I.O.U

  “What you and Sherry have been through.”

  “Yes.”

  “Then why don’t you find out, Jenny?”

  I stared at her. “What?”

  She smiled at me. “You’re such a hotshot amateur sleuth? Always sticking your nose into other people’s business?” Her smile turned self-deprecating. “Like me. Well, here you’ve been going around for years helping other people solve the mysteries of their lives… what about the mysteries of your own life? Why did your father’s business fail? Ask around. Find out! Who was the woman named Margaret Cain? Find out! Investigate your mother’s life. Interview people who knew her. Maybe she’ll begin to come alive for you as the separate person she really was. You might even find some clues the doctors missed that will help us to understand what happened to her.” She added quickly, “I think that’s unlikely, but you never know. And if it would make you feel better to try, then why not do it?”

  I continued staring at her, but now it was in admiration. Tears spurted to my eyes, but this time I wiped them away, and they stopped flowing. “You did that in fifteen minutes flat,” I joked. “Are you going to charge me for a full fifty minutes anyway?”

  Marsha smiled again, but her tone was serious as she said, “And listen, how do you feel? Physically, I mean. Do you feel as terrible as you look?”

  “Thanks a lot.” I grinned foolishly, feeling eager and even a little happy. “I guess the answer is not quite. I’m tired, that’s all. I want to sleep all the time, and I don’t have any appetite. I’ve lost about ten pounds in the last five days—”

  “Not good, Jenny.”

  “I know, but—”

  “I want you to get a physical. I know you’ll put it off if I leave it up to you, so I’m going to call Doc Farrell—he’s still your GYN, isn’t he? —and get you in to see him tomorrow. You’re way too thin and you’re so pale I think they buried the wrong woman. I think you’ll feel better if you’re put on a vitamin regimen, and that sort of advice should come from a doctor who has examined you, and not from me.” Having delivered herself of those prescriptions, she stood up and reached out a hand to me. “Let’s fix some hot chocolate. You’re having yours with marshmallows.”

  I was suddenly ravenously hungry as I let my best friend help me to my feet.

  “Do you feel any better, Jen?”

  “I feel a lot better,” I admitted, as I followed her to her kitchen. “Kind of hopeful. Less crazy and sad and helpless.”

  She turned halfway around and jabbed one of my shoulders with one of her fingers, hard enough to make me cry, “Ouch!”

  “You’re not crazy,” she said, and then she faced me straight on and grasped both my shoulders with her hands. “I am a bona fide, gen-u-ine psychiatrist, and I hereby declare you not crazy. A shade neurotic, perhaps, on the subject of your mother, maybe a mite confused about the separation between your identity and hers, but otherwise every bit as sane as your average contemporary American female.”

  Marsha smiled at me and released me. She turned back around and continued on down the hall to her kitchen.

  “Thank you,” I said, hurrying after her. “I think.”

  But I thought of my strange visit to my mother’s hospital room, of my outburst of hysteria in the funeral limousine, of my behavior at Sherry’s house after the funeral, and of leaving work in tears that very morning. Not to mention my general reputation about town as a woman who regularly got involved in trouble more often than any normal person ought to do. And I said, in words so prophetic I would have taken the next bus to Boston if I’d known the truth of them: “You’d have a hard time convincing some people.”

  5

  AT BREAKFAST THE NEXT MORNING, GEOF MADE ME EAT CHOCOLATE chip cookies, along with a breakfast of eggs and toast.

  “Are you trying to fatten me up?” I asked him.

  “Fatten schmatten,” my husband replied, as he fed a last bite of cookie into my waiting mouth. “I’d be happy just to get you all the way up to thin. I want you to eat at least two more of these, Jenny. And drink all of your milk. The whole glass.”

  “Aw, Dad, you’re so mean to me.”

  I called my assistant at her home that morning to tell her I wouldn’t be at the office that day.

  “Good,” Faye said. “I approve. Stay away as long as you need, Jenny. I’ll take care of everything just fine.”

