A skinny little anorexic wife was his assistant—they were both from Muskegon—and our congregation consisted mostly of elderly professors’ widows, a few confused and homely coeds and a homosexual or two just coming to grips with things.

I lasted five weeks, then put my Bible away and started staying up Saturday nights at the fraternity and getting good and drunk. Christianity, like everything else in the Ann Arbor of those times, was too factual and problem-solving-oriented. The spirit was made flesh too matter-of-factly. Small-scale rapture and ecstasy (what I’d come for) were out of the question given the mess the world was in. Consequently I loathed going.

But the First Presbyterians of Haddam offer a good, safe-and-sound approach to things. Their ardent hope is to bring you down to earth by causing your spirit to lift—a kind of complex spiritual orienteering. The regulars all have no doubts about what they’re there for; they’re there to be saved or give a damned good impression of it, and nobody’s pulling the wool over anybody else’s eyes.

What I could read off the marquee, however, seemed strange business, though it will probably turn out to be as ordinary as toast—a trick to lure the once-a-year guys into thinking church has changed.

“The Race To The Tomb”

The preacher will have some witty, eyebrow-arching joke to start off: “Now this fella, Jesus, he was really some heckuva peculiar kind of guy, wouldn’t you say so?” And we all would. Then straight away we’d get to the hard-nosed corroborating of the resurrection and suggesting how such a fate might be ours.

I slipped on by, gave Officer Carnevale the lucky thumbs-up, which he managed moodily to return, then drove straight over to The Presidents—up Tyler, down Pierce and winding a sinewy way to Cleveland Street, before stopping under a giant tupelo across from 116, X’s little white clapboard colonial. Her Citation sat in the narrow drive, an unknown blue car parked at the curb.

Quick as a ferret I left my car, crossed the street, crouched and laid my hand on the hood of the unknown blue car—a Thunderbird—then stole back to mine before anyone on Cleveland Street could see. As I had hoped, the Bird was as cold as a murderer’s heart, and I was relieved to believe it belonged to a neighbor, or to some relative visiting the Armentis next door. Though it could’ve been a suitor I knew nothing about—one of the fat-belly credit card boys from the country club, a thought which changed relief back to doubt.

My plan had been to pay an innocent visit. I hadn’t seen Paul and Clarissa in four days, a long interval in the normal course of our lives. The two of them usually waltz by after school, eat a sandwich, sit and chat together, rummage around their former rooms the way they used to, play Yahtzee or Clue, read books, all while I try by fervent misdirection to prove a continuity in their little lives with my presence. Periodically I quit the work I’m doing and clump upstairs to tease and flirt with them, answer their questions, challenge them and try to woo them back to me in some plain and forthright way, a strategy they’re wise to but don’t mind because they love me, know I love them, and have no choice, really. We are, all four of us in this, a solid and divided family, doing our level bests to see our duty clearly.

Last night I hoped to stay for a drink, see the kids to bed, yak with X for half an hour, then end up, possibly, spending the night on the couch, something I hadn’t done in some time (not, in fact, since I met Vicki) but felt a fierce urge to do suddenly.

Still if I’d gone hat-in-hand up to the door, on a mission of somber fatherhood, I couldn’t be sure I wouldn’t have interrupted an intime—the kids away on overnights at the Armentis, the lights turned up to facilitate the best atmosphere of grownup-bittersweet-excitement-since-so-much-has-gone-before, for the benefit of neighbors interested in seeing a proud woman make the best of a fractured life. I would’ve been thunderstruck to intercept some well-dressed corporate-level type with love in his eyes, athwart the precise couch I hoped to curl up on. X would’ve been in her rights to say I’d torpedoed her attempts at getting her feet on the ground, and the fellow would’ve been in his rights to run me out or punch me. And we’d have both ended up having to leave (the two men always have to trudge off into the night alone, though occasionally they become friends if they meet up later in a bar).

My whole scenario, in short, had lost its glow, and I was left in the dark understory, facing the blue intruder car with nothing to do more than breathe the plush air and endorse X’s neighborhood. The Presidents, with their precise fifty-foot frontages, their mature mulberries and straight sidewalks, are actually an excellent location for a young, divorced lady with children, steady means and an independent bent, to dig her heels in. Up and down the street are other young free-thinking people on the way someplace in the world, sharp-eyed, idealistic folks who spotted a good investment and acted fast, and now have some value to sit on. The immigrant Italians who built them (some chosen right out of Sears catalogs) now prefer Delray Beach and Fort Myers and citizens’ groups more their own age, and have left their neighborhoods to the young, though hardly ever their own young, who prefer the likes of Pheasant Run and Kendall Park. The banks have proved compassionate with mortgage points and variable rates, and as a result the young liberals—most of them prospering stockbrokers, corporate speech writers, and public defenders—have revived a proud, close-knit neighborhood and property-value ethic where everybody looks after everybody else’s kids and grinds their own espresso. Bright new façades and paint jobs. New footings dug. A reshingled weather stoop. Smart art-deco numerals and a pane of discreetly stained glass done at home. All of it promisingly modern.