Five Wives

by Joan Thomas

  Nicely done, Abigail, David thinks, smiling up at her. Because it’s a fact that Betty didn’t place a lot of value in the grandmother role. A kid wasn’t going to get gingerbread and hand-knit mittens from Elisabeth Elliot.

  Abby tells the story of a family trip to the shore near Portland. She gets a laugh describing Betty walking across the sand in a tweed jacket and leather pumps. “I was an eight-year-old in a polka-dot swimsuit, and I wanted her to help me build a sand castle. Instead, she taught me to write ‘Jesus Loves You’ in Chinese. It’s not that easy to make Chinese characters legible when you’re squatting on a beach, drawing in coarse sand with a piece of driftwood. ‘You have to make them big,’ my grandma said. ‘That’s the trick.’ I think for Betty it was the trick to everything. For a woman born in 1926, my grandmother had a really big life.”

  Abby’s voice is calm and natural, and she never glances down at her script. This is a speech that comes from the heart. She’s always been such a fantastic role model for the other girls in the church. That blue dress—raised by a single dad, how did she develop this lovely and modest style? Dress as if Jesus is your boyfriend, she jokes.

  “It’s been a few years since my grandmother and I have been able to talk, but I guess I’m luckier than most grandkids, because Betty left a shelf full of her books for me to read. I hope with time I’ll understand some of the contradictions of her life. She sat on platforms with world-famous leaders of the church, and she was a better speaker—in my opinion—than pretty much all of them, and yet she believed in women being subservient to men. She wrote books that questioned the way Christian missions operate and yet she accepted the tragedy of Operation Auca and the senseless killings that turned her into a writer.”

  David’s misheard, it seems—but beside him, Martha draws in a sharp breath.

  “When her young husband died, Betty said, ‘I prayed that God would keep Jim safe, but the Lord had something better in mind.’ Imagine being as intelligent as Elisabeth Elliot was, and as willing to think deeply about everything, and then in the end to still have faith that terrible and even bizarre tragedies are planned and carried out by God.”

  David leans forward. This speech could be saved—Now we see through a glass, darkly! Fervently, he telegraphs the words up to the stage. But Abby never looks in his direction. She veers into a secular children’s book, that nonsensical Alice thing.

  “It was my favourite book—I actually know most of it by heart. My grandma liked it too, and when she visited, we would take parts. Grandma would be the Red Queen and I would be Alice. I would say, ‘You can’t believe impossible things. There’s no use trying.’ And Grandma would say, ‘You just haven’t had enough practice. When I was young, I worked at it for half an hour a day. Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.’”

  Not a Scripture passage, no. Asked to speak at Elisabeth Elliot’s funeral, his daughter is quoting Alice in Bloody Wonderland.

  IT SEEMS A sea change has taken place, but he was clueless until the water started lapping at his ankles. It’s almost a year since Abby graduated from high school. Most of her friends from the church left town last fall, went to Bible college or nursing school, or to build clinics in Nigeria out of sun-dried bricks, and Abby (their undisputed queen) stayed home, sleeping till noon, tanning on the trampoline in the backyard if there was sun in the afternoon, avoiding David. It had always been his dream to send her to Wheaton College, but she was pushing for the University of Oregon, and he couldn’t bring himself to cough up money to watch her morph into one of those vegan hipsters hanging out in Portland’s coffee shops, trying to pass their godlessness off as social justice, harassing staff about the purity and provenance of the chocolate sprinkled on their soy lattes. So he and Abby were at a stalemate with regards to her education. He tried hard to get her involved at the church (they could have cobbled together a job in the education programs), but she wouldn’t bite. She worked as a waitress for a while, not remotely what he’d imagined of his brilliant daughter, but the café shut down. It was all complicated by Sean Youderian, one of her Operation Auca “cousins.” He worked mostly in LA, in the Christian film industry. Abby talked about moving to California if and when they got engaged. She was awfully young to be thinking of marriage, but David saw the rightness of her and Sean together, given the tragic past they shared, given their many talents; you had to think God would use them powerfully. And then suddenly Sean was out of the picture, and Abby was restless and full of attitude. One of her lifelong friends stopped coming to the Portland Church of God. He joined a worship community that met above a nail salon. He wanted Abby to go with him, and David could actually have lived with that for a while, anything to keep her in the fold, but she mocked her friend, she said, “Dude thinks gluten-free communion wafers are going to be enough to lure me in.” One night when she wasn’t home by the agreed-upon time, David went to the door and changed the security code so she couldn’t slip in unobserved, and when the alarm started to shriek around two o’clock, he got up to find her in the entrance, flushed and confused, punching numbers randomly into the keypad. Leaning in to help her, he could smell alcohol. She was laughing inappropriately, and after he got the siren turned off, he wouldn’t let her go to her room. He steered her to the living room, recalling stories he’d heard of inebriated people who threw up and aspirated their vomit and died. “Oh, for crying out loud,” she protested, but she kicked off her sandals and sank onto the couch. He sat in the armchair and asked her how she’d got home. “Will,” she said. Eventually she volunteered that Will was a guy she’d worked with at Fernando’s, the café.

