by Monica Wood
“The police?” Pauline took off one of her high heels, shook out a pebble onto the linoleum, then picked up the pebble and plinked it into the sink. She turned to her sister. Their heads tended together, and they murmured in that way they had when discussing even the simplest matter.
“You think the police care one little bit where Ray went?” Pauline said.
“They might,” Mrs. Blanchard said. “They think men should always come back.” She went to the sink and scraped out a frying pan. It was almost lunchtime.
Pauline said, “You girls get the boys’ hands washed. Vite!”
We each took a boy—I liked Buddy best because at two and a half he was still very small and loved to be carried—but we didn’t leave the kitchen. Why would we? Pauline and Mrs. Blanchard were launching an irresistibly adult conversation, Pauline still holding her pointy red shoe.
“Ray disappears all the time, Vivi.”
“Not this long.”
“Oh, so!” Pauline said, tossing her hair. “Every time he goes he says he won’t come back. He tells everybody he’s leaving this town and never coming back.”
Mrs. Blanchard hung on to the edge of the sink for a moment, then plunged her hands into the dishwater. “This time is different.” She whirled around, soap flicking off the tips of her fingers. She looked frailer than usual, more papery and brittle, the skin beneath her eyes still soft and punched-looking, though she’d had all summer to heal since the night she answered the door with the bag of peas held to her eye.
“Papa’s gone,” Bernard whimpered. “He left us.”
As if summoned by our voices, Father Mike appeared. Major nudged the door open and in he came. Everything in the room returned to balance, as if a seesaw had just stopped, flattened at midair. Here was Father Mike, trim and well-kept, his fingers smooth as a woman’s, his face scraped clean of stubble, his clothing predictable, pressed, black and white. He seemed, every time he entered this house, to have come a long way, without sweating, for the sole purpose of refining a place unused to finishing touches.
“Mrs. Hanson’s looking for you, Lizzy,” he said. “Lunchtime.”
“Can I stay here?” I said, shifting Buddy to my other hip. He was heavy, but I liked the work of him.
Father Mike looked around. He looked at Pauline’s shoe, at the lacy ribbon of soap dripping down Mrs. Blanchard’s dress. “Did something happen?” he asked.
“Chummy Foster saw Ray’s truck,” Pauline said.
Mrs. Blanchard made a little cry, turning to face away from us.
“Oh, the children,” Pauline said.
Was Mrs. Blanchard crying, I wondered, because the Ray who hollered at night might come back, or because the other Ray—the one who step-danced and told stories and made money—might not?
Father Mike began putting the boys’ coats on. “Tell Mrs. Hanson I said to feed the lot of you,” he said.
“But Father,” I whined, “Father.”
“No buts,” he said. “Now.” Because he never made commands, we obeyed, all of us, glancing over our shoulders as we scampered down the shortcut to the rectory, the crisp November air strafing our faces.
Mrs. Hanson was hardly thrilled to see us—four kids to feed instead of one. “He said what?” she asked, scuffing her hands on her apron lest her consternation be not plain enough.
“He’s helping Maman,” Mariette said. “He doesn’t want us to see her cry.” I gawked at Mariette, her weight distributed evenly, defiantly, on both feet.
“Fine, then,” Mrs. Hanson sighed. With each passing year her lips paled another shade, as if keeping pace with the rest of her diminishing reserves. I had never thought her unkind, merely underpowered for the job. “Make yourself useful, Lizzy, and put out some plates.”
We ate tomato soup and buttered bread in relative silence. Father Mike and I had made the bread the night before, way past my bedtime, listening to The Barber of Seville on the radio. The boys were miraculously quiet, anesthetized by the unfamiliar table, new food. The bachelors had wisely hidden themselves away.
Mrs. Hanson was glaring at me. “Take that off,” she ordered.
I looked up. The shirt was my best, a hot-pink shell with a wave of sequins glimmering across the front. Crissy Miller had one exactly like it. Father Mike had thought it too loud, had done his best to talk me into something else, but in the end he relented, as he always did. “It’s my favorite,” I protested.
