I don't think nuns counted in that bounty-hunt and they didn't take young ladies in the priesthood. If they had, I think she would've thought nothing of wrapping me up and sending me along, "see what you can do with this one. Not much to look at maybe, but good with pots and pans, and she knows how to do a wash. Send her back if it looks like she isn't going to work out for you." But the choice wasn't available.
"So you could see what she was thinking, the minute he was born and we knew he was a boy. She thought maybe Ambrose might become a priest, if she took a hand in it as she generally did everything that happened within a mile or two of her, and played her cards right, of course.
Wasn't his namesake a famous bishop? And a saint? The bishop who baptized Saint Augustine, by God? Well, didn't that tell you something? Meaning that if the vocation didn't come naturally to our little boy, if the Holy Ghost didn't give him a good bat on the head and tell him what he ought to do, well then, she might get involved herself in working out the matter. Since she was pretty sure she knew what would've been God's will, if He'd only just spent the time and taken the proper interest in it. If you know what I mean. Bashfulness was not a thing that troubled her.
"So for a while then, after Pat and I were first married and Amby'd come into the world after only the bare decent interval, there, I'm sure she had her eye on him. Not that I'd want you to think, for even one moment, that my dear mother Rose actually had a thing to be concerned about where getting into heaven was concerned. Far from it butter wouldn't've melted in her mouth, not in that one's. No, it was just that she was always one to believe that where salvation was concerned, you couldn't be too careful. If now a grandson was the closest she could come to meeting the requirements, well, that was the best she could do. Couldn't ask for more than that. At least 'til I told her I didn't think grandsons counted, met the tariff for admission to Jerusalem, the holy city, the same way that sons do. And so that more or less cut down her zeal.
"It really was all for the best. If Ambrose'd gone into the church, you know, none of you here in this room or even at this table would've ever heard of him at all. He'd most likely be the curate in a small parish 'way up in the State of Maine someplace, up there on the forty-fifth parallel, on the Canadian border. And he'd be perfectly happy, you know? Completely at peace with the world. My boy's a humble man."
"At least she didn't say the celibacy stuff would've been no trouble for you," Mary Pat Sweeney had said to him that night in the apartment he'd been renting then in Hampton Pond. "If she had then I'd've known for sure I'd come to the wrong funeral after all." Mary Pat had kept about a hundred-fifteen pounds in what seemed like constant merry motion back in those days, and not just in her office down in Springfield at Massachusetts Mutual, or at the evening and weekend county Democratic meetings, either.
Mary Pat was well-known far and wide "Oh sure, both ways, north and south, up and down the river," as she used to say herself, 'good-time Mary Pat' for being the one person that you had to sign up before you could be really sure that what you had in mind to do would be a success. Merrion admitted cheerfully that her reddish hair and greenish eyes were the sights he first looked for when he walked into a room, 'just like everybody else does. Everybody else."
She believed in realism, just as he and Dan did. While Sunny was around but stationed far away from home, he 'always seemed to get along real good with Mary Pat," as Polly said from time to time, with some insistent wistfulness, the closest that she ever came to declaring her preference for Mary Pat among his girlfriends that she'd met. That was fully close enough for him to implying her somewhat-less-than-full approval of then-Lieutenant later Captain Geraldine Keller, USAF. Mary Pat in those days without discussion understood and apparently accepted the fact that she was his second-best girl and probably always would be no more than that. She appeared to believe that the reason was timing: he'd met Sunny first, at UMass." and because he was a loyal man, Sunny would remain first as long as they lived. Many times without wishing Sunny any ill Mary Pat therefore sincerely and coolly wished her dead.
She excused such thoughts to the accuser in her mind with the mitigation that she never actually prayed for Keller's death. That would have been deliberate; she wasn't willing anything; she simply couldn't help thinking that it would have been much more convenient for her and better for Ambrose as well, if Sunny were to die young without any pain at all, peacefully, in her sleep.
