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ONE

It was when driving the parish car that Dominic felt most secular. He was just a guy in a Mercury Sable, driving to and from work, doing errands; he could be anyone else on wheels, someone hard to track. Even though the old Sable was nearly twelve years old, it clocked only 47,253 miles on its odometer and was more likely to die of old age than experience.
He had taken the last two stop signs on a roll. Since he was driving with a suspended license, Father Dominic opened the gate and pulled into the church parking lot with a bad conscience, into the vast emptiness of a weekday morning.
Pulling the keys out of the ignition quieted the dinging in the dashboard. The alarm had rung his anxiety to attention as he sat in the car surveying the church property. The gutters leaked, and the asbestos-lined basement flooded after every rain. The boiler surely would not last the winter. The locks didn’t secure, and it was only after they had reported the theft of a gold-plated chalice to the Falcones, the local organized “family,” that the break-ins ceased. Mice or something bigger worried the walls of the rectory. Empty bottles of beer and cheap whiskey littered the corners of the lot; Dominic turned out early every Sunday morning to clear them before Mass. How he hated the clink of glass against glass in the garbage bag, hollow and carnal like a laugh track.
Now in its fifth decade of urban renewal, New Haven was just a bunch of little neighborhoods struggling to assert their integrity. Dom liked the tired maturity of the city’s faith—the kind that knew better than to reach a conclusion, that believes despite the contrary evidence, despite the improbability of redemption. His church was needed here.
Dominic packed up his portable “death kit”—that little pouch of blessed oils, holy water, a stole and his battered little green book,Pastoral Care of the Sick—that he had used in administering Extreme Unction, the last rites, to Father Carl. He leaned over to jam the kit into his glove compartment when in the rearview mirror he saw a flash of movement, a white T-shirt behind a tree. He froze as the girl ran to the next tree—barely a girl, really, a sliver of agitation. Dolores.
Dom had known her since she was a kid in the parochial school—when there still was a school. It was Father Carl who had had the primary relationship with her. They had scheduled spiritual counseling every Thursday night at 6:30 right after the evening Mass, but it was always a gamble whether the girl would show or not.
“One of God’s special cases, given us to know Him better,” Father Carl had winked, which, again, had confused the younger priest. Dolores was an insistent but erratic presence; she would come to the church every day for a period but then disappear for months only to wind up calling Father Carl at the rectory in a panic in the middle of the night. Then the pattern would repeat. Dom tried to be patient with the girl, but he worried about the toll she took on the ailing older priest. She showed up rarely when expected and often when inconvenient. If her timing was unpredictable, she was even harder to place physically. During his weekly visits to Dolores’s housebound mother he barely saw any sign of the daughter in the apartment. Dominic even wondered whether she lived half the time out on the street. The truant officer, social worker and welfare agent had filed their final reports and were done with her. The high school and the state had virtually given up on her. She had turned to the Church in the end.
Father Carl had really been her last lifeline, and when he got sick Dom began to see more of her. She ran errands for the elder priest, made round-trips to the post office and drugstore, brought him books from the library and, then, audiotapes when he grew too weak to read. He began to show up at morning Mass in polished shoes. She was desperate to be of use to him, although Dom had always found her to be in the way.
“She must be wearing you out; you need your rest,” Dom warned Father Carl.
“What I need is a life I can still help,” he replied.
Dominic felt Dolores competing for the priest’s affection. A few months ago, in what would turn out to be Father Carl’s final public sermon, she had scooped Dom by arriving at the church early, shoving him aside in order to seize control of the wheelchair. She would be the one who wheeled Father Carl down the aisle to the altar, glowering at the congregants in the pews, daring them to look directly at their frail pastor with anything but reverence. But now that the old priest had died, would she be turning to him for counsel? The thought exhausted him.
Wincing at the grunting door (he half expected it to fall off completely any day now), Dominic made hard work of gathering himself out of the car. Glancing at the bumper, he confirmed that he had swiped the mailbox backing into that tight spot. He bent down pretending to examine the scratch while getting a peripheral glimpse of the tree she hid behind. She was so skinny a birch could manage it. He stood up, put his hands on his hips, stared directly at where he thought she would be and walked toward the line of trees at the edge of the lot.
“Hello?” he cried out.
There was no answer. Dom heard the steady roar of the Interstate beyond the concrete barrier at the edge of the shallow woods. His next call was lost in the rumble of a passing truck.
“Is that you, Dolores?” he asked and stepped over the curb onto the soft pile of pine needles. The damp of the earth seeped through the hole in his left shoe he hadn’t gotten around to mending.
“What, no coat? Aren’t you cold? Come into the rectory and warm up.”
“You can hear me, but you can’t see me.”
“Why is that? Are you invisible?”
“Might as well be.”
“Come in; it’s cold out. Or I can drive you home.”
“Oh no, none of that.”
“None of what?”
“Whatever. Sooo, how is he?”
Dom sighed. Would this girl be the first he told? “He’s with God now.”
Dolores stepped out from behind the tree. He barely recognized her. Long stringy hair, not so much unwashed as unclean. Untreated acne on her forehead. Teenage skinny, probably too skinny. Her very posture was angular and aggressive, vaguely contentious. She was the age at which physiology was temperament. Or was it something more? She seemed somehow hurt.
Dominic cleared his throat. “I’m very sorry. I know how you loved him.”
“How do you know that?”
“Well, because I know how he loved you.”
He watched the bones of her face fold into an ache; then she turned and ran across the parking lot. He called after her.
As he watched her race down the street, he felt that familiar discomfort he hated in himself: the capacity for pity. He had been prone to it his whole life but had grown to mistrust it utterly; it was feminine and sentimental. It turned on him like heartburn. He had hidden within it, and he had mistaken it for kindness.
*   *   *
Climbing the narrow stairs off the kitchen, Dominic balanced a hot cup of tea on his briefcase; he had forfeited his usual dash of brandy. The hot water steamed in the cool hallway. Much of the rectory had been shut down to save on heating; now it would be kept just warm enough for him.
Upstairs in the library, Dom logged on to his blog. With naive goodwill, he had recently written an essay arguing for the preservation of Our Lady of Fatima Church, which the archdiocese had recently named among the several dozen churches likely to close. There had been a sudden if modest outcry within the parish. The friends of the church were supportive, holding midnight candlelight vigils and prayer sessions. A petition was drawn and signed by the very people who never bothered coming to Mass.
Parishioners came to him with visions. A widow claimed she could suddenly see a teardrop form in the corner of the eye of the marble statue of the Virgin, only it’s a blemish in the stone that Dom knows has always been there. He did not disabuse the woman, though, and stayed off the record while she talked to the newspapers. None followed up on her claim in print, thank God. He was glad they didn’t take her seriously; the world was right to be suspicious about these sightings: Guadalupe, Lourdes, Fatima, Medjugorje, Queens, and hundreds of others. He mistrusted any literalizing of the mysteries.
It was on the Internet, though, that Dom got his first real idea of how people outside the parish felt about the church and its future. There would be nothing of the Bing Crosby sort of priest for Dom, drawing strength from the supportive folk of the parish. Daily doses of anonymous venom spat through the Web and landed on his blog. Over the last dozen months or so, he had posted his sermons, editorials, daily meditations, personal essays to a small but growing and appreciative audience. His blog had even been linked to several national sites; he had become a kind of go-to guy for reporters watching contemporary Catholicism. His Facebook account collected hundreds of friends, while his social life added none. Most of his readers were either orthodox Catholics looking for blessings or those curious few who came to find out what the fuss was—those agnostics who didn’t necessarily believe in the Deity but held on to “their own personal idea of God.” As if the purpose of being a god was to be conjured up in the imaginations of those who needed Him.
But it wasn’t until the rumors about the closings went public that he got the full blast of those who did not come with sympathy.
Comment #1022 by jimmyfox on November 25 at 7:14 p.m.
Nobody wants you. Just shut it down. Why would you ask us to hold out against all that gives us a little pleasure in this crappy world? No sex, no drugs. Puh-leeeeze!
Comment #1023 by indiparent on November 25 at 7:39 p.m.
I agree. Go to hell! You churches are just recruitment centers for innocent children to be sodomized by the priests anyway. What are you but safe havens for pedophiles. Read a newspaper, people. Get out of town and be in a hurry, Our Lady of Flatulence. God riddance (pun intended).
Comment #1024 by holyjizz on November 26 at 12:12 a.m.
Me again, Father. Let me ask you about that little girl who got shot in Columbine, the one the book got written about,She Said Yes. That’s what the newspapers reported the girl said when asked if she believed in Jesus—with a gun to her head. Turns out the whole thing was a sham. It’s more likeShe Shit Herself. That’s the humanity of the situation. Am I right, Father?
Let’s talk turkey, Padre. When it comes to religion, we’re supposed to respect and honor your right to preach superstition and ancient taboos that we wouldn’t allow anyone else to get away with. So—we’ve gotten rid of slavery, cannibalism, the fucking stoning of whores—you name it, the list goes on and on. But in the case of religion, we have to simply annihilate the entire rational evolution of our minds and bow our heads at the effort?
Face it, Father. The fight’s over. The world is better off for moving on. The New Atheism: Bring it on.
Dominic typed in a response:
I recognize a definite zealotry to your atheism. Your attack on religion is not only ideological, it’s downright evangelical! It’s almost as if your ambition doesn’t just want to destroy religion; you want to replace it.
Your certitude astonishes me. I’ve heard all of it before: that our vision of God is a defense system against the fear of the unknown, a fantasy of anthropomorphic grandiosity, a cognitive response to some ancient offending or frightening mental stimuli. I’ve heard this all before from social psychology, social-exchange theory, evolutionary psychology, behavioral economics, cognitive science, members of whom inform us that human instinct and intuition are evidence of adaptive behavior, learned fitness, market motives, encoded survival techniques. To give no credence to the wild and unknowable side of consciousness—how small that must feel.
Faith is that willful belief in what is not possible, or, as Wallace Stevens put it:
—the nicer knowledge of belief
That what it believes in is not true.
Your legitimate gripe is actually with the Church, which really in the end is nothing more than the social management of the wildness of spirit institutionalized within religion. More than that, it’s also the acceptable mechanism for people to safely explore that wildness. They won’t like that I write this, but they should realize it’s their greatest asset.
Why would anyone not want a greater, more ambitious idea of the human soul—one that can believe in something beyond what it can conceive of? Why wouldn’t you cultivate the kind of soul that is able to willfully experience beyond the rational mind and material world, even if illusory? Isn’t that in itself a kind of joy?
