Chapter 27

August 1984

As a child, Brenda longed for something—material or emotional—nearly every day. The deprivation coloured most of her adult attitudes, desires and actions. Shopping became her favorite form of recreation. She was determined that her children, Robert and Marilyn, would receive a surfeit of the parental love that Virginia had shown her when she could summon the energy amid Sam’s relentless tyranny. Brenda showered her children with presents, whether she could afford them or not. Every August, their closets swelled with new clothing for the school year. Her heart was large. Her love was deep. Her inner woe was vast.

From the week after she turned eighteen, Brenda had worked fulltime for the telephone company. In those days, there only was one: AT&T. Additionally, every November and December, their house turned into a ceramics cottage industry. Each day after work, until late into the night, Brenda painted angels, crèches, trees and Santas by the carload to sell for the cash to buy dozens of Christmas gifts for Robert, Marilyn and Tom. There were so many that the children grew weary of unwrapping on Christmas morning, and Brenda had to prod them to remain focused on their task.

Other than Christmas, Brenda’s great passion was the summer vacation, and Robert adored these far-flung excursions. Brenda, Sam and Virginia never had taken one. Accordingly, she, Tom and their children took one every year without fail, for the full two weeks she had off from the telephone company and Tom from the bank where he worked making loans.

Brenda could have made a career in logistics. The scope of these summer trips often stretched the bounds of physical ability. She crafted them to the smallest detail, mapping driving routes, reserving hotels at every stop, purchasing as many entry tickets as possible in advance by mail.

She funded these grand excursions with another round of springtime ceramics: summer planters shaped like frogs and baskets, and eggs and bunnies of all sizes and configurations for Easter. Tom, more or less, enjoyed the trips once they were underway. But he made it clear from the start that they were Brenda’s project. He would have been equally content to spend the two weeks off work at home, golfing and tossing a baseball in their yard with Robert.

Brenda’s vacation expeditions reached their apogee in the summer of Robert’s fifteenth year. To her regular income and the seasonal ceramics sales, she had added selling cosmetics at home shows. Brenda worked as tirelessly and obsessively at the makeup business as she did in every other venture she undertook. Not only was she flush with cash by the start of summer, but she would be honored for her voluminous sales totals at the company’s annual convention in Philadelphia in July. Sam never acknowledged anything she did as she was growing up, and Julia’s abandonment had hobbled her selfconfidence. Brenda craved public recognition. The anticipation of the convention filled her with ecstasy.

The trip contained enough activity for three vacations. They would drive from their home in western West Virginia to Niagara Falls, then on to Toronto, Montreal, New Hampshire, Boston, Cape Cod, Cape May and Philadelphia. In two weeks.

It was nearly midnight as they approached Montreal in their enormous, light blue Pontiac station wagon. Marilyn was stretched out on the back seat asleep, but Robert was too excited to rest. He perched as far forward as he could, hanging halfway over the back of the front seat, and peered intently at the city lights in the distance.

A dense string of multicolored incandescence hugged the ground along the horizon. In the center rose a dark hill topped by a huge pointed dome. It gleamed in white light against the black sky. Robert could not take his eyes off it. “What is that?” he asked his parents, pointing toward the dome.

“Have no idea, Buddy,” Tom replied, exhausted already from the endless driving. “We’ll find out tomorrow.”

They learned from the hotel desk clerk the next morning that they had seen the Oratory of St. Joseph, a nineteenth-century Catholic basilica and the largest church in Canada. Robert insisted they visit. Brenda added it to their itinerary.

Robert had never set foot in a Catholic church. When he did on that day, he experienced a sense of peace and holiness he had not known in his life. And he had never seen anything so beautiful. He walked through the Neo-Gothic nave with his mouth gaping open and gazed up into the soaring dome. The Baptist church they attended was typical: low-ceilinged and devoid of grandeur. This place transported him to a different world.

Robert read in the guidebook that the thousands of crutches they saw hanging along the walls and stuffed into every recess were left by the pilgrims who had arrived physically impaired and walked away on their own power. They had prayed for intercession from a priest called Brother André, who had preached and healed at a small chapel on the hilltop in the nineteenth and early part of the twentieth century.

The church and the story were a revelation for Robert, but they also felt like a dangerous flirtation with the Devil. In their doctrinally strident Baptist church, most other Christian denominations were condemned as false, and the Holy See most of all. They believed that a Pope would one day be the Antichrist. Just that spring, his church had withdrawn from an interfaith boys’ basketball tournament on dogmatic grounds. “What if the Episcopal priest wanted to say the prayer before the game?” the youth minister had asked the disappointed team. Well-indoctrinated, the boys required no further explanation.

Now, however, Robert was thrown unexpectedly into a crisis of faith, though he did not really recognize it as such. He just felt tremendously confused.

Doubts had begun to squirm in the back of his mind for the first time when they met his mother’s family. They were the first Catholics he knew. He questioned, though only to himself, how such good, loving people could be headed for eternal damnation. Now this kindly looking Canadian priest in the little black-and-white photo in the brochure, who had apparently helped heal all these people. How could he be in Hell, burning forever? And what about this strange inner comfort he felt in the Oratory of St. Joseph? It gnawed at him for the remainder of the day.

Robert did not mention any of this to his parents as they toured Montreal. They never discussed religious matters, or much else of any significance. They were an openly affectionate family, and they spent most evenings and weekends together, but Brenda and Tom were not ones for talking about personal things. The lack of reflection and communication did not consciously trouble Robert. They never had those sorts of discussions, so it didn’t occur to him that things could be otherwise. It would have been like an aboriginal child in the jungle suddenly wondering why they had no electricity. Robert accepted without a second thought that this new religious quandary was his to sort out alone.

But for the moment, the wonders and pace of the vacation distracted him. The experience at the basilica in Montreal slipped into the recess of his mind as they followed the tourist trail through Boston. The Revolution was the only part of US history which interested Robert, and he was astonished by the age of the buildings they saw.

They had taken a summer vacation for as long as he could remember, but they usually went to the beach, professional baseball games and amusement parks. This was their first visit to New England and the first to include so many historical sites. Huntington, where they lived, was founded in 1871. To Robert, a hundred-year-old farmhouse seemed ancient. Here he saw buildings from the seventeenth century. Robert could not drink in enough to slake his thirst.