'My God, is this you?' she'd said on her first visit to his office, the previous summer, as she studied the photo from the Navajo reservation.

It had taken Frances Cottrell to redeem it. Marion was inseparable from an identity that had proved to be humiliating. And Marion didn't count, because it was Marion who'd impelled him to New York, Marion who'd turned him on to Parker and Thomas and Robeson, Marion who'd thrilled to his stories of the Navajos and urged him to heed his calling to the ministry. After his humiliation, he'd hidden in his office and ached amid the fading totems of a youth that no one but his wife found interesting anymore. The office of Rick Ambrose, him of the stringy black hair and the glistening black Fu Manchu, had a kindergarten feel to it, the walls and shelves bedecked with the crudely painted effusions of his young disciples, the special meaningful rocks and bleached bones and wildflower necklaces they'd given him, the silk-screened posters for fundraising concerts with no discernible relation to any religion Russ recognized. But to the kids who now thronged the church's hallways in their bell-bottoms and bib overalls, their bandannas, they signified only obsolescence. Ten years ago, when he'd assumed the associate ministry in New Prospect, these artfully chosen assertions of identity had resonated with the teenagers whose development in Christ had been part of his brief. On his office walls were posters of Charlie Parker and his sax, Dylan Thomas and his fag a smaller picture of Paul Robeson framed alongside a handbill for Robeson's appearance at the Judson Church in 1952 Russ's diploma from the Biblical Seminary in New York and a blown-up photo of him and two Navajo friends in Arizona, in 1946.

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