I ignored the priest as he told us what we could not do, and tapped my pen and thought about poetry. I never met any boys anyway. Only a few seminarians, from time to time. Only a few of my father’s students. I stared down at my notebook that had the word “MORALITY” written on it in black block letters—that’s what the class was officially called—and tried to dream up great last lines, ones that hit like a sock in the gut. As the priest lectured, the expression in his eyes was unchanging and his glasses flashed opaquely. His skin was so carnation-colored a blush would never have shown. You could not tell what he was thinking, which meant that later, people would say they knew it all along.
You see it coming a mile off, but I didn’t, none of us did: the priest was arrested for having sex with a fourteen-year-old boy, and he went to jail soon after I was let out of high school for good. Everyone was shocked, everyone is always shocked. I was shocked—not because I had never witnessed it before, but because it had never been my priest. One of my classmates said, “All I can think about is the people he must have helped,” but that didn’t enter my mind. I was thinking about the cathedral, and its buttressed stone walkways in the middle of the air, where you saw black figures hurrying back and forth to their hidden business. I was thinking when a priest shone his spotlight of attention on you, it was always considered an honor, a sign you had been chosen. The boy had stood in that place too, and felt like the gleam off gold. I was conjuring the room where it must have happened, the sort of room I had been in a hundred times, with a desk and wood paneling and a stark brassy cross on the wall, where even the paperweights were religious and the potted plants kept their palms pressed together. And the ceiling was so low and the walls so close that you felt more inside than you ever felt elsewhere. And a priest was in it, and a boy.
“Oh, I knew him,” the seminarian says. “I met him at a retreat when I was twelve years old.” My heart twists horribly inside me—other stories had come to light later, stories almost too black to write down. The priest had a habit of seeking out boys who thought they might have a religious calling, the serious-minded ones with bright auras, ones who wanted to stay up late into the night talking about what it might mean to give themselves to God. One of his victims drank antifreeze after an early teenage encounter with him—the pain and the shame, he said, were too much—and then was told he couldn’t enter the priesthood because of this attempt on his life. He tried annihilation again when he was twenty-one, and this time he succeeded.
“Tell me you escaped,” I say silently, as the seminarian describes how the priest shone that spotlight of attention on him. He gave him a relic—a piece of the One True Cross, of which there were no fewer than four thousand chunks floating around the greater St. Louis area, orbiting each other but never touching, burning holes in the khaki pockets of Christian teenagers. That was all that ever happened between them, but that was strange enough.
6
DINNER WITH THE BISHOP
There is always someone in a writer’s family who is funnier and more original than she is—someone for her to quote and observe, someone to dazzle and dumbfound her, someone to confuse her so much she has to look things up in the dictionary. That would be my sister Mary, whom I worship as people used to worship the sun.
Every time I try to capture her and force her into my private zoo of description, I fail. I have, on different occasions and in different moods, described her as “a tricked-out club Chewbacca,” a “highly literate female Tarzan,” and “a jaguar who went through a human puberty.” One thing is certain: she is straight out of Nature. She speaks a made-up language largely consisting of the words “ayyyy” and “baybay” in various combinations, interspersed with nuanced and meaningful growls. She’s always wearing a tiny fur vest of some kind. If I tracked her through the woods on a snowy night, I am sure she would leave paw prints.
The first time she ever saw a T. rex skeleton in a museum, she stared at it with passionate attraction. I’m surprised she didn’t try to climb up into its rib cage and hang there as its heart. “Ayyyy,” she whispered in a voice full of emotion, “it’s just a little baybay.”
Unsurprisingly, she’s the only one of us who ever made it all the way through college and got a real job. “I saw what happened to you and Christina, and I knew I had to do it myself, I had to figure it all out for myself,” she has told me, and that is what she did. She chased the scholarships, she submitted the paperwork, she kept after my mother to file our taxes on time so she could apply for financial aid. She graduated from pharmacy school in 2012, and soon after married a fellow pharmacist, a soft-spoken man named Jon who seems to have drunk more milk in his life than other people. At their wedding, while attempting to fulfill the duties of a bridesmaid, I fell down the marble steps in front of the whole church, causing everyone except my father and my husband to burst into joyous laughter. Then, at the reception, I gave a sentimental toast where I pretended I had carried the bride and groom as twins in my womb. Later, I learned quite a few of the groom’s guests believed I had extemporized the whole speech while on mushrooms. God bless them. If that’s what mushrooms did, I would take them all the time.
Under the influence of tequila, she once wrenched a toilet paper dispenser off a bathroom wall and threw it in the Ohio River. Also under the influence of tequila, she once strode down the streets of historic Newport, Kentucky, grabbing fistfuls of leaves off the decorative trees while screaming, “I hate plants, bitch!” and daring unseen cops to arrest her. “COME AND GET ME!” she yelled, throwing her arms wide, slapping her chest, and ripping off a jacket that looked freshly killed. The pleasure is in never knowing what she’s going to do next. I think when I threw that firecracker directly at her face, so long ago when we were children, it might have granted her the superpower of unpredictability.
