Diane Davidson - The Last Suppers

“So then Lucille collapsed,” she went on grimly. “There was a priest nearby who tried to tend to her, and she told him that your fiancé wanted you on the phone. Eventually she gasped out the news that Olson was dead. Father Doug Ramsey just made an announcement that your wedding would be postponed. And why. Good old Doug is trying to start a silent prayer service. Of course, silence is the last thing the poor guy’s going to get. It’s pretty crazy out there. Looks as if the cops who were here, Schulz’s friends, are scrambling outside for their car radios.” She shook out her mass of crimped hair, stowed the hairpins in her suit pocket, and with sudden resolve took my arm. “We have to get you out of here. People are going to be coming in to use the phone. And you’re the bride, you don’t’ need to have everyone asking you questions. Let them read it in the paper. Where were you before Lucille put you in the sacristy to wait?”

Olson’s office.”

“Anybody else there?”

I shook my head.

“Let’s go.”

She steered me out of the choir room. Lucille Boatwright was now sitting, slumped, in a kid-size chair hastily provided form one of the Sunday School rooms She was moaning again, so I assumed she was not in imminent danger. Marla and I made a quick left out the side door beside the sacristy, the same door I had come through with so much hope only fifteen minutes before. All the attention focused on Lucille meant the exit of the would-be bride and her matron of honor went unnoticed. Thank God for small favors, my father would say.

The chilly air outdoors was a pleasant shock after the too-warm, too-close air in the church. When my beige shoes slipped on the ice, I begged Marla to sit with me on the bench by the side door for a moment. I needed to clear me head of the image of a bloodstained Father Olson. She reluctantly took a place beside me and muttered that someone could find us here. But she took my right hand anyway, and firmly held it in hers.

At length she said, “Look, Goldy. Don’t think about Olson.”

“I can’t help it.”

“Then let’s go into the office.”

“I can’t.”

I shivered and glanced at the columbarium that Lucille and the parish Art and Architecture committee were having built in honor of old Father Pinckney, Lucille hadn’t obtained Father Olson’s permission, much less a building permit, but excavation was moving ahead anyway, despite the fact that St. Luke’s, and the columbarium, were in the county floodplain. The idea of Father Olson’s ashes being the first interred there made me avert my eyes and look up the steep hill across the street, where the old Aspen meadow Episcopal Conference Center’s Hymnal House and Brio Barn overlooked our church and Cottonwood Creek. I could see Lucille’s henchwomen still moving through the doors of Hymnal House with platters of food. So much for our wedding reception in the historic district.

“let’s go,” I said. “This is depressing me.”

Once we’d entered the church office building, Marla sat me down and asked if I needed anything.

“Just Arch. And nobody else, please. Maybe Julian,” I added. “I don’t want to go home, and Tom promised he’d be along as soon as he could get away.”

“Gotcha.” Marla shut the heavy wooden door behind her.

The air in the office building seemed stuffier than the church. Some of the remnants of the ongoing renovation were piled by the desk in the secretary’s outer office: torn-out drywall, pipes, an old faucet. My street clothes and garment bag hung forlornly on a door hook beside a faded reproduction of Leonardo Da Vinci’s Last Supper. I gazed at the painting, in which a sunlit Jesus and eleven followers talk and gesticulate while Judas reaches for food, his face in shadow. My eyes were drawn to the ph9otographs above the desk: Father Olson, somber with Sportsmen Against Hunger and the carcass of an elk, smiling with the Aspen Meadow Habitat for Humanity Committee, standing proudly with the committee I was on with him, the diocesan Board of Theological Examiners. Had been on with him. Someone would have to call the diocesan office. A photograph over the desk made my ears ring: dark-bearded Olson, holding a tiny white-robed infant and bending over the baptismal font. Someone would have to arrange the funeral. The first rites to the last.

I tried to open one of the old windows, but it was painted shut. I turned away and willed myself not to think of Ted Olson dying. Dead. What ran through my head were images of him alive. Olson laughing and arguing at our Theological Examiners’ meeting; Olson rolling his eyes as I shook out an enormous molded grapefruit salad for the Women’s Prayer Group; Olson preaching on his favorite topic – renewal.

And then in my recollection his face was suddenly, vividly, up close, in one of our early premarital counseling sessions. I had never really known Ted Olson until we began that very personal journey into discussing Tom’s and my relationship. I recalled the skin at the sides of his eyes crinkling deeply when he laughed, his slender fingers absently stroking his dark beard when he listened. For the sessions, he had worn jeans topped with dark turtlenecks instead of his customary black clerical shirt and white collar. Sitting in his tweed-covered swivel chair, he had lifted one dark eyebrow and eyed me skeptically.

“And why exactly do you want to get married again?”

“Second time’s the charm.”

A mischievous smile curled his mouth. “Do you always hide behind the flip answer?’

“It helps.”

Sometimes it helped. And now Olson was gone. I tried again to breathe deeply and told myself to stop thinking about him. But I couldn’t.

“Mom?”

Arch stood uneasily between the secretary’s desk and a stack of contorted water pipes. He bit the inside of his cheek and tugged on the hem of the tux.

“Do you want me to leave? Marla said I should come over.” “No, no, I’m glad you came.” I asked him to sit down so I could explain that Father Olson, who had been due to present Arch for confirmation this month, wasn’t going to show up. And why.

“Yeah, I heard,” he said haltingly when I’d told him the news. He raised his chin and pushed his glasses up his freckled nose. In Aspen Meadow, a mountain town that was more like a village than a suburb, Arch had had much experience of death. Here, the two of us knew a larger group of people than I ever had in the towns I’d lived in before moving to Colorado. For Arch, to experience townspeople killed in skiing and car accidents, n avalanches, by cancer or of heart attacks, was unfortunately commonplace.

He asked in a low voice, “Do they know hot it happened yet?”

“Tom will.”

Beneath his freckles, Arch’s face had turned translucently white. The skin under his eyes was dark as pitch. “Where is Tom? Will he be here soon?”

When I nodded, he said, “Julian wants to know what you want to do with the food.”

“Oh, Lord. I don’t know.”

Arch waited for me to elaborate. Then he went on. “Something else. Mrs. Boatwright, you know?’ When I nodded, he said, “Well, they’re waiting to take her when the Mountain Rescue Team gets here. But …” He stopped.

“What is it, Arch? Things couldn’t get much worse.”

“She was sitting out there in the hall, you know, after she passed out. Then she saw me and like, signaled me over. She told me in this loud whisper to ask you to donate the food to Aspen Meadow Outreach. ‘Obviously your mother won’t be able to use it today,’ “ Arch whispered in an uncannily throaty imitation, “ ‘ and I’ve seen this kind of thing before.’ “

“Seen a priest die before a wedding?”

“No.” Arch drew his lips into a thoughtful pucker, then continued. “Mrs. Boatwright said she’d seen a groom change his mind.” He singsonged, “ ‘Sometimes they just can’t go through with it.’ “ He’d always had a talent for imitation, but I’d never been devastated by the results before.