by Maile Meloy
Teddy started to say, “That’s the attitude that got France occupied—” But then he ran out of air.
“Oh, but Teddy, it’s about the women at home. Why would they want their husbands to go off to war? They wouldn’t, they never do.”
“Sometimes there’s no choice.”
“But we don’t have to like it,” Yvette said. “I’d give Versailles and Notre-Dame to have you out of this damn hospital right now! I really would.”
“And the church tower?” he wheezed, to tease her.
“And the damn church tower!” she said. “Just don’t leave me here.”
Teddy tried to smile and then closed his eyes, just for a minute, exhausted by her need.
81
CLARISSA WALKED THROUGH the house, barely seeing. She felt like a cartoon character after a safe had fallen on her head from a high building. She thought her body must be accordioned from the blow, her head surrounded by stars, and her walk a stagger. But when she looked down at her body, she was upright and unbent. And her father was dead. They had given him massive doses of antibiotics, but the pneumonia had gotten into his heart. His heart. She couldn’t understand it.
She hadn’t even kissed him good-bye when he went to the hospital. She’d been so sure he would be back. She had walked to the door and called “Bye, Dad,” as they helped him out. He’d been so focused on getting to the car. But how could she not have had a sense, a feeling, and hugged him tight?
She picked up the phone in her mother’s kitchen, to call Jimmy Vaughan, and heard her daughter’s voice on the line.
“No one expected it,” Abby was saying. “Jamie’s a wreck, he feels like it’s his fault.”
“Why does he think that?” a woman’s voice asked. It wasn’t a voice Clarissa recognized. She stayed on just a second longer. She could apologize and hang up when she knew who it was.
“Because he brought the people who got sick first,” Abby said. “Saffron and the baby. But no one was sick then. And the pneumonia probably came from midnight Mass. Everyone was sick there.”
“So it isn’t Jamie’s fault,” the woman said.
“Of course not.”
“Do you feel like it’s yours?”
Abby said nothing.
“Did your grandfather say anything about your book?”
“He asked if there had been more printings. And he told me again that he likes books without negativism in them.” Abby made a funny noise as she finished the sentence.
“In which people don’t die?”
Abby started to cry, on the other extension. “Not of pneumonia from a baby at Christmastime,” she said. “Jesus.”
“You didn’t cause the pneumonia,” the woman said.
“Saffron came with the baby because of the book. She wanted to meet them.”
“Oh, Abby.”
“It’s your job to say it’s not my fault, but it is,” Abby said.
A therapist, then. Clarissa knew she should hang up, but she couldn’t. She hadn’t known Abby was seeing anyone. If she had known, she would have hung up at once.
“It was the fault of a virus or bacteria,” the therapist said. “People get sick, this time of year, and some die. I’m not being callous. I’m so sorry it happened to your family and to you. But you didn’t do it.”
“I don’t know,” Abby said, and Clarissa thought that probably it was Abby’s fault, for bringing the book and the baby on her father. He could still be alive, and instead he was gone. She was about to say it, but the thought of Abby knowing she’d listened stopped her. Abby would be furious, and she couldn’t give her the advantage like that, so she silently hung up the phone.
82
ABBY DROVE HER grandmother to the church to finish the funeral plans. Yvette had put on lipstick, but she hadn’t been out of the house since coming home from the hospital, and she was trembling and ghostlike.
“I haven’t been to visit my shut-ins,” she said in the car. “I have to go see Teddy’s, too. There’s no one else to do it.”
“They can wait,” Abby said, stopping at a yellow light.
“It helps them so much,” Yvette said. “Some of them don’t know anything, they don’t know their children’s names, they’re in nursing homes, and then they take the Host and you should see their faces light up. They know exactly what it is.”
The light turned green and Abby pulled through.
“Thank you for driving me, sweetheart,” her grandmother said.
