The Crooked Heart of Mercy

by Billie Livingston

  There was a simpering giggle from the other boys.

  Sister Clare let her gaze settle on each of them as she spoke. “I’ll give your father a call, Mr. Boyle. Same goes for you, Mike Conner, Peter Duffy, Jason—I’ve got your numbers. I know where you live.”

  “Sorry, Sister,” Duffy muttered. The three bystanders took a last look at Keith Boyle, jammed their hands in their pockets, and trudged away. Boyle rolled his head to the side and watched them go. His jaw was red and stormy where Sister Clare’s punch had connected.

  He climbed onto his feet and looked at us. For a moment it seemed he might say something, but he turned away, and trailed up the sidewalk after his friends.

  “Okay, Francis, come on.” Sister Clare crouched beside him. “Come inside and we’ll get you cleaned up.”

  My brother’s back heaved and shook. I knelt on the other side of him, laid my hand on the back of his head, and stroked him like a scared pet. “They’re gone, Francis.”

  There was a small whimper from him when Sister Clare lifted his shoulders. The stink of dog shit was close and heavy. It was smeared across his mouth and nose, his hands. Tears streamed and he tried to cover his face.

  Sister Clare grimaced. Once she had him on his feet, she draped her arm across his shoulders and walked him back toward Good Shepherd, pulling him tight to her side as they went. I picked up my brother’s lunchbox and followed them up the stairs, concentrating on Sister’s navy tunic, her sensible black shoes. I marveled at how tough she was, especially for someone so short and skinny and female. I wondered if there was such a thing as God-power.

  While Sister Clare took my brother down the hall to get cleaned up, I waited in a pew and fidgeted with the hole in my tights. I stared up at the crucifix high on the wall. Light shone down on Christ’s sad, dying face. So mean, I thought. Why do people have to be so mean?

  “I KNOW WHAT they did to you,” I tell Francis now. “You think I don’t remember Keith Boyle?”

  “One of many,” Francis says. He gets off the couch and heads to the kitchen. “But those nuns were always there for me. Sister Clare, Sister Angelica. I used to go over there for Father Jim’s noon mass. In grade two, I got an assignment to draw what I wanted to be when I grew up and I drew Father Jim.” He comes back with the coffeepot and gives us each a top-up. “Church was the safest place in the world. The smell of it, the atmosphere—it felt like God. I wanted to feel that way all the time, like my relationship with God was the most natural thing in the world. Nothing made me feel that way like church.” He stands over the coffee table, holding the pot. His gaze drifts as if he’s considering his own words. “Then the Vatican started with their saber rattling—We’re going to root out the gays! Sure as heck doesn’t feel safe now.”

  “What do you like about it then?”

  “I like being a priest.”

  An incredulous laugh escapes me. “Why? Is it the robes? Getting all dressed up in the vestments? Is it like the ultimate drag show or what?”

  He snorts and carries the coffeepot back to the kitchen. “It’s a drag all right. But not the fun kind. Familiarity breeds contempt.”

  I listen to him putter, wipe the counter, and toss silverware in the sink. Eventually he says, “To get that feeling now, that close-to-God feeling, I have to find it around me, in people and in nature.”

  “Which brings us back to the original question,” I call back. “Why do you stay in the church?”

  Seconds go by. A minute. “Francis?”

  “I heard you.”

  He drifts back into the living room and wanders to the window, coffee cup in his good hand. Parting the short sheers with his blistered hand, he rests his forehead against the pane. “I’m not going to jump ship just to pander to my own sexual stuff.” His voice trails off as he says, “Every day I recommit. Every day I pray for help.”

  Watching his silhouette, I think of us when we were young. Francis used to tell me to pray. Ask for help, he’d say. I think I was about twenty when I turned on him and said, “Oh fuck off with your imaginary friend.”

  He’d looked at me with a pained expression. “Maggie, even if there’s nothing out there, at the very least you might be waking up some sleepy part of your brain and putting it to work. You’re acknowledging that you need help, and that’s huge.”

  That’s Francis. Over and over. No matter what, he finds a way to hope.

