The Buried Bride

Two

Two

“BUT I JUST DON’T GET it, Dad!”

I’m about halfway between Dulles International Airport and Myerton, having picked Gladys up after her flight from Tallahassee. Even considering how crowded that airport usually is, it was easy for me to spot her when I pulled into the Arrivals pick-up lane. After all, there just are not that many young 24-year-old women with light blue hair in teal wheelchairs wearing a vintage, boxy, navy blue suit accessorized with a brand new fuchsia Hermes scarf. I know it’s Hermes, and that this is a very expensive brand, because Helen had pointed it out to me when we were going through my sister’s closet.

We’d spent most of the time just chatting, and by chatting, I mean her talking and me listening. She spoke of her work with the FBI, made several observations about how bad the people who ran the human trafficking operation were, bemoaned the fate of some of the girls who either didn’t have families or whose families were not interested in having them back, and of course made several pointed observations about Mom. Particularly, observations about Mom’s comments concerning Helen’s weight. Which, apparently, she made quite often for some reason.

I had stopped her from saying more when she said, “Oh, then there’s the things she said about your injury.”

As if she needed a reset, she lapsed into a silence after that remark. This lasted some thirty miles or so, when she blurted out, “I just don’t get it.”

I look at her out of the corner of my eye. “What don’t you get, Gladys?”

“What’s going on between you and Mom—or, I guess what isn’t going on?”

I can’t suppress a chuckle. Gladys insists on calling me Dad and Helen Mom. Having been orphaned at eight in the same car accident that left her in a wheelchair, she’s spent some time looking for substitutes, not always making the best decisions in the process. It’s an unspoken agreement between Helen and I that we let her, at least in private.

Besides, it’s not like people don’t call me Father all the time. And Dad’s just a variation of that.

“Oh, I see,” I say. “What about it?”

“You and Mom are obviously in love,” she says.

“True.”

“So you admit it?”

“Gladys, to deny that I love Helen would be like denying that the sky is blue and water is wet.”

“Well?” she says, her voice a mixture of confusion and irritation. “Couldn’t you just ditch this whole priest thing and go back to being an archivist? I mean, I know you’re old and all.” I shoot her a dirty look and she adds quickly, “But not that old. I’m sure you could get a job or Mom could support you. You know she makes a lot more money than you do.”

“I know,” I say, a bit defensively, “but how do you know?”

“Oh, well, that’s easy. I manage the personnel files for the police department, and one day I noticed a copy of Saint Clare’s annual financial statement on Mom’s desk.”

I am about to pursue this further when she interrupts me, dragging me back against my will to our previous, very uncomfortable topic.

“So wouldn’t being with her be worth giving up your job?”

This question hits me like a punch in the stomach. It's the question that I have faced again and again.

“Being with Helen, being married to Helen, would be worth giving up any job in the world, Gladys,” I say. “But being a priest is more than just a job, it's a calling. The Church calls it a vocation and compares it to being married. Furthermore, something special happens when a man is ordained. He gets special powers, I guess you could call them, that come from God himself. A man makes promises, lifelong vows to God and the Church, vows that are every bit as valuable and real as marriage vows. Gladys, would you ever ask a man to leave his wife and children for you?”

“No, of course not. That would be gross.”

“Not just gross, but wrong. So would my leaving the priesthood for Helen. Even if I did decide to do so, I would be leaving my best self behind.”

“But she wouldn’t care as long as you were both happy,” Gladys pleads.

“Has she said that to you?” I ask.

“Well, no.”

“What has she said?” I ask, already knowing the answer.

Gladys, with arms crossed and a pout, says with the bored tone that only the very young can still manage, “She said that she wants you to stay a priest because she loves God and she loves the way you love God and she doesn’t want that to change.”

She turns her head to look out the window at the passing scenery. After a few minutes, she turns back to me and says, with an angry tone that surprises me, “And by the way, I don’t get that, either.”

“Get what?” I ask.

“The whole God thing. You and Mom, you’re good people. She puts her life on the line everyday and you almost got killed trying to help some girls you’d never even met. So why do you need to make yourselves miserable? Don’t you do enough? I mean, how much more can He want?”

“Hmmm,” I say, trying to buy some time to sort through my answer. I’m not quite sure what to say, especially since I’ve spent a good portion of the months since Father Leonard’s suicide asking the same questions.

