Our Father (20 page)

“It is a bore,” Mary said.

“What would
you
know about it?” Ronnie said fiercely. “You had servants to do all the work!” Rosa, worried about the boys all the time and then after all it was Tina who flipped out, coming home drugged and disheveled. Rosa working all day working all night sick with worry all the time, if it wasn’t money it was the kids, if it was money it was
for
the kids.

“I nursed my babies!” Mary cried indignantly. “I didn’t have them carried in to visit me at night before I went out and ignore them the rest of the time! I didn’t send my children away to school at seven! I didn’t raise them the way I was raised! I spent time with them, gave them attention, and sometimes it was very hard … you may not know but Alberto left me when I was pregnant with Marie-Laure. I had her all by myself. Completely alone!” She burst into tears.

Alex sighed, “Life is pain.”

Elizabeth rolled her eyes.

Ronnie smirked.

Still, from that day onward, the climate was different among them: they were somehow calmer together, as if they had passed through a lock and sailed in slightly lower channels.

On foot or by bicycle, Alex visited Lincoln’s three churches, having discovered there was no synagogue of any persuasion in this town. St. Anne’s in-the-Fields, an Episcopal church, was really in the middle of fields two miles from the town center, across the road from the Codman House. It was the official church of the Upton family, although there was some question as to when the last Upton had attended any church. Despite seat cushions, (thin) pads on the kneeling benches, and a carpet down the center aisle, it was austere. Yet it appealed to Alex, and she attended a couple of services there, amused to find that they used pita bread for the communion wafers.

St. Joseph’s, the Catholic church, a plain white frame structure, was very neat and clean, more like a classroom than a place of worship, she thought. Even its carved wood stations of the cross done in freestanding scenes without a frame and painted in muted pinks, browns, greens could not save it from a studious dryness, not at all what she associated with Catholicism. It was like a Knights of Columbus meeting hall, she thought, with its small round-arched windows and geometric stained glass, each window devoted to the memory of some man or other, all Irish. There was one woman listed, she noticed. But what most upset her about St. Joseph’s was the warning in the parish newsletter: “
PLEASE! PLEASE! PLEASE! NO EATING IN THE CRYING ROOM.
” What could that be, a crying room? Was there a place in this church where people went to cry? Did going there guarantee that tears would come? Maybe she should look for it. But instead, she scurried away on her bicycle and she returned to St. Joseph’s only once more, to attend Mass.

Alex’s favorite was the Unitarian church, called the White Church. Built in 1842 in Greek Revival style, it was small and wooden, with closed pews. Some were larger than others, and Alex wondered if they belonged to richer families or larger ones. The White Church was simple and clean and somehow piety was built into its very walls, into the single plain chandelier, the organ in the choir, the twelve-over-twelve windows, the Empire style burled-walnut altar.

Alex would stop in of a morning or an afternoon to sit and try to sense import in the quality of light, the look of the altar. She strained to hear voices she felt hid in the echoes, the hollow footfalls. She attended services there and at St. Joseph’s and found herself drawn to the music, flowers, and incense of the Catholic church. But the only sermon that lingered in her memory was one delivered by the Episcopalian priest.

In time, however, she decided that a spot in the woods behind the house was the best place to do what she wanted to do. While she did not think of this as worship, she called the spot, a small clearing amid a patch of leafless maples and oaks where the sun broke through to the forest floor, her cathedral. She could come here every day: it was never locked, no one ever barred her way or questioned her presence, and there were even benches—a fallen log and the stump of a tree that had not fallen but been felled, so it was smooth and even.

Walking to her cathedral Tuesday morning around nine, she saw Ronnie bent over in the thick woods off the path. She picked her way toward her through clotted underbrush. A wheelbarrow stood in a small clearing, piled high with twigs.

“Hi! Whatcha doing?”

Ronnie raised herself, pink with exertion. She held some broken branches in her hand, a canvas bag hung over her shoulder. “Gathering wood. Broken twigs. For kindling.” She dropped the branches in the wheelbarrow and wiped her hands on her jean legs. “Saves money. We use a lot of firewood these days.”

“What’s in the bag?”

