by Robert Price
Chapter Nineteen
Over seven years had passed since Father Hilliard had had the opportunity to place a log upon a fire. The fireplace in the rectory living room, where he occasionally entertained parishioners, was now a cleaner, safer, propane-fueled fire. At first he thought the fire looked fake; ceramic logs lit by a fancy gas cooking range. But he soon adapted to the ease and comfort of the gas without the mess of the wood. Besides, guests would all comment that it was impossible for them to tell the difference.
He clapped once and slowly stood, his old body complaining as he rose. “There, that should do it,” he said proudly. Despite the new gas fireplace at the rectory, Father Hilliard had retained that unique piece of knowledge of how to successfully lay logs upon a fire.
“Perfect,” Mrs. Hubbard said to him.
“Bien,” Marco’s grandmother, Gabriella, and Juan’s mother, Patella, who the day before had helped clean the house and ready the sitting room for Mrs. Hubbard, agreed in unison from their position on the couch. The older Central American women understood the grief that accompanies motherhood and war. And the past evening, after they departed, they were determined to return and offer their support to Mrs. Hubbard on this important day. They thought of her as a lonely woman because those closest to her, her daughter and son-in-law, were selfish, incapable of empathizing with her loss. Juan’s son, Eduardo, who on the previous day had prepared the fires, had volunteered to give up the afternoon and drive his grandmother and great grandmother to the farmhouse so they could attend to what they considered their duty, that is, supporting a grieving mother. Eduardo understood and also felt sympathy for Mrs. Hubbard. After all, he had lost both of his grandfathers to war. After their arrival, he occupied himself by tending to the fires in all the rooms.
“Yes, a good fire.” Father Hilliard watched as the flames began to lick and crackle around the dry wedge of Oak. “I’ll see to the other guests now and check back in on you in a bit,” he told Mrs. Hubbard. “Can I get you anything before I disappear?”
He glanced toward the two stocky women sitting on the couch. Though many other mourners had come into the small reception room to pay their respects, they had all eventually left. Gabriela and Patella did not; they took up residency on the couch and did not move. Like the single candle flickering on the mantel, they shared a silent but intimate presence with Mrs. Hubbard.
“Just a tad more.” Though she could already feel, just behind her eyes, the warm, intensifying tug of alcohol mixing with her medication, Mrs. Hubbard held the small plastic cup and indicated with a finger a ridge about three quarters of the way up. “Whiskey.”
“Are you sure?”
“Please,” she said, as Father Hilliard took the plastic cup out of her hand. She kept her hand raised, holding him in a position of servitude for a moment. She narrowed her eyes and looked closely into his face. He had aged a great deal since the last time he had forced himself upon her. They were in their later forties then. Tom must have been in high school, she thought. How many other women of the parish had he had? Was it just the women or had he raped the boys as well, like the other priests in Boston? Is that why Tom had hated him so?
She looked closely at his mouth and dull lips—she remembered them as brutal. He had forced them around hers and sucked while he jammed a tongue into her mouth like a frozen pop. The thought of it made her shoulders tense.
“Anything else?” he asked her before turning to the women on the couch. “And you two, are you all set?” He raised his gray eyebrows and cheeks in a friendly manner.
“Si, gracias,” Gabriella and Patella waved and smiled. Although they did not know Father Hilliard, they suspected the worst. They had seen such men in their own culture, men of God who consider their actions upon woman, girls and even boys justified by their faith. And from the little they knew of Mrs. Hubbard, they also suspected that in her youth she had been an easy target.
A large black man blocked Father Hilliard’s exit from the living room.
“Hello, Father.” Ezekiel looked down at the bald dome on Father Hilliard’s head.
The shorter man lifted his head up, coke-bottle glasses balanced on the bridge of his nose. He looked over the top of the rims. “Hello,” a thin voice barely scratched out of his throat.
“I’m happy to have bumped into you,” Ezekiel said pleasantly.
“Oh?”
“I want to thank you for your kind words this morning at the burial, about Tom.”
“Yes?” Father Hilliard tilted his head so that his ear with the hearing aid was closer to Ezekiel.
“I’m sorry.” Ezekiel noticed the hearing aid and laid a hand on the Father’s bony shoulder. Lowering his tone and speaking directly into the device, “This morning, at the service, thank you.”
“Oh! You’re welcome!” The man’s hand on his shoulder made him uncomfortable. “You are among friends.”
Father Hilliard pulled back and cupped a palm around his deafened ear. Black men intimidated him. And over the years he had learned that he could hide almost anything, including fear, behind hearing loss. Besides, when exaggerating this disability he could usually shorten the length of any unwanted conversation.
Ezekiel spoke easily: “Thank you, Father.” He had always been black, and Father Hilliard, he suspected, had always been frightened of blacks. This was not an unfamiliar situation. Ezekiel had met his share of scared, small town white men.
“I think you described Tom fabulously this morning during the ceremony. I also found it interesting when you said that in the course of human history, especially in war, it is tragic how stubborn men can be.”
Pretending to have misheard, Father Hilliard squinted for effect, “Mrs. Hubbard? She’s in here,” he said loudly and then stepped aside to let Ezekiel enter the small room. “Mrs. Hubbard,” he announced, “this man knew Tom from the war.” Before Ezekiel could correct him, Father Hilliard slipped out of the room to refill Mrs. Hubbard’s cup.
