Conceived Without Sin (22 page)

"Her mom stared at me like I was the devil while Sandi's dad did the
talking. The whole thing was surreal, and reminded me of getting cut off by a customer. He even said, 'It just didn't work out. You didn't deliver,' like I was some kind of machine. They told me I needed help. I stalled, promised to get better, go to AA, but Sandi kept shaking her head. I remember the needlepoint on the wall above her head better than the expression on her face. It was Home Sweet
Home, with flowers around it.

"Inside, I knew that they were right. I never made a home with Sandi. She was at home with her folks. I even rationalized that Jennifer was better off with them, not me, the Screw Up.

"She had already called the lawyer. It was a done deal. We had been married almost three years. I went to AA in a desperate, last ditch attempt to get them back, but I wasn't ready for
it, yet. I stopped going after the first couple meetings. I actually convinced myself that the people there were plastic, weak, and that I wasn't that bad.

"Sandi wasn't taking any chances, and moved to Florida two months after the divorce went through. Her lawyer, a woman who was divorced herself, took me to the cleaners. Things happened so fast. I felt sorry for myself, and in typical alcoholic
fashion, went on a bender when she moved to Florida.

"I showed up at work late, or drunk, and missed whole days with blackouts. I lost the job. I lost the apartment, which I couldn't afford without Sandi's income. I hit rock bottom. Deep depression. That's when I saw the shrink. He put me on drugs, which didn't work for me, even though they help others. They just made me go up and down. I couldn't
afford them, either.

"I went back to AA. It worked. That's all I can say. My conversion, or reversion, back to my faith happened because of AA. My conversion was nothing so spectacular, really. When it got to the part about the necessity of a Supreme Being to overcome the disease, I simply went to the first parish I drove by after the meeting, and prayed before the Blessed Sacrament.

"Peace came.
I didn't cry or anything. I just, well, gave it up. Gave everything up. I lost hope in myself, and found hope in God. I read this little book once, after all this happened, just a bunch of sayings by Saint John Vianney, and one of them was something like, 'God's reserves begin when our reserves are empty.' When I read it, I thought of my first day back into the faith. That's what it was like.
I was out of my own gas, and God filled the tank with His gas.

"I often wonder how many people's lives would change if they just let go like that. 'Offer it up,' the saints advise us. I offered up my life to God, figuring it was worthless, and to my surprise, He took it. Is God crazy?

"Oh, I almost forgot–one thing did happen that was out of the ordinary. Just as I was finished praying, and this
happened at Saint Angelas, the pastor wandered in. He came right up to me, even though he had never seen me before, and told me that he had forgotten to lock the doors, and that he had to close the church. I said okay, and started to get up. He started to walk away, then turned back, and asked if I wanted to go to confession. I said yes.

"It took an hour. I cried some. He absolved me and encouraged
me to keep going to AA, and to try to not lose touch with Jennifer.

"That's it. I started going to daily Mass the next day. It gave me peace, and enough grace to stay off the bottle. I moved back to New Jersey when my Uncle Charlie called me out of the blue and told me that one of his centers needed drivers for Christmas. He's the personnel director there. He wasn't doing me a favor; he was doing
himself a favor. He didn't know I was a drunk or out of work or divorced or anything.

"Like I said, we're not close. He must have figured that a Notre Dame grad could work his way into management and be a feather in his cap. Looking back, I think it was the Holy Spirit. I never liked Ohio. Sorry, Donna and Sam, but Ohio just isn't home. I needed a new start in an old place. New Jersey is as close
to home as I'll ever have. People are more gritty there, more real. I'm not saying they're better.

"And I was alone, and needed the money. I didn't think I could handle moving to Florida. New Jersey was halfway there in my twisted logic.

