Читать книгу Celibate - Maria Giura - Страница 11

Chapter One

The Long Loneliness

I first noticed Father Infanzi in the way that matters during his second year at Saint Stephen’s. It’s not that I hadn’t noticed him before. It was impossible not to. He was thirty—four years older than me— tall and lean with black hair parted to the side, and he said beautiful things like God loved us into existence. But it wasn’t until my sister Janine introduced him to my family after Easter Sunday Mass that he really got my attention. It was a cool, sunny day with the fragrance of daffodils in the air as we waited on a long line to greet Father outside the front doors. When it was our turn, we all smiled and said hello, and my step-dad Tom complimented his homily. Father said, “Thank you,” and then, shaking our hands and blushing, said to my sisters and me, “Wow, four girls. You all have the same blue eyes,” but when he got to me he held my eyes a beat longer than he did theirs, and I felt a sharp pulse of attraction. After we walked away, my sister Julie said, without a hint of irony, “He’d be perfect for Maria.” Nellie, the youngest, rolled her eyes, and my mother shot back, “Julie!” but with a smirk. I nearly gasped. He was perfect—smart and handsome and personable but also a touch shy to make him sweet. He made me feel more special in that moment than the men I dated, sometimes slept with, so I wouldn’t have to be alone. After that, whenever he said Mass I thought good but walked out the side door and didn’t greet him. He was a priest. Besides, the last thing I wanted to be reminded of was celibacy. I’d been running from it ever since I was eight and, sitting in St. Bernadette’s one night, I felt God calling me to become a nun.

It was after five o’clock Mass on a Saturday, and I was headed out the door when something made me pick up The Tablet’s Special Vocations Issue and stay a while. Nestled into hewn rock high above the altar was the Blessed Mother in a beautiful white dress and powder blue sash with fourteen-year-old Bernadette kneeling beside her and gazing into her face. It looked like a giant circle of love surrounded them, but not one that made me feel left out like I had ever since Nellie was born. I walked a few feet down the long aisle, sat down in a pew, and opened The Tablet. There in the centerfold in big bold letters was GIVE YOUR LIFE TO GOD. I stared at it for a while unsure why God would want jealous eight year old me to give my life to Him or what that even meant until I turned the page and saw picture after picture of smiling nuns and priests. God was telling me to become a nun. I was sure of it. Why else had I picked up the paper that week and not another? Why weren’t there any pictures of regular people? Why did it say Give and not you Can give? I knew nuns and priests marry God, and I felt a tug on my heart, but I was embarrassed and afraid. When I got older I wanted a husband I could see and feel, who would talk to me with a real voice. I wanted to feel special and beautiful, the way I did when James Gardini touched my hair in school, not plain and invisible the way I did during Princess Hour when my mother and teenaged sisters transformed the kitchen table into a pink baby spa and took turns bathing Nellie’s cherubic, glistening body. It felt like there wasn’t enough love even though Baby Jesus had promised me there was the previous Christmas Eve when He whispered it to my heart during Communion. It felt like his Father was giving me an order like Papa always tried to give Mommy. Sometimes he’d pound his thick fist against the dinner table, and I’d jump.

I brought The Tablet home that night but didn’t say a word. I was afraid if I talked about it, I’d make it real and God wouldn’t leave me alone. I filled out some of the return cards for more information, but I never mailed them, and then one day The Tablet got thrown away with The Daily News. I still went to Mass every week even when my mother couldn’t take me, but I wouldn’t stay afterward anymore, and as the months went by, the calling dimmed, though not my hunger. One day when my mother was kissing Nellie all over and calling her Gioia, joy, what she used to call me, I cried out, “What about me?” Janine and Julie looked at me with open mouths, but my mother narrowed her eyes like I was mean, which devastated me. From the moment Nellie was born, my mother saw her blond, fair-skinned self; she didn’t want Nellie, who was the baby like her, to feel as insecure as she had growing up in the shadow of older sisters. For the first time in my mother’s life, she wasn’t working and could enjoy being a mother. She had also almost lost Nellie. The doctor had told her that because she was thirty-five and had had tuberculosis, the pregnancy could kill her. The appointment for the abortion was scheduled, but the night before, twisting and turning in bed, my mother knew she’d never be able to answer to God or live with herself. Nellie was a miracle.

