Any Bitter Thing (26 page)

Outside Allentown he stops at a Citgo, not because he needs gas but because the road has begun to change shape before his eyes and he hasn’t eaten in two and a half days. Nothing but a few sips from the drinking fountain in the hospital lobby, a glass of water pulled from the bathroom tap in the motel. He buys a hot dog from a boy at the counter, gets back into the car. When he stops again, this time for gas, he realizes the hot dog is gone and can only assume that he is the one who ate it.

Then, a stretch of land in northern Pennsylvania that reminds him of Prince Edward Island.

No strangers to grief
, people once said of his family.

But he was, as it turns out. He was a complete stranger to grief.

A few miles past the Ohio border, at the crest of a long, ambling hill, sits a country church: copper cross, white clapboards, medium-sized parking lot, tidy house with an add-on office. It is so open to the sky and fields that he already believes in the benevolence of the man who lives there, but not until he pulls in does he recognize this church—St. Anne’s—as the place he stopped the last time he took this very journey. He’d found his car in the Baltimore parking lot, feeling poised and calm and guided. They had given him medication—what, he didn’t know. He stashed his few belongings in the trunk, and headed north. He arrived in Maine seven hours later, mailed a letter to the Chancery, shut his bank accounts and transferred everything to the modest trust
left to Lizzy after the death of her parents. He kept two hundred dollars for himself, then turned around and drove south again, over the same highways. In Pennsylvania he switched to the side roads—more hills back then, more untouched land, but the same journey, the same instinct for open land propelling him. He had been a man with nothing left but his own name. He had shed everything: his family, his home, his vocation. But he found himself unable to resist that simple church, its doors opened to the broad, sunny day, and after a time a priest strode in—a young pastor like himself, engulfed by duties that had taken him by surprise. The pastor raised his eyebrows in a question, which he answered by saying:
My name is Father Mike Murphy.
A priest once, a priest always. A permanent vow. They shook hands, the other priest saying nothing about his colleague’s demolished eyes, his growth of beard, his gnawed fingertips.
Hungry?
he asked. After supper, this kind priest offered to hear his confession.

I abandoned a child
, he whispered, risking forgiveness at last.
But this is not all of my sin.

On his last day there, he asked to use the phone.

Stop calling here.

Let me speak to her, Celie. Please. Five minutes.

They said you quit. Nobody knows where you went.

To purgatory, Celie.

A priest came here looking for you. Concerned, not that you deserve it. A nice man looking for souls to redeem.

Just let me speak to her.

Not for another twelve years. As you very well know.

Just so I can reassure her that I’m still—

This was my responsibility in the first place, but I didn’t take it, and look what happened. They told me everything, so don’t try to soft-pedal this to me. I should have taken the responsibility, I realize that, but I didn’t, and now here I am with this damaged—

Surely you don’t believe—

God is punishing me but good, and I won’t lay one more stick on my conscience.

I’m just asking for five minutes, Celie. Five minutes. She needs reassuring.

I told her you died. She thinks you’re dead because of your horrible heart.

You told her—?

I told the priest the same thing. You want to resurrect yourself, be my guest, but it won’t make a lick of difference for twelve years.

One minute. You can time me. Give me one minute.

You’re not to speak to this child until she’s twenty-one. That’s the agreement, that’s the legal agreement, you agreed. If you call again, if you show up here, if you so much as write a letter, I’ll report you to every authority in the United States of America and you can tell your side to a judge.

Panicked and speechless, he held the disconnected phone. In his head he shouted her name as surely she would be shouting his. Her name bled in his throat as he weighed his narrowing options. For a child like his—a stubborn, meddling, wonderful girl who brooked no compromise, for whom there would be no predicting how twelve years of severed ties might disintegrate her soul—would not his death be more bearable than years of separation? In his fever of grief and shame, he decided to grant her the mercy of a gradual forgetting.

And so he died. And took to the road, to endless driving and temporary jobs and years of misery that would bring him eventually to Frannie and her son and their oblivious consortium with a dead man. A walking tomb.

