Chapter 86: Paris Vaut Bien Une Messe?

March 5, 1988, McKinley, Ohio

The doorbell rang at 9:00am on Saturday morning, which was when I was expecting Becka. Band practice had been moved to Thursday morning because Kim had a conflict, but everyone was available on Thursday, so it worked out.

I had a pot of coffee and hot water for tea ready, and had also shaved chocolate, should Becka want hot chocolate. I left Rachel on the rug in the great room and went to open the door.

“Hi!” Becka, Jo, and Sammy exclaimed in unison.

“Hi,” I replied with a smile.

“Les stayed with her boyfriend, but the three of us came home for the weekend!” Jo exclaimed.

“Becka,” I said, “it’s up to you if you want them to come in for coffee, tea, or hot chocolate.”

“What is she, the wife?” Sammy asked playfully.

“I suppose they can come in if they promise to be good,” Becka said.

“Oh, we’ll be good alright,” Jo exclaimed.

“I meant behave!” Becka retorted.

I let the three of them in and after they took off their coats, I opened the gate for them to go into the great room, and instantly the three twenty-one-year-old girls were caught in the ‘baby cone of power’ and hurried over to a clearly amused Rachel who always enjoyed that kind of attention.

“She’s adorable!” Sammy declared. “Can we hold her?”

“Yes. Can I get you coffee, tea, or hot chocolate?”

All of them chose hot chocolate, and I was glad I’d shaved the entire bar, so I’d have enough for all three of them while I had tea. Ten minutes later, I carried a tray with three mugs of hot chocolate with whipped cream to the girls, then returned to get my tea.

I totally wasn’t surprised when Jo showed me her tongue with whipped cream on it and made a show of swallowing. Not to be outdone, Sammy got whipped cream on her lips and tongue, winked, licked her lips, and made a show of swallowing. Becka simply laughed and rolled her eyes.

“We did promise to make sure you forgot those sisters even exist!” Jo exclaimed.

“We did!” Sammy confirmed.

“Becka?” I asked. “What do you think?”

“Can I talk to you in private, please?” she asked.

“Sure,” I agreed.

We went to my study, and I shut the door so there was no chance we could be overheard.

“Would you be willing to mess with them?” Becka asked with a sly smile.

“Possibly,” I replied. “What did you have in mind?”

“To tell them they can have what they want, but they have to do it in the great room with me watching, but they have to leave before you and I do anything. I think they’ll refuse, but there’s a chance they’d say ‘yes’ and then you’d have to go through with it.”

“First, are you actually OK with that?”

Becka smirked, “Thinking about them blowing you and you fucking them while I watch actually turns me on! And you and I haven’t agreed to anything for the future, which is what I expect to talk about today. I plan to spend the night and stay as long as you want, at least until I have to go back to Cinci. Our plan is to go back to Xavier tomorrow afternoon around 4:00pm and the girls can pick me up here. That would give us plenty of time to talk and stuff.”

“Stuff?” I asked with a grin.

“A bubble bath, for one! Becka exclaimed. “Otherwise, I’m sure we can figure out plenty of ways to have fun!”

“I’m having a friend visit tomorrow after liturgy, around 1:00pm.”

“OK. Can you drop me at Jo’s?”

“Absolutely. Back to the point of the conversation — if you and I were to continue this exploration beyond today, would it bother you that I’d been with your friends?”

“No. I mean, I picked you up at the club and planned to just fuck for my birthday! You changed the encounter, obviously, but I think you and I both know it’s something of a longshot. I’m not saying it won’t happen, but it was kind of out of the blue and random! We have a lot to talk about, but it’s absolutely worth exploring.”

“Couples do have to meet somehow,” I replied. “Why not a pickup at a club?”

“Good point! No, I won’t be upset, and I meant what I said about being turned on by the idea of watching you with them!”

And I had been totally turned on by Clarissa watching me with Tessa, though the other way around hadn’t been the case. But that was the only way I could make love to Clarissa, and that had made the decision quite easy. There was, though, one point I wanted to make to Becka, or, as I thought about it, probably two.

“First,” I said, “from everything Jo has said, I’m reasonably certain she’ll go for it. I’m not so sure about Sammy.”

“What if I say it’s both or none?” Becka smirked.

