She felt like one of those women you read about who’d been sexually abused by their fathers when they were children and then repressed the memory till they were middle-aged, when suddenly it all came spilling back. Or like the people who’d had previous lives in another century. If she closed her eyes and just listened to his voice, it was easier to connect to the feeling. There was a purr to the voice, and a certain rhythm to the words, and a way of falling silent after he’d said anything that might make you feel guilty, as though giving you time to fill in the blank with your own name.
And then he said something that was the key to the whole thing. He’d finished up with abortion and gotten back to Father’s Day and the holy sacrament of matrimony, and he said, “There is something holy in the love between a man and a woman, which is only surpassed by the love between man and God.” And it was as though he were in the bed beside her, saying the same thing, looking all dreamy-eyed and smelling of sweat and hair tonic.
She opened her eyes and, yes, she could see that the man up there was Willy Cogling, almost half a century older, and his hair gone white, just like hers, and the wrinkles in his face revealing how mean he really was, the way wrinkles can do. But otherwise he was not that much different.
She laughed aloud, one brief bark of recognition, and turned to Peter and whispered, “That man up there is your father.”
“Mother,” Peter said, with a shocked look. But she could see that he’d taken in her meaning and was already processing it through the computer in his head. He was good at making calculations. They had that in common.
Willy Cogling was glaring at her again, but not with a look that suggested he’d heard more than her laugh. He knew who she was all right! And he couldn’t have felt that comfortable delivering his sermon on the sanctity of fatherhood with the two of them sitting down there in front of him. So even if he hadn’t heard what she’d whispered to Peter, he could imagine what it might be.
He smiled, and nodded, and continued: “Marriage isn’t all a bed of roses, of course. There are times when it may not seem the least bit holy, and we may want to laugh at the idea. I don’t suppose Saint Joseph was that happy to be woken up in the middle of the night and told he had to go to Egypt that very moment. He might have said to that angel, ‘You’ve got to be kidding.’ But God’s angels aren’t kidding when they tell us what we have to do. And neither is Holy Mother Church.”
Birth control will be next, Margaret thought, and sure enough, that was the sermon’s next theme. There had been a period, after the war, when the suburbs were going up and people were having babies like rabbits, when that’s all you heard about when you went to church. The great evil of birth control was right up there with the Communist menace. And when you went to confession, you got the third degree. That was how they’d met, she and Willy. It all came spilling back as though it were yesterday. In fact, much more vividly than yesterday, which was already part of the blur of last week.
It had been an old-fashioned kind of confessional, a big, dark mahogany number that looked like sin. Inside it, he had kept cross-examining her about her sex life with Paul until she’d finally confessed to him what she’d never told anyone else, the fact more shameful than any sin she could have come up with, the fact that she lived in a sexless marriage. How sympathetic young Father Cogling had been, how curious, how encouraging. He’d said there could be no annulment, since the marriage had been consummated. He’d advised prayer and patience. He’d said he would like to meet Paul, so he might understand the situation better, and in a few months he and Paul had become good friends while he and Margaret became lovers.
Lovers? Maybe that was overstating it. She’d never loved him in the romantic way that the woman in The Thorn Birds had loved Richard Chamberlain. Her biggest satisfaction in having the affair had been revenging herself on Paul, and having the twins was the sweetest part of the revenge. And it had been Willy—with all his talk about abortion being the new massacre of the innocents—who’d tried to convince her to get an abortion before Paul found out she was pregnant. Paul never did find out about Willy, since she’d been able to diddle him into thinking he’d actually performed his conjugal duties one night when he’d got dead drunk. Paul was so gratefully deceived. The twins would be a living proof of his conjugal adequacy.
With Willy it was another matter. Once she was visibly and officially pregnant, that was the end of the romance. Willy was transferred to another parish (probably at his own request) and gradually faded from her life, and she’d been just as glad. If truth be told, she hadn’t had much talent for adultery. Once the sex had progressed beyond the point of kisses and caresses, once it got to the parts you never saw in movies (at least in the movies of those days), Margaret could live without it. And so she had, for the next almost fifty years.
