Foreword

So I've written a novel. I actually started it in 2000 and finished it in the spring of last year, 2008. I had it "in me," so to speak, and now it's "out," and it's a good feeling to be able to say that I've done it. I have always known that the chances of it ever being published and marketed in the conventional manner are quite slim indeed. More lately, I have come to realize that I simply lack the passion to make finding a bona fide literary agent the consuming focus of my life. It's not that I don't think my work is worth it--I do--but I have, as they say, "a life," and that life is more important to me than getting my book published. I have no designs on whatever wealth literary success might bring, and I'm not all that keen on the fame either. So the internet, and a free blogging account, enable me to self-publish on the cheap, and make my story available to those who are interested.

I was always taught that one should write about what one knows. That advice, combined with my natural laziness and lack of motivation to do research, led me to make the main character an Episcopal priest on the cusp of turning fifty. That described me when I began the work. Beyond that, this is not an autobiographical story, for a number of reasons that will be evident to anyone who knows me. My knowledge of the daily working world of a parish pastor, and the peculiar demands that someone called to that vocation deals with, give me the skeleton on which I can hang my narrative. I would like to think that the same broad themes which I hope emerge in the imagination of the attentive reader would lend themselves to explication in any number of other narrative contexts. The life of a middle-aged Episcopal priest is simply the context I know best.

The story is set mostly in the Chicago area, framed on either end by events occurring in southeastern Wisconsin. Many of the places and communities mentioned are real, while others are entirely fictitious. Those who are familiar with the Chicago area will be able to tell the difference. Others, presumably, will not care. On the off chance that anyone will actually notice this, I may as well acknowledge that the majority of surnames of the incidental characters are those of people I went to school with in the Chicago suburbs in the 1950s and 60s. Trust me--it's purely random. There is no intended (or even unintended) connection between the characters and the people whose names I borrowed for them.

If this novel were a movie, it would be R-rated, for occasional "language" and "adult situations." Caveat lector.

Each chapter appears as a blog post. I have disabled comments, but I would be happy to receive feedback via email. My contact information is available on my blog profile.

Enjoy.

Chapter 1

It was neither a particularly good day nor a particularly bad day for a funeral. April in southeast Wisconsin discourages rigid expectations about the weather. In one spot, the sun shines, the air is calm, and summer is within reach. A few yards away, the ground is shielded by the edge of a cloud, a wind gust penetrates with its chill, and winter petulantly refuses to exit the stage. It is a liminal time, a moment of instability and transition. The grass in the graveyard at Nashotah House, a theological seminary of the Episcopal Church thirty miles due west of Milwaukee, had only turned green—virtually overnight, as it is wont to do—a few days earlier, serendipitously coordinated with the arrival of Easter. The burial took place on the afternoon of the Friday following.

There had been some anxiety among the seminary’s maintenance crew members about whether the ground was sufficiently thawed beneath the surface for their backhoe to penetrate the earth deeply enough; it had been an unusually frigid winter. People tend not to consider such potential problems when they die. The crewmen were relieved when they were able to prepare the site without incident. Since the 150-year old institution was in the burial business on only an occasional basis, the protocol was conservative, even archaic—which is to say, there was no effort to disguise the nature of the day’s work: the burial of the mortal remains of a human being. There was no blanket of artificial turf to conceal the mound of soil that would shortly be used to close the grave.

After the appointed scripture verses from the committal service in the Book of Common Prayer were read, the six pallbearers secured both ends of three lengths of heavy rope that lay underneath the coffin while maintenance workers removed the two-by-fours that had been holding it in place above the hole. The pallbearers then slowly lowered the casket into the concrete casing that had already been placed at the bottom. The Right Reverend Edward Chase Landry, bishop of the Episcopal Church’s Chicago diocese, in a flat tone which masked the true intensity of his emotions, continued with the liturgical rite.

“In the sure and certain hope of the resurrection to eternal life through our Lord Jesus Christ, we commend to Almighty God our sister Sharon, and we commit her body to the ground.” Here the bishop, standing at the head of the grave, paused, turned to his rear, and bent over to scoop a handful of soil from the adjacent pile. A wind gust momentarily delayed the completion of this ritual chore, holding the edge of his white, gold, and red cope against his right hand as he tried to extend it outward. For an instant, he feared his miter might blow off his head, and instinctively steadied it with his left hand. The gust spent itself even before its presence was registered in anyone’s conscious attention. Bishop Landry disposed of the contents of his right hand into the grave, where it struck the lid of the plain wooden coffin with a sound somewhere between a thud and rattle. For those who loved Sharon Marie Daley Coverdale, the sound was an aural sign and seal of the bitter concreteness of what was being accomplished.

“…earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust. The Lord bless her and keep her, the Lord make his face to shine upon her and be gracious to her, the Lord lift up his countenance upon her and give her peace.” There were only some twenty-odd voices to offer the “Amen.” Standing next to the bishop was Father Frank Craig, the dean of the seminary. At the other end of the grave were three seminarians who had been arbitrarily impressed into service as acolytes. Vested in plain white albs, girded at the waist, one held a processional crucifix, while his colleagues flanked him on either side with their torches (or so they are called, though really only ordinary candles mounted on four-foot wooden rods and protected from the wind by hurricane globes). The rest of the small company of mourners was composed of Sharon’s immediate family and a few close friends. The public funeral itself, a Requiem Mass, had taken place several hours earlier at St Alban’s Church in Grove Lake, Illinois, eighty miles to the south. The nucleus of those gathered at the graveside that Friday afternoon were the ones whose lives would be most deeply affected by Sharon’s passing—her two barely-grown children, her still actively retired parents, and her husband, Miles. Miles was a distinguished alumnus of the House from twenty-five years earlier, and it was the long-standing policy of the seminary to provide burial space for alumni and their immediate family members. He was also the rector, for the twelve years prior, of St Alban’s Church. The Coverdales had always planned on someday occupying adjacent sites in that peaceful cemetery, but certainly not before either one of them had yet turned fifty. Sharon was forty-eight when she died; Miles was just approaching the midpoint of his fiftieth year.

Sharon’s first awareness of a symptom took place during a solo shopping expedition the day after the previous Thanksgiving. She became cripplingly dizzy in the mall and had to have a security guard call Miles, who brought their twenty-one year old son, Brian, with him to drive Sharon’s car home. She never did quite feel like herself again. The headaches began the following week. Sharon had been remarkably healthy her whole life. She tended not to get the usual winter colds and flu, was only twelve pounds heavier than the day she was married, and was not even allergic to anything. Against this backdrop, her sudden malaise was compellingly visible, in stark relief. The standard sequence of diagnostic events ensued. The CT scan was the final arrow to point in the same direction—Sharon had inoperable brain cancer. Christmas in the Coverdale rectory was celebrated under a cloud. By the time Glen and Mary Daley returned glumly to Florida early in January after their hastily arranged visit to their daughter, Sharon’s face was already marked like a map for the radiation therapy.

The Coverdale family had no template, no collective memory, to steer it through the straits of such an adversity. Miles and Sharon had negotiated the all too normal vicissitudes of their married life with a tacit agreement that it rarely served a useful purpose to confront a problem directly. They were reinforced in this attitude by the fact that it remained largely untested. Finances had never been problematic. Neither encountered more than momentary career frustration. The children never had as much as a broken bone, and were both bright, personable, well-educated, and Rachel well-married at age twenty-three. Both the elder Coverdales and the Daleys were alive, in good health, and in intact marriages. Terminal illness is always uncharted territory for the person who experiences it, but it was especially so for Sharon and those closest to her. She and Miles coped with it the only way they knew—by not talking about it.

“We’re not going to get any better at this, you know,” she had said to him as they drove away from the clinic following her final terminal diagnosis.

“I know,” Miles replied flatly, and then, when he could think of nothing more profound to say, he simply repeated himself. “I know.”

Rachel and Brian, however, having no tools other than the family tradition of silence, and being less adept than their parents at employing even this questionably valuable device, found themselves in more of an emotional free fall.

The severe mercy of Sharon’s final illness was its brevity. Hers was an orderly death. There was time enough to prepare, but no agonizing lingering. By Ash Wednesday, it became clear—though the doctors had never held out much hope anyway—that the radiation treatment was going to be of no avail. Sharon checked out of the hospital for the final time and settled into a hospital-style bed in the family room of the rectory. Bishop Landry was a weekly visitor. The Daleys moved into one guest room for the duration. Howard and Joan Coverdale spent that first week of Lent in the other bedroom that had been vacated by their now grown grandchildren and took proper leave of their daughter-in-law. Miles presided at one Mass each Sunday, but turned all the preaching and other liturgical duties over to his curate, Justin Hooker. Lance Kemper, the senior warden of St Alban’s, and Donna Lessing, the office manager, quietly took care of the most pressing administrative chores. On Easter Sunday, Sharon received her viaticum—final Holy Communion—from her husband’s own hand, was anointed with oil by the Bishop, and was alert for the formal reading of the Prayers for the Dying, the official last rites of the Episcopal Church. The next day, Monday in Easter Week, Sharon lost any meaningful semblance of consciousness. Fluids continued to be administered intravenously, but as she had long since ordered that no feeding tube be inserted, she was no longer able to take nourishment. She stopped breathing just before midnight Tuesday. Everyone else was asleep at that precise moment. Miles roused himself a few minutes later when the hall clock struck the hour. He quietly offered the Prayer of Commendation, as he had for so many others so many times before, disconnected the IV line, straightened his wife’s hair, and placed her arms in the traditional crossed position. He then went and woke the others, first his children, then Sharon’s parents. Only as dawn approached did he place a call to the funeral home so they could come and remove the body.

The end of a graveside rite is an awkward moment under any circumstances, but even moreso on this occasion. There was no dark-suited mortician to direct the pallbearers to place their boutonnieres on the casket as they file by, and to announce, “This concludes the service.” The seminarian acolytes, having the smallest emotional investment, were the first to break ranks. Dean Craig discreetly stepped over to whisper his thanks before they retired with their paraphernalia several hundred yards across the campus to the sacristy of St Mary’s Chapel. Miles was momentarily frozen, disoriented by having to act in a familiar play on a familiar stage, but having been cast in the wrong role. The Nashotah graveyard was home territory for him—he had honed his craft as a preacher two and a half decades before by using a conveniently-sized headstone as a pulpit and preaching to the dead (half hoping, at times, for a response, which would confirm that he was following his true call). Funerals, of course, were part of the substance of his vocation, but always with himself in the familiar (dare he say even comfortable?) role of presider. He had never buried his wife before. He was like an experienced shortstop being suddenly asked to play left field; he could describe the duties of the job, but they were not yet instinctive, reflexive. Miles knew that the proper action at this moment was to hug his children, but which one first? Rachel was to his left, Brian to his right, and he was paralyzed by a decision that was probably entirely without consequences. Bishop Landry faced no such dilemma, and was therefore able to solve Miles’s—two long strides and outstretched arms put Rachel Coverdale DeFronzo in his embrace, with her husband Greg’s hand never leaving her shoulder. Miles instantly recognized his deliverance, and turned to wordlessly hug his son.

