“Yes. What are you doing here?”
“I was asked to come and hear confessions.”
“Are you sure? We’re not a Catholic college. We have Catholic students, but I don’t think we’d have confessions available on just any Saturday.”
“I’m pretty certain I’m supposed to be here,” he said taking out a piece of paper, clearing his throat before saying the name on it.
“There’s no such person here. Maybe you’re supposed to be at St. Vincent’s University up the road?” I asked as casually as possible, so he wouldn’t feel silly.
“Oh, you know what?” he said, slapping his palm against his forehead, “That’s right. I just turned into the first college I saw.” A thin film of red spread across his face, and then he paused, looking as surprised as I felt. “Thank you.”
“You’re welcome.”
“You work here?”
“I’m an admissions counselor.”
“Oh. Well it was nice bumping into you like this,” he said, looking at me longer than he needed to. As he left, I watched him out the window and then looked away quickly in case he turned back. When I was done, I walked outside where the magnolia trees were starting to bloom and felt stunned. It was one thing that of all the hundreds of parishes Father Infanzi could have been assigned to, he was assigned to St. Stephen’s but showing up on my doorstep on the one Saturday a month I work? It had to be about my calling, didn’t it? It had to be God sending him, a priest, to finally make me face it. But could God be that cruel? Father seemed to be everything I was looking for in a man, the perfect catch. I wasn’t wise or religious enough to consider that maybe I was unconsciously drawing Father to myself or that this might be the work of the devil preying on my weak and immature soul. After this, I sometimes went out the front door to greet him. We’d shake hands and smile; he’d compliment my reading, and I’d compliment his homily, and he’d stare as I pretended not to notice. I didn’t tell anybody about my attraction to him, not even RF, the therapist I began seeing when my depression had gotten so bad I started running red lights to get to work on time.
She was in her forties, had shoulder-length brown hair, and listened intently. In the first few sessions, she asked me what I remembered about my mother and father when I was a child. All I could recall about my mother was that I was always afraid she was going to leave. Once when I was five and napping in the early evening, I woke up to the dark, the only sliver of light coming from the lit-up gondola in the enormous oil painting above the couch. I called, “Mommy, Mommy!” but no answer. Terrified, I went into the kitchen where she was supposed to be at the stove cooking dinner, her glasses fogging from the boiling water, but all I found was the glaring yellow light. I don’t remember anything else after that. When I asked her about it years later, she said she’d never leave me in the house alone, that she was always afraid she’d lose me.
My father was gruff and always working, and in the evenings when I had a few minutes on his lap, he’d conk out with his arm across me. I’d feel trapped but afraid to wake him, because I knew how tired he was, and I didn’t want him to think I didn’t love him. After he and my mother separated, I only saw him a few hours a month when he’d take Nellie and me for a meal. I didn’t remember that he’d sometimes cancel, leaving the two of us in our dresses and barrettes, holding hands. He’d come over for special occasions, but he never stayed long. After he remarried when I was sixteen and I visited him and my step-family, he’d swallow down some steak and bread and then leave for the caffé, the business he bought after he sold the pastry shoppe. Or he’d go downstairs to watch soccer in the dark.
RF asked what I knew of my family’s history of depression, which was scant even though three women on my mother’s side suffered from it. I wondered if my mother was ever depressed because of her tendency to withdraw at times, but I never asked, because I was afraid she’d think I was trying to dig up something negative. RF also asked about my dreams. There was the kind I’d been having ever since I moved out. My mother, Janine, and Julie—Nellie was never in it—are doing something fun together and excluding me. When I ask if I can join them, they dismiss me, sometimes make fun, or act like they don’t hear and walk away, which devastates me. In another dream, my five year old half-sister Daniella has asked our father for something, but he’s ignoring her. I don’t know if it’s me or my step-mother who yells, “She needs you, and you’re ignoring her.” In a third dream, my mother and I are in a big, dark house where she has misplaced a baby she is not trying to find, and I’m angry. I showed RF a blurry picture of me when I was about a year old standing in my crib after a nap, my hair bent with sleep, my diaper pulling away from my waist. The picture is proof that I wasn’t alone, but I told her that I looked as if I’d been holding myself up for a long time before anyone came for me and that I felt that way now. I added that I wanted my mother to recognize my accomplishments more when I was growing up, but she didn’t believe in praising kids.
I also told RF that my sisters rebelled as teenagers but that I didn’t, that I fantasized about rebelling now, cutting my hair and dyeing it, or quitting my job and that when Janine and Julie went out together with their husbands, I felt left out the way I did when I was little. After a couple of sessions, she told me I should get Alice Miller’s Drama of the Gifted Child. Sometimes if parents didn’t get to be children themselves, their children learn to hide their needs and memories “in order to meet their parents’ expectations and win their love.” They pretend to be well-behaved, reliable, and empathetic and are mortified when they find out they’re not. Grown up, they feel alienated from themselves and rely on their partner, their achievements, or their own children to make them feel good. The book explains that loneliness can be caused by the loss of self in childhood, that denying it can lead to depression, and that we cannot really love if we don’t know the truth about our parents and ourselves. It sounded as if it could be describing me, especially the part about pretending, but just the thought of owning up to it made me feel as if I were betraying my family, especially my mother. Besides, how I could trust any of these statements if I didn’t know much about my parents’ childhoods and couldn’t remember much of my own?
One day, certain that my religious calling was causing my depression, I finally blurted to RF, “I think I’m supposed to become a nun.” She asked me why I thought that. “I just know. Because nothing ever works out with men.” I still didn’t say anything about Father Infanzi. I didn’t want her to think badly of me or presume that he was the only reason I thought I had a vocation. After this, neither one of us brought it up again for a long time. She was rightly interested in helping me discover why I didn’t give good, available men a chance like the kind, devout teacher I met at a Catholic young adult event who took long walks on the beach with his ill father. “He doesn’t wow me,” I said. I was comparing him to Father Infanzi who did, whose homilies I took home in my heart especially the Sunday he connected Beauty and the Beast, the French original that I’d never seen, to the love between a husband and wife. When he said that the first time he saw his father cry was during this movie, I started crying. Who was this man who got to watch tender movies with his father and who believed that a husband’s love for his wife should mirror Christ’s sacrificial love for his Bride, the Church? I had learned a little about Pope John Paul II’s—now St. John Paul II’s—Theology of the Body in high school, but I had forgotten most of it. Now Father had stirred my longing for this kind of love all over again. I started looking for it in him. That’s why I was devastated a few weeks later on the day of Janine and Phil’s wedding when he forgot me.
It was after the ceremony, and he had already taken off his chasuble and alb and was busy retuning hymnals to their slots and gathering stray papers. What good care he takes, I thought as I stood on the side in my sleeveless, navy blue gown looking at his bare forearms. One of Janine’s girlfriends had just told me I looked like Audrey Hepburn with my hair up, but nervously waiting for him to notice me and compliment my reading of “Love is Patient” from Second Corinthians, I felt more strange than pretty. When he looked up, I extended my hand, “Father, the ceremony was beautiful, and