My mom once had a thing for a parish priest named Father Marius. A flirtation, or a crush, a devotion, I don’t know what to call it. I don’t know how deep it ran. But I saw it in her, whatever it was. This was in the summer of 1997; I was 10. Mom and Jennifer and I still lived in the little house in Rosslyn, just across the Key Bridge from Georgetown. Father Marius had come for dinner. He sat at the head of the table. His beige tweed jacket and striped tie looked like a disguise—I’d never seen a priest out of his customary black. We could hear Mom in the kitchen, chanting to herself, “All right. Medium flame. Medium? All right. Rosemary, rosemary.” From Jennifer’s room came the arrhythmic growl of her electric bass. She’d been sent away from the table; her blasphemy hung over the abandoned place setting like a whiff of singed hair.
I said to Father Marius—I can hear my needy little voice—“My sister is an apostate.”
“Is she?” He darted a worried glance at her chair. Two red candles flickered between us, but they gave no light or shadow. The room was lit by electric candles fixed on the brass chandelier. A couple of bulbs on one side were always out, giving the table a tilted feeling, as though the house were adrift.
Seeing I’d made an impression, I said, “My dad, too.”
But Father had already lost interest. He lifted his wine and sniffed at the rim of the glass. He had a sour face, always, and a waxy glow to his cheeks. He set the wine down without a sip and called to the kitchen, “Kathleen, what is this claret?”
Mom appeared in the doorway, her cheeks flushed from the stove, or the wine, or from infatuation, if that’s what it was. “Do you like it? I had a feeling.”
He tilted the carafe towards him, peering into its mouth. “It’s absolutely piquant.”
Below her apron, against the kitchen light, her bohemian gown was translucent. Hoops glittered in her ears. She canted her hips, fingers curled on the jamb. “Well, then. It’ll just be my little secret.”
Her costume, this kittenish manner, the wine, the candles, it was all new to me. That whole evening—for weeks, really, since Dad had left—I’d been trying to match pace with the changes I was seeing in Mom. She was 35 but seemed to be growing younger.
Father Marius must have been in his late 20s. But his bearing, stiff and preoccupied, faintly haughty, added decades. No one like him had ever sat at our table. He sniffed at his wine again. “Saddle leather, cedar smoke … tayberry?” He turned the glass before his eyes, gazing into its mysteries.
I hear Jennifer’s church key popping another bottle cap on her end of the line. It’s Sunday night in Korea. Here in Virginia it’s late Sunday morning and I’m still in bed. Outside my window a crow is ranting.
“That priest never messed with you, did he?” Jennifer says. “I always wondered if he was, like … the cause.”
I give her a silence long enough for her to hear what she’s just asked me.
“Yeah. Sorry,” she says. “I don’t know why I said that. I’m not that stupid, I swear.”
I can’t remember the last time she called unexpectedly. We text now and then, we comment on each other’s Instagram posts. But often I don’t hear from her for months. “It’s fine,” I say.
“You didn’t answer my question, though. And I ask only because he was a priest. But also, you were such a little pleaser. Whenever Kathleen flitted into some new coterie, she always had you at her side. Her little familiar. I feel like you would’ve gone along with anything if you thought it would win her approval. I worried about you.”
“Please. When did you worry? While you were touring around out west? Backpacking through Europe?”
“Okay, true. But in retrospect. Now I worry about you back then. Poor little Walter.” I hear her puffing on her vape pen. “I feel bad for not protecting you more.”
Is this why she called? Drinking alone on a work night, memory souring into guilt. She’s 42—time to make amends? “I absolve you,” I say. “None of Mom’s friends ever messed with me. At least not until I was old enough to make an informed decision.” And when would Father have had the chance? We were alone only twice: that night at the table, as Mom bustled in the kitchen and Jennifer sulked in her room; and once, weeks later, at reconciliation. “I don’t think Father Marius had any interest in children.”
