Any Bitter Thing

by Monica Wood

  “We were given to understand—”

  “And it’s the Church who sent word to us. They sent a priest to my aunt’s house. We ‘re the ones who received word”

  He gazed at me, his eyes very still, the watery, bonny blue of a homesick Irishman. “You were just a child, Mrs. Mitchell. Perhaps you got the story turned around somewhere along the line.”

  It’s true, I’m sorry, but it’s true, Celie had insisted in those first lightless days. Stage one, disbelief. I can’t help it, Lizzy. The priest who came here, Lizzy. He told me himself. A priest would never lie.

  “Are you all right?” Monsignor Fleury asked.

  “I didn’t get my story turned around.”

  He seemed reluctant to contradict me; his lips pulsed like a guppy’s before he spoke again. “My understanding is that the Church got word of his death from the family. His confessor, Father Derocher, made a personal visit—to Rhode Island, I believe it was?—hoping the family might know where he’d disappeared to. We might never have known of his passing otherwise.” He regarded me with an unctuous sympathy. “It’s Father Derocher you recall coming to the house. We were concerned about your uncle, regardless of how it might appear to you.”

  “You just took her word for it?”

  “We had no reason to disbelieve the family.”

  “Do you have an obituary?”

  “As I said, Father Murphy’s death occurred after he left the priesthood. Everything was over, so to speak, and as he had no interested relatives here, there would be no need—”

  “He had a very interested relative, Monsignor.”

  “Forgive me. I meant to say no interested adult relatives.”

  I was remembering the funeral of Father Devlin, Father Mike’s predecessor at St. Bart’s, and my unmitigated awe at the spectacle of thirty men in black worshipping in one voice. I’d wheedled my way in and had been spectacularly rewarded. Until the arid service of Mariette’s grandmother, I had thought all funerals vibrated with that same pomp and circumstance. I’d imagined my parents’ funeral as a cortege of gowned and chanting friends.

  “One of its own priests dies in the prime of life,” I said to the chancellor, “and the Church doesn’t bother to run an obituary? Wouldn’t they want to bear his body home, see to his burial? Don’t you do a high Mass, don’t you all file in together, don’t you fill the pews like an honor guard? Like the police, or the firemen? Isn’t that how it’s done? So what if he jumped the league, so what? According to you he was having a breakdown. Where is this famous Christian compassion? He was still one of yours.”

  The chancellor cleared his throat again, dainty as a girl. “Mrs. Mitchell,” he said, “your uncle was dead and buried by the time we received word. But even if the Church had known in time, we would have been in somewhat of a quandary over funeral rites.”

  “Why?” My voice was getting higher, tinged with something like hysteria. “Those accusations were wrong.”

  His mouth took a downward turn. “As I said, Father Murphy appeared to be suffering from intense remorse.”

  “He was suffering, Monsignor, but not from remorse.”

  “After his arrival in Baltimore, there was a general impression—a fear that he might take his own life.”

  “That’s ridiculous. I don’t believe you.”

  “Father Derocher made a personal visit expressly to prevent such a catastrophe. When Mrs. Barrett informed him of Father Murphy’s death, she was loath to provide details, but the conclusion was a foregone one. And the Church, I’m ashamed to say, was probably relieved that someone else tied up the details in the case of a problem priest. I’m being very open with you here, Mrs. Mitchell.” He unlocked his hands and lifted them, his mission complete. “I have no idea where your uncle is buried. You would have to get that information from your aunt. I’m sorry. The details were kept very quiet. Understandably so.”

  The words “problem priest” scorched me. We might have been talking about a house pet being carted off to the vet. “Do you need some water?” he said—or, I think he said. The room was taking on a muffled quality, his voice coming through a cottony fog. Despite this scrim of confusion, a finely etched image began to form: that little hole in the cuff of my uncle’s jacket. That hand at my bedside. That frayed hole, yes, and the missing button. The ring. I had seen them in my consecrated between-time—same cuff, same hole, same ring. Except, not quite. The hole was bigger. The ring was scratched. The hand was older. As if they’d been worked over by time. As if the cloth were real cloth, the ring a real ring. The hand a real hand and not the memory of a hand.

