“What makes you think he wasn’t helping them?”
“Well, you can use your own judgment, Your Grace. When we couldn’t find them at the hotel, we went out looking for them on the street and there they were walking the streets.”
“What did they actually want from you?”
“Money.”
“Umph.”
“I don’t care about them wanting money. I’d give them money. But I don’t want to contribute to a public scandal for the amusement of the whole city.”
“Tell me the young priest’s name, Mr. Robison.”
“Father Dowling at the Cathedral. A likeable chap, too.”
The Bishop nodded his big head and sighed deeply, as if the sound of the priest’s name had made him very sad, but what he actually was thinking of as he looked out the window so gloomily, was not of the priest but of a charity campaign he was about to launch throughout the city, and he was imagining the result of a scandal that would follow if a priest were implicated with two prostitutes. Sitting there, he could almost hear the story spreading and growing throughout the city, appearing first of all half hidden in the newspapers, and then whispered about till it became a matter for obscene joking. This was not the first time that a young priest had worried him; only a month ago one of them had got drunk and had driven an automobile into a parked car, smashing it up, and he had been arrested, and it had been necessary to have the matter adjusted very quietly. So the Bishop, sighing again, said patiently to Mr. Robison, “I wonder if many people understand the temptations that continually confront a young priest. They’re human beings, young men without much guile or experience, full-blooded and healthy, right out of the seminary into a world where many silly women dote on them. And yet the priesthood doesn’t want them if they’re not normal sexually, otherwise there would be no purpose in the vow of celibacy. It’s astonishing to realize how few of them go wrong, isn’t it? It would be impossible without the special grace of God. The greater the temptation, the more abundant the marvellous grace to strengthen them. Extraordinary, isn’t it, Mr. Robison?”
“Indeed it is astonishing, Your Grace,” Mr. Robison said. But his face began to redden and he looked a bit angry, as though he were being rebuked, or as though he were being teased, and he remembered having heard it said that the Bishop spent many secret hours studying the modern philosophers, so he would always know more than the brilliant young men who tossed quotations at him. But then the Bishop added, “Such a state of affairs as you outline can’t be allowed to continue, of course. Heaven only knows what might happen.”
“Ah, I’m glad you agree with me, Your Grace.”
“I agree with you entirely, Mr. Robison. I might say I know of no one I would rather have bring me this information. And I’ve got a pretty good idea that it worried you a good deal.”
“It upset me all last night, and I gave it plenty of consideration this morning, too. You know Father Dowling is a fine enough fellow in many ways. It’s a shame, a ghastly shame.”
“By the way, Mr. Robison, you have possibly some connection through the courts with the police?”
“You’re suggesting, Your Grace…”
“Dear me, it’s hard to say what to do. It’s a pity the police wouldn’t arrest the girls and get them out of the way. Maybe we ought to pray for that.”
“We will, Your Grace.”
“Ah, we should forgive these young priests for having a little too much enthusiasm. They ought to have it. Let me know if you hear anything about the girls. And I know you’ll mention the affair to no one.”
“I hesitated to mention it even to you.”
“I know it. You’re a good fellow,” and standing up and smiling, the Bishop said, “How is Mrs. Robison? Be sure and remember me to her and tell her we must have a game of bridge some night.” And while they were both standing up, he suddenly switched the conversation and began talking about the possibility of the Chinese offering stubborn resistance to the Japanese invasion. “I’ve heard missionaries say that the Chinese make the best soldiers in the world,” he said. “That is, for trench warfare, because of their ineffable patience.” And as he talked in this fashion, Father Dowling seemed to have been forgotten, as an insignificant detail in a great plan is quickly passed by, and even Mr. Robison, chatting affably, began to feel that he had worried himself needlessly. After one or two dry jokes about political matters, the two middle-aged men put out their plump white hands, bowed to each other and the Bishop said, “Be sure and say a little prayer for me.”
Out in the sunlight, with his hat tilted cockily on one side of his head, Mr. Robison strutted along, holding his cane stiff in one hand, like a man who has come from an important and successful conference. But when he was at the corner, looking around for a cab, he suddenly remembered again the young priest’s eagerness and his enthusiasm talking about the girls that night. And then he became uneasy, flustered, and irritable.
Instead of going back to his office, Mr. Robison went to his club for a cup of coffee, so he could relax and get rid of his uneasiness. And as soon as he stepped into the lounge room and saw a few of his white-headed cronies half buried in deep leather chairs, smoking, laughing, or dozing until they dropped forward, he knew that he had been wise in seeing the Bishop. If there were scandal these men, his business associates, would tease him slyly for weeks.
SIXTEEN
After mass in the morning, Father Dowling was ashamed of the way he had been thinking of the parish people the night before. He ate breakfast with Father Jolly and Father Anglin, looked a long time at the old priest’s severe, weary face and made little conversation with either one of them. As they ate, he knew they were looking at him as though he were gloomy and haggard. Father Jolly, who was very fond of music, talked a lot about a concert he had attended. Father Anglin once asked Father Dowling if something were bothering him and waited for an answer with his blue eyes blinking steadily.
