The Good Life (9 page)

“Yes,” she said.

“Excuse me, you two,” said Amy Burding, materializing beside Beth. “Can I steal Father away? The kids are ready to start their skit.”

“Of course,” he said. “I've been looking forward to it. I've been looking forward to everything tonight.”

“We hope so, Father,” Amy said, steering him away. “We wanted to give you exactly what you wanted.” Not a glance back at Beth. Not one.

 

Following that night, when she did not sleep, she woke the girls with the promise of chocolate French toast, usually only a special-event breakfast. She saw them onto the bus from the front porch, then called the Women's Services office and told them she had the flu. Waiting for the phone to ring, she took apart and scrubbed the stove hood. She removed the china from the hutch and washed it, piece by piece.

By noon she was polishing the chandelier. The house's silence turned her joyful anticipation into unease and then, as the afternoon lengthened, into panic. Beth could well imagine the guilt Father Marino might be experiencing, the jolting fear—or, worse, the uneasy memory. He mustn't shut her away from him. Not now of all times. At two-ten, before the girls came home, she reached for the phone.

She was prepared for a diminished voice, but he was full of sass. “Thanks for the card. I put it on the mantel, to remind me that I'm getting decrepit.”

“Did you enjoy your party?”

“I love parties. But I don't think the kids showed me enough respect. At the next Youth Fellowship we're going to have a sensitivity session on the word
geezer
.”

“That wasn't the part of the evening I paid most attention to.”

“Did I miss something?”

“You. Asked me to go away with you.”

Though he laughed, the stiffness in his voice was instant. “Every single guy in this parish should want to go away with you.”

“You said opportunities make new doors in our lives. All we have to do is walk through.”

“Maybe Frank Burding? He was feeling his oats.”

“You said you were trying to hold on.” She couldn't get her mouth to stop. “You asked me to hold on to you.”

“Listen, Beth. Everyone understands how difficult things have been for you.”

The hand holding the telephone against Beth's ear began to shake, and her brain was flooded with bright heat. “Do you have any idea what you have done?” she said.

“I haven't done anything,” he said. “You're not listening to me.”

After she hung up, Beth sat at the kitchen table for a very long time. She smiled when Ali and Stephanie clattered in. Sensing an advantage, they asked if they could play now and do homework later, and she nodded.

Every inch of her—skin, organs—ached, and her lungs seemed to have narrowed to the circumference of a thread. What she could hardly tolerate was the unfairness.

As a boy, Father Marino—Joseph, the man's name was Joseph—had once won a competition for flying a toy airplane farther than any of the other boys. His prize was a movie pass, which he used to see
Carnal Knowledge
. The movie was forbidden to every child he knew, but the theater, when he entered, was filled with furtive ten-year-olds. As a teenager, he had driven a violent green Buick and wore his hair down to his shoulders. He liked peanut butter and honey sandwiches and linguini
con vongole
. All this Father Marino had told her, and every detail she had cherished.

In the end, he had given Beth nothing. She'd been an imbecile to believe otherwise.

 

For the next two weeks she answered the telephone at Women's Services with tight courtesy, hearing but not able to amend the sharpness in her manner. The clients who came in asked to talk to other counselors.

Her daughters shied away from her, though she spent extra time with them, listening to Stephanie's endless stories and sitting up with Alison to watch the girl's favorite TV show. The handsome doctor saved one life after another, in the operating room and beside a hospital bed and at the scene of a car wreck, where thrilling, photogenic mouth-to-mouth resuscitation was called for. When Alison asked if Beth would volunteer for resuscitation from the doctor, the first question the girl had volunteered in weeks, Beth nodded curtly, and the girl didn't ask anymore.

Had she been able to talk to Father Marino as she used to, Beth could have told him that she was trying to listen to her daughters, to walk a narrow bridge of love and communication through this dark time. She and her priest could have talked about darkness, which always implied, somewhere, the presence of light.

