A Matter of Time

by David Manuel

  Amy’s father was never part of their gatherings. Aggie told her sister that after the wedding he must have said or done something so horrible to their mother that she moved into one of the guest rooms and seldom came downstairs again.

  They spoke to him as little as possible, and after the funeral they went away for good, leaving their father all alone on his grand plantation.

  Eight years passed. Then three months ago, Amy’s sister had called. Their father had just undergone quadruple bypass surgery.

  “So?”

  “Well—he’s different.”

  “How?”

  “He’s sorry for what he’s done and wants to make it right.”

  Amy chuckled. “Sounds like a death-bed conversion, if there ever was one. Maybe he got a little glimpse over the edge, and saw what was in store for him.”

  But Aggie was serious. “This may be for real. He wants to see us, ask our forgiveness before he dies.”

  “He’s about to die?”

  Aggie laughed. “I don’t think so.” She paused. “But he seems serious about wanting to get reconciled. Especially with you. He’s reinstated you in his will.”

  “Well, isn’t that special!” said Amy, with dripping sarcasm. “Did it ever occur to him that I might not be ready to forgive him?”

  Silence.

  “Sorry, Ags, no point killing the messenger. Have you seen him?”

  “Yes.”

  “And?”

  “He’s—different.”

  Amy sighed. “All right, what do you think I should do, older, wiser one?”

  “Why don’t you just come over? If he’s changed, fine; if he hasn’t, split. But if you don’t come, and something does happen to him, it could be on your conscience for a long time.”

  Amy knew she was right. “I’ll come tomorrow. Don’t tell him; I want to take him off guard.”

  “Whatever you say, younger, dumber one.” Then she remembered. “If you agreed to come, he wanted to get you the ticket.”

  “No. No obligations. I’ll use the trust money.”

  “It’ll be good to see you, Ames.”

  “You, too.”

  Outside her father’s hospital room, Amy paused to brace herself for the sight of him, head wan and pale on the pillow, tubes running out of him everywhere, an IV drip suspended above him. Taking a deep breath and putting on a smile, she entered.

  Her father was sitting up in bed, doing the New York Times crossword. In ink.

  “Thanks for coming, honey,” he said, putting the paper down. “I guess it’s too much to expect a hug.”

  “It is,” she replied, taking the visitor’s chair.

  “Did Aggie not tell you why I wanted you to come?” He smiled at her, looking sincere. “I’ve got a lot to ask your forgiveness for.”

  Amy clenched her jaw. “Too bad you can’t ask Mom,” she said, not bothering to hide her bitterness.

  “It is too bad,” he agreed. “I’ve asked God to forgive me, over and over.”

  Amy stood up. “Yeah, well, that’s great, Daddy, and I’m sure it makes you feel better. But frankly, it’s a little late! And quite frankly—” she almost said it. Almost left.

  But if there was anything to this, anything at all, she could not in good conscience abort the process.

  She sat back down.

  And stayed two weeks, long enough to get her father home and settled on the road to recovery.

  When she finally got back to Bermuda and aboard Care Away, she and Colin had a fight. A horrendous, unprecedented fight—in which things were said that could not be taken back. Things that made it impossible to remain on the boat a moment longer.

  She had taken Jamie with her. To Georgia.

  15 fathers and sons

  That Saturday was Brother Bartholomew’s birthday. His fiftieth birthday. The worst birthday of his life.

  Sitting in the chair in the one-room cottage that measured ten feet by eighteen feet, staring at the lintel of the door on which he had just struck his head, Brother Bartholomew wondered if he had ever been so miserable. Not even as a corpsman in Viet Nam, and certainly not in nearly twenty years in the friary. This was the worst.

  This was—wretched.

  In a way, that doorway summed up everything. The cottage had been built two centuries earlier, when the height of the average Bermudian had been five-foot-four. Bartholomew was six feet. As long as he remembered to duck, he was fine. The trouble was, he kept forgetting.

