The call came on the rectory phone when Notre Dame was down by three. Father Pollock, watching TV in the den, heard the phone, but the Irish, on USC’s twenty, had just broken huddle. The play was about to begin. Father Pollock hoped Father Anthony would answer. The second ring sounded before the priest remembered Father Anthony had hurried over to St. Catherine’s Home, where one of the nuns was ill.
A nagging, third ring came. Father Pollock sprinted for the phone. Someone named Simmons spoke, sounding scared. To his first question Father Pollock said, “Father Anthony’s not here,” because that’s who the caller, who sounded like a boy, had asked for.
“Can you come?” Simmons said.
“Where are you? What’s the matter?” Father Pollock asked. As he spoke, he stretched the phone’s cord out full length and craned to see the TV in the den. The glimpse of screen he got showed him a commercial. While Simmons babbled Father Pollock’s thoughts were on what might have happened. He had little faith the Irish might have scored, but he hoped the commercial meant a time-out had been called.
Simmons said, “Sodality,” and then whispered, “Indigestion.”
“What are you talking about?” Father Pollack snapped his question.
The stuttering youngster began his explanation over. He had been assisting Father Getz at a Sodality meeting for eighth graders. Father Getz had become indisposed. “He went to see a doctor,” Simmons said.
“Dr. Jack Daniels?”
Simmons whispered, “I don’t know.” Father Pollack’s sarcasm had been lost on the nervous boy.
In the absence of the boozy priest the children ostensibly gathered to learn to serve the Blessed Virgin had gotten out of hand. That was Father Pollock’s guess. Pandemonium reigned, as it would naturally reign when a crowd of early adolescents senses its power. The classroom was in St. Leo’s School, only steps away.
“I’ll be right there.” Father Pollack told the frightened boy. Then he returned the phone to its table and sped back into the den to snap the TV off before he could be tempted by the resumption of the game.
He pulled on his windbreaker and trotted to the school. First and ten, he told himself, as if he were a lineman and the day was glorious and Notre Dame was on the verge of yet another triumph. He let himself into St. Leo’s by the door close to the gym and heard at once an uproar from the second floor. He bounded up the stairs and followed the racket to a classroom lighted up behind its frosted window. He threw the door open and yelled, “Hey!”
His voice had the same effect a rifle shot would have. Heads snapped. Children faced his way. What had been a roar turned into silence. Twenty or so revelers, aged thirteen or fourteen, instantly looked furtive—young hoodlums caught in the act. The ones who were standing began to slide into desk chairs. Some students in chairs tried to inch them into orderly files.
“Knock it off,” Father Pollock barked, and the attempt the students were making to pretend innocence died an instant death.
A reedy youth stood at the chalkboard. Over his street clothes he wore a deacon’s surplice which he had cinched at his waist with a gold-colored cord.
Father Pollock felt his heart sink. The ridiculous young man—who was probably eighteen—had no business wearing a deacon’s long surplice. He had made himself absurd. What had he been thinking?
“Are you here to learn or are you here to act like brats?” Father Pollock glared at the cowed students as he strode to where their shaking instructor stood. He faced the children. He made them meet his eye. He told them if they acted like animals they did not deserve the privilege of a Catholic education. “Get out paper. Get out pens,” he told them. “Each of you is going to write an essay and sign it with your full Christian name. In your essay you will personally tell me, Father Pollock, why you should not be thrown out of this school on your ear. If you act like little criminals you are going to be treated like little criminals. And little criminals do not belong in Catholic schools.”
A girl in round glasses sobbed.
“Stow it,” Father Pollock snapped, and while her nearby friends reached tentatively out to comfort her, other students pulled notebooks from their backpacks and opened them to blank pages. Pens began moving and squiggles of ink traced their way between the ruled lines. Even the girl who’d let her tears flow started writing, sniffing back the nose-goo of her sobs.
Industry and quiet established themselves, and in that atmosphere of imposed control Father Pollock turned to the quaking, skinny youth. “Let’s talk,” he said, and he nodded toward the classroom door. The boy followed him to the hall. Father Pollock closed the door behind them. “What the heck are you doing in that get-up?” he asked. “Simmons? Is that your name? Who told you to put a surplice on?”
