The Tender Birds, page 18
Before sending it, she went to cross herself, then stopped, feeling her hands cold with fury, every blessing wrung out of them.
The hell with it, she thought. Pray for your goddamn self, Mom.
She hit “Send.”
Frailty
A DAY PASSED, AND HER MOTHER responded. When Alison clicked on the subject line, the page was blank. Glitch, she thought. She’ll try again.
She didn’t.
A week passed.
Maybe she’s disappeared. Or is in the process of disappearing with her lover. If I were to see them in Montreal, on Rue Ste. Catherine, I might peer through them, see restaurants and sidewalk cafés greyed out against a floating membrane, a placenta detached from the life of a child, the ripple of a sheer veil pulled across reality.
But I am the one who cannot see. I have let go of them. I am no longer capable of reading my mother’s words. They are invisible, written in a language I refuse to speak, a language of I-need-her-I-love-her-it-was-all-my-fault-forgive-me. It is I who am disappearing from her world.
Perhaps she cannot read my messages.
Perhaps no one can see me anymore.
The truth is that all of us will vanish.
A week ago, I was sorting books in the rectory, and Father Matt told me the sad story of how he came to love birds. He is also frail. He carries within him unfathomable shock and loss from the flight he missed that destroyed so many. So, I spoke to him about the gifts of the hawk, the falcon, the spirituality of these creatures, their embodiment of mystery.
What I did not tell him was that since adopting Daisy, I have learned that in falconry lore, an aggressive name for the raptor will produce a passive creature. So, no Genghis Khans, no Stalins or Napoleons. They will never hunt for you. If you want a killer, name your falcon … Daisy. Yet my Daisy is not like that. Perhaps if she could hunt, she would be fierce, but if the gentle carry fire, then Daisy bears the flame of the Holy Spirit.
I am remembering my father’s prayer.
“I am a transient being, homeless, and God is my shelter.”
“I will lift up a falcon, a fiery torch to light the way home.”
As for me, I am as frail as my parents, a crockery vase with a hollow centre and a thousand tiny cracks. I did not deserve the horror that was done to me, and yet it happened. This is the fate of human clay, broken soul and heart, bones in a shroud, waiting for a thunderclap, the stone rolled back.
A Bad Read
GOD BLESS CAM. HE’S SO BLUNT, got me off my butt around my mother, she thought. Cam was in town to give a few classes. He had invited her to sit in on his Saturday session, but she had promised to help sort books for the parish sale. With the weight of her mother gone, she felt lighter, as if she had unloaded an unwieldy backpack. Today’s task would be mundane, but she enjoyed perusing old tomes, even the musty and neglected fare stashed in a parish library. After so poignant an encounter with her father’s writing, she welcomed the relief of tired prose.
Alison put Daisy in her cage and took her to the church, hoping she would not be irritated by the dust and mould of so many unread books. “Yes, Daisy does sneeze from time to time,” she tells school kids, “although sneezes usually follow eating.” Having never exposed her to dust, Alison had no idea how she might react.
The parish library doubled as Father Matt’s office. The door had been left unlocked, and she went in with the cage. Matt wasn’t there, but her eye caught the striking photo taken on the day of his ordination, and she thought that the luminous image of Matt was company enough. She had wanted to work alone since she’d left the office in some disarray, with stacks of books on the floor, in open boxes.
Within the hour, Matt showed up. He looked frazzled, impaled on a bolt of lightning. Frizzled and fried. She asked if he needed anything, if she were in the way.
“No problem,” he said, but she knew there was.
She continued sorting books in silence, while Matt worked on the opposite side of the room, tossing bulletins and out-of-date periodicals in the recycle bin with ballistic efficiency that signalled equal parts distress and fury. Alison felt uncomfortable. Then she spotted a slim book, Matt hurling it with a pitcher’s aim, a curveball thrown from across the room that sent the unwanted volume over his desk and thunk, straight into the bin, pages bent and cover askew, visible evidence of a rotten read.
“Ball one,” said Alison. Matt didn’t smile.
“I’ll take care of the bin,” he said.
“It must have been a terrible book.”
“It is evidence that priests make stupid errors in judgment, just like everyone else,” said Matt.
Alison walked over to the bin and peered at the cover. The book was face down and she couldn’t see the author’s name.
“Not good enough for the sale?” she asked. “People buy all kinds of…”
“They won’t be buying this one.” He paused. “Have a look, if you like.”
She took the book out of the bin, then gasped and dropped it.
“What’s wrong?”
“Who is this author? The name is…”
“ …no one you’d want to know.”
“But the name is … tell me who it is.”
“You can’t read it?” Matt looked alarmed.
“I can’t.” She panicked. Letters strung together, but she was unable to make sense of the words. She grabbed the edge of Matt’s desk.
“Sit down, Alison.”
She did. She felt faint.
“Are you all right?” he asked.
“It’s nothing.” Her heart was racing. She’d dropped the book so that it was face down, so that the author’s photo on the back was visible.
She couldn’t speak. Matt got her a glass of water.
“Is he famous?” she said at last because she knew who it was and didn’t know what else to say.
