A Slight Momentary Affliction

Foreword

2009-10-08T20:06:00.000-07:00

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

2009-10-08T19:59:00.000-07:00

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

2009-10-08T19:53:00.000-07:00

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

2009-10-08T19:40:00.000-07:00

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.

Chapter 4

2009-10-08T19:30:00.000-07:00

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.

Chapter 5

2009-10-08T19:21:00.000-07:00

After stopping for a drive-through Italian beef sandwich, Miles pulled in to his reserved parking place outside the parish office at about half past noon. His head ached, and his tentative plan was to touch base with Donna, check his messages, make whatever phone calls were necessary, and head back to the rectory for a beer and a nap, and—dared he hope?—some perspective or solace with respect to his morning meeting at the diocesan office. Miles had never been given to depression, per se, but he was surely not immune to being in a depressed mood, and, this afternoon, he was in a depressed mood. But the office door was locked and the lights were out. So much for touching base with Donna. Where could she be? He glanced at the answering machine on her desk and noticed the indicator light reading “02”. There were two messages. The first one was from Donna; she was home trying to fend off a migraine. Miles was grateful that the pain emanating from within his own skull was less crippling in scale. On to the second message. “Dad, it’s me.” She did not need to identify herself with any more precision; the voice was Rachel’s. “I don’t know where you are, but you and I need to talk.” There was an edge to her tone that made him subliminally uneasy. What could be wrong? She did not sound wounded and weepy like on the night she announced her separation from Greg. Was she angry? No, it was more like a matter-of-fact urgency. “I’m just going to take a chance and roll into Grove Lake about two. I’ll check at home first, then come to the church if you’re not there. This is important. I…” There was a pause as Rachel considered whether to release the thought that was next in the queue that had formed in her brain. “I…this is important. I’ll see you…when I see you…today…this is important.” Incoherence of expression was highly uncharacteristic of his daughter, and Miles was mildly alarmed. He stepped back out of the office, returned to his car, and drove home. Rachel had said that would be her first stop, and he wanted to be there when she arrived.

When the Coverdale family moved to Grove Lake, Rachel had just turned eleven. She and Brian, as yet pre-adolescent, suffered only minor emotional trauma in negotiating the transition from one milieu to the other—their new house was more commodious than their old one, and a school is a school is a school. Sharon and Miles found her a piano teacher, Louis Ewald, who had actually had a brief professional career as a concert artist in the 1930s—a career blocked by the Great Depression from reaching critical mass for a sustained life. By the time he took on Rachel as a student, Mr Ewald was a kindly man of seventy-something. For the first dozen or so lessons, Rachel was uncharacteristically dour about the new arrangements, missing Brenda Duncan in Porterville, the only teacher she had ever known, and insisting the she was uncomfortable with Mr Ewald, and couldn’t Mom and Dad look a little further afield for a different teacher? But Louis Ewald came so highly recommended—and weren’t they so fortunate that someone of his caliber lived right in Grove Lake?—that Miles and Sharon were steeled to hold their ground with the protestations of their eleven year old. In time, Rachel settled in, stopped complaining about going to lessons, and continued to progress as a pianist.

During the summer after Rachel’s freshman year at Northwestern, Louis Ewald died suddenly, but peacefully, in his sleep. He was not an Episcopalian, but he was not much of anything else either (his parents had been Christian Scientists, but he had never embraced their religion), so his daughter, having flown in from her home in the San Francisco Bay area, and knowing of his late-in-life star pupil, asked Father Coverdale to preside at a community memorial service to be held in the auditorium of Grove Lake High, with the added request that Rachel perform on the occasion. It would be a musical eulogy. Miles happily accepted the engagement, both on his behalf and his daughter’s; it seemed an eminently natural and appropriate request. But Rachel, for reasons inexplicable at the time, balked. She did not lack for excuses—no appropriate repertoire at a polished stage, too much emotional involvement, a left thumb jammed slightly in a volleyball game six weeks earlier, even the “time of the month”—but none was entirely plausible.

Her refusal, which eventually softened into mere reluctance, carried for those who might have had ears to hear—though, in fact, no one did—an undertone of desperation. She indeed delivered a performance of Beethoven’s Apassionata sonata that plumbed the depths of the composition as thoroughly as might be hoped. Afterward, she was visibly disturbed, though always more than adequately functional, for several weeks. She surprised her mother by agreeing to spend the last six weeks before school resumed, save for a couple of weekend trips home, at the Wisconsin cabin. What was startling about this was that the cabin contained no piano, meaning that Rachel spent a month and a half without practicing. For an aspiring virtuoso, this was a remarkable breach of discipline. Sharon wondered about it, but was so happy to have her daughter’s company at the cabin that she didn’t bring it up. Miles was mildly uneasy over his presumptuousness in committing Rachel to the funeral performance, and for being the primary source of subtle pressure on her to execute the plans she had no part in forming, but by the time the women in his life departed for their northern retreat, he was sufficiently distracted by the demands of breaking in a new curate, mollifying an irritated organist, holding the hand of the Sunday School director during the annual scramble for enough volunteer teachers, and otherwise seeing to the administrative details of the impending program year, that he did not have room for a second thought about Rachel’s just barely noticeable—but uncharacteristic, nonetheless—docile and taciturn disposition. Truth to tell, Rachel was herself sufficiently adroit at concealing the signs of her own distress that her father’s propensity for overlooking it could be forgiven by any charitable person.

Miles had unconsciously filed away the memory of the events of that summer—six years ago, now—but as he sat on the couch in his den, beer can in hand, waiting for Rachel to arrive, he retrieved it all, just as unconsciously as he had once consigned it to storage. The memories simply presented themselves, as if on a tape cassette, and Miles dutifully pushed the “Play” button. It did not, at the time, occur to him to wonder why. Later, he would wonder how he could possibly have missed the significance of this premonition.

Rachel’s car pulled into the driveway just as the grandfather clock in the rectory foyer chimed two. Miles got up to greet her at the door. All the elements of the standard ritual of greeting and hospitality were present—smiles, an embrace, offer of refreshment, inquiry after health—but there was a steeliness in her demeanor that the amenities could not conceal. He began to brace himself emotionally as they took seats in the den—father in the recliner, daughter on the end of the couch about three feet away. There was a moment of excruciating silence, which Miles instinctively broke when he noticed Rachel’s eyes flitting everywhere in the room but toward his own.

“Hey, call me psychic, but you walked in here with some pretty heavy baggage, and I have a feeling I’m not going to find looking through it much of a picnic.”

She still did not look at him squarely when she responded, and her words were just as oblique, though they did move the conversation unambiguously in the direction of the purpose for her visit. “You know, of course, that I’ve been seeing Dr Newhouse.”

“Yes…” Miles hesitated, then continued, “Please forgive me, Rachel. I’ve neglected to ask how that’s been going.” Is that what this visit is about? To goad him into an appropriate parental interest in the status of her troubled marriage? How could he have let this one slip through the cracks? He had been so absorbed by the prelude and postlude to his meeting earlier that day with Bishop Landry that he had pushed his daughter’s crisis to the periphery of his awareness. It was the sort of lapse which, when made in connection with the pastoral care of his flock—though this was rare—was the occasion of severe remonstrance from his own conscience. Now Rachel, it seemed, was one of the proverbial cobbler’s barefoot children. “I’ve always thought Audrey is superb. Does she want to see you and Greg together yet? Do you think he would agree…”

“Dad!” It was not exactly a shout—at least, not according to the decibel meter. But it was still a verbal slap; there could be no mistake. “This isn’t about Greg. This is about us. This is about me and you.” She paused for an instant, taking a resolute breath. “Mostly you.”

“Oh, wow.” Miles’s response was not an exclamation, but a quiet acknowledgement of the gravity of what had just passed his daughter’s lips.

Rachel’s voice quavered. “I’m going to try and not lose control here. I promised myself I would keep it together.” She paused, then continued, almost laughingly. “I even rehearsed it in the car mirror on the way here!” All the while, her own eyes never locked on to her father’s.

Miles instantly began groping for an emotional toehold. Should he let himself react spontaneously? Should he adopt his practiced demeanor of pastoral attentiveness? Should he remain passive, and try to listen well, or actively attempt to help Rachel along in the agenda which was apparently so clear—or had been, at least—in her own mind, maybe even injecting a little playfulness (sarcasm?—sometimes too fine a distinction) into the conversation? It was in this latter spirit that he offered, “I believe I am on the receiving end of what is known in the psycho babble trade as a ‘confrontation.’"

If it was his intent to move Rachel beyond form and into substance, he could not have been more successful. “Dammit, Dad! Don’t patronize me. Don’t trivialize me. This is hard enough already. I need you to … I need you to just shut up and listen. It’s my turn to talk. My turn.”

Silence.

Rachel took a slow, deep breath, exhaled, then continued. “This thing with Greg—I think it’s finally gotten through to me—or Audrey has helped me see—at least I couldn’t have done it without her—anyway, my trouble with Greg, that’s not the real trouble. That’s not what this is about. What it’s about is…” She paused, as if to build up engine pressure for climbing a steep hill. “What it’s about is, I’m really screwed up, and I think you and Mom played a big part in getting me where I am, but Mom’s dead, so I can’t criticize her, but you’re here, so you get dumped on, but you deserve it—God, I hate to say it!—but you deserve it. There are some things you probably have no idea about. I know this is unfair, and you’re probably going to hate me, but better you hating me than me hating you, huh? I know this is unfair, but I’ve got to do this, I’ve got to do this. I promised Audrey…”

“Promised Audrey?” Rachel had paused just long enough for Miles to insert this question without feeling like he was interrupting. He must not sound defensive, though. That would definitely be a bad move. “What did you promise Audrey, sweetheart?”

“I promised her…you know…that I would do this, that I wouldn’t continue to just sweep my issues with you under the rug.”

“I see.” Miles made a conscious effort to attend to his body language—shoulders back, legs uncrossed, palms open, lots of eye contact—all indicating his volitional intent, even if his emotional inclination lagged behind, to be disarmingly open to absorbing whatever bombs his daughter needed to lob his way. “Well, I agree with Audrey.” He was only lying a little. His agreement was alloyed with resentment toward his friend and parishioner for apparently making Rachel more confused than she already was. “Whatever you and she have dug up, let’s have it. I certainly don’t want anything to fester.”

“OK. You’re not making this any easier, by the way, by being sweet. I’m trying hard to be mad at you.”

“Don’t worry,” Miles reassured playfully. “I’ll yell at you when you least expect it.”

“Please do. Well, let me see if I can, as Brian would say, ‘bottom-line it’ for you. The reason Greg left me, so he says, is that he got fed up with me being emotionally distant—‘ice princess’ was his exact label, to be precise. I thought he was full of shit until I talked to Audrey. She asked all the usual shrink questions about whether I had a happy childhood and all that, which I didn’t think was going to lead to anything, but I played along, you know, just to be cooperative. It was so nice of her to see me, and she was being so kind, that I didn’t want to be a hard case. And then—wham!—out of the blue, it hit me. It hit me in one question she asked me. Do you want to know what that question was, Dad?”

“I have a feeling I’m going to find out whether I want to or not.”

“You’re damn right you are!” Rachel’s serene demeanor of the previous minutes evaporated. “OK, the sweetness and light isn’t going to cut it anymore. I’m officially pissed again. Just thinking about it puts me back in touch with my feelings. Here’s the deal. Audrey asked me, ‘Do you think your parents loved each other?’ and I said, ‘Of course they did.’ But then she asked me, ‘Well, how did they show their affection for one another?’ and I was stumped. Completely stumped. I wracked my brain, but the sad fact is, the pathetic fact is, I could not think of one time when I saw you and Mom demonstrate whatever it was I always assumed you felt for each other. I never saw you kiss, I never saw you hold hands, I never saw you walk arm in arm. Honestly, Dad, now that I think about it, I wonder how Brian and I are even on this planet. Are you sure we aren’t adopted?”

“Rachel!” Miles was profoundly pained. “Is this really necessary?”

“Yes, Dad, it is. I’m afraid it is necessary.”

“Then please tell me where the hell you’re going with this, because I’m confused. What happened to your promise to bottom-line it?”

“You want the bottom line? I’ll give you the bottom line! I’m the Ice Princess because my father and mother are the Ice King and the Ice Queen! And I married a hot-blooded Italian who doesn’t know what to do with ice, and now he’s left me for a warmer climate and I’m desperately in love with him and I don’t know if I’m going to be able to get him back. That, my dear father, is the bottom line.”

Miles sat motionless. Then his lips parted and his jaw dropped slightly as he exhaled audibly. “Rachel, I don’t know what to say.” But after voicing that standard disclaimer, he suddenly thought of a great deal to say. “Your mother and I loved each other very much. You yourself just said you assumed we felt something for one another. Well, you were right—we did. And you must have gotten that impression from somewhere, huh? I know it’s bad form for me to get defensive—you’ve made it clear that this is your show—but I’m not sure but that Audrey Newhouse has got you chasing a shadow.” Now he was not only being defensive, but seeming to attack Audrey. Did he really want to be doing this? He continued nonetheless, “I am really sorry for what’s happened between you and Greg. I will do anything in my power, and then some, to get the two of you back together. But I will not start by apologizing for my marriage, for the way Sharon and I showed affection. We were true to ourselves, true to who we were. We were comfortable with that.” Once again, his prevarication was slight. Sharon and he had indeed been comfortable with their relationship, but a clean master bedroom closet was ample testimony to his own more recent doubts and second thoughts. “Maybe, for your sake, we should have been more demonstrative. I don’t know. We did what seemed to come naturally at the time. But what good would it do, anyway, for me to beat myself up about it now? Your mother is gone, Rachel. She’s gone. What’s done is done.”

Rachel wasted no time framing her rejoinder. “That’s where you’re wrong, Dad. It may be ‘done’ for you, but it’s certainly not ‘done’ for me. I’m still in the middle of it all.”

“I can understand that, Rachel, I really can.” Was she going to calm down now? Was the attacking over? “Tell me. Have you talked to Greg about any of this?”

“No, not yet. Audrey wanted me to do this first. She says it’s important…”

“Audrey again?” Miles was fully aware that an interruption would be costly, but his irritation at hearing Dr Newhouse mentioned yet again got the best of him. (Where was this coming from? It wasn’t quite rational.) “What is she doing—scripting your life for you now?” A tight smile only accentuated, rather than concealed, his perturbed state.

Now it was Rachel’s turn to be momentarily nonplussed. “Scripting my life? I don’t think so.” The monosyllables were detached and articulated, for emphasis. “She has helped me make some connections that I never would have seen otherwise—the main one being that I’ve tried to import into my marriage some communication patterns—the only ones that were ever imprinted on me—that can only be described as dysfunctional. They may have worked for you and Mom—I don’t see how, but I’ll have to take your word for it—but they sure as hell don’t work with Greg DeFronzo. I’m damaged goods, and it’s because of the way I was raised, and I had no idea, none whatsoever, and now that it’s as obvious as the nose on my face, it kind of pisses me off.”

Miles had recovered, by this time, enough of his composure to resist the impulse toward a sarcastic retort (like “Thanks for sharing”). “And that’s something I’ll just have to take your word on. Geez, Rachel, this is heavy stuff. I apologize for getting testy a minute ago. I don’t want to demean you at all. And I don’t want to seem to put down whatever Audrey is doing with you, though it does sound like a lot of psycho-babble to me. But I don’t know what else to say right now. You’ve had some time to process this—I haven’t.”

“I know, Dad, I know.” These pro forma words of comfort were uttered perfunctorily, without expression. Rachel’s mind was already on her next move, and her eyes stared across the room toward the french doors leading to the back patio. Throughout the whole conversation, her own gaze had yet to lock on to her father’s. “But there’s more.”

“More?”

“There’s another shoe to drop, I’m afraid. My God, I feel like Super Bitch for doing this to you, but it was hard enough for me to do this at all, and if I don’t get it all out now, I don’t know if I ever will.”

This time, maintaining a posture of openness required more effort on Miles’s part than it had before. He was ready for this conversation to be over, but his strength of rational will yet managed to trump his visceral impulse. He shook the empty beer can in his hand. Did he need another one? Perhaps so, but the thought of delaying the end of this meeting by even a few seconds was potently distasteful. “All right, sweetheart, I’m braced. Let’s have it.”

“It’s about Mr Ewald.” This arrested Miles’s attention, simply because he could not imagine how his daughter’s deceased childhood piano teacher could relate to the crisis which threatened her marriage. But he remained silently attentive, and Rachel continued. “You probably remember that I was not too happy with him at first.”