Rather than post, Dominic highlighted and then deleted the response. He knew that he would never win or lose that argument; it would just devolve into name-calling. He would be just another priest arguing with another atheist: “But you’re guilty of the same thing you accuse me of; you are trapped within the structural dynamics of your own prejudices.” They would get into that “I know that you know that I know that you know” game, like a bad high. Better to resist the easy grooves of careless thinking online: all these people who just wanted to come lift a leg and pee in his yard. Instead, he simply wrote and sent through the line:
I quote: “To believe in God means to see that the facts of the world are not the end of the matter.”—Ludwig Wittgenstein
Funny point in our history, isn’t it, for a priest to be attacked like a heretic.
*   *   *
“Whatever you say, say nothing.”
Father Carl’s last words haunted him. It was as if the old priest had passed invisibly inside the younger, but instead of being burdened Dom felt curiously lighter, happier and excited even—as if they were road buddies off together on some caper.
Whatever you say, say nothing. In the sacrament of Extreme Unction, Dominic had touched with the consecrated oil the eyes, the ears, the nostrils, the lips of the old priest but then lingered, rubbing the oil into the hands. How soft, still, cool and so white: between flesh and marble, man and monument.Through this holy unction and His own most tender mercy may the Lord pardon thee whatever sins or faults thou has committed by walking, Dominic said, touching the feet of Father Carl. A douse of holy water, a dose of morphine. Father Carl was nothing but a man and barely that. What was it that Dominic listened for in the sound of the breath held in that grim line of the lips, life or death? And then nothing. Withheld. He had counted slowly and at the twenty-third beat, he listened to the rattle in the man’s chest. How many deaths had he witnessed? At what point had they become—no, never routine—but the opposite of something happening?
Whatever you say, say nothing.
The phrase would stick. Even with his cheeks sunken, his bulk weightless on the bed, humming to stay just a little alive, that motherless child, that childless man made the effort to be priestly, significant in his last words, as if they might become famous last words. But who remembers a dead priest?
Holding the hand a bit longer, Dominic had listened for the warmth to cool; he smelled the rank from under the sheets as the old man’s bowels loosened. He turned his head away. Is this how a soul at death, at the pearly gates themselves, must look back and first see itself? Soiled and still. How big and true little words pretended to be. Dead. God.
Dom laid the hands across the chest. Old tools in a junk shop. He closed the priest’s lids over his eyes. Why did people in the movies always die with their eyes closed? Dom said a final prayer, struggling to let the words settle into meaning; he leaned into their rhythm and fought the hunch that it might just be his own last sincere prayer. He kissed the waxy forehead. He thumbed the jaw to shut the gape of the mouth. Agape. Say nothing. Little Lamb. Lamb of God. Who made thee?
There was much to do. Arrange for the transport of the body from the hospital to the funeral home. But, in fact, many of the details—the choice of coffin, the parish cemetery lot, even the list of eulogists—had been prearranged by Father Carl, who was proud of the fact that he had exacted an “ecumenical discount” from the undertaker. After all the referrals he had given? Father Carl’s two brothers were on call, and Dom knew that the answering machine blinking red in the vestibule signaled a neglected call from the elder checking up on things. None of it should wait, really. Nevertheless, he wanted to drift quietly for a while in the depressurized air of the emptying rectory. Weightless and suggestible as a ghost, he wondered the places he might go, the things he might see, might hear. From his earliest awareness, Dominic knew he was given to a mystifying tendency, prone to imagining things around him deeper and more beautiful than perhaps they really were—or had a right to be.
Roaming the halls, he passed Father Henry’s room, sealed shut since the priest died fourteen months ago. The door to Father Carl’s suite was open, as he had left it. Dominic stood in the doorway as his loneliness warmed its way into the room; his solitude was thermostatic, portable. Sitting on the twin bed made up tight as a military cot, Dominic handled the rosary beads Father Carl had left on his bed table, and resisted the temptation to see human wear in the bevel of the beads.
There was very little the old priest left behind. Not a clue to a single secret. Even if the parish had wanted to honor him as an elder or the chief of a small tribe, there was no personal treasure to bury him with. Where were the things he loved and held on to—the list of which might serve as a kind of biography?
When Father Carl had asked why he wanted to be a priest, Dominic joked, “Why, to have what you have: the girls, the money, the cars, the houses.” Looking around, Dom realized he had learned to crave as little as Father Carl. The bureau drawers contained only graying and neatly folded underwear, socks in a limp roll, his personal Bible fraying with Post-it notes, his liturgical calendar, his notes for sermons in copy books, his library copies of Trollope and Nouwen. A beach pebble—the one unpractical item, ostentatious in its useless sentiment. A photograph of Father Carl with his twin brother, at least thirty years old by the look of the Pontiac and their sideburns. In the bathroom, his shaving mug, brush and razor. Under the bed his pair of slippers, his pair of sneakers. He was simple, like a bird, maybe, who loved his few colorful threads but left them behind within the nest. He hoarded nothing.
The absence of belongings, in fact, testified to how little Father Carl regarded his mortal life. The old priest had believed so fervently in the afterlife (almost till the end) that Dominic’s own faith had been excited by it. In the old man, extravagance of soul was in equal parts to the modesty of the body.
“Of course you can argue that it is improbable—heaven, the afterlife, the Great Merger with Being, whatever you want to call it—but you can’t argue with me that it is impossible because I can believe it. To me if it’s conceivable, it’s possible.”
That was what the old man had argued. If irrational or illogical, there was also a beautiful justice to his faith: what ought to be true has to be true. “There’s no dishonor in it, you know,” he had argued to Dominic, “in believing in something merely because you cannot disprove it.”
Dom opened the little white paper bag and took out the sandwich the orderly had given him as he left the hospital. The tuna fish glued the two stale slices of bread together like a gray paste. He wasn’t hungry but ate the whole thing anyway, tasting it like medicine. Father Carl had loved tuna and ordered it in a club sandwich with a whiskey sour—“the real stuff, not the mix”—at the Graduate Club every Friday lunch.
Dominic looked in the old man’s closet. Sweats on a hanger. Three clerical suits. One double-breasted pinstripe, which Dominic took out. He pulled off his sweater and tried on the jacket; the satin lining was cool against his bare back as he buttoned the front. The sleeves hung below his wrists, and as he turned to the mirror and lifted his arms in a mock benediction to his congregation, he braced himself against the unexpected smell of Father Carl that crept up. The old priest had been like a father to Dominic; how difficult it is for a son to love up to a father.
“Call no one your father on Earth,” exhorted the Bible; Dominic’s childhood had nicely accommodated that.
Dominic took the suit off and looked at himself in the mirror. “You’re too sexy to be a priest,” one of his bloggers had commented not so long ago. “Even if you were meant to be one,” she wrote, “my God, what a waste!”
The mirror didn’t exactly corroborate. Fifty loomed just a few years away like a drop-deadline. His workouts had gone by the wayside, and his belly rolled over his underpants. The hair on his chest was graying faster than the hair on his head and grew like a jungle, creeping over his shoulder. Wasn’t there supposed to be the equivalent of a tree line to one’s torso? Walking closer to the mirror, he saw that he seemed to have the face he deserved: his lips dipped sourly at the corners over the empty space left by the molars that had been removed a decade ago. Worry marks creased his brow. Still, he believed he could whip himself into shape, pass for handsome again, make it on the outside should things come to that. Should the parish close for a fact. Should he be set loose from the Church. Should he become answerable to the charge of being “sexy.”
Those hostile comments on his blog—he should find them instructive, be proud of them even. He was too old to have no enemies.
As he hung Father Carl’s suit back in the closet, Dominic hummed a song that the dead priest had used to whistle frequently, “Do Nothing till You Hear from Me.” He smiled and understood what he was looking for: Father Carl would “write” his own eulogy by limiting or censoring what might be said. He owed the dead man that much at least: whatever he said, he would say nothing.
*   *   *
“Kneel when you pray,” Father Carl had instructed him.
“Kneel even if you aren’t able to pray.”
Dominic dreaded his evening prayers. The Liturgy of the Hours, November 26, was the Day of the Moon.
Let us pray.
Most merciful God, we humbly pray thee: that, like as when thy blessed Abbot Sylvester was devoutly meditating over an open tomb on the vanity of this life, thou didst vouchsafe to call him thence unto the desert, and to adorn him with a life of wondrous merit; so thou wouldst enable us after his example, to despise all earthly things and hereafter to rejoice in his eternal fellowship.
Dominic sat before the still-black window, tracing the filigree of the treetops against the starless but bright night sky, a bemooned sky. He waited for the comforts that reliably came with prayer: for the uphill pull of the eyelids to set at half-mast, for the lips to part and the tongue to go soft, for the tingle at the bridge of the nose, for the lightness at the top of his head. He listened for what he loved about the language of prayer: how it reminded him sometimes of the grit of gravel being stepped on, sometimes of rain running in a gutter, but always of the pinch of recrimination. He tried to pray as young seminarians do, clueless yet stimulated, groups of men sent off like toddlers into a playground. He meditated upon the lesson of Abbot Sylvester, who had looked into an open grave and saw there the disfigured body of a handsome kinsman who had lived nearby, saying, “I am what he was and what he is I shall be.”
Sweat broke across his forehead; fatigue pressed at the back of his eyes. The pain in his knees insisted that his body was just matter: what Simone Weil called simple, disobedient matter. He was unable to pray. This wasn’t just the usual quieting of doubt, like calling a room to order. This was different.
He worked hard at it, but it was like learning to draw by tracing. Better a copy than a fake. Faith should be authentic, not original.
His prayers reached for the moment when the words lost meaning and began, simply, to act. But not this evening. The failure startled him, like a child who looks up to discover that the legs he clings to do not belong to his father.
“Pray every day, Dominic,” Father Carl had said. “It’s like money in the bank.”
But his body disobeyed. He was starving; his stomach rumbled, and his head ached. Sluggish, constipated, swollen with false starts. Not subservient to his will, but selfish. He craved; he was hungrier than he had ever been. How unlikely this physical rebellion, as if the rocks on the beach were to rise up and colonize elsewhere. He felt the corrosion of conviction deep in his bowels. He dropped to his knees and invoked the antique panic of Psalm 70.
Be pleased, O God, to deliver me!
O Lord, make haste to help me!
His knees, experienced as a yoga master’s, ached under his weight and gave in. He fell to his side, hugged his legs to his chest and let the pressure radiate between the shoulder blades on his back. He turned over onto his belly. He closed his eyes to block the rush of images coming at him. He laid his head in his hands, pressed the warm curve of his fingers against his face. The weight of his head in his hands moved him, as if he were another gazing upon this picture of anguish. He had lain in this pose the day of his ordination—prostrate: a young man so eager to be saved and to save. That day seemed so long ago; the image itself an anachronism.
