by Jim Sano
David didn’t respond to Tom’s comments. Tom hesitated to push anything but without thinking, he asked, “If your father were alive, walked in that door, and was sitting down in front of you where I am now, what do you think you would say?”
David sat quietly and lifted his head as he gazed at Tom with his eyes now red around the edges. He got up from the table. “I cannot do this. Don’t ask me to do this right now.” He grabbed Trooper’s leash. “I’m going for a walk. Thanks for talking.”
Tom opened the door for David and put his hand on his shoulder as he stepped by him. “You are not alone, David.”
Chapter 32
David didn’t sleep well on Wednesday or Thursday nights but gave no clues at work that anything serious was on his mind, although it was working overtime.
On Friday, he went for an early run then off to work still feeling unsettled. He worked through lunch and at one o’clock told Izzie that he was going to step out for a bit. Izzie reached to hand him his umbrella, but he ignored her and walked out the door. By the time he ended up at Tom’s door, his hair and shoes were drenched.
Tom opened the door before David had a chance to knock. “Come in. Let me get you a towel to dry off.”
David sat at the table once again, this time with his wet coat dripping onto the floor. He accepted the towel from Tom and wiped his face and dried his hair.
“I’ve been thinking of you. How have you been doing dealing with things?”
David raised his head. “How have you been doing dealing with things?” Tom’s head tilted in confusion. “You’re a little wet yourself. Where’ve you been?”
“Oh! I had an appointment and just got back.”
“And where, if you don’t mind my asking, are you coming from today?”
Tom fell silent, bowing his head toward the table.
“Tom, I have no doubt that you care. And I know you can sometimes ask difficult questions because you care, but I wonder how much you let people into your world.”
“David, what’s going on?”
“When I ask a simple question like ‘Where are you coming from?’ you pull back.”
Tom was visibly thinking, rubbing one hand down the back of his neck.
“Do you go to the same place every Friday?”
Tom raised his head. “I do. I was coming from the Forest Hills Cemetery in JP. Why do you ask?”
“You expect me to open up to share my childhood pains, but I’m not sure you’d do the same if I asked.”
Tom took a deep breath but didn’t respond.
“No one is ever really prepared or ready to talk about some things, are they?”
There was a long hesitation before Tom responded, “No. You never really are ready. So which way will we go?”
They sat in deep, pervading silence for several minutes, each inside their own self-imposed prisons. Finally, Tom uttered the first words. “Her name is Corlie. Corlie Ann Smith. We met in my freshman Modern Lit class at BU. I remember walking into the large lecture hall with two hundred other students feeling a bit lost and alone, and then I saw her a few rows over from where I was sitting. There was something about her that intrigued me, but it took over three weeks for me to talk to her. All she said was, ‘Why did it take you so long?’”
A smile came to Tom’s face but didn’t reach his eyes as he drifted back to another time. “I just fell for Corlie right away but didn’t tell her until a month later. Then she asked, ‘Why did it take you so long?’ When she told me she loved me, it began the most incredibly happy time of my life. The world seemed so alive, and I felt such a sense of joy when I was with her that I wanted to feel that way all the time, which meant being with her all the time.”
David had never thought of Tom as being in love with a woman, never mind being in a head-over-heels romance.
Tom gazed out the rain-soaked window. “Corlie was close to her family, her mom, dad, brother, and sister. While she was trying to figure life out, her Catholic upbringing in Jamaica Plain was a part of the fabric of who she was. I, on the other hand, thought of faith as a set of archaic myths for those who feared thinking for themselves and living life. I had developed a quiet arrogance about what I believed to be true and was a master of taking in information in a way that fit what I wanted to believe. I’d then confidently convince Corlie of those beliefs out of what I had mistaken as an act love.”
David moved forward in his seat. “It sounds like you loved her a great deal.”
Tom sighed. “I thought I did, but I had mistaken infatuation, romance, and a big dose of egoism for real love. As much as I had the strongest attraction and feelings for Corlie, I love her more now than I ever did then.”
“You shouldn’t be so hard on yourself, Tom.”
“I try not to, but nothing I did was really loving. I wasn’t listening to what she believed. Instead, I spent my energy convincing her to believe what I wanted her to believe. I wasn’t ‘willing the good of the other’ for her with sincere, self-sacrificing love. I wasn’t looking at her as a woman with goodness and dignity that had been beautifully made, but looking at the person I wanted her to be for me. Despite her values and a desire to wait, I convinced her to express that love to show she really loved me. Our sexual relationship intensified our feelings and connection together. I convinced her to take the pill, despite the fact that there are a multitude of negative side effects for women and convinced her that it was the loving and moral thing to do.”
Tom covered his face with his hands and continued, “I knew it would devastate her family, especially the relationship with her parents, but I was constantly working to convince Corlie to live together that summer after our freshman year. I knew how much she wanted to be together, but I also knew, deep down, that she didn’t think it was the right thing to do and didn’t want to hurt her parents. She told me that if we were meant to be together, then we’d have our entire lives, and if we weren’t, then the answer was easy. Instead of really listening, I convinced her we could live together in an apartment in Brighton without her parents ever knowing. Our friends would be living in the apartment below us. When her parents came over, we would just switch so it would look like the girls were rooming together. I wore her down to do what I wanted and not what she believed was right.
