Good-bye and Amen (22 page)
Authors: Beth Gutcheon
I put most of my things in storage. I left Norman's stuff in the rectory; let him deal with it. Let
Mother
Tautsch give it all to the rummage sale.
Jeannie wanted me to get out of town, go to New York, but I had to at least finish the year. This was my town too. I did have my work here, my friends, I was more than the minister's wife.
Oh, that's baloney. I stayed because I was too hurt and angry and addled to make sensible plans. It was a class-B miracle that I could get dressed in the morning and get through my workday. It did mean that I had no effing idea what to do about Christmas, and we do still have children.
In the end, I took Edie and Sylvia to L.A. to be with Jimmy and Josslyn. Their house was full; Josslyn's mother and sister were there. We stayed at a bed-and-breakfast a few blocks from them. Josslyn was lovely about having us all. It was better; her house, her style, her turf. Sam was with us as much as he could be and that was very good for the girls. All three of them were livid at their father.
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Sylvia Faithful
I admit it. I became a Buddhist to embarrass my father. He was a god to me and it was uncomfortable. But tell me I'm wrong. Buddhism is all about doing
away with troublesome ego. How can you go to St. Peter's in Rome and not say that if Jesus walked in here and saw all these statues of dead popes and their marble and gold sarcophagi, he'd think it was demented?
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Edith Faithful
Someone said Buddhism is better than Christianity because it gets away from the Neolithic craving to gloat over human sacrifice. How about gloating, period?
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Josslyn Moss
I liked having Monica as a guest. She helped in the kitchen. She asked me how I liked to do things. She taught Boedie to play “Heart and Soul” with her on the piano, and she and Jimmy played some four-hand sheet music they found in the piano bench. Jimmy had only recently started playing again. I guess the music belonged to Aunt Nina.
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Monica Faithful
We sight-read
Dolly
, the Fauré suite. At least I was sight-reading. Jimmy was doing his part by ear. I caught him when I didn't turn the page in the right place, and he went right on playing. It made me laugh. God, he plays like an angel.
We took long walks in the sun on the Santa Monica pier. I asked Jimmy how Norman could have done what he did. Someone much nicer than I am had told me some elaborate theory that when you're seen as this God-like person but you know that you're human and flawed, you have a need to be found out.
Jimmy listened with that sweet, mild steadiness he has these days, like someone who's been to the moon and knows what it's really made of, but knows it's no use telling the
rest of us. He just watches, and helps if he's asked to. So I asked how a man of God, whose whole life is supposed to be a model of goodness, could do what Norman did, and he said, Oh that's easy. Charisma is amoral.
Charisma is amoral. If you have it, you may think at first it's some gift from a higher place that you're supposed to use in a special way, but once you recognize it's much simpler than that, you can do anything you want. And when you see that the world's usual limits don't apply to you, your choices get really interesting.
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Bobby Applegate
Jimmy called me after Christmas to ask if El would sell her part of Leeway Cottage to him. We had a huge family powwow about it.
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Eleanor Applegate
The children didn't like it at all. I was surprised at how much they cared. They loved being able to spill over into Leeway when our house is full, the way they could with Monica in it. They clamored about their summer birthdays there, with their grandparents on the porch and the kids playing Capture the Flag in the field below all afternoon. They love those huge family dinners with everyone at one table. Adam and Alison want to be married there.
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Bobby Applegate
I thought, now wait. Is this a matter of being in love with your own childhood? Change is good. Or change is real. People die. Things end.
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Eleanor Applegate
I certainly had as many bad memories of that house as good ones. Jimmy probably had the fewest
bad ones. And as I said, we wanted to build a guesthouse at the Salt Pond.
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Bobby Applegate
Of course, Jimmy has the fewest memories of any kind from his childhood, let's be honest. A lot got lost in the fire.
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Eleanor Applegate
While the subject was on the table, we went to St. Louis. Bobby's nephew was getting married. It was a beautiful wedding. Of course. The children stayed to dance, but Bobby and I went back to our hotel after the cake was cut. Weddings always make me cry, all that youth, all that hope. Bobby carries an extra handkerchief for me at weddings, because I forget I'm going to cry, but he doesn't. At the hotel, there was some sort of wingding going on, a Sweet Sixteen maybe. We were holding hands as we walked through the lobby, and two girls with braces on their teeth, all dressed up, ran after us to the elevator. They said, “Waitâhow long have you been married?” We said thirty-six years. “What's the secret?” they wanted to know. (That's when we realized we were holding hands.) I was about to say Never Marry a Man Who Hates His Mother, but Bobby answered first. He said, “Marry someone who makes you laugh, who will never betray you.” And he meant me.
