Any Bitter Thing

by Monica Wood

  “So,” I said. “Harry.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Did I say anything?”

  “On the road, you mean?”

  “On the road. In my white light”

  “Nope. Nothing.” “Were my eyes open?”

  “No.”

  “Are you sure? I keep remembering things, like how the rain looked from where I was lying.”

  “Well, it was dark. Maybe they opened for a second. They could’ve opened for maybe a second.”

  “I was on the yellow line.”

  “Yeah. Lined up like you planned it.”

  Each word reached me as a discrete, critical bit of information. Vital information, without which my connected parts could not function normally. It was like rehab all over again. Put your foot here. Contract that muscle. Step down.

  “You moved me.”

  “Course I moved you,” he said, suddenly defensive. “You were in the middle of the goddamn road.”

  “And you moved me to the side.”

  “Yeah.”

  “To the shoulder. It was kind of muddy there.”

  “There wasn’t really anyplace else to put you.”

  “Oh, I know,” I said. “I’m not complaining. Did you say ‘Jesus on a stick’?”

  He shrugged. “Sounds like me.”

  “Out loud? Or were you just thinking it?”

  “Considering the circumstances, I’m gonna say it was out loud. Pretty goddamn loud.”

  “I thought I could hear people’s thoughts,” I said. Again, he didn’t look surprised. “That’s why I’m asking,” I added.

  The sky finally opened, and out poured a relief of rain. The windows shuddered, not hard. It was coming on dusk.

  “My husband will be wondering where I am,” I said. “He had a wedding today. A big one up in Sidney. He’s a photographer.” I glanced out at the cove again, the tide fading into the distance.

  “You can call from here,” he said. There was a phone sitting on the floor, a black rotary phone, no desk or stand, just the phone. “Cost me two-fifty this time to get reconnected. Can’t get a job without a phone.”

  “What happened to the cell phone?” I asked.

  “Well, you know,” he said. “They had it turned off.”

  “Wouldn’t they have traced the calls back to you?”

  “Not these people. I had them pegged.” He smiled sheepishly. “Not that I’m in the habit of stealing, I’m really not. It was a crime of opportunity.”

  I sat there for a long while, too tired to move. The phone was in my lap, and therefore I thought I had called Drew; I was sure of it. I went over the brief conversation in my head. I’m delayed, don’t wait dinner. The conversations I conducted in my head were more or less permanently merging with the ones I had with actual people.

  Harry got up at one point and made me a cup of instant coffee. I sipped at it as the evening encroached, a grainy darkness shaping itself around the lighter squares of window, the rain tap-tapping against the panes. I could no longer see his face clearly, but his shadow remained an attentive presence. The ice in his glass moved; he was on his third or fourth tumbler of Gatorade. He was still wearing his coat.

  “So,” I said. “Here we are.” A veil dropped then, the faintest suggestion of secret.

  His boots moved on the bare floor, but he didn’t speak.

  “Can I tell you something?” I asked.

  “Anything, sure, anything you want.”

  “I had a visitation.” I blinked into the dark. “When I was in the hospital.”

  “A visitation? From who?”

  “From my uncle, who died when I was nine. And I have to tell you that ‘uncle’ is a small word for what he was to me. I was really, really glad to see him.”

  “You saw your dead uncle?”

  “I heard his voice, too, clear as yours.”

  I had said this very thing to the doctors, to an orderly, to a nurse and chaplain, to my husband and my friend and my friend’s husband and my friend’s mother, all of whom initially responded in various patient and compassionate and ultimately cold therapeutic ways, but nobody, not one person, thought to ask what Harry Griggs now asked: “What did he say?”

  I blinked hard. “He said, ‘my child.’”

  “My child. Okay, sure. My child. That makes sense.”

  “He was in the company of an angel.”

  “An angel? Well, sure, if he’s dead, why not?” He nodded, agreeing with me. “It was just the one visit?”

