The Father Pat Stories Read online

  “Hey you guys, I thought you had a professional relationship,” Terry quipped as he came around and sat opposite them.

  They continued to look at each other almost oblivious to Terry.

  Then turning to meet Terry’s eyes, Father Pat began a rambling monologue.

  “Look, Terry, being a priest and a man is harder than you think. You don’t stop feeling the need for some sort of physical intimacy, affection — the need to touch others — just because you are supposedly working with the love of God on an hourly basis …” Father Pat looked towards Deirdre, but she was studying her empty wine glass.

  “There are different kinds of yearnings. At least for products of the fifties. There are the forever unfulfilled kind you have, perhaps for your first love. Then, if you’re lucky, and I was, there are the memories of the fulfilled love you have had with, perhaps, the person you marry. Then I guess the years pass, you become more practical, less focused, less obsessive. I don’t know. But, now I have to admit that there are several women and men in my life who I simply want to be near … Deirdre perhaps the most. And it’s hard for me even to explain it to myself…” At this Deirdre perked up.

  “He’s just in love with love,” she said. “And worse, he doesn’t know what to do with it.”

  “Yes, I suppose so. But my life is stretched like a tired old elastic band … I spend far to much time alone, looking in instead of out. You saved me from that at seminary Terry, when I was more elastic. Remember, I learnt to drink martinis with you. But now, it’s getting harder to distract myself. Can you believe I’m wrestling with the problem of when and why life takes on such demanding physical dimensions — you know, the spirit and the flesh. For half the parishioners I see with problems, it comes down to that. And for me, it’s almost constant.

  “Like just now. I’m too young to be an old fool, and I’m married, relatively happily. And I’m too old to … and … I’m a priest.” He sighed deeply.

  “Hey, Pat, we’re all the same. Did you think getting ordained was going to make it easier?” Terry was trying to be helpful.

  “No, we’re not the same.” Father Pat suddenly got to his feet and strode to the window. Then turning to face his startled friends, he burst out. “I love Deirdre and there isn’t a damn thing I can do about it!”

  An extraordinary thing happened. Deirdre slowly got up and went over to Father Pat. She put out her arms and enveloped the priest, who by this time was sobbing. Deirdre was if anything an inch or so taller than Father Pat, and cradled his head in the hollow of her shoulder. Father Pat’s head continued to shake as he buried it in the richly patterned scarf Deirdre had around her shoulders.

  Finally, after what seemed like an agonized eternity, she carefully moved his head back with her left hand and with her right took a corner of her scarf, and with exquisite gentleness wiped the priest’s eyes, and cheeks.

  The room fell into silence and she helped him back to the couch. Finally, Father Pat said in a low voice, “Deirdre, Terry. I’m sorry … this didn’t happen. It didn’t. I’m so sorry but I really lost it. This didn’t happen.”

  It apparently didn’t. A few minutes later the three were wrestling a meal together in the tiny kitchen, exchanging war stories about the cast of characters that had been part of the St. Matthew’s scandal. Reminiscing about the absurdities of seminary life. Rocking the room with bonhomie and good humour.

  “So you remember Beau, the bible-beating southerner who was my roommate in first year?” Father Pat was back in form. “The look of pious revulsion that night we drank one too many martinis and ran into him in the quadrangle and forced him to listen to our rendition of 99 Bottles of Beer on the Wall?”

  As Terry watched his friends engaged with each other, that moment of tenderness between Deirdre and Father Pat still puzzled Terry. He knew that while the two would always be very tight indeed, he doubted it would ever go beyond that. Deirdre, he thought, would always be part of Father Pat’s curious circle of friendship and love. As he knew he was.

  “Well guys, I’d better get back to the city and file this one,” Deirdre grabbed them both and brought Terry back. “The photographer will be here in about half an hour. Make sure he gets Paddy in the shot. You know, Pat, dogs and babies!”

  She gave the priest a kiss on the cheek — he blushed like a schoolboy — then she turned and embraced Terry.

  “You know you are my two favourite men,” she said as she walked towards the car.

