’re up here hiding?”

In the sanctuary, Becky had promised Jesus that she would live in accordance with his teachings and not shy from proclaiming it. Now she could see how much courage it would take to be a Christian in the mundane world. “No,” she said. “I came up here to pray.”

“Oh boy.” Gig laughed. “I guess it shouldn’t surprise me, being as we’re in a church. But—pardon my forwardness. I didn’t realize.”

“It’s okay. It’s actually the first time I’ve ever really prayed.”

“My timing perfect as always.”

It was wrong to apologize for praying, but she didn’t want to hurt the Bleu Notes’ chances. “It’s just me,” she said. “The band isn’t, you know, religious or anything.”

“I don’t care if they’re Hare Krishnas, as long as they show up on time and play some Billboard hits. Which, by the way, I’m serious about the tambourine. You can be as Christian as you want on the inside—it’s all about keeping people buying drinks. That is the sad little secret of the business I’m in. Something for the ears, something for the eyes.” His own eyes went up and down her yet again. “‘Why, yes, we’ll have another round.’”

“I’m sorry,” Becky said, “but I’m so hungry. I need to go eat something.”

Gig peeled back an apricot leather sleeve and exposed an enormous watch. “Not sure we quite have time for dinner, but there’s bound to be something salty at the tavern.”

“The band is really excited that you’re here, I—I’ll see you later, okay?”

She ran away, actually ran, for fear of being pursued. At New Prospect Township, one little flick of her disdain was enough to drive away aggressive boys, and at the Grove, whenever an older man tried to flirt with her, she frostily asked him for his order. If she ended up with Tanner, despite her new willingness to renounce him, she would be entering a world of older men, men like Gig. If only to help Tanner professionally, she would need to learn to play the game. It was disturbing to think that her looks might be of use to him. When she saw people flirting, she saw people who wanted to have sex, and sex still seemed more than gross to her; it seemed—wrong. In the light of her religious experience, it seemed even wronger. Sweet though Tanner was, there was little doubt that he had sex with Laura. Maybe it really would be better to leave them to it and simply be his friend.

Halfway down the church’s central staircase was a landing that led to the rear parking lot. Outside the glass door, someone in a peacoat was smoking a cigarette in the snow. With a lurch in her heart, she saw that it was Clem.

She hesitated on the landing. Catching sight of Clem usually brought a rush of happiness, but the feeling she had now was the opposite of happy. His new peacoat reminded her of the walk they’d taken at Thanksgiving, his boasting about sex with his college girlfriend, but it was more than that. She was afraid of his judgment. She’d smoked marijuana, and, worse yet, she’d been praying. He was so contemptuous of religion, he would make her ashamed of finding God.

Worried that he’d come to the church specifically to see her, she continued down the stairs. She thought she was in the clear, but the door behind her clanked open, and Clem called her name. She looked back guiltily. “Oh, hey.”

“Hi, hi, hi,” he said, running down to her.

His peacoat, when he hugged her, smelled of winter air and cigarettes, and he wouldn’t let go. She had to squirm to extricate herself.

“Where have you been?” he accused. “I’ve been looking for you everywhere.”

“I was just … I’m getting something to eat.”

She started down the corridor to the function hall.

“Wait,” Clem said, grabbing her arm. “We need to talk. There’s stuff I have to tell you.”

She yanked her arm away. “I’m really hungry.”

“Becky—”

“I’m sorry, okay? I need food.”

The function hall was much hotter than the corridor. Raising her arms to make herself narrower, she entered a humid thicket of dark bodies. Hands were clapping to the beat of Biff Allard and his congas, and Gig was right: he looked like Donny Osmond. The crowd was so large that it pressed against the food tables in the back. Becky went around behind them, pursued by Clem. The first table was nearly depleted, but there was still a respectable wedge of Bundt cake, spangled with red and green cherries. She took out her pocketbook, paid for a slice, and retreated to the back wall to eat it.

“Where have you been?” Clem shouted.

Her mouth full, she waved a limp hand. Clem was practically thrashing with impatience. She was relieved to see Kim Perkins and David Goya coming their way.

“There you are,” Kim shouted. “You had us worried.”

“I’m fine.”

Kim reached for a fragment of Bundt cake, and Becky raised the paper plate above her head. Kim made a jumping pass at it.

“Down, girl,” David shouted.

From the stage came a thunderous coda, every instrument at full volume. The hall erupted in applause.

“Thank you,” Biff Allard shouted. “We’ve still got one act coming, our own Tanner Evans and Laura Dobrinsky, with the one and only Bleu Notes, so stick around! Good night!”

The hall lights came up. Becky ate the last bite of cake feeling more famished, not less.

“I should have warned you,” David said to her. “That shit is pretty killer. They grow it indoors in Montreal.” He patted her arm, as if to make sure she really was intact, and nodded to Clem. “Thanks for finding her.”

Clem was watching them with a demented kind of fixity, his face haggard.

“I need more food,” she said.

“Somebody has the munchies,” Kim said.

A woman on a mission, Becky marched over to the other food table. In the middle of it, as in a holy vision, sat two-thirds of a loaf of cheese-and-chive bread.

“Can I have, like, all of that?” she asked the sophomore boy taking money.

“Sure. Buck-fifty?”

This was too little, but she didn’t offer more. When she turned away from the table, clutching the bread like a squirrel, Kim was there to grab at it.

“Fine, fine,” Becky said, tearing off a hunk.

David, in his harmless way, had engaged Clem in some topic of interest to himself, and she took the opportunity to slip through the crowd and back out to the corridor, where there was a drinking fountain. The bread was delicious but her throat was parched. While she was bent over the fountain, someone came up behind her. Afraid that it was Clem, she kept drinking.

“Becky.”

The voice was Tanner’s. Turning around, she experienced the rush of joy that seeing Clem hadn’t given her. Somehow her intention to renounce Tanner had made him even more gorgeous. He was like a young Jesus in a fringed suede jacket. Without saying a word, he took her head in his hands and kissed her hard on the mouth.

She was too surprised to kiss him back. Her arms hung at her sides, the ridiculous bread in one hand. By the time she got over her surprise, he was pulling her away from the fountain and leading her up the hallway.

“We’re so fucked,” he said. “Laura’s gone. She went home.”

“She went home?”

“An hour ago. She quit the band.”

Becky was horrified. It was like learning that the accident she’d fled the scene of had been fatal. So much for Gig hearing the voice he’d come to hear.

“Just play,” she bravely said. “You’ll be great. I saw the agent upstairs—he’s been waiting to hear you.”

Tanner stopped in the front hall and looked around it, very agitated. When his eyes alighted on Becky, it was as if she was the very thing he’d been looking for. He took her head in his hands again. “I did what you asked me to.”

“Oh.”

“But now—I had to redo the whole playlist. I’m not sure Biff and Darryl know half of it.”

“It’ll be fine. Gig told me he wants to sign you.”

“You talked to him? What’s he like?”

“I don’t know. Just—a guy.”

“Shit. Shit shit shit.” Tanner let go of her and gazed down the corridor, toward the function hall, where failure awaited him. “Tonight of all nights. I really didn’t—and now—shit. It’s going to be a mess.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be sorry. You were right. It had to be done.”

“Okay, but…” She took a breath. “Something amazing just happened to me. Upstairs, in the sanctuary. Tanner, it was so amazing. I think I saw God.”

This got his attention.

“I want to be a Christian,” she said. “I want you to help me be a real Christian. Even if it means—I don’t know what it means. For us, I mean. Will you help me?”

“You saw God?”

“I think so. I was praying for the longest time. I could feel God in me—I could feel Jesus. He was there.”

“Wow.”

“Have you ever felt that?”

He didn’t answer. He seemed a little frightened of her.

“You can go back to Laura,” she said. “I shouldn’t have tried to pressure you. It was selfish of me, and I wanted to tell you that. I want to be a better person. If you just want to be friends with me, or whatever, it’s really all right. I’m sorry I pressured you.”

He stared at her. “Do you not want this?”

“I don’t know. I did, but—I’m saying there’s no hurry. I bet if you went back to her now—maybe you should go back to her. Tell her you’re sorry and see if she’ll play with you.”

“We’re going on in ten minutes!”

“You can be a little late, no one’s going to leave. You should go. Just go. Go get Laura.”

Tanner seemed confounded. “But you made such a big deal out of this.”

“I’m sorry! It was wrong! I’m sorry!” Becky threw up her hands and found a loaf of bread in one of them. She set it down on a table arrayed with church-related literature. Tanner enveloped her again.

“You’re the person I want to be with,” he said. “I should have been clear about that. I’m crazy about you. This is going to be a really hard show, but I’m not sorry about Laura.”

Over Tanner’s shoulder, Becky saw Clem standing halfway down the corridor. He looked—demented. A few hours ago, she’d wanted nothing more than to be seen in Tanner’s arms, and now the impediment of Laura had been removed, now her wish was coming true; but the person seeing her was Clem.

She wriggled free of Tanner. “You need to go and get her.”

“No way.”

“Well, someone needs to get her. You need your full sound tonight.”

“I don’t even care. The only thing that matters is that you believe in me.”

“Yes, but you still need to get her. Just say—whatever it takes, just say it.”

“Are you saying you don’t believe in me?”

“No, I do, but…” Becky imagined Gig Benedetti’s disappointment, his anger, when the Bleu Notes took the stage without the singer he’d come to hear. It was all her fault, and she had to make it right. “Where does she live?”

“At this point, I doubt she’d even let me in the door.”

“I’m saying let me go. I owe her a huge apology anyway.”

“Are you kidding me? The only person she’s madder at than me is you.”

“Where does she live?”

“In the apartment above the drugstore. With Kay and Louise. But, Becky, there’s no way.”

She buttoned her coat. She was reluctant to part with the cheese-and-chive bread, but it wasn’t a convenient thing to carry around. While she considered where to hide it, Clem walked up.

“Clem,” Tanner said nervously. “Welcome back.”

“I need to talk to my sister.”

Becky unfolded a church bulletin and draped it over the bread, concealing it no better than she’d been concealed by Tanner’s blanket the night before. Tanner collared her from behind and kissed her cheek. “Don’t go anywhere,” he said. “I need to know you’re in the audience.”

He hurried off toward the function hall. The pleasure of his kiss had been killed by the discomfort of Clem’s seeing it. Without looking at her brother, she ran outside. There was a new layer of snow on the shoveled pavement, and Clem was right behind her.

“Stop following me,” she said.

“Why won’t you talk to me? Are you high on drugs? I’ve never seen you like this.”

“Leave me alone!”

She slipped on underlying ice, and he caught her by the wrist. “Tell me what is going on.”

“Nothing. I have to talk to Laura.”

“Dobrinsky? Why?”

She wrenched her wrist free and pressed onward. “Because Tanner needs her to play and she won’t do it.”

“So, wait. Are you and he—”

“Yes! Okay? I’m with Tanner! Okay?”

“But when did this happen?”

“Stop following me.”

“I’m just trying to—you’re with Tanner?”

“How many times do I have to say it?”

“You only said it once.”

“I’m with Tanner and he’s with me. Is there something wrong with that?”

“No. I’m just surprised. Davy Goya said—are you smoking pot now, too? Is that because of Tanner?”

She strode alongside a ridge of plowed snow on Pirsig Avenue. “It had nothing to do with Tanner. It was just a mistake.”

“I always wondered if he smoked pot.”

“I can make my own decisions, Clem. I don’t need you to tell me what’s right and what’s wrong. What I need right now is for you to stay out of my business.”

She could see the drugstore ahead of her. Lights were on upstairs.

“Fine,” Clem said huskily. “I’ll stay out of your business. Although I must say…”

“What must you say.”

