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  For Kathy!

  ADVENT

  The sky broken by the bare oaks and elms of New Prospect was full of moist promise, a pair of frontal systems grayly colluding to deliver a white Christmas, when Russ Hildebrandt made his morning rounds among the homes of bedridden and senile parishioners in his Plymouth Fury wagon. A certain person, Mrs. Frances Cottrell, a member of the church, had volunteered to help him bring toys and canned goods to the Community of God that afternoon, and though he knew that only as her pastor did he have a right to rejoice in her act of free will, he couldn’t have asked for a better Christmas present than four hours alone with her.

  After Russ’s humiliation, three years earlier, the church’s senior minister, Dwight Haefle, had upped the associate minister’s share of pastoral visitations. What exactly Dwight was doing with the time Russ saved him, besides taking more frequent vacations and working on his long-awaited volume of lyric poetry, wasn’t clear to Russ. But he appreciated his coquettish reception by Mrs. O’Dwyer, an amputee confined by severe edema to a hospital bed in what had been her dining room. He appreciated the routine of being of service, especially to those who, unlike him, couldn’t remember one thing from three years ago. At the nursing home in Hinsdale, where the mingling smells of holiday pine wreaths and geriatric feces reminded him of Arizona high-country latrines, he handed old Jim Devereaux the new church membership face-book they’d been using as a prompt for conversation and asked if Jim remembered the Pattison family. To a pastor feeling reckless with Advent spirit, Jim was an ideal confidant, a wishing well in which a penny dropped would never hit bottom and resound.

  “Pattison,” Jim said.

  “They had a daughter, Frances.” Russ leaned over his parishioner’s wheelchair and paged to the Cs. “She goes by her married name now—Frances Cottrell.”

  He never spoke her name at home, even when it would have been natural to, for fear of what his wife might hear in his voice. Jim bent closer to the picture of Frances and her two children. “Oh … Frannie? I remember Frannie Pattison. What ever happened to her?”

  “She’s back in New Prospect. She lost her husband a year and a half ago—terrible thing. He was a test pilot for General Dynamics.”

  “Where is she now?”

  “She’s back in New Prospect.”

  “Oh, huh. Frannie Pattison. Where is she now?”

  “She came back home. She’s Mrs. Frances Cottrell now.” Russ pointed at her picture and said it again. “Frances Cottrell.”

  She was meeting him in the First Reformed parking lot at two thirty. Like a boy who couldn’t wait for Christmas, he got there at 12:45 and ate his sack lunch in the car. On his bad days, of which there’d been many in the past three years, he resorted to an elaborate detour—into the church through its function hall, up a stairwell and down a corridor lined with stacks of banished Pilgrim Hymnals, across a storage room for off-kilter music stands and a crèche ensemble last displayed eleven Advents ago, a jumble of wooden sheep and one meek steer, graying with dust, with whom he felt a sad fraternity, then down a narrow staircase where only God could see and judge him, into the sanctuary via the “secret” door in the paneling behind the altar, and finally out through the sanctuary’s side entrance—to avoid passing the office of Rick Ambrose, the director of youth programming. The teenagers who massed in the hallway outside it were too young to have personally witnessed Russ’s humiliation, but they surely knew the story of it, and he couldn’t look at Ambrose without betraying his failure to follow their Savior’s example and forgive him.

  Today, however, was a very good day, and the halls of First Reformed were still empty. He went directly to his office, rolled paper into his typewriter, and considered his unwritten sermon for the Sunday after Christmas, when Dwight Haefle would be vacationing again. He slouched in his chair and combed his eyebrows with his fingernails, pinched the bridge of his nose, touching a face whose angular contours he’d learned too late were attractive to many women, not just his wife, and imagined a sermon about his Christmas mission to the South Side. He preached too often about Vietnam, too often about the Navajos. To boldly speak, from the pulpit, the words Frances Cottrell and I had the privilege—to pronounce her name while she sat listening from the fourth row of pews and the congregation’s eyes, perhaps enviously, connected her with him—was a pleasure, alas, foreclosed by his wife, who read his sermons in advance and would also be sitting in a pew, and who didn’t know that Frances was joining him today.

