Roman Catholics were no longer required to go to Confession, which is a sacrament, (now called the sacrament of Penance), but the Church still offered it as an option.\u00a0 You could participate in the general Confession during Mass and be absolved in that way: it was the same thing, had the same effect, or at least that\u2019s what they said.\u00a0 But the old-fashioned way\u2014confessing your sins to a priest and asking for absolution while the two of you sat inside a wooden box that was divided in two, with a black cloth screen to conceal face of penitent from face of confessor\u2014was still offered in some churches.\u00a0 On Saturday afternoons you could always see a few old women waiting at the back of the church, kerchiefs bound to wooly heads, wrinkled pie-dough faces washed in light filtered through stained glass illustrations of Bible stories.\u00a0 Shea sat among them, boozy from lunch and with three airplane bottles of Absolut in the inside pocket of his topcoat, admiring the lingering scent of incense toward the front of the church and amusing himself by imagining their confessions, their paltry sins, their shriveled and undoubtedly sinless vaginas clotted with spider webs and dead leaves.<\/p>\n
Once, long ago, when one afternoon he\u2019d gotten drunk with his grandfather, the old fellow had told him the story of his own old woman, Shea\u2019s grandmother, more than thirty years in the ground, who had gone to Confession followed by eight o\u2019clock Mass every weekday morning of her life.\u00a0 The old man had conjured the image of spider webs and dead leaves to describe his dead wife\u2019s shriveled dead cunt, and the image had remained with Shea long after most of the time he\u2019d spent with his grandfather had been forgotten.\u00a0 Imagine having a grandfather, old and remote and unpredictable as God, an old-school Boston police detective from a time when the boundary between Boston detectives and Boston gangsters was thin as a pencil line, and just as easy to erase.\u00a0 Imagine barely knowing him, then one day you are around twenty, you go over to the house to see if he needs anything since his wife (your grandmother) has just died and he\u2019s all alone with his carton of Marlboros and his stack of Mickey Spillanes, his service revolver in its sweat-stained shoulder holster still on top of the console television, and you end up getting pissed with him and one thing leads to another.\u00a0 You ask him about a few things that have been on your mind.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis priest told her it was a sin\u2014a mortal sin\u2014to touch a man\u2019s prick,\u201d the old fellow explained, and an earnest look came over his face, although \u201cearnest\u201d was the last word Shea would have used to describe his grandfather.\u00a0 Apparently the old woman had never touched his prick again, if she ever had.\u00a0 This had all come up in a roundabout way, because it was pretty common knowledge in the neighborhood by then that the old man had led a separate life all those years, had kept a separate family only blocks away from where they now sat drinking Miller High Life. \u00a0The old man had offered this story of his old woman and the mischievous priest as explanation; at least, that was the only explanation he offered, at that time or any other time.\u00a0 Apparently, between men and in the language of men, a sentence like that would be sufficient to explain a man who looked enough like Shea to be his twin.\u00a0 He\u2019d come across that man one afternoon, long ago, only a couple of blocks from where they now sat, and it was like running into yourself, really like coming across yourself as you were going about your business in the world.\u00a0 He\u2019d gone home and gotten under the covers with a stack of old New Yorkers<\/em>.\u00a0 Running into yourself, Shea discovered, was not something you wanted to do, even once.<\/p>\n He lost himself in thoughts of the long ago\u2014his violent, sadistic father whom he no longer spoke to (also a Boston police detective, a bagman for low-level State House stooges, as was later determined by a Grand Jury); his grandfather of the large and many appetites dead from lung cancer and many years in the ground, hairless and gaunt from chemo the last time Shea had gone to the house to visit; the troubling knowledge of a man his own age and looking uncannily like him having gone about the old neighborhood all these years in a sort of parallel life (my very own Gothic Double, remarked Shea, somewhat amused, for he was an English professor).\u00a0 During his last visit his grandfather had asked him, in all seriousness, if he liked being a \u201cschoolteacher.