No, he thought. You had commitment to things once. You were deeply religious, excited about becoming a minister, eager to help people, anxious to spread the word of God. You were madly in love with Carolyn when you first met her; you courted her for all you were worth.
Then where had it gone, the enthusiasm and commitment? But that was another question for which he had no answer. Maybe this was just the classic case of a minister who’d lost his faith.
But he didn’t think so. He still believed in God, and that faith was unshaken. This was more like a midlife crisis. Burnout. He wasn’t sure that he’d taken the right steps in life, and it was too late to start over. He was stuck with what he had done, what he had become. And even though he still loved God, he was tired of being one of His ministers. Sermons had become a grind. The demands people made on him were wearing him down. If a member of his flock was ill, he had to comfort. If a member of his flock had a problem, he had to listen. In return they gave him a salary lower than the Roto-Rooter man’s.
He put a new sheet of paper into the typewriter, turned the machine on, looked at the paper, turned the machine off. He sighed.
Through the study window he could see the gray day. It looked more like the first day of winter than the day the Split was declared. A gust of wind moaned softly in the eaves, and the green shutter on the window’s left side creaked on its rusted hinges. It was frozen at about a thirty-degree angle from the wall. He’d tried pushing it back flat against the clapboards so he could secure it, but it wouldn’t budge. It needed new hinges. He should install them before a big storm came along and tore the shutter from the house.
Actually, since the house was the property of the church, he should be able to call a repairman, have him bill the First Lutheran Church of Ice Island. But he knew that if he wanted the job done he would have to buy the hinges and do the work himself. I’m being selfish, he thought, when I expect others to do things for me. Maybe he was; maybe he wasn’t. At the moment he was too depressed to care.
The phone on his desk rang, and when he lifted the receiver Carolyn said, “Mrs. Neuhaus is on the line.”
“What does she want?”
“To talk to you.”
“Put her through,” he said, resigned. Mrs. Neuhaus was one of the congregation’s most active members, the principal force behind the bazaar and the bake sale and many of the church’s other activities. She was also quite demanding. Anything she was unable to get volunteers to do she expected him to do.
“How are you today, Mrs. Neuhaus?” he said, putting as much cheer into his voice as he could.
“Just fine, Reverend. Thank you. Uh, the reason I called is that I’m having a little bit of trouble with Brooke.” Brooke was her eighteen-year-old daughter. “As you know, she’s graduating from high school this year, and she refuses to apply to any colleges. She’s applied for a job as an airline stewardess, and she says if she doesn’t get it she’s going to go out to California with some other girls and spend the summer bumming around—to use her term.” It was clear by the tone of her voice that Mrs. Neuhaus found the idea shocking.
Inwardly the minister sighed. “Young people don’t always know what they want to do, Anna. Sometimes they just need a little time to figure things out.”
“Brooke is not cut out to be an airline stewardess, Reverend. How could she possibly be happy as an airborne waitress? And as for going to California, can you imagine how much trouble a naive eighteen-year-old could get into out there?”
“Maybe if you just gave her a little time—”
“Reverend, a young woman can ruin her reputation—her whole life—if she makes the wrong decision at this point in her life. She needs straightening out, and I’m hoping you’re someone she might listen to. She certainly won’t listen to me or Conrad. She becomes obstinate if either one of us so much as opens our mouths.”
If I had you for a mother, I’d rebel too, the minister thought. “I’m not sure I can be of any help, but if you want me to, I’ll be happy to talk to her. Uh, how about sometime next—”
“Can you make it tomorrow evening about seven?”
“Tomorrow evening at seven will be fine.”
After hanging up, he leaned back in his desk chair. His own daughter, Carly, who was sixteen, had problems too. She was going out with a guy who reeked of tobacco smoke and had an IQ that had to at least qualify him as a gifted moron. He drove a car with no muffler and kept Carly out until the wee hours of the morning. Douglas Pfeil kept expecting his daughter to come home pregnant and then give birth to something that wasn’t human. If he tried to exercise some parental authority, they’d have a scene. Carolyn stayed out of it. Guiding her daughter took too much time from her other interests.
