40

Mottle Sin

That was when I learned that weather is memory. That even the wind matters. That you don’t need a calendar to remind you of anniversaries. You smell them, you feel them on your skin, you taste them. If you go on living in the same place year after year the weather begins to take on meanings; it is weighted with omens, and the temperature, the light, the trees and leaves, evoke emotions. The whole venerating world turns on this principle of weather-sniffing familiarity: all such pieties have their origin in a season, on a particular day. It had been a warm fragrant morning in May when Father was buried.

So there was something primitive in the way we stood in the parking lot of St. Joe’s Catholic Church on Station Avenue—all of us, heavier, older, none of us making eye contact. It was the month, it was the day, it was the morning, it was the very weather of ten years before, when we had gathered for Father’s funeral: the same heat, the same light, the same smells of damp earth and fresh leaves. May thirtieth—the pungency of new warmth on the rain-sodden turf of spring, the rising sourness of sun-cooked and crumbled dirt, the whiff of pine duff and the sting of leaf mold ripening into mulch, the suggestion of wet roots and swelling bulbs pricking through the wet earth, the earliest flowers—daffodils, jonquils, azaleas, the big rosy buds of rhododendrons, heavy yellow forsythia, the sweetness of white viburnum.

Even Mother felt it. “My favorite flower.” And she added to test us, “Do you remember my favorite?” Before anyone could supply the right answer, she said, “Magnolia.”

We all agreed in a reluctant murmur, a chorus of muffled moos. The grudging tone of this owed much to the fact that while each of us wanted to be at the church, for Father’s sake, to honor his memory, we did not want to be together.

“I’d like all of us to be there,” Mother said when she told us individually of her plan. “As a family.”

At the lowest, most savage mood of this family, the nastiest and most corrosive I had known—“You asshole,” “You shithead,” “You fat greedy fuck,” all that—Mother announced that she had paid for a memorial high mass to be said for Father and that we were expected to be there on our knees.

“It’s for the repose of his soul,” Mother said, using the church’s formula.

Floyd remarked on the medieval practice of buying a church service, paying for prayers.

“Selling indulgences,” he said. “Paying money to get redemption—it’s what Luther objected to. ‘The Pardoner’s Tale.’ And here it is again, coin to gain advancement. Look!”

He turned me around to face the sidewalk where two people were carrying signs, jerking them up and down to call attention to the messages. One sign said, Reclaim Our Church, the other, Punish the Pedophile Priests. Near them on the lawn some other people were kneeling, saying the rosary.

“It’s kinda bad taste,” Franny said to no one in particular. “That’s what I think.”

“Would you say that if a priest had sodomized Jonty when he was twelve?” Hubby said. “ ’Cause that’s what they were doing, nailing twelve-year-old boys on camping trips.”

Fred rolled his eyes and put his arm around Mother.

The scandal had been reported in the Cape Cod Times—disturbed, wild-haired men coming forward to claim they had been fondled and raped by homosexual priests in Boston twenty and thirty years ago. The lawsuits and accusations had divided the church; the Boston cardinal had protected the priests—indeed, had sent them to new parishes, where they abused more boys. Some priests had recently been sent to prison, others were soon to stand trial. The lawsuits demanded millions—so much money that the diocese had begun to close churches, anticipating the huge payout.

“Shanley’s in Provincetown,” Floyd said. “In our very midst.”

The recently arrested Father Shanley was one of the accused pedophile priests, out on bail, awaiting trial, living in the gay enclave on the lower Cape. While still a priest, he had been a charter member of the North American Man/Boy Love Association.

“Maybe he’s saying mass today,” Hubby said.

“He’s been defrocked,” I said.

“After defrocking all those little boys.”

“I think he was frocking them,” Hubby said.

“Keep it down,” Rose said.

“You’re disgusting,” Franny said.

“That’s right, criticize me. Don’t say anything about the pervert priests.”

Our shrillness exaggerated our frailty and our age. Arguing, growing wheezy with anger, we seemed older and crueler, and our ill temper suggested weakness.

And we did look old. I had been shocked by the sight of the crone in the car in Osterville, screaming out the window at me—Rose. But Franny was a crone too, Fred was an old coot, Floyd was almost wholly bald, and Hubby had a tonsure. Gilbert had a paunch. I was balding and fatter. No one was more undignified than a foulmouthed oldster.

Only Mother was unchanged. She was a stick figure but seemed indestructible. At ninety-three, she looked no older than she had ten years before at the funeral. She was standing with her arms folded, her big Sunday handbag hanging from one arm, at the center of our family group. We were still shuffling like penguins in the parking lot.

“I think we should go in,” she said. “I’ve reserved a special pew for us up front. Who’s that?”

