Any Bitter Thing (23 page)

“There’s something else, Drew.”

He looked at me.

“It’s about Father Mike.” I wanted to say, I’ve
moved on.
I’ve
snapped out of it. Time has healed all wounds.
I wanted to say,
Forgive me.

“You know what’s ironic?” he said. “After the accident, my big fear was that you’d lose your memory.”

“Drew—”

“Tell it to your boyfriend,” he said, swiping his keys off the dresser. “I’m going to see Charlie. Don’t wait up.” I couldn’t imagine anything more lonely-looking than Drew knocking on the door of Charlie’s McDonald’s after hours, the crew gone home, the grill cleaned, the yellow sign darkened for the night, Charlie fumbling with the lock to let Drew in. Two grown men in their own Hopper painting, sipping coffee at a booth in the window, talking about whatever men talk about. My name would not come up, because Drew did not speak of the things that most pressed him.

Before leaving, he paused at our bedroom door. “Lizzy,” he said. “You expect too much of me.”

The words landed hard. We flinched, each of us, at the bare, bald truth of our marriage:
You expect too much of me.
Two empty vessels hoping to be filled.

The Little Hours

NONE

SEVENTEEN

From
The Liturgy of the Hours:
This guilt of yours shall be
like a descending rift
Bulging out in a high wall
whose crash comes suddenly, in an instant
. . .

He is watering a lawn in Conlin, Ohio. A flat landscape. Flat and uninspiring in the weak light of early morning. Over the pickets of his fence—yes, a picket fence, and a twelve-year-old boy getting into the family car parked on the stiff sheet of driveway that smells of fresh resurfacing—he can see ten, no, fifteen houses, vinyl-sided and shallow-pitched, like his. This neighborhood, so like the watercolor neighborhoods from the educational primers of his youth, rarely fails to please him. At fifty-nine years old, he can hardly believe he landed himself here. In this evenness. This place of straight lines.

His wife, a husky, sandy-haired woman named Frannie, moves past him over the black, sealed driveway, her heels clicking
smartly. She has a boy to drop off, a hundred errands, then work. He envies her. Urgency is one of the things he misses about the life he once led.

They have been married five years now—five solid, blessed, uneventful years. Frannie likes having a husband; after nursing Alfred through his cancer, she seems glad to feel like a wife again. Frannie brooks no hesitation when it comes to second chances. She does not love him, he feels; but she likes him. They are friends. Every time he comes home at the end of an endless day, he feels rescued anew.

She gets into the car to drive her son to school. The boy is an easy boy who still misses his dead father. Before Frannie starts the car she unwinds the window, blows a big, cheery kiss. Her smile will sustain him over the next few hours. This is how he measures time.

He is due at work himself in two hours, though today will be a dark one. A nervous condition that comes and goes. Frannie understands. She knows that he used to be a shepherd of men, that turning into a sheep takes its toll.

His work, a cobweb of a challenge compared to what he once had, unfolds at the Good Deeds shelter in East Cleveland, a place for men who have fallen upon hard times: fallen down, fallen off, fallen away, fallen sick. He’s good at listening, and unlike the others who work there he does not tire of their tales of woe. Their putrid breath does not sicken him; their encrusted clothes make no impression. He doesn’t roll his eyes behind their backs. Without complaint he swabs toilets and traps rats and strips beds and boils rice, working like a man at Heaven’s gate. Sometimes he prays with the men, if they ask.

The phone rings from within the house. He shuts off the hose, wrapping it quickly. He leaves nothing unwrapped, uncoiled, unboxed, unhung. By the time he clamps the hose to its hook outside the garage, the phone has fallen silent and the machine does not engage.

His wife’s son calls him Mr. Clean. With affection, he hopes. He tries so hard to shelter them, to keep the gutters clear, the driveway shoveled, the roof sealed, the grass clipped. The fridge never wants for milk; the breadbox stays full.

The boy also calls him Dad. It’s not that he doesn’t care for the boy. It’s just that it is very hard to fall for a child, knowing how suddenly they can be lost. How suddenly abandoned.

The phone rings again. Bounding up the steps, he feels better. Movement always helps. For years he did nothing but drive, across the country and back. Twenty times, stopping here two months, there eight months, working just long enough to keep moving. On the twentieth return trip he stopped in Ohio, exhausted.