Ezekiel stood frozen in the doorway. Father Hilliard’s trick had successfully confused him. He had had no intention of meeting Mrs. Hubbard yet. He wanted to slowly work up to an introduction. First, he had planned to meet Tom’s sister, Elizabeth, and her husband Jon, and win them over, gaining their friendship and support. And then they could introduce him to Tom’s mother.
Since arriving at the reception however, Elizabeth and Jon remained busy managing the unexpectedly large crowd. So he intended to wait until later in the day when the crowd thinned, wanting his time with the family to have significance to them and at the same time have significance to him. His greatest desire for the day was to leave with a feeling of closure. After all, over the last ten years he had vicariously watched and secretly participated in the growth and change of this small family. In the end, he was losing more than just Tom.
Ezekiel winced, unprepared to meet Tom’s mother. Conversations with Tom’s old friends had been difficult enough. Like the proud husband he felt he was, he found it painful to refrain from explaining the exact nature of his relationship with Tom and hard to keep from bragging about his spouse. In truth, he even found it hard to hear Tom’s old friends simply talk about Tom.
For example, he was surprised when introducing himself to Ted and Shelly Dorsey, whom he had always assumed at least knew he existed. But they responded blankly: they had never heard his name before. Then, instead of explaining his partnership with Tom, he simply stated he had known Tom in Arlington. To which Shelly Dorsey took the opportunity to expound upon her own closeness to Tom, telling Ezekiel about Tom’s “free spirited life,” his “shoot from the hip honesty,” and his “success and heroics in war.” Until finally, hushing her voice, she recapped Tom’s last phone call to her and Ted: He called them shortly before he went back over, she whispered.
Ezekiel knew that almost everything Shelly Dorsey told him was a fabrication. Still, he felt pangs of jealousy at the professed closeness they had. He tried to reassure himself that Tom’s old friends me
rely needed to fill an empty shell of what they called “Tom Hubbard” with their own wishes. Without actually knowing Tom, they concocted a fantasy of him and their friendship, making him into what they wanted a friend of theirs to be. Ezekiel understood this. Still, each conversation had left him a little more disheartened and discouraged than the last. And he figured that if this is how he reacted to talking with Tom’s old friends, then meeting Tom’s family was going to be a heart wrenching challenge.
After Father Hilliard left, Mrs. Hubbard leaned her head back and looked over her shoulder. She only caught a hint of Ezekiel’s presence in the doorway. “Come in, please. Come in,” she waved toward a chair by the couch. “Sit.” Her weak voice carried no strength; it seemed to drift meekly around the room and then fall apart.
Confronted with a decision that he had hoped to avoid until later in the day, Ezekiel hesitated: Should I tell her who I am? Again noticing the black shawl he had purchased, packaged and sent—it hung off of Mrs. Hubbard’s arm and over the side of the chair—he wanted to touch it, to feel the familiar fine threads of the fabric.
“I hope I’m not disturbing you?”
His eyes lingered on the sheen of the shawl’s shimmering gold fringe. It reminded him of Tom and how he had looked during their lovemaking the evening he mailed the shawl to Mrs. Hubbard. It was their last intimate time together before Tom returned to the war. As his face had twisted during the height of ecstasy, his tense white skin seemed to shimmer in their bedroom light.
No, he wouldn’t tell her. His and Tom’s love would remain hidden. Unlike Elizabeth and Jon, whose children served as a testimony of their fertile love, he had nothing, no proof of his and Tom’s relationship and thus, he felt, he could never tell Mrs. Hubbard. Why would she believe that Tom was as much my life partner as Elizabeth is Jon’s?
“Buenos dias.” Ezekiel forced a half smile while trying his Spanish with Gabriella and Patella.
Should I?
Avoiding the subject of he and Tom would be equivalent to lying.
And why not lie?
After all, lying had formed Ezekiel’s identity for half of his life. He had learned to talk around his sexual and romantic urges as a boy. As a teenager he simply dodged the subject. And as a young man, when he finally told his family the truth about his homosexuality, instead of acceptance they shut the door in his face. So to save his partner from suffering the same pain, he had agreed to go along with this charade, that is, he agreed to honor Tom’s request to keep their relationship hidden from Tom’s family.
Why should circumventing the truth now with Mrs. Hubbard be any different? He could always speak about Tom the way others at the reception had, superficially and in fabricated ideals.
But Ezekiel knew Tom through and through. He knew Tom ate a half a cup of oatmeal with a handful of walnuts each morning for breakfast. He knew it took Tom exactly four minutes to shave after his shower. And he knew how many boxes of Kleenex Tom bought every week when he did their food shopping on Friday’s after work. Lying to Mrs. Hubbard about his partnership with Tom would belittle everything that their life as a couple had meant to him. Why should he continue to deny the truth of their love? Was it merely to preserve the lie that his partner had insisted upon? Yes.
But what good reasons remain now? After all, Tom Hubbard was dead.
“I hope I’m not intruding.”
“Oh, don’t be silly.” Mrs. Hubbard’s voice sounded far away, dreamy. “Please, take a seat. I want to meet all of Tom’s friends.”
