As Mom and I enter the crowded waiting lounge for overseas flights, our eyes fix upward at the arrival board. We exchange a smile when we see that Alitalia Flight 467 has just arrived, and we’ve escaped the lecture on lateness or common courtesy.
“I’m dying of thirst. You want something, Mom?”
“Sure, sweetie, I’ll take a diet soda. Here.” She hands me a twenty-dollar bill.
Inside the newsstand, unable to resist a sexy woman on the cover of Vogue, I pick up the magazine along with our sodas. Inside the magazine a light-skinned black model reminds me of the flirtatious drag queen at the Lost and Found. I realize there’s no way Dad and I are getting to Sunday tea dance today even though Miss Darla made me promise that I’d come see her again. While waiting to pay the cashier, I fantasize about tonguing her on the dance floor.
As I wander toward the sterile lounge, I look through the glass partition that separates the international terminal from the rest of the airport. Just a month ago, Nic and I were arriving here, bronzed and buzzing with eagerness to have our film developed to relive Greece all over again. I hear her voice in my head: “I hit the jackpot with you, hot stuff.” I miss being the most important person in the whole world to someone. I miss the safety of gripping her waist as she rode us out to the country for a picnic on her motorcycle, my cheek resting on her capable back. I watch the mostly sleepy-looking travelers lugging bags, entering the main waiting area. Behind a large group is Dad, wide awake and marching.
I hustle back to Mom with the ice-cold Tab. Dad speeds through the sliding glass doors—then slows, and discreetly tucks a red handkerchief into his sports coat. Odd, since he doesn’t use colored handkerchiefs—only white. Spotting me, he offers a big open smile, then stops dead in his tracks. I see him see Mom. His face goes frosty, but she presses toward him, full of warmth. I hang back. He pecks her on the cheek, shakes his head blatantly at the futility of her diet soda, and marches up to me.
“I asked that you, and only you, pick me up,” he whispers, with a mixture of disappointment and harshness.
I check to see that Mom didn’t overhear and then make a half-hearted effort to help with his bag.
“No need, dear,” he says, and races away, a horse length ahead of us. Dad is always moving fast, even to places he doesn’t want to go, like home.
I let Mom drive, preferring to sit behind his foul mood rather than next to it. The car is silent until she finally flips on the radio and hums along in her soft low voice.
The dead silence between them hangs heavily until Mom extends an olive branch. “How were things in Rome, dear?”
Dad lets out a big sigh, palm gliding over his prickly flattop.
“Busy,” he says, not looking at her.
“Were you able to attend a papal mass?” she tries with more cheer.
“Woman, yes, I told you I was planning on attending, of course I did. Stop asking such bloody stupid questions!” he fumes while Mom keeps her eyes on the road.
“Let me ask you a question: Have you gotten back on your Weight Watchers?” He dares her to respond.
My body stiffens.
“This week,” she murmurs.
He grabs for the radio dial and shuts it off, nearly ripping the knob off. Silence falls over us again.
A few years ago Dad offered Mom a “chance of a lifetime.”
“Dear, if you lose at least fifty pounds, I will take you on the Around the World Cruise on the QE2,” he said.
So she put away her miniature Weight Watchers scale in a kitchen drawer, next to other rarely used things like the meat timer and the turkey baster, and committed herself to a different kind of starvation. The liquid diet.
Every day for two months, she drank the most putrid-smelling concoction you could imagine. I watched her gag it down, laugh it down, pray it down—all so that she could finally get her husband back. It worked—the liquid diet, that is. My older sisters bought her a whole new wardrobe. I saw her stand in the dining room in a wool gabardine camel-color dress, a size 14, and wondered where my mother had gone. I was fidgety and ashamed to look at her body, which had been masked under Lane Bryant tent dresses for as long as I could remember. For days she waited for Dad to book the cruise, then weeks, then months, too passive to ask for what she had earned, fair and square. He never gave her the trip, nor a compliment. And a year later, she was back in a size 20.
But what makes me just as angry is that the moment we attack him for being cruel, selfish, and a goddamn hypocrite, she will defend him. “Your father is under a lot of pressure with work. But he’s very generous, sending me on trips and to Lourdes every year. Beggars can’t be choosers.”