As he crosses the foyer he notices a curl in the wallpaper that will have to be re-stuck. He envisions exactly where in the basement he left the bucket of sizing and the tub of glue. The kitchen looks nearly beatified at this time of day: sunlight raging through the bay window, his plants a wondrous, living green. For a moment he misses the smell of an empty church. That feeling of just him and the Eucharist, that private, shared space.

He picks up the phone. Listens a moment. His shuttered past throws itself open. Smack in his face.

When Frannie comes back for her briefcase she finds him packing.

—A niece? she asks, befuddled. You have a niece?

—She’s had an accident.

—You never told me you had a niece. Who called?

—A friend. An old friend from there.

—I’ll go with you, then.

—No.

—No? What do you mean, no? Of course we’ll go.

David and I will both go. You’ll need us.

—No, no, he says, I can’t explain right now. He puts his keys in his pocket.

—You’re driving? To Maine?

—I can’t get a flight till tomorrow.

He stops what he’s doing, ticking off a litany of preventable catastrophes.

—Don’t forget to lock the patio door. Don’t let David leave his bike outside. I just had your oil changed, so you should be all set, carwise. Aaron’s covering for me, they put me on for the weekend so we won’t lose anything in my check.

—I lived without you for fifty-one years, Mike.

He stashes some shirts into a suitcase. The shirts are white, mostly; one of them is a pale blue. This wardrobe has been a source of merriment in the household, for he has never learned to dress as a layman. When Frannie withdraws from their bedroom—
clack, clack clack
, go her hurt feelings down the stairs—he steals into the closet and reaches into the back, unzips the garment bag wherein hang his blacks, two complete sets. Black jacket. Rabat. Shirt, slightly yellowed. Black pants. Cassock and collar. They still smell like home. On the floor, next to the black shoes, a small leather case containing the essentials for a sacrament he cannot bear to consider.

He must hurry. She needs a priest.

For a long time after he left Maine, he tried to make God forsake him. Alone and despairing, he determined himself unheard. Landscapes blinded him, sunrises mocked him, Earth’s abundance salted his wounds. Seven times a day he spit into the abyss, reading his Breviary with moving lips, repeating words that vanished into the ether. Driving endlessly, a long escape, endless and to no end. He found himself in large, anonymous cities, ducking into churches to hide and finding God there. Trysts, he thought of these impulses: illicit moments of undeserved relief.

—Who’s the friend who called? Frannie asks as he puts the one valise (a flight bag, they used to call these small black bags) in the trunk. She eyes the garment bag but says nothing.

—Her name’s Vivienne, he says. She was my neighbor back then.

—Back when?

—Frannie. I have to go.

She studies him, confused.

—All right, she says. Call me.

—All right. I love you.

—Me too. She kisses him briskly, her eyes wet.

He wants to explain, but where would he begin?

—I’ll pray for her, she says.

In his rearview he catches the worried folding of Frannie’s arms as she stands at the end of their straight, swept, blacktopped driveway in neat, safe, featureless Conlin, Ohio. He stops, backs up, rolls down the window, suddenly frightened.

—The roof is not going to collapse, Mike, she says wearily. The boiler isn’t going to blow. Now, go.

But the boiler
could
blow. A tree branch could smash through a window. The boy could come down with pneumonia, and he will be nowhere in sight. He starts out again, his rearview filling this time with the well-appointed house that, for lack of anything sturdier, will have to pass for shelter.

Fourteen hours and Maine appears, much changed after so much time. Clearing the tollbooth at the border, he finds more sky than he expected. More sky and fewer trees. Fewer trees, wider roadways, construction everywhere, the innocent land looking hacked and abused. He sucks in his breath, escaping at the first exit in search of a less violated route. In and in he goes, his Maine, his old life, his younger self appearing before him as the
road unrolls like a spool of remembered cloth.
God, my God
, he prays:
Is it here you have waited?

He is quaking now, feeling the old white light of divine connection, hands knuckled ferociously around the steering wheel.
God, my God, is it here you have waited?

He rolls down the window, inhaling: pine, hay, a small, agonizing thwack of ocean. He can barely drive for the din of blood in his head.

No one called a priest. It is up to the husband. The husband said: My wife isn’t Catholic.