She haunted him for the rest of the day and that night, and when he woke the following morning, he struck a bargain. If You look out for her, I will fast for the next month. To show the Deity good faith, he started straightaway, restricting himself to tea and toast at breakfast, clear broth and bread at lunch. As he was about to lie down for the afternoon siesta, Lisette phoned with an invitation to Thanksgiving dinner at her place. “You’re the only other gringo in town,” she said, which he would have taken as a mild insult if he hadn’t known her better. He’d forgotten that today was Thanksgiving! He’d been in Mexico too long.
“Well, I’m on a fast,” he said, but with a certain indefiniteness in his tone. “I can allow myself only one full meal a day, like we do at Lent.”
“A little early for Lent, isn’t it?” she replied. “But Thanksgiving dinner should qualify as your full meal.”
Her son would be there, she went on, along with a friend, a painter who had done restorations for museums and who might be willing to tackle the work that needed doing in the church. “She’ll be down here for the spring and summer, so she’ll have the time.”
He was dizzy with hunger when he rang Lisette’s bell at five p.m. The heavy oak door swung open into the interior courtyard. She said, “So glad you’re here right on the button.”
She was all done up by the standards of San Patricio: a skirt and low-heeled pumps, silver bracelets on her wrists.
“So glad you invited me,” he said. He caught the smells floating out of the kitchen. “I am famished.”
“We’ll take care of that if you can wait half an hour.” She gave him a wet kiss that smeared lipstick on his cheek. “There’s salsa and chips to take the edge off.”
She motioned at the table, set with colorful plates beside a bubbling fountain and overlooked by an electric heater on a pedestal—a cold front had moved down from the north.
He denied himself the salsa and chips but accepted a glass of red wine from Lisette’s friend, Pamela. The subject of Lisette’s sexual orientation had seldom come up, not because Riordan objected but because she had an aversion to talking about herself. “Where I come from,” she had said, “people don’t wear their hearts on their sleeves.” At any rate, he knew Pamela had to be more than a friend, and it was easy to see why. His father would have described her as “a looker”: tall, blond, stylishly dressed in black slacks, a pale green silk blouse, a pearl necklace—and the pearls looked real. His first impression was of an aloof fashion model a little too aware that she was gorgeous; but after a minute or two of light conversation, he saw that her detached air was a disguised shyness. He tried to put her at ease with questions about her painting. Stupid questions, like “Are you into abstract or representational?” She responded civilly enough, while making it plain that she preferred to talk about something else. He checked his pantry of topics, could find nothing beyond the weather, and so turned to Nick, asking him stupid questions about college.
Cell-phone and wireless service in San Patricio being spotty at best, Nick could not flee into his smartphone, which lay idle on the table, and was forced to answer. When he and Riordan fell into male default mode—sports—Pamela picked up her wineglass and went into the kitchen, carrying herself as if she were on a runway. Nick said that he played first base on the University of Arizona baseball team, and Riordan admitted to being a lifelong Cubs fan. He gave an embarrassed smile, as if that were a character flaw.
“I feel sorry for you,” Nick remarked. “That’s gotta be tough.”
“Oh, there’s a certain masochistic pleasure in it,” Riordan said. “My dad used to bring all us kids to Wrigley Field for the Crosstown Series against the White Sox. I was five or six the first time. Can’t remember if the Cubs won or lost.”
“I’d bet my car they lost,” said Nick.
He was a big, enthusiastic kid, seemingly as uncomplicated as a single-celled organism. Uncomplicated, but not an idiot. After they had exhausted the topic of baseball, he mentioned that he was taking an introductory astronomy course and had been to the Kitt Peak observatory with his class. Through its thirty-six-inch telescope, they had seen the moons and bands of Jupiter, Saturn’s rings, the Andromeda Galaxy. Riordan said he envied him the experience. His own observations of the cosmos had been limited to the naked eye or binoculars.
Nick was captivated by the phenomenon of archaic light. When he’d looked at Andromeda, 2.5 million light-years away, he’d seen it as it was 2.5 million years ago, right? Right, Riordan answered. A telescope was a time machine, in a manner of speaking. It took you out into space, backward in time. Nick speculated: “Let’s say that last week, or last month, or even ten years ago, some really huge disaster wiped out the Andromeda Galaxy. So that would mean that it’ll take two and a half million years for people on Earth to see the explosion and realize that the galaxy no longer exists, right?”
“Right, again,” Riordan said. “Assuming there still are people on Earth by that time.”
“But for two million years or so, they’d be seeing it like we do now,” Nick said with an undertone of complaint. “So would it or wouldn’t it? Exist, I’m asking.”
Riordan felt like a parent who has been asked Why is the sky blue, Daddy? and can’t find an answer.
