The Monk Upstairs

by Tim Farrington

  “Really?” he said now, feeling stupid.

  “Yes,” Mary Martha said firmly.

  He’d seen her act the same way about buckling her own seat belt, sharpening her own pencil, and scooping out the insides of her own pumpkins at Halloween. At least it was clear now what all this early morning activity was about.

  “All right, then,” Mike said, “let’s fix your buttons.”

  In the dim narthex of St. Jude’s, Mary Martha dipped her fingers into the font of holy water and crossed herself studiously. She’d learned the ritual during the lighting-candles-for-Phoebe period, though Mike had taught her the movements as his grandfather had first taught him—glasses, belt buckle, watch, wallet—so that Mary Martha’s devotional motions looked more like an old man checking himself to be sure he was together before leaving the house. If this church thing went much further, Mike knew, he was going to have to introduce her to the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost—and then, he realized, explain to her also somehow that the Holy Ghost was now the Holy Spirit. He could just picture Mary Martha earnestly relaying all that theology to Rebecca.

  There seemed no way around it. Rock, hard place. He was screwed.

  They paused at the bank of candles beneath the statue of the Virgin, whom Mike had introduced to Mary Martha as Mary, as he was loath to begin his stepdaughter’s sex education with the notion of the Immaculate Conception. Mary Martha took one of the long tapers with a seasoned if self-conscious air, lit a candle, and knelt briefly before the shrine with her eyes fiercely closed. She never said what she was lighting the candles for; she seemed to feel that birthday-candle wish etiquette applied and that the prayer would not come true if she said what it was.

  Mike led them to his usual row, as far back in the tiers of pews as possible without getting ostentatious about it. Any farther back and people would have had to wonder if he was a serial killer or something; any closer and he’d have felt compelled to interact like a decent human being with his fellow worshippers. The morning mass crowd was the usual dozen or so elderly solitaries, borderline eccentrics, and earnest salt-of-the-earth people who got straight on the N-Judah train after mass to go to work. Mike eased the kneeler down and knelt, and Mary Martha mirrored him, folding her small hands atop the pew. An angel. An innocent. An unwritten scripture.

  God help me, Mike thought. God. Help. Me.

  “Where is everybody?” Mary Martha whispered.

  “This is pretty much it,” Mike whispered back.

  “Then why are there so many seats?”

  “For Sundays. Most people only come on Sunday.”

  Mary Martha took this in and was silent for a long moment. Then she leaned over again and said, “Can God hear us if we whisper?”

  Mike hesitated. He was tempted to start straight in on the mythico-metaphorical nature of God’s ears. The true answer seemed to him to be that one child’s earnest whisper was probably worth a thousand generations of proper church behavior. The book answer, of course, was, Yes, sweetheart, God hears everything, with some kind of asterisk about His understanding and mercy. But Mike recalled how much God as divine hall monitor had terrified him as a child of Mary Martha’s age. The nuns who had taught him the Baltimore Catechism had emphasized that his thoughts were an open book to God. He’d felt for years like his head was caught in a constant X-ray beam, his every wide-eyed inner lapse a deer in the headlights of the Lord.

  Still, there was no way around certain basics. Mike said, opting for the asterisk, “Yes, but he’s very discreet.”

  “What’s discreet?”

  The bell rang, a mercy. Mike stood, with Mary Martha a beat behind, and the priest and altar boy hustled onto the altar from offstage and got to it.

  “In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.”

  “Amen.”

  “The Lord be with you.”

  “And also with you.”

  Mike realized that Mary Martha didn’t have a script. He took a missal from the rack on the pew back and opened it to the introductory rites. By the time he had found the right page, they were already through the Kyrie. The morning mass was a very wham-bam-thank-you-ma’am affair, like framing work in carpentry, just drive the fundamental nails, knock the boards together, and get the walls up. They left the interior decoration and finish work for Sundays.

