Answer as a Man

by Taylor Caldwell

  Bernard winked at him. “Thanks, lad, but I’ll wait for tea. Put it all away, Kate, for our feast tonight. Except for giving Jason a slice now—on some of that toast, Joanie, which you are kindly buttering.”

  Joan felt a thrill of hatred for both Jason and her grandfather, but she silently thrust the fresh toast at Jason, who took it with the slice of cheese his grandfather had cut for him. John had assumed an appearance of proud martyrdom. He sipped daintily at his tea. Joan touched his arm in sympathy. “Mr. Maggot must think we are beggars.”

  Bernard said in a slow, hard voice, “Don’t call him that again, Joan. Ever.”

  She flinched. Bernard did not use that tone often, and it was threatening. He had slapped her lovely face more than once when she had been unusually impudent. He did not consider her crippled state to be any excuse for cruelty.

  Jason remembered something else. He withdrew the silver dollar from his jacket pocket. “Mr. Maggi gave me this, too, for my birthday.” He held it in the palm of his hand and it glittered in the lamplight.

  “A rare bucko, my friend,” said Bernard. “You’ll save it, Jason?”

  “How very kind,” said Kate as she closed the cupboard door where she kept her small store of foodstuffs. “A whole dollar. He must need it for himself, poor soul.” John and Joan stared unblinkingly at the coin. “We could use it,” said John.

  “And Jason could save it,” said Bernard. “It can inspire him.”

  Jason hesitated. He glanced at his mother, at her sweet exhausted face. He went to her and put the dollar in her hand. She tried to refuse it. “No, Mum,” he said. “It gives me pleasure to know you can buy a new length of cloth for a Sunday dress, and you need it.” Kate’s eyes grew large and bright with tears. She looked at Bernard, who smiled at her. “A good enough use for a birthday dollar, Katie. Take it.”

  “Joanie needs some new petticoats,” murmured Kate. Bernard promptly reached out and removed the coin from her hand. He tossed it in the air and it shone. “A frock for you, Katie, or back it goes to Jason. Take your choice.”

  “Oh, Da,” she said, but accepted the coin and put it on a shelf.

  Jason, eating hungrily, told his family of the gold piece Mr. Mulligan had attempted to give him. They stared at him dumbfounded and incredulous. Jason said, “I dropped it back in his post box.”

  “No!” cried John with new outrage. “Five dollars! A gold piece! It could pay this month’s rent. You must have been out of your mind, Jase!”

  Jason said in his grandfather’s own hard, slow voice, “It was alms—charity. Mr. Mulligan isn’t my friend, he’s only a customer. He isn’t a relation. He is a stranger. Alms.”

  “You did right,” said Bernard. “It was the only thing to do. I’m proud of you, Jason.”

  But John was thinly excited and trembling. His whole body quivered. He regarded his brother as one regards an enemy. “At the very least, you could have dropped it in the poor box in the church!”

  Bernard leaned back ponderously in his chair, and his eyes, as they looked at John, were icily bitter. “It minds me I heard that before—about giving a gift to the poor,” he said. “It minds me someone was given a lesson concerning that. Or you, with your Bible, Jack, know nothing about that.”

  “We are obligated to give to the poor,” said John, who winced at his grandfather’s look. But he had some courage of his own.

  Bernard uttered a sound which was neither a grunt nor a laugh. “Well, tell me, then, what our Lord said to Judas when Judas complained to our Lord that the gift of ointment which Mary Magdalen was rubbing on the good Lord’s feet was a waste. ‘The money should have been given to the poor,’ said Judas. And what did our Lord say to that, Jack?”

  Stains of scarlet appeared on John’s gaunt cheeks. He was silent at first. Then he said, “In this case it doesn’t apply, Da.”

  “Who are you to judge?” replied Bernard with a contempt which forbade any further argument. He smiled briefly at Jason. “And proud am I of you, boyo, for not believing you’ are poor. A man’s only poor when he thinks he is, poor devil.”

  John swung on Jason. “You didn’t think it ‘alms’ to take that food from Mr. Maggiotti! What’s the difference?”

  “He’s a friend,” said Jason. “We give him things, too. But I had nothing to give Mr. Mulligan, who’s not my friend.”