\u201d<\/p>\n One of the biddies emerged from the confessional nearest him and, gripping the suitcase by its oily leather handle and glancing ceilingward, he went in after her and closed the door.\u00a0 He placed the suitcase on the wooden ledge behind him and set the bony points of his knees upon the kneeler, a sensation that still revolted him.\u00a0 The smell of the confessional was the same as he remembered, like dry fragrant wood, incense, old candles made from animal tallow: funereal, or so he\u2019d considered it as a boy in this very same church, this very same confessional, the one between the Seventh and Eighth Stations of the Cross, \u201cJesus Falls the Second Time\u201d and \u201cJesus Meets the Women.\u201d<\/p>\n Shea heard the slat of wood move sideways, a nasty dry sound like the sudden springing of a trapdoor, and through the screen of gauzy black cloth he saw the dark figure of the priest slumped sideways, his head in profile tilted backward.\u00a0 For a few moments neither man spoke, then finally the priest said in a voice low but full of menace, \u201cWell, what do you want?\u00a0 Come on, then.\u00a0 Speak up.\u00a0 I don\u2019t have all bloody afternoon.\u201d<\/p>\n Shea came to life like a vending machine someone had dropped a quarter into.\u00a0 \u201cA college professor steals a pair of Ray-Ban<\/em> sunglasses from a display case in the men\u2019s furnishings section of a department store on Boylston Street.\u00a0 The professor can afford to pay for the sunglasses, but he enjoys stealing them and likes to rationalize that he spends plenty of money in the store and that this is an extra sort of discount, and one he doesn\u2019t take advantage of often enough.\u201d<\/p>\n His voice was loud, his classroom voice that could shift unpredictably into a bray, and the wooden compartment buzzed like a faulty car-radio speaker.\u00a0 The priest did not seem to think anything of it, though.<\/p>\n \u201cWhy does this man come to this church, to this confessional?\u201d<\/p>\n Shea lowered his voice a little anyway, and focused it, like he was siphoning his words into the priest\u2019s right ear as he imagined its location in the backward-shifting silhouette.\u00a0 He pressed the tip of his nose to the gauzy screen.\u00a0 \u201cA man grows up in Southie, where good grammar can get you a good beating, becomes a college professor, doesn\u2019t go back for many years, hasn\u2019t been inside the church since his grandfather\u2019s funeral over twenty years ago.\u00a0 Then one day he feels the need to go back to church, and he goes to the church where he was a grammar school boy, an altar boy.\u00a0 A man grows up, gets an education, moves away.\u00a0 A man doesn\u2019t look back, then a day comes when he can only look back.\u00a0 A man thought he could get away, go someplace else and be free.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cA man refers to himself in the third person,\u201d the priest replied, and underneath his low voice his lungs rattled, a smoker\u2019s cough.\u00a0 Shea knew the sound.\u00a0 \u201cA man who doesn\u2019t want to know himself.\u00a0 A man who doesn\u2019t want to be on easy terms with himself.\u00a0 A man who lives a shadowlife, who watches himself coming and going.\u00a0 I shouldn\u2019t allow it.\u00a0 The grammatical dishonesty, I mean.\u00a0 Use the first person pronoun or get out, is what I should tell you.\u201d<\/p>\n Shea could smell a faint odor of whiskey, cigarette smoke, and cheap aftershave.\u00a0 He thought of these priests all living together, not all of them gays or pedophiles, some of them like old confirmed bachelors, an Irish tradition, crusty men with their cigarettes and whiskey and the cheap aftershave given to them by their shriveled older sisters at Christmastime, all these old confirmed Old Spice<\/em>-smelling bachelors eschewing the feminine and all that it represented.<\/p>\n \u201cBut go on,\u201d the priest said.\u00a0 \u201cTell me more about this \u2018mahn\u2019.\u201d<\/p>\n Shea could hear the air quotes.\u00a0 It annoyed him; already this priest annoyed him.\u00a0 Then again, they always had, even though at one time in his life, in high school, he\u2019d considered applying to the Society of Jesus.\u00a0 He felt his weight pooling into his knees like something draining from him.<\/p>\n \u201cA man comes to a certain place in his life and considers himself a gentleman.\u00a0 College professors don\u2019t make a fortune, but the profession itself is highly respected.\u00a0 Glamorized, I would say.\u00a0 In the old days college professors could come to class half- drunk once in a while and it was colorful, and they had their pick of the brightest, prettiest coeds.