The Monk Downstairs

by Tim Farrington

  She finally took Mary Martha to see her grandmother the next day, after first calling Bee-Well to let them know her daughter would not be coming in. The woman who ran the place was unprecedentedly warm. Mary Martha must have told her about Phoebe, because she said that her own father had recently had a stroke. This was offered almost casually, in the shorthand of the afflicted, and Rebecca suddenly glimpsed how vast it was, this secret society of domestic suffering into which she had been initiated. The revelation was a little disorienting. It made the world seem like a different place.

  Mary Martha insisted on wearing the red jumper that Phoebe had given her, which was showing real signs of wear by now; there was no dissuading her, and Rebecca had to smile, getting a taste of what Mike had been dealing with. She decided that as soon as her mother had recovered enough to consider such things, she was going to ask Phoebe to buy her granddaughter more clothes.

  On the way to the hospital, Mary Martha was solemn and preoccupied, absorbed in the gravity of the expedition, clutching her cards and pictures for Phoebe in her lap. As they drove up Potrero, Rebecca tried her best to prepare her daughter, reminding her that Phoebe was still very sick, that she was a little confused and that she couldn’t talk the way she had used to talk. Mary Martha nodded, not dismissively but with a dogged air, determined to make her own judgments.

  Phoebe was sitting up in bed, trying to make sense of a straw and a glass of cranberry juice, when they arrived. She had already had a nurse apply some lipstick and rouge, and she looked undeniably more chipper. Mike, who had spent the night at the hospital, sat beside her, looking unshaven but cheerful. The curtains were wide open and the room was full of flowers from Phoebe’s friends and cronies. Mary Martha hung back for a moment, but Phoebe spotted her right away and said brightly, “Hello, Mary Martha. Come give your old granny a kiss.”

  Mary Martha glanced at Mike, who nodded encouragingly and moved out of the way. She crossed to the bed and gave Phoebe a tentative peck on the cheek, and Phoebe hugged her with her good arm.

  “Don’t you look wonderful in red,” she said.

  “It’s my favorite dress now,” Mary Martha said. “I’m sorry you’ve been sick.”

  “Just a little speed bump,” Phoebe said. “I’m feeling much better.”

  “I made you a card.”

  “Did you? You sweetheart!” Phoebe accepted the card and exclaimed over the artwork, then opened it and stared at the inside text for a while. Rebecca realized with dismay that her mother couldn’t read it, and she was about to say something to dilute the moment’s impact when Phoebe looked at Mary Martha and said quite naturally, “Maybe you could read it to me, dear.”

  Rebecca sat in the corner chair admiring her mother’s grace under pressure. She was fairly certain that Mike had coached Phoebe in advance on some of the details, such as her granddaughter’s name, but the old Phoebe charm was undeniably functioning. The discussion soon turned to pumpkins, and the rest of the visit went much better than Rebecca had expected. Nevertheless, in the car on the way home, Mary Martha began to cry.

  Rebecca stopped the car and put her arms around her daughter. There didn’t seem to be that much to say. If you loved Phoebe now, it was going to hurt you to see her. Like facing cold water, you just jumped in and swam anyway. But she was glad she hadn’t taken Mary Martha to the hospital any sooner.

  When Mary Martha had quieted, they drove on. Mary Martha was still preoccupied, looking out the window, but as they crossed Sunset, on Kirkham, she stirred.

  “Could we stop at the church and light a candle?”

  “What?” Rebecca asked, caught off guard.

  “I want to say a prayer for Grandma,” Mary Martha said, a little doggedly.

  Rebecca drove in silence for a moment before she said, “Of course we can, sweetheart. We’ll say a prayer for Grandpa too.”