“We’re having roast beef, right?” I call from the backseat, my voice rising.
“Yes, sweetie. You must be hungry; you didn’t eat after your morning workout.”
Mom never leaves me hungry. And even though she missed so many clues about my childhood, she was keenly aware that Simon was hogging all the Oreo cookies, so she bought me my own bag and hid them from him in the turkey pan.
“Christine, I was doing some thinking whilst I was away, and I know you are busy with your basketball training, but I think a few days a week working in my office is important.” He looks at me through the side-view mirror and nods.
I squirm on the hot leather seat, moving my bare legs away from the intense sun, worried about losing my focus on training and becoming his employee instead of one of his favorite things.
“I think it’s vital that you start to get acquainted with the travel business. I can’t run Holy Pilgrimages forever. Although I do plan to live until one hundred!” Dad’s mood warms.
“It would be nice to drive in with my baby, even if it’s just a day or two,” Mom adds sweetly.
“Christine, let’s plan on an early start in the morning, and then you and I will go to lunch at the University Club to discuss my thoughts for the future,” he states, ignoring Mom. His cruelty to her is at least consistent.
“Sure, Dad, that sounds good,” I lie, knowing that he’ll be ordering a few bottles of pinot grigio and tomorrow’s workout will be ruined.
“That’s a fancy first day,” Mom says, furrowing her brow.
“Dear, this is not intended as a social luncheon!” he blasts her.
She squeezes the steering wheel but says nothing, while I feel queasy at the thought of my future as a Catholic travel agent.
* * *
“I must be hearing things. YOU actually have a summer job? A miracle,” Simon jabs as he helps himself to leftovers on the marble buffet. From my place next to Mom, I stare at a glass Virgin Mary statue resting on the thin wooden ledge that runs around the dining room.
“I train, that’s my job,” I snap, biting down on an ice cube, feeling cocky since I’m a better shooter than Simon.
“Good luck training now. You’ll be lucky to get out of Dad’s office before it gets dark every night,” Simon warns, as he sits down with a full plate on the other side of Mom, next to Margaret, who blows smoke toward the ceiling. My head throbs listening to him.
“I’m not working there every day. Dad just wants me to come in a couple days a week, to start learning the business,” I explain half-heartedly.
“Yeah, yeah, yeah, we’ve all heard it before: ‘I’d like you to take over the business. I can’t run Holy Pilgrimages forever,’” Simon imitates Dad’s drunken loose lower lip.
“Take it from me, kid, we’ve all been Dad’s chosen one at one time or another,” Margaret adds.
“You’ll go down, like everybody else.” Simon laughs. He crumples his paper napkin and shoots at my lemonade glass, missing off the rim.
“Cut it out.” I flick his napkin off my place mat, mumbling, “Asshole.”
Simon jumps out of his chair and stands over me. “What did you say?” He shadowboxes above me.
“Hey, I thought all this ended when you moved into your own house.” Mom gives Simon a soft smack on his muscular bicep. I say nothi
ng. I wish I had bolted to my room upon our return from the airport, like Dad did, with his soup and baked potato, announcing that he must catch the six thirty news.
“Just remember, kid, whenever Dad goes to lunch and he’s still gone at five o’clock, get the hell out of there, or if he passes out at his desk, don’t wake him. Just leave,” Margaret instructs.
“You kids are terrible. Poor man,” Mom says, cleaning her eyeglasses with the hem of her dress.
“Poor man? How about poor employees? How about the time he came back from a five-hour lunch and screamed his head off, then fired the entire staff when no one would accept responsibility for misspelling Medjugorje?” Simon says.
Mom chuckles. I find nothing funny. Looking at our four reflections in the polished table, I secretly wish everyone had surprised Mom tonight with a stop-by, not just Margaret and Simon. The table would be bustling with after-dinner chaos, Mom would be merrier, and my new position with Dad would have been overshadowed.
“How about the time Dad fired me for telling a client that I would check to see if there was a McDonald’s in Jerusalem?” Margaret shakes her head.
