Empire Falls (56 page)

A
LTHOUGH
F
ATHER
M
ARK
had composed much of “When God Retreats” in his head while lying awake in his bed during an interminable and restless night—during which, he now understood, Father Tom was making his escape—he’d been thinking about the sermon since he’d had a long afternoon’s chat back in September with Miles, who told him a story about the week he and his mother had spent on Martha’s Vineyard, when Miles was nine and his mother, trapped in the unhappiest of marriages, had, Miles believed, a brief affair with a man she’d met on the island. Father Mark had never met Grace Roby, of course, having arrived in Empire Falls years after she died, but according to Miles, after the affair she’d returned to both her marriage and the church.

Hers was not, Father Mark believed, an unusual story. Most people tried to be faithful, though few could boast an unblemished record. What had struck him about Grace Roby, at least as she was revealed by her son’s account, was that by falling in love, she had become an entirely different woman. It wasn’t so much that her behavior changed, but rather that she became astonishingly beautiful—so beautiful, in fact, that her beauty could not fail to impress even her nine-year-old son, who’d so taken her for granted to that point that he’d never really seen her as a woman, but only as his mother. For a brief span of a few sun-drenched days, she’d been truly happy, perhaps for the first time in her life, and that happiness had been manifest in a radiance that had turned the head of every man they met.

Though common, it was still a remarkable story, and Father Mark couldn’t help being a little in love with Grace Roby himself and, even more disturbing, glad for this woman he’d never met, that she’d enjoyed at least this fleeting happiness. That she had betrayed her marriage and her faith seemed almost too fine a point, perhaps because Father Mark, knowing Max Roby, understood that her married life must’ve been a trial. That she ultimately returned to both her husband and her faith seemed far more significant, and he said as much to Miles, who confessed his lifelong worry that the intensity of his mother’s brief joy had somehow been the root cause of the illness that killed her a decade later. “You’re telling me that happiness is carcinogenic?” he’d asked when Miles explained how his mother was never truly the same after their return to Empire Falls, that she’d immediately begun to lose weight, that she became pale as a cave dweller and fell ill several times each winter, that she’d nearly died giving birth to his brother, David. Odd that Miles should’ve concluded as a child that happiness, not its loss, was what had stricken his mother. Odder still that he apparently hadn’t been able to revise his thesis later in life. Was this what it meant to be a Catholic?

But it was only last night, as he lay awake in bed, that the meaning of Grace Roby’s story, or one of its meanings, became clear to him. By this time Father Mark’s own crisis had passed, leaving him weak and relieved, as if a fever had broken.

They had gone to an opening held at a tiny gallery on a back street in Camden, and afterward the two men had had dinner at a nearby restaurant overlooking the harbor. For the first week of October, the weather on the coast was unseasonably warm, and in the evening it was still mild enough to eat outside under the suspended heat lamps. At the next table a man and a woman were sharing a bowl of steamer clams, which had reminded Father Mark of Miles’s story. The man and woman might’ve been husband and wife, or husband and someone else’s wife, but it was obvious they loved each other. When the artist noticed his smile and asked what was so amusing, Father Mark told him Grace’s story pretty much as Miles had told it, and in the telling he realized something he hadn’t entirely grasped in the hearing. Wondrous! he thought, how the heart leaps when one is chosen, especially later in life, after one would suppose the time for choosing and being chosen has passed. To be recognized as lovely, as desirable—to
feel
lovely and desirable—surely that was precisely what Grace Roby had needed. It was a God-given moment, during which God had mercifully averted His eyes and absented Himself. Hence the title of his sermon.

Some of the paintings in the artist’s Camden exhibition had been ones Father Mark had already seen in the downtown studio, but others either were new or had been concealed from him before. The majority of these were specifically homoerotic, and when Father Mark examined them, he could feel the young artist’s eyes on him. Later, over dinner, Father Mark explained that his own counsel to homosexual men and women had always been similar to the activist priest’s, before, that is, his lamentable conversion to strict orthodoxy. Father Mark also said he wasn’t entirely surprised by such a midlife reevaluation. After all, Chaucer had renounced his own
Canterbury Tales
, and surely, as an artist, the young man must be aware of painters and sculptors who in later life disavowed their best work as vain or immoral. Father Mark intended all of this to offer comfort on the off-chance that the young man genuinely needed it, though in truth he was no longer confident that there was either an activist priest or a betrayal. He couldn’t say why, but he was suspicious. At the gallery it had also occurred to him that while there might be no single priest, there could’ve been many.

What was
un
deniable was that Father Mark understood that he was being chosen, and his heart had leapt with recognition, just as he imagined Grace Roby’s must have. Was anything in the world truer than that intuitive leap of the heart? Could anything so true be a sin? Even though he now knew, as he had not before, that he wouldn’t surrender to this particular temptation, still, how wonderful to be desired! Surely this was God’s gift to fallen Man. Both the reason and sweet recompense for the loss of Paradise. How deftly God steps back out of view, as He had done with Grace, as He’d done with Father Mark himself, to let them muddle through on their own. Father Mark understood that he was not to feel virtuous, merely fortunate. Or maybe blessed.

