The Pilot's Wife_ A Novel - Anita Shreve [50]
Kathryn knew that there were more appropriate and more obvious targets for her anger, but, inexplicably, she most often found herself mute or helpless in the face of them: the media, the airline, the agencies with their acronyms, and the hecklers — disturbed and frightening hecklers on the telephone, in the streets, at the memorial service, and even once, mind-numbingly, on the television, when a woman, asked for a man-on-the-street comment about the crash investigation, turned to the camera and accused Kathryn of hiding critical information about the explosion.
Shortly after her interview with the Safety Board investigator, Robert had suggested they go for a drive. They left the house and walked toward the car. He held the door for her, and only after it had closed did it occur to her to ask where they were going.
“Saint Joseph’s Church,” he said quickly.
“Why?” she asked.
“I think it’s time for you to talk to a priest.”
They drove through Ely and then across the road that traversed the salt marsh and led into Ely Falls, past abandoned mills and storefronts with signs that hadn’t been updated since the 1960s. Robert parked in front of the rectory, a dark brick edifice that needed scouring, a building Kathryn had never entered. As a girl, she had often taken the bus into Ely Falls with her friends on Saturday afternoons and gone with them to confession at Saint Joseph’s. Sitting alone on a darkened pew, she had been entranced by the seemingly moist stone walls, the intricately carved wooden cubicles with their maroon drapes behind which her friends confessed their sins (what they’d been, Kathryn could not now imagine), the captivatingly lurid paintings of the Stations of the Cross (which her best friend, Patty Regan, had once tried without success to explain to Kathryn), and the tawdry red glass globes that held the flickering candles that Patty would pay for and then light on her way out. Kathryn’s own childhood church, Saint Matthew’s Methodist on High Street in Ely, had been almost aggressively sterile by comparison, a brown-shingled church, trimmed in yellow wood, with long multipaned windows through which the sun bountifully shone on Sunday mornings, as though the architect had been specifically commissioned to include the light and air of Protestantism in his design. Julia had taken Kathryn to Sunday school, though not much past the fifth grade, the age at which stories from the Bible no longer mesmerized her as they once had. And after that time, Kathryn had not been to church much at all, except at Christmas and Easter with Julia. Sometimes, Kathryn had felt a small twinge of parental guilt at not sending Mattie to Sunday school, not allowing her daughter the opportunity to learn about Christianity and then decide its validity for herself, as Kathryn had been allowed to do. Kathryn guessed that Mattie hardly ever thought about God, although in this she knew she could be wrong.
In the early years of their marriage, Jack had been aggressively scornful of the Catholic Church. He had attended the School of the Holy Name in Chelsea, with the worst that such parochial schools had to offer, including corporal punishment. It was hard for Kathryn to imagine schooling much worse than her own, which had been so spectacularly dull that when Kathryn thought about her years at Ely Elementary, the first image that came to mind was that of dust in the corridors. Lately, however, Jack’s vehemence against the church had seemed to subside, and she wondered if he’d changed his mind. As he never talked about it, she couldn’t say.
They got out of the car and knocked