It was Charlie, hurrying toward us from his car.

“Charlie,” I said.

Mother said, “Who’s Charlie?”

“My son—one of them.”

“Oh, that’s right, I remember,” Mother said.

“Hope I’m not late,” Charlie said.

“I can feel Angela here,” Mother said. “Her presence. She’s speaking to me. She’s grieving for Dad. Would anyone like to say anything to her? I can pass on the message.”

Mother, assuming the role of sibyl and go-between, was speaking loudly, attracting the attention of other people who’d already taken their seats. It struck me that Mother intended to make a spectacle of our entrance into the church, our procession down the main aisle, Mother and her seven children, like Snow White and the dwarfs.

“She says she’s happy that we’re all together, in harmony,” Mother said, looking left and right. “As a family.”

Fred walked on one side of her, turtle-headed, looking ill. Franny and Rose jostled on the other side. Hubby was behind them, walking alone, next came Gilbert and me, and finally Floyd. Charlie and the grandchildren and the spouses were far to the rear. Perhaps the people in the church saw us as the exemplary family Mother wished them to see—the many offspring supporting their aged, widowed mother in her mourning. Perhaps they did not see what I felt profoundly, that we were old and mean, ugly children with their aged mother, committing sacrilege by pretending to pray.

Father would have been uncomfortable with the charade, the paid-for mass, the expensive flowers, the procession, the pomp, the show of fake solidarity, the appeal to Angela. He would have crept through a side door, sat in the back, and expressed himself with full-throated singing, his favorite hymns, or kneeling with closed eyes, in prayer.

At the front of the altar rail Mother genuflected before the tabernacle, in conspicuous piety, and then directed us into the first pew. We sidled in and sat compactly. Was it obvious that we hated to be together, that we were sitting separately, that only Floyd and I were conversing, the rest of them sitting stony-faced?

“Has it occurred to you that Ma might be the poorest one of us?” Floyd said in a whisper. “Think of all the money and property she’s given away. She doesn’t even own the house she’s living in.”

I lowered my head and said, “She might have another bank account or investments we don’t know about.”

“Look at them,” Floyd said. “Queen Lear with Regan and Goneril.”

The three of them were kneeling, Mother between the two daughters, all of them praying with folded hands, their bums against the pew. Mother blessed herself, made the sign of the cross. The daughters did the same. And they sat.

Then they stood—we all did. The priest had entered, followed by two gray-haired women, one very thin, the other one potbellied, both purse-lipped and ostentatiously pious, like busybodies.

“What happened to altar boys?” I asked Floyd.

“When’s the last time you were in church?”

The day of Father’s funeral was the correct answer, a decade ago, and before that I could not remember. The whole service seemed strange to me now, the altar positioned like a dining table, the priest standing behind it, facing the churchgoers, flanked by the two biddies. It was all unfamiliar, not like any other mass I had ever attended.

The priest was a big, pink-faced man with a crown of white hair, handling the items on the altar with chubby fingers, pushing at the pages of the thick missal lying in its cradle, then clasping his hands and praying loudly—more ostentatious piety. The two women jostled on either side of him, seeming to compete for attention, while the priest carried himself back and forth, his big belly draped in brocaded vestments, gold tassels, his surplice trimmed in fine lace.

“Nullifidian,” Floyd said under his breath. “Father Corkery, heretic and blasphemer. I miss Father Furty.”

We stood, we knelt, we sat, we muttered responses. A man with a guitar strummed and sang “The Impossible Dream” while some people hummed. Then one of the women jingled a set of bells, and the priest, looking like a chef in drag, fussed with the chalice as if he was seasoning a soufflé.

Adjusting his lace cuffs, tugging his sleeves, Father Corkery ascended the pulpit. He was a glowing, well-fed priest, plump under his swelling vestments. Now that he was lit by the blaze from above him, I could study him. It was obvious that he was vain about his thick white hair. His pink face set it off, his eyes were pale blue, his head seemed oversized and babyish because of his short neck, lost in the frills of his collar, and when he gripped the edge of the pulpit I could see the sparkle of his rings on those thick fingers.

As Father Corkery frowned and inhaled and began, Floyd said, “He is the reason the Mormons call the Catholic Church the Great Whore of Babylon.”

I heard Boston Irish in his voice as Father Corkery intoned the formulas of the mass. His hee-yah for here, his hee-yands for hands, his onna-ments for ornaments, and his nasal squeak marked him as a Southie native. He announced as his subject “Mottle Sin.”

“In the reading today”—and clipping the r, the word came out veeding—“Paul mentions fy-ah. He means hell fy-ah, as a penalty for mottle sin.” He tapped the open Bible. “So it says right hee-yah . . .”

