I opened the door to Saint Thomas’ rectory to find the two police officers Father Bruno Ackerman had told me to expect standing on the steps outside. I greeted them in a friendly fashion, as any good part-time secretary would do, and invited them in to warm themselves in the waiting room while I went to fetch Father Bruno. It was an unseasonably cold May evening during a year when there had been flurries of snow at noon during the first day of spring. The officers stepped inside but remained standing, waiting patiently in front of the secretary cubicle in which I had been working.  

The man, P.O. Cheetwood was tall, bald, had a moustache, and wore glasses. 

The woman, P.O. Noseworthy, was an equally tall woman with a flapper hairstyle and the face of a pgymy marmoset.

When he heard that the police had arrived, Father Bruno came down the stairs and shook the hands of the officers in serious-yet-friendly manner. At six-foot-six, the priest stood half a head taller than Cheetwood, only Bruno had a barrel-chested build, that made him appear to dwarf the still-formidable-looking Cheetwood.

“Hello,” the female officer said. “I’m Ileana Noseworthy, and this is my partner, Douglas Cheetwood.”

“Father Bruno,” the priest replied.

“I understand you’ve had some vandalism,” Cheetwood said in a deep, gravelly voice.

“Yes.” Father Bruno nodded and his eyes dipped downward in an expression that was more sad than angry.

Although I hadn’t actually seen the vandalism, I knew what it was. Someone had broken into the church and used black permanent marker to write “The pope is the whore of Satan” on the wall. On the floor just below the inscription, fifty seven multi-colored condoms in transparent plastic packages had been neatly arranged in the figure of an inverted crucifix. Apparently, Saint Thomas’ wasn’t the fist incident of vandalism. Other churches had been hit recently, and the local press was already theorizing that the vandals came from the same nameless cult that had been leaving the bodies of animals in children’s playgrounds.

With the officers following close behind him, Father Bruno left the rectory and headed out towards the site of the vandalism, leaving me alone with my thoughts. The police were the first of many visitors to come to the rectory that night, and I, being only the secretary, found myself occasionally discouraged that I was missing all the juicy parts. Once the door shut on Father Bruno’s conference room, it was back to sitting waiting for the phone to ring.

The first time I was left with nothing to do, I began to look around the office, wondering if there was anything around of interest. It was the first time I had worked at this job, so I was still feeling my way around, trying to become comfortable with it. I was covering my friend Marissa’s secretary hours while she went on a cross-country hiking trip. I hoped that the additional earnings would ensure that I was able to see Amy Grant at Madison Square Garden this coming August. It was a bonus that there wasn’t much I had to do aside from answering the phone, since I’d never really used a complex, office-type phone before and had no idea how to manage three lines and an intercom properly.

The little office I was placed in had a soft brown, wooden paneling, and on its walls were a multitude of pictures such as the Sacred Heart and Our Lady of Fatima. Contrasting the strongly religious pictures with some humor were a number of little joke plaques with clever phrases printed on them, like: “Being a priest doesn’t pay much, but the retirement benefits are out of this world.”

I leaned back in the office chair and folded my fingers behind my head. For the moment, the place was dead silent and I felt as if I had it all to myself. With a solid block of quiet time spread out ahead of me, I felt it was the perfect opportunity to begin reading the book I had brought with me – Rush Limbaugh’s The Way Things Ought to Be.

I had read straight through to page fifty-seven before I heard the sound of footsteps on the rectory stairs. Without hesitation, I snapped the book shut and slid it discretely under the desk, resting it atop my lap. The sight of such a potentially offensive book consistently plummeted other peoples’ estimation of me in the past, and I did not want to chance provoking that reaction from Father Bruno. (Of course, because I had chosen to be so secretive, there would be no way for me to ever find out that the priest had a copy of the same book in the study upstairs.)


“The police have gone.” Bruno leaned on the counter above my desk and assumed a casual pose. To make himself more comfortable, he had unfastened the top button of his shirt and his starched white collar was hanging out in midair. “They didn’t learn anything new here, but they are certain they’ll find the vandals soon.”

