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  “I guess I need to apologize,” he said.

  “It’s too late for that,” Ambrose said. “Those kids aren’t coming back.”

  “Maybe you should tell them why you weren’t in Kitsillie. If they heard it from you—”

  “Kitsillie’s not the issue. Didn’t you hear what they were saying? The issue is your style of ministry. It’s simply not compatible with the kids I’m trying to reach.”

  “The groovy kids.”

  “The troubled kids. The ones who need an adult they can relate to. There are plenty of other kids who appreciate a more traditional style, and you’ll be fine with them. The numbers should be small enough for you to handle by yourself.”

  “What are you saying?”

  “I’m saying I can’t keep working here.”

  Ambrose’s eyes were on him, but Russ felt too loathsomely sweaty to raise his own. The trip he’d been on since October had been the fantasy of a dork freeloading on another man’s charisma. Picturing the sorry little rump group that would remain after tonight, he could see only shame. Even the kids who stayed would never respect him after what they’d witnessed.

  “You can’t leave,” he said. “You’re still under contract.”

  “I will finish out the school year.”

  “No,” Russ said. “It’s your group now. I’m not going to fight you for it.”

  “I’m not saying you should quit. I’m saying I will find another church.”

  “And I’m saying take it. I don’t want it.” Fearing he would cry, Russ stood up and went to the door. “You didn’t say one goddamned word in my defense up there.”

  “You’re right,” Ambrose said. “I’m sorry about that.”

  “The hell you are.”

  “It’s unfortunate that the whole group got pulled into this. I know that was brutal for you.”

  “I don’t want your compassion. In fact, you can shove it up your ass.”

  Those were the last words he ever spoke to Ambrose. He left the church that night with a shame so crippling that he didn’t see how he could set foot in it again. His impulse was to resign from First Reformed and never again have anything to do with teenagers. But he couldn’t put his family through another move—Becky especially was having a splendid time at school—and so, the next morning, he went to Dwight Haefle and asked that Ambrose be given full charge of the youth group. Haefle, alarmed, asked why. Embracing his shame, not going into detail, Russ said he couldn’t relate to high-school kids. He said he would still run Sunday school and confirmation classes, would happily do more pastoral visitation, and might like to start an outreach program in the inner city.

  “Hmm,” Haefle said. “Perhaps a few more sermons, too?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “More committee work.”

  “Definitely.”

  Haefle, who was sixty-three, seemed to weigh Russ’s failure against the agreeable prospect of working less. “Rick does seem to be doing a bang-up job,” he said.

  From the senior minister’s office, Russ went to the church secretary and asked her to instruct Ambrose to direct any future communications to him in written form. Later that day, after getting the message, Ambrose came and tapped on Russ’s door, which Russ had locked. “Hey Russ,” he said. “You in there?”

  Russ said nothing.

  “Written communication? What the fuck?”

  Russ knew he was being childish, but his hurt and hatred had a horizonless totality, unrelieved by adult perspective, and beneath them was the sweetness of being thrown upon God’s mercy: of making himself so alone and so wretched that only God could love him. He refused to speak to Ambrose, either on the day following his humiliation or ever after. While he performed his other duties vigorously, starting a women’s circle in the inner city, reaching new heights of political eloquence in his sermons, earning his paychecks and proving that everyone else still valued him, he avoided Ambrose and lowered his eyes when they accidentally met. By and by—Russ could sense it—Ambrose began to hate him for hating him. This, too, was sweet, because it gave Russ company and helped sustain his own hatred. Though he had some hope that the congregation was unaware of their feud, there was no hiding it in the church offices. Dwight Haefle kept trying to broker a peace, calling meetings, and the shamefulness of Russ’s refusals, the knowledge of how childish he appeared to Haefle and the secretarial staff, even to the janitor, compounded his wretchedness. His grievance with Ambrose was like a hair shirt, like a strand of barbed wire he wore wrapped around his chest. He suffered and in his suffering felt close to God.

