The Wonder Worker

by Susan Howatch

  No good talking to Rosalind in that kind of mystical language. She couldn’t relate to it. I’d tried to explain to her that metaphor, symbol and analogy can convey truth which can’t be expressed adequately in straightforward language, but she hadn’t really understood. She preferred plain, factual statements. It interested me that although she loved flowers, what she loved best was the mechanics of selling them at a profit. Fair enough. Capitalists have their own language and their own world-view, just like any other group, but I did wish more of them could believe their language wasn’t automatically superior to any other language which was on offer.

  I suddenly realised I was staring at the Psion Organiser brochure, discarded earlier and now lying in my “pending” tray. I was also still shuddering with pain. Obviously I needed to move before I started banging my head against the wall. Leaving the study I headed for Lewis’s bedsit to wait for him to return from work, but as I crossed the hall I saw Alice working in the kitchen. At once I knew that in her presence I would find peace and a respite from pain.

  I veered away from the bedsit.

  No moth could have headed more rapidly to the light.

  III

  Alice was rolling pastry. I was informed that we were going to have steak-and-kidney pie that night with potatoes and cabbage. Belatedly I remembered to tell her that Rosalind and I would be present for dinner but Alice said fine, no problem, she’d do extra vegetables for the second helpings. Sitting down at the kitchen table I began to watch her while she worked.

  After a moment the cat sprang onto my lap and finally succeeded in making himself comfortable after much revolving and stamping and pawing. He was growing fast. Neutering loomed on the horizon. Lewis and Stacy, who knew nothing about cats, were emotionally opposed to this operation but Alice and I knew better. Tomcats have a terrible life in cities if they’re left to the mercy of their sex-drive. They’re perpetually exhausted, both by copulation and by fighting, and they can get badly injured, particularly if they pick up infections from dirty claws. That kind of chaotic existence shortens the life-span and makes the cat mean. What was the point of James having a full set of sex organs if he died young with one ear missing and his tail bitten off as the result of a violent and smelly career? Lewis said he recognised himself in this description and would still elect to be fully equipped. Stacy objected that Lewis was too old to die young. Alice, sensible as always, pointed out that Lewis wasn’t a cat. Meanwhile James, ignorant of his approaching fate, was enthusiastically chewing our shoelaces under the table.

  I stroked his fur now as I watched Alice work, and listened to his purring. Alice was very good at silences. Happiness emanated from her as the pie took shape. She was centred, focused, serene.

  I sat motionless, the wounded healer, and soaked up the wordless comfort she offered.

  “When you came to work here,” I said at last, “you used to behave as if you could hardly believe that Lewis and I, the healers, had done you such a favour—and perhaps in our arrogance we too saw ourselves as doing all the giving, providing healing for you in various ways. But that wasn’t God’s purpose at all, was it? We may originally have been sent to you, but then the tables were turned and you were sent to us. It’s you who’s now the real healer at the Rectory, Alice.”

  She paused in her task of fluting the pie-crust. The pie was enormous, sumptuous, resplendent. Gazing at it reflectively she was too shy to look me in the eyes.

  Alice was thinner now, still plump but the plumpness had an acceptable pattern. She was no longer an elongated lump with various thick appendages; she was a series of generous curves. Lewis, I knew, liked them and had remarked more than once to me recently how good it was to see Alice acquiring what he called a “non-repulsive shape.” I’d agreed, although I’d never thought much about Alice’s physical shape because I was so entranced by the shape of her psyche. Alice had the most beautiful psyche, supple as an athlete’s body and glowing in richly patterned strands of warmth, compassion and understanding. I’d been aware of it as soon as we’d met, although at the time it had been disfigured by so much anxiety and pain. The extreme beauty of this aspect of Alice, an aspect invisible to the eye, was why I’d taken such a special interest in her. I had never admitted this to Lewis, but no doubt he had long since guessed what was going on. He himself would have been aware of Alice’s psyche, although not nearly so aware as I was. Lewis always had trouble perceiving women accurately. He wasn’t incapable of a clear perception but the process took him longer because he had to battle away against his hang-ups.

