Last Things

by Ralph McInerny

  “Maybe it was the Edmundites.”

  17

  Jessica came to the hospital on Sunday straight from Mass and stopped in the restaurant off the lobby to pick up a roll and container of coffee before going upstairs. She met Raymond in the hallway as he was coming out of her father’s room. He looked stricken.

  “Raymond?”

  He stared at her a moment before recognizing her, and his expression changed into a California one. She hesitated but he did not, taking her in his arms. He said as he held her, “That was bad.”

  “What happened?”

  “Later.”

  If ever. “How like Dad you look.”

  “Do I?” He stepped back. “You look just like you.”

  “Come on, you didn’t recognize me at first.”

  “Jet lag.”

  They found their mother in the waiting room, sitting with her eyes closed, a rosary in her hands. When she opened her eyes and looked at Raymond she saw at once that her prayers had not been answered.

  “He’s being stubborn, Mom. That’s all.”

  Of course she knew better. “What did happen?” Jessica asked.

  “He wanted me to hear his confession.”

  “Could you do that?”

  “I told him I’d have to get in line; there were several others before me.”

  “They won’t be able to do a thing,” Margaret said. She got to her feet. “I’ll go in to him.”

  “I’ll be along in a minute, Mom,” Jessica said. When they were alone, she asked him, “Could you do that, hear his confession?”

  “Technically.”

  “Do you lose the power or what?”

  “Something like that. The exercise anyway.”

  “Then do it, Ray. For Mom.”

  He smiled at her. “It doesn’t even require that I believe in what I am doing.”

  “Ex opere operato.”

  “How on earth did you know that?”

  “I’m researching a story.”

  She almost hoped he would ask about it, but he only said, “We have a lot of catching up to do.”

  “I want to hear all about California.”

  “Not all.”

  “What you do, how you live, everything like that.”

  “My favorite subject.”

  “Do you have pictures of Phyllis?”

  “No. Does that sound awful? We’ve never been apart. I do have her photograph on the desk in my office.”

  “What’s she like?”

  “What have you heard of her?”

  “That she was a nun. And you were a priest.”

  The expression he had worn coming from her father’s room was back. “Raymond, I didn’t mean …”

  “I know. Everyone is so damned kind. Except Dad.”

  Leaving together as they had spared him and Phyllis experience of the shock they had caused. Was this the first time he had confronted anyone who thought he had done something awful?

  “Is that coffee?” The container had cooled in her hand.

  “I got it downstairs.”

  “Come with me so I can get some.”

  “Didn’t Mom feed you?”

  “That has to be a rhetorical question.”

  They went down in the elevator in silence. This was so different from being with Andrew; with Andrew she always felt a little edge of resentment. Raymond was such a different kind of brother, tall, good looking, tan. And dressed about a season off for Chicago.

  The cafeteria had been almost empty when she stopped there; now they had to get in line, no skipping places just for coffee.

  He leaned toward her and whispered, “Everyone is so fat.”

  “I’m not.”

  “No, you’re not. You’ve become a beautiful young woman.”

  No flattery, just an observation. She found that she liked him. Of course she felt sorry for him, too, having seen what the visit to her father had done to him.

  Eventually they got coffee, he paid, and they took a little table that looked onto the parking lot and the entrance to Emergency. Half the customers in the cafeteria wore hospital garb. Outside were smokers, all in hospital garb.

  “I’m surprised they allow it.”

  “You don’t smoke?”

  “Not for years. Do you?”

  “Only when lit.” A stupid remark, a blush spread over her face, and she frowned at the smokers out in the cold, killing themselves in stages.

  “In the seminary in those days, everyone smoked. I suppose it was like the service.”

  “Do you miss it?”

  “Smoking?”

  “All of it.”

  “You ask very direct questions.”

  “And fail to get an answer.”

  “What story are you writing that required you to find out about ex opere operato?”

  “Oh I don’t want to talk about me. I want to hear about California.”

  He decided she meant it and proceeded to describe the house in Thousand Oaks, the offices he and Phyllis had, their clientele.

  “What are they, crazies?”

  “No. Normal enough. Full of self-loathing and guilt.”

  “From what?”

  “Usually sex.”

  “It sounds like hearing confessions.”

  “Well, it isn’t ex opere operato, no inevitable results.”

  “So what do you tell them?”

  “What they want to hear, mainly. Sometimes I think Phyllis and I are charlatans. There are many who would find it odd that we should be telling others how to live their lives.”

  “Doesn’t a priest hearing confessions feel that way?”

  “But he’s not acting in his own name.”

  “So hear Dad’s confession. You can do it. It would be such a relief to Mom.”

  “Jessica, it’s just his way of blackmailing me. It’s a bargain. He goes to confession and I …” He made a face. “What a godawful conversation to be having when we haven’t seen one another in years.”

  “Did you miss us?”

  “You don’t forget your family.”

  “That sounds as if you tried.”

  “I did. I had a lot of forgetting to do.”

  “Have you ever regretted going?”

  Again he made a face. “You’ll end up writing a book about me.”

