Hotel of the Saints (2 page)

But Aunt Jocelyn never even watered the roses. He was the one who would fertilize them in March and September; spray against rust and mildew, aphids and spider mites; cut off their weak branches in the fall and prune the strong canes by a third; cover them with pine needles for the winter.

His uncle's death has given Lenny an acceptable excuse to leave the seminary for a while to help Aunt Jocelyn get the hotel ready for sale. Lenny has some doubts about being in the seminary; for some time now he has felt that, if only he could get a few months away from there, he might figure things out. What he thought he wanted was much clearer to him before he entered the order, and in the four years since, he's been trying to get back to it—that undefinable sense of one source.

Faith has become complicated: it has moved from his heart into his head, where it abides, fed by scriptures and prayers. But his heart keeps forgetting, and he no longer feels the certainty of faith that belonged to him as a boy.

Lenny has confided this to only two people—carefully to his adviser, Father Richard Bailey, and far more openly to his best friend, Fred Fate. Fred is two days older than Lenny and entered the seminary—so he'll tell you—“because then everyone will have to call me Father Fate.” But you can see Fred's faith in his walk, hear it in his laughter. In comparison, Lenny's faith is puny. He feels constricted by his black clothes, yearns for canary yellow and a shade of orange so intense it's vulgar, for lush green and the kind of blue you can climb into.

The morning of Leonard's funeral, Fred checks out a monkmo-bile—his name for any one of the long, well-maintained cars in the Jesuit garage —and meets Lenny at the starch queen's house for breakfast. Aunt Jocelyn already sits at the table, hands folded on her chiffon skirt. Her cousin, Bill, has brought her. Lenny is not used to seeing his aunt in black. Most of her clothes are white, and with her pallid complexion —“indoor skin,” the
starch sisters call it—she usually looks like the overexposed photo of a lady missionary. But the black fabric makes her skin look even more faded. As Lenny reaches for his aunt's hands and kisses her on both cheeks, he wishes he could sketch her: she has the kind of face that comes at you in eyes, all eyes.

The starch queen's best friend from high school, Cheryl Albott, arrives with two tablecloths and stacks of matching cloth napkins that still have the manufacturer's stickers on them. Cheryl, who works in the customer-service department at Sears, has a front row opera subscription together with the starch queen. For decades, the two have attended every opening night in Portland, and for decades Cheryl has given the starch queen refunds for fancy outfits that she buys to wear at the opera or other special occasions and brings back a day or two later.

Ever since Lenny became a Jesuit, Cheryl has looked at him with reverence and called him “Father,” though Lenny has explained to her that he's a brother, and that brothers—though they take vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience just like Fathers—do not administer the sacraments or give absolution.

Cheryl's arrival makes Lenny notice his mother's dark tailored suit with the lace collar. “New?” he inquires, though he doesn't really want to know.

The starch queen fondles her lapel, winks at Cheryl. “Only the best for Leonard's funeral.”

At the grave site, Lenny holds Aunt Jocelyn's elbow. She is younger than the starch queen, yet she can barely walk alone and stumbles frequently. Her cousin tells Lenny that Aunt Joce-lyn can't prepare meals for herself, that she refuses to move out of the hotel although her side of the family has found a safe place for her to live.

“It's run by the nuns. Your aunt could go to mass every day. You know how important mass is to her.”

“We don't have to rush her.”

“She's not fit to live alone. She doesn't even use the phone.”

“I'll look after her while I work on the hotel.”

“And how long will that be?”

After the funeral, when the starch queen tries to pile seconds on Fred's plate, he diverts her by asking, “Did you know that Lenny hardly eats at the seminary? Don't you think he's getting awfully thin?”

The serving spoon with manicotti still in motion, the starch queen changes its course from Fred to Lenny, who mouths a silent
fuck-you-very-much
across the table to his friend.

“… working too hard,” Fred goes on. “Always running around. Looking peaked. Don't you think so?”

Cheryl from the refund department gets that
bless-me-Father
look in her eyes, and the manicotti on Lenny's plate is joined by a chunk of oily garlic bread.

But Lenny gets even when Fred is ready to leave. “Father Fate is crazy about your cooking,” he tells the starch sisters. “You should hear him. He's always raving about you.”

Promptly, the starch sisters gather by the counter to wrap leftover lasagna, eggplant parmigiana, and poppyseed strudel for Father Fate, stacking everything in a shopping bag for him to take back with him.

“I can't possibly eat all this,” Fred groans.

But Lenny urges the starch sisters on. “Father Fate is always so modest.”

“You'll get hungry tonight,” the starch queen promises Fred. “You can share it with the other Fathers,” Cheryl says.

Wrought-iron balconies, too narrow for anyone to stand on, decorate the façade of Uncle Leonard's hotel on N.E. Sandy Boulevard. Roses, the size of grapefruits, cover the slope in front, and the gift shop is crammed full of religious pictures and enough statues to outfit four cathedrals. It's only a few blocks from the Grotto —Sanctuary of Our Sorrowful Mother—where visitors like to ride the huge elevator up a sheer cliff and walk the scenic pathway lined with the Mysteries of the Rosary.

During the year of Uncle Leonard's chemotherapy, the hotel has grown shabby despite the efforts of Mr. Wolbergsen, the handyman, who moved to his sister's in Walla Walla when Uncle Leonard closed the hotel three months before his death.