This very church, on this very hill. The moon is up, the trees silhouetting grandly against the empty, almost dark sky. He pulls in. Again. He knocks on the rectory door, finds an old priest, not a twenty-years-older version of the young one who opened the door back then, but a truly old man in his eighties
who could be retired right now had so many of his brethren not jumped the league.

Father Mike Murphy
, he says.

Or thinks he says. The world is tipping and pitching.

St. Bartholomew’s, Hinton, Maine.
That balm again, allowing him to engage properties of time that he had forgotten all about. It stands still. It moves backwards and forwards. It deposits a dozen layers upon a single moment. Standing on this tilting porch that needs paint and a new number for the door post, he can believe that nothing has happened yet. This feeling used to visit him during prayer.

If I could sit in your church for a while
, he says to the old man.
If I could compose myself.

The old priest leads his visitor to the church, which is well lighted and decorated with lilacs bubbling out of glass jars that look like the ones Vivienne used to bring into St. Bart’s when she was in charge of the altar.

Thanks, Father
, he tells the old man, who looks him over and asks,
Do you need to say a Mass?

He nods, and the old man, who knows a priest in distress when he sees one, leads his visitor to the sacristy, opens the door, shows him a drawer containing a tiny key that opens the tabernacle.

Everything’s laid out
, he says.
I’d stay, but I’m waiting for a pair of souls I’m trying to talk out of a divorce.

Not for years and years has he stood on this side of the altar, but the composing moment returns untrammeled, that instant calm, the silent white expanse of laid-out linen filling his vision, his mind, and what comes to him first is the Latin of his seminary days, and the memory of one of his first Masses, at a prison in Thomaston, and the inmate who grabbed his sleeve afterward, saying:
Father, I watched your face when you were foolin with the host, and I said to myself, Christ, this guy buys the whole works.

He’s become used to sitting in the pews, as a husband and stepfather, a parishioner like any other, and he believes in the liturgy still. But this is different, standing here, bent over the altar with his hands on the chalice. He remembers anew, believes anew, believes in a way no one can know except another priest who lifts the brittle white disk
—Do this in memory of Me
—the bread no longer bread, the wine no longer wine.

As a boy of twelve he believed wholly. A called boy, he believed. Time shifts and flitters, loops and flattens. He is fourteen, in spring, riding in his sister’s bottom-heavy Dodge Dart station wagon, hanging his head hard out the window, eager as a dog. Oh. His first whiff of Maine.

His sister calls to him, his big sister, Elizabeth, his beloved:
Get your face inside, Mikey, I don’t plan to lose you too.

Their mother, their father, their uncle, their baby brother, gone. He counts, too, the cats and dogs that vanished over the years, and Johnny-Boy, the crippled crow that patrolled his mother’s flower patch, yelling “Hi, Johnny! Hi, Johnny!” all day long. All of them gone, dust to dust beneath the furrowed earth.

They drive and drive. Maine is not beautiful in the way of Prince Edward Island. It is beautiful in a way he has not thought to imagine. He takes in the flooded sky, the changeable, spooling land.

Look how much life is left, he wants to say. Not in those words. He is young, tongue-tied, alight with possibility. He invents a sort of poetry for this place, naming everything he sees as a way of receiving it. His sister’s loaded car wends south along the shimmering coast, then inland, away from the water.
I’m sick of ocean
, his sister tells him, following a river in and in. They encounter furred ridges and tree-lined roads, purple valleys split by rivers. He glimpses the arrogant stacks of mills and factories shouldered into the landscape, senses a dropping away of farmland, ocean, the calm and rolling countryside they have left forever.

His sister slows down, creeping down a main street in a town upon a river, a shoe factory just across the bridge.
How about this?
she asks.

He spots a rock in the river, an emergent, gray-backed boulder. Upon this rock, he thinks, then blushes at his audacity. He is no St. Peter, but he will try.

