Any Bitter Thing

by Monica Wood

  He prompts her: “All good wishes. . .”

  “All good wishes to you in God’s good name!”

  “Beautifully done.”

  “Santé,” Vivienne adds, the glass resting in the nest of her fingers as if placed there expressly to be admired.

  Good cheer wakens the room. The glasses flare beneath the kitchen light. Moments like this are reputed to perfect the vocation, to bring into play the full intention of the priest’s own vows. He is husband to his parish, father and brother and friend. In this brimming moment, however, there arrives a notion so fleeting it comes and goes like a burglar with surprise as his sole weapon. What if—what if he misheard God all those years ago? His head buzzes briefly with the possibility of missed connection, then the notion is gone before he can catch it, gone before he can detect how it got in and what it took on its way out.

  He blames the champagne rushing down his gullet, and the cat’s cradle Vivienne makes of her fingers around that filled, flashing glass of celebration.

  ELEVEN

  Drew and I couldn’t go back, like Mariette and Charlie, and point out some fall-dappled tree under which we first locked eyes. In college Drew was just a guy cutting through the cafeteria line, another student bounding out of the art building with a roll of sketch paper tucked under his arm, one face among many in a history class or at a football game. We never really spoke. The first time I noticed his voice—that soft, anxious monotone—was in one of those impromptu gatherings that pop up just before graduation, where everybody feels a little sick with nostalgia for good times they never had. By then it was too late to make friends.

  When we re-met, three years later at a homecoming weekend we had each separately decided to attend out of a desperate loneliness, he was in Boston, a twenty-four-year-old freelance photographer living in a monkish apartment on Hemenway near Northeastern. I was back in Hinton, doling out advice to sixteen-year-olds whose social life contained layers of intrigue entirely lacking in my own—which consisted mainly of helping newlyweds Mariette and Charlie pick out wallpaper for their kitchen.

  Roiling inwardly, I arrived at the alumni reception pretending to be the type of person who liked crowds. Drew was the first soul I encountered, pretending the same. In that sense, it could be said that we re-met under false pretenses.

  The one who will save me, he thought.

  And I was thinking the same thing.

  During the first weeks of our re-acquaintance, I drove to Boston after school every Friday afternoon, then tunneled home through the dark on Monday morning, barely making the early bell. I’d enter the school building in a kind of trance, my body humming with the memory of him. Our courtship took us from September to December, fall to winter, but in my memory it is a single season, the trees aflame with autumn reds as we walk the city, aimless and untrammeled.

  We often wound up in the North End, stopping here for ice cream, there for flowers, loving time, Earth, traffic, strangers, each other. Evenings we chose some noisy Italian joint catty-cornered into an intersection, then caught the T to Newbury Street to find an art opening or simply to ogle the window displays. We saw a couple of Celtics games before Boston Garden sold its soul and took up the parquet tile by tile.

  I can still see us there. Drew and Lizzy, holding hands, a game ticket or show schedule jammed into their pockets. They spend all their money, stay up too late, walk the city as if running a search pattern. They talk till dawn, choose this single season to behave entirely out of character. They have been alone, separately and for different reasons, for a long time. They enjoy the reassembled selves they become in each other’s presence. For the moment they are the fully formed people they always intended to be, counting on the moment to forecast the rest of their lives. They slip into this new skin and hope it holds. Maybe that’s all love is.

  At Christmastime, I told him. In the version he already knew, the same one I’d been telling for years, I’d granted Father Mike his heart attack at our local hospital, no extenuating circumstances. I’d been wanting to tell Drew the real story since the homecoming weekend at our alma mater, but it was a hard story to tell.

  We had reversed our pattern come holiday time, so it was Drew now who made the trek from Boston every weekend, often to help me with unshirkable duties: the H-S Regional Key Club food drive, the H-S Regional holiday concert, the H-S Regional Snowflake Dance. I’d agreed to be club advisor, ticket taker, and chaperone, respectively. Already I was turning back into myself.

