Lockwood - Priestdaddy: a memoir

B efore they allowed your father to be a priest, my mother tells me, they made me take the Psychopath Test. You know, a priest cant have a psychopath wife, it would bring disgrace.

She sets a brimming teacup in front of me and yells, HOT! She sets a second one in front of my husband, Jason, and yells, Dont touch it! She situates herself in the chair at the head of the table and gazes at the two of us with total maternal happiness, ready to tell the story of the time someone dared to question her mental health.

We are congregating in the dining room of my fathers rectory in Kansas City, where I have returned to live with my parents after twelve long years away. Jason presses his shoulder against mine for reassurance and tries to avoid making eye contact with the graphic crucifix on the opposite wall, whose nouns are like a poems nouns: blood, bone, skin. We are penniless and we are exhausted, and in the grand human tradition, we have thrown ourselves on the mercy of the church, which exists for me on this earth in an unusually patriarchal form. It walks, it cusses, it calls me Bit. It is currently shredding its guitar upstairs, across the hallway from the room where we will be staying for the foreseeable future. Through the east window I can see the same dark geometry of buildings that surrounded me all throughout my childhood: closed school, locked gymnasium, the squares and spires of a place of worship plummeting up into the night.

Well. You wouldnt want... to bring disgrace... to the Catholic Church, Jason says, with a diplomacy that is almost beautiful, making a great show of blowing on his murderously hot tea.

No, you wouldnt, my mother agrees. They came to the house, because where people are a psychopath the most is in their own homes. And they tried to trap me. They brought all these questions.

They said, Oh, did you ever feel bad when you killed someone? Which drug tastes the best to you? When your dog talks, what does he say? How many times have you been suicidal? They didnt believe me that Id never been suicidal. Why would I be suicidal. Im in love with life.

She bangs down her rosebud-patterned cup with unexpected force, seized with the sudden urge to backflip through time and attempt a citizens arrest. They were using so many double negatives that finally I just lost it. You can come back here and give me that test when the questions are in English! I said, and I chased them away.

I dont understand how you passed, I say. From what youre telling me, it sounds like you should have gotten a pretty bad grade. It sounds like you should have gotten the worst grade, actually.

I passed it by being smarter than the test itself, she says, lifting an aha! finger and touching the tip of my nose with it. Same way I got the highest-ever score in the history of the SAT.

I didnt know you even took the SAT.

The Sears Aptitude Test, she clarifies in ringing tones. They had never seen anything like it.

Why would you hang that on your wall, Jason breathes, staring past us at the bloody spectacle of the crucifix, held spellbound by its gore. Why would you hang that in the room where you eat. It looks like someone screamed into a ribeye.

They also tested you, my mother continues, to see if you were a psychopath. But you were young enough that nothing showed up, thank God.

Your dad gets an F, Jason says, looking up the questions on his phone and motioning us to be quiet. Listen.

I was a problem child.

True

False

I am neither shy nor self-conscious; I speak with authority.

True

False

I am not or would not be proud of getting away with crimes.

True

False

I can hear my fathers objections now: who wouldnt be proud of getting away with crimes? Who wasnt a problem child? When your dog talks, doesnt he tell you that youre a champion? Mom cant remember if he took it at all, but if he did, Jesus must have appeared at the last minute and filled out the answers for him, because he was allowed to walk through the doors of the priesthood freely, as upright as sanity itself, while his sane wife and sane children watched sanely from the pews.

Jason continues to scroll through the test, growing more and more horrified as he goes. When he reads, I often get others to pay for things for me, true or false, he clutches at his heart. Were psychopaths, he says mournfully. Were being psychopaths right now, in your dads holy rectory.

I told you it happens at home, says my mother.

W E TAKE OUR TEACUPS into the living room and curl up on the couch together looking at family pictures. There are hundreds and hundreds of them, almost none of them fine except the sunsets over flat scalloping water and beaches of crushed mussel shells. There is my mother in a Playboy Bunny T-shirt my father gave her for her twenty-second birthdaythat was before he found God. My mother in a library, with long carved carnelian hair, smiling in front of shelves of red-and-gold encyclopedias. There is my father on a five-week biblical archaeological dig, wearing white short shorts and his whole body the color of wet sand, searching for the door of the First Temple. There he is standing on the spot where the herd of demon swine were driven squealing into the Sea of Galilee.

Should we see if Dad wants to come down? I ask, but hes never found the family saga as compelling as the rest of us do. Once, when we were going through the slides from that aforementioned dig with him, he was somehow able to tell us his exact geographical coordinates in the Holy Land and every detail of every last stone in the excavation sites, but when the first baby picture popped up, he didnt know which of his five children it was.

There I am, sluglike and drooling, unwilling to close my mouth until my first words arrived to me. You were the kind of baby I could set down on a blanket and then come back three hours later and you hadnt moved, my mother tells me approvingly. Thats how I knew you were a thinker. There I am, held in a pair of black-sleeved arms, a white rectangular collar floating over my head, not like a halo at all, but like the first page of an open notebook.