The general thrust of his sermon, which he tried in vain to remember as he stood awkwardly in the pulpit, searching his notes, had been to suggest that while God never abandoned us, neither was He on every occasion equally present, perhaps because His continual presence is what we desire most—that is, to be led away from temptation, away from
ourselves
. We want Him to be there, ready to receive our call in the moment of our need: lead us not into … Whereas God, for reasons of His own, sometimes chooses to let the machine answer.
The Supreme Being is unavailable to come to the phone at this time, but He wants you to know that your call is important to Him. In the meantime, for sins of pride, press one. For avarice, press two …

“When God Retreats” had seemed one of his finer sermons as he’d delivered it to his sleepy early congregation. Exhausted and happy, he could find little fault with it as a personal reflection. That God had trusted him to lose and then regain his path had seemed a wise, beneficent gesture. Though now it seemed that what God had actually done was allow him to lose Father Tom.

A
ND SO
F
ATHER
M
ARK
, feeling chastened by the day’s events, left the transparently unchastened Mrs. Walsh in her kitchen drying her pots. He crossed the lawn to where Miles Roby’s Jetta sat in the back lot. He’d hoped that Mrs. Walsh was wrong when she reported it was just Miles in the car, but she was right and Max wasn’t there, which meant that Father Mark could surrender that final hope against hope. The conclusion he and Mrs. Walsh had reluctantly drawn about the old man’s whereabouts held up, even though he wanted very much to be mistaken. Being mistaken, after all, was something he could usually manage. But he’d known the truth when he went through Father Tom’s wastebasket and found among the mint-green offering envelopes and discarded checks, a rumpled color brochure:
Your New Life Awaits You in the Florida Keys!

If Miles saw him coming across the lawn, he gave no sign, even when Father Mark waved. He was looking up at St. Catherine’s, just as Father Mark had imagined in Mrs. Walsh’s kitchen that he would be, but the expression on his face was nothing like what the priest would’ve predicted. He looked like a man seeing the church and steeple for the first time, almost like a man who’d never seen either one before and was having a hard time imagining what the purpose of such a structure might be.

CHAPTER 21

S
UNDAY AFTERNOONS
during the NFL season were almost enough to restore a person’s faith in the bar business. Of course, if Bea believed her customers, what her own bar needed was one of those wide-screens like they had out at the Lamplighter. Bea’s doubts about this need ran deep and philosophical. For one thing, people rarely knew what they wanted. Despite their certainty that they
did
know, she’d never seen much compelling evidence, and since giving her customers what they
said
they wanted would cost her fifteen hundred dollars, she continued to tell them she was considering it. True, her Sunday-afternoon clientele bitched at her more or less constantly about the little black-and-white TV she brought out of mothballs for football season, setting it up on a back shelf usually reserved for bottles of expensive scotches and bourbons for which there’d never been much call, even when people had jobs.

In Bea’s view, her patrons’ need to piss and moan about something was more profound and real than their need for wide-screen television. The thing about the black-and-white set, they said, was that it created an imbalance. If you were lucky enough to be located on a stool at the good end of the bar, you got to watch the game in color on the regular TV; down at the other end you watched in black and white and the draft beers weren’t any cheaper for the inconvenience, either. Plus, on Saturdays and Sundays it could get crowded, everybody elbowing up close to the bar. People’s change got mixed up. When you spun off your stool to go to the head, you were liable to spill the beer of the man standing behind you, and by the time you returned he’d have retaliated by claiming your stool. Then he’d tell you to your face he thought you’d left. If Bea would spring for a big-screen TV, they argued, they wouldn’t all have to crowd within a foot of one another.

What her customers didn’t seem to understand was that deep down they enjoyed being bunched up, just as they enjoyed the jostling and the spilled beer and the stolen barstools. They enjoyed holding their urine as long as they could and then asking the guy on the next stool to save theirs until they got back, knowing full well he wouldn’t, even after he promised to. They didn’t know it, but they even liked the little black-and-white TV, though they were right, it did have a shitty picture. But there wasn’t a damn thing wrong with imbalance. What was life but good barstools and bad ones, good fortune and bad, shifting from Sunday to Sunday, year to year, like the fortunes of the New England Patriots. There was no such thing as continual good fortune—or misfortune, except for the Red Sox, whose curse seemed eternal.

Besides, a new wide-screen TV wouldn’t get rid of the imbalance. There’d still be a good television and one shitty one. The only difference was that what people had thought of as the good big one now would become the shitty little one. Worse, the quickest way to beget a new desire, Bea knew, was to satisfy an old one, and each new desire had a way of becoming more expensive than the last. If she was foolish enough to gratify her customers’ current demands, who knew what they’d dream up next?

Another reason not to invest in a wide-screen TV was Walt Comeau, who bugged her more than all her other patrons combined. He’d stopped by for part of the Patriots’ game today and, as usual, refused to let up. He had a gigantic TV in his health club and said Bea was a damn fool if she didn’t buy one just like it. “You like it so much, go watch football there,” she suggested. In her opinion, Walt Comeau had altogether too many suggestions for a man who drank seltzer water and never left a tip. She just hoped her idiot daughter wasn’t marrying him for his money, because Bea had known her share of Walt Comeaus over the years and she knew how stingy they could be. The way she had this one pegged, Janine was going to have to fight for every bent nickel.