The Resurrection of Tess Blessing

by Lesley Kagen

  A few days later, Tess was gazing down at the standing-room-only crowd at St. Lucy’s who’d come to remember the life of this extraordinary man.

  After a few other friends and family members spoke about Richie’s many attributes and contributions, ancient Father Jessop introduced Tess to the congregation. She stood tall behind the lectern, pointed first at Richie’s wife and his two beautiful children in the first pew, upwards, and then to her heart. The joke she’d prepared was a spin on a treasured anecdote Richie had shared with her before he’d become too ill to speak.

  She clears her throat and says, “During one of his usual Sunday school classes a while back, Richie quizzed his little students on how one went about getting into Heaven. He asked them, ‘If I gave a lot of my time and money to St. Lucy’s would that do the trick?’”

  “‘NO!’ the children shouted back.”

  “‘Well…what if I helped paint the church and mowed the lawn and plowed out the parking lot in winter, would that get me into Heaven?’ he wondered.”

  “Once more the group of kids answered with a loud and clear, ‘NO!’”

  “Richie said, ‘How about if I was super-duper nice and smart and worked hard at being a great dad and husband and coached Little League and donated turkeys on Thanksgiving to people less fortunate and never once complained when I got sick with a horrible disease, would that be enough to get me into Heaven?’”

  “Once again, his Sunday school pupils hollered together, ‘NO!’”

  “‘Huh,’ Richie said as he scratched his head and looked perplexed at their sweet upturned faces. ‘Then…how in the heck would I get into Heaven?’”

  “One of the little boys sitting in the back of the room jumped up and shouted, “‘You gotta be dead, Mr. Mattigan!’”

  Since the congregation was more familiar with sermons than stand-up, no one knew quite how to react to the punch line. It wasn’t until Richie’s wife and kids began to laugh that the rest of the mourners joined in.

  Tess would later tell Will that she was certain that amongst the giggles and guffaws that’d filled the church that afternoon, she’d heard Richie’s unmistakably soulful laugh. She’d know it anywhere.

  A deeply depressed Tess and I are making the first of many drives we’ll be taking during the following months to St. Joe’s Hospital. Will offered to come along, but she’d shot him down. Losing Richie has heightened her worries about losing her own husband. Not to illness, but to Connie Lushman.

  I tell her as we exit the I-43 and turn up North Avenue, “You’re in a rut. You need to go someplace other than funerals, the grocery store, the diner, Henry’s basketball games, the old folks’ home, and doctors’ offices.”

  “Like where?” she says flatly.

  “You could get your hair done.” Her mass of red curls has grown long enough to reach her shoulder blades. “It’s lookin’ confused.”

  Sitting in the Peaches and Cream salon, listening to stylist Suzanne going on about Wonder Bras, steamy television shows, or saying, Hey, did you hear that Mrs. Johnson got so ticked off at incoming PTA president Mrs. Hoskins that she toilet-papered her house? seems as pointless as everything else does when Tess gets down like this.

  And this morning’s trip isn’t helping her mood any. She’s well aware that spending time in the old neighborhood might ignite painful flashbacks and panic on top of everything else, so we are proceeding westward under a yellow flag.

  When we are stopped by the light on 48th Street, the corner home of Dalinsky’s Drugstore, I point out the window and say to her perkily, “How about a little pleasure before business?”

  She’s hoping they still serve their classic root beer floats as she pulls to the curb. I usher her through the door and over to the red Formica lunch counter that’s so much like the one at Count Your Blessings, they could be twins. While we wait for Tess’s brown cow, she checks her memory against the improvements the store has made over the decades. The cosmetic counter is still where it was, so is the magazine rack near the front door. She notices the banner of a True Detective, and below it a row of Playboys that remind her of how she’d once dreamed of her chest growing as huge as Miss August 1962. She wonders if checking out those dirty magazines when she was a kid was why she got breast cancer. Is she paying for her sins?

  “Here ya go,” the young waitress says as she sets the frosty mug down.

