St. Anthony's fire

Wyatt and Dave were in Wyatt's attached garage, searching for a croquet set Wyatt insisted he had bought, once, long ago, and that had to be in the garage somewhere, and while they were looking they got to talking, idly, about the weather, baseball, the status of their job searches, and the conversation took a surprising turn or two and soon Wyatt and Dave discovered that they had both been abused by Catholic priests when they were boys.

Once that was out was out in the open, Wyatt and Dave forgot all about croquet. From the mouth of the garage they could see their wives-Susan and Rachel-smoking Merits under the last remaining mature oak in Shady Oaks, which was the name of their subdivision. Wyatt's two sons were playing a complicated game involving a Frisbee, a dog, a detached piece of rusty gutter extension, and someone's hat. They all of a sudden seemed very far away, as if they were someone else's wives and children, as if Wyatt and Dave were very far from the selves they now were. Wyatt could smell the chemicals from the slow-burning charcoal fire he'd set earlier. As was the case with every barbecue he hosted, Wyatt had already made a big speech about cooking with charcoal and not propane. But now that he and Dave had ripped open their chests and revealed their tortured hearts, he felt very far from the man who had been so adamant about the superior taste of ground beef cooked over charcoal, too.

As for Dave, he felt something different. His and Rachel's baby son had died just two months earlier. he had died of crib death. The doctor had told them that it happened more often than people think, but news of its surprising frequency did not make Dave or Rachel feel any better. The doctor had also asked them if they had put their son to sleep on his stomach or his back. "He liked to sleep on his side," Dave said. The doctor had nodded sadly, as if sleeping on one's side were the problem, which pretty much ruined what was left of Dave to ruin. Every night Dave had sneaked into his son's room to watch his son sleep on his side and in doing so had begun to feel the blossoming of his own loving, fatherly self. Now that he and Wyatt had told the truth to one another about their abuse, he could start thinking about that and stop thinking about his dead baby.

But he didn't say any of this. Instead, he said, "I don't want to be like one of those guys on TV." he was talking about the many other men who'd been sexually abused by Catholic priests in their youths, those legions of sad, wide-eyed men you see on TV who told their stories in public for reasons-money? attention? forgiveness? peace of mind? the well-being of other would-be victims?-that seemed mysterious, even to them. No, Dave didn't want to be one of those men, didn't want what they wanted.

"But what do we want?" Wyatt asked.

"We want an apology," Dave said.

he was right. They simply wanted an apology. So Dave and Wyatt abandoned the garage and set off for St. Anthony's.

Rachel and Susan were finishing their cigarettes when they noticed their husbands walking down the street, away from the garage and the smoldering charcoal briquettes and their chirping children and their smoking wives.

"Dave, where are you going?" Rachel asked.

"We're going to St. Anthony's."

"What for?"

"To demand an apology," he said, and then they kept on walking.

This was not the first time Dave and Wyatt had demanded an apology. Dave had demanded an apology from his bank for sandbagging him with hidden withdrawal fees. Wyatt had demanded an apology from his children's teachers for making assumptions about how much time Wyatt did or did not spend with his sons going over their homework after school. Dave and Wyatt had both demanded apologies from Lance Paper Company for transferring them from jobs in Utica, New York, and Worcester, Massachusetts, respectively, to Clemson, South Carolina without giving them a real say in the matter, and then they demanded an apology from their new bosses in South Carolina for laying them off not even six months after they'd uprooted themselves and their families. When Dave and Wyatt were done demanding their apologies, they had apologized to their wives for not getting the apologies they felt they deserved, or for getting the apologies and then being disappointed that those apologies didn't make the sun any brighter or the grass any greener or their lives any happier.

So Dave and Wyatt had demanded other apologies. But this was the first time they had walked out to demand one. It was a longer walk than they'd reckoned. For one, Dave and Wyatt never walked anywhere anymore, a fact their physicians couldn't say enough about vis à vis Dave's and Wyatt's hanging bellies and high blood pressure and diminishing life expectations, and every quarter mile or so Dave and Wyatt had to pretend to look at a bird or something so that they could stop and catch their breath. For another, Shady Oaks didn't have sidewalks. Plus, theirs was one of those pick-up truck subdivisions and the S-ios roared by all the time, going well above the posted thirty mph limit and sending Dave and Wyatt diving into the open sewers their taxes had been raised for. Wyatt-whose belly was bigger than Dave's and whose blood pressure was higher-even raised the possibility of turning back and just driving to the church in their own S-ios, or maybe just making the trek some other time, when the sun wasn't so high or the heat so oppressive or the traffic so heavy, and when he and Dave were in better physical condition. But Wyatt's suggestion didn't have much conviction behind it and Dave knew it was just nervousness talking. Because they knew they were doing what they had to do, and as Dave pointed out, that they were walking instead of driving was a testimony to their seriousness of purpose. Besides, Dave said, there was something biblical and symbolic about their walking, and Wyatt agreed that he couldn't really imagine Moses driving around the desert for forty years in a detailed truck with running boards and cupholders.