  “I know you, Faye,” I laughed. “You’ll take care of everything so ‘fine’ the foundation won’t need me anymore.”

  It was only intended as a joke, and I was surprised to feel my spirits lift at the very idea. What, me? Not go back to the foundation? What an extraordinary thought. I loved my job, didn’t I? But Faye was good enough, she could do it… in an emergency. Like now. Right, that was all. Now. Temporarily. For a day or two. Of course I was going back to my job.

  As I emerged from our house that Tuesday morning, my body felt loose and rattly in its skin, and my skin itself felt dry and itchy, as did my throat. If I’d had to run the fifty-yard dash, I’d have been winded by the third yard. Still, I was moving. Eating. Talking. I felt as if I were emerging from a dark, warm, silent cave. I was a bat, blinking in the sunlight, flapping my wings weakly, tentatively, to see if they’d still hold me up. And, deep inside, longing a bit to return to the strange, dark comfort of the cave. But I knew that Marsha was right in something she hadn’t even voiced: In the process of immersing myself in the mysteries of other people’s lives, I had avoided my own.

  Well, no longer.

  Even bats eventually fly out of their caves.

  I flapped my elbows experimentally (after looking around to make sure nobody was around to see me) and then I got into my car.

  I had a list. I had a plan. I had hope.

  I would start at the beginning…

  Once upon a time, a child named Margaret Mary Thorne was born to a Lutheran father and a Catholic mother in the seacoast town of Port Frederick, Massachusetts. And it came to pass that the priest who christened her, and educated her in the church, and who heard her childish confessions was Father Francis Gower…

  He was eighty-two now, and living in retirement in a tiny, one-story brick house squeezed between St. Michael’s Cathedral and its rectory. I knew him by reputation and by the vaguest memories of things I thought my mother had told me, as he was not a priest who had ever entered into the wider affairs of the community outside of his own church. When I had called him the previous night to make an appointment for this morning, Father Francis had sounded old, tired and cranky as a nun in a wool habit. “I’m retired,” he’d said, in a weak croak. “I don’t feel well at all. And you are not a member of my parish, so what gives you the right to bother me now?”

  “I want to ask you some things about my mother,” I told him, not at all abashed by his bad temper. With five elderly powerhouses on my board of trustees, I was used to dealing with those moments when their aching bones and failing eyesight and hearing made them irritable and hard to get along with. Hell, in their place, I’d have been cranky, too, and a lot more often. “I’m gathering memories of her. And I have a gift for you.”

  “Things! I don’t need any more things.”

  “It’s food, Father Gower, cookies.”

  There had been a pause, full of suspicion. “What kind of cookies?”

  “Chocolate chip, like my mother used to make.”

  “I don’t believe it,” he said, but he sounded as if he wanted to believe it. “I hear you’re a working woman. Everybody knows working women don’t cook, which is the reason their husbands run around and their children take drugs.”

  I laughed, and sweetened the bribe: “Two dozen.”

  “You’re sure it’s her recipe?”

  “Out of her very own recipe box.”

  “All right. Ten o’clock in the morning. Put the cookies in a paper sack, and be sure you give them to me and not to anybody else, do you understand?”

  “No,” I said, “but I’ll do that.”


  “Not to anybody else!”

  At my phone, I raised my left hand. “I swear it.”

  He grunted, and hung up.

  So I had the cookies with me when I walked up his front steps. I was thinking how this man remembered my mother as a baby; it was poignant to think of her as a child, to imagine her sweet innocence, and the loss of it. I rang his doorbell.

  “You bring the cookies?” he demanded, right off.

  Physically, he suited his house well, as he, too, was small in height, but thick and solid-looking, like a brick, with a face of a similar flushed color. That was from high blood pressure, I deduced, which might help to account for his choleric disposition. Even wearing low-heeled shoes, I loomed over him by a good eight inches.

  I smiled in reply, and held out the brown paper sack to him.

