by Jack Falla
We were headed back to my place, Faith driving Boss Scags again, when I told her what I’d seen upstairs.
“Are you going to tell anyone?”
“No.”
“Not even Cam?”
“No one except you. I figure it’s between Kevin and Nan unless one of them wants to talk about it … whatever it is.”
“Whatever it is, if it’s causing him that much pain it’s going to come out,” Faith said. “Emotions leak.”
“They can leak after the season,” I said.
* * *
Christmas Eve morning I was at practice (if you want to call it that; half the guys were hungover), so Denny Moran sent a limo to Hanscom Field to meet the C&P jet carrying my mother and Mammam. They were at my condo when I got home.
“Really, Jean Pierre, was all that private-jet and limo business really necessary?” my mother asked.
“That’s what agents are for. They’re problem solvers,” I said.
“They’re enablers,” my mother said.
Our Christmas plans were dictated by Mammam’s weakening condition.
Cam’s parents and Faith’s parents invited my mother, Mammam, and me to Christmas dinner but I said no because I didn’t think my grandmother was up to it. The earliest I could hire a nurse to stay with her on Christmas Day was 5 p.m. and that cost me triple the usual rate. So our plans called for Faith to come over for dinner on Christmas Eve. Then on Christmas Day we’d play what Faith called “a split-squad game.” She’d have Christmas dinner with her parents, I’d eat with my mother and grandmother, and then we’d meet at Cam’s parents’ house at about six o’clock.
Faith and I exchanged presents on Christmas Eve. She gave me an Italian-made black leather jacket with the prancing-stallion Ferrari logo on the left sleeve and my jersey number—number 1, “the loneliest number,” Faith said—on the right sleeve. I gave her small custom-made diamond-and-gold earrings that from a distance look identical but up close you can see that one is the numeral 3 and the other the numeral 1—31, her basketball number.
Faith and I each took one for the team on Christmas Eve. Faith brought my mother to early-evening Mass at St. Ignatius Church while I stayed home in man coverage against my now constantly wheezing grandmother. “Give her the short routes but don’t let her beat you deep,” Faith whispered to me as she left the house.
* * *
My mother and I cooked Christmas dinner. My grandmother couldn’t even work in the kitchen anymore, the place that had always been the center of her life. As soon as the nurse arrived, my mother and I headed for Weston and Cam’s parents’ open house.
Cam’s mom and dad live in a porticoed mansion that looks like the White House. The butler had barely opened the door for my mother and me when we were greeted by the Deuce himself, hospitable and engagingly drunk: “Merry Christmas, JP. Jacqueline. Come on in. If you’re lucky you won’t have to put up with Diana modeling the fur coat I gave her. And don’t give me any of that goddamn political correctness PETA crap, because Lindsey already gave it to me. My own grandaughter for Christ’s sake. What Linds doesn’t understand is that a warm wife is a happy wife and a happy wife is one less goddamn problem.”
Faith had arrived before us. And I was surprised to see Denny Moran there. He was sipping what looked like a Cognac and standing by himself next to the bar when my mother went over to him.
“JP says I have you to thank for the plane and limo, Denny,” my mother said.
“Dennis, please,” said Denny Moran.
My mother looked taken aback for a second. Then she smiled. “Got me,” she said.
“Thanks for the goalie stuff, Mr. Savard,” said Lindsey, coming up on my blind side.
“You’re a sick and demented person, Jean Pierre,” said Tamara, kissing me on the cheek. “But Lindsey loved your present. We had to make her take off the mask so she could eat dinner.”
I told Lindsey I could get Harry Flask of Masks by Flask Inc. to design whatever she wanted on her mask and helmet. Harry did up my outfit with a drawing of Montreal great Jacques Plante’s first goalie mask on the front and with three crossed flags—the American flag, the Canadian maple leaf, and the Quebecois fleur-de-lis—on the back.
Lindsey said she wanted her mask painted “pink with a picture of Belle from Beauty and the Beast.”
“Harry can do it but people might laugh,” I said.
“Not if I stop the puck,” she said.