\u00a0 My own dissertation advisor had some stories\u2014well, I guess this isn\u2019t the place.\u00a0 But then the day comes when that job is the same as any job, since the day has come when everyone has been turned into automatons.\u00a0 Beg, borrow, and steal to get a tenure-track job, then tenure itself, then the grind of holding it together, of publishing and teaching, advising graduate students, sitting on committees, of having a career\u2014of living a life based on an intense interest in things one is no longer intensely interested in.\u00a0 But a larger idea has taken the place of the ideas the man was once intensely interested in.\u00a0 The idea is that he has earned a place in society, and he doesn\u2019t want to give it up.\u00a0 Everything he does is merely to keep that place, the perception of himself by other people who look up to him: students and colleagues, people from his past, too, from the old neighborhood, all of it.\u00a0 He sees that it\u2019s all been for that, although there once was a time when he really was interested in the things he is no longer very much interested in.<\/p>\n \u201cSo with all this comes an image,\u201d Shea continued.\u00a0 \u201cIt\u2019s about an image, and the \u2018mahn\u2019 has to maintain the image he\u2019s created, since that\u2019s what it\u2019s been about all along.\u00a0 He sees that, acknowledges it.\u00a0 As part of the image he buys good clothes, becomes a regular customer in one of the best department stores in Boston.\u00a0 He waits for sales, of course, but he spends money on clothes.\u00a0 Not flashy but very good clothes.\u00a0 Well made, with costly piece goods.\u00a0 Over time he develops a relationship with a man who works in the men\u2019s department.\u00a0 This man is in some ways his mirror image, a distinguished-looking black man in his late forties.\u00a0 Tall, neatly trimmed goatee, impeccably groomed.\u00a0 Let\u2019s call this man Rufus.\u00a0 That\u2019s a stereotypical black name, and in some ways this man is a black stereotype even as the man we\u2019re talking about is a white stereotype.\u00a0 They complement one another.\u00a0 And so since the man is a regular customer it\u2019s only natural that he and Rufus strike up a conversation, and after that day the man stops to chat with Rufus whenever he\u2019s in the store, which is often, since he likes to browse.\u00a0 He likes to run Italian silk and lambswool through his fingers.\u00a0 He likes to touch the merchandise even though he might not need anything or have plans to buy anything.\u00a0 He likes to pick up ties, try on sports jackets.\u00a0 It\u2019s around this time that the man begins stealing small objects, first from the men\u2019s department and then from anywhere in the store.\u00a0 He likes to steal whatever is at hand, put it in his pocket, and then, when the urge to leave the store is strongest\u2014when his fear of being caught is greatest, when he thinks the surveillance camera has spotted him\u2014in a windowless room a plain-clothes supervisor in an ill-fitting blazer peering into a dusty monitor\u2014he gives the signal to the uniformed guard at the door to go and pick up the subject, bring him up here for questioning, try not to make a big scene\u2014to force himself to stand there and talk with Rufus\u2014to ask how Rufus\u2019s daughter is getting on at college, how his wife Alma has been since the mastectomy, and so on.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cBut tell me more about this Rufus,\u201d said the priest on the other side of the box.\u00a0 And his voice was different.\u00a0 He was interested now, Shea could tell.\u00a0 He shifted his weight forward in the creaky chair.\u00a0 Shea had him now.\u00a0 Had him going.\u00a0 \u201cWhat does Rufus look like?\u201d wondered the priest.\u00a0 \u201cHow does he dress for work?\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cLike a less-famous member of a once-famous soul band,\u201d Shea answered, and he surprised himself.\u00a0 That was good.\u00a0 He must have thought it beforehand, somehow.\u00a0 \u201cLike a man who has performed for thousands, who has made hundreds of thousands but has let it all slip through his fingers.\u00a0 The crooked managers, the hangers-on, the wives and girlfriends who bled him one after the other.\u00a0 Then one day he sobers up, dusts himself off, finds a good plain honest woman and a regular day job.\u00a0 \u2018Now I\u2019m through with all that,\u2019 he says.\u00a0 But he\u2019s still a peacock at heart, has still got to feed his vanity, and so he works in a place where he gets substantial discounts on clothes, his last indulgence.