Good-bye and Amen

by Beth Gutcheon

  Lindsay Tautsch Father Faithful is a very poor delegator, that’s one problem. I’m his curate, I could proofread for him. But I didn’t go to Harvard, my language skills aren’t fancy enough for him. Result of that? He did a funeral for Mary Detweiler in June. It went fine. Then Edna Wally died on the Fourth of July (and why her children had a ninety-three-year-old woman out watching the parade in that heat, I don’t know) and they asked Norman to do the service. They’re Presbyterians but they’ve worshipped with us since the Reverend Macramé started his hootenanny over there. So Norman told Mrs. Cherry to do Search and Replace on the program from Mary Detweiler’s funeral, just change Mary to Edna and Detweiler to Wally, and then obviously didn’t proof it, because we found ourselves on our knees praying to the Virgin Edna. You wouldn’t think it was funny if it was your mother’s funeral.

  Calvin Sector Lindsay Tautsch came to see me the week I got back from Beaumaris. She came to the house with Bill Pafford. I’ve known Lindsay Tautsch since she was small. Her father was a champion bridge player and a mean drunk. She said that while Father Faithful was away, she had asked Bill to look at the books, because there were things she didn’t understand about the church finances. She just wanted to understand. Trying to grow in her job. I tell you the truth, I thought it was smarmy. Not very Christian of me, is it? I pointed out that she should have asked me first, and Bill said they didn’t want to bother me on vacation and didn’t think I’d mind. Really.

  Then Bill told me that he’d found that the rector’s discretionary fund was empty, and that there were unexplained withdrawals from other accounts, especially the building fund. I was disturbed, of course, but I pointed out that the discretionary fund was exactly that—to be used for any purposes the rector deemed worthy, at his discretion. That was a little smarmy of me, of course. But there are people in need who come to him in confidence, and we shouldn’t breach their trust. I thanked them and said that I’d get back to them. Then I went to Norman.

  I was on the search committee that had called Norman to Good Shepherd. He’s a marvelous preacher. I knew that he’d be working on his sermon on a Thursday afternoon, and he would know that it wasn’t a trifling matter that I chose that time to interrupt him.

  We sat in his study window overlooking the church close. I told him there were rumors that needed addressing, sooner rather than later, and that I was calling a special meeting of the vestry. He assured me that he knew about the rumors, but that what we had was a personnel problem. Things were stalled because the bishop was on vacation, but as soon as he was back, he would solve it. I was reassured by his manner, and we talked a little while about what to do. It would be tricky to counsel Lindsay Tautsch to move on, since she grew up here and has her following, but I’d seen enough to believe this might not be the right place for her.

  Norman Faithful It was Proper 19 that Sunday, one of my favorites. I decided to use the lesson from Ecclesiasticus. The older I get, the more the Apocrypha interest me. And I would ask the Reverend Tautsch to read the Gospel.

  The Gospel reading is from Matthew, about the king whose servant owes him ten thousand talents. The debtor weeps and begs and the king cancels the debt. Then the debtor runs into a man on the road who owed him a hundred denarii, and when the small debtor begs for more time, the big debtor grabs him by the throat and has him thrown into prison. The other servants report this to the king, and the king calls the big debtor a scoundrel and orders him tortured.

  Standing in the middle of the church reading that story should be an interesting experience for her.

  Monica Faithful Norman asked me to read the lesson. He hasn’t asked me to do that for a long time, but it annoys him when some won’t conclude a reading from the Apocrypha with “The Word of the Lord,” instead of “Here ends the lesson.” I’m not getting into the “divinely inspired or not” battle. Unless you want to talk about Swedenborg.

  I get terrible stage fright so I have to read the piece over and over before I get into the pulpit. I went around for the rest of the week declaiming it: “Rage and anger, these also I abhor, but a sinner has them ready at hand. Whoever acts vengefully will face the vengeance of the Lord, who keeps strict account of sins.”