Dom rubbed his eyes until they ached, and the very blindness made its own images. He watched the nervous movie unfold: psychedelic constellations, arid deserts of cracked skin and creeks of blood; even this self-abuse had the colors of cosmic illusions.
Save me, O God!
For the waters have come up to my neck.
I sink in deep mire, where there is no foothold.Psalm 69
His prayers had been stripped of belief, authoritative and petrified like a dead language. They were impotent even as he ground his hips against the hardwood planks of the floor, unforgiving of the unwelcome bulge in his pajama pants. “A common affliction,” he told himself with consolation and condescension. He was like an adolescent again. Now in his middle ages, he couldn’t even bear himself in pants. His flesh rushed and engorged while his spirit withered and shrunk. The mind was willing, but the flesh was materialist, insistent. Prayer, in fact, had become an irritant like his morning erection: objectless, unfocused, unloved, unloving.
“Listen, Dominic, the big challenge is not to keep believing but to believe again and again, to start all over,” Father Carl had exhorted. “Day by day. Day after day. From scratch. Every day.”
He tried to pray as he had been able to as a young man, tireless and ardent, with that once-in-a-lifetime sense of attainment young men have. It had come to him so naturally and so blessed. He even used to think he had a gift for it. Now he felt plain foolish. His entire inner life—so credulous, so accredited, so historically buttressed by centuries of theology—now seemed merely ridiculous. What could he do, given the failure of his praying, but simply talk.
Failed Prayer Number One
In prayer I am never alone, both the dreamer and the dreamed.
Even our nightmares deliberate. He who could save us is almost always too late, almost never on time.
You and I, though, we’re right on schedule: Here I am, prostrate before You, in this ancient pose this late in the story. You recede as the day emerges, impressing upon me You’re going missing.
I’ll go out for You again tomorrow.
“Pray like you still believe,” Father Carl had said. “Let it sneak up on you.”
Failed Prayer Number Two
Lord, open my lips. And my mouth will proclaim your praise.
I will listen for you all night long.
I am beside myself listening for You.
Here, in the aftermath of You.
I am comfortable with Your absence so long as I know You are there.
He worried that using the second person in his prayers was presuming too much—as if he was admitting his own person by implying a listener.
He slept for a while without dreams. When he woke several hours later, stiff and wary, trying to remember why he felt afraid, he wiped his mouth on his sleeve, rose to his knees and continued where he had left off.
Failed Prayer Number Three
All is still—“Dead quiet,” Father Carl used to call this kind of outside, as if telling the future.
I awoke hoping that I had changed in some essential way; that I would know exactly what to do; that I would recognize Your guidance though it had not been given.
All summer long, trying to ward off this crisis, Dominic had read outside the Liturgy for his morning prayers, looking for inspiration from Chinese poets of the eighth century; Californians from the last—but he found the simplicity of their spirit overly burdened. Their openness crowded him. He had stood in the predawn and tried to feel virtuous before the beauty of a single leaf that fell at his feet. He tried to free himself of promise and be in the moment. His breathing would grow heavy at the proud pressure of being “present,” the bias that so much depended on one’s attention. In any event, his prayers had stopped asking for anything long ago. He wanted to return to his own enraged universe before which he lay watchful, helpless and expectant.
Failed Prayer Number Four
With prayer, practice does not make perfect.
Tragic as I feel, this must look pretty funny: me, here on my knees, smelling the failure of will on my hands.
My spirit is suspicious of epiphany: all that blissful filling.
I have never felt so much filled up with You as infiltrated and occupied.
*   *   *
At five, Dom dressed and went to the chapel to walk the Stations of the Cross before the parishioners filed in for the 6 a.m. Mass. At Communion, he dropped the host onto the furtive tongues of the daily dozen that still bothered to attend. He knew their habits: Tony, the tall old man who took it too high on the tongue; Maria, his wife, who winced as if about to be shocked; Ronnie, ever the enthusiast, stuck his out too long, curling the tip; and then there was Erin, the depressed mother whose baby whimpered in the car seat left behind in the pew, running up to the altar at the last moment, as if deliberating whether or not to. Offering her palms to receive the host, she would nonetheless dart her tongue out like a lizard snagging a bug.
Back in the rectory at seven, he ate his oatmeal and fried his egg (he still took the host on an empty stomach) before starting his day. Rounds at the two local hospitals before lunch with the bishop about his and his church’s future. In the afternoon, service at the assisted living home, house visits to the elderly disabled in the projects, a chance to answer letters and e-mails before the 5:30 Mass. Maybe another blog post. Dinner at the YWCA annual fund-raiser. In between: trying to organize Father Carl’s funeral. Then: facing himself again in prayer.
But first, the happy clarity of his morning walk, which he hoped would soon evolve into a run. He would work his way up the park’s wooded trails, switchback up the Rock to the top from where he could look at the city’s episodic skyline, the doomed dome of his own church, the storied campus, the Long Island Sound, the thickening curve of the sky down to New York City. A fresh powdering of snow had fallen overnight, and the white winter light made him squint. The trails would be precarious; sometimes the world promised to be just too beautiful.
As he crossed the parking lot, he saw something move in the Sable. The windows were fogged; the top of a head peaked up above the dashboard. He leaned in to look.
Dolores rolled down the window.
“What are you doing in there?”
“The doors were open.”
“There’s no point in locking them; they’ll just smash in the windows again. This way they know there’s nothing worthwhile inside.”
“You should just junk this old thing.”
“Have you been here all night?”
“Well, I’ve just been waiting for you.”
“For me? What for?”
“To help you properly bury Father Carl,” she said, puffing her chest out. Dominic saw her thin neck as a brave thing, a turtle sunning. The girl darkened just as quickly, sinking into herself. Her face reddened. She looked down at her feet, then raised her eyes to meet his. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to…”
“It’s OK,” Dom said. “Why don’t you go home and rest?”
“No, I came to see you. I want to say confession,” she said.
“You want me to hear your confession? Now? There are times posted in the bulletin.”
“I can’t wait till then.”
“Aren’t we ahead of ourselves here? I thought you said you had never been baptized.”
She curled a strand of hair around her finger. “Of course I’ve been baptized. I grew up here. I just don’t go into that church anymore.”
“But now, you want to?”
“I need to.”
She stared at Dom until he knew he had no choice. Was this the kind of power she had over Father Carl? This girl—lost—without options, would somehow always get her way.
In the darkened chapel, Dom watched Dolores take off her coat, impressed by the continuing transformation of a little girl into this almost woman. Years ago, he sat next to her on a school bus coming back from the Botanical Gardens in the Bronx; she had fallen asleep with her head against the window, the sunlight illuminating the little spittle that bubbled up in her nostril with each breath. She smelled a little like baked beans.
Now, she wore a tight top that did not quite reach the waist of her low-cut jeans, revealing both the crack of her butt and the pout of her navel. Dom noted the lovely swelling of her flesh—“the hinge of salvation” (Tertullian De res. 8,2)—at the hips, the soft down on her calves. Even in a girl so thin the white extravagance of skin: so clean and helpless and ubiquitous. So much flesh in the world, all forbidden to him. How could something so plentiful feel so rare? Random, uncounted as weeds: that’s what we are here on earth—flowering, unappreciated too. And he so lonely amidst it all. She padded heavily down the aisle in her big furry boots that parodied some kind of Eskimo mammoth hunter, scuffing the tiles with the lazy presumption that she had all the time in the world to accomplish precisely nothing.
As a sixteen-year-old she had perplexing looks. She was beautiful at certain angles; today she wore a macabre red lipstick, rounded out like a hot cherry pepper smack in the middle of her pale face. Her skin was usually erupting, flaking; she carried an undernourished cast about her, as if dieting for martyrdom. That was her paradox: her tolerance for her own weakness had become a kind of strength. She carried herself with that difference: she was not made for this world. Father Carl thought that she took herself too seriously; Dom knew he thought the same about him.
Father Dominic settled into the confessional and waited for Dolores. He heard her part the heavy red curtains of the confessional and call out, “Oh-Kaa’ay, here we co’ome,” as if she were a frightened child walking into a dark room, trying to fool the monsters into thinking she was not alone. She could still make herself sound like a little girl. She knelt down like a kid too, lithe and tentative in the near darkness, cringing at the creak of the knee stand as she shifted her weight. Why had she had been so afraid to come in here? It turned out to be less like a coffin and more like a phone booth. The curtains smelled of mothballs, and she felt sleepy behind their dimness like an old sweater in a trunk.
A minute passed. She ran her finger along the high trim as if looking for a key. She wiped the dust on the inside of her boot. She grew bored. How would her voice sound in here? She sniffled and cleared her throat, decided to test it further.
“Boop,” she ventured in falsetto.
“Beep-boop,” she dared a bit louder.
“Boop-de-boop.”
The screen slid and let in a soft yellow light and the shadowed profile of the priest behind the grate.
Confession, for Dominic, felt almost clinical; he faced the mysteries of the soul the way a doctor might a network of physical symptoms. What hadn’t he heard here: the lovelessness of wives, the remorse of two-bit gangsters in a sentimental mood. The husband who admitted he could no longer bear the thought of making love to his wife of twenty-three years, tormenting himself with fantasies of her death. How could Dominic reassure him that his villainy was one of the most common complaints he heard? How many wives had he smuggled off to shelters? How many confessors came to him seeking advice on negotiating wills, fights with their boyfriends, even investment questions? None of it ever surprised him; all of it made him envious of lives free to transgress. For these people, sin ended up more disappointing than trying to be good.
He was bored with the generic sinners; most people believed they were basically good. Hope depended on their naïveté. Dom was tired of them; they reminded him of himself. It was those with buried sins, secret fears that had ossified into trouble, who fascinated Dominic. He was compelled by those transgressions that attracted not just his compassion but his curiosity: the prepubescent boy who, after a severe bout of diarrhea, was terrified that he was turning into a girl getting her period. Or the middle-aged woman who went to Rome to apply for an exorcism but got married instead. Or the man who became impotent in bed with his wife and was afraid that, unable to ejaculate, he would begin urinating inside her. Or the businesswoman in a panic attack on her morning commuter train, convinced that her fellow passengers intended to eat her alive.
Secrets rarely keep their original shape. Once buried, they begin to rot from within or compress into a crystalline hardness, the way fear and desire collude to produce an elusive individual soul. While the shrink might ask a patient what he feels, a priest is more likely to be interested in what a penitent fears. With the sacrament of confession, the Catholic Church had figured this out early: the creation of a dark and different silence to which one repaired to invite the soul, a ritual in which one might be dug up, buffed, reevaluated. Dom had persuaded Father Carl to shut down the sterile reconciliation room with its face-to-face frankness and reopen the traditional confessional. What happened inside the darkness confirmed for Dom the aspiration of Catholics to live their lives inwardly, to schedule regular self-reflection. He wondered too about the eventual loss of this ritual in the future: Would it be one more roadblock to the unconscious? Would we find redemption in the pillbox?