  Father Gower took it, opened it, held it up to his face, and sniffed. He reached in with one hand and took out a cookie, which he stuck in his mouth while offering the open sack to me. Having already eaten three for breakfast, I declined. He crumpled up the mouth of the sack and, munching his cookie, escorted me into his little home.

  He wiped crumbs from his whiskery chin. “Don’t tell.”

  I was alarmed. “You aren’t diabetic or anything, are you?”

  “No, no.” But when he opened the hall closet and stuffed the paper sack into a sleeve of a black raincoat, after removing one more cookie, I wondered if he’d tricked me into helping him break a diet. “No, nothing like that,” he said, as he tried to shove the door to again. It wasn’t easy, as the tiny closet was stuffed with a lot more than coats; I glimpsed piles of newspapers, boots, walking canes, hats, rectangles of cardboard, a vacuum sweeper, a broom, and a mop. Clearly, it double—tripled?—as a parish art supply and utility closet, too. I put my own shoulder to the task. “It’s not that at all,” he repeated, as the door clicked shut, catching only a bit of a sleeve in the crack. “It’s Mrs. Kennedy, my daily. She’s the world’s worst cook with the world’s most sensitive feelings. When she catches me eating some other woman’s cooking, she gets her feelings hurt, and then I suffer the consequences for meals to come. Mrs. K takes it out on me by trying to impress me with strange concoctions she calls gourmet dinners, things like fried spinach turnovers.” He shivered. “Awful stuff like that. You have no idea how bad it used to be back in the days when we had to eat fish on Fridays. What that woman could do to cod ought to be against canon law. I used to make her do a penance and say five Hail Marys for some of those offenses against the culinary arts. I have been at the mercy of that woman for forty-two years, and I’ll keep those chocolate chip cookies a secret from her if I have to commit a venial sin to do it. Come in, come in. Sit down.”

  We were in his compact living room by then.

  It was immaculate, thanks to the infamous Mrs. K, I supposed. A number of lurid prints of paintings purporting to be of Jesus Christ adorned the walls. Judging from them, Jesus was an anorexic white man with glaucoma and a bad barber. The room was also distinguished by a plentitude of doilies draped over every conceivable surface—on the arms and backs of the sofa and chairs, under the church magazines that were stacked on the coffee table, under the lamps on the end tables, under the candy dishes on top of the television set, under the homemade pen holder that contained pencils and felt-tip pens, even pinned to the hassocks. I could only guess that Father Gower had brought with him into retirement his collection of Christmas and birthday gifts made for him through the years by the devoted women of his parish. Or, as jealous as he claimed his housekeeper to be, maybe Mrs. K had crocheted two doilies for every one he’d been given. The room smelled strongly of lavender, as if she’d hidden sachets in every drawer, perhaps also gifts from the ladies guilds.

  When he sat down, only the tips of his brogues touched the carpet. He wore baggy black trousers, belted with brown leather, and a red flannel shirt that was buttoned to his neck and frayed at the cuffs. The shirt made his complexion look even redder, so that even his ears, below a rim of white hair, looked fiery. If it hadn’t been for the stern expression on his face, what with his short stature and high color he would have looked more like a retired circus clown than a retired priest. I had a feeling, however, that it would be unwise in the extreme to laugh at this man.

  “Jennifer Lynn.” He pronounced my name slowly, experimentally, as if trying it out on his tongue to see if it had a good Catholic feel to it. Evidently not, judging from the way his mouth pursed in distaste. “Margaret Mary’s oldest girl.”

  “That’s right, Father.”

  “You’re not married.”

  “Yes, I am.”

  “What’s your last name now?”

  “It’s still Cain.”

  “Hmmph. I suppose you work, and you don’t have any children”

  “That’s right, Father.”

  “I thought as much. It’s young women like you who are responsible for the decline of parishes like this one. Women are the backbone, the very mainstay of a church. When you selfishly work somewhere for money, you deprive your family and your church of the fruit of your labor and the wealth of your time.”

  “Yes,” I agreed. “We do.”

