Apparition & Late Fictions: A Novella and Stories (15 page)

Adrian could see it now, watching from the long porch of the National Hotel, the parade of suffering humankind, bearing their various histories and fears of missed chances and discontents along the esplanade, the mercilessly sunlit day unfolding around them; it was inevitable. “The story of love,” as he often told his audience, “to quote Professor Bowlby, is told in three volumes: Attachment, Separation, and Loss.” Or if the time allowed only a thumbnail version, “Love,” he would say, quoting Roy Orbison, “hurts.”

“No pair of words ever added up to more truth than that!” Adrian would often close his keynotes with the observation.

“Boudleaux Bryant wrote it. Roy Orbison sang it. Everyone in the room here knows it—
Love hurts!
We ante up, we go all in, we play the cards we’re dealt as best we can, and still it comes down to a simple two-word arithmetic, this fact of life:
Shit happens, Jesus wept, Life sucks, Love hurts.
And yet we keep on playing for keeps because
Love heals, love sings, love haunts, love holds, love gives, love takes, love warms, love knows, love waits, love weeps, love laughs, love lives, love lasts, God is love and love never ends.
” This litany of love, for which Adrian had become well-known, always signaled the end of his speech. He would let the last words settle in the air, careful to keep his gaze fixed above their heads, off in the distance beyond the back of the room, then step back from the lectern, let his hands fall to his
side and his head bow slightly, which never failed to bring on the first round of applause. “Thank you,” he would say, holding his hands to his heart as the applause grew louder. “Thank you, thank you…you are so very kind…” It would bring them to their feet. He would bow again.

ADRIAN LITTLEFIELD
looked down the long porch of the National Hotel and tried to envision his ex-wife Clare in her thirties seated at one of these tables with her old artist Ben, wizened and hirsute, each of them pleased with what they had just accomplished by getting sufficiently free of life’s entanglements to arrive here on the island together, off-season, unencumbered. Like Ben’s wife, Adrian and the children had been jettisoned, thrown overboard to the fish or gulls, somewhere en route between the mainland and island. How knowingly they must have smiled at one another, how free of any moral vexation, how entitled they surely must have felt to their mutual lapses of faith. Or maybe not. Maybe there was some whiff of regret. How could he ever know? How, of course, could Findlay, Ohio, flat and landlocked, compete with an island in the ocean? How could an associate pastor compete with a true artist or a sickly, sexless, disabled wife back in Westchester—how could she compete with a young and eager and interested girl?

ADRIAN PICKED
at the elements of his meal. He wasn’t as hungry as he’d thought. He asked for the bill, left a large gratuity, and asked the waitress for another cup of coffee and a local phone book.

IV

F
ATHER FRANCIS
Assisi Concannon phoned the Reverend Adrian Littlefield and told him to be ready at five o’clock.

“I can’t make it, Francis. I’ve got kids to watch.”

“I’m bringing a sitter. We need a night out.”

“No really, Francis, I really can’t.”

“Never cross a priest, Adrian. It’s bad karma. See you at five.”

Word about the marital woes of the associate pastor at Findlay’s St. Mark’s Methodist Church had gotten round all over that part of Ohio. If bad news travels fast, Adrian observed, news involving the private lives of the reverend clergy moved like wildfire.
And the tongue is a fire
, he recalled from the Letter of James.
The tongue is set among our members as a world of iniquity; it stains the whole body, sets on fire the cycle of nature, as is itself set on fire by hell.

A tongue among my members would be just the thing, he thought, then tried to turn his thoughts to godly themes.

“The people who know you know you,” his father had told him when Adrian had shared his worry over the gossip that was circulating about his wife leaving him. “And those who don’t, don’t care.” But Adrian knew that people were talking. Clare had spent a few weeks in an apartment on the north end of Findlay, then moved to Bowling Green, then eastward on to Cleveland.

She kept giving Damien new phone numbers which the boy
would sit repeating to himself until he had them memorized. To watch his son, just gone eight years old, holding the slip of paper, quizzing himself and his little sister Sarah on their mother’s new numbers hurt Adrian and angered him.

