by Thomas Lynch
“Back at you, brother,” the priest smiled widely. “Amen!”
AT MARIO’S on Ouellette Street, the priest ordered steaks and baked potatoes and a bottle of Bardolino.
“I was six months at the University of Padua,” he told Adrian. “I love their wines—all from the hill country around Verona. Romeo and Juliet, Lago di Garda, the Dolomites…sei la più bella del mondo…Goddammit Adrian, where goes the time?”
All Adrian could do was nod and sigh.
After dinner, the men walked up Ouellette Street to a place on the corner called Studio 4. The priest held the door for Adrian, who eyed him narrowly.
“Have no fear, Reverend Littlefield. Would I lead you astray?”
Inside it was dark and sparsely crowded. There were booths and tables along the brick walls with candles on them. The middle space was one broad serpentine bar winding its way around through adjoining rooms with black-shirted bar men and women serving drinks on one side and on the other, men of all ages, some seated, some standing, all gazing upward at an odd parade of beautiful, awkwardly dancing girls, working their way at intervals along the bar in various stages of exotic undress, from partial to total nakedness.
“Oh God, Francis…” said Adrian. But he could not avert his eyes from their bodies, in general and in particular, and their smiles and their eyes which, the closer he got, seemed to bear him no apparent malice, rather seemed to understand how he was entirely enthralled, quite hopelessly fixed upon their beauty, quite beyond the province of reason or words. He had not seen a naked woman in months except in movies and magazines—the little stash of pornography he kept hidden in his bedroom closet. But these were live and moving beauties. He could smell their powders and perfumes. That he could not touch them was no bother. He only wanted to admire them and bless them for how they did not refuse his gaze.
It was late when they left Windsor, and Adrian was fairly drunk and the lights of the Detroit skyline shining off the river were, like everything, a blur to him. The U.S. Customs guard asked if they had anything to declare.
“Nothing,” Father Concannon told him.
“Bringing any guns into Detroit?”
“No, nothing,” the priest repeated.
“Maybe I should loan you one of mine!” the fat guard joked, and waved them on.
Adrian slept through Toledo and never woke when the priest stopped for coffee in Bowling Green and had to be helped from the car at home.
“What a night, Francis,” Adrian tried to say, as the priest helped him into the house and up the stairs, out of his clothes and into bed. Downstairs the priest found Mary De Dona curled on the couch in her own slumber, the TV flickering out some infomercial, the children’s drawings on the coffee table. He shook her gently by the shoulder.
“I’m all right, Father, let it be.”
“Will I take you home?”
“Go on, Father, let it be.”
The priest stood straight and still, listening for the sounds of anything wrong in the house. No noise issued from upstairs where Adrian and his children were safely asleep. Only the hum of ceiling fans and appliances, the low and orderly breathing of Mary De Dona on the couch, and low din of the flickering TV—all was well, he reasoned, all was well.
Out on the porch Father Concannon pronounced a general absolution: “Ego te absolvo a peccatis tuis in nomine Patris et Filii et Spiritus Sancti. Amen,” then drove home and slept the sleep of a child of God.
ADRIAN LITTLEFIELD dreamed he was whole again, his consortium restored, the body of a woman opening to him. In the dream she was a stranger to him, her habits a mystery, their desires new. The feel of her flesh under his fingers tingled with what were entirely new sensations; still, he knew that she knew that he knew that she knew. And her body was smaller than he might have remembered if he had remembered anything, which in his dream it was well known that he didn’t. He had no past or future, only now. And her hair was darker and her sweet mouth lovelier and her parts in their own way accustomed to his. Oh God, Oh God, is all he could hear himself trying to say, because now that he thought of it God is love, and those who abide in love abide in God, and God…Oh Love, Oh Yes…Oh…
Wherever he was between awake and the dream, it was Mary De Dona astraddle him, pressing her little body onto his body, with one hand on his chest and with the other pressing her fingers to his open lips, whispering, “Hush, Reverend Littlefield, let it be,” still moving on him, though he had come already, still shoving herself against him, him holding her buttocks in his hands, pulling her forward and pressing her back, pressing his heels into the mattress, his head thrown back until she bent to kiss him on his mouth and on his head and then sitting back upright, because now he was hard again and turning her over and pressing himself deeper and deeper into her and her eyes closing and her mouth wide open and the room awash in new morning light and her two hands pulling him into her and she was finished and he was finished again and it was done. Adrian Littlefield rolled on his back, breathless and wide awake.
“Have you a cigarette?” she asked him.
“Cigarette?…Why, no…”
“Porca miseria! Are you good for anything?”
She was pulling her camisole over her head, and stepping into her panties, and buttoning her blue jeans and throwing the green sweatshirt over her with St. Michael the Archangel printed in gold and pulling her curly black hair back and knotting it in a bun. He had not noticed the night before how very comely she was—her rose skin, her brown eyes, the little figure of her standing right in front of him. He wondered at her age.
“Was your ex-wife beautiful?”
Adrian hadn’t a clue what to say.
“I don’t know…I suppose she was…I don’t know…Why…?”