  He shot me a canny look, not at all deceived by the mildness of my tone. “Hmmph. It is woman’s role to serve God and man.”

  “How very convenient for you both.” Although my words were sarcastic, I was careful to keep my tone nearly as cheerful as my stepmother’s. “Tell me, Father, my mother attended St. Michael’s as a child, didn’t she?”

  “You expect me to remember that?”

  “I expect you have an excellent memory, Father. What do you remember about her?”

  “Why do you want to know?”

  Out of sheer frustration, I laughed. “Are you a Jesuit?”

  “Why do you ask?”

  I smiled at him. “Because you ask, instead of answering.”

  “I am a diocesan priest, not a Jesuit, as you would surely know had you been raised properly in the church. But, if you like, I will give you questions. Three of them.” He proceeded to tick them off on his short, stubby fingers. “What business is it of yours to pry into your mother’s spiritual life? What gives you, who never participated in my church, the expectation that I will serve your whim now? Three, your mother’s soul is in the hands of God, and who are you to question the natural order of the sacred universe?”

  “Is that what I’m doing?” I shook my head. “I thought I was only asking someone who knew her to share a few memories of her with me. I’m only trying to find out what kind of life my mother had before she got sick, Father. And why she got so sick. I’m trying to trace her life and her death, so that I can find some peace in my own soul about it.”

  “Our Lord Jesus is the only path to peace.”

  “Well, here I am, talking to a priest.”

  He grunted. “My memories are none of your business.”

  “Even when they’re about my own mother?” I heard my voice rise in disbelief. I felt baffled by this hard old man, and I asked him out of genuine curiosity, “Why are you being so tough with me, Father Gower?”

  He ignored the second question and answered only the first one. “Even when they include other people, my memories are still mine.” He glanced dismissively around him at the doily-littered room. “Priests own nothing, not even their own souls. I came to retirement with nothing but my vestments and a change of clothing. Nothing else do I own or want to own. But my thoughts are my own, known only to God and to me, and so are my memories of other people’s confessions. As a priest, I have been expected to relinquish everything else, but I do not have to give my memories away. And I will not. Not to you or to anyone. You have your own memories of your mother. Do I ask you to give them to me? I do not. I do not want them. And do not ask me to give you mine.”

  I stood up. “I didn’t know my request would offend you.”

  He started to rise, too, but the effort of pulling his thick body out of his chair see
med to defeat him. I was reminded of myself, last night at Marsha’s house, and I wanted to reach out a hand to help him up, as she had helped me. But I remained on my side of the wall he had erected between us, afraid of offending him even more. Father Gower glared up at me from under eyebrows that might once have been ferociously bushy and black. “Is that an apology?”

  “No,” I said, “I don’t believe it is.”

  When he didn’t respond, I started to leave the room, but he stopped me by asking, “Where did you bury her?”

  I turned to face him again. “Harbor Lights.”

  “In the Catholic section?”

  “No, we told you, she wanted to be buried with her father’s people, and they were Protestant.”

  He crossed himself, and muttered something in Latin. I wanted to think it was “rest in peace,” but I was half afraid it was a curse of some kind. I was glad the weather that day had kept him even from attending, much less presiding over, her funeral.

  “Your mother’s past is none of your business, either,” he suddenly said, startling me. “Leave it alone. Leave her alone. You’ll be happier that way. You think you’ll find the mother you loved—and you might. But you might also find a woman you wouldn’t even recognize if you passed her on the street. You might not even like her.”

  “I doubt that.”

  “You don’t know,” he said, angrily. “Listen to me! It’s risky enough to dive into one’s own past, but it’s particularly dangerous to dig into somebody else’s life. You don’t belong in it. Get out of it!”

  We were divided only by the length of a tiny living room, Father Gower and I, but it felt like a gulf we could never bridge. I didn’t know what else to say to him, so I settled for, “Thanks for the advice. I hope you enjoy the cookies.”

  “Thank you for those,” he said, grudgingly. “They’re good.”

  “I’ll tell my husband you said so. He baked them.”