In the early afternoon he hurried to the hotel and rapped on the white door and waited, and when there was no answer, he went back to the street and stood in front of the hotel, with his hand up, shading his eyes from the sunlight, wondering where he might find the girls. As he walked slowly around the block, looking on the streets and through restaurant windows, he was thinking, “Wherever they are, whatever they’re doing, God would forgive them now.”
Before he went home, late that afternoon, he called on Mrs. Canzano, a poor Italian woman, bulging with her twelfth child. Her husband was out of work, and he tried patiently to instill into the poor woman a Christian resignation to a life of misery.
Early that evening he was ready to go again to the hotel, but he received a call to the bedside of old Mrs. Schwartz, that old lady whom he had visited that winter night when he first met Ronnie and Midge; only this time the old woman was really dying. He knelt beside her, praying for her, he stroked her head so lightly that her eyes were full of wonder. There were no shouts from her, no struggle as there had been on that other night, no fear, just a fixed simple smile on her face as he anointed her, and then she died very peacefully.
The way this old woman had died was still in his mind, making him calmer, when he went later that night to the hotel. When he was on the stair the proprietor looked at him in a certain way, a half smile, and Father Dowling knew that the girls were in the room, and he rapped on the door lightly with sureness and eagerness. But the door was opened only a few inches and he heard Ronnie say “Who is it?”
“I want to see you, Ronnie,” he said.
A few inches more the door was opened, and Ronnie, smelling of cheap perfume and perspiration, and with her hair mussed over her head, said sullenly, “You’d better go away. You can’t come in here any more.”
“I’ll wait, then,” he said.
“You ought to go away and leave us alone,” she said, closing the door.
Waiting, listening to every sound that came from the room, he walked up and down the narrow corridor, and sometimes he heard a l
augh, and he said, “That’s Ronnie,” and sometimes he heard a man’s voice and he frowned. As he kept on walking, his own footfalls sounded dreadfully loud, so loud he thought they made it hard for him to hear Midge’s laughter. She was in one of those rooms. Then these sudden wild noises that he sometimes heard and sometimes imagined began to make him feel so unhappy that he tried to tread more heavily so his footfalls would drown out all other sounds. He thought of the peaceful death of old Mrs. Schwartz just a few hours ago. “Death and life, death and life. Where is the beginning and where the end?” he muttered. “What did I expect the girls to be doing? What else was there for them to do? God help them. Last night they were insulted and hurt. I can’t blame them if they hate the whole city.”
Then the door opened and he hurried along the corridor and almost bumped into the swarthy, short, fierce-faced man with shiny black hair and yellow teeth, who was coming out of the room. Mumbling something, the man turned, scared, and darted down the stairs, looking back once in spite of his fright.
By this time Father Dowling had his foot in the door, and he pushed his way into the room against the weight of some one pushing from the other side. There was Ronnie, breathing heavily, in an old green kimono and a pair of silk stockings and green pumps, and her hands were on her hips and her head was wagging from side to side in complete disgust. “For the love of Mike, Father,” she said. “Why don’t you leave us alone? You got your nerve pushing in here.”
“Ronnie, Ronnie, just a minute. I only want to say how sorry I am for last night. It was my fault taking you there.”
“Forget it. You don’t think I’m sitting here worrying about your friends, do you?”
“He’s not my friend, he never was.”
“No? Never mind. He may get drunk and stumble in here some time, then he can go to church and tell you about it.”
“Listen, Ronnie, I may have made a mistake and I embarrassed you and Midge. I had the best of intentions. Forgive me, won’t you?” Coaxing, he smiled and put out his hand and touched her arm.
Frowning, as though he were a reckless young person and she did not know what to do with him, she sat down on the bed. Then she looked at the door leading into the other room and she wished he would go. As she lay back and crossed her legs, he could see a two-dollar bill showing through the silk stocking just below her knee. He could see the figure “two” quite clearly. His face, flushing at first, suddenly got white. Following his glance, Ronnie looked down at the two-dollar bill and grinned. “That’s the gent that just went out,” she said.
“I bumped into him,” the priest said, dropping his glance to the floor.
“He didn’t hurt you, did he?”
“Please don’t talk about him, Ronnie.”
Then there was the noise of laughter in the other room, Midge’s laughter, and then other horrible sounds, and Father Dowling, thinking of Midge being sick and yet having some one in there, moistened his dry lips, went to speak, faltered as he stared at Ronnie, and listened and waited while she stared at him, his mouth opening and waiting for words to come from him, when there was only within him a shame that was making him die.
“I told you you’d better go away,” Ronnie mumbled angrily. “What are you sitting there for if you don’t like it?”
“I came to see you both and I’m waiting, that’s all,” he said. And then he smiled suddenly as if he were encouraging her, and he surprised her so that she shrugged her shoulders, said, “Suit yourself. Have your own picnic,” and then looked at him with wonder.
