Even Now (4 page)

The admission felt not factual, but personal, lovely. In the small silence Peter tapped my glass with his. “Can I get you
another drink?”

“I’ll get it,” Hal said. “Need anything from the bar, Peter?”

“Thanks, no.”

As Hal wove through the guests indoors, I laced my fingers, lacking the social prop of a glass. “My mother always says if
you put three Episcopalians in a room together, they invariably start talking about the Church, uppercase.”

“
My
mother always says never to discuss dogs, children, or religion with other people. Maybe they’re related.”

“I guess it’s a tough topic to avoid when one of the three is a priest.”

“Were you avoiding it?” Peter said. “Or does the topic just make you choke, like gin?” The corners of his eyes crinkled with
amusement.

I relaxed again. “No, actually it’s
you.
Proximity to priests makes me uncomfortable. I’m afraid you can read my mind, divine my thoughts and faults. When I was young
I was sure Father Edwards knew I was holding my Advent calendar to the light to see what picture was behind the closed flaps.”

He snapped his fingers. “I knew I’d forgotten something tonight. I meant to bring my mind-reading X-ray glasses.”

“You had some, too?” I said, delighted. “My best friend and I saved our allowance for weeks to order some from the—”

“Back page of a comic book.”

“Yes,” I said softly, “exactly.” I stepped backward, away from him. Proximity to this priest was making me decidedly uncomfortable.

“So you and Hal are members of St. Martin’s?”

“Will be, I guess.”

“’Will’?” He was curious, not chastising.

“Maybe one of these Sundays. I’ve been. . . unpacking.”

Peter lifted his chin. “Careful. I’m reading your mind.”

I smiled. “Isn’t it written somewhere that Episcopalians don’t go to church in the summer? I grew up thinking it was the only
perk we had.”

“But Ceel comes, and she grew up in the same house as you, no?”

I reached and sliced my finger through the flickering flame of a torch. “Touché. Okay, read my mind. Can you see I was hoping
I’d move and find a little parish here still doing things the old way? There’s an irony for you, rebelling on behalf of the
old. I miss the litanies and liturgy, I miss it all. The pageantry and drama, and the. . . privacy.”

I waited, but he only said, “I’m listening.”

“Remember when the only issues Episcopalians got heated about were getting married and buried in ten minutes and growing English
box in the churchyard?” Now he laughed, and I did, too. “But you know what I mean. I even miss the old words, the pretty pronunciations.”

“Sustaineth and maintaineth?”

“Yes. And apocrypha and apotheosis and pro-, pro—”

“Propitiation.”

“Yes, propitiation, and—”

“What does it mean?”

“I— Okay, uncle. I have no idea.”

He waited, dark eyes merry, glass to lips. “Go ahead. Dig yourself in a little deeper.”

“It’s just that . . .” I struggled, inhibitions abandoned. “You could lose yourself in those phrases.”

“You go to church to lose yourself?”

“Maybe.” Realizing how the answer sounded, I looked at him guiltily. “Another mindless blurt. I’m sorry.”

He touched my shoulder. “It takes more than that to hurt my feelings.”

“I think I went to a huge university so I could be a Social Security number. Don’t you ever want to do that, lose yourself?”

“Often.”

“Doesn’t seem you picked the right job.”

“You’d be surprised.”

I was surprised. At his candor. It was appealing in someone you’d expect to have all the answers. “I guess I just don’t like
change.”

“You won’t like me, then.” The soft tone of his response, the almost melancholy admission, was nearly obscured by the twangy
forest chorus of crickets and frogs.

“Why?” I asked. Stubble shadowed his jaw. Tennis shoes, and he hadn’t shaved. Not like Hal, in his loafers and beardless cheeks.
Not that I didn’t like my husband’s loafers or his razored skin. But. Had I been in Durham, had Peter Whicker been a friend,
I’d have stroked his face, teased, “Ouch,” no differently and with no more significance than murmuring, “Feels good,” after
touching a man’s arm and discovering the unexpected softness of a cashmere blazer. But Peter Whicker wasn’t an old friend
and not likely to become one. He was a priest.

“Know why it takes four Episcopalians to change a light bulb?” he asked.

“Is this a test?”

“It’s a joke.”

It was my turn to wait. “Because,” he said, “one person changes the bulb, and three say they liked it better the old way.”

