Our Father

by Marilyn French

  Alex’s favorite was the Unitarian church, called the White Church. Built in 1842 in Greek Revival style, it was small and wooden, with closed pews. Some were larger than others, and Alex wondered if they belonged to richer families or larger ones. The White Church was simple and clean and somehow piety was built into its very walls, into the single plain chandelier, the organ in the choir, the twelve-over-twelve windows, the Empire style burled-walnut altar.

  Alex would stop in of a morning or an afternoon to sit and try to sense import in the quality of light, the look of the altar. She strained to hear voices she felt hid in the echoes, the hollow footfalls. She attended services there and at St. Joseph’s and found herself drawn to the music, flowers, and incense of the Catholic church. But the only sermon that lingered in her memory was one delivered by the Episcopalian priest.

  In time, however, she decided that a spot in the woods behind the house was the best place to do what she wanted to do. While she did not think of this as worship, she called the spot, a small clearing amid a patch of leafless maples and oaks where the sun broke through to the forest floor, her cathedral. She could come here every day: it was never locked, no one ever barred her way or questioned her presence, and there were even benches—a fallen log and the stump of a tree that had not fallen but been felled, so it was smooth and even.

  Walking to her cathedral Tuesday morning around nine, she saw Ronnie bent over in the thick woods off the path. She picked her way toward her through clotted underbrush. A wheelbarrow stood in a small clearing, piled high with twigs.

  “Hi! Whatcha doing?”

  Ronnie raised herself, pink with exertion. She held some broken branches in her hand, a canvas bag hung over her shoulder. “Gathering wood. Broken twigs. For kindling.” She dropped the branches in the wheelbarrow and wiped her hands on her jean legs. “Saves money. We use a lot of firewood these days.”

  “What’s in the bag?”

  “Mushrooms. See?” She walked toward Alex and slid the bag off her shoulder. She pulled it open and Alex peered in at huge ruffled fungi. “While I was in Appalachia my friend Lois taught me about mushrooms, how to tell the poisonous ones, which ones are edible. These are chanterelles. I get mostly these and cepes. We’ve been having them for lunch lately, haven’t you noticed?”

  “Oh! The mushroom omelets!”

  “And mushroom risotto. And remember that delicious mushroom soup the other day?”

  “That’s wonderful!” Alex marveled.

  “Where are you off to?”

  “Just walking.”

  “I was just about to take a coffee break,” Ronnie said, nodding toward a thermos lying in the wheelbarrow. “If there was someplace to sit down, I’d offer you a cup. I usually sit on the edge of the wheelbarrow, but it’s precarious.”

  Alex considered. “I know a place where we can sit down.”

  “Lead the way.” Ronnie went for the thermos and followed Alex back to the path and down it for a quarter of a mile to the sunlit clearing.

  Smiling, Alex pointed to the stump. “Seats have been provided.”

  Ronnie sat on the log.

  “You should take the stool. It’s more comfortable.”

  “This is fine.” Ronnie unscrewed the thermos and poured steaming coffee into the lid, passed it to Alex.

  Ronnie tipped the thermos and sipped from its mouth. The lip was too thick for drinking from and some coffee ran down the side of her mouth. She wiped it with her jacket sleeve.

  They sat unspeaking, hearing the busy silence of the forest, Ronnie studying the landscape.

  “This your place?”

  Alex nodded. They fell silent again.

  “Ronnie?” Tentative voice. Waited until Ronnie looked up at her again. “What you said the other day—about it being important to raise children? Did you mean that?”

  “Don’t say what I don’t mean.” God you sound like a pompous ass. She tried to soften her tone. “Why do you ask?”

  “Well, you know, I mean, everyone assumes they’re going to get married and have children.” She glanced at Ronnie, flushed, corrected herself. “I mean, most women think that. And most of us do. And then the children grow up and you wonder what your life was about. You know? Was that it? You know? They don’t really even need me anymore and they’re not even twenty. They hardly notice that I’m not there.”

