“I’ve told you that we are not given that knowledge.”
“You keep saying that, Father. But I want an answer. Job demanded an answer, and he got something, anyway. Don’t you wonder about it?”
“No,” Father Hennessey said, feeling as though the other might be less than sincere, and that this was all at his expense. “I don’t wonder about it at all.”
The boy sighed. Perhaps he was not almost fifteen years old, but thirty-five and mentally unstable.
“There is no perfect answer, son—except faith.”
“That’s what I keep say—” the boy began. But then he stopped.
“You keep—” the priest said. “Is this your mother again—”
There was a shuffling on the other side of the screen, and the shape was gone. Father Hennessey hesitated, and then got to his feet and opened the door to his booth, but there were only the three other people awaiting confession, standing in line under the Stations of the Cross. Two men and a woman he recognized, a member of the choir, who turned from him and seemed sheepish.
“Did you see that boy come out of here?” he said to her.
She stared, as if uncertain that he was speaking to her. “Excuse me?”
“The boy who just left here. Did you see him?”
“I wasn’t paying any attention,” the woman said, in a tone as if to say also that she had problems of her own.
The two men were shaking their heads.
With the second of these, who confessed to missing Mass for twenty years and committing all the mortal sins except murder, he gave a penance of Mass and Communion each morning for a month, and then couldn’t remember the words of absolution—his mind, for that instant, was sheer blankness. The man either didn’t notice or didn’t care. He said his Act of Contrition, crossed himself, and left the booth.
Father Hennessey saw that the red light over the other screen was indicating a presence there, but hesitated a little before opening it. The prayer of absolution came back to him, and he repeated it, then reached to the sliding panel and pulled it back into its socket. The old woman, with petty concerns.
Later, he closed the church and went over to the rectory, where Mrs. Loring, his housekeeper, was holding dinner for him.
She was a big, graying, severe-looking woman who had raised a large family—seven boys and one girl, all of whom were now married, with children of their own. Her stern look was deceiving, for she was full of good humor, and she possessed the kind of practical piety that had always impressed him. He was even a trifle envious of it.
She said, “You look tired, Father.”
“Yes,” he said.
She reported to him about his phone calls and messages—several from parishioners helping with the week’s events, and one from the hospital: a choir member had suffered an attack of appendicitis.
“Thank you,” he told her.
It would be inaccurate to say that she mothered him. She would have been insulted by the suggestion. She had a life of her own, quite separate from the work she did here. Yet in his sleep he sometimes confused her with his mother, who had raised him alone, and lived now in a condominium in Orlando, Florida. Mrs. Loring answered the phone and kept the schedules and cooked the evening meal for him, and she protected his privacy when he needed it. Beyond that, she kept her own counsel. She went elsewhere for her confessions, too.
Upstairs, in his room, he took his coat off and got into a cardigan, then knelt by the bed to do his penance. The phone rang, but he let Mrs. Loring get it, and when she didn’t call to him, assumed that it was something he could handle in the morning.
A little later, she let herself out. He watched from the window as her car pulled away into the dark, and he felt a surprisingly sharp pang of loneliness when the lights disappeared over the hill.
As had become the nightly pattern, he had trouble sleeping. He thought of the boy, imagined what the boy’s night might be with such heavy doubt. And with arthritis. It disturbed him to find that his curiosity was merely intellectual; it was wholly without the grace of compassion: he couldn’t make himself feel anything but the wish to know more. There had been an impatience, an earnestness, an edginess, in the boy’s voice, and the priest had felt annoyed, even while being startled at the precociousness of the speech.
At the six a.m. Mass, he found himself unable to concentrate as he ought to. The whole ceremony was automatic. He felt as though he wasn’t worthy of all those who had gotten up before light and made their way in the unseasonable cold to the church, expecting the consolations of the Mass. But then the sacrament itself was not harmed by the inadequacy of its priest, and everyone understood that.
He himself, of course, understood it perfectly, terribly.
He went back to the rectory and fixed himself a breakfast of cold cereal. On some mornings Mrs. Loring came to the six o’clock Mass. She had not come this morning. He sat at the kitchen table and drank a cup of coffee, listening to the radio, the weather forecast. Frost overnight. Mrs. Loring arrived, wearing a winter coat, which she took off and hung on the hook by the door. He offered her some coffee. She refused. She sat down and folded her hands on the table. “That phone call last evening after you went upstairs, a very strange call. A young man—just a boy, really. He said he wanted to speak not to you but to me.”
“Did he give a name?”
She shook her head. “He wanted to know what my days were like here.”
“What did you tell him?”
“I told him he was impertinent. And he hung up.”
“Did he say anything about doubt?”
Mrs. Loring stared, and seemed to consider. But then she merely repeated the word: “Doubt?”
The cares of his week were not unusual, yet they drained him. He returned to the rectory and sank into his chair and wondered if he would be able to get up again. He took the medicine for his aching joints, and found that his appetite suffered. Mrs. Loring said nothing about any of this, but she waited longer before taking the plate away, and whenever he dozed off in the chair, she would unplug the phone. Several times he had seen her plug it back in.
