The Halo Effect: A Novel

by Anne D. LeClaire

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  The Illustrated Book of the Saints was still on the side table in the living room.

  In the past days, Father Gervase had not returned for the book, nor had Sophie dropped it off at the rectory as I had asked. Again, as I had been the first time I had glanced at it, I was put off by the gaudy sentimentality of the cover art, the blatant piety. The book was thicker than I would have thought necessary. I had no idea how many saints there were but estimated they must number no more than one or two hundred. But then my knowledge of this realm could fit in a thimble with space left for my thumb, just bits and pieces I had gleaned from Sophie over the years: they had suffered for their faith, lived holy lives, many had been martyred and rewarded by sainthood. I thought of the childlike sentimentality it must take to believe in the supernatural power of these beatified to comfort or console, to intercede or heal. And yet people did believe.

  One day while walking down an aisle at the local grocery store, my attention had been drawn to a shelf displaying votive candles with images of different saints on the glass cylinders. One might have expected this at one of those shops dealing in religious icons and books and other kitschy paraphernalia, but at the Safeway? Even more surprising was a smaller grouping of aerosol cans that flanked the candles, each containing the scent connected to a particular saint. Spray and pray, I’d thought. I had never understood it, this bizarre conception that saints could intercede in one’s life. I remembered as a child riding in the backseat of Jimmy Harrington’s family sedan and watching the oval medal of Saint Christopher as it swayed on its chain from the rearview mirror, hung there, Jimmy’s mother explained, to protect them on all journeys. And I had seen ads in the classified pages of the Globe beseeching Saint Jude for help and seen, too, over the years, the occasional television reports documenting the hordes of pilgrims descending on Lourdes for healing, clinging to their last hope, arriving by the thousands, in wheelchairs and on crutches and being transported on gurneys. I had always been both unexpectedly moved by them and equally dismayed. I thought, too, of the front-yard shrines throughout Port Fortune with statues of the Virgin Mary ensconced in the upended bathtubs—Mary on the Half Shell people called them—and of the adults who had placed statues of Saint Francis in their gardens. I even knew a couple who’d buried a miniature replica of Saint Joseph by their front door in the belief that this would facilitate a house sale. “You have to bury him upside down,” the wife had told us over a dinner at the seafood restaurant by the harbor. “And when the house sells, you must unearth him and bring him to your new home,” her husband added. These were intelligent and educated people, skeptical in matters of politics and commerce and in no other way given to superstition. Their gullibility stunned me. It was all such shite. Although Sophie would have argued with me, I thought it was not much different than the Greeks and Romans and Norse with their pantheons of gods. But this was the twenty-first century, for Pete’s sake. What would it take to believe in all this shite? A lobotomy would be a start.

  Early in our marriage, Sophie and I had reached a truce on these matters. She didn’t try to convince or convert me; I didn’t ridicule or subvert her faith and believed I was successful at hiding my true feelings. The only thing she asked of me, even before we married, was that our future children be raised Catholic, and I had agreed without hesitation. Thus I had surrendered our only child to this church. By its priests Lucy was christened and confirmed, and within the stone walls of Holy Apostles a funeral Mass had been said for her. In the end all the rites and rituals had offered no more protection for Lucy than Saint Christopher had for Jimmy’s family when their Ford Fairlane got hit by a drunk driver.

  I flipped the book open to a random page and was surprised to see a painting that was not the mediocre schlock I had expected. I was arrested by the image of a man as slender as a boy, with a boy’s face, clad in what looked like white Jockey briefs. In the painting, he was lashed to a post and four arrows pierced his flesh, one each in chest, thigh, rib, and abdomen. Saint Sebastian, I read, a martyr who, when he refused to sacrifice to the gods, was shot with arrows and then clubbed to death. The protector of archers, athletes, and police officers. I turned to another page. Saint Apollonia, virgin and martyr, and protector of dentists. When she refused to renounce her faith, heretics broke out all of her teeth and then burned her alive. Protector of dentists. On another page, I saw a painting of Saint Bartholomew. He was depicted with a thick beard, receding hairline, and was holding a curved butcher’s knife. The text beneath the painting informed that Bartholomew had been flayed alive and was the patron saint of butchers and tanners. So you were shot with arrows and made the protector of archers, had your teeth broken and became the protector of dentists, were flayed and protected tanners? I doubted the church deliberately intended this to be ironic. As I thumbed through the pages, I scanned passages depicting lives dedicated to supreme good works and charity and lives ended by torture, a listing of the hunted and haunted, the beheaded and burned, crucified and stoned. The accompanying paintings were works of the masters, of Rembrandt and Caravaggio, El Greco and Holbein. I found these renderings to be deeply disturbing. It was hard to tell from the faces whether they were in agony or ecstasy.