  Pat went back into the rectory to prepare for the evening service. For the thousandth time that year he questioned his calling as a priest. Why had he stayed a cleric? Was it fair to those around him? Was he a hypocrite, as Brenda once acidly accused after they had had a particularly tense row. Only later did the words of the service reassure him.

  FATHER PAT WAS up early to see how the Record played the story, just like when he was a politician and had made a noisy intervention in the House of Commons. He felt a familiar but not unpleasant anxiety as he unrolled the paper on the kitchen table. The story was plastered across the city pages. A big story with two photos. “DOGNAPPING, WILD CHASE, AS RIDGEWOOD ACTIVISTS THREATENED OVER DUMP.”

  Deirdre’s column was a lively composite of circumstantial material linking the minister to the Frames, recounting the rumour of a “fix” and Frame’s brother’s impending appointment. A colourful sidebar generously quoting Father Pat’s escapade linked the Frames to the kidnapping of Father Pat’s dog — plus a photo of the note. There were quotes from Terry, the picture he had snapped of the irate group outside the farm house, and his story about being chased and a denial from the Minister’s office. Best of all was a four column photo across the bottom of the page of the heroic Paddy looking up alertly

  The other paper featured the opposite story about Frame agreeing to the offer for financial reasons.

  The phone started to ring about 9:30. Radio stations were calling Father Pat and a TV news crew was at his door at noon. Father Pat, with Paddy at his side, found himself defending his actions in front of an attractive, well made-up blonde television reporter. “What’s a priest doing trespassing? Where’s the dog? Can we get a shot of — what’s its name — Paddy — coming to you just like she did on Saturday?”

  In all this celebrity a horrified Brenda stayed as calmly as possible making coffee in the kitchen, taking messages, and fielding calls from her brother-in-law Peter.

  “Pat’s gone absolutely mad — entirely crazy,” he told Brenda in one of several agitated phone conversations.” And of course this lunacy will cost me money; I’ll never get a contract from Transport again. You can tell him that!”

  “Peter, you know we don’t want this dump. That’s what it’s all about. Relax.” Brenda would go that far in sticking up for her husband who she thought had finally gone totally out of control.

  MONDAY NIGHT. THE day back in the public eye for Father Pat was finally over and it was time to check out the “reviews,” as Father Pat used to call his press coverage when he was in politics.

  In deference to Brenda, who was genuinely tired and feeling none of the adrenaline that was still fueling her husband, Father Pat was installed in Terry’s downstairs TV-cum-rec room with the sliding doors overlooking the unkempt garden. Barber George Cartwright was stretched out in a sixties-style tub chair and Newswatch on the Toronto private channel was about to begin.

  “A curious story in the fight by Ridgewood, a small town twenty-five miles north of the city, against a dump they say will destroy their community. This weekend a small dog became involved in a bizarre turnaround in what seemed a lost cause. We’re calling this report by Jane Forter: ’Paddy saves the day!’”

  The opening shot had Paddy coming up to Father Pat wagging his tail and the story unfolded, complete with a sheepish Al Frame on his doorstep saying he would fight expropriation and that taking the dog wasn’t his idea! The report referred to the Record’s Deirdre Donaldson breaking the story and she was interviewed.

  F
inally over a big closeup of a happy faced Paddy: “Paddy is safe again. Ridgewood has this canine to thank for the anti-dump fight continuing — Jane Forter, Newswatch at Six.”

  The three men burst into a cheer. They got up and did a little jig knocking over Father Pat’s beer. Paddy felt very much part of the celebration, and barked running around the trio, crouching down and bouncing on her front legs, the question mark tail in full wag. They called Deirdre, Terry and Pat grabbing the phone in turn in noisy exclamations. Father Pat cradled the phone.

  Suddenly he was outside the little circle of celebration. He was floating on White Lake with Paddy putting distance between himself and the moral uncertainties he had just emerged from. Yes, he’d drive up to White Lake the next day and break out the old canoe. Time to remember and look ahead in peace.

