Secrets of Eden (7 page)

“Yes.”

“At the baptism you told me about.”

“That’s right.”

“Did you marry them?”

“No. They were married in Bennington years before I met them.”

“Did you want her to leave him? Just kick him out—or get the heck out of that house herself and never go back?”

Yes
, I thought,
in hindsight I did want her to get out of that house. Briefly, perhaps, I even wanted her to move into mine. Into this parsonage
. But of course I didn’t say that. Because no one knew. Because Alice and I had barely even tiptoed around such a notion, even when we were alone in her home and content in the fog of a postcoital torpor—when, usually, all things seem possible and all lovers are optimists.

“I did,” I answered simply. “I kept hoping she would take Katie and run. Go anywhere. Move in with her parents in Nashua. Move in with Ginny right here. Perhaps get a place of her own in Bennington.”

“It’s not that easy. Not emotionally, not financially.”

“I know. She was married to a reprehensible man. She would have needed someone willing to step up and protect her. Still, I wish…”

“What do you wish?”

“I never want to see a marriage go belly-up.” It was not what I had planned to say, but I had to say something.

“Those whom God has joined together let no one put asunder?”

“Something like that. And sometimes I’m afraid that she tried to preserve the marriage for Katie.”

“That’s completely ridiculous, you know.”

“I do. And sometimes I’m afraid that she clung to the marriage because she was afraid she didn’t know what would become of her if she didn’t.”

“The devil she knew?”

“Precisely.”

“What about her friends? What did they want?”

I understood what she was getting at, and she was correct. “I know Ginny wanted her to divorce him. She loathed George. Thought he was absolutely despicable. She was thrilled when Alice got a temporary relief-from-abuse order and he went to live in their cottage on Lake Bomoseen for a couple of months.”

“When was that?”

“Just before Valentine’s Day. He came back just before Memorial Day.”

“Not all that long ago.”

“No.”

“So she got a restraining order—”

“A temporary restraining order. The police served it while George was at his office one Monday afternoon. There was a hearing scheduled a week later. Neither Alice nor George ever showed up.”

“That’s common.”

“I gather. Tell me, are you married? I presume not, because you’re not wearing a wedding ring.” I think I inquired largely because I wanted a respite from her questions. But it’s also possible that on some level
I still felt the need to be pastoral—to give her the chance to talk about herself for a moment. I may have been phoning it in by then—I may have been phoning it in for months—but old habits die hard.

“I’m not. But someday I will be, if only because I have a six-year-old girl’s obsession with weddings,” she said, and she shook her head as if she were in the midst of some small, odd moment of rapture. “Of all the rites of passage a culture creates for itself, weddings are perhaps the most beautiful. And, perhaps, the most mysterious.”

“Well, I certainly preferred doing marriages to funerals.”

“Preferred? Why the past tense? Isn’t that a little melodramatic?”

“No.”

“You really think you’re finished?” She smiled. “Come on, your faith is that fragile?”

I sighed. Across the street the small river burbled and one of the children there squealed. The swallow adjusted herself on her eggs, using her beak to pick at something invisible to me on her wing. And somewhere not all that far away, a dog barked. Years earlier, I recalled, when I had been a junior in college and a member in good standing of what some students dismissively called the God Squad, I had been asked—challenged, more precisely—by a classmate who viewed himself as an atheist to explain Auschwitz and cancer and typhoons in Bangladesh that drowned tens of thousands of people. As I sat on my porch that first afternoon with Heather Laurent, I wondered what I’d said; my world had shrunk to such a degree that I honestly couldn’t remember how I had responded. I wasn’t sure what I’d felt—other, of course, than any sentient person’s reasonable sadness—at all the funerals over which I had officiated and all the times I had sat beside beds in hospitals and homes and held people’s hands as they died. As my own father had expired in a hospital room and spoke his last words before he sank into unconsciousness: “Go. Just…go.” (I didn’t. My mother, my sister, and I would stay till the end.) I had
watched them all depart with what must have seemed to them as confidence and composure, my faith as solid and intact as the heavy pasta pot that hung on a hook above the parsonage stove. But something was different now: It was as if age or rust had worn a great hole in the bottom of that pot and my faith had trickled out like warm water. There were no answered prayers here. And so instead of addressing Heather’s question, I observed, “With everything that must be going on in your life right now, you’ve come here.”

