Tales from a Master's Notebook Read online

  ‘But I have faith,’ he said. ‘With faith all things are possible. Maybe one day I’ll get it.’

  He wanted so little; for as long as I knew him he was a housebound and unambitious man, content with his loving wife and his unusual writing career that was like a cottage industry, but of a spiritual kind.

  I was alone at the wake, except for the few people who’d known him, the plumber and the electrician and the man who mowed the lawn after I left for college. Father had no close friends – he resisted intimacy with everyone except his wife, my mother, who was his whole world. When she died, my father helped me through that sadness, did all the paperwork, prepared the documents, and was resolute while I sobbed, bereft at the thought of losing my mother.

  Father’s patience gave him strength – goodness was his business, as I will explain in a moment; but goodness was his mode of being. My mother was such a part of him that I felt that when she died he was inconsolable and yearned to join her. I sometimes reflected that, though kindly towards me, my parents were so devoted to each other that in many respects they ignored me. Maybe this is a pattern with passionate couples who have kids? My folks were reserved towards everyone else, they had no room for friends, and they were disinclined to spend much time with me. I grew up in awe of them, intimidated by their closeness, while at the same time somewhat resenting the fact that for much of my early life I seemed to be in their way. The memory of this conflict made my grieving harder.

  And then at the wake, alone with the funeral director, at the last hour, I got the shocking news.

  ‘I thought the death certificate was in order, but it seems there’s a problem,’ he said, speaking much too slowly, because I wanted to know it all at once. His name was Ken Mortimer, of Mortimer Mortuary. ‘And it’s not a misfiling,’ he added, as though to keep me in suspense.

  We were standing so near the open casket I got a whiff of my father’s body, the faint tang of chemicals, the perfumed hum of talcum and make-up that made his face puffy and doll-like.

  ‘What is it?’ I whispered, as though Father might hear. Proximity to a corpse awakens superstitions and provokes odd behaviour. I was keenly aware of being within the orbit of his aura. The inert body of the man seemed to have powers, and it was no consolation to me that he was not wearing his bulky hearing aid.

  Mortimer the funeral director wasn’t fussed; he was soft-spoken and correct, which made what he was telling me much harder to take, because his tone gave it a certainty that was almost unbearable.

  ‘The death certificate can’t be authenticated,’ he said. ‘There is no record of your father anywhere.’

  ‘I don’t understand. He has a birth certificate.’

  ‘Not a true one. It doesn’t check out. There is no record of your father’s birth that we can find.’

  ‘He was born here in Boston,’ I said.

  By shaking his head slowly, as though in sorrow, the man made a tactful effort to refute this. ‘Willard Hope does not exist – at least on paper.’

  Hearing his name spoken, with this denial, so near to his lifeless body, cushioned in the silk-lined casket, I whinnied and became breathless and put my hands to my face.

  ‘Date and place of birth,’ I said, protesting. ‘It’s on record.’

  ‘No matches,’ Mortimer said. I began to resent his dark suit, his somber necktie, his highly polished shoes, his pinky ring, the small gold lapel pin – all of it, for the authority it gave him; because I was rumpled and fatigued with grief and unsure of how to handle what he was telling me.

  ‘What about my mother – her birth certificate? Her wake was held right here three years ago.’

  Mortimer was trying to be kind, to let me down gently. His considerate way of dealing with grief was a key element in his work. He was in a sense a professional mourner, the soul of sympathy, grieving with his customers, role-playing perhaps, because high emotion was the day-to-day with him. He remained compassionate yet unfazed, like a doctor delivering bad news.

  ‘Your father supplied the documents then, which we didn’t question,’ he said.

  Each time he spoke I glanced at my father’s powdered nose and rouged cheeks, his hair neatly combed, the trace of a smile on his lips, as though listening.

  The man straightened and faced me. ‘Forgeries.’

  ‘Their marriage certificate.’

  ‘No record of it.’

  ‘He was a pious Catholic. It would have been in a church somewhere in Boston.’

  Mortimer’s saying nothing, his facing me without any expression, seemed the most severe way of refuting me.

  ‘My father was an honest man. He would never involve himself in forgery.’

  ‘I’m not saying he did it.’ Then Mortimer sighed with regret. ‘But the papers were certainly forged. The seal, the notary, the dates, the signatures – all of it was false. None of it checked out. He is not Willard Hope. Your mother was not Frances Hope.’

  Dad always called her Frankie. He loved her, adored her, made her happy, while I watched from a little distance, admiring their love but feeling rejected.

  ‘Who is he, then?’

  ‘I have no idea.’

  He was lying in the casket before me, within earshot of all this, and I was reminded again of how he spoke of hearing words without understanding them.

  ‘What will you do?’

  ‘What we usually do. Keep some of his DNA. Maybe find a match. We took a sample, a swab from inside his mouth. And some hair.’

  ‘What about fingerprints?’

  ‘The service is being held in half an hour. We’ll have to load the casket onto the hearse. It’s a good twenty minutes to the church. There isn’t time.’

  But even as Mortimer was speaking I was calling the police on my cell phone, explaining the urgency; that fingerprints needed to be taken from a body immediately. ‘A set of remains?’ the dispatcher said: a melancholy description of my father. And I had the sad duty of standing before the casket, keeping the fretting Mortimer at bay, while a police woman (nametag Cruz) held Father’s limp arm and rolled one finger after another onto the ink pad and then in the same motion onto the appropriate square of the document, taking his prints. Closing the lid of the casket Mortimer frowned at the sight of my father’s inky fingers, as though we’d spoiled his work.

  The service was held an hour late. The priest was annoyed, though the few mourners didn’t seem to notice. But a large grieving family awaiting their own service, delayed by ours, stood in the parking lot, looking wounded, in sulky postures. I was struck by how many of them there were, their tears, their convoy of cars, each with a flag magnetized to the roof; they were a reproach to me, as I entered the church for our small huddled service.

  The ritual was familiar; still, I sat baffled, wondering who it was that lay in the casket. That puzzlement made me sadder, and for the first time since hearing the news of my father’s death, I wept – sobbing until my throat ached. But I was sure I was weeping for myself, feeling abandoned, tricked by the man in the casket on wheels, watching the priest shaking holy water on the lid.

  Who was he? Who, for that matter, was I?

  He was a recluse. You might have suspected agoraphobia except that when my mother was alive they often went out in the evening for a drive. They brought sandwiches. They parked near the harbor, facing the sea, and ate them. They left me at home, saying, ‘You must have schoolwork to do,’ and I said yes, because I knew from experience that they did not want me along. I seem to be suggesting that they were cold to me, but they were so loving towards each other I could not but admire them. They sometimes appeared to me like two people who shared an amazing secret that only they knew, that would never be revealed, that they marveled over in whispers in their parked car.

  Their love radiated calm in the household. My mother glowed in his adoration. My father was humble, God-fearing, engaged in one of the more unusual professions – rewarding spiritually but not monetarily. He said he didn’t mind. My parents lived
frugally. They often spoke of the virtue of the Economy of Enough.

  Pious, yet he seldom went to church, and when he did go to a holy mass he chose a service in a distant town, sneaked in by a side door, sat in a rear pew, his head down, more of his humility, reminding me of Christ’s parable of the Pharisee and the Publican – my father the Publican who beat his breast because he felt unworthy, and did not raise his eyes to heaven, as the boastful Pharisee did in the Gospel of Luke. Then he sneaked out, by a different door.

  His unusual profession? He wrote sermons for a living. He did not advertise but his business was well enough known so that after a while priests found him and solicited his help in composing the Sunday sermon, or the specific homilies for weddings and funerals.

  In the beginning it was done by mail order, letters addressed to Father X, from priests requesting a thousand words on a particular topic or biblical text, usually enclosing an envelope of dollar bills, never a check; the sort of limp, faded dollar bills you might see in the collection basket or being inserted in the poor box.

  ‘A donation,’ the priest’s note would say.

  Father wrote in longhand, my mother typed the sermons, and it was she who mailed the letters at the post office, while Father stayed home.

  It had started as a column in a Boston newspaper, where my father worked selling classified ads, at that time a profitable section of the paper: ‘small ads’. Father liked it because it was all done on the telephone, he had regular office hours, he did not need to leave his desk; in his modesty, he seemed to enjoy the obscurity of the job. A regular feature of the paper was ‘Thought for the Day’ by ‘Father X’ – the name used by two journalists who wanted to conceal their identity. They took turns writing the ‘Thought’, which appeared beside the editorials, as a way of dignifying the page.

  Overhearing the journalists complaining that they were behind in their work and had to produce a ‘Thought’, my father offered to help.

  ‘You, Willard?’

  His full name was Willard Lawrence Hope, he was then about forty-five, and I would have been five. I was Larry.

  ‘Think you can do it?’

  My modest father said, ‘I’m willing to try. If you don’t like what I write, don’t use it.’

  He wrote a column based on the story in John about Jesus curing the blind man. He made much of the Pharisees mocking Jesus, accusing him of being a sinner, pretending to work a miracle on the Jewish Sabbath, the byplay with the despised parents of the blind man, and the doubting Pharisees.

  ‘I like the dialogue in this story,’ he told me. ‘It has the ring of human speech. “How can a sinner work miracles?” “He is a prophet.” The parents protesting, “He was born blind.” And, “I don’t know if he’s a sinner, but I was blind and now I see.” And “I’ve told you already and you didn’t hear.” You can see them all standing in a little group, with the confused parents, near the mud puddle that the blind man rubbed on his eyes.’

  And his favorite line in it from Jesus, when challenged, the odd ungrammatical protestation, ‘Before Abraham was, I am.’

  That column, on yellowed newsprint, was tacked to the wall of his study as his first effort, the one that earned him his job as Father X.

  The two journalists were delighted, they ran the piece and asked for more, and soon my father had a new job at the paper. He still sold classified ads, but his ‘Thought for the Day’ was so popular it was syndicated in the other newspapers owned by the company. To his relief, after his success he worked from home – the classifieds, the daily ‘Thought’. He liked working in his pajamas.

  It had all happened quickly. He said he was not surprised. He was modest about his column, but he insisted there was another factor.

