Chapter 4

Rachel’s return to the Grove Lake rectory was quite temporary. It lasted all of two nights. She kept the appointment that her father had made for her with Audrey Newhouse, got focused on a short-term coping strategy (“Don’t burn any bridges, stay in non-anxious contact with Greg, maintain the fabric of ‘normal’ life as much as you can”), and returned to her city apartment—which she had all to herself, of course, because it was Greg, after all, who had initiated the separation by moving out. Brian, by contrast, moved back into 227 E. Pound Hill Way with an unstated (he would have insisted, unintended, as well) but inevitably apparent aspect of permanence, the sign and seal of which was that his father made room in the garage for his son’s Porsche.

Miles, having delivered virtual truckloads of pastoral care to countless grieving hearts during his years of ordained ministry, resolved to follow one of the standard components of his own advice and sought solace and energy through an intensified concentration on his work. The pace of activity around St Alban’s was in its customary summertime lull, but its rector was still able to find several tools with which to stir the pot. He systematically renewed his connection with the thirty-odd homebound parishioners of St Alban's by bringing Holy Communion to each of their homes within a two-week period. He purchased four new Bible commentaries—one on each of the Gospels—in order to re-invigorate his preparation for preaching. He registered for a five-day seminar (“Administrative Issues in Larger Churches”) to be given in Chicago the following August. He sat down with his curate, his secretary, and his (lay volunteer) Director of Religious Education, individually in succession, and began a process of refining each one’s job description. There was plenty to do.

Contrary to his hopes, however, the busier Father Coverdale made himself, the less engaged he felt with his activity. He soon felt what he knew to be an inappropriate level of emotional fatigue. The outward appearance was one of high energy productivity, but, to Miles himself, it was as though he were dispassionately observing a third person. By the Fourth of July, a pervasive ennui dominated his life and work. It was a five-year old member of his flock who brought this home to him with a characteristically childlike lack of tact. He was at an informal evening Independence Day cookout in the church parking lot—an ideal spot from which to view the municipal fireworks display emanating from a barge in the middle of the lake from which the village derived its name. In the midst of a spectacular pyrotechnic barrage, thirty-five pound Molly Fairchild observed her pastor and priest seated in a lawn chair looking down and clipping his fingernails.

“Father Coverdale, you’re not even watching!” Her exclamation was framed on one end by the visible explosion of a projectile, and on the other end by its delayed percussive pop. Miles’s response was similarly delayed. He smiled softly at Molly.

“Oh, I’m watching, sweetheart. I’ve got special eyes on the top of my head that you can’t see!” Within his own heart, however, he was not so dismissive of the child’s observation. Maybe this grieving business was more complicated than he thought it would be. Sharon, after all, haunted every corner of his daily physical environment. (The stenciled geese in the bedroom yet remained.) She was a ubiquitous thread in the very fabric of his life in Grove Lake and at St Alban’s. Was it time for a change of scenery, time to build a store of memories and associations which did not include Sharon? Twelve years is a more than respectable tenure for an Episcopal priest in one place. Maybe it was time for him to move on.

Moves had always been positive experiences for Miles. His first assignment after receiving the Master of Divinity degree on the cloister garth of Nashotah House that third week of May in his twenty-fifth year, was at St George’s in the Sherwood Park neighborhood of north Chicago. Sherwood Park was a blue-collar middle class community comprised of third and fourth generation descendants of Polish, German, Swedish, and Irish immigrants, together with a smattering of “Americans” with no consciousness of any other ethnic roots. In the early 1970s, the slow influx of Hispanics and Blacks was still nascent, though it would eventually change the character of the community over the next twenty years. St George’s was one of the older Episcopal parishes in the city, having been founded in the last century on the wave of Irish immigration, which brought with it not only the stereotyped Roman Catholic Irish, but a representative proportion of Anglicans, members of the Church of Ireland (and keepers, they will be glad to tell you, of the cathedral church founded by St Patrick in Dublin). Irish Anglicans tend to define themselves in reaction to the ecclesiastical colossus with which they must co-exist, so they tend to be “low church” within the Anglican scheme of things. This strand of churchmanship was indeed the original taproot of St George’s, but by the time of the arrival of the young curate Deacon Coverdale and his new wife, it was a cold ember. Two factors account for this: One, the general tenor of the Diocese of Chicago, which was part of a pocket of midwestern Anglo-Catholicism known as the “biretta belt,” and, secondly, the parasitic relationship that American Anglicanism tends to have with the Roman Catholic Church wherever there is a large concentration of the latter’s members—there is always a certain element disaffected from Rome by its marriage discipline, or simply by marriage to a Protestant. For them, the Episcopal Church, particularly in its Anglo-Catholic presentation, is an easy choice because it still feels like church—it’s a not just a wholesale conversion to Protestantism—yet, with a more spacious ambience. Not long after its founding, then, St George’s managed to insert itself into this refined but secure niche in the market.