  Calvin Sector The whole vestry was in church that Sunday. I can’t say it was a pleasant service; the trio my wife calls “the Unholy Trinity” were back. They’d left us for several months, driving into Pittsburgh every Sunday to worship at an Anglo-Catholic church to express their displeasure that Norman won’t use Rite One more than once a month. Well, Norman likes to leave a silent time during the Prayers of the People for members of the congregation to pray aloud. I didn’t think I was going to care for it, but I find that I do; the whole congregation learns that way that someone should be on their prayer lists, or that thanksgiving for a birth or a recovery of health is in order. It gets you out of your own little bubble of concerns, reminds you that we’re all part of the body of Christ. Anyway, during the Prayers of the People, the small fat one prayed loudly that our brother Chandler Spring be healed of his drunkenness and homosexuality. You could hear people gasp all over the church. Norman put a fast end to it. He swung right into the General Confession before the other two could chime in and pray for something worse. There was some confusion, people were thrashing through their prayer books, trying to find the right page.

  Margaret Sector I was ushering with Chan Spring that day. Blessedly, he’d been outside smoking during the Prayers of the People. He usually takes the left side of our aisle, and I the right, but I made him switch with me, so he wouldn’t have to pass the plate to those three.

  Goodness, they were pleased with themselves.

  Lindsay Tautsch In a church community, the angry, sick, and sad are expressly invited to the table, and of course, they come. I admired the way Father Faithful handled it. I doubt I’d have done as well.

  Margaret Sector Remember the time that young man in the mirrored sunglasses was arrested in the middle of the Easter Eucharist?

  Calvin Sector At Good Shepherd?

  Margaret Sector Doug something. He used to come to the coffee hour and chat up the single ladies? And once he came up to the house and tried to sell you insurance, remember?

  Calvin Sector I’ve forgotten.

  Margaret Sector You’ll have to forgive my husband. He can’t remember anything unpleasant about anybody. It’s the way his brain is made, you tell him something ugly and it rolls right into a chute and out the back of his head.

  Don’t you remember, they led him out the side door in handcuffs?

  Calvin Sector How could they do that? Isn’t the church a sanctuary?

  Margaret Sector That’s exactly what you said at the time! At least you’re consistent.

  Calvin Sector Anyway. The coffee hour was pretty lively that morning, and it was Norman at his best. People were crowding around him. I even saw Lindsay Tautsch give him a hug. The Unholy Trinity appeared briefly, but they caught the sense of the meeting and slunk away.

  The vestry went into session right after the Fellowship Hour. Coffee and sandwiches provided by the tireless Bertha Manly, but we hardly needed them. I had not committed an agenda to paper; it seemed to me that it would be better if there were no record that this meeting ever happened, if it went the way I thought it would, and it did.

  The charges were produced. I left that to Frank Heroy, since he’s the treasurer. Rather large withdrawals from the building fund seemed irregular, and a couple from the fund to replace the organ, and the fact that the discretionary fund appeared to have been emptied early in the year, with no receipts or records.

  Norman was absolutely unruffled. He apologized for worrying us. He said he was guilty of being behind on his housekeeping chores, but that his records for the discretionary fund would be up-to-date by Wednesday. He had no idea about the building fund but was perfectly sure nothing was amiss. He looked me straight in the eye and said, “You have nothing at all to fear here. Your trust in me is not misplaced. Be at peac
e about this.” I watched him as he looked from one of us to the next.

  One on one, we had his word.

  I said, “That’s good enough for me, Norman. Any discussion?”

  There was none. The meeting was adjourned twenty minutes after it started. We all took our sandwiches and went home.

  Letter to Monica Faithful from Rebecca Vogelsang:

  October 10

  Dear Monica,

  First, I want to tell you how much I have admired and respected you, ever since we first came to Sweetwater. You have in no way deserved what has happened. If I could change it, I swear I would.