“Infamous,” said Matt. “He did time for drugs, and his book came out last year.”
“Did you…”
“His dad’s a hotshot in Toronto,” said Matt. “Big college donor. Set him up for a book-signing. Last year, when I was teaching at St. Mike’s. Natalie and Elias wouldn’t go.”
“And you?”
“I thought he’d surely reformed. He said that my work had inspired him.”
“But you didn’t like the book.”
Matt paused. “He never changed. He preys on homeless women. Now he’s…”
The rest of the sentence crumbled in his mouth.
Alison grew pale. She saw that her strong body, its health restored, began to evaporate before his eyes.
Matt kept looking at her.
Shy Young Man
EIGHT YEARS OF TIME AND MEMORY dissolved into a warm September in 2003, with a quick trip to Toronto for an academic conference, the conclusion of a students’ welcome Mass at St. Basil’s church, and him about to lunch with the college president, along with corporate lawyer Duncan Moore. The man’s son, Gavin, stopped by to speak with them, a young man with the kind of classic features found in museum statuary, whose introverted gaze seemed focused on a great, invisible mirror. He did not look like today’s student. He dressed like an old boy from Upper Canada College: tailored shirt, V-neck sweater, and tie. Matt liked him. He seemed like a gentleman, all courtesy and deference. He hearkened back to a sedate and cultivated world, one he wished he could claim, so far from the troubles of his own youth. Matt had not yet met him; that would come seven years later. And Gavin had not yet been in trouble with the law, had not yet mistaken Matt’s office for the Men’s Room.
Then, out of the church, came a young woman dressed in shabby jeans and jacket, hair askew, lugging a tattered backpack that protruded from her body like an enormous growth. She seemed incoherent (or so he thought), her gaze too purposeless to be a student’s, her face marked with the pallor and hollowed cheeks of a substance abuser. He hated to be so callous; he sensed that he was reacting to her for punching a hole through the fair skies of a late-summer day, one in which he relished his position, the respect and achievement he had earned for himself. The woman’s eyes would not connect with his (drugs would do that); she handed him an envelope, saying that she wanted prayers (reminding him, he supposed, that he was a priest after all, with duties other than dining out). Yes, there are destitute people in this world, but there are also parasites, he’d thought. Then, as she turned to leave, Gavin pulled out his camera and took her picture.
“Do you know her?” Matt asked.
“Not at all. I do this now and again. I collect photos. I don’t actually…”
“What will you do with it?” He wondered if he was doing research for a thesis.
“I guess I like her. Do you think she’d talk to me?”
Matt remembered feeling a trace of alarm at the way Gavin’s mood swerved from a rather chilly collector of women’s photos to a man who wanted to pursue his subject. Quit psychoanalyzing everything, he thought. Gavin was a shy young man, that’s all.
Matt shrugged. “No harm in trying,” he said, then paused. “I noticed she took Communion.”
“I watched her all during Mass,” said Gavin.
“So go for it,” Matt said.
To his surprise, Gavin took off down the path, after the young woman.
He can’t be for real, he thought.
Matt opened the envelope that the woman had given him. He pulled out a slip of paper, a note written in pencil. It was almost illegible. He crumpled it up and threw it in a trash bin.
Photo
ALISON WAITED FOR FATHER MATT to speak. She sensed his hesitation.
“Gavin Moore’s been charged with rape.”
Alison hid her face in her hands.
Matt sighed. “These things are hard to talk about.”
“How awful.”
“Natalie’s mother sent her a link to The Star. He preyed on street kids, had a thing about taking their photos, posting them on social media. That’s how they caught him.” He paused. “That’s why his book’s in the bin.”
Alison reached for her handbag, pulled out her father’s prayer book and withdrew a folded piece of paper.
“He took a photo at St. Basil’s Church,” she said. “September, 2003.”
Matt’s heart turned to ice.
“He sent it to me. I printed it off his email.”
She opened the paper and handed it to Matt.
Ashes
MATT STARED AT THE PHOTO of the waif, thin as a dime, haunted eyes, and hair askew, her swollen hump of a backpack, her gaze confused and innocent. How easy it would be to prey on a child like this. He looked up to see Alison’s face, wet with tears.
She dried her eyes. “The following day, he came after me.”
“I didn’t know you were…”
“I lived in the ravine. He gave me the photo. Every day, he brought me books to read. He waited two months.” She mentioned drugs, then what he’d done.
“Did you tell the police?”
“No. It was just too shameful.”
She told him about her recovery, how she decided to start life again in her dad’s hometown, how she saw Matt at Mass.
“But you didn’t recognize me,” she said.
“No,” he said. “No, Alison, I did not.”
“I had to bulk up for Vet Tech.”
“Please forgive me, Alison,” he said. “Gavin wanted to follow you that day at church. I didn’t stop him.” He said no more, overwhelmed with remorse at what he’d set in motion.
Alison let herself cry.
Confession
“IF I NEED A SHRINK, it won’t be you,” Gavin had said.
Over a year ago, Matt wondered how he had known Gavin, if he might have heard Gavin’s confession. The thought filled him with dread.
