5

On a brilliant afternoon in August of that summer two years ago, when Edith and Peggy Woodcock were in New York for a fitting of Peggy’s wedding dress, Barbara and Barney Callahan sat together on the edge of the dock, looking across the motionless surface of the lake, and Barney said to her—

There are a lot of romantic stories about the poor little boy from the house in the village who falls in love with the beautiful girl who lives in the house on the hill. I suppose that’s what you think about me wanting to marry Peggy. I’m sure it’s what your mother thinks. Perhaps even Peggy thinks this, too. But my case is a little different. I wasn’t born in Boston. I was born in Hancock, Massachusetts, which is a good distance away. If you don’t know where Hancock is, it doesn’t make any difference; it’s a very small town and I hardly remember it. We moved from Hancock to Boston in 1936, when I was seven years old. I don’t remember anything about the trip except that the car was a DeSoto and I got carsick about every twenty miles.

There were five of us then, including my mother and father. Later on, there were six. I have one brother and two sisters. I am the oldest. Not quite enough children, I suppose, to qualify us as a good Catholic family. But it was a good-sized family just the same. My father owns a drugstore which he inherited from an uncle—this was why we left Hancock, dreaming of an inheritance and a life of ease! But my father is not a pharmacist, which is probably why the drugstore has never made as much money for him as it made for his uncle. There’s nothing my father can do with the store but rent it to a druggist. Most of the time, my father stays home. He’s never been well. What it is, I’m sure, is just hypochondria.

He’s one of those men who’s had twenty-seven doctors give up on him. They can’t find anything wrong with him, but that doesn’t make his ailments any less real—to him. He’s done a lot of different things. He has made money at some of them. He had an oil burner service, once, that made money. He owned a restaurant once, too, and made money. But during the depression he didn’t make much money at anything he tried, and he tried a lot of things. Something has always gone wrong with every job he’s ever had. If he was working for someone else, he’d get mad at his boss and quit, or if he was working for himself, he’d get discouraged and lose interest, or else get sick and not be able to carry on.

He made a significant remark to me once. He said, ‘It’s funny, whenever I start making good money at a job. I get scared.’ This is why it’s probably just as well that he doesn’t do anything any more but stay at home and collect a monthly rent cheque—most of which must go to pay doctor’s bills. Doctors have charged him thousands of dollars for telling him that he’s perfectly healthy. From all this you may gather that I don’t have much use for my father, and you’re right. I don’t. But anyway, my father is not the interesting one. The interesting one is my mother.

My mother is an artist, a painter. She has painted hundreds and hundreds of pictures. Her canvases are all over the house, either hanging or stacked away in closets. I don’t know much about art myself, but some of her pictures seem very good to me. I once asked her why she didn’t show them, or try to sell them, but she said no, she didn’t think they were good enough and—besides—she didn’t paint pictures to sell; she painted them for her own personal enjoyment, for the sense of fulfillment that a finished picture gave her.

But there is something essentially wrong with the pictures my mother paints. It is probably because they reflect her personal point of view too strongly, and her personal point of view is a curious one. She is an extremely religious woman, but it is an odd, old-fashioned and rather stubborn religiosity. She is a Catholic because she was born a Catholic and she has never seen any reason to question her faith beyond this point. She is not at all an intellectual Catholic, as many Catholics are. Her Catholicism is completely mindless and emotional. She has never tried to understand—I truly think—Catholicism at all. She accepts its teachings at face value. The Church says so, therefore that is the way it is. There is nothing more to it. This has always struck me as a strange point of view for an artist to have. But then, everything about my mother is contradictory.