“You look like a tramp,” she said. “It’s beyond me why he puts up with your shenanigans.”
At nine I did not understand innuendo. “Tramp” meant a hobo, a drifter, homeless and unwanted. “Shenanigans” was her word for finding me in Father Mike’s bed back in the spring. The humiliation still burned—in both of us, it seemed, for she had changed utterly toward me since then. Her impatience, which had never struck me as personal, had turned to a pointed disgust. Clearly she was remembering anew, her face resolving into that same expression of shock and insult, her prodigious wrinkles converging into the open O of her mouth. Such a baby, I imagined her thinking. Such a tramp, wandering the house at night. The little princess, running downstairs after a nightmare. What shenanigans.
“I’m not changing unless Father says,” I informed her, emboldened by Mariette’s stolid presence and the audience of little boys.
My defiance stunned us both. Her eyes shuttered open. “You think I’m not on to you?” she said. “You think I don’t know what you’ve been up to?” She ripped off her apron. “I won’t stay in this place a minute longer. You tell that uncle of yours, that so-called priest, that I will no longer abide.” She snatched her coat from the rack in the hall as we gawked at her, goggle-eyed. Her own eyes, amazingly, spilled a thin, tearful trail. “I once had a perfectly satisfactory life,” she said, then turned and left for good.
Just like that, we four found ourselves baffled and abandoned, inexplicably insulted. Mariette cried first, then her little brothers startled into tears, then I did. By the time Father Mike returned, we’d worked ourselves into a state and ran to him in a kinetic, sticky throng, wrapping ourselves around his narrow middle, seeking the comfort of his body and lamenting the sudden caprice of our world.
It was Harry Griggs I told this story to, two months after our first meeting. I’d made a visit per week, sometimes two, during that window of time, in secret. I suppose it could be said that I was “seeing” him, but that admission would point in the wrong direction entirely. Nevertheless, I left school at the earliest possible moment like a woman aflame, scooting past Jane’s desk without a word, my coat halfway on as I fumbled for my car keys.
When he opened the door to me on this particular evening, I discovered a second chair placed near the white one, a TV tray between, and two matching coffee cups, with matching saucers, arranged on the tray with a tower of Fig Newtons on a new plate. Each time I returned I found something else placed there just for me.
It was four-thirty and he seemed a little breathless, having rushed home from his shift gutting chickens to make coffee for two, as he had from the start. I would stay an hour (believing, perhaps, that adhering to the length of an actual therapy session mitigated my lie) and leave rested.
Outside Harry’s windows the vanishing daylight glowed; doomed leaves rattled on their branches. “I love Fig Newtons,” I said, picking one off the plate. “I used to eat them all the time when I was a kid.”
“I know,” he said. “You told me.”
We smiled at each other. During the term of our acquaintance he’d become more and more regretful, his eyes sagging over me. He claimed that if he could do it over he’d remain at my side on the muddy shoulder to listen for signs of life and hold my hand. I didn’t honestly believe him, but so what? The bad Samaritan was making up for his half-good deed by remaining at my side now, listening now, holding my hand—figuratively speaking—now.
“It’s starting to look really nice in here,” I said.
“I got the car fixed. Busted head
gasket cost me a shitload, but now that I’ve got wheels I figured I might’s well fix the place up a little. So I drove out to Ames last night to get the chair.” He patted the back of the new chair, a high-backed rocker with tweed upholstery. The TV tray was fashioned out of a wood laminate stamped with green acorns.
“The cups I had left over from Loreen,” he said. “She kept every other friggin’ thing we owned.” He examined one of them, as if looking for spots.
“Maybe you should ask her for another chance.”
“You wouldn’t say that if you knew how many chances she already gave me.” He handed me a cup—bright green china with a border of pink tea roses. “You’d think it was the drinking, wouldn’t you, but Loreen’s a funny one, it’s not the on-and-off wagon ride that got to her in the end. She says she’s gonna find a man who listens to her next time around.” He shook his head. “I’m a piss-poor listener, that’s Loreen’s theme song. My daughter always said the same thing.”
