The Business of Naming Things

by Michael Coffey

  He could deal with this. He’d become hardened to his own sin. He remained in service to his parishioners, their small lives, their small joys, their heartbreaks, marriages, deaths, foibles, sins relayed to him through the screen. He dispensed their penance. They worked their faith and their doubt through him. No one else did this for them, and for the nonce, he wanted it no other way. He wanted Margaret.

  She is not far away. Margaret is quite near, perhaps putting on her habit and scapular. Yes, he will see her, very shortly. The prospect makes his face warm and his groin stir, he is awake now, looking about. He finds his trousers and puts them up and on and yanks his belt.

  The bathroom door has been closed for too long. He tries the knob. Locked. He thinks he hears her. Yes, he does; that’s her. She is sitting on the Eljer toilet, her feet, with their delicate white toes and pale pearl nails, splayed across the soft nap of the floor mat that surrounds the throat of the bowl. Margaret, he thinks to say, but thinks better. Leave her be.

  AS HE TRAIPSES IN THE COLD DOWN BELOW the car park to the dark woods near the lakefront, looking for a tree, he rues the fact that he is not the word artist he wanted to be. Sermons are not in his wheelhouse. He knows that. Wasn’t Portrait the thing that near enlightened him to his calling? It worked on Merton.

  Ah, there.

  Last year, The Moviegoer. Won the big prize. Father Paul read it, but he was no Binx Bolling. He had no desire to hobo around in search of faith or a good thrashing. Not Catholic! This year a book about priests (there on his nightstand). This, then, again, this, yes, his fallenness the stuff of art, religious art, depictions of the struggle for faith. Saint Augustine.

  There is hardly any snow for late November, only little gray stoles of it flung in the gullies. He holds himself a long time at the base of a birch, his yellow cascading down in a steaming review. Himself there, but not himself. Painless anyway. Then a shiver of pleasure, and the vapors of life gently court him, not just his own smells, but also the dry tang of foliage, the cool musk of damp bark, and the wind up from the lake carrying a little of the water’s residual summer warmth along with an odor of dead fish. He notes the sounds around him, too: tree branches creaking, turning in the wind, strengthening themselves; an odd cracking sound now and then; and, distantly, traffic, out on Route 9, approaching slowly, gears, then receding into a pinpoint of silence. Then he hears a cheap door click shut and he knows he is too late.

  There he sees it: the right arm of Mike Seeney extended and his palm pressing down Margaret’s head out of sight as Seeney’s Rambler guns out of the Inn of the Nations parking lot. Father Paul listens to the gears shifting, first, and straining, second, more straining, third now and cruising, as things moving away from you will, out of earshot. Deafening.

  NOTHING BUT A FUNERAL ON TV—what kind of nation kills its leader? Lying in state. On both channels, that’s all. And there’s Father Hartke, old Gil, the show-biz priest, greeting people. Father Paul remembers him—a weekend in Maryland (conveniently, he was down there for the Preakness, and Hartke treated). He caught Hartke’s Catholic U players the next afternoon. Helen Hayes was there.

  What kind of faith kills its savior?

  Father Paul Connolly, lying in state, room 11, should anyone care to view the deceased. Clem Fessette must’ve placed a call to the rectory and Mike Seeney was dispatched to rescue, for once (the word on Mike Seeney: He’ll bury you). O my Jesus. The Mass must go on.

  Margaret had been in the bathroom, then.

  Father Paul sees that dear Margaret had had the kindness to make (quickly) the bed. There, hidden in the nightstand drawer behind Gideon, are their ankle belts. Exquisite shackles. Would not fit his neck.

  Of course, it had to be Seeney. Margaret had a crush on Mike, like all the sisters. The safe man, celibate now, a widower, childless, devoted to the church and grounds. More pious than he. The man who hand-dug all the graves and buried the dead of the parish. He did his work softly and soundlessly, as if in a silent film, hardly disturbing the surface of the earth for his interments. Hadn’t Father Paul seen Seeney blush at the church picnic in August, when a small dribble of Michigan sauce slipped down his chin and Margaret wiped it away with her finger. She smiled in such a warm way that Mike had to fetch something from the shed.