  I suddenly realised Alice was speaking, responding to my comment that she was the real healer at the Rectory. I heard her say: “If you believe that, then I suppose it must be true, although it seems fantastic and I can’t see why you should think such a thing. But thanks anyway. It’s a wonderful compliment.” She smiled at me briefly and for a second our eyes met. Then she returned to her work on the pie.

  I noted that Alice did not ask why the residents at the Rectory needed healing. I assumed she had sensed the changes of atmosphere and the profound unhappiness which was now flowing like an underground river beneath the deceptive normality of our daily routine, but she always knew when to speak and when to be silent, when to ask questions and when to avoid comment. She was particularly clever with Lewis, who had previously terrorised all the domestic help and had at first opposed the idea of her living in at the Rectory.

  Alice stroked Lewis on a psychic level and calmed him. She cooked him his favourite English dishes. She introduced him to rum raisin ice cream. She admired the photographs of his grandchildren. She visited him in hospital. But she never gushed over him or became intrusive. She just cared for him without ever striking a false note. Lewis had made a joke of identifying himself with James, but there’s many a true word spoken in jest, and when I saw how deftly Alice dealt with him I was reminded of a gifted cat-lover looking after a battle-scarred old torn who had never quite recovered from being kicked as a kitten. “Dear little Alice!” Lewis would sigh, tamed and tranquillised. “I’m very fond of her.”

  She was equally successful with Stacy, and he had soon become confident in her presence. Non-threatening and non-possessive, she wanted only to be kind and helpful. She taught him how to use the washing machine without breaking it. When she saw the state of his underclothes after they emerged from the dryer, she offered to buy him a new set of everything at Marks and Spencer. She baked him his favourite biscuits. She introduced him to rum raisin ice cream. She praised the pictures of his sister Aisling’s wedding. She showed him the best way of mending his cassock whenever the hem fell down and would certainly have mended it herself if I hadn’t insisted that Stacy was to take care of his own clothes. On weekends, her official time off, she would find the time to drink cups of tea with him while he talked endlessly about Liverpool and football and his family. He never talked so freely either to Lewis or to me.

  “Where’s Stacy?” I said vaguely to Alice as I concluded this meditation.

  “Upstairs, I suppose. He came in here a while ago and wanted to know what was for dinner.”

  “Was Rosalind with him?”

  “No, but she’s back. I heard her come in.”

  “That’s odd. I wonder where she is. She’s not in the flat.”

  “Oh, she’s probably with Stacy—maybe he’s finally had the chance to show her the pictures of Aisling’s wedding.”

  I started to brood on Stacy’s child-like naivety in relating to the opposite sex.

  Lewis was sure Stacy was a homosexual, but Lewis saw the issue of homosexuality as clear-cut, like a black-and-white pattern which was incapable of ambiguity. This attitude was not, as the Gay Christians thought, because he was a bigot, incapable of sympathising with them. Nor was it, as they also thought, because he was a repressed homosexual who could only keep self-doubt at bay by condemning homosexuality in others. His main problem was that he viewed homosexuals through glasses fashioned in a previous era and he resol
utely refused to acquire a modern pair of spectacles. This previous era wasn’t the thirties, when he had been an adolescent, or the twenties, the decade into which he’d been born. It wasn’t even Edwardian. It was Victorian, the era which had fashioned his mentor Cuthbert Darcy, who had rescued Lewis in his hour of need, dusted him down and reprogrammed him.

