Part 1
The water in the baptismal font at St. Brendan’s in Greyhaven, Iowa, is always colder than you expect. I have stood beside it for forty-one years, and I still flinch when the deacon dips his hand in, the way a child does on the first day of swimming. I have never told anyone that. It seemed like the kind of thing a godfather should keep to himself.
It is a Tuesday morning in October, a little before seven, and the church is nearly empty. Four women in the third pew are saying the rosary in low voices. An old farmer I know by sight sits in the back row with his cap on his knee. The sun comes through the stained-glass window above the altar and lays a blue square across the marble floor.
I have come early, as I always do. I sit in the second pew from the front, on the left side, where I can see the font clearly. I have a small leather case in my lap, and inside it is a rosary, the one I bought for my own nephew’s first communion in 1991. The beads are worn smooth at the crucifix, because I have been carrying it in my coat pocket for thirty-five years.
Last month, at his first Mass, Father Luke Vogt stood at this same altar and looked down at the congregation, and his eyes found me in the second pew, and he smiled.
He is my godson. He was baptized at this font in April 1997, a red-faced infant in a christening gown his grandmother sewed by hand. I held him while Father Hanley poured the water. I said I do when the priest asked if I would help the child grow in faith. I was not, at that moment, a baptized Catholic, and I had not been one for fourteen years.
I have not told him that, either.
He will be at the font this morning, at nine, to bless the new baby of a family from the east side of town. I did not ask him to. He asked me to be there, in a text message sent last week that I have read so many times the words have started to blur. Uncle Frank, I want you standing next to me when I do the first one. Then we’ll talk.
I have been waiting for that then for a month.
The farmer in the back row coughs. One of the rosary women laughs softly at something the other has said. The light moves across the floor, slowly, toward my shoes.
I put the leather case on the pew beside me and fold my hands on my knees, and I look at the water in the font, which I have always known would be cold.
Part 2
My mother was dying in the spring of 1983, in the front bedroom of the house on Parkview Street, with the blinds half drawn against the sun and a hospice nurse named Bernice coming by at ten and four. She had breast cancer that had moved into her bones. She had been a seamstress at the Ludington mill for thirty years. She had sewn every christening gown in the Greyhaven parish for three decades. In 1960 she had sewn one for me, out of white cotton she bought on sale, for a baptism that was booked and then never held, because my father left for Duluth that spring and never came back.
I was twenty-three that year, a junior clerk at the county courthouse, and I had not set foot in a church since I was a boy in Sunday school, when my mother was too tired to drive us and nobody else thought to ask.
My sister Carla had her first baby on a Monday in April. It was a boy. She named him Michael, after our father, and she called me from the hospital that afternoon, crying and laughing at the same time.
“Frank, you’re the godfather,” she said. “I already put you down. The Church won’t take anybody else. Mom wants you.”
“I’m not a Catholic anymore, Carla.”
“You’re the Catholic,” she said. “You’re the one who knows the prayers. Mom says so.”
I did not know the prayers. I knew the first line of the Our Father and the sound of the Hail Mary when my mother said it under her breath over the sink. That was all.
But she was my mother, and she was dying, and on the Wednesday before Easter she took my hand in hers, a hand so thin I could feel every bone in it, and she looked up at me from the pillow and said, very clearly, “Please, Francis. Stand up for him. Stand up for Carla’s boy.”
So I said yes.
The christening was set for Friday, at ten in the morning, at St. Brendan’s. The parish needed the godfather’s name and the baptismal certificate to be filed in the register beforehand, and the deacon, Ed Maloney, came by the house on Thursday evening in a navy suit and a cardigan, to check the paperwork.
He sat in my mother’s living room with a folder on his knee and a cup of coffee going cold on the end table beside him. He was about thirty-eight then, broad-shouldered, a former railroad man with a soft voice and eyes that did not blink very much.
He asked me my full name, my date of birth, my parish. I gave him the answers without thinking.
