Ceel picked at the paint-clogged wicker. “But when you’re beyond the knight-in-shining-armor stage, beyond the bad-boy-one-night-stand
phase, what would attract you now? What’s sexy?”
“Those are two different things. What attracts and what’s sexy. Apples and oranges. I’d have to think.”
She called a week later. “Callused hands.”
“What?”
“That’s what attracts my friend Janie. I asked her.”
So I’d begun asking, too. When I thought of it, when I ran into someone. A casual poll of women of a certain age, my own.
The range and variety of answers were surprising. But most surprising was their immediacy. No one hesitated, paused to ponder;
to a one, the women were ready with their unabashed responses.
“Someone who doesn’t change the subject,” Emily said. “Who doesn’t ask if I’ve had the oil changed while we’re having dinner
out.”
“Naughtiness,” Hillary said. “Sassy is sexy.”
“A man who’s at his professional peak,” Martha said. “Can’t help it: Power attracts me.”
“Fixes smoke detectors. Hangs pictures,” said my divorced friend Susan.
“A touch,” Kathy said. “Not a grope. Just . . . a touch on the wrist, or the waist.”
“Survey says?” Ceel would say when she called.
I read my friend Kathryn’s postcard to her. “ ’I am attracted to gentleness above almost all other things.‘”
“How eloquent,” Ceel said.
“How’s this for eloquent?” I quoted my cynical friend Donna. “Too many women have traded one pile-of-shit relationship for
another pile that turns out to be doody in a new form.”
Here’s what no one said: Muscles. Money. Looks.
“Brains,” Ann said. “Plus a good dancer who can make hollandaise and recites poetry.”
“Someone who makes me laugh,” Julie said.
“You know it when you see it, even if you can’t describe it,” Ceel said. “Like looking for a pair of new shoes.”
“Wonder how Mother would answer,” I said.
“You know what she’d say: ‘Timing is everything.‘”
All those different answers, like fingerprints, no two alike. Later it occurred to me that I’d never cast my own vote. I hadn’t
canvassed myself.
While the columbarium’s design took shape in both my imagination and on paper, I tackled the physical preparation, clearing
away a jungle of undergrowth, weeds, brambles, stumps, even the blameless pansies. The warm dry autumn weather was an Indian
summer boon for the tourist leaf season and a blessing for the columbarium’s creation as well. Or re-creation. I’d come to
view the project that way: not as a task, but as a re-creation, a private Eden.
“I called three times this morning,” Ceel said. “Where
are
you every day? You’re never home.”
“At the columbarium. Working.”
“Yawn,” she said.
But it wasn’t work, it was pleasure. Because most days, he came, too.
“Hannah.”
I hadn’t heard him approach over the scratch of my raking and the hammering up the hill. He’d read the surprise in my eyes.
“They’re reroofing the parish house, and the racket’s making me insane. Not one of
my
changes.”
Peter Whicker had wasted no time in enacting—or forcing, depending on the point of view—changes at St. Martin’s. The bulletin
and newsletter font, the beribboned visitor cards, doodling crayons made available for bored children during the service.
Wicker baskets had replaced the heavy brass collection plates, sold in turn to an Asheville antique store with the proceeds
earmarked for outreach. Moreover, the contents of those collection baskets were being routed to a poor mission church rather
than used to purchase periodicals for a diocesan rest home as they had been for decades. Every night now the parish hall was
made available to community groups, ranging from Alcoholics Anonymous to Single Parents to Parents with Homosexual Children.
“I’ve watched those roofers for two days now, and have decided they’ve got the ideal career,” Peter said. “A biscuit in the
truck with your buddies at six in the morning. On the roof at first light. That wonderful”— he grappled for the word—“
release
of ripping off shingles one after the other and pitching them down with total abandon. Hammer like hell for three hours,
and by four the day’s done, the team’s earned three thousand dollars, and you go home, drink beer, and watch TV.”
He snapped his fingers. “And you don’t work when it rains.”
I laughed. He circled a finger within the white collar at his throat. “This thing can get pretty binding. Literally and figuratively.”
“I like it,” I said without thinking. He made me do that, unafraid to be frank. Or let me.
The dark eyes widened with gratitude, or surprise. “You do?”
