Crossroads: A Novel

ADVENT

The sky broken by the bare oaks and elms of New Prospect was full of moist promise, a pair of frontal systems grayly colluding to deliver a white Christmas, when Russ Hildebrandt made his morning rounds among the homes of bedridden and senile parishioners in his Plymouth Fury wagon. A certain person, Mrs. Frances Cottrell, a member of the church, had volunteered to help him bring toys and canned goods to the Community of God that afternoon, and though he knew that only as her pastor did he have a right to rejoice in her act of free will, he couldn’t have asked for a better Christmas present than four hours alone with her.

After Russ’s humiliation, three years earlier, the church’s senior minister, Dwight Haefle, had upped the associate minister’s share of pastoral visitations. What exactly Dwight was doing with the time Russ saved him, besides taking more frequent vacations and working on his long-awaited volume of lyric poetry, wasn’t clear to Russ. But he appreciated his coquettish reception by Mrs. O’Dwyer, an amputee confined by severe edema to a hospital bed in what had been her dining room. He appreciated the routine of being of service, especially to those who, unlike him, couldn’t remember one thing from three years ago. At the nursing home in Hinsdale, where the mingling smells of holiday pine wreaths and geriatric feces reminded him of Arizona high-country latrines, he handed old Jim Devereaux the new church membership face-book they’d been using as a prompt for conversation and asked if Jim remembered the Pattison family. To a pastor feeling reckless with Advent spirit, Jim was an ideal confidant, a wishing well in which a penny dropped would never hit bottom and resound.

Pattison, Jim said.

They had a daughter, Frances. Russ leaned over his parishioner’s wheelchair and paged to the Cs. She goes by her married name now—Frances Cottrell.

He never spoke her name at home, even when it would have been natural to, for fear of what his wife might hear in his voice. Jim bent closer to the picture of Frances and her two children. Oh … Frannie? I remember Frannie Pattison. What ever happened to her?

She’s back in New Prospect. She lost her husband a year and a half ago—terrible thing. He was a test pilot for General Dynamics.

Where is she now?

She’s back in New Prospect.

Oh, huh. Frannie Pattison. Where is she now?

She came back home. She’s Mrs. Frances Cottrell now. Russ pointed at her picture and said it again. Frances Cottrell.

She was meeting him in the First Reformed parking lot at two thirty. Like a boy who couldn’t wait for Christmas, he got there at 12:45 and ate his sack lunch in the car. On his bad days, of which there’d been many in the past three years, he resorted to an elaborate detour—into the church through its function hall, up a stairwell and down a corridor lined with stacks of banished Pilgrim Hymnals, across a storage room for off-kilter music stands and a crèche ensemble last displayed eleven Advents ago, a jumble of wooden sheep and one meek steer, graying with dust, with whom he felt a sad fraternity, then down a narrow staircase where only God could see and judge him, into the sanctuary via the secret door in the paneling behind the altar, and finally out through the sanctuary’s side entrance—to avoid passing the office of Rick Ambrose, the director of youth programming. The teenagers who massed in the hallway outside it were too young to have personally witnessed Russ’s humiliation, but they surely knew the story of it, and he couldn’t look at Ambrose without betraying his failure to follow their Savior’s example and forgive him.

Today, however, was a very good day, and the halls of First Reformed were still empty. He went directly to his office, rolled paper into his typewriter, and considered his unwritten sermon for the Sunday after Christmas, when Dwight Haefle would be vacationing again. He slouched in his chair and combed his eyebrows with his fingernails, pinched the bridge of his nose, touching a face whose angular contours he’d learned too late were attractive to many women, not just his wife, and imagined a sermon about his Christmas mission to the South Side. He preached too often about Vietnam, too often about the Navajos. To boldly speak, from the pulpit, the words Frances Cottrell and I had the privilege—to pronounce her name while she sat listening from the fourth row of pews and the congregation’s eyes, perhaps enviously, connected her with him—was a pleasure, alas, foreclosed by his wife, who read his sermons in advance and would also be sitting in a pew, and who didn’t know that Frances was joining him today.

On his office walls were posters of Charlie Parker and his sax, Dylan Thomas and his fag; a smaller picture of Paul Robeson framed alongside a handbill for Robeson’s appearance at the Judson Church in 1952; Russ’s diploma from the Biblical Seminary in New York; and a blown-up photo of him and two Navajo friends in Arizona, in 1946. Ten years ago, when he’d assumed the associate ministry in New Prospect, these artfully chosen assertions of identity had resonated with the teenagers whose development in Christ had been part of his brief. But to the kids who now thronged the church’s hallways in their bell-bottoms and bib overalls, their bandannas, they signified only obsolescence. The office of Rick Ambrose, him of the stringy black hair and the glistening black Fu Manchu, had a kindergarten feel to it, the walls and shelves bedecked with the crudely painted effusions of his young disciples, the special meaningful rocks and bleached bones and wildflower necklaces they’d given him, the silk-screened posters for fundraising concerts with no discernible relation to any religion Russ recognized. After his humiliation, he’d hidden in his office and ached amid the fading totems of a youth that no one but his wife found interesting anymore. And Marion didn’t count, because it was Marion who’d impelled him to New York, Marion who’d turned him on to Parker and Thomas and Robeson, Marion who’d thrilled to his stories of the Navajos and urged him to heed his calling to the ministry. Marion was inseparable from an identity that had proved to be humiliating. It had taken Frances Cottrell to redeem it.

My God, is this you? she’d said on her first visit to his office, the previous summer, as she studied the photo from the Navajo reservation. You look like a young Charlton Heston.

