The Father Pat Stories

by Patrick Gossage

  So, although the reviews were not in, the story the bishop would read and base his decision on, Father Pat felt, would be positive. He felt comfortable with his own parish, its understanding, its loyalty and now its basic good nature, even tolerance for what would remain, nevertheless, the unknown.

  This was his accomplishment which he savoured as he walked arm in arm through the leaves, across the lawn to the rectory with Brenda. For him as well it had been a critical demonstration of the depth of feeling that apparently still existed between him and his long-time companion.

  “You were unbelievable,” he said as he squeezed her arm and kicked through a growing painter’s palette of leaves.

  “No, Pat, you were. I did my bit.”

  “Well, you did it to perfection.”

  “It was easy. You needed my help. And Pat, all you have to do is ask.”

  She looked at him. But he was, as she found him so often, lost in another world. He was thinking of the leaf long ago at seminary, which announced his true calling to him. Had he been faithful to that calling that day? Perhaps. Certainly he had been a vehicle for some atonement among a very disparate group of people, his parishioners and the gay community. He had not buckled under to the institutional bigotry of the church. He had forced most of his people to come to terms with their own prejudices. They had been a community of believers when openly challenged.

  “You know, Pat, that was a heck of a show.” Brenda interrupted his daydream as Paddy caught up with them at the door of the rectory. He leaned down to pat the dog and scratch her under the chin. She was cold and needed affection.

  “Yes, but as you said last week, perception is reality. You can’t invent perception, Brenda, but we sure as hell created the right one today!” And with that he punched Brenda gently in the ribs and ran up to his study to call Terry for a complete postmortem.

  Three Women

  So this is the kingdom of heaven,

  And here on the threshold we stand,

  I’ll never leave again,

  Adam and Eve again,

  Hold my hand

  … a 1950s pop song

  Whenever Father Pat thought about his long, parlous and fragile relations with women, this refrain of innocence and bizarrely mixed metaphor came singing back across the decades. He had long since forgotten the melody but not the occasion when it was jukebox popular and he actually felt what it could mean. It was a song that was played a lot on the radio when Pat Cheyne decided to embark on his first date, his first real date when he actually phoned a girl and asked her out — alone, to a movie.

  Pat was a shy bookish fifteen when he steeled himself for this singular adventure. It had become a matter of principle. His city friends had all taken out girls, and at high school where he was ahead of his age group, having skipped a grade, the older boys in his class were already into what adults and teenage magazines of the time referred to disapprovingly as heavy petting. Pat was tired of having to admit he’d never asked a girl out. So he did. Her name was Mary.

  He arrived off the bus at her door and she was there, waiting, ready. Her hair tied back with a bow. A long skirt and white shoes and bobby socks. They got on a bus, then transferred to a streetcar. Pat was finding small talk difficult. Mary was the sister of a girl he knew at Sutton Beach, or at least barely knew, mostly watched from afar. His parents and her parents were friends. In the small middle-class community where he grew up, where cottages and golf and cocktail parties in the city were all part of the same comfortable routine, such contacts were easy, and doubtlessly prodded by her mother — “the Cheyne boys are from a nice family …” Mary dutifully accepted Pat’s hesitating request for a date.

  The date took Pat from total denial of the existence of girls to at least enjoying, very briefly, holding Mary’s hand in the dark theatre. Initially prompted by the saccharine emotions in the song, he held on because, well, it was sort of interesting. That’s about all he could think of as he rode the bus home after dropping her perfunctorily at the door.

  That night he woke up and it was hell, not the kingdom of heaven. He had a piercing pain in his side, a devastating one and he cried out, bringing his mother and father running. Doubled in agony he was rushed in the family sedan to the General Hospital, where his burst appendix was removed.

  “Lucky you brought him in so promptly.” A handsome physician was flattering his mother as she thanked him and led Pat out to the car four days later. “Good thing it happened at home.”

  All Pat could think of was that this must be an omen. In acute embarrassment, he could almost hear Mary gleefully telling her friends at school about the devastating effect she’d had on this shy young guy who, would you believe, had to be taken to the hospital to get over her! Perhaps he was not meant to take girls out on dates. If this was what made a first date memorable, you could have it!

  Years later Father Pat still got a kick out of recalling his appendicitis reaction to girls and regaling his friends with the story of his uncertain first steps on the rocky road to romance. But rocky it was to remain indeed, as was that road for so many products of that era.

  Father Pat only much later realized that his coming of age in the 1950s was in reality quite conventional. He realized it as he saw his friends start to struggle with failed, loveless marriages, marriages that produced kids with distemper or worse. Conventional indeed in its suppressed sexuality, absence of physical warmth and caring from anyone female — including his mother — conventional in its seemingly endlessly unsatisfied curiosity about women, about women’s body parts, and the mysteries of real sex. Conventional in its elaborate detours from the truth when it involved sex and women. His father’s life-long secret about his wartime indiscretion and its result, his daughter Jill, was a perfect example.