  NINE

  Ben

  Every child deserves a parent, a foundation he can count on. That didn’t happen for you.” Dr. Lambert’s at it again. He’s got his pity face on. Poor Ben. Poor fucked-up Ben.

  Don’t feel sorry for Ben. He’s long gone, kicking up sand, dreaming in the dirt, not a care in the world.

  “Yet you showed up at his hospital bedside. Almost daily.”

  Almost daily day of reckoning. Blood will tell. Every day another son’s hands on another windowpane, end over end, blood over blood.

  Even the old man was somebody’s bloody son. Who fucked him up?

  “That’s a good question and it brings us back to something we touched on the other day. Growing up with a man like your father, did you ever fear what kind of parent you would be?”

  Ben was never going to be that old man. Head on Maggie’s big belly, he promised. He told Frankie. Ben was waiting for Frankie since forever. Since the night that Miriam said, “Do you think I should go back to him?” As soon as Ben got away, there’d be no going back. He told Frankie. He told Maggie. Maggie was a believer. Not like Miriam. Maggie was a promise.

  Back of a limo, the first time Ben saw Maggie. It was cold out, Christmas lights up and down the block, up and down the world. Maggie back there for a work party, a year-end gift from the company big shots. Free booze. Gallons—every set of teeth floating. Night over, the car tipped at the curb and they all poured out. All except Maggie. Left alone, alone to go home, only one sober. Home, James.

  Ben watched her face in the rearview, got hooked on those sad eyes, neon light sparking around them, slow eyes, blue eyes, melancholy baby eyes, glinting behind gin bottles and stoplights. Like Viva Las Vegas next to the Sistine Chapel.

  “Do you like Christmas?” That was Maggie.

  “No,” Ben said. Then he watched and waited. Maybe she loved Christmas. Maybe it soothed her like warm milk and mittens.

  Maggie eyes floating in the mirror. Acid eyes, kaleidoscope eyes that tripped and burned and saw it all. “Christmas,” she said. “People disappear and it all falls apart.”

  Maggie said that. Like she knew things. Ben in the driver’s seat, hands on the wheel, but he was sucked straight down a rabbit hole, through a wormhole, a keyhole.

  Say more, say more.

  “I’m going to quit.”

  What’d she mean by that? Quit Christmas? Quit the world?

  There were papers beside Ben. A client sheet. Something about research. Focus groups. Not those eyes, they pulled focus, switched focus. “What do you do?”

  “I’m a fly on the wall.”

  Ben thought of the old man. Miriam. Dirty fly, he called her, touches shit all day, he said. That’s all she’s fit for. Better off without her, he said. Fly away, fly off the handle, straighten up and fly right.

  What’s it like to be a fly? “What’s the worst thing about it?”

  Quiet back there. A few three-hundred-pound seconds. None-of-your-business seconds? Shut-up-and-drive seconds?

  “Desire is shaped by fear.” She says it like a quote. Like she’s been scaring people for years, making them want forever. “That’s how you sell stuff,” she says, and her face is like shame. She looks away.

  Don’t look away. Never look away. Ben might disappear when you look away.

  She says, “What’s the worst part of your job?”

  “Vomit.”

  She snorts. The gilded Madonna snorts and fills the car with tinsel and solace and Ben says, “What’s so funny?”

  “At least it’s real,” she says. “Genuine puke.”


  Say more. Say Ben. Say puke. She feels like home. Feels like he had to drive ten thousand miles to find a girl from his own neighborhood.

  “I think I’d rather clean up puke. At least I’d be helping. There are people who have no one.” She stares out the window. “Old people . . . kids . . .”

  Ben should’ve met her when he was a kid. Should have found her on the sidewalk, playing jacks or hopscotch. Draw a chalk circle and stand in the middle. He’d have found her. He’d have saved her. She’d have saved him right back.

  Through the miles and miles of dark he searches those eyes. He can see playgrounds and lightning. He can see his cradle and his grave, his mother and his child.

  He can see the skylights open and the two of them drift up, into a heart-shaped future. He can see it. He knows it.

  That’s how it’s going to be.

  That’s how it is.

  When Maggie has Frankie, she has Ben. She gives birth to them both, hands against both sides of her belly, hands against the rising moon, on the inside and the outside. Maggie gives birth to the universe.

