Songs in Ordinary Time Read online

  “My mother’s dead,” he’d announced in a cold voice. “It just happened five minutes ago.”

  “Oh Les,” she’d said, trying not to cry. “I don’t know what to say. I’m so sorry.”

  “Well. I just thought you should know,” he’d said, his terse finality sickening her.

  All day long she had tried to look forward to tonight. It was her first night off in three weeks, and Joe had planned something special. She couldn’t imagine what it might be, since the Monsignor had been at the lake for two days with his cousin Nora Hinds. Her son, Bernard, was sick again. The Monsignor would be celebrating Mrs. Stoner’s funeral Mass the day after tomorrow, but then he was headed straight back to the lake. The Monsignor had left Joe completely in charge, which meant he couldn’t see her during the day or pick her up after work. He’d gone on every sick call and kept all the Monsignor’s counseling appointments. Joe had been pressuring her so much lately with all his talk of their life together that not seeing him these last few days had been a relief. People at work were giving her funny looks, and last week her mother had demanded to know why she was spending so much time with a priest. The more she insisted they were friends, the more convinced her mother was that all the convent talk was true. Now she and her mother were barely speaking.

  The line moved ahead. Once inside, she found it wasn’t nearly as upsetting as she’d expected. The woman in the pale blue satin folds was so thin that all of her bones ridged up against her dress, and her skin was an eerie pearly white, and a few dry wisps of her own hair straggled out from under the wig, and yet this woman certainly looked more like Mrs. Stoner than Mrs. Stoner had in the last few months.

  Chief Stoner stood by the casket. His eyes were red, but his voice was clear as he thanked everyone for coming and shook each hand.

  “Alice!” he said as the man in front of her stepped away. “Oh Alice, how nice of you to come,” he said, taking her hands in his.

  “I’m awfully sorry,” she whispered. “Mrs. Stoner was always very nice to me.”

  He shook his head and sniffed. “She was crazy about you, Alice. She thought you were the best thing that ever happened to Les.” He wiped away tears. “She hoped…she wanted…she thought…” He took a deep breath. “Poor Carol, she didn’t deserve any of this,” he sobbed, and her face flamed as a hush fell over the room. “I’m sorry,” she said again. “I’m awfully sorry.” It felt as if she were apologizing for everything, for Mrs. Stoner’s suffering, for leaving Les, for causing the Chief’s worst grief. A man and a woman she recognized as Les’s aunt and uncle from Providence came up then to stand with the distraught Chief. “I’m sorry,” she said to the aunt, who put her arm around his waist. “I’m very sorry,” she said to the uncle, who nodded. She moved gratefully along.

  “Les is out back,” the Chief called after her. “He needs to see you.”

  She found Lester in a tiny sitting room next to the office. He sat on the gold loveseat with a pile of wadded tissues on his lap. His eyes bloodshot, his nose red and swollen, he could breathe only through his mouth. “I had to leave,” he gasped. “I just couldn’t do it anymore.”

  “Oh Les, I’m so sorry.” She hated seeing him like this. He was probably regretting all the times he’d been irritable with his mother. She sat down and tried to make him feel better by recalling the night they’d played cards with his mother and the times they’d had lemonade together, and the time his mother had showed them her high school yearbook and pretended to be so offended when they kept laughing at the weird clothes and hairstyles.

  He covered his face. “I’m all alone,” he sobbed. “And I can’t stand it.”

  “You’ve got your father. He’s such a nice man, and he needs you, Les. Especially now,” she said.

  His head shot up. “He doesn’t need me. All he needs is me to forgive him, but I won’t. I never will.” His mouth was white and quivering.

  “Les, I know. It’s the same as my father. Only it’s not even forgiveness he wants. It’s understanding, and that’s almost worse. At least forgiveness means it’s over. My father just wants me to keep putting up with it.”