The boy was blushing. He said, “Father Getz.”
“If Father Getz told you to run through fire would you run through fire, Simmons? What’s wrong with you? This is Sodality. It’s not a Christmas pageant. You look like one of the wise men. Take that thing off. Put it back where you got it. I’ll stay with your class. What time are you supposed to let them out?”
Simmons was already tugging at his gold-cord cincture. Father Pollock knew the boy would soon cry. He didn’t wait for an answer to his question. He said, “I’ll keep them for ten minutes then I’ll let them go. Enough Sodality for one day, don’t you think?”
Simmons had already started down the hall, but he twisted around to nod his head in an affirmative answer. Father Pollock could have told him he would hang all the children who had caused the ruckus, and Simmons would have nodded in agreement. The boy fled, and Father Pollock watched till he was out of sight before he pulled open the classroom door again.
A flutter, like panic, ran through the room. Obedience, if it had been challenged in his absence, reigned anew. The children concentrated on the essays that would explain why they should not be thrown out of Catholic school on their ears. Father Pollock, his hands clasped behind his back, strode up and down the orderly aisles. His measured march brought him to the window wall, and looking down into the parking lot he saw Simmons, in his civvies now, with a shabby, hip-length jacket on, scuttle out of sight across the street. The boy didn’t look eighteen. He looked like he was twelve. His shoulders sloped and his back bowed like an old man’s. Father Pollock couldn’t see his hands but he imagined Simmons clasping and releasing them, a gesture obsessively repeated, as if whatever the boy needed was always out of grasp.
Where will he go? Father Pollock wondered.
He answered his own question before the boy had even disappeared. Simmons would rush to a church, probably straight to St. Leo’s. He would genuflect and cross himself. He would drop to his knees in front of the statue of the Blessed Virgin. He would pray to her in anguish. He would believe the humiliation he had suffered was God’s way of testing him, and he would ask the Blessed Virgin to help him pass that test and find the strength for a life dedicated to the church.
“Class dismissed,” the priest snapped when he swung around from his window view. He wore the same frown he’d worn since he first walked into the room. In their rush to hand in papers, no child met his eye.
Notre Dame down by three, Father Pollock thought as he pulled the school door shut tight and rattled it to test the lock. He wanted to ignite again his interest in the game, which now would be over except for some blabbermouth analyst yakking on a sports channel. He didn’t turn at the walkway to the rectory, though. He hurried past it with Father Getz in mind, angry about the humiliation that drunkard had caused for poor, pathetic Simmons. Not that the reedy boy didn’t bear much of the blame himself. Two clowns. And who knows how much damage they had done. Making cynics out of Sodality students most likely. Turning an opportunity for a lesson about learning respect for the Blessed Mother into a freak show. What was the lesson in that? Father Pollock imagined himself saying those words to Father Getz. He could see, in his imagination, the surprised look the purple-faced old soak would turn on him.
Lost in rehearsing a speech he knew would wound, Father Pollock let his steps carry him where they would. Without planning it, he came to the gray waterfront with its hearty, commercial bustle. Lumber in great, yellow stacks waited to be loaded onto boats. Cranes moved with the grace of dancers to lift containers off ships. Cannery hands in floppy rubber boots, cigarettes between their lips and their aprons bloody, waited on slimy docks for the silver treasures of salmon and halibut.
Father Pollock inhaled rich, briny odors. Hoists and winches squawked and rumbled all around him. That masculine noise, a sign of work and health, restored his equilibrium. He lost track of the words he would have used to wound Father Getz. His anger emptied out. He let it wash away and became absorbed in the care a fork-lift operator took to move pine two-by-fours—a stack of lumber the color of butter—toward a waiting sling. When he’d watched that task to its conclusion, Father Pollock turned his back on the busy waterfront and climbed through neighborhoods made noisy by natural sounds. Children playing on the cracked pavement of the street lifted their shrill voices. Tenement neighbors called from windows two stories and three stories above the beeps of stalled traffic. The homely streets smelled of onions frying and garbage waiting for tardy trucks. Nothing Father Pollock saw required thought. He strode briskly in the cloud of his own musing until a relic of a church—a mass of stained and crumbling masonry called Holy Name—caught his eye. He pulled himself to a stop.