“He was gay, though,” Jennifer says. “Totally separate question. But he was. Right?”
Was he? He sat at the head of our table in beige tweed, ill at ease, like an audience member drafted to participate in the show. His blond hair was as rigid and whorled as brass filigree. He sniffed at the wine and picked at his Cornish hen. He spoke to me almost not at all, but with Mom he was voluble. They chatted about Caravaggio, Fellini, and Saint Augustine. During dessert, a bee that had gotten into the house zoomed around our three heads. It hovered over Father’s crème brûlée before lighting on his wineglass. (They had changed to a port.) The bee sniffed along the lip for a moment before it dived in. Father scrambled away, shutting himself in the bathroom until Mom and I had tossed the bee, and Father’s wine, out the back door. He returned to the table unashamed. Shaken. He was deathly allergic.
“I was 10,” I say to Jennifer. “What could I have seen in him?”
She says, “I just think—gay, avowed to celibacy. How much more Kathleen’s type could a guy be?”
Mom had always been a Christmas-and-Easter Catholic, but that summer she took wildly to the church. She and I attended Mass every Sunday, some Sundays twice. Occasionally on weeknights she’d order Jennifer and me a pizza and go alone to the 5:30 vigil, leaving in the foyer a turmoil of scents—makeup, perfume, shoe polish.
Saturday mornings she and I went to reconciliation. Mom confessed to Father Marius, face to face in a storage room at the back of the church, between the sixth and seventh stations of the cross. I’d wait in line at the booth where Father Wozzeck heard confessions. If I saw a classmate, I’d avoid eye contact, afraid of seeing my guilt reflected in him, or maybe sheepish about my ceremoniousness, and protective of it.
Father Wozzeck had a reputation. He was a mutterer, hunched and testy, given to outbursts of swearing. Certainly a drunk, possibly deranged. He shuffled along the walls, squinting, eyes hunting, as though he were plagued by mosquitoes. In the confessional he seemed hardly to know I was there. He wheezed and grumbled while I listed my sins. He spoke up only if I took too long thinking—“Yes, what else? Is that all, Goddamn it?”
Mom asked me, “Don’t you even want to try face to face? I honestly think you’ll find it a huge consolation.”
I didn’t want to, not at all. I liked the half-light in the carved wooden booth. I liked the curtain you drew shut, and the screen that hid you from the priest. Mom would sit with Father Marius in that storage room for 15, 20 minutes, and come out with her eye makeup smeared. After two minutes with Father Wozzeck, I came out absolved. I knelt in a pew close to the altar, stared at the crucifix that hung above, and said my penance, trying to feel reconciled with the church.
“For it is the reconciliation,” said Mrs. Imelda at Tuesday-night CCD, “and not the confession, that makes the sacrament.”
She was huge, a woolly-browed woman in a denim smock. She was pregnant with her sixth. Her breasts were as big as her belly, as though she had two more babies ready to go, just waiting their turn. She beamed at us with a love that was grave, unsettling, as if she might claim us for her own, try to take us home with her.
But we were fourth-graders, filled with abstract questions, and Mrs. Imelda encouraged our asking. What did that word—reconciliation—mean? “It means returning. You’re coming home to the church. It means you’ve come home to grace and the Lord has filled you with grace.” Okay, but what was grace? “Grace is the light of the sacraments living inside you. But it’s also the state of being filled with that light.”
Okay—but what exactly was it? (We understood it wasn’t a real light. You couldn’t see in the dark with it.)
She smiled, indulging us, as if we’d asked what, exactly, was the color red. “It’s a big, beautiful mystery,” she said. “In fact, in the Eastern Church, the sacraments are known as the mysteries.” As if this answered anything.
