Secrets of Eden

by Christopher A. Bohjalian

  People who knew the Haywards only casually would never have imagined that he beat her. Alice hid well her cuts and bruises, and only rarely did he touch her face. People might have sensed the strain between them, they might have felt what Heather Laurent might have described as an aura of unease (or outright unhappiness), but I’m sure they would have attributed the tension to the fact that George was juggling a variety of retail businesses in an uncertain economy.

  The fact is, he had been abusive and controlling for years, blaming Alice for whatever small speed bumps he encountered on what he believed was his right to cruise unencumbered through life. From the moment they wed, he had begun to wean her away from her family in New Hampshire and, later, from her co-workers at the bank. He would savage her cooking and cleaning whenever he could, or her inability to stretch the budget he gave her as far as he liked. He would tell her what kinds of clothes she could wear and what kinds she couldn’t: Stirrup pants and jeans that clung to her curves were out, as were Lycra bicycle shorts (even at her spin class at the gym), skimpy cotton dresses, and those camisole shirts with lingerie-like clasps that were popular that summer. Even though one of his stores sold inappropriately revealing tanks and tees and denim microskirts to teen girls, she was to dress like a schoolmarm.

  When, once, she cataloged for me the clothes she was not allowed to wear, I sighed with a mixture of pastoral concern and libidinous longing: I would have been happy to have seen her in any of those things. Instead Alice was likely to be attired in dresses and skirts that were dowdy and sad. Still, when I saw her undressed for the first time, I was not surprised by what a prize she was. She was one year my junior; she had legs that were lithe and long, and a stomach as firm as a dancer’s.

  The Haywards had lived (and died) in a handsome Cape Cod they’d built on two acres of meadow that once had been a part of one of the village’s larger dairy farms. The property was being sold just about the time that they were thinking of leaving their Bennington apartment, four rooms that had been fine even when Katie was a baby but was feeling cramped now that their daughter was six. Most of the property, including the largest parcels, went to the sons and daughters of the dairy farmer, but a substantial section was commandeered by a lawyer and his wife from Westchester—the Brookners—while a two-acre block with impressive views and a small ravine that tended to get a little swampy in April and May went to the Haywards. Theirs was a crisp and modern three-bedroom home, and George had done a fair amount of the work on it himself.

  They would live there for not quite nine years.

  ALICE WAS IN her nightgown when George wrapped his hands around her neck and crushed her windpipe and the strap muscles in the larynx, but she hadn’t yet gotten into bed. The medical examiner estimated it was sometime between eight and nine P.M. when George pressed her against the wall beside a living-room window, in all likelihood lifting her off the floor and slamming the back of her head so hard against the wall as he worked that he dented the Sheetrock. And he killed her while she was slashing away at his own flesh with a ferocity that I suspected might have been there but had certainly never seen manifest myself.

  Although no one other than Alice spent any time with George on the day that he died, we all assumed that the clothes in which he was found were the ones he had been wearing most of the day: Blue jeans and a navy blue T-shirt with a small chest pocket. He was barefoot when he was discovered on the couch, slumped back onto the cushions, one arm spread atop a throw pillow and the other hanging over the side of the armrest. George had been right-handed, and the bullet had entered his head just above his right ear, roughly three inches above where his jaw met his neck, and taken off a sizable chunk of his skull. Dangling from his fingers was a Smith & Wesson .357-caliber handgun with a square butt and a stainless-steel finish. The bullet had exited the head just left of the summit of the cranium and was embedded high in the wall near the window.

  Nobody heard a gunshot, but the nearest house belonged to that lawyer’s family from Westchester, and they hadn’t been in Haverill that weekend. Likewise, no one heard the two of them fight, and so no one had any idea what precisely had set George off this last time. Ginny O’Brien conjectured the next morning that he’d probably hit Alice, and she’d either told him in some new fashion that he’d better not do that again, or—even more likely—said that she was kicking him out once more. This time for good. Perhaps she had straightened her spine and told him to pack a bag and be gone. But this also may have been merely an unachieved aspiration Ginny had had for her friend.