We left Cam’s parents’ party early because our schedule called for a morning skate and a game against Ottawa on the twenty-sixth. When we got home the nurse handed me a slip of paper with a phone number and a message to call Nan O’Brien.
“It’s about what you walked in on at Philip Palmer’s party,” Nan said when I reached her at home. “Have you mentioned that to anyone.”
“Only to Faith,” I said.
“Please don’t talk about it to anyone else,” she said. I promised I wouldn’t and asked if she could tell me what was going on.
“All I can tell you, without betraying a confidence, is that Kevin is dealing with some serious problems from his past.”
“No one has problems anymore, Nan. They’re ‘issues’ these days. Didn’t you get the memo?”
“I call things what they are, Jean Pierre, and this one’s a problem,” she said. I told Nan she should get a national award for being the first social worker in a decade to use the word “problem” instead of the wimpy euphemistic “issue.”
“How can I help?” I said.
“Kevin might want to talk. Not now but eventually. Listen to him. Otherwise just watch him. I think you might see changes in him, and in the short term, they might not be good. Either for him or for your team.”
I said I’d keep an eye on Quig. “But it’s tricky when you don’t know what you’re watching for.”
“Sorry, Jean Pierre,” she said.
If our Christmas schedule was good our New Year’s schedule was terrible. Right after our game on the twenty-sixth—a 6–2 win over an Ottawa team that played as if the guys wished they were home with their families—we hit the road for a four-game southern swing including a New Year’s Eve game at Dallas. That’s where I faced my first penalty shot. Dallas’s speedy center Greg Adamson got around Flipside, who turned and tripped Adamson even though I beg our guys not to do that. I’d rather face the breakaway in the heat of the game than have to stand around and wait for a penalty shot. Most fans don’t know it but the stats on penalty shots favor goalies. We stop about 60 percent of them. I didn’t actually stop Greg Adamson. He hit the post. I watched a rebroadcast of the game and heard the dumb-ass announcer say, “Adamson beat J. P. Savard but his shot hit the post.” That’s bullshit. His shot hit the post because I played the angle like goddamn Pythagoras. Adamson should’ve deked. I think a shooter’s best chance on a penalty shot is a deke and a backhand to the top shelf. But I’m not about to tell them, and most of them are too dumb to figure it out for themselves.
* * *
My mother and grandmother got another complimentary flight to Lewiston courtesy of Denny Moran. Carter & Peabody handles the State of Maine Employees Association pension fund and Denny had a meeting in Bangor on the twenty-seventh. He said it would be easy to make a quick stop in Lewiston. When my mother told me this she tried to imitate Denny Moran, who’d been imitating Cam’s father: “When you’re a private company you can do what you goddamn want without answering to any goddamn whiny shareholders.”
My mother does terrible imitations.
We had back-to-backers at Florida and Tampa Bay on the twenty-eighth and twenty-ninth. I won my start 7–1 (Gaston Deveau scored two more goals) and Rinky Higgins held us in the game against Tampa Bay until we scored five in the third period for a 5–3 win, our fifth in a row. I picked up thirty-eight saves in a strong showing against Carolina but it wasn’t strong enough. The Hurricanes beat us 2–1, a tough loss to one of the league’s legitimate Cup contenders. I was in the shower when
Cam stuck his head in and said, “JP, Sully’s got a phone call for you.”
I wrapped a towel around my waist and found Les Sullivan pitching our equipment bags into a van for the trip to the airport. Les handed me his cell phone. It was Faith relaying a message from my mother. Mammam was dead.
Six
Mammam died of an aortic aneurysm, which Faith said “is like a volcano of blood erupting in your chest.” She died at home, collapsing at the kitchen sink while drawing a glass of water. “It was fast, Jean Pierre. She didn’t suffer,” Faith said.
Shock, sadness, and relief jumped me at the same time. I felt guilty about the relief but I knew Mammam’s death freed my mother from caretaker prison.
