father.
Besides talking to the magazine pictures, Cathy often found herself travelling to the kitchen in Malibu to visit. Andy pulled an extra chair out from beneath the table with her agile feet and motioned for Cathy to sit down; Angela nosed the bowl of grapes towards her.
“There you are. What took you so long? We were worried about you. Why don’t you just live here with us, instead? Here, have some grapes.”
“Yeah! Come to school with me. It’ll be way better. I can introduce you to some of my friends. You’ll have a much better time. Do you want something to drink?”
Sometimes they went for a stroll on the beach accompanied by Mickey, Andy’s black cocker spaniel. Sometimes while they walked, with the ocean breeze lifting up the edges of their hair and caressing their faces, Angela reached up and gently took a shock of Cathy’s hair in her hand and gave her head an affectionate shake.
It was on this beach in Malibu that Cathy spent the Sunday afternoon before beginning her new summer job. She stayed in her room all afternoon, sprawled across her bed, gazing quietly at her collection of magazine pictures. Angela danced around in the sand, making her laugh.
“Just think of the creative possibilities of cooking for three priests. Our father, who art at the table, hallowed be thy grain. Hail Mary, full of grapes, the Lord is whiskey. Blessed be the beans that come unto you. No, no, even better ... blessed be the beans that return unto you. In the name of the fork, the spoon, and the holy roast. Almonds.”
A barefoot Andy stood in ankle-deep water tossing a stick into the Pacific for Mickey. She looked back over her shoulder.
“It’s a good thing you act, Mom, instead of having a night-club routine. We’d starve.”
“Don’t interrupt. I’m on a roll. You can serve spaghetti with saintly sauce. Holy hamburgers, although holy humbuggers would work too. What else? Mother of God’s meatloaf.”
Angela, laughing, turned into the wind to clear her hair out of her face.
“Holy cow, this is too funny. Oops, there’s another one. What’s for dinner tonight, Cathy? Holy cow with massed potatoes and blessings, Father. Oh Christ, we are going to have a blast!”
CHAPTER 6
He’d been taught that in the end, there was no one left but God. But what if God had also turned away? Then what did a person have? Worse, what did a priest have? Nothing, of course. Absolutely nothing. Nothing to embrace, nothing to fall back on. No wife, no children, no job, not even a hobby. The very thought ground Jerome Martin to an absolute halt one winter morning, right in the middle of celebrating mass. As he bowed in prayer over the shiny gold chalice during the consecration, he suddenly saw the face of an impostor looking back at him. He wasn’t changing bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ at all. He was droning sleepily over a stale wafer and sour cheap wine wondering where the draft was coming from because his feet were cold. He had no idea where God was. Or when the last time was that he had known.
He hadn’t slept again. The wretched dream. Over and over, night after night, wandering in an austere dark landscape, listening to haunting whispers. He’d recognized the voices right away: himself as a child, as an adolescent, and as a man, whispering the words to every prayer that he had ever uttered. But, as the dream clearly indicated, the prayers had never come to rest in the sacred ear they were intended for. Instead, they had lost their way and were wandering in the bleak, dark, dead end of the universe, like undelivered mail.
He twirled away from the altar in his stiff white and gold vestments and headed down the three steps towards the altar rail. He knew he could get help if he asked for it. There would be counselling, a new posting perhaps. Things would be tried to rekindle his devotion. And he would be pressured to make a tremendous effort to rediscover God for himself. He would be reminded that prayer was his most powerful tool, that he had only to use it faithfully. He began setting sacred hosts on the quivering extended white tongues of the faithful of St. Alphonsis.
But Jerome Martin was dead certain that he was beyond help. He’d already tried to wring one last bit of devotion out of himself, begging God, every day for months, for guidance. But whenever he closed his eyes in prayer, kneeling alone in the church after it had emptied out, rather than sensing God’s loving presence, all he could think about was how tired he was, how restful it was to close his eyes for a few moments. All he was certain of was that the stale words of his prayers dropped from his lips straight down onto the cold stone floor of the church.
Every night, the dream tormented him, pressing his nose right up against its whispering message. Every night he fled, flying through darkness, breaking through the surface, his eyes popping open to recognize, right there above his bed, splashed with street light, the familiar sloped ceiling of his dingy little room in the rectory of St. Alphonsis parish.
This was precisely how he awoke in the early hours of the first Monday in July, in the summer that he turned forty-six, rising once again into the familiar lonely solitude of the empty hours before dawn. He lay on his back, his long heavy limbs sunken into his sweat-dampened narrow mattress, his eyes tracking across the ceiling. Zigzagging right and zigzagging left, his eyes traced and retraced a jagged crack that resembled a staircase. Then they circled around and around and around over a patch of peeling paint that looked like the head of a bald man with a large round nose. Until recently, these small familiar things had usually helped to anchor him while the bad dream dissipated. But lately, the dream had begun to pursue him beyond the unconscious. He no longer felt safe now that he was awake. He lay in his bed with a racing heart. The voices that he used to leave behind when he awoke now whispered at him from inside the walls of his room.
And so, in the forty-seventh summer of his life, and the twentieth year of his ordination into the priesthood, Jerome Martin lay awake once again in his airless second-floor bedroom, staring at his ceiling, knowing that he had reached an impasse. God had never heard of Jerome Martin.
Through the window just beside his head, he could hear the sharp splash of rain on cement. It was the first respite from the summer heat in days. The heat and humidity had started early this year. Usually it was mid-August before the air grew so gauzy. Trying to sleep in a second-floor bedroom with only one window that faced east was nearly impossible without a fan. He had one, but it was still stored away on the floor in the back of his closet. Fetching it at this hour would only wake the others. After breakfast he could come back upstairs and see to it, since the heat looked like it was here to stay. The fan would be dusty and need a good wiping down and he had just the right worn old hanky ready to be retired from his drawer and reassigned.
The wispy window curtains suddenly lifted off the sill to let a thread of breeze pass beneath them. The delicate ribbon of cool air slid pleasantly down the outside of Jerome’s naked left leg. A dozen more of these and he might be enticed to fall back to sleep. But the curtains sagged back down onto the sill and settled. Out of habit, his hand wandered to the bedside table where he kept an old black sock futilely draped over his clock so that the faint glow from the illuminated face wouldn’t keep him awake. He lifted the sock and confirmed what he already knew. It was 3:05 a.m. Inhaling deeply, he let the sock drop. His arm followed, crash-landing across his brow, forcing his eyes shut. Three long, hot hours stretched out before him. At six, he could get up and prepare for mass.
Thunder rumbled outside. He supposed he could sit up and read. It wouldn’t put him back to sleep again, but it would ease his conscience slightly. Reading could always be considered a positive activity, even when undertaken to avoid something else. When the thunder rumbled again, he half-heartedly propped himself up on
