PEGGY FINALLY GOT so lonely on the night after Francis called her just before he crossed the Mississippi that she invited their dog, Levi, into their bed with her. Levi was a big brown mongrel who drooled a lot. His other name was Spit; he was lonely too. He stood by the bed as Peggy got ready, his rear end wagging with his tail, and when Peggy got in on one side, he leapt up onto the bed on the other, offering to lick Peggy’s face, while Peggy pushed him away, and then he snuggled down beside her, groaning with satisfaction like an old man in a steam bath.
Levi was afflicted with fleas in the summertime, and so when his scratching reached an apogee in the small hours of the dark, the bed shook and Peggy woke up thinking for an instant that she was in California with Francis and there was an earthquake and they were both dying.
“But my dear,” her friend Father Woodward said to her that afternoon when she went to his cluttered little office to tell him about her vivid dream, “Francis will be living in a reconstructed Indian village on Mount Alma. Nothing’s there to fall on him.” Father Woodward spoke in the faintly affected upper-class British accent he joked that he had learned by mistake in theological school. “Francis is going to live forever,” he predicted.
The little priest sat opposite her in a chair to one side of his desk, his feet barely touching the floor, while the light from the window shined on his bald head. Before coming to Fieldington, he’d been a curate in a big New York City parish, and though she’d miss him terribly, Peggy thought he should return to the city’s more eclectic scene. He had told her once that the bishop urged him to take the Fieldington parish ten years ago when the position opened. “He said living in suburbia would test my faith. He obviously suspected it wasn’t very strong.” But now the thought came to Peggy that maybe the bishop just had wanted him out of the way.
“Don’t worry, my dear,” Father Woodward murmured now, “Francis will be fine. He’s exploring.” She watched his little sandy mustache move up and down above his lip, which she found herself comparing to Fred Kindler’s red one, and the thought struck her that she’d do better to go to Fred with her grief. She was sure his faith was not so damn supple as to allow the idea that what Francis was up to was exploring. She shook the treacherous thought away. How did she know what Kindler believed? Besides, he was her boss, not her priest.
She knew Woodward missed the point on purpose, so she pressed on. “Coming to Miss Oliver’s was the best thing that could have happened to Francis and me. We found our calling. And now he risks it all,” she said and went on to remind him that the only thing Francis knew about what he wanted to do with the rest of his life before Marjorie had hired them was that he didn’t want to be a businessman. “Though he didn’t have the foggiest idea what a businessman does,” she said. “It was just what his father did.”
“He knew you had to wear a suit.” Father Woodward smiled. He was dwarfed by his chair, his tiny hands motionless in his lap. His knitting sat on the pile of papers on his desk in his dark little office, and she knew he was itching to get his hands on the needles. She’d advised him lots of times not to let his parishioners know he knitted.
“If it were fly tying or something, it would be okay,” she said. “But knitting! You give your parishioners too much credit. This isn’t San Francisco. It’s New England. We’re even less broadminded than you think.”
Father Woodward’s eyes flitted to his knitting, but he didn’t move his hands. His eyes behind the owlish glasses focused on her. He didn’t say anything. He was taking courses on how to counsel, Peggy thought. How to be like a shrink. But she didn’t want his advice, let alone his therapy. She wanted his prayer.
She had no idea how hard her friend was working not to tell her what he thought she should discover for herself. It’s not just panic that is driving Francis, he wanted to say. It is also courage. Francis shouldn’t have to defend his spiritual quest to anyone. It’s his escaping, his running away, that’s indefensible. He’s going to have to figure out for himself that he can’t do both at once. But Peggy was not ready to hear this yet. So he waited.
“Francis has been having dreams too, all year,” she told him. “I wonder if he’s still having them way out there in the West, and if he is,” she added, “I probably wouldn’t understand them.”
“That’s not surprising,” Father Woodward said. “If you could understand them, you would have gone with him.”
“That’s not fair,” Peggy said, and Father Woodward shrugged his little shoulders. “And it’s beside the point,” she added.
“All right then, my dear, what is the point?”
“You tell me,” she demanded. It was his last chance. Silently she was begging him, Don’t tell me he’s questing. Tell me he’s straying. Say let us pray!
Father Woodward looked out the window to the bright sunshine on the lawn. “It’s easier to explain than to understand,” he murmured. “You could explain it. A Sioux medicine man could tell him what’s really going on. But where are we going to find a Sioux?” Father Woodward turned his face from the window and added, “One could claim they’re the same. What Francis wants and what you believe.”
Oh, please! Don’t be so damn liberal! she wanted to yell. I don’t need a priest who believes in Everything. Instead, she kept her face as expressionless as possible. He had enough problems without knowing how much he’d failed her.
Father Woodward shrugged. “Don’t you two grow apart,” he begged. “I couldn’t bear it.”
“It’s time to go,” she said, stretching the truth. She had plenty of time, and so did he. She stood, moved to his desk, leaned over it, and kissed him tenderly on his forehead like a sister—her forgiveness. His bald pate gleamed beneath her eyes. He kept his hands flat on the desk as if keeping it from flying away. His face was slightly flushed.
“I’ll pray for you both,” he murmured, and she went out into the bright summer light.
STRAIGHT TO EUDORA’S studio. If Father Woodward couldn’t help her, surely Eudora could.
Peggy loved the smell of the studio: turpentine, clay, oil paints, dust. Her spirits lifted as soon as she was through the door. Ever since Marjorie had hired Eudora, a young artist, newly widowed and still thin, thirty-two years ago, just one year after she hired Peggy and Francis, Eudora had been the colleague whom Peggy trusted the most.
“I’ve lost him,” Peggy began. And stopped when Eudora shook her head. “All right, an exaggeration,” she admitted. “But it’s how I feel.”
“You don’t lose them until they die. That’s when they go away.” Eudora tossed this off, a bright, encouraging matter of fact. She was not speaking from grief—her husband died years ago, two weeks after their honeymoon, drowned absurdly in a swamp on a reserve Marine Corps training exercise—but from memory of grief. She sat motionless in her red work smock in her chair across from Peggy’s, more of a presence even than the mammoth wooden chairs she had inspired her students to create. Kinesthetic sculptures she called them, her latest enthusiasm. They dominated the space. And demonstrated Miss Oliver’s at its best. For here was one of the several areas in which the school had freed itself from the ant mentality that craved to departmentalize the curriculum of almost every school. As if life came in boxes! These creations surrounding Peggy in her colleague’s studio were at once furniture and works of art and machines. And also jokes—as if to prove that, in the right atmosphere, teenagers could be counted on not to take themselves too seriously. The piece nearest Peggy was a red-white-and-blue throne, bright and arresting in the cracked and crazed enamel of its varnished paint, that played “The Star Spangled Banner” as soon as you sat in it—so that you had to stand up—and, of course, stopped playing as soon as you did. It was the sixth version; the first five had not been sufficient and were destroyed.
“Francis is doing what