Even as he did so, his own father’s hand was gently on Miles’s shoulder. No one would have ever described Howard Coverdale as a demonstrative man, so a hand on a shoulder was not a minimal gesture. He had, after all, spent more than four decades as an accountant, and had a personality that did nothing to belie the stereotype borne by his profession. Both the personality and the profession occupied prominent places in the family gene pool. Howard’s own father had been a financial officer for Cunard Lines—in its day the premier carrier of trans-Atlantic passenger traffic—until he got off the proverbial boat one day in New York and never saw fit to report for the return voyage to England, choosing instead to purvey his analytical and financial skills in the American market. Charles Coverdale eventually found a niche in the accounting offices of the Monongahela Valley, Pennsylvania steel industry. He never quite made what one would call a fortune, but he did sustain his family in a modicum of comfort through the years of the Great Depression, which was no mean feat. He even managed to marshall the resources to send Howard, his only child, to Marquette University in Milwaukee. Howard’s education was permanently interrupted, however, by Adolf Hitler, against whom he fought as a tail gunner in several dozen bombing runs from England over Germany. He was sent home wounded in the winter before the Normandy invasion—wounded not by an enemy round but by a freak fall on an unanticipated and invisible patch of ice outside his barracks. There was no promising football career for his torn knee ligaments to wreck, but they did end his obligation to the United States Army Air Corps. Howard paid due respects to his family in Pennsylvania, but returned quickly to Milwaukee, not to resume his education, but to rekindle what had been a nascent romance with Joan Grisham, the daughter of a reasonably prosperous retailer of women’s apparel. He was successful not only in that endeavor, but in stumbling upon a position as a bookkeeper with a farm implements manufacturer on the west side of the city, from which he retired forty five years later as chief financial officer. He and Joan, now retired for nearly a decade in Sarasota, had raised Miles in the comfortably affluent, but not ostentatious, suburb of Wauwatosa, barely a twenty minute drive eastward on Interstate 94 from where they were now offering their only son their inadequate support—which is the only kind of support anyone can offer at such a time—at the nodal moment of beginning life as a widower.

The English Coverdales had always been members of the established church of that land, which meant, in America, that they were Episcopalians. No one would have ever suggested aloud that it was an affiliation sustained more by heredity and habit than by conviction and choice, but such a characterization does not miss the mark by much. The truth is, it has never been an unduly arduous task to be both an Episcopalian and relatively unreligious. This capacity for unreflective churchmanship explains how, when it came time for Howard and Joan to name their son, they chose the name Miles almost arbitrarily, just because it appealed to them at the moment. They had not the slightest inkling that they were naming him after a distinguished, even controversial, Anglican bishop of the sixteenth century. The proto-Coverdale had been an Augustinian friar early in the volatile—particularly for monastic orders—early years of Henry VIII’s reign, but renounced that association after falling under the influence of the Protestant reformers on the continent, and went into self-imposed exile there. His consuming interest was the translation of the Bible into English, and he was a partner in the production of the first such completed effort, the Great Bible of 1535. His rendering of the Psalms found its way into the Book of Common Prayer, and thereby into the hearts and imaginations and memories of hundreds of thousands of English speaking Christians who never heard his name. Under Henry’s sickly successor, the boy king Edward VI, Coverdale was made Bishop of Exeter in 1551, but was forced back into exile when Edward’s half-sister, Bloody Mary, assumed the throne two years later. Upon the return of stability to the British monarchy under Elizabeth in 1558, Bishop Coverdale returned permanently to his homeland and championed the Puritan cause in the ecclesiastical politics of the Church of England. His late twentieth century namesake, now in mourning, had never even heard of the good bishop until he studied church history as a college student. The latter-day Miles Coverdale viewed this random connection with some pride, but also as an amusing irony, as his own predilection was solidly toward the Catholic, rather than the Protestant, polarity within the Anglican spectrum.

Miles began to settle into his role as husband-of-the-deceased with a bit more self-assurance. It occurred to him that no one expected him to say or do anything; they were all too pre-occupied with what to say and do themselves. Actually, there was not much to say. Anything profound had already been said. All that remained were platitudes and practicalities. Howard Coverdale opted for the latter.

“Look…uh…we’ll just see you back at your place. I mean, rather than caravan. Your mother hasn’t eaten all day. I’m just gonna take her now and get her fed. We’ll see you in Grove Lake. You’ll probably beat us there.”

“That’s fine, Dad. I’ll see you there.” Miles’s parents had flown up from Florida the day after Sharon died, and had return reservations the next Monday. They drove their rented Ford Taurus from Grove Lake to Nashotah in convoy behind Chase Landry after the service at St Alban’s, along with Rachel and Greg in their Honda Accord, and Brian behind the wheel of the family sedan, with his father in the passenger seat. It was an almost new charcoal gray Mercury Marquis, a symbol of comfortably established middle age that Miles had long resisted in favor of the various incarnations of Volkswagen he had driven since his college days. Sharon had talked him into making the switch—actually, it was more like giving permission than any form of coercion. His protests about it being a sign of conspicuous comsumption unbecoming to a member of the clergy were not convincing, even to himself.

While Howard and Joan were negotiating the slope—too steep to be gentle and too gentle to be steep—from the cemetery grounds to their car parked along the narrow campus road, Fred Craig came alongside Miles.

“Please rest a little while before you hit the road again. I know I can make some tea and I’m sure I can scrounge up some cookies or something to go with it.” Before Miles could answer, Chase Landry was by his other side.

“Miles, I’m going to insist that you take up Fred on his invitation. We’ve practically just gotten here, you know. The traffic’s going to be a mess no matter when we leave, so we might as well get a little break. Brian, you don’t mind, do you?”

“Not at all, Bishop. Father Craig, this is very kind of you. We’d be glad to stop by.” Everyone had correctly intuited that Miles’s inclination would be to avoid any unnecessary delay in returning home, once the official business was completed. The combined pressure of the dean, the bishop, and his son, however, quashed in advance any resistance he may have offered. Realizing he was cornered, Miles tried, not quite convincingly, to sound cheerful about it.

“Sure…absolutely. Tea sounds good.” With that surrender, it was Rachel who then felt the need to be extricated. The company of three black-suited clergymen and her brother was singularly unappealing to her at the moment. Truthfully, anyone’s company was unappealing to her at the moment—even, strangely and unaccountably, her own husband’s, but Greg was her ride home.

“Dad, I think Greg and I are just going to slip away and take our chances with rush hour on the the tollway. Bishop, we’ll clear a path for you.” Rachel spoke from her knowledge that Chase Landry’s destination that afternoon was also the near north side of Chicago. She embraced the still vested bishop once again. “And thank-you. Thank-you so much. You’ve been wonderful to us. I don’t know what we would have done.”

The bishop grasped both her shoulders and looked her squarely in the eyes. “You know I love you all, don’t you?”

“Yes,” she replied through a wan but unaffected smile. “I know. Dad, I’ll call you tonight, OK?”

“I’d love it, sweetheart, but don’t feel like you have to. I’ll be fine.” Miles meant precisely what he said. He hugged Greg in silence and sent them on their way. Chase Landry excused himself to remove his vestments and stow them in the trunk of his care; he would join them in the deanery directly. Fred Craig, not personally close either to the Coverdales or to Bishop Landry, and wishing to be hospitable but not imposing, discreetly walked a few paces ahead, ensuring that he would arrive at his own front door before his guests; the deanery was only a few yards away from the row of cars that were in various stages in the process of departure. Once inside, he quickly put water on to boil, then returned to the living room and bade his company be seated.

“Miles, I know the worst thing to say at a time like this is, ‘I know how you feel.’ But I’m widowed myself, you know—I lost Diane six years ago—so I have an inkling, at least. My heart goes out to you.”

Miles sighed. “Thank-you, Fred. I didn’t know.” The dean had occupied his position only a year and half earlier, and Miles, though he had once served a term on the Nashotah House board of trustees, had not been closely involved in the search process, and was not familiar with that detail of Father Craig’s biography.

“So you’re here by yourself? Do you have any other family around?” Miles was so habituated to the role of an empathetic pastor that he slipped into it quite without any premeditation. His being and his doing were so integrated, in fact, that it was seldom possible to delineate between “Miles” and “Father Coverdale.”

“Three sons, but they’re all in California. One in college, one in law school, one looking for jobs acting in commercials and hoping to get discovered.”

Father Coverdale smiled. “It sounds like they’re all turning out well. That’s a great comfort for a parent. Sharon and I have been lucky in that department. I’m glad she was around long enough to see them turn into respectable human beings.” Miles looked playfully toward Brian, seated in a wing back chair in the corner of the room, with this last remark.

Brian grinned back. “Thanks, Dad. I’m glad you approve.” A shrill sound emanating from the kitchen gave notice that the water was ready for the tea, and Dean Craig retired there to do his duty. When he returned, the four men drank their tea and ate their store-bought cookies and got on decently well. The conversation could not be described as animated, but neither was it awkward. Fred Craig’s anxiety about everything turning morose was thus allayed. He had been an academic his entire ordained ministry, and found—largely to his chagrin—that his pastoral instincts in a crisis were not well-honed. Chase Landry, by contrast, was the consummate sensitive pastor, and put the group at ease with what northerners invariably attribute to southern charm—though Bishop of Chicago, he was a native and proud son of southeast Louisiana. The fact was, Miles needed little in the way of comforting. The circumstances of Sharon’s passing had afforded him ample opportunity to face and come to terms with his grief. Brian was composed and pleasant, but taciturn.

Another ten minutes and it was time to leave. Miles was the first to rise, but this time everyone seconded his motion.

“Fred, thank-you. This is exactly what we needed.”

