The Gospel of Winter (23 page)

It was the power of willing yourself to do something, and I supposed it took the same kind of power to lie to yourself, to redirect memories and push yourself into a different life story. Old Who? Father Nevermind. It was just Mother and me soldiering on, making our way up into that brightness we all want to find.

After dinner, we were home again, blasting some old eighties music, and Mother asked if I'd ever learned to make a martini. She'd had a few at the restaurant, and I supposed it wasn't hard, but Mother said it wasn't about the know-how, it was about the finesse, and we would work on that. I thought about the finesse it took to make it look like I gave a flying fuck. A drink is a drink is a drink, and they all achieve the same end, the same thing that had happened so many nights in our house and that I knew was going to happen again that night. Mother told me to watch while she fixed her next one.

I made one, following her instructions, and once we both had our drinks I slurped mine slowly, but Mother gulped hers down. She walked away from me and leaned back on
the piano. She had the drunkard's swagger. “I really am going to do it on my own again. We are,” she added when she looked at me.

I didn't need another pep talk from Mother. She smiled, though, and I knew I couldn't get away from this unless I moved on to some other topic she'd prefer. “It'll be easy. You're not old and gray yet. I mean, you still look younger than most of the mothers I see around CDA.”

Mother giggled. “Well, aren't you kind. You sure know how to say the right thing,” she said. “Who raised you?” She laughed uneasily. She moved away from the piano and sat down on the arm of Old Donovan's recliner. I stayed quiet and sipped at my drink, leaning against the mantel.

“I'm not as young as I used to be,” Mother continued. “Men don't look at me like they once did. It's something I once had, and now it's gone, just like that. A man looks at you and you know what he thinks.”

Mother was lost in her own reverie, and she stared into the empty fireplace as she spoke. I didn't think it had anything to do with gender. It had to do with being watched, eyes glancing up and down your body, taking it apart, or taking it in piece by piece. Anyone could suffer that kind of moment, could feel the weight of it, could know it, or even want it. It felt good to be wanted sometimes. I didn't need the gravity of time to teach me that. There were many ways to want someone and to be wanted; there was a spectrum
of desire between two people and not all of it had to do with the body.

Mother was trying to give me advice. She thought she knew loss, and assumed I still didn't, or couldn't understand it to the extent she did. How can you trust a person like that, a person who claims a monopoly on victimhood?

She had me fix her another martini. “Look at me,” she said. “Nobody can say I look sad. I don't look sad. I'm going to make it.” She became quiet as she sank down into Old Donovan's chair and the massive padding swelled around her thin frame. Maybe she could smell him, smell his old-man smell, that musty mix of dead skin and arrogance. Soon her head lolled to one side or the other, giving her the effect of a doll thrown aside after the game was over, and eventually, she stumbled upstairs to bed.

I cleaned up for a while and then followed her. From behind the closed doors of the master bedroom, I could hear the moaning of her cello suites drifting through the darkness. She listened to it to remember back to when it had been a partner in her life, the times when the music had swelled in the theaters. I knocked on her door. She didn't respond, but I entered anyway. Faint moonlight reached across the room. The long mirror set into the door to the washroom reflected a shadowy image of the bed, and I didn't see Mother until her foot moved across the bedspread. She had not climbed under the covers. Instead, she had pulled the edge of the comforter off the floor and
rolled it over her so that it hung around her shoulders like a cape. Her thin, stockinged legs were exposed and tucked up against her chest. She hadn't even kicked off her heels.

I walked over, took off her shoes, and slumped her into a movable position. In her dead-limbed daze, I was able to get a shoulder underneath hers and lift her as I pulled the sheets down farther. I got her under the covers and tried to look away, even though she didn't seem to care, because as I moved her down the bed, her skirt bunched and rose up her thigh. I swung her legs up and tucked them under the sheets and blankets as quickly as I could, but I still saw her underwear. Her eyes were unfocused. I probably could have slapped her and she wouldn't have flinched.