A curacy for a new ordinand like Miles in a parish like St George’s was essentially an apprenticeship. Accordingly, Miles did a little bit of most everything there was to do: calling on the hospitalized and homebound, taking his turn in the pulpit on Sundays, attending ladies guild meetings, crisis counseling, setting up chairs and making coffee for special meetings, and, of course (along with every other new curate), taking charge of the youth group. He did all this under the watchful eye of Father Gary Dusek, who had himself once been a Roman Catholic priest of some prominence in the Chicago archdiocese, but who had been smitten by Cupid over a young and pretty teaching nun in his parish. They were now married and the parents of three late-in-life (for Fr Dusek) young children. The frontier between Rome and Canterbury is porous and oft-travelled—quietly, in most cases— by clergy in both directions, though for different reasons.

On the evening of the twentieth of December of that year, being the eve of the Feast of St Thomas the Apostle, Bishop Barton Graves visited St George’s and ordained Miles Coverdale a priest in Christ’s one, holy, catholic, and apostolic church. Sharon and Miles, born and bred affluent suburbanites that they were, adapted to blue collar city life with grace and good cheer, quite in a spirit of adventure. Father Coverdale’s ministry was well-recieved by the good people of St George’s. They had assisted in the training of many new clergy over the years, and their patience and tolerance for mistakes and miscues was ample. Yet, those qualities were scarcely even tested by Miles, so naturally endowed was he for the work of parish priesthood.

Miles and Sharon never fully discussed the pros and cons and timing of expanding their family. They simply became lax in their use of birth control toward the end of their first summer in Chicago, and on the eve of the following Palm Sunday, Rachel Lynn Coverdale first opened her eyes to the light of day.

After Easter, Bishop Graves summoned Miles to the near north side diocesan offices, where they were joined by Father Stephen Collins, rector of the prominent and affluent parish of St Michael and All Angels in Elm Lawn, an attractive north shore suburb. Someone as intuitive as Miles did not need to have the scenario spelled out for him—he knew upon walking into the room that they had a move in mind. Miles was marked as one of the best and brightest among the young priests of the diocese, one who had the gifts for being a successful “cardinal rector” some day, and it was expedient that he be given exposure to a variety of parochial settings in preparation for that inevitability. St George’s and Fr Coverdale had already done for one another what they could; anything else would be treading water. The change had already been cleared with Fr Dusek, who would have his pick of the next crop of seminary graduates. In June, Miles and Sharon and baby Rachel moved into a modest but comfortably appointed bungalow on a quiet shady street in Elm Lawn, just around the corner from St Michael’s Church, where Fr Coverdale had the title of Associate Rector.

The Coverdales demonstrated once again their resilience in the move. Elm Lawn was settled and WASPish, not unlike both Wauwatosa and Oconomowoc, so Miles and Sharon could simply revert to type in order to fit into the social milieu. But the liturgical taproot of St Michael’s was remarkably “low church” (at least by Chicago standards—it would have been considered middle to high in parts of Virginia). Yet, Miles adapted, and one would never have known of his Anglo Catholic proclivities from the way he conducted himself around the altar at St Michael’s. His ministry flourished as it had a St George’s, as he endeared himself to young and old alike, and even to his boss, Father Collins. Together, they helped their parishioners negotiate the sensitive terrain of major liturgical change as they introduced the revised Book of Common Prayer that the Episcopal Church adopted in that time period. Miles took the lead in the pastoral plan and Steve Collins was not reluctant then to give him the credit when the plan worked and the new liturgy was implemented with an absolute minimum of fuss from the staid members of St Michael’s Church.