  He held the book open in front of them anyway, on principle. Mary Martha bent over it attentively. The text seemed tiny, gray, and impossibly close, and Mike knew how fast this little girl could read right now anyway. When he’d been Mary Martha’s age, they’d still been saying the mass in Latin, and he remembered waiting, waiting, waiting through the incomprehensible mumble of the adults’ words for the moments when he could say “Amen.” He’d keyed, desperately and usually unsuccessfully, on certain words he could pick out of the Latin stew like carrot chunks; he’d been so afraid that God thought he was screwing up.

  The mass right now might as well still be in Latin as far as Mary Martha was concerned. Even moving his fingertip under the words to help her follow was a stretch; and Mike finally bent close to her ear and whispered, to the tempo of the prayer in progress, “Blahblah, blah blahblah, blah blah…three, two, one, Amen.”

  Mary Martha giggled. The congregation sat for the Liturgy of the Word, and an earnest woman in sneakers and sweatpants, with hair that seemed cemented into shape, approached the lectern for the reading from the Old Testament. Mike had hoped for some kind of slam-dunk scripture, love and light and mercy, today of all days, but it was the twelfth Wednesday in Ordinary Time, God’s sense of humor had hit the ground running this morning, and the first reading was from Lamentations 2.

  The Lord hath purposed to destroy the wall of the daughter of Zion: He hath stretched out a line; He hath not withdrawn His hand from destroying: therefore He made the rampart and the wall to lament; they languished together.

  Mary Martha sat with her hands in her lap, wide-eyed. Mike hoped she wasn’t really following as closely as it looked like she was. How do you spell divine retribution, sweetheart? Capital D…

  Her gates are sunk into the ground; He hath destroyed and broken her bars. Her king and her princes are among the Gentiles; the law is no more; her prophets also find no vision from the Lord.

  God, Mike thought again. Help. Me.

  Arise, cry out in the night: in the beginning of the watches pour out thine heart like water before the face of the Lord: lift up thy hands toward Him for the life of thy young children, that faint for hunger in the top of every street.

  The lector looked up solemnly, her hair an unmoving testament, and intoned, “This is the Word of the Lord.”

  “Thanks be to God,” Mike said resignedly, with the rest of the congregation. He’d already looked ahead; the Epistle was even worse.

  Rebecca woke, as she almost always did now, to the creak, crunch, and thump of the attic stairs folding up and the trapdoor swinging back into the ceiling. Mike’s little morning cleanup. He was skittish and self-conscious about the mechanics of his attic access, as if his prayer life were something akin to alcoholism and this morning ritual amounted to trying to get the empty bottles into the trash can quietly. His attempts to keep the noisy ladder’s ups and downs off the radar screen had, of course, only made them weirdly central. Aside from the prolonged phase of getting Mary Martha calmed down about the monster traffic, the ladder going up when Mike got back from morning mass had come to be like a rooster crowing for Rebecca, and she suspected it was the same for her daughter. Shutting those monsters in.

  Oh, well, she thought now. It could be worse. Rory usually hadn’t even bothered to clean up after his own bad habits. When Mary Martha had been a toddler, Rebecca had always circled through the house before her daughter woke, to make sure the remains of the previous night’s activities had been disposed of. She’d once caught a two-year-old Mary Martha about to eat the butt end of a joint left on the coffee table. The kid had known what a roach clip was before she’d known what a
hair clip was. At least Mike’s intemperance left no edible residues.

  The bedroom door eased open, a palpable change in the air rather than a noise. Mike had developed some sort of soundless technique for turning the knob, as if the extra several seconds of sleep such consideration might afford Rebecca mattered, but she could always feel the draft from the hall. The deal was, Mike slipped in with coffee for her and woke her with a kiss. Rebecca kept her eyes closed as he entered, to perpetuate the illusion of slumber undisturbed by any reality other than her lover’s arrival. They had their own little off-Broadway reenactment of Sleeping Beauty going every morning here. The elaborate ritual was completely over-the-top, but they both loved it.

