Secrets of Eden (12 page)

“Have you ever preached on remorse?” she asked.

She slept in a T-shirt and old dance shorts with a drawstring, and abstractedly she fiddled with the cord. When she asked the question, she had the slightly puzzled look on her face that I was finding more and more appealing. It was the face she made when she was deep in thought, and it was unguarded and childlike, and it made me want to sit up in bed and kiss her. (Imagine the sorts of monstrous names I would have been called had I ever suggested during the investigation that I found something childlike in a woman to be appealing. The aspersions upon my character would have been far worse. And while my mother wouldn’t have believed that such a thing was possible, my attorney and I took dark comfort in the reality that I was a Baptist and
not a Catholic, and the crimes of which I was accused, thank heavens, at least did not involve altar boys.)

“Yes, I’ve preached on remorse,” I answered. “I’ve preached on guilt and I’ve preached on shame. I’ve preached easily seven hundred and twenty-five sermons in my life. There isn’t a lot I haven’t preached on.”

“If you could make amends—”

“But I can’t make amends,” I said, cutting her off. Quickly I softened my voice, because I feared in that instant that I had hurt her feelings with my abruptness. “That’s the problem. I can’t bring Alice back. There is simply no way to make this sort of horror right.”

She fell back on the pillow and lay on her side, resting her head on her hand. I was still flat on my back. Her T-shirt was black with a pair of pink ballet shoes on it, and I liked looking up at her. Her hair was still a little wild with sleep. “You told me you never believed in angels in a literal sense,” she said after a moment.

“That’s right. Not ever.”

“‘For he shall give his angels charge over thee, to keep thee in all thy ways,’” she said, quoting the ninety-first psalm. “‘They shall bear thee up in their hands, lest thou dash thy foot against a stone. Thou shalt tread upon the lion and adder: the young lion and the dragon shalt thou trample under feet.’” I recognized that the three verses were from the King James Version.

“Can you do that with every angel reference in the Bible?” I asked.

“No way. But some.”

“Still, I’m impressed.”

“Don’t be. I’m sure you know considerably more passages by heart than I do.”

“You’d be surprised at how little I know—about anything.”

“And you’ve never, ever believed in angels. Really?”
I could have given her any number of glib responses, but she deserved better than that. “For a time,” I confessed, “I believed in angelic presence: God’s light in the people around us. People behaving angelically. And sometimes I met people whose demeanor seemed angelic to me. There was a fellow in the congregation when I arrived, an old farmer. A deacon. He was seventy-seven when I got there, and I was a twenty-five-year-old pastoral novice. He was frail, but very kind, very wise. He took me under his wing and taught me all about Haverill, about the history of the church. About the ministers who had come before me. He made sure that the transition was smooth. And—and this is no small
and
—he taught me how to use most power tools. That deck where we sat the day we met? He and I built it together. But no, I’ve never believed in a genus or species of creature you might call an angel.”

“Nothing with halos?”

“No. Nothing with halos—or wings.”

“‘Hope is the thing with feathers,’” she said.

“Emily Dickinson?”

“That’s right.”

“She was referring to birds.”

“I’ve always found some voices angelic,” Heather said.

I thought about this. “I had one parishioner who told me he heard the voice of God in his daughter’s singing voice,” I admitted. “And there were certainly some Sunday mornings when I hated to have to follow the choir’s anthem with a sermon.”

“I didn’t actually mean singing—though I know what you’re talking about.”

“Ah, you meant a plain speaking voice.”

“I did. Some voices are more angelic than others,” she said, and for a moment I tried to recall that elderly deacon’s voice. He’d been dead seven years by then, and so it took me a moment to recapture the
euphonious fusion of words that marked his speech—that marked so many of my most rural neighbors. His voice was gravelly and soft, and he laughed lightly but often. Supposedly a toddler laughs four hundred times every day and an adult barely fourteen. That deacon was an exception. Once I even preached a sermon on that—on laughter as a gift from God.

“I guess I can recall voices that were saintly and beatific,” I agreed.

“I had a feeling you could.”

“Of course, I can also recall voices that, by comparison, were downright evil.”

“You are in a dark place.”

“Apparently.”

“I suppose you’re thinking of George Hayward’s voice?”

“Actually, I was just being ornery.”

“George Hayward’s voice wasn’t demonic?”

“It wasn’t around me. But before he would hurt Alice, she said he would grow condescending. He would start talking like a law-school professor. Old-school. Socratic. He’d start asking her questions, and whatever answer she gave was going to get her in trouble.
Do you think it behooves Katie’s mother to dress like a whore? Did you think you were being helpful doing a load of darks without checking with me to see if I had something—a turtleneck, maybe, a pair of jeans—I might want laundered? How did you expect me to respond when you chose to be with Ginny O’Brien instead of your husband? Are you a lesbian?
He never raised his voice before he would hit her, and even when he was drunk as a sailor, he spoke like Henry Higgins. Alice always knew she was in trouble when he began doing his
My Fair Lady
thing.”

When George Hayward died, his entrepreneurial metabolism may have finally begun to slow. He was, according to Alice, spending increasing amounts of time at his desk and in meetings, rather than on his feet in either of his stores or his restaurant, and I wondered what
effect those changes had had on his temper. Moreover, the bigger and more diverse his retail kingdom had become, the more difficult it must have been to manage. To rule. To control. He had three very different enterprises. And so, perhaps, over the years he had grown more determined to have absolute sway over Alice. I tried to hear in my head what sort of voice he had used with his employees and how it might have differed in tone from when he was alone with his wife. Publicly he had always seemed rather likable. But in point of fact he was—and even ministers have these sorts of thoughts, though we seldom verbalize them—petty and cruel and thoroughly nasty. I am honestly not sure in whose image he was made.

