by Thomas Lynch
“GOD IS good,” he wrote with newfound conviction, “and has given us each other to magnify that goodness.”
“Paul was wrong,” he wrote in a line that would later be quoted in and out of context. “It is good for a man to touch a woman, and good for a woman to touch a man.”
Paul’s confusion of sex and sin seemed to Adrian at odds with the essence of human nature. How, he asked himself, could the goodwill he bore toward Mary De Dona, the gift he saw her as, the grace he felt awash in when with her, the thanks that was overflowing in him since she came to him, the sign he reckoned that she was of God’s love—how could it all be anything but good? What sin could leave one so manifestly at one with creation, at peace with one’s being and another’s? In Mary De Dona all the dull notions he’d studied in seminary were happily incarnate—resurrection, reconciliation, communion, and rebirth. She was Easter, Christmas, epiphany and apocalypse, a blessing and beatitude, a feast for his soul. Christ might have gone to the cross for him, but Mary De Dona had come to bed with him. Jesus might have raised himself from the dead, but Mary De Dona had restored Adrian to life itself—the life of the body and the mind and spirit that had been killed by the failure of his marriage. Paul was wrong. Adrian knew it now. And if Paul could be wrong, why not James and John and Job and the rest? Not entirely wrong, just occasionally. Just enough for reasonable doubt, a little wiggle room for questioning—that’s all he was trying to establish. What if the Bible was only a book, the authors of it merely men who felt, for reasons he could now more fully comprehend, inspired by the loving breath of God?
How had it taken him so long to arrive at this intelligence? It made him want to read it more closely. It made him love the words and fear them less. As human text, a record of mortals searching for glimpses of God, it was engaging and inspiring. As holy writ, inerrant transmissions through prophets and apostles, it seemed as silly now as all pronouncements of infallibility. Still, Adrian had to admit to himself that until very recently, he had accepted the King James Bible as God’s Word dictated to and carefully transcribed by such scriveners as God has chosen for reasons best known to God and God alone.
And it was Paul, that great poser and epistler, that first circuit rider in the cause of Christ, the model for John Wesley’s bold remark that “the world is my parish,” whom Adrian now read with the grain of salt that put the wonder into everything, everything. For never was a man more wrong about women, and therefore wrong about the men who coupled with them, than Paul was when he wrote to the Corinthians. That Paul regarded men as brutes and women as temptresses, fit only to keep each other from “incontinency,” and marriage as a better station than passionate, erotic sex, but not as good as celibacy, struck Adrian as unfair to women like Mary De Dona, who seemed to him quite proper vessels and dispensers of God’s mercy and grace. To be welcomed into another’s bed, into another body, not for the promises you might make, or the shelter you might provide, or the babies you might bear or sire or for all the future possibilities, but rather for the gifts you might bring to the here and now, the moment at hand, not the past or future or pluperfect tense, but for the moment at hand—now there’s the thing, thought Adrian, the gift like grace.
God is love, he quoted the beloved apostle, and he who abides in love abides in God and God in him. Whenever Adrian replaced the word love in this dictum with the name of Mary De Dona, apart from the idolatry, the sentence rang entirely true. He felt reborn, re-created, and alive in her.
By Halloween he had over a hundred pages. Part rant, part methodical reasoning—it had become his manifesto, a statement of faith in flux.
“We are God’s gifts to one another. We come to one another like grace—out of the blue.”
By Thanksgiving he sent what turned out to be the first three chapters to an agent in New York who sent back an agreement for Adrian to sign which gave 15 percent of any sale to the agency.
When a check came in the first week of January for over forty thousand dollars, he could not help but see in it the saving hand of God, coming as it did in the same mail as a letter from the district supervisor detailing how, “after prayerful reflection and full consideration of the needs of the faithful in the Western Ohio Conference, we feel some changes have to be made.”
“The second half of the advance will be paid upon delivery of the completed manuscript,” wrote Adrian’s agent from New York. “Get to work.”
