Worst of all, I could feel myself giving over to all of this, to whatever was coming. To a Great Ecstasy and a Great Catastrophe.
The realization frightened me, which is too mild a way of saying it. I’d not thought I was capable of falling in love again.
Earlier, when Thomas had asked me about myself, I’d not been able to speak, and I wondered now if that was because my sense of myself had been coming apart. I’d come to the island, and everything had disintegrated.
I closed my eyes. Stop this. Stop.
I hadn’t meant it as a prayer, but when I opened my eyes, I was struck with the idea that maybe it had been, and I had a momentary surge of childish hope that now some power-that-be would be obligated to grant my request. Then it would all stop. The feelings, everything, and I would be absolved. Safe.
Of course, I didn’t really believe that. Sit in the chair. Say a prayer—it was juvenile.
Yet even Thomas, who didn’t believe it either, had said there was power in the chair. And there was. I felt it. I felt it as an unraveling of some kind.
What if that was the real power in the chair—its ability to undo you? What if it fished up the most forbidden feelings inside a person and splayed them open?
I stood up. Unable to face strolling back through the church in front of the monks, I blundered around in the ambulatory for a minute, opening the wrong doors before I located the sacristy’s back door, leading out of the church.
I hurried across the quadrangle, the dense air hitting my face. Instead of the fog’s lifting, as it had tried to do earlier when a lone curl of sunlight had appeared, the air had turned to soup.
When I stepped through the gate into Mother’s backyard, I stopped, standing in the same spot where I’d lingered that night Thomas had walked us back to the house. I placed my palms on top of the brick wall and stared at the mortar, pocked with holes from the salt air. Across the yard the oleander bushes swayed, their greenness barely visible.
He’s a monk, I thought.
Wanting to believe that this would save me.
CHAPTER Sixteen
Brother Thomas
During the antiphonal chanting that preceded mass, Thomas noticed Father Sebastian looking at him, staring with his small eyes from behind the enormous black-framed glasses. Thomas wished he would stop. Once, Thomas stared pointedly back, and Sebastian had not even pretended to be embarrassed. Instead he’d nodded as if savoring a private thought or perhaps trying to say something.
Thomas was sweltering beneath his robe. He felt as if he were wrapped in pink insulation. Even in winter the wool was too hot, and the furnace continually blasted them with heat. The reason, as the abbot so thoughtfully put it, was that the older monks were “cold-blooded.” Thomas had bitten down onto his back teeth to keep his face straight.
Three years ago he’d begun daily swims in the creek out in the rookery near the makeshift hermitage he’d built on one of the small marsh islands. He did it just to cool off. He swam more determinedly in the winter than in any other season, hurling himself into the frigid water. It reminded him of an illuminated scene in a medieval Book of Hours, called the Mouth of Hell, which pictured poor, scalded people bolting from an infernal opening toward a spoonful of cold water. His place was secluded, walled off by tall, abundant grasses. It had been formed by a tributary veering off from the creek and dead-ending in a hidden basin. His private swimming hole.
There were no such things as swim trunks in a monastery, so he swam naked. It was something he should probably confess during public culpa on Friday mornings, which was where they divulged such sins as “I was not paying attention and broke the ginger-jar lamp in the Reception Center” or “I snuck into the kitchen after night silence and ate the last of the cherry Jell-O,” but he didn’t really believe he was culpable. When he swam nude, he felt he was venturing out onto an exultant edge. Spiritual people had the habit of closing themselves off, numbing themselves down. He felt strongly about it—people needed to swim naked. Some more than others.
With sweat beading up over his lip, he closed his eyes and dreamed of the cold tide rushing over his bare skin.
The monks stood in choir in order of seniority, or statio as they called it: abbot, prior, subprior, novice master, then each monk by the longevity of his time there. Thomas stood in the last stall on the back row, left-hand side of the church.
As the prior, Father Sebastian was in the first row on the right-hand side, clutching his St. Andrew Daily Missal, which had been abolished back in the sixties. His stare had become obvious and glowering.
