Secrets of Eden (2 page)

When Alice had emerged from the pond beside a wild rosebush with some of its delicate flowers still in bloom, she had fixed her eyes for a moment on the cluster of people in a half circle at the lip of the water. Their collective gaze was as bright as the sun. My parishioners were dressed for a picnic, and they were joyful. I watched Alice give her daughter a small wave. Katie had turned fifteen that summer and had suddenly, almost preternaturally, been transformed from a girl into a woman (or, as her mother had put it to me once when we were alone, her voice rich with love, “a tart with a heart”). The baseball caps, an affectation that had once been as much a requisite part of her clothing as her sneakers or shoes, were gone, and she had allowed her dark hair to grow long. She had replaced her overalls and T-shirts with skirts and short summer dresses and skinny jeans that seemed to cling to her long legs like Lycra. She wore flip-flops and ballet flats instead of the sneakers or the black patent leather shoes with neon spangles she had worn to church as a little girl and christened her “happy Janes.” She had a small stud in her nose and great hoops in her ears. She looked nothing like the child I would recall eating a blue
Popsicle on the steps of the village’s general store or the reserve outfielder I had coached for two years on the town’s Little League team, a player more likely to harvest dandelions in the grass than run down fly balls. She was disarmingly precocious and always had been. Now she wrote for the school newspaper and the school literary magazine, and she was one of those children who seem to defy the logic of genes: She was, in my opinion, smarter than both of her parents. She was a good kid who had become a good teen—too intelligent for drugs and too ambitious to get pregnant. She had survived the worst a man like her father could offer and moved on. In two years, I told myself, she would get out of Haverill, whether it was to a small state college in a remote corner of Vermont or to someplace more impressive in Massachusetts or Maine or New York. My money was on the latter. I hoped the child was thinking Ivy or Little Ivy.

She no longer came to church or to the church’s teenage Youth Group meetings with any regularity, but she had come to her mother’s baptism that morning, and I was pleased. She waved back at Alice, perhaps a little embarrassed, but I imagine also happy for her mother, since this was something that her mother clearly desired. As Katie had grown older—more mature, more confident—I sensed that she had begun to intercede on Alice’s behalf when her father would threaten her mother. I knew of at least one punch she had prevented with her screams and her anger, and I assumed that Ginny O’Brien, Alice’s best friend in the Women’s Circle, knew of a good many more.

When Alice glanced back at me, she wiped the pond water from her eyes and used her thumbs like hooks to hoist back behind her ears the twin drapes of auburn mane that had fallen in front of her face. She then started from the pond, pulling at her long wet T-shirt the way all the women did, holding the material away from her chest so it wouldn’t cling to her breasts as she returned to dry land. Beneath that shirt she was wearing a Speedo tank suit with a paisley pattern that
reminded me vaguely of the upholstery on the couch in my mother’s apartment in Bronxville, and her feet were bare. She had painted her toenails a cupcake-icing pink. Most women were baptized fully clothed in the baggiest pants and sweatshirts they could find, and—given the man to whom she was married—I found myself pondering the reality that she would never have worn only a bathing suit and a T-shirt had her husband been present. He wouldn’t have allowed it, even though the T-shirt happened to fall to midthigh. But I also wondered if this was a rebellion of some sort, a challenge, because there was always the chance he would hear and there was always the likelihood he would see one of those photos that Ginny was taking. Had I not known the details of what she endured in her home, I would have found the image of Alice Hayward emerging wet like a sea nymph from the Brookners’ pond an inappropriate, earthy, but inescapably erotic treat. She was thirty-eight when she died, the second-youngest member of the Women’s Circle, and she had been blessed with eyes that were round and deep and that rested in her pale face like circles of melted chocolate.

When she reached the grass, almost neon green that morning after a week of midsummer rains, her friend Ginny hugged her. The clouds had finally rolled east in the night, and the sun shone down upon the two women, now sisters in Christ, as they embraced.

Years earlier Ginny had joined the church by a simple statement of faith. Not quite five minutes out of a Sunday service, a little paperwork, a handshake, some polite applause. No water.

Not Alice, not at that point in her life. She wanted to leave absolutely nothing to chance, and so she wanted baptism and she wanted it by immersion. Full immersion. She had come to Christ, and she wanted to be certain that she wouldn’t be kept from the kingdom by an ecclesiastical technicality.

And so we went to the Brookners’ pond after the regular worship
service, the water high and clear that Sunday morning after all that late-July rain.

