Bless the Child (19 page)

“And what of women? Or children?” she pursued. “Did the loss of family . . . of sexuality, and all its incumbent responsibilities, seem a great sacrifice to you? It’s very hard for anyone in the outside world to imagine choosing celibacy, Peter—it seems so self-abnegating, somehow. Forgive me, if that’s too personal a question . . .” Maggie wondered at her own audacity. “I’m only asking because I’d really like to understand . . .”

Peter didn’t answer her instantly. “It seemed enough to come so close to God, I think. It seemed a higher octave of the love between man and woman . . . a more celestial choice. And the Mass . . . oh Maggie, when I held the Host aloft each morning, I felt more blessed than any man on the face of the earth! And more fulfilled. I could not conceive of any human love ever bringing me such transcendent
ecstasy . . .
” He smiled a little self-deprecatingly. “I was young then. The liturgy . . . the Church . . . it was all so dazzlingly majestic and full of magic.”

“And when you grew older?”

He took a deep breath before replying. “I better understood what I had abdicated,” he answered. “Life chastens one . . . scrapes the meat from the bone. When you’re young, you think celibacy the great sacrifice—as you age you understand that the companionship of love is by far the greater loss. There are gradations to aloneness, Maggie dear. At first, I was alone with God and with my pursuit of wisdom—and that was fine, elitist aloneness. Then, somewhere, along the road, I reached a crisis of limitations. I came to feel isolated. Yet, after a while, even that was acceptable, for it gave me a chance to think, to hypothesize, to pursue my mystic bent . . .”

“And now? Surely your chastisement by the Church must have made you feel abandonment?”

Peter’s eyes met hers and she saw a rebellious sorrow there. And a hunger. She wondered what it was he hungered for.

“
Now
, Maggie,” he said slowly, carefully, “I fear I may have reached that most ignominious expression of all the alonenesses. I fear I am merely lonely. And growing old, of course, which is so much more fearsome a blight than one imagines in youth.”

Maggie laughed. She had a good laugh, Peter noted. A heartfelt sound.

“I once lamented aging to my father,” she reminisced. “I’d turned thirty-five and discovered I was mortal. I told him, ‘I haven’t found anything good about this stupid aging business, Dad . . . even the wisdom I’ve gained, I could happily live without.’ He just chuckled, and said, ‘Wait till you get to be my age, sweetheart. The memory goes, and you can’t even remember the wisdom.’”

They both laughed, but Peter saw there was moisture in her eyes.

“Tell me about him,” he prompted.

She thought a moment, before replying. How can you ever adequately describe a love so deep, so formative? “‘
My father moved through dooms of love,’”
she said finally
. “Through sames of am through haves of give, singing each morning out of each night my father moved through depths of height.’”

Peter smiled; so much about her was disconcerting. “So e.e. cummings understood best how much you loved and admired him?” he interpreted, and she nodded.

“‘I say though hate were why men breathe—because my father lived his soul love is the whole and more than all.’”
She smiled at the remembered love, and sighed.

“So you’ve been fortunate in your life where men are concerned?” he responded, moved by her odd turn of mind. Wanting to know more of her than he had ever wanted to know of any woman.

Maggie, chin tilted upward, face warm with memory, smiled as she answered, “My father and my husband were both wonderful men, Peter. Very human, very decent, and both quite rare, I think, in their capacity for loving kindness. Living without them, the world is an emptier, colder place.”

“And Cody fills that emptiness?”

“With joy and substance and continuity,” she replied. “I see them all in her, of course. The quick toss of her head, like a flash of sunlight through the trees . . . a smile, a gesture, can bring them all back to me, alive again for a heartbeat. I see Jenna in her often, even though they’re so unlike each other.” He saw the shadow of sorrow cloud her face.

“What went wrong?” he asked softly, compassionately. “If that’s too personal a question, don’t answer.”

Her eyes came up sharply, meeting his. “Not too personal, Peter, just too unfathomable. We were very close when she was small. I was unable to have any more children, so I lavished all my love and attention on Jenna. Maybe too much, I’ve thought sometimes since—maybe for anyone so doted on, the world can never again measure up to that remembered safety.” She shrugged at her confusions. “I’ve found that such speculation can be a treacherous, bottomless swamp.” She sighed eloquently. It was obviously a swamp she’d visited often.

“Then there was teenager-hood—she became terribly rebellious and unreachable. We thought, hoped, it would pass. Jack used to comfort me about the rebuffs . . . I would get so hurt, when she pushed me away . . .” Maggie’s gaze left Peter’s and seemed to fade into remembered pain. Her voice was less steady as she continued.