They kept walking. It took Dave and Wyatt over an hour before they got to St. Anthony's. In fact, they almost walked right past it, because neither of them was an actual member of the church or had even attended mass there and they had really only had a vague idea of where it was located. Besides, it looked nothing like the churches they'd been abused in-nothing like Sacred Heart in Utica with its spire reaching up five stories and the cross at its peak reaching another story; nothing like Our Lady of Assumption in Worcester, which was made of native granite and which took up a whole city block and was so grand and massive that it seemed like even God wouldn't be able to destroy it when the day finally came. No, St. Anthony's was more or less a brick ranch house, and they would have missed it entirely had Wyatt not said, "Hey, there's a crucifix over the front door ofthat brick rancher," and he and Dave turned around, gathered themselves, and then knocked on the church's front door.

Who knows why they didn't just go right in instead of knocking? Why is a vampire in the movies unable to enter a house unless he's been invited? Even a vampire wants to feel wanted. They knocked and knocked, and finally, a priest opened the door. He wasn't wearing a collar or even those black casual clothes priests wear: he was wearing jeans and flip flops and the kind of collarless button down shirt that makes you think of a rich person on vacation. But Dave and Wyatt knew he was a priest-because of course he had answered the church door, but mostly because he looked remarkably like the priests who had abused them: he had a full head of curly reddish-brown hair and a cautious fatigued smile and raised eyebrows and Dave and Wyatt both took a step back, because the priest looked much like both of their abusers, as though they had summoned those priests to appear before them in a single body.

"Can I help you?" the priest asked. His voice was tired, resigned, as if he knew the answer to the question before he even asked it.

"Yes," Dave said and explained how he and Wyatt had been abused by Catholic priests in their youth and now they wanted an apology.

Dave and Wyatt really had been abused. Their abuse had run the gamut. Dave had been fellated on retreats, and the same priest had also more-or-less innocently and chummily draped his arm over Dave's shoulders during church school's discussion of the Virgin Birth and didn't remove the arm until the lesson was through. Wyatt had been fondled in empty church gyms after CYO basketball games, and the same priest, in front of Wyatt's parents, had simply remarked that Wyatt was a "good-looking boy." Dave and Wyatt had been forced to do some things that they couldn't talk about, even now, even with each other. They sometimes still woke up in the middle of the night yelling, "It hurts, it hurts," and had to be comforted by Rachel and Susan, who thought their husbands were merely having garden-variety nightmares.

Wyatt hadn't told Susan about his abuse, but he'd told his three previous wives. His first wife had wondered immediately if the abuse had turned Wyatt homosexual, or if it had happened because he had already been homosexual. Wyatt's second wife had used the abuse as a trump card, and if their checking account was empty when it came time to pay the mortgage, or when Wyatt accidentally spilled wine on the white lace tablecloth his second wife had had in her family centuries before they'd immigrated from Donegal, the second wife said, "Don't worry about it, Wyatt. It's nothing compared to what that son-of-a-bitch priest did to you." Then there was Wyatt's third wife, who had been purely supportive when he first told her. She'd said, "It's better that you told me. It can't hurt you anymore. Life will be different now." But their marriage turned out to be something less than the happy, healthy thing she thought it would be, and whenever Wyatt drank too much at dinner parties and took long, loud stands that were somehow both offensive and boring, or whenever he failed to get the raise or promotion that he felt sure he would get, Wyatt would say "I'm sorry, I don't know what happened, it's not really my fault," until finally, his third wife accused him of subconsciously using the priest's abuse as an excuse for all his subsequent failures and shortcomings. Wyatt hadn't told Susan, his fourth wife, which seemed to Wyatt the only smart thing he had ever done.

Dave hadn't told Rachel, either, and didn't think he ever would, for exactly the reasons that Wyatt had had four wives to his one, and for exactly the same reason that he never, ever talked about his baby son's death, either. In the case of both the abuse and his son's death, Dave was afraid that once the truth was out there in the open it would be promptly lumped in with other unpleasant truths and its importance would be diminished; and he was also afraid that it wouldn't be lumped in with all these other truths, that it would dominate the others and that once it was visible no one, not even Dave, could ignore it if he wanted. Dave was afraid too that he'd be accused of using his abuse and his son's death as an excuse, and that, at some level, that there would be some truth to the accusation.