The cycle at St Michael’s repeated the one at St George’s with uncanny precision. In the late summer, near the beginning of their second year in Elm Lawn, Sharon found herself pregnant—again, by unspoken mutual intention. Just after Christmas, the inquiries from search committees started arriving. On Easter Monday, Brian Daley Coverdale expanded the household once again, and in May—on the Feast of the Ascension, to be exact—Fr Coverdale accepted the call from the vestry of the Church of the Ascension in Porterville, Illinois to become their rector.

Porterville was in the hinterlands of the diocese, well west of the Chicago metropolitan area. It was too large to be a small town but hardly large enough to style itself a “city” in any but the technical sense. Ascension was just large enough to support one full-time priest, and had been slowly declining in numerical and financial strength for several years. But the congregation was optimistic about the number of well-paid manufacturing jobs that were being created by the planned opening of a nuclear power plant and an automotive assembly plant in a nearby towns. With loans (gifts, really) from both sets of parents, the Coverdales were able to make a down payment on a three-bedroom, two bath tract home in a new subdivision.

Once again, Miles flourished professionally. His four years of experience served him well, even at the tender age of 28. The members of Ascension—teachers, civil servants, a healthy but not overwhelming smattering of medical professionals and lawyers, a few farmers and skilled tradesmen—represented a happy medium between the robustly ethnic folk at St George’s and the over-privileged plutocrats at St Michael’s. Attendance and giving bottomed out during the second year of Miles’s cure, then began to turn around—very slowly at first, then, by his sixth year (and with the “Reagan recovery” well under way nationally and locally) angling upward precipitously, bucking the larger trend of the Episcopal Church.

Starting at about the fifth year of Miles’s tenure in Porterville, he began to receive regular inquiries from search committees both within and beyond the Diocese of Chicago. At first, he summarily dismissed them. He was happy in his work. The parish was growing. He celebrated the sacraments, preached the word, gave instruction, visited the sick, counseled the troubled, and buried the dead, and he did it all with grace, humor, and, by any fair measure of a priest yet in his early thirties, with maturity and depth. His children appeared happy and well-adjusted. He and Sharon enjoyed the slow but methodical progress they were making in landscaping their yard. Life was good. Yet, for these very reasons, Father Coverdale was a rising star—even an enfant terrible—within the ranks of diocesan clergy, and a move to a more prominent venue was only a matter a time. The true wonder was that he held out nine years before giving in to the inevitable. When the search committee from St Alban’s, Grove Lake, came calling, they were in the right place at the right time.

This entire history flashed through Miles’s mind in a gestalt during the relentless onslaught of the final minute or so of Independence Day fireworks. As he folded his lawn chair, picked up his miniature cooler and began his three-block trek home (“working” the parking lot all along the way even as he did in the Guild Hall during coffee hour on Sundays), he resolved to make a phone call the following morning. It would be to schedule a pastoral consultation with Edward Chase Landry, Bishop of Chicago.

