The Father Pat Stories

by Patrick Gossage

  Prayer as Pat learned it in those years was not about analyzing loss or failure. It was not like a lover’s repeated mental reconstruction of the loss of the beloved or the agonized assessment of an inability to cope with a challenge. It was, as is prayer at its best, an absolutely silent inward search, a patient waiting for something of deeper meaning to happen. And for Pat sometimes it did.

  It was through praying intensely for his parents, for instance, that Pat felt he had contact with them when his daily physical contacts, particularly with his mother, were formal and cold. He even prayed for Stevey and for his friend Jeff who had now been cashiered by Alison and was heartbroken. This was Pat’s secret way of helping them. And he believed it did.

  And early on a Sunday morning, light-headed from fasting, Pat would stay on his knees for the entire eight o’clock communion service and believe he was in the presence of God. The real presence. He felt he was not alone.

  Half way through the year Pat started to notice from his vantage point to the right of the high altar on days he was helping with communion a fresh-looking young woman with a brilliant shock of blonde hair displaying great piety in the first row. Her face-in-hands humility sharply contrasted with the young woman’s outlandish outfits, large white hats, off-the-shoulder dresses, and for those days provocative white stockings and high heels. Hard not to notice. And Pat did.

  The woman rested lightly on Pat’s mind. Like some exotic flower never picked but left to grow and be enjoyed in a garden passed on a daily round. His university life was full, and between ever-increasing bouts of prayer and self-reflection, and helping in university drama productions, he could feel engaged in life.

  Yet this woman seemed to be speaking to him Sunday after Sunday. One Sunday driving home after the eleven o’clock service he passed her walking alone, her face down. The following Sunday he asked Father Doug about her as they were hanging up their robes in the vestry.

  “Yes, that’s Priscilla Anderson. A strange girl. Has problems I’m afraid. But she’s become a regular. I don’t quite know what she expects of me. But she’s called a couple of times.”

  “Oh.” Pat’s curiosity was piqued. “What about?”

  “Well I suppose there’s no harm in telling you. Heaven knows you might be able to help. Her mother is a drunk and abusive. Priscilla phoned once to ask if she could come down and just be here because she didn’t know where to go. I said sure. So in wafted this lovely thing all in tears. I tried to calm her. But she sort of rejected my attempts and rushed up to the chapel and stayed there for more than an hour. I went up and she was just coming out. She seemed to have fully recovered. Told me quite pointedly that it was a good thing God was there to help and then left.”

  “Sounds a bit disturbed.”

  “Yeah. I’m afraid so. The next call was about a boyfriend of hers and what he’d done to her. She just said she wanted to talk to someone. That her parents were hopeless. Well, I won’t go into details. Anyhow, it wasn’t quite my area of expertise, if you know what I mean.”

  “No, I understand.” Pat was more fascinated than ever. Here was a spiritual challenge perhaps.

  A few weeks later he was invited to a beatnik party given by a classmate, June Anderson. It sounded appealing in that he could go disguised and obviously could leave whenever he wanted. So he borrowed a beret, donned a dime store beard, put on a black shirt and borrowed a pair of black pants and appeared late at the Andersons’ large residence not far from campus.

  Pat blurred his way through the noisy living room. He found his hostess, who effusively latched on to him saying he absolutely had to meet her fascinating cousin. As he was being led by the hand, it dawned on him that indeed the cousin just might be the white-stockinged front-row woman of the same family name, Priscilla Anderson. Indeed the radiant face illuminated by a candle in a corner of the dining room belonged to the woman that had fascinated him from afar for many weeks.

  “Call me Pussy!” Priscilla said with a broad smile, looking up from her molding of the dripping wax. “Pussy Galore!” And she burst out laughing. Then “I know you!” from both simultaneously as they established the basis for what was to become a long and complex relationship of need, help, even love and compassion.

