“Love in the Morning”

By Andre Dubus

At the weekday mass in my parish church, I see the same people, as in a neighborhood bar. Not everyone comes every day, but I rarely see someone who is not a regular. We greet each other going in, say good-bye leaving. One morning when I parked at the church, an old woman and two old men were standing near the door I can go through in my wheelchair. I opened my car door and pressed the switch to open the box on the roof of my car and lower on two chains my folded wheelchair. The woman and men were talking about their bodies, about tests and medications. My chair descended, and the woman looked at me and smiled and said to the men: "And here comes the one with no troubles at all."

I have been at funeral masses for people I did not know. When many people are expected at a funeral, that mass is usually in mid-morning, after the daily mass. Years ago I walked one morning from my apartment to the early mass and saw a hearse outside. I went into the sacristy where the priest was putting on his vestments, and asked him if I should go home. "Oh, no," he said. "It's a very small funeral. Just sit in the back."

"Should I receive Communion?"

"Of course. It's a community. Wait till her family receives, then come."

I kneeled in the back. So did the other regulars, when they came in. That was at Sacred Hearts Church in Bradford, Massachusetts. Now I go to weekday masses at St. John the Baptist Church in Haverhill, because it is close to my house, mass is at nine rather than before eight, and it is the easiest church in town for me to push my wheelchair into. It is a brick church with steps at its front; but at both its sides, close to its rear, there are doors without steps or a curb, and the asphalted ground is level. So I roll in, between the altar and the first pew, and park in the middle aisle.

I have taken part in several funeral masses here. I push backward in a side aisle till I am at the rear of the church with the other regulars. I would feel like an intruder, if the priest at Sacred Hearts had not instructed me. Now I see a few relatives and friends in the first six or seven pews, flanking the body in the casket; then the empty pews separating them from the rest of us; the priest at the altar; the brown wooden walls and ceiling, and the stained glass windows enclosing all of us; and I think it is good for us strangers to be here as witnesses to death and life, to prayer and grief. During the mass and in the church, we are not strangers. We simply do not know one another. Entering the building has rendered us peaceable; the mass keeps us respectful; we only speak when we pray, and when the priest asks us to offer one another a sign of peace, and we take the hands of those near us and say: Peace be with you.

The mass unites us with the body in the casket, and with its soul traversing whatever it is that souls traverse, perhaps visiting now the people in the pew near the body; perhaps melding with infinity, receiving the brilliant love of God. The mass and the walls and floor and ceiling of the church unite us with the people who knew this person, with their sorrow, like the sorrow most of us have felt and all of us will feel unless we die before anyone we love dies. It unites us with the mortality of our bodies, with the immortality of our souls. The mass ends, and everyone but me stands as the family and friends follow the body in the casket out of the church. Then we leave and tell each other good-bye. We do not say goodbye. We wave, we nod: sometimes we say, "Have a good day." Earthly time is upon us again; we enter it, and go to our cars. Sometimes, in spring and fall, I do not go to my car. I push myself around the church, on the asphalt parking lot, downhill on one side of the church, then uphill on the other; I breathe deeply and look at trees and the sky and passing cars, and I sing.

The thirtieth anniversary of John F. Kennedy's murder was a Monday, a day in Massachusetts with a blue sky, and in the morning I filled a quart plastic bottle with water, put on a Boston Red Sox jacket and cap, and a pair of gloves, and went outside and down the six ramps to my car and drove to the church. On Sunday afternoon, while I was driving my young daughters to their mother's house in a nearby town, the first line of a story had come to me. I was talking with my daughters and watching cars and the road, and suddenly the sentence was inside me; it had come from whatever place they come from. It is not a place I can enter at will; I simply receive its gifts. I had been gestating this story for a very long time, not thinking about it, but allowing it to possess me, and waiting to see these characters living in me: their faces, their bodies. I do not start writing a story until I see the people and the beginning of the story. In the car with my girls I knew I must start writing the story on Monday, and before writing I wanted to receive Communion and to exercise. So Monday I drove to the church, grateful to be out of bed and on the way to mass on a lovely morning, my flesh happily anticipating exercise in the air under the sun. In that space between my heart and diaphragm was the fear I always feel before writing, when my soul is poised to leap alone.