One of the first welcoming telephone calls Miles had received as he gradually inhabited the rector’s study at St Alban’s was from Father Chase Landry, rector of St Michael’s Church in nearby Barrington. The two were acquainted, but only in a perfunctory way. Their new geographic proximity allowed a mutually rewarding friendship to develop. Father Landry was three years Miles’s senior, also a Nashotah alum, equipped with a charming and ebullient wife and two apparently perfect children—uncannily, a daughter and a son, each three years older than their Coverdale counterparts. Landry was only a year into his ministry at St Michael’s, having been transplanted from a lifetime (save for the seminary years) in southeast Louisiana. He brought a quick mind and sharp wit to the relationship, along with a sense of humor both playful and irreverent. These qualities were requited by Miles’s own polished intellect and a capacity for persistent but undemanding presence as a friend. During the ninth year of Miles’s tenure at St Alban’s, Barton Graves, after a thirty year episcopate, reached the mandatory retirement age of seventy-two, and the Diocese of Chicago faced its first episcopal election since Lyndon Johnson lived in the White House. Miles submitted Chase Landry’s name to the search committee, spent hours on the telephone marshalling support, and served as unofficial floor manager for his candidacy during the electing convention. It took eight ballots, but Father Landry became Bishop Landry, and when he was consecrated in the basketball arena at Loyola University, Miles was the coordinator of the liturgy.

It was a steamy Illinois mid-summer morning, ten days after his Fourth-of July epiphany, when Miles backed the Grand Marquis out of the rectory garage and headed down state Route 77 toward the Northwest Tollway, en route to his appointment with the Bishop. The radio was tuned to the morning news and banter on WGN, but the volume of Miles’s racing thoughts effectively neutralized the sound emanating from the radio speakers. There was a lightness to his being that he had not experienced since spending a week with Sharon at their Wisconsin hideaway the previous July. Yes, a change would do him good. Derek Sutherland, the Dean of St James’ Cathedral, had just announced his retirement. With the Bishop’s perceived endorsement, Miles would enjoy very short odds on election to that position. It would allow him to work closely with Chase—he would enjoy that. Or maybe it was time for a return to the north shore; there were persistent rumors of an imminently terminal breakdown in the relationship between the vestry of Trinity Church, Lakeside Heights—the neighboring parish to St Michael’s, Elm Lawn—and its rector, Tim Harvey. Miles had demonstrated his gifts as a healer and builder in Porterville, and he felt—on this morning, at least—that he would relish facing such a challenge once again. Then again, where was it written that he was married to the Diocese of Chicago? Or to Illinois or Wisconsin or the upper midwest, for that matter? Maybe a truly substantial change of scenery—California, or Louisiana (Chase had recently made an offhand mention of a vacant parish in New Orleans)—would be the prescription for his torpor. Miles looked forward to the pastoral assistance of his friend and bishop in exploring these and other possibilities, and to his material assistance in bringing one of them to fruition.

The offices of the Diocese of Chicago are located in a quintessentially modern urban box of glass and steel a few blocks north of the Loop. In style, it is the antipode of the Victorian Gothic cathedral next door. Yet, most agree, the combination works well. Because they are unmistakably so distinct, the two structures do not compete with each other. The only problem with the arrangement is not architectural at all, but absolutely utilitarian—available parking is grossly insufficient. It is a constant irritant to visitors, and causes many diocesan meetings and events to be scheduled in the suburbs. On this particular day, however, Miles’s luck was with him—an omen?—and he found a vacant spot with a two-hour meter on a side street just around the corner.

The security guard at the desk in the lobby had held his position since the building opened in the early 1970s, so he was familiar with the cast of characters who were likely to populate the stage of his job on any given day. “Good morning, Father Coverdale! Going to see the Boss today?” he inquired with his customary grin.

“I am indeed, Max. I must have been a very bad boy!” Miles replied.

“Well, His Purpleness looked like he was feeling pretty good this morning, so I don’t expect you have much to worry about.” Max’s moniker for the Bishop referred, of course, to the color of the clergy shirt that is the uniform-of-the-day for bishops in the Episcopal Church.

Miles entered the single elevator and punched the highest-numbered button available, an act which resulted in his being deposited on the fourth floor about fifteen seconds later. Peggy Slinker, the receptionist, greeted him playfully.

“Well, if it’s nine-thirty, this must be Father Coverdale.”

“Last time I looked in a mirror, that’s who I was,” Miles responded in kind. “How are you, Peggy?”

“I could be younger and I could be richer, but, other than that, I’m doing great. I see that you’re on the Bishop’s calendar this morning, but he’s on the phone at the moment, so you know the drill.”