  On his office walls were posters of Charlie Parker and his sax, Dylan Thomas and his fag; a smaller picture of Paul Robeson framed alongside a handbill for Robeson’s appearance at the Judson Church in 1952; Russ’s diploma from the Biblical Seminary in New York; and a blown-up photo of him and two Navajo friends in Arizona, in 1946. Ten years ago, when he’d assumed the associate ministry in New Prospect, these artfully chosen assertions of identity had resonated with the teenagers whose development in Christ had been part of his brief. But to the kids who now thronged the church’s hallways in their bell-bottoms and bib overalls, their bandannas, they signified only obsolescence. The office of Rick Ambrose, him of the stringy black hair and the glistening black Fu Manchu, had a kindergarten feel to it, the walls and shelves bedecked with the crudely painted effusions of his young disciples, the special meaningful rocks and bleached bones and wildflower necklaces they’d given him, the silk-screened posters for fundraising concerts with no discernible relation to any religion Russ recognized. After his humiliation, he’d hidden in his office and ached amid the fading totems of a youth that no one but his wife found interesting anymore. And Marion didn’t count, because it was Marion who’d impelled him to New York, Marion who’d turned him on to Parker and Thomas and Robeson, Marion who’d thrilled to his stories of the Navajos and urged him to heed his calling to the ministry. Marion was inseparable from an identity that had proved to be humiliating. It had taken Frances Cottrell to redeem it.

  “My God, is this you?” she’d said on her first visit to his office, the previous summer, as she studied the photo from the Navajo reservation. “You look like a young Charlton Heston.”

  She’d come to Russ for grief counseling, another part of his brief and not his favorite, since his own most grievous loss to date was of his boyhood dog, Skipper. He’d been relieved to hear that Frances’s worst complaint, a year after her husband’s fiery death in Texas, was a sense of emptiness. At his suggestion that she join one of the First Reformed women’s circles, she flicked her hand. “I’m not going to coffee with the ladies,” she said. “I know I’ve got a boy starting high school, but I’m only thirty-six.” Indeed, she was sagless, pouchless, flabless, lineless, an apparition of vitality in a snug paisley sleeveless dress, her hair naturally blond and boyishly short, her hands boyishly small and square. It was obvious to Russ that she’d be remarried soon enough—that the emptiness she felt was probably little more than the absence of a husband—but he remembered his anger when his mother had asked him, too soon after Skipper’s passing, whether he might like another dog.

  There was, he told Frances, one particular women’s circle, different from the others, guided by Russ himself, that worked with members of First Reformed’s inner-city partner church, the Community of God. “The ladies don’t coffee,” he said. “We paint houses,
clear brush, haul trash. Take the elderly to their appointments, help kids with their homework. We do it every other Tuesday, all day. And, let me tell you, I look forward to those Tuesdays. It’s one of the paradoxes of our faith—the more you give to the less fortunate, the fuller you feel in Christ.”

  “You say his name so easily,” Frances said. “I’ve been going to Sunday service for three months, and I’m still waiting to feel something.”

  “Not even my own sermons have moved you.”

  She colored a little, fetchingly. “That’s not what I meant. You’ve got a beautiful voice. It’s just…”

  “Honestly, you’re more likely to feel something on a Tuesday than a Sunday. I’d rather be on the South Side myself than giving sermons.”

  “It’s a Negro church?”

  “A Black church, yes. Kitty Reynolds is our ringleader.”

  “I like Kitty. I had her for senior English.”

  Russ liked Kitty, too, although he sensed that she was skeptical of him, as a male of the species; Marion had invited him to consider that Kitty, never married, was likely a lesbian. She dressed like a lumberjack for their biweekly trips to the South Side, and she’d quickly asserted possession of Frances, insisting that she ride both ways with her, rather than in Russ’s station wagon. Mindful of her skepticism, he’d ceded the field to Kitty and waited for a day when she might be indisposed.

