Forgiveness 4 You

by Ann Bauer

  SEATON: I still go to church. Every week.

  MURRAY: I didn’t mean ….

  MCKENNA: Which parish do you belong to, Mrs. Seaton?

  SEATON: St. Peter’s.

  MCKENNA: Father O’Shea. He’s a favorite of mine. I used to listen to his sermons on my Sundays off and try to figure out how he made them so funny.

  SEATON: Yes, he is …

  GREEN: I’m sorry, Kat. But we need to get back on track here because I have a hard stop at 10.

  SEATON: Of course.

  GREEN: Go on, Madeline.

  MURRAY: You know those rows of candles in a church where you can light one and say a prayer for someone, but only if you put a dollar in the box? There are no barriers: even non-Catholics are welcome to do it—as long as they pay. Well, there’s our concept. This sort of transactional paradigm exists already in the religious setting. All we’re doing is moving it out to the private sector. People come to Father McKenna with their guilt and pay for his absolution. It’s that simple.

  LYNCH: I’ve got two problems with this, Ms. Murray. First, we bought an advertising agency, not a small business incubator. And in my experience, the best, most stable companies stick with their core competencies. I don’t see the benefit in your going off half-cocked and running this new concern on the side. Second, how is this different from the thousands of therapists out there—some of whom, no doubt, offer a religious component—who are fully covered by insurance?

  BECKWITH: Madeline, if I may? Thank you. You make some excellent points, Mr. Lynch. In regards to the first, I’d ask you to consider 3M, Microsoft, Motorola, Honeywell. All of these very successful companies acted like “incubators,” as you say. In some cases, their spin-offs have more visibility than the original. Who really cares about 3M tape anymore? You can buy generic, works just as well. But Imation? Well, there’s a brand people know.

  LYNCH: I see you came prepared, Mister …?

  BECKWITH: Beckwith. I did. Because I believe in Madeline and Gabe, and I believe in this project. Now, to your second point, I think it’s really valid. In fact, I asked the same thing myself. With everyone in the universe able to hang out a shingle that says, “I’m a personal life coach,” how does this start-up get any traction? What’s our differentiator? Then I came here and met Gabe McKenna, and I’m now 100 percent on board. He’s our differentiator. His character, his training, his … I can’t believe I’m going to use this word … aura. This is a guy who spent sixteen years in the Catholic Church, and now he carries it with him. He isn’t just any old burnt-out bank teller who decided to become a social worker midlife to spice things up. This is a man of God. Not because he says he is or because we say he is. Because that’s what other people sense in him. You can’t spend ten minutes in a room with Father McKenna without confiding the worst thing you’ve ever done. I dare you to try.

  GREEN: Well, ah, I think we’ll keep this on a strictly business level for now. Say I stipulate to everything you’ve said. I agree that we’ve got this guy with a line to God and people will pay money to talk to him. He’s still only one guy. And that’s just not profitable. What’s the multiplicity factor here? I don’t see how this grows.

  MURRAY: Think horizontal, not vertical. We aren’t creating the new pyramid, where dozens or hundreds of people work under Gabe, taking confession. He’s it. He’s our product. I’ve seen him in action and I can tell you, he’s good. Now, put him on digital platforms: everything from the Web to mobile to interactive TV. He’s everywhere. He’s forgiver to the nation. You don’t have to attend church in order to receive his blessing. It’s like putting that dollar in to light a candle. Anyone can do it.

  SEATON: I’m not sure I like this.

  MCKENNA: Mrs. Seaton, I’m not sure I like it, either.

  LYNCH: Let’s hear from you Mister, uh, Father McKenna. Because if you’re not committed to this …

  MCKENNA: Okay. I’m going to be completely honest with you. It’s kind of an occupational hazard. (Laughter from the group.) When I hear forgiveness described as a business, I cringe. I want it to be an open, God-given blessing to other people. One of the reasons I left the Catholic Church was because I felt we’d failed to serve people well. To protect them. And yet …

  GREEN: Sorry to rush you, Father, but I’m at lift-off minus six.