  Jason put his coat on again. His mother’s neatly wrapped laundry was waiting, four thick bundles of it. If he hurried now, he might not be late for school. He ran out.

  Something happened to him, mused Bernard. There’s a grand difference in him today. He has become a man. It was not only the very hot tea which made Bernard’s eyes suddenly moist. For some reason he looked at the plain wooden cross on the wall, and did not know why he looked. He usually avoided it. He and God had some very violent differences of opinion. He said, wholly out of context, “There’s one thing the Sassenagh will never forgive the Irish for. We survived.”

  John shrugged. He was not proud of being Irish. He was proud of nothing but his own piety.

  Jason was late for school after all, in spite of his running on the errands. Mrs. Sturgeon had been too slow in finding her purse to pay him the seventy-five cents she owed.

  “Heedless, wretched, dilatory boy!” Sister Mary Margaret scolded when Jason erupted into the silent classroom of some forty-five boys and girls. “No sense of duty, of obligation, of common politeness and consideration for the other scholars! Hold out your hand, Jason Aloysius Garrity, and a shame on you!”

  She smartly used the ruler on Jason’s extended hand. His palm, fortunately, was numb with cold, so he felt little pain. The nun was a short, plump woman with an irascible face and glittering pince-nez and belligerent eyes. “This is the third time this month. I’ll have a talk with Sister Agatha, or perhaps with Father Sweeney. This carelessness must stop.”

  Jason attempted to say something, but he was out of breath. “No excuses!” cried Sister Mary Margaret. “To your seat with you, and get out your arithmetic book! Page twenty-five. Not that it will do you any good, with your slothful ways.”

  Jason, frankly, was not a good scholar. He read with joy all the books that belonged to his grandfather, and some which he could buy for a penny or two in some frowsy old bookshop. He could write “a fine hand,” which the nun admitted herself, and his compositions were imaginative and grammatically correct, and he was greatly interested in history and poetry and literature. He had a discriminating eye and was aware of nuances and hidden meanings, and was intensely alive to sensations and color. But mathematics, civics, and geography appeared dull and pedestrian. Unlike his brother, John, abstractions did not interest him. He could do sums well enough, after sweaty struggle, but life impinged on him too acutely for mathematics to hold his attention. Curiously enough, what little science he learned in school engrossed him. He did not connect it with mathematics. He knew exactly how far the moon was from the earth, but how that knowledge had been acquired never occurred to him. He believed it was by some occult intuition.

  In short, as Bernard knew, Jason was involved with mankind. He was endlessly fascinated by the changes on men’s faces, the intonations of their voices, their guessed motives, the way they tried to compromise with the grim circumstances of their existence. He did not always sympathize. A man accepted his life, or if it were unbearable, he tried to change it for the better. Like Bernard, Jason detested whiners. A man should never say, “Oh, pity me, for I am a poor soul and the victim of my fate! Or of society!” No. A real man said, “This is where I am, but I need not stay in the gutter. It is my duty to change what is evil or intolerable in my life. I was given the strength to choose my way, and I will choose it. To do less is to degrade myself by my own will.”

  He did not, as yet, put this exactly into words, but he knew it with all his soul.

  He was approaching confirmation. His knowledge of the catechism was uncertain. He could never recite the seven sacraments in the correct order. He coul
d not understand penance, for he rarely, knowingly, did anything to demand penance. There was simply no time for wrongdoing. He could not completely grasp the difference between venial and mortal sin. He could not quote the Ten Commandments in order, either. As for the rosary—he understood the Five Joyful Mysteries, but the others confused him, except for the Sorrows of the Blessed Mother. After all, his own mother had her sorrows. There were times when he felt a vague but deep resentment at her undeserved suffering. He also hated injustice and cruelty and malice, which he observed were all about him. He often asked himself, “Why are people like that?” He had seen that these things were not inspired by poverty, but came out of the dark souls of men themselves, mostly unprovoked. He had been taught of evil. He felt it more powerful in the world than any “innate goodness of man.”

  The nuns considered him a dullard and sighed over him.

