by Howard Fast
Four
When Frank Manelli walked into his home that evening, his wife, Constance, took one look at him, made no move toward her usual welcoming kiss, but said immediately, “Sit down, Frank, and let off some steam, and I’ll get you a cold beer.”
“I don’t want to sit down, I don’t want a beer, I don’t even want to talk. I want to get into a hot bath and sit there.”
“Sure,” Constance said quickly. She was a round gentle woman, round not fat, who counted her blessings and was satisfied with them. She had started to go with Frank when both of them were students at Greenwich High School, and now there were four kids with Frankie Junior going into his sophomore year at UConn and Dorothy beginning in the fall as a freshman at Sacred Heart University, and the two younger ones still at Greenwich High—all this on the income of an independent working plumber. Frank could have put young Frank on the truck with him, and he and Constance had discussed this, but when the boy said he wanted a degree in engineering, Frank supported him all the way.
Not that Frank ever put himself down as a plumber. In a good year, he netted better than sixty thousand dollars, which was all right but only barely met their needs with four kids; and he also took pride in the fact that civilization, or at least a great deal of it, would come to an end without his ministrations.
Unlike so many of his neighbors in the Chickahominy section of Greenwich, Frank never took out his frustrations on those he loved, nor did he leave the church to his wife and children. He was unhappily aware of his own lack of education, having left school to go to work at age sixteen, and he tried to get to every lecture at St. Matthew’s that dealt with any kind of behavioral knowledge. In particular, he took to heart an evening where Monsignor Donovan dealt with rage and the habit of inflicting rage and anger on those we love—the point being that inflicted elsewhere it would not be tolerated. He thought about that now as he lay in a tub of hot water, letting his tight muscles relax. He had all the bodily pains of a heavily muscled middle-aged man, each part of his body knotting up as he twisted into the variety of positions his work required.
He heard the door open, and Constance asking softly, “Want me to rub your back, Frank?”
“Yeah—thanks.”
She loved her husband and never stopped thanking God for him, and she was proud of his large tight body, not a bit of fat anywhere, no beer belly, just hard muscle under the white skin. She soaped and rubbed his back.
“Not a good day, Frank?”
“A lousy day. I spent three hours in a crawl space forty-eight inches high. The house sold for a million two, from what the agent told me, and they put the water connections in a crawl space, or built over them, or whatever. In this demented town, they buy a shack and turn it into a million plus. It must have been a hundred and ten degrees in there, in Belle Haven, about a mile from here, and then I had to drive to the other end of the Back Country, where this stupid bitch, Castle’s wife, had a powder room full of wet shit because she didn’t know what a toilet plunger was—”
“Frank!”
“Yeah. I’m sorry. I hate the word, too, but I live with it.”
“Frankie, think of Mr. Lombardy, who has to drive his truck around and suck out the septic tanks.”
“I don’t want to think about it—not before dinner. And then that piece of—all right, crap—she’s married to drives up in his seventy-five-thousand Mercedes convertible, and he shoves two fifty-dollar bills at me. Not that the job wasn’t worth a hundred dollars—just the stupidity of the whole idiot thing was worth a hundred—but when I say, No, I’ll send him a bill, he won’t take that but shoves the two fifties at me, grinning, because he thinks I’m a lousy Italian mafioso or something and just as crooked as he is, and I can take this off the books and cheat the feds the way he does with his millions—that lousy little bastard! I don’t grudge him his stinking millions but it’s calling me a goddamn thief—I swear, I could have decked him on the spot—”
“Frank!”
“I didn’t. I just drove off.”
“I’ll send him a bill and mark it paid, Frank, and that will tell him where we stand, and I’ll deposit the money.”
“And he’ll put me down as a shmuck.”
“Frankie, Frankie, you got more sense in your little finger than he has in his whole head. I’ll put your clothes in the washer—”
“The money’s in my pocket.”
