The Reverend James Byrnes didn’t look forward to the upcoming meeting. Not at all. He never liked meeting with members of his congregation. He was just at the stage where he was going to begin to hire a buffer of assistant pastors who would shield him from having to go one-on-one with any such members. But that day had not yet arrived; it was only an idea whose time had come.
He waited a few more moments, trying to steel himself for the meeting. He had seen the woman, sitting outside his door, as he had returned from lunch. She was a nice looking young woman, probably about thirty, and she looked vaguely familiar, although by now it was impossible for him to know all of his members. He probably had seen her, out in the crowd, Sunday after Sunday, but other than that he had no recollection of her. His congregation included quite a number of good looking women.
He wondered if she was there to discuss yet another case of marital discord. He had discussed many such cases in his career, mainly with female members of his congregation, although a few males had been sprinkled in. He didn’t particularly object to hearing those more than any other type, and in many cases preferred it. He had developed a set of things to say, things that if applied might solve the situation, but might not. However, he had at least done his part in such instances.
He hesitated for a while longer. Whenever he sat privately with an attractive woman, he recalled the Reverend Lucas Elrod, another Nashville pastor, for whom he had worked for about six years. Reverend Elrod had a reputation for counseling women during times of marital dissolution, and sometimes “overcounseling;” he had been known to juggle ten or twelve different affairs of differing degrees at the same time, and although he had come perilously close to being caught and exposed on several occasions, he had dodged the bullet thus far.
Reverend Byrnes didn’t particularly have those same plans in mind, but he well understood the danger of being in close proximity with attractive women in private meetings. He had no particular moral objection against such involvement, but he knew that it spelled danger at any given moment after such contact started, and he had a lot to lose. His congregation, which he had worked so hard to build from the ground up, was finally getting to the stage where it was becoming financially independent, talked about around town, and attracting new members left and right.
“Reverend, this is Ms. Lucy Wingate.”
Reverend Byrnes came out of his haze to find his administrative assistant introducing his visitor. The woman was taller than he had pictured while she had been seated, with long, dark hair falling to a spot just above the middle of her back. She was slender, but had an athletic look, as if she might be a runner, and even a moderate weightlifter. She seated herself very quickly, almost in one swift movement, and looked at him directly with a pleasant but neutral expression.
“How long have you been attending here, Ms. Wingate?”
“About a year now. We moved here from San Diego.”
“How do you like it so far?”
“Well, it took a little getting used to at first,” she said, speaking crisply, in a businesslike tone. “I was raised in an Episcopalian church, and my father was Jewish, although he didn’t attend any religious services. Your church seems to be quite different, a different tone from what I grew up in. I don’t say that’s better or worse, just different.”
“Yes, I like to think we offer something different. A lot of people are looking for something different. Of course, no church can please everyone, but we do our best to accommodate.”
“My husband and I had a discussion recently, about a situation in the household. That’s one of the things I wanted to ask you about. One of two.”
Reverend Byrnes nodded understandingly, but inwardly his guard went up. It always did when someone was about to pose a specific situation for which he was to provide guidance. The world is too individualistic, he often thought. There’s no way to satisfy everyone, no matter what answer you give, no matter how many variations on an answer you give. If you say what they don’t like, then they don’t like you. He didn’t like that it was that way, but that was the way he had come to feel that it was.
“Our son has a girlfriend,” the woman began. “He’s known her since they began high school last year. She often comes over to our house in the afternoons, when I’m at work, or he goes over to her house when her parents are at work.”
“Okay.”
“Well, we have somewhat assumed that they might be up to something, up to more than we would have liked for them to have been. We’ve been operating on that assumption, but haven’t done anything about it because we didn’t have any real evidence of it. But it’s been on our minds.”
“That’s understandable,” Reverend Byrnes said evenly. “It’s a common problem these days, and has been for quite a while.”
“Yes, but there’s a little wrinkle now that’s developed,” Ms. Wingate said, and a little more concern crept into her voice. “Our son has become friendly with a man who works in city government. He’s head of some board, appointed by the mayor, and he’s part of the mayor’s political machine, if you will.”
“I know the mayor quite well,” Reverend Byrnes said, an air of confidence about him. “We’ve hosted the mayor in my church on more than one occasion. And he’s invited me to speak at several city functions here and there.”
She hesitated, perhaps wondering what the significance of that comment was, given the situation she had just described. The room suddenly seemed very still, and it was easy to hear noises from the outside room, even with the door shut. She wondered how much privacy they really had, and whether it really mattered.
“Well, anyway, about a week ago, this girlfriend of his called me and said she wanted to talk to me—in person. I met her for lunch at a restaurant near the house, and we talked alone for about an hour. She didn’t want me to tell my son about it, and after we met I could understand why.”
Reverend Byrnes’s natural curiosity began to show, and he seemed to forget any concerns he had about the nature of the problem that would be presented to him. “What was it all about?”
“She said that my son and this man had begun to have a—a physical affairNaturally, I was somewhat shocked, both because it was happening and because I had expected to find out that he and his girlfriend were intimate. I guess I was so stunned by it all, that I immediately brought that issue up to her, and she said there was no truth to it, that my son and she had never been intimate, and that she had wondered why he had not seemed more interested.”
Reverend Byrnes scratched his head and shifted in his chair. He and the woman looked at each other during a long pause, then he wondered if he might be making her a little uncomfortable, and he shifted his gaze away from her. He searched the room while he was thinking, trying to find a resting point, and when he didn’t do so, he swiveled his chair around and looked out the window for a while. She sat behind him and said nothing. Then, after realizing that she might think he had run away from the conversation, he twirled around and faced her again. She sat there, with the same searching look he had seen when he had turned away.
“What’s this fellow’s name?”