Any Bitter Thing (6 page)

“What is it?” he asked. “What, Lizzy?”

It was the smell of him—the drugstore shaving-lotion smell that to this day brings a wave of longing—that unloosed me. I began to wail, probably for my lost parents, and I wanted nothing but to be held all night by this poor, saddled man who had to get up at five for the early Mass. He petted my hair, told me my parents were watching over us, and Jesus, too, and our guardian angels, and that nothing else bad would happen. He promised.

“It’s a nightmare,” he said. “Nightmares are make-believe.”

“Can I sleep here, Father?”

“You can stay here till you feel better, and then I’ll take you back upstairs.”

“But I want to sleep here. Pleasepleaseplease.”

“I’ll carry you up. You just think about your guardian angel, that nice, big angel that’s going to sit by your bed all night long, and you’ll feel all better by the time we get you tucked in, I promise.”

“Why can’t I sleep here?”

“Because girls aren’t supposed to sleep in boys’ beds.” “But you’re not a boy.”

“Actually, Lizzy, I am.” That’s just how he said it, too:
Actually, Lizzy, I am.

“You’re
not.
Please, Father. Pleasepleaseplease.”

Most people’s memories do not go back this far. I was so small on this night I’m thinking of that I did not know girl from boy. So small that he could not refuse me.

He tucked me into his bed. He put me on top of his blankets, then covered me with a quilt. He then slipped back beneath the covers and kept his arm around me. This was not exactly the arrangement I wanted—I wanted to sleep under there, where he was—but it did the trick. I woke in my own room in daylight.

Waking in terror every few weeks, I fled down those stairs again and again, beelining for Father Mike’s bed. He picked me up, carried me back upstairs, talked me back to sleep, but after two or three more trips he’d relent and let me burrow into his bed. Who would blame him? Who would imitate the unique loneliness of the parish priest, no live-in brothers to buoy him, no wife to comfort him, no friend to stand with him on equal ground? He let a child into his bed, always arranging the blankets in that fussy chasteness, and let her take her comfort. What was he thinking, waiting for my breathing to slow, my quivering body folded against his? Was he thanking God for me? Was he wishing to be a normal man, a father who had to get up not to say Mass but to make first shift at the shoe shop or the mill?

I always woke in my own bed, no longer afraid. I believe he might have been trying to teach me something about solitude, though in a month’s time I would again barrel down the stairs and into his bed to fracture his sleep.

He let me do this at two years old. At three, and five, and eight.

And once at nine.

April first, the rectory buttoned up, our small town cloaked with the quiet of a late spring snowfall. At one point the plow made its lumbering rounds through our parking lot. The muffled night had been filled with shadows, and because I had come to him in a state of terror, not once but many times, he lay sound asleep, exhausted, when Mrs. Hanson opened the unlocked kitchen door. Normally, Father Mike would be up, coffee made, the paper open on the table; I would be drowsing down from my bed, waiting for Mrs. Hanson’s mushy pancakes or soupy eggs.

But she was early that day, and Father Mike was late. His bedroom door was open, as it always was. He had not moved me in the night.

In my memory the doorway fills with her face, mouth turned down like a hound’s, cheeks enflamed, eyes watery and shocked under her magnified glasses. I sat up, mortified, certain that her coiled face was a reaction to my childishness, a nine-year-old having come crying downstairs in the night. Nine years old! A big girl like that!

How ashamed I must have looked. How caught.

The rest she filled in herself.

Very slowly, with the patience of an uncoiling snake, an ugly story began to take shape in our town. Spring to summer to fall, it wound its way in near silence through the parish, an unseen
presence that finally struck—with no warning and no mercy—at the end of November. Father Mike guided me into his office after supper, looking glum and vacant. I took one of the stiff visitor chairs and gazed across at him. of course I was in love, the way all nine-year-old girls love their fathers. In his cassock and collar, with his swatch of red, untidy hair, he was handsome-man, perfect-man, daddy-man, mine-mine-mine. Women brought him apples and brownies; men fell out of their way to greet him on the street. Middle-aged millwrights came to him for spiritual advice, young parents asked him to bless their babies, the Daughters of Isabella cajoled him into singing “Mrs. Murphy’s Chowder” at the church bazaar.

Up until that fraught season, that is, when the rectory’s front door stuck in its frame, logy from disuse. There was an undercurrent in the parish, an emotional imbalance that I had no way of understanding.

“I couldn’t love you any more if you were my own child,” he told me that evening, sitting at his desk. His back straightened, and his fingers—nails bitten to tatters—rested lightly on the desk. Normally his declarations reached me like an umbrella opening inside my chest, but not on this night. He kept brushing back his lovely hair as if the very fact of it wounded him.

“I love you too, Father,” I said. And though I had said these words numberless times, I detected a change in my own voice, a foreknowledge that frightened me.

“I have to go the Chancery tomorrow, Lizzy. I might be gone all day.”