How about it, Mrs. Neuhaus? Want to help out with my daughter, have a little talk with her, tell her she’s going to catch some incurable disease from this creature she’s running around with, tell her she can’t see him anymore? You talk to my daughter, and I’ll talk to yours. What do you say? Fair’s fair, right? You tell Carly to stop trying to prove that everything they say about preachers’ daughters is true, and I’ll tell Brooke to let you run her life and stop complaining about it. We got a deal?
Suddenly he wanted a drink. He didn’t like alcohol very much, but the thought of being in the bottle appealed to him. Really in the bottle. Inside where no one could bother him, floating along on the alcohol fumes, too plotched to give a shit.
The green shutter squeaked, moved about a quarter of an inch, as the wind came up, blew some flurries past the window. And then the wind gusted again, letting out a long, pitiful wail as it blew through the eaves.
Douglas, I can give you more than just escape into a bottle.
He sat there, confused, listening intently. Had the wind spoken to him? That was crazy. Impossible.
You don’t have to put up with this.
The voice—or the sensation of a voice—whispered in the wind, as if it were the branches of a shrub hitting the clapboards, a window rattling, the power line pulling against the anchor that held it to the house. And yet it was none of those things, and it came from no discernible direction.
Your wife doesn’t love you, Douglas.
He was starting to tremble.
Your daughter’s a slut. Carly spreads her legs for that guy every chance she gets.
No, the minister thought. Don’t say that.
She sucks him off.
Shut up, he thought. Just shut up.
Once she humped him while another guy took pictures.
You’re lying.
The pictures are in her dresser. See for yourself.
No. I won’t listen. I’m imagining this. There’s no voice. It’s all in my head.
Look in Carly’s dresser, Reverend. See for yourself.
The minister felt as if something prickly were crawling around in his stomach, something alien, with many legs. And he realized with an absolute certainty that the voice was evil. It was tempting him as surely as the serpent tempted Eve.
Take a bite of this, my friend. Smell the tantalizing aroma? See the pretty red color? Just say yes.
“No,” he said to the empty room. It was like the antidrug commercials. Just say no. The ad campaign made it sound so easy. Say no. One little word. Forget about all the other pressures. Like drugs being everywhere in your neighborhood, like everybody using them, like the guys who push them having more money than you’ve ever seen.
“No,” he said again.
The word was empty, meaningless. Because it didn’t come from the heart. He was just saying it because he knew he should. There was another part of him that was fed up with his life, a part that agreed with the voice about his wife not loving him, his daughter being a slut. And that part wanted to take a chance. He’d never done anything risky in his entire life. His father had been a minister, and Douglas had followed in Daddy’s footsteps. He’d become a clergyman, married a dull woman, settled into a dull life in which he made mediocre wage
s and had to listen to the problems of people like Mrs. Neuhaus.
Mrs. Neuhaus eats shit, the voice said.
“A-men,” Pfeil said and issued a bitter chuckle.
There’s a better way. The words floated on the wind. Say yes. Just take a bite of the apple.
The minister stood up. There was no voice. This whole thing was ridiculous. Did he truly believe Satan was here in the room with him, tempting him? It was nonsense. His theological notion of the devil was that Satan was basically a metaphor. He represented the bad things, evil. Pfeil did not believe that the devil spoke to people or appeared to people or tried to steal their souls. Satan was the personification of an idea, nothing else, no more or less real than Santa Claus.
The minister looked at his hands. They were trembling. He made them stop. The voice in the wind had been nothing more than his thoughts. He was confused, having doubts, wondering about his life. What he’d been listening to was the internal conflict of a man on the threshold of a midlife crisis. There were things he was unwilling to admit fully to himself, so he created an evil voice to do the job for him.
I wouldn’t think those thoughts. No, sir, not me. That was the devil.
