Any Day Now (8 page)

Midway through his sixty-third year, Father Rich Lawton quietly — too quietly for his parish, not quietly enough for the Catholic diocese — left the priesthood.

“Read me that part again,” said Louise.

It was one night into their seventh month as a married couple, almost enough time for Rich to accept what he had done and what he had failed to do.

He cleared his throat, ready to read. Another half litre of good Merlot had vaporized from the dinner table. Were they drinking too much? Rich didn't want to even begin to wonder.

“Her name was Louise,” he repeated. “She came into his life just as everyone and everything else was to retreat.” He looked up at her. “I'm using real names. But now I don't know. I thought it would be better, more objective somehow, if I used the third person.”

The pages were spread between them on the dining room table. Six in all, his day's labours. He'd always wanted to write. And now there were no weddings, no baptisms, no people coming with unanswerable questions. Why, Father? Tell me why.

The candles on the table flared and dripped. He watched the wax moving in ways that should be impossible for something inanimate.

“The paschal candle,” said Rich.

“Missed that,” said Louise.

“Every year we made a paschal candle for Easter. We'd save all the candles from the year, then melt them down into one giant candle. Thick. I wish you could have seen it. Every year it was different. So many talented people…”

He drifted on, knowing she was used to these fragments by now, pieces of his old life offered up in no specific order.

“You should suggest it to Fritz,” Louise said, picking at the wax. “It's a lovely idea. It's one more way for people to participate. To claim Christ as their own, don't you think?”

Rich didn't answer right away, lined up the edges of his pages. Perhaps it wasn't such a good idea, this nightly sharing, as Louise called it. It felt more like baring, reading his day's work aloud at the dinner table. She was such a good audience, listened like an enchanted girl, eyes focused across the room, hands in her hair. But maybe it was too soon. The words were hardly out of him, hardly dry.

“You don't think Fritz might be threatened by my suggesting we do something I used to do in my old parishes?” he asked. Threatened was probably too strong a word for the mild young priest at the parish that was Rich's, but not Rich's, now that he was a mere follower. Once or twice Rich had made suggestions. When the situation in Rwanda worsened the previous summer he'd suggested directing a week's worth of parish donations there.

“We could consider that,” Father Fritz had said.

Yet the money continued to go, hard-earned dollar by dollar — St. Monica's was a true working-class parish — to missions in Costa Rica and Guatemala. Father Fritz might consider any number of new ideas, Rich now realized. The young priest prided himself on being open, “ready to dialogue.” Yet he would actually do very little that hadn't been done before.

“Let's do coffee, darling,” Louise was saying. “I stopped in at the coffee place on the way home. The girl talked me into the most expensive decaf beans. Costa Rican. La Bella Minita. I loved the name.”

“I love you,” Rich said, watching the generous lines of his wife retreat into the kitchen. “
Si, caffè
,
ma bella!”
he called after her.

“That's Italian, not Spanish.”

Rich looked down at the pages in front of him, reached into his shirt pocket for his pen. Was it too soon to edit? The instructor at the community college had urged them to go easy with the red pen. “Just get it out first,” he said. “Then we'll work at getting it right.”

My theme song, Rich thought, and was hit with a soft, staggering melancholy. It flowered; it grew leaves.

“Let me help!” he called.

But Louise was back already, plates of cake in hand. Every night she made dessert. She loved to bake, mostly the recipes of her German grandmother — heavy on nuts and chocolate and whipping cream. “No more austerity!” she liked to say.

“Did I ever tell you I once lived on Ry-Vita and Coke?” he said as she went back for the decaf. “When I was seventeen.”

“Yum,” she said from the other room.

“It was the closest I could get to bread and water. Besides, I was probably hooked on Coke. I pretended it was water. After three days, I was convinced I saw God.”

Louise sat down, poured coffee into his mug, barely looked away from his face. “Tell me about it.”

