He shook his head.
“Mom’s is Esther, the saint of stars. I bet you forgot that, Belly.”
“I don’t think I ever knew it in the first place.”
“Eliza had Gamo, patron saint of the arts, even though it’s a man’s name. Ann had Bernadette—I remember just trying to spell that on the card—and that meant something like “bold as a bear.” Do you remember all this, Belly?”
“Sure,” he lied.
“And Shannon had Irene, saint of peace.” Nora looked up now from her cookbook. “Do you remember mine?”
“Should I?” he asked, and Nora just glared at him.
“I know what it is,” said Stevie Ray. “It’s Josephine.”
“Is that supposed to mean something to me?”
Stevie Ray leafed through his workbook. “Joseph is the saint of fathers,” he said, closing his book. “Jeez, Grampa, you didn’t remember that?”
Belly said, “Stevie, don’t take the Lord’s name in vain. And on a Sunday, for Chrissake.”
“It’s just about time,” Nora said, closing up Stevie Ray’s notebook and tousling his hair. Whatever war was between them had ceased for the day. Behind them, Phil appeared, six-foot-six and skinny as a street cat in his Sunday best.
Belly stood up. “I’ve managed to go a whole week without seeing my son-in-law.” He extended a hand and Phil shook it, but loosely. Belly’s palm was suddenly coated in sweat; he felt as if Phil were the father and he was a naughty little boy.
“Spell’s broken, I guess,” said Phil, and he served himself a cup of coffee but did not say more to Belly.
He watched his daughter’s husband sit down and sip his coffee and read the paper, watched him keep still while his wife moved around him, watched his sons reach across him, spill orange juice on his paper, trying to get his attention, and the whole scene made some foreign feeling simmer up inside him, something he vaguely recognized as regret.
They wanted to all go to church together but Phil’s pickup was a two-seater, so they tried to pile all three kids and three adults into Margie’s borrowed Dodge Dart. Belly waited for them to smoosh in and then he said, “I’ll walk.”
“Oh, no you don’t,” said Nora. “I don’t trust you to make it there on your own.”
“It’s six blocks away.”
“There are, like, forty bars between here and the church. Get in.”
“Just one minute,” Belly said, and he walked up all those stairs to the attic. He changed into the dress pants and then he reached under the bed and pulled out the plastic Wal-Mart bag with the flask from Eliza, and downstairs he filled the flask with Jameson’s and outside he squeezed into the car with the flask resting safely against his heart.
Eons had passed since Belly had been in this church, more moons than he could count. These last four years remained in sharp focus, his podmates and their fights over what to watch on television, the rare gift of a cigarette or square of chocolate when the guards were feeling generous. But the fifteen years before that were now as blank and beige as the universe.
The interior of St. Peter’s was stern and bland, and a young priest had begun taking over for Father Keneally. But everything about the inside of this church was the same, even the parishioners. Mrs. Radcliffe and her girls, Phil’s brothers and their wives, everyone coming up to him and asking, “How are you?” with faux Christian concern. He recognized a sea of regulars from War Bar and their families.
The question he’d been dreading all week now floated in the air around him: “What are you going to do now? What now? What lies ahead for you, buddy?” He followed Nora to a pew in the front and knelt, he tried to kneel but it was too hard on his knees and he sat back on the bench and looked up to the school of people on the stage, each of them wearing index cards with the names of their patron saints written in bold black ink.
Around Stevie Ray’s neck hung a nametag that read “William.”