Well, I don’t need the devil’s voice, Pfeil thought. Here’s the truth, in my words. My commitment to being a minister faded into oblivion a long time ago. Now it’s just a job, one I don’t like very much. And I don’t like living on this island very much. My wife is as thrilling as a bowl of corn flakes. My daughter’s out of control. If I told her not to see that jerk anymore, she’d see him behind my back. And—
He stopped himself. He didn’t want to go too far down this road. It led to self-pity and thoughtless anger. Sure he was disappointed with Carly. He was disappointed with lots of things right now. But he loved Carly. And he had to remember that sixteen was a disastrous time of life. One crisis after another, things that seemed earth-shattering at the time. The inability to adjust drove a lot of kids to suicide. Maybe what she was going through wasn’t that different from what he was going through. The midteen crisis and the midlife crisis.
Maybe we should take this problem to our minister, he thought.
He smiled then, a Pfeil smile. Throughout Carly’s girlhood, he’d always been able to get her to grin by asking for a Pfeil smile. He thought of the little girl with the honey-blonde hair, the big brown eyes, the ready smile, the smug catch-me-if-you-can look she would give to her playmates. She was the same girl now, except she’d blossomed physically into womanhood, becoming tall and shapely and pretty. Carly would be okay. Being a teenager didn’t last forever—thank the Lord.
As for his problems, he simply had to deal with them. Either he could continue doing what he was doing and make the best of it or he could seek a new line of work. Changing careers wasn’t easy at his age, but it wasn’t impossible either. His fate was in his hands. He could do something, or he could feel sorry for himself. The choice was his.
Feeling better, he opened the door to the study and stepped into the hall, looking for Carolyn. He heard a noise that came from the other end of the house, so he headed that way. He found his wife in the kitchen, scrubbing the painted white cabinets.
“Wish we had oak cabinets,” she said. “These white ones are so hard to keep clean, and they don’t go with all our antiques.”
“I don’t think I can go to the board of elders and ask for oak cabinets.”
Carolyn sighed. “I know.”
Her mood was depressing him again. Instead of asking him about the sermon he’d been unable to write, Carolyn complained about the cabinets—as if he could do something about them.
She continued scrubbing, not looking at him. She was dressed in jeans and checked shirt. Carolyn was a thin woman, small-breasted, with rather a plain face. He noted how time had changed his choice of terms. When he married her, he thought of Carolyn as quiet, unpretentious, the ideal minister’s wife. Now he used words like plain, small-breasted.
Carly had her mother’s honey-blonde hair, which was one of the few features they shared. He wasn’t sure where the girl had gotten her good looks, since both her parents were so ordinary-looking. Why was Carly back on his mind again? Thoughts of her seemed to be poised at the edge of his consciousness, just waiting for the chance to grab his attention.
Suddenly words were circling in his head, words he’d imagined were spoken to him by a voice in the wind, but words that were really his.
Slut …
Humped him …
While another guy took pictures …
The pictures are in her dresser …
Look in Carly’s dresser …
No, he thought. Carly wouldn’t do that, not sleazily like that, not with some guy taking pictures. And then a new thought occurred to him. If she had done it, what was the purpose of the pictures? Would they be shown around school? Hey, look at this, Carly Pfeil getting her brains humped out. Would they appear in some porno magazine whose cover said words like teenage girls, hot, wild, and ready?
Forcing the image to go away, Pfeil said, “I couldn’t come up with a sermon.”
“You’ll have to keep trying,” Carolyn said with no real interest.
He watched as she squatted by the bottom cabinets, dropping the sponge in a yellow plastic bucket, wringing out the suds, then scrubbing a new spot on the white-painted wood. He wanted to yell at her: Don’t you see we’ve got a problem here? We’re slipping into bottomless apathy! We need to do something quickly, before it’s too late! Before we accept boredom and dullness and not caring about anything as the norm!
