Since Josh Died

I stepped out of the Saab, dragging my briefcase off the seat beside me--the briefcase into which I ritually put work to do in the evening. I used to actually do work at home, but now I just carry it back to the office the next day, the work undone. I understand that people who actually do work at home rise in the ranks, as I rose for awhile, but since Josh died three years ago, I have not been able to rally.

My evenings slip away from me, helping Maureen with the gardening, and ESPN, and CNN, and e-mail, and puttering for the Democratic party, and storm windows to put on, storm windows to take off, bills to pay, charity solicitations to sort through. It all takes time.

When I pulled into the driveway, Maureen was watering the flowers. She goes to work at the experiment station now at 6 and comes home at 2. That gives her two hours of quiet before the rest of the staff gets there, when she ca concentrate on her experiments. She can’t work at home any more, since Josh died. I rolled down the window and sat for a moment, feeling the sun warming my arm, watching Mo play the sprinkler back and forth in steady arcs. In my mind, she would turn any moment now and playfully hit me with the water.

But when she did turn, her face was tear-stained and she dropped the hose and went inside. Oh, Lord, not again, I said to myself, but I got out of the car and walked through the wet snapdragons to shut off the faucet. When I got inside, she had drawn the blinds and was standing in the half dark like a statue. Finally she raised her arms to me and I moved into them. I held her and she shook as she had not shaken in three years

“Maureen, Maureen.” I kept saying her name. I eased her over to the couch and got us both seated. After a moment she disengaged herself enough to take a newspaper clipping from the coffee table and hand it to me. With one arm still around her, I read the headline, “Guyana girl sees Virgin’s face in rocks.” I did not know where Guyana was but I scanned on to see that people from all over Guyana were crowding into a little village called Tutamawana to see the face of Mary in the rocks near a waterfall. That seemed to be the only good news. Some kind of fungus was wiping out the crop, children were starving, roads were so bad that international relief trucks bogged down and then were pillaged by tribal militia who sold the food or ate it themselves.

But the Church was there, the Roman Church. The story confirmed my general sense of how those things went: Somehow, incredibly, some Jesuit named Alexander de Hansel had hacked through the underbrush in the 18th century, set up a little church, gotten the women to cover their breasts, taught forgiveness, adjudicated disputes so they didn’t become blood feuds, taught them the body and blood of Jesus would give them more strength than that of their enemies, and eternal life into the bargain. In place of the shrunken faces of the enemy he taught them to put icons of the saints that he had brought with him. Eventually, he showed them how they could make icons, for which they showed surprising talent. They painted their own heroes, mostly warriors, and began to call them Sancta and to pain halos around their heads. He discouraged the practice but did not forbid it and soon his little chapel was lined with dark faces, studded with ornaments and surrounded with halos.

I held the clipping limply in my hand. Maureen sat beside me now, her legs curled under her. I sat looking at her tearstained face.

“Mo, this is moving, but . . .”

“But what?”

“But your reaction is all out of proportion. Do you think this might be about Josh?”

“Calvin, You think everything is about Josh. Can’t the fact that people are starving and being sustained by visions be important enough to respond to? Does every response have to be about us and our tidy little world?

“Our world is hardly tidy,” I said. “We are grieving a son who tore out your insides being born, so you can’t have more children, and then died a terrible, lingering death.

“Is that why we’ve made the outside of it so tidy?”

“We said we needed to regroup, wait to see what the next step was. We agreed on that, didn’t we? The counselor signed off on that.”

“Yes, we agreed.”

“Sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean to treat you like a sullen child.”

“It’s OK. I’m acting like a sullen child. I feel like a sullen child.” I took her hand.

“Do you want to do anything about this? Do you want to send money to someone? The article tells who is trying to help. We could get an address.”

“Yes, that’s how we deal with things, isn’t it? We write a check. A check every month to an agency. That’s supposed to fix it, that’s supposed to fill the void. That’s supposed to make up for that empty room, that’s supposed to make up for holding our children, and bathing them, and watching them learn to walk, and talk, and watching them play in the yard, and giving them birthday parties.” I dropped her hand and faced forward, pressing my fingers into my eyelids till great waves of pressure flowed out, which I could then distribute out over my temples.