Belly moved to the back of the church. He hid in a back pew and sipped from his flask, watching the parishioners and the clergy and his family all milling about in the unfriendly interior. There must be twenty people on the stage, up for confirmation, Stevie Ray obviously the youngest among them. There were two middle-aged sisters in matching outfits, garish green flowered things, fancy muumuus, and blond girls or ladies or whatever you called them when they were on the verge, thin pretty things with their hair done up just perfect, just in the way that calls for a man to take it down. Mostly they looked like high school students, pimply and awkward with dreamy eyes as they swayed to the lame-ass Christian band with piercing drums playing off to the side. In the apse, a girl with bobbed hair, wearing a bright, fifties shade of turquoise, sat next to a fresh-faced boy with a shiny, pomaded pompadour and sparkly eyes, such wholesome teenagers he wanted to shake them and say, Loosen up, have some fun, you are going to die. Go out and have some sex, for Chrissake. But they looked so peaceful, this blond boy and girl, holding hands in the wooden row.
A woman was singing with the band, the kind of old woman you saw in every church, in every elementary school office: big, pink, plastic glasses and a loose jumper in an unsightly shade of red hovering over her like a shroud. But then he realized the old woman was probably his age, and when they sang, when he heard the woman’s high clear voice singing I Am the Bread of Life, then the old aching came back and it was all he could do not to leave.
The bishop wore a microphone so his words echoed off the concrete walls and found Belly in the back. When he was a kid the back of the church was for sleepers, and when your mother asked you what the sermon was about you legitimately answered, “I couldn’t hear.”
The bishop and the priest made their way down the long line of parishioners waiting to be confirmed. Asking, that’s what the bishop said, they were asking to be confirmed. Could the church really say no? The confirmandi stood in front of their sponsors. Belly looked at the man standing with his hand on Belly’s grandson’s shoulder: it was Gene, big fat Gene with his chubby paw clutching Stevie Ray’s clavicle. With relief he noticed they looked nothing alike. Gene would always be the avuncular family addendum and nothing more.
The ceremony began, the bishop asking the questions—“Do you believe all that the Catholic Church believes, teaches, and proclaims to be revealed by God?”—and the whole parish droning in response every time. He wanted to answer, Not so fast. Hold on. Let me think about it a minute. But he kept silent.
After the bishop and the priest had made their rounds, rubbing circles of holy water on the foreheads of the recently confirmed, they turned to the parish and beseeched, “Let us pray that all will proclaim Jesus as God.” Belly wondered, Why? Why is that so important, that every single person should proclaim Jesus as God, even the Jews, or those Muslim types?
“What you doing back here, Grampa?” Jimi climbed next to him on the pew.
“Thinking,” Belly said.
“You’re not allowed,” said Jimi. “We’re supposed to go up front.”
One by one the rows emptied as the parishioners walked up to take Communion, and Belly and Jimi sat in the back of the church and watched the lines of open-mouthed adults kneel and sip on a tasteless wafer and bad wine and Belly did not rise. “Get up, Grampa,” Jimi said, but he did not rise. He watched the line move slowly like a sated snake and he thought of sneaking from row to row and rifling through the ladies’ pocketbooks. What would the muumuu girls have in their bags? How much money did the red jumper lady keep? Were there condoms in the pockets of the fifties boy’s suit?
He looked up and Jimi was not with him. The boy crouched by the big domed doors where the Bibles were kept, and Belly saw him reach for a little green New Testament and slip the book into his suit pants.
The priest told the story of when John baptized Jesus in the river Jordan and the sky opened and a dove came down from heaven and landed on Jesus, saying, “This is my Son, whom I love: with him I am well pleased.” He watched Gene and Stevie Ray with identical gleami
ng grins on the stage, and Stevie Ray holding the nametag and peering out into the audience, looking for his Grampa, making sure that Belly saw. He wanted to stand and wave, there in the back of the church, wanted to jump on the wooden pew and cheer, but all the alcohol pinned him to the floor, gravity trapped him, and he had no recourse but to flee.
He pushed open the great oak doors and left his whole family there to witness his grandson’s lifelong commitment to God and all his glory, he just turned his back on God the same way God had forsaken him. He stood outside and waited for his family to finish.
Mrs. Radcliffe came out first. “You didn’t take communion,” she said.
“I haven’t gone to confession in about ten years.”
“Oh, well, whoever lets that stop them?” She lit a cigarette and waited for her girls.