“We’d like to offer you a chance to truly expand your ministry through our Pastoral Exchange Program,” wrote the district supervisor. There was a pamphlet on the Worldwide Ministerial Exchange of the United Methodist Church and a “call” to trade places for three months with “the Reverend Gilson Miller and his family” from somewhere unpronounceable in England.
“The ‘geographic cure,’” said Francis Concannon. “Bishops are mad for it. Outta sight, outta mind. First they move ya, then they lose ya!”
“Might be good for the children, a change of venue, a chance to see a bit of the world.” Mary De Dona said travel was good education. “Three months will go by in a blink.”
“Would you come with us?” Adrian asked her.
“An international scandal?” she laughed.
She thanked him for asking but said it would be better for him to travel light. She had her work to do and he had his.
HE HAD never heard the voice of God or seen anything that made him certain of God’s direction. His “calling” to the ministry of the Methodist Church had never been a road to Damascus experience. It had happened to him like the rest of life had—the slow accumulation of events, some memorable or remarkable, most others not, which taken together had become his life.
Things happen as they are supposed to happen, Adrian told himself. If God did not speak to him, he thought, God was nonetheless the one in charge. This was largely a default position, faith arrived at by the servants’ door. If Adrian was not in charge of all that happened—and he clearly wasn’t—and yet unable to abide the prospect of no one in charge, then God was whoever was left in the room. This was the only article of faith he still clung to: there was a God and he was not it. So life happened the way it was supposed to happen. If God wasn’t directing things, God was at the least watching. Everything might not work out for the best, but everything would be over soon. It was enough on most days to keep him going forward, this knowledge that whoever was in charge here was carrying on.
He put thirty thousand of his windfall down on the big vacant mansion down the street from the church on the better-than-even chance there’d be no job waiting at St. Mark’s when he came back from England. At least, he figured, they’d have a home. He left ten thousand with Mary De Dona with instructions to “do it up the way you’d like it,” and in his heart of hearts imagined them maybe getting married or moving in together when he returned, absence making their hearts grow fonder, he hoped.
After clearing it with Clare’s attorney, he got passports, took the kids out of school, and in the first week of March, Mary De Dona drove Adrian and Damien and Sarah to Detroit, where they boarded an overnight flight for London. Thence on a train to Leeds in West Yorkshire, changing trains to the village of Hebdon Bridge, where one of the congregants from Heptonstall met them at the station and drove the jet-lagged pilgrims further up into the Pennines to the stone manse that would be their home until the first of June. Looking out over what he’d read was the Caldervale, across the valley to hill fields rising up from the river below, Adrian Littlefield gave thanks for safe journeys and prayed for his children’s well-being and his own.
VII
“GREAT VIEW, isn’t it!”
“Yes, yes it is, spectacular.”
Gloria was leaning on the station wagon, finishing a smoke, recomposed.
“Could you see Long Island?”
“I don’t know. Things kept appearing, then disappearing. Hard to know where the sea gives way to the land or sky. Everything kept blurring into everything else. But yes, yes, beautiful.”
They got back into the car; Gloria started the engine and backed out the drive. Adrian looked at his map to figure the route back to New Shoreham and the Old Harbor. There were still two hours before the return ferry.
“Do you know Pilot Hill Road?” Adrian asked. “Do you know someone by the name of Ben Walters?”
“There was a Walters up that way all right. Just above Tug Hole. His wife was sick in some way. I think she died. Summer people from New York. He painted. You know, pictures. I don’t know if he still comes or not. Do you want to go by there? How do you know them?”
“Friend of the family,” Adrian said. “If you’ve got the time, I’d like to have a look.”