Father Kevin was the priest who had performed the Christmas Mass, and his office was small and simple, with a desk and visitors’ chairs and a tall bookshelf. The passage about love from 1 Corinthians was framed on the wall, in calligraphy. Abby guessed a parishioner had done it and guessed there were some crushes on the priest, among the congregation. “Love is patient; love is kind.” His beard up close was flecked with gray. They went over the readings and music together. They would sing St. Francis’s prayer:
Make me a channel of your peace.
Where there’s despair in life, let me bring hope.
Where there is darkness, only light.
And where there’s sadness, ever joy.
Abby thought about the likelihood of that, even for one person, even for a saint.
Yvette said, “Teddy loved that song.” She hummed a little bit, then was quiet. “I don’t know what to do about the shut-ins,” she said. “I feel so weak and sad.”
“Someone else can take them for a while,” Father Kevin said.
“But there are the ones Teddy visits, too,” Yvette said. “It’s so many. I want to do it, I’m just afraid I’ll fall apart.”
“I could go along,” Abby offered.
Yvette shook her head. “You aren’t baptized, honey. She isn’t baptized,” she told the priest. “If I need help, she can’t give the Host.”
“I’d still consider you to be the conduit,” he said. “She’d just keep you company.”
“But if I did need help.”
“She’d be an attendant, like an altar boy.”
“Altar boys are baptized,” Yvette said firmly, “and have had communion.” Her voice was stronger now that she had some focus.
“Well,” the priest said, “the baptism would be easy to take care of.”
“Wait a minute,” Abby said.
The priest held his hands up. “I just wanted to present it as an option. Obviously it’s a separate issue. But I think it might be good for you, Yvette, to continue with the lay ministry. And I know it’s good for the people you visit. Is there someone you’d rather have with you?”
“The kids are all a wreck,” Yvette said, bitterly. “I knew they would be.”
There was a silence, and Abby felt a question in the air. The room felt so much like a shrink’s office that she said what she was thinking:
“My mother always said I’d go to limbo, like the pagan babies who didn’t get baptized. I think she was joking. But I used to think as a kid that limbo wasn’t a terrible option. You lost your chance at heaven, but you definitely couldn’t go to hell.”
“Oh, honey, you don’t want to go to limbo,” Yvette said.
“I don’t want to go to hell, either,” Abby said, lightly. “Maybe limbo’s not so bad.”
“Maybe I should talk to Abby alone for a minute,” the priest said.
Yvette stood up, taking her handbag. “I’ll go think about flowers.”
When she was gone, the priest said, in a reflective way, “I’ve thought a lot about the infants I baptize, the fact that they have no choice in the matter. They may eventually decide it doesn’t mean anything to them. But I think they usually find that it does.” He studied Abby’s face. “I sense baptism doesn’t mean much to you.”
“Actually it does,” Abby said.
He looked encouraged, and encouraging.
“I mean, it would have to mean something, for me to do it,” she said. “I’m not an infant.”
He sighed. “We have an aging parish,
so I see a lot of grieving people,” he said. “From my perspective, from that experience, I think it would be good for Yvette to keep her routine.”
“But I don’t have to get baptized for that to happen.”
“No,” he said. “I know. The whole topic is just something I’ve been thinking about. The funny thing is that the parents of the babies rarely come back to church again. I guess they don’t have time.”
Abby couldn’t tell if he was lonely and wanted to talk about the decline of the Church, or if they were still arguing politely about the possibility of her baptism. She felt that Dr. Tirrett would want her to make her position clear, so she said, “I can’t inject youth into your parish. I don’t live here.”
“Of course not,” he said. “I thought from your book that you might want the opportunity presented to you.”
Abby wondered if her grandmother had asked him to read it and help her deal with it. “You’re thinking about the girl with cancer getting baptized?”
“I was thinking about the whole thing.”
Abby looked at her hands in her lap and again felt she was in a shrink’s office. She wondered if people gave confession in this room.