  For a moment I could not unstick a single word from my throat. I was running back through those initial weeks in Aunt Celie’s too-small house, all those frightening, big-footed boys, the one dresser drawer set aside for me. My dresses, my socks, my few photographs shoehorned into a space the size of a child’s coffin. I slept on a cot in Celie’s room, somewhere in the helter-skelter state of Rhode Island, an eternity away from my quiet pink bedroom. She kept my hair braided, my clothes washed, she slapped her youngest son for hitting me, but I could tell from the start there would be no room for me. Where is he? I wailed. Where is he where is he where is he where is he where is he? At wits’ end, Aunt Celie applied cold washcloths to my pulpy eyes. Please, Lizzy, please. People will think I’ve been beating you! For God’s sake, can you pull yourself together? But I didn’t pull myself together, I wouldn’t, where is he, I wanted him back, where is he where is he where is he where is he where is he? until finally she spurted the words: He’s dead! And he was. Suddenly, unbelievably dead. It happened in Baltimore, I don’t know, they buried him somewhere in Canada. Back to the Island, where he came from.

  Not until I faced Monsignor Fleury across the mess of his desk did I recognize in retrospect the lie in her voice, the desperation. She was so sick of listening to me, and frightened, too, of my uncle and me and the thing she thought we had done. A by-the-book Catholic, she had suffered the bruising humiliation of divorce, and now this. My soaked and blotchy face and its myriad suggestions—the shame of me—must have been more than she could bear. He’s dead! she cried, two irreversible words dangling at the frayed end of her rope. The front door opened, some time later, a week or a day or two days or three. A priest stood on the stoop and I thought, for a single sanctified second, that it was Father Mike, back from the flexible land of the dead.

  I lifted my eyes to the face that was a face I knew—but not his, not his face, an insult so eviscerating I fled to my private space behind the parlor drapes and held my stomach in fear of a literal spilling of guts. We’ve received word, is what I heard, but the words must have come from Celie, not the priest, whose name, Father Jack, I shouted after he left. They come to give the news officially, she told me quietly, like in the military, and I wondered for some time afterward whether Father Mike’s heart had given out in the midst of battle.

  I dropped my head and rested my forehead against a stack of papers on the chancellor’s desk, feeling, for the first time in many years, like making my confession—but I could not think what I had to confess, unless it was a sin to hold this long to grief. “My uncle isn’t dead, Monsignor,” I muttered into the ink-smelling papers. “My aunt lied.” I tempered each breath, in and out, in and out. The chancellor said nothing. “None of this would have happened if you’d had a little faith in him to begin with. Such an ugly story about a man who loved a child, and you believed so easily.” I lifted my head.

  “There was an investigation,” he said quietly. “We believed what we were told.”

  “So did I,” I snapped. “My excuse is that I was nine years old.” I looked him directly in the eyes. “It must have seemed too good to be true, the problem priest resigning just before his problem death. And a civilian only too willing to tidy up the details. It must have seemed like a miracle.”

  He looked old. Exhausted. Sorry. “Father Murphy was accused of molesting a child,” he said, “after which he res
isted treatment, fled without a word, left the priesthood, and suddenly died. What else would you have us believe?”

  “The truth.”

  The chancellor slipped his fingers beneath his eyeglasses and rubbed his eyes, then drew his hands down along his cheeks. Fury thundered within me, but it was God I was fighting, not this mild-eyed monsignor posing as God’s unlucky stand-in.

  “Elizabeth,” he said, very gently. “Elizabeth. You were not going to see your uncle again in any case. Not until you turned twenty-one years old. There was an agreement”

  I folded my arms involuntarily, as if my body knew something I didn’t and was getting ready to fend off the news. “What agreement?”

  “Between the Diocese and the state. You would be remanded to the care of your aunt. Father Murphy would be sent to Baltimore for counseling and treatment, and after that to a non-pastoral assignment, in return for which the state would drop the inquiry. Nobody wanted this to advance to the stage of official charges, and Father Murphy agreed to the terms.”