Then he looked up from the folder, not unkindly, and said, “Frank, I need to ask you one question before we go any further. Are you baptized, son?”
The room went very quiet. In the kitchen, my mother’s radio was playing a Brewers game, faintly, the crowd noise rising and falling like surf.
I could have said no. I could have told him the truth, or some part of it. I could have said that I had never been christened at all, and that the gown in my mother’s cedar chest had never once been worn, and that I did not know whether a man could be made a Catholic by the lie of standing up at someone else’s font.
But my mother was dying in the next room, and her hand had been in mine that morning, and she had said please.
“Yes,” I said. “I’m baptized, Deacon.”
Ed Maloney looked at me for a long moment. Then he nodded, slowly, and wrote something in the folder, and closed it.
“Good,” he said. “Then I’ll see you Friday.”
He stood up and took his coffee cup to the kitchen sink. At the door he paused, with one hand on the frame, and I thought he was going to say something else.
He did not. He only said, “Give your mother my love,” and went out into the April dusk.
I did not sleep that night. I sat in the chair beside my mother’s bed until four in the morning, holding her hand, listening to her breathing slow. Once she opened her eyes and looked at me and whispered, “Good boy,” and then she was asleep again.
She died the following Tuesday. The christening had been held on Friday. I stood at the font in a borrowed suit, holding my nephew against my chest, and when Father Hanley asked me if I renounced Satan and all his works, I said, “I do,” and the water came down over the baby’s forehead, cold as a river in March.
No one else in that church knew I was lying. Carla did not know. Father Hanley did not know. Ed Maloney, standing at the back in his navy suit, did not say a word.
That was the first lie. I was twenty-three years old, and I told myself it was only for one afternoon.
Part 3
I told myself a great many things in the years that followed.
I told myself that the Church did not need a second baptism to make a godfather. I told myself that Carla would never ask, and that Michael would grow up with his own faith and would not care who had held him at the font. I told myself that I would go back to the classes at the parish hall some Wednesday, and learn the catechism properly, and then, when I knew enough, I would walk up to Father Hanley and say the truth, and he would forgive me, and everything would be all right.
I did not go back to the classes.
What I did instead was buy a copy of the Baltimore Catechism at the used bookstore on Main Street, and read it every night after work, at the kitchen table, under the light of a single lamp. I learned the questions. I learned the answers. I learned the difference between sacraments that could be repeated and sacraments that could not, and I learned, with a sick feeling in my stomach, that baptism was one of the ones that marked the soul forever.
It was not the marking I minded. It was the silence that the book demanded, once you were inside it.
Over the next fourteen years, I stood godfather to seven more children from families I had known since I was small. I held each of them at the font. I said I do at every christening, and each time the words came out a little steadier and a little more false. I gave each of them a rosary at their first communion, carefully chosen, carefully wrapped, with a card in my own handwriting tucked inside the box. Pray for me. You’ll understand one day.
None of them ever did.
The christening of Luke Vogt was the ninth, in April 1997, and it was the one I would think about longest. He was the youngest of Carla’s children by then. Carla and her husband, Dale, had been trying for a daughter for years and got a third son instead, and they named him after the evangelist who was, the book said, a physician and a traveling companion of Paul.
I stood at the font with my nephew in my arms, a small warm weight in a christening gown that my mother had sewn in 1959 for Carla’s own baptism and that Carla had let out with a seam ripper and a prayer. The water was cold. The priest asked me to renounce Satan. The baby cried.
“I do,” I said, and I looked down at the child’s face, and for a moment I was certain the water would not take. That it would run off his head and onto the marble, and that the whole church would see it, and that God would look down at me and say, Not you.
It did not run off.
Joan found the old Baltimore Catechism in the spring of 2001, when we were packing up the house on Maple Street for the divorce. She was holding it in her hands, very still, reading the margins, which were full of my pencil notes.
“You were studying,” she said.
“I was.”
“For what?”
