Any Bitter Thing (16 page)

The women in the parish dress up for him. He finds it touching, their lipstick and good shoes, these signs of respect and distance. How endearing, the businesslike way they straighten their skirts across their knees in advance of the inevitable tears, the admission of weakness or guilt, the confession that will make slush of their voices. Their ladylike attire—tiny earrings, small purses swinging on long straps—serves as a kind of disguise, a loophole in case they renege on promises made while wearing these very clothes. Later, stripped of their armor, they can tell themselves,
That wasn’t me in there
, making their betrayals and inconsistencies easier to bear.

From the beginning, from his first, mercifully brief assignment as a prison chaplain, he set out to make leaders of the led, shepherds of the sheep. His mission, in the words of the
more progressive teachers at Grand Séminaire, was to help his parishioners “find their own priesthood.” He undertook the parable of the loaves and fishes—the first self-help article in recorded history—as the central metaphor of his calling. Now, entrusted with four hundred families in a town he loves, he strives to show his people how to become their own prophets of God’s word, their own keepers of the sacraments. He jokes that he wants to work himself out of a job, to bring them a bit of bread and a gutted trout and watch them multiply the bounty. Cultivate faithful marriages; maintain forthright friendships; pray with your children. Find your own priesthood.

He tries to make it easy, doling out advice the way he doles out penance after Confession, discrete tasks (on the order of six Hail Marys and four Our Fathers) that appear easy but (in the ideal, at least) nudge the penitent toward reflection and forgiveness:

Give a sincere compliment to the child who harries you most.

List three reasons why you married him in the first place.

When God says no, try to rephrase the question.

He hopes and believes that his people—the men, too, when they come—leave his office feeling fortified, not judged; renewed, not encumbered; opened, not diminished. Though ill-prepared for the confounding miscellany of human endeavor, he has learned to meet his congregation’s often muted cries with a certain amount of grace and, increasingly, experience.

He believes he has made a good job of it, discovering on his own that spiritual guidance is often a matter of reassurance.
Father, would you bless me?
they ask him. His fingers rest on their sheening foreheads. Their faces slacken; it has the effect of a magic spell. How glad he is to have been called to service now, with condemnation out of vogue and compassion in!

Unlike the other women, Vivienne comes to her appointments simply dressed, in her softened shirts and much-washed jeans, her hair corralled by a brown barrette. How else, in
this house they’ve come to jokingly call the “north wing” of her own, might she dress? Even so, when she comes to him for guidance she enters by the front door and steps into the narrow hall like any other parishioner. Her formality both dismays and disarms him. Is she taking care to appear unexceptional because she believes she is an exception, or because she believes she is not?

He does not yet understand that he has fallen hard in love.

Wednesday evening. He can hear the girls outside, tending the moon garden in the dusk, nipping spent blossoms with the excellent German-made clippers he gave Lizzy months ago, on her seventh birthday.
(Too young!
said Mrs. Hanson.
C’est beau, ah?
said Vivienne.) The baby boys—Buddy just ten months old, a dimpled troll whom Lizzy and Mariette carry around endlessly, their favorite doll—are next door with Pauline. Ray’s gone fishing. Vivienne arrives, cool outside air filling the tiny hallway through which normally enter so many forms of demand:
Father, the parking lot needs paving. Father, my mother took a turn for the worse. Father, my son is taking drugs.
Vivienne brings something else altogether. Her presence, despite its physical lightness, seems so urgent, so blessedly necessary.

Drawing her into his office, he opens the whispering door. He runs his hand over the light switch, but it does not take.
I’ll have to replace that
, he says. Here is a man with no wood shop, no riding lawn mower, no bowling night or shift work, but he has a lightbulb to replace and wants her to know it.

He crosses to his desk, where he snaps on the lamp Elizabeth bought for him in celebration of his pastorship. The lamp shade shows hummingbirds and lilies floating in thick glass. It casts a quiet, pinkish light. Over the years, so gradually it feels almost like a secret, he has attuned himself to his friend and neighbor with ever-increasing precision. He can recognize her footfall on the porch, the rabbit-quick flick of the knob when she turns
it. He knows when she’s been in his garden, certain careful partings amongst the thickets of flowers. When the Blanchards’ car starts up in their driveway a hundred yards away, he senses whether it is she or Ray at the wheel. He can pick out her voice anywhere: her scratched-glass alto in the recessional hymn, her waterfall laughter at a school play; a single word in a grocery line. She is, quite simply, present. All the time.

And he—who possesses no frame of reference, who depends on God to keep his mission clear, who accepts sexual desire as a path to prayer and psychological strength, whose sister was his only woman friend, whose passion for his child both anchors and terrifies him, who wants no life but the one he’s been given—he names her presence only as a form of relief.

The certainty in her face, those strong, high bones: relief.

Her composed elegance, in her customary pew, hymnal opened on her lap: relief.

The marigolds bordering the moon garden, her recipe for preventing pests: relief.

Her presumptuous reach into the spice cupboard, a fistful of oregano added to his kettle of pallid spaghetti sauce: relief.

He endures thoughts of Vivienne as a passed test, a measure of his focus as a man of God and his willingness to renew his vows on a daily basis. He respects his vocation more, not less, because of her. He is proud of his friendship with her and what it asks of him as a mature man with a calling. He believes he has come to embrace its complications.

Father
, she begins.

We’ve been friends for years, Vivienne. Do you think you could call me Mike?

I call you Michael in my head
, she says. At least, that’s what he thinks she says. He does not ask her to repeat it for fear he heard it wrong. His own head rings. When she speaks again, she calls him Father.

Tonight, as it happens, is also his own counseling night—once every six weeks he drives up to Bangor to visit with Jack Derocher, his confessor, an older man good at parish work. He talks to Jack about parish demands, his impatience at meetings, his annoyance with the housekeeper. He does not, as he suspects some of his brethren must, discuss doubts about God’s plan or presence. Who can doubt God’s plan or presence with Lizzy in the house? In the face of another unendurable loss, God waltzed Lizzy into this rectory, hung her red coat on the newel post, and let her stay.

No, he thinks, I’ve got no quarrel with God.

It’s an arrogant notion, Jack Derocher would say, to believe God selected you for special favors. But he does believe it, and because he does, he cancels his standing appointment. He would rather see Vivienne Blanchard tonight than Jack Derocher. He would rather talk about children, act like a family man, push up his sleeves, work the collar off his chafed neck, talk to a mother. So he switches on the lamp, admiring the pinkish light on Vivienne’s face.

I let her stay up till eleven last night making a leprechaun trap
, he says.
Her eyes were nearly swollen shut this morning when Mrs. Hanson came in.

Did you catch one?

Not yet. Maybe tonight.

Vivienne smiles.
Children love to stay up late
, she tells him.

I can’t seem to put my foot down, Vivienne.

Oh, so!
she scoffs.
She has all her life for people who put their foot down. You go ahead. You keep your foot right where it is.

This is what she says to him, all the time:
You go ahead.

He is not without friends. But Vivienne is the only person he knows who appears to believe he is really a parent. He shows her the trap, a shoe box decorated with crepe paper and green glitter. Her head bobs a little, her hair shivers in the light.

Vivienne inspects the leprechaun trap, then puts it down, turning suddenly formal, distant.
I wish to talk about Ray
, she says.
I have nowhere else to turn. I require advice.

Something curdles within him. He waits. He does not yet know that he will come to her house one night and find her eye blackened, but the foreknowledge resides in his head already, for he expects her to say something about violence.

Instead, she comes up with the words “marital intimacy.” The term fills him with dread, though Vivienne is not the first woman to confide in him this way. He has talked about this with his brother priests. How do we advise wives and husbands? We, with the experience of eunuchs!
We’re choirboys!
Poulin booms over a card game, throwing back his head and showing his fillings.
Choirboys masquerading as grown-ups!
He laughs, slapping the table, four aces, no doubt, quivering in the opposite hand; he laughs when winning.

We know plenty about commitment
, Leary likes to retort, defensive and (few people know) thinking about “jumping the league,” Jack Derocher’s words for leaving the priesthood.

Who understands commitment better than we do?

We’re more than qualified.

You do fine
, Poulin concedes, letting them down easy, a bitty little token before he fans his winning hand and collects their quarters.

And he
has
done fine. Indeed he has. He is a fine priest!

But this?

Vivienne hugs her stomach.
Having Buddy was not easy, Father. I’m not yet myself again.
Her voice, even in its wavering, contains the clarity of a spoon tapped against a fine glass.

His tongue swells. He offers her silence.

I fall tired so often, Father
, she tells him.
I find some obligations of marriage difficult to fulfill.

What he wants to say:
A kick in the nuts should do the trick.

What he does say, without inflection:
Marital obligations apply to both husband and wife.

This is more or less the party line, a point he addresses perfunctorily when preparing young couples for their sacrament. Tonight he sounds not only embarrassed but cloddish and unprepared.

Is he drinking?
he asks, clumsily. He can’t even say Ray’s name, and it occurs to him in a knife-slash of shame that he is afraid of Ray Blanchard. He finds Ray at early Mass on occasion—Ray considers it lucky to pray before going to sea—and when he places the host into Ray’s sea-scarred hands his concentration breaks.
The body of Christ
, he says to his neighbor, and his neighbor responds
Amen
with a throaty, early-morning rumble that borders on—what? Is it disrespect, the way he snatches Christ and chews him? Is it presumption? The ritual changes then, feels rote and hollow. Because of Ray and his manly bluster. Ray and his ice-blue eyes. Ray and his idling truck weighted down with metal hooks and coils of bristly rope and mysterious clanking tools. Only two days ago, as the farmhouse filled with Vivienne’s sisters for Bernard’s birthday, he heard Ray, smoking on the porch with one of the brothers-in-law:
Father likes to stay inside with the women.
Said in that same throaty rumble, without a jot of rivalry, or envy, or suspicion; said, instead, with a throw-away humor, the way one would speak of, or dismiss, a boy.

Vivienne’s head picks up.
I can certainly refuse him when he’s drinking, Father.
Not a question, this: an instruction. She frequently instructs him.

What he should say:
Is he hurting you? Do you need help?

Does he?

What he does say: Nothing.

He offers nothing, sitting like a potted plant, a root-bound ornament, behind the prissy shield of his desk. Heart flapping, he offers not a word of counsel. He will not pick up the
edge of the rug she has dragged in here. He will not peer at the dirt and then be obligated to start sweeping.

Vivienne sees this before he does, to his great chagrin.
It was only a little question
, she says, backtracking, shepherding both of them back to safer ground.
Just something I wondered about. My sister, same thing. Wives get tired. Men, they don’t know.

In the ideal
, he says,
obligation is something the husband and wife work out for themselves. It should, in the ideal, be part of the communication in a good Catholic marriage.

Yes, yes
, she says, dismissing him. His irrelevance stays his throat.
I work toward a good Catholic marriage
, she adds, unsmiling.

He has helped other husbands. Prayed with them. Listened to them with patience and compassion. Neutralized their anger and frustration. Sent them to programs. Shamed them, even, into becoming better husbands, more devoted fathers. He could name five men, right this second, who changed. But they did not have Ray’s sunburned swagger, Ray’s whiff of the street. They did not make him feel pale and cloistered by contrast. Like a nun.

Ray believes in God. Ray could be helped.

Why does his will fail him? A surreptitious inventory of Vivienne’s exposed skin shows not the slightest bruise, merely a creamy, uninterrupted sweep, save for her calloused hands.

Anyway.
In this sudden, hooded silence, Vivienne decides not to tell.