Fellow Travelers

by Thomas Mallon

Rising from the pew, he headed to the little chapel, just off the altar, dedicated to the Blessed Virgin Mary. He had been hiding behind her skirts his whole life, and as he knelt before the chapel’s rack of tall blue candles, he felt certain she would understand his predicament. She might not be part of the Trinity, but her ex officio position, as the intercessor who had God’s ear, had always made her something like Mrs. Roosevelt, the person to go to first.

Whenever the radio played “Secret Love,” Tim believed for a few moments that he had something in common with other Americans in the throes of romance. The song had been riding the airwaves for weeks, and it made him feel more normal than furtive, at least until Doris Day reached the tune’s happy ending.

Tim’s tears came again, from some borderless place between anguish and joy, where he was struggling to believe that the two of them had actually been visible together, out in public, in a restaurant and a store.

The bartender, he knew, could see him pining for normality, for the chance to believe he still lived with the rest of the world.

The Democratic ticket appeared to be sinking fast, swamped not only by the electorate’s instinctive rallying toward the incumbent during a crisis,

He told me that one day twenty years before, he’d realized, all of a sudden, while walking down a street in the city some Saturday afternoon, that he’d spent his whole life trying to make God love him—and that this didn’t matter in the slightest. All that mattered was that he loved God. He told me that once he knew this he was home free.”

YES. This is so true.

Let him know that I was happy enough. Make it easy on him. T.