“And Alice’s voice? What do you recall about hers?” Heather asked.

There is much that I could have told her about Alice Hayward’s voice. I could have described how silky and low it would become in a murmur in bed, or the vibrato it took on when she cried. One of the times when she was in my office—this was before I had crossed the Rubicon into her bed—her voice grew eerily even, almost clinical, when she was explaining to me the source of the chiaroscuro of yellow and hyacinth on her cheek. Most of the congregation accepted her claim that she had walked into an open medicine-cabinet door in the bathroom in the night. She had a swimmer’s body, and sometimes, when we were alone, she would sound to me like she had a swimmer’s voice: a bit throaty, occasionally hoarse, always a little more fragile than her lovely physique.
Remind me who I am
, she said to me one of our first mornings together in her and her husband’s bed.
Sometimes I can’t believe I’m the sort of woman who gets to have a lover
. I found the word
gets
powerfully endearing, as if I were a prize and adultery a privilege. She was blossoming, and I soaked in her every word.

With Heather, however, I shared none of that. I wasn’t yet prepared to reveal the secrets I knew of my most recent lover. Instead
I answered with an evasiveness that people later would say marked so much of my behavior that summer and was emblematic of a dangerous character flaw. A desiccated soul, an arctic heart. In hindsight, I should have told Heather something. Anything. I would have been better off that moment and, I imagine, in the months that followed. But I said nothing.

And when I look back on that Sunday, I should have seen the parallels between that elderly deacon and Heather Laurent—or, for that matter, between Heather and any of the people I had met in my life who had had about them the penumbra of an angel. But on that morning, a week to the day since the Haywards had died, I was far more focused on the dark of the world than I was on the light. I knew what had occurred seven days earlier in the Cape on the hill, and it seemed to me that if there was an otherworldly element residing somewhere deep inside each of our spirits or cores, it was far more likely to be demonic.

THE IDEA THAT I
was fleeing was ridiculous. It was absurd in that I answered my cell phone each and every time it rang—at least when I had it with me—and it was absurd in that I was traveling with a reasonably recognizable woman. (Yes, I know a writer is seldom as famous as a movie star: If Angelina Jolie wanders into a library, the fans and the media will swarm; if Margaret Atwood wanders into a cineplex, the lines for the popcorn barely will waver.)

I hadn’t told my mother where I was going, because I honestly hadn’t known myself when I left Bronxville. The same is true in regard to the Pastoral-Relations Committee and the deacons at the church in Haverill. Likewise, Heather hadn’t known at the time that she would go visit her sister in upstate New York, bringing with her in tow a minister who wasn’t sure what he should be doing with his life
or what it had meant that he had baptized a woman a half day before she would be strangled. I was quite content in Heather’s bed in her loft. She was, too, I believe, after all the traveling she had done in the preceding months. But whatever need she had to cocoon and replenish her (and I will use one of her words here) aura, it was subsumed by her worry about Amanda and her concern for that basket case of a pastor from Vermont. And so we disappeared into the Adirondacks.

And while it is tempting to express some understanding for the appalling ways that Catherine Benincasa or reporters or bloggers would misinterpret my movements—to begin a sentence with
Still
or
Nevertheless
—that would be disingenuous. The truth is, I don’t understand it. And though many people believe I am anything but forthright, in the end I was more candid than I wanted to be or expected to be or was even obliged to be. I know my crimes and I know my mistakes. I live with them.

But I also know that whatever else I may have done (or, worse, failed to do), I positively did not flee. It honestly hadn’t crossed my mind that there might be a need.

Of course, none of us ever knows as much as we think we do. None of us.
If there is a lesson to be learned from my fall—notice I did not say my rise and fall, because it’s not as if the ascent to the pulpit of a country church represents an especially glorious accomplishment—it is this: Believe no one. Trust no one. Assume no one really knows anything that matters at all. Because, alas, we don’t. All of our stories are suspect.

M
y husband is a great guy. It doesn’t take a dirtball like George Hayward or Stephen Drew for me to see that. I think those two have a lot more in common than the reverend ever would be willing to admit.

But that’s the thing about men like that. Total denial. Everyone talks about how a battered woman has a complete unwillingness to admit to herself what’s really going on in her life, and I can tell you that the river Denial is indeed pretty freaking wide in the minds of a lot of those victims. The worst, for me, are those cases where some boyfriend or stepfather is abusing the woman’s daughters, and when we finally charge the bastard—when the daughter finally comes forward—the woman defends the guy! Takes his side! Insists her own kid must be making this up or exaggerating. Trust me: No twelve-year-old girl exaggerates when Mom’s boyfriend makes her do things to him with her mouth.

And, clearly, Alice Hayward was no stranger to denial herself. When I returned to my office that Monday after viewing the mess up in Haverill, I learned that Alice had gotten a temporary relief-from-abuse
order that winter. Had managed to kick her husband’s ornery ass out of the house and—somehow—gotten him to go live for a couple of months at their place on Lake Bomoseen. And then, like so many battered women, had taken him back. Hadn’t even shown up for the hearing a week after the papers were served.

But the men’s rationalizations are even worse. They’ll curl your hair.

Now, Stephen Drew wasn’t using some poor woman’s face as a floor sander, and he wasn’t inflicting himself on some defenseless middle-school girl. (Note I am not being catty and adding “as far as we know.” Because, in my opinion, we do know: He wasn’t.) But he certainly abused his place and his power, and he sure as hell took advantage of women in his congregation. For a minister,
the guy had ice in his veins. Lived completely alone, didn’t even have a dog or a cat. He really creeped me out once when he went off on this riff about the Crucifixion as a form of execution. Very scholarly, but later it was clear that even his lawyer had wished he’d dialed down the serial-killer vibe.