I'm Glad About You(44)

Still. When he mentioned to Van that he had been asked to take on this one week of service for the monks at the monastery, she had feigned enthusiasm for the idea with the clear implication that she would be enthusiastic about anything that would get him out of her hair. At two and a half, Maggie was the charming center of Van’s attention; they lived in a world of gold ringlets and stuffed animals and sticker books and fairy princesses. Oh, and new babies. In her seventh month Van was blooming, as they say, with expectant hopes that her second child would be a little brother for her spectacularly adorable first. The three of them—the second child already had such a vivid reality it was hard to think of it as a fetus—traveled in a kind of bubble apart from him. People stopped them on the street to coo about how lovely Van looked, and how cute Maggie was, and how the second pregnancy was going. And could these total strangers put their hands on her belly to see if the baby within would obligingly twitch on their behalf? At times Kyle wanted to partake in all this delightful nonsense, but it was a world that held him at bay with an insistent feminine disdain. He had heard that some little girls preferred their fathers, and he had even seen it, at the pediatrics practice, girls clinging to men who haplessly admitted that it created real problems at home when she wouldn’t go to bed for her mother. This would never be Kyle’s fate, at least not with his first child, who was so patently averse to him no matter what he did that he was convinced that behind his back Van had been poisoning her mind with tales of Kyle’s dark and loveless heart.

Was his heart dark and loveless? It certainly never felt that way, although it would have been difficult for him to use the word “beloved” for the women in his life with the ease of this young monk, whose gaze upon the ancient priest spoke eloquently of that blessing. Now that Kyle had been forced to slow himself down and quiet his nerves, he could see that the old man—what had the younger monk called him? Father Timothy?—must be in his eighties. He glanced at the chart before him. Father Timothy was ninety-four.

Kyle felt a stirring of panic in the pit of his stomach. He shouldn’t have missed that. But the drive from Cincinnati had been stressful. There was more traffic than he expected and the directions he had pulled off the internet were just a shred too convoluted to figure out while simultaneously operating a car. Having crawled through the city traffic, he found himself wandering down circuitous country lanes which carried him past luscious horse farms before going nowhere, so he’d had to pull into gas stations twice to make sure he was on the right road. When he finally arrived he was already tired, even though it was only ten in the morning. The monk at the front desk of the retreat house had kindly suggested he say hello over at the infirmary before he took his things to his room, but when he got there the receptionist assumed he was already settled in, and she handed him a chart as soon as he walked through the door. Now here he was, in the middle of an examination before he had even landed. No wonder he’d missed a few clues.

“Ninety-four,” he commented. “That’s impressive.”

“Our community is aging,” the young monk explained. “Father Timothy is one of the oldest, but over half are in their seventies and eighties.” His statements were so simple. They bespoke a world of trouble, but there was no trouble in him. His calm goodwill toward both Kyle and the old priest was preternatural.

“I’m sorry, what is your name?”

“I am Brother Peter.”

“Ah.” Kyle had the urge to shake Brother Peter’s hand, but it wasn’t extended. A patient silence bloomed around them as the two men sat before Kyle and waited for him to explain what he knew, which wasn’t much.

“Do you see Father Timothy often enough to give me a sense of his symptoms?” Kyle glanced down at the useless chart and presented his inquiry with a confidence he didn’t feel. He should have asked a few questions before he took this on. But when McManahan had told him of the monastery’s predicament, all his Catholic boyhood training kicked in and flattered some deep sense of wounded pride. He had taken on the study of medicine because he wanted to work with the poor, to heal the sick, and it was humiliating, every day, to find himself once again trapped in that hyperprivileged country club version of a medical practice called Pediatrics West. Although he was popular with the nurses and most of the other doctors there, he had never felt comfortable with the suburban parents and their round pink children who wore him out with their blatant lack of need. This opportunity to come work with the monks, even for only a week, entered his private conundrum and moved through his spirit like a balm. It had never occurred to him that maybe he wouldn’t be qualified.

“We all eat, pray, and live together, and many of us work together too, although Father Timothy has become too frail of late for the real hard labor,” Brother Peter said with a smile at the old man. It was meant to be a light attempt at teasing, but Father Timothy was completely out of it. Kyle had a hard time believing that “some days were better than others”; from what he could now see, the dementia was advanced. “This past week several of us noticed that he really hasn’t been eating anything at all. Obviously it is a concern to everyone.”

“Are there any other symptoms of distress? Does he suffer from incontinence or diarrhea?”

“No, he is as you see. No distress.”

“Do people try to feed him?”

“Yes, of course, we try to get him to eat something at every meal.”