42: Irene Saunders Gets a Surprise

At the doorstep of Saunders’ home on Jim Thorpe Avenue, Darcy McDermott rang the bell. The routine was familiar. In his profession, the ministry, it was termed “calling” on people. It sounded a little Victorian to Darcy—people “calling” on their friends in drawing rooms—but Darcy didn’t mind that archaism. He liked “calling” on people, especially if they met him with a smile and a glass of iced tea. He liked listening to people. That’s what his version of “calling” was, at least pastoral calling: simple, compassionate listening.

But his mature and handsomely grayed companion, Alex Moore, was not used to calling on people. He stood unnaturally straight beside Darcy, beads of sweat glistening on his brow, as if he had been called on by a teacher to recite the Gettysburg’s Address in front of the class. Darcy had to admit that this was a stressful situation. George’s parents were strangers—and very possibly hostile, given the circumstances. Darcy, being trained and seasoned in awkward situations, was prepared for the worst, but hopeful for the best. Alex, on the other hand, was shaking in his loafers, and Darcy knew it.

Taking the lead, Darcy rang the bell again. And again. After three times, the two men looked at one another. Darcy thought he saw relief fill Alex’s eyes. However, Darcy reasoned, if the Saunders were not home, he and Alex would just have to return later on that night, so Darcy buzzed again, hopefully.

The door finally opened.

“Can I help you?” spoke a slightly husky female voice in a mechanical, almost weary manner. The woman speaking was hard to make out clearly in the shadows behind the screen door. She did not open the screen, but stood behind it as if it were a protective shield against a cold, unfeeling, threatening world. What Darcy could make out was that she was tall—possibly six feet—middle-aged, and light-skinned like George. Her short, straw-like blonde hair looked matted on one side, as if she had just woken from a nap. But it was her demeanor that made Darcy want to take a step or two back. Her expression—tight lips and cold eyes—gave the impression that life was hard, everyone was out to cheat her, and that she owned a handgun.

She moved slightly, and a ray of sunshine revealed blue eyes—like her son’s—a reddish streak in her hair, neatly plucked eyebrows, and—most striking, to Darcy—visible lines emanating from her thin upper lip. A chain-smoker, he thought. Her sallow, lined complexion added to the evidence. In fact, she looked prematurely wrinkled all over her face; either too much sun or too many cigarettes, he thought. Or maybe just too much trouble. She had once been beautiful, thought Darcy, for he could see George’s good looks in her defined cheek bones and blue eyes. Her eyes were not beautiful now, as they lacked liveliness and sparkle. They were cold, suspicious, tightly guarded blue eyes. Eyes that had onced looked upon her gay son with utter and complete rejection.

Darcy felt a cold shiver in her presence, as if she were infecting the air and the space and the people around her with all the sorrows and disappointments of her life.

He stood up straight and said, “Good afternoon.” His voice faltered and he sounded a bit like a frog. “Is this the Saunders’ residence?”

“Yes. I’m Irene Saunders. Why? Who are you?” She looked from one man to the other, flicking her steely blue eyes back and forth like she might be assessing which one to shoot first.

“I’m Reverend Darcy McDermott and this is my friend, Alex Moore.”

“I already have my church, thank you very much,” she said briskly, already starting to shut the door.

“But we’re not here on behalf of a church,” said Darcy.

Alex shook his head in confirmation.

The woman now looked at Alex with a flicker of interest at the handsome older man. She inclined her head, as if studying him. She spoke directly to him directly. “Then, what is this about? I’ve got things to do.”

Alex cleared his throat and took a step forward. “It’s about your son, Mrs. Saunders. It’s about George.”

With that, Irene Saunders opened her thin, wrinkled mouth as wide as she could and her neatly plucked eyebrows collapsed into jagged creases of pain. She stood there, looking shocked for several seconds. Then tears began to form.

“George?” she said, finally, in a smaller voice, as if the sound of her son’s name tore down a guarded gate. “My George?”

“Well, you see—” said Alex, but he couldn’t get very far.

Irene Saunders began to openly weep, brushing away the tears with the back of her hand. Darcy and Alex looked at each other.

“Could we come in?” asked Darcy. “Please.”

The tall woman unlocked the screen door and ushered the men in. She did not invite them to sit, as her emotion seemed to blot out everything. She fell onto a cushiony blue sofa, her tall frame melting into it. Then she seemed to utterly fall into her hands, sobbing.

“No!” they could hear her say in a muffled tone. “He can’t be gone. No!”