“Yes, ma’am.” Miles took a seat in one of a rank of comfortable—but not too comfortable—waiting room chairs along an interior wall opposite the door of Bishop Landry’s office. He examined once again the familiar row of portraits of Chicago’s Episcopal diocesan bishops, with particular attention on the leonine Barton Graves, who had welcomed Miles as a postulant while he was yet a college senior, and eventually ordained him deacon and priest. Right next to the door of the bishop’s office itself was the portrait, the only one of the set which was in color, of Chase Landry, formally vested in cope and miter, a jeweled crozier in his right hand, his left hand held against his chest so as to make his episcopal ring prominently visible—a strong assemblage of evocative signs for anyone familiar with the symbolic vocabulary of western catholic Christianity. In his sedentary reflection—which, in fact, lasted only about forty-five seconds—Miles began to ponder the issues which prompted his visit to the diocesan headquarters this morning in the context of this larger universe of faith and tradition and layers of pastoral oversight and individuality within community. Just then, the door of the bishop’s office was flung open, Miles was on his feet, and an ebullient Chase Landry held him in a hearty embrace.

“Father Coverdale!”—the bishop greeted Miles in a tone of playful mock formality—“What a delight. The day can only go downhill from here!”

“I like your attitude, Your Lordship,” Miles replied in a matching vein. “I appreciate the opportunity for an audience with such an eminent prelate.”

The two men entered the spacious office and seated themselves on leather wing-back chairs turned toward each other at forty-five degree angles to the bishop’s cherry-wood desk. The view out the window above the bishop’s credenza was of the apse of St James’s Cathedral. Miles pondered that sign of his quarter-century of service to the Diocese of Chicago as Chase returned to the waiting area for two cups of coffee.

“I’ve finally got them trained to make decent coffee around here,” the bishop boasted as he returned and seated himself, referring to his New Orleans-acquired taste for a brew that would be considered uncommonly strong in most regions of the country. “Miles, tell me, how are Rachel and Brian doing? I haven’t had any contact with them since the weekend we buried Sharon.”

Miles proceeded to brief his friend and pastor on the recent vicissitudes in both of his children’s lives. When all the pertinent facts had been revealed, Chase released a sigh laden with empathy. “Wow! When it rains, it pours, doesn’t it? Miles, you know I’d do anything if I could make this go away, but I can’t. I also know, though, that if anybody’s got the spiritual consitution to see this sort of thing through to some kind of redemptive conclusion, Miles Coverdale is the one.”

“Chase, I’m honored by your confidence. I don’t know. I take it one day at a time, as they say.” There was an ebb in the conversation—a silence neither pregnant nor particularly awkward, just noticeable. Miles observed an awareness within himself—not an irritation, but an awareness that irritation on his part would not be completely implausible—that Chase had inquired after his children’s well-being but not after his. His own well-being, his own future, was, of course, the reason for his trip into the city this day. In time (a mere ten seconds, probably) this realization led him to break the silence. “Much as I treasure your concern for my kids, I actually came here to talk about me. So put on your best pastoral counseling hat, and keep your miter handy, because I might need both a counselor and a bishop this morning.”

“You’ve got both. What’s on your mind?”

“I’m beginning to seriously wonder,” Miles began, just a bit haltingly, “whether it might be time for me to make a move.”

“A move?”

“Well…yes…a change of venue, so to speak, away from St Alban’s.” Chase remained silent, with an impassive expression, so Miles continued. “It’s not that my work is going badly. It’s not. People are being extraordinarily kind to me, in fact. But I’m not really feeling quite all there. I’m not engaged. I’m distracted. It’s like I’m watching another person make the rounds of being a parish priest, but it’s not really me. Does that make any sense?”

“Sense?” replied the bishop quickly. “It’s not what makes sense to me that’s important, Miles, it’s what makes sense to you. And having myself never lost a wife, had a daughter’s marriage fall apart and a son confess to drug abuse, all within the space of a few months, it would be incredibly presumptuous of me to tell you what makes sense. But what does any of this have to do with leaving St Alban’s?”

