Cities of Refuge (10 page)

He’d left a handwritten page for her, tucked into the book Marian had given her,
The Golden Notebook
, face down on her night table. He mustn’t have wanted Marian to know about the letter. She didn’t even pick the book up for two days – it wouldn’t have occurred to him that she’d be too upset to read – but then from under the covers she reached for it and the folded page dislodged itself and a corner nodded out. She plucked it free. Upon
seeing the script, a mix of writing and printing, she realized that he’d never before written to her, that she’d seen his handwriting but had never felt the address of it. The letter kept halting her with words and phrases she didn’t know, and their effect was only to remind her that her father had never really known how to talk to her, or who she was. He wrote of the need “to absent” himself and of “the perplex of life” and “at least not having had to suffer the politesse of a carefully maintained lie. But it has not been a sham marriage, Kim. I love your mother, no matter how she feels about me. I love her more than anyone (except you).”

The parentheses braced an afterthought. She knew it at once. Not that he didn’t love her – he did – but that he couldn’t long hold his love for her in mind. Somehow, having thought to write to her, he then forgot her in the act. And yet for weeks the letter was all she had. There was no contact. Not even Marian could tell her where he was. It had been Kim’s first experience of grief, the first time someone had been lost to her, made all the more senseless because he’d chosen it. So that even if he were to return, it could only be as a fetch of himself. He would never again make sense to her and even the sense that had been, even what she thought she knew of him – that he got in the way of his heart, that though he was a womanizer or ladykiller (Kim had guessed at the facts and could find only the cheap words), Marian understood something about him that led her to forgive him and go on loving him – even that past Harold no longer seemed true. Upon leaving he took with him not only what might have been, but what had been. Even her body didn’t feel her own. She marvelled that any of them, in all ways lost, could stand upright and walk, and for weekends at a time she barely did so, staying in her room, mostly in bed, reading.

Finally, Marian proposed that Kim attend a gymnastics camp in Ottawa the week before school resumed. She said the camp would get Kim’s “focus” back, and allow them both a vacation. Marian herself was thinking about a few days in New York. After some argument, Kim agreed to go – she would quit the sport that year – billeting with the family of a local gymnast, a four-and-a-half-foot-tall tumbler whose single topic of conversation was her beam routine. And Marian decided against New York, travelling instead to Guatemala to look for her husband. She didn’t find him. He hadn’t attended the conference, despite appearing on the program. When she and Kim were both back home, Marian spoke of Guatemala, of fabrics and music, and Kim felt an odd connection to the country for her mother’s experiences there, and for its being another place where Harold had failed to appear.

Marian told her of a hike up a volcano on which she’d almost been trapped by hot lava and had been led to safety by mongrel dogs.

“Those dogs got me out of some big trouble,” she said, and Kim, to the surprise of them both, announced that she hated her father. Even as she said it, calmly, she knew that “hate” was the wrong word for the resentment she felt at being awash with a spoiled love for him, but all she could manage was the one inexact syllable. Marian put her hand on the back of Kim’s neck and said maybe she should have brought the mongrels back with her.

H
arold had met Father André Rowe three winters ago during a badly attended lecture series called Religion and the New Theocratic Age at which they’d both delivered papers. Of the
priest’s address – the first in the series - he recalled only its violent imagery of a “disarticulated church,” and the holy word itself ripped limb from limb by the forces of cynical liberalism and reactionary conservatism. Listening to him, Harold had thought the man had no real command of anything, and was barely in control of his passions. But over the weeks, as the group members got to know one another during the informal discussion sessions, all of them lining up at the coffee urn and then angling their chairs into a sort of parliament, he came to think of Father André as the most valuable participant, the one among them who coaxed them from their turfs, translated the terms now and then, and kept things peaceable even as he challenged arguments and core beliefs. By the end of the semester, Harold had had to admit to himself his own academic hubris.

One night they’d walked together out of the college and across the campus with the city lights holding above them in low winter clouds. They’d been trading views of the evening’s lecture, a sociologist’s work-in-progress on the local adaptations of conservative Islam in European cities. Harold wanted them to get past the subject so that the conversation might move at random. The impulse was familiar to him from his relations with certain especially smart women, a need to be close to the power and authority of a truly other mind. On most days he believed that over his life of observation and thought he’d come to know how to see things. Yet every now and then, it seemed he’d collected nothing but prejudices and a few disguises for them. As they moved single file in the snow onto the packed path that cut across the field, the priest had kept finding new implications in the sociologist’s work, kept asking Harold for an historian’s assessment and then using it to open other levels of inquiry. Finally Harold stepped into a
pause and asked him how a man who spent his day with the unfortunate had the energy or even the inclination to spend his evenings with people whose devotions must seem so removed from the front lines. “I like most academics,” said Father André. “They commit to their enthusiasms, as we all should, with mind, body, and spirit.” Harold said he wasn’t sure that described many of his colleagues, or himself. “It describes you. I know it when I see it.” The comment surprised Harold into speechlessness. He had come to value it out of proportion.

They’d had little contact in the past two years. Before he’d called him yesterday to arrange a meeting, Harold had hunted up the online course calendar and found Father André there on Tuesday nights teaching Time and Ritual in Christian Doctrine. The posted reading list would look pretty daunting to an undergraduate, Harold knew, but he’d have better students because of it. They arranged to meet at noon in a café near campus. The view from their table was of southbound streetcars emerging from the underground, and northbound ones disappearing into the station.

“I read your book on Central American Protestantism.” The man’s faded white short-sleeved shirt was tucked in too far in the back. It gave the impression he was straining at the collar.

“So there’s two of us.”

“I’m not in a position to evaluate the scholarship, but it has an authority. It seems rigorous and well argued.”

