Good-bye and Amen (20 page)

The whole way back to Maine I kept thinking of how many times Sylvie had been the glue that held the family together. The night Edie told us she was dropping out of college, she brought Sylvie with her. Sylvie's a rock. She trusted and actually loved my terrifying mother, which was such a good thing in poor Sydney's life. And what do I do? I forget to call her when we decided to scatter the f-ing ashes. Whether she could have gotten there or not, I could have called her.

You're never too old to keep failing your children, are you? Why weren't we told this was a life sentence?

 

Jimmy Moss
Monica only stayed long enough to pack the car when she got back from Boston. Eleanor gave the last family dinner when all three of us would be together, and that was a welcome diversion from the rolling Charlesie crisis. Nika left the next morning to drive home, and Joss moved us all into the front bedrooms, which pleased her. Regis immediately fell down the front stairs and broke a front tooth. He swore someone had pushed him, though he'd been alone up there. It wasn't the ghost of Uncle
George; he smokes cigars and flushes the toilets, but he never does anything to children. Mother, is that you?

 

Eleanor Applegate
I was disgusted with Charlesie. He was supposed to write two papers this summer and read
Moby-Dick,
and he hadn't done any of it. Ever since he and Mutt won the Retired Skippers' Race, he's been running with the Dodge grandchildren, out till all hours and having parties on the club bathing beach that keep the neighbors up half the night. And which, after all, is private property, for members only. He thinks he's made new friends; I think they're using him and it's an excuse for all of them to drink all night. Jimmy reminded me that when he was that age, Papa sent him to Denmark for a summer to work on a pig farm. He recommended it. I thought he was kidding, but he wasn't.

 

Josslyn Moss
I was finally able to give the kind of party
I
like in my own house, for
our
friends, without all the old china and the octogenarians. They're not that much older than me, but Jimmy's sisters are really another generation. At our party we had crab rolls on paper plates, and hot dogs for the kids, and a contest for spitting watermelon seeds and a blanket toss on the lawn, and everyone went home by nine o'clock. The kids loved it. I loved it.

 

Jimmy Moss
Being under the same roof with my sisters, especially at Leeway—nothing else means home in quite the same way. I was sorry Nika had left. The lower meadow was full of fireflies, and the meteor showers had begun. I believe we saw the northern lights there a couple of times when we were little, but I don't trust my memory. Nika would know.
I'd love for the kids to see them, if it's not a false memory altogether.

Sam came up for Labor Day weekend. His mother was out of the hospital. He taught Virgil to play cribbage and we all went to the fair. Looking for Charlotte and Wilbur in the livestock barn. Sam left, driving a car across country for Rufus Maitland, and taking our puppy home. Joss and I had a September sail by ourselves. You get up one morning and there's a certain kind of edge to the chill, and it's fall. September is the most beautiful month of the year in Dundee. The bay was suddenly empty, the breeze was light and the air was pink and gold on the water.

Someone wrote to me when our parents died that no one ever tells you there's something good about being an orphan. That you own yourself in the universe in a new way. It's true. And I looked at the silent universe that afternoon, ghosting along the empty water toward home, and I absolutely loved the world.

 

Monica Faithful
The house was a mess when I got to Sweetwater. The cleaning lady was on vacation and it didn't look to me as if Norman had emptied a wastebasket or run a wash all month. He was out of clean socks but he thought if he wore dirty ones inside out that took care of it. He said he'd made a good start on a new book, something about Christ riding the subway, but from what I was hearing he'd been up at the club playing golf with Clark Vogelsang six days out of seven. It took me three days of solid work to put the house back in order, not including getting the disposal fixed (one of my grandmother's sterling egg spoons was in it).

 

Norman Faithful
Well of course I spent some time with Clark Vogelsang. His wife is off at the dry-out bin and he's lonely and upset. In counseling you see it can be devastating to a marriage when one spouse gives up an addiction. The addiction is like a person in the marriage. When it leaves, many times people like what's left less than they liked the addiction. I was trying to talk him through it, get him ready to support Beccy when she gets home.

