John D MacDonald - One More Sunday

by One More Sunday(Lit)

  Well, I just don't feel like being patient anymore! I've stood by you all these years working my fingers to the bone and you've been telling me we'd get to the top. This is the top, isn't it? And there's no payoff."

  She bent over further, so close that he could feel the fine spray of spittle as Alberta yelled, eyes bulging, "You do anything those damn Meadowses tell you! It isn't patience, mister. It's plain spinelessness. You like being walked on. It's a sickness! What you are, Walter Macy, you are just plain weak!"

  She began to cry out of anger, and whirled and went back through the house, hooing and hawing as she went, and he heard the slam of the bedroom door.

  He reread the parts of the sermon he had worked on, sighed, put it aside and went on back to where she waited. He wrote the sermons and she wrote their domestic scripts, their scenes and torments. He had always known this. This script called for certain words and actions on his part.

  He tapped on the door and said, softly, "Alberta? Bertie?"

  "Go away!"

  "I have to talk to you, dear. I have to explain. Please."

  When there was no answer, he opened the bedroom door.

  She was on her bed, her back toward the door. He went and sat on the edge of the bed, behind her. He patted and stroked her shoulder, and in a mild and gentle voice he told her that they had to move very, very slowly, that to assert his rights too soon might cause disaster. He told her that he had planned everything very carefully so there would be no chance of things going wrong for them. If it works out, he told her, or rather when it works out, he would be the head of the Church.

  After a predictable period of stroking and murmuring, she gave a great sigh and turned her tear-streaked face toward him and said she was sorry she had been so cross. Up until a few years ago this sort of scene had been one of the preludes to their lovemaking. Never passionate, she had, however, taken some pleasure from the act, he believed. But a few years ago it had begun to give her so much discomfort she had told him they had better not do that anymore. His disappointment was not quite genuine, and more intended to flatter than to argue for resumption. In a short time his vague desire for her faded completely away, and there was no longer any need to try to elicit some response from her slack white flesh.

  After they had kissed and they had each apologized for making the other one unhappy, she went into the bathroom and washed her face and combed her hair. She came out and sat beside him on the edge of the bed and patted his arm and said, "Have you talked to Mary Margaret about... you know what?"

  "Alberta, dearest, I don't even know if that is the right thing to do at this juncture."

  "You keep telling me she's on your side."

  "This is a very delicate matter. One has to anticipate what her choices will be, and which ones she will elect to take."

  "Whatever the hell that means. I don't have the advantages of education you've got."

  "It means that he is her brother, her only living brother. She has no husband. She has no lover. Her father is alive but beyond her reach. Sometimes it is not wise to be the bearer of bad tidings. She is the nearest thing to female royalty we have, and they have been known to order the messenger strangled."

  "She wouldn't dare try to get rid of you! The affiliated ministers wouldn't allow it! Besides, after nothing at all happened after you told that magazine woman..."

  "Hold it!" he shouted, glaring at her.

  "Well, please excuse me for living. You said you were..."

  "I said I was going to try to get in touch with that woman, yes. I was planning to send her a message through somebody I trust that I wanted to talk to her. But on second thought, I decided that it was not a valid idea."

  "Why not? Wouldn't she want to know John Tinker is an adulterer? A hypocrite."

  "Those people are very skeptical. They would consider the source. So I was trying to think of the proper person to go to her and tell her what was going on when all of a sudden she apparently went back to New York. Now, of course, we know she disappeared."

  She stared at him for a moment, eyes narrow and lips compressed.

  "I don't understand why you told me you were going to talk to that woman, and then told me you did."

  "Dearest, I am guilty, I guess, of raising false hopes. I should have made it clear that it was what I intended to do. I wanted you to be happy and hopeful. So I raised false hopes. I'm sorry."

  "Anyway, you promised me you would tell your precious Mary Margaret Meadows about it."

  "What proof do I have, Bertie? The phone lines apparently got crossed somehow and I heard them making a date, and the way they talked, it was evident what they had in mind."

  ' "Evident what they had in mind," she said in a prissy voice, mocking him.

  "Tell me exactly what she said."

  "I told you before. Once was enough. I don't have to say it again."

  "You better tell me Molly Wintergarten's exact words, Walter, or we are going to have a lot more trouble."

  "It's a kind of sickness to want to hear that kind of talk."

  "But you're sure it was her."

  "Absolutely."

  "So say it again, damn you!"

  He sighed.

  "She said to him on the phone, "Tink, I am going to fuck you blind today." ' "You told me you were going to try to get proof."

  "After mature consideration, I decided it wasn't such a great idea. I decided it was better to wait for them to get careless.

  People like that always do."

  "And suppose they don't?"

  "Alberta, dearest, I happen to know that another woman is being sent down from the same filthy magazine. And I am going to try to arrange for my trusted friend to make contact with her, making quite sure she will never know the information came from me."

  "It's a disgusting situation. He is a disgusting man. Mr. Efflander and Charley Winchester and Mary Margaret have been protecting him for years. And so did the old man before his mind began to go." She bent closer to him, eyes narrow.

