Advocate

by Darren Greer

“He’s devoted to God, period,” said my grandmother. “I don’t think emotional or intellectual, as you say, has anything to do with it.” This was before my uncle got meningitis, and my grandmother was still peeved about him being there.

  Uncle David was right about Orlis. He was an intellectual, if a timid one at that. I could easily see him sitting at a desk in the rectory piled high with books and pondering the meaning of God. He was lost in his world of the mind, the importance of the sacraments, the translations of the vulgate, grand cathedrals of theology. He often didn’t notice others in the street when he walked down it. He muttered to himself, and his fingernails were chewed to the nub.

  My grandmother forgave him these eccentricities. He was a brilliant man, she said. A perfect parish priest. “An Oxford graduate!” she would say, in an almost sexual ecstasy. In the Mass of the Roman Rite, Father Orlis would recite the Agnes Dei during the breaking of the host. My grandmother would always say afterwards that he delivered the best Agnus Dei liturgy of any priest she had ever heard.

  My Aunt Jeanette agreed with my grandmother that Orlis was perfect for a priest, not because of his mellifluous speech in Mass but because he was not the type of man she could imagine being married. He had a stoop to his shoulders and he walked slightly tipped forward, as if bowing under the weight of all that brainpower. Even if he wasn’t a priest, she surmised, he would be a bachelor, perhaps a schoolteacher, like Ichabod Crane.

  Orlis’s deacon was Harry, newly appointed to St. Andrew’s Church. He had come from Ontario to serve his last years in the diaconate before being ordained. My mother and Jeanette had seen him in the streets of Advocate, and Aunt Jeanette said he was “cute as a button.”

  “Such a waste,” she lamented.

  My grandmother was of the opposite opinion, that a life of celibacy and service to the lord was the best use of a life possible. “There’s a few young people around here could learn a lesson from that.”

  Harry was younger than my aunt, at twenty-seven, but she fell in love with him anyway. My mother said it was because he was unattainable. Jeanette always fell in love with men who couldn’t love her back. It was defeatist, my mother said, and childish.

  Jeanette did not care. “What’s wrong with a little looky-feely?” she said. “I don’t expect the man to drop out of seminary and marry me.”

  My aunt, as usual about matters particular to the church, had it wrong. Deacon Harry had already completed his four years of seminary. He was taking his master of divinity from Dalhousie University, to which he travelled one day a week, doing the rest by correspondence.

  Living in the rectory with Orlis and Harry was another deacon, Deacon Wilson. Wilson was only a few years younger than Father Orlis. Also a thin, lugubrious, sallow-faced man, he was a “permanent” deacon, which meant he had not gone to seminary and was not eligible to be ordained. He was from Advocate, and technically should not have been living at the rectory at all. He was not paid for his work, and was more like a volunteer to the church. But he had illusions of grandeur and thought he was a priest. Though he didn’t go as far as wearing the clerical collar, he did wear a rabbat and a priest’s frock, and walked and spoke with an air of ecclesiastical authority that rivalled, if not exceeded, Father Orlis’s.

  My grandmother did not like Deacon Wilson. She said he had tone with her. On more than one occasion she asked Father Orlis why they just didn’t kick him out of the rectory and be done with it.

  “He does no harm,” Father Orlis said. “And he even does some good. He’s a very effective deacon. He knows this community well.”

  My grandmother was equally distrustful of the new deacon. Not because he pretended to be a priest — after all, he would be one someday — but because he was so young and handsome. She considered it an unnecessary temptation to her daughter, an invitation to trouble. Jeanette started going to Mass with my grandmother just to lay eyes on him and speak to him when they said goodbye at the door. My grandmother should have been happy something finally brought Jeanette to St. Andrew’s, but she was not. She thought it shameful that her youngest daughter was turning Mass into a “peep show.”

  Jeanette only shrugged when confronted with this accusation. “I like him. What can I say?”

  “You’re not supposed to like him,” said my grandmother. “You’re supposed to like God.”

