I'm Glad About You (20 page)

“No, he is as you see. No distress.”

“Do people try to feed him?”

“Yes, of course, we try to get him to eat something at every meal.”

“And he doesn’t take anything? No liquids, nothing?”

“He takes soup, yes. And occasionally he will eat a bit of ice cream. Other than that, nothing.”

“How are his teeth?”

“His teeth are fine. He just doesn’t eat. We are very concerned, as you can imagine.”

Kyle let out a small breath. They didn’t need a pediatrician here; they needed a gerontologist. “You have to eat, Father,” he informed the old priest, as if the poor man could understand a word anyone was saying. “You need to stay strong, to pray for all of us. We need your prayers.” The old priest trembled, but that was the palsy. As far as Kyle could see, there was nothing in there; he was gone already, and his body was trying to follow. He turned his attention to Brother Peter and summoned up the nerve to just tell him the truth. “I am not an expert on the maladies of the elderly, far from it,” he admitted. “I suspect the dementia is advanced and is an associated cause of the lack of appetite, but I cannot say anything for certain. I do have several colleagues whom I can consult about this. Unfortunately, I just got here fifteen minutes ago, and I haven’t even had time to put my things in my room, and I need to do that, and catch my breath, and then make a few phone calls. Would it be possible for me to see him again, later in the day or even first thing tomorrow? I apologize, I really do feel like I’ve been caught flat-footed and I don’t want to make a quick diagnosis under the circumstances.”

“No apology is necessary. On the contrary, I should apologize to you. Of course you need a moment to orient yourself. We should have been more considerate.”

“You should have, perhaps, found yourself a different doctor. I’m not at all sure I’m the right man for this.”

“That is for God to say,” Brother Peter observed. He smiled at Kyle with a quiet confidence which suggested that they both understood that this was, and would always be, the real truth of the situation. Then he placed his left hand under Father Timothy’s trembling arm and helped guide him off the gurney and out of the room. The old man could barely shuffle to the door.
He doesn’t need a gerontologist
, thought Kyle,
he needs an undertaker.

That’s for God to say
, his brain reminded him. Kyle felt his internal thoughts splinter and come together with a sardonic edge. If only God really had an opinion about things, about anything. He remembered how easily his mother used to toss that phrase around—
That’s for God to say, Kyle, honey; finish your cereal—
but for years it had been buried underneath all the other inanities he was taught as a child.
Learn to share. Clean your plate. All you have to do is work hard and do your best.
That one was really a joke. Working hard and doing your best
wasn’t
all you had to do; not by a long shot. If it were, what was he doing here, surrounded by all these failing monks? He sat on the edge of the examining table, wondering how he was going to pull this off. The sheer challenge of the medicine would have been enough; on top of it, the nearness of so much apparently authentic spirituality was unnerving. This wasn’t just the easy pieties he and his neighbors recited every Sunday at Mass. The muscle in his head which reduced his patients—necessarily reduced them, otherwise how else was he supposed to do this terrifying job—to blood and bones and muscles and bacteria felt frozen, bewildered. He thought about just walking back out into the parking lot, getting in the Volvo, and jumping ship.

Instead, he just sat there. Moments later he found himself in the capable hands of Brother Luke, who informed Kyle that he had been asked to show the young doctor to his room in the dormitory of the retreat house. As he followed the brother at a respectful distance—it seemed to be expected somehow—he took more careful note of those ubiquitous brown and white robes. The simple design of the hooded brown shift tied at the waist over a long white robe looked both practical and holy, a light and comfortable cotton linen which was machine washable while simultaneously whispering of the eternal nature of God’s grace.

His cell—there was no other word for it—was predictably Spartan. White walls, a window, a dresser, a bedside table with a lamp, and a single twin bed with a simple orange coverlet. There wasn’t even a chair, which he found weird until he thought about whether or not he would need one.
Do you really sit in a chair, when you’re in a bedroom? No, you sit on the bed. Then you don’t actually need a chair, do you?
The voice in his head was more and more bemused; its judgmental edge seemed to be tempering those swift and nasty observations Kyle had come to accept as second nature. That plain room was inexplicably comforting.

“Cell phones do work here, but we try to observe silence in the retreat areas and the dormitories. There is an area out by the parking lot which people use to make their calls. We hope that won’t be an imposition.”