  “Yes,” I said, “although I’ve been wondering if he was also there with us, on the road. I was hearing so many things, everything felt so strange, so out of order. So rearranged. Maybe that was him. Or Heaven itself.”

  “Oh. Whoa.” Harry’s shadow had angled somewhat, a full attending.

  “But what struck me most,” I said, “what strikes me still, is how his voice seemed so present, so in the present, I mean. It was so, I don’t know how to explain it, so in the world.” Outside the lights along the cove appeared as apparitions out of the dark. “I saw his sleeve, the cuff of his sleeve, and it looked exactly, exactly like his cuff, just the way I remembered it, a missing button and a little hole. It was so real.”

  “Stuff like that happens. My old granny saw ghosts all the time.”

  “Exactly,” I said. “There are certain things we can’t explain but it doesn’t mean they didn’t happen.”

  “Goddamn right.”

  I was trembling again, wholly unbuckled. Harry materialized at my side, removing his coat to wrap it around me, revealing a wrinkled white shirt. I let my face drop against that whiteness, allowed his arms to encircle me. “Hey, hey,” he said. “Steady now.”

  We sat together in the dimming light for some time, not talking, as I felt myself being transported back, into the velvety between-place I’d inhabited just after my accident, that cushiony here-nor-there where my senses both blurred and sharpened.

  “The weirdest thing,” he said quietly, “when I got out of the car to look, I thought you were Elaine. I thought it was my own daughter somebody’d run over.” He reached into the coat I was now wearing and fished out another cigarette, the feeble glow of the tip making the rest of the room seem darker. I snapped on the lamp to look at him, and we both flinched, blinking hard.

  “Why on Earth did you think that?” I asked.

  “You look like her, if you want to know,” he said. “She has red hair like yours. Skinny like you. It kind of kills me to look at you, if you want the truth.” He got up, looking for an ashtray, grabbed one off one of the deep windowsills and stayed there, looking out the window. “Course I knew right off, I mean after that first impression, you know, that it wasn’t her, couldn’t be her. But it was somebody. If it wasn’t my daughter that was all bunged up, then it was somebody’s daughter.”

  “Except that I’m not,” I said.

  “Pardon?”

  “I’m not somebody’s daughter.”

  He stubbed out the cigarette in the loaded ashtray. “Now there’s another goddamn shame.”

  During my months of rehabilitation I came to accept the pitiful pace of range-of-motion, the futility of desire and the reality of anatomy. I took the incremental mercies visited upon my body—a receding pain, a small rotation—with an accumulating, grudging gratitude. Healed and whole and a stranger to my loved ones, I had another rehabilitation ahead of me, and right now Harry Griggs felt like step one in a range of motion that I was a long way from getting back.

  “Do you have pictures?” I asked. “of your daughter?”

  “Sure, yeah,” he said, whisking into the bedroom and returning with a creased snapshot in a frame. Despite her red hair she looked nothing like me except for a certain blunted look, as if she’d been caught in the moment between being hit hard and realizing she was going down.

  “Any pictures of the baby?”

  “I haven’t seen it yet.”

  “Boy or girl?”

  “I don’t k
now. She told me, but I forgot.”

  “You never went back? You didn’t try again?”

  “Nope.”

  “Didn’t she wonder what happened?”

  He shook his head. “Probably figured car trouble. I’m kinda famous for that.”

  “You got your phone reconnected. You could call. Or write her a letter.”

  He put the photo on the windowsill. “Coulda woulda shoulda. Listen, you want something to eat? All I’ve got is canned.”

  “No,” I said. “I should go.” But I didn’t. Instead, I watched him for a moment, and—either because he had compared me to his daughter, or because at the advanced age of thirty I was still looking for a father—I found something familiar in the set of his shoulders, the farm boy’s surrender that my uncle had also carried.

  “Can I tell you about him?” I asked.

  “Go ahead, deah,” said this shiny-coat heartwreck of a man with one chair. “I got nothing but goddamn time.”