  Like most relationships that fasten one’s mind and heart, it started silly, it was launched in fun, playfulness and laughter. Priscilla was playing with two candles, molding the dripping wax in fantastic shapes. Pat added his own creations. Then they decided the party was hopelessly boring and they’d make their own — under the dining room table. Priscilla had a book of Shelley and they took turns reading to each other in hushed tones. The time flew by and at about midnight he found himself leading her to his car by the hand, leaving the noise and wild dancing echoing lightly in the snowy streetscape. At her door, a small makeshift lobby of a divided older house with three apartments, he took both her hands and looked at her in the dim yellowish light from an ugly Victorian overhead fixture.

  She had wonderful doe-like brown eyes set wide and more blonde hair than he had ever seen. A full mouth and somewhat flaring nostrils gave her an exotic appeal, which was enhanced by her creamy complexion and high cheek bones, and by her physical height and strong carriage.

  She looked right back at him.

  “Well, what do you see?” she said puckishly.

  “I don’t really know. But it’s sure nice to see someone close up you’ve been thinking about for a long time.”

  “You’re not going to screw me around if we see each other again — are you?”

  “No. I promise.”

  “Well, meet me tomorrow at five. On the corner. You can’t come to the door and ring. But you can take me for an ice-cream cone.”

  “It’s a deal.”

  So that day and nearly every day for more than a year thereafter he met Priscilla at the corner and they enacted their solitary relationship in a variety of locales, small coffeehouses, ice-cream parlours, the secret garden of a deserted mansion not far from her flat and occasionally at his parents’ house when they were away.

  And, of course, they now saw each other after church. This was a special time. It was short, because Pat still was expected home for Sunday dinner, but all the more piquant for that. Priscilla always looked wonderful at church and their walk to her door became a very special half-hour every week. The route took them across a narrow footbridge, down a long tree-lined lane, across a park and through old Mr. Galloway’s back gate and backyard, down his driveway and there they were, at the old oak door of 12 Methuen Street, the inaccessible door leading to the Andersons’ upper flat and its ugly secrets, the unhappy and fractured environment that Priscilla suffered, the dark and mysterious place that for better or worse was Priscilla’s home, a place that both repelled and fascinated Pat.

  It was on those walks particularly that Pat and Priscilla wove their young lives together. Free of place, free of adult judgement, praise of a Lord they understood in different ways still in their hearts, they shared their most treasured thoughts.

  “You know for me there are only two kinds of people in this world,” Priscilla said one spring Sunday as they strolled hand in hand across the footbridge. “Allies and enemies. You’re my biggest ally, my darling Pat. You’re there to fight for me. You’re always there. So is my friend Gayle.” Priscilla rambled on in her charming and enticing way as they stopped to look over the treetops into the ravine below. A couple was sitting right under them on a bench. They were kissing.

  She continued, oblivious, “Do you know that her uncle tried to kiss her while she was asleep last week. The nefarious old lecher. Grabbed her. She screamed and he beat it. Then she snuck into her parents’ room and called me. We talked all night. My father was out and Mom was drunk. Gayle has such spirit. I’m trying to get her to come to church. Got to get her out. She’s so shy. And a bit plain. But I’ve been trying to show her how to put on makeup. She needs eye makeup. She could look quite sensational if she tried. You know you should t
ake her out. Just for a coffee or something. Will you?”

  The couple below were now going at it enthusiastically. Pat pulled Priscilla around toward him and hugged her as hard as he could.

  “Why are you always trying to set me up with your girlfriends? You’re my girlfriend, aren’t you?”

  “Yes. I guess so. But poor Gayle …” and Pat managed to end her appeal with a lingering, open-mouthed kiss. For a young woman enduring more than her share of grief, Priscilla was friends to all friendless, whether stray cats, lonely maiden aunts, children of single mothers or of new immigrants that nobody paid any attention to. Pat was always her accomplice and often their five o’clock meetings would end in the musty living room of yet another stray that she had befriended at school and was enthusing over. This, of course, suited Pat’s idea of activist Christianity. And, of course, he’d pray for Priscilla’s strays.

  “Hasn’t she got beautiful hair?” she once said as Pat was introduced to Minna, the part-Greek, part-Italian classmate whose father had just left her and her mother. “Here Pat, touch it!”

