The Father Pat Stories

by Patrick Gossage

  Joe, her estranged husband, who she had not heard from since he traded suburban Ridgewood for the life of an alcoholic street person in the distant city, had suddenly phoned that week pleading to be allowed to see his daughter at Christmas.

  “Well, when I told Mary, she’d have none of it,” Alice said, sniffing back an impending tear. “She utterly refused and told me she remembered how Daddy had shouted at me and so on. When I told Joe, he was devastated.”

  Mary, cowering behind her mother’s skirt, nodded silent assent.

  “He told me he was reformed,” Alice said. “He said he was off the street, living in a rooming house and trying to get a job. “I feel just awful, it being the Christmas season and all. There must be something you can do to help …” Alice’s voice trailed off.

  Father Pat was stumped. These were not the kind of long-running dramas that he liked to become involved in. Yet the simple desire of a father to see his daughter at Christmas, together with how easy he personally found it to forgive, quickly won his heart.

  “You should go into the city, Alice. I think you have to see him and at least judge face-to-face if he’s reformed. Then you can perhaps tell Mary what you think.” Not very convincing, he thought as he looked down at the little girl who appeared very anxious indeed. “That’s about all I can think of at this point”, he added, trying to be as reassuring as possible. “Kids sometimes don’t want to forget, but you never know, it would take a bit of a miracle though.” A real old fashioned miracle, he thought.

  When he was back in the nearby rectory, the phone rang and it was his reporter friend, Deirdre Donaldson. She was her usual upbeat self, her voice rising as they went through the niceties of old friends catching up. She teased him good-naturedly as she often did about missing what he liked to call his former “political calling,” particularly on a Sunday, which was now once again his busiest day.

  “Exhausted from your half-day work week?” she asked, needling him.

  “No, dear Deirdre, I’d say inspired and a bit challenged. Looks like I’ve got something to get my teeth into tomorrow — for a change.” Deirdre knew how he hated Mondays, when he had to scratch to feel useful in a little community that, like most, didn’t make church the focus of its life.

  But while Father Pat worried silently about Alice Alnick, the conversation revolved around Deirdre being stuck doing a story on street people and the desperate straits they were in since the provincial government had cut back hostel funding.

  “Do you know any former street people who could talk articulately about the need for shelter, particularly in the winter?” she asked. Father Pat immediately put Alice’s Joe into the conversation.

  “I’ll get a fix on him,” he told her. “Some positive mention of him in the paper wouldn’t hurt…” He explained the situation with Alice and his daughter. Great, he thought, plugged into the power of the press again. He missed political shop talk with Deirdre. In fact he missed her since his move back from Ottawa had distanced what had then been almost daily contact. They had been useful to each other — the best way for people to relate, Father Pat thought.

  “IT’S THAT ALICE Alnick, and she’s called you about three times this morning already —.in tears, if you can believe it,” Brenda, his wife, was holding the cupped receiver as he shook the snow off his worn oxfords. She was long-suffering in accepting the impositions of the faithful but had secretly preferred the distance she had been able to put between herself and Pat’s political life. Sobbing women, of whom this was not the first, had a way of impinging on your home life.

  Father Pat was returning from his somewhat hopeless rounds comforting the sick at the local hospital, which he had decided to move from Tuesday to Monday since a parishioner had asked him to visit a mother who they didn’t think would make it through the week.

  “Now,” he thought, as he took the receiver and Brenda turned on her heel, “a challenge from the mentally challenged.”

  “Well, I went to see Joe yesterday evening.” Alice was breathless and upset. “He seemed reformed, but I told him flat out that his daughter didn’t want to see him and he flew into a rage. He talked about suicide, getting drunk again, and stormed out. I just sat in that awful, horrible rooming house and cried.”

  “Look, I’ll go and see him tomorrow,” Father Pat said. “There’s got to be something we can do.” Father Pat was pretty sure there wasn’t. But he saw an advantage in meeting him when Deirdre did her interview. Perhaps he could find something positive to bring back to Alice. Anyhow, an opportunity to mix holy business and the pleasure of seeing Deirdre wasn’t to be missed. And, at least he’d have a second objective opinion on whether there was any way to get the family together. Father Pat would sit in on the interview. There seemed nothing to loose.