The building, squared-off in the Romanesque style, stared out at its squalid street with ineffective disapproval. It had gathered its parking lot unto itself with a droopy chain-link fence, as a lady in olden times might have pulled her trailing skirt back from the filth of gutters. A Queen-Anne style home across the street, remodeled as a funeral parlor, shared some of Holy Name’s disdain for the surroundings, but those surroundings carried on with cheerful indifference. Pizza lovers munched greasy slices in a parlor cheek by jowl to the old church. A consignment store stood next to that, and an armchair, dignified but dowdy, was on display in its front window. Next to the parking lot, a storefront church with some kind of evangelical title in the Brazilian language had set itself up in competition with forlorn Holy Name. Father Pollock tried to translate what the title said, but his Portuguese was not up to the task. He turned with a frown of disapproval to Holy Name’s stately steps. They were as wide as the whole front. They had been built to bring the faithful in their pious waves to the old church’s imposing double doors.
Neither of those great, green doors opened at the priest’s tug. They stood rooted in place, as if the habit of using them had died in that parish. Father Pollock tried a humbler door on the building’s left side, and through that more modest entrance he stepped into a dim vestibule with its shabby display of devotional pamphlets. A cardboard box marked Lost & Found stood rich with scarves and mittens. Double doors beyond the Lost & Found were open to the cavern of the sanctuary. Father Pollock, pulling off his cap, stepped across the threshold and stopped next to a baptismal font the size of a bird bath. Carved cherubs held up its veined, marble bowl. How expensive, Father Pollock thought. A dishpan on a counter would have served the purpose just as well. Some extravagance of pride had made the pious dig into their pockets for this Italianate atrocity, and the church’s whole baroque interior spoke of the same extravagance—the altar in its golden glow, the flickering ranks of vigil lights, the studied humility of Mary and Joseph represented by life-size statues, and tortured Jesus dying on his cross.
A sense of grotesqueness soured Father Pollock’s thoughts, but when he turned from the church’s pious altar to escape back to the street, he saw his way out blocked by twelve or fifteen people queueing in through the humble, narrow door the priest had just used. All of them came dressed in their best, and a young mother among them beamed down on an infant wrapped in white and cradled in her arms.
Baptismal party. Father Pollock did not need to be told why the group had come. Grandfathers. Grandmothers. Uncles. Aunts. Cousins of various ages. The boys and men all wearing ties. The women in the shoes and dresses they only wore for weddings and funerals. The decorum of the church imposed quiet on them all. Even the baby in its lacy garment resisted any urge it might have had to bleat.
The family loosely organized itself around the baptismal font—the marble indulgence Father Pollock had been condemning in his thoughts seconds before. Now it seemed to him irreverent to have thought so critically. The marble extravagance, for the family, was the visible sign of the sacrament about to be performed. The ones who weren’t admiring the baby admired the font, but all eyes turned as if on cue toward the altar, and when Father Pollock looked where others were looking he saw a robed priest and an altar boy in cassock and surplice genuflect before the tabernacle and then start down the long aisle toward the waiting faithful, proceeding with liturgical dignity at the required, measured pace.
Instead of leaving, Father Pollack took a seat in a pew a few yards from the font. He sat turned to look back at where the family waited for the priest. Their stillness made him want to stay and witness the welcoming of the infant to the faith. He knew the rationale for what was about to happen was the washing away of original sin, but he didn’t let his thought dwell on that doctrinal point. He admired instead everything else about the sacrament that had made the family interrupt its ordinary afternoon, and shine its shoes and shower and style its hair and put on its best clothes to collect in a group in the back of Holy Name and await the mystery to be performed.
One male member of the family, an older man, separated himself from his relatives and joined Father Pollock in his pew. The priest had to slide over to make room for him. He thought, before he glanced at the man’s face, his pew-mate might have wearied himself climbing the stairs to the church and then grown tired of standing while the officiant and his acolyte made their stately progress from the altar.