  “God’s not half as cute,” quipped Jeanette. “And he’s not around to talk to.”

  ▪ ▪ ▪

  the only part of the church I was interested in was the cemetery. It is one of the oldest landmarks in Advocate. The early Catholic settlers, trying to outdo the Protestants on the other side of the river, planted it with poplars and weeping willows, which gave it a stately, fairy-kingdom atmosphere in spring and summer. I loved the willows, the way their tendrils hung in bunches almost down to the ground. I would wander through them like a green, airy waterfall. The trees seemed to have a personality and a presence of their own that predated the town. They had been there forever, had seen everything, and from my puny perspective — eleven years and four and a half feet — they knew so much more than I did. On days with a breeze their vines rustled and seemed to confer.

  But if I was tempted to go into the graveyard to look at old headstones and relax under the trees, I did not do so when my grandmother was there. She visited the cemetery out of respect for her dead husband once a week to lay a flower on his grave, and the few times she caught me she chased me out. “This is not a play yard,” she said. “It’s hallowed ground, and you can’t be running around in here willy-nilly.”

  Father Orlis had no such compunctions. Once in a while, I’d seen him going around the church from the rectory side, and when he noticed me he’d give me a wave. He never came over and told me how hallowed and sacred everything was. He never told me to stop sitting under the willows, or playing among their low-hanging branches.

  Shortly before my uncle went back to the hospital, Father Orlis asked me if I would come in and help him move the Eucharist table back to its proper place. Some workers had misplaced it when they were sanding the floorboards of the sanctuary and neither of the deacons were available. I was a small kid and was not often asked to do anything physical. We went into the church and moved the table. It was strange being inside that dark, cavernous, richly ornamented space alone. It was open all day, for confession and access to the holy water in the fonts, but I never went in. After I was done Father Orlis asked if I would like to come back to the rectory for a glass of juice and a cookie, a reward for helping with the table.

  I agreed.

  He gave me the juice and cookie in his office, and chatted to me while I ate and drank. As I suspected, the room was lousy with books and papers. Either he had no housekeeper, or he prevented her from doing any work in there.

  If this was a novel, he might have tried to assault me then. Catholics priests have earned such a bad reputation, and their celibacy in community life is supposed to lead to all kinds of transgressions in private, such as sexually assaulting twelve-year-old boys.

  Father Orlis did no such thing. He was a decent man, and he knew how to keep his dick in his pants. Deacon Harry, who would eventually become Father Harry, was also decent. No sexual scandals ever rocked our town, thank God. We were spared that at least.

  Deacon Wilson was another case entirely. As a lay deacon, he was not required to be celibate. He could have a family or even a girlfriend if he wanted one. But he didn’t want one. No one could even imagine Deacon Wilson in a relationship. You’d have to roam pretty far over the Holy Roman Empire to find one willing to sleep with such a brooding, deliberate personality as Deacon Wilson. And even if you could find one, he would not agree to it. If the priests were celibate, he would be celibate. If they wore rabbats, he would wear rabbats. If they were boiled in oil and hung upside down on crosses, he would be clamouring to be next.

  I liked Father Orlis and Deacon Harry; Deacon Wilson terrified me. Whenever he walked by he would flick his eyes
in my direction in the barest kind of acknowledgement. I got the sense he didn’t like children. During christenings Deacon Wilson was always there, standing beside Deacon Harry and Father Orlis. I imagined if you turned your back on him he would snatch the baby and sink his teeth into its neck. With his pale long face and widow’s peak and glittering black eyes, he reminded me of a vampire.

  I was glad, when I ate my cookie and drank my juice, he wasn’t around. Father Orlis, sitting behind his desk and staring out over a pile of books, asked how my uncle was faring.

  “Fine,” I said. “He’s getting better.”

  “He’s had quite a run of bad luck, I hear.”

  “He’s okay,” I said. “Just meningitis.”