  Monica, I know now that I have been in the grip of something much stronger than I am, that I could not change without a tremendous amount of help that I was ashamed to ask for. I am blessed beyond blessed to have been given that help anyway, by my loving family and so many others. But I have a long hard road ahead of me, and I won’t get far if I can’t admit my manifold faults and try in any way I can to make amends. I can imagine how hurt you are, and it hurts me terribly to think about it. Norman is hurting too, I know, but that was never my affair. What is between husband and wife is for them to take to their Lord. I thank God every hour that I draw breath that my Clark has been willing to stand by me, and I see now that there is still a very powerful bond between you and Norman in spite of everything. I thank God for that too.

  I can’t undo what has been done, Monica. But I hope you will accept this apology. It comes from the bottom of my heart. I don’t ask you to forgive me, but I have a hope that someday you will allow me to embrace you as a sister. And though I have no right to, I do hope that you will be able to forgive Norman. He may have sinned, but it came from a place of goodness. He was trying to help me.

  Ever your friend,

  Rebecca Vogelsang

  Monica Faithful Well, how do you think I felt?

  All right. Sorry. All right.

  The letter arrived on a Thursday. I got home from school about three, put the groceries away, and went out to the hall to sort the mail. When I saw the envelope, I thought, how nice. You hardly ever get a handwritten letter any more.

  Well, it came at me in waves. At first I think I shut down. I stared at the letter, seething in my hand, but my brain was scrambling the images.

  Then I began to be able to read again. I read it over and over. The way she kept using my name made me want to kill her with my bare hands.

  I stayed alone with it for about an hour. I had to adjust. First, to what it meant, and second, to the fact that she clearly thought I already knew. Just assumed, I wonder, dumb as a box of rocks as she is, or had Norman told her he’d confessed?

  Norman. Norman Faithful. What on earth had possessed his father to choose a name like that? A little hubris there, don’t we think?

  Norman. For the previous three weeks, famous Norman Faithful had been in a state, I mean a state, about the accusations against him by Lindsay Tautsch. He wasn’t sleeping much, he talked on about how pilloried he felt. He had the gall to talk about Christ’s suffering, as proof that the Lord would understand and comfort the afflicted, meaning him. The vestry had hired an independent auditor to Clear Norman’s Good Name, but that didn’t seem enough for him. I was surprised he hadn’t developed stigmata. And now it all made sense. He was guilty as hell, he’d just been charged with the wrong thing. Waiting for the other shoe to drop.

  In school when a child has a tantrum and can’t pull out of it, we tell him to go sit down with his back to the room, take deep breaths, and count to a hundred. Did I do that?

  Hell no.

  Rosella Cherry It was late on a Thursday afternoon. Mr. Sector was in with Father Norman. Preparing for the vestry meeting on Sunday, I think. The auditors were giving their final report the next day. Monica Faithful marched into the office and barely said hello to me. I started to say he was in a meeting, but she went right by me into the rector’s office.

  Calvin Sector The door banged open. I thought the church must be on fire. But it was Monica Faithful. She looked from one of us to the other, and I must say, she appeared…What’s the word I want? Distrait?

  She didn’t say a thing. She took a couple of sheets of pink letter paper out of her jacket pocket, unfolded them, and handed them to Norman. He read. Then he put his head in his hands.

  Monica picked up the letter and shoved it at me.

  Monica Faithful I don’t know how I got through the next few days.

  I moved into the guest room that night and stayed there. I’d have left town, but I had a job to go to. It wasn’t the school’s fault I married an asshole. But staying was like rubbernecking at a car wreck, when it’s you in the crumpled heap upside down on the guard rail.

  I was so angry at Rebecca Vogelsang, I could barely function. What did she mean, “…still a bond between you in spite of everything”?

  In spite of what?

  What exactly did he tell her about us? How am I supposed to have failed him?

  And now that we’ve got this vat of horseradish open, how many have there been?

