Love Warps the Mind a Little

by John Dufresne

  B. “MARTHA AND THE CATHOLIC CHURCH”

  Martha is the woman in charge of a man’s world. As Bishop Hago Harrigan’s factotum, she runs the day-to-day operation of the Diocese of Worcester. She handles all personnel matters, and there are many. She sees to it that the alcoholic priests get assigned to the quiet, rural parishes out in Orange and Royalston, where the bingos run themselves and there’s not a whole lot of driving to do. The politically ambitious or connected curates get the city’s west side parishes, where they can wheedle money out of the professionals. Martha has to be familiar with the personalities of all two hundred or so priests so that when she makes parish assignments, she doesn’t sentence one of the aunties to rectory life with a couple of jocks, let’s say. And that way she avoids the aggravation of phone calls complaining about Father So-and-so and how he smokes cigars in the TV room—It stinks of the pig farm in there, Mrs. Proulx—and how he hides the remote control, and how his chasuble looks like a tablecloth.

  Martha oversees all public relations, youth programs, fund-raising, charity, and education. While Hago visits the Holy Land or the Old Sod, she’s in charge. Hago spends his weekends golfing with politicians and undertakers down at Pleasant Valley or at his family’s compound in Brewster, and he can relax. So that’s one side, the practical side, of Martha’s faith. There’s another.

  When she was thirteen, Martha made a usual daily visit to St. Stephen’s Church after school. She knelt in the front pew to pray the rosary. She had it down to four minutes. She saw the statue of the Virgin move. Mary lifted her damp eyes upward toward the frescoed apse, raised her plaster arms in supplication. When Martha told Father Holland what had happened, he told her not to tell anyone else what she had seen, especially any of the nuns. That’s all we need. Just keep it between you and the Blessed Mother. Ever since that day, Martha’s been a believer in Marian apparitions and miracles and all the rest. She’s devoted to the blood, she likes to say. She subscribes, in my name, to a kind of underground tabloid, a Catholic Enquirer, if you will, called The Seven Thunders, which regularly features photos of apparitions and stories of miracles in everyday life and so on. I remember reading the story of one woman who lived in Westerly, Rhode Island, whose flesh got so hot when she prayed that her clothes would catch fire, so she prayed naked, kneeling on the tile floor of her kitchen. Plenty of stories of flagellants and self-mutilators.

  Martha wasn’t a disciple of all this neo-Dark Ages stuff exactly, but she was fascinated by it, by women who rub pepper into their faces to prevent vanity, scrub their hands and legs with steel wool, and then rub lime juice into the wounds. Martha thought it was just possible that anorexia was a gift from Jesus, a sign of holiness. One night while we were eating supper, Martha told me about this woman she had visited in Charlton. People in her rooming house wanted the woman, Cecile Blondin, canonized. Cecile was about thirty-five, Martha guessed, lived alone, and kept a dummy of a corpse in her room in a casket. A store mannequin, really. On Fridays, she took out the dummy and lay in the coffin herself. She wore a haircloth blouse and a crown of thorns fashioned from braided rose stems, sometimes draped her limbs in chains, ate a single piece of dry rye bread every day, drank only tap water. I laughed. This is a joke, right? Martha said, Cecile sleeps on the floor, on a bed of uncooked rice. I said, Did you call the hospital, at least? Martha said, Why? I said, This is a sick woman. I think she’s blessed, Martha said.

  I’d like to think that Martha longed to achieve the fervor in her faith that her zealots seemed to have. But how would that play with Hago Haragan the Sane? She didn’t talk about her faith that much, at least not with me, the lapsed Catholic and apostate whom she prayed for at night. We’d only fight about it. Sometimes I hated that freaking church. Could have been the Silverado Bank for all the time it stole from me.

