Any Bitter Thing (7 page)

I have a problem of faith, Father
, says Vivienne, her small face pinkening.
I require advice.

He has always found the odd formalities in her English enchanting. The way she speaks makes him feel necessary.

She requires him.

He takes her hands, which are thin and hard, bony, but in a pleasing way. He squeezes her fingers, meaning to reassure, to appear older than his years.
Faith is not the problem
, he says, and she smiles, answering,
Faith is the solution.

Most Wednesday afternoons, just before supper when the girls like to play together after Mariette’s nap (Lizzy flat-out refuses to nap, ever), Vivienne presents to him a problem of faith, and they talk. Her questions interest him because, unlike the questions of his other parishioners, they strike him as a plea for a more meaningful life but not necessarily an easier one.

If God is always with us, as He claims, then why do we so often feel alone?

Do you often feel alone?

Doesn’t everyone, Father? Clearly God wants us to feel alone at times. There must be a reason.

What do you mean by alone?

Surely you know, Father. You of all people. Tell me where God goes when He leaves me.

He goes to me
, he tells her, smiling.
He says, Remind Vivienne Blanchard that I can exist in two places at once.

At these times, her problems of faith appear to be nothing more than an excuse to talk to somebody who is neither a child of four, nor her sisters who don’t know everything about her, nor her husband who doesn’t listen. This, to his private satisfaction, is something he gleans between the lines.

Not that she tells him much.

He is thirty-three years old, flatters himself that he looks forty: permanently windburned from all those seasons on the Island, his skin exudes an illusion of experience. Despite his toughened complexion and the auburn stubble he has to shave twice a day, during his first years here the parishioners treated him like a little boy. He came to St. Bart’s as a freshly minted curate, straight-shouldered and long of limb, consigned to the tutelage of Father George Devlin, the mulish, much-loved pastor whose sole concession to Vatican II was to say Mass in an English so grudgingly unintelligible that a good third of the congregation didn’t notice the switch from Latin. Night after night, Father Devlin installed himself at the dinner table, masticating one of Mrs. Hanson’s overcooked pepper steaks, wondering loudly what in heaven’s name the Church was coming to. After one of the teenagers in the parish youth group asked to do an interpretive dance for the Offertory, Father Devlin abruptly retired, leaving his understudy in the thankless position of reviving the headliner’s beloved and long-running role.

Because he was young—the youngest pastor in the diocese, a point of pride for the congregation—they treated him as a mascot, a class pet, the freckle-faced boy who had followed his beneficent older sister into the bosom of the Hinton Valley. Among the first seminarians to be ordained in a hometown parish, he had made his vows in this very church, prostrating himself before the Almighty and the bishop and this same congregation, light-headed from incense and suffused with the most exquisite joy and submission. At the reception they pressed upon him like so many uncles and aunties, balancing tea cakes and punch as they pinched his hands and patted his back, wishing him well on his first assignment as a prison chaplain and hoping aloud to get him back as their own pastor. That wish came true—it was his wish, too—but he’d become a man in the meantime, to no one’s notice. Even when officiating at a wedding, or following a slow-moving casket out of the church into a bright cold day, he felt their sticky indulgence:
Don’t worry, Mikey, you’re doing great. And people do improve.

That was then. With a child in the house he can no longer be their child, thank the Lord. They look at him differently now. Askance. He senses their discomfort—at a parish-council meeting, say, or during a homily in which he invokes one of Lizzy’s childhood milestones. He’s good at reading faces: They doubt his commitment.

They think: That kid takes too much time.

They think: How does he give her a bath?

They think: At least there’s a woman in the house.

But Mrs. Hanson keeps so busy. She is pleasant enough, attentive toward Lizzy but not especially affectionate, closer to General MacArthur than the Mary Poppins he might have wished for. Surely Lizzy must find comfort in her cushiony figure, her graying hair, her female presence in these bachelor rooms. Mrs. Hanson drubs Lizzy’s hands every afternoon before
she leaves, scuffing under the nails as if sending him a message. Lizzy seems not to mind being tended like livestock, and he cannot help but believe Mrs. Hanson knows something he doesn’t. Everyone else seems to.

