Chapter 2 Postcoital Epiphanies #3
Mostly, I liked the priest. I did not know Father Whitlock well because my family and I were pretty typical Easter and Christmas Eve Christians only.
But in seventh grade, I had been confirmed at the church—my desire for confirmation fueled neither by parental pressure nor a religious conviction of my own, but by the fact that easily a third of the hundred thirteen-year-olds at the Tallmadge school took the class.
I was a religious lemming, and I ended up enjoying the idea that we spent most of our time in class listening to and then discussing Jesus Christ Superstar.
There are plenty of versions of the New Testament out there, but when you’re in seventh grade, Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice are a much better way to deconstruct the Crucifixion than the King James Bible.
But I also liked him because, it was clear, he wasn’t wild about the fact he’d inherited the local church’s eccentric tradition of casting the Virgin Mary for the annual live nativity by having the senior class at the public school across the street vote on which girl should play the mother of God’s only son.
It was kind of like being voted prom queen, except you rode a donkey in front of lots of people, instead of your boyfriend in the back seat of one of his parents’ cars.
The seniors voted just after Thanksgiving in homeroom, and the winner was posted outside the main administration offices the next day, rather like the way the cast lists for the fall musical and spring drama were posted outside the auditorium.
At twelve and thirteen I didn’t see myself garnering many votes when it was my turn my senior year, and when that time came, my election forecast was spot-on: the previous November I had received zero votes.
In all fairness, unlike the girl who won, Alyssa Darling, I had not campaigned for the role.
Also, Alyssa’s family went to church with far more regularity than my invariably hungover parents. She had that going for her.
Father Whitlock was tall and slender and pulled off late-seventies sideburns better than most men of the cloth.
He was in his mid-forties and had a pretty wife and two pretty girls in the elementary school.
He was patient with my history of histrionics.
And while he explained initially that he had just visited with Nick and Sharon Foster—now the parents of two breathing daughters and one dead son—he added quickly that he was here to see me, the girl who had driven a golf ball into their boy’s cranium.
(In all fairness, he did not say that precisely.
This was Tallmadge, and he was what we in the know called “pisky,” or awash in Episcopalian reticence, meaning lots of the conversation was always going to be polite subterfuge.
His exact words were that he wanted to check in on the next LPGA superstar.)
He stood on the front steps outside our front door, my parents and I on the other side of the screen for a long, awkward moment.
Finally, my mother gathered herself and opened the door, beckoning him in, my father glancing briefly at my mother as if she had lost her mind.
The four of us walked without speaking through the hallway—past the large walk-in closet where my golf bag resided like a vampire in the winter, but not in August, when I kept it at the club.
We continued through the living room and out onto our terrace, where my mother seated the rest of us in the wrought-iron chairs while she stood beside the wrought-iron chaise.
“What can I get everyone to drink?” she asked, ever the polite hostess.
None of us, in keeping with the strategy my mother had made clear to me on our walk that morning, said we were sorry that Kenny Foster was dead. Why give even a priest the testimony that could lead my family to bankruptcy in a civil suit?
“I’ll have a scotch and soda,” Father Whitlock said softly, his voice pleasant and even a little jocular, not unlike the way he’d referred to me as an up-and-coming LPGA champion. My father had the same. I said nothing.
“So,” my father began, his hands on the knees of his suit trousers.
He’d loosened his tie, but he was still wearing it.
He lit a cigarette with a silver lighter that had been handed down to him from his own father.
One Saturday night that spring, he’d forgotten it at home when my parents had gone to a dinner party, and so I brought it with me to a kegger, where I discovered how much easier it was to keep a bong lit with a decent lighter than a drugstore Bic. “How are the Fosters doing?”
“Poorly. As you’d expect.” And then instantly he looked at me and added, “But, of course, it’s not your fault, Mira. And they don’t think it’s your fault.”
“Because it’s not her fault,” my father agreed. “It’s the fault of the club.”
“Or the company that manufactured the net,” suggested the priest.
“Yes! Absolutely. It’s all conjecture at this point, but you may be spot-on.”
“How poorly are they doing?” I asked.
“Sharon didn’t get out of bed until lunchtime today, I gather. Part of that was likely sedation. But you need reasons to get out of bed, and now one’s gone.”
My father reminded him, “She has two other daughters. She has to—”
“Peter,” said the priest, cutting him off with a firmness I’d never seen from the man, even when some of the boys in my confirmation class were running around the church classroom kicking a soccer ball, their arms spread wide as if being crucified, all the while parodying the musical we studied as if it were the actual gospel by belting out the words “Jesus Christ Soccer Star!” There was a determined cast to his chin, and his eyes transformed almost instantly from patient to pissed off.
“She just lost her seventeen-year-old son. She has plenty of extended family to make the girls breakfast. Scrambling eggs for Kenny’s sisters is not a reason to stop weeping.
” Again, he glanced over at me. I must have looked crestfallen, and the impossibility of his situation was starting to dawn on him: here he had come to provide succor for the kid who had killed a boy, and the accidental murderer’s father was going to make that task Sisyphean.
My mother returned with a tray with the drinks and stood before the priest while he took his.
Then she handed my father his scotch, sat down on the chaise, and lit a cigarette.
“I overheard a lot of the conversation, and, I must admit, I was proud of Mira this morning. Was downstairs at a decent hour, dressed, and ready to face the day,” she said.
“You can’t seriously be comparing what I’m going through to Mrs. Foster,” I told her. I was embarrassed she would make this leap.
“No. But still, your cross isn’t light,” she said, and briefly she glanced at the priest. Did she crave his approval? Had she actually just used a carry-the-cross bromide?
“My heart breaks for Sharon and Nick,” the priest said, and my parents’ antennae shot up.
“There’s not just sadness there. There’s anger.
Sharon is angry at God, she’s angry at the club, she’s angry at you, Mira.
That last part is unreasonable, and she knows it.
It’s not as if you were driving drunk and hit Kenny.
She gets that. But just because you understand something intellectually doesn’t mean you can address it emotionally. It’s hard.”
Driving drunk. Nope, I had never done that. Driving stoned? A dozen times, at least. On cocaine? Twice.
“I’m sure it’s very hard,” my mother agreed. “Even Mira can’t imagine returning to the golf course. She will, we all know that, but it’s emotionally wrenching—what happened.”
My mother said more, but eventually she ran out of steam and the priest continued with what he had seen and heard at the Fosters’.
If my parents were getting the message, honestly hearing what the priest was saying in his best pisky code, they didn’t share that with me after he left.
But I got it. I’d heard. As the priest droned on—Sharon Foster this, Sharon Foster that—all my time naked in bed after sex with a middle-aged man paid off.
It had taught me to decipher what males that age were saying between the syllables, and Father Whitlock had come here not merely to console me, but to warn me.
People, even grown-ups, were volatile objects, and no two reacted to a capricious God in quite the same fashion.