  MCKENNA: Excuse me? Oh. I guess what I’m trying to say is that I can’t keep going the way I have been. I can’t, well … survive. People come to me. I don’t know how they find me or how they know. But it’s become clear that I can’t just leave my old life. I no longer have the support of the church. Housing, clothes, salary, car. If I’m going to keep helping people—if that’s what I was put on this earth to do—then I have to figure out some way to live. And this, maybe … if we could build in some sort of sliding scale for people. Or a foundation that helps the poor.

  MURRAY: That would be Phase 2, of course. Our first initiative is to establish Forgiveness4You.com. (reveals poster)

  SEATON: I like the logo.

  MURRAY: Thank you, Kat. We wanted something dignified, something that matches Gabe’s approach. We also needed to convey that, unlike all the workshops and counseling options out there, Forgiveness4You isn’t a class. It’s something real and profound that you receive from a higher source. This image, of a hand lifting a silhouetted person—could be a man or a woman—out of darkness. This shows what Gabe McKenna does. I should know. He did it for me.

  (Light applause.)

  MURRAY: Listen, I know this is a crazy idea. But here are the facts. Mason & Zeus needs to bring in another $2.3 million this year over last year in order to make our projections. The economy has improved, but the 20-- forecast is looking flat, particularly in business services. Meanwhile, Gabe McKenna is living hand to mouth even while he’s lifting others. I’ve witnessed this. You go into a store with this man, and the next thing you know you’re listening to someone confess that he …

  MCKENNA: That was private.

  MURRAY: You see? This is a man with principles, a man who’s doing good. He’s already thinking about how to make the tough choices: charge the people who can well afford to pay—probably those same people who are funding churches and basilicas all over the world—and use their support to help people who are genuinely in need. It’s a win-win-win! We make money. Father McKenna makes money. The public gets this wonderful service without having to commit to some crazy religion that might not allow them to leave their abusive spouse, or marry their same-sex lover. This is that rare case where everybody wins.

  SEE: It does make sense. There’s no capital investment; it’s all creative and intellectual. From a purely business point of view, I can’t see the harm.

  GREEN: It’s 10:01, so I move we adjourn and discuss this at our next meeting.

  LYNCH: I agree with Amy, Bob, and I don’t see any reason to put this off. I move we go ahead with the Forgiveness4You project. All in favor?

  SEE: Aye.

  SEATON: Aye.

  GREEN: Fine. Aye.

  LYNCH: Excellent, it’s decided then. This better work out, Madeline. That’s all I can say.

  Meeting adjourned, 10:02 a.m.

  VI

  WE HAPPENED TO BE SEATED NEXT TO EACH OTHER, KAT SEATON and I. So when the meeting adjourned and she did not stand to leave, it seemed clear she wanted me to do the same.

  Bob Green hustled out first, muttering his goodbyes. One by one, the others followed. “You coming, Gabe?” asked Madeline. “I thought we might go over what the team has been doing, then get some lunch.”

  I felt Mrs. Seaton’s eyes on me, willing me to stay. “Give me a few minutes,” I told Madeline. “I’ll catch up.”

  Madeline stood in the doorway looking at us, first me and then Kat Seaton, who sat silently, her gaze trained on the table. She lifted her water glass to drink and the diamonds on her left hand set off a brilliant shower of sparks.

  “All right, page me when you’re done, okay?” Madeline backed out and gent
ly closed the door.

  I turned to face Mrs. Seaton. “You wanted to speak to me?”

  “Yes.” She sighed. “But given what we just discussed, that whole meeting, I feel like some kind of cliché.”

  “Is that important to you?” I asked. “Do you feel like there’s pride in being different?”

  “Well … kind of.” She turned, swiveling her chair so that her knees were pointing toward me. She had one of those tight older women’s bodies. Pilates, that was my guess. Her bobbed hair was gray and her face had pretty crinkling lines, but from the neck down she could have been thirty. I wondered if that was part of Madeline’s hesitation—jealousy. In a profoundly adolescent way, I hoped that it was. “I feel, Father McKenna, like there’s value in thinking for oneself.”

