The Voiceover Artist

by Dave Reidy

  •••

  I’D EXPERIENCED NEITHER spiritual awakening nor any burgeoning of my little faith. My decision to return to St. Asella’s was an extension of the lesson that had saved my voiceover career from expiring before it began.

  I’d been drowning in the quicksand of my stutter when Lily Eisenberg, the director of the New York Red Bulls session, called me out of the sound booth to tell me that the character in her script was Lily herself. I’d listened to Lily’s client rave on about her sister’s success with the New York Yankees, so I understood why this spot was important to her. Instead of dismissing Lily’s compulsion to chase her more obviously talented sibling as having nothing to do with me and Connor, I found a way to accept that the brokenness in Lily was the brokenness in me, and I professed our likeness in the voice of a character that became as much my creation as hers. What saved me that day was my willingness to see my own brokenness in Lily and her character. Arrogant as he was, Connor had always possessed this humility before his characters. Living in constant fear of banishment to a life on the margins, I had never felt secure enough—before a character or anyone else—to embrace my frailty.

  Until Lily.

  After the session, I was already out on the sidewalk, heading for Washington Street, when Lily opened the front door of Steel Cut Studios and called my name.

  When I turned, she ran toward me.

  “What’s wrong?” I shouted.

  I thought there might’ve been some technical glitch. I certainly could have done another good take, knowing what I knew then.

  But Lily didn’t answer. No, she kept running until she’d nearly knocked me over with a hug that pressed the air out of my lungs.

  •••

  IT WAS LATE on Saturday, the same day I met with Brittany, before I made any connection between the characters in Lily’s script and the people of St. Asella’s. I was back in my Manhattan hotel room, lying on the bed’s slippery comforter. With the tall drapes drawn against the sunshine of a world in which my mother was gone and everything between Connor and me had been ruined by our betrayals of one another, I wallowed in silent repetition of the self-pitying question dredged up in the tumult of Brittany’s making her final break with me: where, if anywhere, do I belong?

  Not in New York. That much was obvious. And a review of my life in Chicago confirmed that I felt unwelcome in almost every place I’d been: at Skyline Talent, because of what I’d done to Erika and my fear that my stutter would be discovered; at Improviso, because it was Connor’s stage and because, without any knowledge of the act I could have been avenging, I’d tried to kiss his girlfriend there; at St. Asella’s, on account of the churlish, childish rant I’d directed at Catherine when she tried to lump me in with the parish’s misfits.

  It was my mental articulation of the word “misfits” that drew the through line from voiceover to my disregard for the people of St. Asella’s. Though still mourning my mother, I’d failed to see my own grief in Jeanne’s. I’d ignored the reality that I was already as lonely and desperate as the old man who waited patiently after mass, with hat in hand, for a brief exchange of small talk with Catherine. And by telling myself that lectoring was nothing more than a way to prepare for the voiceover work I hoped would come, I’d glossed over the fact that, like so many St. Asella’s parishioners, I showed up at St. Asella’s on Sunday mornings because I had nowhere else to go. I hadn’t treated the people of St. Asella’s with the same respect I’d paid to the human being in Lily’s script: I’d refused to admit that what was broken in them was broken in me.

  I, too, was a misfit.

  Who else but a misfit must ask himself, again and again, where he belongs?

  And like me, weren’t the people of St. Asella’s more than their brokenness? Didn’t they have something to offer? Those who couldn’t sing or play the organ or mend the altar cloth offered their presence and their prayers, contributions made precious by the scarcity from which they came. Meanwhile, I had cheapened my own offering of talent by withholding everything else. Determined to stand apart from the misfits of St. Asella’s, I’d hidden everything but my voice from them.

  Only then did I see that my oddness offered a chance at belonging.

  In the stillness of my drape-darkened hotel room, I decided to step out from behind the same self-protecting pride that had prevented me from bringing characters to life on my own, in the hopes of making some human connection in the last place I’d thought to try.