“It doesn’t have anything to do with leaving St Alban’s, as such. It has to do with being some place new, some place different,” Miles answered, pausing before stating the crux of his concern, “…some place I’ve never been with Sharon.”

“Ah, there we have it, don’t we?”

“Yes. I suppose. I’m not sure. I don’t want to give you the impression that I’m wasting away with grief. I’m not depressed. I get up in the morning. I function. I don’t think anyone looking at me would think anything is wrong. But everywhere I turn, I see the life I shared with Sharon. She haunts me, in a way. I’m not even fifty years old yet. I may have thirty or forty good years left. I just need a different environment, some place where I can regroup and get more of a grip.”

Miles had always known Chase Landry to be as emotionally transparent and extroverted as one would want another person to be. But at this moment, his preconscious intuition sensed an uncharacteristic stiffness and reserve, an almost oriental inscrutability, in his friend’s demeanor. The bishop’s next words, though denoting opennes and concern, poorly masked a tone which Miles found profoundly disconcerting. It was as if the wind had suddenly changed direction, and a fine day turned inclement. “Just what would you like me to do for you, Miles?”

Miles decided, despite his intuitive discomfort, to respond to the words themselves, not the undertone. “Well, first, I’d like the benefit of your more objective perception. Am I loony-tunes? More concretely, I guess, would you be willing to put out some feelers for me? With Derek retiring, maybe I could come down here—that is, if you could stand the sight of me on a daily basis.” Miles grinned at this last suggestion, hoping for a reciprocal gesture, but did not receive it. (It would have been impolitic, even in this private meeting, to have brought up the impending debacle at Trinity, Lakeside Heights.) “Or maybe even something outside the diocese. Maybe you could tap that good-old-boy network down in Louisiana for me.”

The bishop remained mute, his eyes averted, for several seconds. When he spoke, his voice had the character of a moss-covered rock—soft and appealing on the surface, impenetrably hard underneath. “Miles, I’m not at all sure that a move is what you should be looking at right now.”

Miles retained his outer composure, but his spirit began to give way like the hull of a submarine under the pressure of too-deep water. Until this moment, he had not realized just how invested he was in changing the venue of his labors. Weakly, he responded, “I see. Why? Chase, is there something you’re not telling me.”

At this, Bishop Landry stood up and walked slowly around the end of his desk and stood in front of his credenza, looking obliquely out the window. “Miles, how in touch are you with what’s going on at St Alban’s? How would you say things are going there?”

Miles pondered his answer for a moment before reponding. “I guess things could always be better, but they could sure be a hell of a lot worse. After twelve years, I’ve got a pretty easy relationship with those people. There are no crises brewing that I’m aware of, at any rate. I’m not trying to run away from anything, if that’s what you’re getting at. It’s purely personal; it has to do with me, not the parish.”

“I know, I know. I know you’re not trying to run from anything, consciously, at least.” Chase returned to his seat and looked Miles squarely in the eye. “God, Miles, this is awkward. I’ve been hearing things, things a bishop doesn’t like to hear about one of his clergy.”

The blood drained from Miles’s face. “What in heaven’s name could you possibly be talking about?”

“It’s my usual policy, I hope you know, not to complete the triangle when I get a letter of complaint about a priest. I usually don’t even file them. I just read them, and that’s that.”

Chase paused in order to measure his words, but Miles interrupted. “You’ve gotten a letter of complaint about me?” There was a tone of disbelief in his voice— not quite contemptuous, not quite swaggering, but tilting that way.

“Letters,” Chase responded glumly, his eyes averted once again, accenting the second syllable and exaggeratedly pronouncing the final ‘s’ as a ‘z’ in order to emphasize the plural inflection.

“Letters of complaint,” Miles repeated softly, his incredulity now evincing a humbler aspect. “Who are they from?”