I did not answer her.
“Frank,” she said, and her voice was quiet and sad. “I was married to you for fifteen years, and you never once asked me to pray with you. You never once asked me to go to Mass. And now I find out you’ve been reading the catechism at the kitchen table at two in the morning, the way someone does when they’re trying to get back into a room they locked themselves out of.” She set the book down. “What’s the room, Frank?”
I could not tell her. I was afraid that if I said it aloud, I would never be able to stop saying it.
Joan went to Des Moines that summer, and I did not follow her, and by the time the papers were signed, I was living alone in a two-bedroom apartment above the hardware store, with a stack of rosaries in a box under my bed and a secret I had kept so long it had grown a shape of its own.
Part 4
Luke Vogt was ordained a priest of the Diocese of Des Moines on the first Saturday in September, in the cathedral, by a bishop whose hands shook a little as he laid them on the young man’s head. I sat in the fourth pew from the front with Carla and her husband. Carla cried through the whole Mass. I did not cry at all.
I had written to him that July.
It was a long letter, four pages, handwritten, because I did not trust myself to type it. I told him everything. The deacon’s question in my mother’s living room. The lie. The christening in 1983. The water that never ran off his own head in 1997, when I was certain it would. The seven other children, the nine rosaries, the card tucked into each box.
I did not ask him to forgive me. I asked him for something else, which I had been carrying for forty-one years, and which had no right to be asked of anyone.
Luke, I want to be baptized. I’ve earned the right to ask for it, and I’m asking you to be the one who pours the water.
I did not hear back for six weeks. Then, on the Monday after the ordination, a single line arrived in a plain envelope, in the same careful hand he had used on the back of every birthday card I’d ever given him.
Uncle Frank. I’ll do it. But I’m going to do it in front of everyone, and you’re going to let me say why.
His first Mass as a priest was celebrated in St. Brendan’s, on a bright Sunday morning at the end of September, with the whole parish in attendance and the church so full that people stood along the side aisles and in the vestibule. The women of the rosary group sat in the front. Carla sat in the second row with her arm around Dale’s shoulders. The farmer in the back row had put on a clean white shirt and a tie that was far too wide for him.
I sat in the second pew from the front, on the left, where I could see the font.
Luke did not preach a long homily. He stood at the lectern in his white vestments, his face still young under the lights, and he looked out over the faces of the people who had baptized him and confirmed him and taught him his first prayers.
“I was baptized at this font,” he said. “My godfather held me while the water poured. He told me, later, that he wasn’t sure he believed in what he was saying. That he’d been carrying a question for a long time, and he didn’t know how to set it down.”
The congregation was very quiet.
“A priest is supposed to be the one who answers the questions,” Luke went on. “But I’ve learned, in the last seven years, that the people who carry the hardest questions are often the ones who are still waiting for someone to ask them the right one.”
He looked directly at me.
“So here is my first act as a priest,” said Father Luke Vogt. “My first assignment. I’m giving it to my godfather, Frank Dunning, who has been standing at this font for forty-one years, and who has never once been able to kneel in it.”
I did not move.
“Uncle Frank,” Luke said quietly. “Come up. I’m going to baptize you.”
The church was silent for a long moment. Then someone in the back row said, very softly, “Oh, my God,” and someone else laughed, and the sound went through the pews like wind through wheat.
I stood up. My legs were shaking. I walked down the center aisle, past the rosary women, past Carla with her hand over her mouth, past the farmer in the back who had taken off his cap and was staring at me as if I had risen from the dead.
At the foot of the altar, a figure in a navy suit stood up from the third pew.
It was Ed Maloney. He was eighty-one now, stooped and silver-haired, leaning on a cane. He had not spoken to me in twenty years. But he looked at me now with those steady, unblinking eyes, and he said, in the soft railroad voice I had not forgotten:
“I knew, Frank. I knew in 1983. You never once looked at the font when you said I do.”
