I was sitting in a training workshop to become a lector, the lay person who reads at Mass, hoping Father was in the building, that he’d stop by. As I heard the back door open, I kept my eyes on Charles, the coordinator, afraid someone might detect my attraction. Sure enough, the deep voice from the back of the room was Father’s. My heart sped as I turned around. There he was, all 6’1” of him in black pants, white collar sitting below his Adam’s apple, and black shirt rolled up to his elbows accentuating his biceps. He looked even more handsome without his robes, like a young Cary Grant. “Don’t let me interrupt all of you. I just wanted to say hello,” he said taking a deep breath, which I found endearing, until Charles continued speaking, and Father folded his arms tightly across his chest like he was offended. A couple of women kept their eyes on him, but I quickly looked back at Charles. Just because he walked into the room everything was supposed to stop? He didn’t seem like the humble, holy priest I’d spotted a month earlier. He seemed a touch arrogant, childish. I struggled to keep his body out of my mind for the rest of the night.
The next time I saw him on the altar with his hands pointed in prayer, I thought him adorable again. Each time I was the lector at one of his masses—which happened every month or two—and he stood behind me in the processional, I worried that he might be looking at my rear end. Just the possibility that he could be attracted to me was unnerving and exciting. After Mass I walked out the side door not the front, trying to avoid him and the nagging question of my own vocation. But then one Saturday in April, he showed up on my doorstep at work. All the interviews were over, and I was waiting for the student tour guide to finish up with the last family when I heard creaking from the front steps and the screen door open. I assumed it was the family returning, so I continued the call I was on, but then he appeared in front of me. I moved my eyes upward to his collar and face and held his gaze until I hung up.
“Father Infanzi?” I asked, trying to hide my shock.
“You’re a lector from St. Stephen’s,” he said. “Maria?” though he didn’t remember I was Janine’s sister.
“Yes. What are you doing here?”
“I was asked to come and hear confessions.”
“Are you sure? We’re not a Catholic college. We have Catholic students, but I don’t think we’d have confessions available on just any Saturday.”
“I’m pretty certain I’m supposed to be here,” he said taking out a piece of paper, clearing his throat before saying the name on it.
“There’s no such person here. Maybe you’re supposed to be at St. Vincent’s University up the road?” I asked as casually as possible, so he wouldn’t feel silly.
“Oh, you know what?” he said, slapping his palm against his forehead, “That’s right. I just turned into the first college I saw.” A thin film of red spread across his face, and then he paused, looking as surprised as I felt. “Thank you.”
“You’re welcome.”
“You work here?”
“I’m an admissions counselor.”
“Oh. Well it was nice bumping into you like this,” he said, looking at me longer than he needed to. As he left, I watched him out the window and then looked away quickly in case he turned back. When I was done, I walked outside where the magnolia trees were starting to bloom and felt stunned. It was one thing that of all the hundreds of parishes Father Infanzi could have been assigned to, he was assigned to St. Stephen’s but showing up on my doorstep on the one Saturday a month I work? It had to be about my calling, didn’t it? It had to be God sending him, a priest, to finally make me face it. But could God be that cruel? Father seemed to be everything I was looking for in a man, the perfect catch. I wasn’t wise or religious enough to consider that maybe I was unconsciously drawing Father to myself or that this might be the work of the devil preying on my weak and immature soul. After this, I sometimes went out the front door to greet him. We’d shake hands and smile; he’d compliment my reading, and I’d compliment his homily, and he’d stare as I pretended not to notice. I didn’t tell anybody about my attraction to him, not even RF, the therapist I began seeing when my depression had gotten so bad I started running red lights to get to work on time.
She was in her forties, had shoulder-length brown hair, and listened intently. In the first few sessions, she asked me what I remembered about my mother and father when I was a child. All I could recall about my mother was that I was always afraid she was going to leave. Once when I was five and napping in the early evening, I woke up to the dark, the only sliver of light coming from the lit-up gondola in the enormous oil painting above the couch. I called, “Mommy, Mommy!” but no answer. Terrified, I went into the kitchen where she was supposed to be at the stove cooking dinner, her glasses fogging from the boiling water, but all I found was the glaring yellow light. I don’t remember anything else after that. When I asked her about it years later, she said she’d never leave me in the house alone, that she was always afraid she’d lose me.
My father was gruff and always working, and in the evenings when I had a few minutes on his lap, he’d conk out with his arm across me. I’d feel trapped but afraid to wake him, because I knew how tired he was, and I didn’t want him to think I didn’t love him. After he and my mother separated, I only saw him a few hours a month when he’d take Nellie and me for a meal. I didn’t remember that he’d sometimes cancel, leaving the two of us in our dresses and barrettes, holding hands. He’d come over for special occasions, but he never stayed long. After he remarried when I was sixteen and I visited him and my step-family, he’d swallow down some steak and bread and then leave for the caffé, the business he bought after he sold the pastry shoppe. Or he’d go downstairs to watch soccer in the dark.
RF asked what I knew of my family’s history of depression, which was scant even though three women on my mother’s side suffered from it. I wondered if my mother was ever depressed because of her tendency to withdraw at times, but I never asked, because I was afraid she’d think I was trying to dig up something negative. RF also asked about my dreams. There was the kind I’d been having ever since I moved out. My mother, Janine, and Julie—Nellie was never in it—are doing something fun together and excluding me. When I ask if I can join them, they dismiss me, sometimes make fun, or act like they don’t hear and walk away, which devastates me. In another dream, my five year old half-sister Daniella has asked our father for something, but he’s ignoring her. I don’t know if it’s me or my step-mother who yells, “She needs you, and you’re ignoring her.” In a third dream, my mother and I are in a big, dark house where she has misplaced a baby she is not trying to find, and I’m angry. I showed RF a blurry picture of me when I was about a year old standing in my crib after a nap, my hair bent with sleep, my diaper pulling away from my waist. The picture is proof that I wasn’t alone, but I told her that I looked as if I’d been holding myself up for a long time before anyone came for me and that I felt that way now. I added that I wanted my mother to recognize my accomplishments more when I was growing up, but she didn’t believe in praising kids.
I also told RF that my sisters rebelled as teenagers but that I didn’t, that I fantasized about rebelling now, cutting my hair and dyeing it, or quitting my job and that when Janine and Julie went out together with their husbands, I felt left out the way I did when I was little. After a couple of sessions, she told me I should get Alice Miller’s Drama of the Gifted Child. Sometimes if parents didn’t get to be children themselves, their children learn to hide their needs and memories “in order to meet their parents’ expectations and win their love.” They pretend to be well-behaved, reliable, and empathetic and are mortified when they find out they’re not. Grown up, they feel alienated from themselves and rely on their partner, their achievements, or their own children to make them feel good. The book explains that loneliness can be caused by the loss of self in childhood, that denying it can lead to depression, and that we cannot really
