July 15, 1979
DEAR BISHOP PINE:
You are probably aware by now that my vestry has voted my demission as rector of St. Andrews Church in Oyster Cove. I do not know if you are also aware that my wife, Ann, has left me. And now this letter will bring you the latest development of the whole sad story: my own decision to give up holy orders. I fear it is irrevocable. But because of my long admiration of you, because of the inspiration which you afforded me as my dean at divinity school, and because of my two wonderful years with you in the cathedral, I feel that I owe you an exact account of what has happened. Who knows? My sorry state may not be untypical. There may be others who, with your help and guidance, will profit by my experience.
I sometimes think that I should never have left the cathedral. Certainly I was very happy there—perhaps too happy. Such may not be the healthiest state of a clergyman. But I was so proud to believe that we were in the vanguard of affirmative action! All around us was the gray picture of urban desolation: poverty, drugs, crime, broken families without hope or faith. And even farther to the east, where the city was wealthy and where philanthropists and liberals were to be found, it was the philanthropy of the materialist, the liberalism of the agnostic. I felt as the apostle must have felt in a pagan world; you were my Saint Paul. When you invited the ballet to dance in the cathedral, when you led that peace march down Broadway, when you ordained the lesbian priest, I felt that the Episcopal Church was living again in Christ.
Ann was less exalted than I about your innovations. She was even frankly relieved when we received our call to Oyster Cove. But I had grave misgivings. I had yearned for a stiffer challenge: for a parish in East Harlem or in the poorest area of the Deep South. It was you who persuaded me that there was just as great a need of salvation on the north shore of Long Island as in indigent places—perhaps more. And of course it was also true, as you pointed out, that the church must never neglect her sources of financial support. A priest is a soldier; he must go where he is called.
Things started well enough in Oyster Cove. My new parishioners turned out in brave array to see me conduct my first service in that quaint little Romanesque church nestled in the wooded triangle bordered by three vast estates. Although the community could hardly be called a religious one, there was a definite interest in the church as an integral part of the structure of society. One must, after all, have weddings, christenings, funerals! Oh, I know, Bishop. I hear your gentle reminder: “Don’t knock what you’ve got. Build on it!” Well, I tried to.
I introduced myself in my first sermon. I told them I had a wife, with whom I was passionately in love; two children, seven and nine, who seemed not unpromising; a canary, an Airedale, and an old macaw, which looked fierce but wasn’t. I told them how I stood on women’s rights, gay lib, pot, capital punishment, and strip mining. They seemed to take it all very well. Even if they weren’t liberal, they showed signs of approving a liberal minister. It has perhaps become the fashion. One jolly old vestryman went so far as to nudge me in the ribs after the service and whisper in a hoarse voice that all could hear: “That’s right, boy. Tell ’em about you and your pretty young wife. Sex always works, even in church. The old gals lap it up!” I wonder if this should have been my warning.
At any rate, I considered the auspices good. Christ expects us to use every tool that we find to hand. Attendance went up; the contribution plate was gratifyingly full. And it was wonderful to see my Ann so happy. She and the children adored Oyster Cove and flourished in the country air. Even our Airedale seemed not to miss the rich urban street smells.
But the work troubled me, or rather, I should say, the lack of work. There were no poor in the parish. There were few old people, and almost no unmarried ones. It was a commuting society; after sixty-five one retired to New England or Florida, and the unwed clung to the city. Oh, there were things I could do, of course, in the village of Oyster Cove proper (as opposed to the suburban community), and I worked closely with the other churches, particularly the Roman Catholic, but it concerned me that my parish calls seemed to be treated as social events. The husbands were never at home for them, and the children were likely to be sent outside or to the rumpus room to play. The lady of the house, dressed as for a Sunday service, would receive me formally and then relax, over tea or even a cocktail, to discuss everybody’s problems but her own. I supposed that it would take a while before they would trust me with anything more personal. After all, they belong to an age where the priest’s function has largely been taken over by the psychiatrist. I had to be patient.
When I met Jessie Hamill, I thought that perhaps my real job was at last beginning. She was a large, fair woman of thirty-seven or -eight, who might have been almost beautiful had she taken off twenty pounds. She had come to the parish house to offer her services as a volunteer. She would do anything; time hung on her hands. Her position was a sad but not uncommon one for that community: her husband, a computer analyst, a handsome and popular man, had deserted her to marry his young secretary, with whom he now lived in the city. There were two children, both in boarding school, a barely adequate alimony, and a bleak void where there had been a happy hearth. Mrs. Hamill seemed intelligent and objective in presenting her facts. I should add that she did not bring them out until I had questioned her.