“Not at all.” The idea that he would have a room all to himself, where no one could speak to him, even on a cell phone, felt like a miracle.

“Would you like a few minutes to unpack? Or would you prefer to see the rest of the complex? It isn’t large.”

The possibility that the rest of this place might reveal itself to be as mutely appealing had in fact already occurred to him. “I’d love to get the full tour, if you have time,” he admitted.

“Of course.” The brother nodded, content, even pleased in a gentle monk-like way. As Kyle set his single bag beside the single bed, Brother Luke drifted out into the narrow white hallway. Kyle followed.

The monastery grounds were apparently large, as it had previously functioned as a working farm. Black-and-white photographs of monks in those timeless robes riding tractors and holding up garden hoes lined the walls of the small hallway adjacent to the cafeteria. The carpeting was industrial gray, and the few chairs stacked in the corner were monotonous, standard-issue office furniture, the kind anybody could pick up in the back of an OfficeMax or Staples. Institutional Catholicism always looked the same, he thought. Bad furniture, fluorescent lighting, industrial carpet, men in dresses.

“This is Brother Albert, you’ll see him often as he is usually here at the front desk,” Brother Luke told Kyle. “This is Doctor Wallace, he is going to take over the infirmary this week, while Dr. Murrough has his operation.”

“That’s very kind of you,” Brother Albert nodded, as he offered his hand.

“It’s an honor to be asked,” Kyle replied, and he meant it. He felt like his best self, the self he always hoped he would someday be, was somehow waking up and taking charge of the show all of a sudden. Without even doing anything these monks were improving his manners.

“I hope we don’t give you too much trouble.”

“I’m sure you won’t.”

“I’m sure we will,” Brother Albert replied. His tone carried an acerbic edge.

“Brother Albert is one of the oldest members of our community,” Brother Luke observed, as if that were a real distinction here.

“Oh my yes, I’m certifiably ancient.”

“If you have any question about the history of the monastery, he’s your man. Or if you’re a Merton fan—”

“Which I am
not
,” Brother Albert interrupted.

“He was his secretary, for a number of years.”

“You
knew
him?” Kyle asked.

“He was a good writer, but a bad monk,” Brother Albert informed Kyle, as if he had asked his opinion of the great man. “He was a child. He was allowed to be a child. He was just terribly neurotic. Oh, don’t get me started. The things I know. I opened the man’s mail!” He beamed at them with a schoolboy’s wicked glee.

What was the story? Merton was a womanizer of some sort, but the specifics eluded him. Not a womanizer, per se—that was Augustine. Augustine, that terrible prude; once he’d sown his wild oats, he turned on sexuality, it was the road to hell, and women were culprits who would lure you there.
That’s right, you could talk to women but only if you were guaranteed not to have any sort of sexual relation to them. A meeting of the minds alone.
The guy had a blissfully fulfilling relationship with his mother, whom the church had obligingly canonized after her death. Still, Augustine was better than Aquinas; that guy had announced that women were nothing better than deformed male fetuses. Kyle remembered the sniggering delight with which he and his friends had received this information from the Jesuits who taught them religion in high school. The memories were so close to the surface here. Lousy cafeterias. The terrifying and fascinating otherness of women. Alison.

She had never had much use for the Catholicism which completely drenched every aspect of their lives. That was apparent from the first time he laid eyes on her, at a Friday night football game, of all things. Saint X versus Moeller High. A crisp October night, white lights pouring over that mythic and insane ritual which taught boys to leap and attack one another for the sake of catching a ball. Desperate to make any kind of connection with the guys he knew from school, he agreed to go to these things even though he didn’t like them. He barely understood the rules. And then there she was, straggling behind a gaggle of Catholic school girls. Hanging out in the parking lot, clearly hoping to meet boys.

Dennis, of course, knew one of the girls in her cluster and when he sauntered over his group followed. This was the real ritual of Friday nights in Cincinnati, high school boys prowling, girls gathering to be prowled.

Those eyes of hers really were something. A green so startling, the edge of the iris melted into a darker rim, utterly unique, that you felt like you were looking into the eyes of a wood goddess, or maybe just a trickster. Because she grinned at him, as soon as she saw him, as if they had known each other for years. He was young, and pathologically lonely, even then. How did this girl with the astonishing eyes know him, already?

