Uncross My Heart (2 page)

“I put it more eloquently,” I said, twirling the large gold signet ring on my left hand and staring down at my Cole Haans.

“He also stated that he had thought today’s lesson was on ecclesiastical apparel—its origin and significance—or he would not have attended.”

I ran my hand through my hair, pushing it back even farther off my face to avoid simply yanking it out of my head over this ridiculous conversation. Hightower’s jaw twitched so I quickly defended myself.

“Adolphus Claridge himself once said, ‘An unpopular truth is the one that should be voiced first.’ In order of truths, I would say Roger’s need to understand Biblical context supersedes his need to understand how things hang…robewise.”

Hightower paced in the way one does when contemplating degrees of punishment, then whirled and opened a desk drawer, pulled out a second folder, and spun it directly across the desk at me as if it were a playing card.

“She’s a Claridge critic. You’re going to meet with her and make her understand the heart and soul of this fine seminary and convince her to stop writing garbage about this school.”

The penance
. Hightower had obviously decided not to spar with me and to simply force me to do something to repay him for this troublesome board call. I flipped open the folder. The top page listed her name as Vivienne Wilde and rank as political activist. Arrest record—multiple demonstrations.

“Is this one of those assignments where, if I’m captured, you deny ever knowing me?”

“I do that now,” Hightower said, and I suppressed a grin. His acerbic humor made me suspect that, deep down, he shared my views.

But I would most likely never confirm that supposition, since the personal lives of seminarians were guarded. Image was everything.

“Her phone number is on the inside cover. Oh, and Dr. Westbrooke, you will also meet with Roger Thurgood III and put his nose back in joint.” I moaned faintly. “This institution doesn’t need financial problems to go along with bad press.” His tone dismissed me as thoroughly as if he’d said good-bye, and I walked out into the reception area where Eleonor waited.

“You survived.”

“Do you know anything about a Vivienne Wilde?”

“Every time he reads something by her or hears her on the radio, he goes—Wilde.” Eleonor’s full-bodied laugh made me laugh. Hightower shouted for her, and she pulled herself together and hurried into his office.Minutes later I was downstairs where Dennis and Ketch had sagged onto the stone steps, killing time. Six feet hit the ground when they spotted me.

I slapped the file into Dennis’s palm and he flipped through it as we walked. “
And
I have to meet with Roger Thurgood III.”

“Careful with him. His compass is a little off. Last semester campus police picked him up for peeping in dorm windows, but Thurgood senior got him off.”

“The man who put the funds in fundamentalist.”

The parking lot appeared over the last grassy hill. I retrieved the file from Dennis as Ketch ran ahead of us and jumped into my black Mustang convertible. After following him, I put the car in gear and headed for the freeway that would take me away from the city and closer to home. A textbook lay on the passenger seat, and I pinned the Wilde folder down with it to keep it from blowing away, then bent back the cover to get her phone number.

In the rearview mirror, I caught sight of Ketch’s thick, silken hair blown back off his broad intelligent face and thought he appeared far smarter than I. In fact, he was. I cooked for him, handled all the driving, and even did his nails. None of which would be happening if I were the smart one.

He suddenly vaulted between the seats, landed on the passenger side, and wriggled his butt around on the textbook and the folder, making himself comfortable.

“Hey, I have to return that folder.” The thought of handing Hightower his folder bearing the scent of anal glands put a big smile on my face. Ketch growled at my trying to readjust his seating. “Off.

You’re dog, not God, despite the semipalindrome.”

Ketch cocked his head.

“A meaningful word when spelled forward or backward. Just think. You and God in the same three letters.”

As I merged onto the freeway, I dialed Vivienne’s office, always one to get unpleasant things off my list immediately. A secretary answered and identified herself as Joyce.

“Is she in?” I asked as the wind whipped around my head, making it hard to hear.

“No, I’m afraid she’s not. Who’s calling, please?” the well-trained lion at the gate demanded. I gave her my name. “And will she know what this is about?”

“No,” I said, enjoying the brevity.

She paused. “I believe she just walked in.” Joyce offered the polite lie and was off the line for a while. I took the next exit and pulled into a parking lot to quiet the wind.