“Yeah. You were actually quite a little brat about it. Brenda Duncan in Porterville spoiled you with indulgence. Your mother and I didn’t blame you, though. It must have been really hard to adjust.”

Rachel’s facial muscles were taut, and she continued to stare out the french doors. “It had nothing to do with Mrs Duncan spoiling me. It had nothing to do with adjusting to a new teacher. Dad, the man was a pervert. He was molesting me. I was sexually abused by my piano teacher.” The volume and intensity of her voice leapt upward as she delivered the punchline. “The piano teacher that you and Mom forced me to continue seeing even when I told you I wanted out!”

In a synchronized autonomic response, father and daughter each sucked in a load of air. This seemed to consume all the oxygen in the room for several seconds; there was none left to facilitate speaking. Both sat motionless, but for the first time in this conversation their eyes locked on to one another. A single tear fell slowly down Rachel’s cheek; she made no effort to wipe it away. Miles was the first to recover his balance, but the best his vocal cords could manage was a whisper. “Rachel…we had no idea. I’m so sorry.”

If Miles sought some indication of understanding or forgiveness on his daughter’s part, she was not accommodating. “I know, Dad. I don’t doubt that you’re sorry.” The volume and intensity of her voice grew with each passing word. “But ‘sorry’ when I’m twenty-three doesn’t help me much when I’m eleven, does it?”

Was that when it happened? Was it when she was eleven? How long did it go on? What exactly did that creep do to her, anyway? ‘Molest’ can mean a lot of different things. Maybe all he did was kiss her, or pat her backside a couple of times. God, please let it be just that. That much is bad enough, to be sure, but it’s information that a father can at least process without emotionally collapsing. But what if it was intercourse at every piano lesson—once a week for seven years? What if that son of a bitch had fucked his daughter a couple or three hundred times? The atheistic bastard was already dead, so Miles couldn’t kill him again. He could wish him to be burning in hell, though; that much he could certainly do. But before Father Coverdale could petition the Almighty for a rise in the temperature of hell for the particular torment of Louis Ewald, he needed more information. He was, after all, a priest, a pastor, one who was supposed to be compassionate toward sinful human souls. It wasn’t Louis Ewald’s soul that was of concern to Miles at the moment, however. It was, rather, a corporeal part of his anatomy. He needed to know more.

“Rachel…sweetheart…forgive me if I’m incoherent…you’ve at least had some time…time to process…prepare…with me, more like a bolt of lightning…Rachel…I don’t even know how to put this…”

Mercifully, Rachel intervened. “You want some details, don’t you? Audrey told me you would. I’ve practiced this…I’m going to talk about it this one time…I’m a big girl, so I’m just going to say it straight out, and then you can deal with it. But I don’t want to play ‘twenty questions,’ okay?”

“Absolutely. Okay. You don’t need to tell me anything you don’t want to…”

“Thank-you, Dad, but I do. I don’t want to, but I do have to tell you this, for my sake as well as yours.” Rachel paused just long enough to take a deliberate breath. “We never had intercourse. He would feel me up—my breasts (even before I had any!) and my rear end—but always through my clothes. He never undressed me.” Miles felt the muscles in his jaw palpably relax. This was nasty stuff, but it could have been worse. His relief was slightly premature, however. Rachel continued, “But he did make me undress him…from the waist down, that is. He wanted me to touch him…play with him. That’s how I knew every lesson was over. He would take my hand and put it on himself. He would already be aroused; I just finished him off and went on my way.”

Miles had neither the motivation nor the means to maintain his composure. He just allowed the tears to flow. “The bastard! The low-life slime bag! Rachel, I am so sorry! I am so sorry! I had no idea!”

Rachel also let herself collapse emotionally, as she responded through her tears, “Oh, but you did! You did have an idea! I was eleven years old, Dad, eleven! You couldn’t expect me to spell it out for you then, could you? ‘Oh, by the way, Mom and Dad, my piano lessons are lasting a little longer than thirty minutes because Mr Ewald makes me give him a hand job before I go.’ I was dropping every hint that I could. I was trying to tell you, and you fought me every step of the way. You made me keep going back to him. It was as if it were okay with you, like you approved, like it was normal, all in a day’s work.”

“Rachel, please! I never…your mother never…we would never have approved. We would have strung the guy up by the…”

“It’s a little late for paternal histrionics, Dad. Too damn late, as a matter of fact. That water is way past the bridge by now.”

“I know, I know. Of course it is. But you’ve got to believe me…”

Rachel interrupted decisively. “Hold it! Hold it! Time out!” She gave the hand sign that a frantic basketball player would give to a referee. “That can’t be on the agenda today. What I believe or don’t believe can’t be on the agenda. Maybe later, maybe not, but what’s important today is not what I believe, but what you believe. You do believe me about all of this, don’t you?”

“Do I believe Mr Ewald molested you? Of course I believe. Why would you have any reason to lie to me about something like that, especially when the guy’s dead?”

Rachel worked her father methodically, like an attorney examining a hostile witness. “Not only that. That’s not good enough. Do you also believe you—you and Mom—are responsible for what happened?”

“Responsible?” Miles was trying to buy time to collect his thoughts. He desperately wanted to agree with Rachel, just because he was ready for this conversation to be over. He was claustrophobic, and felt like he was going to hyperventilate. He needed space, physical and psychic space. Rachel could have asked him to affirm that the moon was populated by little green men, and he would have been inclined to be compliant. But to admit that he and Sharon had been complicit in their own daughter’s sexual abuse? Is that what she was asking. This was over the edge, way over the edge. He had an intuitive flash. It may prove to be inaccurate, and Rachel would probably deny it in any case. But it was all he had to grasp at. “Is this something Audrey put you up to?”

Now it was Rachel’s turn to be momentarily nonplussed, but she recovered quickly. “I’m going to pretend you didn’t say that. No, on second thought, I’m not going to pretend anything! I’m not going to let you manipulate me. Where the hell do you get off being so patronizing? You’re the one that sent me to Audrey Newhouse. So now you’re going to dump all over her?”

Quickly filing away the observation that Rachel did not deny his accusation, Miles countered, “Aw, come on Rachel! I’m not trying to dump on anybody…”

Once again, Rachel wasn’t buying. She stood up, and began to root around in her purse for her car keys. “I can see this conversation is degenerating. I had hoped it wouldn’t. I had hoped it could end more pleasantly than this.” She found her keys and headed for the door. Miles chased her.

“Pleasantly? How in God’s name can a conversation like this end pleasantly?” Belle, who inferred from the activity in the foyer that she stood a good chance of being taken for a walk, began to yap as she traced tight circles on the floor. Rachel ignored the dog and spoke matter-of-factly as she moved toward the door, not bothering to look at her father. “I’m sorry to walk out like this. I guess I didn’t think through an exit strategy for this conversation. It’s really best that I just go. I’m sorry.”

She walked out the door and headed for her car. Miles remonstrated with himself and he stood in the open doorway and watched her, for not making any effort to dissuade her from departing so precipitously. He was traumatized and weary. Belle saw that her own hopes would not reach fruition and retreated to one of her accustomed stations underneath the living room coffee table. Miles closed the door, padded to the kitchen, and removed another can of beer from the refrigerator. He figured he deserved it.

Chapter 6

2009-10-08T19:14:00.000-07:00

Miles considered himself fortunate that he was not given to addiction. He drank beer regularly, but only one at the end of the day—maybe two if it had been unusually stressful. (He also considered himself fortunate that, despite this routine, he retained a trim physique even in middle age, still wearing trousers with a thirty four inch waist and carrying well under two hundred pounds on his six-foot, one inch frame.) His pastoral work had exposed him amply to the ravages of alcohol abuse, so he had an intellectual and practical incentive to complement his genetic and psychological advantages. The evening he spent alone in the rectory after Rachel delivered herself of her dreadful burden afforded him both motive and opportunity to self-medicate, but his conditioning prevented him. As an alternative, he watched a mindless made-for-TV movie, and fell asleep in front of the ten o’clock news, reclining in the same chair which had been his station during Rachel’s revelations. He knew that nothing could ever again be “normal” after the events of that day (but for that matter, what had been “normal” about any of the events of the past nine months?). He knew that it would not behoove him to simply be passive about any of it, to take refuge in the ordinary demands of his life and work. He would be the first to demand of himself a more proactive stance. But not all at once, and not right away. He roused himself from his chair as the entry way clock struck midnight, whereupon Belle reminded him that there were some things left undone that he ought to have done. At such an hour, he discharged his obligation by simply letting her out the front door on her own recognizance; she considered it a treat and never abused the privilege. As he collapsed into his bed, stenciled geese still keeping their silent vigil, he caught a glimpse of his leather bound day-planner open on the top of his dresser. It was a comforting sight. Its contents, in their sheer dailiness, would buffer the stress inherent in coming to terms with the way in which his bishop and his daughter had each re-defined his reality.

The next day was a Friday. Father Coverdale arrived in his study at St Alban’s, as was his custom on weekdays, around seven forty-five. He logged on to his computer to check his electronic mail. Aside from the usual array of forwarded internet humor, there was a belated note of condolence from a seminary classmate from whom he had not heard in years, and a general mailing from the diocesan office reminding the clergy of various coming events and meetings, including the Committee on Vision and Structure, of which Miles was a member. (He double-checked his day-planner to be sure the event was properly entered.) After perusing a couple of message boards which he habitually haunted—it had been months, before Sharon’s death, since he had actually submitted a post, and wondered why he still made the effort to check them, but it was an ingrained habit —it was then time to head for the Chapel of the Annunciation, an alcove extending from the south wall of the church’s nave, where he was scheduled to officiate at the daily recitation of Morning Prayer. About a half-dozen parishioners, drawn from a likely pool of around thirty, joined him for this simple twenty minute devotion on any given morning. This group usually included the curate, but Friday was Justin’s day off. Following the service, it was back to the office for breakfast at his desk—invariably juice, coffee, a cheese Danish, and a bowl of cereal—which time he used to catch up on a few pages of reading in one of the various journals and newsletters to which he subscribed. In the meantime, Donna had arrived, and usually wanted to confer with him on one thing or another as it affected the day’s schedule. Only then, at around half past nine, did he feel himself ready to face the “to do” list.

Today’s agenda contained a new item, however, one which trumped the others on his previously carefully-prioritized list. It involved saying something to Audrey Newhouse—but just what, or how, or to what end, Miles was much less clear on. All he knew was that, during the subliminal stewing of a fitful night’s sleep, her name and visage figured prominently. He considered the visceral reactive feelings which surfaced as Rachel repeatedly cited her therapist as the authorizing agent for her mission of confrontation. As a para-clinician himself, he was aware of the standard emotional dynamics which underlay Audrey’s advice, Rachel’s execution of that advice, and his own response to that execution. It was all quite predictable. As a father whose grown daughter had just accused him of virtually criminal negligence which had inflicted on her a gaping psychic wound, however, none of these professional insights mattered. What mattered was that he was now beset with the task of essentially re-learning the last dozen years. Every time his wandering consciousness alighted on some event in Rachel’s life—her wedding, her college career, recitals she had performed, ordinary family times—he felt himself driven to reinterpret his memory of that event in the light of his staggering new knowledge. Rachel’s strange behavior at the time of Louis Ewald’s funeral suddenly made perfect sense. The fact that she was willing to spend those idle weeks with Sharon at the Wisconsin cabin, and that her momentum as a pianist seemed to burn ever more dimly from then on—these pre-conscious anomalies now emerged with the impact of a lighted billboard. Miles was profoundly aware that he was, quite literally, “not all there” when these times were first recorded in his brain, and it was his duty now to rewind the tape and make a new recording, to dub in the critical information which had been missing on the first pass, to reconstitute his memories of everything that had to do with Rachel since the day the Coverdale family moved to Grove Lake.

He picked up the phone to call Audrey, but checked himself. What was he going to say? That he needed to see her professionally for assistance in assimilating and integrating the knowledge that his daughter was a victim of sexual abuse and that she held him and his poor dead wife largely responsible? Somehow, it didn’t seem quite appropriate. First, there would be an impression, at least, of a fiduciary conflict on Audrey’s part, as the clinical issues which Miles would present to her involved the same raw material over which she was already engaged with Rachel. Second, though Miles hated to admit it to himself, there was the matter of his own ego. He was Audrey’s pastor, and outside that framework, he thought of their relationship as quasi-collegial, as he had referred a couple of dozen counselees to her for more specialized help over the years. To approach her as one in need of the same sort of help now struck him in very much the wrong way. But neither of these objections, he realized, expressed the core of his reluctance. Miles was, in fact, angry with her. Why couldn’t she have just fixed the problem between Rachel and Greg in five minutes, like some radio call-in shrink? Why did she have to go digging around the areas of Rachel’s psyche which were nicely scabbed over, and might just as easily have been left alone? Burying a wife is difficult, but, as surely as the earth fills the grave, there is “closure” to the experience. Dealing with an over educated, drug-addicted, and unemployed son is nobody’s idea of good fortune, but it’s a hand that can be played. Trying to help a grown child through a rocky spot in a marriage is almost a ubiquitous parental experience. Learning to be politically coy with a bishop is a skill most clergy develop without even thinking about it. But crawling out from under a twelve-year pile of missed cues, illusions of well-being now exposed as chimeras, innocent but tragic mistakes in judgment, words which deserved to be spoken never given voice, deeds which demanded execution left gloriously undone—breaking free of these bonds was going to be excruciatingly painful, and Miles knew it, and Audrey Newhouse was a convenient object of blame. He didn’t even need to look up the number; she was one of the select few on the speed-dial list of his office phone. Dr Newhouse agreed to see her priest and friend and para-colleague and father of one of her more troubled clients as long as he agreed to watch her eat a turkey sandwich and an orange between therapy appointments at half past eleven that morning.

Miles arrived promptly at the suite of offices occupied by Lakeside Mental Health Associates downtown on High Street. Audrey’s office opened, through a sliding glass door, onto a deck directly overlooking the lake. It was a pleasant morning by the standards of mid-July in northern Illinois—not quite eighty degrees, a soft breeze, and blessedly low humidity. Even the normally distant but incessant roar of outboard engines pulling water skiers was quiet at the moment. Some windsurfers, about halfway across the lake, were trying, with marginal success, to coax a decent ride out of the breeze. “Please sit down, Miles.” Audrey motioned toward a matched set of patio furniture on the deck—a round table with a glass top and an umbrella pole in the center, wrought-iron chairs with thick pads. “Again, forgive me for eating in front of you, but it’s my only break today.” Miles settled into a chair and cleared his throat to speak, but Audrey continued. “I can’t say I was surprised to hear from you. I should have expected it. I know Rachel came to see you yesterday.”

“Well…”—he smiled ruefully—“…I guess you could say that.”

She responded quickly, “A little rough, was it?”

An innocent enough remark, perhaps. If he were a neutral third party watching two other people have this conversation, he might have thought nothing of it. But, in fact, it grated. “You could say that,” he replied, this time without the smile. “Acutally, it was pure hell. I don’t know that I’ve ever been through anything quite as devastating. Even Sharon getting cancer wasn’t this bad.”

“I’m sorry, Miles.” Audrey looked up from the orange she was peeling and right into his eyes. “I really am.”

Miles felt a sub-aural rage begin to well up from the foundation of his soul, like the lowest notes of an organ’s thirty-two foot pedal stop. He paused to collect himself, then queried, “Sorry? For some reason, Audrey, that strikes me as an odd choice of words. Just what is it you’re sorry about?”

His unsuccessfully disguised ire caught her off balance. “I’m … just … sorry … What do you mean? … I’m sorry—sorry you have to be in such a difficult place as you’re in.”

A boat engine sputtered to life somewhere across the lake, subliminally catching their attention, and momentarily delaying Miles’s response. “Are you sorry for anything you did? Anything you said to Rachel?”

“Well, this is awkward, isn’t it—treading a little close to the client confidentiality line?”

Miles was intentionally cryptic. “I don’t know. Is it?”

Audrey swallowed the segment of orange she had been working on, set the rest of it down on her plate. “Miles, I have a PhD in clinical psychology and thirty years of experience as a therapist, but it doesn’t take any of that to tell me you’re annoyed, and not just generically—you’re annoyed at me.”

Now Miles took refuge is self-deprecating sarcasm. “I’m that transparent, am I?”

“Well, I do know you pretty well!” Audrey chortled.

“Look, I’m a bundle of undifferentiated emotion today, and I’ll admit it—you’re not only in my path, you’re my primary target. I got the feeling yesterday…” He hesitated. “I know this can sound a little…well…self-serving, I guess, but I got the feeling yesterday that I really wasn’t talking to my own daughter. I felt like I was talking to somebody who was…well…acting out a script. I guess I’m here today trying to track down the playwright.”