In a church, I think, she might as well be in a jungle. What goes on there affects her deeply and emotionally, stirs her the way kneeling in the centre of a jungle full of wild, terrifying noises would stir a person. The church affects her heart, not her mind. She will kneel for hours in a church with her beads, transfixed, with angel choirs singing to her and saints smiling down upon her, with tears streaming down her face, beseeching the Blessed Virgin for something. For what? She would not be able to tell you in exact words. Beauty. Happiness. Purpose. Saintliness! She is a very romantic person, a sentimental Catholic. She talks a great deal about the Eternal Verities and her paintings reflect her search for these. A wistful picture of rain falling on a flower garden, which she calls ‘Benediction.’ She paints cathedrals she recalls from childhood, the Shrine at Lourdes—which she has never seen, scenes of mountains, pastures, forests, saints’ faces with tearful smiles that look much like her own. She paints birds building nests, little children kneeling in shafts of sunlight, and also symbolic pictures—Truth, glittering like a sword in the shadows, Honour bursting like a flower from the rubble of the world, Virtue lifting her lovely head from a wallow of seaminess, souls rising at the sound of the Last Trump, the human spirit winding its arduous way toward God, Daybreak at Eden—a confusion of styles and thoughts and images. Nothing so prosaic as the Stations of the Cross! But everything she does reflects her own personal, human, sentimental and nostalgic view of herself, life and the after-life. To hear her talk, you would think that Good and Evil exist in strict terms of black and white to her—virtue and sin. But oddly enough as she has lived her life, they have become all mixed up. Anyway, she brought me up that way. Like a beacon in the night, so shone my mother in a naughty world.

Of the three other children besides myself, only my younger brother, Jerry, I think, has any promise. He is three years younger than I am and we have always been quite close. Jerry has a lot of grit, by which I mean he has determination and courage. I’ve never once seen Jerry cry. He’s a little guy, almost a head shorter than I am, and when he was a kid playing baseball in a back lot or playing football, the bigger kids used to trample all over him, but he never cried. He’s a knobbly little guy and he used to want to be a ballplayer. His dream was to play for the Red Sox. But his size was always against him and now he’s working his way through Law School, working very hard. I think he’ll be a great lawyer someday, but the only thing is, he’s got to break away from home sometime, from my father and mother, as I’ve done. Sooner or later, he must do this.

There is only one other person who affects my family and who is important to know about. That is Father Timmons, my mother’s priest. I say my mother’s priest because I suppose it is common for someone like my mother to have her own, special priest. If I were picking priests for my mother, I would not have picked Father Timmons. I have known many priests in my life who impressed me as sincere, decent, intelligent men—even godly men. But Father Timmons is not this sort. He is a fat little man who smokes cigars—huge cigars. And I think I could even forgive him being ignorant and bigoted—stupid, is what he is—if he were not pompous. He struts. He pontificates. He lectures. He thinks of himself as being very kind and beatific—my mother was forever reminding all of us how kind Father Timmons was to us—but his kindness always emerged seeming rather oily and patronising. He was always patting us on the head, linking arms with us, as he lectured to us. But somewhere along the line he came to fill a gap in my mother’s life, to mean more, perhaps, to her than anyone else in the family. It began, I think, with her pictures. Though I’m sure he didn’t understand them, he praised them—and encouraged her to paint more. She began to have—and perhaps she had it before she met him; I don’t know—an idea for a picture. It would be her great, her final work. And it would be her interpretation of the ecstasy of Saint Theresa. She told Father Timmons about it, and he approved. The two of them would sit on the sofa, evening after evening, discussing it, sipping sherry which Father Timmons sometimes brought, while they listened to the radio or to records on the wind-up Victrola. It was queer, listening to them talk about Saint Theresa with ‘Oh, Susannah’ playing in the background. She had not attempted to begin the picture. ‘I’m still not quite ready for it, Father,’ she would say. ‘But I feel that I’m constantly getting closer to it.’ It was her conscience, she said, that troubled her the most. After all, who was she to think that she could express on a square of canvas something that the poets and mystics of the Church had been trying to get clear in their minds for centuries? And Father Timmons, of course, told her not to begin the picture until she was sure, absolutely sure, until the idea was clear as crystal, like a vision before her. Then she would bring out one of her other paintings and show it to him, and they would discuss it. He would congratulate her on her use of colour, on an effect of sunlight that she managed to get across the waves, or glinting on a barn roof ‘I just dabbed a bit of white there, and there it was,’ she would say. ‘A complete accident.’ And Father Timmons would carefully explain to her that it was not an accident. He convinced her, I am sure, that at her easel a divine hand was guiding her own. He began to convince her that she, too, might be a mystic.