 

Monica Faithful
I went to school one day to prepare my classroom and guess what. There had been a flood over the summer from the boys' bathroom on the second floor. No one discovered it for days, so the ceiling in my supply closet fell in. It wrecked all the materials that I'd made and collected for twenty years. I came home that night and said to Norman, “Do not tell me that this is really an opportunity. Just frigging do not.” And he didn't. But he didn't say much else either.

The next day I was down at the five-and-ten buying construction paper and rolls of felt, when there bearing down on me was Lindsay Tautsch. She asked if I had a minute. Did I look like I had a minute?

She hung around waiting for me to finish my shopping, then we went next door to the Café Express. She bought us some ghastly coffee things with butterscotch sauce and whipped cream. I must not have heard what she said when she asked me if I wanted one. We sat on stools in the window like Betty and Veronica at the Sweet Shoppe, and she told me that she didn't want me to be blindsided. By what? said I.

Well, she said, in that faux-mournful voice of hers, there
was reason to believe that things were not quite right in the church's financials. There were questions about the rector's discretionary fund.

I had no idea what to say. I thought she was just trying to poison every well that Norman drank from. She said yes, she knew I'd be distressed. She said that a member of the vestry, an accountant, had had a look at the books while Norman was in Maine. (Not hard to guess who
that
was.) He'd been wanting to do that for a while, she crooned, because it's a bad sign when someone who keeps the books for an organization never takes a vacation. It often means there's something there he doesn't want anyone else to see.

Or that he's a profoundly dedicated servant of the institution in question, I said. She took my hand, and said, “Let's pray together.”

 

Margaret Sector
I'd had my own little visit from young Lindsay Tautsch in July. She was all dressed up in her priest collar and high heels and a skirt too tight for her size, in spite of the fact it was summer and everyone else in town was in shorts. She wanted to tell me that Norman had “control” issues. Honestly, I hate this jargon that the young talk. So he's bossy. Well, I pointed out, he's the boss. Her point was that Mrs. Cherry, the church secretary, isn't up to her standards. I will grant that the bulletin the week before Easter announced “Plam Sunday.” But I didn't like her bringing it to me. I may not be Norman's biggest fan, but I do believe in proper channels. And I happen to think he was entirely right to stand by Mrs. Cherry. She's been a good and loyal servant for many years, and it won't kill us to have a typo or two in the bulletin.

 

Lindsay Tautsch
Father Faithful is a very poor delegator, that's one problem. I'm his curate, I could proofread for him. But I didn't go to
Harvard,
my language skills aren't fancy enough for him. Result of that? He did a funeral for Mary Detweiler in June. It went fine. Then Edna Wally died on the Fourth of July (and why her children had a ninety-three-year-old woman out watching the parade in that heat, I don't know) and they asked Norman to do the service. They're Presbyterians but they've worshipped with us since the Reverend Macramé started his hootenanny over there. So Norman told Mrs. Cherry to do Search and Replace on the program from Mary Detweiler's funeral, just change Mary to Edna and Detweiler to Wally, and then
obviously
didn't proof it, because we found ourselves on our knees praying to the Virgin Edna. You wouldn't think it was funny if it was
your
mother's funeral.

 

Calvin Sector
Lindsay Tautsch came to see me the week I got back from Beaumaris. She came to the house with Bill Pafford. I've known Lindsay Tautsch since she was small. Her father was a champion bridge player and a mean drunk. She said that while Father Faithful was away, she had asked Bill to look at the books, because there were things she didn't understand about the church finances. She just wanted to understand. Trying to grow in her job. I tell you the truth, I thought it was smarmy. Not very Christian of me, is it? I pointed out that she should have asked me first, and Bill said they didn't want to bother me on vacation and didn't think I'd mind. Really.