“You were very forgiving,” said Gavin.
He wondered what he’d meant by that. Now he began to imagine what Gavin might have confessed, which made the thought of it all the more terrible. Something like: “I seduced a woman who came to my house.”
“Did you know her?”
“Not well. Street kid. She needed a place to wash up, so I offered her my home. I knew I made a mistake, the minute I let her in. She was beautiful, all cleaned up.”
“You must learn to think clearly. The law doesn’t take kindly to these situations.”
“I’m really sorry. I want to improve my life. I don’t want to disappoint my parents.”
Gavin would never have admitted that he raped her. Gavin had been playing games with him. Nothing more.
He wondered now why the man would have bothered to confess in the first place. Or why he himself had bothered to conjure it up. And yet, in his imagined scenario, he had cast Gavin as a gentleman and Alison as a side issue, no more than a young man’s failure at self-improvement.
Bookmark
WHEN SHE LEFT THE DISARRAY of Father Matt’s office, Alison shut the door and noticed a prayer card that had slipped through the space between the door and the floor. She picked it up. On it was an image of the cross surrounded by lilies. Father Matt must have tossed it out in a frenzy, no doubt a bookmark in some outdated periodical or even Gavin Moore’s work. She felt that the image, so redolent of sorrow redeemed by hope, had, in some providential way, been meant for her consolation. Father Matt doesn’t need this. She slipped it in her pocket.
All That Glass
THAT EVENING, SHE SAT WITH DAISY on her gloved fist. “Daisy, how do I forgive him?” She was still crying.
The falcon turned her vast and beautiful eyes toward her, and Alison wondered at her powerful beak and talons, her wings that would lift but never fly again.
If Daisy could think, she would have to forgive God.
Or maybe us, for building all those towers, all that glass that she mistook for sky.
A blessing, not to think so hard. Life is so terrible, in every sense.
How I wish for the wisdom of the birds.
70 x 7
MATT KNEW WHAT HIS OWN CONFESSOR was going to say. “‘You must forgive not seven times, but seventy-seven times.’ You know the gospel. So does she. If she doesn’t forgive you, it’s not your problem.” Legalism, he thought. What priests let each other get away with, around harmless and vulnerable women.
“Did you touch her?”
“No, of course not.”
“Did you have immoral thoughts? Did you take any pleasure in thinking them?”
“No on both counts.”
“So relax.”
He had been forgiven more times than he deserved. Of course, he had nothing to do with Gavin’s crimes, his choice to do harm. But there was that cronyism known to priests and to their male friends in power, an invisible pollutant that fouled the air, an unwitting exclusion of all who tried, like that brave young girl, to make their presence known. He could have helped her — he who had rejected a woman’s love, who had been brought to the point of death by drugs, who had been shown such kindness and compassion. Instead, he had buddied up to Gavin and sent an indifferent message, delivered with a shrug.
“So, go for it,” he had said.
Gavin was a rapist.
He himself had once killed an innocent man.
Prayer Card
YET MATT WANTED AT LEAST the solace of prayer. He looked for his breviary and couldn’t find it. Lord, I’m getting careless. Then, he noticed a heap of abandoned books and papers on the floor, and there he found the prayer book, dumped in a careless moment, headed for the recycle bin. I’m losing it. It was a gift for his ordination, years ago, with ribbon markers, a different colour for each liturgical season. No way to treat such a precious book.
It had also contained a prayer card, old and worn.
In Memory of Andre Lefèvre.
He flipped through the pages, looking for it.
Gone. It may have ended up in the recycle bin.
He spent the rest of the morning, searching.
Phone Message
ALISON HAD BEEN INVITED to bring Daisy to a raptor display on Easter Sunday, as part of a family event at the Boston Nature Center. It was, she realized, a legitimate way of avoiding Father Matt at the noon Mass.
Yet Natalie and Elias had organized an Easter dinner for that evening because Cam was in town, a kind of theological chat room reunion (with special treats for Daisy), and both she and Father Matt had been invited. She would have to make the best of that. It was the shock of what Matt revealed about Gavin, that’s all, she thought.
She still felt raw, as if these revelations had flayed her, had peeled skin back from the body of memory. Yet she was grateful for the friendship of Natalie and Elias, for the way in which they included her in their family. She would do her best to enjoy the dinner, to focus on the chat room, on news about Armande and Josephine and the hawklets.
When she returned home on Easter Sunday, she had phone messages from Natalie and Cam. “Please call asap.”
My Heart Is Old
CAMERON FOUND OUT ABOUT Matt’s heart attack from Elias who’d been at the noon Mass, who’d been worried ever since he’d driven Matt home from dinner a week or so ago. The man didn’t look well, he told Natalie; he never took time off. Natalie logged on to the chat room, so that now the entire group knew about Matt’s collapse in the sacristy.
Alison answered phone messages from both Natalie and Cam. “How terrible,” was all she could manage to say to Natalie. “Is he going to live?”
“It’s under control,” Nat told her. “Come over, Allie, we’ve got lots of food. We’ll talk.”