  •••

  I WAS SITTING on my couch, shrouded in the still stifling heat of my apartment the Sunday morning I returned from New York, when I realized that the two scripture passages I was rehearsing, one from the Book of Isaiah and another from Paul’s letter to the Colossians, shared a common theme: forgiveness. In the very next moment, my hurt feelings rose like a gag, and I flung the workbook into the partially drawn blinds over my front windows. The rush I felt as the book’s binding cracked the aluminum blades out of shape and thudded against the window dissipated as the flapping, fluttering mess of cheap paper fell to the floor.

  I sat on the couch for several minutes, contemplating in the Sunday-morning city silence how empty my day would be if I gave up the plan I’d made and stayed home, instead. Then I stood up, stooped to pick up the workbook, and resumed my rehearsal. I wasn’t ready to forgive Brittany, Connor, or my father. But I wanted to be the person who found the human element in those messages of forgiveness and read them aloud, with precision and rhythm, to the people of St. Asella’s.

  Of course, the odds that I would get that opportunity were very poor. It had been weeks since I called Helen to renege on my lectoring commitment. Even with a volunteer base as thin as that of St. Asella’s, surely she’d found and trained someone to serve in my place by now. My preparation of the readings was, at a minimum, an act of good faith. It was part of my plan to find Helen before mass and ask her to reinstate me as a lector, if only one who filled in occasionally. On the off chance she needed me to read that afternoon, I wanted to be ready.

  Should my service as a lector not be required, my plan called for me to take a place in a pew toward the back and attend mass as any other parishioner or visitor would. Even this contingency was fraught, however. Repeatedly, I imagined Catherine noticing me on her walk from the sacristy to the back of the church before mass and asking me, quietly but firmly, to leave. My decision to open myself to the people of St. Asella’s guaranteed nothing. They’d have to open themselves to me, too, and I had already given their leader several good reasons to close the oaken doors in my face.

  I entered St. Asella’s forty-five minutes before mass was scheduled to begin. Just as I’d hoped, Helen was the only one there. I walked up a side aisle—taking the center aisle felt presumptuous—watching Helen light candles in tall stands on either side of the altar while the cool air of the empty church whirred in my ears. As I neared the sanctuary, I noticed that Helen, whom I’d never seen in anything other than dowdy blouses and blue jeans, was wearing a red skirt that revealed a few inches of white pantyhose above brown, slip-on flats. Her blue and maroon paisley blazer, at least a size too small, had enough padding in the shoulders to adequately protect a football player. Coming around the first row, I got a look at her face. She’d applied something dark around her eyes—eyeliner or eye shadow, maybe both—and her thin lips were flattered by a tasteful application of carmine lipstick.

  Standing at the edge of the sanctuary, I took two waggles and said, “Excuse me, Helen?”

  When she recognized me, Helen frowned. “What can I do for you?”

  She spoke at a volume she might have used if she’d seen me half a block away. I recalled this same tendency in the corps of women who’d volunteered in my boyhood parish. They were no more capable of reverence in the empty sanctuary than they were in their own living rooms. Whispers and reverence were for those of us who hadn’t sewn the vestments, cleaned the tabernacle, vacuumed the sanctuary carpet and polished the wood of the altar.r />
  I stepped into the sanctuary to close the distance between us and take away at least one reason for Helen to raise her voice. “I’m glad I caught you,” I said. “I wanted to let you know that I’m available to lector again. Whenever you might need me.”

  Helen drew a lick of flame inside the mouth of the brass lighter she was holding and returned a thin, smoking taper in its place. She turned to face me but did not descend even one step from the literal high ground of the altar.

  “Let me ask you something,” she said. “Was there really a family illness?”

  I was about to tell Helen that I didn’t understand her question when I recalled that “family illness” was the pretext I’d used to get out of my lectoring commitment.

  I took another waggle and said, “Not really. No.”

  Helen smirked and shook her head. Her disdain was intended for me, but it also seemed to contain her assessment of a working life that required repeated dealings with lying, excuse-peddling adults.

