by Ursula Hegi
“That’s how the starch queen likes to make it,” he tells Aunt Jocelyn. “I miss cooking. In the seminary, everything is served to us”.
After dinner, Aunt Jocelyn rests in a long canvas chair on the flagstone terrace. She closes her eyes while Lenny waters the rose garden. The leaves look even greener when they are wet. He would love to see that color against the somber walls he painted today—not just green, but other colors, so lush you wouldn’t want to wash them from your skin after painting an entire room with them.
Fred is nearly two hours late when he stops by the following afternoon in yet another monkmobile, a Chrysler this time. It has been his turn to drive the nuns from the convent school to the blood drive.
“You look … drained,” Lenny says.
Fred laughs. “The nuns have been asking about you.” He sits down on the floor and watches Lenny paint another wall. “Let’s see….” He counts on his fingers. “There’s Sister Mary of the Most Blessed Heart Exposed, Sister Margaret of the Holy Shroud Exposed, Sister Catherine of the Immaculate Blood—”
“Exposed,” Lenny says, knowing how Fred likes to mangle the nuns’ names and include “exposed,” even when he takes phone messages at the seminary. “Now—who really asked after me?” Lenny wants to know.
“Just Father Bailey and that old feisty sister who always demands two cups of orange juice after relinquishing her blood.”
“Sister Barbara.”
“Of the Most Sacred Thorns — “
“Exposed.”
His third day of painting, Lenny mixes a few drops of Aunt Joce-lyn’s fuchsia paint with the gray, but they’re not enough to soak up the starkness. When his aunt comes to watch him, she dips one finger into the fuchsia can and holds it close to the window. They look at each other; she tries to smile, but her lips tremble. Reaching for Lenny’s brush, she dips it into the fuchsia and draws a brilliant smudge on the wall by the window.
Lenny reaches out to steady her, but she’s not nearly as wobbly as usual, and he doesn’t know what to do except join her. When they finish early that evening, her white culottes and matching blouse are splattered with fuchsia. The entire room is fuchsia, including the trim. Without stopping to clean up, they drive to the hardware store, buy cans of blue, yellow, red. In the morning they go to mass, but Aunt Jocelyn is eager to get home and mix the color for their next project—a rich sun-orange that seems to cover the walls much faster than gray.
They sit down to eat lunch, streaks of brightness in her hair and on her blouse. When Lenny cleans the counter, he finds two pill bottles on top of the kitchen trash. Both are more than half full. He takes them out.
“I feel better without them,” she says.
“Have you talked to your doctor about this?”
“I found the warning slips from the pharmacy in Leonard’s desk … a list of everything that can go wrong.” She gets up, tears the index card her husband used to mark her pills, and holds out her hand for the bottles. “Don’t tell anyone.”
“At least let me keep them till you’ve checked with your doctor.”
“It’s my doctor who put me on them.”
“How long since you’ve stopped?”
“The day we buried Leonard.”
At first he considers calling the starch queen for advice, but with each day Aunt Jocelyn looks so much better—no longer so helpless but oddly energized—that he worries less. And by the time the starch sisters visit, carrying homemade fettuccine and a gallon of tomato sauce with many tiny meatballs, he can brag about how Aunt Jocelyn walks to the library now to choose her own books, how she calls cabs that take her to the supermarket.
“The first time I heard her on the phone,” he says, “I was amazed.”
“You’re good for her,” the starch queen says. “Everyone in the family knows that Jocelyn hasn’t used the phone since she dialed a wrong number twelve years ago.”
“More like thirteen years,” one of the starch sisters says.
Lenny feels content working with Aunt Jocelyn on transforming the rooms. That’s what he had thought being a Jesuit would be like—using his skills to help others, living a simple life. That’s what drew him to enter the order. His faith used to thrive in an atmosphere of simplicity—doing things for one another as his mother and her sisters did within their community and parish all those years he was growing up —but in the seminary that simplicity has become lost to a life filled with comforts, to days filled with philosophy and theology classes. He knows he could stay in the order forever and have all his needs taken care of—from money for books, to monkmobiles at his disposal, to the rich meals that are anything but simple.
