It was painful to recall, but Russ had loved Rick Ambrose.

Once upon a time, in New York, at the seminary on East Forty-ninth Street, Russ and Marion had been the It couple, into whose married-student apartment other young seminarians crowded three or four nights a week to smoke their cigarettes, listen to jazz, and inspire one another with visions of modern Christianity’s renaissance in social action. Twiggy, pretty Marion, more deeply and eclectically read than anyone else, wearing snug pedal pushers and bulky sweaters that evoked the Welsh countryside of Dylan Thomas, was the envy of Russ’s fellow seminarians. Whatever she and Russ did was ipso facto the hip thing. Even pulling up stakes and relocating to rural Indiana, which he’d felt obliged to do when Marion became pregnant and his applications for more exotic postings were rejected, had seemed like an edgy move. Only when Marion withdrew into motherhood, grew heavier and wearier, and Russ needed to come up with fifty sermons a year, rewritten by Marion and delivered in two churches with a combined flock of fewer than three hundred, at eight thirty and ten o’clock every Sunday, did the life she’d once made large for him begin to feel inescapably small. Whenever he contrived a respite from the Indiana farmhouse, by begging favors of pastors from nearby churches, and attended conferences in Columbus or Chicago or protested for civil rights, he was bittersweetly reminded of the edge that he and Marion had lost.