  Father Orlis did not have a widow’s peak, or black eyes, and if he did have a pale face it was a reasonably kind one. And he liked babies. But there was something avaricious in his gaze and the way he spoke to me, something that made me uncomfortable. Like he was mining me for information. Priests do this, I know now. They are not just vassals of God, but counsellors to the community. They look for things that might be wrong so they can deal with them when the time comes. I did not know my grandmother had not told Father Orlis about what was going on at home, and that he was trying to get information. He did not come to see my Uncle David, not because he didn’t know my uncle was sick, but because my grandmother had not asked. He respected her need for privacy.

  But priests are nothing if not gossipmongers with a divine dispensation to be so. He’d likely hear rumours. I was eleven, so it was okay to pump me for information.

  I finished my juice and cookie and told Father Orlis I had to go. He asked me a few more questions which I evaded, and when I finally got away I was relieved.

  Unfortunately, I went outside into the backyard of the rectory just as Deacon Wilson was rounding the corner.

  “What are you doing here?” he said, surprising me, for he rarely ever spoke. “You’re not supposed to be here.”

  “Father Orlis wanted me,” I explained, wanting nothing more than to run away as fast as my legs could carry me from him.

  “What did he want?” Wilson said.

  I wanted to say “None of your business” or “Go suck a lemon” but instead I told him about the Eucharist table and the orange juice.

  “Fine,” Deacon Wilson said. “Run along now. The rectory is no place for children.”

  It was no place for vampires either, I wanted to say. But I ran along.

  Deacon Wilson had no authority to speak of. He had no say in church or town matters. So he took it where he could get it. I’m certain he was glad to find me in a place I wasn’t supposed to be, so he could exercise some personal discretion.

  I did not go back to the graveyard. Instead I went home. I’d had enough of the ecclesiastic for one day.

  ▪ ▪ ▪

  when deanny and I return to her apartment, Richard is still in his pyjamas. It’s because he can’t write in anything else, she says when he goes back to change. No matter the time of day, if Richard is going to write, he changes into them, and then back out when he is done.

  I raise my eyebrows, but make no further comment. Writers are weird. Richard is weird. He barely speaks the entire dinner, and when I ask him questions about his books he barely answers.

  “Richard is an introvert,” Deanny explains, in front of him. “I’m an extrovert. That’s why we get along so well.”

  As usual with the men Deanny picks for me, Pavel is achingly handsome, with a certain casualness of demeanour that makes him even more attractive. It is cliché to say the first thing you notice about a person is his eyes, but this is true of Pavel. They are brilliantly black, swimming with empathy and curiosity. It is impossible not to like him a little. It is true he is a schoolteacher. It also is true he is Russian. He seems to have no problem talking about either, and for much of the dinner it is he and Deanny who keep us entertained. He is voluble, expressive, jovial, and expansive. He laughs at Deanny’s stories, like the time she soaked all the girls’ panty liners in high school in nail polish remover because they made fun of Alison Smith during gym class.

  Eventually he turns to me. He has the slightest trace of a Russian accent. Occasionally he will drop articles from his speech, but other than that, his English is perfect and his accent minimal. It is utterly charming. “I hear you are a mathematician?” he says.

  “Was,” I say. “I am a social worker now.”

  “I heard that too,” says Pavel.

  “I took math in college, and got my degree. But it never amounted to much.”

  I leave unspoken my thought that Deanny and Richard seem to have prepared Pavel well, for he knows a lot about me. I know nothing about him. I ask him about his work. He complains teaching high school math dulls his abilities. Even the most promising students are at little more than remedial level, and the only class he enjoys is calculus, for the small portion of his grade twelve students going on to higher education in math and sciences. Calculus, he says, is something he can sink his teeth into. He enjoys the discussions of limits and integrals and functions and derivatives. “If I can get my students to understand that calculus is the study of change,” he tells me, “the way that geometry is the study of shape and algebra the study of operations, they will be successful. The key is to get them to be excited about it. Don’t you agree?”

  “I’ve never taught,” I tell Pavel. “But yes, I think that would be half the battle.”