“The whole thing was too ghastly to seem quite real,” she explained with a dry little smile and a faint shrug. “You see, I had no inkling of what was coming. Not so much as a hint. You will say I must have been blind. Very well, I was blind. It never crossed my mind that I didn’t have the happiest marriage in Oyster Cove until the day Mike telephoned to tell me to meet him for dinner at Quo Vadis. Well, poor unsuspecting me, who adores French restaurants, of course I dropped everything and rushed into town. Imagine my feelings when—I had hardly downed my first cocktail—he hit me smack in the face with the news that he was in love. ‘Madly’ in love.”
“But that’s a common delusion at his age,” I pointed out. “The last desperate clutch at youth. It’s not your fault.”
“Fault?” Her laugh was sharp, faintly mocking. It seemed to make a bit of a fool of me, but not invidiously. “I didn’t even exist to have a fault. He was in love, and for the first time, too. What had I been? Puberty, puppy love, sentimentality, you name it. And the horrible thing is that I’m beginning to think he did right. The last time I talked to him, when he came to pick up the kids on Christmas Eve, he said, ‘Jess, I know I’ve been a heel, but what’s a man to do? I’m happy now. I didn’t know what happiness was before. That’s not a reproach. For me it all simply depended on Ellen, and I hadn’t met Ellen. So now I work better, play better, feel better. Damn it all, I’d do it again! We’ve only got one life.’”
“But how long will his newfound happiness last?”
“Forever!” She flung up her hands in a sarcastic gesture of despair. “That’s the hell of it. The girl is charming, and she adores him. But where does it all leave me? With my life over, I’m afraid. I used to believe my function was simply to be Mike’s wife. Well, now I’m not his wife. The church recognizes his new marriage. I suppose God, if he exists, does, too. Get a job, people say. Sure. But I’m not trained for anything, and my springs are busted.”
“You put your case very clearly. I wonder if you couldn’t teach. How about trying your hand with the Sunday School? We’re going to be doing it all over.”
“Well, I don’t know my Old Testament, and I . . .”
“Oh, we go very light on the Bible these days,” I assured her. “The emphasis is all on ethics and social service.”
She looked at me now, as with a sudden, timid hope. “Would you help me? I mean, could I see you every so often? To talk, like this? I think you might help. I think you might understand.”
“But of course. What else am I here for?”
Ann was very skeptical that night when I told her of our talk.
“I hear she drinks.”
“It wouldn’t be surprising, under the circumstances, would it?”
“But I mean before. Before he left her. They say he got tired of having to keep an eye on her at parties.”
“We must be charitable, darling. Any way you look at it, the woman needs help.”
Ann’s gray eyes showed a steely look. “Watch your step, big boy. That’s all I have to say.”
“And just what do you mean by that?”
“What do you think I mean?”
Ann was always very possessive about me, and I decided to ignore her remark. But I remembered what she had said about Jessie’s drinking when on two Sunday mornings in succession the latter failed to turn up for her class. I was all the more disappointed in that she had started so well, with a small group of serious teenagers whose interest she had excited in an initial session on “the pros and cons of cohabitation.” I decided to drive over and call on her.
There was something desolate about the house. Its style was what is called “developer’s Queen Anne,” and it sat on two bare acres of lawn and field, with no trees, no garden, and an empty swimming pool. It was a home whose only excuse would have been children playing in it and around it, as the netless basketball hoop over the door of the attached garage seemed poignantly to imply. I found Mrs. Hamill alone, and she made no effort to whisk away the cocktail tray by the sofa. Shrugging, she poured me a drink from the shaker.
“I know I’ve been rotten about the class,” she admitted. Her voice was steady enough, but the syllables were the least bit blurred. “A week ago, I learned that both my children were planning to go west this summer to a ranch with their father. Of course, it’s quite natural for them to want to go, but I can’t help it—it’s knocked me for a loop. They were very sweet, and offered to give up the trip if I really minded, but I couldn’t accept that. So there we are, Denis. I may call you Denis? Thank you.” She paused to stare at me for a long moment. Her expression seemed caught between her own now frankly accepted despair and a rather bemused curiosity about what my reaction to it would be. “Will it shock you too much if I tell you that I can’t think of one good reason not to take my own life?”
“I can give you a reason!” I exclaimed with instant passion. “It will hurt Jesus Christ! Do you want to do that?”
She looked at me in astonishment. “But of course I don’t believe any of that.”
“I can make you believe it!”
“How?”
“Suppose I come here, say twice or three times a week, and talk to you for half to three-quarters of an hour? On a regular basis? Would you let me?”