If my father had been there for us, I don’t think I would’ve been as needy or jealous. The only time I had with him was a few minutes on his lap, but he’d either jump up nearly dropping me, or he’d fall asleep with his arm across me like a bar. Even though my mother worked the same grueling hours in the pastry shoppe as he did, he believed it was her job to raise us and wouldn’t help with anything not even to run to the pharmacy to get us medicine. She didn’t mind the hard work or the serving; they fulfilled her. But she couldn’t stand that he was never home for us, that he was mean. When I came down with recurrent bronchitis at three—probably from his chain smoking—and she had to stay home with me for weeks, he blew up. I imagine my father yelling, “Non puoi!” the huge vein in his forehead throbbing as my mother shouted back, hands on hips, her face pulled in a little, “Watch me!” Sometimes he’d wear her down so much, she’d take us to Grandma Giulia’s or one of our aunts for the night, or she’d lock him out. It got so bad once that she packed our bags and took us to Kennedy Airport to board a plane somewhere, but Aunt Anna and Uncle Dom showed up at the gate just in time to change her mind. For a while my father would do better, take some time off to be with us, but it didn’t last, and he’d be back to driving him and her into the ground. Then, after seventeen years of second chances, when I was nine and Nellie was one, she told us they were divorcing. I stormed out of the kitchen demanding, “Who’s going to be my father now?” What I really wanted to say but didn’t dare was, Bad enough you dropped me for Nellie. Now you’re sending away the man who kisses my hair and calls me Bella?

My mother, Nellie, and I became a family within a family. We did everything together, including all my ball games where my mother was in the stands with Nellie in the stroller next to her fisting a sippy cup, the two of them rooting for me. I finally had someone who needed and looked up to me, but Nellie was so gorgeous with golden locks and such a fungita, pouty lips, that none of us could keep our hands off her. Her looks were only half of it. Once Julie had a friend over who had an enormous pimple on the tip of his nose, and two year old Nellie said, “What’s that ding on your nose?” Even my mother hid a chuckle. There was no way I could compete with that. When Nellie misbehaved, my mother screamed and punished her and cancelled our plans, but then they’d snuggle and make up like I wasn’t there. The fact that I was growing chubby and awkward made me more insecure. My mother did everything for me, but I felt I couldn’t say what I really felt without upsetting her, so I kept it in and made believe I was perfect. In fourth grade, I passed a note to my friend Leslie that said I wanted to “do it” with some boy whose name I don’t remember, but I used the nasty word Frankie LaVerde taught everyone in school. In sixth grade, when I was far enough from home I started rolling up my skirt. In seventh, I hid in the Brooklyn Public Library to read the dirty parts of Judy Blume’s Forever. One summer, I even bullied two sweet, overweight kids in the neighborhood.

When my teachers took us to church, I looked forward to it, paid careful attention, loved the clean way my soul felt after receiving Penance and Holy Communion. But it wasn’t until I was fourteen that I really started searching for Jesus. Initially I’d chosen a large communications high school, but I was intimidated by crowds, so it was hard for me to make friends. I wandered the loud hallways alone until I got to the quiet library carrel where I listened to “You’ve Got a Friend” and imagined Jesus singing to me. When I transferred to a Catholic girls’ school the following semester, I still felt lost, because everyone had already made friends. I started wearing the cross I received at baptism and showing up to Prayer Group every Tuesday morning where a Sister of St. Joseph led a faith sharing. There’d be a candle burning and a song like “Here I Am Lord” or “Be Not Afraid” playing, and I’d cry. The following summer when I turned fifteen and James Gardini asked me out, I told Julie, “If I don’t marry James, I’m becoming a nun.” I was trying to keep my hopes low, so I wouldn’t get hurt, but I also had a feeling that I wasn’t meant to get married, that it wasn’t what God wanted, or what I was born to do. I don’t know if I remembered that night in St. Bernadette’s. I just knew that I felt more peace with Jesus than I did with James, and I sensed that would be the case with every boy. Still, when James kissed me, I started dreaming of taffeta wedding dresses. When he broke up with me two months later, I was crushed.

At the end of sophomore year, I threw out the poem my mother had written for me about how she hoped the world would never steal my innocence. After reading Ronald and Nancy Wilkins’ Man and Woman in Sister St. Paul’s religion class, the only book from high school that I saved, I wanted to remain pure, but the thought of it made me feel more invisible. A lot of the girls in my school teased their hair and wore diamond ankle bracelets their boyfriends bought them and hiked up their skirts higher than I did. Except for the occasional awkward boy I met at a dance, I felt that no one ever saw me, as if God had thrown a sheet over me to keep me for Himself. In spring of senior year, when my friend Leslie found The Nautical, a bar that let us use fake ID, I fell for Gary who I made out with even though he didn’t buy me drinks and who cancelled on me a week before the prom. It only got worse in college where I fell for more Garys. I even fooled around with one who had a girlfriend. I told my mother I had sorority meetings that went late and that I’d be staying in one of my sister’s rooms, but sometimes I’d wind up in a guy’s room, and though I didn’t lose my virginity, I came close.

