His Right Hand

by Mette Ivie Harrison

  I let out a long breath. “If Naomi was from a polygamous family, did she even have to have her name removed from the records like you did?”

  “It’s complicated.” Kenneth sighed. “Her parents were married in the Salt Lake Temple, and they weren’t polygamous until much later. So, yes, her name is on the records of the mainstream church.”

  “And did she leave for the same reason you did?” I asked. “The new policy?”

  Kenneth’s mouth twisted. “Partly that, and partly other things,” he said.

  “Such as?” I prompted

  “Well, to be honest, she couldn’t stand the way the mainstream church covers up so much about polygamy in the past and makes it sound like Joseph Smith and Brigham Young are these heroes who never did anything wrong.”

  “But the new essays on Joseph Smith and polygamy admit he married a fourteen year-old girl,” I pointed out. There was a new series of “Gospel Topics” essays on the church website, even if they weren’t that easy to find if you didn’t know about them. Kurt still had people in church complaining when they were taught because they didn’t believe they were official.

  “They admit it but don’t condemn it. Naomi thinks that’s even worse. It’s okay to take a fourteen-year-old bride if you’re the prophet?”

  That was definitely a problem in my book, as well. But how could the church condemn Joseph Smith’s polygamy without disavowing the other things he had done, like translating The Book of Mormon and restoring the sacred temple rites and proper priesthood power? If that was all gone, we’d just be the same as most other Christian churches, not the “one true Church.”

  “I’m confused. If her family is polygamist, wouldn’t they all have been excommunicated?”

  Kenneth seemed almost amused. I guess now that he was out of the church, this wasn’t his problem anymore. “The bishop of her family’s ward excommunicated her father, but thinks the wives and children aren’t culpable. Naomi thinks it’s all hypocritical. A wink and a nod kind of thing.”

  I mulled this over, hoping that I would like Naomi as much as it seemed that I would based on her views of polygamy. “So if Naomi resigned from the church because of polygamy, does she still have any contact with her family?” Kenneth had said that he was telling me about her family as if he expected me to meet them in the near future.

  Kenneth drummed his fingers on the countertop. “Some contact. She’s trying to figure out how to negotiate things.”

  I heard the same uncertainty in my son’s voice. He didn’t know how he was going to negotiate things with his family, either. This was all such a mess.

  “Will they be attending the wedding?” I asked, because it was easier to focus on the particulars than on the emotions behind them.

  “She wants to talk to you about all that herself. I’m hoping that you and Dad will come to dinner with us next week. We can meet in Salt Lake whenever is convenient for you two.”

  He wanted to know if I could smooth everything over with Kurt by then?

  “I’ll do my best,” I said. I could make sure Kurt was there, and try to make sure that he kept his judgments to himself. I didn’t know if I could manage anything more than that.

  That night I made a special dinner, Kurt’s favorite pot roast and mashed potatoes with peas. Homemade rolls were just coming out of the oven when I heard the garage door open, and I tensed, worried that the conversation I would have to initiate about Kenneth would lead to another big argument between us. Kenneth had left this for me because he thought I could deliver the message to Kurt better than he could, but I wasn’t sure it was true.

  Kurt stepped into the kitchen through the garage door but stopped on the threshold. “Are we having guests tonight?” he asked.

  “No, just us,” I said.

  He loosened his tie. “Did I forget something?” he asked. I could see he was going through the list of occasions in his head. It wasn’t our anniversary. It wasn’t my birthday or his.

  “Kenneth came over this morning and told me some things we should talk over,” I said.

  Kurt nodded. “Let me get changed, all right?”

  “Do you have any church appointments I’m not thinking of?” I asked, because I wanted to make sure we had plenty of time to talk this through. It wasn’t something he could start and then leave off while he went to do interviews at the church.

  “No, nothing tonight,” he said. Right then, his phone chirped.

  “Go ahead, check for messages,” I said. If there was a ward emergency, I’d get to eat this lovely meal by myself. Or maybe I could pack it up and send it to a ward family who would enjoy it more than I would.

  Kurt looked at his phone. “It’s fine,” he said. “Nothing important.”

  “Do you want to go answer it and then come back?” I asked, trying to be understanding.

  He considered, then nodded. “I promise I’ll be back in just one second,” he said, and headed into his office.

  It was actually about five minutes before he came back, but luckily, by then, the rolls had cooled just enough for me to put them on a plate and set the table with the nice china that I never got to use for family occasions since we only had four settings. I’d put down the lace tablecloth Marie had given us for Christmas last year.