She’d come to Russ for grief counseling, another part of his brief and not his favorite, since his own most grievous loss to date was of his boyhood dog, Skipper. He’d been relieved to hear that Frances’s worst complaint, a year after her husband’s fiery death in Texas, was a sense of emptiness. At his suggestion that she join one of the First Reformed women’s circles, she flicked her hand. I’m not going to coffee with the ladies, she said. I know I’ve got a boy starting high school, but I’m only thirty-six. Indeed, she was sagless, pouchless, flabless, lineless, an apparition of vitality in a snug paisley sleeveless dress, her hair naturally blond and boyishly short, her hands boyishly small and square. It was obvious to Russ that she’d be remarried soon enough—that the emptiness she felt was probably little more than the absence of a husband—but he remembered his anger when his mother had asked him, too soon after Skipper’s passing, whether he might like another dog.

There was, he told Frances, one particular women’s circle, different from the others, guided by Russ himself, that worked with members of First Reformed’s inner-city partner church, the Community of God. The ladies don’t coffee, he said. We paint houses, clear brush, haul trash. Take the elderly to their appointments, help kids with their homework. We do it every other Tuesday, all day. And, let me tell you, I look forward to those Tuesdays. It’s one of the paradoxes of our faith—the more you give to the less fortunate, the fuller you feel in Christ.

You say his name so easily, Frances said. I’ve been going to Sunday service for three months, and I’m still waiting to feel something.

Not even my own sermons have moved you.

She colored a little, fetchingly. That’s not what I meant. You’ve got a beautiful voice. It’s just…

Honestly, you’re more likely to feel something on a Tuesday than a Sunday. I’d rather be on the South Side myself than giving sermons.

It’s a Negro church?

A Black church, yes. Kitty Reynolds is our ringleader.

I like Kitty. I had her for senior English.

Russ liked Kitty, too, although he sensed that she was skeptical of him, as a male of the species; Marion had invited him to consider that Kitty, never married, was likely a lesbian. She dressed like a lumberjack for their biweekly trips to the South Side, and she’d quickly asserted possession of Frances, insisting that she ride both ways with her, rather than in Russ’s station wagon. Mindful of her skepticism, he’d ceded the field to Kitty and waited for a day when she might be indisposed.

On the Tuesday after Thanksgiving, when a flu-like cold was going around, only three ladies, all widows, had shown up in the First Reformed parking lot. Frances, wearing a plaid wool hunting cap like the one Russ had worn as a boy, hopped into the front seat of his Fury and left the hat on, perhaps owing to the leak in the Fury’s heating system that fogged the windshield if he didn’t keep a window down. Or did she know how gut-punchingly, faith-testingly, androgynously adorable she looked to him in that hat? The two older widows might have known it, because all the way in to the city, past Midway and across on Fifty-fifth Street, they pestered Russ from the back seat with seemingly pointed questions about his wife and his four children.

The Community of God was a small, unsteepled church of yellow brick, originally built by Germans, with a tar-roofed community center attached to one side. Its congregation, mostly female, was led by a middle-aged pastor, Theo Crenshaw, who did the circle the favor of accepting its suburban charity without thanks. Every second Tuesday, Theo simply presented Russ and Kitty with a prioritized to-do list; they came not to minister but to serve. Kitty had marched with Russ for civil rights, but Russ had had to counsel other women in the circle, explaining that just because they struggled to understand urban English it didn’t mean they had to speak loudly and slowly to make themselves understood. For the women who got it, and learned to overcome their fear of walking on the 6700 block of South Morgan Street, the circle had been a powerful experience. On the women who didn’t get it—some of whom had joined the circle for competitive reasons, not wanting to be left out—he’d been obliged to inflict the same humiliation he’d suffered at the hands of Rick Ambrose and ask them not to come again.

Because Kitty had kept her glued to her side, Frances hadn’t been tested yet. When they arrived on Morgan Street, she left the car reluctantly and waited to be asked before helping Russ and the other widows carry toolboxes and bags of cast-off winter clothes into the community center. Her hesitancy set off a flurry of misgivings in Russ—that he’d mistaken style for substance, a hat for an adventurous spirit—but they were melted by a gust of compassion when Theo Crenshaw, ignoring Frances, directed the two older widows to catalogue a shipment of secondhand books for the Sunday school. The two men were going to install a new water heater in the basement.

And Frances, Russ said.

She was hovering by the street door. Theo sized her up coolly. There’s a whole lot of books.

Why don’t you help Theo and me, Russ said.

The eagerness of her nod confirmed his compassionate instinct, dispelling the suspicion that what he really wanted was to show off how strong he was, how skilled with tools. In the basement, he stripped down to his undershirt and applied a bear hug to the nasty, asbestos-clad old heater and lifted it off its seat. At forty-seven, he was no longer a tall sapling; he’d broadened in the chest and shoulders like an oak tree. But there wasn’t much for Frances to do but watch, and when the intake pipe snapped off flush with the wall, necessitating work with a stone chisel and a pipe die, he was slow to notice that she’d left the basement.

What Russ most liked about Theo was his reticence, which spared Russ from the vanity of imagining that the two of them could be interracial buddies. Theo knew the essential facts about Russ—that he didn’t shy from hard work, that he’d never lived far from poverty, that he believed in the divinity of Jesus Christ—and he neither asked nor welcomed more open-ended questions. About, for example, the retarded neighborhood boy Ronnie, who wandered in and out of the church in all seasons, sometimes stopping to do a peculiar swaying dance with his eyes closed, or to cadge a quarter from a First Reformed lady, Theo would only say, Best leave that boy alone. When Russ had tried to engage with Ronnie anyway, asking him where he lived, who his mother was, Ronnie had responded, Can I have a quarter? and Theo had said to Russ, more sharply, Best just leave him be.

It was an instruction Frances hadn’t received. Upstairs, at lunchtime, they found her and Ronnie on the floor of the community room with a box of crayons. Ronnie was wearing a cast-off parka recognizably from New Prospect, swaying on his knees while Frances drew an orange sun on a sheet of newsprint. Theo stopped dead, began to say something, and shook his head. Frances offered Ronnie her crayon and looked up at Russ happily. She’d found her own way to serve and to give of herself, and he was happy for her, too.

Theo, following him into the sanctuary, was not. You need to speak to her. Tell her Ronnie is off-limits.

I really don’t see the harm.

