Reading the Signs

The spirit of an old woman appeared like a mist floating across the stained glass window of St. Elizabeth's Catholic Church. Her body was translucent, as fragile as rice paper. Loose strands of white hair fell about the deep wrinkles of her face. She called Ted Jones' name. She gestured for him to come closer. She spoke in Russian-accented English. "Please help my granddaughter," she pleaded. "Sherry needs you." The old woman descended, sweeping past the granite stones of the church, and took hold of Ted's arms. She pulled at them with a tugging that wasn't as strong as that of an embodied human being. "Help my Sherry " the woman cried with greater urgency. Ted heard the more substantial voice of a young woman about his age. He turned to see a living person bending on the sidewalk in front of the church. She was buckling the ankle strap on one of her pumps. She looked up and saw him. "Hello," she said. "Beautiful day, isn't it?" Her voice like an oboe, reedy, pleased his ear. The highlights of her shoulder-length auburn curls glinted in the sun. Her skin tones were creamy, her eyes a warm brown. "Sherry's a good girl. Don't forget that when she tests you," the old woman interjected, tugging at him from behind. Ted Jones, campus chaplain and English Professor in a downtown Denver University, doesn't need more problems. His life has been full of them. More than a few of the clergy seem to think of the church as a sex club, and many of the powerful in the university are vipers. At thirty-three, Ted has ignored the sexual advances of both the Episcopal Cathedral Dean and the Chairman of his Department-married men, who because of his rejection, try to nail him on every cross they can find. Still idealistic and inexperienced in love, Ted finds an intelligent and educated woman, named Sharon irresistible, though constantly puzzling. Eventually Sharon reveals that she was sexually abused as a girl by her priest. She's never found the steadfast love that Ted offers in any of the men who've passed through the hole in her belly like that of a Henry More sculpture. Ted soon becomes involved with Sharon, the deceased woman's grown granddaughter. Damaged though she is, Sharon responds, trying to return the steadfast love that Ted offers. After her grandmother died, she lost that capacity in herself and couldn't find it in any of the people who professed to love her. Although Sharon and Ted's trials are multiple, their love forms the crux of the novel. Such love reaches beyond time and space as we normally conceive them, to involve intersecting planes of existence that touch both past and future.