His need for her attention had once again placed him where he was not quite himself. He felt the soft thud again. Leaves trembled.

“Well, I only thought I saw God,” he said, his eyes avoiding hers. Amazing how willful he was finding himself to be. There were now moments with Louise when he locked his knees, refused to be led. He'd been different in the beginning. She could have dragged him anywhere.

“It doesn't really matter, does it? With God, it's all…all…” Louise gestured around the room, her lovely round arm sweeping everything in. For a large woman she was grace itself. Where had she come from? he wondered again. Had she always been waiting for him? Had God set her aside just for him, just for his
use
? The word startled him, almost made him blush at his own dining room table, while, for her sake, he did an earnest search inside for the memory of those hungry days when he was seventeen.

“I got quite high that first day. Felt eager for everything. I think I even read the Bible out loud,” he said, aiming for lightness.

“And then…?” Louise wanted more.

“Second day I was faint. Nauseous even. Oh, for God's sake, Louise, I was a kid. I can't remember.”

Louise put down her cake fork. “Well, there I go being Miss Christian Mystic again,” she said, but he could see she felt batted away.

He helped her clear the table; then Louise called her mother in Maine, as she did several times a week. While she talked — listened mostly, from the sound of it — he went back into his office, the small end room that until recently had served as a guest room when Louise's family was in town. He tinkered with the last of his six pages. Deleted a line that felt too florid. Put it back, because, damn, he liked it.

The paschal candle. Rich hadn't consciously thought of it since two Easters ago, the last one he'd made since…departing. He still hadn't come up with the appropriate word. In the early days when he was still having to deal with people's shock, he'd used the phrase “moving on.” With Lawrence, his best friend, a priest who'd left the church not to marry but to move ever more left in his politics, a true practitioner of liberation theology, Rich had used the word “defecting.”

That last candle had been a beauty. A member of the parish, a misunderstood older Polish man, had painted the candle with exploding colours. At the heart of the explosion was a tiny crown of thorns, every leaf exquisitely delineated in silver.

“It's like the aurora borealis,” Rich had told the man.

“No, it is like an orgasm,” the man answered, looking straight into the eyes of his priest. It was a word Rich in all his years of counseling and listening and shepherding had never heard spoken aloud. Infidelities, out-of-wedlock babies, impotence — the whole sad string of human sexual failings had paraded into and out of his various offices. But the word, the miraculous experience itself, had never been called by name.

“Yes,” said Rich, carefully, because he found his heart beginning to race. Did this man know something? “It is very beautiful. Thank you.”

Rich hadn't mentioned the inspiration behind the image to the priest he worked under. He'd had a hard enough go convincing him to let “members of the community,” as the diocese now called the faithful, make their own candle each Easter.

“We can buy the damn candle,” Father Frank Kennedy had insisted. He was an old Irishman who liked order, obedience and whiskey, and disliked unnecessary work.

“It will get more people involved,” Rich had pressed. “When I was chaplain at NYU, it brought all kinds of people together. It's a group thing, very galvanizing.”

“More people, more problems,” said Father Frank. “Don't forget, Rich, my man. Granby, Mass., is not New York, New York.”

As if he needed reminding. The truth was the candle hadn't caught on right away at NYU either. Not so much churchly resistance to new things, as youthful enthusiasm that wasn't matched by youthful follow-through. The first year was a real hassle. The volunteer in charge of collecting the stubs of chapel candles ran off with a Black Panther and Rich had had to buy up and melt down defective candles from a bankrupt candle company.

Still, those were the years to be a priest, the kind of priest he wanted to be. Sometimes now as he watched TV, read the paper, shopped in one of those endless malls that seemed to be springing up all over western Massachusetts, sometimes in the middle of a droning homily, he thought those were the best years to have been alive, period.

