Secrets of Eden Read online

  But in all fairness to Catherine Benincasa, I know also that there were parishioners who thought I was distant. Or, perhaps, that I had secrets. Cards that I was loath to reveal. No one verbalized such things prior to my departure, of course. It was only after I left that people's secret doubts became rumor and gossip and innuendo.

  I will be the first to admit that a pastor in a small town has enormous power over the people who come to church and even a fair amount over those who don't. The directors or coordinators of easily a dozen organizations across the county--the dental clinic for low-income Vermonters, for example, the hospice, the women's crisis center--would ask me to stand up for them at the town meeting the first Tuesday in March and thereby ensure that Haverill would vote to approve their budget requests.

  And we have power in other, more invidious ways as well. There were temptations throughout the congregation, women--some half my age--whose eyes I would meet as I spoke Sunday mornings and whose gaze I would hold a second longer than was probably right. There were single women in the congregation who I know would have been happy to date me and married ones who would have risked the wrath of our small town had I shown any interest at all. Like any minister--not merely the Dimmesdales of fiction--in my little pond, I could have been either a big moral fish or a more complex sort of predator. Many of the parishioners I counseled were female and in a condition that could only be called vulnerable. And, because I am male, that ingrained desire to protect them invariably would kick in. Nevertheless, in most of my dealings, I strove for a moral compass that was sound. There were some women with whom I would flirt more shamelessly than with others, but they were always the parishioners who were happily married and understood that our flirations would never progress beyond vague intimations. In my fourteen years in Haverill, I had dated three women seriously, all of whom, it seemed to me, were unsuited to the life of a country pastor's wife. None of them were from Haverill: One was from Albany, one was from Manchester, and one lived far to the north in Burlington. The woman from Manchester grew close to my congregation, and I think they were hurt--and saddened for me--when we did not walk down the aisle of my church together.

  Yes, I did ask her, despite my misgivings about whether her constitution was right for the role that would be demanded of her if she agreed. She declined, and it was the first time in my life that a woman ended our relationship before I did.

  But the only member of the Haverill United Church I ever slept with was Alice Hayward, and that was mostly (though, in truth, not always) in the period when George had moved to the cottage on the lake, where he would reside for a little more than one hundred days: An adult man separated from his wife and his daughter, but living alone in a second house alive with their detritus and scent. I did not, as one newspaper later would put it, pounce upon Alice the moment her husband was gone. But it is an inarguable fact that I took advantage of her precarious emotional health. I massaged the lower back that had been left contused--stripes that changed like the leaves from scarlet to sulfur--with a leather belt. I brought my lips to the stomach that once had carried her husband's child and then would be beaten by that very man's fists, at least twice to the point that she was left retching into the toilet.

  And yes, the illicit nature of our activities--the way one moment we might be sitting fully clothed, chatting languorously on the rug in her living room, but in the next we would be naked on that floor and my tongue would be buried between her legs with a hunger I had never before experienced--energized my otherwise distressingly placid life.

  But it is also a fact that I had never planned to take advantage of Alice Hayward. For a time I had even thought we were in love.

  IT IS A Monday afternoon in March, and Alice and I are lying in her bed as the snow blows fiercely against the western window and the howl of the wind is cut only by the occasional rumble of the town plow and sand truck. This storm is arriving a little earlier than any of us expected.

  In another hour Katie will be coming home, and so in a moment Alice and I will rouse ourselves, shower together, and get dressed. I plan to be gone long before her daughter's bus will coast to a stop at the end of the Haywards' driveway.

  "You know," Alice murmurs, her head resting on my chest, "he has his hurts, too."

  I know who she means, but for a brief second I nonetheless have to spool back in my head the discussion we were having, because on afternoons like this we tend to allow ourselves long, sumptuous pauses in our conversations. Sometimes we will doze and pick up the strand of an exchange a full five or ten minutes later.

  "George," I respond.

  "His life was no picnic when he was growing up. All those brothers. My father-in-law can be horrible."

  "Well, he hasn't made your life a picnic."

  "No. But it wasn't always so ... so troubled. And now ... "

  "Go on."

  "I've taken away his daughter. He aches for her."

  I want to say that he brought that loss upon himself. But instead I merely listen. I think I have an idea where this is going, but I want to be sure.

  "You know I don't feel good about that," she continues. "But I didn't have a choice, did I?"

  My arm is asleep, but still I am able to pull her against me. "No," I reassure her, "you had absolutely no choice." But as I had suspected--as I had feared--once more she is going to punish herself and recount things she feels she has done wrong in her marriage and the innumerable ways she drove her husband to hurt her. And this litany will end, as it does often, with her flagellating herself for being unfaithful. She will remind herself--and me--that George may have done some terrible things in this world, but he always, as far as she knows, was faithful.

