The Right Reverend Michael T. Hollis stepped out of his bathtub. He groped around blindly for a towel and, realizing that the rack was empty, stumbled to the clothes hamper and pulled out a used one. Trying to focus despite his throbbing forehead, he decided that the monogrammed side was the least soiled and dried himself with that. Satan was always busy. Now, he knew there were at least three sets of towels on that rack last night—or was it the night before? See that, he couldn’t remember and he certainly wasn’t going to waste time thinking about it. He had a funeral to preach and he hadn’t been late for a sermon in twenty years. Devil or no devil, he was getting dressed for work. A sudden pain flared up in his middle and stopped him at the sink. He gripped its edge, belching up the taste of Scotch and bile from his sour stomach. Bending well beneath the mirror, he turned and gargled his mouth again. He needed to take something to coat his stomach and there was just no time for breakfast. Imagining his ulcer reddening and spreading because he had to push himself through a service without eating was strangely gratifying. He could add this to a growing list of sacrifices his job demanded.
Walking into the bedroom naked and opening his mahogany-and-brass armoire, he thrust his hand toward the right and pulled out a suit. His winter suits were arranged in gradation of shades from the tans, brown, blues, and on toward the blacks. So he knew a right-angle plunge should give him the appropriate color for a funeral. He grunted at the charcoal tweed he found in his hand and hung it on his silent valet. He should have been a lawyer, like his brother. He knew where Gabriel was at this very minute: in Aruba, his toes buried in the sand and his fingers wrapped around a Mai Tai or the waist of some shapely tour guide. Sure, his phone could be ringing off the hook right now because someone decided to get born, get married, or drop dead. You want to set up a trust fund, buy a house, or see a will? Some secretary pushed a button and put them on hold. They’d have to wait until her boss ran out of money at the casino and came home. But when his congregation needed him, he was at their mercy. In just this one week someone had already decided to get married and to die, so what was he to do? And you couldn’t put Sunday on hold. No, it rolled around every week in spite of what plans he had. No wonder Gabriel was always asking him if he was crazy. No, he wasn’t crazy, he was called.
Michael didn’t know it then, but that moment had come when he was twelve years old, sitting in the fifth row of his grandmother’s weather-beaten church. The rough floorboards threatening to give way under the weight of those pounding feet. The sagging walls miraculously held up by the Tennessee heat pushing in and the body heat pushing out. The stale air, the clapping and swaying, put him to sleep, his eyes flying open whenever an unpredictable explosion of sound shattered the rhythm of his stupor. Was it the same man or a series of men behind that plywood podium? They all sounded and looked the same to him. The faces disfigured and melting from the moisture in his eyes and on their foreheads and temples. One of a hundred evenings he had to endure in one of a dozen vacations to the country.
There was nothing particularly memorable about that evening, except that he was more tired than usual after running with his cousins in the woods all day, and there was a huge mosquito bite on his left knee that kept itching. And definitely nothing outstanding about the minister on whom he couldn’t focus through his heavy eyelids. But somewhere in his sleep, in the region where sound can live without words and words without sound, just as the vibrations were dreamed to him—I am the voice of the one crying in the wilderness, make straight the way of the Lord—a clap of thunderous hands snapped his neck up and his eyes open to engulf him in an intense flow of energy moving between the pews and the podium. In that moment the air had thickened, so that it crackled and sizzled around him, threatening to choke him as it closed in on his throat and chest, making it difficult to breathe what was left of the oxygen in that room. His first lungful sent his head rolling onto his chest and in his sleep he expelled that breath of power, fear, and mortality to draw in another that gave life to the belief: here is a force that can destroy you if you don’t control it. He stood there now in his bedroom, knowing that for some mysterious reason he had simply wanted a career in the church, never remembering the origin of that desire.