Observing the digital clock on the corner of my desk, Bruno straightened up and brushed some lint off his inky black slacks. “Pretty soon I’ll have to interview a couple that’s getting married and right after that I’ll be going out to talk to the Confirmation students, so I’ll probably be busy all night. Have you gotten the hang of the phone yet?”

“I know what I’m supposed to do, but I’m nervous because I haven’t done it yet. There are a few steps, so there’s a lot of room to make a mistake.”

“You’ll be okay.” The priest dug an envelope out of his shirt pocket and handed it to me. “Here’s your pay before I forget.”

“Thank you.” I pulled my pay out of the envelope and slipped it into my wallet.

“I guess you’re excited about graduating from high school.” Bruno closed the top button on his shirt and slid his priest’s collar back into position.

“Sure am.”

“Lot of stuff going on at the end of the year now.” Bruno’s face melted into a half-mischievous, half-self-conscious smile. “So, have you asked a beautiful young girl to the prom yet?”

I cleared my throat, shifted position in my seat, and glanced down at my hands. “I’ve asked seven beautiful young girls to the prom.”

“Ah.” Bruno instantly regretted bringing up the sore subject. He patted me reassuringly on the shoulder and added, “I’d forget about it if I were you. Thousands of other girls where those seven came from.”

I smiled at the horribly familiar line. “I haven’t had any luck in the past, so I won’t hold my breath.”

Bruno waved his hand dismissively. “Don’t talk like that. You should hear how you sound. It’s maudlin and ridiculous.”

“Yeah. I don’t mean to sound like a poor thing. I’m just close to graduation and I haven’t dated much at all in high school.  Actually, I had one girlfriend for three weeks.  And I went on one date with one other girl.”

“A lot of people don’t date much until they reach college,” Bruno reassured me.

“Junior high was worse, of course,” I added. “It was so bad I had a complex about dating. I went into high school upset because I new the prom was coming and I wasn’t looking forward to not finding a date for it. So my freshman year of high school I had this uneasy feeling that each year I’d get closer to the prom and, in the end, still not go.”

“Oh, Marc…”

“I told my friend Smiley all this and he had a funny response. He blinked a few times and said, ‘So, Marc, I guess you’re not exactly a ‘cup-is-half-full’ kind of guy, are you?’ But here I am, and it is prom time, and my self-fulfilled prophecy has come to pass.”

There was a moment of quiet.

Bruno stuck his hands in his pockets and rocked slightly back and forth on his heels.  "Just because things have gone bad in the past doesn't mean they won't get better in the future.  It is only when you give up hope, or obsess about the past that you really ruin things for yourself.  You need hope.  If you stress about where things went wrong, or mistakes you've made, you start to hate yourself.  You start to feel unlovable.  That's no good." 

I sighed.  "I do dwell on my mistakes.  I do feel unlovable.  I do feel like everything I say and do and think is wrong.."

"You're very hard on yourself."

"I guess."

“You know, whenever I get depressed about my own track record in life, I remember a bumper sticker I saw as a kid. It said: ‘If the devil ever taunts you with your past, just remind him of his future.’”

I smirked. “I’ve got to remember that one.”

Father Bruno shook his head in disbelief. “Wow. I can barely believe that twenty years have passed since my own graduation. They’ve gone by…like a blur.” As he said this, he made a slow, sweeping motion with his hand. “Whatever you do, don’t let everything slip by you. Forget your depressions and live life to the fullest, the way God wants you to.”

Even though it was an old, almost trite message, it regained its freshness after Bruno restated it.

Then I found myself chuckling.

“What?”

“I think events conspired to prevent me from going. It isn’t entirely my fault.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well,” I said, “my high school allows people who don’t go to the school to go to the prom. Funnily enough, the girls in my high school can’t stand the guys. So they’ve all asked their cousins, or their thirty-year-old boyfriends to take them.”

“Thirty-year-old boyfriends?”

