On the walls behind the altar were paintings, old, oils. My father didn’t mind when I whispered to ask who they were. Before I was born, everyone in my family went regularly to church—to this one. Sometimes I could not believe how unfair it was to belong to a family of people who quit church.
The paintings were of Apostles, and they were saints named Joseph, Francis, Patrick. They were rich with a vibrancy, an aliveness. They were actual men being shown at their best. The light around them seemed to come from the sun.
Then I saw that the one female presence was off to the side in an alcove: a white stone statue I knew was Mary, life-size, standing above a secondary altar, her gaze looking downward at vigil candles, flickering in frosted-glass cups. Trails of wispy smoke rose toward her. Her face was finely chiseled, and completely without expression. Her hands were at her sides, palms upward. Her head was covered with a stone veil, her body draped in stone folds of a gown, and also a cloak.
Even with the garments and the heat of the candles, she looked cold. She looked as if someone would be angry at her if she didn’t stay still all the time, or tried to speak.
Meanwhile in our pew, my sister pretended to read from the mass book. Secretly inside was a laminated card that listed the rules of lacrosse. I was mortified by that, as I was mortified by my brothers’ behavior.
But now everything was different. I understood that my soul had chosen this time to take a nap, after looking around and deciding there would not be the other thing, because of the feel of what was left out.
All the voices rising and falling on the altar were the voices of men. Clearly, something here was very wrong. It reminded me of when my brothers altered the radio in our mother’s car, so all that came out was the bass. She would tell them she’d kill them if they kept messing with the treble. She would un-control her temper. She’d shout, “Stop turning off the treble! The treble has to be on!”
“I am going to be a priest,” I said to myself.
I felt logical about it. I did not have a sense I was a little girl planning my future. I felt my future was already going on. I felt practical.
I had figured out that the reason there were only men and boys on the altar was that all the women and girls were at some other church. Or they were simply not available for a funeral on a weekday morning. I knew that my grandfather had wanted the bishop to officiate; they were friends. I knew the bishop was somewhere away, and had sent his regrets.
Women and girls were unavailable like the bishop. I felt that the altar was saving a place for me, for when I grew up.
“I will be available,” I was telling the cathedral. It was as simple and real to me as my sister announcing, the day before, “I need a new sport, so I’m going to learn lacrosse.”
Then at eight, I went to the birthday party of a girl in my neighborhood. A priest was there.
He was the girl’s uncle. He was tall and handsome in a movie-star way, and he moved with elegant smoothness on the living room rug: the only grown-up willing to dance with the kids. Fifteen minutes of the party were set aside for music and dancing, which I hadn’t known, or I wouldn’t have gone. Michael Jackson songs were playing. The older kids made fun of Michael Jackson and mocked the songs for being bubblegum-stupid. But the priest showed everyone he could moonwalk.
A priest could moonwalk! I was awestruck. When he approached me, and told me it made him sad that I was playing the part of a wallflower, I thought I’d giggle like a baby from the joy that he was paying attention to me.
He knew my family. What would it take to bring my parents and my big teenage sister and brothers back to the fold of the church?
“Fold,” I echoed, in my head. I knew he didn’t mean it like what you do with clothes or a piece of paper. He meant it as the thing someone does with their arms, in an embrace.
I was happy to assure him that the day would come when they’d be back. I thought I’d leave it at that. But a burst of courage came into me.
“When I grow up,” I confided, “I’m going to be a priest, like you”.
I took his failure to respond to me immediately as a sign of encouragement. I thought he was silently urging me to tell him more, so I explained that after I became a priest, my family would show up in church because of me. I was different from them, I pointed out, but all of us were stuck with each other. They would want to keep track of how I was doing. My only worry was that, being the sort of people they are, they might not behave appropriately—for example, when I emerged on the altar investments, they’d clap and cheer.
“I’m trying to figure out what a soul is, to get myself ready,” I said.
As I held my breath, waiting for any inside information the handsome priest might offer, I saw that he was looking at me with an expression of great disapproval, like maybe he was about to scold me. Inside my skin, I went prickly, head to toes, as if a rash had broken out, invisibly.
“Are you telling me you’ve had the calling?”
Now he looked a little amused.
I wondered, What calling? Was that my mistake, like the ringing of a telephone with a message meant for me, but I wasn’t around for it? Or maybe the message hadn’t yet come, and I should be patient and wait?
“You funny little girl,” he then said. “Don’t you know what everyone calls a priest?”
My mouth had locked shut. I couldn’t understand what his question had to do with a soul and what I’d just told him.
He answered the question himself. “Everyone has to call a priest Father. See my niece over there? She’s always talking about growing up to have lots of children. What if she said she wants to be the dad of her kids, not their mom? Wouldn’t you think there’s something very wrong with a mother who goes around saying she’s a daddy?”
The music had stopped. When the priest walked away to join the grown-ups gathering at the table with the cake, I rushed to the door and ran home, and never went back to that house.
Soon, I was wondering about a new idea.
“Can a soul show up in X-rays?”
I was having an annual physical. I didn’t know if my doctor had grandchildren, but if he did, I was jealous of them. He was a Sikh, kind and gentle, and the first man I knew who went to work in a turban.
On television shows that were medical, I told him, X-rays were always showing cloudy white shapes.
Talking about souls was already established with us. I had told him on a previous visit about my father’s comparison to the genie in the lamp, which he shook his head at, because, as he put it, with great authority, I felt, there is no such thing as a genie. I agreed with him. I didn’t tell him about the fairy.
He felt that my question was excellent, and so was my theory of an inner white cloud. But given the special properties of a soul, it was unlikely to allow itself to be photographed, not even with the finest equipment in the field of radiology. He didn’t say what the special properties were, like they were a secret you had to be a professional to know.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “But I can’t order an X-ray for you, when nothing is suspicious about your health.”
After that, I never mentioned souls again, not even when his stethoscope was at a spot on my chest where maybe mine was asleep. We started talking about hospitals and what it’s like to go to work in the field of medicine.