Chapter 4

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“A move?”

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

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

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

“Ah, there we have it, don’t we?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Chapter 5

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

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!”