He didn’t know exactly what he wanted to find. He’d never really sorted out his thoughts on the matter. He didn’t know what he was supposed to feel or think about it. Ben Walters had only been the first of the infidelities he was sure of. There might have been others before him. It hardly mattered now. He remembered a time when he hated the name and the idea of another man touching his wife in that way. He’d tried to outgrow those primitive feelings. He could remember, as a much younger man, wishing for the kind of marriage Gloria had had—those long years, those children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren, that love and grief and routine. Adrian could remember the times as a young family man driving through small towns in Ohio with Clare on a Sunday afternoon, looking into the tall windows of turn-of-the-century homes with their gingerbread and clapboard and backyard gardens, trying to imagine the orderly good-old-days lives of the inhabitants of such places, where everyone had a huge front porch on which they sat in the evening drinking lemonade and telling stories and waving at the neighbors who’d be walking by. He could remember how he awoke one morning to find he had the very thing, a settled life in Findlay, Ohio, in an old house with a wide porch and wooden floors and knickknacks and radiators and a wife whose unhappiness seemed to grow in direct proportion to his happiness. He’d wanted that life, the settled, Sunday dinner with the family, Rockwell print of an existence where he’d eventually be the senior pastor of a thriving church where everyone knew everyone and everyone’s business and kept an eye out for each other’s children and were determined to live happily ever after.
At about the same time Clare was getting tired of all of that. She wanted to know if he’d consider moving to New York. He could maybe manage one of her Uncle Harold’s companies. They could live in Westchester. There would be more money, she was sure. He could commute to the city by train like Uncle Harold did, to his office in midtown. She could do photography or videos or something artistic and the kids could get a nanny or go to a fashionable day care center and then to a Montessori school. She could come into the city on Friday nights for the theater; they could ice-skate at the rink at Rockefeller Center as she had done as a girl visiting Uncle Harold after her mother and father divorced. They would have interesting friends, an interesting life. She was tired of Ohio and Findlay and the First Methodist Church. She didn’t want to be a senior pastor’s wife. She didn’t want a summer place on Lake Erie. She didn’t want to grow old in an old house in the Midwest with a man who was content to be going nowhere.
He told her he thought there were no geographic cures. “Unhappiness,” he told her, in the way she hated that ministers had of speaking in slogans, “was portable. Discontent travels light.”
Gloria had turned up High Street and it turned to a dirt road at Pilot Hill and she broke suddenly at the entrance to a small two-track drive on the right.
“I think that’s the Walters place up there. Go ahead, I’ll wait. Take your time.”
Adrian hadn’t a clue what he was supposed to do, or what it was he wanted to find. What if Ben Walters was there and knew who he was? Maybe he’d read one of his books, or seen him on Oprah or heard him on the radio and knew the connections. What if he didn’t know Adrian’s connections to the woman he had seduced here almost twenty years ago and how it changed all their lives and left his children motherless and him with his hands full of duty and detail? What if he was only a withered old man walking around in tennis shorts and sandals with leathery skin and a bald head? What would they have to say to each other?
Adrian could feel his heart racing as he worked his way up the little gravel drive to the clearing in the woods where a little cedar-shingled cottage appeared surrounded by a little lawn with a few old Adirondack chairs in a semicircle and badly in need of paint. The place was tiny, a story and a half with a screened porch, inside of which was what looked like the main door. There was no sign of life anywhere around the place. No car, no open windows, the grass a little overgrown. He tried the screen door, walked in, and knocked at the main door and listened hard for the sound of any movement inside. There was none. He tried the doorknob but it was locked.
There was nothing. Only the sound of catbirds in the thick woods around the place, and the smell of the sea, and the movement of the breeze in the greeny things around the place. There was as well the small noise of a wind chime hanging from a hawthorn tree in the yard, and at a distance, as he listened, the noise of children down the hill near what he guessed was the fresh water pond he’d seen on the map at the base of the hill. Adrian looked in the window. The interior was small and dark. A table at one end of the kitchen. A fieldstone fireplace at one end of the main room, and a small hallway leading to what must be the bedroom, or bedrooms—maybe two. There were no signs of recent life inside the house.