  TEN

  From The Liturgy of the Hours:

  We all have secret fears to face,

  Our minds and motives to attend . . .

  Of all his pastoral duties, marrying brings him the most pleasure. He loves engaged couples, especially the young ones who come to him ruddy and thrilled. For some, marriage occasions their return to a faith they have lost, or misplaced. When he utters the word “sacrament,” the engaged couple lift their faces as one face. The word is a poetic intrusion, crisp with consonants, the very sound of it both precise and evocative. He introduces the word with gravity, a hint of melodrama. Even the ones who come reluctantly, at the behest of Catholic parents footing the bill, or out of plain nostalgia for the rituals of their childhood, even they perk up at this unexpected word for what they are about to do and promise.

  One of the first changes he made after succeeding Father Devlin was to institute new guidelines for marriage at St. Bartholomew’s Catholic Church. In brief: No more cakewalks. To earn the privilege of entering into the sacrament of Holy Matrimony, engaged couples would meet three times with the pastor and register for a daylong engagement retreat, offered six times per year. Some balked. A few accused him of grandstanding. Others said: Who does he think he is?

  He reminds them that his own sacrament, so similar in magnitude and permanence, required a college education and then a formal training of four years. What is a few meetings with the priest, what is a day of study and reflection in the face of a lifetime promise? If you begrudge yourselves this feeble requirement, then kindly find yourself another priest.

  He says it more politely than that. But he’s not fooling around and they know it.

  Hear, hear, say some. Dictator, say others. Vivienne says: I wish I’d done the engagement program. What a wonderful idea.

  He uses an outline sent from the Chancery and redlines it like a movie director, adding a role-play here, a wish list there. List two goals for the next two years. Five goals for the next five. Ten for the next ten. Brides discover grooms who don’t want babies. Grooms discover brides who long to flee their hometown. They discuss these things in the cloistered privacy of the pastor’s office. Then, at the retreat, they undertake similar tasks in a friendly group, and listen to speakers brought in expressly for them: pediatric nurses, financial advisors, real-estate agents. Some couples decide not to marry after all, despite two hundred embossed invitations sitting in a box on an enraged mother’s dining-room table, a four-hundred-dollar deposit already cashed by the resort hotel, eight disgusted bridesmaids stuck with nonreturnable salmon-pink dresses.

  They think he’s a stickler, or a killjoy; but really he’s a romantic, sending God’s lovers down the marital path with all due preparation, metaphorical rose petals floating in their wake. His custom is to have the engaged couple to dinner a few days before the wedding. His ostensible mission is to review the details of the ceremony, but really he wishes to have a happy couple at his table for the edification of Lizzy, who cannot remember her parents. See what happiness marriage brings? He serves lasagna and garlic bread and a single toast of champagne (Lizzy is allowed a taste, diluted with ginger ale) served in the crystal flutes that were his wedding gift to Bill and Elizabeth. Removing them from Elizabeth’s breakfront is Lizzy’s favorite task—she loves to turn the slim brass key in the old-fashioned keyhole—and he beams at her as she opens the glass doors.

  “Mrs. Hanson says I shouldn’t drink champagne,” Lizzy informs him. Claire Gagnon and Will Cleary wait in the dining room, dressed for the occasion, Claire in a lightweight yellow dress, Will in a starched shirt and pants that are not jeans. With few exceptions (Sandra Leighton, who was forty-four years old with two kids and an annulment, arrived in a tube top and shorts) the couples he marries rise to this particular occasion, dinner with Father, feeling proud and (he believes) grateful to have prepared for their sacrament with such focus and alacrity. Some, like Sandra Leighton, are just humoring him. But that’s all right. He does his job, putting as much Holy into Matrimony as the couple can bear, and mostly the fruit of this labor ripens just in time.

  “Tell Mrs. Hanson that I said it’s okay,” he says.

  “I told her,” Lizzy says. “She did that thing with her mouth, you know the way she does.”

