A Short Story By Greg Venne

Old women do not attract the attention of priests. A parish can always count so many widows, soon-to-be-widows, and a smattering of old maids like myself. The priest will conduct our quiet funerals in front of a sparse congregation. A misperception, old women appear to give the most reverence to the priest, and seemingly without question or scrutiny.

The priest currently assigned to St. Catherine’s pushes his gentle manner and kind, loving words to excess. When children gather near him, his hands reach down and he gently cups the back of their heads. He gives a reassuring rub and then he spreads out his arms and hands to their parents in a jubilant welcome. These are fleshless embraces. The young of the parish take a reward from his smile and his extended hand. Now, to me, it seems to be a smile painted on a cheap doll. The priests of my younger years carried stern faces, demeanors earned by the heavy duties they carried.

Father Megner, the priest before Father Boldt arrived in the mid-twenties, chewed on his own mouth. He sucked on his large teeth, and his gaunt face was pocked. To match his straight and greasy dark hair, an odor lingered around him. He was an awfully ugly man. As best anyone knew, he laundered his own clothes and cooked his own meals. Refusing to use an automobile, he tended and cared for his horse that he hitched to a buggy. The next priest, Boldt, immediately tore down the small stable adjacent to the rectory.

My brother, Steven, didn’t care about or see the ugliness in Megner. According to Steven, Megner knew history and philosophy, and he considered his job to be learned. One of three or four young men that gathered around Megner, Steven heard his history lessons. While the rest of us acquiesced to the unfolding of world war, Megner placed it in an historical sequence that he explained to his small gang of young men.

“I hear one half of history at school,” Steven said. “I hear the other half from Father Megner.”

“Maybe you know too much,” Mother said.

“Father says that we…America…thinks it will alter history if we enter the war in Europe. But history always alters us.”

“I don’t know what that means,” Mother said. I didn’t understand until Auggie died. Auggie and I were courting. Before he left for France, he asked me to wait for him. When word came of Auggie’s death, Megner did not come to the house. At the cemetery his words came from the missal. It seemed he stood alongside our sorrow, but he did not hold it himself. Steven said later that historians do that.

In the confessional a week or two past the funeral Mass, I started by rote, “Bless me Father, for I…”

“Helen, the world sins and those are not your personal sins. Don’t worry about sin…about your sins right now. Don’t worry about that,” he said.

“I’m lost,” I said. “I feel empty now. I cried all week. But now I don’t know if I should cry more.”

“Does someone tell you not to cry?” he asked.

“Mother says that it’s time for me to ‘get on with the world.’”

“You’ll feel your sorrow until the sorrow just seems normal,” he said. “Just be sad, go ahead. And then it will be there with your happiness.”

“Auggie didn’t propose. We knew we wanted to…”

“That’s just so many words; a proposal is just the words. You know what Auggie felt,” he said. “Is your mother saying that you don’t have the full right to be sad?”

“No…she says…” I said.

“Helen…Miss Prevett, for your penance, go home and cry all night long, tonight, tomorrow night, for as many nights as you need to cry, cry!” he said. I am still struck by his wisdom. He added a simple offer before I was able to push myself up from the kneeler. “Maybe when you are ready, you might work as the housekeeper in the rectory…here in the church. But when you are ready and you will know when.” Then he slid the little door closed.

A lull came in our supper conversation that evening and I filled it in with Megner’s offer. It seemed safe to disclose that part of my confession.

“Oh, no!” Mother blurted. But Father put down his fork and raised his hand across his plate.

“We…you should leave a job like that to someone from a family with need,” he said and he kept his hand poised above his plate. “That’s who should take a job like that.”

Mother watched me closely that night. She insisted we pray the rosary. I stayed awake for several days, but I was afraid to cry. I did not know how to take advice from a priest, one who used my first name, who knew who I was behind the opaque screen of the confessional.  I suppose, if I admit it, I understand him now, his advise to cry, and yes, his offer. Father’s steady hand above his plate is unforgettable!

When Megner died suddenly, members of the parish cleaned the rectory from top to bottom. They took most of his belongings a few miles from town and started a bonfire. In less than a week from his arrival, Boldt enlisted some of those same men to tear down the old stable.

Boldt carried his weight and muscle on a short frame. At evening in the heat of summer, he might be a lone swimmer crossing the Wisconsin River. Father noticed him one evening out our parlor window. From a distance, I saw the priest pull himself from the river, dressed only in his swim trunks.

He might put his cigar down for a few moments to talk or work, and of course to swim, but when not saying Mass, he had it either in his mouth or on its way to his gaping lips.