\u00a0 He raises a family, makes sure the girls get into good colleges and that they stay there.\u00a0 He wants that for them.\u00a0 For himself, it\u2019s like he\u2019s finally found his place in the world.\u00a0 The brief fame, the women and the flashy cars and the money, all that was like something that happened to somebody else.\u00a0 Standing in the men\u2019s department is real.\u00a0 Standing in a certain place in society and seeing other men stand in relation to that is real, is what becomes real to him.\u00a0 Hearing the regular customers talk about their houses on the Cape, their investments, their latest cars and once in a while a few cell phone snapshots of girls they have on the side, girls they keep in apartments that cost thousands a month.\u00a0 Sometimes coming in late in the day from the bars and flashing photographs of naked women.\u00a0 \u2018You\u2019d like to get a piece of that, huh?\u00a0 Come on, you can say, any guy would like to get a piece of that.\u00a0 But you wouldn\u2019t believe the hell she puts me through.\u00a0 And I\u2019m not just talking about the sixty-five grand I\u2019m already out\u2014\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n Shea had worked himself up, had said more than he\u2019d intended.\u00a0 He was sitting inside a dark confessional in a church in Southie on a Saturday afternoon in October\u2014a church where he\u2019d spent a lot of time as a boy\u2014and he was telling stories, inventing things.\u00a0 And the priest had let him go on.\u00a0 Had encouraged it, even.\u00a0 Maybe he was making a fool of himself and that\u2019s what the priest was encouraging.\u00a0 He wondered if the few old women waiting in the pews for their turn to abase themselves could hear any of this.\u00a0 He imagined them whispering behind their gloved hands, the dry wood of the confessional rasping and creaking.<\/p>\n \u201cThe idea of being a gentleman is what I\u2019m talking about,\u201d Shea continued.\u00a0 He wanted the priest to understand him, what he was going through, who he was, but he only fell back on the same old rhetoric, the tired formula stuff he\u2019d used to insulate himself from his students all these years.\u00a0 \u201cEverything suggested by the idea of a suit of clothes, clothes make the man and all that, a tailor on Saville Row, and how the man has willingly and willfully broken the contract that the salesman Rufus is implicitly living by, Rufus as a sort of Gentleman\u2019s Gentleman of the department store, a willing participant in the class system and the sense of identity created by that system, whether real or imagined.\u00a0 Rufus and the act of shoplifting as a meditation on the structure and coherence of American society, on the American class system and this man\u2019s place in it, both real and imagined.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cThe shame of his own past,\u201d the priest put in with a hoarse, watery chuckle\u2014a smoker\u2019s laugh that was half a smoker\u2019s cough.\u00a0 \u201cThe shame of growing up in a certain way.\u00a0 Doing things to punish himself,\u201d the priest went on, but his voice changed yet again, darkened.\u00a0 \u201cNow you go on and you tell me everything you\u2019ve stolen.\u00a0 Describe every item to me.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cI started with sunglasses, Ray-Bans that cost a hundred twenty a pair, and when I had three pairs I moved on to other things.\u00a0 Beautiful inlaid cufflinks.\u00a0 Hundred dollar ties.\u00a0 Hundred and fifty dollar shirts.\u00a0 Then I just took anything at hand.\u00a0 The Godiva chocolate bars they always leave out by the register.\u00a0 Why do all these department stores leave boxfuls of Godiva chocolate bars out by the register?\u00a0 Are they asking people to shoplift?\u201d\u00a0 Shea, paused, cleared his throat, imagined a fistful of chocolate bars.\u00a0 \u201cOne day I was wandering around on the second floor and I put a pair of women\u2019s panties in my coat pocket.\u00a0 A tiny leopard-patterned thong, you could fit your thumb into the little triangle of silk, almost like it was made for that.\u00a0 I went downstairs and spoke to Rufus with one hand in my coat pocket while\u2014\u201d\u00a0 Shea laughed.\u00a0 He\u2019d forgotten where he was for a moment.\u00a0 \u201cI keep those panties and all the other stuff in an old Gladstone suitcase I\u2019ve had since college.\u201d\u00a0 He reached behind him and grabbed tightly at the leather handle, ran the back of his hand down the stiff side, like the flank of a faithful animal.\u00a0 \u201cOn rainy days I open the bag.