Holly can sense that the room has gotten quieter in the face of this bold statement from the priest. “The Holy book tells us, it lets us know that even you he has quickened,” and he glances from one person to the next among the half-empty rows of armless chairs, “you who were dead in trespasses and sins.”
Holly watches the little black-haired preacher with apprehension. He has veered abruptly from a bland and harmless reminiscence into a territory where his statements have the tenor of boastful self-assurance on the one hand and, at the same time, the cryptic ramblings of a fool. She can see that he is clearly nervous in front of his audience, whether it is because of the unfamiliar syntax of his second language or the company of strangers from outside the parish, she cannot be sure. But she knows from experience that anyone who speaks so assertively about a topic is usually trying to cover something up. Either he doesn’t believe what he is saying, or he thinks the people he is saying it to won’t believe him.
“For by grace are you saved through faith,” he continues, “and not of yourselves: It is the gift of God.” Holly has always been good at tuning out words like this when someone starts preaching at her. She can tell when someone is trying to tell her that she should be doing something a certain way, for her own good. And this guy is giving off the vibe: Do this, believe what I say, and you can get to heaven, just like the dead woman behind me in the box. Well, Holly knows a few things about that woman too. She has touched her cold body, and it is not going anywhere. She has washed that woman’s hair for the very last time.
“These are things you must know, about Amelia, about all of us. This is the gift of God, that He is all around us, He is with us every moment of our lives. He has always loved us, and always will.” The priest’s dark eyes flit from one face to another, looking for acceptance, trying to make a connection.
“God is never late. He will never abandon us. And the Original Sin that everyone has heard so much about is nothing more than this: It is the belief, the mistaken belief, that we are separate from God.”
The priest pauses and emits a ticklish cough, from the back of his throat. He takes a glass of water that is resting on the podium in front of him and drinks from it.
“Original Sin, the trespasses and sins He saves us from, by grace, is nothing more than a belief—a mistaken belief—in two powers: Good and Evil. But I know,” he thrusts his hand up at the low ceiling, “I know, and so does every other man of faith, that there is only one power in this universe, and that is God. Deus. Dios. Not two powers, only one.”
Holly looks over at Tom, to see if he is reacting to any of this. He still has the faint trace of a smile on his face, as if he has been reliving in his mind a particularly satisfying point of contention with his colleagues and adversaries in the stuffy conference rooms he inhabits. He must feel at home here, Holly thinks, dressed up in his suspenders, among the big words and the painstaking efforts to drive home a point. He and the priest are two of a kind—convincers, salesmen at heart.
“I have always struggled with a way to make this idea seem more real to the people in my parish, who see a world around them filled with many terrible things, raping, killing, children who go to bed hungry at night. The other day I was looking around in the basement of the church, an old building filled with many dusty things from long ago, and I saw a lantern that was probably used to light the building in the days before the electricity came. I picked it up and observed it—for some reason it caught my eye among all the other things there—and I saw that it had a lot of very small holes, cut into the tin to make a pattern with the light that would shine from the lamp. And behind this, another piece of tin that slides across to close it, to shut off the light.”
“And the thought came to me: This is how it is when we die. We are each of us points of consciousness— conocimiento, we say in Spanish—points of light, that comes from God. And when the tin slides across one of the points of light to close it, when one of us dies, the light it was a part of does not go away—the light that came through that hole is still there and part of the entire light. It is one with it.”
Yes, Holly thinks, he is struggling. This idea of a life being like a lantern—she can sense that the others in the room are growing uncomfortable by the shuffling of feet and the adjustment of collars or cuffs. She looks around at the group of people, many of them at least sixty years old, a couple of them younger, hispanic. They came here to see the old lady one last time and hear a few kind words about her; they shouldn’t have to stand through this.
“That is why it is the gift of God. We cannot do anything to achieve it.” A smile lights up his face, as if he has realized himself for the very first time why he is saying these things. “This is Grace—it is inevitable, it is in the nature of things, when we make out of two things—separateness from God, Good and Evil—one. When we realize that God does this as a matter of course, this is Grace, the realization of God’s abiding love for this woman must have been such that he idealized her, he propped her up in his mind as being something she could never be once he left her, a much more attractive version of the woman who actually remained behind here in Middlesborough, living out her life in solitude, padding herself with excess flesh perhaps in an effort to protect herself from any further painful encounters with a man.
