by Thomas Lynch
Whatever the response, Adrian counted himself blessed to have anyone listening at all. So many churches had lost members to the growing hoard of radio and TV preachers—Swaggart and the Bakkers, Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson—and the local crazies from the Ohio River valley who flooded the local radio airways with variously “old-time,” or “feel-good,” or “prosperity” gospels and perpetual appeals for “seed offerings” and “love gifts.”
Many late Saturday nights or early Sunday mornings, crawling into bed beside Clare, bits and pieces of his sermon still tumbling through his brain, Adrian would press himself to the warm bend of his wife’s buttocks, and reaching beneath her night shirt, cup one of her breasts in his hand and bury his face in her long hair, which always smelled to him like Eden. Unfailingly that verse that held how “the word became flesh and dwelt among us” would come to him, along with the prayer that she might wake sufficiently to allow him to dwell among her flesh entirely.
In their early years, before Damien and Sarah, before she returned to school, before he and his work and their dull routines in what she’d begun to call “Finally,” Ohio, had become the focus for her discontent, Clare would often give in to this ritual seduction, signaling by a tiny sigh, a catch of her breath, or a little moan, or by pushing her rump more firmly against him, or by rolling on her back and moving his hand with her hand between her legs while still seeming to be deep in sleep. Afterward, as she curled back into her private slumber, the wordless discourse of their lovemaking done, Adrian would count his blessings, giving thanks for the gift of his wife while replaying the tape of his freshly typed sermon in his mind, tapping out the phrases such as he could remember them, word by word, syllable by syllable, with his fingers tapping on Clare’s beautiful bottom, a private code the cadence of which would put him eventually to sleep.
In the weeks since she had left him, his homiletics, even Dr. Hinkston, the senior pastor, commented, had become suddenly “more moving, more engaged, more relevant somehow, more meaningful.”
“A gift of the Holy Spirit, the fiery tongue!” Dr. Hinkston called it, but Adrian figured it might be the drink that Francis Concannon and he had gotten in the habit of overdoing on Saturday nights, and the low-grade, ever-present, and flickering rage, the mysteries of human suffering and passion, the cross and flame his life had become.
FATHER FRANCIS Concannon couldn’t care less about that. His anger was no mystery at all.
“For fuck sake, Adrian,” the priest shouted over the phone, “next time I get word about a friend in trouble from a horse’s ass instead of the horse’s mouth, I’m gonna really be pissed.”
“I’m sorry, Francis, I should have called.”
Word of his friend’s trouble had got to him at St. Michael’s as gossip from one of his church ladies.
“At least we don’t have to worry about your missus running off with an artist, Father!” said Mrs. Bokuniewicz one Tuesday in late June after morning Mass.
The priest had been a true friend ever since, coming over to Adrian’s without invitation, bringing pizza and beer, chicken chop suey, a bag of burgers and fries, and a bottle of Irish, sitting up with Adrian those summer nights in the first weeks of his single parenthood. And when Adrian would take the kids up to bathe them and tuck them into bed and say their prayers, the priest would tidy up downstairs, picking up the toys, folding the laundry, cleaning up the kitchen, feeding the kitten and the dog. Then he’d fix two tumblers of what he called “Dunphy’s damage”—generous measures of bronze-colored liquor poured from a green bottle over ice cubes, and insist that Adrian sit out on the screened porch and tell him everything.
“That’s the stuff, boyo,” the priest would say in a stage-Irish brogue, taking a long sip of the whiskey, “St. Patrick’s holy water itself. Any fucking wonder they call it ‘spirits’!”
Adrian would sip from his own glass, wince with the burn of it, exhale deeply, and settle into the chair with one ear tuned for the children upstairs, glad to have the priest sharing the watch with him. On such nights the general panic that he’d felt since Clare had left him would subside, if only for the couple of hours that the two men sat out on the screened porch, in the dark, watching the evening traffic on Lima Avenue go by and the streetlamps attracting bugs and the bats circling in the night air.