The reason for the staring became clear to Thomas suddenly. He tightened his fingers on his breviary. Father Sebastian had seen him talking to Jessie Sullivan. There had been that sound outside the chapel. He’d forgotten that Sebastian always came into the church through the sacristy. Undoubtedly he’d eavesdropped.
Certain things Thomas had said to her floated back to him. There had been nothing inappropriate. They’d talked about the mermaid chair. About praying, for heaven’s sake. He had merely been friendly to the daughter of the woman who cooked their midday meal. What was wrong with that? Monks talked to visitors all the time.
He stood in his choir stall gorged with self-justification, his old attorney self risen like Lazarus. It was startling to feel that instinct alive in him, how easily he deliberated and defended his encounter with Jessie Sullivan, like it was evidence against him.
He stopped singing, and the abbot, noticing, glanced at him and frowned. Thomas began again, then stopped once more, his arms sagging. That he even needed to mount a defense was a revelation.
He let his eyes move slowly toward Sebastian and nodded when the older monk met his gaze. His nod was an admission to himself, a painful acquiescence that he could not defend himself, not truthfully, because he had thought of this woman since he first saw her in the rose garden sitting on the ground. He’d thought of the perfect oval of her face, how she’d looked at him before getting to her feet. Mostly he’d remembered the way her head had blotted out the moon when she’d stood erect. It had been rising behind her, and for one, maybe two seconds, she’d appeared like an eclipse, a thin corona around her head and her face cloaked behind a glowing shadow.
It had, frankly, taken his breath away. It had reminded him of something, though he couldn’t say what. He’d walked them back to Nelle’s house through the blackened stretch of trees, talking to her mother but in his mind picturing Jessie Sullivan’s face behind that luminous darkness.
It had set off a longing in him that had not diminished as he’d hoped but had grown so acute he couldn’t sleep some nights for thinking about her. He would get up then and read the poem by Yeats about going out to the hazel wood with a fire in one’s head. Yeats had written it after he’d met Maude Gonne, a woman he’d glimpsed one day standing by a window and fallen hopelessly in love with.
Thomas had felt increasingly foolish about it, at how enmeshed he was in wanting her. As if he’d been snared in one of the monastery’s own cast nets. He’d been doing fine, for five years carried along on the rhythm of the abbey: ora, labora, vita communis—prayer, work, community. His life rested in this. Dom Anthony gave sermons sometimes on what he called acedia, the grueling sameness that could snare monks in tedium and boredom, but Thomas had never suffered from it. The cadence and measure of this place had consoled him through his terrible doubt, the profound anguish he’d felt at being left alive when those he’d loved were dead.
And then that one innocuous moment: this woman getting to her feet in a garden without flowers, her face dark and beautiful, and turning to him with light daubed around her head. It had shattered his deep contentment, the whole perfect order.
He felt her even now like something returning, flooding around him like the hidden waters where he swam.
He knew hardly anything about her, but he’d seen the ring on her finger, and that had been reassuring to him. She was married. He was grateful for that.
He
thought of her deep blush when she’d talked about the egret mating dance. He’d foolishly gone with her to the mermaid chair, and now he would lie awake tonight with a vision of her standing in the chapel, her blue jeans tight across her hips.
The abbot led them into the mass, and at the moment when the host was raised, Thomas felt the onrush of longing, not for Jessie but for his home, his monastic home, this place he loved beyond all places. He looked at the wafer, asking God to satiate him with that little bite of Jesus, and resolved to put her out of his mind. He would shake himself free of this. He would.
As the monks filed from the church toward the refectory for lunch, he slipped away from them, following the path to his cottage, not wanting to eat.
Father Dominic was sitting on the porch in an Adirondack rocker that had once been painted green. He wore a brown-and-red-plaid afghan draped around his shoulders, not rocking the way he typically did but motionless, his gaze fixed on a clump of Spanish moss on the ground. Thomas realized he had not seen him at mass. For the first time, Dominic appeared old to him.