  I WENT TO visit my mother in Bronxville the Thursday night after the funeral, though she was sound asleep by the time I arrived. It was after midnight. But she had known I was coming, and so, as if I were nineteen rather than thirty-nine--a student returning home from college--she had stocked the refrigerator with beer and milk and Hostess cupcakes, which as a boy I had always preferred cold. Over breakfast on Friday morning, she asked me all the right questions about my future and whether (and here she was delicate) the deaths of two of my congregants were more of a personal or a pastoral crisis. I answered evasively by explaining that only one was a congregant and that I tended not to use that term in any event. On Friday the sky was a cerulean blue, and I walked alone for hours around the streets on which I had lived as a child and a teenage boy, loitering for a few moments before the slightly imposing Tudor in which I had grown up--a house not far from the swim and tennis club where my older sister would spend long summer days with her friends but that I always found less inviting and tended to avoid. I passed the school, an elegant, lengthy Georgian structure that looked like it belonged on a college campus, then the ball field and the library. That library and ball field and the village itself were far more likely to be my summer haunts than was the swim and tennis club. The town was a collection of hills, the roads laid out chaotically along the cow paths from the nineteenth century, the trees now tall and thick and statuesque, the houses substantial. Most of my neighbors, I would realize in high school, had money and advantages, but as a boy I had been largely oblivious to both. I was more aware of Mike Ferris's humongous baseball-card collection, for example, and how content and secure I would feel trading cards and arguing baseball with him in his family's screened porch as a thunderstorm would rumble in from the west.

  That Friday as I walked along the sidewalk in the village, I detoured into the bookstore and bought Angels and Aurascapes and A Sacred While.

  I had brought my laptop with me, and in the afternoon, as if I were consciously trying to give the investigation that soon would be launched interesting fodder, once again I surfed the Web for information about Alice Hayward (there was nothing I didn't already know) and about domestic abuse and death by strangulation and gunshot. Some of those sites would come back to haunt me during the investigation, but it was all very innocent. W
hile online I read reviews of Heather's books and visited her website, and I found myself spending far more time with her blog than I would have anticipated. In the evening, after I took my mother to dinner at a French bistro in town that she had always enjoyed, I read from both of Heather's books.

  And then on Saturday morning, I awoke and pondered my next destination. I had options other than Heather Laurent, including acquaintances who had remained in Westchester County. And there were my friends from seminary--one in Illinois, another in upstate New York, and a third in Pennsylvania. There was my friend in Texas. Instead, however, I found myself drawn toward lower Manhattan: I veered on to the Saw Mill River Parkway, then the Henry Hudson, and then the West Side Highway. I exited at Canal Street and turned on to Greene. I honestly wasn't sure whether I would ring the bell at Heather Laurent's building or just glance around her neighborhood for a few moments. There are fine lines between interest and obsession and stalking, but I think I was still well within the bounds of mere intellectual curiosity. And I may also have been experimenting on some level with a flirtatious quid pro quo: She had dropped in unexpectedly on me that Tuesday; now I was returning the favor on Saturday. I hadn't decided what I would do if she weren't home. Wait or leave a note or simply depart. For a few moments, they were all equal in my mind.

  But I did press the call button, and she was home, and I felt a little rush of pleasure at the sound of her voice over the crackling intercom. She invited me up and said there would be doors to four lofts when the elevator doors parted, and hers would be the one farthest to the left. It turned out to be more information than I needed, because when the elevator reached her floor, she was there with her front door open, the loft behind her illuminated by the sun that was cascading in from the western-facing windows.

  "I READ SOME of your books last night," I told her as I sipped the peppermint iced tea she had in a glass pitcher in her refrigerator. I couldn't remember the last time I had drunk tea, hot or cold. But just as I didn't keep tea around my kitchen, she didn't keep coffee in hers. This seemed very significant to me at the time, a further indication that there was no future between a pastor in the midst of a crisis of faith and a self-help writer with an apparent fixation on angels. "I enjoyed them," I said.

  "But ... " She was smiling.

  "But there's a lot there about cherubs and seraphim. About luminescence and flashes of light."

  "And prayer. And meditation."

  "That, too."

  Her loft, as she had told me, was really not all that extravagant: high tin ceilings, the original fleur-de-lis tile, but not the basketball arena I had seen in my mind. A soft wood floor, wide pine that I suspected had probably been there for generations, covered in sections with plush Oriental rugs. A row of tall windows faced out upon Greene Street, each of them about half as large as the stained-glass windows of the church in Haverill, and there were four chandeliers dangling from the ceiling that initially left me confused and disturbed. I thought the bulbs of coiled glass were supposed to be the snakes that grew from Medusa's skull. But then I realized I was mistaken: The tentacles, I saw when I looked more closely, were merely the arms and trumpets and small, delicate feet of angels. The glass was white as cooked rice. And on a solid-looking pedestal on one side of a bookcase, positioned against a wall so a visitor couldn't help but feel he was being watched, was a carved bird the size of a preschooler. It was a bird of prey of some kind, an osprey perhaps, quite accurate, I thought, except that the wings--which were unfolded as if it were about to dive from a high perch--looked like they belonged on an angel. They ran parallel to the bird's body and were arched at the top like a harp.

