Saints for All Occasions

by J. Courtney Sullivan

  She was ashamed to recall how they felt relief at being excluded and simply moved forward. They already prayed for their sisters and brothers on the outside, who might not have time to properly pray for themselves. If some of them let their thoughts linger on the sisters a moment longer than usual at evening prayers, that was all.

  Some weeks later, Mother Cecilia came across a story in her Catholic news bulletin. It concerned reiki sessions, which their Mother Ava had practiced for years. The bishops had issued a statement saying that reiki was incompatible with the church’s teachings. This had been sent to Catholic hospitals and health-care facilities, but the directive had never reached the abbey.

  “She performs this therapy on the homeless. On women who are going through chemo and poor people from the community who work on their feet all day,” Mother Cecilia said when she brought it to the abbess.

  “We’ll consider it a warning,” Mother Placid said, folding up the paper. “We won’t trouble her with this. It doesn’t apply to us anyway.”

  But not long after came an order from Bishop Dolan, handed down from Rome: Mother Ava must stop. There was no biblical justification for her actions.

  Mother Cecilia wondered how Rome had learned of it. From Bishop Dolan, she supposed. He had an obsession with the abbey, with calling them out for the most absurd offenses. It was because Mother Placid had embarrassed him once, decades ago. He was a fragile, humorless man and he never could forget it.

  They were forced to tell Mother Ava that her work must cease.

  She wept.

  When she left the room, Mother Placid began to pace.

  “After everything these men have done to harm bodies and souls, this is what they choose to focus on?”

  “I know,” Mother Cecilia said. “It feels like something essential has been lost.”

  All over the world, the story was the same. The church of her childhood was in tatters. It made her heartsick to think of it.

  The Vatican didn’t seem to notice. They had declared it the Year for Priests.

  Three weeks passed before Mother Ava came to them with an idea.

  “I’ve looked to the scriptures and I’ve found this,” she said, opening her Bible, turning to the page. “Mark 10:16. And He took them in His arms and began blessing them, laying His hands on them. A biblical justification.”

  “Very good,” Mother Placid said.

  Mother Ava resumed her work. They did not speak of it again.

  Weeks passed before Bishop Dolan found out. He was raging with anger.

  “Reiki is forbidden for everyone, but as contemplatives you are meant to be secluded, separate. Some of your nuns are living too close to the outside. We have been through it before.”

  “Yes,” Mother Placid said. “And in the past, that openness was what saved the abbey from extinction.”

  “This is the last in a long line of infractions,” he said. “We need to discuss the abbey’s future. I’ll come after New Year, when I’m back from Italy. I’ll discuss it with Rome.”

  He had returned a week ago. They knew the day was imminent.

  When Mother Placid came on the line, Mother Cecilia smiled at the sound of her voice.

  “Has he arrived yet?” she asked.

  “Not yet,” Mother Placid said. “But never mind him. How is it going?”

  “It’s hard. Nora is so angry with me. I don’t know why she asked me to come.”

  “Keep trying. Try again tomorrow.”

  “I will. But I’m angry too. Do I have the right? I still feel that if she had just done what I said, this never would have happened. It was so awful, seeing him that way.”

  “I’m sure.”

  “It makes me question everything she did. Everything I did. Ultimately, I have to blame myself.”

  “You’re not to blame,” Mother Placid said. “You did what you could do. Everyone here is thinking of you. It’s quite a strange thing, having one of our own away. How does it feel, being out there in the world?”

  “It feels…odd.”

  When she was young, she had dreamed of leaving, every day. Now a year or two might pass without that feeling. And when it came, she knew how to manage. She had reached an age where there was no place for her but the abbey.

  Once, she thought her brother had been lucky, inheriting the family farm. But when they discussed it in their letters as adults, she realized that he wanted to leave Ireland. It was obligation that kept him home. She thought of her brother and sister now. Of the three of them, she believed she might be the only one who found happiness in the end.

