He nodded in recognition, but said nothing.
“But then I can’t,” I went on. “For one thing, what Whitman is talking about is totally posthumous, and that’s weird, and kind of mean, and then if I ever bring up any kind of prospect of reckoning, it would be like triggering a smoke alarm. I’m worried she’ll shriek with terror.” At that, I faltered, and smiled apologetically.
“Sure, that’s Bernice,” he said, still grinning. Was this funny? I opened my mouth, then clapped it shut. I suddenly worried about what I was doing, in the Good Father’s mind. I was gossiping, maybe. Perhaps he had no intention of advising me at all. I swallowed hard.
Father McPhee at last rid himself of his grin and straightened, pushing at his glasses, coughing, and gazing downward as he assembled his thoughts.
“Frances,” he ventured, “my experience, such as it is, and maybe I’m not old, but I’m certainly around the old, is that people die the way they live.” He held my gaze. “Bernice has not lived her life reflectively and searchingly, is that fair to say?”
I nodded and bit my upper lip, suddenly on the verge of tears. How would I know if she’s lived her life searchingly? I’ve only met the woman three times.
“In some ways,” he continued, “Bernice is more like a child than an old woman. Which is—you know, the elderly often become childlike because they lose their faculties, they grow dependant—but Bernice has always been like that. Since I’ve known her. Like a particularly upsettable child. I don’t why that is, Frances.” He paused, in case I wished to provide an explanation, which I could not. “But I do know that she will not change on her deathbed. In most cases—God will correct me if I’m wrong—people just keep on living, keep on complaining or joking or raging or drinking, you know, whatever, until they fall off their barstools. Even when they’re administered their last rites, they are still very much animated by what drove them all along. With Stan, your father-in-law, I came in—I don’t know if Calvin told you this—I came in when he was in the Regional with pneumonia a couple of years ago; we thought he was very close. And the nurse explained why I was there, and he said: ‘I ain’t seein’ no priest on my deathbed. This is a special occasion, and I ain’t gonna talk to no one but the Pope.’” He laughed at the memory, his sides shaking, then sobered and leaned toward me. “Nor should you feel obliged to change her.”
I wasn’t about to argue. I sat there still as stone, considering the truth of what he’d said.
“On the other hand, Bernice has always been very open to receiving God. As I recall, she is very devoted to St. Anne de Beaupré. I believe that’s her patron saint?”
I nodded. I’d seen several St. Anne knickknacks in the house. Curious, I looked her up on the Internet and found out she was the patron saint of broommakers, French-Canadian fur traders, housewives and lost articles.
“So the great task,” McPhee concluded, crossing his hamlike arms, “of bringing the soul closer to God, has already been accomplished. Do you see this? All that is left for you to do, Frances, is to call upon God with your own prayers.”
“What do you mean?” I bit my thumbnail. Was God going to take care of this and let me get back to my own life?
“Pray for Bernice. Support her soul’s journey toward death and onward to Heaven through prayer.”
“Oh.” I winced at my childishness.
The priest cocked his chin to one side and considered me, clearly attuned to such instantaneous Good Person/ Bad Person struggles within his parishioners. “Is there anything you would like to confess?”
“I beg your pardon?”
“The words spoken in confession are guarded by the most solemn obligation of confidentiality, and I certainly hold that to be true in all circumstances. Is there anything you’d like to confess to, Frances?”
“Oh … that’s very nice of you.” Did he know I wasn’t Catholic? I was caught between confessing that I didn’t understand what he meant, and confessing anything else. “You mean, right now? Today’s sins?”
“Whatever is troubling your conscience.”
My shoulders drooped and I sighed. I thought about Bernice’s kitchen stuff. The greed tic. How I’d lied about something to Avery in November. How I dumped that guy in high school. And then, for some reason, I remembered that jet-lagged morning in Spain, long ago, in the house my mother rented in Malaga, when I accidentally went number two in a bidet. In a panic of embarrassment, I denied all responsibility when my mother found something wrapped in paper, sprayed with perfume, and concealed in the wastebasket. I suggested that she ask my grandmother. Rank exploitation of the elderly was emerging as a theme. I remembered other things too, worse things I’d done, which flashed into my conscious mind and disappeared into the dark of denial as swiftly as heat lightning. If, by your late thirties, you haven’t gone to confession, it’s more like Life Review on Judgment Day than a quick Hail Mary.
