Good-bye and Amen (8 page)

And, there were mice. It had wide-plank old pine floors with great gaps between them, all full of mouse dirt. We couldn't have a cat because Norman's allergic. We couldn't put down poison for fear Bridey would eat it. We had to trap them. For all that happened to us while we were at Holy Innocents, my clearest association is walking into that cold kitchen in my bathrobe in the mornings, with the wind shaking the windowpanes, listening for the scrabbling sound behind the refrigerator that meant a mouse was in the trap and it wasn't dead. If you think Norman was going to deal with that sort of thing, good luck to you.

 

Edith Faithful
I liked Holy Innocents School pretty much. We had smaller classes. There was good art. All the other kids had known each other since they were three, so that was hard for me, and our play yards were tiny and I liked sports. One was a fenced-in lot beside the school and the other was up on the roof. That was for the little kids. It was a kindergarten-through-sixth-grade school. After sixth, you went to public middle school, or changed to one of the private schools that went through twelfth. The gym wasn't very big and it was also used for plays and assembly. I loved being able to go home for lunch. Dad would make me soup and Triscuits, or tomato sandwiches, and we both read at the table while we ate. We weren't allowed to do that when Mom was there.

 

Ted Wineapple
Norman hadn't had a failure since he was five, that I could tell. Oh yes. I guess you could say his marriage to Rachel had failed. Though I'm not sure he saw it that way. When he got to New York, it happened that the senior warden, who'd been there forever, was recovering from surgery. He asked Norman to have the vestry meet at his apartment, instead of in the parish hall, and Norman said, “Of course.” Big mistake.

 

Monica Faithful
Being in the faculty room, in on the gossip, I understood the parish better than I would have otherwise, and maybe better than Norman did. The parish and the school were at war with each other. Absolute war. The school was coining money. Downtown New York was
changing, there were people living in places like SoHo that had never been residential before and there suddenly weren't enough schools for the downtown kids.

Holy Innocents School could have been twice as big as it was, but it was bonsaied by the church. Some of the classrooms were actually in the church undercroft and the basement of the parish hall. They had to be completely cleaned up, all the displays and maps and so forth put away every Friday, so the rooms could be used for Sunday school over the weekend. Even when no one came to Sunday school, the vestry made us do that. The rest of the school buildings were this little jumble on church land that had grown up higgledy-piggledy. The school wanted to tear them down and build a suitable building, and take the meditation garden, which nobody used, for more play yards. The vestry was dead set against it.

The vestry looked at the school as a cash cow, period. If there was a budget shortfall at the church, and there always was, they made the school cover it. It caused havoc with the school budget. And school fund-raising. People didn't want to give toward a new theater curtain or piano for the music room if the church was just going to come and take the money.

 

Norman Faithful
I was writing a book about the urban church. I joined a group of prominent clergy marching to protest the blight in the South Bronx. The dean of the cathedral allowed me to preach up there now and then, and I got several op-ed pieces published in the
Times
. You'd have thought all of that would draw parishioners to Holy Innocents, but it didn't.

Location was a problem. The unchurched in the neighborhood were old lefties with no interest in established religions, and the young families either weren't interested in Christianity or weren't interested in joining a church with the kind of financial problems Holy Innocents had. I thought it would be easy to draw families who had children in our school, but that too was not meant to be. I spent a lot of time on my knees that first year or two.

 

Monica Faithful
Norman tried to start a youth group, which had always been one of his strong suits, but at Holy Innocents, he couldn't get it off the ground. He was older and didn't look hip or cool as he had in Oregon or when we first got to Colorado. And New York teenagers are not like kids in other places. They have subways, they can move around the city without having to drive so they're not stuck at home or prowling the mall bored out of their squashes. Sitting in a parish hall or the rector's study with someone who reminded them of their parents didn't strike them as an entrancing way to spend an evening. Why should it, when they could as soon be out on the street with cans of spray paint, writing their tags on people's front doors? “Kum ba ya” was definitely over.

Meanwhile, the vestry was wilding.

 

Norman Faithful
Hi Thomas was the senior warden. He'd been ill, and he asked me to bring the vestry to him for my first meeting. Seemed like a sensible request. But the anti-Thomas faction, and there was bound to be one, I realized too late, decided that meant I was Hi's creature.

The church was hemorrhaging money when I got there.
Hi didn't see it as a problem. The school makes plenty of money. The anti-Thomas faction wanted to rent the sanctuary to a church called St. Jude's that had no home of its own for a nine o'clock service. Only about six people come regularly to ours. But of course, those six were addicted to their little service and their little time slot, and one of them was Hi Thomas's wife. St. Jude's saw themselves as the early Christians, pure and persecuted. They were Anglo-Catholics, mostly confirmed bachelors, and they used the 1928 prayer book. The Episcopal church is a big tent, but not big enough for St. Jude's under our roof, according to Hi Thomas. They'd fill the place with smells and bells, they'd bow at the Incarnatus, and other abominations.

In the middle of all this, I had to tell the vestry we didn't want to live in the rectory.

 

Monica Faithful
There was one night when Edith literally gasped for breath; she couldn't even get enough to call to me, but she woke me anyway, it was so loud and desperate. I called 911. We spent six hours in the ER, frightened out of our wits. Did you know asthma could come on so suddenly? Well, the upshot was that it was the mouse dirt in the house that was making her sick. One hundred fifty years of it. Mice were in the walls and under the floors. The docs said she could live in a sterile tent in her room, or we could move.

