Apparition & Late Fictions: A Novella and Stories

by Thomas Lynch

  “How many will that buy?”

  “Only one, but it’s all you’ll need, bucko!”

  Adrian and the priest had been friends for ten years since they’d both come to Findlay, fresh from their separate educations and appointments. The one and only meeting of the Findlay Ministerial Association, now defunct, had been held at St. Mark’s Methodist. They played racquetball together, took in a movie from time to time, commiserated over parish politics and their bishops, and traded titles of books to read. Father Concannon favored Irish poets while Reverend Littlefield preferred spiritual guides and homiletics. The Collected Poems of William Butler Yeats got traded for The Best of Robert Ingersoll. Beckett got traded for Frederick Buechner. Every so often they’d go to dinner in the next town over, where no one knew them and they could be free of the scrutiny of parishioner and congregant.

  “And where’s the beautiful Mrs. Littlefield on such a fine moon and June and spooning evening?” The priest loved the sound of the pursed vowels in his mouth second only to the sound of his own voice. He pressed a ticket and pencil on the table for Adrian to fill out.

  “She’s gone to Cincinnati, to Mount St. Joseph.”

  “Jaysus, Adrian, she’s gone and joined the convent on ye—the nuns will rob you, man.”

  Mount St. Joseph was one of the many holdings of the Sisters of Charity in Cincinnati—a four-year school for good Catholic girls, a fraction of whom would get a calling and join the order after graduation.

  Adrian scribbled his name and phone number on the ticket stub, tore off his portion, and gave the book of tickets back to the priest.

  “She’s gone past the point where the nuns would take her, Frank.”

  Adrian wondered if the priest could hear more than small talk in what he’d said, the way he’d said it, and there was this sudden panic that he’d have to explain, to everyone—his parents and children, his senior pastor and his congregation, his neighbors and friends, old and new, the lawyers and taxman, God in heaven, everyone, everyone would know—that he had failed as a husband and father and head of the household; he had failed to keep his marriage intact, he had failed to keep his wife happy and satisfied and at home with her family where she belonged. Because he knew at the moment she was riding southbound with her new lover, David Eason, on I-75, maybe indulging in a little highway sex, his hand in her panties, her face in his lap, the reckless pleasure of it. He figured they were well south of Dayton now. Adrian knew he’d have to account to everyone but he just didn’t want to do it now and so he smiled into the priest’s inquisitive gaze.

  “A film project, Francis, something for school.”

  ADRIAN’S WIFE and her new lover had dinner on Mount Adams, in a small Italian restaurant, Guido’s on the Hill, then strolled among the boutiques and galleries, then went to their room at the Cincinnatian and reappeared the following morning, when, hand in hand, they were photographed leaving the hotel together, each with their cameras and equipment bags. They drove out River Road, along the north shore of the Ohio to the southwest, and were photographed photographing Anderson’s Ferry, no doubt to supply some bit of alibi. They even rode it across the Ohio to the Kentucky shore, then back again. The photo of the ferry disappearing into the sunlit fog with the hills barely visible and half a dozen cars lined up on deck was almost artistic. Then they drove up Anderson Ferry Road to Delhi Road, where Adrian’s detective took a photo of David taking a photo of Clare, posing among the summer semester students, at the door to one of the dorms, Clare trying her best to be “one of the girls” though she was more than a decade older than them. Then they returned to the hotel and window-shopped downtown. She bought him a straw boater at Batsakes hat shop. He bought her flowers. It was all in the report. They returned to their room for their second night of bliss, new lovers in early June, carefree in a not-too-distant city.

  Adrian was not proud of the fact that he’d hired DiBardino to spy on Clare, but he figured he really had to have proof, not only for the eventual proceedings, but for himself, before he could call an attorney from outside the congregation, have him file for divorce and an “ex parte” order granting custody of “the minor children” to him and possession of the marital home pending the outcome of the proceedings. He really had to know. He was not proud of the fact that he’d talked to an attorney who’d given him the number for the private eye and told him how to get the goods on Clare.

  “What you want is chapter and verse, open-and-shut, a slam dunk. Play for keeps, Reverend, play to win it,” the attorney told him. He said he’d need three thousand up front and would bill him for the balance, if there was any more. He promised discretion and anonymity.

