Empire Falls (55 page)

Slinging himself into the booth, he paused, the tip of the pencil above the paper, sensing that if he did not write down his first thought immediately, it would be lost forever. In this he was correct.
“What
did you just say?” he asked, looking up, unsure he’d heard his housekeeper right.

“I
said
that what’s missing
is
Father Tom.”

Father Mark swallowed uncomfortably. “Well, he can’t have gone far,” he offered, his intended certainty sounding rather wishful. “You’re sure he’s not around somewhere?”

Mrs. Walsh
was
certain, and told him so.

“Still, let’s make sure,” Father Mark suggested, rising from the booth.

“Make
you
sure, you mean,” she grumbled, but together they searched the house all over again. When they finished, Father Mark returned and searched the church too, aware how fond the old man was of hiding in the confessional.

The mission a failure, Father Mark and Mrs. Walsh stood on the back porch surveying the church grounds, the priest looking gut-shot, his housekeeper smug, their search having revealed nothing but the truth of her theory, which held that the old father had not gone missing this morning between Father Mark’s departure for Mass and Mrs. Walsh’s arrival, but rather sometime last night. Which meant Father Mark was to blame.

On those rare occasions when he had to leave the rectory in the evening, Father Mark always hired a sitter to watch TV with Tom and make sure he got to bed okay. Mostly he assigned an altar boy to this duty because, after Father Tom had appeared bottomless in Mrs. Walsh’s kitchen, Father Mark hadn’t wanted to risk a female sitter. The boy who’d done last night’s shift had left a note saying the old priest had retired early, at eight-thirty. The boy himself had remained at the rectory until ten, then closed up as instructed and gone home, with the understanding that Father Mark would be home shortly—though, as it happened, the younger priest hadn’t returned until nearly midnight. Nor had he looked in on Father Tom, as he now realized he should have. Tom was a notoriously light sleeper, and Father Mark hadn’t wanted to disturb his slumber. At least that was the lie he’d told himself at the time and now repeated to Mrs. Walsh. What Father Mark had actually feared was not that the old man would be asleep, but that he would be awake and full of curiosity.

So it was possible, as much as Father Mark hated to admit it, that he’d already been gone for
fifteen hours!
Particularly worrisome was that no one had called to report seeing Father Tom at large. He’d wandered off before, but he was a well-known figure in Empire Falls and, often as not, he was gathered up and returned to St. Cat’s even before he was discovered to be missing. That fact, combined with his guilt, preyed on Father Mark’s mind, and as they stood there on the back porch, it occurred to him to ask, “Tom
can
swim, can’t he?” The possibility that the old priest might’ve ended up in the river sent a vivid chill straight through him. If he’d gone into the river below the falls, he might travel all the way to Fairhaven, where the dam would stop him. In the previous century, suicides along the Knox sometimes made it all the way to the ocean.

Mrs. Walsh had no idea whether Father Tom could swim, any more than she knew why on earth she was expected to know such a thing. “I’m just glad you had the car,” she said. “You know how he used to love to drive that Crown Victoria.”

Father Mark looked at her.

Mrs. Walsh looked back at him. “You
did
have the car?”

“Shit,” he said, for he hadn’t taken the car last night. His companion had driven.

“Bingo,” said Mrs. Walsh.

They both regarded the closed door of the detached garage, the one place on the parish grounds they had not checked. Father Mark heard his name called and saw an altar boy waving to him as he entered St. Cat’s sacristy door. Father Mark consulted his watch. It was ten after ten, only twenty minutes until Mass was scheduled to begin, and the early birds were already filtering in. What he would’ve preferred, Father Mark realized, was to postpone further revelations until after Mass. Not possible. Not with the good Mrs. Walsh at his side, her very presence demanding action.

“You stay here,” he instructed her, then crossed the drive, paused and finally peered in through one of the garage’s square little windows.

On the back porch, Mrs. Walsh watched him lean forward and rest his forehead against the garage door. She counted to ten before he straightened up again. Better to be a competent housekeeper, she thought, than an incompetent priest.

