Herself

by Leslie Carroll

  Bob Dobson, who hails originally from Arkansas, must want to run for Congress in New York because he’s got his eyes on a bigger prize. And even if New Yorkers see through carpetbaggers’ rhetoric, we tend to vote for them anyway. Look at RFK and Hillary Clinton. Of course Dobson is neither of those. But I’ve been trying to locate his Achilles’ heel so I can stick it to him there.

  “Stick to message; you don’t have time to go negative,” Gus has advised me. “Dobson’s capable of shooting himself in the foot, even with Avariss’s eagle eye on his ass 24/7.” I feel like David’s legacy is slipping through my grasp though. We’re fighting to preserve an ideology, here. If I lose, I lose a whole lot more than an election. Was I naïve enough to think it would be a sleigh ride all the way down to Capitol Hill?

  “Hey, Tess, are you home? I brought yiz a present!” Jamie announces through the door. I hear a scratching, followed by a “shhh!” And then, “Can you open the door, please? I’ve got me hands full.”

  And there is Jamie Doyle standing on my threshold, cradling a rust-colored puppy, whose affection for his new dad is obvious.

  I clap my hand to my heart and burst into tears. “You bought me a dog! Ohmigod, you bought me a dog. I’ve always wanted—”

  “I know. Remember that time in Dublin when I mentioned that I just knew that about yiz?” He hands me the puppy, which immediately begins to explore my collarbone. “And it’s an Irish setter,” I sniffle. The dog doesn’t quite know what to make of my tears.

  “Of course it’s an Irish setter! Whatja expect from an Irishman? A Cavalier King Charles spaniel?”

  “What’s his name?”

  “Her. It’s a bitch.”

  I give him a look. I know that’s the proper term, but still…“Well, we should name her something Irish. What do you think of calling her Lady Gregory?”

  Jamie shrugs. “A bit posh, but she’s yer dog.”

  “I guess we should wait to see what kind of a personality she has before we consign her to something inappropriate for the rest of her life.”

  I place the dog on the living room floor, briefly wonder if she’s been toilet trained or if that’s my job, and throw my arms around Jamie. “You are wonderful. I…I really don’t know how to properly thank you. No one’s ever made one of my childhood dreams come true.”

  “I figured she’ll come in handy for your commercial. I thought ya should have a dog like the other people in the dog run. Bob Dobson will be eatin’ his own biscuits for lunch if you muscle in on the one territory he thinks he’s got fenced in: the pet owners. Now you’re one of them.”

  And so we did a bit of quick rewriting and shot a spot called Dog Run just beyond a public playground, where my little Maeve, named for a great Irish queen (with her long neck she looks kind of regal the way she sits), frolics with her peers, then snuggles beside me as I introduce myself to the voters and talk about “making sure we’ve got a safe place for all of us to play…whether we’re with our kids or our best friends”…using the requisite buzz words and catch-phrases regarding the environment and counter-terrorism measures so the voters know I’m going to fight like hell to protect them from any kind of harm, whether it means being truly tough on corporate polluters and other corner-cutters that harm our environment, or fighting for every available resource to keep our skies, our harbors, and our mass transit systems safe.

  By the time the commercial is aired, we’re hoping all the die-hard dog lovers will become Craig supporters as well.

  September 23

  I’ve been stressing over my Education speech, wondering whether to include a section that may push a lot of buttons and cost me key voters, but it’s one that I truly believe separates me as a Pragmatic Progressive from the garden variety liberal too often demonized by the right. I’ve written:

  “As much as I admire the reason unions were formed in the first place—to stand up for safe conditions in the workplace, mandate an eight-hour workday, eliminate child labor—the unions have become a part of the problem when they should be a part of the solution instead. Too many educators who should never have been hired in the first place, or else put out to pasture years ago, are allowed to languish in ineptitude and mediocrity, rising according to the Peter Principle to their highest level of incompetence; and your children are suffering the consequences of their inadequacy and lack of creativity.”