“Hello.” The rich alto voice reverberated. “Dr. Westbrooke, I’m sorry to keep you waiting. I was actually here but I don’t take many calls.”

“Well, nice you admit it. I’m on the faculty at Claridge and would like you to come to campus as my guest and learn a bit more about the seminary.”

“Dr. Hightower must have put you up to this.”

“He did.”

“Nice you admit it,” she echoed me. “And the tour is to do what precisely?”

“Offer you a fuller appreciation of the positive aspects of Claridge. I’ll have to hunt some up between now and then.”

“But your true mission is to shut down my scurrilous scribbling.”

I remained silent. “You’re an academic, you say?”

“I am.”

“If I decide to come, I should speak with one of the clerics on campus—”

“I’m also an ordained priest.” I envisioned her pausing to suppress a smile. I filled the silence. “Next Monday at ten, would that work?”

“Let me check my schedule.” A clicking of computer keys.

“Yes, Perfect. So do people call you Father?” The tone was slightly mocking.

“Only if I’ve slept with their mother.”

A pause. “See you Monday.” She sounded amused as she hung up.

The rock driveway scattered stones as we flew down its winding contours to the gray-and-white clapboard cottage at road’s end. Ketch jumped over the top of the car door and was on the front porch before I had turned off the ignition. His enthusiasm at being home always made me smile.

I balanced books and papers in my left hand as I pulled the key out of the lock and pushed the door open with the toe of my shoe, revealing the irregular woodwork of the hundred-year-old farmhouse.

An old oxen-harness mirror dangled from a large hook on the wall over a leather couch. The side table, consisting of a metal-strapped barrel, sat next to the large tartan-plaid doggie bed whose soft, circular surface lay next to the fireplace and was Ketch’s first stop—or flop—after getting inside.

Given to me when my mother died, my grandmother’s original homestead was my haven when I was young and now my home, with its wraparound screened porch, huge country kitchen with tall window-paned dish cabinets, wide wooden countertops, and an ancient but excellent gas stove. The old farm was beautiful in its simplicity, an elusive commodity these days. Having loved it as a child, I wasn’t letting go now even though I had to drive an hour to and from my work.I was about to exit through the squeaky screen door down the steps to the lopsided wooden horse gate to greet my two old trail horses when the phone rang. The voice on the line belonged to Sylvia Slaughter, the new neighbor to the north who’d recently moved from the city to the country, buying the Browns’ farm after Mr. Brown died.

“I’m so glad you’re home. Ralph is away on business and there’s something loose in my kitchen. At first I thought it was a snake, which completely freaked me out. Now I don’t know. I hate to ask, but…”

Like any new country people, she and her husband were alarmed over things most folks out here had learned to handle decades ago. Sylvia’s voice was calm, but her words sounded urgent. “Could you just come over and…if it’s a rat or a possum I’ll just die.”

“Okay, give me a few minutes.” I hung up and dashed to the bedroom, changed into a pair of faded jeans and a T-shirt, and threw on some ankle-high boots. Not certain what Sylvia would have available to assist in the search, I grabbed a flashlight, walking stick, and a towel.

The first item was to find it, the second to fend it off, and the third to subdue it so we could get it out of the kitchen.

I left the lightly snoring Ketch to guard the unlocked door as I traipsed across the open field toward the back side of Sylvia’s brick farmhouse. Having walked these fields for many years, I thought nothing of striding across twenty acres in the near dark.

She was standing on the porch with a drink in her hand, which she set on the porch rail as I climbed the two-by-six wooden steps, and she held the door for me, saying how grateful she was to see me.

Her curly auburn hair was a bit damp, as if she’d just showered, or perhaps she was in a nervous sweat over the animal intruder. She wore short-shorts and a yellow V-neck golf tee, despite the cool night air, and a lot of jewelry, broadcasting with her plunging neckline that she wasn’t suited to a rural environment. Her presence made me long for Mrs. Brown, Brownie as we called her, a squat, heavyset woman who could beat a snake to death with a rolling pin.

“You’re wonderful to come over. Brownies?” Sylvia extended a platter, startling me by producing a culinary version of my remembrance.