  “I helped raise some children—my aunt’s—in the inner city for a while. And the kids were great, adorable, sweet, terrific—but doing that job in that place with no money is pure hell. Maybe I’m idealizing—some people say I am—but even though there’s worse poverty in Africa and India and Latin America I think people there’re better off than people in cities here. Maybe in any industrial country. In cities you don’t just have to worry about finding food for your kids, you have to worry about everything around them, the people, the drugs, the guns, the community. …

  “And those mothers—the ones I know and I know a lot—are incredibly brave, good. All their thoughts are for those kids, keeping them alive, getting them through, getting them grown, trying to make the kids’ lives better than their own. And I imagine it’s like that even if you’re better off. Hard.”

  Alex’s face softened in sympathy. “It is hard. You never know if you’re doing the best thing. What works with one doesn’t work with the other. They’re all different and need different things. But even after you go through all that, does it matter? Suppose the children die after all that? And whether they live or die can destroy you but it makes no difference to the world. There’re so many people. What does it matter that we have kids, spend our lives raising them? On the grand scale.”

  “So what do you think is more important?”

  Alex shrugged. “Almost anything.”

  “Making cars? Making airplanes? Making bombs that will kill someone’s kids, maybe your own?”

  “Well, when you put it that way. …”

  “What job do you think is harder than raising kids?” Ronnie persisted. Rosa and Enriqué nearly coming to blows over what to do about Tina, experimenting with drugs at fourteen. Worried talks long into the night about Raoul drifting toward a gang at thirteen, ten-year-old Téo failing in school. Enriqué threatening the belt, Rosa begging, “Ronalda, speak to them, they’ll listen to you!” Talking was like trying to blow out a forest fire.

  Raoul dead now, Tina in the life, the family split apart.

  —You wan me to do what you do, Mama? Sit at a fucking sewing machine all day?

  —You watch your mouth when you talk to your mama, girl!

  —What does she make, huh? Twenty, twenty-two dollars for a whole day’s work? I can make two hundred dollars in a night.

  —And that cojones takes it all off you, whore!

  —Is he any different from you? Don you take Momma’s money, don she use it to feed you? Where does all Mama’s money go, huh? What does she see? Has she got boots like these, clothes like mine? Hah? It goes to you and the kids, the kids and you! You’re the same as him!

  Enriqué pale, driven beyond endurance, arm raised.

  —Out of my house you whore, you no blood of mine! And don come back! We raised you decent!

  Rosa weeping. Still a chance for Téo, maybe, but he’d always be slow. Lidia and Joey all right so far. Rosa wants to move. But where can they be safe? They wouldn’t want to live in any neighborhood that would let them in, she thought grimly.

  “It is hard,” Alex repeated as if by rote. “You’re never sure what’s the best thing to do.”

  Ronnie smiled. Not interested in this conversation, this woman, her problems. Maybe she wasn’t raised to the purple like Mary and Elizabeth but her life was a far cry from Momma’s or Rosa’s. Nice middle-class white couple, professional husband, two kids, two cars, house in the suburbs. Country club just for Du Pont employees, she said the other night, dinner, dancing, golf links. What is it, she’s suddenly worried about her image—just a housewife?

  Jesus Christ, what makes a
ny life worthwhile? Does the great arch of nature care how we plague ourselves for meaning? Love, Momma said, loving makes life worthwhile.

  Alex said, “I want you to know … I think of you as my sister. I’m glad you’re my sister.”

  Ronnie studied the ground. “Well, I’m glad to have you as a sister too,” she said tightly.

  They smiled at each other ruefully.

  “I feel like you … here. Maybe not otherwise, I’m not saying I’ve had your experience … but in this house.”

  Ronnie questioned her with her face.

  “You know, I feel like I don’t belong.”

  “Illegitimate.”

  “Yes.”

  Ronnie thought about that. “I guess.”

  “I love Elizabeth and Mary. You know, I knew them when I was a baby, I loved them then, adored them really the way a baby does, you know?”

  Seeing them glamorous, dashing, in their full-skirted pastel summer dresses, full of confidence, talking to senators and presidents under the green-striped tent with a mouthful of canapé and a cocktail in one hand. I remember.