I stole one of her cigarettes from her bedside table and smoked it as I sat with my back to her. Maybe she would come back to life, if only to yell at me. It was a woman's cigarette, one of those long, skinny ones, but it didn't really matter what kind of cigarette I smoked. I could have slipped on high heels for God's sake: I still would have felt like the man of the house.

I knocked my ashes into the tray on the bedside table. Beside it was a tall glass of water and a small plastic bottle of Mother's sleeping pills. I thought about taking one. I probably needed to be knocked out and dropped into a long, dreamless, protective cloud of sleep. There were only two pills left, however. I turned around and pulled back part of the sheets until I found her hand. I squeezed it, and
to my relief she squeezed back. She had a weak grip, but there was life left in it. I was cold, or so I told myself, so I climbed under the covers too.

Old Donovan wasn't dead, but he'd still left her feeling like a widow, curling up each night with the weight of absence lying beside her, and I wondered if, in her comatose state, she thought I was him, or wanted to believe I was him, filling that space beside her. I guess I wanted to be him in some way, or someone like him—someone who had the luxury of feeling needed.

I was on my way, I decided. It felt like my own deck was finally clear. I never had to say a word about any of what had happened to me. I could move forward, telling a new story, a better story—one that I could craft completely on my own.

T
he problem is that you don't always get to write your own story. You get written into some stories, and if you ask why, there isn't an answer. You don't have any control, because the forces at work are too large to confront, and sometimes too large even to understand. When Old Donovan had encouraged me to read the paper every morning and become involved, I had thought of myself as an armchair general watching and opining about the war from afar. I didn't think I would become a participant. Old Donovan must have been used to finding himself as a character—one whose actions or remarks or at least associations were captured in the text of an article. All that time reading the news, it never occurred to me that I would one day find myself a part of it too.

On Monday morning I flipped open the
Times
while I ate my cereal. The flakes went soggy as I stared at the headlines
and let the details of the article blur into a fuzzy black-and-white haze. A pit widened within me, and I sank deep into it, beyond shouting range, beyond light. The Boston archdiocese was in trouble. The
Globe
had broken the story the day before. Initially, one priest had been accused of innumerable abuses, then there was another, and within no time the entire archdiocese was embroiled in a scandal, a widespread institutional cover-up, an epidemic of abuse.
Abuse
. I had a hard time reading the word. It seemed like a misnomer, inaccurate.

There are times when we all want to tell ourselves,
Look at that misfortune over there; thank God that isn't happening here, to us, to me.
You can ignore the bombs and the violence across the ocean until buildings are crumbling in your own country; you can dismiss the gossip about the neighbors across town as melodramatic, until those fists and the screams you'd heard about come barreling into your own home. Then what do you do?

The scandal wasn't only in Boston. There was a larger investigation now, and others had already started to speak out. The pages nearly turned themselves, against my will, and I glanced through the articles timidly, forgetting most of the information after my eyes had left the line and moved on, slipping over the words until I got to the bottom of the article and there was a mention of priests in Rhode Island and Connecticut who had also been accused. Another article later in the paper explained it in further detail, and fear stung me up and down my body.

The article didn't mention Most Precious Blood or Father Greg—they were all other churches and priests—but as I read, the specter of Most Precious Blood and Father Greg burned like an afterimage on the story. Father Greg's laughter boomed up and out of the ink stamp of other names in the article. “A gregarious neighbor,” the article said, “a prominent society figure.” It was the language the newspapers used to talk about murderers: “the friendly man next door.”

I wondered if I should skip school. Missing more days would encourage Mr. Weinstein's wrath, but even worse, it would rouse suspicion. Everyone knew that I had worked at Most Precious Blood. I wanted to run back over to Josie's and shave the ice off the tree and see if I couldn't bring back that image of our bodies pressed together, restore it like an old fresco buried in the vaults of some forgotten city and, by bringing that moment to life again, create a permanent reminder that I, too, was just a normal high school kid who didn't need to be sent to Bullington, who didn't need to be cross-examined and strung up in the newspaper headlines and turned into a circus-freak-show act, a beast with a human face prowling a cage, onlookers beyond the bars asking,
How did he become that thing, how did he let it happen to himself?