“Nothing important,” I mumbled.
“Everything is important in God’s eyes.”
“Well, I can’t see that.” I raised my head to argue, “I imagine someone confessing to strangling eleven old ladies with a nylon is going to have a more important conversation with God than someone who wants her dying mother-in-law’s wok.”
“You are covetous, then.”
“Only of appliances.”
“Go on.”
I felt like kicking myself for giving him something to work with. “It’s not like I want to go out and buy appliances. I do not covet all appliances. It’s just that I don’t have very many, and Bernice has tons, which are all just sitting around her house unused. Really, some of them are still in their boxes. And I wouldn’t even bring it up, except that I feel guilty about the fact that I’m thinking of Bernice’s stuff this way. But I can’t help it, because … the truth is, I don’t like her. I don’t like Bernice, and I want her wok.”
I was aflame with a sense of my own ridiculousness at this point, and couldn’t meet Father McPhee’s eyes. He said nothing for a moment, and then I felt his palm resting lightly on my knee.
I looked up, tentative. “So?”
“So?” he echoed, amused.
“So, what should I do?”
He resumed his original posture, elbows on his knees, eyes glinting behind the glasses, that big fat grin. “Don’t pine for woks, Frances. Set them aside. Give them away. Take Bernice herself up into your arms and pray for the Lord’s guidance.”
I nodded, rubbing my eyes, playing an imaginary game of Whack-A-Mole with the disgruntled and irritable thoughts that kept popping up in my mind, chief among them, “Damn it all to hell.”
“I know what you’re thinking,” McPhee said.
Oh, God, I hope not.
“You’re thinking you can’t do it. But I’ll tell you something: I may be a Catholic, but I’m not so narrow-minded I can’t quote a Jewish rabbi. Do you know Rabbi Herschel?”
“No,” I shook my head.
“That’s okay. You don’t need to know who he was, just what he said. He said—and I’ve always liked this—‘Religion begins with a consciousness that something is asked of us.’”
12
Christmas Eve. Santa Claus was coming, and so was Bernice. I’d hummed an anxious little song about it that morning, as I’d rushed around the house trying to make everything look just so, recovering Bernice’s medical gadgets and restoring some of her things.
“Can’t see my chuckwagon,” she announced right off the bat, as Calvin gingerly settled her into her easy chair by the fire. He himself had arrived only a few hours earlier, checked her out of the Regional and had yet to ease off his overcoat. Did Bernice think she couldn’t see the chuckwagon because I had put a tree up, all twinkly and bright with nightgowns wrapped for her beneath, or was she making a broader comment about my rearrangements in the house?
“Momma hid it,” Lester offered, from his perch on the arm of the couch. “She said it was a thing.”
“Okay, what he means by that,” I hastened
to add, tucking a blanket around her, “is that I didn’t want him playing with your things.”
Bernice made no reply. She was staring over the fireplace. “Is that a statue of Satan you put on my mantelpiece, Nancy, beside the Christmas carol trio, or what is that?”
“Oh. No, that’s a pliosaur, actually,” I said, as my cheeks flared crimson. “It’s uh … it’s one of Lester’s prehistoric marine reptiles. He just—you know, he puts these things everywhere and I just lose track.” Calvin chuckled, patting my back. He headed for the kitchen, saying over his shoulder, “Wanna cuppa tea, Mum?”
Bernice nodded weakly and Lester homed in on this new species, Satan.
“What’s a Satan, Granny?” he asked, pulling lightly on her fingers, which hung limply off the edge of the armrest.
“Oh, don’t worry about him, darlin’,” Bernice said, still distracted by her own dismay, “he’s just a fallen angel. The devil. You don’t want him to know you, dear. No, not at all.”