  So, Tuesday morning, after a long and slippery drive into the city, Father Pat found himself squeezed next to his tall reporter friend on a dirty couch in the smelly lounge of a downtown rooming house waiting for Joe.

  “So, here we go again,” Father Pat said. “Don’t run off afterward, I want to know what you think of him. There’s more than a story riding on this. I have to make a reunion happen or Brenda will leave me. Joe’s wife has been phoning daily in tears.”

  “Good thing I wasn’t getting the calls,” Deirdre said, trying unsuccessfully to put herself into Brenda’s shoes. She had nearly always lived alone and could not imagine dealing with a husband’s emotional clients as a duty. “I’d politely suggest this Alice see a shrink.”

  “Well I have to at least believe that I know enough about humanity and human nature to be something of a help in this situation. At any rate, that’s my job too,” he said defensively.

  “Don’t take it personally Pat. But this does sound like a loser, don’t you think?”

  With that they heard a heavy footfall and a big man heaved into the room. Joe was a rarity among alcoholic street people. He was a large, full-framed intense middle-aged man whose grey hair and white beard gave him a striking, somewhat prophet-like appearance. And he had the mouth to go with it.

  Father Pat’s apprehensions about the meeting turned out to be justified. Joe started the interview by swearing there were only two things he needed to finally get back on his feet.“I gotta see my daughter. “I gotta get a decent job. Period. Plain and simple. End of story,” he said flatly.

  At least his lurid stories of living on the street helped Deirdre. He spoke well and gave her great anti-government quotes. He was making minimum wage doing physical labour nearly every day, “donkey work” as Joe, a former Cape Breton miner called it. But even that didn’t give him enough to afford anything but a cheap room.

  “Look at these lousy duds. Who’d hire a guy who looks like a bum. But unless I can get decent housing for less, forget it. I can’t even afford a haircut. And they tell me that I’ll wait three years for subsidized housing. Damned if you do, damned if you don’t. Hell of a life. I paid hellish Jesus taxes for fifteen years and now when I need it, it isn’t there. They can afford …” and he tailed off into a story of the premier going to his cottage in a helicopter. Father Pat wondered what Jesus had to do with taxes.

  “Anyway, Father, looks like you could use a new pair of shoes yourself,” he said bursting into laughter as he looked down at the priest’s scuffed black oxfords that were coming apart at the seams.

  “Well, what do you think?” Father Pat asked Deirdre anxiously as they bustled out arm in arm into the cold downtown street.

  “I think he’s a good storyteller. I’m not sure what he’s worth as a husband. But then, how would I know?”.

  Father Pat smiled at this challenge and, lightly kissing her cheek, said good-bye.

  Later that day Father Pat decided, in what seemed a hopeless situation — Brenda was finding Alice’s tear-stained calls increasingly tiresome — that he would take a leaf out of his years in politics and try and fix up a full-time, respectable job for Joe. He also hoped that if Deirdre’s story used Joe in a p
ositive light, it might help convince his daughter that he was a changed man.

  The next day, he scanned the paper the way a politician does — first browsing for “reviews”, stories that commented on the political doings of himself, his friends and the government, then back over the front section again to read in detail. Deirdre’s feature was a full-page story on an inside page with a lurid photo of a filthy man peering out from his cardboard home under a bridge. The headline, “GOVERNMENT CONDEMNS ME TO HOPELESS FILTH,” did no justice to the more articulate criticisms of the housing program’s shortfalls that Joe had given Deirdre. Worse, Joe’s truncated story was lumped with a number of other desperate street people Deirdre had interviewed. She was on the phone after breakfast to Father Pat.