“Do you believe in the Lord Jesus Christ as your personal savior?” I asked her.

“I do.”

“Do you intend to follow him all the days of your life?”

“I do,” she said again.

I cradled the back of her head with my left hand and held her clasped fingers like the handles of a shopping bag with my right, and then leaned her backward beneath the surface of the cold, mountain-fed waters, baptizing her in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.

There.

Like Christ, she had been buried and reborn. She had risen, been resurrected. The symbolism is unmistakable, as clear as any metaphor in the Bible. I wondered when I baptized Alice why so few members of the congregation chose immersion. The wetness means more than the words.

HER HUSBAND, GEORGE
, hadn’t set foot inside the church in at least four or five years, and he had not come to his wife’s baptism. Later I would ask myself whether it would have made a difference if he had seen his wife baptized. I would see in my mind the deep, eggplant-colored bruises from his thumbs on her neck, as well as the marks on his face where she had gouged out whole chunks of his cheeks with her fingernails. (I had expected that the right side of his face would have been completely obliterated, but it wasn’t. A little swollen, a little distorted, but not nearly the ruin I had imagined. We could all see the scratch marks there.) Alice may have walked into the water with resignation that Sunday morning, but she had fought
hard for her life that Sunday night—if only reflexively. If only because she thought of her daughter and experienced one last, fierce pang of maternal protectiveness. If only because the way that he killed her was brutal and she couldn’t help but battle back against the pain. And so the question of whether George’s attendance at the spectacle (and, trust me, immersion
is
spectacle) would have saved Alice’s life dogged me. That question, as well as the myriad others that followed it relentlessly like the rhythms of a sermon—would he have been transformed by his wife’s faith? would he have given therapy a chance? would he have stopped pulling fistfuls of Alice’s hair like black rope? would he have stopped yanking back her head like a church bell? would they both be alive today?—bobbed amid the waves of images that roll behind all of our eyes.

I followed Alice from the water, my own blue jeans heavy around my hips because they had sponged up so much of the Brookners’ pond. Some of my fellow pastors, especially my peers in the South, wear weighted black robes that allow them to wade into the water without fear that the robe will float about them like algae. Not me. Weighting a robe in my mind transformed meaningful ritual into pretentious theatrics. Besides, I liked wearing blue jeans into the water, I liked the way they represented the ordinariness of our daily lives as we presented ourselves to God. And the fact is, I actually performed very few baptisms by immersion. This is Vermont. Our church, a union of the old Baptist and Congregational fellowships that had thrived in the nineteenth century when the community had been larger, didn’t even have a baptismal tank, and Alice was the only person I baptized that summer by immersion, the sole parishioner to join the church in that manner.

“That was so powerful,” Ginny said to her friend. “Aren’t you glad you did it?” When they pulled apart, the front of Ginny’s shirt was almost as damp as Alice’s.

“I am,” Alice said, and I saw that she’d begun to cry. Katie noticed, too, and did what she probably did often when she saw her mother’s eyes fill with tears. She patted her on the back as if she were their family’s springer spaniel, Lula, offering gentle taps that were about as close as a fifteen-year-old with a stud in her nose gets to an embrace in public with her mother.

The Brookners, the family whose pond we used, were summer people, a wealthy family who came north to Haverill from a suburb of Manhattan sometime around Memorial Day weekend and lived at the top of one of the hills that surrounded the village. Michelle Brookner and the three children did, anyway. Michelle’s husband, Gordon, was an attorney who would drive up for weekends and a two-week vacation in August. From the Brookners’ pond, it was impossible to see the town itself, not even the church steeple, but we could see the verdant hollow in which the village sat, as well as the cemetery at the top of the distant ridge. I looked that way to avert my eyes from Alice’s tears.

Members of the Women’s Circle gathered around Ginny and Alice, embracing Alice as Ginny had, and I found George’s absence conspicuous in ways that it wasn’t at a routine Sunday-morning service. I wondered briefly whether I should have visited him prior to the baptism and asked him to come. Convinced him. Later, of course, I would blame myself for not insisting that he attend, just as I would blame myself for not understanding the meaning of the ritual in Alice’s mind—for denying in my head what I must have known in my heart.