A year after college graduation, there was Dave, six foot and athletic with a slight overbite that made him good-looking in a sweet way. He drove a hundred ten miles round trip every weekend to see me. I finally had a lover, someone who made me feel beautiful, who made me an even number. I knew he wasn’t the one, but I was enjoying myself. As time went on, I was afraid that if I broke up with him, God would finally get me for Himself. There were also the voices of my southern Italian ancestors in my head: All your cousins your age are married or engaged. What about you? Cos’e` questo soulmate? You’re next in line on both sides of the family. And my own voice. What about me? Why can’t I just want this? Why can’t Dave be enough? I held on for two and a half years. Five months before we broke up, when my mother found out that we’d been sleeping together, she was livid. “What you’ve pulled is absolutely unacceptable under my roof,” her light blue eyes piercing mine as I faced her, my bed in between us, my heart pounding. I was sorry but only because she had found out. Now that I knew how good sex could be, I didn’t want to give it up. If I didn’t get married, the only life my mother and the Church would deem worthy was a nun’s. Three months later I moved into the apartment in Julie and her husband Nick’s house. I wanted to have something to show for myself in place of marriage, so I wouldn’t feel like a failure. I had to get away from my mother’s and Nellie’s fighting, which had become impossible since my mother and Tom married.

On the night I left, she and I were standing at the top of the landing while Tom brought the last of my things to the car. Her anger had cooled months earlier. Now I was the hurt, angry one. I didn’t want to move out knowing that I’d be breaking up with Dave soon, that I’d be alone. I wanted her to march to the front door, spread her arms across it, and tell me not to go—that she and Nellie would go for therapy, I should wait another year or two when I wasn’t so afraid to move out, it was okay if I never got married, she loved me no matter what. All I’d told her was that I didn’t want to marry Dave, which she sensed I blamed her for and I denied, but it was true. I subconsciously blamed her for my calling: maybe if she hadn’t named me after the Blessed Mother or nicknamed me Baby Jesus when I was small…I was jealous that all she’d ever wanted was to marry and have a family. It didn’t matter that I saw how dearly she was paying for it again. I was certain I’d do better. Except for Dave, I attracted emotionally unavailable men like my father who could never bring himself to say, “I love you,” or “I’m proud of you” or “Tell me about your day.” I told myself that Papa hadn’t known any better, that he loved us, which was true but not enough. All I’d ever had were some fleeting moments when I’d feel a rush of his attention and affection. It was my mother’s love that always carried me, but it was Papa I was excusing and protecting. I romanticized marriage, making it an eternal honeymoon, but deep down I distrusted men and commitment. I wanted a prince to find and save me, to fill the deepest desires of my heart. What I needed was a Savior.

Four months later when I got home from a New Year’s cruise that I took with my family, I collapsed from the grief. I knew that moving out and breaking up with Dave was going to be hard, but I didn’t know it would feel like someone had died. The singles scene on the cruise was awful. I felt like God had abandoned me. I was terrified He was going to use the silence of my apartment to trap me into the calling I didn’t want. I felt a dark voice close in on me: It would be so much easier if I weren’t here tomorrow. I cried out, “Jesus, please take me.” I didn’t want to die; I wanted to be delivered, but I didn’t want to give up my will, find out for sure what God’s was. If He allowed His own glorious Son to be crucified, why would He ever love or take care of a nobody like me? I still went to Mass but I left as soon as it was over, afraid I’d hear God whisper, Come Follow Me. I told myself that just because I felt called to be a nun when I was a child didn’t mean it was real; how did I know there wasn’t someone else out there for me? If God wasn’t going to give me a husband, I was going to find one myself.

I dated as often as possible. There was Mark, the blue-eyed paramedic my cousin Gino introduced me to (I don’t remember why it didn’t lead anywhere); Vincent, the strawberry-blonde architect who started cancelling our dates because his ex was back in the picture; and Tim, the thirty-year-old lawyer I went out with for three months who wanted to quit his job and move to the south of France to paint. After a few dates, he started shutting down, showing up late, stopping at his mother’s for something to eat even when he and I were going to dinner. Maybe he smelled the Bride magazine I’d bought after three dates. He even asked me to drive. When he didn’t read the anger in my pause, I gave in, because I didn’t want him to break up with me. Sleeping with him only made me angrier, kept me from Holy Communion. When he got up at five to put on sneakers, I couldn’t believe it. “You’re leaving me to go running?” I asked, humiliated.

There were stretches when I enjoyed being single, like when my coworker Henry and I rented a house on the Jersey Shore, and he invited his friends, and I invited mine or when I threw parties, and my apartment was brimming. I was happy bringing people together, but when they left, or I had too much time on my hands, I felt helpless and panicked. Except for the gym and my job as an admissions counselor, I didn’t have a lot going on. My close friends were either married or unavailable, like Silvia who was in med school or Kara who lived seventy miles away. I wasn’t involved in anything—a charity, a team, not even a hobby—to pull me out of myself. I joined a couple of young adult groups, one for Catholics in Manhattan, but if I didn’t see anyone in the audience who looked attractive and well-adjusted, I walked out when the guest speakers were on their last syllable. Three day weekends with no plans were the worst. I’d start out hopeful on Saturday mornings, do three miles on the treadmill with the stereo blasting and the blinds thrown open to let the sun pour in. Then I’d make a pot of cinnamon decaf and a batch of corn muffins and give myself some kind of project like cleaning out my drawers, but when I was done and had forty-eight hours to go, all the nothing made me feel so miserable that I curled up on my couch sobbing, convinced God had forgotten me, but also, in the back of my mind, terrified that He hadn’t.

