The Business of Naming Things (9 page)

She'd said, “No.” She'd said no over and over, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no till it is what no is, a refusal, and she said it until it is what no becomes, surrender. The Church is one big no, isn't it? And then the surrender: The flock obeys.

He'd had to nearly force her into the car. Fortunately, they were in the carport, where the other sisters could not see—their only blind spot!—and Mike Seeney was far down the hill turning the grave for Silas Liberty. The world was glued to their TV sets.

“Margaret, now,” he said, meant to soothe, meant to direct. “We'll be late.”

For what? she should have asked. What would Father Paul say to that? Put that into words, Brother Hopkins. “Wreck of the Deutschland.” Okay:
Sister, a sister calling / A master, her master and mine!— / And the inboard seas run swirling and hawling
. . .

Five nuns drown. For a great poem.

They got in the old Packard, the best this parish could do, though how Father Paul had coveted that Fairlane Bob Guerin dangled on Palm Sunday. One day maybe—if monsignor could see to the minuscule down payment and not insist on another auctioneer in his rolling hurdy-gurdy voice—on church grounds!—selling old doors and rotted window frames for the “pastoral car fund.”
Gawd
.

The Packard was deep like a carriage, or like that rickety gondola at the county fair. And no radio—a relief today. All
the talk of Dallas and the president dead and Johnson shot too? Could that be true?

“Margaret, please calm down.” She was shaking. Her small nose pinkened, her cheeks rashed.

She simply could not speak and did not want to speak, and, after a while, cruising along the river, Father Paul thought this is what life among the Carmelites must be like, and then he changed his mind—silence was fine—by the time they reached the new freeway south. It had been a nice day, but now the sky was glowering and early dark was beginning to sift in. A cover.

They made a funny couple . . . if someone knew, but no one did. Father Paul longed for it all to be known, though: his need for immersion in another person, his mingling there, and how good it was for his soul and for his fellowship, meeting the secular halfway; how good it was for his health and strength, so necessary to serving his flock; the Jack LaLanne “Trimnastics” his weekday secret, exercising with his prie-dieu, his little hobbyhorse; did he want it to be known, his trouble with sanctity? All in God's eyes. Did God know? Father Paul often wondered why he still lived.

They weren't a funny couple.

“Justice was done.” He said this to her, meant to console. Not a single car on the road.

This elicited a measure of conversation—a derisive sound, not a snort, but something issued from deep within Margaret that she then squelched, angrily, resignedly, a punch pulled. She's better than that. He went on. “I'm not sure I agree with Kennedy's politics,” he said, trying on casual.

“He's dead,” said Margaret.

“Of course.”

“
Agreed
, then. Not
agree
. You the writer.”

“That was mean,” she added. He could not see her in the backseat, but he could hear her crying.

W
HERE DID IT ALL BEGIN
? In the beginning.

Paul Connolly, the elder of two children born to John and Joyce (Dugan) Connolly, a star athlete and student in an old mill town, received the call one day in the spring of his junior year. By then, his father had long been dead—a steam joint blew on a dryer at the mill when Paul was eight—a brutal scalding. The mortician replaced Paul Connolly Sr.'s eyes with glass. Paul Junior became his mother's partner, the ardent scholar athlete and Boy Scout. His future, to that point, had been set—or assumed: he would attend Normal School in the county seat; he would be a teacher—perhaps English and gym—and he'd hunt and fish and read
Life
and
Time
and probably marry Jill Chilton, with whom he'd attended two proms. Paul himself assumed that intimacy with a female would begin and end with Jill Chilton, though it had not begun. They would consummate their union, perhaps in a small hotel in Montreal or in Niagara Falls, and have children. But on a cold April Saturday morning—it would have been his father's birthday—Paul worked his tackle in the Black River, just like his father had shown him, when a shadow fell across him, and then fell across the sun. He thought it was a bird of prey, an osprey intent on him. He staggered on the riverbank, cold, frightened. Maybe I am epileptic, he thought, like Ronnie Gonyea, whom he'd seen ride out a fit sitting in his truck, his head flailing up and down in silence—then everything began to rush at him, and then he was in the river. It was high and fast. Paul rose to the surface, but his waders became snagged in branches at the bottom. He was held there
in the current, the water to his chin and then higher. Only the flat of his face was out of the water, a floating mask staring at the swirling gray above, the small gnats a fresh hatch to outlive him, and he prayed for his soul. For minutes. If he tried to move, he pulled himself under. Then he tried to pull himself under, to free himself from the swollen waders or break off tree branches, but his hands were numb. He surrendered to this entrapment. He stared downstream, only his nose and brow above water, not daring to open his mouth to shout. He thought, I will drown. He thought, I will die in a river. That is appropriate. And then the sun opened a hole in the cloud, making him blink, and the river shifted beneath him. He spilled into a pool downstream, his gullied waders pulling him onto a shallow sandbar, where he gathered himself, and walked out, saying, “Your will, not mine.”

