Authors: Lynn Austin
TWENTT-NINE
“I want to serve God,” Patrick told me as we sat on the beach on Squaw Island, “but I can’t accept His terms. God is asking too much of me. He’s demanding that I give up . . . life! Living! Going places and seeing things!”
“I feel exactly the same way!” I said.
“The dean of the seminary says that I haven’t surrendered all of myself to Him. That I won’t make a good priest until I do. He suggested that I take a year off from school and work here.”
My father had recognized God’s call on Patrick’s life the day they had talked in his study after Papa’s beating. In spite of his disagreement with many of the tenets of the Catholic faith, he said that Patrick was “God’s workman in another vineyard.” He warned me not to oppose God’s will. I wouldn’t listen.
When Patrick decided we would elope and be married by a justice of the peace, he was not only abandoning his church, but his calling to the priesthood. The pressure on his side of the family was even worse than on mine. They were so proud to have a future priest in the family, someone who could redeem the name of Thomas O’Duggan. But that would all be lost if he gave up his calling, especially to marry a Protestant girl. But God had the final say over all our plans. God wielded a weapon more powerful than love—He held the power of life and death. Eva died. Our disobedience killed her. Patrick belonged to God, and He wanted him back.
We held each other that night after Eva’s funeral, standing beside the desolate road, our eyes finally opened to our sin.
“When Jonah ran from God, he plunged everyone on board the ship into the hurricane,” Patrick said. “Now I’ve done the same thing. I’ve brought all this misery on you and your family by my disobedience. I don’t know how you can ever forgive me, Emma. I won’t even ask you to. But I know I will never stop loving you. When I take the vow of celibacy, it will be because I can never marry you.”
I lost my two best friends, Eva and Patrick. When I started dating Karl Bauer in the spring of 1919, 1 still hadn’t touched the bottom of my grief. It was so fathomless that I accepted Karl as part of my punishment. I would serve out my life sentence with him in Bremenville.
Karl knew all about Patrick and me. The entire town knew. In his jealousy, he never quite believed that we had been chaste. “Is that the way you greeted your Catholic lover?” Karl said when I didn’t rush to the door to meet him every day. “Would your holy man have bought you all these nice things?” he said as he fastened a diamond necklace around my throat. For five years Karl poked at the wound, keeping it bloody and raw, never allowing me to forget Patrick.
Then in August of 1924, Karl went away for three days. The morning he left was a beautiful sunny day, and since Karl had taken the car, I decided to walk across the river to the parsonage to visit my mother and my sister Vera. But when I got to the church I kept walking, for some reason. I found the Metzgers’ boat tied where it had always been and got in and rowed across the river to Squaw Island.
The river, like my soul, was at the lowest ebb of my lifetime. There had been no rain all that summer and the woods were so dry there were warnings about the danger of forest fires. I remember thinking how appropriate it was to return to the place where Patrick and I had fallen in love and find it as dry and desolate as my soul.
My boat ran aground on the beach a long way from the dock. I hauled it out of the water and set out to explore the now-alien landscape. The marshlands, once teeming with wildlife, lay barren and exposed. Rotting fish and dead reeds littered the cracked, sun-baked clay. I looked for our white birds but found only their abandoned nest. The island, like my life, had changed. Nothing looked the same. I sat on the rock where Patrick had once read poetry to me and recited our favorite verse aloud.
“I am haunted by numberless islands,
and many a Danaan shore,
Where Time would surely forget us,
and Sorrow come near us no more;
Soon far from the rose and the lily
and fret of the flames would we be,
Were we only white birds, my beloved,
buoyed out on the foam of the sea!”
Later, I wandered across the island to the cabin. I remembered standing beside Patrick at the cabin’s sink, pumping water together, frying mushrooms on the potbellied stove. But as I peered through the dingy window at cobwebs and dust, I saw a house devoid of life. At last, I lay down in the sun on the porch swing and cried myself to sleep.
I opened my eyes to find Patrick standing over me. I thought I was still dreaming. He was much too handsome to be real, a golden-haired Apollo with eyes as blue as the sky. Then his eyes clouded with tears.
“Emma? Is it really you?”