Things got especially bad the second winter in my apartment, one of the stormiest in history. Just as we dug out from one blizzard, another hit. Nick helped me with all the shoveling, but all I thought was, I’m alone. The one date I almost had with an investment banker from Julie’s firm on Valentine’s weekend got cancelled because of another storm and never got rescheduled, because Julie hadn’t thought we were a good match to begin with. I should have trusted her, but I didn’t. When I broke up with Dave, she was loving and sympathetic, but since then I felt she was avoiding me. In retrospect, I couldn’t blame her. I was needy and holding a grudge from childhood that I wasn’t fully aware of. While I was always trying to close the six year gap between us, she was usually looking for me to run her errands. It didn’t help that until I was seventeen I felt homely around her like the summer I was twelve and wore knee-length sweat socks, because I wasn’t allowed to shave, and she asked, “What’s with the thick knee socks in 90 degree heat?” When I started going out with Dave, my insecurities disappeared, but now that I was alone, I felt twelve again. One day when she calmly corrected me for not bringing the garbage out in time, I snapped, “Sorry, I’m not obsessed with garbage removal like you,” taking a shot at her domestic life, which I secretly envied. I wouldn’t even call her until one night when my fear and dread were so bad I didn’t know what else to do.

It was the end of the first day back to work after another blizzard, and everyone was gone, even my intensely dedicated boss Doris. The office was silent except for the wind against the thin paned windows. I had finished calling a few student applicants and had settled in to write a couple of cover letters. Even though working in Admissions was a good fit, I fantasized about a job in publishing, certain it would be easier and more glamorous than schlepping to high schools two hours away where students walked passed my Westerly College table toward the far more popular Villanova. My first two sentences came quickly, but then I couldn’t think of anything else, and the more I tried the more defeated I felt. I was resentful that instead of working on Madison Avenue, I was in a hundred-year-old house where I couldn’t keep the space heater on without blowing a fuse. I started telling off one person after another in my head: Janine and Julie for double dating and not including me; Doris for getting upset with me for not inviting her to a counselor’s birthday that someone else had planned; my mother for not intuiting how unhappy I was. I shook my head, saved the cover letter, and brought up my resume hoping for some kind of inspiration, but when I saw my name and objective, I felt empty, and that’s when it happened. The image of a nun in full habit flashed on the screen before me, her face indistinct like in a dream. I gasped, pushed my chair back as she disappeared, reappeared, and then disappeared again. I stared at the computer until it rebooted itself. I started to cry; then I was sobbing.

Still shaking, I drove home convinced that it was God hunting me down. Why not? Throughout the Old Testament, He was jealously cruel to get what He wanted, but then I wondered if I’d hallucinated the nun, if this was connected to how depressed I felt. I finally broke down and called Julie but didn’t say a word about what had happened. I knew how nuts I’d sound, and I didn’t want to admit I felt a calling. The first time I dialed, I hung up, but I dialed again, and after apologizing for bothering her even though she didn’t sound bothered, I tried to explain, tears welling in my eyes.

“Jule, I don’t know what to do, what’s wrong. I think it’s starting to scare me that I’m going to wind up alone forever. Since Dave and I broke up, I haven’t been with anyone for more than three months. And most times I don’t even want to go out. I’m just going through the motions. I feel I have no control over making things better. I can’t make the right guy find me.”

“Not having someone must not be easy at times, but I don’t think that’s what this is about. You haven’t been yourself in a while,” she said kindly.

“But it’s the only thing that makes sense, that seems concrete. What do you mean that I haven’t been myself?”

“Maria’s bubbly. You’re bubbly. You like people and being out there doing things. But what I’ve seen you doing lately is withdrawing and then being angry about it and seeming so disappointed in us, in me.”

“I’m bubbly?” I asked, embarrassed to own up to the other.

“Yes, you’re the girl lovin’ up the camera in our home videos,” she said, referring to the one when I was about five. On one reel, it’s New Year’s Eve, the only holiday my father was home for, because he loved his lobsters. I have a party hat on and my doll in my arms and am doing a fast can-can next to Dick Clark on the TV, and Papa is sitting on the edge of the couch in chinos and white tee, looking at me as if I’m his only daughter, which makes me tilt my hat and ham it up more. In another reel, we’ve stopped for a picnic on our way to Niagara Falls, one of two family vacations we took, and Papa’s chasing me around our big, brown boat of a Cadillac. I’m running as fast as I can, pretending I don’t want him to catch me. When he does, I squeal as he scoops me up in his arms and holds me in the air like his prize.