• • •
A BREAK IN THE CLOUDS: Mary and Jon are driving in for the weekend so we can all go to dinner with the bishop. “It would mean a lot to your dad if you came,” my mother hinted gently on the phone last time they talked, and my mother’s gentle hints are law. “This is a big night for him—it’s the seventy-fifth anniversary of his church, and the bishop is going to give a speech.” Jason and I have promised to attend as well. My father wants the smaller congregation of his family to surround him again. He persists in considering us a credit to him, despite the fact that Mary is from the jungle, I am from the devil, and neither of our husbands has ever held a gun.
In the sideways light of late Friday afternoon, they pull into the shade of the spreading oak tree, and Mary leaps from the passenger seat of the car and runs to hug Mom. “Baby, how are you?” she cries, cupping her face in her hands, petting her red hair. “You look a little tired.”
“I was up till four in the morning shredding documents,” Mom informs her, the light of vigilance shining in her eyes. My mother shreds documents with the ruthlessness of a person who believes a French con artist named The Mustache is trying to steal her identity. Woe to The Mustache if he succeeded. As soon as he realized what living her life entails, he would very quickly give it back.
They go arm in arm through the yard, remarking on the disrespectfulness of the local squirrels, who, as my mother has observed, are “just a bunch of nasty little, horny little teenagers.” “Oooo, how pretty!” Mary says, indicating the ornamental shrubs along the walkway. We are not at all fooled by this pleasantry. We know as soon as she gets a few drinks into her, the garden will be in real danger.
Mom points a dreadful finger at a clump of shiny leaves. “I’ve been after the handyman to burn this entire area, because I think that’s poison sumac,” she says. “I have told him many times that if I breathe poison sumac into my lungs, there will be serious consequences.”
“Okay, Mom needs a glass of wine!” Mary hollers as she enters the house, and claps her hands to get the party started. She is, after all, a pharmacist. She knows what people need. The floor, I notice, is covered
with hundreds of tiny slivers of evidence, the only kind of confetti my mother can enjoy.
“Wassup Tee,” Mary says, hurling herself on me and stroking my ear. “Little beebee. Babygee.”
“Hay booboo,” I answer as an involuntary reflex, then cover my mouth with my hand.
“Jay! Burd!” she calls to my husband. “Ay JayJay!”
“Mur,” he responds. “MurMur.”
“Gurl,” my mother says graciously, as Mary gives her a glass of wine.
“How’s it going, J-money,” Jon asks Jason in a businessman’s no-nonsense tone.
“Dawg,” Jason says, shaking his hand as a show of respect.
My father comes in through the side door, cooing to his puppy as he goes. “Ay baybay,” Mary greets him, in the same vein in which she began.
A silence as he lifts his black dress over his head and hangs it on the back of the basement door. Then, “Hey bay-bee,” he replies.
I turn to Jason, much struck. “The random nicknames . . . the bizarre ejaculations and fake catchphrases . . . the mispronunciations of the word ‘baby’? It’s Dad. It’s all Dad.”
“Hahaha,” Mary says, overhearing. “Tricia. T-rish. Ya big dino. Ya old bitch.”
• • •
“WHAT ARE YOU GOING to wear tonight?” she asks me, perching on the edge of the guest-room bed and looking at my current outfit with great pity. I can’t blame her. Ever since we came, I’ve taken to dressing like a nun who is extremely cold—mostly out of respect for the seminarian, who has “gone up to the lake” with the other seminarians this weekend and won’t be able to join us. She refrains from mentioning my head at all, understanding certain things cannot be helped. As I lack the money for a proper cut, my once-chic short hair has recently reached a stage I can only refer to as Fashion Hitler.
“Don’t worry, I have the perfect thing,” Mary purrs, slapping me on the butt. She rummages in her suitcase for a minute and then presents me with something the size of a panty, composed largely of spandex and black mesh.
“Go try it on, baby!” she calls, throwing one arm up to the ceiling, as if she’s expecting an angel to hand her down a mimosa. I take it to the bathroom, strip down, and somehow rearrange my atoms to fit inside it. Could it even be called a dress? I ask the mirror, philosophically. It ends fourteen inches above my knee. The mesh is so see-through it opens a window onto my soul. Wearing this in front of the bishop would be tantamount to going to confession again.
I exit the bathroom and they study me. My mother gasps like she’s been stabbed in the park. Jon averts his eyes, as if at the terrible passing of an eclipse. My sister hollers something that can be transcribed only as “GIT IT GYOORL!” and then performs a brief indecent dance against the arm of the couch.
“YOU’RE NOT WEARING THAT!” my father yells, appearing out of nowhere to loom large in the doorway. For a man who only ever wants to be naked and spread-eagled in front of other people, he sure has a lot of provincial ideas about clothing. I turn around and shut myself in the bathroom again.
• • •
THE DINNER STARTS in just an hour. In the end, I dive deep into my single garbage bag of clothes and decide on a silky blue dress with lounging cats printed all over it, to show my allegiance. It has a round schoolgirl collar, to remind me to behave myself. I look decent, but Mary, once she finishes getting ready, is even more glorious than usual. Her hair looks like a lion explosion. Her outfit is almost impossible to deconstruct. Is it a dress . . . over another dress . . . over a pair of pants? Is she wearing three shoes? Atop all of it, she is sporting a businesslike white coat, to remind us she is in charge of the drugs.