  ‘No one likes to write,’ he said to me more than once. ‘Writing is a chore for even an experienced journalist. For the average person it is awful to contemplate – the blank page, how do I fill it, what do I say? Even a letter. Ask someone to put something in writing – “write me a letter” and you’ll probably never receive it. Most people would rather do anything than write. Especially sermons.’

  Another day he told me why.

  ‘They’re happy to condemn sinners – just talking. But a reasoned sermon, with biblical authority, is another story. It’s much easier to condemn someone out of hand than denounce him in a well-written sermon. And anyway, Jesus taught love and forgiveness.’

  ‘So you like to write?’

  ‘I usually have something to say, which makes it easier. I believe in what I write. And I am inspired by the Word of God.’

  The other journalists were writing the ‘Thought’ as a job. My father was doing it for pleasure and as a spiritual exercise.

  ‘Maybe it’s a form of prayer,’ he said.

  Yet he still sold small ads and made a reasonable living, while my mother busied herself looking after wayward souls – unwed mothers, battered wives, counseling them and helping them find their way.

  Father X’s columns, which he structured like sermons, were quoted in churches, from the pulpit, and my father received many letters of thanks, as well as an additional income, writing sermons to order. How does one console the parents of a dead child? he was asked. He answered by writing a page of consolation, and he received some money in return. This is the money the parents gave me, in gratitude. Please accept it as a donation. That happened so many times he had a regular correspondence with priests, stuck for ideas for sermons, who implored Father X to help them out.

  He gladly did so. He felt in this way that he was speaking to a congregation through this priest. He said that when he felt the fervor of devotion he could write a sermon in ten minutes. ‘And that small effort might change lives.’ He had a thorough knowledge of scripture. ‘The human parts – people speaking. Those are real voices. “I don’t know if he’s a sinner, but I was blind and now I see” – that’s nice, that’s real.’

  Most people who tried to write had nothing to say. ‘But this is the living word.’

  He did not regard this writing as a business. It was a mission, these were donations, not fees; but he realized that towards the end of the week most priests were agonizing over the Sunday sermon.

  One wrote to him, ‘I’d planned to play golf today. I thought I’d miss the tee-time. Your help has allowed me to do this.’

  Golf! he exclaimed. Priests had boats, parties to attend, friends and families to visit. My father writing their sermons freed them to do as they wished and gave meaning to their work.

  ‘And you have the last word,’ I said.

  ‘Not me,’ he said. He tapped his head and then pointed to the heavens.

  Towards the end of the Nineties, when the newspaper closed, Father X’s ‘Thought’ appeared on a website. He posted sermons, he fielded questions, he accepted commissions to write for special occasions. Perhaps he realized how much power he had as a writer, that on any given Sunday many priests would be standing before a congregation, reciting his words, always, as he said, a message of forgiveness.

  ‘Priests are like college professors,’ he said. ‘They give the same lessons every year. They repeat themselves. That’s why, after a while, I seldom hear from them again. They have all they need from me.’

  He was never more passionate or persuasive than when he was writing of the sanctity of marriage, the word made flesh, God is Love. And that was the man I knew, the salesman in Classifieds who became a columnist, who ended up writing sermons for desperate priests – who were desperate perhaps because they had faltered in the faith.

  But he was not Father X. Nor, as I learned, was he Willard Hope. And if he was not Willard Hope, I was not Larry Hope.

  When the funeral rituals ended I did not go back to Maryland, where I had been living with my fiancée, Beth. I simply told her, ‘I need to stay a while, to sort out my father’s papers.’ She accepted that explanation.

  How could I tell her that I was not the man she thought I was? My identity was in doubt, my pious fa
ther had lied about his name, and so had my mother. Beth and I had talked about marrying soon. That had cheered my father. Once I had told him that his piety had inspired me to think of the priesthood – that I might have a vocation. ‘Think hard,’ he said. ‘It’s a torment for many priests. Look how desperate they are,’ and he showed me their letters, begging him to write for them.

  My birth certificate was clearly as false as my father’s. How could I get married if I did not know who I was? I looked again at my birth certificate, though I knew all the details, my name Lawrence Hope, my father Willard Hope, his profession given as Journalist, a modest way of describing someone writing spiritual texts for uplifting congregations; his date of birth; my mother was Frances, profession Housewife – more modesty, for as a social worker she eased the lives of many single mothers.

  I looked for more paper, for any documents in my father’s desk or around the house that might help explain who he was. There was nothing. He had not been in the army, he had not applied for a passport, he had never been in trouble with the law: more and more he seemed like a shadow.

  ‘No hits,’ Mortimer, the funeral director said, when I called to ask about the DNA samples.

  This call reminded me that I had fingerprints. I took them to police headquarters and explained my problem, saying that I needed to establish my father’s true identity in order to find out who I was.

  ‘But I don’t have much hope,’ I said. ‘I can’t think of any occasion when my father would have been fingerprinted.’

  ‘You’d be surprised,’ the desk sergeant said, taking the envelope of prints.

  That same week I got a call saying that they had a match, his fingerprints were on file in the federal database. I made an appointment to examine the relevant documents.