“Do you think this has to do with the fact that I’m convinced Papa’s absence hasn’t affected me?”

“Him, yes. But also, things in our house were never talked about,” Julie said. “And each one of us deals with it differently... ” She also said I shouldn’t be embarrassed about going to a therapist, so a month later I tried. When I told the therapist that I felt I wasn’t meant to get married, she said that I just hadn’t met the right one yet. Had she said, “Okay, so let’s explore why you feel that way,” I might have trusted her enough to show up again. I was convinced no one would understand; yet I wasn’t sure I wanted anyone to, so I didn’t try another therapist. I certainly wasn’t going to talk to a nun or a priest. However, after Janine introduced us to Father Infanzi on Easter, I did officially register as a parishioner at St. Stephen’s. I even went to a new parishioners’ meeting, but I left right after Father finished speaking. I was too intimidated and attracted to talk to him. His homilies were smart, interesting mini-lessons from the time of Christ, and he opened them with adorable anecdotes like the time his older brothers lowered him by his ankles into a sewer to get a baseball. Maybe when I joined a dating service the following month, I was hoping there’d be someone like him out there. I told myself it’d be fun. If I didn’t like the men, I’d have one drink and leave. But I was hurt that it had come to this. If it was meant to be—if God loved me enough—He would’ve already found me someone.

My first date was scheduled for when I got back from a short trip to South Beach with Nellie. Initially I was thrilled to be in such a beautiful, bustling place, but by five on Friday, the scene on Collins Avenue overwhelmed me. Roller-bladders in thongs wove through the crowd at dizzying speeds like Adams and Eves on wheels, and in the street, guys and girls dressed the same way sprouted from cars that blasted techno and hip hop so loudly the bass pounded my skull. The next day while Nellie was on a towel thumbing through the catalog of the college she was attending in the fall, I was in the blue-green water with my eyes closed trying to feel peace. As a child I loved how weightless I felt in the ocean, how if I rode the waves at the exact right moment, they’d raise me up and carry me safely back to shore, but now I felt alien and unmoored, pulled apart from the Source like the flute in Rumi’s poetry. I didn’t realize that at the heart of my unhappiness was my deep distrust of God. I opened my eyes and walked several steps farther into the ocean when I felt what I thought was seaweed. Looking down, I saw something stringy and purple coiled around my calf like a snake as a horrible burn shot up my leg. I started screaming and trying to run, but the ocean floor felt like it was sucking me in, though when I looked back down it was completely still except for where my effort was forcing up little volcanoes of sand. When I finally made it to shore, I collapsed, gripping my swelling, reddening leg. I looked up at people whose faces were wobbly and closing in on me. I heard Nellie ask, “Ri Ri, What happened? Are you okay?” felt paramedics hovering, laying compresses, announcing, “This sure is early for man-of-wars.”

A few Friday nights later when my TV blew, I was convinced God had broken it. I was also sure He was behind the man-of-war and the fact that I didn’t feel a connection with any of the men from the dating service. I’d never been attacked by nature before, and it felt so personal. For the first time since that night after the cruise two years earlier, I tried reaching for Christ. I grabbed note paper and pen and began writing Dear Christ, feeling foolish like I was writing to a ghost, but then the words poured out. I’m not happy. I’m embarrassed. I feel trapped. I don’t know where else to turn. I don’t know why Your Father is doing this to me. What have I ever done that’s so wrong? Why are all these things happening? You’re the one who is gentle and loving, you’re the one who suffered. You’re so perfect and good. Please help me, Jesus, please, please help me. I’m not even sure what my dreams are or ever were, Lord, just that this is not them, not what I thought my life would turn out to be. I’m crushed. I don’t know what else I wrote, just that my tears made the ink run down the paper. I took a deep breath and signed the letter, Love always, Maria. A few days later feeling no better, I tore it to pieces.

Around this time, my Aunt Anna told me about Luisa Piccaretta, who, in 1878 when she was thirteen, Jesus appeared to in a vision on the Via Doloroso crying out, “Anima, aiuta mi, aiuta mi”—Soul, help me, help me. After that, she offered herself to Christ as a victim-soul. In order for her to understand everything he told her about the Divine Will, he removed her spirit from her body, a separation so disturbing that even after he returned it, only certain Catholic priests could release her from her death-like rigidity. For sixty-five years she survived on nothing but the Holy Eucharist, and in 1898, she began writing the thirty-six volume Book of Heaven, which included all that Christ had told her. It took her forty years to complete. I nodded respectfully as my aunt spoke zealously, but I was horrified. Yes, Luisa miraculously never got a sore, but she was still confined to bed for thirty-nine years. Why would she say yes to such ghastly suffering? How could God ask for it in the first place? Why did a gentle, petite, unmarried soul from southern Italy deserve such a sacrificial calling?