  It always took Mike longer to cross the room than seemed possible, but Rebecca knew he was taking his clothes off somehow en route. She wondered how he did it with the coffee in his hand, because there was no place to set the mug down between the door and the bed, but she’d never peeked at the process, preferring to enjoy the slightly mysterious touch of magic it lent. Prince Charming as an amazingly silent and somewhat acrobatic stripper.

  She felt rather than heard his presence beside her, and smelled the coffee as the mug was eased onto its coaster on the bedside table; and at last Mike slipped beneath the quilt and his arms found the perfect way around her, in the true daily miracle, and the length of his body molded itself to her nakedness. His lips touched her face, just beside her nose, a kiss like a butterfly landing, and she felt his warmth and the slight sandpaper scrape of his unshaved early morning beard and heard the gentle flux of his breath as he breathed her in. He liked her smell, he always said. No one had ever liked her smell before.

  She liked his smell too. Thank God.

  “Mmm,” she murmured, stirring, turning toward him.

  “Mmm-hmm,” Mike said.

  They lay quietly in each other’s arms. It would be somewhere between 6:58 and 7:03, Rebecca knew, which meant they had between seventeen and twenty-two minutes until Mary Martha’s alarm went off. Sometimes they went the whole twenty-some minutes without saying a coherent word. She liked that best.

  To hell with meditation, she thought. Give me this. Love mumbling into love, a warmth that held the world at bay, with nowhere to go and nothing to do but love and mumble. Rebecca wondered if that was terrible, if it made her a shallow person. She didn’t particularly want to be good, wise, or even articulate; she didn’t really want to accomplish a damn thing in the world beyond keeping her child happy and alive. She just wanted this man’s arms around her. It was so easy to lose sight of that during the hectic days of doing this and that, of being this necessary person or that one. She just wanted her body entwined with the body of this guy who liked her smell.

  “You smell like cookies,” she said.

  “Well, we stopped at the bakery.”

  Rebecca registered the caution in his tone before she’d fully digested the meaning of the sentence. She opened her eyes and found Mike looking at her, his eyebrows slightly up, transparently hoping she would take this well.

  “‘We,’” she said.

  “Mary Martha wanted to go to mass with me this morning.” And, as Rebecca said nothing, “There was no stopping her, I swear.”

  It made her furious that he expected her to be upset, which was completely unreasonable, because she knew perfectly well she’d given him plenty of cause to expect her to be upset. It wasn’t that she was opposed to God, per se. She just didn’t want His damn church screwing with her daughter’s head.

  Rebecca sat up and reached for her coffee, trying to buy some time for herself to calm down, and noted that the clock read 7:17, which meant they had precisely three minutes to process this.

  She sipped the coffee and it was cold. Of course it was cold, it was symbolic, for God’s sake. This precious period before the world kicked in was not about the coffee being the right temperature. But if the world was going to kick in this early, she wanted her coffee hot.

  “I hope you at least bought me a cinnamon scone,” she said.

  “They were out of scones. I got you a muffin.”

  “How the hell could a bakery be out of scones at seven in the morning?”

  “It’s that little Chinese place at the corner of Fortieth. There’s an emphasis on deep-fried things and lots of glaze.”

  “The Chinese have never understood the importance of baking,” Rebecca said.

  They were silent for a moment, mutually assessing the state of the art. She could feel Mike hoping she would keep it light. She was hoping that herself.

  “What kind of muffin?” she asked at last.

  “I was going to get some kind of apple-bran thing, but Mary Martha said you liked blueberry.”

  “Or cranberry,” Rebecca conceded. “White flour. Life is too short for bran.”

  “Live and learn,” Mike said. She could feel his tentative relief, which only made it harder to be decent. They were a long way from through this thing.