“What if I just give you a blessing,” he said, “so that Yvette can accept your help in the ministry?”
“I’m not going to tell her I’ve been baptized.”
“Of course not,” he said. “It’s just a blessing.” He smiled. “It’s very noninvasive. You can still think whatever you want.”
“How do you know she’ll accept that?”
“I think she will.”
Abby gave in. “Okay,” she said. “All I wanted was to be her driver. I didn’t think there would be all this.”
The priest laughed. “I promise I’m not trying to trap you for the faith,” he said. “It doesn’t work that way.”
The words came out before she could stop herself: “I know the book hurt them. I know I’m guilty of that. I didn’t want it to, but that doesn’t change that it’s true.”
Father Kevin was silent.
Abby felt close to tears and said, “Okay, let’s get it over with.”
The priest stood in front of Abby’s chair, in his ordinary clothes, and folded his hands and seemed to pray for a minute, while she sat, feeling embarrassed. Then he put his right hand on Abby’s forehead, so his fingers rested on her hair. She was startled by his touch, and by the warmth that spread from his palm into her head. For a second she thought, Oh, well, it’s supposed to feel like something is happening, and then the grief overcame her, and she shook under his hand with involuntary sobs.
83
HOW DO YOU KNOW he wasn’t secretly baptizing you?” Peter asked, lying on his old bed in Philadelphia. His mother had left everything exactly as it was when he was in high school: an M. C. Escher poster held up with yellowing tape, a Yes album cover, some photographs he had taken with his new Pentax on a family trip to Yellowstone.
“He wasn’t,” Abby said. “There wasn’t any water.”
“Maybe they don’t need water. The Mormons baptize people who are dead and buried.”
“It was just a blessing.”
“So he says.”
“He’s not that kind of priest.”
“You see? They’ve got you.”
“Peter, please,” she said. “It’s hard enough here.”
“Sing me the St. Francis song again.”
“I can’t sing.”
“Come on.”
“Oh, Master, grant that I may never seek,” she sang, off-key, “so much to be consoled as to console, to be understood as to understand, to be loved as to love with all my soul.”
“St. Francis must have written that when he realized that his birds weren’t going to console and understand and love him like he hoped.”
“It’s such a sixties folk song, the melody,” Abby said. “It’s strange that it was Teddy’s favorite. It makes me think I didn’t know him well enough.”
“You knew he identified with St. Francis.”
“But why? Maybe he wanted to escape all of us and go live with the birds.”
“Sometimes he probably did.”
“Yvette thinks he’s with God. The afterlife is a really good selling point, for a religion.”
“You’re just noticing this now ?”
“I keep thinking I brought a curse on my family. I murdered my grandmother in a book, and I must be punished, but God has a sense of irony, so he took Teddy.”
“Abby, I love you, but you’re insane.”
“The difference is that the novel is basically comic, and this just feels agonizing.”
“Your novel is sad, too.”
“But it’s comic in structure. Everyone comes together at the end.”
“Because of a death.”
“But you know what I mean. People come clean, they’re moving on, they make toasts.”
“Why does everything have to be strictly comic or tragic?” he asked, in his best teaching voice. “What about Hamlet ? What about Duck Soup ?”
“ Hamletis a tragedy and Duck Soup is a com—Oh, God,” Abby said.
He was already laughing. He loved having caught her.
“That’s so mean,” she said. “I’m not prepared for jokes right now.”
“I’m sorry,” he said. “Will you hurry up with the consoling, and come seek to be consoled?”
84
THE FUNERAL WAS in the church, which was filled. Yvette was surprised how many people were there. They had come from all different parts of Teddy’s life, from the church and the YMCA and the café where they had breakfast on Saturdays. Yvette saw their favorite waitress, in a flimsy black dress. There were nurses and attendants from the assisted-living homes. A big Samoan woman named Joey was red-eyed from crying.