“And you think that might be me, I presume?”

“Ah, you’ve figured it out. You are, in fact, Dr Newhouse, my prime suspect.”

“And what was your first clue, Father Detective Coverdale?” There was a patina of levity in both their demeanors and voices, but neither one doubted that severe remonstrance was on call and available at a moment’s notice.

“Oh, let me see,” Miles answered. “I guess it was the phrase ‘Audrey said’ that kept popping up about every other sentence.”

“Look, Miles, I will neither hide nor apologize for the fact that I strongly suggested that Rachel have that conversation with you…”

Miles interrupted, “Conversation? Conversation?” The volume of his voice exceeded emphatic but stopped short of shouting. “That’s a rather bizarre spin, I would say. Conversations are usually two-way, aren’t they?”

Audrey sighed in a way that was clearly indicative of impatience. “Miles … whatever … call it what you will. I put her up to it, OK? Guilty as charged. Take me downtown and book me. Is that what you’re looking for?”

He parried this attempt to steer the meeting toward a conclusion. “Audrey, tell me, what does turning my daughter against me for something that happened years and years ago and over which I had no control—what does any of this have to do with trying to fix her relationship with her husband, which, as I recall, was the reason I sent her to you in the first place?”

Audrey was momentarily flummoxed, suggesting incredulity that Miles would even pose such a question, that someone of his position and experience would display such ignorance of the therapeutic milieu and how a person’s life issues are organically connected to one another. “Miles, I can see that you’re still in reaction to the shock of learning about Rachel’s sexual abuse. I know that’s a horrible blow. I can understand your anger.”

“Understand my anger?” Miles looked away from Audrey and out over the lake, straightening his back, unaware that his right fist was clenched. “Understand my anger?! Don’t patronize me, Audrey! Don’t pander to me!”

“Miles, forgive me, I don’t know what to say.” Audrey still gripped the orange she had not yet begun to peel. “I used my best clinical judgment. Sometimes that judgment is wrong, heaven knows, but I have to tell you, I don’t think it was in this case. I think I did the right thing in having Rachel confront you. You’re my friend, and it grieves me to see you hurt, but it was the right thing to do.”

Miles stood as he turned to face his interlocutor. “This isn’t going anywhere, is it? You exercise your ‘clinical judgment’ and I lose a daughter. I guess that works for you, but it sure as hell doesn’t work for me.” Saying nothing further, he headed through the doorway back into the office. He was subliminally aware of Audrey remonstrating with him as he left (the word “please” was the only vestige of her plea that eventually floated to the surface of his consciousness), but he did not break his stride until he was touching the door handle of his car.

Arriving back at the parish office, he immediately retrieved the mail from the cubby-hole arrangement on the counter just inside the door. As he thumbed through the stack (mostly fundraising pleas from various social service agencies and other assorted causes), Donna Lessing overlooked his discourtesy in completely ignoring her presence. “Father, Tracy Lindholm just called confirming her one o’clock with you. Is that still on?”

Miles did not want to admit that he had completely forgotten about the counseling appointment he scheduled two weeks earlier—seemingly an eon before his bruising encounter with Bishop Landry, and the crushing revelations of his beloved firstborn child. “Tracy … yes … I’m expecting her. What time is it?” A glance up at the wall clock above Donna’s computer answered his question—it was ten minutes past noon. Could that whole awkward meeting with Audrey have really only lasted under half an hour? He had behaved badly, of course, and knew that he would eventually have to apologize to his friend. But at the moment, his own pain was too acute to permit long contemplation of that future duty. He leaned on the counter and addressed Donna, but looked beyond her as he spoke. (She had grown accustomed to his distracted behavior since Sharon got sick, and was inclined to be forgiving of his lack of manners.) “I guess I’ve got just enough time to grab something to eat. If I don’t make it back right at one, just have her hold tight; I won’t be too late.”

Miles got back into the gray Mercury and, after making a mental inventory of the contents of his refrigerator—or, more precisely, the lack thereof—he headed toward Bea’s, the Italian Beef place on the south edge of town. But no sooner had he made the left turn onto Kimball Road than he realized that he was not the least bit hungry. It was purely the convention and habit of eating at the noon hour, rather than any authentically present appetitive urge, that instigated his trip. He used the time it took to drive the mile and a half to Bea’s to persuade himself that it would only be a waste of resources for him to order lunch when his stomach felt the way it did. Instead, he pulled into the convenience store across the road from his intended destination and bought a Hershey bar, just to prevent his stomach from suddenly growling during his conversation with Tracy. He was aware now that the low-grade irritation that he felt was not because he had forgotten the appointment even though it was duly recorded in his day planner, or because he was resentful of the obligation of attending to someone else’s relatively petty (so it seemed to him) personal problems when he was coping so poorly with his own very large ones. It was uneasiness over his counseling relationship with Tracy.

Tracy Lindholm was a forty-year-old divorced mother with custody of her three teenage children, whom she supported creatively on the salary of a kindergarten teacher. Their father was long out of the picture, and while child support was mandated by the court, the order was unenforceable because he could not be found. The family did not have long roots either at St Alban’s or in the Episcopal Church, but had been hanging around the fringes of parish life for about five years. More recently, the youngest child, Kelsey, had decided to become an acolyte, adding an element of discipline to their previously erratic Sunday attendance patterns, and providing the parish clergy with an opportunity for some informal pastoral interraction with her. Kelsey’s two older brothers—Alan and Dustin (only thirteen months apart from one another in age)—had been showing up at youth group activities, a motivation which was less religious than hormonal, both responding to the magnetic appeal of two particular young ladies already active in the group. The increased level of her children’s involvement at St Alban’s gave Tracy the impetus she needed to unburden herself to Miles about her own frustration with her personal inability to crack the social system of the parish. She felt like an outsider and wanted to feel like an insider. Miles’s sense of discomfort was not over the subject matter of Tracy’s presenting problem, but with the fact that this was going to be their fourth meeting on that issue in a six-week time period. This fact was in itself a red flag. A few members of the clergy have special training in counseling, and are in fact licensed therapists. Most, however, are pastoral generalists—sufficiently skilled to spot a clinical mental health issue when they see one, provide appropriate first aid, and make a prompt referral to a professional. Miles was in this latter category, and he had a subliminal sense, a pre-conscious awareness, that Tracy Lindholm was a candidate for just such a course of action.

Due to his aborted eating plans, Miles arrived back at the parish office ahead of his appointment, and had time to continue a volley a telephone tag with a colleague on the diocesan Vision and Structure committee. Was this the third time he had talked to Oksanna Brown’s answering machine? Or was it only the second? Tracy arrived promptly at one o’clock. She was blonde, and retained an attractive figure, but her faced was etched with the stress of single parenthood. She took her accustomed position on the couch located at the “informal” end of the oblong rector’s study; Miles’s desk and two wingback chairs comprised the “formal” end. Miles sat in an oak rocking chair placed at right angles to one end of the couch. The conversation felt to him as though it were following a script firmly established by the previous three: Tracy attended Sunday services, and came to the coffee hour and the adult education hour, but was frustrated with the quality of the relationships she had established in those endeavors. Had she extended herself to talk to people? Yes, she was not shy by nature, but the contact seemed superficial. She was hungry for deep and authentic interpersonal connection, but she couldn’t find anybody whose desire for community matched the intensity of her own. Miles inquired whether she might be unwittingly scaring people away with her intensity. Perhaps, but if that were true, it just makes matters worse—she had real loneliness, real pain, a story to tell, a desire to be heard. What’s the point of the church if it cannot provide such a place to know and be known, to love and be loved? That was a valid question, Miles assured her, one for which he had no easy answer. But persistent faith is critical; remember the gospel parables in which importunate prayer—one might even call it “nagging”—is eventually rewarded.

“So what you’re telling me, Father, is to ‘hang in there,’ to ‘keep on keeping on?’”

“Well …”—Miles was taken aback by the bluntness of her question—“when you put it that way, it does seem platitudinous, I realize. But…yes, actually. Very often we quit doing the right thing too soon because it doesn’t yield immediate results. Sometimes there isn’t just a simple cause and effect. Sometimes there’s a long delay between the cause and the effect, so we quit doing constructive things too soon because there’s no payoff, or we keep doing destructive things too long because there are no negative consequences. But it all catches up with us in the end.” Miles was simultaneously impressed with this outburst of wisdom, and congizant of the fact that it fell way short of its mark. Tracy was looking past him, past him and back into herself, as if the wall behind his desk were a mirror. Her visage was contorted, indicating that something in their conversation had exposed a spot in her psyche that was quite painful to touch.

Miles was not ordinarily uncomfortable with extended silence in such situations, but this time he was more than uncomfortable; he felt the silence as foreboding, portentous, and elected to break it. “Tracy, is there something you’re not telling me?”

“Father Coverdale,” she responded, her facial muscles suddenly relaxed, “I thought you would never ask.”

“Well,” Miles responded after an appropriate pause, “I am, as they say, ‘all ears.”

“What I haven’t told you, Father, goes deeper than the stuff we’ve been talking about, I’m afraid.” She took a deep breath, then exhaled vigorously. Miles was silently attentive. He was relieved that their conversation seemed on the verge of no longer being stuck in the same cycling loop, but too emotionally weary himself to care very intensely what it was Tracy was about to reveal. “I’m an incest survivor. My grandfather abused me from before I can remember until I was a young teenager.”

“Tracy”—Miles’s response was measured and deliberate—“I have to ask you. You said you’re an incest survivor. Do you really mean you’re a survivor? Or are you still a victim?”

“Father Coverdale, if I knew the answer to that, I’d be a hell of a lot happier, now, wouldn’t I? I mean…I’ve done pretty well considering the hand life has dealt me, huh? I have a college degree, and I do my job well. But I guess I wouldn’t be sitting here taking up your time if I weren’t pretty well messed up, right?”

“‘Messed up’ is a relative term, Tracy. We’re all messed up in one way or another.” Miles was aware of the truth of his own words more acutely than Tracy could have guessed. The mere mention of child sexual abuse initiated a flow of acid into his stomach, and visions of Louis Ewald letting his trousers down in front of a pre-pubescent Rachel forced themselves into his imagination. In that instant, his seasoned pastoral judgment told him that he had taken his work with Tracy to the limit of his own competency. She was a classic candidate for referral to a mental health professional. Audrey Newhouse was the logical choice, and he was envisioning himself taking one of her business cards from a small stack he kept in his desk drawer, handing it to Tracy, urging her to call Audrey, and assuring her of his own support and prayers as she worked on the unresolved emotional issues which doubtless underlay her difficulty in feeling herself a valued and integral member of St Alban’s Church. Audrey would be able to help her in a way he never could. But in the same instant, he thought of his lakeside exchange with Dr Newhouse barely two hours earlier. He remembered the mark of concern on her face and in her voice which he had experienced as so mawkish and patronizing. He remembered Rachel so overcome with anger toward him that she had not been able to end her last conversation with him civilly, let alone lovingly. And in those remembrances, he did not rise and move toward his desk to retrieve Audrey’s card. He did not talk to Tracy about Audrey’s considerable skill and experience in the very clinical area which concerned her. Instead, the words which came out of his mouth were, “Tracy, I think I can help you with this. Let’s make another appointment for two weeks from now, shall we?”

Tracy Lindholm smiled broadly, and wiped a tear from the corner of one eye. “Thank-you, Father, thank-you. I feel like I have such hope now!”

Chapter 7

2009-10-08T18:21:00.000-07:00

With the advent of August, the uncharacteristically dry weather vanished, and humidity once again hung over Chicagoland like a damp beach towel. As a concession to the heat, Father Coverdale emerged from the sacristy of St Alban’s Church after the early Mass on the first Sunday of the month wearing a short sleeved clergy shirt rather than his accustomed cassock (though the shirt was black, of course; Miles had never embraced the trend toward powder blue or various shades of gray or maroon pin stripes or any of the other available variations on traditional clerical vesture). The glass which enclosed the covered walkways connecting the church with the Guild Hall was removed during the warmer months, so Miles traversed the length of the section forming the east side of the garth with a langorous gait, taking a subliminal cue from the heavy air. Observing hallowed Episcopalian custom, there was no Sunday School at St Alban’s during July and August, but Miles knew a dozen or so members of the early congregation would be sipping coffee in the cool of the Guild Hall basement room where the Adult Forum would have otherwise been held, and he was on his way to join them.

His restrained pace betokened not only the weather, but his mood. He would not have called himself depressed—the word had too many clinical overtones for him—but he was assuredly still bruised from the blows of the previous month. Unfinished business and unresolved conflict were piling up on every front. There had been no communication between the rector of St Alban’s and the Bishop of Chicago since their last awkward meeting at the diocesan office. There had been no communication between Rachel Coverdale and her father since their wrenching encounter later that same day in the Grove Lake rectory. There had been no communication—save that which was required for the transaction of sacramental business at the communion rail: “the Body of Christ, the Bread of Heaven”—between Audrey Newhouse and her priest/para-colleague since their tense exchange on the deck of the Lakeside Mental Health Associates office. Brian was his father’s only regular human companion. Contrary to his expectations, Miles had actually come to enjoy having his son around the house again. Without forgetting the real framework of their relationship, and neither one glossing over the painful circumstances surrounding the younger Coverdale’s return to Pound Hill Way, their relationship took on an aspect resembling that between college roommates. Serendipitously sharing the same taste in beer, they managed together to amass an impressive display of empty cans strewn about the house in the course of a few days, much of the contents of which had been consumed while watching the Cubs, ubiquitous on WGN television, prosecute a season which remained promising even in early August. On this weekend, however, Miles was temporarily alone again, as Brian was at the Wisconsin lake cabin with some college friends.

Miles arrived in the Guild Hall basement, poured himself a cup of coffee, and took a seat at the end of two oblong tables placed end to end so as to accomodate about sixteen people; some two-thirds of the seats were filled this morning. At the other end of the formation, two middle-aged men were engaged in an animated debate about state politics. The decibel level of their voices did not cross the threshold of what might be described as boorish, but came close enough to be annoying. The others did not participate in the discussion, but made no attempt to drown it out either. When Father Coverdale took his seat, it was a welcome distraction. No sooner had the coffee in his cup settled down to a dead calm, however, than Miles was aware—subconsciously at first, then overtly—of the telephone ringing in the kithen some twenty feet away. It was the sort of background noise that most ears would have filtered out—ears of those other than one who would plausibly be expected to answer a ringing telephone on church grounds on a Sunday morning. Anyone trying to call St Alban’s at that hour probably had a good reason. If it were only a potential new worshipper inquiring as to service times and directions, the outgoing message on the answering machine would satisfy that need. But what if an acolyte or usher or lay eucharistic minister scheduled for service at the later celebration was calling to give regrets for the morning? Or what if someone had taken seriously ill, or worse. Miles excused himself hastily and ran toward the kitchen, knowing that the answering machine in the office would pick up the call after the third ring. His right hand lifted the reciever from its cradle without an instant to spare.

“St Alban’s, Father Coverdale.” His zeal to not miss the call did not motivate him to extend himself in the direction of what would have been standard office courtesy on a weekday (“Good morning, thank you for calling St Alban’s Church; this is Father Coverdale. How may I help you?”). It was just as well, because the next voice he heard emanated from a recording. “You have a collect call from…” —here the recorded voice paused, and the quite human voice of his son was afforded just enough time to utter its own name— “…Brian…” The machine took over: “To accept charges, please press ‘1’.” In the instant it took for the index finger of Miles’s left hand to reach the keypad of the telephone, there was no opportunity to cognitively process why Brian would be making a collect call to his father under such unlikely cirsumstances, but his emotions realized immediately that Brian always carried a cell phone with him (in fact, he was veritably compulsive about it) and that the lake cabin had a functioning phone line, so something was, therefore, quite wrong, and a response of anxiety was entirely appropriate. The acid reservoirs in his stomach immediately complied.

“Brian?”

“Yeah, Dad, it’s me.”

“What’s going on? Where are you?”

“I’m in the Delles, actually.” Wisconsin Delles, in its natural state a particularly scenic stretch of the Wisconsin River, had developed over the years into a highly commercialized tourist and recreation area, and would have been heavily populated by the likes of Brian and his peers on a hot August weekend.

Miles tried to conceal his alarm, but to say that he was merely “curious” would have understated his concern. “The Delles? Bit of a change in plans, huh?”

Brian laughed heartily. “Well, you could certainly say that! Actually, Dad…I’m going to try and say this calmly…I don’t want you to worry…but, actually, Dad, I’m in jail.”