Turning toward the mirror over his dresser, he surveyed himself intently from the neck down and reached for his Aramis body lotion. Put on the whole armour of God that ye may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil. His bronze skin was almost as even and firm as the day he entered college, with just a few gray hairs mixed in with the auburn on his chest. His hands smoothed the lotion over the lean muscled arms and torso, the flat plane of the stomach and corded thighs that had qualified him for those three letters in all-collegiate track and field and a three-minute introduction into most beds on campus. The man of the hour. The man most likely to succeed in business, law, economics, politics—or pimping (depending upon whether the poll was taken in the faculty lounge or the student center). Yes, anything that you could parlay a liberal arts degree and the ability to be elected the first black captain of the debating team into—anything but the ministry.
His acceptance at Harvard surprised no one, but the fact that it was the Divinity School made front page in the campus newspaper. The caption under his handsome face was predictable: “U of P Star Athlete Headed for a Celestial Track.” And since his latest conquest was the editor’s girlfriend, the tone was predictable as well. The staff wished him the best in this new race for a heavenly crown, but wondered if his proven and much publicized abilities to sprint past fleshly temptations and clear the hurdles of egocentrism might not find him at a finish line that was a bit farther South than he intended. Whether the congratulations that circled the campus during his final semester were sincere or not, the bewilderment certainly was. Although he skillfully answered a multitude of questions that basically boiled down to “why?” with a dozen clever variations of “why not?” no one left him completely satisfied because everyone knew that in four years Michael Hollis had never even made it to chapel. He was the last person to expect there Sunday mornings because he was the first person to pass out at the parties the night before.
But he had gone a few times in his freshman year, keeping a promise made to his grandmother that he wouldn’t forget his “upbringing” and go to church. It only took him a couple of services to realize that going to chapel wasn’t going to church. And so on Sunday afternoons he quietly left the dorm and drove past the manicured lawn and Gothic stones of the Penn chapel into South Philadelphia to sit in the back of reconverted candy stores with stained-glass cellophane peeling at the windows. Where, more often than not, the altar was a scarred wooden table with an oilskin cloth and plastic crucifix; the battered piano missing keys if not pitch; the chairs missing leg braces if not backs. And a congregation of determined, tired faces never seeming to miss the everything they never had or never would have once they walked out that door. He always sat quietly: a slender, polite young man who seemed to want nothing more than to offer a monogrammed handkerchief to a sister weeping from the spirit, or a pair of strong arms to another who had fallen on his polished calf loafers. They didn’t wonder what he was doing there. Like their faith, he was absorbed for whatever brief comfort he might bring. Every Sunday (except for the weekends the track team competed out of state) Michael made the circuit: The Tabernacle of the Saints, The Zionist Mission, The House of Divine Ascension. The names changed constantly, but the feeling didn’t. Sitting in the rear of those small rooms, he could almost see the currents racing from back to front and back again. The presence of that type of raw power connected up with something in his center, where it transformed fear into fascination and mortality into meaning. All of this surfaced to tell him that he was “called.” He was meant to be at the center of that energy. And now all he needed was the training.
While filling out his application for Divinity School, he hesitated a moment before the blank after denomination. His family had been Baptists for generations and so he final
ly decided to write that. But the line filled in with his second career choice was instinctual and it may have puzzled the admissions committee. Since he wasn’t questioned, he didn’t have to explain why, if the Divinity School turned him down, he would have become an electrical engineer.