She taught that when we said our penance, we should gaze at the crucified Christ above the altar, choose one of his wounds, and focus our prayers upon it—for it was his suffering that made our reconciliation possible. So I gazed. The plaster Jesus was lifelike, but smaller than a man: He looked more 13 than 33, his beard painted on as for a school play. I chose the wound closest to me, the wound in his feet, one nail driven through both. His left foot lay atop the right, his toes pointed, his knee bent coquettishly. With his loincloth, his skin as pale as pancake batter, his arms thrown wide, he looked like a Matisse odalisque. I prayed, but I was distracted. A moth was fluttering at the pendant candle that burned steadily in its sheath above the tabernacle.
“The whole thing’s obscene,” Jennifer says. “Little kids that never hurt anybody, forced to get on their knees for some crusty old man and beg his forgiveness.”
But she never went with us. What does she know about it?
One Saturday in the car with Mom, both of us reconciled to the church and filled with grace, it occurred to me I hadn’t seen my dad in … how long had it been? Days, weeks. I asked where he was.
Mom stared at the road, choosing her words. Bangles rattled on her wrists. The rearview mirror lay on the seat between us, where it had fallen days earlier. The July sun had melted the glue that held it in place.
At last she said, “Your dad has gone to the forest, to live by himself.” She looked at me, to see that I understood I would get no more from her.
I chewed on her answer all the way home. What could I have made of it? Maybe I took it for a metaphor, like Mrs. Imelda’s light of grace. But I wasn’t satisfied. I knocked at Jennifer’s bedroom door. She sat on the carpet with her bass guitar, plunking along to a CD, the Smiths or Joy Division, something jangly and aggrieved. “Dad’s an apostate,” she said, “so Mom kicked him out. He’s camping at Manassas Battlefield. I’m probably next.”
Jennifer’s view was hardly impartial, back then especially. So I’ve often wondered. I still wonder. Mom’s flare-up of religious devotion, and her adoration of Father Marius (if that’s what it was)—did that come before or after Dad went to live in the forest? How did all the events of that year bear on one another?
I tried asking Mom only once. I was 22. I’d been invited to spend the summer in Rome with Gordon Berger, an architecture critic I’d met through Mom’s sculptor friends. He was 41 and owned a sprawling flat in the EUR district. He kept the place stocked with guests, young listless expats drifting from couch to couch. I called Mom at home from the phone in Gordon’s bedroom, where we had a partial view of the Colosseo Quadrato. She wanted to hear only about the cafés on the Via Veneto, which I hadn’t visited, and the Villa Borghese, which I had. “Did you see the Daphne?” she asked. “Are her toes incredible?”
I had been that morning to the Lateran Basilica. Not as a worshipper, just as a tourist. But the smell of incense burning in a side chapel had stirred ashes deep in me—in depths I hadn’t known were there. It was the same incense, sweet and musty, they used to burn on holy days at St. Thomas in Arlington.
I steeled myself and asked her, “Did Dad leave after you got so involved with the church? Or was it the other way around?” I didn’t mention Father Marius by name.
“Oh, Walter, I don’t know,” she sighed. “That was another life. What are you hunting for? Just look around you. Look where you are.”
The bed was unmade, strewn with Gordon’s clothes and mine. On the bedside table lay a hunk of travertine, porous and shapeless. A 19th-century still life—a mandolin, a honeycomb, a crust of stale bread, an overturned chalice—hung ironically above the headboard. Elsewhere in the flat, someone chortled. If only Mrs. Imelda had been there, in Rome, to wrap me in her mysteries, her sacraments and grace. That summer I was ready for them. I was hungry for them.
Gordon was writing a monograph on midwestern shopping malls of the 1980s. He seemed to view all of Rome as kitsch, a sham, as though he was secretly afraid of being taken for a fool. Dowdy Germans milling on the Colosseum floor like lion bait; penitents climbing the Scala Santa on their knees; even Bernini’s Saint Teresa, sprawling in ecstasy under a fluorescent bulb that was turned on, like a jukebox, by a two-euro coin: he smirked at all of it. He glugged from a flask of grappa and recited Walter Benjamin to me.