  “Did you ever read my novels?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well?”

  “The dust-jacket praise is deserved. I marveled at your ability to tell a story so movingly.”

  She definitely liked him.

  “Are we going to spend the day here?” he asked.

  “Andrew will come at noon, then you and I can go.”

  “Mom?”

  “She’ll stay of course.”

  “Andrew went on and on about academic politics at St. Edmund’s.”

  “Trouble in paradise.”

  He laughed. “That’s what we called our residence there. Paradiso.”

  During the next several hours Jessica fluctuated between wanting to abandon her novel and being determined to write it. Being with Raymond made it a more vivid idea. If he hadn’t come home, if she hadn’t had the chance to talk to him, her character would have been very different, black and white. Tout comprendre est tout pardonner. Would he go out to St. Edmund’s and see old friends? The thought seemed to alarm him. “They might be more unforgiving than Dad.”

  “Are you in touch with any of your old friends in the Order?”

  “No.”

  What an odd man he was. Was it possible simply to walk away from one’s life, to tell no one he was going, never contact his family or his friends? How could one escape the memories that brought the past into the present willy-nilly?

  “Latin was one of my favorite subjects,” she said apropos of nothing, and everything.

  “It lost its significance in the Church, but I loved it too.”

  “Horace?”

  “Livy was more to my taste. My teacher for Horace was a bore. H
e seemed always to fear we would catch him in a mistake.”

  “Maybe it’s because I’ve only read him on my own. It’s not just the odes; he is a collection of pithy phrases.”

  “Such as?”

  “Dimidium animae meae. Non omnis moriar. Are you testing me?”

  “Jessica, if there is one thing I am sure of it is that you would not pretend.”

  But she felt she was pretending with him. It was undeniably moving to be reunited with the older brother she had never really known, but it was equally undeniable that she was studying him with an eye to her novel. He was forty-one, he had been gone almost a decade. How long had he been active as a priest, half a dozen years?

  “I count all the years, from the time I entered the novitiate.”

  “What happened?”

  He looked at her. “I don’t want to shock you.”

  “You won’t.” Was there some lurid story to be told?

  “I lost my faith.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “It was as sudden as some conversions. Gaining and losing faith have a lot in common. One day while saying Mass I realized that I did not believe that the words of consecration made any difference. What was bread and wine before was still bread and wine.”

  “Just like that?”

  “That is how it seemed to me then. It still does. Maybe things led up to it, but I don’t think so.” He tipped his head. “Phyllis came after, not before.” But he looked away when he said it.

  “But what you believed was a miracle already. You couldn’t have been surprised at what consecration means.”

  “The Eucharist is so central to it all that if belief in it goes everything goes. Losing faith in it destroyed my sense of the priesthood, and with the priesthood go the bishops who ordain and the apostles from whom they descend and the whole tradition of the teaching Church. I had a greater sense of its coherence when I lost it than when I had it.”

  “And you couldn’t pretend?”

  “Could you?”

  “No.”

  “That’s why I can’t do what Dad asks. Even if I thought he was sincere about it, I couldn’t do it. Of course if it’s all true, then what I believe or don’t believe would not vitiate the deed. But you know that.”

  What a nice smile he had. “What did Dad say when you refused him?”

  Again the abject expression he had worn when he came out of their father’s room.

  “He called me Judas.”

  18

  “Can your father receive visitors now?” Gloria asked, her pretty mouth a pout, avoiding his eyes.

  Andrew looked at her. Only those we know can be such strangers. Gloria was miffed that, at this critical moment, he had excluded her from the drama of his father’s illness. Did she expect him to show up at his dying father’s bedside with her on his arm? Apparently she did. She had never met his father. On the one occasion she had come with him to his parents’ home, only his mother had been there, and the consideration she had shown Gloria told him that she had guessed their secret. Secret? Of course it was a secret, and suddenly a source of shame.

  “So you are in the same building?” his mother had said, when she had asked Gloria where she lived.

  Gloria glanced at him, and he gave a little shake of his head. But then he caught his mother’s eyes and saw that she was not deceived. How must what the world had become strike her, men and women living together without benefit of clergy, their cohabitation having nothing to do with the biological purposes of gender? He had wanted to erect a buffer between this self-effacing, good woman and the mores of the time. Her son the priest had deserted his vocation and gone off to California with a nun; her only daughter worked in a pathologist’s lab, wrote novels the old woman could not understand, and showed no signs of settling down and marrying. That he himself added to the cross she bore filled him with a desire to flee, but of course she insisted they must have something to eat, wait for his father, pretend that Gloria was just a friend of his who happened to be with him when he stopped to say hello to his mother.

  That had been two months ago, and nothing had been quite the same between him and Gloria since.

  “Why didn’t you tell her?” Gloria had asked with that prelapsarian innocence that explained in large part her attraction for him. His residual conscience had no counterpart in her; he had never detected the slightest indication that she regarded their living together as in any way at odds with the way things ought to be. How had he drifted into their arrangement? Drift seemed to be the right word; he could recall no agony of decision when the practical advantage of their sharing an apartment had arisen.