“I don’t know. I’m just surprised. I mean—Tanner Evans? He’s a good guy. He’s super nice, but … not exactly a live wire. He’s kind of the definition of passive.”

The sensation of hating Clem was new and overwhelming. It was like love ripped brutally inside out.

“Go to hell,” she said.

“Becky, come on. I’m not trying to tell you what to do. It’s just that you’ve got so much going on. You’re about to start college, you’ve got your whole life ahead of you. And Tanner—I wouldn’t be surprised if he never leaves New Prospect.”

She stopped and wheeled around. “Go to hell! I’m sick of you! I’m sick of you judging me and my friends! You’ve been doing it my whole life and I’m sick of it! I’m not six years old anymore! You’ve got your amazing life-changing sex-loving girlfriend—why don’t you stop bossing me around and tell her what to do? Or is she not passive?”

She hardly knew what she was saying. An evil spirit had possessed her, and Clem’s shock was apparent in the streetlight. She struggled to regain her Christian bearings, but her hatred was too intense. She turned and ran full-tilt toward the drugstore.

 

 

 

Russ was happy with his Christmas present. He’d had more than six hours with Frances, enough to feel like an entire day, and every seeming setback had turned into an advance. She’d no sooner disclosed her affair with the heart surgeon than she contrasted him unfavorably with Russ, no sooner threatened to go to Arizona than pushed Russ to join her there, no sooner antagonized Theo Crenshaw than commended herself to Russ’s guidance. Even the accident on Fifty-ninth Street had been a boon. He’d wrestled with the Fury’s mangled bumper and its frozen lug nuts, displaying strength of body and coolness of head, and when a group of teenagers loomed up in the snow, causing her to clutch his arm in suburban terror, she’d learned an important lesson about racial prejudice: the young men were only offering to help. The accident had made Russ so late that he now had no choice but to tell Marion he’d been with Frances, thus sparing him from fretting that Perry would tell her. Frances still claimed to be in a hurry to get home, but when he proposed a quick stop at McDonald’s she’d admitted she was starving, and when they finally returned to First Reformed her reluctance to go inside with him had yielded, piquantly, to his insistence.

In his office, he’d handed her his blues records one by one, relating what little was known of Robert Johnson, what a tragic alcoholic Tommy Johnson had been, what a miracle that Victor and Paramount and Vocalion had made recordings of the early greats. The 78s were among his most valuable possessions, and she accepted them with appropriate reverence. She was sitting on his desk with her legs uncrossed, snowmelt dripping from her dangling feet. He was a short step away from standing between her legs, if he’d had the nerve of a heart surgeon.

“I’m going to go straight home and listen to these,” she said. “I’d ask you to join me, but I’ve already kept you way too long.”

“Not at all,” he said. “It’s been a rare pleasure.”

“The other ladies will be jealous. But you know what? Tough luck. Fortune favors the bold.”

He found it necessary to clear his throat. “I’m not sure I’d have time to listen to all ten of the records, but I could certainly—”

“No, I don’t want to be greedy. You should get home.”

“I’m not in any rush.”

“Plus, what if I decide to get high with Larry’s pot? They say it’s great for appreciating music, but I don’t imagine you’d consider that a meaningful reason to break the law.”

“Now you’re teasing me.”

“You’re such a square, it’s irresistible.”

“I already told you I’m open to experimenting with you.”

“Yeah, I don’t know what to do with that.” She laughed. “Has the church ever had to excommunicate someone? I could see me being the first, if it came out I’d lured you into reefer madness. You’d see me down at the A&P, wearing a scarlet letter.”

“R for reefer,” he said, trying to keep up with her.

“R for Russ. It could also stand for Russ.”

He couldn’t remember her having spoken his first name. It was somehow astonishing that she even knew it, so breathtaking was the intimacy it seemed to promise.

“I’m willing to take the chance if you are.”

“Okay, noted,” she said, hopping off his desk. “But not tonight. I’m sure your wife is wondering where you are.”

“She’s not. I left a message with Perry.”

What he wanted must have been plain to her. She looked him in the eye and scrunched up her face, as if she smelled something off and wondered if he did, too. “This has been enough, don’t you think?”

“If you say so.”

“I—you don’t think so?”

“I am in no hurry at all for this evening to end.”

He could hardly have been plainer, and he saw her blanch. Then she laughed and touched him on the nose. “I like you, Reverend Hildebrandt. But I think it’s time for me to go.”

That Clem had found that very moment to knock on his door, before the cataclysm of being beeped on the nose had fully registered, was simply an embarrassment, not a setback, but it had been followed, in the church parking lot, after he and Clem had dug out her Buick, by yet another advance. Frances beckoned him over and said, “It’s probably good he came when he did. Things were getting a little tensy-tense.”

“I’m sorry I tried to keep you. I should be grateful you donated as much time as you did.”

“Mission accomplished. Deliverables delivered.”

“I truly am grateful,” he said with feeling.

“Oh, pooh. I’m grateful, too. But if you really want to show your gratitude…”

“Yes.”

“You could go and talk to Rick. It looked like he was still in his office.”

“Talk to him now?”

“No time like the present.”

It seemed to Russ that any other time would be better than the present.

“I’m serious about going to Arizona,” she said, “and it won’t be half as rewarding if you aren’t there. I know that sounds selfish, but I’m not just being selfish. I hate to see you holding on to a grudge.”

“I’ll—see what I can do.”

“Good. I’ll be waiting. I want you to call me and tell me how it goes.”

“Call you on the telephone.”

“Is there some other kind of calling? I suppose I could ask you to drop by, but who knows what kind of reefer madness you’d be walking into.”

“Seriously, Frances. You should not be doing that experiment by yourself.”

“Okay, I’ll make sure to have a pastor present. I was going to say a pastor and a physician, but maybe we can do without the physician. I suspect he wouldn’t approve of—you.”

Russ didn’t know what to say. Was the heart surgeon still a threat?

“Anyway,” she said, “I hope you’ll make peace with Rick. Until you do, you’re not allowed to call me.” She shifted her car into forward gear. “Ha, listen to her. Giving ultimatums to a pastor. Who does she think she is?”

And away she went.

Russ had once devoted a Sunday sermon to Jesus’s disturbing prophesy to Peter at the Last Supper—his prediction that his most faithful disciple would thrice, before the cock crowed, deny that he knew him. The conclusion Russ had drawn from Peter’s fulfillment of the prophesy, and from the tears he then shed for his betrayal of his Lord, was that the prophesy had in fact been a profound parting gift. Jesus had told Peter, in effect, that he knew that Peter was only human; was fearful of worldly censure and punishment. The prophesy was his assurance that he would still be there in Peter at the moment when Peter most bitterly failed him—would always be there, would always understand him, always love him, in spite of his human weakness. In Russ’s interpretation, Peter had wept not simply with remorse but with gratitude for the assurance.

Though the comparison was profane, Russ had been reminded of Peter’s denials when he denied to Clem, at least three times, that he lusted after Mrs. Cottrell. Frances was his joy of the season—she’d beeped him on the nose!—and he ought to have been shouting the good news from every rooftop, but Clem’s accusations had caught him off guard. The accusations, and even more the crazy talk of Vietnam, had reeked of adolescent moral absolutism. Clem was too young to understand that, although commandments were important, the callings of the heart amounted to a higher law. This had been Christ’s revision of the Covenant, his message of love, and Russ regretted having lacked the courage to level with his son and make an example of his own heart’s calling for Frances. Clem needed to be cured of his absolutism. By denying his feelings, Russ had done a disservice not only to them but arguably to his son as well.

Left alone in his office, he sat at his desk and tried to clear his head, telling himself that Clem might yet change his mind or fail to be drafted, and that, in any case, with American infantry no longer in combat, his risk of physical injury was low, so that he could devote his thoughts again to Frances. His outing with her hadn’t exceeded his wildest dreams, because it hadn’t ended with her sliding her hands inside his sheepskin coat and gazing up into his eyes, but it had come pretty close. She’d given him a dozen reasons to hope, and the tensy-tension she’d alluded to, in the parking lot, was unmistakably sexual.

The tension was still in him, palpable in the rapid beating of his heart. He’d never profaned the church by abusing himself in his office, but he was so deeply in the thrall of Frances that he was tempted to do it now. Turn out the light, lower his zipper, and declare his allegiance. Beneath his feet was a bass rhythm from the function hall, so blurred and diffracted that it was more of a random hum. Slipping in beneath his door was the attenuated smoke of countless concert cigarettes. The church was already profaned; there was license in the air. But the thought of Rick Ambrose stayed his hand.

Heart beating in a less agreeable way, he stood and opened his door. He couldn’t help hoping that Ambrose had gone home—had spared him from taking any action until after the holidays. But Ambrose’s door was still ajar. The very light spilling out of it was hateful to Russ. The last time he’d set foot in that office, three years ago, he’d been accused of coming on to Sally Perkins, and Ambrose had stabbed him in the back.

He closed his own door again and sat down to pray.

Heavenly Father, I come to you seeking the spirit of forgiveness. Already, as you know, I’ve broken your commandments by following my heart, and I pray you’ll forgive me for wanting to experience more joy in your Creation—to more fully rejoice in the life you’ve given me. What I need now is to find forgiveness in myself. Earlier tonight, when I felt moved to make peace with my enemy, I heard your Son speaking in my heart, and I allowed myself to hope that you were working your will through Frances. But now I’ve lost hold of the impulse. Now I worry that what I heard speaking wasn’t love of your Son but simply lust for Frances—a selfish wish to be with her in Arizona. Now I worry that “making peace” without love in my heart will only compound my offenses against you. I’m alone with my doubts and my weakness, and I beg you, humbly, to instill me again with the spirit of Christmas. Please help me sincerely want to forgive Rick.

He knew better than to expect a direct response. Prayer was an inflection of the soul in God’s direction, an inner movement. God’s answer, if it came at all, would seem to him his own idea. The thing to do was wait quietly and make himself receptive to it.

The first words that came to him were lacerating. Do you have any idea how embarrassing it is to be your son? In hindsight, of all the abuses Clem had rained on him, this was the hardest to dismiss, because it seemed to refer to more than just Russ’s weakness for Frances. It was an explicit eruption of a disrespect that had been building in Clem for several years. Russ had attributed the disrespect to adolescence, but it came to him now, all at once, that his humiliation at the hands of Rick Ambrose had been painful not only to him. The humiliation must have been painful to his son as well. He’d been too preoccupied with his own pain to see it.

At the humiliating fellowship meeting, the Clem who’d stood up to defend him against Sally Perkins and Laura Dobrinsky was still the Clem he knew and loved. But Clem had become less and less recognizable since then. He’d grossly overstepped at Thanksgiving, styling himself as Becky’s defender, ordering Russ to let her make her own decision about her inheritance. And now he wanted to go to Vietnam. What had happened to the boy who’d marched against the war’s immorality? Even allowing for his absolutism, even granting the validity of his point about student deferments, it made little sense to join the army when the war was winding down and he wasn’t saving some other boy’s life, just derailing his own. As an act of principle, it didn’t add up. He was clearly doing it to hurt his father.

How terribly Russ must have embarrassed him. It was all very well to be privately deplorable, cowering in his office, nursing his grudge, creeping through the attic for fear of running into Ambrose. He could bear the private shame; he could square his own accounts with God. But to be so deplorable in his son’s eyes? He saw that if he only thought of Frances he would never sincerely forgive Ambrose, because the impulse was impure. It was hopelessly tangled up with his desire to (in Clem’s outrageous word) bone her. But if he performed the act of forgiveness as a gift to Clem? To make himself a father more worthy of respect?