“Ignorantly, I believed birth control meant one hundred percent effective protection, but Corlie found out that this wasn’t the case and panicked. I tried to comfort her, but I didn’t really listen as I moved into fixing mode instead of empathy and love. She knew in her gut that aborting the baby was wrong, but I again convinced her with my ignorance and selfishness that it was the smart and moral thing to do for her and the baby. I never took the time to know how she really felt. I just wanted to fix the problem. I was a strong proponent of women’s rights and abortion rights, but I never took the time to honestly find out what an abortion entailed. I really didn’t want to know if the fetus was a living human being whose life we were ending for our convenience. The information, the truth, the facts were all there, but they didn’t fit what I wanted to believe, so I dismissed them for the cliché arguments that supported abortion as a good thing; fighting overpopulation, being fair to the baby, being too young or not in a good place to be parents now. I’d rationalize that it would compromise our lives, or that a fetus was a bunch of cells and not a living human being with the right to continue living.”
David put his hand out and laid it on Tom’s shoulder. “If you honestly believed it was the right thing to do back then, should you blame yourself?”
Tom's eyes welled up as tears rolled down his cheeks. “I blame myself every day for not being responsible, loving or honest. I wasn’t truly there for Corlie. I took her to the abortion clinic. They offered no alternatives, so I felt good about what we were doing, even though I could tell that Corlie didn’t. I convinced myself that she was just afraid, and I kept telling her it would be over quickly and then we could go back to our lives.
“When we left th
e clinic, she had that shell-shocked expression on her face that lasted for weeks. I tried to soothe her, humor her, to do anything to make her feel better, but a deep depression began to set into her being. I couldn’t figure out what to do. I tried to get her to go to counseling, but she wouldn’t go; maybe it was the shame she felt. As it got closer to September, she was no better, and she didn’t even want to see her parents or siblings. I was worried but kept thinking it would get better with time. I didn’t know the level of darkness, the loss and regret she was feeling. Corlie woke up at night after re-experiencing the abortion in her dreams, feeling overwhelmed by the shame and grief. She never blamed me for any of this, only herself. She tried to go back to classes in September but missed more than she attended. As midterms came around, she was desperately behind and still depressed, with no sleep and no peace.”
Tom paused. As he spoke, his voice cracked from the pain in his throat. “She couldn’t take it anymore. She believed there was no forgiveness for what she had done. That she’d never see our child whom she had never held and hadn’t protected. One afternoon, I came home to our apartment, and I thought she was asleep until I saw the empty bottle of pills and a note next to the bed. Right then, I wanted to die myself to find her and hold her. She didn’t deserve the path I worked so hard to lead her down. She was gone, and that was the first moment I actually loved her in the true sense. I would’ve given my life so she could have hers. I would’ve done so many things differently to put her and what was good for her ahead of my selfish desires. Two beautiful individuals were dead because of me.”
Tom’s voice had gotten louder as he went on and the pain on his face was the same pain David witnessed in the cemetery a short time earlier. David realized that Tom had entrusted him with the most painful and sensitive part of his life. David found himself listening empathically and felt as if he were walking in Tom’s footsteps as he shared his story and feelings about Corlie. He couldn’t think of the last time he allowed himself to feel something through someone else’s experience. There was an uncomfortable feeling in his chest as his throat tightened and tears fell for what he now believed was a friend.
Despite feeling as if his own world had been turned on its side in recent months, David was thinking solely about someone outside of himself and not in reference to himself. “I‘m sorry that I pushed you like that, and I’m even sorrier for what you’ve been carrying around with you all these years. There must be a point where you can—”
“Forgive myself?” Tom interjected sharply. “I work on that every day, but two beautiful lives do not exist today because of my selfishness and willful ignorance.”
David resisted fixing. “I can imagine that would weigh heavy on your heart. How have you been coping with that?”
“I guess I haven’t thought a lot about how I’m coping, but more about how Corlie and the baby are doing. I pray that they are safely in God’s loving arms.”
“If you honestly believe in God and heaven, then you must know that they’re okay, not struggling any longer. You must know that they would want you to let go of the guilt. I would think they would want you to forgive yourself. Remember, you asked me what I’d do if my father were sitting right in front of me, could I forgive him? With all your wisdom, what would you tell me?”
Tom sat in silence for several moments before responding, “I would tell you that mercy and forgiveness are at the heart of God’s unconditional love for each one of us. From the beginning of creation, God has been coming to us with forgiveness and mercy time after time, despite our constantly turning our backs on all of his love and not trusting his plans for us. I would tell you he loved us so much that he was willing to send his only Son to repent for the sum of our sins for all time and to pour himself out in the greatest act of love by dying on the cross for me and you personally. I would tell you the story of the Prodigal Son.”