  Of course my position on English-language immersion for non-native-speaking students might set off bells and whistles among the liberal base as well. I’m feeling like I’m chickening out if I don’t include it in the final draft, and I risk a further drop in the polls if I do:

  “Economic freedom begins with education. It begins with English-language immersion classes early on, when studies show that kids are most likely to learn a foreign language with greater rapidity than their older counterparts. Here’s another area where I disagree with many of my colleagues. We are a glorious melting pot, which makes our stew so richly flavored, but we’re doing our kids a disser vice by consigning them in grade school—their most formative years—to classes in their native tongues, when the language of the American economy, of technology, is English. When their English-language skills lag from the get-go, very often many of these kids never catch up; they end up left back or left out of the ability to obtain genuine economic freedom.”

  When I worked for David I had enough distance to allow me to gain some perspective. Now that I’m the candidate, I find myself questioning my instincts and second-guessing myself. I’ll run it by Gus; I’ve got to trust his judgment on this.

  A few nights later, while Maureen is bent over a 500-piece jigsaw puzzle of Oslo, and I’m at my desk redrafting the speech, Brigid anxiously asks if she can talk to me.

  “Well, I’m kind of curious about how all that works,” she says as she helps me set aside my research. “Like how do ya lorn all the things ya need to know to write something like this, but that’s not what I’ve been wanting to ask yiz. Do ya mind if we close the door?”

  “What’s on your mind?”

  “I’m all like topsy-torvy lately. I’ve been going to Holy Trinity every day since ya told me where it was, and I even tried atoning for my sins on your special day this week. Since I figured it was God’s day to listen, He might lend me an ear as well. It’s big, ya see.”

  I wonder aloud what monstrous deed Brigid could possibly need to atone for.

  “So like I said, I’ve been goin’ there every day about the same time; maybe noonish, and this being a residential area and all, you don’t get too many people paying God a call on their lunch hours. Didja know there’s a police station just up the block from the church?” I nod my head. “So…this is…you have to promise not to say anything to Mum…” Brigid runs her hand through her short hair and laughs. “Oh aye, I’ve got the social skills of St. Francis.” She slides her butt onto the floor and leans against the sofa in my home office. “It’s quiet as a tomb inside the church when I get there. I think I’ve only seen a priest wander through once or twice. Usually for the first half hour or so it’s just me sitting there in the pew starin’ at the crucifix, askin’ questions in my prayers.

  “But every day there’s been a man come to pray and for the forst two days we pretended not to see each other, for he was cryin’ when he prayed, and I think he was embarrassed that someone else was there to see him so. I mean he’s no baby…broad back, gray-haired and all; and a very lived-in face, too. Though I pretended not to notice it. I would hear footsteps behind me and torn to see who was comin’ in. And he would always take the very last pew on the right, where I would sit up front on the left. On the tord day he smiled at me, and I didn’t know whether to smile back, bein’ a friendly porson, but not wishin’ to give him any ideas o’course, so I torned my head back to our Lord and tried to think pure thoughts. I think he thought I was a bit standoffish. The gray-haired man, I mean, not Jesus.

  “Then yesterday he came up and asked if he could sit beside me. ‘Want compan
y?’ he asked me, and I shrugged and moved over so’s he could join me. ‘I’ve been noticin’ you,’ he whispers and I see his eyes are sad. They’re Irish eyes, too, I can tell—I have a way of knowing these things, don’t ask me how—so I ask him his name, and as sure as I’m a candidate for the veil, he tells me his name is Anthony O’Reilly. Captain O’Reilly from the police station up the street.

  “‘Anto,’ I say to him, looking deep into his eyes. Tessa, they’re so black you can hardly see his pupils. ‘Anto,’ I say very softly, ‘can ya tell me why you’re so sad?’ And then it all comes pouring out of him, like he’s at confession almost, and he tells me he was a forst responder on 9/11.”

