One

Sometimes, to love too well is not to love at all. Old Provencal proverb

It should have been a splendid May evening. Lilacs were in full flower. Robins sang. Sprinklers tossed glittering strands of water on fresh-scented lawns, and screeching children stampeded down hilly, cobblestone streets. But as Belinda stepped from the ancient Volvo that Gretta had managed to cram between two room-size Hummers, her heart sank at the sight of the crowd framed in the high, narrow windows of a stately, brick, Georgian house. The dignified black clothes and subdued air suggested a high-toned dinner affair, yet nobody held the tell-tale cocktail or scrambled for hors d’oeuvres. Fair Mantle was grieving, pounded into the face of mortality by the unforeseen loss of a youth who had drunk himself to Kingdom Come in a rash and thoughtless quest for fun.

Belinda clutched her little black handbag, grateful that she had refrained from wearing her clerical collar and instead had chosen the refined black suit. She had no desire to make Nestor feel she was intruding. Two months ago, this would have been “her” funeral. But the little, Gothic church that she had shepherded for the last three years was closed, locked tight, awaiting word that would turn it into a nightclub or the recipient of a wrecker’s ball.

Her presence here was a matter of form, really. Pay respects, counsel and console, extend offers of future help. Hopefully, nobody would notice she was there. It was Nestor’s territory now. She was an intruder.

An usher saw her edging through a clog of weeping teenaged girls. “Reverend Wadley? Father Hayes asked us to give you this.”

Belinda thought the man’s voice unnecessarily loud. All the same, she accepted the note he extended with thanks and delicately blazed her way to a vacant spot between a credenza and a wingchair. There, she could read without anyone looking over her shoulder. Anyone, that is, except Grett, a former ballerina who retained the ability to execute an elegant corkscrew in the merest amount of space.

The note had been written on the funeral parlor’s stationery. A familiar, spidery hand defaced the cushy faux-vellum. ”Blin, So sorry to miss you. I wanted you to know that I feel I’m encroaching on your territory. The boy was, after all, a member of your own parish.”

Gretta “Hmph’d.” “’Encroaching,’ my backside. The diocese closed the church. What were you supposed to do, drive roundtrip a hundred miles and spend the night in a slam-bam, pay-by-the-hour motel?”

“Which would have made it even more charitable for Nestor and his wife to put me up with them.”

“Consider yourself saved. In their putting you up, you’d have been putting up with them.”

Blin leveled Gretta her signature “there’s-a-reason-why-you-don’t-work-in-the-diplomatic-corps” look. “Here’s an idea: Why don’t you see if the house has any chocolate Easter bunnies left over. You can cut off its head and gum it down in the privacy of the kitchen. That’s the only thing I can think of that will stop you from putting your foot in your mouth and getting us both in trouble.”

“In other words, ‘Cleve to me or shut up.’”

“I can do without the cleaving, Grett, but silence would be helpful.”

“Sorry, Blin.” Grett briefly hung her head in mock shame, then cheerily sought out her husband, who had driven to the funeral home directly from work.

Blin had never doubted her ability and purpose as a member of the clergy. She had ever willingly stepped into situations that made the most world-hardened police, firefighters and medical professionals tremble with nerves. The death of a teenager who had no reason to die was such an occasion, and Blin had expected to find the kind of uncontrollable grief that usually made the bereaved claw at her lapels, wailing, “Why, why?” Her professional sense of urgency cooled as she spoke with mourners and sensed that nobody needed her: Not the stoic parents; not the blubbering friends; not the bewildered teachers. It was as though everyone in the room had satisfied their own questions and formulated their own interpretations of God's Plan (if they believed in God). Some lumped on chairs or clustered around the closed casket in anguished silence. Others sobbed into their hands or on somebody’s shoulder.