\u00a0 I plunge both hands in\u2014\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cWho do you think you are?\u201d the priest broke in.\u00a0 It was a voice Shea was familiar with.\u00a0 \u201cThe things you\u2019ve stolen cry out to be taken to their rightful owner,\u201d the priest continued, and his voice settled into its old familiar groove.\u00a0 \u201cAll the things in the whole of creation scream loud and long to be restored to their rightful place.\u00a0 We ourselves scream loud and long until the time when we are restored to our rightful place.\u00a0 Some people scream loud and long for all eternity and are never restored!\u201d<\/p>\n The voice on the other side.\u00a0 The voice in the dark.\u00a0 The voice that smelled of dry rosewood and cigarette smoke and whiskey and that stinking cheap Old Spice<\/em>.\u00a0 He touched the tip of his nose to the gauzy black screen and peered at the shadow of the priest through the interstices of the loosely woven cloth.<\/p>\n \u201cYou\u2019re a lousy, venal prick,\u201d the priest said evenly, almost apologetically, leaning forward so suddenly that the entire box creaked.\u00a0 \u201cI knew your father and your grandfather, too.\u00a0 The whole lousy venal prick bunch of you, I\u2019m sorry to say, all that drinking and wifebeating.\u00a0 Pigshit Irish like it was something to be proud of, selling your souls for a mess of porridge.\u00a0 Irish Jews, from what I\u2019m told, if you go far enough back.\u00a0 Sheeny, isn\u2019t it?\u00a0 Little Billy Sheeny coming round to serve at the eight o\u2019clock Mass and sucking up to every priest in the sacristy, the catamite of Saint Cat\u2019s with his report card full of A\u2019s!\u00a0 You think you\u2019re living in a Dennis Lehane novel?\u00a0 What point to come all this way only to do the same things, the same lousy venal prick things?\u00a0 I know you, I know the lot of you.\u00a0 Gladstone suitcase indeed, you phony bastard,\u201d the priest hissed.\u00a0 \u201cWhy do you come here?\u00a0 What is it you\u2019re after?\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cThe same thing everyone is after, I suppose.\u00a0 The same thing everyone wants, if it comes to that, sitting here in this black box.\u00a0 Listen\u2014suppose I told you I was going to die?\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cWell, that\u2019s always implied, you know,\u201d the priest answered with a dry, airless chuckle, and Shea could hear him pull the cork from the bottle (it had been at his feet or elbow the entire time), take a single long swallow, and replace it with a penetrating squeak.\u00a0 \u201cLittle Billy Sheeny, I absolve you in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost.\u00a0 For your penance\u2014\u201d<\/p>\n But Shea was out of there, pushing through the weightless wooden door of the confessional, then the brass-encrusted oak church doors, crashing into loud daylight, sucking air on the steps of St. Catherine\u2019s, the same granite steps he could recognize without even really looking at them, leaving the confessional before he knew what his penance was, before he knew what he must do in order to be restored to a state of grace.<\/p>\n He walked the old familiar street, fumbling in the pockets of his camelhair coat.\u00a0 He opened one of the airplane bottles, sucked the vodka through the tiny hole, screwed the cap back on, returned the empty to the inside pocket, did the same with the second bottle, kept the third in reserve.\u00a0 He exhaled, and light seemed to spool out through his open mouth, luxe calme et volupte<\/em>.\u00a0\u00a0 The day had turned sunny and warm, a perfect afternoon for a college Homecoming.\u00a0 He felt with the fingers of his right hand for the oily leather handle, the right arm mechanically dropping a little lower with the sagging bottom-weight.\u00a0 He had left the suitcase in the confessional and would have to go back for it, though he did not turn around.\u00a0 It had been his high school graduation present, and he had asked specifically for a Gladstone bag to take away to college with him because he\u2019d wanted one ever since reading The Catcher in the Rye<\/em>.\u00a0 His father had given it to him, Shea\u2019s initials embossed in gold leaf on the leather tab just below the brass lock, the bag itself tied up in a floppy red bow.\u00a0 Inside the bag was ten thousand in cash in small-denomination bills.\u00a0 \u201cThat\u2019s it, then,\u201d his father had said, taking him off to the side of the room, which had been decorated with blue and gold streamers, the colors of Notre Dame.\u00a0 \u201cWe\u2019re square now, eh sonny?\u00a0 You go off and be a writer now.\u201d\u00a0 Shea had gone away, and had been gone a good long time.