The Waters & the Wild Read online

  The Waters & The Wild is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2018 by DeSales Harrison

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Random House, an imprint and division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

  RANDOM HOUSE and the HOUSE colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Names: Harrison, DeSales, author.

  Title: The waters & the wild : a novel / DeSales Harrison.

  Other titles: Waters and the wild

  Description: New York : Random House, 2018.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2017008173| ISBN 9780812989540 | ISBN 9780812989564 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: Psychoanalysts—New York (State)—New York—Fiction. | Psychotherapist and patient—Fiction. | Fathers and daughters—Fiction. | Life change events—France—Fiction. | Family secrets—Fiction. | Psychological fiction. | GSAFD: Mystery fiction.

  Classification: LCC PS3608.A78342 W38 2018 | DDC 813/.6—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2017008173

  Ebook ISBN 9780812989564

  randomhousebooks.com

  Book design by Susan Turner, adapted for ebook

  Cover design: Laura Klynstra

  v5.2

  ep

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Prologue: October 2008

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Spurlock: 11:57 P.M.

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Spurlock: 1:07 A.M.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Spurlock: 3:41 A.M.

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-one

  Chapter Thirty-two

  Chapter Thirty-three

  Chapter Thirty-four

  Chapter Thirty-five

  Chapter Thirty-six

  Chapter Thirty-seven

  Chapter Thirty-eight

  Chapter Thirty-nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-one

  Chapter Forty-two

  Chapter Forty-three

  April 2016

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  PROLOGUE

  October 2008

  Had you a nightscope, or the eye of a night bird staring down from the rafters of the church, you could make him out, the priest: supine, sunk in darkness, wide-awake.

  He had not seen her come in, the girl. How long ago had that been, Father Spurlock wondered, lying on the shelter cot, his gaze lost above him in the groined and vaulting shadows of the church. Three weeks, he counted, three weeks since she appeared, occupying the café table as though she had always been there, her profile still and grave as a figure cut in bas-relief. The table she had chosen in the church café was the small one beneath the Noah window, and the stained-glass eye of Noah’s crow scrutinized her, or rather the sheet of paper she’d unfolded in front of her, as though the crow had perched on the gunwale of the ark for that purpose alone. That day she had approached him, shown him the paper, and abruptly departed, leaving him with nothing save the name Clementine Abend scrawled on the palm of his hand.

  How long had she been sitting there, staring out at the evening rush-hour traffic? Or rather through the traffic, he thought, as one might stare through a clear stream to its streambed. Had she been there when he’d tied his apron on over his clericals and assumed the five P.M. shift behind the café counter? And at what moment had she changed, imperceptibly and without moving, from anyone into someone, from someone into that girl?

  But no, she wasn’t a girl anymore. Even from where he stood he could sense that. Eighteen? Possible, though she seemed older. Twenty? No, younger than that. Something in her bearing, in the unmoved abstraction of her gaze, had convinced him that she expected no one, that no one would arrive to join her. The volume of huge darkness pressed down on his chest, like a book of stone.

  Yes, he remembered, she had chosen the table under the Noah window, the crow over her shoulder hunched up and pitch-black against the glassy expanse of the floodwaters. If the crow had been visible when she had come in, he thought, if the rest of the window had yet to go dark, then she had arrived before sunset. She had remained into the evening, even after Luis, the custodian, had stacked the last chairs and herded the tables together, chaining everything to an eyebolt he’d sunk in the church facade. “Buenas noches, Padre—” Luis had said as he always said, closing the doors on the setting sun as he left. “Que duerma bien.” Then the girl had been alone in the closed shop.

  It was Father Spurlock’s custom, since the café had first opened eight months ago in what had once been the Lady Chapel, to intone a mock dismissal, filling the space with his ringing, ecclesial baritone: “Hallowed Grounds is closing now. Go in peace! We’re here every day, even Sundays,” before adding with hambone emphasis, “Especially on Sundays.” Now, however, he didn’t know what to say. She couldn’t—she wasn’t hoping to stay in the church, was she? The “overnight visitors” (as they were known with varying degrees of irony by the vestry) knew to approach the church after dark, to stash their carts behind the alley dumpsters before making their way through the service door. Surely she was not one of them. Even if there was something vagabond about her (she’d propped a worn backpack in the seat facing her), her bearing shared nothing with the unreachable, untouchable abjection of the visitors. Untying his apron, he had resolved then to revert to his pastoral approach and greet her as he would greet any tourist or passerby from the avenue. Welcome to the Incarnation, miss, he would say. I’m Father Spurlock. What brings you here today? He regretted now, as he never did otherwise, that he had let his beard, heavy and lion-gold, grow long enough to hide his priest’s collar.