Keeping his eyes half shut, to protect his fragile idea, he left his office and went up the hallway to the hateful door. With someone’s volition, his own or God’s, he knocked.

The response was immediate and sharp. “Yep.”

Russ pushed the door farther open. Ambrose, seated at his desk, looked over his shoulder. To judge from his expression, Russ might have been a blood-soaked apparition.

“We need to talk,” he said.

“Um—sure,” Ambrose said. “Come in.”

Russ shut the door and sat down on the sofa where the young crowd received its counseling. Its springs were so shot that his knees ended up higher than his head. He shifted to the edge of a cushion, trying to gain height, but the sofa insisted on his being lower than Ambrose. And just like that, in no time at all, despite his loving intentions, he was engulfed in hatred. Engulfed in the misery of being made to feel smaller than a man half his age. There was a reason he’d shunned Ambrose for three years. It was only in the madness of Frances that he’d forgotten. She had no concept of the enormity of what she’d asked of him.

“I suppose,” he said stiffly, “I should begin with an apology.”

Ambrose was now glowering. “You can skip it.”

“No, I have to say it. It’s long overdue. I’ve been—childish—and I apologize for that. I don’t expect you to forgive me, but I apologize.”

The words rang completely hollow. Not only did he not expect to be forgiven, he didn’t even want to be. He struggled to find a way around his hatred, but it had grown so large in three years, and thinking of Clem helped him not at all.

“So,” Ambrose said. “What can I do for you?”

Russ leaned back on the sofa and looked at the ceiling. He wanted to be gone, but to run away now, it seemed to him, would be to admit that he would never have Frances, never regain Clem’s respect. He opened his mouth to see what he might say. “What do you make of all this?”

“All this what.”

“You, me, the situation. What do you make of it?”

Ambrose sighed. “I think it’s a misfortune. I won’t pretend I don’t blame you for it, but I understand that your pride was badly wounded. To the extent I made it worse, I regret it. I apologized to you at the time. I can apologize again if you’d like.”

“No. Skip it.”

“Then tell me what I can do for you.”

The tokens of love and adulation in Ambrose’s office had proliferated since Russ was last in it. Above the desk were poems and messages in female handwriting, on pages ripped from spiral notebooks. Hundreds of snapshots were thumbtacked on top of one another, teen faces peeking out from the lower strata. Silk-screened posters now entirely covered one wall, right up to the ceiling. Feathers and rocks and carved sticks and scraps of watercolor painting crowded two long shelves. The cup of Ambrose ranneth over.

“I don’t even know how it happened,” Russ said. “How I came to hate you so much. It goes way beyond pride—it’s basically consumed my life, and I don’t understand it. How I can be a servant of God and feel this way. Just being in this office is a torture. The only thing I can say in my defense is that I can’t control it. I can’t think of you for five seconds without feeling sick. I can’t even look at you now—your face makes me sick.”

He sounded like a little girl running to her parents with hurt feelings. Mean Rick made me feel bad.

“If it’s any comfort,” Ambrose said, “I don’t like you, either. I used to have a lot of respect for you, but that’s long gone.”

Beneath them, the bass vibrations crescendoed and stopped. That Russ could hear the crowd’s cheering at all, at this distance, suggested that it was very large. It really should have been a comfort to know that his hatred was reciprocated, but now it only reminded him of Clem’s disrespect.

“Be that as it may,” he said, “we can’t keep doing this to the church. It’s just too obscene. I don’t know how to get out of it, but we have to find a way to be more—civil.”

“It was brave of you to knock on my door. To take that step.”

“Oh my God.” Russ clutched at the air and made his hands into fists. “Talk about things that make me sick. That little tremor in your voice when you tell someone they’re brave. As if you’re the world’s leading authority on courage. As if your opinion is of the utmost importance.”

Ambrose laughed. “That was a brave thing to say.”

“I used to love you, Rick. I thought we were friends.” Again the hurt little girl.

“It was good while it lasted,” Ambrose said.

“No. I don’t think so. I think I was always basically a fraud. I had no business trying to be a youth minister—I was never any good at it. And then you came into my church, and you’re right, it was a blow to my pride. How good at it you were. It was stupid of me to envy that, because I’m good at other things—things you’re not good at. But none of them seemed to matter.”

“I’ll have you know I’ve gotten better at carpentry and plumbing.”

“You’ll never be as good as me. I’ve got any number of skills to feel good about. But all I have to do is think of you, and—none of them matters.”

Russ glanced at Ambrose, caught the gaze of his dark eyes, and quickly looked away again.

“I feel for you, Russ. But you probably don’t want to hear that.”

“You’re damn right I don’t. It’s easier for me if you’re an asshole. Which, by the way, I think you are. I think you’re a raging egomaniac. I think Crossroads for you is one big power trip. I think you get off on having all the pretty girls lined up outside your office. You’re an even bigger fraud than I was, but it doesn’t matter, because the kids still love you. You really do help them, because they’re too stupid to see through you. And then I don’t just hate you—I hate the kids for loving you.”

“What if I told you that I worry about the same thing? That I wrestle with these questions all the time?”

“That would be interesting. It’s interesting to imagine you as a person more or less like me, trying to be good, trying to serve God, but constantly doubting yourself. Rationally, I ought to be able to build on that and find a way to forgive you. But as soon as I put your face to the person I’m imagining, I’m sick with hatred. All I can see is you having it both ways. Getting off on your power and feeling good about the fact that it worries you. Being an asshole and congratulating yourself on your ‘honesty’ about it. And maybe everyone does that. Maybe everyone finds a way to feel good about their fundamental sinfulness, but it doesn’t make me hate you any less. It’s the other way around. I hate you so much that I start hating all of humanity, including myself. The idea that you and I are in any way alike—it’s disgusting.”

“Wow.” Ambrose shook his head, as if in wonder. “I knew things were bad, but I had no idea.”

“Do you see what I’ve been dealing with?”

“I guess I should be honored that I loom so large in your imagination.”

“Really? I thought you were the Second Coming. I’d have thought you’d be used to looming large.”

“But what you’re saying now, the way you’re speaking to me—there’s a level to this that I never saw when you were in the group. A level of honesty, vulnerability. If you could have opened yourself up like this even once … It’s kind of amazing to see it now.”

“Yeah, screw that. Screw you. I mean, Jesus Christ, Rick—you approve of my honesty? Who the hell are you to approve of me? I’m an ordained minister—I’m twice your age! I’m supposed to sit here and be grateful that some posturing upper-middle-class asshole from Shaker Heights approves of me? When he couldn’t care less if I approve of him?”

“You misunderstood me.”

“I’ve been thinking about Joseph and his brothers. I know how you feel about citing Scripture, but you’ll remember that the Bible is very clear on who the bad guys were. The older brothers sold Joseph into slavery, because why? Because they were envious. Because the Lord was with Joseph. That’s the refrain in Genesis: The Lord was with Joseph. He was the wunderkind, the favorite son, the person everyone went to with their dreams, because he had the gift from God. Everywhere he went, people put him in charge, they raised him up and praised him. And boy, did his approval matter to them. When I used to read Genesis as a young person, it seemed crystal clear who was good and who was bad. But you know what? When I read that book now, Joseph makes me sick. My sympathies are completely with the brothers, because God didn’t choose them. It was all preordained, and they were the unlucky ones, and it’s incredible: I hate you so much, I’ve started hating God!”

“Yikes.”

“I ask myself what I did to offend Him, what kind of abominations I committed, that I deserved the curse of you coming to this church. Or whether it was just His plan when He created me. That I be the bad guy. How am I supposed to love a God like that?”

Ambrose leaned forward, bringing his head closer to the height of Russ’s.

“Try to think,” he said. “Let’s both try to think. Is there anything I could say to you that wouldn’t set you off? I can’t express sympathy, I can’t say I admire you, I can’t apologize. It seems like literally any human response I could give you, you’ll turn it against me.”

“That’s exactly right.”

“Then what did you come here for? What do you want?”

“I want you to be a person you could never be.”

“What kind of person is that?”

Russ considered the question. It was a relief to finally air his feelings, but he was following a familiar pattern. Later on—soon—he would be mortified by everything he’d said. For better or worse, this was who he was. When he saw the answer to Ambrose’s question, he went ahead and spoke it.

“I want you to be a person who needs something. Who cares about my approval. You ask me what you could say that wouldn’t set me off, well, there is one thing. You could say you loved me, the way I used to love you.”

Ambrose sat up straight again.

“Don’t worry,” Russ said. “Even if you could say it, I wouldn’t believe you. You never loved me, and both of us know it.”

Afraid that he might cry, like a little girl, he closed his eyes. It seemed unfair that he’d been punished for loving Ambrose. Punished for loving Clem, too. Punished even for loving Marion, because she was the one person who loved him in return, and she was the very person he seemed fated to injure. Shouldn’t his capacity for love, which was the essence of Christ’s gospel, have earned him a modicum of credit with God?

“Wait here,” Ambrose said.

Russ heard him get up and leave the office. Even on his worst days, especially on his worst days, his unhappiness had been a portal to God’s mercy. Now he could find no reward in it at all. He couldn’t even count on the reward of being allowed to call Frances, because he’d failed at the task she’d set him.

Ambrose returned holding a collection plate from the sanctuary. When he crouched and set it on the floor, Russ saw that it was filled with water. Ambrose loosened the laces of the work shoes Russ was wearing. He’d bought them at Sears. “Lift your foot,” Ambrose said.

“Don’t.”

Ambrose lifted the foot himself and took off the shoe. Russ squirmed, but Ambrose held his leg and pulled off his sock. The ritual was too sacred, had too many biblical associations, for Russ to resist it by kicking him away.

“Rick. Really.”

Intent on his work, Ambrose pulled off the other shoe and sock.

“Seriously,” Russ said. “You want to play Jesus?”

“By that logic, anything we ever do to emulate him is grandiose.”

“I don’t want you washing my feet.”

“The gesture wasn’t original to him. It had a more general meaning, as an act of humility.”

The water in the plate was very cold—it must have come from a drinking fountain. Russ watched powerlessly while Ambrose, on his knees, his black hair hanging in his eyes, washed one foot and then the other. He took a flannel shirt from the back of his desk chair and gently dried Russ’s feet with it. Then, leaning forward, head bowed, he grasped Russ’s hand.

“What are you doing now?”

“I’m praying for you.”

“I don’t want your prayers.”

“Then I’m praying for myself. Shut the fuck up.”

Russ knew better than to try to pray his way out of his hatred—he’d tried it a hundred times to no avail. What moved him now was the hand grasping his. It was slender, black-haired, still youthful. It was just a human hand, a young man’s hand, and it reminded him of Clem. His chest began to shake. Ambrose tightened his grip; and Russ surrendered to his weakness.

He must have wept for ten minutes, with Ambrose kneeling at his feet. The goodness of Christ, the meaning of Christmas, was in him again. He’d forgotten its sweetness, but now he remembered. Remembered that when he was bathed in God’s goodness it was enough to simply remain in it, experience the joy of it, not think of anything, just be there. When Ambrose finally released his hand, Russ clutched at it. He didn’t want the moment to end.

Ambrose went away with the collection plate, and Russ put on his socks and shoes. His previous experiences of grace, most of them in his adolescence and his early twenties, had left his mind in a state of calm clarity, a kind of early-morning stillness that daily life would soon dispel. With the same clarity, now, he accepted that the Lord was with Ambrose.

“I feel better,” he announced when Ambrose returned.

“Then I’m not going to say another word. Let’s not mess it up.”

