Of course, as we know, one seldom uses the word good anymore about anyone, except as that word relates to skill.
But we are not talking about skill. Where Brother Fire is concerned, good is the word that one can say is operative about the man: He has the gift of charity. He wants little for himself. A glass of wine in the evenings. A good book. A little music. Pleasing conversation. And there is his abiding love of his own kind. If, at times, something in his eyes gives forth a sense that he carries in his heart a great and sovereign 20
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weight of human misery—one thinks of such a compassionate soul carrying around everything that has been unloaded on him in the dark of the confessional; one imagines his personal sorrows, the loss of his parents and of the other members of his family—if this darkness shows in his gaze, it’s fleeting. He has gone from being a young, devoted man to being an old one without much change in the tenor of his days, and it hasn’t seemed nearly so long as it is. His own battles with himself, and his own work against the despair in his blood (“Not, I’ll not, carrion comfort, Despair, not feast on thee; not untwist—slack they may be—these last strands of man in me”) have cost him plenty, physically and spiritually, but he considers all this the province of his own journey and not a part of his real life, which is, simply, helping other souls on their journey. All of it, to Brother Fire, has been a journey toward the Godhead. The benevolent light at the heart of the universe. And he has managed all his troubles by concentrating on his pastoral work. People come to him not only to confess but to complain. Because there’s nothing judgmental in him, nothing of the prig. The sacrament of penance has always lifted his spirit.
Until now.
The trouble now is that while he has always been strengthened by the hope of those who come to him seeking the mystery of divine forbearance, lately, his spirits are weighted down with a morbid curiosity about the confessions of his parishioners, as if it were all something being whispered to him as gossip. And Brother Fire is thinking seriously about leaving the priesthood.
2.
Here are Holly Grey and Brother Fire at the local diner, having a late cup of coffee together. They’re old friends. They met through Fiona many years ago, when Holly was still married to the father of her one son. Holly and the priest worked together back in the early seventies, organizing protests against Nixon. They appreciate each other, though t h a n k s g i v i n g n i g h t
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Holly doesn’t attend church, has never practiced. She says her aunt Fiona attends enough church for both of them. Brother Fire counters that he worries about her immortal soul. Yet he also believes that Holly will probably go to heaven anyway, and he smiles. Like so many American clerics, he’s far less rigid than his own church. It’s true that he worries about everything in the nights—the nights lately have been long for him—and sometimes he thinks of friends like Holly, and tries to pray for them, friends who have never availed themselves of the strength of faith, never had that gift. His trouble now, of course, is that he’s been having a little trouble in that vein himself. He has no real doubts about the tenets of his religion and practice, it’s just that he hasn’t been able at all to concentrate on the words of the prayers he says. This stems from the trouble he’s having with confessions. There are sins his parishioners confess that interest him salaciously—weirdly—as if it has all come close to a form of entertainment. In the beginning, this was nothing more than a minor irritation, something he put aside in his usual manner, as one dismisses an importunate thought. But the fascination has begun to lead him away from concentration on the words of his office.
His reaction to the problem has been rather severe: he spends the hours after confession on his knees, in his room, saying his office and enduring the discomfort of the hard, wooden floor. He denies himself his evening meal and the glass of red wine, and he retires without drinking any water or juice, though the medicines he’s taking for his heart give him dry mouth.
Then there’s the problem of his curate, Father McFadden, a young man whose energies are difficult to respond to. Well, it’s just that Brother Fire knows his reactions to Father McFadden’s heartfelt enthusiasms are less than the younger man might hope for.
The new situation concerning confessions has shortened his patience and left some nerves jangled, a synapse broken, a line disconnected in his soul, like a phone left off the hook. The words go off, and his mind wanders. It’s disconcerting and rather scary.