Father and son each waited for the other to speak further, and the ensuing five seconds or so of silence seemed more like a minute to them both. Miles blinked first. “Jail?!” It was an exclamation in voice tone, but not in volume, as he was suddenly aware that the politcal discussion in the next room had ebbed, and it felt as though everyone there was listening in on his end of the exchange.

“Yeah, these cops…well, I have to watch what I say, because they’re right here hovering over me. This is my ‘one phone call,’ just like on TV. Anyway, there’s a big screwup. I haven’t done anything, but they think I’ve been dealing.”

“Dealing?” Miles replied, with more than an edge of irritation in his voice. “Dealing what?”

“Dealing nothing!” Now it was Brian’s turn to be irritated. “They think I was dealing coke, but they’re mixed up. Look, Dad, I can explain everything, but I need you to come up here and bail me out. Can you do that?”

Both men knew, of course, that Miles would certainly, in the end, comply. They knew how the dance would conclude, but they were unsure of the steps that would lead them to that point. As Miles tried to absorb the shock of Brian’s circumstances, he was aware that any hesitation on his part would be construed by his son as lack of faith, as distrust. He did not want to communicate that impression (not that there wasn’t a significant element of truth in it). But to respond simply, “Sure, I’ll be right over” (it was, in fact, more than a two hour drive) seemed oblivious to the gravity of the situation. Being held in a county jail a hundred miles away is not exactly on a par with a flat tire or a flooded engine just on the other side of town. And besides, it was Sunday morning. In a quarter century of ordained ministry, Miles had never missed a Sunday service at which he was scheduled to officiate by reason of illness or other personal extenuating circumstances. Miles intuitively realized the face-saving value of that fact. “Brian, sure, of course I’ll come up.” He hoped the tone of his voice conveyed calm confidence, along with a due appreciation of the seriousness of the situation. “But I hope they’re treating you well, because you’re going to have to just cool your jets for a few hours. You know about my regular Sunday morning gig, of course.”

“Hey, they’re not, like, torturing me or anything. But I haven’t had any sleep. It was after midnight when they busted me, and I’ve spent most of the last few hours either waiting around in handcuffs or watching the ‘good cop/bad cop’ dance. And I have to tell you, this is not a fun place. There are some mighty strange characters here. Can’t Father Hook step up to the plate for you?”

“He did plenty of pinch-hitting when your mother was sick.” Miles wanted to be resolute without sounding unkind. “No, I’ve got to finish the morning routine. Then I’ll head right on up. You should see me by three o’clock or so.”

Brian sighed with frustration, but had sufficient presence of mind to realize that his father was the best friend he had at the moment, and to risk further alienating him would have been grossly unwise. “OK. I’ll bake you a cake and have it ready.”

Miles was not in a playful spirit. “So where are you, exactly? How do I find you?” Brian, with the assistance of a jail official who was already poised to bring the conversation to a halt, supplied his father with the necessary information. Miles then politely excused himself from his coffee-sipping parishioners and repaired to the privacy of his office, where he placed a phone call to Clarence Crumb, a former member of the St Alban’s vestry who still served as informal legal counsel to the parish. He was seventy-seven years old, but only semi-retired as a partner in a prominent Loop law firm which did not do criminal work, but knew who did. Mr Crumb phoned Vince Piaseki, a suburban criminal attorney, who then phoned a bail bondsman of his acquaintance in Madison, who, in turn, phoned one of his colleagues in Wisconsin Delles, who saw to all the relevant technicalities of getting Brian Coverdale released into his father’s custody as expeditiously as possible—not shoddy work for a Sunday morning.

Miles arrived at the Wisconsin Delles Police Department holding facility at the stroke of three, exactly as he had predicted. His high-powered legal connections had paid off, and the process leading to Brian actually walking out of the building and entering the passenger side of the Grand Marquis was suprisingly free of bureaucratic complication. The same could not be said, unfortunately, for the quality of the father-son relationship. Miles played host within his own psyche to a debate between priest and parent, between “Father”—the savvy pastor who was experienced at seeing through people’s dissembling obfuscations, and “Dad”—the loving sire of his own flesh and blood, who wanted to believe the best about the son he had raised to adulthood. In order to protect “Dad” on this unscheduled Sunday afternoon drive in the country, “Father” decided to remain silent. Barely a half dozen words were exchanged between Miles and Brian during the entire return trip to Grove Lake. As for Brian’s Porsche, it remained in Wisconsin. The police considered it evidence.

Miles slept poorly that night, and awakened early the next morning. It was Monday, his day off. He peeked in on Brian, who was sound asleep, and by any informed reckoning, was likely to remain so well into the daylight hours. Belle demanded, and received, her morning ambulation, after which Miles retrieved the Chicago Tribune from the front step and repaired to the recliner in the family room. He was not in the mood to face the formalities of his morning prayers; God would just have to understand (He always had before in similar circumstances, Miles reasoned). Purely by habit, a habit acquired more than three decades earlier during his student days, Miles opened the sports section first. The big news was the arrival of the Atlanta Braves at Wrigley Field for a three game series. The Cubs held a tenuous two game lead over the St Louis Cardinals in the National League Central Division, and the Braves were similarly positioned with respect to the New York Mets in the Eastern Division. Though the season was a long way from over, many speculated that this August encounter in Chicago might be a preview of the first round of post-season playoffs. While Atlantans were well-accustomed to watching their home team play baseball in October, Chicagoans found the prospect a distinct novelty. Game time on this Monday was the traditional 1:20 PM. It didn’t take very much planning, and Miles didn’t put a lot of thought into it. He grabbed a hat and some sunglasses and his cell phone, backed his Mercury out of the garage, and headed for Clark and Addison, the inimitable “friendly confines of beautiful Wrigley Field.”

Miles had played the three “major” sports in high school—football, basketball, and baseball, and earned a varsity letter in all three. Autumn and winter found him usually on the bench, but he didn’t mind. He enjoyed the esprit de corps and was even something of a leader—captain of the football team his senior year, as a matter of fact—a remarkable feat for a benchwarmer. In the spring, however, Miles rose to the top like cream. Baseball had always been one of his passions; the excitement of the back to back World Series triumphs of the Milwaukee Braves in 1957 and 1958 had been indelibly etched on the memory of his heart (and their departure for Atlanta just before his own senior season permanently alienated him from that franchise). He was advanced to the varsity baseball team toward the end of his freshman season, and held on securely to the starting first baseman’s job for the remainder of his high school career. He was a switch hitter, not for power, but for average, particularly on-base average; he was equally adept at coaxing a walk out of a pitcher as getting a hit. On the bases, Miles did not have exceptional speed, but his sense of timing was acute. In the field, he made up for a throwing arm that might even have been described as weak with a glove that seemed like there was glue in its pocket, and a consistent ability to compensate for the throwing errors of the shortstop and third baseman.

It was his baseball coach, Danny Schultz, who steered Miles toward Wheaton College. Schultz was a recent graduate, had played baseball there, and maintained a close friendship with the Wheaton coach, Don Sederstrom. Even as a sophomore, flush with the honor of having made the varsity so quickly, Miles entertained aspirations toward a professional career, and had the initiative to investigate collegiate baseball hothouses like Arizona State and Louisiana State. But his capacity for realistic, objective good judgment matched his initiative, and he realized it was more of a longshot than he wanted to commit himself to. So Danny Schultz began to casually talk to Miles about Wheaton, selling it as a place where he could be a big fish in a little pond, not be too far from home, and get a good liberal arts education in the meantime. It was that afterthought, the bonus of a good education, that ultimately had the most impact on his life, but althought baseball receded from the prominent position it enjoyed during his high school days, he retained his love for the game.

Miles realized that, without a ticket in hand, the whole enterprise was a little iffy, but gambled that arriving more than two hours before the first pitch, and aspiring only to the bleachers, his chances of admission were enhanced. His intuition was on the mark, and he soon found himself in the left field bleachers, at the end of the eighth row, next to the section of left-center field seats that had been permanently blocked off in the 1950s and covered in green carpet, for the sake of batters being able to more clearly see the ball as it flew from the pitcher’s mound to home plate. The leisurely pre-game rituals of major league baseball unfolded with liturgical precision: stretching exercises, slow games of catch, jogging along the outfield warning track, and, ever the highlight for early bird fans, batting practice. In the distance, between home plate and the third base dugout, somebody in a Cubs uniform was being interviewed in front of a WGN television camera. It was too early for the pre-game show, Miles thought to himself; perhaps the reporter was acquiring sound bites for the sports segment of the evening news. As Wrigley Field’s inimitable “bleacher bums” inexorably took possesion of their turf, the alternating chants of “Left field sucks,” answered without rancor, and in perfect proportion to the offense—“Right field sucks”—gained momentum in the first of its many cycles. It was as predictable, and as impersonal—no one was ever formally designated to commence or conclude the litany—as a summer afternoon thunderstorm in the tropics.

Without breaking his conscious attention to the sheer sensory immediacy of the experience, Miles was subliminally aware of another’s presence—first approaching, then alighting. An older gentleman—Miles would have guessed him to be in his early seventies, but he could have been older—was in the process of occupying the seat to his right. Miles had no impulse to protest, but he was immediately annoyed; there were still several other vacant spots in that area of the bleachers, and it seemed a breach of an unspoken rule of ettiquette for a party-of-one to take a seat directly adjacent to another loner when there were plenty of available alternatives. To his chagrin, it was as if the interloper read Miles’s thoughts. “I hope you don’t mind,” he immediately proferred as soon as Miles made eye contact with him, “but it looked like you were alone, and I am too, and … well, when some of these young folks arrive, they like to sit together, and I end up gettin’ run off to all around these left field bleachers anyway …” The inflection of his voice did not descend in the manner of a declarative statement, but remained at an inconclusive mid-pitch, a subtle request for reassurance.

Miles did not disappoint, even though the level of entusiasm he communicated exceeded that which he actually felt. “No, not at all, not a problem.” He patted the seat in question with his right hand, as if to say, “Sit here,” then turned his gaze back to the activity on the field. Already a marginal introvert by nature, Miles Coverdale was in a season of introspection that was uncharacteristic even for him. He was able to accomodate his neighbor’s request for sanctuary from the less than perfectly mannered “young people” of the Wrigley Field bleachers. Yet, it would be just fine with him if conversation were not on the agenda.

The authoritative crack of a bat—more particularly, the “sweet spot” of a bat—making solid contact with a baseball arrested the attention of everyone in the ball park and brought those in the left field bleachers instinctively to their feet. The Cubs’ rookie backup catcher, a Venezuelan built like an oak tree, was taking his practice swings and had just, as they say, “connected.” The ball soared in a high arc that seemed for a moment destined for earth orbit. It did indeed eventually reach an apogee and begin to descend, but it was clear that no ticket-holding fan would acquire it as a souvenier, as it cleared not only the bleachers but, according to the report of those in the top row, Waveland Avenue itself, landing on the sidewalk just inches from an apartment building entrance. Miles’s new companion whistled. “My, oh my, why can’t he do that when they’re actually keeping score?”

Miles answered back through a grin as they turned to face forward again and sit back down, “Oh, he will—about the time they start using batting practice pitchers in real games!”

“You have a point, sir, you have a point. That boy can swing a bat, but big league pitchers are eatin’ his lunch.”

“Well, fortunately, the way Davis is hitting”—Miles referred to the Cubs’ regular starting catcher—“they don’t have to use him much.”

“My name’s Ron, by the way. I guess I’m sort of a regular here—the day games, at least, and when it’s not too cold. My old bones don’t like cold weather much.”

Miles extended his hand. “I’m Miles. I’m one of those suburbanites who occasionally get the urge to watch real baseball—you know, without the constant yak from announcers and their instant replays and instant statistics and all that crap.” Just then, the right field/left field war heated up again for about a minute, and all conversation was quashed. Miles eyed Ron, this time with a more amicable spirit—the beginnings of a bond had been formed in the brief lines they had exchanged. Ron was of African descent, stocky in build, but not obese, about as tall as Miles, and dressed neatly, if not fashionably, in a short-sleeve white dress shirt, nondescript dark trowsers, navy blue suspenders, black plastic-framed sunglasses, and an old straw hat with a more than ample brim.

After the roar died down, Ron picked up the dialogue right where Miles had left it, but without taking his eye of the field. “Miles, I’m honored to meet you. Welcome to the left field bleachers.”

Miles felt as though the older man were ushering him as a guest into his own home. “The honor is all mine, Ron, believe me. I have an envious high regard for anyone who can call himself a ‘regular’ here.”

Ron laughed. “Oh, please don’t flatter me! What does it say about me that I haven’t got anything better to do than come here and watch grown men play? It’s just that I love it so. I love the way it looks, and the way it smells, and the way it feels. I even love these bleacher bums,” emphasizing his point with a 180 degree wave of his right arm. “Hell, I am one of them, I reckon,” he continued, chortling.

Miles was aware both that he was grinning broadly, and that he possessed neither the desire nor the ability to quit. Ron, sensing that Miles’s facial contortion was itself a response, a bone fide contribution to the continuing dialogue, simply went on. “And the best part—well, not the actual best part, I guess; if the Cubs win, that’s the best part, but you and I both know, most years, on most days, you can’t count too much on that happening—” (another infectious laugh punctuated his remarks) “… one of the best parts of the game is not the game itself, but what leads up to it, all of this.” He waved his arm again, this time in a wider arc. “And that’s the part y’all don’t even see on WGN. Now don’t get me wrong—God bless WGN, I mean, where would Cubs fans be without them? But, you know what I mean? Eighty-one times a year, people come to this place—and more or less fill it up, these days, though I can surely remember a time when that wasn’t so, when there would be only three or four thousand for a weekday afternoon game, but nowadays we about pack the place—and every day is a new day. No matter how bad things went yesterday, today is a new day, a fresh start. Anything can happen. The players believe it, the grounds crew believes it, the coke and beer and hot dog vendors believe it, and the fans believe it. That’s why they’re having batting practice, and that’s why we’re watching them take batting practice. You know what they say about today being the first day of the rest of your life? Most of the time, that sounds like a load of crap, don’ it? But for some reason—I can’t figure it—for some reason, not here. Here it makes perfect sense. The Cubs can win, and right now, at this time, nobody has any doubt that they will. Am I right, Miles? Don’t you think the Cubs are going to win today?”

Miles had been holding his breath, he subliminally realized, as he was holding his grin, and now he laughed as he exhaled. “Absolutely! I do believe it! The Cubs are going to win today!” The two men exchanged high-fives.

The game turned out to be a textbook pitcher’s duel, a sort of contest Miles much preferred to the more popular home run slugfests. Through five innings, each team had been able to put only one man on base, both as a result of ground balls that were not particularly sharply hit, but had “eyes” and eluded the grasp of lunging infielders. Neither hit turned into a run. In the top of the sixth, the Braves put themselves on the scoreboard with a walk, a perfectly-executed hit-and run which moved the lead runner to third base, and a sacrifice fly. In the bottom of the inning, the Cubs answered more efficiently when the Atlanta pitcher hung a curve ball, and the Cubs’ first baseman, swinging from the left side, slammed it over the right field wall with such ferocity that it seemed as though the ball was still gaining altitude when it struck the bleachers. In the top of the ninth, the Cubs starter finally showed signs of fatigue, and walked the first two batters. This brought in the Chicago bullpen ace, who threw only ten pitches, the final nine of which were consecutive strikes, all clocking in three digits, thus retiring the side. Unfortunately, from the point of view of most everyone in the ballpark that afternoon, pitch number one yielded a double in the right field gap, scoring the lead runner. Thus the Braves took a one run lead into the bottom of the ninth.

Miles and Ron, whose conversation had ebbed considerably after the game got under way, turned to each other and smiled ruefully. As longtime fans of the Cubs, they were all too accustomed to their heroes’ uncanny knack for snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. And as fate would have it, the bottom of the Cubs’ batting order was due up. The lanky Chicago shortstop, who had an arm like a cannon, but whose batting average was currently hovering only a few digits above his weight, took two quick balls, low and away. He then proceeded to foul off the next seven consecutive pitches, after which he successfully checked his swing at two more pitches which appeared to him just below the knee and just on the other side of home plate. The umpire agreed, despite the efforts of the Atlanta catcher to hold his glove in such a way as to foster the appearance that he caught the ball over the plate. The Cubs had a man on base with nobody out.