When the girls got home from school, they slung their backpacks into the living room and raced back outside to join other children, sometimes not bothering to call out a greeting to her. Standing in the doorway, Beth grew angry, then felt her heart soften painfully at the sound of their squealing laughter, blocks away. Soon, she thought, picking up Alison's backpack, she would have to remind them to take sweaters, as the October afternoons faded. Soon. Not yet.

She shivered. From a distance, she heard a high, long shriek—a child, screaming to be screaming, making noise because she could. Beth listened to the keening for a few moments in furious sympathy. Then she was through the living room, out of her house, running as fast as she could, but not fast enough.

On a neighbor's lawn Alison sprawled under a drooping fir, her neck propped painfully on a root. There was no blood. Her knees jerked, out of rhythm with her screams, and above her the tree stretched like a column, thirty feet at least. No telling how far she had fallen.

“Hush, sweetheart. Hush, baby girl. I'm right here. You're all right.” Beth touched her daughter's shoulder while her brain, frosty with terror, ran down the table of contents from the first-aid manual she'd memorized for work: shock, head trauma, neck injury. She looked around for Stephanie, but the littler girl was not in sight—either hiding from her mother or lying at the bottom of her own tree.

“Listen, Ali. Stop crying, baby. I'm going back to the house. I'm going to make a phone call. I'll be right back. Don't cry, angel. You'll see.”

A brave girl, Anthony's favorite, Alison tried to stop screaming, though her body shuddered with every racking breath. Smudged across the back of one dirty hand were the remains of a face she had drawn at school, its smile showing a single tooth. Beth bent to kiss that hand. Then she stumbled to the neighbor's house and planned the next hours: first the ambulance, then the emergency room. Then Anthony. Already, underneath her fear, she felt the stirring of guilt. She understood that it would only grow, a fact that in her terrified eyes seemed natural and right.

 

Alison had fallen head first, her arms outstretched before her. Both her wrists were snapped, but her back was untouched; she was able to walk out of the emergency room, tapping her casts together. Later, when she could, Beth planned to make jokes about Superman. First she had to stop shaking.

In the emergency room and in x-ray, doctors and technicians and three nurses told Beth how lucky Alison had been. “You should have a party,” said the radiology attendant, her Hispanic accent softening her vowels. “You should celebrate.” Beth thanked her and turned away. The woman meant well.

Only Anthony understood. “I keep imagining her dropping out of that tree. When I think of what could have happened—” he said.

“Stop,” she said. “Save yourself the anguish.”

In the pause she could imagine his crooked smile. “I thought you wanted me to have anguish.”

“I do. But not about this.” She made her own flickering, rueful smile. She had read the articles by women who claimed their ex-husbands had become their best friends. Beth believed those women were deluded, but nevertheless, she saw how intimacy between two people was never quite erased.

“I miss,” he said, and cleared his throat. “I miss the girls. I think it's time for us to talk about custody.”

“We did that already.”

“Circumstances have changed.”

“Don't be a jackass, Anthony. It was an accident.”

“That's not what I'm talking about.”

Through the sudden roaring in her ears, Beth tried to scrutinize Anthony's voice, but, lawyer trained, it revealed nothing. He routinely worked fourteen hours a day. He couldn't think of changing the girls' custody unless he was getting married again.

He said, “It's time to move on.”

“I'm not going anywhere.” The words were out before she could reel them back, and his laugh was honestly mirthful. “It's a great big world, Beth,” he said. “Get out a little.”

 

Predictably, Alison was a handful that night. Holding up her casts, she refused to attempt even the tasks she could manage, bullying Beth into feeding her and brushing her teeth. Stephanie took her sister's cue and tugged at her mother, whining about television and school and a diorama for her reading class until Beth's remaining speck of patience exploded. By nine o'clock both of the girls were in bed, tucked in so hard they couldn't move. The house was filled with their raging resentment, the emotion that would make their lives easier when their father announced his news. What was the name of the girls' stepmother-to-be? Beth had read that men were drawn to sibilant names—Susan, Cheryl. She fixed herself a glass of water with a splash of Dewar's from a bottle Anthony had left. When the doorbell rang at nine-thirty, she was remembering with irritation that two of Anthony's secretaries had been named Sandra.