What could I tell him? That the snowy circlet and fresh haircut and lack of a coat over that plain shirt made him look boyish,
youthful as a twenty-year-old. “Mark wanted to wear a tie when he was only six, but I made him wait. He has all his life to
dress like a man.”
Peter pointed to the leaf pile. A squirrel brazenly nosed the fringes where the heavier acorns, resisting capture between
the rake tines, accumulated. “Won’t you just have to do that again tomorrow? A new batch of leaves overnight?”
“You don’t feel that way on Sundays, do you? There they go, sinners again tomorrow.”
He laughed. “I refuse to answer that on the grounds that it may incriminate me.”
I leaned my chin on the tip of the rake handle.
“What?”
“You’re the most unminister minister I’ve ever known.”
“How many have you known?” Then the teasing tone vanished, and his expression sobered. “We’re only ordinary people.” I felt
both chastised and confessed to. He shoved his hands into pockets of slaty twill pants, knuckles moving against the fabric,
then pulled out his pocket watch as he had that night at Ceel’s. “Duty calls.” But, turning to leave, he pivoted slowly. “Can
I come again, to visit? To escape?”
He was asking permission.
“Don’t you ever want to be anonymous?”
I’d asked him at Ceel’s party.
“Often,”
he’d answered. I nodded, shook my head, nodded again. Yes, no, please, come. And proximity must have been part of it, that
Peter became the person I saw most often.
He did come. At no particular time, for no particular reason. Sometimes he helped, more often he watched. And always we talked,
of everything and nothing. “Talk to me,” he said, chin between his palms.
I knew the distress symptom. “What is it?”
“Phone’s ringing off the hook. My abolishing the parish dinner, and announcement—or pronouncement, rather—that the vestry
vote will be taken during a Sunday service instead is creating a new and different furor.” He sat on a stump, hands dangling
over his knees. “So talk to me. In person. Tell me something trivial.”
So I did: what I was reading, what I was cooking for dinner, of friends I’d left in Durham, my father’s army stories of Okinawa.
I taught him a little of gardening, how pansies need to be picked, how plantings should be done in threes, how a rusty nail
made hydrangeas bloom blue, how tuberoses would winter over only if they were dug up in fall and saved.
He picked up a spiral notebook lying on the ground. “This your journal?”
“Nothing so fascinating,” I said, liking that he didn’t move to open it. “A list of plants for the columbarium. Quince, spirea,
dwarf euonymous, daphne, if I can find a protected place. And those are just the shrubs. Perennials on this page, daylilies
and columbine and coral bells and Lenten rose and . . .” I trailed off and looked at him apologetically. “Sorry. Completely
carried away.”
“Carried away gets things accomplished.” Though the day was still, a sudden shower of leaves fluttered down as thickly as
snow. Not dried and brittle, but perfect yellow ovals still pliable with the velvety texture of living. They caught in our
hair and shoulders, softened stones and tools and earth with autumn camouflage. “Carried away is another word for passionate,”
he said.
Perhaps that was it. Peter took me seriously.
Couldn’t a string of impossibly perfect fall days, blue skied and golden hued, lie behind an attraction? Crystalline mornings
when every filament of a spiderweb glistened, dogwood berries shone plump and red, light filtered through branches in distinct
rays like a child’s drawing of sunbeams. Warm noons and breezy afternoons and solitude interrupted only by dropping nuts and
rustling leaves and the chink of a shovel, scratch of a rake.
Hands on hips, I critically surveyed my work. The precise and hideous cinder-block outline was now painfully visible, the
flat marble plaques shiny perfections within rich black soil, a by-product of time and nature that couldn’t be purchased at
any price anywhere.
“Busy?”
“Just about to start digging up these lovely cinder blocks. How about you?”
“Busy making enemies. The narthex has sign-up boards for covenant groups and prayer groups, tutoring at schools, a walk for
the hungry, and female ushers. And I’ve sent out a notice for parishioners to bring powdered milk on Sundays—there’s an ugly
rubber barrel smack in the middle of the narthex, too, for collecting the boxes. That enough?”
Was he looking for solace or reassurance? Didn’t matter; I gave it. “They’re small atrocities.”
“Depends on who’s judging.”
“Ceel—”
“Yes?” His eyes asked for affirmation.