Isn’t a matter of harm.

Theo went home to his wife for a hot meal, and Russ, not wanting to discourage Frances’s act of charity, took his sack lunch up to the Sunday-school room, where the older widows had undertaken a wholesale reorganization. When you were sick in the body, you surrendered it to the touch of strangers, and when you were sick with poverty you surrendered your environment. Without asking permission, the widows had sorted all of the children’s books and created bright, enticing labels for them. When you were poor, it could be hard to see what needed doing until someone showed you by doing it. Not asking permission hadn’t come naturally to Russ, but it was the counterpart of not expecting to be thanked. Venturing into a back yard of bramble and shoulder-high ragweed, he didn’t ask the old lady who owned it which bushes and which pieces of rusting junk weren’t worth saving, and when the job was done, more often than not, the old lady didn’t thank him. She said, Now doesn’t that look better.

He was chatting with the two widows when they heard a door bang downstairs, a woman’s voice rising in anger. He leaped to his feet and ran down to the community room. Frances, clutching a sheet of newsprint, was shrinking from a young woman he’d never seen before. She was emaciated, filthy-haired. Even halfway across the room, he could smell the liquor on her.

"This my son, you understand me? My son."

Ronnie was still on his knees with the crayons, swaying.

Whoa, whoa, Russ said.

The young woman wheeled around. You the husband?

No, I’m the pastor.

Well, you tell whatever she is to stay away from my boy. She addressed herself again to Frances. Stay away from my boy, bitch! What you got there anyway?

Russ stepped between the women. Miss. Please.

"What you got there?"

It’s a drawing, Frances said. A nice drawing. Ronnie made it. Didn’t you, Ronnie?

The drawing in question was a random red scrawl. Ronnie’s mother reached and snatched it from Frances’s hand. This ain’t your property.

No, Frances said. I think he made it for you.

She still talking to me? Is that what I’m hearing?

I think we all need to calm down here, Russ said.

"She need to get her white ass outta my face and not be messing with my boy."

I’m sorry, Frances said. He’s so sweet, I was only—

"Why is she still talking to me? The mother ripped the drawing into quarters and yanked Ronnie to his feet. I told you to keep away from these folk. Didn’t I tell you that?"

Dunno, Ronnie said.

She slapped him. "You don’t know?"

Miss, Russ said, if you hit the boy again, there’s going to be trouble.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. She was heading toward the street door. Come on, Ronnie. We done here.

After they were gone, and Frances had broken down in sobs and he’d embraced her, feeling her fear expend itself in shudders, but also noticing how neatly her narrow form fit in his arms, her delicate head in his hand, he was close to tears himself. They should have asked permission. He should have kept a more protective eye on her. He should have insisted that she help the older ladies with the books.

I don’t know if I’m cut out for this, she said.

It was just bad luck. I’ve never seen her before.

But I’m afraid of them. And she knew it. And you’re not, and she respected you.

It gets easier if you keep showing up.

She shook her head, not believing him.

When Theo Crenshaw returned from his lunch, Russ was too ashamed to mention the incident. He’d had no plan for him and Frances, no specific fantasy, nothing more than a wish to be near her, and now, in his vanity and error, he’d blown his chance to see her twice a month. He was bad enough to desire a woman who wasn’t his wife, but he was also bad at being bad. How hideously passive a tactic it had been to bring her down to the basement. To imagine that watching him work could make her want him, the way watching her do anything made him want her, was to be the kind of man her kind of woman wouldn’t want. Watching him had bored her, and he deserved the blame for what had followed.

In his Fury, on the slow drive back to New Prospect, she was silent until one of the older widows asked her how her son, Larry, the tenth grader, was liking Crossroads. It was news to Russ that her son had joined the church’s youth group.

Rick Ambrose must be some kind of genius, Frances said. I don’t think there were thirty kids in that group when I was growing up.

Were you in it? the older widow asked.

Nope. Not enough cute boys. Not any, actually.

Coming from Frances, the word genius was like acid on Russ’s brain. He should have borne it stoically, but on his bad days he was unable not to do things he would later regret. It was almost as if he did them because he would later regret them. Writhing with retrospective shame, abasing himself in solitude, was how he found his way back to God’s mercy.

Do you know, he said, why the group is named Crossroads? It’s because Rick Ambrose thought kids could relate to the name of a rock song.

This was a scabrous half-truth. Russ himself had originally proposed the name.

"And so I asked him—I had to ask—if he knew the original Robert Johnson song. And he gives me a blank look. Because to him, you know, music history started with the Beatles. Believe me, I’ve heard the Cream version of ‘Crossroads.’ I know exactly what it is. It’s a bunch of guys from England ripping off an authentic Black American blues master and acting like it’s their music."

Frances, in her hunting cap, had her eyes on the truck ahead of them. The older widows were holding their breath while their associate minister trashed the director of youth programming.

I happen to have the original recording of Johnson singing ‘Cross Road Blues,’ he bragged, repellently. "Back when I lived in Greenwich Village—you know, I used to live there, in New York City—I’d find old 78s in junk stores. During the Depression, the record companies went out in the field and made amazing authentic recordings—Lead Belly, Charley Patton, Tommy Johnson. I was working with an afterschool program in Harlem, and I’d come home every night and play those records, and it was like being carried straight into the South in the twenties. There was so much pain in those old voices. It helped me understand the pain I was dealing with in Harlem. Because that’s what the blues are really about. That’s what went missing when the white bands started aping the style. I can’t hear any pain at all in the new music."

An embarrassed silence fell. The last daylight of November was dying in crayon colors beneath the clouds on the suburban horizon. Russ now had more than enough to be ashamed of later, more than enough to be sure that he deserved to suffer. The sense of rightness at the bottom of his worst days, the feeling of homecoming in his humiliations, was how he knew that God existed. Already, as he drove toward the dying light, he had a foretaste of their reunion.

In the First Reformed parking lot, Frances lingered in the car after the others had taken their leave. Why did she hate me? she said.

