Florian's Gate

by T. Davis Bunn

  “The fact is, church attendance is falling. The question is, how many of those who have stopped coming have lost a living faith, rejecting this new group that is attempting to become another authority over their lives, and how many came to church simply to escape the storm of life under Communist rule?”

  * * *

  That afternoon Jeffrey returned from a second meeting with Mr. Henryk to find Katya in her room surrounded by government forms, handwritten lists, and a Polish-English dictionary. He sat down on the floor beside her and began helping her with the tedious business of making a complete inventory for the export forms.

  Once the forms were completed, they went downstairs for dinner, then returned and gathered up the papers, content to sit together and enjoy the feeling of a shared intimacy.

  “This is the way I always thought a confessional would feel,” he told her. “Quiet and intimate and protected. As though I could say anything I wanted and it would be all right.”

  “We all need a place where secrets can be revealed,” she replied, setting aside her papers.

  “We’re not talking about the same thing, though, are we.”

  Katya shook her head. “I carry my place with me. Wherever I go, wherever I am, whatever happens.”

  “I used to feel that way.”

  “I know.”

  He leaned back. “That reminds me of something I haven’t thought of in years. Back then, the greatest part of being religious for me was this feeling I had. I had a friend, somebody I could talk with about anything. I would talk with God and tell Him everything and He would always be there and everything would always be okay. He was my perfect friend.”

  She gazed at him with eyes more open than he had ever seen. “You really miss Him, don’t you?”

  Katya was too close to him for there to be any room for a lie. “I don’t know if I really believe God exists. I miss the feeling, though. I see what I used to have there in your eyes, and I miss that.”

  She watched him, her eyes two gray-violet pools where he could lose himself for all his days. Jeffrey whispered, “I really love you, Katya.”

  She did not flinch, she did not draw back, she did not belittle his confession with indifference. Instead, she cradled his hand in both of hers, bent down, and kissed it with the soft caress of butterfly wings.

  Katya stroked his hand and murmured, “I’ve been so afraid.”

  “Of what?”

  She kept her eyes on his hand. “Of falling in love. Afraid because it had already happened, afraid because . . .”

  There was no longer enough room in Jeffrey’s chest for his heart. “Because why?”

  She turned to him in mute appeal, a yearning gaze that beckoned and pleaded for he knew not what. Slowly, very slowly she shook her head.

  “Why won’t you tell me, Katya?”

  Her gaze did not waver as she asked, “What pushed you away from faith, Jeffrey?”

  At that moment, in an instant of realization, he knew that the entire journey had been leading up to this question. Not just the evening. The thread leading to this had been woven into their relationship from the very first moment of their meeting. Some hidden part of him had been waiting for this, waiting and knowing that when the question came, he would tell her.

  “When I was driving with Gregor the other day,” Jeffrey began, “I was listening to him talk about faith and suffering, and at the same time I was going back over what happened to me. It was like being able to see it through his eyes and his perspective, which was totally different from how I felt about it at the time.”

  “How long ago was it? I mean, whatever happened to you.”

  “Hang on a minute, I’ll tell you, I promise. But I want to tell you about this first.” He related what Gregor had told him, then said, “As I was listening to him, I kept seeing things about myself I’ve never really understood before. Back when the problems all started, I’d get really mad and scream at God in my head, saying, you let my brother go through this and you let him hurt and you let him degrade himself, so to heck with you. But I was really thinking, you said I was special because I believed and I got baptized, but since you came into my life, it’s been worse than it ever has before. That was why I left God behind, Katya—because He didn’t do anything but make things worse for me, not for my brother or my parents or anybody else. I cared about them only after I’d finished caring about myself. He’d let me down. I didn’t want to have anything more to do with Him.”

  The drawing away that he half expected didn’t come. Katya’s gaze remained open, her look filled with love. She said, “Tell me about your brother, Jeffrey.”

  “My brother. Yeah. The brother I don’t have.” The pressure in his chest built to an enormous bubble that demanded to be released.

  “What was his name?”

  “Is. What is his name. Charles. Chuckie was the kid; I don’t know what he wants to be called anymore. My parents call him Charles. I guess they figure he’s outgrown Chuckie. Either that, or they want to keep some kind of barrier between who Chuckie was and who this Charles is that he’s become.”

  Katya’s only movement was a soft caressing of his hand, one finger gently stroking out a reminder that he was not alone, that someone was there and listening and caring.

  “Chuckie was a great kid. He was two years younger and I always felt like he was the kid for both of us. My mother used to say that I was born old, and that’s the way I’ve felt. She has this picture of me, it was always the first thing she’d unpack whenever we arrived in a new home. My dad is sitting in his living-room chair, his slippers are on and he’s got the paper spread all around him with the front section spread open and just low enough so you can see him frowning as he reads. And there I am, about four years old, sitting in this tiny little chair. I’ve got my bunny slippers on and I’ve got my legs crossed like Dad and I’ve got the funny papers spread all over me and I’m wearing an identical frown.”

  “It sounds adorable,” Katya said.