  “I’d agree.” I could already tell we were in a sparring match, one of those old-fashioned Oscar Wilde wars of words and wit. This lady wouldn’t be a crier—not unless the tactic would help her win a point.

  She looked at me, a bemused smile on her powdery face. “I had an abortion, Father.”

  First, in my defense, I looked over at the door to make sure it was closed. But then I said, “Mrs. Seaton, that is very possibly the greatest cliché in the Catholic Church.”

  “I know, I know.” She nodded as if we were two scientists making a breakthrough together. “How many times have you heard this in confession?”

  “Honestly, Mrs. Seaton”—I’d even slipped into a mildly Victorian style of speech—“So many, I’ve lost count.”

  “Ah, but I think my story has a slightly different … twist.”

  I settled back, hands folded in front of me; I would play my part to the end. “Tell me,” I said. And she tipped her head, birdlike, to the left.

  “It was 1975. Rick was finishing up at Wharton. We were engaged, and I was planning a wedding for 250 the following year. That’s when I found out I was pregnant. Oh, and I was sick. Putrid! Miserable, every day. You have no idea.”

  “I’m sure I don’t,” I said.

  “So. I tried to hide it from him, from my mother. I passed it off as flu for a few days. I remember …” Again she smiled, as if this were a happy memory. “We had to put off our appointment to taste cake. That would have been …” She shook her head. “Intolerable.”

  “That sounds very difficult.”

  “Oh, for heaven’s sake, Father, it does not.” Her tone got a little schoolmarmish, and I sat up in my chair. Kat Seaton leaned down and retrieved a small silver tube from her purse; she squirted a dollop of cream on her hand and began briskly rubbing it in. The scents of rose and patchouli rose in the air. “Lotion?” she asked, holding up the tube.

  “Why not?” I held out one palm, and she deposited a tuft of the cream there before stowing it back in her purse.

  “Back then, of course, I thought what was happening to me was tragic. I was terrified. Everything would be ruined, all our plans. I went to a doctor who set the due date the same week as our wedding. It was—well, when I look back, kind of funny.” She laughed briefly, but I did not.

  “When did you decide to terminate?” Despite my ambivalence, all the many years I’d spent wrestling this issue inside my own conscience, I had adopted the lingo of the other side because it seemed more humane.

  “Well, I told Rick. Finally. After his thesis defense. We discussed the options, which were—remember—brand-new. The Supreme Court had passed Roe v. Wade just the year before. This was a new era for women. We had choices. You can’t imagine how significant that was.”

  “So you chose not to have the baby.”

  “We chose not to have the baby. I was on the fence. I was embarrassed, and I wanted my beautiful wedding.” She rolled her eyes, a teenage gesture in a sixty-year-old face. “But Rick made the better, more logical arguments. We weren’t prepared: he was just starting a job with lots of travel, and we’d been planning to go together. Shanghai, Tokyo, Paris. There wasn’t room for a baby. Not yet. Can you imagine, Father?”

  She stared at me, and I remained silent, staring back.

  “We decided whether to have a child based upon a week in Paris.” She found a leftover dab of lotion on the back of one hand and worked it in. “It rained,” she said as she rubbed, “the whole time we were there.”

  “Was there counseling provided back then?” I’d have been a baby at the time, I was thinking. Her phantom child and I would be around the same age. “Many women are depressed after an abortion. It sounds like you needed help.”

  “Not at all. I was fine. In fact, I was tremendously relieved. The procedure went off like that.” She snapped her fingers. “All the horror stories I’d heard? Nothing. I went home, I rested for a day or two. It was like nothing had happened. I went on to plan my wedding, and it turned out exactly like I wanted. You should see the pictures, Father. Like Charles and Diana.” She smirked. “Well, almost.”

  “So when …”

  “Not until our brothers and sisters started having children, and Rick said he’d like to try. I’d been on the Pill—another new thing—even though the Church said not to. That just seemed silly.” She took a drink of water, set her empty glass carefully on one of the coasters Candy had passed out. “Then my sister had a baby. Amy. Oh, she was so beautiful. I was completely in love with that little girl. But she was also like proof for me that this—pregnancy—was a real process. Do you know what I mean? I’d seen my sister sick as a dog one entire Fourth of July weekend, then growing larger and larger as winter came on and now, suddenly, there was this new person in the world. It just. Stopped me.”