And they wouldn't leave me alone. I've walked through too many grocery-store lines and looked at all the tabloids featuring pictures of mill workers recently
crippled, of celebrities maimed by cosmetic surgery, or children abducted. Everyone wants to gossip about those stories, but nobody wanted to be a part of them. There was something monstrous about all the people involved in those stories—the perpetrators, the families, and the victims themselves—everyone seemed portrayed with fearsome qualities: Nobody wanted to be involved with those kinds of people, and I didn't either.

+    +    +

When I got to CDA, I knew I couldn't avoid the story. From outside I could see into the lobby, where small clusters of mothers and nannies chattered softly and eyed each of the students carefully as we passed by. “Awful, just awful,” I heard one mother say as I passed through the doorway. As intangible and immaterial fear might be, it still creates tangible effects. It might as well have a taste and a smell. Father Greg's stale cigarette breath and the nose-burning stink of scotch followed me into the school.

As I walked toward Mrs. Perrich's desk, Hazel, the mother of a sixth grader I had mentored the year before, saw me. She tapped a friend of hers on her shoulder, and they pulled away from their circle of mothers to look at me. “Oh,” Hazel said, pushing a smile into her face that had all the signs of pity I knew so well. She stepped away from her friend and put a hand on my shoulder. “Oh, dear,” she said to me, and then she patted me on the shoulder again. “Look at you. What happened? Are you okay?”

“Of course,” I said, and then I realized she was talking about my eye. “An accident. On New Year's,” I said.

She shook her head gently. “It's just that people can worry. They can think the worst. You know. The churches,” she said finally. “That scandal. Awful.”

“It's so hard to believe,” the other mother said. I didn't answer; I stared down at her boots. They rose to her calf and were trimmed at the top with a ring of pale fur—I'd seen girls in my own grade wear the same boots. “You just never see these things coming,” she continued. “Not to this extent.”

Two other mothers now focused their attention on me. Mrs. Perrich was on the phone, but she looked up at me over her glasses as well. “You work at Most Precious Blood, don't you?” one of them asked me.

Hazel couldn't keep her hand off me for too long. She rubbed the side of my arm. “It has to be so hard. I mean, you do work there, right?”

“Danny was in confirmation classes there,” another mother in the group said. “How many kids go through confirmation class in our community?”

“I know,” the fourth one said. Then she addressed me. “What grade are you in?”

“Aidan's a sophomore,” Hazel answered quickly.

“Oh, dear,” the fourth mother said. “You work there? Is there any discussion, I mean, are they talking about it?”

“Teal!” Hazel snapped. “Aidan, it's none of our business.” The other mothers had already drawn back a little,
not rallying around Hazel, but shifting back toward Teal, who stood with her arms folded in front of her.

I didn't know any of those mothers, really—I didn't even know most of their names—and yet they knew I had worked at Most Precious Blood. “I don't believe anything has happened at Most Precious Blood,” I said. “If nothing's happened at Most Precious Blood, why does anyone need to talk about it?” My voice grew louder as I continued. I could feel the sweat pouring down my back and curling down my forehead. I clenched my fists and jammed them into my pockets so I wouldn't wipe at my face.

“Dear,” Hazel said. “Now, dear. It's okay. We're not accusing anyone of anything.”

“No,” I said too loudly. “I'm not either.”

“Well,” the mother in the furry boots said, “I still think the Parents Association should address this in some way. We need to get people talking about this, and I think it's pretty obvious that the kids need some kind of conversation about it too.”

“Absolutely,” Teal said. “Dr. Ridge should call an all-school assembly.”