Any Bitter Thing (17 page)

He knows this. She knows this.

They sit uncomfortably in this weird intimacy. It will be another two years before he rattles the latch on her kitchen door and finds her holding a bag of peas to her punched eye. There he will be, thoroughly unmanned, carrying a cake.

It will be two years, but he knows already.

At the back of his head, far enough back that he can barely ascertain it, a thought flitters, a faint pumping: If Ray Blanchard became a good husband, then—?

I do not want another baby with him
, Vivienne says suddenly, her voice a twinge in the charged air. It is a voice he has never heard from her: heartless.

With him
are the words that reverberate. Everything she says seems to take on double meaning. If not with him—? goes the second faraway thought.

Pardon?
he asks, blinking.

Nothing, Father
, she says.
Forgive me. I act like the new mother and I should know better after three times, yes? It was just a silly question.

She gets up, smoothing her stomach. He lets her go. She will come back next week at their regular time. Ray’s name will not come up.

I am helpless.

I am helpless before you.

I require advice.

Because Vivienne Blanchard is so slight of frame, the girls, at nine years old, flank her at nearly her own height and weight. Lizzy has shot up over the summer, all leg, while Mariette carries her height in the torso, a strong-looking girl with her mother’s wavy dark hair. He sees the three of them gliding down the flattened lane between the pines and bramble and laden maples, three lovely creatures in fluid motion. This always happens when Ray goes away. Vivienne’s spine appears to loosen, all her flinching caution drains away. Mercifully, Ray is gone more often than not of late, and Vivienne’s body looks reclaimed, fully returned to loveliness, an ease of motion that the girls replicate to near perfection.

He watches them approach, and sees that Lizzy, too, will be a woman someday. With the precision of a hornet’s sting comes the recognition that he has not prepared her.

Mariette calls out first, waving her bathing suit over her head. They are going for a swim. Now they are all calling—these three feminine specters—calling to him in varying, equally pleasing pitches. The little boys, comical afterthoughts thumping after their mother like a pair of boots tied to the tailpipe of a Mercedes, suddenly shoot ahead, hollering across the lawn to the short trail leading to the river’s bend. The water there is cold but tolerable, not too deep, far enough upriver from the mills that it runs clear. A massive, flattened boulder where they all like to sit is close enough to the house that he can hear the phone when it rings. Lizzy tears off to her room to change clothes, Mariette following; he hears Mrs. Hanson shouting directions from the laundry room
—Not those towels, take the ones in the basket
—as he follows Vivienne down the trail after the boys.

They sit quietly, watching Buddy and Bernard, who have been told to stay close to the bank but can’t be trusted. Their eternally skinned knees recall his own tumbling boyhood. Ray plays too rough with them, he believes. Secretly, he hopes that Vivienne brings them over here to show them a different way to be a man.

Only recently has it fully dawned on him that he and Vivienne are raising their children together. And as Lizzy gets older, he needs Vivienne more. A week ago, in civvies and blistering with shame, he bought a copy of
Our Bodies, Ourselves
at a Bangor bookstore. The title alone mortifies him, but how else is he to introduce even the most rudimentary topics of a female’s physical development? Surely he requires more information than he can glean from this embarrassing book (whose graphic illustrations of fully developed women torture him in all the tiresome, predictable ways) and a stash of articles on the sexual development of girls that he has hidden—
hidden
, for God’s sweet sake—beneath his socks and handkerchiefs. For months now he’s been lifting copies of
Seventeen
from waiting rooms, looking exactly like the kind of reprobate he must now find a way to warn Lizzy away from.

Vivienne
, he begins. Fortunately she’s got her eyes on the boys, and so, with a sigh, he confesses the subject that worries him through sleepless nights. He tells her about the book.

I don’t know where to start
, he tells his friend.

Vivienne keeps watch on the children, and her mouth does not move, but he can see how she is struggling not to laugh. He feels, maddeningly, like a child himself. Since his refusal to brook the topic of Ray two years past, there has evolved a subtle shift in their relationship, a reversal that completed itself on the first night of this very summer, when he arrived at her kitchen door with a cake in his hands and found the children crying, the dog cowering, Vivienne emerging from the shadows with a bag of peas pressed against her eye. Though he saw to her, after a fashion, bundling her into the car and whisking her off to a doctor who stitched her eye, he was the one who felt seen to, for she allowed him to minister to her without once mentioning Ray’s name. And Ray made himself easy to forget, grabbing every fishing trip that came up, giving wide berth to his family. Her eye healed as the desire to forget spread across the two households. Now, with her cheek restored to its former smoothness, she comports herself just as before—except for a slight, oddly appealing defiance that makes ordinary speech seem rehearsed and ordinary tasks appear choreographed. A bystander would scarcely notice, but there it is: The parishioner has found her own priesthood. He has achieved what he so often publicly wished for—obsolescence. That was the night she ceased to call him Father.

And yet she courts his company, and in her company he feels renewed.

I feel foolish asking, Vivienne. But she’s nine years old and knows nothing about—about certain things.

Now she looks at him. Blood rushes straight up his neck and deep into the roots of his hair. He envisions Ray’s hands on her breasts, his mouth at her neck, then flings the thought away.

I’m afraid I’ve kept her too innocent
, he says.
When she was four I told her babies came from God.

Don’t they?
she says. Her bright, dark eyes strike him mute. Finally she laughs out loud.
Lizzy knows where babies come from, Michael
, she says.
Don’t worry! You think those girls never talk to me?

Lizzy and Mariette are working their way down the bank, tiptoeing over the dirt and rocks, bare-limbed and summer-tanned and wearing bright swimsuits on bodies that are short of puberty but nonetheless seem to have transformed—this very summer—from young girl to young lady. Young lady. How in God’s sweet name does he plan to raise a young lady?

Besides
, says Vivienne—as the girls explode into the water, spraying a geyser of river foam onto the howling boys—
there is no such thing as being too innocent.

But
, he says,
certain matters are unavoidable. She’ll be maturing. Certain matters will have to be addressed.

Vivienne smiles generously.
On her next birthday I’ll bring over a package of sanitary napkins
, she says.
She can keep them in her bathroom. Then, when the time comes, you can have a calm and peaceful day.

I won’t have a calm and peaceful day, Vivienne
, he says, his blushing now so intense it causes physical dismay.
How can I ever have a calm and peaceful day? I have to prepare her to live in the world as a mature woman. What do I know about living in this world as a mature woman?

You don’t have to know
, she says.
I know. Besides
, she adds, patting his hand:
We have plenty of time.
Then, as an afterthought that washes him white with relief, she adds,
It’s not just you, Michael. Men are no good at the talking.

The phone rings from the house, and he scrambles to his feet, sighing inwardly. Somebody else needs him; someone he knows (or doesn’t) is in mourning, or in labor, or in trouble.

Mrs. Hanson hands him the phone. She’s been washing clothes, so the receiver is wet and smells of bleach. She is brusque, and he guesses the reason: At the Sunday ten-thirty he called everyone with a July birthday to the communion rail and led a chorus of “Happy Birthday.” The children were delighted, and others, too. But it’s the very kind of thing some in his parish detest.

Some people don’t get birthdays at home
, he tells her.

She counters pleasantly,
We’re God’s children, Father, not God’s spoiled brats.

He brisks away, to take the call in his office.

It’s Frank Flannagan—Monsignor, now—from the Chancery, a functionary who was a pastor in Aroostook County before his rise through the ranks. Flannagan’s made no small hints that he doesn’t approve of the circumstances at St. Bart’s—nor does the present bishop, whose predecessor, a soft-hearted, grandfatherly soul who held Lizzy on his own lap after approving the unorthodox arrangements for her guardianship; nor do other church officials, who go unnamed. Flannagan’s call feeds a generalized paranoia that has begun to dog him: the feeling that his brotherhood has shrunk since he became a father, small
f.
”

By how much, or in which quarters, he has no way of knowing.

Reflexively, he counts his friends. There’s Matt at St. Dom’s, Bob at St. Stan’s; there’s the bunch he plays cards with once per season. Loyalists all. And he relies on Jack Derocher at St. Pete’s in Bangor. Once a year he has dinner with Luc Bellefleur, who jumped the league two years in and now meets God in a fifth-grade classroom in Peekskill, New York. He finds time for these people, and others, too, parishioners and colleagues who open their homes and their hearts, they really do. He has cleared an impressive amount of room in a life designed for one.

But in fact, Vivienne Blanchard is his only true friend.

We’ve had a complaint
, Flannagan says on the phone. The complaints are always anonymous and strike the same sour notes. Father Murphy is not present enough to this congregation. He appears distracted by his other duties. He cut the number of weekend Masses. He missed three council meetings in a row. He posted office hours—posted hours! like a dentist! or a hairdresser!

Other pastors, one-man bands like himself, have resorted to the same tactics simply to find time for reflection, for stillness—for
God
, dammit. Do their personnel files also bulge with complaint?

Too much father and not enough priest
, says Flannagan.
A little more focus, Mike. This isn’t coming only from one quarter.

Yes indeed. Thank you, Monsignor.

Do you need anything, Mike? We have a regional retreat coming up. I could send somebody up there to fill in.

My spirit is in fine shape, Monsignor. God and I are getting along famously.

And this, he thinks with a quiet whoosh of joy, is the plain truth. He is close to his God and sure of his mission, despite coming to service in the rancorous aftermath of Vatican II. Scores of his brethren have since abandoned their posts, but he harbors no such desire. In seminary he learned the Mass in Latin with his back to the faithful, but when the time came for him to take up service he found himself face-out, speaking English to a room bejeweled with the gleaming eyes of a waiting assembly who, he believed, wished him well.

He believes he has done right by his congregation. Spend some time every day in the silent company of God, he exhorts them. Is this so difficult? Is the presence of God so terrifying that you can spare no time?

But not everyone wishes to become his own prophet of God’s word, as it turns out. Not everyone wishes to find his own
priesthood. And, frankly, Vivienne reminds him, sometimes he can be a nag.

In this one way, he is old-fashioned. People think he came from another place and time.

Which he did.

Others think him an upstart. In his weekly homily he flaunts his taste for the theatrical, not above crooning a few bars of “Lean on Me” as the springboard for a meditation on friendship under pressure.

Who’s your confessor?
Flannagan asks.

Jack Derocher at St. Pete’s.

You want someone else?

Why would I want someone else?

Well, nobody wants an unhappy parish. Maybe you’re not getting the best advice.

There are some unhappy people here, Monsignor. It’s not an unhappy parish.

He wants to add:
I’ve inherited eight families from that windbag across the river because I know the difference between preaching and anesthesia.
But considering the hot flash he experienced in Vivienne’s company just now, he decides not to add the sin of pride.

He hopes God can laugh with him about this later.