Willy wound up his sermon at last, by reading a cartoon from this morning’s paper, the moral of which was “Like father, like son.” Then, having sermonized for such a long time, he handled the rest of the Mass expeditiously. Margaret, though in no way arthritic, insisted on the prerogative of old age and stayed seated while all the genuflecting and kneeling went on. So, to her annoyance, did Peter. It was his way of announcing he was not a believer, which was fine for him, but it did suggest that Margaret’s unbending knees might have the same explanation. Was she a believer? Possibly not. The older she got, the less she was concerned with the Church’s official teachings. It was not so much disbelief as a feeling that she was entitled, at her age, not to have to pay taxes—even, if it came to that, lip service.
But when it came time for Communion, she had no compunction about joining the line, which, at St. Bernardine’s, was not very long. Nor did she lower her eyes when it came her turn and Willy stood in front of her, chalice in hand, to place the host on her tongue. She stuck out her tongue and stared him straight in the eyes, and he was the one to blink. Lowering his eyes and reciting the words, so much less magical in English than in Latin, he placed the tasteless wafer on her tongue.
For the very briefest of moments she was tempted to spit it out. But surely no one in the entire history of the Church had ever done such a thing, and Margaret was not about to be the first. On the other hand, she didn’t want to swallow it. So, when she was back in the pew, seated beside Peter, she discreetly removed the half-dissolved wafer from her tongue with a Kleenex she took from her purse, then wadded up the Kleenex and put it back in her purse. She was certain that God, if He concerned Himself in such matters at all, would understand.
At last, the Mass was over, and everyone was supposed to give a formal hug to the person next to them—an observance that Peter neatly finessed by an elaborate charade of helping Margaret get to her feet.
The best was yet to come. Willy had stationed himself at the side exit in order to shake the parishioners’ hands as they left the church. There was a double flow at the door, a fast and a slow lane, just like on the thruway, and Peter tried to steer his mother into the fast lane, but Margaret insisted, with a decisive shake of her head, that they would be among the hand-shakers.
When it came their turn, Willy didn’t miss a beat. “Mrs. Bryce, how nice to see you. And your son. Peter, isn’t it? Father Pat will be so sorry to hear that he’s missed you. He’s on retreat.”
“You needn’t apologize, Willy,” Margaret said, matching his tone of formal courtesy. “It was a greater treat seeing you. I didn’t know you were still alive.”
When Willy didn’t have a quick response to that, Peter stepped in, with blundering courtesy: “Mother’s memory can be erratic.”
“That’s just the way it is,” Margaret agreed briskly. “Sometimes I don’t know my own name. Other times it all comes back. And this morning, Willy, you made it all come back.”
“I’m glad to hear that, Mrs. Bryce. And so, I’m sure, will Father Pat be when he returns. Unfortunately, where he is there are no telephones. That is one of the luxuries of a retreat, though some think of it as a penance. I assume you came here expecting hi
m to be saying Mass?”
“Yes, Father Cogling,” Peter said. “Then we thought we’d take him out to visit our father’s grave. If he could spare the time.”
“Father’s Day,” Father Cogling said, nodding genially. “What a thoughtful idea. Father Pat will be doubly disappointed.”
“Perhaps you would like to come with us, Willy,” Margaret suggested. “There’s room in the car.”
“I wish I could. Paul was a dear friend, and a good Catholic of a kind that’s become all too rare.” (This, with a glance toward Peter.) “But”—he lifted his shoulders—“with Father Pat away, my time is not my own.”
“We understand, of course,” said Peter, laying his hand on his mother’s shoulder and shoving her forward, gently.
Father Cogling nodded, and turned to the next parishioner in line behind them. “Gerhardt,” he said. “You read the Gospel today with great feeling.”
Margaret turned around just in time to see Willy exchange a meaningful look with the man, Gerhardt Ober, who would, only two hours later, murder her.
