Father Gervase coughed again, setting off a spasm. “I wonder,” he said when he regained his breath. “Might you have a glass of water?”
No, I thought. No, I have the only goddamn house in the state without plumbing. “Yes,” I said. “Of course.” As we crossed the hall, for the first time I noticed the priest walked with a limp. Arthritis? Surgery? It seemed like every week Sophie relayed news of someone else she knew who was having a knee or hip replaced. People in their forties and fifties, for God’s sake. In the kitchen, I retrieved a tumbler from the cabinet, turned on the tap. While I let the water run cold, I stared out the window at the last of the vernal flowers on the elm in the backyard. My eyes were caught by movement, and I watched the invisible hand of the wind stir the swing hanging from a low branch. I’d made it for Lucy when she was not quite two, too small for it really. She could only use it held in the safety of Sophie’s arms. I’d taken a photo of them the day we put it up, a picture I can see clearly even now. Sophie in a long peasant skirt, Lucy dressed in miniature overalls. Pink, I remember. Both sheltered by a canopy of ovate leaves. That snapshot had been the start of a tradition. Each year I’d photograph Lucy on the swing, a visual record taking her from toddler to girl to teenager. The memory pains even today, although now of course for a different reason. A soft rustling behind me brought me back from the reverie. The priest had settled himself at the table, set his package on an empty chair. It was a mistake to have let him in. Too late, I understood this. I filled the glass and passed it to him. In the light cast through the bank of windows that lined the south wall, he appeared younger than I’d first thought.
“Tan zoo.”
“Pardon?” I said.
“Thank you,” the priest repeated.
“No problem.” Lately I had been having hearing difficulties. Words were jumbled; there were long moments when entire chunks of conversation were lost or when the CD or television audio went silent, as if I had hit the mute button. Sporadically, I heard ringing, a persistent pestilent tone. Tinnitus. I hadn’t mentioned this to anyone, least of all Sophie, who would have insisted I see someone. Was I going deaf? Developing a tumor? Well, what if I was? That was not the worst that could happen. The worst that could happen had already happened. At least that was what I believed on that spring day. Had you asked me I would have told you I had nothing left to lose, but of course there is always more to lose. I poured the last of the morning coffee into a mug and nuked it. I made no apology for not offering any to the priest.
“Myself, I never learned the knack,” Father Gervase said.
“What’s that, Father?”
“Brewing coffee.”
“It takes no great skill.” A fleck of paint rimmed my thumbnail. Cadmium yellow. Like the smudge on his clothing. “It’s in the measuring.”
“Now my maternal grandmother, a first-generation Swede she was. She could perk a pot that would make Satan himself weep. She’d spoon in the grounds, add water and an egg, and smash it with a spoon. Shell and all.”
I could picture it—the brown coffee grounds, the shards of shell, the viscous strings of albumen, the bright splash of yoke bleeding into the mix—and I felt slightly queasy. A memory rose, unbidden. Lucy at the breakfast table, refusing to eat her scrambled eggs with implacable determination because her sixth-grade science teacher had informed the class that an egg was the embryo of a chicken. A band tightened across my chest. That was the cruelty of memory. The way it could ambush you. Take you out at the knees. Our entire house was a minefield. Once I’d come across Sophie sitting in the living room with tears running down her cheeks, a bronze hair clip she’d found in the recesses of the sofa held in her palm. Or I would find a note Lucy had scrawled and left unfinished in the back of a drawer, and the sight of her handwriting would take my breath away. So many things in this minefield. A simple word. An empty swing swaying in the breeze.
“Have you ever heard of that?” the priest was saying.
“What?”
“Beating an egg into coffee?”
“No.” I managed a breath. “Can’t say that I have.” To steady myself, I concentrated on words. Egg. Eggplant. Egghead. Eggbeater. Egg in one’s beer. Egg on. Eggnog.
“The idea is that the shells bind and settle the grounds.”
Egg timer. Egg tempera. Eggcup. Egg roll. Egg hunt.
Egg hunt. Easter. In the field of memory, land mines were buried everywhere, easily tripped. Lucy with a purple straw basket, systematically searching the yard for the foil-covered eggs Sophie and I had hidden in the night. She was a methodical child, our Lucy. Sophie used to tease her about it. Lucy, you’re an old lady dressed in a girl suit. A pain heated my chest. I forced my mind to the present, to this room. “I doubt you’re here to talk about coffee, Father.”
“No. No, of course not.” The priest took a sip of water.
“Well, I’m afraid you’ve wasted your time coming here. I’m sorry for your trouble.” The hypocrisy was not even a small bone in my throat. Of all I had to regret and mourn, the inconveniencing of this priest didn’t even make the extended list.
“You know why I’ve come, then?”
“I assume Sophie asked you to come by.”
“Sophie?”
“Yes. Sophie. My wife.”
“Ah, Sophia. Well, no, actually it was the archbishop who sent me.”
I frowned, confused. What the hell could the archbishop have to do with anything?
“Cardinal Kneeland,” Father Gervase said.
“I don’t understand.”
“Of course. Of course. How would you?” He smiled, sipped again from the glass. “I should have explained. He wants to meet with you.”
“Well, I have no interest in meeting with him.” So I had misunderstood his mission in coming. This whole business had to have something to do with Sophie’s work, a futile, do-good mission I wanted no part of.
“Let me explain. He wants you to come to Boston. Of course, I’ll drive you. I’m happy to drive. We wouldn’t expect you to drive.” A slight tremor of his hand on the glass revealed the priest’s nervousness, or, it occurred to me, perhaps an early symptom of Parkinson’s.
“If your cardinal wants to see me, he could have come himself. We’re wasting time here, Father.”
“Yes, well.” The priest hesitated, then forged on. “It’s about the new cathedral,” he said. “He wants you to see the cathedral.”
At last I got it. Money. “You’ve got the wrong guy, Father. I’m not interested in donating to the building fund.” If the cardinal wanted someone to pay for the damn cathedral, then let him ask the Vatican to open its coffers. A trace of a smile flicked across the priest’s face, as if we shared a secret. “I won’t change my mind,” I said.
“No. I don’t imagine you will.” Now the priest did smile. It was like fencing with a cloud. I wondered what it would take to offend him.
“But it isn’t about a contribution,” Father Gervase said.