The Numismatist: A Novella

By Elizabeth Genovise

In The Numismatist, a priest recalls a defining childhood summer during which his father's affair shattered his family. Befriended against his will by an elderly numismatist and a lonely neighborhood boy named Percy, the young James is forced to confront the realities of his parents' crumbling marriage, his fragile faith, and his own capacity for darkness. The temptation to project his resentment onto others slowly fades beneath the pressure of the love and inspiration he finds in his two neighbors, putting James on track to someday become a man of God.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Resource Publications
• Release date: May 9, 2023
• ISBN: 9781666773613

Elizabeth Genovise

Elizabeth Genovise grew up in Chicago, Illinois and earned her MFA at McNeese State University in Lake Charles, Louisiana. She is an O. Henry Prize recipient and has published five short story collections via small or university presses, the most recent being Palindrome from the Texas Review Press, and Lighthouse Dreams from Passengers Press. Her first novel, "=Third Class Relics, is due out from Texas Review Press in 2024.

Book preview

The Numismatist

A Novella

Elizabeth Genovise

The Numismatist

A Novella

Copyright ©

2023

Elizabeth Genovise. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical publications or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Write: Permissions, Wipf and Stock Publishers,

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Resource Publications

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paperback isbn: 978-1-6667-7359-0

hardcover isbn: 978-1-6667-7360-6

ebook isbn: 978-1-6667-7361-3

03/27/23

Table of Contents

Title Page

A

woman in my

confession box this past Advent Sunday told me that she was finished with the currency of faith. The precision of her phrasing stopped me a little, so that I sat there squinting for a few seconds before I said, Go on. She shifted position on the other side of the latticework before explaining that over time, you realized this currency had no backing. You spent yourself like a saint, and there were no returns. You began to feel like a fool, like a toddler in a store thinking she could pay for a toy with pebbles or butterfly wings. So you closed accounts, burned your assets, went off the holy grid. If a windfall penny strayed your way, you were happy to let it ricochet into the pockets of some other person, some sucker who still believed like a child. I know what you’ll say, she added, interrupting herself. We have to have faith like children, it’s right there in the Bible. But it’s hard, Father—it’s like being willfully stupid. I don’t even know why I keep coming here. She spoke of her philandering ex-husband, her three sons who never called or wrote, her conniving daughters-in-law, her boss who demeaned her, the fellow nurses at her hospital who gossiped and backstabbed and seemed hellbent on burdening her with responsibilities that weren’t her own. And the patients: selfish, spoiled, adult-sized infants clad in paper gowns who funneled all their rage at her even when it was their own delinquent choices that had landed them in those beds.

Humanity, Father James, she went on, spitting the word like a curse. "Humanity. This is what it looks like. And expecting me to get the shivers, to feel anything, even at Christmas, Christianity’s biggest hit, is like asking me to be excited about a sunrise over a fucking nuclear wasteland. Isn’t it a little beside the point? What can you do with it?" Then, abruptly sapped and ashamed as people often are at the end of such outpourings, she apologized. I prayed with her. I didn’t tell her that, unusual language notwithstanding, I’d heard some version of her speech a thousand times before: half the souls who knelt there, presumably to confess their most private sins, proceeded to denigrate everyone on earth except themselves. I asked her to return and visit with me before the Christmas Eve Mass, though I wasn’t sure yet what I’d to say to her. I’m not one to hand out nubs of Scripture like cough drops. I prefer stories—they were His penchant, too.

m n

Having given two decades to the priesthood, there are dense orchards of memory from which I can pluck an anecdote or parable as nourishment for this woman. But all week I’ve found myself reaching all the way into childhood, to the summer I was ten back home in Manitowoc, Wisconsin—the summer my family split apart like a dud geode, revealing not a glimmering crystal center but a bleak expanse of pallid grey stone.

It was the summer my father confessed to a long-running affair with a twenty-two-year-old he’d met at a church picnic of all places. And it was a season of screaming, of relentless siren-wails: I remember that distant packs of coyotes shrieked together every twilight as if in terror, and that my newborn sister Celia, who had colic (though nobody knew the name for it at the time), gasped and howled from four in the afternoon until midnight, and that my mother’s voice caught and tore on everything as if there were nails sticking out of the walls, furniture, and floors. My parents never fought in front of me, but they no longer spoke to each other save in the wee hours of the morning, when I’d press a water glass to my bedroom wall and stand there listening, feeling my legs going numb and my spine kinking. From my mother there were high-pitched warblings punctuated by short harsh words: whore, joke, liar, baby; from my father, long low murmurs that built into crescendos: ". . . and that just shows how you refuse to understand, . . . and if you’d thought of that ten months ago maybe we wouldn’t be here, . . . and have you ever considered what I need?"

Shorn of context, these words were like stray pieces from board games or jigsaw puzzles, and I found myself commiserating with my mother’s fury at finding such things underfoot in the kitchen or in the yard. Snatching them up, she’d be as disgusted as if a loose checker or errant Monopoly hotel implied that a whole kingdom had been carelessly dismantled. "Without all the pieces, the game is useless, James, she’d say, thrusting the trinket into my hand. Put it back, count them up. If you lost any others, we may as well throw the set out, because you can’t play it again."

Come sunrise my parents would be pale and glassy-eyed, carefully circumnavigating each other and the furniture too as if badly bruised and afraid to come into contact with solid matter. My father would dress for work in his usual buttoned shirt and dark pants, hunching a little as he slunk out. The last time he’d hugged me—what seemed like months ago—he’d done it as though he had a bomb strapped to his chest. Was he afraid of hurting me, or himself? When he began avoiding my eyes completely, I figured either I didn’t exist for him anymore or else he was too ashamed to talk to me. Yet, the one time I