  “I know the way she does,” he assures her, petting her head. She is seven years old, an intelligent child with hair the color of old pennies. A few drops of champagne to honor this couple’s joy before God won’t do her a bit of harm. She loves toasting—All joy, all love, all good wishes to you, in God’s good name—and they both believe that ginger ale alone doesn’t count.

  They bring the flutes into the seldom-used dining room, where the table is set in a precise imitation of an article from Good Housekeeping entitled “Spice Up a Special Occasion.”

  “What are all these tags for, Father?” asks Claire. Such a pretty, solid girl, whom Will Cleary, God bless him, cannot stop gazing at. She has glossy black hair and dimples.

  “I’m learning French,” Lizzy explains, lifting a tag from the curtain that reads le rideau.

  “Say ‘good evening’ to Claire,” he tells Lizzy.

  “Bonsoir, Mademoiselle,” Lizzy says. He can’t help but smile; she sounds exactly like Vivienne.

  “Wow,” says Claire.

  He has a good feeling about this couple. Their children will be smart and rosy and profoundly loved. Claire is a student nurse; Will’s applying to law school. They want two children, but not for five years. Their plans are perhaps too exact, but he believes they will weather surprise or disappointment gracefully. They each placed “friendship” at the top of their priority list. They will not be back in his office nineteen months hence looking for a way out.

  “She can read all these?” Claire asks, moving lightly around the room, picking up tags at random: le mur taped to the wall; le tableau stuck to the framed print of a babbling brook that Vivienne gave Lizzy last Christmas; la fenêtre lying loose on the windowsill. The tags make the room look festive, fluttering like confetti.

  “She’s picked up a lot from the neighbors,” he explains. “We’re working mainly on her accent.”

  It’s the one thing that annoys Vivienne: You’re a snob, Father, and God knows it, she tells him, only halfway joking. True enough, but in one of his many daydreams of Lizzy as a grown woman, she is captivating a roomful of Parisians with her formal, melodious French. In another she sits in a brocade armchair with a view of the Seine, singing “Fais Dodo” to her newborn baby as a smitten husband looks in from their grand, tiled kitchen.

  “Aren’t you, like, seven?” Will asks, exchanging a quick look with Claire: Jeez, I hope we end up with a kid like this.

  “She was reading at four,” he tells them, which is a tiny stretch. “Now she’s the top second-grader in the county,” which is either true or should be. Lizzy grins, either believing him or delighting in his slippery facts.

  Lizzy has her mother’s face, pliant and rubbery, her grin reaching all the way up to
her eyes. He doesn’t spend enough time with her. She comes to the weddings but not the funerals. She accompanies him to the Saturday five o’clock Mass and the Sunday ten-thirty, but not the Saturday six-thirty or the Sunday nine. She seems to enjoy her duties—passing out the church bulletin, collecting the hymnals after Mass, arranging donuts on paper plates—and would happily attend four Masses per weekend, but how much time must a normal child be expected to spend in church? She likes Mrs. Hanson well enough, loves Vivienne, spends every spare moment with Mariette. He’s never left her alone. Is this enough? Can the thing he provides be called a happy childhood?

  Vivienne taps at the back door and slips into the kitchen, surprised to find a crowd in the dining room.

  “Sorry!” she calls lightly, draping Lizzy’s red sweater over a chair back. “Lizzy, you left this.” She makes to leave but he stops her. Claire and Will come out to say hello—Vivienne knows Claire’s mother.

  “We’re just about to toast the engaged couple,” he tells her, offering her his glass. “Join us”

  “A toast,” Vivienne says, delighted. “I don’t remember the last time I lifted the glass.”

  He rushes to get another flute, fizzing champagne into it without spilling a drop, then gathers with the others, who wind up thronged between the narrow archway that separates the dining room from the kitchen. One side of the wall reads la cuisine, the other reads la salle à manger.

  “Lizzy?” he says. “Would you do the honors?”

  Lizzy holds her glass high above her head. “All joy,” she quavers, “all love. . .” Her face knots with effort.