I.O.U

by Nancy Pickard

  “Me, too, Ma,” he said, and tossed the brochure away. “Let’s save ’em.”

  “Here it is,” I said.

  “Father Gower’s house? Which one?”

  “His house is the little brick one next to the rectory, but that’s not what I meant. What I meant was, here it is, the last big snow-storm of the year.”

  The flakes that were falling were big and thick enough to remind me of the blizzard of doilies in Father Gower’s living room. The snow started when Geof and I left the New East Gallery and in only the short time it took us to walk to the car, and then drive to St. Michael’s and park, the streets and sidewalks got slick, and the trees, pedestrians, cars, and rooftops got heavily dusted with white. A winter wonderland was in the making, all right, promising just the sort of romantic atmosphere that usually made us want to curl up together in front of a big fire back at our cottage.

  “We’re going to wish we’d worn boots.” Geof looked morosely down at the snow that dampened the soles of his good leather loafers.

  “Boots, nothing, we’re going to wish we had dogs and a sled.” I grasped his arm. “Come on, let’s mush before we freeze into snow-covered statues.”

  “Like Pompeii,” he suggested, and I laughed at the accidental appropriateness of his jest.

  “Yes, and wait ’til you meet the volcano inside.”

  We quickened our pace—cautiously—on the front walk, which was already so slick that walking on it was like treading on wet plastic with bare feet. An evening newspaper, camouflaged by the snow, lay in the yard. I picked it up—so it wouldn’t get buried—and stuck it down into the outside pocket of my purse. When we reached the porch, Geof rang the doorbell. I heard Mrs. Kennedy’s approach before she reached the door.

  “I’ll get it, Father!” her voice sang out. “Don’t you be botherin’ yourself now, that’s what I’m here for!”

  Darn right, I thought, smiling a little to myself, you bother him, Mrs. K.

  She flung open the door and pantomimed great astonishment and pleasure upon seeing two large snow bunnies on the porch. Mrs. Kennedy wore a baggy, faded yellow sweat suit with tennis shoes; this time she held a bottle of furniture polish and a dust rag with which to punctuate her conversation. She must have recently had her hair done, because she’d gone to the trouble of protecting it with a scarf which she’d tied at the nape of her neck. Her expressive face projected nothing but joy at the sight of us.

  “Well, and if it isn’t Margaret Mary’s oldest girl and a handsome young gentleman with her! Father!” She turned with her whole body, and bellowed in a hospitable sort of way into the interior. “Yoo hoo! You’ve visitors!”

  Having made her announcement, she turned back to us and smiled happily, clasping the polish and rag to her bosom.

  “Is this your husband, dear?”

  I made the introductions with a flourish I thought she’d like, knowing it might be the only part of our visit she would enjoy. “Yes, Mrs. Kennedy. May I present my husband, Geoffrey Bushfield? Geof, this is Mrs. Kennedy, who has been a devoted housekeeper for many years to Father Gower and to St. Michael’s.” He inclined slightly at his waist in a mock but charming little bow. She flushed and dimpled, liking it very much. I could hardly blame her; he had a similar effect on me. “Geof,” I continued, “is a lieutenant in the Port Frederick Police Department.”

  She turned quickly and yelled again into the interior: “Father Gower! Company!”

  A male voice bellowed back at her. “It’s not a 48-room mansion! I can hear the damn doorbell myself, Mrs. Kennedy!” The old priest, dressed in the same frayed black pants and red plaid shirt again, but this time with brown suspenders, appeared in the doorway that led to the living room. His face was screwed up and red as a monkey’s. “I’m not senile, for God’s sake. I am even capable of deducing that when a doorbell rings it means somebody’s at the door.” He shuffled closer, in old brown house slippers. “And unlike you, Mrs. Kennedy, I wouldn’t leave them standing out there, freezing! Step out of their way, Mrs. Kennedy,” he exclaimed, swinging his short arms as if they were brooms for sweeping her out of the hall. “For the love of Mike!”

  “He loves visitors,” Mrs. K said behind her hand to Geof and to me, as she moved aside and then closed the door and shut off the snowy world outside. “Does him such a world of good to see people, him bein’ retired and all.”