“Do we need to go back to doctor Shreckel? Can’t we just save the money and remember what he said--that nothing we do is going to fix anything. There are ways of living with the pain, ways of going on. We agreed not to adopt for now. We agreed to concentrate on our careers and do a good job on those and give to charity. Do you want to rethink all that?

I want to go there.”

“Go where?”

She sprang up and went to stand by the window and then spun to face him. “Go to God damn South America where people are starving and seeing visions, not watering their God damn flowers and watching CNN.”
I remembered what the doctor had said: “If she’s acting crazy, don’t humor her. Tell her she’s acting nuts.”

“Maureen that’s nuts. You probably can’t get tours there.

“They guy who wrote the article got there.”

“OK, but he’s probably an obsessed sociopath with three ex-wives and no kids.” I did not need her quick glance to tell him I should have said that last part, but I forged on.

“What do you think you are going to find there?

“I don’t know Edward. If I knew I wouldn’t want to go. Malaria maybe, ants, snakes. The truth. Mystery. Being.”

“That stuff’s inside you.”

“I don’t feel like it’s inside me. Do you feel like those things inside you? Or don’t you notice any more? Or maybe you don’t miss them because they never were.”

“Mo, that’s not fair.”

“OK, sorry.” She sat down on the chair across the room. We sat in silence for a long time. The air conditioning hummed so we could barely hear the sounds of the children playing street hockey outside, pausing when the occasional car went by.

“Mo, do you need to talk to a priest?”

That was another piece of unexplored territory. Maureen was raised Catholic--confessions, stations of the cross, white gloves, fish on Fridays, the whole thing. Her folks still practiced the faith in Racine. We had visited a lot before, but not much since Josh died. They don’t go overboard--no oversized rosaries or pictures of Mary with daggers sticking in her heart. Just a simple crucifix on the beige living room wall.

Mo had been raised Catholic and gone to Catholic boarding school the last two years of high school. We still went to the place for reunions, though it headlong been converted into a dance studio by the university that bought the property. They had done what they could to secularize the chapel space, but the light still filtered in through the stained glass panels at the top of each window. They had painted the confessional in bright colors, but you could still see where the priest sat and where the screens had been. There were niches around the wall where the saints had been, now filled with knockoffs of oriental pottery.

When we went there, we both felt mostly relief. I felt the relief that I had never had to make the effort to throw off that vast burden of logic and icon and ritual, and she said she felt relieved that she had been able to do it. But she confessed to feeling some nostalgia too, and I to feeling some jealousy. I could see that it was a world, self-contained, with a kind of shorthand, where a gesture or word could convey a whole volume of shared assumptions, like major league baseball with pretensions to the absolute and 6,000 year old history.

But Mo had given it up before she married me. College knocked it out of her, like it does so many. She had an story down pat, that she used when the topic of religion came up. It was like drifting in a boat, she said. The boat is drifting through one landscape, where you go to church with your parents and then with your friends. God is one more thing you have in common with them. The girls love the dress-up and the hushed silences. It’s kind of erotic. You talk with your friends about becoming a nun, in the same furtiveness that you talk about sex. Then you go off to college. You stop watching the landscape while you read a book, drink a beer, maybe lose your virginity, and then you look up to see that the boat has drifted into new territory, but you are still on the same boat, so what’s the difference? Then one day, you start to think about things. You get off the boat and everything is different. The territory looks a little strange, but you adjust. You’ve decided God is a concept, but one you don’t need. You don’t become an atheist. You just say you can’t be sure whether there’s a God or not. So you have your bets hedged, you don’t give offense. You don’t feel the need to actually provide alternate explanations for the things God explains--like origins of things, or beauty, or love. You have a vague sense that there are books that do that but don’t read them any more than you read the ones that tell you how the God-concept explains them.

I was part of that new landscape in college, though I was not the one she lost her virginity with. I was raised by parents who didn’t go to church, but had their children baptized as a precaution. I once asked what church, but my mother couldn’t remember. “Methodist, “ I think, she said. “There’s a certificate somewhere. We were not so good about keeping that stuff. Do you want me to look for it.”

“No, no, that’s OK, I said. “Was it in Dayton? Near where we lived?”

“No it was across town. Your father had a friend who went there. They were your godparents. Their names were Tom and Karla. They sent cards to you on the anniversary of your baptism for a few years. We still hear at Christmas.”

