Mortal Sin (3 page)

But that had been a different lifetime, and he’d been a different man. Before he got the calling, before people started looking at him as though he were somehow set apart from the rest of humanity. A holy man. As though he didn’t get up every morning and put his pants on one leg at a time, like every other man on the planet.

Nowadays, he drank in moderation. He didn’t tipple every night—only the bad ones—and he always stopped after one drink. That was supposed to be the dividing line, the thing that separated the alcoholics from the regular sots. Alcoholics, they said, couldn’t stop at just one. So far, he’d done a fine job of convincing himself that as long as he was able to stop after that first shot, history wasn’t in danger of repeating itself.

He downed the Scotch in a single fiery gulp that scorched his throat and seeped, languid and lovely, into his veins. He hadn’t planned on cruising tonight. He’d gone to bed early, and for a while, he’d actually slept. But somewhere around one o’clock he’d come fully awake, just as he had nearly every night for the past six months. At that dark hour, the day’s niggling concerns were magnified to biblical proportions and, in his wide-eyed state of unease, sleep was reduced to an elusive fantasy.

Tonight, it was the Branigans who’d kept him awake. Mike and Iris. The Battling Branigans, as he’d come to call them, were hovering on the cusp of divorce. As their parish priest, he was expected to counsel the members of his flock when they came to him with their troubles. He should have been able to make a difference in Iris and Mike’s faltering marriage. But somehow, he’d failed them.

Over the past few months, he’d become increasingly aware of his limitations when it came to counseling married couples. What did he, a celibate who lived with a mismatched pair of goldfish, know about the struggle, the intimacy, the delicate balance between two egos that characterized marriage? He’d never been married, and he’d grown up fatherless, raised by a mother who loved him, but not as much as she loved the bottle. Erin Donovan hadn’t exactly provided him with a model for successful relationships.

Bishop Halloran would have said that Jesus Christ, and the teachings of the Church, were all the model he needed, but then he and the bishop had been known to disagree before. The Branigans needed something he couldn’t give them and today, for the first time since he’d entered the priesthood, he’d referred a member of his congregation to a secular counselor.

But it was more than just his competence at marriage counseling that he questioned. Lately, he’d begun to doubt his adequacy in a number of areas. Did he really have any business guiding people’s souls when his own soul was in such turmoil?

A crisis of faith. That’s what the bishop would call it. Or maybe it was nothing more complicated than burnout. In either case, he’d shared his doubts with nobody. Confession might be good for the soul, but the darkness inside him was something he could confess to nobody but God. Sometimes, in the wee hours, as he lay awake waiting for the sun’s first rays to penetrate his bedroom window, he prayed for guidance. So far, he hadn’t received any.

Still, he gave of himself, doled out bits and pieces of his soul until he felt drained, bled dry. He presided over bake sales and bean suppers, authorized the purchase of new choir robes, arbitrated squabbles between the sisters over at the convent. He called the repairman when the church boiler broke down, conducted Mass twice each Sunday, heard confession each Saturday. He joined couples in holy matrimony, christened infants, administered last rites to the dying, and prayed over the dead.

But for some time now, he’d been bone-weary and operating on automatic pilot. Going through the motions. Winter had settled, bleak and barren, into the depths of his soul. The joy had left him, and Father Clancy Donovan had no idea how to get it back.

When the clock on the mantel chimed four-thirty, he realized he’d nodded off. Across the room, John Wayne’s rugged face filled the TV screen. He picked up the remote and muted the actor’s annoying drawl.

Silence was a distinct improvement. He ran his hands over his face. Maybe he’d lie down for just a few minutes, rest for a while before he had to begin the day. He stretched out the full length of the couch. It was too short, and he had to bend his knees to accommodate his feet. In the flickering blue light of the television, he plumped the hideous plaid throw pillow Mrs. O’Toole had given him last Christmas, tucked it under his head, and closed his eyes.

He awoke to bright sunshine and the absolute certainty that he’d overslept, a certainty that was confirmed by the mantel clock. He clicked off the television, performed his morning ablutions in record time, dropped a pinch of goldfish food into Fred and Barney’s fishbowl, and headed across the icy parking lot to the church.