  Pat obediently touched it then settled in while Priscilla probed away in her lively, exuberant way. “Oh that’s awful.

  What a jerk. Well, don’t worry. We’ll look after you, won’t we Pat?”

  That day on the footbridge Pat agreed to take Gayle out for coffee on Wednesday instead of seeing Priscilla at five. Then he would report. He left her at the outside door in the sun and as usual she looked longingly after him. Finally he had to turn the corner. She was still looking after him sadly, facing God-knows-what, Pat thought. Their “momentary pause amid the solitary waste” — they both liked Gibran’s The Prophet and often read it to each other — was over. He blew her a kiss and she caught it.

  Pat would swing home after a post-church encounter like this walking on clouds. He’d pass dinner with his parents and younger brother, Peter, in virtual silence. Then off to his third-floor study for an afternoon of “cracking the books,” Ed Sullivan on TV in the evening, again in silence with the family and off to bed with Priscilla and their five o’clock rendezvous the next day swimming his consciousness into sleep.

  That he never met her parents and she never met his didn’t seem abnormal to Pat. Why lumber them with other realities, which were only temporary costs to be borne for growing up. Anyhow, theirs were magic places. That spring Pat even borrowed his parent’s car on the pretense of having to go shopping for books and he and Priscilla made a breathless visit to Whitehaven. The cottage was closed, and there was still snow in the woods. But it was fine and sunny on the dock and for an hour they held hands and Pat told her what the cottage and lake meant to him.

  But, later that spring, realities did intrude. Pat’s light, undemanding nature and fixation on what he liked to think was the “spiritual” became a liability in this man-woman encounter, the depth of which he could not know or adequately deal with. Stevey’s “you’re too nice” would turn out to be prophetic. It started with a conversation with Doug the Rector the Sunday after Pat had dutifully taken out Gayle. He had missed talking to Priscilla that day. Couldn’t get through as her mother kept answering the phone, obviously drunk.

  “You know, last Wednesday Priscilla phoned me again,” Father Doug said as he and Pat were sitting in his office before Sunday service going over the week’s server duties.

  “Really? Mind telling me what about?” Pat knew that the rector knew he was seeing a lot of Priscilla. He had no idea what his parish priest thought about it. It had never come up.

  “Well, it was the same stuff. What a former boyfriend had done to her and what she could do to escape her drunken mother. I’m afraid there wasn’t much I could say. Bit out of my depth. I suggested that if she needed spiritual counseling, she’d be welcome to make an appointment. By jove, I’m not even sure she’s confirmed. Is she? You should know.”

  This self satisfied, institutionally centred sequence that seemed indifferent to a parishioner’s suffering left Pat speechless. At least he’s been praying for Priscilla and being a good friend to her even before they became romantically involved.

  “Do you pray for her?” he heard himself saying.

  “What kind of question is that? Of course, we all do, many times in the course of a week.” What a cop-out, Pat thought, thinking of the Book of Common Prayer’s appeal for “all sorts and conditions of men.” Doesn’t even mention women, let alone young vulnerable women in precarious home situations. Maybe I’m mixing up the sacred and the profane, but surely the church has to have some sort of answer for a woman like Priscilla, beyond providing a service of worship, however uplifting, once a week, he thought. Much later, when Father Pat reflected on the church and Priscilla, he realized this was a turning point in his attitude to organized religion.

  “At any rate, I know you are seeing her,” the good rector droned on pompously. “Perhaps you would be good enough to pass on my invitation. She was upset when she called and may not have understood. You will, won’t you?” Clearly this red-faced co-worker in God’s fields did not want to harvest this potentially dangerous young woman.

  Pat could not believe what he had just heard. Here was his Priscilla sending out a signal of distress to the church and the door was virtually shut. He determined to open it as God’s surrogate for the rector. He decided to broach the subject the following Monday. He would “sign out” from home for the evening, borrow the car and take Priscilla to their favourite coffee-house, the 79, a downstairs hangout in what was then the city’s somewhat hippie village.