  “At least your father’s not a hypocrite,” he spat. “He is what he is. He doesn’t go around preaching honor and responsibility like my father did the whole time he was screwing my aunt while my poor mother laid in her bed night after night, crying! But the worst thing is, he used me. He didn’t have to feel so guilty if I was with her. And that way, it didn’t look so bad. And that’s the most important thing, what people think of good Chief Stoner. But no matter what he does or what he says, I know the truth about him. I know just how bad he is.” Spittle foamed in the corners of his mouth. His eyes glittered. “And he can’t stand that,” he whispered, almost gloating.

  “Les.” It was an effort to look at him. The hair on her arms bristled. She had to get out of here. “Oh Les.” She stood up. “Les, all of that’s over now.”

  He put his head back and closed his eyes. The floorboards creaked outside as people passed through the corridor. “I’m leaving for the seminary in two weeks,” he said.

  “That’s probably the best thing, then. Just get away from everything here.”

  He stood up as she moved to the door. His shoulders heaved up and down as he began to cry. “Alice. Alice, will you hold me? Just hold me, that’s all.”

  “Oh poor Les,” she said with a limp embrace where only cheeks touched, his queasily hot and damp against hers, and she was ashamed of the revulsion she felt.

  Her face reddened as she came up the street toward the rectory. She stared at her aunt’s house, praying no one was watching now as she turned onto the rectory walk. In the time it took to get to the side door she cringed with toes bunched, eyes almost closed, begging through clenched teeth, “Please hurry, please hurry, please, please hurry.”

  Joe grinned as she stepped into the warm kitchen. Lidded pans were on the stove, and she could smell onions and meat roasting in the oven. Joe wore a blue button-down shirt with his clerical pants and black shoes. The long lace-covered table in the dining room was set for two, with silver flatware, pale-blue-and-white china, gold-rimmed crystal, linen napkins, and a silver candelabrum that held five slender candles. In the middle of the table were gladioli and white carnations in a stuccoed basket she knew must have come from the church.

  Mrs. Arkaday had the night off. Alice was relieved that this was the surprise. No matter where they went, even if they were just in the car late at night, there was always the fear of being recognized by a parishioner. The fear made her not only nervous but bitchy, she realized an hour later as she couldn’t stop laughing at Joe’s word, feency, on the Scrabble board.

  “Sorry! No such word. I never heard of it.”

  “Feency,” he said, getting up to check the roast beef again. His apron was a dish towel tucked into his pants. “That’s what Howard Menka said his sister has now that she’s engaged to Carson. A ‘feency.’”

  “It has to be in the dictionary,” she said, laughing.

  “Look it up if you insist,” he called, and she smiled, watching him hurry down the hallway. He wanted everything to be perfect. She wasn’t to lift a finger or to worry about a single thing. He had even made her feel better about seeing Lester at the funeral home. Joe said Lester was taking out his own guilt and resentment of his mother’s illness on his father, and also, in a sense, on her. He wants to be rescued, that’s what that was all about, Joe had said, and for some reason the words kept surfacing. He wants to be rescued. Yes, she thought, as he came back to the table. We all do.

  They were midway through dinner when the phone rang. “Oh no, please, not a sick call,” Joe groaned, hurrying into the kitchen to answer it.

  She could hear him laughing.

  “Just Mrs. Arkaday checking to make sure everything’s all right,” he said, returning to the table. He sat down and replaced his napkin in his lap with an irritating fussiness. “She hopes you like the roast beef. She ordered th
e cut special.”

  Alice gulped. “She knows I’m here? Mrs. Arkaday knows I’m here?”

  He smiled. “She thinks I’m cooking dinner for Father Krystecki.”

  “But what happens when she sees Father Krystecki and asks him how he liked dinner?”

  “Oh, he hardly ever comes here,” he said with a wave of his fork.

  “But when he does, she’ll—”

  “Don’t worry about it,” he interrupted. He leaned across the table and touched her cheek. “I’m not,” he said, his wide grin startling her.

  How could he not worry, when lately it was all she thought about? He confused her. Sometimes it seemed his priesthood was a miserable trap in which he felt hopelessly snared. And then there would be times like this, as he spoke of counseling Bernie Hinds, the Monsignor’s young cousin, that his words ran together and his brow beaded with sweat, and his zeal and enthusiasm made her squirm.