Or maybe people were afraid to bother her. Two years ago, it had been Paul’s turn to go. A beautiful time to be buried, he said. The ground was soft and welcoming, more intent on pushing out life than consuming it. Belinda smiled to recall the evening she had found him in the rose bower, seated on the stone bench, reading a volume of Romantic poetry. He had greeted her with the kind of smile that is fired by knowledge of a great truth. “Nightingale time,” he had said, gently abashed despite the simmering brilliance of his eyes. Belinda sat beside him, listening as he read aloud Ode To a Nightingale, which Keats had written in mid-May. The line “Now more than ever seems it rich to die” emerged from him with as much concern as if he was saying, “What a lovely night.” Within two days, he was gone. Blin said the funeral herself. She never understood how. Like death, it was just another one of life’s glorious mysteries.

Something tickled her cheek. She flicked it away. The sensation of wetness made her stare at her finger. A tear. Not good. She was at a wake, surrounded by open displays of grief. She had no right to cry over her own trouble. She tried not to hurry up the stairs to the second floor and the sanctuary of the ladies’ room, where she could compose herself.

Steps away from the landing, she stopped. Did someone whisper her name?

”Blin!”

This time the unmistakable sound was emphasized by pressure on her arm and a fearful whimper. “Don’t go there.”

“The ladies’ room is up there.”

Grett looked stricken. “So is Hance’s office. Can’t you wait?”

“If I could, would I need the ladies’ room?”

“It can’t be that bad.”

Blushing, Blin opened her handbag and discreetly revealed the little feminine article lying in the black-leather depths. Grett rolled her eyes but hung back and let Blin go about her business.

Clumps of people had broken away from the main event and clotted points along the landing and hallway, choking back guffaws when not speaking in subdued, more respectful tones. Beneath the group murmur, hardly audible, warbled countertenors and thin-stringed Baroque violins in a recording of Heinrich Schutz’s Symphoniae Sacrae. The music, Blin knew, came from the office, a refined, high-ceilinged abode overlooking the garden. Though the room was part of the business, it was also the place where weary mourners could relax with books, tasteful classical music, and a cup of tea. If they were lucky, they would also have the benefit of the proprietor’s wit, which could be scathing or benign, depending on the gentleman’s whim. This evening he was nowhere in sight. Blin’s relief was heightened when she discovered the ladies’ room was empty. Actually, “ladies’ room” was a misnomer, for the bathroom was a nicely-appointed, lavender-scented affair for both sexes that one would find in one’s own home.

As Blin dabbed her eyes and refreshed her makeup, the voices in the recording sang “Singet dem Herrn ein neues Lied”—Sing unto the Lord a new song—with a restraint that denoted sad resignation, not the joy the words usually commanded. She listened a moment, wondering whether the odd turn had been compelled by seventeenth-century Lutheran practice or the trauma of the Thirty Years’ War. She ruminated too long. Somebody stopped outside the bathroom door. A man. Two men, really, speaking about plans for the funeral. The younger of the voices, a clear baritone, remained low, but became crisply casual.

”A good thing Nestor’s still around. If something ever happened to my own child, I’d never want a female in flowing robes officiating. It’s downright pagan.”

“Shhhh!” went the second man. “Ordained is ordained, John, male or female—“

“Ever see the Star Trek movie with Judith Anderson playing the Vulcan priestess? It’s the closest approximation of what happens when a woman masquerades as a cleric.”

Blin, who had seen the movie when she was a child, remembered the elderly, hawk-nosed woman in flowing robes, proclaiming an imaginary language with melodramatic gestures and the booming, quavering tones of a bad Shakespearean actor. Had she been sixteen or twenty-one, she might have yanked open the door, confronted the speaker and retorted, “And you are a miserable approximation of a human!” Now, however, she wondered which was worse, the fact that the man detested her, or his need to humiliate her.

“Macht es gut auf Saitenspiel,” the music counseled as she opened the door. Play with skill. Yes, Blin thought, catch him off his guard; he’d never expect a challenge. I’ll challenge him now. I’ll say to him, “You cannot resist insulting me. I’d like to know why.”

Blin felt the muscles in her back stiffen as she straightened her posture, girding herself for battle. But her opponent was nowhere in sight. All the men who had been loitering in the hallway when she entered the restroom had dispersed. Still holding the door open, she strained to listen until a voice, very near but muffled, intervened. “Looking for someone--Reverend?” The stress on the title struck Blin as a fraction of a care away from malicious. She cleared the wince from her burning face and peeked around the door at a tall, intelligent-looking fellow who had long but graying sandy hair and ruddy cheeks--a color combination that was enhanced, not swallowed, by his black suit.

John-Emory Hance showed not the slightest annoyance at having just received a piece of architecture in his face. He leaned against the wall, the image of quiet arrogance, one hand in his trousers pocket, the other holding a teacup. He had to slightly lower his head in order to have eye contact with Blin, who spoke quickly, with a nervousness whose source she could not place.

”You know how people often gauge something’s importance by asking whether it will matter in a year? I prefer the longer perspective. What and who we are will appear as ancient to people two thousand years from now as what we call Bible times appears to us. In other words, Mr. Hance, we’re not as advanced as we like to think. This is antiquity. On this date two thousand years from now, nothing we say or do tonight will matter to anyone.”

Hance’s wide, blue eyes flinched with, what? Mockery? Surprise? He made a noise between a small cough and a gasp. “Is that an insult?”

Blin regarded the scorn-tipped smile with a heavy heart. How sad, that someone so handsome should be a vessel of hate! Despite herself, she spoke. “Derision doesn’t become you, sir.”

She looked Hance in the eye, shocked by her rudeness yet certain she was right to say what she thought. Too late she wondered how he would react, and for an instant she imagined a scene that involved loud, verbal flagellation and the teacup shattering against a wall after narrowly missing her head. The fear passed when all Hance did was stare back at her, maintaining the disdainful arc of his mouth.

Blin returned to the wake downstairs. Finally. At last. En fin. It was accomplished. She had retaliated for all the affronts of the last three years. Tonight would be the last she would ever again have to deal with John-Emory Hance. Soon she would have a new assignment. She would be gone from Fair Mantle. So why could she not shake a feeling of dread?

Hours later, she lay in bed in her rooms over the Schneiders’ bookshop, staring at the chalk-smudge moon, churning up disjointed thoughts about the evening. She had made the mistake of telling Grett about Hance as they drove home. Grett, at the wheel, scolded her with the speed of someone bursting for the chance to unleash an opinion. “’Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord.’ You should have kept your mouth shut and let the Big Boy impale him with a lightning bolt."

“I wasn’t seeking vengeance!” Blin had nearly shouted. “I was offering an observation intended to make him think about his real place in the greater scheme of things.”

“He knows his place in the greater scheme of things. He’s a single parent. A male single parent. He wants a wife. Just as you want a husband.”

“I do not want a husband."

“Yes you do. In the sense of ‘wanting’ when it used to mean ‘not having something and not knowing that you need it.'”

“I ‘need’ to show my flock how to live no matter what happens to us. It’s wrong to put my carnal needs first. I cannot, cannot, cannot ignore my flock. Not with the church closed. They have no one to turn to.”

“Well, I’ve got news for you, Blin. Some of those ‘they’—those faithful ‘they’-- just turned to Nestor, fifty miles away.”

The hurtful point hurt more when Blin checked her voice- and emails and found no messages.

A warm breeze pushed the scent of lilacs through the gauzy curtains.

Blin stretched, yawned. "Ode To a Nightingale. 'I cannot see what flowers are at my feet, Nor what soft incense hangs upon the boughs, But, in embalmed darkness, guess each sweet Wherewith the seasonable month endows The grass, the thicket, and the fruit-tree wild…'”

This time of year would always be Paul's Nightingale Time, no matter how awful life seemed. Once again she was back in the rectory’s rose bower, reading the beloved Keats poem aloud with him. Except now, so unlike that miraculous evening two years ago, she wondered what he would say if he knew that she had neither church nor home. And now, as she sleepily repeated “Now more than ever seems it rich to die,” the words of her memories were of Paul, but the images in her mind were of John-Emory Hance.