“Why?” Lester persisted. “Is he dangerous? Is he a meat-eater or a plant-eater?”
Bernice leaned her head on her chair back and laughed. Took off her glasses and rubbed her eyes. “Good Lord in Heaven, Lester, I don’t know what the devil eats. But he takes souls. You just be good, don’t listen to his voice, and he won’t take yours.”
* * *
Later, Calvin took Lester out to toboggan, and I found Bernice silently weeping in her chair. Was it the absence of Stan, I wondered, or the perturbation of pliosaurs and missing chuckwagons? Did she feel that her life was being dismantled and replaced? I can only imagine how distressing that sense of displacement would be. I hovered.
“Oh, go on,” she said, waving me away, “you go on and fix up Lester’s presents. I’m just tired, that’s all.”
It was unclear to me what Bernice noticed, or didn’t notice about her house, and I found myself compulsively worrying over each small transgression. Did she register that Lester and I had eaten all of her toffees? Was that okay, since we were guests? Or had we been hogs? Had she seen that I’d opened and investigated a box containing a brand-new pressure cooker? Just looked. I put it back beside the box of knives. Did she think I wanted to steal it?
Certainly, she seemed to think that Dana had pinched a knobby orange throw rug that no longer sat folded on the bureau beside her bed, and since neither Calvin nor I could locate this rug, after an earnest and irrationally guilt-ridden search, we had to agree that it had somehow exited the house. Later, we would learn that Bernice had sold it at a yard sale but forgotten. This wound up accounting for the lawn mower, too, and a number of other objects she’d been complaining about all autumn. But we hadn’t been around to monitor the humdrum transactions of her life. We had no idea what was true. We were lost with her, self-conscious and under suspicion, in the fun house of her own forgetfulness.
“No need to buy a turkey, Nancy,” Bernice had told me at the hospital, when I said I was headed to the IGA for Christmas dinner groceries. “Been savin’ one in the freezer. Got cranberry sauce down there, too. Lots of it. The secret to good cranberry sauce is not too much sugar. Shirley always spoils it, makes it too sweet.”
“Oh, okay,” I answered, “that makes things easier. Will you eat potatoes, Bernice, if I buy some?”
“You go on and get what you want, dear, I’ll eat what I can.”
So I did, and then, surprise. I went down on Christmas Eve to pull out the turkey for thawing, and found nothing resembling fowl, not even a chicken, residing in those arctic boxes filled with soup and jam.
“Oh, Lord in Heaven!” Bernice exclaimed from her easy chair, when I broke the news. “Dana’s stolen my turkey right out from under me!” She tugged at her white tufts of hair in distress and held a balled fist to her mouth to keep from crying.
“I didn’t take no turkey,” Dana retorted with a snort of derision when I phoned her at home, at Bernice’s insistence, to say, “Merry Christmas and where’s the bird, you robber.”
“Bernice don’t even cook turkey for Christmas,” Dana added. “Stan always wanted meat pie. You don’t believe me, ask Shirley. Shirley brings over her turkey leftovers, sometimes, so’s Bernice can make that rice soup she likes!”
“Alright,” I said, trying to mollify Dana, “don’t worry about it, I just promised Bernice that I’d ask. It’s hard to tell what’s true in what she says, you know.”
“That’s just because you ain’t been around,” Dana countered. “Otherwise it would be clear as the nose on your face.”
“I know, and I’m sorry. It’s confusing. Listen, have a Merry Christmas.”
I hung up feeling desperate for a scotch. Lester and Calvin were in the kitchen, arranging a plate of Peek Freans to leave by the fire for Santa. “Are you sure Santa will know that we’re here, and not home?” Lester pressed his father. “Are you sure?” He was very worried about it, as I had been the day before. (“Are you sure you remembered to buy Lester all the stuff I suggested. Are you sure?”)
I brought Bernice another cup of tea and sat down across from her chair. When I relayed Dana’s protestation of innocence, she rolled her head away from me, and closed her eyes. A tear began to wander down her withered cheek.