  C. “DOMESTICITY”

  Martha would deny this, I’m sure, but she is obsessed with housework. She has three vacuum cleaners: an Electrolux family heirloom that she stores in the front hall and uses on the living room and dining room carpets. She keeps the Hoover upright in the bedroom closet and uses it on the hardwood floors and the kitchen linoleum. The Shop-Vac in the shed is for the big spills. She’s got a little portable Dirt Devil, too. I threatened to get her a holster for it. She never laughs at housekeeping jokes. At parties she was right there with her Devil, sucking up crumbs around the guests’ feet, or she was snatching up their cocktail glasses as soon as drinkers set them down on the coasters. She didn’t understand that this behavior made our guests ill-at-ease. Or she understood it, sympathized, but could do nothing to control herself. All our parties ended around ten-thirty with me at the door saying, Good-night, glad you could make it, we’ll do it again soon, safe home, and Martha fastened to a roaring canister back in the apartment. I’d say, Martha, now? And she’d say, Unless you’re planning to do it in the morning. When I told her she would have “No Dust Bunnies Under This Coffin” carved on her headstone, she said I was raised like a pig, so how could I expect to know what a clean house was. I’d say, I don’t want to eat off the floor, Martha. If I’m going to clean the floor, I’ll clean it to my standards, not yours. She’d say, That is just your typically male way of shirking housework. I hated being called typically anything.

  Martha loved paper products. We used paper towels and paper napkins and paper plates and paper cups and paper trash-can liners and paper placemats and paper doilies under our canisters and fruit bowls. We had boxes of tissues opened in very room. Martha thought the whole idea of handkerchiefs was nauseating. Martha used the same cleaning products her grandmother had used and was fiercely loyal to the brands. She used Ivory Soap for clothes—but only because you couldn’t get Rinso Blue anymore—Dutch Cleanser, Octagon all-purpose soap, Red Cap Refresh-R, Brasso on the hardware and Never Dull on the dinnerware, Glass Wax on the windows, a sudsy ammonia for the mirrors, and liquid Joy for the dishes. She washed and ironed our cloth cleaning rags and bought only real sponges, which she trimmed with scissors once a week.

  D. “THE GRAND PASSION”

  Martha didn’t read trash. Her favorite novel, one she read each January, was Anna Karenina. Anna followed her heart. Martha was a devotee of the grand passion, the sensual rapture so overwhelming that it sweeps all reason away. There is no fighting the heart. Martha, I believe, desired to live that intensified, unrestrained, tortured life in the same way that she craved the passionate spiritual life. It was clear, however, that she did not wish the same life on me. She talked almost obsessively about unfaithful husbands.

  I speculated that to succumb to her passion as Anna had would have been a loss of control that Martha could not tolerate or confront, the surrender to fate, to faith, to love. Our own courtship was theatrical, but reserved. Perhaps she was simply better able than I to make a clear distinction between literature and life, between the spiritual and the histrionic. I do wonder why she would not want for herself what she admired in others. But maybe it’s normal to feel that way.

  E. “METEOROLOGY”

  Martha takes the weather personally. It’s too hot for her, or it’s too cold or too damp, too cloudy, dry, or bright. She’s never dressed appropriately, it seems. Her comfort zone is so minuscule as to be nonexistent. She’ll wear a sweater inside the apartment until it’s eighty degrees and then immediately close down the windows and doors and switch on the air conditioner, lie on the couch, and lament the insufferable heat. How does one learn to take offense at the weather?

  Her entire family was like that, was unable to adjust and enjoy the natural environment. Her parents and her cousin Blondell, who lived with her family while Martha was growing up, all jacked up the heat in winter and wore their knit caps, crocheted slippers, and chenille robes over their sweaters. In winter, it was so dry in their house, you could barely open your eyes. The four of them were forever squirting Nivea cream on their skin, massaging Vaseline on their lips. Then, in the summer, they cranked up the AC and sat in their swimsuits like pud
dles, mouths open, barely able to whine complaints.

  Throughout our marriage, Martha and I fought about the windows. I wanted them open, especially the bedroom windows at night. But Martha thought the draft would cause stiff necks, or it might rain. In the summer she was too sweaty and rashed to be touched. In the winter, my hands and feet were too cold for her. I hope she doesn’t find herself dating an outdoorsman. Then again, maybe it was life with me that brought all this on. Or maybe I just like to think she’d be better off without me.

  24.

  2 Cool

  +2 Be

  4 Gotten

  WHAT I SHOULD HAVE KNOWN—IT’S SO OBVIOUS—BUT DIDN’T, AND HAD TO learn from Francis X., was this: that the experience with the most profound impact on a child’s life is the unlived life of the parent. But I’m not sure Francis X. understood his own lesson; otherwise, wouldn’t he have done something about it?