A lot has been all my way for a lot of years. So when we got home I asked him what he wanted to do about Leeway, and he said, “Sell to Jimmy.” So we did.
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Monica Faithful
El had told me in February that Jimmy had bought her out and what he'd paid for her share. I waited for him to call about mine. I felt bereft; I mean, I was already so
bereft I thought it was going to kill me to lose Leeway too, but life seems to practice an economy of pain. Pile it all on at once, see how long it takes you to snap. I couldn't provide a place where all my children could celebrate Christmas or Hanukkah or the winter solstice together, and now I wouldn't be able to provide a place in the summer either. And I'd felt stretched to breaking
before
that. I couldn't pray. My nights were so long and bleak, I can't tell you. The children would be devastated. I'd failed the three of them in so many ways. How would I keep them together as a family without Dundee? And where would home be for me now?
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Josslyn Moss
I waited until about March to bring up the subject of Leeway Cottage. I said, “Jimmy, Christmas was fine, but I can't share the house again with your sisters.” He said, “I know.”
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Monica Faithful
In early March, Norman's mother died. Died on March Hill, they say in Dundee. They get through Christmas, they even get through February, our old ones, but then March comes and there's still no spring and it's too much to bear. I thought of that, and pictured Hazel, halfway up a hill in patchy snow, with the rocks underfoot glazed with ice and the wind blowing at her baggy skin and her blind old eyes, saying, “No, I've had enough of this.” I know she died in her bed at the nursing place, with rails on the sides like a baby's crib, and a glass on her tray of that horrible thickened water that she had to drink because regular water went down the wrong tube and made her chokeâ¦it's truer to see her splayed out on the path up a hill too steep, having chosen to say, “Stop. I'm done.”
Norman called me in tears, to ask me please to come to the funeral. I went, much more for the children than for him. It was a bleak little business in the chapel of the nursing place. Just me and Norman and the three children, and a handful of nurses and of Hazel's most recent friends, in wheelchairs and walkers, probably there more because it was a festive outing for them than because Hazel had made an impression. She'd outlived everybody in her outside world except us. The nurses were very kind, though. They told us stories of happy moments in her last days. They seemed generic, except that one admitted Hazel had been quite exercised about another patient, an old gent who kept wandering into her room and putting his sweater into her drawers.
I guess
that
never ends.
Sylvie went right to the airport and back to New York after the service, but Edie and Sam and I stayed to help Norman pack up Hazel's belongings. We had dinner together, and afterward Norman asked me to sit with him. He talked about what it was like to be sober for the first time in years. He talked about spiritual renewal, and how alone he felt in the world without a church home, without his mother, without me. He cried a lot and apologized a lot.
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Eleanor Applegate
And of course he asked her to take him back. I said, “Monica, tell me you're not even
thinking
about it.” She told me she wasn't. But she was lying.
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Jeannie Israel
It's very hard to break the habit of trying to make the world right for someone you've loved. It's especially hard if you're a mother, and you've spent decades with those emotional habits of loving and protecting your
children. When someone like Norman appeals to those same instincts, it's like turning your back on your best self to say no. Especially if without him, you don't know what you have or who you are. Norman is a genius at understanding that sort of weakness in people.
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Monica Faithful
Then I got a big envelope from a lawyer in Los Angeles, which said in about thirty-five pages of boilerplate and three sentences I could actually read, that Jimmy had given Leeway Cottage to me.
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Josslyn Moss
At first I was poleaxed. I said, “Why the hell would you do that? I love that house! The children love that house! Regis has this little ivory elephant he found there that he's carried around with him so much he's broken the tusks off!” Jimmy said, “I thought it would do the greatest good for the greatest number.” I said, “I know that's a quote I'm supposed to recognize, asshole.”
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Jimmy Moss
I told her if it made her too unhappy, we wouldn't do it. Nika would give it back.
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Josslyn Moss
Actually, I knew she would, if we asked.
Virgil wandered in, and he and Jimmy sat at the piano and sang their new theme song, from some record that came out of our boxes from Connecticut. It's called “Nobody Ever Wants to Court a Warthog.” Virgil is starting to play by ear like his dad, and they made me laugh.
After the kids were in bed, Jimmy said, “Don't forget, something in the house pushed Regis down the stairs.” I said, “You don't believe that.” He said, “Actually, maybe I do.”
I waited for the real reason. Jimmy doesn't like to spell things out, but I wanted more than a ghost story. But I didn't get it.