  A Little Late Redemption

  FATHER PAT PULLED himself stiffly out of his beaten up little pickup truck in the almost vacant lot of the veteran’s hospital. His thoughts that late autumn day were on his father, waiting in B Wing for his weekly visit from his son. Father Pat knew that his hour a week was far too little to give to a man who had never been able to do enough for his family. And he preferred not to be reminded of his mother and her untimely death just over five years ago, a subject certain to dominate the conversation he was about to have.

  General Elliott, a wizened ninety-year-old in a wheelchair, played the seated sentry role amid a group of his more mobile cronies on the concrete entrance apron of the low 1950s structure. His soiled beret was perched jauntily on his skull-like head, and he greeted Father Pat with the same bleak warning he had given dozens of times before. “Better look out for that old man of yours, Father. The Captain’s bloody lonely and not taking his food well.”

  “Thanks General,” the priest said as he spun through the glass doors with a mock salute and helped another staggering resident into the big stainless-steel elevator for the ride to the third floor.

  The doors opened on a familiar setting — a semi-circle of feeble warriors in various states of undress, several dozing around a large television, which today displayed an incongruous scene of two smooth-skinned young things indulging in soap opera foreplay. As he walked into the circle, Father Pat noted one old gentleman firmly clasping his crotch in hopeless response to the images of youthful desire.

  “Dad, wake up, it’s Pat. Let me wheel you over by the window so we can have a chat.” Father Pat took his father’s hand to bring him gently out of his reverie, pushing his wheelchair over by the window away from the TV peanut gallery. Once there, he pulled over a worn upholstered armchair and set it so they were knee to knee. He examined his still drowsy father.

  Murray Cheyne had been a big man, a try-anything kind of chummy type. He’d had a modestly successful law practice based more on charm than talent, a charm more evident in social circumstances than when alone with his wife and sons. Nevertheless he was always unfailingly attentive and correct with his active family, trying to make up for years away “defending the British Isles,” during the Second World War. Indeed he had spent more time in the English countryside preparing endlessly for the invasion of the continent than in actual life-threatening action. The boys, Pat and Peter, were both the result of brief mid-war sojourns back in Canada.

  Now before Father Pat was a gaunt eighty-year-old with slicked down grey hair, peering at him through equally grey, bloodshot eyes that could barely be seen through slits in puffy bags that extended in half-moons halfway down his blotchy cheeks. Captain Cheyne, as he was called in the hospital, still had a fine, strong mouth, even though there were traces of rice pudding from lunch at the corners of his lips.

  The unkempt mustache reminded Father Pat somewhat poignantly of the great care his father had taken with this affectation before a stroke, following on the death of his wife, Grace, left him partly paralyzed and forced him to become a permanent resident of the veterans’ chronic care facility.

  “So, how has it been? Did Helen come to visit this week?” Father Pat asked, still looking intently at the old man. Helen was the seventy-five-year-old widow of Captain Murray Cheyne’s oldest friend Gus Seaforth. She was the Captain’s only woman visitor, and he still appreciated female company.

  “No, she didn’t, I don’t think. Not this week.”

  A large black Jamaican nurse passed by and Father Pat caught his father eyeing her. The old vet was coming around.

  “You know, Grace always cooked such fine breakfasts — bacon and fried eggs, especially at Whithaven — always tasted best at the cottage, hum?” Murray started a familiar stream of consciousness reminiscence. “Can’t stand the garbage we get here. Was better overseas. Your mother sure had a way of getting us all going, every morning, year after year. Then after you boys were gone and I retired, we used to sit in that sunny breakfast room and read the paper. Never said much, I suppose, but it was nice, real nice …” His voice trailed off as he stared out the window at the almost leafless upper branches of a group of old elms that framed B Wing’s entrance below.

  “Mom was great that way,” he continued. “I can’t say my mornings were ever better either.” Father Pat thought of his wife, Brenda, and her morning moods lately. Cooking hearty breakfasts was no longer in her repertoire.

  “Yup, a fine woman. Sometimes wonder how she put up with us boys.” added the Captain. “The “boys”, her husband, and the two sons born during the war were certainly Grace’s whole life, until her sons left that is, and then her zest for life seemed to leave with them. Pat had been her favourite, although it was an affection barely shown and often not returned in an era when demonstrations of attachment were the exception to normal acceptable behaviour.

