by Dave Reidy
“My response,” my father told me, “was so consistent that, in time, my friends would recite it before I could speak it myself.”
I remember my father waiting, as we idled at a red light, for me to ask about his usual response, and the rush I felt in refusing to play along.
“I would say to them, ‘Franco has taken everything else. This, my faith, I will not give up for him.’”
I may have rolled my eyes. I was a terrible teenager.
“Even your friends will criticize you for being Catholic.”
There was no bitterness in my father’s words. He’d long ago accepted this reality as a condition of the life he chose.
Riding in that cab, I resolved, with a venom I was too cowardly to show my father, that: My friends won’t criticize me for being Catholic because I won’t be Catholic.
I wonder now if my father knew me better than I knew myself, or if he simply understood the inevitability of life’s disappointments and guessed where I would turn when they touched me. My father may also have guessed—correctly, as it turns out—that by the time life was taking its toll on his only daughter, he’d be dead, and she would not have him to turn to.
Awake and alone, I wrestled with the possibility that my friends are less tolerant of me than my father’s were of him, and the fact that my involvement with the people of St. Asella’s has made me the kind of person I once vowed I’d never become. And the delayed karmic consequence of my having dismissed and disrespected my father arrives as a paralyzing fear that, having so recently lost my husband, I’ve also squandered my friendship with Nicola Hayes.
•••
AT HE MARRAKECH airport, having already spent hundreds of dollars shipping home four ceramic vases and seven copper lanterns, I stand in line at the Royal Air Maroc ticket counter to check two cheap suitcases bulging with embroidered fabrics, hand-woven rugs and thuya woodcarvings. My feet, soft and supple after my second spa pedicure, nestle into the padded leather soles of new sandals. My toes, painted a deep, dark green, look like two turtle families, each sharing a brown, braided shell. I watch travelers and airport workers as they walk from one end of the terminal to the other, enjoying a range of motion in my neck made possible by a week of daily deep-tissue massage.
When I’m through security, I pass the time in a chair near an unattended departure gate, watching waves of heat rise from the tarmac. As the month-long celebration of my life after divorce comes to an end, I’m not looking forward to my return. Forty-two voicemails await me. None of them are from Nicola. (I’ve already checked.) I’ll spend much of the next month carrying Moroccan handicrafts into the homes of my clients, and half of them, for reasons that having nothing to do with good interior design, will kindly ask me to carry them right out again. And, of course, there is St. Asella’s. After a month of having more delicious food than I can sample laid out for me at every meal, I’ll go back to coordinating lasagna deliveries for the indigent and infirm and hunting down new jobs for the jobless.
Ten cuidado con los pobres.
A small, private jet accelerates and takes off before my eyes. I wonder if Daniel Shadid feels a sense of relief when leaving Africa. I wonder if the feeling troubles him at all, or if he flies home with his mind and heart at peace, having done what he has come to do. For Daniel Shadid has been cleverer in arranging his life than I’ve been. Shadid keeps an ocean between himself and the people he’s committed to help. In Chicago, Shadid’s only duties to them are to attend thousand-dollar-a-plate dinners and bid on silent auctions. He’s reserved his hometown as a playground.
Daniel Shadid has no St. Asella’s.
•••
THE WARMTH OF the welcome I receive from the people of St. Asella’s takes me by surprise. Before mass, I am stopped every few steps by someone standing up at the end of a row to grasp my hands, ask about my trip and, at a low whisper, update me on her life. The bigger surprise, though, is how easily my own warmth rises to meet theirs. At the airport in Marrakech, I reduced the people of St. Asella’s to their problems. But in the face of their inelegant kindness, the humanity of these people is harder to ignore, and it stirs my own. Before I have reached the back of church, I am convinced again that what I said to Nicola is still true: There is a community here, and it’s worth something to all of its members. Even to me.
Mrs. Landry, with her husband standing unsteadily at her side, meets me at the mouth of the side aisle. She raises her hand to pat my arm, gently.