  “Are you telling me he admitted—”

  “I’m telling you that he did not deny it with the vigor we might have been hoping for.” The chancellor looked unfathomably sad. “And neither, my dear woman, did you.”

  All my injuries, even the healed ones, stung fleetingly. The room felt tipped over, I couldn’t quite get a breath, and then came a clean, white-light image of Father Mike spreading honey on toast. I’d tasted some at the Fryeburg fair on my fifth birthday, blueberry honey, and we’d been eating it ever since. Mrs. Hanson didn’t hold with honey; honey was out of the ordinary. Honey was not unsalted butter. I yearned to sit at that table, in the warm light of the kitchen window, and spread honey on toast.

  If I could have done that, just for a second, I believe I might have left the chancellor’s office and returned to my former self.

  “I’ll take that water now,” I said, swallowing and swallowing. “Can you get me some water?”

  He was up in a flash, relieved to have something to do. Alone, I breathed ten times, measuring out my fury and confusion, bent on keeping my feet in contact with the floor. Drew had offered to accompany me here, expecting that I’d be handed a map to a gravesite on Prince Edward Island. He’d be the shoulder to cry on. We’d made up, after a fashion, and I vowed to put Father Mike to rest, to get on with my life—our life—and pronounce my rehabilitation complete. But I’d insisted on coming alone and now I knew what I’d come for. As if guided by the hand of God I filched the folder, jammed it into my purse, and left.

  The chancellor was just outside in the carpeted anteroom, filling a glass of water from a pitcher.

  “My uncle is alive, Monsignor,” I said. “I saw him last March. He visited me in the hospital.”

  He closed his eyes—praying, probably—and made a disconcerting noise that sounded like humming. Finally he sighed. “I’m very sorry for your trouble, Elizabeth.”

  “Thank you,” I said, preposterously.

  He nodded once. Then he set the glass of water down, intending to shake my hand, I suppose, though for a moment I thought he meant to bless me. His hand lifted. “Don’t,” I said—not gently, I think—and left there, unblessed.

  NINETEEN

  From The Liturgy of the Hours:

  My foes encircle me with deadly intent.

  Their hearts shut tight, their mouths speak proudly . . .

  Lord, arise, confront them, strike them down!

  He thinks he knows grief in its every shade. As a dread of nightfall. A glue that has to be walked through. A ticking clock in an empty room, each tock like something taking bites inside his body. He thinks he knows how grief works: It sucks taste from apples, it drains color from trees, it makes absence into a presence.

  He thinks he’s ready.

  But grief does not prepare the bereaved for future grief. Grief is not something you get good at. Practice does not perfect anything.

  Driving back to Conlin, Ohio, unable to loosen the vision of his grown, broken child from the locked cage of his own head, he cannot remember a worse sorrow than the one that weights him now: this stinging knowledge of time lost. Lost and irrecoverable. For two decades he deluded himself, shaping the past into something immutable and fully formed. A museum that might be visited. But the past, that slippery traitor, evolved without his permission. It refused to stay put. Waiting in the unbearable quiet of a hospital room at night, gazing down at a grown woman, a stranger, he felt the past lurch violently and then collapse like so many bricks, and he lost her once and for all.

  Outside Allentown he stops at a Citgo, not because he needs gas but because the road has begun to change shape before his eyes and he hasn’t eaten in two and a half days. Nothing but a few sips from the drinking fountain in the hospital lobby, a glass of water pulled from the bathroom tap in the motel. He buys a hot dog from a boy at the counter, gets back into the car. When he stops again, this time for gas, he realizes the hot dog is gone and can only assume that he is the one who ate it.

  Then, a stretch of land in northern Pennsylvania that reminds him of Prince Edward Island.

  No strangers to grief, people once said of his family.

  But he was, as it turns out. He was a complete stranger to grief.

  A few miles past the Ohio border, at the crest of a long, ambling hill, sits a country church: copper cross, white clapboards, medium-sized parking lot, tidy house with an add-on office. It is so open to the sky and fields that he already believes in the benevolence of the man who lives there, but not until he pulls in does he recognize this church—St. Anne’s—as the place he stopped the last time he took this very journey. He’d found his car in the Baltimore parking lot, feeling poised and calm and guided. They had given him medication—what, he didn’t know. He stashed his few belongings in the trunk, and headed north. He arrived in Maine seven hours later, mailed a letter to the Chancery, shut his bank accounts and transferred everything to the modest trust left to Lizzy after the death of her parents. He kept two hundred dollars for himself, then turned around and drove south again, over the same highways. In Pennsylvania he switched to the side roads—more hills back then, more untouched land, but the same journey, the same instinct for open land propelling him. He had been a man with nothing left but his own name. He had shed everything: his family, his home, his vocation. But he found himself unable to resist that simple church, its doors opened to the broad, sunny day, and after a time a priest strode in—a young pastor like himself, engulfed by duties that had taken him by surprise. The pastor raised his eyebrows in a question, which he answered by saying: My name is Father Mike Murphy. A priest once, a priest always. A permanent vow. They shook hands, the other priest saying nothing about his colleague’s demolished eyes, his growth of beard, his gnawed fingertips. Hungry? he asked. After supper, this kind priest offered to hear his confession.

  I abandoned a child, he whispered, risking forgiveness at last. But this is not all of my sin.

  On his last day there, he asked to use the phone.

  Stop calling here.

  Let me speak to her, Celie. Please. Five minutes.

  They said you quit. Nobody knows where you went.

  To purgatory, Celie.

  A priest came here looking for you. Concerned, not that you deserve it. A nice man looking for souls to redeem.

  Just let me speak to her.

  Not for another twelve years. As you very well know.

  Just so I can reassure her that I’m still—

  This was my responsibility in the first place, but I didn’t take it, and look what happened. They told me everything, so don’t try to soft-pedal this to me. I should have taken the responsibility, I realize that, but I didn’t, and now here I am with this damaged—

  Surely you don’t believe—

  God is punishing me but good, and I won’t lay one more stick on my conscience.

  I’m just asking for five minutes, Celie. Five minutes. She needs reassuring.

  I
told her you died. She thinks you’re dead because of your horrible heart.

  You told her—?

  I told the priest the same thing. You want to resurrect yourself, be my guest, but it won’t make a lick of difference for twelve years.

  One minute. You can time me. Give me one minute.

  You’re not to speak to this child until she’s twenty-one. That’s the agreement, that’s the legal agreement, you agreed. If you call again, if you show up here, if you so much as write a letter, I’ll report you to every authority in the United States of America and you can tell your side to a judge.

  Panicked and speechless, he held the disconnected phone. In his head he shouted her name as surely she would be shouting his. Her name bled in his throat as he weighed his narrowing options. For a child like his—a stubborn, meddling, wonderful girl who brooked no compromise, for whom there would be no predicting how twelve years of severed ties might disintegrate her soul—would not his death be more bearable than years of separation? In his fever of grief and shame, he decided to grant her the mercy of a gradual forgetting.

  And so he died. And took to the road, to endless driving and temporary jobs and years of misery that would bring him eventually to Frannie and her son and their oblivious consortium with a dead man. A walking tomb.

  This very church, on this very hill. The moon is up, the trees silhouetting grandly against the empty, almost dark sky. He pulls in. Again. He knocks on the rectory door, finds an old priest, not a twenty-years-older version of the young one who opened the door back then, but a truly old man in his eighties who could be retired right now had so many of his brethren not jumped the league.

  Father Mike Murphy, he says.

  Or thinks he says. The world is tipping and pitching.

  St. Bartholomew’s, Hinton, Maine. That balm again, allowing him to engage properties of time that he had forgotten all about. It stands still. It moves backwards and forwards. It deposits a dozen layers upon a single moment. Standing on this tilting porch that needs paint and a new number for the door post, he can believe that nothing has happened yet. This feeling used to visit him during prayer.