When the World Was Young

by Tony Romano

  He pushed himself away from her so he could cup one of her small round breasts. She kissed his forehead, and they made love a second time, the first time having ended nearly before it began. He would accept this one last gift from her. Then he would slip into the alley and walk to Huron Street, where he’d parked Eddie’s car. He would return the car and work a few hours at the store, filling glasses, making change. Planning what he knew he had to do.

  Victoria found him waiting at the end of her block, one foot propped on the length of black pipe that outlined one side of the dirt parkway, the rest of him leaning over his raised knee. She’d never met a priest before who seemed so normal. Except for the sturdy black priest shoes he wore, oxfords she thought they called them, he seemed like a regular person. Outside of church he never wore a cassock or a collar, so he may have felt some tug of obligation to wear the shoes at least. But he’d constantly poke a finger inside to stretch the leather or retie the laces, as if the shoes defined him and he was going to get the better of them.

  “If I weren’t a priest,” he said as she walked over to him.

  She smiled at their old joke. “What are you doing here?” she asked.

  “No ‘Hi, Father’? ‘How are you, Father?’ No ‘Good to see you, Father.’ What are you doing here? That’s the best you can do?”

  “Give me a break.”

  Those first few weeks after Benito died, Father Ernie came to check on Mama nearly every day, praying the rosary aloud while Angela Rosa followed along with her fingers, Victoria waiting alone on the back porch, her own fingers marking time, the very tips lightly touching the ghostlike beads that passed between them. After, she would walk him down, not wanting him to leave, not wanting to face Mama alone.

  Father Ernie pointed to the knee-high black pipe surrounding the parkway. “What is this? This pipe. What’s it for?”

  Victoria stepped on one of the bars, walked across a segment of it like a tightrope artist, and jumped off. “That’s what they’re for,” she said. “We used to do that all day when I was a kid. We’d have contests, who could stay on the longest.”

  “But what are they for? What’s their purpose?”

  “Everything has to have a purpose?”

  He looked away from her. “Ah, this.”

  “You said, ‘What’s their purpose?’ We all have a purpose, remember?”

  “I wasn’t trying to suggest the pipe has a soul, if that’s what you mean. I just wanted to know their…function.”

  “To tell you the truth, Father, I never thought about it.”

  “When you grow up with something, I guess you don’t notice it,” he said. He placed a foot on the pipe, as if to walk on it himself, but he just looked at it. Victoria caught his bemused grin. He seemed lost in thought for a moment, probably contemplating his own kid games somewhere back in Pennsylvania. The branches of the catalpa tree canopied over his head, framing him, Victoria thought.

  She imagined herself under the tree as a kid, how she must have looked to her father as he walked home and saw her and Penny and Darlene gathering the cigarlike appendages that dropped from the branches, for no good reason other than to collect them. As the image came back to her, a hot ache pulsed at the back of her throat.

  She was about to ask him a question, which she promptly forgot when she saw Crazy Willie crossing the street one block over, his windmill arms sweeping the air in rhythmic slashes, his head bobbing in time to each step.

  “Look,” she said.

  Father Ernie glanced over to where she pointed, but Willie was gone. “Crazy Willie,” she said. “Do you know him?”

  “I know who you mean.”

  “That’s all he does. All day. He walks.”

  “He walks?”

  “That’s all he does.”

  “Definitely crazy. They should lock up all those walkers.”

  “You know what I mean. He’s not all there. When I was a kid everybody would play tricks on him. The boys mostly. Get him to swear. Or give him gross stuff to eat. Leaves…ants. Worse things. But after a while everyone left him alone. Like they got bored with him.”

  “What about you? Did you participate?”

  “I don’t know. I laughed sometimes. Sometimes it was funny.”

  Father Ernie looked off to where Crazy Willie had crossed and scratched at his chin with one finger.

  “I couldn’t help it,” she said. “When he said, ‘That’s BS,’ I wanted to die. He had this round round face, all red and purply, like a baby. And the swearing coming out of that face…it was, you know, hilarious. And he didn’t seem to mind. He’d laugh, too. His face would get…all red and—”

  Father Ernie nodded and stuck a finger in his shoe, pulled hard on the leather tongue. Victoria kicked at the bar around the parkway and finally sat down on it. She hadn’t seen her block from this angle since she was a girl, and the burden of the here and now, her seventeen years, seemed like a heavy weight on her.

  “Sometimes when I see him now,” she said, “I’m jealous. Isn’t that terrible? I’m jealous. Of Crazy Willie.” Her throat ached again. She seemed always to be on the verge of tears lately, and she was surprised at the sorts of things that could make her cry. But she swallowed and fought back the wavering that had crept into her voice. “Explain that to me,” she said. “Tell me why I’m jealous.”

  “I think you know.”

  “You’re going to pull that on me, are you?”

  He sat down next to her, trying to tuck his legs under the bar as she had them, but they wouldn’t fit. Resigned, he folded his arms and straightened his legs, and they sat there and stared at his shoes. “So tell me,” he said.

