Secret Vow

Middle-aged lovers who part and meet again are the protagonists of this ambitious but forced first novel that traces the resumption of a forbidden love affair between Rose Connolly Keating, a gifted gardener, and Father Ellis Barlowe, her tormented priest. The narrative is split between chapters set in 1965, in which the newly widowed Rose, nearly 40, spends a blissful summer in Ellis's rambling family home, in Maine, and those set in 1995, when Rose sets out to find Ellis, who has stopped writing to her and, she fears, may be in danger. In the intervening years since their affair ended, the two have been in contact only through letters. Rose has embraced a life of familial security and obligation, remarrying and raising children and grandchildren. Ellis, by contrast, has become a monk, retreating into a world where human connections are forged only with the terminally ill patients he soothes with the herbal remedies Rose taught him. It is often hard to sympathize with Cecala's unhappy, self-absorbed hero and heroine: Ellis believes that his gory war experiences were his spiritual high point, while Rose's sole reaction to the suicide of her mentally ill first husband is one of unvarnished relief. But when the couple finally reunite in the last chapters, they are honest with each other for the first time about their flaws, and about secrets long kept, and the novel turns out to be more about recognition and acceptance than about resurrecting a passionate and fraught past. (May)