“Well, yeah. Guys that age -- you know, thirty -- hate dating women in their thirties because they feel that those women all either want to get married right away, because their clock is ticking, or they are bitter about past boyfriends. (I’m not saying this is how I feel, but I heard several men that age say this. And Smiley says it, too.) So they like to date younger women. As young as possible. And high school girls get a boyfriend with money and a career out of the deal, who can buy them things, take them around, and act all worldly and mature. And they’re probably better in bed than high school guys. And that is why most teen pregnancies, so I hear, are from guys in their twenties and thirties, and not high school guys. Now, I think this all kind of sucks, not just because of the sort of cradle-robbing, Lolita-esque, statutory rape angle, but because … well … there’s no girls for me to go to the prom with.  And there's no girls for a lot of the guys my age to go to the prom with.”

The priest’s mind reeled at this. There were a million questions he seemed to want to ask, but he finally settled on the final thing I said. “So you aren’t the only one not going to the prom?”

“Yeah,” I said. “There’s this really cool guy Bubba, who took a lot of steroids, and worked out til he got lots of muscles. He was the coolest guy of all time in junior high, and all the women swooned over him. In fact, my first crush didn’t have the time of day for me, but loved Bubba. But now it is high school and Bubba, the king of junior high, can’t get a date. The king of junior high can't get a date to the high school prom.  And he still looks great.  He even came up to me and said, ‘Marc, what the hell is going on around here? You can’t get a prom date, I can’t get a prom date. What’s with all these cousins and middle-aged guy dates?’”

“’Well, we all know what the cousins are about,’ I said. ‘Parents are worried their daughters will have sex with their prom dates, so they send them with a relative.’

“’That might not work,’ Bubba said. ‘I know I’d do my cousin. She’s hot.’”

Father Bruno winced at this point in my narrative. “Yes, yes, but what did he say about the situation you were both in?”

“Bubba didn’t know what to do about it,” I said. “He was very angry and said, ‘I don’t get it, Marc. I’m handsome. Put you in a suit, you’re diesel and ready to rock n’ roll. What the hell?’”

“So, no solution?”

“Yeah,” I said. “He’s not going.”

“And the seven girls you asked were all going with cousins and thirty-year-olds?” Father Bruno asked.

“Hmmm…”

“You don’t have to answer.”

“Well, the first girl I asked could only go with a Jewish guy, and I’m not Jewish. The next two girls I asked were the smartest, coolest girls in the school, and I found out they were both lesbians. Then I asked a really cool hippie Marxist chick, and she told me she was boycotting the prom because it was a symbol of Western capitalist decadence and objectified women. A junior girl then asked me to take her to the prom because she wanted to go twice before she graduated. But she had a boyfriend and he objected, so she uninvited me.”

“What about the other two?” he asked.

“Oh, I was just kidding at that point. I don’t even remember who I asked. It just figured, ‘Ask five, why not ask seven?’ They picked up on this, and probably heard that I’d been bouncing from girl to girl, were insulted they were low on my list, and said ‘No.’ And good for them, really.”

“So none of this has anything to do with your theory about the thirtysomething dates and the cousins.”

I cleared my throat. “Ahem. Well … I don’t know. Some of these were probably excuses to avoid hurting my feelings. In other cases, I think an invisible – or visible - parent was involved. The Jewish girl is going with her cousin, for example.”

“Ah.”

“So I guess that’s life.”

“I guess so,” said Father Bruno.

He looked at his watch. “Well, I better get to work. Call me if you need anything.”

“10-4,” I said.

And Bruno sodded off.

The conversation wound up leaving me in a thoughtful, subdued mood, but not a depressed one. Bruno had given me something to think about. When the phone rang, the shock of reality intruding on my thoughts startled me, and it took me a second to recover.

I gingerly plucked up the pone receiver and held it between my head and shoulder, keeping my hands free as I spoke so I could play aimlessly with the parish envelopes. “Hello, Saint Thomas’ rectory,” I said in his happy secretary voice.

“Hello? Father Bruno?” The woman’s reply from the other end was a little hesitant.

“Ah, no,” I said apologetically. “I’m just the secretary. Would you like me to get him?”

“Yes, please.”

