Any Day Now (10 page)

“OK,” said Fritz, finally cutting him off as Rich, less certain now, was saying, “lovely, unifying experience…”

“I'll bring it up at our next meeting. As luck would have it...” Rich could hear Fritz hitting computer keys. Did priests keep their agendas on computer these days? “Tomorrow night's our next meeting.”

“I can bring you some photos,” Rich said. “Every year we took Polaroids so we could keep a record. And I could write up a short proposal if you'd like. Since I won't be there.” Proposal? What was he proposing? The years of university administration bog-down were still with him. If you wanted to do something, anything, even wipe your nose in this institution, Rich used to say to Lawrence, you have to write a damn proposal. Not a memo. A proposal. And then the finance committee and the curriculum committee and the student rights committee had to wave it through.

“You really got into this candle, didn't you?” said Fritz. Rich could still hear keys clicking. Was Fritz checking out the rest of his week, or was he giving Rich the sign-off?

“It was a wonderful thing,” Rich said, suddenly tired, suddenly feeling helpless. How could he ever explain anything to this young man? “Yes, I guess you could say I really ‘got into it.'”

“Would photos help sell the idea?” he asked again.

“Save yourself the trouble, Rich,” Fritz said. “I find people either take an idea and run with it, or they leave it alone. I'll do my best. Personally, I think it sounds nice.”

When he hung up the phone Rich had to go right into the kitchen and make himself another cup of coffee. Nice, was it? In Rich's experience, especially in Father Rich's experience, there was nothing nice about Holy Week. Some years, especially those last years, he would reach Easter evening feeling like a frayed cincture. Like someone about to unravel, like someone turned inside out. Father Fritz, Louise would say, could use some unravelling.

Louise. He'd almost forgotten about Louise this morning, the primary, still-beautiful fact of his new life. He sat down at the kitchen table, stirred some sugar — too much sugar, too bad — into his coffee, felt things slow in his body again. He thought of last night, the way Louise always looked away to the right, almost as if she were looking out the window, at the moment of climaxing.

“Do I do that?” She'd looked amused and baffled when he'd told her. “I didn't know I did that.”

“What about me? What do I do when I come?” he'd asked. Such a bold question. Every time they talked about sex, even more than every time they had sex, he was surprised, pleased with himself.

“You...” She paused. This was delicate lovers' territory. “You furrow your brow.” She demonstrated, crinkling the wide, pale space between her dark eyes.

“And you, you do this,” he turned his head languidly, eyes closed. It was enough to arouse him again, enough to make him ask, “Did you have any plans for the next thirty minutes, Mrs. Lawton? Do you think you could schedule me in? I'm a hard-luck case.”

“I guess you could call it a crisis of faith, Father.”

Louise told him later that she had rehearsed that line before coming to see him the week after Easter three years before.

“I didn't want to freak you out completely,” she explained. “Of course, that was why I'd come to talk to you instead of trying to get through to dear old Father Ben at my parish. It would have knocked his collar off.”

That was the way Louise talked. And she looked the way she talked, he realized after she left his office that first afternoon. A curvy woman with hips that made no apologies for enjoying the delicious in life, light-brown hair straight at the roots, cloudy at the shoulders, the traces of last year's perm, eyelids filled in with mauve pencil. She also had the most animated face Rich had ever seen. The woman was either laughing or smiling or rapt or frowning in close attention. She likes to be alive, Rich remembered thinking.

It was always so quiet after Holy Week. The twice-yearly faithful were gone until Advent or even next Easter. Even the regulars, those who showed up from Holy Thursday to Good Friday to Easter Vigil to Easter Sunday, seemed to need a break. Father Frank always went conveniently supine with some flu — “The spirit seems to go right out of me after Holy Week, Rich, my man.”

Three years into his time at St. Mary's, Rich knew what to expect. He played catch-up in the rectory office. He answered the calls from mothers getting into full gear for summer weddings. “Now that Easter's over, Father, we can get down to details. What was your fee again? Oh? That much?”