Only Nero’s Domus Aurea impressed him. A complex of lavish, vaulting chambers that had been landfilled, in hatred, by the Romans the emperor had lorded over and abused. Archaeologists had just started bailing the place out. We had a private tour of the dig. We wore hardhats and carried electric lanterns that threw our shadows into the emptiness above. The air smelled of wet dust and mold. On the exhumed walls, you could make out only traces of the ancient frescoes. Most rooms were unreachable, filled to their yawning arches with dirt and smashed crockery. Gordon, breathless, scribbled notes. I brought it up when we fought—in the whole living city, only this had he found worth his attention. Rot, detritus. “Ruins,” he corrected me.
“Anyway, I found him,” Jennifer says. “He’s in Washington. The state.”
“Wait—who? Father Marius?” I’m still on Rome, on incense and Nero.
“Dad,” she says. “Tim Chapman. Our father, who art in Tacoma.” She’s pretty drunk, her speech sounding increasingly like a car whose brakes have given out. “You’re not going to believe this, but LinkedIn suggested him as a connection. I think maybe that means he was looking at my profile. I’m not sure. You have to get a premium membership to see your visitors, and fuck that.”
I gaze at the shadows of tiny dead things in the bowl of my ceiling lamp. My mind has gone very still. It seems to be waiting, distantly, for some wave to crash over me.
Jennifer says, “It’s weird that he’s just getting online, right? After years of being invisible. Decades. On LinkedIn, for chrissake.”
“Maybe he’s looking for a job.”
“Should I message him? What if he doesn’t answer? What if it turns out he wasn’t even looking at me?”
Jennifer has always seemed to me unmoored. Or more charitably, a seeker. She left home at 17 to tour with her band, which broke up on the road, stranding her in Reno. She got her GED at 20 and studied for six years at three colleges in three different states before completing a bachelor’s in public administration, of all things—and then she took up backpacking abroad. Yet she’s taught English in the same small-town high school in Korea, has lived in the same studio apartment, for nine years. That’s longer than I’ve worked or lived anywhere.
“I don’t know what you should do,” I say.
“I’m texting you the link. That’s him, right?”
By the fall of 1997, Mom’s religious passion had flickered out. She went to Sunday Mass only rarely, to weeknight Mass never. I still went to reconciliation on Saturdays (and I would keep going until I was 17, when I came to understand that the church didn’t want me), but Mom would wait in the car or run errands while I confessed to Father Wozzeck in the half-lit booth. Father Marius was no longer mentioned, though I once heard Mom tell her brother Rich on the phone, “It was a huge consolation to me, for what that’s worth.” By the end of the year, Father Marius would be gone entirely, transferred to another parish.
Jennifer set out with her band in the spring. Mom and I moved to an apartment in Douglas Park. From then on, we would move house every year or two, priced out of every corner of Arlington, driven farther and farther into the suburbs. But before all that, in October of 1997, Dad came home for one weekend.
That Friday night, Mom went to stay at Uncle Rich’s. Jennifer locked her bedroom door, blasted music, and wouldn’t come out. I sat with Dad on the sofa, out of politeness. Even before he’d gone to live in the woods, he’d been a mystery to me. Now he was a stranger. With his matted beard and sun-spotted, haggard face, he reminded me of John the Baptist. He had an acrid, dejected smell, as from wet charcoal. He wore a Rolling Stones T-shirt (Gordon would have chortled at that, if I’d shared it), its image long faded. Even the patches on his jeans were worn through, as though he spent a lot of time on his knees.
I didn’t speak. He’d always had little to say to me, and that little was mostly glancing, but now he was forthcoming and blunt. “This place just never felt like home to me. You kids—you especially, Walt … I never really felt like I was your dad.”
