“Today we come together…,” her father had said, lifting his glass at their wedding, “to celebrate Bethany’s choice of a good man.” It was as though the matter had been decided elsewhere. If Bethany had made the choice of a good man, and he was that man, then he must be good. His job was to assent.
And assent he had, but that assent felt different now: less the work of providence than of human provision against loneliness. Each passing year paused for a briefer interval, like Diogenes with his lantern looking for one good man, squinting at him, then turning away. “Here you are,” he would still say to Bethany when she returned from work, and “There you are” was still her reply, though the “there” sounded more and more like somewhere far away.
—
He stared up into the darkness of the church and felt his thoughts turn to Jessica Burke’s mother, a boiled-looking woman slumped in the front pew on the day of the funeral. He remembered how she remained seated when the congregation rose in song or knelt to pray. She had once been, he was told, a parishioner, a member of the altar guild, a decorator of the church at Christmas and Easter, but he had not known her, and after her daughter’s funeral, she had never returned.
Should he try to find her now to tell her her daughter had been murdered? Or so he thought. Or so someone named Daniel Abend had maintained. Such an announcement would be a cruelty. No doubt, but still, was he not obliged to say something, if not to her, then to the authorities?
This quandary was what they meant, he thought, when they spoke of “the seal of the confessional.” It was not like a seal on an envelope or a diplomatic pouch, or a lozenge of wax pressed at the base of a document, but something more like the seal he mentioned whenever he performed the baptismal rite. After dousing the infant, he would make the sign of the cross on its forehead with a fragrant oil, then proclaim the child to be “sealed by the Holy Spirit and marked as Christ’s own forever.” Spurlock had always understood that seal to be the mark of God’s unshakable love, the love that called each soul into being, but now he felt the weight of it on his own forehead as though it were a brand or scar proclaiming his guilt, his complicity in every sin for which he had presumed to offer absolution. For the first time, he felt a flicker of kinship with members of the old unreformed priesthood, charged to bear bodily in persona Christi the sins of the penitent, to carry them from the confessional to the altar, where the priest in turn would be forgiven.
Informing Jessica Burke’s mother would not remove the grip of sin, would only drag someone else into its embrace. No, Nelson, he thought, this knowledge is for you alone, an excruciation entrusted to you only, for keeps.
Spurlock understood then that it was the solitude that was unbearable, the solitude of his sleeplessness amid the sleepers, as though he had been sentenced to stand lookout forever, scanning the horizon, squinting into the darkness for…what? What was it? How would he recognize it when it appeared? Who was to say he would not wait forever? The prospect seemed to him as certain as it was unbearable, as opaque and unrevealing as the dark above him in the church. But even as the weight of this solitude threatened to crush him, he realized that what he waited for he had already encountered, and it was not a what but a who: a person, a face, her face, Clementine Abend’s. That level brow, the flat-bright nickel gray of her eye, he could see them now as though she had never left, as though she had not fled at the sound of her name when he had said, “Yes, Clementine Abend, all I would need is your address….”
THIRTEEN
As for the question of how Clementine has lived since her departure, I have said nothing of my daughter’s money, the money she took to calling her “abundant riches.”
“Hardly riches,” I would say to her.
“Dan is jealous,” she would say in reply. But I was not jealous; in fact, half of the money had been mine, my portion of my own father’s legacy.
When my father died, three years after I returned from France with Clementine, I inherited half his estate, the other half to be held in a trust for Clementine’s “education and upbringing.” Any moneys remaining in the corpus would be disbursed to Clementine upon her twenty-fifth birthday. A smaller portion, however, was to be maintained in a separate account and released to Clementine when she turned eighteen, on the stipulation that it be used for “a grand voyage” the summer after her graduation from high school. I do not doubt that this private gift expressed principally my father’s love for his only granddaughter, his “French Fry,” his “Tiny,” but I am certain also that it expressed his frustration with what he called my “womanish dithering” over Clementine’s safety and health. “If you’re not careful, French Fry,” he would say to her when she was in grade school, “your pop will seal you up in a bell jar, just so you don’t skin your knee.”
“What’s a bell jar, Grumpus?”
“Why, a jar for capturing tiny belles like you!”
That was how he spoke, the charmer, the great litigator, his eyes lit with guile, like a great cat’s, even in the frailty of his last decline. His allure had always