“Maybe we should look for your alien intruder first.” She drew back and pointed toward the broom closet. “You’re sure it’s in this closet?”

“Something’s moving around in there and my dog’s in the bedroom. He’s a city animal and more afraid than I am.”

I opened the closet door and shined the light inside. Nothing. I poked at the clothes with my walking stick. Nothing. Sylvia peeked in gingerly. “I swear there was something in there.”

Suddenly a big black blob flew out of the closet right between us. I jumped back, nearly losing my balance, and let out a yelp. She screamed and flung herself on me, clinging and jumping up and down.

“Ahh, ahh, ahh.” She screamed in rhythm with her feet leaving the ground. I tried to visually track the black creature as she bounced me along with her. I spotted it by the door—a bat.

Extracting myself from Sylvia, I crept up on its angular backside as it clung to the wall and gave it the gym-towel snap, knocking it to the floor, and before it could gather itself up, I tossed the towel over it.

While it tried to claw its way out of the maze of terry cloth, I scooped it up and shook it loose out on the porch, where it flew away. I reentered to find Sylvia standing on top of a kitchen chair, her hands clasped tight up against her chest and her face contorted into a little-girl grimace.

“Done,” I said as she squealed her thank-yous, hopped down, and hugged me again.

Collecting my tools, I prepared to leave but she thrust the brownie plate in front of me again and begged me to stay a minute longer.

Never one to pass up chocolate, I took a seat at the kitchen counter, noting Sylvia had torn out my favorite place in the old farmhouse—the built-in pie cabinet that faced a battered old kitchen table where I used to sit and talk to Brownie for hours. In its place, Sylvia and her husband had installed a granite countertop with black leather bar stools.

Without asking, she poured me a tall glass of wine and pushed it in my direction.

“Priests drink wine, that much I know.”

The dry wine chasing the sweet brownies made a rather unpleasant combination, but I smiled and gave her baking an appreciative little toast.She held her own glass up in the air. “Here’s to…not going bats.”

Her voice held a tinge of sadness, and for a moment I thought I glimpsed a lonely woman most likely as locked away from her dreams as the poor creature we’d just freed. “So, what do priests do in their spare time other than save souls, read boring books, and chase their neighbors’ horrors away?”

The fascination with women priests was a constant topic at any gathering and barely allowed me to do much more in any new relationship than spend time brushing aside preconceived notions of priests as sanctimonious, saintly, or celibate. I concluded my dissertation on “priests as ordinary people” about the time my wineglass reached empty and realized I was slightly high.

Sylvia was not without conversation on any topic and rattled on about her life and her husband, and frankly I had tuned out, until the moment I heard her say, “Tell me what you think about late at night when you’re in bed? We all think about things we don’t say. What does a priest dream about?”

“I’m generally too tired to dream and too dull to remember my dreams even if I had them.”

“I don’t believe that,” she said.

“Ah, it’s always an issue of nonbelief.”

Sylvia had inched her bar stool nearer and nearer in her chatting, shifting fashion. She put her hand with the giant amethyst-ridden finger on my arm, trapping it there, and leaned close to my face.

“You must tell me one secret before you go.” Her eyes gleamed like a teenage girl’s at a slumber party. When I didn’t answer immediately she quickly added, “No secrets? Not even something from your childhood?” I felt the mood going awry—the way children of dysfunctional families sense danger in a look or a laugh. “Then I need to give you one.”

Sylvia darted into my face and her lips landed on mine as she kissed me, stunning me and leaving a soft, pleasant sensation. She placed her index finger on my lips as if to seal the secret, letting her finger trail across my mouth as she whispered, “You have now kissed the woman next door. That can be your secret…until you find a better one.”

I was off the bar stool and standing at attention, my walking stick, flashlight, and towel carried like military issue as I retreated from her house. I thought I heard her chuckling from the porch as I marched back to my barnyard barracks, determined never to step foot in Sylvia’s home again and praying to God she told no one about this evening, and certainly not that I had kissed
her
, which was often how these stories got turned around. I wished I had someone to share this with—my surprise, my fears, my feelings—but there was no one to confide in, and so I guessed that alone made it a secret. No one to tell.