Even Now

by Susan S. Kelly

  “Velvet Elvises?”

  “Other end of the scale. Upscale. Cutesy cocktail napkins, placemats made of leaves, yard art, hideously overpriced hand-smocked nightgowns. You know, useless essentials.”

  I did know. I’d been introduced to useless essentials— monogrammed jewelry pouches, quilted checkbook covers, piped and plaid garment bags, satin-padded coat hangers—at boarding school. Before Wyndham Hall I’d never seen a fingernail buffer, much less a matching manicure set. “Can you make a decent living on summer tourists alone?”

  “Suckers know no season, fortunately. And fortunately I’m not in it to make a living. You’ve heard of ‘marrying well’? I divorced well. You married?”

  “Yes, he’s . . .” I glanced around. “Somewhere.” Frances Mason drained her bottle. “Excuse me while I get another.”

  Left alone, I wandered outside and gazed appreciatively at the fringe of forest, black feathers against the navy sky of evening. Dangling from hooks above me, moss baskets dripped pink blossoms of fuchsia. I closed my eyes and tilted my face to the delicate cascading blooms.

  “Sorry,” a man said, sliding open the screen door. “I didn’t realize this hiding place was taken.”

  Feeling foolish, I swiveled. “I wasn’t hiding, I was—”

  “Oh, go ahead, admit it.” He smiled from a face still ruddy with summer’s sun, made darker still by the faded aqua-striped shirt and the dim gold of torchlight. Smiled as if he’d caught me. His eyes were dark, the pinpoints of reflected torchlight seeming to emphasize his accusation. “Just listening to the quiet, then,” he said.

  “You must be Rod McKuen.” He was wearing white tennis shoes, old-fashioned thick-soled canvas versions not meant for any activity but comfort. “Except you’re too young to know Rod McKuen.” The sneakers inexplicably charmed me. “I like your shoes.”

  “I keep them in the closet right beside my Wallabes. Proof enough that I’m old enough to know Rod McKuen?”

  I laughed. “I was hiding.” It was enjoyable to flirt with this man, whoever he was; to indulge in harmless play with its harmless message: This is fun. Your turn.

  “And I’m Peter Whicker,” he said, extending one hand to me and raking hair from his forehead—a funny backward sweep of his knuckles—with the other. A pale slice of untanned skin flashed before the hair fell disobediently forward again.

  “Hannah Marsh.” His hand closed around mine. He must be another teacher at the Academy. . . English, I decided. The eighth-grade girls probably wrote about him—transparently disguised—in their short stories and creative writing journals. I would have.

  His dark eyes narrowed into a squint, thinking. “I forgot my cheat sheet, with everyone’s name and two-word description. You’re the sister who assists with the children’s choir, right?”

  “What?”

  “No,” Ceel said, stepping through the open door with a platter of crudités, “that’s me. So you’ve met . . .” She hesitated. “Nowadays you all have different titles. Are you ‘Father Whicker’?”

  I was confused. “ ’Father’?”

  “Didn’t he tell you?” Ceel asked. “This is our other guest of honor, St. Martin’s new rector.”

  “Oh, I . . . ”

  Peter Whicker drew a thumb across his upper lip. “I saw that.”

  “Saw what?”

  “You rearranged your attitude. Changed your entire manner—and opinion—of me. Didn’t you? Don’t lie.” He knit his brow, frowning sternly. “Thou shalt not, et cetera. See? See how terrifying I am, quoting commandments?”

  I laughed. “No, no, it’s just that I was expecting—” Someone not so nice looking. So relaxed and regular, unstern and unsomber.

  “Wait, let me run through my file of stereotypes.” Again, the backward-knuckled gesture through his hair. “Fat. Bald. Friar Tuck.”

  I opened my mouth to say, Exactly. Precisely. You read my mind, and said only, “Something like that.”

  His grin was wry. “Fat and bald all in good time, probably.”

  “It’s that you aren’t. . . ”

  He touched his bare throat. “Wearing a collar.”

  Right again. “Is that allowed?”

  “Allowed?” He laughed.

  Ceel sighed noisily, reprovingly. “Jeez, Hannah. No thought unexpressed.” She slipped between us, heading for the door. “I’m leaving before she says something worse. You two come get a plate soon.”