“Your children are beautiful. I’ve got to go. They shouldn’t see me here.”
“Wait,” he called after her, but she was gone.
RUMMAGING THROUGH his sermon archives for something to say that Sunday morning, the Reverend Adrian Littlefield could not stop grinning. Nor could he focus on the titles of his collection: “If It’s Good It’s God’s,” “The Attitude is Gratitude,” “The Present’s a Gift,” “The Corinthians Write Back.” He hustled Damien and Sarah into their Sunday clothes, brushed his teeth and gargled with mouthwash, put on his brown suit, and made for St. Mark’s, wondering why he couldn’t wipe the grin off his face. Nor could he make sense of the morning’s readings—from Ezekiel and Psalms, Philippians and Matthew—all he could think of was the bend of her body, the taste of her shoulder, the smell of her hair, her inexplicable kindnesses. Had it been a dream? And rising to his homiletic duties, gazing into the faces of his people, he knew he had nothing to tell them. So he sang.
As for Father Francis Assisi Concannon, holding forth to the faithful at the ten o’clock Mass, he observed it was the Feast of Michael the Archangel and another Sunday in Ordinary Time.
V
IN THE Block Island phone book, Dr. Adrian Littlefield looked among the W’s for Ben Walters. There was only one, on Pilot Hill Road. He pulled a map of the island from his back pocket. Pilot Hill Road ran a little ways southwest of town. He walked across the street to the taxi ranks near the boat docks and climbed in an old station wagon with Island Hack & Taxi Tours on it.
“Tour of the island?” the old woman at the wheel asked him.
“How long does it take?” he asked.
“How long do you have?”
“I have to be back for the four o’clock ferry.”
“No problem,” she told him. “That’s acres of time. It really is a tiny island.”
Adrian got in and introduced himself.
“Adrian Littlefield,” he extended his hand.
“Gloria, Gloria Dodge,” she said. “You’re welcome to the island. First time here?”
“Yes, well…yes, my first time.”
She drove out of the parking lot and turned northward going out past the hotels, the local bars, the long beaches packed with s
unbathers. Adrian kept a map and watched the sights and signposts go by. Gloria kept up the travelogue.
“The island is only seven miles long by three miles wide, shaped like a pork chop, less than eleven square miles.” Gloria had this “tour” memorized. Adrian looked at his foldout map of the island that he’d been given by the tour organizers. Block Island did, indeed, look like a pork chop, with the narrow bony end to the north and the squat round meaty end to the south. There was a profusion of dune and seascape as they drove out of town.
“That’s Scotch Beach there, a little rougher water. It was named for the people who didn’t want to pay the dime a week to help with the upkeep of the beaches. They could swim there free.”
Adrian smiled and nodded and feigned interest. The old station wagon bumped along out what he read was Corn Neck Road past Bush Lot Hill toward Chaqum Pond at the north end of the island.
“Many people live here year-round?” he asked.
“I guess they figure around nine hundred now. Most of these homes are seasonals. People from Providence and Hartford and Boston and New York. Many of the same families are coming for generations. I’ve been here my entire life. We raised seven children here. Seventeen grandchildren and nine great-grandchildren. They’ll all be coming home next week. My husband’s birthday.”
“Wow,” said Adrian, and looked out at the sea.
At the end of the road was a rock beach, a small parking lot, and off to the west an old lighthouse.
“1867 it was built. They’re making it into a museum. My son is on the volunteer committee. If you want to get out and have a look, I’ll wait. There’s plenty of time.”
Adrian shook his head and she backed the car around to head back the road they’d come.
“How old will your husband be?”
“Well, he’d have been eighty but he died last year. Still, we figured we’d get together anyway, and celebrate, you know…it’s all just family.”
“That must be very hard,” said Adrian, a little worried that he’d gotten more information about Gloria than he ever wanted but figuring now there was no turning back.
“Well, of course, we all miss him terribly. He was the dearest man and the grandchildren were so sad, so beautiful…they wanted to have a cake and get out all the pictures. I can’t wait to see them. They’re coming from as far away as Denver. He was the dearest man, everybody’s favorite. He always loved it when they came to visit us here on the island.”
“Won’t that be nice,” Adrian said. “Look at those beautiful yachts!”
They’d come to the marina at the Great Salt Pond and the New Harbor area. Sailboats tied to their moorings rocked in the wide basin. Fashionably clad boaters walked up and down the docks. A restaurant called Dead Eye Dick’s was doing a brisk luncheon trade. The old station wagon passed a small graveyard on the left.
“He’s buried in there,” said Gloria.
Adrian said nothing, hoping the conversation might take another turn.
“Fifty-eight years we were married. But we’d been ‘together’ for years before that. I met him when I was thirteen. It was February. I was ice-skating with friends and all they could do was laugh at me because I kept falling and I couldn’t stand up. The legs would go right out from under me. They were all laughing. It was horrible. And all of a sudden, I look up and this boy is holding out a hockey stick to me. ‘Grab on,’ he says to me, ‘I’ll pull you to shore.’ And after he had rescued me, he sat me on a bench on the shore and knelt and untied my skates and helped me on with my boots and I thought, What a beautiful boy, what a beautiful boy.”
