Thomas M. Disch (28 page)

It was your revenge for all the years that other people had pretended the same thing about you.

The woman finished reading and stepped down from the pulpit, and a prune-faced old layman took her place. He put on a pair of bifocal glasses and began to read, in a raspy voice, from the Gospel according to Saint Mark. It was the story of the man possessed by devils, whom Jesus meets and exorcises, at which point the devils enter into a herd of swine, and all the swine—two thousand of them, according to Saint Mark—run down the side of a mountain and jump into the sea and are drowned. Margaret had always thought this one of the more unsavory stories in the New Testament. Why did Jesus have to destroy so many pigs in order to help the man? Couldn’t he have just sent the devils back to hell, where they belonged? It seemed almost like an act of vandalism, not to mention cruelty to animals. Then, when the man who’d been exorcised had asked Jesus if maybe he couldn’t travel around with him, like one of his disciples, the answer is No, go home, get lost.

God certainly works in mysterious ways sometimes, but the old fellow reading the Gospel didn’t appear to have any misgivings about the story. He read it with a kind of gloating satisfaction, like a newscaster reporting on the total destruction of Saddam Hussein’s army. She was beginning to wish she’d never let Peter talk her into coming here to surprise Patrick.

Then the priest came up to the pulpit to deliver the sermon, and that was the last straw. He was another old codger, like the layman who’d read the gospel. She leaned sideways and whispered into Peter’s ear, “That isn’t Patrick!”

“I can see that, Mother. But please don’t make a fuss. People can hear you.”

“I thought you said Patrick always said the eleven o’clock Mass.”

“Mother. Please.”

Margaret folded her hands in her lap, and looked up at the priest in the pulpit, who was looking down at her with an identical smile of peeved false patience.

When he seemed satisfied that she’d been shushed, he smiled a benign smile and announced, “Today is Father’s Day!” He seemed to be claiming personal responsibility for the fact, as though he were a school principal announcing an unexpected holiday. Then he went on for a while about how wonderful fathers were, and how much we owe them for working hard to support our families, and how if we thought about it, every day ought to be Father’s Day. And it was, in the sense that every day was a gift from our Father in heaven, and we should think about how much we owed Him, and that led around to Saint Joseph, and how the angels had alerted him to Herod’s intention of massacring the innocents, and you could see what would come next— abortion.

Abortion was a new massacre of the innocents, and a sin that everyone shared in, if they didn’t do something to combat it. And that included men as well as women. The protests at the abortion clinics were a step in the right direction, but when you went to those protests, who did you see? Women and children. Perhaps Herod—that is, the government—didn’t take the protests seriously because Catholic
men
weren’t doing their share. More
could
be done. The priest did not condone the bombing that had just taken place in Edina, but he could understand the anger and frustration that had prompted it.

Violence was seldom the right course to pursue, but there might be other steps that could legitimately be taken. Any men—any
fathers
—who wanted to become involved in a positive way were advised to attend the next meeting of the Knights of Columbus, next Thursday evening at eight o’clock in the parish hall.

Margaret felt herself becoming unaccountably angry, an anger provoked not so much by what the priest
said
, most of which she agreed with in theory, as by the man himself. At first, it was more of an irritation, the way sometimes complete strangers can rub you the wrong way—by smoking where they shouldn’t or just by a tone of voice. But soon it went beyond that. Soon she began to be all pins and needles. She had to bite her lip to keep from saying something out loud, though what she’d have said she didn’t know.

She knew who the priest was, up there in the pulpit. Of course, she’d probably seen him other times she’d come here to see Peter’s twin brother, Patrick, who was the pastor of St. Bernardine’s, and she might even have spoken with him one or more of those times and not remembered. But she was certain that that wasn’t the way she knew him. It went back farther. He’d been part of her real life, before she’d gone into the nursing home.

Long before.

She felt like one of those women you read about who’d been sexually abused by their fathers when they were children and then repressed the memory till they were middle-aged, when suddenly it all came spilling back. Or like the people who’d had previous lives in another century. If she closed her eyes and just listened to his voice, it was easier to connect to the feeling. There was a purr to the voice, and a certain rhythm to the words, and a way of falling silent after he’d said anything that might make you feel guilty, as though giving you time to fill in the blank with your own name.

And then he said something that was the key to the whole thing. He’d finished up with abortion and gotten back to Father’s Day and the holy sacrament of matrimony, and he said, “There is something holy in the love between a man and a woman, which is only surpassed by the love between man and God.” And it was as though he were in the bed beside her, saying the same thing, looking all dreamy-eyed and smelling of sweat and hair tonic.

She opened her eyes and, yes, she could see that the man up there was Willy Cogling, almost half a century older, and his hair gone white, just like hers, and the wrinkles in his face revealing how mean he really was, the way wrinkles can do. But otherwise he was not that much different.

She laughed aloud, one brief bark of recognition, and turned to Peter and whispered, “That man up there is your father.”

“Mother,” Peter said, with a shocked look. But she could see that he’d taken in her meaning and was already processing it through the computer in his head. He was good at making calculations. They had that in common.

Willy Cogling was glaring at her again, but not with a look that suggested he’d heard more than her laugh. He knew who
she
was all right! And he couldn’t have felt that comfortable delivering his sermon on the sanctity of fatherhood with the two of them sitting down there in front of him. So even if he hadn’t
heard
what she’d whispered to Peter, he could imagine what it might be.

He smiled, and nodded, and continued: “Marriage isn’t all a bed of roses, of course. There are times when it may not seem the least bit holy, and we may want to laugh at the idea. I don’t suppose Saint Joseph was that happy to be woken up in the middle of the night and told he had to go to Egypt that very moment. He might have said to that angel, ‘You’ve got to be kidding.’ But God’s angels aren’t kidding when they tell us what we have to do. And neither is Holy Mother Church.”

