Fragile (23 page)

“And to those many of you who do not know me and have not heard me preach at our church, I apologize in advance if my speaking in the accent of my native land makes it difficult for you to understand my words.”

Holly glances towards Tom, another man of words, to see if he has any reaction to this rather aggressive tone, as if the man resents in some way being forced to eulogize the woman lying in the casket behind him. The priest does have a hint of a Mexican accent, but he is clearly quite comfortable composing his sentences in English. Tom stares forward with a hint of a smile on his face, his dark suit jacket and the firm white crease of his shirt collar making him appear trimmer than usual and more handsome, but the smile is likely a result of something he is thinking about from work, a comment someone made at the
Statehouse. He will often relate to Holly offhand quips that he finds hilarious, jokes that he chuckles over which she can neither understand nor laugh about without feeling like a child who has overheard the adults at a cocktail party telling a tawdry story.

“Amelia was a great and kind lady.” The priest continues with the awkward formality of someone who has learned the language in a classroom, from a textbook. “I did not know her well. But I have spoken with many of you, friends and family and fellow parishioners alike, and you have given me a pitcure of her kindnesses, her commitment to the church. From her few family members here remaining in the city, I have heard you tell of her great love of children, of her patience with them whenever nieces and nephews paid a visit.”

“St. Augustine tells us that patience is the companion of wisdom, and I have always found it to be so. You have seen it in her—this is how she lived. And I have seen it in her too. In my brief but happy times with Amelia at the church, I have seen a woman who was devoted to her faith, and to the Catholic church, who did not abandon the parish of her youth, even though it has seen many changes over the years. This is the sign of a woman with patience, with wisdom. With faith.”

The priest brings his hand to his mouth and wipes the sweat from his lip. The silken fabric of his vestments rustles as he moves, lending every motion an extra weight, an added meaning.

“I have seen her working among the many Latino members of our church, which is now a mainly Mexican parish, as if she
were among her own family, helping with the difficult work and tedious preparations that the Christmas Benevolence committee is even now undertaking to make sure there is food on the table and gifts in the little children's hands on the magical and most holy day when our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ was born.”

He takes a deep breath and darts his eyes around the room, as if he suspects that the small group of people gathered here might have somehow stumbled in to the wrong service. “I did not know her well, but you did know her. You knew her as the sister of that most revered pastor of St. Monica's Church, the Reverend Karl Geist, who founded ministries across the ocean in Japan and China, who is still spoken of in the parish as a famous and—how you say—charismatic preacher from years ago.”

In the brief pause as the priest takes a breath, Holly can hear another voice, just above a whisper. “I like the way that lady's hair puffs out of her hat.” It is Jenny, trying to amuse herself, and her sister, by making fun of someone, one of the chief pasttimes of a bored teenager. Holly glares at Jenny, purses her lips, and shakes her head in a silent “No.”

“I did not know her well, Amelia Geist, but one thing I do know for certain about her is that she is even now still alive and well and sitting this day at the right hand of God with our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. For the Holy Bible tells us that God, who is rich in mercy, by his great love, even when we were dead in sins, has quickened us together with Christ, and has raised us up together, and made us sit together in heavenly places in Christ Jesus.”

Holly can sense that the room has gotten quieter in the face of this bold statement from the priest. “The Holy book tells us, it lets us know that even
you
he has quickened,” and he glances from one person to the next among the half-empty rows of armless chairs, “you who were dead in trespasses and sins.”

Holly watches the little black-haired preacher with apprehension. He has veered abruptly from a bland and harmless reminiscence into a territory where his statements have the tenor of boastful self-assurance on the one hand and, at the same time, the cryptic ramblings of a fool. She can see that he is clearly nervous in front of his audience, whether it is because of the unfamiliar syntax of his second language or the company of strangers from outside the parish, she cannot be sure. But she knows from experience that anyone who speaks so assertively about a topic is usually trying to cover something up. Either he doesn't believe what he is saying, or he thinks the people he is saying it to won't believe him.

“For by grace are you saved through faith,” he continues, “and not of yourselves: It is the gift of God.” Holly has always been good at tuning out words like this when someone starts preaching at her. She can tell when someone is trying to tell her that she should be doing something a certain way, for her own good. And this guy is giving off the vibe: Do this, believe what I say, and you can get to heaven, just like the dead woman behind me in the box. Well, Holly knows a few things about that woman too. She has touched her cold body, and it is not going anywhere. She has washed that woman's hair for the very last time.

“These are things you must know, about Amelia, about all of us. This is the gift of God, that He is all around us, He is with us every moment of our lives. He has always loved us, and always will.” The priest's dark eyes flit from one face to another, looking for acceptance, trying to make a connection.

“God is never late. He will never abandon us. And the Original Sin that everyone has heard so much about is nothing more than this: It is the belief, the mistaken belief, that we are separate from God.”

The priest pauses and emits a ticklish cough, from the back of his throat. He takes a glass of water that is resting on the podium in front of him and drinks from it.

“Original Sin, the trespasses and sins He saves us from, by grace, is nothing more than a belief—a mistaken belief—in two powers: Good and Evil. But I know,” he thrusts his hand up at the low ceiling, “I know, and so does every other man of faith, that there is only one power in this universe, and that is God. Deus. Dios. Not two powers, only one.”

Holly looks over at Tom, to see if he is reacting to any of this. He still has the faint trace of a smile on his face, as if he has been reliving in his mind a particularly satisfying point of contention with his colleagues and adversaries in the stuffy conference rooms he inhabits. He must feel at home here, Holly thinks, dressed up in his suspenders, among the big words and the painstaking efforts to drive home a point. He and the priest are two of a kind—convincers, salesmen at heart.