“Oh, you’re absolutely welcome,” the dean replied. “I wish we could have met under happier circumstances. You’re part of the oral tradition here from your time on the board, and even from your student days—I feel like I’ve met something of a celebrity.”

Miles laughed. “Well, I don’t know about that. But it’s kind of you to say so.” He then turned to his bishop, and judged the situation to be sufficiently private and informal to address his old friend by his first name.

“Chase, thanks again for everything. You’ve been the proverbial tower of strength. I know the work must be piling up on your desk.”

“Which means it will still all be there when I get back to it. But I’m not through with you yet. My meeting in New York this weekend got canceled, and I know Justin is overworked covering for you. I talked to him this morning and he told me he hasn’t written a sermon yet. So, with your permission, I’ll come to St Alban’s this Sunday and preach and celebrate and remind them how they need to be treating you.”

“I’m certainly not going to argue with that.” Miles’s gratitude was genuine. He knew it would be both wise and therapeutic to get back deeply involved in his work, but a breather of a few days would be welcome. “We’ll look forward to having you.”

By this time, the three departees had reached the deanery foyer, took proper leave of their host, and stepped out into what was at that moment bright sunlight, bringing the newly verdant carpet of Nashotah’s spacious rolling acreage the more vividly to life for its late-in-the-day low angle. Miles and Brian approached the Mercury.

“Do you want me to drive again, Dad?”

“Absolutely. It’s not often that I get to be chauffered. Home, Jeeves.”

To drive from Nashotah, Wisconsin to Grove Lake, Illinois presents a dilemma. It is only eighty miles as the crow flies, but it is a difficult eighty miles of two-lane state highways, full of twists, turns, small towns, and speed traps. That is the route the caravan had taken earlier in the day, leaving Grove Lake at noon, but not arriving at Nashotah until almost three. The alternative is to make a big letter ‘C’, heading east into Milwaukee, following Interstate 94 south until it becomes a tollway at the Illinois border, then backtracking both west and a little north into the ring of exurbs-cum-suburbs that includes the Village of Grove Lake. Without consulting his father, but receiving no argument, Brian opted for this longer mileage/equal time alternative.

Both men were silent. Miles was simply mentally exhausted. Brian was grappling with demons whose names had not yet been spoken. As they entered Illinois, darkness and rain fell simultaneously. Miles offered no resistance when his imagination offered him a glimpse of the enormity of all that had happened. There was no question of comprehending it just yet, only glimpsing. His ruminations paused on the Proper Preface of the Requiem Mass—”…and to your faithful people, Lord, life is changed, not ended.” Those words, of course, refer to the changed existence of the decedent. But surely they speak of his own life, too. In that moment of reflection, he may even have been bold enough to speculate that his own life would change as radically as had Sharon’s. It was a time of flux, a time-in between. His physical crossing of the Wisconsin-Illinois border was a sacramental sign and seal of a much more substantial border, but he knew the territory of northern Illinois much more intimately than he knew the territory of his changed, not ended, life. Exploring that territory would require effort—more effort than he was up to at the moment. It was a labor that would confront him soon enough.

Chapter 2

St Alban’s was one of a dwindling number of Episcopal parishes to maintain the venerable custom of providing a rectory—a residence for its senior priest and his family. It was a spacious two-story brick colonial structure, three doors down a side street from the church itself—close enough to be convenient, but far enough removed to allow for a healthy measure of distinction between the priest’s professional life and his family life. The Coverdales took their equity from the home they had owned in Porterville, the site of Miles’s previous cure, and sank it into a vacation cottage in north central Wisconsin, between Wausau and Rhinelander. (Chicagoans usually made their playground in an area radiating from Lake Geneva in the southeastern part of the state, but Miles and Sharon were themselves natives of that territory, so they did as the other natives were wont to do, and staked out getaways in various more northerly areas.) On the Monday morning following Sharon’s funeral, Miles was alone in the rectory. Howard and Joan had departed for Sarasota that morning. Brian had left the night before for his own bachelor apartment in the Wrigleyville neighborhood of Chicago’s north side—not quite the fulfillment of his childhood fantasy of playing for the Cubs, but close. Rachel and Greg had driven out to Grove Lake early in the morning to attend church and generally be of support. She prepared an impromptu pasta luncheon for her family and Bishop Landry, who was accompanied this time by his wife, Jeanette. (Did Rachel sense a subliminal need to assume the role of surrogate “lady of the house”?) By nightfall, however, all the company had departed, and Miles was alone.

Monday was the regular weekly day off for the rector of St Alban’s, so there was no deadline which required rising at a given hour. On most Mondays, Miles was as likely as not to sleep in until near nine o’clock. But on this particular Monday, he was restive just after seven—which was just as well, because Belle, an eight-year old Sheltie, made it clear that she was ready for her morning promenade. What could he do with Belle? She was really Sharon’s dog. Miles had lodged formal objections when Sharon and the kids accepted the puppy from an amateur breeder who was a member of the parish. He was very fond of dogs in general and this one in particular, but knew that he already had enough stress in the routine structure of his life, and he didn’t need the extra stress that attended responsibility for a pet. Miles knew, however, there was nothing to be gained by being adamant. The formality of his protest was met with the corresponding formality of assurance that he wouldn’t have to concern himself at all about Belle’s care; they would see that she was fed, groomed, walked, and played with. Miles knew better, of course, than to take these assurances any more seriously than Sharon and Rachel and Brian took his protestations, and ended up doing at least his share of feeding, walking, and petting (he drew the line at bathing). When Sharon’s illness finally confined her to a bed, he did virtually all the pet-related work, placating himself sub-consciously with the notion that he was merely a pinch-hitter, a temporary replacement for the person whose real job it was. On the Monday morning after Sharon’s burial, however, this deception was revealed for what it was.

After taking care of his own version of the need that Belle was clamoring to have met, Miles stuffed his bare feet into a pair of all-purpose athletic shoes and threw on the Wheaton College sweatshirt that lay on the floor next to this bed over his pajamas. (He rarely had any contact with his nearby alma mater, but had bought the garment on a whim three years before on a visit to the college bookstore.) Belle, oblivious to the complexity of her supposed master’s feelings toward her, led him down the stairs in a state of rapturous anticipation, stopping at every other step to look back and make sure he was following. She had been well-trained not to bark under such circumstances, but it was obvious that such restraint was grossly counter-intuitive. From a closet in the entry hall at the base of the stairs, Miles retrieved a baseball cap for himself and a leash for Belle.

The morning was sunny, but there was a light frost on the roofs of the neighborhood houses. The regular dog-walking route led through a parcel of real estate which was large enough for four homes, but which, through a serendipitous coincidence of bureacratic, political, and economic conditions, had been preserved undeveloped. As Belle attended to her business (how awful it must be, Miles thought, to have one’s bodily functions held hostage to the timing of a twice-daily ambulation) he gazed back a couple of hundred yards to the house that had been his family’s home for the past twelve years. There was work to be done there. The activities of the weekend, the constant presence of family members and parishioners, had distracted him from this work. Now there was no longer a plausible excuse for avoidance. To some extent, the mild sense of crisis which he felt was self-imposed. It was not as though the Illinois corn crop would fail if he did not start the process of re-configuring and re-contextualizing the physical fabric of his life to reflect the reality of his new status as widowed (… or single? Was there a substantive distinction to be made between the two? This question would have to be received into the record by title, for it needed to mature a good while longer before any coherent sense could be made of it.) But, nevertheless, Miles felt a need for a definite transition from the chapter in his life in which he was Sharon’s husband to whatever was next. He gambled on the intuition that he was at the narrowest and shallowest section of the stream that delineated one life segment from the other, and now was the time to cross it, lest it be more difficult later. His resolution, however, did little to reduce the inherently intimidating nature of the task.

Belle, the essential work of the expedition having been accomplished, proceeded in the general direction of home, but not without testing the limits of her keeper’s tolerance for gratuitous sniffing around. This morning, Miles was indulgent. He was grateful for any excuse to delay what he had determined would be the main work of the day. He knew, of course, that it was one of those tasks that was terrifying precisely because it was uncommenced, and once engaged, its terrors would vaporize. Still, the prospect was formidable. In due course, Belle led him back to the front door of the rectory. Miles decided that today would be a low maintenance day—no shower and no shave. He did not plan to go out at all. Coffee, grapefruit juice, and a bowl of rolled oats warmed in a saucepan with some sugar and melted butter—all consumed during a half-hour of channel surfing between the television network morning shows—fortified him for what lay ahead. It was his established custom to recite the full Prayer Book office of Morning Prayer daily, but on this occasion he elected the lazy option, and offered the short form from memory—a few verses of Psalm 51, a couple of lines from the first epistle of St Peter, the Lord’s Prayer, and a collect invoking divine blessing on the day’s activities.

The first step toward the restoration—redefinition, actually—of normalcy, was to get rid of the hospital bed in which Sharon died. It had been unused nearly a week, and so was available for disposal earlier, but somehow this detail had been overlooked amid the preparations for the funeral and its aftermath. A quick phone call to the supply house from which it had been rented, and its removal was arranged for that very afternoon. Miles felt his energy level rise slightly, and he proceeded up the stairs to the master bedroom. First on his mental list were the dresser drawers; five of the nine were dedicated to Sharon’s belongings. Miles allowed himself a second simply to contemplate the piece of furniture—an ebonized Chinese-style bureau which they had treated themselves to as a housewarming gift when they occupied the Grove Lake rectory. “It’s rather … different, don’t you think?” he had remarked to Sharon when she first called his attention to it in the furniture showroom.”

“Yes, I suppose it is,” she replied. “But I like it. It’s eclectic. One might even say it’s bold!”

In that moment, Miles voiced his assent. Later—he realized fully for the first time only during this second of contemplation—he had grown weary of it. It was no longer exotic or bold, just out of place. But as he perceived that his wife continued to take pleasure in it, he did not voice his own discontent. It was not any reluctance in principle on Miles’s part to express disagreement with Sharon—he was quite capable of doing so when he felt it necessary—nor, still less, an impulse to be chivalrously considerate. Rather, it was a simple matter of balance and scale—the oriental chest-of-drawers was a low-grade, almost subliminal, irritant. It was too minor to allow the calibration of a properly measured response.

