The Priest's Madonna Read Online Free PDF

none. She never debased herself as they did, bringing him cake, uttering low-toned gossip in his presence in order to “apprise him of the goings-on in the parish.” Those women sought Bérenger out to sanctify their days; they baptized themselves in his attention and called their desire devotion. He scolded them only when they became too demanding. He turned Mme Baptiste away from the confessional once, when she’d come too many days in a row. “You’ve nothing to tell me, Germaine,” he said. “Go home.”
    But my mother was not like that. She truly cared for Bérenger. She was sensitive to his moods, joyful in his company. She respected his privacy and never pestered him when he was put out about something. Their friendship was based on mutual regard and affection. One had the sense that, had circumstances been different—had my mother been fifteen years younger, say, and not happily married to my father, and had Bérenger been a draftsman or a builder—they might have courted each other, might even have married. But it was a subtle affection they shared, expressed always in smiles and silent acquiescences. There was no frustrated passion, nothing like the damning blushes and freighted stares I tried so hard to disguise. It was the way my mother was with many men: easy with them, never flirtatious, but always genuine and affable.
    I admired this quality of my mother’s and wished I had been blessed with it. I tried to emulate her but Bérenger flustered me. Whenever he addressed me, I became uncharacteristically tongue-tied and studied my feet. When he was home, I barely spoke. My mother remarked on my silence on more than one occasion: “What’s the matter with you, then?” she’d say. “Did you sell your tongue to the butcher?” But I didn’t want to speak. I wanted only to watch Bérenger’s movements around the house: the cozy way he leaned against the doorjamb to chat with my mother as she cooked, how he knelt with Claude on the dusty floor to help him with his inventions.
    At seventeen, I was too old to fuss over homemade grape pickers made from cast-off wheel spokes and twine, but Bérenger did not let me remain completely aloof. He would draw me out at the dinner table, asking my opinion, calling me his petite érudite, his little scholar. Occasionally he would call me over and read to me from one of his books. “Marinette,” he would say, “Marinette. Come listen.” The Imitation of Christ was a favorite of his at the time, as were the sermons of Père Bourdaloue—reading that proclaimed the vanity of worldly pursuits and the peace obtained from spiritual ones. I would stand at his shoulder or sit on the edge of the nearby chair and watch his face as he read, observing the way he lifted his eyebrows when his glasses slipped down his nose, as if it would help to right them. He read quietly, compelling me to move close. I reveled in the fondness his nicknames implied, but also felt slighted by their diminutive effect. I did not want to be his “little” anything: I wanted to be his obsession, as he was mine.
    What confusion I endured! What a morass of conflicted feeling! I felt drawn to him as strongly as if we were bound by an invisible sash. I wanted always to be near him, to inhale his peppery scent, to watch him as he worked, the way he held his breath when he concentrated and then released it all at once, in a forceful explosion of air. I wanted only to please him. I was prepared do whatever it took to maintain and increase his regard for me, and I expended the full force of my reason and imagination striving to understand how I could best delight him. If I attended Mass regularly, if I listened attentively to his impromptu evening lessons, if I performed my duties as his assistant in catechism class, if I treated my family members with kindness, if, in short, I behaved like a perfectly devout and selfless young woman, expressing none of my own desires and living to fulfill the needs of