Good-bye and Amen by Beth Gutcheon Page A

either weren’t interested in Christianity or weren’t interested in joining a church with the kind of financial problems Holy Innocents had. I thought it would be easy to draw families who had children in our school, but that too was not meant to be. I spent a lot of time on my knees that first year or two.
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    Monica Faithful Norman tried to start a youth group, which had always been one of his strong suits, but at Holy Innocents, he couldn’t get it off the ground. He was older and didn’t look hip or cool as he had in Oregon or when we first got to Colorado. And New York teenagers are not like kids in other places. They have subways, they can move around the city without having to drive so they’re not stuck at home or prowling the mall bored out of their squashes. Sitting in a parish hall or the rector’s study with someone who reminded them of their parents didn’t strike them as an entrancing way to spend an evening. Why should it, when they could as soon be out on the street with cans of spray paint, writing their tags on people’s front doors? “Kum ba ya” was definitely over.
    Meanwhile, the vestry was wilding.
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    Norman Faithful Hi Thomas was the senior warden. He’d been ill, and he asked me to bring the vestry to him for my first meeting. Seemed like a sensible request. But the anti-Thomas faction, and there was bound to be one, I realized too late, decided that meant I was Hi’s creature.
    The church was hemorrhaging money when I got there.Hi didn’t see it as a problem. The school makes plenty of money. The anti-Thomas faction wanted to rent the sanctuary to a church called St. Jude’s that had no home of its own for a nine o’clock service. Only about six people come regularly to ours. But of course, those six were addicted to their little service and their little time slot, and one of them was Hi Thomas’s wife. St. Jude’s saw themselves as the early Christians, pure and persecuted. They were Anglo-Catholics, mostly confirmed bachelors, and they used the 1928 prayer book. The Episcopal church is a big tent, but not big enough for St. Jude’s under our roof, according to Hi Thomas. They’d fill the place with smells and bells, they’d bow at the Incarnatus, and other abominations.
    In the middle of all this, I had to tell the vestry we didn’t want to live in the rectory.
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    Monica Faithful There was one night when Edith literally gasped for breath; she couldn’t even get enough to call to me, but she woke me anyway, it was so loud and desperate. I called 911. We spent six hours in the ER, frightened out of our wits. Did you know asthma could come on so suddenly? Well, the upshot was that it was the mouse dirt in the house that was making her sick. One hundred fifty years of it. Mice were in the walls and under the floors. The docs said she could live in a sterile tent in her room, or we could move.
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    Bella McChesney I never thought Norman Faithful was committed to us. From the first he was like one of those people at a cocktail party who is looking over your shoulder to see if someone more important has come in.
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    Paul McChesney When they first arrived, we had them to dinner. I wanted to give him some advice, you know. Give him the lay of the land, tell him what he might want to watch out for. He wasn’t listening. He was very entertaining, I give him that. He told some wild story about a colleague whose church was haunted by the former rector. If you went into the nave at midnight there were noises and blasts of cold air. Lights that had been out were found burning in the morning. He and his friend went in there together and performed some kind of exorcism.
    After they left, Bella said that Norman had drunk over half a bottle of very expensive Scotch. I should have known he was already in bed with Hi Thomas.
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    Ted Wineapple I never thought Norman should be a bishop. He was too much of a lone