The sun rose on Wednesday morning, but the residents of Grove Lake, and the entire Chicago area, had to take that fact on faith. A line of storm cells swept in from the west about an hour before dawn, obviating anyone’s need for an alarm clock with high-decibel thunder. When the radio on Miles’ nightstand relayed the beginning of WGN’s early morning “drive time” program into the Coverdale master bedroom at 6:00 AM, Miles was already awake. There was a tornado watch in effect for all of northern Cook, DuPage, and Lake counties—not a particularly rare occurrence during the summer, so Miles registered that fact and went on with his morning routine. It did not escape his notice, however, that the weather was an apt sign of his mood, and his general outlook on life.
The short drive from the rectory to the church was accomplished during a lull in the otherwise tropically intense rainfall that persisted for most of the morning. Donna arrived to officially open the office while the rector was at his desk with his customary bowl of cereal. “So, Father, how was vestry?” she inquired as she turned on the overhead lights in the reception area. (Normally, there was sufficient illumination from windows to make the fluorescents superfluous, but not today.) Miles had a comfortable working relationship with his secretary, and though he did not confide in her deeply, he did usually make known, by means of informal chitchat, his ordinary workaday anxieties. Her question, then, was not impertinent. Yet, it was not a subject he felt like discussing with her—or with anyone—at that moment. So his mind scanned subconsciously for a way to respond that would be truthful and informative, yet not invite extended discussion.
“Well, I think it’s safe to say that Kara Lessard is a happier camper than Bruce Meuller. But I think we’ll all survive.” Survive, yes, but not thrive.
Donna then sharpened her focus. “And how are you doing with it?”
For the first time in the conversation, Miles looked up from his cereal bowl and computer screen, and forced a thin smile. He extended his arms and looked to his left and to his right, as if he were inspecting himself. “Well, I don’t see any obvious cuts or bruises.” Donna got his point; it was not something her boss wanted to talk about.
Having checked his eMail (nothing but junk this morning), Miles opened up his day planner, hoping to find that he was free of scheduled commitments. (Not that a clear calendar is any guarantor of serenity; a parish priest is subject to a “walk-in” crisis at any moment.) No such luck. There was a 3:00 appointment with Tracy Lindholm. A wave of anxiety washed quickly across his psyche. All the uneasy feelings he’d had at the time of Tracy’s last appointment were instantly refreshed—his intuitive sense that there was more trouble ahead with Tracy than he yet knew about, that her case was in that gray zone between pastoral care and psychotherapy, and that she ought to see a therapist. He probably ought to call her now and cancel the appointment and make a referral to…well now, that’s a bit of a problem, huh? It would have to be Audrey Newhouse. But the other memory that was refreshed was why he had failed to do just that two weeks earlier. He was still peeved with her—sorely peeved—for her role in the alienation of his daughter’s affection. Yet, he had grown to so trust and rely on his professional connection with her that he had failed to develop any alternatives. This completely sapped his determination to press the point about referral, and he turned his attention to some sermon preparation chores that he wanted to accomplish before the end of the morning.
Just before noon, the phone rang, which Miles observed only subliminally, as Donna, in her characteristic fashion, picked it up before the end of the second ring. A moment later, however, she tapped on his door and stuck her head in the rector’s study. “Father, that was Jeffrey’s day care person.” Jeffrey was Donna’s eight year old, almost too old for summertime daycare, but a couple of his best friends were in the group, so he didn’t protest the indignity. “She says he fell and whacked his head pretty good on a tree trunk. He seems to be OK—he’s up walking around and talking and everything—but, you know, with a head injury, I feel like I need to have him checked out, just to be on the safe side. I don’t know if I’ll be able to make it back in today. Do you think you can manage without me for the afternoon?”
Father Coverdale snapped into his best pastoral concern mode, and immediately reassured Donna as he stepped out from behind his desk. “Donna, of course. In fact, I insist that you spend the afternoon with Jeffrey, even if he checks out OK. If I see you back in here today, I’m going to turn you right back around.”
