Any Day Now (9 page)

“Listen, it's our parish, right?” she said. “And most priests know that if they can't engage their people, they won't come back. They know church attendance is way down. Do what you have to.” She kissed him. “Love you. I'm late.”

Do what you have to. The words didn't leave with her; they stuck in the air, came back with his second cup of coffee. He'd never liked it when people said this to him. It implied an unpleasant, but necessary deed, something that was morally, technically right but would hurt you or someone else. One of the elders in his last parish would say this when he felt Rich needed to crack down on parish protocol. People weren't dropping in enough coins when they lit votive candles or weren't using the right envelopes for collection, or something equally serious. The bishop in Springfield had said the same words when Rich had gone to him a year and a half ago, having rehearsed “Sir, this hasn't been an easy decision…”

He went into the kitchen. Twenty to nine. Father Fritz was probably just finishing the 8:00 a.m. mass. Rich cleared the breakfast dishes, loaded the dishwasher, tried to read the front page of the newspaper. He wandered into the dining room. The candles were where they'd left them. Pieces of purple wax lay in the ashtray. Louise couldn't stop herself. “It oozes so wonderfully between the fingers.”

The house often felt like this in the first hour after Louise left. Full of echo, chilly. He would go around turning up the thermostats in each room. Then he'd have to go around and turn them all down an hour later. He'd tried going out right after Louise left, to one of the local coffee shops to read. Or into Northampton to walk and browse. But it only made him feel the displacement more. He missed New York; he even missed Granby, the town only half an hour, but now a lifetime, away. His last parish.

He'd been in Granby only six years. Six Easters, six Advents — the way he measured his life as a priest. He'd asked for the transfer there, even put some force into it.

“But you're made for this life,” his superior at the New York archdiocese had countered gently. “You're an inspiration to the rest of us who couldn't do two
days
of late-adolescent angst. I swear, Rich, I don't know how you've lasted as a university chaplain for the past thirty years. Not just lasted. The kids love you.”

“It's not lack of love,” Rich had tried to explain, finally getting the transfer granted when he pleaded the need to regroup, rethink and regain some kind of life for himself. “Spiritually I'm pretty burned out,” he said. “The kids need a lot.”

But it wasn't the kids. God bless the kids. Greg and Trish and Sam had all long graduated. In fact, Sam was a professor himself now at Penn State. Of course, no one could ever really replace the original trio. Just like no one could ever bring back the late sixties. That kind of crazy hope was never coming back. That's what Sam himself had said the last time they'd met in the city.

“The kids now, they're not like we were, are they?” Sam was drinking a double latte and dunking a croissant into the foam. Some of the foam stuck to his new goatee. He still looked like Kid Sam.

“No. Thank God,” Rich said. “I couldn't handle all that earnestness all over again. All that earnestness at 3:00 a.m.” They smiled at each other.

“We were earnest, weren't we?” said Sam.

“And arrogant and polemical and argumentative and full of yourselves.” Rich stopped, suddenly choked by memory. “God, I loved you guys.”

For the most part, he found eighties kids arrogant, full of themselves and practical in a way no one under forty had a right to be. But the kids who came to see him, the kids who hung out at the Newman Center were still basically tender-hearted and smart and funny. The ones who were searching reminded him of the ones who'd been searching two decades before.

It wasn't the kids that made him want to leave New York, the university, his nifty little life of galleries and plays and good taste and good causes. He'd begun to think about women in a new way. They'd moved in close. No. He'd moved them in close.

He'd always been a looker, an appreciator.

“Of course I look,” he'd once confessed to Sam and Greg. “I'm a man. I look.”

“And you don't feel guilty?” Sam had never been afraid of asking direct questions.

Rich was about to explain that looking and doing were two different things, that old argument. But that would have been glossing over the truth. These two young men had earned, at least, access to his ambivalence.

“Sometimes,” he admitted.

“When?” Sam pressed.

“Sam,” warned Greg, who still sometimes wanted his church, his priest, to be Bible-story pure.