  “And it would be hard for them to dislodge that love,” Alex continued. “But”—Alex looked straight at her—“everyone in this house has a hard time loving. It’s like they grudge any sign of love, as if they feel that if they give any away they won’t have anything left, as if they secretly hug what shreds of it they feel they have to themselves like they were hoarding bread in a concentration camp. …” She dropped her eyes, let her arms fall limp “… Or a house of secrets.”

  Ronnie just stared at her.

  Alex listened as Ronnie’s light tread, crackling branches and leaves, faded: I can sit for a while, I’m dressed for the hospital, I don’t have to change. Nice here this hour of morning, the sun still in the east. Oh I love the morning sun flaring down through the bare branches, god’s fingers whenever I see it I feel so grateful I want to cry out hallelujah well of course we call it the grandeur of god when it’s just a ball of hot gases burning, sending light through the universe. But it feels like some beneficent presence meant just for us and it does enable us to be—us, the plants, the animals, bugs, everything. So why shouldn’t we worship it? But then we say it wants this or that as if it were sentient and we knew what it wanted, as if virtue, sin, redemption, were words we knew the meanings of as if lines were clearly drawn in space. Still they exist, don’t they—virtue, sin. If not redemption. Or was that St. Anne’s priest right in that wonderful sermon and redemption is the power to love. You can love because you are loved, Jesus loves you. You don’t have to earn his love, you just have to be. He reaches out and embraces you simply because you are. So embarrassing, weeping like that in public, people around me looking at me. Maybe they thought I was a widow or had lost a child. …

  She shuddered.

  I am NOT going to lose a child.

  Strange too: I don’t believe all that business, Jesus, god, any god. Sam so upset that David doesn’t go regularly to temple but David can’t understand how he can go on believing after the Holocaust. I don’t believe either: God the Father. Who needs a father like that? Yet that time in Jerusalem. Like my eyes opening, like something ancient calling me, pulling on my very flesh, some way of life, some other way to be. I tell David I pray but I think what I call praying is just thinking. Not like a real thinker, like Elizabeth, say, not like an intellectual.

  Her mind entered the state she called praying—sensation and emotion wrapped in imagination. Scenes, words, characters popped up in it like jetsam carried by a flood, but the stream moved on its own and she never reached any conclusion, never even framed a question in words. She knew only that the periods of quiet solitude she called prayer were necessary to her existence.

  I am loved and I love, I know that. If love is redemption, why isn’t that enough?

  Elizabeth’s grim face as she pounded the table, Mary sobbing frighteningly, uncontrollably, Ronnie’s dark resentment, eyes haunted with rage, pain they live in so much pain, I too with no cause. Useless suffering.

  What religion is about? Suffering earns you brownie points with god, phah, what kind of god is that. That book David made me read when we were first dating, what was his name? Russian. Suffering alone redeems.

  Why? How?

  No.

  All of us walking around smiling, bobbing, working, scurrying, catching buses, inside an acute pain, a nail in the flesh a need a hope a tragic loss a something that cannot can never be made right. What good is that? The only thing we share, the pain of living and of the knowledge of death. Move from childhood is the movement into the knowledge that pain is always with us. True loss of innocence. Never did have anything to do with sex. Only thing pain is good for is to help us to connect: weep for me sister for I am sore at heart you too I weep for you I feel your pain I feel mine you feel mine you feel yours know we are together in that if nothing else whatever the cause. We weep together if alone.

  Air brushed her cheek, images flickered, slight bird sounds animal movement in the forest that forgot she was present, had adjusted to her utterly still silent body. Faces flickered, wrenched and gray, bodies missing limbs, dancing, dancing. The lines on people’s faces are scarifications—deep straight scars, curled shallow scars, purple-red zigzags. Each set of hands traces the scars on another face, tenderly, strokes the crippled limbs, the stumps. Music playing, we are alone, together, together alone. We are therefore we suffer. Animals march into the room in pairs like into the ark, sheep elephants gazelles dogs anteaters ants scarified but less than the humans, biting and nuzzling each other, noisy, mooing and baahing, rank familiar comforting smell of living flesh and dung, all shitting on the floor and all hungry, always hungry.

