themselves on the altar. Silvia slipped into the seat next to mine, we kissed hello, and she waved at Janine.
I looked at the altar and felt an odd sense of satisfaction—Silvia and Father Infanzi in the same place. She and I’d been friends since third grade except for the first semester of high school. Since I was going to a different school than she was, I was hoping I’d make a new best friend. She was always so perfect and pulled together: her straight dirty-blonde hair never out of place, her science scores always higher than mine, her sins hardly worthy of confession. The night of our eighth grade awards ceremony, I’d had enough, but not because she was valedictorian. I had won the English award. It was all I’d wanted, but back at her house after the ceremony, she asked me to take a picture of her and her father. My father had not been there. I’m not sure if my mother or I even bothered to ask him. When I looked through the lens, Silvia and Mr. Pelusi both 5’7” and holding her certificate in front of them, looked like a couple—heads cocked, Neapolitan pride flooding their faces, especially his. I felt invisible, but I wasn’t sure why, which only made it worse. A few months later when we went off to high school, I tried to break it off with her. But when I transferred to Catholic school half way through the year, she stopped me in the hall one day and asked, “Ri, can we be friends again?”
I bowed my head thanking God for Father, when out of the corner of my eye I saw the emerald cut engagement ring on Silvia’s hand that she’d splayed on the pew in front of us. I’d known this day was coming—she’d been going out with Greg for a year—but I’d pretended it wasn’t. She was my only single friend left. Stung, I looked at the altar trying not to see the ring, but it pressed on me, springing up from the pew like a big, perfect bow, growing to the size of my envy. I wanted to drop my head on my sister’s shoulder, but she wouldn’t have understood. Even if she and the rest of my family knew that the only reason I was dating Rick—a friend of a friend who had called on Valentine’s Day—was so I’d have something to do on Saturday nights, they’d never suspect I felt a calling. They’d tell me I was only twenty-seven, I’d meet the right one, there was plenty of time.
I steadied myself as I looked at Father Infanzi on the floor. There was no way he was celibate because he couldn’t get a wife. He had a choice, which made his priesthood a beautiful sacrifice. It didn’t matter that he had lifted my phone number or that whenever we spoke he looked like he was struggling not to say something. All I saw now was a perfectly sweet, good looking man who would’ve made a wonderful husband giving his life to Christ. How did he do it? When the men rose from the floor and continued the liturgy, I was certain Father helped me overcome my jealousy. I lifted Silvia’s hand, looked directly at the gem, and mouthed as genuinely as I could, C…o…n…g…r…a…t…u…l…a…t…i…o…n…s and W…o…w. She smiled and mouthed in return, I k…n…o…w. After church, when Silvia showed off her ring to me, I proudly introduced Father Infanzi to her.
The next night at the Easter Vigil after Father had sung the Exsultet, and I approached the lectern to read, I looked in his eyes. It was a split second, but I could see how excited he got. After Mass I told him, “I didn’t know you could sing too,” and he laughed and said, “You look nice.” I walked away feeling lit up but unsettled, the same way I felt four days later when he called again. It was one thing for us to talk after Mass, another for him to call a second time for no reason. It felt wrong. I wanted his attention but on my terms. I’d told myself that this was just a budding friendship. His phone call had threatened that. For the next several weeks I walked out the side door again, but I was soon in line at the front door once more. His relief when he saw me was intoxicating. We started talking after Mass nearly every week. In June, when he was leaving to go on a cruise, I sent him a bon voyage card: I wish you some lucky strolls in the casino. I thought celibacy such an enormous sacrifice that he deserved a little fun. When he called to thank me, I felt the knot in my stomach again, but I said, “You’ll be missed.” Two weeks later, I asked him out to lunch.
I was standing near my car after Mass stalling, hoping that if I gave Father enough time to finish locking up the gates he’d come over before I drove away. I’d spent the previous weekend with Rick at our friends’ pre-wedding festivities in upstate New York, but I thought about Father Infanzi. I’d sent him another postcard: After driving beside Seneca Lake for a half hour, there’s still more lake. As beautiful as it is, I’m truly a city girl. Hope you’re doing well. I got in my car, put the key in the ignition, and pretended to search for something in my pocketbook. A minute later, Father was a few inches from my window telling me how special the postcards were. Then he told me that he was going on a second vacation, this time to the Midwest to visit his family and to go to Vegas. “Wow,” I said, feeling a little jealous, though I wasn’t sure why. Priests go to Vegas? When he added that he’d be gone for a month, I looked away and back at him. Then, before I lost my nerve, “Maybe when you return, I could show you around the college, and we could go to lunch?” He blushed and laughed nervously. Putting his hand in his pocket to calm himself, he said, “That would be very nice.”
Five weeks later on my 28th birthday, we were sitting in a quaint Italian restaurant, the salt tang of New York Harbor sweeping through the French doors. I was wearing a long flower-printed dress with short sleeves and had my hair pulled up softly on the sides. He was wearing khakis and a light pink button-down shirt with a beeper clipped to his belt in case the rectory needed him. Ordinarily I would have waited for him to call, but the day after he got home from vacation I called him. My birthday was the following week, and I wanted to spend it with him, not Rick who I’d slept with the night of our friends’ wedding. Afterward, I felt just as numb and disconnected from myself as I always did, but I hadn’t gone to confession, because I didn’t want to promise I wouldn’t do it again.
As we looked at the menu, I told Father how good the pastas and fried calamari were. “I like pasta puttanesca,” he said. When he couldn’t find it, I pointed to it, the sight of my hand near his making him blush more. After the waiter took our order, I complimented Father’s pronunciation. “A lot of people say calamary. It’s so wrong, it hurts the ear.”
“I know,” he said laughing. “That’s my half Italian side.”
“Your father’s father is from Puglia?”
“Right,” he said, impressed that I’d remembered. “And both your mother and father were born in Italy. You’re the real thing.”
I shrugged my shoulders to be cute, which made him laugh harder. “You studied Chemistry at Fairfield, right?”
He looked impressed again. “Yes, and you graduated from Westerly.”
I nodded. “Then the fall after graduation, I went to work in the Admissions office.”
“Where I bumped into you like a clod last April,” he said, rolling his eyes.
“It was an honest mistake. Soon after that is when I got the career placement director position, and that’s what I’ve been doing for the last year.” By the time the waiter arrived with our platter of calamari, we were talking a steady stream. Both our mothers went back to college in their forties to become health care professionals; we were third-born and mildly introverted, almost always falling into the role of listener; his mother’s name is Maria. I asked him what he does in the parish even though I already knew, and he asked me about my job and the graduate course in autobiographical writing that I was taking, both of which I enjoyed so much it showed on my face. I told him I wanted to write a memoir one day, though I didn’t tell him that I cried in my professor’s office when he asked me what my very first memory was, and I couldn’t remember a thing. Half-way through our main course when we came to a pause, he started to laugh. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’ve just never had lunch with a girl like you before.”
It was the moment when I should have steered the conversation toward vocation, asked him when he first felt called to the priesthood, told him that I also felt a calling, so that he wasn’t wondering for one more moment why the two of us were having a three hour lunch on my birthday. But I was making him laugh with a spontaneity I’d forgotten I had. He was hanging on my words. He seemed so different from the men I dated: innocent and child-like and easy to charm. I was looking for some answer