There is only one priest at the church, and he is the pastor and lives in the small brick rectory beside the church. The rectory faces the street and is close to the sidewalk, and it is separated from the church by a driveway of the parking lot, and on some mornings in the basement of the rectory people in Alcoholics Anonymous gather to help one another. I like this priest, but liking him is not important. A priest can be shallow, boring, shy, arrogant, bigoted, or mean; during mass, it is not important. I believe most Catholics go to mass for the same reason I do: to take part in ritual, and to eat the body of Christ. If the priest is an intelligent, humorous, and impassioned speaker, then the mass includes the thrill of being entertained, even spiritually fed. I know that a homily can affect the soul. But a mute priest could perform a beautiful mass, and anyone could read aloud the prayer and the Gospel and the words of the consecration of the bread and wine. The homilies of the priest at St. John the Baptist are good; he always says something I can use that day.

I do not remember his homily on that November Monday morning. At mass my mind wanders about like a released small child. It does this wherever I am; it is not mine to hold, and I can either concentrate and so contain it, or wait for it to return. Probably at mass that morning I was concentrating on not writing the story in my mind, for doing that disturbs the gestation, and the life that may come on the page comes too soon. Once, while working on a novella, I came home from teaching and, before writing, I took my golden retriever outside to relieve himself. It was late afternoon, and we walked in a grove of trees on the campus. The dog rolled on the ground and chewed on fallen branches, and the work I meant to do at my desk began coming to me: the people and the words I would use and the rhythms of punctuation. I let it come and it filled me and I was not under a blue sky in the shade of a grove with my happy dog, I was a young woman who lived in a notebook on my desk, and the words I saw and hefted in my mind gave her a body and motion and dread and hope, and I was those, too. Then I went inside with the dog and made a cup of tea and went to my desk; but my soul, filled in the grove, was empty. I sat at my desk but did not write. I had already written, without a pen in my hand, standing under trees and gazing at my golden dog. It is part of my vocation not to worry about what I am working on, and never to think about it when I am not at my desk, and doing this demands as much discipline and focus as sitting at my desk and writing. I also keep a notebook and pen with me, everyplace where I am clothed, for those images or people or scenes that may fall on me like drops of rain.

I hope I prayed for my murdered president at mass; I do not remember. Dead for thirty years, he would not need prayers to help him on that Monday in 1993. But since reading Dorothy Day's belief that prayers for the dead can help them while they were alive on earth, I have believed it. I prayed to Kennedy later in the day, after mass and exercise and a shower and breakfast, when I wheeled to my desk. I had never prayed to him before. Moments before I wrote the sentence that had come to me in the car with my girls. I prayed: Jack, you were an active man, and probably people don't ask you to do much anymore, so will you help me with this story?

When mass ended I put on my jacket and gloves, and hung my leather bag on my right shoulder, the straps angling down my chest and back to the bag on my left thigh, which is now a stump. I left the church and put on the baseball cap and looked up at the blue sky. I went to the passenger side of the car, reached for the bottle of water on the seat, and drank. People got into their cars and drove out of the parking lot. I waited for them to leave; I do not like moving among cars in motion; my body's instincts are to step or jump out of their way, but the chair has no instincts at all. This is something I think about when I am sitting next to the stove, stirring a pot of beans.