  "The reality is that I probably view angels in much the same way that you do," she said. "The fact you've come here suggests you don't believe I'm a complete phony." We were sitting on an elegant wrought-iron daybed with black bolsters. It was adjacent to the wall with the windows, near a row of hulking stainless-steel kitchen appliances: The refrigerator doors alone looked wide enough to be the entrance to a walk-in closet. There was another corner of the loft with a regular couch, a mirrored coffee table, and a pair of reupholstered easy chairs without arms that looked as if they were from the 1950s. She slept on a bed in an alcove ledge high above the corner in which--based on the desk and computer--she wrote. Along the wall opposite all those windows, broken only by the entryway, was a long line of modern wardrobe doors: the critical renovation she had made, she would tell me later, because the loft was wholly bereft of closets. I counted five wardrobes on each side of the entryway. And scattered along the walls that had neither windows nor wardrobes were framed dust jackets of her books beside specific bestseller lists, as well as a half dozen prints of angels: grown-up angels, I was happy to see, not pudgy child ones with naked ham hocks for thighs. There was a small painting of an angel in a copse of cedar trees that looked a bit like a Botticelli, but she had assured me that it was the work of a minor painter from Siena and it was barely two hundred years old.

  "I don't believe you're a phony at all," I said.

  "A bit loopy, maybe," she suggested. "But not phony."

  "You're putting words in my mouth," I insisted. "Just last Sunday a fellow in my church who is five years younger than I am and dying of cancer gave the children's message, and he talked all about the angels among us. He told the kids angels don't always have wings."

  "He's right."

  "He said they were the women who drive him to and from his chemotherapy. Who make him his carrot juice."

  She nodded. "I have readers, of course, who see angels in a pretty literal sense. When I was in Vermont the other day, I had one reader tell me that a particularly amazing angel had caught her husband's small plane in midair when the engine flamed out and stopped it from crashing."

  "How?"

  "You know, with his hands."

  "Just brought it safely to earth?"

  "Because the angel had wings," she said, as if this explained everything. I found myself imagining, no doubt as this reader had, an angel in a white robe flying atop a Cessna, holding the fuselage in his hands while flapping his wings to keep both him and the plane aloft. "As you might imagine, my books do better with some sorts of readers than with others."

  She was wearing black jeans and a white linen top, which was untucked. Her feet were bare, and she had curled them beneath her on the couch. Her toenails were plum.

  "What would you be doing if I hadn't appeared?" I asked.

  "Going through the piles of mail my assistant prioritized in my absence. Reading e-mail. Grocery shopping. It was going to be a pretty glamorous Saturday."

  "How long have you lived here?"

  "Oh, let's see. Today's the first day of August. A little less than two years. I call this the Loft That Angels Built," and I understood she was referring to her first book.

  "And you've always lived here alone?"

  "I have."

  "May I ask you something?"

  "You seem to be asking me a great many somethings. Go ahead."

  "Do you pray?" I hadn't meant it to be an especially challenging or antagonistic inquiry--though I did hear in my head the homonym, prey, and that part of me that I have discovered is capable of unexpected bouts of savagery and anger may have lent an edge to my voice--and she sat back and seemed to be contemplating the question, her eyes growing a little stern, her forehead slightly creased. I imagined her suddenly as a child struggling with a math equation that was beyond her ken. "Everyone prays," she said finally, "even if they don't use that verb. Even if they're not completely sure who or what they're imploring. Why? Have you stopped praying?"

  "So it seems," I answered, and I told her how hard I had tried that past week to connect with a living God--and how I had even faked it late Tuesday afternoon before the altar with Joanie Gaylord. I had, in truth, spent a good part of Wednesday afternoon at the church. I was either alone in my office in the wing by the Sunday-school classrooms or in the sanctuary itself trying to pray. I let Bet
sy or the answering machine handle the usual sorts of calls that came in--a request to give the invocation at a special Masonic gathering at the lodge in Bennington, a change in the date of an upcoming Church Council meeting, the increasingly urgent need as September approached to find a Sunday-school teacher for the third-and fourth-graders--as well as the barrage that was linked directly to the Haywards' deaths and upcoming funeral: The mortician. A deacon. The high-school principal. Ginny.

  In theory I knew a very great deal about prayer, so praying shouldn't have been all that difficult. I had studied it at seminary, I had read all the right books. I'd led prayer groups in my little church, I'd conducted seminars for pastors and lay people in our region. And though I never had expectations of a miracle when someone was actively dying, there had been a period in my life when I had believed fervently in the healing powers of prayer. For over two decades, I had prayed every single day of my life.

  Yet when I'd fall on my knees in the days immediately after Alice and George Hayward had died, praying in different measures for forgiveness and healing and understanding, I'd come to realize that I didn't know a bloody thing about prayer--at least not anything useful. When I needed to find the Lord most desperately, I hadn't a clue where to begin.