“My God,” Alison said. “You can’t trust anybody. The world’s gotten so corrupt. Try to live a simple, decent life and what happens? Get poisoned by chemical companies on the one hand, and tyrannized by the minister’s daughter on the other. I think I’m going to quit the Sunday-school business after Christmas, Rhonda.”
“Listen,” said Rhonda. “I’m going to tell you something. In confidence.”
When she hung up, Alison opened the closet door and whispered, “Fred, Fred! Come here!”
Fred had been watching television with the boys, and, at his wife’s call, he went and joined her in the closet. “What is it, Ali?”
Eventually the older boy banged on the door. “What are you two doing in there?”
“Leave us alone,” Fred called through the door.
“Yuck,” the boy said. “Oh, yuck—you two make me sick.”
AND SO THE NEWS had gone around that Tyler might be mixed up with his housekeeper. It was the most dramatic news since Lauren’s death—more dramatic, in a way, because it wasn’t entirely clear. Many dismissed it, saying the child was “not right” and such a thing was simply foolish and unthinkable. Others weren’t so sure. In any event, it provided the townspeople with the chance to complain without guilt about their minister, who had increasingly disappointed them. Tyler’s behavior was gone over with such enthusiasm that the fact he had told Alison Chase her apple crisp was delicious while he did, in truth, hate apples, took on the sheen of questionable character. Doris Austin told people that he had promised her a new organ—or that he almost had—and then backed away from it. Fred Chase said he had never heard a Congregational minister quote the Catholic saints the way Tyler did. Auggie and Sylvia Dean wondered about that young woman who showed up in the back pew these days—was it true she sold cosmetics in Hollywell? And hadn’t he been seen skating with her? Well, then. That was hardly the action of a man who had proposed to his married housekeeper, a woman significantly older than he was, a woman who was wanted by the state police for stealing, no less! But these things happened. You heard about desperate men all the time, men who couldn’t live two minutes without a woman under the roof. He was secretive, when you thought about it. And where there’s smoke, there’s fire.
Bertha Babcock, the retired English teacher, was so distressed by these rumors that she told her husband to put the Pilgrim costumes away—she didn’t feel like going around to the schools to lecture on the history of Maine’s early settlers, nor did she feel like hosting the Historical Society meeting because she knew it would be an afternoon of gossip. She sat on her tightly upholstered loveseat while her little pug dog, Miles, stood on his tiny feet and shook in a frenzy of need, yapping his small mouth, his eyes bulging. Bertha sat with her hands in her lap, thinking how Tyler had agreed with her years before that Wordsworth’s poem “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud” was the most beautiful in English verse, and then had shown her one day, chuckling, a parody he had come across: “When all at once I saw a crowd,/A host, of unpaid household bills!”
She sat there half the morning, watching through the old, swirly glass of her living-room window the vitiated view of the river. Finally her small dog stopped yapping and collapsed at her feet.
TYLER, MEANWHILE, after receiving the phone call from Mr. Waterbury, sat in the kitchen listening to the radio. The news mentioned nothing about Connie, and he did not think he should call her home. “On the national front,” said the newscaster, “President Eisenhower has not yet responded to Premier Khrushchev’s recent claim that Russia is producing two hundred fifty missiles per year, all equipped with hydrogen warheads. Khrushchev insists he will destroy all these weapons, if other powers will follow suit.” Tyler looked around: There were dirty dishes on the table, pots in the sink. A pile of laundry sat in a basket by the door to the mudroom. A dish towel by the refrigerator was streaked with the dark juice of the baked beans from days ago. He thought of his mother walking through the door, and he rose to run water in the sink. “This holiday season, do something special for your family,” the radio said, and he reached to turn it off.
Squirting dish soap onto a sponge, he thought the sink seemed far below him, and small. The pot he washed would not come clean; the crusted baked beans fell into the sink, leaving the skin of dark, dried, syrupy stuff on the pot. He left it, and moved into the living room. He was not entirely sure that Charlie had come over last night, not entirely sure that he had encountered Connie in the church. He remembered the chaplain in the navy telling him that in a case of shock, a person needed to be told again and again what had occurred. Repetition, the man had said. Tyler did not think he was in shock, but he was frightened by how distant and unreal the furniture seemed, the ridiculous pink walls, the dirty socks by the couch, the hooked rug his mother had made for them—all this puzzled him. Charlie Austin, he remembered now, had survived the Bataan Death March in the Philippines during the war. This is what had been mentioned to Tyler when he first arrived in town, but who had mentioned it, and was it true? Why would Charlie choose this time to come to threaten Tyler?