“When I use the looking to fuel…”

“What? Fantasies?”

“I guess,” Rich said. “Yes.”

This was what had begun to ever so slowly change. A length of leg, a swell of buttock, a surprise glimpse down a neckline. He began to hoard the images. Even this wasn't so new. Except the ferocity. Except the space they filled. What do I want? he asked, trying not to scare himself. He'd been tempted before: all those gauzy Indian tops, no bras, tight, ripped jeans. He'd survived all that and he'd been a younger man. What was this?

“Mid-life crisis, old man.” Trust his old friend, Lawrence, to hit it right on the head. But Lawrence was the only one Rich could talk to. Lawrence had been growling for years about Rome's requirements of priests.

“Don't give me that,” Rich had argued. “That's practically a cliché.”

“You think God's protecting you more than anyone else? Welcome to the human race. You're what? Fifty-four? So it's a little late for mid-life. Still…”

“What?”

“Nothing.”

“Say it.”

“Have you ever…?”

“No.” And in that moment Rich knew that if he asked his friend the same question, he would be forced to hear a different answer. And he knew, in a way that actually turned his stomach, that he was less proud of his own
no
than he'd once been. Less…invested.

He went to a Christmas party a few weeks later, a party at the chancellor's big house on the edge of campus. Every year the chancellor held two parties: one for the academics, the other for what he called “the professionals.” The place was packed. People had begun drinking early, way before Rich arrived for a token appearance. A woman, attractive, quite drunk, in her early forties, met him at the door. She took his coat. She offered him a drink. No one else seemed to notice that he'd arrived. It was a party past the point of keeping social score. It was drink time, get-down time.

“Do you work on campus?” Rich asked the woman. She was wearing a suit jacket over one of those lace teddies. He'd seen the effect on the streets lately. All business, all eighties, but still all woman.

“Loan office,” she said. “You look familiar.”

“Campus ministry,” he said.

“Ohhh,” she said.

They drank together for a while, watching those around them get silly, then stupid. The head of building maintenance started doing the tango with the chancellor's wife. Ties came off, shoes, belts.

“What next?” Rich asked his companion. She seemed amused by the antics, sputtered with laughter when the man swooped the woman to the floor in a charade of the dignified dance.

“Wanna dance?” Rich asked, a charade question.

She turned, looked Rich straight in the eye. “You're very good-looking, do you know that?”

Rich had been told this often in his thirties, even deep into his forties. He had boyish looks. Straight blond hair, square jaw, brown eyes a bit widely spaced. And he'd stayed in shape, walked back and forth to campus two miles in both directions even in streets piled with dirty snow. But no one seemed to have noticed much of anything about him lately. The days of appreciation seemed to be over. He'd never known what to do with such compliments anyway, offered as they often were either apologetically or boldly, rebelliously. I don't care if you're a priest: you're a hunk.

He smiled at her.

“Have you seen the upstairs?” she asked.

In one of the bedrooms, the one that didn't have a bed full of coats, she turned to him. It wasn't the first time. Easily a dozen women over the past thirty years had turned and fixed on him in the same way. And this time, although nothing was different — the woman wasn't more irresistible, the setting not more paradisiacal, he'd drunk no more than he would have at a similar gathering — he let it happen. The energy to say no. That was all that stood between them. And it left him as he looked into her expertly made-up eyes.

She led him into the closet. In the crush and rustle of hanging clothes he kissed her lips, touched her breasts, and with as much resistance as a piece of paper has to the wind, let himself be unzipped and coaxed and stroked and adored until he came in her warm hands. “But you?” he insisted, as she stuck her head out the door. “I didn't…”

“Honey, I'm just fine,” she said. She went downstairs first, and when he got to the base of the stairs, he kept walking, right out the door. He worried in the next week that he would run into her on campus.
I don't even know her name
.

