by Andre Dubus
She hoped Hank would be awake when she got home. He would look up from his book, his eyes amused and arrogant as they always were when she returned from her nights. She hoped he was awake. For if he was already asleep she would in silence ascend the stairs and undress in the dark and lie beside him unable to sleep and she would feel the house enclosing and caressing her with some fear she could not name.
III
BEFORE JOE RITCHIE was dying they lay together in the cool nights of spring and he talked. His virginal, long-stored and (he told her) near-atrophied passion leaped and quivered inside her; during the lulls he talked with the effusion of a man who had lived forty years without being intimate with a woman. Which was, he said, pretty much a case of having never been intimate with anyone at all. It was why he left the priesthood. Edith looked beyond the foot of the bed and above the chest of drawers at the silhouette of the hanging crucifix while he told her of what he called his failures, and the yearnings they caused.
He said he had never doubted. When he consecrated he knew that he held the body, the blood. He did not feel proud or particularly humble either; just awed. It was happening in his two lifted hands (and he lifted them above his large and naked chest in the dark), his two hands, of his body; yet at the same time it was not of his body. He knew some priests who doubted. Their eyes were troubled, sometimes furtive. They kept busy: some were athletic, and did that; some read a lot, and others were active in the parish: organized and supervised fairs, started discussion groups, youth groups, pre-Cana groups, married groups, counselled, made sick calls, jail calls, anything to keep them from themselves. Some entered the service, became chaplains. One of them was reported lost at sea. He had been flying with a navy pilot, from a carrier. The poor bastard, Joe said. You know what I think? He wanted to be with that pilot, so he could be around certainty. Watch the man and the machine. A chaplain in an airplane. When I got the word I thought: That’s it: in the destructive element immerse, you poor bastard.
Joe had loved the Eucharist since he was a boy; it was why he became a priest. Some went to the seminary to be pastors and bishops; they didn’t know it, but it was why they went, and in the seminary they were like young officers. Some, he said, went to pad and shelter their neuroses—or give direction to them. They had a joke then, the young students with their fresh and hopeful faces: behind every Irish priest there’s an Irish mother wringing her hands. But most became priests because they wanted to live their lives with God; they had, as the phrase went, a vocation. There were only two vocations, the church taught: the religious life or marriage. Tell that to Hank, she said; he’d sneer at one and laugh at the other. Which would he sneer at? Joe said. I don’t really know, she said.
It was a difficult vocation because it demanded a marriage of sorts with a God who showed himself only through the volition, action, imagination, and the resultant faith of the priest himself; when he failed to create and complete his union with God he was thrust back upon himself and his loneliness. For a long time the Eucharist worked for Joe. It was the high point of his day, when he consecrated and ate and drank. The trouble was it happened early in the morning. He rose and said Mass and the day was over, but it was only beginning. That was what he realized or admitted in his mid-thirties: that the morning consecration completed him but it didn’t last; there was no other act during the day that gave him that completion, made him feel an action of his performed in time and mortality had transcended both and been received by a God who knew his name.
Of course while performing the tasks of a parish priest he gained the sense of accomplishment which even a conscripted soldier could feel at the end of a chore. Sometimes the reward was simply that the job was over: that he had smiled and chatted through two and a half hours of bingo without displaying his weariness that bordered on panic. But with another duty came a reward that was insidious: he knew that he was a good speaker, that his sermons were better than those of the pastor and the two younger priests. One of the younger priests should have been excused altogether from speaking to gathered people. He lacked intelligence, imagination, and style; with sweaty brow he spoke stiffly of old and superfluous truths he had learned as a student. When he was done, he left the pulpit and with great relief and concentration worked through the ritual, toward the moment when he would raise the host. When he did this, and looked up at the Eucharist in his hands, his face was no longer that of the misfit in the pulpit; his jaw was solemn, his eyes firm. Joe pitied him for his lack of talent, for his anxiety each Sunday, for his awareness of each blank face, each shifting body in the church, and his knowledge that what he said was ineffectual and dull.
Yet he also envied the young priest. In the pulpit Joe loved the sound of his own voice: the graceful flow of his words, his imagery, his timing, and the tenor reaches of his passion; his eyes engaged and swept and recorded for his delight the upturned and attentive faces. At the end of his homily he descended from the pulpit, his head lowered, his face set in the seriousness of a man who has just perceived truth. His pose continued as he faced the congregation for the Credo and the prayers of petition; it continued as he ascended the three steps to the altar and began the offertory and prepared to consecrate. In his struggle to rid himself of the pose, he assumed another: he acted like a priest who was about to hold the body of Christ in his hands, while all the time, even as he raised the host and then the chalice, his heart swelled and beat with love for himself. On the other six days, at the sparsely attended weekday masses without sermons, he broke the silence of the early mornings only with prayers, and unaware of the daily communicants, the same people usually, most of them old women who smelled of sleep and cleanliness and time, he was absorbed by the ritual, the ritual became him, and in the privacy of his soul he ate the body and drank the blood; he ascended; and then his day was over.