He loves God. He is in love with God. There is nothing but God, and the state of Maine, and his sister.

Now I’ll have to find us a man
, his sister says, laughing.

So he prays and prays. At last they find him: Bill Finneran, a setup man at the shoe shop, his commodious Irish laugh the most enthralling of all his enthrallments. He doesn’t mind that the woman he wants comes packaged with a little brother. And why would he mind? She’s strong and redheaded, quick to kiss, looking for a place to land.

You learn to meet God everywhere, is what he was taught as a child in church, so he meets God here, in Maine, in this town on a river, the ocean many miles away but close enough to smell if the wind blows right. He meets God in the parish church that he will, years hence, be called to and then banished from. He meets God in Bill Finneran, who will become his brother-in-law and send him to college on the strength of a bank account stashed with overtime and moonlighting, who will welcome him back home eight years later and smile through the ordination rite in his ugly brown suit and applaud with hands stained orange with shoe dye. In time a baby will arrive, a new beginning named for her mother. They’ll call her Lizzy.

Okay then
, his sister says, halting the car. Factory, river, town.
What do you think, Mikey?

Meet God everywhere, is what he thinks, flush with certainty. Here at the beginning, on this clear spring day in the State of Maine, United States of America, meeting God seems easy. It is Elizabeth, after all—Elizabeth, his favorite—whom God spared.

Time is layering again, moving back and ahead simultaneously, expanding and contracting. Dressed in sweat-crushed clothes and a borrowed surplice he lifts the chalice, the consecrated host:
Do this in memory of Me.
God, my father, my savior, my every breath, I meet you. You who punish and forgive, You who weep and rejoice, You who have given and taken all I have, You who refuse to abandon me, You son of a bitch, my only friend.

He lifts his head as if to find his lost parishioners, Vivienne in front with the girls at each side, the little boys squirming on the lap of one aunt or another. Row upon row of fine faces, hymnals opened to the same white page, mouths opened to the same word of the same prayer. He can almost smell the wet coats and incense, hear the thudding of children’s shoes against the kneelers, Vivienne’s awkward vibrato, Lizzy’s effortful alto, the swaggering off-key stylings of the parish-council treasurer, the flutelike notes emanating from the kissed throat of Vivienne’s sister Pauline, who stands in the low balcony with the twelve-voice choir. In time’s layered way, his parents seem to be sitting out there, too, and the churchgoing farmers of his boyhood, and the complicated seminarians with whom he prayed and fasted in a city that spoke an effervescent French and loved dessert.

Outside, the stars begin to blink on. He thanks the old priest and resumes his journey, the road dark now, and winding. So little traffic here, off the highway. The road pleases him; the smallest sensation of pleasure, or remembered pleasure, reaches him through the air lock of his grief. He took this road on instinct. The codger’s route, Frannie calls roads like this. He can drive as slow as he likes, praying for his anointed child. It will take a long time to get home.

TWENTY

I opened the file in nearby Payson Park, where Father Mike used to take me after our twice-a-year shopping trip, or as my reward for waiting in a room with no books as he conducted church business in the Chancery. We liked to stroll the winding lanes, often all the way down to the cove to feed the ducks that snapped up the Cheerios we brought in wrinkled bread bags. The park had changed since then—cobblestones thrown over for asphalt drive-throughs, ball fields chain-linked into territories.

The file contained Father Mike’s resignation, a perfunctory note that nonetheless began,
With bottomless sorrow.
There were also a couple of letters between the Chancery and the Department of Human Services, and three transcribed interviews, each headed “Unofficial.” The transcripts—signed by a nun in the front office, everything prepared within the family—began with a set of names, each of which opened a flower of memory.

Monsignor Frank Flannagan, co-chancellor, Diocese of Portland.
Snowy beard and glittery blue eyes, Santa Claus in disguise.

Father John Derocher, pastor, St. Peter’s, Bangor.
High summer, hot weather, Father Jack arriving with a bottle of wine and photos from his trip to Italy.