  The torment for which there was no reward came from Marion. Never having trusted Ambrose, she blamed him entirely for Russ’s humiliation. Russ ought to have been grateful for her loyalty, but instead it made him feel all the more alone. The difficulty was that he could never tell her the real story of the shaming that Ambrose and Sally had inflicted on him, because the story hinged on his having admitted to Sally, in a fit of admittedly poor judgment, that he and his wife very rarely made love anymore. This had obviously been a terrible betrayal of Marion. And yet, by a curious alchemy, as the months went by, he came to feel that Marion herself had been the cause of his humiliation, by having become unattractive to him. In the illogic of the alchemy, the more Marion was to blame, the less Sally was. Finally there came a night when Sally appeared to him in a dream, wearing an innocent but breast-accentuating argyle sweater, and meltingly gave him to understand that she preferred him to Ambrose and was ready to be his. Some unsleeping shred of superego steered the dream away from consummation, but he woke up in a state of maximum arousal. Creeping from the bed, his self-awareness attenuated by the darkness of the parsonage, he paid an onanistic visit to the bathroom. Into the sink came concrete substantiation of Sally’s complaint with him. He saw that it had been inside him all along.

  Every man seeking salvation had a signature weakness to remind him of his nullity before the Lord and complicate communion with Him. Russ’s own weakness had been revealed to him in 1946, in Arizona, where his susceptibility to female beauty had aggravated a crisis of faith in the religion of his brethren. The image of Marion’s dewy dark eyes, her kiss-inviting mouth, her narrow waist and slender neck and fine-boned wrists, had come buzzing, like a huge and never resting hornet, into the formerly chaste chamber of his soul. Neither the imagined fires of Hell nor the very real prospect of breaking with his brethren could still the buzzing of that hornet. Although the result had been a permanent estrangement from his parents, he’d resolved his spiritual crisis by adopting a less stringent but still legitimate form of Christian faith, and he’d solved the problem of his weakness by lawfully wedding Marion.

  Or so it had seemed. In the wake of his taboo-upending dream, he saw that he hadn’t actually overcome his weakness—that he’d merely repressed it from his consciousness. Now the dream had opened his eyes. Now, at forty-five, he saw beauty at every turn—in the forty-year-old women who turned to him with startling friendliness on Pirsig Avenue, the thirty-year-olds he glimpsed in passing cars, the twenty-year-old candy stripers at the hospital. Now he was beset not by a single hornet but by a chaotically swirling swarm of them. Try as he might, he couldn’t shut the windows of his soul against them. And then along came Frances Cottrell.

  The afterfeel of her teasing little kick was persisting in his hip as he piloted the Fury through heavy snow on Archer Avenue. Three cars ahead of him, an orange truck was flashing yellow lights and strewing salt, but he had yet to see a snowplow. Frances had fallen silent, and he felt obliged to say something, if only to defuse the charge of her having foot-prodded her pastor in the vicinity of his genitals, but the Fury’s tractionless tires were palpably shimmying. If he got stuck in the snow, significantly delayed, the outing would become a misadventure that Marion, the next time she saw Kitty at church, might naturally remark on and thereby learn that Frances, not Kitty, had come along with him. As if he were one with the Fury, he willed himself to keep a grip. It was
vital to avoid hard braking, but the momentum of events was frightening—Perry’s giving drugs to Frances’s son, the painful conversation that Russ was now obliged to have with him, Frances’s invitation to smoke marijuana with her, and the risk that if Russ declined her invitation she would look elsewhere for company on her youth quest; the upsetting fact that she’d already been looking elsewhere, not more than an hour ago. She’d sat chatting away with Rick Ambrose, against whose hipness Russ had abundantly demonstrated he could not contend.

  “So, ah,” he said, when he’d safely braked for a stoplight. “You had a good talk with Rick?”

  “I did.”