Adrian walked around to the bedroom window. Through the sheer curtains he could see an old metal bed, a bureau, and a chair. Off to one side was a sink and a mirror. The bed was made. There was no disorder to the room.
He looked out across the yard. There was a small shed with windows and a small porch. It was, he reckoned, the artist’s studio. He looked inside and saw an easel and a table and jars full of brushes and rags hung from hooks on the wall. No canvases or works in progress were anywhere to be seen.
Adrian walked back across the yard and sat in one of the Adirondack chairs and propped his elbows on the wide arms and rested his chin on his folded hands and wondered what to make of the place. Surely, he thought, Ben Walters would be here in midsummer if he was going to be here at all. The place’s vacancy had about it a permanence that was, to Adrian, palpable. He figured that Ben Walters, now nearing seventy-five, widowed and alone, his little artistic career having come to nothing, must be summering out in assisted living or a nursing home, probably after the second or third stroke had left him paralyzed or dumbstruck. Anyway, Adrian was sure, Ben was never going to be skippering a sailboat off the coast or walking the beach or sweeping anyone else’s wife off her feet, not in this life, and likely not in another. Ben Walters was no longer a man he need contend with. It was good that he’d come here to make this clear.
Adrian tried to imagine how it must have been for Clare. Getting her friend Christine to cover for her, getting here, getting it on with the old fart, the romance of it all, the distance from Findlay, Ohio, the hopes for a new, more exciting life.
She’d gotten as far as Cleveland in the years since. She’d married again and divorced again, and again. She seemed, these long years since, every bit as discontented, only older. The children had each spent hours with counselors learning to love their mother without having to approve of her “inappropriate choices,” and to maintain the proper “emotional borders” between themselves and their mother’s insuperably chaotic life.
It occurred to Adrian that if she outlived him, much of his hard-earned estate would work its way to her, through the generosity of his children, who would surely use a portion of their inheritance to support their mother, who could be counted on to be, as ever, in need.
Oh well, is what he told himself, when such things came to him.
There was nothing about this place, his coming here that had the sense of portent he had imagined when he first made arrangements to come here. He had simply married the wrong woman. He had chosen wrongly. He ha
d mistaken passion and good sex, easy to muster at twenty-something, for true affection. He knew it early in the marriage. He remembered the mornings he would awake beside her, wishing there were more about her that he really treasured, really admired, really needed. She was not, he knew, a great mother, an exceptional human, or a particularly good woman. They had made good babies, not brought out the worst in each other. But neither had they brought out the best. And he had been, stupidly, willing to live with the consequences of his poor decisions, to tolerate waking next to a woman whom he did not truly admire in trade for lovely children and an ordinary life free of the larger vexations. He had not, in his marriage to her, abused her physically or verbally. He had tried his very best to make her happy. He hadn’t drank or gambled or cavorted with other women. He’d done his share of diapers and dishes. He had tried to support her efforts to find more interesting things to “do” than “wife and mothering.” He had been, in all ways he thought, the reliable husband, the agreeable helpmate, the hedged bet against hunger and loneliness, the other body in the bed. But he had not, he knew it now, ever loved her entirely. Surely that was a critical fault. Sitting in the Adirondack chair on Ben Walters’s deserted front lawn, Adrian wondered if she’d ever known how much he really didn’t love her. Maybe something in her sensed that emptiness and railed against his willingness to live in a lackluster if otherwise functional marriage. Maybe it was this that drove her to do what she had done. He had been willing to settle for too little. For him it had always seemed sufficient. For her, enough would never be enough. Which aberration of desire, he now wondered, offended God or Nature or the Fates the most? His willingness to settle or her refusal to? His contentment or her discontent?
Here in a clearing in the woods, in the small yard of the small house where the wife of his youth had long ago betrayed him, it all seemed to him like a mystery now, fathomless and unknowable—the ways of the humans and their hearts.