On that next Monday he went to talk to the dean. By the next month, his papers were ready at the archdiocese. A place had been found in a parish in western Massachusetts. Rich didn't think about any of it too much. Packed. Wrote goodbye notes. Threw away years' worth of theatre programs. Sold the bulk of his books. Prayed as he hadn't in years.

≈

As Rich dialed St. Monica's he half hoped Fritz would be in a meeting or out making visits. Fritz made a point of getting himself out there. Dialoguing.

“Father Fritz here.” That mild, unworried voice.

“Fritz, hi. It's Rich Lawton.”

“Rich. You've been on my mind.”

“Telepathy.”

“Call it what you like, Rich.”

Why did it always feel as if Fritz received his words, any words, as a personal challenge? I don't want your job, Rich thought. I had your job.

“Fritz, I know it's only February. Probably too soon to be thinking about Easter.”

“Never too soon. In fact, the liturgy committee's already met twice. We're pretty much on top of things at St. Monica's. Listen, it's not me,” he added. “I'm a professional procrastinator. It's people like Birdie Waters and Don Westcott who keep this place chugging along. I tell you, Rich, it's the parishioners who run things. I just do what they tell me.”

Fritz laughed and Rich tried to join in. He knew that not for a moment did Fritz believe this. No parish priest did. If there was any ego left in these guys after making it through the parish circuit, it was pride in making things happen. But it was only the most subtle and skillful leader of the flock who saw the wisdom in hiding his own efforts. Yet when you did, when you let your people shine like little stars over Bethlehem, you gained their unconditional support and devotion. What you gained was love. Score one for Fritz. He was smarter than Rich had thought.

“Fritz, as you can understand, I've been trying to keep my nose out of things. For your sake. And for mine, to be honest.” Rich began his approach.

“Yes,” murmured Fritz. “Yes, I would think it would be very difficult. Well, I have to say that I think you're doing a fine, fine job of managing.” It was generic, professional comfort. Rich might have been receiving a pat on the hand for coming through gall bladder surgery or accepting a child marrying outside the faith.

“We did some things during Holy Week at Granby — well, even at NYU, that I thought might transfer nicely to St. Monica's.” Transfer? Bad word. Rich plunged on: “You know. Activities that bring people together. Get them involved. We have to do that, Fritz, as you know.” He regretted right away the cautionary last line.

“I'm all for involvement, Rich. As you know. Why not come along to our next liturgy committee meeting? I'll have to check with the members first, but I'm sure they'd be more than happy to welcome you. They're real keeners, these folks. And you have, as you say, a different perspective. A priest's perspective and…” Fritz searched for the sensitive phrase.

“Something of a lay perspective?” Rich said and almost laughed. “Laid perspective,” Lawrence would have said. Where was Lawrence? Didn't any of these new guys have a sense of humour?

“I do want new blood, you know. New ideas. We can't afford to stand still, Rich, as you said. If we do, we'll end up out here all by ourselves preaching to each other.”

Not me, thought Rich, and realized he didn't want to join any committee. He'd had years of committees. He could already see himself one or two or three nights a week pulling on his coat or his sweater or his sandals and kissing Louise after another marvelous supper and telling her, “Don't wait up. Sometimes these guys get real carried away. There are about seventy items on tonight's agenda.” No.

“What I had in mind actually, Fritz, was something rather specific. A paschal candle.”

“A candle,” Fritz said. Not a question: a flat, very flat, statement. What had he been expecting: some revolutionary twist on the Gospel for Holy Week? A rap version? No wonder he'd been defensive, protective.

And Rich explained, as he had explained to Louise, about the melting of the year's candles by parishioners to make a new candle, a huge candle, one big enough and bold enough to shine out the miracle of Christ's resurrection. He was surprised when his voice cracked on the word “Christ.” Jesus. My saviour. It had been weeks since he'd said those words out loud. In the days when he would say daily mass, they had been so familiar. Like coffee, dear, love, yes, the words of his new life.

“It's not complicated to make. And not hard to coordinate, just a couple of people is all you need,” Rich continued because Fritz was not saying anything.