  I feel a chill creep up my spine as though I’ve walked over a grave. I don’t know what’s coming, but I know it’s not going to be pretty.

  “His partner never made it out of the rubble, and all Anto remembers of that morning was that he was running, running north. And he says, to this day he doesn’t know if he was a coward or a hero for his memory’s all gone blank of some of the things that happened. He can’t even remember if he tried to save Mike—his partner—or even if he was in a position to…but every day he says he hates something deep inside himself for not being able to rescue him. Mike had just gotten married six months before; his wife Joan was expecting their forst…you know Anto’s only thirty-eight years old, but he looks fifty.

  “He told me he still can’t seem to resolve his feelings of remorse and that he would do anything for contrition. He moonlights as an accordion-playing circus clown at pediatric wards and volunteers at the soup kitchen in the basement at Holy Trinity—that is, when the church isn’t renting it out to a movie company as a holding space for their background actors. Do ya know there are homeless people right here in your neighborhood? Camping right on the doorsteps, I suppose, of the people who live in the brownstones and send their children to fancy schools. It’s true the world over, I guess, but to me New York seems like the richest city in the world.

  “‘Well, a soup kitchen, that sounds like a good thing to do,’ I said to him, since I couldn’t think of anything else to say. You know nuns can’t hear confession, and I think that’s one of the bummers about the Church. And here’s this man who looks like he wants to pour out his soul into my hands…it’s almost as if he knows I’m a little bit…it sounds both immodest and daft to say ‘closer to God,’ but you know what I mean.

  “I tried not to smile when he told me I seem different from other women he’s met. Especially when he asked me if I wanted to go to the Starbucks with him. ‘No, I’m afraid I’d better not,’ I said to him. ‘Why?’ he asked me. ‘I’m not at liberty to date,’ I answered, so he asked me, suddenly norvous like a schoolboy, ‘Oh, then you’re going with someone?’ ‘In a manner of speaking,’ I said.”

  “So you didn’t tell him—?”

  “I couldn’t tell him I’m a nunlet! I couldn’t say, ‘I’m in the middle of discernment, Anto, so I won’t be having that half-caf latte with yiz.’ I know he’d become all weird, and there’d be no way we could even just be friends after that. At best he’d be asking me if I’d rap him on the knuckles with my ruler, and at worst he’d think I’d go all judgmental on him if he does so much as swear. He’s a soul in torment, Anto is. I sat there in the church…just the two of us…and I wanted to be able to heal him.” Brigid begins to fidget with the hem of her skirt. “But more than that, and this is the part that distorbs me…I wanted to offer Anto more than words of comfort, more than a sympathetic ear. I wanted to hold him.” I watch a tear make its way down her right cheek. “And I don’t know what God has to say about this, and maybe He’ll find a way to punish me for my actions, somehow, for I know they were wrong—for someone on my vocational path—but they weren’t wrong for a person; for a compassionate person I know it was normal. I put my arms around him anyway and held him close. And I didn’t have to tell him it was all right to cry; he just knew somehow. And we sat there in the pew, me rockin’ him almost like he was my baby. The Father walked through and looked at us, and I tried to avoid his gaze because I didn’t want him to see right through me and say that what I was doing was a sin.

  “It was nothing sexual, at least I didn’t think it was, but it was so deeply personal. And it made me feel good to know that I was helping Anto in the way that he needed, truly needed, not through rote or empty directives to say novenas and recite Hail Marys. This—with Anto—this afternoon—this was the most spiritual I have ever felt in me life. Mum would have a cow if she knew. But I want to help people—help them personally, one at a time. Like I do on the teen crisis hotline in Dublin. Like I did with Anto today. So I’m going to join him and volunteer in the soup kitchen. And maybe one of these days I’ll tell him the truth. I don’t know how long I can stay out of the Starbucks with him. He says he was never a churchgoer until after 9/11. And even now, he’s not sure he believes, but believing that there’s something out there, up there, that can comfort him and ease his pain, is better than believing that nothing and no one can, he says. ‘I’m glad I’ve met a religious girl. I like the way you come in here every day, when you must have plenty of other places to be. My mother would be very impressed with that. She’d never kick you out of the house and call you a tart, like a couple of the women I’ve dated over the years.’” Brigid buries her face in her hands. “I know he was trying to make it into a light moment, but the poor man has no clue what a crisis of faith I’m having!”