From the same mouth come blessing and cursing. Does a spring pour forth from the same opening both fresh and brackish water?
Whenever he heard some strand of a rumor about his predicament, he renewed his vow to keep silent rather than add his own fiery tongue—
a restless evil full of deadly poison
—to the general conflagration.

Oh, to put my tongue to better use, he thought, at the altar of some good woman’s pleasure…then caught himself again and tried to budge his brain from the parts of women.

Whether it was coincidence, correlation, or cause and effect, soon after Clare Littlefield moved out of the manse, her cuckolded husband’s sermons began to draw more listeners to church. Adrian thought it was mostly the spectacle of a churchman writhing in such worldly pain that packed the pews.
Not many of you should become teachers
, James the brother of Jesus advised,
for you know that we who teach will be judged with greater strictness.

Folks from as far off as Fostoria and Columbus Grove, Bowling Green and Bucyrus would show up for the eleven o’clock services on the every other Sundays Adrian preached. Even his Wednesday night Bible Study, formerly a lackluster assembly of elders and widows, suddenly had new faces, younger faces, and more females than ever before. His former custom of preparing typed sermons, two minutes a page, eight pages per service of carefully constructed remarks on some biblical principal, gave way to a much looser, catch-as-catch-can delivery. This owed to the necessities of his newly single life
as the custodial parent of two young children. He hadn’t the time proper preparation takes, to study the readings from the Lectionary, and find some way to connect those dots.

In the years of his marriage he’d spend every other Saturday night in his office at St. Mark’s, preparing his sermon for the following morning. He liked to think of members of the congregation, driving up and down South Main at all hours, returning from boozy dinners, late movies, the shift change at Cooper Tires, God knows what assignations—how they would see the lights blazing from his basement office and know he was hard at the Lord’s work late at night.

“You were burning the midnight oil again,” someone would always say, shaking his hand after Sunday services. Adrian thought it was a good thing to be known for. The Reverend Hinkston had a fairly comprehensive library, which he had generously opened to Adrian. It had volumes of old sermons, church histories, homiletic guides, and toastmaster’s resources. A formula for his homilies had emerged, by which he sought to speak to his entire flock, young and old, devout and backsliding, male and female, country and townie, educated and simple. He would pick out a couple of homey anecdotes with an evident lesson, maybe a verse from Helen Steiner Rice for the blue hairs, some folksy jokes, and something from the current music, “a little bit country, a little bit rock and roll,” to keep the younger crowd alert. To these he would add something from the day’s Scripture readings and tie them all together seamlessly, like the papers he wrote in seminary—five paragraphs, compare and contrast, beginning, middle, and end—methodical. Thus, Jesus would be our “bridge over troubled waters” and Moses was an example of “knowing when to fold and knowing when to hold them.”

He’d type them up with double spacing and wide margins for notes he might add in longhand afterward, shifting those points he most wanted to stress into capital letters and underlining things he might want to repeat. The old Underwood his father gave him had given way to an Olympia Electronic and then to an IBM Selectric. He would go into the darkened sanctuary and test his delivery in the vaulted acoustics of the worship space. “My brothers and sisters in Christ Jesus Arisen,” he would always open. He would listen for the echo of his own voice off the stone walls and open the articulation of the words to allow for this amplification. “Amen and Amen,” he would almost always close, in a style borrowed from a TV preacher he’d seen as a boy who would heal people by the laying on of hands. And though his sermons were, in their printed versions, carefully wrought and often very readable, and though he kept copies for his pastoral archives, the homilies he labored over were as enthusiastically ignored and as politely disregarded by his congregants as the Reverend Hinkston’s famous “three points and a poem” snorers. Regardless of what it was he was saying, he could effect no manifest change in the congregants’ response. The smilers kept smiling, the nodders kept nodding, the sighers kept sighing, the dozers kept getting elbowed by their wives. “Uplifting message this morning,” Mrs. Melzer would always say, shaking his hand and pressing the handkerchief to her nostrils. “Covered all the bases today, Reverend,” Clark Waters, the head of the DPW would say without fail. “A blessing, a blessing, words from the heart,” the breathless Donna Montgomery would always own, holding her right hand over her bosom and offering her left hand for Adrian to take in the kind of straight-armed feint he always associated with characters from a Tennessee Williams play. He would assume
his place at the back doors of the church while half of the congregants made for the parking lot and the other half made for the fellowship hall where coffee and donuts and cookies were served.