  Can it have started in Oregon? As early as that? There was a particular yummy mummy having a crisis of faith at odd hours, I remember. Certainly in Colorado, there were the adoring Marys and Marthas. And I don’t even need to be told who it was in New York. Nor did the awful Bella McChesney.

  In seminary, we talked all the time about pastors who use the pulpit as a sexual aid.

  So how could he?

  Norman Faithful I could have explained. I know I could have. I never meant to hurt her. I never meant to hurt anyone. I must have gone to the guest room door four times, five times, in the course of the evening, begging her to come out, just to listen. But she was obdurate. Hard as stone. Even now, I find it hard to forgive her for that.

  Margaret Sector Calvin came home with the letter from Beccy Vogelsang. He was shocked that I wasn’t shocked.

  I was sorry Calvin was head of the vestry. Again. He’s seventy-four years old. He doesn’t have that many healthy years in front of him. Why does he need this? To have his faith in a friend shattered, to feel that it’s his fault that Norman Faithful can’t keep his pants zipped, or his wallet, that people will blame him, that he blames himself…what kind of toll would this take on him? How about on his faith? I’m sick of all of them, Norman, Beccy, Monica, Little Miss Tautsch, all of them.

  Calvin Sector What I can’t forgive is that he looked us in the eye and lied to us. The whole vestry, one after the other. We were on the line ourselves. I was going around giving people my personal word that the charges were untrue. My personal word.

  Margaret Sector My opinion? I don’t think he knew he was lying. I think he’s one of those people who believes whatever comes out of his own mouth. Think of all the years of standing up above a sea of trusting faces, dressed in shining robes and posing as God’s mouthpiece. I’ve often wondered if Norman believes in anything, except Norman.

  Calvin Sector My wife is forgetting how she felt before this broke. They’ve been dear friends. He’s a wonderful preacher.

  Margaret Sector I’m not forgetting anything. They’ve been friends, I’ve enjoyed their company, and Norman is a wonderful preacher. He’s done a lot of socially useful things in his life. But he’s got an ego as big as the Ritz, and I never thought he believed in anything. He just went into the family business.

  What moral stage is Norman?

  Ah, well, yes. That is the question, isn’t it?

  Calvin Sector’s letter to the congregation of Good Shepherd Episcopal Church:

  Dear Fellow Parishioners:

  It is with deep regret that we report that the vestry has today accepted Father Faithful’s resignation, effective immediately. The Reverend Lindsay Tautsch has agreed to act as interim rector, and we trust that you all will welcome her in her new post, and give her whatever support she needs as she leads us forward at this difficult time.

  As some of you know, we have had an outside auditor at work on our boo
ks, and her report, which was given to the vestry yesterday morning, will be available in the church office for interested members. Ms. Tautsch will be working with the finance committee to create a new budget for the coming church year and will report to you on the shape of things to come as soon as possible.

  We will begin our search for a permanent rector after Christmas. If you know of likely candidates, please communicate with the Search Committee when the time comes; we welcome your input. Until then, be assured that Good Shepherd is strong in trust and love. If you have questions, feel free to be in touch with me, or any member of the vestry.

  Yours sincerely,

  Calvin Sector, Senior Warden

  Lindsay Tautsch You want numbers? Over nine years, just shy of two hundred thousand. Want to know what he did with it? So do we.

  Hotels, I’m guessing, with his lady friends. Bespoke clothes he couldn’t afford. The Rolex watch, the Italian shoes. Club memberships, his mother’s fancy nursing home. He’s an awful social climber.

  Calvin Sector I don’t understand this. It’s not even that much money. If he needed it, why didn’t he come to me?

  Bobby Applegate So that’s the way the money goes. Pop goes the weasel.

  Calvin Sector He must have been terrified all this time, knowing he’d be found out. It must have been a nightmare for him.

  Margaret Sector Oh, Calvin. For heaven’s sake.