He’d been so frightened that something would happen to Damien or Sarah. It was an ever-present fear, a general dread, a constant wariness that something bad would happen to them if he let down his guard. He’d always had it, but it was doubled now that his wife had left him and he realized only half the eyes were keeping watch, half the ears were tuned toward their protection, only one body to place between them and peril. He was not sleeping very well. He was always tired. The giant frame of Francis Concannon, his thick hair wild on his head, his great jaw silhouetted by the yellow glow of the streetlamp, sitting on the other side of the small table on the screened porch was a comfort—as if, at least on such evenings, there was another protector in the house and Adrian’s vigilance could be dialed down. In his Ohio State sweatshirt, a pipe smoldering in one hand, a glass of whiskey in the other, the priest made an unlikely sentry. But for Adrian his friendship had been a gift. All the area’s Protestant clergy had sent polite epistles, promised prayers, cited Scriptures, encouraged him to get in touch if they “could help in any way,” but otherwise had kept their distance, as if spousal distemper and divorce were contagions and Adrian the local carrier. Father Concannon had broken the quarantine and entered the pesthouse. He had been unambiguously the friend in need. And Adrian was ever grateful. That he had become Adrian’s de facto confessor had been another gift. The deepest secrets of his ruined heart had been dumped on the priest, his black anger and dark rages, his vengeful impulses toward Clare and her new lover—“the motherfucker,” Adrian seethed, because she was a mother and she left her children and “he’ll never love her like I loved her, he’s only fucking her.” Sometimes he wept and the priest would reach across the table, take hold of Adrian’s shoulder in his massive hand, and steady him till the worst was over.
“Lacrimae fucking rerum, pal,” he’d commiserate, “the fucking tears of things.”
Adrian couldn’t confide much to his senior pastor, the Reverend Hinkston, or to the Northwest Plains district superintendent, the Reverend Carlton Paul Ritter, or to the West Ohio Conference bishop, Bishop Wesley A. Maghee. Nor could he imagine really having a drink, really letting his tongue get loosened with any of them. While they were his connectional and episcopal up-line, he knew that the failure of his marriage presented some difficulties for them. The scandal of a minister’s wife running off with another man, leaving children behind, was a cup they’d rather God had let pass. A committee had already been formed at the church to monitor Adrian’s “changed status” and report to the district superintendent, who would report to the bishop.
To his credit, the Reverend Hinkston had at least made an effort, however clumsy. He’d told Adrian he’d be happy to counsel him and Clare and let it be known that he’d saved many marriages over his “nearly forty years of servant ministry.”
“Cleta and I have met with many a young couple in distress, and prayed with them and set them right—it’s all there in the book, you know, that’s the guide. Sometimes all it takes is someone with a little more experience, you know, to remind us of the times we were in love. Cleta and I have gotten through many a crisis, and still been married forty-three years. Even sexual dilemmas can be gotten through.”
Adrian could not bring himself to tell the Reverend Hinkston that he did not want Clare back. Her having sex with other men was not a “sexual dilemma.” It was betrayal. Her lack of remorse, her willingness to leave her children were all, for him, signs of moral or mental disorder, perhaps forgivable, even, he prayed, forgettable, but ultimately—he knew this in his heart of hearts—irreparable. Their deal was done. She had breached the central contract of their marriage, broken their household, reneged on their in
timate agreements. That damage was done and could not be undone. They would all have to live with it, for better or worse. Whether madness or passion or unfortunate choices, whether she was just spreading her own wings, realizing her full potential, or just reaching her sexual prime and hungry for a little unfamiliar sex, he neither knew nor any longer wanted to know. He could live with the brokenness, the worry over his children’s well-being, the fears he had for the future. He could live with all of that. But he could no longer live with her. Whether this was unchristian, unholy, sinful, or immoral, whether work of the devil or Will of God, he couldn’t say. And didn’t care; it was what it was.
