Body In The Belfry

Jane Sibley was a real estate lawyer specializing in litigation involving new construction, of which there seemed to be ever increasing amounts in the city.

When Faith, and then Hope, one year younger, were born, Jane had stopped working briefly before firmly putting her little Frizon-clad feet back into place. There were no more babies after Hope, which Faith attributed in part to her mother 's understandable aversion to the name 'Charity,”

“Chat' for short. The first three girls in generations of Sibley families were always named 'Faith,”

“Hope,' and 'Charity,' after a pious ancestral trio. Boys were named 'Lawrence' or 'Theodore,' nothing for short, after equally distant kinsmen.

Faith 's father, a Lawrence, grew up in New Jersey, virtually another country for Jane, who was raised in solitary splendor, or rather 'comfort,' high above Fifth Avenue. She still felt more wary about crossing the Hudson than the Atlantic.

Lawrence settled into life in New York City, his adaptation perhaps hastened by the winds of change that swept away the old farms surrounding his father 'schurch. The rolling meadows and gentle-faced cows, which had been his boyhood neighbors, were replaced by shopping malls and parking lots. In New York, he told himself, you knew where you were and no one, not even Donald Trump, would ever think of blacktopping Central Park.

As Faith and Hope grew older they were allowed to roam around the city on their own—a very carefully circumscribed part of the city, that is. They walked from their apartment to school—Dalton, and to various lessons at which they did not show any genius, but did not disgrace themselves either.

College followed Dalton as night the day. Both Faith and Hope returned to the city immediately afterward, but there the resemblance stopped.

Hope, when her turn came, burst meteorically upon the skyline and landed a terrific job at Citibank, began to dress for success, and bought a Bottega Veneta briefcase. Faith was still busy wondering what to do.

But when Faith finally hit upon her life's work, it satisfied her every requirement. No one at home would like it much and no one at home could do it. She was amazed that it hadn 't occurred to her before.

Faith had always loved to cook, and from the time she was a little girl would happily mess about the kitchen inventing surprisingly good things to eat whenever her mother would let her. Now she started quietly taking advanced culinary courses, coming home a bit befloured and flushed from the hot kitchens. As no one asked where she was spending her days, she didn 't say.

Later she went to work for one of the city's top caterers at a ridiculously low salary and started to dream of Japanese vegetable flowers and salmon coulibiac. At this point the family knew she was doing something with food, but assumed it was a hobby.

* * * When Faith announced she was dipping into the small but adequate trust fund set up by her grandfather, 'and mine own' she reminded them, to start a catering business, they were amazed. However, nothing daunted, she went forward and Have Faith was born. The rest is history, culinary and cultural. As soon as the initial confusion over the name was straightened out—people thought she was a new cult, an escort service for the guilt ridden, or, worst of all, a food service specializing in lenten fare—New Yorkers were vying for her services and she was a year ahead in her bookings. The fact that she had been at their parties as a guest added to the image. Now she supplied not only her beautiful self, but her beautiful food.

By the time Faith met Tom at a wedding she was catering, she had been featured in Gourmet, New York Magazine, and the Times.

Thomas Fairchild was in town to perform the ceremony for his college roommate. Tom had grown up in Massachusetts on the South Shore. His family was not particularly religious. They went to church every Sunday and the four little Fairchilds regarded it in much the same light as the invariable Sunday dinner that followed, or as playing baseball in the town league or doing well in school. This is what the Fairchilds did. Not with a lot of show, but solid and steady. This was what life was all about. The family had lived in the area for generations and Tom's father's business, Fairchild's Real Estate, had several counterparts : Fairchild's Ford in nearby Duxbury (Tom's uncle) and Fairchild's Market in town (Tom's grandfather and another uncle).

The wedding was a small one in an apartment overlooking Central Park, and if Faith had divined the past and present of the man hovering over the buffet when she went to check on the supply of saucisson en brioche,she might have approached with a little trepidation. As it was, all she saw was a terribly attractive, tall, handsome stranger. Always good qualifications. She liked his reddish-brown hair and figured she could get rid of the straggly mustache once she got to know him better. Nobody told her he was the minister and nobody told him she was the caterer. They started to talk.

They were still talking several hours later, huddled under blankets against the February cold, riding in one of those tacky, impossibly romantic horse-drawn carriages around Central Park. If Faith gave an embarrassed thought to what her friends would say if they could see her in one of these, it quickly vanished in the moonlight.

And there was a lot of moonlight.

The mustache came off the next day.

Tom gave Faith the Fairchild engagement ring, a tiny little diamond, when she came to visit him two weeks later. It was so sweet Faith thought she would cry. She made a mental note not to wear the more noticeable stone her grandparents had given her for her twenty-first birthday until they had been married a couple of months.

Then as he slipped the ring on her finger she realized with a start that she was not going to have her cake and eat it too. The cake being Tom and it, New York City. Not just Have Faith, but her cozy little apartment on the West Side, the first place all her own, and a social life that could be as dazzling as she chose. She also knew from experience that parish life was a goldfish bowl, however holy the water. Tom had told her the ministry wasn't like this anymore and she could behave as she wished.

He was a dear, of course, but Faith knew better.

Then in church the next morning she had subtly scrutinized the congregation and come to the conclusion that they looked like ordinary God-fearing souls who would mind their own business and let her mind hers. She wanted to believe. Later Faith and Tom, recalling this optimistic moment, had dissolved in tears of laughter, and other things too.

After the quick study of her fellow worshippers, she had turned her attention to Tom, who was stepping into the pulpit. His sermon was filled with common sense and occasional poetry. She got a lump in her throat and her heart was filled with nonsinful pride. She felt devoutly thankful. Thankful for Tom and thankful she had managed to find him.

She knew, she told herself that night in her bed back in New York, if it hadn 't been Aleford, it would have been someplace very like it. Tom found it puzzling that she could even consider living in New York City. Nor would he raise a family there. Faith had often found this true of people who didn 't live in the city. Very intelligent people, too. Surely they knew when one told them one had been born and raised in New York that that meant one had spent one's childhood there, and lived to tell the tale ; but they continued to speak as though Manhattan and the five boroughs were inhabited only by adults.

In Tom's view, Faith and Hope were somehow exceptions. No other children had ever been raised there.

Another thing Tom was firm about was not using any of Faith's trust fund. He considered that it was for Faith's future (read lonely old age, widowed at ninety) and the children's. It wasn't that Tom didn't like money and what it could buy. He was as pleasantly hedonistic as the next parson—or lawyer or firefighter or anyone else. And he was happy for Faith to work and bring home 'beaucoup de bacon.' A sophomore year in France had left him fluent, permanently in love with the country, and prone to such expressions.

Faith agreed with him about the money—up to a point. She had replaced what she had initially withdrawn with Have Faith 's profits and was happy to have the fund merrily accumulating 'beaucoup de interest.”

As for the trust, she decided to let the matter lie for the time being. Certainly they would educate their children well and then the darlings were on their own.

She had no intention of a frugal old age trying to make ends meet on a parish pension when her arms were no longer capable of beating egg whites in her copper bowl. The trust fund could make those golden years a little more golden, preferably somewhere sunny like Provence. But it was not something that concerned her now. She figured she had years ahead to convince Tom.

Meanwhile the only exception she was quite firm about was clothes. Faith could not see herself in Filene 's Basement beating other women over the heads for a skirt from Saks that no one had wanted to buy in the first place ; nor was she about to plug in a Singer and start running up tea gowns. No, she would pay for her own clothes