After Aunt Jocelyn goes to sleep, Lenny wanders through the rooms—all identical, with pale-gray walls, faded curtains, and a single painting above the dresser, usually of either Mary or Jesus with a liver-colored heart weeping through a gap in the tunic. Lenny settles himself in the room closest to his aunt's apartment in case she needs help during the night, but when he wakes up, it's already eight and she's in the kitchen, dressed for mass, stirring a concoction of lard and sunflower seeds on the gas stove.

He feels queasy. “I'll eat later,” he says.

When he drives her to church in Uncle Leonard's old station wagon, she sits stiffly next to him, handbag clutched to her chest, eyes vacant. During mass, she keeps frowning and rubbing
one finger up and down the ridges as if to erase them. On the way home, Lenny stops with her at the hardware store and buys ten gallons of pale-gray interior latex while she lingers above the paint charts, pointing to bright pinks and reds. She won't leave until he buys a quart of fuchsia.

At the hotel, she scoops the cooled lard and seeds into a pie tin and sets it out on the windowsill.

“Oh, it's for the birds,” Lenny says.

She shields her eyes. Peers at him.

After he fries eggs and butters her toast, he begins with the renovation, starting in the last room down the hall. Soon, his eyes ache from the relentless gray, and his arms feel heavy when he raises the brush. He wishes he could accept everything about the Jesuits. Or nothing. While Fred chooses what he believes, Lenny feels uneasy in the middle. Yet, whenever he pictures himself leaving the order, he gets sweaty and afraid that his faith is not strong enough to stand on its own, that he needs the frame of the church as much as his uncle needed the props of religious statues and holy cards.

There is something about hard work and bone-aching tiredness that appeals to him, because, gradually, it blots his doubts. Specks of gray settle in his nostrils, his eyebrows, in the fine hairs on his arms. He swears he's breathing paint.

Late afternoon, when he showers, he uses up four tiny cakes of hotel soap. Ready to cook dinner for his aunt and himself, he hobbles into the kitchen and finds Aunt Jocelyn sitting at the table, a can of tuna in front of her. He gets the opener, mixes the fish with mayonnaise, onion curls, and celery seeds. In the cupboard he finds a jar of pimentos and dices them, sprinkling them across the tuna salad.

“That's how the starch queen likes to make it,” he tells Aunt
Jocelyn. “I miss cooking. In the seminary, everything is served to us”.

After dinner, Aunt Jocelyn rests in a long canvas chair on the flagstone terrace. She closes her eyes while Lenny waters the rose garden. The leaves look even greener when they are wet. He would love to see that color against the somber walls he painted today—not just green, but other colors, so lush you wouldn't want to wash them from your skin after painting an entire room with them.

Fred is nearly two hours late when he stops by the following afternoon in yet another monkmobile, a Chrysler this time. It has been his turn to drive the nuns from the convent school to the blood drive.

“You look … drained,” Lenny says.

Fred laughs. “The nuns have been asking about you.” He sits down on the floor and watches Lenny paint another wall. “Let's see….” He counts on his fingers. “There's Sister Mary of the Most Blessed Heart Exposed, Sister Margaret of the Holy Shroud Exposed, Sister Catherine of the Immaculate Blood—”

“Exposed,” Lenny says, knowing how Fred likes to mangle the nuns' names and include “exposed,” even when he takes phone messages at the seminary. “Now—who really asked after me?” Lenny wants to know.

“Just Father Bailey and that old feisty sister who always demands two cups of orange juice after relinquishing her blood.”

“Sister Barbara.”

“Of the Most Sacred Thorns — “

“Exposed.”

His third day of painting, Lenny mixes a few drops of Aunt Joce-lyn's fuchsia paint with the gray, but they're not enough to soak up the starkness. When his aunt comes to watch him, she dips one finger into the fuchsia can and holds it close to the window. They look at each other; she tries to smile, but her lips tremble. Reaching for Lenny's brush, she dips it into the fuchsia and draws a brilliant smudge on the wall by the window.

Lenny reaches out to steady her, but she's not nearly as wobbly as usual, and he doesn't know what to do except join her. When they finish early that evening, her white culottes and matching blouse are splattered with fuchsia. The entire room is fuchsia, including the trim. Without stopping to clean up, they drive to the hardware store, buy cans of blue, yellow, red. In the morning they go to mass, but Aunt Jocelyn is eager to get home and mix the color for their next project—a rich sun-orange that seems to cover the walls much faster than gray.

They sit down to eat lunch, streaks of brightness in her hair and on her blouse. When Lenny cleans the counter, he finds two pill bottles on top of the kitchen trash. Both are more than half full. He takes them out.

“I feel better without them,” she says.

“Have you talked to your doctor about this?”

“I found the warning slips from the pharmacy in Leonard's desk … a list of everything that can go wrong.” She gets up, tears the index card her husband used to mark her pills, and holds out her hand for the bottles. “Don't tell anyone.”

“At least let me keep them till you've checked with your doctor.”

“It's my doctor who put me on them.”

“How long since you've stopped?”

“The day we buried Leonard.”

At first he considers calling the starch queen for advice, but with each day Aunt Jocelyn looks so much better—no longer so helpless but oddly energized—that he worries less. And by the time the starch sisters visit, carrying homemade fettuccine and a gallon of tomato sauce with many tiny meatballs, he can brag about how Aunt Jocelyn walks to the library now to choose her own books, how she calls cabs that take her to the supermarket.