Ronnie’s mother?

No one’s ever spoken to me like that.

I’m very sorry that happened to you, he said. But this is what I meant about pain. Imagine being so poor that your kids are the only thing you have, the only people who care about you and need you. What if you saw some other woman treating them better than you were able to treat them? Can you imagine how that might feel?

It would make me try to treat them better myself.

"Yes, but that’s because you’re not poor. When you’re poor, things just happen to you. You feel like you can’t control anything. You’re completely at God’s mercy. That’s why Jesus tells us that the poor are blessed—because having nothing brings you closer to God."

That woman didn’t strike me as being especially close to God.

Actually, Frances, you have no way of knowing. She was obviously angry and troubled—

And stinking drunk.

And stinking drunk at noon. But if we learn nothing else from these Tuesdays, it should be that you and I are not in a position to judge the poor. We can only try to serve them.

So you’re saying it was my fault.

Not at all. You were listening to something generous in your heart. That’s never a fault.

He was hearing something generous in his own heart: he could still be a good pastor to her.

I know it’s hard to see when you’re upset, he said gently, but what you experienced today is what people in that neighborhood experience on a daily basis. Abusive words, racial prejudice. And I know you’re no stranger to pain yourself—I can’t even imagine what you’ve been through. If you decide you’ve had enough pain and you’d rather not work with us right now, I won’t think less of you. But you have an opportunity, if you’re up for it, to turn your pain into compassion. When Jesus tells us to turn the other cheek, what is he really saying to us? That the person who’s abusing us is hopelessly evil and we just have to put up with it? Or is he reminding us that the person is a person like us, a person who feels the same kind of pain that we do? I know it can be hard to see, but that perspective is always available, and I think it’s one we all should strive for.

Frances considered his words for a moment. You’re right, she said. I do have a hard time seeing it that way.

And that had seemed to be the end of it. When he phoned her the next day, as any good pastor would have done, she said her daughter had a fever and she couldn’t talk right then. He didn’t see her at services the following two Sundays, and she skipped the circle’s next trip to the South Side. He thought of calling her again, if only to resupply himself with shame, but the purity of the hurt of losing her was of a piece with the season’s dark afternoons and long nights. He would have lost her sooner or later—at the latest when one of them died, very probably much sooner than that—and his need to reconnect with God was so pressing that he seized on the hurt almost greedily.

But then, four days ago, she’d called him. She’d had a wretched cold, she said, but she couldn’t stop thinking about his words in the car. She didn’t think she had the strength to be like him, but she felt like she’d turned a corner, and Kitty Reynolds had mentioned a Christmas delivery to the South Side. Could she come along with them for that?

Russ would have been content to rejoice merely as her pastor, her enabler, if Frances hadn’t then asked if he might loan her some of his blues recordings.

Our turntable plays 78s, she said. I’m thinking, if I’m going to do this, I should try to understand their culture better.

He winced at the phrase their culture, but even he was not so bad at being bad as not to know what sharing music signified. He went up to the unheatable third floor of his hulking church-provided house and spent a good hour on his knees, selecting and reselecting 78s, trying to guess which ten of them together were likeliest to inspire feelings like the ones he already had for her. His connection with God had vanished, but this wasn’t a worry for now. The worry was Kitty Reynolds. It was imperative that he have Frances all to himself, but Kitty was sharp and he was bad at lying. Any ruse he tried, like telling her to meet him at three and then departing with Frances at two thirty, was bound to raise Kitty’s suspicions. He saw that he had no choice but to level with her, sort of, and say that Frances had suffered a small trauma in the city, and that he needed to be alone with her when she bravely revisited the scene of it.

It sounds to me, Kitty had said when he called her, like you fell down on the job.

You’re right. I did. And now I need to try and regain her trust. It’s encouraging that she wants to go back, but it’s still very delicate.

And she’s a cute one, and it’s Christmastime. If it were anyone but you, Russ, I might be worried about your motives.

He’d wondered about Kitty’s implication—whether she considered him uniquely good and trustworthy, or uniquely unsexed and unmanly and unthreatening. Either way, the effect had been to make his impending date with Frances feel more thrillingly illicit. In anticipation of it, he’d smuggled out of his house and into the church his final selection of blues records and a grimy old coat, a sheepskin thing from Arizona, that he hoped might lend him a bit of an edge. In Arizona, he’d had an edge, and, fairly or not, he believed that what had dulled it was his marriage. When Marion, after his humiliation, had loyally undertaken to hate Rick Ambrose, calling him that charlatan, Russ had snapped at her—lashed out—and declared that Rick was many things but not a charlatan, the simple fact was that he, Russ, had lost his edge and couldn’t relate to young people anymore. He flagellated himself and resented Marion for interfering with the pleasure of it. His subsequent daily shame, whether of walking past Ambrose’s office or taking a craven detour to avoid it, had connected him to the sufferings of Christ. It was a torment that nourished him in his faith, whereas the too-gentle touch of Marion’s hand on his arm, when she tried to comfort him, was a torment without spiritual upside.

From his office, as the hour finally approached two thirty, the page in his typewriter still blank, he could hear the afterschool influx of Crossroads teenagers buzzing around the honeypot of Ambrose, the pounding of running footsteps, the shouting of swear words that Mr. Fuck-Piss-Shit encouraged by using them incessantly himself. More than a hundred and twenty kids now belonged to Crossroads, among them two of Russ’s own children; and it was a measure of how focused he’d been on Frances, how mad with anticipation of their date, that only now, as he stood up from his desk and pulled on the sheepskin coat, did he consider that he and she might run into his son Perry.

Bad criminals overlook obvious things. Relations with his daughter, Becky, had been strained ever since she’d joined Crossroads, gratuitously, in October, but at least she was aware of how deeply she’d wounded him by joining, and he rarely saw her at the church after school. Perry, however, knew nothing of tact. Perry, whose IQ had been measured at 160, saw too much and smirked too much at what he saw. Perry was fully capable of chatting up Frances, his manner seemingly forthright and respectful but somehow neither, and he would definitely notice the sheepskin coat.

