by Monica Wood
But God asked no such thing. A scent wafts into the house through an ill-fitting window, a weak premonition of spring whose origins he can’t guess; it brings back his boyhood in a sudden rush: the high Masses, the silent adults, the quilted fields and golden haystacks, the surging, suggestive seasons. He knew nothing of men and women. He witnessed the workhorses, the dogs in the lane, a pair of doves on the weathervane, and wondered about the world of the body, that strangest manifestation of God’s glory. He discovered his body in secret, marveling at its shudders and heat, peeking sidelong at the girls in the school-house, throat afire.
Of course he did. He was a boy. But he found something more powerful than the body’s wonders, something more marvelous and astounding.
God called him.
It happened in the north field, just after planting, the red furrows with their promise of potatoes, his uncle’s tractor at the far end, parked beside the lilacs. The sky, starched flat and white as a pillowcase, thrilled him. He looked into it and found the face of God bearing down. Like St. Paul being knocked off his horse, he fell to his knees, crying out, his body vibrating with news. He rushed to the house, past the stone cap of the well, over the flattened front steps and into his mother’s kitchen. The fragrance of molasses filled the drafty room. I’ve been called, he told his stunned mother, who was months from dying, her vine of cancer almost fully bloomed, the bad luck of this family a whisper down the long, long lane. But he did not yet know this. His sister, Elizabeth, who did know, wiped her reddened hands on a dish towel. Tell us.
Light carpeted through the dusty windows. His mother had been spooning cookie batter onto tin sheets, and now her hand stilled, the spoon suspended and full. The stove glowed. For the moment, the family’s impending grief waited politely outside the door. Tears pearled on his mother’s cheeks, for she knew, as everyone did, that the mother of a priest goes directly to heaven. He often imagines her there, basking in the grace of her son’s vocation.
Look what our smart girls have done, Vivienne says, casting a bemused eye over the pretend merchandise: the black Keds he wears in the garden, the shiny wingtips he saves for high holidays, the flip-flops he takes to the beach. She raises one winged eyebrow, sliding him a look, parent to parent. This thrills him.
But he wonders: Should Lizzy always play the customer? Shouldn’t he be teaching her to be less accommodating? Children need rules, Father, is Mrs. Hanson’s stock answer to questions he’s given up posing. My Rosie always had rules. He longs to ask Vivienne, whose every maternal motion he examines like a map of heaven. Sometimes she is brusque with the children, all business. At other times her face loosens, her hair swinging like a girl’s as she turns to answer one of their endless questions.
Her ladies’ magazines gather on his desk. Clipping recipes and columns, he commits to memory the tips on child-rearing, window-dressing, fruit-arranging, bathroom-disinfecting. With Mrs. Hanson on board he finds little room to implement his ideas, unable to get past a certain awkwardness with this housekeeper who used to put supper in front of him only after Father Devlin had been pointedly, deferentially, served. With Father Devlin now gone, she guards her history, an impulse he understands. Her former tenure in this house lives on: those humdrum, codified years. No longer live-in, having been relieved of supper duty (sent home now at three), Mrs. Hanson nonetheless keeps the laundry a secret, the cooking a mystery. The disposal of trash resembles a multistage exercise worthy of a world war. She keeps the pantry in stern order, a barracks of soup cans and cereal boxes. Phone messages are recorded on coded index cards placed —this way, Father, not that way—into a converted recipe box. Her absence on Tuesdays and Saturdays turns him giddy and slightly panicked, as if he were a soldier absent without leave.
Buy some shoes, Maman! Mariette calls, installed officiously behind the coffee table. Lizzy grins, picking up his black Keds and thrusting them into Vivienne’s arms. She plays the salesman convincingly, he notes with relief.
That’s enough, he chides gently, embarrassed by his shoes. Not one of them resembles the glossy, clean-smelling moccasins that materialize from Vivienne’s hands every week. Maman is here on a spiritual matter.
