He was weighed down by the world, and more immediately, in this very moment, he was encumbered by the burden of failure. Double failures. He had failed the archbishop, and all too well he understood he had failed Will Light. This was, in his mind, the greater of the two failures. His foot eased on the accelerator, slowing his return to the rectory.
He needed time to quiet his heart. It all had been so unexpected. Although Sophia Light had spoken to him about her concerns for her husband, he’d been unprepared for not only the man and his grief and rage, but for the house itself and the flood of childhood memories the foyer had awakened, the echo of the past that had washed in. For a moment, hijacked by a vivid memory, he saw his sister, Cecelia, at ten, kneeling on the parquet floor in her Ursuline Academy uniform, pleated green jumper, the white sleeves of her blouse pushed up to her elbows, ribbon-tipped braids swinging forward, intent on a game of jacks. He experienced the old sorrow anew, anguish he had believed long ago metastasized into dead and shiny tissue. What was it Faulkner wrote about the past? It wasn’t dead? It wasn’t even past? The burden and bitter truth of this haunted.
A horn sounded, startling him, and he realized he was creeping along, slowed to a pace just short of a dead stop. The driver in the car behind him was practically attached to his bumper. Father Gervase flicked on his right turn signal and edged over to the curb. As the driver pulled past, he recognized her as a member of the parish, yes, the mother of one of the former altar boys, and struggled to pull up the name. Beth LaBrea. He felt the victory of this recall, even remembered the name of her boy. Duane. That was it. This small success pleased him. A sweet, reclusive boy, he recalled. And there was a daughter too. A girl with an unusual name, but that he could not recall. As she passed him and sped off, Beth glared at him, off with one final dismissive look. Everyone was in such a hurry these days. Rush, rush, rush. And to get where? he wondered. The inevitable fate that awaited everyone? But this encounter shook him further. His hands trembled, and he tightened his grip on the steering wheel. The car idled at the curb, its engine whispering of futilities. And of failures both ancient and new. What should he have said to Will? What could he have said to blunt the acuteness of his pain? That with time things would get better?
He thought again of Cecelia. No, grief was not healed by time. Eventually, the edges crusted over and no longer ran scarlet, but the best one could hope for was the blessed way that memory faded at the edges, for the numbness of a scar in place of a wound or its fragile, webbed scab. Well, whether a memory grew clouded, a scab or scar, he knew fully how grief permanently changed one’s world, how it gave rise to doubt and despair, and even to questions about the nature of faith. Countless times over the years he had sat in the rectory study facing parishioners seeking consolation, desperate for answers because their world had been shattered and they were lost as to how to pick up the shards and start again. And it was an immutable fact that the loss of a child violently shifted the tectonic plates of one’s world. If he knew anything it was this. A current of unrest, ephemeral as the wake of a passing wasp, rippled through him, and he brushed it away. He reminded himself that faith was not faith if it had not been questioned and that even grief had a purpose. And hadn’t he delivered a homily on this very subject just weeks back? “Suffering points us to the good,” he’d quoted Pope John. “It creates the possibility of rebuilding goodness.” As he’d looked out at his parishioners, he’d felt the stony, near-hostile stare of Andrea Doucette, who had lost her husband three years before when the Alva Josephine went down off Georges Bank, and the hopeful, trusting gaze of twenty-seven-year-old Mary Silveria, whose husband had so recently been buried in the watery grave of the bank. His eyes had fallen next on Sophia Light, her face sober and purposeful. The grief of these women had disconcerted him—as if the Fates or the Weird Sisters had materialized in the wooden pews that morning—and before them he’d felt insubstantial. For a moment, he’d lost his place in the text. When he continued, he’d spoken of the link of suffering to love—a radical and resolute love in the passion of the cross—and had hoped that his words would reach them. “It is not our concern,” he’d said, “to erase or regret the scars of grief, but to find opportunity in the wounds that wrought them. Our faith,” he had told them, “must triumph over both our sorrows and our fears.”
Now he thought of Sophia’s husband. He doubted Will would have sat through his homily. Certainly the man he’d seen earlier would reject any philosophical or theological discussion of the mystery and meaning of suffering. And again, at the thought of Will Light, he was swept by an anxiety so sharp it verged on apprehension, actually—impossibly—closer to premonition than perturbation.
He was brought back by the sound of a policeman tapping on the passenger window.
“Father Gervase?”
He rolled down the window, and Michael Callahan peered into the car. In spite of the uniform, Father Gervase could see the child the officer must have been—a skinny kid, an altar boy with a splash of freckles across his nose.
“Is everything all right, Father?”
“Fine, Michael. Fine. Thank you.”
The policeman seemed uncertain.
“I’m just thinking for a bit,” Father Gervase said. He repeated the words. “Just thinking.” As if it were his regular practice to plant his car and sit in meditation in what he now saw was a no-parking zone. At that moment, a convertible with the top down swept past, crammed with teenagers. He counted six in the backseat: three boys and, sitting on their laps, three girls, two of whom he recognized as members of the parish. They seemed to him as exotic as tropical birds. For the third time in minutes, he thought of Cecelia, remembered seeing her in their father’s old Nash, riding around town with her best friend, May, windows down, radio blasting, so filled with life and joy that even strangers smiled at the sight.
Michael Callahan watched the car as it took the corner with wheels squealing.
“Gotta go, Father,” he said.
“I’ll see you on Sunday, then, Michael? At Mass?”
“If I’m not on the duty roster, Father.”