“If they care more about their bloody Big Macs than their devotion to Christ, they should just stay home,” Simon mimics Dad. The three of them laugh.
“Margaret, why did he fire you the other two times?” Simon needles.
“Don’t remind me.” Margaret stamps out her butt. “And I’m still sitting at home doing his damn dictations. I must be crazy.”
“You said it, I didn’t. But don’t feel bad, everyone’s been fired—not three times—but everyone’s gotten the ax. Except hot dog, here. I give her a week.”
I twirl my knife, finally dropping it on top of my untouched carrots.
“Well, he isn’t going to fire me,” I say flatly.
Everyone turns, looking at me as if I just said I was Mary Magdalene.
“You’ll get fired, trust me,” Simon snips.
That tone sends me back to his jealous anger over my choosing—in seventh grade—to play on Miss Lange’s sister’s team instead of his. He spewed attitude at me and labeled my frequent outings with my teacher as “strange.” But that time with her got me away from the encounters with him in the laundry room. And as Miss Lange regularly pointed out, she taught me how to study, too. When we weren’t listening to her old Anne Murray or Fleetwood Mac albums, she’d spend hours quizzing me in her music room on world capitals, presidents, and current events, and having long conversations about things she’d read to me from her “Values” teacher’s manual—a new course she introduced as part of the seventh-grade curriculum.
“Are you more like a bubbling brook or a placid lake?”
Questions that Miss Lange said would help me to “know thyself.”
She was a good listener, too, catching me whenever I messed up I versus me or lie versus lay. And unlike Mom, she never fell asleep when I was reading her my term papers. Most of all, she made me feel special, and except for in the classroom, I never had to share her with any other kids.
“Trust ME. He won’t fire me,” I say softly, rising from my seat, clearing my plate, and striding out of the room with my brother’s eyes on me.
“Sweetie, grab the coffee ice cream from the basement freezer while you’re up, please,” Mom says.
“Yeah, why don’t you?” Simon orders.
I want to say no.
“Sure, Mom,” I say politely, swallowing my rage, and head down the dusty basement steps.
7
Missions
The fountain at Dupont Circle, designed by Henry Bacon, is a two-tiered white marble sculpture with three classical nudes carved into the shaft, symbolizing the sea, the stars, and the wind. With a strong and accurate arm, you could throw a baseball from Dad’s Holy Pilgrimages office and land smack in the middle of the erupting spout. An errant throw could easily nail a homosexual cruising near the fountain, since Dupont Circle is a labyrinth of gay men with colorful bandannas hanging out of their back pockets—left pocket for a “top,” right for a “bottom.”
“Holy Pilgrimages, may I help you?” Mom answers the phone. I place her brown bag of pastries on the bare metal receptionist’s desk formerly manned by Marta, a middle-aged German hypochondriac, who was fired last week when she mistakenly refused my father’s collect call from Rome.
“Poor thing,” my mom said on the drive in this morning. “She’s been calling every day explaining, ‘Dhere vus a lot of static ven Mr. Vorthington called.’”
“No, Marta, he’s not back yet. But I will tell him you called. Yes, I will . . . Oh, I’m sorry to hear that . . . Well, you better have that looked at by a doctor.”
My mother hangs up the phone, restraining a laugh. I hear Dad’s wing tips speeding down the narrow parquet hallway.
“Was that that bloody woman again? I told Dale to tell her to stop calling! She’s finished. This is a business, not a charity! If she calls again, Christine, just hang up on her.”
My father hands me a file. My breath quickens. I’m nervous already, not wanting to mess up, not wanting him to yell at me for not knowing how to do whatever he’s going to ask me to do. I was praying the other version of Dad—the loose guy who was doing some weird fox-trot on the dance floor of the Lost and Found a few weeks ago—was going to welcome me to the office today. No such luck.
“Let’s get you started back here.” He motions for me to follow him into the main room.
There are large windows with open venetian blinds, unframed posters of holy places and shrines hanging next to crucifixes and plaques with messages about love and Jesus. On a scroll, I scan the familiar Hail Mary, resting on “Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death.” Catholic prayers depress me.
“Dear, would you like a sticky bun?” Mom calls to Dad.