Russ could have used the detour to the parking lot, but the man who resorted to it wasn’t the man he meant to be today. He squared his shoulders, deliberately forgot to take the blues recordings, so that he and Frances would have a reason to return to his office after dark, and stepped into a dense bank of smoke from the cigarettes of a dozen kids camped out in the hallway. There was no immediate sign of Perry. One chubby, apple-cheeked girl was splayed out happily on the laps of three boys on the saggy old divan that someone, over Russ’s quiet objections to Dwight Haefle (the hallway was a fire escape route), had dragged in for kids waiting their turn to be confronted by Ambrose, with brutal but loving honesty, in the privacy of his office.

Russ moved forward with his eyes on the floor, stepping around blue-jeaned shins and sneakered feet. But as he approached his adversary’s office he could see, peripherally, that its door was halfway open; and then he heard her voice.

He stopped without having wanted to.

It’s so great, he heard Frances gush. A year ago, I practically had to put a gun to his head to get him to church.

Of Ambrose, through the doorway, only ragged denim cuffs and beat-up work boots were visible. But the chair Frances was sitting in faced the hallway. She saw Russ, waved to him, and said, See you outside?

God only knew what expression was on his face. He walked on, blindly overshot the main entrance, and found himself outside the function hall. He was taking on dark water through large holes in his hull. The stupidity of never once imagining that she could go to Ambrose. The clairvoyant certainty that Ambrose would take her away from him. The guilt of having hardened his heart against the wife he’d vowed to cherish. The vanity of believing that his sheepskin coat made him look like anything but a fatuous, obsolete, repellent clown. He wanted to tear off the coat and retrieve his regular wool one, but he was too much of a coward to walk back up the hallway, and he was afraid that if he took the detour and saw the dusty crèche steer, in the state he was in, he might cry.

Oh God, he prayed from within the loathsomeness of his coat. Please help me.

If God answered his prayer, it was by reminding him that the way to endure misery was to humble himself, think of the poor, and be of service. He went to the church secretary’s office and ferried cartons of toys and canned goods to the parking lot. Each passing minute deepened the late-dawning badness of the day. Why was she with Ambrose? What could they be discussing that was taking so long? The toys all appeared to be new or indestructible enough to pass as new, but Russ was able to survive further minutes by rooting through the food cartons, culling the lazy or thoughtless donations (cocktail onions, water chestnuts) and taking comfort in the weight of jumbo cans of pork and beans, of Chef Boyardee, of pear halves in syrup: the thought of how welcome each would be to a person who was genuinely hungry and not merely, like him, starved in spirit.

It was 2:52 when Frances came bounding up to him, like a boy, full of bounce. She was wearing the hunting cap and, today, a matching wool jacket. Where’s Kitty? she said brightly.

Kitty was afraid she wouldn’t fit, with all the boxes.

She’s not coming?

Unable to look Frances in the eye, he couldn’t tell if she was disappointed or, worse yet, suspicious. He shook his head.

That’s silly, she said. I could have sat on her lap.

Do you mind?

"Mind? It’s a privilege! I’m feeling very special today. I’ve turned a corner."

She made an airy little ballet move, expressive of turning a corner. He wondered if her feeling had preceded or been caused by her visit with Ambrose.

Good, then, he said, slamming the Fury’s rear door. We should probably get going.

It was a subtle reference to her lateness, the only one he intended to permit himself, and she didn’t pick up on it. Is there anything I need to bring?

No. Just yourself.

The one thing I never leave home without! Let me just make sure I locked my car.

He watched her bounce over to her own, newer car. Her spirits seemed higher than his not only at this moment but possibly in his entire life. Certainly higher than he’d ever seen Marion’s.

Ha! Frances exulted from across the lot. Locked!

He gave her two thumbs up. He never gave anyone two thumbs up. It felt so strange he wasn’t sure he’d done it right. He looked around to see if anyone else, Perry in particular, had witnessed it. There was no one in sight but a pair of teenagers carrying guitar cases toward the church, not looking in his direction, perhaps intentionally. One was a boy he’d known since he was a second grader in Sunday school.

What would it be like to live with a person capable of joy?

As he was getting into the Fury, a single, floppy snowflake, the first of the multitude the sky had promised all day, came to rest on his forearm and dissolved in itself. Frances, climbing in from the other side, said, That’s a great old coat. Where’d you get it?

Resolved: that the soul is independent of the body and immutable. First affirmative speaker: Perry Hildebrandt, New Prospect Township High School.

Ahem.

Tempting though it may be, let’s not make the mistake of misreading the experience, familiar to any pothead worthy of the name, of being in one place, doing one thing—say, struggling to tear open a bag of marshmallows in Ansel Roder’s kitchen—and then, the very next instant, finding one’s bodily self performing an entirely different task in a wholly different setting. Such spatio-temporal elisions or (in common but misleading parlance) blackouts need not suggest a division of soul and body; any decent mechanistic theory of mind can account for them. Let’s begin, instead, by considering a question that may at first glance seem trivial or unanswerable or even nonsensical: Why am I me and not someone else? Let’s peer into the dizzying depths of this question …

It was curious the way time slowed, almost stopped, when he was feeling well: wonderful (but also not, because of the sleepless night it augured) the number of laps his mind could run in the seconds it took him to climb one staircase. The pulsing nowness of it all, body and soul in sync, his skin registering each degree of falling temperature as he approached the third floor of the Crappier Parsonage, his nose the mustiness of the cold air flowing down toward the door at the bottom of the stairs, which he’d left open in case his mother came home unexpectedly; his ears the assurance that she hadn’t, his retinas the slightly less gloomy December light in windows nearer to the sky, less shaded by trees, his soul the almost déjà vu familiarity of climbing these stairs alone.