  “I’m right here, Mrs. Kennedy,” he snapped. “I’ll thank you not to talk about me as if I weren’t here. We’ll take coffee in the living room, thank you, Mrs. Kennedy.”

  “Now that’s a lovely idea, Father,” she said, approvingly, although she didn’t make any move to follow his directions. “And you’ll be interested to know that Jennifer’s young man is a police officer. Now isn’t that thrilling?”

  It was pathetic, the way she tried to make him out to be a lovable old Bing Crosby sort of priest. Around him, she had that kind of forced vivaciousness that you find in some wives who have surly husbands. He threw her a look of pure disgust, and then shuffled into his living room, as if he expected us to follow him.

  “We’ll just hang up our coats,” I said.

  Father Gower turned back around quickly, but Mrs. Kennedy was closer and beat him to it. Reaching out to take the coat I slipped off, she said, “It’s wet, isn’t it? I’ll just hang it over the newel post to dry. Lieutenant, I’ll take—”

  But Geof was already opening the hall closet door, his black ski jacket in his hand. Mrs. Kennedy froze with my coat, the furniture polish, and the rag in her arms. The priest glared at her from the entrance to the living room, as if it were her fault that she hadn’t jumped quickly enough to assist Geof.

  He pushed aside coats, apparently searching for a hanger. His black jacket slipped from his grasp. Geof bent down to pick it up, bringing himself to eye level with the assorted contents on the floor of the closet. He paused, looking for what I had told him he would find, and in the process, creating a moment in which nobody else seemed to breathe. He reached into the crowded closet and pulled out several large rectangles of white cardboard, and displayed them to us.

  “This your art supply closet, Father?” he asked.

  I slipped past the priest into his living room. There, I found what I wanted and brought it back into the hall and held it out for the inspection of all three of them. It was the penholder containing felt-tip pens of many colors.

  “Where are the stencils, Father?” I inquired.

  The old man raised his shoulders and lowered them in a heavy, surrendering, disgusted breath.

  “In the kitchen,” Mrs. Kennedy said quickly. She pointed with the can of furniture polish. Her vaudeville Irish accent disappeared entirely. “That’s where I do it. That’s where I made the signs. I wrote the letters. I’m sorry, Father, forgive me, I shouldn’t have done it, but you said yourself those women artists are an offense against God with their blasphemous paintings!”

  “Mrs. Kennedy,” Geof said, “what about that coffee?”

  “But—”

  “Black will be fine,” he said.

  “But don’t you want to interrogate me?” She pressed my coat to her chest. “I’ll go downtown with you right now—” she said, pointing to the door, with the furniture polish. “I’ll sign a confession—” She made scribbling motions with the dust rag. “—whatever you need—”

  “Mrs. Kennedy, you’ve been watching too much television,” the priest snapped. “Get the damned coffee!”

  With a last desperate glance at me, she obeyed.

  “The living room,” Geof said, so the remaining three of us trooped in there and sat down. Geof crossed one of his long legs over the other, folded his hands over his abdomen and said, calmly, “Okay, Father Gower, let’s hear it.”

  “She had nothing to do with it,” the priest said immediately. He looked so red in the face, so angry and defensive, that I worried that he’d suffer a stroke right then and there. “Of course, you can see that. She’s lying, because she
has a misguided notion about trying to protect me. Stupid woman. I don’t need protecting. I am under the wing and the divine protection of God in this endeavor. As an agent of His will, I am responsible.”

  At first, I had thought he was trying to protect her, as she was him, and I started to like him a little better for it. But then I grasped a less flattering, more unpleasant truth: He wasn’t trying to absolve Mrs. Kennedy of any blame; rather, he wanted all of the “credit” for committing acts that he considered to be justifiable and even divinely ordered.

  “Oh, I’ll accept that it was your idea, all right,” Geof agreed. “I’ll bet you wrote the letters and you dictated the messages you wanted on the posters. But she made those posters, and it was she who took the masking tape and put them up on the gallery windows. She addressed and stamped the letters for you, and she delivered them to the various mailboxes that she used. She was pretty smart about that, Father—”

  “Only because I told her to do it.”