Lizzy and Mariette have lined up all of his shoes on the coffee table. The girls are four years old, it’s a snow-gray afternoon, and they’ve transformed his parlor into a make-believe shoe store. Mariette plays the salesman, Lizzy the customer. She follows Mariette’s instructions, tying the laces over and over—a triumph he mentioned just last Sunday as a metaphor for perfecting the act of prayer. His oratory is a vanity he fights to control. He registers with glee the upturned faces, the unswerving eyes, none of the rustling or coughing that accompanies Joe Poulin’s tone-deaf bromides or Stan Leary’s syntactical rotaries and culde-sacs. St. Catherine’s, across the river, is a two-man parish with a school and convent and a spired church made of fieldstone and blue glass, yet he has spotted some crossovers slipping into his pews on Sunday. No matter the few (unimportant, he hopes) misgivings about his loyalties, when he preaches people sit enthralled. He brings God to them in his own best way—through his vanity, truth be told—and they cannot resist. He would gladly have become an actor, had God asked.

But God asked no such thing. A scent wafts into the house through an ill-fitting window, a weak premonition of spring whose origins he can’t guess; it brings back his boyhood in a sudden rush: the high Masses, the silent adults, the quilted fields and golden haystacks, the surging, suggestive seasons. He knew nothing of men and women. He witnessed the workhorses, the dogs in the lane, a pair of doves on the weathervane, and wondered about the world of the body, that strangest manifestation of God’s glory. He discovered his body in secret, marveling at its shudders and heat, peeking sidelong at the girls in the school-house, throat afire.

Of course he did. He was a boy. But he found something more powerful than the body’s wonders, something more marvelous and astounding.

God called him.

It happened in the north field, just after planting, the red furrows with their promise of potatoes, his uncle’s tractor at the far end, parked beside the lilacs. The sky, starched flat and white as a pillowcase, thrilled him. He looked into it and found the face of God bearing down. Like St. Paul being knocked off his horse, he fell to his knees, crying out, his body vibrating with news. He rushed to the house, past the stone cap of the well, over the flattened front steps and into his mother’s kitchen. The fragrance of molasses filled the drafty room.
I’ve been called
, he told his stunned mother, who was months from dying, her vine of cancer almost fully bloomed, the bad luck of this family a whisper down the long, long lane. But he did not yet know this. His sister, Elizabeth, who did know, wiped her reddened hands on a dish towel.
Tell us.

Light carpeted through the dusty windows. His mother had been spooning cookie batter onto tin sheets, and now her hand stilled, the spoon suspended and full. The stove glowed. For the moment, the family’s impending grief waited politely outside the door. Tears pearled on his mother’s cheeks, for she knew, as everyone did, that the mother of a priest goes directly to heaven. He often imagines her there, basking in the grace of her son’s vocation.

Look what our smart girls have done
, Vivienne says, casting a bemused eye over the pretend merchandise: the black Keds he wears in the garden, the shiny wingtips he saves for high holidays, the flip-flops he takes to the beach. She raises one winged eyebrow, sliding him a look, parent to parent. This thrills him.

But he wonders: Should Lizzy always play the customer? Shouldn’t he be teaching her to be less accommodating?
Children need rules, Father
, is Mrs. Hanson’s stock answer to questions he’s given up posing.
My Rosie always had rules.
He longs to ask Vivienne, whose every maternal motion he examines like a map of heaven. Sometimes she is brusque with the children, all business. At other times her face loosens, her hair swinging like a girl’s as she turns to answer one of their endless questions.