  A week later, Rebecca drove downtown to the Hall of Justice for Rory’s sentencing hearing. She was dressed in a blue power suit, as Rory had advised, and had even gone so far as to apply some lipstick and mascara. But even disguised as an upright citizen, she wasn’t sure what she could possibly say to a judge to keep her ex-husband out of jail. Well, Your Honor, it’s true that for quite a while now he’s taken his last hit in the car before he comes in to pick up Mary Martha.…

  She met Rory, his girlfriend, and his court-assigned lawyer in the hallway outside the courtroom. Rory was outfitted incongruously in a navy blue suit and a gray tie sprinkled with little black anchors. He’d gotten a severe new haircut, flattering in a crisp, quasi-military way, and he looked surprisingly good, a young executive on the rise. Rebecca wondered who had tied the tie for him. Not his girlfriend, certainly, who was wearing the sort of dress that hippie girls often wore when compelled to ransack their closet on short notice to produce an effect of straightness: an old-fashioned calico print with a flared and pleated skirt and nonfunctional pearl buttons. She’d scrubbed off her usual savage crimson lipstick and painted her nails light pink. The overall effect was vaguely Appalachian, a simple girl just out of the hills, an impression heightened by the fact that she was at least four months pregnant. Rebecca realized that she was probably going to have to learn this one’s name.

  Rory’s lawyer, an earnest, harried-looking kid himself, coached her briefly: Rory was a good father, crucial to Mary Martha’s emotional development, unstinting in his support.

  “‘Unstinting’?” Rebecca exclaimed, as Rory looked uneasy. “What is this, a eulogy?”

  “Judges love ‘unstinting.’ It sounds very family values.”

  “I’m not sure I can say ‘unstinting’ without snickering.”

  “No snickering,” the kid lawyer said, alarmed. “Somber and dignified. Mutually committed to the best interests of the child. Loving.”

  “Loving!”

  “Fond, then.”

  “It’s a goddamn miracle I’m here at all. I’m not going to say ‘unstinting.’”

  “You just say what you have to say in your own way, Bec,” Rory said hastily. “We’re so grateful to you for coming down here like this.”

  “I’ll give you ‘fond.’ Intermittently fond.”

  “I know how much Rory values his friendship with you,” the girlfriend said.

  The lawyer took a deep breath, straightened Rory’s tie, and led them into the courtroom. The place was crowded, and they seated themselves near the back; trailing the group slightly as they filed in, Rebecca found herself beside Rory’s girlfriend, which was briefly disconcerting. She still could not recall the woman’s name.

  “When is it due?” she whispered.

  “April,” the girl said shyly.

  “Rory never even mentioned it to me.”

  “We didn’t want to tell anyone until we were sure I wouldn’t lose it. I lost one about a year ago.”

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t know.”

  “It’s okay. I think it was even for the best. There’s no way Rory was ready then.”

  They exchanged a knowing, female look, and Rebecca felt an unwilling camaraderie. Chelsea, she recalled suddenly. The girl’s name was Chelsea.

  “I hope he’s ready now,” she said.

  “He’s ready,” Chelsea said. “He better be.” She was clutching a packet of index cards in her lap—her plea to the judge, Rebecca realized, written out in full in a rounded, surprisingly firm hand.

  At the front of the room the court’s business proceeded, a succession of grand theft auto and drug cases, domestic abuse and burglary, handled briskly by the presiding judge, a no-nonsense woman in her fifties with severe gray hair in a short cut reminiscent of Phoebe’s. It was almost an hour before Rory’s case came up, and as she sat there waiting, Rebecca tried her best to think of nice things she could say about Rory’s moral character without rolling her eyes. But she kept thinking about a joke Mike had told her the night before as they discussed the situation in bed: A woman dies and goes to heaven, where she is met at the gate by Saint Peter, who tells
her that to get in, she has to spell a word.

  “What word?” the woman asks uneasily.

  “Love.”

  Relieved, the woman spells L-O-V-E and enters paradise. Some time later, in the normal course of things there, she is assigned to watch the gates herself, and while she is on duty, who should show up but her ex-husband, who has finally succumbed to cirrhosis of the liver.

  “Well, well, look who’s here,” the woman says. “How’ve you been?”

  “Pretty much the same,” her ex-husband says. “So how do I get in?”

  “It’s very simple,” she tells him. “You just have to spell a word.”