  “This looks delicious,” said Kurt stiffly. “Thank you.”

  I passed him the roast and then the potatoes. I had already eaten one of the rolls fresh out of the oven, so I wasn’t as hungry as I might normally have been. I watched Kurt. He was clearly nervous, and kept glancing up at me as if he were afraid of me.

  “I need to talk to you about Kenneth,” I said.

  “Right,” he said. “Kenneth.” He swallowed hard and then put his fork down, waiting.

  “I don’t know how to put this,” I said, hesitating.

  “Just get it out, Linda. I’m a grown man. I know bad things sometimes happen.”

  But it wasn’t as if Kenneth had a terminal cancer diagnosis. That, of course, would have been terrible, but at least Kenneth would be part of our eternal family still. He would be in the celestial kingdom, the highest part of heaven, if he was a baptized and endowed Mormon and died without sin. But resigning from the church would mean no matter how good Kenneth was, he could never be with us in heaven. He had rejected the truth and denied his temple covenants. That was worse, much worse, than never being a Mormon in the first place.

  “Kenneth resigned his membership in March,” I said. After I got it out, I expected to feel relief, but it didn’t come. I waited for Kurt to respond. It wasn’t as if I thought he’d throw things, but I also knew he wasn’t going to just accept this.

  “He resigned without even talking to me?” said Kurt in a pained near-whisper.

  “It was because of the policy change,” I said. Maybe it was selfish of me to say that, because I was using Kenneth to prove my own point, that the policy change was a big deal, that it wasn’t just an extension of everything the church already taught, as Kurt had argued with me before.

  “I see,” said Kurt.

  There was a long silence. I had more on my mind, but I wanted Kurt to react to this first. When he didn’t, I said, “Don’t you have anything to say?”

  “I don’t see that what I have to say matters. Kenneth has already done this. He clearly didn’t want my opinion.”

  That was true. Kenneth hadn’t asked either of us. A part of me wanted to defend him and mention his mission companion, Elder Ellison. But I didn’t want to hear Kurt’s dismissal of a young gay man’s suicide as his own problem and not the church’s, so I left it unsaid.

  “I think we need to make sure Kenneth sees that we treat him exactly the same as before and show him our love for him will never change, no matter what.”

  Kurt shook his head and put down his fork. “Linda, I will love Kenneth with every part of my being for
all of eternity, but that doesn’t mean I will treat him the same. I can’t just pretend he hasn’t done this.”

  It was about what I should have expected from Kurt. I started to tear apart one of the rolls I’d buttered, which was entirely unfair to the long strands of beautiful gluten I’d worked so hard to create with my kneading. “He’s just as much our son as he ever was. He’s a good person.”

  “Yes, he is,” said Kurt mildly. “But God is a god of order. There are rules in heaven, as there are in any place of order.”

  Again, I didn’t want to argue this point with him. So instead, I said, “Kenneth also came to tell me that he’s engaged.”

  Kurt’s eyes widened. “To get married?”

  I smiled for the first time in this conversation. “Yes, to get married. Her name is Naomi Carter. She’s also resigned from the church.”

  “Ah,” said Kurt.

  Was he going to ask anything about her? I could only tell him what Kenneth had told me. I hadn’t even seen a photograph of her.

  “She’s in med school,” I said. “She wants to be an OB/GYN.” I was deliberately avoiding her family’s polygamy for the moment. It wasn’t like me to do that, especially to Kurt, but everything had changed between us in the last few months. None of our old marriage habits worked anymore. We weren’t strangers, but there was now an unspoken contract for how we interacted and avoided conflict. We both followed the rules because we still loved each other and wanted to keep from inflicting pain. So all the pain got held inside.

  “Well, that sounds good for both of them. She’ll have a steady career if they stay in Utah. Are they planning to stay in Utah, do you know?”

  This was like the kind of stilted, polite conversation I had with my parents on the occasions when I called them on the phone dutifully to make sure they were still healthy and alive. The night before Mother’s Day, the night before Father’s Day, and Christmas Eve, so that the actual days were unspoiled by the bad taste in my mouth my extended family left with me. We were all politeness now, no recriminations about the past and how they had treated me after my divorce, more than thirty years in the past.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I didn’t ask him that.” Kenneth hadn’t said anything about leaving Utah, but there were a lot of ex-Mormons who were happy to get away from a state where Mormonism was so much a part of the culture and politics.

