Saint Maybe (34 page)

And Daphne had always relied on him so, had taken it for granted that he would stand by her no matter what. He still had an acute physical memory of the weight of her infant head resting in the cup of his palm. Even now, sometimes, she would lean against him while they watched TV and artlessly confide her secrets and gossip about her classmates and recount her hair-raising adventures that he had had no inkling of, thank heaven, while she was undergoing them. (She knew the city inside out, and slipped without a thought through neighborhoods that Ian himself avoided.) But if he showed any concern she would say, “I knew I shouldn’t have told you! I should never tell you anything!” And when her friends came over she grew visibly remote from him, referring to him as “my uncle” as if he had no name and rolling her eyes when her girlfriends tried to make small talk or (on occasion) flirt with him. When he said he was off to Prayer Meeting, she told her friends he was “speaking metaphorically.” When he enforced her curfew, she announced she was running away to live with her mother’s people, who—she claimed—were worldly-wise and cosmopolitan and
wouldn’t
think
of making her return to their mansion at the dot of any set time. Ian had laughed, and then felt a deep, sad ache.

That was what Daphne brought out in him, generally. Laughter and an ache.

Reverend Emmett invited him to supper. “Just the two of us,” he said on the phone, “to talk about the matter of your vocation.” Ian gulped, but of course he accepted.

Reverend Emmett warned him that he wasn’t much of a cook (his mother had died the previous fall) and so Ian asked if he could bring something. “Well,” Reverend Emmett said, “you know that cold white sauce that people serve with potato chips?”

“Sauce? You mean dip?”

“It has little bits of dried onion scattered through it.”

“You mean onion soup dip?”

“That must be it,” Reverend Emmett said. “Mother used to make it whenever we had guests, but I haven’t been able to find her recipe. I thought maybe you could ask
your
mother if she might fix it for us.”

“Shoot, I’ll fix it myself,” Ian said. “I’ll bring over the ingredients and show you how it’s done.”

“I’d appreciate that,” Reverend Emmett told him.

So Tuesday evening, when Ian rang the doorbell, he was carrying a pint of sour cream and an envelope of the only brand of onion soup mix on the market that didn’t contain any sugar. He had washed up after work but (mindful of the sin of superficiality) kept on his everyday clothes, and Reverend Emmett answered the door in jeans and one of his incongruously jaunty polo shirts. “Come in!” he said.

Ian said, “Thanks.”

To tell the truth, he felt a bit apprehensive. He worried
that Reverend Emmett labored under some false impression of him, for how else to explain his plans for Ian’s future?

The living room was small but formal, slightly fussy—the mother’s doing, Ian guessed. He had seen it on several occasions but had never gone beyond it, and now he looked about him curiously as he followed Reverend Emmett through a dim, flowered dining room to a kitchen that seemed to have been turned on end and shaken. “I thought I would make us a roast of beef,” Reverend Emmett told him, and Ian said, “Sounds good.” He wondered how a roast could have required all these pans and utensils. Maybe they’d been used for some side dish. “Would you like an apron to work in?” Reverend Emmett asked.

“It’s not that complicated,” Ian said. “Just a mixing bowl and a spoon will do.”

He emptied the sour cream into the bowl Reverend Emmett brought him and then stirred in the soup mix, with Reverend Emmett hovering over the whole operation. “Why, there’s really nothing to it,” he said at the end.

“A veritable snap,” Ian told him.

“Would you mind very much if we ate this in the kitchen? I’ll need to keep an eye on the roast.”

“That’s fine with me.”

They pulled two stools up to the counter, which was puddled with several different colors of liquids, and started on the chips and dip. Reverend Emmett gobbled chips wolfishly, a vein standing out in his temple as he chewed. (Had his doctor not warned him off fats?) He told Ian to call him Emmett. “Oh. All right … Emmett,” Ian said. But he could force the name out only by imagining a “Reverend” in the gap, and he thought, from the way Reverend Emmett paused at each “Ian,” that he was mentally inserting a “Brother.”

“The fact is, um … Ian, hardly anyone I know calls me just plain Emmett anymore,” Reverend Emmett said. “The fact is, this is a lonely profession. Oh, but not for
you
, it wouldn’t be. You would be training among our own kind from the start. You would be making your friendships among them, and whoever you marry will know she shouldn’t expect a half-timbered rectory and white-glove teas.”