  As my friend slurps, I point out, “I know ya don’t give a hoot about anything right now, but you might want to have a copy of that detecting magazine at the ready. When you feel better and decide to follow Will, you’ll want to be prepared.” She won’t respond because she can’t imagine ever feeling lighter of heart again, or caring about Will, their marriage, or anything else. Except for her children. There is no dark force within or without that could keep her from loving and protecting them.

  She pays the check at the same register Birdie had once seen the postcard of the burly, redheaded fellow she thought was their daddy in Boca Raton. She gets impulsive when she gets in this mood, so as we pass the rack, Tess slips a copy of True Detective inside her coat.

  I’m hoping her mood will take an uptick after she completes her mission as we head toward our next intended stop that’s about a half mile west of the drugstore.

  Will had shown her Mrs. Alvina “Ma” Malishewski’s obituary and the accompanying story in the Milwaukee Journal, so she knew the Allen Ludden-loving candy lady had died years ago of diabetes, and that her daughter Katrina a.k.a. “New Ma,” was doing her best to follow in her mother’s footsteps.

  The bell still tinkles on the front door of the sweet shop, and it still smells of sauerkraut, and the bins are overflowing with the identical sweets that Birdie and she had adored as kids. When the woman comes scuffling out of the back room, Tess gasps at how much she resembles Old Ma. My friend tells her she was sorry to hear about her mother, and they reminisce for a bit before she asks for the four sets of red wax lips for her sister and a Holloway sucker for herself. She runs her hand down the black iron railing next to the front steps on her way back to the car and it feels the same.

  It strikes her on the quick drive to the hospital how things may get an overhaul, but at the heart of the matter…do they really change? Do people? How much different was she really from the mixed-up sad girl who sat on the steps of Ma’s forty years ago hoping to learn more about love and life?

  Since she’d dissociated during their get-together last week, Tess is having a hard time recalling what her radiation oncologist, Dr. Sherman, had told her to expect at this morning’s mapping appointment. Something about receiving tattoos and that the thirty-six treatments would be painless. For sure he said, “You’re going to get a little tired.”

  She could handle just a little tired, but barely. The three surgeries had taken a toll not only on her mind, but her forty-nine-year-old body. She wanted to take Garbo for a walk down Chestnut St. yesterday, but they only got as far as the Keller’s house before she had succumbed to spaghetti legs and shortness of breath. (Some of those symptoms might not have been caused by her physical state. Strolling down the block always reminded her of how she and Will would tango down to the tree that he’d carved their initials in, and the passionate lovemaking that followed.)

  “Theresa…Tess Blessing,” she tells the itty-bitty woman at the cancer center’s check-in desk. “I have an appointment to get my mapping done.”

  “Welcome,” the gal says in a dolly voice. “I’m Marty. Dr. Whaley’s office forwarded your insurance information, so you can take a seat. Someone will be with you soon.”

  Two chairs down from us in the fluorescent-lit waiting area there’s an older, ski-pole thin, bald, black woman. Her grandbaby, who she may never see grow up, is at her feet making vroom, vroom sounds with a red Matchbox car.

  Tess thinks of Henry and turns her head away to take in the rest of the room. Unattractive nature prints similar to the ones that dot the walls of St. Mary’s North hang on the walls. The four
vinyl couches are muddy brown and worn on the arms, and the room reeks of nervous sweat, perfumes, and…salami?

  A medium-sized man with lovely white hair worn in a pompadour appears at the edge of the waiting room. “Theresa Blessing?” When she asks him to call her by her nickname, he replies in a voice that makes her think of the Shhhh sign at the library. “I’m Irwin.” The smile he shares is welcoming and very white. His eyes are Paul Newman blue and Tess wonders if he’s wearing contacts. “I’ll be your radiation tech for the next seven weeks.” He slips a lotion-softened hand around her elbow and guides her down a hall to the women’s locker room because men get breast cancer too. “After you change, wait here.” He gestures to six hard tan chairs lined up across from a wall TV where a cocoa-colored woman is seated. When he says, “Harriet,” the woman shuffles after him in worn, yellow bedroom slippers.

