“Oh, believe me, Father, I know very well what grief is.” I lifted the sherry, drained the glass.
“Yes. Yes, I would guess that you do.” Father Gervase took a sip of wine, looked into the distance, sat for a long minute. “What do you think of it?” he finally said.
“Grief?” My voice was sharp with disbelief that I would be asked this.
“The book.” The priest nodded toward the table where I had placed The Illustrated Book of the Saints.
For an instant, I considered lying, saying I hadn’t opened it. Instead I said, “Frankly, I found it repugnant.”
Father Gervase leaned forward, smiling as if nothing I might have said could have given him greater pleasure. “Really? Tell me more, Will.”
“What else do you want to know? I found it repellent.”
“Ah. And what was particularly disturbing about the book?”
“Christ,” I said. An image from the book materialized in my mind—Saint Agatha, breasts torn with pincers—and a heat of rage began to rise. I recalled Sophie’s view that the glorification of violence edged near pornographic. Murdertainment. “All of it. The violence. People stoned to death. Burned. Beheaded. Hunted and haunted. Tortured.” Lucy’s ruined body. The bloody book tote. My worst fantasies of what she must have suffered rose up.
“Ah, the early saints,” the priest said. “Yes, there was a good deal of that. Of course, we have to read the stories through the lens of their times. Actually, the range of saints is quite wide.”
“I have no interest in your saints, Father.”
“They came from all races,” the priest continued as if I had not spoken. “All ages. Those born into poverty and those born into wealth. Hermits and kings.”
I set the empty glass on the table. “Let’s get this straight, Father. I have no interest in your saints, and you can tell your archbishop I’m not interested in your commission. I don’t paint saints.”
Father Gervase made a flicking motion with his fingers. “But you do, you know.”
“What?”
“You do paint saints. I saw them at the exhibit.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Your portraits.” The priest rested his head back against the chair back and stared at the ceiling, reflecting. “The fisherman mending nets,” he said. “The young woman at the coffee shop. The woman at her vanity. Go back and look at their faces, Will. You were capturing the faces that could be saints.”
“Oh, spare the sentimental shite,” I said. I no longer worried about offending this priest. All I wanted was escape. “What you saw, what I painted were just people. Ordinary people.”
“And that is my point, Will. The saints were ordinary people.”
I didn’t bother with a response.
“They were people just like us. They worked hard. They tried to find solutions. Some of them were sinners. A good many of them, in fact. Sinners who kept on trying.”
I had had enough. I was so full of rage my hands trembled with it. “I mean it, Father. I’m finished with this. Find another artist. Tell your cardinal to find someone else to paint your goddamn saints.”
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Find someone else to paint your goddamn saints.
I supposed I should have felt feel ashamed at my outburst and the way I’d stormed out of the rectory, but I felt only relief at escaping from Father Gervase and his sanctimonious talk of saints. In weakening daylight that muted the outlines of the buildings along Main Street, I walked home. The air had turned cool. Porch lights cast a soft glow through windows and reflected in puddles from the earlier storm. As I continued, the cloying taste of the sherry lingered in my throat, just as anger continued to simmer. I need you to understand, as Sophie so clearly did, the source of my rage. It wasn’t the little priest’s conversation or his persistence about the saints. It was the truth of what had happened to Lucy that simply couldn’t be borne, so weighty and opaque I was surprised I was able to walk upright or speak. I had a keen need to wash it all away and thought the hell with promises I’d made to Sophie. The hell with everything. Much later, I would wonder how events might have been altered if I had gone straight home, if she still lived there instead of renting a condo. But of course blaming her for my behavior was an easy way to ease my conscience. I switched directions and headed toward the Crow’s Nest.
When I entered the tavern, the highlights from the previous night’s Sox game were showing on ESPN, the sound muted. It was early for the dinner crowd, but business was brisk at the bar. There were two empty stools at the far end, and I slid onto one. A bartender I didn’t recognize approached. She was tall—at least five eleven—with one arm covered from wrist to elbow with a sleeve of tattoos that looked like a piece of garish fabric. She looked too young to be serving legally, but it was getting more and more difficult to gauge ages. Half the ball players playing for the majors looked like they belonged on a Little League team.
“What can I get for you?”
“A draft.”
“Anything in particular?” Her voice held a husky undertone.
“Sam Adams,” I said.
When she crossed to the tap, I observed the others at the bar watching her. “Why do men do that?” Sophie had asked me once. “Why do they check out every woman who walks by?”
“Oh,” I’d answered, “I believe it’s hardwired in the male chromosome,” but I’d learned not to do it when I was with her. Not that other women interested me once I had met Sophie. It had been easy to be faithful.
A memory came. A snowy February night. The three of us watching some mindless rerun of a rerun, a docudrama about a woman who had disappeared and her husband who, it turned out, had been having an affair with her best friend. The show was narrated by that writer who died, the one whose daughter had been murdered after which he had become famous for covering murders and scandals of the famous and the wealthy. The name came to me. Dominick Dunne.
During the commercial break, Sophia had gone to the kitchen to make cocoa and get a bowl of cheese popcorn. Lucy turned from the screen and fixed her eyes on mine. “Jeannie’s dad is cheating on her mom,” she said.
“Wow,” was all I could think to say. “That’s rough.”
“She hates him. Jeannie does, I mean. Not her mom. She doesn’t think her mom knows.”
“Wow,” I said again, wondering how much longer Sophie would be. She knew how to field things like this.
“You’d never cheat on Mom, would you, Da?” Lucy said.
“Jesus, Lucy.”
“Well, you wouldn’t, would you?”
“Of course not. I can’t believe we are even having this conversation.”