So Dave told no one about the abuse and he never talked about his dead son either, not even with Rachel. They instead talked idly. They had so many conversations about the weather that Dave had begun to feel the same way about Rachel that he did about the television weatherwoman-sometimes she wore clothes that were understated and flattering, sometimes garish and unbecoming; sometimes he found her encyclopedic knowledge of tornadoes fascinating, sometimes dull. But he did not feel love for Rachel anymore, which before their son had died had been pretty much the only thing he'd felt for her. But at least he didn't talk to her about their dead son, at least she didn't make him admit to his terrible, true feelings-that the only thing that mattered anymore about their son was that he was dead; and not once did Dave tell her or anyone else about being abused, until he told Wyatt, and then the priest at St. Anthony's.

The priest listened, head down like a man in deep thought or deep regret, and when Dave and Wyatt were done he said, "I see," and then said, "It doesn't sound like either of you was abused in this church, though."

"Even so," Wyatt said. "We'd like an apology."

"Can you come back tomorrow?" the priest asked. "Or maybe later in the week?"

"No," Dave said. "We've waited twenty-five years already. We want it now."

"Okay." he said. "But I'll have to talk to the bishop first. He'll have to talk the cardinal. Lawyers will have to be consulted. It might take a little while."

"That's fine," Dave told him. "We have plenty of time."

And it was true that Dave and Wyatt had plenty of time. They could have waited there all night and into the morning for their apology. Because even though the next day was Monday, Dave and Wyatt had no jobs to go to. They hadn't looked for work since they'd been laid off six months earlier, even though they both had new houses and crushing mortgages and Wyatt had children who would eventually have to get their teeth straightened and go to college. Dave and Wyatt weren't old, either; they were still in their late thirties; they had the relevant college degrees; they could have gone out and found something: there were paper companies everywhere, and someone needed to work for them. But Dave and Wyatt didn't even bother looking. It was as though they had lost their will to do something about anything. It wasn't that they were lazy, exactly; it was that they felt that being ambitious wouldn't amount to much. Besides, Wyatt had the kind of oversized garage designed to accommodate the speedboat Wyatt talked about buying but knew he never would. Wyatt and Dave liked to set up folding chairs in the garage and leave the country music channel playing softly on the transistor radio and not talk and watch Wyatt's grass seed wash away in the warm, monsoonal spring rains. The rain made a nice, fat, bonging sound on the garage's tin roof; it was comfortable in the garage, safe. Why would they want to go and look for work when they could stay in the garage?

Wyatt's and Dave's abuse at the hands of their priests might have had nothing to do with this lethargy. This was yet another thing they were afraid of: that they wouldn't know what was the product of abuse or what was simply part and parcel of being a normal thirty-eight-year-old American man disgruntled and living far away from his true home with no job, not even one he disliked. They would never know what was connected to the abuse and what was not. They would never be sure. This was another thing they would demand an apology for.

The priest made them wait in the church basement. Wyatt griped about this at first. The basement was carpeted and the carpet smelled of something wet and long dead and the glaring overhead fluorescent light kept flickering and if it were to go out Dave and Wyatt would be in complete darkness, because there were no windows and no other lights that they could see. Wyatt said, "After all we've been through, we deserve better than to be stuck in a church basement." Wyatt hadn't been in a church in ages, and spoke longingly of the seed-oiled wood pews, the stained glass, the votive candles, the towering pipe organ, the holy water, the veined marble pulpit, and the stations of the cross. "I wouldn't mind waiting so much," Wyatt said, "if we could only wait in the church itself."

But Dave said, "No, it's better that we wait in the basement. It's better this way," and the subject was dropped.

They waited. They waited a very long time. They did not speak to each other. Wyatt breathed heavily through his nose, then began whistling in the distracted manner of a person unaccustomed to introspection. Dave was crying softly, so softly that Wyatt couldn't hear it over the white noise of his nose breathing and whistling.

Dave was crying because he had started thinking about the apology-how satisfying it would be to get it finally after all these years and how maybe he could then forget about the priest, the retreats, everything, how maybe once the apology was tendered he could then start living his life-and then he realized that he had never asked anyone to apologize for his son's death. It had simply never occurred to him. he had demanded apologies from everyone and for everything imaginable, and yet he had not demanded one for what had happened to his son. It was yet another way he had failed his son: he had failed to keep his son alive, and he had failed to demand an apology for his death. This was why he was crying; he cried for what seemed like hours, until the crying exhausted itself. You couldn't cry forever, Dave knew this from experience; and once you stopped crying, you had to do the only thing you were capable of doing. The only thing Dave was capable of doing was to wait for the priest's apology, and that apology would have to double for the apology he should have gotten for his son.

just then Wyatt and Dave heard voices. The basement door opened; there was the sound of someone walking down the stairs. They both rose to their feet without realizing that they had risen to their feet. They expected it to be the priest, of course, apology in hand. But it was just Rachel and Susan, their wives.

