It was a stillness different in kind from the weekday lull of the lonely afternoons. This was a peopled silence, like the self-conscious hush of a crowd in a library.Sunday’s sounds were the sputtering fat of the lamb leg roasting in the oven, the thud of my mother’s knife on the chopping board as she prepared a mountain of vegetables, and the rustle of the thick Sunday papers as my father turned the pages. In the street outside, the neighbors passed by on their way to Mass, their Sunday high heels clip-clipping on the concrete footpath.In our street, only the women went to Mass; the men stayed in bed with the newspapers or sat by the fridge with a beer. Outwardly, my family fitted the mold of the local Catholic community. I went to Mass with my mother and sister while my father stayed at home. But despite the family’s apparent conformity, I knew that there was something wrong with this picture. My father didn’t go to Mass with us because he wasn’t a Catholic, and that set him perilously apart from the other fathers who didn’t go because they couldn’t be bothered.
