Any Bitter Thing (12 page)

One of the first changes he made after succeeding Father Devlin was to institute new guidelines for marriage at
St. Bartholomew’s Catholic Church. In brief: No more cakewalks. To earn the privilege of entering into the sacrament of Holy Matrimony, engaged couples would meet three times with the pastor and register for a daylong engagement retreat, offered six times per year. Some balked. A few accused him of grandstanding. Others said:
Who does he think he is?

He reminds them that his own sacrament, so similar in magnitude and permanence, required a college education and then a formal training of four years. What is a few meetings with the priest, what is a day of study and reflection in the face of a lifetime promise? If you begrudge yourselves this feeble requirement, then kindly find yourself another priest.

He says it more politely than that. But he’s not fooling around and they know it.

Hear, hear
, say some.
Dictator
, say others. Vivienne says:
I wish I’d done the engagement program. What a wonderful idea.

He uses an outline sent from the Chancery and redlines it like a movie director, adding a role-play here, a wish list there.
List two goals for the next two years. Five goals for the next five. Ten for the next ten.
Brides discover grooms who don’t want babies. Grooms discover brides who long to flee their hometown. They discuss these things in the cloistered privacy of the pastor’s office. Then, at the retreat, they undertake similar tasks in a friendly group, and listen to speakers brought in expressly for them: pediatric nurses, financial advisors, real-estate agents. Some couples decide not to marry after all, despite two hundred embossed invitations sitting in a box on an enraged mother’s dining-room table, a four-hundred-dollar deposit already cashed by the resort hotel, eight disgusted bridesmaids stuck with nonreturnable salmon-pink dresses.

They think he’s a stickler, or a killjoy; but really he’s a romantic, sending God’s lovers down the marital path with all due preparation, metaphorical rose petals floating in their wake.
His custom is to have the engaged couple to dinner a few days before the wedding. His ostensible mission is to review the details of the ceremony, but really he wishes to have a happy couple at his table for the edification of Lizzy, who cannot remember her parents. See what happiness marriage brings? He serves lasagna and garlic bread and a single toast of champagne (Lizzy is allowed a taste, diluted with ginger ale) served in the crystal flutes that were his wedding gift to Bill and Elizabeth. Removing them from Elizabeth’s breakfront is Lizzy’s favorite task—she loves to turn the slim brass key in the old-fashioned keyhole—and he beams at her as she opens the glass doors.

“Mrs. Hanson says I shouldn’t drink champagne,” Lizzy informs him. Claire Gagnon and Will Cleary wait in the dining room, dressed for the occasion, Claire in a lightweight yellow dress, Will in a starched shirt and pants that are not jeans. With few exceptions (Sandra Leighton, who was forty-four years old with two kids and an annulment, arrived in a tube top and shorts) the couples he marries rise to this particular occasion, dinner with Father, feeling proud and (he believes) grateful to have prepared for their sacrament with such focus and alacrity. Some, like Sandra Leighton, are just humoring him. But that’s all right. He does his job, putting as much Holy into Matrimony as the couple can bear, and mostly the fruit of this labor ripens just in time.

“Tell Mrs. Hanson that I said it’s okay,” he says.

“I told her,” Lizzy says. “She did that thing with her mouth, you know the way she does.”

“I know the way she does,” he assures her, petting her head. She is seven years old, an intelligent child with hair the color of old pennies. A few drops of champagne to honor this couple’s joy before God won’t do her a bit of harm. She loves toasting—
All joy, all love, all good wishes to you, in God’s good name
—and they both believe that ginger ale alone doesn’t count.

They bring the flutes into the seldom-used dining room, where the table is set in a precise imitation of an article from
Good Housekeeping
entitled “Spice Up a Special Occasion.”

“What are all these tags for, Father?” asks Claire. Such a pretty, solid girl, whom Will Cleary, God bless him, cannot stop gazing at. She has glossy black hair and dimples.

“I’m learning French,” Lizzy explains, lifting a tag from the curtain that reads
le rideau.

“Say ‘good evening’ to Claire,” he tells Lizzy.

