To the aggravation of some of the more aesthetically inclined parishioners, the priest also put up a cheap portable road sign where he maintained the statistics on “Children Murdered since Roe vs. Wade.” Around it on the hillside above the cemetery Susan Hayward had so elegantly landscaped, he stuck white crosses for every million dead babies. In case anyone is imagining the ordered, poetic beauty of the white crosses in the Normandy cemeteries, don’t. It was more like a pincushion. There are some classic pictures of him being hauled off, head and knees still bent in prayer, from an abortion protest by two policemen.

This priest was great. Sometimes he would just suddenly, out of the blue, on a Wednesday morning when everyone was trying to fit church in before work and school, decide to sing High Mass in Latin. I loved High Mass in Latin; it was like he brought back all the power and mystery to a world that otherwise bore very little resemblance to my fantasy books. I think that’s what Monsignor felt, too. Other times, a Mass reading would make him think about sacrifices in the Judeo-Christian tradition, and he’d be off for twenty minutes on how the blood spurted up, his voice moving into a joyful cadence. Second-generation Irish, he sang “Danny Boy” at every single potluck dinner and sang it so well that as a kid I actively looked forward to the moment he wandered into the center of the church hall with a mike. Increasingly fat and rambling as he got older, he was always kind to parish youth and was robbed frequently by the stray criminals he took in off the streets. Whenever I went to Confession, he would recite from the other side of the shadowy screen, “Oh, my Jesus, oh, my Jesus,” as if I was breaking his heart, and then remind me my mother was a saint, an absolute saint. He had started that with my older brothers; it wasn’t anything I did, I swear.

Monsignor died three years before our wedding, and the new priest swept all the animals and white crosses away in a wave of fastidiousness, but I still “saw” them when I stepped out of the car in my lace gown into the suffocating humidity. It was my real (if not legal) wedding day, and this was my history. My first idea, the New Zealand church, would have solved our cross-cultural difficulties by removing us from both cultures to a place where neither of us had anything. Sébastien and his family’s insistence on France for at least one ceremony, though, had somehow made this church my only choice for another ceremony. My home, where I came from, where I still kept expecting Irish wolfhounds to run up and jump all over my dress.