“But what would your wife say?”
“She knows it’s my job.”
Jessie actually laughed. “Dear me. Well, I’ll try to make it something less than that.” Then, as quickly, she was grave again. “Seriously, Denis, you’re an angel. Maybe literally.”
When I got home that evening I told Ann about my project with a promptitude that indicated less assurance about her attitude than I had professed to Jessie. As it turned out, any assurance at all would have been folly. Ann was simply furious.
“That drunken slut!” she cried. “How can you be such an ass? Don’t you see she’s making a play for you? And don’t kid yourself it’s because of your beaux yeux, either. It’s because she’s bored and lonely and bitchy!”
“Darling, you’re not only being unkind, you’re being unwise. That woman is on the verge of suicide.”
“Well, I wish somebody’d push her over!”
“Now you’re being un-Christian,” I said mildly.
“I don’t even know that I am a Christian!” Ann retorted hotly. “All I know is that I’m not going to loan you out to a designing hussy.”
“But surely you’ll admit it’s the duty of a priest to look after lost souls? That woman is the first serious challenge I’ve had in Oyster Cove. If I fail her I may as well pack my bags and go back to the cathedral.”
“All right, then, look after her. But look after yourself, too. And look after your marriage.” Ann’s chin, thrust forward, had a harsh, angular look. “Christian duty may be your concern, but my family’s mine. To me it’s God and Trinity and all the life hereafter I’m ever going to need. That may come as a shock to you, Denis Sanders, but there’s something else you’d better learn too. No matter how important my marriage is to me, it’s not worth a compromise. The first funny business between you and that lush, and I’m through!”
Of course, it was thus that she established in my mind the idea that my relationship with Jessie Hamill might have a sexual basis. Had this not come simultaneously with the revelation that Ann considered herself only formally a Christian, it might not have had such an impact. But as things were, I reeled under her double barrage. First she smeared my function as a priest; then she stripped our union of its sanctity. Evidently she could see me as nothing but a rooster, strutting through the barnyard in search of a hen. What were the Gospels, what was the Sermon on the Mount, what was Christ Himself but a cock-a-doodle-doo? But when I pointed this out to her, she would not yield an inch. She simply repeated stonily what she had said.
“Why have you waited until now to tell me all this?” I asked in despair.
“Because there’s never been another woman before.”
“You think there’s one now?”
“I think there’s one after you now. And I’m taking no chances.”
What was finally decided between us took the form of a treaty. I was to be allowed to visit Jessie Hamill on Wednesdays and Saturdays at five o’clock for a trial period of three weeks. I was to be home promptly at six, and I was not to have a drink while I was there. Finally, I was to inform Jessie of the existence of these terms.
Jessie, to my surprise, seemed amused. She at once agreed to the conditions, and the first two visits went off with absolute propriety. It was a little bit like an hour of therapy. Jessie, at first constrained, rapidly warmed up. She told me volubly of her childhood, her meeting with Mike, his courtship, their early marriage. Indeed, I was inundated with a full tide of reminiscence that seemed to have no spiritual potential. But on the third meeting everything went wrong.
To begin with, she had a visitor when I called. Andy Smithers, a big, red-complexioned man, the largest landowner in Oyster Cove, the father of seven children and the henpecked husband of the community crosspatch, had evidently been drinking with Jessie most of the afternoon. Both were in a rather bleary state, and Andy stared at me with undisguised hostility and uttered no greeting. It took Jessie ten minutes to make him go, and then she had to walk with him to his car. When she returned she stood for a moment in the doorway to the living room, staring at me in a rather wild, haggard way. She struck me as on the verge of hysteria.
“Andy says people are talking about us!” she exclaimed at last. “I told him you only cared about my soul. Who ever cared about my body? My poor, soggy, too-big body? Could a body like mine have a soul?” She ran her hands feverishly up and down her sides. “I tell you, Denis, I don’t exist! I never have! I’m a worthless sot, and I’ll be better off dead. Who needs me? Who wants me?” She stamped her foot in a fit of violent temper. “Damn it all, Denis, help me! Can’t you help me?”
My taking Jessie to bed that afternoon was a perfectly deliberate act. I believed that it was my duty to convince her that she was a live, lovable woman. I considered that the act of sexual union under the circumstances was equivalent to a blood transfusion. In primitive societies the functions of priest and physician were frequently identical; there are times today when they still can be. You will ask if I derived pleasure from the act. Certainly I did. Had I not, I could never have convinced her that she was lovable. I derived and conveyed intense pleasure. But I believed that I was performing a kind of sacrament. When I left Jessie she was calm again, even serene. I returned home by half-past seven and told Ann that I had had to change a tire. I had never been able to lie to her successfully before. I dared to hope that it was God who had given me the necessary fortitude.
