Secrets of Eden

loathed George. Thought he was absolutely despicable. She was thrilled when Alice got a temporary relief-from- abuse order and he went to live in their cottage on Lake Bomoseen for a couple of months.”

“When was that?”

“Just before Valentine’s Day. He came back just before Memorial Day.”

“Not all that long ago.”

“No.”

“So she got a restraining order-”

“A temporary restraining order. The police served it while George was at his office one Monday afternoon. There was a hearing scheduled a week later. Neither Alice nor George ever showed up.”

“That’s common.”

“I gather. Tell me, are you married? I presume not, because you’re not wearing a wedding ring.” I think I inquired largely because I wanted a respite from her questions. But it’s also possible that on some level I still felt the need to be pastoral-to give her the chance to talk about herself for a moment. I may have been phoning it in by then-I may have been phoning it in for months-but old habits die hard.

“I’m not. But someday I will be, if only because I have a six-year-old girl’s obsession with weddings,” she said, and she shook her head as if she were in the midst of some small, odd moment of rapture. “Of all the rites of passage a culture creates for itself, weddings are perhaps the most beautiful. And, perhaps, the most mysterious.”

“Well, I certainly preferred doing marriages to funerals.”

“Preferred? Why the past tense? Isn’t that a little melodramatic?”

“No.”

“You really think you’re finished?” She smiled. “Come on, your faith is that fragile?”

I sighed. Across the street the small river burbled and one of the children there squealed. The swallow adjusted herself on her eggs, using her beak to pick at something invisible to me on her wing. And somewhere not all that far away, a dog barked. Years earlier, I recalled, when I had been a junior in college and a member in good standing of what some students dismissively called the God Squad, I had been asked-challenged, more precisely-by a classmate who viewed himself as an atheist to explain Auschwitz and cancer and typhoons in Bangladesh that drowned tens of thousands of people. As I sat on my porch that first afternoon with Heather Laurent, I wondered what I’d said; my world had shrunk to such a degree that I honestly couldn’t remember how I had responded. I wasn’t sure what I’d felt-other, of course, than any sentient person’s reasonable sadness-at all the funerals over which I had officiated and all the times I had sat beside beds in hospitals and homes and held people’s hands as they died. As my own father had expired in a hospital room and spoke his last words before he sank into unconsciousness: “Go. Just… go.” (I didn’t. My mother, my sister, and I would stay till the end.) I had watched them all depart with what must have seemed to them as confidence and composure, my faith as solid and intact as the heavy pasta pot that hung on a hook above the parsonage stove. But something was different now: It was as if age or rust had worn a great hole in the bottom of that pot and my faith had trickled out like warm water. There were no answered prayers here. And so instead of addressing Heather’s question, I observed, “With everything that must be going on in your life right now, you’ve come here.”

“And that surprises you.”

“It astonishes me.”

“It shouldn’t,” she said.

“No?”

She shook her head. “Not at all. My father used to beat the living hell out of my mother.”

My stomach lurched a little bit at the revelation, but years of pastoral hand-holding kept me from reacting in any visible way, and I mouthed the words I’d probably said hundreds of times every year of my ministerial life: “I’m sorry. I’m very, very sorry.”

“Don’t be. You weren’t the one who hit her.”

“Still… I’m sorry.”

“No, no, no. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have dropped the bombshell on you like that. I’m used to most people knowing.”

“Knowing?”

“A lot of their story is in Angels and Aurascapes.”

“Are they divorced?”

She gazed out at the maples behind my house and then looked me squarely in the eye. “They’re dead. When I was fourteen, a few months after my sister and I were sent away to boarding school, my father killed my mother- and then killed himself.”

FROM ANGELS AND AURASCAPES BY HEATHER LAURENT (PP. 51-52)

… and then killed himself.

The head of the school, who had been deferring to the school psychiatrist for most of the past half hour, finally spoke. He asked my sister and me what we wanted to do, but neither of us answered him. We couldn’t, because neither of us was capable of giving him the answers he needed. What did I want to do? My God, I was fourteen years old. I wanted to bring my mother back. I wanted to go back in time. I wanted to know where I was going to live-who was going to take care of me. I wanted to learn how to drive. Those were the things that crossed my mind in response to his question, those were the first desires that came to me. And what did my sister want? She was sixteen, she probably wanted pretty much the same things and to have the same sorts of answers. And the headmaster could grant us absolutely none of our desires or answer our most basic questions.

I understood, of course, that traveling back in time and getting my mother back were implausible wishes and never going to happen. But as we sat in the headmaster’s office, I imagined quite concretely what I would do if I could drive-what, to go back to that initial question of his, I wanted.

And I understood I wanted this: I wanted to drive to my grandmother’s house in upstate New York and explain to her that I was all finished with this fine school in New England. And then I wanted to go to one of the huge shopping malls near the old air force base in Plattsburgh, the ones kept in business by the Canadians, and buy all the clothes that my father had forbidden me from wearing and that my mother said I didn’t dare bring into the house. I wanted, in essence, to wear a shirt with spaghetti straps that revealed my shoulders and tight-fitting shorts made from blue jeans that had been faded almost to a robin’s egg blue. I wanted to get my ears pierced at the kiosk in the corridor by the poster-and-frame shop in the mall, and then I wanted to buy earrings. Lipstick. Mascara.

I wanted to drive my friends to my house, and I wanted them all to sit with me on the front porch without fearing that my father would embarrass me with his temper or my mother with her drinking.

That, I realized, was what I wanted to do.

And, fortunately, those images of not-unconventional teenage taste crowded out the reality of what had actually happened to my mother at the hands of my father.

Still, I hadn’t spoken aloud any of this, I hadn’t answered the head of the school’s question. Finally, after the sort of conversational lull that’s polite only after someone has died, he turned to my sister and asked Amanda what she wanted to do.

“I want to go home,” I heard Amanda tell him, her voice appropriately subdued. She was an aspiring painter at the time and even then savored her solitude.

The head of the school nodded and smiled gently. This was the right response, even if home- technically still that cold and massive Victorian, which, despite the resources of both my parents’ families, was in desperate need of a good scraping and painting-was about to become a pretty vague place.

“And you, Heather?” he asked again. “What would you like?”

“A shirt with spaghetti straps,” I answered. “And pierced ears.”