by Pat Conroy
Wildness, I thought, that’s what I’ve missed in Italy, that intimate connection with the inhuman and untamable.
Father Jude was waiting for me beside the bell that divided the strictly accounted-for hours in the lives of monks. He was a tall man, built like a heron and with the face of a spooked herbivore, and vaguely off-balance. In human relationships he had always seemed maladroit and overly cautious. To my mother, Jude was indisputably a holy man, but to me he made faith seem like melancholia. When I was a child, I thought he was afraid of me, as though my bones were made of the most fragile porcelains. As an adult, he avoided all eye contact with me. I headed the car toward the same highway that had brought me to him. He was so jumpy you would have thought I was driving him to a whorehouse.
On the ride back to Waterford he spoke very little and was oblivious to the cypress swamps and ink-black rivers of the Edisto and Ashepoo and Combahee. But as we crossed the first of a series of bridges that marked the beginning of the saltwater zone, where the marshes of Waterford assumed dominion over the cottonwood and tupelo forests, he found his voice:
“Do you miss God?” the priest asked. The pure simplicity of the question startled me.
“Why do you ask, Father?”
“You were a very religious boy once,” the priest said.
“I believed in the tooth fairy then, too,” I said. “That dime underneath my pillow. I like solid proof.”
“Your mother told me you were a fallen-away Catholic,” he said.
“That’s right,” I said, annoyed by the statement, but trying to catch myself. “That doesn’t mean I don’t enjoy a little bingo game every now and then.”
“That’s all the Church meant to you?” the priest said. “Bingo?”
“No,” I answered. “It also means the Inquisition. Franco. The Pope’s silence during the Holocaust. Abortion. Birth control. The celibacy of priests.”
“I see,” the priest said.
“Just the tip of the iceberg,” I said.
“But God,” he said, “what of him?”
“We’re having a lovers’ quarrel,” I said.
“Why?”
“He helped kill my wife,” I answered. “Not really, of course. But I find it easier to blame him than me.”
“An odd take,” he said.
I looked over at the thin-faced man with his profile of a minor saint. His gauntness gave him a fierceness his soft voice lacked.
“We thought Mom was having an affair with you when we were younger. We all were sure of it.”
The priest smiled but did not look shaken by the revelation.
“You were too close,” I continued. “There was always something strange and unspoken when you two got together. Whispers and touching of hands. Going off together in the woods. My father was jealous as hell. He’s always hated you.”
“Ah. The judge,” the priest said. “Yes. But he didn’t understand either. He once confronted me about your mother and said he had proof we were lovers. He even claimed that he’d written the Pope.”
“Were you lovers?” I asked.
“No, but we loved each other,” Father Jude said.
“But why? What was the attraction?”
“It was not attraction,” the priest said. “It was history.”
“History?”
“I knew her before she met your father.”
“Keep going,” I encouraged him.
“Our souls take comfort in each other,” the priest said. “Secrets bind us. Early ones.”
“Why don’t you just speak in Latin? You’d make more sense,” I said.
“Do you know anything about your mother’s childhood?” he asked.
“Sure.”
“What?”
“She was born in the mountains of North Carolina. She was raised in Atlanta. She met my father in Charleston.”
“You know nothing. Just as I thought,” he said.
“I know more than you do,” I said, then added, “pal.”
We rode for a minute in complete silence before he answered, “No, you don’t …” He waited for a full ten seconds before he completed his sentence.
“… pal,” he said.
As soon as I parked my mother’s car, we hurriedly but silently entered the hospital and went straight to my mother’s bedside. I waved to my brothers as we passed them, but the priest moved through the waiting room as though they were invisible. Already, his lips were moving in prayer as he laid his case at the foot of her bed and began to prepare himself for administering the last rites. But before he began, Father Jude knelt beside my mother, took her hand in his, kissed the center of her palm, closed her hand, then quietly wept.