  Mrs. Kennedy had crept back into the hall, where I could see her from where we sat. Father Gower had his back to her.

  “Well, then tell her this.” Geof stood up, and I suspected that he knew very well that his height and size created a towering presence—all official and all male—in that small room with its little priest and its feminine doilies and the lavender smell of sachet. “Tell her to get the advice of a good lawyer in your parish, because if you keep this up, she’s going to need one.”

  “My parish is full of lawyers who will help me.”

  “Well, good for you.” Geof was suddenly deeply sarcastic, causing even my stomach to clench. “But what about her? You think they’ll leap to do pro bono work for a housekeeper? She’ll be lucky to keep her job. You’ll get farmed out to some old priest’s retirement home, a little sooner than you’d planned, and she’ll be turned out. No more salary, no retirement pay. And that’s the good news for her. That’s what will happen to her if she doesn’t go to court, or to jail.”

  “I’ll tell them she wasn’t responsible.”

  “Yes, she is. Morally, legally, any way you want to look at it. She’s a grown woman and she’s responsible for her actions, just as you are for yours. Nobody forced her to lick those envelopes, Father, and I seriously doubt that you kicked her out the door and made her walk to the mailbox. She is responsible for her part in this, and she’ll pay for it, only the price will be higher than the one you pay, because I seriously doubt that the Church will go to the same lengths to protect a housekeeper that it will to protect one of its priests.

  “You have three choices, as I see it, Father Gower. You can continue as you’re doing, and take the inevitable consequences, and maybe that’s what you want, a little public martyrdom to enliven your retirement. I doubt that’s what she wants. Or you can cut it out. Or you can continue your protests, but do it openly and within the law, which is your constitutional right.”

  Father Gower avoided our eyes, refusing to respond.

  I had been covertly watching Mrs. Kennedy during Geof’s entire speech, and I thought—hoped—that she looked terrified.

  “This is a warning, Father,” Geof said.

  Still, the old priest said nothing.

  “Consider it a sign from God, if you like,” Geof added, in that same profoundly sarcastic tone. “And the sign says, lay off.”

  He held out a hand to me, and pulled me up out of my chair. We started for the door.

  Suddenly the priest spoke. “Your mother could not have been buried in the Catholic section.”

  I turned, slowly. “Why not?”

  “I would not have allowed it.”

  I waited, hating him.

  “Because women who have abortions,” he said, “are damned to unconsecrated burial.”

  Behind me, Mrs. Kennedy moaned, then murmured, “Father!”

  “My mother had an abortion? She confessed this to you, and you’re breaking the sacred trust of the confession to tell me?”

  He smiled, a slow, smug, cunning smile that said he would have his little revenge for this afternoon. “I have broken no trust. She never confessed it to me. But I know it’s the truth.”

  “If she didn’t tell you, then how do you know it?”

  He closed his lips on his awful secrets.

  “I don’t believe you,” I said.

  We left his house in silence, and walked out into another kind of silence—the muffled kind produced by several inches of new snow.

  22

  “I’VE GOT TO FIND THE WIPER TO SCRAPE THE WINDOWS BEFORE we can go anywhere,” Geof said.

  “Don’t bother.” I jerked open the door on my side. “I’m so furious I could melt the snow off the car all by myself. He made all that up because he hates us for revealing his nasty little game. He said himself that she never confessed it to him, so there isn’t any way he could know a thing like that. Damn him! You didn’t even scare him with your warning, and he sure as hell doesn’t give a shit about Mrs. K. I wish you’d pulled him in and locked him up in a cell full of exhibitionists and porno queens.” I punched open the door to the glove compartment, nearly pulling it off its hinges as I rummaged inside it. “Here, I’ll help you look.”

  “No, get in the car, Jenny. Leave that alone before you break it. I’ll take care of it.”