  “I don’t know. I just think he’s lucky in some ways. Like when we used to tease him, he didn’t know what was going on. A few minutes later he’d be walking up and down the neighborhood, swinging his arms, talking to himself. He didn’t care what anyone thought.”

  “So you don’t think any of the teasing registered?”

  She thought about it for a while. “No. I don’t think it did. I really don’t. He didn’t have a clue. Sometimes he’d say—I guess it’s okay to say it…I’m just telling you what he said—he’d say, ‘Kiss my ass.’ But we taught him to say that. And then we’d fall all over ourselves and he’d be snorting and slapping his leg, laughing harder than any of us. He had this overbite thing and you could see all his teeth. ‘Kiss my ass. Kiss my ass,’ he’d say. He’d be talking to the ground. The only thing that registered, I think, is that he made us laugh. He liked to make us laugh.”

  She leaned over to pick up a catalpa leaf and began ripping it down the middle, small precise tears. She imagined the two halves to be identical.

  “That’s what I’m jealous of, I guess. That laugh. That crazy laugh. That laugh of not knowing any better. I mean, sometimes it’s better not to know. Like that Negro girl in Arkansas who’s trying to get into that school. What kind of day must she be having, knowing that all these people just hate her. If she had stayed home…Gone to her old school.”

  Father Ernie cleared his throat.

  “And don’t be giving me that two-steps-forward-one-step-back crap. Those people would have pushed her down the stairs if they could’ve gotten away with it. Those Christians down there. Where’s God when you need Him? He’s never there when you need Him.”

  If Father Ernie had tugged at his shoe then to remind her she was talking to a priest, she wouldn’t have said what she said next. But he didn’t and she got caught up in her anger at the white Christians in Arkansas and God and blurted out suddenly, “He can kiss my ass.” Father Ernie did tug at his shoe then, first the left and then the right, and she felt all at once the full impact of what she’d said and she didn’t regret it. She didn’t regret a word. Kiss my ass, God, she thought.

  She turned to him. “You’re pretty quiet today, Father. Seminary didn’t teach you to deal with cases like me, did they?”

  He rubbed his eyes and shook his head and wiped away
a slow grin. “You’re a case, all right. I guess there’s nothing to say to you. You’re one step ahead of me.”

  “Oh, swell, I get the priest who gives up. Tell me what to do. Should I apologize? Say three Hail Marys? What?”

  “Is that remorse I hear? Or just words?”

  She let the leaf float out of her hand. “Words, I guess.”

  “That’s what I thought,” he said. He folded his arms high across his chest, pushed up his shoulders, and rocked.

  “What?”

  “My father. He used to…” He seemed to be deciding whether to go on. “He would lift his hands sometimes to my mother. He’d have the perfect words for her later. He knew ten thousand ways to kingdom come to say sorry. And she’d fall for it every time. But I knew. The words fell around me like pocketknives.” He was talking more to himself now. “She’d slap him away and between crying she’d tell him to leave, and I’d fall for it, too. Her words. This time she really meant it, I’d think. But then he’d whimper, on and on, and my mother would take him finally in her arms, and I’d go in my room. It was probably the only time they were really intimate. After she was bruised.” He crossed his legs. “So don’t think you’re the first one to cuss out God.”

  Down the street old man Dominick was picking up scraps of paper that had blown onto his patch of lawn. It took all his effort to bend down like that.

  Victoria’s face felt hot. “So what happened? What changed?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. No one thing. When I turned sixteen I started stepping between them. And then he left for a while. When he came back he had a new job selling life insurance. He’d been working steel his whole life, pounding and flattening these rumbling sheets of it—his fingers looked like steel—and then he left it. Just like that. And he never hit my mother again. Not that I saw. They had a couple of happy years together before he died.”

  She could smell the rectory on him, a dark, musk scent that made her think of stained wood. “I would have never forgiven him,” she said. “I would have never taken him back.”

  “That’s what I used to think. Every day. And now that’s my job, to take people back. The irony of that always hits me hard.” He turned the ring on his wedding finger, as if he were gently twisting it on. She’d seen men play with their wedding rings before and always wondered if the gesture held deeper meaning, whether they felt lucky or trapped.

  “So there’s still hope for me?” she said.

  “There’s always hope.”

  He looked away when he said it. He wouldn’t let his eyes bore into you, demanding answers. Only when he joked did he fix his gaze outward, as if this were the only time he really felt like himself. That’s what she liked about Father Ernie. Anyone else talking to her about hope would have seemed solemn as sin, but this man threw out hope almost in apology, with a shrug. She wondered for the first time if he’d ever done it, if he’d ever been with anyone before entering the seminary. Something to talk about with Darlene. She started anticipating the conversation already, how both of them would get caught up in the wild possibilities. Father Ernie at sixteen in the back of his father’s car. Father Ernie with Sister Francine…with Sister Margaret Mary. Sister Rosaline’s name would come up, of course. She’d been their eighth-grade teacher, and every lecture she ever began always ended with sex. She’d warn the girls against bumping into boys in the halls because that’s how it started…the itch. Don’t dare scratch the itch until matrimony. She picked up another leaf, trying to wipe away the cartoon images in her mind.