“Benedicite Dominus,” Dominic said, looking up, using the old-fashioned greeting as he often did.
“Are you all right?” Thomas said. Except for the spring when Dominic had spent three weeks in the infirmary with pneumonia, Thomas couldn’t remember the monk’s ever missing mass.
Dominic smiled, his expression a little forced. “I’m fine. Just fine.”
“You weren’t at mass,” Thomas said, stepping up onto the porch.
“Yes, God forgive me, I was taking my own communion here on the porch. Have you ever thought, Thomas, that if God could dwell in the host, he could just as easily dwell in other things, too, like that moss over there on the ground?”
Thomas regarded the ball of moss that had blown up beside the steps. It looked like a tumbleweed. “I think that sort of thing all the time. I just didn’t know anyone else here did.”
Dominic laughed. “And neither did I. So we are two peas in a pod, then. Or maybe two heretics in a pod.” He pushed against his feet, coaxing the chair into a gentle rock.
Thomas listened to the creaking wood. Impulsively he squatted down beside the chair. “Father Dominic, I know you’re not my confessor, and the abbot wouldn’t approve of this, but…would you hear my confession?”
Dominic stopped rocking. He leaned forward, giving Thomas a quizzical look. “Right here, you mean? Right now?”
Thomas nodded, his body tightened with urgency. He was racked with a sudden, powerful need to unburden himself.
“All right,” Dominic said. “I’ve already missed mass, so I’m on a roll. Let’s hear it.”
Thomas situated himself on his knees beside the rocker. He said, “Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. It has been four days since my last confession.”
Dominic stared off into the yard. From the angle of his eyes, Thomas guessed he was focused again on the moss.
Thomas said, “Father, something has happened. I seem to be falling in love. I met her in the rose garden.”
The wind lifted around them, and they sat in the ruffling quietness, in the welcome, elegant cold. Simply saying the words—such unbridled, imperiling words—released a groundswell of feeling in Thomas. They ushered him to a place from which he could not return.
And there he was. Kneeling on the small porch beside Dominic. His head bowed. The day milk white. Loving a woman he hardly knew.
CHAPTER Seventeen
In the strange days that followed my encounter with Brother Thomas in the abbey church, the rains began. Cold February monsoons. The island sloshed around in the Atlantic.
I remembered the winter rains from my childhood as grim, torrential episodes: Mike and I hurrying down the road to school huddled under an old boat tarp while the rain lashed at our legs and, when we were older, crossing the bay to meet the bus, the ferry bobbing around like a rubber duck.
For more than a week, I stood at the window in Mother’s house watching the water fall through the oaks and spatter against the bathtub grotto out front. I cooked lackluster dinners out of the stockpile of food in the pantry, changed Mother’s bandage, and methodically brought her cinnamon-colored pills and red-and-white capsules, but I always seemed to end up back at one of the windows, subdued and staring. I could feel myself receding to a place inside that was new to me. It was like slipping into a nautilus shell. I simply withdrew, winding down through the spiraling passageway to a small, dark hospice.
Some days Mother and I watched the Winter Olympics on her little television. It was a way to sit in a room together and carry on as if everything were normal. Mother would watch the screen while working her rosary, attacking the decades of red beads, and when she got through all five of them, twisting the Rubik’s Cube Dee had sent her at least five Christmases ago, working it awkwardly with one hand. Eventually she would let the cube tumble out of her lap, then sit with her fingers still fidgeting.
We were both caught, I suppose, in our private distractions. Mother in her commonplace torments, her buried finger, her pastness. And me in growing thoughts of Brother Thomas, in a kind of incessant desiring I could not banish. And I tried, I did try.
I’d forgotten how that sort of craving felt, how it rose suddenly and loudly from the pit of my stomach like a flock of startled birds, then floated back down in the slow, beguiling way of feathers.