Alex looked confused, and it suddenly hit Darcy that Irene Saunders thought her son must be dead.

Darcy sat down beside her on the sofa, noting a faint smell of cigarette smoke in the room. “No, Mrs. Saunders, it’s not that.”

“Was it . . . you know . . . AIDS?” she asked Alex, as if not hearing Darcy. “I knew it. I knew he would get that disease if he went to California. Oh, George, if only . . .” Even with her large frame, Irene Saunders seemed fragile as she trailed off into some other world where she had already fantasized the worst for her estranged son.

“No!” said Alex, positioning himself on the edge of a Queen Anne chair across from Irene, leaning in toward her. His voice held the kind of authority and maturity that Irene Saunders apparently respected. Just as apparent, she seemed to write off Darcy as some half-baked, freckled kid compared to his older, more handsome companion. Darcy didn’t take it too personally, and thought it best to let Alex—a suddenly calm, cool, and collected Alex—take it from here.

“Mrs. Saunders,” Alex said, “you’ve got it all wrong. George is alive and well.”

She froze for a minute, shook her head as if confused and then sat up, looking at Alex with wide eyes, eyes that looked half-relieved and half-bewildered. Then she smiled. And when she smiled, Darcy noted the lines of age disappeared and she looked almost beautiful. She certainly looked less forbidding.

“Alive and well? George is alive and well?”

“Quite alive and well,” said Alex. “And I’m terribly sorry I misled you. He works for me, you see. He’s the manager of my shop, a tea and bookshop in Laguna Beach.”

“Is that in California?”

“Yes, it is.”

“But is that close to San Francisco? Don’t all the . . . well, boys like him go to meet other . . . well, you know.”

“No, San Francisco is quite further north,” said Alex. “We’re in Orange County, in Southern California, south of Los Angeles.”

“But, you sound English, like you’re from . . . England,” she said, puzzled, as if Alex did not meet her expectations of a Californian.

“I am, originally. London.”

“Oh,” she said, with admiration in her voice. “You’ve got a very nice accent.”

Alex offered his most attractive smile. Darcy, now enjoying his role as observer, knew Irene Saunders was putty in the Brit’s hands.

“So, tell me about George,” she said. “Tell me all about my boy.”

For a woman who had coldly and brutally disowned her son, this woman surprised Darcy. Certainly not what he expected.

“Well, as it happens,” said Alex, in his best British way, said, “He’s a fine young man. Doing well. Healthy. Doing well, yes.” He seemed to be stuck and flustered as to what else to say at this delicate juncture.

Darcy intervened, in hopes of getting to the bottom of things before the sun went down. “Mrs. Saunders, you said you already had a church. Do you want me to call your pastor?”

“I don’t have a pastor,” she said coldly, suddenly aware of the Darcy’s presence. She sat up very straight, turned to him with eyes that reverted back into hard steel.

“But . . .”

“Our pastor has been dismissed,” she said to a bewildered Darcy. “Fired,” she said loudly, as if Darcy were an idiot. “We don’t have a permanent pastor anymore.”

“And why was he . . . dismissed?” Darcy probed. He felt more like a detective than a minister, but he couldn’t help himself.

She relaxed into a resigned sort of slouch. “Oh, it’s a scandal. He was found sleeping with one of the choir members.”

Darcy looked at Alex, sharing raised brows, and back at Irene. “Sorry to hear that.”

“And that’s not all. It wasn’t just any choir member. It was a male choir member.”

“Oh,” said Alex. “Oh,” he repeated, almost to himself.

She looked satisfied at the shock value of her words and continued, “A young man. Looks to be about your age,” she said, looking at Darcy as if he were guilty of some terrible crime. “Turned out he, himself, was one of those . . . those gay people. After preaching against them, and convincing Mr. Saunders and me that”–she shook her head to ward off the emotion—“that we should look on our boy as . . . well as dead to us.”

Darcy shook his head in sympathy. “That must have felt like a kind of betrayal.”

She gave snort of a laugh. “To say the least. It was a terrible betrayal of our trust. We trusted him. Everybody trusted him. Hundreds of people trusted him. It wasn’t just us,” she said looking them both in turn, as if she had to convince them that they were not the only dupes. “And he betrayed us all.” She paused, fidgeted and blinked too fast, as if struggling for composure. “And I lost my only boy over it.”

“You have other children?” asked Alex. “George never mentioned—”

“I have two daughters from my first marriage,” she said. “They lived with their dad most of the time. The girls and George were never close.” She paused, giving Alex a questioning look. “But why are you here, then? Did George send you?”