“Actually,” I said, “you’re a very good listener.”
His face brimmed; it had probably been a long time since he’d felt complimented. “Huh. Well, it feels like one more goddamn second chance—you being here.” He stared at me over the rim of his cup. “Isn’t your husband kinda wondering what you’re up to?”
I felt caught, ashamed. “I told him you’re a shrink.”
“Hah! My VA counselor would get a kick out of that” He looked at his watch—a cheap Timex with a battered strap. “I charge by the hour, lady, so you better start talking. What have you got for me today?”
Stories. That’s all I had. I’d intended to proceed chronologically, to recapture as many of those lost days as I could, but the story broke down almost instantly, as stories will. On this day, as before, I told things out of order, feeling little hinge-clicks as the hour wore on, one memory begetting another from two years earlier or two years later, the narrative resembling not the straight line I might have been hoping for but a circle that hid its beginning and end. Despite this disorder, I felt landed, tranquil, the way some people describe the act of prayer.
For his part, Harry seemed to like being confided in. He kept at attention, his head cocked, as if he were not so much listening—though he was—as rehearsing for a role he was just beginning to believe himself capable of.
“She’s a piece of work, that housekeeper,” Harry said.
This is how he referred to the characters in my story. The priest. The friend. The friend’s mother. The housekeeper. Something about the way I told it. I sipped my drink, recalling Mrs. Hanson’s face, which in my memory appeared perpetually wronged, wearied by the changing world. “I thought she quit us because I defied her,” I said. “Kids are always making the wrong connections.”
“Adults, too,” Harry said. “Adults do it even worse. Take Elaine, she makes everything I do into an angle. Everything’s an angle with you, that’s the tune she’s been playing since she was eighteen years old. I make the slightest goddamn attempt to make up for my mistakes and she thinks I’m hitting her up for cash. So what happens is, I ask her to visit me sometime, and she’s thinking, okay, he wants cash, he wants cash, he wants cash, and I’ll be goddamned if it doesn’t pop into my head to ask for cash out of spite, and so I do, and there’s her jackass jumped conclusion all tied up in a bow and handed to her on a velvet cushion.”
“I thought you hadn’t seen her in years.”
“Yeah, well. Time doesn’t move too fast when it comes to Elaine.”
She seemed to be with us that day. Harry had gotten into the habit of moving his few sticks of furniture around, and on this afternoon, he’d placed her picture, the snapshot in the frame, on one of the windowsills. As I talked and her father listened, she stared out at us, eyes alight.
Just then a motion sensor from the facing building snapped on; a wide swath of light teetered in through the big windows—the apartment’s one beauty—reminding me of an afternoon in some season where the sun made that same sudden appearance, slanting down on an oval of bread dough that rested on the kitchen table. It was a memory I loved because of its light and air, its aroma of molasses, its vision of flour clouding up from the dough as I patted it with both hands. Vivid and immediate, the memory nonetheless came disembodied. I couldn’t say how old I was, or what time of day we were in, or what I was wearing, or any other thing I did on that day or on the days leading up to or away from that single moment. I could say exactly how my hand looked making those clouds: Band-Aid on my pinky finger, fingernails newly clipped. I could say that despite its lack of context, this vision recalled what childhood felt like—homey, fragrant, containing just enough surprise.
It wasn’t all one way. Harry told stories, too—war stories, mostly, from his stateside stint in the early years of the Vietnam War. He preferred high-concept tales heavy on hijinks and starring officious superiors shanghaied by their own arrogance. He often told the same one twice, with different endings.
“They did that on M*A*S*H once,” I said after a tale of a private mistaken for a major by a visiting colonel.
“Yeah, well. The army’s so goddamn boring, sometimes you have to borrow your stories.”
“You’ve told me plenty of good ones” I assured him.
“I took my first drink when I was fourteen and a half years old,” he said. “That’s pretty much the only story I’ve got.” He checked his watch. “It’s five-thirty,” he said. “You don’t want your people sending out for the Mounties.”