What Francis Concannon seemed to offer, since he first called Adrian and came barging into the wreckage of his family, was moral immunity, spiritual oasis, a kind of ecclesiastical safe harbor neither too shallow for the hard truth nor too fathomless to obscure the sadness of it. He never quoted the Letters of Paul or the Gospel of Matthew or the Acts of the Apostles to Adrian. Rather, he had brought him food and drink and poems. He brought him time and the moment’s safety. He brought his brother cleric the gift of his presence and manifest willingness to bear his portion of the grief and rage and fear. And sitting out on the screened porch, listening to crickets and watching lightning bugs, sipping their “damage,” Adrian found himself somehow comforted by the priest’s recitations, his tipsy party-pieces, his bits of Yeats:
Others because you did not keep
That deep-sworn vow have been friends of mine;
Yet always when I look death in the face,
When I clamber to the heights of sleep,
Or when I grow excited with wine,
Suddenly I meet your face.
or Beckett:
I would like my love to die
and the rain to be raining on the graveyard
and on me walking the streets
mourning her who thought she loved me.
Even an anonymous, possibly medieval bard who claimed:
The way to get on with a girl
Is to drift like a man in the mist,
Happy enough to be caught,
Happy to be dismissed.
Glad to be out of her way,
Glad to rejoin her in bed,
Equally grieved or gay
To learn that she’s living or dead.
The lilt and faux brogue the priest achieved in the recitation of his poems unfailingly made Adrian laugh or weep. The drink assisted.
Best of all of them, Adrian thought, was Philip Larkin. “That awful man,” Francis Concannon called him, and gave out with line after line by heart:
There is regret. Always, there is regret.
But it is better that our lives unloose,
As two tall ships, wind-mastered, wet with light,
Break from an estuary with their courses set,
And waving part, and waving drop from sight.
Adrian so wanted to get past it all. He knew it would kill him if he did not let it go. He wanted to be free of it. To be restored to some kind of wholeness, beyond regret, beyond fear, beyond it all—yes, two tall ships, wind-mastered, wet with light—he wouldn’t begrudge Clare any happiness, once he had been restored to his; once he had his new course set he’d happily wish her a good riddance: and waving part, and waving drop from sight. In the meantime, though, the dark wound still festered. She had harmed him and harmed his household and he did not wish her well.
NIGHTS AFTER the priest left Adrian slept better, not least because of the bottle of whiskey they would feel duty-bound to empty before they’d say good night. The priest would slump into his Buick and drive off to St. Michael’s rectory and Adrian would quench the lights in the manse, promising again to slow down the drinking, thanking God, as he climbed the stairs, for friends like Francis, for the safety of his children on whose slumber he would always peek, bending to kiss them and to hear them breathe.
In his own bedroom he would strip, piss, brush his teeth, and crawl onto the mattress on the floor. Clare had taken the brass bed frame, bought at the Salvation Army store soon after they’d married, when she left. And the large Persian rug that had covered the pine floorboards—it went off rolled up in David Eason’s Toyota van, and the oak dresser he’d refinished for her for one of their anniversaries and the matching beveled-glass mirror he’d found for Christmas one year—all of it gone—the fixtures and furnishings of their married life. He lay in the sheets ogling the breasts of the willing, come-hithering beauties in the pages of a girlie magazine he’d taken from an embarrassed teen at church when it fell from her school bag inadvertently. He would study their ankles and the curl of their feet, their tattoos and perfectly tonsured genitalia. He would try to imagine his hand on their breasts, then his mouth, then his ear placed over their sternum where he’d hear their heart beating life and longing. After masturbating, he’d pray to be spared the fate of Onan, who had spilled his seed in the Book of Genesis. He’d resolve to quit the drink, to be a better father, to accept his circumstances, and to do God’s will and God’s work in accordance with his calling. Whether it was drink or fatigue that made him sleep, he was glad for it whenever it came. If he dreamed, he did not remember it.
A NIGHT of excess and a resolve to quit drinking had kept him abstemious for a couple of weeks. But the priest’s phone call had left him little wiggle room for an excuse. Adrian did not want to go out that night. He’d never left the kids with a sitter since Clare had left. He had to prepare a sermon for the morning. Things were getting shaky at the church. Still, he knew he never could refuse the priest, and so resigned himself to be ready at five. He showered and shaved and put on a fresh pair of khakis, his brown penny loafers, a blue button-down shirt, and his dark blue sport coat.