It had been a grey mid-April, melancholy weather that had nudged him closer to what had been scratching in his chest for the past decade. A decade? It now seemed impossible to Rich that he could have tolerated such discomfort, such dis-ease, for so long. The thing with women, that pressure in his groin and imagination, had lessened in the first year at St. Mary's. But it seemed to have taken everything exciting with it.

“But you don't understand. That's what a priest's life is like, Louise.” Back then, three years ago, in those early conversations, he'd been able to justify the low-level lack of joy.

“You're supposed to feel shitty while you try to get the rest of us to feel good? Some life,” she'd said.

It had been Louise's growing belief in destiny —
destino
, she called it — and angels and reincarnation and female spirituality that had brought her into Rich's office. “It's not like I want to do a formal confession or anything. I've just got some questions,” she'd said. She was on the defensive at the beginning. Rich had just sat, quiet, nodding, not saying much, letting her frame, then answer her own questions. It wasn't hard work. Watching Louise's face as she tried to explain the limitations she found in her own parish, her need to be on her own path, especially now that her father — “the ultimate patriarch” — was dead, her belief in both more and less than the Bible promised, was quite simply a pleasure. And because Rich had come to hoard his few pleasures, he listened, kept still, afraid even to get up and offer a cup of coffee.

“I know what you mean,” he said at some point, when Louise's voice had dropped off.

“You do?” she asked and looked him so clearly in both eyes, that he stood up and put out his hands to her.

“I'd like to go for a walk,” he said. They went out into the cool, promising day. They talked and walked until 5:00.

It was still, of course, priest to parishioner, still leader to follower, and it stayed that way for months. He couldn't leap, although at night he placed her next to him, then underneath him. He felt incapable of leaps after thirty-five years.

Louise came to St. Mary's only on rare Sundays, both of them agreeing she needed to work things out on her own turf. “And besides, I need you to be there at a slight, disinterested distance. Separate, you know? Like the shepherd of another flock. I'm the stray sheep you have no real investment in,” she said.

Still, it was Louise who confessed first. “I love you,” she said one Sunday night just before Advent. They'd gone for one of their walks after mass, then out for coffee, then out for pizza, had even discussed driving to Northampton for a late bookstore prowl.

“That's not a good idea,” he said. So automatic, so priestly, so crass really. It was the kind of line he'd used on enamoured college students.

“We're not talking ideas here,” said Louise.

“Well, that's where it has to stay, Louise.” The threat was so real this time, the space between them so easily violable, that he felt himself turn nasty.

“OK,” said Louise. “I'm tucking it away.”

She stayed out of sight for a few weeks. And everything in his life began to go wrong. Father Frank started sounding like the bigot Rich had always suspected him of being. Rich's two favourite people on the chapel's planning committee, Hugh Malone and Bette Rice, began an ugly play for power, splitting the formerly friendly group in two. Three, four times a day someone would call and ask, “Father, what are we supposed to do?”

Scarier than his impotence in the situation was his indifference. For the first time, Rich didn't give a damn. Let the little people slug it out on their own. He missed Louise, the sight of her, the sound of her, that face always willing to show something. Was this love? It didn't feel like the earlier stuff. Trish with the tight jeans and high voice who would sometimes look at him as if he were God and not a mere priest. And other women he'd flirted with in public, cavorted with in private. A privacy so private he was the only one there.

One afternoon, he actually asked one of the widows in the parish if she'd like to take a ride into Boston to browse through used-book stores. Saralee was one of the rare sophisticates in the parish, a former New Yorker, a former Jew who'd converted for her husband, a French-Canadian, years before. She was a big reader; her confessions often involved reading novels that did not jibe with church dogma.

“Father, I have sinned.” He could always recognize the accent. Years in Granby and she still sounded like she was living in Queens.

“I read a book this week that condemned the Catholic church for its silence during the Holocaust.”

“And did you agree with the point of view?” He felt like a fraud sitting behind the screen. Of course, the church had committed the reprehensible sin of silence during the war. What else was new?