He knew Dolores would not disappoint. He nodded at her and waited. She had been briefed how to begin, but there was only silence. She appeared in a violet outline, shadowy and penitent. The wire grate pixilated her image. Dominic took a disciplinary breath: impure thoughts tormented him most reliably here in the dim light of this big box. He had spent years welcoming lines of women to kneel before him in submission, heavy and open like peonies in a garden after a rain. He regretted every missed opportunity, every lack of transaction between them in this dark, intimate space. The only thing he would ever leave inside a woman was by proxy. A blessing. He would stare as a woman spoke, watching her mouth deepen into a hole of dark against which a tooth might flash like a silverfish. Sometimes he wished the mouth would just talk dirt.
“Yes, my child,” he started, surprising himself with his sepulchral mumbling. Who was he now? He sounded just like Father Carl, as if he had been possessed by the elder’s manner. Still, he could feel that insipid smile on his face, benign and hopeful like a virgin at a dance hall. Wipe it off!
He pinched a thumbful of his cheek, twisted it and winced. He waited.
“I forget how to start,” she whispered.
“Bless me, Father, for I have sinned,” he prompted her.
He heard his words back in her voice, timid yet formal. She sounded so much younger than her years in here. Words that began with a hardcorgwould catch in her throat; listening to her, he always had the urge to blow his nose.
“It has been ‘x’ since my last confession,” he prompted her again.”
“I forget.”
“OK, never mind. Tell me what you want to confess,” he said.
Dom waited. He heard her sigh.
“I’m not sure I’ve done anything wrong.”
“Well, you came here for a reason, right?”
“Why I came here? In the first place? I guess I just wanted to talk. I find it kinda wild that big hairy grown-up men—like you—get up there at the altar and talk about, you know, Love, like with a capitalL. And didn’t even seem embarrassed by it, you know? It just seems impossible.… And nice.”
Dominic waited through her pause.
“Also, I just wanted, or thought I ought to tell you something that I feel which is so bad.”
“What is that?”
“I don’t know. I think I just need to talk to you about my feelings.”
“OK. I’m listening.”
“It’s just that I get so upset. I get really confused about everything.”
“How so?”
“Well, I know that I want to be really, really good, deep down—a better person than I really even know how to be? Like being good isn’t good enough? I want to be good so badly.”
He kept quiet.
“But it’s like only after being bad that I know how hard it is to be good. Or even that I’m the kind of person who can be good or holy.”
“What makes you think you’ve been so bad?”
“I really don’t know if I should tell.”
“I can help you. Listen, our failures are important too; they teach us to know ourselves, to see ourselves as God sees us. In some ways, our troubles may lead us to our true selves.”
“I don’t know. I just, like,feeleverything so much. All the awful things in the world. And not only the awful things but just people, like, walking around, doing things, thinking they know how to run their lives.”
“Do you feel like you don’t know how to run your own life?”
“Well, but even the big things like that giant earthquake where so many people—SO MANY PEOPLE—got killed. I can’t even understand that number. All this starvation, people starving. AIDS. Just so much suffering—but I see the pictures and they are so real, and are we supposed to just pretend? Just walk on by and pretend everything’s, like, normal? I feel nobody is doing anything. Maybe I need to do something.”
“Yes, but how are these your…?”
“I don’t know … I don’t know … I don’t know.”
She started to sob.
“OK, easy now, Dolores. Let’s slow things down.”
“And global warming and the poor, poor polar bears. And I stand here, you know, like everybody, helpless to help. We just go on, like, I don’t know, watching television and eating, eating, eating—just stuffing our faces. I can’t even keep up with the horrible stories. I can’t, I can’t even count how much this happens. How can you even believe in a future this way? How can you expect me to believe in God? Why is He so freakin’ complacent?”
“Dolores, shhhh. You’re shouting now. Let’s start again.”
He heard her go quiet; the silence exhaled with a punch in the gut. The girl fell with a bang against the back wall of the confessional.
He scrambled out and picked her up from the floor. She clung to him tightly while her body shook thinly. Her collarbone pressed so hard into his Adam’s apple he had to disengage her before she hurt them both. This is what it must feel like to be a father—that which she called him. How much she needed him might hurt him. It was over quickly. She quieted; her body went limp. He stroked her hair, greasy and uncombed; she was a little, feral animal in his arms, but one comforted by being captured, wanting to be saved from her wildness. This was what he was for, he told himself: to see one individual’s pain so clearly, to acknowledge that misery is everywhere and to reassure that the power that will save is also everywhere.
They sat down, and he laid her head in his lap until the cold of the marble floor numbed his butt. Dolores had stopped crying, but her little sniffs sounded substantial in the still dark of the church. The impropriety of their embrace burrowed between them. Dominic cleared his throat, shifted beneath the girl. She turned and leaned against the end of the pew.
Dominic straightened the curtain of the confessional.
“Are you OK? You fainted.”
“I know; I’ve been feeling sick in the mornings.”
“What’s the matter? Are you ill?”
“I don’t know. I feel like I’m going to throw up.”
He held her as she dry-retched. The suggestion of vomit lingered in the air.
“When was the last time you ate something?”
“Not since yesterday.”
“You’ll need to eat something.”
“No, no. I couldn’t.”
“Let’s get you to a doctor.”
“No. I won’t go. I know what’s wrong, anyway.”
“Tell me.”
She looked at him dead on and said, “OK. What the fuck.”
Taking a deep breath in, she exhaled. “Whooo. OK. Truth or Dare?” She let out a big sigh and looked to the side. “I’m pregnant.”
Dominic fixed on the dainty gold cross hanging around her neck and was calmed by the sight. No matter what, they had this in common. He knew this girl.
“I’m sorry. I guess I was scared to tell you.”
“Why?”
“For all the obvious reasons.”
“Dolores, stop being coy with me.”
“I’m not. I’m just … ashamed.”
“Do you know who the father is?”
“I’m not sure.”
“There was more than one?”
Dominic could not tell whether the look she shot at him betrayed contempt for his lack of experience or shame for her own.
“Why don’t you go to a doctor?”
“I won’t go. I hate them, that whole world. They’re worse than priests.” She smiled at him. “You can have that for your blog.”
“Dolores, you have to see someone.”
“I will. I will. I’ll go for a midwife. That’s how my baby will be born.”
“Who’s going to take care of you?”
“Who ever does?”
“Do you want the baby? Can you take care of it?”
“What choice do I have?”
He looked at her solemnly. A moment passed.
“You’re kidding.” She stared at him with wide eyes. “What are you telling me?”
Dominic stared at her silently.
“I can’t believe you.”
“I’m just pointing out that you are very young and that you have … choices.”
“You’re a real piece of shit.”
Dolores sat up to all fours, like a cat.
“Wait. Just listen to me for a minute.”
“So this is the great advice of a Catholic priest.”
“I haven’t said anything. I just want to help you think through…”
“No, you didn’t say anything. You never say anything.”
They sat in a tense silence until Dolores picked herself up.
“I feel sorry for you, Father Dominic. I mean, what if I told on you?”
Dominic felt a door slam inside his gut.
“Don’t worry.… Anyway, nobody believes me about anything anymore.”
She walked down the aisle.
“You believe me, right?” she asked before leaving the chapel.
Dominic sat in a center pew allowing the chilled shadows to settle around him. Looking up at the rose window, he could see that the leading was eroding even further; it was going to fold in on itself if attention wasn’t soon paid. The whole circle buckled toward its concave center, and its purposeful light now fell fragile, as if the tension point of its buttressing would be the cause of its own collapse.
*   *   *
Dominic crossed over the green river via the condemned but not yet demolished bridge. He felt righteous walking instead of driving: the green thing. He really should just garage the car, wait out his probation, do the right thing. Father Carl used to remind him that being a priest didn’t earn him special rules. He’d have to get the bus schedule to Hartford for his meeting with the bishop the next day.
At the far side of the bridge, a homeless man held out his hand; Dominic put his head down and patted his pockets to signal they were empty as he walked quickly past.
“Have a good day,” the man called out after him. “Hey … the least thing you can do is to wish me a pleasant afternoon.”
Dominic picked up his pace.
“I’m not invisible, you know,” the man called after him.
“No, but I might as well be,” Dominic thought. “I deserve a good kick in the ass for that,” he said and made a mental note to address the theme in a future sermon or Web essay: a homeless man complains that he is made to feel invisible by people who turn their head and hurry past him without acknowledgment. But the real trouble belongs with those passing by: it is they who are made invisible. It is they who hide and decide not to exist. That is the challenge the homeless present: to deny them is to deny ourselves. It would make a great homily with just enough regret to delude a Sunday morning.
Dominic grunted. Must every encounter, every image he stopped to apprehend—must all of it warm the heart, charge the soul, make the point, mean something? He was sick of it.
At the other side of the bridge, he saw Ronnie digging for clams in a tide pool of brackish water. His dog was sleeping beside him; an AM transistor radio lay between his paws spitting out conspiracy theories. The old bitch barely looked up when Dom called out, “Hey, Ronnie, you sure you want to be eating that stuff?”
“Eat it? Hell no. I’m gonna sell it.”
“Ronnie, come on, that isn’t kosher.”
“What do you know about kosher, Father?” Ronnie laughed. “Our shellfish used to be famous, you know. I just wanna return to the glory days. You know, like Sheepshead Bay or up in Wellfleet.”
“You’re gonna kill somebody someday with that, Ronnie.” Dom shook his head. Ronnie was a regular at the AA workshop Dominic led on Saturdays at 6:30 just after the evening Mass and before the temptation of the pub crawl. Ronnie had joined them seven years ago after he was in a bad car accident that had injured his back and forced him to leave his construction job and live on disability. But Dom knew it was all a scam as he watched Ronnie rake the sand and collect his polluted haul. Every time he saw the man at a bowling alley or softball game, he wanted to rat him out, but it was just another injustice he had to wink at. Father Carl had talked him out of it, saying it wasn’t his job to be God’s cop.
“It’s very simple, Dominic,” the old priest had advised. “The bottom line for most people, the golden rule for everybody, is to treat others as you would be treated yourself. The difference for priests is that we have to learn to treat other people better than we can expect them to treat us.”
It sounded good at the time—even comforting in its challenge—but Dom knew there was something off: the selfless benevolence of the comment covered up its superiority. That’s how martyrs get made; torture them as one might, no one can touch them.
Dominic had the key to Building 4 of the row of projects behind the train station, where he saw several families on a weekly basis, making sure they had not been forgotten and had been given food, checking that social services were keeping the place habitable and, most important, serving them the Eucharist. He unlocked the heavy fire door with its quick return. Despite the cold, he could smell the urine snap in the frigid air, sharp as smelling salts. Climbing the concave steps to the third floor, he rapped his knuckles against the apartment door.