Standing up, Russ was reminded of how short his nemesis was. He looked like a long-haired boy with a bandito costume mustache. Russ suspected that his hatred was merely subdued, not vanquished, but his clarity was holding. He felt no envy of the shelves of gifts the teenagers had given Ambrose. On the lower shelf was a long feather, doubtless from Arizona, the tail feather of a hawk. He picked it up and twirled the quill between his fingers. It was better to have nothing. Better to be like the Navajos, the Diné, as they called themselves, in Diné Bikéyah, among the four sacred mountains. The Diné had nothing. In their hogans, they lived with almost nothing. Even in better times, before the Europeans came, they had never had much. But spiritually they were the richest people he’d ever known.

“I want to go to Arizona,” he said.

 

 

 

Becky was literally following in Laura Dobrinsky’s steps. Behind the drugstore, she found a single set of deep footprints leading up a flight of wooden stairs. At the top of them, outside a weather-beaten door, she looked down to make sure Clem hadn’t followed her. She was very afraid of Laura, but she had no time to waste. She knocked on the door and waited. Hearing nothing from within, she knocked again and tried the doorknob. It wasn’t locked.

Stepping inside, into a kitchenette, she saw Laura kneeling on a floor carpeted in tangerine shag. She was wearing her biker jacket and stuffing a fiberfill sleeping bag into a nylon sack. Beside it was a jumble of toiletries, a stack of books, and a military-style backpack, a sweater sleeve dangling from its mouth. An electrical space heater was scenting the air with burned dust.

“Laura?”

Laura stiffened, not turning her head.

“I know you don’t want to see me,” Becky said, “but this isn’t about me. This is about Tanner’s career. He really needs you to play tonight. Will you please do that?”

“Get the fuck out of my house.”

“I talked to the agent. I talked to Gig, and you know why he’s here? Because of you. I mean, you’re such an amazing singer. I know you must be hurt, but—Gig’s dying to hear you.”

“I know you must be hurt,” Laura echoed in a babyish voice. She punched the last of the sleeping bag into the nylon sack and tightened the drawstring.

“I’m sorry,” Becky said, moving toward her. “I wish I could take everything back. I wish I’d known yesterday—that there’s a right path. A right way to live. I was on the wrong path.”

“And praise be to Jesus for showing you the way.”

Becky struggled to forbear. “My point is, you shouldn’t take it out on Tanner. It’s my fault, not his. Can’t you take one hour to help him when he truly needs you?”

“Nope.”

“Why not?”

“Because I’m splitting. Going to San Francisco.”

“I’m saying right now, though.”

“Right now is when I’m doing it.”

“Now? There’s like a foot of snow out there.”

“No better time to thumb a ride. Everybody wants to help a stranger.”

Laura loosened straps on the backpack and pushed the sleeping bag under them. Tanner had said it himself—she was radical.

“I just think,” Becky said, “if you cared enough about Tanner to be with him for however long—”

“Four years, sister.”

“Don’t you still want the best for him?”

Laura looked up through her pink lenses. “Are you out of your mind?”

“No, I get that you’re angry. I get that I did a bad thing. But we both love Tanner—”

“Oh really. You love him.”

“I—think so.”

“Well, isn’t that the sweetest thing.”

Laura rooted in the pile of toiletries, and something came flying at Becky’s face. She caught it defensively. It was a toothpaste tube, halfway rolled up from the bottom. Seeing the word Gynol, she dropped it. Not toothpaste.

“A little present for you,” Laura said. “Unless—Jesus. You’re probably on the Pill.”

Becky’s hand felt dirtied. She rubbed it on her coat.

“Not that a cheerleader would care, but you do realize you’re just buying into the male-industrial complex? Messing with your hormones for their pleasure? There’s nothing a dick loves better than trouble-free access. Even Tanner tried to get me on the Pill. You’re going to make him sorry he ever bothered with me.”

The room was underheated, but Becky was sweating. The gagging sensation in her chest was like the carsickness of her childhood, the prospect of sex unfolding like a mountain road ahead of her, a hundred curves coming to make her even sicker. She’d gotten into the car of being Tanner’s. Now she wished it would slow down.

“My point is,” she said unsteadily, “he really needs you to play tonight.”

“Or wait. Wait.” The eyes behind the pink lenses narrowed. “Have you even had sex?”

“Have I—?”

“Oh my God. Of course you haven’t. No, please, no, the Bible says you shouldn’t touch me there.” Laura laughed. “Not that being a churchgoer ever stopped our boy. He’s quite the frisky Christian. You’d better be ready for that.”

The cold sweat of carsickness.

“Or, no, I hope you’re not ready. I hope the only thing you let him do with you is sing hymns. Serve him right.”

“Please,” Becky said. “We need to go right now. The agent is there, he came to hear you, and I just think—we should go.”

“I told you to get the fuck out of here.”

“Please, Laura.”

Laura sprang to her feet and came at Becky. Why Becky dropped to her knees, she couldn’t have said. Maybe she didn’t want to be so much taller, maybe it was a gesture of supplication. But, finding herself kneeling again, she bowed her head and pressed her palms together. Please help Laura, she prayed. Please forgive me.

Laura shrieked. “What the fuck? Are you fucking kidding me?”

Becky kept her head bowed. From above her came a sputtering, and then a cold hand was in her hair, grabbing a fistful of it, violating her physical sanctity, trying to yank her to her feet. She could feel hairs tearing from their roots, but she refused to stand up. The hand let go. An instant later, she was walloped in the ear. The blow was vicious, there was wristbone in it, and sparks in her vision—stars. She saw stars. The blow that followed was neck-wrenching, brain-shaking. Worse than the pain was the sheer fact of violence. No one had ever hit her. She squeezed her eyes shut and tried to keep praying.

Now Laura was kneeling, too. Her fingertips brushed Becky’s ear, which felt skinless and hot. “Becky, I’m sorry. Are you all right?”

Please, God. Please, God.

“I’m—shit. I’m no better than my old man.”

At the change in Laura’s voice, which might have been an answer to her prayer, something stirred in Becky’s core—the same opening-up that she’d experienced in the sanctuary. God was still there. She concentrated, not wanting to lose her connection to Him. But Laura spoke again.

“You know about that, right? Tanner told you?”

Becky shook her head.

“He didn’t tell you why I moved in with him? With his family?”

It was news to Becky that Laura had lived with the Evanses. Never mind the why of it.

“I know what it’s like to be hit,” Laura said. “I’m sorry I did that to you.”

“It’s all right. I did a bad thing to you, too.”

“That’s exactly how my old man made me feel. Like I deserved it.” Laura touched Becky’s shoulder. “Are you really all right?”

“Yes.”

“An open hand can do a lot of damage. Like, I’m partially deaf in one ear. It was Tanner’s mom who noticed. She was my piano teacher, and now she’s basically my mother. The other one—I can’t even be in the same room with her. He still hits her, and she still thinks she deserves it.”

Becky felt grateful—to God—that Laura was speaking more kindly, but beneath the gratitude were the beginnings of a grievance with Tanner. He hadn’t told her that Laura’s father had beaten her; that Laura had lived with his family; that she was practically his sister. If Becky had understood the depths of what she was stepping into, she would have been more careful. The harm she’d proceeded to cause was partly her fault, but it seemed to her that it was partly also Tanner’s.

“I’m so sorry,” she said.

“It’s just the left ear.”

“No, I mean, about everything. I’m sorry about everything. I’m thinking—maybe I should step aside. Leave the two of you alone.”

“Too late for that, sister. He’s in love with you.”

Again the carsick vista.

“I asked him point-blank,” Laura said. “That was his answer.”

“But it’s only because I threw myself at him. If I just went away…”

“That’s not how it works.”

“But I know he still has feelings for you. If I just—”

“Mess with his emotions and walk away? That truly would be a cunt move. Not that I can’t see you doing it.”

Loudly, or angrily, it seemed, a telephone rang. The phone was on the wall in the kitchenette. Laura gave it an uninterested glance.

“I’m the one who’s going to split,” she said. “I should have done it years ago.” She stood up and added, “I’m sorry I hit you.”

She returned to her backpack, and the phone continued its angry ringing. Becky, who came from a family where ignoring a phone was unthinkable, jumped up and answered. She heard the sound of a crowd and Tanner shouting over it.

“Becky? What are you doing? I’ve been—Gig’s here—we have to play. What are you doing?”

“Just one second, okay?” She pressed the receiver to her chest and walked it toward Laura. “It’s Tanner,” she said. “They need to start. Will you come with me? Please?”

The fact that Laura, after a moment, made a petulant, hand-flinging gesture of assent—the fact that she would never have done this if she hadn’t hit Becky, which wouldn’t have happened if Becky hadn’t fallen to her knees to pray, which wouldn’t have happened if the spirit of Christ hadn’t brought her to Laura’s apartment, which wouldn’t have happened if she hadn’t found God in the sanctuary, which wouldn’t have happened if she hadn’t smoked marijuana—seemed to Becky, as she followed Laura down the snowy stairs behind the drugstore, the most beautiful proof of God’s mysterious workings. She’d done bad things, she’d accepted her punishment, and now she had her reward. She could feel a whole new life, a life in faith, beginning.

“This is so stupid,” Laura said as they strode along the sidewalk. “I hope you understand what this is costing me.”

The cold air stung Becky’s battered ear. She didn’t dare speak, lest Laura change her mind.

The crowd in the function hall was restive, the stage dimly bathed in purple light. Laura went straight to the door that led backstage while Becky hung back near the vestibule. Seeing the food tables, which were now fully denuded, she understood how considerably stoned she’d still been when she thought she was over being stoned. She was also reminded unpleasantly of Clem.

Gig Benedetti came ambling over to her, smiling. “We meet again.”

“Yeah, hi.”

“I can’t say I’m loving the level of organization here. By which I mean it’s rather low.”

“Laura wasn’t feeling well.”

Was there a commandment in the Bible against lying? Maybe not, but the truth would come out anyway. She wondered if, having performed one amazing deed, she might perform another.

“So, actually, though,” she said. “Actually, here’s the thing. Laura’s quitting the band.”

Gig laughed. “Seriously?”

“Um, yeah.”

“The act I came to hear included a female vocalist.”

“I know. But I’ve heard them play without her, and it’s actually better. Tanner really takes over when he doesn’t have to share the stage. It’s his band, not hers.”

“Is it possible you’re not the most objective critic?”

By instinct, her hand went to her hair and lifted it out from her coat collar. She gave it a luxuriant shake, nothing God could disapprove of. It wasn’t her fault if Gig thought she was a good-looking girl.

“If you really want to know,” she said, “I’m the reason Laura’s quitting. I’m going to feel very shitty if you don’t sign them because of me.” Likewise instinctual was the note of hurt in her voice. She shook her hair again. “I know it sounds like I’m asking you a favor, but Tanner’s the one with ambition. Laura’s just an amateur.”

Gig narrowed his eyes. “What’s your deal?”

“What do you mean?”

“Why am I talking to you and not him?”

“I don’t know. Just—if you sign the band, you’ll be seeing a whole lot of me.”

To really flirt, she should have looked him in the eye, but she couldn’t do it.

“That’s a consideration,” he said.

 

 

 

After the blizzard came a starry-skied chill. The parsonage was dark, but the snow on the driveway was furrowed with new tracks. As Clem followed them toward the back door, he caught a whiff of tobacco smoke. He stopped and sniffed the air. He was out of cigarettes, having emptied his pack after his fight with his father. He’d intended to quit smoking in New Prospect, but that was before Becky told him to go to hell.