“—I’ll take it out. It’s a warm evening—how about shorts and a T-shirt?”
“You read my mind.”
“I’ll bring them. We have orzo and greens and sausage for dinner.”
“Great.”
“Christina won’t be here for dinner. She has a date.”
“Come on, she’s too young for dates.”
“Frank, she’s fifteen and she’ll be sixteen when school starts in the fall. This is nothing. They’re going to have pizza and then see Godzilla, and she’ll be back early.”
“Who’s the boy?”
“She says he’s a nice kid.”
“What’s his name?”
“She said Dick. I didn’t ask her. For heaven’s sake, Frank, it’s pizza and a movie. She’s not going to marry him.”
Five
Driving out to the Castles’ home in the Back Country, Sister Pat Brody told Monsignor Donovan that she had difficulty in accepting the basis of their errand.
“It is not an errand, Sister. It is a dinner invitation, and you are invited because Mrs. Castle may want to talk about matters that might make her uncomfortable speaking to a man. We are going to arrive a bit early, before the other guests, so that you can have at least a few minutes alone with her.”
“But why does she come to us? Why not to St. Michael’s, so much closer to the Back Country, or to St. Mary’s on Greenwich Avenue?”
“She is a very timid woman, and lives, I venture to say, in some fear, if not terror, of her husband. She doesn’t dare go to St. Michael’s because some of her husband’s friends might recognize her, and I don’t think she even knew that St. Mary’s is a Catholic church. She chose St. Matthew’s because it is at the extreme opposite end of Greenwich, and when she spoke to Father Garibaldi, he was just out of his depth and brought her to me. She is also very beautiful.”
“Which is the bottom line to most men!” Sister Brody, a plump woman with a sharp tongue, never stood on ceremony with priests.
“Yes, Sister, I’m afraid so. God made us that way.”
“I’m glad none of our parishioners are listening to this conversation. I still don’t understand.”
“Then consider our Secretary of State, who thought she was born a Catholic, until someone discovered that she was born Jewish.”
“That was the result of the Holocaust. It’s not comparable. You say this woman is about forty?”
“Yes. A guess. I didn’t ask her,” Donovan replied, somewhat defensively.
“And you tell me that she believes that perhaps she is a Catholic? Or does she want to convert? Was she baptized?”
“She doesn’t know.”
“But how was she raised?”
“Like a stray dog, from all I could gather. She has lied so much about her past that apparently she cannot separate invention from reality. She calls herself a Valley Girl, which is very pejorative in Southern California. She doesn’t know who her mother and father are, and she confessed to me that she had invented them. I don’t know that anyone will ever know the truth of her background, but there’s nothing bitter in her nature, but a certain kind of innocence. She used the word tramp in describing herself to me, but I don’t know. I hate the word, and perhaps she felt that by talking to a priest she could plumb some inner feeling that she was unable to reveal even to herself.”
“You didn’t confess her?”
“No, no, no, we simply talked. I don’t know whether she even knows what confession is, and her notions of Catholicism are confused, to put it in the best light. But she has no anchor and she lives in an enviro
nment—well, you’ll see for yourself tonight. She is also, as I said, afraid of the man she’s married to.”
“What is he like?” Sister Brody asked, her tone of voice changing.
“What is he like?” Monsignor Donovan repeated.
“I presume he’s not a Catholic?”
“No. When they go to church, Christmas once and Easter once, they go to Christ Church, but from what she said, he has no affiliation with the Episcopalians or anywhere else. She said that some of his business friends go to Christ Church. Christ Church—well, she thought it was a Catholic church, and when she mentioned that to him, he became very angry.”
“Poor child. What do you imagine—or what does she imagine—he would do if she were to be baptized as a Catholic?”
“I asked her that, more or less. She thinks he would kill her—possibly hyperbole, but she is afraid. In any case, he would” throw her out, which at this point in her life might amount to the same thing.”
