Good-bye and Amen

by Beth Gutcheon

  Norman weathered that, but he did then get out in front of his constituents in a couple of ways. He took a stand in favor of gay marriage that he could have prepared them for better than he did, and he published a pamphlet called A Priest Asks, about the spirit world. Why, he asks, if we believe that Jesus’ spirit was personally intact after the death of his body, so that he could appear to people and everything, wouldn’t we also believe that something similar happens to the rest of us? If Jesus’ life is a pattern for us to follow? Of course, some people found it threatening, and some found it plain nuts. Then a couple of years after we got there, Norman went off campaigning to be bishop of New Jersey. It was Hawaii all over again. He made the final cut, he was by far the best preacher, and he had great strengths the diocese needed, but it went to the archdeacon of the diocese. Another inside candidate. Norman took it hard. Really hard. And people in the parish didn’t like thinking that Norman saw Good Shepherd as a booby prize. Why should they? They think Sweetwater is paradise.

  Norman Faithful Her nest is new, since the family lottery. She’s got this old chair that was her father’s. It needs recovering so she had some grisly quilt draped over it and somehow she’s shaping it so it kind of fills in around her when she climbs into it. I’m pretty sure she hops in there to build it with twigs and scraps of bunny tail fluff in her beak.

  Rebecca Vogelsang Of course I’ve only been in Sweetwater a few years. But Good Shepherd has been my church home from the first. Father Faithful is a gifted preacher and a gifted counselor. He worked with me and Clark when we first got here. We had stretched to buy a house on the Heights with a lawn and a pool when Clark was moved here, and then he got fired. It was a bad time. Father Faithful didn’t just comfort and pray with us, he got involved. He’d call Clark up and say, “I was thinking about you, let’s have lunch.” I started teaching Sunday school and Clark eventually went on the vestry.

  We might have moved back to Cincinnati if it hadn’t been for Norman, even though the children were settled in school and we loved the community. Norman kept saying if we prayed and trusted the Lord, Clark would get another job, and of course he did.

  It’s true, Norman can be erratic. He’s not one to lead meditation hikes or go on prayer retreats, and sometimes he moves too fast. He lives in the world; he gives a hundred percent to the Here and Now. There are plenty of us broken and needing healing walking around the A&P, it doesn’t take a pilgrimage to find us. Probably he gets too involved. Maybe he acts before he’s thought everything through. But he was a lifesaver for us.

  When I heard that Lindsay Tautsch was going around in her vestments saying, “You know, I always have a sermon ready in my pocket in case Father Faithful can’t perform,” it made me very angry.

  Calvin Sector Of course Norman Faithful’s been known to take a drink. So have I. So have you. I mean it’s an old joke: where two or three Episcoplians are gathered in His name, there’s bound to be a fifth. There’s no need to hold the man to an inhuman standard. He’s not supposed to be Jesus Christ. Who liked his wine as well as the next man, by the by.

  Monica Faithful I left for Dundee the very end of June. Sweetwater was lovely, lush and green. The back fence at the rectory is covered in honeysuckle, and when it blooms it fills the air with scent and the neighborhood children come over to pull the stems out of the blossoms backward to get that pure drop of nectar on their tongues. Of course the bees are busy; I love the sound of them. And the beech and oak and maple trees on our street form great green vaulted ceilings above our heads. But it does get horribly hot, and we only have air-conditioning in our bedroom. The church is cool, of course.

  Rebecca Vogelsang And keep in mind, all last winter Norman had the worry of moving his mother to a nursing home. She broke her hip and they thought that would kill her but it didn’t. But she couldn’t live alone after that. She couldn’t keep her pills straight or remember if she’d eaten. Norman was brought to tears when he talked about it. He’s an only child, he had to do it all himself. Well, of course, Nicky helped when she wasn’t too busy with her own family.

