Apparition & Late Fictions: A Novella and Stories (13 page)

He got photos of Clare and David coming and going at hotels along I-75, tastefully north and south of Findlay, where only transients and other adulterers might be. There were detailed logs of their arrivals, departures, room numbers, dates and times. Adrian calculated that the average stay was 2.75 hours, which he tried to divide into foreplay, intercourse, and afterglow, and was bothered to find himself slightly aroused by these contemplations. After twelve years he felt he knew Clare’s sexual repertoire—what she liked to do and have done to her—and the thought of her doing those things with someone else first enraged, then excited, then sickened, then saddened him. There were photos of them having dessert at a Cracker Barrel restaurant near the Lima exit. They looked like teenagers, sharing a piece of Boston cream pie, surrounded by booths full of old married couples, their forks hovering over the pie on the plate, nearly touching, their eyes fixed deeply on each other’s eyes. There was a background workup on David Eason, who, except for the fact that he still lived with his parents at age twenty-nine, in the carriage house of one of the great mansions on Sandusky Street, and had been hospitalized once for an unspecified nervous disorder, seemed unremarkable in every way. A month or so into their affair, midway through the spring semester, Clare and David planned a romantic weekend at a boutique hotel in Cincinnati. Clare had told Adrian she was going to film a short movie about the Anderson Ferry that brought cars back and forth across the Ohio River, to fulfill requirements for her video arts class.

“It’s the last of the old ferryboats on the Ohio—since 1817! There’s a whole crew of us going, production and sound, camera
and lighting, we’re going to submit it to short film competitions. We’ll be staying in dorm rooms at Mount St. Joseph. There are no phones. I’m riding with the other camera operator.” Clare had her story perfectly constructed. Adrian had smiled agreeably, and nodded and said nothing except that he’d watch the kids. While she packed a small bag, he called his detective.

That evening, after Clare went off waving from David Eason’s Toyota van, Adrian took Sarah and Damien out to St. Michael the Archangel’s for the annual parish fair and let them ride the rides and eat cotton candy and sit under the big tent eating spaghetti and meatballs with the Catholics. He walked with them among the booths of crafts and white elephants and children’s games and bought them both chances at ringtoss and beanbags. He could not resist the urge to spoil them with diversions and easy pleasures. He peeked into the casino tent with blackjack tables and roulette wheels and tables of bingo games and wondered at the way these otherwise devout people would wallow in sin for a worthy cause. Whereas the Baptists had bake sales and the Methodists did Christmas bazaars, the Episcopalians favored crafts and antiques sales and the Presbyterians were forever doing dinners and teas to raise money for their various causes, there was something to envy in the way these Poles and Germans, Italian and Irish Catholics would indulge their nearly pagan appetites to put some money in the priests’ pension fund or a new roof on the rectory or construct a bell tower to sound the Angelus all over town. Food and drink and dance and games of chance—St. Michael the Archangel’s parish fair had become the biggest and best of the churchy entertainments in Findlay, the opening of the summer season, and folks from all over Hamilton County came.

Adrian sat at a long table littered with half-empty plastic
cups of beer and soda, under the main tent where a band was playing. He gave Damien a roll of tickets for rides and games and told him to hold his sister’s hand. He sipped a Coca-Cola and looked at his watch to figure how far south Clare was by now. An accordion and clarinet wheezed between drumbeats from the bandstand at the end of the tent and Adrian found himself fixed on the long-married couples—bald men with plump bellies and women half again their marriage weight, still holding one another, after thirty or forty years, through waltzes and polkas, a little tipsy with the beer, the press of coreligionists and the humid evening air, like figures out of a Flemish painting, all knees and elbows and red faces sweltering under the canvas and party lights, circling in this rollicking dance.

“How you keeping, Adrian? Good of you to come.”

The priest startled Adrian from his contemplations.

“Oh, yes, yes, Francis, fine. And how are you? This extravaganza gets bigger every year!”

“First full convergence since the sixteenth century! You wanna raffle ticket?”

Adrian was still catching up to the priest’s conversation.

“Convergence? Raffle?”

“Yep, first time since the Council of Trent that Friday the thirteenth and the full moon in June fall on the same day—should be lucky. First prize is a trip to Cancún for two. Clare would like that, Adrian. What say ye?”

The priest could sell anything, Adrian thought, especially in his slightly manic, larger-than-life incarnation as Father Francis Assisi Concannon, priest of God—half huckster, half holy man—the six-foot-four-inch lumbering frame clad in a Hawaiian shirt and Bermuda shorts, one fist full of dollars and
another full of raffle tickets. Adrian fished five dollars from his pocket and handed it over.