  She shuddered awake. I’m going crazy. I must go away.

  9

  “I’M READY TO GO,” Alex called, putting her head out the front door where they stood waiting for her. “Just have to pee! Get in the car, I’ll be right there.” Mary tried to share her contempt for Alex’s crude speech with Elizabeth but Elizabeth was gazing into space. After a few minutes, Alex hopped in the car where the others waited. “Sorry,” she offered breathlessly as the car started up. “I was out in the woods and lost track of time.”

  “We need to stop for milk on the way back,” Mary said.

  “Can’t Mrs. Browning telephone the market?”

  “And ask them to deliver a quart of milk?”

  “Can’t Aldo get it later without holding us up?” Elizabeth protested. “I have work to do.”

  “I’ll get it, on my bike,” Alex offered.

  Mary shrugged. “He’d have to make an extra trip. Use more gas. You’re the one always on about saving money.”

  “We’re not that broke,” Elizabeth said.

  “You said every penny counts when I wanted the beluga.”

  “There’s a huge difference in price between beluga and sevruga caviar, Mary.”

  “But that’s a difference that matters.”

  Elizabeth exploded. “Maybe you enjoy it, but I don’t like stopping at Donelan’s in a limousine. Do you mind?”

  Mary arched her eyebrow. “Reverse snobbery?”

  Elizabeth pulled out a cigarette and lighted it.

  Mary fanned herself with her purse.

  Alex wondered why her offer to pick up the milk had simply been ignored.

  Ronnie grimaced. Their squabbles no longer fascinated her: it was no longer a surprise to discover signs of trouble in paradise. Clearly, the idea of paradise had been a delusion. Just had to find something to fight over, those two. Tedious, she thought, then discarded this as a Mary-word. And however she sounded, she didn’t want to sound like Mary. She’d rather reek of the streets.

  Funny. She’d almost liked Mary the other week. Shy but curious, wanted to see how I live. The other half, the lower half really. She lives like practically nobody. One percent? Less? And it seems like she can’t afford to keep doing it. Maybe getting ready for her future? Never happen. Ron
nie chewed on the inside of her lip.

  But all of them were out of kilter today, surprising after the general harmony yesterday.

  Today when Stephen’s eyelid fluttered, all of them saw it. Mary cried out, “Father! Father! You’re awake!” The others stood watching, silent, and all seemed deep in their own thoughts on the ride home. They did not stop for milk, but Aldo drove back to town after dropping them at the house.

  “I would’ve gotten it,” Alex said reproachfully to Mary.

  “We need it for lunch,” she said brusquely.

  They spoke little at lunch. Some geese flew over honking, and they all looked out at the sky. Mary said it was late for geese. Ronnie agreed. Elizabeth remarked that she should call Hollis. The conservatorship hadn’t come through yet and perhaps he should delay it if Father was going to wake up. No one responded. They had finished eating and Elizabeth had rolled her napkin and slid it back in its ring when Alex said, “Do you all realize that Thursday is Thanksgiving?” They looked at her blankly.

  “So what,” Elizabeth said.

  “Oh dear. That’s why Browning asked for the day off,” Mary said petulantly.

  “Well, what are we planning to do?” Alex pushed.

  They all shrugged, muttering that they didn’t know.

  “Well,” she began brightly, “I was thinking we could cook a Thanksgiving dinner and take it to Father in the hospital!”

  This earned her looks of disgust. Everyone left the table.

  Later in the afternoon, hearing the loud banging on the piano, Ronnie wondered what was up Mary’s butt, then hearing the door to the study slam shut, extended the question to Elizabeth. Are they upset that he’s getting better? But why are they angry with each other? She wondered if anyone would show up at cocktail hour.

  But they all wandered in, Mary with a tight angry mouth, Elizabeth looking distracted, as if she were not inside her body. She made an announcement: she was having a gin and tonic; Ronnie and Alex joined her. Mary stuck with her vermouth cassis.