“Not exactly,” said Alex. “We came on our own because, you see, George is pretty torn up over the estrangement.”

“Is that what he calls it? An . . . estrangement? It’s a big word for George. He was always popular at school, but not what you called . . . well, college material. But he was so good-looking. The girls were always after him. And so it was big shock when we found out about him, you know. Broke his dad’s heart. But, you say he’s torn up?”

Alex nodded. “Quite torn up. But I think he’s afraid to come home.”

A fit of emotion seized her. “He wants to come home?”

“What I mean is, Irene—is it all right if I call you Irene?—he’s afraid of trying to initiate a reconciliation. He doesn’t want to face anymore . . . rejection.”

At this, her cold, guarded eyes relented; feeling spilled through. She let the heavy drops roll down her cheek and fall off onto her blouse, as if giving in completely.

Alex looked uncomfortable. “Can we just talk a bit? I think it would make you feel better.”

She accepted a tissue from Alex's pocket. “Thanks. But it’s his fault.”

Alex sat back. “George’s fault?”

“No. No! Pastor Dwayne’s fault!”

Now this was getting interesting, thought Darcy.

“And even when we told George that he was . . . you know, dead to us . . . I only went along with it, thinking that it might shake George up and make him repent and come back to us. Pastor Dwayne called it ‘tough love.’” She snorted at this. “Yeah, right. Tough love. Sounded good. I didn’t want my only son to go to the hell. To burn for all eternity! Surely you can understand that?” She looked from one man to another.

Alex struggled with how to respond. Darcy nodded with his best show of sympathy, but inwardly finding it hard to imagine how a woman like Irene could be so duped by Pastor Dwayne’s medieval and bigoted version of religion.

She sniffed and looked down, talking to her beige slacks. “But he never did. Never came back to us. We lost track of him and every time I would fall apart over it, my husband–that’s George, Sr.—would tell me to go talk to Pastor Dwayne. I did. I went almost once every year, about the time of George’s birthday. I’d tell the pastor that I thought we’d made a mistake by being so harsh. But he always pulled out his Bible and read me passages and convinced me to hold fast. To believe that George would one day repent and return to the Lord. And to us.” She welled up, and then cried, “But he never did!”

Alex put his arm around her in a comforting way. “Irene, when did this thing—this scandal—happen with your pastor.”

“Three months ago,” she said, wiping her eyes. “And for three months I’ve thought of nothing but George. I wanted to find him and tell him I was sorry, that I was duped. And all this time, Pastor Dwayne was a gay person himself, which I still can’t understand.”

“A classic case of ‘Thou dost protest too much,’ said Alex.

Irene looked confused.

“Shakespeare. I mean that Pastor Dwayne must have been fighting against his own self with all that preaching against it.”

She nodded. “Yeah, and all that fighting within himself just hurt so many people.”

“Very sad,” said Alex. “Tragic, really.”

Darcy nodded, but invisibly so, as Irene was so fixed on Alex.

She looked up at Alex now with imploring eyes. “Look, I just want to see my son again. I want to say that I’m sorry. That I love him. And even if he is gay, he is still my son. I don’t know what I think about homosexuality anymore, but it doesn’t matter. Nothing matters right now, but seeing my boy.”

Darcy nearly fell over. The work was already done. At least at this point—the emotional breakthrough—there was no need to try and convince Irene of a more educated and humane approach to understanding the Bible. That God was love. That being gay was not a sin. That Pastor Dwayne was a bigot wrapped up in sheep’s clothing. No need to wean her away from a charismatic egomaniac who evidently held pliable, feeble minds tightly in his grip. No, the work was done by Pastor Dwayne’s own doing—or undoing, as was the case. Through the cloud of disillusionment, her maternal feelings, pressed down for so many years, sprang up with a fierceness and urgency that made her seem actually human—sympathetic, even.

Just as Darcy was breathing a sigh of relief, the door opened and a large, red-faced, thick-necked man entered, wearing a dark tie and carrying a jacket over his shoulder. “What’s going on here?” he said gruffly. “Who are you people?”

“This is George, Sr.,” said Irene, unsteadily. She turned to her husband, drying her eyes with one hand. “They’ve come to tell us that George is all right. That he’s in California, working as a waiter—”

“Well, not really a waiter. More of a shop manager,” Alex said.

The man didn’t seem much interested in the clarification. He stood before them, wide and tall—even taller than his wife—and much more threatening. “I’m going to have to ask you gentlemen to leave. You’ve upset my wife. And we have no son.”