Philip & Ruth
Glass of wine?” Philip invited Ruth, opened bottle in hand, both sitting on barstools in their hideaway apartment that afternoon. They had talked on the phone over the past few weeks, but had not been physically together since the morning after the gala and whatever it was that had happened to Bishop Mackey. He had been busy managing the aftermath and doing all he could to accomplish the everyday work of the diocese, all the while trying to do his work at Caring Street. “I got your fave Sauvignon Blanc.”
“No, thanks.” The idea of wine made her sick to her stomach.
He poured himself a shot of tequila, unsure if he had her permission, or if he wanted it.
“What’s with tequila? That’s a new thing for you.”
It was a new thing for Philip, but he had nothing revealing to add. The silence stretched along the counter where they sat at opposite ends and the quiet sludged up the air between them like invisible grease. Same time, he intended to appear jovial, cheerful, positive. He wasn’t adept at faking that. He could almost tell she wanted him to appear anything but, which only increased his commitment to keeping things light. He sensed escalating intensity, but unless that was attributable to their temporary separation from each other as a result of forces beyond their control, he couldn’t put his finger on the cause.
“You smoking these days?” For a change, he didn’t use an accusatory tone.
She shook her head.
“Proud of you. Not easy, giving up.”
She let his unconsciously provocative words hang, suspended on the tightrope between them, accumulating greater mass. But she couldn’t tolerate the tension, and she commenced the journey down her mental slalom…
Ruth possessed the therapist’s essential knack for highlighting, or underscoring, those extraordinary disclosures that are cloaked in the mundane. (Classic moment on this score she remembered hearing in her office: “Nice weather we’re having.” “What do you mean by that wisecrack?”) She never saw a pulled curtain she didn’t try to draw open. When she accomplished that feat, and it was no small thing, light could flood the room, although sometimes darkness pooled. Either result could be something she could work with. And when psychic walls popped up between her and her client, as was hardly uncommon, she wouldn’t use a battering ram. No, she looked for a door, she and her client, a search party heading off into the darkness. In her experience, there usually was a door, often hidden or small, occasionally constructed in an unexpected place. The door could be sealed shut, of course, but that’s what a talented therapist learns how to do: To encourage subtly, artfully the client to open wide the door they discovered to let them both come inside. But what if that turns out to be an elevator door? Going up, going down? That is the question, isn’t it? She once had a lighthearted former flower child, rage-against-the-machine ex-hippie who became, as a result of an unexpected and mind-boggling inheritance from a stepfather she hardly knew, an unfathomably rich (and depressed) client who suffered from debilitating vertigo as well as continual motion sickness. For her, elevators would have amounted to a nonstarter, at least without proper meds. Poor Delphine, wonder whatever happened to her after she bought that tiny Greek island—last she ever heard of her. But for most people, anything but going sideways produces therapeutic dividends. But it’s come to that now? Talking dividends, therapy? How could Ruth feel simultaneously exhausted and wired up? She’d gone cold turkey with the coffee, too.
That is how long it took her to respond to his saying he was proud of her for stopping smoking:
“Yes, I mean no, because there are people who are always just around the corner from giving up, thank you,” she said, admittedly nonsensically. Passive-aggressive is a specialized faculty, one she lacked. When she came upon its manifestations with clients during a session in her office, her first barely resistible inclination was to go all World Wrestling Federation upon them. It was among the most insidious syndromes to address. That’s partly why working with adolescents, who can be masters of passive-aggressive, can be so exasperating. Philip and she, she began to realize, were going to have to endure this new awkwardness until one of them decided to blow it up. Ready, set…
Philip never for a moment aspired to being a therapist or to undergoing therapy, for that matter. At the outset, her profession thrilled him as much as his thrilled her. When things were going well between them, he regarded her vocation as glamorous and fascinating. When they weren’t going so well, he would feel alternately amused and annoyed by therapy-speak. But he never condescended. No, he was smitten and he felt lucky to know her. At the same time, he might have some clue to the nature of the world Ruth inhabited, from his exposure to those unconscious or deflected disclosures that took place in the rarefied tiny enclosure known as the confessional box. That’s where he listened as supplicants for forgiveness owned up to their faults and failings, their treacheries and infidelities, which unfailingly moved him. The longer he was a priest, the surer he was that there were those who didn’t completely give up and divulge the ultimately sordid unfiltered, unmediated truths about their lives—and they were wise to do so. They held back some guiltiness in reserve, feeling there were some sins they were not ready to own up to, or that they were unworthy of forgiveness for some unnamed sin. He himself shared that feeling. But if he’d had the chance he would have advised them that there was nothing—absolutely nothing—he had not already heard before, and he would assure them he was acquainted with much greater sinners than they were, whoever they may be. He shared that experience, too. Nonetheless, some indeed felt they were healed in the confessional process—and that was not a suboptimal result. As far as they were concerned, that might have qualified as a transcendent experience. In a way, it might have been simpler for someone