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dumbfounded when he turned me down. He had his detractors in the firm, but the rising young Turks always do. I had put a lot of eggs in his basket, pushing him for partner track so early, and I came away with some of it on my face. I told him, you can survive doing this in public once, but don’t make a habit of it. I was thinking that he meant to run for office down the line. I never pegged him for a priest. Never.
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    Bobby Applegate We had rented a tiny house up on the mountain that summer. On the Dump Road. The real estate lady called it “Turkey Farm Road,” but I preferred Dump. I wanted to buy it so I could have Dump Road on my stationery. One night during their visit Norman and Monica came up to supper with us, and Norman announced that he had quit the law to become a priest. I was speechless. Eleanor blurted out, “Why?”
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    Eleanor Applegate He said he’d come to know Christ had a plan for him. I asked him how he’d come to know that. A voice spoke from clouds? Monica said that not all calls are so dramatic, and that she thought it was very exciting.
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    Ted Wineapple In our church there is quite a tough process, “discernment,” it’s called, where you have to get permission from the priest in your own parish, and a committee, and a lay mentor and the bishop in your diocese, to be a candidate for ordination. I had to go through an entire year of counseling and prayer and testing of various sorts before I could apply to seminary. The year before mine, our bishop hadn’t recommended a single candidate to go forward. Norman managed to get the process speeded up in some way. I asked him about it years later and he just said, “That avenue’s closed now.”
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    Jimmy Moss I don’t remember what I thought at the time about Norman’s sudden conversion to Christianity. Saint Paul on the road to Damascus. I wish I did. I was pursuing various vision quests of my own in those years, and I’d have been interested, but what can I say.
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    Jeannie Israel I assumed he’d go to divinity school at Harvard. Norman was really good at school, and let’s face it, he likes the fancy brand names. But he chose General Theological. Maybe he had a contact there; the doors opened fast for him. I was only glad they’d be in New York. I only saw Nika briefly in the summers these years, and I missed her. All those summer days when we were kids, when whoever finished breakfast first turned up on the other one’s porch, and we’d be off to meet Amelia in the lane, and then on foot, on bikes, or in little boats out into our day.
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    Monica Faithful What troubled me was leaving Sam and Sylvie. They were so young to have their father far away, and Rachel had full custody and certainly wasn’t going to let them travel to us on weekends. But Norman was serenely confident. He knew what the Lord wanted him to do, and where, and he knew he had to get on with it. I’d like to think he was also trying to protect me—our marriage. I couldn’t deny that the children strained things.
    What I did like, very much, was that the whole curriculum of the marriage changed. Instead of talking about, I don’t know, which senior partner wasn’t pulling his weight and which brownnosing associate was getting all the good cases, suddenly we were all about Bible studies, and liturgy and church history. We started reading Compline aloud together every night, and it was so beautiful. So comforting, so mysterious. I began to have glimpses of…I guess wonder is the word. That it might be possible to open an inner door to another world, to live in it or be filled with it. It was thrilling. Literally. Living with a person who is engaged with faith is a revelation.
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    Of course you want to know what prayer is. Whether it works. Oh Lord, won’t you buy me a Mercedes-Benz.
    Of course it works. It works on the one who prays, like water pouring