Finding his behavior odd and unbecoming, I walked over to the window. I looked out the blinds toward the river, trying to make my presence disappear. This priest was a difficult man to warm up to, ice cold in the center, blizzardy at the edges. My mother’s friendship with him always seemed like a rejection of me.
Then I heard him say, “They don’t know what we went through, Lucy. They don’t know how we got here.”
The words surprised me as much as his tears. Here I was judging this gaunt priest for his remoteness, yet I stood before my unconscious mother without allowing myself to feel a thing. My own tears seemed landlocked and frozen in a glacier I could not reach or touch within me. What kind of man was I who could not even bring himself to weep at the bedside of his dying mother? I thought. My mother had raised her sons to be hard and stoical and it cost her that portion of tears we should have shed for her in this hospital. I turned back toward Father Jude, who was now preparing himself to administer Extreme Unction.
Extreme Unction, I said to myself, as the priest lit candles and handed them to me. Introit and compline, I said, eucharist and consecration, kyrie and confiteor. Was there ever a boy who loved the soaring language of his church more than I? In the language of my church I could approach the altar of God with words like flung roses sustaining me. Without faith so long, I could hear my church singing me love songs as the priest stepped closer to my mother: The words were winged and feathered, drifting like Paracletes around me. This mother, this holy earth, this basilica that once had housed me.
Vested in a violet stole, Father Jude put a crucifix to Lucy’s mouth for her to kiss. Because she was unconscious and in danger of death he forgave Lucy all of her sins and, according to the faith, Lucy’s immortal soul blazed like a newly formed coin. It was now pure white.
Father Jude made the sign of the cross and addressed me. “Will you please say the responses?”
I nodded. “Been a long time. English or Latin?”
He did not answer, but simply began: “Pax huic domui,” and the altar boy in me leapt back into existence. Silently, I translated the words I found so beautiful. “Peace be unto this house.” Then answered, “Et omnibus habitantibus in ea.”
And unto all who dwell therein.
I watched Father Jude perform the asperges, sprinkling holy water over my mother’s body, across her bed, then sprinkling me. He handed me a small black book and opened it to page 484 and pointed. My eyes fell upon the words, “May the devils fear to approach this place, may the angels of peace be present therein, and may all wicked strife depart from this house. Magnify, O Lord.” The beads of holy water flowed down my face.
I remembered how often in my life I had prayed for my own father to die after one of his binges and this thought overwhelmed me as I recited the Latin responses. Father Jude was calm now, lost in the formalities of the sacrament, subsumed by function.
We worked well together, as we had years ago when I would serve Mass for him at Mepkin Abbey. He dipped his thumb in a vial of holy oil and anointed Lucy’s eyes in the form of a cross. I read the English as he recited the Latin. “Through this holy unction and of his most tender mercy, may the Lord pardon thee whatsoever sins thou has committed by sight.”
He then anointed her ears in the sign of the cross, then her nostrils, her lip
s, her hands, and her feet.
“Kyrie eleison,” he said. Lord have mercy.
“Christe eleison,” I responded. Christ have mercy.
Lastly, he prayed to put to flight all the temptations of the Evil One and asked Jesus to take Lucy up in his loving arms after the sufferings and tribulations of this transitory and sinful life.
I looked at my mother as my mother for the first time since I had returned home. I had once lived inside that woman, I marveled, my bloodstream comingling with hers. When she had eaten, it had nourished me. I tried to imagine her before I was born, dreaming of the child inside her, forming me into the boy she needed me to be, the one who would grow up much too close to her, much too in love with her, dazzled by her fierce health, her famous beauty. Can a boy love a mother too much? What happens to a soul when that love wanders as mine had, and turns to other pursuits? How can all that happen in one lifetime and how on earth did it happen to me?
The last rites ended and Father Jude removed his violet stole.
He turned to me and said, “You owe the Church again.”
“Why?”
“Because your mother’s going to live.”
“How do you know?”
“I was heard,” the priest said.
