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aggressively plied by a Protestant missionary and at long last turned into a Christian, and by contrast with that person Lee found Gaither admirably subtle. Their conversations scarcely touched upon religion; it was the friendship itself that would reel Lee in. But as aware as Lee felt of all this, he wasn’t willing to admit what a prisoner he was of his loneliness and that he would have accepted Gaither’s friendship even if it consisted entirely of the desire to make a new convert. Lee told himself, in his early encounters with Gaither, that he, too, was indulging one weaker; Gaither’s need to convert was a flaw, toward which Lee could be kind.
    It was in this spirit of wary but willing friendship with Gaither that Lee met Aileen. Lee knew that Aileen was Gaither’s wife of less than a year; they had married the July before Gaither entered grad school, about six months after they’d met. Aileen had a secretarial job in another department and took the occasional class toward a B.A. degree; she and Gaither did not yet have children. Lee assumed, because Gaither had not said otherwise, that Aileen must be a Christian also, and he imagined her unremarkably, pinkishly pale and smooth-featured and plump. Perhaps she had lusterless, heavy brown hair in a matronly clip at the back of her neck and wore dowdy plaid skirts and support hose and practical shoes. Perhaps she was tranquilly faithful, like Gaither, but lacking his brains; though for the most part, until he met her, Lee did not think of Aileen at all.
    One evening after their seminar, as they walked the fl agstone quad path to the gate where they usually parted, Lee to his rooming house four blocks off campus, Gaither to the bus that took him several miles to wherever he lived with Aileen, Gaither said, “There’s a shindig this weekend at the park outside town. A statewide church event. I know you’re not in the market to pick up religion, but I’d like it if you met A P E R S O N O F I N T E R E S T 19
    my friends. My church friends. And Aileen. It would make a nice outing. When’s the last time you saw hills and trees? They must have had those things back in your country.” Gaither’s peculiarly gentle, ironical manner of speech was his most signal asset, the winking blade that allowed for his faith to be tolerable. His voice was slowed by a very slight drawl from a boyhood in Texas, but this was entwined with pe-dantic enunciativeness, which was then overlaid by self-mockery.
    Gaither used words like “shindig” to acknowledge he was just the sort of stay-at-home stick who should never say “shindig.” And his reference to Lee’s foreignness somehow worked as a reference to all those who saw Lee that way, among whom Gaither wasn’t included: their peers in the program, who effortlessly shunned them both.
    “Shindig?” Lee said, smiling wryly. This was one of many moments at which his awareness of Gaither’s attempt to convert him was outweighed by his pleasure at having the man as his friend.
    “An evening cookout, in a tent, with some singing and talking and milling around. You won’t be preached at, I promise. The folks we don’t know will assume you’re a Christian already, and my friends will know better than to give you an earful. They already tried that with Aileen. She got them trained pretty quick.” This was the fi rst indication Lee had that Aileen was not as he’d thought. Gaither winked, and they parted, agreeing that Gaither would pick Lee up Friday evening at six on that corner.
    This had been early April, their first spring in graduate school. In that part of the Midwest, April was even more variable than it is in New England; the week of Gaither’s invitation, the daffodils and the tulips had started to open in the long, geometrical beds that outlined campus buildings, but it happened almost every year and was endlessly discussed by the locals that after a week of exquisite, damp days the temperature fell and brought with it