  I sit beside her on the floor, and when I slip my arm around her shoulder, she begins to weep. “I don’t know what I want,” she sobs. “I thought I did, but now it’s all topsy-torvy. I thought I had a calling…but…but is it possible I was just bored? I don’t even know the answer to that. I’m too old to be bored. There are days when I don’t even know why I wanted to go into the Church except that I’ve always known that I want to help people. Through the Sisters of St. Joseph, I’m learnin’ how to counsel troubled youth, and it makes me so happy when I see that we can really make a difference in someone’s life. But lately I’ve been thinkin’ I don’t need to spend my life in a convent to do that. Maybe the truth is I don’t like responsibility, and if I become a nun every plan for my life is already set; I’ve no decisions. And maybe deep down, that’s what I wanted. Not to have to think too hard. But being here in New York…well, let me ask ya, what kind of nun loves Sex and the City? I should be thinking it’s an abomination—all that swearing and fornicating and inappropriately grand fixations on shoes—when to tell yiz the truth, I never minded swearing, I’m dead curious about sex, and I’d give anything just to try on a pair of six-hundred-dollar sandals and know what it feels like, just once! It doesn’t mean I can’t help a sixteen-year-old addict torn her life around and believe in the word of Jesus Christ.” Brigid grows momentarily thoughtful, then suddenly clasps both my hands in hers. “You’re a woman of the world; tell me—is it really everything it’s cracked up to be? Sex, I mean.”

  “Well, it depends on a lot of factors, actually: whether you’re in love with the person—which could make even tepid sex spectacular; whether you’re in lust—in which case the act can be a bit of an anticlimax, so to speak, if it doesn’t live up to the fantasy of it. Then there’s technique…yours, his…there’s experience…”

  “Would it be worth leaving the calling for is what I’m askin’.”

  “Oh boy,” I sigh. “I really don’t want the responsibility of responding to that question. If you feel you’ve got a calling to be a nun, that’s a rare and precious thing, and I would never want to throw a monkey wrench into it. You can’t talk in generalities here; each situation is unique. And deeply personal. Look, I’ve got a recipe for brownies that some people tell me is better than sex, so who am I to judge their preferences?”

  Brigid suddenly breaks out into laughter. “Oh, Jaysus, Mary, and Joseph, it’s in the Doyle genes!”

  Her laughter is infectious and without needing a reason, I catch the bug. “What is?”


  “When did Jamie know he was in love with you?”

  “I guess you’d have to ask him that. But he said the three little words within a week of knowing me. I think it was after only five days.”

  “It’s a family corse,” Brigid sighs. “We Doyles fall like boulders: hard and fast. Oh, Tessa, I think I’m in love with Anto. And I’m certain he feels almost the same. Why else would he ask me to Starbucks and say that I’m the kind of gorl he’d bring home to meet his mum? Tess, I need your help.”

  I hand her the box of tissues so she can dry her tears. “Anything you want.”

  “Tessa, how do I tell this poor unlucky son-of-a-gun that I’m plannin’ to become a nun!”

  Twenty-five

  Before I deliver my Education speech, I decide to road test the salient points at a breakfast meeting in my living room. Gus Trumbo is there, of course, and I’ve invited Imogen and Venus to join the Doyles and Brigid’s new pal from the police department, Anto O’Reilly. Maureen has baked shortbread for the occasion.