wedding. Afterward, I felt just as numb and disconnected from myself as I always did, but I hadn’t gone to confession, because I didn’t want to promise I wouldn’t do it again.
As we looked at the menu, I told Father how good the pastas and fried calamari were. “I like pasta puttanesca,” he said. When he couldn’t find it, I pointed to it, the sight of my hand near his making him blush more. After the waiter took our order, I complimented Father’s pronunciation. “A lot of people say calamary. It’s so wrong, it hurts the ear.”
“I know,” he said laughing. “That’s my half Italian side.”
“Your father’s father is from Puglia?”
“Right,” he said, impressed that I’d remembered. “And both your mother and father were born in Italy. You’re the real thing.”
I shrugged my shoulders to be cute, which made him laugh harder. “You studied Chemistry at Fairfield, right?”
He looked impressed again. “Yes, and you graduated from Westerly.”
I nodded. “Then the fall after graduation, I went to work in the Admissions office.”
“Where I bumped into you like a clod last April,” he said, rolling his eyes.
“It was an honest mistake. Soon after that is when I got the career placement director position, and that’s what I’ve been doing for the last year.” By the time the waiter arrived with our platter of calamari, we were talking a steady stream. Both our mothers went back to college in their forties to become health care professionals; we were third-born and mildly introverted, almost always falling into the role of listener; his mother’s name is Maria. I asked him what he does in the parish even though I already knew, and he asked me about my job and the graduate course in autobiographical writing that I was taking, both of which I enjoyed so much it showed on my face. I told him I wanted to write a memoir one day, though I didn’t tell him that I cried in my professor’s office when he asked me what my very first memory was, and I couldn’t remember a thing. Half-way through our main course when we came to a pause, he started to laugh. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’ve just never had lunch with a girl like you before.”
It was the moment when I should have steered the conversation toward vocation, asked him when he first felt called to the priesthood, told him that I also felt a calling, so that he wasn’t wondering for one more moment why the two of us were having a three hour lunch on my birthday. But I was making him laugh with a spontaneity I’d forgotten I had. He was hanging on my words. He seemed so different from the men I dated: innocent and child-like and easy to charm. I was looking for some answer to my life, something pure to save me and give me the courage to take the next step toward God. One of the reasons I was attracted to him was because I couldn’t have him, wouldn’t have to have him, or owe him anything, but now all I cared about was how I might be able to keep him. For the three hours that we talked and ate and paused while the sun danced its shadows on the hardwood floors, I was running as hard as I could from God. As we waited for Father to get his change, he said abruptly, “I’d be happy to be the priest at your wedding.”
At first I felt an odd sense of relief. He didn’t say if you get married. He said it as if it were certain, and hearing it from a priest, I allowed myself to think that maybe I had this whole calling thing wrong. Maybe I had misunderstood God all these years, but then I felt a sharp twist of irony. If I were to get married, I was pretty sure I’d want to marry him. He was everything I wanted in a man. Why did he have to say that? I couldn’t not feel what I was feeling. We had so much in common. The more I got to know him the more I felt I’d known him before, that it was our fate to meet. Maybe he was a gift from God, so I wouldn’t have to be completely alone; I’d be happy and fortunate just to have him as a friend. This couldn’t be the end. All I managed to say was, “That would be nice, Father.”
Later that night, when Janine, Julie, and I were gathered at my mother’s for cake, someone asked me if I had done anything special. I said as casually as I could, “I went to lunch with Father Infanzi.” The only one who seemed a little upset was Janine whose mouth tightened. “You did?” My mother asked intrigued, “What did you talk about?” imagining herself sitting with him. Then she added, “I always thought it’d be good for you girls to have a priest-friend.” And from Julie, a completely innocent, “Where did you go? That sounds really nice.” If Nellie were there, she probably would’ve been onto me, but she was twenty and never wanted to be with us. Right before my mother placed the cake in front of me with nine flickering candles, one for good luck, I boasted, “It was a three-hour lunch.”
Less than a week later, Father asked me out for a second lunch. While we waited for our food, he told me that one day when a woman had come to the rectory to talk to him about her marital problems, all he could think was, Go away, lady! Why can’t you be Maria? I bristled. I wanted him to prefer me, but I didn’t want him to own up to it that way. Besides, why was he bringing up another woman? When he asked if something was wrong, I said, “No,” but I was distant for the rest of lunch. Did all the unhappily married women call on him? Was he responding to them the way he was to me? When I walked out after Sunday Mass with a frown, he asked if he’d done anything wrong. I said, “Your comment made me nervous.” Two days later I received an apology in the mail: As privileged as he felt to be a priest, he needed to remind himself that he could cause great harm when he betrayed one’s trust in him. I had no reason to feel nervous in my own church, which I’d be attending long after he left. He was sorry. It’s what I thought I wanted to hear until I got to the part where he said he wasn’t trying to start anything, that he planned to be a faithful priest until he died. Now I felt jealous of the Church. When I called to accept his apology, he told me that he had just gotten home from helping a single mom whose house was in need of repair.
No priest had ever helped my mother or spent time with Nellie and me once our father was gone. It seemed like an odd form of charity. The next time I greeted him after Mass, I shook his hand as if he were any other priest and said, “Have a good week, Father.” He said warmly, “You too, Maria” and then reached in to give me a peck on the cheek, but he didn’t ask me to stay and chat. I walked away feeling slighted, more resolved to keep my distance. In the meantime, Rick and I broke up by Labor Day, and I met Sam, a physician’s assistant who rescued me from a table of misfit singles at a wedding in October. Fifteen minutes into our first date, with the pain still palpable on his face, he told me that his ex-wife decided on their honeymoon that she didn’t want to be married. I was hoping he’d like me enough to forget her, but I knew from the obligatory kiss he gave me on our third date that I was wrong. I still went home four nights in a row hoping for a blinking red light on my answering machine. By Thursday, I had to accept that I wasn’t going to hear from him. It was the same week that Grandpa Anthony died, my mother’s father with his bald head and mischievous blue eyes who wanted all of us to run businesses from home so we didn’t have to pay taxes, who always said, “Go the straight way,” and “Se Dio vuole,” if God wants, and who prayed the Rosary for us every day. Grandpa whom I loved, with whom I couldn’t walk or talk with because of his Sicilian dialect and missing leg, which he lost the year I was born when he was walking home one day and a drunk driver crashed into him.
I pulled out a pot from the set my mother had bought me for when I got married and put water up for pasta. While I waited, I obsessed. Maybe if I had said or done something just a little bit differently, Sam would have called. Here was more proof that I wasn’t meant to get married. Something would have worked out by now. As for Father, if God had wanted us to be together, he would have allowed us to meet before he entered the seminary or at the very least before he was ordained. How could God send me such a wonderful man I couldn’t have to corner me into a vocation I didn’t want? I was leading on a priest I wasn’t sure I trusted and blaming it on God. All these months I hadn’t said a word to him about my calling: letting him believe that I was available, sending
