Empire Falls

the priest was stern, too, reminding the young man that God demanded of him the same degree of fidelity He required of His other children. In His eyes, promiscuity and carelessness were the true offenses, no matter one’s sexuality.
    When his degree work was finished, the young professor moved on with great reluctance from one marginal teaching post to the next, and it was clear to Father Mark that he’d fallen in love with the priest and had held his memory sacred over the intervening years, which was why it had come as such a shock to get a phone call from him a month ago. His heart had leapt at the sound of his old friend’s voice, and his first thought was how much trouble it must have been to track him down in Fairhaven, Maine, of all places. But his joy was short-lived. At first he didn’t understand that the priest was calling him to explain that he’d offered misguided spiritual counsel all those years ago, that further reflection and prayer had forced him to concede that while the church was indeed as large as the world it embraced, it could not be infinitely flexible in its doctrine—that is, all things to all men. In matters of faith and morals there could be neither doubt nor dissent, and where its teachings were clear and unambiguous, a true believer had no choice but to accept these as the very will of God. Further, it was the duty of all who were ill to seek the cure.
    “You want to know the sad part?” the young man concluded, his voice weak with emotion and on the verge of breaking.
    Father Mark, listening both to the voice on the phone and to Father Tom’s relentless shuffling in the hall, already knew the sad part. “You suspect he was gay himself, don’t you?”
    A LTHOUGH F ATHER M ARK had composed much of “When God Retreats” in his head while lying awake in his bed during an interminable and restless night—during which, he now understood, Father Tom was making his escape—he’d been thinking about the sermon since he’d had a long afternoon’s chat back in September with Miles, who told him a story about the week he and his mother had spent on Martha’s Vineyard, when Miles was nine and his mother, trapped in the unhappiest of marriages, had, Miles believed, a brief affair with a man she’d met on the island. Father Mark had never met Grace Roby, of course, having arrived in Empire Falls years after she died, but according to Miles, after the affair she’d returned to both her marriage and the church.
    Hers was not, Father Mark believed, an unusual story. Most people tried to be faithful, though few could boast an unblemished record. What had struck him about Grace Roby, at least as she was revealed by her son’s account, was that by falling in love, she had become an entirely different woman. It wasn’t so much that her behavior changed, but rather that she became astonishingly beautiful—so beautiful, in fact, that her beauty could not fail to impress even her nine-year-old son, who’d so taken her for granted to that point that he’d never really seen her as a woman, but only as his mother. For a brief span of a few sun-drenched days, she’d been truly happy, perhaps for the first time in her life, and that happiness had been manifest in a radiance that had turned the head of every man they met.
    Though common, it was still a remarkable story, and Father Mark couldn’t help being a little in love with Grace Roby himself and, even more disturbing, glad for this woman he’d never met, that she’d enjoyed at least this fleeting happiness. That she had betrayed her marriage and her faith seemed almost too fine a point, perhaps because Father Mark, knowing Max Roby, understood that her married life must’ve been a trial. That she ultimately returned to both her husband and her faith seemed far more significant, and he said as much to Miles, who confessed his lifelong worry that the intensity of his mother’s brief joy had somehow been the root cause of the illness that killed her a decade later. “You’re telling me that happiness is carcinogenic?” he’d asked when Miles explained how his mother was never truly the same after their return to Empire Falls, that she’d immediately begun to lose weight, that she became pale as a cave dweller and fell ill several times each winter, that she’d nearly died giving birth to his brother, David. Odd that Miles should’ve concluded as a child that happiness, not its loss, was what had stricken his mother. Odder