Then, on these evenings, with my father sick in bed, they’d talk about her children and she would call for us. We would all troop in and sit around, listening to Father Timmon’s wisdom. If there were bad marks at school, he would have heard about them from the Sisters, and he would lecture to us about the virtues of studiousness and endeavour and, eventually, we would all kneel and listen while Father Timmons thanked the angels and all the saints and the Blessed Virgin for such bounties as life bestowed, and for life’s suffering, too. At the end of these prayers, Mother would stand up and—with a wide gesture of her arms that included all her children—say, ‘Children, the Holy Mother and Father Timmons are more of a mother and father to you than your earthly parents!’ And she believed this.

One summer when I was sixteen we rented a house at the shore, at Marblehead, for two weeks. Perhaps it was Father Timmons himself who rented the house. I don’t know, but anyway we all drove down with him in his new car, except for my father, who stayed behind in Boston. It was a big old ramshackle house with a damp stone cellar with stone steps leading down, and a garden full of rambler roses in the back yard. Father Timmons left us there but then he came back to visit. I thought I was very sophisticated in those days; I was sixteen. But it was my brother Jerry who first noticed that something was wrong, that something was different, that my mother’s relationship with Father Timmons was no longer that of parishioner with priest. He mentioned it to me. It was nothing that he had actually seen. It was just a feeling, an uneasiness, something in their behaviour that confused him and worried him. Perhaps the idea came to him in a vision! Anyway, he told me and at first I was only terribly frightened. I can remember only being suddenly almost sick with fear. I saw all of us struck instantly by a lightning bolt from heaven, then wandering for ever through purgatory. Then I told him that it couldn’t be true, to forget about it. But of course I couldn’t forget about it and neither could he. Because we were watching, now, we began to notice things—the looks he gave her, the way, on the porch glider as they sat together, he would squeeze her hand—the ashes from his cigar in parts of the house where they had no business being. But Mother seemed so blissful and happy it was hard for us to believe that she was engaged in committing a mortal sin. Adultery—and with a priest.

It was Jerry, then, who wrote to my father. He told me, after he had sent the letter so there was nothing I could do. My father came and there was a terrible scene—terrible to me because everybody was weeping. My mother, my father, Father Timmons—everyone wept. Even I wept, though Jerry did not, because he never cried. I went out alone to the beach and thought, I thought: What if there has been a terrible injustice done? What if none of it is true? So I went back to the house, determined to ask my mother. The house seemed empty. I hunted upstairs and downstairs for her, everywhere, and then I found her. She was sitting on a little stool in the cellar, painting. Her face was clear. She was even smiling and in the light from the cellar window she did appear to be bathed in some sort of holy radiance. She seemed to be in a trance and I thought at once of Saint Theresa. In some mad way, my mother was Saint Theresa, and she had had her ecstasy. I looked at the picture she was painting. It was all sunshine with yellows and reds and big, golden jonquils, and in every corner of the canvas, strewn all over that sunlike design, were human forms, people scattered about like flowers in a park after May Day. There was no saint there. I made her put down the brushes and come with me upstairs and out into the garden where the sun was so hot it was visibly blistering and flaking the paint off the Adirondack chairs, and the heat haze was so thick and bright that we had to shield our eyes to see each other’s faces clearly. I sat her down. I looked at her and asked her, ‘Is it true?’ And she looked straight up at me, her eyes enormous, and answered, ‘Yes.’

After that, I left home. I got a job and lived in a series of crazy rooming houses. I went back, from time to time, but only to see Jerry and I never stayed long. I lived like that for a year, then I decided to finish high school—I still had one more year—so I got a different job, working at nights, and went back to school. I decided I wanted to go to college, and so I did. I entered B.U., still living in the same way, working nights at whatever job I could get, studying whenever I could. And then I went into the Army and went to Korea. I didn’t even find God again in Korea, the way I have heard one is supposed to do. Perhaps it was because I had lost Him too thoroughly. Or perhaps I was more frightened of finding God again than of being killed.