“I don’t really know the story. Do I want to know it?”
Tom wiped at his eyes and took a deep, cleansing breath. “It’s truly the best parable Jesus gave us to understand how much God loves us. Are you sure you really want to hear this?”
“I want to hear it from you.”
“Okay, then. The story is about a man who has two sons. The younger, rebellious, independent son demands from his father his share of his inheritance now. The son’s breathtaking rudeness is basically saying to the father, hurry up and die and ‘Give me my share coming to me.’ Despite the son’s hurtful behavior, the father gives the son what he asks for and the son goes out into the ‘cora makra,’ which in Greek translates to the ‘big emptiness.’ There the son tries to cling to what he thought was owed to him as he spends it on empty worldly pleasures until he himself is empty, alone, penniless, and starving. The son ends up feeding pigs, an indignity for any Jew, and realizes that his father’s servants and even these pigs eat better than he. Finally, he chooses to return to ask forgiveness of his father and hopes he can work for his father as a servant.”
David listened with interest. He was thinking about how difficult it must’ve been for the son to come back to his father and wondered how his father would react.
“The son headed home on foot. Now, remember that he hadn’t only spent half of his father’s estate on sinful living but also committed the ultimate insult to his father. Because this was seen as an insult to the community as well, it was dangerous for him to walk through the town to reach his father’s estate. Jesus tells us that the father had been looking out for his son the entire time he was gone and when he finally saw him off in the distance, he didn’t wait for him but runs to greet and protect him. It was considered disrespectful for a father to have to come out to his son, but this showed the father’s unconditional love as he embraced him and kissed him. The son said to him, ‘Father, I have sinned against heaven and against you. I am no longer worthy to be called your son,’ but the father put the best robe on him, a ring on his finger, and sandals on his feet, calling for the fatted calf to be killed for a feast to celebrate his return. The father said, ‘For this son of mine was dead and is alive again; he was lost and is found.’”
David knew he couldn’t do the same for his father but was still struck by the story.
“That’s what I might tell you.”
“Thanks. I will say that is quite a story. Now, what would you tell yourself? Is the issue that you won’t forgive yourself or that you don’t believe God would forgive you?”
Tom sat stunned for a moment. David could tell by the look in his eyes that he hadn’t thought of the question being turned back on him.
David got up. “Are you going to be okay?”
“Sure. I appreciate your pushing me in uncomfortable places. That’s what friends who care do, and it is good for me to take some of my own medicine to see how it tastes once in a while.”
“Unfortunately, I have to get back to work, now that I’m dry in more ways than one.”
Tom shook his hand firmly as they opened the door. “I might be a little peeved at you but mostly I’m grateful for your coming by and dripping all over my kitchen floor–in more ways than one.”
David smiled and headed back to work as blue skies and sunshine started to break through the previously gray cloud cover.
Chapter 33
When he got up on Saturday, David had a sense of impending confrontation he couldn’t calm. He was supposed to take his daughter, Amy, out on Sunday, but she had a tennis tournament on Saturday Kathleen thought he should attend instead.
During the match, Kathleen told David that Amy was continuing to become more and more withdrawn from her and was particularly upset when Kathleen confronted her about a nineteen-year-old boy who was asking her to go out.
David gasped. “What?”
People turned to look at them. David lowered his voice. “Who’s asking her out? She’s only sixteen. Why’s some guy that’s almost twenty doing asking a high school girl out? It’s usually because they can’t get anyone their own age to date them a
nd they know a younger girl is going to be flattered and easy to impress.”
Kathleen raised her eyebrows. “Really?”
David knew Kathleen was well aware of the younger women he had dated, including Jillian. David said, “She’s just a kid.”
Kathleen said, “And a kid that’s becoming a young woman and an attractive one if you hadn’t noticed yet.”
He wished he’d arrived beforehand to talk to Amy. She didn’t notice him there until the very end, and she greeted him afterward with a snide attitude. David and Kathleen walked over to congratulate her on her win as she was putting her rackets in the bag. Amy didn’t even look up at him.
David repeated, “Great game, Ames.”
Amy finished zipping up her bag. “The first games were even better. Too bad you couldn’t make it.”
“Amy!” Kathleen said in a warning tone.
David put up his hand to let it go for now. They all went back to the house. Amy took a shower while Kathleen and David talked.
Kathleen settled on the sofa. “I was thinking this new attitude would be a passing phase but ever since this boy came into the picture, it seems as if she’s been building a wall between herself and everyone else in the family. I know some of this is normal, but I’m getting worried about bad decisions that don’t go away.”
“I may be the last person who can help right now, but I’ll try to see what I can do.”
Amy came down the stairs with wet hair, a peach blouse, and a pair of jeans on over her boots. She didn’t look like someone who was planning on being great company. David gave Kathleen a “wish me luck” glance as he and Amy headed out the door.
The ride was quiet. David was thinking about how to open up the conversation and at the same time how miserable this date seemed like it was going to be.