I was nothing like Luisa. I railed. Why was God asking me to give up the powerful sex drive He’d given me? How was I supposed to have any intimacy without it? Was my life just supposed to be work, being a dutiful employee for the college? Why was I expected to walk into every family occasion without someone who belonged to me? I even felt left out and strange at church where all the petitions and announcements were for married couples and families, where the only other single people were seniors. This is why I felt increasingly drawn to Father Infanzi, especially one November Saturday when I saw him lovingly greet a little boy with Down Syndrome after Mass.

Father was shaking people’s hands, his green chasuble swaying slightly as a breeze came in the door, when I saw the little boy step toward him. He was four or five with a round face and brown eyes with wide, heavy lids. Father extended his hand to him, and he shook it, looking up at him as if he was a superhero. Then Father knelt down to meet the boy’s eyes, and they smiled deeply at each other. They looked so pure and happy that I lost sense of myself. The picture of Cardinal O’Connor holding his miter in both hands became an 11 x 14 blur of red on the wall, the last snatches of conversation slurred, and everyone but the two of them faded away. They didn’t care that the other was strange; all they saw was each other’s light. For the first time in years, I didn’t feel odd or guilty or afraid. Father made being celibate look beautiful, painless. As he stood back up and the boy’s mother put one hand on her son’s shoulder and they said goodbye, he suddenly felt deeply familiar, like I’d known him forever.

A month later I was sitting in a training workshop to become a lector, the lay person who reads at Mass, hoping Father was in the building, that he’d stop by. As I heard the back door open, I kept my eyes on Charles, the coordinator, afraid someone might detect my attraction. Sure enough, the deep voice from the back of the room was Father’s. My heart sped as I turned around. There he was, all 6’1” of him in black pants, white collar sitting below his Adam’s apple, and black shirt rolled up to his elbows accentuating his biceps. He looked even more handsome without his robes, like a young Cary Grant. “Don’t let me interrupt all of you. I just wanted to say hello,” he said taking a deep breath, which I found endearing, until Charles continued speaking, and Father folded his arms tightly across his chest like he was offended. A couple of women kept their eyes on him, but I quickly looked back at Charles. Just because he walked into the room everything was supposed to stop? He didn’t seem like the humble, holy priest I’d spotted a month earlier. He seemed a touch arrogant, childish. I struggled to keep his body out of my mind for the rest of the night.

The next time I saw him on the altar with his hands pointed in prayer, I thought him adorable again. Each time I was the lector at one of his masses—which happened every month or two—and he stood behind me in the processional, I worried that he might be looking at me. Just the possibility that he could be attracted to me was unnerving and exciting. After Mass I walked out the side door not the front, trying to avoid him and the nagging question of my own vocation. But then one Saturday in April, he showed up on my doorstep at work. All the interviews were over, and I was waiting for the student tour guide to finish up with the last family when I heard creaking from the front steps and the screen door open. I assumed it was the family returning, so I continued the call I was on, but then he appeared in front of me. I moved my eyes upward to his collar and face and held his gaze until I hung up.

“Father Infanzi?” I asked, trying to hide my shock.

“You’re a lector from St. Stephen’s,” he said. “Maria?” though he didn’t remember I was Janine’s sister.

“Yes. What are you doing here?”

“I was asked to come and hear confessions.”

“Are you sure? We’re not a Catholic college. We have Catholic students, but I don’t think we’d have confessions available on just any Saturday.”

“I’m pretty certain I’m supposed to be here,” he said taking out a piece of paper, clearing his throat before saying the name on it.

“There’s no such person here. Maybe you’re supposed to be at St. Vincent’s University up the road?” I asked as casually as possible, so he wouldn’t feel silly.

“Oh, you know what?” he said, slapping his palm against his forehead, “That’s right. I just turned into the first college I saw.” A thin film of red spread across his face, and then he paused, looking as surprised as I felt. “Thank you.”

“You’re welcome.”

“You work here?”

“I’m an admissions counselor.”

“Oh. Well it was nice bumping into you like this,” he said, looking at me longer than he needed to. As he left, I watched him out the window and then looked away quickly in case he turned back. When I was done, I walked outside where the magnolia trees were starting to bloom and felt stunned. It was one thing that of all the hundreds of parishes Father Infanzi could have been assigned to, he was assigned to St. Stephen’s but showing up on my doorstep on the one Saturday a month I work? It had to be about my calling, didn’t it? It had to be God sending him, a priest, to finally make me face it. But could God be that cruel? Father seemed to be everything I was looking for in a man, the perfect catch. I wasn’t wise or religious enough to consider that maybe I was unconsciously drawing Father to myself or that this might be the work of the devil preying on my weak and immature soul. After this, I sometimes went out the front door to greet him. We’d shake hands and smile; he’d compliment my reading, and I’d compliment his homily, and he’d stare as I pretended not to notice. I didn’t tell anybody about my attraction to him, not even RF, the therapist I began seeing when my depression had gotten so bad I started running red lights to get to work on time.

