Elaine laughed. “As long as you care nothing for your belongings!”
Hannah eyed her little sisters and said solemnly, “I’ll make sure they don’t break anything.”
“Ah, well,” Peter said with equal gravity, “we couldn’t ask for better assurance than that.”
When they had left, Peter snorted. “Hannah is the worst of them!”
Over the next hour, we heard the occasional squeal of four girls playing in a room down the hall, and the house felt as if the furnace had finally kicked on. I can’t remember what we talked about, likely holiday events and summer plans, but I was distracted. Peter was watching his wife with an expression I couldn’t quite unravel. A type of longing, almost reverence, as if she were a tenuous new love, not the woman he tussled with over bills and child care and household chores. You’d think he was only now discovering the depth of her mysteries and wonders.
When they left that afternoon, the little girls wore lipstick and blush and silver ribbons in braided hair, and for the first time in a long time I felt the affectionate familiarity with Peter I’d been missing.
* * *
—
THAT NIGHT, I sat in my office clearing old emails and thinking of Peter, how he’d held Elaine in his sight with such tender curiosity. I wondered whether, after marrying Katherine, I’d ever let my eyes rest on her that way.
Probably not. By the time we’d said our vows, I believed I saw my wife with near-perfect clarity. I believed it was that sight that would keep our marriage safe. In truth, I had made myself blind to her, turned her static, destroyed any possibility of discovering in her something new. I was always calling her “my wife.” And to a woman like Katherine, wouldn’t that very term be a type of violence? The shearing back of a full and wild human into a form that can be owned and contained, safe and neat and completely known. “My wife.” I was always saying that. No wonder she fled the confines of me.
I was about to shut down the computer when Evangeline poked her head in to say she was going to bed.
“That was nice today, wasn’t it?” I said.
“What?”
“Peter and Elaine and the girls stopping by.”
Evangeline shrugged.
“You didn’t like having them here?”
“The little girls were fun.”
“And Peter and Elaine?”
“Elaine seems nice.”
“But not Peter?”
“I don’t want to talk about it.”
I swiveled to face her. “No, really, I’d like to know.”
“It’s just that . . .” She let out an exasperated breath. “I just don’t think he’s who you think he is.”
“What do you mean?”
“This whole aren’t-I-an-amazing-family-man-and-school-leader shtick he’s got going on. It’s kind of bullshit.”
“I don’t see how you’re in a position to—”
Her hand shot up. “I told you. I don’t want to talk about this. I said I’m going to bed, and that’s what I’m doing.”
After she left, I stared blankly at the computer. It must have been painful for Evangeline to see such a close-knit family, to witness their easy touches and laughter, to know that each child was cherished. I understood why she’d rather deny the reality of such a family than accept the unfairness of her own life.
As for Peter, the school’s rumor mill likely contributed to her false impression. A tale had spread in the fall of a supposed affair between Peter and a pretty new teacher. I was back east when the rumor hit its brief peak, but I would never have believed it in any case. Students imagine dalliances between faculty and staff on the flimsiest of evidence. Peter was a powerful man. It did not surprise me in the least that, on a few occasions, he had become the object of sexual fantasy.
* * *
—
WHEN SCHOOL RESUMED, life took on a soothing routine. I was so loath to risk it I considered canceling the clearness committee. But George had gone to some lengths to put it together, and schedules had almost certainly been changed on my behalf.
On the second Tuesday of January, I arrived at the meetinghouse at six thirty in the evening. George had just finished setting up the conference room. He’d arranged three chairs to form a soft curve facing a fourth chair that would be mine. An end table with a lamp sat beside the lone chair. Though likely aiming for coziness, the way George powered the lamp—with an orange extension cord stretched across yards of bare linoleum—created an atmosphere of inquisition rather than of soulfulness.
I approved of George’s other choices though. He’d turned off the overhead fluorescents and provided two more lamps that lit a narrow credenza along a wall. He’d collapsed the large center table and leaned it at the back so there’d be no barrier between us. The effect, while far from intimate, was overall less harsh than it would have been without his efforts.
George and I had agreed the committee would be small. I didn’t know whom he had selected. He hadn’t volunteered the information, and I had decided to make it a part of my spiritual practice to accept whoever presented.
Ralph Prouser was the first to arrive. I glared at George—surely he understood the long-standing tension between us—but his back was turned in greeting Ralph, who looked past him to acknowledge me with a stern nod. A short, wiry man with an unkempt graying beard, Ralph was in the overalls and canvas jacket he wore at his thrift store. In all the years I’d known him, he’d never once broken the silence in meeting and wasn’t one to waste words outside it either.
One of the few times he had spoken to me was at a holiday gathering. He’d downed several glasses of wine, then sidled up as I was about to dig into the onion dip. “Perhaps you could tell me, Isaac, how you and the Lord came to be so close. I’ve never known anyone else who’s chosen with such regularity to speak for the Divine.”
What galled me was this: Ralph didn’t believe, as I did, in the need for a physical sign from God before breaking the silence. My Pennsylvania meeting insisted on a quickening before speaking—a tremor or sweat or a wildly beating heart, some clear manifestation that the One wished to convey a message. Many of these West Coast Quakers didn’t even recognize the term “quickening.” They broke the silence on the barest of thresholds, suggesting only that a Friend consider waiting for an “inner nudge.”
Once I proposed that we hold ourselves to a higher standard, pointing out that a “nudge” was far more likely to arise from one’s ego than from anything of the Divine. Ralph snorted when I said this. Truly, it was nearly a guffaw. Yet he stood before me at that holiday table, mocking me, implying that I was the one who had violated Quaker standards.
I should have specifically requested that Ralph not be on my committee. I was still trying to catch George’s eye when Abigail Groff came through the door. Though her long gray hair was limp and her skin sallow, you could see the beauty she’d once been. That was before her husband died of pancreatic cancer at fifty-four and the decades of work on their horse-training barn were lost to bankruptcy, before the stress stripped the meat off her bones, left her thin and angular in her flannel shirt and muck boots. Yet when she turned my way, a strength landed on me, an intelligence deeper and more beautiful than any young woman could ever muster.