“And that surprises you.”

“It astonishes me.”

“It shouldn’t,” she said.

“No?”

She shook her head. “Not at all. My father used to beat the living hell out of my mother.”

My stomach lurched a little bit at the revelation, but years of pastoral hand-holding kept me from reacting in any visible way, and I mouthed the words I’d probably said hundreds of times every year of my ministerial life: “I’m sorry. I’m very, very sorry.”

“Don’t be. You weren’t the one who hit her.”

“Still…I’m sorry.”

“No, no, no.
I’m
sorry. I shouldn’t have dropped the bombshell on you like that. I’m used to most people knowing.”

“Knowing?”

“A lot of their story is in
Angels and Aurascapes
.”

“Are they divorced?”

She gazed out at the maples behind my house and then looked me squarely in the eye. “They’re dead. When I was fourteen, a few months after my sister and I were sent away to boarding school, my father killed my mother—and then killed himself.”

T
hat afternoon Heather shared with me an abbreviated but nonetheless harrowing account of her parents’ sordid and, in the end, horrific marriage. In some ways its trajectory was eerily similar to the Haywards’. But, of course, in other ways it had its own idiosyncrasies and detours. Tolstoy was right about families. The most salient feature of her parents’ marriage was money: Both Alex and Courtney Laurent came from what my mother would refer to as “families with means,” though I am not sure that expression does justice to the veritable bank vaults that subsidized the Laurents. Apparently Alex and Courtney had grown accustomed to getting everything, needing nothing, and behaving in a fashion that suggested a complete uninterest in the responsibilities that came with all those advantages. The result, in Heather’s opinion, is that her father was selfish and spoiled, while her mother was entitled and helpless. It was, in her mother’s case, almost a learned helplessness. And so while Courtney Laurent had the fiscal resources at her disposal that most abused women lack, she would have needed someone to remind her of the reality that she had alternatives. Options. But Alex, in the
tradition of most batterers, had seen to it by then that she was more or less entombed in the marriage: cut off from her family, out of touch with her closest friends. The Laurents had more money and more connections than the Haywards (though the Haywards were, by any fiscal barometer, extremely comfortable) and thus made a much bigger media splash when Alex Laurent shot his wife in the living room and then killed himself, but otherwise the scaffolding of the tragedy was not dissimilar.

Later Heather and I ventured to Ginny O’Brien’s to retrieve the key to the Hayward house. Unlike me, Ginny knew exactly who Heather Laurent was, and in the woman’s presence her demeanor was transformed from shaken and grieving to a little giddy. She was suddenly a bit like a hyperactive puppy, and I was reminded of the Haywards’ affectionate but needy springer spaniel. Ginny had read
Angels and Aurascapes
, and when I introduced them, she told the author how much the book had meant to her—and how she had already marked
A Sacred While
as “to read” on all her online book forums and discussion groups, and suggested to the church book group that they tackle the new one together that autumn. (My sense, now having read both of Heather’s books, is that Ginny most likely was made deeply uncomfortable by Heather’s chapters on the “auras of death” but saw the logic and importance of, once in a while, taking a long walk in the woods with an angel.) We did not see either Katie or her grandparents, but I hadn’t expected we would. I had spent a part of the morning with the three of them in my office at the church, and I knew they had a variety of errands that afternoon that ranged from the merely unpleasant to the downright ghoulish. They were seeing the mortician in Bennington, for instance, to pick out a casket, and deciding whether Alice should be buried in the cemetery in Haverill or with other members of her family in Nashua. I knew that her parents were going to choose Nashua soon enough and were simply trying to spare the feelings of
Alice’s friends and her pastor in Vermont. But they were nonetheless taking the time to visit the cemetery, an act of due diligence that couldn’t have been easy.

George’s body—its eternal resting place was of great interest to Alice’s mother and father—was going to be buried back in Buffalo, which mattered because Alice’s family wanted to be sure that she was nowhere near the man who had killed her. Ginny, too. Ginny, however, had recommended cremating George Hayward, “since that vicious bastard’s soul is already roasting in hell, anyway.”