The owner of the hardware store was there, with his daughter who worked at the counter. And there were some of the catechumens who had come to the house, and a young Navy pilot Teddy had met recently. There were old friends, too: some from the service, some from when the children were young—but Yvette was struck by the new ones, the near strangers, the people who must have responded to something in Teddy, in this quiet, kind man.
They had come because Teddy was gone. That was hard for Yvette to fully understand. She woke each morning on her own side of the bed, saw that he wasn’t there, and thought how quietly he must have gotten up. Then consciousness and memory came back, and she had to catch her breath at the pain. She prayed to be able to accept it, to be graceful until her own time came, but she felt unsettlingly healthy. It might be a long time. It didn’t seem fair. She wanted to be quick to follow him, to feel that her body would not last long without him, but she knew it would. She was angry at God, angry at Teddy, angry at the doctors, angry at that damn baby with the cold.
Things happened that she wanted to tell him, just little daily things. She wanted to tell him about the priest talking to Abby about baptism, and maybe planting a seed. And about the way Margot seemed better every day now, after falling apart at first, and how even the grief seemed to bring her back to herself. She hoped Teddy somehow knew, and she told him in her head; it was like prayer. If God could hear, then why not Teddy?
Jimmy Vaughan turned up for the funeral, leather-skinned from the sun. Yvette cried out in surprise when she realized who it was—a boy who couldn’t have grown a mustache the last time she saw him. He kissed her and said how sorry he was, and Yvette understood the comfort he would bring Clarissa. Teddy had disapproved of Jimmy when the children were young, but the boy had stood up to him. In that way he was like Teddy: he had quietly refused to give up what he wanted.
Father Kevin gave the eulogy, and Yvette spoke as long as she could before the tears came. Then Margot walked to the lectern. She wore her hair pulled back and looked like her elegant self, a little thinner.
“I wasn’t going to speak today,” she said, adjusting the microphone. “I’ve been having a difficult time, and I didn’t think I was
up to it. But this is my one chance to say good-bye to my father in public, and I realized I needed to do it.” She took a breath and seemed to gather herself.
“Some of you know that my niece, Abby Collins, wrote a novel,” she said. “And if you’ve read it, you know that it’s fictional, but that my parents are very much alive in it, their voices are in it, even though their characters do things that they would never do. I’m in it, too, as the insufferable older sister.”
The people in the room laughed, and Yvette glanced at her granddaughter next to her. Abby looked pale. “I’ve been having a difficult time recently,” Margot said, “that coincided with seeking out a part of my past that Abby’s novel brought up for me. It had nothing to do with the novel, but the existence of the novel reminded me.”
The room went silent.
Margot said, “My father died before I had really recovered—I’m still recovering—and I regret that I spent my last days with him so intently focused on myself. I regret that I caused him pain, at the end, and worry. He was a private man and wouldn’t want me to say this so publicly, but I did cause him worry, we all did.
“I think I speak for my sister and brother, too, when I say that he was not always perfectly understanding about the things we did. He was an old-style Catholic father, and a good Marine, and it could make him rigid. It was difficult for him that Jamie hadn’t settled down in the way he expected, and that my sister’s life was not what he wanted for her. I was the good daughter for a long time, but in the end I gave him trouble, too. We knew in all of these cases that he hoped things would turn out differently. I think if he’d had more time, he would have seen that we were each finding our own way, but he didn’t have that time. I want to be honest here.”
Yvette didn’t like the way this was going, but she felt that nothing was real, and she was lifted above the scene, looking down on it.
“I think I see, from being a mother myself,” Margot said, “that you do want so much more for your children than life will ever offer them. And that’s what he wanted for us. He wanted life to be understandable, and morally unambiguous, and not filled with strife. The defining event of his youth was the war, but he wanted what the song we’re going to sing asks: to be a channel of peace. He wanted to trust in God and sow faith and love like St. Francis. Which is difficult always to do.