You will say that I was making some very bold assumptions, but what happened thereafter seemed to bear out the boldest of them. You know what is commonly supposed to be the inevitable aftermath of such a situation as I have just described. The “other” woman is never satisfied with a single act. She yearns for more, and then more; she berates her lover if he fails to comply; she makes terrible scenes. If he continues to oblige, his life becomes a tissue of lies and subterfuges. In the end his wife discovers all. Who has not read that novel or seen that play?
But that is not what happened. What happened was precisely what I had hoped and prayed would happen. Jessie Hamill pulled herself together, as if by a miracle. She wrote me a letter, which she told me to show to Ann, in which she said that she was so much better that I could now discontinue the twice-weekly visitations. She did not fail again to appear for her Sunday School class, and she made no efforts in the parish house to see me alone. Her attitude in public to both Ann and myself seemed friendly and natural. She told us that she was on a diet to lose thirty pounds. People even said that she was on the wagon. Had I not reason to believe that that carnal act had been spiritually inspired?
The violence of my disillusionment was to equal the fury of my folly. One Sunday afternoon, when I returned from a visit to Cedarhurst, where I had been invited to preach, I found Ann, dressed in her city clothes, waiting grimly for me in the living room. The children were nowhere to be seen.
“Something’s happened!” I exclaimed.
“No, but something’s going to,” she announced in a hard, flat tone. “I’m going to leave you. I’m going to Mother. With the children. Tonight.”
I found myself suddenly sitting in a chair, and there was a throb where I had bitten my lip. “May I ask why?”
“You know why. That Hamill woman was here this morning. She told me everything.”
“She told you? Why, in God’s name?”
“Because she was afraid I would hear about it. Andy Smithers parked his car down the road and came back to gawk at you through the window. Then he apparently blurted it all out in Murphy’s bar. But you’ll be glad to hear he’s sorry and that he’s expressing his contrition most touchingly. He’s left his wife and seven children and is going to marry the old slut.” Ann snorted derisively. “I’m sure you’re mad with jealousy!”
“I’m not jealous at all,” I retorted, beginning now to assemble my wits. “I’m simply saddened that Jessie should be a party to the breakup of a home. There was never any question of love between us.”
“Oh, she told me all about that! She told me you’d done it for the good of her soul. She thought that would make me forgive you!”
“I don’t suppose I’ve done much for her soul. It’s all too horrible. Is Andy really going to divorce his wife?”
“Oh, yes, your Jessie has him firmly on the hook. He’ll never shake free of her now. And do you know what she used for bait? You, you poor sap! I got the story from Alice Mellish, after she left. What Jessie needed, you see, was the chance to show Andy that someone else could get the hots for her. He’d been sniffing around her for months, but like so many men these days, he couldn’t think any piece of meat was really palatable unless someone else was sniffing it too. A young minister was just what she needed. To show that old Jessie, still the sexpot, could make him break his vows, forget his wife, forget Christ!” Ann rose, almost exultant in her fury. “Oh, she had it all planned out. And how it worked! When Andy saw you two, he decided that she was Venus herself! And now he has to have her, even if it costs him a million bucks to get rid of his wife!”
“But, Ann, if you know why I did it, can’t you forgive me?”
“Never!” Her voice rose almost to a scream. “If it had been a question of lust, a quick roll in the hay, that might have been different. But this way! Oh . . . you disgust me! You nauseate me! Get out of my sight!”
And so she left me. Do you remember your sermon about the seagull? It was the first I ever heard you deliver. You told the story of how you had been out sailing and found a seagull swimming in circles, unable to fly. Its bill was pierced by one barb of a triple fishhook, its wing by another, so the poor bird’s head was pinioned back against its side. You told how you picked it up and worked for half an hour to release it. And then what did it do? It ruffled its feathers, gave you a nasty bite, and flew away. You used this as a parable to illustrate the ingratitude that all healers and priests must be prepared to receive. I see now that Jessie Hamill was simply behaving as she believed she had to behave in a suburban society. She had been wounded, and the wounded must look to themselves as best they can or be pecked to death by other birds. Once cured, however, she flapped happily off to rejoin the flock. Her final bite was even kindly meant! There is no reason for me to be bitter. But neither is there any reason for me to go on ministering to this community. And if I cannot minister to one, I am unfit to minister to any.
I know what you are going to tell me: that seagulls, too, have souls. All I can suggest is that you send another seagull to save them!
Cordially yours,
Denis Sanders