Sometimes after she left he would write down the titles. It would make for a good reading list. Someday.

Saralee accepted the offer eagerly. He knew she had no interest in him romantically, so able was he now to read the signals women gave off. It had been a nice afternoon, a companionable afternoon even. But at one point, standing in front of a bin of used novels, Saralee had thrust a book in his face.

“Josephine Humphreys. Fantastic first novel,” she told him. “Don't you just love Southern writers? They have this Gothic honesty.”

And his reaction had been to blush so completely — thank God, he was completely clothed, because he was certain that even the backs of his knees had throbbed pink — that he'd had to squat quickly to study a lower shelf.

Rich in Love
. He felt found out, covers stripped: Father Rich was in love. In love, in love, in love. For the rest of the afternoon, he kept seeing the book cover, only half heard the happy chatter of his companion.

“Louise? Can we talk?” He hadn't even called first, afraid he'd weasel out on the phone. He needed to be there at her door. Present and ready.

“I love you,” she'd said at the door, not even waiting to hear what he had to say.

When Rich went to Frank Kennedy a week later, the old priest had acted personally put out.

“Why now, Brother Rich? I'm getting ready to move over. You could have had it all.”

I don't want it all, Rich said once, twice, three times, as they went round and round the reasons.

“I'm in love with someone,” Rich finally said.

“Not in this parish,” said Frank.

“Not in this parish,” said Rich.

“Not a man,” said Frank looking more and more alarmed.

“Not a man,” said Rich.

“This will have to go upstairs to the bishop first, obviously,” said Frank. “Lines of command, as you well know. But I don't want a big hullabaloo around here, understand? Go quietly.”

The chapel committee took him out to supper a few days later. He'd called them each to tell them he was leaving. Most misunderstood at first, thought he was just going to a new parish. He'd had to really drum it in.

“I'm just so shocked, Father. I mean, love is always a cause for celebration” — this from Bette Rice. “But you know, it's a shock. I'm being honest.”

The dinner was quiet, both camps trying to come to grips with the news. They spent the bulk of the evening talking about the choice of a new musical director — the old one was retiring and moving to Florida — as if nothing had happened. Only at the end did a few people get emotional. “We'll miss you, Father,” said Hugh Malone. “You're one of the few live ones left in this old, backward church of ours.”

Maybe he should call Louise at work. The conversation with Fritz hadn't gone down completely. Rich could feel it stuck in his chest somewhere. The leaves murmured around it.

“I talked to Fritz…” he began.

“And…” He always had to cut to the chase with Louise when she was at work. She did become someone else, he'd noticed. Someone tougher, someone with only so much patience.

“Louise, I don't know. I can't seem to get a handle on the guy. He wouldn't say yes or no. He's leaving it up to some committee.”

“Teflon priest,” Louise said.

“How long till closing time? I miss you.” He hated the way he was sounding now. He could act needy at night with her, but not now, not during her work day.

“Listen, we'll do it ourselves,” she said. “I'll go ask at all the parishes in the area and see if we can collect their old candle stubs. And then we'll make our own candle. Just for us. Our own little tradition. Forget Fritz.”

He wasn't sure why he put the phone down not so gently and why he found himself in the hall closet searching for his old spring coat, a tweedy, three-quarter-length from the New York days. So not in style. Just like the old Honda he now backed out the driveway. Thank God he hadn't let Louise talk him into getting rid of it. He drove to the corner for gas, though lately he'd found half a tank could last him a month. Pulling out, he looked left and right.
Tell me which way to go
.

At the outskirts of Easthampton he turned toward Northampton, but he sped by his usual haunts, out Route 9 into Amherst, then east into Belchertown, and back through Granby, South Hadley. All that early afternoon and into mid, then late afternoon, he went toward and through one town after another. Quaint towns. Working towns. He didn't stop. He didn't get out of the car. He drove until the gas registered one-quarter full, until his chest was quiet again.