and emotionally poor, and religious Sisters work with them all.”
“But I don’t understand why God would pick me for this. My mother is more selfless than I could ever be, and my friend Silvia is perfect and disciplined. They’d be much more suited for religious life than me.”
“Your mother has had many years to grow in virtue. And God isn’t looking for perfection; after all, look at the motley twelve he chose as his apostles,” she said with a grin. I nodded, but they weren’t the answers I wanted or believed. Besides, if Sister was right and I was already working with the “poor” then I didn’t have to become a nun to continue doing so, but I didn’t say this. Instead, I asked her to tell me more about St. Elizabeth, which she did passionately for the next fifteen minutes, referring to her as “Betty” like they were old friends. Then we made an appointment for a month later, and she walked me to the door.
I couldn’t tell Sister about Father Infanzi. I still hadn’t told him about me, not even when we spoke during Christmas week, and he sounded depressed. He said he’d planned to open the gifts from parishioners and send thank yous, but that he didn’t get around to it. I pictured him surrounded by foil covered boxes filled with scarves and chocolates and bottles of sherry. I knew that they were a reminder of his life and that I should tell him about my calling to help lessen his pain and confusion, but the prospect that I could be more appealing to him than the priesthood, than God, enticed me. I played dumb, “Did something come up that took you away from it?” but he evaded the question. A few days later on New Year’s Eve, I was the one hurting.
My mother and Tom had Janine, Father, and me over for dinner. Phil was working, Nellie was at a party, and Nick and Julie were at the hospital where Julie was waiting to go into labor. My mother was in her glory, her first grandchild hours away from being born and a priest over for the holiday. After she gave him a tour of the house, we spent the next couple of hours talking and eating and laughing, my mother telling Father that her favorite scripture passage was the multiplication of the loaves and fishes, in part because Jesus was practical enough to save the leftovers. As I stood at the sink doing dishes, Father snuck admiring looks at me. Then after coffee and cheesecake, at about ten-thirty or eleven, he abruptly announced that he had to get going, that his sister and brother-in-law were expecting him. I assumed he was staying for midnight, that he’d sip champagne with us, that I wouldn’t be alone as the ball dropped. When he hugged me goodbye, I did my best to hide how crushed I felt. An hour later waiting at the hospital where Julie was seven centimeters, I felt empty. The next day, in the midst of all the excitement—she’d given birth to a healthy baby girl, Nicole—I told Janine how sad I felt that Father left before midnight. “Me too,” she said.
About two weeks later on a Sunday afternoon, Father and I were upstairs visiting Nicole. He’d called Julie to ask if he could stop by to meet her. We stayed less than an hour, long enough for me to instigate Father as I held Nicole who had Nick’s brown eyes and fine, brown hair. My hair was smooth and long with no wave, because I’d had it blown out straight, and I was rocking her gently, breathing in her purity and baby cream, thrilled that Father was seeing me look like a mother. Even though he was dressed in regular clothes and they knew we were going for a burger, they were too dizzy with bliss to suspect anything, at least Julie was. If Nick thought it odd, he didn’t act it or say anything. But on the way out, we ran into his mother who looked at me hesitatingly. I don’t know if she was trying to place Father, or if she immediately remembered him from Janine’s wedding. I nervously said hello and rushed out without introducing him. It was the first time I felt caught. The second time was less than an hour later at TGI Fridays. As Father self-consciously tried to explain football to me as it played on the large screen, I saw a woman look at us, especially me, accusingly. I grew indignant, “Father, Do you know who this woman is?” He glanced at her quickly, loosened his collar, and said he wasn’t sure if he recognized her from the parish. Then he hungrily returned to his burger and me. Fifteen minutes later she left. For the rest of lunch, I pretended her stare hadn’t bothered me.
One night on the phone, he said, “Maria, my friends call me James.” I clutched the receiver and said excitedly, “Okay, James.” Then a few nights later, he said, “I have feelings for you.” I was sitting in my kitchen where the crackling sound of baseboard heat and the ticking of the clock were suddenly amplified. When I finally opened my mouth, the only word that came out was, “Yes.” He hesitated, waiting for me to say more, but I couldn’t. I didn’t want to say something I didn’t mean. I was afraid of where I was allowing this to go, but happy, as if I’d just acquired a new boyfriend. After that, we spoke long and often. I casually told Silvia and my college friend Kara that I was becoming friends with my parish priest and how nice it was to have someone to confide in, though I said nothing about my calling. Kara said, “That’s really nice, girlie,” before she bounced to the next topic. Silvia was just as unfazed. In fact, she offered to go out with the two of us. I didn’t realize it, but she didn’t agree with mandatory celibacy. She didn’t understand why a man couldn’t serve the Church and a family and had been deeply perplexed when Meggie and Father de Bricassart didn’t wind up happily ever after. Within a couple of weeks, I made a dinner reservation for the first Saturday in February.
When I opened my front door, Father was standing tall against the night sky, the two of us in jackets too lightweight for winter, my heart beating thickly in my chest. We hugged our waist-up hug and then got in his car. On the way to Silvia’s, he played Kenny Loggins’ “Return to Pooh Corner.” “You have to hear the whole thing. It just gets cuter,” he said, as Amy Grant’s singing and the sound of children’s giggling began. I wanted to laugh—I’d never known a grown man who liked such a song—but it was also sweet, and I didn’t want to hurt his feelings. When he asked if I liked it, I said, “Very much.” Then as he braked at a red light and Loggins sang, “…a few precious things seem to follow throughout all our lives,” it was as if the moments of the previous fourteen months lodged in my heart. The Advent Concert when his elbow hit me right before “O Come, O Come Emmanuel”; our three hour lunch the day of my 28th birthday; exchanging our first Christmas gifts at the diner; feeling like a team on the altar when I lectored; our phone calls growing from five minutes to an hour. I ignored my conscience and misgivings as I leaned my head on his arm. He sighed, “Oh, Maria,” and inched closer to me.
At the restaurant it was the three of us because Silvia’s fiancé Greg had to do an extra shift at the hospital. At first I was worried that he didn’t approve, but then I was enjoying myself too much to care, feeling the rush of my liqueur and of being with two people whose only link to each other was their admiration of me. Halfway through dinner when James went to the bathroom, Silvia leaned in and said, “It’s obvious he has feelings for you. The way he wants me to keep telling stories about you when we were younger; it’s really sweet,” her emerald-cut diamond far less a threat than it had been. After we dropped her home, I asked James if he wanted to see the house I grew up in. It was a corner house we moved to in Dyker Heights when I was a year old, the one that made a few boys in my third grade class sing “Rich Girl” at my back, which confused me because rich, to me, meant ease, and there was always something broken in our house that my mother was left with to fix. She sold it when I was seventeen, and the new owners tore it down and started all over again. It hardly looked like the house we’d lived in, but every time I was in the neighborhood, I drove by as if I was searching for something and the answer might be there. As soon as I told James to pull over, his eyes widened. “Wow. Your father must have done really well. Were all these people around you rich?”
“No. Yes. I guess.”
“Look at this block.”
I gazed out the window to the spot where we’d had a giant fountain with a goddess at the top who was supposed to spout water but never worked, so I used it as base for hide and seek. It looked like the fountains on the Sergio Bruni and Mario Lanza album jackets that my mother had stacked in the breakfront, music I never saw her and my father dance to, not even once. That’s when it hit me. Infanzi. The people who bought the house