“Oh, Father, thank-you!” She stepped forward and embraced Miles briefly. “That kid. I swear, he gets himself into more scrapes. He has absolutely no fear. I’ve always thought he was a disaster waiting to happen.”
“I’m sure he’ll be fine. Now go.” Miles gently turned Donna’s shoulders in the direction of a full turn, which she voluntarily completed on her way toward obeying his final directive.
The next thought that crossed Miles’ mind was that no one else would be around at 3:00 PM when Tracy came for her appointment. Here was yet another reason to cancel it, in light of the latest “risk management” strategies forced on churches by the liability insurance carriers in the wake of a rash of claims arising from clergy sexual misconduct.
The next sound he hears, however, is the telephone, and he is distracted from his thought. At the other end of the line is his friend and colleague, Fr Rob Walker, who is, as usual, heated up over national church politics and successfully draws Miles into a twenty-minute conversation. By the time he hangs up the phone, his stomach is rumbling, and he heads for Bea’s without another thought of Tracy Lindholm.
She arrived precisely in time for her scheduled appointment. Due to Donna Lessing’s absence, however, the outer door of the parish office was locked, the suction-grip sign attached to the glass was in the “Closed” position, and the lights in the outer office were turned off. If he had thought of it, Miles might have changed one or more of these conditions when he returned from lunch. But he didn’t think of it. And if Tracy hadn’t spotted the rector’s Mercury in its accustomed spot when she drove into the parking lot, she might have concluded that she’d been stood up. The all but sure sign of his presence, however, gave her the impetus she needed to knock loudly. When Miles rushed to the door in response to her knock, and let her in while liberally apologizing, he might, once again, have remembered to unlock the door, or change the sign to “Open,” or turn on the lights in the reception area. But he did not so remember.
Once they were settled in the counseling area of his study (by habit, Miles had closed the door behind him), and had spent sufficient time on the obligatory trivial pleasantries, he took the initiative. “Tracy, as I recall, we reached a sort of turning point last time. You revealed to me that you’re an incest survivor, and that this might underlie the issue that you originally came to see me about—namely, your discomfort about how you fit in here at St Alban’s. Do I have that about right”
“You do, Father,” Tracy replied. “I think that about nails it.”
“Well, what would you like me to know that you think would help me better understand what you’re experiencing?”
Tracy was silent for a few seconds, and took in a deep breath. With her eyes cast down toward the coffee table that stood in front of the couch, she began to tell her story. “My parents got married really young—I mean, really young. My mother was nineteen when I was born, and my father died while she was pregnant—he was killed in a stupid drag-racing accident. So Mom moved back in with her parents, and that’s where it all started. It started with…” Tracy had to stop so as to not lose her composure. She gulped hard. Miles handed her the box of tissue from the coffee table. “It started with my grandfather, actually. I don’t even remember when it started…I don’t remember it ever not happening. I must have been three or four. I definitely remember an incident from when I was six, but I know that wasn’t the first time; it was routine by then.”
There was another break in the narrative as Tracy collected herself. Miles prayed for her silently, but said nothing. She continued, “We took baths together. God, that sounds so sick! I’m ashamed to even be telling you this. You must be completely grossed out.”
“This isn’t about me, Tracy,” he responded, “I’m ready to hear anything you have to tell.”
Tracy let out a long sigh, keeping her gaze fixed on the table. Then, slowly, she looked up at Miles, her eyes wide open like those of a child on Christmas morning. She blinked twice, and the edges of her mouth widened, not quite into a smile, but in that general direction. “Father Miles, I trust you completely to hear my story. Believe it or not, you’re the first person I’ve ever told this to. You’ll never know how much you mean to me; you’ve given me strength…courage…this is something I’ve been holding in my whole life!” Her voice cracked slightly with these final words, and she reached for another tissue.
Miles experienced a twinge of discomfort, but it did not rise to the level of conscious awareness. There was something about her tone—or maybe it was the way her tone made him feel. “Tracy, I’m honored to be let into your life in this way. I’m honored to be able to be here for you at this painful time.” He paused a second, then continued, “What else is it you want me to hear?”