  On the Tuesday after Thanksgiving, when a flu-like cold was going around, only three ladies, all widows, had shown up in the First Reformed parking lot. Frances, wearing a plaid wool hunting cap like the one Russ had worn as a boy, hopped into the front seat of his Fury and left the hat on, perhaps owing to the leak in the Fury’s heating system that fogged the windshield if he didn’t keep a window down. Or did she know how gut-punchingly, faith-testingly, androgynously adorable she looked to him in that hat? The two older widows might have known it, because all the way in to the city, past Midway and across on Fifty-fifth Street, they pestered Russ from the back seat with seemingly pointed questions about his wife and his four children.

  The Community of God was a small, unsteepled church of yellow brick, originally built by Germans, with a tar-roofed community center attached to one side. Its congregation, mostly female, was led by a middle-aged pastor, Theo Crenshaw, who did the circle the favor of accepting its suburban charity without thanks. Every second Tuesday, Theo simply presented Russ and Kitty with a prioritized to-do list; they came not to minister but to serve. Kitty had marched with Russ for civil rights, but Russ had had to counsel other women in the circle, explaining that just because they struggled to understand “urban” English it didn’t mean they had to speak loudly and slowly to make themselves understood. For the women who got it, and learned to overcome their fear of walking on the 6700 block of South Morgan Street, the circle had been a powerful experience. On the women who didn’t get it—some of whom had joined the circle for competitive reasons, not wanting to be left out—he’d been obliged to inflict the same humiliation he’d suffered at the hands of Rick Ambrose and ask them not to come again.

  Because Kitty had kept her glued to her side, Frances hadn’t been tested yet. When they arrived on Morgan Street, she left the car reluctantly and waited to be asked before helping Russ and the other widows carry toolboxes and bags of cast-off winter clothes into the community center. Her hesitancy set off a flurry of misgivings in Russ—that he’d mistaken style for substance, a hat for an adventurous spirit—but they were melted by a gust of compassion when Theo Crenshaw, ignoring Frances, directed the two older widows to catalogue a shipment of secondhand books for the Sunday school. The two men were going to install a new water heater in the basement.

  “And Frances,” Russ said.

  She was hovering by the street door. Theo sized her up coolly. “There’s a whole lot of books.”

  “Why don’t you help Theo and me,” Russ said.

  The eagerness of her nod confirmed his compassionate instinct, dispelling the suspicion that what he really wanted was to show off how strong he was, how skilled with tools. In the basement, he stripped down to his undershirt and applied a bear hug to the nasty, asbestos-clad old heater and lifted it off its seat. At forty-seven, he was no longer a tall sapling; he’d broadened in the chest and shoulders like an oak tree. But there wasn’t much for Frances to do but watch, and when the intake pipe snapped off flush with the wall, necessitating work with a stone chisel and a pipe die, he was slow to notice that she’d left the basement.

  What Russ most liked about Theo was his reticence, which spared Russ from the vanity of imagining that the two of them could be interracial buddies. Theo knew the essential facts about Russ—that he didn’t shy from hard work, that he’d never lived far from poverty, that he believed in the divinity of Jesus Christ—and he neither asked nor welcomed more open-ended questions. About, for example, the retarded neighborhood boy Ronnie, who wandered in and out of the church in all seasons, sometimes stopping to do a peculiar swaying dance with his eyes closed, or to cadge a quarter from a First Reformed lady, Theo would only say, “Best leave that boy alone.” When Russ had tried to engage with Ronnie anyway, asking him where he lived, who his mother was, Ronnie had responded, “Can I have a quarter?” and Theo had said to Russ, more sharply, “Best just leave him be.”

  It was an instruction Frances hadn’t received. Upstairs, at lunchtime, they found her and Ronnie on the floor of the community room with a box of crayons. Ronnie was wearing a cast-off parka recognizably from New Prospect, swaying on his knees while Frances drew an orange sun on a sheet of newsprint. Theo stopped dead, began to say something, and shook his head. Frances offered Ronnie her crayon and looked up at Russ happily. She’d found her own way to serve and to give of herself, and he was happy for her, too.

