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.”
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.
