and we had all begun to swelter over our dinners. There was so much still in between: the potluck, the baptism, the word.
Not
The baptism immediately followed the Sunday service, a good old-fashioned, once-a-year Baptist dunking in the Brookners’ pond. Behind me I heard the congregation clapping for Alice, including the members of the Women’s Circle, at least one of whom, like me, was aware of what sometimes went on in the house the Haywards had built together on the ridge.
None of them, I know now, had heard what she’d said. But even if they had, I doubt they would have heard in that one word exactly what I did, because that single syllable hadn’t been meant for them. It had been meant only for me.
“There,” I said to Alice in response. Nodding. Agreeing. Affirming her faith. A single syllable uttered from my own lips. It was the word that gave Alice Hayward all the reassurance she needed to go forward into the death that her husband may have been envisioning for her-perhaps even for the two of them-for years.
THE NEXT MORNING a deputy state’s attorney, a woman perhaps five years younger than me with that rare but fetching combination of blue eyes and raven-black hair, would try to convince me that I was reading too much into that single syllable. The lawyer was Catherine Benincasa, a name I would have remembered a long while even if our paths had not continued to converge throughout the late summer and autumn, because she was named after the saint who convinced Gregory XI to return the papacy to Rome in 1376, after three and a half generations of exile in Avignon. But I reminded Catherine that she had not been present at the baptism. If she had, if she had known all that I did about Alice’s pilgrimage to the water-if she had spent the time that I had listening to her and offering what counsel I could-she would have understood I was right.
When Alice had emerged from the pond beside a wild rosebush with some of its delicate flowers still in bloom, she had fixed her eyes for a moment on the cluster of people in a half circle at the lip of the water. Their collective gaze was as bright as the sun. My parishioners were dressed for a picnic, and they were joyful. I watched Alice give her daughter a small wave. Katie had turned fifteen that summer and had suddenly, almost preternaturally, been transformed from a girl into a woman (or, as her mother had put it to me once when we were alone, her voice rich with love, “a tart with a heart”). The baseball caps, an affectation that had once been as much a requisite part of her clothing as her sneakers or shoes, were gone, and she had allowed her dark hair to grow long. She had replaced her overalls and T-shirts with skirts and short summer dresses and skinny jeans that seemed to cling to her long legs like Lycra. She wore flip-flops and ballet flats instead of the sneakers or the black patent leather shoes with neon spangles she had worn to church as a little girl and christened her “happy Janes.” She had a small stud in her nose and great hoops in her ears. She looked nothing like the child I would recall eating a blue Popsicle on the steps of the village’s general store or the reserve outfielder I had coached for two years on the town’s Little League team, a player more likely to harvest dandelions in the grass than run down fly balls. She was disarmingly precocious and always had been. Now she wrote for the school newspaper and the school literary magazine, and she was one of those children who seem to defy the logic of genes: She was, in my opinion, smarter than both of her parents. She was a good kid who had become a good teen-too intelligent for drugs and too ambitious to get pregnant. She had survived the worst a man like her father could offer and moved on. In two years, I told myself, she would get out of Haverill, whether it was to a small state college in a remote corner of Vermont or to someplace more impressive in Massachusetts or Maine or New York. My money was on the latter. I hoped the child was thinking Ivy or Little Ivy.
She no longer came to church or to the church’s teenage Youth Group meetings with any regularity, but she had come to her mother’s baptism that morning, and I was pleased. She waved back at Alice, perhaps a little embarrassed, but I imagine also happy for her mother, since this was something that her mother clearly desired. As Katie had grown older-more mature, more confident-I sensed that she had begun to intercede on Alice’s behalf when her father would threaten her mother. I knew of at least one punch she had prevented with her screams and her anger, and I assumed that Ginny O’Brien, Alice’s best friend in the Women’s Circle, knew of a good many more.
When Alice glanced back at me, she wiped the pond water from her eyes and used her thumbs like hooks to hoist back behind her ears the twin drapes of auburn mane that had fallen in front of her face. She then started from the pond, pulling at her long wet T-shirt the way all the women did, holding the material away from her chest so it wouldn’t cling to her breasts as she returned to dry land. Beneath that shirt she was wearing a Speedo tank suit with a paisley pattern that reminded me vaguely of the upholstery on the couch in my mother’s apartment in Bronxville, and her feet were bare. She had painted her toenails a cupcake-icing pink. Most women were baptized fully clothed in the baggiest pants and sweatshirts they could find, and-given the man to whom she was married-I found myself pondering the reality that she would never have worn only a bathing suit and a T-shirt had her husband been present. He wouldn’t have allowed it, even though the T-shirt happened to fall to midthigh. But I also wondered if this was a rebellion of some sort, a challenge, because there was always the chance he would hear and there was always the likelihood he would see one of those photos that Ginny was taking. Had I not known the details of what she endured in her home, I would have found the image of Alice Hayward emerging wet like a sea nymph from the Brookners’ pond an inappropriate, earthy, but inescapably erotic treat. She was thirty-eight when she died, the second-youngest member of the Women’s Circle, and she had been blessed with eyes that were round and deep and that rested in her pale face like circles of melted chocolate.
When she reached the grass, almost neon green that morning after a week of midsummer rains, her friend Ginny hugged her. The clouds had finally rolled east in the night, and the sun shone down upon the two women, now sisters in Christ, as they embraced.
Years earlier Ginny had joined the church by a simple statement of faith. Not quite five minutes out of a Sunday service, a little paperwork, a handshake, some polite applause. No water.
Not Alice, not at that point in her life. She wanted to leave absolutely nothing to chance, and so she wanted baptism and she wanted it by immersion. Full immersion. She had come to Christ, and she wanted to be certain that she wouldn’t be kept from the kingdom by an ecclesiastical technicality.
And so we went to the Brookners’ pond after the regular worship service, the water high and clear that Sunday morning after all that late-July rain.
“Do you believe in the Lord Jesus Christ as your personal savior?” I asked her.
“I do.”
“Do you intend to follow him all the days of your life?”
“I do,” she said again.
I cradled the back of her head with my left hand and held her clasped fingers like the handles of a shopping bag with my right, and then leaned her backward beneath the surface of the cold, mountain-fed waters, baptizing her in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.
There.
Like Christ, she had been buried and reborn. She had risen, been resurrected. The symbolism is unmistakable, as clear as any metaphor in the Bible. I wondered when I baptized Alice why so few members of the congregation chose immersion. The wetness means more than the words.
HER HUSBAND, GEORGE, hadn’t set foot inside the church in at least four or five years, and he had not come to his wife’s baptism. Later I would ask myself whether it would have made a difference if he had seen his wife baptized. I would see in my mind the deep, eggplant-colored bruises from his thumbs on her neck, as well as the marks on his face where she had gouged out whole chunks of his cheeks with her fingernails. (I had expected that the right side of his face would have been completely obliterated, but it wasn’t. A little swollen, a little distorted, but not nearly the ruin I had imagined. We could all see the scratch marks there.) Alice may have walked into the water with resignation that Sunday morning, but she had fought hard for her life that Sunday night-if only reflexively. If only because she thought of her daughter and experienced one last, fierce pang of maternal protectiveness. If only because the way that he killed her was brutal and she couldn’t help but battle back against the pain. And so the question of whether George’s attendance at the spectacle (and, trust me, immersion
