“Father no more,” Gabe said. He touched his tie, as if to indicate the missing Roman collar. “It wasn’t for me.”
Now real panic crossed the young man’s eyes—he looked to me again and I found myself shrugging, the two of us united for a moment by the puzzle of Gabe’s lost vocation. It was the sensation of standing on a pier with a stranger, watching a familiar face disappear over the water’s horizon and knowing suddenly that all kinship now was determined by the fact of earth beneath your feet or only sea. For a moment I was more kin to this florid young stranger than I was to my brother, the failed priest, at my side.
“Oh gee,” the young man said, “I’m sorry.” It was impossible to know if he was sorry for the lost vocation or for his own, awkward mistake. He looked to me again, as if I would know. “Once a priest,” he began to say, but Gabe spoke over him.
“How’s everybody at the brewery?” he asked cheerfully. “Everybody busy?”
“Oh, sure,” the man said. The effort he was making to recover himself was undermined by the growing flush to his skin.
“The beer’s still dry?” Gabe asked, and the young man laughed as if this were a great joke.
“Oh yeah,” he said.
“Good to hear it,” Gabe said. “Give my best to the others, will you?” He held out his hand again. “Nice to see you, Tom.”
“Nice to see you, Father,” he said, and then quickly pulled his lips together. He did not literally bite his tongue, but it was clear he wanted to.
Gabe raised his hand, a kind of absolution. “That’s all right, Tom,” he said gently.
As we walked on, my brother explained that the young man worked at the brewery that had been part of his first parish. He sometimes came to the noon Mass. A lot of the workers there did.
I said, “Oh yeah?”
“Jeepers, it’s brutal,” Gabe said. He pushed his hat back. Ran a handkerchief over his brow. The soles of my feet had begun to burn, and a blister was forming at the back of my left heel. I felt my dress clinging to my shoulder blades, felt the tickle of sweat running down my spine. Gabe touched my elbow briefly to get me to cross to the shadier side of the street, but the heat was no better there. At a corner candy store he paused and asked if I wanted to duck in for a soda. I looked up, smelled the mingling odors of coffee and newsprint and stale milk, and shook my head no.
When we reached the park, I was surprised to discover how far we had come, although by now my legs felt swollen in my stockings and the pain of the blister on my heel was making me limp. We found a bench just inside, covered in shade, and Gabe said, “Let’s sit before we head back.” He said it with an air of defeat, as if we had formerly agreed that we would not stop at all.
We sat together in the sun-spotted shade. Gabe crossed his legs and folded his hands in his lap. I reached down to take off my left shoe, feeling the thin flesh of the blister pull away with the leather and the silk. There was blood on my stocking. It was late afternoon by now and the park was full of people looking for relief from the heat. Some had already found a spot on a stretch of grass. Others were arriving with picnic baskets. There were kids with baseball bats and mitts hanging, forgotten, it seemed, from their hands. Mothers with carriages. Men with their jackets off. Some in sweat-stained undershirts. My brother took off his hat and put it on the bench between us. He loosened his tie, reached into his pocket for cigarettes and matches. There was something clean, even cool, about the scent of the struck match, the first exhalation of smoke. I watched him as he drew on the cigarette again and saw how handsome his face was—the smooth stubble of his cheek, the amber glow of his skin and his fair hair. There was something lovely about the precision of his hairline at temple and ear, about the hinge of his jaw. His hands, too, were fine, long-fingered. They’d been wrapped in white cloth on the day of his ordination. They had placed the Communion wafer on my tongue. It had been a beautiful winter day, the day of Gabe’s ordination. My mother and I had ridden the train out to the seminary together. We’d gone straight to the hospital on our return so my mother could go up to tell my father about all we had seen.
I opened my purse and took out my own handkerchief. I took off my glasses to wipe the perspiration from under my eyes. My parents had said, “We’re not so enamored with the clergy as some.” They had said, “A priest is a fine thing. But a family is, too.”
Leaving the hospital that evening, my mother had told me, “Your father might have preferred to see him married.”
With my glasses off, I looked to my brother once more, my eyes drawn, perhaps, by the movement of his arm, the cigarette to his lips, the suggestion, in my peripheral vision, of a blessing. Here he was again as I preferred him, the red gold of his hair and skin, the familiar blur of his profile seen through my distorted vision: the way I’d known him when we were young, when we had shared that single bedroom. He was not sitting close—the heat required a good space on the bench between us—but I was aware of the easy physical nearness we had known as children.
I put the handkerchief to my eyes and then put my glasses back on. I looked up, looked out, as my brother was doing. I watched the turning silver spokes of an elegant baby carriage go by. And then a woman walking with her lanky son, a gloved finger raised in the air. “Get this,” Gabe whispered as two teenage girls I knew entered the park. They were dressed in stiff Roman collars and big red choirboy bow ties. “Sharpies” was what we called them.
“Sacrilege,” Gabe said, amused. “And in this heat.”
“They go to Bishop’s,” I told him.
“They should know better, then,” he said.
One of the girls waved at me, and when I waved back, the other did the same. And then the first girl pretended to stumble. She grabbed her friend’s arm, laughing loudly, throwing the laugh back over her shoulder, her eyes on Gabe.
I saw the flirtation. He did not. I felt older than them all.
We watched a young man pass by with his jacket over his shoulder, a thick book in his hand. Then a pair of policemen with swinging billy clubs. A trio of thin sailors. I watched a pigeon strut in the dirt beneath another bench. I was only vaguely aware of birdsong in the trees, barely audible above the echoing din of the traffic in the street.
Gabe tossed his cigarette into the dirt at his feet. He lifted his hat. The space between us on the bench was wide. He leaned forward, over his knees, his hat in his hands. He spoke without turning.
“He’s more to be pitied,” he said softly. “That bad leg. An affliction like that. It can sometimes make a person more compassionate. You’d expect it would. But more often than not, it makes them cruel.”
I looked up at the trees, the thick landscape of them against the colorless sky. I had loved Walter Hartnett for the hitch in his walk, the built-up shoe, as much as I loved him for his clever smile and his gray eyes.
“More often than not,” Gabe said, “it diminishes compassion. Makes people resent God. I’ve seen it. They figure, If He formed me, then why did He choose to form me this way? Why burden me with all this needless pain? It seems deliberate.” He paused.
“Once,” he said, “we were playing ball. Walter was there, but he was just a little kid. This was long before he made himself grand commissioner of the Brooklyn street leagues.” He looked up at me to see if I laughed. I didn’t. “An ambulance came along,” he went on. “It stopped just past us, in front of the Corrigans’ house. Of course we tore over there to see what was going on. The ambulance men were halfway up the Corrigans’ steps when this nursing Sister comes running out of the house next door, waving her arms and saying, ‘She’s here, over here.’ So they turn around, back down the Corrigans’ steps and then up the steps next door. All of us right behind them. In no time at all they’re back out again with an old woman—Mrs. Cooper, it was, I don’t know if you remember her—on a stretcher. Dead, one of us says. Drunk says someone else. But the nun says, ‘Mind your own business,’ and shoos us all away.” He held the hat between his knees. He was slowly turning it in his hands.