“What mumbo jumbo,” I said. “What arrogance.”
The priest grabbed my wrist and cut the blood flow. He said fiercely, “No, Jack. Faith. It’s faith.”
• • •
Leaving the hospital early, I went shopping at the Piggly Wiggly for a dinner I wanted to fix for my father and brothers. After the endless bounty of the Campo dei Fiori, I had not sufficiently prepared myself for the barrenness of the produce department of a small-town Southern supermarket. But I am a flexible man, especially when it comes to my kitchen, and I bought beans and vegetables and spareribs, then hurried off to my father’s house to get it ready.
My brothers also tired of the ambiance in the waiting room and I soon found them sitting around me in the kitchen as I started the evening meal. My father was continuing his sober vigil at the hospital in the company of Dr. Pitts and Father Jude. I was peeling potatoes when I remembered that I had not spoken to Leah since my return. Twice I had called her, but it was long after her bedtime. I checked the clock on the wall and realized it would soon be midnight in Rome.
“Did you guys invite John Hardin for dinner?” I asked as I used the phone in the kitchen.
“Sure did, bro,” Tee said, taking a sip of his beer. “He said I could tell Jack to kiss his ass and he didn’t need to eat any of your fancy food.”
“His loss,” I said as I spoke with an overseas operator and gave her my credit card number, the code for Italy, the city of Rome, and finally my apartment in the Piazza Farnese.
The phone rang twice before I heard Leah answer it, and I responded.
“Daddy?” she said.
“Hey, kiddo.” I felt my throat tighten with my love for this child. “I’m here with some of my brothers and all of them send their love to you.”
“How’s Grandma Lucy, Daddy? Is she going to be all right?”
“They don’t know. They hope she’s going to live, but they’re just not sure right now.”
“If she dies, can I go to the funeral, Daddy?”
“You’ll be on the next plane, I promise. Is Maria taking real good care of you?”
“Of course, Daddy. But she makes me eat too much. She feeds me too much. She dresses me too warmly. She thinks all my dolls have germs. She makes me pray for you a lot. We lit three candles in three different churches for your mother yesterday.”
“Good for her. How is school? How is Suor Rosaria? How is everyone on the piazza?”
“Everyone’s fine, Daddy,” Leah said, then her voice dropped a register.
“Momma’s parents called me last night. We talked a long time.”
My heart froze. “What did they say?”
“Grandpa hardly said anything. He just cried when he heard my voice. Then Grandma Fox took the phone away from him. She was so nice. So sweet. She said she hoped they’d see you while you were home. Are you going to see them?”
“If I have time, sugarpeeps,” I said. “It’s hard, Leah. Grandpa Fox doesn’t like me very much. He never has.”
“He told me that they have every right to see me,” Leah said.
“There’s a lot I haven’t told you, darling,” I said.
“But you’ll start telling me?”
“As soon as we’re back together. As soon as I know something about Mom.”
“I found a photograph album in the library. There are two people standing beside a river. Are those my mother’s parents? Are those my grandparents?”
“I know the picture,” I said. “Yes.”
“They look so kind.”
“Yes, that’s how they look.”
“Martha called earlier tonight,” Leah said. “She was afraid you might get mad that she’d given our number to her parents.”
“It doesn’t make me the happiest man on earth,” I said, “but we seem to be swept along by family events this month. Something’s up, Leah. And when something’s up, you can’t fight the flood tide.”
“Does everyone ask about me? Do they want to meet me?”
“They’re mad to meet you,” I said, “and I’m mad to be with you again.” I looked up and saw Dupree, Dallas, and Tee walking toward me.
“Can we say hello to our niece?” Dupree asked. “We won’t be long. Just want to welcome her into the family.”
Dupree took the phone and said, “Hello, Leah. This is your uncle Dupree and you don’t know this yet but I’m going to fall in love with you and you’re gonna fall in love with me. In fact, I’m already in love with you just hearing your daddy talk.”