Now, he sips his espresso and drums his fingers on the table, trying to appreciate, for itself alone, in reference to nothing, the sunny day, the quality of the pleasant, half-shady light. He looks off at the street, at the 22
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post office entrance on the other side, with its open patio where four ladies stand talking and smoking and laughing through the smoke. How he would love a cigarette just now. He hasn’t had one in about thirty years.
Holly remarks that the coffee’s proving to be too acid for her stomach. She has never been the type to worry about her health. She takes a long drink of her water. “I don’t know what to do,” she says, talking about Fiona. “This morning she threw a water glass at me. A tumbler.
Just hurled it, pitched it at me. It broke on the dining-room floor and it’s still lying there.”
“I’ll come clean it up,” he says. He’s serious. If it will solve anything, he’s willing to try it. There’s the dignity of working with one’s hands. This morning, in the rectory, he gave Mrs. Eddings the day off and cleaned the whole house himself. At noon, he was down on all fours in the kitchen, scrubbing the floor, wearing an apron belonging to the lady—the one with the cartoon drawing of a cheery-eyed roasted pig with an apple in its mouth—when Father McFadden came in from a stint at the hospital. The curate was appalled and tried not to show it.
“Is there anything I can do, Father?” he asked in a quavering voice. It was exactly as if he’d walked in on Brother Fire while the old priest was performing some privy act.
“No,” the Monsignor answered simply. “I’m almost done.”
Now, he offers a slightly conspiratorial smile to Holly and says, “I will come over and clean it up, you know. I wasn’t speaking figuratively.”
Holly says, “The woman should clean up her own mess.”
“What caused her to throw it?” he asks in what he knows is a faintly chiding tone.
“I don’t remember. I really don’t. Lately, she doesn’t need a reason. I never know how she’s going to react to anything. Maybe she’ll call you in the middle of the night and tell you.”
Fiona often does call him at night with one or more of her obsessions: he has tolerated it for Holly and because Fiona has always been like a kind of moral barometer for him. Whatever else there is about her, she’s a woman who speaks the unvarnished truth. When, early in his time in this parish, he first knew her, he thought she must be some kind of savant about it all: he could never have believed anyone could t h a n k s g i v i n g n i g h t
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be so penetrating about what kinds of untruth were taking place around her. The trouble is that when she chooses to overindulge with wine, her discernment suffers, yet he has to listen to her in any case.
“I never knew our dear Fiona to be anything but direct,” he says.
Holly shakes her head, giving forth a little smirking laugh. “By the way, she would kill me for telling you this, but she always thought you were a Socialist, and a terrible influence on me.”
He leans back in his chair as if having heard something quite surprising. “Is that so?” But there’s no real surprise in his tone. He’s actually grinning slightly. He laces his fingers together in his lap, thinking about how Fiona might react to his leaving. Holly stares. “What?” she says.
“Pardon?” says the priest.
“What was that? Something crossed your mind. I saw it.” Holly has a kind of radar of the emotions.
He says, “Actually, I’m thinking of l
eaving the priesthood.”
She stares.
“Well, you know, retiring. Priests do retire sometimes.”
“But this wouldn’t be retiring, would it.”
He looks at his hands, the veins there. “No, right. In fact, you’ve guessed it.”
“Well, old friend,” Holly says, “I won’t say I’m not surprised.”
“A function of my age,” he tells her. “Perhaps it’ll pass.”
“I don’t feel old, because I don’t feel tired,” Holly says.
Brother Fire ponders this for a moment. This morning, over breakfast, young Father McFadden wanted to discuss a recruiting idea for more altar boys. He was waiting for the thirteen present members to arrive, along with a camp bus, for a journey up to a monastery in the West Virginia mountains. Something he’d worked very hard to arrange—
parents’ permissions, insurance coverage, the rental of the bus, the tour of the monastery—and the old priest had felt remiss for not being of more help. “I thought I’d arrange more outings like today’s if that meets with your approval,” Father McFadden said, spooning oatmeal into his mouth. “When I was a boy, being an altar boy was a big prize. You got to go on field trips like today’s, and there was a certain amount of status attached to it—you know, advancement.”