  Norman found a very nice place for Mrs. F., and Norman was paying for it all. Three weeks after they moved her in, the place called up and said they couldn’t keep her, she had too much dementia and they weren’t equipped for it. He had to go all through it again. Find a new place, who knows how many trips back and forth. The new one is the kind of place where you have to give them all your assets and you never get them back. Not that she has much, so Norman had to take care of that too. It was terribly hard on him. And Monica just left him. Off she went to Maine to spend the summer with her people.

  Monica Faithful When I got to Leeway Cottage, I walked into the front bedroom with my suitcases and a half-naked girl walked out of the bathroom. She was obviously living there. She looked startled to see me.

  Alison Boyd I was plenty surprised, standing in my undies. I said, “May I help you?”

  Monica Faithful I said, “I’m Monica Moss. This is my house. And you are…?”

  A summer or two ago, when my parents arrived, they found clear signs that someone had been living in the back of the house. A bed was unmade and there was a big gruntie floating in the toilet. I thought, My heavens, this one has some crust, moving right into the best guest room.

  Alison Boyd I said, “OH! Aunt Monica…no one knew when you were arriving. I’m Alison, Adam’s friend.”

  Monica Faithful I was nonplussed. Shirley certainly knew when I was coming, and I said so.

  Alison Boyd I hadn’t seen Shirley yet. Eleanor and Bobby hadn’t seemed to know, and since they suddenly had a full house, they told us to go to Leeway. We had just gotten there the night before.

  Monica went straight to the phone.

  Eleanor Applegate I said, “Ohmigod, are you here? I spoke to Norman three days ago and he said he didn’t know when you were leaving. Didn’t he tell you?”

  Monica Faithful Of course he didn’t tell me, when had she ever known Norman to give me a message? Eleanor said that Adam and Alison came early as a surprise and she still had a coven of houseguests, and did I mind terribly? I didn’t, but was I supposed to let them share a bedroom? She said, “Well, they do live together in Washington,” and I said that didn’t answer my question, and she said, “Then do whatever Mother would have done, isn’t that the rule for Leeway this summer?” So I told this girl she should move into Mother and Papa’s bedroom since it would creep me out to sleep there, and I would take the big guest room, which she’d been in, and Adam could sleep across the hall. I went down to the kitchen where Shirley was having a high old time feeding Adam blueberry pancakes. I sent her up to change the sheets for me in “my” bedroom. Of course I spent the rest of the week bumping into one or the other at midnight or the crack of dawn, creeping back and forth across the hall.

  Adam Applegate The next thing that happened was, Nika noticed the grandparents’ ashes weren’t on the mantelpiece where they had been left last fall. Housewide crisis. Shirley said she hadn’t touched them. I asked Marlon, the caretaker—he’s a little slow, and he remembered taking some old tins to the dump but he couldn’t describe them. Nika was in a state.

  Monica Faithful I rushed into El’s house, a wreck, to tell her we’d lost the ashes, when I saw the urns on her mantelpiece. I said, “Why didn’t you tell me you took those?”

  Eleanor Applegate Yelled is more like it.

  Monica Faithful And she said, “Because you just walked in the door!” And that was true. So I calmed down and said I was sorry and she said she was too, but it wasn’t…You know, it wasn’t a very nice way to begin the summer. Not even counting the “who’s been sleeping in my bed” issue. I felt like an hysteric. Ugh.

  Once I got to know her, I liked Alison very much. She had a lovely sense of humor. She seemed a little lost, in want of mothering; her own mother was dead. We had some delightful talks on the porch while Adam was off playing golf with his childhood buddies. Dundee can be a bit much when you�
��re new. There’s a limit to how many times you want to hear the story about the time Colin Gantry threw up in the wastebasket, or the time Gordon Maitland, racing his ketch in a gale, handed his houseguest the steering wheel, which he’d secretly unscrewed, and said, “You take the helm, I’m going below.”

  I was sorry when Adam and Alison moved back over to the Salt Pond.

  Eleanor Applegate When my houseguests finally left, we had a dinner for Adam and Alison. I was hoping they might announce their engagement. The party kept growing, though, as it turned out more of Adam’s friends were in town and then suddenly Edie and Sylvie showed up for the weekend, Sylvie with a beau. At that point, we decided to move the whole feast to Leeway, where the table can expand to seat something huge, twenty people or so. Nika and I did all the cooking and the kids helped with everything—duh, half of them are professional food people. Edie is going to chef school. Even Bobby helped.