Time was when an NHL player could miss games only for the death of a wife, child, or parent. Today it’s common in all major pro sports for a player to miss a game or two for a grandparent’s death. Packy was good about it. He asked me to fly with the team to New Jersey in case Kent Wilson, the goalie the team called up from Providence, didn’t make it to the rink by game time. But as soon as Kent arrived I could grab a flight to Boston and Packy would start Rinky Higgins against the Devils on Thursday and against Toronto in Boston on Saturday. My grandmother’s wake was Friday and the funeral Saturday.
Kent, thrilled at the call-up, was in New Jersey before we were. By late Thursday I was in Faith’s Lexus heading north on I-95, which route number she apparently mistook for the speed limit.
* * *
After checking into the Holiday Inn we went to my mother’s house, which by this time—about 8 p.m.—was crowded with neighbors and relatives, many of whom I hadn’t seen since I’d left Lewiston to go to college. Most of my grandmother’s older friends spoke to each other in French. They’d brought enough food to fill an NHL training table.
It was there in the parlor that my mother told me that my grandmother had long ago arranged with Monsignor Faucette that her funeral Mass would be the traditional High Requiem. Mammam had also said she wanted the altar boy at her funeral to be none other than her grandson, namely me. “A thirty-one-year-old altar boy?” I almost shouted at my mother. “I should be with you.”
“You should be with your grandmother,” my mother said.
“What’s a High Requiem?” Faith asked.
“About an hour. Fifty minutes if you’re lucky,” I said. “Good music, though.” I took Faith’s hand and led her toward the stairs.
“Where are we going?”
“My bedroom.”
“For God’s sake, Jean Pierre, not now.”
“You’re going to run some lines with me,” I said.
My old room was almost the same as I’d left it thirteen years ago. Yellowed newspaper clippings covered the walls, ceiling, and closet door. There were posters of the University of Maine hockey team; Go Black Bears! (I’ve forgiven them for not recruiting me); photos of ex-Bruins Ray Bourque and Cam Neely and of the Celtics’ Larry Bird; and a framed black-and-white glossy of Bobby Orr joyfully belly whomping through the air after he scored the overtime goal giving Boston the 1970 Stanley Cup back before I was born. “The greatest player in his greatest moment,” I said when I saw Faith staring at the photo.
I knelt to rummage through the bottom drawer of my old desk. “Got it,” I said, pulling out a six-panel folding card entitled “Mass Server’s Responses.” On it the priest’s lines appeared in red type and the altar boy’s lines in black.
“Read me the red lines,” I said to Faith.
“I go unto the altar of God,” Faith read.
“To God who gives joy to my youth,” I said.
“Yesssss. Nailed it,” said Faith. She kept reading the priest’s lines and I kept giving the right responses. I was on a roll until we hit the Apostles’ Creed. “I believe in God, the Father Almighty, Creator of heaven and earth; and in Jesus Christ His only Son, Our Lord; who … who … aw, shit, I could never remember this.”
“Who was conceived by the Holy Spirit, born of the Virgin Mary…,” Faith said.
“No wonder I can’t remember it. I don’t believe any of that,” I said.
“I don’t either,” Faith said, “but you’re going to have to know the words by Saturday morning.”
“Give me that,” I said, reaching for the altar boy card, then tearing out the Apostles’ Creed and putting it in my shirt pocket.
“Great. You don’t like a tenet of your religion you tear it out. What do you call that, JP? Religion à la carte? Wish I could tear out sections of the capital-gains tax laws,” Faith said.
“I’m going to tape it to my left wrist like a quarterback’s play sheet. The altar boy’s back is to the congregation when he recites the Apostles’ Creed so no one will know I’m reading it.”
Faith smiled. For the next few minutes in my old bedroom we talked about the religion we’d been brought up in and had turned away from. Faith and I went to Catholic grammar schools and high schools. We’d each had deeply religious parents and grandparents. Catholicism was as much a part of her Irish culture as it was of my French culture. Yet neither of us believed anymore. “When did you lose your religion?” I asked her.