  His best friend from his adolescence, Jeff was suffering late after-effects of the same conventions and compensating in a curious post-adolescent way. At the age of fifty-three he was finally getting it off with alarming and exhausting regularity with a brassy, noisy but very affectionate exotic dancer he had met at a convention and imported into the staid circle of lawyers and uptight professionals he frequented. That was his solution to his own 1950s sexual angst and twenty years of a bloodless but proper marriage.

  Father Pat still chugged along with a quiet if moderately obsessive curiosity about women whose company he sought out and enjoyed more than that of men. Part of Pat’s kingdom of heaven was destined to be the search for that sugary intimacy of the song that first got him thinking about the opposite sex. When he thought about the words late at night in St. Bart’s rectory, just before turning in, he even made a sort of direct connection with his confused feelings toward Deirdre and concluded that perhaps he hadn’t come very far at all in the intervening years. Adam and Eve again, hold my hand!

  Father Pat could easily locate the time and place when serious yearnings began, when real pining for the comforts of a woman who was not his mother entered his life. The ridiculous first date was only a very faint shadow of what was to come in that respect. No, the actual genesis occurred on a warm, humid day the next summer at the family cottage on White Lake. Pat Cheyne was still a skinny rake of fifteen, a pipe-legged runt, an almost pretty boy with large brown eyes and curly sandy hair. Pat’s friends were way ahead of him in both body hair and women savvy.

  Pat and his chum Jeff were pretty busy that summer playing golf, making an elaborate Huck Finn raft and on windy days tempting big waves in a leaky rowboat. Pat, as usual, was disappearing at least twice a day on his solitary “paddles”, and staying out of the way of his parents and their guests who rocked Whitehaven every weekend. Stevey was part of their daily round of activities — they met at swim time at her cottage which boasted a small boathouse and one of the few ample sandy beaches on the generally rocky shore. Another girl, Alison lived next door and often joined them.

  Alison and Stevey had their own teenage passions but liked the daily routine of swimming with the boys. Alison was then
more shapeless than shapely, but she was blessed with an open freckled, girlish face and wonderful sparkling eyes. That summer those eyes were often moist with glycerin emotion as she contemplated the death of her matinee idol James Dean. This was serious stuff. Alison kept a shrine to the late movie star in a sacred place of honour in her bedroom. His slim, surly persona lived in her adolescent dreams as the ultimate unattainable.

  This behaviour confused Pat who understood little about passion displacement in 1950s teens. He liked Alison, who claimed they had cuddled in the playpen when their mothers were together husbandless during the war with tots almost the same age. But not being competitive by nature, he was relieved that his tall friend Jeff was directing a lot of anxious and boisterous puppy love her way.

  In fact the precise day of Pat’s discovery, Jeff was having a knock’em down water fight with Alison and was recklessly chasing her stumbling through waist-deep water. Pat and Stevey were swimming back from the diving tower, a small metal platform about thirty yards out where the water finally was over their heads.

  “He’s going to hurt her,” Pat said, trying to be mature. Indeed in the spray and splatter of water Alison could be seen face-down begging for mercy.

  “OK big boy. You won!” Stevey shouted. She was the more grown up of the two girls and acted that way.

  No fan of screen magazines or movie star fantasy, this was a hands-on young woman. It was rumoured she had gone out with a counselor, a much older young man — perhaps eighteen — at Powana Camp where her parents had sent her earlier that summer. The golf pro also had an eye for her — and lessons sometimes stretched beyond the time allocated.

  The back-lawn talk in the tight little community of summer residences was that Stevey was a “problem.” Her father had been killed at the war, and her mother had remarried — into real money — to the heir of a hardware store chain.. There was another younger family now and Stevey was often left to her own devices.

  Jeff felt remonstrated by Stevey’s superior tone.

  “Lay off Stevey, I didn’t hurt her.” Jeff was helping up Alison, who was shaking sand out of her hair.

  “Let’s go and tan on the other side of the boat house and leave these damn idiots to themselves,” Stevey said.

  She was the only girl Pat knew who said “damn” right out loud. She had even said it once in front of Pat’s mother and caused a great shock. It had been the subject of conversation at dinner that night and Pat’s mother had decided that while such language was unacceptable from a “young lady,” in Stevey’s case it was at least not unexpected. Stevey had had, after all, a difficult time with her new father and likely was not getting enough love and attention — the subtext being that Pat and his brother Peter of course were, and therefore could be expected to avoid vulgar language.

  “Poor Stevey. Well dear, you mustn’t judge her too harshly. But still, what language!” Pat’s mother opined. Judging her at all was the farthest thing from Pat’s mind.

  As they dangled their feet in the water and looked beyond the boat house across the silky blue water to the distant shore, Pat stayed a discrete three or four feet away from Stevey. He found himself sizing her up. For the first time noticing the curve of her waist and the back of her neck under her short, shiny straight black hair, which she was combing demonstratively with a large sequined comb.

  “Don’t just sit there gawking dummy, why don’t you help me comb my hair. One hundred strokes a day you know.” Stevey knew she had Pat’s attention. And she did — like day one of the rest of his life.

  Rather awkwardly Pat knelt behind her and above her as she splashed her feet in the water and started combing her hair nervously. It was remarkably thick, much thicker than his mother’s, who used to ask Pat to comb her hair when he was five or six. He liked that. But this was different.

  He watched the comb neatly spread the glistening jet black strands of hair. He was careful to stop and flip up the comb just above the nape of Stevey’s neck. Stevey started to apply suntan lotion to top of her legs. Although she was short, Stevey had slender legs and girlish thighs. It was August, and a long summer holiday since June had tanned her young body to what Pat now saw as perfection.

  “OK, OK, that’s enough. Now how about putting some lotion on my back — will ya Pat?” This was definitely a first. Stevey was wearing a shiny one piece black swimsuit with a low back and scoop front. With what seemed a single motion Stevey passed the lotion back to the still kneeling Pat and casually flipped down the straps of her swimsuit to expose her shoulders. She hunched slightly forward.

  “OK. And put it on evenly. And don’t get it on my damned swimsuit. It’s greasy!”

  And the very young man found himself applying lotion to that wonderful brown back, in the slight rounded hollow between her shoulder blades and below, down where her young backbone protruded in four small bumps. For a moment in time Pat wasn’t the awkward “social retard” fifteen-year-old, but Stevey’s confidante, intimate, even friend.

  He started rubbing lotion on to her shoulders. It struck him how white the areas of her body were that were covered by her swimsuit as his hands were actually carefully applying lotion on her shoulders, which had very distinct tan lines where the straps had been. As he finished, the straps were hanging very low indeed, flopped over so that the top of the suit was only partly covering Stevey’s well-developed breasts.

  In that instant Pat found himself staring straight over her left shoulder and down into Stevey’s cleavage. And for the first time he plainly saw two remarkably formed symmetrical white mounds, with amazingly large and perky nipples the shade of fresh pink roses. Stevey’s firm young breasts that day seemed to Pat dream like in their milky softness. They were creamy below the scoop-shaped line which was a clear, almost brutal demarcation between what the sun saw, what young boys were supposed to see and a zone so strange and forbidden to Pat that this first glimpse made a huge and lasting impression.

  The summer before, one of the older women on Sutton Beach, Manny Williams (the girl Pat had seen necking with the Marina attendant a couple of years earlier), had read her secret copy of a Mickey Spillane thriller to a few of the younger kids on a dark dock. This was about as close to pornography as that generation was going to get. In one passage a young woman who had caught the hero’s eye had been described as having “the high firm breasts of youth.” That lusty image now had a strong visual reference for Pat.

  Stevey’s breasts, like those in the tattered pocket book, were at the same time forbidden and inviting. That was the timeless conundrum for Pat then, and remained a central conundrum for Father Pat the priest wrestling with the world, the flesh and the devil — and his behaviour with and towards women — thirty-five years later. “The apple never falls far from the tree,” his mother used to say.

  Stevey was well into the puberty which still largely escaped Pat — physically at least. She must have been aware that the distinct pause in Pat’s careful lotion application and the way she had let her straps drop to expose the top — perhaps more — of her breasts meant Pat was drinking in part of her young womanhood. So she slowly turned around and looked up at him.

  “Hey thanks. You did that nicely,” she said, looking at him intently as she slowly pulled her straps back up. The show was over and it was lunch time. Bells started ringing up and down the beach as children were summoned to lunches served on breezy verandahs.

  Pat said a sheepish “see ya” to Stevey and gathering up his towel and bounded up the stone steps to the path that connected the row of tidy cottages on Sutton Beach. That night, in the canoe alone, he vowed then that one day he would kiss Stevey, that he would feel those wonderful breasts against his chest. But not that summer.

  Well, almost a year later he did kiss Stevey and finally felt her breasts pushing against his chest. With much less definition than he thought since this was his first time beyond holding hands with Mary on his first date. It was Stevey who knowingly and happily supplied Pat with his first major p
etting experience, although it was certainly not hers.

  In fact, in his own somewhat fearful and cerebral way, his very tentative fling the following summer with Stevey was really only a foretaste of a foretaste. As with many of his generation, it would be literally years before the promise of that first tentative sexual awakening would be fully realized.

  The summer he finally kissed Stevey, Father Pat realized much later, set up a pattern of secrecy and publicly denying romantic attachments that would follow him all his life. It was in the nature of the exaggerated mind/flesh Protestant dichotomy in so many lives of that transitional generation — more developed in Pat who actually sought solitude and a form of purification in his canoe rides. As well for Pat it was anxiety about making too much of, or hanging out too boldly a part of his life that always seemed surrounded with such uncertainty, even peril.

  Father Pat retained vivid memories of that summer. He took part almost at arm’s lengths in the day’s social routines — playing with his friends like puppies in the water, falling around on the tennis courts, even bicycling to the store to listen to the jukebox and play the slot machine for a nickel. But more often he would be alone in his canoe, or drawing, making model boats, wandering alone in the fields beside the golf course looking for golf balls, and waiting for the early evening.