  Mostly, Tess selected this hospital because she’s positive she won’t bump into someone she knows from Ruby Falls who’d blow her cover. But that’s not the only reason. The color of the residents of this part of town played a huge part in her decision. Like I mentioned earlier on, my friend has always felt more comfortable with people of a darker hue. If they should hail from the South, they get bonus points. (Which came first? Her passion for To Kill a Mockingbird or the passion she brought to the story? Her subconscious also remembers more than she realizes about the first encounter we’d had when she and Birdie were driven furiously to the Core by Louise during one of her drop-off punishments. My rolled sugar cookies are hard to forget.)

  I say with a grin when she exits the locker room gowned and robed, “I take it that you’ve noticed that you’re the only white girl in the joint besides tiny Marty, right?”

  She cracks a smile—the first of the day—as she tugs her spine-broke copy of Miss Harper Lee’s book out of her lucky purse. She’s using her new To-Do List both as a bookmark and inspiration to press on, but she doesn’t stop to obsess over it the way she normally would. She dives into one of her favorite scenes in her favorite story to ground herself.

  Four cars of fired up men have arrived at the Maycomb jailhouse carrying a rope they’re fixin’ to drop over the neck of the man wrongly accused of raping Mayella Violet Ewell. Atticus Finch has come to guard his client Tom Robinson. In answer to the rumblings around town, he’s propped himself up in a chair outside the jailhouse door beneath a dark sky. Unbeknownst to Mr. Finch, his children, Jem and Scout, and their friend Dill have followed him into town. They’re witnessing the drama that’s about to unfold from the shadows the jail casts.

  As told by Scout: “They were sullen-looking, sleepy-eyed men who seemed unused to late hours. I sought once more for a familiar face, and in the center of the semi-circle I found one. Hey, Mr. Cunningham.”

  Courtesy of her PTSD, she isn’t just reading the story, she’s in the story. Breathing the hot honeysuckle perfumed Alabama night air, the leftover dust and sweat on the children, the car fumes, and the rancid bloodlust covering the men who are there to do the devil’s work. Atticus’s integrity is touchable. Scout’s voice…inches away.

  Tess is so immersed that soft-spoken Irwin must resort to shouting her name before she takes her nose out of the book.

  She says, “Sorry,” and follows him into a small room off the hallway.

  “Our controls,” he sweeps his arm Vanna-like across the panel of dials, meters, and flashing lights. “And that’s our radiation machine.” He nods through a viewing window at the metal monster. “Let me introduce you.”

  While Irwin is giving her the ten-cent tour around the radiation room, a muscular guy wearing tight blue jeans and Tony Lama boots joins them. He extends a calloused hand, and says, “I’m Cliff,” like he’s the boss around these here parts. (He’s wearing a wedding ring, but Tess would bet that’s not preventing Irwin from having a secret cowboy crush on him.)

  As Cliff helps her onto the table below the machine, he warns, “It’s extremely important that you don’t move during the process,” and then he and Irwin pick up rulers and begin measuring her breast, which is what mapping is all about. They’re formulating a AAA TripTik for the radiation machine.

  Irwin stomps his foot at one point during the process and tells Tess in a frustrated way, “I’m sorry this is taking me so long. Cliff is a lovely teacher, but…,” he shrugs, “I’m just learning the ropes.”

  You got the new guy…ha…ha…ha.

  Tess feels the familiar fear bunch up in her gut, but she doesn’t have the heart to request someone more seasoned, she can tell Irwin’s feelings would be hurt. She focuses on the ceiling. Cumulus clouds are floating across a trompe l’oeil sky. She and Haddie used to lie in their backyard grass and search for animal shapes back when her daughter still thought she hung the moon. The memory solidifies into a tear that drips past her right temple and down onto the papered table with a plop.

  Irwin stops whatever it is he’s doing to ask, “You okay?”

  Cliff takes a tougher love approach. “Hang in there. We’ve completed the measuring and it’s time for your tattoos.”

  While Irwin is creating the dots across her breast with a small branding iron under Cliff’s watchful eye, he repeats with every stab of the needle, “Ouch…I know that hurts, dear. Ouch…I know that hurts, dear.”

  Upon completion, Cliff high-fives Irwin and says, “Not bad for your first time, buddy.”

  It’s been a lot to take in.