What are you going to do? I knew what he was like when I married him.
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An interesting development. Norman has started using a Ouija board. He got the idea from some woman he met at the dry-out place, whom he's keeping company with. He started by wanting to talk to his mother. But instead he's got someone very old and canny, who's given her name as Sarai. She told him Hazel's spirit has already been reborn, to a Mexican mother in Fort Worth. Gave a lot of details about how to find the baby. Didn't go so far as to offer stars to guide him there, but it's enough to keep him busy.
He keeps asking if there's anyone here called Jesus Christ. Sarai gives him puzzle answers. If there were such a being he wouldn't call himself that. If there were such a being he wouldn't be here. That sort of thing. To each according to his needs.
Who is here? As I've said. New arrivals, those in transition. And we who are not going anywhere.
It's true that there are many mansions. Very many. And there are some of us who are built to serve. It's what we're made of, it's what we chose. We arrived like the others, but we don't go on. We stay, to help and guide at the moment of maximum confusion.
No. It isn't sad for us. Oh, maybe it is, a little. Was at first. But there are so many compensations. We do have fun.
Adam Applegate
, son of Eleanor and Bobby Applegate, is twenty-nine. He attended the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, then law school at University of Virginia. He currently practices tax law in Washington, D.C., at the firm of O'Melveny & Myers. He is learning to cook Chinese food, which he especially enjoys because of all the manly chopping with big sharp knives.
Annabelle Applegate,
known as Annie, is the oldest child of Eleanor and Bobby Applegate. She is thirty-two. She went to Middlebury College, where she majored in French. She manages the office of a Boston architect and belongs to the Junior League of Boston and to her mother's Topics Club, which she particularly enjoys. She is most proud of having finished the Boston Marathon in under four hours, and would like to live in France for a year.
Bobby Applegate
married Eleanor Moss in 1964. An investment banker, president and CEO of Applegate Brothers, Ltd., where he feels only slightly under the thumb of the chairman of the board, his older brother Terry. He grew up in Rye, New York, and graduated from Georgetown. Can play guitar, banjo, and trombone, and still sometimes regrets that he never tried to make it playing rock and roll. John is his favorite Beatle.
Henrik Charles Applegate
, called Charlesie, youngest child of Bobby and Eleanor Applegate, is almost nineteen. He has spent a lot of time in the Opportunity Room at school, and couldn't do math if you put a gun to his head, but he can read the wind on the bay like a private language. He would like to be a professional sailor and crew in an America's Cup, and also to sail in the Whitbread Round the World Race. If he can manage to finish high school, he hopes to go to the Maine Maritime Academy in Castine.
Eleanor Wells Moss Applegate,
oldest daughter of Laurus and Sydney Moss, was born in Dundee, Maine, in August of 1942. She eloped with Bobby Applegate during her senior year at Skidmore. She completed a master's degree in history of art, hoping to go into museum work, but in the end settled for a lot of volunteering. She particularly likes the following cultural truism: What's the ultimate status symbol? Answer: four kids and a wife who doesn't work. She hopes she can talk her husband into working less and traveling more once Charlesie goes to college. She would like to spend an entire week in the Scuola Grande di San Rocco in Venice, and another in the Prado in Madrid. She is especially proud of her Topics Club, which she keeps on the straight and narrow in spite of the tendency of some of the older members to pay Harvard students to write their Topics papers.
Nora Marion Applegate
, younger daughter of Eleanor and Bobby Applegate, just turned twenty-one. As a girl she was passionate about competitive horse show jumping, which she was forced to give up when her mother refused to spend her life trailing around to horse shows from Boston to Florida. She will graduate from Brown with a degree in English
literature and would like to live in New York City or San Francisco, or to go to the Iowa Writers' Workshop or else film school. She is also interested in journalism. Biggest unrealized dream: to disguise herself as a boy and ride a racehorse like Elizabeth Taylor in
National Velvet.
Also, she plans to finish the family photo archive she's putting on DVD for everyone as soon as she can get to it.
Trinny Biggs
, Sandusky, Ohio. Manager, Second Acts, a store for lightly used children's clothing. Formerly a homemaker in Sand Hills, Oregon. Currently supervising care for her elderly parents. Proudest accomplishment: winning second prize in the local newspaper's biannual quilt contest for her original appliqué pattern quilt called Hawaiian Luau. She would like to visit Honolulu.
Benedikte Bastlund
is a lawyer in Copenhagen. Married to Iain McCallum, a Scottish professor of maths. They have three grown children, all living in Denmark. Her favorite pastime: golf vacations in Scotland.