So that was pretty much it for church, until Josh was born. Then we thought we should try again. We went once to her ex-church and once to mine. They were both awful experiences, so we wrote it off. We can do without this, we said. Millions have. Voltaire did. Spinoza did. Stephen Hawking does. When Josh died, of course we thought about it again, but we held firm and had Josh buried from a funeral home. Her parents were disappointed but we stuck by our guns. Anything else would be hypocritical, we agreed. The idea of Josh singing with the choirs of angles was attractive, but too attractive. Anything that desirable just couldn’t be true.

So the funeral home helped us design a secular service. We went with a closed casket because Josh was down to 40 pounds, beyond the reach of even mortuary cosmetics. But we put a picture of him on the casket for the reviewal, one taken on the day he got his first paper route. He’s standing on the porch practically enveloped in the carrier bag, his hair long because was intrigued just then with 70’s rock stars. His face is radiant with pride, overlaid with a layer of self-consciousness. My brother MC’d the service which had Bible readings--Jesus suffering the little children, a little child shall lead them. People spoke, but his friends didn’t. We agreed that would be too much for fourth graders. Mo didn’t think she could speak without crying, but she wrote something and I read it. I’m steady in a crisis. In fact, I’m pretty steady all the time. She wanted it in the form of a letter to Josh. I did what I could to discourage that and used the word sentimental. That was a mistake, but I was bound to make a mistake.

“Sentimental,” she had said. “My God if this isn’t a time for sentiment, what is? God, what are you, a machine, a nest of numbers? Is Josh a statistic to you, like all those people whose deaths you predict all day?” I sat there pretty grim and strained. This had come up before, of course, but in a teasing sort of way. I’d been an accounting major when we met in college, and she was in biology. She teased me about my cool world of numbers and I ribbed her about the smell of formaldehyde. We enjoyed making caricatures of each other’s classes, even though she was not a bad math student and I did all right in my introductory biology. I liked thinking of her sticking those long pins thorough the body parts to hold them to the thick waxy stuff at the bottom of dissecting trays, and she liked to watch the numbers hum on my laptop.

“Mo if you need to go back to church, it’s OK.”

“Will you go with me?”

“Oh, God.”

“Yes, Oh God.”
   “Mo, we talked about this before we were married and a dozen times since. We were not going to violate each other’s conscience on this. We were not going to ask one another to add hypocrisy to our list of sins. It was part of the deal.”

“A deal to cut God out of the game.”

“God isn’t in the game. He never was.” Then I added lamely, “for me.”

“So we have it right now? All the people in all the cultures in all the times who believed in God, against the 20th century western Europeans who read Darwin.

“And Copernicus. And Freud. Maureen, it isn’t a vote. We know more now. The world runs by itself. It runs by laws. But no one made those laws. The laws evolved, along with the universe. Bit by bit, infinite combinations, and some work. There’s no master plan, just things bumping into each other and some of the sticking. Laws are just how things work. Now it’s our job to find the laws. The more of them we know, the better we can live in the world.

“Do your laws explain Birkenwald or Hiroshima?”

“No system explains everything. Something always gets left out. Christianity doesn’t explain everything either.”
   “It explains Birkenwald and Hiroshima. Those are the things that I need explained right now. I don’t care about the others.” We were in deep, way deeper than I wanted to be. I could not tell where the conversation was going next, and I could not calculate the effects of what I was about to say. Usually I can think of two or three things to say at once and select the one that’s best for that occasion. But now I felt myself hanging in the void where phrases came into my head with startling clarity, with no alternatives, and no way of calculating the effect. I was not even sure I had the choice of not saying them. When the next words came out of my mouth, it was as if they were spoken by someone else who had spent a lifetime imitating me.

“Does it explain why Josh died?”

“No. I mean I don’t know. Josh died of leukemia.”

“You think Josh died because we didn’t believe in God, don’t you?”

“I can’t help it.”

“You know that’s stupid.”

“I don’t know it’s stupid and I don’t think you should call my deepest feeling stupid, even if they are. “

“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean that.”

“Actually, you did, but I appreciate the apology.” She came over and sat down beside me. “Calvin are we ever going to get over this?”

“We’ll get over when we want to get over it. Do you want to get over it?”