Wyatt was glad to see Susan, because he had begun to think his and Dave's mission was a big mistake: they had begun the quest for their apology together, on the same page, but they were not on that same page anymore. There was something about Dave's gloominess Wyatt could not penetrate. Wyatt knew about Dave's son, of course, and was very grateful that nothing bad had happened to any of his three boys, but he had not realized until now how much greater Dave's pain was than his. It had not occurred to Wyatt that all pain is not equal, and that one's pain didn't give one a greater insight into someone else's. Dave's and Wyatt's abuse had brought them together, but it could not do so completely, or forever, and so while Wyatt felt sorry for his friend, his best friend, he also felt estranged.

As for Dave, he wasn't thinking about Wyatt now; he was thinking about Rachel, how beautiful she was with her hair swept back in the messy ponytail that would always make her look like a twenty-year-old girl just back from the beach, how she was much too lovely to be in this musty basement, how her beauty didn't make him feel any better and in fact made him even more sad because the beauty didn't matter to him anymore, and how he wanted her to leave immediately.

"What are you doing here?" Dave asked them.

"We're here to get both of you to come home," Susan said. "The kids are waiting in the van. We saved some hamburgers for you back home."

"Is the priest up there?" Dave asked.

"Yes," Rachel said.

"What's he doing?"

"He's just sitting in a pew, staring into space. When we asked him where you were, he put his face his hands and said, 'Basement.'"

"He seemed a little freaked out," Susan said.

"Good," Dave said.

"Dave," Rachel said, "what are you doing here?"

Dave shot a look at Wyatt, who sighed his big man's sigh and nodded, and so Dave told the story. he spoke for himself and for Wyatt, looking at his feet the whole time. When he was done telling the story, he didn't look up.

"I'm sorry," Wyatt said to Susan. he knew his history, and could see the end of their marriage looming in the distance like an abandoned factory.

Susan shrugged and said, "That's okay," because she was more than a decade younger than Wyatt, and her generation was relatively comfortable talking publicly about the bad things that had been done to them. "No big deal," she said. "I still love you."

"Do you know what I hate?" Rachel said to Dave.

"What?" Dave said. But she didn't answer him back until he lifted his head to look at her.

"I hate when I tell people that Nick died of crib death, and they ask 'Where did it happen?'"

Dave smiled then, he really did. But when Rachel said, "I want you to come home," he shook his head, and the smile disappeared and he said, "No, I'm going to wait for this apology."

"I miss him, too," she said. "And I'm truly sorry about what that priest did to you. But I want you to come home."

"I can't," he said.

"I wish you'd come home with me right now," she said, very slowly, as if speaking to someone addled or retarded. "Because I don't think I'm coming back to get you." They looked at each other for a while, their gazes steady, unblinking. It was the way people stare at each other not when they're in love, but afterward, when they finally realize all the many horrible and beautiful things locked up within that love. But Dave didn't move, and Rachel finally broke the eyelock and ran up the stairs, two at a time.

Wyatt was on his feet; he was already thinking of how lucky he was to have this younger fourth wife and his spacious garage and his kids and suddenly the apology didn't seem so urgent anymore: he had waited so long, he could certainly wait a little longer. And even if Wyatt never got his apology, then maybe that was all right, too; it seemed to him that he had gotten what he wanted, somehow, without getting what he wanted, and he marveled to himself about how resilient the human animal is and thought that he might even work on his resume when he got home, maybe check the employment ads in the morning.

"I'm going home, buddy," he said to Dave. "You should, too."

Dave shook his head. "It's all right," he said. "I'll catch up with you later."

They shook hands, then Wyatt took Susan's and they walked up the stairs, closing the door behind them.

When they were gone, Dave turned off the light and lay down on the rug. he was thinking of the future. His wife and friends were gone; it was undoubtedly too dark to walk home, and besides he didn't want to go there anyway. But maybe he could stay in the basement. It wasn't as nice as Wyatt's garage, but overall it didn't seem such a bad place to stay. There was an old Frigidaire humming in the corner. There was a bathroom with an exhaust fan. he could conceivably stay in there forever. Maybe he would ask the priest if that were possible. Maybe he could attach it as a rider to the apology. Dave fell asleep, rolling over on his side in the fashion of his dead son, and his last thought before falling asleep was that he would waive his demand for apology if God would just let him die in his sleep, just as God had let his son die in his sleep, just as God had let so many other things happen.

But Dave didn't die in his sleep; he woke up when he heard a door open at the top of the stairway. he got up and walked to the foot of the stairs. The priest was standing there, illuminated from above by the chandelier in the vestibule. The priest saw Dave, but he didn't move, and neither did Dave. It seemed possible that they would stand staring at each other forever; and that was fine with Dave. Because there was nothing left for him to do but wait for his apology, which was the only thing standing between the life he had lived up until now, and the life to come.

Copyright New England Review Summer 2003
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