  Every visit she made beyond the abbey gates was at the behest of the abbey and the Vatican. But Mother Cecilia thought she had led an extraordinary life. When she was in her forties, the abbey voted to send a handful of nuns to the University of Vermont to help sustain the farm. Mother Cecilia was among them. She went back and forth to campus every day in full habit, a middle-aged nun in a rush of young coeds. She got her degree the day she turned forty-seven, and three years later, she got another. A master’s in animal science and agronomy. Mother Stella Maris got a doctorate in microbiology in the end, which she applied to her cheesemaking. Mother Anne got her degree in plant science. Mother Cecilia remembered thinking of her sister then. How Nora had wanted so badly for her to be educated. How, had life turned out differently, she would have been proud.

  She and Mother Placid both continued to work with young people, a passion they had always shared. Mother Cecilia was director of the internship program, which was for laypeople, some of whom ended up joining them eventually. Young adults now were more cautious than ever before. They asked her whether the abbey had insurance, whether she could write them a letter of recommendation if they did a sterling job.

  The previous generation hadn’t thought so much about the future. Today, she could just feel the weight on them, their strong desire to do the best thing, even when they didn’t know what that was. They were living in an age of great anxiety. A young woman in a parlor told her she repeated the mantra We are too blessed to be depressed over and over each morning. Mother Cecilia didn’t think that seemed particularly helpful. If you were, you were.

  “How is Sister Alma feeling about her vows?” she asked now.

  “I’m sure she’ll be eager to talk to you when you get back,” Mother Placid said. “She’s excited, but nervous, of course.”

  Different parts of their lifestyle were harder for different women. Mother Claudette was an only child. Her devotion to God was never in question. But her life at its core had been a solitary one. Now she was forced to live in community with thirty-six other women. Mother Andrea had attended both Chapin and Radcliffe—she knew the ways women had in one another’s close company. Her issue was the monotony of the work.

  A woman of Mother Cecilia’s age had never experienced all the technological advances that someone like Sister Alma took for granted in her life before the abbey. She had never had an email account, so she didn’t know what it was not to have one. But some of the young ones struggled when the Internet was taken away all at once, as if it were a drug they needed to be weaned off of. She and Mother Placid had talked endlessly about the best way to handle this, and they still weren’t sure.

  For many, sex was the last obstacle, the thing that could not be overcome. Others agonized over giving up the idea of marriage, motherhood. Some left because of it.

  She had never once told a pondering nun her own story. When they asked what her final struggle had been, she spoke about a sweater she had not been allowed to keep, she spoke about a cup of hot lemonade that had gotten her in trouble. She never told them there had been a child.

  She had long ago decided that this was a lie she told for the good of the abbey. Not even a lie, but something she left out. A sin of omission. The story would only be a distraction. Now she wondered if it was wrong of her. She had asked Nora to tell the truth when she herself never had.

  “Try to sleep in tomorrow,” Mother Placid
said. “Your one and only chance.”

  “No. I’ve set the alarm for two.”

  “Oh, foolish woman.”

  “I’m sure I’ll be up anyway.”

  She intended to keep to the schedule as much as possible while she was here. She had always been an early riser. Her faith in God was renewed by the simple return of morning, containing the seeds of the day ahead, bringing with it new chances for redemption, for grace.

  21

  WHEN THE WAKE WAS OVER, Nora handed Brian a twenty.

  “Stop for some extra ice on the way home, will you?” she said. “Two bags.”

  She touched his cheek. “And don’t run off again.”

  Being the baby of the family enabled him to disappear. When he was seven, eight years old, he’d slip under the table at big dinners and lie flat on his back on the rug, listening. No one ever told him not to. He wondered now if his parents had even noticed. By the time he was born, they were too tired to be as strict as they once were. He had an entirely different type of childhood from the others.

