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.