The remaining hours were dutiful, and he accepted them with a commitment that nearly always lacked emotion. After a few years he began to yearn; for months, perhaps a year or more, he did not know what he yearned for. Perhaps he was afraid to know. At night he drank more; sometimes the gin curbed his longings that still he wouldn’t name; but usually, with drinking, he grew sad. He did not get drunk, so in the morning he woke without hangover or lapse of memory, and recalling last night’s gloom he wondered at its source, as though he were trying to understand not himself but a close friend. One night he did drink too much, alone, the pastor and the two younger priests long asleep, Joe going down the hall to the kitchen with less and less caution, the cracking sound of the ice tray in his hands nothing compared to the sound that only he could hear: his monologue with himself; and it was so intense that he felt anyone who passed the kitchen door would hear the voice that resounded in his skull. In the morning he did not recall what he talked about while he drank. He woke dehydrated and remorseful, his mind so dissipated that he had to talk himself through each step of his preparation for the day, for if he didn’t focus carefully on buttoning his shirt, tying his shoes, brushing his teeth, he might fall again into the shards of last night. His sleep had been heavy and drunken, his dreams anxious. He was thankful that he could not recall them. He wished he could not recall what he did as he got into bed: lying on his side he had hugged a pillow to his breast, and holding it in both arms had left consciousness saying to himself, to the pillow, to God, and perhaps aloud: I must have a woman. Leaving the rectory, crossing the lawn to the church in the cool morning, where he would say mass not for the old ladies but for himself, he vowed that he would not get drunk again.
It was not his holding the pillow that frightened him; nor was it the words he had spoken either aloud or within his soul: it was the fearful and ascendant freedom he had felt as he listened to and saw the words. There was dew on the grass beneath his feet; he stopped and looked down at the flecks of it on his polished black shoes. He stood for a moment, a slight cool breeze touching his flesh, the early warmth of the sun on his hair and face, and he felt a loving and plaintive union with all those a
live and dead who had at one time in their lives, through drink or rage or passion, suddenly made the statement whose result they had both feared and hoped for and had therefore long suppressed. He imagined a multitude of voices and pained and determined faces, leaping into separation and solitude and fear and hope. His hand rose to his hair, grey in his thirties. He walked on to the church. As he put on his vestments he looked down at the sleepy altar boy, a child. He wanted to touch him but was afraid to. He spoke gently to the boy, touched him with words. They filed into the church, and the old women and a young couple who were engaged and one old man rose.
There were ten of them. With his gin-dried mouth he voiced the prayers while his anticipatory heart beat toward that decision he knew he would one day reach, and had been reaching for some time, as though his soul had taken its own direction while his body and voice moved through the work of the parish. When the ten filed up to receive communion and he placed the host on their tongues and smelled their mouths and bodies and clothes, the sterile old ones and the young couple smelling washed as though for a date, the boy of after-shave lotion, the girl of scented soap, he studied each face for a sign. The couple were too young. In the wrinkled faces of the old he could see only an accumulation of time, of experience; he could not tell whether, beneath those faces, there was a vague recollection of a rewarding life or weary and muted self-contempt because of moments denied, choices run from. He could not tell whether any of them had reached and then denied or followed an admission like the one that gin had drawn from him the night before. Their tongues wet his fingers. He watched them with the dread, excitement, and vulnerability of a man who knows his life is about to change.
After that he stayed sober. The gin had done its work. Before dinner he approached the bottle conspiratorially, held it and looked at it as though it contained a benevolent yet demanding genie. He did not even have to drink carefully. He did not have to drink at all. He drank to achieve a warm nimbus for his secret that soon he would bare to the pastor. In the weeks that followed his drunken night he gathered up some of his past, looked at it as he had not when it was his present, and smiling at himself he saw that he had been in trouble, and the deepest trouble had been his not knowing that he was in trouble. He saw that while he was delivering his sermons he had been proud, yes; perhaps that wasn’t even sinful; perhaps it was natural, even good; but the pride was no longer significant. The real trap of his sermons was that while he spoke he had acted out, soberly and with no sense of desperation, the same yearning that had made him cling to the pillow while drunk. For he realized now that beneath his sermons, even possibly at the source of them, was an abiding desire to expose his soul with all his strengths and vanities and weaknesses to another human being. And, further, the other human being was a woman.
Studying himself from his new distance he learned that while he had scanned the congregation he had of course noted the men’s faces; but as attentive, as impressed, as they might be, he brushed them aside, and his eyes moved on to the faces of women. He spoke to them. It was never one face. He saw in all those eyes of all those ages the female reception he had to have: grandmothers and widows and matrons and young wives and young girls all formed a composite woman who loved him.
