It was true that, for all his foul-mouthed forthrightness, there was something unknowable about Ambrose, and Russ never quite shook the awareness of his affluent background, in contrast to his own. But Russ had an eager and generous heart, which suited him well to the ministry, and Ambrose had been right: they made a good team. Their mentoring styles were complementary, Ambrose’s psychological and streetwise, Russ’s more political and Bible-oriented, and he was grateful that Ambrose took charge of the stormier kids in the youth fellowship, leaving him to lead the others by example.
After hearing Russ’s stories of his time among the Navajos, Ambrose had proposed that the fellowship refocus itself on a spring work camp in Arizona. Russ loved the idea so much that he soon forgot it hadn’t been his. Arizona was his place, after all. Arriving on the arid reservation, landing in waste and privation beyond what anyone else on the bus had experienced, he felt forty pairs of suburban teenage eyes looking to him for courage and guidance. It transpired that Ambrose, though he had the swagger of a tough who didn’t shy from manual labor, couldn’t so much as drive a clean nail without first bending two of them. Time and again, he came to Russ, or even to Clem, for help with seemingly elementary tasks. Although his ineptitude later became a real issue—was arguably, indeed, the catalyst of Russ’s humiliation—on the first spring trip it served to highlight Russ’s capability.
By the following October, so many teenagers were thronging to the fellowship that Russ worried about a surprise inspection by the fire marshal. Beyond the sheer numbers, what excited him was the kind of kids who were joining. There were long-haired musicians, there was a raft of blond girls from the Episcopal church, there were even some Black kids, and they weren’t just seeking spiritual renewal. They wanted to invite guest speakers from the inner city and the peace movement, they wanted to examine their suburban affluence. For six years, in his sermons, Russ had tried to awaken the adult congregation of First Reformed to the implications of its privilege. Now, suddenly, for the first time since New York, he was at the center of the It place. He knew he had Ambrose to thank for this, but he also knew that reports of the Arizona trip had set the high school afire, and that the promise of a second trip was driving the rise in membership numbers. In November, after a rollicking Sunday-night meeting, Ambrose, who so rarely smiled, turned to Russ with a cockeyed grin.
“Pretty wild, isn’t it.”
“Incredible,” Russ said.
“I counted fourteen kids who weren’t here last week.”
“Absolutely incredible.”
“It was Arizona,” Ambrose said, more seriously. “That trip completely changed the dynamic. That’s what made this whole thing real.”
Russ, already giddy, felt even giddier. Arizona was his place. He, no less than Ambrose, had changed the dynamic. In his giddiness, through the winter and into the early spring, he plunged into the spirit of the times. He took the risk of rapping about his feelings, he opened himself to new styles of music. He found that shutting his eyes and raising a clenched fist, while speaking of Dr. King or Stokely Carmichael, whose hand he’d once shaken, had a powerful effect on the young people. Though it never sounded quite convincing, he took to using curse words such as bullshit. He let his hair grow over his collar and started a beard, the latter lasting until Marion remarked on his resemblance to John the Baptist. He was stung enough to shave the beard, but he felt that Marion was becoming a drag. He preferred the excitement of the attention he was getting from the new breed of girls in the fellowship. They swore as bluely as the boys did, they were loud and gross in the sexual innuendoes they traded with the boys, and yet, being suburban, their na?veté was even greater than his had been at their age. None of them had decapitated a chicken or seen a bank seize a man’s ancestral farm. Russ believed he could offer them a depth of authentic experience lacking in young Ambrose. He put more thought into his Sunday-night prayers than he put into his Sunday-morning sermons （Marion did much of that thinking for him anyway）， because the dream he’d once had in New York, the vision of a nation transformed by vigorously Christian ethics, was alive in the blue-jeaned throng in the First Reformed function hall, not in the sleepy gray heads in the sanctuary.
Among the new converts to the fellowship was a young woman, Laura Dobrinsky, who was tight with Tanner Evans and thus instantly popular. At her first meeting, Russ had greeted her with a hug that she did not return, and at subsequent meetings he’d been unsettled by the openly hostile way she stared at him. It seemed strangely personal, unlike anything he could remember being the object of. Per the discussions of adolescent psychology he’d had with Ambrose, Russ hypothesized that Laura had a problem with her father and was seeing him in Russ. But one afternoon in March, ten days before the Arizona trip, he emerged from the church library, where he’d been consulting references for a sermon, and heard Laura Dobrinsky uttering the words That dude is such an unbelievable fucking dork. From the silence that fell as he rounded a corner and saw half a dozen girls seated in the corridor, and from the glances the girls then exchanged, the smirks they imperfectly suppressed, he conceived the hurtful suspicion that Laura had been referring to him. Especially hurtful was that one of the girls smirking was the popular, blond Sally Perkins, who a few weeks earlier, after school, had come to his office and opened up to him about her unhappiness at home. Most of the popular kids preferred to go to Ambrose with their troubles, and Russ had been surprised and gratified that Sally had come to him.