He did not believe, as Charlie had said, that people had found him “stuck-up and standoffish.” The rumor that he was involved with Connie in some nefarious way was not one he thought to dignify with a response. Besides, who would he respond to? He was tempted to call Ora Kendall, but it was not his job to ask what foolishness was being said about him. He tried looking through his old folders for a sermon he could use on Sunday, but even that he could not seem to do. The call from Mr. Waterbury caused a swelling of warm anxiety to pump through his limbs. The man’s voice had been eager and polite, assuring Tyler there would just be a “progress report,” but as Tyler moved fruitlessly about the house, it began to seem to him that this voice hid unpleasant news.
He sat down with a pad of paper and wrote: Shirley Falls. The navy. Dad. Orono. Seminary. Lauren. West Annett. Katherine. Jean-nie. Lauren—D. Connie. Then he erased the word “Connie.” He spoke each word aloud, trying to connect himself to it. This, apparently, was his life.
The telephone rang and he hurried to answer it. Matilda Gowen, his secretary, spoke with some hesitation, as she explained that she and Skogie had decided to spend the winter in Florida. They would be leaving right after Christmas, but she wanted Tyler to know, so he could find a replacement. No, she didn’t know, offhand, anyone who might be interested in the job. “You’re not to worry about it,” Tyler told her. “I’ll find someone. You and Skogie deserve a nice rest.”
They were renting a house in Key West, Matilda said. It was her idea.
“Wonderful,” Tyler said.
When he hung up he could not tell if she had been her usual self. He didn’t think she had been. Matilda was not a talkative person, but he thought she sounded different. Perhaps she had been embarrassed to let him down. Perhaps she had heard the foolish rumors about Connie, but she would not have believed them.
He looked at the list in his hand. Shirley Falls. The navy. He shook his head. They were just words, and yet around them swirled a universe of colors, scents, and scenes. With his pencil he circled again and again Katherine and Jeannie.
THE MORNING SEEMED ENDLESS. Through the window the sky was low and gray. He waited. He waited for Connie to call, or Adrian, or Ora Kendall, Doris—he hardly knew. But he felt suspended above his life, as though he were a large man doing the dead man’s float in a lake, while below him fish swam through the town of West Annett, busy on their way to do things. And he had nothing to do. He realized that recently his parishioners had not been calling him nearly so often needing visits, prayer, consultation, guidance. He remembered how he had often felt like there was more than he could manage. How he had slipped into his top desk drawer the quote from Henri Nouwen: “My whole life I have been complaining that my work was constantly interrupted, until I discovered that my interruptions were my work.”
He called Carol Meadows and thanked her for taking Katherine, apologized for not calling the child first th
ing this morning before she went to school.
“Oh, she’s a sweet little girl,” Carol said. “I told her we’d love to have her come back and visit, and bring little Jeannie, too.”
“Say, Carol,” Tyler said, “I do hate to prevail on you further. But I have a meeting tomorrow afternoon. Could she come back over just for an hour or so then? I’ll drop her off after lunch, when she gets out of school.”
“Of course,” Carol said. “And listen. I put her in one of Tracy’s old dresses this morning, and if she likes it, you keep it.”
When he hung up, Tyler thought how Davis Meadows was a very lucky man. Even with the death of their first baby so many years back, Davis and Carol gave the appearance of being quietly united. What he felt was envy, as he moved once more about the empty house. The envy was like a gray sea inside him, filled with swells. That others should be wrapped in the quilt of their own worlds, safe within their families . . . pained him. And he did not want to be this way—filled with unrighteousness, full of envy, murder, deceit, malignity, whisperers . . .
Whisperers.