“Mrs. Alfano?” he called. There was no answer and he paused, his head bowed in attention. He always expected the worst on these visits, knew it would happen one day. Somewhere inside he even knows he looks forward to it. But he heard her call out, “Father, is that you?” His key stuck in the door, but he sighed and scraped himself into the front room.
She sat in her red vinyl armchair; the plastic, glow-in-the-dark rosary beads wrapped around her monstrous fingers, soaking up the daylight for their nocturnal life. Many times on entering this apartment, he wished he were as good a priest as Father Carl, and not feel the tremor of repulsion that crept up his spine. He would look at this woman and see her “incandescence,” as Father Carl would have called it: “That is truly what I see, Dominic, I see the Lord in their eyes, the way the heart shines. I see a brightness around them. You’ll reject the word, Dominic, I know, but I see them asluminous.” Dominic did reject the word—not just for its pretension but because he was genuinely blind to it. In the endless lines of people who came to be in the presence of the elder priest he saw nothing but dark need and drab loneliness—as well as a lack of realism by those who expected him to be if not omniscient certainly ubiquitous, tending to each one individually all at once. “Be here, now,” he reminded himself.
“How are you today, Mrs. Alfano?” Dominic asked. Although she was widowed over fifteen years ago, she went by nothing other than her married name. After her husband died, she rapidly gained the 170 pounds that tipped her over the 300 mark and shrouded herself in the black mourning dresses she wore too many days in a row. The smell of body odor pervaded the place like the gloom of her grief, stained into the lurid varnish on the walls and the tattered weave of the upholstery.
It was hard to believe Mrs. Alfano had ended up this way. She had always been a proud beauty. As a younger woman, she used to volunteer in the parish: soup kitchens, CYA benefits, Girl Scout meetings. However modest the occasion, her hair was always up in a complex beehive, high and contrived. She wore good dresses and high heels; there was something about her belted waist and high-heeled ankles that was “worth watching,” as Father Carl put it. He had always imagined a kind of orthodoxy to her physical life at home: meatless Fridays and the rhythm method were just two of the rules Dominic knew so many in the community used to obey—those who didn’t “keep two sets of books.”
She used to flirt with Father Carl in that chaste way a young fiancée would a future father-in-law. But widowhood had determined her now; she wore nothing but black and had “let herself go,” as people say, a step before wanting to be taken away.
Dominic leaned over as the old woman kissed his hands. When she moved in her seat he could smell the vinegar in her clothes, unfolding like a wet and crumpled washcloth left to dry. “This is what I am for,” he told himself: “to love the unloved, to refute their unlovableness.”
“Has the social worker been here this week?” he asked delicately.
“Yes, but I told her I don’t need her. I don’t need anybody but you, Father. Bless you, Father.”
“And your children.”
She grunted. “One uses me, and the other hates me.”
“I wanted to talk to you about Dolores, Mrs. Alfano.”
“I have nothing to say. I have no power over that girl.”
“Is Dolores in some kind of trouble?”
“I don’t even know where she is half the time. It’s up to God what happens to her. After all I’ve done for them. Say what you will about Marco; he has some respect for his mother. He comes to visit. But that girl, ahhh.”
“She doesn’t look well to me. Are you sure everything’s all right?”
“Who sees her? You see her. Father Carl sees her, maybe too much. Anyways, I have a hard enough time looking after myself. She wants to look like Saint Theresa, that’s her business.”
“I called the school. They tell me now she has stopped going altogether.”
“They called. They talked to her. They sent two shrinks, social workers—what? Three. Nothing helps, and they gave up. Who can blame them? I’ve given up. Why do you bother me with this now? You’re upsetting me. I’m getting upset. Look what you’ve done.”
She rocked in her chair; her arms rubbed against the plastic covers with a dry snort. Dominic looked away. The TV was tuned to the Catholic station with the sound turned down: Channel 99, the last before the infinite static. After he left, she would pilgrimage through the channels, walking through the stations backward, stopping to chat with the nice ladies on the Home Shopping Network, charging hard against her credit card limits.
“OK, OK.” Dom tried to calm her.
Week after week, he tried to get her to look at her life, her daughter’s life, try to persuade her to go into assisted living quarters, whose van could get her to church, help her do errands. But she was stubborn. What would her husband have said? Instead, Dom traveled to her every Friday afternoon to hear her confession and celebrate the Eucharist.
What really offended Dom was the woman’s outdated brand of Catholicism, the mystical heaviness that understood the stories in the Bible as literal truth. Vatican II, postmodern theology, the easing of restrictions, the backing away from the saints—none of it might have happened by the looks of this place. Dominic felt irritated by the heavy symbolism everywhere: the lurid crucifix on the wall with its little plastic Jesus, that carnage of conviction, curling up like a stale Cheez Doodle; the ceramic Madonna banal as a Barbie on the bureau; the saint cards lined up by the days of the week on the table beside her chair. She had a jewelry box filled with rosary beads, little blue bottles filled with holy water on the window sash, a charm bracelet of bleeding hearts. Seeing all this enraged Dominic like some local Inquisitor. He wanted to smash the idols, strip the altars; this was the immigrant’s Catholicism, which modern America felt entitled to condescend to. Class, religion, race, weight, ethnicity—these are the things that replace what people might know about other people.
The apartment, her infirmary, had become a little museum of rejected pieties, almost un-American in its fetishization of relics stripped of value but invested with presence. If only he could free himself of the associations, Dom might approach the place with the wit of kitsch. The whole place reminded him of how being Catholic had gone from feeling like the ultimate insider—chosen, blessed, charged—to being marginalized and patronized. He tried to focus on what she was saying, to hear the human soul through the metastasis of her pain.
“Father, you don’t know what it’s like, really. All alone here. Always alone here. I need you so bad; why can’t you come more often? What’s once a week? What keeps you too busy for me?”
“I do my best. Come now, let me hear your confession.”
“Confession. What do I have to confess? A simple woman, who suffers alone here. I have grief everywhere. My knees hurt, my eyes are bad. All I want now is to be with Jesus Christ. Why won’t he take me, Father? It’s all I ask.”
Dominic looked away. There was a perverse pride in her suffering; she wore her pain so fervently, with a passion lacking dignity. She was the antidote to sophistication, she wanted him to know. She was all spirit: simple, needy, closer than he to the ultimate misery.
“We all know pain, Mrs. Alfano. And what is pain for other than to bring us closer to the Lord’s ultimate suffering?”
“Madonna mia,” the woman cried out, and Dominic followed her gaze to the bust of the immaculate mother of all grief who knew the hardness of life, the meanness of birth, the overhanging pressure of what life is for, the need not only to flee but to ascend. For a moment Dominic felt an old, familiar flush come over him. He cast his eyes down; the bare fact of his shoes, scuffed and dirty, grounded him again. This holy woman understood him better than that narcissistic martyr on the cross.
Mrs. Alfano’s confessions were ceremonious at best; she had blocked too much of the world out by this point to offend it. Taking in the body of Christ—craving and ingesting it—was the only meaningful sacrament to her. Dominic led her in prayer:Our Father who art in heaven. Hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come; thy will be done. On earth as it is …
She seemed to get smaller as she bowed her head. She made room for it. The room thrummed with their whispered prayers; the old woman worried over her beads, engaging the old story, the teller of the sacred life.
He delivered the host. “The body of Christ.”
“Father, slow down, you’re rushing.”
Dominic repeated, “The body of Christ.”
The old woman grabbed his wrist. “Make him take me, Father. Soon, Father. I can’t anymore. Doesn’t he love me?”
Dominic shrugged her off. “Mrs. Alfano. The body of Christ.”
The old woman nodded, said “Amen” and took the host on her white tongue.
He would leave her like this: with the host pasted against the roof of her mouth, contemplating the Fifteen Mysteries. The Joyful ones. The Five Sorrowful Mysteries and the Five Glorious Mysteries.
Dominic heard the heavy footfall of steps and the turn of a key in the lock. Marc Alfano stormed into the room. On break from the restaurant where he worked across town, he looked always tired, like most waiters. He was a big man with a big mouth, and Dominic instinctively squared himself. The two had never gotten along. Marc took his coat off and wiped his brow with his shirt sleeve, stained at the button. He was already sweating from the walk up the stairs.
“Oh,” he said, nodding at Dominic, “you’re here.” He turned to his mother. “Ma, look, I brought you a little skirt steak to fry me up.”
Dominic watched the old woman gather herself up from the chair into her walker and make her way into the kitchen.
“Ma. Peppers. Onions. Thanks,” Marc called after her.
When she was out of range, Dominic said, “Maybe, Marc, this is a little too much for her.”
“What? And take away the one thing she has left to live for?” Marc whispered loudly. He leaned forward. “And what do you know about it anyway? Get something straight. I’m not looking for some kind of guidance from the likes of you. So, just relax, huh?”
He threw himself onto the couch. The air wheezed through the seams of the plastic upholstery covers; everything in the apartment exasperated. Taking his shoes off with a heavy groan, Marc propped his feet on the coffee table. The glass fogged beneath his heels. Belching loudly, he picked up his newspaper and began to read. Dominic stood there awhile anyway, trying not to look ignored, nor to look at the hole in the man’s damp socks, their odor mingling with the onions his mother had begun frying in the kitchen.
Dominic looked at his watch, 3:30 p.m., the restaurant worker’s lunch hour, and stood to button his coat.
“Let me tell you something,” Marc said, looking up at him. “That woman in there is a saint, you know. A freakin’ saint.” He stood up and paced the room till he stood directly in front of Dominic.
“Let me tell you something else,” Marc said; he was the kind of man who needed to silence a room before speaking to it. He pointed at Dominic’s chest with his index finger. “Her whole life, she did nothing but sacrifice herself for her children, for me and that miserable tramp of a sister of mine.” Marc was getting red in the face, sputtering, “No one understands the depth of her devotion to her family. No one! Not even you, especially not you. No matter how much you come around here.”
He was shouting now, as if angry with Dominic for arguing otherwise, for pretending to know her heart better.
Dominic nodded, stepped around him, walked to the kitchen and put his hand on the old woman’s shoulder. She turned to receive his blessing and whispered, “I’d ask you to stay and eat something but…”
“Not to worry.”
As he walked to the door, he heard Marc call after him, “You know, Father, you should pay attention to what people are saying about you priests.”
Dominic froze at the door. His head cleared like a vacuum. Paranoia drew on him like a leech. It was so easy to suspect the worst about himself in the eyes of others. He glanced at Mrs. Alfano, who did not look up from her pan, and let himself out quickly.