“Thank you. But I’m guessing you don’t think it addresses the whole picture.”

Father André smiled. His boyish yellow hair clashed with the thick parchment on his arms and face. He looked worn and hardened.

“Your book reads like a smart market analysis. Event X leads to event Y. I don’t see why the force of living faith has to be put aside in such studies, or discussed exclusively in terms of material needs and politics and American business models used to sell Pentecostalism to the poor.”

“Well. There’s the whole chapter on the migration of the spirit, conversion as the movements of people from the country to the city.”

“Yes, but that’s only a metaphor. There should be room for testaments. It isn’t that I don’t acknowledge the power of need and politics to shape history. It’s that I do, I know it very well, and so I know how people endure their hungers and sufferings and despair.”

“You’re talking about a kind of social history, or simply documentary history, that I don’t do. It’s not my particular thing.”

“I think it should be part of the practice.”

“Well, take it up with the ancients, I guess.”

“Oh, I do.” He laughed. “I debate daily with the Ancient of Days.”

They talked about their courses and students, and the vague sense of the world at large bearing down on them. Father André asked about Marian – she’d been first diagnosed the winter of the lecture series – and Harold gave him the short answer.

“If you’d like to talk about that, I’m certainly your man, Harold.”

“Thank you. Thanks. No, actually, I wanted to get together with you because of my daughter, Kim.”

Harold hadn’t realized he could say anything at all to another about Kim. He wasn’t sure, starting into it, that he could tell it fully, but he just kept talking and let the story run where it would.
Kim emerged in the telling as a serious woman full of unrestrained heart, or love, he supposed, and anger, maybe a few notes of spite. She was not always aware of her own motives. You couldn’t really know her without watching her carefully, but even then there was something elusive. She had ascetic tendencies that seemed to distance her from her generation. New technologies didn’t interest her. She had few amusements. Few friends. She was purposeful but directionless, or at least without professional ambitions. It was not just his fatherly imagination, he stressed, that she was possessed of an enormous power that had no apparent means of expression or becoming, and he was worried this power, an intelligence, a talent, if contained much longer would grow sinister and begin to ruin her.

Then he told the priest about the attack. He had never told anyone about it – either people had heard or they hadn’t – and he was surprised at how hard it was. He wanted to leave out the details but found himself describing them. At some point he became aware of himself trying to get the story right, and he thought of how much harder the telling must be for Kim, and his voice began to constrict and he had to leave off.

Father André was sitting back. He’d received it all with an expression of pained but warm understanding. Harold knew the look would stay in his mind and do good there.

“To think of what’s loose out here.” He shook his head. “I’m sorry, Harold. How can I help?”

Harold had an image of himself, a rodent poking his nose out into the light of the calamitous world. The priest was at home in it. Harold hadn’t been for most of his adult life. It was obvious to both of them. But the man respected him. Around Father André Rowe, Harold almost respected himself.

“She used to work with rejected refugee claimants. As you do, or your church does. She volunteered for an organization called
GROUND
.”

“I know it. They do important work.”

“But the work made her vulnerable. I’m not saying she was naive, but she told her mother once about never knowing enough at
GROUND
, never being able to see all the things in play at a given time. The faces, the body language. And in that kind of world, even an ounce of ignorance and you pay the consequences.”

“You said the attacker wasn’t caught.”

“She might have been followed. Which means she was chosen in some way.”

“Chosen at random?”

“It might be she was followed from her apartment building. That the attacker waited for her there. That he knew where she lived, and knew her. And the attacker didn’t speak English. Neither did most of her clients. And he was dark-skinned, but not black. She works with a lot of Central and South Americans because of her Spanish.”

“Is this the police theory?”

“Not exactly.”

“Is it her theory?”

“She doesn’t want to examine these questions.”

The priest met his eye. Harold supposed he was wondering about him as a figure in his daughter’s life. Would he ask for the salient facts, for direct admissions? He was sure the man inferred it all at some level anyway.

“Not knowing her myself, Harold, I can say only that her soul must be in a state of turbulence. Next up, I’m afraid, is torment. And as creatures, our signature means of dealing with torment
aren’t so good. Many are lost to it. Some become habituated, and are lost to that. What your daughter needs is what we all do. She needs peace. And we can only find that in the goodness and strength of others, the people we’re closest to.”

“A simple enough equation.”

“Peace is real. It has force. It spreads.”

“Like democracy.”

“Don’t fail it like that.” His tone was calm but dead stern. “Don’t try to debase it, or disarm it with irony or politics.” “It’s all politics at some level, Father.”

“There are things that stand outside of politics. We’re made of solitude and endure it through the social. We can draw on others for peace. Not abstractly. Our essential networks are very small. A few people. Mutually supportive. People who value others for their goodness, not their sophistication or wit. People who don’t pretend there aren’t differences between us, and yet know what it is we share.”

“All right. And so you’ve diagnosed her troubles by seeing mine. I don’t strike you as at peace.”

“Almost no one does.”

Harold tried on a rueful smile. “There’s no quick fix for us, is there?”

“You don’t feel God is watching over you?”

“Not watching over, no. Just watching.”

“At least you feel Him.”

“I don’t know who I feel.”

He was not used to talking like this. It was astonishing, what came out of his mouth.

“Years ago, Harold, when I left the seminary, I confessed to an older priest that I wasn’t sure what my job was, going out into the
world. He said it was to get people to look beyond whatever it was they most wanted in life, and what they most feared in it. But I think maybe that’s all it is. People get into trouble because they can’t answer those questions of what they want and what they fear.”

“And those, also, are more complicated matters than they might seem.”

“They might be. Or they might not. Can you answer them?”

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t know, or you aren’t prepared to?”

“Maybe that’s what I mean by complicated.”