He had once (only once) asked the higher powers if one of the third-floor rooms could be his, or really not so much asked as rationally pointed out the third floor’s suitability for the third child he ineluctably was, and when the answer had come down from on maternal high—no, sweetie, it’s too cold in the winter, too hot in the summer, and Judson likes sharing a room with you—he’d accepted it without protest or renewed entreaty, because, by his own rational assessment, he was the one child in the family with no rightful claim to a room of his own, being neither the oldest nor the youngest nor the prettiest, and he was used to operating at a level of rationality inaccessible to others.

Nevertheless, in his mind, the third floor belonged to him. Many a lungful of depleted smoke had been puffed out the storage-room window, many an ash smudged into the polleny dust on the outer sill, and the Reverend Father’s home office, which he now brazenly entered, had no secrets from him. He had read, partly out of curiosity, partly to gauge just how miserable a worm he could be, the entirety of his mother’s premarital correspondence with his father, except for two letters that his father himself had never opened. Searching, with little optimism, for Playboys, he’d exhumed his father’s stacks of The Other Side and The Witness, the fruit of minds so woody that not a drop of sweetness could be pressed from them, along with a year’s worth of Psychology Todays, in one of which he’d dwelled on the words clitoris and clitoral orgasm, sadly not illustrated. (Ansel Roder’s father stored his collection of Playboys in hinged archival cardboard boxes, labeled by calendar year, which was impressive but discouraged pilferage.) The Reverend’s jazz and blues recordings were so much mute plastic and moldering sleeve, and the old coats in the slope-ceilinged closet weren’t covetable, cut as they were for a man much bigger than Perry, who could feel, literally in his bones, that he would end up as the physical runt of the Hildebrandt litter, his growth spurt, the year before, having resembled the bottle rocket that goes off at a faltering angle and dies with a dull pop. The closet interested him only in December, when the floor of it filled up with presents.

A noteworthy fact, possibly bearing on the question of the soul’s immutability, was that a person named Perry Hildebrandt had existed on earth for nine Christmases, his consciousness alive and functioning on five of them, before it occurred to him that the presents that appeared under the tree on Christmas Eve must have been in the house, not yet wrapped, for some days or even weeks before their appearance. His blindness had had nothing to do with Santa Claus. Of Santa the Hildebrandts had always said, Bah, humbug. And yet somehow, long past the age of understanding that presents don’t just buy and wrap themselves, he’d accepted their sudden annual appearance as, if not a miraculous provision, then a phenomenon like his bladder filling with urine, part of the normal course of things. How had he not grasped at nine a truth so obvious to him at ten? The epistemological disjunction was absolute. His nine-year-old self seemed to him a total stranger, and not in a good way. It was a figure of vague menace to the older Perry, who couldn’t escape the suspicion that, although the cherubic face in photos from 1965 was identifiably his own, the two Perrys did not have the same soul. That somehow there had been a switcheroo. In which case, where had his current soul come from? And where had the other one gone?

He opened the closet door and dropped to his knees. The nakedness of the presents on the floor was a sad premonition of their naked future, after the brief, false glory of being wrapped. A shirt, a velour pullover, socks. An argyle sweater, further socks. A ribboned box from Marshall Field’s—pretty tony! Gentle shaking indicated a lightweight garment within, doubtless for Becky. Reaching in deeper, he uncrimped the paper bags of books and records. Among the latter was the Yes album he’d mentioned to his mother in a sideways conversation of the sort that gave them pleasure. (Transmitting a Christmas list without referring to Christmas was a very elementary game, and yet the Reverend Father couldn’t have managed it without winking, and Becky would have spoiled it altogether: Are you trying to tell me what you want for Christmas? Only his mother and his little brother had proper ludic faculties.) In hindsight, it was a pity he’d hinted at the Yes record before he formed his new resolution. Yes paired outstandingly with reefer, but he feared that its music might forfeit a certain luster if listened to with head unaltered.

At the back of the closet were heavier items, a small yellow Samsonite suitcase (for Becky, certainly), what appeared to be a secondhand microscope (had to be Clem), a portable cassette player/recorder (hinted at but by no means counted on!), and, oh dear, an electric NFL Football game. Poor Judson. He was still young enough that he needed to be given a game, but Perry had already played this particular game at Roder’s and nearly passed out laughing at its shittiness. The sheet-metal playing field vibrated electrically, with a sound like a Norelco shaver’s, beneath two teams of tiny plastic gridders with oblongs of plastic turf glued to their feet, the quarterbacks eternally frozen in he-man forward-passing posture, the halfbacks carrying a ball that was more like a pellet of pocket lint and frequently fumbling it, or becoming so disoriented in the buzzy scrum that they speeded toward their own end zone and scored a safety for their opponent. Nothing was more hilarious to the stupidly stoned than stupidly stoned-looking behavior; but Judson, of course, would not be playing it while stoned.

On the plus side: no sign of a camera. Perry had been fairly sure that only he knew what his little brother most wanted, because Judson was a superior human being, to whom it wouldn’t occur to engage in avaricious hinting with their mother, and the paternal style was so anti-materialistic that Christmas lists were never solicited. Still, there was such a thing as bad luck, intuitive guesses, and so he had to ransack the closet—a small infraction, smaller yet in the context of a greater good.

Because this was his new resolution: to be good.

Or, failing that, at least less bad.

Although his motives for so resolving suggested that the badness was underlying and perhaps intractable.

For example: the reluctance he now felt, as he stood up and headed back down the drafty staircase, to liquidate the asset. The liquidation was a sentence he’d passed on himself, a punitive fine he’d levied at the peak of his resolution, but now he wondered if it was really necessary. He had in his billfold the twenty-dollar bill his mother had slipped him for Christmas shopping, plus eleven dollars he’d managed not to spend on poisoning his central nervous system. The camera that he and Judson had admired in the window of New Prospect Photo cost $24.99, not including sales tax and rolls of film. Even if he could find a cheap used frame for his gouache portrait of his mother and bought paperbacks for everyone else—and his irritation at having to buy anything for Becky or Clem or the Reverend was already an ominous violation of his resolution—he was facing a shortfall.

