Remember Ben Clayton by Stephen Harrigan Page A

in missals—but also because of a guilty reluctance to finally close off the last secret threads of communication between mother and son.
    He should do it today. Give up the box and switch the address. But the line at the counter was gratifyingly long; he would do it next week. Instead he took out his other key and opened the box and gathered up the stray pieces of mail that had accumulated since he last checked it. There was a parish bulletin from St. Joseph’s, the old church on Sixth Avenue where Gil had made his first communion and to which his mother in her later years had increasingly devoted her life. There was also a Catholic newspaper with stories about the latest miraculous cures at Lourdes and the Blessed Mother’s pleas at Fatima for the conversion of Russia. His mother had subscribed to these periodicals in his name. He did not know why they kept coming, five years after her death. Maybe she had bought some sort of extended subscription, so that she could be sure her influence would reach beyond the grave.
    When he got home, Mrs. Gossling was quartering potatoes and dropping them into the soup well of the stove.
    “I’m leaving you three meals,” she said without turning around to greet him. “You do remember I have to go to Castroville to visit my poor brother?”
    “Of course I remember,” Gil said. And he did remember, if vaguely. Mrs. Gossling never stopped talking about her baby brother, a good man but a hopeless drunkard who was always dying but then not dying of various ailments. When she first came to work for them, after Victoria’s death, Gil and Maureen had felt obligated to pause in the kitchen and listen intently to her catalog of grief, but after a month or so they had both come to the conclusion that Mrs. Gossling was more interested in hearing herself talk than in eliciting pity from them.
    “I’ll be off in a half hour then,” she said, sweeping up potato and carrot peels with the heel of her hand. “This will need to simmer until six o’clock or so. I’ve set out the bowls for you to put the leftovers in.”
    “Thank you, Mrs. Gossling,” he said.
    She replied with a curt nod and he went to his studio, thinking of Victoria’s cooking—now mostly lost to them, except for the dishes Maureen had learned at her mother’s side—and of Victoria’s presence in the kitchen, which even in her homesickness and melancholy had been so much more warming and welcoming than Mrs. Gossling’s.
    But he also remembered the times when Victoria had glanced at him as he was entering the house and seen an envelope in his pocket from his secret post office box, an envelope with his mother’s handwriting. On these occasions her welcoming smile would instantly disappear. She would not say anything; the argument between them on this point was ancient and irresolvable. She would just turn back to the stove and tell him in a polite voice when dinner would be ready.
    He went into the studio and got out the key to the always-locked drawer where he stored his mother’s letters. There was no reason to hold onto the parish bulletins and newspapers that kept arriving but he could not make himself throw them out, so he unlocked the drawer and slipped today’s additions under the rubber bands that held the growing stacks of back issues.
    And then there were the rubber-banded collections of his mother’s letters, dozens of them in this drawer, probably a hundred more locked away in a file cabinet. His name was written on the envelopes in his mother’s beautiful hand: Mister Francis Gilheaney, the “Mister,” he knew, less a form of address than a mother’s assertive declaration of her son’s worldly success. The letters were typically long, full of boilerplate exhortations for him to make a good confession, to attend Mass, to offer up a prayer now and then to Saint Jude, along with effusive declarations of love and pride and occasional bafflement. He had carefully answered every one of them, taking