<\/p>\n At the next corner he found his car, a vintage black Mercedes 300D that had been vandalized by a graffiti artist with the tag of Old King, his name in Gaelic scrawled in green paint across both windshields.\u00a0 The punks of the neighborhood didn\u2019t like strangers coming in, driving up real estate prices, changing things.\u00a0 They gave themselves respectability with a few words of an arcane language and some clich\u00e9d rhetoric about saving dear old Southie from the yuppies.\u00a0 He could picture this fellow who called himself Old King getting pissed in the corner taproom while passing the hat for the IRA.\u00a0 He could hear him with his fake brogue and his Notre Dame Tam O\u2019Shanter saying to the lousy prick he was getting pissed with, \u201cWell, it was only the windshields, y\u2019know.\u00a0 Oy\u2019d never heart the paint of a luvely car like tha\u2019.\u201d\u00a0 The lousy illiterate conscienceless prick would not be caught, Shea well knew, but he would call the police anyway, for insurance purposes.<\/p>\n Shea searched his coat pockets for his cell phone.\u00a0 High up, in the top floor of one of the paint-peeled wooden three-deckers that lined the street, a man was cursing at somebody named Siobhan to get his dinner on the table.\u00a0 Shea yelled at the man on the top floor to shut the fuck up.\u00a0 The man yelled back that he would be down in just one minute.\u00a0 \u201cIs that you, Billy Dolan?\u201d the man hollered through the open window.\u00a0 \u201cIs that you, Billy Dolan?\u201d\u00a0 Shea shrugged off his coat and threw it on the hood of the car and glared up at the window where the man\u2019s round, hairless face had been.\u00a0 A few people began to gather, then a few more; it occurred to Shea that he was attracting a crowd with his vandalized car and his camelhair coat and his yelling at the man in the top floor of the three-decker to shut the fuck up.\u00a0 At the back of the crowd was an old priest, flanked by two old women who had him by the elbows, unsteady on his bandy legs and holding up the suitcase in both hands like the Host at the Consecration.\u00a0 He winked at Shea as he opened the suitcase and, with the broad flourish of a magician, began tossing brightly colored pieces of lingerie, silk neckties, jeweled cufflinks, designer sunglasses, Godiva chocolates in their golden wrappers.\u00a0 \u201cJust look at all this shit!\u201d cried a grammar school boy with spiky, flame-colored hair.\u00a0 The boy and his two friends plucked Shea\u2019s treasure from the air, from the street, from one another, and ran with it laughing down the littered avenue.\u00a0 The old priest dropped the empty suitcase to the ground and hobbled away on his bandy legs, the two women clutching and pulling at his coatsleeves.\u00a0 A few cars slowed.\u00a0 \u201cBilly Dolan, Billy Dolan!\u201d\u00a0 Shea could hear the man\u2019s voice bellowing from deep inside the three-decker house.\u00a0 He gazed mutely at the painted red door.\u00a0 He took the third airplane bottle from inside his coat, twisted it open, dropped the tiny silver cap to the pavement, where it went skipping and spinning into the gutter\u2014sipped at his leisure, drop by drop, as he waited for the man with the round, hairless face to come down in just one minute so he could settle things, all the shit he\u2019d spent his life despising, the petty violence and vulgarity, Get my dinner on the table right now, you dumb bitch<\/em>, and she would do it, too, his own mother\u2014the low behavior, the dishonesty, the layers of false personality\u2014to be free of all that, finally\u2014one time she tried to get away, packed a small cloth suitcase and hurried in tears to a neighbor\u2019s house, but he followed her, busted right in after her, pulled her back outside, pointed his finger down the street like life only goes in one direction, Get home, you\u2014<\/em>and Shea had stood watching as she obeyed him\u2014Get home<\/em>\u2014his father undoing his cuffbuttons, first left then right\u2014<\/p>\n <\/p>\n The man with the round, hairless face punched Shea twice in the face to get his attention, two quick lefts, then once in the stomach, a right uppercut, deftly and with full force, as if he\u2019d had lots of practice.\u00a0 Shea doubled over, dropped to his knees.\u00a0 Shea rhymes with pray<\/em>.\u00a0 An old priest had told him that, smiling his old priest smile, sitting with him on a green velvet sofa.\u00a0 Now let us pray together.\u00a0 Let us pray to our lord and savior Jesus Christ, who suffered and died for our sins.\u00a0 Let us confess our sins and pray for absolution.