But the man wasn’t weary. He smirked at Father Pollock. His florid face—fleshy and broad—crinkled just a bit, only enough to make his smirk a greeting. His eyes, beneath their puffy lids, conveyed disdain. He was a cynic, and Father Pollock was not surprised when, just after the officiating priest in his brocade and lace went gliding by, his new companion leaned toward him to whisper. “Can you believe all this?” The man spoke in a low voice only Father Pollock could hear. As he spoke, he gave his head a toss in the direction of the group he’d separated himself from. He meant his relatives. He meant the piety they had put on for this special occasion. But Father Pollock—whose zipped-up jacket hid his Roman collar—understood the man intended his barbed whisper to mean more. He meant the whole, baroque interior of Holy Name Church, with its plaster-of-Paris stations of the cross and its dusty chandeliers and stained-glass windows. He had mistaken Father Pollock for a layman like himself, and he had assumed—perhaps because of how casually the priest was seated—that he was some sort of tourist in this church, someone who had come to see with his own eyes a curious ritual of faith.
The impression lasted only a few seconds. One of the older women in the group around the font quietly called a name. To Father Pollock, it sounded like ‘Stan,’ but he wasn’t sure that was exactly what he’d heard. At the summons, his pew-mate rose and lumbered the few steps it took to make him once again a member of the beaming group waiting at the font for the trickling of holy water on the infant’s skull.
Father Pollock turned his back. He faced the altar and tried to analyze to what degree he felt annoyed by the question he’d been asked. No clarity came to his mind. Simmons came instead—Simmons looking wimpy in his surplice and failing to tame the eighth-grade demons. If some cynic wished to sneer and say, ‘Can you believe all this?’ he should say it about Simmons. Simmons was a sham. He had no force, no power. He put his faith in garments even children knew to mock.
Father Pollock’s own garment was a baseball jacket zipped up to his chin. If he shed that garment now, if he stood up with his Roman collar showing, would Stan the mocker, the cynic, the wise guy have an answer to his question? The collar would tell the cynic ‘Of course I believe all this. I am part of all this. I am a person of faith.’
Notre Dame down by three, Father Pollock thought. The football team’s solidity returned him to a comfortable world where people did not make snide comments or poke their noses into matters that weren’t any of their business.
He rose to go. He skirted the group surrounding the mother and child. He forged an angry look to ward off anyone who might challenge him about belief, but no one challenged him. No one met his eye. The individual supposedly called Stan wasn’t even discernible. He had melted into the supportive family taking time out of its Saturday to welcome to their faith a red-faced child.
What welcomed Father Pollock to the outside street was a fender-bender accident. He hadn’t even time to sigh relief at having put behind him the quandary of his unsettled thoughts. The driver of a Dodge Colt had scraped the door and fender of a Chevrolet Camaro that had been steering into traffic from its parking place. The screech of metal on metal had captured attention up and down the street. Father Pollock froze to see what would happen next. Drivers slowed and gawked. Two boys with pizza slices in their hands stepped off the curb, maneuvering to get a better view among the slowed cars and the rush of sidewalk passers-by.
The drivers of both cars pushed open their doors and stepped out. The woman driving the Camaro said, “Jesus!” as she eyed the ugly scrape on her car’s tan paint. The Dodge driver fingered the dent he found in his right fender. Each eyed the damage done to the other, then the woman yelled, “What the fuck were you doing?”
“Lady, you should have looked.” The man spoke firmly but not in the same range of rage as the shouting woman.
The woman, the tails of her coat flaring, charged two steps forward and shoved him.
“Hey!” he shouted, and he raised his hands to ward off further menace.
The scuffle, slight as it was, electrified six or seven scruffy boys. They’d been passing a football back and forth as they walked. They looked like they had come from some pick-up game. All were disheveled. The shove they’d witnessed, and the defense against it, made them roar. They packed in close to the drivers facing off. Others on the street thronged forward, too. A driver who had seen the altercation halted his car, setting off a honking protest from drivers stuck behind him.
The woman, shouting things Father Pollock could not hear above the sudden uproar from the street, slapped at the other driver’s raised hands. Her aggression made him double his hands into fists. He yelled things back at her.