“It wouldn’a happened when Stan was alive, all this thieving and lying. Taking advantage of me.”
A silence settled between us, and at length I reached for the remote and turned on the TV.
Calvin hated having Lester bear witness to his mother’s fear.
“This is crap,” he said, as we lay down on the pull-out couch in the living room and stared at the ruby lights of the tree. “You spend so much time convincing your child that the world is a safe place, you know?”
I knew.
“And then my mother blows it all to hell by announcing that in fact, in fact, the world is really out to kill you and rob you blind. Oh, and watch out for Satan.”
“She doesn’t mean any harm,” I said quietly, flinging one arm up over my head, exhausted from the lastminute blitz of present-wrapping and stocking-stuffing.
“Maybe we shouldn’t have brought Lester here,” Calvin said. His tone was bleak, belligerent. Characteristic of Cape Bretoners—fatalistic Scots and doomed Acadians who arrived in the new world desperate and fucked, and never got over it, just took refuge in their wonderful, mordant humor.
“We should have brought him home for Christmas,” he continued. “We’re freaking him out. I’ll tell you what: I can’t stand parenting at both ends—trying to keep one end from completely alarming the other.”
“Well, it could be worse,” I ventured, turning to press my nose into his flannel-shirted side, which smelled of deodorant and Christmas pine, and ever so faintly of scotch. “We could be living at any other time in history, when families stayed together until the bitter end, all the different generations in one hut, having to do everything, you know? Fart in front of one another. Make love. Die. The children saw all of that. And then the dead bodies would hang around in the parlor with flies on them for a while.”
“Huts don’t have parlors.”
“Well, you know what I mean.” I cuffed him lightly. “Like that time I spent those three months in Cuba, and there was a dead dog outside on the road one day, it must have been hit by a car. Did I ever tell you about this? So you think, oh that’s grim and sad. The way you would think in Canada. But then it just stayed there. Nobody removed it. They didn’t have a department of sanitation, or whatever, in that town. Plus, it was the dry season, it never rained, so the body took an extremely long time to decompose. So, eventually the sentiment shifts from ‘Oh, that’s grim and sad’ to ‘Hey, I wonder what state of decay that German shepherd is in today? Has the tongue fallen out of the skull yet?’”
Calvin raised himself up on his elbow and twisted around to stare at me in amusement. “And your point is?”
I sighed. Defensive. I rolled onto my other side. “It’s not funny, Calvin. My point is that you can get used to anything. It�
��s just how far removed you are from trying times that makes you worry about Lester. He’s better off learning how to makes sense of the world now, for good and bad, than in expecting nothing to happen but sunshine and Santa.”
“Oh, you have been thinking,” Calvin murmured, sliding his arm around my waist and nosing into my neck. “I try not to do that on holidays.”
We were still in bed the next morning, drugged with sleep, ruffled heads immovable beneath the floral quilt, when I heard Bernice and Lester chatting in the kitchen as Christmas dawned.
I couldn’t make out what she was saying—she spoke in such a rasping whisper these days—but I certainly caught my own boy’s chipper Boy Scout sing-song. “It’s okay, Granny,” he told her, “you don’t have to worry about the devil. He doesn’t live in Canada.”
13
Monday morning. Freezing rain. Hunkered down and glowering, I rode the crowded streetcar to work after a long month’s absence, squished between two strangers talking on their cell phones. Bernice had returned to the Regional, unable to procure twenty-four-hour nursing until she’d been “signed over to palliative,” as Dr. Richardson explained it, which nobody seemed prepared to do. So we flew home to resume our lives in the uncertain light of her illness.
“Hey, Jim. Whassup?” the man to the left of me suddenly barked. “Yeah, I’m on my way to the office. I did go skiing. Yeah. The powder was awesome.” To my right, a young woman with blue-tinted hair sang out gaily, “No way! That is such a hoot! What do edible panties taste like?”
Believe Me Page 6