  “I can’t believe what they did to my story, Pat,” she was clearly upset. “They rewrote it after I filed. I wish I’d never talked to that guy under the bridge. The desk couldn’t resist him. And he really was a bum. Oh damn, another tussle with Carter.” Carter was her city desk editor and Deirdre found it demeaning to have to hassle with him about basics like the integrity of a story. She had a good decade more experience than he did. And more irritating, the young man teased her about being single.

  “I can’t believe the editing. My reference to Joe as a reformed alcoholic who actually works was deleted. Shit. It strengthened the story. Carter’s too damn stupid to know.”

  Deirdre had already phoned Alice to apologize. But the damage was done. That afternoon Alice called Father Pat to say that little Mary was being teased by her friends at school about the piece.

  Curse the power of the press, Father Pat thought. He spent much of the day regretting that he had involved Deirdre at all. Now a whole lot of people had been hurt, including Deirdre, who Father Pat knew had a good heart as well as a keen eye, and, unlike many of the next generation of journalists, showed great respect for the subjects of her stories.

  It was now Wednesday, and with little else to do except plan Sunday’s sermon and meet the aging altar guild, Father Pat, after trying a few fruitless calls to local establishments that sometimes took on workers, phoned his entrepreneur brother, Peter, in desperation. Did he have any decent work Joe could do?

  A difficult conversation ensued. It was clear that “bums” like Joe deserved what they got — at least in Peter’s view. But if Joe would deign to come and clean out his garage.

  “You know perfectly well, Pat,” Peter explained in his patronizing way, “nobody likes getting their hands dirty with this kind of work anymore. I know I’ve been trying to get someone to clean the basement for weeks.” Further examples of the innate sloth of welfare bums followed.

  Father Pat could think only of Joe’s tired hands and his tales of eight hours of loading huge scaffolding timbers on trucks for $4.50 an hour.

  SATURDAY BEFORE THE first Sunday in Advent. Father Pat had persuaded Alice and her daughter to help set up the big créche outside the church. Little Mary was unusually talkative as they set carefully wrapped china doll baby Jesus into the manger.

  “Were Joseph and Mary married?” Mary piped up.

  “Well … yes. And they were very poor. But everyone was so kind to them. They knew their baby Jesus was special — well, all children are. And their parents are so important to them when they’re young …and always …” Father Pat explained, thinking that he’d taken the story about as far as he could. This brought a fleeting refection on his and Brenda’s failure in having their own children, a kind of lingering incompleteness that often lay quietly but heavily on his soul.

  “Did they have other babies?” Mary was determined to get the whole story.

  “No. Jesus was their only child. Just like you. But he grew up to be very important and to be a wonderful teacher. Maybe you’d like to be a teacher?”

  “I don’t like my teacher.”

  Ouch, thought Father Pat, wrong comment.

  “She wouldn’t stop them from teasing me about the newspaper at recess,” the little girl continued. “All she said was, ‘Poor you, Mary’.”

  Father Pat could almost feel the syrupy sentiment. Poor little Mary indeed.

  As they finished placing the wooden animals, Father Pat realized that priestly homilies to seven-year-olds were ineffective today. Appeals to his family to get Joe a job were equally so. The media route had backfired. A more radical solution was needed. Explaining the situation to Brenda over dinner that evening, he was amazed to find that her genuinely sympathetic.

  “Pat, you have to realize that you may just not have all the answers for situations like this,” she said. “How long has Joe been on the street anyway?”

  “Probably about two years. But he seems motivated.”

  “Do you think he beat her?” Brenda always cut to the chase.

  “I think he was abusive.”

  “Well, if he really was violent with her and the child was present, I can see every reason why it will take a bit more than the joy of Christmas to get them together.” Brenda was a bit of an amateur psychologist. But more important she was a realist — not that her kind of practical, even cold reality often deterred her husband.

  Father Pat looked into his coffee and remembered the evening in Ottawa over a decade ago when he had come close to being violently angry with Brenda. She had just had the umpteenth visit to her gynecologist, to be told that their latest attempt to have a child with heaven knows what technique had failed. It was a couple of days before Brenda’s thirty-eighth birthday and time was running out. She was frying up a chop in silence while Pat read the newspaper. They were both depressed. Suddenly, hot fat spit on Brenda’s hand as she was moving the pan off the heat and she dropped it on the element, splattering more fat on her apron.