“Bonsoir, Mademoiselle,”
Lizzy says. He can’t help but smile; she sounds exactly like Vivienne.

“Wow,” says Claire.

He has a good feeling about this couple. Their children will be smart and rosy and profoundly loved. Claire is a student nurse; Will’s applying to law school. They want two children, but not for five years. Their plans are perhaps too exact, but he believes they will weather surprise or disappointment gracefully. They each placed “friendship” at the top of their priority list. They will not be back in his office nineteen months hence looking for a way out.

“She can read all these?” Claire asks, moving lightly around the room, picking up tags at random:
le mur
taped to the wall;
le tableau
stuck to the framed print of a babbling brook that Vivienne gave Lizzy last Christmas;
la fenêtre
lying loose on the windowsill. The tags make the room look festive, fluttering like confetti.

“She’s picked up a lot from the neighbors,” he explains. “We’re working mainly on her accent.”

It’s the one thing that annoys Vivienne:
You’re a snob, Father, and God knows it
, she tells him, only halfway joking. True enough, but in one of his many daydreams of Lizzy as a grown woman, she is captivating a roomful of Parisians with her formal, melodious French. In another she sits in a brocade armchair with
a view of the Seine, singing
“Fais Dodo”
to her newborn baby as a smitten husband looks in from their grand, tiled kitchen.

“Aren’t you, like, seven?” Will asks, exchanging a quick look with Claire:
Jeez, I hope we end up with a kid like this.

“She was reading at four,” he tells them, which is a tiny stretch. “Now she’s the top second-grader in the county,” which is either true or should be. Lizzy grins, either believing him or delighting in his slippery facts.

Lizzy has her mother’s face, pliant and rubbery, her grin reaching all the way up to her eyes. He doesn’t spend enough time with her. She comes to the weddings but not the funerals. She accompanies him to the Saturday five o’clock Mass and the Sunday ten-thirty, but not the Saturday six-thirty or the Sunday nine. She seems to enjoy her duties—passing out the church bulletin, collecting the hymnals after Mass, arranging donuts on paper plates—and would happily attend four Masses per weekend, but how much time must a normal child be expected to spend in church? She likes Mrs. Hanson well enough, loves Vivienne, spends every spare moment with Mariette. He’s never left her alone. Is this enough? Can the thing he provides be called a happy childhood?

Vivienne taps at the back door and slips into the kitchen, surprised to find a crowd in the dining room.

“Sorry!” she calls lightly, draping Lizzy’s red sweater over a chair back. “Lizzy, you left this.” She makes to leave but he stops her. Claire and Will come out to say hello—Vivienne knows Claire’s mother.

“We’re just about to toast the engaged couple,” he tells her, offering her his glass. “Join us”

“A toast,” Vivienne says, delighted. “I don’t remember the last time I lifted the glass.”

He rushes to get another flute, fizzing champagne into it without spilling a drop, then gathers with the others, who
wind up thronged between the narrow archway that separates the dining room from the kitchen. One side of the wall reads
la cuisine
, the other reads
la salle à manger.

“Lizzy?” he says. “Would you do the honors?”

Lizzy holds her glass high above her head. “All joy,” she quavers, “all love. . .” Her face knots with effort.

He prompts her: “All good wishes. . .”

“All good wishes to you in God’s good name!”

“Beautifully done.”

“Santé,”
Vivienne adds, the glass resting in the nest of her fingers as if placed there expressly to be admired.

Good cheer wakens the room. The glasses flare beneath the kitchen light. Moments like this are reputed to perfect the vocation, to bring into play the full intention of the priest’s own vows. He is husband to his parish, father and brother and friend. In this brimming moment, however, there arrives a notion so fleeting it comes and goes like a burglar with surprise as his sole weapon. What if—what if he misheard God all those years ago? His head buzzes briefly with the possibility of missed connection, then the notion is gone before he can catch it, gone before he can detect how it got in and what it took on its way out.

He blames the champagne rushing down his gullet, and the cat’s cradle Vivienne makes of her fingers around that filled, flashing glass of celebration.

ELEVEN

Drew and I couldn’t go back, like Mariette and Charlie, and point out some fall-dappled tree under which we first locked eyes. In college Drew was just a guy cutting through the cafeteria line, another student bounding out of the art building with a roll of sketch paper tucked under his arm, one face among many in a history class or at a football game. We never really spoke. The first time I noticed his voice—that soft, anxious monotone—was in one of those impromptu gatherings that pop up just before graduation, where everybody feels a little sick with nostalgia for good times they never had. By then it was too late to make friends.

When we re-met, three years later at a homecoming weekend we had each separately decided to attend out of a desperate loneliness, he was in Boston, a twenty-four-year-old freelance photographer living in a monkish apartment on Hemenway near Northeastern. I was back in Hinton, doling out advice to sixteen-year-olds whose social life contained layers of intrigue entirely lacking in my own—which consisted mainly of helping newlyweds Mariette and Charlie pick out wallpaper for their kitchen.

Roiling inwardly, I arrived at the alumni reception pretending to be the type of person who liked crowds. Drew was the first soul I encountered, pretending the same. In that sense, it could be said that we re-met under false pretenses.

The one who will save me
, he thought.

And I was thinking the same thing.

During the first weeks of our re-acquaintance, I drove to Boston after school every Friday afternoon, then tunneled home through the dark on Monday morning, barely making the early bell. I’d enter the school building in a kind of trance, my body humming with the memory of him. Our courtship took us from September to December, fall to winter, but in my memory it is a single season, the trees aflame with autumn reds as we walk the city, aimless and untrammeled.

We often wound up in the North End, stopping here for ice cream, there for flowers, loving time, Earth, traffic, strangers, each other. Evenings we chose some noisy Italian joint catty-cornered into an intersection, then caught the T to Newbury Street to find an art opening or simply to ogle the window displays. We saw a couple of Celtics games before Boston Garden sold its soul and took up the parquet tile by tile.

I can still see us there. Drew and Lizzy, holding hands, a game ticket or show schedule jammed into their pockets. They spend all their money, stay up too late, walk the city as if running a search pattern. They talk till dawn, choose this single season to behave entirely out of character. They have been alone, separately and for different reasons, for a long time. They enjoy the reassembled selves they become in each other’s presence. For the moment they are the fully formed people they always intended to be, counting on the moment to forecast the rest of their lives. They slip into this new skin and hope it holds. Maybe that’s all love is.

At Christmastime, I told him. In the version he already knew, the same one I’d been telling for years, I’d granted Father Mike his heart attack at our local hospital, no extenuating circumstances. I’d been wanting to tell Drew the real story since the homecoming weekend at our alma mater, but it was a hard story to tell.

We had reversed our pattern come holiday time, so it was Drew now who made the trek from Boston every weekend, often to help me with unshirkable duties: the H-S Regional Key Club food drive, the H-S Regional holiday concert, the H-S Regional Snowflake Dance. I’d agreed to be club advisor, ticket taker, and chaperone, respectively. Already I was turning back into myself.

“We should put up a tree in here,” Drew said. My apartment was spartan in the sense that I hadn’t much furniture. Most of my mother’s things had been left unclaimed at the rectory, though Mariette’s mother had rescued the dishes and saved them for me. I didn’t have much in the way of wall decor, either, except the photograph of Father Mike, the one of my parents in the silver frame, and a portrait from Mariette and Charlie’s wedding. I had no curtains, two rugs. The landlord forbade pets. But my place was not empty. I’d kept things from as far back as Sacred Heart: old mittens and programs from school plays and macramé god’s-eyes and cotton pouches containing cheap jewelry and beach stones. I still had all the clothes I’d taken with me from St. Bart’s, my good shoes from then, my child-sized winter boots. I had souvenirs from college—mugs and sweatshirts and bath towels and emblazoned bric-a-brac of all kinds—and from grad school I still had the papers I’d written and a dozen tapes of practice counseling sessions and all my evaluations. I had a glass bell I’d bought on a trip to Quebec City with Mariette and Charlie. These things were in boxes, mostly; but they did exist.