Whit
He sat in the music-listening room on a ladder-back chair, staring at the television set, which was perched on a table conspicuously covered with an old altar cloth. It was the top of the seventh of a Braves doubleheader on TBS. Tom Glavine had just struck out. Whit took his pencil and traced a small K on the scorecard he’d drawn in the back of his journal.
There was something about watching baseball that took him completely out of himself. It worked on him better than meditation. He could never meditate more than two minutes without chasing one thought after another or becoming so self-conscious it defeated the whole purpose, but he could sit in front of a game with absolute absorption. He lost himself in the tension of the play, the strategy, the intricacies of scoring—all the diagrams, symbols, and numbers. He would never have been able to explain to Father Sebastian or any of the others why it was a refuge for him; he just knew he felt exempt sitting here. From the monastery. From himself.
Before vespers the abbot had announced Nelle’s latest “tragedy,” as he now delicately referred to her amputations, asking the monks to pray for her, their beloved cook and friend. Whit had stood in choir staring stoically ahead, aware of Dominic turning to look at him. He’d thought then how he’d spent all afternoon waiting for Jessie in the rookery to no avail, only to come back and find Dominic pacing the porch of the cottage. He’d been the one to give Whit the news, even the part about Jessie’s husband coming from Atlanta to be with her. He’d delivered that portion with scrupulous concern.
Whit had not had the presence of mind to ask Dominic until later how he’d come to know all this, when he discovered that Hepzibah Postell, the Gullah woman, had come to the monastery and explained everything to Dominic. Why would Hepzibah come to Dominic, of all people?
All through vespers Whit had yearned to come here and turn on the doubleheader and disappear into the game. He’d burst out of his choir stall like a racehorse so he could get the game on before the other monks came herding in for community time.
They inevitably spent it watching the evening news. It mostly boiled down to watching Tom Brokaw announcing Reagan’s latest social cutbacks. The last time he’d come in here, they had been watching a segment on how to “dress for success”—something about designer suits by Perry Ellis and Calvin Klein—and the monks had sat there with such rapt attention he’d wanted to stand up and shout, But you’re wearing robes! The point of their robes was the exact opposite of dressing for success. Surely they saw that. He’d gotten up and left. On weekends Brother Fabian would put one of the monastery’s scratchy old 331/3 rpm records on the stereo, usually Wagner’s The Ring of the Nibelung. He would turn the volume so loud the air would tremble with the bass.
Tonight, when the monks had arrived to find that Whit had commandeered the TV set and filled it with the announcers’ play-by-play, they’d complained to Father Sebastian, who had sovereign jurisdiction over the room. Sebastian had scrutinized Whit before telling the men to stop whining, it wouldn’t kill them to miss the news once in a blue moon. They had all left and gone back to their rooms to wait for compline, except for Dominic and Sebastian.
He wanted to be angry at them, to use this as just more justification for leaving, but the sight of the monks shuffling off in various degrees of huff was no different, really, from his own arrogant refusal to be in here when they watched Brokaw or listened to Siegfried and Brünnhilde.
It reminded him suddenly of the whole point of existing here with these curmudgeonly old men—that somewhere on the face of the earth, there needed to be people bound together with irrevocable stamina, figuring out a way to live with one another. He’d come here with such idiotic notions, expecting a slight variation on utopia—everybody loving everybody else, returning good for evil, turning the other cheek left and right. Monks, it’d turned out, were no more perfect than any other group of people. He’d gradually realized with a kind of wonder that they’d been picked for a hidden but noble experiment—to see if people might actually be able to live in genuine relatedness, to see if perhaps God had made a mistake by creating the human species.
He seemed to think constantly these days about what it meant to be at the monastery, to be part of it—the whole outrageous thing. He thought equally about Jessie, what it meant to love her, to be part of her. That was outrageous, too. What he’d not thought about was her husband. A real person, a man who’d rushed here to be with his wife at a moment of crisis. What was his name? He forced himself to remember. Hugh. Yes, Hugh. It repeated in his mind with the drone of the stadium noise, with Skip Caray and the baseball trivia question.
Hugh was the ruptured place in Whit’s conscience, one that had—in a self-protective act—gotten walled off. Even now, after two walks and the bases loaded, when he should have been completely immersed in the game, Whit could not stop thinking of the man. He could see how Hugh, the very reality of him, had been inside all along, quietly turning to an abscess. The poisonous mess starting to leak.
After the third out, everyone in the stadium stood for the seventh-inning stretch, and he stood up and put his journal down on the chair. He thought of the day he’d told Jessie he loved her. They’d been in the rookery, lying on the blanket.
We’ll be damned and saved both, he’d told her. And already it was happening.
He closed his eyes and tried to listen to the song the fans on TV were singing. He’d thought he could blot everything out, calm the anxiety that had begun on the porch with Dominic, but all he wanted now was to bolt and go to her. He felt consumed with the need to pull her into his arms. To claim her again. Jessie, he thought. He could barely stand still.
Across the room Dominic sat in an old lounge chair with his hat in his lap. After Whit had confessed to Dominic all those weeks ago that he’d fallen in love, they hadn’t spoken of it again. Of course the old monk had to know it was Jessie. Why else would he have pulled Whit aside like that and given him this extra bit of information about her husband’s being on the island, staying in Nelle’s house with her?
He wanted to concentrate his distress on how upset Jessie must be over her mother, and yet he stood before the television and could not keep himself from imagining her with Hugh. In the kitchen with a glass of wine, the solacing embrace, telling small jokes to break the agony—the myriad ways Hugh might comfort her. He felt frightened by the lifetime of small, secret rituals they must’ve shared at moments like this, the magnitude of such things.
The man is her husband, he told himself. For the love of God, he’s her husband.