“Shh. Don’t talk,” I whispered. “I don’t ever want to wake up.”
He sank down on the porch steps as if too weak to stand. “You’re not dreaming . . . I’m real. . . .” I watched his chest rise and fall with each breath and saw a vein in his temple throb with his pulse. I sat up, never taking my eyes off of him.
“Then I must have conjured you with a magic poem,” I said. “I wished . . . oh, how I wished that you would appear. And now you have! Our birds have flown, Patrick, but you’re here. You’re here, so everything is all right again.”
I wiped my tears as fast as they fell, afraid to take my eyes off him, afraid he would disappear. But even in our joy we didn’t embrace, as if we instinctively knew that a single touch would spark a conflagration. Instead we sat on the cabin porch, talking quietly.
“I thought I would be alone here,” Patrick said. “I didn’t know you still came back to our island.”
“I’ll leave. . . .”
“No. Please don’t. I came back to Bremenville because I wanted to see you, but I promised myself that I would just watch you from a distance—just drive past your house and see if you were happy. I needed to find out if your husband takes you to all those places we talked about, if he’s shown you the ocean and oranges growing on trees.” A mixture of emotions played across Patrick’s face—joy, longing, apprehension. “I drove past your home and your husband’s drugstore, but I didn’t see you. I was never going to let you know I was here.”
“Because you’re a priest now?”
“Yes. Because you’re married and because I’m a priest now. I was ordained a year ago, on June fifth. I asked for a parish in the same city where I was
raised, and they assigned me to St. Michael’s—a mostly Irish parish, much like the one I grew up in.”
“I’m glad it has all worked out for you.”
He shook his head, looking away for the first time. “I’m not a very good priest, Emma. I’m frustrated. And I’m angry. All the time. I see my congregation yawning and whispering through my homilies, as if salvation wasn’t really a matter of life and death, and it makes me furious. I listen to their confessions—the same sins week after week—and I think of my father. I remember his sins, and how he didn’t even try to change because the kindly old priest assigned him a few Hail Marys and told him he was forgiven.”
Patrick plucked a blade of grass from beside the steps and tore it into pieces as he talked. “It’s my job to dispense God’s grace to those who confess, but I can’t bring myself to do it. They’re abusing the grace of God, abusing His forgiveness. And that grace was purchased at such a staggering price! I’m angry with people, angry with their weaknesses and their sin. I administer the sacrament, the body and blood of Christ that restores them to communion with God, knowing their sins will crucify Him all over again.”
I watched him swat at a mosquito that had landed on his neck, longing for the warmth of his broad, golden hands. He was quiet for a moment, then said, “The bishop suggested I make a spiritual retreat. He said I’m still carrying a huge weight of unforgiveness from my past. I’m supposed to be a father to the people God has given me. But I don’t know how to be a father, you see, because my own father—” He stopped again, waiting until he could trust himself to speak. “Maybe if I’d had a father like yours . . .”
“Like mine . . .?” I forced my gaze away from him and stared across the river. I could barely see the steeple of Papa’s church through the treetops. “When I was a little girl, I thought my papa was the wisest, most wonderful man in the world. I remember telling him once how I planned to travel all over the world, playing the piano, and he spoke as though he understood exactly how I felt. But he couldn’t have known. He couldn’t have understood me at all. He let me give up my dream. He let me marry a man who has wounded me and broken me until there is nothing left of
me
inside. I can’t play the piano anymore. Not at home, not even at church.” I heard the bitterness in my voice when I spoke the word. I wondered if Patrick did.
“Karl Bauer doesn’t love me. I was only his prize. He won’t let me have children because he knows that I’ll love them more than him. You talk about the ‘cheap grace’ of your church, but in my church there is no grace. We pay the consequences of our sins for the rest of our lives. Karl is my penance for
causing Eva’s death. All the Hail Marys in the world wouldn’t free me from the vows I made to him.”
“I’m sorry,” Patrick said softly. “When I’d heard that you’d married, I prayed that you would love him, that you would be happy with him.”
“And I hoped that you would be happy in the life God called you to.”
We gazed at each other, and the longing to hold and comfort each other pulled at both of us. Patrick had the spiritual strength to resist. I drew strength from him.