The smoke was coming from the parsonage itself. Sitting on the front porch, on the firewood box, in a bulky coat, was—his mother? He was tempted to continue up the driveway, slip inside, go straight to bed. But he saw that his father had been right: he hadn’t considered his mother’s feelings when he wrote to the draft board. Worse yet, he saw that he needed to tell her, right now, what he’d done. Better that she hear it from him than from the old man.

He retraced his steps down the driveway. By the time he reached the porch, her cigarette had vanished and she was on her feet.

“Sweetie,” she said. “There you are.”

He leaned down and received a smoky kiss. He knew she’d smoked as a teenager, but that was thirty years ago.

“Yes,” she said, “I was having a cigarette. You caught me.”

“Actually—can I bum one?”

She laughed. “This is getting ridiculous.”

He didn’t know what she meant, but a laugh was better than a lecture. “I’m going to quit,” he said. “Tomorrow. But—just one?”

“The things I didn’t know.” She shook her head and reached into her pocket. “Filter? Nonfilter?”

The quicker to light up, he took a cigarette from the pack that was already open. Filterless Lucky Strikes. In the Arctic air, the smoke was abstract and nearly flavorless. He fastened his eyes on the white street, to make himself an abstraction, and told his mother about the letter and the reason he’d sent it.

Only when he’d finished did he turn to see how she was taking the news. In her hands was a coffee cup with cigarette ends in it. As if awakened by his silence, she looked down at the cup. It seemed to surprise her. She handed it to him and said, “I’m going inside.”

He didn’t know what exactly he’d expected, but he’d expected more than no response at all. He extinguished his Lucky and followed her into the house. His bags were at the bottom of the stairs, where he’d dropped them. The Christmas tree was dark.

In the kitchen, his mother had crouched by a seldom-opened cabinet.

“Mom, are you all right?”

She stood up with a bottle of J&B scotch. “Why do you ask? Is there a bottle of liquor in my hand? Oh, why, yes, there is.” She laughed and upended the bottle over a glass. Barely a finger of scotch came out. She drank it off. “What do you want me to say? That I’m happy my son wants to fight in that war?”

“I’m not going to be morally half-assed about it.”

She lowered her chin and fixed him with a dubious look, inviting him to amend what he’d said. When he didn’t, she crouched again by the cabinet.

“I can’t deal with this,” she said. “Not tonight. If you want me to worry about you every hour of the next two years, it’s your decision. It would have been nice to have a little warning, but—it’s your decision.”

Bottles clanked as she examined their discolored labels.

“This will devastate your father,” she added. “I imagine you know that.”

“Yeah, I saw him at church. He’s pretty mad.”

“He’s at the church?”

Mrs. Cottrell and her beckoning finger were still fresh in Clem’s mind, and he didn’t owe the old man anything. The question was whether to spare his mother’s feelings.

“He was with a parishioner,” he said carefully. “We had to dig her car out.”

“Let me guess. Frances Cottrell.”

It was dizzying to hear the name from his mother. He wondered if she was smoking and drinking because she knew all about Mrs. Cottrell. Knew more, perhaps, than he did.

“Do you want something?” she said. “Food? A drink? There’s still some bourbon here. Some ancient vermouth.”

“I might have a sandwich.”

She stood up with a bottle and squinted at the dram remaining in it. “Why does this happen? Why is it that, when a person finally really needs a drink, every damn bottle is empty? It can’t be random. If it were random, some of the bottles would be full.”

Something was definitely not right with her.

“Actually, no,” she said. “I suspect it’s your brother.” She poured the dram into her glass. “It’s sort of heartbreaking when you think about it. He keeps going back and taking a little more, but he can’t leave an empty bottle. How much can he take without making it officially empty? I don’t know whether to laugh or cry.”

The state she was in was too much for Clem to process. In the relative warmth of the house, now that he’d told his parents what he’d done, his exhaustion was overwhelming. He sat down at the kitchen table and rested his head on his arms. He thought he might fall asleep instantly, but he’d passed that point. The exhaustion was so painful that it kept him awake. He heard his mother pouring herself a third drink, opening the refrigerator, handling utensils. He heard her setting a plate on the table.

“You should eat something,” she said.

With extreme exertion, he sat up. The sandwich on the plate was ham and Swiss on rye. He was grateful that she’d made it, too sick with exhaustion to want it. He thought of the cinnamon toast that Sharon had offered him that morning, the eggs she’d scrambled him on other mornings. He thought of how happy she’d been to see him, how full of plans for their future. The pain behind his eyes became unbearable.

“Oh, honey, Clem, sweetie, what is it? Why are you crying?”

He had so much misery to express and only one way to do it. When his mother put her arms around him, he struggled to maintain some shred of strength and dignity. But, really, he had none.

It was interesting to note that, when his tears subsided, the sandwich looked more appealing. He also wanted a cigarette. These were the same appetites that returned after sexual release.

“Will you tell me what’s wrong?” his mother said. “Do you not really want to be in the army?”

Someone had left a paper napkin on the table. He blew his nose with it, and his mother sat down across from him. In her glass was some brownish vermouth.

“We can call the draft board in the morning,” she said. “You can say you changed your mind. No one will think any less of you.”

“No. I’m just worn out.”

“But that can affect your judgment. Maybe if you got some rest—this is such a crazy thing.”

“It’s not crazy. It’s the one thing I’m sure about.”

From his mother’s silence, he could tell that she was disappointed. Her way as a parent had always been to offer suggestions, hoping he would see that they were sensible, rather than telling him what to do.

“Do you remember what you told me?” he said. “That sex without commitment is a bad idea?”

“Something like that, yes.”

“Well, so, I’ve been with a girl. A woman. It’s been the most amazing thing.”

His mother’s eyes widened as if he’d stuck her with a needle.

“But you were right,” he said. “If there’s no commitment, people get hurt. And that’s exactly what happened. She’s horribly hurt.”

The misery rose in him, and his mother reached across the table for his hand. Not wanting to cry again, he pulled it away.

“We broke up,” he said. “This morning. Or I broke up with her. She didn’t want to.”

“Oh, honey.”

“I had to—I’m leaving school.”

“You don’t have to leave school.”

“I did a horribly cruel thing to her.”

The misery overcame him. While he struggled to master it, his mother stood up and went to the stove. He heard a whoosh and smelled smoke. The weirdness of her smoking brought him back out of himself.

“Don’t you want to go outside?”

“No,” she said. “This is my house, too.”

“Why are you smoking?”

“I’m sorry. It’s been one thing after another today. I’m sorry you’re hurt. I’m sorry about—what’s her name?”

“Sharon.”

His mother drew hard on the cigarette. “It’s just hard for me to understand. If you were happy with her, why are you leaving school?”

“Because my lottery number is nineteen.”

“But why now? Why not wait another semester?”

“Because I’m too crazy about her to keep my grades up. As long as I’m there, I only want to be with her.”

“But that’s—” His mother frowned. “Are you quitting school to get away from her?”

“I’m pulling a B average. I don’t deserve a deferment.”

“No, no, no. You’re not thinking straight. Do you love her?”

“It doesn’t matter.”

“Do you love her?”

“Yes. I mean—yes. But it doesn’t matter. It’s too late.”

His mother went to the sink and ran water on her cigarette.

“It’s never too late,” she said. “If you love her, and she loves you, then don’t leave her. It’s as simple as that. Do not run away from the person you love.”

“I know, but…”

His mother wheeled around from the sink. A strange light was in her eyes. “It’s not right! There’s nothing more terrible you can do!”

He’d never felt afraid of her before. She’d always only been his mother, small and soft, ever-present but diffuse. His fear deepened when she went to the wall phone by the dining-room door and took the receiver off its hook. She thrust it in his face.

“Call her.”

“Mom?”

“Honey, just do it. You’ll feel better. I want you to call her and tell her you’re sorry. Please. She’ll take you back.”

The receiver was emitting a dial tone. His mother’s hand was shaking.

“Is Sharon with her family? Did she go home, too?”

“Tomorrow, I think.”

“Then tell her you want to come and see her. It’s fine with me.”

“Mom, it’s Christmas.”

“So what? You have my permission. I mean, honestly—is this where you want to be? Here?” She made a sweeping gesture with the receiver. “In this?”

The disgust in her voice was shocking. And yet she had a point. He really didn’t want to be in the parsonage, not after what Becky had said to him.

“It’s too late to go back,” he said. “She’s leaving in the morning.”

The receiver burst into an off-the-hook yammering.

“Then go there now,” his mother said.

 

 

 

Why Perry, late in the evening, was on the far side of the tracks, in the prospectless part of New Prospect where streets of sorry little houses dead-ended at the rail embankment, was a question answerable only in the narrowest pragmatic sense. To address the greater why of it required a framework of ratiocination whose pointlessness was now evident. As he trotted along Terminal Street, the snow squeaking beneath his feet, he felt pursued by an expanding black crater. Before it caught up and swallowed him, he needed to reach the house whose threshold he hadn’t expected to cross again. Under the circumstances, this seemed excusable.

The crater had appeared after he confessed to his mother that he’d sold contraband. Although the confession had been strategic, a matter of securing her complicity against the raging of his father, should his misconduct ever come to general light, he’d been prepared to shed some tears, as he’d done with impressive success at Crossroads, in order to be forgiven. But his mother hadn’t seemed to care. She hadn’t scolded him; hadn’t even asked questions. The effect, when he left her to her cigarette and went downstairs, had been to render him defenseless against the mental crater that had opened.

He’d set out in the snow for Ansel Roder’s house. Surely, if only tonight, he was permitted to get very high. The anticipation of toke after toke in the trusty seclusion of the Roder swimming-pool shed, the foretaste of deliberately massive excess, the imminence of futurity-banishing befuddlement, was giving him a boner that grew harder as he imagined the pleasure of servicing it, while extremely high, in the bathroom Roder shared with his skinny, non-bra-wearing sister, Annette, when she was home from college. Annette was dry of wit, a junior at Grinnell, and had an oily, rough complexion that only added to her allure. She was close to Perry’s ideal, female-wise, and seemed approximately as attainable to him as the Andromeda Galaxy.

Embarrassingly, Annette herself answered his ringing of the Roder doorbell. He couldn’t look at her face; could barely find the voice to ask for Ansel. In his cheap parka, his dorkoid rubbers, his arrant craving, he was every inch the repulsive little worm. All he could do was wait for her to turn away. His desperation to be high and by himself, in a locked bathroom, was approaching intolerable. Through the open front door, he saw scintillant orange in the Roder fireplace. The fireplace was outsized, manorial, and burned longer split logs than he’d seen anywhere else.

Roder, when he came to the door, barefoot, seemed pre-annoyed. “What do you want?”

“I’d like to come in,” Perry said. “If I may.”

“Not a good time. We’re playing canasta.”

“Canasta.”

“It’s a holiday tradition. It’s actually pretty fun.”

“You and your family are playing a card game.”

“Troll the ancient yuletide carol and the like. Yes.”

The Roders were even less a family unit than the Hildebrandts. Their doing a fun thing together was unusual to the point of seeming cosmically unjust. Without looking behind him, Perry could sense the dark crater widening toward him.

“Well, then,” he said, his throat thick with disappointment, “I wonder, if you have a second—I made a small error in judgment today. A miscalculation.”

“Seriously, man.” Roder began to close the door. “Not a good time.”

“If you could just quickly run and get me one of the bags. Help a friend.”

“We’re playing a game here.”

“You mentioned that. If you’d like, I can give you some cash.”

Roder made a face, as if repulsed by a worm.

“Ansel, come on. When have I ever come to you like this?”

“What is wrong with you?”

“I shouldn’t have mentioned money. That was a mistake—I’m sorry.”