  Hal’s silhouette was momentarily framed in a large window before he strode out to join us. “Interim rector,” Peter corrected my introduction. “Here to wean the congregation from old alliances, and sentiments and”—his expression was mischievous—“grudges, maybe.”

  “To ready the flock,” I offered.

  “Exactly. One of those good Episcopal edicts. What brought the two of you to Rural Ridge?” Peter asked.

  I hesitated, reticent. Peter Whicker’s earlier assessment was correct. Knowing what I now knew—that he was a priest—inhibited me. I couldn’t imagine admitting, To look for something perfect and good and un-complicated. “To garden,” I finally blurted. “And because of the mountains.”

  Hal looked at me piercingly, evidently annoyed by my insufficient answer. “I sold a business recently, and when Ben called offering a temporary teaching position, I jumped. We, I mean.” He touched my shoulder, adding, “Hannah and I thought our lives might be simpler here.” I sipped my drink to cover embarrassment at his forthrightness and immediately choked on the alcohol’s fiery bite.

  “Are you okay?” Peter asked. I nodded, coughing. “And is it simpler?” he asked Hal.

  “Too early to tell.”

  “We’re in the same temporary category, then. Leaving is part of my job description, too, no matter how much I fall in love with the people, or the parish, or”—he gestured toward the enveloping blackness—“even the mountains. And I have, just like Hannah.”

  The admission felt not factual, but personal, lovely. In the small silence Peter tapped my glass with his. “Can I get you another drink?”

  “I’ll get it,” Hal said. “Need anything from the bar, Peter?”

  “Thanks, no.”

  As Hal wove through the guests indoors, I laced my fingers, lacking the social prop of a glass. “My mother always says if you put three Episcopalians in a room together, they invariably start talking about the Church, uppercase.”

  “My mother always says never to discuss dogs, children, or religion with other people. Maybe they’re related.”

  “I guess it’s a tough topic to avoid when one of the three is a priest.”

  “Were you avoiding it?” Peter said. “Or does the topic just make you choke, like gin?” The corners of his eyes crinkled with amusement.

  I relaxed again. “No, actually it’s you. Proximity to priests makes me uncomfortable. I’m afraid you can read my mind, divine my thoughts and faults. When I was young I was sure Father Edwards knew I was holding my Advent calendar to the light to see what picture was behind the closed flaps.”

  He snapped his fingers. “I knew I’d forgotten something tonight. I meant to bring my mind-reading X-ray glasses.”

  “You had some, too?” I said, delighted. “My best friend and I saved our allowance for weeks to order some from the—”

  “Back page of a comic book.”

  “Yes,” I said softly, “exactly.” I stepped backward, away from him. Proximity to this priest was making me decidedly uncomfortable.

  “So you and Hal are members of St. Martin’s?”

  “Will be, I guess.”

  “’Will’?” He was curious, not chastising.

  “Maybe one of these Sundays. I’ve been. . . unpacking.”

  Peter lifted his chin. “Careful. I’m reading your mind.”

  I smiled. “Isn’t it written somewhere that Episcopalians don’t go to church in the summer? I grew up thinking it was the only perk we had.”

  “But Ceel comes, and she grew up in the same house as you,
no?”

  I reached and sliced my finger through the flickering flame of a torch. “Touché. Okay, read my mind. Can you see I was hoping I’d move and find a little parish here still doing things the old way? There’s an irony for you, rebelling on behalf of the old. I miss the litanies and liturgy, I miss it all. The pageantry and drama, and the. . . privacy.”

  I waited, but he only said, “I’m listening.”

  “Remember when the only issues Episcopalians got heated about were getting married and buried in ten minutes and growing English box in the churchyard?” Now he laughed, and I did, too. “But you know what I mean. I even miss the old words, the pretty pronunciations.”

  “Sustaineth and maintaineth?”

  “Yes. And apocrypha and apotheosis and pro-, pro—”

  “Propitiation.”

  “Yes, propitiation, and—”

  “What does it mean?”

  “I— Okay, uncle. I have no idea.”

  He waited, dark eyes merry, glass to lips. “Go ahead. Dig yourself in a little deeper.”