“Ceel always says to ask yourself, How sorry will I be? How sorry will I be if—oh, I don’t know. The question applies to every
ridiculous situation. How sorry will I be if I leave the car unlocked and someone steals the book I left on the front seat?
How sorry will I be if I postpone buying milk until tomorrow? How sorry will I be if I wash this sweater when the tag says
D
RY
C
LEAN
O
NLY
and it’s ruined? How sorry will I be if I tell this person something they might not want to hear?” I lifted my shoulders
at his laughter. “You asked.”
“Now that I know Ceel’s, what’s your philosophy of living?”
“Oh, don’t. You’re as bad as Ellen. She was doing an assignment for school and wanted to know if I could give only one piece
of advice to a child, what would it be? Whatever I said wouldn’t be right. Wouldn’t be enough, couldn’t possibly be the best
or wisest or kindest advice.” I drew a stick across the marble surface of a plaque. “Besides,” I said, “I don’t even break
the unwritten rules.”
“Tell me one.”
“Don’t bring a baby into a movie theater. Don’t have more than one transaction at the bank drive-through. Don’t take up two
parking places.”
Peter gazed out at the panoramic mountainscape where vivid blocks of red and gold cozied with green corridors of conifers.
When he spoke again, his voice was filled with doubt. “Do you think I’m making terrible changes?”
I looked at him but saw only the dark bowed head, as though the need to know shamed him.
“Do you?” he said, raising his head.
He was entrusting me with his misgivings. Asking for encouragement is a gift. “No,” I said. “Not me.”
If anyone had asked,
Are you worried?
I would have answered,
Why should I be?
There was nothing illicit or furtive about our time together, no longer than half an hour. Nothing stealthy or clandestine.
But no one asked. Nor did I. Ask myself why I parked on the service road, out of sight. Ask, What’s happening here? Though
once I did say, “Where are you supposed to be?”
“Here,” he said, with certainty in eyes that could as easily provoke, tease. “Today’s the day we’re moving the urns to the
parish house for safekeeping, remember?” I didn’t ask him where he was supposed to be again, unwilling to spoil a friendship.
That’s what we were, all we were. It’s simply that we happened to be male and female, mother and minister. Sharing a sandwich
or a story.
He taught me a little of clerical lore, the theory that the height of a rector’s collar is in direct proportion to the stiffness
of its wearer. One afternoon I finally learned all the names for priestly vestments, stole and alb and cassock, and clerics’
vanity in particular fabrics and embroidery. We discovered we were on the same religious mailing lists, receiving how-to-be-a-saint
junk mail with pictures of miracles guaranteed to stop mailmen in their appointed-round tracks. And he talked about his roles,
wryly, frankly, with no self-pity. “Yesterday I was an administrator. Tomorrow I’ll be a mentor, Sunday I’m a lecturer.”
“What are you today? Treasurer? Listener? Mourner?”
“Regular,” he said. “That’s why I come.”
“I can’t even imagine,” I said.
“Yes, you can. It’s a service industry.”
“Like waitressing, and insurance.”
“Like mothering.”
He mused aloud at the irony of “Anglican ambiguity,” as he termed it, how vocation is different from avocation, how people
who feel strongly connected to the liturgy—“like you”—generally appreciated silence, meditation. We laughed over the strangers
on the street who yelled, “Howdy, Padre!” to him, and over what he called his Anti-Christ Auto Art, a collection of irreverent
bumper stickers. “The best of show are ‘The only hell Mama ever raised’ and ‘Jesus is coming, and He’s pissed.‘”
“There’s something I’ve always wanted to know,” I said gravely.
“Is God dead?”
“A far more serious topic.”
He composed his face to match mine. “Hit me.”
“When people knock on your door selling magazine subscriptions and light bulbs, do you buy because you’re a minister and have
to be nice?”
“Come here.” He beckoned and whispered in my ear, “I hide in the closet.”
He told me about spending Saturdays of his Maryland youth in the JUG basement of Catholic school— “Judgment Under God”—corralled
with other models of bad behavior. I told him how whenever I woke up feeling sick as a child that I looked in the mirror and
smiled hugely and fiercely, to convince myself that I was well enough to go to school. “Hence four years of perfect attendance
medals.”
“And untold numbers of infected classmates.”