  What did I believe in that, in the face of torture and inquisition, I could hold tight? Lucy, I knew instantly. I would have suffered anything to have saved Lucy. And Sophia. That was my list. My daughter and my wife. My country? I considered the question. I had never been one of those people who needed to wear a flag in my lapel proclaiming proof of my allegiance. I had never served in the military, and in college I had signed a petition opposing a certain government policy. I didn’t hang a flag from our front porch, not even on the patriotic holidays when the entirety of Port Fortune was swathed in red, white, and blue. And yet, standing in the hall, staring at the faces of the saints and reflecting on the question, I believed I would not betray my country. But, then, who knew, when put to the test, what a man would do, what a person could withstand in the face of torture? Who knew what a person was capable of? As it turns out, we are all capable of much, much more than we would have dreamed.

  Shadows crossed the room as the sun moved lower in the sky. I flipped to another page and was completely unprepared for what was depicted in the painting. A woman—nude to the waist—was having her breasts torn off with pincers. Saint Agatha, the text instructed. Protector of wet nurses. A wave of nausea swept me. I’d had more than enough of martyrs and of saints, of the torture and murder of virgins elevated into something sacred instead of profane. I was taken by an anger so violent I was queasy with it and slammed the book shut. I wanted the goddamn thing out of my house.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Father Gervase closed the book and lowered it to his lap.

  Earlier a brief thunderstorm had rolled through, leaving the lilac leaves a magnified and brilliant green. The bench where he rested was still damp, but this hadn’t deterred him from coming out to sit in the garden situated between church and rectory. It was five thirty in the afternoon, and soon Holy Apostles would be on the summer Mass schedule arranged to accommodate tourists and returning seasonal residents, but for now this hour was free and the meditation garden was hushed and cool. There was a narrow stone bench nestled in an arc of lilacs and another in the shadow of a juniper, and this was where the priest sat. He inhaled the nitrogen-charged air deeply, almost greedily, drinking in not only the ever-present scent of the sea but also the daylight, which wouldn’t edge toward shadow until after seven, compensating for the enforced confinement of past winter days that he found more challenging each year. Lately he had daydreams about slowing down and moving to a warmer part of the country, a place of extended daylight. A reassignment to a seminary or retreat in Arizona, perhaps, or New Mexico, although he would miss being near water. There was always Florida, but he did not seriously consider it. Geography called to one, and, in spite of the climate, Florida had never appealed to him. The San Francisco area was a possi
bility. He had never been there and yet could imagine it—a more laid-back Boston with cable cars and the Golden Gate Bridge. His ideal spot would be somewhere with a temperate climate and a suggestion of seasonal change. He had little control over the wishes of the church regarding his placement, but he liked to dream. He pictured a small place with a garden, one similar to the site where he now sat and that gave him such pleasure.

  He had always liked this hour when the world slowed down and he could claim a slender window of it for himself. Even as a boy he’d looked forward to this time. School would be over and homework could be put off until later in the evening. His mother would be busy in the kitchen preparing dinner, his father not yet home from work. His brother, Joe, would be off somewhere with a posse of friends, playing baseball or shooting hoops, depending on the season, or hanging out at the home of his current girlfriend. Cecelia would be occupied too, playing jacks with her friend May or jumping rope, always with an intense concentration that to this day he associated with his sister. Unlike his siblings, he would not seek company but would slip away to a corner of the laundry room where he could read undisturbed, enveloped by the lingering smell of laundry detergent and wet cotton spinning in the dryer, and enjoy the quiet pleasures of solitude, as he did even now.

  Often these days he changed into gardening clothes and donned gloves to tend to the ferns and hostas that lined the walk in the shady section or to take up a trowel and rough the ground around the bed of daylilies that edged the front path, a narrow strip that received direct sun. The garden was not overly large and required little care: the plucking of weeds from the border beds and crushed clamshell paths, the cutting back of shoots that sprang up at the base of the lilacs, the dividing of an overgrown hosta that threatened to choke adjacent plants, chores of basic maintenance he relished in spite of the way his energy seemed to wane lately and despite the disapproval of Lena MacDougall, the president of the Rosary Society, who hinted that weeding was beneath his station.

  “We have a gardener for that, Father,” she said the first time she spied him on his knees in the lily bed, her lips pursed thin. “You shouldn’t be doing it.”

  “Laborare est orare,” he replied. Work is prayer. He’d spoken to her of how such work could uplift one and, if done consciously, celebrate existence and contain the teachings of life, but she had not been swayed by this philosophy. She believed his work should stay inside church walls and not involve dirt beneath his fingernails and had even complained to Father Burns that it reflected poorly on Holy Apostles to have Father Gervase doing the job that was the responsibility of the hired gardener.

  “After all, we are not First Baptist,” she had reproved, “and we mustn’t act like it.”