  When he picked her up at the corner and on time, she was dressed appropriately. A big black-and-gold shawl over a full purple skirt with matching peasant top. She was in full makeup and her golden hair was freshly curled and cascaded over her shoulders.

  “You look terrific,” Pat said as he politely helped her into the family VW.

  “Not often I get you for the whole evening. And don’t think this just happened!” she replied, pulling her full skirt through the door after her as she swung into the low seat. Pat watched her slim legs follow and waited while she arranged herself before reaching across and pulling the door shut.

  As they drove to the coffee shop, Pat thought silently about how little he really knew about this human flower who had put herself in his care. They had constructed an appealing, even complex series of relations with each other and other people and things and routines, and they shared about the same kind of physical intimacy as he had experienced with Stevey. He felt he was helping her cope — a favourite word of the late fifties — which meant barely surviving but carried a measure of courage and will with it. But he occasionally sensed she needed a lot more.

  Often they would meet and he would sense something dark and threatening shadowing her, marking her face. He would always put his arm around her as she stared straight ahead and ask, “What’s wrong?”

  Her answers were often elliptical. Perhaps it was how her evil mother had refused to buy the cat food her beloved tabby, tigger, needed for her upset tummy. Or how a teacher she “adored” had refused to giver her an extension on a book review already days overdue, another betrayal, in Priscilla’s terms. She would look down at her bracelets and turn them thoughtfully on her wrist; they were her mantras, symbols of friends and relatives she loved and from whom she could take strength.

  “This is one darling old Aunt Iris gave me — she loves me. And this is the one you got for me when we first met, Pat. I’ll always wear it.” She’d be reassured. But Pat sensed that these stories, these comforts, were surrogates in some way for what really could help.

  In this case she had obviously called Father Doug Charter for real, perhaps more mature solace, in real desperation. And as Pat helped her out of the car at the dingy lot beside the coffee shop he realized again that he stood convicted in a different way. She had not called him.

  “Oh, Pat, I was just upset. I didn’t want to bother you at home. What would your mother think? She already hates me, I’m sure.
Isn’t that what priests are for? Helping damsels in distress!” Priscilla had a way of fictionalizing and dramatizing her life that Pat felt often made too light of more gnawing problems.

  “Anyway after the way he put me off, he goes on my enemy list. That’s for sure. But not you. Oh, if only you were my very own personal priest.” She was now on a roll and grabbed his arm in the dark. “Let’s change the subject.”

  “Not quite. Not quite. You apparently had some trouble with a boyfriend. The rector said it was out of his league to discuss that with you. Why not try me? Maybe I should know anyway.”

  “Well, you haven’t told me much about you and your cottage friend Stevey. Ever go to bed with her? Did you love her? Do you see her?” Priscilla wasn’t going to let this opportunity slip by without exacting some conversational equity.

  “Come on, Priscilla, she dumped me after we’d spent a summer playing around. That’s all. I’ve told you. I haven’t seen her since I started university. Now what about this problem you had. Isn’t there anything you can say? Am I not worthy?” That was a clincher.

  “Well I suppose you are — Mister Nosy. Do you really want the whole gruesome story?” She looked at him knowingly. She was taking him somewhere from which there might be no turning back.

  “When I was fifteen I met this guy, a wealthy guy called Ted. Let’s just leave him as Ted. He had a sister at school and used to come and pick her up after class in a big Thunderbird. I used to watch him. It was his parents’ car. It was a chore I guess he did every other day or so. Her name was Iris, same as my favourite Aunt’s, and she was a year behind me. I knew her a bit from basketball, which — don’t laugh — I played for a year or two.

  “Well, one day I was talking to her and he pulled up. He looked great. Must have been eighteen or nineteen. Black hair done just so and a wonderful blue crew shirt with white pants and white loafers. Bit of a dream — in a dreamboat, I suppose. So assured as can be he says to Iris, ask your friend if she wants a lift? I wasn’t hard to persuade.