Roder shut the door in his face. Out of reach, not fifty feet from where he stood, in a drawer in Roder’s bedroom, were three ounces of weed, schoolyard in quality but adequate to the task at hand, and he couldn’t even blame the cosmos. It was he who’d offended Roder. By proposing a deal today, he’d rendered glaring a fact heretofore overlookable in the bonhomie of being high, of Roder’s generosity and his own capacity to amuse. The fact was that he didn’t love Roder. He loved drugs.

Pursued by the crater’s edge, he made his way to First Reformed. Of the friends of his who might be holding, only Roder wasn’t in Crossroads, and so the concert was his only recourse. His mother had lost her mind. She’d been committed to a loony bin, her father had drowned himself, and she’d named these facts to Perry—named two outcomes that had lurked behind doors in his head which he’d never permitted himself to open, not even on the most sleepless of nights. And yet, as if with X-ray vision, telekinetic intelligence, he must have seen through the shut doors, because nothing she’d told him had surprised him. He’d had only a dull sense of recognition. The outcomes were ugly but not shocking; he knew their faces.

He would tell her nothing more. Not now, not ever. In a sense, the crater he was fleeing was his mother.

He’d hoped to find a party in the church parking lot, but he’d arrived too late—the lot was empty. Inside the function hall, at the rear margin of the crowd, a couple of Crossroads alumnae were dancing with a blissy sloppiness to the instrumental jam in “Wooden Ships,” performed by a band Perry recognized by general repute, and also from having silk-screened its name on the concert posters, as the Bleu Notes. Through shifting lanes in the crowd, he caught glimpses of the fabled Laura Dobrinsky frowning over an electric keyboard, studious in her syncopations, and a tall Afro’d guitarist vaguely moving his lips to his riffing, and Tanner Evans behaving more like a rock star, tossing his hair and making little lunges as he whaled away on rhythm. They sounded note for note like Crosby, Stills and Nash on their first record, and the crowd, unfortunately, was totally into it. Except for the dancing girls, all he could see was the backs of nodding heads. Disappointment was rising in his throat when someone touched him on the shoulder.

Of all the useless people, it was Larry Cottrell. Larry had done something dumb to his hair, overcombed it, and the result was to make everything else about him—jean jacket, straight-legged corduroys, hiking boots—seem similarly overconsidered. He spread his arms as if, Jesus Christ, he expected a hug. Perry turned toward the stage and craned his neck, pretending to be greatly interested in the band. Having admitted to his mother that he’d been a dealer, and thereby inoculated himself against paternal discovery, he no longer had anything to fear from Larry.

We are lea-ea-ving, came the refrain onstage. You don’t nee-ee-eed us.

Larry, undiscouraged, shouted into Perry’s ear. “Where were you?”

As in a game of chess, Perry saw that, unless he took bold action, his little pawn would be dogging him at every turn, complicating the task of finding drugs. Again the sense of cosmic unfairness. Again the recognition that he had no one but himself to blame.

What to do? A bold move came to him as it did on a chessboard, with a frisson of do-I-dare. He beckoned Larry to follow him, which Larry eagerly did, out into the deserted vestibule.

“I had a thought,” he said.

“What, what,” Larry said.

“We need to get drunk.”

Larry’s fingers went straight to the sebaceous sides of his nose. “Okay.”

“I assume your mother has a liquor shelf?”

The fingers rubbed. The nose sniffed sebum. The eyes were wide.

“I want you to go there now,” Perry said. “Take something she won’t notice, triple sec or crème de menthe. Any bottle that’s more or less full.”

“Yeah, um. What about the rules, though?”

“You can hide the bottle in a snowdrift—it won’t freeze. Will you do that for me?”

Larry was obviously scared. “You have to come with me.”

“No. Too suspicious. You can take however long it takes—I’ll wait.”

“I don’t know about this.”

Perry grasped the arms of his pawn and looked into his eyes. “Just do it. You’ll thank me for it later.”

To observe his power over Larry was to push back the edge of the crater. There was a kind of liberation in jettisoning all thought of being a good person. From the outer doorway, he watched Larry hustle across the parking lot.

While Laura Dobrinsky, now seated at the church’s baby grand piano, belted out a Carole King song, he returned to the crowd and maneuvered through it, stopping for a hug from a Crossroads girl who’d confessed to being awed by his vocabulary, and a hug from a girl who’d challenged him to be more emotionally open, and a hug from a girl with whom he’d improvised a skit about the hazards of dishonesty, to much approbation, and a hug from a girl who’d vouchsafed to him, in a dyad, that she’d gotten her first period before she turned eleven, and then a thumbs-up from the boy who’d helped him with the concert posters, and a friendly nod from no less an eminence than Ike Isner, whose face he’d once palpated, while blindfolded, in a trust exercise, and whose blind fingers had then palpated his own face. None of these people could see inside his cranium, all had been fooled into applauding his emotional candor and collectively propelling him, with a kind of gently pulsing group action, like macroscopic cilia, in the direction of belonging to the Crossroads inner circle. The hugs in particular were still pleasant, but the edge of the crater was creeping up on him again, now taking the form of a classic depressive question: What was the point? The inner circle had no actual power. It was merely the goal of an abstract game.

Near the corner of the stage, by an American flag, which the church for unknowable reasons felt obliged to display on a pole, he found all his old friends in one tight group. Bobby Jett and Keith Stratton were there with David Goya and his ill-complected girlfriend, Kim, and also Becky, by whose side stood an older man, unfamiliar to Perry, lavishly sideburned and wearing a belted orange leather coat, who might have stepped off the set of The Mod Squad. Kim promptly hugged Perry, and he was pleased to detect a whiff of skunk in her hair. Where there was dope, there was hope. Becky only waved to him, but not unkindly. She looked taller to him somehow, radiantly okay, as if to accentuate his own runtiness, his galloping not-okayness.

Onstage, Tanner Evans had taken up an acoustic guitar, his Afro’d friend a banjo, and the Bleu Notes had rolled into a theologically tendentious ballad whose lyrics were known to Perry, because it was the semiofficial theme song of Crossroads, purportedly written by Tanner Evans himself, and was often sung at the end of Sunday-night meetings.

The song is in the changes not the notes

I was looking for a thing

Couldn’t find it in myself

Until I met somebody else

And I found it in between

Yeah, the song is in the changes not the notes

Becky seemed enthralled by the performance, the sideburned modster possibly a bit enthralled with Becky, but David Goya, who enjoyed amending the line I found it in between to I found it between her legs, was gazing at the crowd like a deaf old man puzzled by visual evidence of sound. Perry tugged on his sleeve and led him out into the hallway.

“Are you holding?” he said.

In the hallway light, Goya’s eyes were bloodshot, his expression wistful. “Sadly, I am not.”

“Then who is? If I may ask.”

“At this late hour, I couldn’t tell you. Demand was early and brisk.”

“David. Did you think I wasn’t coming?”

“What can I say? Events have taken their course. And now, yes, all pockets are empty. You should have been here with your sister.”

“My sister?”

“Is there a problem? Do we not like Becky?”

Something evil, the edge of the crater, was nipping the undersides of Perry’s heels. Evidently, despite the recent forward stride in relations with his sister, the cessation of hostilities, her larger project of dispossessing him was ongoing.

“Apropos of which,” Goya said. “Were you aware that she’s with Tanner Evans? Did you know this and not tell us?”

Perry stared at the brass handles of the doors to the function hall, behind which the Bleu Notes were doing better justice to “The Song Is in the Changes” than was done on Sunday nights.

“We have eyewitness reports of smooching,” Goya said. “Kim is—what’s the word. Kim is agog.”

Down down down. Perry was going down.

“Can we go to your house?” he said. “I was—that is … Can we do a resupply run?”

“There’s talk of pancakes,” Goya said. “Becky wants midnight pancakes, and who could blame her? Kim’s going. And whither Kim goest…”

“We could catch up with them later.”

The desperate edge in Perry’s voice seemed to cut through Goya’s mellowness. His eyes, though red, became alert. “Is something up with you?”

The cosmos was unjust. By dallying in conversation with his mother, Perry had made himself too late to procure relief from the disturbance the conversation had caused him, whereas, if he’d skipped the conversation and come to the concert earlier, when drugs were still available, he wouldn’t have been disturbed and could have stuck to his resolution.

“I just,” he said. “I, uh. Is—who’s going?”

“Kim, Becky, me. Tanner, too, I think. Maybe others.”

Perry saw an idea and pounced on it. “The band has to pack up. If we go right now, we’ll be back in plenty of time.”

The idea was rational and easily realized, but Goya was too stoned or too stubborn to see it. “Is something wrong?”

“No. No.”

“Then let’s not do this.”

A tremendous closing cheer went up in the function hall. Goya turned and went back in, and Perry, after a hesitation, followed. One might have expected an encore, but Laura Dobrinsky was hopping down from the stage. She lowered her head and charged into the crowd, jostling Perry as she hurried out the door. Over his shoulder, he saw her sprinting down the hallway.

The house lights had come up, and Tanner Evans, too, was in the crowd, his hair damp with musical exertion. He shook the modster’s hand and draped his arm around Becky. Perry couldn’t see her face, but he could see the few people who’d hugged him, the many who hadn’t. Every one of them was looking at his sister, who had both arms around Tanner Evans. She’d been in Crossroads for less than two months, and already, it was clear, she’d leaped past Perry and advanced to the center of it.

How happy her soul must have been with the person in whom it had chanced to land.

From the ensuing blackness in his head, he’d returned to himself on Pirsig Avenue, walking with apparent intention toward the Shell station. In his wallet were twenty-three dollars, currently earmarked for Christmas presents for Becky, Clem, and the Reverend, but the world wouldn’t end if he spent only a few dollars on each of them. He also had coins in the flat, clear-plastic coin purse that Judson had given him for his birthday. Reaching the gas station, he took a dime from the purse and put it in the frigid pay phone by the restrooms. Behind him, in the snow, a tow truck idled with its roof lights flashing, no driver at the wheel. The phone number, 241–7642, was a cinch to remember, the fourth digit being the sum of the first three, which also recurred in the decimal inverse of the fourth, and the concluding two-digit number being the product of the two foregoing integers.

The guy answered on the sixth ring. Perry got no further than pronouncing his first and last names when the guy interrupted him. “Sorry, man. Closed for the holidays.”

“It’s something of an emergency.”

The guy hung up on him.

At this point, Perry might wisely have conceded defeat and gone back to First Reformed to content himself with whatever bottle Larry Cottrell had managed to poach, but Larry’s success was by no means assured, perhaps more like the opposite, and Perry had money, the guy had drugs—what could be simpler?

He’d been to the guy’s house only once, not to cop but simply to be introduced to him by a disagreeable upperclassman, Randy Toft, who’d been Keith Stratton’s dealer. Subsequent guy–Perry meetings had occurred among potholes in the parking lot behind the old A&P, which was boarded up but not yet demolished or repurposed, and had invariably involved lengthy waiting for the guy’s anonymous white Dodge to nose into view, Perry stewing about his lack of punctuality but never brave enough, when the guy finally arrived, to raise the issue. Both of them knew who had the power and who didn’t.

The house was easy to find again, because it was on a dead-end street by the cheerful name of Felix and its street-side mailbox bore a weathered NIXON AGNEW bumper sticker, possibly humor, possibly a red herring for the township police, or possibly, who could say, a heartfelt statement. As Perry came up the street named Felix toward the rail embankment, he saw the white Dodge in the driveway, buried in whiter snow. Light showed around the edges of sagging shades in the house’s living-room windows. The front walk was unshoveled, altogether untrodden.

Resolved: that embracing badness accords power.