“Well…all of a sudden, the details don’t seem so important. I had sex with my grandfather, probably about once a week, until he dropped dead of a heart attack one day when I was in the ninth grade. I don’t remember ever being a virgin, Father Miles. I was robbed!”
“Yes, Tracy, you were robbed,” Miles echoed softly.
“I was glad when the son-of-a-bitch…O, Father, excuse my language!…I was glad when my own grandfather died. It broke up my grandmother and my mother. They cried for weeks. But I couldn’t cry. I was glad! But then I felt guilty for being glad, you know? I thought, maybe I caused it—you know, in some cosmic way? Before he died, I didn’t know enough to be mad at him. Everything just seemed routine, it just seemed normal. I mean, to look at me, you’d never have been able to tell what a mess I was in. But the minute I heard that he was dead, I was so pissed off—you wouldn’t believe how pissed off I was! I just dawned on me in an instant what that…”—Tracy paused and grinned sheepishly—“what that S.O.B. had done to me.”
“Wow!” Miles exclaimed, but without sacrificing his softest demeanor. “You know, it doesn’t surprise me at all that you had such a reaction. Other incest victims have said the same thing.”
Tracy smiled softly and brushed her shoulder length blond hair back with her left hand. “Have they, Father Miles? I feel like I should know that. But I’ve never even talked to anybody. I know there are support groups and whatnot, but I’ve never been to one. I’ve never told a soul about this. You’re the first one. You’re the first person I’ve ever opened up to about this. You don’t know what a relief this is!” Her voice cracked with this last comment, and more tears flowed.
Miles leaned over and offered her another tissue. Then he continued, “Tracy, this is an important line you’ve crossed. It really is. I can’t say that strongly enough. But you’ve got an awful lot of work to do now. You’ve let the genie out of the bottle and you can’t put it back in. Do you know what I mean? You’ve finally had the courage to speak the monster’s name, but he’s still in your closet, so to speak. He’s still affecting your life, and your work now is to find out where and how and do something about it.”
Tracy looked her pastor straight in the eye. Her smile was gone now, but she was not angry or disturbed. Rather, she was calm and serious. “Father Miles, no one knows that more than I do. Believe me, no one knows that more than I do.” From her tone, Miles got the impression that there was more of substance that Tracy Lindholm needed to expel and have purged from her psyche, and that, whether anybody liked it or not, it was going to happen imminently.
So he said nothing, and, sure enough, she filled the void with only that much of a prompt. “Father, this is embarrassing, but you’ve given me no reason not to trust you. You’ll probably throw me out of your office when you hear this, and then God will probably strike me dead in the parking lot before I get to my car.”
Miles moved instinctively to his lines of reassurance that he had spoken so many times in the confessional to nervous penitents. “I’m really beyond being shocked. It’s hard to imagine that you could tell me anything I haven’t already heard several times before.”
“Well…” she said with hesitation, “I’ll have to take your word for that, I suppose.” Miles offered no response, so she continued, “I guess the crass way of saying is that, ever since my grandfather died, I haven’t been able to keep my legs together. Not for very long, at any rate. That’s the reason my marriage ended. John was patient the first couple of times, but finally he just couldn’t take it anymore, and I can’t say as I blame him. But that’s just the tip of the iceberg. It started long before I ever married him, and, I’m ashamed to say, it’s continued long after. My God, what you must think of me!”
Miles waited several seconds before replying, “Tracy, the important question is not what I think of you, but what you think of yourself, isn’t it?”
“What I think of myself? God, I hope not. I’m not what you would call my own biggest fan.” She then proceeded to continue enumerating the counts of her self-indictment. “In high school, I was what you call ‘easy.’ My thing was for wrestlers, and I got passed around between the guys on the wrestling team for four years. College only made it all easier. I got pregnant twice, but miscarried very early on both times, before I had to make a decision about what to do. It’s amazing I never got … you know… a disease, truly amazing.”