\u00a0 You confess it, then I make it go away.\u00a0 See how it works?\u00a0 We can have Mass right here in this sacristy, the two of us.\u00a0 We can have our own Mass, our own consecration and communion.\u00a0 But first you must be restored to a state of grace.\u00a0 See?\u00a0 Ego te absolvo<\/em>.\u00a0 There are the kneelers, right over there.\u00a0 See?\u00a0 Shea sounds like she.\u00a0 He braceleted the boy\u2019s wrist with thumb and forefinger.\u00a0 Shea sounds like shade sounds like shadow.\u00a0 Come in under the shadow of this red rock.\u00a0 That\u2019s T. S. Eliot, a very good poet but also unfortunately an Episcopalian.\u00a0 Now listen here: I am the Father and you are the Son.\u00a0 I may take this cup from you, but not as you will, but only as I <\/em>will.\u00a0 For this cup to be taken away you must drink from it.\u00a0 See?<\/p>\n Shea thought of the old priest in his sacristy, the musty green velvet sofa with the scratched walnut arms, and while he thought of the old priest he took one hell of a vicious beating.\u00a0 The man standing over him was laughing and grunting as he kicked Shea with his filthy workboots.\u00a0 He looked like a pig, his ears folded over like a pig\u2019s ears.\u00a0 He was wearing a yellowed T-shirt and striped blue pajama bottom.\u00a0 The workboots were unlaced, and as they struck his head and mid-section made a muffled sound like driving a car on a flat tire.\u00a0 The man grunted one final time and shrieked, You\u2019re not Billy Dolan at all, you execrable imposter, but let that be a lesson to you, whomever you are! <\/em>and went back into the house and pulled the painted red door shut behind him.\u00a0 Why did he stop?\u00a0 Shea had not asked him to stop.\u00a0 He touched his face and his fingers came away sticky with blood.\u00a0 He extended his arms and hugged the warm South Boston pavement like an old friend, the pebbled concrete cutting into his hands, the side of his face, the bridge of his nose.\u00a0 The Mass is ended, go in peace<\/em>, said the old priest.\u00a0 A police car pulled up to the curb and Shea contemplated his own writhing shape in the polished hubcaps.\u00a0 Shea sounds like shape.\u00a0 <\/em>He was a person in the world; a person in the world was shaped like Shea.\u00a0 They were the same: himself and his shape in the world, the same.\u00a0 Shea sounds like shade sounds like shadow.\u00a0 <\/em>The crowd dispersed and he found himself alone with two uniformed patrolmen who hovered over him like two blue angels, one at the head and one at the feet.<\/p>\n The State of Grace Roman Catholics were no longer required to go to Confession, which is a sacrament, (now called the sacrament of Penance), but the Church still offered it as an option.\u00a0 You could participate in the general Confession during Mass and be absolved in that way: it was the same thing, had the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2391,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/236magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1447"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/236magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/236magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/236magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2391"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/236magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1447"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/236magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1447\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1449,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/236magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1447\/revisions\/1449"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/236magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1447"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}A 1999 graduate of the Creative Writing Program, Anthony Wallace taught in the College of Arts and Sciences Writing Program at BU from 2001 until his death in 2018. His collection of short stories\u00a0<\/span>The Old Priest<\/a>\u00a0won the 2013 Drue Heinz Literature Prize and was a\u00a0finalist for the 2014 PEN\/Hemingway Award<\/a>. He published short fiction and poetry in a variety of literary journals and won two Pushcart Prizes, the second one for \u201cThe Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,\u201d which originally appeared in\u00a0The Southern Review<\/i>. That story and other published and unpublished stories, including “State of Grace,” are part of a collection of stories titled\u00a0The World We Sense is There<\/i>.<\/span><\/h5>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"