The top drawers contained lingerie—bras and panties. There was certainly no question of keeping any of it, even as a sentimental momento; it would seem perverse. Maybe he should have offered some of it to Rachel, but he could not imagine how he could do so comfortably. He wasn’t even sure whether women swap and share such items. Besides, his wife and his daughter did not have similar body types. Sharon was tall and large-boned, like her father. Rachel was petite, like both her grandmothers. So Miles stepped over to the closet, where there was a supply of paper shopping bags in one corner. He retrieved one with handles, the kind that better department stores use during the Christmas shopping season. In it went all the underwear, pantyhose, and tights. He would just drop it off at the thrift store operated by St George’s, the north side Chicago parish where he had begun his ordained ministry twenty-five years earlier. There were manifold visible tokens of feminine influence in the decor of the bedroom, from the lace curtains on the windows to the stenciled geese around the upper perimeter of the walls. In time, Miles would have to appropriate or alter these womanly touches to the room’s status of occupation by a single male. But it was as he packed this shopping bag that Miles felt himself to be dispatching the very essence of the room’s femininity. His familiarity with these items—the navy tights that she paired with the charcoal gray wool skirt that he so much enjoyed seeing her in, the pastel cotton briefs that she invariably wore under denim jeans, the black lace bra that he could tell she was wearing, even if she was fully dressed, by the darker-than-usual lipstick that nearly always coincided with it—represented a level of intimacy that is proper to a man and woman who are married to one another. Now the bonds of that marriage were dissolved by death (“…until we are parted by death,” they had vowed to one another), and it seemed appropriate that such signs of the relationship disappear as well.

Miles found that it took two bags to hold the contents of as many drawers of intimate apparel, two bags to hold what, for him at that moment, were the tangible residue of the peculiar intimacy of his marriage to Sharon. As with most courtships, there was a discernible element of passion while they were dating and through the first year or so of married life. It would be an exaggeration to so describe their relations beyond that time. After Sharon’s recovery from Rachel’s birth, they settled into a pattern of sexual intimacy once or twice a month—a little early in the marrige, by some standards, for that degree of abatement in energy—but neither complained and neither considered it a problem. It had been in the fall of his middler year at Nashotah House that Miles began to do field work at Zion Parish in Oconomowoc. There he met Sharon Marie Daley, daughter of Glen and Mary Daley, pillars of Zion Church. She had just graduated from the University of Wisconsin and was a student teacher at one of the local elementary schools. At the time they met, Sharon had a steady boyfriend from her college days, but that relationship ended, with a moderate amount of trauma, sometime during the Christmas holidays. She and Miles got to know each other as they helped out with the high school youth group. Miles had dated regularly while at Wheaton, but nothing was ever “serious.” It was never crystal clear just when they moved to the dating stage, but by Easter, Miles and Sharon were very much an “item.” The following summer allowed them to spend long and lazy hours together at the Daley’s Oconomowoc Lake property, and although it remained unspoken, even between the two of them, they knew they were destined for marriage. Sharon was hired for a regular teaching position in Delafield, so she remained close at hand in the fall. The formal engagement came over Thanksgiving weekend, when the Daleys of Oconomowoc invited the Coverdales of Wauwatosa to join them for their holiday dinner. In mid-May of the following year, Miles was awarded the Master of Divinity degree, cum laude, from Nashotah House. On the first Saturday in June, he was ordained deacon in St James’ Cathedral in Chicago. One week later, Miles and Sharon were married in the too-picturesque setting of Zion Church, perched on the end of a peninsula jutting out into Fowler Lake in the heart of Oconomowoc, on a too perfect June afternoon. Deacon and Mrs Coverdale both came from well-to-do families, so their ability to honeymoon in Acapulco was not remarkable. What was remarkable, in an age when the sexual revolution was still ascending frenetically toward its eventual peak a decade or more later, was that both Sharon and Miles were virgins when they shared a bed for the first time on the night of their wedding.

The remaining items in the bureau drawers were less problematic. Slacks, jeans, and shorts were bagged for delivery to the St George’s thrift shop, along with cardigan sweaters. Miles knew Rachel never wore cardigans, but she was fond of pullovers, so the latter were segregated for her review. He was energized by what he had accomplished. On to the closet—a walk-in. There were dresses and skirts which he barely recognized, or which he knew he had not seen in years, and which seemed hardly worn. This was no surprise, but the sheer number of such items was nevertheless momentarily staggering. Miles—long conditioned as a pastor to be observant of his own emotions—took note of an undertone of irritation that bordered on anger. Why did she have to hang on to so many articles of clothing? Was it vanity? Laziness? A misplaced perception of need? (No woman could possibly need that many skirts and dresses.) How difficult could it be to cull the unused portion of one’s wardrobe from time to time? Didn’t she know how hard this would be for him? Did she care? On an impulse, Miles resurrected the technique he had perfected when he had an after-school job as a delivery driver for a dry cleaner—the hooks of a dozen hangers distributed along the length of his right index finger and wedged against the corner formed by its intersection with his thumb, bending slightly as the waist to balance and support the load of garments slung over his right shoulder. He lumbered down the stairs, pausing to grab his keys from a hook in the entry hall, and then headed through the kitchen to the attached garage, where he deposited his cargo in the cavernous trunk of the Grand Marquis. Eight more such trips—Miles did the rough math in his head and determined he had transported nearly a hundred skirts, dresses, jumpers, blouses, and miscellaneous other pieces of apparel—and the trunk was tightly full, but not so much as to prevent the lid from latching shut. The trip to St George’s thift shop would happen sooner than he had anticipated.

Though Miles’s suits, jackets, shirts, and shoes remained, the closet seemed like it had tripled in size. He sat on the floor in the doorway and caught his breath. Belle, agitated by his frenetic trips up and down the stairs, nuzzled his hand, demanding to be petted, but he was impassive. Though he was winded, the visage of the cleared closet was invigorating, a sensation tending in its trajectory toward euphoria. The whole enterprise felt cleansing, renewing—and arousingly unfamiliar. It was as though he were ten years old again and had furtively crossed the thoroughfare four blocks from his house which his mother had established as the westward limit of his designated roaming area. It was like the feeling he had at the first half-dozen or so Masses he celebrated after being ordained to the priesthood, the thought of his words and actions being the instrument through which the body and blood of Christ are confected on the altar was unbearably exciting, nearly sexual in its intensity. Miles contemplated the emptied drawers and the linear feet of liberated closet space as an artist who has just applied the final brush stroke to a canvas. It may yet need a bit of touching up—a once-over with the vacuum cleaner would remove the remaining traces of evidence that a woman once lodged her wardrobe in this closet—but it was nonetheless good, very good. He mentally moved some of his own possessions so as to be more evenly distributed.

This was strange solace—the sight of a cleaned and re-arranged closet—but Miles desired no other comfort in that moment. Yet, where was the grieving widower? Where was the dutiful and faithful husband who had loved and honored his wife for a quarter century, only to be deprived of her companionship in middle age? What singular coldness in the deeper layers of his soul was being revealed by his impulse to rejoice in the eradication of the material infrastructure of his and Sharon’s common life, even while the earth above her grave had not yet begun to settle? Miles was crushed by remonstrance in direct proportion to the elation that had been generated by his morning’s activity. He rose from the closet floor and sat on the end of the bed, contemplating his image in the mirror over the newly-lightened dresser. In the periphery of his field-of-view was Sharon herself, gazing inertly from a picture frame on the dresser top—it was the “complimentary 8x10” they had chosen the last time St Alban’s had updated its pictorial membership directory. He was disgusted with himself, not for being glad that Sharon’s clothes were gone, but for not being disgusted with himself for being glad that Sharon’s clothes were gone. He knew that, were he to yield to the temptation to objectify his emotions and behavior, he would find it all suspiciously problematic. It meant more than it said, and that was worrisome. Intentional analysis of his motives would be fatal to his nascent joy. Even in his making such a simple acknowledgement, of course, the potential became actual. What were the repressed feelings which opportunistically siezed, as the path to their own fruition, Miles’s practical need to adjust to widowhood?

At any time during the twenty-five years of his marriage, Miles would not have hesitated to describe it as happy. It was never particularly ecstatic, but neither did it ever seem particularly troubled. He had always felt that his and Sharon’s affection for one another was genuine. It ebbed and flowed with the normal vicissitudes of life, but it neither overflowed when it flowed nor ran too dry when it ebbed. The scope and scale of his emotions this morning—and he had to admit it, his feelings were ultimately, if not immediately, about Sharon—were strange more for their quantity than their quality. Although Miles was not one of those parish clergy who make a specialty out of counseling therapy, it did not take an advanced degree in psychology to make the obvious inference. His conscious estimation of his marital relationship did not harmonize with the complex of semi-conscious and subconscious emotions associated with the same object. Could it be that he had been deluding himself about the quality of his marriage? Though he never would have characterized the relationship as stellar, he did consider it exemplary precisely for its workmanlike adequacy. It was daily, it was ordinary, and because it did not depend on passion for its sustenance, it was emotionally economical to maintain. Now even that modest sense of accomplishment, of responsible contribution to the greater social fabric, was being suddenly challenged—challenged because there was obviously something profoundly wrong with the marriage. What he had thought worked had indeed failed. Why else would he have have felt such frustration with his poor dead wife because she held on to articles of clothing long after apparently deciding to retire them to inactive status. But it was not just frustration—candor with himself demanded that he confront this reality—it was rage, and it was not a rage he felt only an hour ago as he worked in the closet, it was a present and living and dynamic, though controlled, rage. Why else would he have packed the trunk of his car with Sharon’s clothes, creating an artificially urgent need to make nearly a fifty mile round trip into the city, all for the dubious gratification of spreading his own wardrobe around the now seemingly cavernous expanse of the walk-in closet? No, there was something wrong, something wrong with himself . This was no mere secondary theme in the music of his grieving. It was not about Sharon’s death at all; Sharon’s death only provided the context in which what was wrong with Miles could appear in plain view. He came to this realization with the same shock experienced by a myopic child who puts on a pair of glasses for the first time.