And there was a cheaper way. Judson would also have liked to get the game of Risk, a new one of which cost less than half the camera, and to play it with Perry in their bedroom, which Perry would gladly have done as a further gift to Judson, being fond of the game himself. But along with every other game involving war or killing, any toy that shot projectiles or could be imagined to shoot them, any representations of soldiers, warplanes, tanks, etc.—in short, every thing a normal boy like Judson most wanted—Risk was forbidden in the house, owing to the Reverend’s violent pacifism. Perry did have an arsenal of rational arguments at his disposal: Wasn’t the object of all games a kind of warlike vanquishment? How come the virtual slaughter in chess and checkers didn’t run afoul of the ban? Was it truly obligatory to view the pleasing enameled lozenges of Risk as armies, rather than as abstract markers in a game of topological strategy and dice-rolling? If only it were possible to argue with his father without flushing and choking up with tears of anger and hating himself for being smarter, but also less good, than the old man! A fine gift to Judson a fight would be on Christmas morning.

Concluding, reluctantly, that there was no saving the asset, he shut the stairway door behind him and found Judson where he’d left him, in their bedroom, reading a book beneath the homemade reading light that Perry had rigged up for him above his captain’s bed. Judson’s corner of their room recalled the cabin of the Spray, the globe-circling vessel of his hero Joshua Slocum—everything in its place, clothes folded and stowed beneath the bed, fifty-cent paperbacks ordered alphabetically by title, Dinky cars parked on a little shelf at parallel diagonals, alarm clock tightly wound—outside which raged the sea of Perry, for whom folding clothes was an irrational waste of time and ordering his possessions a superfluity, since he remembered exactly where he’d left them. The asset was under his bed, in the padlocked plywood strongbox that he’d built as his final project in eighth-grade shop class.

Hey, kiddo, sorry to bother you, he said from the doorway. But I need you to go somewhere else.

Judson’s book was The Incredible Journey. He frowned elaborately. First you tell me I have to stay here and then you tell me I have to leave.

Just for a minute. Unusual commands must be obeyed at Christmas time.

Judson, not budging, said, What do you feel like doing today?

A sideways question.

Right now, Perry said, I feel like doing something you need to leave the room for.

Later, though.

I have to go downtown. Why don’t you go over to Kevin’s? Or Brett’s.

They’re both sick. How long will you be gone?

Possibly until dinnertime.

I have a new idea for how to set the game up. Can I do it while you’re gone and we can play it after dinner?

I don’t know, Jay. Maybe.

A bruise of disappointment in Judson’s face returned Perry to his resolution.

I mean, yes, he said. But the game’s not coming out before then, you understand?

Judson nodded and hopped off the bed with his book. Promise?

Perry promised and locked the door behind him. Ever since he’d manufactured a copy of Stratego, rather cunningly, out of shirt cardboard, his brother had been mad to play it with him. Because it was nominally a game of bombs and killing, it carried the risk of confiscation by the higher powers, and Judson had needed no telling to keep it a secret. There were many worse little brothers in New Prospect. Not only was Judson Perry’s best evidence of the reality of love, he was such an appealing and well-regulated youngster, nearly as smart as Perry and much better able to sleep at night, that Perry sometimes wished that he, Perry, were his little brother.

But what did that even mean? If the soul was merely a psychic artifact created by the body, it was tautologically self-evident why Perry’s soul was in Perry and not in Judson. And yet it didn’t feel self-evident. The reason he wondered if the soul might be independent and immutable was his persistent sense of how odd it was, how seemingly random, that his soul had landed where it had. Try as he might, altered or sober, he could never quite solve—or even properly articulate—the mystery of his happening to be Perry. It wasn’t at all clear to him what Becky, for example, had done to deserve being Becky, or when exactly (in an earlier incarnation?) she’d earned that privilege. She just found herself being Becky, around whom the heavens revolved; and this, too, confounded him.

A delicious faint skunk smell wafted off the asset when he opened the strongbox. The asset consisted of three ounces of weed, in double Baggies, and twenty-one Quaaludes, the remnant of a wholesale buy that, like every previous buy, had cost him nearly unendurable anxiety and shame. He stared at it in frank disbelief that he was going to part with it for nothing in return but the putative joy of Christmas giving. So very cruel, his resolution. He thought he might love being high a little less than he loved his brother, but he wasn’t sure that when his mind was racing and one night in bed felt like a month of nights he didn’t love two Quaaludes better. Aye, that was the question: whether to shove the whole fucking asset in the pocket of his parka and be done with it, or to sleep tonight. The weed alone would fetch him thirty dollars, more cash than he needed. Why not hold back a few ’ludes? For that matter, why not hold back all of them?

Eleven days earlier, in an eerie correlative of the cosmic lottery in which his soul had drawn the name Perry, he’d plucked the name Becky H from a pile of folded slips on the linoleum floor of the function hall at First Reformed. (What were the chances? About one in fifty-five—a hundred million times greater than the chances of being Perry, but still rather low.) As soon as he’d seen his sister’s name, he’d sidled back toward the pile, hoping to trade in his slip for a different one, but a Crossroads adviser was standing there to guard against this sort of cheating. Ordinarily, when it came time to choose partners for a dyad exercise, Rick Ambrose directed everyone to pick a person they didn’t know well or hadn’t shared with recently. The previous Sunday, however, one of the inner-circle twelfth graders, Ike Isner, had stood up and complained to the group that people were choosing too many safe partners and avoiding risky ones. In good Stalinist show-trial fashion, with a display of strong emotion, Isner confessed that he was guilty of this himself. The group immediately drenched him with approval for his courageous honesty. Someone then proposed a lottery system, against which another inner-circler argued that they ought to take personal responsibility for their choices, rather than relying on a mechanical system, but the proposal carried a group vote by a wide margin—Perry, as was his habit, waiting to see which way the wind was blowing before raising his hand in favor.