“How many will that buy?”

“Only one, but it’s all you’ll need, bucko!”

Adrian and the priest had been friends for ten years since they’d both come to Findlay, fresh from their separate educations and appointments. The one and only meeting of the Findlay Ministerial Association, now defunct, had been held at St. Mark’s Methodist. They played racquetball together, took in a movie from time to time, commiserated over parish politics and their bishops, and traded titles of books to read. Father Concannon favored Irish poets while Reverend Littlefield preferred spiritual guides and homiletics.
The Collected Poems of William Butler Yeats
got traded for
The Best of Robert Ingersoll.
Beckett got traded for Frederick Buechner. Every so often they’d go to dinner in the next town over, where no one knew them and they could be free of the scrutiny of parishioner and congregant.

“And where’s the beautiful Mrs. Littlefield on such a fine moon and June and spooning evening?” The priest loved the sound of the pursed vowels in his mouth second only to the sound of his own voice. He pressed a ticket and pencil on the table for Adrian to fill out.

“She’s gone to Cincinnati, to Mount St. Joseph.”

“Jaysus, Adrian, she’s gone and joined the convent on ye—the nuns will rob you, man.”

Mount St. Joseph was one of the many holdings of the Sisters of Charity in Cincinnati—a four-year school for good Catholic girls, a fraction of whom would get a calling and join the order after graduation.

Adrian scribbled his name and phone number on the ticket
stub, tore off his portion, and gave the book of tickets back to the priest.

“She’s gone past the point where the nuns would take her, Frank.”

Adrian wondered if the priest could hear more than small talk in what he’d said, the way he’d said it, and there was this sudden panic that he’d have to explain, to everyone—his parents and children, his senior pastor and his congregation, his neighbors and friends, old and new, the lawyers and taxman, God in heaven, everyone, everyone would know—that he had failed as a husband and father and head of the household; he had failed to keep his marriage intact, he had failed to keep his wife happy and satisfied and at home with her family where she belonged. Because he knew at the moment she was riding southbound with her new lover, David Eason, on I-75, maybe indulging in a little highway sex, his hand in her panties, her face in his lap, the reckless pleasure of it. He figured they were well south of Dayton now. Adrian knew he’d have to account to everyone but he just didn’t want to do it now and so he smiled into the priest’s inquisitive gaze.

“A film project, Francis, something for school.”

ADRIAN’S WIFE
and her new lover had dinner on Mount Adams, in a small Italian restaurant, Guido’s on the Hill, then strolled among the boutiques and galleries, then went to their room at the Cincinnatian and reappeared the following morning, when, hand in hand, they were photographed leaving the hotel together, each with their cameras and equipment bags. They drove out River Road, along the north shore of the Ohio to the southwest, and were photographed photographing
Anderson’s Ferry, no doubt to supply some bit of alibi. They even rode it across the Ohio to the Kentucky shore, then back again. The photo of the ferry disappearing into the sunlit fog with the hills barely visible and half a dozen cars lined up on deck was almost artistic. Then they drove up Anderson Ferry Road to Delhi Road, where Adrian’s detective took a photo of David taking a photo of Clare, posing among the summer semester students, at the door to one of the dorms, Clare trying her best to be “one of the girls” though she was more than a decade older than them. Then they returned to the hotel and window-shopped downtown. She bought him a straw boater at Batsakes hat shop. He bought her flowers. It was all in the report. They returned to their room for their second night of bliss, new lovers in early June, carefree in a not-too-distant city.

Adrian was not proud of the fact that he’d hired DiBardino to spy on Clare, but he figured he really had to have proof, not only for the eventual proceedings, but for himself, before he could call an attorney from outside the congregation, have him file for divorce and an “ex parte” order granting custody of “the minor children” to him and possession of the marital home pending the outcome of the proceedings. He really had to know. He was not proud of the fact that he’d talked to an attorney who’d given him the number for the private eye and told him how to get the goods on Clare.

“What you want is chapter and verse, open-and-shut, a slam dunk. Play for keeps, Reverend, play to win it,” the attorney told him. He said he’d need three thousand up front and would bill him for the balance, if there was any more. He promised discretion and anonymity.

It was early Sunday afternoon, after the eleven o’clock
service to which he always took his children and at which he preached, every other week, when DiBardino brought him the file and the photos. Reading it was like working a rotten tooth loose, the dull ache sharpening, then subsiding, then sharpening again, the nerve exposed, then numbing inexplicably.