 

Bella McChesney
I never thought Norman Faithful was committed to us. From the first he was like one of those people at a cocktail party who is looking over your shoulder to see if someone more important has come in.

 

Paul McChesney
When they first arrived, we had them to dinner. I wanted to give him some advice, you know. Give him the lay of the land, tell him what he might want to watch out for. He wasn't listening. He was very entertaining, I give him that. He told some wild story about a colleague whose church was haunted by the former rector. If you went into the nave at midnight there were noises and blasts of cold air. Lights that had been out were found burning in the morning. He and his friend went in there together and performed some kind of exorcism.

After they left, Bella said that Norman had drunk over half a bottle of very expensive Scotch. I should have known he was already in bed with Hi Thomas.

 

Ted Wineapple
I never thought Norman should be a bishop. He was too much of a lone wolf. And I thought the royal trappings would be spiritually dangerous for him. The first step toward becoming a bishop should be a great deal of very humble prayer, a great deal of “Thy will, Lord, not mine.” To be sure that it is God calling you to the bishopric, and not your own ego. The higher you go in the church, the harder it is to tell which line your calls are coming in on.

But something in the heart of man loves a hierarchy. A pyramid, having it there, and climbing it. This is a church we've built in the name of one who said, “When two or three are gathered in my name…” Two or three. In private, with no display and no audience, just two or three, in faith. This is a church of very poor listeners.

 

Monica Faithful
There was a time when I knew Jesus as a person, a man like my father or my brother, who had me by the hand—who knew and cared about me as a person, who listened for my voice in the night and found ways to answer me, showed me his love in the eyes of a friend, spoke to me, from pulpits, from books, from the mouths of children. He was alive and He was with me. To have had that and lost it is…I can't finish this sentence.

 

Ted Wineapple
Norman told me once about the moment he decided to be a priest. He and Monica were on some island in Maine, poking around an old settlement that had vanished, when he heard somebody weeping. No one was there. He said it was a woman. He said it seemed to be pleading with him for something, comfort, attention, something. And he knew in that instant that he could help, that God wanted him to help.

Have you made any sort of study of ghost stories? I have. Not
The Turn of the Screw,
not the kind made up by authors. I mean the kinds of contacts that happen to real people. I do happen to believe the spirit world is thick around us. How could I not? But I'll tell you something about those stories. For one thing, there are more of them in places close to water. Islands. I have no idea why, I'm just observing. For another, by far the most common are of furious servants or slaves or victims. People who could not express their rage in life at what life had given to others but not to them. Would you seek such souls if they had bodies?

I asked Norman that, and in about ten seconds flat he was off on a tear about starting a writing program for angry people in prisons. I mean—he wasn't
wrong,
but that wasn't the point.

 

Islands. Interesting.

Of course we
are
involved with those in the body. The air around you is crowded with us.

How we concern ourselves with you is stage eight or nine at least. There have been those in the body who have grasped it, but usually even here it takes individual tutorial. One can't even ensnare it in body language without using a body word like that “individual.” Since that particular personal individual thing one spends so much time protecting becomes useless here as the egg shell to the hatchling. The great relief, the great good thing about here, is that you don't have to now protect and honor both at once, the shell and the spirit maturing inside. All those uncomfortable dualities. Art versus science. Mind versus body. Good versus evil. Becoming versus being. One yearned for the simplicity of being all one thing. Here it is.

 

Norman Faithful
The diocese of Hawaii was seeking a bishop coadjutor. It was perfect. It was as if the Lord said to me, through my child's desperate struggle for breath, Take your family to a new place, where it's pure and warm and you can all heal. There you will find a mentor to help you grow into the miter and the crozier. This is what I have trained you for. Here you will be my good shepherd, and use your highest gifts.

 

Bella McChesney
I made an appointment with Norman. I told Paul I was going to do it. I thought it might help him to hear what people were saying if it came from a woman, since he seemed to get along with them so well. He chose the time, and I met him in his office in the parish hall.

I'd arrived a little early and put my head in at the sacristy, since it was open, just to be sure all was well in that department. Things have not always been perfect in appearance since Father Faithful came. There was a stain on his alb you could see from the fifth row one week, and sometimes the ushers failed to straighten up the pews after services, and I had to go through them gathering bulletins and putting the hymnals back in the racks. Which I'm happy to do, of course. But Norman came to the door of the sacristy and stood looking at me as if it wasn't my business to be in there, which I didn't like.

I'd brought him a stole I'd been working for some time, with Greek crosses in gold thread. Actually I started it for Father Andrew and then left off when he was so rigid about the Women's Committee. When I knew he was leaving, I got it out and finished it for the new rector. I'm a past president of our chapter of the Embroiderers' Guild of America, so you may take it my work is excellent.

Father Norman unwrapped the package and I could see he was very touched. He thanked me; then he asked me to pray with him that he would wear my gift in humility and gratitude, for God's love and for the chance to serve in our parish, amen. It was slickly done. I told him how much we were enjoying his beautiful preaching, and how much we hoped that our work together would be long and fruitful, as
we were so lucky that he had answered our call. He seemed pleased. Then I told him what he needed to hear.

I said, “Father Norm, there's something I feel I should share with you as I know there are quite a few in the congregation who have this concern. Have expressed distress and dismay, in fact.”

“About what?” he said.

I said, “We're an old parish, as you know. Some of our families have worshipped here for many generations, and we may be a little set in our ways. But that's not always a bad thing.”

“Bella,” he said, “is this about the rectory?”

He looked as if he thought it was funny. He interrupted me and thought it was funny.