All these thoughts were my companions as I stood on the doorstep of Mrs. Bruner’s residence.  The doorknocker was perfect; it reminded me of one I saw on a monastery door during a retreat.  Behind this doorknocker was organ music, I was sure.  I had no organ music at my services, but a small folk choir, two guitars, and a tambourine.
        I knocked.
         Mrs. Bruner was not happy to see me.  The feeling was mutual, but I was taken aback by her youthful appearance.  She was, in fact, a striking woman the likes of which normally wouldn't see fit to hide herself indefinitely behind closed doors.  But I had come to express the thoughts of others and truly had no personal issue.  The widow, despite her printed attacks, was a curiosity to me and I was frankly grateful for the interest that her presence gave the town.  And I respected her.  She lived in a hall of learning.
        She just stood at the door.
         "About the sisters?" she asked.
         "Yes."
         Perhaps she knew there would be repercussions from her article.  I hadn’t thought she would have cared.
         "Come in," she said.
         This, of course, was the coveted invitation that everyone in town had dreamt of, feared, and never, ever, expected.  I certainly hadn’t anticipated actually getting to see her living space.  Nobody ever had, since I had come to town.  My obsession with the widow may have been in empathy for her isolation, or a response to my own.
        So details competed for my attention in a fierce Olympics of discovery.  I admit to being a bit sheltered as an envoy minister in a small town, but I had neglected to admit to myself how eager I was to unearth the fact or fiction of the gossipers’ tales.  The details flooded in, however, with the same lack of explanations of a rain storm.
        A portrait, presumably of her late husband, large, in the living room.  Oriental rugs, also very big.  Candle holders.  That gothic smell fostered by some of my contemporaries in the clergy, who never air out their rooms for fear their faith will blow out the window.  No organ music, though.  Against one wall, in the "study" I suppose it was where she led me, in relief against all that antiquity, sat the computer from where she published the Cryer.
        And next to that, a box of tissues.  So that much was true.
        "I expected you might call," she said, "but on the phone."
        She seated herself with much groaning ado, and that was when I understood how old she was.  In years, maybe sixty or sixty-five, but in aesthetics she was forty-something..  It was there my pity turned for the first time to admiration: this woman was an enticing outer triumph over the human condition, at least.  I was also surprised she had a phone; who she spoke to I knew not.
        "I didn’t know the best way to handle this," I told her, "I am here under obligation, as you know."
         "Oh, I know.  You’ve been putting it off."
        Odd; the article I had come there about was only then a few days old.  The response from the sisters was instant.  I made her understand that I did not understand.
       "There’s a lot of history between us.  You could have contacted me much earlier.  I’m surprised you didn’t," she said.
        "You’ve never been to services," I said, trying to erase any tone of accusation.
        "There’s reasons for that," she laughed, and coughed, and coughed for awhile, and made me feel the pity again.
        She recovered from her coughing spell and squinted her eyes at me as she detected my confusions.
        "My husband’s been gone for a long, long time," she said, "He was a genius.  A person gets lonely after an intelligent person decides it's time to die and leave you."  This was some sort of explanation.
        "Surely it wasn’t his choice to pass away," I said.
        "Oh, no.  Nothing like that.  He loved life."
        "And you loved him very much."
        "More than I remember," she said, "I moved on out of necessity, and that is all.  I never wanted-"
         She reached into the big desk her computer rested on, and I again thought "how odd" about the computer and the phone.  She was a modern widow, a woman with the air of Victorian England who lived behind bricks and ivy, typing away on a word processor.
        This would disappoint the people in town, if I ever told them.
        From the desk she pulled a purple sash, of all things, inscribed with the monograph L.L.W. in yellow.  I didn’t think it then, but these were the initials of my predecessor.  Lawrence Langley Welsch was his name.  The town knew him as "Langley" in the parlors of gossip where he now existed exclusively.  Who knows where he is now.
        "Langley is in Washington State.  He has a new ministry," she revealed as she handed me the sash.  "He wanted you to have this."
        To me this was high intrigue.  A man I had never met intended a gift for me, a man of my own order who was somehow defamed and then decided to flee.  What did he know of me?
        "He pities you," she said, slouching.  But slouching almost sexily, I thought. What was going through my mind?
        "Why?" I had to ask.
        She straightened up for this proclamation: "Out with the Old, in with the New.  That’s the way it goes.  I’m sure you have heard that Langley loved me very much.
        She then crossed her legs in the most dainty fashion.  Completely prudish, but completely not.
        "He said I was the only woman in town a minister could ever love."