Frank’s chronic pericarditis, arising from the rheumatoid arthritis, led to a virulent infection of the pericardium, which ultimately led to heart failure. Frank died two days before Joe’s eighteenth birthday.
The week following the funeral Mass, Joe visited the same church after midnight, when it was deserted. He’d had too many beers. He sprayed black paint on all the stations of the cross. He overturned a cast-stone statue of Our Lady and smashed a score of the ruby-red glasses from the votive-candle rack.
He might have done considerably more damage if he had not quickly been overcome by a sense of futility. He could not teach remorse to God. He could not express his pain with sufficient power to penetrate the steel veil between this world and the next—if there was a next.
Slumping in the front pew, he wept.
He sat there less than a minute, however, because suddenly he felt that weeping in the church might seem to be an admission of his powerlessness. Ludicrously, he thought it important that his tears not be misconstrued as an acceptance of the cruelty with which the universe was ruled.
He left the church and was never apprehended for the vandalism. He felt no guilt about what he’d done—and again, no pride.
For a while he was crazy, and then he went to college, where he fit in because half of the student body was crazy too, with youth, and the faculty with tenure.
His mother died just three years later, at the age of forty-seven. Lung cancer, spreading to the lymphatic system. She had never been a smoker. Neither had his father. Maybe it was the fumes of the benzene and other solvents in the dry-cleaner’s shop. Maybe it was weariness, loneliness, and a way out.
The night she died, Joe sat at her bedside in the hospital, holding her hand, putting cold compresses on her brow, and slipping slivers of ice into her parched mouth when she asked for them, while she spoke sporadically, half coherently, about a Knights of Columbus dinner dance to which Frank had taken her when Joe was only two, the year before the accident and amputation. There was a big band with eighteen fine musicians, playing genuine dance music, not just shake-in-place rock-‘n’-roll. She and Frank were self-taught in the fox trot, swing, and the cha-cha, but they weren’t bad. They knew each other’s moves. How they laughed. There were balloons, oh, hundreds of balloons, suspended in a net from the ceiling. The centrepiece on each table was a white plastic swan holding a fat candle surrounded by red chrysanthemums. Dessert was ice cream in a sugar swan. It was a night of swans. The balloons were red and white, hundreds of them. Holding her close in a slow dance, he whispered in her ear that she was the most beautiful woman in the room, and oh how he loved her. A revolving ballroom chandelier cast off splinters of coloured light, the balloons came down red and white, and the sugar swan tasted of almonds when it crunched between the teeth. She was twenty-nine years old the night of the dance, and she relished this memory and no other through the final hour of her life, as though it had been the last good time she could recall.
Joe buried her from the same church that he had vandalized two years earlier. The stations of the cross had been restored. A new statue of the Holy Mother watched over a full complement of votive glasses on the tiered rack.
Later, he expressed his grief in a bar fight. His nose was broken, but he did worse damage to the other guy.
He stayed crazy until he met Michelle.
On their first date, as he had returned her to her apartment, she had told him that he had a wild streak a foot wide. When he’d taken that as a compliment, she had told him that only a moron, a hormone-crazed pubescent boy, or an ape in the zoo would be witless enough to take pride in it.
Thereafter, by her example, she taught him everything that was to shape his future. That love was worth the risk of loss. That anger harms no one more than he who harbours it. That both bitterness and true happiness are choices that we make, not conditions that fall upon us from the hands of fate. That peace is to be found in the acceptance of things that we are unable to change. That friends and family are the blood of life, and that the purpose of existence is caring, commitment.