to speak in the darkness to somebody else in darkness on the other side of the screen. These days, you could also opt for face-to-face confession, which could strike somebody as the equivalent of surgery in the battlefield triage tent. Non-Catholics have been known to cynically deride the entire concept. You commit your depravities and you go dump the news on some invisible priest on the other side of the screen and you automatically receive a free pass, a clean bill of psychic health? Come on. That’s mumbo jumbo and a whitewash of your conscience. Philip agreed that the critics had half of a point, but they missed the essence. Unconcealing oneself, even partially, was never simple, and coming to terms with one’s own culpability required fortitude and faith in a forgiving Divinity. In this way, the priest functioned as nothing less than the conduit of God’s love for a sinner pleading forgiveness for transgressions, including the sins they dare not articulate. A priest might be riddled with guilt himself, might conceivably be a son of a bitch, but he could help other sinners come to terms with what they had done by being present with them in their naked moment of admission. In this age of relentless self-absorption, loving oneself and forgiving oneself were deemed virtues and sufficient. Father Philip begged to differ. And he had firsthand the rock-solid proof: himself. Given the high stakes of the confessional encounter, it was no wonder people didn’t seek out the sacrament as often as they used to. And that was an understatement. Confession had practically collapsed as a religious practice, though it had been modernized during his lifetime, rechristened the Sacrament of Reconciliation. Philip preferred the old-school terminology. Remarkably, and this is something he kept private, he himself hadn’t taken that sacrament for a long time—he had not confessed and he was not reconciled, either. Early in Philip’s priesthood, confession went for hours on Saturdays for people willing to tell what they did that they regretted and beseech pardon. These days, confessional hours were abbreviated and pews were mostly empty on Saturday, unlike when he was growing up and churches were buzzing and people stood patiently in wait for the onslaught of grace. In many parishes, confession was available now only by appointment. These days in some parishes the confessional box was the default repository for hymnals and custodial equipment. What had happened? Philip was sure people sinned as often as they ever did, but they felt less of a need to unburden themselves and receive the grace that flowed. Maybe therapy was their preferred recourse to self-deliverance. Or assuming one’s own guilt had fallen out of fashion. Or people did their confessing on Twitter or Facebook or Instagram or somewhere bloodless and fleshless online, prophylactically and anonymously. When you confessed you were hidden in shadows behind a closed door, but you were not anonymous—just the opposite. He was always amused to recall a story told by an old priest. “Lady of a certain age takes a knee in the creaky confessional box, Philip, and she goes, ‘Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. It has been thirty years since my last confession.’ I say to her, ‘Thirty years? Just the highlights, my child.’”
He didn’t like where Ruth’s line of thinking, and the silence gathered between them, was leading him.
“Something on your mind? You look distracted,” she said.
“We haven’t seen each other for a while.”
“You look burned out, too.”
“Thanks a lot.” But he guessed that was how he must appear. He had been putting in longer than ever hours and it was grueling working closely with Bishop Mackey, who was struggling to recover full function. All the same, the bishop was also doing unexpected, extraordinary, remarkable things now, on a regular basis. “One thing is, Mackey, he’s driving me crazy—but in a great way, hard to explain.”
Whatever happened after the gala that night just might have altered the bishop’s perspective on his life and his faith. Philip would concede the possibility. Take the matter of Patricia, who had once been a good nun for over twenty years. Her case presented a sticky challenge. Patricia left her religious order almost fifteen years ago, at age forty-four, and took up with her partner, with whom she had fallen in love. She and Gina were happy together, and in their hearts remained Catholics, despite the church’s not recognizing their union or the sanctity of their love. Then Gina’s cancer got the best of her and she died an agonizing, protracted death in hospice. After a year of living alone, or so Patricia told Bishop Mackey and Philip, she heard a calling to return to the order and resume her vows, and she humbly pleaded with the sisters for readmission. She wasn’t motivated by loneliness or financial considerations either, because Patricia had a loving family and Gina left her enough inherited money to live in her accustomed ways, if that was her preference. But it wasn’t. Patricia yearned once again for the communal life and heard a calling to return to her vocation as a schoolteacher. Her superiors put her through the paces, and after a lot of hard talk and harder prayer, they took her back with approval from the Vatican, embracing her wholeheartedly—the prodigal nun parable, they may have called it. Superiors established no conditions, but Patricia donated every cent of her financial assets to the order anyway. She had no need for money anymore, but the order did, and a life of willed poverty felt more meaningful than ever to her. But then there was a complication. When Mackey first caught wind of the sisters’ decision to put her back in the classroom, he was adamant: she was not the kind of nun he would permit working in his diocese schools. She had made her choices, had lived in mortal sin, or as he put it, in a gravely evil state. Sister Patricia’s order was infuriated, but powerless before Mackey’s authority, and assigned her to administrative duties with the order, placing her nowhere with access to children, as the bishop insisted.