  Monica Faithful I was afraid it would feel haunted to have a dinner party in Mother and Papa’s house without them, but you know what? It was great. It felt as if we were finally grown-ups ourselves. What are we, in our fifties? I liked Sylvie’s beau, Edie made fabulous tartes tatin, and Alison was adorable. She was working hard to keep straight which of the friends were cousins, and who had had summer romances…you could see her falling in love with it, the Brigadoon effect.

  After dinner, when the table was cleared, we played UpJenkins. Mother and Papa’s happy spirits were hovering. They were back on the Leeway mantelpiece; Eleanor brought them with her; she said they hadn’t wanted to miss the season opener.

  At that point Alison was beside me and I noticed she was wearing a very striking ring, a huge amethyst in an old-fashioned setting with little pearls. She took it off and showed it to me. It had been her mother’s.

  In the middle of the night, I got it, why I couldn’t get over that ring. Patsy Starr had had a ring exactly like that when we were in boarding school. I’d been fascinated by the way the stone changed color in different lights. It could look blue or purple or even green. I’d never seen an amethyst before. We weren’t supposed to bring valuable things to school, plus I was surprised at someone our age having it at all.

  I hadn’t seen Patsy in donkey’s years, so the next day I called the alumnae office and got her number. We had a great catch-up. Finally I said, “Patsy, remember that antique ring you had when we were in school?” She said it was made for her grandmother, and why did I ask? I told her, my nephew’s girl blah blah, and there was a long silence. I was thinking, is Alison related to her somehow?

  Finally she said, “When I was first married, I was at a dinner party in New York. We got to talking about the jewelry at the table, where our pieces came from, what the family stories were. Someone suggested we pass them around, so we did. And when that was over, my ring had disappeared.”

  I couldn’t speak for a moment. Way creepy. I asked the obvious question.

  She said, “What could I do? I couldn’t ruin the party. I told my hostess as I was leaving. We went back to the dining room and crawled around on the floor; it wasn’t there. She put her staff on the watch for it, you know, they cut open the vacuum cleaner bags the next day and so forth, but it never turned up.”

  Patsy asked me the name of Alison’s mother. I told her. And was she at the dinner party? She was. They were friends. Patsy went to her funeral.

  I asked her what she wanted me to do. She said, “Tell Alison her mother had beautiful taste.”

  Norman Faithful We tried to have a phone call every couple of days once Nicky left for Dundee, but it was hard. By the time she got in from some dinner party, I was often in bed. Naturally, I went down to visit Mother whenever I could. Things weren’t cooling down at all this July. The minister over at the United Presby Church is a sort of cult leader in a cassock. They have people coming in buses from Ohio and West Virginia to his services. He does a huge nine o’clock and eleven o’clock on Sundays, plus there are youth services, there are sing-alongs, even a Friday evening Speaking in Tongues. They’d bought a house next door to the church and torn it down to make room for more parking. The family that sold them the house was irate, and the village wasn’t well pleased either, that the lot was removed from the tax rolls. It wasn’t as if these busloads of born-again Protestants were spending money in town.

  Naturally a lot of the Presby old guard were coming over to worship with us, but that was not an unmixed blessing. They weren’t used to common chalice communion; they were upset that we have two side aisles in the nave instead of a center aisle. Brides don’t like it. I had deputations of new members coming to get me to tear out our pews. One family whose daughter is getting married this fall even offered to pay for it. The minute word of that gets out, deputations of old members would arrive to tell me their grandparents would spin in their graves…I saw a hole in my schedule, and decided I could take a weekend and get out of Dodge.