When I got out of the Army I decided that the thing I needed to learn was how to make money, and it seemed to me that Business School was the place to do it. So I went to Harvard. Last year I met Peggy with a group of other Wellesley girls, at a party at the Business School. We started going out together. She was different from the other girls I’d known—not pretty, really, not as pretty as you are—but different. Bright and attractive and sensible. We discussed our different backgrounds. She told me that she came from a prominent, well-to-do family in Connecticut, that she would be a wealthy woman some day. We talked and I told her everything—what I’ve just told you—and we agreed, together, to get married. It wouldn’t be true to say that I’m marrying her for her money. But it is true to say that Peggy’s money is going to be very important to us. You cannot serve God and Mammon, I understand. Well, since I can’t serve God, I’m going to serve Mammon. If Peggy has money, then I intend to serve it, and serve it as well as I can. I’ll devote myself to it the way another man might devote himself to God. I asked Peggy if this made sense. She told me yes it did.

After he finished they sat quietly for a long time at the edge of the dock, on the little wooden pier. Then Barbara said, ‘You’re very honest. Thank you for being honest.’

He laughed bitterly. ‘Honest!’ he said. ‘Yes, perhaps that’s one thing you can say for me—that I’m honest.’

‘No,’ she insisted. ‘I admire honest people!’

And he stared across the still water of the lake for a long time. Then he said, ‘But there are other things—almost as important.’

‘What things?’ she asked.

‘There’s a certain manner,’ he said.

‘What?’

‘There’s a certain manner, a way of doing things, that I want to learn.’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘It’s hard to explain,’ he said. ‘But there’s something, a manner, that I was never taught and I need to learn it now. It’s something you know already, because you were taught it. You grew up with it and got it that way. I didn’t, that’s all.’

‘I think you have lovely manners,’ she said, laughing.

‘I’m not talking about manners,’ he said and his voice was cross. ‘I’m talking about—well, about things like this.’ He leaned his head toward her. ‘Smell my hair,’ he said.

‘Why?’

‘Just go ahead, smell my hair …’

She sniffed his dark head; it smelled warmly of pine and, possibly, lemon. ‘Very nice,’ she said. She smiled at him, puzzled and amused.

But his face was serious. ‘Cologne,’ he said. ‘I poured it on my head without thinking—by mistake. Do you see what I mean? I used to think that it was—you know, very correct—in very good taste—to pour cologne on my head! So I bought this cologne—bay rum, in a fancy bottle. But just the other day I found out that it isn’t good taste—it’s something only fops do! But this morning I did it again, out of habit. You see—I’ve got so many crazy and wrong ideas to get out of my head. And there are so many things I’ve got to learn.’

‘Are things like that really so important to you?’ she asked him.

‘Of course they are. They’re important to anyone who doesn’t have them. The word for what I’m talking about is poise.’

‘But I think you have a great deal of poise.’

‘I don’t, not really. I’m trying to learn it by watching people.’

‘What people?’

‘People like your mother and father,’ he said. He looked at her. ‘Why am I telling you all this?’ he asked.

‘I’m rather glad you are,’ she said.

‘Well, it’s important to me—very important now. I want, you see, to be inconspicuous among people like—well, like your family. I want to be unobtrusive, not to be noticed. I don’t want to stand out. That’s what poise is.’

‘You’re a funny boy,’ she said. ‘That’s not what I would say poise was. Not at all.’

‘I know,’ he said, ‘It’s not the same thing for you. I know that. But to me—well, to me it’s like a Persian cat. Have you ever noticed the way a Persian cat goes from room to room? He goes so quietly no one really sees him come and go, but every move is made with dignity. And grace. That’s the way I want to be …’

Then he said, ‘You see—at Harvard—I met boys who knew exactly what they wanted to be like—they wanted to be like their fathers. In fact, things were so certain for them that they didn’t even have to worry about what they wanted to be like! They would be like their fathers, that’s all. But I’m different, because I don’t want to be like my father. I’d rather be like yours.’

They sat silently for a while. A breeze ruffled the lake and the hot sun beat down upon them. Finally Barney said, ‘I suppose Peggy and your mother will be getting home soon.’

‘Yes.’

They stood up. Suddenly, almost impulsively, he reached for her hands. ‘You know,’ he said ‘you’re very nice. I like you very much. You’re very nice.’ And then he kissed her. It was a strange kiss, a quick touch of her cheek with his mouth, but it startled her because of its swiftness and strength.

Immediately he said, ‘I’m sorry I did that. Forgive me.’

So she laughed lightly and said, ‘Of course.’