But what was it? What was wrong? Here there was no clarity. Maybe it was just grief after all. Maybe it would all settle down once he got back into a routine. Miles had always thrived under the discipline of routine. During his school years, he had religiously devoted an equal amount of time to his studies each school night —almost never more than three hours and rarely less than two-and-a-half. His grades, correspondingly, were almost never outstanding and rarely less than “good.” In seminary, he adopted the monastic-style discipline of Nashotah House—bells governing every aspect of daily life, gathering two to three times a day in the chapel for liturgical prayer, regular student “work crew” assignments around the buildings and grounds—with gratitude and verve. In ordained ministry, his pastoral and administrative style had always been characterized by a stable predictability that his parishioners eventually found comforting and nurturing. There is nothing routine, however, about having a wife who is fighting a malignant brain tumor, so when Sharon got sick, there was no routine in Miles’s life that was not disrupted. In time, the norm was re-defined such that the very lack of routine became itself a routine, enabling Miles to handle the demands of saying goodbye to a wife with relative serenity and grace. Now, however, with Sharon duly buried, and her closet duly cleaned out, there was both an opportunity and a need to once again erect the fences and repair the walkways and re-arrange the furniture of Miles Coverdale’s life. Surely doing so would reveal his tantrum in the closet as an anomaly, his sidelong glimpse of his own rage-infested psyche as a mere chimera.

The doorbell rang—though not before Belle anticipated the chimes with her own barking. It was the hospital-supply company come to retrieve their bed. Miles led the two employees into the den. They were caricatures of themselves, clad entirely in white, including their shoes, windbreakers, and baseball-style caps. This struck Miles, when he thought about it later, as amusingly odd. These guys don’t even work in a hospital, yet they take pains to appear “medical,” by mere association with the nature of the goods that they purvey. But at the moment, their uniform was subliminally comforting. It gave them an air of competence, and seemed to add significance to their really quite mundane task of dismantling the bed just enough to get it efficiently out of the den and into the entry hall, then out the front door and into their van, which was backed into the driveway. Miles was familiar with the power of a uniform, of course. He would don his own long-sleeve black shirt and starched white Anglican “dog collar” once again the next morning, and people would instinctively see significance in his words and actions that they would not otherwise be inclined to look for. It would be good to be back in harness, to be “Father Coverdale” once again. Certainly Justin would be relieved. Miles had mentored three other curates during his time at St Alban’s. Each brought his own distinctive gifts. Among Justin Hook’s, blessedly, was administration. It had been nearly six weeks that Miles was functionally out of the loop in the operation of the parish, and Justin’s grasp of the systemic landscape of human relationships within an organization had undoubtedly served him well during the crisis in the Coverdale household. Donna and Lance would no-doubt welcome his return to full-time active status as well. There was probably a chaotic array of mail and phone messages waiting for him on his desk, and the prospect of engaging it seemed sweet indeed.

Just as he shut the front door at the final departure of the men in white, the telephone rang. “Coverdales” was his accustomed opening words to the initiator of an incoming call. For the first time, it dawned on Miles that the plural was no longer appropriate—there was only one Coverdale living in the rectory of St Alban’s Church. Unless he were to count Belle. No, Belle was not his dog—she thought differently, of course, but she was merely an ignorant dog—and he was not about to share his name with her. He would have to think of some other way of answering the phone.

“Miles, I know the last voice you probably want to hear on your day off is your bishop’s.” It was Chase Landry. “So don’t let me linger. But I just wanted to check in.”

“I’m glad you did, Chase. You’re never an intrusion. You know that.”

“I hope you’re getting some good solitude and rest today.” The bishop voiced this hope in a solicitous, not admonishing, tone.

“Solitude, yes. Rest, I’m not so sure about. It’s been good for me, though. I’ve been going through Sharon’s things. Got to wear a new groove for myself, you know.” Miles’s affinity for routine had been a theme they had explored in the development of their collegial friendship before Chase’s elevation to the episcopate. The bishop hesitated just long enough in his reply that Miles realized in an instant that his friend on the other end of the telephone line had never buried a close family member of his own, so of course he would not have through such mundane details.

“Well, I guess you would. Yes, I guess you would. That’s good, Miles, that’s a good thing for you to be doing.”

“Well, it’s got to get done. And it’s therapeutic, I suppose.”

“Of course it is. Of course it is. So, are you going back in tomorrow?”

“Oh, yes.” Miles was confident in his assertion. “I need to. I’m looking forward to it. That will be just as therapeutic, too, I think.”

“I agree. I agree completely. How are the kids? Have you talked to them today?” Miles was suddenly aware that he had not only not talked to Rachel or Brian today, he had barely even thought about them, so intense was his self preoccupation.

“Actually, you know, I haven’t. I expect Rachel will be calling before the day is out. Brian’s hanging in there, I think. He’s pretty busy at work these days.” There was more optimism in Miles’s response to the bishop’s question about his children than he actually felt in his gut.

“To tell you the truth, Miles, it’s Brian I’m more worried about. I don’t know why. I just have a sense when I look at him that there’s more going on in there than meets the eye.”

Miles took a moment to digest this observation. He found that he was concerned about Brian intellectually but not viscerally. For whatever reason, he could not summon the emotional energy to focus intensely on his son’s state-of mind. That attitude would no doubt change in due course, but helping that change along was not a task he was willing to assume presently; he particularly was not interested in a protracted conversation on the subject of Brian.

“Thank-you, Bishop. I hadn’t really noticed anything myself. But I will keep an eye on him.”

Landry, ever the intuitive pastor, discerned that the purpose of his call had been accomplished. “Well, I said I wouldn’t linger, so I won’t. Just know that you’re in my prayers. And that goes for Jeanette, too.”

“Chase, that means more to me than I can say. Thank-you.”

“You’re absolutely welcome. I hope things go well for you tomorrow. I’ll touch base later in the week.”

“I’ll look forward to it. Goodbye, Bishop.”

It was mid-afternoon, and, the distractions of the removal of the bed and the bishop’s phone call having passed, Miles realized he’d eaten nothing since breakfast. With a minimum of reflection, he threw on a jacket and cap, got behind the wheel of the Mercury, requisitioned an Italian roast beef sandwich—vitually unique to the Chicago area and ubiquitous within it—at the drive-through window of a fast-foot restaurant at the edge of the Grove Lake village limit, and worked his way, with a right turn and a left turn and another right turn, to the nearest interchange of the Northwest Tollway. Passing O’Hare Airport, he made the connection to the Kennedy Expressway and into Chicago, catching the last inning of the Cubs’ season home opener on WGN radio. (The Cubs lost.) The Fullerton Avenue exit set him on a path to the Sherwood Park neighborhood and St George’s Church, where he had begun his ordained ministry in his mid-twenties. Miles was grateful that the volunteers manning the thrift store that day had arrived at St George’s after his own time there, so he was not faced with the obligation of socializing with old friends and admirers. The trunk of his car thus significantly lightened, Miles re-traced his path, just enough behind the peak of the afternoon rush hour that his progress was slowed only slightly. For a moment, it occurred to him that he should have made arrangements to see one or both of his children while he was, almost literally, in the neighborhood. His departure from Grove Lake that afternoon, however, had been virtually on a whim. He had even neglected to bring his cellular phone with him, so that clinched his decision to just head back for home without doing any visiting.

Belle was as attuned to the sound of the garage door opening as she was to the doorbell. She greeted him enthusiastically as he entered the kitchen from the garage. He got her to quiet down long enough to determine that there was no telltale beeping from the telephone answering machine. Nobody had called. Miles was tired, and looked forward to an hour or two of mindless diversion in front of the television, with a beer in hand. But it made sense to walk the dog before he took his shoes off. Belle was not his dog. He was only taking care of her temporarily.

Chapter 3

One of the pieces of furniture which Miles and Sharon acquired in the early years of their marriage was the old Steinway upright piano that he had played as a child. (Howard and Joan bought a grand to celebrate their thirty-fifth wedding anniversary, not because either of them played, but because it was one impressive piece of furniture.) It was mature both in its appearance—the dark mahogony finish had been lovingly cared for and was not overly knicked for its age, but neverthess emitted an aura consistent with its longevity—and in tone, which had grown more pleasingly mellow as the years advanced, a hallmark of fine pianos. The instrument had occupied the same place in the den of the St Alban’s rectory—along an inside wall to blunt the impact of temperature fluctuations on its tuning—since the day the Coverdales moved to Grove Lake from Porterville. Miles ran his finger along the top of lid and collected a layer of dust, a token of the disuse into which the piano had fallen in the years since Rachel had left for college. It really wasn’t something anybody should feel guilty about, Miles knew, but it nevertheless evoked sadness. As if to compensate for the slight, however unintended, he sat down on the bench and offered an elegantly simple rendition of the hymn tune “Old Hundredth,” better known to Christians of many stripes as the “Doxology.”

It was the afternoon of the first Sunday in June—the Day of Pentecost, fifty days after Easter. Miles was unwinding from the demanding routine of Sunday morning: arriving at the church by 6:45 to make sure all the right doors were unlocked and all the right lights turned on—such chores were part of the sexton’s job description, but if any were left undone, it would be Miles who would hear about it first. Then came Morning Prayer at 7:00, recited simply in a side chapel, usually with his curate, Father Hook, and a half-dozen or so faithful regulars. (Two Sundays each month, either the rector or the curate would take the early services alone, affording his counterpart a more relaxed morning—Pentecost, however, was not one of those occasions.) The first of the day’s two Masses began at 7:30. It was a “low” celebration—meaning the entire liturgy was spoken, with no music—and was attended by an average of forty or fifty congregants, the median age of whom was probably pushing seventy. Occasionally, Miles would wonder why it was virtually axiomatic in the Episcopal Church that, as people age, they tend to prefer their church services quieter and earlier, but he had never developed a totally satisfying hypothesis. Justin presided at the early celebration this week, and Miles preached. In the sacristy afterward, as the clergy and their lay assistants (one teenaged acolyte and an adult licensed to administer the chalice of consecrated wine during Holy Communion) were removing their vestments, a member of the Altar Guild, a woman in her mid-fifties, informed Miles that a mammogram had revealed a suspicious mass in her breast and she was scheduled for a biopsy the following Wednesday. He made a mental note to see her for prayers and sacramental anointing the day before, hoping that he would remember to write it into his day planner. Miles had always tried to gently discourage parishioners from passing important information to him in casual settings—hard experience had educated him as to the fallibility of his memory—but he was not about to reprimand, even gently, a lady who was consumed with anxiety over the possibility that she might have cancer.

