Some of the photos seemed salvageable; Mike carefully laid them out to dry, smoothing them flat on the bedside table. Then he turned back to the carton and continued to sort through its contents until he found what he was looking for, the waterproof pen that Liz had sent him early in his tour.
All the activity had exhausted him. He set the pen carefully on his chest and lay back and rested for a while, listening to the hushed churning of the fans, like distant helicopters in a dream purged of urgency, and to the moans of the poor guy in bed fifteen. Somewhere in the distance, he could hear the rumble of artillery fire. Or maybe it was thunder.
His pain settled slowly, like silt from stirred waters. When his breath had steadied, Mike unpinned the medals from his pillow and dropped them into the howitzer-shell jar beside his bed, along with the eighty-seven other pieces of useless metal. Then he picked up the writing tablet he’d had the nurse leave earlier, flaked the dried blood from his pen, and started the letter to Smitty’s wife.
CHAPTER 19
DECEMBER 1967
THE WEEKLY MEETING of the pastoral care committee had run long, as it always did. It was hot in Priscilla Starkey’s parlor, where Prissy kept the central heating cranked up near eighty through the winter, right up until the moment she turned the central air down to sixty-five for the summer, and Germaine resisted an urge to undo his clerical collar. He had done that once, early in his time at St. Jude’s, and never heard the end of it. Jesus had sent his disciples out without wallets, shoes, or extra coats, but St. Jude’s wanted its divine representatives in uniform at all times.
He was sitting in the mauve Queen Anne chair by the window, which was in the sun but offered the advantage of being not quite entirely in the loop of the discussion, which for the last fifteen minutes had revolved around what to do with last week’s altar flowers. Cynthia Abbott wanted to give them to Mabel Condotti, whose husband, James, had died the week before, which was fine with Germaine. It was all fine with Germaine. But Priscilla Starkey had other ideas for the lilies, and the two women were negotiating the fine points of the charitable dispersal with barely subliminal savagery.
“It seems to me that Mabel has plenty of flowers left over from the funeral,” Priscilla said.
Germaine considered his empty coffee cup. It was impossible to get enough coffee at these meetings. Priscilla Starkey made a single pot of weak Jamaican Blue Mountain at 8:59, poured the first round at 9:05, and never offered more. She had a connection in Kingston and brought back smuggler-sized hauls of the beans from her regular jaunts to the Caribbean, but she always acted as if she bought the coffee retail and served it as a benevolence to the parish. Propriety demanded that everyone sip a single cup throughout the meeting and exclaim occasionally over how extraordinary it was. As a priest, Germaine was often allowed a second cup, but Priscilla’s fine china cups were very small. It didn’t help that he was hungover.
Wise as a serpent, Germaine reminded himself. And, more important in parish work, harmless as a dove. He sat tight.
“I think it’s the least we can do,” Cynthia Abbott persisted. “I mean, the poor woman—”
“The poor woman already has a house full of irises and carnations, and we’ve got half a dozen other situations. Portia Morgan’s husband just went in for heart surgery. And what about some of our housebounds?”
“We could divide them up,” one of the other women suggested.
“No, no,” Cynthia said firmly. “We can’t break up that beautiful arrangement, not after Peggy went to so much trouble putting it together.”
Priscilla nodded her agreement: no feeble Christian compromises on the lilies. It was one of those all-or-nothing things. A surprising number of the pastoral care committee’s issues were.
Beyond the window, a thrush was rummaging in Priscilla’s freshly planted bed of autumn pansies. Germaine watched it idly, thinking of James Condotti. He hadn’t known the man well, but he’d liked him. Jim and Mabel had shown up at mass together every Sunday for fifty years, sitting unobtrusively in a pew in the middle of the church, dropping their envelope in the collection basket, smiling over coffee afterward. The two of them would hold hands when they walked back to their car after mass, which always touched Germaine. A veteran of the third wave at Omaha Beach, who never mentioned his war experiences, Condotti had fathered four children who had bred true in their turn and given him a dozen grandchildren and three great-grandchildren, at last count, and even now it was a rare month at St. Jude’s that did not include a Condotti marriage, baptism, or first communion. Jim Condotti had always been the one to notice when a lightbulb at the church needed changing and to change it without fuss; he’d been the one out there on Saturday mornings in the fall with a rake in his hand, the one who repainted the lines in the parking lot when they started to fade, with paint that he would buy himself. Asking nothing, and quietly giving much, an almost bafflingly good man. A miracle of decency, typical of his generation.