“It’s good to see you,” she says.
“It’s nice to see you, too, Mrs. Landry.”
“Did you meet the new lector?”
“I don’t think so,” I say, but what I’ve heard is lectern, and I look over my shoulder expecting to see a new podium at which I will do my singing.
“He’s by the doors,” Mrs. Landry says.
“Oh,” I say, and when I see a young man in a sport coat standing by the church door with a big red book in his hand, I put her meaning together. “I’ll introduce myself.”
My return to St. Asella’s is proving full of surprises. Perhaps the biggest surprise of all is that the new lector, Simon Davies, is really good. The quality of his voice and performance oblige me to listen to what I have been ignoring since I was a girl. And as I listen, I get an almost uncontrollable urge to laugh. The high level of quality Simon brings to the amateurish proceedings at St. Asella’s is comically out of place. It’s as if I am flipping through channels and happen across a network news anchor on cable access recapping a three-car parade with his customary gravity. As he reads to us, I get the sense that we are a tribe of two, Simon and me: we have some of the talent and appeal necessary to make one’s way in the world, and yet, here we are, volunteering at shabby St. Asella’s. I allow myself to imagine that Simon Davies will help me help the needy of St. Asella’s find a foothold in the world. I go so far as to envision a day in which parishioners might go to Simon, instead of me, with their problems. By the time he completes the second reading, I have plans for him. But Simon has other plans for himself and for me.
On the sunlit sidewalk after mass, I am greeted by more people and made to summarize my trip to Morocco several times. It has been a month since I have had any contact with the people of St. Asella’s, and I find that I am expecting tragic news—that someone has died or been injured in a car accident. At first, most of the news I hear is good. With her two sons in tow, Jill tells me that her daughter has been accepted into a magnet school that will give her the quality education that her neighborhood school could not. And lonely old Joseph, whom Jill has been calling once a week, is expecting a visit from his daughter, her first in years. Then I see Jeanne, of Jeanne and Rose Marie, the pair whom I have come to think of as our community’s beloved aunts. The look on her face seems to send storm clouds in front of the sun.
“Are you all right, Jeanne?” I turn around and look for Rose Marie, but I do not see her. Only Simon Davies is still waiting. “Where’s Rose Marie?”
Only when I turn back to Jeanne do I understand that Rose Marie isn’t there, that Rose Marie is the reason Jeanne is so upset.
“She’s dying,” Jeanne says.
Jeanne tells me that Rose Marie went in to the emergency room with what the sisters believed to be a bad case of the stomach flu, or maybe appendicitis. It is late-stage pancreatic cancer. There is no drug to take, no operation that would do any good. Rose Marie is in pain. She is unable to keep food down. And she is dying.
“I’m so, so sorry, Jeanne,” I say.
Jeanne nods and wipes her upper lip. Then she says, “I’m afraid to be alone.”
Now I am crying—for Rose Marie and for Jeanne, but also—maybe mostly—for myself.
At my request, Jeanne pulls a scrap of paper and a pen from her purse and writes down her address.
“I’ll make sure some meals get sent over,” I say.
“That’s very kind,” Jeanne says. “Thank you.”
Jeanne reaches back into her purse
. I hear the muted jangle of a ring of keys. She hands me a tissue.
“Again, Jeanne,” I say, “I’m so very sorry.”
I wrap my arms gently around Jeanne in a last, desperate attempt to give her some comfort. And I feel Jeanne’s hand patting my back.
When Jeanne whispers, “It’ll be okay,” I know she isn’t talking about her own problems. Jeanne is comforting me.
This realization starts me crying again. But as we pull away from one another, I smile to let Jeanne know that I will be fine, and that I appreciate her kindness. She gives my hand a shake, then releases it and walks to the parking lot.
I turn toward the church doors to blow my nose and notice that Simon Davies is still standing there. I don’t much care what he thinks of the scene he has witnessed. I am drenched with embarrassment. I cannot absorb any more.
