Imaginary Latvian Pastor’s Wife Who Quoted Long Latvian Poems
in Jane McCafferty’s “Thank You for the Music”
He was grateful that the calls lasted no more than twenty minutes or so. Then relieved when the pastor had grown so busy with his inner-city congregation years ago, more passionately committed than ever. The pastor and his wife, Claire, had almost no time to come visit after that. Claire was soft-spoken, a first-generation Latvian with warm blue eyes and an ability to quote long Latvian poems that seemed to always include wet brick streets. Quietly insightful, intelligent and somewhat melancholy by nature, she was an old friend by now, but too often during their visits, the pastor’s brother would be pretending to talk to Claire, when really he’d be listening rapaciously to the conversation going on across the room, the ones where the pastor and Rachel would somehow fit Dietrich Bonhoeffer, John Coltrane, and Celtic myths into the same conversation. The ones that transformed his wife (beauty almost aggressively residing in her face as she listened), and to a lesser extent transformed the pastor too, though Clair and the rest of the world had never bothered to notice.
