The Father Pat Stories by Patrick Gossage

Author:Patrick Gossage
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: FIC000000
Publisher: Dundurn
Published: 1997-04-01T04:00:00+00:00

Three Women

So this is the kingdom of heaven,

And here on the threshold we stand,

I’ll never leave again,

Adam and Eve again,

Hold my hand

… a 1950s pop song

Whenever Father Pat thought about his long, parlous and fragile relations with women, this refrain of innocence and bizarrely mixed metaphor came singing back across the decades. He had long since forgotten the melody but not the occasion when it was jukebox popular and he actually felt what it could mean. It was a song that was played a lot on the radio when Pat Cheyne decided to embark on his first date, his first real date when he actually phoned a girl and asked her out — alone, to a movie.

Pat was a shy bookish fifteen when he steeled himself for this singular adventure. It had become a matter of principle. His city friends had all taken out girls, and at high school where he was ahead of his age group, having skipped a grade, the older boys in his class were already into what adults and teenage magazines of the time referred to disapprovingly as heavy petting. Pat was tired of having to admit he’d never asked a girl out. So he did. Her name was Mary.

He arrived off the bus at her door and she was there, waiting, ready. Her hair tied back with a bow. A long skirt and white shoes and bobby socks. They got on a bus, then transferred to a streetcar. Pat was finding small talk difficult. Mary was the sister of a girl he knew at Sutton Beach, or at least barely knew, mostly watched from afar. His parents and her parents were friends. In the small middle-class community where he grew up, where cottages and golf and cocktail parties in the city were all part of the same comfortable routine, such contacts were easy, and doubtlessly prodded by her mother — “the Cheyne boys are from a nice family …” Mary dutifully accepted Pat’s hesitating request for a date.

The date took Pat from total denial of the existence of girls to at least enjoying, very briefly, holding Mary’s hand in the dark theatre. Initially prompted by the saccharine emotions in the song, he held on because, well, it was sort of interesting. That’s about all he could think of as he rode the bus home after dropping her perfunctorily at the door.

That night he woke up and it was hell, not the kingdom of heaven. He had a piercing pain in his side, a devastating one and he cried out, bringing his mother and father running. Doubled in agony he was rushed in the family sedan to the General Hospital, where his burst appendix was removed.

“Lucky you brought him in so promptly.” A handsome physician was flattering his mother as she thanked him and led Pat out to the car four days later. “Good thing it happened at home.”

All Pat could think of was that this must be an omen. In acute embarrassment, he could almost

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