  Out of sheer weariness he fell asleep at eleven o’clock, and was awakened painfully by a box on his ears. “Lazy, stupid boy!” cried Sister Mary Margaret. “You think of nothing but eating and sleeping—a great big boy like you! Look at your smudged paper! Haven’t you learned how to use a pen yet? What a trial you must be to your poor mother!”

  She added, with a deep moan and with uplifted eyes, “But she is comforted by your brother, for which we must give thanks to God.”

  Jason was still more than half-asleep, for he said in a loud if sluggish voice, “My brother needs a kick in the ass.”

  The class exploded with delight. Sister Mary Margaret retreated a step as if at a sacrilege. Some of the boys clapped, some booed. Some of the girls pretended shock. Jason was sent down to the office with a note for Sister Agatha.

  Sister Agatha, an ancient lady with a rigorous view of mankind—quite justified—was in a rare benevolent mood that morning. She had just given young Father Sweeney what she called “a piece of my mind,” which had been extraordinarily eloquent due to her arthritis. Ordinarily she regarded Jason with a less-than-kindly eye. She was old and she was harassed and her constant pain made her impatient, and she was always hungry. She could not recall ever having had a good satisfying meal in all her life. She was convinced that humanity had no authentic reason for existence, for which opinion no acts of contrition on her part could ever make her sorry. Tiny, active as a cricket for all the arthritis—she did not believe in “Giving In”—she had a wizened face like a parched raisin, wise fierce old hazel eyes leaping with life, a pale cherry of a nose, and a baleful mouth full of obviously false teeth. Even in repose her expression was wrathful and suspicious, and her wimple crackled loudly like winter ice underfoot when she was disturbed, which was almost always.

  Her office was small and extremely shabby if savagely clean and tidy with its files and bare floors and two bare uncurtained windows. One showed the nearby wall of the church with its sooty bricks now painted with streaks of snow, a bleak sad scene hardly four feet away, which blocked the light from her office. But the other window revealed a glimpse of mountain splendor, white and dark blue against the wan sky. Suddenly a crown of gold touched the brow of one peak, and Jason, in spite of his exhausted condition, felt a faint memory of what he had experienced earlier that morning. Sister Agatha, always acute, saw that subtle change on the youth’s face, and she sat back in her creaking chair and gazed at him intently.

  “Well, and what have you done now, Jason lad?” she asked. She pretended to study the note Sister Mary Margaret had sent her. Jason had never heard her speak so mildly. It was invariably the case, with Sister Agatha, to administer punishment first and then, very occasionally, to suffer explanations afterward. “‘Never a lick amiss’ is my motto,” she would say.

  “You cursed, it says here, Sister Mary Margaret. No.” She peered at the small writing. “You used vulgar language in connection with your excellent brother, John.” As she had employed vulgar language to young Father Sweeney only half an hour ago, she felt what was for her an expansive glow. “What did you say? What inspired it?” Her voice was loud and husky for so minute a woman.

  “I was asleep,” said Jason. “Sister.”

  “Again? Third time this month.”

  Jason hesitated. He was too proud to explain what had caused his sleepiness, but there was something now in Sister Agatha’s voice which made him say, “I was tired.”

  “Lollygagging with worthless spalpeens like yourself most of the night, instead of sleeping?”

  “No. Sister.” Then, in spite of his reticence, a tinge of exasperation came into his own voice. “John, my brother, was off to Mass this morning, and I had to deliver his papers for him, second or third time this week, and then deliver my mother’s laundry.”

  “There’s nothing wrong with going to Mass so often,” said the old lady. “Perhaps ’twould be better for you if you followed John’s example.”

  “Then there would be less to eat in the house,” Jason said with a reckless anger she had never heard from him before. “Everyone works in our house except Jack and my little sister, who can’t walk well. My grandda works all hours, and so does my mother, and so do I. We wouldn’t eat or have a roof over our heads if we didn’t.” He had begun to breathe hard and his tired face flushed deeply with a renewed anger. “If Jack would make up for his going to Mass when he should be delivering his papers and helping Mum, it wouldn’t be so bad. But he doesn’t.”