One night he dreams Aunt Jocelyn is standing by the refrigerator, staring at a blank index card. She raises both arms, howls as she pounds her fists against the refrigerator door. He catches her fists, pulls her toward him. Her fine hair falls away from her face, and he can see into her soul. “The hospital is on the roof,” he tries to say, but he can’t separate his lips. With one hand he holds his aunt’s wrists to keep her from hurting herself; with the other he strokes her face.
When he wakes up, he decides to call her doctor, but as soon as he sees his aunt in the kitchen, his concerns vanish. She has this secret little smile, and when she tells him to come with her, he follows her toward the gift shop. She’s wearing the shirt and culottes she has designated as painting clothes—streaked with every color she’s used so far. With each project she has become more vibrant, more muscular.
“What is it?” he asks her.
She doesn’t tell him until they’re inside the shop, surrounded by his uncle’s religious kitsch. Then the words tumble from her. “I have this idea, a wonderful idea, Lenny…. We’ll decorate each room after a different saint.”
“It’ll be difficult to sell the hotel.”
She shakes her head and says what Lenny has already begun to suspect. “I’m keeping the hotel.”
“It’s too much work for you alone.”
She watches him, silently. Then she smiles as if she’d just figured something out and touches one finger to his heart. “It has to be authentic….”
Lenny sees himself as an altar boy, feeling holy while kneeling in front of the Sacred Heart of Jesus statue, whose toes were smudged from all the kisses people had pressed on them, and whose heart was covered with fake rubies that sparkled when you lit one of the votive candles.
“The decor,” she says, “well make the decor authentic—so that it doesn’t offend believers. They need to feel… confirmed when they stay at the hotel.”
“Maybe that’s the challenge.” He nods. “To make it so authentic that the kitsch amuses some and makes others think they’ve arrived in their own heaven.”
Fred is enthusiastic about the idea—“a pious sacrilege,” he calls it—and he’s eager to help. The first room, St. Anthony, is easy enough to put together—a basket with things previous guests have lost: keys, glasses, pens, hats.
The tiny bar next to the lobby they christen Mary Magdalene, and from there it seems only logical that the breakfast room is called Last Supper. “Service for thirteen,” Lenny declares, though there are only eleven chairs around the long table. When Fred haunts secondhand stores in downtown Portland, he returns with two wooden chairs.
The honeymoon suite is named after Maria Goretti, who died very young while defending her honor. There is a room for St. Simon Stock, the hermit who lived in a tree trunk. Next to the bed, Aunt Jocelyn has set up a lava lamp on top of the tree stump that Fred brought in a monkmobile.
They call the men’s room in the lobby St. Peter. When they try to find an equally appropriate name for the women’s room, they don’t come up with anything suitable and finally settle on two unisex bathrooms—both St. Peter. The only room that is painted entirely in white is the laundry room, named Immaculate Conception.
Some of their other ideas are too outrageous to follow through, but they laugh discussing them. “Would you hang this up in a
church?” is their test question for quality control. “That’s irreverent,” expresses their approval. And Aunt Jocelyn will invariably say, “You better believe it.”
The starch sisters take Aunt Jocelyn to the fabric store, where she buys entire bolts of bright prints. At their Victorian, they help her cut and sew curtains for the hotel. The ones for St. Francis’s room have a forest pattern. It’s the most elaborate room in the hotel. Propped in front of a painting of St. Francis are stuffed birds and an insipid wooden seagull. A plastic flamingo with a ribbon around its neck hangs above the bed. Lenny paints the floor with splotches to simulate bird shit, and Fred mounts a bird feeder to the outside of the window.
In St. Agnes’s room the curtains have a design of baby lambs to symbolize the virginal purity of the sad plaster saint, whose eyes are turned up so far that you see only the whites, and whose hands are folded in front of her chest so that her fingertips point up in the same direction as her nose.