  “I don’t suppose he mentioned that he and I are not on speaking terms.”

  “No, I already knew that. Everybody knows that.”

  So much for his hope that their feud wasn’t universal knowledge.

  “Why do you ask?” she said. “Am I not allowed to talk to him if I want to be friends with you?”

  “Of course not. You can talk to whoever you like. Just be aware that everything with Rick Ambrose is always about Rick Ambrose. He can be very seductive, and you might think he’s your friend. But you’d better watch your back.”

  “Why, Reverend Hildebrandt,” she said with a lilt. “I do believe you’re jealous.”

  The traffic light turned green, and he nudged the gas pedal. The rear wheels squealed and fishtailed a little.

  “I mean jealous of Crossroads,” she said. “Rick’s got a hundred and fifty kids adoring him every Sunday. You get eight old ladies twice a month. I’d be jealous, too, if I were you.”

  “I’m not jealous. There’s nowhere I’d rather be right now than here.”

  “That’s nice of you to say.”

  “I mean it.”

  “Okay. But then why the hard feelings about Rick? I guess it’s none of my business. But if he’s great at what he does and you’re great at what you do—I don’t see the problem.”

  Even on a straight stretch of road, the car was subtly bucking, wanting to spin.

  “It’s a long story,” Russ said.

  “In other words, none of my business.”

  Russ’s refusal to forgive Ambrose, which for nearly three years had organized his interior life and received daily support from Marion, seemed silly when he imagined explaining it to Frances. Worse than silly: unattractive. He saw that, to have a chance with her, he might need to let go of his hatred. But his heart didn’t want to. The loss would be huge, would waste a thousand days of nursing his grudge, would render them meaningless in retrospect. There was also the danger that, if he made peace with Ambrose, Frances would feel even freer to admire Ambrose, and that he, Russ, would end up with nothing—neither his righteous pain nor Frances as his private reward for bearing it. He and Ambrose would still be competing, and he would lose the competition.

  “Not to be all Mrs. Fix-It,” she said, “but Crossroads has been so good for Larry, and you’ve been so good for me. It seems like there ought to be some solution.”

  “Rick doesn’t like me, and I don’t like Rick. It’s just a natural antipathy.”

  “But why? Why? It goes against everything you say in your sermons. It goes against what you said to me about turning the other cheek. I can’t stop thinking about that. It’s the reason I wanted to come along with you today.”

  The spot on his hip where she’d kicked him was still buzzing. He understood her to be saying that she was attracted to his goodness, and that, in order to do a very bad thing, to break his vows of marriage, he was now required to practice goodness.

  “It means a lot to me,” he said. “That you came along today.”

  “Oh, pooh. It’s an honor.”

  “You mentioned getting involved in Crossroads yourself.” A tremor in his voice betrayed his anxiety. “Were you serious about that?”

  “God, you really are jealous.”

  Again—again—she prodded his upper leg with her toe.

  “My only job,” she said, “is being a mother. I only get to work with you and Kitty twice a month, so, yes, I asked Rick if I could work in Crossroads as an adviser. He didn’t seem too enthusiastic, but they always take a couple of parents on the Arizona trip, and he put me on the list for that.”

  “For the spring trip,” Russ said, aghast.

  “Yes!”

  Arizona was his place. The thought of her being there with Ambrose was atrocious.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, “I know I shouldn’t try to save the day. But you should be going on those trips yourself. You obviously love the Navajos, you lived there for however many years. If you and Rick could patch things up, we could all be there together. Wouldn’t that be fun? I would love that.”

