“So, Lance has a son?” Thackeray said while he twisted the edge of his bedspread.
“Yeah,” Dylan said. “But, more importantly, it seems you do to. Or a something.”
I don’t know,” Thackeray shrugged. “And I can’t push her.”
“Dad’s gotta be…? How is Dad?” Dylan wondered.
“Tom doesn’t know cause I haven’t told him. As for Fenn, he’s Fenn,” Thackeray shrugged. “You know he never hits us over the head with his feelings. But he’ll be so glad if the baby is born.”
“That’s so odd,” Dylan thought. “For it to be an option. I was just thinking, she’s pregnant so she’s having a baby. But…”
“It’s her decision.”
“Yeah, apparently you’re not the first person in this house to have that philosophy.”
“That’s not fair.”
“None of it is,” Dylan said, “and look, since I’ve never been straight and I’ve never slept with a woman, I don’t have to pretend to be this feminist who just shrugs and says, oh whatever she does it alright with me. It can’t be that simple.
The two of you did this together, and… Lance just wiped everything off of his hands and said the same thing. I dunno. I guess I don’t understand it, but the way I see it you’ve got to feel some way about it.”
“I feel a bunch of ways about it. I want my kid. And… I know I’m not ready. If she decides not to have it, it’s going to be a relief. And if she decides not to have it I know part of me will never forgive her.”
Dylan took a deep breath. He didn’t say anything for a moment and then he said, “I think I just wanted to hear you say that.”
“You wanted me to be sad?”
“I wanted you to be something. And…. Why the fuck don’t you be a man and talk to her?”
“Dyl!”
“No, seriously, go to her and tell her you want you fucking kid. My future niece of nephew. For fuck’s sake.”
“And what about you?” Thackeray said.
“Me?”
“And Lance’s kid.”
“Uh…” Dylan shook his head. “I’m definitely not ready.”
“Do not let me forget to get my copy of Bede’s Ecclesiastical History back from Fenn,” Dan said when they left their lake house early that morning.
The last two times he has been to Rossford, he has forgotten it in Fenn’s house, and he feel’s suddenly, he must have the old Penguin Classic volume he received when he entered the Episcopal Church. He must have that old friend with him.
Dan Malloy’s crime, well not crime, fault was a better word, was believing that things could be taken care of simply. His cravings for holiness were to be solved by entering the priesthood. His desire to be near Fenn would be taken care of by moving to Rossford. His loneliness and sexual craving, his betrayal of his vows would be taken care of by running off with Keith MacDonald and joining the Episcopal Church.
But his semi disdain for the Episcopal Church was never quite taken care of. He still loved the Catholic Church where he could never properly be a priest. And then he had retired at sixty and settled down to a pension he never would have had in the Catholic church, but with a little stipend from them, and, for the first time, from a distance, he could observe all things.
“An Episcopal priest is really more like am ininister,” Dan said. “It’s like a job. Bur a Catholic priest… ah, that never goes.”
“And it never does go,” Keith reminded him. Not really.
This was to say that a Catholic priest recited the Mass everyday, regardless of employment or congregation. Now, in their house in Michigan, for each other and with each other, Dan and Keith raised their hands and gave themselves up to the liturgy everyday and, what was more, to the Anglican one.
As they drove, Dan murmured:
“Because I do not dare to hope, because I do not dare…”
After all this time, in retirement, there was some solace. There was some becoming something. Now, paid by both churches and under the employ of none, he settled into the joy of priesthood. The Episcopal Church of America meant very little to him, but Anglicanism had come to mean a great deal. There was room for doubt in it, and the older he grew the more doubt ceased to be an enemy, the more he took pity on the rash seminarian he had been.
“Because I do not dare, because I do not dare.”
They drove across the white fields of Michigan, seeing the stark trees, pale brown and naked, tipped in snow under the icy blue sky. Under viaducts, past farms and by the woods they would go.
“Are we wise men?” Dan demanded, half musing as Keith looked at him. “Are we two wise men? And where is the third? And where is the baby?”
Keith shook his head and said nothing. He had not retired. Grey was in his temples.
“Will you serve Mass with me at John Crysostom?” he asked Dan.
“I might.”
“Since I’ve known you you’ve been my rest,” Keith said. “Since you’ve been my man, you’ve been my rest. I had no rest. I had no peace until you.”
While Keith had been in seminary he had also been engaged in pornography, not the watching of, but the actual acting in. The beast had risen in him and only been slaked on the screen in sex acts, putting away who he was until the need rose again. Even after his ordination, past the image his parishioners liked, he’d pursued risky sex in strange places. He’d even hired male prostitutes. Becoming an Anglican priest had not made him less sexual. It was only in Dan, the two of them answering each others desire and loneliness, that the sexuality that had been more of a rough master than a liberation had slaked. In his first times with Dan, they had both been surrendering to great desire, but over time the desire that threatened their friendship had become love. The fire that could kill had been tamed to a home fire.