  Our classroom was Moynihan’s on a Wednesday night. Francis X. and I had finally managed to get together. I wondered where he told Sandy he was going. I could see early on that Francis X. was on a mission—to talk some sense into me. He held his beer bottle with both hands, only sipped at the Bushmills. My job, then, was to see that he drank enough to forget why he was here and to have some fun—loosen his golden tongue.

  “You seem tense, Francis X.,” I said.

  He denied it, looked up at the Sox game on the TV at the end of the bar. He asked me why I was throwing my life away. His eyes never left the screen. Clemens struck someone out. I said, “Francis X., I’m not a tenth-grader, and I don’t need a lecture right now.” I ordered another round. Now Francis X. had two shots of whiskey in front of him. He told me that Martha was dating Marty O’Sullivan, who, it turns out, has always been interested in her. Marty taught with us at South. Science.

  I said, “Isn’t he married?”

  Francis X. nodded. “Three boys.”

  Great, I thought, now I’m responsible for five more miserable lives. “Does his wife know?”

  He raised his shoulders, turned his hands palms up. “Well,” he said, “I don’t know if you’d say they were seeing each other exactly. Let’s just say O’Sullivan’s been very solicitous, you know what I mean? Always asking Martha if she needs anything. Tuned up her car. Things like that.”

  “How do you know this?” I said.

  “She talks to Sandy.”

  I said, “Maybe Marty’s just being kind.”

  He said, “Marty?” and laughed.

  We weren’t having fun yet.

  I held up my shot glass. “To your kids,” I said. He’d have to drink to that. He did. He bought me another shot. “To Ireland,” I said. “One island. One country. Two more shots, John Joe,” I said.

  I said, “Don’t you want to do something spectacular with your life, Francis X.?”

  He gave me a look like didn’t I think six kids was spectacular.

  “You know what I mean. Have you done everything you wanted?”

  He said, “I’m a success.”

  “You’re a vice-principal of a public high school.”

  “And you’re a fish-fryer.” Francis X. swiveled on his stool so that he faced me. He leaned his left elbow on the bar, struck his chest with his right fist like he was saying the Confiteor. “I have a beautiful family, Laf, six wonderful kids.” He tossed back his shot. Pretty soon we’d be talking about his mother. “I got security” He tapped his forehead. “Peace of mind.” I held up two fingers to John Joe. “I got a home on Beechmont Street. Swell neighborhood. I got a cottage down the Cape.” Francis X. paused for effect. “What do you have to show for yourself, Laf?”

  I had to admit this was a disconcerting question. We were talking a whole other level of possessions here. Forget peace of mind, too. “A dog.”

  “You still got that crazy setter?”

  “Spot.”

  “What else you got?”

  “I got a good friend sitting beside me.”

  Francis X. told me to cut the bullshit and get serious. But he smiled. We drank to our friendship.

  I said, “One time you told me all you ever wanted to do was move to Maine, get a farm, live off the land. Whatever happened to that?”

  “Why don’t you grow up, Laf? You’re acting like a spoiled child. Your wife’s in pain. Go to her. Don’t throw your life away.”

  “I guess you didn’t want it bad enough.”

  We were quiet then. Drank our shots and watched the Dread Sox get shelled by the Indians in the fifth. I said, “You have a home on the Cape and you’re in Worcester for the summer?”

  “We rent it out except for the last two weeks in August. A gold mine.”

  I ordered two more shots.

  Francis X. said, “Around 1980 I had a chance to buy three hundred fifty acres in Hancock County. Had an old farmhouse, a barn . . . I don’t know, some other shit. Near Ellsworth.” My friend took a drink and excused himself. He went to the men’s room. At the end of the bar under the TV, John Joe was arguing with some older guy about the Sox. The guy wanted the manager fired tomorrow. John Joe wanted the whole team executed in Copley Square.

  Francis X. picked up where he’d left off. “Sandy said no way in hell was she living there, raising her kids with the Frenchies in some goddamn bog. No offense, Laf.”

  I shrugged.

  “She thinks your people fuck their children.”

  “Not as much as we used to.”