"Here's where the Holy Spirit comes in. There were three guys in my UPS section who were in AA. What are the chances of that? We met for lunch every other day,
depending on our routes. I put psychology down a lot, but these guys were like an encounter group. They were all Catholics, and one, Jimmy Huckelby, was very devout, and off the bottle for almost fifteen years. I had already been reading like a madman since I started with AA the second time around. Jimmy helped me fill out my annulment papers; said it was an open and shut case and he was right.
Alcoholism. Adultery. Abuse. The triple As. No real marriage preparation. Not open to children. I wasn't capable of making a lifetime vow the day I got married. I'm a classic. He also gave me some good Catholic books to read. The Story of a Soul by the Little Flower, stuff like that.

"The Little Flower? That's a nickname for Saint Thérèse of Lisieux.

"It was Jimmy who convinced me to put in for
a transfer to Ohio. Uncle Charlie wasn't thrilled, but I don't want to be a manager. Our managers treat drivers like boxes, and I can't do that.

"Anyway, now Sandi doesn't talk to me on the phone. Geeze, she can be cold. I get Jennifer for four weeks a year, but I have to pay for the airfare and she ends up staying with her grandparents every time. I won't get into it, but basically, she hates
me. She acts up, and never warms up to me. She's coming next month. You'll see. Maybe when she gets older she'll understand. She's only six. Anyway, when I was in New Jersey, Sandi's folks told me that Sandi doesn't like Florida, and might move back up to Ohio soon.

"I don't have any hope that she'll take me back. No hope at all. I just want to have another chance with Jennifer, that's all. I
pray for them both, every night and every day. I'm still Jenny's dad, and Sandi hasn't remarried, though her folks told me that she lived with someone briefly in Florida.

"So I moved here, hoping that Sandi will come back. That's how I got here. Buzz Woodward, this is your life. I'm still working through things. You know, one day at a time. I guess I can tell you, but I still battle depression.
Just getting up and going to work is a struggle sometimes. Exercise is the best drug I know. The ocean helps, too. I'm toughing it out.

"Thanks for letting me get this off my chest. I guess I feel better. But it's not how I feel that counts. It's what I do that matters. It's what I do. When I was drinking, I was always trying to feel good, or feel better, or feel something. One of the most amazing
things–to me at least–when I started reading Catholic books, especially The Imitation of Christ by Thomas à Kempis, and Introduction to the Devout Life by Saint Francis de Sales, was how deceptive emotions can be. They come and go like the weather. We can't ignore them, of course, but we can't let them run our life, either.

"Look, we're coming out of Pennsylvania. Two miles to Ohio. We're almost
home."

3

Bill and Mark had gone to Sunday Mass before visiting the Kemps. Two hours before dinner, Bill excused himself, and left. He didn't tell Mark where he was going. Bill went to Our Lady of the Angels, which had a perpetual adoration chapel with the Eucharist exposed in a monstrance. He prayed for his friend. Toward the end of Bill's first full Rosary, Mark had a small, but pivotal, revelation
about the Kemps.

Mark was sitting in the living room. Annie Kemp had come and sat on his lap, reading a book about horses. Mary Kemp was in the kitchen with the older daughter, frying chicken breasts for parmigiana. Joe was outside with his two oldest sons, fixing the deck, and preparing it for a coat of water sealant.

"Do you like horses?" Annie asked, turning to look into his eyes. Her gaze
was utterly direct.

"I suppose. I've never had experience with them."

"Do your daughters like horses?"

"I… I don't know. I guess so."

"Oh," Annie said, disappointment in her voice.

Why don't I know if my girls like horses?
Mark asked.
Should I?

Because he was an FBI agent, he was trained in the practice of reading little things. A memory from an interrogation he had one time with a small-time
mobster came back to him. The interrogation had yielded no useful information. It was early in his career, and afterwards, his supervisor had critiqued him, standing outside the glass window of the empty interrogation room in the FBI offices.

"Johnson, you failed to get squat out of that lowlife because you don't realize that these guys don't think like cops. You asked him questions like he was
a frat buddy from the Academy. You've got to get into their heads."

"Get into their heads?" Mark had asked.

"Look at most families nowadays, Johnson. Do the parents think like the kids think? No. The parents like Gershwin, and the kids like Billy Idol. Do they read the same books? No. Parents read Harold Robbins and the kids read–if they read at all–they read Stephen King. They live together,
but they don't think together.