Miles fell into his softest demeanor yet. “Tracy, I’m so sorry. I’m so dreadfully sorry about what you’ve had to go through. I truly do believe that God can make some tremendous good come out of this, but, you know, I get paid to say that, and, at this precise moment, it sounds pretty hollow to me. It’s my job to say it, and you expect me to say it, and I have to tell you, it’s true. I believe it’s true. God can not only make this OK; he can make it better than OK.” He allowed himself a faint smile. “OK?”
Tracy saw the smile and upped the ante to a broad grin—a brief grin, but a grin nonetheless. “I’ll trust you on that, Father.” She paused a second, resuming her matter-of-fact narrative demeanor. “But there’s more. I don’t want to kid you. I don’t want to give you the impression that I’ve changed my ways.” She brushed her hair back again, and her eyes widened as she looked directly as Miles. “I still have the libido of a rabbit. I don’t like that about myself, necessarily. But I’ve learned to accept it. Since you and I last talked—What was it? Two weeks ago?—since you and I last talked, I’ve woken up twice in strange beds, with men whose names I don’t even know. I pick them up in bars, but it’s not like I’m drunk out of my mind. They are, of course! But I’m not. I’m pretty much a sober slut, as sluts go.” She looked back down at the table and smiled demurely.
For the first time in the conversation, Miles felt regret for even being a part of it. He should have been strong enough to set his own issues aside and make the referral to Audrey Newhouse. This was approaching territory that was out of his league. He looked up to try and collect himself. He was not accustomed to being at a loss for words in pastoral counseling. He knew that promiscuity in adulthood is not an uncommon response to the trauma of childhood sexual abuse, but there was a disturbing gap between this conceptual awareness and the actual person—Tracy Lindholm, very much in the flesh—confessing her particular acts of promiscuity. What tack should he take? There was no point in lecturing her about how destructive such behavior is; she was intelligent and educated enough to know as much. Yet, he could not simply pretend that he didn’t hear what she’d just said and go back to dissecting her childhood; it was the proverbial elephant in the living room. Was there a graceful way he could simply end the session? What time was it, anyway? He tried to recall his last view of his watch without actually looking at it. That would have to be his strategy. It was time to punt—make a new appointment, make a referral, pray with her, anything.
These thought processes all transpired in no more than five ticks of the second hand. Then he looked back down at Tracy, and suddenly it didn’t matter that he had not yet thought of what to say. Tracy was looking right at him, still smiling. More to the point, she was methodically undoing the buttons on her cotton knit dress. Four were already loosened and she was working on the fifth. Miles froze.
When Tracy saw that she had her rector’s undivided attention, she blushed, and paused her disrobing. “Father Miles…I just figured…why should I go to a bar tonight. I mean, you’ve been without a woman for—How long has it been now?—and, well, I’m here, and this couch is here, and the sign on the door says ‘Closed.’ What more could we ask for, eh?” Then, in one continuous deft move, she let the top of her dress fall to her waist.
It isn’t that Miles wasn’t tempted, and much less that he didn’t notice that Tracy was very nicely put together. It only took an instant, but he noticed. He had never overtly planned strategy for dealing with such a moment; the possibility had always seemed so utterly remote. Sharon had been the only woman he was ever sexually intimate with, and since her death, he had been too preoccupied with other concerns to devote very much conscious energy to re-imagining himself as a sexual being. So now that a half-undressed attractive woman was standing four feet away from him with a beckoning smile, he reverted to a more unconscious script. Tracy was taking her clothes off. That was inappropriate. His job was to fix things, to make them turn out right. He needed to make sure that she got her dress back on and fully buttoned. So he made the only logical move under the circumstances—he stepped forward and reached for the shoulders of the dress to pull it up. En route to this chivalrous and paternal destination, however, Father Coverdale’s hands were arrested by Tracy Lindholm’s hands, and firmly redirected—minus their intended target, the top of her dress—firmly redirected to her own breasts, which were clad only in a filmy lace bra.