  Theo, following him into the sanctuary, was not. “You need to speak to her. Tell her Ronnie is off-limits.”

  “I really don’t see the harm.”

  “Isn’t a matter of harm.”

  Theo went home to his wife for a hot meal, and Russ, not wanting to discourage Frances’s act of charity, took his sack lunch up to the Sunday-school room, where the older widows had undertaken a wholesale reorganization. When you were sick in the body, you surrendered it to the touch of strangers, and when you were sick with poverty you surrendered your environment. Without asking permission, the widows had sorted all of the children’s books and created bright, enticing labels for them. When you were poor, it could be hard to see what needed doing until someone showed you by doing it. Not asking permission hadn’t come naturally to Russ, but it was the counterpart of not expecting to be thanked. Venturing into a back yard of bramble and shoulder-high ragweed, he didn’t ask the old lady who owned it which bushes and which pieces of rusting junk weren’t worth saving, and when the job was done, more often than not, the old lady didn’t thank him. She said, “Now doesn’t that look better.”

  He was chatting with the two widows when they heard a door bang downstairs, a woman’s voice rising in anger. He leaped to his feet and ran down to the community room. Frances, clutching a sheet of newsprint, was shrinking from a young woman he’d never seen before. She was emaciated, filthy-haired. Even halfway across the room, he could smell the liquor on her.

  “This my son, you understand me? My son.”

  Ronnie was still on his knees with the crayons, swaying.

  “Whoa, whoa,” Russ said.

  The young woman wheeled around. “You the husband?”

  “No, I’m the pastor.”

  “Well, you tell whatever she is to stay away from my boy.” She addressed herself again to Frances. “Stay away from my boy, bitch! What you got there anyway?”

  Russ stepped between the women. “Miss. Please.”

  “What you got there?”

  “It’s a drawing,” Frances said. “A nice drawing. Ronnie made it. Didn’t you, Ronnie?”

  The drawing in question was a random red scrawl. Ronnie’s mother reached and snatch
ed it from Frances’s hand. “This ain’t your property.”

  “No,” Frances said. “I think he made it for you.”

  “She still talking to me? Is that what I’m hearing?”

  “I think we all need to calm down here,” Russ said.

  “She need to get her white ass outta my face and not be messing with my boy.”

  “I’m sorry,” Frances said. “He’s so sweet, I was only—”

  “Why is she still talking to me?” The mother ripped the drawing into quarters and yanked Ronnie to his feet. “I told you to keep away from these folk. Didn’t I tell you that?”

  “Dunno,” Ronnie said.

  She slapped him. “You don’t know?”

  “Miss,” Russ said, “if you hit the boy again, there’s going to be trouble.”

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah.” She was heading toward the street door. “Come on, Ronnie. We done here.”

  After they were gone, and Frances had broken down in sobs and he’d embraced her, feeling her fear expend itself in shudders, but also noticing how neatly her narrow form fit in his arms, her delicate head in his hand, he was close to tears himself. They should have asked permission. He should have kept a more protective eye on her. He should have insisted that she help the older ladies with the books.

  “I don’t know if I’m cut out for this,” she said.

  “It was just bad luck. I’ve never seen her before.”

  “But I’m afraid of them. And she knew it. And you’re not, and she respected you.”

  “It gets easier if you keep showing up.”

  She shook her head, not believing him.

  When Theo Crenshaw returned from his lunch, Russ was too ashamed to mention the incident. He’d had no plan for him and Frances, no specific fantasy, nothing more than a wish to be near her, and now, in his vanity and error, he’d blown his chance to see her twice a month. He was bad enough to desire a woman who wasn’t his wife, but he was also bad at being bad. How hideously passive a tactic it had been to bring her down to the basement. To imagine that watching him work could make her want him, the way watching her do anything made him want her, was to be the kind of man her kind of woman wouldn’t want. Watching him had bored her, and he deserved the blame for what had followed.