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Brother Fire reflected that his curate was still a boy. He smiled at him and said, “I think that might be fun. Anything I can do to help?”
Now, he glances over at Holly sipping her water, and feels the urge to unburden himself even more. He allows himself the statement of a truth he has, in fact, suspected for years: “I sometimes think I was meant to live alone.”
“I’m sure Fiona was,” says Holly. And so she has already left the subject of his possible exit from the priesthood.
“It’s been strange, over this past year,” he says. “Seeing her in her old place in the front pew. It’s as if she never left. She seems to dote on my every word.”
“Oh, she’s always thought the world of you as her priest,” Holly says.
“Don’t get me wrong. But she’s also been convinced that politically, like me, you’re only a couple of yards to the right of Trotsky.” She chuckles at her own figure of speech.
They sit quietly for a while, a pleasant silence. The world goes on with its obsessions all around them. Across the way, the women are beginning to disperse. Two of them are starting off together. Holly takes another long swig of water, and then sets the glass down with a decided clunk. She’s finished with it. “I think I can get some prominent people in the area to be involved,” she tells him. “Especially if I have your help.”
“What would you do?”
She stares, narrow-eyed.
“All right. What would we do?” he says.
“Letter-writing, maybe a little door-to-door. Maybe a little standing in doors. Maybe even a little sitting.” She smiles. Twenty-nine years ago, they camped with a crowd of others for fifteen days in the downstairs lobby of the Bureau of Indian Affairs.
“I’m so old, dear. I have to say that the energy is flagging a little. I am tired, you see. And you know, to tell you the truth, just between you and me, Father McFadden is fairly exhausting to live with.”
“So we’re essentially contending with the same kind of problem.”
He grins out of one side of his mouth, nodding slightly. It is such a pretty day, really. He wishes he felt better. He wishes he could tell her more about his present difficulty—part of the upset of it is simply that t h a n k s g i v i n g n i g h t
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it could have such an unraveling effect on him, rob him of sleep as it has, depriving him of any kind of peace. But he knows it would worry her, and it isn’t in his nature to trouble anyone. “Well,” he says. “I’d better get back to the rectory. Young Father McFadden will be coming in from his field trip with the altar boys and he always needs bolster-ing after being with that particular group. Poor man. Black Irish, you know. Human foibles upset him.” The priest is indeed dreading the afternoon with Father McFadden, who actually is afflicted not with melancholy, like the Black Irish, but with ebullience, a kind of wellspring of excited idealism that suffers whenever he’s thrust among the rough and unidealistic—and perhaps there’s no species on earth less idealistic than a fifteen-year-old boy.
Holly talks about Oliver Ward’s visit, Fiona’s behavior about the money. Brother Fire rubs his eyes, then sips the last of the espresso.
“I’m at the end of my rope,” Holly says.
“I’ve been having trouble concentrating,” he tells her, as if he’s reporting a curiosity. He smiles, telling it. Some part of him would be relieved if she were to say that she’s experiencing something similar. He goes on: “Lately, you know, my mind’s a jumble of everything I’ve been told.”
“Good Lord,” says Holly, who understands his duties. “That must be some jumble. No wonder you’re thinking of leaving.”
They say nothing for another little space. A breeze kicks up a spiral of dust in the empty lot next door, where construction has begun on an IHOP.
“Do you ever look at something like this,” Holly says, “and feel a sense of complete astonishment at human industry?”
“Well, no,” the priest tells her.
“You want to talk about your trouble. And I’m making pompous observations.”
“It’s something I ought to be able to shoulder alone,” he says. But he begins brooding about it, even as he shrugs it off to his friend.
The scary thing is how unexpectedly it arose, out of nothing he could name or discern. A man named Petit, who teaches math, and is an assistant principal at the local high school, was on the other side of the screen, confessing to having impure thoughts about one of his students.