“But then, here comes the truly crazy part. You won’t believe this, Ruth, last week Mackey—out of the blue, Mackey said he’d had a change of heart as to Sister Patricia. I had no clue she was still on his radar. But then he goes and tells me, notify the sisters that Sister Patricia would be welcomed back into the classroom. Everybody is entitled to make a mistake, even a major one like hers, he told me, but she deserved a second chance. And get this. He wanted to be clear about something else with the nuns. He was sorry for what he had put Sister Patricia and them through, and he asked me to convey his apologies, and to ask for their forgiveness. Believe that?”
“That’s a great and weird story. Something must have rearranged his brain, and his soul. Now that his heart might have been pried open, you think there’s a chance he’s going to drop the morality clause from teachers’ contracts? That is such a crackpot idea: calling them ministers.”
“Yeah, I know, I know, I’m working on that, too.”
“I hope you’re trying to convince him to do the right thing.”
“And I’m not done. He also said we should check back in with Hector Alessandro, remember him from Caring Street? He wants to meet with him again. He is wondering if he’d made a mistake there, too. My head hasn’t stopped spinning. I’m no neurosurgeon, but I guess amazing turnarounds and happy endings can happen when you least expect them.”
That’s what he said, to which she replied, “Hope you’re right about that.” She knew he was about to spin out more.
—
“You okay, Ruth?” She didn’t look it.
“Why should I be?”
So that’s where they were going.
“You want me to leave?”
“The opposite. I want you to stay.”
“Not going anywhere, Ruth.”
“I want you to stay. I want you to stay, and to marry me.”
The old argument had taken a decidedly unfeasible turn, and if she was determined to raise the stakes, he was prepared to call. “Maybe this is wrong, what we are doing, and what we have become. Maybe it’s time we stop. We had something wonderful, which I will always treasure, but maybe our time is up.”
“Patronizing asshole. Why don’t you treasure that?” She refused to weep.
Philip threw down another tequila shot. They were going to have that conversation again—except that here she proposed the impossible marriage idea. He understood why they would talk about this and why they should. He asked her again if she would like a glass of wine, because that helped her mood in moments like this, but she refused, and then at long last explained to him why she wasn’t drinking.
“I am pregnant, you idiot.” She rushed off into the bathroom, where she could be sick by herself if it came to that, and stayed there for a long time till she gathered herself.
—
“How’d that happen?”
“What, they don’t teach biology in the seminary?”
“We took precautions.”
“You mean I took precautions, and shut up.” Gloves were now off.
He was at a loss for words.
“Restrain yourself being overly concerned for the woman you supposedly love.”
“What are you going to do?”
“What am I going to do? What am I going to do? Are you serious?”
“The priesthood, it’s my life.”
“That’s your problem, not mine—and not ours. We have a baby on the way. Ten weeks, says the OB. Not an embryo anymore. Know what a fetus looks like at ten weeks? You should go online and look up what your child is doing. Ten weeks, nervous system, fingers and toes.”
“Jesus.”
“Look around. Jesus is not helping you or me. What’d you say a minute ago? Amazing turnarounds can happen? Got one up your sleeve?”
“Okay, Ruth, what are we going to do?”
“I can show you the sonar.”
Not now, not yet ready to look.
“Wait a second,” she said. “You think there are options? You really want to go there?”
“I’m going to take care of you, if you let me. But I don’t know what that means.”
“This is the biggest moment of your life, isn’t it? Guess what? Me too, me too.”
“It’s not how I expected it all to end.”
“Son of a bitch.”
“What I mean is, this is not how I expected my life would go.”
She almost said he should have thought about that before, but she herself should have thought about that, too. “When are you going to come over to me?”