He made us pancakes for dinner, then went to the back yard, where he had set up his tent. I knelt at my bedroom window and gazed out at the glowing pyramid, his shadow casting around within. He’d taken me camping only once, the summer before he left. We’d lugged our supplies from his van deep into the forest, passing ruins of old campfires. We had come to a clearing near a creek bed, where a smell of earthy decay hung in the air. He said to me, “I want you to take a really good look around. You’re going to choose the spot where we pitch the tent.” He seemed not to notice the gnats swarming our faces. “Now pick carefully. Wherever you choose, that’s where we have to sleep.”
I understood that his love for me—or at least his interest in me (but to a nine-year-old, these are the same)—teetered upon my choice. Still I picked rashly: a tilted spot of ground, humped with roots and stones.
“Are you sure?” he asked, swiping at the gnats.
I was helpless, sweating. I wanted only for this trial to be over. I said I was sure.
He sighed and went to stake out a better place.
It might be him, this tiny image on the screen of my phone. This dark, clipped mustache, these pendulous ears. The frown. The gaze distant, the brow puckered, as though he’s trying to remember an old song lyric. Yet he doesn’t look so baffled as my dad. This face is steady, somber, a Byzantine icon. But it’s been 27 years, what do I know about him?
Jennifer has gone to bed. Tomorrow she’ll be embarrassed; I imagine I won’t hear from her for a while. But you can’t ever know with Jennifer. Maybe this very moment she’s sending a message to Tim Chapman, this stranger, this icon, and tomorrow she’ll call me again. “He accepted my friend request and read the message—like instantly. But he didn’t reply. What does that mean?”
I’m still under my blankets, though the morning light has drained out of the room. The jeering crow has been joined by others. It occurs to me to look up Gordon Berger. I do the math: he’d be 57, somehow younger than I picture him. After I left him in Rome, weeks earlier than planned, we spoke only once. I had flown to Barcelona, believing I needed to be alone. I didn’t have much money; I stayed in a hostel on the outskirts of the Eixample, where I was kept awake for days by backpackers and partiers—people who, like Jennifer, were happy being foreigners. Every cup of coffee I ordered was a trial. The waiters sneered at you for using English, and when you tried Spanish they sneered because you hadn’t used Catalan. I felt I had to get back to Virginia before I found I was a tourist at home, too—before I stopped believing in home. I called Gordon from the airport in the Barcelona suburbs. I apologized for abandoning him. I used that word, abandoned—I can hear the hungry penance in my voice. Gordon laughed and said, “What was it, exactly, you thought we were?”
Instead, I find myself Googling Father Marius. “Frederick Marius”—there are more of them in the world than I’d have guessed. But here he is, a recent photo in the Santa Fe Catholic Mirror. I know him instantly.
I confess I’m surprised he’s still a priest. Somehow I believed he’d have left the church long ago, or at least gone Episcopal. But he still wears his priestly black, sitting at someone’s kitchen table. It’s a ladies’ Bible study. Women surround him, preened and glowing, six of them in gauzy scarves, the flash glinting on their teeth and turquoise pendants. I can almost smell the makeup. Father’s whorls have gone silver, though the ends hold some blond, like toasted meringue. His face is still sour, his manner even stiffer than I remember—barely tolerant. I imagine him shutting himself in a bathroom while these ladies dispose of some New Mexico creature that has gotten into the house. A scorpion, a rattlesnake. And now, when I’ve stopped waiting for it, the wave crashes over me.
In the morning, I found Dad at the stove, frying steak and eggs. Jennifer stood behind him, her arms around his waist, her face pressed to his back. They both wore flannel shirts and tattered jeans, his blue, hers gray. I waited for them in the dining room. I didn’t sit in my place. It felt wrong, somehow, or I felt obliged to try something new. I sat in Mom’s chair. Dad took mine, Jennifer sat at the head. We ate by the thin sunlight that got in through the kitchen. Grease smoke hung between us.