  Sister Agatha put on her glasses to see him more clearly. “‘Render unto Caesar,’” she began, and then was taken aback when Jason made a most unusual gesture, as of dismissal. “I know all that, Sister. ‘And to God the things which are God’s.’ But I heard once that our Lord worked as a carpenter, and I bet he did that after praying, and didn’t make prayer the only thing.”

  “Um,” said Sister Agatha.

  “My grandda says to work is to pray, anyway,” said Jason. “Someone should tell Jack that.”

  Sister Agatha again studied the note. “‘Vulgar language.’ What did you say to Sister Mary Margaret, Jason?”

  Jason slowly remembered and then could not help smiling. “Sister mentioned Jack, and I said he needs a kick in … uh … well, something like a donkey.”

  As Sister Agatha had thought something perilously like that about poor young Father Sweeney that morning, she began to cough and covered her mouth with her handkerchief. The hazel eyes twinkled. She was not an unworldly old lady. She had heard hearty language from her brothers and father in Ireland when she had been a young girl, and she guessed, very knowingly, exactly what Jason had meant to convey. She knew John Garrity very well, indeed, and though she virtuously admired his piety and devotion and his ambition to be a priest, she had thought him somewhat of a prig, not unlike Father Sweeney, for whom she had no affection at all, and a less-than-ardent respect.

  Again she studied Jason, the intense gray eyes and thick black lashes and brows, the inherent strength of his features, and the set of his body. She saw his hands, big and raw and chapped, calloused with labor. She said, trying for severity, “I hear your arithmetic hasn’t improved lately.”

  “I don’t understand it very much,” he confessed. The nun had made no move for the switch, though it lay near her hand. Sister Agatha recalled that Father Sweeney did not seem to comprehend the relationship between money and life either. He had complained that morning of “undue expenditures.” She knew it was useless to explain to him that the meager sums at her disposal covered barely half of the expenses, and that she had, as she had said, to “rob Peter to pay Paul,” an allusion that seemed to puzzle him.

  “Well, then,” she said to Jason now, “you know there has to be money for the rent, for clothing and food. That’s mathematics.”

  “Then I don’t have to learn it,” said Jason. “I know all about it. I’ve known about it for years.” He seemed relieved.

  Sister Agatha found herself nodding, then severely came to herself. “And civics. That’s government and such, Jason. A literate man needs to know all about it.”

  “Da says govern
ment should be hanged,” the boy replied. “That is, politicians.”

  “An unworthy sentiment, Jason. And a stupid one, I am afraid. You must live in this world, unless it is your hope to be a monk?” Her mouth quirked with humor.

  The thought was so appalling that Jason blurted out, “Christ, no!” Then he slapped his hand over his mouth. Sister Agatha did not feel she had been exposed to a blasphemy. She felt that Jason had been quite sincere, even reverent, in his denial. But she believed it proper to raise a stern hand.

  “That will do, Jason.” She looked at the switch. She had no desire to pick it up. “Go back and apologize to Sister Mary Margaret, and see you do better—in something. Anything.” She waved her hand at him and took up some papers and frowned at them. She sensed, rather than saw, that Jason was hesitating near her, as if he wished to speak again. But she did not look up; she felt very moved, though she did not know why. In a moment or two he was gone.

  Had she failed the lad as perhaps she had failed many others? She reflected that God had not promised man joy in this life, but only labor. Yet, it was a lovely world—if it were not for man. She had a profound faith, but still … I am a sinner, she thought, and tried to feel guilt and contrition.

  She was not very successful.

  Jason returned home in the bitter dark after his work at the shop of Mr. Maggiotti. His eyes burned hotly and he was also full of rage. He had detected that Mr. Maggiotti had neatly covered two large breaks in his window with a court plaster and cardboard. The damage was in a corner, and the old man had put a jar of candies in front of it to conceal it. When questioned by Jason, Mr. Maggiotti had shrugged deprecatingly and had said, “I’m an old man, Jason. Careless.”

  Jason went outside and examined the break. He came back, his eyes sharp. “Did you throw this stone when you were playing this morning?”

  Joe spread his hands eloquently. “It was the jar.”

  “You threw it at the window?”

  Joe bent his small head in distress and mumbled something. Jason hitched up his knickers and tightened the buckle just below his knee. He still glowered at his friend. Joe said, “What can a man do when he is no liked?”