The blue white sky, so crystal clear it is actually hard like a diamond, fades into a softer, bleaker white and from white to grey, and while grey is going to night, Dan says, “Matthew is the Gospel of darkness.”
“What?” Keith says.
He is coming back to the car in his fur cap, looking like Dr. Shivago or something except he is carrying Cheetos and soda and not medicine.
“Matthew is the Gospel of Darkness.”
“It is the Sermon on the Mount.”
“It is the Crucifixion on the Mount,” Dan says.
“Every Gospel has a crucifixion on a mount.”
“Then every gospel is a dark one,” Dan says, “but Matthew is the darkest.”
He allows Keith to drive into the night. The road sign says that they are only a half hour from New Buffalo, Michigan, which means only an hour and a half from Rossford, Indiana.
“Luke begins in the light. Zechariah comes to the Temple in the presence of all, in glittering Herod’s Temple, one of the wonders of the world, he enters the Holy of of Holies and before a golden altar, amidst white incense, burns the angel Gabriel, named and specific with his annunciation. Only paragraphs later, in the day, while she is doing whatever she is doing— gathering water the stain glass windows seem to say—Mary is interrupted by this same angel. Months later, though there is no room in the end, the sky is filled with angels singing to shepherds. Even at night, all is done in the light.
“Not so in Matthew. It begins with a man called Joseph getting some dim news from the woman he will marry that she has conceived of the holy ghost…whatever the hell that means. A hazy dream from an angel, something dreamed in the dark, and then a birth at night and again, a star in the sky, and look up there, look at how dim a star is, and how many there are, and how impossible it is to follow one across a desert, to Herod’s palace, not an angel at all, not a touch of direct news, only, to at last, reach Bethlehem and be warned in dreams, but not in person not to go back the same way.
“But the warning does not help the other babies. Joseph gets the dream, but the town does not. And again, an angel in a dream. Not an angel standing before him, but a voice in the dark. See, the Gospel of darkness, of dimness.
“I used to think it did not fit,” Dan said. “After all, my favorite gospel was Matthew, but my favorite Christmas story was Luke. Now I see it fits perfectly.”
Keith did not say a thing. To say one thing would have been to say too much. They were a half hour from Rossford now. To say anything would have been to point out the obvious, that God always came in the dark, on the edge of a dream, came so quietly, with so much stealth it was subjective if he even came at all. The power of God was a stealthy one, under the door and not kicking it down. The Holy Spirit was a draft that could be easily ignored. In the middle of the night, as he slept naked in his bed those first times, and Dan had come to him, reaching across the great gulf of two feet, joining to him, that had been the power. Did Dan remember similar things?
At Fenn’s house the laughter and light is so powerful, the smell of the food, buttered chicken, gumbo, jumbalaya, shrimp biryani, is so potent, it drives all the darkness away, a darkness which started in a good and holy place but which has now become entirely too much to bear. He and Keith are separated as they are surrounded by guest.
Brendan has said they need to talk. He said it casually, but Dan understands by now. In another world, Brendan would have been his son, he thinks. Rafe his grandson.
“Do you still have my Ecclesiastical History?” Dan says.
“By Bede?” Fenn says. Then, “By who else? Yes. It’s in Thackeray’s room, Dylan’s old room.”
“I’m not going to forget it.”
“You’re not leaving tonight. You’re staying in town.”
“True,” Dan says. “But I don’t want to forget it.”
Fenn shrugs as Dan heads upstairs, wondering if he even remembers where Thackeray’s room is. On his way up, Todd is coming down.
“Heya, Dan!” he gives the former priest a hug.
It is good to be here. Good to be staying here. Who would have known that, even at sixty, one could still be afraid of the dark. The dark that sets in after New Year’s Day, after the time of magic has ended, can be the deepest darkness of all, Dan thinks as he reaches the upstairs goes down the half lit hall. Thank goodness they all have each other and that now they can huddle together, so to speak.
Here is Dylan’s old room, and here is the book he longs for, another old friend in the dark. The Ecclesiastical History, when Anglican and Catholic were one, when sex mattered little. In the dying light, Dan opens the door just long enough to see the blond boy and the red headed boy naked, their bodies bunching like cords, now untwisting, kissing hungrily, now arms wrapping back together. Desire rises in him, not for them, but for the memory so long ago of the same dark power he thought of earlier that blossomed years ago. He in his button up shirt, sitting next to Fenn on the bed. Fenn saying, “Come with me. This Christmas?” Him saying yes. That Christmas so long ago when they were both boys not even twenty, like this, stripping, kissing, linking together, Fenn’s hands in his hair, his hands on Fenn’s body like this thin blond boy’s on the red headed ones. And all those years later, in this very room, with Fenn it had happened again.
That boy, strong limbed, a man really, is Dena Meradan’s son. That is Todd’s great nephew.
He hears the shudder of pleasure and closes the door behind them.
This is their dark mystery. Their overshadowing of the spirit. He was the witness, not the angel.
Dan whispers, reverently: “I’ll not tell a soul.”