  Great-Uncle Cuthbert had had some very Victorian views on all forms of sexual activity. Good women, he had believed, were for marriage and motherhood. The sex-drive, he had been convinced, was a considerable nuisance, interfering as it did with a man’s concentration on more important matters, but if one really couldn’t function adequately without coitus, then one was obliged to marry a woman of one’s own class and procreate. Marriage was, of course, for ever. Fornication was not just sinful but at best time-consuming and at worst life-threatening. Those who indulged in such a fundamentally trivial activity were clearly disturbed individuals who needed to rearrange their priorities in order to lead happier, more rewarding lives. The fallen women who lured men from the path to fulfilment could only be described as the dregs of humanity, but even such dregs could be redeemed; one should never forget that because God had made each one of us in his own image, each one of us was precious in his sight; nor should one ever forget that because of the Incarnation, God was present in the world and calling us to care for our fellow men, whatever their rank or condition, as if they were Jesus Christ himself. Homosexuals—perverts, as Great-Uncle Cuthbert would have called them—were also the dregs of humanity, cursed with a handicap for which there was no cure, but again one had to remember that Christ cared for everyone: the poor, the handicapped, the outcasts—even women. So if the perverts chose to renounce their unnatural sexual activity and embrace celibacy, they were capable, by the grace of God, of leading just as good a life as their more fortunate brothers. Happy ending.

  Lewis had swallowed whole at the age of fifteen this gospel according to Father Darcy, and he had never quite recovered from it. The basic theology—the idea that one should care for all people, regardless of who they were, since each individual was precious in God’s sight—was as true today as it was yesterday; it was the Darcy interpretation, wedded to the sociology of his youth, which now looked like a museum-piece. To be fair to Lewis, he did accept that much more was known in the late twentieth century about sexuality than had been known in the nineteenth, and he also accepted that the Church, reflecting this new knowledge, had become more wary of uttering simplistic judgements on this most complex of subjects, but although he was capable of being both modern and imaginative in his pastoral care of people in trouble, no matter what they got up to in bed, the diverse nature of homosexuality was hidden from him behind a monolith marked SIN. In his view people were either homosexual or heterosexual. Homosexuality was a handicap. Bisexuality was either immature behavior by heterosexuals or else homosexuals pretending to be what they weren’t. Either way it indicated an unintegrated personality which needed help. All forms of homosexual activity were wrong—but of course one should never fail to treat these handicapped people with as much care and compassion as if they were Christ himself in order to help them lead rewarding celibate lives.

  As I always said to the Gay Christians, it wasn’t that Lewis ever intended to be unkind, patronising or just plain unchristian. He was as firmly convinced as any of us that we were all of equal value in God’s sight. But on the subjects which preoccupied the gays, he was a heterosexual Victorian male and there was no changing him.

  That was why I failed to take Lewis as seriously as I might otherwise have done when he diagnosed that Stacy was a homosexual. My unwillingness to support this diagnosis was also influenced by the fact that Stacy showed no interest in other men and every interest in getting a steady girlfriend. I did note that he was so nervous while trying to gain this status symbol that every date was an ordeal achieved only by a major effort of the will, but I decided this was just a symptom of immaturity. I also rejected Lewis’s view that Stacy was only trying to acquire a girlfriend in order to please me, but since I saw sexuality as a complex spectrum encompassing an enormous variety of behavior, I was inevitably going to shy away from such an unsubtle opinion. What I had to remember, even as every liberal instinct urged me to discard Lewis’s judgement on this subject, was that he might be right. Not all psycho-sexual puzzles are wreathed in complexity. But I was fairly sure this one was.

  Stacy had ben seduced in his teens by an older man who was well educated, well respected and even, I’m sorry to say, a pillar of his local church. Despite my liberal views I don’t approve of seducing minors. Nor do I approve of promiscuity, and those who persist in such behaviour have no business turning up in church and pretending they’re trying to lead Christian lives. Both during and after this clandestine affair Stacy had never been to bed with anyone else so he at least could hardly be rated promiscuous, but I was prepared to bet the older man had notched up a colourful past while compensating himself for the strain of staying in the closet in order to preserve his respectable facade.