  It was early Sunday afternoon, after the eleven o’clock service to which he always took his children and at which he preached, every other week, when DiBardino brought him the file and the photos. Reading it was like working a rotten tooth loose, the dull ache sharpening, then subsiding, then sharpening again, the nerve exposed, then numbing inexplicably.

  It was the sentence in the report that read, “Subjects were observed embracing in front of a church on Mount Adams,” that finished it for him. He knew that she had taken her new lover there because it was where Adrian had taken her the night he had proposed to her almost a dozen years before. They’d had dinner at the Rookwood Pottery and walked up to Immaculata Church on the highest point of Cincinnati’s seven hills. Adrian had planned this part. They’d walked up Guido Street to where it dead-ended in the small front courtyard of the church, surrounded by cast-iron fencing and overlooking the city. They had looked down on the wide turn of the Ohio River, and the city with its bridges, and the southwestern expanse of Kentucky and America, and pledged their love and planned their future there. They’d driven down from Delaware, where he was finishing his studies at Methodist Theological and she was a student at Ohio Wesleyan. They’d spent the day walking around Eden Park among the gardens and observatories. It was late summer and Clare was the golden girl of his dreams with whom he’d had sex maybe a half a dozen times since the night she came to him, to the flat he’d rented off campus, and kissed him and let her clothes be taken off of her. Though neither of them were virgins, neither was really experienced either. They were, in his memory of it, innocents. It was in front of the church atop Mount Adams he had taken from his pocket the quarter-karat diamond ring his mother had helped him buy the weekend before and he pressed it into her palm and said he wanted to be married to her and to live with her forever and to build a future with her and would she be his wife? She said nothing at first, only slipped the ring on her finger, kissed him deeply and pressed her head against his chest, sighed and said of course she would. “My darling,” she called him, “of course.” In his memory of it, they seemed in love.

  It was, in Adrian’s heart, the place they were truly pledged, truly promised to one another, truly wed. In the early years of their marriage, when he wondered whether they were going to make it, it was that place, that moment, and its nearly cinematic replay in his memory that always convinced him they were meant for one another. And it was the wash of moonlight through the window of the Holiday Inn in downtown Cincinnati, which shone on Clare’s bare shoulders as she knelt over his outstretched body that night, that still illumined his recollection of their sex, in slow motion, like a silent film—how she slowly bent to kiss him, letting her mouth with its warmth and quickened breathing work its way up and down his body, her hands so smooth, her arms outstretched, touching at once his right temple and his eyelids and his inner thighs, then taking him slowly into her mouth, hushing with the fingers of her left hand the catch of his breath, then in her own time, when he could not imagine any greater ecstasy, straddling him, taking him into herself—this was the consummation of their love, silver in every former remembrance, transcendent and sacramental, anointed, bathed in light, and now, now gone terribly, irretrievably dark.

  That she would share their places with someone else seemed a more intimate betrayal than even sex. He
called the attorney; he wept giving their particulars; full names, birth dates, date of marriage; the papers would be filed in the morning. She was served as she left her class with David Monday night. Adrian had left on Sunday afternoon and taken the children to visit his parents in Grand Rapids. He left a manila envelope on their bed, with photos of her and David coming and going from their assorted rendezvous and a note that told her he had “chapter and verse” on her “film project” and would use them against her if she contested anything. It would be a “slam dunk.” She was to move out. “Now.” He underlined the word. He included a check for five thousand dollars which he’d borrowed from the same church elder who’d loaned him the retainer for the attorney. She could use that to get set up in her “new life.” She could keep the diamond ring, take anything she regarded as hers, and get out. He would contact the Western Ohio Conference of the UMC to find out whatever paltry amount had accrued to his pension fund and insurance account. If it was more than the five thousand, he’d pay her the difference. If it was less, she could keep the change. He wanted no fiscal entanglements between them. He would, he assured her, never keep the children from her, neither would he allow her to take them with her wherever it was she saw herself going. On this point Adrian was fairly certain that she would not put up much of a fight because what she really wanted was to travel light, free of encumbrances, into a new life with a new man off to New York where her truly artistic self would surface once the dull weight of husband and household and maternity had been lifted from her. He offered her, in this manila envelope, a package deal—freedom, some finances, and a permanent if à la carte relationship with her children, in trade for her getting out and letting everyone settle into the lives they would lead without her. Adrian, of course, had had the counsel of his attorney, who told him it would all go much better for him and for his children if there were truly no hope of reconciliation, if he could get Clare to move out of the “marital home.” The photos, the check, the promises of freedom and a future of “quality time” with her children, and the not-entirely-articulated but none-too-hidden threat of embarrassment, Adrian figured would be enough.