  A sigh escaped the priest’s lips as he thought of Lena, who believed her duties involved policing the parish and enforcing her personal standards of behavior. And didn’t she have a bee in her bonnet about the weekend janitor. “There is something off about that man,” she’d said. “I just don’t trust him.” And just last month she’d created a stir about Miriam Endelheim coming to pray in the sanctuary. “She has her own synagogue,” she’d complained. “Why does she have to come here?”

  At that moment, the priest had found himself praying for the virtues of patience and acceptance. “Mrs. Endelheim has a special affection for the Blessed Virgin. She likes to sit with her,” he’d explained, then added, smiling, “Don’t forget, Mary was the original Jewish mother.” His attempt at humor had fallen flat as it often did with her. And his explanation for Miriam Endelheim’s presence in the sanctuary hadn’t satisfied Lena any more than his equating manual work with prayer had. Father Gervase rarely allowed himself the luxury of disliking people, but Lena reminded him of a creature of prey. But in spite of her sniffing disapproval, Mr. Jervis was still employed to clean the sanctuary and chapel, Mrs. Endelheim continued her regular visits to the Virgin Mary, and he went on working in the garden.

  The love and pull of the land was bred in his genes, handed down from his paternal grandfather, a Wisconsin apple farmer. Throughout his teen years he’d helped in the summer orchards. Autumns, during the harvest, he operated one of the farm’s cider presses, an old John Deere machine that clattered and whirred as the air filled with the heady scent of apple mash and the buzz of intoxicated yellow jackets. He had loved his hours at the farm, certainly some of the happiest of his childhood, and imagined a future spent there. But occupations, like geography, called to one, and another life outside Wisconsin awaited him. Still, had he not entered the priesthood, he would have been content tilling soil, growing crops. Or reading poetry. Now there was a job that should exist. To spend one’s days in the company of Blake and Dickinson, Yeats and Hopkins, Auden and Milton. To fill one’s mind with their wisdom, the music of their words.

  Today he did not weed or rake, but he had brought with him to the garden a volume of Neruda’s poetry. He read only a few lines before setting the book aside. Will Light intruded on his concentration. Since his visit to Will, Father Gervase had replayed their conversation, unable to escape the lingering knowledge of failure, a burden that had not lessened with the passing days but had seemed only to reveal and magnify his previous ineffectiveness and shortcomings, failures that, in the face of Will Light’s grief and anger, festered like splinters beneath flesh. Late in the game, Father Gervase realized that too often he had been tone deaf to the needs of those needing help or comfort. In response to these needs, he had quoted scripture, promoted faith, parroted the words of mystics and saints and popes. Better to have said nothing. Better to have listened. Or simply laid a hand on Will’s shoulder. Better to have handed over an anthology of poems.

  On the matter of Will Light, and in spite of Father Gervase’s report, Cardinal Kneeland hadn’t given up. “Perhaps we need to speak to him about the amount of the commission,” the archbishop had said, his mind that of a Medici banker.

  “I’m sure that will not make a difference,” he’d replied.

  “Well, you have planted the seed,” the archbishop told him. “When you go back, it will have taken root.”

  In this, as in so much, Cardinal Kneeland’s faith was stronger that his own.

  Determined to be better prepared for a return visit to the artist, two days ago he had walked over to the Port Fortune Museum of Art to familiarize himself with Will’s work, something it occurred to him he should have done sooner. The museum, a two-story Greek Revival, had been donated to the art association by the heirs of its original owners. Inside, the walls were filled with work he found somewhat predictable: oversized canvases of seascapes at sunrise, landscapes captured at sunset, smaller oils of pink roses draped over white fences, pastels of peonies in full bloom. A docent directed him to the second floor, where two rooms were dedicated entirely to Will Light’s work, the majority of which were portraits. They’d struck Father Gervase as Vermeer-like in composition. A teenage girl behind the counter of a coffee shop. A child crouching at water’s edge, surf sucking at her feet. A young fisherman in yellow oilskins, on loan from the permanent collection of a Boston museum. An older fisherman sitting on a barrel by a shack mending nets. A woman seated at a vanity, her image reflected in the mirror. Another painting of the same woman looking through a window out to the sea, her face drawn with sorrow. After he had seen the entire exhibit, he circled the galleries again, going slowly from room to room, this time looking more closely at each painting. Shadows reflected on foreheads and cheeks; soft smudges of vermilion furred edges; clear, translucent glazes from morning light filtered through clouds and raked flesh once vibrant as embers, now captured with mineral earth and linseed oil. He returned to the old fisherman, the child at the seashore, a young boy crossing a meadow captured on the cusp of manhood, the woman at her dressing table. Exact moments held in time—a morning light, a constant gaze, a flushed life—caught by a deft hand. As he studied the portraits he saw they had, at first glance, a quiet, contemplative focus, but there was also incorporated in each
a second layer of suggestion and a meaning beyond the obvious. He could now understand fully why, beyond the artist’s fame, the archbishop was set on having Will accept the commission to paint the mural of the saints.