Stories of parish life sustained him when he wasn’t sure if there was anything new to the job after the fifty or seventy-five marriages and just as many funerals, who knew how many baptisms and confirmations. The church calendar often looked to him like a child’s roller coaster, with gentle, predictable acclivities and declivities, and not much else. Here he is again at the end of the church year, coming up on Advent, that time of reflection, when the symbolism is so comforting: the all-powerful disguised as a defenseless baby in mean estate.
Well, not quite yet. First, the end of the church year. Time of eschatological imaginings, as in the week’s reading from Hebrews: “It is a dreadful thing to fall into the hands of a living God.” Not yet the advent of the baby with the fancy halo, not yet the time of the dove fluttering above the baby. Not yet. Instead, we are here where the metaphors are not comforting. So perhaps it’s appropriate that his wife is downstairs shouting at his biological son, which, it should be said, is an unusual thing in the household of the reverend. The shouting mostly came to its conclusion when the older, adopted son left. Still, some shouting does not mean that he must be immediately involved. When William Duffy, the eldest, was young there was much gnashing of teeth. There was never enough of anything to salve the open sore of William’s adoption, not to mention the unforgivable fact of William’s being of a different race. If only they had known of identity politics in the seventies what they know now at the
fin de siècle.
At present, William is in difficult legal circumstance, and it is this circumstance that leads the reverend to the commencement of next Sunday’s homily, the notes on which he will embellish extempore, according to his usual style. Start on Sunday, work the whole week in a leisurely way, avoid the oppression of deadlines. He types the words on his old Smith-Corona, with its warm, percussive music:
You may be surprised to learn that it has been nearly two decades since I felt any certainty about the existence of the Almighty ---
A relief when he types the line, and how many times he has thought of typing it before, never feeling that it was right, always feeling that it would shock the parish, perhaps even more than the liaison between Brian and Archie. The instructor in homiletics always advised getting down associations first, whatever they were. So he will get down all the thoughts and, likewise, all the uncertainties he has at the end of this jubilee year. He is uncertain about many things. His uncertainties are the “dreadful thing,” as advertised in the epistle to the Hebrews. Where are the saints who are supposed to be abroad in the land, in whom we might delight? The Reverend Duffy does not know where they are and he doesn’t know if they will come again in such a way that there is no doubt associated with them. The saints will not come on a particular day, wearing a particular robe, and with a particular program, and this is because the time of saints is past:
You may be surprised to know that when I pray I often do not know what to say and in reply I receive only silence ---
He can hear his wife begging to know where his younger son, Maximillian, has been. Where has he been spending these last nights? With which of his friends did he allegedly stay, and will the parents of these friends vouch as to the facts? It is known that William, the elder, turned up briefly in the house, on Friday, speaking only of a need for a short vacation from his work, though in fact his entire life seems to have been a vacation. It is known that William is in an enormous amount of trouble, because almost immediately after his appearance the Reverend Duffy and his wife began to receive telephone calls about William’s trouble, which trouble came to pass in New York City. First among this sequence of dreadful revelations was the call from his daughter, Annabel, the middle child, whom the reverend loves most, though a father is not meant to love one child above the others. His daughter explained to them about the young Asian woman, and the reverend’s wife, Debby, wept there at the kitchen table, and she asked why they had all this going on
now,
alluding to other periods of trouble in their union and their family. The reverend held her briefly, though he was no good at holding people. He was better at a certain stiff resolve, and this is perhaps what made him effective at the weddings and funerals of the Congregationalists of Newton, Massachusetts, where stiffness has a long history.
His daughter called, and then his wife went upstairs to do the reconnaissance. In their younger son’s room she saw the curtains blowing in like sails on the sea vessel of calamity. Her two sons had gone out the window and shimmied down the tree, as though they were teenage hoodlums, and the window was open, and now they were gone. If this was not a story as full of metaphors as the powerless baby in mean estate, well, then the Reverend Duffy did not know his biblical stories.
The Gospel reading for the last Sunday of the church calendar is from Mark, and the homily had better deal with it. The only problem, seeing as how the reverend is cataloguing his uncertainties while his wife interrogates their son downstairs (she will not be trifled with, et cetera), is that the reverend doesn’t believe that Mark actually wrote the passage attributed to him here. The fiction of Mark is perhaps one of his uncertainties, as is the liberally embellished narrative of Jesus, especially in passages such as this one, wherein it feels that powerful bishops or church leaders are retroactively attempting to foreshadow kinds of martyrdom that had probably already taken place by the time of their subsequent redaction, in order that the wandering mendicant Jesus of Nazareth should come off as a fine prognosticator:
9 You must be on your guard. You will be handed over to the local councils and flogged in the synagogues. On account of me you will stand before governors and kings as witnesses to them. 10 And the gospel must first be preached to all nations. 11 Whenever you are arrested and brought to trial, do not worry beforehand about what to say. Just say whatever is given you at the time, for it is not you speaking, but the Holy Spirit. 12 Brother will betray brother to death, and a father his child. Children will rebel against their parents and have them put to death. 13 All men will hate you because of me, but he who stands firm to the end will be saved.
This is just the kind of End Times nonsense that supports an entire industry of televangelist frauds, who learned their skills, the reverend thinks, not from theologians but from manufacturers of underarm deodorant. It nauseates the Reverend Duffy, this type of scriptural passage, it depresses him, but at the end of the church calendar, it is unavoidable. The people who incline toward this kind of bunk, or the Book of Revelation, are the ones with borderline personality disorder or a deluxe helping of delusional narcissism. They need clinical care. His son William, for example, always liked the Book of Revelation best because of all the special effects. And there are plenty of those in the reading today:
I don’t care for the readings, and I question their relevance. There’s always evidence of an ending, if we look for it, but where there’s an ending there’s always evidence of a beginning. I say look for the beginning. Look for the opening of the blossom. For the intimation of spring.