Stand therefore, having your loins girt about with truth, and having on the breastplate of righteousness. The pima-cotton boxer shorts slid over his thighs and he fumbled in the drawer for an undershirt. The material responded like cashmere under his fingers as he pulled it over his chest and smoothed it down. Marie had never let him wear undershirts at Harvard. After cutting one of her classes at Radcliffe or standing up a prospective MBA, she was subject to showing up at his room any time of the day or night. Arms full of oranges, salami, and beer that were dropped directly on top of his open books. Her small fingers impatient at even the shirt buttons and belt buckle that took her only seconds—that was enough effort, she’d say. And God knows, he didn’t want to tire her out. Not before the lights were off and he had to adjust his eyes to the soft, muted outlines of a body that blended so evenly with the shadows. Even in a weak afternoon light it was impossible to tell where her hairline ended and the satin of her skin began. If he didn’t have light sheets, he’d never find her in the dark, he’d tease. And she’d let him know in that strange, cryptic fashion of hers that the strength and length of his eyesight were the least of her concerns at the moment. He could feel the tensions draining out of his body as she made him laugh, the piles of books and doubts left on his desk dissolving. His beautiful Marie. He quickly told her, although she had never asked, that a man like him shouldn’t marry until fifty. But when the time came, not of imagining a life with her, but of being unable to imagine one without her, he invited her to see how he spent his Sunday afternoons.
At first he was nervous about dragging a doctor’s daughter from Cambridge to Roxbury. But she sat through the service quietly, her gloved hands tapping on the silk dress and the red pillbox hat, nodding in time to the music. When it was over she simply turned to him and smiled, and without his needing to explain, she understood. But, of course, with his type of degree he wouldn’t have to work in places like this. Not if he planned to support her and the three children they wanted: one for each of them and one to convince themselves that they weren’t insane to begin it all in the first place. But if he simply insisted on his fondness for cramped rooms that smelled of stale cabbage, at least she could console herself with the fact that he wasn’t called to the Catholic priesthood. And just to safeguard herself against that being a future possibility, she presented him with a graduation gift of a dozen of the whitest sheets he had ever seen.
Yes, it was impossible to imagine the texture of his existence if Marie had not been there to understand. She understood his frustrations over the irrelevancy of courses in Latin, Greek, and German. The eternal wading through papers on the sociological implications of the Nicene Council, Gnosticism and Early Christianity, the dialectics of Hegelian thought, all to the end of forgetting it and going about what he wanted to do in the first place. She understood his scorn about what Harvard considered a “model sermon,” and she brought the champagne with which they celebrated his Th.D. and laughed with him over its real meaning: total horse dung. She followed him away from Boston, accepting that her own career would have to be put aside because there was a strange correlation between a community’s increasing need for ministers and decreasing need for psychologists. She even understood that the discovery of his sterility, which deprived her of the children that could have then filled up her life, was somehow much more devastating for him than her.
But after twelve years, Marie could not understand the other Women. He saw her trying. God, how he saw her do that. And he had wanted so very much to help her. But since you couldn’t talk about what wasn’t happening, he couldn’t tell her that he respected her too much to ever have it be anyone in the church. There was no need for that hard, guarded look in her eyes when she sat on the Missionary Board or Ladies’ Auxiliary. No, there was just no way to tell her the truth, that his infidelities hurt him much more than her because he had to watch the only woman he could say he ever really loved crumble inside bit by bit.
Was it the month she brought home the dark brown sheets, or the month they moved to Linden Hills? He knew it wasn’t the day she left, because he had already lost the days before and after that. He could remember saying to himself, She left last week, when the new week finally became clear. Even eight years later he could point to the very chair where he had sat for three days—completely sober—and cried. So it didn’t begin then. It must have been a few years before, in the month they moved here, which was the same month she bought those sheets. Yes, his new post at Sinai Baptist, the coup of his career, the one that came complete with a home in Linden Hills—that was when. The bottom became the top.