  And that bed! He glared over at “the rack.” He called it that, not as a colloquialism left over from his Marine Corps days, but as a medieval instrument of torture. Nor could he blame the rack on eighteenth-century Bermudians; it was a thoroughly modern invention, a bed that could be folded in half to masquerade as a sofa, if he ever had any company. Which he never did.

  Like the door, it was just under six feet tall, with arms at both ends. Which meant that anyone his height or taller could not lie out straight on it, even if he slept diagonally. Plus, there was a hard ridge down the middle, where the fold was. If he was exhausted, he might get three hours of sleep before the rack contrived to awaken him.

  He would have simply put the mattress on the floor, were it not for the cockroaches. If there was one creature on earth that Bartholomew purely loathed, it was the cockroach. To him, they were worse than snakes or spiders; they seemed the embodiment of evil. They came out only at night, and no matter how many you killed, there was always one more.

  “Happy Birthday!” he exclaimed aloud, to break the silence. That was another thing: In the cottage the silence was so total, it actually seemed to have a ringing quality to it.

  The sad part was, his birthday had not started off that badly. When he had returned to the cottage from a morning of edging grassy footpaths, he found that the sisters had left some ripe oranges for him, picked from the property’s little citrus grove. With them was a manila envelope with his name on it.

  It was a fax from home, from the young people in the calligraphy guild. They had composed and beautifully lettered a greeting in Latin:

  Diem Natalem Age,

  Frater Bartolomeo,

  tibi Deum precamur

  —Happy Birthday, Brother Bartholomew, we’re praying for you.

  He could have cried.

  Homesickness, like breaking surf, had washed over him before. Yet he’d always been able to regain his footing and shake it off. But this was a tidal wave—and for once, he gave in to it.

  In his mind he was back in the friary’s Scriptorium, on a sunny Saturday afternoon. Through the open window wafted the indolent sounds and smells of summer, while on the window seat beneath it was curled the friary cat, Pangur Ban—basking in the sun, supremely confident that all was right in his world.

  His young charges were perched on stools in front of the five drafting tables—two boys and three girls, high schoolers, from abbey families. In front of each was tacked a clean sheet of white paper. Playing softly on the stereo was a recording of the abbey’s monks singing Gregorian Chant, the notes echoing off the stone of the basilica, evoking a timelessness well suited to the ancient craft they were about to practice.

  At the blackboard stood the master calligrapher, his chalk held horizontally, in imitation of the square nib of a lettering pen. He deftly drew a large capital R and smiled at them. All was right in his world, too.

  “Like everything we’ve covered so far, adding a swash is not as easy as it looks. After you’ve formed your basic R, start lightly here,” he said, beginning to duplicate the swash, “apply pressure—here, and begin your lift-off—here.”

  With a graceful gesture he lifted the chalk from the board. “You see?”

  He nodded to them, confident they would be able to do what he’d just demonstrated. And they hesitantly nodded back.

  Hands clasped behind his back, he moved slowly behind them, pausing to murmur a suggestion here, an encouragement there.

  “Now again.”

  They drew
another. And once more he passed behind them, offering the help that each needed. His smile never wavered—and gradually theirs gained confidence.

  Finally, tall, willowy Kate, in an exaggerated Rex Harrison accent, exclaimed “I think we’ve got it! By George, I think we’ve got it!”

  Bartholomew beamed. They had indeed.

  Now, gazing down at their elegant birthday effort, he missed them terribly.

  He got up. He’d send them a reply, something light and cheerful. Glancing at his watch, he saw that it was twenty minutes to noon. If he went down to the main house right now, he could get a fax off before they started lunch.

  He went down the path, composing one as he walked. He’d commend their Latin, and their fine hand (probably Kate’s). He was just imagining their delight at hearing from him, when he arrived at the kitchen door. He asked if he could use the fax machine, and the sister at the stove gave him the office key. Letting himself in, he dashed off the note, popped it into the fax, and for once it went through without balking.

