That Dammed Beaver, page 15
Sitting again in the confessional, he said a short prayer to the Virgin Mary to get in the mood for hearing confessions. He wiped his lips with his handkerchief, cleared his throat, and pushed back the panel, inclining his ear to hear a woman’s confession. The panel slid back with a sharp grating noise. Father Francis whispered his ritual prayer and made the sign of the cross. The woman hadn’t been to confession for three months and had missed mass twice for no good reason. He questioned her determinedly, indignant with this woman who had missed mass for no good reason. In a steady whisper he told her the story of an old woman who had crawled on the ice to get to mass. The woman hesitated, then told about missing her morning prayers… “Yes, my child, yes, my child…” “And about certain thoughts…” “Now about these thoughts; let’s look at it in this way…” He gave the woman absolution and told her to say the beads once for her penance.
Closing the panel on the women’s side, he sat quietly for a moment in the darkness of the confessional. He was a young priest, very interested in confessions.
Father Francis turned to the other side, pushing back the panel to hear some man’s confession. Resting his chin on his hand after making the sign of the cross, he did not bother trying to discern the outline of the head and shoulders of the man kneeling in the corner.
The man said in a husky voice: “I wanna get off at the corner of King and Yonge Street.”
Father Francis sat up straight, peering through the wirework. The man’s head was moving. He could see his nose and eyes. His heart began to beat unevenly. He sat back quietly.
“Cancha hear me, wasamatter, I wanna get off at King and Yonge,” the man said insistently, pushing his nose through the wirework.
On the man’s breath there was a strong smell of whiskey. Father Francis nervously slid the panel back into position. As the panel slid into place he knew it sounded like the closing of doors on a bus or streetcar. There he was hearing confessions, and a drunken man on the other side of the panel thought him a conductor on a streetcar. He would go into the vestry and tell Father Marlow.
Father Francis stepped out of the confessional to look around the cathedral. Men and women in the pews and on the penitents’ benches wondered why he had come out of the confessional twice in the last few minutes when so many were waiting. Father Francis wasn’t feeling well, that was the trouble. Walking up the aisle, he rubbed his smooth cheek with his hand, thinking hard. If he had the man thrown out he might be a tough customer and there would be a disturbance in the cathedral. Such a disturbance would be sure to get in the papers. Everything got in the papers. There was no use telling it to anybody. Walking erectly he went back to the confessional. Father Francis was sweating.
Rubbing his shoulder blades uneasily against the back of the confessional, he decided to hear a woman’s confession. It was evading the issue – it was a compromise, but it didn’t matter; he was going to hear a woman’s confession first.
The woman, encouraged by many questions from Father Francis, made an extraordinarily good confession, though sometimes he did not seem to be listening very attentively. He thought he could hear the man moving. The man was drunk – drunkenness, the over-indulgence of an appetite, the drunken state. Scholastic psychology. Cardinal Mercier’s book on psychology had got him through the exam at the seminary.
“When you feel you’re going to tell a lie, say a short prayer to Mary, the mother of God,” he said to the woman.
“Yes, Father.”
“Some lies are more serious than others.”
“Yes, Father.”
“But they are lies just the same.”
“I tell mostly white lies,” she said.
“They are lies, lies, lies, just the same. They may not endanger your soul, but they lead to something worse. Do you see?”
“Yes, Father.”
“Will you promise to say a little prayer every time?”
Father Francis could not concentrate on what the woman was saying. But he wanted her to stay there for a long time. She was company. He would try and concentrate on her. He could not forget the drunken man for more than a few moments.
The woman finished her confession. Father Francis, breathing heavily, gave her absolution. Slowly he pushed back the panel – a streetcar, a conductor swinging back the doors on a streetcar. He turned deliberately to the other side of the confessional, but hesitated, eager to turn and hear another confession. It was no use – it couldn’t go on in that way. Closing his eyes he said three “Our Fathers” and three “Hail Marys,” and felt much better. He was calm and the man might have gone.
He tried to push back the panel so it would not make much noise, but moving slowly it grated loudly. He could see the man’s head bobbing up, watching the panel sliding back.
“Yes, my son,” Father Francis said deliberately.