  “That’s what I thought,” she said.

  I took this to be Helen’s ruling against my petition to be reinstated as a lector. I was turning around, deliberating whether to find a seat in the back or head straight for the door, when Helen spoke up again.

  “You left me in a real lurch. I spent the better part of two weeks trying to find someone in this parish willing and able to lector. But the only reader I’ve got right now called me ten minutes ago with a vicious summer cold.”

  With her painted lips sucked into the hollow of her open mouth, Helen looked to the back doors and shook her head again. Then she sighed without relaxing a muscle.

  “I’ve got nobody,” she said. “Except you.”

  I lowered my eyes and nodded to show that I understood the circumstances under which I was being taken back. “I rehearsed,” I said, “so I’m ready.”

  “I know you are,” Helen said, as if my readiness made having to take me back more irritating. She turned and stepped down carefully from the altar’s riser in the direction of the open sacristy door. Still facing away from me, she shouted, “The big book is in the lectern.”

  I crossed the sanctuary in front of the altar and retrieved the gospel book from the lectern’s single interior shelf. As I walked down the side aisle to the back of the empty church, I experienced some of the clarity of thought that accompanies a sense of purpose—I had a job to do now, and I knew how to do it—but I was under no illusion that doing two readings in front of this congregation would make me a part of it. If anything, Helen’s resentment made me feel even more unwelcome.

  I’d been standing alongside the church doors for only a moment when the six middle-aged Filipina ladies entered. Even for women so devout, they were arriving very early. Like Helen, the ladies were dressed more formally than usual. The shortest of them, who was also the most beautiful, wore a colorful silk blouse, its band collar closed at the neck with a wide, padded button. The angled platforms of her high-heeled shoes gave her another two inches in height, and a subtle shade of red marked the location of high cheekbones all but buried in her round, pleasant face.

  The ladies were still making their way to the first pews on the church’s right side when an old man—the same one I’d seen talking to Catherine after mass, I thought—walked through the door and removed his hat. He wore a brown suit with wide, notched lapels. The pink and orange diagonal stripes of his tie, which was wide like his lapels, were discolored below the knot by a dark blotch—coffee or soup spilled long ago, I guessed. As the man passed me on his way to the near side aisle, my nose detected camphor and body odor. I fought off my revulsion with a reminder that my loneliness and awkwardness were not so different from the old man’s. As he shuffled up the aisle, I forced myself to see my brokenness in his.

  The early arrivals continued at a slow trickle, but almost without interruption. Everyone was dressed, stains and dated fashions notwithstanding, in his or her Sunday best. I wondered if this was the feast day of a minor saint important here and nowhere else—perhaps St. Asella herself—or the anniversary of Fr. Dunne’s ordination. Or perhaps Fr. Dunne had dedicated a recent homily to that old summer stand-by of the priest who is out of ideas: chiding churchgoers for their inappropriately casual warm-weather clothing. All I knew for sure was that something had changed. Given how static and stale St. Asella’s and its people had seemed to me, any change at all was unsettling.

  By twenty minutes to twelve, the church was already half full—as full as I’d ever seen it—and people were still coming through the main doors. But none of them was the person I wanted to see most: Mrs. Landry. There was little for us to say to each other, but I wanted Mrs. Landry to witness that I’d returned, as she’d asked me to, and that I was finally able to accept some of the fellowship she’d offered me when I walked her home. I worried that, in the nearly four weeks since last I’d seen her, Mrs. Landry or her husband had suffered some grave illness or serious fall. Even standing on the outside of it, I understood that the St. Asella’s community would be greatly diminished without her. Her tenacious grace seemed irreplaceable.

  Ten minutes later, Catherine appeared at the front of the church. She wore a gray dress with a belt that accentuated her hourglass figure, and a stylish necklace of amber pieces strung in a cascade. As she passed through the sanctuary, I waggled twice and waited for her to start down the usual route of her Sunday-morning parade of mutual appreciation. But the appreciation never materialized. Though crowding in the front pews had pushed people to the very edge of the side aisle, only one woman reached out to grasp Catherine’s hand. Catherine took the hand for a second and released it without slowing her progress toward the back of the church.