Winking at me, Dupree listened to Leah’s response and the delight in his face told me how the conversation was going. Dallas reached out for the phone, but Dupree slapped his hand away, then he said, “Your uncle Dallas wants to say a word to you, darling. But remember, it’s your uncle Dupree who’s the pick of this sorry litter.”
Dallas took the phone and said, “Don’t you listen to a word he says, Leah. This is your favorite uncle Dallas. You’ll like me a lot better than Dupree because I’m funnier, handsomer, and I’ve got a lot more money. I’ve got two kids of my own for you to play with and I’ll give you all the ice cream you can eat every day. Now, my brother Tee is reaching for the phone … Yes, we’ll have a great time. Okay, here’s Uncle Tee. He weighs four hundred pounds, never takes a bath, and tells dirty jokes even to little girls. No one likes Tee, so we can’t expect you to be any different.”
He handed the phone to Tee, who said hello, then was the first of the uncles to listen to Leah and see what was on her mind. Tee laughed again and again, then said, “God, you get here and we’ll have a blast. I’ll teach you how to go crabbing and toss the shrimp net. We’ll catch us some fish off the dock, and I’ll even take you deep-sea fishing if you’re good. If you’re bad, I’ll teach you how to smoke and buy you your first pair of high heels. Now, here’s your daddy. People say we look alike, but I’m twice as good-looking.”
I said good night to Leah, then Maria commandeered the phone and demanded to speak to me. Whenever she spoke long-distance, Maria was overaware of money wasted, so she spoke rapidly, lapsing into the almost unintelligible patois of her village.
“Lentamente, Maria,” I said.
Maria talked on, complaining about the prices she was paying for food, repeating the gossip of the piazza, and assuring me that Leah was as smart and beautiful as she was when I left. She ended her part of the conversation by hoping she had not wasted much money, and urging me not to forget the irresistible charms of Rome.
Then Leah got back on the phone and said, “Daddy, will you do something for me?”
“Anything, kiddo. You know that.”
“Don’t be mad at Mama’s parents for calling me. Promise.”
“I promise,” I said.
“And one more thing,” she asked.
“It’s yours,” I answered.
“Tell me a story,” she said.
“I’ll never forget the year of the flood and the time the Great Dog Chippie …” I began.
Chapter Thirteen
We learned to measure time by the drip of the chemo through the plastic tube that led to a needle in my mother’s arm. Her heart rate wrote its signature across a graph paper as it beat steadily under the watchful gaze of nurses. Her doctor delivered reports twice a day in a dry, uninflected voice. Tee brought a football and my brothers and I went out to toss the ball around the parking lot several times the next day. My mother’s temperature had gone down a full degree. For the first time we felt cautious optimism.
After leaving the hospital the next evening, I went home, slept for a while, and then drove my mother’s car to Mike Hess’s recently purchased retreat in the low country.
Pale light still held Waterford in the hot palm of the backsliding day. Late April is that time of year when light seems to melt into the river and touch the blossoms of the transfigured trees; it made the town seem tenderly kissed with regret as the river moved away from the fading sun.
Slowly, I drove out toward the island country east of town. The bridge went up and stopped me when a snowbird heading south came through. I turned on the country music station out of Savannah so I could feel completely Southern again. The music acted as a marinade in my weary spirit.
Mike’s house sat on a hundred fragrant, breathtaking acres on the inland waterway, that winding, storied channel of navigation that ran between buoys and markers for a thousand miles between Miami and Maine. I had always known that if you were skilled enough, you could set sail from the Waterford River to any port in the world. You could go anywhere, could do anything. You could cast yourself on a flood tide and escape the terrors of your own life.
Mike’s house was itself a grotesquerie, although it was surrounded by an exquisite garden laid out in painted groupings of lily of the valley, narcissus, alyssum, and forget-me-not. Banks of azaleas leaned against it and dogwood lit up the side yard in white fire.