“I got to get off at King and Yonge,” the man said stubbornly.
“You better go, you’ve no business here.”
“Say, there, did you hear me say King and Yonge?”
The man was getting ugly. The whiskey smelled bad in the confessional. Father Francis drew back quickly and half closed the panel. That same grating noise. It put an idea into his head. He said impatiently: “Step lively there; this is King and Yonge. Do you want to go past your stop?”
“All right, brother,” the man said slowly, getting up clumsily.
“Move along now,” Father Francis said authoritatively.
“I’m movin’; don’t get so huffy,” the drunk said, swinging aside the curtains of the confessional, stepping out to the aisle.
Father Francis leaned back and nervously gripped the leather seat. He began to feel very happy. There were no thoughts at all in his head. Suddenly he got up and stepped out to the aisle. He stood watching a man going down the aisle swaying almost imperceptibly. The men and women in the pews watched Father Francis curiously, wondering if he was really unwell because he had come out of the confessional three times in a half-hour. Again he went into the confessional.
At first Father Francis was happy hearing the confessions, but he became restive. He should have used shrewd judgment. With that drunken man he had gone too far, forgotten himself in the confessional. He had descended to artifice in the confessional to save himself from embarrassment.
At the supper table he did not talk much to the other priests. He had a feeling he would not sleep well that night. He would lie awake trying to straighten everything out. The thing would first have to be settled in his own conscience. Then perhaps he would tell the bishop.
GOODBYE, GOD
MARTY GERVAIS
I was the fifth born, the fifth son, but the first in my family to be born in a hospital. All the others in a house on George Avenue. I was also born on my brother’s birthday… No one knew what to call me. I started out as Douglas, then it was Charlie, then it was Allen, then it was… Well, it was finally my uncle, a Catholic priest, who broke the deadlock and called me Henry, naming me after himself. He stepped out of the church on a grey windy day in early November, and presented me: my wispy forehead damp with baptism. I was finally saved from Limbo the place where a heap of unbaptized dead babies wind up…
I was six years old and I could ride a bike and read a book and stay up an extra half hour every night… It wasn’t a good time though, this being 1952, and Saturday mornings with the sirens in Detroit jarring us all awake like an alarm clock, reminding us we were at war. War with Russia, and there’ll come the day when the Russians will paratroop from the sky to blow up our homes and bury us alive… And my neighbours back then started tunnelling backyard bunkers, places to hide, a refuge, and they were storing up beans and weiners and Vernors and Mars bars…But my dad said there was no point in doing that – we’ll all be dead, but we’ll all go Heaven straight away because the Russians weren’t Catholics, and we were, but, like the Russians, the Protestants were all going to Hell too, and so they better build the bomb shelters – they’re all going to Hell – they weren’t part of the one true Holy Apostolic Roman Catholic Church.
My first confession. I was seven. The nuns at St. Thomas told me my soul was black from sin, and the only way to wash away that evil was to confess. We practiced in the basement of the school, kneeling on the concrete floor, our hands clasped together, eyes shut, and reciting the Act of Contrition: Oh, my God, I am heartily sorry for having offended Thee, and I detest all my sins, because I dread the loss of Heaven, and the pains of Hell, but most of all because they offend Thee, my God, Who are all good and deserving of all my love.
