friend.
Nevertheless, in one of the days immediately after Alice was killed, a female minister I’ve known since seminary-a woman who counsels a great many victims (and perpetrators) of domestic abuse-tried to convince me that this was indeed what had occurred. George had probably hit Alice, and she had told him that was it, they were finished. She’d had it. George, in turn, had warned her that she’d better not even try to get dressed. And when she’d said that he couldn’t stop her, he’d killed her. It was the classic pattern, my friend said.
Her point? Alice Hayward had wanted to live. She hadn’t expected to die, and I hadn’t missed some staggeringly obvious signal at the baptism. This wasn’t my fault. Of course, my minister friend hadn’t been at the pond that afternoon. Nor did she know Alice’s and my-and I use this word with both guilelessness and guilt-history. Perhaps if Alice had left behind a suitcase, I might think otherwise. In my mind it is resting on her side of their bed, half filled and hastily packed. But there wasn’t one. There wasn’t even a small pile of clothes anywhere in the bedroom: No shirt, no jeans, no panties, no socks. I would not have needed a suitcase at the scene to have my faith resurrected, but I did need a sign that she had at least planned to leave the house that night.
AND THERE WAS this: Her mother would tell me when we met in my church on folding metal chairs that Monday night that her daughter had been planning to schedule appointments with a lawyer in Bennington and an advocate at the women’s shelter. Alice, her mother insisted, wanted to understand what she needed to do to protect her daughter from George in the event that something like-and here her mother waved her arm once as if swatting at a fly and then collapsed in upon herself in sobs-
“I told her to get out of the house, but… but she wouldn’t listen,” she stammered through her tears, as her husband awkwardly rubbed her shoulders and the back of her neck from his own folding chair.
And if I needed any more proof of my suspicions, it resided in a red felt jewelry box that Katie had told us about that afternoon: Two days before she would die, that Friday, Alice had taken the ruby-and-diamond earrings and the pearl necklace that had belonged to her own grandmother-Katie’s great-grandmother-and given them to her daughter, telling Katie to keep them close to her chest.
THE CHURCH WOMEN’S Circle included about fifteen members of the congregation. They met Monday mornings at seven to accommodate the half dozen members who had jobs outside the home, convening each time in a different woman’s living room or terrace or kitchen. Rarely were all fifteen present; usually there were no more than eleven or twelve women there. The meetings usually lasted until nine-thirty or ten, with the members whose schedules demanded they leave sooner departing whenever they needed. During the school year, for instance, Ginny stayed most Mondays only until seven forty-five because she was due at the village school a little before eight. Alice’s schedule at the bank was Tuesday through Saturday, however, and so she never left early. She was known for remaining till the very end, with the elderly women who were retired and whose children were grown and who had nowhere else they needed to be. When I had suggested the Women’s Circle to Alice, offering the idea one evening when we were alone at the parsonage, I thought it would be weeks or even months before she might find the courage to contact one of the informal group leaders. I could see how thoroughly George had eroded her confidence and severed her ties with so many of her friends-with so much of the world. I contemplated having one of the members reach out to her. But I was mistaken. Within days Alice had contacted the woman nearest her age, Ginny O’Brien, and had asked if she could come to the next meeting. The fact that the group met on the very day Alice had off seemed like a good omen.
And I have no doubts that the women provided a necessary respite for Alice-and yes, a better shoulder than mine. Still, only Ginny knew the extent of George’s violence, and Alice forbade her from ever bringing it up at the Women’s Circle.
