Any Bitter Thing (25 page)

“No,” I said evenly. “He died in Baltimore. He was probably wearing a regulation johnny and robe.”

Monsignor Fleury’s bearing changed then, taking on the befuzzled cant of the hard of hearing. “Father Murphy left our facility,” he said, enunciating, “without being discharged. The Church had arranged for him to join a retreat center in Pennsylvania. He would be trained in keeping archives, fielding requests for marriage annulments and the like. It was not work he looked forward to.” He buckled his hands over his stomach. “After leaving Baltimore, Father Murphy sent a letter to the bishop, informing him that he had—well, that he had left us. Left the fold. We received word of his death not long after that.”

Now my head was in full throb.
“Received
word? From where?”

One quick spark of the eye toward the folder. “From his sister, I believe. A Mrs. Cecilia Barrett. As next of kin, she was the one notified by the authorities.”

The room pitched a little. “She wasn’t his next of kin I was.”

“As his sister—”

“She wasn’t his sister. She was my father’s sister. They weren’t related.”

“We were given to understand—”

“And it’s the Church who sent word to
us.
They sent a priest to my aunt’s house.
We ‘re
the ones who received word”

He gazed at me, his eyes very still, the watery, bonny blue of a homesick Irishman. “You were just a child, Mrs. Mitchell. Perhaps you got the story turned around somewhere along the line.”

It’s true, I’m sorry, but it’s true
, Celie had insisted in those first lightless days. Stage one, disbelief.
I can’t help it, Lizzy. The priest who came here, Lizzy. He told me himself. A priest would never lie.

“Are you all right?” Monsignor Fleury asked.

“I didn’t get my story turned around.”

He seemed reluctant to contradict me; his lips pulsed like a guppy’s before he spoke again. “My understanding is that the Church got word of his death from the family. His confessor, Father Derocher, made a personal visit—to Rhode Island, I believe it was?—hoping the family might know where he’d disappeared to. We might never have known of his passing otherwise.” He regarded me with an unctuous sympathy. “It’s Father Derocher you recall coming to the house. We
were
concerned about your uncle, regardless of how it might appear to you.”

“You just took her word for it?”

“We had no reason to disbelieve the family.”

“Do you have an obituary?”

“As I said, Father Murphy’s death occurred after he left the priesthood. Everything was over, so to speak, and as he had no interested relatives here, there would be no need—”

“He had a very interested relative, Monsignor.”

“Forgive me. I meant to say no interested
adult
relatives.”

I was remembering the funeral of Father Devlin, Father Mike’s predecessor at St. Bart’s, and my unmitigated awe at the spectacle of thirty men in black worshipping in one voice. I’d wheedled my way in and had been spectacularly rewarded. Until the arid service of Mariette’s grandmother, I had thought all funerals vibrated with that same pomp and circumstance. I’d imagined my parents’ funeral as a cortege of gowned and chanting friends.

“One of its own priests dies in the prime of life,” I said to the chancellor, “and the Church doesn’t bother to run an obituary? Wouldn’t they want to bear his body home, see to his burial? Don’t you do a high Mass, don’t you all file in together, don’t you fill the pews like an honor guard? Like the police, or the firemen? Isn’t that how it’s done? So what if he jumped the league, so what? According to you he was having a breakdown. Where is this famous Christian compassion? He was still one of yours.”

The chancellor cleared his throat again, dainty as a girl. “Mrs. Mitchell,” he said, “your uncle was dead and buried by the time we received word. But even if the Church
had
known in time, we would have been in somewhat of a quandary over funeral rites.”

“Why?” My voice was getting higher, tinged with something like hysteria. “Those accusations were
wrong.”

His mouth took a downward turn. “As I said, Father Murphy appeared to be suffering from intense remorse.”

“He was suffering, Monsignor, but not from remorse.”

“After his arrival in Baltimore, there was a general impression—a fear that he might take his own life.”

“That’s ridiculous. I don’t believe you.”

“Father Derocher made a personal visit expressly to prevent such a catastrophe. When Mrs. Barrett informed him of Father Murphy’s death, she was loath to provide details, but the conclusion was a foregone one. And the Church, I’m ashamed to say, was probably relieved that someone else tied up the details in the case of a problem priest. I’m being very open with you here, Mrs. Mitchell.” He unlocked his hands and lifted them, his mission complete. “I have no idea where your uncle is buried. You would have to get that information from your aunt. I’m sorry. The details were kept very quiet. Understandably so.”

The words “problem priest” scorched me. We might have been talking about a house pet being carted off to the vet. “Do you need some water?” he said—or, I think he said. The room was taking on a muffled quality, his voice coming through a cottony fog. Despite this scrim of confusion, a finely etched image began to form: that little hole in the cuff of my uncle’s jacket. That hand at my bedside. That frayed hole, yes, and the missing button. The ring. I had seen them in my consecrated between-time—same cuff, same hole, same ring. Except, not quite. The hole was bigger. The ring was scratched. The hand was older. As if they’d been
worked over by time. As if the cloth were real cloth, the ring a real ring. The hand a real hand and not the memory of a hand.

For a moment I could not unstick a single word from my throat. I was running back through those initial weeks in Aunt Celie’s too-small house, all those frightening, big-footed boys, the one dresser drawer set aside for me. My dresses, my socks, my few photographs shoehorned into a space the size of a child’s coffin. I slept on a cot in Celie’s room, somewhere in the helter-skelter state of Rhode Island, an eternity away from my quiet pink bedroom. She kept my hair braided, my clothes washed, she slapped her youngest son for hitting me, but I could tell from the start there would be no room for me.
Where is he?
I wailed.
Where is he where is he where is he where is he where is he?
At wits’ end, Aunt Celie applied cold washcloths to my pulpy eyes.
Please, Lizzy, please. People will think I’ve been beating you! For God’s sake, can you pull yourself together?
But I didn’t pull myself together, I wouldn’t,
where is he
, I wanted him back,
where is he where is he where is he where is he where is he?
until finally she spurted the words:
He’s dead!
And he was. Suddenly, unbelievably dead.
It happened in Baltimore, I don’t know, they buried him somewhere in Canada. Back to the Island, where he came from.

Not until I faced Monsignor Fleury across the mess of his desk did I recognize in retrospect the lie in her voice, the desperation. She was so sick of listening to me, and frightened, too, of my uncle and me and the thing she thought we had done. A by-the-book Catholic, she had suffered the bruising humiliation of divorce, and now this. My soaked and blotchy face and its myriad suggestions—the shame of me—must have been more than she could bear.
He’s dead!
she cried, two irreversible words dangling at the frayed end of her rope. The front door opened, some time later, a week or a day or two days or three. A priest stood on the stoop and I thought, for a single sanctified second, that it was Father Mike, back from the flexible land of the dead.

I lifted my eyes to the face that was a face I knew—but not his, not his face, an insult so eviscerating I fled to my private space behind the parlor drapes and held my stomach in fear of a literal spilling of guts.
We’ve received word
, is what I heard, but the words must have come from Celie, not the priest, whose name, Father Jack, I shouted after he left.
They come to give the news officially
, she told me quietly,
like in the military
, and I wondered for some time afterward whether Father Mike’s heart had given out in the midst of battle.

I dropped my head and rested my forehead against a stack of papers on the chancellor’s desk, feeling, for the first time in many years, like making my confession—but I could not think what I had to confess, unless it was a sin to hold this long to grief. “My uncle isn’t dead, Monsignor,” I muttered into the ink-smelling papers. “My aunt lied.” I tempered each breath, in and out, in and out. The chancellor said nothing. “None of this would have happened if you’d had a little faith in him to begin with. Such an ugly story about a man who loved a child, and you believed so easily.” I lifted my head.

“There was an investigation,” he said quietly. “We believed what we were told.”

“So did I,” I snapped. “My excuse is that I was nine years old.” I looked him directly in the eyes. “It must have seemed too good to be true, the problem priest resigning just before his problem death. And a civilian only too willing to tidy up the details. It must have seemed like a miracle.”