Without any warning the other door was opened all of a sudden, and a huge, fat Italian, in a good navy-blue suit, his dark face beaming with an everlasting satisfaction, his dark eyes shining with new life, came out laughing and shaking his head happily. He must have weighed two hundred and fifty pounds. His name was Al Spagnola and he was in the fruit business. With one great expansive sigh of contentment that included Ronnie and Father Dowling, whom he hardly noticed, he walked across the room and out to the hall.
Father Dowling was astonished and angry because of the man’s brazen, laughing contentment. “A big pagan, a happy animal. I seem to have seen him some place before. Just an earth worm, a barbarian right out of pagan Rome two thousand years ago,” he thought.
Midge, leaning lazily against the doorpost, watched the priest and puffed slowly at a cigarette. Her face was pale and calm. For a long time she stared at Father Dowling and then smiled just a little bit as though he amused her in some secret way she would never reveal. And then she snapped at him: “You haven’t got the gall to come around here to-night nagging at us, have you?”
“I don’t want to nag, Midge. What makes you think I want to nag? I’m apologizing, not nagging. I came around here so you could nag at me.”
“I didn’t think you’d put your nose around here again.”
“I don’t know why you’d think that.”
“You had us insulted. You had us treated like dirt.”
“That’s why I want to apologize, don’t you see, Midge? That’s all I can do. If you don’t want me to call on you again, all right, but you had an apology coming to you anyway,” he said.
When the girls saw that the priest was not angry with them, nor disgusted at finding them with men, they grew ashamed and looked at each other foolishly. By this time both girls were sitting together on the bed. Father Dowling was smiling patiently. “All I say is you shouldn’t have come in here when we were busy,” Midge said, as though defending herself.
“You shouldn’t let that worry you, Midge. Look here. I’m not worrying about it at all. I can forgive you for that to-night. You were provoked and bitter in spirit. Let’s be friends again, eh?” he said.
But the girls could see that while he was forgiving them, the hurt remained very deep in him, for while he pleaded with such smiling eagerness, he was white-faced and halting sometimes in his speech. All last night and to-day, too, whenever they had mentioned him, they had jeered and joked at him, but now they couldn’t sit there at ease and look at him when he was so full of humility. They both began to remember that they liked him very much; they wished he would not go on pleading with his eyes so silently, or keep making it so clear that he forgave them willingly.
“We’re not blaming you for anything, Father. What made you think we were? What put that idea into your head?” Midge said.
“Oh, hell, we know there’s nothing wrong with you, Father,” Ronnie said.
“That’s fine. Maybe you think everything I’ve ever recommended to you is pretty shallow, I mean you think the people I’ve respected are pretty shoddy.”
“I’m not holding your lousy friends against you. You got used to them, I guess. We’re not going to snoot you because of those mugs.”
“You get used to anything,” Ronnie said. “But you shouldn’t play around with people like those Robisons. When you get down to brass tacks they’re dirt. I wouldn’t give that old hussy a tumble if I dropped from a parachute right on her knee. Don’t get me wrong. We’re whores and we know we’re whores, but she’s a different kind of a whore. See what I mean? Don’t let her worry you, that’s all.”
“I knew you’d be bitter to-night. I don’t blame you for your resentment,” he said.
Looking puzzled, the girls shifted their bodies awkwardly on the bed and did not answer. He added simply, “That’s why I wanted to be with you to-night. Do you mind if I stay a while?”
He was so friendly, he seemed to like them so much that they felt vaguely pleased and they did not want to offend him. As he talked mildly, he was locking the fingers of one big hand into the fingers of the other, smiling at them sometimes with that curious diffidence that always puzzled them.
“What do you want to do, Father?” Midge asked.
“Just stay here a while with you,” he said, laughing.
“All right, that’s easy. In that case I’ll get dressed,” Midge said. She started to go to the other room. Then she turned, because she liked him and knew
how often he worried about her and because this kind of friendship seemed so very rare, and she said, “I’m sorry, Father, that you saw me like this.” And she went into the room to get dressed.
Father Dowling began to smile warmly as he walked up and down the room, for his whole being was full of hope as he kept thinking, “How simple she was when she said that. What a fine simple regret. She’d be such a beautiful child under different circumstances. She’d have such understanding, too, and a far deeper understanding than so many superficially polite women have.” As he paced back and forth, he smiled with relief, and Ronnie, who was watching him, full of curiosity, said, “What are you thinking about, Father? What do you find so funny?”
“I was thinking of Midge.”
“Thinking what about her?”
“Just about the way she turned at the door.”
“Do you love her?”
“In the same way I love you.”
“But you don’t smile like that when you think of me?”
“I often think of you. I always see the two of you together in my thoughts.”
But she smiled at him very skeptically, as if she had a secret she would not tell, and when she was smiling, having this thought, she looked good-natured, easy-going and not at all stubborn or sullen, though her face was powdered thickly and her lips were a livid streak.
As soon as Midge returned to the room, Father Dowling asked them if they were hungry. “I’ve got a dollar in my pocket,” he said. He wondered if they might get some sandwiches and coffee at the lunch counter on the street and have the food there in the room. “I’ll go down and get the stuff for you,” Midge said, and they all began to laugh as though they were looking forward to having a very good time.
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