  “God dammit,” she screamed in some pain. Then the whole day and all her frustration with herself, her husband and her lot exploded and she closed her eyes and clenched her fists in a tearful rage. Father Pat jumped up and took her by the shoulders. She pushed him away violently.

  “Leave me alone. You can’t understand, you don’t, and you don’t even want to,” she screamed. “You dragged me to Ottawa. Now I have no job, no family, no …” and she started sobbing even louder.

  Then Father Pat felt his own anger welling up. “No. It’s you who doesn’t understand. I’ve just about had it.” First her moods and then her coldness, and now he of course felt that the latest bad news was being laid entirely on him. He grabbed her and started shaking her.

  “Get a hold of yourself, for God’s sake,” he shouted meanly.

  She tried to break away, and for just a heartbeat he felt as if he could hit her. And she looked at him. And she knew. The dismal memory passed and as Father Pat looked up at Brenda, he knew she was thinking the same thing. But she beat him to it.

  “You know it’s hard enough for a woman to live with a man,” Brenda said, clearing away their simple meal. “I wouldn’t stay with you a minute if you were violent with me. Believe me. But I do feel sorry for the kid if her father really wants to see her” Brenda certainly had a way of catching his silent thoughts.

  A week later Father Pat was studying a tumbler of malt whisky in the rec room of his friend Terry, “one of my few remaining close connections with the alleged real world,” as the priest was fond of reminding him. Terry had not only dropped out of seminary but out of several marriages as well while Father Pat had persevered. He also had a grown daughter from his first marriage whom Father Pat doted on.

  That evening, the conversation turned to the secularization of Christmas and how kids were fixated on Santa Claus, and the spirit of getting rather than giving — standard pre-Christmas fare. They talked about Deirdre, and Father Pat told Terry about his problem with Alice and Deirdre’s feature on street people and how it had gone awry.

  “Didn’t think it sounded like Deirdre,” Terry opined. “Too obvious, the stuff about the guy living in the cardboard box under the viaduct. How is she anyway? Any new boyfriends?” Although they both felt grea
t affection for Deirdre, they adopted a kind of older brother concern about her love life.

  “Don’t know. There was the ’Italian stallion,’ as she called him, who took her home to meet his parents before even so much as kissing her. The mother asked in Italian if she was Catholic and that was that. But apparently on the way home in his ’awful Camarro reeking of cheap cologne,’ as she described it, he realized that since now it wasn’t a serious matter he was free to come on to her. So he took her down an alley and fell all over her. She barely escaped and hailed a cab with him in hot pursuit.” They both laughed.

  Deirdre loved telling them about her uninvited escapades with amorous forty-year-odds. “Lucky I was bigger than him,” she had finished the story with a big, open, mirthful roar.

  They paused and started talking about Terry’s work. He was doing some unusual Christmas promotions for a client that involved hiring Santas for the smaller local malls, which normally didn’t have one.

  “I’m having a hell of a time recruiting too — for the Ridgewood Mall in fact. Next two Saturdays. Doesn’t pay much, and the huge malls take all the regulars … oh well …” As they both emptied their second, Father Pat got a buzz, and it wasn’t the whisky. Why not hire Joe as Santa for the local gig? Then Alice could take Mary to see him. At least Joe would get to talk to his daughter again.

  “You’re too clever by half, old boy,” Terry thought. He was way ahead of his friend. “If the girl believes in Santa, it would be a terrible shock if he revealed that he was her father in disguise — so that wouldn’t work, and if she doesn’t, she won’t want to sit on some fat stranger’s knee anyhow. Oh well, good try!”

  Father Pat agreed that anything approaching a real reunion would indeed be a miracle.

  “But, well, it’s Christmas.” Father Pat wasn’t about to let a live idea die. “Come on, why don’t we give it a try. At least he’ll see her and that may keep him on the wagon.”