“I can’t come?”

“Not this time. You can stay with Mrs. Blanchard.”

“But it’s Buddy’s birthday. You said we could make a coconut cake.”

“I have to go, though. It’s a very important meeting.”

“With who?”

“Father Jack, you remember him.”

I nodded. When Father Jack visited I lay awake well into the night, in thrall to their loud stories and rips of laughter and clinking glasses.

“And Monsignor Frank, and maybe Bishop Byrnes.”

“What’s the meeting about?”

“Just Church business. Nothing to worry about”

“All right,” I said, worrying already.

He got out of his chair and onto his knees. “Pray with me, Lizzy?” he asked, and my first memory came back to me then, my uncle melting in his chair after unspeakable news, asking was it all right to cry. I scrambled to my knees, overcome by maternal fervor. He had a rosary in his hand; from my pocket I took my own rosary, which he himself had blessed on the occasion of my First Holy Communion. I laid my hand on his shoulder and let it warm there. We weren’t halfway through the second decade when my uncle began to weep. I clung to him, afraid he might fall. He got up, crushed me to his beating chest, and for a moment I thought we were about to dance, the way we did sometimes at parish weddings, my legs dangling free. But no, he simply squeezed the breath from me and put me down.

Early the next morning, before leaving for Portland, he gave me a real guardian angel, one he’d been saving for Christmas: a winged doll in sequined robes, sixteen inches high. It would be up to her to keep nightmares away, and in her glittering glory she appeared to be up to the task. After breakfast, Father Jack arrived, inexplicably, accompanied by a priest I knew just a little, and a pink-cheeked, nunlike woman who asked me a series of bewildering questions. The woman stayed with me that night, and when Father Mike finally returned, a day later, he was in the company of a monsignor whom I didn’t know at all.
I have to go away, Lizzy. For a little while.
His coursing tears silenced me. Within minutes, it seemed, he was gone.

The angel reposed on my dresser for the brief remainder of my time at St. Bart’s, a dark-haired doll with a porcelain face and large, dolorous eyes and wings fashioned out of real feathers. Her lips parted faintly, as if she’d been created in the midst of confiding a secret. I thought he must have retrieved her from heaven itself. Whenever I woke in those last blunted days, there she would be, this benevolent specter to whom I whispered each night before falling into feverish sleep. I could scarcely breathe under the weight of ending. Father Mike gone, the house so quiet you could hear the padding of cats, the light snoring of a kindly woman sent to supervise my last days there.

Your uncle went to a nice place called a retreat center. They’re going to help him there.

Help him what?

You’ll see. Everything will be fine
, she said to me, and it was the sad-eyed angel whom I beseeched, night to night,
When?
A week later, when I finally left there myself—that awful, high-cold day—my angel got left behind, and no amount of pleading could persuade Aunt Celie, herself reeling from the concussion of change, to drive back to Maine to reclaim her.

I believed I would never see her again, my shining, gold-threaded angel, but twenty-one years later, in my fog of recovery, she returned to me—her dark hair, her voluminous gown, her snowy feathers. She seemed to hover, warming the air, then stepped aside in a hush of wings to let him speak.

The Little Hours

TERCE

SEVEN

From
The Liturgy of the Hours:
The spirit of the Lord God is upon me, because the Lord has anointed me; He has sent me to bring glad tidings to the lowly, to heal the brokenhearted
. . .

His life is a pleasure for which he thanks God seven times daily, guided by his Breviary, a set of four prayer books bound in soft leather, one for each liturgical season. The Breviary contains the complete Liturgy of the Hours, a flawless scheme of psalms and canticles, inspirational readings, intercessions, scripture, hymns. Sometimes he sings aloud, sometimes he hums, often he whispers. Since his ordination he has woken each day to murmur the Invitatory:
Lord, open my lips.
Before breakfast comes Lauds, then The Little Hours: Terce at midmorning, Sext at noon, None at midafternoon. Vespers is said as evening falls, Compline in the dreaming moments before sleep. Sometimes he adds Matins, a prayer for the middle of the night, which has become obsolete for all but the occasional insomniac. Like any careful design, this
one offers more than one application: balm for the wounded, calm for the fearful, solace for the griefstricken, celebration for the blessed, inspiration for the ambitious. For him, in these radiant days of a dual fatherhood, the Breviary gives form to a free flow of gratitude.

Seven times a day:
Thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you.
He seeks holiness in the poorest moment, a fulfillment of his calling. Seven times a day, he consecrates time.

As Vivienne Blanchard knocks at the door for their weekly session, he recognizes that in some ways he is no different from the men in his parish who do shift work at the shoe shop or the mills. He never expected his life to resemble a layman’s, but like them, he has a child to raise, a job with routines. In all other respects his days resemble no one’s but another priest’s. Custodian of secrets, shepherd and steward, God’s stand-in, he opens the door to his neighbor and friend with the heady certainty of the chosen.