16
He came through the door of the darkroom as I was laying out my prints to dry. Betsy Callaghan and Annie Jordan were developing in the back. My drawing was in his hand.
“Okay,” Rourke said as he returned it to me.
“Okay,” I repeated, taking it from him.
We were face-to-face, almost but not quite, since I hardly came as high as his shoulders. If I were to lie against him, my hand would just reach the recess between his arm and chest.
I did not raise my head, just my eyes. “Is that it?”
He nodded. “That’s it.”
Reverend Olcott exited the rectory, his belly jiggling ever so slightly as he crossed the driveway. He was dressed as usual in casual black, no silk, no sash.
“Hello there, Eveline,” he said. “Long time no see.”
I’d been leaning on a tree, regarding the church spire through the rolled-up tube of my sketch. “I’m sorry. I’ve been, you know—”
He raised a comforting hand. “Any word on college yet?”
“NYU, probably.”
The reverend came from Wisconsin. I couldn’t recall the name of the town, but it must have been nice if the people in it were like him. He was a man of restless intelligence and limitless energy. Powell always said that the reverend had so much bounce as to make you think privately of fleas. If Kate and I happened to be feeding the ducks in the morning, we’d see him jogging past, or, if you stopped by the church to use the bathroom, you might find him painting the wheelchair ramp. Everyone said he was the best Cajun cook on the East End.
I gestured with my sketch. “I’m designing a chapel. For the Drama Club.”
He jerked his neck toward the church. “Let’s have a look.”
The mammoth white door closed behind him with a tidy click, and the room we entered was stark and still. It made me think of the inside of an egg. We moved in the direction of the front pew. We sat, and Reverend Olcott examined my sketch.
“Yes,” he said, and he nodded. “I see.”
With a low stroke of one hand, he referred to the body of the church, which was nothing compared to the steeple. “The congregation is minimized,” he said. “The architecture is part of the landscape. It has a proportionate relationship to nature.”
My eyes ventured to his face. His glasses bridged the base of his nose, and his head was tucked into his neck, adjusting to the near distance of the sheet of paper.
“But the steeple, the reaching to God—to godliness—is immense. Symbolic, muscular, like a fist thrust into the air.” He tapped the drawing twice and returned it to me. “Very nice.”
I considered his remarks. It was strange to have communicated something that I supposed I believed, but didn’t think I knew how to relate.
“It’s the striving that intrigues you, the theoretical endeavor,” he proposed. “Abstraction.” The reverend cleared his throat. “Do you know it’s been nearly thirty years since I joined the church? January 1951. In that time, I’ve encountered as many devoted worshippers who lack true compassion as”—he paused to search for a word—“individualists like you who possess a pious reverence for life.”
He pointed to the paper, now in my hands. “I especially like the easy lines, the quickness of hand, the conservation of voice. Spontaneity is too frequently mistaken for immaturity. But we are spontaneous when we are at our genuine best—childlike as opposed to childish. Standards of goodness and propriety are necessary, of course. They’re guideposts for those who stray. But ideally, decency resides in the heart, undiminished from birth.” He continued, “One sometimes wonders, though, whether purity of heart is sufficient.”
“It does confuse me,” I ventured, “the whole idea of God as a man.” Reverend Olcott looked toward the altar. I hoped he was not offended. “You know, the beard and the robes. Six days to create the earth.”
For a while we sat in silence. I gathered he was thinking what to say. Probably he wanted to choose his words carefully. It did seem like a risky and unofficial way to discuss God, sitting in the first pew with our legs stretched out.
“Some prefer to draw inspiration from the story of Jesus rather than from belief in God.” His tone was circumspect. “We can be certain that a man named Jesus existed and that he preached—at great personal sacrifice and without material compensation—the virtues of faith and forgiveness. And from that ancient narrative, we continue to extract messages pertaining to the sacredness of devotion, and we follow its prescriptions for living peaceably. In fact,” he added as he gestured to the steeple in my drawing, “such a proposal is in keeping with your notion of ideological enterprise, the expenditure of spiritual energy in working toward actual understanding. That’s the reaching part,” he said. “Do you see?”
I thought I did. I thought he was saying it was okay to be confused. I thought he was alluding to how he himself had come to terms with confusion.
“It’s like, heaven is not an actual destination,” I said, “but a conceptual place of peace.”
He said nothing, which was okay. I understood that he couldn’t. It seemed like the right time for the conversation to end, so I stood. He encouraged me to sit and think.
“Oh, no,” I said. “It’s hard for me to sit and think.” I had to move and think, or sit and do. It was just one of those things. I held up my sketch. “But thank you very much.”
As Reverend Olcott and I parted, I thought again of light glowing through an eggshell. I thought of mosaic, geometry, overlap. Maybe I could use texture instead of color and line. Maybe I could use pieces of vanilla canvas to make a collage. If I shined stage lights through the back of a scenery flat, it would make the muslin glow like an incubated egg. I thought of that candle in my house, of light coming through a wall.