“Do you have any eye drops?” she asked him in a low voice.
“Yes, as it happens, I do.”
She waited while he ran upstairs to the third floor, thereby betraying where he’d been hiding his paraphernalia. The complicity in their transaction, like the complicity of being in on the secret of his and Judson’s war game, was giving her a sense of what life might be like in a happier family, with her at the center of it.
“You can keep this,” Perry said, returning with a bottle. “My eye-drop-using days are over.”
“Are you worried about Mom? The fact that she hasn’t even called?”
“You think she’s lying frozen in a snowdrift.”
“It’s just weird.”
Perry frowned. “What time does the reception start?”
“Six thirty.”
“So here’s an idea. Why don’t you go to the concert and let Jay and me go to the Haefles’？ Admittedly, I’m judging only by appearances, but I have the sense you don’t actually want to miss the concert.”
“I don’t think the Haefles want little kids there.”
“Assuming you don’t put me in that category, I think you’re underestimating Jay. He has an old soul.”
Becky considered her long-haired brother. To feel allied with his brainpower, rather than mocked and threatened by it, was a strange sensation. “You would do that for me?”
It was painful to recall, but Russ had loved Rick Ambrose.
Once upon a time, in New York, at the seminary on East Forty-ninth Street, Russ and Marion had been the It couple, into whose married-student apartment other young seminarians crowded three or four nights a week to smoke their cigarettes, listen to jazz, and inspire one another with visions of modern Christianity’s renaissance in social action. Twiggy, pretty Marion, more deeply and eclectically read than anyone else, wearing snug pedal pushers and bulky sweaters that evoked the Welsh countryside of Dylan Thomas, was the envy of Russ’s fellow seminarians. Whatever she and Russ did was ipso facto the hip thing. Even pulling up stakes and relocating to rural Indiana, which he’d felt obliged to do when Marion became pregnant and his applications for more exotic postings were rejected, had seemed like an edgy move. Only when Marion withdrew into motherhood, grew heavier and wearier, and Russ needed to come up with fifty sermons a year, rewritten by Marion and delivered in two churches with a combined flock of fewer than three hundred, at eight thirty and ten o’clock every Sunday, did the life she’d once made large for him begin to feel inescapably small. Whenever he contrived a respite from the Indiana farmhouse, by begging favors of pastors from nearby churches, and attended conferences in Columbus or Chicago or protested for civil rights, he was bittersweetly reminded of the edge that he and Marion had lost.
In prosperous New Prospect, although he continued to agitate for social justice, the political sleepiness of First Reformed had just about defeated him when Rick Ambrose arrived to wake it up. Where Russ came by his alienation from the suburbs honestly, by virtue of his Mennonite childhood, Ambrose’s was adopted. He’d been the causeless young rebel in the otherwise happy family of an endocrinologist in Shaker Heights, Ohio. On the night of his high-school graduation, he and his girlfriend had ridden his motorcycle down the main drag of Shaker Heights and straight out of town. A month later, on a highway in Idaho, he and the girl had been passed by four teenagers doing a hundred miles an hour in a Chevy that broadsided a rancher crossing in front of them in his pickup. Beside the road, staring at teenaged death, Ambrose had heard a bell-clear calling from God. Seven years later, as a minister in training, he felt called to work with troubled young people. When he came to Russ’s office to accept, in person, the job of director of youth programming, he flattered Russ. A congregation in Oak Park had offered him a position with better pay, but he’d chosen First Reformed because, he said, he admired Russ’s vocal commitment to peace and justice. He said, “I think we’ll make a great team.”
Warmed by the sense of being recognized, and taken with the simmering charisma of his young associate, imagining they might become friends, Russ repeatedly invited him to dinner at the parsonage. When Ambrose finally accepted, and lingered at the table after the kids had been excused, he paid so much attention to Marion that Russ felt uneasy about the scant attention he’d lately given her himself. Marion had never been a flirt, but she seemed enjoyably energized by Ambrose’s intensity. After he left, Russ was surprised to hear she hadn’t liked him. “That glower of his,” she said. “It’s like a mind-control trick he picked up somewhere and fell in love with. It’s a car salesman’s trick—making people afraid they don’t have your approval. They’ll do anything to get it, and they never stop to wonder why they even want it.”