A Light in the Window (4 page)

“I ain’t into ’at ol’ poop, n’ more.”

The rector grinned. There! he thought. There’s my old Dooley.

In his room, Barnabas leapt onto the blanket at the foot of the bed, then lay down with a yawn as the rector stepped into the shower. While the raftered room in the Sligo farmhouse had been perfectly comfortable, the long passage down the hall to the finicky shower was another story entirely. As far as he could see, it might be months before the thrill of his own bathroom,
en suite
, began to wane.

He felt as mindless and contented as a steamed clam as he sat on the bed and dialed his neighbor.

“Hello?”

“Hello, yourself.”

“Timothy!” said Cynthia. “I was just thinking of you.”

“Surely you have something better to do.”

“I was thinking that my idea of how to celebrate was too silly.”

“Silly, yes, but not too silly,” he said. “In fact, I was wondering—when are we going to do it?”

“Ummmm ...”

“Saturday night?” he asked, hoping.

“Oh, rats. My nephew’s coming. I mean, I’m delighted he’s coming. You must meet him. He’s very dear. Saturday would have been so perfect. Could we do it Monday evening?

“Vestry meeting,” he said.

“Tuesday I have to finish an illustration and FedEx it first thing Wednesday morning. Could you do it Wednesday around six-thirty?”

“Building committee at seven.”

“Darn.”

“I could do it Friday,” he said.

“Great!”

“No. No, wait, there’s something on Friday,” he said, extending the phone cord to the dresser where he opened his black engagement book. “Yes, that’s it. The hospital is having a staff dinner for Hoppy, and I’m giving the invocation. Would you come?”

“Dinner in a hospital? That’s suicide! Besides, I can’t stand hospitals. I nearly died in one, you know.”

“No, I didn’t know.”

“And I don’t know how you ever will know these things unless we can figure out a way to see each other. What about Sunday evening? That’s usually a relaxing time for you. Sunday might be lovely.”

“I’m helping Dooley finish his science project. He has to hand it in Monday morning.” A nameless despair was robbing him of any contentment he had just felt.

“I could meet you on the bench by your German roses at six o’clock tomorrow. We could do it there and get it over with.”

But he didn’t want to do it and get it over with. He wanted to linger over it, to savor it.

“You’re sighing,” she said.

“It’s just that there’s so much going on after being away for two months.”

“I understand,” she said simply.

“You do? Do you really?”

“Of course I do.”

“I’ll call you tomorrow. Let’s not waste it on the garden bench.”

“All that lumpy, wet moss,” she said, laughing.

“All that cold, damp concrete,” he said forlornly.

“I hope you sleep well.” He could hear a tenderness in her voice. “Jet lag really does persist for days.”

“Yes. Well. So,” he said, feeling immeasurably foolish, “blink your bedroom lights good night.”

“I will if you will.”

“Cynthia?”

“Yes?”

“I ...” He cleared his throat. “You ...”

“Spit it out,” she said.

He had started to croak; he couldn’t have uttered another word if his life depended on it.

“I’m not going to worry anymore about being too silly. It’s you, Timothy, who are far too silly!”

His heart pounded as he hung up the phone. He had nearly told her he loved her, that she was wonderful; he had nearly gone over the edge of the cliff, with no ledges to break his fall.

He went to the window and looked down upon her tiny house. He saw the lights blink twice through the windows of her bedroom under the eaves. He raced around the bed and flipped his own light switch off, then on again, and off.

“Good Lord,” he said, breathlessly, standing there in the dark. “Who is the twelve-year-old in this house, anyway?”

When he called at noon, her answering machine emitted a long series of beeps followed by a dial tone.

He had just hung up when the phone rang.

“Father!” It was Absalom Greer, the country preacher.

“Brother Greer! I was going to call you this very afternoon.”

“Well, sir, how bad a mess did I leave for you to clean up?”

“People are still telling me how much they enjoyed your supply preaching at Lord’s Chapel. We caught them off-guard, you know. I hope it didn’t go too hard for you in the beginning.”

“The first Sunday was mighty lean. Your flock didn’t mind you too good about throwin’ their support to an old revival preacher. Then the next Sunday, about half-full, I’d say. Third Sunday, full up. On and on like that ’til they were standin’ on the steps.

“If you hadn’t come home s’ soon, we’d have had an altar call. It was all I could do t’ hold it back toward the end.”

Father Tim laughed. “You’re going to be a tough act to follow, my friend.”

“I tried to hold back on the brimstone, too, but I didn’t always succeed. ‘Repent and be saved!’ said John. ‘Repent and be saved!’ said Jesus. There’s the gist of it. If you don’t repent, you don’t get saved. So, you’re lookin’ at the alternative, and people don’t want to hear that nowadays.”

“You’d better prepare your crowd for me when I come out to the country.”

Absalom laughed heartily. “That might be askin’ the impossible!” He could see the faces of his rural Baptist congregation when they got a load of a preacher in a long dress.