Whatever the response, Adrian counted himself blessed to have anyone listening at all. So many churches had lost members to the growing hoard of radio and TV preachers—Swaggart and the Bakkers, Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson—and the local crazies from the Ohio River valley who flooded the local radio airways with variously “old-time,” or “feel-good,” or “prosperity” gospels and perpetual appeals for “seed offerings” and “love gifts.”

Many late Saturday nights or early Sunday mornings, crawling into bed beside Clare, bits and pieces of his sermon still tumbling through his brain, Adrian would press himself to the warm bend of his wife’s buttocks, and reaching beneath her night shirt, cup one of her breasts in his hand and bury his face in her long hair, which always smelled to him like Eden. Unfailingly that verse that held how “the word became flesh and dwelt among us” would come to him, along with the prayer that she might wake sufficiently to allow him to dwell among her flesh entirely.

In their early years, before Damien and Sarah, before she returned to school, before he and his work and their dull routines in what she’d begun to call “Finally,” Ohio, had become the focus for her discontent, Clare would often give in to this ritual seduction, signaling by a tiny sigh, a catch of her breath, or a little moan, or by pushing her rump more firmly against him, or by rolling on her back and moving his hand with her hand between her legs while still seeming to be deep in sleep. Afterward, as she curled back into her private slumber, the
wordless discourse of their lovemaking done, Adrian would count his blessings, giving thanks for the gift of his wife while replaying the tape of his freshly typed sermon in his mind, tapping out the phrases such as he could remember them, word by word, syllable by syllable, with his fingers tapping on Clare’s beautiful bottom, a private code the cadence of which would put him eventually to sleep.

In the weeks since she had left him, his homiletics, even Dr. Hinkston, the senior pastor, commented, had become suddenly “more moving, more engaged, more relevant somehow, more meaningful.”

“A gift of the Holy Spirit, the fiery tongue!” Dr. Hinkston called it, but Adrian figured it might be the drink that Francis Concannon and he had gotten in the habit of overdoing on Saturday nights, and the low-grade, ever-present, and flickering rage, the mysteries of human suffering and passion, the cross and flame his life had become.

F
ATHER
F
RANCIS
Concannon couldn’t care less about that. His anger was no mystery at all.

“For fuck sake, Adrian,” the priest shouted over the phone, “next time I get word about a friend in trouble from a horse’s ass instead of the horse’s mouth, I’m gonna really be pissed.”

“I’m sorry, Francis, I should have called.”

Word of his friend’s trouble had got to him at St. Michael’s as gossip from one of his church ladies.

“At least we don’t have to worry about your missus running off with an artist, Father!” said Mrs. Bokuniewicz one Tuesday in late June after morning Mass.

The priest had been a true friend ever since, coming over to
Adrian’s without invitation, bringing pizza and beer, chicken chop suey, a bag of burgers and fries, and a bottle of Irish, sitting up with Adrian those summer nights in the first weeks of his single parenthood. And when Adrian would take the kids up to bathe them and tuck them into bed and say their prayers, the priest would tidy up downstairs, picking up the toys, folding the laundry, cleaning up the kitchen, feeding the kitten and the dog. Then he’d fix two tumblers of what he called “Dunphy’s damage”—generous measures of bronze-colored liquor poured from a green bottle over ice cubes, and insist that Adrian sit out on the screened porch and tell him everything.

“That’s the stuff, boyo,” the priest would say in a stage-Irish brogue, taking a long sip of the whiskey, “St. Patrick’s holy water itself. Any fucking wonder they call it ‘spirits’!”

Adrian would sip from his own glass, wince with the burn of it, exhale deeply, and settle into the chair with one ear tuned for the children upstairs, glad to have the priest sharing the watch with him. On such nights the general panic that he’d felt since Clare had left him would subside, if only for the couple of hours that the two men sat out on the screened porch, in the dark, watching the evening traffic on Lima Avenue go by and the streetlamps attracting bugs and the bats circling in the night air.