  There was a dignified reserve in Catherine’s perfect posture and the stillness of her head. She looked older than I remembered. The word “handsome” came to mind. I wondered if what I perceived to be changes in Catherine were actually changes in me.

  When she turned the corner around the last pew, Catherine’s closed lips spread into a smile. She seemed entirely unsurprised to see me.

  “Hello, Simon,” she said.

  “Good morning.”

  We stood there with our backs to the wall, saying nothing. It was not an awkward silence so much as an ordinary one, as if I had not been absent from St. Asella’s for weeks, as if our last conversation had been all politeness and pleasantries, as if dozens of people were not still streaming through the church doors and packing into pews, dressed for a wedding or a funeral.

  After almost a minute, I waggled, turned to Catherine, and asked, “What’s going on here today?”

  She studied my face for a moment. “Didn’t Mrs. Landry tell you?”

  “I haven’t seen her yet.”

  My answer seemed to confuse Catherine, but she didn’t voice her confusion. “The Archdiocese is sending a representative today,” she said. “Monsignor someone-or-other.”

  “Why?”

  Catherine shook her head and raised her eyes to the distant ceiling. She was smiling, but seemed mildly put out.

  “Sorry,” I said. “Too many questions.”

  “No, no,” she said, “it isn’t you. It’s this place. No one tells anyone anything.” She turned to me. “St. Asella’s is closing. The Archdiocese is shutting it down.”

  “Wait, what?”

  “A diocesan official is visiting every parish on the closings list to explain the decision,” she said. “The people of the parish are taking this mass as their chance to show the Cardinal that St. Asella’s should be kept open.”

  “That’s why it’s so crowded.”

  “Yes.”

  “How did you do it?” I asked Catherine.

  “Do what?”

  “How did you get all these people here?”

  “I didn’t,” Catherine said. “Mrs. Landry did. She called me.”

  I felt stung that neither Mrs. Landry, nor anyone else, had called me. Then I remembered that, as we stood in front of her condo building,
Mrs. Landry had personally invited me to return to St. Asella’s, and I’d turned her down.

  “So, Mrs. Landry knew the monsignor was coming before you did?”

  I looked to the church doors again, expecting to see the four-footed platform of Mrs. Landry’s cane crossing the threshold, but saw no sign of her.

  Where is she?

  Keeping her eyes forward, Catherine reassumed the reserve she’d displayed coming down the side aisle. “I haven’t been coming to mass,” she said. “I wouldn’t have known about any of this if Mrs. Landry hadn’t told me.”

  “Why haven’t you been coming to mass?”

  “It just isn’t for me.”

  Her sharp tone made it clear that I shouldn’t press the issue any further. Of the many changes I encountered at St. Asella’s that day, this was the most disorienting: Catherine and I were both standing outside the community that she had given so much of herself to create, and I was the only one of us who wanted in.

  Two altar boys in yellowed, ill-fitting albs hurried down the near side aisle with their heads down and their hair in their eyes. As they slipped past people scanning hopelessly for an open seat in the pews, the boys looked embarrassed, as if they were wearing Halloween costumes their mothers had chosen for them. When they reached the back of the church, the altar boys leaned against the wall alongside a wooden box labeled “Offerings for the Poor” and tried to disappear.

  Fr. Dunne stepped into the sanctuary and turned back to the sacristy door to watch the aged monsignor follow him out. The monsignor was dressed just like Fr. Dunne except for a black cassock, the hem of which was visible beneath his green vestments. Slowing his usual frenetic pace to match that of the older man, Fr. Dunne led his distinguished concelebrant to the side aisle. The monsignor smiled and drew small, tasteful crosses in the air with his hand as he passed people seated in the pews. The action looked less like a blessing than it did the glad-handing of a politician.