Alison Boyd
grew up in New York City, partly raised by her grandmother when her mother became ill. She graduated from Wheaton College and is currently working at the Renwick Gallery in Washington, D.C. She met Adam Applegate at a wedding in Richmond. Her proudest accomplishment: she overcame her fear of flying and went skydiving. Once. She especially likes summer storms in Washington, when the sky turns purple-green.
Kendra Brayton
is retired. She lives with her husband in a gated senior community in Orange County, California. She enjoys visiting her grandchildren. She swims fifty laps in the pool at least four times a week, and walks briskly with two girlfriends on the other days. She has organized
progressive dinner parties where you have a different course at each person's house, and enjoys a trip to Las Vegas twice a year. Her favorite first lady was Barbara Bush.
Owen Cantwell
is long retired, but his firm keeps an office for him and he goes in every day. He counsels the young associates, though more and more they seem to him like children masquerading as lawyers. He and his wife have passed their sixty-fifth anniversary. He can see and she can hear, which works out pretty well. He is too old to have a favorite Beatle but believes you would have to go a long way to do better than the score of
Oklahoma!
Rosella Cherry
lives in Sweetwater, Pennsylvania. Grew up in Aliquippa, Pennsylvania, daughter of a steel worker. Briefly married, has one daughter living in Australia, who is an otologist. She was the longtime one-woman sales force for the town's only bookstore, now defunct. Retrained for office work at a local business college and is now church secretary at Good Shepherd Episcopal. She also sings first alto in the choir. Paul is her favorite Beatle.
Lincoln Cluett
is a Philadelphia lawyer. He met his wife Janet at a glee club dance at Miss Pratt's School, when his friend Eleanor Moss put him on Janet's dance card. He plays championship bridge and has recently taken up croquet. Biggest thrill to date: a trip to Gambia to visit their youngest daughter who was studying drumming.
Kim Colwin
is a Trusts and Estates lawyer in Detroit. He has one daughter at the Stanford Business School and one special-needs son, and is deeply proud of them both. He wears the same pants size he did in college, plays in a seniors squash league, and also enjoys playing mixed doubles tennis
with his wife. John is his favorite Beatle. His favorite song is “In My Life.”
Syl Conary
manages the yacht club in Dundee in the summer and teaches carpentry at the academy in the winter. He enjoys saying that he took the train to New York City once, but there was so much going on at the depot he never did get to see the village.
Toby Crane
is the son of Gladdy and Neville Crane, grew up in Philadelphia and spent summers in Dundee, Maine, as a boy. A schoolteacher and confirmed bachelor living in San Rafael, California.
Auggie Dodge
was born in Dundee, Maine. Finished high school in Dundee, then did three years in the navy, where he was stationed in Honolulu. Went to work as a finish carpenter in East Dundee Boat Yard in 1963, and took the yard over from Junior Horton in 1985, when Junior retired. His favorite beetle is the sow bug.
Shirley Eaton
was born in Union, Maine. Makes breads, rolls, and pizza for Abbott's market in Dundee during the winter; in summer cooks for the family at Leeway Cottage. She grew deeply fond of Sydney and Laurus Moss, and even went down to visit them in Connecticut one winter, to see where they lived the rest of the time. She would like to fly in an airplane to Florida and take her grandchildren to Disney World.
Edith Faithful
, known as Edie or Edes, daughter of Monica and Norman, is twenty-two. After a case of mononucleosis, she dropped out of Oberlin, where she had been studying voice. She is now attending the Culinary Institute in Hyde Park, New York. She would love to go into busi
ness with her sister Sylvie. At the moment her favorite singers are Carolyn Mark and Caitlin Cary, her favorite book is
Human Croquet
by Kate Atkinson, and her unrealized ambition is to someday see Tibet.
Monica Moss Faithful
, daughter of Laurus and Sydney Moss, was born after her father returned from the war. Called Nika (NEEka) by her family. She graduated from Sarah Lawrence College and married Norman Faithful in 1971. She is an elementary school teacher. Paul was her favorite Beatle, but she can't listen to any Beatle music any more as she knows it all by heart. Her favorite album is
69 Love Songs
by Magnetic Fields, her favorite song is “Hallelujah” by Leonard Cohen, or maybe “Alexandra Leaving.” Her favorite book, not counting Austen, Dickens, or L. Frank Baum, is
The Book of Ebenezer Le Page
by G. B. Edwards. She hopes that her proudest moment is still ahead of her. Thanks for asking.