  Nevertheless, in one of the days immediately after Alice was killed, a female minister I’ve known since seminary—a woman who counsels a great many victims (and perpetrators) of domestic abuse—tried to convince me that this was indeed what had occurred. George had probably hit Alice, and she had told him that was it, they were finished. She’d had it. George, in turn, had warned her that she’d better not even try to get dressed. And when she’d said that he couldn’t stop her, he’d killed her. It was the classic pattern, my friend said.

  Her point? Alice Hayward had wanted to live. She hadn’t expected to die, and I hadn’t missed some staggeringly obvious signal at the baptism. This wasn’t my fault. Of course, my minister friend hadn’t been at the pond that afternoon. Nor did she know Alice’s and my—and I use this word with both guilelessness and guilt—history. Perhaps if Alice had left behind a suitcase, I might think otherwise. In my mind it is resting on her side of their bed, half filled and hastily packed. But there wasn’t one. There wasn’t even a small pile of clothes anywhere in the bedroom: No shirt, no jeans, no panties, no socks. I would not have needed a suitcase at the scene to have my faith resurrected, but I did need a sign that she had at least planned to leave the house that night.

  AND THERE WAS this: Her mother would tell me when we met in my church on folding metal chairs that Monday night that her daughter had been planning to schedule appointments with a lawyer in Bennington and an advocate at the women’s shelter. Alice, her mother insisted, wanted to understand what she needed to do to protect her daughter from George in the event that something like—and here her mother waved her arm once as if swatting at a fly and then collapsed in upon herself in sobs—this ever happened to her. Alice had even taught her parents a new expression: the termination or extinguishment of parental rights. She wanted, her mother insisted, to be sure that George wouldn’t have control of Katie if somehow her husband got away with murder.

  “I told her to get out of the house, but … but she wouldn’t listen,” she stammered through her tears, as her husband awkwardly rubbed her shoulders and the back of her neck from his own folding chair.

  And if I needed any more proof of my suspicions, it resided in a red felt jewelry box that Katie had told us about that afternoon: Two days before she would die, that Friday, Alice had taken the ruby-and-diamond earrings and the pearl necklace that had belonged to her own grandmother—Katie’s great-grandmother—and given them to her daughter, telling Katie to keep them close to her chest.

  THE CHURCH WOMEN’S Circle included about fifteen members of the congregation. They met Monday mornings at seven to accommodate the half dozen members who had jobs outside the home, convening each time in a different woman’s living room or terrace or kitchen. Rarely were all fifteen present; usually there were no more than eleven or twelve women there. The meetings usually lasted until nine-thirty or ten, with the members whose schedules demanded they leave sooner departing whenever they needed. During the school year, for instance, Ginny stayed most Mondays only until seven forty-five because she was due at the village school a little before eight. Alice’s schedule at the bank was Tuesday through Saturday, however, and so she never left early. She was known for remaining till the very end, with the elderly women who were retired and whose children were grown and who had nowhere else they needed to be. When I had suggested the Women’s Circle to Alice, offering the idea one evening when we were alone at the parsonage, I thought it would be
weeks or even months before she might find the courage to contact one of the informal group leaders. I could see how thoroughly George had eroded her confidence and severed her ties with so many of her friends—with so much of the world. I contemplated having one of the members reach out to her. But I was mistaken. Within days Alice had contacted the woman nearest her age, Ginny O’Brien, and had asked if she could come to the next meeting. The fact that the group met on the very day Alice had off seemed like a good omen.

  And I have no doubts that the women provided a necessary respite for Alice—and yes, a better shoulder than mine. Still, only Ginny knew the extent of George’s violence, and Alice forbade her from ever bringing it up at the Women’s Circle.

  In the days after Alice’s death, many adult members of the church took great comfort in Alice’s involvement with the group. I was told often by parishioners in the four days before I left that if Alice had not been a part of the Circle, the Haywards’ bodies would probably have been found by their daughter the next morning or afternoon, when she returned from Tina Cousino’s house. Instead it was Ginny O’Brien who would alert the world that the couple was dead. That day Joanie Gaylord was hosting the group, and when Alice had failed to arrive by seven-thirty, Ginny called her friend. There was, of course, no answer at the Haywards’. And so when the meeting adjourned around nine-thirty, she decided to drop by her friend’s house. She would tell me that afternoon that she’d had a bad feeling as she drove up the driveway to the usually immaculate yellow Cape and seen Lula the dog asleep on the porch. She had, in fact, known what had occurred before she even opened the unlocked front door.