Lenny’s favorite room is St. Sebastian’s. He paints arrows around the windows, and Aunt Jocelyn hangs a basket of arrows across the wall from the bed. In the bathroom they install arrows as hooks for robes and replace the plastic toilet seat with an old wooden one. It has a crack that will pinch you if you don’t sit sideways.
Fred helps with the painting of St. Stephen’s room, named after the very first martyr. “You see, what it is,” Fred explains, drawing the brush across the wall, “is that those martyrs were basically lazy. They wanted the quick way to glory…”
“None of that waiting around for decades of drudgery like the rest of us mortals,” Lenny says.
“But think of the ones who didn’t make it,” Aunt Jocelyn says.
“You’ll make it,” Lenny blurts.
They both stare at him.
He blushes. She’ll make it, he thinks, if I stay here with her; maybe then she’ll get well. He is awed by her courage—or is it foolishness, blind foolishness?—to burst from a life that has sheltered her for so long.
Fred arches his eyebrows.
“I wasn’t talking about martyrdom,” Lenny says.
“Those hundreds of poor souls …” His aunt sighs. “Those who waited for their chance at martyrdom — “
“And found no takers.” Fred laughs. “No Huns or Romans who’d relieve them of their heads or tear off their limbs.”
His third week at the hotel, Lenny wakes at dawn to sounds outside. In the garden, Aunt Jocelyn is tearing out the rosebushes. She’s wearing her painting clothes and leather work-gloves that are too big for her.
“What are you doing?”
“I’m not taking care of Leonard’s roses.”
“I can water them. I don’t mind.” He steps between her and the next bush.
“Lenny …” She shields her eyes, though the sun hasn’t come out yet. Her bare arms are scratched from her wrists to her elbows. “I don’t want to look at Leonard’s roses.” She proceeds to yank bushes from the earth. “I’ve called a landscaping service to fix it up.”
Lenny tries to predict the starch sisters’ reaction once they find out about all this.
The starch queen: “If that’s what Jocelyn wants.”
One starch sister: “Doesn’t she look better all around?”
The other starch sister: “Some lasagna will be good for her.”
Lenny seizes a bush as close to the roots as possible to keep from getting scratched, and as he pulls, hard, he feels he’s dislodging something deep within himself. By the edge of the lawn, he helps Aunt Jocelyn pile the bushes into a mound, tall enough for a funeral pyre. Three men in Easter-green overalls arrive in a lettered truck to lay squares of Easter-green sod into the spaces where the roses used to grow.
“This is what it looked like when I moved in here,” Aunt Jocelyn tells Lenny after the men have left. She steps out of her sandals. Lying down, she extends her arms above her head and rolls down the slope —a whirling canvas.
Lenny runs after her, afraid she’ll tumble into the street, but she stops by herself where the lawn meets the sidewalk. The sun is on her face. Bits of grass stick to her clothes.
“You ought to try it, Lenny.” She squints up at him. Smiles.
“Maybe some other time.”
“Once you’re old enough?”
“Right,” he says and has to laugh.
“Feel this.” She curls her long toes into the thick grass. “Just feel this, Lenny.”
He unties his shoes, sits down, fingers splayed, palms sinking into the lawn. For an instant there, it feels as though the ground were tilting beneath him—a seesaw kind of tilting—and as he instinctively braces it with his body, Lenny knows this is the kind of tilting that may happen to you again, and all you have is your faith that each time your body will find some new balance.
The End of All Sadness
And when I saw him that first time sleeping on the ground by the pond there was light all around him and I stood watching him till he opened his eyes and poured me the light and then he strapped his clothes and blanket into his tarp and followed me to my apartment and the food he cooked for me nourished me more than anything I had eaten for years. Already the weight of the lonely flesh was falling from me as his beauty filled me and even at the mall my customers said I had a glow that lit up the whole Sears.