He looked old. Exhausted. Sorry. “Father Murphy was accused of molesting a child,” he said, “after which he resisted treatment, fled without a word, left the priesthood, and suddenly died. What else would you have us believe?”

“The truth.”

The chancellor slipped his fingers beneath his eyeglasses and rubbed his eyes, then drew his hands down along his cheeks.
Fury thundered within me, but it was God I was fighting, not this mild-eyed monsignor posing as God’s unlucky stand-in.

“Elizabeth,” he said, very gently. “Elizabeth. You were not going to see your uncle again in any case. Not until you turned twenty-one years old. There was an agreement”

I folded my arms involuntarily, as if my body knew something I didn’t and was getting ready to fend off the news. “What agreement?”

“Between the Diocese and the state. You would be remanded to the care of your aunt. Father Murphy would be sent to Baltimore for counseling and treatment, and after that to a non-pastoral assignment, in return for which the state would drop the inquiry. Nobody wanted this to advance to the stage of official charges, and Father Murphy agreed to the terms.”

“Are you telling me he
admitted
—”

“I’m telling you that he did not deny it with the vigor we might have been hoping for.” The chancellor looked unfathomably sad. “And neither, my dear woman, did you.”

All my injuries, even the healed ones, stung fleetingly. The room felt tipped over, I couldn’t quite get a breath, and then came a clean, white-light image of Father Mike spreading honey on toast. I’d tasted some at the Fryeburg fair on my fifth birthday, blueberry honey, and we’d been eating it ever since. Mrs. Hanson didn’t hold with honey; honey was out of the ordinary. Honey was not unsalted butter. I yearned to sit at that table, in the warm light of the kitchen window, and spread honey on toast.

If I could have done that, just for a second, I believe I might have left the chancellor’s office and returned to my former self.

“I’ll take that water now,” I said, swallowing and swallowing. “Can you get me some water?”

He was up in a flash, relieved to have something to do. Alone, I breathed ten times, measuring out my fury and
confusion, bent on keeping my feet in contact with the floor. Drew had offered to accompany me here, expecting that I’d be handed a map to a gravesite on Prince Edward Island. He’d be the shoulder to cry on. We’d made up, after a fashion, and I vowed to put Father Mike to rest, to get on with my life—our life—and pronounce my rehabilitation complete. But I’d insisted on coming alone and now I knew what I’d come for. As if guided by the hand of God I filched the folder, jammed it into my purse, and left.

The chancellor was just outside in the carpeted anteroom, filling a glass of water from a pitcher.

“My uncle is alive, Monsignor,” I said. “I saw him last March. He visited me in the hospital.”

He closed his eyes—praying, probably—and made a disconcerting noise that sounded like humming. Finally he sighed. “I’m very sorry for your trouble, Elizabeth.”

“Thank you,” I said, preposterously.

He nodded once. Then he set the glass of water down, intending to shake my hand, I suppose, though for a moment I thought he meant to bless me. His hand lifted. “Don’t,” I said—not gently, I think—and left there, unblessed.

NINETEEN

From
The Liturgy of the Hours:
My foes encircle me with deadly intent.
Their hearts shut tight, their mouths speak proudly . . .
Lord, arise, confront them, strike them down!

He thinks he knows grief in its every shade. As a dread of nightfall. A glue that has to be walked through. A ticking clock in an empty room, each
tock
like something taking bites inside his body. He thinks he knows how grief works: It sucks taste from apples, it drains color from trees, it makes absence into a presence.

He thinks he’s ready.

But grief does not prepare the bereaved for future grief. Grief is not something you get good at. Practice does not perfect anything.

Driving back to Conlin, Ohio, unable to loosen the vision of his grown, broken child from the locked cage of his own head, he cannot remember a worse sorrow than the one
that weights him now: this stinging knowledge of time lost. Lost and irrecoverable. For two decades he deluded himself, shaping the past into something immutable and fully formed. A museum that might be visited. But the past, that slippery traitor, evolved without his permission. It refused to stay put. Waiting in the unbearable quiet of a hospital room at night, gazing down at a grown woman, a stranger, he felt the past lurch violently and then collapse like so many bricks, and he lost her once and for all.