Obscured by the arcade and wrapped in his black cloak, Bothwell watched his breath turn to fog in the cool night air. His attention was arrested from this inspection by the sound of footsteps from the direction of the chapel. Turning, he saw the back of a tall young man whose legs were khaki stovepipes emerging beneath a B-24 flight jacket. The lamp over the door highlighted a blond crew cut, and Bothwell knew from that and from the figure’s athletic grace that the celebrity of the Junior class (as first-year students were called) was exiting the building: Seth Clarke, late first lieutenant in the Army’s Special Forces and Medal of Honor winner in a war in which there appeared little honor to be gained.
Clarke turned neither to the right nor to the left but instead walked toward the dark, unpaved middle section of the quad. Bothwell looked in the direction the young man was headed and saw the person Clarke was moving to intercept. Even in the reduced light Bothwell could see that she was dressed with chic that seldom graced the campus of CCTC. While most of the student wives still wore miniskirts, this young woman was clad in a tweed jacket and flannel trousers. Something about the way the bottom of the jacket swirled reminded Bothwell of the fox-hunting crowd when he was at Cambridge, but a style utterly masculine on them acquired an exquisitely feminine aspect on her. When she emerged into light, Bothwell recognized her as Clarke’s wife, Sheila, who was no less a celebrity, having been Miss Illinois. At Atlantic City she had won the swimsuit competition and was generally admitted to have been the nearest thing to a real beauty there, but rumors leaked that she had not been in the running for the friendship award. Her talent had been dramatic reading, which is to say she had no talent. In reality, it was as a couple that Sheila and Seth were best known. Their meeting at a bond rally when Clarke was back in the States to be decorated by the President, their whirlwind courtship, and their honeymoon cut short by emergency orders had been one of the few romantic things to fill space in newspapers otherwise devoted to accounts of unavailing warfare abroad, riots at home, and gloom and violence everywhere.
“Did you come to meet me?” Clarke called to his wife as they neared each another. Bothwell thought his voice sounded both a little surprised and a little hopeful.
“No, I didn’t really expect to see you. I left a note explaining.” Sheila changed course enough that she could walk past without stopping.
“But what about supper?”
“It’s on the stove. All you have to do is heat it twenty minutes at 350 degrees and peel the foil off.”
“Not another of those damn TV dinners!”
Sheila had already reached the bottom steps of the chapel. She stopped, turned toward him, and said, “I’m sorry, I can’t be the breadwinner and the maid and the cook and everything else. Besides, I have to make my meditation. Don’t think that because you are the seminarian, you are the only one in the family who can have a spiritual life.” With that she ran up the steps and entered the chapel. Seth walked off into the dark, hands in his pockets, his shoulders rounded, his athlete’s stride reduced to a shuffle.
Later, seated in the Wright’s living room, Bothwell was warmed not only by the roaring fire, but also by the room’s comfort and the welcome of Tom and his wife Mary, an artist. Less formal than his own parlor and less orderly as well, the room nevertheless made him feel very much at home. The Wrights’ concern for the comfort of their guests was summed up for Bothwell in the way every place to sit was within easy reaching distance of a surface on which to rest a glass or an ashtray. The room’s furnishings were eclectic, chosen for comfort rather than period, and carrying associations with the places the Wrights had lived. The pictures on the walls were divided between Mary Wright’s work and that of friends with whom she had exchanged pieces. Her own represented an earlier period when she had done landscapes in an impressionistic style. Nowhere to be seen was her current work, canvases on which were juxtaposed bands of color only slightly modeled or shaded with the economy, order, and aesthetic satisfaction of a Japanese garden. “It’s not relaxing,” she explained to Bothwell, “to sit surrounded by my current explorations in style.”
This evening it did not take long to dispose of the faculty meeting. The Dean had acted very much in character. For The Very Reverend J. Stanley Huston, programs or projects were to be evaluated not so much for their improvement of students’ preparation for ministry as for their effectiveness in giving the world the impression that the Clergy Training College was in the vanguard of the seminary world. This preference for appearance over substance had once been labeled by Bothwell as the window dressing approach to theological education. “To be rather than to seem” was not a motto that Huston was ever likely to adopt.
Bothwell was still disturbed by the scene that he had witnessed while waiting for Tom, disturbed and a little embarrassed at having been an eavesdropper on a conversation that should have been private, although it was conducted in a tone of voice easily audible from fifteen yards away. As a bachelor he had an idealized view of what marital relations should be, and he knew that parishioners expected, however unfairly, that the marriage in the rectory would be better than that in their own houses. It was natural for him to share what he had heard with his friends, not in any spirit of gossip that delights in the discovery of feet of clay, but in a pastoral concern for the development of a student who would someday bear the responsibility of ministering to others. And Tom had come to the seminary from parish ministry rather than academia.
“You know, Rod,” he said, “I haven’t really gotten to know the Clarkes since I don’t teach Juniors. But let me suggest what might be going on with this couple. When my mind is unhampered by facts, I am free to perform great feats of interpretation. There is a guy at Harvard named Harvey Cox who wrote a fascinating book a couple of years ago called The Secular City. I make all of my parish administration students read it. In it Cox discusses beauty pageants, especially Miss America. He proposes that Miss America and Hugh Heffner’s Playboy function in our society like goddesses and gods did in primitive societies, providing models for the members of the society and personifying and authenticating its value structure. The Playboy and ‘the Girl,’ as he calls her, epitomize our society’s devotion to leisure and consumerism. Here, let me read you a bit,” Tom said as he unfolded his lank limbs and moved to one of the bulging bookcases.
Watching his friend as he stretched his long, big-boned fingers to select a volume, pull it down, and flip quickly through to find a place, Bothwell thought that there was something Lincolnesque about Tom, although it was a resemblance in type rather that in detail, since his features had a different sort of homely beauty. His mouth was as mobile as Honest Abe’s, his nose as hooked, and he had as many moles; but his head was rounder, his brow slanted, and while it was not weak, his chin did recede.
“Here it is,” he said. “Listen to this. ‘In Miss America’s glowingly healthy smile, her openly sexual but officially virgin figure, and in the brand-name gadgets around her, she personifies the stunted aspirations and ambivalent fears of her culture. There she goes, she is your ideal.’ How’s