  Returning the key to the kitchen, he was suddenly assailed with the aromas from not one but several simmering pots. All four sisters were in the kitchen now, tossing a salad, slicing a loaf of homemade bread, getting out the dinner plates.

  Noting his expression, the sister at the stove seemed to read his mind. “Happy Birthday, Bart!” she exclaimed. “You’ll stay for lunch, of course!”

  “We have plenty,” the bread sister assured him.

  “These are Greek olives and Feta cheese,” added the salad-making sister. “I’ll set a place,” said the fourth.

  With the salivary juices already building in the back of his mouth, Bartholomew murmured, “Well, perhaps I—”

  Father Francis came in. “He’s not staying!” he announced flatly. “He’s here on personal retreat. He’ll eat up at the cottage. Alone.”

  The sisters were crestfallen, but none more than Bartholomew. He trudged back up the hill, and sitting morosely on his little stoop, he chewed his cold, dry turkey sandwich and added Father Francis to the list of things he loathed about Bermuda. At the top.

  The list grew longer later that afternoon at the grocery store. Purchasing the ingredients of his solitary birthday supper, he reached for what would be its pièce de résistance, a pint of Rum Raisin ice cream.

  And stopped. He had the distinct impression that God did not want him to have it. He knew why; his cholesterol had gotten high enough that the abbey’s doctor in residence had recently cautioned him to avoid high-fat foods or face serious trouble.

  He reached for it again, only to receive another interior warning, clear and unmistakable.

  “But I always have Rum Raisin ice cream on my birthday!” he declared under his breath, not caring that he’d now joined the ranks of those who muttered to themselves as they pushed their carts through supermarkets. Or that he sounded, even to his own ears, like a petulant child.

  By the time he got through the checkout counter, he was so angry that he retrieved a discarded Royal Gazette from the trash bin by the door, though on a personal retreat one was not supposed to read newspapers or anything else that would bring back the world he was supposed to be retreating from.

  That evening after supper, he read the old paper from cover to cover, even the endless descriptions of distant cricket matches. He went to bed at eight o’clock, an hour earlier than usual, just to be done with the worst birthday of his life.

  He did not say good night to God. He had not spoken to God since the ice cream incident, not even to return thanks before his meal.

  He fell into a deep and dreamless sleep, until awakened by the creaking rack at eleven. Which made him angry—even angrier than he’d been three hours before. He lay there in the darkness and steamed.

  But while he was not on speaking terms with God, it seemed that his heavenly Father would have words with him.

  Get up, came the thought. I want to talk to you.

  Well, I don’t want to talk to you, Bartholomew thought back.

  Nevertheless, he got out of bed, pulled on a sweater, and slouched down in the chair. From the table next to him, he took up his clipboard and wrote down what it seemed God was saying to his heart:

  Is this the way friends treat friends?

  Under it, Bartholomew wrote:

  Who says we’re friends?

  I do.

  Bartholomew hastily responded:

  Saint Teresa was right when she told you: “If this is the way you treat your friends, it’s no wonder you have so few of them.”

  It hurt when she said that. It hurts now, when you say it.

  Good! Now you know what it feels like!

  I know.

  All at once, another thought came to him, hard and cold: You are crazy, thinking you’re talking to God. You’re just imagining what He might say to you. It’s nothing more than “Let’s Pretend.”

  He considered that. It made sense: The psychiatric explanation would probably be that this was some form of mild, schizophrenic self-delusion, or, taken to the extreme, a multiple-personality disorder. Bizarre, perhaps, but explicable.

  And yet… the Bible did say that anyone filled with the Spirit of God should be able to hear His still, small voice within. Believers had been doing it for centuries. And not just saints or mystics. Look at Tevye, in “Fiddler on the Roof.”

  He smiled at that. And besides, even if he was imagining it, or making it up, was his imagination not inspired by the Holy Spirit? At the very least, he was giving voice to his conscience.