“That leads to a second concern, and that’s peer pressure. I’d hate for one of them to feel pressured into doing it if they were reluctant.”

“I have an idea,” Becka said. “Let me handle it, OK?”

“OK.”

We went back into the great room and Becka asked Sammy to go into the kitchen, then came back and took Jo into the kitchen and when they came back, they were laughing.

“What time does Rachel go down for her nap?” Becka asked.

“About 10:00am,” I replied. “So, in about forty minutes.”

“Then let’s drink our hot chocolate and play with Rachel!”

“Do you have any books to read her?” Becka asked.

I suspected they were messing with me and wouldn’t tell me what the decision was until after Rachel went down for her nap.

“There are three on the coffee table, and more upstairs,” I said.

She moved over to the coffee table and picked up Put Me in the Zoo. She then sat on the floor, moved Rachel to her lap, and began reading. Watching her with Rachel, and watching how Rachel responded, I had a feeling that by Sunday afternoon, Becka would have the ‘Rachel Seal of Approval’. That was the first hurdle, but there were others, and my goal was to find out before Becka left if she was willing to try to clear those hurdles.

“She’ll need a bottle of juice before her nap,” I said when Becka finished reading the book.

“Think she’ll take it from me?” Becka asked.

“There’s only one way to find out. Let me get some apple juice and see what she thinks.”

“Babies like attention,” Jo observed. “She’s a complete angel!”

“Oh sure,” I chuckled as I got up to go to the kitchen. “Jinx it!”

Jo wasn’t the only person to observe that Rachel was a very happy baby. In one sense, that surprised me, because she didn’t have a mom. But in another sense, she had four or more moms — Lara, Serafima, Alyssa, and Anna. And there were plenty of others who helped care for her, including Anicka and the girls I was dating. And that made me consider if my thinking about her ‘needing’ a mom might be off, at least in the way I had thought.

If it was off, it wasn’t too far off, though, as the current team effort wasn’t truly sustainable for the long term. I was positive it would have been close to impossible had it not been for Lara’s self-sacrificial offer to be Rachel’s primary caregiver and the fact that the medical school and hospital had mostly bent over backwards to help me.

In August, things would change, and while the hospital daycare would help, it would do nothing for any twenty-four-hour shifts, or worse, thirty-six-hour shifts, which would begin a year from June. What I didn’t want was for Rachel to have to sleep somewhere else most nights, and that meant whoever cared for her would need to sleep at my house, and the most logical way to solve that was marriage.

I had other reasons for wanting to marry, most importantly, having a life partner with whom I would grow old, though what had happened to Elizaveta was a stark reminder of the futility of assuming that would happen. I also wanted more children, though obviously it was possible to have those outside marriage, as Clarissa and I planned.

But there was one other driving force, and that was the only way I could control my libido with any level of certainty was within a committed, exclusive relationship. That made something I otherwise struggled with trivially easy, and while I could solve it with a committed, monogamous relationship without a wedding ceremony, I simply didn’t want to. The permanence of marriage was key, even if that permanence might be ephemeral, as it was with Elizaveta.

In the end, I thought, as I returned from the kitchen with the bottle of juice, I was on the right course, and by the end of Bright Week, I’d ask one of three girls to marry me — Dani, Sara, or Becka.

“Fair warning,” I said as I handed the bottle to Becka. “She likes to be rocked when she eats. Not always, but most of the time. If she turns her head from the bottle, or complains, that means she wants the rocking chair.”

“Complains?” Sammy asked.

“She has a one-word vocabulary at the moment, so it takes some interpretation, but it’s usually fairly obvious what she needs when she says ‘PA!’”

Well, she’d said ‘DA!’ but that felt like her just trying out a new sound. Rachel accepted the bottle without complaint or resistance, which was another vote of confidence in Becka.

“She’s not just asking for you?” Jo inquired.

“It’s not clear,” I replied. “She learned that sound and it gets her what she wants. I have no idea if she associates it with ‘Papa’ or just attention. According to the very basic child developmental material I’ve read, ‘Mom’ or ‘Mommy’ are a result of babies making the ‘ma’ sound first, and ‘Pop’ or ‘Papa’ from making the ‘pa’ sound second. The ‘da’ sound is a little more difficult and comes after the sounds that only use the lips.”