He got his coat and hat and walked into town. The sky had become a light white, and tiny snowflakes appeared as he walked, seeming to come not from above, but from the air around him. Stepping into the sanctuary, he heard organ music, and saw the back of Doris up in the choir loft; Doris was playing the organ. Tyler sat in the back pew, looking for the blanket, or any sign of Connie. But apparently she had not been back. The carpet was vacuumed smoothly—there was no smell, there were no crumbs or anything else. He watched through the tall windows as the snow fell with a gentle steadiness now. Already it had begun to line the branches of the maple trees, a small white powder, like someone had sifted confectioners’ sugar over the world out there. His coat still on, Tyler listened to the organ in a kind of tired trance, and it seemed as though little snowflakes fell inside him. When the music stopped, the silence was abrupt. He shivered.
“Doris,” he called out, “that was beautiful. Play some more, why don’t you? How about that wonderful hymn ‘Abide with Me.’ Gosh, I’d love to hear that one. It’s always been my favorite.”
He heard a book thump shut, and in a moment Doris walked down the stairs of the choir loft. “I’m not a wind-up jack-in-the-box,” she said.
He followed her into the vestibule. “Doris, is everything all right?”
“Oh, now you wonder.” She was pulling on her coat, and when he stepped to help her with it, she moved away. “I arrived in your office weeping, and could you bother to call to check back with me? No. How many weeks ago was that? I guess you’ve been very busy.”
“I have been busy. But your point is well taken, and I’m sorry.”
Doris’s cheeks had grown pink, and her braid was pulled up so tightly onto her head that he could see streaks of her scalp. “Yuh,” she said. “Well, don’t bother with your pity. I’m fine.”
“The music is beautiful, Doris. It’s nice to stop in here and hear you playing.”
“If it’s so nice, Tyler, why is it you never called up Chris Congdon to say they should plan in the budget for a new organ? They’re starting their preliminary financial meetings for the new year, as you very well know. Or perhaps you have your mind on other things.”
Horribly, a sudden pinpoint of fury seemed to explode in his brain, and he said coldly, “What other things are you referring to, Doris? Is there something on your mind? Why don’t you speak to me directly?”
She looked at him with eyes that seemed big as nickels. “Oh, I’ll speak to you directly,” she said, clutching her music scores against her coat. “I’ll tell you directly that I will not be spoken to that way. Do you understand?” She went away quickly, snowflakes falling on her braided bun.
OVERNIGHT, SHE SEEMED to have grown taller. Katherine stood in the kitchen holding her borrowed lunch box and waited while her father unzipped her coat. “I missed you,” Tyler said. “It’s not the same here without you.” He thought even her face was older. She watched him with a kind of detachment, and he had a fleeting image of her growing into a teenager, a young woman, looking at him this way, as if she didn’t need him. “Did you have a good time with the Meadowses?”
She nodded.
“You can go back there after school tomorrow. I have a meeting.”
Her only response seemed a slight intake of breath. “Is that okay? Do you like being there?” She nodded again. “Good.” He took the lunch box from her, set it on the table.
Katherine watched it with longing. She hoped he would not make her give it back. The beautiful Alice in Wonderland right there on its tin side. When she’d opened it at snack time, she had discovered crackers and raisins, and a peanut-butter-and-marshmallow sandwich cut into four pieces, and also two cookies.
SHE COLORED AT the dining-room table until evening. She colored a picture of Mrs. Meadows with her pretty pink cheeks, she colored a picture of Alice in Wonderland with her long yellow hair. She colored a picture of Mr. Meadows with his gray trousers and their cuffs, and a hat on his head like the kind her father wore.
For supper, her father opened a can of spaghetti, heated it in a pan. Katherine, because he asked her to, put two forks and paper napkins on the table. “Pumpkin,” he said, as the pan began to sizzle, “did Connie Hatch ever hurt you?” She stared at him. “Did she ever spank you, or anything like that?” He turned the burner off, came and sat down at the table. She shook her head, a tiny gesture, watching as her father’s lips became orange from the spaghetti clump he pushed into his mouth. He wiped his mouth with a napkin. “Do you know what gossip is?”
Katherine’s face got warm. She knew the word, but not really the meaning, and somehow this failure in front of her father caused her pain.
“Gossip is when people talk about one another, saying things that may not be true.”
He kept speaking, but a feeling of horror had come over her, and beneath the kitchen table she crossed her fingers. She thought how in Sunday school they had been told how children were kept in caves and then asked if they believed in Jesus. If they said yes, they were taken out and the lions ate them. Katherine knew she would have crossed her fingers and said she didn’t believe in Jesus, and knowing this was a deep secret inside her. It made her as bad as the man who denied Jesus three times before the cock crowed, and that was awful. He got hung upside down.