“Thank you, Father,” said Gerhardt.
“Come along, Mother,” said Peter.
“Good-bye, Mrs. Bryce,” said Willy.
25
A bell was ringing, repeatedly, in the darkness. Silvanus, waking by degrees, thought at first that he had fallen asleep during a vigil before the Holy Sacrament. He made his hand into a fist and struck his heart, praying Domine, non sum dignus! O Lord, I am not worthy! Just how true that was became evident as the bell’s ringing continued and he remembered where he was—in Delilah’s little house in the village of Low Rates Trailer Court, lying beside her corpse. Where he’d struck himself the inflamed flesh reminded him, with a flash of pain, that it was not for one who bore Satan’s mark to call upon the Lord, even to proclaim his unworthiness. That had been established beyond all doubt.
A man rattled the door of the little house and shouted, “Damon, I know you’re in there. I heard you. Stop fucking around and let me in.”
He went to the door and unbolted it, expecting to be greeted by the man who called himself Wolf. But this was someone else, younger, in a flimsy white doublet that revealed the heraldic emblems on his upper arms. “I figured I’d find you here,” he said, pushing past Silvanus to enter the house. “Shit—it stinks in here!”
Silvanus stood on the mortar block outside the doorway and considered for a moment simply running away and losing himself in the maze of the village’s unlighted paths. But he had no confidence in his powers of flight, so he followed the young man into the house and asked him who he was.
“What’s this? Suddenly you got amnesia? The shock of murdering someone has catapulted you into some new dimension?”
Silvanus stood mute, unable to answer the man’s questions.
“I’m Clay, and I’m your personal trainer. Okay, we got that settled? Now tell me what’s happened here. Something’s gone wrong.”
“I did not mean to murder her. I did what she bade me do—but with too great vigor.” He held out his hands to be manacled, as he had seen apprehended felons do so often on the Trinitron.
But Clay only wrinkled his forehead and sniffed the tainted air. “Her?” he asked. “Don’t you mean him?” Then, with great feeling, “Oh shit! Delilah? You didn’t!” He went into the next room of the little house and removed the lengths of fine fabric with which Silvanus had shrouded Delilah’s body. He turned to Silvanus with a look of incredulity. “You cut off her fucking breast?”
“Only after I knew her to be dead,” Silvanus said.
“Have you completely flipped out?”
“I did no more than she asked to have done.”
“Have you been here with Delilah ever since you left the bar you went to with her and Wolf?”
“I think so. Yes.”
“Was there anyone else here with you?”
Silvanus gestured toward the Trinitron.
“Are you still high on something? You sound spaced out.”
The way that the man was looking at him made Silvanus realize that he was naked.
“I’ll tell you, if it was up to me, I would like nothing better than just to let the cops find you like this. You would generate some first-class headlines. It’s not every pedophile priest who manages to get tattooed and murder a hooker right after he kills the fag who’s blackmailing him. You’re definitely ahead of the competition now, Father Bryce. But it’s not up to me—fortunately for you. I’ve got orders to get you back to your fucking rectory. Pronto. I got your clothes in the car. You think you can dress yourself?”
Silvanus nodded. “My name is Father Bryce now? I am not Damon?”
The man smirked. “Hey, you learn quick.”
“A priest—not a bishop?”
“You were expecting a promotion for what you did?” Clay laughed and shook his head. “Man, you better come down from that cloud. You’re in deep shit.”
Silvanus nodded. For all the man’s expressions of contempt, he seemed to have a clear idea of what Silvanus ought to do—and he himself had none at all.
“You better get washed up,” Clay told Silvanus, and made him immerse himself in an immense white basin of heated water to remove the incrustations of blood—his own and Delilah’s—from his body. The hot water eased the pain of the Satanic face incised upon his chest and stomach, and Clay found a compartment of balms and unguents hidden behind the speculum mounted on the wall of the cubicle containing the great basin. One of these balms was applied to the inflamed tissues, to their still greater relief.