In the dark hallway, Dominic clutched the railing as a rat moved along the wall not quite as quickly as it ought.
The door opened and Marc called after him, “Yo, Father. Wait up.”
He put a beefy arm around the priest’s shoulders. “Almost forgot something.”
“What is it?” Dominic asked him.
Marc cleared his throat. “Because I like you, Father, I’m gonna help you out.”
He handed the priest a wrinkled paper bag. Dominic looked inside and saw a ratty collection of porn magazines.
“You know, Father, I’m sorry sometimes I get a little rough with you. Truth is I feel a little sorry for you; that’s why I want to make this gift to you.”
“I’ve got to run,” Dominic said.
“Never mind. Go home. Take a look.” He spread his fingers and patted the priest’s chest. “Let off a little steam.”
“Listen, Marc. Thanks for thinking of me, but no thanks. I’ve got to go,” Dominic said, laying the bag on the landing and starting down the stairs.
“Father,” Marc yelled after him, “what do you think, you’re something special?”
*   *   *
Many priests who want to leave the Church find it easier to do so after their mothers have died.
Dominic was different; he was marked to join the priesthood upon the death of his mother when he was just seven years old. Remembering little of his childhood, he imagined it happy enough in the way most unaware things must be. A dreamy kid, picked up and shuttled about by his mother, barely disturbing her solitude. Watched over by her somewhere in the next room. She without a husband; he without a father. That seemed just fine as far as he was concerned; you don’t have to believe in a mother.
Pajama feet: that was the predominant image of his boyhood, a onesie that wrapped him from neck to toe, its flannel softly pilling and consoling, except that he was always too hot in the groin and damp between the toes. Irritated and chafing, rubbing himself red. The baths his mother gave him, leaving him in the tub while she ran around doing laundry and making supper until the water cooled and the soap scum grayed against the sides, until he screamed for her with bluing lips, and she would come and kiss his eyes, her soft breath on the wet darkness, the towel shrouding him, the roughness against the crew cut, and if it were possible he might never again have opened his eyes to find everything different—suddenly it seemed—his mother gone.
That the world could make such a tragedy could mean only one thing: it was there to astonish him. If these things outside him—the late afternoon light on the chapel, the predawn chants he sang—were mysteries able to move him, they must then be solved. They had to have meaning.
“My little secret,” his mother would call him. “I want to know everything about you. Just me. You can tell me everything.”
With her gone, he would have no one to tell secrets to. There wouldbeno secrets then, only an inner life that would always be apparent before God.
He feared that his mother had secrets. He had never seriously tried to find out exactly how she died except to know that she had been in a car accident. A man was driving. One of the priests said to him, unkindly, “She liked that, you know, taking drives with a man friend.”
Having no appropriate next of kin, Dominic was shuttled among Catholic foster homes until he was taken to a community shelter in the northeast Bronx run by an old Jesuit, Father Francis, whom he and the other boys called “Ma.” Father Francis never objected; he liked being both mother and father to the boys and fulfilled both roles without gender. He looked between sexes as well with his big hips and soft man breasts, his nasal, sitcom voice, his waddle walk, his nervous clucking around the pots of soup on the stove. He looked no one directly in the eye. His constant chatter worried every detail of maintaining the home; he talked to every task that lay before him: “OK. Now you’re done. I’ve taken care of you. And now I have to…” His existence filtered between states, somehow membranous, as if a gelatinous film formed between him and the world, protecting him under its insular damp cover.
Toward the end of a hot and humid July, the ten-year-old Dominic wandered the parish grounds, pretending it was a country estate to which he had been exiled. He had always been good at creating magical worlds, in his own image, little make-believe worlds suitable for living and scalable to his imagination. He climbed up to a second floor terrace and balanced himself on the railing. He extended his arms and closed his eyes pretending to be Superman. Preparing himself for flight, his knees buckled, and he crumpled down to the small patch of grass below. Father Francis screamed for the other boys, who carried Dom to the hospital several blocks away. All he had suffered was a broken elbow. But Father Francis’s hysteria had set the tone for how the boy would be cared for: he was a fragile gift, vulnerable to their neglect.
From that point on, Dom was excited by the very strangeness of dimension. Troubled by the vastness of some things (the night sky, oceans), he was puzzled by the smallness of his body, an inadequacy of his senses to match the largeness of his thought. How would he ever fit into the great and undifferentiated world outside himself? Who would see him there; who else but God?
The other boys in the house began to treat him differently too, as if he actually deserved better. He was their special case: a good boy with a mother who had loved him; a boy who would have led a proper life except now he couldn’t. That he would fall into their lot through no fault of his own, through rotten luck, ought to mean some sort of special fate. He was sent. They watched over him, got his back at school, saved him from the rougher chores, encouraging him, instead, to “hit the books.” They talked themselves into his essential “goodness,” to which they attributed his lack of aggression. And Dominic, in turn, was pleased at how he pleased others; he became almost addicted to their approval.
The house didn’t know what else to do except to groom him for the priesthood. He was good for almost nothing else. Lacking his own family, he would belong to the family of man. He was an excellent student, and Ma appealed to the archdiocese and raised money to send him to a seminary prep school. It seemed absolutely the right thing to do.
At Dom’s going-away party, one of the older boys was allowed to bring his girlfriend. It was the first time a member of the fairer sex had entered the inner sanctum. She arrived with a red mop of hair, big-heeled shoes, a tiny miniskirt and a tube top. Dominic had to bite his lip to keep from laughing but was caught short to find the older boys staring hard at her with a serious and intent silence that he couldn’t begin to understand yet.
Dom approached his devotion at the seminary prep with all the conviction of a young cadet in a military academy. Faith to him was precisely this: a set of buildings with defined purpose that he would make his way among, fulfilling duties along the way. As he had no real sense of home, he wanted the places he inhabited to define his life. This is where you pray; this is where you study; this is where you promise. And Dominic was nothing if not promise (even if he was nothing in actuality). He learned the charms of the good boy; he inspired benevolence in others. How he was thought about was in fact who he would become.
As with most boys his age, his confession was big and shapeless; he didn’t exaggerate so much as cast a wide net that might catch something. His prayer didn’t really concern itself with authenticity or lack of it, but with expectation. The future loomed before him with the prospect of the calling; he waited for it through most of his adolescence until he pretended to hear it. He didn’t grow up so much as he was called up. Until this moment in his life, there had always been more space in front of him than behind. He pretended to be called forward to cover the fact that he was being pushed from behind.
When asked if he thought about becoming a priest, he didn’t know what else to say but that he had thought of little else. “Explore it,” Father Francis said. “You’re not like the other boys here. They are ultimately good boys, but you—you have a gentleness. Your smile. People want to listen to you.”
“How are you called by God?” went the Jesuit mantra, asked first by Saint Ignatius. Dominic heard it as oddly evasive. While the Jesuit course of study was so rigorously prescribed, the essential question of discernment felt individualistic, with lots of wiggle room. The vast spectrum of possible and acceptable answers confused him. No two novices would be called in the same way, leaving plenty of room to doubt the way in which one was specifically called. He wanted discernment to tighten around him, squeeze out the notice of choice. He already had a passion for faith, but he lacked mechanical competence for it; like a music lover with a tin ear. What came first: the calling or your readiness to hear it?
Perhaps this is why he never felt particularly “chosen”; he had decided to choose, instead. He worked hard at discerning the call. He didn’t have a natural genius for it. Like a young groom in an arranged marriage, he figured love would come.
And so he listened and listened and listened until he was convinced he heard voices. Father Francis asked him if he was ready.
“I don’t know, Father. I don’t know if I’m right.”
“Of course you don’t, my boy. That’s the point.”
He complained again to Ma. “I’m making believe.”
“That’s OK. It is supposed to feel like play. Serious play.”
He tried one last time. “I’m not worthy to be a priest,” he said to Father Francis, nearly in tears.
“And that is why you’ll be a good one.”
And so, after these three denials, the story of his life would be told in the progress of the sacraments he took. The mechanics of becoming a priest would mark the chapters of his spiritual autobiography. His faith would be the great thing, his special fate. On the day of his ordination Dominic lay prostrate for the Litany of the Saints, his face pressed into the cool marble floor of the cathedral. It was hard to think against the cold. He tightened his abdomen to keep from shivering. He was being transformed at the naked core of himself even as he took on layer after layer of beautiful embroidered garments. As the bishop made his way toward the young novice, Dom felt both inert and expectant, like a coveted object up for bid at an auction. Did the bishop feel the tremble in Dominic’s hands as he lay his own around them in a double layer of prayer? The monsignor passed the holy chrism from which the bishop removed the crystal flask and dabbed the sweet oil of kings into Dominic’s palms, rubbing it in vigorously, seeing if it would take. Dominic’s hands were then wrapped in fine linen bands; were his mother here, she would have received these after the service, like a military widow receiving the tight triangle of a flag. With his bound hands he touched the chalice and the golden paten of the sacred host. With the archbishop’s blessing, a blessing that had its power in its ancestry, through the generations of priests laying their hands on Dominic’s head, a gesture that reached all the way back to the twelve apostles, he received the power to change bread and wine into body and blood; to serve the mystery of transubstantiation. The shunt of Grace.
Deus qui incepit, ipse perficiet. God, who began this, will also bring it to perfection.
“A priest forever,” the bishop said, never diverting his rheumy eye from Dominic. Dominic nodded and swallowed. What was that, a promise or a threat? Neither. At last, something definitively. Did the bishop sense the doubt in his heart? It troubled Dominic so deeply that he took pains to doubt his very heart itself. Instead. He accepted more vestments being slipped over his head, grateful for the accumulating weight of the garments, as if his body needed to be held down against its dissolution.
He closed his eyes and thanked his mother, tried to imagine her happy at his growing into such a good man, of being so purposed. She was his home, and he had lost her; he had only wanted his whole life to honor her, to find her by stepping into the life she might have wanted for him. He was not, like many of his generation, born into a world he would eventually repudiate but into one that he needed to re-create. He wanted not so much to shed his skins but to grow them back, one by one. Girded like this, he would appear before his mother in his mind’s eye and ask,Is this right? Do you find me here?
*   *   *
Dominic remembers one of the men she went out with in particular. The man had taken Dominic and his mother out to the circus one weekend. Dom was impressed with the way the man licked his thumb to peel off the bills from the wad to pay for the tickets and peanuts. The man had a big mustache and serious eyes. One ear was bigger than the other. He smelled of aftershave and wore two-toned shoes. He accepted Dom’s mother’s shoulder rub and kiss on the cheek—but not with any great show, as if he understood how closely children observe every detail.
He called Dominic “little man,” and the boy loved that. His mother liked it too.