  Not very hygienic, for an Ursuline, Sister, said her pastor.

  Father, she whispered. He who is clean among us . . .

  That kind of brash he both loved and feared. But now, of course, he had other things to fear. Seeney had spied the pastor’s Packard, if not the strewn bedsheets in the room. Margaret’s tears in the car (inevitable), her damp lashes and sniffles, could have as cover the death of the president, if she wished it to. If. Conversely, she could be destroying Father Paul right now in Seeney’s Rambler somewhere on Route 22. Right around Peru, the dead orchards.

  Noon. And why had it come to this? Father Paul was sitting up in bed. No more Ballantines in the cooler. All of college football canceled or preempted, just like Father Paul—at this point, he was simply a test pattern—a big silent Indian chief, with no tribe. But it had come to this and Margaret had warned him, warned him that his lack of piety, his weakness, his harsh judgments of his fellow man, were fatiguing her, weakening her in faith and body, and he was slipping beyond her capacity to hold on to him. Especially in the face of her own “contradictions,” as she called them. Ah, but she’d never consign him to the fire.

  She was leaving the Church herself, she said. He could not, and would not, and would she without him? And she would not! This is what he had wanted to talk about during the night, not the unimaginable events in Dallas—the horror of it. The sudden death of a prince. The weeping.

  He sought a confessor.

  “CLEM,” HE SAYS, OPENING THE DOOR next to the sign that said OFFICE. “Do you have anything I might eat?”

  “Father, shouldn’t you be getting back?” Father Paul can hear the solemn notes of the broadcast beneath Clem’s counter somewhere, the click of shoes in the East Room of the White House, the sighing of veils and men.

  “Clem, I should not. I am not well today. A curate from St. Alex’s is covering,” he says, lying.

  “Nothing for you to eat, Father. The missus isn’t bringing over my dinner today. She’s watching this and you can’t talk to her. I should be home, but for this retreat going on.”

  “It’s an empty parking lot, Clem.”

  Clem just looks at Father Paul, his only guest.

  “You should be getting back. I can give you a drink,” says Clem. He produces a bottle of VO from beneath the counter. “There’s 7 Up and Coke and Fanta in the machine. Ice-cold.”

  Father Paul, surprising himself, declines, but does ring up a Coke bottle, which dropped out of the big red machine like ordnance. The bleakness of it—man and soda, November afternoon.

  “Ice-cold all right,” he says, palming it. “Thanks, Clem. Bless you.”

  Halfway through the door, Father Paul turns. “Clem, Inn of the Nations. What nations?” But Clem has retired to the back.

  OH, IT IS OVER. Father Paul stands in his room and looks out the window. He can see nothing but sky, gray and featureless. Rampant, he thinks, as in spreading, unchecked. A good word, that. And the vacuum of his future—his rampant future, spreading, unchecked? Hardly. There’s no one in it, out there only vanished souls—his mother’s, his father’s, and wherever Sarah’s is. Now Margaret, off with Mike Seeney. And nowhere his faith, his Holy God, his service, his sanctity. The Coca-Cola revived him some.

  Not rampant. Contracting.

  Sitting in a chair, TV off, he opens the curtains. Come on in, he says, inviting the cold scrutiny of midafternoon. He settles in with his book, the condemned man’s last cigarette.

  Ironic: a priest novel. He recalls that the book won the big award (lot’s of to-do: The monsignor mentioned it in his bulletin), and Father Paul’d committed the sin of envy. Was the author a priest? He was not, apparently, from the back flap—J.F. Powers
, “raised in a devout family,” a CO in the war—good for him. But: Father Urban? What’s that make him, Father Rural?

  Made quite a stir, anyway. Beat out the Russian with the nymphet. Ha! A good time for the Catholics right now (till yesterday). But what to learn?

  Father Paul, since falling ass over teakettle for Margaret three years ago, hadn’t written a word in his “Soul Journey,” his work in progress, fashioned after The Spiritual Exercises, which instruction, he has thought more than once, was to find a kind of engagement with belief and discipline and spiritual cleansing that a small French girl had delivered in a single afternoon.