  He decided to continue the exercise.

  All right, Father, what do you want of me?

  You can stop behaving like a child.

  That stung. You’re right, he admitted. I have been. Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned.

  Do not be sarcastic with me. And give up your self-pity. It is merely anger, denied an external focus.

  That sounds like it came off a Salada tea-bag, he wrote. Then, abashed at being so smart-mouthed, he added: What am I so angry at?

  What do you think?

  You?

  Yes. Who else?

  Father Francis.

  My son, he was only speaking for me. It was difficult for him to do, because he is fond of you.

  Bartholomew thought about that. Then he wrote:

  Now that you say that, I can see it. I was lonely and—in self-pity. I really wanted to have lunch with them!

  Why?

  He thought about that and wanted to write something else in response, other than what was coming to him. But if this was—what he thought it was—there was no point in being anything less than excoriatingly honest. So he wrote:

  Probably to release the pressure that’s been building in me these past two weeks down here.

  Probably?

  All right! I was trying to get out of the pressure cooker, if only for an hour or so.

  He paused and added: And all Father Francis was doing was keeping the lid on. Your lid.

  Yes.

  The poor guy was only trying to do what you were calling him to.

  Yes.

  And it cost him.

  It usually does.

  Well, you know what? Now—I love him!

  Good. He is my gift to you, my son.

  Bartholomew yawned and glanced at his watch—and was astonished to see that an hour had passed. Once again, he asked:

  Father, what do you want of me?

  You already know.

  If I knew, I wouldn’t be asking.

  You know.

  Feeling himself getting angry again, he wrote:

  I suspect you want me to say “Surrender.” But I already have! Look what I’ve given up for you! I’m not allowed to earn a living. I’m celibate. I’m under obedience. What more do you want?

  Your opinions. Your will. Your independence.

  Why don’t you just say my essence and be done with it!

  Your essence.

  Bartholomew threw down the pen, which skitter
ed away under the bed. He got up and with difficulty retrieved it.

  This is ridiculous! he wrote. When did anyone ever win an argument with you? And Jacob doesn’t count; he was only wrestling an angel.

  He sighed and laid the pen down. Then picked it up again:

  What’s the point of going on with this?

  It is important for you to write down what is in your heart, my son. For while I already know what you are going to say, you do not know what my reply will be.

  They spoke in this fashion for another hour, and gradually Bartholomew’s heart softened. Finally he wrote:

  You know, I enjoy this, just talking with you, one on one. In fact, I think I enjoy it more than anything you and I have ever done.

  Why?

  He thought for a moment, then wrote: I was only seventeen the last time I saw my earthly father, and he was never one for talking much. So I guess somehow this—talking with my Heavenly Father—is finishing that.

  Your father was a good man, my son. He loved you very much.

  Me, too. I never told him. And it’s a little late now.

  He is here with me now, my son. And he knows.

  Bartholomew wiped his eyes, to keep the tears off the pad.

  This is weird, he wrote, when his emotions had calmed down. Really weird. But—it’s also the best birthday I’ve ever had.

  Another wave of emotion swept over him, and he covered his eyes with his hand, his shoulders shaking.

  Then he wrote: Thank you, Father. I love you.

  I love you, too. Now get some sleep. There is more we must cover tonight.

  16 a miserable saturday afternoon

  Everyone, it seemed, was miserable that Saturday afternoon. Amy Baxter Bennett sat in the paneled den of her family’s plantation house, gazing out the window where her son Jamie had been playing with Blitzkrieg, one of her father’s pointers.

  Shivering, she drew the beige cashmere cardigan closer about her shoulders. And sneezed, adding another wadded-up tissue to the small pile beside her chair. Her cold had blossomed into a full-fledged case of the flu. Her head throbbed, her energy level was zilch, and her father had gotten his doctor to prescribe a potent antibiotic and an even more potent antidepressant. Most of the time she was halfway to la-la land.