  Tess is half-naked, flat on her back, the tattoos are stinging, and strange men are paying an awful lot of attention to her breasts. She feels like she’s been kidnapped by two motorcycle gang members.

  When she returns to the changing room, she bumps into me humming, Born to Be Wild.

  “Hardy har har. Don’t quit your day job,” she tells me as she bangs the locker door open.

  She’s in pain, worried about the treatments, but mostly, she’s fretting about Haddie, who would be home soon for her monthlong spring break. When her mother left for St. Joe’s each day, she would wonder where she was going. How would she react when Tess broke down and told her? Would the news send her into a tailspin? Force her to wedge her finger down her throat after she ate everything she could find in the pantry? Starve herself?

  Tess is in tears when I take her into my arms and whisper, “Need something?”

  “You can’t know,” she says as she rests her cheek against my shoulder.

  “Oh, but I can, darlin’.” I run my hand down her rumpled red hair. “Trust me. I know exactly what you’re hankerin’ for.”

  Aloha Means Hello and Goodbye

  A life-size wooden cross juts out of St. Lucy’s front lawn reminding all that the time for atonement and resurrection will soon be upon us. I tell Tessie from the confines of the Volvo that she’s parked on the street out front of the church, “Let’s go inside and say hi.”

  “I gave Him up for Lent.” This is not at all what she had in mind when I told her I knew what she needed. She was hoping for a hot-fudge sundae with extra whipped cream.

  “Please?” I ask.

  “Uh-uh.”

  “Quit playin’ hard to get.”

  After I pled with her for a few more minutes, she gives in, she has to. She’s got business to take care of.

  As we walk up the path to the church doors together, she’s gazing up at the cross and the body of Jesus Christ. “How does seein’ Him make you feel?” I ask her.

  “Defeated. I never noticed how skinny He is. If his mother couldn’t protect and nourish her kid, what are my chances?”

  I open the heavy double doors and slowly proceed down the main aisle with her in tow. The church is not ostentatious, the way some of them can be. Not too small, not too large, it reflects the character of Ruby Falls. It’s old the way the most of the town is, and resonates with the sounds of the beginnings, the middles, and the ends of life—squalling baptized babies, brides and grooms exchanging I do’s, and farewell funeral wails.

  Above the main altar, a cru
cified Christ looks down upon his flock. On one of the two smaller side altars, votive candles are flickering beneath the feet of St. Lucy, the patron saint of the blind. The altar on the right is guarded over by St. Theresa, the Little Flower. (I arranged that years ago. Good for her self-esteem.) Morning sun streams through three lovely stained-glass windows on the east side of the church. In a few minutes, the middle window will grab Tessie’s attention. It always does.

  I chose a pew up front. When I go straight to my knees, Tess doesn’t join me. She fidgets on the dark-blond bench behind me, pages through the hymn book, and beats out a rhythm on the wood, until she can’t stand the suspense anymore.

  Sidling up to me, she whispers, “What are you praying for?”

  “Not what. Who.”

  “Okay. Who?”

  “You.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I love you, and I’m not the only one. I want you to remember that when I’m gone.”

  She slams back in the pew like I’d slapped her. “No! You can’t go away, Grace. I won’t let you. I need you! I know I crossed number eight off my list, but I did it in pencil because I…I still might die! That…that radiation machine could shrink me the way it did Marty the receptionist at the center who I’m sure was average-sized at one time. Or…or cowboy Cliff could stop by during a treatment and Irwin could get distracted and set the machine too high.”

  “Yeah, that’s probably what’ll happen,” I say solemnly. “And after flustered Irwin reduced you to snack size, maybe he’d offer you a Coca-Cola spiked with curare to wet your teeny whistle.”

  After she gives me a disgusted look, one she absorbed from her mother, her attention wanders to the stained-glass window. When she’s in church for the life and death holidays, art lover Tess can’t help but be captivated by the magnificent blues and greens, the umber oranges and brilliant reds, but the remarkable craftsmanship is not what draws her to this particular window. It’s the subject matter. St. Joan of Arc swaddled in fire up to her neck is wearing a peaceful smile that has always annoyed the hell out of Tess.