Rick Moody - The Diviners

I don’t care for the readings, and I question their relevance. There’s always evidence of an ending, if we look for it, but where there’s an ending there’s always evidence of a beginning. I say look for the beginning. Look for the opening of the blossom. For the intimation of spring.

His wife and he were on separate extensions when they got the news. The Reverend Duffy asked Annabel if it would be possible to contact the family of Samantha Lee, the injured girl, and this was his rather insistent question for the first twenty-four hours. Is there a way for us to contact the family of the poor girl? So much so that his wife asked him if he did not care for his son. The reverend, stricken by the remark, looked deep, and he determined that he did believe it possible that William had perpetrated the attack. He had no trouble believing it, in fact, though he would tell no one this, not even his wife. Moreover, believing that his son had committed the assault, he nonetheless had no trouble continuing to love his flawed, reckless, impossible son, who knew more about physics and linguistics and engineering and a thousand other things than the Reverend Duffy would ever know, but who seemed unable to hold down any job more complicated than message delivery.

Downstairs, again, his wife, slamming some kitchen implement on a countertop, demands to know of Max how he expects what he has done — helping his brother avoid the authorities — will reflect on what the Reverend Duffy does, and his son replies in a measured voice, which the reverend can clearly hear through the floorboards (the parsonage is no vast mansion), that it’s his father’s ministry that has allowed him to do what he did. He says he would do it again. Well, his mother says, the window has new hardware on it now, and you owe it to your father and myself to respect our wishes, and you can go up there and look out the window for a while and imagine what you see on the far side of it because you’re not going to be on the other side of that glass until the daffodils blossom.

The end, as we learn of it in Mark — a time and place when certain people will be rewarded for perfection and others consigned to the lake of fire — is a convenience for those who are unable to shoulder the responsibilities of the present —

He turns off the typewriter with the sheet of paper still in it. He closes the office door behind himself. Down in the kitchen, he finds his wife, expert on adolescent psychology, with textbooks spread wide around her. The boy has retired to his room. They are a couple of common laborers, the two of them, and if there are things that are never thoroughly discussed between them, then at least there is the sensation that they have worked in concert, they have labored, and it is in this feeling that gratitude sweeps through him, and he puts a hand on his wife’s back and looks over her shoulder at the book, at its scientific language.

“I don’t even know if he’s been staying after school like he says,” his wife remarks. “I don’t know where the beginning and end of the truth are with him, and I hate the sensation of it. He was such a sweet little one.”

The reverend grunts in assent. They will be in bed early, as they have always been, and there’s no use eating some snack before bed, because it will not agree with him, even though he has a powerful hankering for a cookie. His wife will not tolerate crumbs in the bed.

“It’s all going to work out,” he says mechanically. “And if it doesn’t, we’ll be strong. We have always been strong.”

Then he trudges up the back stairs.

Once, and this was fifteen or twenty years ago, he’d been at a party in town. The reverend had been at a party, which wasn’t unusual, because he was often invited to parties. He was invited to play golf or tennis occasionally, and sometimes he was invited to give a speech at the high school or to officiate at a classroom debate on some ethical issue. He was a minister of the Congregational Church, and Massachusetts had Congregationalists before anything else, except the Pequods. He preached at a plain church building in the center of town, on a green, the First Congregational Church, and he lived in a small house two blocks away, because he needed room for his children. He was a pillar of the community.

And he came to be at the party, and there was a girl there, just fourteen or fifteen, and he realized that he had seen this girl a hundred times over the years, with her friends and on the holidays. It was another of those instances when he realized that he had been at the church long enough to have watched children grow from their baptisms to their very adulthood. He had baptized this child, in fact, had made the watery cross upon her forehead, her parents beaming proudly. He knew them well enough, John and Barbara.

He’d come across her in her ballet class years, in her tree-climbing years; he’d watched her in her homely years with the braces and the skinny legs, and then he’d watched her in her cheerleader years, and now he was seeing her in the flourishing of her adulthood, at this party. He was watching her because she was employed this night by her father, John, to serve drinks to his friends, the other pillars of the community. She had certainly developed in a way that the Reverend Duffy had never expected. He had never expected a girl that he’d baptized to be one of the great beauties of her age. You never knew to expect such a thing, but this was just what she looked like now: at the bar, with a dozen bottles in front of her and a pitcher of water with which to water down the whiskeys, just as if this, too, were baptismal water.

So much time should not have passed. Not with him doing what little he had done, which was to pace through time as though it were stepping-stoned with church calendars, without learning, without growth. The girl was a symbol of this, of how miserly was time in his life. Time had made him good at one thing and horrible at everything else, so that the blessings of the world were always elsewhere, never his. All the conversations he had that night, he approached these conversations in the same graceful way he always approached them. The people of Newton told him what they had to tell him, with a certain cant of the head, a certain nervous gesture, how they were proud and terrified, and he listened well, that’s how he remembers it now, that he listened well, and he spent the night stealing glances at the girl at the bar, and she was a goddess of wine, so resolute, so statuesque.

The party proceeded into the kind of cheerful disorder that marked these events. The people who stayed were the ones you wished would leave. His own wife had left because Max was still in diapers then. And William was going through a rough patch in high school or maybe college. He can’t remember which. The reverend himself became one of those guests you wished would leave, standing out on the patio. The more recognizable constellations were just visible through the light pollution and the cloud cover. Bare trees waved in the breeze. He saw the daughter, and the daughter was picking up drinks and coasters, and she was drinking from the drinks, surreptitiously. She was drinking and carrying the glasses off to the kitchen, and he followed her into the house, observing the methodical performance of her responsibilities, and then he watched as she went upstairs, already tipsy, no doubt. His body carried him along with her, as if he was drunk, too, upon her shadow. Then he surprised her in her bedroom.

In bed, on Sunday night, in his sleeplessness, he thinks of it again, as he has often thought of it. Here he is again, wishing that he could remember the language of the moment, because if he could remember it, then maybe he could undo it. How he surprised her, how she was slipping a sweatshirt over the polo shirt she’d been wearing. She remarked that he’d surprised her; he said he wished he hadn’t. A simple exchange, at first, and innocent enough, for the moment.