As was true in most of the parish’s terminal cases, Germaine had been the one called to the hospital for James Condotti’s last long night; Father Winters did not like deathbeds and avoided them when he could. Germaine arrived in late afternoon, as a beautiful autumn day turned to twilight. The doctors had already let the family know that Condotti would probably not last through the evening, and the grown children were there, two of them having flown in from out of state. Germaine said a mass in the crowded room and gave Jim his last rites as the sun went down in a damask blaze outside the window. Condotti had refused morphine and was lucid, though weak. His children made their good-byes, kissed him, and held his hand. From every corner of the room, the rosary beads rattled; a small altar had been set up on the bedside table, with a statue of the Virgin Mary that Condotti had brought back from France after the war. Mabel sat on James’s right, holding his hand in both of hers. From time to time he would glance toward her, as if reassuring himself that she was still there; their eyes would meet and they would smile.
Just after eight o’clock, Condotti sent the children out. Germaine would have gone with them, but Mabel shook her head; her husband wanted the priest to stay. Germaine took the seat to Condotti’s left and picked up his free hand, and the man squeezed his fingers once in greeting, then seemed to buckle down to the business at hand. His demeanor had changed the moment the door closed on his children, like someone taking off his tuxedo jacket after a party; he was now plainly in pain, his breathing ragged. He gave his wife a glance, lingering and tender, almost apologetic, then closed his eyes and sank into his suffering.
It was a terrible thing to see. Condotti fought, his body resisting its demise instinctively, his face contorting with the effort. Germaine could feel the agony of his every breath, the confounding depth of the misery within the man, rising wave by submerging wave like a tide, while everything in him struggled toward the surface. There was nothing to do for him, which was its own agony.
This was why Father Winters avoided the ministry of the dying, of course: the rector’s muscular religion left no room for this helplessness. But Germaine felt the weird peace that came upon him at such times, the tranquillity of utter defeat, the same whether it came in a hospital room or lying in the bloody mud of a shell crater. It was, perversely, the only time he ever felt like a priest: here, just here, where every priestly comfort failed. Dying with the dying, he knew God’s immediacy. It was only with the heedless living, in the kingdom of stopgap and denial that passed for most of life, that he felt despair.
He could see that same peace in Mabel Condotti’s eyes across the bed, the helpless freedom of surrender; her face was calm, though her cheeks streamed with tears at her husband’s agony. For an hour they sat in silence with Condotti, his increasingly labored breathing the only sound in the room. Condotti opened his eyes twice to meet his wife’s gaze, disoriented now, his eyes wild with pain. Each time Mabel murmured something and brought his hand to her lips and kissed it; and Condotti settled himself, closed his eyes, and got back to
dying.
“What do you think, Father Germaine?” Cynthia Abbott asked.
Germaine came back to himself: a futile man in clothes as black as a sewer grate, draining the heat from a room full of dangerously earnest women. “Excuse me?”
Cynthia exchanged an arch glance with the others; they all took Germaine’s abstractions as a given by now, not entirely endearing but better than too much actual participation. “About the flowers, Father.”
“Of course, the flowers.”
Prissy reiterated, preemptively, “It’s not that I don’t feel for Mabel in her loss, deeply—”
“Of course,” Germaine said again. The discussion, clearly, had reached an impasse. Like the vice president in the Senate, he was a ceremonial presence at these meetings, useless except to break ties.
“I still say it’s the least we can do,” Cynthia Abbott insisted.