… And your feet shod with the preparation of the gospel of peace. He sat on the bed and pulled on a pair of black silk socks and reached for his wing-tipped shoes. Bending over his knees caused his head to pound, and his hands trembled slightly as he looked down at his feet. With a sigh he realized that he hadn’t put his trousers on and so the shoes would have to be taken off again. Maybe, if he was careful, he could slip his feet through anyway. And if he ruined the suit, that would teach him to pay attention next time. Had that been the problem? He just didn’t pay attention when the line that brought him to the top of his form kept receding? At first it was a quarter, then it was half. Half of the bottle—halfway up the pews? The ratio couldn’t be that exact. Then, as the churches got larger, the boards he headed more impressive, and the budgets doubled—tripled—it took much more to enable him to reach up those pews to the line where the right ones were to keep the current flowing. He was fooled for so long because the faces seemed the same out there—the various shades of brown that he knew could produce the sparks needed to refuel his efforts. But the postures in front of the church had slowly stiffened under the cashmere, silk, and beaver skins, so he had to reach over them to the others, where he felt a supple willingness to receive, be filled, and return the energy he needed to keep going. Then the line was three-fourths because they were now sitting all the way up in the back. And it was left to him to find something to help generate a circular current over the heads and bodies that threatened to absorb the flow with their plastic postures.
… Above all, taking the shield of faith, wherewith ye shall be able to quench all the fiery darts of the wicked. Quickly now, the oxford cloth shirt, black tie knotted without looking above the Adam’s apple, initialed gold cuff links. Vest. Jacket. He began to take form, as he always did, behind the proclamative work of Tiffany, Pierre Cardin, Hart Schaffner & Marx, Shreve Crump & Lowe, Yves Saint Laurent, Cartier, and the two Brooks Brothers. They faithfully covered his front, back, fingers, wrists, and neck with the message that the Right Reverend Michael T. Hollis was ready for the outside world.
Did he really need a vest? Yes, even with his gabardine robe the church would probably be cold. Sinai Baptist had a persistent draft that defied the heating system. A cold church. After his first sermon, he remembered asking the former pastor if Sinai was always that cold and being told: Yes, but the board of trustees had just approved a new furnace. He could have gone home and laughed about that with Marie, but by then he couldn’t find her at night. If those dark sheets weren’t always on the bed, he could have told her why he started sponsoring those Christmas parties for Putney Wayne out of his own pocket. The board had refused, since all allocations for “foreign communities” were already tied up building mission homes in South Africa. He really didn’t mind the personal cost, because if he could find a way to bring them there at Christmas, they might come back during the year. And they had at first, sitting in the back pews and the balconies, but gradually drifting away to where they could be free to worship as they believed: that the spirit of God meant just that. They left him alone, and he could have gone with them but he had already r
eached the bottom. And it took only one-fourth of the new bottle for him to believe that there still might be hope at the top. He could still stand up at the pulpit, feeling the inner warmth that meant the power was still there, and the power gave meaning to it all. Because without that—in spite of the multimillion-dollar credit union, his presidency at the Northeastern Baptist Council, his seat on the governor’s planning board—somehow, he had no ministry. And his ministry was his life.
He was ready except for his hair … And take the helmet of salvalion. Slowly, he put his hand on the brush and brought it up toward his face. He tried to concentrate on the soft curls at his hairline, gauging the rapidly advancing gray. But there was no way not to see that a stranger was brushing his hair. The red-rimmed eyes with heavy folds under them hanging like puffed bruises. The furrowed brow that could easily hold a coin, and the slack jawline. He told himself the usual lie, it was a face that looked like death. Harsh as it was, it was better than the truth: it was a face that looked like it had no reason to live.
Heading downstairs toward the kitchen, he passed long strands of tinsel on the steps, and picked his way around smashed tree ornaments—the silvery greens, reds, and golds littering the coffee table and floor. The tall Christmas tree stood half-trimmed and leaned at a precarious thirty-degree angle. The empty ashtrays told him that he hadn’t had any company last night—unless it was a nonsmoker. He found his missing bath towels mangled on the kitchen floor, lying in gummy pools of drying eggnog. That’s what happened to them. But why had he gone all the way upstairs to get something to clean up this mess? He glanced over the kitchen counter crowded with egg shells, spilled sugar, open cartons of souring milk, and saw that the paper-towel rack was empty. So that was it. He would have to speak to the cleaning woman after the holidays. God knows, he paid her enough to keep his supplies in the proper place.