I was afraid of God. Kept expecting he was going to zap the Earth any minute because the nuns were constantly forewarning us that we knew not the day, nor the hour… What the hell? What kind of God is this that he can’t even give us a little bit of a warning! And he was always watching us, knowing our every step. What kind of creep would do that? But this was God. What I couldn’t understand, however, was all the fuss about Satan. He seemed like God’s biggest competitor, and if God was all powerful, and Satan was all Evil, then why wouldn’t God just zap him and get rid of him? Besides, why was it so much easier to go to Hell than Heaven. And why resist? Anyway, when I was about eight or nine, I wondered about all this stuff, and thought maybe there was no Satan, maybe it was God’s way of frightening us, so I stood there one day in my room, all by myself, and glanced around, and thought, Hey, let’s go for it. “Okay, take my soul if you’d like – it’s yours!” Satan never appeared. It’s not like he tapped on the window, and said, “Henry, open up!” But over the next couple of months, I was testing 100% on all my tests, without ever studying, and I was on my feet in the classroom answering questions with words I didn’t even know the meaning of, but now I did… And my cursive handwriting suddenly was the best in the school, and I was gobbling up book after book, and my head was spinning with…and…and…
I watched men in felt fedoras ogling the nyloned curves of the legs of demure women. That’s when I heard those words. Men would parry about them, guffaw, mutter things I never understood – names for a body part I knew nothing about. I was awed by such lingo, vocabularies that were alien, foreign, out of sync, exotic, mysterious – flaming lips, hoohaw, cha-cha, snapper, muff, Lady V, kitty, cupcake, beaver, cooter… I wrote them all down, committed them to memory, recited them like a square dance tune – snapper, muff, cupcake, beaver…cha-cha, kitty, hoohaw, cooter… It’s a do-si-do and tip of the hat, one step forward and two steps back, cowboy cowboy marry me, I’ll bake you a cherry pie, Well, thank you very kindly, ma’am, but I’m too young to die. Well do-si-do side-by-side, one step forward, one step back, cupcake, beaver, snapper, muff, cowboy’s kitty is not enough, it’s do-si-do and tip of the hat, we’ll all lay down back to back… I didn’t know what the hell it all meant. I loved the sound, the beat, the tumble and turn of words, a “lexicon of lust” as the priest told me when I asked if these were “bad words,” grown-up obscenities. I saw the old priest slumped behind the grating of the confessional, shaking his bald head in disgust, yet inviting me to repeat each word, to pronounce them clearly, and slowly, and I mouthed them: cooter, cupcake, kitty, cha-cha, hoohaw, snapper, beaver, muff…
I was afraid of God. We counted sins. Venial sins and mortal sins. We found out about Purgatory, a place that wasn’t anywhere near as bad as Hell, but definitely not comfortable. A one-star hotel, maybe. Bathroom down the hall. No TV, no Disney, no sports, no Vernors, no chocolate. This is how the nuns introduced us to arithmetic. We counted and subtracted. This was plus and minus. And lying to your mother was a venial sin, and that would send you into exile for a couple of hundred years. The only way around it was to stockpile “indulgences” or special prayers, or acts of kindness that would somehow lessen your sins. A single day in Purgatory, hissed Sister Bartholomew, would feel like a thousand years of anguish. But if you recited your prayers before meals for one full week without fail, you could win back twenty years. If you made the sign of the cross, that might erase another 150 days, and if you performed this with holy water, there might be a bonus. And if you served Mass on Sundays, as well as one day during the week, and you did that seven straight days, you could deduct six years from your sentence… My brother figured he’d scored big when he traded a stack of holy cards, including five different St. Francis of Assisi images, for a card that contained a miniscule bone chip of St. Gerard. This relic was worth at least a thousand days spent in Purgatory. I stared at it for such a long time, and when I told my brother it looked like a fingernail, he beat the crap out of me… At six or eight or nine, the concept of indulgences sounded a lot like Monopoly and being handed a get-out-of-jail card.
Mark Twain apparently said, “The two most important days in your life are the day you are born…and the day you find out why.” I’m not sure I know why. Do you? Does anyone? But I do know that language has always been the thing to grab on to, and movies were the bones of language – dialogue, plot, the lyric grace of gesture, all swarming those afternoon movies. It all made sense. Somehow it awakened in me something to say, formally, maybe a deep longing, that is, and yet I didn’t understand that…yet that morning when I slipped into a wooden desk in the windowed classroom – a little bored, inattentive, and opened up the textbook, and began reading the Dark Lady Sonnets by Shakespeare, it all made sense. Didn’t it? This love-lost narrator worried sick over a woman’s betrayal:
O! call not me to justify the wrong
That thy unkindness lays upon my heart;
Wound me not with thine eye, but with thy tongue:
Use power with power, and slay me not by art,
Tell me thou lov’st elsewhere; but in my sight,
Dear heart, forbear to glance thine eye aside:
What need’st thou wound with cunning, when thy might
Is more than my o’erpressed defence can bide?