The sight that confronts Tris as he stands in a small alcove, an open closet tucked into one side of the main parlor, where coats and jackets might be hung on a much colder day than this, has the power to stop him in his tracks. He is always running late, and so he has become expert over the years at making a stealthy entrance to events such as this, a latecomer to church who knows how to shuffle silently to his seat of dishonor at the back pew during a hymn, a laggard to business meetings and conference calls who knows to remain quiet for a few moments and then blend in to the discussion as if he has always been there.
This time he has sought to slide in through a little-used entrance near the front, where the priest is giving his lecture, mistakenly thinking that it would be closer to one of the rows of chairs and less conspicuous than the large main doorway where the official register stands guarding the room, but now he remains rooted to the spot in this alcove, stunned by the vision of the first girl he ever kissed lying flat on her back in a satiny lavender casket. If he had not known this is who he was coming to see, perhaps he would not even have recognized her. Had she been one of the crowd of people watching the Lyceum meet its doom, he might not have looked twice. Yet here she is, the features of her face distended by years of added fat and distorted by the foreshortened angle from which he stares at her over the open lip of the casket.
The elaborate formality of this room, and the box she is in, somehow makes the astonishment of seeing her this way unbearable. It would be better if they displayed her in a plain pine box. The plush, cushiony sides of the coffin are too much, an effort to gloss over the truth that everyone here can see: Amelia is gone. The girl he knew as a teenager has been gone for years; she was buried long ago, and only the faintest remnants of that person must have lived on with her beyond the day he left her.
If he concentrates, he can make out the features of her face that he once recognized, the compressed, rosebud mouth, the broad forehead, the eyebrows slightly raised, as if she always expected to be asked a question. But the skin is a shade of gray he has only seen in skies that threaten rain, and the cheeks have been rouged in a clownish attempt to hide what everyone can plainly see. The hair still clings to a remnant of the blond he remembers, but it has been flattened and shortened by death and by time. The lips are pursed shut, manipulated by the undertakers into a contour that would not dare to suggest a smile. Perhaps he had a premonition of her death, through some undefinable connection, and he has been mourning these past few days not her, but the missing part of him that was lost when he made the decision more than fifty years ago not to see her any longer—mourning the unfulfilled potential, the life he might have lived.
But who’s to say he would ha
ve been any happier had he chosen to stay with her, to remain at home here in Middlesborough? Perhaps he is merely mourning the fact that he must choose, at every step in life, one place over another, one person over another, and these choices only serve to narrow him, to dwindle him down to a single straight line and, finally, to a solitary, terminating point. These choices have defined his life by constructing a set of infinite impossibilities, all the many things he will never see or have or do.
He peeks around the corner of the vestibule to examine the remainder of the room. He must remain still here. Someone will notice him, lurking behind this wall. A few people scattered among the rows of chairs—Louise’s sons, two of the three it appears, have made it. And there is Louise herself, she did show up, looking for all the world as if she has just floated in from a garden party she might at any moment decide to rejoin, with her head tilted up towards the ceiling beneath a wide-brimmed summer hat. He takes half a step more to get a better look, and he can see that it is him, the man she spoke to from California. Looks like he made it after all. She had thought he would not come, after speaking to him for a few awkward moments on the phone. It had seemed either too painful or too much of a hassle—she couldn’t be sure which—for him to make the long journey on such short notice. But here he is, standing, for some reason, among the unused coat hangers in the vestibule. He may be ashamed of arriving late.
The priest is droning on, but he has lost his audience. Holly looks around to see whether the others are still listening, but they do not seem to be affected by his words. They are hearing what they want to hear. Or they are tuning him out completely. Most of them would rather be somewhere else; they would rather not have to think about things such as this. The sooner he is done with his speech, the sooner they can all go back to the business of living their lives.
“But now in Christ Jesus, you who sometimes were far off are brought near by the blood of Christ.”
