The Minister’s Wife: A Novel
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About this ebook
Their love is very intense and leads to extraordinary consequences.
Michael Cantwell
Michael Cantwell, CCIM (1958-present) is an author and commercial real estate agent in South Florida as well as a published photographer. He was born in Ft. Campbell KY, raised in Trenton, NJ, graduated college at LaSalle University in Philadelphia, PA. He now resides in Palm Beach County, Florida. He is married with three children and one dog. He loves music and is a big Miami Marlins, Dolphins, Panthers and Heat fan. He also enjoys strolling South Florida with his camera at hand. He has served on many board of directors and volunteered many hours as a coach for baseball and basketball as well as for Junior Achievement in many schools around South Florida.
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The Minister’s Wife - Michael Cantwell
Copyright © 2019 Michael Cantwell.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
This is a work of fiction. All the characters, names, incidents, organizations, and dialogue in this novel are either the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
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Because of the dynamic nature of the internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.
Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.
Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.
ISBN: 978-1-5320-6608-5 (sc)
ISBN: 978-1-5320-6609-2 (e)
Library of Congress Control Number: 2019900472
iUniverse rev. date: 02/23/2019
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
I wish to thank my computer expert, Ali Sutjianto, who, among other things,
helped me prepare a copy suitable for publication with iUniverse.
To the memory of my father and mother
and to my sister, Anne-Marie
Chapter 1
T he first time I saw Cecilia, she was a face passing in the rain. Perhaps it is a Platonic rule that the first sight of love is of a face dimly remembered and never really seen. The sighting took place not in the rain, actually, but in the middle of a long hospital corridor on an island in the East River, where I watched over an abandoned piece of the world: this island, the last home of forgotten people lingering in depleted bodies.
The hall was nearly deserted that supper hour of a late November afternoon. I greeted an old man in his wheelchair who, as was his custom at that time of day, took his position before a particular window and lit his pipe as if to match the glow of the city spewing its volcanic ash across the way. My assistant, Horace, and I, dressed in our official white jackets, slouched toward the staff cafeteria, and I lifted my gaze from the reflected glare of the waxed floor to see the beautiful young woman walking toward us. She was veiled, not only in the ginger ale haze created by the string of lights and the hour or by her coat with the turned-up collar. Her hair was the rain. It streamed over her lowered head in torrents when, at the point of passing, it was blown aside by an upward thrust of the head and the astonishing face was almost fully revealed. I looked back, surprised that she had also turned, and a bright, shining eye met mine for a curious moment, before vanishing like a rainbow in a waterfall.
Then Horace and I were in the mundane reality of the cafeteria, which was more depressing than usual since most of the staff left at five. We were staying to conduct recreational activities with patients, which was our job. Even the big windows in the dining room looked out at nothing more than other windows in other chunks of the sprawling buildings.
Did you notice that girl?
I asked Horace when we were settled with our trays.
What girl?
The girl—the chick who passed us in the hall.
I noticed no chick in the hall, my man.
She kind of scurried by. But you should have seen her face.
Her face? It’s getting to you when you start seeing faces. I would have seen legs or breasts. But when you start in with faces, you’ve been out here too long.
Cecilia herself subsequently denied any recollection of that initial encounter, so I may as well put it down as a prophetic vision or simply the kind of mad hallucination given to men at the end of their hold on the reality of their lives. I was letting go and knew, as I approached middle age, that I was not, and never had been, in control of my destiny, no more than the patients were in control of their failed bodies or the world that had disposed of them.
I was once flying across Mexico in a four-seater when the door at my side kept flapping open. With north-of-the-border anxiety, I complained to the pilot, who shrugged. Vaya con Dios.
The thought returned to me from time to time, as it did now. Well, go with God, this atheist said to himself. So I surrendered to my romantic fantasy and tried to recall the magical face as it was run over by Horace’s cascading laughter.
Asses, my man, asses are what’s happening, thighs, bellies, breasts rolling along like the swells in an ocean. He starts in with faces in the hallway, this cat here.
He laughed his low, rumbling laugh. You will be the last of the white man’s poets, all right.
Horace Burns was six feet seven and had played basketball with Lou Alcindor. Now in his twenty-second year, he was filling out to the proportions of a linebacker. He was a member of a militant African American organization. He was also one of the very few people who could make me laugh.
You just won’t admit there are any beautiful pale faces,
I countered.
Then one day I saw the face coming out of the hospital canteen in the cold light of morning. The girl was carrying a small brown paper bag that must have held a container of coffee. It was evident that a cold wait for the bus had brought blotches of blood to her white cheeks. Though I was staring at her, she passed me as if I were invisible. I felt a dull bruise of disappointment. I did not, in the course of my day and habits, have an opportunity to meet many stimulating and available women, and the idea of a love affair flowering in a setting I thought I understood was put aside again.
I brooded in my remote and abandoned island, though in my isolation I could see the towers of Manhattan from certain windows. The light was so blinding bright I felt invisible in it as I walked the carnival streets to my Greenwich Village apartment every night.
To be more precise about my position on the island, I had taken a civil service test for recreation director some years before and was, as the chief personnel clerk said, given a post on the island. I remember my first feeling of what the island and the watch for death were like when I started to use the patients’ men’s room. There I found the solitude of men shaving with liquid soap, smoking the salvaged ends of cigarettes that gave off a yellow smoke that climbed the tile walls, drinking aftershave lotion, or, for those more fortunate, imbibing a pint of wine for which they’d paid twice the market price. It was the magnification of the feeling you get of loiterers in bus stations. I was assigned to linger with the loiterers and help them find a socially constructive way to pass the time.
Hello, Mr. David,
an old negro amputee would say. You’re looking good, Mr. David.
Hi, Mr. Howard. How are you?
Wrong