“Are you ready for me bishop,” she says in a low, threatening voice, holding up her paws.
Noticing that we seem jittery, Jason proposes we all take a shot to strengthen ourselves—well, all except Mom, who believes shots are a sin. Then we take another, just to be safe, and set out in high spirits for the church. The shots take quick effect. Halfway across the parking lot, we break into a spontaneous tribute to Biggie’s “Hypnotize”:
“Bishie bishie bishie, can’t you see
Sometimes your Mass just hypnotize me
And I just love your flashy ways—”
“Guess that’s why tha pope says you’re so saved,” Jason finishes in a rich baritone.
“Oh, nooooooo,” Jon says softly, as he always does when something’s funny. “Oh, nooooooo!”
• • •
WE ENTER THE CHURCH and take the elevator downstairs, where the doors open on a cross-stitched portrait of the Virgin Mary, holding a malformed fiber-art Jesus against her chest and rolling her eyes back in her head with suffering. I know just how she feels. The light of the basement throbs and fluoresces, and shines down on all our defects. My mother guides me over to the bishop to introduce me. “He’s a saint,” my mother, my father, and the seminarian have all assured me with the utmost sincerity. “He can tell anything about a person just by looking at them.” Anything? I think back to my first confession, when I simply sat in the booth across from the priest and streamed tears, because I had once lied to the school principal about a winter hat.
“This is our second-oldest daughter, Tricia,” my mother tells the bishop, and a sweet, unprejudiced smile spreads across his face. Ha! The man doesn’t know who he’s dealing with. I lie about hats every day. To anyone. And I never cry about it anymore.
“And what do you do?” he asks.
“She’s a poet,” my mother says, knowing instinctively that this is one of the few jobs bishops have to respect. King David, after all, was a poet. He was also a man who liked to krump down the street and bang the clean wives of soldiers whom he would later have murdered, but somehow the poetry is never counted among these more questionable peccadilloes.
Behind me, exactly in tandem, I can hear a member of the congregation asking my husband what he does.
“I work in newspapers.”
“Oh, a member of the media,” comes the sorrowful response.
We check our seating cards and discover the whole family has been assigned a place of honor on a dais at the front of the room. A hundred kind faces are turned toward us with respect and admiration; it’s a living nightmare. I close my eyes and visualize a stretch of empty white beach, far away from it all. No, that’s no good. Any minute now a missionary is going to land on shore and whack me with a Bible for being naked. Next to me, I can feel Jason slump into a corpselike position. I can tell he’s practicing Progressive Relaxation, where you relax your body parts one by one until you feel so calm you’re almost dead. He finds it works for him in stressful situations.
A row of priests, with the bishop at the center, is sitting just parallel to us, so that I’m making eye contact with at least one man of God wherever I turn. Mary and I play a frightened footsie underneath the table, lacking any other outlet for communication. “Our salvation has arrived,” Jon tells us on the way back from a trip to the bathroom. “The alcohol is free.” He is carrying an armful of Mountain Vodka Dews, a sophisticated yellow cocktail he invented two minutes ago, and he distributes them with the efficiency of a nurse passing out pills in paper cups. “Keep them coming,” we instruct him, and he nods. There is also champagne in the middle of the table, which we drink in the panicked moments when we find ourselves between Mountain Vodka Dews. Never in my life have I needed so much liquid reinforcement.
One of the men of God is pacing back and forth behind the banquet table, addressing the crowd, telling the sorts of jokes you only ever hear at church functions. Often these jokes involve sporting events that are being broadcast that day, and then all the men groan, because they love sports very much and would rather be watching them, but just kidding, because Jesus is a football that all of us can carry down the field for the win. Other times they involve pop culture figures the priests perceive to be current, such as the Power
Rangers and Cher. After a beat, I recognize the man who’s talking—he’s the priest who’s always coming over at odd hours of the day to confess his sins to my father. When that happens, we all have to vanish instantly. Once Jason got trapped in the basement for three hours because my dad forgot to tell him he could come back up. “He must have been extra bad this time,” he said when we finally let him out.
When the priest is finished, the bishop himself takes the microphone and begins to speak. He is a sweeping black figure accented with fuchsia, and appears to have been dressed in the morning by spiritual birds, fresh off the outstretched fingers of St. Francis of Assisi.
He has the look of someone whom a great deal of reverent attention has been poured into for a long time. He begins to list my father’s accomplishments, his years of service, his dedication, and my father’s face flushes. The bishop makes the predestined joke about football, and my father laughs, long and loud enough to reveal the gap on one side of his mouth where a molar was removed a while back. When I see that black space I feel the same tenderness that wells up when I look at pictures of the Sacred Heart, that tenderness just where the thorn touches the meat—an empathy for his body I could not possibly feel for his mind. “This guy seems nice,” Jason whispers, raising his Mountain Vodka Dew toward the bishop. “It’s hard to believe he drinks human blood.”
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