Ron straightened his spine and sat at attention. “Miles, my friend, did I really say all the stuff before the game is the best part of coming here? Well, I lied! This is the best part, the part when you can really feel like ‘it ain’t over till it’s over.’ The clock may say we been at this for goin’ on to three hours now, but you and I both know, this game could still be young, could still be very young.” Miles nodded in agreement, keeping his attention fixed on the pitcher’s mound, where the Braves’ pitcher stared down the Cubs’ number eight hitter, the veteran third baseman they had acquired as a free agent during the off season. Having learned his lesson with the previous batter about how the plate umpire viewed the strike zone, he came high and inside for two quick called strikes. Hopes were high, particularly in the left field bleachers, when the next pitch was off-speed and out over the plate, and the experienced slugger got good wood on it. Miles and Ron stood in unison with everyone around them, and for a couple of long moments, Miles thought the ball was going to land right on top of him. But he erred. The Atlanta left fielder had his back on Wrigley Field’s famous ivy, but it was a clean catch. Next up was a pinch hitter in the pitcher’s spot—Carlos Reynoso, the backup catcher who had provided batting practice fireworks.

Miles turned to Ron. “Well, what do you think? Can he do it again?”

“Stranger things have happened. This surely is his big chance, though, ain’t it?”

The first pitch was a called strike at the knees; no one could fault the Braves’ pitcher for lack of aggressiveness or courage. Being ahead in the count now afforded him a certain luxury in the way he pursued his task. He missed with his next delivery—a curve ball in the dirt, but followed up quickly with a fastball, catching the inexperienced hitter with his guard down as he swung lamely and, it seemed, a full half-second too late. The count was one ball and two strikes. Ron could not contain himself. “Now ain’t this the very thing? In sixty second we could be walking out of here, with the Cubs having won, or the Braves having won, or we could be here another two hours watching extra innings. But we just don’t know. We’ve got to wait and see how it plays out. Ain’t baseball great?” Miles only nodded his concurrence, but in his own mind he experienced a veritable epiphany, a sudden flash of intuitive insight. He now had a metaphor for the mystery of kairos, the ancient Greek notion of time which has nothing to do with the movement of a clock, or sand through an hourglass, or shadows across a sundial, but which exists entirely unto itself, the “time” in which God dwells. God lives in “baseball time,” not clock time. In that moment before the one-and-two pitch to Carlos Reynoso, Miles glimpsed the morass into which his life had sunk from an eternal perspective, and for the first time in nearly a year, he felt hope. It would be fleeting, he knew. No more than Peter, James, and John could sustain the glory of the Transfiguration by building monuments to mark the event could Miles bask too long in the glow of this sidelong glance at hope. But it was real, and it could not be taken from him, and he knew it was a well from which he would yet drink again. And most amazingly, the vehicle of his epiphany had been a seventy-something (eighty-something?) year old about whom he knew virtually nothing (Where did he live? Did he have a family? What had been his occupation? Was he a man of faith? A Christian?), and whom he, in all probability, would never see again in his life.

Carlos Reynoso examined a change-up floating toward home plate seemingly at the leisurely pace of a badminton birdie. It looked for all the world to him like the friendly lobs of a batting practice pitcher. He did what came naturally, and parked it on Waveland Avenue. Cubs win.

Miles waited out the afternoon rush hour by stopping for barbecued ribs at one of his and Sharon’s favorite old haunts from their St George’s days, walking distance from Wrigley Field, just down Clark Street. He felt a stab of angst as he passed within a couple of blocks of the luxury condo which, until recently, had been home to Brian, but he did not allow himself to dwell in negativity. Upon arriving home, just before seven, he noticed Sharon’s car was gone—Brian must be out somewhere. He grabbed a beer from the refrigerator, picked up the day’s mail from the table in the entry hall (grateful that Brian was at least good for the simple errand of retrieving mail from the box just outside the front door), and sat in his favorite chair in the den to sort through it. At the top of the stack was a hand-addressed envelope. It was the only item that looked like it was neither a bill nor an ad, so he opened it first. It was from Tricia Sakamoto—a newer parishioner, a housewife in her thirties with three small children.

Dear Fr Coverdale,

I’m not much of a writer, so I have delayed saying this to you longer than I should have. Plus, you have been through so much in the last few months that I have not wanted to intrude. But I want you to know what a great priest I think you are. The services at St Alban’s are so beautiful that I don’t even know how to express it. And your sermons are always so meaningful—it feels like you are speaking them directly to me! You have been such a help to me and to my family. We are so blessed for having found St Alban’s. Thank-you very much, Father, and please excuse my poor writing!

Blessings, Tricia

Miles wept. Your writing is just fine, Tricia, your writing is just fine. And isn’t timing everything?

Chapter 8

2009-10-08T18:15:00.000-07:00

Miles was buouyed, emotionally and spiritually, by his Wrigley Field experience. None of the mounting problems that were weighing him down had been solved. Rachel was still alienated both from her husband and her father, Brian still faced the very real prospect of a substantial prison sentence, and Miles himself had no more clarity on the direction of his life and vocation. Nevertheless, he enjoyed welcome relief from undue anxiety, and felt expectantly optomistic, confident in the myserious ways of providential grace. As a seasoned pastor, however, he would have been the first to warn anyone else in similar circumstances that the mountaintop, while a wonderful place to visit, cannot sustain life indefinitely. One must journey back into the valley to, if nothing else, lay in provisions, and recover from the hallucinogenic thin air of the heights.

For Miles, the descent from his latest trip up the mountain began the following Sunday. A couple of oblique coffee hour comments from members of the vestry portended some angst brewing in anticipation of the regular August meeting two nights hence (always the third Tuesday evening of the month). As they were both reaching for the same lemon bar on the table bearing the usual assortment of post liturgical finger food confections, Bruce Mueller casually remarked, “By the way, Father, I’ve finally gotten written requests from AlaTeen and Smokers Anonymous. I know the vestry packets have probably already been mailed, but I’m hoping we can approve them Tuesday night.” Bruce chaired the Facilities Use Committee, which was responsible for, among other things, overseeing arrangements with outside groups for the use of parish buidlings and grounds. Miles simply nodded his assent; he did not want to get into an extended discussion of the matter. A few moments later, this time as they were both reaching for a paper cup full of lemonade, Kara Lessard, also a member of the vestry and chair of the Program Committee, gently grasped his elbow. In sotto voce tones she made her feelings known on what Miles knew was the same subject, although one not familiar with parish politics might not have grasped the connection. “Father Miles, I eMailed Donna with something for the vestry packet. I’ve done a rough schedule of parish events and group meetings for the coming program year, and what rooms they’ll be needing to use. I’m hoping that if everybody has this information early we can avoid some of the conflicts we’ve had in the past.” Again, Miles smiled and indicated his thanks and avoided going any deeper.

An experienced parish priest learns to perform a delicate intuitive calculus on such comments. They never exist purely unto themselves, but are chained to an intricate maze of similar and complementary and expanded and amplified and nuanced and contradictory remarks. And the priest is invariably at or near the end of the chain. Depending on the source, and the precise content of the comment, it needs to be accorded a greater gravity than would inhere in a strict and narrow construction. Miles quickly began to dread Tuesday’s vestry meeting. An issue that had quietly dogged him for two or three years, despite his repeated attempts to ignore it, was apparently going to make an unscheduled and uninvited appearance. The presenting problem was that of balancing the use of St Alban’s physical plant between functions that originate from within the life of the parish, and the growing demands of various outside groups—Twelve Step and other “recovery” organizations, to be specific—that were allowed to use the facilities, either without charge or with a very nominal rent, as part of the “outreach” ministry of the church, because, while not directly church-related, or even overtly Christian, their general aims were consonant with what church communities normally consider to be included within the scope of their mission. What had begun as one Alcoholis Anonymous group using one room one night per week during Father Lawrence’s tenure had ballooned to over two dozen weekly meetings, both in the evening and during the day, of those addicted to, or codependent with someone addicted to, not only alcohol, but various sorts of drugs, overeating, pornography, and sexual acting out. Inevitably, conflict waxed and waned. Miles was genuinely ambivalent on the matter; he was sympathetic to the core concerns of both sides. Ambivalence, in itself, did not necessarily create a pastoral problem. If anything, it allowed him to demonstrate even-handedness and universality of caring. In tandem with what could quite reasonably be described as apathy, however, something much more volatile emerged. In truth, Miles found it difficult to work up a respectable lather over any aspect of the conflict. He cared genuinely, but not intensely. It was this apathetic ambivalence, he was beginning to realize, that underlay the perception of weak leadership that Bishop Landry had revealed to him in their uncomfortable encounter the previous month. As he returned to the sacristy to stow his cassock (the weather had significantly cooled since the previous Sunday) after the coffee hour, he once again had the opportunity to regret his appointment of Lance Kemper as the senior warden. By custom, the senior warden of a parish is not only the ranking lay leader, but is also supposed to be a confidante and supportive advisor to the rector. The personal chemistry Miles had hoped for, however, never gelled. He knew Lance, who was in his late forties, and editor of the Lake Country Herald, a suburban competitor to the major Chicago dailies, to be outspokenly a member of the “open” faction—supportive of accomodating the “Twelve Steppers” in any degree possible.

Later that afternoon, as he reclined on the den couch with the Sunday Tribune, Miles realized, on a deeper level, that he straddled a generational vortex not of his own making, but which was at the very heart of the conflict. Born in the late 1940s, he was very much a “baby boomer.” Those who were his chronological senior carry a memory of the way “church” was “done” in the halcyon days of the ’50s and ’60s, with a smorgasbord of age and interest-focused programs. These were allied with the twentysomethings and younger thirtysomethings who were raising families and who otherwise easily fall prey to Little League, soccer, ballet lessons, and the like. They lust for meaning. They want to reclaim the church for the church, and leave the Twelve Steppers to their own devices. The sandwich generation, “boomers,” are driven by a social conscience forged in the cultural crucible of the late sixties and early seventies. To them, the recovery groups are an important symbol of their idea of outreach—social responsibility. The overall anxiety is compounded by the fact that, not only has the parish operating budget become dependent on the modest rental income from the outside groups, but regular giving for the year is running an alarming twenty percent below budget and attendance is flagging as well.

Miles blames himself for this, and remembers the severity of Chase Landry’s mandate to bring down the level of anxiety at St Alban’s. Heretofore, he had excelled at precisely this task. With wisdom both innate and acquired, Miles studiously avoided making any but the most minor changes to the ethos and fabric of St Alban’s Church for a full two years after his arrival. Austin Lawrence had, fortunately, left the parochial infrastructure well-maintained and smoothly running, so there was no demand, real or perceived, for a bold stroke on the part of the new rector. To inherit such a position as Miles did is a double-edged sword. It is a blessing not to have to engage in crisis management or create new administrative systems. But that very stability that is so welcome from one angle is bothersome from the other side. When the time does arrive for a leader to initiate change, the system is so closed, so attached to its own homeostasis, that inordinate leverage is required to effect movement.

Such leverage, much to his advantage, Miles found not so much in any innate charm as in his utter dependability as a pastor, combined with an intentionally-acquired knowledge of how social systems operate in organizations like churches, all combined with the unforced transparency of his personality. He had an ability, therefore, to inspire trust across generational and socio-economic lines. If people had the sense that they were being taken into his confidence more than was actually the case, it sprang from no chicanery on his part. And when people were in crisis, Father Coverdale had trained himself to be at his empathetic best. This quality works serendipitously for a parish priest if the right people go into crisis. Six months into Miles’s cure, the Junior Warden’s four-year-old grandson was struck by a car while riding his bike and suffered a massive closed head injury. Miles sat with the parents, twenty-six-year old Tom and Kara Lessard, the better part of three days as doctors tried every measure available to them to relieve pressure on Andy’s brain, but, in the end, it didn’t work, and he held their hands and prayed as the life support systems were turned off. Another half-year later, Terry Lovejoy Mueller—granddaughter of St Alban’s patriarch Elton Lovejoy—came with her husband, Bruce, in desperate concern for their daughter Melinda, who was distant, withdrawn, and sallow beyond the norm for a fifteen-year-old. Miles was able not only able to intuit the signs of anorexia, but to calmly talk Melinda into cooperatively entering an eating disorders treatment program.

For most of the hundred years since it was first named, Grove Lake was a quiet farming and low-key resort community in the lake country northwest of Chicago. Even in the post-World War II explosion of suburban growth, it remained just off the fringe of the Chicago metropolitan area. It was nearly 1970 before the urban behemoth could be said to have pulled the Village of Grove Lake securely into its orbit. St Alban’s mission was established in late 1920s as a chapel-of-ease for the affluent Chicagoans who maintained summer cottages on the scores of miles of lakefront within a ten mile radius of the center of town. The church was an early casualty of the Great Depression, and after the summer of 1930, the doors of the small brick chapel were padlocked for four years. Regular worship resumed thereafter, with a priest driving in from Elgin to the southwest, or Arlington Heights to the southeast, once or twice a month. On the other Sundays, services were conducted by Dr Elton Lovejoy, a licensed Lay Reader, who was also the local veterinarian for creatures both domestic and agricultural. Dr Lovejoy was an immigrant from the moors of Yorkshire, and his younger brother was a Church of England clergyman, a village priest in the Diocese of Durham.

St Alban’s muddled along in this fashion through the war years until its first full-time resident priest took up his duties on Christmas Eve 1946. Father Giles Wentworth was a single man in his thirties—undoubtedly homosexual, many would later opine, though no one was given to such speculation at the time. He was inveterately outgoing, and singularly gifted in what was probably the one thing needful at that stage in the history of St Albans—fundraising. He parked himself in the cocktail lounge of the Grove Lake Country Club (membership in which was arranged and subsidized for him by the Vestry of St Alban’s) and adroitly picked the pockets of the aging lake resort set, both parishioners and non-parishioners alike, just before they faded from the scene. On St Alban’s Day 1954, the Bishop of Chicago consecrated a stone-faced neo-gothic structure seating 350, on a two-and-a-half acre parcel just inside the village limits on the main highway through town. The membership of the parish at that time, if they all decided to come to church on one Sunday, would still have left the structure half-empty. But Father Wentworth proved prescient in his insistence on building for the needs of the future, not the present. He never got to see himself vindicated, however. On the night of the day the new church was consecrated, Giles Wentworth drove his car into the Fox River in Elgin and drowned. Everyone presumed gin was involved, but such presumption was always unspoken.

By the late 1950s, the trickle, later to become a torrent, of Chicago commuters began to take up residence in Grove Lake, utilizing existing housing stock at first, then discreetly erecting boutique subdivisions, miniaturizations of the large-scale developments going in closer to the city. The Milwaukee Road added the village to its daily commuter schedule and built a proper station—though not without the protest of several citizens of longevity, who did not wish to see their town be absorbed into the Chicago megalopolis. St Alban’s grew slowly but steadily during these years. A Guild Hall and Sunday School wing was added in 1960. The next year, a full-time assisting priest was added to the staff. When the golden era of the mainline churches came to an end even as they flexed their collective muscle most aggressively as part of the general protest against the Vietnam War, growth at St Alban’s slowed, but never stalled. The rector during those years, Larry Cole, was decidedly out in front of his parishioners in his participation in the protest movements of the time, but they suffered him with good humor, partly because they were well conditioned to be deferential toward the clergy, and partly because Father Cole was just a nice guy.

By the midpoint of the second Reagan administration, about the time Father Miles Coverdale became the fifth rector of St Alban’s Church, it was one of the top ten parishes in the Diocese of Chicago, with nearly nine hundred baptized members on the rolls and average Sunday attendance of just under four hundred. Miles’s predecessor, Austin Lawrence, had been elected Bishop of Iowa, leaving his nearly retired assistant, Charlie Sage, to hold the fabric of the parish together during the interregnum. Father Sage was a gifted counselor and pastoral visitor, but he was a mediocre preacher, administrator, and liturgist. The lay leaders of the parish released an audible gasp of relief when Father Coverdale moved his books and pictures and certificates into the rector’s study on the first Tuesday in August.

After two years, Miles felt it to be the right time to move toward a more proactive position of pastoral leadership. The pea under his mattress was liturgical—which is to say, it was a quite intimate spiritual issue for him. Since his conversion experience in college, corporate worship had been the life blood of his personal prayer. And the template which defined his ideal of corporate worship was the vigorous Anglo-Catholicism of Father Locke in Wheaton, his college mentor, and St Mary’s Chapel at Nashotah House. Against this measure, the liturgical practice which he inherited from Father Lawrence was tepid fare. It reflected the slowly emerging re-homogenization of Sunday worship in the Episcopal Church in the wake of the ferment leading up to the revision of the Prayer Book in 1976 (which, in turn, was fueled by, as much as anything else, the convulsions in the Roman Catholic Church following the Second Vatican Council)—contemporary (as opposed to the venerable Elizabethan) English, simple and accessible congregational music, no chanting of prayers by the priest, no incense, and a generally relaxed, almost casual, attitude toward ceremonial of any sort. The essential mystery of the Eucharist, of course, still happens under such a regime, but not, by the lights of Miles Coverdale, in a way that does justice to its profundity. He would have preferred something more along the lines of “High Mass with an attitude.” In the fullness of time—after two years, that is—the rector of St Alban’s began to ratchet up the liturgical ambience of the place. He proceeded slowly but deliberately, and had the backing of such families as the Lessards and the Muellers (and others of the Lovejoy clan who remained in the parish) and everything happened in due course and virtually without conflict.

