Dorothy, January 12, 2008

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St. Stanislaus Parish, $1,820. They always send her a receipt, first thing every January, which is nice, but Dorothy takes out a calculator and adds it up anyway. $35 a week. You wouldn't think it would come to that total, the sevens turning into sixes, but somehow it does. Is it still the right amount? Dorothy reaches across the dining room table, and finds a hand-written sheet on one of the stacks of paper. In 2007, her gross income was about $36,000, what with Social Security, her mutual funds, and the annuitized payment from her husband's life insurance, about a thousand more than the year before, the mutual funds did a little better this last year, so for this year Dorothy will continue to follow Father Wilkes' formula, and start putting checks for $36 in the envelope each week. One dollar more each week, it doesn't really seem to matter, except when you look at yourself in the mirror, that's what Father Wilkes used to say. His formula was simple—however many thousands of dollars you made last year, before taxes, give that many dollars weekly to the parish. He called it "half-tithing." Father Wilkes expected that you would tithe, of course, but he only expected that half of your tithe would go to your church. Dorothy liked that—the acknowledgment that her other giving was, well, valid. It wasn't the only reason Dorothy had stopped attending her suburban parish in the 1980's, and started driving in to St. Stanislaus, in the old Polish neighborhood near downtown, where because of her name, Shepanski, everyone thought she was one of the old-time parishioners coming back, but of course she wasn't, her maiden name was Sullivan, and Walter had come from Pittsburgh, not from any parish around here. No, it wasn't the only reason, but it was part of it. Her old pastor had looked at every other charity in the world as competition, practically enemies. Father Wilkes had been so much more reasonable. Dorothy still liked Father Wilkes, in spite of everything. Centro de Barrio Lange, $125. Dorothy has found the shoebox where she keeps the notes she writes herself about her charitable donations. She takes out a new sheet of paper and begins to add them up. Friends of the Parks, $100. It still upsets Dorothy that the county won't keep up the parks the way they used to, it offends her to be asked for money to support something that tax dollars ought to take care of, but Dorothy gives anyway, the parks are too important. Northern Day School, $100. Samantha's school, too rich for Dorothy's blood, but she feels obligated to contribute something, a school like that, she wonders if they get annoyed at $100 checks, the way waitresses get annoyed if you leave pennies on the table. Public Radio, $100. The young man on the phone allowed as how the station would take any amount, but he kept talking about their minimum suggested donation of $75. Then as soon as Dorothy agreed to the $75, the slippery young fellow tried to talk her into upgrading to the $150 level, saying how at that level she would get a discount card that she could apply to various cultural events around town. Dorothy let him read her the list, but the only one Dorothy would be interested in was the Repertory Theatre, and she and Louise already had season tickets to that. So after half an hour of discussion with the young man, Dorothy proposed a compromise—instead of $75, she would give $100, sort of a $25 tip, and they could keep the discount card for someone who wanted to go to the symphony, and the nice young man eventually agreed that was good solution. Public Television, $160. Dorothy shakes her head as she reads the note, how ridiculous these so-called "gifts" are! For her donation, she received a set of four "Comfort Food" cookbooks as a thank you, and a note telling her she must reduce her IRS deduction by $40 for "fair market value." Well, she thinks, the IRS can figure it any way they want, for her own personal purposes the donation was $160, those cookbooks weren't worth a damn anyway. Catholic Relief Services, $75, Doctors without Borders, $50, American Friends Service Committee, $50. She doesn't know which one does the most good, so she spreads it around, her little bit. Save the Children, $336. $28 a month for the child in Sierra Leone. Her friend Louise sponsors a child too, and Louise puts the photos and letters and drawings from the child on the refrigerator. Dorothy can't do that—the shame of having so much more overwhelms her. She reads the letters, looks at the pictures, then puts them in a drawer. Tangled Bank Nature Center, $250. Louise had suggested the two of them make their gifts in memory of Professor Jorgensen, but Dorothy had quietly refused. St. Stanislaus Stained Glass Restoration Fund, $75. It had broken Father Wilkes's heart to have to cover those gorgeous windows with Plexiglas. Dorothy didn't care much for the new pastor, Fr. Knoll, but this was one project where she had to support him. American Heart Association, $300. Walter died in 1968 at the age of 47. She was 42. Gary was only 12. In the late 1980s, she had opened a mailing from the American Heart Association, asking her to make a donation in the memory of her late husband. She threw the mailer away, offended. How did they know he had died of a heart attack? And how did they track her down, twenty years after the event? But the next year, the mailer came again, and this time she put it on the table. Maybe she should call them, and complain. The next day, when she was volunteering in the rectory office, she took a coffee break with Father Wilkes. She told him about the mailer, how offended and angry it made her. She had never considered that her husband had died of a disease, simply that he had died and left her, that's the way it was. At the end of the coffee break, Father Wilkes gave her absolution. Father, she told him, I wasn't going to confession. Yes you were, he said. He suggested she join a widows group. She resisted. It was so long ago, she told him, I've been widow for twenty years. He kept urging her. She finally joined. She didn't like most of the ladies, especially the ones who made whatever disease their husbands had died from into a cause. Death was just death, she thought to herself, not a personal insult. Eventually she spoke up and said so to the group. The other women didn't know what to say. But they weren't all bad, the widows. There were some women she didn't mind listening to, the ones who were having troubles with their kids now that the fathers were gone. She tried to tell them what Gary had been like in high school, how he had always been in trouble with school, but never in trouble with her, not really. Maybe some of the women understood. There was one other "veteran" in the group, a woman, like her, who had been widowed a long time. That was Louise, the beginning of a friendship. Anyway Dorothy had kept going to the group for several months, until they changed the time and it didn't fit into her schedule anymore. And the next year, when the begging letter from the American Heart Association came, Dorothy made a memorial in her husband's name. And every year since.