Because what else, the first affirmative speaker asked rhetorically, distinguishes the person who needs to score from the person who needs to sell? The buyer, after all, is as free to withhold money as the seller is free to withhold his goods. Doesn’t it follow that the difference in power must relate to the gravity of the offense? A high-school dealer is nothing worse than a dispersing nozzle on a hose, dispensing good times to his peers and to himself, whereas the man who makes a career of being the hose has chosen to flout stern federal statutes. He’s morally far worse than the young dealer, and this is why the latter silently endures the former’s lack of punctuality. The deeper you go into badness, the more formidable you become.

Empowered by the shittiness of what he’d done to Larry Cottrell, Perry opened the guy’s chain-link gate and waded through the snow to the door, behind which he heard music. Before he could knock, there came a kind of strangled howl from a dog he’d forgotten about until this moment, followed by a cascade of savage basso barks, as the dog found the breath it had lacked for its initial howl. On Perry’s only other visit to the house, the dog had stood in the open doorway, large and short-haired, slit-eyed with suspicion, its jaw muscles grotesquely bulging, while the guy met him and Randy Toft outside the gate and put his arms on their shoulders, demonstrating amity, which the dog had grudgingly conceded. Now the barking caused the porch light to come on. Through the door, he heard the guy shouting.

“What are you doing, man, it’s out of control! The dog is out of control! You better just get the fuck away from here! It’s nobody’s business!”

The door had a fish-eye peephole through which Perry felt sure he was being observed. Even discounting for a distributor’s understandable paranoia, the situation didn’t seem promising, but he thought it was worth trying to signal his harmlessness before he gave up. He fished out his wallet, removed his twenty-dollar bill, and dangled it at the peephole.

“What are you doing to me?” the guy shouted, over the barking. “Wrong house, man! Go away!”

To make his intention clear, Perry mimed taking a toke.

“Yeah, I get it! Go away!”

Perry made a beseeching gesture, and the porch light went out. This seemed to be the end of it, but the door suddenly opened. The guy was wearing only blue jeans, neither buttoned nor zipped, and had his fingers under the collar of the outraged dog, which was scratching at the air with raised forelegs. “What are you doing?” he said. “What are you standing there for? You can’t be standing there. What do you think I am?”

He dragged the lunging dog back from the door. Extremely warm air was flowing out.

“Shut the fucking door already!”

Taking this as an invitation, Perry entered and closed the door. The guy was straddling the dog as if it were a canine pony, hauling it farther back into the house while Perry waited on the entry rug, the snow on his rubbers immediately liquefying. The house temperature was a good ninety degrees. The music, which came from a wooden stereo console, was Vanilla Fudge. Perry remembered neither the console nor anything else about the living room, partly because the walls were bare and the furniture nondescript, but mainly because he’d been too agitated, too full of anxiety and shame, to pay attention. The guy, that afternoon, the previous April, had introduced himself as “Bill,” but his smirking intonation had led Perry to assume that Bill wasn’t his real name. He had a reddish mustache too large for his face, and one of his legs was an inch or two shorter than the other. According to Randy Toft, the leg had kept him out of Vietnam, but the guy didn’t seem to have much going for him otherwise. Namelessness suited his station in life.

A door slammed, and the dog howled more forlornly. The guy returned with his jeans still open, the zipper skewed by the differential in his leg lengths. His chest was nearly as hairless as Perry’s, but he was much furrier below the navel. He looked around the room, at everything but Perry, with jerky motions of his head, as though seeking the source of a threat. Seeming to find it in the stereo, he lifted the needle from the record with a shaking hand. There was a sickening sound of needle droppage, scratched vinyl. He raised the needle again and moved it safely aside. His head nodding rapidly, he stood and considered what he’d done.

“So,” Perry said carefully, for it was obvious that the guy was seriously amped on something, “I apologize for disturbing you—”

“Can’t do, can’t do, can’t do,” the guy said, staring at the turntable. “Nothing in the house, man, they fucked me over, why are you here?”

“I was hoping you might set me up.”

“You definitely shouldn’t be here—I don’t like it.”

“I’m aware of that, and I apologize.”

“You’re not listening. I’m saying I don’t like it. You know what I’m saying? I’m not talking about the thing, I’m talking about the thing behind the thing, the thing behind the thing behind the thing. You know what I’m saying?”

“You don’t have to worry about me,” Perry said. “If you could just set me up, I’d be happy to pay full retail price, and I’ll be on my way again.”

The guy continued to nod. He’d been edgy and distracted the last time Perry saw him, six weeks ago, behind the A&P, but nothing like this. It came to Perry that he was looking at a speed freak. He’d heard about them but had never seen one. He didn’t want to leave, because the crater was waiting for him, right outside the house, but a self-preservative instinct was asserting itself. He turned toward the door.

“Whoa, whoa, whoa, where you going?” The guy bounded over and put his hand on the door. There were ugly sores on the inside of his arm, a very rank odor coming off him. “What are you doing to me? I can’t deal with the dimensions of this.”

“If you can’t help me—”

“You’re fucking me over. Every one of you is fucking me over. I don’t have any weed, all right? Merry Christmas, Happy New Year—where’s your money?”

“I think I’d better go.”

“No no no no no no. You like the pills, you like the ’ludes, I’ve still got Ludydudies.”

“Unfortunately, I’m not in the market.”

The guy nodded vigorously. “That’s okay, man, we’re still good. Just don’t go anywhere, right? Stay here, don’t move, I’ve got something else for you.”

In his bare feet, with his hitching gait, he lumbered into the rear of the house, where the dog howled again. His eagerness, the shift in power it represented, was somewhat alleviating Perry’s fear, and he wondered what the something else might be.

The guy returned shaking a glass jar like a maraca, a Planters Peanuts jar with several hundred pills in it, a quantity that told Perry they couldn’t be valuable. Amphetamines, presumably. Not a substance he’d ever had reason to try.

“Take a handful,” the guy said, “there’s no such thing as too many.”

The lid of the jar hit the entry rug with a dull clank and rolled away. The open jar was offered with a trembling hand.

“What have we here?” Perry said.

“Take like four of ’em and chew ’em—you’ll see, there’s no such thing as too many, you’ll forget about your weed. Chew ’em up and wait a minute, it’ll hit you. The first four are on me, because, shit, man, it’s Christmas, I’ll give you another forty for your twenty dollars, you’ll forget about your weed, this shit’s like a bomb, take take take. If you like it, which you will, I can set you up with the big bomb. Take take take.”

The dark crater had appeared in front of Perry; it was both behind him and in front of him, which could only mean that he was falling into it. He held out his hand.

 

 

 

Having performed the task that Frances had set him, having secured a place on the Crossroads spring trip to Arizona, Russ returned to his office in a state of exultation. On the desk where his lady had sat in her hunting cap, her legs parted, he saw an Arizona landscape unfolding. In his mind, he was already driving deep into this landscape. He was tempted to call her immediately and report his accomplishment, but all afternoon, all evening, she’d been running the show, provoking his ardor, withholding rewards, and this needed to stop. It was he who’d slain the dragon! He who’d had the guts to knock on Ambrose’s door! Better, he thought, to leave her in suspense. Better to let her wonder until she finally had to ask. And then, casually, let drop that he’d forgiven Ambrose and was going to Arizona.

He locked his office and went down to the parking lot. In the snow on his Fury’s rear window, some teenaged hand had inscribed the word OOPS. Hearing the music from the function hall, he recalled that he and Frances wouldn’t be alone in Arizona; there would also be busloads of potentially hostile young people. It occurred to him that he was still wearing his sheepskin coat.

He had a guilty impulse to go back for his other one, but he was done with being gutless. He could wear whatever goddamned coat he pleased. He no longer cared if Marion knew he’d spent the day with Frances. In the future, yes, if he commenced an affair and it grew into something larger, a new life, a second chance, the repercussions would be daunting, but for now his only detectable crime was the little lie he’d told at breakfast. If Marion remarked on the sheepskin coat, made the mildest insinuation, he would blast her with the news that Perry was a pot smoker. Even better, he would tell her about Ambrose. For three years, she’d been maligning Rick, reinforcing Russ’s grudge against him, and when she learned that Russ had forgiven him, unilaterally, without consulting her, she was bound to feel betrayed. No doubt she’d imagined she was being a loyal wife. But she, in a sense, had betrayed him first. If she hadn’t been so supportive of his failings, he might have made peace long ago. Frances had restored him to his courage, his edge, by believing he was capable of more.

Not trusting his tires on the unplowed hill on Maple, and being in no hurry to lay eyes on Marion, he drove the long way home to Highland Street. Again and again today, for six hours, he’d glanced at the face of his female companion and liked what he saw. It was such a simple thing, a lightness that so many other men took for granted, to walk into a McDonald’s with Frances and not be embarrassed to be seen with her, but to him the relief of it, the contrast with the daily disappointment of seeing Marion, had felt almost miraculous. Where Frances’s hair, even flattened by the hunting cap, had flattered her, each of the hairstyles that Marion had tried in recent years had been wrong in a different way, too short or too long, each serving to accentuate the redness of her skin, the thickening of her neck, the pinching of her eyes by adipose and insomnia. He knew it was unfair of him to care. It was unfair that his eye should be more painfully affronted by his wife than by the many objectively worse-looking women in New Prospect. It was unfair to have enjoyed her body when she was young and then burdened her with children and a thousand duties, only to now feel miserable whenever he had to venture into public with her and her sorry hair, her unavailing makeup, her seemingly self-spiting choice of dress. He pitied her for the unfairness; he felt guilty. But he couldn’t help blaming her, too, because her unattractiveness advertised unhappiness. Sometimes, when she looked especially dumpy at a church dinner, he sensed a satisfaction in being unsightly to him, a wish to make him suffer along with her for what he and their marriage had done to her, but most of the time her unhappiness excluded him. Hating her looks was yet another of the jobs she quietly and capably took on for him. Was it any wonder he was lonely in his marriage?

When he finally reached the parsonage, a large Oldsmobile, Dwight Haefle’s, was backing out of the driveway. He tried to go around it, but Dwight stopped at an angle and lowered his window. Russ could only lower his.

“We missed you at the party,” Dwight said.

“Yes, I’m sorry about that.”

“Marion mentioned that you and Mrs. Cottrell had some trouble in the city?”

Dwight’s expression was unreadable in the incidental light. What was he doing at the parsonage? How had Marion known that Russ was with Frances and not Kitty Reynolds?

“No, ah, no injuries,” he said.

“I brought you some leftovers, in case you’re hungry.”

“That’s very thoughtful of you.”

“Don’t thank me, thank Doris.”

Dwight’s window went up again, quickly and smoothly. The Oldsmobile, its power windows, its capabilities and newness, seemed emblematic of the senior minister’s invulnerability to temptations of the flesh. The Lord was with him; but so was Doris. Russ was a wreck at the wheel of a wreck, but he had Mrs. Cottrell.

Only when he’d pulled into the driveway and cut the engine did he recall that Clem might be at home. He wanted to see Clem as little as he wanted to see Marion, but he knew he needed to speak to him again. He needed to revise what he’d said earlier—take the same risk he’d taken with Ambrose and be honest, confess to the complications of his heart and forgive, as he had with Ambrose, the hurtful things his son had said. Nothing less was demanded of the man he was becoming.

Inside, in the kitchen, he found Marion and Judson at the table with a carton of eggnog. Judson was leaning back with a nog-smeared glass in his hand, coaxing the last viscous drops into his mouth. A faint scent of bacon was in the air.

“Good Lord,” Marion said. “There you are.”

“Hi, Dad,” Judson said.

“Hello, lad. You’re up pretty late.”