“Mushrooms. See?” She walked toward Alex and slid the bag off her shoulder. She pulled it open and Alex peered in at huge ruffled fungi. “While I was in Appalachia my friend Lois taught me about mushrooms, how to tell the poisonous ones, which ones are edible. These are chanterelles. I get mostly these and cepes. We’ve been having them for lunch lately, haven’t you noticed?”

“Oh! The mushroom omelets!”

“And mushroom risotto. And remember that delicious mushroom soup the other day?”

“That’s wonderful!” Alex marveled.

“Where are you off to?”

“Just walking.”

“I was just about to take a coffee break,” Ronnie said, nodding toward a thermos lying in the wheelbarrow. “If there was someplace to sit down, I’d offer you a cup. I usually sit on the edge of the wheelbarrow, but it’s precarious.”

Alex considered. “I know a place where we can sit down.”

“Lead the way.” Ronnie went for the thermos and followed Alex back to the path and down it for a quarter of a mile to the sunlit clearing.

Smiling, Alex pointed to the stump. “Seats have been provided.”

Ronnie sat on the log.

“You should take the stool. It’s more comfortable.”

“This is fine.” Ronnie unscrewed the thermos and poured steaming coffee into the lid, passed it to Alex.

Ronnie tipped the thermos and sipped from its mouth. The lip was too thick for drinking from and some coffee ran down the side of her mouth. She wiped it with her jacket sleeve.

They sat unspeaking, hearing the busy silence of the forest, Ronnie studying the landscape.

“This your place?”

Alex nodded. They fell silent again.

“Ronnie?” Tentative voice. Waited until Ronnie looked up at her again. “What you said the other day—about it being important to raise children? Did you mean that?”

“Don’t say what I don’t mean.” God you sound like a pompous ass. She tried to soften her tone. “Why do you ask?”

“Well, you know, I mean, everyone assumes they’re going to get married and have children.” She glanced at Ronnie, flushed, corrected herself. “I mean,
most
women think that. And most of us do. And then the children grow up and you wonder what your life was about. You know? Was that
it
? You know? They don’t really even need me anymore and they’re not even twenty. They hardly notice that I’m not there.”

“I helped raise some children—my aunt’s—in the inner city for a while. And the kids were great, adorable, sweet, terrific—but doing that job in that place with no money is pure hell. Maybe I’m idealizing—some people say I am—but even though there’s worse poverty in Africa and India and Latin America I think people there’re better off than people in cities here. Maybe in any industrial country. In cities you don’t just have to worry about finding food for your kids, you have to worry about everything around them, the people, the drugs, the guns, the community. …

“And those mothers—the ones I know and I know a lot—are incredibly brave, good. All their thoughts are for those kids, keeping them alive, getting them through, getting them grown, trying to make the kids’ lives better than their own. And I imagine it’s like that even if you’re better off. Hard.”

Alex’s face softened in sympathy. “It is hard. You never know if you’re doing the best thing. What works with one doesn’t work with the other. They’re all different and need different things. But even after you go through all that, does it matter? Suppose the children die after all that? And whether they live or die can destroy you but it makes no difference to the world. There’re so many people. What does it matter that we have kids, spend our lives raising them? On the grand scale.”

“So what do you think is more important?”

Alex shrugged. “Almost anything.”

“Making cars? Making airplanes? Making bombs that will kill someone’s kids, maybe your own?”

“Well, when you put it that way. …”

“What job do you think is harder than raising kids?” Ronnie persisted. Rosa and Enriqué nearly coming to blows over what to do about Tina, experimenting with drugs at fourteen. Worried talks long into the night about Raoul drifting toward a gang at thirteen, ten-year-old Téo failing in school. Enriqué threatening the belt, Rosa begging, “Ronalda, speak to them, they’ll listen to you!” Talking was like trying to blow out a forest fire.

Raoul dead now, Tina in the life, the family split apart.

—You wan me to do what you do, Mama? Sit at a fucking sewing machine all day?

—You watch your mouth when you talk to your mama, girl!

—What does she make, huh? Twenty, twenty-two dollars for a whole day’s work? I can make two hundred dollars in a night.

—And that
cojones
takes it all off you, whore!