But he didn’t, for Carly was back in his thoughts. The pictures are in her dresser. The words seemed to float in front of his eyes like the stock prices electronically displayed at the exchange in New York. Traveling from right to left. The … pictures … are … in … her … dresser …
Well, it was easy enough to put an end to this nonsense.
All he had to do was look in his daughter’s dresser and find out. But he wasn’t going to do that. It would be snooping. And Carly would know she had no privacy in the house, she wasn’t trusted.
Besides, there were no pictures. Sure Carly was running around with a guy old enough to be out of school. The guy rented out boats during the summer and did nothing the rest of the year. No ambition except to have a good time. Maybe she had made it with the guy. Teens were pretty anxious to hop into the back seats of cars with each other these days, see what it was like. But Douglas Pfeil knew his daughter. She wouldn’t let some third party take pictures.
Abruptly the minister turned and headed for the stairs, telling himself he was just going to the bathroom, which was located on the second story. But when he reached the short upstairs hallway, he realized that he’d just been deluding himself. He wasn’t going to the bathroom. He was going to look in Carly’s dresser. He stepped into her room.
The bed was unmade; clothes had been tossed on the floor. The pink floral wallpaper was hidden behind posters of people the minister didn’t recognize. Some were clearly rock musicians; others could be movie stars. The only furnishings were the bed, the dresser, and a desk, everything maple. They were the things Carly had picked out when she was younger, and none was antique. Carly had never shared her mother’s love for things old.
Pfeil moved to the dresser. It was a mess. The top was covered with diet soft drink cans, lipstick tubes, bottles of perfume, eye makeup in various shades, jewelry, a clock radio that was still set to daylight time. He put his hands on top of the dresser, then hesitated. Did he really want to do this? Yes, he told himself, for all he was doing was proving to himself that there was no picture here of Carly making it with some guy. He wasn’t prying; he was proving that he’d been foolish to even think Carly would do something like that.
He opened the dresser.
Inside was more clutter, scarves and mittens mixed in with jewelry and makeup, a rolled-up poster, a scribbled note that Pfeil didn’t read. The next drawer had sweaters on one side, underwear o
n the other. It was much neater. The bottom drawer held still more clothes. And a box of panty shields. The minister felt guilty, seeing the panty shields.
In the corner, under some heavy socks, was a packet of processed photos. We use Kodak paper, it proclaimed proudly. The minister picked it up, looked at it, but didn’t open it. Do I really want to look in here? he asked himself. And then it occurred to him that you wouldn’t send certain kinds of photos to the regular processor. The photos in here would have to be innocent. He pulled out the pictures and found himself looking at the photos Carly had taken two years ago at the church picnic. A boy in a Detroit Tigers T-shirt trying to eat an enormous hunk of watermelon. Two girls in shorts grinning stupidly. Carolyn serving potato salad. Pfeil himself roasting a marshmallow. Nothing even remotely pornographic. This was Americana, the stuff of Norman Rockwell paintings.
Feeling relieved and ashamed, he slipped the pictures back into their yellow envelope. One squirted out, dropping to the floor, and as he retrieved it, he glanced up. The top drawer was open an inch or two, and there was a piece of Scotch tape there, on the bottom, as if something had been hidden there at one time. Reaching up, he pulled the drawer out a little farther. Another piece of clear tape came into view. This one was holding an envelope to the underside of the drawer. Pfeil peeled it off.
He held it, staring at it, for whatever was in the envelope was secret, not meant to be found. Carly’s secret. Something she wanted to hide from her parents. Taking a deep breath, the minister slipped out the only thing in the envelope. A single Polaroid photo. It was a picture of Carly and her boyfriend.
Naked.
On a bed.
Doing it.
The photo was shaking in his hand. It wasn’t just an act of love he was looking at. This was something dirty, pornographic. The kind of thing some grimy character might try to sell you on a shadowy street in a Mexican border town. Hey, you wanna buy some dirty peek-chures? And adding to Pfeil’s revulsion was the knowledge that someone had to have taken this photo.
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