I give Simon the outline of Jeanne’s story, and he listens, still standing at a distance. He waits for me while I retrieve my purse from the sacristy, and when I return, we start walking in the direction of my apartment. I outline for Simon the ways in which the St. Asella’s community will pitch in to help Jeanne—home-cooked meals and house cleaning and groceries. Focusing on the concrete, meaningful good that the St. Asella’s community can do for Jeanne and Rose Marie distracts me from my inability to solve their problems and my own, and I begin to brighten. For a moment, I can see that this upsetting episode has given Simon an authentic and fully human introduction to the St. Asella’s community. I stop short of asking Simon to pitch in to help Jeanne, though. I wait to see if he will offer to help.
What he offers is to take me to lunch.
He tries to be casual, but I know when a man is asking me out. And Simon’s proposition changes things. What changes first is how I see him. Something in the way Simon asks me to lunch—his earnestness, maybe, or the hopefulness he tries to conceal—shows me another similarity between us, one that I have not noticed before: Simon, too, is lonely. And though Simon may see me as an answer to his loneliness, I know that he is not the solution to mine. We are not a fit.
For one thing, I’m not ready, so soon after the divorce has been made official, to be going to lunch with men I barely know. For another, Simon is too young for me. But what disqualifies Simon from my dating pool is the very basis for the tribal affinity I felt between us—that Simon has a talent the world can use and chooses to use it at St. Asella’s. Seen through the lens of romance, Simon’s presence at St. Asella’s is grossly unappealing.
My refusal of Simon’s invitation to lunch is less than elegant.
“I can’t,” I say.
Simon’s embarrassment is immediately visible. “No problem,” he says. “Maybe some other time.”
My stomach tightens. I can’t have Simon believing I’ve left the door open for any romantic involvement. I need him to forget about me and buy into the role I’ve envisioned for him at St. Asella’s. So I come up with an excuse I hope will spare Simon’s feelings and give my refusal some finality.
“Simon, I’m newly divorced, and people at St. Asella’s know it. You lector there. I’m the cantor.” Then I say, “And I have no plans to get an annulment or anything like that. So I can’t see you. Socially.”
In the tense wrinkles above his eyebrows and the pink rising in his cheeks, I see that Simon takes my refusal as an insult.
“I think I understand,” he says.
He continues to walk with me, and I return to the conversation we were having before Simon knocked it off course.
“What an awful scene Jeanne is returning home to,” I say. “Thank God she has St. Asella’s.”
I go on about the value of community, comforting myself with heartwarming thoughts of Jeanne’s fellow parishioners shouldering some share of her enormous burden. I’m prepping Simon to hear the pitch I have already decided to make at a later date, when Simon’s asking me to lunch is just a mildly embarrassing memory.
“I don’t think community is good for much,” Simon says.
“What?”
“If anyone shows up at Jeanne’s door with buckets and rags or a hot meal,” Simon says, “community won’t have anything to do with it. Any help she gets will come because of you.”
Trying to disagree with more grace than I showed in turning him down, I smile, drop my eyes to the sidewalk and say, “Me and a lot of other people.”
“No, I was there last week, when you weren’t. I saw none of the community you’re talking about. No one was hanging around the sidewalk, chatting away. How many of the people you’re going to ask to help Jeanne know her already?” Simon asks. “Not know of her. Know her. How many of them have been to her house? How many say anything more than hello when they see her?”
He shrugs.
“They’re strangers to each other,” he says. “The people who don’t know Jeanne personally, but help her anyway, will do it because they know you.”
The arrogance and petulance of Simon’s attack—not on the value of community at St. Asella’s, but on its existence—irritates me. It’s just like a young, white, American man to think he can explain something he knows nothing about to the woman who made it. Worse, Simon is stirring up my bad feelings about Nicola. I’ve replayed our last phone conversation time and again, discovering in each reimagining some clever retort I wish I’d made to my friend’s refusal to see any value in my work at St. Asella’s. And I see in my confrontation with Simon a chance to win where I lost with Nicola.
