The Road at My Door

by Lori Windsor Mohr

  “That’s more like it. Come, sit. You cannot pass up this sinful indulgence.”

  You call CAKE a sinful indulgence? What about making love to Mom right in our house? How can the two of you sit here drinking coffee as if some seismic shift hasn’t reordered the layers of the earth?

  How otherworldly it felt being with the two people whose presence I had sought more than any other. Until last night. What a fool I’d been. There had never been any secrets between me and FD. There never would be. His secrets were Mom’s secrets, one and the same, the way it was supposed to be with her and Dad.

  It took all my effort to choke down the cake, so heavy was its betrayal, so bitter its truth. Swallowing Styrofoam would’ve been easier. FD and Mom resumed whatever conversation they’d been having earlier with gossip and laughter as if I weren’t there.

  How naive I’d been the first day they met to assume FD could stave off the power of Mom’s charisma. Other men couldn’t. A priest was still a man I supposed. The one man Mom shouldn’t have was the one she wanted. Now she had him. Now she could thumb her nose at all the women in the parish who supposedly had a crush on Father Donnelly. She knew something they didn’t—Sir Lancelot had chosen his Guinevere.

  *

  Dad answered the phone on the second ring. It was Father Donnelly. The calls were always for Mom. He talked for a minute to whoever answered the phone. He would ask about what was new at school—or work in Dad’s case—followed by some cornball joke, the hearty laughter on our end confirming his identity.

  Father Donnelly was only five years younger than Mom. His taste for lame humor sometimes made him seem like a teenager. Dad said his youthfulness came from not having to pay a mortgage, and that maybe he should’ve been a priest, too. He didn’t hold the mortgage-free status against Father Donnelly. The two played golf every Sunday afternoon.

  Dad being duped, by our family priest no less, broke my heart. My secret felt heavier than ever. At least it had put everything in perspective. Divorce wasn’t the worst thing that could happen after all.

  *

  I paused for my routine check halfway up the back stairs. His car was there, as usual. We were the only family in the parish who understood the meaning behind the Agent 007 glued on the driver’s side door above the handle. It was the code name Kit and I had assigned. My cuckold father had offered FD a legitimate avenue of deceit the night he transferred the garage door opener. Kit and I decided the secret agent code suited him. It was a prescient moniker.

  My stomach was a pit of acid at the image of him and Mom making love. I didn’t know how much longer I could keep the secret. It was a monster eating me up inside. There had to be someone to confide in, someone who would know what to do. Kit would be risky. She might just see it as an irresistible opportunity to blackmail Mom, get the upper hand once and for all. That was a gamble I would have to take. Once she recovered from the shock, Kit would know how to move forward.

  I finished my homework and waited for her to get home from school. Kit moseyed into the bedroom an hour before dinner. She threw me a glare. This wasn’t going to be easy. Kit sat cross-legged on the floor and extracted her trove of movie magazines under the bed. She flipped through each one before designating it to one of two piles.

  “Whatcha doin’, Kit?”

  “What does it look like I’m doing? I’m sorting through these to swap with Jackie.” My sister was as sassy as her ducktail haircut.

  I moved to the edge of the bed. “I have to tell you something.”

  “You have something to tell me? What could a child like you possibly have to tell me?”

  “I think—” The words wouldn’t come. My throat went dry.

  “You think what?”

  “I think there’s something going on…between Mom and FD.”

  Kit stopped sorting. The shock must’ve hit her hard. “Well duhhh. How long did it take you to figure that one out?”

  “You mean you know?”

  Her voice dropped. “Yeah, I know.”

  “Does Daddy know?”

  “No, Daddy doesn’t know. And you’re not going to tell him.”

  “But—”

  Kit turned to me with squinted eyes. “Listen, Reese, and you listen good. Daddy is not going to find out. What Mom and FD do behind his back is their own damn business. As long as it keeps Mom off my case, I couldn’t care less what that bitch does. So just leave it alone.”