When the medical examiner did the autopsies on the Haywards, he reported that Alice’s rear end and her back were flecked with fresh contusions, which meant that George had beaten her the Friday or Saturday night before she was baptized and none of us knew. At least I didn’t. Her kidneys were so badly bruised that she might very well have peed blood before she’d come to church that morning.
Nevertheless, I don’t think it was that finding that set me off, because I wouldn’t learn that particular detail until much later. In my mind at least, I was gone from the church the moment Ginny had called me the day after the baptism, that Monday morning, sobbing uncontrollably, with the news that George and Alice were dead and it looked like he had killed them both. In the midst of Ginny’s wails—and she really was wailing, this was indeed a lament of biblical proportions—I somehow heard in my head the last word that Alice had addressed solely to me, that single word
there
, and
the seeds of my estrangement from my calling had been sown.

There.

I’d nodded when Alice had said it; I’d echoed her word. I’d known exactly what she’d meant. She wasn’t referring to Romans or Colossians, to the letters of Peter or Paul. She wasn’t thinking of any of the passages in the Bible explaining baptism that we’d discussed at a table outside my church office or in the living room of her house as her immersion approached.

She was thinking of John, and of Christ’s three words at the end of his torment on the cross; she was imagining that precise moment when he bows his head and gives up his spirit.

It is finished, said Christ. There.

And Alice Hayward was ready to die.

V
ermont rarely has more than ten or fifteen homicides in any given year, and while the majority of them begin with domestic disputes, murder-suicides are blessedly uncommon: Usually a husband or ex-husband, boyfriend or ex-boyfriend, merely shoots or strangles the poor woman with whom he might have built a life and then goes to prison for the majority of what remains of his own. Frequently he turns himself in. We are conditioned to expect one dead at the scenes of our homicides, not two. And so the Haywards’ story—a murder and a suicide together—was both horrific and exceptional.

George Hayward had come to southern Vermont from Buffalo as an ambitious young retailer who saw that Manchester could use more than high-end designer outlets and shops that sold maple syrup and quaint Green Mountain trinkets. He was the first to see that a clothing store for teens and young adults and modeled on Abercrombie & Fitch—but stressing natural fibers and stocking Vermont-made clothing—could anchor a corner of the block near the town’s busiest intersection and thrive though surrounded by national chains that sold
clothes sewn together in sweatshops for less. There were just enough tourists and just enough locals and—when word filtered south to Bennington, half an hour away by car—just enough college students to keep the store afloat through its first year, and by its second it was an institution. It actually would become a destination for young adults as far away as Albany, Rutland, and Pittsfield. Eventually his magic touch would extend to a southern-style rib restaurant (skiers in the winter particularly loved it) and an upscale toy store that used retro toys as the marketing bait for baby boomers, but electronic gadgets to ensnare their kids and make the serious money. For a long time, the formula worked. In addition to the house that he built in Haverill, he acquired what he and Alice referred to as a cottage on Lake Bomoseen—a svelte stretch of water perhaps nine miles long that over the years had numbered among its guests the Marx Brothers, Alexander Woollcott, and Rebecca West. Based on the photos, however, the cottage was actually rather elegant: a post-and-beam barn frame with a wall of glass windows facing west to savor the sunsets over the rippling pinewoods.

George had been a teen model in Buffalo, and he had grown into a dramatically handsome adult. He’d actually worn a wedding band before he was married to Alice to minimize the number of women who would hit on him on the streets and in the restaurants of first Buffalo and then Manchester and Bennington. Once when he was drunk, he told friends—famously, since this is Vermont, a state in which vanity and self-absorption are still viewed by the locals as character defects commensurate with gluttony, greed, and sloth—that his magnetism had helped to ensure that he found the requisite bankers and private investors to bankroll his big ideas before he had a track record. One of my parishioners said that he looked like Prince Valiant with a better haircut: His hair was a shade more terra-cotta than blond and was only beginning to thin now that he was on the far side of forty, and his skin barely showed the wear and tear of either retail risk or age. Some years he had
a mustache that was the color of faded pumpkin pine, but he was clean-shaven the summer he murdered his wife. If he hadn’t started drinking so heavily in his mid-thirties, I imagine his workout regimen would have kept even his slight, midlife paunch at bay. He was handsome and strong and could be charming and charismatic when he wanted. He had a chip on his shoulder (wholly unwarranted), and he was more savvy than smart, but he was far from humorless. He was a person of some renown in the southern Vermont business community. There were people who were firmly convinced that Alice, though pretty, was lucky to have him. Almost no one knew that she had gotten a temporary relief-from-abuse order against him that last winter of her life, and many people suspected that he had left her in those months they were separated.