In the days after Alice’s death, many adult members of the church took great comfort in Alice’s involvement with the group. I was told often by parishioners in the four days before I left that if Alice had not been a part of the Circle, the Haywards’ bodies would probably have been found by their daughter the next morning or afternoon, when she returned from Tina Cousino’s house. Instead it was Ginny O’Brien who would alert the world that the couple was dead. That day Joanie Gaylord was hosting the group, and when Alice had failed to arrive by seven- thirty, Ginny called her friend. There was, of course, no answer at the Haywards’. And so when the meeting adjourned around nine-thirty, she decided to drop by her friend’s house. She would tell me that afternoon that she’d had a bad feeling as she drove up the driveway to the usually immaculate yellow Cape and seen Lula the dog asleep on the porch. She had, in fact, known what had occurred before she even opened the unlocked front door.
She knew, she said, because the living room was right beside the entry hall, and so from the front steps of the house she had seen the flesh and bone and brain that had once been a part of George Hayward on the inside mesh of the screen window.
CHAPTER FOUR
There is no explanation for my decision to enter the clergy that is both quick and honest. They tend to be one or the other. The quick answer-and it is a response I’ve given most often to especially avid or fundamental believers (of which there is no dearth, even among Baptists in northern New England)-is this, an anecdote I was told by one of my more erudite professors at seminary. When he was a young graduate being considered for a poor, rural parish in West Virginia, he gave a sermon at the church there one Sunday morning. It was, even in his own opinion, more intellectual than inspired, more long-winded than wise. It wasn’t very good. After the service an old deacon-a coal miner who had somehow made it into his seventies without succumbing to any of the grotesque lung diseases that usually mark the end of a coal miner’s life-approached him and asked with a voice rich in irony, “Was you sent or did you just went?” My professor understood instantly what the deacon was suggesting: He, the young pastor, seemed to lack passion and conviction. He seemed merely to be going through the motions. And so when people would ask me why I’d become a minister and I could tell from the question that they wanted an answer singed with Pentecostal fires, I’d recount this story, always ending with a self-deprecating shrug and the remark, “All I can tell you is I believe I was sent.”
The honest answer is more complex. On some level I was sent. Or inspired. Or called. But my calling, such as it was, wasn’t a single booming invitation from above (really, is it ever?), or even one palpable experience of the living Christ in the here and now. When I was ten and eleven, I had a fairly common boy’s interest in the horrific and the frightening, in whatever it was that caused one’s heart to beat a little faster: chain-saw murderers, serial killers, and those nightmare ghouls who lurk under our beds. Nasty stuff, but pretty typical. And then, of course, there was the predictable array of werewolves, vampires, mummies, aliens, killer robots, psychotic cyborgs, and the assorted undead zombies and freaks that television shows and movies churned out for my entertainment and dreams (or, to be precise, for my disturbing, sheet-gripping nightmares). My friends in Bronxville and I would savor monster movies whenever they arrived for the summer at the theater across the street from the railroad station, and alone or together we would follow their computer-generated mayhem on what are now quaint and primitive video games. My fascination with this sort of carnage and violence was neither unusual nor a sign of a potentially dangerous personality disorder. Given the always precarious state of my parents’ marriage, I wouldn’t describe my childhood as flawless or serene. (Some years later, when I announced my decision to go to divinity school, my sister observed that I was moving from a bickerage to a vicarage.) But neither was my childhood inordinately painful or scarring. I played Little League baseball in the spring and Pop Warner football in the fall. In the winter I played ice hockey and skied. My father was head of personnel for a large investment bank and commuted with a great many of my friends’ parents into lower Manhattan, gathering like pigeons every morning at that train station by the movie theater. My mother was an editor at a travel magazine but left the publication in her early thirties to stay home and raise my sister and me. My father was ten years older than she was. Their marriage was certainly not exempt from the strangeness that marked the 1970s, but its strains had more to do with the idiosyncratic characters of my parents than with the nature of their friends. As far as I know, no one was swapping spouses at pool parties in July and August. And though I occasionally smelled marijuana, the drug of choice in that circle was clearly brown liquor: The adults encouraged one another to drink scotch the way they insisted their children drink milk.
As a teenager I listened to a lot of heavy-metal and punk music, and I papered my bedroom walls with posters
