Chris Bohjalian - Secrets of Eden

Alice’s body was in its casket at the church that Thursday morning, though she was not going to be buried in Haverill. As I suspected, Alice went home to New Hampshire. And though the local mortician, an eccentric elderly gentleman whose funeral parlor was known for the exotic birds he kept, had been able to make her corpse presentable, Alice’s family had decided upon a closed casket. (George’s face, he would confess to me later, could have been reconstructed and made viewable, but he said he was just not inclined to do what he called his “best work” on it, and so that would be a closed casket, too.)

As Heather had predicted, Alice’s funeral was so crowded that one of the stewards had to set up a video feed so the overflow of mourners in the common room below the sanctuary could watch, and we sat people in the choir loft behind me. The sanctuary was packed well beyond the capacity of our two sluggish ceiling fans, and I saw people sweating through their short-sleeved summer shirts (and others, undoubtedly, beneath their blazers), and I watched beads of perspiration run down some of their faces and mingle with tears. I think there must have been forty students from the high school alone in the church, many for the first time, and their faces-so guileless and sweet, despite the girls who were wearing too much eye shadow and lipstick and the boys who were struggling mightily to be too tough for tears-were the hardest for me to watch. Katie, of course, was a source of particular sadness for me. She wore a sleeveless, somewhat slinky black dress that might have been more appropriate at a cocktail party than at her mother’s funeral, but how many black dresses does a teenage girl in rural Vermont own? I was surprised she had even one, and my sense was that in the past she had worn it surreptitiously. George Hayward probably hadn’t even known it existed, though it was the sort of thing he sold without irony to teenage girls and college students at his store in Manchester Center. Her hair was pulled off her face, and she looked pale and a little blank to me. Numb. Her friends cried, but she didn’t, and I realized later it was because Ginny had given her a tranquilizer. She sat impassively as I spoke and Alice’s sister spoke and the choir sang and different people in the sanctuary stood up to offer their memories, mostly of Alice but twice of George. Alice’s father, a sickly-looking old man with skin that struck me as fishlike and was riddled with age spots the size of dimes, flinched when one of the volunteer firefighters reminded us of the countless hours George had devoted to the company and how he hoped that the man’s soul might, at last, find peace. George’s secretary, a svelte and powerfully built young woman who could have moonlit as a fitness trainer, said he had always been a good boss and that no one in his small empire would ever have thought he was capable of such violence. (Instantly I was struck by the salacious and unfounded notion that she and George had been lovers.) No one, in my opinion, tried to grandstand for the media.

And among that great crowd of mourners in the church? Heather Laurent. Yes, she did return. She got home after midnight on Tuesday, yet still drove back to Vermont first thing Thursday morning.

But when I left Haverill on Thursday evening-not like a thief in the night, in all fairness, since the deacons and Ron Dobson and I had made sure that an interim pastor would be there to hold the hands of the congregation after their minister had ostensibly had a nervous breakdown-I did not leave with Heather. Though later there would be gossip to that effect, we most assuredly did not decamp together. I knew how that would look. And I hadn’t known that she was coming back for the funeral. We did not meet up again until Saturday morning, when I showed up in the dark, warehouselike lobby of her building on Greene Street and pressed the ivory-colored call button beside her name. Upstairs she would tell me that she had hoped I would visit, but she hadn’t expected it. She told me she honestly hadn’t realized that I was still so willing to give myself over to my angel.

My father shot my mother on the night of the day that he learned she had taken a lease on another house, one that would be large enough for my sister and me when we were home from school. This was as clear a signal as he needed that this time she really was going to leave him. And so, late that night, he shot her and then killed himself. But he didn’t use the same gun. In fact, he didn’t use a gun, period, when he took his own life. Instead, after murdering my mother, he walked next door to our neighbors’ and left a note on the windshield of the car that the husband drove each morning to work. The note instructed the fellow to call the police immediately and to direct them to the Laurents’ house. He wasn’t to go there himself, and under no circumstances was he to call Heather or Amanda at boarding school. Then, after leaving the note pinned to the glass by the wiper blade, he went home, climbed the stairs to our attic, and hanged himself from an inner beam across the peak of our twelve-by-twelve-pitch roof .

Some months later that deputy state’s attorney with those lovely blue eyes and the name of a saint would tell me that she had thought I was a pretty cold fish from the moment we’d met that Monday morning after I had baptized Alice Hayward. This might have been posturing to elicit some sort of reaction from me, but it may also have been an honest and legitimate first impression. Certainly I had been anesthetized that day by guilt and despair: guilt that I had not realized why baptism had been so important to Alice the previous morning and despair at her death. Make no mistake: I was grieving as her former lover as well as her minister.

But in all fairness to Catherine Benincasa, I know also that there were parishioners who thought I was distant. Or, perhaps, that I had secrets. Cards that I was loath to reveal. No one verbalized such things prior to my departure, of course. It was only after I left that people’s secret doubts became rumor and gossip and innuendo.

I will be the first to admit that a pastor in a small town has enormous power over the people who come to church and even a fair amount over those who don’t. The directors or coordinators of easily a dozen organizations across the county-the dental clinic for low-income Vermonters, for example, the hospice, the women’s crisis center-would ask me to stand up for them at the town meeting the first Tuesday in March and thereby ensure that Haverill would vote to approve their budget requests.

And we have power in other, more invidious ways as well. There were temptations throughout the congregation, women-some half my age-whose eyes I would meet as I spoke Sunday mornings and whose gaze I would hold a second longer than was probably right. There were single women in the congregation who I know would have been happy to date me and married ones who would have risked the wrath of our small town had I shown any interest at all. Like any minister-not merely the Dimmesdales of fiction-in my little pond, I could have been either a big moral fish or a more complex sort of predator. Many of the parishioners I counseled were female and in a condition that could only be called vulnerable. And, because I am male, that ingrained desire to protect them invariably would kick in. Nevertheless, in most of my dealings, I strove for a moral compass that was sound. There were some women with whom I would flirt more shamelessly than with others, but they were always the parishioners who were happily married and understood that our flirations would never progress beyond vague intimations. In my fourteen years in Haverill, I had dated three women seriously, all of whom, it seemed to me, were unsuited to the life of a country pastor’s wife. None of them were from Haverill: One was from Albany, one was from Manchester, and one lived far to the north in Burlington. The woman from Manchester grew close to my congregation, and I think they were hurt-and saddened for me-when we did not walk down the aisle of my church together.