The other women held their tongues; no one wanted to cross either Priscilla or Cynthia.
Germaine considered his empty coffee cup. James Condotti’s last breath had been little different from the tortured breaths before it, a shallow exhalation like the last drip of a faucet, too weak to be a sigh but perfectly audible in the silent room. And then, simply, there had not been an in-breath, and Condotti’s face relaxed and was still.
Mabel had raised her husband’s hand to her lips and kissed his knuckle; she held his hand there, pressed against her lips, her eyes closed. For a long time neither she nor Germaine moved or spoke, and the silence was deep and sweet and full.
Finally, Mabel had opened her eyes and met Germaine’s look, her gaze serene and spent. “Would you mind getting the children?”
He rose at once. “Of course.”
“Thank you,” she said. “It meant a lot to him, to have you here. And to me.”
“I’m the one who is grateful,” Germaine had said. And in the hushed expectancy of Prissy Starkey’s parlor now, “Frankly, I think Mabel Condotti couldn’t care less about the damn flowers.”
The meeting broke up quickly after that. As everyone was getting their coats, Priscilla, still bright with triumph, sang out, “Oh, one more thing, ladies. Elizabeth O’Reilly’s husband was wounded in Vietnam the other day, and someone should probably stop by there and express our sympathy. Any takers?”
There was a beat of irritated silence as half a dozen busy women recalculated their day’s itineraries. Germaine said, “I’ll go.”
It was so unprecedented that everyone gaped briefly, but there was a general sense of relief as well, at one less thing to do, and they quickly went back to getting their coats on and getting out of Prissy’s house before they began to sweat. Priscilla’s eyes narrowed, lizardlike, into alertness, but all she said was, “Wonderful.”
One for the gossip mill, Germaine thought. But he didn’t care. He picked up his coat and started for the door, then paused by the vase of disputed lilies and plucked one flower from the sacred arrangement.
“For Mabel,” he told Priscilla before she could object, and he took a moment’s guilty pleasure in the flare of her nostrils.
“Of course, Father,” she said.
GERMAINE DROVE STRAIGHT to the O’Reillys’ house, already beginning to feel ashamed, and blatant in his eagerness. He felt like an idiot. And worse, remembering Prissy Starkey’s knowing lizard look, an obvious idiot. To be at Elizabeth O’Reilly’s side in this hour of her pain was the only pastoral duty he had actually been eager to perform since he had arrived at the parish. This struck Germaine as a devastating judgment on his life.
His second thoughts peaked as he approached the house, and he drove past it instead. Pulling to the curb a hundred yards farther down the road, beside one of the subdivision’s lakes, he turned off the VW’s engine. The sunlight glittering on the lake hurt his eyes; his head and his heart were both pounding. He opened the glove compartment and took out a bottle of aspirin and a pint of Jack Daniel’s, his emergency stash. The bourbon and the aspirin both burned going down. So much for his head.
He took a second shot of the whiskey, to clear the aspirin taste. And then another shot, just because. Because the day was already ruined by what he’d seen in himself. Because he could either get out of the car now and walk the hundred yards back to the O’Reilly house as one more skirt-chasing priest, or he could sit here and do nothing, and let a decent woman grieve alone, because he was a burnout and a human husk.
He wanted to be with Elizabeth O’Reilly. Not to comfort her, that cheap thing, but to be with her in her suffering, to suffer with her, as helpless in it as she was. To keep vigil, to wait with her for the glimmer of God at the root of everything, for the grace that came only through being torn open. He wanted to tell her that he understood, both her wound and her husband’s; that he had been wounded too, and was wounded still; that everyone was wounded, finally, and that wisdom came with learning to live with your wounds. Humility came with that, and compassion. That was truth, God’s truth, hard-won. But the deeper truth here was that anything of wisdom, humility, and compassion he had to offer Liz O’Reilly was false, was poisoned with hope and longing, and with a secret joy.