I bit my lip to keep from laughing. “How nice that I’m in the majority.”

He smiled broadly. “Come to church tomorrow and give me moral support. It’s my first sermon at St. Martin’s.”

I stood on tiptoe, craning over his shoulder to peer indoors. “
Where
is Hal with that drink?”

“Say you will,” he pestered with all the insistence of an adolescent. “I’ll wear my sandals and rope belt. But you have to
call me Peter. No Friar, and no Father. My wife thinks ‘Father’ is—let me get this right—an offensive term of the patriarchy.”

Wife. Why wouldn’t there be a wife? Because he wasn’t wearing a wedding ring. Once I’d told Hal that I automatically checked
for wedding bands. In elevators, restaurants, on anyone I looked twice at. “Why?” Hal had asked in a tone that was partly
curious, partly annoyed.

“No reason. It’s just something women do habitually. Like men checking out breasts. Admit it. After the face, your eyes drop
right to the boobs.” Hal shook his head, refusing to agree.

I’d asked Ceel. “Of course I look for a ring,” she’d said. “Always. It’s an age thing. After you stop looking at butts.”

I realized that Peter Whicker and I hadn’t talked about our spouses. Nor had we swapped information about where we were from
or where we went to school or whom we knew in common. He hadn’t asked me what I
did.
Typical social fact-finding had never materialized in our conversation. We hadn’t needed it, and I hadn’t missed it.

I pointed to the window, looking among the guests for the woman who might qualify. “Which one is she?”

“Running late.” Peter pulled a thick old-fashioned pocket watch from his pocket. “Still getting her office organized.”

“What does she do?”

“Keeps the world safe for capitalism. Investments.”

“A stockbroker? I have a little inherited stock. Maybe I should call her.”

“Actually, she’s been hired to run the western N.C. office of Burke and McConnell.”

“Sounds like a big job.”

“She’s more than up to it.” Peter Whicker’s face had become a mask backlit by the house’s interior, where people mingled and
moved, laughed and chatted, in a pretty party tableau. Ceel, ever attentive to food and drink and conversation, touched an
arm here, inclined her head to listen there. With darkness had come chill, autumn’s forecast, and I shivered.

“You’re cold. Let’s go inside.” A car door slammed faintly from the other side of the house. “Maybe that’s her now,” Peter
said, steering me through the open glass doors. “There she is.” Across the room of milling guests a tall woman stood out,
self-assuredly greeting Frances Mason. “Come meet her.”

My mouth went dry. Thick, blunt-cut hair brushed the woman’s shoulders, a straight inky curtain framing high brow and pointed
chin. “Daintry? You’re married to Daintry O’Connor?”

“Yes,” Peter said with puzzled surprise. “Do you know her?”

From Hannah’s quote book:

(I love you as) . . . I love my vanished youth— which is as much as a human heart can hold.

—Zelda Fitzgerald

K
now her? Know Daintry?

BFF
we scratched with an opened paper clip on any available surface: her bunk bed headboard, the ledge in her telephone booth,
the armrest of a terrace chair.
BFF
we inked on canvas-bound three-ring notebooks and the smooth rubbery soles of sneakers. Best Friends Forever.

“Striking,”
Mother once described Daintry, and she was yet. Not classically beautiful, Daintry O’Connor was nonetheless arresting, even
commanding, in appearance. I stared at the woman she’d become, watched as she placed her purse on the fireplace mantel. The
early and ungainly adolescent height had become state-liness, the skin was a smooth pale porcelain, the black hair fell Asian
straight and gleaming. Hair I’d once watched her chop off with a single ruthless scissor slice.

She seemed to shimmer, standing there, to radiate the wavering glow of mirage. Though perhaps it was only the gauzy haze of
memory that cloaked her in the dazzle she’d radiated for so long to me.

Since I was six years old,
I might have said to Peter Whicker, and reeled backward, propelled by memory.

The hot June morning the O’Connors moved to Cullen I was just out of first grade. My mother burned the breakfast toast in
her absorption with the activities across the street, a Tiffany lamp prompting the first in a series of derogatory groans.
“My God, mock French provincial furniture,” she observed of a gold-trimmed dresser and bureau. “An entire
suite.”