Vivienne frowns. Surely I have time to buy one shoe. She produces two quarters—from where? his smelly shoes? how does she manage always to produce exactly what they need?—and drops them into the girls’ pink palms. Vivienne puts the shoes back, pretending to eye the remaining merchandise, then examines things that are not for sale: his sister’s glass bookcase, the uncomfortable rocking chair, the plain white curtains, the three cats. Not for sale! Not for sale! the girls holler, pushy and self-important, which makes him laugh.
I was looking to buy a badger, he says, joining in. Do you sell badgers?
No, Father Mike! We sell shoes!
Earmuffs, then?
No-ho-ho-ho!
How about a nice little tub of snails?
Besotted by this game, Lizzy collapses on the sofa, so wilted by laughter that Vivienne bends to check her, bends slowly, since she is hugely pregnant. Lizzy is fine, eyes alert and focused, looking very much like her mother. In a brief time he has learned some things about children, but not nearly enough. Certainly a child requires a schedule, some discipline. In this arena he has not done well. Spoiled, he’s heard Mrs. Hanson tsk into the telephone. Spoiled rotten. He wants Vivienne’s opinion before cutting Mrs. Hanson’s hours any further than he already has. But he is unwilling to sound as befuddled as he feels.
The gloomy evening renders the parlor especially close, its leafy wallpaper encasing the four of them briefly as the girls settle down again, adding items to their store, recruiting Fatty, the only willing cat, to serve as an extra customer. Play nice, Vivienne warns them. Be nice to the kitty.
He invites Vivienne into his little office, leaving the door ajar. She sits down gingerly and hugs her blooming belly. He is hoping to pick up their discussion about the presence of God. After their talk of loneliness they concluded that God is most accessible to us in extremes—when we are in great need or in great bounty—and almost invisible in our daily endeavors, when we feel neither completely empty nor completely full. How can God seem most absent when we are doing exactly what He wants? They talked a long time about this, and now he would like to know how she has sorted out the paradox.
Instead, she has something else on her mind.
Must a good Catholic follow all the laws, Father, even the stupid ones?
Nothing she says insults him. She speaks without irony when she speaks of Church law. She wishes to be a good Catholic, to live a Christian life, to raise Catholic children and die anointed. In this way she is unlike most of his parishioners except the very old; most of them come to him wanting loopholes and shortcuts and permission to remarry. They want from him the minimum required to please their grandmothers. They expect their wedding rite to include a high Mass that will become their last memory of receiving the Eucharist. In two years they will bring a baby to be baptized in a Red Sox outfit and running shoes.
The stupidest laws, in Vivienne’s view, are the ones governing birth control and the strict obligations of certain sacraments. He thinks she means the sacrament of Holy Matrimony but can’t be sure. What comes to him is a vision of Ray Blanchard hogging all the space in the marital bed, all the space in his wife’s body, Ray of the muscular forearms, Ray of the well-upholstered chest, Ray of the blue eyes his own sister once said reminded her of Paul Newman’s. When Vivienne wants to discuss the Church’s stupid laws, it is always just after Ray has left for the sea.
That’s not a problem of faith, Vivienne.
No, she agrees, smiling. Faith has nothing to do with the Church.
I wouldn’t go that far.
No. You wouldn’t.
They have their customary debate about the Pope’s unyielding reign. At the end he leans across the desk as her co-conspirator: I agree with you, Vivienne. Don’t tell.
I was testing you, Father. From time to time I m
ust remind you what you really believe.
He blushes, which he does too easily, and her eyes crease merrily at the corners. He minds, very much, that he amuses her sometimes, but he doesn’t know how to make things different. Vivienne knew Lizzy’s father back in grade school; for this alone he needs her. For this, and their mutual memories of Elizabeth and Bill in this house for Sunday-night cook-outs, the two baby girls gabbling in the twilight. Sometimes Ray wandered over to join them, toting his own six-pack and sitting on the steps, wrapping his big hands around a can and popping a top, that distinctive summer sound. The babies crawled over the grass with the mothers standing watch; Bill helped grill the steaks. Ray mostly kept his own company—not unfriendly, exactly, but perhaps cowed a little by the presence of the priest.