On the drive home, Dom had decided to show how good and clever he was by saying how much he enjoyed the circus except for the trainers whipping the tigers.
“I don’t think the tigers liked doing those tricks. Why did those men have to make the tigers so afraid of them?”
The man breathed sharply through his nose. “Maybe they have to,” he said.
“Why?”
“Maybe the men know it’s important to show the tigers they are stronger. That they must be listened to.”
The man kept on visiting for a while. Dom loved learning things from him. He taught him how to tie knots, swim, ride a bike. He remembers playing catch for the first time and the lightness in his stomach in that moment of suspension when the ball lobbed slowly toward him. How he laughed at his own clumsiness as he missed, chasing the ball across the field over and over. In his heart, Dom knew that eventually he would know how to do this. He would get good at it. And what fun that would be. But then he saw the disappointment in the man’s eyes.
“What?” Dominic asked.
“Nothing.”
“Am I bad?”
“If you were my boy,” he said and stopped.
“What?” Dominic asked and held his breath as if he were afraid of heights but had to look down anyway.
“If you were my boy, you would … you would know how to do this already.”
Failed Prayer Number Five
Remember those ironic gods and superheroes—the ones who scared us because we understood they were driven by urges recognized only by their victims?
You would reveal us if we’d just let You.
But it is not we, the beloved, nor Your enemies who bother You. You are terrified by the indifferent, aren’t You?
So You must torment those that love You.
Like an abused child, I know what the truth is: it’s all my fault.
*   *   *
Dominic was late for his appointment with the bishop and had failed to arrange for other transport; nonetheless, he pushed the Sable to eighty mph on the highway up to Hartford, expecting to see troopers waiting for him behind every curve in the road. Rubbernecking an accident being cleared on the right shoulder, he shuddered at the buckle of the hood and the crack in the windshield, at the impact its victims must have felt. Father Carl filed gruesome pictures of accidents at the rectory in order to show them to the sixteen-year-olds who were so anxious to get their driving permits. Now he would be the keeper of these images.
The old seminary building hadn’t changed much since Dom had studied there. With its dark brick facade, formidable and impenetrable, it had never meant to appear hospitable. What was different was that the greater metropolitan area had sprawled right up against the edge of its campus: the mall with its multiplex cinema just to the north and a housing development to the south. It no longer felt like a world apart, but one holding on to its place in the sand. Still, Dominic knew it as one of the few places in the state where his collar signified as clearly as a lieutenant’s badges in the barracks, accomplishing two things: he would be both honored and put in his place.
In public, Dominic was used to drawing one of two reactions: condescension or curiosity. There were times the collar kept him as private and hidden as a Muslim wife in a burka. His self-consciousness had become vigilant, as if he had developed a third eye on how he was regarded. It was a kind of power to enter a subway car and have everyone in it fall silent, sit a little straighter. Gentlemen cleared paths for him; old ladies often crossed themselves as he passed. Teenage boys would sometimes smirk and poke each other’s ribs. He was more than and less than a man in his black clerical suit: a shadow, a scold, an omen, a guilty memory.
“Good morning, Father Dominic,” Carol, the executive assistant, greeted him. “The bishop is expecting you. Let me tell him you’re here.”
Carol poked her head into the bishop’s office.
“He’ll see you in a minute. And don’t forget to take these home,” she said to Dominic, stuffing a little bag of cookies into a pocket of the coat she took.
Dominic knew why he had been called. The bishop was going to “put it straight,” give him the “lay of the land,” “talk turkey” as if he were a change agent consulting some corporate reengineering project. The last contact he had with the bishop was about nine months ago when he had asked Dominic to prepare a performance for the Northeast Regional Conference of Bishops. When Dominic proudly offered a contemporary, minimalist setting of the Psalms, the bishop said that he would prefer something more “musical next time.”
“Father Dominic.” The bishop appeared at the door and extended his hand.
“Bishop.”
“Can I get you something?” The bishop settled down behind the broad expanse of the partner’s desk that took up nearly half the office. Dom marveled at the man: how old could he be? He was like an artifact: salt-and-pepper hair cropped close to his narrow skull. The smallest ears Dominic had ever seen. Black round pupils set in enormous whites, like pebbles in a Zen garden. A pressured smile that he flashed with discrimination, as a strike of lightning. He lacked canine incisors, as if he could sever with just one bite. The man lit like tinsel on a Christmas tree. Beneath the perfect complexion, he must have a skull of sterling silver.
He poured himself a vitaminwater.
“So, Dominic. How is it going? Tell me what people are saying about Father Carl,” the bishop asked, rifling through a folder of letters requiring his signature. Dominic appreciated the elegant and genderless Catholic school cursive the bishop wrote across each of the pages.
“No one really knows yet. We haven’t announced it.”
“Surely the Sisters know.”
“Well, Sister. We’re down to Sister Agnes, you’ll remember, and she is away, visiting her family for the Thanksgiving holiday.”
“Right.”
Dominic hated the efficiency of this man. After the special citation had been given to Father Carl several months ago, the bishop actually seemed impatient for the old man to die, as if the old priest’s tenacity was merely awkward.
“Actually one parishioner came to me, a girl who seemed to know all about it already.”
“Oh, who was that?”
“Dolores Alfano.”
In the room, the air pressure deflated; Dom felt half afloat, a day-old balloon. The bishop’s chin dropped.
“What did she want?”
“She took confession.”
“This morning?”
“She seemed upset.”
The light from the window dimmed as the sun moved slowly behind a cloud. The bishop simply did not like him; the blunt force of his judgment came down with the finality of a gavel. Anyone brought before him was not presumed innocent. The bishop was a man who knew what he needed to know and nothing more than that. He would prefer not to deal with Dominic, which inspired in the priest a perverse respect.
“There are rules and schedules, Dominic. You’ll have to abide by them.”
“Yes, Bishop.”
“What did she say? No, don’t even tell me; I’ve heard it all before. You know that she’s something of an infamous problem for the diocese. I could show you her file.” He cracked the knuckle of each middle finger, then folded his hands on the desk and said, “You know, Dominic, as I’m sure Father Carl has told you, the girl … overstates things.”
The bishop fingered the part in his hair.
“You mustn’t make too much of what she says because she will say almost anything. Anything to get you to listen to her.”
Dominic said nothing, taking the power of restraint.
“You mustn’t speak with her. You’ll only encourage her, Dominic.”
Another censure.Say nothing. The bishop was looking at Dom as if waiting for him to grow up on the spot. These were adult things meant for men more experienced than Dominic to handle.
“Look, Dominic,” the bishop continued. “You are a wonderful priest, but you know as well as I that you are sometimes guilty of misguided sympathy. Listen, I am in touch with the mother.”
“Oh, but, so am I. We—”
“Let me finish. Anyway, it’s not a pretty situation. We are trying to help them both out. It may be that the girl will be sent away.”
“Sent away? Where?”
“Somewhere she can be helped.”
“Let me try first.”
“Dominic, you don’t know what you’re up against.”
“Bishop, with all due respect.”
“It’s all been decided. It should have happened long ago. Father Carl should never have let things get so far with her.”
“What’s been decided?”
“I can’t divulge the details. We—you and I—that is, have a trust issue.”
“What do you mean?” Dominic asked.
“That ‘blog’ of yours?”
“You actually read my blog?” Dom beamed.
The bishop smiled thinly.
“It’s just meant to engage—”
“I’m sure I’m not interested. But you need to think it through. Who do you think you are, some public intellectual? Some Deepak Chopra? What’s next, a book?The Colbert Report? You are a priest in the Roman Catholic Church. And, anyway, it’s not what I called you here to discuss. Just stay out of it for now.”
“I’m not sure what you mean.”
The bishop shut his eyes and rolled his head back. Then, looking directly at Dominic, he sighed and said, “Our Lady of Fatima.”
Dominic took a deep breath. “I want you to know, Bishop, I stand ready to serve. I don’t know how much contact you have with the parishioners in our community—sounds like there is some—but I feel there would be considerable support for me to step in as pastor.”
The bishop studied him.
“I could even say that I’ve lived my entire life for such a moment, and, truth be told, I’ve been functioning as pastor for at least two years anyway while Father Carl was ill.”
“Dominic, you know the problems we face as an archdiocese.”
“Of course, Bishop, but…”
The bishop glared at Dom. “But. But what? Dominic, you can’t sit there and tell me that the prospect of closing the parish hasn’t occurred to you. It was listed in the newspaper as a candidate, for God’s sake.”
Dominic felt the blush rise on his face. “Actually, no. I hadn’t. I mean, I didn’t believe…”
“Well, you’re more naive than I thought.”
“It’s a wonderful parish.”
“No doubt. But one with crumbling buildings, a diminishing congregation that is changing constantly and seems to need the Church less and less.”
“I am sorry to disagree with you there. Our Lady has a vital congregation; the community needs a center.”
“We’re hemorrhaging money.”
“We can raise it. People will volunteer to fix the place.”
“Dominic…”
“We’re a small parish, but a vital one. The place is changing. We’re catching up to what the community needs. In fact, until just two years ago, we raised enough money to pay for the vouchers to keep the minimum two hundred kids in the school. We could get there again. I’m sure of it. Let’s see. We’ve got the soccer team—our league will be five years old next year; and the kids, they’re a beautiful mix. I think there are eight countries represented. The undergrads volunteering ESL, the community breakfasts, the HIV support group, the cancer support group, the AA workshop. We sent close to a dozen high schoolers down to New Orleans after Katrina. Closing a church is not just shutting a building down; it’s like turning out a family.”
“Dominic, be realistic. The Mass?”
“Certainly not what it used to be; we both know that already. But we still get one hundred, one hundred and fifty—”
“Dominic.”
“OK, thirty, forty, sometimes even fifty people at the eleven o’clock most Sundays. We’re down to one morning Mass weekdays. I plan to continue Father Carl’s excellent annual Mass for all the community families, regardless of faith, who lost children to violent crime. I’ll even cook the same dinner—the baked ham and potato salad. You know, he cooked like a Baptist.” Dominic chuckled, but the bishop had turned to stone. “But the real work is with the people throughout the day. The counseling. My people really count on my one-on-one consultations.”
Dom looked at the bishop, who was penciling a document on his desk; how bored and unimpressed he was.
“It’s not nothing,” Dominic said.
The bishop’s attention picked up at the defeated beat. “And you, Father. How are you?”
“Me? I’m fine; I’ll be even better if you give us another chance.”
“You’ll be taken care of, you know. We’ll find another home for you, nearby.
“But as a pastor?”
The bishop looked at him steadily. “I asked how you were doing for a reason, Father. I worry about you a little.”
Dominic felt the heavy rumble in his gut. Of course. He must have done something terrible; no one ever had a serious talk with anyone because he had done something well. He spread his legs and hung his hands loosely from the arms of the chair, trying desperately to pose like a grown man who wasn’t worried about standing his ground.