  “I guess so. Mom sure thinks it is. But that’s the way I was. Chuckie, though, was always into everything. There was never anything steady or ‘normal’ about Chuckie. If he was happy you could hear him shouting and singing and laughing a block away. It was the same if he was sad. He hated being sad. When he was down he’d become just as mad as he could, and let the whole world know it.

  “Chuckie didn’t get on well with all the relocations my dad’s company put us through. When he was still little, he’d get sick—real sick. His favorite was bronchial pneumonia, but he pretty much covered the range from appendicitis to the bubonic plague. A lot of my first memories of a new place were of Mom dragging us around to different hospitals and doctors’ offices—I was still too little to be left at home. And Chuckie was not exactly what you’d call an ideal patient. He didn’t like the move, he didn’t like the new home, he didn’t like being sick, and he wanted the whole world to be angry with him. It was tough.

  “Right after his fourteenth birthday we moved again. All I can remember about that first couple of weeks was unconsciously waiting for Chuckie to get sick, and then somehow not being happy when it didn’t happen. Instead of getting sick, Chuckie sort of went away.

  “The move was to Phoenix. I had just turned sixteen, and my dad gave me this clunker of an Olds, so what I really thought about was getting out and stretching my wings. So while Chuckie started fading into the shadows, I was busy being a teenager.”

  “You were a Christian then, isn’t that right?”

  “Yeah. I got baptized on my fifteenth birthday. I know, I know, a Christian’s not supposed to be so selfish about himself, right?”

  “That’s not at all what I was thinking. Just because you’re a Christian doesn’t mean you’re all of a sudden going to be made perfect. It just means you’re called to work toward certain standards. Meeting these standards is a goal you’ll be working for all your life.”

  “I like the way you say that.”

  “Why?”
<
br />   “I don’t know. You make it sound, well, approachable, as if I’m not being asked for the impossible.”

  She squeezed his hand. “Go on with the story.”

  “Mom was busy unpacking and getting us settled, and I was busy with this new school and new freedom, and Dad was busy with his new job. Nobody really seemed to notice that Chuckie had disappeared. His body was there, but he wasn’t. He just left.

  “We moved again at the end of the school year, and about that time we finally started noticing things—well, we finally started talking about things that we’d all been noticing for quite a while. Money was missing. Silver, too. And other things, little things like Dad’s gold cufflinks that he wore only when he and Mom went out on special nights, and one of Mom’s necklaces, and my new camera, and some other stuff.

  “And the liquor was going down a lot faster than ever before, or so my Mom thought. They’d never really been big drinkers, but it was always there, and the bottles never seemed to be full anymore.

  “First it was Dad who talked to Chuckie. Then Mom. Then Dad and Mom. Then me. Then all of us. It didn’t do any good, though. Nothing at all. You can’t imagine how sincere that kid was when he denied it. His pupils would be dilated to the size of bullet holes, and he’d be so sincere denying he was on anything that I’d go away believing him. Denial is the name of the game with somebody like that. They deny it to you, to themselves, to everybody who tries to get underneath the shell and make them face up to what they’re doing. You don’t know what lying is until you’ve tried to talk to an addict about his habit.”

  “Chuckie was on drugs?”

  “Drugs, booze, anything he could buy or steal to stick down his throat or up his nose. It was like a metamorphosis in reverse. When we moved to Phoenix I had a colorful little butterfly for a kid brother. When we left there and moved to Philadelphia I had a worm.

  “Philadelphia was the wrong place to take a kid with a drug problem. I guess we should have figured that out before, but Mom, Dad, and I never really complained about where the company was going to send us next. We knew without ever talking about it that this was just one of the prices we had to pay. And no matter how bad it was, we knew that it wasn’t ever going to be for too long. But Philly was bad. Really bad. The only good thing I remember about Philadelphia was that as the problems with Chuckie got worse, my parents and I kept growing closer and closer together.

  “Chuckie started selling drugs in Philly—or at least he got caught the first time there. I don’t know if he’d already started in Phoenix or not. Philadelphia was something from another world, though, with guys out of your worst nightmare hanging around the school fence, dripping with gold jewelry and selling everything. I mean everything. And Chuckie was into it all.”

  “It must have been awful for you,” Katya said, her voice carrying a shared pain.

  “You can’t imagine. We’d get called down to the police station in the middle of the night, and I’d go down with Dad because Mom was having hysterics and I didn’t want him to have to go alone. When my baby brother would come out, sometimes he was still drugged up. Sometimes he’d been sick all over himself, or had somebody else in the tank get sick on him. It seemed like we were in court almost every week.

  “Finally the judge gave Dad an ultimatum. Either Chuckie went into a state-run rehabilitation program for under-age drug offenders, or he was going to reform school. I know it sounds strange, but that’s really the first time that any of us admitted that the problem was out of control. Things like that happened to other people, not us. But this time it was us, and it wasn’t just out of our control, it was out of our hands. Dad signed the papers and Chuckie went to a hospital for drugged-out teenage criminals.

  “It just gets worse and worse,” Katya murmured.