  “Ohio is a no-fault state,” his attorney had told him, “but when it comes to the division of property and the custody of minor children, who is at fault still matters to judges and jury panels.” Adrian had said as much in his note, which he paper-clipped to the photos and the check.

  Over and over he had read the portions from the Gospel of Matthew—in the fifth chapter and the nineteenth—which held, “Whosoever shall put away his wife, except it be for fornication, committeth adultery.” He read the same text in a different translation which replaced “fornication” with “marital infidelity.” He had, he assured himself, the perfect right to put Clare away, to save his children from her craziness, to free himself from this overwhelming pain.

  In the end, of course, she moved out, not because of his threats but because of himself, and the dull life with him she no longer wanted and could no longer endure. She moved out because that’s exactly what she wanted to do and Clare could be counted on to do what she wanted.

  When Adrian and Damien and Sarah came home that Tuesday in the middle of June, to the house they had all shared on the corner of South Cory Street and Lima Avenue, some blocks south of the river that flowed through Findlay, Clare and her things were unmistakably gone. She had moved out, into an apartment on the other side of Findlay. She told the children she would always love them and would be coming back for them as soon as she got herself established.

  “Everything is going to be really terrific! You’re going to love New York! There’s so much to see and do there. Not like ‘Finally, Ohio’—wait and see!” She’d come back for the last bits and pieces of her things. The white Toyota van was idling at the curb with the back doors open for Clare to pitch garbage bags full of her clothes and linens.

  They kept nodding and smiling and weeping and hugging her, their little hands and faces holding and searching and wondering why this was all happening and why couldn’t she stay with them and be their mother and she would always be their mother no matter what and someday she was sure they’d understand and Adrian went into the house and vomited, because he felt so helpless, so totally lost in the tears of things, so angry and heart-rent and utterly helpless, and their mother’s voice trailing off as she left them on the porch waving and sobbing and jumped in the van with her lover and drove off into the future. Adrian stood looking out the screen door at the small figures of his children on the porch—all of this happening in slow motion now—as the van disembarked, and they raised their little hands and waved, and waved, and waved.

  No remembrance of these events was free of the guilt Adrian still felt for the damage done his son and daughter, his complicity in its infliction.

  Now what he could remember was the creak of the spring on the screen door as he pushed it open, and held it open and said, Come in now, and how the two of them turned, limp from the waving and weeping, and how Damien took his sister Sarah’s hand and brought her back inside their suddenly and terribly broken home.

  This was the moment, these many years since, that Adrian Littlefield could never forgive himself for—for failing his darling son and precious daughter so profoundly, for doing them such unspeakable damage by failing to keep their mother home, the marriage together, the household intact, life as they had come to know it safe and warm and blessed with abundant love. He couldn’t protect his children from this hurt. His wife, their mother, had just driven off with her new lover, in a white van, leaving them all fixed and wriggling in the here and now without a clue as to what the future would hold. And as much as his heart hurt for his children’s damage, standing at the kitchen counter buttering bread to make them grilled cheese sandwiches, and pouring out three matching glasses of milk, and cutting up a green apple into six little wedges, and placing this meal before them, and holding their tiny hands saying “Let us pray,” and hearing their little voices give out with the accustomed grace, to wit: “God is great, God is good…” some corner of his broken, brooding heart quickened with the hope that his own life and times might just have gotten better, easier, simpler, saner somehow. Good riddance, he did not say out loud, while they ate their sandwiches wordlessly, but he said it nonetheless, good riddance, indeed.