“Surely there was a prenuptial agreement,” Sister Brody said. She was a practical person.
“Yes. She knows she signed some sort of agreement, but she doesn’t know what she signed, nor was she represented by an attorney. She’s not very bright, Sister, and don’t lecture me on feminism. She is simply not very bright. My guess is that the premarital agreement gave her nothing.”
“I can’t imagine that any lawyer who isn’t completely a scoundrel would agree to draw up anything like that.”
“Lawyers are like other people, and there are scoundrels, and money will buy advice for sale.”
“Then what hope is there for Mrs. Castle?”
“I don’t know. That’s why I depend on your very perceptive and keen intelligence.”
“Or else you’re using me as a cop-out. Which is it, Monsignor? If she decides that she wants to join the church, well, where do we go from there? Wreck her marriage, which is still better than sleeping in the street, or maybe get her killed by the man she’s married to? Haven’t we enough trouble? And it’s not even our parish. Just suppose that she decides to take on the church and that her husband can be talked into it. Oh, they’ll love that at St. Michael’s, taking the wife of a Back Country millionaire and dragging her off to money-strapped St. Matthew’s—another parish.”
“Sister, a practical turn of mind is one thing, but you don’t turn away a human being pleading for help.”
“Please don’t lecture me, Monsignor. I will talk to her and we’ll see. But I will not push her into the church, and I will ask her to consider the consequences to her personal life.”
The monsignor did not reply to that, thinking that in Sister Brody, he might well have taken on more than he had bargained for.
Six
Richard Bush Castle was related neither to the Bush who had been president some years back nor to the family that had once owned Bush-Holley House, a small period museum in Greenwich, built some two centuries ago by a Jew who liked the notion of living in Greenwich. Castle’s family had put no middle name on his birth certificate, so he simply appropriated the name “Bush,” an action legal in Connecticut. He felt that it gave him style and importance.
In the normal course of things, he certainly would never have asked Monsignor Donovan to dinner. He disliked Catholics, with passion and undisguised contempt. As he had put it once to Sally, “They’re worse than Jews. They all belong body and soul to the Vatican, and their endgame is to take over!” His own religious roots, if they could be called that, were small-town Baptist, but he had discarded that in years past, leaving them in the Georgia village where he had been born. He was shrewd, cunning without foresight, but bright enough to get through Georgetown University, to get a job in government, and to work himself up to a spot in the Reagan administration as Assistant Secretary for Latin American Affairs.
He moved to Greenwich in 1982, abandoned the government—because there was no money in it—and became an investment banker and money trader. During the nineties, he blossomed in the financial world.
Thus, when Sally asked a question that would have evoked a storm of anger from him at another time—whether she could invite Monsignor Donovan to the dinner party—he agreed, deciding that it was better to know why a monsignor might desire to see him than to wonder how much anyone in Greenwich knew about certain incidents during his time with the State Department. It never occurred to him that a priest might be interested in Sally’s problems, or that Sally had any problems besides running the house and playing the role of a more-beautiful-than-usual trophy wife.
His willingness to see Father Donovan stemmed from his desire to find out just how much Father Donovan knew about him; and since the monsignor worked at a parish at the opposite end of Greenwich, Richard felt he could control whatever knowledge there was.
All of this stemmed from a story in the New York Times, which began:
“El Salvador’s defense minister suspected that a member of his high command had ordered the killing of four American churchwomen in 1980 and later informed the U.S. ambassador of his belief, according to newly released State Department documents….” And then it went on to say that “Three Roman Catholic nuns, Maura Clarke, Ita Ford and Dorothy Kazel, and a lay worker, Jean Donovan, were abducted by a military unit on Dec. 2, 1980, and raped and shot to death.”
The story was a long one, and Castle had read it carefully and then reread it several times. He had vivid memories of those times, of a meeting in Washington where a decision had been made to “get rid of those Jesuit bastards once and for all.” And while he had not been alone in ordering the killings of these particular churchwomen and the other killings of Jesuits that followed, he alone had signed on to the instructions written in detail and his name was on numerous documents, as well as one that discussed the assassination of the bishop of the central church in El Salvador.