Birth control will be next, Margaret thought, and sure enough, that was the sermon’s next theme. There had been a period, after the war, when the suburbs were going up and people were having babies like rabbits, when that’s all you heard about when you went to church. The great evil of birth control was right up there with the Communist menace. And when you went to confession, you got the third degree. That was how they’d met, she and Willy. It all came spilling back as though it were yesterday. In fact, much more vividly than yesterday, which was already part of the blur of last week.

It had been an old-fashioned kind of confessional, a big, dark mahogany number that
looked
like sin. Inside it, he had kept cross-examining her about her sex life with Paul until she’d finally confessed to him what she’d never told anyone else, the fact more shameful than any sin she could have come up with, the fact that she lived in a sexless marriage. How sympathetic young Father Cogling had been, how curious, how encouraging. He’d said there could be no annulment, since the marriage had been consummated. He’d advised prayer and patience. He’d said he would like to meet Paul, so he might understand the situation better, and in a few months he and Paul had become good friends while he and Margaret became lovers.

Lovers? Maybe that was overstating it. She’d never loved him in the romantic way that the woman in
The Thorn Birds
had loved Richard Chamberlain. Her biggest satisfaction in having the affair had been revenging herself on Paul, and having the twins was the sweetest part of the revenge.

And it had been Willy—with all his talk about abortion being the new massacre of the innocents—who’d tried to convince her to get an abortion before Paul found out she was pregnant. Paul never did find out about Willy, since she’d been able to diddle him into thinking he’d actually performed his conjugal duties one night when he’d got dead drunk. Paul was so gratefully deceived.

The twins would be a living proof of his conjugal adequacy.

With Willy it was another matter. Once she was visibly and officially pregnant, that was the end of the romance. Willy was transferred to another parish (probably at his own request) and gradually faded from her life, and she’d been just as glad. If truth be told, she hadn’t had much talent for adultery. Once the sex had progressed beyond the point of kisses and caresses, once it got to the parts you never saw in movies (at least in the movies of those days), Margaret could live without it. And so she had, for the next almost fifty years.

Willy wound up his sermon at last, by reading a cartoon from this morning’s paper, the moral of which was “Like father, like son.” Then, having sermonized for such a long time, he handled the rest of the Mass expeditiously. Margaret, though in no way arthritic, insisted on the prerogative of old age and stayed seated while all the genuflecting and kneeling went on. So, to her annoyance, did Peter. It was his way of announcing he was not a believer, which was fine for him, but it did suggest that Margaret’s unbending knees might have the same explanation. Was she a believer? Possibly not. The older she got, the less she was concerned with the Church’s official teachings. It was not so much disbelief as a feeling that she was entitled, at her age, not to have to pay taxes—even, if it came to that, lip service.

But when it came time for Communion, she had no compunction about joining the line, which, at St. Bernardine’s, was not very long. Nor did she lower her eyes when it came her turn and Willy stood in front of her, chalice in hand, to place the host on her tongue. She stuck out her tongue and stared him straight in the eyes, and
he
was the one to blink. Lowering his eyes and reciting the words, so much less magical in English than in Latin, he placed the tasteless wafer on her tongue.

For the very briefest of moments she was tempted to spit it out. But surely no one in the entire history of the Church had ever done such a thing, and Margaret was not about to be the first. On the other hand, she didn’t want to swallow it. So, when she was back in the pew, seated beside Peter, she discreetly removed the half-dissolved wafer from her tongue with a Kleenex she took from her purse, then wadded up the Kleenex and put it back in her purse.

She was certain that God, if He concerned Himself in such matters at all, would understand.

At last, the Mass was over, and everyone was supposed to give a formal hug to the person next to them—an observance that Peter neatly finessed by an elaborate charade of helping Margaret get to her feet.

The best was yet to come. Willy had stationed himself at the side exit in order to shake the parishioners’ hands as they left the church. There was a double flow at the door, a fast and a slow lane, just like on the thruway, and Peter tried to steer his mother into the fast lane, but Margaret insisted, with a decisive shake of her head, that they would be among the hand-shakers.

When it came their turn, Willy didn’t miss a beat. “Mrs. Bryce, how
nice
to see you. And your son. Peter, isn’t it? Father Pat will be so sorry to hear that he’s missed you. He’s on retreat.”

“You needn’t apologize, Willy,” Margaret said, matching his tone of formal courtesy. “It was a greater treat seeing you. I didn’t know you were still alive.”

When Willy didn’t have a quick response to that, Peter stepped in, with blundering courtesy: “Mother’s memory can be erratic.”

“That’s just the way it is,” Margaret agreed briskly. “Sometimes I don’t know my own name. Other times it all comes back. And this morning, Willy, you made it all come back.”

“I’m glad to hear that, Mrs. Bryce. And so, I’m sure, will Father Pat be when he returns. Unfortunately, where he is there are no telephones. That is one of the luxuries of a retreat, though some think of it as a penance. I assume you came here expecting him to be saying Mass?”

“Yes, Father Cogling,” Peter said. “Then we thought we’d take him out to visit our father’s grave. If he could spare the time.”

“Father’s Day,” Father Cogling said, nodding genially. “What a thoughtful idea. Father Pat will be doubly disappointed.”

“Perhaps you would like to come with us, Willy,” Margaret suggested.

“There’s room in the car.”

“I wish I could. Paul was a dear friend, and a good Catholic of a kind that’s become all too rare.” (This, with a glance toward Peter.) “But”—he lifted his shoulders—”with Father Pat away, my time is not my own.”