Father Marino said, “I came as soon as I heard. You should have called me when you got to the hospital.”

“She was in good hands,” Beth said, barely able to hear herself over the slamming of her heart. “Come in.” She went to the kitchen and brought him a Sprite, which he smiled at and set aside. Almost certainly he had been drinking. He wouldn't be here otherwise.

“People are saying it was a miracle that she fell just right,” he said.

“She was lucky,” Beth said.

“Same thing.” Father Marino leaned toward her. “How are
you?
”

To her horror, she felt her face crumple and tears race to her eyes. “Terrible,” she whispered.

“It's too hard,” he said. “No one should have to go through what you've been through. You of all people.”

“Please stop.”

“I should, I know,” Father Marino said. “I just want to talk to you. Every day I want to pick up the phone. ‘Did you see that sunset? Did you see that double play? Did you see that God-awful hat Louise Skipper wore to Mass?' The second I saw it, I thought about how you would laugh. Everything I look at brings me back to you.”

“And here I am,” Beth said. “The priest's friend. Poor thing, she doesn't get out much.”

“What can we do?” he said. “We have no choices left.”

His voice lapped happily at its self-pity, like a pet cat given its cup of cream. Angrily, she got up and poured him a scotch. He looked at her hand, not her face, when she gave it to him. “I need you,” he said.

“This is hardly the time.”

“I need you to talk to someone. A woman I know,” he said, and for a moment she was convinced that her heart stopped beating. She had not realized that another disappointment could be so stunning.

He said, “You're the only person I trust. I told her to talk to you at Women's Services, but you won't be there now that Alison's home.”

“Is this woman you know pregnant?”

“Yes.” The hand that raised his glass to his mouth was unsteady, and scotch sloshed onto his chin.

“Oh, Joseph,” she said, and watched him flinch. “What have you done?” Something, maybe the half-finger of Dewar's, was affecting her ability to focus. Father Marino's face was a watery blur, but the room around him—the green chair, the knife-pleat curtains, the Sunday newspaper that Stephanie had cut into pieces the size of fingernail clippings—was sharp and hard as glass.

“The thing that always drew me to you was your kindness,” he was saying. “Even when things were at their worst, you had the impulse for giving and helping. I could turn to you.”

She cleared her rippling voice. “Anthony had two names for me: Cupcake and Frau Gestapo. You'd be surprised how early he moved from one to the other.”

He looked around at the mostly tidy room. “You've turned my life inside out. You never meant to, I know.”

“For Pete's sake, Joseph,” she said. “What do you think I am?”

Because he was looking at the photos of the girls on the wall, she couldn't see his face. “People call me Father.”

When he turned back nothing had changed—not his watery eyes or his trembling, swollen mouth. She could see that he was filled with regret and she wished, as she had wished so many times, that she could keep her heart from opening like a mollusk to him. She said, “Your friend might have been pregnant before. I know you don't want to think about it, but that's the pattern with certain women.” Seeing Father Marino's wrecked expression, Beth couldn't keep her voice from softening. She hoped he did not take encouragement from that. “What's her name?”

“Cecily. Cessy.” He smiled. “I liked playing with her name. Cessation. C-Span.”

Cesspool
, Beth thought, but said instead, “Adoption services need babies.”

“Not this one,” he whispered, and then, “Do you want me to pay you for counseling her?”

In the moment before the insult took hold, her uncooperative brain pondered all she was owed. Father Marino could not pay those debts. “Anthony's got a girlfriend,” she said. “Talk to him. Tell him that she's endangering his position in the church. Tell him she's got the clap. Tell him you'll withhold communion.”

“I don't think anybody's been able to do that since the 1500s.”

“It's less than you're asking of me.”