Evidence of Love

by John Bloom

  The cards were undoubtedly stacked against him, but Ron didn’t help his case any the first time he showed up at Lucas to meet his new parishioners. It was Jackie’s last week before leaving for Wichita Falls, and an informal reception was held after choir practice by the Pastor-Parish Committee. While women were crying and hugging Jackie and bidding emotional farewalls, Ron stood to one side, very stiffly, and gave solemn, formal answers to everything that was asked him. He spoke of the necessity of a building program. He used works like “task-oriented.” He seemed cold and distant and a little haughty. While the reception was going on, several volunteers were busily decorating the sanctuary with tiny angels made out of pipe cleaners and felt. They were particularly proud of the work, since at least four families had been working on the decorations for some time, resulting in literally thousands of toy angels all over the ceiling and walls. When somebody made a light-hearted remark about how well the work was going, Ron took one look at it and said, “This stuff has gotta go.” Shortly thereafter, somebody made the mistake of introducing Ron to Betty Gore, who had not only heard the remark but was convinced that Ron was responsible for forcing Jackie out.

  “Why don’t you go back to your big-city church?” she said.

  Ron was beginning to realize what he was up against.

  Jackie, for her part, was able to see what was happening and tried to smooth things over. When Elaine Williams came over to say good-bye, they talked briefly about personal matters—Elaine’s ex-husband, David, had moved back in with her—and then Jackie said, “Now listen to me. I want you to make this church work. I want you to get along with this man.”

  Elaine looked across the room at Ron.

  “How can I?” she said. “Look at him. He’s wearing an orange jacket.”

  On New Year’s Day, 1979, the day Ron and his wife moved to Lucas, Candy and Pat were the only people who came to the parsonage to help them unload. Candy was not quite as harsh toward Ron as the other women, mainly because she knew that Jackie had made the decision to leave on her own. Candy also felt that, since she and Pat were the most active couple in church, she needed to help temper the ruffled feelings between Ron and people like JoAnn and Betty, who where refusing to give him a chance. Candy tended to laugh at people who were pompous or stiff, so she joked with Ron even though he seldom joked back. She thought he was a funny little guy; she thought it was especially amusing that he “snorted” when he spoke, breathing loudly through his nose. (As a child, Ron had had surgery for sinus cancer.) She dismissed most of his social mistakes as simple immaturity. After all, he was only twenty-four.

  But Ron was not the sort to be assuaged with simple good humor. Almost as soon as he moved in, he started making decisions that, to a few of the parishioners, seemed like the intentional destruction of everything Jackie Ponder had built. His first sermon was a disaster. Even Candy had to admit that she had never heard a worse public speaker in her life. Ron frequently stared at the notes on his lectern, made very few gestures, and droned on and on in a monotone punctuated only by short, comical snorts. Candy felt he was speaking at the congregation instead of to it. There was no sense of spontaneity or emotion. Ron was not the type to stop, gaze out over the audience, and say, “Now how do those words make you feel?” the way Jackie used to do. If he had, he wouldn’t have liked the answer anyway. Ron was systematic, formal, and a little old-fashioned. He had a program for the worship service—hymn here, sermon here, announcements here—that never altered from week to week. He never encouraged the participation of laymen in the formal service, as Jackie had. He was, in a word, boring.

  Though he never said so publicly, Ron had decided early on that some of the younger members, especially the ones in the choir, were “troublemakers” and “carpetbaggers,” people from the city who had invaded a small, local church and virtually taken over its management. He thought it especially odd that some of them had to drive thirty miles or more to get to Lucas when there were other, perfectly adequate Methodist churches within a few minutes of their homes. Clearly they had come to Lucas because they wanted a social club instead of a church. It didn’t surprise him one bit that they would rather have a “recreational building” than a sanctuary; it indicated their priorities.