  Last week Bernie had refused to go to Albany for any more treatments, which he said only made him sicker. Nora Hinds had called in tears, begging the Monsignor to come at once to talk to him. Everyone had tried, but Bernie was adamant, Joe said, pouring more wine into their glasses.

  “I don’t know if I blame him after seeing what Mrs. Stoner went through,” she said.

  “Well, yah,” he conceded with a wave of his fork. “But he’s just a kid. He’s got to keep trying.”

  “But why, if it just means more suffering and he’ll never get better?” She’d already heard this story their last time together, and it had irritated her as much then as now.

  “But that’s not the point. You don’t just give up. You fight. You fight back!” he said, eyes gleaming.

  “But why?” she persisted. In moments like this there seemed a strange blankness in him.

  “My God, Alice, you know why,” he said with another wave of his fork, impatient to continue.

  Yes. She knew why. Because Joe needed to be a hero, she thought, drinking more wine. That was his passion, to be a savior. And it was also the void.

  “So when all else failed, I asked if I could try, and the Monsignor figured, well, why the hell not.” He sipped his wine. “I’ll never forget it, walking into that huge stone house, down that long hallway, opening the door into that dark room; and there he was, sitting on his bed, not only stark naked but so hairless with this terrible white skin. Like a radioactive ghost. That’s all I could think of,” he whispered, taking another sip. “A shining ghost. I kept thinking: He’s already died. He’s dead, and they don’t even know it. But you see, I knew it. The minute I walked in there, I knew it. And I told him. I said, ‘Bernie, your problem isn’t your body. It’s something in here, isn’t it?’” he whispered, tapping his breast and staring as if she were the dying boy whose reply he now awaited, chin out, brow raised.

  She drank her wine, drank more, filled her mouth with water, swishing to get rid of the bitter aftertaste now as he related the conversation that had left Bernie curled in his mother’s arms, sobbing and begging for help. Joe had told him he was a spoiled rich brat who had never learned to fight back, who expected everything, including his recovery, handed to him on a silver tray.

  “It’s time for the hard fight, I told him. Time to find out not whether he can get better, not whether he’s going to be cured, but whether or not he’s got the guts to live.”

  She held her breath. The flickering candlelight deepened the cleft in his chin, the hollows round his piercing eyes, the tuft of black hair at his throat. His husky voice darkened with the wine and made her shiver. It’s all right, she thought. He was a priest, and in spite of everything, always would be a priest, maybe even a better one for all of this. She felt not only safer with him when he seemed most priestly, but, oddly enough, in this moment, more womanly, more alive than she had ever felt.

  She took another sip, this time savoring the lushness in her mouth. Every nerve tingled. Her eyelids were heavy. She smiled and pushed away her plate.

  He was telling her how grateful the Monsignor had been. “He offered me a weekend off with my family, but I said not now. I thought I’d wait till you got up to school, and then maybe I’d take the time then, you know, stay someplace up there, the two of us.”

  She tried to smile, but now she was very tired. It was the wine. She had had alcohol only once before, a few sips of beer with Mary Agnes. She thought of her father, but not with the awful guilt she had experienced in Mary Agnes’s cellar. She had often wondered how he could give up his family and all that mattered for the sake of some foul-tasting liquid. At least now, at this moment, anyway, it didn’t seem quite the incomprehensibly selfish choice it usually did.

  “Would you like dessert?” Joe asked. He had asked a previous question she had not answered, then had quickly forgotten. “I have chocolate cake.”

  “No, thank you,” she said, making every effort to speak distinctly. Her tongue felt too big for her mouth. “I’m very full.”

  “You hardly ate,” he said, looking at her.

  “The meat…the meal was delicious.” She smiled. “I mean it.” She stretched back with a deep groan.

  He suggested coffee, but she didn’t want any. Just the smell of it was making her stomach feel funny. The phone rang. While he was gone, she braced her cheek on her fist and catnapped. He was back. She looked up, startled and trembling. He said it was someone from out of town wanting to know what time the early Mass was tomorrow. She watched him clear the table. He was telling her about a priest named Velecchi who had been in his first parish with him. Velecchi had called the other day to invite him up to his new parish, which was on a lake where they could go fishing. He paused and she was conscious of him looking at her, but she had been thinking of something else.