The second year at NYU, he'd gathered together a trio of his favourite students. They'd drunk wine — too much — smoked a little — very little — weed and melted those suckers down. The smell of wax stayed in his kitchen for weeks, long after Holy Week had left its softening mark on them all. He'd fallen in love with Trish, the bright-faced, unknowingly funny, youngest of the three that night. Fallen in love. He smiled at the recollection, at how easily he could even use those words back then.

“I fell in love all the time,” he'd confessed to Louise the night everything spilled between them. “I can't explain exactly why it was so innocent, but it was. They loved me and I loved them. These girls were so full of happiness and promise and problems. I never did anything about it. It was so innocent,” he'd repeated.

“So human,” Louise had said and had laid her hand on his chest.

That trio — Trish, Greg and Sam — held together for eight of his years at NYU, the good years. After the Kennedys and before Watergate, he used to say. And every year, no matter who was doing what, they got together, usually with a few other less constant kids from the Newman Center and made the paschal candle. One year, Greg painted a Russian Orthodox cross on it that glowed like an ancient icon. And then that got melted down the next year, part of the new candle, one year melting into the other. Wax to wax. Dust to dust.

“Come to bed,” Louise said now from behind him, her arm crossing his chest, securing him against the back of his chair. “There's something I want to show you.” He stood. She led.

It was still so new. Close to four hundred nights now — he
was
counting — but a mere moment in the total of his life as a man. To lie in a bed all your life alone, some nights your skin dying from the waste and desolation of it, your mind full of good reasons and mighty rationalizations. And then in one moment to take everything off, every last thread so that your solitary skin burned against another's. It still shocked him. Sometimes he'd startle while he was inside —
his body inside! —
his wife's and wonder: Where am I? The shock, he was beginning to understand, was part of the pleasure.

She was turning him on now, lying behind, her front to his back, stroking his thighs, fingers trailing up deliberately? accidentally? to his balls. “Have I ever showed you this?” she whispered into his hair. “We used to call it spooning.”

“Spooning?” he asked, his voice far away from her hands. This tripping away from the actual, from the room itself, had only rarely happened in all those solitary meetings with his own susceptible flesh. The M-word, the mum word in the Church. He'd hated it when mothers of teenage boys would come to him in his last parish and say, “Father, he's abusing himself, what should I do?”

“Perhaps we should not look on it as a sin,” he'd once said to a woman. She'd given him a bruised look. If masturbation wasn't a sin, what could one lean on, now that meat on Fridays was OK? What was going to hold them all up?

He was losing himself again under the knowing hands of his wife. Every night she wanted him and wanted him to want her. She slid her body underneath his, her forty-five-year-old flesh just solid enough, just soft enough, to make him dizzy. He raised himself, grasped her shoulders, let her guide him into the place he'd imagined for fifty years, a half-century of conjuring and erasing. He heard his voice, then hers. The ancient call and response.

As he dropped into sleep later, his hand in hers, he felt again the rustle of those leaves. But I regret nothing, he thought, a loud thought that woke him up. He spent the next hour watching Louise sleep and peering at his watch. He thought about waking her, about making love again. No more austerity! But he let them both be.

“I
will
talk to Fritz about the candle,” Rich told Louise over breakfast. Breakfast was his job. He had more time, with Louise still employed as a social worker at the county health centre. They figured she'd work another five years, then they'd travel. “Or just putz,” Louise said.

Breakfast was also his favourite meal. He liked lining up the eggs on the counter, cracking them into the blue ceramic bowl — a present to Louise before any of this — timing the toast, running back and forth from toaster to stove, grabbing the jam jars out of the fridge before the toast had cooled, getting the coffee on the table just as the yolks in the eggs turned solid.

“You should have been a short-order cook,” Louise said one morning, as she watched. And then they'd looked at each other and laughed, getting it at the same moment. He had been that.

“I'll call Fritz first thing this morning,” he said to her at the door, after he'd made her change hats. “This one makes you look like Garbo,” he said. “Lady of mystery.”

“Do you think I should?” he asked again, since she hadn't applauded his first announcement.