He was kind to my daughter and though she’s ten he let her ride on his bare shoulders when we walked down the hill to swim in the pond and after one week we were a family and soon we had a canary and two hamsters that a woman gave us at the Laundromat and he found work in custodial at the mall and bought salmon for us and I borrowed three wedges of lemon from my cousin next door and he grilled the salmon on the balcony in the evening while my daughter painted her toenails purple and pink and when we rode in my car to get ice cream we looked like a family and it was the end of all sadness.
Outside the kitchen window he fastened a hummingbird feeder and we watched the Jesus-birds hang from the sky like fire lanterns with their chests skin instead of feathers and their long beaks immersed in the sweet red and their wings whirring waiting as if someone had folded them around the core of a heart.
He wept when he left marks on my face because I’d smiled at the UPS man the way my mama had taught me about being polite and smiling when someone is nice to you and he told me he’d rather kill himself than ever hurt me again and that he ought to leave me except he loved me too much and I held his head between my palms and kissed his eyes and cried stay with me. All that night he held me and brushed my hair for me in the morning and brought me French toast in bed and after my daughter went to school he loved me as if I were expensive glass and I felt his light pour through me as I rose to the surface of my skin.
I slept and when I woke my daughter was lying on her bed shivering and wrapped in my raincoat though it was summer and I explained to her how he couldn’t bear to watch me talk to other men and he came into her room and gave us money for white dresses and married me that Sunday by the pond. My cousin said she couldn’t come but he said you have me now and the minister stood with his back to the water but we could see the green ripples were wind swished across the surface and the green glint of sun in broken bottle glass and I marveled that a man so beautiful had come to choose me. After being loved like that I knew I’d die if I ever had to return to the sadness and when my daughter wouldn’t speak to him at the Denny’s where he took us in our white dresses for our wedding lunch he reminded me that she would not always be with me but that he would.
He was my husband then and he painted the front door and fixed the TV and disconnected the phone and hung a ceiling fan above our bed that spun its wings all night till the room pulsed like a Jesus-bird and I could see the reflection of the pulse in the windows and in his eyes and feel it low in my belly. He took us to the carnival and bought my daughter cotton candy and a monkey-on-a-stick and he kept my keys and drove me to work and picked me up with his beautiful jealous love that no one has ever loved me with and I felt strong and s
pecial as I walked beneath his gaze and when my cousin turned from his greeting though he looked respectable now I stopped visiting next door and he said there’s a tree in Arizona where miracles are starting to happen and maybe we’ll move there and start over without suspicious neighbors but he didn’t know what kind of tree and what kind of miracles only that it was south of Tucson and that someone in jail had told him and he was sorry he hadn’t thought to ask.
He cashed our paychecks and shopped for our food and cooked for the three of us my own family he said my very own while my daughter did her homework and when we ate he asked her to tell him about school but the happier I got the smaller my daughter looked and I said give her time when she wouldn’t talk to him and he slapped her mouth and I said no but I understood that he was like those women in India who jumped off a burning train and were hit by an oncoming train. I read about them in the paper a long time ago but I think of them often and when I told him about them and I said that’s just like you getting away from one misfortune only to fall right in the path of the next he said but it’s different now because you’ve come along.
I don’t tell him that sometimes I’m grateful he had his hard-luck life that kept him away from the world even though it’s unjust because it began when his fiancée cheated on him and he shook her wanting to hear the truth and then she was dead but it means he has come to me new and that I’m his only wife ever because if he hadn’t been in jail all these years another woman would have found him long before me and married him.
And even now when I see the rage climb into his eyes it’s never for long and most of the time I know how to ease him out of it by taking his hands and bringing them around my breasts and motioning my daughter out of the living room as I pull him into me because then his rage spins into light and fills me and makes me powerful and even when I can’t harness his rage and it crushes both of us I always remind myself that he’ll only love me so much more the next day. What I’ve come to recognize is that moment when the power can shift and when he’ll either move into me or shatter me with his rage and it’s that moment that has become the most exciting thing in my life because if I can turn that rage into light I own him and each time I own him adds to the sum of holding him.