  As a Jesuit, of course, Ignatius’s Exercises, the four-week regimen of spiritual examen, was a rite of passage. All struggled with it, but Paul Connolly, self-trained in ardent visualization of the scriptural, shined. As he sat in the pale seepage of the one window to Room 11, he recited the Fifth Exercise, a meditation on hell: “The first Point will be to see with the sight of the imagination the great fires, and the souls as in bodies of fire. The second, to hear with the ears wailings, howlings, cries, blasphemies against Christ our Lord and against all His Saints. The third, to smell with the smell smoke, sulphur, dregs and putrid things. The fourth, to taste with the taste bitter things, like tears, sadness and the worm of conscience. The fifth, to touch with the touch—” But he could not go on.

  Yes, he should be visualizing his own torment right now—Hell, his hell; wailings, howlings, cries, blasphemies against Christ our Lord, his rantings; smoke and dregs and putrid things, here in room 11; the awful taste of tears, the worm of conscience—the worm! His. And the touch of fire—on his skin. But no, he is thumbing through a piece of fiction.

  He could be visualizing the torment of a widow and a family and a nation right now—his vocation, look at Hartke—but he is not. This is a tragedy that shall not be read.

  What is transpiring in his life is a tragedy, too—that shall not be read.

  It won’t even be written.

  The Book of the Month people—it takes him a while to figure this out—are offering a short story by the author as a little appetizer.

  As he begins the story—“The Presence of Grace”—he flinches at the absence of it, and of Margaret, and of his vocation, all fled. The presence of emptiness yawns around him in the silent landscape of a splattered world. He’s got the TV on now, for atmosphere. Funerary art. He is remains. Of the dead. He has been cast adrift in another dimension, from which he can see the world spinning away into its intricately charged orbits, while he will tumble slowly through space alone.

  Father Paul cannot write. He cannot even think . . . of . . . the empty rectory, the loneliness or anger of Margaret, perhaps hatred, perhaps pain of confusion. No. Mike Seeney ministering her—minister!—or the gaggle of sisters gossiping. He won’t even merit a search party, will he? He matters not. He digs into the text—the consolations of prose. The oblivion of other people’s words.

  For the next two hours Father Paul follows one Father Fabre, a curate to a daft pastor who is stubbornly antisocial (likes to picnic by himself, go to the zoo, and count the collections in his room—by himself). Fabre tries to compensate, balancing out the parish presence by accepting invitations to dinner from parishioners, only to make a grave mistake: He becomes coerced into offering his blessing to an unmarried older couple living together, in sin, of course, while the curate for the duration of the meal is paired with a young single woman, who tells him, “I know priests who are married.” Father Fabre escapes, but he understands what he has done. He bravely presents his dilemma to the pastor, who, it is immediately clear, will have to intervene with a council of outraged parishioners who want him to do something about his wayward curate and the sinning couple. But the old guy just refuses to accept their account that anything untoward has happened and manages to do it in a way that does not offend them, or accuse them of misrepresenting the facts. “ ’S not so,” he simply tells them, and nothing more. “ ’S not so.”

  Father Paul finds himself laughing throughout this tale at the author’s gentle sarcasm delivered in sentences as sharp as strung diamonds, all facets beautifully balanced in the weight of clauses and the light they carry. As the offending older gentleman, the wonderfully named (and diminutive) Mr. Pint, struggles in the summer heat to turn the ice-cream crank, Father Fabre quietly offers to take a turn. “But Mr. Pint, out to deny his size and years, needed no help, or lost in his exertions, had not heard.”

  Father Paul laughs loudly, and rereads the lines about Mr. Pint—such care and attention and not a little bit of dignity bestowed upon the little man’s efforts through the writer’s own. Father Paul reads around in the story, delight after delight. When he reaches the end, where, indeed, there is a near-miraculous presence of grace in the church—the pastor’s way, gentle stonewalling, perhaps the Church’s way, prevails—Father Paul feels joy in his breast, at last: All come together to pray before the curate at devotions; his pastor, in the “dim, dell-like recesses of the nave,” opens a few windows. A lovely feat, a lovely, perfect story, and Father Paul begins to whimper then, to feel his eyes moisten, perhaps a cry coming. Somehow, he understands what it is to listen. The Lord listens.