  She knew, she said, because the living room was right beside the entry hall, and so from the front steps of the house she had seen the flesh and bone and brain that had once been a part of George Hayward on the inside mesh of the screen window.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  There is no explanation for my decision to enter the clergy that is both quick and honest. They tend to be one or the other. The quick answer—and it is a response I’ve given most often to especially avid or fundamental believers (of which there is no dearth, even among Baptists in northern New England)—is this, an anecdote I was told by one of my more erudite professors at seminary. When he was a young graduate being considered for a poor, rural parish in West Virginia, he gave a sermon at the church there one Sunday morning. It was, even in his own opinion, more intellectual than inspired, more long-winded than wise. It wasn’t very good. After the service an old deacon—a coal miner who had somehow made it into his seventies without succumbing to any of the grotesque lung diseases that usually mark the end of a coal miner’s life—approached him and asked with a voice rich in irony, “Was you sent or did you just went?” My professor understood instantly what the deacon was suggesting: He, the young pastor, seemed to lack passion and conviction. He seemed merely to be going through the motions. And so when people would ask me why I’d become a minister and I could tell from the question that they wanted an answer singed with Pentecostal fires, I’d recount this story, always ending with a self-deprecating shrug and the remark, “All I can tell you is I believe I was sent.”

  The honest answer is more complex. On some level I was sent. Or inspired. Or called. But my calling, such as it was, wasn’t a single booming invitation from above (really, is it ever?), or even one palpable experience of the living Christ in the here and now. When I was ten and eleven, I had a fairly common boy’s interest in the horrific and the frightening, in whatever it was that caused one’s heart to beat a little faster: chain-saw murderers, serial killers, and those nightmare ghouls who lurk under our beds. Nasty stuff, but pretty typical. And then, of course, there was the predictable array of werewolves, vampires, mummies, aliens, killer robots, psychotic cyborgs, and the assorted undead zombies and freaks that television shows and movies churned out for my entertainment and dreams (or, to be precise, for my disturbing, sheet-gripping nightmares). My friends in Bronxville and I would savor monster movies whenever they arrived for the summer at the theater across the street from the railroad station, and alone or together we would follow their computer-generated mayhem on what are now quaint and primitive video games. My fascination with this sort of carnage and violence was neither unusual nor a sign of a potentially dangerous personality disorder. Given the always precarious state of my parents’ marriage, I wouldn’t describe my childhood as flawless or serene. (Some years later, when I announced my decision to go to divinity school, my sister observed that I was moving from a bickerage to a vicarage.) But neither was my childhood inordinately painful or scarring. I played Little League baseball in the spring and Pop Warner football in the fall. In the winter I played ice hockey and skied. My father was head of personnel for a large investment bank and commuted with a great many of my friends’ parents into lower Manhattan, gathering like pigeons every morning at that train station by the movie theater. My mother was an editor at a travel magazine but left the publication in her early thirties to stay home and raise my sister and me. My father was ten years older than she was. Their marriage was certainly not exempt from the strangeness that marked the 1970s, but its strains had more to do with the idiosyncratic characters of my parents than with the nature of their friends. As far as I know, no one was swapping spouses at pool parties in July and August. And though I occasionally smelled marijuana, the drug of choice in that circle was clearly brown liquor: The adults encouraged one another to drink scotch the way they insisted their children drink milk.

  As a teenager I listened to a lot of heavy-metal and punk music, and I papered my bedroom walls with posters of athletes and rock stars. I had girlfriends, but, in a pattern that would continue through college and into my adult life, I withdrew as soon as it became evident that the relationship was reaching what airline pilots call the V1 point, that point of decision: Either we lifted off and became a very serious couple or we aborted the takeoff and went our separate ways. Invariably I chose to slow the engines if my girlfriend showed no sign of decelerating first.