  Three weeks later, staring up from his cot into the dimensionless darkness of the church, he saw it again as though she had never left, her profile against the wall beneath the Noah window. The “custodian man” (she had said) had told her to wait until the coffee shop had closed. Padre Spurlock, Luis had said, would be able to see her then.

  * * *

  —

  So, Father Spurlock thought, I have Luis to thank for this as
well. “We’ve got Luis to thank for this!” Mrs. Nickerson, his helmet-haired secretary, never tired of proclaiming, whether in amazement, or gratitude, or exasperation. Luis: whom the church payroll listed as sexton; Luis, who referred to himself—even after forty years and six rectors—as the “yanitor.” With inert forbearance, Luis had taken the coffeehouse project in stride. How many “outreach initiatives” (Spurlock wondered) had Luis watched flower and die? How many hours, days, years, had he spent clearing the debris of all-volunteer projects, the pageants, the potlucks and rock operas, the water tables set up along the avenue for marathon Sunday, the much advertised yearly blessing of the animals with its attendant panoply of shit-shapes to be hustled into his dustpan? Luis responded to each new request with an undeceived and unobliging “If that’s how you want it, Padre…” But hadn’t Luis, unasked, taken to hauling chairs and tables from the sidewalk, every evening? He had Luis to thank for that, for the vigilant eyebolt, for the sidewalk hosed clean each night of sugar wrappers, lemon rinds, and coffee stirrers, for the doors opened every morning, the coffee made, and the pastries laid out for the first customers.

  He had Luis to thank—and, alas, probably God too—for leaving the side door of the church unlocked. Luis had assumed this dereliction of duty not long after the coffee shop had opened for business, as though to say, “If we are going to lure the well-heeled from the avenue with cappuccino and biscotti, then ciertamente we could accommodate more shadowy passersby with a dry place to sleep.” At first only one or two men slipped in, vague forms vaguely familiar from the church steps, where they would hunch and rock before burrowing for the night into middens of flattened cardboard, newspaper, bubble pack, and Spurlock could not bear to think what else. Later, when the weather cooled, more faces appeared at the shelter, followed shortly by a citation from the city, mounting complaints from some parishioners, enthusiasm from others, and the long, tedious debates in vestry meetings, the endless declension of earnest phrases: “the least of these,” “the least we can do,” “doing mission,” “clarity of mission,” “mission creep”…Holding up the citation, Mrs. Nickerson said as though for the first time, “For this, chief, we have our Luis to thank.”

  The visitors were men, most of them older, many of them trembling, all untalkative. God knew how long they had lived on the street or what they had experienced at Bellevue or Wards Island to drive them from the archipelago of licensed city shelters. The parish might have been more welcoming had they been battered women or gay teens expelled from suburban homes, but these shuffling mutterers shrank from all expression of sympathy or concern. To each one, sealed in his grease-caked garments and encasing stench, the merest acknowledgment seemed unbearable.

  For Father Spurlock, the stench was the hardest part. At some point, in a gesture of what he’d described as solidarity, he’d begun sleeping four nights a week on a cot alongside them. He would doze briefly, overcome by the exhaustion of the day, only to wake when the smell reached him, an infiltrating mist, the sublimation of ash and tooth-rot, urine and scurf. In time (he thought at first) he might learn to give himself over to it, even to welcome it as a cleansing penance. Solidarity with the poor, the naked, the captive! O cinder-path of saintly effacements! The nobility of it! The absurdity of it! A bubble of his drowned divinity school idealism rose up in his throat, then dissipated like a sighing belch. How quickly it had happened, his transformation from freshly ordained provisional deacon—scrubbed and penny-bright, ablaze for avant-garde liturgies and boisterous youth programs—into a nail-biting, sheep-counting, budget-hobbled rector, yoked to a listless parish, or rather the remnant of one. His predecessor, Mother Janice, had departed to serve uptown as canon of the cathedral, along with her ringing laugh, her famous saxophone, and the younger half of the congregation. The senior warden still insisted on calling him Sonny the Kid in vestry meetings. He’d been in fact the youngest rector installed in the nearly two-hundred-year history of the church, but whatever remained of that youthfulness now seemed to hang from him like a dinner jacket surprised by a Sunday sunrise. The turmoil of five brief years had disgorged him onto a midlife plateau where somewhere in the distance his wife, Bethany, labored grimly to make partner at her law firm because, as she put it, someone had to earn an actual living in this marriage.