About half of the 7:30 parishioners retired from the main door of the church directly to the parking lot following the dismissing injunction to “Go forth into the world, rejoicing in the power of the Spirit.” The others exited through a door at the north end of the narthex and made their way through a glassed-in cloistered walkway to the Guild Hall—a quaintly vestigal expression surviving from the days when the women of the parish generally did not hold paying jobs, and were organized into several “guilds,” named for various saints, which busied themselves with bazaars and rummage sales and the like, raising funds that supplemented the parish budget and were applied to, among other uses, the upkeep of the Guild Hall. A matching enclosed cloistered path connecting the sacristy with the kitchen at the east end of the Guild Hall—and thereby, with its twin and the two buildings themselves, defining the space of the courtyard known as the Garth—led Fathers Coverdale and Hook, each wearing a black cassock, to that venerable Episcopalian institution, the post-service “coffee hour.” There the principal challenge to a priest is to make relatively brief and upbeat contact with as many people as possible while avoiding being monopolized by anyone. This task calls for uncommon tact at times. On occasion, a parishioner will take the opportunity to vent frustration over an array of church-related and non-church related iussues. Since Sharon’s death, however, the members of St Alban’s had been more solicitous than usual of their rector; they were grateful to have him operating back at full capacity and did not wish to jeopardize his emotional equilibrium.

As the nine o’clock hour approached, families began to deposit their children in the Sunday School classrooms on the second floor of the Guild Hall, and adults began to gather in a large basement meeting area, furnished with an assortment of lounge furniture and padded folding chairs, for the Rector’s Forum, a relatively informal time of teaching and conversation on anything from a Bible passage to the morning’s headlines. Attendance at this event ranged between thirty and sixty, the majority arriving late in one degree or another.

Within a minute either side of 9:45, Miles brought the discussion to a conclusion—smoothly in this case, though it might just as easily have been abrupt—and proceeded back up the stairs and through the breezeway to prepare for the ten o’clock celebration, a ceremonially rich affair, with a twenty-three voice choir, ten handbell ringers, eight acolytes (including, on this high feast day of the Holy Spirit, a thurifer swinging a pot of fragrant incense), two lectors, and three lay assistants to administer the chalice. At this liturgy, Father Coverdale was both the celebrant and the preacher for a congregation totalling about three hundred, roughly three-quarters of the capacity of the building. Afterward, there was yet another coffee hour. It had always been Miles’s pastoral style to be nearly the last one to leave, and it was usually somewhere past noon when he did so. Pentecost was no exception.

It was after a lunch of microwave-reheated ravioli and a cold beer, followed by a short nap, that Miles found himself at the piano bench playing the Doxology. He considered himself fortunate. He was, he had to admit at moments such as this, somewhat lonely for steady companionship, but he was not morose or self-pitying. The angst of his closet-cleaning tantrum six weeks earlier would present itself from time to time, and he knew that he had not yet dealt with it decisively. But the great majority of his recollections of Sharon were sweet and tender, and he missed her in a way that was profound, though not maudlin.

The piano was part of that sweetness and sorrow. It was redolent of the years during which he and Sharon had engaged the holy calling of raising their daughter to adulthood. Before Rachel even had a fully working vocabulary, she was entranced by the instrument. When she was not quite six years old, the Coverdales prevailed upon Brenda Duncan, one of the parishioners of the Church of the Ascension, Miles’s cure in Porterville, and a newly retired school teacher, to lower her standard threshold of eight years and take Rachel on as a student. The child flourished, and although the piano did not consume her life, it did become the center. It was Sharon, however, who provided the energy that fueled Rachel’s life as a musician. Miles was never discouraging, or openly resentful, and he was never less than the dutiful parent in attending her recitals and appropriately doting. Only when she was grown did Miles realize he had been both jealous and envious of Rachel—jealous of Sharon’s devoted attention (Miles might have described it as smothering, consuming) to her. By the late 1970s, the era was long since past when the parish priesthood of the Episcopal Church carried with it either financial or social preferment. As the American economy reconfigured itself as to require a double income to support a comfortable middle class lifestyle (a process abetted by an ever-escalating expectation of the scope of a comfortable middle-class lifestyle), clergy families had to adjust along with the rest. Sharon Coverdale had enjoyed her year of teaching kindergarten in Delafield and the two years in a Chicago inner-city school before Rachel was born, but she was not excessively career-driven. Sustaining mortgage payments on their home in Porterville should have strapped the young Coverdales, but generous odds and ends of assistance from Wauwatosa and Oconomowoc kept them solvent and out of extraordinary debt and enabled Sharon to stay home with the kids until Brian entered kindergarten in the early part of his father’s sixth year as rector of Ascension. Miles suspected he was also envious of his daughter’s musical accomplishment outshining his own. He had voluntarily given up the piano before entering high school, and though he was eminently comfortable with the decision at the time, now he feared that he had unwittingly planted an emotional time bomb of self-recrimination over unrealized potential. He had kept these insights sublimated during Rachel’s youth, so they were thereby allowed to inflict their damage silently. Rachel had once entertained hopes of a professional performing career, but such aspirations had decayed into a barely glowing coal. There was certainly no financial incentive, as Greg’s own career—hence, his ability as a provider—was developing handsomely.

The telephone rang even as the final G-major chord of Old Hundredth lingered in the air, thanks to Miles’s foot continuing to depress the sustain pedal. Miles took a flash mental inventory of his parishioners who were seriously ill, and wondered whether this might be a family member calling to announce a turn for the worse. He answered in his accumstomed manner.

“Coverdales.”

“Dad.” It was Brian. “I’m glad I caught you.”

“I am too,” Miles replied, “but I’m glad you caught me after my nap! How’s things with you?”

“Things are great with me. But I was getting a little restless this afternoon, and decided to take a drive, and now I find myself on the tollway heading your direction. So I was just calling to see if you were home, which you obviously are. Is it OK if I pop in on you?”

“Absolutely. Don’t expect me to bake a cake or anything, though.”

“Wouldn’t dream of it, Dad. I’ll probably be there in about fifteen.”

“Sounds great. See you then.”

Miles moved the switch on his cordless phone to the Off position and placed it in its cradle. It would be good to see Brian. If Rachel was precocious artistically, her younger brother turned out to be equally so intellectually—to be specific, in quantitative skills. Brian could count before he was even walking steadily, and staked out a solid claim to the ninety-ninth percentile in his first standardized mathematics test and never yielded the territory all the way through school (including, eventually, a perfect 800 on the math portion of the SAT). The family speculated that he acquired this aptitude from his paternal grandfather—who by that time was chief financial officer of the firm which would turn out to be his career-long employer—but Brian’s potential was, in fact, of a different order altogether. When the family moved to Grove Lake, Brian Coverdale entered Mrs Gillespie’s fourth grade class at Lakeview School. His reputation as a math wunderkind in Porterville did not, in fact, accompany him to Grove Lake. It did not need to. The child wasted no time in establishing a new one. As the other students were working on their assignments, Mrs Gillespie tutored Brian in algebra. His extroverted personality served him well in establishing a new social web. It also contributed to his success as an entrepeneur. Even as a fourth grader, Brian Coverdale was never without pocket money. A paper route, yardwork, washing cars—if there was a dollar to be made, Brian was making it. He even read some of the newspapers he delivered, displaying a precocious attention to the price of stocks (the October crash of 1987 piqued his interest), and a more socially acceptable, though unusually intense, fascination with the performance statistics of professional athletes. Among his peers, Brian’s mental database of such information was legendary. The obvious opportunity to transpose the letters of “Brian” into “brain” did not long elude them. They meant it neither as a compliment nor an insult, merely as a statement of fact. With this sort of ability, it was fortunate for everyone—Brian in particular—that he was also outgoing and charming, thus sparing him the stereotyped appellation of “math nerd.” Miles came nowhere near sharing his son’s aptitude for numbers, except as they were applied to baseball statistics, and it was in this nexus of interest that the two formed a durable bond. The elder Coverdale always supplied appropriate approbation for Brian’s academic achievments, but he never doted—not, at least, the way Sharon did on Rachel for her musicianship—nor did Brian’s mother dote on him either. In the weeks following her death, Miles sometimes wondered whether she distanced herself from Brian in reaction to the strength of the bond she sensed, not only between her husband and her son, but between her husband and her son and her own father, a bond formed by common devotion to baseball in general and the Chicago Cubs in particular (or, in Glen Daley’s case, the Milwaukee Brewers).

The bright stars of the Chicago area’s academic constellation are Northwestern University in the north (Evanston, a northern suburb, to be precise), and the University of Chicago in the south side neighborhood of Hyde Park. Rachel elected the conservatory at Northwestern; Brian opted for the other institution, qualifying for both a baccalaureate degree and a Master of Business Administration all within the traditional four-year time frame. His rare combination of objective numbers-crunching analytical ability and sharp intuitive perception, along with a winning personality, led to his being heavily recruited by financial institutions on both coasts, as well as in the midwest. In the end, though, he chose to remain close to home and accepted a generous offer to be a commodity market analyst for a major Chicago bank which was heavily involved in agricultural lending. With bonuses, Brian’s first year income reached six figures (rather more than his father would likely ever earn in one year as a priest). A Wrigleyville condominium (rented) and a new Porsche were the outward and visible signs of his precocious career achievements.

It was the distinctive, though prudently-muffled, roar of the Porche’s engine, followed by Belle’s animated pacing in the entry way, that alerted Miles to his son’s arrival nearly a full minute before the doorbell actually rang. Miles opened the door and the father and son embraced heartily. Brian’s taste in clothing was strictly classic, a predilection he had manifested since grade school and which he had no doubt acquired from his mother. As he stepped into the tiled entry way, he might just as well have been a model in an L.L. Bean catalog—cordovan penny loafers, argyle socks, khaki chinos, tatersall long-sleeved shirt, and maroon windbreaker, an ensemble completed by designer sunglasses and a seventy-five dollar haircut.

“I am really glad you came by,” Miles volunteered. “I was probably going to piss the rest of the day away with cheesy made-for-TV movies.” His own nearly threadbare white socks, faded jeans, and plain gray sweatshirt presented a study in contrast with his son’s fashionable countenance.

“Well, now you can piss it away with me.”

“Oh, come on, Brian, this is ‘quality time,’ isn’t it?” Miles offered with mock seriousness. He padded in the direction of the kitchen. “You want a beer? I think I’m gonna have another one.”

“I do, actually, but, you know what? After I got off the phone with you I decided I was hungry. How ‘bout we go get a pizza?”

Miles demurred tacitly for a moment. At this point in the day, even wearing shoes was more formal than he wanted to be. Then he challenged, “What? Pizza in the suburbs? I thought you gentrified city types were above that sort of thing.”