“Miles, who they’re from isn’t nearly as significant for our present purposes as what they say.” This was an evasive move heretofore completely uncharacteristic of Miles’s experience of Chase Landry’s behavior, but he was still sufficiently shocked from the initial disclosure that he left it unchallenged. The bishop continued, “What I’m hearing is that you’re not giving any leadership at St Alban’s, that you let conflict fester, and that you take both sides of an issue, depending on who you’re talking to.”

Miles opened his mouth, but his ability to calculate the content of his next statement was three or four seconds slower than his visceral urge to speak. “Chase, I’ve never been more baldly honest in all my life as I am at this moment. I am simply not creative enough to imagine where those kinds of remarks could come from.” Having now recovered something of his rhetorical equilibrium, Miles continued, “Who in the world wrote you those letters? And what conflicts are they talking about? Help me out here!”

“I know this is tricky territory, but for right now, at least, I’m going to choose to keep my sources confidential. I don’t want to muddy the waters for you in Grove Lake any more than I already have by even bringing it up. Now as for the specific issues, it’s mostly pissant stuff—something about outside groups using your buildings is one of them—but that’s not the point. Hell, you already made the point—the point is you’re not all there. But I don’t think the solution is to turn tail and run. Whatever demons you’ve got are going to dog you wherever I might help you land. I’d rather you face them and deal with them right where you are. Then we can talk about other options.”

Miles heard the bishop’s words about discussing “other options” in the future, but only cursorily; his attention had been arrested by the single reference—oblique as it was—to the nature of the alleged discontent among his parishioners. “Chase, we’ve got some Twelve Step groups that meet during the week in some of our rooms. A few of the old guard—I can only think of two individuals, acutally— are bent out of shape…”

The bishop interrupted with a brushing-aside gesture, “Miles, I don’t even need to know about all that. You know as well as I do that the issue is never the issue. If it weren’t the Twelve Step group, it’d be something else. The issue is your relationship. You’re too disconnected. You need to find some more balance. If you’re going to leave Grove Lake—and I’m not at all convinced that’s the best thing for either you or them—but if you’re going to leave Grove Lake, I want you to do it healthy. These people that wrote me the letters may be completely nuts. I don’t know. But I want you to deal with them.”

Miles allowed himself a reluctant smile, part sarcastic and part genuine amusement. “Deal with them? Chase, I don’t even know who ‘they’ are!”

“Father Coverdale, you were not born yesterday! I have no doubt that you’re plenty smart enough to solve that particular mystery without even breaking a sweat.”

The conversation lagged. Both men sensed that it had probably reached a natural conclusion. Miles elected to initiate the closing amenities himself; having been rebuffed in his goals for the meeting, it was a way to salvage some measure of dignity. He stood, as did Chase an instant thereafter. “My lord bishop, I would not be honest if I didn’t say I am disappointed in the way this little chat has gone. But I shall try to take your advice to heart. I’ll really try.”

“Miles, I know you will, but don’t bullshit me. You’re P.O.’d at me, and I don’t really blame you. I don’t like being a hard case with anyone, but least of all you. Now get out of here before you do me bodily harm!”

The two men embraced, and Miles made his way back through the reception area, down the elevator, and out of the building, taking playful leave of Peggy and Max along the way. He found his car, still with plenty of time left on the meter. (It seemed a shame to waste such a choice, already paid-for, location; he hoped whoever stumbled on it a few second later would appropriately appreciate his anonymous gift.) After he cleared the stressful congestion of the near-north side and achieved cruising speed on the Kennedy Expressway, he allowed himself to process the emotional impact of the morning. A dark and bitter wave inundated his psyche. Bishop Landry was right—more right than he knew. The issue is never the issue, and it is indeed about relationships. Miles was aware that the issue of moving from St Alban’s had migrated to the periphery of his emotional field. Occupying center stage was a relationship—his relationship with the man on the other end of the morning’s conversation. He had driven into the city hoping to have a talk with his old friend Chase. Instead, he had encountered the Bishop of Chicago. He began to mourn the loss of his friend, and knew that the day would soon arrive when, along with the other hundred-odd parish clergy of the diocese, he would, instead, coldly work out the political calculus of his relationship with his bishop.