  “It’s just that . . .” I struggled, inhibitions abandoned. “You could lose yourself in those phrases.”

  “You go to church to lose yourself?”

  “Maybe.” Realizing how the answer sounded, I looked at him guiltily. “Another mindless blurt. I’m sorry.”

  He touched my shoulder. “It takes more than that to hurt my feelings.”

  “I think I went to a huge university so I could be a Social Security number. Don’t you ever want to do that, lose yourself?”

  “Often.”

  “Doesn’t seem you picked the right job.”

  “You’d be surprised.”

  I was surprised. At his candor. It was appealing in someone you’d expect to have all the answers. “I guess I just don’t like change.”

  “You won’t like me, then.” The soft tone of his response, the almost melancholy admission, was nearly obscured by the twangy forest chorus of crickets and frogs.

  “Why?” I asked. Stubble shadowed his jaw. Tennis shoes, and he hadn’t shaved. Not like Hal, in his loafers and beardless cheeks. Not that I didn’t like my husband’s loafers or his razored skin. But. Had I been in Durham, had Peter Whicker been a friend, I’d have stroked his face, teased, “Ouch,” no differently and with no more significance than murmuring, “Feels good,” after touching a man’s arm and discovering the unexpected softness of a cashmere blazer. But Peter Whicker wasn’t an old friend and not likely to become one. He was a priest.

  “Know why it takes four Episcopalians to change a light bulb?” he asked.

  “Is this a test?”

  “It’s a joke.”

  It was my turn to wait. “Because,” he said, “one person changes the bulb, and three say they liked it better the old way.”

  I bit my lip to keep from laughing. “How nice that I’m in the majority.”

  He smiled broadly. “Come to church tomorrow and give me moral support. It’s my first sermon at St. Martin’s.”

  I stood on tiptoe, craning over his shoulder to peer indoors. “Where is Hal with that drink?”

  “Say you will,” he pestered with all the insistence of an adolescent. “I’ll wear my sandals and rope belt. But you have to call me Peter. No Friar, and no Father. My wife thinks ‘Father’ is—let me get this right—an offensive term of the patriarchy.”

  Wife. Why wouldn’t there be a wife? Because he wasn’t wearing a wedding ring. Once I’d told Hal that I automatically checked for wedding bands. In elevators, restaurants, on anyone I looked twice at. “Why?” Hal had asked in a tone that was partly curious, partly annoyed.

  “No reason. It’s just something women do habitually. Like men checking out breasts. Admit it. After the face, your eyes drop right to the boobs.” Hal shook his head, refusing to agree.

  I’d asked Ceel. “Of course I look for a ring,” she’d said. “Always. It’s an age thing. After you stop looking at butts.”

  I realized that Peter Whicker and I hadn’t talked about our spouses. Nor had we swapped information about where we were from or where we went to school or whom we knew in common. He hadn’t asked me what I did. Typical social fact-finding had never materialized in our conversation. We hadn’t needed it, and I hadn’t missed it.

  I pointed to the window, looking among the guests for the woman who might qualify. “Which one is she?”

  “Running late.” Peter pulled a thick old-fashioned pocket watch from his pocket. “Still getting her office organized.”

  “What does she do?”

  “Keeps the world safe for capitalism. Investments.”

  “A stockbroker? I have a little inherited stock. Maybe I should call her.”

  “Actually, she’s been hired to run the western N.C. office of Burke and McConnell.”

  “Sounds like a big job.”

  “She’s more than up to it.” Peter Whicker’s face had become a mask backlit by the house’s interior, where people mingled and moved, laughed and chatted, in a pretty party tableau. Ceel, ever attentive to food and drink and conversation, touched an arm here, inclined her head to listen there. With darkness had come chill, autumn’s forecast, and I shivered.

  “You’re cold. Let’s go inside.” A car door slammed faintly from the other side of the house. “Maybe that’s her now,” Peter said, steering me through the open glass doors. “There she is.” Across the room of milling guests a tall woman stood out, self-assuredly greeting Frances Mason. “Come meet her.”

  My mouth went dry. Thick, blunt-cut hair brushed the woman’s shoulders, a straight inky curtain framing high brow and pointed chin. “Daintry? You’re married to Daintry O’Connor?”