WHETHER IT was the bag of books and crayons and paper, the fact that she was nearer their own size, or that she was the first adult female to stand at the kitchen table since their mother had left three months before, that drew his kids to Mary De Dona, Adrian Littlefield had no idea. Either way, halfway through his list of child care guidelines—what they should eat, when they should go to bed, their family doctor’s emergency numbers, his beeper number, the numbers for the police and fire and ambulance—Sarah was seated with her thumb in her mouth, picking crayons from the cigar box and drawing stick figures on a blank page that Mary De Dona had given her. Damien was explaining the decals on his skateboard to Mary De Dona, who sat listening intently to the boy.
“C’mon, Reverend Littlefield,” Francis Concannon pleaded, holding the back screen door open, “the car’s running, can’t you see they’ll be fine.”
“But I don’t know anything about her,” Adrian protested as the priest’s car backed out of the driveway and made its way up Cory Street, past East Sandusky Street, to West Main Cross.
“For fuck sake, Adrian, what’s to know? She teaches fourth grade at our parish school. She’s a woman. She’s Italian. She knows more about kids than either of us will ever know. They’ll be fine. We’re taking the night off. We’re on a mission.”
Still, when the priest stopped for gas before getting on the freeway, Adrian went into the station and called home to see if everything was all right.
“They’re fine,” Mary De Dona assured him. “We’re having grilled cheese sandwiches and then we’re walking to Riverbend Park to feed the carp and do some people-watching.”
By the time they’d passed Toledo and crossed from Ohio into Michigan, Adrian knew there’d be no turning back.
“Where are we going, Francis?”
“Tijuana…relax. We’ll be there before you know it.”
Just north of Monroe, the priest rolled up his car window, lit up his pipe, and the car filled with the acrid smell of marijuana.
“I’m your designated driver tonight, Adrian, no boozola for me. Wanna toke?”
Adrian declined the pipe, but it hardly mattered. The car filled with a cloud of smoke and he could feel the sudden lightheadedness he hadn’t felt since his pre-semina
ry days at Wesleyan. The same idiot grin, the same stupid nodding as if he could agree with anything; the same hollow in his stomach—the priest was looking over and smiling inexplicably. Outside of Detroit, they opened the windows again and from under the driver’s seat the priest pulled a bottle of after-shave and splashed the car and Adrian.
Crossing over the Detroit River on the Ambassador Bridge, Adrian was counting boats in the water below them when he was seized by a sudden panic. He was going into a foreign country in the company of an apparently crazy priest. He was a single parent from Findlay, Ohio, who’d left his minor children, two hours south, in the custody of an unknown Italian woman who might sell them to the circus or run off with them, for all he knew, or testify against him in some future trial brought by his ex-wife for negligence.
“Where in God’s name are we going, Francis?” Adrian pleaded with the priest.
“For dinner in Windsor—and then the ballet. Aren’t you hungry? I am starving, man.”
Adrian was hungry, and though utterly helpless, he could not work up any anger at the priest or make sufficient protest.
The light of late September was fading from the evening sky and the cities on either side of the river were bathed in the most inextinguishable light, and he decided to give it all to God—his children’s safety, his shaky situation at St. Mark’s, the sermon he had not prepared, the hapless prospects for his future, his damaged household, his pummeled heart, his hunger, his desire, his unfathomable want, the sores and boils of rejection he felt—all of it he was giving to God, as Job had in that god-awful comfortless book which had only ever raised in Adrian reasonable doubts. It didn’t matter. And as they passed through Canadian customs, assuring the border agent that they were U.S. citizens, here for the evening only, and only for pleasure, Adrian turned to his guide and guardian, his pilot and protector, the dry but pleasantly stoned parish priest, and quoted, “Blessed be the name of the Lord.”