“All right,” I say. “Simplest terms. Where would Jeanne have gone this morning if there were no St. Asella’s?”
The question seems to confuse Simon. “A coffee shop,” he says. “Or a restaurant. Does it matter?” Then he says, “Maybe she would have stayed at home with her dying sister.”
In the way Simon hits the word dying, I hear him implying that Jeanne abandoned Rose Marie to her suffering when she left the house for an hour. Whether or not he really believes what he has suggested—and I doubt he does—I can see in Simon’s twisted lips and hanging head that he knows he has forfeited the high ground from which he was staring down his nose at St. Asella’s.
A minute later, we’re standing in front of my building. I say goodbye and, from Simon’s former position on the high ground, add that I hope I’ll see him next Sunday.
As victories go, it isn’t much of one. But as I walk to the elevator, I allow myself to believe that, if I had pushed back just a little harder in my conversation with Nicola, or challenged her with just the right question, I might have won that argument, too.
•••
THE NEXT DAY, Monday, I try to organize a meal-drop for Jeanne. I start with Helen, hoping that she will agree to let us use the rectory freezer to store any meals provided by any volunteers who cannot drop them off at Jeanne’s.
“Hello, Helen,” I say. “It’s Catherine Ferrán.”
“How are you?”
“I’m fine,” I say, “but I’m calling with sad news.”
“Oh?”
“You know Rose Marie?” I realize then that I do not know Rose Marie’s last name. “Of Jeanne and Rose Marie?”
“Oh, yes,” Helen says. “Cancer. Just dreadful.”
“You know already,” I say, unable to hide my surprise.
“Before you came around, Catherine, I was the woman who knew things around here, and there are still a few things I find out about before you do.”
I laugh at this, mostly because I am glad that, for once, word of a community member in hard times has spread without my spreading it.
“How did you hear?” I ask.
“Jeanne called a few weeks ago and asked me to put Rose Marie’s name on the prayer list.”
“Wait. Jeanne called a few weeks ago?”
“Yeah,” Helen says.
Not once has it occurred to me that Rose Marie was given her diagnosis more than a few days before.
“Okay,” I say. “So, who should I tell that I’d like to bring dinner for Jeanne one night this week?�
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“You just told her.”
“You’re running the meal planning, then.”
Helen laughs. “No, honey. You are.”
“There’s nothing set up for her?”
“Just the dinner you promised.”
“I found out yesterday that Rose Marie was sick! What has Jeanne been doing for food?”
“I don’t know,” Helen says. “Cooking it herself, I guess.”
I recall Rose Marie’s line about the sisters splitting the duties of slicing and dicing and imagine the terrifying aloneness, after all those years of making dinner as a twosome, that Jeanne has experienced each time she opened a can of soup and poured it into a cold saucepan while Rose Marie slept fitfully in her sickbed.
“I don’t understand,” I say. “Why didn’t you set something up for Jeanne if you’ve known about Rose Marie’s diagnosis for three weeks?”
“That’s your department,” Helen says, sharpening her tone. “Not mine.”
“I was in Africa!”
“That’s right! And I was here, doing my job, which covers pretty much everything else that needs doing around here!”
I am speechless. In the brief silence, I try to absorb the facts: for three weeks, Jeanne has been caring for her dying sister and, because I was away, no one at St. Asella’s has done a damn thing but add her sister’s name to a prayer list.
I hear the echo of Simon Davies telling me that the community at St. Asella’s is no community at all, just a cult of loyalty to—or dependence on—one woman. But I tell myself he isn’t right. I tell myself that people in a community have roles. Part of my role is to organize volunteers to cook meals for people who need them. And Helen, if she wishes, is free to limit her role to writing names on prayer lists.