“I’ve got something for you,” said the rector. “I’d like to bring it out one day and hear what another man saw from the backside of my pulpit.”

“Just let us know when you’re comin’. We’ll lay on a big feed.”

“I’ll do it! And God bless you for all the effort you gave us here. It counted for something. Ron Malcolm said you were as plain as the bark on a tree in delivering the Gospel.”

“A man has to stand out of the way of the Gospel, and that keeps us plain if we let it.”

The rector sat smiling after he hung up. There was nothing, in fact, plain about the old man with the craggy brows and mane of silver hair. His tall, lean frame made a stunning sight in the pulpit, Cynthia said, with his blue eyes blazing like flint striking rock and a sprig of laurel in his buttonhole.

Greer,
he wrote on the calendar for the third week of October.

He was walking home from the office in a misting rain when the heavens erupted in a downpour.

Drenched at once, he raced to the wool shop and stood under the awning that was drumming with rain, pondering what to do. Hazel Bailey waved to him from the back of the shop, signaling that he should come in and take refuge. Already soaked, he decided he would make a run for it.

He lifted his newspaper over his head and was ready to dash toward the next awning when he heard a car horn. It was Edith Mallory’s black Lincoln, which was approximately the size of a condominium.

The window slipped down as if oiled, and her driver leaned across the seat. “Father Tim,” Ed Coffey yelled, “Miz Mallory says get in. We’ll carry you home.”

The water was already running along the curb in a torrent.

He got in.

Edith Mallory might have been Cleopatra on her barge, for all the swath of silk raincoat that flowed against the cushiony leather and the mahogany bar that appeared from the arm rest.

“Sherry?” she said, smiling in that enigmatic way that made his adrenalin pump. It was, however, his flight adrenalin.

“No, thanks!” he exclaimed, trying to do something with the sodden newspaper. A veritable cloud of perfume hung in the air of the warm interior; he felt instantly woozy, drugged, like a child of four going down for a nap.

That’s the way it was with Edith; one’s guard weakened when needed most.

“Dreadful weather, and you above all must mind your health ...” Why above all, he wondered, irritated.

“... Because you’re our shepherd, of course, and your little flock needs you to take care of us.” Edith looked at him with the large brown eyes that overpowered her sharp features, rather like, he thought, one of those urchin children in paintings done on velvet.

“Well, yes, you have a point,” he said stiffly. He saw Ed Coffey’s eyes in the rearview mirror; the corners appeared to be crinkling, as if he were grinning hugely.

“We want you to stay strong,” she crooned, “for all your widows and orphans.”

He looked out the window mindlessly, not noticing that they had passed his street. The awning over the Grill had come loose on one corner, and the rain was gushing onto the sidewalk like a waterfall.

“You might have just the weensiest sherry,” she said, filling a small glass from a decanter that sat in the mahogany bar like an egg in a nest.

“I really don’t think ... ,” he said, feeling the glass already in his hand.

“There, now!” she said. “That will hit the nail on the jackpot!” When she smiled, her wide mouth pushed her cheeks into a series of tiny wrinkles like those in crepe paper. Some people actually found her attractive, he reminded himself—why couldn’t he?

He gulped the sherry and returned the glass to her, feeling like a child who had taken his croup medicine.

“Good boy,” she said.

Where were they, anyway? The windows were streaming with rain, and the lights of the car didn’t penetrate far enough to give him any idea of their whereabouts. They had just passed the Grill, but he couldn’t remember turning at the corner. Perhaps they had driven by the monument and were on their way to Wesley.

“Why ah, haven’t we gone to the rectory?” He felt a mild panic.

“We’re going in just the weensiest minute,” she said, blinking at him. He could not believe that her hand snaked across the seat toward his. He remembered the dream about the coat closet, and how he had pounded on the door and shouted for Russell Jacks.

He drew his hand away, quite unobtrusively, he thought, and scratched his nose. The sherry had turned on a small light in a far corner of his mind. Perhaps she imagined he’d be after her money for the Sunday school rooms and willing to do a little hand-holding to get it. It was going to take a cool two hundred thousand to turn that sprawling airstrip of an attic into the Sunday school Josiah Baxter had envisioned. But his own hand would most certainly not milk it forth. On his visitation meeting with the vestry, he had gone over a list of wouldn’ts, so no one would be aggrieved down the road.

He wouldn’t, for example, participate in fund-raising efforts outside the pulpit. Period. He would not personally court, cajole, preach to, sweet-talk, or exhort anyone for money to build anything.

“Ah, Timothy,” sighed Edith Mallory, rubbing the tweed of his sleeve as if it were a cat, “Ireland has done wonders for you, I can tell.” She moved closer. “It’s so lonely being a widow,” she said, sniffing. “I sometimes just ... ache all over.”

When he was finally delivered to the rectory, nearly soaked to the skin, Puny was getting ready to leave. She stared at him with alarm as she put on her coat.

“You look like you been through somethin’ awful!”

“Hell!” he exclaimed.

She was shocked to hear him use such language.