They had been family and neighbors, assembled on a pretty stretch of yard beside a river. Such happy times, these bouts of normalcy, these glimmers of God’s ordinary gifts. He and his sister reminisced about the Island, but never for long. There was too much here-and-now: the tiny girls, the rising moon, bloody steaks spitting on the grill. How did we land here, Mikey? Elizabeth would say, astonished. Why such beautiful luck?
Elizabeth is gone, but Vivienne remembers. For this alone he loves her.
When they emerge once again from his office, Lizzy waylays him: Here’s your badger, she cackles, handing him a shoe. Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Her little teeth make him feel bitten.
Is this what people mean when they claim to have fallen in love?
I don’t want this particular badger, he informs her, I don’t care for the sunglasses he’s wearing. He waits for her face, the entire apple-shaped miracle of it, to crinkle hilariously.
Is it normal, this feeling of bursting, this sustained longing? She pitches herself toward him, her stick arms branching around him, the smell of soap or snow or dirt or strawberry ice cream rising from her coppery hair. Is it normal, this monstrous, engulfing anguish that feels like no other thing? Like no other single thing?
He nearly ate her once. She was so small, so newly arrived in his life, he’d just lifted her out of the bath, warm water dripping from her ringlets and the lobes of her flushed ears, one pink leg dangling from the towel he’d wrapped her in. Arrgharrgh-arrgh, he growled, hoping to make her laugh, kissing at her toes, pretending to be a monster—a nice monster, the one they’d invented and named Biggy. Arrgh-arrgh-arrgh, and then he was nipping her, arrgh-arrgh-arrgh, one pink, beloved toe at a time. Then—this is what troubles him—he took in her entire foot as if he meant literally to devour her, to swallow her whole, to eat her up. Expecting laughter, he found her gaping at him instead, her eyes big and blue and startled. He spit her out, ashamed.
Is this normal? To feel so ravenous, so heartsplit? He’s heard prayer described this way, but has found the opposite to be true. Prayer is his journey toward stillness, a calm, white hollow, a noiseless comfort, the opposite, in fact, of the mysterious, disquieting forwardness of parental love.
He does not want his love to be desperate, the result of having lost his family. He does not want his love to weigh too much.
Vivienne steps into his kitchen now, to copy a recipe onto a pad he keeps hidden from Mrs. Hanson. Lizzy is trying to sell them another badger and also a kangaroo. Sometimes he fails to distinguish between his love for her and his fear of losing her. Too, he adds in his head. Losing her, too.
It is he who requires advice.
He admires the quick strokes of Vivienne’s handwriting, her confident presence in another person’s kitchen.
Of course, she will say. Of course it’s normal. But he does not ask.
EIGHT
On my first day back, the school seemed like a place remembered from a dream. From far down the hall came the staccato notes of a new term, the slam-bang of teachers flinging open cabinets, filling trash cans, stapling lists to bulletin boards, dragging desks into optimistic configurations. The students weren’t due back for a week, but already the place ballooned with the sound of industry, destruction, hope, effort—the main ingredients of any school year.
I stepped out of my office and into the guidance lobby—a misnamed cranny containing the reception desk, a cranky copy machine, and a walk-in vault that sheltered a few decades’ worth of student records. Another door opened into a shabby conference room that we shared with the school nurse. Our school district had more hope than money, and the discrepancy showed especially in the high school, which had been converted, unconvincingly, from a defunct shoe factory. Oxblood dye still showed in the floor planks outside the cafeteria.