  He went to the 7-Eleven. When he reached home, a dozen cars were parked outside the house. Brian slowed down, but he couldn’t bring himself to stop. He turned the car around. He drove down the hill and then followed Nantasket Avenue to Main Street, all the way out to Pemberton Point, where Hull High School stood. He pulled the car around back to the parking lot. When he reached the baseball diamond, he shut off the engine. The sky was black and starless. Brian stared out into nothing. This was the last point of land in town. If you hit a long home run to left field, you could watch it drop straight into the sea.

  He’d avoided this spot since he came home from Ohio seven years ago. It was the last place he had left still full of promise, full of the expectation that good things were coming his way. Patrick never missed a game. He drove out here all the way from Dorchester two, three times a week and stood beside Nora, the pair of them whooping and hollering, embarrassing the crap out of Brian. He wished he could hear them now.

  He thought of Coach O’Leary. I’m just waiting for you to take the reins, he’d said. Brian told Patrick about it, expecting him to say that the job was beneath him, not the kind of thing a former pro should waste his time on. But Pat got a huge grin on his face and said, Perfect. You’ve got to do it.

  Maybe he was right. The bar had nothing to offer Brian now. And he felt a little spark of something, being here again. He hadn’t expected that.

  He drove home after a while. He went up the walkway, bracing himself before opening the front door. Coats had been flung over the banister. There was a barrage of voices, conversations overlapping, the occasional word or eruption of laughter rising above the rest.

  The neighborhood ladies were setting the dining room table. At one end were two neat stacks of plates and a basket of plastic utensils, each set wrapped in a paper napkin and tied with a bow. At the other end was the hot food—a pink ham, a steaming tray of lasagna. Every inch of the table was full. Sandwiches had been arranged in tiers, sliced cheese and crackers were spread out like a fan, cold salads had been spooned evenly into glass bowls. There was something appealing about the perfect order of it all, the abundance. They would eat their grief before it swallowed them.

  Bridget’s dog was under the table, waiting for a scrap to drop. Rocco glanced up at Brian, moving only his eyes.

  Brian was looking back, pondering whether to give him some cheese, when Betty Joyce bumped into him on her way to the kitchen.

  “Oops, pardon me,” she said.

  The sight of her made him stare at his shoes, even now. As a teenager, he had logged so many hours in the attic, staring out the tiny window at the top of the stairs, which looked down on the ocean in the distance and, closer to home, right into Betty Joyce’s side yard. Many mornings in summertime she could be spotted there, naked in her outdoor shower after a run on the beach.

  Patrick had been the one to discover it, right after the family moved in and he claimed the attic for his bedroom. Up there, sneaking one of Charlie’s beers, he realized he could just make out the white orbs of Betty Joyce’s breasts, bobbing up and down as she massaged shampoo into her hair. In due time, this information was passed along to his brothers, one to the next, like Patrick’s old fake ID.

  “Sorry, Mrs. Joyce,” Brian mumbled now.

  “You’re fine, sweetheart.”

  Last night, everyone stayed at the bar until four. He slept at Ashley’s. In the morning, after she and her roommates went to work, Brian found himself not hungover but still drunk. She had told him he could stay all day if he wanted. But he knew his mother was waiting. Brian sat on Ashley’s sofa for twenty minutes. He let the tears fall and didn’t bother to wipe them away.

  At home, he had seven beers while he waited for everyone to arrive. He threw up twice at O’Dell’s, before the wake got started, and vowed to slow down. But standing here now, he felt ready for another drink.

  Patrick’s favorite stories were always stories of drunken debauchery. There was the time they were driving down Nantasket Avenue in Pat’s old Jeep and he had to stop short to avoid hitting a cat crossing the street. Pat didn’t have a seat belt on. He went flying out onto the road, landing with a thud. Then he stood and shook himself off like a cartoon character, jogged back to the slow-rolling Jeep, jumped in, and drove on as if nothing had happened. There was the time Brian woke up in a bush in someone’s front yard in Cambridge holding a Chinese takeout container. White rice in his hair, a purple bruise spreading across one knee. He had no idea how he’d gotten there. When he called Patrick to tell him, Patrick howled with laughter. “Happens to the best of us, kid.”