  There is a knock on the door to room 11. “It’s Mike, Father. You must open up.”

  Seeney, his face worn, stands there, with state troopers at his shoulders—like crows, thinks Father Paul.

  THE NEWMAN BOYS

  I

  “CLEAN UNDERWEAR, MICHAEL,” said Michael’s mother when she knocked on his door in the morning. He knew what this meant: They were going clothes shopping.

  Michael’s mother had directed his back-to-school shopping the previous August, on the eve of his entrance into seventh grade. It was considered a success. When outfitted, he looked neither like a farmer nor a beatnik, but “a young man from Andover,” as his mother put it. Michael didn’t know what to think. But that was last year, an okay school year, in his view. He’d made the honor roll; he’d finished third in the low hurdles at Field Day and received a ribbon; and, at the end of the school year, he’d proven himself adept at spin the bottle. In the last six months or so, he’d had his growth spurt—he was no longer a size 14 boys’. He might even be a men’s small.

  It was big news for Michael’s mother to drive the Cadillac anywhere. In her worldview, women didn’t drive; they were driven—in every sense of the word. Michael didn’t know if this made his mother modern or old-fashioned, and he didn’t know whom to ask.

  The everyday driving in the family was left mostly to his father, who motored the old Ford truck with the emblem of a big bull on the driver’s side door to and from the barn twice a day, ran errands, and made his Friday-night jaunts to the taverns on the river, where he talked local politics, shot pool, and came back with a few stories that he shared carefully at Saturday supper. And then there was the handyman, Ted Farrell, who drove a little. Ted helped on the farm some but was generally at the beck and call of Michael’s mother. It was Ted who squired her to her hair appointments, to checkups with Dr. Forquet, and for her monthly visit to the credit union in Dannemora to make her deposits.

  Indeed, Gwendolyn (Chilcott) Touhey spent most of her time right at home in the large salon, doing her accounts—Michael understood that a block of properties she’d inherited in Troy was the principle source of the family income. The Touheys lived in the biggest house in town, a three-story Victorian with a widow’s walk and a cupola, though they were the smallest family in Oreville, but for the childless.

  IT HAD BEEN A SULLEN SUMMER for Michael. A yellow coin of impetigo on his right shin had kept him from the swimming hole during most of August, and a badly sprained left ankle, incurred in the spring while playing in the hayloft, had dashed most of his Little League season. To make matters worse, in July his best friend’s family had moved away, taking his best friend’s older sister, Pearl, with them. Michael, as a result of these deprivations, spent most of his spare time during that summer
of ’66 reading the Sporting News his father would bring home, with its endless statistics on every major-league team as well as stats on all the minor leagues—the Pacific Coast League, the International League, the American Association, all the way down to the rookie leagues. It was Michael’s world. And there was also the one old copy of Play-boy he’d stolen from the outhouse at Macomb Park: Stella Stevens stretched out on a white mink bench, plus a long, confounding story by Ernest Hemingway. Michael’s next world. As Labor Day weekend approached, for the first time he found himself adrift and, also for the first time, excited about returning to school. He was looking forward to the trip with his mother to find a new wardrobe.

  “It’s the finest men’s clothier south of Montreal,” his mother said at breakfast—a soft-boiled egg in a cup, three fingers of toast for her, a bowl of Wheaties and glass of prune juice for him. “The finest north of Bergdorf’s. The Merkels are Jewish, you know.

  “Now wash up.”

  THE FIFTEEN-MILE TRIP TO THE NEAREST CITY, where there were nice shops in an actual downtown with traffic lights and metered parking and a pizza parlor, was very navigable; indeed, it was a leisurely route—a well-banked two-lane road that followed the easy laze of the river. Michael’s mother drove slowly, with no distractions—no radio, no conversation. She eyed the road with an intense concentration. She shared this with her son, catching her breath at a four-way stop: “You line up the hood ornament with the stripe on the right shoulder and you’ll always know where you are.”