  “How can we not tell Dad? He has to do something.” I tried to curb a growing sense of desperation. Kit had to do better than tell me to leave it alone. How could I keep such a secret?

  She cocked her head. “I swear, you’re such a child. You’re in such a hot hurry to tell Dad? What do you think will happen? I’ll paint the picture for you. You blab to Dad. He confronts Mom. She refuses to give FD up. What’s Dad supposed to do then? I’ll tell you what…he shoots FD! Dad goes to prison for attempted murder of a priest. We never see him again.”

  My mouth fell open. She waited for the scene of disaster to sink in.

  “And Dad’s getting a life sentence would just be the beginning. It would be headline news in all the papers once the police figured why he felt justified shooting a priest. Mom would never forgive you for exposing the affair because then she really would have to give FD up. Father Sebastian would make sure he got transferred to a parish far away.

  “Mom would be an outcast. Everyone we know would hate her…hate us…for getting the most popular priest in the world sent away. That wouldn’t matter because we wouldn’t be able to afford the Palisades anymore after Dad lost his job. We’d be forced to move back to our old house. Mom would be humiliated facing the neighbors she was so snooty to. She would hate you a hundred times more than she hates me.

  “You would be to blame for ruining our lives…Dad’s, Mom’s, FD’s, mine. Is that what you want? All because you can’t keep a stupid secret?”

  I looked at her in horror.

  “Grow up, Reese. Real life isn’t like Father Knows Best or any other show on TV. Well, maybe The Twilight Zone. Just keep this whole thing to yourself. I mean do not tell a living soul unless you want to destroy this family and be ostracized forever.”

  My sister resumed her magazines sorting. I sat on the bed, flummoxed. Kit had been my last hope, my only hope. Not only was she not going to help, she’d made it crystal clear I should do nothing. Nothing except keep the secret.

  Kit was talking to me.

  “It’s too bad you had to find out about them. That’ll teach you not to eavesdrop.”

  Was she really putting me down for how I found out? As if that mattered. “It’s going to be hard, the secret.”

  “You’re the one who thinks it’s so bitchin’ that FD sneaks over here all the time and you’ve kept that secret. Just think of this as an extra twist at the end. If you can keep the first part, there’s no reason you can’t keep the second.” She tossed a magazine into my lap. “It’s brand new. There’s a spread on your beloved Troy Donahue.”

  I was too numb to speak.

  Kit walked to the door. She turned to me with a soft look on her face. I thought she might say something comforting. Wrong. Whatever feeling she’d had was fleeting. “You better not cry on my magazine.”

  I didn’t cry on Kit’s magazine. I swallowed the secret, the burden of it cutting me off from whatever happiness was left in my world.

  Kit kept the secret to free herself from Mom. I would keep it to hold on to her.

  I would not betray my mother. I would not destroy my family. Even if it killed me.

  4 See No Evil

  The end of school on Monday came too soon. I leaned my head against the window in the back of the bus. The autumn sky hung low, late afternoon sun fading fast with the end of Daylight Saving Time. Greg didn’t come over as much after school now that track season was in full swing. It was just as well. Faking my mood required too much effort. I was sure he could sense something different about me.

  I still
wanted to go to the freshman dance in February. For those few hours I would force myself to forget about Mom and FD. A miserable girl is no fun. It felt like a million years ago that Greg and I had run sprints on the beach, buried each other in sand. Now I wasn’t sure I would ever smile again, much less feel playful.

  Brother McPherson’s class was the only time anyone talked about anything that mattered, anything that had to do with me. It was also the only time I didn’t feel completely alone. I had become less aware of Greg’s presence in class as I glommed on to any morsel of how to cope.

  “‘The Road Less Traveled’, what can we conclude about Frost’s meaning. Miss Cavanaugh?”

  Greg caught my attention with the smile he’d been trying to send all period. I startled at my name and turned to Brother McPherson. What was the question? The meaning?

  “I think he meant the road less traveled was the better one.”

  “Because—”

  “Because in the last stanza, he says ‘making all the difference…’ the road he chose was the right one.”