“Perry took me to the Haefles’. I got to watch a movie, and it was excellent, it was in New York City, and there was a gigantic department store, the one that does the Macy’s parade—”

“Judson, honey,” Marion said, “why don’t you run upstairs and get your teeth brushed. I’ll come up and tuck you in.”

“I’d like to hear more about that movie,” Russ said heartily.

Without seeming to hear him, Judson got up and left the kitchen. Only for Marion did his children have ears. He pried off the work shoes that Ambrose had earlier unlaced.

“I’m sorry I missed the party.”

“I’m sure you are,” she said. “It was a laugh a minute.”

From the chill in her voice, without looking at her, he gathered that his lie at breakfast hadn’t gone unnoticed. He was tempted to explain it away—to volunteer that Mrs. Cottrell had unexpectedly taken Kitty’s place. But this would have been the old Russ.

“Is Clem here?”

“No,” she said.

“He’s—have you seen him?”

“I sent him back to Champaign.”

Now he looked at her. Her face was as red as ever, her hair no better, but there was something steely in her eyes.

“One of us needed to do something,” she said. “I gather you did less than nothing.”

“He’s going back to Champaign? Now?”

“There’s a midnight bus and apparently a girl he’s involved with. I don’t know if he’ll change his mind, but it’s a start.”

Russ looked away from her. “That’s unfortunate. I was hoping to talk to him again.”

“If only you hadn’t been detained…”

“I already apologized for being late. I didn’t realize—”

“That he was having a major crisis?”

“I tried to reason with him.”

“And how did that go?”

“I—not well.”

She laughed at him. Laughed and stood up and went to the coat hooks by the door, removed something from a coat pocket, and shook it. Though small, the white object she extracted with her lips was so alien, had such a powerful charge, that it was like a third presence in the room. The bacony smell, he realized, was coming from his wife.

“What in God’s name are you doing?”

“Smoking,” she said.

“Not in my house.”

“This isn’t your house, Russ. That’s a silly idea you need to let go of. The house is the church’s, and I’m the one who’s always in it. In what sense is it yours?”

The question took him aback. “It is part of my compensation as a minister.”

“Oh dear.” She laughed again. “You want to argue with me? I wouldn’t recommend it.”

He saw that she was angry, perhaps inordinately so, about his little lie. She lit a burner on the stove and leaned over it, holding her hair away from the flame.

“Put that out,” he said. “I don’t know what you think you’re doing, but put that out.”

With mirth in her eyes, she blew smoke in his direction.

“Marion. What is wrong with you?”

“Nothing!”

“If you’re angry with me about missing the party—”

“Truth be told, I was hardly even thinking of you.”

“I had an accident in the city. I ended up going with Mrs. Cottrell, by the way. Kitty couldn’t, ah. Kitty couldn’t make it. She, ah…”

He could feel himself being dragged down, by the inertia of marriage, into a well-established pattern of evasion. As long as he stayed with Marion, he would never change.

“You and I have a lot to discuss,” he said threateningly. “It’s not just Clem. There’s also a problem with Perry you need to know about. And— I went to see Ambrose. I thought it was—”

“Russ, really. I’m just having a cigarette.”

The sight of her smoking, in the middle of the kitchen, was uncanny. If she’d stripped out of her clothes and shaken her breasts at him, it wouldn’t have been any stranger. There was something of sex in the gasp of her drag on the cigarette.

“Although I do wonder,” she said, exhaling, “how you think it would work. Even at the level of fantasy, how do you picture it working?”

“How what would work?”

“You’d still have four kids to support. You’d still be making seven thousand dollars a year. Is the idea that you’d go and live on her charity? Forgive me for wondering how well you’ve thought it through.”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

Again Marion laughed. “I hope she’s good at writing sermons,” she said. “I hope she likes cooking your meals and washing your underwear. I hope she’s ready to have the relationship with your kids that you’re too busy saving the world for. I hope she’s up for dealing with your insecurity every night of the week. And you know what else? I hope she keeps a close eye on you.”

For the second time in two hours, he was being taunted. Although, in strict point of morality, he deserved it, he had a physical urge, stronger even than he’d had with Clem, to strike his wife. He felt like batting the cigarette from her hand, slapping her in the face, knocking the smile off it, so angering was the contrast between his family’s disrespect and Frances’s ingratiations.

“I didn’t realize,” he said stiffly, “that you resented helping me with my sermons.”

“I don’t, Russ. The help is freely given.”

“In the future, I will write them all myself.”

She took another puff on the cigarette. “Whatever you like, dear.”

“As for the rest of it,” he said, “I won’t dignify it with an answer. I’ve had a very long day, and I’m going to bed. I would only thank you not to smoke in a house where the rest of us need to sleep.”

In response, she made an O with her lips and blew a smoke ring. Her mouth stayed open.

“God damn it, Marion.”

“Yes, dear?”

“I don’t know what you’re trying to prove—”

“I’m sure you don’t. You have some fine qualities, but imagination was never one of them.”

The insult was naked and it shocked him. Time and again, in the early years of their marriage, he’d sensed that she was angry about something small or large he’d done or failed to do. Each time, he’d expected an explosion of the sort he knew occurred in other marriages, and each time her anger had faded into soft-spoken reproach, at worst a sulking that she maintained for a day or two and then let go of, until finally he’d understood that they weren’t a couple who had fights. He remembered feeling proud of this. Now it seemed like another instance of her deadness to him as a wife.

“I shouldn’t have to imagine,” he said. “If something is bothering you, the responsible thing is to tell me what it is, instead of making insinuations.”

“Be careful what you ask for.”

“Do you think I can’t handle it? There’s nothing I can’t handle.”

“Tall words.”

“I mean it. If you have something to say to me, say it.”

“All right.” She brought the cigarette to her lips, her eyes crossing to focus on the coal. “It annoys me that you want to fuck her.”

The kitchen seemed to spin beneath his feet. He’d never heard that word from her.

“It’s really quite annoying, and if you think it’s because I’m jealous, that’s even more annoying. I mean, really—me? Jealous of that thing? Who do you think I am? Who do you think you married? I’ve seen the face of God.”

Russ stared at her. A schizophrenic parishioner had once said the same thing to him.

“You’ve got your liberal religion,” she said, “you’ve got your second-floor office, you’ve got your ladies on Tuesdays, but you have no idea what it means to know God. No idea what true belief is like. You think you’re God’s gift, you think you deserve better than what you’ve got, and, well, yes, I find that more than a little annoying. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but your children are amazing—at least one of them is a flat-out genius. Where do you think that came from? Where do you think the brilliance in this family came from? Do you think it came from you? Ah—fuck!”

She shook her hand and dropped the cigarette, which had burned her. She picked it up and took it to the sink. She appeared to be having some kind of nervous breakdown, and it ought to have worried him, ought to have repelled him, but it didn’t. He remembered an intensity so deeply buried in the past it might have been a dream, the intensity she’d possessed at twenty-five, the intensity with which he’d wanted her. And she was still his wife. Still lawfully his. Provoked by her abandon, he approached her from behind and put his hands on her breasts. Beneath the wool of her dress and the folds of middle-aged flesh was the off-kilter girl who’d maddened him in Arizona. The smoke in her hair and something equally foreign, a smell of liquor, were further provocations. It was exciting to touch the breasts of a drunk stranger.

He tried to turn her around, but she ducked under his elbow and broke free. When he took a step toward her, she skittered away.

“Don’t you dare.”

“Marion—”

“You think I’m sloppy seconds?”

She never rejected him. In matters of the bedroom, he was the rejecter.

“Fine,” he said angrily. “I was simply trying to—”

“You and she deserve each other. Go ahead and see if I care. You have my permission.”

The contempt in her voice robbed him of any joy he might have taken in her permission. She really was smarter than he was. As crazy as she was acting, she was right about that, and it didn’t matter if she was squat and red-faced, it didn’t matter if he slew dragons. As long as they stayed married—even if they didn’t—she would always have that on him.

“You seem to think it’s just me,” he said, shaking, “but it’s not just me. You’re as much to blame as I am. You’ve got it set up so I’m the only one who needs support. You’ve got your whole litany—support, support, support. No joy, no nothing, just support. Is it any wonder I’m sick of it?”

“You can’t be half as sick of it as I am.”

“But you’re the one who wanted this.”

“This?”

“You wanted the kids. You wanted this life.”

“You didn’t?”

“If it had been up to me, we’d be devoted to service. You wouldn’t be a housewife, and I damn sure wouldn’t be giving sermons to bankers and the bridge club.”

“You’re saying that I’m the one who dragged you down? That you’re the one who sacrificed? That you’re doing me a favor with this marriage?”

“At this point? Yes. That is what I think. If you want to know why, take a look at yourself in the goddamned mirror.”

It was the cruelest thing he’d ever said.

“That hurts me,” she said quietly, “but not as much as you wish it did.”

“I—apologize.”

“You don’t have the faintest idea who you married.”

“Since I’m so stupid, maybe you should go ahead and tell me.”

“No. You’ll just have to wait and see.”

“What does that mean?”

She came over to him, stood on her toes, and tilted her face toward his. For a moment, he thought she might kiss him after all. But she merely blew a puff of air at him. It stank of tar and alcohol.

“Wait and see.”

 

 

 

“Do not crowd the gate area. If you insist on standing up, I’m going to need to see an orderly line. There is no reason to crowd the gate. Everyone holding a ticket will get a seat. If a second bus is needed, there will be a second bus. That bus will be making all the same stops. Due to inclement weather, we have system-wide delays, but there is equipment on the way. All you do by jostling is make yourself unhappy. The bus will not be boarding as long as I see jostling. No, ma’am, we do not have an estimated departure time as of yet. As soon as the equipment arrives and I see an orderly line, the boarding process will commence…”

On and on the voice went. It belonged to a heavy, dark-skinned woman whose exhaustion could not have exceeded Clem’s. On the lap of the very young mother seated next to him, a baby was sleeping with its arms outflung, its head dangling off the side of her thigh. Sixty or seventy people were at the gate, most of them Black, all traveling south to St. Louis, to Cairo, to Jackson, to New Orleans, in the cruel first hour of Christmas Eve. The station was reasonably warm, but Clem was still chilled in his core. He sat hugging himself tightly, his ticket clenched in his fist. A kiosk in the station was selling coffee, and he objectively observed the thing he rawly was, wondering if the thing might stand up and go to the kiosk. His exhaustion made his condition existential, beyond motive, like Meursault’s in The Stranger.

If, when he’d called the hippie house from the parsonage, the line hadn’t been busy, and if his mother, before sending him away with his duffel bag, hadn’t gone upstairs and returned with ten twenty-dollar bills and pressed them on him, and if he hadn’t then had time, on the inbound commuter train, to revisit the question of freedom, he might have done his mother’s bidding. Coming home to New Prospect and feeling loved by his father, hated by his favorite person in the world, and confused by his mother, he’d lost his bearings. His family had pulled him back into the conditioned lineaments of the self he’d taken action to escape. But the inbound train was slowed by heavy snow. By the time it dragged into Union Station, he’d recognized that he wasn’t obliged to step off the bus in Urbana; that he wasn’t a needle following the grooves of a familiar record; that radical freedom was still available. He’d had a month of mornings to wake up and reconsider his decision to quit school. Shouldn’t a decision so long and well considered outweigh a few hours with his family, on a night when he was wrecked by lack of sleep? He’d already seen his way clear of Sharon. If he went back to her now, his earlier reasoning would still be valid. He didn’t have the strength to meet the challenge of a woman, he wasn’t yet man enough. All that would come of going back to her was the pain of leaving her again. And so, when he reached the Trailways station, he’d bought a ticket for New Orleans. He’d never been to New Orleans. He had two hundred dollars, and he was glad to think of being alone.