The first Sunday I read was, shall we say, eventful. I tripped climbing up to the lectern and went sprawling at Father Pat's feet. That got everyone's attention as surely as Sister Margaret's whistle had when I was in grade school—she put her thumb and middle finger to her mouth and shot out a sound that even the boys playing football on the big field couldn't fail to hear. When I was in the third grade, I'd asked her how she did it—I was the only girl ever to ask, she said—and the first time I'd belted out a good one, she'd laughed and said, “Delightfully unladylike! Now you'd best be careful how you use it, Frances, or you'll end up an old nun like me!”
With all those people staring at me from the pews, I picked myself up as gracefully as I could, straightened my glasses, and stood at the lectern. I could hardly find the page where I was to start the reading, even though it was marked with a ribbon. My voice croaked as I began. You could feel everyone suppressing their laughter, or holding their breaths.
The reading was from the prophet Isaiah, and I hadn't yet recovered from my inauspicious beginning when I read, “‘None shall be weary nor . . . nor stumble . . .’” I choked up for a minute, too embarrassed to read on. I looked down at Danny, sitting with Maggie and Davy in the second pew, working hard not to laugh. At the whole congregation behind him.
I made a silly face and shrugged, and a rather delightful chuckle rippled through the church.
“‘None shall slumber nor sleep,’” I read on, cutting a glance toward Father Pat, who was known to doze off on occasion when he was assisting rather than saying the Mass himself. That got another chuckle, along with some poking of spouses who were known dozers, too.
When I'd finished reading and sat in the pew again, Danny took my hand and squeezed it, and whispered that I'd done a great job. I closed my eyes, prepared to have a few stern words with my God—privately, of course. But the God that came to me in that closed-eyed darkness looked more like a Wednesday Sister than like a stern old bearded Father, and she was chuckling, too.
All sorts of people stopped me after that Mass to say they'd enjoyed my reading. Even Father Pat had laughed, they said. And though I never did quite feel comfortable up at that lectern, in no time I went from sitting anonymously in the pews every Sunday to knowing so many parishioners that I was forever bumping into them at the parish office and the grocery store.
I was surprised to find myself controversial, too: a woman reader. Just when women had finally found our way to participating in the Mass—not reading the Gospels, that was still reserved for men, just doing the non-Gospel readings—the Vatican issued a revised Roman Missal, which restricted us. The NOW Ecumenical Task Force on Women and Religion burned part of the missal in protest that spring, and that fall it seemed half the nuns in America were in an uproar, the heads of seven orders meeting with Catholic bishops in Washington to demand a stronger voice in the Church. A nun, a woman who'd dedicated her life to the Church, couldn't read the Gospels when a mere deacon could, just because he was a man? That didn't seem right.
We learned that Danny was going to Canada that fall, too. His company was looking precarious—they had rushed to release the 1103, a breakthrough MOS memory product with four times the capacity of the original 1101, but as Danny's boss said privately, “Sometimes the thing just doesn't remember.” Andy feared the chips would all come back in returns and it would be the company's death. But the manufacturing arm of Bell Canada offered an amount equal to the company's entire net worth to be a second source for producing the 1103s, and Danny was being sent to Ottawa as part of the transfer team.
“Just temporarily. A few months, maybe,” he said.
“A few months!”
“Six or eight at most, I hope.”
I thought we ought to move with him—what would we do without him?—but he insisted that it wouldn't be that long, and that if we moved we'd end up living in a shabby apartment in the heart of one of those dreadful Canadian winters. “You'd be miserable having to bundle up the kids every time you stepped out the door, Frankie,” he said. “And with no friends, no park.” He'd be working all the time, anyway, he said. It wasn't like we'd ever see each other, even if we all moved.
The first few weeks Danny was away, I called him at his Ottawa apartment each night just before eight—eleven his time—so Mags and Davy could say good night to him, and he was always there. But he started getting back later and later as the weeks dragged on into months. I'd call every half hour, at eight-thirty, at nine; he didn't like to call me lest the phone wake the children, and no amount of assurance from me would convince him it would not.