When the people in cars were gone I pushed uphill to a tree at the edge of the lot. Behind it the hill with brown grass rose to a brick nursing home. Three young women sat in chairs outside, smoking in the sunlight. I turned right and pushed behind the church, singing "Glad to Be Unhappy." I sing while exercising so that I will breathe deeply into my stomach; I also do it because pushing a wheelchair around a parking lot is not exciting, as running and walking were; but singing, combined with the work of muscles and blood, makes it joyful. I know that, to some people, I may seem mad, wheeling up and down and around a parking lot and singing torch songs. But there were no people, and the priest was in the rectory, and I did not care if he heard me; he is a priest, and must be merciful about things more serious than someone singing off-key. It amused me to imagine watching this from the height of a hunting hawk: the nursing home, and downhill from it the church, and the singing man on wheels speeding down and turning right and passing the front of the church, then pushing uphill to the tree. Safety was not the only reason I chose the church parking lot for laps; I did not want anyone to hear me.

The people who heard me arrived in cars a quarter of an hour after I started my laps. They parked near the rectory and gathered at its rear, by the open door of the garage. In the garage are steps to the basement, and at ten o'clock these people would go down there for a meeting. But now they stood talking, men and women, most of them drinking coffee from Styrofoam cups, and smoking. I sang softly as I pushed past them, up the hill, and did not look at their faces. If I looked at their faces I would not sing. At the tree I looked up the hill at the three women sitting outside the nursing home, then turned right and sang loudly again and wheeled past the back of the church. All of us were receiving sensual and soothing pleasures: the workers at the nursing home, smoking; the alcoholics drinking coffee and smoking; me pushing and singing, after eating the body of Christ. At the end of the parking lot I turned downhill and steered as the chair rolled fast; to my left were houses, and across the street was the high school football stadium, but not the school, which is in another part of town.

When I came around the church and went up between it and the rectory, I stopped singing and looked at the alcoholics. I felt an affinity for them and believed that, because of their own pain and their desire to mend, they did not see me as an aberrant singer on wheels, but as a man also trying to mend. That was in their faces. They all watched me going by; some of the men greeted me; women smiled and looked. I said: "How y'all doing?" and went up the hill, sweating. I stopped at my car and unlocked the passenger door and drank water. A small gray bus with the engine in front, like a school bus for only a few children, came up the driveway between the rectory and the church. It turned left and stopped and teenage girls and boys got out, some lit cigarettes, and they all walked down to the gathering of alcoholics. I pushed away from my car and went up to the tree and turned.

Going down the hill toward the street, I saw a man on the sidewalk, to my left; he was walking at a quick pace toward the church. His overcoat was unbuttoned, and he wore a coat and white shirt and tie; he had lost hair above his brow, and something about his face made me feel that he did not work in an office. I turned to roll in front of the church; he was walking parallel to me, thirty feet away, and he looked at me. I stopped singing. He was glaring, and I felt a soft rush of fear under my heart, and a readying of myself. He raised his right arm and his middle finger and yelled: "Fuck God."

He was looking at the church, walking fast, his finger up. My fear changed; for a moment I expected a response: the sky suddenly dark gray, thunder, lightning. He yelled it again. We were both opposite the church door, and there was no fear in me now; I wondered if any of the alcoholics or if the priest in the rectory were frightened or offended. He yelled again, his finger up; his anger was pure and fascinating. By now I knew he was unsound. We passed the church, and I turned and pushed upward, looking at him over my left shoulder. He kept his finger up as he passed the rectory, still yelling. I moved past the alcoholics watching him; some smiled at me, and I smiled. As I pushed to the top of the parking lot, I looked up at the nursing home. The workers had gone inside. I sang, and laughed as I rolled past the rear of the church, seeing all of us: the roofs of the church and rectory, and the alcoholics talking and smoking, and me singing and sweating in the wheelchair, and the man in the suit and tie, with his finger up as far as he could reach. On that morning under a blue November sky, it was beautiful to see and hear such belief: Fuck God.

