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hope.”

    I forced myself to smile again.

     
    “The wrath to come …” Those bleak words of absolution say it all, now that I think of it. The grim warning in the burial prayers. I think it was at a funeral in 1970 that the innocence first began to wash away under a pounding rain. I remember a stormy day, the pungent incense fumes blowing back in my face, censer clinking on its chains, rivulets of water creeping out around the edges of the artificial turf that hides the muddy evidence of our mortality.

    Poor Jack Gillis. His death was as unremarkable as his life. He was visiting my father late one night and dropped dead.

    His only son was glassy-eyed. “What the fuck was that all about?” Sextus said, gesturing angrily toward the casket. “Is that it?”

    Jack’s sudden departure had caught him off guard. Jack was relatively young. There was so much left unsaid, undone; death should have meaning, not this feeling of betrayal, of something interrupted. Sextus repeated all the common phrases of confusion after unexpected loss, but later, calmed by liquor, he became more analytical. He spoke of how his father, travelling for work, was mostly absent from his life; how their occasional coexistence always suffered from anticipated separation. It was how most people grew up here, in this godforsaken place, scrabbling for survival.

    “You don’t have to explain,” I assured him.

    In the end he admitted his real anxiety: a father’s death reveals the awful tragedy of deferred conciliation. “I’m not talking about reconciliation,” he said fiercely. “I’m talking about the basics. I’m talking about what you, yourself, know all too well.”

    I just listened. It’s my job, I told myself. I nodded, gripped his shoulder reassuringly. “You’ll be okay.” This I knew for sure.

    Sextus bounced back quickly, as he has always done. It’s never long before he finds some sleazy analgesic. That was how I saw it then. How easily our lowest needs take over and redirect the heart away from grief. I see them still, Sextus on one side of Jack’s open grave, my sister and her husband John, standing close but somehow disconnected, on the other side, John’s face a mask of pain. He loved his uncle Jack. Or maybe he could already feel the other bond, could see the future coming.

    I hear the awful words again: “I am seized with fear and trembling, until the trial shall be at hand, the wrath to come.”

    “That day, a day of wrath, of wasting, and of misery, a great day, and exceeding bitter. When Thou shalt come to judge the world by fire.”

    My priestly words linger in the flap of wind. I observe my sister’s stealthy glance, the ghostly smile.

    “I am desperately unhappy,” she has told me.

    “I blessed your marriage,” I’d replied. “You will find the strength. You and John, together.”

    She laughed.

    “Eternal rest grant unto him, O Lord.” And in the pouring rain, the mourners murmured the response: “And let perpetual light shine upon him.”

    Perhaps John was still unconscious of the mute transaction happening between his cousin and his wife. Truthfully, I see it only now, knowing what unfolded afterwards, the monstrous betrayal she later justified by calling it compassion.

    “Sextus needed me,” she said. “My husband didn’t.”

     
    After Mass on my first Sunday, I had lunch in the hall with the Catholic Women’s League. Some of them I recognized from high school, self-conscious girls transformed by time into plump and pious matrons. I wondered if they remembered me as I remembered them. They wanted to know if I’d support them in a campaign to revive the daily rosary in the home. Why not, I thought. We need it now more than ever before, they said, and I nodded.

    We used to say the rosary for peace, I said. Maybe we could focus on the Balkans or the Middle East. The Holy Land especially. They seemed uncomfortable with that, and proposed the integrity of the family and the