Tarnished Halos

Although fiction, this story contains murder, rape, and suicide.

Tarnished Halos

Why do I keep torturing myself week after week? Sitting here staring out the window as this train slowly rips me away from my comfortable place. All four decades of my life have been spent in Saint Andrews. First, a choir boy, then an altar boy, and four years of seminary school. The obvious next step was the priesthood. I've always known that I was destined to be a priest like my father, his father, and so on, four generations back. 

I have loved my parish members like my family for all my life. I applaud their achievements, award the children who have been able to maintain good grades, and run the tutoring and mentoring programs. That is not the problem, spreading me thin, but I enjoy seeing their faces light up when they catch on. The monsignor has praised me for the outreach programs I have gotten implemented to help our young children, women, and families. I try to see the whole situation and not judge.

I love children; the one thing God didn't bless my wife and me with. I met Sarah in my second year at the University of Virginia in 1989. We have been married for twenty-four years; she is my first and only girlfriend, best friend, and world. It hurts every Saturday morning to wave goodbye until Friday night, but it's been our reality as long as we have known each other. Maybe we are better this way, but I always wish for more time together.

Working one week on and one off makes for disconnection everywhere. The "honey-do list" never gets shorter when I am home. My Sarah is a wonderful homemaker and a nurse. For years we have tried to synchronize our work schedules as best as possible. Usually, we meet up around Wednesday, and I have two days before I have to return to the city. This house was my childhood home, and I couldn't bring myself to let it go after my parents died. Some thought that I should have sold it or burned it down. My mother found my father in bed with a parishioner he'd been counseling, killed them both, and turned the gun on herself. The other speculation was that the woman's husband killed all three before running his truck into the path of an oncoming train; when I was in my first year at college.

Maybe, this is why I understand the children I come in contact with; I suffer with them when they grieve. I'm unsure if it's because I looked up to my father and felt that he tainted my ideas of a priest, father, man, and role model. Or do I understand how he could be unfaithful? Please understand my words; I have seen others tempted as well. I referred a client and her children to another priest because I was developing feelings for the children.

I'm usually mild-mannered, calm, and soft-spoken, but their mother tested my patience, generosity, and beliefs. I believe that God doesn't make mistakes. The father was absent from the home when I began tutoring the older twins, Mandy and Sandy. Those two adorable girls were not reading on a twelve-year-old level and were about to fail the third grade for the third time. I only learned about the twin Sandy because the mother landed in the hospital where my Sarah works.

Sarah cares for drug-addicted women. One Friday evening, Sarah wasn't herself when she scooped me from the train depot. Usually, Sarah was good at leaving work behind, but Sandy touched her heart twice in two days. The first time she caught her eating the leftover food on her mom's roommate's lunch tray. The next time Sandy swiped a partially eaten sandwich from a tray in the hall and ran away to avoid having to relinquish the find.

Risking her job, Sarah wrote down the address from the mother's chart, and I accompanied her to the residence to find four children alone, dirty, hungry, and scared. So, while the mother was hospitalized, Sarah and I played house and parents. We cleaned the small two-bedroom unit and cooked breakfasts and dinners for six. When the mother was released, she agreed to let the children continue tutoring, so I would bring dinners from the parish three days a week. I found it hard to overlook the choices of the mother.

 I loved the girls and didn't want to see them split up by social services, so I decided to get someone else to tutor them. Sarah and I decided to petition the court for custody of all four girls when the mom relapsed within a month of being home. The girls were placed with us temporarily while their mom was in the treatment program for her addictions. We even agreed to let her come to stay at our country bungalow with the children, but she had to remain clean and sober. Unfortunately, she hung herself in her room at the treatment center, leaving a suicide letter naming the monsignor as her rapist and the father of both sets of twins.

Her mother, Glo, trying to quit smoking, drinking, and prostitution, turned to the leader of Saint Andrews twenty years ago when she wanted to be a better role model for her sixteen-year-old daughter. The monsignor, still battling his demons, began a relationship with the very person he was supposed to be counseling. In a drunken state, one night raped her teen daughter. Rather than risking her mother's sobriety, she remained quiet. After finding out she was pregnant, she was kicked out of the church and not believed. Needing to provide for the twins, her abuser gave her half his monthly stipend. Keeping the mother in booze, he had sex with the daughter regularly. When sober in rehab, the truth was too much for her to live with.

The state awarded full custody to Sarah and me. We agreed that the girls didn't need to know what had happened to her or that the monsignor was their father. The girls are sixteen and fourteen now. Their father died in prison for the crimes he committed against many women. I was promoted to monsignor yesterday!