She can see that he is struggling. And she can tell, instinctively, that he must believe, at some level, the things he is saying. How could he not? But he looks from one to the next at the people shifting their weight and scuffling their feet impatiently among the rows of armless chairs, searching for someone who will greet his words with a smile of recognition. “For He is our peace, who has made the two one, and has broken down the middle wall of partition between us; for to make in Himself out of two one new man, so making peace.”
She wants to meet his eyes and show him that she understands, but these things are better left to the lawyers and the priests, these fine points of rhetoric and reason.
“Through Jesus we both have access by one Spirit unto the Father.” There is something in the way he says this that lacks conviction. He is letting it slip—he knows his words are not enough for something this big. And these words, the droning of his voice, and the trace of a lisp, are making her head throb again. Two tight spots at the back of her neck. The wound on her wrist is knitting together nicely, but she should not be here. They were talking about keeping her in the hospital for a week.
Through the fog of her headache, Holly hears a chair scrape against the wood floor and sees the girls picking at each other again, out of boredom. Zoe is tugging at the hem of Jenny’s dress, slyly keeping her hand at her side so no one else will see, because she knows this will annoy Jenny and perhaps force her into an act of retaliation. Holly is close enough to reach over and give Zoe a quick smack on the hand, and is about to, when she sees Tom put his hand on Zoe’s shoulder, gently, the way a genuine father would, and calmly whisper to her: “No.”
And then, when she is about to smile at Tom, to give him the look she has been thinking about giving him all through the service, a sudden, preening movement deflects into the corner of her vision.
She looks in the direction of that shy man hunched in the vestibule with the suspicion that it must be him, but it is only a fluttering aura in the mirror directly behind him. A bird, caught in flight within the particular angle of the mirror’s glass, a trembling image reflected from the window on the opposite side of the room. In a play of the unyielding sunlight, the bird tosses its wings another time and is gone, leaving only the face of that man, and she can see now what she must have also heard in his weary voice over the phone, that he has always loved this woman lying in the casket, who has lived a separate life, beyond his ability to imagine. The thought of all the days stacked one upon the other in which they both inhabited this earth, separated by thousands of miles and more than that, makes him shudder. All the other women he has known, the two or three others he dated in college, the one he eventually married, were nothing more than pallid replacements for this first woman. He has always been a prisoner of convenience. He settled upon Laura as his wife because she had left him behind after senior year, and it seemed if he didn’t follow her and ask her to marry him, he would be making the same mistake twice. He would not lose his nerve again. That’s what it had all boiled down to, when he heard what Louise had done that day and how furious Amelia’s father had become, he had simply lost his nerve and left Amelia, standing on a corner, alone.
In the space between that memory and the present moment, time collapses, then expands outward, grows immense; a series of concentric circles receding away from the present, ripples in a black pond disturbed by a falling pebble.
There was a foot, a young girl’s foot in a sock hanging off the edge of a hammock. The foot bounced, and in bouncing, the ankle tipped the hammock, rolled her body closer to him. The heat of her tucked inside the envelope of the hammock with him; only the two of them and the sky deep and cloudless above, the branches of the pinoak tree swinging side to side as they swung. The sound of the bells ringing, heavy and dense, their iron lambent noise drawing the deep crescent of sky and her body closer together with him, swinging, swaying, all together as one. He understands that he has always loved me and always will, he has always been with me, a solitary star in the first breaking of the dawn. This thought, this realization, comes to me like a light in the distance, and I know that he will never leave me. Now I know he never did.
I slip away from the hands that bind me. I am lighter than water, lighter than air. I am lighter than darkness and night. Restore to me the bright smooth flame, the dawn of white-hot filaments enormous singing into one another, singing into waves of candles glittering, radiant and white.
Sheer immensity sweats away all sins. I embroider all the wreathed and savoured offerings, in entrance caught by pure delight; I launch the tumbling hasted river. I behold the firmament of halfmoon, the vivid purest ray, gently universal and serene.
When two of you agree, it shall be done. So today I am in union, the marriage of my Soul and my Spirit, through this unison remembrance, sanctified and whole.
About the Author
Chris Katsaropoulos is one of the founders and partners at Emergent Learning LLC, developers of educational content for major publishers. He has traveled extensively in Europe and North America, and enjoys collecting books and music. Fragile is his first novel.
Fragile Page 18