  She bounced on the seat, so lovely in her energy that Russ became confused. Lo, I bring you tidings of great joy—peace on earth among all men. The opposing headlights on Archer Avenue were tightly bunched, in every car a stewing driver. There was nothing of Christmas in the mess the weather was making. The joy of the season was in Frances, in her childlike questioning of the strife between Russ and Ambrose, and a tendril of her joy was reaching into Russ’s hardened heart. Was it possible? Might he finally forgive Rick Ambrose? If his reward on earth were Frances? A week in Arizona in her hopeful, playful, eye-delighting presence? Or maybe more than just a week—maybe half a lifetime? Was she the second chance that God was giving him? The chance to entirely transform his life? To joyfully make love with a joyful woman? He’d been hating himself and Ambrose for a thousand Marion-darkened days, imagining that he was close to God, while all along, every second of every day, a simple turn of his heart toward forgiveness, which was the essence of Christ’s message to the world, the true meaning of Christmas, had been there to be freely chosen.

  “I’m going to think about that,” he said.

  “Please do,” she said. “There’s no earthly reason you and Rick can’t get along.”

  In medieval romances, a lady set her suitor an impossible task to perform, the retrieval of the Grail, the slaying of a dragon. It seemed to Russ that his fair lady, in her hunting cap, was requiring him to slay a dragon in his heart.

  Mayor Daley didn’t plow Englewood until the streets of white neighborhoods were cleared to bare pavement. Russ zigzagged through side streets, where the snow was more powdery and gave better traction, and maintained his momentum by rolling through stop signs. By the time the Community of God came into view, the hour was approaching five o’clock. To get home by seven, so that the trip didn’t become a thing that Marion might comment on to Kitty Reynolds, he needed to unload the Fury quickly.

  The door to the community center was locked, the light above it off. Russ rang the bell, and they waited in the invisibly falling snow, Frances stamping her feet against the chill, until the light came on and Theo Crenshaw opened the door.

  “I’d almost given up on you,” he said to Russ.

  “Yeah, pretty serious snow.”

  An impression that Russ had had before—that Theo was reluctant to acknowledge Frances’s presence—deepened when Theo turned away and kicked a wooden wedge under the door.

  “I’m Frances,” she said brightly. “Remember me?”

  Theo nodded without looking at her. He was dressed in a saggy velour pullover and ill-fitting stretch trousers. He seemed immune to the vanity that had led Russ to wear his favorite shirt and his sheepskin coat for Frances. The poignancy of an urban preacher, beloved on Sundays to the women of his congregation but otherwise so very alone in his church, with no support staff, no associate, his annual salary paltry, his primary sustenance spiritual, was especially keen on a raw December evening. Russ thought there might be no one he admired more than Theo, no one he knew more authentically Christian. Theo made him feel as privileged as Rick Ambrose made him feel disadvantaged, and he could imagine how Frances, showing up in her suburban blond loveliness, might be an unwelcome apparition to Theo.

  He was pleased to see her pitch right in and hustle boxes in
to the community center. He hoped that Theo, seeing her cheerful industry, might better acknowledge her in the future. As always, the delivery of food and toys was a straightforward transaction. Russ expected no thanks for the donations, and Theo expected no lingering for sociability. When all the boxes were inside, Theo put his hands on his hips and said, “Good. Some ladies will be here in the morning for anybody who wants to stop by.”

  “And we will see you here again on Tuesday,” Russ said. He clapped his hands and turned to Frances. “Shall we?”

  He saw that she was holding a small, flat package. It was wrapped in Santa Claus paper and red ribbon.

  “Will you do something for me?” she asked Theo. “Will you give this to Ronnie tomorrow? Tell him it’s from the lady he made the drawings with?”

  Russ hadn’t seen the package in any of the boxes. She must have had it in her coat pocket. He wished she’d mentioned it to him earlier, because Theo was frowning.

  “I don’t think that’s a good idea.”

  “It’s just a set of Flair pens. They’re great for coloring-books.”

  “That’s nice,” Theo said. “Some little boy or girl be happy to get that.”

  “No, it’s for Ronnie. I got it specially for him.”

  “All well and good. But I think you should put that with the other toys.”

  “Why? He’s such a sweet boy—why can’t I give him a little present?”