  “You’re seeing somebody new?”

  “I’m not seeing him. He’s gay, Dad. He’s my best friend at the moment.” She made a rueful face. “Hopefully he never finds out about My Two Dads.”

  “What?”

  “Remember? That protest we held outside the library. About that children’s book? What was the sign I carried?” She sighed and closed her eyes and tipped back her head. After a minute she said, “‘Gay Sex Is Sin, Christ Can Set You Free.’”

  At that hour, in those circumstances, he was not about to take her on. He sat until she’d stretched out and seemed to be falling asleep. She’s going to get cold, he thought, and he got up and pulled the light blanket his mother had crocheted off the back of the couch and stooped to drape it over her. Again he smelled the booze on her breath—a pollution, it sickened him. Oh, his lovely daughter, his motherless girl. He sat back on the chair, thinking, God has his ways of humbling us. All over the nation, parents endure scenes like this, their children coming home drunk, or worse. Oh, darling, tell me what to do.

  Possibly he uttered this aloud, because Abby opened her eyes and looked at him neutrally.

  “I was just thinking about your mother,” he said. “Sweetheart, it would break her heart to see you like this.”

  She muttered something he couldn’t make out.

  “Abby, is this about Sean?”

  “What?”

  “Are you missing Sean?”

  “No, Dad. No. Cripes.”

  “I’m hoping you two will patch things up.”

  “I don’t think so. Sean’s a total hypocrite.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You don’t want to know.”

  “Yes, I do.”

  “Well, he was so hung up on me being his virgin bride, but I know what he was up to in LA.”

  Oh, on every side lay perils.

  Her voice came through the dark again. “Dad, tonight. I had a great time. Just a little too great. It was . . . it’s nothing.”

  “It’s not nothing, Abby. Maybe other kids can afford to experiment a bit, but God has called you out in a particular way. You carry a glorious legacy. Everybody knows you—not just here, but all across the nation. Even as a child, you inspired a lot of people. You need to think about what that means. Satan is not going to let God’s Kingdom be advanced without a fig
ht. The powers of darkness are going to go after you in a vicious way.”

  “The powers of darkness!” She put a hand over her face, genuinely overcome with laughter. “You can’t be serious! Oh, the powers of darkness! Maybe you should hire an exorcist!”

  He got up and said good night and went to his room. He’d lobbed his two most potent hand grenades in her direction (her mother, the devil), he had nothing left.

  3

  ABBY WAKES TO THE BUZZ of her dad’s alarm, glad to be in her own bed after three nights in the Wheaton College dorm, and lies listening to the small sounds of his morning routine. The toilet flushes, the shower starts up. He mutters to the dog. Silence while he has devotions in his room. Then he’s in the kitchen, his spoon hitting the sides of his cereal bowl. The electronic chirp of the TV (he’s carried his coffee to the living room) and the hectic voices of news anchors. Every morning he watches half an hour of news. Conscientiously. As a pastor in contemporary America, he likes to say, you can focus on the everyday concerns of the faithful (“What would Jesus buy?” Abby suggests) or you can try to provoke your congregation to take on the world and its sorrows. Her dad has always aspired to be the latter sort of pastor.

