“Tea Party assholes!” Matthew and I heard Em screaming; she must have been watching CNN.
“I’ll bet it’s Ted Cruz or Michele Bachmann,” Matthew told me.
“She said assholes, plural,” I reminded him.
“It’s Ted Cruz and Michele Bachmann—they’re both assholes,” Matthew assured me.
That was when his cell phone spoke to us; the voice on the subway was on his cell phone. “The next station is Bathurst—Bathurst Station,” the woman on the subway said.
“Her name is Susan Bigioni,” Matthew told me, handing me his phone. A short film was on Matthew’s cell phone, a Toronto Transit Commission film. Voices of the TTC, it was called.
Susan Bigioni speaks on camera for only ten seconds. “Arriving at Bathurst—Bathurst Station,” the bright-eyed brunette says, more sincerely than my mother, no fooling around.
“She works as a TTC communications assistant,” Matthew said.
“You’re our communications assistant,” I told him.
“I know,” Matthew said.
“It won’t be an aw-shucks, seeming nice guy—not the next time, you assholes!” Em was screaming at Ted Cruz and Michele Bachmann—or at everyone in the Tea Party, or at all the Republicans. Em had a point. There was an angry bullying about the patriotism down south—as we say in Canada, when we mean the United States. Matthew and I knew what Em meant—the next bad Republican president, whoever it was, wouldn’t have Reagan’s B-actor charm.
Matthew and I just went on watching the same dumb game. We kept replaying Susan Bigioni’s ten seconds about Bathurst Station; I don’t know why it held our attention. Maybe that was when I saw where I belonged—where the voice on the subway told me all the stops. It’s such a clear voice.
As Em and Matthew know, I hear the silence in the Rock Garden no less clearly.
I can tell when Em is thinking about Nora or the snowshoer—the way she lowers her eyes when she is cast down. I never know what to say. “There’s a reason we’re fiction writers, you know—real life sucks; make-believe is our business,” I try to tell her.
Em does a better job with me when she knows I’m in the Rock Garden. “There are German students somewhere, kiddo—they’re still singing,” Em keeps saying.
We were living full-time in Toronto when Trump was elected president and Em blamed those Democrats who didn’t vote for Mrs. Clinton. If there was ever a time for a FUCK THE DEMOCRATS sign, I feared this was it. But Em already knew a sign like that could be misunderstood; she didn’t want to be mistaken for a Trump supporter. Besides, our dry cleaning in Toronto was returned to us on hangers—no more shirt cardboards. I should have known. You can’t have enough GOOD RIDDANCE signs.
In December 2017—two days after my seventy-sixth birthday—I found The New York Times in disarray on our kitchen table, where Em had abandoned her uneaten breakfast. Enough time had passed since the Reagan obituary—Em was reading the Times again. (I was reading the Toronto Star; it was a good way to learn about the city.) I saw that the Times was open to another obituary. Cardinal Bernard Law had died in Rome. The former archbishop of Boston, the cardinal who covered up all those child molestations by priests, was gone. If there was ever a time for a GOOD RIDDANCE sign, here it was.
I saw the torn-apart cardboard carton on the kitchen floor—a box from Blood Brothers Brewing; she’d taken one of the cardboard panels for her sign. I had an idea where Em would go with her message.
There was a six-story building on Yonge Street, on the corner of Shaftesbury Avenue. Em and I had talked about it. Both the shield and the name of the Archdiocese of Toronto were inscribed above the glass doors, where the words CATHOLIC PASTORAL CENTRE were written. The building didn’t look like a cathedral could be contained inside it. We never saw nuns coming or going—not a single priest with a collar, not that we could remember. Matthew must have gotten tired of hearing us wonder out loud about the place. He’d gone online, which only added to the Catholic mystery. There were archives, collections, artifacts; researchers could book an appointment, after consulting with the reference archivist. “Usually, or often, there is a photo of Pope Francis by the glass doors—he looks very nice, in a beneficent way,” Em had said.
This was where I found her, one December morning—in front of the beneficent-looking Pope Francis, or someone with the pope’s generous smile. I’d read only the last sentence of Cardinal Law’s obituary—the part about the pope’s presiding over the cardinal’s funeral rites in St. Peter’s, “an honor accorded to all cardinals based in Rome.”
I suggested to Em that she move away from the photo of Pope Francis. It isn’t always the pope who is pictured there; the photos change. But I’m pretty sure it was Pope Francis this December morning. “Someone might think the pope has died, and you’re saying good riddance to him,” I said to Em. The longer we stood on the Yonge Street sidewalk, the more we were in the way of people headed for the subway—or people coming from the subway station on Shaftesbury Avenue. That was when the young priest suddenly appeared, as if he’d been born with his hand holding Em’s arm in her warmest winter parka. He had the unflagging enthusiasm of an assistant coach on an athletic team, or like someone new to his job.
“You look unhappy—good riddance to what, or to whom?” he asked her. We’d not seen him emerge from the glass doors of the archdiocese building. Maybe the young priest had nothing to do with the Catholic Pastoral Centre; he could have been coming from the subway, or he might have been on his way to it. He’d appeared so suddenly, it was as if he descended from heaven.
“Cardinal Bernard Law is dead—good riddance to him,” Em said, almost shyly. “He knew about those sexually abused children—he protected the pedophile priests,” Em told the young priest, slightly more assertively. His scarf was knotted loosely, his overcoat unbuttoned, as if the winter weather didn’t affect him; the whiteness of his priestly collar stood out on the gray sidewalk. “The Vatican rewarded Cardinal Law—they made him a high priest of some big-deal basilica,” Em said, more boldly.
“The Basilica of Saint Mary Major,” the young priest assented, nodding grimly. This would go nowhere, I was thinking. I took hold of Em’s other arm, pointing across Yonge Street to the Boxcar Social—a coffeehouse she liked.
“You didn’t eat your breakfast—would you like a croissant?” I asked Em. She nodded—in the fierce way she used to nod when she wasn’t speaking. When Em nodded this way, it made me afraid she could revert to nonspeaking without warning or explanation.
“Croissants are sinful!” the young priest cried; he came with us. The walk light takes forever when you’re trying to cross Yonge Street there, but the light seemed to change for us as soon as the young priest pressed the button. “Mind you, croissants are not as sinful as Cardinal Law,” the priest was saying. “Cardinal Law isn’t in Rome anymore. ‘It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God.’ Hebrews 10:31, I think,” he told us. Em and I just looked at each other. This might go somewhere after all, we thought.
Each of us had a croissant. We were drinking our tea or coffee when Em got up the nerve to ask the young priest if he meant that Cardinal Law would face “harsher judgment”—where the evil cardinal was going.
“Romans 12:19, maybe. ‘Beloved, do not avenge yourselves, but rather give place to wrath’—this is where the ‘Vengeance is Mine’ bit comes in,” the young priest told us. Em had unzipped her parka, but she’d kept it on; this was when I noticed she was wearing her pajamas and her fleece-lined slippers.