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Everybody loves Mr. Petit. Kindly. Softhearted. Resourceful Mr. Petit.
Passionate about his work, a dedicated and devoted educator. He lives in an apartment not far from the church. A widower more than twelve years now, and childless.
I see myself reaching out and holding him. Just a hug. But I can’t stop seeing it.
I’m not sure that qualifies as impure thoughts.
No, but I indulge in them. I go to sleep with them. Thinking about how it would be to have him with me.
Do you mean sexually?
No. Yes. No. Just to protect. Keep—keep warm.
Pray for strength, take a long walk each morning if you can, and say a Rosary each evening for the next nine weeks. I want you to call me if you experience any kind of crisis about this. The number’s listed.
The nights are the worst, Father.
This does not surprise me.
I’m not a bad man, Father.
No. You wouldn’t be here if you were.
When the priest pulled the little sliding door shut, he felt a surprising urge to remind the poor man not to forget to call, not from wanting to help but purely from the wish to know what might happen next. It stopped him. He had always felt, when he read or heard of others with this problem, that it was a matter of failed concentration, like losing the thread of meaning in a prayer. That evening of Petit’s confession, he sat in the dark, both doors shut, hands in his lap, unable to turn away the sensation of hunger for the sordid details.
For some reason beyond knowing—age, or circumstance, or weari-ness, or undiagnosed illness—he has entered a zone of detachment. It frightens him. And, in the night, it haunts him.
Hearing confessions has become an ordeal.
Last night, he woke from some nightmare, the kind that wake you as they vanish, and he thought of poor Mr. Petit at the high school. The thought was now redolent of the scare of the dream, whatever it was, and he became rather distressingly agitated and sad-hearted—he could have said so many other things to the man—for instance, he could have t h a n k s g i v i n g n i g h t
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said that affection, e
ven when it is colored with longing, is only human, and not to be despised.
But then he stopped himself from the sin of being scrupulous, of expecting perfection, demanding more than God provides.
He labors to do that now, turning to his friend Holly and attempting to give her an untroubled smile.
“Well,” she says. “I think I’ll let you tell Fiona about these thoughts you’re having about—um, retirement.”
“Oh, please don’t mention anything about this to her.”
Holly gives him a look of friendly annoyance. “How long have we known each other?”
t h e c o m f o r t s o f h o m e
1.
Holly and her aunt Fiona Gerhin moved into the house on Temporary Road at the beginning of last winter, having spent the last several years in Scotland, where Holly had moved with her third husband, an elderly Scotsman named Michael Grey, the last name pronounced, by Mr.
Grey, as Gree. He was the sort of man who insisted on that one thing, and about everything else was as tractable as a little boy looking for friends—a jolly man, large and round and generous, and he provided Holly with exactly the temper and passion she needed. He did, indeed, have a temper, and a highly developed sense of humor. Holly’s letters home were full of reports of his tirades and escapades, which somehow managed to be both hilarious and disconcerting. She loved the edginess of it all, and the excitement. He was unpredictable, a gifted man in an argument, since his verbal resources seemed to increase in direct proportion to his displeasure. Injustice in all its forms—up to and including casual rudeness to waitresses and all the various populations of people in service, as he called them—sent him into towering rages, and he could be an adventure in a restaurant. Actually, Holly has always been like that, too. They were suited to each other. They both believed that t h a n k s g i v i n g n i g h t
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there’s a special place in hell reserved for the kind of person who sends a steak back to the kitchen if it is not cooked exactly to specification. (Of course, the fact that Fiona is one of those people is not lost on her niece, or anyone else. Only last week she got after the manager of a local steak house because her frijoles were, according to her, only a little past being resuscitatable, to use her expression.) After Michael Grey’s demise of a stroke, at ninety-seven, Holly invited her aunt Fiona to join her in the big castle, as she called it (it was a stone cottage, actually, out in the country north of Edinburgh).
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