Jane Rodgers, an old-fashioned secretary who’d been trained in the fifties, was installed behind her desk, talking on the phone and stapling orientation booklets. Stay put, she mouthed, and I did, pouring myself a cup of coffee. I had been home for three weeks, had slept in my own bed—my sheets, my pillow, my husband—but only now did my former life begin to seem familiar.
“You all right?” Jane asked, hanging up. She gave me a worried squint from above the tortoisey rims of her half-glasses. “You look paler than when you first got in.”
“I’m fine,” I said. In truth I felt a little sad, wanting to call Drew. Breakfast had been a tense affair even though the word “forbid” didn’t formally enter our conversation.
“That was the Harmon girl,” Jane said. “None too happy with her course schedule, big surprise.”
Andrea Harmon was none too happy with anything. “Jane?” I set my coffee down. “Why isn’t this place hopping?” I was the sole guidance counselor for a population of three hundred and fifty kids; on a normal pre-opening day, the place would be a-clamor with complaint.
She set her mouth, her pink lipstick puckering. Jane remembered me as a child and retained her right to mother me. Usually I didn’t mind. “I thought you’d want to wait until Rick got the schedules unsnagged,” she said. “He balled them up, Lizzy, he can vet them himself.”
“Excuse me,” I said carefully, “but isn’t this my job?”
She lifted her eyes without moving a single muscle in her face. “You look as if you just escaped from a labor camp.”
“This is the labor camp. I escaped from Limbo.”
“Mariette says—”
“Mariette doesn’t have a medical degree. Actual doctors have cleared me for takeoff.” I looked down at my blank appointment book. “Apparently I have openings.” Then I limped across the hall to reclaim the schedules from the main office. From there I detoured to Mariette’s classroom, moving as nimbly as I could without my cane just to prove a point, but as a result the plates in my leg seemed to be heating up.
Mariette looked surprised to see me. “I thought you were staying home today.”
“The only people who thought that were you and Drew.”
She was in the back of the lab, uncrating boxes of rats. “I love these guys,” she said. “I hate like hell to feed them crap.” She picked one up and kissed its pointy, polka-dotted, disobliging face.
The rats, which would be named for famous scientists, were the stars of her single-quarter, one-credit elective course called “Our Magnificent World,” a garage sale of her favorite topics, ranging from the properties of light to the effects of junk food on unsuspecting rodents. Every year she managed to accidentally kill one of them—Madame Curie drowned in the janitor’s water bucket, Copernicus expired in a heating vent—occasioning her annual, suspiciously canned, sermon on accountability.
“You could sound a little more sorry,” I said. I glanced around her classroom, an underfunded lab that brimmed with life. Literally. A village of gerbils, two tanks of fish, and a bashful chinchilla had joined their rat brethren in the aid of scientific inquiry. “I don’t know how you keep this up.”
She put up one finger, obviously rehearsing. “It is the ever-marching quest for knowledge that separates man from beast.”
I set my schedules on the lab table. “Mariette, is it my imagination, or are people looking at me funny?”
“Who?
“Jane,” I said. “And both janitors. And the new guy in English, who dropped off a syllabus and acted as if I had rabies. Tell me the truth. Do I look that pitiful?”
“No.” She carried the rats to a six-foot cage outfitted with rat-sized chutes and ladders and let them go, plop, plop, plop, into a heap of wood shavings, like a platoon being released on a beach. “People hear things, that’s all”
“What things?”
“Some people around here still think of you as the town orphan. And now this,” she said, grazing her eyes over my creaky body. “Maybe the thing with Father Mike came up again in certain quarters.”
I closed my eyes. During my first year back in Hinton, I ran into parishioners, former friends of the family, certain shopkeepers in whose memory I had continued to exist as the damaged child. I endured their tiptoeing conversation, their undisguised amazement that I had not wound up on the street conversing with phone poles. “What did you hear?”
“I didn’t, my mother did.” Mariette closed the cage lid. “She told the offending party to shut her fat face, if that makes you feel any better.”