Her ladies’ magazines gather on his desk. Clipping recipes and columns, he commits to memory the tips on child-rearing, window-dressing, fruit-arranging, bathroom-disinfecting. With Mrs. Hanson on board he finds little room to implement his ideas, unable to get past a certain awkwardness with this housekeeper who used to put supper in front of him only after Father Devlin had been pointedly, deferentially, served. With Father Devlin now gone, she guards her history, an impulse he understands. Her former tenure in this house lives on: those humdrum, codified years. No longer live-in, having been relieved of supper duty (sent home now at three), Mrs. Hanson nonetheless keeps the laundry a secret, the cooking a mystery. The disposal of trash resembles a multistage exercise worthy of a world war. She keeps the pantry in stern order, a barracks of soup cans and cereal boxes. Phone messages are recorded on coded index cards placed
—this way, Father, not that way
—into a converted recipe box. Her absence on Tuesdays and Saturdays turns him giddy and slightly panicked, as if he were a soldier absent without leave.

Buy some shoes, Maman!
Mariette calls, installed officiously behind the coffee table. Lizzy grins, picking up his black Keds and thrusting them into Vivienne’s arms. She plays the salesman convincingly, he notes with relief.

That’s enough
, he chides gently, embarrassed by his shoes. Not one of them resembles the glossy, clean-smelling moccasins that materialize from Vivienne’s hands every week.
Maman is here on a spiritual matter.

Vivienne frowns.
Surely I have time to buy one shoe.
She
produces two quarters—from where? his smelly shoes? how does she manage always to produce exactly what they need?—and drops them into the girls’ pink palms. Vivienne puts the shoes back, pretending to eye the remaining merchandise, then examines things that are not for sale: his sister’s glass bookcase, the uncomfortable rocking chair, the plain white curtains, the three cats.
Not for sale! Not for sale!
the girls holler, pushy and self-important, which makes him laugh.

I was looking to buy a badger
, he says, joining in.
Do you sell badgers?

No, Father Mike! We sell shoes!

Earmuffs, then?

No-ho-ho-ho!

How about a nice little tub of snails?

Besotted by this game, Lizzy collapses on the sofa, so wilted by laughter that Vivienne bends to check her, bends slowly, since she is hugely pregnant. Lizzy is fine, eyes alert and focused, looking very much like her mother. In a brief time he has learned some things about children, but not nearly enough. Certainly a child requires a schedule, some discipline. In this arena he has not done well.
Spoiled
, he’s heard Mrs. Hanson tsk into the telephone.
Spoiled rotten.
He wants Vivienne’s opinion before cutting Mrs. Hanson’s hours any further than he already has. But he is unwilling to sound as befuddled as he feels.

The gloomy evening renders the parlor especially close, its leafy wallpaper encasing the four of them briefly as the girls settle down again, adding items to their store, recruiting Fatty, the only willing cat, to serve as an extra customer.
Play nice
, Vivienne warns them.
Be nice to the kitty.

He invites Vivienne into his little office, leaving the door ajar. She sits down gingerly and hugs her blooming belly. He is hoping to pick up their discussion about the presence of God. After their talk of loneliness they concluded that God is
most accessible to us in extremes—when we are in great need or in great bounty—and almost invisible in our daily endeavors, when we feel neither completely empty nor completely full. How can God seem most absent when we are doing exactly what He wants? They talked a long time about this, and now he would like to know how she has sorted out the paradox.

Instead, she has something else on her mind.

Must a good Catholic follow all the laws, Father, even the stupid ones?

Nothing she says insults him. She speaks without irony when she speaks of Church law. She wishes to be a good Catholic, to live a Christian life, to raise Catholic children and die anointed. In this way she is unlike most of his parishioners except the very old; most of them come to him wanting loopholes and shortcuts and permission to remarry. They want from him the minimum required to please their grandmothers. They expect their wedding rite to include a high Mass that will become their last memory of receiving the Eucharist. In two years they will bring a baby to be baptized in a Red Sox outfit and running shoes.

The stupidest laws, in Vivienne’s view, are the ones governing birth control and the strict obligations of certain sacraments. He thinks she means the sacrament of Holy Matrimony but can’t be sure. What comes to him is a vision of Ray Blanchard hogging all the space in the marital bed, all the space in his wife’s body, Ray of the muscular forearms, Ray of the well-upholstered chest, Ray of the blue eyes his own sister once said reminded her of Paul Newman’s. When Vivienne wants to discuss the Church’s stupid laws, it is always just after Ray has left for the sea.