  “What word?” her absolute slimeball of an ex-husband asks, and the woman smiles sweetly and says, “Pteridophytic.”

  Rebecca had laughed appreciatively the night before; Mike had a deft way of acknowledging her darker impulses without getting grim about them. But today in the court-room, sitting beside Rory’s pregnant girlfriend, it didn’t seem so funny. Rebecca felt that she knew this judge already. She could see the wedding ring on the woman’s hand; she’d noted the dry humor, the swiftness of the judge’s moral intuition, and the impatience with bullshit. She didn’t have to make Rory spell pteridophytic; she could have her revenge with an inflection, with the lift of an eyebrow and a strategic hesitation; the judge would grasp her point instantly. Rory would probably never even know what had hit him.

  She recalled an afternoon at the beach, early in her relationship with Rory. There had been a shark scare, and everyone had come out of the water except Rory. Rebecca could remember the progression of her emotions that day, watching her lover bob nonchalantly on the empty sea beyond the breakers—her panic, her helplessness and rage, and finally, with the bittersweetness of acceptance, a grudging, impersonal admiration. The surf hadn’t even been particularly good that day. But Rory was free. That had been his point to her, always. Free to make a mess of things and free to take full advantage of that fleeting moment of beauty when the wave curled right and grace was all that mattered. Free as a bird, she’d thought wearily: free as those seagulls that worked the trash cans along Ocean Beach.

  There was a stir beside her; Rory’s case had been called. The previous defendant was being led away through the door at the far side of the room, flanked by a sheriff’s deputy. The four of them rose, and, as the last one into the row, Rebecca found herself leading them forward. She paused at the swinging gate that separated the spectators’ section from the judge’s bench and the attorneys’ tables and glanced back. Rory, a step behind her, gave her a smile and a wink, and a nod to go forward. He was flaunting a determined cockiness, she noted, but he was scared.

  She turned right and took one of the seats at the defendant’s table, and the others arrayed themselves to her left, still standing. Rebecca hurriedly rose to her feet again. The bailiff read the details of The City of San Francisco v. Rory Burke and noted that a plea of nolo contendere had been entered. Rory’s lawyer affirmed that this was so and they all sat down.

  The assistant city attorney rose and asked for a sentence of three to five years; Rory’s lawyer rose in turn and noted that while this was the defendant’s third arrest, it was only his first conviction. His client had purchased the marijuana from the undercover officer without any intent to resell it; it had been for recreational use only. Moreover, he’d since gotten himself into rehab. He was a committed father to his daughter, maintained good relations with his ex-wife, and was the primary source of support for his new family.

  “Let’s hear from the women,” the judge said, sounding unconvinced.

  Chelsea rose and in a wavering voice read her little speech from her index cards. Rory was a good and loving man, she said; he’d never been anything but kind to her. And this arrest had changed him. It really had. He was sobered. He’d gotten a haircut and a job. He didn’t want to be in jail when their child was born.

  “Is he going to marry you?” the judge asked.

  Chelsea bit her lip and glanced uncertainly at Rory.

  “I am, Your Honor,” Rory said.

  “How romantic,” the judge said dryly, but Chelsea’s face lit up. She sat down with a pleased little flutter and reached for Rory’s hand under the table.

  “Do you have anything to add, Ms. Martin?” the judge asked.

  Rebecca stood up, wishing she had thought to bring notes too. “Rory really is a decent guy, Your Honor. He has a generous spirit and he’s been…unstinting in his devotion to our daughter. He’s a truly loving father, and I think it would have a terrible effect on Mary Martha if he were to have to go to jail.”

  “Most loving fathers think of that before they commit the crime,” the judge said.

  Rebecca met the woman’s cool blue eyes. This was the moment, she knew: woman to woman.

  “Rory’s been a little slow to grow up, Your Honor,” she said. “But I believe him when he says he going to take this chance to do it.”

  The judge held her glance appreciatively; she had the picture. Rebecca sat down.

  “The defendant will rise,” the judge said.

  Rory and his lawyer stood up hurriedly.