  “She wouldn’t understand.”

  “Andrew, she knows.”

  “Did she say something?”

  “She didn’t have to.”

  “So what’s the point?”

  “Are you ashamed of me?”

  This was in the car after they had driven away from his parents’ house. For answer, he had turned the car around and headed back to the house.

  “What are you doing?”

  “If you want me to tell her, we will.”

  “Oh, don’t be silly.”

  “Are you ashamed of me?”

  Her question, redirected, made her laugh. She took his arm and moved closer against him.

  “Let’s go home, you idiot.”

  Victory of a sort, but from that visit she had understood what he really thought of their living together. That a man should find irresistible the prospect of having a live-in girlfriend was no mystery, but that a woman whose body was the perpetual possibility of pregnancy should agree to it was something else.

  “Let’s get married,” he said.

  “Married!”

  She had received tenure the previous spring, she was a member of the faculty senate, her rewritten dissertation was scheduled for publication, and she had already cannibalized it for a number of articles in historical journals. She had defined herself as an academic, and living with him was sufficient concession to the urges of the flesh. It was clear as could be that she had no intention of having children. Even if she had, the category of single parent would have been sufficient for her. Graduate school and academic politics had made her a foe of bourgeois standards. Her contempt for the past and its vision of life was odd in an historian. What could marriage add to what they already had? Did she imagine the two of them growing old together, sharing a bed and campus gossip, busy with their separate careers, living happily ever after? But the future seemed as uninteresting to her as the past.

  He thought these thoughts and hated himself for them. He was trying to heap on her the guilt he had felt when his eyes met his mother’s. He knew how those old eyes would view the life he led. And he knew he shared her judgment on it.

  “Sometimes I think I am exploiting you.”

  “I don’t know what you mean. I thought it was mutual.”

  “Mutual exploitation?”

  “That’s your word.”

  She had no counterpart of his mother. Her own had engaged in serial matrimony, something Gloria professed to despise.

  “She has no notion of herself except as attached to a man.”

  Which meant that Gloria’s attachment to him was only incidental to what she was. The one thing they had never discussed before he moved his things into her apartment—hers was larger than the one he’d had and there was no question which could accommodate them both—was an exit strategy. In theory, at least, marriage ruled out an exit. Divorce would have been easier than any decision to move out of her apartment. Their apartment.

  The following weekend they had flown to New York, where she was to read a paper at a meeting of historians and they could avail themselves of the excitement of the city. Such flights from the ordinary were the seasoning of their lives, sharing a hotel room more illicit than their shared apartment in Fox River. His parents’ ignorance of their living together was something else they couldn’t talk about, like Horst Cassirer, who
m Gloria professed to admire. The visit to his parents’ home had been a revelation to her, and she saw how he regarded their life together. He knew this, not because she said anything, but because she hadn’t. Until her question about visiting his father in the hospital.

  “Would you like to come along?”

  “I don’t know. What do you think?”

  He ostensibly gave it thought. “Maybe later. If he continues to get better.”

  She seemed relieved. She did not really want to visit a dying man in the hospital.

  Aunt Eleanor had met Gloria, and it was clear from the outset that she understood and, being Eleanor, had to let him know that she knew.

  “Of course your parents don’t know.”

  Andrew just smiled at her.

  “It would kill them.”

  He was damned if he would discuss it with her. Eleanor’s status in the family was in one way clear and in others obscure. Her marriage to Uncle Joe had made her one of them, and her remarriage hadn’t weakened her obvious assumption that she remained a Bernardo. They all joked about Eleanor; she had become a caricature of the maiden aunt despite her twice widowed status. She seemed to regard herself as the guardian angel of the family. So it was not surprising that she fussed about how Margaret could possibly cope if something happened to Fulvio.

  “I’ve talked with Jessica about it, and it was suggested that someone ought to make sure that everything is in order. Of course you’re no more practical than your mother, Andrew. I myself am perfectly willing to put order into his papers.”

  “That would be up to my mother.”

  “But what do you think?”

  “I am sure that Dad’s affairs are in apple pie order.”

  “Isn’t that an odd phrase? You have to understand that I have experience in such matters. I have been through it twice.”

  “You want to check out his financial affairs?”

  “No, of course not. I was thinking of his papers. Letters, that sort of thing. It is unbelievable how things accumulate.”

  “I’m sure my mother would appreciate any help you could give her.”

  Eleanor squeezed his hand. “I will tell her you said so. And, Andrew?”

  “Yes.”

  “I wouldn’t burden your parents with any revelations about Gloria.”

  For years, Andrew had resented what Raymond had done, seeing what it did to their father, but in some ways he was glad to have his older brother fall off his pedestal. Raymond had always been the standard the rest of them fell short of, but his defection had changed all that, at least with his father. He was certain his mother would say nothing to his father about Gloria, but even if she had it would not have figured as high on Fulvio’s scale of disillusionment. He might in his way approve. The old man had always had a flirty manner, pawing ladies, even Aunt Eleanor. Had there ever been anything more?