  She gives birth to tiny fingers and peanut butter breath and toy cars and the weight of that boy lying on Ben’s chest. Baby teeth spark a whole new Ben. Sponge ball in the park, kicking and running in circles till they drop. Frankie learns the staring contest. He loves it like he made it up. All eyes on deck, no blinking. Ben gets to stare into the universe and Frankie gets to look in Ben’s attic, and his closets, deep in the back at the grime and dark and each time Frankie looks, he laughs a little harder. Fearless. Like a Buddha. Like it’s safe. Like it couldn’t hurt a fly. Who’d want to sleep when awake is so damn funny.

  Enough to make you laugh right back. Enough to make you dance. Ben and Maggie dancing. Just the two of them, floating in the kitchen.

  Ben took care of the rest. He believed in fearless. Just the two of them, floating in the kitchen. He loved her so hard, the attic disappeared and the closets and the flies. He loved them so much he didn’t keep watch. And then suddenly it was yesterday—already past—like a watch in the night. The moon disappeared, the bed, and the mirrors and the mother and the child. All of it out the window. Even the window disappeared.

  Who needs the old man when you’ve got Ben? Blood will tell.

  NINE

  Maggie

  Standing at the window in my living room Francis says, “I’m going to go down and see Ben this afternoon.”

  What? What in God’s name is he talking about?

  “You just got in the door after—”

  “—another royal fuckup. I know.” He turns and sits on the sill. “I need to do this, Maggie.”

  “Is this some kind of atonement? If anyone should be down there it should be me.”

  Francis looks at me. I look into my hands.

  AFTER FRANKIE DIED, I began to feel as though anyone I met must know at once that I was the most contemptible bit of filth he or she would ever lay eyes on. I felt as if I should be driven into the wilderness.

  Francis tried to be pastoral at first, but coming from him it was insulting—all the God talk and the prayer. Couldn’t he just shut up and be my brother? I hadn’t been in a Catholic church since I was eighteen, when Francis announced that he would be leaving me for God.

  But what do you do with death? Where do you go when you need someone to lift you out of the mire, forgive you, and rock you to sleep?

  I snuck off to five o’clock mass at St. Clare’s Cathedral on the outskirts of town. I didn’t tell anyone, not Francis or Ben. Coming back into a church after all those years felt shameful somehow. I wore a shawl over my head—hid under it like a widow—and sat in the very back pew.

  I watched a woman about my age praying in the same pew at the opposite end. A tiny smile played around her mouth; she looked so content, so free from doubt. I wanted that. I tried to pray, but all I could hear was my own voice echoing back. No matter how I genuflected, crossed myself, or rubbed at a rosary, I couldn’t escape that terrible sense of dread that I was the ghost, not Frankie.

  Over the next few weeks, I tried the Episcopalians, the Baptists, the Methodists, and the Pentecostals. I tried a synagogue. I tried a Buddhist temple. But there was nothing. Not for me. Not in a temple, and not at home.

  When I finally told Ben what I’d been doing, it was a confession. We rarely spoke anymore and the sound of my voice in our apartment had a strange hollow quality. “I’m scared,” I said. “I’m scared that I’ll never be whole again.”

  Ben looked at me for a long time. Then he said those damning words of his: “How do you fill a hole?”

  I gave up. I left.

  WE PULL UP out front of St. Anthony General and I put Lucy’s old Volvo in park. St. Anthony is the patron saint of lost things: seems particularly fitting right now.

  The engine idles as I wait for Francis to make a move. The closer we got to Ben, the less we said. Now we sit in silence, catching our breath and fidgeting.

  Francis had a hot shower before we left, and he’s still damp. A slow, warm rivulet slides out of his hairline down his temple. He’s sweating out last night’s vodka, but I’m starting to wonder if fear is playing a part too.

  It should be me going in there, but I can’t calm the shudder in my chest. Knowing Ben’s inside, on the brink of Here and Not-Here, makes my guts roil.

  The night the police called me I sat beside Ben in the recovery room and watched him sleep, his head wrapped in bandages, monitors beeping. I kept looking at his hand, the pulse sensor on his index finger—did he pull the trigger with that finger? How could he do it? It was almost as if he’d shot us both. Slammed the door for good.