Sometimes when she left in the evenings, he unplugged it himself. The answering machine could take the calls. There were usually quite a few, of course. More than any one person could handle on many nights. So much distress in the world. Everyone was so needy. He felt it, too.
That Saturday evening, after listening to four rather ordinary confessions, he heard the boy’s voice again, and sat up straight. Somewhere in his mind was a sense of this being a chance to do better.
“Forgive me, Father. I have to confess the sin of doubt.”
“Doubt is not in itself a sin,” Father Hennessey told him. “Remember that, son.”
“I keep thinking about the other planets, Father. Why put a planet way out in the middle of endless space and leave it with nothing on it forever. Did he know he was going to create us?”
Father Hennessey had a long history of answering exactly these kinds of questions, and he could not understand why they should cause him any unrest now, except that this child was so scarily precocious. And then, too, there was something in the voice, some element of sadness, and it had risen as it went on. Father Hennessey said, “This is a confessional.” He took a breath. “It isn’t sinful to question things.”
“I know—right. I’m sorry. I’m afraid. I’m all hell inside.”
“That’s a feeling. It isn’t the true situation. God is with you, son.” The words felt empty.
“I don’t believe it. And I can’t fake it.”
Had he heard a sob in the voice? Was the boy crying? This frighteningly intelligent presence? He leaned closer to the screen and said, “You must try to remember that you’re in the hands of a merciful God.”
Nothing.
“Pray with me.”
He listened. Silence. “Perhaps you should come see me outside.”
No sound.
“How—” the priest began. “How do
you get here? Do you live near here?”
Again, nothing. The boy was out of the booth and gone. This time Father Hennessey walked out of the building, past the line of CCD students waiting for him, and on down the walk to the end of the block. But there was just the empty street. A chilly wind kicked up dust. Leaves flew from the maple tree on the corner.
The following Monday night, after religion class, he sat in the confessional and found once more that he couldn’t pay attention. His mind failed him, tottered, lost its hold on every subject, over and over.
Outside, a steady drizzle fell out of a featureless black sky. People came into the booth in wet coats, smelling of the winter air and the rain. Most of them were teenagers from the CCD classes for public school children. Their sins were the same, the same, the same, and so it was a simple matter to hide his inattention through the usual portion of adolescent foment—all that forlorn and overwrought faltering with the unexpected and terrifying delights and demands of the body.
He kept thinking about the second failure with the boy.
And, well, this, too, was failure, this wandering away from the voices on the other side of the screen, and for a while, near the end of the time, he tried repeatedly—he did try, but without success—to haul himself back to them. Failure inside failure inside failure.
Another week went by. He tried—and did slightly better—concentrating on the confessions he heard Saturday, and again Monday. And he suffered the penance of sleeplessness in the nights. The first snow of the year hit in the middle of the following week, a dusting, not more than an inch, and when it cleared a bright moon shone. The world looked changed; there was a silvery softness to the light. He walked out in it, late, past midnight, unable to sleep. The church loomed over him, its shadow printed on the sifted dust of snow. He saw his own breath, and looked at the shadows of the houses beyond the trees.
That week, he read in the paper that a Mr. Alphonse Graham, a beloved high school teacher, had been caught engaging in a sexual act in the gymnasium equipment cabinet with one of his students, and was being charged for having contributed to the delinquency of a minor. The girl, not named, was only fifteen. The paper said that if she were a year younger, the charge would have been statutory rape. Her mother was a hospital patient, the article said, and the girl was living at home with her younger brother, who had juvenile rheumatoid arthritis. The two minors had lived alone in the house for several months, having been abandoned by their mother’s live-in friend shortly after she entered the hospital. The article didn’t say why she was in the hospital.
Father Hennessey knew instantly that this was the boy who had been coming to see him.
He asked Mrs. Loring to call the hospital and find out if this woman was allowed visitors. The hospital asked if Mrs. Loring was family, and when Mrs. Loring explained that she was calling for Father Hennessey, she was told that the woman was in the psychiatric ward and was presently in no condition to receive any visitors.
He went on with the increasing weight of what there was to do. He kept busy, and he prayed—or tried to pray.
Perhaps it was a mistake to deny himself so much—his own osteoarthritis was worse, and the sleeplessness was becoming a serious problem. He related this to his own confessor—Father Allenby, who talked of staleness and of ridding one’s self of the earthly pull of ego. “It is always the ego that keeps us awake,” he said. “Empty yourself of all that. Give yourself over to the spirit. We have to cross a desert, a spiritual wasteland, to reach him, remember that. Remember the forty years of wandering in the desert.”
“Father, either it happened that way, or it didn’t. I would like not to have to think of it as only a metaphor.”
“You know quite well it is all a part of creation, and this spiritual journey,” the gentle voice said.
“Forgive me,” Father Hennessey murmured.