  “I didn’t mean to swear, Father. Sorry.”

  “No, you’re not.”

  “I mean in front of you. Sorry about swearing in front of you.”

  “To tell you the truth, I’m a little tired of people becoming all hushed around me. Like they’re going to corrupt me. So I don’t mind. I’d rather hear a little swearing, I think. It’s more…human.”

  She glanced at his ring again. “Can I ask you something?”

  He grinned and nodded.

  “Why did you—I mean, I can see why maybe you didn’t want to get married. But why, you know, a priest?” She felt instant regret for asking.

  “Well, the circus wasn’t accepting applications, so…”

  “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to make it sound that way. I didn’t—”

  “It’s okay. It’s not you. I get asked that all the time. I must have this face that doesn’t fit what people think of when they think priest. I’ll have to learn to use that to my advantage.”

  “So why did you?”

  “Which answer do you want? The one I gave when I entered the seminary? And you’d be surprised how seldom they asked after I was in. Young men weren’t exactly beating a path to their door. Or do you want the answer I give to parishioners who don’t really want to know, who just want to find a way to feel comfortable around me, a question to get out of the way. Which is okay. Or do you want the real answer, something I’ve only recently discovered?”

  “Real.”

  “I’d like to tell you the skies opened, that holy light warmed my forehead, but I think, I really believe that I am a priest today”—he lowered his voice, as if he’d never spoken this aloud, and raised a fist—“because of this, because my father beat my mother. I don’t know if I’d have seen her strength otherwise. I’d follow her to church most mornings—I’d have to set my alarm since she didn’t have the heart to wake me—because I wanted to please her, to show her that someone would stand by her. But she didn’t go to church for herself. She went to pray for my father, to save his soul. She saw goodness in him that I still don’t fully recognize. And that’s what I want, that peace, that capacity for forgiveness. It’s what I work on every day. Maybe that’s what all of us strive for, some kind of lasting peace.”

  Talking with Father Ernie pacified her, made her forget her anger for a while. She knew her calm would pass, though, so she clung to it, taking in the sided houses and the afternoon shade and the smell of the sticky catalpa leaf on her fingers. She thought she could will herself to smell Benito, but she couldn’t. She couldn’t even make out his face, which frightened her. She could only recall the softness of his skin and how she would lightly pinch the dumpling flesh of his arm with the back of her fingers. She’d give anything, she thought, for one last touch, that peace. Strangely, her eyes stayed dry. All she felt was a dull searing deep in her chest with each in-take of air.

  “Listen,” he said. “Take care of Victoria. Crazy Willie and the girl in Arkansas, they can take care of themselves.”

  She waited for him to add Benito to the list. Benito could take care of himself, she wanted to hear. Benito could take care of himself. He didn’t say it because it wasn’t true. It couldn’t be true. Even the people charged to take care of him couldn’t do anything. They’d all been helpless as babies themselves.

  Father Ernie stood and stretched his back, his signal to leave. “Do me a favor, will you,” he said. “Tomorrow at school, sit in the front. Sister Francine, you know—” He leaned toward her. “She’s getting up there in age, and you know how it goes, she must have missed you when she took attendance today. I can see how that could happen. All those uniforms in a row. Just wave to her or something, let her know you’re there.”

  He gazed right at her, trying his best to appear earnest.

  “Sure,” she said. “Will do.”

  He squeezed her shoulder and turned. “We’ll see you tomorrow at school, then. Okay?” He stepped away with a wave and turned back and said, “If I weren’t a priest…”

  “Can I ask you a question, Anthony?” Victoria asked.

  She’d found him sitting on a folding chair on the back porch and joined him. Startled, he quickly palmed his rosary and jammed it in his back pocket.

  “What?”

  “Do you—where’s Alfredo?”

  “That’s your big question? Where’s Alfredo?”

  “Well, you guys are always together, and—”

  “I don’
t know where he is.” He seemed startled still. Or angry. Even angry, he appeared kind. He’d inherited Papa’s good looks, the angular cheeks and thick brows, and Mama’s doleful eyes.

  “Are you two fighting?”

  He shook his head unconvincingly, and she understood his reluctance. Big sister might try to make things right. Though this wasn’t her intention. In fact, she hadn’t wanted to ask about Alfredo at all. She wanted to ask how he could still believe so strongly in God.

  “Okay, forget Alfredo. Another question?”

  “I don’t know where Mama is either.”

  Victoria shook back her hair to hide a smile. She wasn’t used to sarcasm from Anthony. “Forget Mama, too. I want to know…”

  “What?” He squirmed but turned toward her. “What is it?”

  She didn’t care that he was fourteen, a child in many ways. More mature than many of her friends, Anthony possessed a calm resolve she’d always admired, a demeanor infused with innocence that she may have confused with wisdom. Though she wasn’t embarrassed asking him about God and other such weighty matters, she didn’t want him worrying about her aimless lot. And she didn’t want him too aware of who he was—not yet. It was enough that he possessed goodness; he didn’t need the burden of living up to that. She needed to strike the right tone.