“So babies saying ‘mama’ is really just them learning to make sounds?” Jo asked.

“So it would appear, though obviously we don’t know for sure how a baby’s mind works or how babies learn language. What they don’t do is study books, conjugate verbs, or decline nouns! If you think about it, you know how to conjugate verbs without having to think about it, while I suspect you do have to think about it with French, Spanish, German, or Latin, whichever you studied in High School.”

“French and Latin. Everyone has to take one semester of Latin at Saint Augustine. It used to be two years, but that changed after Vatican II switched everything to English. Does your church use Russian?”

“Our services are mostly in English, with a few prayers and hymns in Church Slavonic, which is an older form of Russian, probably best described as comparable to Middle English. The Orthodox Church has always translated the liturgical service books, hymns, Scriptures, and prayers into the local language.

“Rome’s choice of a single universal language made some sense when Latin was the lingua franca of the West. Greek was the primary language of the East, and we use occasional hymns in Greek on special occasions, such as greeting a bishop. There is actually a remnant of Greek in the Latin Rite Novus Ordo Mass — Kyrie eleison. And the language difference is responsible for much of the disagreement between Rome and Constantinople.”

“How do you know so much about the Catholic Church?” Sammy asked.

“I’m a catechist, and one of the most important parts of the training is comparative religion. I read quite a bit of theology, both Orthodox and non-Orthodox, in High School when I was studying. I also had two semesters of world religions at Taft. I can, if you want, expound on Islam, Judaism, Buddhism, and a host of other ‘isms’, as well as what are often called ‘pagan’ religions. If you want to know about Zeus, Jupiter, or Thor, I’m your man!”

“Did you ever think about being a priest?” Jo asked.

“No, and not for the reason you might think! We ordain married men, so there is no celibacy requirement!”

“That’s actually cool,” she replied. “I think it’s dumb that our priests are required to be single. And there are quite a few who fit what Zappa sang — Father Riley’s a fairy but it don’t bother Mary! So why did you not want to be a priest?”

“It’s not compatible with being a doctor for theological reasons, so it was never even a consideration. I was ordained a deacon just after I married, but once my wife reposed, I asked to be released because while it’s true that we ordain married men, someone who is ordained cannot marry.”

“Reposed?”

“The Orthodox word for ‘died’, because Christ rising from the dead defeated death. As the Holy Apostle Paul says, ’oh Death where is thy sting’. And the Scriptures refer to those who have ‘fallen asleep in the Lord’. Whatever else may or may not be true, Elizaveta is experiencing the presence of God in a way that none of us who are living can experience it.”

“What do you mean by ‘whatever else may or may not be true’?” Becka asked.

“The idea of heaven as a place, ‘up there’ and of Hell or Hades as a place ‘down there’ have significant theological problems, not to mention scientific problems. Unlike the West, the East has no trouble with science, so long as it remains in its domain.”

“Didn’t some Russian astronaut say that he didn’t see God while in orbit?” Jo asked.

“No. That’s attributed to cosmonaut Yuri Alekseyevich Gagarin, but it’s actually something Nikita Khrushchev said — ’Why are you clinging to God? Here Gagarin flew into space and didn’t see God’. My grandfather and his friends assert that Gagarin was actually a baptized Orthodox Christian, though there’s no way to prove that, and if it were true, it would be something Gagarin kept secret, because otherwise he’d never have been selected for the Soviet space program.”

“If heaven isn’t a place, then what is it?” Becka asked.

“That is one of the great mysteries, by which I mean things which are hidden from us, not like Agatha Christie or Sherlock Holmes mysteries. The icon of the Last Judgment shows both saints and the damned in the direct presence of God, in the same condition, though the saints are refined by the energies of God, represented as a river of fire, while the damned are tortured by it. The only difference between them is that the saints love God, and the damned do not.”

“What about Purgatory?” Jo asked.

“What about it?” I asked with a grin. “Theologically speaking, it has a number of weak points, though it is rooted in the question of what happens between physical death and the bodily resurrection. There are strains of the theology that support Purgatory in Orthodox mysticism, rooted in the idea of Aerial Toll Houses, found in modern times in the teachings of a monk, Serafim Rose. As a metaphor, it works at some level, but it’s not dogmatic truth, and, in fact, most Orthodox bishops reject it even as a metaphor because it is legalistic and juridical, while Orthodox concepts of salvation are rooted in love.”