  “Ah! But does our narrator say anything about the kind of difference? Good? Bad? What makes you say he made the ‘right’ choice?”

  “I thought something awful must’ve happened in his life that made him want to be alone…I mean…made him not want to run into anybody.” I slid lower in the desk. “Maybe that’s wrong.”

  Brother McPherson gazed at me long after I answered. He spoke in a soft voice, as if he and I were the only ones in the room. “Everyone interprets poetry based on his or her own experience, Reese. There is no right or wrong answer, only the personal meaning you attribute to his words.”

  He could see right through me, I was sure of it. He spoke to the class. “The narrator decides to save traveling on the first road for another day, though he suspects he'll never actually come back. There’s a wistful quality in choosing one road over the other. Frost is describing the nature of human experience. We all face tough choices and have to live with the consequences.”

  Choose the right road, Reese. If you get this wrong, you’ll destroy everyone.

  *

  The Church welcomed qualified professionals willing to volunteer their time under the supervision of the parish priest. At FD’s urging, Mom had enrolled in graduate school at Mount St. Mary’s College. Successful completion of the one-year, post baccalaureate program in Marriage and Family Counseling meant Mom could be certified. If she doubled up on classes she would be eligible for the exam in six months, which meant she could help FD with people from the church and start seeing them on her own that much sooner. That was what she did, doubled up.

  Dad was all for it. Whatever it took to keep Mom happy. Now when FD came over, instead of gossiping with characters in fiction as stand-ins, Mom and FD talked about the problems of real people, which always came down to one thing—sex, within the context of the Church of course. What did a bunch of celibate priests know about marriage, Mom asked him?

  If you listened long enough to their conversations, you would think every problem in the world boiled down to sex. I knew that was just them. I didn’t know much about war, but I was pretty sure the Russians wouldn’t drop a nuclear bomb over sex.

  After a while I began to understand the bantering between Mom and FD wasn’t about making a point. Their sparring was a Tango, the real communication transcending words, meanings transmitted on a level having nothing to do with language. It’s as if each of them had been lonely all their lives, wandering the earth in search of the one person with whom they could truly connect. Mom certainly hadn’t found this extraordinary fusion in her husband. FD apparently hadn’t found it in his God.

  But find it they did—in each other. They knew it, and we knew it, too.

  I knew it the first day they met.

  *

  Two weeks before Christmas, Mom announced that Father Donnelly would be treating us to The Sound of Music as his gift to the family. He’d bought tickets for a Saturday night performance at the Music Center. Mom could hardly contain her excitement over an evening of culture in downtown Los Angeles. She would brag about it at church in high-brow style and a haughty tone of ho hum, like this was something we did every week, though she would leave out the best part, the part about FD.

  It had never occurred to me that a priest might have a salary. I wondered how he paid for the gifts he brought us, the latest a soundtrack of the The Sound of Music. For two weeks, Julie Andrews had been in residence, all of us singing along when Mom put the album on the Hi Fi.

  The story told in song became one more form of coded communication for Mom and FD. With his big goofy grin, FD would orchestrate, hands in the air, and croon to Mom as if she were Maria and he the widower infatuated with the would-be nun turned governess, two roles for which my mother was exquisitely ill-suited.

  Our big night was central to every conversation as the date got close. The evening would begin with dinner at the Bel Air Hotel, an extravagance Dad never could have offered with me and Kit in private school. The famous restaurant was less than half an hour down Sunset Boulevard in Beverly Hills. It was hard to believe I had only seen it on the pages of Kit’s movie magazines.

  Three days before our extravaganza, I ran up the back stairs after school without checking the garage. There was no need. Now that Mom was in school, FD was in our kitchen by three o’clock most weekdays, the two of them drinking coffee at the table over Mom’s books.

  “Ah, speaking of the devil, here she is now. Would you please join us in here, Miss Cavanaugh?”