Then Bill told me that he'd found that the rector's dis
cretionary fund was empty, and that there were unexplained withdrawals from other accounts, especially the building fund. I was disturbed, of course, but I pointed out that the discretionary fund was exactly that—to be used for any purposes the rector deemed worthy, at his discretion. That was a little smarmy of
me,
of course. But there are people in need who come to him in confidence, and we shouldn't breach their trust. I thanked them and said that I'd get back to them. Then I went to Norman.

I was on the search committee that had called Norman to Good Shepherd. He's a marvelous preacher. I knew that he'd be working on his sermon on a Thursday afternoon, and he would know that it wasn't a trifling matter that I chose that time to interrupt him.

We sat in his study window overlooking the church close. I told him there were rumors that needed addressing, sooner rather than later, and that I was calling a special meeting of the vestry. He assured me that he knew about the rumors, but that what we had was a personnel problem. Things were stalled because the bishop was on vacation, but as soon as he was back, he would solve it. I was reassured by his manner, and we talked a little while about what to do. It would be tricky to counsel Lindsay Tautsch to move on, since she grew up here and has her following, but I'd seen enough to believe this might not be the right place for her.

 

Norman Faithful
It was Proper 19 that Sunday, one of my favorites. I decided to use the lesson from Ecclesiasticus. The older I get, the more the Apocrypha interest me. And I would ask the Reverend Tautsch to read the Gospel.

The Gospel reading is from Matthew, about the king
whose servant owes him ten thousand talents. The debtor weeps and begs and the king cancels the debt. Then the debtor runs into a man on the road who owed
him
a hundred denarii, and when the small debtor begs for more time, the big debtor grabs him by the throat and has him thrown into prison. The other servants report this to the king, and the king calls the big debtor a scoundrel and orders him tortured.

Standing in the middle of the church reading that story should be an interesting experience for her.

 

Monica Faithful
Norman asked me to read the lesson. He hasn't asked me to do that for a long time, but it annoys him when some won't conclude a reading from the Apocrypha with “The Word of the Lord,” instead of “Here ends the lesson.” I'm not getting into the “divinely inspired or not” battle. Unless you want to talk about Swedenborg.

I get terrible stage fright so I have to read the piece over and over before I get into the pulpit. I went around for the rest of the week declaiming it: “Rage and anger, these also I abhor, but a sinner has them ready at hand. Whoever acts vengefully will face the vengeance of the Lord, who keeps strict account of sins.”

 

Calvin Sector
The whole vestry was in church that Sunday. I can't say it was a pleasant service; the trio my wife calls “the Unholy Trinity” were back. They'd left us for several months, driving into Pittsburgh every Sunday to worship at an Anglo-Catholic church to express their displeasure that Norman won't use Rite One more than once a month. Well, Norman likes to leave a silent time during the
Prayers of the People for members of the congregation to pray aloud. I didn't think I was going to care for it, but I find that I do; the whole congregation learns that way that someone should be on their prayer lists, or that thanksgiving for a birth or a recovery of health is in order. It gets you out of your own little bubble of concerns, reminds you that we're all part of the body of Christ. Anyway, during the Prayers of the People, the small fat one prayed loudly that our brother Chandler Spring be healed of his drunkenness and homosexuality. You could hear people gasp all over the church. Norman put a fast end to it. He swung right into the General Confession before the other two could chime in and pray for something worse. There was some confusion, people were thrashing through their prayer books, trying to find the right page.

 

Margaret Sector
I was ushering with Chan Spring that day. Blessedly, he'd been outside smoking during the Prayers of the People. He usually takes the left side of our aisle, and I the right, but I made him switch with me, so he wouldn't have to pass the plate to those three.

Goodness, they were pleased with themselves.

 

Lindsay Tautsch
In a church community, the angry, sick, and sad are expressly invited to the table, and of course, they come. I admired the way Father Faithful handled it. I doubt I'd have done as well.