Father Pollock hurried down the steps, dismayed at this rude rupture in his day. He felt like someone forced to witness the infliction of a wound. His strongest wish was to quickly turn away, though he had to thread through gawkers to do it. As soon as he escaped the crowd’s thickest knot he broke into a speed-walk in a direction aimed at bringing him swiftly back to St. Leo’s. His route led him into a neighborhood of seedier streets, where pawn shops stood cheek by jowl next to businesses that cashed checks for a fee. He paid no attention until, in glancing for a street name on a post, he saw the blazon display an adult book store offered. XXX screamed in giant letters across most of the building’s front. Beneath the letters, window displays showed mannequins of scantily clad women, some with feather boas draped around their necks.
The priest looked away. He looked again. He took three steps. He reversed himself and stepped back to where he’d been.
Can you believe all this? His eyes were on the garbage spilling from its plastic sacks and XXX blazing like a brand burned into flesh.
Can you believe all this? That’s what the pouch-faced cynic had sneered in Holy Name. ‘A know-it-all, a wise-guy,’ Father Pollack thought. ‘I should have given him what-for.’
As soon as he thought it, the priest knew what he’d do: He’d return to Holy Name; he’d find the cynic and drag him, by the ear if necessary, to Smut and Garbage Street, and say his own words right back to his face. ‘Can you believe all this?’
He bulled past the overflowing trash cans and the grimy store fronts he had passed before. An aggressive feeling propelled him. ‘By the ear,’ he thought. ‘Drag him by his ear.’
Blue lights. The sight of police in front of Holy Name brought Father Pollock’s purposeful stride to a halt. An officer stood writing down testimony the gesticulating driver of the Dodge was pouring forth. The Camaro woman sat sideways in her car, her face a mask of venom.
Father Pollock skipped up the stairs to Holy Name’s side door. He tugged. It resisted. Locked. He tried the massive, main doors, too. No luck. He returned to the side door and pounded. No one came.
The striders on the sidewalk, the investigating police, the Dodge driver reciting his story—Father Pollock saw no one free enough to tell him where the family with the infant might have gone, though the priest imagined a clear picture of the innocent child in his mother’s arms, she and the baby surrounded by loving relatives, the whole clan squeezed in shoulder to shoulder at some family-friendly restaurant, enjoying pancakes and eggs and orange juice in celebration of the sacrament that cleanses the soul of original sin and ushers a newborn into the light of God’s mercy and grace.
Father Pollock trudged back to St. Leo’s and sat in the back pew of the almost empty church. Two kneeling women, old and widely separated, knelt mouthing prayers and moving rosary beads through their arthritic fingers. They faced the glowing altar, praying to their unseen God. The hum of traffic from the street outside did nothing to disturb them, nor did the shouts of boys and the thump of basketballs on the playground by the school. After minutes, maybe three, another crone limped her way past the baptismal fount. She moved slowly, to the rhythm of a black cane she required for support. When she reached a pew five rows ahead of Father Pollock, she halted to gauge the difficulties it posed to someone as crippled as she. Whatever her assessment told her about impediments, she resolutely drew herself up as straight as her bent back allowed and maneuvered at her crippled pace to the center of the pew. She lay her black cane on the cushioned bench. She lowered herself in measured increments to kneel. Kneeling made her barely taller than the pew in front of her. She rested her forearms and elbows on the back of that pew and let her chin sink to rest on her bony, wrinkled hands. With her eyes fixed on the tabernacle, she whispered to the God her faith permitted her see behind the frame of glistening wood, the same God who would, in her belief, welcome her to heaven when her heavy treading here on earth came to an end.
Father Pollock rose. He found his way to the sacristy. In the dressing room between the altar and the rectory, he pulled on a white surplice and cinched a golden cord around his waist. Then he sat in the rectory’s dark den, facing the blank TV, waiting for the Holy Ghost he hoped would blaze and sear.
Robert Kinerk writes fiction, poetry, and plays. His most recent publication is ‘Tales from the Territory: Stories of Southeast Alaska.’ A long-time Alaskan, Kinerk now lives with his wife, Anne, in Cambridge, MA.