  In the kitchen, Mary Martha was already dressed—in yesterday’s clothes, Rebecca noted. It was probably too much to expect a seven-year-old to get her wardrobe together by herself before dawn, but it was all Rebecca could do to bite back a comment. Her daughter was sitting at the table with a bowl of Cheerios and the remnants of some kind of gigantic pastry that Rebecca didn’t recognize. There was already a small plate set up at the spot beside her, with Rebecca’s muffin on it, and a napkin, plastic knife, and pat of butter from the bakery laid neatly beside it. Rebecca wondered whether that had been Mike’s touch or Mary Martha’s. Both of them were treating her like a bomb that might go off.

  She did not want to be that person. She would not be that person.

  “What is that?” she asked her daughter, of the pastry, as she sat down beside her.

  “A panda’s foot.”

  “A panda’s foot. Wow. I never heard of a panda’s foot before.”

  “A bear claw,” Mike translated quietly from the counter, where he was refilling her coffee mug. “Chinese. Bear claw. So, a panda.”

  She caught his look, inviting her to share their usual delight in the working of Mary Martha’s brain. The shameless bastard.

  Rebecca reached for her muffin. Mike delivered the fresh coffee and went back to fix a cup for himself. Mary Martha reached for the milk carton and said, with a trace of an English accent, “Cream, Miss?”

  “Please,” Rebecca said, a little unnerved. She watched her daughter pour enough milk into the coffee to drown any chance of it still being warm. If she was going to tolerate this sudden influx of God into their lives before breakfast, she needed hot coffee. Needed it badly. But that appeared beyond reach.

  “I hear you went to church this morning,” she said to Mary Martha.

  “Uh-huh.”

  “How was it?”

  “Good,” Mary Martha said.

  “Did you learn any new, uh, prayers?”

  Mike came back to the table and sat down with his own perfectly hot coffee. Mary Martha gave him a conspiratorial glance, and he smiled and shrugged a kind of permission. She turned back to Rebecca and recited, deadpan, “Blahblahblah, blahblah blah, blah blah blah.”

  “Three, two, one—” Mike said, and the two of them chorused, “Amen,” and giggled.

  Rebecca realized that she had been half hoping Mary Martha would come up with something over-the-top, something so religiously wacko and patently destructive to her tender little psyche that the wrongheadedness of this would be obvious to all of them and they could get on with their secular lives in the fallen world. But clearly Mike was on the case, and it was probably too much to hope for the institution to show its colors so neatly on first encounter. If this kept up, though, she might have to hire a nun with a stick, to get her daughter up to speed on Catholicism as she knew it.

  The muffin, at least, was delicious.

  “Cream, Sir?” Mary Martha asked Mike.

  “Just a dollop, please.”

  “A dollop is a doll-sized plol
lop,” Mary Martha informed Rebecca, as she wrecked Mike’s coffee too. But he seemed cheerful enough about it.

  “How about that,” Rebecca said.

  When Mary Martha finally finished her Cheerios and went upstairs to brush her teeth, Rebecca took her coffee straight to the microwave, set the machine on three minutes, and punched the button hard.

  “I know, I know,” Mike said.

  “Do you, now?”

  “Let’s say I have an inkling.”

  “A little dollop of Catholicism, huh?”

  “At least she’ll have something to work with when she rebels against it all in her teens and embraces Buddhism.”

  Rebecca wanted to ask Mike how he’d gotten Mary Martha out of bed that early in the first place, as her daughter was generally even less of a morning person than Rebecca herself, but she couldn’t find a tone in her head for the question that wouldn’t sound overly aggressive. They were both trying so hard, she didn’t want to fire the first shot. Instead, she opened the microwave and stuck her finger into her coffee, which wasn’t even lukewarm yet. She put it back in the machine and shut the door firmly. It came across sounding like a slam.

  Mike, apparently taking the door as commentary, said defensively, “A lot of people have survived Catholic childhoods and gone on to lead normal, productive lives.” And, with a rueful smile, as Rebecca said nothing, “Present company excepted, of course.”

  “I’m prepared to stipulate that I may be a little insane about this.”

  He looked genuinely surprised. “I meant me.”

  “Oh,” Rebecca said. “Well, then, I take it back.”