  Yet life’s never so simple as it seems. This man apparently came to love Stacy and was without doubt very good to him. He encouraged Stacy to read and study. He took him on cultural expeditions. He even fostered Stacy’s interest in becoming a priest. So although I can only disapprove of the way this man wound up muddling and maiming Stacy’s sexual development, I have to admit he must have been not only a good man in many ways but probably interesting and delightful as well. The story’s a sharp illustration of how reluctant one should be to rush to judgement. Who was I anyway to act as a judge? I’d rattled around too in my time. In my own way. With girls and psychic parlour-tricks.

  Stacy’s ordination certainly represented some sort of redemption of the mess, but it seemed clear that the redemption was by no means complete and that Lewis and I were being called to help Stacy finish his delayed journey to maturity. Unfortunately, as neither of us could agree on the exact nature of the problem we had to solve, this was easier said than done. If Lewis was right, then our task would be to help Stacy come to terms with the homosexuality he was now busy denying. But supposing I was right? I thought the inevitable guilt and shame resulting from the secret love affair had turned him off sex—all sex—and that his genuine desire to live as a heterosexual was being hampered by this deep-seated revulsion. I also thought he was currently trapped in the bisexuality which is so common among teenagers with the result that he was unable to move on in the sexual spectrum to a place which would more accurately reflect his adult self. I saw the correct place as being at the heterosexual end of the bisexual middle of the spectrum; or in other words, I thought it likely that although in maturity he might experience the occasional homosexual attraction, he was not fundamentally homosexual. In which case any effort to help him to maturity by urging him to see himself as gay would do almost as much harm as the seducer who had imprisoned him in adolescence.

  I did suggest the obvious: that Stacy should talk through his homosexual past with an expert counsellor so that it could be properly explored and finally transcended. But Stacy said he didn’t want to talk about the past. It was done, finished, he didn’t want to think about it any more. I explained that there were different ways of not thinking about the past and that some were more helpful than others. If one merely repressed painful memories they didn’t go away but instead burrowed into the unconscious mind and resurfaced in some other form. On the other hand, if one faced the memories and examined them, instead of splitting them off and denying them, there was more chance of the past being successfully integrated with the present, and then all the energy wasted on repression would be set free for a more productive use.

  But Stacy stood his ground and refused further help.

  There are certain practitioners of the ministry of healing, notably those from the ranks of the Charismatic Evangelicals, who would no doubt at that point have tried to “deliver” Stacy by means of a traditional ritual from the malign spirit which was im
pairing him, but I’m a mainstream Church of England priest in the Catholic tradition and my ministry tends to be much more low-key and much more interwoven with modern medicine. I don’t mean to disassociate myself from my Charismatic brethren, Protestant or Catholic, many of whom are dedicated, honourable people, and I don’t mean to imply that their direct dealings with the unconscious mind are necessarily either misguided or ineffective; statistics wouldn’t support such a statement. But generally speaking, I prefer to damp religious emotions down rather than rev them up, so I take care to operate within a highly conventional structure which leaves the minimum of room for histrionics. Mass hysteria is a very real danger at a healing service of any kind, and uncontrollable behaviour which has nothing to do with the Spirit of God can give religion a bad name.

  I say all this to explain why I didn’t play the exorcist with Stacy and, as my Charismatic brethren would have put it, attempt to “deliver him from the spirit of sexual confusion which was infesting him.” I prayed for him, of course. That went without saying. I counselled him as his Rector. That too went without saying. But finally I decided that my prayers and counselling needed to be complemented by the healing skills of someone with a medical background who had specific training in this area. Rightly or wrongly I believed that this course would be more likely to produce an effective and lasting healing in Stacy’s case than to deal directly, in Charismatic fashion, with the unconscious mind by using the ritual of deliverance.

  One of the great maxims of the ministry of healing is expressed in the quotation: “One may lead a horse to water, Twenty cannot make him drink.” When Stacy refused further help I knew I couldn’t force him to take my advice and for a time I tried to convince myself that my decision to get him into therapy was wrong. But I didn’t think it was. I foresaw he would go on being blocked from further spiritual and emotional development, and I couldn’t work out how to break the impasse.