At sixteen he had no defenses. He had no game either. Some utterly forgettable and forgotten girl said, “This is somebody, and this is some other girl, and this is Alison.” The whole evening was a blur from then on. She was funny and shrewd and sure of herself, and he followed her around like a dork, barely coming to life when she agreed she hated football.

“Oh, God, it’s awful,” Kyle admitted. “I don’t know why the church condones it.”

“Oh, the Catholic church, they condone pedophilia, what do you expect?”

“Well, it’s a little more complicated than that.”

“Is it?” Alison turned to give him a full blast of those eyes. He knew he’d never recover. By the end of the evening they were making out under a corner of the bleachers, the crowd roaring around and above them. Apparently it was a pretty good game.

“I’m going to show him the chapel, and then the rest of the grounds,” Brother Luke told Brother Albert.

“Thank God I don’t have to go to choir anymore,” Brother Albert replied. “When I turned eighty-four, they decided to let me off the hook.”

The tour concluded with a visit to the bookstore, which looked like an unexceptional gift shop, crowded with books and fudge and prefabricated figurines of Mary and Joseph and the baby Jesus. But the ladies behind the counter, the first women he had seen all morning, were straightforward and friendly, and they welcomed him with a cheerful Kentucky twang.

“You’re not going to want to leave, that is what I predict,” declared the older of the two, a large woman with bright blonde pigtails affixed to both sides of a round face. “People come down for the retreats thinking just to stay for maybe two days, but some of them come back and back and back, they find it so restful.”

“Oh yes, it’s just wonderful here, we love it here,” agreed the other, a luscious young thing in tight jeans and a pale blue tank top. “I heard you saw Father Timothy this morning; we’ve been real worried about him, he looks like he’s just wasting away and no one can get him to eat a thing! He’s real confused, too.”

“He’s very frail,” Kyle said, trying to acknowledge her concern without assuaging it. “I’m going to see him again tomorrow.” It was a trick he had worked on for years: Don’t sound like anything is too dire, but don’t offer hopeful assurances either, even tonally. In a pediatrician’s office these guarded pronouncements rarely extended to concerns past the effects of a flu shot. It had been a long time since he had had to withhold so much professional judgment around questions of life and death.

“Well, God willing, you’ll be able to help him, ’cause he is real special to me and Leeanne,” asserted the round-faced woman. “Here, let me ring that up for you.” She reached over and took the two books he held out of his hands. “
The Seven Storey Mountain
and
The Sign of Jonas
, anything else I can get for you? You didn’t want any fudge or cheese?”

“No, thank you.”

“That’ll be thirty-two fifty-three.”

Kyle paid and then headed to the infirmary, where he spent the rest of the day acquainting himself with its limited resources and doing internet research about dementia in the elderly and its associative symptoms. He downloaded several articles about Alzheimer’s disease and nutrition. He studied Father Timothy’s files and put a call in to Dr. Murrough, who returned it immediately—that hernia surgery wasn’t scheduled till the next day—and got him to fill in the blanks on Father Timothy’s medical history. Then he waited and read, uninterrupted; there were no further patients that afternoon. At 5:30 Kyle called it a day and went back to his monk’s cell to unpack his few things before dinner.

The room was spare and silent. He sat on the bed and considered taking his phone out to the designated area underneath the trees next to the parking lot, so that he might call Van and tell her about this place. The image he carried in his head, of her and Maggie going about their daily routines in the kitchen and the backyard and the park, seemed distant and irrelevant. Or maybe it was he who was irrelevant. A sudden panic jolted through him. This affectless cell was substantial in a way that he was not. Why had he come here? What was he looking for? Time and space opened around him like an empty balloon. The thought that God might make an appearance and explain a few things to him shot through his mind as a complete, terrifying absurdity. What was the use of faith itself, when it went hand in hand with the knowledge that God wasn’t going to show up? The longer he stared at the phone, the less he felt like making any move to communicate to anyone at all, much less his wife. And now, ever, and again, there was Alison crawling around the corner of his brain. Making out underneath the bleachers. Cool night air. The memory of joy, of first young love.