When he stepped into the parish office, he found Melissa, his perky young secretary, standing on a wooden chair in a shaft of morning sunlight, humming as she watered the English ivy that hung over her desk. “Good morning, Father,” she warbled.

“Good morning.” He unwound the wool scarf and peeled off his gloves. “It’s brutal out there today. What’s on the agenda?”

She paused, watering can in hand, gray eyes magnified by owlish glasses. “You have a full morning. Tia McCauley and Jeff Stuart are coming in at nine-thirty, and at ten-thirty you have an appointment with a Sarah Connelly. At eleven, you’re supposed to meet with the altar guild. After that, you promised you’d stop by to see Patty O’Malley’s new baby.”

He tucked the gloves into his pocket and sniffed the air. “Coffee,” he said. “That’s coffee I smell.”

She beamed. “And I picked up a half-dozen doughnuts from Fezinger’s. The chocolate ones you like.”

In the four years he’d been pastor of this parish, he’d watched Melissa grow from a giggly, bubble-headed teenager to a lovely, refined young woman. Fiercely loyal, tenacious as a pitbull when it came to protecting him, she had a marked tendency to smother him with maternal concern. She also knew precisely where each paper clip and sheet of letterhead was located in the parish office, she remembered details about his parishioners that he couldn’t keep straight, and she kept his life running smoothly as a Rolex. He tolerated her mollycoddling because her assets far outweighed her liabilities.

In his study, lined up with military precision on his desk, were a steaming mug of coffee, a chocolate doughnut wrapped in a napkin, a folded copy of the
Globe
, and a tidy stack of mail that Melissa had already opened for him.

He sat down, took a quick slug of caffeine, and waited for the buzz to hit. It didn’t take long. One more of Melissa’s attributes. If he hadn’t been a priest, and nearly old enough to be her father, he might have considered marrying the girl just for her coffee.

He set the newspaper aside to read later, took a bite of doughnut, and tackled the mail. Most of it was routine: a gas bill, a committee meeting reminder, a postcard from his favorite octogenarian parishioner, Alton Robbins, who wintered with his son and daughter-in-law in Boca Raton.

Melissa had hidden the letter on the bottom of the pile, undoubtedly because she knew what his reaction would be. When he saw the Archdiocese of Boston letterhead, he closed his eyes and counted to ten. He took another swig of coffee to bolster him, leaned back in his chair and began to read.

It has been brought to our attention that you have been dispensing contraception advice to the engaged couples who come to you for premarital counseling. As you are well aware, Church policy regarding this issue is clear. The Catholic Church condones neither contraception nor premarital sex, nor does it appreciate your attempts to undermine the moral values instilled by the Church in these young people who trust you to provide them with appropriate guidance. Unless you cease this practice immediately, you will risk formal disciplinary action.

He crumpled the letter and hurled it at the wall. It hit and bounced, much like the words bouncing around inside his head, words not befitting a man of his station. “Cretins,” he muttered. “Mummified, antiquated, blind old fools.”

He pulled a sheet of letterhead from the drawer, picked up his felt-tipped pen, and with bold, black lettering scratched out a hasty response. He scrawled his name, a dark, illegible slash, across the bottom, folded the sheet of paper, and sealed it in an envelope.

Still steaming, he stalked to the outer office and dropped the envelope on Melissa’s desk. “See that this goes out in today’s mail.”

“I thought about hiding it,” she said, “but I couldn’t see any sense in putting off the inevitable.”

“They’re cattle. Cattle who wouldn’t recognize reality if it fell out of the sky and bashed them on the head. Fully half of this planet’s woes can be directly attributed to overpopulation. Crime, pollution, abject poverty. And what’s the Church’s response? Make more babies! Deplete the oil supplies, destroy the rain forests, and move us steadily closer to extinction. These blind fools haven’t turned on a television or stepped outdoors in thirty years. They’re cloistered inside their own little fantasy world. If it rained for forty days and forty nights, do you think they’d build an ark? Of course not! They’d just stand there in the valley of the shadow of self-righteousness, milling around and waiting for the water to sweep them away!”

Melissa, accustomed to his rants, remained unmoved. “Are you sure you really want to mail this?”

He leaned over her desk, hands planted firmly on the edge. “Am I not right about this issue?”