  I got in and slammed the door, knocking most of the snow off the window on my side. Geof found a scraper on the floor of the back seat. I watched him clear the other windows, although everyplace he scraped was quickly coated with more snow. I pulled out my keys, started the car and the defroster, and turned on the windshield wipers and the rearwindow deicer for him. All the while, I muttered imprecations against the priest. Damn him, damn him, damn him!

  “Jenny.” Geof got in, after knocking snow off his shoes and brushing it off his clothes. He took my keys out of the ignition, traded them for his own, and tossed mine back to me. His voice still held some of the impatient tone he’d used with the priest. “Listen to me. You’re pissed off, so you’re not thinking. He could know.”

  “Oh, bullshit. He said himself that she never con—”

  “She wouldn’t have to confess an abortion for him to know she had one. She could have confessed a pregnancy to him, and told him she wanted to terminate it. And then when the pregnancy didn’t continue and no baby ever appeared, he’d know, wouldn’t he?”

  I leaned my head back against the seat.

  “Well, wouldn’t he?”

  “Oh, shit,” I said.

  Geof relented, coming down off his tough tone. “I’m sorry, honey, but I think maybe that’s the way it was.”

  “My God. She was pregnant. At forty-six. With an unfaithful husband. And a business going bust. And worst of all, a history of postpartum psychosis.”

  “Psychosis? What are you talking about?”

  I looked over at him. “Francine Daniel told me that Mom was hospitalized after I was born and after Sherry was born. She may have tried to kill herself the second time, and Francie thinks that Mom hurt, or tried to harm Sherry.” I spoke pedantically, to hide the pain. “Today, they call that postpartum psychosis. It’s probably behind a lot of cases of infanticide. Women can be treated for it now. But back in those days, they would have just called her crazy, and treated her for God knows what, and made her think she was a horrible mother and a terrible person.”

  Geof reached over to touch my shoulder, but he didn’t interrupt. I suddenly realized that I was lecturing to a cop about a phenomenon that he’d probably seen in other women, other cases.

  “I need to see Doc Farrell,” I said. “I’ll bet you that’s why he gave her the hysterectomy—because he performed the abortion and botched it, and then he had to cover it up, the bastard.”

  “And you think he’s just going to confess that to you, as if you were a priest?”

  “Geof, I don’t give a damn what he says. It’s too late to do anything about it, and we’d never prove it anyway. I just want him to know that I know.”

/>   But when Geof tried to pull out into the street, the wheels slid and wouldn’t go forward. Cursing, he got out to retrieve a shovel from the trunk and then to hack away at the snow and ice that blocked the tires. There was only one shovel, so I stayed in the car. When I reached for my purse to put my keys away, I discovered the newspaper that was still stuck down into the outside pocket. I pulled it out, and then out of its cellophane wrapper, and spread it over my lap, just for something to do with my hands. I didn’t intend to read it; I was too worked up, too distracted to read the news. I leafed through it without looking at it, seeing instead my mother’s face when I was a child, and her face in the hospital, and Dr. Calvin Farrell’s face as he told me about the hysterectomy—some of the truth, just enough of the truth so he didn’t have to lie. And I saw the tears on my father’s face and I wondered, did he know? I thought of my mother and of how she’d been that Christmas, and I realized that what I had seen then, without knowing it, was utter depression and hopeless desperation. She was Catholic, raised to believe abortion was a mortal sin. But she couldn’t have that baby, no way, not a woman who’d already been hospitalized for psychosis related to childbirth. What if she had the baby, and hurt it, as she had tried to hurt Sherry? What if she had it, and then tried to kill herself? Those must have been the horrible worries afflicting her and paralyzing her. And where could she turn for help and counsel—to male priests and a male god and male doctors and her philandering husband, to an entire universe of powerful, controlling men who couldn’t possibly understand the anguish growing within her. My mother, I decided, had been a woman torn by her love and fear of her God and by her fear of the horror this pregnancy could inflict on the baby, on her husband and daughters, and on herself.

  I understood perfectly why she had the abortion.

  She saw no other way out.

  And now, finally, it all made sense. Now, finally, I could also understand why she withdrew into madness. Maybe it was a repeat of the postpartum psychosis. Or maybe there wasn’t any other escape from the guilt.