He could see himself in her eyes, and this should have stopped him.
What did he imagine he wanted? To offer some praise for her beauty that she would not have understood or that she would have thought cheesy, to use the language of the young? She was sixteen, or maybe seventeen, and even if she looked older, with her womanly breasts and her weary, off-kilter smile and her auburn hair and her green eyes, she was still a child. She would launch ships, maybe, or she would launch magazines and clothing lines, and there was no place in this for the likes of him. He can remember what she said next because she said it with a kind of generosity, and she didn’t need to. She could have screamed, called for her father. She could have screamed, but she didn’t. She said, “Reverend Duffy, have you maybe had a little too much to drink?”
Who hadn’t? Everyone had had too much to drink. His own wife hadn’t had too much to drink, because his wife was impossibly good, with reservoirs of goodness that debased him. She always had more energy for another homemade dessert that the kids would ignore. His wife had not drunk too much, but many others had, all the people who stayed too late at the party. If only drinking too much would explain it away, if only the gin bottle had an advisory about reckless behavior. Unfortunately, he’d drunk just enough to remember and to know better. Though his exact wording was lost, fifteen years later, the matter of his request was not. What he asked was if this sixteen-year-old girl would hold him.
When he reimagines it now, he reimagines it as if he were the fluttering dove himself, the holy spook, up near the corner of the ceiling, near some recessed source of interior illumination. Here he can watch as the Reverend Duffy asks a teenage girl to hold him. He can watch when, without waiting for assent or dissent, the reverend launches himself into her arms. What a foul tableau it is, for there is much music and merriment coming from elsewhere in the house. The music is the old rock music from the sixties, something like the Association or the Lovin’ Spoonful or perhaps the sound track to Hair. There are whoops of laughter from out on the patio, and the Reverend Duffy has launched himself into the arms of the goddess of wine. The girl doesn’t know she is beautiful yet, but she knows enough to recognize that she should not have a middle-aged man wrapped around her. She also knows that this middle-aged man should not be aroused.
Drink is said to increase the need and to decrease the ability, but it did nothing to dampen the arousal brought about by the teenage daughter. He could feel himself sweaty and desirous, in a way he had not been with his wife in a long time, though they had their loving and generous middle-of-the-night encounters. This was different; this was the lust that intended to conquer, that wanted to possess and overcome, that wanted to bend philosophy and history to its will and that broke the will of its subjects if it had to. This lust would admit of no opposition. What could the teenage daughter do to fend off the first part of the debasement? She crumpled backward onto her bed, with him piling onto her as though he were a rugby enthusiast. He was in her arms, or some portion of her arms, as little as she could get away with, and he tried to wrap his hands around her. In recollection, this is a fine moment in which to examine the particulars of her room, its immaculateness, the football team banner, the guitar case in the corner, the stuffed animals piled on the hope chest, the lacy curtains, the baby blue bedspread, the sliding closet door, which was open just enough to glimpse some of her girlish outfits.
She began to wriggle free. She spoke of his post, emphatically, “Reverend, Reverend,” the very thing that he was and is not, worthy of reverence, as if saying this would loosen him up somehow, and he was pouring out his all but drunken heart, the reservations that he had then and still has now, that any person of substance would have, that his profession was founded on the kinds of horseshit that you tell sensitive children to get them to sleep; he told her that we all lived here in emptiness and desolation, recognizing ourselves nonetheless as isolates in the infinitude of space, little asteroids of frozen rock in the endlessly expanding nothingness of creation; he tried to get out a couple of lines of poetry in some language that the girl could understand and then, and this is the worst part, he attempted to caress her breast. He remembers this part particularly well. He remembers that he attempted to touch her breast. He remembers that he put his hand down upon her breast, as if he might feel its fullness, as if he might feel where the nipple slumbered, where she would be as the Madonna once was, a feeder of human potential, and perhaps he even wished to suckle at the nipple of the girl, but the girl, who in this time had not ceased from saying “Reverend, please, Reverend, please,” pleading, came up with some surfeit of strength, and she heaved him sideways off of her, and with tremendous haste, she skittered into the bathroom next door, where he could hear the little ping of the push-button lock sealing her in.
His clothes were disarranged. His shirt needed to be tucked in. He went to the bathroom door. Probably she could hear him. She could hear him brushing softly against the bathroom door like a house cat against a shin. Most likely, she could hear him listening to her as she listened, and then she could hear him giving up, could hear the dawning of woeful recognition on his part as he headed down the staircase, straightening his tie. Maybe she could hear him talking to her father, telling John and Barbara what a fabulous party it had been and how he hoped to see them again soon, and then maybe she could hear him, just down the street, starting up his ten-year-old Volvo. If she could hear it, she did so without any pity, because no pity was owed.
That’s what he thinks about in the middle of the night. Waiting still, after all these years, for the repercussions.