  “We should put up a tree in here,” Drew said. My apartment was spartan in the sense that I hadn’t much furniture. Most of my mother’s things had been left unclaimed at the rectory, though Mariette’s mother had rescued the dishes and saved them for me. I didn’t have much in the way of wall decor, either, except the photograph of Father Mike, the one of my parents in the silver frame, and a portrait from Mariette and Charlie’s wedding. I had no curtains, two rugs. The landlord forbade pets. But my place was not empty. I’d kept things from as far back as Sacred Heart: old mittens and programs from school plays and macramé god’s-eyes and cotton pouches containing cheap jewelry and beach stones. I still had all the clothes I’d taken with me from St. Bart’s, my good shoes from then, my child-sized winter boots. I had souvenirs from college—mugs and sweatshirts and bath towels and emblazoned bric-a-brac of all kinds—and from grad school I still had the papers I’d written and a dozen tapes of practice counseling sessions and all my evaluations. I had a glass bell I’d bought on a trip to Quebec City with Mariette and Charlie. These things were in boxes, mostly; but they did exist.

  Since meeting Drew I’d begun laying everything out—flowers long dead and badly dried, a new umbrella, some books we’d read together, a stuffed elephant he won for me at a carnival—displaying them on a low table like objects about to be either sold or enshrined. As the bounty grew, between September and December, I began to feel full.

  “I wouldn’t mind a tree,” I said. “I don’t remember the last time I had my own tree.” Though I did.

  “They’re selling them over at the Catholic church.”

  I’d been back in Hinton for six months, but had yet to approach St. Bart’s. Not for Mass, not for the spring bazaar, not for the Christmas pageant, not even to look at my old house and mourn. “Whatever you say,” I told him, standing up, suddenly glutted with hope. St. Bart’s was a beautiful place. I had been happy there. Besides, Drew was looking at me as if I were the gold he’d just turned up in a streambed, and I felt lucky.

  I had told the true story only twice before, once to a girl in my dorm at Sacred Heart on the last day of school, and again to the first boy I slept with, in college. At the time, the news was full of lurid stories about recovered-memory syndrome, adult women remembering all manner of mayhem years after the fact. This new climate of suspicion made it hard to tell the truth—nothing happened; the accuser lied—without sounding like a liar myself, or a memory-repressor, a textbook case. I thought I had chosen carefully the people in whom I would confide the truth, but in both listeners, first the girl and then the boy, two years apart, I saw the same quick light of alarm, an ambiguous eye blink, as if I’d flicked a ribbon at their faces. The girl in my dorm said, “Ick,” and turned over in her bed; the boy I slept with didn’t call back.

  Drew pulled over just short of the St. Bart’s turnoff, next to the newly painted sign. He listened to the story all the way to the end without speaking. When I finished, he said, “Why would your housekeeper say such a thing?”

  I shook my head. “She never liked him, really. I think she wanted him out, and she wasn’t the only one, I guess. Anyway, she got her wish.”

  “‘Nonpastoral,’ they said?”

  “People drew their own conclusions”

  “And then he died?”

  “He was thirty-eight. Bad hearts ran in the family, and you can imagine the strain he was under.”

  “That woman’s going to burn in hell,” Drew said.

  “It’s not so
mething I dwell on,” I told him. Which at the time, I believe, was true. “But I did want you to know.”

  He looked up and down the road. “Is this common knowledge around here?”

  “Once in a while I’ll get a look—pity, I guess. But the town’s changed a lot now that the shoe shop’s gone. More strangers, which suits me fine. Not as many churchgoers, either.”

  Drew went quiet for a while. “I wonder how things would have turned out,” he said finally. “If he’d lived, I mean” This was exactly the right thing to say, the thing I remember about that evening with perfect clarity. During my exile at Sacred Heart I had imagined, over and over, my alternative life: Father Mike, alive, back from retreat, the two of us recommencing our jeweled existence.

  “They reassigned priests all the time back then,” I said, “even after the most lurid allegations. They’d whisk them off for some therapy, pronounce them cured, then place them somewhere else. Everything stays in the family that way.”

  “Until somebody blows the whistle years later, and it ends up in the papers.”

