“Hooray, hooray,” she said. “I knew I was right.”
“You were right about Perry, too. He did sell marijuana.”
“Of course I was right. Aren’t I always?”
“Well, so, I could use your advice there. Are you, ah, private?”
“Sort of. My folks are here for dinner.”
“Oh, I’m sorry to interrupt.”
“I was just clearing the table. Tell me how I can help.”
From two floors below came a burst of family laughter in which Perry’s arpeggio of hilarity was uppermost. Russ wondered if, a year from now, he wouldn’t have to call Frances; if he might be sitting down to dinner with her and her folks.
“Well, apparently,” he said, “Perry’s cleaned up his act. At this point, I could just let it drop, but I feel some sort of punishment is in order.”
“You’re asking the wrong gal. You may remember what’s in my sock drawer.”
“I do. And the fact—well, the experiment we talked about. It complicates things for me. I can’t punish Perry and then—you know. It would be hypocritical.”
“That’s an easy one. Just don’t do the second thing.”
“But I want to. I want to do it with you.”
“Okay, wow. I should probably get off the phone.”
“Just quickly tell me if you’re still interested in doing this.”
“Definitely getting off the phone.”
“Frances—”
“I’m not saying no. I’m saying I need to think about it.”
“You were the one who suggested it!”
“Mm, not quite. The just-you-and-me part was your idea.”
He couldn’t have asked for a clearer indication that his desires were known to her. To be engaged in sexual implication, in his church-provided house, on a family holiday, was shameful and thrilling.
“Anyway,” she said, “Merry Christmas. I’ll see you in church on Sunday.”
“You’re not coming to the midnight service?”
“No. But your eagerness is noted, Reverend Hildebrandt.”
In the manner of the early Christians, who’d believed that the Messiah who’d walked the earth within living memory would soon return—that the Day of Judgment was just around the corner—Russ imagined that his situation with Frances, already so fraught with implication, so poised to blossom into rapture, would resolve itself in a matter of days. While he awaited her judgment, which seemed imminent, he postponed a confrontation with his son, and by the time he understood how long he might have to wait, Perry’s transgressions had become, as Marion had said, ancient history. Perry really did seem to be doing better. No longer an evasive, late-sleeping boy, he seemed slimmer and perhaps a little taller, and he was always in good spirits. Because Marion had taken to sleeping on the third floor and keeping odd hours, it sometimes happened that Perry, who now rose even earlier than Russ, made breakfast for him and Judson.
Beginning with old Mrs. O’Dwyer, who’d succumbed to pneumonia, the new year brought a string of funerals for which Russ did all the counseling and officiating, while the Haefles vacationed in Florida. He still had the extra duties Dwight had given him when he left Crossroads, and now that he’d been reinstated in the group he felt obliged to attend Sunday-night meetings. To show Ambrose the sincerity of his repentance, while avoiding the hazard of counseling troubled teenagers, he volunteered to handle all the logistics for the Arizona trip—hiring the buses, reviewing the church’s liability policy, procuring project supplies, coordinating with the Navajos.
Mired in work, he watched Marion race ahead of him. She was visibly losing weight, abetted by smoking and a regimen of punishing walks. He was included in the dinners she continued to put on the table, but she now sorted through the laundry hamper and set aside his clothes while she washed everyone else’s. He attended church functions without her, poured hours he couldn’t spare into sermons that refused to come into focus without her help, while she went out to the library, to lectures at the Ethical Culture Society, and to the decaying clapboard theater that was home to the New Prospect Players. Her new independence smacked of women’s liberation, which he approved of at the societal level, and he might have approved of it in his wife if he’d been getting anywhere with Frances.
But the day of judgment kept receding. On the Tuesday circle’s first outing to the inner city after Christmas, Frances attached herself so tightly to Kitty Reynolds that he couldn’t get a single private word with her. When he called her house, a few days later, in the guise of routine pastoral concern, she said she was late to class and would stop by his office later in the week. He waited, in vain, for eight days. Feeling unfairly at her mercy, casting about for leverage, he was inspired to invite an unmarried seminarian, Carolyn Polley, to come along on the next Tuesday outing. Carolyn was a friend of Ambrose and an adviser in Crossroads, and Russ hoped that by insisting that she ride with him, by making a fuss of introducing her to Theo Crenshaw, and by keeping her at his side throughout the day, he might provoke some jealousy in Frances. Instead he provoked a statement from Carolyn, in the awkwardly explicit style of Crossroads, that she had a boyfriend in Minneapolis. Frances herself was so chummy with Kitty Reynolds, so intimately murmuring, that Russ, in his jealousy, wondered if her hunger for new experiences might extend as far as lesbianism. Not once did she look at him directly. It was as if none of the tensy-tension between them, none of the innuendo on Christmas Eve, had ever happened.