  Mom and FD were ensconced on the couch in deep conversation. They paused as I approached, FD turning his attention to me. I knew the game plan. Mom had laid it out for me not long after her return to school. Once I had said hello and exchanged chit chat, I was to disappear unless otherwise notified. The chit chat would be brief and never extend beyond the point at which Mom grew irritated, a temperamental shift FD was alert to and honored. He knew her anger would come back to me later. Today was one of those times I was otherwise notified to stay.

  Something was definitely up. FD had a big prankish grin. His body twitched with the trademark springiness I’d noticed the first day we met. He was percolating with glee. It looked like he might explode unless he could open the valve to release pressure. Mom sparkled too, the way she always did at his delight in setting the scene for whatever was about to unfold.

  I wasn’t sure how long this would take. Instead of sitting in the club chair I balanced on the arm. Stage set.

  His manner changed from playful to serious. He leaned forward on the couch with hands clasped. “A problem has come up with our outing to The Sound of Music.”

  “What? Are we not going?” Mom didn’t look upset, so I guessed that wasn’t it.

  “Well, that all depends on you.”

  FD launched into his performance. “Here’s the problem: You haven’t got a dress classy enough for the Bel Air Hotel and the Music Center. I might have a solution.” He took a long sip of coffee to pause for effect. “If you will kindly turn around, three boxes await you on the hearth.”

  The rectangular white boxes tied with blue ribbon stood against the wall. I registered passing irritation at the color scheme, a reference to ‘girls in white dresses with blue satin sashes’ from The Sound of Music. It was Mom’s favorite song. That’s how well I knew the man. Just like the big Life Secret he’d shared about real friends coming to you, this little drama was every bit as much for Mom as for me, if not more.

  “Now, if you’ll be good enough to open the first one, I think you’ll begin to understand the predicament. I expect you to handle it without too much trouble.”

  He bubbled with excitement. I thought for a moment he might levitate. Mom sat with one leg tucked under her dress. She squeezed his forearm, beaming.

  I untied the blue satin on the first box. There, under layers of pink tissue, lay a glorious crepe dress. I lifted it out with a gasp as the folds opened. This was no ordinary creation.
A movie star would wear such a dress—black crepe in a knee-length sheath with long sleeves ending in white French cuffs. A wide ribbon of white flowed from the empire waist all the way down the front, forming a perfect inverted white V against the black.

  “It’s the most beautiful dress I’ve ever seen!”

  “Well, now, you see, that’s the problem. Maybe it is and maybe it isn’t. You’d better have a look behind Door No. 2.”

  Mom giggled. I opened the second box. It was another black and white number, this one raw silk with a big white stripe running perpendicular across the bodice and another stripe down the front in the form of a giant T, very mod, very Julie Christie. I held it against my chest and rocked back and forth on my feet, unable to contain my thrill.

  FD grinned at Mom. “Would you agree the client is responding rather well to therapy?”

  I felt them watching as I evaluated and compared details of each dress.

  “You’re not done yet, young lady. You’d better open the third box.”

  I practically ripped the thing open. This box revealed pink mohair with a fitted bodice and three quarter length sleeves. Attached at the waist of the A-line skirt was a darker pink ribbon that tied in back and trailed to the hem.

  “Do I really get to keep one?”

  “You do indeed, but you certainly can’t choose without trying them on. Why don’t you put on a fashion show for us?”

  Mom was glowing, though her eyes were on FD, not my dresses. Tucking the boxes under my arm, I rushed from the room, dresses and tissue spilling from all sides. Three minutes later I was back. I jumped up and down in the first dress.

  “For gosh sakes, Clarice,” Mom said, “stop bouncing and let’s see how you look.”

  FD stroked his chin in the manner of a professor in deep thought. “Hmmmm. That certainly is pretty on you. Awfully pretty indeed. What do you think, Vivienne?”

  “I want this one,” I blurted before she could answer.

  FD chuckled with his hand in the air, palm facing me. “Now wait. We have to proceed in an orderly fashion here. Let’s at least take a look at the others.”