Crossroads

The joy lasted until they were married, on the day his term of service ended, with George and Jimmy as their witnesses, at the courthouse in Flagstaff. They’d abandoned their respective religions and were seeking a new faith to share, but their slate was still clean and they didn’t have a church to marry in. Russ felt obliged to write to his parents the very same day, and he didn’t sugarcoat what he’d done. He explained that Marion had been previously married and that he had no interest in rejoining the community, but that he would like to bring his wife to Lesser Hebron and introduce her to the family.

His father’s reply was brief and bitter. It grieved him but didn’t entirely surprise him, he said, that Russ had been infected by a pestilence stemming from elsewhere in the family, and neither he nor Russ’s mother had any wish to meet Marion. Russ’s mother’s reply was longer and more anguished, more a descant on her own failures, but the point was the same: she’d lost her son. Not rejected him (as Marion, ever defensive of Russ, was quick to point out) but lost him.

The rejection confirmed the rightness of his choice—shame and blame on anyone who refused to meet the most wonderful woman in the world—and he adored being wedded to Marion, adored having her always at his side, on his side. And yet, in his innermost heart, a shadow fell when his parents disowned him. The shadow wasn’t quite doubt and it wasn’t quite guilt. It was more a sense of what he’d lost in gaining Marion. He no longer belonged in Lesser Hebron, but he was still haunted by it. He found himself missing his mother’s little farm, his grandfather’s shop, the eternity in the sameness of the days there, the rightness of a community radically organized around the Word. He understood that his father was a deeply flawed person, his stringency a compensation for an underlying weakness, and that his mother had indeed, in a way, lost her mind. But he couldn’t help secretly admiring them. Their faith had an edge that his own never would.

When he accepted a rural ministry in Indiana, four years later, he hoped he might regain a bit of what he’d lost. He was certainly glad to see more of his grandfather, who, in spite of himself, had married Estelle and now lived in her hometown, two hours to the north of Russ. But the sense of loss was spiritual, not geographical. It was portable and its name was Marion. As his reliance on her became routine, her capabilities merely useful to him, their lovemaking duly procreative, his misgivings about her first marriage returned in the form of grievance. He began to wonder why he’d been so determined to ignore Clement’s advice and marry the first woman he’d loved.

On his bad days, he saw a rube from Indiana who’d been pounced on by an older city girl—snared by the sexual cunning of a woman who’d developed it with a different man. On his worst days, he suspected that Marion had known very well that he could have done better. She must have known that as soon as he left the little world of Flagstaff he would encounter women younger than he was, taller than Marion, less odd, more awed by his own capabilities, and not previously married. She’d seduced him into a contract before he knew his value in the marketplace.

And still, even then, he might have made peace with having married her, if only she, too, had been a virgin when he met her. His grievance was no less gnawing for being trivial and godless. In the final, hard form it had taken, after his dream about Sally Perkins had opened his eyes to the multitude of desirable women, the grievance was that Marion had gotten to enjoy sex with a second person, he only with her. He could tolerate her superiority in every other regard, but not in this one.