Concerning his problem with confessions, it was of course a very familiar thing. “Remember your training, Father.” Still, it did not feel ordinary—it felt like a kind of secret quake, a collapsing, deep.
The following Friday evening, he poured himself a cognac, after turning it down during dinner with a parishioner, whose wife and two grown children were anxious to trade stories about the disgrace at the high school. They gossiped about it while Father Hennessey was sitting right there; and they kept on through his feeble and finally insincere attempts to change the subject. When he returned to the rectory, through a fine rain and a cold wind, he strode into the kitchen, poured the cognac and drank it down, and then poured another, which he later trickled back into the bottle, deciding not to allow even this small relinquishment of his hold on himself.
In the morning, he woke with a little headache, and took nothing for it. Penance. He said Mass as usual, at six o’clock, for the five people who came, and then he went back to the rectory and recited his office, kneeling on the hard wooden floor. He would construct something to articulate from the pulpit about gossip, one of the seven deadly sins. A sin nobody even thought about anymore, or paid the slightest bit of attention to, as if it had simply gone the way of weekly fasting before Communion.
He was fairly certain that he would never hear from the boy again.
But that evening in the confessional, the voice came, fraught with angry sorrow, going on again as if it had begun before he opened the panel. “I don’t care why humans suffer or why the world is a place where living creatures have to kill and eat other living creatures in order to survive; that doesn’t worry me. I’m worried about all the places in the universe where there’s nothing going on, and nothing but silence. And stars that died out a billion years ago and you can’t see the light of the explosion because it hasn’t reached us yet or we can see the light and it’s been dead for a million years.”
The priest had begun to try to quiet him. “Shhhh, son. Shhhh. Shhhh.”
“… and the dinosaurs, the dinosaurs, Father. Sixty-five million years of grunts and screeches and death, and these horrible things coming out of big eggs and laying big eggs. And then this meteor hits and the sun’s blotted out and the vegetation dies and everything dies out starving for an eon. He must’ve caused it all to die out, so why did he do that? Did he make a mistake? He’s faulty, isn’t he, like all of us. He doesn’t get it either. He’s just blind power, like a force of nature. A person goes crazy and it’s all just chemicals in the brain.”
Father Hennessey said, “Listen. Listen.”
The boy stopped.
“How is your mother?”
“I don’t want to talk about her now.”
“Are your sister and you living with relatives now?”
“Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned.”
“You can tell me, can’t you, son?”
“We’re in a foster home.”
“I’d like to help.”
“Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. It has been two weeks since my last confession. I have the sin of doubt. And it’s the dinosaurs, the millions of years.”
“The idea that a meteor caused the death of those creatures is something that has to be taken on faith as well, son. Don’t you see? No one knows what happened. We have no way of knowing. But we do have the written records of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.”
“Yes, Father—but you haven’t really answered. John says in the beginning was the word, and that just isn’t so. In the beginning was millions of years of meaningless grunting and screeching and roaring.”
Father Hennessey murmured, “You were talking before about Job, right?”
“Yes.”
“You’re very advanced for your age. Do you know about the war in heaven?”
“Yes.”
“What was the sin of the angel Lucifer?”
“Pride. Pride. Pride. I told you I already know all this stuff.”
“Well, son, to question certain things too far is to commit the sin of pride, too, isn’t it?”
The other was silent again.
“Isn’t
it.” Nothing.
“Do you see?”
“So doubt is a sin of pride.”
“Yes,” Father Hennessey told him, feeling a tightening in his chest. “If you indulge in it.” “I can’t get out of it.”
“You have to work at it. It’s never easy. The path to holiness is arduous and full of traps. Remember there’s an adversary, who would like very much for you to fail, and is working all the time to bring that about.”
“She’s not that.”
“What did you say?”
Silence again.
“Please repeat that,” said the priest.
“Never mind,” the boy said.
“I was talking about the devil, son.”
Another silence.
Father Hennessey endeavored to take a softer tone. “Son, you’ve brought this to confession, so you are acting on faith. Isn’t that true? And isn’t that a good thing?”
There was a long sigh. “I don’t get anything out of it, though.”
“All the more reason to pray for help.”
“Nothing gets better.”
“Pray with me,” the priest said.
“It’s all terrible empty space.”
“Did you call my housekeeper?” Father Hennessey hadn’t known that he would ask this, and now that he had, he felt weirdly as if he had entered some kind of unreality. He had crossed over a line, and would have to pursue it now. “Did you?” he said.
“I don’t know.”
“Who are you? Tell me that. You say you don’t come from here.”
The shadow moved on the other side of the screen, and the priest got up and opened his door, wanting to catch him, or catch sight of him. The others in line stood docilely staring. He saw the boy—close-cut blond hair, a ragged red flannel shirt—moving with a lurch along the aisle, on the far side, to the door there. “Wait,” Father Hennessey said, trying to move quickly. But his arthritic hip caught him, and the boy was out. He limped to the door and looked at the empty alley with its puddles of rain. When he turned to go back into the church, he saw the others staring at him, and then trying not to stare.
Something Is Out There Page 23