I fell in love. I fell for the words, the plummet and pitch of sound, the playful wit, again, the gesture in the way someone turned, or the way a hand coyly smooths the collar of a jacket…I sit here now believing in all that authority that comes alive with words, and I play the moment for all its worth, I see the moon, I see the moon, I see its playful heart, I see the moon, I breathe its mischievous art…
This was era of bow ties, and our dads wore white shirts rolled up to the elbows, and Clark Gable mustaches. By 1959 though, my dad stuffed those elaborate silk ties in a shoebox that he placed on the top shelf of his closet. My father wore a tie to his first interview at the Motor Lamp. And got a job on the line making headlamps before he wound up working in the office. And when we were kids, we wore bow ties, clipped to our collars, and brushed back our hair like his, straight back, no part, and drove off to church like that, each Sunday. We wanted to be like him. When we grew up, and started our own families, and accidentally caught sight of ourselves in a store window or mirror, and instantly recognized that look, that sullenness of my father all over again. We hated that. It was everything we had hoped for as kids, but now as grown men, we needed something else, our own soul, not his. Finding the bow ties in that shoebox after his death was like looking at old school pictures. We wore those ties on Sundays, all day long and by nightfall we tossed them across the dining room at one another. I never saw the point of these ties. They seemed fake, a half tie, a gesture, a half- hearted nod in deference to ties. They look like misplaced eyebrows.
Ah! The good old days. No, I am no sentimentalist, believe me. Hated school. Hated teachers. Hated priests. Hated the neighbourhood. Happy to move north to Muskoka. At first, I hated being there too. Spotted my classmates leaping into the river near the falls. I couldn’t swim. Instead, I retreated to the closed-in verandah at the back of the house, and read… Read all of Mark Twain, my afternoons fading into the twilight, my mind swarming with images of adventure and mystery. Outside was foreign, distant, irrelevant. My mother was worried sick over my lack of “ambition” and not being “out in the sun…with friends.” I didn’t need them. I felt cheated by them actually… My first days in grade four. Minny McCracken, a stout elementary school spinster whose sister Mae also taught at that school, ordered us to open up our geometry sets, and for reasons unknown to me, I was slow to doing it, and it prompted her to challenge me. My forbearance triggered a confrontation. “Open it!” she demanded. My new friends, all around me in desks, were snickering, and I suddenly was emboldened by this, thinking they were cheering me on. “No!” I said. Finally, I did, but only after Minny sidled up to the desk and tapped the tin box three times with cold insistence. I flipped it open, but to my horror, there, resting on my protractor was a cut-out black-and-white photograph of a tit. It sat there looking up at me like a stranger, maybe a little dog, maybe a bug…I don’t know. Horrified, I slammed the geometry set shut. Minny was appalled. She scooped up the tin box and walked to the front of the class. She said nothing. I was going to Hell for sure. I survived, but at recess, my new friends all had a good laugh.
To soothe my ruffled feelings, they treated me to the other part of the snapshot. A picture of a sister taken by a boyfriend. Her brother held up that beat-up Brownie photograph, and graciously presented it to me, like a prize, or trophy. I stared at this young girl whose one breast was now missing. Minny had the other tit on her desk, secure in my geometry set. I never knew what happened to it. Did she take it home? I didn’t really care, because I had the rest of the shot. I pored over it for days deliberating over what this girl was thinking when it was taken, what the conversation was like with her boyfriend, and did they do anything before or after it was snapped… She just stood there, naked from the waist up, hands resting on her hips eyeballing the camera, maybe a trace of a smile, bright bright eyes, and I knew her. She lived in town, a high-school girl, and I saw her nearly every day… All such conjecturing left me paralyzed as I stumbled about the schoolyard, face flushed, as I strayed aimlessly over the playground. I stuffed the photograph into my coat pocket, and at night, slumped in the bathtub, stared at it, mute, the only sound in the house pulsating from Leave It to Beaver downstairs… The picture of that town girl with one tit. I kept it for years, and somehow, over time, it got lost, maybe thrown out, who knows? Maybe tucked inside a book. Years later – and I swear this is true – I heard this same person had a breast removed… I didn’t make that up.