She was in her forties, had shoulder-length brown hair, and listened intently. In the first few sessions, she asked me what I remembered about my mother and father when I was a child. All I could recall about my mother was that I was always afraid she was going to leave. Once when I was five and napping in the early evening, I woke up to the dark, the only sliver of light coming from the lit-up gondola in the enormous oil painting above the couch. I called, “Mommy, Mommy!” but no answer. Terrified, I went into the kitchen where she was supposed to be at the stove cooking dinner, her glasses fogging from the boiling water, but all I found was the glaring yellow light. I don’t remember anything else after that. When I asked her about it years later, she said she’d never leave me in the house alone, that she was always afraid she’d lose me.

My father was gruff and always working, and in the evenings when I had a few minutes on his lap, he’d conk out with his arm across me. I’d feel trapped but afraid to wake him, because I knew how tired he was, and I didn’t want him to think I didn’t love him. After he and my mother separated, I only saw him a few hours a month when he’d take Nellie and me for a meal. I didn’t remember that he’d sometimes cancel, leaving the two of us in our dresses and barrettes, holding hands. He’d come over for special occasions, but he never stayed long. After he remarried when I was sixteen and I visited him and my step-family, he’d swallow down some steak and bread and then leave for the caffé, the business he bought after he sold the pastry shoppe. Or he’d go downstairs to watch soccer in the dark.

RF asked what I knew of my family’s history of depression, which was scant even though three women on my mother’s side suffered from it. I wondered if my mother was ever depressed because of her tendency to withdraw at times, but I never asked, because I was afraid she’d think I was trying to dig up something negative. RF also asked about my dreams. There was the kind I’d been having ever since I moved out. My mother, Janine, and Julie—Nellie was never in it—are doing something fun together and excluding me. When I ask if I can join them, they dismiss me, sometimes make fun, or act like they don’t hear and walk away, which devastates me. In another dream, my five year old half-sister Daniella has asked our father for something, but he’s ignoring her. I don’t know if it’s me or my step-mother who yells, “She needs you, and you’re ignoring her.” In a third dream, my mother and I are in a big, dark house where she has misplaced a baby she is not trying to find, and I’m angry. I showed RF a blurry picture of me when I was about a year old standing in my crib after a nap, my hair bent with sleep, my diaper pulling away from my waist. The picture is proof that I wasn’t alone, but, because I felt that way now, I told her that I looked as if I’d been holding myself up for a long time before anyone came for me.

I also told RF that my sisters rebelled as teenagers but that I didn’t, that I fantasized about rebelling now, cutting my hair and dyeing it, or quitting my job and that when Janine and Julie went out together with their husbands, I felt left out the way I did when I was little. After a couple of sessions, she told me I should get Alice Miller’s Drama of the Gifted Child. Sometimes if parents didn’t get to be children themselves, their children learn to hide their needs and memories “in order to meet their parents’ expectations and win their love.” They pretend to be well-behaved, reliable, and empathetic and are mortified when they find out they’re not. Grown up, they feel alienated from themselves and rely on their partner, their achievements, or their own children to make them feel good. The book explains that loneliness can be caused by the loss of self in childhood, that denying it can lead to depression, and that we cannot really love if we don’t know the truth about our parents and ourselves. It sounded as if it could be describing me, especially the part about pretending, but just the thought of owning up to it made me feel as if I were betraying my family, especially my mother. Besides, how could I trust any of these statements if I didn’t know much about my parents’ childhoods and couldn’t remember much of my own?

One day, certain that my religious calling was causing my depression, I finally blurted to RF, “I think I’m supposed to become a nun.” She asked me why I thought that. “I just know. Because nothing ever works out with men.” I still didn’t say anything about Father Infanzi. I didn’t want her to think badly of me or presume that he was the only reason I thought I had a vocation. After this, neither one of us brought it up again for a long time. She was rightly interested in helping me discover why I didn’t give good, available men a chance like the kind, devout teacher I met at a Catholic young adult event who took long walks on the beach with his ill father. “He doesn’t wow me,” I said. I was comparing him to Father Infanzi who did, whose homilies I took home in my heart especially the Sunday he connected Beauty and the Beast, the French original that I’d never seen, to the love between a husband and wife. When he said that the first time he saw his father cry was during this movie, I started crying. Who was this man who got to watch tender movies with his father and who believed that a husband’s love for his wife should mirror Christ’s sacrificial love for his Bride, the Church? I had learned a little about Pope John Paul II’s—now St. John Paul II’s—Theology of the Body in high school, but I had forgotten most of it. Now Father had stirred my longing for this kind of love all over again. I started looking for it in him. That’s why I was devastated a few weeks later on the day of Janine and Phil’s wedding when he forgot me.