“You were very young,” Adrian said. He was studying the map as the road curved south, working its way down the west side of the island. He plotted the winding route that would get them eventually to Pilot Hill Road. Like it or not, Gloria was giving him the full-course tour.
“Well, it was three years later. I was sixteen. I was walking into town and he stopped his truck and asked if I wanted a lift. And at first I said ‘No thanks’ because I didn’t want to be too easy, but he just leaned over and said, ‘Are you sure?’ and I thought, Well…why not. I climbed in and we’ve been together ever since. The day they bombed Pearl Harbor he asked me to marry him. He knelt down just the way he had when he rescued me that time, you know, to untie my skates, only this time he asked me to marry him. And I thought what a beautiful man he is. We had the wedding on New Year’s Eve. It was 1941. He left for the Navy three days later. He was a UDT man. Well, you know, growing up on the island, he knew how to swim. I was nineteen. He was twenty.”
Adrian looked at the old woman beside him and tried to imagine her at nineteen. He tried to imagine what it took to marry a man and sleep with a man who was leaving for war and might never return. He wondered if she had been faithful to him. He wondered if he had been faithful to her. He wondered if they discussed such things in those days.
“What was his name?” Adrian asked her.
“Bob. Well, Robert. Well, Bob…Bob Dodge.” Her eyes were red and watering now. Saying his name aloud must have triggered the tears. There was no sadness in her voice. Only resignation. But her eyes were brimming with real tears. She was looking for something to wipe them with.
“I’m sorry, I don’t know…”
“Oh no, no worry,” Adrian said.
They’d nearly made it to the southeast corner of the island.
Gloria pulled into a parking area below another lighthouse.
“Take a walk out there and you’ll be able to see the end of Long Island,” she said, “and Mohegan Bluffs and the Southeast Lighthouse. They had to move the thing back a few years ago. It would have fallen into the sea. And you can say you stood in Rhode Island and saw New York.”
Adrian had no interest in the lighthouse or Long Island or a walk in the sand but he figured Gloria might want a moment to recompose herself. So he got out and took the path out among the scrub trees and Rosa rugosa shrubs, to where a wooden deck overlooked the high bluffs and the beach maybe two hundred feet below. It was a breathtaking view and he opened his arms wide and closed his eyes and tilted his head back so his face basked fully in the brackish air and the bright sunlight and the slight breeze and the beauty of it. He stood and looked at the seascape. He looked back the way he’d come but everything had disappeared behind the dunes he’d walked through. He wondered how long it might take for Gloria to get herself together.
Below on the long beach he could see fishermen casting lines into the sea and reeling in and casting out again and further up the beach were figures of men and women—maybe a dozen or two dozen—outstretched on the strand taking the sun, and others running into the waves and back or diving into the pounding surf. The noise of the ocean and their voices seemed even more distant than he’d gauged at this height.
Out on the sea he could make out pleasure boats in their various odysseys, seabirds diving, what looked like schools of fish feeding on the surface. He wondered how long he’d have to watch and if the season was the right one to see a whale or a dolphin, or great sea turtles coming ashore to lay their eggs, or any of the countless other creatures that would never appear in Findlay, Ohio, no matter how long one looked out into the light or dark. There were cloud banks in the distance and the line between the sea and the sky, and what he reckoned might be the edge of Long Island far in the distance, grew less and less articulate and for a moment he wondered if he might be entirely lost.
VI
THE MEETING with the bishop had gone fairly badly. In retrospect, Adrian was not surprised. This was Ohio and these were the 1980s, and they were Methodists and what did he expect the bishop to do?
“It’s not,” Bishop Maghee was eager to assure him, “that Clare left you, or the divorce, or that your children might be scandalized,” though he felt duty-bound to cite, in the prayer he began the audience with, that caution from the Gospel Matthew, to wit: If any of you put a stumbling block before one of these little ones who believe in me, it would be bet
ter for you if a great millstone were fastened around your neck and you were drowned in the sea…Woe to the one by whom the stumbling block comes.
Nor was it the “very reasonable” concern about a suddenly single man with, “let us say, adult desires,” ministering to churchwomen made vulnerable by their “religious dilemmas.” The issue of “clerical continence” was not the thing. Though the bishop was pained to remind him, it was not unheard of—a clergyman preying on a parishioner or vice versa.
“Romance and religious fervor are so often confused.”
It was simply the concern the bishop had for Reverend Littlefield’s emotional well-being which seemed, if reports were even partially true, something he ought to be tending to. And all he was recommending, after all, all he was actually insisting upon, all he had actually conferred with the district superintendent and Reverend Hinkston about was a “little respite” from pastoral duties—neither millstone nor drowning—only a temporary “leave of absence” until after the holidays; three months of personal reflection, “with pay of course,” during which time both Adrian and the good people at St. Mark’s could “reassess their relationship.”
The bishop gave Adrian a list of “Christian counselors,” approved by the district, none with offices nearer to Findlay than Toledo and Cleveland, who would be “helpful and discreet” and who would bill the UMC directly for “up to six months of therapy and an evaluation.”