My father was a man of singular devotions. For a few years before I was born, he was a priest in the Roman Catholic Church. As a priest, his countenance—that old word—was eerie. His light gray eyes gave him, from a certain angle, a quality of rapt contemplation. At those moments his expression conveyed a disturbing radiance. He had—I can't avoid saying it this way—an oddly beautiful face. Many people said so. Rapture was sometimes visible in his expressive gestures, in the way he aimed his face at the sky. He had a gift for rapture, strange as that may sound. As a consequence, women sometimes found themselves going a bit shivery in his presence. I have spoken to some of them. Most are grandmothers by now. But they do not especially mind talking about the past, and a few can be direct. "It wasn't his fault," one of them once said to me, "but your father made me weak in the knees."
She took a sip of her tea. We sat in her kitchen, at the oil cloth-covered table. It was a hot day, and tiny beads of sweat had appeared above her upper lip. Hot as it was, she was still wearing a blue scarf, and she dabbed at herself with it. "I never told him, of course," she said, with a pallid smile, "because he was my priest for those three years, and I don't suppose he knew how I felt. Nobody knew not my husband or my sister. Why should I tell anyone? It wasn't important, you see, that I reacted that way. But I'm older now and I'm a widow and you're his son. Women love their priests sometimes. They bring casseroles to the rectory. It's not news. It shouldn't be news to you. Besides, you look like him."
Another one of these ladies said to me, "When he was nearby, my whole body knew it." She didn't smile. She glanced at the ceiling. "I don't care in the least," she added, "if you know this or not. It doesn't make any difference now. Not the slightest difference."
In addition to his gray eyes, my father had straight sandy hair parted on the left and layered neatly across his head, hair that he did not lose even in early middle age. The photographs of him as a young man suggest a narrow nose and thin lips on a mouth whose corners curved upward, so that he gave the impression of smiling even when he was pensive and did not intend to smile and was not, in fact, smiling. He had a slight limp from a childhood injury. Like many North Germans, afflicted for countless generations by clouds and damp weather, he could be moody, but unlike most of those same Germans, his moods were almost weightless, and the shifts in his emotions were often so quick that watching him was like being stationed in a field over which clouds were rapidly passing, creating patterned successions of shadow and light.
I was the child in that field, over which the clouds passed.
I loved my father, lost calling and all. I might as well say it. I loved him for his instinctual goodness, which was evident to just about everyone who knew him, a peculiar variety of without righteousness or piety, and for his forbearance, a word rarely used now, because its referent is disappearing. True goodness can be bland. The unworldliness surrounding it often suggests something peculiarly childlike. Most men secretly have a contempt for it. My father was blessed, and cursed, with the quality. He did not hold it aloft as a feature of his character, a some people make a practice of doing, the ones transfixed with hypocrisy and mania. Reader, you may have known, at some time in your life, someone good and quietly honorable like my father. You must try to recognize what I am describing. You must help me breathe the breath of life back into him. I might as well tell you that this is a desperate enterprise.
Finally, I think, his goodness brought him into the arms of my mother. And when that happened, he was vacated of his faith. God, who says of Himself that He is jealous, took His leave of my father. And my father was given this world, the one we live in, for all the good it would do him.