Songs in Ordinary Time (61 page)

Said what? Had she missed something? She tried to listen more closely.

“He’s had it in for me since the day I came!” There was a catch to his breathing, like a pant or a ragged little cry. “A good priest is apolitical, is he? No, a good priest keeps his mouth shut. A good priest doesn’t think! A good priest doesn’t feel! That’s what he really means!” He kept glancing at her. “That’s what he wants, ears and a mouth. That’s what they all want, you know. Maybe he figured I’d been lobotomized or something.” He laughed so suddenly that she laughed, too, then squirmed in the mirthless silence.

For the next few miles neither one spoke. She twisted her purse strap miserably as he brooded over the road’s curving glare. He was so emotional, so volatile. This intensity she’d first sensed in him made her as uneasy now as it had then. There was too much power here, too much energy for one so used to fleeing it. She felt as if she were being crimped smaller and smaller, like a scrap of paper the air might at any moment seize through the open window. She wished she hadn’t come. Maybe it was better at night, when they were tired, when all they could do was hold each other.

“There’s one!” she said, pointing to the little white restaurant ahead. Even the crushed stone in the parking lot was white. She read the sign, “The White Cottage,” relieved when he said he was starving. Maybe he’d be in a better mood now with all that off his chest. She waited while he locked the car. He put his arm around her, and she leaned against him as they came through the parking lot. It must be awful, she thought, having to listen to people’s problems all day long and never being able to share his own with anyone.

Inside the bustling dining room his gloom returned, so she tried to do most of the talking. UVM had sent her information about her dorm, her academic adviser, her courses. She even knew her roommate’s name. She still hadn’t decided whether to get the linen service or not, and she had to let them know soon. “But whenever I bring anything up my mother says,

‘Not now. Wait until the soap comes.’ That’s all she talks about now: ‘when SONGS IN ORDINARY TIME / 297

the soap comes, when the soap comes.’ God, she thinks her whole life’s going to change when the soap comes.”

“Don’t be so hard on her. Maybe it will,” he said, making her feel childish and petty.

Bristling, she carved off a small piece of steak. She hadn’t been criticizing her mother, just trying to keep the conversation light. There was so much she wouldn’t burden him with, her father’s escape from Applegate, her mother’s crying herself to sleep every night because Omar hadn’t been around in days, and her own terrible guilt. Last night she’d dreamed that she was kneeling at the rail waiting for Communion. When the priest came to her she closed her eyes and held out her tongue, but instead he gave the Host to the person next to her. “Wait,” she called softly. “You skipped me.”

He looked back in disgust, and she saw that it was Joe.

“That’s just the way my mother was about my going into the seminary,”

he was telling her as he began to cut up his entire steak.

For a moment she wasn’t sure what Presto Soap and UVM had to do with his going into the seminary. Suddenly she wanted to tell him that she hadn’t gone to Mass in weeks. She wondered if he would tell her it was a mortal sin.

“You know I don’t think she ever had one single moment, or accomplish-ment, or person in her whole life to be proud of until I went into the seminary. Right away I knew it was different for me than for the others, but I kept fooling myself. I kept thinking somewhere along the line I’m going to change, I’m going to find exactly what God wants me to do. I thought it would come like wisdom, you know, this enlightenment like a tongue of fire over my head. I waited for it. I actually did.” He laughed and she felt a little better.

He chewed and talked and gestured with his fork, all at the same time. He really had terrible manners, but at least his mood was improving. Maybe he just needed a chance to talk about himself.

“My first parish was in this little mill town in upstate New York. I said Mass, I did the novenas, the evening catechism classes, I visited the hospital and the nursing homes, I went by the parish school once a week. And still I had all this free time, all this energy, so I asked the principal for a group of troubled kids maybe I could help. I took them on hikes and picnics and played ball with them. They were always at my door. Winter came and there was this one kid, this runt named Radlette, who was wearing sweaters because he didn’t have a jacket. So I bought him one, fleece-lined with a hood and buckles all over the place. No other kid had a better jacket, let me tell you, than Radlette had. The other kids picked on him for it. Radlette’s mother told me to mind my own business, that she could get her kid a jacket, which I guess caused trouble with her and her husband, because one night he got drunk and said he’d punch me out if I ever laid another queer hand on his kid. Pretty soon Radlette wouldn’t even look at me, his life had become so miserable. Next thing I know, my pastor’s accusing me of buying the jacket with the priests’ birthday party money. It was gone from the jar, twenty-five dollars. I was transferred. I couldn’t figure out how one kind 298 / MARY MCGARRY MORRIS