“Are you hungry?” he asked suddenly. “I brought some lunch.” He pointed to the box of groceries he had abandoned on the cabin steps. Coming from any other man besides Patrick, it would have been a ridiculous question to ask when our hearts were so full of pain, but I understood him perfectly. We had only a few hours together, and so, by unspoken agreement, we would live in the present, finding joy in each moment before we returned to our empty lives.
We cooked bacon and eggs in the cabin, then washed the dishes together, just as we had the time we’d hunted mushrooms. Sometimes we talked without words—one in heart and thought—always careful not to touch, not to so much as brush against each other.
Later we strolled around the island, reading poetry in the trees as they bent in the wind, delighting in a carpet of dainty wild flowers that had miraculously survived the drought. We sat on the beach, listening to the music of lapping water and the melody of bird song. The island didn’t seem nearly as dry and desolate with Patrick beside me.
Too soon, the day drew to a close. As we stood together on the porch of the cabin, we both grew quiet, sensing the end. When we said good-bye this time, it would probably be forever. We would both return to honor the vows we had made before God. We stood looking out at the woods and the water beyond, not at each other.
“It’s so unfair,” I murmured. “We should have spent a lifetime together, not one day . . . .”
“Hush, Emma. Don’t.”
“I’m sorry.”
“I believe in a God of design, and I know you do too. He’s teaching us through our present circumstances, but we have to listen closely to understand what He’s saying, just as we listened to the wind and to the bird song today. I’ll pray for your marriage, that you’ll find happiness in it. Will you pray that He’ll make me a better priest?”
I nodded, but somehow Patrick knew that I was lying. The woods seemed to grow still.
“Tell me what’s wrong, Emma.”
“I can’t pray. I haven’t prayed since the day Eva died.”
“I see. . . .” He drew a breath, as if about to speak, then exhaled with a weary sigh. “If I were a better priest I would know what to say to you, but I don’t. I’m sorry.”
“It doesn’t matter. There is really nothing you can say.” The moment I had dreaded all day had finally come. “I should go now,” I said. “Good-bye, Patrick.”
“Good-bye,” he whispered. We turned to each other at the same time.
I remember thinking,
If only I could feel the strength of his arms around me and the warmth of his embrace once more. If only I could inhale the scent of him, just once . . . just one more time . . . to remember . . .
We hesitated for the same moment. Then he took my face in his hands. And from the moment our lips touched, we were swept away.
I remember the force of the flood when I was a child, and how I’d felt the bridge tremble and sway beneath us the moment before the deluge washed it away. Mama backed the carriage away in time, and we escaped. But Patrick and I made a mistake. We didn’t step back in time. We lost our footing, and we were swept away. After that, nothing could have restrained the flood of stored-up love and longing that was unleashed with that single kiss. Nothing.
I spent the night with him. What happened between Patrick and me in that cabin was as different from Karl and me as a spring shower is from a hurricane. The aftermath would prove just as destructive. We lost ourselves in each other’s embrace, never thinking about the consequences.
As I lay in his arms the next morning after dawn, we heard a man’s shout outside. “Hello? Anyone home?” Patrick froze.
“Answer him,” I whispered. “He knows someone is here. The windows are open . . . our boats are on the beach. . . .”
Patrick scrambled out of bed to pull on his trousers. “Who’s there?” he called.
“It’s Alan Metzger.”
“We can’t let Alan see me!” I whispered frantically. “He goes to Papa’s church!”
Patrick stumbled to the door and opened it a crack. “Uh . . . good morning. What can I do for you?”
“My father’s boat disappeared from his dock across the river yesterday. I was out fishing this morning and happened to see it on your beach.”
“Yes, it was there when I arrived,” Patrick said truthfully. “That’s the boat I used alongside it.”
I slipped into my clothes as they talked, then crawled across the floor on my hands and knees to the woodpile in an alcove behind the potbellied stove. We had been using the older, seasoned wood from the back of the stack, leaving a narrow space behind the pile of newer logs. I crawled into the space and hid.
“That’s strange,” Alan said. “I guess it must have come unmoored and drifted over here. What did you say your name was?”