"What can I say? Maybe I have a sudden need to re-connect with my roots in the ‘burbs. Besides, as I recall, Louie’s makes a pretty good facsimile of the real thing.”

Miles continued silently pensive, so Brian upped the ante. “I’ll let you drive the Porsche.”

So, Louie’s, is it?” The tone of Miles’ voice perked up. It wasn’t that he was swayed solely by the thought of driving his son’s Porsche, but he was swayed by the gesture. And it would be fun. “I haven’t been to Louie’s in … five years, I would guess. Belle!” He roused the dog from her slumber beneath the octagonal coffee table in the den. “Go upstairs and get my shoes.”

Brian arched his eyebrows. “Have you been teaching an old dog new tricks, Dad?”

“No, dammit, she’s as worthless as she ever was.” Miles began to lumber up the stairs to retrieve his own shoes. “Can’t do a damn thing. But I can keep fantasizing.”

“You do that, Dad. Keep fantasizing.” Yes, Dad, keep fantasizing. I need you to keep fantasizing.

Louie’s was, in fact, a tavern. It was just south of the Grove Lake village limit, on Kimball Road (which was also Illinois Route 77, but became downtown’s High Street after it crossed Broadhurst Highway, the intersection of which was the shorthand description of the location of St Alban’s Church—actually, the church sat about a hundred yards south of Broadhurst, and was buffered from Kimball Road by an ample parking lot). Louie’s was both unique and ubiquitous—unique because it was owned and operated by a single extended family and was not part of any chain, ubiquitous because virtual clones of the establishment dotted the exurban landscape of Chicagoland, usually along what had originally been semi-rural roads, but most of which had long since become suburban arterials. Miles and Brian found a corner booth empty and occupuied it. The place was clean and well-maintained, but the decor had not been seriously updated since Harry Truman lived in the White House. They ordered a deep-dish with pepperoni and a pitcher of beer. Miles resolved that he would consume only one glassful, and continue to be the designated driver. Brian, by contrast, chugged one glass and poured himself another before taking a breath.

This time it was Miles’s turn to arch his eyebrows. “Hard day at the office, Brian?” Brian remained mute, fixing his gaze at nothing in particular somewhere beyond his father’s left shoulder. Miles tried again. “This isn’t just a social call, is it?”

Brian sighed heavily, and made a fist with his left hand on the table, matching the intensity with which his right hand grasped his beer glass. “No.” Several seconds elapsed as Brian prepared to elaborate. “The fact is…I haven’t got an office to have a hard day at. They canned me on Friday.”

Miles was just beginning to inhale, but when his brain decoded the meaning of the words his son had just uttered, his diaphragm froze for an instant—just long enough for a feeling of terror to pass like a wave through his body. “Brian…” — several more seconds of silence went by— “I find myself completely at a loss for words. What the hell happened?”

Seeing his father so taken aback somehow gave Brian space in which to compose himself. “This is going to sound worse than it is, Dad, so please don’t freak, OK?”

“Please don’t freak? When do I ever freak? What the hell happened?”

“You’d better put away about half that glass of beer before I go on, Dad. At least I need some more.” Brian took a long draught—his father did likewise—and then continued. “They fired me because they think I have a drug problem. They think I’m addicted, to cocaine and to speed.”

Miles looked directly at Brian, with an expression that was not severe, but resolute. “At the risk of sounding cliché…are you?”

“No, Dad, I’m not.” The resolution in Brian’s voice matched that in his father’s face.

“Do you use?”

“Whatever happend to ‘Don’t ask, don’t tell’?” This was Brian’s attempt to lighten the atmosphere with some levity, but he saw quickly that it was a failure. “This is damn awkward, isn’t it? Hey, I’m not as pure as the driven snow. Hell, you were in college in the sixties. We’ve never talked about it, but I’ve always just assumed…”

Brian’s hesitation provided Miles with an opportunity to finish the sentence. “You’ve always assumed that I experimented with drugs when I was young. Sorry to disappoint you, Brian, but the fact is, I didn’t. I’ve never so much as held a lit cigarette.”

“Well, you weren’t trying to do an MBA from the University of Chicago before your twenty-second birthday. In retrospect, I may have bitten off too much. But at the time, I needed some occasional help. Help concentrating and focusing. Help just staying awake. And when the work was done…help relaxing. I’m sorry if that bursts some image you had of me. I really am.”

Miles took several moments to collect his next contribution to the dialogue. “In retrospect…yeah, retrospect…that’s a funny thing isn’t it? All of a sudden I’m aware that I knew you were getting an incredible amount done, but it never occurred to me to wonder exactly what it was like for you to be doing it. It never occurred to me…”

Miles’s voice trailed off and Brian took up the slack. “It never occurred to me either, Dad. It just happenned. But the good news is—God, this is going to sound incredibly self-serving—the good news is, I was never really ever messed up. I mean, I was in control. I never binged. It’s not like I would recommend it to anyone, or anything like that. But it did the job. I got through.”

By this time, Miles had absorbed the initial shock wave, and he felt his mind beginning to clear up; his thought processes became sharper. “But what about now? How much are you using now? They didn’t fire you for doing drugs in college.”

Brian rolled his eyes and sighed. “That’s the delicious irony. For all practical purposes I’m clean now. I am no way a habitual user.”

“…and…they fired you because…?”

“They fired me because I tested positive. I don’t even know why they were suspcious of me—or maybe it was one of those random things, they haven’t been telling me much—but one day this geek from Human Resources meets me in my office—he was in my office, how do you figure that?—this guy just hands me the old dixie cup—you know, to pee in.”

“OK, Brian, I’m trying to do the math here. You’re not using, but you tested positive. What’s wrong with this picture?”

“Dad, please chill. I need you to be with me here.”

Miles downed another ounce of beer, and then the pizza arrived. Each one took a piece on to his plate and began to eat, wordlessly. Miles broke the silence. “All right, I am officially chilled. But still in the dark. And, Mr Chairman, I move the previous question: What the hell happened?”

“What happened is this: They gave me the dixie cup on Monday. I had been to a party on Saturday night. I did a little bit of coke there—just a little bit. And, honest to God, it was the first time I had used since getting out of college, I mean that. I guess there was enough left in my system.”

“So they just up and fired you? No warning? No appeal?”

“Basically, yes. Oh, they had their procedures. But, bottom line, I’m out on my ass.”

“I would have thought you’d be too valuable to them for them to do something like this to you.”

“I thought the same,” concurred Brian, “but I was wrong, obviously. You know how banks are regulated. They were under some kind of government pressure—that ‘zero tolerance’ bullshit, or something.”

“Whatever. Bureaucracy can be inscrutable. Hey, this really stinks, I have to say. But you’re dealing with it, I see. I’m not sure I would be anywhere near as composed as you are if our positions were reversed.”

“Thanks.” Brian let his shoulders fall as he exhaled. “I have had a couple of days to get it together.”

Look, I still have a Christmas card relationship with George Kortmann.” Miles referred to a former parishioner, now a New York bank executive, from his days as curate at St Michael’s in the north shore suburb of Elm Lawn, around the time Brian was born. “Fresh start. New location. Close to the Wall Street action.”

“I appreciate the thought. And maybe so…but I’m afraid I’ve got a more pressing near-term problem.”

Brian hesistated long enough for Miles to feel moved to offer him a jump start. “Which is…?”

“Which is…I’m just a working stiff, like everyone else. I live paycheck-to paycheck. Only there won’t be any more paychecks. My rent’s paid up through the rest of the month, and it won’t be any problem finding somebody to take over my lease. But I’m going to need a place to hang my hat in the interim. I hate to even ask. I mean, who wants to move back home at my age? It’s such the nineties thing.” He grinned with an affected sheepishness.

Miles grinned back with an equally affected empathy. “Brian, help me out here. I guess I’m Mr Naivete tonight. Forgive my indelicacy, but you’ve been making roughly twice my salary—if you count the rental value of the rectory and the utilities that the church pays—you’ve been making twice my salary for about the past year, and I live decently well. You make more more money than I could think of ways to spend. And now you’re telling me you’re about to become homeless?” There was a new edge to Miles’s tone. A quarter-century of pastoral experience was beginning to float to the surface. Inexplicable destitution was prima facie evidence of a serious drug problem.

“I don’t know what to say, Dad. When you put it that way, it sounds pretty horrible. I really don’t know what to say. I guess I’ve been living the high life. ‘Eat, drink, and be merry.’ Isn’t that biblical?”

“Not funny. And I don’t want to sound inhospitable. But I don’t think you moving back into the rectory is very wise.” Miles wished he had the gall to say “Hell, no!” He could see his son’s anxiety level rising rapidly.

Brian fumbled, starting to speak three or for times before he was confident that he could offer something reasonably coherent. He took a deep breath, smiled, and spoke calmly. “I don’t get it, Dad. It’s not like I want to take up permanent residence. But my Porsche would look a little funny parked in front of the Rescue Mission on West Madison.” Actually, they both thought, Brian’s car would not last intact overnight in that location. “I honestly didn’t think it would be an issue. Something’s not clicking here. What are you not telling me?”

His father’s retort was immediate and pointed. “That’s my line, Son. What are you not telling me?”

“I’m absolutely an open book. Do you think it’s been a party for me to tell you about some of my more unsavory experiences. The fact is, I’ve been shafted by the bank, I’m in a first-class jam, and I need your help. Will you help me?”

What Miles wanted to say was, “That’s exactly why I’m saying ‘No.’ It will help you deal with reality.” What actually came out of his mouth, after a long pause, was, “You’re gonna have to give me some time on this. I’m feeling really conflicted. I don’t want to be a hard-ass, but you’ve laid an awful lot on me in an awfully short time. My God, Brian, you’re a major league drug user, and I never had a clue! Forgive me for going mildly ballistic, but I’ve invested about half my life in you, and I’ve earned the right!”

Both men were conscious of their public surroundings, so their dialogue was conducted in whispered shouts. The energy of Miles’s last volley was matched by that of his son’s return. “Your life? Your life? It’s my life we’re talking about here. I’m the one who made the decision to use, not you. I’m the one who’s been fired, not you. I’m the one whose life is presently screwed up, not you. I’m the one who’s asking for a little bit of understanding, not you. And you know what? I’m sorry I asked. Please don’t give it a second thought. I’m sorry I asked. Request withdrawn.”