They made plans. We’d go downtown to the museums, the Natural History, the Air and Space. Jennifer wanted to visit Lincoln, who sat alone in his big marble chair. I began to cry. (I can hear my halting snuffles and breathy sobs.) Dad lowered his knife and fork. “What. What’s wrong with him.”
“I have to go to church.” My voice trembling.
“Is he serious? It’s Saturday.”
“They go to confession,” Jennifer said. “Him and Kathleen.”
Was there worry for me in her voice? Or only her customary scorn? (If it’s impossible to know, can I choose which I believe?) She said to Dad, “It won’t take him long. It’s important to him.” (No, I can’t choose; she didn’t say that—she wouldn’t have.)
She sat in the bucket seat, up front in his work van. I squatted on the oil-crusted carpet in back, with Dad’s bicycle. “She has really done a job on you kids,” he said. He drove too fast, took corners hard. Screwdrivers and bolts clattered loose around me. I held my breath, clutching fistfuls of carpet. I believed I was going to die. “You got 10 minutes, bud,” he told me.
The line at Father Wozzeck’s confessional was too long, I felt too rushed; or that day the curtain wasn’t enough, I needed a door to shut: I went to the storage room where Father Marius heard face-to-face confessions. It was a bright expanse of linoleum tile, much of it stacked to the ceiling with boxes. Against one cinderblock wall a stone altar stood, engraved with Celtic crosses, like something exhumed from a medieval abbey—but below it lay a basket filled with the albs, balled up and stained, that altar boys wore. On a card table in a corner stood the monstrance I had seen at benediction on first Fridays: its halo rays of gold and silver filigree that glittered in the sanctuary’s candlelight, at its center the lozenge eye into which the blessed sacrament would be slotted, like a 50-cent piece, for our adoration. Under these fluorescent tubes, amid the laundry and rusty file cabinets, it seemed cheap, stainless steel, a prop.
At the back of the room, two folding chairs faced each other. Father Marius sat in one, in his priestly black and a long green stole. I took my place in the other. I said, “Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. It has been one week—” and I began to cry.
His composure burned away in an instant. “Did she send you in here?”
I became confused; the “she” who appeared to me was Mrs. Imelda, quilted denim and mounds of flesh, gaze of onerous love. The air smelled of mop water and candle wax. What was I doing here? What was being asked of me?
“There must be some distance,” Father was saying. “For her own progress, to say nothing of propriety. Your mother is not the only parishioner in this church. But she simply won’t hear it.”
He went quiet. The emptiness between us grew dire. I returned to the script I knew: I confessed my sins.
What did I believe I’d done? What wrongs could have weighed on the soul of a 10-year-old boy—a little pleaser like me? Did I believe, already, and confess that Dad had gone to live alone in the woods because something about me, some defect I’d shown, had convinced him I wasn’t his? (Would I have been mistaken?) Did I see already, and confess it, that I didn’t want him to stay?
Here’s what I know. As I told him my sins, Father Marius saw something in me. I could see in his face that he’d seen it. He saw my fear certainly, but also, I believe, my strangeness. I felt very far, always, from the world out there, from its guttering lights, its sudden darkness, its people appearing and dissolving. But I also felt it inside me. It moved through me, burning and stroking me, causing me to glow and contract. It hurt me, but I was hungry for it, too. I had only started to become aware of this strangeness. But I believe Father saw it in me and recognized it.
“I’m very sorry, Walter,” he said, interrupting my confession. “I shouldn’t have laid all that at your feet.” He handed me a box of tissues. “Can you forgive me?”
He looked away, out of politeness, as I wiped my nose and dried my eyes. Then he began to talk. He asked me, “What do you think of the new windows they’ve put in at the rectory? Have you seen them? They’ve got a coating, some chemical mélange—a golden tint that, to my eye, looks oily.”
What I heard was this: Just sit here a moment. There’s no hurry to go. You can stay a little while, if you like. You can stay as long as you need.
