Good-bye and Amen (5 page)

 

Ted Wineapple
In our church there is quite a tough process, “discernment,” it's called, where you have to get permission from the priest in your own parish, and a committee, and a lay mentor and the bishop in your diocese, to be a candidate for ordination. I had to go through an entire year of counseling and prayer and testing of various sorts before I could apply to seminary. The year before mine, our bishop hadn't recommended a single candidate to go forward. Norman managed to get the process speeded up in some way. I asked him about it years later and he just said, “That avenue's closed now.”

 

Jimmy Moss
I don't remember what I thought at the time about Norman's sudden conversion to Christianity. Saint Paul on the road to Damascus. I wish I did. I was pursuing various vision quests of my own in those years, and I'd have been interested, but what can I say.

 

Jeannie Israel
I assumed he'd go to divinity school at Harvard. Norman was really good at school, and let's face it, he likes the fancy brand names. But he chose General Theological. Maybe he had a contact there; the doors opened fast for him. I was only glad they'd be in New York. I only saw Nika briefly in the summers these years, and I missed her. All those summer days when we were kids, when whoever finished breakfast first turned up on the other one's porch, and we'd be off to meet Amelia in the lane, and then on foot, on bikes, or in little boats out into our day.

 

Monica Faithful
What troubled me was leaving Sam and Sylvie. They were so young to have their father far away, and Rachel had full custody and certainly wasn't going to let them travel to us on weekends. But Norman was serenely confident. He knew what the Lord wanted him to do, and where, and he knew he had to get on with it. I'd like to think he was also trying to protect me—our marriage. I couldn't deny that the children strained things.

What I
did
like, very much, was that the whole curriculum of the marriage changed. Instead of talking about, I don't know, which senior partner wasn't pulling his weight and which brownnosing associate was getting all the good cases, suddenly we were all about Bible studies, and liturgy and church history. We started reading Compline aloud together every night, and it was so beautiful. So comforting, so mysterious. I began to have glimpses of…I guess
wonder
is the word. That it might be possible to open an inner door to another world, to live in it or be filled with it. It was thrilling. Literally. Living with a person who is engaged with faith is a revelation.

 

Of course you want to know what prayer is. Whether it works. Oh Lord, won't you buy me a Mercedes-Benz.

Of course it works. It works on the one who prays, like water pouring over rocks without being changed or broken, fitting through crevices, quietly turning fissures into ravines. And in turn it changes the universe, through the actions of those changed by praying. Praying, chanting, meditating, spirit dancing. Every
culture has prayer forms, and words for them. For some natures the work is like hammering rocks, for some it's as simple as breathing, and for all it grows by itself with practice. Ask and it shall be given. Seek and ye shall find. Those are not tricks or riddles, but simple truths.

Unless you were serious about the Mercedes-Benz.

 

Jeannie Israel
They had a little apartment across the street from General. It's beautiful, General Theological Seminary, a peaceful cloister inside a brick wall in the midst of the city. Monica loved the chapel especially, but she also loved the whole conversation that went on. About the Bible. About Jesus. We'd both been dragged to Sunday school as children and Nika sang in the choir at boarding school because she liked singing. We'd heard a lot of Bible readings in our day, but did we understand them? Who the Gospels were addressed to, what the Old Testament had to do with the New Testament? No. Really shockingly little.

Monica loved learning things. That first year, they'd moved too late for her to get a teaching job, so she was subbing. She had time to listen to the seminarians, and to read Norman's texts on the lectionaries and things. We didn't talk about faith as such at the time, but I had the feeling that was because she felt she'd pitched forward into a tub of butter and it would be rude to go on about it to those who hadn't.

 

Monica Faithful
Because we had moved to New York and didn't see the children during the school year, I got them for half of summer vacation. I remember being terrified of how Mother was going to react when Sam fed his lunch to the
dog from the table, or stood on the cane-seat chairs with his cowboy boots on, but instead I found myself in a competition with her. She just loved Norman. He flirted with her and asked her advice. They even started praying together for a while. So of course she wanted Sam and Sylvie to think Leeway was the best place in the world and that she was the world's best grandmother. She was really pretty great that summer, except for the Affair of the Potion.

 

Ellen Gott
I remember the summer Norman's children first came to the cottage for the month. I'll never forget it, I mean.
Please
and
thank you
were a foreign language. The little girl wet her bed so many times we had to throw the mattress out. Mrs. Moss was determined to love them to death, but when the boy made a “magic potion” out of Pepto-Bismol, her whole bottle of Chanel no. 5, and Mr. Moss's prescription pills,
that
was over. Monica couldn't eat, afraid of what her mother would do. I don't remember what happened next.

 

Eleanor Applegate
That was the year that Jimmy asked to have his inheritance in advance, and my parents gave it to him. I mean, they
knew
he was going to piss it all away, they knew he was going to sniff it or smoke it or give it all to some cult, to see what it was like to have nothing but lice and a begging bowl. What were they thinking?

 

Bobby Applegate
I wonder what the conversation was like, when Sydney and Laurus were deciding whether to do what Jimmy asked. Here is their firstborn, Eleanor, a model citizen in every way, a college graduate, married, a mother…
I had just gone to work for my brother and
we
could have used an infusion of capital, I promise you.

 

Eleanor Applegate
It wasn't the money. I mean, it wasn't
not
the money, but what I minded was knowing that if
I
had asked, or Monica, we'd have been insulted or laughed at. Jimmy was just on a different plane for Mother. It didn't matter what I said or did, or how many As Monica got. Don't all those parables begin “The Kingdom of Heaven Is Like This”? Help.

