"Because he was the only father I knew. Because he was this stranger who had appeared out of nowhere when I had lived quite contentedly without a father, because he brought noise and fear and pain to you and us and to this house." Matt looked around, sure the walls and floors would creak in agreement with him. "I never knew why one day he wasn't there, and the next he was."
"He was not your father. He never acted as a father to you, certainly not a good one. He was my husband, that's all. He was a necessary evil."
"Why? Why on earth was a lazy, ill-tempered, ultimately violent man who wasn't worth the bones in your little finger necessary to us? To you?"
"Because he would marry me."
"That's it? Everyone knew about us. It's not like we weren't news. I was about to enter kindergarten. We were stable, until he came."
She shook her head. "We were not. You thought we were, but we were not. We were nothing. We were a blot on the parish, a stain on the family, an embarrassment, and as you went through school, fatherless, the shame would have been rubbed in worse and worse.
"I was nineteen when you were born. In age. I was . . . fifteen, the way Polish girls are raised, kept away from the boys, hearing stories of Saint Maria Goretti, the patroness of virginity, the little Italian girl who was raped and stabbed but lived long enough to forgive her attacker. That's what made her a saint, not her pain, not her death, bur her forgiveness of her despoiler."
"We agree. That kind of standard lessens women. It implies that they'd be better off dead than to be tainted forever by rape. It makes them property, not people."
"You think that? A priest.'"
"An ex-priest. But I've always thought that. The seminar was strict; it was doctrinaire, but ten percent of the seminarians were women in my day, and more are enrolled now that so few men are joining the priesthood. The instructors didn't quite dare hold the double standard as high as they might have, and they were never as Old World as we were at St. Stan's. Actually, the seminary was very liberating for me."
His mother sat back, underneath the Black Madonna, an expression on her face he'd never seen before.
"Perhaps this will not be so difficult," she muttered. "Or perhaps it will be even more difficult, to make you see how it was then."
"I want to see," Matt said. "You don't have to make me. Just let me in." He set the empty cup of cocoa on the low table next to the chair, with its cheap, ring proof, baked-on finish.
"There's no point getting into your real father. I was eighteen with the mind and heart of a child. We met only once. I can't say what happened. I was too ignorant to know. There was chemistry. It felt like a miracle. He was very handsome. I can't say I loved him, or he loved me, but we were both dazzled for the moment. I never saw him again."
Matt absorbed the story, vague as it was. "Once, and I--?"
She nodded. "As if the angels were laughing at me. I'd heard the tougher girls in school, the ones who rolled their uniform skirts higher than the rest and who smoked cigarettes and worse in the rest room. They were . . . taking chances all the time, and trusting to shaken bottles of Coca-Cola to protect them. Apparently it worked, for I was the only one who didn't graduate."
"You didn't graduate? Not even . . . privately?"
She shook her head. "No. Everything changed. I was sent away to a very cold, hard place for girls like me to wait. We worked like drudges, cleaned up the delivery room even when the morning sickness made us vomit. Twice a week we were walked into 'town' for 'recreation.' The recreation was the townspeople's. They gawked and pointed at us. When our times came it was like torture. Comfort seemed to be too good for us. Most were persuaded to give up their children to couples who could have none. I was stubborn."
"My God, Mother, that was only ... thirty-some years ago. What you're describing is some medieval penitentiary for fallen women."
"It was only thirty-some years ago, but it was like that. In far northern Wisconsin. I think the place is a hospice for the terminally ill now."
"Why did you keep me?"
"Are you complaining?"
"No, I just want to know. It would have been easier the other way."
Again she shook her head. "No. I've seen some of those girls since. They've had easier lives, but they're haunted harder. I can look at you now. Despite the past, you are healthy, well educated, you have spent most of your life serving others. I only mourn your priesthood because I saw it as a sanctuary for you. If now you want to live another life, go ahead. I just. . . don't like the past. Look forward, not back."
He nodded. "Then you don't disapprove?"
"No, never that. But I'm fearful. I don't want you feeling what I've felt for so long. An outcast in your own family. Your priesthood redeemed us, and especially you, as my marriage to that man redeemed us. In the family, in the church."
"But... he was worthless."
"He was a husband, and he was willing to marry in the church. As bad as things became in this house later, beyond it they were much, much better. I was able to go out and get work--"
"And needed to, with that lout around."
"Matt!"
He shrugged. She felt she had made the right choice, the only choice. She would never admit otherwise, but he wondered if she understood the effect of that unhappy domestic life on him, or the fears of himself it had raised.
"What about my real father?"
She straightened nonexistent folds in her gray wool skirt. His mother had never worn pants; in her youth, the fifties, Polish girls wore skirts and were not allowed to don trousers. Much less blue jeans . . . ! Surely, those rules were long gone now?
"I never heard from him again." When Matt would have spoken, she went on, raising a hand. "This you must never tell anyone. When you were just past two, a man came from the City. Downtown Chicago. A man in a very fine suit. He said he was a lawyer, and that . . . the family had learned of our existence because their son had died. In Vietnam. I was to have a settlement. A one-time settlement, and then I would have nothing more to do with them. It could be child support, paid on a Certain schedule, or something else I wanted."
She smiled and looked around. "I asked for a house, just a two-flat. With a house I would have the security of rental income from upstairs, and whatever small wages I earned would be sufficient. The lawyer agreed, and handled everything."
"But you bought it here, in the old neighborhood, that was going the way of all old neighborhoods, into decay. No new start. No escape."
"There was no escape for me anywhere. And you were better off knowing the family. Bo and Mary Margaret hadn't moved out to the suburbs yet. The house was why Cliff married me. He had big plans in those days. I think he was sincere in his way. Only when his big ideas didn't work out, he drank and then he gambled, hoping to win a fortune, and finally he became . . . But he left. You left. The Latinos moved in, some of them, but the yuppies want to move in more. Real-estate values have escalated. You'd be surprised. I have the house."
She was the daughter of people who had been through the Depression. The house was everything. And it had given them stability, even as it had attracted the worst element in their life together. Matt nodded. He couldn't argue with her choice of so long ago.
"Was Devine really my father's name?"
She shook her head. "I never knew his last name, and the lawyer wasn't about to tell me. Devine is a name I got from my favorite Christmas hymn, not spelled that way, but I changed it."
"Christmas hymn?" Matt's memory pulled up no phrase containing the word "divine."