  “Richard and I are abysmal at math,” says Deanny. “Aren’t we Richard?”

  Richard looks at her as if she is an oncoming train. I can see she’s trying to push Pavel and me closer together. I am interested in Pavel’s background, though, and I ask him about that. He explains to me he lived in Russia until the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. He came to Canada in 1992.

  “Why Canada?” I ask.

  “The weather,” he says, and laughs. “It was like Russia. Cold and almost as big. But free. When my country changed all was chaos in Moscow. I wanted stability, and work. It’s strange,” he says. “Before the fall, everyone hated Russians. Then suddenly you loved us. Everyone was hiring us. I had no problem getting work here, as I already spoke English. I heard Nova Scotia was paradise. I came here and found job almost right away.”

  He has lived an interesting life. When he was a student, he studied mathematics and international journalism. Anybody who wanted to make something of themselves, he tells me, had to study something to do with foreign relations or the Communist Party.

  “They taught us to despise you,” Pavel says, “as capitalist swine. But we were also to study you as much as we could. To find your weaknesses. We all wanted to be part of the nomenklatura.”

  “The nomenklatura?”

  “The elite,” says Pavel. “Members of the party.”

  I am fascinated. I have never met anyone who lived in Soviet Russia before, and Pavel has no issues it seems with talking about his past. I ask Pavel if he has ever thought of us as “capitalist swine.”

  “Never,” says Pavel. “That’s why I studied journalism instead of foreign relations or party politics. I knew from early age the assumptions were flawed. That Americans, and Canadians, were likely no different from us. You looked the same. The truth is probably you were the same. When the Curtain fell, I was relieved. I dropped journalism and studied only math. And decided I would come here when I could. I miss my family. My father is an old Komsomol member and wanted entrance into the party, but was denied because of indiscretions of his own great-grandfather during the revolution. He hates the fact I live in the West, and barely speaks to me. Also,” Pavel says, “he is troubled by my sexuality, which I make no secret of.”

  He smiles at me, and takes a sip of the latte that Deanny has provided with dessert. I don’t know what to say. Never has anyone been so open with me in an initial salvo. Pavel has spent the last hour telling me his life story, including his sexual orientation and his relationship with his father.
I have told him nothing about me. Despite my apparent openness at my work, and my advocacy for people to say who they are without fear of reprisal, I have never been very good at taking my own advice. I am conditioned by my childhood; I rarely tell anyone anything about myself unless they ask directly. I ask Pavel if his sexuality was okay in Communist Russia.

  Pavel smiles again. “It was not,” he says. “Marx and Engels did not forbid it, but they didn’t like it. The gay laws were abolished after the revolution as being tsarist, but Stalin put them in place again. They were not repealed until 1993. I left before that happened.”

  “But why would you come to such a small city?” I ask. “Why not Toronto or Montreal where you have half a chance of meeting someone?”

  “Have you met anyone in Toronto?” Pavel asks, still smiling.

  I have to admit I have not.

  “It’s not where you are, but how you think. When you are ready, the right person will come along. It doesn’t matter if you live in Halifax or Toronto. That thing will happen if it’s supposed to.”

  And then Pavel does a remarkable thing. He winks at me. The lascivious effect of such a handsome man winking at me leaves me completely undone. I drink my coffee and eventually Pavel continues talking.

  Shortly after we finish dessert I announce I have to go and Deanny sits up in her chair like she’d been shot. I see her move her leg nearest Richard and imagine that she is kicking him. He looks up slowly from his coffee like a man emerging from a dream. Pavel looks bemused and bewildered. Before I can say any more, Deanny says, “You can’t go yet. We’re going into the living room.”

  “Mom will be expecting me,” I say. “They don’t like me to drive after dark.”

  “Nonsense. They’d want you to stay out as long as you wanted.”

  “Really, Deanny. I have to go.”

  “Fine then,” she says. “Pavel, you walk him to his car. I want to talk to Richard alone.”