  Monica Faithful It was perfect. Norman told me on a Wednesday he would be there Friday night. The weather was gorgeous and likely to stay that way all weekend. Nora was living at Leeway because she was working on the famous family archive in the living room, on the big table where we usually did jigsaw puzzles. I didn’t want to tell her to clear out for the weekend, it would have embarrassed us both. You don’t want your beloved niece to picture you and the rector chasing each other naked through the bedrooms or Auntie Nika serving him breakfast in bed dressed like Fifi the French maid. Neither scenario was very likely, by the way, but we needed some alone time together, we really did. And the Rolling Stone was on her mooring as of that morning.

  I decided to surprise Norman and take him out for an overnight. We could spend the day on Beal Island, explore the old foundations, whatever he wanted, and then sail down to Loon Island. There is nothing in the world, nothing, like being at anchor in a wild cove, with only the light and the gulls and the rocking of the boat on the water to fill your senses.

  I planned the menus for two days. I drove to Union for supplies. I made egg salad and gazpacho and went to a special store for Norman’s favorite kind of beer, and got out the coolers and pillows and linens for the double bunk. I went down to the yacht club to bring the boat to the dock for water and ice and gas, and it was gone.

  Syl Conary Mrs. Faithful came up to the manager’s shack. She looked a little druv up, but she was perfectly polite. An angel from heaven compared to her mother. She says, “Syl, where is the Rolling Stone?” And I say, “Camden by now, I expect.” And she says, “Camden?” And I says, “Charlesie Applegate took her down this morning so Mutt Dodge can race her in the Retired Skippers’ tomorrow.” “I see,” she says. And after a while, she says Mutt Dodge was a great friend of her father’s and he’d be pleased. I told her I hope it wasn’t a problem and she said no, of course not, she was just surprised.

  Eleanor Applegate We were playing bridge with Lincoln and Janet Cluett Saturday night when Charlesie, Jeff Pease, and Auggie and Mutt Dodge walked in. They were still in their sailing clothes and Mutt was holding a trophy. Well, I just screamed.

  Lincoln Cluett We all crowded around them. I said, “You won? You won the Retired Skippers’ Race in a wooden boat?” Mutt looked so lit up I thought he might levitate. “I lay it all to my tactician,” he said, meaning Charlesie.

  Charlesie Applegate You should have seen it! The breeze died after we rounded the windward mark. Of course the plastic boats were all way ahead of us and we saw their chutes go flat one after another—they had sailed right into a hole. Mutt had me up on the bow with glasses scanning for wind. We still had some way on, which the leaders didn’t. I could see there was some texture on the water over on the other side of Egg Rock, so we made for that.

  Eleanor Applegate Mutt said, “We went spooking past the fleet while they lay becalmed. By the time they finally got some air back, we were around the leeward mark, doing eight knots to windward and we could see the finish line.” That’s a lo-o-ong speech for him, but he was grinning to b
eat the band.

  Bobby Applegate There were high fives all around, and El went out to the kitchen to heat up some dinner for them. Mutt and Auggie said they just came to drop Charlesie off, they had to get Jeff home and go tell their wives, but we made them stay for a glass of champagne. What pleased me as much as anything was seeing the new respect Mutt and Auggie had for Charlesie. Big difference from the way the summer started.

  Eleanor Applegate All I could think was how thrilled Papa would have been. I know Mutt was thinking it too, but neither of us said a word about it. He tried to give the trophy to me. “Now El,” he said, “it’s your boat, I was just the nut holding the tiller.” Bobby said, “Mutt, it’s called the Retired Skippers’ Race.” “Well, if you’re sure,” he said, “the wife will be some tickled.” And they went off. How old is Mutt, I wonder? Got to be late eighties…

  We gave up cards and sat around the dining room table while Charlesie ate and told us the whole story again, from starting gun to the look on the faces of the fleet hotshots as the old Stone went by them.

  Then Charlesie went to shower and get ready to go out and find his friends. We finally finished our rubber, and the Cluetts went home. Charlesie came down and we sent him off into the night to howl, except two minutes later he was back inside, looking as if someone had punched him. All the wind was knocked right out of his sails. You know they say you’re only as happy as your unhappiest child? When Charlesie gets knocked down he gets so down, and it takes him so long to climb out of it, it tears the heart right out of me.