“W
HEN
G
OD
R
ETREATS,”
so alive and accessible for the early Mass, proved elusive for the late. In fact, as Father Mark ascended into the pulpit, he offered up a quick, fervent prayer asking God to help him recall the main thrust of the sermon he’d delivered so eloquently just two hours before, only to discover that He had indeed retreated, forcing Father Mark to pore desperately over his handwritten notes while the congregation grew curious, then restless, then alarmed. What Father Mark was having trouble locating in his notes was the conviction required to say these things. Two hours before, he had believed them to be true. Now he wasn’t so sure.

He had spent the evening before in the company of a young artist who taught at Fairhaven College, the same professor who, though Father Mark was unaware of this, had selected Christina Roby’s and John Voss’s paintings to represent the sophomore class in the citywide art show. The two men had met a few weeks earlier at the Bath Iron Works at a rally against the commissioning of a new nuclear submarine. Both had been arrested for criminal trespass, then quickly released. During their incarceration, Father Mark had suspected immediately that the young artist was gay.

He was less certain what conclusions the artist himself had drawn, but a few days later Father Mark received a note asking him to visit his campus studio. The letter arrived in Tuesday’s mail, and Father Mark, his heart pounding as he held it in his hand, found himself pondering both time, which had just slowed, and how it might be speeded up. Normally he tacked invitations onto the kitchen bulletin board as a reminder, but in this instance he took the note to the desk in his room and put it in the middle drawer among some worthless papers, as if proximity to mundane matters might magically render it mundane as well.

No such luck. He checked the drawer half a dozen times that first day, rereading the letter until he had it memorized. In addition to showing him some work in progress, the artist said there was a spiritual matter he wanted to consult Father Mark about. By Wednesday he was unable to delude himself any further. He was
hiding
the note, and that gesture told him everything he needed to know. Neither did it leave him much choice but to tear the sheet up, which he did, depositing its pieces into the wastepaper basket beside his desk, after which he crossed the lawn to the church, where he lit a candle and knelt at the side altar to offer a prayer of gratitude.

He was about to begin this prayer when he heard a sound behind him and turned just in time to see Father Tom sneak into the confessional. The old man had clearly followed him, and before Father Mark could chalk up his batty colleague’s behavior to his dementia, he felt a terrible, righteous rage rising in his chest. He stormed over to the confessional, dragged the old man out, and walked him back across the lawn, dressing him down as they went. When they arrived at Mrs. Walsh’s kitchen, the old man was hanging his head in shame and looked so pitiful that Father Mark relented, telling him that of course he was forgiven. He did not, however, return to the church to complete his prayer. A prayer was a prayer, he reassured himself, no matter where it was offered, and Father Mark decided to offer this one in the privacy of his room. Once there, however, it struck him that he was making far too much of the whole thing. There was no reason to believe that the invitation wasn’t entirely innocent, and no reason that it shouldn’t be innocently accepted. It was not the artist but Father Mark himself who, by his thoughts, had turned this into an occasion of sin. Blessedly, he’d only torn the letter in quarters. He had a roll of Scotch tape right in his desk.

The artist, Father Mark learned when he visited his studio on Wednesday, had been raised in Nicaragua, the son of a low-level American diplomat, who’d died there in a car accident, and a woman from Managua. As a young man he’d come to the United States to study, but after the Sandinistas fell he stayed on. His paintings—Father Mark thought them extraordinary—were expressly religious in theme and imagery, and utterly devoid of irony. American artists were no longer able to paint without irony, the young man agreed, pleased by Father Mark’s observation. While there was nothing overt in the paintings he was shown that day in the studio on the top floor of the red-brick building in downtown Fairhaven, Father Mark came away more certain that the artist was gay. Only on the drive home did it occur to him that the spiritual dilemma the man had mentioned had not come up.