She came to the confessional too, where he sat profiled to the face behind the veiled window, one hand supporting his forehead and shielding his eyes. He sat and listened to the woman’s voice. He had the reputation of being an understanding confessor; he had been told this by many of those people who when speaking to a priest were compelled to talk shop; not theirs: his. Go to Father Ritchie, the women told him at parish gatherings; that’s what they all say, Father. He sat and listened to the woman’s voice. Usually the sins were not important; and even when they were he began to sense that the woman and the ritual of confession had nothing to do with the woman and her sin. Often the sins of men were pragmatic and calculated and had to do with money; their adulteries were restive lapses from their responsibilities as husbands and fathers, and they confessed them that way, some adding the assurance that they loved their wives, their children. Some men confessed not working at their jobs as hard as they could, and giving too little time to their children. Theirs was a world of responsible action; their sins were what they considered violations of that responsibility.
But the women lived in a mysterious and amoral region which both amused and attracted Joe. Their sins were instinctual. They raged at husbands or children; they fornicated or committed adultery; the closest they came to pragmatic sin was birth control, and few of them confessed that anymore. It was not celibate lust that made Joe particularly curious about their sexual sins: it was the vision these sins gave him of their natures. Sometimes he wondered if they were capable of sinning at all. Husbands whispered of one-night stands, and in their voices Joe could hear self-reproach that was rooted in how they saw themselves as part of the world. But not so with the women. In passion they made love. There was no other context for the act. It had nothing to do with their husbands or their children; Joe never said it in the confessional but it was clear to him that it had nothing to do with God either. He began to see God and the church and those activities that he thought of as the world—education, business, politics—as male and serious, perhaps comically so; while women were their own temples and walked cryptic, oblivious, and brooding across the earth. Behind the veil their voices whispered without remorse. Their confessions were a distant and dutiful salute to the rules and patterns of men. He sat and listened to the woman’s voice.
And his reputation was real: he was indeed understanding and kind, but not for God, not for the sacrament that demanded of him empathy and compassion as God might have; or Christ. For it was not God he loved, it was Christ: God in the flesh that each morning he touched and ate, making his willful and faithful connection with what he could neither touch nor see. But his awareness of his duty to imitate Christ was not the source of his virtues as a confessor. Now, as he prepared to leave the priesthood, he saw that he had given kindness and compassion and understanding because he had wanted to expose that part of himself, real or false, to a faceless nameless woman who would at least know his name because it hung outside the confessional door. And he understood why on that hungover morning he had wanted to touch the altar boy but had been afraid to, though until then his hands had instinctively gone out to children, to touch, to caress; on that morning he had been afraid he would not stop at a touch; that he would embrace the boy, fiercely, like a father.
He did not lose his faith in the Eucharist. After leaving the priesthood he had daily gone to Mass and received what he knew was the body and blood of Christ. He knew it, he told Edith, in the simplest and perhaps most profound way: most profound, he said, because he believed that faith had no more to do with intellect than love did; that touching her he knew he loved her and loving her he touched her; and that his flesh knew God through touch as it had to; that there was no other way it could; that bread and wine becoming body and blood was neither miracle nor mystery, but natural, for it happened within the leap of the heart of man toward the heart of God, a leap caused by the awareness of death. Like us, he had said. Like us what? she said, lying beside him last spring, his seed swimming in her, thinking of her Episcopal childhood, she and her family Christian by skin color and pragmatic in belief. When we make love, he said. We do it in the face of death. (And this was in the spring, before he knew.) Our bodies aren’t just meat then; they become statement too; they become spirit. If we can do that with each other then why can’t we do it with God, and he with us? I don’t know, she said; I’ve never thought about it. Don’t, he said; it’s too simple.
After they became lovers he continued going to daily Mass but he stopped receiving communion. She offered to stop seeing him, to let him confess and return to his sacrament. He told her no. It was not that he believed he was sinning with her; it was that he didn’t know. And if indeed he were living in sin it was too complex for him to enter a confessional and simply
murmur the word adultery; too complex for him to burden just any priest with, in any confessional. He recognized this as pride: the sinner assuming the anonymous confessor would be unable to understand and unwilling to grapple with the extent and perhaps even the exonerating circumstances of the sin, but would instead have to retreat and cling to the word adultery and the divine law forbidding it. So he did not confess. And there were times at daily Mass when he nearly joined the others and received communion, because he felt that he could, that it would be all right. But he did not trust what he felt: in his love for Edith he was untroubled and happy but he did not trust himself enough to believe he could only be happy within the grace of God. It could be, he told her, that his long and celibate need for earthly love now satisfied, he had chosen to complete himself outside the corridor leading to God; that he was not really a spiritual man but was capable of, if not turning his back on God, at least glancing off to one side and keeping that glance fixed for as long as he and Edith loved. So he did not receive, even though at times he felt that he could.