Becky had been one of the few people voting against. Seeing her name on the slip now, he wondered if she’d foreseen this very eventuality; had been, in this rare instance, sharper than he was. All across the church function hall, people were running up to their partners. Becky was looking around innocently to see who hers would be. As Perry approached her, he saw the situation dawn on her. Her expression matched his own. It said Oh, shit.

All right, listen up, Ambrose barked. "In this exercise, I want each of us to tell our partner something we really admire about them. First one of us, then the other. And then I want each of us to tell our partner something they’re doing that’s a barrier to getting to know them better. I’m talking about barriers, not character assassination. Everyone got it? Are we all clear on what comes first?"

The group was big enough that Perry and Becky had easily avoided each other since the night, six weeks earlier, when she’d shocked the world by joining Crossroads. He personally had been shocked because Becky was rather too obviously the Reverend Father’s favorite child and she knew very well how much their father hated Rick Ambrose; Perry’s own defection to Crossroads had merely deepened an existing chill between him and the Reverend, whereas Becky’s was a brutal betrayal. More universally shocking was the sheer sight of her face on a Sunday night at First Reformed. Perry had been there. He’d seen the heads turning, he’d heard the murmurs of astonishment. It was as if a Cleopatra had shown up at one of Jesus’s rallies in Galilee, a diademed queen sitting down among the freaks and the lepers and trying to blend in; because Becky, too, came from a different world—the social royalty of New Prospect Township High.

Perry as a boy hadn’t been a student of his sister’s doings. Along with Clem, with whom she was tight, she’d constituted a generic Older Siblings unit, notable mainly for always being more advanced than Perry, better with scissors, better at hopscotch, better (much better) at control of emotion and mood. Only when he started junior high did he become aware of Becky as a distinct individual, about whom the larger world had strong opinions. She was the captain of the Lifton Central cheerleading squad and could have won any other popularity contest she cared to enter. Whichever lunch table she sat down at filled up instantly with the prettiest girls, the cocksurest boys. Strangely, she herself was held to be very pretty. To Perry, the tall and bony girl with whom he impatiently shared a bathroom, and whose face twisted into something haglike when he corrected her on a point of fact or grammar, was more like vaguely disgusting, but the group of older Lifton Central boys he’d quickly fallen in with, Ansel Roder among them, assured him that he was mistaken. He was never able to agree with them, though he did eventually concede that his sister had something—an aura of singularity, a force at once attractive and unapproachable (no one had ever dared claim to be her boyfriend), a kind of expensiveness that had nothing to do with money (it was said that she wasn’t stuck up like the other cheerleaders, as if she didn’t even notice the attention she effortlessly commanded)—because he himself, Perry, the negligible sibling satellite, reflected a glow of his own from her preeminence.

In New Prospect the words Becky Hildebrandt were magical in the strict sense, their mere utterance sufficing to ensure massive attendance at a party or to induce self-reported boners in shop class (Perry regrettably within earshot for that one). As the sharer of half of her name, he’d found himself immediately noticed at Lifton Central, at least by the set of eighth- and ninth-grade boys whose parents’ high incomes and large homes accorded them a certain elevated status. He started as their runty mascot but soon proved himself their equal or better. No one could hold a pipe hit longer in his lungs, no one could drink more shots without slurring his speech, no one knew more words in the English language. Even his hair, being flax-colored and having natural wave and body, looked better than his friends’ at shoulder length. Roder had gotten so tired of brushing his lank, dull hair from his eyes that he’d finally cut it off; he was the biggest freak of them all and looked like G.I. Joe now.

It had seemed appropriate to Perry that his friends should all be older than he was. Becky might have provided the initial entrée to them, and they might never have forgotten whose brother he was, but in his own way he was singular, too. This became especially evident in ninth grade, when the last of his friends had gone on to high school. Surrounded by contemporaries of paltrier intelligence, and having no one to get him high at lunch hour, he felt like an astronaut who’d moonwalked too long and missed the flight home. This was when his sleeping troubles started. During a period of weeks between January and March, now blessedly largely lost to memory, he experienced his first nights of being 100% awake until dawn, other dawns when he felt physically incapable of raising his eyelids, a number of mornings when he crept back into the Crappier Parsonage and up the third-floor stairs and slept under an old throw rug until dinnertime, many incidents of falling asleep in his uniformly profitless classes, an excruciating conference with his principal and his parents at which he also briefly fell asleep, intermittent intense phobia of his mother, and level-voiced lectures from his father. Was it not impressive that he’d nonetheless maintained straight As that quarter? He had his sleepless nights to thank for that. There was also the psychic respite of seeing his friends after school and on weekends, but these get-togethers were shadowed, during the dark months, by his sense of wanting—of needing—larger quantities of whatever was being smoked or swallowed than the others seemed to need. To a man, his friends all could have afforded to buy more drugs. Only he, whose craving for relief didn’t peak until he was alone at home and facing another night on the rack, had a churchmouse for a father.

Right around the time he determined that he had no choice but to start dealing drugs, three of his best friends had joined Crossroads. For Bobby Jett it was a matter of a girl he was chasing, for Keith Stratton the allure of nine undersupervised days on the Crossroads spring trip to Arizona, and for David Goya, whose mother belonged to First Reformed, a not terribly punishing punishment for multiple curfew violations. Under Rick Ambrose, Crossroads had begun to undermine traditional social categories. Seemingly unlikely candidates for Christian fellowship drifted in, gave it a try. Among the ones who stuck with it, to Perry’s surprise, were all three of his friends. They still partied of a weekend, but their center of conversational gravity had shifted. Referring warmly to the Arizona trip, or more archly to the sensitivity training they did on Sunday nights, or more lubriciously to certain choice girls on the Crossroads roster, they made Perry feel excluded from a thing that sounded fun.

After a harrowing spring, followed by a summer of inhaling lawn-mower exhaust and getting wasted and rereading Tolkien, he proposed to Ansel Roder that the two of them check out Crossroads. Roder refused emphatically (I’m not into cults), and so