“Well, objectively speaking, from God’s point of view, so to speak, it would have ceased to exist,” he said, taking a stab. “But from our point of view, it … it would be like … what? A fossil. Archaic light is called that sometimes, fossil light. The galaxy we now see would be like that preserved mastodon carcass they found in the Arctic ice some years back. Not a perfect analogy, but…”
Nick made a face. He thought it very imperfect. Lisette rescued Riordan from further interrogations, emerging from the kitchen with Pamela and Anna Montoya, her nurse, a plump, pleasant woman who had been pressed into service as a sous-chef. She was carrying a tray covered in tinfoil.
“This will be a binational, bicultural Thanksgiving feed,” Lisette announced and, with burlesqued élan, whipped the foil off five soup bowls. “First course: posole sonorense. Second will be turkey norteamericano.”
Deferring to his companions’ secularist sensibilities (Anna excepted), Riordan said a silent grace. Lisette poured tequila into small, blue glasses for everyone, and they toasted one another’s health. In his half-starved state, Riordan gulped his soup with the table manners of Oliver Twist in the workhouse. He had to wait a few minutes before the others finished theirs. Then Lisette asked him to carve the turkey.
“I can do it myself—I’m trained in minor surgery,” she said. “But it’s traditional for the man to carve, and I am in a traditional mood.”
The ceremony was performed in the kitchen. As he whetted the carving knives, he flashed on a nostalgic picture of childhood Thanksgivings among his populous family, Grandfather Riordan at the head of the table, scraping a blade over the sharpening stone. In his younger days, before he opened Riordan’s Shamrock Lounge, a watering hole for varied species of Chicago wildlife—ward heelers, bookies, cops, newspapermen—Grandfather Riordan had been a meat cutter in the stockyards. He could disassemble a twenty-five-pound turkey before it got cold. Riordan’s skills weren’t up to those standards, but he figured he could do a passable job on Lisette’s smaller bird.
“You do the breast this way, see…” He cut along the backbone, around the wings and thighs. “You take the breast out whole on both sides, then slice it crosswise.” The smell, the steam curling out from the body cavity made him light-headed. Unable to resist, he snatched a small chunk of white meat and swallowed it whole. “You’ll pardon me, Lisette? I’ve hardly eaten all day.”
“So what’s with this fast? Are you purging toxins?”
“No. It’s … it’s a personal thing.” Anna came in with the soup bowls and spoons and stacked them next to the sink. Although she did not understand much English, he waited till she left. “It has to do with someone who came to me for counseling…”
He checked himself, unable to think how to proceed without violating a confidence.
“I think I know who.” Lisette lay breast pieces around the edge of a platter. “She told me she was going to see you. What does she have to do with you fasting?”
“I’m not free to say.” How far could he go, should he go? Had he gone too far already? “There were consequences.… I’m sure you know…”
“Let’s us both be careful. We’re on thin ice here. Patient-doctor privilege,” she said.
“I’m worried about her health,” Riordan confided. “That there might be consequences to the consequences. I don’t think she’s as aware of them as she should be.”
Lisette paused in her preparation and looked at him. Her irises were the color of old pennies.
“I think she needs to talk to someone besides me. A woman,” he added.
Lisette piled drumsticks and stuffing between the ring of white meat and lifted the platter. “I’d say we’re out of bounds, Father Tim.”
“Yes, we are. We’ll drop it.”
“It’s decent of you to be concerned, but she’s not your responsibility. And not mine, either, unless she comes in and asks. I can’t tell a girl I barely know to come in for a woman-to-woman chitchat.”
“No, of course not. My meaning was … Oh, I don’t know what the heck my meaning was.”
“Get the gravy boat, please,” she said, shouldering the kitchen door open into the courtyard.
They ate yellow rice and black beans, a Cuban specialty, with the turkey. That made it, Lisette said, a trinational Thanksgiving. She told Riordan about the experiences she, Nick, and Pamela had had on the drive from Tucson. Nick jumped in, declaring that he hadn’t been scared, and the arrest of the gunrunners had been a rush. If this was bravado, it was the bravado of ignorance. A privileged American kid had not the haziest notion of what could happen in certain parts of Mexico if you were careless or just unlucky.
“Watch yourself while you’re here, Nick,” Riordan said, feeling obliged to offer counsel. “How you act, what you say.”
“Hey, I’m cool.”
“I’m sure you are. I’m also sure you’ve never been cut. My old boxing coach at Notre Dame taught us how to throw jabs and hooks and an axiom: ‘If you’ve never been cut, you don’t know shit.’ I’m quoting.”
He grinned to show that he meant no insult to Nick’s intelligence. No offense intended, none taken. Nick merely laughed at hearing a Franciscan friar utter a four-letter word.
Lisette nudged the conversation to the church’s refurbishment. She seemed eager to establish Pamela’s credentials in art restoration, while Pamela was no less eager to play down her expertise. She had not worked for museums, as Lisette had claimed, but for a company that repaired murals in municipal buildings, and that had been years ago.
