Chapter 28

Dear Aunt Pilar,

Thank you very much for the money and the card. It always makes me happy that you think of me, and I am so glad we found you.

I got lots of great things for my birthday, the biggest being a car! I sure am glad I passed that driving test last month. I opened this little package from Dad, and it was a Volkswagen key. I didn’t know what to think, and he told me to look out the window, and there it sat on the street in front of the house. It is a silver Scirocco. Dad bought it from one of his friends and had it painted and it looks like new. I love it. Maybe one day Mom and Dad will let me drive to visit you.

I am enclosing two calligraphies I did for you. They are prayers I got from a Catholic devotional book I found at the library. I joined a calligraphy club at the museum a few months ago, and I like it very much. I can sit in my room for hours at night, with just candles for light, and work on it. I feel like a monk at some monastery in the middle ages. Mom gave me a really nice set of pens for my birthday, and I bought the parchment with the money you sent me.

I hope you’re well, and I’m looking forward to us visiting you at Thanksgiving. Your turkey is the best, and I can’t wait to have some of Aunt Elizabeth’s chocolate chip cookies. I have to get the recipe from her this year.

Love,

Robert

* * *

Huntington, West Virginia

September 1985

Robert looked around nervously as he ascended the steps to the open doors of St. Joseph’s, Huntington’s primary Catholic church. His parents would have been no more horrified had someone told them they saw him entering a strip club. He slipped inside quickly and sat in the back pew.

The Gothic Revival nave was illuminated only by the early evening sunlight coming through the stained glass windows and by the two spotlights shining on the large crucifix in the apse. It was aesthetically more pleasing than the Baptist church he attended every Wednesday night and twice on Sundays with his parents, but St. Joe— as everyone in the town called it—had none of the grandeur of St. Joseph’s Oratory. A year had passed since that day in Montreal, but the same sense of peace and stillness rose again within him as soon as Robert entered the silent nave.

After half an hour in the stillness, a tall, burly, slightly hunchshouldered priest plodded from the vestry. He stopped, bowed at the waist and crossed himself before the spotlighted crucifix and then finished tidying around the altar from the Saturday evening mass. As he came up the center aisle, the priest noticed Robert. “Say one for me,” he called over as he passed.

A bit startled, Robert said: “Excuse me?”

The priest stopped and looked back. “A prayer. Say one for me.” Then he continued with his work, stacking and straightening the missalettes, brochures and offering envelopes on the table in the vestibule. As he passed again, this time down the side aisle next to Robert, the young man asked: “Is it okay if I come back in the morning, for the mass?”

The priest crunched his brow and looked at him curiously. “Well, of course. Why wouldn’t it be okay?”

“I’m not Catholic,” Robert said tentatively.

“You don’t have to be Catholic to pray!” the priest declared and let loose a robust laugh that echoed through the empty church. He tromped off toward the side door midway down the nave. As he started out, the priest said without looking back to Robert: “I’ll leave those lights on if you’ll be in here longer. I’m going next door to eat my dinner.”

“Thank you,” Robert said. “I would like to stay for a bit more.”

“No rush, sit as long as you want,” the priest said. “Hope to see you tomorrow.”

Brenda and Tom were out of town for the weekend. They had left seventeen-year-old Robert at home alone overnight for the first time in his life. Marilyn was staying with a friend. Robert relished the freedom and having the house to himself.

He had wanted to come to St. Joe for months, but he could never find the courage, or come up with a good explanation for his parents about where he was going. Robert had grown increasingly frustrated and angry with them over the past year. The more his doubts about their church and its rigid, exclusionary doctrines grew, and the more he tried to avoid the host of Baptist youth group activities, the harder they pressed him to participate.

That spring, Robert had declined an offer from the youth minister to narrate a religious puppet show because it conflicted with his high school elections. He was running for student council president. His parents were greatly displeased when the youth minister informed them—Robert was too afraid of their disapproval to tell them himself—and Tom told him gravely one night in his bedroom: “You need to get your mind right with God.”

Further complicating the turmoil swirling inside him, Robert was in love with his debate team partner. Isabel was Catholic, and she worshipped at St. Joe. Isabel did not share his affection—which he never even came close to revealing—but she was happy to talk about her faith and answer his endless questions about it. Robert was glad to learn about Catholicism, and focusing on the topic allowed him to surmount the social anxiety which usually rendered him mute around girls.

Despite the concern someone would see him and tell his parents, Robert attended his first mass that Sunday morning. Over the following year, he went regularly on his bicycle to St. Joe on weekday evenings. He told his parents he was going to the park or just out for a ride. He sat alone in the church, thinking and feeling. When he was there, it seemed as if he had recovered a piece of his identity that he did not even know existed. With increasing frequency over the months, he also spent time in the living room of the rectory next door, chatting with the two parish priests.

Father Moore was an irascible, voluble old West Virginian. He was the priest Robert encountered on that first evening. Father Callahan hailed from Massachusetts and was his compatriots’ opposite: diminutive, avuncular, almost bashful. “The sweetest, truest man of God I’ve ever known,” Father Moore once told Robert. The priests had met in seminary and served together ever since, almost fifty years. Father Moore’s simple declaration, “You don’t have to be Catholic to pray,” endeared him to Robert, though the priest’s imposing physical size and forceful personality also scared him a little.

Sprightly little Father Callahan, however, Robert loved unequivocally, and the priest reciprocated his sentiments. Father Callahan was the supportive and gentle grandfather that life had denied Robert. Robert was the beloved grandson celibacy had denied Father Callahan. One summer evening as they strolled over to the church to turn out the lights and lock the doors, Father Callahan told him: “When I’m Pope, I’ll appoint you Secretary of State!”

When Robert was nineteen, Father Callahan suffered an aortal aneurism. He lay placidly unconscious in his upstairs bedroom at the rectory, breathing softly when Robert came in to see him. The housekeeper left when Robert came in, and Robert talked to the old man about the things they always discussed: history, theology, architecture, vegetable gardening. Father Callahan looked so small and childlike under the sheet on the twin bed. A single lamp on the bedside table cast a faint glow across the oak paneled room.

Robert had brought a little gold-painted plaster frame with a picture of Christ pasted on it. He had made it in Vacation Bible School when he was a child and had placed it beside the bed of Tom’s father as he lay dying of cancer when Robert was five years old. Sitting in the rectory, he put it on Father Callahan’s bedside table beneath the lamp. For more than an hour, Robert sat on a wooden chair beside the bed and recalled the many pleasant, easy evenings he had passed with his friend.

Eventually, the housekeeper returned and clambered around the room, making it clear that she was ready for Robert to go. He stood and leaned over the old man and kissed him on his bald head. “Sleep well, Father,” he said. He lightly squeezed Father Callahan’s boney shoulder beneath the sheet. As Robert walked toward the door, the catatonic priest stirred. He grunted fiercely, as if he knew Robert was going for the last time.

Two days later, Father Callahan died. Father Moore asked Robert to serve as an honorary pallbearer at the funeral. Robert accepted. Although he no longer lived with his parents, Robert worried what they would say if they found out. At the same time, another part of him did not care.