  Among the choir members, accustomed to being the center of all church business, Candy was the last holdout in Ron’s defense. But even she was shocked by his autocratic behavior, how he seemed to be asking people to dislike him. One of her duties under Jackie had been to edit the church newsletter. When Ron arrived she changed the name of it to “Adams Apple” and offered to handle all the logistics of getting it out. Far from being pleased, he was desultory about getting information to her, causing delays and wasted time, and on one occasion he trashed an entire issue because Candy had written a sentimental, flowery essay about the meaning of Maundy Thursday. “That’s all wrong,” Ron snapped. “Jesus didn’t literally rise from the dead.” Candy didn’t like some of the things in the Bible herself, but she was still shocked to hear those words from a minister. Then another time Pat was doing one of his popular children’s sermons, which were actually puppet shows, and he used Peter Rabbit to represent Jesus. Ron was upset afterward and told Pat not to do it again. One little thing that came to bother Candy was that Ron didn’t appear to pray spontaneously; he read all his prayers from a prepared text. But the main thing Candy didn’t like about Ron was that he either manipulated people for his own purposes, or discounted them altogether. Ron had had too many chances. Candy finally agreed with everyone else: the man was cold and unfeeling. All he cared about was his damned building fund.

  Despite everything, though, Ron might have been able to weather the first difficult year of his ministry were it not for one thing: Marriage Encounter. It started with a dinner invitation. Richard and JoAnn thought perhaps Ron would “come around” if they invited him over and then had a heart-to-heart talk. What they wanted to talk about, unfortunately, was Ron’s marriage. They had just returned from another Marriage Encounter weekend, a special “Focus on God” session, and they were brimming over with their brand of emotional honesty. They told Ron they wanted to be totally open with him and discuss their disappointments in his ministry. But then they proceeded to list so many of his personal shortcomings that he became understandably defensive. First, they didn’t like his style of preaching. He was rigid, not open to suggestion, and his sermons were boring. Second, he was not coming across as a loving or caring person. He seemed too stern for their tastes. And finally, Richard and JoAnn told him, they were a little concerned about his marriage and his relationship with his young son. In their opinion, Ron treated his wife like property, and he didn’t “relate well” to the child. What he and his wife needed was a Marriage Encounter weekend, which would make him a lot more loving and understanding person and strengthen his marriage as well.

  Ron listened to the whole speech, and then exploded.

  “You’re entitled to your opinion,” he said, “but you’re just plain wrong.”

  As far as the Garlingtons were concerned, that was it for Ron. They tried to be honest and loving, but Ron had refused to listen.

  As far as Ron was concerned, that was it for the “Marriage Encounter bunch,” as the Garlingtons and Maples and friends were beginning to be called. Ron had never liked the association of the Marriage Encounter organization with the Methodist church. He disagreed with the whole concept, since all it amounted to was having the husband and wife talk to each other without the advantage of professional counseling or guidance. That was dangerous, he thought, and in the hands of insistent people like the Garlingtons it could get in the way of his ministry. When JoAnn made Marriage Encounter announcements during the worship service, he was furious, especially since it gave the members the false impression that he supported the program. He also had no taste for the public displays of affection that seemed to be required of anyone who had been “encountered.” Richard and JoAnn were the worst. They were all over each other
at church, wrapping their arms around each other, holding hands at all times, each refusing to leave the other’s side even for a moment. They also had the irritating habit of taking communion in “Marriage Encounter style,” their elbows entwined like lovers making a champagne toast. For her part, JoAnn Garlington took Ron’s dislike of the program as evidence that he didn’t know what he was talking about (since he had never been encountered) and that he probably did have problems in the loving-and-caring department. She continued to campaign for Marriage Encounter at every opportunity.

  Two of the most active lay leaders in Lucas Methodist Church were Candy Montgomery and Allan Gore. So, as 1979 began, they were both wrapped up in the political controversy surrounding Ron Adams, but, unbeknownst to the other choir members, they were more wrapped up in each other. After the first meeting at the Continental Inn, it was obvious that both of them would want more. So a week later, just before the Christmas holidays, they arranged by phone for a repeat performance. This time Candy spent the morning preparing beef teriyaki strips and cheese blintzes. She did change one detail though. When she got to Richardson, she noticed a smaller—and sleazier—motel across the freeway from the Continental. Always the practical shopper, she figured a motel room is a motel room, so why not get something cheaper than $29?