It was after the ceremony, and he had already taken off his chasuble and alb and was busy returning hymnals to their slots and gathering stray papers. What good care he takes, I thought as I stood on the side in my sleeveless, navy blue gown looking at his bare forearms. One of Janine’s girlfriends had just told me I looked like Audrey Hepburn with my hair up, but nervously waiting for him to notice me and compliment my reading of “Love is Patient” from Second Corinthians, I felt more strange than pretty. When he looked up, I extended my hand, “Father, the ceremony was beautiful, and your homily really good,” but he merely shook my hand, said thank you, and slid out the pew as if he were headed to something better. Even if he didn’t recognize me with my hair up or still hadn’t remembered I was Janine’s sister, didn’t he remember my voice? Didn’t he see how pretty I looked? How could he forget me? He was just like my father who was outside, antsy in a tux, who had barely given me his cheek for a kiss, never mind a word about how well I’d done. I’m just another parishioner, I thought, and walked out into the June sun where my sisters were posing for pictures without me.

I had no business feeling disappointed. Father didn’t owe me anything. But he’d bumped into me at work only two months earlier. We’d had conversations. What was wrong with him? I had no idea how needy I was. On one hand, I was drawn to the purity and freedom I saw in him, what I wanted to be and to have but couldn’t accept; on the other, I desperately needed him to pay attention to me the way my father never had. Not only was I attracted to another unavailable man, this time I’d found someone completely off limits, the perfect man with whom to rebel against God and my family. Six months later on the night of the Advent concert, I got Father to remember me for good.

I was one of five lectors reading Scripture passages that were interspersed between choir music. Four of us were there, but the fifth seat beside mine was still empty. As I looked in the program to see who it was, there was Father Infanzi’s name. I couldn’t believe it. He was going to be seated next to me for an hour. I looked at the crucifix, trying to focus on God the way I always did before I lectored but never could. I worried I’d trip over the words or that I wouldn’t be able to get my hair back if it fell in my face when I bowed. Now I was also thinking how glad I was that the pants I wore made my backside look good. That’s when I heard from the side aisle the clack of a man’s shoes against the tile. I crossed my legs and pretended to be interested in the program as Father slipped into the seat next to me wearing a black bomber jacket, the kind the boys in school used to wear.

“Hi Father.”

“Hello,” he said, cold air and the scent of mouthwash wafting off him. Too nervous to look in his eyes, I watched him tug the pleat of his pants, stretch his leg out, and reach in his pocket with his other hand, a movement I found as alluring as a man shaving. He took out his reading, leaned his elbows hard into his knees as he looked it over for a few seconds, and then put it back, unlike me who had practiced five times and still felt nervous. Then he removed his jacket, his left arm hovering just behind my head so that if he lowered it, it would’ve fallen right around my shoulders. Twisting around to put it on the back of his chair, he finally realized, “You’re Janine’s sister.”

“Yes.”

“How are she and Phil?”

“Good.”

“She’s a nice girl.”

“I like her.”

He paused, then laughed.

For the next thirty minutes songs were sung and readings read, and then during the third reading, Father went completely still. I turned my head just enough to find him asleep. I thought about tapping him but felt too self-conscious. When the lector was done, and the flautist began to play, Father shuddered, his elbow nudging my rib, the contact waking him. “Did I just elbow you?” he whispered. “It’s okay,” I said. He didn’t apologize, just looked at me as if he was seeing for the first time. The flute fell softer and softer, cue that I was next.

“Good luck.”

“Thanks.”

I bowed at the foot of the altar and with clammy palms lit the pink candle in the wreath, the one that symbolizes joy, as I tried not to think about Father. Once at the lectern, I saw the rows of people stretched out in front of me and Monsignor Brennan facing the altar in a seat that had been placed especially for him in the middle of the aisle like an island. He was wearing a straight, full-length black robe with a wide purple sash, the kind you didn’t see monsignors wear anymore, the kind that Father de Bricassart wore in The Thorn Birds.

I adjusted the microphone even though it was fine, looked down at the paper even though I had practiced looking up. “During those days Mary set out and traveled to the hill country in haste to a town of Judah where she entered the house of Zechariah and greeted Elizabeth…,” I recited, my voice even despite the rumbling in one leg that was so terrible I leaned heavily on the other for support. I gazed up a couple of times avoiding Father’s face except toward the end when I finally looked in his eyes. I folded my reading and walked off the altar, thinking, He’s not going to forget me now, as I looked at him one last time to see if he was still watching. He was. Then I quickly looked away again and sat down but not before I saw that his face had gone from white to pink, from unaware to roused.