I was not following his argument. I was listening to the peculiarities of his speech, imagining how to write them phonetically, and reflecting on how people spoke blithely of the Boston accent. But there was no such thing. There were fifty ways of speaking, and his was the lower-middle-class Irish accent of South Boston—“the lace-curtain Irish,” Father called them, as opposed to “the shanty Irish.” Someone from Southie could probably identify the priest’s precise neighborhood. Such men became the priests, the policemen, the politicians, roughly equivalent roles in the status-minded city.

He was speaking about the sanctity of life, how “all living creetchahs belawng to Gawd.” As this was Father’s memorial mass, I listened for any mention of him.

“Here it comes,” Floyd murmured.

“Yet there are people who give this idea shawt shriff,” Father Corkery said. “Who are bent on destroying life. Believe me, that takes its toll.”

He said this word as thole, using his emphatic tongue. That was true to his part of Boston, for in his next sentence he used the expression “square deal”—squa-yah theel—and how there were people who “vipped living children from the wombs of their mothers, Gawd love them, and then flushed them down the terlet. And dint cay-yah! Went to a function! Fixed themselves something to eat. Took and made themselves a drink. Had a bee-yah. Had a time!”

“See what he’s doing? What he’s not talking about?” Floyd said. “No buggery. It’s what magicians call indirection.”

Though Father Corkery was railing against abortion, speaking of the abortionists as murderers, the clinics as slaughterhouses and Nazi death camps “like Os-wich” (making it sound like a town on the Cape near Hah-wich), and that things had to change, I continued to be fascinated by his accent. Why did no one ever put this sort of local speech into a book?

The heckling sermon went on, but I was thinking how local accents in America were being lost and absorbed into the more homogenized speech of TV and radio. That was a shame, because there was something in a local accent that helped you to verify the truth of what someone was saying. I could tell from the way Father Corkery spoke that he was posturing. He was talking about “doctors drinking a bottle of tonic”—bawtell of tawnic—“on their piazzas without a cay-ah in the world, and yet they’re in a state of mottle sin.”

We could do something about it, he said. There was an election coming this fall.

“If you’re fed up to hee-yah, go over they-ah to that polling booth and take your ballot and mahk it. Vote for the candidate who promises to overturn the mottle sin of abortion. Tell your friends and nay-biz. Tell them Father Cokkery wants to know. Demand to know where the candidates stee-yand on the issue.”

“Ayatollah,” Floyd said.

Mother’s head was bent in prayer.

“Notice how much time he’s spending on the pervert priests,” Floyd murmured again.

What I had noticed was that Father Corkery had been raising his voice throughout the sermon, along with a contrary wail, a sort of chanting, coming from outside the church but piercing the stained-glass windows with its shrillness.

And when at last Father Corkery said, “Let us join ourselves in pray-yah,” I heard the rhythmic shouts again, not clear but loud and discordant with emotion.

In this prayer that followed the sermon, Father Corkery mentioned the souls that had departed from this church, and lifted his eyes as if they had been launched through the roof of St. Joe’s. Among the three or four deceased, he spoke Father’s name, mispronouncing it as Joo-stiss.

Making the sign of the cross, Floyd murmured, “In the name of the former and of the latter and of their holocaust. All men.”

With muffled voices that became shouts, the doors of the church burst open and red-faced people appeared in the aisle, crying “Hypocrites!” in cracked nervous voices.

They were protesting the cover-up of the pedophile priests, but we shrank—everyone did—taking the word personally.

The mass fell apart at this point—it was almost over anyway. The priest busied himself, clutched at his skirts, said some hurried prayers, and fled. The churchgoers got up and pressed toward the door, driving out the protesters, who without their signs mingled with everyone else and were indistinguishable. Because we were in the long pew at the front of the church, we stood and shuffled and were the last to leave.

We gathered again in the parking lot. Charlie said he had to go back to work.

“I think it would be appropriate to visit Dad’s grave,” Mother said.

“I’ll be there,” Charlie said. “Work can wait.”

We drove separately to Oak Grove and met again in a group before Father’s rough-textured stone—two names on it, Father’s with his dates, and Mother’s with a birth date.

In her primary school teacher’s voice, Mother said, “I’d like you all to form a circle.”

We stepped forward, frowning, hating to be together.

“Shall we join hands?” Mother asked.

“No way,” Hubby said.

“Is it necessary?” Rose asked.

“I think it might be a nice idea,” Mother said.

No one looked up. Fred said, “I agree.” He was Mother’s enforcer now, as Father had sometimes been. I reached to the left and right, and my hands were caught, I did not want to know by whom. Dry scaly fingers and soft palms, almost reptilian, damp in the May warmth, held mine in an unwilling grip, as Mother intoned, “Let us pray.”