owning up to it made me feel as if I were betraying my family, especially my mother. Besides, how I could trust any of these statements if I didn’t know much about my parents’ childhoods and couldn’t remember much of my own?
One day, certain that my religious calling was causing my depression, I finally blurted to RF, “I think I’m supposed to become a nun.” She asked me why I thought that. “I just know. Because nothing ever works out with men.” I still didn’t say anything about Father Infanzi. I didn’t want her to think badly of me or presume that he was the only reason I thought I had a vocation. After this, neither one of us brought it up again for a long time. She was rightly interested in helping me discover why I didn’t give good, available men a chance like the kind, devout teacher I met at a Catholic young adult event who took long walks on the beach with his ill father. “He doesn’t wow me,” I said. I was comparing him to Father Infanzi who did, whose homilies I took home in my heart especially the Sunday he connected Beauty and the Beast, the French original that I’d never seen, to the love between a husband and wife. When he said that the first time he saw his father cry was during this movie, I started crying. Who was this man who got to watch tender movies with his father and who believed that a husband’s love for his wife should mirror Christ’s sacrificial love for his Bride, the Church? I had learned a little about Pope John Paul II’s—now St. John Paul II’s—Theology of the Body in high school, but I had forgotten most of it. Now Father had stirred my longing for this kind of love all over again. I started looking for it in him. That’s why I was devastated a few weeks later on the day of Janine and Phil’s wedding when he forgot me.
It was after the ceremony, and he had already taken off his chasuble and alb and was busy retuning hymnals to their slots and gathering stray papers. What good care he takes, I thought as I stood on the side in my sleeveless, navy blue gown looking at his bare forearms. One of Janine’s girlfriends had just told me I looked like Audrey Hepburn with my hair up, but nervously waiting for him to notice me and compliment my reading of “Love is Patient” from Second Corinthians, I felt more strange than pretty. When he looked up, I extended my hand, “Father, the ceremony was beautiful, and your homily really good,” but he merely shook my hand, said thank you, and slid out the pew as if he were headed to something better. Even if he didn’t recognize me with my hair up or still hadn’t remembered I was Janine’s sister, didn’t he remember my voice? Didn’t he see how pretty I looked? How could he forget me? He was just like my father who was outside, antsy in a tux, who had barely given me his cheek for a kiss, never mind a word about how well I’d done. I’m just another parishioner, I thought, and walked out into the June sun where my sisters were posing for pictures without me.
I had no business feeling disappointed. Father didn’t owe me anything. But he’d bumped into me at work only two months earlier. We’d had conversations. What was wrong with him? I had no idea how needy I was. On one hand, I was drawn to the purity and freedom I saw in him, what I wanted to be and to have but couldn’t accept; on the other, I desperately needed him to pay attention to me the way my father never had. Not only was I attracted to another unavailable man, this time I’d found someone completely off limits, the perfect man with whom to rebel against God and my family. Six months later on the night of the Advent concert, I got Father to remember me for good.
I was one of five lectors reading Scripture passages that were interspersed between choir music. Four of us were there, but the fifth seat beside mine was still empty. As I looked in the program to see who it was, there was Father Infanzi’s name. I couldn’t believe it. He was going to be seated next to me for an hour. I looked at the crucifix, trying to focus on God the way I always did before I lectored but never could. I worried I’d trip over the words or that I wouldn’t be able to get my hair back if it fell in my face when I bowed. Now I was also thinking how glad I was that the pants I wore made my backside look good. That’s when I heard from the side aisle the clack of a man’s shoes against the tile. I crossed my legs and pretended to be interested in the program as Father slipped into the seat next to me wearing a black bomber jacket, the kind the boys in school used to wear.
“Hi Father.”
“Hello,” he said, cold air and the scent of mouthwash wafting off him. Too nervous to look in his eyes, I watched him tug the pleat of his pants, stretch his leg out, and reach in his pocket with his other hand, a movement I found as alluring as a man shaving. He took out his reading, leaned his elbows hard into his knees as he looked it over for a few seconds, and then put it back, unlike me who had practiced five times and still felt nervous. Then he removed his jacket, his left arm hovering just behind my head so that if he lowered it, it would’ve fallen right around my shoulders. Twisting around to put it on the back of his chair, he finally realized, “You’re Janine’s sister.”
“Yes.”
“How are she and Phil?”
“Good.”
“She’s a nice girl.”
“I like her.”
He paused, then laughed.
For the next thirty minutes songs were sung and readings read, and then during the third reading, Father went completely still. I turned my head just enough to find him asleep. I thought about tapping him but felt too self-conscious. When the lector was done, and the flautist began to play, Father shuddered, his elbow nudging my rib, the contact waking him. “Did I just elbow you?” he whispered. “It’s okay,” I said. He didn’t apologize, just looked at me as if he was seeing for the first time. The flute fell softer and softer, cue that I was next.
“Good luck.”
“Thanks.”
I bowed at the foot of the altar and with clammy palms lit the pink candle in the wreath, the one that symbolizes joy, as I tried not to think about Father. Once at the lectern, I saw the rows of people stretched out in front of me and Monsignor Brennan facing the altar in a seat that had been placed especially for him in the middle of the aisle like an island. He was wearing a straight, full-length black robe with a wide purple sash, the kind you didn’t see monsignors wear anymore, the kind that Father de Bricassart wore in The Thorn Birds.
I adjusted the microphone even though it was fine, looked down at the paper even though I had practiced looking up. “During those days Mary set out and traveled to the hill country in haste to a town of Judah where she entered the house of Zechariah and greeted Elizabeth…,” I recited, my voice even despite the rumbling in one leg that was so terrible I leaned heavily on the other for support. I gazed up a couple of times avoiding Father’s face except toward the end when I finally looked in his eyes. I folded my reading and walked off the altar, thinking, He’s not going to forget me now, as I looked at him one last time to see if he was still watching. He was. Then I quickly looked away again and sat down but not before I saw that his face had gone from white to pink, from unaware to roused.
Chapter Two
After Mass
After the concert, Father asked me if I’d light the candle on the Advent wreath at Mass. I said yes, hiding my delight. A couple of weeks later I sent him a Christmas card with Shirley Temple standing on tippy toes in her short skirt to hang an ornament on a tree. When he thanked me for it on Sunday, he looked at me like he didn’t want me to go. Then after Christmas Eve Mass, I kissed him on the cheek. The following week he asked if I’d wait until he was done greeting parishioners, so we could talk a few minutes. As he finished, he slyly popped a mint, and then walked over and said hi, his fresh breath curling into the air. He was in his clerical clothing and jacket—had taken off his vestments as soon as he reached the back of the church—and I was in my long, beige coat and a pair of heels, which I always wore so I’d look taller. The church patio had cleared out except for a straggler or two, and the ushers had locked up the heavy