Jimi and Nora and Gene and Phil and Eliza’s husband Henry and Stevie Ray and all the rest poured out the doors, flash photos and flowers and hugs and Belly tried to remember his own confirmation but it was a sober event as far as he could recall, and what was all this fuss for?
He approached his grandson, rested a hand on his shoulder as people swirled about him, congratulating, congratulating and Belly said, “Why’d you do it so young? You’re the youngest one here, I bet.” He tried to wipe something from Stevie Ray’s starched white collar but the stain had set. “You’ve got some Christ blood on your shirt,” he said.
Stevie Ray looked up with his big, sad blue eyes and said, “I want to be a priest.”
“Oh, Jesus, you’ve got to be kidding me. That’s the last thing you want to do.”
Nora swooped in to separate them. “Let’s head back to the house,” she said, ushering them toward Margie’s Dart.
They all piled in again, and as they headed home Belly said, “Why don’t you just be gay and skip the whole priest thing?”
“Enough,” Nora said. She was squished in the front seat between her husband and Stevie Ray and Belly smooshed in the back with King and Jimi and he watched out the window as if by looking he could make the town turn back into its former self.
What can I do?” Belly asked Nora when they returned from church. She was tidying furiously. “How can I help?”
“Stay out of the house.”
“Don’t be like that. Let me do something. I’ll watch the baby.”
“Right,” was all she said.
“I cannot believe Eliza is not here for this. That is just so selfish.”
“Don’t start on that again.”
“You’re trying to tell me that it’s okay if she misses her own niece’s —”
“— nephew’s —”
“— nephew’s confirmation?”
“There’ll be three more.”
“But this is the first one.”
“You missed all of their christenings.”
“I was in jail.”
“Only for King’s.”
He added up the numbers in his head, but it did not work out.
“That’s not true.”
“It is true.”
“It isn’t.” He opened the liquor cupboard, hidden high above the microwave and pulled down the near-empty bottle of Jameson’s.
“It’s true.”
“It can’t be true.”
“It is.”
“Tell me it’s not true.” He opened the bottle and poured the last drops of alcohol into the flask. Nora never turned around, and he slipped the flask into his jacket pocket and put the bottle back in the cupboard, all this without her seeing.
She put down her spatula. “Belly, you didn’t show up to Stevie Ray’s christening or his first communion and you didn’t come to Jimi’s christening and today you sat in the back and left early and I don’t know what to do with you, I really don’t.”
“Where was I?” he asked. “The other times.”
“You were busy. You were booking. You were drunk.” She rinsed the spatula and wiped her hands on her jeans. “Belly,” she said. “You were a terrible father.”
He opened the fridge and took out a beer.
“It’s not even noon,” she said and he said, “Who cares?”
She said, “I do.”
He looked at Nora, and Nora was crying, and he needed beer and he needed a cigarette. He felt in his pockets but the lighter, his cherry-red lighter, was not there.
“You never did anything for us,” she said, “not once. But now you can.”
“Where’s my lighter?” he asked, watching tears roll down Nora’s cheeks.
She shook her head.
“I need my lighter, dammit,” he yelled. He patted all of his pockets and he searched through the kitchen drawers while Nora’s face turned red and blotchy, and the face of ten-year-old Nora with skinned knees broke through. “I can’t live without my lighter,” he said.
She opened her purse and pulled out a small white lighter, and she showed him how to pull back the childproof lever and light it, crying all the while. She said, “Eliza’s gone and Shannon’s gone and Ann’s not coming and you chased Mom off a long time ago.” She was really crying now, steady tears, her shoulders jerking and Belly had never been so thirsty in his life.
“I did it for you. I did it all for you.” But she kept shaking her head. “It was for you.”
“We forgive you,” she said. “So just, stop, you know? Stop. You don’t have to be a terrible father anymore. You can just stop, that’s what you can do for us.” She moved toward him with one hand reaching out and he tried to root himself to the floor, he tried to make himself stay and open his arms to her, tried to summon some words of comfort.