  “So what’d that boy’s father think you did? The one you gave the jacket to. You never said,” she asked, peering at him.

  “I don’t know. I guess he—” Joe stammered. He was annoyed with her. The other night he had accused her of daydreaming while he was telling her about his most recent meeting with the Bishop. “I don’t know what he thought.”

  “He thought you were queer.” She giggled. “He did, didn’t he? I know that’s what it was, so you might as well admit it,” she said smugly. She liked this honesty, this getting things out in the open, like a cool clear stream running straight through her, delivering her thoughts so smoothly she did not have to grope for or censor a word.

  “I don’t know what he thought,” Joe said. He carried more dishes into the kitchen.

  She blinked as the door swung in and out, its diminishing arc leaving her stranded and alone out here. “Joe?” she called, cringing with the thickness of her voice. “I’m sorry. I hurt your feelings, didn’t I? Joe?”

  “I’m right here,” he said, backing through the door with a cup of milky coffee for her.

  There was something she had to say, but he urged her to drink the coffee. It was something no one ever talked about. Like the boy and the jacket, there was always a part left out. “You know what it is, don’t you?” she asked, bending low to sip from the edge of the dripping cup. “It’s…it’s…sex! That’s what the problem is. That’s what’s so…so stupid!”

  “Drink your coffee,” he said, gesturing for her to lift the cup.

  “Well, it is! It just makes everything so complicated and so dirty.”

  “No, Alice,” he said patiently. “It’s natural! It’s part of living. Like eating and sleeping.”

  He didn’t understand, and now she was losing her train of thought. She looked at him and started to cry. “But sometimes I feel like some animal that gives off this smell. It makes me sick, and every time I say the same thing. I vow I’ll never ever do it again, it’s so wrong. And then every night when I’m with you I can’t help it. I can’t stop myself. It feels like I’m out of control. And the harder I try not to, the better it feels. And then I’m so ashamed. Sometimes I even walk funny. I try to keep my legs close together.”

  “Alic
e…”

  “No, no, listen. I know this is a weird thing to say, but I don’t know who else to ask.”

  “What?” He looked frightened.

  She rubbed her eyes, then scratched the back of her head. “Well…Oh God,” she moaned, rolling he eyes. “I don’t know how to say this.”

  “Then just say it. Whatever it is, say it.” He kept swallowing and taking deep breaths.

  “Is there a smell? Do I smell? Is that what happens? Is that how men can tell? How could you tell?”

  “Alice! Alice, what have I done to you?” He came around the table and sat close to her. “Men can’t tell anything. There’s no, no odor. It’s not like a dog in heat. It’s not dirty. It’s beautiful. You don’t smell. You’re the sweetest, purest, most wonderful person I know. Don’t cry, please don’t. There’s nothing wrong with you, honey. Believe me. I love you, and love isn’t dirty, Alice. It’s not wrong.”

  She looked up and wailed with this soreness in her chest. She had to tell him: the thing was, the terrible, terrible thing was that she didn’t love him. She didn’t love anyone.

  “Come here, baby. You’re upset. You’re tired, and you’ve had too much wine. Come here. Let me take care of you. Let me hold you,” he whispered as they climbed the stairs to his quiet room, to his dark bed with its cool bleached linen. He eased down beside her. Curled against him, she drifted in and out of sleep as he kissed her ear, her eyes, her mouth, her throat. He stroked the length of her arms to the damp tender skin between each finger. He helped her unbutton her dress. She heard him move away and lay it neatly on the chair. He took off his own clothes, then pulled the sheet over them.

  “I love you,” he whispered with every new place he touched and kissed. “You taste like flowers.”

  A wall rose around her and in here nothing hurt. In here she was safe, as long as someone loved her and did not demand it back.

  “Aaargh,” the Monsignor groaned with every rut and bump in the road while his cousin Nora drove. He was doubled over with pain, his brow pressed against the dashboard. Nora kept insisting he go to the hospital.