  “Mrs. Seaton,” I said, trying mightily to suppress my boredom. “There is still nothing new here. I have talked to hundreds of women who regret their abortion. And I have no doubt that God understands.”

  She was shaking her head. “No. No, no. Father, I have long since forgiven myself for the abortion itself. It’s an option, it was for me. And I took it at one moment in my life. That, I can live with. It’s what I did next.”

  I waited, and again she smiled. This seemed to be her defense. “So we were talking about having a baby. It was a very good time: Rick had been promoted, and we’d bought a house. All I had to do was stop taking the Pill. But I … didn’t.”

  “You kept taking it?” I was more interested now. No one ever thought to confess about birth control.

  “I did. And I wish I could tell you why.” Her face twisted, and for a few seconds she was an ancient woman. “I would think about that first pregnancy. It had only been three years since the abortion at that point, and I wondered, why now but not then? Why this baby, not that? It was so …” Her hand fluttered in the air. “Random.”

  “What did your husband think?” I asked.

  “He, ah, didn’t know.” Again, the smile. “He never knew, Father. He was disappointed every month.”

  “So you kept it up?”

  “I did.” She sat up straight, as if this were a point of pride. “Because I knew, I knew that when I got pregnant for the second time, with Rick, we would both, in our heads, think about that first time and imagine how old that child would be. Whether it was a boy or a girl. I had such a strong aversion to that. It was some form of pride, I suppose.”

  “Yes, it always comes back to one of the seven deadly sins, doesn’t it?” I felt I was playing my part, but Kat Seaton looked at me strangely and I remembered that she had cast the deciding vote in our favor. I hunched forward, hands clasped, full priest on. “What is it that’s bothering you?”

  “I’ve lied to my husband for forty years,” she said somewhat proudly, an irony that was not lost on me. “We went to a doctor once and talked about infertility. It was a brand-new specialty back then. But Rick …” She got a dreamy, indulgent look; it was likely she really did love the man.

  “He’s very Catholic, a lay deacon with our church. He wouldn’t tell anyone that we actually had conceived a child once and aborted it. So the doctor did all his tests, found nothing wrong, and conclude
d that our chemistry just wasn’t right for each other. I remember the night we got the ‘results.’” She made air quotes with her fingers, a gesture I detest for no reason I can name. I stifled my irritation with a cough. “Rick was so sweet. He told me it didn’t matter. Our chemistry was perfect as far as he was concerned.”

  “But you kept it up, even after your husband proved his love to you?”

  “Yes, isn’t that odd?” She peered at me. “What do you make of it?”

  I was startled. Never in my tenure had anyone asked me to define their sin. This required thought. I imagined myself as a young woman in the early seventies, experiencing the equally strong pulls of the Rolling Stones and the Catholic Church. I had a tendency to idealize that period—as we all do the eras in which we’re born. But to be female at a time when abortion was ten minutes legal and free love was on the news? I formed a ridiculous picture—inspired, I’m sure, by some record album cover—of a young Kat Seaton in a mini-skirt, twirling senselessly against a fiery sky.

  “Whom did you tell about the abortion? Your sister, your mother?”

  “No one,” she said. Her tone was approving. She wanted me to find the answer, and I was getting warm. “Rick never wanted anyone to know.”

  “So you weren’t ashamed of it, but he was?”

  She sighed. “I don’t want to give you the wrong impression, Father. My husband is a man of great principle. You will find, when you meet him, he’s the only one on that board who gives a damn about doing the right thing. But this … His way of dealing with it was to erase it. Put it in the past. I believe that may have been my concern: If I’d become pregnant I might have talked about that first time. It would have hurt him.”

  “It takes a great deal of energy to ignore your past,” I told her. Believe me, I intoned silently. I should know. “If you were protecting Rick, that’s your answer. Also, and here I’m just speculating, but you were really at the beginning of something. How to be a wife and, if you chose, a mother had changed radically. There were no role models. Am I right?”