  Until now, all the stories were funny stories because they began and ended the same way: they had acted like jackasses, but everything had turned out fine. Occasionally it occurred to Brian that he had a problem that might need to be addressed, this thing that had afflicted his people for generations. He could choose to fight it. Or he could admit that he was one of them and carry on, leaving the problem for someone else to solve.

  At work, he saw people wrestling with it all the time. Guys teetering on that blurry line between pleasure and the sick sort of need that could undo you. The ones who came back night after night kept one another drinking. Stories that might otherwise be considered tragic wake-up calls were, in their hands, just punch lines. When someone left the group to sober up, they closed ranks and never talked about that person. Or else they said he was crazy, a drama queen, that he was just looking for attention. Brian could hear in their voices how much they needed it to be true. The perfect drinker was the one who could go on all night, never getting sloppy, but never being dull either. Switching over to seltzer was considered a character flaw, but so was falling backward off the bar stool.

  He wondered in those moments if there was something shameful to what he did for work. His presence, as he served them, practically pouring the liquid down their throats, gave the impression that someone was in control and would catch them before anything truly terrible happened.

  Fergie had turned up wasted at the funeral home. Brian watched him wander in. He had never seen the guy in a suit before. He wondered if Fergie had borrowed it. The sleeves of the jacket fell to his fingertips. The pant legs pooled at the floor.

  Fergie approached the coffin, stood over it for a long time. He spoke with Bridget and Natalie, Julia and John, and then he came to Brian. He reeked of booze.

  “Well, Raf,” Fergie said, stroking his chin. “I’ve seen him look worse.”

  Brian burst out laughing. It was the first time he had laughed in two days, the first time he remembered the sound of Patrick’s laughter. He looked to his mother to see if she had heard, but he couldn’t tell one way or the other.

  Brian’s buddies from high school were there, but they stood too far away, shuffling in place, eager to escape, as if death itself were contagious. The crowd from the bar came and left quickly, and he was relieved to see them go. It felt strange being in t
heir company out of context, like running into your third grade teacher on a date at the mall.

  Fergie said he wouldn’t come back to the house. The family had never liked him much. Once or twice, his name came up in conversation and Bridget said, “That poor kid.” Brian never knew what she meant. He supposed she thought it was pathetic that Fergie was still tending bar at his age.

  Someone pushed past him into the dining room, a palm on his upper arm. Brian looked up and realized he was still holding a bag of ice in each hand. The ice was melting. Water pooled on the hardwood below.

  In the kitchen, Nora stood at the stove, stirring something. She had the saddest look on her face. Then she noticed him there.

  “Straight into the cooler,” she said, pointing with her free hand.

  “You doing okay, Ma? You want to sit down for a while?”

  “Why does everyone want me to sit?”

  Her tone was almost right, but it didn’t convince him.

  His father had joked once that he had the most important job when it came to wakes—Charlie kept the running tally of grudges, of people who had skipped out. Nora did the rest.

  She turned fifty when Brian was in the fifth grade. All his friends had mothers in their thirties. Those other mothers looked to Nora to tell them how to organize a bake sale or how many chaperones they’d need for a field trip. She was a mother, even to them. He had never known her to get so much as a cold. She was up every day at six; she had her routines. She would still climb a ladder to clean leaves out of the gutters when she didn’t think Brian was getting around to it fast enough.

  He watched her now. The rush of all this was meant to be a defense against what she would have to feel, eventually. But he could tell from her face that it wasn’t working. Brian wished he could take her away from here. She had just lost her son. She should be screaming in the streets, pulling her hair out, making a scene. Not arranging stuffed mushrooms on a plate, so that they were evenly spaced.