"It's the same way with us and the bad guys. I'm not telling you to forget what they taught you at the Academy–FBI or Naval. But you've got to read and think the same way these thugs think, or you'll never be a good agent. Get into their heads. It's not so hard. You'll meet enough of them. You'll follow them. Some of the older agents can tell you things. Just pay
attention. It takes time and effort. You can't just pick it up by osmosis, unless you're a natural, and frankly, Johnson, after what I just saw in there, you're not a natural. You can't intimidate these guys, no matter how tough you are."

Now, all these years later, Mark put two and two together.

Get into Maggie's head. Get into your daughters' heads.

"Why do you like horses?" he asked Annie now.

"I don't know. I saw National Velvet, and I started reading about horses. They're beautiful. Dad took me to a stable last summer."

"He did? Did he see National Velvet, too?"

"He rented it for me," she replied.

"For you? Or for the whole family?"

"Just for me."

She turned back to her book. She adjusted her head on his arm.

Get into her head,
he thought again, not sure what he was surfing up to.

Later, Bill returned from prayer. Dinner began.

Mark started to get excited during the meal. There was no major revelation. There was nothing unusual about the dinner conversation, except that the Kemp children seemed more articulate than most kids. Mark was watching with agent's eyes now.

When the oldest boy, Steven, who was in high school, had a discussion with his father about
The Catcher in
the Rye,
it clicked.

Joe's in Steve's head!

The Kemps thought
together.
They talked about these things, too. About ideas, not just sports.

In Mark's home, the old rule, that children don't speak unless spoken to, was always in effect. His mother and dad talked, mostly about his father bringing down bad guys or the politics in the department, but never, ever, about ideas.

Mark finished his meal
quickly, and excused himself from the table. He went outside. The backyard was well kept. Not in any way unusual. Mark threw himself into thought, concentrating.

Finally, he prayed.
Dear Lord, help me.

What else was different about his dinner table as a boy compared to the dinner table in the house behind him?

The ideas were different.

The Johnsons had ideas for sure. Those ideas underscored every
conversation, every facial expression, every gesture. But the Johnson ideas were limited to a few simple, easily understood areas. Mark simply couldn't imagine having a discussion about a book with his father, who had not gone to college, at the dinner table. His father didn't read much besides the occasional detective novel.

Our ideas weren't bad,
Mark thought now.
They were always the same.
How to be tough. How to be a man. How to crush other men. It was never so obvious as all that, but that's what it always boiled down to. We never talked about women, or the faith
(even though both his parents were rock-ribbed Catholics in practice),
or philosophy. It was like our house was a barracks.

Somehow, talking about anything beyond the restricted area of, to put it roughly, what men do,
was considered, well, unmanly. Is this true?

My dad was in my head, but only part of it. The guy part.

And somehow, ideas outside 'guy ideas' were considered too effeminate for a real man to entertain. Art. Literature. Even political ideas were restricted; the rules were set–Vote Democratic. Period. Back when Mark was a child, before the abortion issue came up, the Democrats were for the little
guy, and in New Jersey, they supported the cops. His father's short, terse dinnertime speeches, which brooked no discussion, came back to Mark now. They were in his head.

Indeed, Mr. Johnson was always in Mark's head, silent, watching his every move.
Is that true?

But I love my dad.

Of course Mark did.

But did he teach you how to relate to your wife?
a little voice, but a strong voice, asked.

The answer was obvious.

No. I mean, yes. I treated Maggie like he treated Mom. He didn't treat Mom badly. Mom didn't have a problem with it. She never gave him any lip. She followed the rules.

She did? What did she really think of the rules? What was in your mother's head?
the voice asked.

It was time to be honest. He thought for a moment, watching clouds slip behind a neighbor's roof.

I don't
know,
Mark thought.
I have no idea what was going on in Mom's mind.

What's in Maggie's head?
the inner interrogator persisted. Mark felt weak.

I…I'm not sure. She hates me.

Does she?
his conscience continued.

You don't have a clue, do you, Mark?