and Dad all of it, I just let it loose. And when Mom heard how I’d beaten Lorraine, how I’d kicked her, kicked the life out of that child, well, you can imagine the look on her face. When she saw the bloodstains all over that carpet, on the floor, on the walls … And then Mom and Dad just put me in the shower, cleaned me up, and drove me straight south to the Betty Ford Center in Rancho Mirage, California, and I was there for ninety days.”
“Jim, I’m so sorry.”
“Reuben, I was lucky. Lorraine could have put me behind bars for what I did to her. As it turned out, she and Professor Maitland had gone back to England before Mom and Dad ever came knocking on my door. Mom found out all that. The professor’s mother in Cheltenham had suffered a severe stroke. Lorraine had made all the arrangements with the university. So she was all right, it seemed. Mom was able to verify that. And the house in south Berkeley was up for sale. Whether Lorraine had checked into a hospital herself after I beat her, well, we never could find out.”
“I hear you, Jim, I know what you’re telling me. I understand.”
“Reuben, I am nobody’s hero, nobody’s saint. If it wasn’t for Mom and Dad, if they hadn’t taken me to Betty Ford, if they hadn’t stuck with me through that, I don’t know where I’d be now. I don’t know if I’d be alive. But look, listen to what I’m telling you. Play along with Celeste for the sake of the baby. That’s lesson number one. Let her have that baby, Reuben, because you do not know how you might regret it to your dying day if she gets rid of it because of something that you say! Reuben, there are times when it is so painful for me to even see children, to see little kids with their parents, I … I tell you, I don’t know if I could work in a regular Catholic parish, Reuben, with a school and kids. I just don’t. There’s a reason I’m deep in the Tenderloin. There’s a reason my mission is working with addicts. There’s a reason, all right.”
“I understand. Look, I’m going to go talk to her now, apologize.”
“Do it, please,” said Jim. “And who knows, Reuben? Maybe somehow this child can keep you connected to us, to me, to Mom and Dad, to your flesh and blood family, to things that matter for all of us in life.”
Reuben went at once to knock on Celeste’s door. The house was quiet. But he could see the light was on in her room.
She was in her nightgown but immediately invited him in. She was frosty, but polite. He stood there and made his apologies to her as sincerely as he could.
“Oh, I understand,” she said with a faint sneer. “Don’t worry about it. This will all be over for us soon enough.”
“I want you to be happy, Celeste,” he said.
“I know that, Reuben, and I know you’ll be a good father to this baby. Even if Grace and Phil weren’t here to do the dirty work. I never had any real doubt about that. Sometimes the most childish and immature men make the best fathers.”
“Thank you, Celeste,” he said, forcing an icy smile. He kissed her on the cheek.
No need to repeat that parting shot to Jim when he went back to his room.
Jim was by the fire still and obviously deep in his thoughts. Reuben settled into his chair as before.
“Tell me,” Reuben said, “is this the real reason that you became a priest?”
For a long moment Jim didn’t respond. Then he looked up as if he were slightly dazed. In a low voice, he said, “I became a priest because I wanted to, Reuben.”
“I know that, Jim, but did you feel you had to make amends for the rest of your life?”
“You don’t understand,” said Jim. He sounded weary, dispirited. “I took my time deciding what to do. I traveled. I spent months in a Catholic mission in the Amazon. I spent a year studying philosophy in Rome.”
“I remember that,” Reuben said. “We’d get these great packages from Italy. And I couldn’t figure out why you weren’t coming home.”
“I had a lot of choices, Reuben. Maybe for the first time in my life, I had real choices. And the archbishop asked me the very same question, actually, when I asked to enter the priesthood. We discussed the whole affair. I told him everything. We talked about atonement, and what it means to become a priest—to live as a priest year in and year out for the rest of one’s life. He insisted on another year of sobriety in the world before he’d accept my application to the seminary. Usually he demanded five years of sober living, but admittedly, my period of drinking had been relatively short. And then there was Grandfather Spangler’s donation and Mom’s ongoing support. I worked every day at St. Francis at Gubbio as a volunteer during that year. By the time I entered the seminary, I’d been sober three years, and I was on strict probation. One drink and I would be out. I went through all that because I wanted to, Reuben. I became a priest because that’s what I wanted to do with my life.”
“What about faith?” Reuben asked. He was remembering what Margon had said, that Jim was a priest who didn’t believe in God.
“Oh, it’s about faith,” said Jim. His voice was low now and more confidential. “Of course, it’s about faith— faith that this is God’s world and we’re God’s children. How could it not be about faith? I think if one truly loves God with all one’s heart, then one
Reuben was unable to speak. He just shook his head.
“Think about it,” Jim said in a whisper. “Looking at each person and thinking, ‘God made this being; God put a soul into this being!’ ” He sat back in the chair and sighed. “I try. I stumble. I get up. I try again.”
“Amen,” said Reuben in a reverent whisper.
“I wanted to work with addicts, with drunks, with people whose weaknesses I understood. Above all, I wanted to do something that mattered, and I was convinced that as a priest I could do that. I could make some difference in people’s lives. Maybe I could even save a life now and then—save a life, imagine—to make some kind of amends for the life I’d destroyed. You could say that AA and the Twelve Steps saved me along with Mom and Dad. And yes, they led to my decision. But I had choices. And faith is part of it. I came out of the whole nightmare having faith. And a kind of crazy gratitude that I did not have to be a doctor! I can’t tell you how much I really did not want to be a doctor! Medicine doesn’t need any more coldhearted selfish bastards. Thank God, I got out of that.”
“I can’t quite understand it,” said Reuben. “But I’ve never had much faith in God myself.”
“I know,” said Jim, looking into the little gas fire. “I knew that about you when you were a little kid. But I’ve always had faith in God. The creation speaks to me of God. I see God in the sky and in the falling leaves. That’s always the way it was for me.”
“I think I know what you mean,” Reuben said in a low voice. He wanted Jim to go on.
“I see God in the little kindnesses people do for one another. I see God in the eyes of the worst down-and- out derelicts I deal with.…” Jim broke off suddenly, shaking his head. “Faith isn’t a decision, is it? It’s something you admit to having, or something you admit that you don’t have.”
“I think you’re right about that.”
“That’s why I never preach to people about the supposed sin of not believing,” said Jim. “You’ll never hear me condemning a nonbeliever as a sinner. That makes no sense to me at all.”
Reuben smiled. “And maybe that’s why you sometimes give people the wrong impression. They think you don’t believe when in fact you do.”
“Yes, that does happen now and then,” said Jim, with a soft smile. “But it doesn’t matter. How people believe in God is a vast subject, isn’t it?”
A silence fell between them. There was so much Reuben wanted to ask.
“Did you ever see or hear from Lorraine?” he asked.
“Yes,” he said. “I wrote an amends letter about a year after I left Betty Ford. I wrote more than one. But they came back to me from the forwarding address she’d left in Berkeley. Then I got Simon Oliver to confirm that she was in fact in Cheltenham and at that address. I couldn’t blame her for returning my letters. I wrote to her again, laying it all out in more candid terms. I told her how sorry I was, how in my eyes I was guilty of murder for what I’d done to the baby, how I feared I had irreparably hurt her so that she could never have a child. I got a brief but very compassionate note: she was all right; she was fine; not to worry. I had done her no lasting harm; I should go on with my life.
“Then before I went into the seminary, I wrote to her again, asking after her welfare and telling her of my decision to become a priest. I told her that time had only deepened my sense of the wrong that I’d done to her. I told her how the Twelve Steps and my faith had changed my life. I put too damned much of my own plans and
