Friend of My Youth

Street. The church has built the new minister a new house, quite nice, with a patio and a double garage—ministers’ wives often work now; it’s a big help if they can get jobs as nurses or teachers, and in that case you need two cars. The old parsonage is a grayish-white brick house with blue-painted trim on the veranda and the gables. It needs a lot of work. Insulating, sandblasting, new paint, new window frames, new tiles in the bathroom. Walking back to her own place at night, Karin sometimes occupies her mind thinking what she’d do to that place if it was hers and she had the money.
    Austin shows her a picture of Sheila Brothers, the woman he is to marry. Actually, it’s a picture of the three of them—Austin, his wife, and Sheila Brothers, in front of a log building and somepine trees. A Retreat, where he—they—first met Sheila. Austin has on his minister’s black shirt and turned collar; he looks shifty, with his apologetic, ministerial smile. His wife is looking away from him, but the big bow of her flowered scarf flutters against his neck. Fluffy white hair, trim figure. Chic. Sheila Brothers—Mrs. Brothers, a widow—is looking straight ahead, and she is the only one who seems really cheerful. Short fair hair combed around her face in a businesslike way, brown slacks, white sweatshirt, with the fairly large bumps of her breasts and stomach plain to see, she meets the camera head-on and doesn’t seem worried about what it will make of her.
    “She looks happy,” Karin says.
    “Well. She didn’t know she was going to marry me, at the time.”
    He shows her a postcard picture of the town where Sheila lives. The town where he will live in Hawaii. Also a photograph of her house. The town’s main street has a row of palm trees down the middle, it has low white or pinkish buildings, lampposts with brimming flower baskets, and over all a sky of deep turquoise in which the town’s name—a Hawaiian name there is no hope of pronouncing or remembering—is written in flowing letters like silk ribbon. The name floating in the sky looked as possible as anything else about it. As for the house, you could hardly make it out at all—just a bit of balcony among the red and pink and gold flowering trees and bushes. But there was the beach in front of it, the sand pure as cream and the jewel-bright waves breaking. Where Austin Cobbett would walk with friendly Sheila. No wonder he needed all new clothes.
    What Austin wants Karin to do is clear everything out. Even his books, his old typewriter, the pictures of his wife and children. His son lives in Denver, his daughter in Montreal. He has written to them, he has talked to them on the phone, he has asked them to claim anything they want. His son wants the dining-roomfurniture, which a moving-truck will pick up next week. His daughter said she didn’t want anything. (Karin think she’s apt to reconsider; people always want
something
.) All the furniture, books, pictures, curtains, rugs, dishes, pots, and pans are to go to the Auction Barn. Austin’s car will be auctioned as well, and his power mower and the snowblower his son gave him last Christmas. These will be sold after Austin leaves for Hawaii, and the money is to go to Lazarus House. Austin started Lazarus House when he was a minister. Only he didn’t call it that; he called it Turnaround House. But now they have decided—Brent Duprey has decided—it would be better to have a name that is more religious, more Christian.
    At first Austin was just going to give them all these things to use in or around the House. Then he thought that it would be showing more respect to give them the money, to let them spend it as they liked, buying things they liked, instead of using his wife’s dishes and sitting on his wife’s chintz sofa.
    “What if they take the money and buy lottery tickets with it?” Karin asks him. “Don’t you think it’ll be a big temptation to them?”
    “You don’t get anywhere in life without temptations,” Austin says, with his maddening little smile. “What if they won the lottery?”
    “Brent Duprey is a snake.”
    Brent has taken over the whole control of Lazarus House, which Austin started. It was a place for people to stay who wanted to stop drinking or some other way of life they were in; now it’s a born-again sort of place, with nightlong sessions of praying and singing and groaning and confessing. That’s how Brent got hold of it—by becoming more religious than