act could brand me a pervert and a thief. This must be it, I told myself. God’s testing you, that’s all. He’s getting you ready for that tongue of fire. Later, that pastor wrote and said they’d found the birthday money, after all. I was exonerated. At least I wasn’t a thief.”

Again his laughter rang with bitterness. Each piece of steak seemed to take longer to chew.

“My next assignment was the Bronx, in a crummy, beat-up, lousy neighborhood like the one I grew up in. Only worse. All the kids were Radlettes.

Most of the young priests in that parish hated it. Not me. I was so happy I thought I was going to cry that first day. It felt like I was trembling all over.

I thought, This is why the crazy Radlette thing happened. This is what God wants.

“I got right to work. I got stores to donate their day-old bread and bruised fruit to the needy, and I delivered a lot of it myself. I wrote to some seminary buddies in rich parishes and had their parishioners send their old clothes and shoes to our parish. The rectory basement started looking like Macy’s, people going through the bundles and trying things on. But that’s where the trouble started. They said it was in direct competition with the Bishop’s relief fund, that I had no business running my own clothing drive without going through the proper channels. I was told to submit my requests in writing on the proper forms directly to the Chancellery officials. So I did, but all I got back were these polite notes saying how the needs of our parish would be met as soon as other parishes ahead of us on the list had gotten their share. I tried to accept that. I’ll be patient, I told myself. Then a letter comes saying there’d been an earthquake in South America somewhere and all the clothes had to be shipped there. My parish would be on next year’s list. And would we, by the way, take up a special collection that Sunday for the suffering disaster victims in Bolivia. Okay, I said to myself. I even read the letter at one of the Masses.”

He had stopped eating.

“Then winter came. An awful winter. People were heating their tenements with their oven doors opened twenty-four hours a day, because the landlords kept the building thermostats locked at sixty degrees.” He leaned over the table and looked at her. She swallowed hard.

“There was this one woman,” he said, his voice falling to a whisper. “She wasn’t much older than you, with two babies. She came to me crying. She showed me her gas bill. Sixty dollars for one month! I told her I’d get the money for her somehow. While I was begging around from people I knew, the gas company shut her off. Her three-month-old baby got pneumonia and died. Sure, she should have gone to Welfare. Sure, she should have taken the baby to the hospital whether she had the money or not. But she was one of those that just didn’t know how to make things happen. She went crazy and she tried to drown the other baby, so they put her away and sent the baby to a foster home.” He rubbed his face in his hands.

There seemed to be silence at every booth and table.

SONGS IN ORDINARY TIME / 299

“That’s awful. At least there’s nothing like that here,” she said, but he didn’t seem to hear her.

“That’s when I took my first real look at the polite and pious and obedient Father Joseph Gannon. I started visiting every apartment in the neighborhood. Catholics, Protestants, Jews, it didn’t matter. It took me two weeks.

And what I saw made up my mind for me. I knew if I did nothing but pray for these people and go through the charade of proper channels, then I was no better than their landlords.

“I mimeographed leaflets, calling for a rent strike until the thermostats were turned up, until the broken windows were replaced, until the holes in the roof and the walls were patched. A lot of the landlords, the big ones, the ones who had five or six or ten of these hovels, reacted by turning the thermostats down even lower. So I went out and got blankets. I asked for blankets everywhere, from stores, the Salvation Army, Goodwill, hospitals, my fellow seminarians again. Even my own rectory. I took every extra blanket and tablecloth I could get my hands on, even old drapes from the attic. Word got around and three other priests joined me and a nun. We set up a kind of relief station in the parish hall. We passed out I don’t know how many blankets. We had soup and coffee for them when they came, and cookies for the kids. We wrote letters to the papers. It looked like a couple of the smaller landlords were coming around. But then three of the biggest landlords, and two of them were Catholics, went to my Bishop with checks in hand. They convinced him I was disturbed, the nun was a Communist, and the other priests were drunks.