The Lessards and the Lovejoys, then, were two very influential families at St Alban’s, and as a result of his personal ministry to them, they had been habitually inclined to give Miles’s ideas and proposals every possible benefit of the doubt. Now the Lovejoys (under the Mueller name) and the (younger) Lessards were in opposite camps, and the priest who had been their pastor and friend for a dozen years was caught in the middle. He fretted about the vestry meeting all during his Monday sabbatical, and wished profoundly that the Cubs were playing at home that week, when, in fact, they had moved on to St Louis. By the time he tapped his ceremonial gavel on the conference room table to begin the meeting, he had conjured a serious resolve to be unflappable, to carefully modulate the tone of his voice, to be careful about letting both sides of the issue have something resembling equal time, and to exercise his own moral authority in such a way that would represent what the group-process gurus at the management seminars he attended from time to time called “win-win thinking.”

The first few items on agenda were routine, and were dispensed with quickly, beginning, ironically enough, with adoption of the agenda itself. Miles could sense Kara Lessard’s anxiety over the fact that, according to the arbitrary rules of alphabetical order, in the section of the agenda falling under the heading “Committee Reports,” the report of the Facilities Use Committee preceded that of the Program Committee. Bruce Mueller would have the first word on the subject, forcing her to play defense. The draft minutes from the previous meeting were approved quickly. The treasurer presented a report typical for summer, which is always a low ebb for church finances, so it therefore did little to allay anxiety with respect to outside rental income. To Miles’s relief, Lance Kemper did not use his privileged floor time in his Senior Warden’s report to advance his position on what everyone knew would be “the issue” of the meeting. Miles’ own rector’s report was manifestly brief.

When it was Bruce Mueller’s turn to present the report of the Facilities Use Committee, he avoided anything that could have been construed as pugnacity, but he was a strong advocate for his cause. “As most of you probably know, since out last meeting, we’ve received formal applications from two groups that have been waiting a long time for us to find a spot for them—Smoker’s Anonymous and AlaTeen. These are both really strong programs that are presently meeting in people’s homes, which, of course, limits the number of people they can accommodate. I would really hate to see us not be able to help them out.”

When Bruce finished speaking, there was silence. Miles knew, however, that Bruce’s hope was to get vestry approval at this meeting for Smoker’s Anonymous and AlaTeen to be added to St Alban’s list of tenants, and although it was not strictly his duty, as chairman of the meeting, to come to Mueller’s rescue, his inner pastor trumped his inner parliamentarian. “Would you like to make a motion, Bruce?” But even as the words were leaving his lips, Miles felt a twinge of anxiety. Would his coming to Bruce’s aid be construed as favoritism toward Bruce’s position? Would it create damage in his relationship with Kara that he would have to repair later?

“Thank-you, Father,” was Bruce Mueller’s reply. “Yes, I would like to move that we approve the applications from Smoker’s Anonymous and AlaTeen.” At that point, the duty of the chairman was clear. “Is there a second?” Lance Kemper did not hesitate for a moment. “I second the motion.”

“Is there any discussion?” the chairman inquired, realizing full well what the answer would be, although, once again, there was a four or five second period of silence during which Miles began to wonder whether the question would proceed to an immediate vote. But, as he might have guesssed, Kara Lessard spoke up. “Well, I really do hate to be the ‘bad cop’ on this, I really do. But, you know, it’s just like when we talk about the budget, and somebody wants this or that item to have more money put into it, but they don’t say where they’re going to get the money from. You’ve got to ‘rob Peter to pay Paul,’ you know? So my question is, Where are we going to put these groups? In the sacristy? In Father Coverdale’s office?” She lifted a sheaf of papers that lay in front of her on the conference room table. “I’ve got a report here that’s already on the agenda, but I can tell you right now what it says. It says we’re maxed out. I would love nothing better than to accommodate every Twelve Step group in the county that needs a place to meet, but we just haven’t got the room.”

Another awkward silence—this time broken by Lance Kemper. “Kara, if I thought you meant that literally, I could see your point. But I find it difficult to believe that, in any given week, there aren’t two rooms available for a couple of hours. I mean, we’re not talking about a coporate boardroom, for Pete’s sake, we’re talking about a table and a few chairs. What about the Youth Room? Why can’t AlaTeen meet in the Youth Room? They are teenagers, after all. And we certainly don’t have a youth group that meets every night of the week.”

“That’s easy to say, Lance,” Kara retorted, “but Steve tells me it would cramp their style to have others on their turf.” Steve Wilson was the half-time staff member in charge of youth ministry. “We made a commitment to the kids when we hired Steve that they would have space they can call their own—be able to decorate the way they want, and to come and go they way they want. Besides—yes, AlaTeen are teenagers, and that’s my point: They’re going to act like teenagers, and sooner or later there’s going to be problems, and our own kids are going to get the short end.”

“Well, we really can’t say that, can we?” opined Wanda Jennings, a legal secretary in her day job, now serving the first year of her first term on the vestry, and speaking openly for the first time in a meeting. “We just don’t know. Maybe it would work out and maybe it wouldn’t. We just don’t know.”

Meanwhile, Miles felt his eyes start to glaze over, and hoped it wasn’t evident to anyone else. Intense boredom was setting in. He just wanted this meeting to be over. He wanted to be home, watching the news, drinking a beer. Even walking Belle would be preferable to this.

Bruce Meuller rejoined the exchange, reiterating how desperate the two groups in question were. The volume of his voice, however, was overpowered in Miles’ head by the memory of Chase Landry’s stentorian tone from their last meeting: “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.” Bruce’s contribution was followed by one from Frank Williams, a retired history professor whose voice still betrayed his Welsh upbringing. But the rector’s attention was so stretched that he was scarcely aware of what side of the question the professor was advocating for. Three other members also weighed in passionately, though not really saying anything new.

“Father, I move the previous question.” It was Michael McKittrick, a physician in his early sixties, serving his third tour of duty on the vestry.

That motion temporarily snapped Miles out of his torpor. “It’s been moved that we end debate. Is there a second?” Lance Kemper wasted no time answering that call. Miles continued, “OK, that’s a non-debatable motion. All in favor, please signify by saying ‘Aye.’” There was a determined chorus of response, but Miles knew immediately that it was far from unanimous. “All opposed?” Led by Kara Lessard’s sonorous alto voice, those who wanted to keep talking expressed their wishes. It was a divided house, so the chair was forced to ask for a show of hands. When six arms were raised to indicate an ‘Aye’ vote, Miles wondered why this had to be the first meeting of the year—in August, no less—at which all twelve members of the vestry were present. For an instant, he silently held out hope for an abstention, but none materialized. It was six in favor, six opposed—and this was only on a motion to end debate, not even on the substantive question itself.

It was not a complicated calculation, and Miles made it in a moment. The moorings of his neutral position as a “non-anxious presence” were collapsing beneath him. It was his duty now to cast a tie-breaking vote. He could exercise his right to abstain, of course, but since, when there is a tie vote, the motion is presumed to have failed, abstaning would be the functional equivalent of voting No. He could not remain detached. He no longer had the luxury of being bored. He would have to come down on one side or the other. Upon later reflection, he would realize that to vote Yes would be construed as aligning himself with Bruce Mueller and the “open” contingent. To vote No would be perceived as an endorsement of Kara Lessard and the “no vacancy” position. Under the pressure of the moment, however, even such relatively obvious deductions did not bubble to the surface of Miles’ consciousness. His pastoral default mode led him to conclude that, as a general principle, when a group is faced with an important decision, it’s better to allow people to talk than to deny them that opportunity.

Yet, in the more than two hundred vestry meetings at which he had presided during his ministry, Miles had never had to cast a tie-breaking vote. It was uncharted territory for him. There was no script, either conscious or sub-conscious, for him to follow. He found himself looking down at his agenda sheet on the table in front of him for what seemed like a minute, though it was in fact only about six seconds. “I, uh…I guess I just want…I just want to be sure that everybody’s had a say and nobody feels steamrolled. So I guess that means I vote No. The motion to end debate fails. Of course, it would have anyway, even if I hadn’t voted. But…the motion fails. We keep talking.” Then, before anyone had a chance to say anything, Miles added a coda: “Of course, please don’t interpret my vote as expressing an opinion on the question that’s on the floor…that of approving agreements with Al-a-Teen and Smokers Anonymous. Which we now have the opportunity to keep talking about, if anybody has anything to say. Does anybody have anything to say?”

Miles knew immediately that, despite the good intentions that underlay his vote, his comment on it constituted one of the most infelicitous remarks ever to come out of his mouth. He uttered it, and it just sat in the middle of the conference room table like a stack of dirty dishes. Sure, he wanted to call it back and have another shot at crafting something more elegant, but—aside from the impossibility of doing so—what would he say? There was no obvious way out of the quicksand into which he was slowly sinking.

Meanwhile, as Miles was indulging himself in these morbid reflections, no one said a word. Wasn’t the last thing he said, “Does anybody have anything to say?” Hadn’t he just spent a pocketful of political capital for the sake of keeping the conversation going? And now nobody has anything to say? Surely someone would speak up if they were only nudged. “Wow. Are we really all talked out on this?” Silence. Maybe levity would cut the fog that had descended onto the room. “Going once…going twice…I guess it looks like we’re ready to vote, huh?”

As he was voicing that observation, Miles was suddenly stabbed with the realization that the vote on closing debate was a preview of the vote on the question itself. But he had to think and act at the same time. “OK, all in favor of approving the agreements with Al-a-Teen and Smokers Anonymous as proposed by the Facilities Use Committee, please signify by saying…oh, why even bother; we pretty much know where this is going…please signify by raising your hand.” There were several smiles and a couple of chuckles over the rector’s assessment of the futility of a voice vote. Bruce Mueller and Lance Kemper and Michael McKittrick and the same three others who had voted in favor of “calling the question” raised their hands. Miles felt like the widow in a silent film melodrama, tied by the villain to the railroad tracks, with the locomotive bearing down. Only the good guys in the white hats were not charging over the hill to come to the rescue.

“All opposed, same sign.” Kara Lessard and the same five others who had voted to keep talking, but then had nothing more to say, raised their hands. “Does the chair hear a motion to adjourn?” Miles’ attempt to lighten the atmosphere, and buy himself some time, through humor was appreciated by all. It did not, however, change the reality that lay before him. He looked back down at his agenda sheet, took a deep and slow breath, sent a short but earnest silent prayer heavenward, and addressed his vestry. “Look, folks, I’ve got to be honest with you.” (As if he would ever be expected, by himself or others, to be duplicitous—yet, it felt important to say.) “I just don’t have passionate feelings about either side of this debate.” (This was more than a mild understatement, but he hoped the members would not realize that.) “I don’t have some superior wisdom that I can now reveal and break the knot.” (He never would have claimed such, but for most of his career, it felt as though that were true.) “I apologize to you if it seems that I’m AWOL on this. Bruce—(doesn’t the judge announcing a decision in a civil suit usually address the “loser” first?)—I honor the time and effort and good faith you’ve put into this. Kara, the same goes for you. We’re not enemies here. We’re on the same team. As you can probably tell, I wish I had some way out of this. But I’ve got to cast a vote, and as I examine my conscience in this moment, the most honest thing for me to do is abstain. Because I really do not have an opinion one way or the other. I actually think both sides are right, for whatever that’s worth! I don’t want to just cop out on this, I really don’t. But I have to abstain. And I know that means the motion fails. But you have to trust me—and Bruce, I guess I’m aiming this mostly at you—you’ve go to trust me that, if the motion were that we not enter into these proposed agreements, I would still abstain, even though that would mean, if effect, that the teens and the smokers would now be camping out with us. It’s just a parliamentary quirk the way things have worked out.” Miles knew that was a rather lame and contorted observation and wished he hadn’t said it.

The rest of the meeting was subdued. Kara Lessard reported for the Program Committee, assisted by the four page handout containing facts and numbers and diagrams that Miles—though he would never say this to anyone—found mind-numbing. The report was purely informative, and did not require a vestry decision. Yet, it had the unavoidable effect of seeming to rub Bruce Mueller’s nose in the sourness of his defeat. This added to Miles’ already considerable discomfort, and he suspected that Kara was not enjoying the experience either.

When the moment of adjournment finally arrived, the members of the vetry departed with much less than the usual amount of post-meeting banter. Miles quickly retreated to his study, where he took the opportunity to check his electronic mail—not a strictly necessary task at that moment, but one that removed him from the occasion of having to perform further damage assessment and spin control. He just wanted to get home as quickly as possible, preferably without talking to anybody en route.

A few minutes later, as Miles ventured out into the parking lot, he spotted at least thee separate conversations going on between various vestry members. He knew he ought to find that alarming, but it was difficult to summon the emotional energy. He knew he ought to have extracted a pledge from both Bruce and Kara to meet with him informally as soon as possible and find a way forward that both could embrace. He ought to have done that even before tonight’s vestry meeting and, barring that, he should have arranged that meeting publicly even as he was announcing his abstaining vote. There were, in fact, a great many things left undone that he ought to have done. In the parlance of the General Confession from the liturgy of Morning Prayer that had been imprinted on him in his youth, he was a “miserable offender,” and he felt as though there was indeed “no health” in him. But in that moment, he could no sooner have done what needed to be done than he could have flown straight to the full moon that illumined the parking lot of St Alban’s Church.

Chapter 9

2009-10-08T18:09:00.000-07:00

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.

Chapter 10

2009-10-08T17:54:00.000-07:00

Under the canons of the Episcopal Church and the Diocese of Chicago, it would have been within Bishop Landry’s discretion to suspend Miles from the exercise of his ministry pending the outcome of the investigation. The possibility never crossed Miles’s mind during their phone conversation, but about thirty seconds after he hung up, it hit him—not only mentally and emotionally, but physically. As he sat in his desk chair, energy drained from his body; his face felt flush, and he hoped Donna wouldn’t have reason to step into his study. He also hoped he would not be called upon to stand up for any reason, because he did not believe himself able to do so. Later, he would surmise that he had experienced a storm surge of adrenalin, and then the ensuing letdown as the hormone ebbed as suddenly as it had flowed. His very livelihood, to say nothing of his vocation and identity as a priest, was in serious jeopardy, but the effect of his precarious position had been stayed by the exercise of episcopal prerogative on the part of one who was not only his bishop, but his friend. Would very many other clergy under a similar cloud of suspicion have been so fortunate? He knew of his own innocence, of course, and he knew he would have ample opportunity to proclaim that innocence. He also knew that it was essentially a “he said—she said” situation, and, given the current environment of the church’s newly found awareness of its own culpability in abetting the rapacity of a handful of clergy, there would be no effective presumption in his favor. This was not a random blip on the radar screen; this was a hurricane.

Even so, and precisely because of Chase Landry’s lenient hand, the ordinary demands of his ministry did not suddenly evaporate. As his paralysis slowly abated, Miles allowed himself to glance down at his appointment schedule and task list. There was a sermon to work on, and an adult Bible study to prepare for. His article for the September issue of the monthly parish newsletter was due. He needed to check with Justin Hook about some changes in the altar rota, and touch base with the chair of the Stewardship Committee to make sure plans were in progress for the annual campaign for coming-year operating funds. He had committed himself to the gathering of some statistical data in connection with his role on the diocesan Committee on Vision and Structure. Of course, there was the continuing pastoral fallout from the recent vestry meeting that needed to be dealt with, to say nothing of his perseverant anxiety over the disintegrating lives of Rachel and Brian. Without the Tracy Lindholm mess, his plate would have been amply full; with that added complication, it was overflowing.

From such a state of ordered disarray, then, Miles Coverdale moved instinctively toward emotional and spiritual regrouping. When he felt like he could walk in a straight line, he headed toward the door of the parish office, stopping long enough to lean on the counter and distract Donna from the laborious task of posting offerings from the previous Sunday to the records of the respective donors. “Donna, I’m going to be in the church for a few minutes.” This was not an odd bit of news, as she was accustomed to her boss stepping into the church for any number of reasons several times during a typical workweek. So she merely glanced in his direction and smiled quickly. “Thanks, Father,” was her only verbal acknowledgement.

