|
Article Excerpt
After the screaming and the poisonous accusations, after the broken vase and rib, after the gonorrhea, waking up to find Anthony gone was not the hardest thing. It was not the hardest thing to sleep on the fluffy clown rug between the girls' beds, or to come to school to pick up Stephanie the day a rash bloomed across her chest. It was not even so hard to forward Anthony's mail and to review the bar association's list of divorce lawyers, so many of whom Anthony had gone to law school with, and mocked.
The hardest thing was sitting in church, where the scalding sense of failure shot from Beth's hairline to the soles of her feet. Surrounded by intact families with husbands who looked proud of their wives--Anthony had not looked proud, ever--Beth read the ads for funeral homes and CPAs on the back of the bulletin, leafed through the hymnal, distracted herself in every way she could think of until the hour was over and she could race to the parking lot, always one of the first to gun it out.
"You don't know how hard it is," she said to Father Marino. "If it weren't for the kids, I wouldn't come back here."
"Then thank goodness for the kids," he said.
The easiest thing after Anthony left was Beth's talks with Father Marino. Every week he made room for her in a schedule filled with Social Justice Committee meetings and intramural soccer and the daily hospital visits--needs more legitimate than her small loneliness and sorrow. Every week he opened his office door and produced his cracked-tooth grin, and she saw the sort of boy he must have been, round headed and cocky, sure of the world's affection.
He had long ago captured the affections of everybody at Holy Name. After cranky Father Mestin had retired and nervous Father Torbeiner had been whisked away with so little explanation--people still murmured about him--parishioners recognized their good fortune in Father Marino. He had a friendly habit of snapping off his Roman collar in mid-conversation. "Enough of this. Let's talk." People confided in him--guilty teenagers and angry mothers and the whole Men's Club, which took Father Marino on a trout-fishing trip every June from which they returned sunburned, hung over, and sheepishly low on trout. Beth wondered whom Father Marino confided in, but she recognized her curiosity as the question of a freshly divorced woman half in love with her priest, and kept it to herself.
Instead, she told him about her job at the Women's Services office on the weedy outskirts of town. Now she was working as a receptionist and sometime counselor, but she was planning to become a paralegal and, after that, an attorney. "That would kill Anthony," Father Marino said, and she said, "My point exactly."
Anthony had asked her how she, a Catholic, could work in such a place, a question she thought rich, considering that he had been the one with the girlfriend. "The women who go there need help," she said shortly. She wasn't about to give him details on the sullen, exhausted mothers who edged through the office door needing health care, legal advice, babysitters. Sometimes they needed abortions, and Beth counseled them about facilities, a fact she'd confessed to Father Marino and that he told her didn't need to be confessed. More than anything, they worried about their children, and Beth told them with real compassion, "Children are the fear that steals your heart. I know just what you mean."
When she said this her eyes slid to the desk photo of her two daughters, laughing and proud on their new Rollerblades. They were older now, and laughed less. The divorce had hurt them. Ten-year-old Alison threw tantrums like a first grader, and seven-year-old Stephanie refused to read her colorful schoolbooks. Beth told Father Marino about this, too. "Ali screams until she's blue. Anthony would never have stood for it."
"No kidding. He left." He leaned forward, resting his bony elbows on his thighs. Despite his apple-round face, he had a lean frame, freckled skin stretched over long bones. "Don't you feel like screaming?"
"No more than ten times a day. But for the last six months Anthony was home, I wanted to scream all day long, so I should be grateful."
Father Marino shook his head. "You don't ask for enough."
"I ask for plenty," she said. "I just don't get."
"We'll have to see about that," he said.
Beth understood that she should not take Father Marino's vague promises too seriously. Everybody knew that he liked to make promises. He especially liked to make them on the telephone, at night, when people heard the sound of ice cubes rattling in a glass not far from the phone.
There weren't rumors, exactly, and there had been no incident--unlike with Father Toole at St. Agnes who had been pulled over for DUI and was abusive to the officer, when the whole parish council had had to swing its weight to keep the story out of the paper. Still, so many people had run into Father Marino at the Liquor Barn. At so many parties he had gotten tipsy. Holy Name parishioners were accustomed to a priest who took a drink--if anything, they liked the little touch of worldliness--but sometimes when they called the rectory late, they heard a wildness in Father Marino's voice--too much laughter, too-quick sympathy. He spoke very knowledgeably about wine.
Beth's own mother had drunk too much, and had died of it. Beth knew the signs. Still, she didn't blame Father Marino. Lately, when the girls were at Anthony's condo, Beth had been learning about the stillness of an empty house, how a person could wade through loneliness as if through mud. One night she'd sat in...
|