“So if someone says anything to you about Connie or me, you just ignore them, okay? Rumors get started by an ugliness in people. It’s sad, Katherine. But some people can’t help but be ugly. You just ignore them, understand?”
Katherine nodded, kept her fingers crossed hard, beneath the table.
NINE
Mr. Waterbury’s office had three large windows, two looking over the front parking lot and the other looking toward the playground and playing fields in the distance. A weak winter sun shone through this afternoon, making pale washes of light fall over his big wooden desk and across the brown tweed skirt Mary Ingersoll wore. Mr. Waterbury leaned back in his wooden swivel chair, causing it to creak as he hoisted one leg over the other. He was not a large man, but there was a corpulence to him, as though he had been inflated just slightly with a bicycle pump. He held a pen loosely in one hand, which he pointed now toward Rhonda Skillings. “I agree with you,” he said. “There’s no need to bring up the business with the housekeeper. If he’s carrying on with her, that’s a separate kettle of fish. We don’t want him to think he’s been called in to have rumors flung at him.”
“Exactly,” said Rhonda. She was seated in a big chair that had darkened maroon leather nailed to it with brass upholstery tacks, and she held a pen herself, a folder on her lap. “We’re here to help his child. Period. The end. Concern is the name of our game today. We’ll lay out for him the fears that have sprung from infantile grandiosity, coupled, as it were, with the further developmental stage of castration—”
Mr. Waterbury and Mary Ingersoll exchanged a quick glance. On Mr. Waterbury’s face wa
s the momentary expression of someone perplexed, who very much did not want to appear to be. “Concern, absolutely,” Mr. Waterbury said, nodding vigorously, then wiping at his shoulders, as though he had just discovered the dandruff there. “Every day, concern is the name of our game.”
Rhonda poked the end of the pen into her hair, and said: “My theory is this: When Tyler hears anything negative about Katherine’s behavior, he experiences this as a narcissistic wound. Which then results in narcissistic rage. And that’s what we want to avoid.”
“We sure do,” said Mary Ingersoll, seated over by the window. Both Rhonda and Mr. Waterbury smiled at her kindly.
“You’re not to worry,” Rhonda assured her.
“Is he going to stay minister?” Mary asked. “If he’s involved with a married woman? It’s really disgusting.”
Mr. Waterbury, who attended the Episcopal church in Holly-well, opened his palm toward Rhonda. “Well, we’re hardly sure if it’s true,” Rhonda said. “And that will be up to the church to decide. That’s why I think it’s important today to simply focus on Katherine. It’s hard to imagine it’s true,” she added.
“Anything’s possible when a man’s in pain,” Mr. Waterbury said. “Why, I knew a man who married his wife’s best friend six weeks after his wife had died.”
“But was his wife’s best friend married?” Mary asked.
“No. No, she wasn’t.” Mr. Waterbury gave a sorrowful look toward his desk.
“I’m just going to run to the washroom,” Mary said, rising.
“Of course, dear.” Rhonda moved her legs to let the young woman by.
TYLER DID NOT want to park in the main lot, where he imagined he could be seen by those sitting in Mr. Waterbury’s office, perhaps watching him as he walked across the lot, and so he drove the long way around so he could park by the back. He entered the side door of the school and found himself accosted at once by the smell of fear—all mixed with the presence of paint? Chalk? Paste? It swept up his throat, as he stood by the stairwell, along with the childhood memory of old Mrs. Lurvy, who used to tape kids’ mouths shut with yellow tape if they whispered; it had sat on her desk with the authority of a surgical instrument. She had favored him, though Belle had broken out in hives for months when she’d first had her. Hearing the sharp clack of heels, Tyler turned. A pair of brown pumps emerged above him, the nylon stockings, a tweed skirt—some kind of paralysis kept Tyler standing, looking up, as the tweed skirt turned the corner of the stairwell, showing him a glimpse of stockinged thigh, the flash of a garter. It was Mary Ingersoll, and she might not have seen him—Tyler, in his state, had opened his mouth, but whatever part of him made decisions had decided not to say hello—but she happened to turn, and she did see him there. She stared; he stared.