“Then Jack got sick, and we were ensnared in the endless downward spiral of cancer. Diagnosis, disbelief, desperate search for a miracle . . . you know how it goes. Then all those ghastly treatments that made life a living hell. Radiation. Chemo. Pain, suffering, terror. Anger at the doctors, Anger at Fate . . .” She looked up at him, needing comfort and, perhaps, absolution. He’d seen the need often enough to understand.

“It took Jack three years to die. Terrible, grim years. Afterward . . . when Jenna left, I tormented myself with the thought that I should have recognized her addiction sooner, should have fixed it
somehow
. If I hadn’t been so desperately trying to save Jack . . .” She let her thought drift off.

“Was there a history of addiction in your family?” he asked, wanting to ease her pain, to shield her from the unbearable burden of what might have been.

She nodded. “We were both Irish, Peter. What Irish family doesn’t have alcoholics in its closet?”

“There is a hereditary component, you know, Maggie. A genetic link that appears to encompass drug addiction, alcoholism, diabetes, depression, and certain kinds of mental illness. Some very substantial scientists are hypothesizing a biochemical imbalance predisposes some people to addictive substances, perhaps even addictive behavior.”

Maggie nodded; he could read easily the endless price that Jenna’s addiction had exacted of Maggie.

“Do you think you love Cody so much because you feel guilty about her mother, Maggie?”

“I’m sure people imagine that of me, Peter,” she answered ruefully. “But no, I don’t think so.” She smiled suddenly. “I love Cody for herself . . . if you knew her, you’d understand. For her love, and her laughter. For her goodness. For her responsiveness to every morsel of love I have to give. To think that my love for her is based on guilt would demean us both.”

Peter Messenguer had sat back in his chair as she spoke, listening carefully. Women are the strong ones. He had learned that early on in his priesthood. They endured, suffered, nursed, bore injustice. And somehow prevailed. How men have ever managed to perpetrate the lie that they were the stronger sex, he couldn’t imagine. From birth to death, women were the ones shoveling out the muck of the ages, trying to beat the odds of a lopsided game. Pulling the world behind them on the upward climb from the mire. Relentlessly struggling to change things for the better, while they defied the voices telling them they were second-best. Ask any priest what the world’s value system would be, if left to men, and you’d hear who was the cook and who the potato, as his Irish mother would have said.

“I’ve always admired women,” he said aloud, more to himself than to Maggie. “They manage still to
feel
through their scar tissue. Still to love. We men mistake their softness for weakness, I suspect. Or perhaps in recognizing their strength we fear it so much we must lie to ourselves and denigrate what we cannot match. Men are fools more often than not.”

Maggie heard the regret beneath the word, and wondered about its wellspring.

“You’re the odd man out, Peter Messenguer,” she replied softly. “I knew it all those years ago, when we were young. You fit no patterns.”

He laughed. “I think that’s what the Pope said when he reprimanded me.” It was so easy to talk intimately with this woman, he realized. It was so easy to share vulnerabilities. Tread carefully, Peter, he told himself. Tread very, very carefully.

An hour later, Peter dropped her off at her home on St. Luke’s Place.

“Where are you going now?” she asked him, concerned at the lateness of the hour.

“I’ve been asking myself that very question all evening, Maggie,” he replied quietly.

There didn’t seem to be anything to say to that, so Maggie bade him good night, and let herself into the darkened house that was her second skin. She stood there for a while, just inside the door, trying to find her center. Why did he unnerve her so, this lovely, lonely, interesting man . . . priest.
Man
. If he were not a priest . . . she said to herself, not knowing where the thought might end, if she let it. Afraid to know.

But he is a priest.
She said the words aloud. With finality.

Then she went upstairs to bed.

How
strange.
What was Cody’s Love Bear doing on the floor in Maggie’s bedroom? As if it had been dropped there moments before by a small hand. Puzzled, Maggie reached for the stuffed creature that was scruffy from so much love, and sat down on the bed, as a wash of memory engulfed her, and she was looking at the bear through a scrim of tears. . . .
Oh, my own dear love, where are you now? Who holds you close at night and soothes your fears?
How can you close your eyes without Bear to cuddle near your heart?

Maggie hugged the battered toy to her body, and began to rock with him, back and forth, back and forth, to that eternal rhythm that comes to mothers with their genes. The rhythm that binds and comforts and cures. The rhythm that binds the rocking ones into the endless continuum of love that is the strength of the ages . . . She could almost
feel
the weight of Cody in her arms; the trusting, loving warmth pressed close to her heart.
Oh God, she trusted me! She thought I’d never let her come to harm.

Maggie lay back on the bed, without undressing, locked in a kind of communion with the Love Bear. She simply couldn’t let him go . . . he was the only link. So, she curled herself into a fetal position, the toy still clutched to her chest, and wrapped herself around him,

After a while she slept.

M
aggie stared out her kitchen window; spring was trying to manifest against the odds. God, how she needed to see signs of life. Something . . . anything, to reaffirm hope.