“No, dear! And I don’t want that mess all over the place!” he yells.
“Tina?” she offers.
“No, thanks, Mom. Thank you, maybe later.”
Dad rolls his eyes and shakes his head; I look down, trying to avoid colluding. My father leads me into his office and closes the door. I lay the file down in front of a gold-framed family photo from our trip to Rome in 1975.
“Now, this is the heart and soul of my organization,” he says, pointing to a new gray fax machine sitting on the corner of his massive oak desk. I run my hand over it, trying to appear interested, but my mind is busy scanning through options of where to work out after I blow this joint.
“No one—besides me—uses this fax. Of course, no one has any business being in my private office.” Dad sounds annoyed, as if I’ve already messed up.
I look around the room, which could be mistaken for an office at Blessed Sacrament rectory. The wall opposite the large window holds framed photos of Dad with priests and cardinals and four of the most recent popes. In one, John Paul I is wearing granny glasses as he blesses my father, who kneels before him.
“A good man, he was.” Dad stares at the picture.
“He was the shortest-reigning pope,” I say, to impress him.
“No, one of the shortest, but not the shortest. That would be Urban VII, who reigned for thirteen days. John Paul I’s papacy was thirty-three days. A travesty. This was taken not long before,” he says, gently touching the photo, tearful.
“Before he died?”
“Before he was murdered,” he says in a low voice, glancing at the door, holding his index finger to his lips.
“They wanted him out and they got him out,” he whispers. “Between us, the Holy Father was in good health, and those who had access were well aware that an autopsy is never performed on the pope. John Paul was preparing to make a lot of changes inside the Vatican, particularly at the Vatican Bank.”
The murder of a pope? What is my dad talking about? Archbishop Magni? I consider my father’s last urgent business trip to meet with Magni, the papal nuncio. “Vatican matters,” Dad had told me. But what could be so pre
ssing about American Catholics touring the Sistine Chapel? He moves to the window and I follow, taking a whiff behind him to see if he’s been drinking. Seems not. I take in more framed pictures of Dad and other popes: Dad kneeling before Pope Paul VI, gazing at John XXIII wearing his crusader medallion, talking casually to John Paul II. Beeping sounds come from the fax and paper starts to roll. Dad heads to his machine as I spot a man out the window in cutoff jeans and worker boots with two bandannas in his right back pocket. Light blue and black. He fingers his Tom Selleck mustache.
“Dear, I need to head over to the Vatican embassy and drop off something,” Dad says, distracted by his freshly delivered fax. “Why don’t you step into the mailroom and study some brochures of our upcoming tours. Get familiar, as I may want you to accompany me abroad as your time permits.”
“Sure, Dad,” I sing, wondering where he might take me.
Turning from the window, I catch Dad quickly slipping a hand underneath his leather blotter and removing two small keys attached to a medallion with a familiar coat of arms—the Vatican’s. At the door, I glance back as he whips out his briefcase from under the desk, unlocks it, drops a file inside. His pace is rapid even by his hurried standard. What’s so urgent at the Vatican embassy that requires files in a locked briefcase? I’ve been around the travel business my whole life and am well aware that Americans don’t need a visa to travel to Italy. Nothing could be that urgent.
The mailroom is filled with much less intriguing things, like a silver scale to weigh packages—a much larger version of Mom’s Weight Watchers scale. Metal shelving holds various-size envelopes, stamps of every denomination, the massive Catholic Encyclopedia, and a press release stating that Dad’s business is the largest Catholic travel agency in the United States. I open the encyclopedia, checking for a mention of his company. Nothing. Flipping to the P’s, I search for Papal Nuncio. Nothing. I thumb back to the N’s and find Nuncio. It says nuncio is from the Latin word meaning “envoy” or “messenger.” As the diplomatic representatives of the pope, nuncios are given “special credentials as well as special instructions, whether of a public or of a private nature. They also receive a secret code and enjoy the same privileges as ambassadors.” So like all the diplomats living in Washington, D.C., would Archbishop Magni, the papal nuncio to Italy, have diplomatic immunity? Nowhere in the Catholic Encyclopedia can I find any cross-reference about a “secret code.”
Hiding Out Page 7