What the Naughtons didn’t know about my priesthood was that I had become apostate, and left behind the church years ago. I was Protestant and they Roman Catholic, and our paths hadn’t crossed, but remained contiguous for Thirteen years, as our properties touched, they facing Grey Street and me Parsons Avenue, divided by a wire fence.
The Naughtons consist of Mr. and Mrs., Nicolette, Julia, Josh, and baby Andrew, each divided by a year’s partition but Julia, the oldest, who had just turned fourteen the previous January. Our depth of communication was as deep as the distance between my fence and the kids’ Bounce House, a subsistence of about fifteen feet, proffered with amiable waves and polite nods.
I’d seen Harriet, Mrs., pacing along the property line for quite a bit of time, a wax melt of solemn consternation dripping from her face. She was pallid and bird-thin. I watched through the diaphanous curtains which shadowed my bedroom in a month of grey haze and chiaroscuro shadows. Back and forth. Back, and forth. For the better part of an hour, before I was of mind to approach her.
“Oh, Father. I’m, I’ve gone deep as a mother can dive, far as a parent could swim…my child is so lost”.
“Who, Harriet? One of your daughters?”
“Doctors, prescriptions, hospital stays, and she only gets worse. And before I abandon my faith, I like to seek refuge in a man who is in so many ways married to it. I ask too much, but– “(if only you knew, Mrs. Naughton)
“Would you like me to consult with her?”
“Consult”, she scoffed, genteely dabbing her tears with a cloth from her coat pocket, which she then neatly folded and replaced, as if dining with an aristocracy and trying to exude good manners.
“Consult. Lord, pray. She’s so far driven, in soul, from that voluble conceit of self-professed ‘consultants’, and so suddenly manipulative that, I fear, it has to only be one thing. Im scared to say it. I am afraid that what I might be asking may be too great a favor. But we’ve got nobody, Father”
“What about your parish priest?”
“Oh, violence. Shooed him away in-“
She stopped, wary of such words which might serve as that diminutive yet all-too-powerful stone pelting that may motivate me to act as the former righteous visitor.
“Maybe a visit”, as I recall saying. But then, of course, I asked what the trouble was with Juliet.
“You will have to see for yourself”, she replied. “But I’d be remiss to not at least alert you of her aversion to the clergy”.
That afternoon I went over after lunch. I met Juliet seated in an upright, stately posture on the davenport tailored with a strange expression. Her lips were pursed and her big, gleaming gray eyes caromed between me and her mother, as if upon the verge of bursting into laughter at the sight of me. I sat down on the conjoined arm of the beige upholstered couch and greeted her. The sinew of her jaws tensed and shifted as if she was rolling her tongue around inside of her mouth. Harriet asked me if I wanted coffee, which I refused. “Let me get you a cup”, she persisted, and before I could reneg, she scampered off into the kitchen. I can see now it was merely one excuse of so many a day to escape her own child, if even for a minute.
I asked Juliet how she was. Her long, dark lashes batted her gaze to the ground, in the grey shade, as shadows moved about for seemingly no reason. I asked her if she knew who I was. Staring at the ground, her cheeks rolled back with disquieting affect, and as she craned her neck back and leaned into the cushion behind her, eyelids narrowing the scope of her eyes to slits, as if squinting to examine me in a microcosm, she said, in a manner and tone almost felicitous, “you’re no priest”.
I laughed and felt extremely uncomfortable at the same time, and by then her eyes were driving nails into me. Lips pursed, gritting her teeth beneath her flesh, jaw akimbo once more. Her look was totally and absolutely hateful. I told her that she was wrong. That I was a priest. Her mother came back and immediately responded to the tonal shift in the room, which had dimmed three shades since my entrance, with a polite gesture of “everything okay?”. And Juliet, in all her impish frailty, softened to a smile once more, and said “not since you left the parish”. I couldn’t take me eyes from the hypnosis of hers, and what rang in drips from my ears, perhaps clairvoiyantly, but clear as rain, was “game on, preacher”.
I wanted to run out of there. I knew that whatever was wrong with her was an adversary I had no will against. I digressed from religious conjecture and we proceeded with informal banalities, as if willingly withdrawing from attack, a subtle white flag, and within the hour, I made an excuse, and fled the scene. Her comment abjectly leveled me. Never in my life had I been pinned by such a vulgar paryoxysm of dread as I was in that house, and I knew there and then, that her condition was beyond psychosomatic.
Just before I stepped out, a grunting belch sprung from Juliet’s side of the room, the air turned foul, and Mrs. Naughton said with palpable acknowledgement, “never mind that”. I hastily apologized, and briskly paced across the yard. I moved a short time later to an apartment in the city and away from the Naughtons. I still see her in my dreams, in places and positions and expressions so ineffable they transcend description. Even if I tried, even if Dostoyevsky attempted, it could not be done justice. I swept them from their chamber of vivid memory within me and have since reclaimed my faith.
But in the deep, black sleep from which I so often swim up from, blurry after images haunt me, and in so few words, convey to me that whatever “problems” which plagued Juliet have only gotten much, much worse. Nevertheless, I suppose that the motivation of my intentional separation from that community was one requiring a boundary far stronger than a wire fence.