I wasn’t sure originally, but now I was positive there was something wrong with the woman’s voice. It seemed to quiver or shake as if she had some sort of speech impediment. It was hard to tell since she barely spoke more than two words at a time to me.

“Hold on.” I hesitated a second, looking over the multitude of little black buttons and flashing lights all over the telephone. I tried to go over in my mind the instructions Father Bruno had given me when I first arrived. “Let me see,” I murmured under my breath. “It’s ‘Hold,’ then ‘Intercom,’ and then…two and four? Yes. Two and four.”

My fingers danced along the keys, hitting “Intercom” first and then the number twenty four. After two or three beep noises that were too high frequency for me to hear well, Father Bruno’s voice appeared on the intercom.

“Yes, Marc?”

“Call for you.”

“Got it.”

Knowing that the father had transferred the call, I hung up and sat back in my swivel chair. I regarded the empty waiting room that my cubicle was attached to with a blank expression and felt things slowly drift out of focus. Before I could slip into one of my habitual, trance-like states, the telephone rang again.

It was the same woman.

“I never got to talk to Father Bruno. My line was cut off.”

I frowned, knowing that my inexperience was probably somehow responsible. Feeling I had to make it up to her by getting the Father as quickly as I could, I hurriedly hit “intercom,” summoned Father Bruno to the phone, and told him that the caller was back online. After I hung up the phone, my irritation with myself lingered, and I wondered what I did to lose the woman’s call. Little mistakes like that – which most other people couldn’t care less about – had a tendency to bother me and I found himself suddenly too restless to read my book or do much of anything at all.

“So, what do I do now?” I mumbled to myself.

It occurred to me that I could pray, which was an appropriate thing to do in a church. I rolled the option around in my head a moment before responding verbally to it.

“Nah. I don’t even know how to do that properly.”

Praying to God was something I was never very good at, so I tried to improve my communication with Heaven by picking someone I felt more comfortable chatting with. I wanted someone I could relate better to than God, who was little more than a distant, masculine force whom nobody had ever seen. As it turned out, Mary was the ideal choice for me. She was a kind, beautiful mother figure, who had an advantage over God in that she was human, female, and was never, at any time, responsible for killing most of the earth’s inhabitants with a torrential rainstorm.

Knowing that exhibiting this attitude towards God was not the fastest way to get into Heaven, I later alternated prayers between Mary and God. I found a gimmick to make God more human simply by picturing the pleasant, bearded image of Jesus that one found in paintings as the logical recipient of my prayers. (Not the bloody Jesus hanging on the cross, but the well groomed Jesus of paintings, surrounded by sheep in a field and smiling warmly at a posse of young children. That Jesus.) Now that was a sympathetic audience. I wondered why I hadn’t thought of it sooner, it was so simple. However, despite my best efforts, my preference for Mary stayed with me.

Realizing this, I mused, So, when Protestants say that there's something wrong with Catholics, because they like Mary too much ... that they're heathens ... and Maryists ... well ... they're talking about me.  I admit it.

In the end, it turned out I didn’t have to pray to pass time in the office since something happened to distract me. Just as Father Bruno had predicted, a young couple arrived at the door shortly thereafter, and I let them in. There was a man in his twenties, with a strong, unshaven jaw and steel grey eyes, whom I wasn’t particularly interested in at all. The fiancé on the other hand, was a pleasantly familiar sight.

Her eyes were soft brown, like the wavy curls of her hair, and they glinted with humor and intelligence. Her complexion was slightly bronzed as well, adding to my suspicion she was not only Italian, but of a "purer" descent than my own German-diluted blood (if one will forgive me for coaching these descriptions in dangerously ethnic and racial terms that sound suspiciously like really narrow-minded sentiments ... apologies). The bridge of her nose was raised slightly, but it added rather than detracted from her looks, giving her face character and an unlikely beauty.

I had noticed her every Saturday evening at mass and would always cast furtive glances in her direction during the slow parts. It was hardly the case that I was filled with lustful thoughts throughout the entire mass, but there was no denying she was a distraction. Still, her regular presence at the end of his pew gave me a bizarre sense of comfort and completeness, and I was put off whenever she wasn’t there. In some bizarre sort of way, I had come to think of seeing her each week as having a relationship of a kind with her. Of course, she didn’t know I was alive, but that was nothing new for me.

