Living Proof, стр. 13

And how many had been lost? No one would ever know, since it was before the government kept such records, but the question haunted him. Hundreds of thousands, he guessed, if not more.

He glanced up to look at the thing that calmed him: A digital picture frame propped next to his computer spun through dozens of family pictures, a slideshow he often updated. He picked up the frame, pausing it on a photo of his two-year-old daughter, Abby, splashing in an inflated Jacuzzi in their Long Island backyard. She was too young to know it now, but one day she would understand how much his work related to her own existence.

After nine failed attempts at in vitro fertilization and more than $100,000, his wife, Joanie, had become pregnant naturally with Abby. Despite the Catholic Church’s disapproval of in vitro, when four years of trying had worn out their patience, Dopp had reluctantly given in to Joanie’s desperation to try the procedure, and God had made them pay the price. But everything happened for a reason, and Dopp knew that God wanted them to endure those years, which could hardly be summed up by the word struggle; no, it was closer to an all-encompassing feeling of failure that strained his marriage and his confidence, an ordeal that thrust him into a pattern of empty reassurances, holding Joanie and stroking her belly as she wept, while he whispered in her ear, “It’s not your fault, sweetie, it will happen.…” Crusted underneath his words like hidden grime was a private guilt—he was fifteen years older than she, and surely not as potent as a younger man.

God’s reason for their agony, as he interpreted it after Abby’s birth, was to show him the true nature of fertility doctors: They were swift in cashing their payment after each time Joanie did not get pregnant, and swifter still in urging her to try the same, costly, difficult procedure again. But what he resented the most were the pictures of the doctors’ own babies in their offices: eight-by-eleven-inch portraits of tender faces that mocked him and Joanie with their own inability to conceive. He had been angered by the doctors’ insensitivity and their lack of compassion in displaying the photos. It was only after he and Joanie stopped trying with the doctors that God had blessed them with Abby, just as He had blessed them seven years prior with Ethan. And, as if to reward their patience, God had smiled upon them once more: elated and incredulous, Joanie was now, at age forty-one, pregnant again.

Yet Dopp understood that there was a darker reason for their struggles to conceive, and he knew that Joanie knew it, too. Their suffering was God’s punishment for Dopp’s abandonment of the priesthood. Fifteen years ago, right after the DEP had first formed, Dopp was a revered priest at a large Catholic Church on Long Island. As a younger, idealistic man, he had hardly flinched at the vow of celibacy, believing that pleasures of the flesh were only a sinful distraction from God’s work. Though the work was spiritually fulfilling, he became crushingly lonely. It was a feeling he alternately discounted and wrestled with, never reaching a solution.

At about the same time that he began to sink into a depression, he noticed a beautiful young woman sitting in the front pew of his congregation; her green eyes watched him intensely—erotically, he thought—as if he were the only person there. She was slender like a dancer, and just as graceful, with limbs that seemed to exert no effort when she came up to take her Communion. Those moments were the closest Dopp came to her, the moments he began to look forward to. If only for a few seconds, he could smell her perfume and admire the way her dress straps fell against her white collarbone. She always sat alone at the service. The first time she caught him watching her, she had smiled a strange mocking smile, as if extending a forbidden invitation. Looking back, Dopp would realize that their relationship had begun then, and that the months they exchanged glances over the heads of the congregation had been not a prelude to courtship, but the main act, a deliciously public trespassing. To Dopp, Sundays had become like dates, each seemingly more intimate than the last. It was both an ecstasy and a torment to feel such temptation. They had not exchanged a word, but what they shared was enough to sate his desire, more pleasure than he had ever expected from a woman. At least he told himself it was enough.

And then one Sunday, she didn’t show up. Or the next, or the next. Dopp lost focus. Each week, he watched the back door of the church as he delivered a halfhearted sermon. Later he would find out that she had forced herself to stay away, that she knew she risked ruining him. She fought for him valiantly by remaining scarce, not knowing that he was ruined either way. After three weeks, Dopp insisted to himself that her absence was for the best, that his loneliness had probably blown the whole thing out of proportion. That maybe it was God’s way of letting him off gracefully.

But after six weeks, she returned.

He stopped her after the service for the first time, as the other churchgoers were leaving. She didn’t seem surprised.

“Where were you?” he asked before any introduction.

“I didn’t know you took attendance,” she replied. She smiled up at him with a look of pain: I’ve given up, so here I am.

“It would help if I knew your name,” he said.

“Joanie,” she replied, extending her hand. “I think I already know yours.”

As soon as he clutched her hand, Dopp knew he had surrendered the priesthood. It was the quiet death of a life he could no longer uphold. Their affair quickly grew physical—a step neither of them even pretended to fight—and Dopp