“A lot of the stuff we did was what you see in city halls and county court buildings—you know, big agricultural or industrial scenes, dreck, imitation Diego Rivera or Thomas Hart Benton.”
It had grown twilit and chilly. Lisette lit candles in small jars and switched on the electric heater, which stood over them like a tall, mechanical servant awaiting orders.
“But surely the techniques, the materials are the same, no matter what,” Riordan said.
“They are, but I’m way out of practice. I wouldn’t feel confident taking on the paintings in your church.”
“Nonsense!” Lisette cried. Then, to Riordan: “Pam is afflicted with acute self-effacement. It’s her Waspy upbringing.”
Pamela scowled, but not at the comment about her upbringing; she disliked being spoken of as if she weren’t present. “How would you feel if you had to do an appendectomy when it had been years since your last one?”
“Actually, I’ve never done an appendectomy, except on cadavers,” Lisette said. “But I wouldn’t let that stop me if I had to do one.”
Riordan, following his instinct to play peacemaker, stepped in to avert a quarrel. “Why don’t you stop by the rectory tomorrow?” he said to Pamela. “I’ll show you the church. You can tell me what you think. No pressure. Around ten?”
“That would be all right,” she answered as they took up forkfuls of pumpkin pie with far too much whipped cream for a man on a fast. Later, as Riordan left, Lisette planted another wet kiss on his cheek, and when he went to erase the lipstick, she grabbed his hand.
“Don’t rub it off, Padre,” she said flirtatiously. “Like Bonnie Raitt sang…” She belted out the lyric in a mock-bluesy voice, her abundant chestnut hair flying as she swung her head from one side to the other. “‘Let’s give ’em something to talk about!’”
There seemed to be something altogether excessive about this merry parting. “But not about that,” he said. “We don’t want them talking about that all over again.”
She flicked her eyebrows comically at Nick and Pamela. “Once upon a time, there was gossip in town that me and the padre were gettin’ it on.”
“Oh, Mom,” Nick groaned.
Riordan walked home, feeling bloated and more out of sorts than he should have after a fine meal in good company. Entering the rectory courtyard, beyond the plaza lights’ glare, he looked up and saw Jupiter, as big and bright as a headlamp. On one of his morning vigils, he had spotted Callisto, the outermost of the four Galilean moons, with his naked eye. Poor Galileo, persecuted for daring to propose that Earth wasn’t the center of the universe. Riordan had resolved, within himself, the mossy conflict between science and faith. The church wasn’t as hidebound and intolerant as she had been four hundred years ago; she was capable of progress, though her pace was often glacial. The father of the big bang theory had been a Belgian priest named Georges LeMaître, and now astronomers from the Vatican observatory were charting the big bang’s first children: galaxies so distant it had taken twelve billion years for their light to reach the observatory’s scopes.
He went to his room, turned on the desk lamp, and began to read from his worn leather-bound breviary. He couldn’t keep his mind on his evening prayers; it was fixated on that number, twelve billion light-years. A single light-year equaled more than six trillion miles, so the distance to those galaxies was twelve billion multiplied by six trillion. He could not grasp such a staggering figure. No human could, no more than a dog could grasp quadratic equations.
This thought led him to lay down his breviary and pull a volume of H. P. Lovecraft’s writings from his bookshelf. He flipped through it to a passage he recalled underlining some time ago:
Humanity with its pompous pretensions sinks to complete nothingness when viewed in relation to the unfathomed abysses of infinity and eternity which yawn about it. Man, so far from being the central and supreme object of Nature, is clearly demonstrated to be a mere incident, perhaps an accident, of a natural scheme whose boundless reach relegates him to total insignificance. His presence or absence, his life or death, are obviously matters of utter indifference to the plan of Nature as a whole.
Riordan squinted at a note he’d scrawled in the margins: “The Holocaust? 6 million Jews murdered? Not significant in the grand scheme of things?”
Quite a few people these days, some very bright people, shared Lovecraft’s view, and they reacted to it with a kind of insouciant despair that Riordan suspected was a pose; they went on living their lives as if they meant something. Lovecraft’s response was more honest: his perception of a cold, limitless void, empty of love and purpose, terrified him. Riordan knew he could not live in such a universe; he doubted that many could. Absent the divine fire of God’s love, which conferred value on human life, singly or in multitudes, it would be as toxic to the spirit and the heart as Pluto’s atmosphere was to the body. Of course, that didn’t prove God’s existence, only the human need to believe in Him.
More of his notations, beginning at the top of the page, running down the right margin: “You might be vanishingly small, yet you are not nothing. What you do or fail to do does make a difference, even if the celestial bodies perform their usual motions with no regard to you or for you.”
Those words snatched his mind out of the galactic, back to the tiny corner of the middling planet he inhabited and, finally, to the suffering microbe named Cristina Herrera. She was the source of the jangling discontent that continued to plague him, the sense of failure. Which brought him to the question he never could answer: Why do I think it’s my responsibility to save people from the wrongs that are done to them?