—Is he any different from you? Don you take Momma’s money, don she use it to feed you? Where does all Mama’s money go, huh? What does she see? Has she got boots like these, clothes like mine? Hah? It goes to you and the kids, the kids and you! You’re the same as him!

Enriqué pale, driven beyond endurance, arm raised.

—Out of my house you whore, you no blood of mine! And don come back! We raised you decent!

Rosa weeping. Still a chance for Téo, maybe, but he’d always be slow. Lidia and Joey all right so far. Rosa wants to move. But where can
they
be safe? They wouldn’t want to live in any neighborhood that would let them in, she thought grimly.

“It
is
hard,” Alex repeated as if by rote. “You’re never sure what’s the best thing to do.”

Ronnie smiled. Not interested in this conversation, this woman, her problems. Maybe she wasn’t raised to the purple like Mary and Elizabeth but her life was a far cry from Momma’s or Rosa’s. Nice middle-class white couple, professional husband, two kids, two cars, house in the suburbs. Country club just for Du Pont employees, she said the other night, dinner, dancing, golf links. What is it, she’s suddenly worried about her image—just a housewife?

Jesus Christ, what makes any life worthwhile? Does the great arch of nature care how we plague ourselves for meaning? Love, Momma said, loving makes life worthwhile.

Alex said, “I want you to know … I think of you as my sister. I’m
glad
you’re my sister.”

Ronnie studied the ground. “Well, I’m glad to have you as a sister too,” she said tightly.

They smiled at each other ruefully.

“I feel like you … here. Maybe not otherwise, I’m not saying I’ve had your experience … but in this house.”

Ronnie questioned her with her face.

“You know, I feel like I don’t belong.”

“Illegitimate.”

“Yes.”

Ronnie thought about that. “I guess.”

“I love Elizabeth and Mary. You know, I knew them when I was a baby, I loved them then, adored them really the way a baby does, you know?”

Seeing them glamorous, dashing, in their full-skirted pastel summer dresses, full of confidence, talking to senators and presidents under the green-striped tent with a mouthful of canapé and a cocktail in one hand. I remember.

“And it would be hard for them to dislodge that love,” Alex continued. “But”—Alex looked straight at her—“everyone in this house has a hard time loving. It’s like they grudge any sign of love, as if they feel that if they give any away they won’t have anything left, as if they secretly hug what shreds of it they feel they have to themselves like they were hoarding bread in a concentration camp. …” She dropped her eyes, let her arms fall limp “… Or a house of secrets.”

Ronnie just stared at her.

Alex listened as Ronnie’s light tread, crackling branches and leaves, faded: I can sit for a while, I’m dressed for the hospital, I don’t have to change. Nice here this hour of morning, the sun still in the east. Oh I love the morning sun flaring down through the bare branches, god’s fingers whenever I see it I feel so grateful I want to cry out hallelujah well of course we call it the grandeur of god when it’s just a ball of hot gases burning, sending light through the universe. But it
feels
like some beneficent presence meant just for us and it does enable us to be—us, the plants, the animals, bugs, everything. So why shouldn’t we worship it? But then we say it wants this or that as if it were sentient and we knew what it wanted, as if virtue, sin, redemption, were words we knew the meanings of as if lines were clearly drawn in space. Still they exist, don’t they—virtue, sin. If not redemption. Or was that St. Anne’s priest right in that wonderful sermon and redemption is the power to love. You can love because you are loved, Jesus loves you. You don’t have to earn his love, you just have to be. He reaches out and embraces you simply because you are. So embarrassing, weeping like that in public, people around me looking at me. Maybe they thought I was a widow or had lost a child. …

She shuddered.

I am NOT going to lose a child.

Strange too: I don’t believe all that business, Jesus, god, any god. Sam so upset that David doesn’t go regularly to temple but David can’t understand how he can go on believing after the Holocaust. I don’t believe either: God the Father. Who needs a father like that? Yet that time in Jerusalem. Like my eyes opening, like something ancient calling me, pulling on my very flesh, some way of life, some other way to be. I tell David I pray but I think what I call praying is just thinking. Not like a real thinker, like Elizabeth, say, not like an intellectual.