For a fraction of a second, their eyes locked, with his hands on her breasts and her hands on top of his. Then, in an explosion of undifferentiated emotion, Miles yanked himself away, did an about-face, and in three decisive steps, repositioned himself in the opposite corner of the room, facing away from his counselee. He was virtually in shock, but he managed to keep his voice calm. “Tracy, our session is over. I want you to put your dress back on, button it up, and then leave the office.”
He heard evidence of what he assumed to be her compliance with this demand, but Tracy said nothing. He even listened intently for a sniffle, some sign that she was in emotional distress over his rejection of her advance. There was none. He maintained his pose until he heard her footsteps become more and more distant, then the unmistakable shutting of the outer door of the parish office.
No one from the Lindholm family was in church the following Sunday.
On Tuesday morning, after a somewhat fitful day off, the rector of St Alban’s arrived in the parish office at the usual time and followed his usual routine. Before he was finished with his breakfast, however, Donna interrupted him. “Father, the Bishop’s office is on line one. Would you like me to shut your door?” Donna had developed a fairly keen intuitive sense for when her boss needed privacy for a phone conversation. Miles nodded in the affirmative as he swallowed the spoonful of cereal that was in his mouth. What could be the purpose of this call? The uncomfortable face to face encounter in Bishop Landry’s office the previous month had put an end to the series of pastoral check-ins that had become fairly frequent in the weeks following Sharon’s death. Was he calling to see how the vestry meeting had gone, whether Miles had improved the quality of his “leadership”? That was an irritating thought, to say the least. Maybe the Bishop was having second thoughts about his refusal to even discuss having Miles’ name submitted to the cathedral chapter in their search for a new dean. That would be a welcome surprise.
Then he picked up the receiver and punched the appropriate lighted button. “Hello. Father Coverdale speaking.” He did not know precisely who would be on the other end of the line, so he opted for a formal tone. It turned out to be Peggy Slinker, the Bishop’s secretary. Casual banter was apparently not on her agenda this morning, however. “Hello, Father. Here’s the Bishop.”
After about three seconds of silence, Miles heard the familiar sound of Chase Landry’s voice. “Good morning, Miles. I’m sorry to say that something pretty serious has come down the pike. I assume that the name Tracy Lindholm means something to you?”
In an instant, it all came together in Miles’ head. How could he not have seen this one coming? “My God, Chase, she didn’t….”
“That’s exactly what I said to myself yesterday when it all hit the fan. ‘My God, Miles, you didn’t…”
“Well, for what it’s worth, I didn’t.”
“I suspected you were going to say something like that,” the Bishop responded. “ I’m not allowed to say that I was hoping you might say something like that. But I sure did suspect it. Hell, my life would never be so simple as to have you or anyone just say, ‘Yeah, I’m guilty as charged. Take me out and shoot me.’”
“'Charged,’ huh. That kinda gets my attention. I think I know what this is about, but you’d better bring me up to speed officially.”
“Sexual misconduct, Miles, sexual misconduct. Ms. Lindholm has filed a formal complaint. She says you came on to her during a counseling session, that you fondled her, and when she refused your advances, you got pissed off and threw her out of the office. I mean, there are more details, but that’s it in a nutshell. I’ll fax it all to you as soon as you tell me it’s safe. But I’m afraid that’s all I can say now about the specific charges. You know the drill. We’ve got to investigate this now, and I’m supposed to be nice to everyone concerned, but not too cozy with anyone, least of all you, I’m afraid. I hate this, Miles. You know I hate this.”
Miles found himself remarkably calm in the face of this explosive news. “I know you do, Chase. I know you do. I just hope this whole thing can play out quickly, and we don’t fart around forever.”
“Me too, buddy, me too. I’ll talk to you later.” With that, Bishop Landry terminated the conversation. Miles leaned back in his chair and sighed. He was too emotionally numb to do anything else. It occurred to him to pray, but no words seemed appropriate to the occasion. His sigh would also have to serve as his prayer.