That followed two days later, over the phone. Father Mark took the call in the den, purposely leaving the door open. The young art professor began by apologizing for dragging Father Mark all the way to Fairhaven and then not finding the courage to bring up the subject that was troubling him. Not at all, Father Mark said. The paintings themselves had been well worth the trip. The simple truth was, the young man said, that he’d enjoyed Father Mark’s company so much that he hadn’t dared say something that might very well make him loathsome in his new friend’s eyes. At least he hoped they were friends. But now, since Wednesday, he felt ashamed of himself in an even more complicated way, so he’d decided that the best and only thing to do was the honest thing, and confess his sexual orientation.

Yes, said Father Mark, looking up from the phone to find Father Tom in the doorway, and he continued to stand there until Father Mark made a motion for him to move along. If the old priest had any recollection of what had transpired between them earlier in the week, he gave no sign. Listening to people talk on the telephone, to Father Tom’s way of thinking, was the next best thing to hearing confessions.

This pregnant silence was exactly what he’d been afraid of, the young artist blurted, sounding distressed. Father Mark hastened to explain that he’d been interrupted and that his silence indicated neither shock nor mortification nor revulsion. He assured the young man that he now had his complete attention, after which he proceeded to talk for half an hour, during which Father Tom found occasion to pass by the open door four more times.

The artist’s crisis of faith had been occasioned by the betrayal of a friend who—if you can believe it, he said—also happened to be a priest. He hadn’t seen the man in nearly a decade, not since they’d known each other in Texas, where he’d been in graduate school and both had been active in the Sanctuary movement, helping illegal aliens cross the border into the United States, providing them with temporary safe houses and, eventually, forged documents that would allow them to work. Many of these refugees had given their life savings to “coyotes,” smugglers who would abandon them to their exhaustion and the hot Texas sun; the majority were rounded up and taken back across the border. The lucky few who slipped through the net wanted nothing more than the kind of hard, dirty labor most American workers spurned, and half of their meager wages they sent back to families in Guatemala or El Salvador or Nicaragua or Mexico.

Both the activists had been arrested on numerous occasions, and it was in jail that the young artist confessed to the priest that as a gay man, he felt as lost and abused in an increasingly hostile church as the illegals did when they were off-loaded from trucks in the darkness and turned loose to find their way, or not, across the Texas desert. If there was no place for him in the Catholic Church, where was he to go?

The priest did more than anyone ever had to put his mind and heart at rest, assuring him that the church was as large and diverse as the world itself. All of God’s children were welcome in it. True, there were many who condemned what they did not understand, who made the church seem small and cold as a prison cell. Far better to remember who it was that Jesus Himself chose to befriend during his brief tenure upon the earth. Far better to be an outcast here than in heaven. But the priest was stern, too, reminding the young man that God demanded of him the same degree of fidelity He required of His other children. In His eyes, promiscuity and carelessness were the true offenses, no matter one’s sexuality.

When his degree work was finished, the young professor moved on with great reluctance from one marginal teaching post to the next, and it was clear to Father Mark that he’d fallen in love with the priest and had held his memory sacred over the intervening years, which was why it had come as such a shock to get a phone call from him a month ago. His heart had leapt at the sound of his old friend’s voice, and his first thought was how much trouble it must have been to track him down in Fairhaven, Maine, of all places. But his joy was short-lived. At first he didn’t understand that the priest was calling him to explain that he’d offered misguided spiritual counsel all those years ago, that further reflection and prayer had forced him to concede that while the church was indeed as large as the world it embraced, it could not be infinitely flexible in its doctrine—that is, all things to all men. In matters of faith and morals there could be neither doubt nor dissent, and where its teachings were clear and unambiguous, a true believer had no choice but to accept these as the very will of God. Further, it was the duty of all who were ill to seek the cure.

“You want to know the sad part?” the young man concluded, his voice weak with emotion and on the verge of breaking.

Father Mark, listening both to the voice on the phone and to Father Tom’s relentless shuffling in the hall, already knew the sad part. “You suspect he was gay himself, don’t you?”