“But … Emmett,” Ian said, “how can I be certain I’m cut out for this? I’m nothing but a carpenter.”

“Our Lord was a carpenter,” Reverend Emmett reminded him. He rose and went to peer inside the oven.

“Maybe so,” Ian said, “but that might have been made a little too much of.”

“Excuse me?”

“Well, we don’t seem to hear about anything He built, do we? I wish we did. Sometimes when I look at paintings of Him I try to see what kind of muscles He had—whether they’re the kind that come from hammering and sawing. I like to think He really did put a few bits of wood together; He didn’t just stand around discussing theology with His friends while Joseph built the furniture.”

Reverend Emmett set the roast on the counter and cocked his head at him thoughtfully.

“Or camel barns, or whatever it was,” Ian said. “I hope I don’t sound disrespectful.”

“No, no … Could you bring in that salad, please?”

“But anyhow,” Ian said. He picked up the salad bowl and followed Reverend Emmett into the dining room. “I’m getting off the track here. What I’m trying to say is, I’m not sure someone like me would be able to give people answers. When they had doubts and serious problems and such. All those ups and downs people go through, those little
hells
they go through—I wouldn’t know what to tell them.”

“But that’s what Bible School teaches,” Reverend Emmett said.

“It’s not enough,” Ian said.

They had both taken their seats now at the lace-covered table. Reverend Emmett was brandishing a bone-handled carving set. He paused and looked at Ian.

“I mean,” Ian said, “
maybe
it’s not enough.”

“Well, of course it is,” Reverend Emmett told him. “How do you suppose I learned? No one is born knowing.”

He started slicing the roast. Plainly it was overdone—a charred black knob glued fast to the pan it had been cooked in. “When I began seminary,” he said, sawing away manfully, “I had every possible misconception. I thought I was entering upon a career that was stable and comfortable, my father’s career—a family business like any other. I envisioned how Father and I would sit together in his study over sherry and ponder obscure interpretations of the New Testament. Finally he would think well of me; he would listen to my opinions. But it didn’t happen that way. What happened was I started reading the Bible, really reading it, and by the time I’d finished, my father wasn’t speaking to me and my fiancée had left me and all my classmates thought I was some kind of mental case.”

He laid down his knife. “Oh, dear,” he said, “
that’s
not the point I was trying to make.”

Ian laughed. Reverend Emmett glanced at him in surprise, and then he laughed too.

“Also, this meat is inedible, isn’t it?” he said. “Let’s face it, I’m a terrible cook.”

“We could always fill up on salad,” Ian told him.

“We could, but you know what I’d really like? I’d like to polish off that dip, your onion dip. That was excellent!”

“Let’s do it, then,” Ian said.

So while he helped himself to the salad, Reverend Emmett went out to the kitchen for the chips and dip. “No,” he said, returning, “that wasn’t my point at all, believe me. No, my point was … well, the ministry is like anything else: a matter of trial and error. I’ve made so many errors! In the hospital it seemed they all came back to me. I lay on that bed and looked at the ceiling and all my errors came scrolling across those dotted soundproof panels.”

“
I’ve
never seen you make an error.”

“Oh, Ian,” Reverend Emmett said, shaking his head. He noticed a blob of dip on his finger and reached for a linen napkin. “When I was starting out, my church was going to be perfect,” he said. “I figured I was setting up the ideal doctrine. But now I see how inconsistent it is, how riddled with holes and contradictions. What do I care if someone drinks a cup of coffee? Wouldn’t I have done better to ban TV? And here’s the worst, Ian: the thought of doing that did cross my mind, back in the beginning. But then I said, no, no. And never admitted the reason, which was: how would I get any members, if I didn’t let them watch TV?”

Ian didn’t know what to say to that. He supposed it would have been nearly impossible to get members, come to think of it.