  The TV goes off. His briefcase slides across the tile floor in the side entrance. The door slams. Abby holds her breath for a minute and then she turns her face into her pillow and lets out the sobs she’s been holding in her throat. Betty is so alive in her mind this morning. A young Betty—there she is, straight out of a photograph in one of her books, striding barefoot along a mud path in the rainforest, a flock of children running to keep up. Looking hungry, eager for life and for experience. Abby loved her because she recognized that look. At the funeral, she so wanted to speak the truth, even if it meant upsetting some of the people there. She felt close to Betty as she wrote her speech, Betty who never backed off from challenging others. It was as if she was channelling Betty’s courage. But afterwards! No one admitted to being upset by what she’d said—they just wanted to point out how upset Betty would have been. And they were right, of course. It was the wrong occasion for a speech like that. She has no judgment, it’s obvious.

  Her sobs subside and she hears Gizmo whining at her door. She wipes her face on the quilt and gets up to let him in. “Hey, Dogma,” she says, dropping a hand down to him. He jumps onto the bed and she scratches his tummy and goes down the hall to the bathroom. When she returns, he’s still writhing on his back. “You little tramp,” she says, indulging him with another scratch.

  Her weekend bag’s on the floor, still not unpacked. She sits on the bed and picks up her phone. Last night, chilled by her dad’s silence, she decided she’d drive up to Seattle this afternoon and stay with Olive for a bit. But instead of calling Olive, she presses Will’s number. They haven’t known each other very long, but he’s the only Portland friend she missed during the trip to Wheaton. The day she met him, maybe three months ago, she felt a lurch of longing to know him better. The easy, humorous way he had of holding your eye, and the solemnity with which he served out hamburger platters, as if he was a professional waiter at a bistro in Paris. He’s the first gay friend she’s ever had (well, that she knows of ), and he is so honest and smart and clear about who he is. He has a force of character that fills her with admiration.

  To her delight, he picks up. “So you’re back.”

  “Yep.”

  “How was it?”

  “Well, it was, you know, a funeral.”

  “Did your ex show up?”

  “No, he did not.”

  “And how did your speech go?”

  “Oh, it was doomed from the beginning. I couldn’t quite say what I wanted to say, but I pissed people off anyway. My dad won’t speak to me. The flight home was brutal.” This would be the point to plunge into the whole story, but Will lacks the context to understand it. She’s been cautious about how much she tells him. Back when her church staged its homophobic protest in front of the library, Abby was interviewed on the radio, and she has this horror that one day Will is going to be listening to her talk and he’s going to think, I know that voice from somewhere. Where have I heard that voice before? “Anyway, tell me what you’re up to.”

  “I’m pretending to work on my thesis. You know, reading cool shit online and telling myself it’s relevant.”

  “Like?”

  “Well, I just read an article about a group of Buddhist monks on the east coast of Canada. They’ve been saving money for a long time, and they went to a seafood wholesaler and bought six hundred pounds of lobsters heading to restaurants and rented a truck to carry them back to the ocean.”

  “That’s so cool. I hope they cut the rubber bands off their claws.”

  “I’m sure they did. And then they lowered them one by one into a little bay where lobster fishing isn’t allowed.”

  “Will they stay there? Maybe they’ll head right back to their old breeding grounds.”

  “It’s always possible. But that’s outside the purview of an act of charity. The monks did their thing and the lobsters . . .” His voice trails off.

  Abby calls up his hazel eyes and his thoughtful face. She pictures him in the yellow robe of a Buddhist monk, crouching on a rock, granting a lobster its perilous freedom on the vast dark floor of the Atlantic Ocean.

  He asks her whether she’s coming to the library today. He’s a grad student in philosophy and he can’t figure out why she’s not in university.

  “Nah, I’m grounded.”

  He laughs.

  “You think I’m kidding.”

  “You’re grounded.”

