Chris Bohjalian: Secrets of Eden

I followed Alice from the water, my own blue jeans heavy around my hips because they had sponged up so much of the Brookners’ pond. Some of my fellow pastors, especially my peers in the South, wear weighted black robes that allow them to wade into the water without fear that the robe will float about them like algae. Not me. Weighting a robe in my mind transformed meaningful ritual into pretentious theatrics. Besides, I liked wearing blue jeans into the water, I liked the way they represented the ordinariness of our daily lives as we presented ourselves to God. And the fact is, I actually performed very few baptisms by immersion. This is Vermont. Our church, a union of the old Baptist and Congregational fellowships that had thrived in the nineteenth century when the community had been larger, didn’t even have a baptismal tank, and Alice was the only person I baptized that summer by immersion, the sole parishioner to join the church in that manner.

“That was so powerful,” Ginny said to her friend. “Aren’t you glad you did it?” When they pulled apart, the front of Ginny’s shirt was almost as damp as Alice’s.

“I am,” Alice said, and I saw that she’d begun to cry. Katie noticed, too, and did what she probably did often when she saw her mother’s eyes fill with tears. She patted her on the back as if she were their family’s springer spaniel, Lula, offering gentle taps that were about as close as a fifteen-year-old with a stud in her nose gets to an embrace in public with her mother.

The Brookners, the family whose pond we used, were summer people, a wealthy family who came north to Haverill from a suburb of Manhattan sometime around Memorial Day weekend and lived at the top of one of the hills that surrounded the village. Michelle Brookner and the three children did, anyway. Michelle’s husband, Gordon, was an attorney who would drive up for weekends and a two-week vacation in August. From the Brookners’ pond, it was impossible to see the town itself, not even the church steeple, but we could see the verdant hollow in which the village sat, as well as the cemetery at the top of the distant ridge. I looked that way to avert my eyes from Alice’s tears.

Members of the Women’s Circle gathered around Ginny and Alice, embracing Alice as Ginny had, and I found George’s absence conspicuous in ways that it wasn’t at a routine Sunday-morning service. I wondered briefly whether I should have visited him prior to the baptism and asked him to come. Convinced him. Later, of course, I would blame myself for not insisting that he attend, just as I would blame myself for not understanding the meaning of the ritual in Alice’s mind-for denying in my head what I must have known in my heart.

When the medical examiner did the autopsies on the Haywards, he reported that Alice’s rear end and her back were flecked with fresh contusions, which meant that George had beaten her the Friday or Saturday night before she was baptized and none of us knew. At least I didn’t. Her kidneys were so badly bruised that she might very well have peed blood before she’d come to church that morning. Nevertheless, I don’t think it was that finding that set me off, because I wouldn’t learn that particular detail until much later. In my mind at least, I was gone from the church the moment Ginny had called me the day after the baptism, that Monday morning, sobbing uncontrollably, with the news that George and Alice were dead and it looked like he had killed them both. In the midst of Ginny’s wails-and she really was wailing, this was indeed a lament of biblical proportions-I somehow heard in my head the last word that Alice had addressed solely to me, that single word there , and the seeds of my estrangement from my calling had been sown.

There.

I’d nodded when Alice had said it; I’d echoed her word. I’d known exactly what she’d meant. She wasn’t referring to Romans or Colossians, to the letters of Peter or Paul. She wasn’t thinking of any of the passages in the Bible explaining baptism that we’d discussed at a table outside my church office or in the living room of her house as her immersion approached.

She was thinking of John, and of Christ’s three words at the end of his torment on the cross; she was imagining that precise moment when he bows his head and gives up his spirit.

It is finished, said Christ. There.

And Alice Hayward was ready to die.

Vermont rarely has more than ten or fifteen homicides in any given year, and while the majority of them begin with domestic disputes, murder-suicides are blessedly uncommon: Usually a husband or ex-husband, boyfriend or ex-boyfriend, merely shoots or strangles the poor woman with whom he might have built a life and then goes to prison for the majority of what remains of his own. Frequently he turns himself in. We are conditioned to expect one dead at the scenes of our homicides, not two. And so the Haywards’ story-a murder and a suicide together-was both horrific and exceptional.

George Hayward had come to southern Vermont from Buffalo as an ambitious young retailer who saw that Manchester could use more than high-end designer outlets and shops that sold maple syrup and quaint Green Mountain trinkets. He was the first to see that a clothing store for teens and young adults and modeled on Abercrombie & Fitch-but stressing natural fibers and stocking Vermont-made clothing-could anchor a corner of the block near the town’s busiest intersection and thrive though surrounded by national chains that sold clothes sewn together in sweatshops for less. There were just enough tourists and just enough locals and-when word filtered south to Bennington, half an hour away by car-just enough college students to keep the store afloat through its first year, and by its second it was an institution. It actually would become a destination for young adults as far away as Albany, Rutland, and Pittsfield. Eventually his magic touch would extend to a southern-style rib restaurant (skiers in the winter particularly loved it) and an upscale toy store that used retro toys as the marketing bait for baby boomers, but electronic gadgets to ensnare their kids and make the serious money. For a long time, the formula worked. In addition to the house that he built in Haverill, he acquired what he and Alice referred to as a cottage on Lake Bomoseen-a svelte stretch of water perhaps nine miles long that over the years had numbered among its guests the Marx Brothers, Alexander Woollcott, and Rebecca West. Based on the photos, however, the cottage was actually rather elegant: a post-and-beam barn frame with a wall of glass windows facing west to savor the sunsets over the rippling pinewoods.

George had been a teen model in Buffalo, and he had grown into a dramatically handsome adult. He’d actually worn a wedding band before he was married to Alice to minimize the number of women who would hit on him on the streets and in the restaurants of first Buffalo and then Manchester and Bennington. Once when he was drunk, he told friends-famously, since this is Vermont, a state in which vanity and self-absorption are still viewed by the locals as character defects commensurate with gluttony, greed, and sloth-that his magnetism had helped to ensure that he found the requisite bankers and private investors to bankroll his big ideas before he had a track record. One of my parishioners said that he looked like Prince Valiant with a better haircut: His hair was a shade more terra-cotta than blond and was only beginning to thin now that he was on the far side of forty, and his skin barely showed the wear and tear of either retail risk or age. Some years he had a mustache that was the color of faded pumpkin pine, but he was clean-shaven the summer he murdered his wife. If he hadn’t started drinking so heavily in his mid-thirties, I imagine his workout regimen would have kept even his slight, midlife paunch at bay. He was handsome and strong and could be charming and charismatic when he wanted. He had a chip on his shoulder (wholly unwarranted), and he was more savvy than smart, but he was far from humorless. He was a person of some renown in the southern Vermont business community. There were people who were firmly convinced that Alice, though pretty, was lucky to have him. Almost no one knew that she had gotten a temporary relief-from-abuse order against him that last winter of her life, and many people suspected that he had left her in those months they were separated.