  The Como Motel was quite a comedown, even by the less-than-luxurious standards of the Continental. Candy got the impression that the Como didn’t have a lot of overnight visitors when she walked into the office and came face to face with a clerk standing behind a plexiglass screen, like a bank teller’s window or, perhaps more appropriate, a jailer’s. The manager was a greying, avuncular guy in an Alpaca sweater who wanted $23.50 cash in advance, plus a $2 deposit for the key. Candy put her money in the trough under the window, and he passed her a key to one of about thirty rooms grouped in a triangle around the “swim pool” (the sign was short on neon). She drove her car around to the asphalt lot in back.

  In months to come Allan and Candy would joke about their room at the Como. Candy always said it smelled like old money. The very sleaziness of the place is what made it so illicit, and so much fun. The room was a little more than a cubicle, ten by ten at the most, done in a sort of tattered harvest gold. The curtains were drooping and frayed. The shag carpet was matted like dirty hair. The bathroom had fake terrazzo flooring, the faucet leaked, and the only furnishings other than the bed were a tiny vanity, a black-and-white TV set, and two hideous captain’s chairs with imitation leather cushions. They had a wall phone with no dial on it, two lamps that sometimes worked, and a big fluorescent reading lamp perched awkwardly over the bed.

  Here, for the last days of 1978 and the first three months of 1979, Allan and Candy made glorious love every other week, dined on taco salad and homemade lasagna, and sipped cheap red wine out of plastic cups supplied by the management. (They came wrapped in cellophane bags with Walt Disney cartoon characters on them.) Afterwards they would recline on the harvest-gold velour bedspread—covering the venerable sheets, which often sported suspicious stains—and rest their heads on tiny foam-rubber pillows and talk about their lives and their spouses and their children and their mutual love, the church. They would talk until it was time for Allan to go back to work, or for Candy to pick up her five-year-old at kindergarten, and then go stand in the tub and turn on the faulty shower attachment and wash off the smell of each other. Finally, they would gather up their belongings, kiss each other lightly on the lips, and go back to their normal lives, closing the door behind them. The sign on the door read, “Notice: Contents of Rooms Are Checked Before and After Being Occupied. Anything Missing Is Reported to the Police. Your Car License Is On Record.”

  Later, when Allan looked back on his whirlwind lunch hours with Candy Montgomery, he would think less of the sex than of the relaxation he took there. Those two hours with Candy were often the only time he didn’t feel the responsibility for other people’s emotions, the awful burden of making Betty happy. In the limited confines of a room at the Como Motel, Allan was a man with no past and no future, able to accept Candy’s unconditional affection—she virtually showered him with it—in a way that was simple and guiltless. Candy cooked lavish meals for him, she made the domestic arrangements (checking in), and she was a skilled instructor in lovemaking of a sort Allan hadn’t been aware of. Allan had never been with any woman except Betty in his life. This experience was revitalizing, in a way that his life with Betty hadn’t been for a long time.

  It didn’t help that, in the early months of 1979, Betty was starting to grow even more dissatisfied with her own life. She was pregnant again, for one thing, and that brought back the same emotional fears and physical ailments she had suffered through five years earlier, when her first pregnancy brought on a deep depression. Betty’s unhappiness and insecurity had always been something Allan could deal with, though. What made it different this time was the situation at church.

  No one despised Ron Adams the way Betty did. It had been an almost instinctual hatred, from the day he arrived, and it had very little to do with the pros and cons of his ministry. It was not even anything Betty said to Ron—they had had very few face-to-face conversations—but the way she would make offhand, sarcastic comments in group meetings. Betty had no particular fondness for the Marriage Encounter movement, for example, but as soon as her friend JoAnn Garlington was asked by Ron not to make announcements at the worship service, Betty leapt to her defense. After Ron’s first few weeks as pastor, Betty, JoAnn, and Elaine Williams had formed a sort of alliance against the man and spent much of their time at church whispering snide remarks about this incompetence.