The waitress intruded, inquiring whether they required any further service. Both men smiled, shook their heads, and replied, “No, thank-you,” almost in tandem. She quickly totalled their tab and left in on the table. Miles picked it up and stepped over to the bar to pay for the pizza and beer which had provided the context for the first serious trauma he could remember in his relationship with Brian.

Father and son were mute on the seven-minute drive back to the rectory. Miles argued within himself. His training and experience as a pastor told him that Brian was not coming clean, that there remained much more to be spoken than had yet been said. He knew that he had a duty to be suspicious, that if he were counseling another parent who presented a similar situation to him, his advice would be severe, and he would be handing out the phone numbers of every drug evaluation and rehab program in the northwest suburbs. But Brian was not somebody else’s son, somebody else’s flesh and blood. Brian was his. And he knew clearly that he could not risk alienating his son. In the wake of Sharon’s passing, the prospect of losing Brian’s affection was not one he could contemplate with equanimity.

After passing the parking lot of St Alban’s Church, Brian made a right turn off Kimball Road on to Pound Hill Way. (“Hill” is a relative term in the northern Illinois flatland—a small rise another half-mile to the east was the site of the original municipal dog pound during the Great Depression.) The first cross-street, Willow, marked the northeast corner of the church property. The next one, Vine, defined the western edge of the undeveloped real estate that was such an important feature of Belle’s daily routine. The second house on the left in the next block, just past the improbably-named Palm Street, was the rectory—227 E. Pound Hill Way. It was in the middle of the block between Vine and Palm that Miles spotted a silver gray Honda Accord sedan in the driveway—Rachel’s car. He had an immediate premonition that his Pentecost of unpleasant surprises was not over.

As the Porsche was parked to the left of the Honda, Miles saw that Rachel was indeed still at the wheel of her vehicle. The arrival of her father and brother momentarily startled her, but she quickly regained her composure and reached for the door handle. In their simultaneous haste, Miles and Rachel barely managed to avert a collision between the driver’s door of the Accord and the passenger door of the Porsche. It was a short-lived dance, however, and the two were soon standing in the driveway hugging one another tightly.

Miles was the first to speak. “Sweetheart, I always adore seeing you, but something is apparently quite wrong. I didn’t live with your mother for twenty-five years without developing the ability to spot when she was trying to cover up a good cry. You’re trying to cover up a good cry.”

“Lucky for you, I’m about all cried out.” By that time, Brian had made his way around the rear of his car and joined them. Rachel turned and embraced her brother. Neither one thought to question the reason for the other’s presence. She took a deep breath, straightened her posture, and continued. “Okay, you may as well both hear this at the same time. Greg and I are separated. He moved out this afternoon. It’s complicated, and I don’t want to give a dissertation on everything right now, but it boils down to the fact that I’ve been a bitch to live with since Mom got sick.”

Miles’s defensive paternal instincts were immediately aroused. “He didn’t put it exactly that way, I hope.”

“Nope. Those are my words,” Rachel was quick to respond. “I don’t know. Maybe it’s the ethnic thing, me not being Italian and all. But we just haven’t been connecting, and every time we try, we just end up hurting each other more. I didn’t know what to do. I needed to tell you, but it’s not the kind of thing I wanted to do over the phone. I know I’ve thrown cold water on whatever male bonding you two were in the middle of.”

When Rachel had moved back into her Northwestern University dorm room for her sophomore year, her life took a turn she had never planned on. She practiced less, studied less, and spent a great deal more time with a senior psychology major whom she had met at a party given by his Sigma Alpha Epsilon fraternity. Greg DeFronzo was a third-generation Italian-American. His grandparents were immigrants and supported themselves with factory labor. They lived in an ethnic neighborhood on Chicago’s west side. Greg’s father clawed and scratched his way into ownership of a small chain of dry cleaners and moved a half dozen miles further west to the suburb of Bellwood. Greg, the oldest of five siblings, was the first in his family to attend college, and benefited—both in his admission and in the financial aid package he received—from Northwestern’s desire to attain a socio-economically diverse student body. By the time he met Rachel Coverdale, he was into his psychology major too deep to make a change and still graduate on time, but he had some time since reached the conclusion that his avocational interest—software development—was going to be the source of his living.

There was an edge to his attraction to Rachel that Greg had never felt before. He had virtually no exposure to classical music before he met her. Soon thereafter, he attended a student recital at which she performed Chopin’s Ballade No.1 in G minor, and he knew that he had never experienced anything quite so compellingly lovely, but was not at all sure whether it was Chopin’s music or Rachel performing Chopin’s music which captivated him. Either way, he was hooked. Rachel was initially slow to respond to his attention, and it was only the intoxication of his own infatuation that kept him motivated long enough to secure the relationship.

By Christmas it had reached the meet-the-family stage. A DeFronzo in Chicago is, virtually by definition, a Roman Catholic, but Greg’s family—in its American incarnation, at least—was never distinguished by its piety. Greg attended Christmas Eve midnight Mass at St Alban’s and was both amused and impressed that he was dating the daughter of a priest, a species he had come to percieve as essentially asexual and only outwardly human (thus applying the Docetist heresy not to Christ himself but to the clergy who represent him). Miles, in his quintessential paternal domesticity at Christmas dinner, dispelled Greg’s stereotype, and he took it all in with wonder. The next day, Rachel accompanied Greg at the DeFronzo family celebration in Bellwood. It was necessarily a louder and less tranquil affair, which she found exotic, and responded to with a mixture of enthusiastic attraction and wistful resentment that she was constitutionally incapable—it seemed almost genetic—of fully participating in it.

In time, Rachel more than compensated for her initial slowness in responding to Greg’s suit. If it was the angst surrounding her childhood piano teacher’s death that kept her away from the piano the summer before her sophomore year, it was her attachment to Greg which performed the same service twelve months later. He received his Bachelor of Arts in psychology in late May and by the first of June was working at the corporate headquarters of United Airlines helping maintain and fine tune the software which underlay its reservations and ticketing system. His starting salary was at a higher figure than his father had ever netted in the dry cleaning business, and he rented himself a modest—but not too modest—bachelor pad on Chicago’s north shore, just a few el stops down from Northwestern’s Evanston campus. Out of genuine regard for the values and sensibilities of her parents, Rachel would have never arranged to formally receive her mail at Greg’s address, but she did not think twice about accepting a key to the place, coming and going both day and night.

It was actually Greg—the non-observant Catholic—who took the lead in making an “honest woman” out of Rachel, and he had a sense of the dramatic about it. Around the Coverdale Christmas tree, Rachel opened a small package on which the tag was clearly marked “To Rachel,” but the “From” was left blank. It contained a respectable diamond ring and a note of proposal, which a not entirely stunned Rachel accepted tearfully in front of her not entirely stunned parents and brother. They were married at St Alban’s the following June, with Miles presiding at the ceremony and a beaming Glen Daley walking his granddaughter down the aisle. (He and Howard Coverdale had, at Rachel’s insistence, flipped a coin for the honor. It was not too difficult for Howard to be graceful in defeat, as the two men had become close friends over the years, both before and after both couples moved from Wisconsin to Florida.) Rachel was dutiful in completing her senior year as a married woman, and completed her Bachelor of Music degree, even earning academic honors.

Now the infrastructure of Rachel’s life, grounded in her marriage to Greg, was revealed as fragile, suddenly and to everyone’s surprise. Her father was determined to be proactive. When they entered the house, Rachel and Brian turned left from the entry hall into the infrequently inhabited formal living room. Miles proceeded the opposite way, and retrieved the cordless phone from the lid of the Steinway. Two keystrokes activated the speed-dial feature, and within three seconds a phone at the other end of the line was ringing.

“Audrey, it’s Miles.” His call was placed to Dr Audrey Newhouse, an active member of St Alban’s (past senior warden, currently on the Altar Guild), a clinical psychologist, and someone to whom Miles had referred dozens of counselees for longer-term care after he had performed the therapeutic first aid.

“Hello, Miles. I didn’t get a chance to tell you this morning, but I’ve been thinking how wonderful it is to have you back in harness. The liturgy today was especially gorgeous.”

“Thank-you, Audrey. I would accept that coming from anybody, but, coming from you, I treasure it. Listen, this is a professional contact, so start your meter running. Rachel showed up here out of the blue tonight. She and Greg are having some trouble and she’s pretty wrung out. If I can talk her into spending the night, is there any chance you can see her tomorrow?”

“Miles, I’m so sorry! The poor girl. I won’t make you tell me the details tonight, but tell her how much I care. As it turns out, tomorrow is a chores and errands day, so I would be glad to see her. Why don’t you have her come by the house mid-morning. She can just give me a call when she’s ready.”

“Thank-you. I appreciate it. I’m sorry to put a crimp in your day, but I’m in my ‘Daddy’s going to fix it’ mode, so I’m not going to apologize too profusely.”

“No need to apologize at all. Give Rachel a hug for me. I’ll see her tomorrow.”

Miles thanked her again and bid her goodnight. Then he made his way into the living room, where his children were engaged in earnest dialogue. At that moment, Rachel was expostulating on her troubles with Greg. Miles wondered whether Brian had already come clean about the reason for his own visit to Grove Lake that day. He summoned his most paternal tone of voice.

“All right, boys and girls, here’s the way it is. Rachel, you’re spending the night. You know where everything is. Call me presumptuous, but I’ve arranged for you to talk to Audrey Newhouse in the morning. She’s eager to see you, and I think you need someone more dispassionate than your father at this point.” Before giving his daughter an opportunity to respond, he continued. “Brian, I don’t know what you’ve already told your sister, but if she hasn’t already heard your latest news, now’s the time. And forget whatever reservations I expressed earlier. You’re my son. My home is always your home. I don’t know if there’s room for all your stuff here—we’ll figure that out—but you yourself can move in any time. I’ve only got one requirement, and that is, that as long as you’re here, you do all the dog chores. Starting tonight. She needs a w-a-l-k even as we speak. Now, both of you give your dad a hug, because you’ve both worn me out, and I’m going to bed.”

Such a speech neither invited nor permitted a verbal response. Both grown children did exactly as they were told, and the three of them held each other silently for a full two minutes in the darkened living room, while Belle paced and whimpered anxiously in the entry way. As Miles pulled the covers over himself, he heard the sound of the front door being shut and locked, as Brian brought the dog back from her walk. The muffled strains of Chopin’s Ballade No.1 in G-minor, emanating from the Steinway in the den, lulled him to sleep.