  “Guess with me being overseas for the war for five years and all we never got to be that close again, not like it was. But she was such a good woman … and she did look after me. I still think some evenings I can hear her playing her songs … damned if they don’t seem that real sometimes. Maybe it’s just because she played the same tunes on the piano damn near every night for thirty-five years … same tunes, imagine that! And I’d sit there with a bit of a buzz on. Guess there wasn’t anyone quite like Grace though, not really, eh Pat?” He wiped a few drops of saliva and rice from the corner of his mouth.

  Murray was getting maudlin and sentimental as he always did, yet his protestations about Grace were strangely cool, almost without the measure of real regret and genuine affection one would expect, Father Pat thought. And he wondered why. On that visit he was to get a clue.

  “You know, Pat, I saw some movies of the Rockies the other day on the television, something about the Japanese taking over Banff,” Murray started on another memory, this time with considerable zest. “At any rate, it made me think about our trip, the one just you and I took to the mountains years ago. My god you were a serious young fellow then … couldn’t have been more than sixteen or seventeen and we had to find a church to go to so you could pray — pray, imagine that, in the middle of the Rockies, on a Sunday!

  “Hell, I just wanted to spend some time at the pool … Remember that’s where you met Jill … yeah, at the pool, at Jasper was it? Yes. Jasper. Oh well. That was a good trip …” In a blink, the obviously warm memory evaporated.

  “Where’s my tea Pat? They’re always late with my tea. Get that black nurse. Where’s my tea? Is it 3:30 yet, Pat?” Murray whined as he looked at Father Pat for all the world like Pat used to look at him when he was little and really wanted something. He was pleading. The roles were reversed and Father Pat, the strange disjointed story still lingering on his mind, left his father to find the black nurse.

  LATER THAT AFTERNOON, on the long drive home through the now bleak autumn countryside, Father Pat tried to focus on the trip he and his father had taken him on years before, and on Jill, his father’s mysterious friend, whom he had met just that once and had not thought about over the long intervening years. They were treating themselves to a couple of nights at Jasper Park Lodge after a somewh
at grueling three days on a packhorse trip in the mountains.

  It seemed to Pat that this once-in-a-lifetime trip alone with his father took place in the late spring between high school and university. “Time we got to know each other” was the reason given by Murray Cheyne. Time indeed. Pat was at the time emotionally torn up between his first serious and secret girl friend, Priscilla, and his return to a very active spiritual life. He was glad of the unusual break.

  His father was in an unusually ebullient mood at Jasper. He could almost hear the conversation that sunny afternoon by the huge pool.

  “You know Pat,” his father was saying, “that pack trip may have given me the sorest ass I’ve ever had since I had to ride an old Triumph from Portsmouth to London during the war, but it made me feel real good, yup, real good. Let’s have a big steak tonight, OK? You know, old boy, there are two things that make a man feel good — hard physical exertion, and good sex, out I guess you’re a bit young to know about that, eh?” Murray Cheyne often asked questions without caring in the least to hear an answer. And as for good sex, that was still something Pat could only barely imagine.

  Pat looked away with some relief. He picked up a Popular Mechanics he had bought and started to read it. Suddenly his father was at his ear, pulling his rustic wooden lounge chair right beside his. “Pat, there’s a young gal who is coming here today to meet us. I want you to be your usual charming self. She’s a friend that I haven’t seen for a long time … in fact, the daughter of a friend of mine who was killed overseas. I looked her up a few years ago and we became friends. I see her once in a blue moon. But … she’s young and, well, I think you are old enough to know when you meet her why I don’t make a lot of her with your mother. So, well, you understand.”

  Father Pat remembered the colour coming to his face as his father told him about this woman. His shock at sixteen to think for the very first time that his beloved parents might not be the perfectly close if argumentative couple they projected to the boys and to the outside world. If they were, how could his father have a young woman friend, even if it was the daughter of a war buddy, and why did he have to be an accomplice in keeping the secret from his mother. Was his father an adulterer? His exaggerated morality was being challenged for the first time.