“I didn’t realize there was much difference,” Jo said. “I mean, our priest says we can fulfill our Sunday obligation at an Orthodox church if there is no Roman Catholic church available.”

“There are significant differences in theology, not just practice, and those differences are not limited to rejecting the universal jurisdiction of the Bishop of Rome. But I don’t think you came here for a theology lesson!”

“Well,” Jo smirked, “according to Becka, you made her see God!”

Becka and Sammy both laughed, and I smiled smugly, which was the only possible response to that statement.

“I think that might be a different context than salvation,” I chuckled.

Rachel finished her bottle, and I handed Becka one of the soft cloths which she draped over her shoulder so she could burp Rachel. Once that was done, I took Rachel from Becka, carried her upstairs and settled her in her crib.

“Have a good nap,” I said, then leaned down to kiss her.

I covered her with her special blanket, which would be one of the few things she had from Elizaveta, then went back downstairs to join the girls.

“I have to ask,” Jo said, “why didn’t you ask about our decision?”

I smiled, “Because I assumed you were trying to mess with me, and that the best response was to simply pretend nothing had happened, which, of course, would mess with YOU!”

“Now that’s just low!” Jo exclaimed, but she was laughing.

“Maybe, but I have an example from my medical training that’s instructive. A Resident who made the schedule for one of my rotations was unhappy that the hospital and medical school allowed me to wear my clerical garb. He purposefully scheduled me for shifts that prevented me from going to church and did his best to assign me only scut, which is basically routine tasks which can be done by anyone. Instead of complaining, I simply complied, happily. Guess who was annoyed and upset?”

“That’s supervillain levels of genius!” Jo exclaimed. “How long did that last?”

“A month. He tried to do it again for the next month, but a fellow student had personal reasons for asking me to trade and the department chief approved.”

“I’d call that passive-aggressive,” Sammy said, “but not in a negative way. It’s like the perfect resistance, assuming you can pull it off.”

“I believe in nonviolence,” I replied. “And those principles can be applied to situations where physical force isn’t an option. Why fight, even non-violently, when you can win without fighting? That said, sometimes direct action is necessary, and you have to accept the consequences. Think Doctor Martin Luther King, Junior, and his peaceful protests. He won when the other side escalated, though it cost him time in jail and ultimately cost him his life.”

“What about fighting Hitler?” Jo asked.

“There is no such thing as a ‘Just War’, though there are necessary ones. Rome teaches there are ‘just’ wars and we strongly disagree. The necessary wars are when you are defending yourself against violence and non-violent means are ineffective. It’s sinful, not ‘just’, as it misses the mark of being like Christ. But that doesn’t mean it’s not necessary.”

“What if you were drafted?” Sammy inquired.

“I’d serve. At this point, I’d be a corpsman for sure, and in a little over a year, a doctor, so I’d be a non-combatant. If something prevented me from being a doctor or corpsman, then I’d ask for conscientious objector status and accept a non-combatant role. I’d do my duty, in line with my conscience and the teachings of the Church. But my fervent hope is that the Soviet Union goes out with a whimper, not a bang, as the bang is likely to end civilization, if not all life on earth.”

“Damn, he’s patient!” Jo exclaimed. “And annoying!”

“Thanks!” I replied with a grin.

I couldn’t decide if the answer was ‘yes’ and they were messing with me, or the answer was ‘no’ and they were messing with me. It was also possible that they were unsure, even if it was something they were considering, and were delaying for that reason. I felt the best approach was to be as neutral as possible, even though my inner pig was imagining sex with the short, compact, brunette Sammy and the short, thin, blonde Jo. That said, if it came down to a choice, I’d pick Becka over the other two.

“If you’ll excuse me for about five minutes,” I said. “I need to make a phone call.”

I didn’t, really, but it was a good subterfuge. The girls didn’t object, so I went to the study and shut the door, trying to decide who to call. The answer popped immediately into my head and was as obvious as could be. I dialed the number, and was rewarded when the person I wanted to speak to answered the phone.

“Turner-Cooper residence; Annette speaking.”

“Hi, it’s Mike!”

“I was wondering when you’d call! It’s been months!”