Each time I left there—passing over from such stillness into the teeming reality outside—I felt submerged, at an exquisite distance from the actual world. Telling felt like resting. I was resting. Just like Father Mike.
FIFTEEN
From The Liturgy of the Hours:
Now my soul is troubled,
yet what am I to say:
“Father, save me from this hour”?
But it was for this very reason that I came to this hour.
September intoxicates him. Some lost memory of the Island drifts in on the bitten air: the rattle of leaves, the taste of apples. September! The natural world in full crackle, a rapturous harvest surfacing at roadside stands. The altar abounds with pushy, pie-faced sunflowers.
Though Lizzy’s return to school grieves him a little—fourth grade! can it really be fourth grade?—it also brings a thrill of newness. Mornings, she runs down the path to collect Mariette and wait on the road for the bus to St. Catherine’s, and he watches her go, colossally happy. Like Lizzy, he loved school. The four-room schoolhouse on the Island where every spring an exhausted blackbird winged through the open window and flapped against the blackboard. The public high school in Maine where he had his own desk, all the paper he wanted, books he could take home and not give back till the term ended. Notre Dame, where he missed home so badly he hid in the field house and wept beneath the bleachers. He sought refuge in books, his big love—his own books, he owned them, a wonder in itself, all that Latin and philosophy and theology and mathematics, each guiding him toward a different possibility for his God-made mind.
At Notre Dame he abstained from alcohol, unwilling to enfeeble his percolating intellect, though he did go to parties. He was not an odd boy, just a committed one. His classmates liked him. He moved among them as a peacemaker, a storyteller, a pillar of dependability, already practicing for his intended life. His vocation revealed itself in his outer aura, obvious as the color of his hair.
Girls adored him, for he was green and guileless and kept his hands to himself. He liked them, too, their feminine company, and there were occasions, one or two, when he wondered whether he could make the big sacrifice when the time came.
At seminary he found more books, oceans of thought as yet unnavigated. He found learned men who did not fear irony. And some, of course, who did. He disappeared for hours, even days at a time, into the oiled mahogany carrels of the central study room—reading as meditation. He studied religion in general and Catholicism in specific, loving th
eory and practice in equal parts, reveling in the nuances of doctrine in transition.
Outside of the books and lectures, he discovered prayer. Real prayer, not the romantic notions of his fervid boyhood—God is my father, God is my friend, God is my protector.
No. God is not this, God is not that. God is.
In his solitary hours at chapel, he came to understand that the opposite of God is not Satan. The opposite of God is not evil. The opposite of God is absence.
Perpetually present, he was; fully alive in body and spirit. A stupefied seminarian, throbbing with purpose, speaking French and Latin, afire with erudition and scholarship. Willing not only to make the big sacrifice (no wife no child no mortgage no garage no tools no physical refuge), but also the myriad little ones, the finely calibrated interpersonal adjustments required to maintain warm but reasonable relationships with both men and women. It didn’t seem so difficult a projection; he would have his sister and brother-in-law, after all, and his fellow priests. He believed these people would shore him up in the hours of spiritual darkness he did not quite believe would befall him but nonetheless felt required to anticipate, if only to maintain a modicum of humility.
On this first day of September, watching Lizzy run off to school with her hem flapping against each headlong step, he hopes she will also enjoy a life of the mind. Already she shows the capacity to encounter God every time something new reveals itself: long division, the order of planets. Lizzy will think her way to the soul, as he did, and discover it with her eyes open. She will not be called to a vocation—she’s awful at rules (his fault, he fears) and would make a terrible nun. Vivienne harbors a futile wish for Mariette to be called, but that’s only a mother’s impulse, the contemplative life the one sure path to prevent Mariette from finding a man like her father.
Lizzy will be no nun, he thinks, fondly. This summer, noticing her kindness toward the bratty baby brothers Mariette suddenly can’t abide, he has come to understand that Lizzy is the sort of person who will require an earthly mate. Already he imagines the man, intelligent and good-natured, a teacher or housebuilder. Already he envies him, the man who will guard Lizzy’s dreams.