“And then there’s tithing,” Reverend Emmett said. “Who am I to tell them they have to give a tenth of their income? Some of those people are dirt poor. Not a one of them is wealthy. Now I see that’s why I dispensed with the ritual of collection. I said, ‘Slip your envelopes through the mail slot, no return address,’ because secretly I hoped they
wouldn’t
tithe, even when the heating bill had to come out of my own pocket; and I didn’t want to have to deal with it if they didn’t. I preferred to be looking the other way. There’s so much I’ve looked away from! I see everyone has made Second
Chance his own, adapted it to suit his own purposes, changed the rules to whatever is more convenient, and I pretend not to notice. I know Brother Kenneth smokes! I can smell it on his clothes, although I never say so. I know Daphne smokes too, and also drinks beer, and Sister Jessie has never given up her evening cocktail, not even the day she joined the church, which rumor has it she celebrated with a split of champagne after services. But I’ve never so much as mentioned it, because the awful truth is I find I don’t mind. I find as I get older that it all seems just sort of … endearing, really: this little flock of human beings who came to me first to atone for some sin, most of them, and then relaxed and settled in and entirely forgot about atonement. How long since you’ve seen someone stand up at Public Amending? And Christmas! Three-quarters of the congregation marks Christmas with trees and Santa Claus, don’t you think I know that?” Ian stirred guiltily.

“But the silliest,” Reverend Emmett said, “is the Sugar Rule.”

“Oh, well …” Ian said.

It wasn’t as if this subject hadn’t come up before, here and there.

“I knew almost from the start I’d made a mistake on that one. I just didn’t know how to get out of it. And truthfully, I never felt sure that I wasn’t merely rationalizing, once I’d seen how hard the rule was to follow. But in the hospital I was reading this book Sister Nell brought me. This nutrition book. I was trying to learn how to eat more healthily. Although,” he said, waving a hand toward the potato chips, “I may not always act on what I’ve learned. Well, I came upon a discussion of sugar, and do you know what? It’s not a stimulant.”

“It’s not?”

“It’s a tranquilizer.”

“It can’t be,” Ian said.

“It’s a tranquilizer. Oh, it gives you energy, all right.
Physical
energy. But as far as the mental effect: it lulls you.”

“Well, uh …”

“Want to know what
is
a stimulant?”

“What?”

“Milk.”

Ian thought about that. He started grinning.

“See?” Reverend Emmett said. He was grinning too. “How could you give answers any more wrong than mine have been, Ian? Why, you could be a better minister with one hand tied behind you!”

“No one could be a better minister,” Ian said.

He meant it with all his heart. Reverend Emmett must have realized that, because he sobered and said, “Well, thank you.”

“But I’ll think about Bible School, um, Emmett.”

“Wonderful,” Reverend Emmett said. Then he reached for another potato chip. His eyes seemed no longer brown but amber. “Oh,” he said, “it would be so wonderful to have somebody working at my side and calling me Emmett!”

And he popped the entire chip into his mouth and chomped down happily.

Bert was telling the new man, Rafael, how Mr. Brant had discovered his wife had left him. “First he claims she’s kidnapped,” Bert said. “He shows Jeannie the closet: ‘See? All her clothes still hanging here. She can’t have left on purpose.’ ‘Uncle,’ Jeannie goes. She goes, ‘These clothes are her very least favorites. Where’s her silk blouse with the poppies on it? Where’s her turquoise skirt? These are just the extras,’ she goes.”

Rafael tut-tutted. He said, “Womens always got so many emergency backups.”

“Tell about the neighbor,” Greg said, nudging Bert in the ribs.

“Jeannie goes, ‘Uncle, your neighbor Mr. Hoffberg is missing too. His wife is just about frantic.’ Know what he says? Says, ‘Why!’ Says, ‘Why, it’s a
rash
of kidnaps!’ ”

The three men chuckled. Ian frowned at the bureau he was working on. He should have given Mr. Brant some warning. He wished he had it to do over again.

Unexpectedly, Gideon and the redhead strolled through his memory. Framed by the church’s doorway, they kissed, and Ian all at once straightened.

What if that was the sign he had prayed for inside the church?

But if it was, he had no idea what it meant.

The others went for their break and Ian drove off to pick up Daphne. It was a crisp, glittery day, and the leaves were at their brightest. He found the ride so pleasant that when he reached the school, it took him a moment to notice the place was deserted. Not a single car sat out front; not a single student loitered on the grounds. He got out of the car and went to try the main entrance, but it was locked. A janitor pushing a broom down the hall saw him through the glass and came over to open the door. “School’s closed,” he told Ian. “There’s a teachers’ meeting. Kids got out at noon.”

“Oh. Great,” Ian said. “Thanks.”