She raised a tear-stained face. “No, I don’t want to get over it, ever. It’s the most important thing that ever happened to me--to us. We had a son, and he died. It was the creation and the apocalypse. Why would I want to get over it? How could I get over it? If I got over it, I wouldn’t exist.”

I reached out to put my arm around her, but she flung herself away from me and ran sobbing from the room. A moment later I heard the garage door opening and the roar of her Plymouth and a squeal of tires. I thought of calling the cops, of calling no one, but instead I called Mona, Maureen’s best friend, where she was most likely to go. Mona was divorced, with a boy Josh’s age. She had been through the wringer with us.

“Hi Mona.”

“Hi Cal.” After a moment of silence, she said, “It’s Maureen, isn’t it?” She usually used my wife’s full name when they talked about her.

“Yeah, she just left. I assume she’s coming over. If she’s not there in 30 minutes, could you call?”

“Sure, Cal. Anything. Anything I should know? Anything new? What set her off this time?”

“Well, she found a clipping in the paper--a filler piece about a Catholic mission somewhere in frigging South America, up some river, disease, starvation, the usual. There’s a Catholic priest there and the natives are seeing visions of the virgin in the rocks. It seems to have stirred up something in Maureen.’

“Yeah, the Catholic Thing. Bummer.”

“It’s OK. It'll be OK. How’s Bradlely?”

“He’s fine. He’s got scouts. I’ll have to take him, but if we’re not here, Maureen knows where the key is.” She paused. “You can come over and wait if you want.”

“No, she needs to talk to you. Call me when she’s ready to come home.”

“Sure, Calvin. And Calvin . . .”

“Yeah?”

“I’m sorry.”

“I know. I appreciate it.”

“You shouldn’t have to live like this. You are too nice a person.” I wanted to say, “Don’t make things any harder, Mona,” but the words would not come out.

“We live how we have to live. Lots of people have it worse.”

“I don’t know why she comes to me with her spiritual crises.”

“Sure you do. You grew up together. Brad and Josh were best friends.”

“I don’t know what to say to her. I don’t know theology from potatoes. I don’t know why people die. I’m in retail. I can’t justify the ways of God to man. I can’t even justify the ways of Man to man.”

“You don’t have to say anything. Just listen.”

“Yeah, I’m a helluva listener, aren’t I? But I don’t discriminate. I’ll listen to you too, Calvin. If you need to talk, anytime. Just call.” Still the deflecting words would not come.

“Sure, thanks. I’ll be fine.”

Mona was no beauty, less elegant than Maureen, and carrying 20 extra pounds, and in and out of counseling, but at that moment I imagined sinking in that body. It might be housing an unstable mind, but it was at least unburdened with the loss of a child, with the dark specter of the Roman Church, the reproachful eye of God, the labyrinths of doctrine, the shimmering halos of guilt.

Nothing to do now but wait for the routine to develop. She would go to Mona’s. There would be talk, wine, coffee. Then about 10 she should come home, stand by the door, her face puffy from crying. Gingerly, I would put one arm around her, lead her to the bedroom, help her undress. She would fall into my arms and we would make up, gently or violently but always the absence of procreation.

I decided I would walk out into the soft suburban night. The lawns were broad and weedless. Dogs lunged at me but where restrained by invisible force fields emanating from wires buried in the ground. Children bounced on trampolines, protected from falling by cylindrical barriers. Families cruised by me in bicycles--father, mother, one, two, three children, helmeted and smiling. As it grew darker, figures passed back and forth across the yellow squares of window light. Stems of peonies drooped with the weight of head-headed flowers. Fecundity drooped from the eaves.

I noticed I was crossing a parking lot and looked up to see a large suburban church, one I drove by every . Now I walked over to the well-lit sign, which announced it was St. Paul’s Methodist. It gave the hours, and the pastor’s name. The building all glass and brick, cut and stacked in clean modern angles, burgeoning with efficient elegance. It was Wednesday the parking lot was full. Evidently the traditions of my youth has not died. I had nothing to do but wait while Maureen wrestled with her angels, so I went up the stairs through the plate glass doors.