On Monday, having slept fitfully, he is back at work on the sermon, for a few hours, before walking over to the church to see if there are any calls. There he will banter with the elderly widows who work for him selling picture postcards of the beautiful old church on the green and helping to plan potluck dinners and Bible study classes.
His wife, the forgiver and forgetter, yells to him that he should come down and have some breakfast, and she is right, of course, so he comes down. He’s been up since dawn, in his office. He asks, shouting as he descends the stairs, if there is any news on the answering machine. His wife says not. He asks if Annabel called again. She says not. He says he slept badly, and she slept badly, too, and yet there was no moment when they reached out for each other across the old lumpy king-size mattress. She asks what he will do today, though she knows what he will do today. And he knows what she will do, which is work on her textbook and then go to the office, where she has a couple of hours of private practice, and during these hours he agrees to be back at the house, to answer the phone and to keep an eye on Max.
“What’s the sermon about?” she asks.
“‘It is a dreadful thing to fall into the hands of the living God,’” he says. “Oh, and another section: ‘You sympathized with those in prison and joyfully accepted the confiscation of your property, because you knew that you yourselves had better and lasting possessions.’”
He pries a piece of burnt toast from the toaster, butters it without conviction. “Good news, if true.”
“Maybe if we told Max that his property would be joyfully confiscated?”
“He’ll come around,” the reverend says.
He doesn’t even sit at the kitchen table. He stands. The toast is a disappointment.
“I have no point of view,” he offers. “My angle is that I write this sermon at a dark moment in human history, and I am a mediocre man, and these are mediocre times. None of the gauzy apocalyptic promises will cover over all of this, the daily horror of people at their worst and most selfish. I don’t quite know what to say after that.”
His wife has a gentle expression of disapproval, which involves some mix of eyebrows and one corner of the mouth appearing to smile while the other frowns. This is her commentary on the sermon he proposes. He chokes down the toast in silence before banishing the crusts to the trash barrel. Then he rinses his plate and houses it in the drying rack.
/> “I wish you lots of inspiration,” she says, and excuses herself. Her office was formerly Annabel’s bedroom. It still has a few movie posters in it, as well as a radically sloping ceiling that would make it uncomfortable for the men in the household. His wife’s voice disappears into the living room, reminding him of various responsibilities, and there’s more, distantly, from upstairs. The telephone rings as soon as he has alighted at his own desk, and it’s the police from New York City. Wanting to know again if William has made contact with the Duffys. The reverend has the typewriter turned on. He has just written these lines:
If you believe the reports, Martin Luther King Jr. was not, when writing his dissertation, good at citing his sources. If you believe the reports, President Kennedy kept files on his opponents and had chemically enhanced romps in the White House.
When it is his turn, he tells the police what he knows, that his son appeared on Friday night and disappeared almost immediately, and they have not heard from him since. He says that his son did not perform the crime of which he is accused, and he says this as a matter of course. And he whites out some of his homiletic text by hand while he talks to the police. There is some back and forth with the detective on the other end of the line about the exact time that William appeared in the house on Friday, the time he left, and so forth. What was he wearing? “He was well turned out,” the reverend says, and the police ask if he would please call if William attempts to contact them, and the reverend says, “Of course.” Soon after, Annabel calls and offers to come and stay with them until it is ironed out, and she asks how the reverend can get any work done, and the reverend tells Annabel not to come. She has her job, her scripts, and she should have time for these things. His wife, who has by now picked up the other extension, agrees.
“Where’s Max?” Annabel says.
“In his room,” his wife says. “Where, for the moment, he belongs.”
“Did your mother —” the reverend says.
“She told me,” Annabel says. “I have a feeling he’s going to —”
“Good-bye, sweetheart, work hard,” the reverend says, and leaves the women to it.
Has he mentioned in the sermon yet that everyone needs to get their pledge cards in? Yes, it’s the time of year when every sermon features a hundred different appeals for cash money. ’Tis the season to remind the affluent that the First Congregational Church of Newton is a symbol of civic pride and that its upkeep is not inexpensive, since the building was constructed in 1721, after an earlier church was outgrown. It has been in continuous service ever since. It has had only twenty parsons in all those years, in part because of a pair of long-suffering types in the nineteenth century. It is worth reminding the congregation of this eminent history, and that the Reverend Duffy is now in fourth place on the all-time list in terms of duration of service. He scrawls on a notepad: Remember to ask for pledges.
In the middle of the afternoon, the reverend does what he never does, what he abominates as a pastor and an ethicist. He goes to watch television in the family room. Max is down there, wearing a pair of torn jeans and a T-shirt and an old mohair cardigan. Father sits next to son, on the couch, and neither says anything for a while, especially as the space of conversation is currently occupied by some kind of talk show featuring women of the plus sizes. The question is whether plus-size women are as sexy as women of regular sizes. What the reverend does believe, in the chatter of the indignant plus-size women, is that Max knows where his brother is.