Unfortunately, this man of hers with the steel grey eyes had recently appeared next to her in church and I took an instant dislike to him. Knowing that he would soon be her husband did not further endear him to me.

“Is Father Bruno in?” Steel Grey Eyes asked.

Before I could respond, Father Bruno appeared at the door of his office and invited the couple in. When the door closed, its heavy brown wood prevented any sound from sifting through. The silence was not long-lasting as the telephone rang the instant the door jam clicked.

“Saint Thomas’ rectory, secretary speaking.”

“Father Bruno, please,” a woman’s voice asked.

“I’m sorry, he’s in conference right now.” I fumbled for a pad and pencil to take her name and phone number down with. “Can I take a message?”

The moment she heard this, the woman began to break down. “Please, can you get him?”

“Um…I’m not sure – “

“Please,” she pleaded. “I have to talk to him. I’ve tried to reach him twice already and I got disconnected. My father…” She stopped, too overcome to continue.

I hadn’t recognized her voice because it was composed at first, but now it was trembling again, and I knew it was the same woman from before. I closed my eyes and could hear and feel the tears coming down her cheeks.

“My father is dying.”

Oh, God, I thought. And I hung up on her twice.

“I’ll go get him.”

I placed the phone gently on the table and went over to knock on the conference room door. It didn’t take long for me to coax Father Bruno away from the meeting, and I was too worried about the caller to even notice that the Italian woman was staring at me as I stood in the doorway.

Father Bruno took the phone from off of the table and listened to what the woman had to say. When she was done, it was his unenviable task to tell her that he couldn’t go to the hospital. “I’m sorry, Marilla, but I’m not going to be able to get there right away.”

I didn’t know what the woman’s reply was, but I knew that I was disappointed that Father Bruno didn’t just cast off everything else to help her. An interview with an engaged couple and the instruction of a Confirmation class seemed like pretty small time stuff next to what she and her father were going through.

Bruno was soothing and apologetic as he spoke to Marilla, but it was clear that he was pained to hear her so distraught. “There is a chaplain at the hospital. It’s his job to give Last Rites to patients there. You should have him do it…I understand that, but the rites have to be administered. I could stop everything and leave right now and – God forbid – still arrive too late.”

I knew the priest was right, but it didn’t make it any easier for me to listen to. I couldn’t even conceive how Marilla felt. (And I hung up on her. Twice. I forgot to press the ‘hold’ button before the ‘intercom’ button. Twice. And I was warned about doing it, too.)

“I promise,” Bruno added, “when I’m done I’ll be right over to see you. I’ll get Father Romano to cover my Confirmation class and I’ll be there in a half hour. In the meantime, you should have the chaplain see your father. I’ll come and visit him afterwards.”

I sank into my chair and rested my forehead against my palm. She called looking for help and I made her eat dial tone. Twice. Good God, what a moron.

Father Bruno wished her well and reassured her that he would be there as soon as he could before hanging up and returning to the couple in his office.

I mentally pounded myself over and over, viciously cutting myself apart in my mind. I just couldn’t get over the stupidity of what I’d done. I couldn’t get Marilla’s pained voice out of my mind. I had to do something to make it up to her, to ease the guilt I felt.

It came to me without him even really thinking. I didn’t plan it or realize I was about to do it. I just did it. I pulled myself out of my chair, walked to the center of the room, and knelt on the red carpet. Feeling the beginnings of a tear in my right eye, I felt the same quiver I heard over the phone creep into my voice as I spoke.

“Please, God…whatever your will is towards her, father…please help her.”

It was short and simple, but I had never prayed more earnestly to God in my life. This time I needed no gimmick and no image to summon in my mind. This time my feelings were strong enough to make the connection. It was all there in the strength of my guilt, the certainty of my faith, and the rare depth of the compassion which I felt for a person whom I had never met.