The last piece of the thing I had carried since I was twenty-three fell away from me, like a coat I had been wearing so long I forgot its weight.
“Why didn’t you say anything?” I whispered.
“Because your mother asked me to let you have the chance,” said Ed Maloney. “And because I wanted to see if you’d ever come back on your own.”
Part 5
The baptism took place the following Saturday, at ten in the morning, in a church so full that the vestibule doors had been propped open to the sidewalk. The day was clear and cold. A hard frost had come overnight, and it lay in thin white ridges along the windowsills and the steps.
I wore a plain dark suit. I had bought it at the Penney’s in Des Moines, the day after my divorce was final, and I had never once worn it to Mass. Carla had pressed the shirt the night before, and she had come to the apartment above the hardware store at seven with two cups of coffee and a box of cinnamon rolls and had not said a word about any of it.
Luke stood at the font in his white vestments. The water in the basin was cold. I could see my own reflection in it, faintly, the way I had seen it every time I had stood beside it since 1983, and it had always seemed to me the face of someone who was not quite there.
Ed Maloney stood beside him, a deacon in his own right, holding the book.
“Frank Dunning,” Luke said. “What do you ask of the Church?”
“Baptism,” I said. My voice was steady.
“Are you prepared to take up the life of faith, and to walk it, and to keep the faith you are about to receive?”
I had rehearsed the answer a hundred times in the dark. I had written it on index cards, which I carried in my jacket pocket, and which I did not need to read.
“Yes,” I said. “I am.”
Ed Maloney opened the book.
“Are you baptized, son?” he asked. His voice was gentle, and it carried to the back of the church.
I looked at him, and I looked at the water, and I looked out at the faces of the people who had stood beside me at a hundred christenings, who had watched me hold their children, who had never once asked me the question because they had assumed the answer.
“No, Deacon,” I said. “I’m not.”
A ripple went through the crowd. Somebody gasped. Carla, in the second row, put both hands over her face.
“Then let’s fix that,” said Ed Maloney quietly.
Luke dipped his hand into the font. The water was cold. He lifted it, and the drops ran down his fingers and fell back into the basin with small, clear sounds, like rain on a tin roof.
“Frank Dunning,” said Father Luke Vogt, “I baptize you in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.”
He poured the water over my forehead.
It was colder than I had ever imagined, a shock of cold that went straight through my scalp and down my spine and into my chest, so sharp that I gasped aloud. And then, very slowly, the cold became something else. It became the same water that had been poured over a red-faced infant in 1997, and over a boy who had been carried to the font in a christening gown his grandmother had sewn in 1959.
It was the same water. It had always been the same water.
It did not run off.
Luke placed a hand on my head and said the words of the blessing. Then he reached into his vestments and took out a small wooden box, and inside it, on a bed of faded blue velvet, a rosary. It was the one I had bought in 1991 for Carla’s oldest son, and had given away at his first communion, and had taken back from his dresser drawer two summers later, when he had said he didn’t want it.
“You kept it,” Luke said softly.
“I kept all of them,” I said. My voice cracked. “I just couldn’t give them the reason.”
He smiled and closed the box and pressed it into my hands.
“You’ll give it to someone else now,” he said. “And you’ll tell them why.”
I walked back down the center aisle with the water still running down my face, and the box in my hands, past the rosary women and the farmer in the back row, past Carla and Dale, past Ed Maloney, who was standing at the end of the third pew, with his cane in one hand and his eyes wet and bright.
He nodded once, very slightly, as I passed.
I sat in the second pew, on the left side, where I could see the font. The light from the window lay across the floor in a long, clear square. The water in the basin still shimmered, very faintly, from where Luke had dipped his hand.
I looked down at the rosary in my palm, its beads worn smooth from thirty-five years in my coat pocket.
Then I looked at the water again, and I saw my own reflection there, clearly for the first time since I was twenty-three, and the face looking back was the face of a man who had finally been allowed to be cold.
