“I don’t mean to be cold. But I’ve lost everything. I am suffering.”
I nodded at the two beautiful little kids. I’d met Rapunzel, their mother. It seemed that Roman Wild would land on both feet.
He saw my glance. “Reenie, I did not want to hurt Ruth or my boys, my older boys. They’re with me right now, in fact, and I’m trying to explain to them in a way they’ll understand. But they’ll never understand. Not until they’re grown men and they have their own complicated lives. I am mortified.” Roman looked like he was strangling, his face purpling. Was he having a heart attack? Or a stroke? “When David saw Bathsheba, he was struck with love for her and lay with her, and when her husband came back, to cover for the pregnancy, which is what happened to me, there was a pregnancy...” He spoke as if this baby, presumably Owen the Loud, had fallen from the sky, which maybe, in Roman’s mind, he did. “But Uriah didn’t want to claim the baby and so David sent him into battle and made sure he was killed.”
“Well, right, you haven’t killed anybody. And you’re not King David.” What kind of delusions did this guy have anyway? A defrocked Wisconsin minister comparing himself to this great Biblical prophet... or whatever David was?
“David pleaded with God to forgive him. He freely acknowledged his sin. He said, ‘my sin is ever before me... Against you... have I sinned and done what is evil in your sight... Behold, I was brought forth in iniquity, and in sin did my mother conceive me... blot out all my iniquities.’”
There was always some way to blame a woman. “So you’re forgiven if you’re sorry?”
“In Proverbs, it says that a man who commits adultery destroys himself, and I am destroyed, at least professionally. If I didn’t believe that living a pure life from now on could redeem me, then my life would be meaningless. Scripture says it’s better to marry than burn in sin.”
“I don’t know anything about the Bible but if it says it’s better to marry, well, you must be fireproof because you did it twice at the same time.”
Unasked, he said that the church council first considered letting him quietly make full financial restitution and go through pastoral and traditional counseling, but when the news about Felicity broke, however, all bets were off. Apparently, a polygamist pastor might hope for forgiveness, but the father of a courtesan killer? Poor Ruth, deserted by a bigamist and then this arrest? I might go into hiding too.
“So Felicity deserves forgiveness too? Even if the worst is true?”
The reverend was quiet for a long time, maybe a full minute, which can seem infinite in the cold. He finally said, “We’re all sinners.”
I said, “I won’t keep you any longer. I just have one question. I’ll ask Ruth too when I talk to her. Do you know why Felicity did what she did? I don’t mean why did she kill someone, because I think that’s impossible. I just want to ask...”
“What, Reenie? I don’t have time.”
“Why do you think she became a sex worker? Did anything happen at home that might have caused her to do that?”
Roman Wild reached down and took a mittened hand from each of his little boys. He did seem like a devoted father. How could he be both things? And yet, wasn’t Felicity also? Were all of us two people, one facing outward, one facing in?
“You’d have to ask her.”
“She won’t talk to me.”
“That should tell you something,” he said, a trace of triumph tensing his dramatic chin. “My relationship with my stepdaughter...”
“Wait. You adopted her, right? So she’s your daughter, not your stepdaughter.”
“With Felicity. It wasn’t close at the end.”
I didn’t get the sense that Roman Wild was lying, unless he was a stone psychopath. He’d answered my questions. That didn’t track with some horrendous abuse situation. Felicity left Starbright Academy, but she didn’t leave their house until she graduated. I thought now, she could have come to us, but she never gave even me a hint of any real trouble, except taking off for Madison one day after graduation.
To my shame, that was only something I’d heard by chance, not from her. After a month in upstate New York as a counselor at a fashion journalism camp for high schoolers, I headed to Chicago to a restaurant and bar called Angel on the Rock, which was owned by a college friend’s family, who also put me up at their house in Evanston. By night, I waited tables there and learned to tend bar. During the day, I wrote copy for a teen fashion blog called Miss Lead. I was busy morning until night until I left for Missouri. But that was no excuse for the fact that I never even texted Felicity a funny face with tears to say goodbye. Why? Felicity and I used to talk or text daily. Was I ashamed of how well she knew me?
I was.
I knew why. I just couldn’t face her. In all honesty, I couldn’t face myself and the appalling truth she now knewabout me. Even now, in the bone-deep cold, I was pushed back to that June night, just days before we were set to graduate, the breathless wet heat, the flat black surface of the water, the loud, insistent shriek of the crickets. For years, I couldn’t hear crickets, a sweet sound for the innocent, without breaking out in a scrim of sweat.
I’d let shame overrule love. Never, I decided on the spot, would I ever do that again.
“About Ruth?”
“Reenie, all I know is that she resigned from her job around Christmas. I wouldn’t have even known that except the school called to ask me where to send her things. The boys are worried. I am too. I’m grateful she even wanted me in their lives after everything. I can’t exactly call her parents. She used to go and stay there for weeks at a time. They have money, so it was probably a nice setup for her. It didn’t help our marriage. I will say that.”
To my eyes, his own setup seemed pretty good, at least for a while. But in the end, they had nothing—less than nothing, the house and even their car the property of the church. Rev. Wild would get a small pension from a fund for disabled clergy. He said Ruth had some savings, but that money went for their debts. How unfair that Ruth, in her Mennonite cotton sack dresses, had to share the burden of Roman’s spending.
Finally, he sighed and said, “Yes, Reenie. I’m fallen. Are you happy now?”
The question was a surprise. “Reverend Wild, I never wished anything bad for you. And I loved Ruth. Ruth didn’t do anything wrong.”