He had not been prepared for the loneliness, Germaine thought, watching a raft of mallards duck and bob near the shore, as the alcohol began to blunt the edge of his self-contempt. For sacrifice, yes; but what was commonly viewed as sacrifice was easy for him. He had never wanted status, security, material goods, the soothing and absorbing whirl of family and friends; the conventional protections against the abyss, the things most people could not imagine living without, had never appealed to him in the first place. All that had turned to dust too early for him. What had drawn him along, what had sustained him all these decades now, was the simplest, weightless brightness: the moment, always a surprise, when the world turned clear and lucid and holy in the light of God.
It seemed absurd to think of that now, sitting here without a destination in a car that might not start when he turned the key, watching ducks through a whiskey haze while the world groaned and labored. The lily lay beside him on the seat, already beginning to wilt. He had known, Germaine realized now, even when he snatched it out from under Priscilla Starkey’s nose, that he wanted to give it to Liz O’Reilly. But that would be a giving that undid the gift, made it a lie and a theft.
Take up your cross and follow me. Well, he had. He had the cross down cold; he was even a specialist of sorts. A man perversely good at dying, at home only when he was nailed into hopelessness between two thieves. It was the resurrection, the path back into the world of the living, that baffled him. Like Lazarus, Germaine thought, called back by Jesus after three days among the dead: dressed in the ragged black of the grave, he still stank of the tomb. He had set out to live in the light and found his way through infinite effort only into deeper darkness, largely of his own making. He was an empty clerical costume, a wasted grace, a drunk among fools. The real sacrifice, for someone like him, was knowing that.
Germaine took one more hit from the Jack Daniel’s, then recapped the pint, half empty now, and laid it in the glove compartment, beside the half-empty bottle of aspirin. The VW’s engine caught on the third try, with a cough and roar that startled the ducks. As they swam away, bobbing fastidiously, Germaine coaxed the car into gear and headed up the road to the Condotti house, to give Mabel her flower.
CHAPTER 20
DECEMBER 1967
ON THURSDAY AFTERNOON, a week and a half after Mike was wounded, the principal of King’s Grant Elementary School called Liz to inform her that Danny, Kathie, and Angus were all in his office after getting into what he characterized as “a rumble” in the school cafeteria.
She rushed to the school at once and found her children sitting together on a wooden bench in the school’s outer office. The three of them had a chastened but embattled air, like an outnumbered platoon dug in against overwhelming odds. The bench was big enough for half a dozen children, but the O’Reilly siblings were tightly bunched, their shoulders pressed aga
inst each other, sealing the perimeter. Kathie had been crying. Both boys had wads of paper towels pressed to bloody noses, though Angus’s efforts to stem the flow had failed and the front of his yellow shirt was streaked unnervingly with blood.
Kathie began crying again as soon as she saw Liz. Liz hurried to hug her.
“What happened, Danny?” she asked as she took Kathie into her arms.
Her oldest son gave a Mike-like shrug. His face was stony with defiance.
“We got in a fight with the Bentleys,” Angus said.
“With Tony and Mark?” The Bentley boys were both enormous; Tony, a fourth grader in Danny’s class, was a year older, having been kept back once, and Mark was an oversized fifth grader, also repeating his grade. The two were notorious bullies.
Angus nodded. He had taken the paper towels from his nose to talk and was bleeding again. Liz took the gory wad and reformed it so that an unbloody spot was facing up, then pressed the paper gently beneath her son’s nose.
“Hold it right there,” she said.
Principal Evans emerged from his office. He was an earnest man in his midthirties, with thinning brown hair swirling toward his collar, in the fashion of the times, and a tendency toward stockiness, ill served by a pair of olive bell-bottoms with light lavender stripes and half-boots that zipped up the inside of the ankle.
“Mrs. O’Reilly, thank you for getting here so quickly.”
“What in the world happened?”
He glanced at the children and said, “Perhaps we could discuss this in my office.”
“Of course. Kids—”
The three O’Reilly children rose at once.
Lizzie's War Page 21