The Storm A Novel Chapter One They say that Kenzie Maxwell married Willow because she was the only woman he still knew at the time who could afford him. She was a patrician to her fingertips and, like Kenzie's two earlier wives, a woman of means. He said that, poor as he was, he would have been crazy to marry for money but crazier still to have let it stand in his way any more than pretty eyes or a fetching sense of humor. The wives on their part never complained that he hadn't given them their money's worth one way or another. It was just that after a few years, in each case, he managed to convey to them in his disarming way that he had found another who seemed to find him worth a little more. They say that Willow married Kenzie--they were both in their early sixties at the time--because she was bored and because even at his worst, she told him, he struck her as at least less boring than most people she knew. She had more wrinkles than any other woman on Plantation Island--most of the others had had tucks taken in their faces so many times that they could hardly get their mouths closed--and she was also the most beautiful. Even at the approach of seventy, she had the figure of a girl and a girl's supple movement when she walked, usually with either a parasol or a golf club for a walking stick. She took no pains with her clothes but always looked more chic than anybody else in a pair of floppy slacks, maybe, and a loose-fitting, long-sleeved silk jacket, and any one of a number of broad-brimmed straw hats that she had picked up at some thrift shop or souvenir stand with a gauzy scarf tied under her chin to hold it in place, and sunglasses. She did nothing with her hair but let it straggle about her shoulders, oystery white and uncombed. Her smile was both mocking and self-mocking. Kenzie had a large, intelligent face and a bushy mustache at a time when in his particular world even a small one was considered an eccentricity. When Willow talked about boredom, he said boredom was a sin and that being bored to death, as she often said she was, was a form of suicide. She said she was all for suicide, but as for sin, she didn't believe in it any more than she believed in much of anything else. "Unlike you, Kenzie," she said. "You are a believer--like your friend the Bishop." "I believe in everything' " he said. "It's why I am never bored." Bishop Hazleton, who was known as Frog because he somewhat resembled one, had for several seasons since his retirement been in charge of the chapel that Violet Sickert had caused to be built overlooking one of the fairways, and Kenzie attended the early service there every Sunday. Whereas every other man in the place looked as though he was straight out of a Brooks Brothers catalogue, Kenzie wore a baggy, dark sweatshirt with a hood in back like a monk's cowl and always chose a pew near a window so he would have as much light to read the service by as possible.With a faint smile on his bps, he would sit attentive through the Bishop's rambling homilies, which seldom failed to include a pleasantry or two about the Sunday golfers going by outside in their electric golf carts. As soon as the service was over, Kenzie always left through the side door so he wouldn't have to shake hands with everybody on the front steps afterwards. "They say he has taken up karate lessons," Willow said. Kenzie shrugged his shoulders. "It's better than destroying the life of a girl young enough to be your daughter," he said. "I say it so you won't have to." "I would never dream of saying it, Kenzie," she said. "We are mismatched in almost every way, but we have always treated each other with consideration." "Noblesse oblige," Kenzie said. He pushed the sunglasses back on her forehead so he could see her better." Tendresse oblige." "Can you imagine the Bishop breaking bricks in two with his bare hand?" Willow said, and he said, "The trouble is I have always been able to imagine almost anything. It has been my downfall." It had also been his strongest suit and, before scandal drove him into exile, the way he had made his mark on the world. It was what had led him to become a writer or, as he preferred to put it sometimes, a "delusionist," which struck him as less pretentious. He thought of himself as a man who wrote because he couldn't think of anything else to do with his delusions. He had first appeared in print when, to his surprise, The New Yorker accepted one of his stories while he was still in his twenties and then maybe five or six others over the next few years. They were ironic, graceful little glimpses of people falling in and out of love in Manhattan, where he had often fallen in and out of love himself, and their style was spare, translucent, wistful. Eventually a collection of them was published under the title Both, Both, My Girl, from Prospero's answer to Miranda when she asks him if it was by blessed means or foul that they were washed up on their enchanted island. "Both, both is what all those stories are about," he told his wife at the time. "It is also the story of my life." The book never sold particularly well but was by and large favorably received by reviewers so that in time his name and even his face started to ring a bell in places where such matters were known and talked about. He gave a reading or two... The Storm A Novel . Copyright © by Frederick Buechner. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold. Excerpted from The Storm: A Novel by Frederick Buechner All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