It took less than an hour for me to discover Daintry O’Connor. It would take seven years for Daintry to evolve into mentor
and guide—always more and less than friend.

I was never to examine that gilded suite in the years to come. But Daintry’s marvelous beds I knew well: the double-decker
thrill of bunks. While I was required to straighten my bed, Daintry’s went unmade for days, and the drooping sheets and blankets
created a secretive cave for the two of us, a private burrow. I campaigned for the top bunk when I spent the night with her,
enthralled with its height and claustrophobic closeness to the ceiling. Mornings, Daintry kicked the mattress slats to jolt
me awake, and, sated with Saturday cartoon idiocy, we contentedly slurped cereal and plaited each other’s hair until noon.
Our lives became similarly braided. Same age and street and grade and gender, Daintry O’Connor and I were destined to be friends.

She hadn’t seen me. I swiftly crossed the room to her. “Daintry.” I put down my drink and reached for her across nearly twenty
years of separation. “Daintry.” How long since I had seen her, even uttered her name aloud?

Yet she made no move to touch me, didn’t so much as extend an arm in a semblance of embrace. A slight smile crossed her lips,
and I recalled how Mother hadn’t rushed across the street to welcome the O’Connors to Cullen three decades earlier.

“Hannah,” she said. Even the timbre of her voice— husky, rich—had hardly altered. “What a coincidence.”

Instantly I forgave her the stunted casual greeting. Not for Daintry the effusive hellos of Southern women. And she knew I’d
be here, must have known who was giving the party. How many other Ceel-short-for-Cecelias could there be?

“What a shock,” I said. “Sometimes in airports or restaurants I’m overcome with absolute certainty that I’ll run into a person
I know from some other phase of my life—a girl from camp, a sorority sister or Wyndham classmate. But never anyone from Cullen.
Never you.”

“And here I am.”

Daintry’s stance, her attitude—all polished poise and cool graciousness—was bewildering, but I plunged on. “I’m trying to
remember the last time we saw each other. Though I heard you’d gone to graduate school. And now you’re married to a minister.
Our minister, Peter, whatever,” I stammered, feebled by this sudden, slippery collision of past and present. Hers, mine, ours.

“You know Peter?”

“Just introduced. . . ”

Daintry gave me a long, assessing gaze. “Two birds with one stone. Peter and I met in divinity school.”

How many more surprises? “You were studying for the priesthood, too?”

“No, I was only there to learn.”

I fought down the impression of belittlement implicit in her response, as though I ought to have known better; known that
she’d choose hard work merely for the pleasure of
learning.
“Kind of a crooked path, isn’t it?” I said. “Theology to stockbroking? God and mammon?”

Something softened in her expression, and I still recognized it: amusement. I remembered the pleasure of making Daintry laugh,
coaxing and cajoling her from the occasional black mood she was prey to, long hours of a sourceless, stubborn gloom. “You
have to decide whether Daintry’s friendship is worth it,” Mother would tell me as I moped and waited. I’d worked so hard for
the privilege of her company.

“Well put.” She laughed. “Strange bedfellows.”

I wasn’t sure I wanted to know what she was talking about. Despite those times I had wanted to know, shamelessly asking even
though—unenlightened and inexperienced—I’d had no sexual tales of my own to swap.
“Okay, I’ll tell you what it’s like. I almost choked on his tongue.”

“He put his tongue in you?”

“So far in I could feel his taste buds. Then”—her eyes flickered toward mine, as if gauging my reaction—“he felt me off.”

“You let him?” I breathed.

“Hannah, grow up. It feels sooo good. Better than his tongue.” She giggled, snapping the tension. “But you can’t ask me anything
else because I won’t tell you. Not after second base.”

“I just had no idea . . .” I tried again, childishly tongue-tied.

Small diamond studs glittered at her ears. “No idea of what?”

It had not faded, that old power. “Anything. Everything,” I said lamely.
Where would I have been without you? You who convinced me that I needed a shirt with a poor-boy collar. You who persuaded
me to replace bulletin board pictures of Julie Andrews with teenage idols. You who corrected me in the song lyrics of “Don’t
Sleep in the Subway” before I made a sing-along fool of myself before other, less kind peers. Unprotected from the land mines
of nonconforming, where would I have been without you during that dangerous age? You were savvier and smarter and better in
every way.