  I nodded. “The old system would have been a godsend, though, in my case. It’s a terrible thing to say, but it’s true. After submitting to the so-called retreat, he would have collected me from Celie and brought me to our new parish, no questions asked.”

  “Your aunt would have unhanded you, just like that?”

  “She didn’t want me. She packed me off to boarding school and took me back for three grudging weeks every summer. Besides, she would never have crossed the Church.” I looked at him. “In other words, things would have turned out fine. I would have gotten my old life back. I’d be an entirely different person.”

  “I like the person you are.” He kissed my cheek. “Come on. Let’s get our tree.” He started the car—one hand on the wheel, one hand on me. We were off.

  The place had changed little. The same ring of trees, taller now, a little thicker. The same river appearing between the arthritic tangle of branches, the same sealed-offquality where the driveway angled toward the house. A light from the Blanchards’ old farmhouse showed dimly through the shortcut, which had grown over from a dearth of footfalls. No more neighbors ferrying back and forth, no stampeding children ramming sleds or bikes down and back, down and back, down and back. No picnics on the boulder, no raspberry-gathering, no stomping dead leaves just to hear them crack. The rectory had been painted—the black trim changed to green—but otherwise looked the same, a bright porch light casting down on the shiny, bluish snow.

  I got out of the car, not bereft, as I might have expected, but wistful; perhaps I even felt a touch of awe. Come in, the place insisted, even now. How we’ve missed you.

  The Christmas trees had been set up beside the church hall. People milled and moved, cheerfully dragging trees by their chopped trunks back to idling cars. Some people had moved their cars into the official lot, anticipating the Saturday-evening Mass. Making the transactions with the aid of a much-used money pouch was a young priest I’d never seen, wearing a lumberjack-plaid coat and earmuffs that didn’t quite cover his flappy ears. His boots looked comically out of fashion, the same buckle boots Father Mike used to wear, and it occurred to me that they might be the same boots, a pair that had stayed in the closet to be passed down from priest to priest.

  Drew’s arm came around me. The light in my old room burned yellow; something, a vase or figurine, showed through the window, in silhouette. I had no great yearning to go inside, to see new things in an old place; it was enough to know that the lights still worked, that if a child wanted to send signals through the trees to the house next door, she needed only to wave the curtain back and forth. It struck me that I’d been furious at God for so long it felt like my own form of religion, but something moved inside me right then, and it was the church itself I was drawn to. This was my first experience of nostalgia; maybe that’s what grief becomes over time.

  We bought a tree from the young priest, and he thanked us. “Are those your boots?” I asked him.

  “Pardon?” He was smiling, merry as all get-out. Christmas was a convivial time in the parish; the church filled up, the coffers swelled, the priest felt more useful at this time of year.

  “Your boots,” I said.

  He laughed, a dry ripple that reminded me of falling acorns. “My sister’s idea of a joke.” He lifted his foot. “We wore these when we were kids.” We smiled with him, wished him a merry Christmas, and carried our small tree back to the car, where Drew tied it to the roof. We looked like a family in the type of Christmas movie where some lost soul who needs a miracle gets one.

  The ride home was quiet. Not until we’d muscled the tree up the stairs and into my living room did we realize we had no tree stand and not a single decoration.

  “Maybe we could put it in a bucket of water and kind of lean it against the wall,” I suggested.

  “Not too festive,” Drew said, but he found a bucket under my kitchen sink and did the honors. The tree looked like a post-holiday castoff left out for the trash man.

  “I’ll go out and get a stand right now,” Drew said, but he didn’t. Instead, we left the tree as it was, plain and leaning, and laid ourselves down beneath it. In the morning we were still there, the tree looking green and well watered.

  “Hey,” Drew said when I opened my eyes.

  “Hey” I sat up. “What?”

  His voice was soft and sleep-graveled. “Why did you come back here, of all places?”

  I rolled onto my back, not knowing how to answer. When I first came back there must have been people who asked the same question. Why Hinton? Of all places? They had no way of imagining the wing-lift of reliefthe sugar maples gave me, the comfort of remembered streets, the blessed nearness of Mariette and her mother, who had known me as a safe and cared-for child. When I finally finished at Sacred Heart I joined Mariette at the University of Maine, following her like a homeless dog for four solid years and two grad-school years beyond. She came back here, so I did. Why not here?