  “Do you have any idea what a lucky man you are, Mr. Burke?” the judge said.

  “I think I do, Your Honor.”

  “I don’t think that you do at all. I think you’re a long shot, and I think these women know it. But if they’re willing to make that bet, then I am too. I am sentencing you to time already served in the city jail and a three-year period of probation. If you violate the terms of that probation, you will be prosecuted to the full extent of the law.”

  “Thank you, Your Honor,” Rory said, in his best imitation of sincerity.

  “I don’t want to see you again,” the judge said. “I don’t actually like you very much.” She made a note on the sheet in front of her, then tapped her gavel firmly. “Next!”

  At the desk on the first floor, Rebecca completed the paperwork to have the bail she’d posted returned, minus a hefty administrative fee. To her surprise, Rory wrote her a check for the difference on the spot. He’d gotten himself into some kind of second-chance program for minor felons, and he really did have a job. Unlikely as it seemed, after a lifetime of creative unemployment, Rory was a lifeguard at the YMCA.

  “If you could hold off cashing it for a week or two—” he said sheepishly.

  “Of course,” Rebecca said. She’d already decided that there was no way she was ever going to cash that check. There was no sense tempting fate.

  She would have left immediately, but Chelsea gave her an unexpected, heartfelt hug, and Rebecca felt the swell of the girl’s belly against her own, the firm reality of the next phase of Rory’s life, the palpable demand.

  “Is it going to be a boy or a girl?” she asked.

  Chelsea smiled proudly. “A boy.”

  “Mary Martha has always wanted a little brother,” Rebecca said, and turned to leave while everything was still going so well.

  Dear Brother James,

  Please forgive my long delay in responding. We have been extraordinarily busy here, as I’m sure you can imagine. But thank you, as ever, for your thoughtful letter. Despite the occasional indications to the contrary, I am glad that you have kept our embattled correspondence alive. Something of the best of the monastery revives for me still, in your dogged, earnest script. Even now, when I wake too early, in the old, automatic way, all dressed up and nowhere to go at 3 A.M., I think of you in the predawn darkness, shuffling through the dew to matins with your hands in your sleeves, your cowled head bowed. I still hear the murmur of lauds through the trees as the sky turns, the song unchanged for a thousand years. And on through the day, through prime and terce, I hear the plain-chant and the prayer; through the noontime brightness of sext, through lazy none and the sweetness of vespers, and the final rounding tenderness of compline, I am reminded of the circling song, the never-ending dance, ancient and ever new. And I am grateful for it. I am grateful for it all.


  There is a passage in John of the Cross’s “Spiritual Canticle” that had always baffled me. It comes quite late in the poem, well after the “small white dove” of the seeking soul has built her nest in solitude with the One she sought. St. John says:

  Let us rejoice, Beloved,

  And let us go forth to behold ourselves in Your beauty,

  To the mountain and to the hill,

  To where the pure water flows,

  And further, deep into the thicket.

  It was the thicket that I could not understand. My rosy notion of the life fulfilled in love did not include such exertions; I suppose that I pictured an eternal rest by a heavenly poolside, with umbrella drinks served in the unimpeded sunlight. But we do not serve that larger Love by renouncing our particular loves for some mystical lounge chair; we serve by being faithful to those loves, by suffering them wholly. We are born to love as we are born to die, and between the heartbeats of those two great mysteries lies all the tangled undergrowth of our tiny lives. There is nowhere to go but through. And so we walk on, lost, and lost again, in the mapless wilderness of love.

  As I write this, Mary Martha is at the kitchen table with me, puzzling out the intricacies of Dick and Jane. Phoebe is due to move in downstairs this week, and is already filling the backyard with zinnias and gladiolas in her imagination; she will no doubt wrest the garden from my control and turn it into a wonderland. Rebecca is on the back porch with her easel out, painting our view of Point Reyes, editing out the rooftops and TV antennas. She’s on a sabbatical of sorts for the moment, and is thinking about starting her own graphics business and finding work on a scale that suits her.