  At some point in high school, when my history class was focused on the Roman Empire, my interest in all things Grand Guignol and sensational found a new fixation: the Crucifixion. My father had been raised a Baptist in southern Vermont—one of the reasons, I imagine, that I wound up here—and my mother was a Presbyterian from a nearby suburb in Westchester. I had gone to Sunday school at the local Baptist church along with my older sister until I was seven, but by the time I was in second grade, we stopped attending church with any regularity. My parents had been worn down by their bickering, their constant late nights on Fridays and Saturdays, my father’s job, and the simple demands of raising their two children. We became Easter and Christmas Christians, making it to church roughly twice a year, and my spiritual quest as a Christian was stalled somewhere between second grade and my adolescent desire to sleep till noon most Sunday mornings.

  The Crucifixion changed that. The whole idea that an empire as seemingly civilized as Rome’s—in the movies that formed my conception of the ancient world, the Romans were always extremely mannered and would have passed easily in Bronxville or Pelham—saw crucifixion as a reasonable and relatively common form of justice mesmerized me. I was appalled, but I was also fascinated. We’ll never know exactly how many men were crucified when the revolt of Spartacus the slave was finally suppressed, but one account suggests that six thousand crosses lined the road between Capua and Rome. Of course, it wasn’t the sheer numbers that made crucifixion at once abominable and hypnotic, it was the grotesque particulars of the execution. Nails as thick as Magic Markers and about five inches in length pounded through the bones in the palms of one’s hands or—after the Romans had perfected their technique—through the bones in the wrists. Another, even longer nail, a shade under seven inches in the case of the crucified skeleton excavated at Giv’at ha-Mivtar—was banged through the heels of both feet. Or the ankles. Or the metatarsals traversing the arch. (Wander for even half an hour through the U
ffizi in Florence: For nearly a millennium, the great artists in Europe were drawn to those nails.) Bodies would hang on a cross in the Mediterranean heat for hours or—not infrequently—two and three days, the criminal or the prisoner wide awake, in unspeakable agony.

  And yet it wasn’t usually those nails that killed the victim. It was asphyxiation. Eventually neither the victim’s arms nor his legs could support his chest a moment longer, and the weight of his own body conspired with gravity to press shut his lungs.

  This was torture of a most grisly sort, the kind of violence against the flesh that in my opinion novelists and filmmakers rarely have equaled. Only people (and by that I mean both individuals and groups of individuals working in concert as mobs and, alas, as nations) of a strikingly malevolent disposition are capable of such madness. Such cruelty. Such evil. The idea that someone, Jesus Christ, would subject himself to it willingly haunted me. I remember one Easter weekend I rented all the biblical epics the video store had in stock and watched them for hours on end. That month I pored over the different accounts I had found of the day Christ died. Bishop, Bouquet, and William; Morton and Zeitlin and the writers—four or forty or four hundred in number, we’ll never know for sure—behind the Synoptic Gospels and that especially mystical fourth one, the Gospel According to John.

  In college, the sort of small liberal-arts school where many of us from Bronxville would go, it was only natural that I would continue what had been my solitary and ill-defined studies in a more structured manner. I majored in religion. I started going to chapel. Then, when I pondered career choices as a senior, I kept coming back to the reality that what had interested me most for the past eight years had been religion, and why one man—a man who without a doubt in my mind had indeed walked this earth some two thousand years ago, regardless of whether he really was who he said he was—would be willing to die on the cross. I applied to a variety of divinity schools and seminaries and chose one known for its liberal theology and worldliness, just outside Boston. I wasn’t notably zealous when I arrived at the seminary and for a time regretted that I hadn’t simply joined the Peace Corps or become a schoolteacher in (pick one) an inner city or Appalachia or on a Navajo reservation: Either path, Peace Corps or public-school teacher, it seemed to me, would have been a far better way to make a meaningful difference in the world. This was especially true since initially I imagined that my studies in divinity school were most likely to result in my teaching religion someday at precisely the sort of college from which I had graduated. That, in a vague way, was my plan.