That was 1950. It came out of the blue, literally—the clearing sky—but in other respects it was no surprise, at least to Paul. He'd suffered a period of near-fanatical (but private) devotion to prayer, secretly saying grace before and after every meal (sometimes every course; for a while—one Lent—after every swallow); his evening prayers, too, were forced to be completely imagined in every word—no thoughtless, rote recitation for Paul: Each word of each prayer had to be visualized as both word and a corresponding image (“fruit of thy womb, Jesus” was a high-wire construction involving an apple where something else should be).

His still-grieving mother welcomed his vocation, as if she deserved it. They were good Irish Catholics, after all; it was a fine tradition to give one son to the Church, even if your only son. Fortunately, his sister, Sarah, could bear the grandchildren. Father Paul would baptize them.

Girlfriend Jill (“A.F.A.” she had written in his yearbook
under her own picture) eased her way out of Paul's future—a combination of Paul treating her, on a hammock, to a deadly disquisition on Teilhard de Chardin, and then the late-closing suitor with a milk route and a sporty, black, two-door Studebaker, Gordy Gregory, who won her heart. So the four-star athlete and smart boy left for the Korean War, a stint, however, cut short (a misunderstanding in the PX; discharge); then a B.A. in philosophy from the University of the State of New York and a certificate in philosophy from Wadhams Hall College, a seminary up on the St. Lawrence River. On his ordination day in 1958, he took his mother and sister to see a dam come down—what was called “inundation day” for the valley, which would see ten villages sacrificed in the name of progress. He had changed out of the cream and gold of the ceremony into the simple black cassock and black biretta he favored like a boy might. He was severe; his mother, in a feathered hat, dotty; his sister, hatless, and in a bright green suit rather too jaunty for the setting. They saw the explosion at the dam, and then heard it; and then saw the slow hemorrhage of dark water flood the countryside.

“A big day,” Paul said to his stricken mother.

“What are you talking about?”

“The river is too shallow,” said Paul.

“Too shallow for what?” asked his mother. “For drowning?”

Paul swallowed hard. “For tankers. They're going to build locks.”

“For what?”

“One needs to get from here to there, all over. Cargo, freighters.”

Masonry crumbling. His mother turned away.

M
ARGARET TOOK A DIFFERENT PATH
in the same direction. She came from farther north, from Quebec City. She was an only child who lost her mother to a street accident when she was only six. Her father was a civil engineer, building bridges, and brought a young woman in to help with Margaret. Margaret loved Mireille, who taught her to dance and bake bread and comb and braid her thick auburn hair. Mireille was also a bit of a rebel—Margaret's father called her a
flambeuse
, a risk taker, because she smoked and had
beaucoup petit copain
—boys.