  “So, what was I supposed to do?” Francis X. looked at himself in the mirror behind the bar. “Kids would have had a quality life up there. Fiona, anyway, wouldn’t have a goddamn ring in her nose,” he said.

  We talked about his kids for a while—the eldest with the nose ring and the grunge records; the son who back talks his mother; the boy with strabismus; Kevin, who rides the bench for his Little League team; Timothy, whose life is dinosaurs; and, of course, Eamon, who forgets what he’s doing when he walks into a room. Francis X. told me about his dreams for all of them—college, marriage, homes nearby, successful careers, tranquillity, and children. Fiona wants to start a rock ’n’ roll band. FX wants to be a doctor, but he can’t even pass science. The others are too young, God bless them. How would the kids live their own dreams if their old man hadn’t lived his? How do you learn to do that?

  When my father came back from Korea, he had one thing in mind—to play professional basketball. He was the best around and had all the clippings to prove it. He took a job at the South Works wire mill and kept playing ball four or five nights a week in parks and industrial leagues. This was all before Edgar and I came along, before he even married Eudine Pelletier. Well, the Celtics called and offered him a tryout. At last, he’d get to play with Cousy and Sharman. He’d have his shot at the bigs. So he showed up at the Garden drunk on his ass. I didn’t hear this from him but from a couple of his pals at my wedding. They thought it was a hoot. None of the players would even talk to him. Right after that, he married your old lady, the friends told me.

  Francis X. had set us up again. We drank. His mother was a saint, he said. If she hadn’t met up with Herc, she could have been a fucking diva, he said. She had a splendid voice, lovely voice. Sang like an angel. You ought to come down the Cape this year, he said. You know where Pocasset is, right? I said, Yeah, I’m sure Sandy would love that. Francis X. became animated. Fuck her, he said. It’s my fucking house. I built it with my own frigging hands. If I can’t have my friends in my own house . . . Jesus . . . what can I have? Am I right?

  And so we got plastered along with the Sox, and soon it was time to leave. I told Francis X. I didn’t want him to drive. He was drunk, and I loved him. I gave him a hug out on the sidewalk. I’ve driven in worse condition than this, he told me. But now you’re vice-principal, and you have a, you know, lot to lose. He said, Get in. I’ll drive you home. No, not home. Wherever. I said, No way, Francis X. Give me your keys. He shook his head, took a deep breath, made a face like he’d tasted something sour. This was a bad sign. I
leaned him up against his Voyager. I told him to wait there a minute. I put my hands on his shoulders, looked him in the eyes. Promise? I said. He nodded. I went back into the bar and had John Joe fix me up two black coffees to go. When I went back outside, Francis X. and his Voyager were gone.

  The next morning, when I finally woke up, I checked the Telegram & Gazette. Nothing about a minivan wrapped around a light pole. I considered calling the Harvey home, but I imagined things were a little tense for Francis X. already. I could relate. How many times had Martha sobbed and locked herself in the bedroom when I had too much to drink?

  I took a shower. I drank coffee and let Dale reminisce about his old man, Les Evans. Dale’s at home on Monday night. Just he and Keynes. He’s got Bob Wills on the stereo, and he’s trying to think of himself as a father to two children. Stepfather, anyway.

  Dale remembers his dad coming home from work. He’d park the cruiser in the driveway, peel off his uniform, park himself in front of the tube, and send Dale off to fetch him a beer from the fridge. Most nights he wouldn’t even join Dale, his sister, and his mom for supper in the kitchen. The only time they were together as a family was Sunday morning at Mass. When Les died, Dale was ten. Les, himself, only thirty-seven. Dale’s age now. Died of a massive cerebral hemorrhage while watching The Man from U.N.C.L.E. And that’s when Dale found out who his father really was.

  Before Les married Dale’s mom and they moved out here to Lovington to raise a family, Les Evans had been a nightclub singer in New Jersey, where he’d grown up and where he served on the Newark police force. Dale’s mom brought down all the old photo albums and scrap-books from the attic. There was a poster of Les opening for Frank Fontaine at a club in the Poconos. One newspaper feature called him “Les Evans, the cop with a beat,” and said he was the next Sinatra. He was even a local celebrity when he was still in high school. He had his own weekly radio show on a New Milford station.