As long as the Soviet Union was in existence, he knew that these assassinations would be filed as part of the battle against communism; but with the Soviet Union a thing of the past, and with more and more of these stories coming to light, Richard Castle’s uneasiness had increased. Now, with a major story on the affair in the New York Times, he felt that he must try to find out what was in store for him locally, and therefore he had agreed to Sally’s suggestion that the monsignor be invited to dinner.
When Sister Brody and Monsignor Donovan arrived, both Richard and Sally welcomed them cordially. Richard took the monsignor around the grounds, making a point of the new swimming pool, just completed, forty-eight feet in length to replace the thirty-eight-foot pool that had been there, explaining that it was no easy matter to stay in shape with a short pool.
“Although why it had to cost two hundred thousand dollars when most of the excavation was already dug, I don’t know. Of course, the old masonry had to be scrapped. One of the disadvantages of being rich is that you get soaked for everything, don’t you think so?”
“I’m hardly the one to ask. I’ve never been rich.”
“Yes. Sure.” He swallowed any thought of asking the cleric what his job paid.
“I’ll show you the gardens,” Richard said, at his wit’s end for a subject. “I had them redone completely by Tony Compana. He has an international reputation, and this, he tells me, is a seventeenth-century Florentine layout, except that the hedges are English. When the tour comes around”—referring to the annual charity tour of Greenwich houses of the super rich—“I always lead them through the gardens myself. After all, it’s charity. I always accept my obligations to charity. This, over here, is agapanthus and these topiary specimens cost an arm and a leg. I grew up on a farm, I mean sort of, we lived on the edge of town. But we grew plants, didn’t buy them in a nursery …”
While Richard was struggling with the monsignor and praying that the other guests would soon arrive and take him off the hook and listening at the same time for any hint that the priest knew something about the El Salvador business, Sally was leading Sister Brody around the house, pointing out what she ca
lled “nice things,” and mentioning, on occasion, with awe, their price. When they reached her bedroom, Sally sighed and shook her head.
“Why don’t we sit down here and talk?” Sister Brody suggested. “It’s so pretty and cool.”
“Yes. Sure. Can I get you a cold drink?”
“Don’t trouble, please.”
“It’s no trouble. I just press a button and they’ll bring me anything I want. I’d just as soon go down to the kitchen or the bar and get it myself, but this is the way Richard wants it done. I do everything the way Richard wants it done. He’s very good to me—I mean when he’s not angry.”
“I don’t want anything, dear. When the other guests come, I’m sure there’ll be drinks and things to nibble, but now. I’d just like to sit here and chat.” Sister Brody wore a pale gray skirt and a loose white blouse. Sally was relieved that she wasn’t wearing one of those heavy, hooded things that some nuns, she supposed, had to wear.
“What shall I call you?” Sally asked uneasily.
“You can call me Pat or Sister Pat or whatever.”
“That’s nice. Thank you.”
Sister Pat rearranged her thinking, sitting and looking at this exquisitely beautiful woman and trying to find an inkling of what was inside of her. Pat Brody was far from being a cloistered nun. She had dealt with women whose husbands had beat them to a pulp, and with women expecting a fifth child with no way of feeding the previous four, and with women whose husbands had walked out and away from every responsibility. She had worked in Guatemala and in El Salvador as well as in the worst slums of New York and Philadelphia; but this was something else entirely.
Now she said to Sally, “I think we should talk about religion. You know, of course, that I’m a Catholic nun. I am what they call a Sister of Charity. I don’t live in a convent. I work with people who need help with social and religious problems, a sort of social worker you might say. I am explaining this because I know you haven’t had much experience about how the church works. That’s why Monsignor brought me here to meet you and talk with you.”