  “Well, I hope they are very happy,” said Kurt. There was clearly part of that wish left unsaid.

  “But . . . ?”

  He shook his head. “But nothing. I hope they are happy.”

  “You hope they’re happy, but you think it’s unlikely if they both have left the church.”

  Kurt looked down at his plate, took a long drink of water, and then set down his glass deliberately.

  I said nothing.

  Finally, he offered, “I just mean that I don’t know how a marriage will work if the two people in it can’t depend on each other absolutely for commitment.”

  It was hard for me not to feel that this was an indictment of me, being disloyal to the church, as well. But I took a breath and focused on our son and his marriage again. “What do you mean by commitment?” I asked. Was Kurt going to say that he thought only Mormons could have good marriages? Because that was demonstrably false. Our divorce statistics were not that different from the rest of America’s.

  “Well, when someone has been baptized and has made certain promises to a church, and then they turned their back on those promises . . .” He didn’t finish. He didn’t have to.

  “Kenneth was eight when he was baptized. Do you really think that’s old enough to make a promise for the rest of his life?” I asked.

  “He said he was ready. He was very certain about it,” Kurt said.

  I wanted to roll my eyes at him. At eight, most children just wanted to please their parents. It was one of the reasons I didn’t like it when children bore their testimonies in Sacrament Meeting. They were just too young to do any more than repeat what they’d been told. They hadn’t had spiritual experiences of their own. But in Mormonism, eight was supposed to be the “age of accountability.”

  “People can change their minds, you know,” I said instead.

  “Yes, they can. But it doesn’t bode well for marriage.”

  Was this about Kurt regretting he’d married me because I’d been divorced? Was I a covenant-breaker, too? “She’s from a polygamous family,” I blurted out, to direct the focus elsewhere.

  “What?”

  “Not the FLDS,” I said. “I guess they’re an independent group. Kenneth said that her father was excommunicated, but it sounds like the children and the wives are still active members of the Mormon church.” Sort of.

  Kurt muttered something to himself that I decided I didn’t want to ask him to repeat.

  “He wants us to go meet her for dinner in Salt Lake City if we can find an evening that works.”

  “Fine. I can do that,” said Kurt. “Any evening that week. Except for Tuesday and Wednesday because I have bishopric stuff then.”

  I waited for him to add a few other days as he thought about it, but he didn’t.

  He stood up. “Thanks for the lovely dinner. It was delicious.”

  He’d barely touched it, but he was scraping the plate and putting it in the dishwasher before I said anything else.

  “I’m going to spend some time reading scriptures and praying in my office,” he added as he walked out of the kitchen.

  I suspected he’d be praying for Kenneth and Naomi. And me, too.

  Fine, let him. God wasn’t going to change who I was. That was a fundamental principle of Mormonism that I loved. We all had free agency. It was the reason that Christ had made the Atonement, so we could all choose and learn from our mistakes instead of being forced to do everything right, which had been the other plan, the wrong one. I didn’t know if Kenneth was making a mistake or not, but I was going to honor his choices and not try to pray them away.

  I cleaned up the kitchen, packing the leftovers into containers for Kurt to take to work the rest of the week. He often forgot to eat if I didn’t pack him a lunch. Despite all our problems since November, I’d packed him a lunch every day. It was easier to do things like that, and not just because it was a habit. It was a concrete expression of love that didn’t imply I agreed with him in any way. If only Kurt could figure out something equivalent to do for Kenneth.

  An hour later, I passed by his office on the way to putting away my coat and stopped by the door. The sound of weeping was clear, even through the door.

  My heart clenched and I thought about going inside to comfort him. I could hold him, at the very least, and tell him that I loved him. I should have done it. If I were a better, more Christ-like person, I would have done it. I wouldn’t have thought about my own pride or about him thinking I was admitting I was wrong. I would have cared only about showing my husband that I loved him.

  I went to bed alone instead and thought for a long time about how long an eternal marriage could really be. Forever. Eternity. That’s how long Kurt and I were supposed to be bound together. And I had always, through every disagreement we’d had before, felt comforted by this idea, buoyed by the thought that we would work everything out eventually. But things had changed.

  We should have been celebrating our son’s decision to marry, but at the moment I wondered if our own marriage would survive. And if I wanted it to. Forever was a long time to be sealed to someone you thought was profoundly, deeply wrong, about the nature of God, about the workings of the leadership of the Mormon church, and about marriage itself.

 

 

 
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