  “Yes,” Peter said with puzzled surprise. “Do you know her?”

  From Hannah’s quote book:

  (I love you as) . . . I love my vanished youth— which is as much as a human heart can hold.

  —Zelda Fitzgerald

  Chapter 3

  Know her? Know Daintry?

  BFF we scratched with an opened paper clip on any available surface: her bunk bed headboard, the ledge in her telephone booth, the armrest of a terrace chair. BFF we inked on canvas-bound three-ring notebooks and the smooth rubbery soles of sneakers. Best Friends Forever.

  “Striking,” Mother once described Daintry, and she was yet. Not classically beautiful, Daintry O’Connor was nonetheless arresting, even commanding, in appearance. I stared at the woman she’d become, watched as she placed her purse on the fireplace mantel. The early and ungainly adolescent height had become state-liness, the skin was a smooth pale porcelain, the black hair fell Asian straight and gleaming. Hair I’d once watched her chop off with a single ruthless scissor slice.

  She seemed to shimmer, standing there, to radiate the wavering glow of mirage. Though perhaps it was only the gauzy haze of memory that cloaked her in the dazzle she’d radiated for so long to me.

  Since I was six years old, I might have said to Peter Whicker, and reeled backward, propelled by memory.

  The hot June morning the O’Connors moved to Cullen I was just out of first grade. My mother burned the breakfast toast in her absorption with the activities across the street, a Tiffany lamp prompting the first in a series of derogatory groans. “My God, mock French provincial furniture,” she observed of a gold-trimmed dresser and bureau. “An entire suite.”

  It took less than an hour for me to discover Daintry O’Connor. It would take seven years for Daintry to evolve into mentor and guide—always more and less than friend.

  I was never to examine that gilded suite in the years to come. But Daintry’s marvelous beds I knew well: the double-decker thrill of bunks. While I was required to straighten my bed, Daintry’s went unmade for days, and the drooping sheets and blankets created a secretive cave for the two of us, a private burrow. I campaigned for the top bunk when I spent the night with her, enthralled with its height and claustrophobic closeness to the ceiling. Mornings, Daintry kicked the mattress sla
ts to jolt me awake, and, sated with Saturday cartoon idiocy, we contentedly slurped cereal and plaited each other’s hair until noon. Our lives became similarly braided. Same age and street and grade and gender, Daintry O’Connor and I were destined to be friends.

  She hadn’t seen me. I swiftly crossed the room to her. “Daintry.” I put down my drink and reached for her across nearly twenty years of separation. “Daintry.” How long since I had seen her, even uttered her name aloud?

  Yet she made no move to touch me, didn’t so much as extend an arm in a semblance of embrace. A slight smile crossed her lips, and I recalled how Mother hadn’t rushed across the street to welcome the O’Connors to Cullen three decades earlier.

  “Hannah,” she said. Even the timbre of her voice— husky, rich—had hardly altered. “What a coincidence.”

  Instantly I forgave her the stunted casual greeting. Not for Daintry the effusive hellos of Southern women. And she knew I’d be here, must have known who was giving the party. How many other Ceel-short-for-Cecelias could there be?

  “What a shock,” I said. “Sometimes in airports or restaurants I’m overcome with absolute certainty that I’ll run into a person I know from some other phase of my life—a girl from camp, a sorority sister or Wyndham classmate. But never anyone from Cullen. Never you.”

  “And here I am.”

  Daintry’s stance, her attitude—all polished poise and cool graciousness—was bewildering, but I plunged on. “I’m trying to remember the last time we saw each other. Though I heard you’d gone to graduate school. And now you’re married to a minister. Our minister, Peter, whatever,” I stammered, feebled by this sudden, slippery collision of past and present. Hers, mine, ours.

  “You know Peter?”

  “Just introduced. . . ”

  Daintry gave me a long, assessing gaze. “Two birds with one stone. Peter and I met in divinity school.”

  How many more surprises? “You were studying for the priesthood, too?”

  “No, I was only there to learn.”

  I fought down the impression of belittlement implicit in her response, as though I ought to have known better; known that she’d choose hard work merely for the pleasure of learning. “Kind of a crooked path, isn’t it?” I said. “Theology to stockbroking? God and mammon?”