Then Silvanus dressed himself, with some assistance in the fastenings of his shirt and shoes, in a costume of black wool, finely woven. When he’d finished dressing, the image he presented in the speculum was decidedly priestly.
“Now I am a priest?” he asked Clay.
“It looks like that, don’t it?”
“But without a tonsure?”
“A tonsure?” The man laughed aloud. Then, soberly, “You’re not joking, are you? You are really out of it. Well, that won’t be my problem, once I get you out of here. Come on, we’ll get you back to Willowville. Do you want to kiss Delilah good-bye?”
Silvanus shook his head. “At this moment I feel no lust at all.”
“Glad to hear it.”
Clay extinguished the flameless torches within the house and stood in the doorway, surveying the dark streets of the village. There was no one in sight. He gestured for Silvanus to leave the house, and then locked the door behind them with a key he’d taken from a small leather purse he’d found in Delilah’s bedchamber.
Silvanus now understood, from looking at the Trinitron, that what he’d first supposed to be armored houses were self-powered carriages and were, in the dominion of the Antichrist, more common than horses. Each man seemed to have his own “automobile.” (Though no one seemed able to speak Latin, many of the words in use clearly derived from Latin, just as in the vulgar tongues of Silvanus’s own era.) There were greater marvels still—self-moving carriages that flew, though with rigid wings. These were not chimeras of the sort abounding on the Trinitron, for he had seen them himself—moving above the clouds, traversing the sky from horizon to horizon, just as in the prophecies of Ezekiel.
Clay entered on one side of the automobile, and Silvanus, after fumbling at the latch, entered on the other side and lowered himself, not without difficulty, into the low, cushioned seat. Silvanus watched intently as Clay went through the motions that excited the carriage into responsive motion. In moments they were outside the perimeter of the village and part of the irregular stream of other Fords, Toyotas, Datsuns, and so forth (for there were as many varieties of automobile as there were flowers in a garden, and the distinctive excellence of each one variety compared to all the rest was one of overriding concern to the Trinitron), speeding almost soundlessly along one of the wide, gray, glass-smooth roadways.
Because of the terrible velocity at which they were moving, Clay had to fix his attent
ion on the operation of the automobile, though his eyes would dart from time to time to Silvanus, who, for his part, was transfixed by the prospect before him, at once fearful and wonderstruck.
At length Clay spoke. “What you said a while ago, in the trailer, about how you’re a priest now, not a bishop—what did you mean by that? Why would you be a bishop?”
Silvanus did not know how to reply. Clay seemed to have his own idea of an already existing relationship between himself and Silvanus, an idea that Silvanus had no wish to challenge. That he should pose such a question meant that he had no notion of Silvanus’s real identity. He believed him to be a priest called Father Bryce, and Silvanus fervently desired nothing more than to step into the priestly shoes of this Father Bryce and to forget the life he’d led as Damon, the slave of Satan and murderer of the temptress Delilah.
So he made a reply as unrevealing as he could devise. “I cannot think why I should have said that. I was in great distress. I was not myself.”
“Yeah, that’s what I’m asking, shithead. Are you yourself?”
“How can I answer such a question?”
“Why not try for honestly.”
Silvanus turned sideways and glared. He glared well, being accustomed to authority. “Yes,” he said, “I am myself.” Then, fearing that Clay’s next demand would be for some fuller declaration of his identity, he parried, “Can you say the same?”
Clay was annoyed, but not baffled, by the challenge. “Hey, who I am is classified information to you, motherfucker. I ask the questions, I don’t answer them. I thought we established that a while ago.”
Silvanus bowed his head, as though in submission.
“Why ‘bishop’?” Clay persisted.
Silvanus had recovered his wits to the degree that he could ask in turn, plausibly, “What priest does not think he might become a bishop?”
Clay seemed to give this serious consideration. And then he asked, simply, crushingly, “Does the name Bonamico ring a bell?”
THE PRIEST A Gothic Romance Page 21