 

The hardest part for most, when they first arrive here, is understanding that they're dead. It's every bit as shocking as being born. (Being born! The lights, the noise, the air on your skin…I still shudder.) At first, some keep going back, sure there's been a mistake, especially if the departure was abrupt. If they're angry or persistent enough they make themselves felt, even seen or heard. A few find this perversely thrilling and keep it up, beyond the normal leavetaking or comforting of those left behind. Not a good choice. They can get stuck outside the great flow of spiritual matter. But most soon find that the life they just lived in the body is less and less compelling. Perhaps like a long distance call on a signal that breaks up, so when it fades out altogether it comes as a relief.

Usually there will be guides waiting to help. Then new steps and stages. Just as you were taught, just as you expected. Masks and dodges forged in life fall away, and what remains is what you chose to become, with all those choices you made every day when in the body. It's very interesting. Free will.

 

Edith Faithful
I'm named Edith Bing for my Danish great-grandmother, but I look like my father. Mother's eyes, but the rest of it. I'm six feet tall. As you can see I like that; I wear high heels. But inside I have Mother's brain. Neither of us can do math or read maps.

For the lottery, I was sharing the maid's room on the third floor with Sylvie. Sam was in California, and couldn't come, but we had his list.

At lunch, Mom told me she hadn't gotten Nina's piano for me. She was quite unwrapped about it. I'd love to have something of Nina's but I don't play any more, and they have a piano at the rectory. It belonged to my grandmother Hazel and it isn't very good but how much does that matter if it's never played? She got me a set of silver instead. Meanwhile, Sam wanted the monogrammed barware, and Sylvie wanted Granny Syd's fur coat, and I wanted the beautiful topaz ring Granny Syd wore when she dressed up. There's a story there.

 

Nora Applegate
Annie and I were bunking in the bedroom above Grandpapa's music studio, and Adam and Charlesie slept downstairs on the couches. There's a TV and VCR, so at Christmas and such we tended to congregate there in the evenings while the 'rents played bridge in the house, or whatever they did.

 

Annie Applegate
Uncle Jimmy's a scary-good bridge player. I played a lot in college, but he's way out of my league.
Mummy and Dad are both good. Normal is terrible because he never shuts up. Josslyn doesn't play. Aunt Monica only plays if they need her; she'd rather read. And let's face it, the last year or two, she's been pretty deep into the chardonnay in the evenings. Daddy plays just the same, sober or plastered (ask me how I know), but most people don't.

 

Nora Applegate
After dinner the night before the lottery no one was even thinking of playing bridge or going to bed. Everyone started going from room to room again, opening drawers or pawing through boxes and saying, Oh my God, look at this. It was exhilarating. We were all still up at two or three in the morning. I found a picture of Mom and Monica dressed in matching Hopalong Cassidy outfits, with little cap guns in their holsters. Mom was a little chubby, and the hair was unfortunate. Monica had this cute little Dutch-boy haircut.

 

Jimmy Moss
I walked into the playroom downstairs and found Monica sitting on the floor in her robe and jammies, wearing a mink cape and a church hat of Mother's, and long blue kid gloves. It had gotten cold down there so she put on whatever was at hand. She's a very droll woman, my sister. We sat down there for over an hour, sorting photographs. Astronomers must feel like this when they get a bigger telescope. Suddenly you can see past your own little galaxy, to the older worlds of astral matter you're made of. It was always
there,
you could sort of know that, but it's different to see it.

 

Monica Faithful
We found a snapshot of Eleanor and Bobby on their wedding day in New York. El is wearing
dark lipstick and a new spring suit and high heels, very pretty with her small waist and the big gazongas. I
remember
when that picture arrived at the house. Bobby's mother sent it. Bobby's father had been their witness and he was in the picture, and Mother had actually taken a pair of scissors and cut off that side of the picture!

 

Nora Applegate
The only person who didn't seem to be into it was Uncle Norman. I went up to the attic, to look in the maids' rooms' closets and under the beds, since Granny Syd had stashed things everywhere, and there was Normal, pacing up and down the hall with his cell phone to his ear. He was listening to someone. He looked startled to see me, and said something like, “Yes, I'm here, go on…” and I waved at him and beetled off to the cedar closet. There were still some boxes up on the shelves that hadn't been gone through. I found someone's wedding dress, like from a museum, with little seed pearls sewn on, and a train and everything. I ran to get Mummy.

 

Eleanor Applegate
We rushed upstairs. Norman was up there on his cell phone in the hall, oblivious. Nora had found Great-grandmother Annabelle's wedding dress. I thought at first it was Candace's but there's a picture of James and Candace on their wedding day, and she was wearing satin, with no lace or train. And besides, would Mother have kept the dread Candace's wedding dress if she'd ever had it? This was more froufrou and much older, we thought. The bodice was tiny, too small for Monica or me at any time in our lives, let alone now, but Nora is a sylph. We got her into it.

 

Monica Faithful
I do think Mother would have kept Candace's wedding dress if she'd had it. I think that was always a love-hate thing for her, that she went on hoping until the end of Candace's life for some sign that her mother actually loved her. But Candace actually didn't. Sydney just wasn't her type. Poor Mother. But Nora in Great-grandmother's wedding dress! Ooh-lala! The sleeves were ivory lace and the veil fastened on with combs, which of course wouldn't work unless you have long hair pinned up to stick the combs into. We had to improvise. There were about a hundred little pearl buttons that had to be done up in the back. Even the matching shoes were there but those were much too small. Ellie and I hummed “Here Comes the Bride” and carried the train as Nora made her way down the stairs, to show everyone.

 

Eleanor Applegate
And as we went by, Norman was still on the phone!

 

Sylvia Faithful
You should know, by the way, that the most striking thing about this story is that my father was
listening
to somebody.