  When I called the hospital the next day, they said he had stabilized. They had moved him to the psych ward.

  “Are you sure about this?” I finally ask my brother.

  “I should have been here days ago,” Francis says.

  “I don’t know who you’re going to find. He’s supposed to be in a dissociative state. That’s what they said.”

  “I can relate.” His voice sounds odd. Something like surrender. As if his plan to make a pastoral visit to his brother-in-law in a psychiatric ward is a train that can’t be stopped.

  “Listen, I know Ben’s never been able to make much sense of me”—Francis touches the white plastic collar blaring out from his black clerical shirt—“but it’s all I got.”

  “He actually does respect you, Francis . . . what you do.”

  My brother’s eyebrows jump a little in disbelief, or relief, I’m not sure which.

  The curbside sign says NO PARKING: PATIENT DROP-OFF AND PICKUP ONLY. I check the rearview to make sure no one is trying to shoo me away. Looking past Francis into the main lobby of the hospital, I can see patients and family milling near the admitting desk, asking questions, being discharged. Ben didn’t come in this way. He came by ambulance. He came bleeding down Main Street a hundred miles an hour with a bullet in his head.

  Instant. What’s more instant than a bullet to the head? And yet he’s here. And not here. I don’t know what they mean by dissociative. If I were to go up there, would he know who I am? Does he know who he is? If he could do what he did, then Ben didn’t want to be Ben. He wanted out of his life and mine.

  I stare off into traffic. “I just want to say again, if you feel like you need to do this out of some sense of obligation or—or restitution or whatever—you don’t.”

  Francis watches people pass on the sidewalk. “I’m a priest, Maggie.” He flicks his collar. “I realize that scenes like last night make it a little hard to believe, but I am. And that means showing up. Even if all I’m able to do is listen.”

  On the other side of the road, a homeless man stands on the corner with a harmonica in one hand and an empty milk carton in the other. He breathes in and out on the mouthpiece and sends a tuneless whinny into the air as he shakes the milk carton at passersby. A young black woman in a fitted suit slows as she passes him. She pulls a bill from th
e side pocket of her purse and drops it into the carton. As she continues down the sidewalk, he shouts, “God bless you, beautiful!” and wolf-whistles into his harmonica. The woman hikes her purse up her shoulder and keeps moving.

  “Ben has this thing,” I say, “where he can’t pass a street person without giving them money.” I crack the window for some air. “Even if he’s totally broke. Even if all he can manage is a couple of quarters. I really got on him about it once, you know—‘Hey, we’re broke and here you are giving this guy money to buy booze.’ I told him he should volunteer at a shelter if he was so fired up about it. The next time we walked by some homeless lady, he kept going. To shut me up, I suppose. We got home and he . . . he just couldn’t take it. He turned around and drove back downtown. We drove round and round looking for this woman.”

  “Doesn’t sound like such a bad impulse,” Francis says.

  “But he didn’t want to admit why we were driving back. He—”

  Knuckles rap the passenger window and we both start.

  “Father Luke!” A silver-haired woman smiles in at us, waving.

  “Mrs. Mundy! Hello!” Francis rolls his window down. “How nice to see you!”

  “Oh, Father Luke! It’s you.” Mrs. Mundy must be one of his parishioners. She looks so pleased to see him that maybe she hasn’t seen DRUNK PRIEST PROPOSITIONS COPS.

  She leans down a little more and looks in at me. “Hello,” she says with a slightly curt nod. Maybe she has seen the news.

  “Mrs. Mundy, this is my sister, Maggie.”

  “Oh!” she says. “Nice to meet you. We’re all so very fond of your brother, Maggie. So fond.” Tears come to her eyes and she puts a small clawlike hand to her temple as if she needs a moment to get her words back. “I can’t tell you how happy I am to see you, Father Luke. Everyone’s been asking when you’ll be back.”

  Francis takes a big nervous breath and then says, “That’s kind of you. Thank you. I, ah, well, I’m going to be away for a little while. I’m going on a, ah, a retreat.”