“I have always struggled with a way to make this idea seem more real to the people in my parish, who see a world around
them filled with many terrible things, raping, killing, children who go to bed hungry at night. The other day I was looking around in the basement of the church, an old building filled with many dusty things from long ago, and I saw a lantern that was probably used to light the building in the days before the electricity came. I picked it up and observed it—for some reason it caught my eye among all the other things there—and I saw that it had a lot of very small holes, cut into the tin to make a pattern with the light that would shine from the lamp. And behind this, another piece of tin that slides across to close it, to shut off the light.”

“And the thought came to me: This is how it is when we die. We are each of us points of consciousness—
conocimiento
, we say in Spanish—points of light, that comes from God. And when the tin slides across one of the points of light to close it, when one of us dies, the light it was a part of does not go away—the light that came through that hole is still there and part of the entire light. It is one with it.”

Yes, Holly thinks, he is struggling. This idea of a life being like a lantern—she can sense that the others in the room are growing uncomfortable by the shuffling of feet and the adjustment of collars or cuffs. She looks around at the group of people, many of them at least sixty years old, a couple of them younger, hispanic. They came here to see the old lady one last time and hear a few kind words about her; they shouldn't have to stand through this.

“That is why it is the gift of God. We cannot do anything to achieve it.” A smile lights up his face, as if he has realized himself
for the very first time why he is saying these things. “This is Grace—it is inevitable, it is in the nature of things, when we make out of two things—separateness from God, Good and Evil—one. When we realize that God does this as a matter of course, this is Grace, the realization of God's abiding love for this woman must have been such that he idealized her, he propped her up in his mind as being something she could never be once he left her, a much more attractive version of the woman who actually remained behind here in Middlesborough, living out her life in solitude, padding herself with excess flesh perhaps in an effort to protect herself from any further painful encounters with a man.

The sight that confronts Tris as he stands in a small alcove, an open closet tucked into one side of the main parlor, where coats and jackets might be hung on a much colder day than this, has the power to stop him in his tracks. He is always running late, and so he has become expert over the years at making a stealthy entrance to events such as this, a latecomer to church who knows how to shuffle silently to his seat of dishonor at the back pew during a hymn, a laggard to business meetings and conference calls who knows to remain quiet for a few moments and then blend in to the discussion as if he has always been there.

This time he has sought to slide in through a little-used entrance near the front, where the priest is giving his lecture, mistakenly thinking that it would be closer to one of the rows of chairs and less conspicuous than the large main doorway where
the official register stands guarding the room, but now he remains rooted to the spot in this alcove, stunned by the vision of the first girl he ever kissed lying flat on her back in a satiny lavender casket. If he had not known this is who he was coming to see, perhaps he would not even have recognized her. Had she been one of the crowd of people watching the Lyceum meet its doom, he might not have looked twice. Yet here she is, the features of her face distended by years of added fat and distorted by the foreshortened angle from which he stares at her over the open lip of the casket.

The elaborate formality of this room, and the box she is in, somehow makes the astonishment of seeing her this way unbearable. It would be better if they displayed her in a plain pine box. The plush, cushiony sides of the coffin are too much, an effort to gloss over the truth that everyone here can see: Amelia is gone. The girl he knew as a teenager has been gone for years; she was buried long ago, and only the faintest remnants of that person must have lived on with her beyond the day he left her.

If he concentrates, he can make out the features of her face that he once recognized, the compressed, rosebud mouth, the broad forehead, the eyebrows slightly raised, as if she always expected to be asked a question. But the skin is a shade of gray he has only seen in skies that threaten rain, and the cheeks have been rouged in a clownish attempt to hide what everyone can plainly see. The hair still clings to a remnant of the blond he remembers, but it has been flattened and shortened by death and by time. The lips are pursed shut, manipulated by the undertakers into a contour that would not dare to suggest a smile.
Perhaps he had a premonition of her death, through some undefinable connection, and he has been mourning these past few days not her, but the missing part of him that was lost when he made the decision more than fifty years ago not to see her any longer—mourning the unfulfilled potential, the life he might have lived.

But who's to say he would have been any happier had he chosen to stay with her, to remain at home here in Middlesborough? Perhaps he is merely mourning the fact that he must choose, at every step in life, one place over another, one person over another, and these choices only serve to narrow him, to dwindle him down to a single straight line and, finally, to a solitary, terminating point. These choices have defined his life by constructing a set of infinite impossibilities, all the many things he will never see or have or do.

He peeks around the corner of the vestibule to examine the remainder of the room. He must remain still here. Someone will notice him, lurking behind this wall. A few people scattered among the rows of chairs—Louise's sons, two of the three it appears, have made it. And there is Louise herself, she did show up, looking for all the world as if she has just floated in from a garden party she might at any moment decide to rejoin, with her head tilted up towards the ceiling beneath a wide-brimmed summer hat. He takes half a step more to get a better look, and he can see that it is him, the man she spoke to from California. Looks like he made it after all. She had thought he would not come, after speaking to him for a few awkward moments on the
phone. It had seemed either too painful or too much of a hassle—she couldn't be sure which—for him to make the long journey on such short notice. But here he is, standing, for some reason, among the unused coat hangers in the vestibule. He may be ashamed of arriving late.

The priest is droning on, but he has lost his audience. Holly looks around to see whether the others are still listening, but they do not seem to be affected by his words. They are hearing what they want to hear. Or they are tuning him out completely. Most of them would rather be somewhere else; they would rather not have to think about things such as this. The sooner he is done with his speech, the sooner they can all go back to the business of living their lives.