“I think you’re right. But that’s not the point.”

“Oh?” He narrowed his eyes. “Then what, precisely, is the point?”

“The point is you’re never going to win the battle.”

He stared at her for a moment before realizing she was right. “Damn it.”

She raised her eyebrows, and he straightened and snatched back the envelope. “If cursing is the biggest sin I commit today, it’ll be a miracle. I’ll be in my study.”

“One of these days,” she said to his retreating back, “you’re actually going to mail one of these letters. Then you’ll really be in hot water.”

He slammed the door behind him, opened a desk drawer and tossed in the envelope alongside a half-dozen others he’d never mailed. Unwrapping a hard candy from the jar on his desk, he popped it into his mouth, imprisoning it under his tongue while cinnamon and sugar melted into his bloodstream. Some days, it was the only thing that helped. On a good day, he’d eat only a half-dozen or so. On a bad day, he’d be on his knees under the desk at day’s end, gathering cellophane wrappers off the floor and tossing them into the trash.

Today was showing every indication of being a bad day. He bit down hard on the candy and it disintegrated. How was he supposed to carry out his ministry when the Church kept throwing roadblocks in his path? Was he expected to offer only spiritual guidance, intended to herd his flock along the most direct route to heaven? Certainly the afterlife was a primary concern for all people of reason, Catholic or otherwise. But what about the lives his parishioners led right here, right now? If there were something he could do to improve the quality of their lives, wasn’t it his responsibility to follow through? To whom did he owe his principal loyalty: God, or the Catholic Church?

It was a question he’d asked himself numerous times over the past few months, but he hadn’t yet come up with an acceptable answer.

By the time Jeff and Tia showed up, he was on his third piece of candy. He hung up their coats, offered them each a candy to break the ice, then sat back in his chair and studied their young, earnest faces. Each year, the couples he married seemed younger and younger. It was probably a sign of encroaching middle age, something he wasn’t ready to think about. Not just yet, not while he still remained far enough on the good side of forty that he could pretend it wasn’t hovering on the not-so-distant horizon.

While the kids held hands with white-knuckled devotion, he talked to them about the sacrament of marriage, about its significance to the Church and to God. He discussed with them the nature of their relationship, explored their expectations of marriage and their readiness to make a lifetime commitment to each other.

He talked about the spiraling divorce rate, advised them of the gravity of the step they were considering, reminded them that the Church didn’t recognize divorce. He pointed out for a second time that marriage was a lifetime commitment, and not just something to try on and discard if it didn’t fit. Still livid over the hand-slapping he’d received this morning, he stuck to the party line, reminding them of the Church’s expectation that as an engaged couple, they would conduct themselves with chastity and decorum.

After forty-five minutes, he closed the session with a prayer. The kids both looked somber, and he believed he’d instilled a sufficient level of anxiety in them for one day. He felt like an ogre, but he’d done his job, which was to make them think before they jumped blindly into something that might ruin both their lives.

Jeff helped Tia with her coat, his hand lingering at her shoulder in a show of tenderness. With all his heart, Clancy wished them a happy ending, even though he knew it would take a great deal of work, and more than a little luck, to achieve that happy ending. It was a misnomer anyway, that term, for marriage was a journey, not a destination. All of life was a journey. Heaven was the destination.

“We’ll meet again in a month or so,” he told them, “after you’ve had time to talk over what we’ve discussed today. You can make an appointment with Melissa on your way out.”

Jeff held out a boyish hand. He didn’t look old enough to shave, let alone get married. “Thank you, Father.”

He shook Jeffs hand warmly. “You’re welcome. Tia, how’s school going?”

“Great. I made the dean’s list last semester. Mom practically keeled over from the shock. Which reminds me.” She reached into her coat pocket, long hair falling around her, and pulled out a small envelope. “For you, Father.” She held it out to him. “From my mom. It’s a pair of tickets to the spring flower show. It starts today. She works at the Bayside Expo, and she always gets free tickets to all the events. She said she thought you looked a little down last Sunday.” Tia rolled her eyes in exaggerated aggravation. “You know how mothers are. Anyway, she thought after the winter we’ve had, the flower show might cheer you up.”