“Do you know where he is? Because I think you know where he is. And I think your sister knows, too, and I wish you would tell me, so that we can make sure he is all right and isn’t making things worse for himself. This is not a matter for individuals. It is a matter for families.”
Max pretends to be watching the plus-size women.
“He didn’t tell me where he was going.”
“Your story is full of holes. It’s all going to come out eventually, and I don’t want you feeling worse for what you have done later. I’m offering you the chance to tell me what you know so that you won’t feel ashamed. Telling me will lighten your heart.”
Max gets up unceremoniously, goes upstairs. Slams his door. The Reverend Duffy is now alone with the plus-size women and he sits through several commercial breaks, always coming back to the talk show, and then he falls into a stuporous slumber that comes on like fever. There is a sick member of the congregation, Mrs. Milliken, but he forgets about her. There is the bereaved family, the Ericksons, whose son just died of lymphoma. The stupor wipes away the Ericksons. The great forgetting of afternoon television is upon him, and he is asleep, and the commercials are singing their jingles into his slumbering ears, and they are telling him about excellent medications that he should ask his doctor about, Lipitor and Nexium and Elysium, they are telling him about feminine products, and they are telling him various things that will help him with the family wash, and they are telling him about other programs that he might enjoy, and all of these things are much louder than the responsibility of the last Sunday of the church calendar and the manifold signs of the end of the age, and he hears of Lipitor and Nexium and also of the stars falling from the sky and the heavenly bodies trembling. Never have the End Times been more apparent than in the combination of ranting of plus-size women and the traumatic napping of an insomniac Reverend Duffy, and when he wakes a half hour later, with the television unaccountably turned off, he feels acutely the disgust of a violent waking. He’s nauseated and disgusted and hates the world, and hates himself for having watched the plus-size women when he should have been calling on the Ericksons, but instead of calling on the Ericksons, he goes directly upstairs to the office and to the typewriter, which still trembles and hums in the way that typewriters do:
1 As he was leaving the temple, one of his disciples said to him, “Look, Teacher! What massive stones! What magnificent buildings!”
2 “Do you see all these great buildings?” replied Jesus. “Not one stone here will be left on another; every one will be thrown down.”
So it follows that edifices will fall, just as we all are fallen men and women, just as I am myself, who has given to this parish things he does not have, namely charity and love. Your faith gives me faith today, when my own family most needs it.
Dusk already! The days are getting so intolerably short, and the end of the year is coming, with all the dread of winter. His wife comes back into the house, and he doesn’t even call out to her. She has gone and she has returned, and he has taken no notice of it. The tension would seem to call for something, but what is the something that it calls for? He has not had a stiff drink in many a year, but maybe tonight is the night for a stiff drink. He doesn’t know how to sit still, nor what to do with himself. He hasn’t done a legitimately ministerial thing all day, nor has he spoken to anyone but the police and his wife and son.
When he goes into the kitchen, his wife has some pasta boiling, which he might as well have made himself, as he is an expert boiler of pasta. They are here when the knock at the door comes. The two of them go to the door, he with the dishrag in his hands because he just tasted the pasta and pronounced it not quite ready, and when they open the door it is the door opened on the lesson of prodigality, on the lesson of the son who wastes his advantages and resources only to return home to be loved, to be loved because the prodigal son is now in the light on the front step, here he is, and the prodigal son is loved! He looks as if he has never been looked at, he looks as if he has set a new world record for dishevelment, and he has on no shoes at all, and his shirt is untucked, and his hands are waving madly, as if his hands have now liberated themselves, and he is crying this low, savage cry, the cry of relapsed madness; or the son seems to come in from the wilderness, even though there is no wilderness in Newton; there is no topographical wilderness here, the reverend knows, and yet tears are streaming down the face of the adopted son, and his parents are on the step, and they have their son in their arms, because the son has come home, and
he is in their arms, and the three of them are there, in the light of the step, and the neighbors must be watching, but what does it matter if the neighbors are watching, damn the neighbors, what is God to the reverend and his son but an inadvertent thing, unless of course there is the action of grace in the moment of the return of the son, the son on the front step, wearing no shoes, cuts upon his feet and hands, who may or may not have done whatever it is he is accused of having done but who is now here, is now home, and his parents are with him, for he has no other place to go, and his father is the agent of forgiveness, and the agent of forgiveness is bringing the son into the house, all the things that divide us should not divide us, because those things are nothing, those things are just hesitations, and the wife of the reverend, the mother of the son, is saying, “Mercy, mercy,” and she is picking up the phone, but the phone will not help, because the son’s wickedness is now commuted, whatever it is, whatever it was, because the reverend is holding his son, his gigantic son; his son is in danger, and his father has not yet done everything he could do, nor has he believed as strongly as he could believe, but now he will, and now the father loves the son again, because the scriptures are correct: