Any Bitter Thing (20 page)

“The cups I had left over from Loreen,” he said. “She kept every other friggin’ thing we owned.” He examined one of them, as if looking for spots.

“Maybe you should ask her for another chance.”

“You wouldn’t say that if you knew how many chances she already gave me.” He handed me a cup—bright green china with a border of pink tea roses. “You’d think it was the drinking, wouldn’t you, but Loreen’s a funny one, it’s not the on-and-off wagon ride that got to her in the end. She says she’s gonna find a man who listens to her next time around.” He shook his head. “I’m
a piss-poor listener, that’s Loreen’s theme song. My daughter always said the same thing.”

“Actually,” I said, “you’re a very good listener.”

His face brimmed; it had probably been a long time since he’d felt complimented. “Huh. Well, it feels like one more goddamn second chance—you being here.” He stared at me over the rim of his cup. “Isn’t your husband kinda wondering what you’re up to?”

I felt caught, ashamed. “I told him you’re a shrink.”

“Hah! My
VA
counselor would get a kick out of that” He looked at his watch—a cheap Timex with a battered strap. “I charge by the hour, lady, so you better start talking. What have you got for me today?”

Stories. That’s all I had. I’d intended to proceed chronologically, to recapture as many of those lost days as I could, but the story broke down almost instantly, as stories will. On this day, as before, I told things out of order, feeling little hinge-clicks as the hour wore on, one memory begetting another from two years earlier or two years later, the narrative resembling not the straight line I might have been hoping for but a circle that hid its beginning and end. Despite this disorder, I felt landed, tranquil, the way some people describe the act of prayer.

For his part, Harry seemed to like being confided in. He kept at attention, his head cocked, as if he were not so much listening—though he was—as rehearsing for a role he was just beginning to believe himself capable of.

“She’s a piece of work, that housekeeper,” Harry said.

This is how he referred to the characters in my story. The priest. The friend. The friend’s mother. The housekeeper. Something about the way I told it. I sipped my drink, recalling Mrs. Hanson’s face, which in my memory appeared perpetually wronged, wearied by the changing world. “I thought she quit us because I defied her,” I said. “Kids are always making the wrong connections.”

“Adults, too,” Harry said. “Adults do it even worse. Take Elaine, she makes everything I do into an angle. Everything’s an
angle
with you, that’s the tune she’s been playing since she was eighteen years old. I make the slightest goddamn attempt to make up for my mistakes and she thinks I’m hitting her up for cash. So what happens is, I ask her to visit me sometime, and she’s thinking, okay, he wants cash, he wants cash, he wants cash, and I’ll be goddamned if it doesn’t pop into my head to ask for cash out of spite, and so I do, and there’s her jackass jumped conclusion all tied up in a bow and handed to her on a velvet cushion.”

“I thought you hadn’t seen her in years.”

“Yeah, well. Time doesn’t move too fast when it comes to Elaine.”

She seemed to be with us that day. Harry had gotten into the habit of moving his few sticks of furniture around, and on this afternoon, he’d placed her picture, the snapshot in the frame, on one of the windowsills. As I talked and her father listened, she stared out at us, eyes alight.

Just then a motion sensor from the facing building snapped on; a wide swath of light teetered in through the big windows—the apartment’s one beauty—reminding me of an afternoon in some season where the sun made that same sudden appearance, slanting down on an oval of bread dough that rested on the kitchen table. It was a memory I loved because of its light and air, its aroma of molasses, its vision of flour clouding up from the dough as I patted it with both hands. Vivid and immediate, the memory nonetheless came disembodied. I couldn’t say how old I was, or what time of day we were in, or what I was wearing, or any other thing I did on that day or on the days leading up to or away from that single moment. I
could
say exactly how my hand looked making those clouds: Band-Aid on my pinky finger, fingernails newly clipped. I could say that despite its lack of context, this vision recalled
what childhood felt like—homey, fragrant, containing just enough surprise.

It wasn’t all one way. Harry told stories, too—war stories, mostly, from his stateside stint in the early years of the Vietnam War. He preferred high-concept tales heavy on hijinks and starring officious superiors shanghaied by their own arrogance. He often told the same one twice, with different endings.

“They did that on
M*A*S*H
once,” I said after a tale of a private mistaken for a major by a visiting colonel.

“Yeah, well. The army’s so goddamn boring, sometimes you have to borrow your stories.”

“You’ve told me plenty of good ones” I assured him.

“I took my first drink when I was fourteen and a half years old,” he said. “That’s pretty much the only story I’ve got.” He checked his watch. “It’s five-thirty,” he said. “You don’t want your people sending out for the Mounties.”

Each time I left there—passing over from such stillness into the teeming reality outside—I felt submerged, at an exquisite distance from the actual world. Telling felt like resting. I was resting. Just like Father Mike.

FIFTEEN

From
The Liturgy of the Hours:
Now my soul is troubled,
yet what am I to say:
“Father, save me from this hour”?
But it was for this very reason that I came to this hour.

September intoxicates him. Some lost memory of the Island drifts in on the bitten air: the rattle of leaves, the taste of apples. September! The natural world in full crackle, a rapturous harvest surfacing at roadside stands. The altar abounds with pushy, pie-faced sunflowers.

Though Lizzy’s return to school grieves him a little—fourth grade! can it really be fourth grade?—it also brings a thrill of newness. Mornings, she runs down the path to collect Mariette and wait on the road for the bus to St. Catherine’s, and he watches her go, colossally happy. Like Lizzy, he loved school. The four-room schoolhouse on the Island where every spring an exhausted blackbird winged through the open window
and flapped against the blackboard. The public high school in Maine where he had his own desk, all the paper he wanted, books he could take home and not give back till the term ended. Notre Dame, where he missed home so badly he hid in the field house and wept beneath the bleachers. He sought refuge in books, his big love—his own books, he owned them, a wonder in itself, all that Latin and philosophy and theology and mathematics, each guiding him toward a different possibility for his God-made mind.

At Notre Dame he abstained from alcohol, unwilling to enfeeble his percolating intellect, though he did go to parties. He was not an odd boy, just a committed one. His classmates liked him. He moved among them as a peacemaker, a storyteller, a pillar of dependability, already practicing for his intended life. His vocation revealed itself in his outer aura, obvious as the color of his hair.

Girls adored him, for he was green and guileless and kept his hands to himself. He liked them, too, their feminine company, and there were occasions, one or two, when he wondered whether he could make the big sacrifice when the time came.

At seminary he found more books, oceans of thought as yet unnavigated. He found learned men who did not fear irony. And some, of course, who did. He disappeared for hours, even days at a time, into the oiled mahogany carrels of the central study room—reading as meditation. He studied religion in general and Catholicism in specific, loving theory and practice in equal parts, reveling in the nuances of doctrine in transition.

Outside of the books and lectures, he discovered prayer. Real prayer, not the romantic notions of his fervid boyhood—God is my father, God is my friend, God is my protector.

No. God is not this, God is not that. God
is.

In his solitary hours at chapel, he came to understand that the opposite of God is not Satan. The opposite of God is not evil. The opposite of God is absence.

Perpetually present, he was; fully alive in body and spirit. A stupefied seminarian, throbbing with purpose, speaking French and Latin, afire with erudition and scholarship. Willing not only to make the big sacrifice (no wife no child no mortgage no garage no tools no physical refuge), but also the myriad little ones, the finely calibrated interpersonal adjustments required to maintain warm but reasonable relationships with both men and women. It didn’t seem so difficult a projection; he would have his sister and brother-in-law, after all, and his fellow priests. He believed these people would shore him up in the hours of spiritual darkness he did not quite believe would befall him but nonetheless felt required to anticipate, if only to maintain a modicum of humility.

On this first day of September, watching Lizzy run off to school with her hem flapping against each headlong step, he hopes she will also enjoy a life of the mind. Already she shows the capacity to encounter God every time something new reveals itself: long division, the order of planets. Lizzy will think her way to the soul, as he did, and discover it with her eyes open. She will not be called to a vocation—she’s awful at rules (his fault, he fears) and would make a terrible nun. Vivienne harbors a futile wish for Mariette to be called, but that’s only a mother’s impulse, the contemplative life the one sure path to prevent Mariette from finding a man like her father.

Lizzy will be no nun, he thinks, fondly. This summer, noticing her kindness toward the bratty baby brothers Mariette suddenly can’t abide, he has come to understand that Lizzy is the sort of person who will require an earthly mate. Already he imagines the man, intelligent and good-natured, a teacher or housebuilder. Already he envies him, the man who will guard Lizzy’s dreams.

He feels his vocation most keenly in September, too, everything starting anew as the ground begins to die. The church
hall humming with industry. The Daughters of Isabella planning the fall bazaar. The parish council prepping for a new election. The choir regathers, their rehearsal notes fluting into his open windows at suppertime. All this amidst the flowers’ last bloom before death and resurrection. He loves paradox, the best thing God made.

Looking across the moon garden—a final glory of physostegia, phlox, and white sedum—he imagines Lizzy and Mariette terrorizing some unsuspecting community of nuns, Mariette too bossy and headstrong, Lizzy unable to countenance supper at five, the two of them pulling up the community herb garden in order to plant something useless and beautiful. He chuckles, liking the sound of his laughter in the snappish, open morning. Intensely happy, he stands at his back door with a mug of coffee fisted into one hand, behind him the clacking of Mrs. Hanson doing up the breakfast dishes, across from him, at the other end of the path, the sound of the Blanchards’ door banging shut and the girls calling good-bye.

This is how that last season begins: a happy man with a calling, holding a mug of coffee and seeing a child off to school.

Later in the week, on Wednesday, the air gone brittle and the first leaves curling, he sets out for Bangor to see Jack Derocher. He’d prefer not to go, but has missed his last two visits. He likes Jack, but the thing that occupies his mind right now—nothing too pressing, just something he thinks ought to be mentioned—is not, he realizes while gassing up the car, something he especially wants to say to his confessor.

Along Random Road, the first wash of autumn gleams in the leaning trees. Halfway to Bangor, he gets stuck behind a line of cars. Construction, backup, men shouting to be heard over backhoes and cranes. The radio sputters irritatingly—he’s in one of Maine’s many dead spots, where hill and valley conspire for
poor reception—so he turns it off. He ticks his fingers on the wheel—like Lizzy he is bad at waiting. His parlor beckons, his chair and lamp, his stack of books and fleece slippers.

U-turn, and the smallest click at the back of his mind:
You’re afraid of confession.

He heads for home.

Since the house will be empty, he stops to eat at a family restaurant stranded along an ill-traveled stretch. A teenaged waitress serves him a platter of clams. He returns the polite nods of strangers, accepts the owner’s offer to cover the check.
Let me rip that right up, Father.
He feels full to bursting, foolish and punch-drunk, headed home, away from confession and toward Vivienne.

There. There it is, the notion forming into words. Words in the head, but still, there will be no taking them back. He wants to see Vivienne.

“I want to see her,” he says aloud, pulling out of the restaurant’s gravel lot. He takes in his breath—it sounds wet and unfamiliar—and now he does not know what is happening. Talking to himself (to a passerby he’ll appear to be praying), he begins a conversation with the safely absent Jack Derocher: