The Father Pat Stories

by Patrick Gossage

  Then he would sneak off after the family supper to meet Stevey at her back gate. They would walk hand in hand along what was called the back road, which bordered those fields, and go to their secret place, a secluded knoll behind an old icehouse that looked into a little wood. There they would wrestle playfully, hug as if their very lives depended on it and kiss. Once Pat tried to slip his hands over Stevey’s breasts from behind. She politely but firmly put them back around her waist.

  “Oh no you don’t, young man,” she said. And that was that. When he hugged her, he felt their softness. That was all. He loved the feel of her mouth on his. For that summer that was enough. What was off-limits would remain so.

  She dominated their secret conversations the way girls that age often did. She talked a lot about boys — other boys, and Pat listened patiently. She talked about fighting off the golf pro — though Pat thought her protests were not very convincing. She talked about her period and how painful it was. Pat listened in some awe. She talked about how she disliked the girl’s boarding school to which her parents had sent her to instill some discipline. Pat listened with understanding. In fact, he learned that summer the technique of drawing a girl out by asking questions. A way to keep her going, and keep her interested, he thought. In any case, his self-protective ways offered little life episodes to offer up in return for her more worldly, even raunchy, adolescent experiences.

  “School’s like a hellish sort of prison,” she would say. “But if I really want to stay out late on a Saturday night, all I have to do is sign out and go to my aunt’s. She doesn’t care what time I get in,” she would add suggestively. That was the summer Pat tries to integrate this new attachment with his canoeing experiences, and decided quickly they should be kept separate. His inner self and this new feeling should and would be kept apart.

  Pat’s development was marked by the passing of those summers, by the caressing breezes and the romantic lushness of sun-streaked lawns and woods and the sparkling blue lake. But that development was as measured as the growth of the two young spruce trees which flanked the front double screen doors of Whitehaven.

  His father had planted them to cover the ugly hole dug by a local handyman who came one day when Pat was about five or six to unplug the septic system. It was easier to plant a small spruce than to try and grow grass on that dark bare side of the house, and of course another on the other side for symmetry. So in they went. Pat had his picture taken standing beside them. Ten years later they were almost up to the roof line. And Pat was still a small, slight man who still at best looked thirteen.

  In the winter following their summer of teenage caresses, Pat only saw Stevey once. He decided after much soul searching to invite her to the big dance the final year of his private high school. The Battalion Ball it was called, and it was a full dress affair with the boys in their cadet outfits and the girls in “formals.” Pat had studiously avoided these outings until he yielded under great pressure from his friend Jeff, who was still chasing Alison but had notably failed to “bed her,” as he put it. Bedding anyone was far from Pat’s mind that year. He was determined to beat his rowdy classmates at the only thing he could excel at — marks.

  But he remembered and savoured in his lonely mind Stevey’s soft lips, her faint moans and the promise, the ever-so-slight promise that clung to him from that long-ago day on the dock by the boat house. He knew she had been seeing someone — an American cadet she had met on a school trip. But he called her. She was staying with her aunt.

  “Yeah. If you want. It would be hellish fun to see what you look like without a tan. And I suppose Jeff and Alison will be going?” Stevey still swore — like a truck driver, according to Alison.

  “Yes. I’m afraid I’m not an officer and my uniform is pretty awful. But it would be great to see you … and I can get my parent’s car.” Pat was already thinking of taking Stevey back to her aunt’s and the lingering kiss in the car.

  So they went. As it turned out they enjoyed dancing together. Pat’s mother’s hasty fox-trot lessons seemed to work. They fitted together on the dance floor. Stevey had a low-cut gown with a frilly bodice that protected at the same time as they showed off her breasts. She had let her slick dark hair grow to shoulder length, and her pert mouth and flashing dark eyes all seemed part of some sort of magazine layout for late fifties youth and romance.

  Later, they sat bundled together in Pat’s parents’ cold little VW on the snowy deserted street outside her aunt’s modest Victorian home. There were no lights on and Stevey assured Pat that her aunt was very “tolerant.” She didn’t care what time she came in. They were silent, exhausted from adolescent kissing and tired of the groping within fifties limits. It was the scene by the icehouse transposed to the city, to bulky winter clothes and pale skins. Stevey had allowed Pat to put his hand through her coat and around her breasts carefully enveloped in the hard sculpted padding of her merry widow undergarment. But Pat felt a tingling just from being that close. The more sophisticated Stevey also treated Pat to a slow and deliberate sucking of his fingertips. He returned the favour and they both sighed the sighs of simple, unfulfilled ecstasy.

  It was almost 3:30 in the morning. Stevey started portentiously.

  “You know I like you, Pat. You’re cute, and not a bad dancer,” she paused.

  “I like you too Stevey, I guess I always have,” Pat said shyly.

  “But you know, Pat, I haven’t been … I’m not what you think I am. I’m not like Alison.”

  “I don’t know what you mean. I like you, not Alison. She’s still talking about James Dean for heaven’s sake. I think she’s a bit crazy … I like you.” Pat was about to get his first lesson in the utter irrationality and complexity of male female relationships.

  “No. I’m not explaining myself. Well, you’re nice. You are always nice to me, good to me. Like … attentive. You don’t ask much. I like you and appreciate that. But…” she paused.

  “But what?” Pat thought how weak it sounded to be called nice. But he knew in his heart he was just that. Not much more.

  “But, Pat, you have to know that this guy I met, this American guy. Well, I went all the way with him.” A big pause. This was big news in the fifties. Then, as if to explain, “ I think I love him. I’m going to see him at Easter. He has relatives here. I don t want to hurt you.”

  She was sounding final. Pat was taken aback — going all the way meant different things in the 1950s — from actual lovemaking to letting a boy play with you. But it definitely signified traveling in very dangerous territory and it was hard for Pat to put the most unpleasant take on this revelation out of his mind. Still, in Pat’s strange scheme of things, what he heard did not alter the way he felt about Stevey or obliterate the promise she represented for him. If anything it made it more tantalizing, appealing to think she had actually let a boy go over that line.

  “Well I don’t want this to be over.” Pat said it the way he felt it. This was pretty basic to him considering the intimacy they’d just been enjoying, however little it might have seemed to have been to her, he thought. He wasn’t sure even then that it was over.

  “Well, I don’t know why I tell you my secrets anyway. You aren’t a priest! Maybe I’d better go in. We always see each other in the summer anyway, don’t we, my sweet Pat?” And she kissed him with a good deal of lingering affection.

  That summer, the first evening he knew she was up at her cottage, he hurried expectantly down the back road, past their secret rendezvous, to her garden gate. She was sitting in a circle with her family behind the house in the early evening light, which painted long shimmering ribbons of golden yellow across the lawn. She was in trim shorts and a clinging blue sleeveless top. She looked up and saw him waiting. She came up, striding purposefully, and leaned, bare arms akimbo, on the low white gate, tantalizingly out of reach.

  “So, how’s your summer? Fallen in love?” she asked with a slight mocking tone in her voice.

  “Come on. You know me. Who would f
all in love with me? Anyhow, I’m here to see you.”

  “Well, don’t be impatient. You have to wait for good things. Do you want to know about my American beau?”

  “Not really. He’s not here and I am. Let’s go to the icehouse. Everyone’s watching.”

  “Well, I don’t give a damn. Let them.” And as if to further spite and confuse the whole situation. Stevey grabbed Patrick’s head across the gate and pulled their lips together for a long, moist kiss. Pat finally pulled back. Over his shoulder he could see the rest of Stevey’s family watching.

  “Come on,” he pleaded. “Let’s go somewhere we can talk.”

  “We can talk just fine here,” she said, straightening up and half turning away to lean against the gate. She sounded serious, and Pat felt his face flushing as he studied her neck and bare shoulders above her halter top. A neck he had kissed over and over the summer before. “Pat, I told you in the car that night that I had this guy. Or that he damn well had me, I suppose. And that you were too nice to hurt any more. Well, I can’t go on with you. I know we don’t even see much of each other. But it’s early in the summer, and, well. You know. I can’t lead you on because I just don’t think we’re going anywhere. We’ve had fun and liked each other. That should be enough. You’re bound to meet someone a lot nicer than me.” And with that she turned around and took his shoulders. “I know you will Pat.”

  He looked straight into her eyes. There was no twinkle, no magazine layout appeal, no more promise. Even though they were the same age physically, this became an older woman telling a younger man her truth, kindly.

  He was speechless. She had not hurt him before, even when she told him in the car about her American boyfriend. But now she was hurting him very much. He wanted so little. Just to kiss her, to feel her warm, yielding little body next to his To tell her a few secrets and listen to her stories of struggling to grow up. To be enlivened by her energy, her physical and spiritual tautness and lack of guile. And, of course, to yearn, to pine, to be able late at night as the winds off the dark lake swished through the poplars to agonize over the unspoken hint of more to come, more of her in every way, more of the milky whiteness of her own secret and forbidden self. Pull the pillow tight and dream of his bedroom door opening ever so slowly and her warm young body slipping under the sheets and embracing him tenderly. Was it all really gone now? Was he being left at the proverbial garden gate?

  Apparently he was.

  WHILE THIS INCIDENT marked a distinct throttling back in Pat’s maturing, the following autumn, during his first year at university, he found in another young woman a focus for the yearnings that had been so devastatingly put on ice that summer by the garden gate. It was no mystery to Father Pat, or to Brenda or Deirdre for that matter, that this relationship was to mark him and continue to influence him through the years even more than his adolescent episode with Stevey. For Pat’s next female encounter paralleled his formative encounter with the spiritual and emotional substance of the rest of his life. It also coincided with his first and confusing meeting with Jill, his father’s young friend whose real relationship with Pat’s dad would only become clear thirty years later.

  University for Pat was an organized, disciplined quest for knowledge. On a somewhat different plane from high school, where getting good marks was the only way for an unathletic, socially unaccomplished young man to survive inside himself. It was a bigger menu now, with more variety, richer and more fully preoccupying.

  In addition, Pat was finding satisfaction in a mature spiritual life. It did differentiate him from what he considered the self-indulgent and sophomoric round of dating, drinking, carousing, fraternity parties and orgiastic football weekends that consumed most of his contemporaries. In the fall particularly Pat tried to get up to White Lake and away from it all.

  “I just can’t believe how many good-looking chicks there are. I’ll never be able to get my hands on even half of them. What a shame!” Pat heard one of his high school mates exclaim at a fraternity “rushing” party he had reluctantly agreed to attend. That was it. That kind of attitude was enough to turn him off fraternity life permanently.

  So while his erstwhile friends tried on yet another co-ed for size, Pat, still a very green sapling in many ways, might be found buried in a newspaper in the common room, studying in the library, or working on a design for a poster for the latest college drama production. Pat was also noticeably more studious, holding to the belief inculcated by his demanding father that university was an eight-hour-a-day job.

  He might even be found on his knees in chapel praying. Praying that his life, the only one he had, the only one in his lone struggle he had any control over, might be spent soundly, in some worthwhile endeavour that at that time he could not himself imagine. Perhaps Stevey was right, but only partly. Being nice sounded syrupy to him. Perhaps he could be more — be a good man.

  At the very least he believed he had never hurt anyone. Not the way Alison was being hurt by Jeff’s persistent, even aggressive attempts to make love to her. Not the way he saw Stevey was hurt by her mother, and her pestering stepbrother and stepsister. Not the way he saw his contemporaries hurt the girls they dated, getting them drunk and taking advantage of them.

  He had no such inclinations anyway. He was passive on the whole. His life had been unpretentious, even modest — as modest as his mother’s idea of a good lunch — tomato soup from a can and a thinly sliced cucumber sandwich with a bit of pepper and mayonnaise. Pat was not brought up on peanut butter and jam, and it showed.

  At seventeen, he could look back with no shame, if a few regrets. He was putting together and adding up what in his own immature way had happened with Stevey, his own reactions to university hedonism and his fear that his father had in the mysterious Jill a young and dangerous mistress. And after much lonely reflection amid the swirl and blazing attractions and freedoms of first year, Pat concluded that there was perhaps more real promise in spiritual fulfillment than in physical satisfaction that was both impossibly elusive and generally problematic. At this point in Pat’s life the two were opposed. It was impossible to see them as complementary. Girl and friend were apparently mutually exclusive terms. A dream not to dare dreaming.

  In first-year university Pat was back attending the family’s local parish church, St. Timothy’s, sometimes twice on Sundays. It was a coming home. He had gone with his family every Sunday of his life until he was about fourteen. The service was written on his mind and engraved in his soul and he sang every hymn without a hymn book, reading it from a sort of mental scroll. The scripture readings, the seasons of the church, the great central mystery of the God made flesh and the glory of transubstantiation in which Christ visits through bread and wine in communion at the Lord’s Supper had been and were again a normal function of dealing with life for Pat Cheyne.

  Pat had been precocious in understanding the basics of a faith in the numinous, in the humility required in face of the major mysteries, the looming not-understandables. He had learned a sort of meditation on silent White Lake. Then, once, at the age of eleven, he had surprised his parents at Sunday dinner which followed church in the Cheyne weekly family ritual by explaining to them that faith was no more and no less than the fact that they knew that they would always love each other and be together even if there was no particularly rational reason to believe that or even behave that way. But they had to believe, to have faith that it would be that way. That was a conversation killer as his mother and father simply looked at each other in silent assent to a theory they could hardly contest in front of their earnest young son.

  Pat had never really absented himself from that awe in life, in the wonder of creation and the beauty and message in nature that characterized the spirituality of non-fundamentalist Episcopal Protestantism. He shared a taste for the contemplative life on the upside of monasticism. Pat had been deeply moved in his final year of high school by a simple, undemanding retreat weekend with Episcopal lay brothers in a north country monastic
setting. It had reaffirmed everything he had more vaguely felt in several years of solitary paddles on White Lake. He appreciated a style of Christianity that eschewed simple answers, simplistic revelation and focused on exposing and improving the inner self, then applying those revelations to daily life.

  In any case, a rigid sacramental and hierarchical spirituality would hardly have suited a young man for whom the magic rustle of a paddle in the water at twilight on a pellucid lake could be infinitely mind expanding. A sacrament, or an outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace in itself.

  So, Pat’s spiritual life, unlike his romantic life, was floating along just fine. Father Pat could look back with some longing on that year as a time of deepening of a simple faith.

  Pat had absented himself for a few years from organized worship at St. Timothy’s for the simple reason that he didn’t want to sit with his parents. But these years really only served as a transition period from a catechist to a full participant in at least some of God’s more organized mysteries.

  So, in first-year university, as befitted a more mature Christian, Pat offered his services as a server helping with communion in a regular rotation. Ah! The ritual of handling the highly polished cruets of sacramental wine with the whole congregation looking on, robing up with the rector. It was all a bit of a high.

  As well, Pat put in time as a Sunday School teacher on alternate Sundays. St. Timothy’s rector, Father Doug Charter, a robust middle aged man of striking looks, a full round face with a perennial grin surrounded by a half-day’s stubble, was “deelighted” to have the slight dedicated young man to assign around the parish. But he found him hard to penetrate. Clearly a young man trying to work something out, he thought.

  Pat tried to work many things out in prayer. Prayer for him was perhaps as self-indulgent as losing oneself in a loved-one’s eyes, or simply turning all in upon oneself when surrounded by the irresistible and quiet beauty of a natural scene. It was indeed a looking inside, a piecing together of all the elements of a day and examining them, turning them over for meaning or lack of meaning.