His wife and he were on separate extensions when they got the news. The Reverend Duffy asked Annabel if it would be possible to contact the family of Samantha Lee, the injured girl, and this was his rather insistent question for the first twenty-four hours. Is there a way for us to contact the family of the poor girl? So much so that his wife asked him if he did not care for his son. The reverend, stricken by the remark, looked deep, and he determined that he did believe it possible that William had perpetrated the attack. He had no trouble believing it, in fact, though he would tell no one this, not even his wife. Moreover, believing that his son had committed the assault, he nonetheless had no trouble continuing to love his flawed, reckless, impossible son, who knew more about physics and linguistics and engineering and a thousand other things than the Reverend Duffy would ever know, but who seemed unable to hold down any job more complicated than message delivery.
Downstairs, again, his wife, slamming some kitchen implement on a countertop, demands to know of Max how he expects what he has done—helping his brother avoid the authorities—will reflect on what the Reverend Duffy does, and his son replies in a measured voice, which the reverend can clearly hear through the floorboards (the parsonage is no vast mansion), that it’s his father’s ministry that has
allowed
him to do what he did. He says he would do it again. Well, his mother says, the window has new hardware on it now, and you owe it to your father and myself to respect our wishes, and you can go up there and look out the window for a while and imagine what you see on the far side of it because you’re not going to be on the other side of that glass until the daffodils blossom.
The end, as we learn of it in Mark—a time and place when certain people will be rewarded for perfection and others consigned to the lake of fire—is a convenience for those who are unable to shoulder the responsibilities of the present —-
He turns off the typewriter with the sheet of paper still in it. He closes the office door behind himself. Down in the kitchen, he finds his wife, expert on adolescent psychology, with textbooks spread wide around her. The boy has retired to his room. They are a couple of common laborers, the two of them, and if there are things that are never thoroughly discussed between them, then at least there is the sensation that they have worked in concert, they have labored, and it is in this feeling that gratitude sweeps through him, and he puts a hand on his wife’s back and looks over her shoulder at the book, at its scientific language.
“I don’t even know if he’s been staying after school like he says,” his wife remarks. “I don’t know where the beginning and end of the truth are with him, and I hate the sensation of it. He was such a sweet little one.”
The reverend grunts in assent. They will be in bed early, as they have always been, and there’s no use eating some snack before bed, because it will not agree with him, even though he has a powerful hankering for a cookie. His wife will not tolerate crumbs in the bed.
“It’s all going to work out,” he says mechanically. “And if it doesn’t, we’ll be strong. We have always been strong.”
Then he trudges up the back stairs.
Once, and this was fifteen or twenty years ago, he’d been at a party in town. The reverend had been at a party, which wasn’t unusual, because he was often invited to parties. He was invited to play golf or tennis occasionally, and sometimes he was invited to give a speech at the high school or to officiate at a classroom debate on some ethical issue. He was a minister of the Congregational Church, and Massachusetts had Congregationalists before anything else, except the Pequods. He preached at a plain church building in the center of town, on a green, the First Congregational Church, and he lived in a small house two blocks away, because he needed room for his children. He was a pillar of the community.
And he came to be at the party, and there was a girl there, just fourteen or fifteen, and he realized that he had seen this girl a hundred times over the years, with her friends and on the holidays. It was another of those instances when he realized that he had been at the church long enough to have watched children grow from their baptisms to their very adulthood. He had baptized this child, in fact, had made the watery cross upon her forehead, her parents beaming proudly. He knew them well enough, John and Barbara.
He’d come across her in her ballet class years, in her tree-climbing years; he’d watched her in her homely years with the braces and the skinny legs, and then he’d watched her in her cheerleader years, and now he was seeing her in the flourishing of her adulthood, at this party. He was watching her because she was employed this night by her father, John, to serve drinks to his friends, the other pillars of the community. She had certainly developed in a way that the Reverend Duffy had never expected. He had never expected a girl that he’d baptized to be one of the great beauties of her age. You never knew to expect such a thing, but this was just what she looked like now: at the bar, with a dozen bottles in front of her and a pitcher of water with which to water down the whiskeys, just as if this, too, were baptismal water.
So much time should not have passed. Not with him doing what little he had done, which was to pace through time as though it were stepping-stoned with church calendars, without learning, without growth. The girl was a symbol of this, of how miserly was time in his life. Time had made him good at one thing and horrible at everything else, so that the blessings of the world were always elsewhere, never his. All the conversations he had that night, he approached these conversations in the same graceful way he always approached them. The people of Newton told him what they had to tell him, with a certain cant of the head, a certain nervous gesture, how they were proud and terrified, and he listened well, that’s how he remembers it now, that he listened well, and he spent the night stealing glances at the girl at the bar, and she was a goddess of wine, so resolute, so statuesque.
The party proceeded into the kind of cheerful disorder that marked these events. The people who stayed were the ones you wished would leave. His own wife had left because Max was still in diapers then. And William was going through a rough patch in high school or maybe college. He can’t remember which. The reverend himself became one of those guests you wished would leave, standing out on the patio. The more recognizable constellations were just visible through the light pollution and the cloud cover. Bare trees waved in the breeze. He saw the daughter, and the daughter was picking up drinks and coasters, and she was drinking from the drinks, surreptitiously. She was drinking and carrying the glasses off to the kitchen, and he followed her into the house, observing the methodical performance of her responsibilities, and then he watched as she went upstairs, already tipsy, no doubt. His body carried him along with her, as if he was drunk, too, upon her shadow. Then he surprised her in her bedroom.