  “Well, I’m confined to my room by my father’s righteous anguish. We have an appointment at two this afternoon. For a formal reaming-out. It’s an old tactic of his, to maximize the guilt and stress.” Will does not live at home. He got a grant for grad school and has a basement apartment in the Lloyd area. “You have no idea how lucky you are.”

  “Oh, I kind of do. And even when I was living at home, my parents didn’t pull shit like that.”

  “Like, can I ask—how did they take it when you came out? I mean, if it’s not too private.”

  “It’s not private. It was no big deal. My mom suggested it to me, actually. I had a huge crush on a guy in junior high, somebody named Joel who, you might be fascinated to know, had a ferret as a pet, and she raised the possibility that guys might be my thing, and we talked about what that would mean. And she was right. About all of it.”

  We’re from different planets, Abby thinks with a fresh surge of emotion. She sits with Will’s voice in her ear, widening her eyes to keep her tears from dropping, and feels how alone she is, how deeply bereft. I have nothing, she thinks. No past, no character, no truth to guide me. There’s no way forward. It comes to her that what she needs is a ceremony. Like her baptism, when sunlight streamed through narrow windows onto the immersion font and she stepped down four cement steps into cold water, her green choir gown blackening, and Pastor Dave put one hand on her forehead and one hand on her back, and she surrendered and sank backwards, dying to her old life, rising to a new.

  They hang up, and Abby lies back on the bed. I’ll get on my bike, she thinks. I’ll ride and ride. By the time I see Dad, my head will be totally empty and I’ll be too tired to fight. I’ll go to Forest Park. Or is there time to do the Willamette Loop? She turns her eyes toward her clock.

  On the bedside table stands a photo in a silver frame, an old black-and-white taken by a famous photographer. An iconic photo, at least in her world. A brown-skinned man walks up a path in the jungle with a little girl on his shoulders. The girl’s blond curls are a splash of silver in the dim forest. The two of them are naked; the photo’s taken from the back. The little girl is Abby’s mom, and the man is an Auca named Nincambo, an Amazonian Indian from a tribe that eluded contact for centuries. He was involved in the massacre of the missionaries, this has been established. He may even have led it, he may have been the one who slaughtered the little girl’s
father. And Sharon told Abby that in those days she called him Baepo, the Auca word for Daddy.

  Abby lies and rests her eyes on this photo. All the meanings they impose upon it don’t begin to drain it of its power.

  THE AUCA. IT’S a habit to use that word, but the people her family served are actually the Waorani (or the Huaorani, if you are writing in Spanish). Abby has only one memory of meeting Waorani people. Just before her mom died, when Abby was twelve, her great-aunt Rachel Saint brought two converts from Ecuador to America on a fundraising tour, and their nearest stop was a church in Seattle. Abby’s mother really wanted to see them, so they drove to Seattle for the day.

  The Ecuadorean contingent was late arriving at the church; their flight had been delayed. Abby and her parents were led to a front pew and then they waited. Sharon was terribly nauseated that night, and the thinness of her face under her peachy-blond wig gave her the look of an aged Barbie. The pew felt very hard. Abby sat close so her mother could lean on her, feeling wretched that they hadn’t thought to bring a cushion for Sharon to sit on. She was nursing a childlike fantasy of what lay ahead, something momentous for her mother, a scene in which the Auca warriors would come up to them, tall and fierce and feathered, and bow their heads and beg Sharon’s forgiveness on behalf of their people. And Sharon would say something like, Our Lord Jesus Christ forgives you, it doesn’t matter about me.

  But they were so late that finally the organizers asked Pastor Dave if he would fill in, and he willingly took the podium. No doubt everybody in that audience already knew the story of Operation Auca, but Abby could feel how moved they were, hearing Nate Saint’s very own son tell it. Her father was unusually emotional himself. “I have a family now, and I love them more than life itself. And so I think about those five men who gave up their safe and comfortable homes in America, and went into the jungle in obedience to God’s call, and I’m in awe at their courage, at their willingness to pay the supreme price, so that these lost souls might hear the gospel. ‘Who will go?’ God called, and bravely they replied, ‘Take me, Lord.’”