Norman Faithful
was born in Carmel, Indiana. He graduated from De Pauw University, then from Harvard Law in 1970. Ordained an Episcopal priest in 1976. He reads little fiction, and likes the triumphal hymns of Easter best. Biggest unrealized ambition: to see Qumran, where the Dead Sea Scrolls were found.
Sam Faithful
, son of Norman and Rachel Cohen Faithful, was born in Indiana in 1966. Currently working in Hollywood as a lighting designer. He loves the climate in Southern California, enjoys hang gliding, and does not want to direct. He is interested in kabbalah and also in the Sufi poet Rumi. His favorite book is anything by Neil Gaiman. He plays a mean game of snooker.
Sylvia Faithful
, daughter of Norman and Rachel Cohen
Faithful, was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and is thirty-two. Worked her way through the New School waiting on tables. Currently running the room at a new restaurant in west SoHo, and moonlighting as catering waiter/bartender. She can't imagine living anywhere but New York, and her favorite thing about the restaurant business is playing liar's poker at the bar with the rest of the staff after they close for the night. On her favorite playlists are Sam Lardner, especially
Barcelona,
and also the New Pornographers and Goldfrapp.
Homer Gantry.
Childhood summer friend of Sydney Brant Moss. Once worked briefly in the insurance industry, but found that he was not for it and it was not for him. For many years was a trustee and chief source of funds for Ischl Hall, the renowned summer music school in Dundee, Maine. Now lives in winter with his wife Gloria in Rosemont Village in Philadelphia, a retirement community. In summer, his three children return their parents to their cottage on Carleton Point in Dundee, where they are attended by a live-in “housekeeper,” in charge of balancing their prescription medicines and their alcohol intake, and driving. His favorite composer is Schubert, but he likes to tell people it's Ethelbert Nevin.
Ellen Gott
was born in Dundee, Maine, in 1917. Longtime summer cook and housekeeper for the Moss family at Leeway Cottage, she retired in 1986. She stayed in touch with Mr. and Mrs. Moss, and always kept them supplied with butterscotch cookies that no one could get right but her. She can no longer see to drive but can bake from touch and habit. She does laugh about the Thanksgiving when she made the apple pies with cayenne pepper instead of cinnamon. She enjoys getting out for a drive and going to the
Baptist Church with her granddaughter on Sundays. Eleanor Applegate sends her the large print edition of the
New York Times,
and she enjoys some, but not all, of the books on tape she gets from the library.
Elise Maitland Henneberry
. Childhood summer friend of Sydney Brant Moss, Gladdy McClintock Crane, Homer Gantry, and their crowd. “Aunt Elise” to all the young in the summer community. A legendary fund-raiser for many New York institutions, including New York Hospital, the City Ballet, and the New York Public Library. She and her husband divide their time between Park Avenue and their house in East Dundee. They keep scrupulous count of the days they spend outside of New York so they can pay taxes and vote in Maine. She enjoys gardening, watching her grandchildren's sailing races, and rereading books she loved in her youth like
The Forsyte Saga
and
The Winthrop Woman
. She has no unrealized ambitions. She's had a blessed life.
Jeannie Courtemanche Israel
. Monica Moss's best friend in life since they met at age eight in summer sailing class in Dundee and neither one could tie a bowline. A psychotherapist in New York City, fifty-three. Married, no children. Unrealized ambition: to be a fearless old lady sitting on the porch of Leeway Cottage with Monica and Amelia, thumping their canes and terrorizing the young. Her husband was recently diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, but they are both still hoping to travel when she retires. She would like to see Antarctica and has recently begun learning Italian.
Betty Kersey
. Formerly a homemaker, mother, and rector's wife, she now works as an event planner in Mountain View, California. She stays in touch with old friends from
their church days by e-mail, including Monica Faithful. Her guilty secret: that she loves computer games like Myst and Riven, and don't even talk to her about computer solitaire. Current peeve about her job: fund-raising affairs where they auction off a puppy at the end. Someone with a snootful always buys it even though his wife is holding his arm down, and two days later, they give it back and guess who has to find a home for it.
George Kersey
. Curate in same county as Norman in Missouri in the seventies. Served in several parishes before becoming rector of St. Jude's in Mountain View, California. Served for eight years before leaving the profession to become a school business manager. After some initial difficulty coming to grips with bookkeeping on computer, he enjoys his job and loves the bustle of school. He prefers to worship in private. His favorite writer is C. S. Lewis. Guilty secret: he loves Oprah.