Absolution

by Alice McDermott

Looking back on those glorious first months of my married life, I confess I do wonder what ease, what pleasure, women have sacrificed since. Something to be said, I suppose, for the luxurious life of a contented concubine.

And yet he was told in an early interview, by a man who had been recruited for the OSS by Wild Bill Donovan himself, that it was Catholics they were seeking. Who better understood the threat of godless communism? In the middle of their conversation, Peter’s interviewer had reached into his pocket and placed a black rosary on the desk before him. Wordlessly, Peter did the same. The Catholic Intelligence Agency was the joke.

It was a favorite fantasy of ours, up there in Stella’s room, to imagine what would become of us if the communists won. God eliminated, of course. Statues and crosses banished. Our glorious cathedrals—St. Patrick’s, even!—turned into palaces for the ruling class. Even our humble parish churches and chapels beset by barbed wire and armed guards.

We women would have to go to work. Our children, even our infants and newborns, dropped off every morning at some massive brick or concrete government institution. Our aging parents and grandparents sent off as well to desolate warehouses— no sweet Babkas squeezed in among your loving family, your daily life—all so that we would be free to take up our duties in office buildings or factories or construction sites. (We’d seen the photographs of stout and solemn-faced Soviet women in babushkas sweeping Moscow streets.)

All sense of family obligation erased so we could go to work—work being, in this godless world, our only source of happiness, our only reason...

What’s the line from Emily Dickinson? “While we were fearing it, it came.”

I shook my head. “He’ll iron a shirt every morning just to walk down the driveway to get the newspaper. He’ll set the table for one and peel three potatoes instead of five every night for dinner. He’ll say ‘pardon’ if he burps, even with no one there.” “The High Episcopal refinements of the working-class Irish Catholic,” Stella said.

Brothers from different Testaments:

And then the professor whispered, “Tikkun olam.” He smiled at us all. An ancient midrash, he explained. “Your Mr. Tannen would know it,” he told me. “It means ‘repair the world.’”

They never saw the hand of God in it, Peter later said of his superiors in Saigon. “But they made useful fools of those of us who thought we did.”

Maybe it was because Dominic was so young, and looked even younger, but everything he did—every polite and grateful gesture, his eager conversation with the nuns, his easy camaraderie with our teenage waiters—seemed infused with his own wide-eyed appreciation that he was here, having an interesting life. Like a newly released prisoner, perhaps, or, more apt, a young man newly escaped from a safe and boring middle-class childhood. Look at us, his blue-eyed joy seemed to convey, convey to everyone, even those poor young men whom he was somehow managing to make laugh. Look at us, here on earth, having an interesting life. Jesus. Aren’t we something? Aren’t we great?

THEY’D BEEN UP EARLIER THAN USUAL, before dawn, and it was barely light enough to see when they’d made their way toward the stream. Jamie hoped to find another gorgeous stone to bring back to his mother. Running ahead of Dom in the bare morning light, he’d somehow stumbled into the open septic tank, left uncovered by the workmen the day before. Dom had climbed in after his son, hoisted him on his shoulders, raised him up until Jamie scrambled out. He’d run to the house for help, poor kid, but by the time they returned, Dom had been overcome. I think he was gone even as his son struggled to restart his good heart.

I have to laugh when I think about it now: how much easier life must have been for certain government agencies—how much easier for secrecy to be maintained—in those days before men felt any obligation to share their lives with the women they loved.