“You know what I’ll do for you?” He grabbed his suit coat from the back of the chair. “I’ll go downtown and get drunk. Would that help?”
“That would be great, Dad,” Nora said through her tears. “With my blessing.”
He slammed the door behind him.
Downtown tourists swarmed. On Caroline Street the little bars looked like cells holding endless alcoholics captive. He put on his sunglasses, walked into Ruffian’s, ordered a tequila with Sprite, “Just like in Mexico,” though he’d never been, and then a Patron silver and a Guinness and a boilermaker and then he said, “One of everything.”
The waitress, the little dark-haired waitress said, “You coming in every day?”
“I just might be. I might be here every day.”
He drank in the midday heat until so many of his pilfered dollars dissolved and then he walked down Maple Street, wobbling south and into Congress Park.
The first thing he saw was Margie, sitting on a bench with a Café Newton coffee cup, reading the Sunday Times. He said, “Sipping with the enemy, I see.”
“It was closest.”
“Why aren’t you at the house? You didn’t get invited?”
“Of course I was invited. I just don’t do religion.”
“Jesus,” he said. The world twisted and turned around him, and he had to focus on his shoes to slow it down.
Margie looked up at the darkening sky and said, “It’s going to rain.”
“A big rain or a little rain?”
“A big rain,” she said. “Definitely a big rain.”
A fat gray cloud covered the sky, and he said a little prayer that the heat wave would end, the tourist wave would end, that Labor Day would come a week early and give him his town back. He dripped sweat inside his Sunday suit.
Belly said, “Stevie Ray wants to be a priest.” He slipped the flask from his jacket pocket and took a big swig.
“I know,” she said. “Don’t forget what you’re doing is illegal.”
He said, “I was getting too sober.”
“However you want to justify it.”
“How do you know?” he asked. “About Stevie?”
“Eliza told me.”
He sat down next to her on the bench. “Why does it bother me so much?”
“I suppose you just want everyone in your family to be normal.”
He said, “Fat chance of that happening,” but he thought about them, his three girls, and he thought about their mother, and he tried to revisit the list of ways they’d wronged him but it was gone, melted in the heat or obscured by heavy clouds and suddenly they did not seem so strange.
“I don’t know,” Margie said. “I’ve seen some real freaks in my time and I’d say you lucked out.”
“I’ve got a man-hater and a meat-hater.”
“Count yourself lucky.”
“What’s lucky about that?”
“First of all, considering where they came from, I think your daughters are doing great. Amazingly, in fact.” Margie looked up at the sky as it grew darker and she looked at Belly and she reached and put her hand on his shoulder, and he did not move away. “Second of all, you can’t take that shit personally,” she said. “Eliza’s not a vegetarian because you force-fed her pork or anything.”
“That’s your influence,” he interrupted.
“Maybe. My parents’ influence, anyway. But Ann’s not a lesbian to punish you. That’s just who she is.” Margie rubbed circles in the dirt with her foot. “Think about how it is for you. I highly doubt you ran a nationwide gambling ring just to disrupt your daughters. People just make mistakes or bad decisions or they can’t help how they turn out.”
He looked at his cowboy boots, scuffed on the side. His shirt stuck to his back, the humidity seeped into his brain, his bones, everything expanded and softened and all he wanted in the world was to lie down and look up and see the faces of his four daughters surrounding him.
He said, “She ruined my fantasy life forever, that Ann.”
“You’ll have to live in the real world like the rest of us.”
He looked at Margie, big fat Margie in her hippie dress with her hairy pits and he asked, “How can you stand living here now? With all those big stores and everything all tidy—the whole downtown feels like a dental office. It was so much better before.”
“Belly, you act like that all happened since you left town. Half that stuff was already here, the new library and the bookstore. And the plans to tear down the Woolworth’s building were in place long before you left.”
Belly Page 22