I wrote the story in four days; it is very short, and I knew before starting it that it was coming like grace to me, and I could receive it or bungle it, but I could not hold it at bay; and if I were not able to receive it with an open heart and, with concentration, write it on paper, it would come anyway, and pass through me and through my room to dissipate in the air, and it might not come back. That is why I prayed to Kennedy. It was strange, in those four days, to become one with the woman in the story, and the evil she chose, and the ecstasy it gave her and me. I called the story "The Last Moon," and in December I wrote it again, and in January I wrote it again. I did not look at it for days between drafts, and worked at not thinking about it, because it was hot and I was hot, and we both needed to cool, so I could see it clearly enough to take words away from it. But in January it was done, which truly means I had done all I can ever do with it, and it became something that lived apart from me. I started another story, and in a few weeks "The Last Moon" was a memory, much like meeting someone while you are traveling, and you eat and drink and talk with this person, feel even love, and then you go home with the memory and it does not matter to you whether you ever see the person again.

That winter, snow fell and fell and froze and stayed on the ground. The church parking lot was plowed often, but a coating of snow remained, and all winter I did not push my chair around the church. I live on a steep hill, and each time the snow stopped falling a friend plowed it, then I paid young men to come in a pickup truck and shovel sand onto the driveway. A friend shoveled my ramps and spread rock salt on them and chipped away the ice on top of the railings I use to pull myself upward to the house. Most days that winter I did not go to mass; I could have gone, on many days, but waking in the morning and thinking of cold air and of rolling on the packed, thin layer of snow and ice blunted the frail edge of my desire to leave my warm bed, and I lay in it.

One of the regulars at daily mass is a pretty blond woman in her thirties. On a cold and gray spring morning I drove to the church, and a seventy-eight-year-old man walked from his car to talk to me while I lowered my chair. I knew his age because once I asked him how old Jack Kennedy would be if he were still alive, and he said: Same as me: seventy-eight. On that morning in spring, after the winter of snow, I got into my chair, and the blond drove into the parking lot and stopped. We looked at her. She walked past us to the church and smiled and said good morning, and we did, and she went through the door I use. The man shook his head, grinning. He said: "If I were ten minutes younger."

Two days later he was standing outside when I drove to the church. The sky was still gray, the air cold. As I lowered my chair and got the armrest and seat cushion and leg rest from the back seat, I watched him. He was looking at the sky, at the green hill in front of the nursing home, at trees near the parking lot. I got into my chair, and he looked at me and said: "I'm looking for a robin."

I told him I had seen one this week, on my lawn.

* * *

Today is a Friday in early September, it is not autumn yet, but the air is cool and rain falls and in the rain I see winter coming, snow and ice on my ramps and driveway, on roads and parking lots and sidewalks, snowbanks pushed by plows to curbs, blocking the curb-cuts I use in my chair; and the long dark nights. While this September rain falls I want to be held, loved; but this morning I woke too late to go to mass. I have learned rarely to worry about my work, and not to write it in my mind without a pen in my hand and paper in front of me. But I have not learned to live this way, so I sit in September, listening to rain, glancing up from the page at it, feeling the cool air coming through my windows and open glass door, and I feel the sorrow of a season that has not come. This morning the sky was blue, and if I had gotten out of bed and gone to mass, I would not feel this sorrow now; it would be there, but as a shadow, among other shadows of pain; the trees that cast these shadows are mortality and failures in love, in faith, in hope; and if I had this morning received the Eucharist, all of these would be small shapes and shadows surrounded by light.

I go to mass because the Eucharist is there. Before the priest raises the disk of unleavened bread and the chalice of wine and consecrates them and they become Christ, the Eucharist is there in the tabernacle. When it is time for us to receive communion, the priest will go to the tabernacle and take from it the consecrated hosts to give to us. But the Eucharist is not only there in the tabernacle. I can feel it as I roll into the church. It fills the church. If the church had no walls, the Eucharist would fill the parking lot, the rectory, the nursing home, the football stadium. And the church has no walls, and the Eucharist fills the women smoking outside the nursing home; and the alcoholics waiting to gather, but already they are gathered, as they are gathered when they are apart; fills the man cursing God from the isolation of his mind; fills the old man watching a woman, and looking for robins. When I am enclosed by the walls and roof and floor, and the prayers and duration of mass, I see this, and feel it; and when the priest places the host in the palm of my hand, I put it in my mouth and taste and chew and swallow the intimacy of God.