“I’ve heard that you keep to yourself a lot these days.”
“I’m allowed some private time, aren’t I, Bishop?”
“Of course; it’s even essential. If there was any fault in Father Carl, bless him, it was that. He never took time for himself, always gave, gave, gave. Unlike you, I think he almost hated being alone. His outreach, his availability—well, it almost became a kind of neediness. But, anyway, that’s not what I’m talking about.”
“Have people complained, Bishop?”
“No, no, it’s not that. You command a great deal of respect; you even inspire your community. But people do want to get closer to you, Father.”
“I’m stunned, Bishop. I don’t know what to say. I don’t know that I can actually give any more.”
“Probably you can’t. But that’s not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about something simpler, deeper. They want to be given the chance to love you, Father. To reach you as well as being reached by you.”
Dominic was silent.
“Don’t isolate; accept invitations. Don’t spend so much time alone in your room. Don’t drink so much, Father.”
Dominic looked down; he sat up in his seat.
“Listen, Father, I’m sorry to spring this all on you today. You’ll have a little time to reconcile all this.”
“Bishop, listen. It’s not too late; let’s not make this decision right now. We can figure out ways: sell the parking lot.”
“We already have, Dominic.”
“Oh. No one thought to ask me?”
“It’s not just Our Lady, Dominic; it’s the whole diocese, the whole Church itself. It’s an international crisis. A historical adjustment is needed.”
“Oh, Bishop.”
“Listen, Dominic, don’t preach to me. We are in the real world here. We have to adapt to all the things that are changing.”
Dominic stared at his lap. He had come here to be “promoted,” to take up Father Carl’s congregation; to shepherd his own church. Now it would be going under. On his watch. The whole flock left to wander the borders of the woods in which the wolves howled. Or did he take himself too seriously? Did anyone really need him that much?
“Father Carl should have prepared you better for this. I can’t believe he left this whole thing up to me; I’m actually a bit angry with him about this. What did he think, that his dying would change everything?”
“Well, some can’t help but believe that.”
“You know what I’m talking about, Dominic.”
“Is there nothing to be done?”
“I’m afraid not.”
“What is your time frame, Bishop?”
“We’re working on that. Within the year.”
“When will the press know?”
“Tuesday.”
“The day of Father Carl’s funeral.”
“Yes, of course, a coincidence.”
“Or not? At any rate, it won’t be seen that way.”
“Don’t be so self-important, Dominic. These are historical times. We are adjusting institutionally.”
“What will I say to them?”
“Carol has a packet for you before you go. Read it and take guidance.”
“I don’t think we can just apply some template to my people. We’re not the same as everyone else.”
“You’re not that different.”
*   *   *
Dominic would not know where to go next. All he wanted was to circle around and around the old refectory table at which Father Carl—the old Father Carl, the one he thought he knew—would be sitting, nodding his head and fuming as Dom told him of the stupidity or injustice he had just suffered. Father Carl always dismissed the bishop as pedantic and two-dimensional, a natural-born religious administrator. He possessed the kind of certitude and authority that made the Church appear downright delusional. In fact, this was where he could begin the elder priest’s eulogy: “There were certain kinds of behavior that irritated Father Carl most: flash, polemicism, righteousness, a favoring of orthodoxy over subtlety,” he would preach, casting an eye on the bishop in the congregation. “While he was strong and principled—even unbending, some might say—he was never unforgiving.”
Whom would he talk to now? Dom couldn’t simply be expected to go on. He had lost his chief coconspirator, his better collaborationist half. Gone was the other person who believed in the things that held his story together.
Father Carl himself had tried so hard to come to a proper finish. But he ended not with revelation but with resignation, resentment, regret. His life did not resolve itself so much as come sliding to a halt. And with his passing, everything was coming loose. The stick of prayer was losing its tack. Receptivity was giving way to gullibility. The wine was turning to vinegar. The church itself would go to ruins. The spiritual fog that lay over their life in the rectory was lifting; Father Carl’s death cleared the air, revealing nothing but the hard line of the self in doubt.
Never had he realized with such profundity that the Church cared less about the saving of a particular soul than the survival of its bureaucracy on a grand scale. The ambassador of the devil, Mephistopheles himself, always took one person at a time—that was his genius and limitation. Evil specialized. Seduction over induction. Christians, on the other hand, fell by the legions. Mass conversions. Like natural disasters, the Church found efficiencies in numbers.
Failed Prayer Number Six
I read and I read with the prejudice (on Your behalf) that while study without faith may be heresy, faith without study is surely banality.
I will study You.
Read and reread You.
Stalk You.
I pretend to wonder at You so as not to worry You. Anger You. Frighten myself.
I will study You.
*   *   *
Dom stopped in at Burger ’N Brew in the strip mall. He ordered a burger and a first martini. And then another. He stewed in the morbid imagery of what would be happening to Father Carl’s body. He couldn’t keep himself from looking into the open tomb like the Abbot Sylvester meditating on the “vanity of this life,” tracking the steps of decomposition. Despite the embalming and the expensive copper coffin, bacteria would gather on the body, creating gases that would break the seal of the casket and attract the insects who would feed and lay their eggs on his corpse. His face, Father Carl’s actual beloved face, would swell beyond recognition. His skin, slippery and fragile, would marbleize green and red. Then it would begin to brown. His chest cavity would rupture, allowing greater access to his innards. His bones, fresh and greasy—“green” it was called—would show within a couple weeks. So go the organs. For a brief period, before disappearing, the body would mummify.
Dominic couldn’t escape imagining Father Carl bloating and hollowing and disappearing. “It’s the beginning of winter,” he thought hopefully. “Maybe the body will freeze and keep until spring.” Not that it mattered. The priest’s body no longer belonged on the earth but to the earth.I am what he was and what he is I shall be.
He finished his burger with a brandy and hightailed it back to the rectory. There was so much to do. He could do it. With renewed confidence, he gunned into the far left lane, pressing the old Sable to a nice eighty mph. This earned him his rightful place in the fast lane. A black sedan rode up behind, nosed him aggressively and flashed its brights.
“What?” Dom said aloud. “Relax.” Switching to the right lane, he’d be stuck behind the laggards. That wouldn’t do. The sedan would just have to settle in behind him, at an appropriate speed, some fifteen-plus miles over the limit. That was fast enough. Live with it.
As Dom paralleled the next caravan of sixty-five mph-ers in the right lane, he took his foot off the gas, slowing down by seven or so mph. Not braking, not doing anything unsafe, but forcing the black sedan to brake behind him. There was nowhere to go; the driver would have to accept Dom’s lead. He could see the eyes of the driver in his rear window. Set tight. Both hands on the top of the steering wheel.
Passing the group of cars on his right, Dom accelerated back up to eighty. The sedan behind him charged into the right lane and gunned it. If he thought he was going to pass Dom on the right, he had another think coming. Dom took it to eighty-five, needled past ninety. The sedan was edging up to his side. Dom scrupulously ignored the driver; he would not make eye contact. Before long, they came upon another caravan of cars in the right lane. He watched the black sedan sidle up to him and give the little surge that calculated whether he could swing in front. Dom gunned the gas and closed the gap; the sedan bucked in its brake.
“Hah!” Dom cried out. He backed down to a strong seventy mph, keeping pace with the last car in the right lane. The black sedan settled in behind him again.
In his rearview mirror Dominic watched the driver roll his window down and place a red light on his roof and then set it flashing. The state trooper gestured with his left index finger for Dom to pull over into the right lane. Looking into his rearview mirror, he saw the man mouth, “Pull over.”
“Fuck.”
He hated that the cop had played him this way, that the trooper had the ironic advantage of knowing how the game would end, a preordained entrapment. Dom blessed himself in a hopeless effort to cushion the fall of his self-esteem. (It used to be his anxiety that escalated.) How would he get out of this one?
Now he knew enough to go blank. His sense of moral immunity—that he was mostly good in the big picture, so it was OK to take small transgressions—was his greatest liability.
The trooper got out of his car, adjusted his pants, put on his hat and walked over to Dom’s passenger window. He didn’t know this cop personally but had come to expect a positive response to his Roman collar. He did a quick survey of the passenger seat: a back issue ofBooks and Culture, his “death kit” still not put back into the glove compartment, the packet from the bishop with the archdiocese seal blazoned on its envelope, a CD set on “The Age of Bach” from Great Courses. Pretty good, respectable signals.
Dom rolled down the window and watched the trooper size him up, scan a flashlight over the worthy clutter in the car and say, “Good afternoon, Father. I just wanted to see how long you’d keep that up.”
“Oh yes, Officer. I must be in my own little world here. All I can really say is”—Dom added a chuckle—“is that I am more than a little embarrassed and very, very sorry.”
“Driver’s license and registration, please.”
“What?”
“Driver’s license and registration, please.”
“Oh, OK. Let me see here.” Dom pulled out his license but made hard work at finding the registration within the chaos of his glove compartment.
The trooper walked back into his car and picked up the radio. Dom shrunk a bit into the seat and imagined the surprise in the faces of the passing drivers at seeing a priest being pulled over. He closed his eyes.
His driving habits were something that Father Carl had always been on him about: parking in yellow zones, turning left on reds. In a traffic jam, he would idle onto the shoulder to prevent other cars from speeding past the traffic. “I don’t understand this attitude of exceptionalism,” he had said. “There’s an arrogance about this I don’t like, like you think you’re special and don’t have to play by the rules or something.”
The trooper appeared at his window again.
“Well, Father, looks like someone up there likes you. Driving like that, you’re not dead yet or in jail.”
“Yes.” Dom frowned affably. “So sorry about that. Emergency. Official church business.”
“Step out of the car, please.”
“You don’t understand; let me talk to Sergeant O’Malley downtown.”
“State matter. Step out of the car, Sir.”
“Goddammit, you just don’t get it, do you?”
The trooper radioed for assistance. Dom took a deep breath and failed the straight line he was asked to walk. Alcohol registered on the Breathalyzer test. Presumed guilty. Seven days to request a hearing. Facing a fine of five hundred dollars. A possible six to twelve months of jail time; forty-eight hours mandatory. License revoked for one additional year. The old Sable was impounded, and Dom was escorted to the station.
When they hit construction traffic on I-91, the trooper set his light atop the car and cruised down the shoulder at an easy twenty-five mph. It was in that slow, silent flashing glow that Dominic resolved that he would go through the pregnancy with Dolores: the doctor visits, the sonograms, the birthing lessons, the baby superstores. He would figure out a way to pay for all of that; he would figure out a way for her to go forward.

Copyright © 2012 by John Donatich

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The Variations A Novel

0805094385

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