  It was true that Ron wasn’t a model of diplomacy. Given a personality conflict with one of his parishioners, his solution was either to ignore it or to defy it. One day that spring, Ron’s wife, Mary, called Diane Maples to tell her she was expected to help out at the church nursery that week. Diane was a veteran of Marriage Encounter, a friend of Jackie Ponder, a close friend of JoAnn Garlington, and just as dissatisfied as everyone else. “Forget it,” Diane told Mary. “I sing in the choir, and I think that’s enough church service.” Mary didn’t like Diane’s tone of voice and told her so. Diane got even huffier with Mary. Ron, rather than simply let the matter drop, then made an issue of it by inserting a veiled reference to Diane into the following Sunday’s church announcements. “A certain member of this church recently yelled at my wife,” he said before the assembled worshipers. “And that’s the last time that sort of thing is going to happen.”

  Late that spring, Ron attended a meeting of the Pastor-Parish Committee to discuss the renovation of the parsonage. This would normally be a fairly routine matter. Since the house stood just a stone’s throw from the back door of the sanctuary, everyone could plainly see that it was definitely not in the best of shape. Ron made a formal request for $10,000, to be used for painting and repairs. A brief discussion ensued. Then Betty, unable to control her anger, exploded at Ron.

  “Why should we give you $10,000?” she demanded. “Why can’t you do the work yourself? We all have to fix our houses.”

  It fell to Allan to try to cover for Betty’s feelings when he could—he didn’t like Ron, either, but he didn’t want it to show—and to reassure her constantly that things would be better after the new baby arrived. Privately, he wished she were more flexible, more secure, more even-tempered, like she had been back in Kansas, before she developed so many minor illnesses and petty complaints.

  Candy Montgomery seemed the opposite of Betty in every respect. Candy was always “up,” always busy, self-confident, easygoing, warm. She took voice lessons and English courses and helped out at Fire Department fundraisers and worked as a voter registrar and shepherded two young children from place to place and even helped out her neighbor Peter Haas with his mayoral campaign, and yet nothing she did seemed burdensome or self-conscious. Even her reaction to Ron Adams was different. Betty whispered sarcastically behind his back. Candy frankly told Ron how
silly she thought some of his decisions were, and then laughed so he wouldn’t take it too hard.

  One reason Candy could be so good-natured about “the Ron problem” was that the affair made her feel alive again. At first she was so excited about the sex and the intrigue and the adventure of it all that she had to have a confidante. Normally that would have been Jackie, but after Jackie left she spent more and more time with Sherry, her Fairview neighbor. She even told Sherry about Allan’s “perfectly shaped” penis, and then added, “Now if he could only use it in more imaginative ways.” Sherry was actually a better confidante than Jackie, because Sherry didn’t have any reservations whatsoever. She knew that Candy had felt dissatisfied with Pat, and she could see how much happier Candy was once the long-contemplated affair began. On some days, usually the day after a rendezvous with Allan, Candy and Sherry would meet for morning coffee and go over the juicy details. Sherry always remained light-hearted about the whole business, especially since she had met Allan and told Candy she frankly couldn’t understand what she saw in him.

  “I can’t either,” said Candy. “He’s not that handsome. He has a receding hairline. He’s not what I would call my type at all. I don’t know what I see in him.”

  Still, she continued to see him, every two weeks like clockwork, usually on a Tuesday or a Thursday except on those rare occasions when she could get a baby sitter—usually Sherry—and dare to go to bed with him on a Monday, Wednesday, or Friday. Unfortunately, after the third or fourth time at the Como, she started to have second thoughts. Her doubts weren’t spurred by any feelings of guilt. They started, in fact, when she first realized that sex with Allan Gore probably wasn’t going to get much better than it already was. The first two or three times it had felt good, but there had been virtually no improvement, and she was beginning to suspect that the man was not capable of fireworks, no matter how much she coached him. The more serious problem was that Candy feared she was beginning to like Allan too much. Sometimes she even thought she loved him. She knew she loved him in the Jackie Ponder sense, but she didn’t want to fall in love with him. That was too risky.