  That night he tucked them into bed and said their prayers with them, including the part about God blessing “Mommy and Daddy and Gramma and Grandpa and all the children in the world who don’t have homes” and promised that everything was going to be all right and they’d go tomorrow for Vacation Bible Camp. Then he sat out on the porch watching the darkness tighten around the neighborhood and the bats circling out of the trees up and down the street and sipped from a tumbler of whiskey he’d taken to pouring himself, at the suggestion of the same church elder who’d loaned him money. “It’ll help you sleep,” is what he’d said.

  And as often happened then and now, something out of Scriptures came to mind. May your fountain be blessed, and may you rejoice in the wife of your youth. A loving doe, a graceful deer—may her breasts satisfy you always, may you ever be captivated by her love. Why be captivated, my son, by an adulteress? Adrian remembered this reading from their wedding. He had chosen it from Proverbs, Chapter 5, as a reminder of the gifts of fidelity. Of course, he chose it as a caution against mannish misconduct—the biblical and still-conventional wisdom which assigned to men brute passions and moral weakness and more or less assumed that he would stray while she, the “loving doe” and “graceful deer” would remain true and unblemished by temptation. Now he read it as a cruel twist of his cuckolding, that even the Scriptures seemed to mock him. He had been happy enough, satisfied, captivated by her love, such as he’d known it, captivated by an adulteress, after all.

  His fountain seemed blighted, the wife of his youth banished. The loving doe and graceful deer she’d seemed for years, now seemed a snarling bitch; her breasts gone dry, now satisfying David Eason, the silly
fuck, captivated by an adulteress with stretch marks, hemorrhoids, more wear and tear than he might’ve imagined. Adrian gulped the bourbon. It made his eyes water. The taste of it, deliciously sinful for a Methodist, burned his tongue and the back of his throat and made him feel suddenly wonderful, capable, incredibly released, as if the whole of this disaster might be managed. But at night he wept.

  WHEN HE woke in the morning, dry-mouthed, slightly hungover, but the children alive and sleeping soundly and himself alive and the sky remarkably not fallen, it seemed to Adrian they might all survive, the wife of his youth’s departure notwithstanding. He pulled the photos DiBardino had given him from out of the large manila envelope marked confidential and carefully tore them all to shreds, all but the one of Anderson’s Ferry, its paddle wheels flanking its barge of cars, its fog lights beaming from above the pilot’s cabin—Boone No. 7 Port of Cincinnati—easing out from shore into the crosscurrents of the river, its masts and antennae turning and tuned in, the dense fog lifting off the water. That one Adrian Littlefield kept.

  III

  WHEN BLOCK Island came into view, he could see the tall sand cliffs, the green headlands, and the litter of sailing boats. From the dock in Old Harbor, Block Island seemed to Adrian like a postcard of the upmarket Yankee resort—huge painted Victorian hotels overlooking the harbor with red, white, and blue buntings hanging from their broad verandas, sloops and schooners and power yachts scattered around the seafront, brightly painted shop fronts done up for the season, and an abundance of cedar-shingled housing, graying but not particularly aged. Everywhere there were tanned and happy people in shorts and sandals and designer eyewear going about no particular business. There were bicycles and mopeds and cars for hire. The dockside was busy with day-trippers and courtesy vans from the various hotels meeting their guests. There were grandparents there to welcome their visiting families and the predictable vignettes of arrival and departure that are all the business of ports of call. Adrian Littlefield waited while the other passengers disembarked. The organizer from the National Association of Family Law Attorneys, holding her clipboard and smiling widely, was reminding the attorneys to “be back for the four o’clock ferry! We have the installation of officers ball tonight at Foxwoods!” This gave the group five hours to tour the island, maybe take a swim, maybe browse the shops for souvenirs. Adrian waited for the rest to leave. He wanted to do his tour alone. He walked up the town, looking over the offerings in store windows, admiring the lithe bodies of women in beachwear, looking into the faces of men. At the top of the Main Street where the road turned sharply left, he came to the National Hotel. It looked familiar to him. He climbed the front steps and took a seat on the long porch where lunch was being served. He ordered iced tea and, from the list of appetizers, steamers in drawn butter, a cup of seafood chowder, and bruschetta. A little taste of everything, he thought. He had a good view of the harbor and the foot traffic coming and going along the Main Street front.