Difficult Women by Roxane Gay

Author:Roxane Gay [Gay, Roxane]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780802189646
Publisher: Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
Published: 2017-05-10T16:00:00+00:00

Bad Priest

Father Mickey—Father Michael Patrick Minty, who went by Mickey to distance himself from the expectations of his mother—was having an affair with a girl named Rebekah. Rebekah was a perfume girl in a department store who still lived with her parents. She was not Catholic. Father Mickey’s mother, Nora Minty, a devout Catholic, named her son Michael after the archangel Michael because she was convinced, from the moment she laid eyes on her baby boy, that he would be a warrior for the faith. He was named Patrick for his father, may he rest in peace, who left Nora when Mickey was four, and died three months later from an excess of joy, Patrick Minty’s friends would later say, because he died in his studio apartment watching a baseball game with a six-pack of beer in his lap.

While his friends were told bedtime stories, Mickey Minty was nurtured with dark stories about the constant battle for salvation and how David beat Goliath and how Sodom and Gomorrah fell. Over and over, Nora would recite the Book of Daniel, Chapter Twelve, Verse One—”But at that time shall Michael rise up, the great prince, who standeth for the children of thy people.” He heard the verse so often that the words made him sick to his stomach. That is how, he later decided, the lining of his stomach began to give way to acid and ulcers.

No one was more surprised than Michael Patrick Minty when he entered the seminary and then the priesthood. It was a simple life, he told himself. He didn’t have to think that much. He would never have to support anyone. Mickey Minty wasn’t incapable of handling responsibility, but given his mother’s expectations, he simply didn’t have the energy for anything more. There were his parishioners, but at the end of the day, he could lock himself in the rectory, alone, without having to worry about anyone but himself. There was comfort in that, and that comfort made the sacrifices of the priesthood something he could endure.

Mickey Minty did not like to listen to strangers. He did not like to listen to anyone at all. The sounds of other voices, high-pitched and flighty or low and timid or any other variation, they all made him edgy and nauseated. There were days when he heard so many words detailing so many sins and sorrows and hopes and wants and needs that hot sprays of acid burned the back of his throat while he sat, hidden in the confessional, shifting his weight uncomfortably during particularly long excavations of human failing. Having to care, to soothe, to dispense was just too much. Worse yet was the way they looked to him for answers, eagerly listened to his counsel, believed, and dutifully carried out penance. What he hated was the way his parishioners had faith—faith that he would show them the way and faith that he would fight for their faith and faith that there was meaning in all this, and faith that there was something greater than themselves.

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