  “That’s the way it is with an addict. Alcoholic, druggie—they’re all addicted, and the problems are the same. You wouldn’t believe the letters we got from him in the beginning—how they were beating him and treating him horribly. Those letters just tore my mother up. The people we spoke to on the phone didn’t help any; they all had the same deadpan delivery that made them sound like they’d do anything for a buck. Most of them were recovered addicts, and they knew all about the tricks the kids used to try and get out, or try and stay high.

  “When we picked him up six weeks later, they warned us that Chuckie displayed all the symptoms of a recividist.”

  “Denial,” Katya said.

  “Right. They say that the biggest step to help a recovering addict is for the addict to admit that he or she has a problem. Chuckie never admitted once in all this time that he was taking anything. Not drinking, smoking, snorting, anything. Not even after we started finding his stash and pipes and empty bottles and roaches all over the house. Never. It was all a big conspiracy. And the people at the center were right. As soon as Chuckie got out, he started up again. Nothing at all had changed, except once he was back he stopped trying to hide it at all.”

  Jeffrey’s mind went back to the uncounted days and nights—the sounds of his dad yelling and his mom crying and Chuckie cursing. At last his parents stopped trying to confront Chuckie at all, and the boy would come home late at night in a drug-induced stupor, crash around the house, and finally fall into bed, unchallenged.

  In January there was yet another visit to the court, after his brother—still too young to have a license—tried to drive the family car through a concrete bridge support. The dust settled just in time for one more move, the last his parents would ever make. By then they were involved in Al-Anon support groups and classes on co-dependency, learning how to deal with their son’s addiction, struggling to keep their marriage and their home intact.

  There was none of the usual joking and half-worried excitement about this move. There was no time for that, no place, no energy. The three of them went through the accustomed motions with grim determination. Chuckie came and went like a wraith, occasionally sobering up long enough to realize that their world no longer revolved around him.

  The day after they arrived in Jacksonville, Florida, they laid down the law to Charles—all three of them, together. They formed a united front and gave him the ultimatum in no uncertain terms. He was moving out.

  Charles was told that an apartment had been rented for him near the university. A bedroom was going to be made up for him in their new house, but he could stay there only if he allowed himself to be tested for drugs and alcohol every day for two months. The only way he would be welcome in their home was if he was sober.

  Charles whined and begged and pleaded and cried and finally stomped his feet and screamed curses and punched a hole in the dining room wall. He spent only one night in their home; he came in around dawn, falling down drunk. Jeffrey and his father poured him into the new family car, drove him over to his new furnished studio, and dumped him fully clothed on the bed. They pinned a note to his shirt—since he was too drunk or stoned to understand what anyone was telling him—saying that if he was kicked out of this apartment, for any reason whatsoever, he was on his own. Charles missed seeing his father and his brother drive back home, both of them dry-eyed and grim-faced, neither having any more tears to shed.

  “I left God behind in Philadelphia,” Jeffrey went on. “I can still remember the exact moment. I was packing up Mom’s porcelain figurines—she would buy herself one new figurine each time we moved. She loved them, she really did. She’d spend hours taking them out of this display case we had in the living room and dusting them off and just looking at them. It was her concession for having to move, and it gave her something nice to look forward to. She’d spend days and days going around all the shops in the new town, coming home with little pictures she’d take with her Polaroid. And the higher up the ladder Dad went, the nicer the figurines became. It was the one thing she always made us pack ourselves, and we always drove to our new home with them stowed somewhere safe in our car.

  “So there I was, packing up the figurines, and I had this
mental image of deciding it was time to stick God back somewhere in a box too—one that I never intended to open again. Nothing I’d heard in Sunday school or church ever got me prepared for what we were going through, and nobody was able to help me. The Bible sure didn’t.”

  Katya did not contradict him as he expected. Instead she asked, “What happened to Charles?”

  Jeffrey took a deep breath and steeled himself. “Charles wasn’t exactly what you’d call pleased to all of a sudden lose his family. Only I doubt that he thought of us as family by then—more like a haven and a source of money and somebody to beat on emotionally.”

  Katya nodded.

  “Anyway, we’d get calls from the landlord or the police to ask if we knew that Charles had been here and done this or that. My parents absolutely refused to get involved. Every once in a while Charles would call and scream over the phone about abandonment and heartlessness, but they really stuck to their guns. Al-Anon had taught them how to detach from Charles’ problems. After about nine months or so, just as I was getting ready to go off to college, I started seeing smiles around the house again, hearing laughter. You can’t imagine how nice it is to hear laughter until you’ve lived in a house without it for a year or so.”

  “I can imagine it,” Katya said softly.

  He looked at her. “Yeah, maybe you can.”

  “What is that supposed to mean?”

  “Ever since I’ve gotten here, I’ve been coming to grips with what lies behind that silent strength of yours.”

  This time it was different. This time the defense mechanism did not automatically freeze him out. There was no indifference, no denial, no drawing away. She simply said, “Finish your story.”

  “Okay. So Chuckie, I mean Charles, began going to greater and greater extremes. He got kicked out of his apartment, but by then he had a girl who took him in. Charles was growing up into this really good-looking kid. And there was something else about him, something other than his looks that drew the girls like a magnet.”