  Singled out among the squadron of lawyers marshaled to defend a pharmaceutical corporation in a class-action case, Bethany had been rewarded by her superiors with ever-escalating responsibilities, and the hours she spent at work had multiplied accordingly. When she’d first been assigned to the case, he’d announced with some satisfaction that he would see to it that dinner was waiting for her when she got home—whenever she got home—but this resolution had collapsed in the boneyard of his other marital initiatives (learning bridge, couples yoga). It was more convenient for Bethany to eat with her “team” before it renewed its evening onslaught, and anyway, by the time Bethany’s heels finally clacked out of the elevator, Spurlock would have long since fallen asleep on the sofa, pinned beneath the puttering bulk of Perpetua, his cat. Without consulting his wife or even himself, Spurlock had doubled, then redoubled his initial one-night-a-week commitment to the impromptu shelter in the church.

  Had he perversely come to prefer sleeping in the church, he asked himself, steeped in odors of sweat and destitution? Was this how the Holy Spirit bent the soul to virtue, not by persuasion but simply by revoking alternatives? But no: he knew he had come to spend more than half his nights in the shelter not because doing so was virtuous, but because it was plausible—plausible and easy—a path of minimal resistance, an easy slide from his upstairs office, past Mrs. Nickerson’s desk, down the stairwell, and into the church. If the church was a ship—and that’s what nave meant, he explained each year to his handful of bored confirmands—then an imperious gravity drew him down into steerage with this skeleton crew, these ghostly stowaways. As this path hollowed its groove, he had accustomed himself to repeating that everything would be different once the pharmaceutical case was completed, or at least once Bethany made partner. If, however, that assertion had reassured him in the past, now it carried with it a whiff of dread.

  * * *

  —

  In the event, it was the girl who spoke first. “Does ‘Padre’ mean you are the…” She paused and cleared her throat, as though unused to the sound of her own voice. “The head person?” Until then, her face in profile projected a severity, sharpened by the high bridge of her nose, by the ink-stroke of her eyebrow. Now that she had turned toward him, however, her face seemed younger, her lips full and pursed around an uncertainty. In his confusion at finding himself the object of that gaze, he registered somewhere in it the glint of gold, a rivet or staple piercing her septum or eyebrow, or was it the hood of her ear? Less an adornment, he thought, than a mortification of the flesh. He thought: How intolerable it is to the young, their beauty.

  “Head person? I like the sound of that,” he said, putting on affability. She did not smile in return, so he said, “Yes, I am the rector here, Nelson Spurlock. How can I help you?”

  He would never forget what she said then: I believe you might have something for—for a Clementine Abend. Something my father sent you.

  Her father? Whose daughter was this? Had she mistaken him for someone? Had he met her somewhere and forgotten? But that, he knew abruptly, was an impossibility. Impossible that such a face—that he could ever have forgotten it.

  “I’m sorry—” he had said. “Your father? He sent you something?”

  “A letter maybe. I don’t know exactly. Maybe some papers.”

  “Your father is a parishioner?”

  “No, a—he was a psychoanalyst. But I believe that a patient of his—I believe you performed the funeral for a patient of his, a person named Jessica Burke.”

  Jessica Burke. Of course he remembered. Hers had been the first funeral he had conducted after his “installation” as rector. T
wenty-eight years old Jessica Burke had been when she died of an overdose, not much younger than Spurlock himself was at the time. He had never met her, but the sacristan had placed a photograph on a little easel by the coffin, a portrait that Jessica Burke, a struggling artist, had made of herself in a mirror, standing behind an expensive-looking box camera, a Hasselblad or Rolleiflex, her face downturned toward the viewfinder, one thin arm, heavily tattooed, crooked behind her head to keep her hair from falling down over her face. The picture had given the impression that Jessica Burke had showed up to serve as photographer at her own funeral, underdressed, uninvolved, annoyed to have to work on a Saturday morning.

  “Your father knew me only because I buried a patient of his?”

  The girl had spread a handwritten sheet of paper on the counter between them. “He says here—” she began, but interrupted herself. “This document,” she began again, “it’s a testament, a will, or at least a piece of one.”

  “Your father’s will?”

  “Yes. It’s in French. I can translate if you like.”

  He said something about having studied a little French in high school, but she had already begun.

  “ ‘Maître,’ it begins,” she said, following the line of precise cursive with her finger.

  “Master?” Spurlock ventured.