Only speaking from my experience, he didn’t talk directly to younger women either. Perhaps my sister, Corrine, said something once, but I doubt if it was a lengthy conversation. Of course there was the confessional. “Three Our Fathers and Three Hail Marys.”

Boldt looked at me though. He looked at Corrine as well. Just a couple of times I noticed him pause as he moved onto the sidewalk after Mass. He greeted Father, nodded at Mother and passed by Corrine and I, his eyes curious about something. His eyeballs stayed still for a moment or two and even his hands halted in their motion. I knew I had been looked at. Corrine parted her lips and drew her head away. I would say both of us were uncomfortable for those moments, so discomfited as to say nothing to one another.

Boldt did not seem to look at his housekeeper. He knew Emma worked next to him preparing for Mass, cleaning the rectory, and cooking his meals. As it’s said in most places, the priest had a housekeeper.

Emma appeared shapeless with simple strands of hair pulled down and tied in a long ponytail. As colorless as light-brown hair can be, it turned a mottled gray over the years, always tied into a tail. She set her facial expression to her work: simple jobs, tedious and familiar tasks.

Boldt took his release with Emma, regardless. I have to believe Steven’s account, one he developed by literally standing in the shadows of the rectory at midnight. He confirmed the gossip of others. On most Wednesdays Emma left the rectory at midnight. With her drab hair hanging loose and her step less measured, she left by a back door. I imagined the near bare torso of Boldt standing a few steps back, the body I saw as he pulled himself from the river.

On a schedule, a routine that kept him sated, Emma joined with him as she might have washed the floors or set the altar cloths. This is my telling, my perception of such an association between a priest and a waif of a housekeeper.

But if Emma’s heart raced, if Boldt raised his hand gently to her face, no one I know ever witnessed the acts that would precede or follow save Steven and a few others standing in a secret shadow. Emma had to think, and think about it daily…and all day on some days…and remain expressionless as she moved from task to task. A small and thin woman, she squared away her shoulders and stood erect. Only age brought on a stoop common to all of us.

Mother and Father knew, for sure they knew. And they would have acquiesced to the persistent deception. The parish…no one from the parish negotiated the protracted sophism. We all strived to be virtuous, to be held in God’s grace. This was something concurrent but not congruent necessarily, not to me anyway. Without seeing any hint of romance, I felt deeply sad.

Boldt retired with the title of the Right Reverend Monsignor Boldt. Taking Emma with him, he moved to a lake home fifty or more miles north of Twin Pines, far enough away to almost vanish from our thoughts. Maybe some felt that Emma and Boldt settled into a little love nest. But when Boldt died, his body returned to Twin Pines for a stately funeral overseen by the diocese. Maybe I was the only one looking for Emma, or the only one waiting for a mention of her name. Nothing! The celebrant of the Mass praised Boldt’s stalwart shepherding of St. Catherine’s congregation, but nowhere in his homily did he insert the existence of Emma or her co-existence with Boldt.

Raised bronze letters announce the remains of Right Reverend Monsignor Boldt on a gravestone in Saint Catherine’s Cemetery. I am left to guess that Emma’s remains lie in a modest grave 50 or more miles north of here, and no title in raised letters will point to her steadfast service to a congregation, to a church, to a priest!

For a long time I wanted to be the one to smash the deception. But how can anyone do that, explain it all and still keep Emma’s deep goodness intact? As long as she knelt with such dedicated subservience at Mass, the rest of us could glance away for a moment or two. The clean church, the crisp vestments and altar cloths, the Angeles bell precisely tolled made us all Catholic. More than anything, her penitence helped us all atone.

This sin, his sin, did not push us way from church. And if we doubted church, religion, believing in priests, we did not show it unless we doubted deep inside, privately. I still go to Mass and any observer could say religiously so.

I saw Boldt rise from the river without his holy garments. He was a well-formed man who loved the rigor of a strenuous swim, who took the pleasure of a woman, a primal form of being a man.

Mother and Father did not feel sad about all the contradictions, the obvious violation of Emma. At least I did not see that as the source for any of their everyday and awfully human anxiety. Did they believe that virtue had to exist alongside primitive appetites for even or especially for a priest?

One little thought I have had for a while tells me that I felt sad because I was afraid. Whatever I was, however I appeared, that priest looked at me long enough. I didn’t think I offered any other reason for his interest, for his momentary appraisal. Maybe Megner based his offer on innocent and genuine concern, but my father always showed himself to be a smart man.

I’m an old woman now, but I hold back from any starry-eyed reverence for our current parish priest. If he is the one to celebrate my funeral Mass, I have already matched his indifference.

Note: This short story is an adaptation of a chapter from my novel, Behind A Still Face.