  “I wouldn’t have,” Drew said, “if it had been me. I wouldn’t want to be reminded of everything I lost”

  “It’s home,” I said simply. “I had no other place to come back to.”

  Later that morning, after we’d rustled up some red crepe paper to put on the tree, he said to me, “Lizzy, you’re the most rooted person I know.”

  This is what he thought he learned about me in our season of re-meeting. That I was fiercely rooted. For Drew, who had grown up on shifting ground, following his sergeant father and mouselike mother from base to base, this one fact—my rootedness—struck him, hard, as his one missing piece. You could almost hear a click as he pressed it into place. For this he married me, after a ten-week courtship, in front of a Justice of the Peace in the Hinton-Stanton town hall. Mariette brought balloons, which we released into the air as we descended the courthouse steps, thrilled and oblivious. Boston was calling him, but he chose me.

  After leaving Harry Griggs’s apartment, I hit heavy rain. The storm barreled down the turnpike at such a pitch I had to keep pulling over, cowed by the racket. Water broke in waves against the windshield. It took me two and a half hours to drive fifty-eight miles. By the time I got home the driveway was sheeted with roiling water, and behind the blur of rain my house looked like a pretend house, like the ones I remembered from Six Gun City, a corny theme park in New Hampshire where Father Mike took me for my fourth birthday. “Main Street” had been tricked out with sepia-toned facades, including a pair of swinging saloon doors with nothing behind them but a mashed and shocking stretch of grass. I planted myself on the fake road, howling with outrage, refusing to surrender to Father Mike’s blandishments. This is how unused I was to having expectation open into nothing.

  I loped from car to house, dragging my leg through a stinging, horizontal rain. “Where the hell have you been?” Drew demanded, jerking open the door. It was all there—our clutter and books, every corner spoken for. He picked up the phone before I co
uld answer. “She’s okay, Mariette,” he said, “she just walked in.”

  He put down the phone and looked at me. “Is this a test?” he asked. “Because if it is, I flunked” His voice shook with anger, or possibly relief. I was having a harder and harder time reading people.

  “It’s not a test,” I said. I looked at my watch, twice, unable to believe it had somehow gotten to be eleven-thirty. “Is this right?” I asked. I’d been thinking, nine o’clock. Nine-thirty, tops.

  And of course I hadn’t called. I was sure I’d called, but judging from Drew’s expression, I couldn’t have. This I kept to myself, this evidence of the dreaded “faulty thinking”

  I checked my watch again Apparently I had spent hours in Harry Griggs’s company, taking chips of my childhood and holding them up to the light. He was a good listener, resting on the floor of his barren place, his back against the rattling windows, head tilted just so.

  “I thought it was earlier,” I said lamely.

  Drew closed his eyes, probably counting to a hundred. At last he said, “You can’t just take off in weather like this and not tell anybody where you’re going.” He looked tired—the kind of weddings he photographed often tired him: the grubby function hall, the cottony sound from the band’s terrible speakers, the drunken cousins, the blue garter slipping down the bride’s dimpled thigh. In truth, Drew was not good with people. Word of mouth followed him only in the bad ways; he was not the jokey type, not given to coaxing laughter from a jumpy bride. I imagined that he worked in almost complete silence. Perhaps his bedecked subjects sensed his true yearnings—to be photographing murder victims or apartment fires in Southie, capturing the human spirit in its moments of disbelief. Instead, he was in Hinton, Maine, taking pictures of three-tier spongecakes and tipsy groomsmen. Amongst the obligatory shots of bouquets being tossed and rings being swapped, he always managed to unearth something interesting to him, but not necessarily to the people paying him. Look at this, he’d tell me, coming out of the darkroom, a still-damp replica of the single aunt’s averted eyes, a close-up of the mother-in-law’s bared teeth. He liked these moments of accidental honesty, and I did too, but these mementos also troubled me, as if they proved that even the luckiest, happiest times contained unrealized potential for violence.