Margaret's father was strict enough, but not too much. He was gentle toward his little Marguerite, but he hated the Protestant English and the Catholic Mohawks. One day in Vieux Ville—as if the whole city weren't old—her father ran into a Mohawk he knew from work on the Taschereau suspension, who was out with his family. He spoke harshly to the man. The Mohawk had a rosary around his neck, and was drunk. Margaret's father berated the big man, who was ashamed and sought no trouble, but Margaret's father would not stop. She began to scream for him to stop. She pulled on his sleeve. He slapped her, and then punched the Mohawk in the ear. The man fell. Her father then kicked him down the rough cobblestone. Margaret thought, Father, you will go to hell. She said to him,
Allez en enfer!
Her father looked at her, stricken. He could not catch his breath. They made their way toward the cathedral, but once they reached the steep steps, Margaret's father sat down slowly. He put his cheek on the limestone, frothed pink bubbles, and convulsed, looking at his only daughter. Margaret was twelve years old. She went silent then for many months. She thought she would go to hell, but she did not go to hell and made sure she wouldn't. She went to the Ursulines, the teaching order of Catholic nuns that ran a boarding school in a convent at the top of the cliff.

Margaret learned ornamental tapestry making, weaving threads of gold and silver—tapestry being the Ursuline's principal service to the iconography of the Church. Margaret's specialty was in structuring reliefs out of horsehair—the outcropping upon which a saint might stand, the roll of a bishop's miter, the breast and shoulder—and this Margaret felt most fitting—of a horse. But she also learned chemistry and hygiene and German; she learned how to read music and to play the harp—Purcell's
Ode to St. Cecilia
, she practiced for a year. At nineteen she was married to Christ in a wedding dress with a dozen other girls, all of them homely in homely glasses but for Margaret, who was slender and small-boned, her green eyes bright with belief and her French braid curled on her shoulder like a reminder of who she once had been.

When Margaret arrived at Franklin Manor—a former sanatorium and now an Ursuline convent in northern New York—Father Paul, the pastor, saw her by accident one morning her first week there—he'd not had a formal introduction to the new sister. She was down in the laundry; she had taken off her habit and wimple and scapular. Her hair was short, rough-cut, and the color of brass. She had on only a loose white shift. She was bone white. Father Paul could see her breasts moving against the fabric as she worked her arms around, putting clothes into the washer. Her whole upper body tensed and flexed as she ran bedclothes through the ringer, turning the crank round and round. She thought she was alone and unseen in her exertions, didn't she? A private ecstasy. Or did she know that the priest next door across the lawn could see right through the hydrangeas to the convent laundry? When she turned and framed her face in the window and looked right at him, he knew. Almost three years ago. It was Easter week. . . .

H
E IS WIDE AWAKE NOW
. Where is Margaret? What are those birds? Only chickadees left in November. All that squawking.

It was a night of weeping. Weeping and distance and then violent comings together. Margaret was shattered. Father Paul was stunned, confused, but somehow personally exonerated. That was his mistake. She said he wasn't listening.

He began: “For all his Catholic trappings, all that Irish going back, the French Catholic wife, he was hardly a man of the spirit.”

“Enough,” said Margaret.

“He was a man of the body, of the secular mind. You know, his father ran liquor.”

“You. Envied. Him.” She said it evenly, three dead taps.

Father Paul paused, encouraged at the line of conversation. They were on the bed, not in it. Oh, touching was irrelevant. But he'd been rebuked. He liked that. His heartbeat walloped ahead; he could feel his Irish coming up, which made him smart.

“I don't
now
.”

Ha-ha. He could only hope a smirk did not sneak out and mar his simple wisdom. Margaret fled to the bathroom, which, weirdly, had the room number on the door, and one of the ones popped off when she slammed it.

T
HE LIGHT IS GRIM AND GRAY IN ROOM
11. He cannot look at his Bulova curled on the nightstand, but he knows it is 7:00
A.M.
—an instinct of the seminary—all the hours lived fully in faith and most, alarmingly, in wakefulness. He knows all the hours and the accompanying light according to the seasons, amen.
At 8:00
A.M
.—today—he should be saying Mass for Mrs. Letorneau and Cubby Waldron and the widow Ashline, with Sister Mary Margaret and the Forkey boys serving. But that does not seem possible today. It is 7:05 as he coils his Bulova onto his wrist, where the band snaps, punishing his hairs. Day begins. It's an hour and a half over the mountain. Call Mike Seeney. The rector will handle the simple posting. “Father out on sick call.”