“I was put in a hospital in New Mexico for a month.” He looked at her.

“I wasn’t there a month, Alice, but a whole year. They said I had a nervous breakdown. I don’t remember much of it besides crying a lot.” He sighed.

“I certainly did cry. I stayed in one little room and wouldn’t go outside for months. I never saw the sun or the rain. I didn’t want to know anything.”

She moved the peas around on her plate, remembering Marlin and his breathy questions and her father pressing the flat white box into her hand and her mother’s bitter laughter at such a gift for their only daughter, their firstborn child, whose conception had seeded a marriage and disaster.

“I wanted to tell you,” he said. “I thought you should know.”

She nodded.

“Can’t you say anything?”

“I’m sorry,” she whispered. Why was he doing this? Why here, with all these people around?

“I don’t want you to be sorry,” he said irritably. “I want you to understand.”

“I understand,” she said, as cautiously as if she were extricating the very bottom piece from a jumble of pickup sticks, because, as always, to blink or take a breath might bring her father lurching through that door, might fill this quiet place with her mother’s prayerful entreaties that were as bitter as curses, “Sweet Jesus, help me. I beg you, please, please help me!” Didn’t he know how fragile it all was, how precarious the balance?

300 / MARY MCGARRY MORRIS

“You see, it wasn’t Radlette or rent strikes or blankets I needed, Alice, it was you! I love you!” he said fiercely.

“Shh.” She stiffened and did not dare look away from his rough face that glowed with sweat.

“This is what God wanted for me. I know that now. Love!”

The waitress was coming.

“Aren’t you going to finish?” Alice tried to ask, but he kept on talking.

“All this time I thought I’d lost my faith….”

“Excuse me,” the waitress said with a toothy grin. She reached for Alice’s plate and asked if they were done.

“No!” Joe said so sharply that the woman’s hand jerked back.

Alice’s face reddened, and she stared miserably at her plate as the waitress moved to the next booth. She could feel them all turning, looking, listening.

“But now, now I realize that my faith has become a wholeness. It’s a unity of mind and soul. And flesh,” he said, taking her hand in both of his. “I finally feel like a real priest!”

O
n their way down to Hankham, Mississippi, a hose blew in the old green station wagon. They taped it up, but they had to keep putting water into the radiator every couple of hours. A nice white lady gave them two one-gallon mayonnaise jars from back of her hotdog stand. Luther kept them filled with water, their sloshing almost unbearable for Montague, whose own plumbing was so bad Luther had to stop about every half hour so the old man could pee. Like all their troubles past and to come, this, too, settled into the flux, fueling the rhythm, so that the minute the car pulled over, the old man would open the door, turn a ways and relieve himself into the dusty road weeds. The old man said he wished there was some kind of internal replenishment between his output and the leaky radiator, and Luther said maybe he could fix it so the old man could piss straight into the radiator hose from the front seat.
Replenishment
—that was one of Montague’s favorite words: to put back what had been taken out.
Replenishment
. It played through his thoughts night and day like the fragment of an ancient hymn.
Replenishment
. It was a hunger beyond flesh.
Replenishment
.

He had not eaten a meal or slept a moment since they’d lost Earlie. Not once. Oh, his eyes might close, but he was painfully, doggedly awake.

The little money they had came from the few Bibles they managed to sell along the way. Luther would wait in the car while Montague shuffled house to house, his soiled satchel bulging with the plastic-sealed Bibles and in his palm Earlie’s worn photograph fondled now to the softness of cloth. “My only living relative,” he would cry before they could shut the door. “I’m a tired and sick old man and ready to die, but I can’t do it alone. I need to be mourned and prayed into heaven, and this is the only one I got to do it, this here handsome young man.”

Luther said the first thing he was going to do when they found Earlie was beat him to a pulp. Every day the old man had to endure this idiotic reverie, although the closer they got now, the less he minded it. He liked SONGS IN ORDINARY TIME / 301