Every morning for the last three days, she had telephoned Cody. And every morning, her call had been rejected. It wasn’t that she expected to get through, just that the thought of the child desperate and alone was so wrenching that even the futile act of telephoning was a connection, however slender
. I’m still trying, sweetheart
, it said.
I’ll never stop
trying.

Fear, dread, terror . . . how could mere words begin to convey the anxiety that tore at her gut? Fear for Cody. Fear, too, for herself.
I’m too small for this, God! Don’t ask this of me, please. I don’t know what to do.

She turned from the window; it was time to get to the shop; two major collectors were coming in this morning. She couldn’t afford to not pay attention to their needs. One large commission from either of these two men could make up for all the time she hadn’t spent on business, since this nightmare had begun.

Maggie sat at her desk, after the first of the clients had left, trying to get a grip on herself. It had been a good meeting, she was fairly sure she could produce at least two of the pieces Mr. Cox had his eye on, even if it took a little time to do so. It always warmed her to meet a collector who truly loved the objects he purchased as did this charming little man. “We, who are blessed by fate with money to indulge our desires, are curators in our own way, Maggie,” he’d told her. “We are stewards of God’s bounty, and must use it to preserve and protect that which is rare and beautiful.”

Maggie turned her gaze across the room to Amanda, who sat behind her desk, Mont Blanc pen poised imperially, as if ready to sign a treaty. Maggie need to talk to a friend.

“I have to keep reminding myself that Jenna has an
illness
that causes her to do these terrible things, Amanda,” she said suddenly, and her friend looked up, startled, concerned. “But I just get so furious with her when I think of her harming Cody, I forget that addiction is a disease.”

“It’s a disease all right,” Amanda a replied, without a trace of her usual good humor. “A disease of the backbone.”

Oh, Lord, Amanda’s ex-husband was an alcoholic, Maggie remembered too late. Well, it’s a disease that certainly leaves scar tissue, she thought. A sudden sharp recollection of Jenna’s odyssey of drug rehabs hit her—three of them in one year. They had given her hope at first, then only the realization of how few drug addicts ever recovered.

“No one can change an addict, but the addict herself,” the counselor had said authoritatively, and Maggie had lived to learn what a catch-22 that was; the seduction of heroin so intense, most users never cease to want it more than everything else that might replace it.

“You think of dope as snake venom, Mother,” Jenna had screamed once in a therapy session, shocking Maggie, “but I think it’s the most beautiful ambrosia in the world. There’ll never be a day of my life I won’t want it!” It was that terrible wanting that sucked them all back. One addict in thirty-six permanently cured. Nothing else on earth offered such ghastly odds.

“Heroin changes you, Mrs., O’Connor,” one of the counselors had told her. “It sucks out life-force, and replaces it with something else. After a while, you just aren’t who you were before at all. You have the same body on the outside. But on the inside, you are someone else.”

That had to be what had happened to her daughter, Maggie thought, tears shimmering Amanda into soft focus. Jenna didn’t live there anymore.

“You know you never told me, Amanda, how you came to leave your husband,” Maggie said softly, needing to share her sorrow with someone who had been there, too. “Was it because of his drinking?”

Amanda settled back against the desk chair and put down her pen. “He’d been an alcoholic for a great many years of our marriage, Maggie,” she replied judiciously. “I’d seen him through some pretty grim times—loss of business, money, health, self-esteem, friends, family—the usual downhill ride. Finally, he got back on his feet, due in great measure, to my Herculean labors at keeping him sober. Then, he became as obsessive about making money as he’d been about drinking. That’s when he found ‘the mistress.’

“I learned about her by fluke, and confronted him, of course. Frederick told me quite seriously that he loved us equally. It took me twenty-four hours to absorb that rather astonishing piece of news . . . trying to keep my dignity intact, while I bled to death.” Amanda stopped speaking, her usual composure strained by memory. She looked down at her folded hands for a moment, and then back up at Maggie.

“The following evening was cook’s night off. For some bizarre reason, I decided to prepare lamb chops—a little fantasy about domesticity rekindling the flame, I suppose. Anyway . . . while they were broiling, Freddy picked at me about everything . . . my hair, the household budget, my working . . . Finally he focused on the smoke in the kitchen from my lamb chop enterprise. It was really too absurd—after all we’d been through, it was such a trifling snit . . . but it was the last snit.

“I left the broiler on, left the house, and never returned.” Amanda shrugged her shoulders and smiled, a little.

“The lamb chop that broke the camel’s back, eh?” Maggie said, realizing that nobody goes through life unscathed.
Life breaks everybody. Some get stronger at the broken places.

Amanda nodded, a mischievous twinkle animating her expressive eyes, once again. “Leaving well is the best revenge,” she said.