I’m still not a hundred percent sure of the answers. But Gladys is a young soul asking me for guidance. I’m not about to taint that with my own still confused feelings.

“So, it sounds like you believe in God,” I begin. “I mean, we’ve never really talked about it or anything. I know you seem to enjoy Mass when you come.”

“Oh, yeah. I totally believe in God. I mean, obviously my Dad was Jewish but my Mom was raised Catholic and had me baptized. I even made my first Holy Communion the year before they died. Big, puffy white dress, veil, and everything.”

I have no trouble imagining Gladys wearing that now. “And then?”

“After my parents died, I lived with my grandparents. They were wonderful people but old. They wanted to send me to Catholic school but I was in the chair and there were stairs everywhere in that building. So they homeschooled through this online private school. I loved that and pretty much spent all my time online. That’s when I really started loving computers and how I ended up at MIT when I was still so young.

“The thing was, though, I didn’t have many friends, any really, at least not my own age. My grandmother was a member of the Ladies of Charity, and they were really sweet, but they were pretty much the only people I ever saw other than my Grandma and Grandpa. We went to Mass on Sunday and I loved dressing up for that but the priest was old, too, and I think he was just too tired to really make the Mass special. Not like you do.”

“That’s not me, Gladys,” I point out. “The Mass is special because it's the Mass. It doesn’t matter who is celebrating it.”

“Maybe so,” she says. “Anyway, there weren’t really any other teenagers in the parish. By the time my grandmother began to bring up Confirmation, I was so caught up in other stuff that I just wasn’t interested. So we dropped it, I went off to college, and that was it.”

“But you said you do believe in God. I mean, a lot of kids stop believing after they’re in college.”

“Hey, I may not be a good Catholic, but I am smart enough to know that all the stuff I’ve studied couldn’t have happened by accident. And anyway, I like the idea of God and heaven and that my Mom and Dad are happy there.”

She pauses for a minute and then takes a deep breath. “What I don’t like is the idea of a God who makes rules that hurt people and cause them to be miserable.”

“Oh, I see.” I let this sit for a minute and then ask, “Do you think Helen and I are miserable?”

“Yeah, I do, at least some of the time. Though it's not as bad now as it was.”

“So we were more miserable before, in Bellamy?”

“Well, yeah. I know that you were upset about your sister and all but you were also miserable together.”

“But we’re better, now?”

“Definitely. I mean, Mom still looks a little sad sometimes but everyone has their moments.”

“Good point. So,” and I pause here, not wanting to appear disrespectful, “what do you think has changed?”

“Well, Mom says that you both decided to back off and figure out what God wants you to do.”

“And that has made us happier,” I say, in something between a statement and a question.

“I guess.”

I think that I’ve made my point but the young never give up that easily.

“But why do you have to?” she wails. “Why can’t you be happy together and get married or even just live together or at least steal away for a dirty weekend now and then?”

I know at this point I could quote Church teaching or something from Saint Pope John Paul II, but I decide to take a different tactic.

“Gladys,” I say, “You know a lot about computers, right?”

“You know I do.”

“And you know that they are designed to run a certain way. That what you get out depends on what you put in.”

“Yeah,” she says dubiously.

“OK. So if I want good information, I have to put in the correct codes and commands.” Out of the corner of my eye, I see her nod. “Do I do this because the person who did the original programming is mean or wants to make my life harder?”

“No, it's just the way it is.”

“Right, and I’m sure that you know that some systems and some programs run better than others.”

“Well, yeah, a lot of them are complete crap.”

“So you choose the good ones.”

“Yeah.”

“Even with their limitations? Even if the very best one still has some things it won’t let you do?”

“OK. I get it. You’re saying the Catholic Church has the best system. But how do you know?”

“How do you know what computer system is the best?”

“I don’t know. I’ve tried some of them. Some of them I’ve just read about. Some, my friends recommended.”

“So you use what you’ve read, your experience and that of other people, and what people you trust have said.”

“More or less.” She’s silent for a minute, processing. Then she says, “But just because it works for you doesn’t mean it would work for anyone else, like me, for instance.”

“That, Gladys,” I say with a smile, “is something you’ll have to figure out for yourself.”