“Why, certainly, Horny,” she said, impulsively pressing his arm. “I’ll come around tomorrow to talk to you about it. You’ve been so good to all of us, why, I couldn’t deny you anything at all!” She leaned forward and kissed his cheek before she turned away.
It almost seemed that the headache was less, Hake thought gratefully. He did not think Curmudgeon would approve, but he decided to know what was going on. And with a trained researcher to help him, maybe he could find out.
On the steps of the church, a gray-haired man whose name he could not quite place stopped him and said: “Reverend Hake, may I have a word with you?”
“I’m so glad you enjoyed the sermon.”
“Well, uh, yes, I did. But that wasn’t what I was going to ask you. You see, I’m with International Pets and Flowers. We’re expanding our operations here in New Jersey. I don’t know whether you’ve heard of it, but we’ve acquired the old Fort Monmouth tract in Eatontown, and we like to have responsible local representation on our district Board of Directors in a thing like this. Could you accept a directorship?”
“Directorship? I’m sorry, Mr.—”
“Haversford, Reverend Hake. Allen T. Haversford.”
“Well, I appreciate the offer, Mr. Haversford. Did you say pets and flowers? I’m afraid I don’t know very much about pets and flowers. And my time—”
“No special knowledge is needed, Reverend Hake. It’s a question of community welfare. We want your inputs on the way we can help carry our share of the load.”
“Yes, I see that, but I’m very—”
“I know your time is at a premium, but it is quite a useful service you could do. And there’s a tiny honorarium, of course. Ten thousand dollars. But the important thing is that I’m sure you could be of great help to us, and we to your church. Please say yes.”
‘Ten thousand dollars a yearl”
“Oh, no. The honorarium is ten thousand dollars per meeting. There’s one regular meeting each quarter—sometimes special ones, of course, when some decision is needed quickly, but they are usually quite brief. You’ll do it? Thank you so much, Reverend. The other members of the Board will be very pleased.”
Horny stared after Haversford, his head forgetting to ache. Forty thousand dollars a year, plus. And a community service too! As he turned toward the rectory he was thinking of what he could do with an extra forty thousand dollars a year; and then he caught sight of the Brant-Sturgis family. Walter Sturgis was turning the crank of the compressor of their charcoal-burner van, while the two women sat stiffly inside, red-eyed or brightly and sadistically cheerful, according to their private ways of expressing stress. Ted Brant was standing at the curb, glowering at him.
That almost brought the headache back. For the moment Hake had forgotten how jealous Ted was.
Horny had made it Rule Number One to avoid sexual entanglements within his congregation, or with other people with whom he associated in his professional capacity.
Considering that Hake’s twenty-four-hour days allowed six hours of sleep and eighteen hours in contact with some member or another of his congregation—or some person who was off-limits for equally valid reasons, like the wife of another minister in the Regional Confraternity or his fellow members of the Right to Abort Committee—that meant he avoided sexual entanglements just about completely. It wasn’t that he wanted it that way. Sometimes he didn’t even think he could stand it that way. But he knew what happened to other ministers when they departed from that golden rule. He was the only bachelor in Monmouth County who never missed a meeting of the Interfaith Singles Club—and who never failed to go home alone from them, usually after everyone else had left because he stacked the chairs and emptied the ashtrays to ready the room for its next use. His vacation weeks gave him the only romantic interludes of his life. And there weren’t many of them. Weren’t nearly enough.
But the last thing he was willing to accept was any share in the probable collapse of the precarious Brant-Sturgis marriage. Before he went to sleep that night he had typed out a careful list of subjects for Alys to look up for him, and left the envelope on Jessie Tunman’s desk clipped to a scrap of paper that said only “Gv. to A.—DWS.” Jessie was not terribly smart or efficient, and she did talk a lot. But she knew what he meant by Give to Alys—Don’t Want to See, and would abide by it.
As it happened, in the morning he almost forgot that Alys Brant existed. He had gone to sleep with the power still off in the rectory, and what woke him was a sudden glare of light in his eyes and the creaking hum of his bedside electric heater going on. When he went down to the basement to investigate, the man from the electric company was working over the meter box. “Putting a new fuse in?” Hake asked.
The man looked up and grinned enviously. “Hell, no, Reverend—excuse me. I’m taking the fuse out. Didn’t you know?”
“Know what?”
“Why, you’re off fusing from now on. Seems you’ve got your own generator coming in, and we’ll be buying from you part of the time, so you’re no longer subject to rationing.”
“My what?” -
“Your new generator. It’s a wind generator, go on top of your house. Should be coming in today, I guess—anyway we got a priority-rush order this morning. So you can draw up to full capacity, which is rated at six hundred amps, according to your specs plate here.”
“I don’t know anything about a wind-power generator!” “Yeah, well, that’s the way it goes,” the man sympathized. “Your wife said she had some letter about it.”
Hake repressed the urge to explain that Jessie Tunman wasn’t his wife, and went to find the letter. It was on the stationery of something called The Fund for Clerical Fellowship, and it said:
Dear Reverend Hake:
We are pleased to inform you that our Board has granted your Church a beneficence for the purpose of installing generating facilities for your rectory.
Accordingly, we have ordered a Model (x)A-40 Win-Tility unit, with necessary mounts and electrical connections, and have secured the services of William S. Murfree & Co., Belmar, to effect the installation.
If there is any further way in which we can serve your Church, please advise us.
It was signed by a scribble, but Hake didn’t need the name to know who it came from. He was being well taken care of, just as promised.
A thought struck him. A generator. They wanted him to have dependable power. So he spent the next half hour snooping around his office and bedroom, looking for bugs. He didn’t find any.
That set him back in his thinking. It was a letdown, almost a disappointment, because if they were bugging him they were automatically providing him with a means of communication. He wanted one. That wasn’t the same as saying that he had made up his mind to use it. He was still thinking about that, but he wanted the option. The thought was nagging at him that he should somehow report his kidnapping. If he had been able to find a bug he could have just said it out loud; “Hey, Curmudgeon! I got kidnapped. Somebody’s broken my cover. Give me a call when you get a chance, why don’t you, and we’ll talk about it over lunch.”
But he hadn’t found a bug, and that was confusing. If the Team was not supplying him with power just so they could be sure of monitoring everything he did, then maybe his whole attitude was wrong. Maybe they were really kindly and protective, and simply providing fringe benefits for a new recruit. Maybe his negative feelings were not to be trusted.
Now that he had plenty of heat the weather had turned mild. When he took his morning run, a mile down the beach to the pier and a mile back, he was panting and pouring sweat, and as he came up over the boardwalk he saw Alys Brant’s three-wheeled van sitting crookedly outside the rectory. He skulked behind the rail for five minutes until she came out and drove away, and by then he was chilled and sodden.