“Sophomore year at Cambridge Catholic when Burlington High came back from seventeen points down and that bitch Hazel Anne Worthington beat us with a three-pointer at the buzzer in the state finals. She didn’t have both feet behind the line but the zebra gave it to her anyway,” Faith said.
“No. Seriously,” I said.
“When I got to college. Got away from my parents.”
“My grandmother used to tell me stories her mother had told her about how the priests controlled the French in Canada. French Canadians believed in what they called revanche à berceau, the revenge of the cradle. Since they’d lost Quebec to English Protestants on the battlefield they thought they’d get it back in the bedroom by producing enormous numbers of little French Catholics. Families with ten, twelve, fifteen children were common. All that did was guarantee a life of poverty.”
“But your grandmother never let go of her religion.”
“Religion offers hope, cheap at any price. Keep the rules, go to Heaven. I think religions begin with our fear of death.”
“What do you think comes after death?”
“Eternal nothingness,” I said. “Our work is our immortality.”
We left my old room and headed for the stairs.
“Wait a minute,” I said, and led Faith to my mother’s room, where I snapped on the TV. “I just want the score.”
The Bruins were up 6–3 over New Jersey with a few minutes to play. I was about to click off the TV when I noticed Kent Wilson was in the Boston net. Then I heard the TV announcer say Rinky Higgins had given up all three New Jersey goals, all in the first period, and Packy had benched him for the start of the second period. The shelf life on loyalty to a goaltender is about twenty minutes or three goals, whichever comes first.
* * *
I spent most of the wake standing between my mother and Faith in the receiving line and trying not to look at my grandmother’s body lying in an open casket a few feet away. Faith told me later that viewing the body “helps people accept the reality of death.” I know she’s right but I’d rather watch curling than look at a dead body.
My mother was a rock through it all except for the final closing of the casket on Saturday morning before the funeral-home guys loaded it into the hearse for the trip to the church. She cried then but not for long.
Faith sat with my mother in church while I served the Mass. I’d worn a black Hugo Boss suit, white shirt, and black silk tie for the occasion. But Monsignor Faucette found a size XL altar boy’s black cassock and white surplice that fit over my suit so I had to parade around dressed like a ten-year-old. At least the long sleeves of the cassock hid the cheat sheet I’d taped to my wrist. But as with goaltending, all the responses and actions came back to me once the Mass started. It was as if I were a kid again and serving morning Mass in front of pews filled with murmuring kerchiev
ed women, their rosary beads clacking against the backs of oaken pews.
Toward the end of Mass the soprano soloist sang a song in French. I think beauty transcends language; this was one of the most moving songs I’d ever heard, yet I didn’t understand a word of it. Later my mother told me the song was “Ceux qui sen vont.” It means “To Those Who Leave,” she said.
“I wish I remembered my French,” I told her.
“Your heart remembers,” she said.
Take this to the bank; in relationships between the sexes, one family crisis, successfully negotiated, equals one hundred good dates. “Thanks for coming here with me,” I said to Faith when, long after dark, we left my mother’s house for the drive back to Boston.
“You’d do it for me,” she said.
“I would. But not as gracefully.”
“Do you ever miss it? Catholicism?” she asked.
“Sometimes. I miss the comfort of it. Most of those people in church, especially the old frogs … I envy them their certainty. And you?”
“Same thing. God’s gone but I miss Him.”
“What would it take to make you believe again?” I asked.
Faith hesitated a minute. “I think if the world went dark and the dead rose from their graves and God stepped out of the sky and told everyone that bitch Hazel Anne Worthington didn’t have both feet behind the three-point arc and that CC really won the Massachusetts girls hoops title and then God handed me the trophy in front of the billions of risen souls and Hazel Anne Fucking Worthington.”
Had to laugh at that. We rode a few miles in silence. We’d just gone through the Hampton, New Hampshire, toll booths when I said, “We ought to make some time to talk about us. Where we’re going. Weren’t we going to talk about that after the holidays?”
“We’ll talk, JP. But not in a car. Not tonight.”
That was the second time I’d brought up our long-term prospects only to have Faith ice the conversational puck.