It was the sentence in the report that read, “Subjects were observed embracing in front of a church on Mount Adams,” that finished it for him. He knew that she had taken her new lover there because it was where Adrian had taken her the night he had proposed to her almost a dozen years before. They’d had dinner at the Rookwood Pottery and walked up to Immaculata Church on the highest point of Cincinnati’s seven hills. Adrian had planned this part. They’d walked up Guido Street to where it dead-ended in the small front courtyard of the church, surrounded by cast-iron fencing and overlooking the city. They had looked down on the wide turn of the Ohio River, and the city with its bridges, and the southwestern expanse of Kentucky and America, and pledged their love and planned their future there. They’d driven down from Delaware, where he was finishing his studies at Methodist Theological and she was a student at Ohio Wesleyan. They’d spent the day walking around Eden Park among the gardens and observatories. It was late summer and Clare was the golden girl of his dreams with whom he’d had sex maybe a half a dozen times since the night she came to him, to the flat he’d rented off campus, and kissed him and let her clothes be taken off of her. Though neither of them were virgins, neither was really experienced either. They were, in his memory of it, innocents. It was in front of the church atop Mount Adams he had taken from his pocket the quarter-karat diamond ring his mother had helped him buy the weekend before and he pressed it into her palm and said he wanted to
be married to her and to live with her forever and to build a future with her and would she be his wife? She said nothing at first, only slipped the ring on her finger, kissed him deeply and pressed her head against his chest, sighed and said of course she would. “My darling,” she called him, “of course.” In his memory of it, they seemed in love.

It was, in Adrian’s heart, the place they were truly pledged, truly promised to one another, truly wed. In the early years of their marriage, when he wondered whether they were going to make it, it was that place, that moment, and its nearly cinematic replay in his memory that always convinced him they were meant for one another. And it was the wash of moonlight through the window of the Holiday Inn in downtown Cincinnati, which shone on Clare’s bare shoulders as she knelt over his outstretched body that night, that still illumined his recollection of their sex, in slow motion, like a silent film—how she slowly bent to kiss him, letting her mouth with its warmth and quickened breathing work its way up and down his body, her hands so smooth, her arms outstretched, touching at once his right temple and his eyelids and his inner thighs, then taking him slowly into her mouth, hushing with the fingers of her left hand the catch of his breath, then in her own time, when he could not imagine any greater ecstasy, straddling him, taking him into herself—this was the consummation of their love, silver in every former remembrance, transcendent and sacramental, anointed, bathed in light, and now, now gone terribly, irretrievably dark.

That she would share their places with someone else seemed a more intimate betrayal than even sex. He called the attorney; he wept giving their particulars; full names, birth dates, date of marriage; the papers would be filed in the morning. She was
served as she left her class with David Monday night. Adrian had left on Sunday afternoon and taken the children to visit his parents in Grand Rapids. He left a manila envelope on their bed, with photos of her and David coming and going from their assorted rendezvous and a note that told her he had “chapter and verse” on her “film project” and would use them against her if she contested anything. It would be a “slam dunk.” She was to move out. “Now.” He underlined the word. He included a check for five thousand dollars which he’d borrowed from the same church elder who’d loaned him the retainer for the attorney. She could use that to get set up in her “new life.” She could keep the diamond ring, take anything she regarded as hers, and get out. He would contact the Western Ohio Conference of the UMC to find out whatever paltry amount had accrued to his pension fund and insurance account. If it was more than the five thousand, he’d pay her the difference. If it was less, she could keep the change. He wanted no fiscal entanglements between them. He would, he assured her, never keep the children from her, neither would he allow her to take them with her wherever it was she saw herself going. On this point Adrian was fairly certain that she would not put up much of a fight because what she really wanted was to travel light, free of encumbrances, into a new life with a new man off to New York where her truly artistic self would surface once the dull weight of husband and household and maternity had been lifted from her. He offered her, in this manila envelope, a package deal—freedom, some finances, and a permanent if à la carte relationship with her children, in trade for her getting out and letting everyone settle into the lives they would lead without her. Adrian, of course, had had the counsel of his attorney, who told him it would all go much better for him and for his children if there were
truly no hope of reconciliation, if he could get Clare to move out of the “marital home.” The photos, the check, the promises of freedom and a future of “quality time” with her children, and the not-entirely-articulated but none-too-hidden threat of embarrassment, Adrian figured would be enough.