“Never mind. You still end up looking like a horse’s butt, Adam.”
“‘A horse’s butt?’”
“What kind of man leaves his wife and son to study religion? Jesus.”
“I do not care. How I end up. Looking. To people who do not know me.”
“You just want Paulie back?”
“Yes.”
On Gospel Giveaway, the words of McElroy’s sermon rolled from him like Gulf Coast combers in hurricane season, powerful, dangerous, unrelenting. (Of course, there was also the ever-present inset of the woman interpreting the sermon for deaf viewers, her hands flashing like hungry seagulls.) Suddenly, though, McElroy held up a copy of the same section of the Atlanta paper now in my own hands.
“…a continuing assault on the American family,” he thundered, waving the newspaper at his auditors. “I’d planned to apologize today for my overzealousness last summer in castigatin’ the former RuthClaire Loyd for livin’ in sin with a male creature not her husband. Well, it’s long since become evident to everybody that this so-called creature is a man. He and Miss RuthClaire were in fact husband and wife at the time of their apparent illicit cohabitation. That bein’ so, they deserved an apology. Why, this past week I visited Adam Montaraz at a hospital in Atlanta, laid my hands square on his head, and baptized him into the everlastin’ glory and the ever-glorious communion of the Body of Christ. Say Amen!”
The people in the Televangelism Center roared, “Amen!”
“At the same time, I unburdened my spirit of its load of guilt and sorrow to both Montarazes, callin’ upon them to forgive me in the great and gracious name of Jesus Christ. And did they forgive me? I believe they did, and I went away fully convicted that here were two righteous human bein’s saved from sin and despair by faith in God and their humble devotion to each other.”
“To God give the glory!” a member of the audience cried.
“But this morning I read that this same couple, so concerned and carin’ only five days ago, has fallen to the epidemic of sundered relationships ravagin’ our country the way the plague once ravaged Europe! This story wounds me so bad because RuthClaire Montaraz has broken her marriage for one incredible reason—nothing more terrible than her husband’s desire to… to study for the ministry!”
The congregation groaned collectively.
Adam sprang up from the floor and punched the button turning the set off. “That. Son. Of. Bitch,” he enunciated.
“RuthClaire didn’t let him baptize T. P. He resents her for that, Adam. He’s trying to get back at her.”
“He has. Misread the story. I am the one. Who has deserted my family.”
“Adam, it’s all a fabrication. Everything in that story.”
Adam struggled to explain himself: “But he has misread, even, the fabrication. A person working for a Master of Theological Studies… is not preparing for the ministry. That is the degree of a lay person. Mr. McElroy should know that.”
“RuthClaire balked him. That’s all he knows.”
“So he blackens her name from his pulpit? For oh-so-many viewers? Is that what he does?” Adam stopped pacing, rubbed his lower jaw, and pointed a bony finger at the blank screen. “Dwight ‘Happy’ McElroy, you are a… very unpleasant… son of bitch.”
I calmed Adam down and got him into the kitchen where, remembering the orders of Dr. Ruggiero, I prepared him a plate of soft scrambled eggs and a bowl of oatmeal. Adam ate ravenously, polishing off his eggs before turning his spoon to the still steaming, cinnamon-sprinkled oatmeal.
The West Bank was closed on Sundays, not so much to honor the sabbath as to acknowledge the mores of the townspeople who honored it. And, like God, I myself was not opposed to twenty-four hours of uninterrupted rest every seven days. At any rate, that afternoon Adam and I entertained ourselves preparing a makeshift gallery display of RuthClaire’s paintings Souls in her old studio. We organized them by dividing them into five groups of seven canvases each, scrupulously assigning different background colors and frame sizes to each group—after which we either hung them or propped them on shelves or tables where they would show off to best advantage.
Warm afternoon sun came through the dusty Venetian blinds in zebra stripes of marmalade and shadow. Then, when I hoisted the blinds, the same light flooded the entire studio. Prismatic dazzle bounced around the room, and our placement of the canvases, along with the sunlight streaming in, transformed them from muddy, earthbound mistakes into oddly spectacular affirmations of their creator’s talent.
“My God,” I said.
Adam pointed at this canvas and then at that, daring me to note how the finishes that had once seemed flat and monolithic now had depth and intricacy. Under the mute pastels lay eloquent patterns of shape and line, iridescent commentaries on the otherwise commonplace surfaces in which they were embedded.
“I never saw any of this before. It’s hard to believe.”
“I know,” Adam said.
“Is this the way you always see them?”
“Of course not.”
“But the other way, they’re inexcusably ugly… hardly worth keeping.”
“Sometimes they might seem so. I have heard Miss RuthClaire admit the same.”
“A desire to undo them? A desire to destroy them?”
“Yes. But only when she has got… beyond them.”
Above Paradise Farm, summer clouds pushed in from the west, mounting one another like amorous sheep. The light in the studio changed. Someone had swaddled the sun in gauze.
“They’re ruined,” I said, meaning the paintings. “They’re back to normal.”
Adam gave me a funny look. Then he patted my shoulder: Don’t fret, Mister Paul.
A golden glory poured through the summer clouds. Only a little less dazzling than before, sunlight pirouetted through the studio. I looked again at RuthClaire’s paintings. No transcendence. The infinitesimal change in the light had somehow leached them of magic. And no matter how hard I tried over the next few days, I was never able to enter the studio at a time when the light slanted in at the necessary angle and chromatic intensity to bring the canvases back to life.
On Monday morning, Adam and I each tried to disguise from the other our individual senses of expectancy. Today RuthClaire was supposed to receive from Craig a letter stipulating the groups—charities, political organizations—to which the Montarazes must write their ransom checks.
At 10:01, I began to get ready to drive into town for my luncheon business. Niedrach should have called, I told myself. But I withdrew that thought, doubting the security of Beulah Fork’s telephone lines. Craig did not need to know where Adam had gone, only that he’d moved away from the big cupola’d house on Hurt Street. As for Adam, he was walking barefoot through my pecan grove, contemplating his and RuthClaire’s misfortune. I went down my sundeck steps to talk to him. “If anything happens here, keep me posted. Call me at the West Bank. Even if Livia George answers the phone, she won’t recognize your voice. She’s never heard it before.”
Before Adam could reply, a vehicle crunched through the gravel on the circular drive fronting the house. Who? Friend, foe, or unsuspecting Avon lady?
“Get inside,” I said. “I’ll check this out.”
Adam obeyed. In the sweltering midmorning heat, I trotted around the house beneath the studio loft and turned the corner in time to see a male figure climbing down from the cab of a glossy violet pickup. The truck was jacked up so high on its oversized wheels that the man’s final step was a low-level parachute jump. He saw me the moment he landed and stood staring at me with a resolute skepticism. “You Mr. Loyd?”