Where had all this sexual longing come from anyway? I used to imagine that women had a little tank of it lodged back behind their navels somewhere, a kind of erotic gas tank they’d come into the world with, and that I had used the entire contents of mine on Hugh those first years we were together. I’d recklessly emptied it out, and there was nothing I could do to refill it. I told Hugh once that I’d gotten the quart-size tank instead of the gallon-size, that it was like having a small bladder—some women had them and some didn’t. He’d looked at me like I was crazy.
“Men don’t have this situation,” I’d explained to him. “You don’t have to conserve the way we do. Your sexual appetite comes through a faucet you can turn on whenever you want. There’s an unending supply; it’s like getting water from a sink.”
“Really?” he’d said. “Did you get all this in biology class?”
“There are things not recorded in books,” I’d said.
“Apparently.” He’d laughed as if I were kidding around.
I sort of was, and I sort of wasn’t. I did believe that women had only so much libido, and when it was used up, it was used up.
Now I saw I’d had it wrong. There were no tanks, small or otherwise, just faucets. All of them connected to a bottomless erotic sea. Perhaps I’d let my faucet rust shut, or something had clogged it up. I didn’t know.
Mother grew quiet during those days, too. She stopped talking about going back to the abbey to resume cooking for the monks. She consigned them to the miserable efforts of Brother Timothy. I kept thinking about what Hugh had said, how her need to rid herself of guilt could build up again. I worried. Every time I looked at her, I got the impression of something large and menacing locked in a cellar, wanting in.
For a day or so after she’d buried her finger, there had been a brief revival of her old self. She’d talked in her usual scattershot way about converting recipes for six into forty, about Julia Child, about the infallibility of the pope, about Mike. Thankfully she had not gotten wind of his Buddhism experiment. My mother did not typically have an unarticulated thought, and now she was all but silent. It was not a good sign.
I couldn’t muster the energy, or the courage, to ask her again about Dominic or bring up the matter of my father’s pipe.
Kat called almost every day. “Are you two still alive over there?” she’d ask. “Maybe I ought to come check on you.” I would reassure her we were fine. I didn’t want company, and she picked up on that.
Hugh called also. But only once. The phone rang two or three days after I’d sat in the mermaid chair and felt the floodgates open. Mother and I were watc
hing a bobsled race.
The first words out of Hugh’s mouth were, “Let’s not fight.” He wanted me to apologize for before. I could tell. He waited patiently.
“I don’t want to fight either.” That’s all I could manage.
He waited some more. After a pointed sigh, he said, “I hope you’ve thought it over and changed your mind about my coming.”
“I haven’t changed my mind at all,” I said. “I still think I should do this by myself.” It sounded harsh, so I tried to soften it up. “Try to understand it from my side, okay?”
He said automatically, “Okay,” but I knew he wouldn’t. That’s one of the worst things about living with brilliant people—they’re so used to being right they don’t really have experience being anything else.
A blinding-white tiredness came over me as we talked. I didn’t mention Dominic and how I suspected he was involved somehow because Hugh would have dissected it half to death. He would have told me how to proceed. I wanted to navigate by my own instincts.
“When are you coming home?” Hugh wanted to know.
Home. How could I tell him that at this moment I had an unbearable need to flee it. I had an urge to say, Please, I want to be alone with my life right now, to go down into my nautilus shell and see what’s there. But I didn’t say anything.
I was driven by a deep, sickening selfishness and that same discontent I’d felt back at home, but also by a kind of sorrowing love for myself. My life seemed sweet and dull and small and repellent. So much of it unused.
The last few days, I’d been thinking about the life I’d meant to live, the one that had shone in my head a long time ago, full of art and sex and mesmerizing discussions about philosophy and politics and God. I’d owned my own gallery in that nonexistent life. I’d painted surrealistic works full of startling, dreamlike imagery.
There had been a moment a couple of years earlier when I might have reached for that life, at least for a little piece of it. Two days before Christmas, I’d crawled into a storage space beneath a dormer to retrieve my good china—a fine bone Lenox pattern that had been discontinued and was thus irreplaceable. It was packed and stored in boxes, brought out for major holidays and the occasional wedding anniversary.