To the left was a broad hallway leading to meeting room. The tile glistened so I wanted to shield my eyes. I could just see the corner of the stairs where exuberant youth went up and down, giggling, but subdued. Down the hall, earnest ladies with glistening hair were sitting at round tables, Bibles open before them. To the right, I could see the church itself, the rows of pews marching rank on rank to the spot-lit altar. I could hear, though I could not see the choir practicing. The piano thumped in firm, confident chords. With so much activity, I hoped each group would think I was part of another, but I realized that the longer I stood the more likely someone would come up to me to offer help but also be sure I was not a pedophile or an odd duck. I was turning to go when a young man strode purposefully from the church and started toward the parish hall, but turned to collar me.

“Can I help you,” he said.

What could I say. I could hardly say “I came in on impulse when I was out wandering the streets because my wife and I have been in spiritual crisis since our son died three years ago. You cannot imagine what a beautiful child he was, enterprising, energetic, rushing from one hobby to another, filling our lives with joy. You cannot imagine what it was like to see him grow listless and to take him for the tests and to sit in the waiting room, staring at the charts of anatomy charts, unable to touch the magazines with their obscene tales of human happiness to be found in a recipe for beef stew or begonia garden before the doctor came in to tell us the final results, which we already suspected.” So I said, “I guess I was looking for some information about your church.”

“You mean the Methodist church or this particular church?

“Well, this one, guess. I was baptized as Methodist.”

“And then confirmed and haven’t been back since. Am I right?

“Well, yes, except for the confirmed part.”

“Do you have a minute to talk now?”

“Yeah, I guess. Sure.”

“The library is just around the corner and down the hall. Let me make sure my assistant has the Bible study under while I walked over the gleaming tiles and into the library, Books lined the halls, neat, dusted, many in matching sets, most with their dust-jackets intact. Perfectly lettered signs described an elaborate check-out procedure. Selected books were displayed on stands made of cleverly bent wire. The titles evoked hope and confidence.

I recognized the general shape of the world as spiritual equivalent of my professional world, pale and clean and orderly and with no place for a dead child, a distraught wife, for the beckoning curves of my wife’s best friend. Quite suddenly, I thought I might be sick. I fled out into hall and looked desperately for a restroom but all I could see was an exit door with a warning sign on the push bar: Emergency exit only. Alarm will sound.” Well, it was an emergency, I couldn’t puke on the Methodists’ floors I bolted through it, sprinted to the Honda and laid rubber all the way to the street. As I careened around the corner, I could see the pastor and two women stood framed in the doorway.

When I came to a Dairy Queen, I pulled in. I picked my cell phone up off the seat and dialed Mona.

Yes, Calvin, she said.

“Did Maureen come?”

“Yes Calvin, she came and went. She didn’t stay long. She said it was OK to tell you this. She says she’s going to get a divorce, that she’s already talked to a lawyer.

“A lawyer. My God. “

“She says it isn’t fair to you, that you’ve tried to go on, but it’s not working. Josh’s ghost is bigger than either one of you. The only way to kill it is to separate. Calvin , you can come over if you want. I told Rexanne to pick up Brad and take him to their house for a while, that I might be dealing with something here. We could be alone for a little while. You need to talk. I can give you an hour’s peace. You are going to need it.”

My mouth was dry, but I said OK and sped off into the night, pushing the speed limit down the arterials. But the phone rang.

“Yes,” I said.

“Calvin? I recognized Mo’s voice, but barely.

“Yes, yes. Who did you think?”

“Calvin, this is Mo. I didn’t recognize your voice. Are you all right.”

"I’m as good as anyone can be who has just found out his wife wants a divorce.”

“Calvin, have you been drinking?”

“Mona just told me.”

“I told her no such thing.”

“Just a minute, “ I said. I eased the car over to the curb.

“Maureen, Mona told me you were getting a divorce, that you had seen a lawyer.”

“That’s crazy. I said I was going back to church, that I had been stopping after work to pray, that I had talked to a priest. Maybe she assumed that would mean a divorcee. “ She paused for a long time. “Does it?”

Hell, Maureen. I don’t know. “Why didn’t you tell me. And what the flop is Mona up to”

“Mona’s in love with you. She told me that. She said you had given her signals. That she could have you anytime she wanted, that she only held back for my sake. It was pretty awful.”

“Where are you now.

“Well, actually, I’m at a church.

“ I bet you are. Which one?”

“St. Albans, down the street from where we live.”

“Are you there alone.”

“Yes. “

“Well, light a frigging candle. I’ll be there in a few minutes.?