Miles proceeded through the cloister along the side of the garth and into the church via the sacristy door. It was still pleasantly cool—a residue from the air conditioner having cycled on for Morning Prayer not too much earlier. Once inside the church proper, he genuflected toward the tabernacle that was placed in the center of a long shelf (known technically as a retable) attached to the wall behind the main altar. Hanging above the altar was an oil lamp that burned perpetually, save for the roughly forty-eight hour interval between the conclusion of the liturgy on Maundy Thursday each year and the administration of Holy Communion at the end of the Great Vigil of Easter. The lamp indicated the presence within the tabernacle of the reserved sacrament—the body and blood of Christ under the species of consecrated bread and wine. Ever since the significance of the sanctuary lamp had been explained to Miles near the time of his confirmation as a sixth-grader, he had found it viscerally comforting. On this day, he claimed that comfort once again in full measure, and with a more focused understanding than was available to him as a twelve-year old.

The floor plan of St Alban’s was a traditional Gothic cruciform, the south transept of which comprised the Lady Chapel, a more intimate venue appropriate for daily Morning and Evening Prayer and weekday Masses. (The expression ‘Lady Chapel’ hearkened back to medieval English usage, when it was customary, whatever the dedication of the church itself might be, to place the side chapel under the patronage of Mary, the mother of Jesus.) At one end of the communion rail was a bank of votive candles—blue in honor of St Mary—placed underneath an icon of the Madonna and Child that hung on the wall at that spot. As Miles approached, there were two candles burning, silent emblems of the petitions and intercessions offered by a couple of parishioners who had attended Morning Prayer. The rector knelt and lit a third votive. This was definitely a well prayed-in spot, and at this moment, Miles needed nothing else quite so urgently. He needed nothing quite to badly as to freshly connect with his spiritual roots, to draw upon whatever residue of strength—no, to petition for a fresh infusion, a new work of divine grace—in regaining some sense of self after this latest in the series of assaults that had begun nine months earlier with Sharon’s cancer diagnosis.

As he knelt in front of the votive candle stand, Miles summoned the images and memories that constituted his spiritual biography. Howard and Joan Coverdale both were Episcopalian by long family tradition, which meant they were not overly religious. They were better than “Christmas and Easter” at Trinity Church in Wauwatosa, but Howard never was a vestryman and Joan only rarely attended an ECW meeting and was not even a member of one of the women’s guilds. Miles was duly baptized when he was six weeks old and confirmed at twelve years. He attended Sunday School with relative regularity—quitting, of course, after being confirmed. He served as an acolyte from the fourth through eighth grades, when he lost interest and harassed his parents into letting him quit. Religion, theology, and church in general were never topics of profound discussion in the Coverdale household. So, if pressed to identify a bona fide conversion experience, he would have had to link it with his time at Wheaton College. Wheaton is an evangelical Christian institution located in the seat of DuPage County, Illinois. The college has an unapologetic religious test for admission and employment. As an Episcopalian, Miles did not fit the typical profile for a Wheaton applicant. He did not lack faith, but it was more of a vague theistic moralism than anything distinctively Christian, and grossly inarticulate at that. Yet, networking and string pulling can be effective even in a place like Wheaton College, and Danny Schultz, his high school baseball coach and a Wheaton alum, and Don Sederstrom, the Wheaton baseball coach, were skilled practitioners of the art. A letter from the rector of Trinity Church, who was not himself an evangelical, but knew enough of the buzzwords of that subculture, pushed Miles over the top with the admissions committee. Wheaton did not offer any baseball scholarships, but the Coverdales were not hard pressed financially. Miles liked the atmosphere of the campus when he visited it, liked coach Sederstrom, and enrolled happily in Wheaton College.

In college, Miles limited his athletic endeavors to baseball. This allowed the space for an awakening in other areas of his life—namely, intellectual and spiritual. An introductory philosophy course his first semester whetted his appetite for deep thinking on deep questions, ultimate reality. He developed an awareness of how much he took for granted the material and domestic security of his childhood. He began to see it all in a larger context of mystery, chance, and providence—and wondered profoundly.

Daily chapel was mandatory at Wheaton in the 1960s, and there was palpable social pressure in the direction of Sunday worship attendance. Miles adapted to this milieu with relative equanimity—occasional mild resentment and occasional curiosity. It certainly wasn’t “church” like anything he had ever known, and his first impression was that the whole evangelical subculture as it was incarnated at Wheaton was rather unnecessarily frenzied in its piety. Yet, he adopted a spirit of go-along-to-get-along. He had the uneasy awareness that he was too non-conversant with his own oddball (in that environment) Episcopalian tradition to be intelligently critical of those around him. About every other week, he accompanied one his dorm friends to one of the evangelical conventicles in the area.

It was in January of his freshman year that a chapel speaker whose name Miles—despite his best efforts several times in later years—was never able to remember snuck into the recesses of his soul like an accomplished cat burglar and turned on the lights. His text was from the first epistle of John, chapter two: “If any man sin, we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous, and he is the propitiation for all our sins.” The speaker explained the cosmic nature of “sin” and the “righteousness” of Christ and the effects of his “propitiation” in a way that radically transcended the image of crossing, then placating, a petty bureaucratic or capriciously dictatorial God that Miles carried around in his mind, left over from his sketchy and ill-remembered catechesis in Sunday School and Confirmation instruction. Miles “got it” for the first time. He did not answer an altar call or walk down an aisle, but he gave his life to Christ as surely as anyone who ever came forward in a Billy Graham crusade.

The next thing Miles did was find the nearest Episcopal parish on a Sunday morning. As soon as they got to the General Confession and the “Comfortable Words” which follow, he knew why he had been moved by the chapel speaker. The words had already been implanted in his soul by the repetition of the Eucharistic liturgy to which he was exposed, even if sporadically at times, during the preceding nineteen years. Rather than rejecting the tradition of his upbringing, as many who undergo a similar conversion under similar circumstances seem inclined to do, Miles embraced it, absorbed it, and lived it. He had no living mentor, but was sufficiently motivated as a self-directed student that the college library itself offered him every resource he needed to develop a disciplined familiarity with Anglican faith and practice. At the same time, he became fluent in the symbols and vocabulary of the evangelical piety that surrounded him. He was quickly able to pray aloud extemporaneously with an ease that caught the notice of anyone who was inclined to be attuned to such presumptive indicators of spiritual depth and maturity. Miles enjoyed being both in and of the evangelical subculture while not being contained by it. One could almost say that he cultivated his odd-duck status as an Episcopalian at Wheaton College.

Miles’ intellectual curiosity led him to major in philosophy (concentrating in its influence on theology), with a minor in history (concentrating in medieval Europe). He made solid grades and played solid baseball, though his athletic endeavors became less a passion for him than they had been when he was in high school. From the time of his “conversion” on he was a regular communicant at Trinity Church, Wheaton, even attending a 6:30 Mass on Friday mornings. He developed a close relationship with Fr Ned Locke, the rector, who was a seasoned priest on the verge of retirement. Neither he nor Miles could later remember which one first mentioned the possibility of Miles having a vocation to the priesthood; it seemed so natural as to be almost beyond question, but Fr Locke certainly fanned the flame. As it happened, Miles’s college career coincided with Ned Locke’s term on the Commission on Ministry of the Diocese of Chicago. By the end of Miles’s junior year at Wheaton, Fr Locke had arranged an informal interview with the Right Reverend Barton Graves, Bishop of Chicago, and greased the skids with the commission. He also did not neglect to take Miles for a visit to Nashotah House, whose loyal son he had been since his matriculation there when Calvin Coolidge was president. Miles graduated cum laude from Wheaton, hung up his baseball spikes for the last time, and took up residence in the cloister at Nashotah House as a postulant for Holy Orders from the Diocese of Chicago. At the same time, he discovered that his spirituality had an ethereal dimension. His experience of the Divine Presence in the Mass was quickened, becoming intense and vivid—not quite ecstatic, but definitely mystical.

As a seminarian, Miles Coverdale was a round peg in a round hole. (Howard and Joan had taken the whole idea very much in stride, and even began to attend services on Sundays in Wauwatosa a little more frequently, pulsating with restrained pride, but they did not replicate in themselves the sort of spiritual awakening Miles had experienced at Wheaton.) Miles soaked up the Anglo- Catholic piety of Nashotah House like a terry-cloth towel absorbing water off a freshly bathed body.

After their wedding and Miles’ sequential ordinations, first as deacon and then as priest, Sharon was transparently interested in Miles’s ministry, not as a corporate trophy wife would be concerned for her spouse’s career advancement, but with sincere care for the spiritual welfare of his parishioners. She was also a cradle Episcopalian, but somewhat more pious and better catechized than Miles had been. She was also willing to allow some of his evangelical experience at Wheaton to rub off on her. The fact is, the edge of Miles’s own pietistic fervor had worn smooth over the years, so the tenor of his spirituality and hers met on common ground. Their joint piety was comfortable and genuine, but not intense, and, like so much else in their relationship, largely unspoken. It was a good match.

In this moment, his prayer was wordless. The verbal and overtly petitionary style of prayer he had learned in college had served him well, and continued to do so under the right circumstances. He did not feel that his present condition constituted such circumstances. What words had not already been spoken? What requests had not already been given voice? No, this was a time for the sound of sheer silence in the presence of the Mysterious One, the Holy One, the One whose mercy and grace Miles would now have to rely on more exclusively than ever. As he gazed at the icon, he had an experience that was at the same time familiar, having occurred before a half dozen or so times in his life, but altogether exotic and engrossing, both because of its rarity and its intense sweetness. He felt himself gripped by the image in the icon, as if he were the object of the exchange, rather than the subject. He was not so much looking at the image as it was looking at him, demanding his attention, gently and lovingly, but with resolute firmness. Miles neither desired nor was able to avert his gaze. For a period that felt timeless, though in actuality less than a minute, Miles was in the thrall of the Virgin Mother and the Eternal Word she had brought forth into the world. Then, with tenderness in proportion to the firmness with which it had first gripped him, the image let him go. Miles rose from his knees and returned to the office, feeling a measure of peace that was sufficient for the hour—not euphoria, but a sense that all was well in that moment. He would face succeeding moments as they came.

Some elements of both his inner turmoil and his mystical encounter must have been evident in his demeanor. Donna looked up from her desk when he came through the door, noted that it was her boss, and looked back down—yet, in an instant, looked back up at him. She furrowed her brow in a telltale manner. “Father, are you all right?”

Miles paused. He did not want to brief his secretary on all that was going on just yet, but neither did he want to be disingenuous. He smiled as he deflected her inquiry in an attempt to buy a few seconds of time. “Why do you ask?”

Now it was Donna’ turn to hesitate. “I don’t know. I just caught something in your face as you walked in—almost a ‘deer in the headlights’ kind of look, I guess.”

“I’m OK, Donna, I really am. But thanks. There are a couple of things I’m trying to get straight in my head, but I’ll be OK.” With that, he repaired to his study, but left the door open. Just then his computer emitted a synthesized chime-like sound, which was its way of reminding him of an upcoming appointment. He was subconsciously irritated by this unanticipated intrusion of the mundane into the mystical, but he instinctively concentrated his attention on the pop-up “dialogue box” that appeared on the screen. It read simply “Elmer Johnson, HC—10:30 AM.” It meant that, in a half-hour’s time, he was due at the home of one of his elderly and homebound parishioners for the purpose of bringing him Holy Communion; this is a standard element of Anglican pastoral practice. The appointment had been made the previous week, part of an orderly process Miles had established for making sure he had face-to-face contact with each homebound member of his flock—there were nearly thirty on the list—at least twice a year. Father Hook, or one of the deacons or retired priests, or one of a team of lay visitors, insured that a visit from some official representative of the parish happened on a monthly basis. Yet, somehow, its presence on his calendar had escaped his attention, not surprising given all that had transpired since the last time he laid eyes—and hands, he ruefully reminded himself—on Tracy Lindholm. Normally, Miles enjoyed these opportunities, but he was manifestly not in the mood today. Should he call and postpone it? He wished for the end result of that idea—no visit to Elmer Johnson in thirty minutes—but he could not bring himself to imagine the process of actually achieving that result. Canceling appointments was just not something he did; it was too out of character for him to even accept it himself.

So, after killing a few minutes looking at his e-mail inbox—there were a couple of messages that required a reply, and doing so would not have required more than a few seconds of time and effort; yet it seemed an intolerably onerous task, so he left them alone—Miles headed back into the church, this time to retrieve a consecrated communion host from the tabernacle. Inside the cedar-lined box—How often had he explained its significance to confirmation candidates as “a refrigerator for the sacred leftovers”? —were a ciborium—a silver chalice-like vessel with a lid—which contained consecrated communion bread, and a pyx, a smaller silver vessel with a hinged lid and a clasp, inside a zipped leather case. Miles genuflected in front of the tabernacle, in token of the Church’s belief that it contains the real presence of the Body and Blood of Christ, opened the door, and retrieved the ciborium. From it he took two wafers, one for Elmer and one for…well, he always took one more than he thought he would actually need, “just in case,” and, indeed, on a handful of occasions there had been a friend or relative who chanced to be visiting at the same time and who appreciated the opportunity to receive the sacrament alongside the homebound person. He then placed the consecrated communion wafers into the pyx, replaced the pyx in its leather case, and deposited the case into his left shirt pocket—keeping Jesus next to his heart, he would have said if asked, though no one had ever asked. With these necessary preparations for his visit now having been accomplished, he closed the door on the tabernacle and made his way out to the parking lot.

Elmer Johnson was 88 years old, and not only homebound, but bed-bound, a result of advanced muscular dystrophy. His wife, Clare, had always been his primary caregiver, and appeared to be in vigorous health at 81 when she suffered a stroke. (Blessedly, Clare was never one for half measures, so she had the only kind of stroke worth having at her stage in life—immediately fatal.) Due to the couple’s frugality and modest lifestyle—and also due to their childlessness, no doubt—they were able to accumulate sufficient savings to pay for round-the-clock in-home care, thus sparing Elmer the indignity of a nursing home. He was not one of Miles’ favorite people to visit. Elmer was one of those individuals who considers it a moral obligation to have an opinion on any conceivable question, and he took great care to make sure it was the correct one, and thus considered it worthy of nothing but his untiring best efforts in expounding and defending it. Privately to Justin Hook, and preceding curates over the years, Miles had confided his assessment that Elmer was “educated beyond his intelligence.” His contention that the entire New Testament was originally written in Aramaic, an enormity that placed him in the same category as members of the Flat Earth Society, and supplemented with the claim that he had acquired a knowledge of Aramaic from a fellow deckhand on a merchant vessel in the 1930s, was only the most egregious of his “correct” opinions.

Yet, as personally annoying as he found Mr Johnson, the rector of St Alban’s kept him in his pastoral heart of love. Perhaps it was an instance of “there but for the grace of God go I” gratitude, because Elmer, like his pastor, was a lifelong Episcopalian, but without the “Aha!” experience Miles had acquired as a result of rubbing shoulders with evangelical Protestants while in college. “He’s an ethical theist,” Miles had remarked to Sharon over dinner after his first pastoral call on the Johnson household, “but not much of a Christian. In fact, I think his real religion is probably Masonry.” Indeed, at every single visit Miles had made over the years of his tenure at St Alban’s, Elmer managed by one means or another to steer the conversation around to his deep involvement with his Masonic Lodge, stories (oft repeated) of trips he and Clare had made all around the country and overseas and the fellowship they had enjoyed with other Masons, and his attainment of the coveted Thirty-Third Degree status. On a handful of occasions he broadly hinted that Fr Coverdale would be most welcome to apply for lodge membership, but receiving no hints of a possible positive response, he did not press the point. All were probably happier for that bit of intuitive wisdom on Elmer Johnson’s part, because, if forced somehow into unqualified candor, Miles would have had to render a decidedly negative judgment on Freemasonry. As he explained to Sharon at that initial dinner table discussion, “I guess you could say I’m jealous of Masonry—jealous on behalf of the Church, that is, jealous on behalf of Christ, actually. If I thought it was just a bunch of old guys down at the lodge dressing up in funny outfits for the evening and chanting some mumbo-jumbo, I could just smile and look the other way. And nobody can deny, they do great work when it comes to raising money for sick kids and stuff like that. But what really gives me the creeps, you know, is that, for hardcore Masons—and I think Elmer is about as hardcore as you can get—for the hardcore Masons, being a Mason is…it. They may go to church, and be very active in church, but their real community, their real family, is Masonry. When they’re stranded in a strange town and need to call somebody at three in the morning, they’re going to call a brother Mason. That’s their first loyalty, their first affection.”

“So, just what is it you’re jealous about?” Sharon inquired as she began to clear dishes from the table.

“That’s what I’m jealous about…the 3:00 AM phone call.”

“You want people calling you at three in the morning? We need separate bedrooms!”

She was kidding, and he knew it, but Miles felt nonetheless compelled to clarify his point. “OK, I’m not being…like…literal here. It’s what the middle-of-the-night phone call symbolizes. It says, ‘We’re family. I may never have met you before, but if you’re a Mason, you’re family, and I’m here for you.’ Do you see what I’m saying? That’s precisely what I sweat blood trying to get my own parishioners to understand. That’s what Christians are supposed to be for each other.”

Sharon couldn’t resist needling her husband just a bit further. “I see. So now what you want is for your parishioners to be calling each other on the phone in the wee hours, eh?”

Miles paused, then grinned through loosely clenched teeth; he truly was not upset with his wife, and did not want to convey any impression of impatience. “I hope you’re enjoying being deliberately difficult. My time will come, and when you least expect it, O light of my life.” Then he added, “But here’s the deal: Why am I jealous of the Masons? Because they’re draining off energy from people like Elmer Johnson who could be—should be—devoting that energy to the Church, toward the community of Christians. It’s not his fault, and it really isn’t even the Masons’ fault; they’re just a convenient target for my frustration. It’s our fault, really. It’s the Church’s fault. We’ve raised generations of Christians, generations of Episcopalians, who don’t know any better. They just don’t get it. Some of them get it as Masons. They just don’t get it as Christians.”

With the memory of this ancient exchange on the surface of his consciousness, Miles parked his Mercury curbside in front of Elmer Johnson’s home. He reached into his glove compartment and grabbed the folded priest’s stole that he kept there for such occasions. It was purple, a vestige of the days when a pastoral call on a sick person always bore a penitential hue, because the prevailing view was that sickness was intentionally visited by God on people as punishment for their sins. He walked up to the front door of the simple three-bedroom brick-faced ranch style tract home, vintage 1960, and rang the doorbell. A few seconds later, the door opened and Fr Coverdale was greeted by Teresa, Elmer’s weekday caregiver. “Oh, Father, thank-you for coming. Please come in.”

Elmer was prepared for his visitor. Teresa had adjusted his bed to a near-upright position, helped him into a clean shirt, and brushed his hair. The bed was in what used to be the formal dining room, right where the table would have gone. This was Miles’ first visit since before Sharon got sick, and the sight of a hospital-style bed in a living area of a house gave him a start, though he masked his reaction. He was quite familiar with the furniture arrangement, of course, but he saw it now in a different emotional context. He approached the bed with his customary warm smile, grasped Elmer’s right hand in both of his, and looked him squarely in the eye. “Elmer, it’s so good to see you. It’s been too long. How’ve you been?” It was a question that formed an essential part of the virtual liturgy for such an exchange, but it had always troubled Miles, and often struck him as utterly ludicrous. You don’t need to ask a man in a hospital bed how he is; he’s in a hospital bed, so quite clearly he’s not doing well. And in addition to this self-evident insight, Miles had in this case the additional data of Elmer’s frequently voiced desire to die, a wish that carried even more pathos in the wake of Clare’s sudden passing.

If the question “How’ve you been?” was indeed liturgical in its predictability, Elmer’s appointed response was some variation of “I’ve got Muscular Dystrophy and I’m stuck in this goddamn bed and I feel like shit and I want to die!” So when he missed his cue and blew his line, this time Miles was not able to hide his surprise. “What did you say, Elmer?”

“I said I’m doing pretty well, Father, and it’s wonderful to see you, too. Please have a seat. Teresa, can you get Father Coverdale something to drink, please? What would you like, Father?”

“Just a glass of ice water will be fine, thank you,” Miles responded, still in a state of semi-amazement as he pulled up a chair—a dining room chair, he would have noticed if he’d been paying attention to such details—to the side of the bed. The two men looked at one another in silence. If it had lasted a second longer, it would have turned awkward. Elmer spoke first. “Listen, I know you’ve been through hell since was we last saw each other, and I didn’t send you so much as a sympathy note.” With a hand gesture, Miles tried to graciously put an end to this ritual of self-deprecation, but Elmer drove right through the stop sign into the intersection. “I’m sorry, I really am. But, you know, even when I was healthy and Clare was around, those little niceties were a little hard for me. Please forgive me.”

Miles raised and waved his hand, in a motion of absolution that was sincere, if not sacramental. “Nothing to forgive, Elmer, nothing to forgive. I completely understand.”

“Well, thank-you.” Teresa arrived with the requested glass of water as Elmer continued. “Like I said, I know it was awful for you. When I lost Clare…I don’t really know how to explain it…it was like the color of light changed. I didn’t know how I was going to make it from one minute to the next.”

Miles was genuinely moved. “Tell me again how long you and Clare were together.”

“You mean ‘together’ or ‘married’?” There was a twinkle in Elmer’s eye that Miles didn’t remember seeing before. “We met when we were fifteen, and we were in love instantly. That would be 73 years ago, I guess. And she’s been gone…what?…seven years? So that means we were together…help me with the math now, Father…”

“That would make it 66 years, Elmer. That’s so amazing. How blessed you are. What a great deal you have to be thankful for.”

“I know, I know.” Elmer’s affect suddenly turned pensive. “That’s something you’ve been trying to get through to me for a long, long time, isn’t it? I have a pretty thick skull, as you’ve no doubt noticed. But the message is finally beginning to get through.”

Miles’ immediate reaction was that he did not recall particularly pressing the issue of gratitude in his previous pastoral exchanges with Elmer, but he was well-accustomed to the fact that what he intended to stress often bore little resemblance to what people actually perceived him to be stressing. This happened in sermons, teaching sessions, and pastoral conversations. So he took Elmer’s present comment completely in stride. “I’m glad the message is getting through, Elmer. It’s a good message. To tell you the truth, I need to listen to a little bit of that message myself!”

“Forgive me, Father Coverdale, but it seems to me that you’re entitled to feel sorry for yourself for a good long while and not have anybody make you feel guilty for it. I mean, I had Clare for 66 years. We grew old together. We were high school sweethearts, and we grew old together. You lost Sharon in the prime of life. I can’t even begin to know how that must hurt.”

Miles was nonplussed, though he tried to conceal it. Elmer was quite uncharacteristically outside himself, transcending his own misery in a way Miles had never witnessed. “Elmer…” This time the silence was awkward. “That’s so kind of you. Thank-you.” He paused again to find words for his feelings. Slowly, they revealed themselves. “You know, I haven’t really opened up to very many people about what it was like. The Bishop, because he’s an old friend, and my kids, but not really anyone else.” Miles took another moment to continue regrouping, and Elmer was entirely focused in his listening. “It’s not that people haven’t been sympathetic. They have. They’ve been wonderful. But nobody has nailed it the way you just did: You and Clare grew old together. Sharon and I won’t, and that’s the mother lode for the pain I’ve been coping with. And you nailed it. I guess I haven’t really given anyone else a chance, but you nailed it, Elmer. You nailed it for sure.”

Now it was Elmer’s turn to lose a grip on his composure. “Damn!” he cried, with a lump in his throat and a tear dropping down the right side of his face. “Now look what I’ve done. I was trying to atone for my social faux pas and now I’ve ended up invading your privacy. Damn, I’m sorry all over again.”

Miles laughed through his own moistened eyes. “Please don’t worry about it, Elmer,” he countered reassuringly. “I’m actually very grateful.” Miles paused again briefly before continuing, “But I don’t want to take advantage of you. I’m the one who came here wearing the minister’s hat. Tell me how things have been with you since we last met. I know, of course…well, hell, you’re sick and you’re in bed and you can’t walk. ‘Other than that, Mrs Lincoln, how did you enjoy the play?’ But, I mean…” Miles could scarcely believe he was about to ask this question. The Elmer Johnson he had known for so many years would not have known how to begin to answer it. But this morning he had an intuition that things were different, and he felt emboldened to take a pastoral risk. Perhaps he was wrong and would soon regret it, but it seemed an opportune moment to explore uncharted territory in his relationship with this particular member of his flock. “…how are you on the inside? How are things with your soul?”

Elmer turned his head toward the french doors along the dining room wall that ran parallel to his bed, and looked out on the garden that had once been his and Clare’s pride and joy, but which he had not been able to work in for the better part of a decade. If Miles had been connected to a polygraph at that moment, there would have been a flurry of activity on the readout. Then Elmer turned back and looked straight at his pastor. “That’s a hard question to give a simple answer to, Father. But I’m glad you asked it, because stuff has been going on. I’m not sure what, exactly, but stuff has been going on.” Miles said nothing, simply giving an encouraging nod and the faintest of smiles as he stroked his chin, which Elmer understood correctly as tacit permission to proceed. “You know, I’ve always believed in God. I can’t ever remember a moment of not believing in God. I never had an ‘atheist phase’ or anything like that. Hell, Masons believe in God. I’m sorry, Father, I don’t mean to imply that Episcopalians don’t believe in God, of course! But it’s a really big deal with Masons; you know that, I’m sure.”

“Yes, Elmer, I think I know what you’re getting at.” Miles was anxious to facilitate the continuance of Elmer’s main narrative without taking a detour into Freemasonry.

His effort paid off. “So, I’ve always believed in God. But, I have to tell you, I haven’t always been so sure that God believed in me, if you know what I mean. Especially since I got sick, especially since I got this goddamned disease—I can say that, can’t I? I’m not even trying to be flippant or sacrilegious. I know—you know—that’s the way I talk without giving it a second thought, but this time I mean it…well, I mean it literally. And that’s part of what’s been dawning on me: God didn’t make me sick; God doesn’t get some kind of perverted thrill out of Elmer Johnson having Muscular Dystrophy. I never would have said that I blame God for everything that’s happened to me. But I did. Without my even knowing it, I did. And, for some reason, I don’t anymore. I don’t know what that reason is, to tell you the truth, but I don’t blame God anymore.”

Miles sat back in his chair, as if to fully absorb and digest what he had heard. Then he allowed himself a broad grin as he responded, “Well, I’m sure God is relieved to hear that!”

Elmer laughed deeply. “I’m sure you’re right, Father. But there’s another side to the coin. I’m getting the feeling that, all the while I was blaming God, God was never blaming me for blaming him. Does that make any sense? For the first time in my life, I feel like God’s on my side, in my corner, not waiting for me to screw up so he can zap me, but on my side, pulling for me, giving me the benefit of the doubt.”

“Elmer, it sounds to me like you’ve had a genuine bona fide spiritual experience,” Miles concluded. “Who’d have thought that would happen to you at your age, huh?”

Elmer’s demeanor turned very pensive once again. “I like to think you might have thought as much, Father Coverdale. I know I’ve been a pain in the royal you-know-what, but you’ve never given up on me. You’ve come here over and over again to hear me blather on about stuff I don’t even really know anything about. Why would you do that unless you thought you would eventually get through to me someday?”

Now Miles was humbled beyond the point of knowing what to say just at that moment. To fully admit the truth would be embarrassing. He had continued to visit Elmer Johnson because he believed it was his duty to do so, and he was, if anything, a man who did his duty. But he had long since surrendered any fantasy that, this side of Eternity, Elmer would have the sort of breakthrough that would lift him above his own ego and his own constricted universe of wishful certitude. He had been wrong, it was clear now. God was having the last laugh not only on Elmer Johnson, but on Elmer Johnson’s parish priest as well. He was humbled indeed—as if he actually needed to be humbled on this day, of all days; outside the passion of the moment he might have thought to wonder what God could possibly be thinking—yet, there was a sweetness to the humbling that one does not ordinarily associate with the experience. It was as if he sensed permission to tap a small portion of the stream of divine mercy that was flowing toward his parishioner and divert it in his own direction.

“Elmer, how ’bout we say our prayers now?” This was Miles’ accustomed verbal shorthand for initiating the transition from general conversation to the business of the visit—administering Holy Communion. On this occasion, it was also his way of mentally regrouping, assimilating what Elmer had revealed about his recent growth in the knowledge and love of the Lord. It was a great deal more than he had expected, and at the same time some good bit less than he would wish for—for Elmer, or for anyone committed to his pastoral charge. To be speaking of a living relationship with God was a huge step. A fully Christian spirituality factors in the name of Jesus somehow and somewhere. Yet, Miles was ready to declare victory on this day and save the Jesus discussion for his next visit. He deftly removed the pyx from his breast pocket and slipped it out of its case. Taking Elmer’s hand in his own and squeezing it firmly, he began reciting the Collect for Purity: “Almighty God, unto whom all hearts are open, all desires known, and from whom no secrets are hid…”

On the short drive back to St Alban’s, he realized that his visit with Elmer was in fact the answer to his wordless but heartfelt prayer in the Lady Chapel earlier that morning. God had not stopped believing in his servant Miles Coverdale. He was facing the valley of the shadow of death—unresolved grief, a daughter’s alienation, a son’s imploding life, and now the burden of proving a negative in combating Tracy Lindholm’s false accusations. But he was sensing the reality of those words that had crossed his lips in more than two-and-a-half decades of ordained ministry, most recently just minutes earlier as he blessed Elmer Johnson before walking out the door: “The peace of God, which passes understanding….”

When he opened the door of the parish office, Donna looked up at him, a phone on her ear and a pen in her hand, with which she was writing on a message pad. “Oh, wait a minute. He just walked in the door. Would like to talk to him in person?” Brief pause. “OK, hold just a minute please.” She pressed the appropriate button and replaced her handset on its cradle. “I’m sorry, Father, I should have asked you first, I guess. It’s Dean Craig at Nashotah House. Would you like to take his call? I can think of something to tell him if not.”

“No, no, not a problem. Put him through.” He proceeded straight into his own study and closed the door behind him, remarking to himself ruefully in an instant that even if he and the vestry had not procrastinated responding to the polite demand from the church’s liability insurance company, in the wake of skyrocketing claims alleging clergy sexual abuse, to replace all but the frame with clear glass, it certainly served to protect no one if no one else was in the building. What could Fred Craig possibly want? Whatever it was, it would be a welcome distraction from the details of his not-so-ordinary life. His finger hit the “Hold” button at about the same instant his body slumped into the high-backed desk chair. “Fred, how nice to hear from you. To what do I owe the honor?”

“Well, the honor’s all mine, and it’s good to hear your voice, too, Miles. Listen, I’m just doing my usual anal-retentive dean thing, you know, and trying to line up a few guest chapel preachers for the Michaelmas Term.” (Nashotah House followed the slightly quaint English custom of naming the fall academic semester for the feast day that falls near its commencement—St Michael and All Angels on September 29.) “Anyway, I’ve got a very special one with your name on it, if you’re available and so inclined.”

“Fred, I’m flattered. You know, I haven’t preached in St Mary’s Chapel since I was a student there. It would be a real thrill. What did you have in mind?” He meant every word of what he said. Truthfully, he had felt just a tiny bit slighted over the years, since he was a relatively accomplished alum of “the House,” and so close by, but never invited to be a guest chapel preacher, of which there were probably thirty or so during an academic year.

Dean Craig continued, “Well, it’s about time we rectified that, and I can’t imagine what’s taken us so long. So let me make it up to you by not giving you one of those sets of apostles nobody knows anything about, like Ss Simon and Jude.”

“Actually, Fred, I have quite fond memories of Ss Simon and Jude. One year when I was there, the organist got away with a very subtle improvisation during Communion that used the chorus of “Hey, Jude” in the pedals!”

The dean chortled, “I’m sure it wasn’t the first time, nor the last. But I’ve got a good one for you—at least I think it’s a good one. I hope you will too. I’d like you to preach on All Souls’ Day—November 2, of course. It falls on a Tuesday this year, I think.”

“All Souls, huh?” Miles paused for a moment, but Dean Craig made no attempt to fill the void. “Tell me, Fred, do you all still do the whole deal? I mean, with a Requiem Mass in the chapel and then a procession up to the cemetery?”

“You bet we do! We may have gone soft on a few things since the old days, but we still do All Souls right.” Then his enthusiasm was suddenly tempered. “Oh, my God, Miles. Should I be feeling like an idiot now, or what? It just slipped my mind that the last time you were here was for your wife’s burial. You know, nothing’s set in stone. I can find another date for you.”

Miles jumped in. “Oh, no Fred, not on my account. And don’t feel bad. It’s not a problem. I want to do it. I’m glad you asked me, and I’m glad you still do all the rigmarole. I want to do it.” Once again, he spoke the truth from his heart. But this time, he didn’t exactly know why.