  "If only you had more gumption, if only you had spoken out a few years ago. The years are going by and we're stuck here in this' "Hey," he said softly, noticing the new mottling of her face, the red blotches appearing.

  "Hey, don't get all worked up again. Everything is going to work out just fine."

  And she had quieted down at once, much to his relief. They then took an evening walk through the Settlements, making a point of speaking most pleasantly to everyone they met.

  Now he had finished the work on the sermon. He knew it would go well. He was wondering what other chore he could begin, when Mary Margaret rapped twice and came in, smiling, and sat in the big chair across the desk from him. She was wearing another one of those cover-everything dresses she ordered from Honolulu, apparently by the dozen. Sometimes he found himself wondering what she looked like under all the fabric. Very moist and pink and rubbery, he suspected. Like a big baby fresh out of the bath.

  For years they had been allies, she and Walter Macy and the old man against Finn and John Tinker and Joe Deets. They had tried to make allies of the Winchester brothers, but Charley was too clever to take sides in any factional split, and whatever Charley did, Clyde did. Walter Macy felt he had another ally in Walker McGaw, who produced and directed the talk shows, and who, with patient coaching, had managed to correct a lot of Walter Macy's mistakes. He had reduced the scope of the gestures, dropped the voice range, taught Walter how to speak to the lens as though speaking to a dear friend. And, of course, come right down to it, the affiliated ministers were on Walter's side. They thought they were on the side of Matthew Meadows, but they did not yet know that he was never going to be able to take the pulpit again.

  "Walter, I hear you are off to South Carolina this Sunday."

  "That's right."

  "I know you plan pretty well in advance. Can you give me an idea of how far you're scheduled into the future?"

  He found the folder in his drawer and took the top sheet out and handed it acros
s to her. She studied it, biting her underlip.

  "Way into November. Okay, you keep those dates, but don't make any more past that point."

  "Why not? What do you mean?"

  "I've talked this over with John Tinker and Finn. We've decided that we want you to drop the Bible lessons and the radio talk show and the cable panel show. We'll fill in with other personnel."

  "Does somebody think I'm getting too much exposure?"

  She stared at him.

  "What an odd idea! Of course not!

  Everybody knows how hard you work, Walter dear, and why.

  This change of plans is contingent on our being able to convince a minister he should move here to headquarters and pick up a big share of the preaching load, especially in the Tabernacle."

  "Who is he?"

  "He's the Reverend Tom Daniel Birdy. He has a little church in a little town down near Pensacola. He's apparently self ordained He was born again before he was sent to prison and he spent a lot of years there and got out and started saving souls, in a little traveling tent show. He's really, really fabulous, Walter. You wouldn't have heard my father when he was young, as I did. But I know you heard Paul, those few years he preached. The Reverend Birdy is crude, but he's got it all. He's very dubious about joining in with us, but John says we really need him. And we thought the best thing to do would be to put him in your hands so you can groom him, knock off the rough edges. That is, if he comes with us."

  "Why do we need him?" Walter asked in a harsh voice.

  "He sounds like some kind of a hooligan to me, a man with no religious background or education."

  She looked at him, and in a fraction of a second she saw a depth of purpose and ambition she had never before recognized. She had thought of him as a pleasant, bumbling, hardworking man. He was a big man, imposing enough, with a mild psoriasis that kept his face and forehead red and slightly scaly. He wore glasses with big black frames. He had big curving white sideburns and a pulpit delivery that could rattle the windows. He could preach a good rousing sermon and bring a reasonable number flocking up to the rail to be saved.

  He was, of course, endlessly and unctuously political, as was his meechy little wife, Alberta, who looked as if she had selected every one of her three or four sedate outfits at a Salvation Army sale. Mary Margaret did not like Alberta, and she had tolerated Walter because she had good uses for him.

  She had huffed upon the flames of what she had thought was a minor streak of ambition, letting him know she was on his side, arranging special sermons in the Tabernacle for him so that he would believe she was furthering his ambition to one day run the Church.

  She had felt she could safely do this because he was no real danger to John Tinker or anyone. There was something in definably hollow about him. The ecclesiastical bombast of his sermons was too patterned, too mannered, his gestures too formal, and too practiced, his very tears too automatic. When the old man had been out of sorts, and when John Tinker was traveling, it was Walter who had shared the Tabernacle pulpit with her, and Walter who, in return for that great favor, had worked his head off on the scut work of the Church, making certain they stayed on the air and on cable twenty-four hours of every day in the week.

  With this new awareness of what was behind the facade, Mary Margaret changed direction so rapidly she wondered if he could hear her wheels spinning.

  "Well yes, of course, he is a bit of a barbarian, Walter dear, but we decided that with you to teach him how to give a decent sermon, we would have a very useful stand-in."

  ' "Stand-in?" he said blankly.

  "Someone to help us out! Someone to help you and me, so that John Tinker will be free to attend some international meetings he has his heart set on. And in any case, if he proves to be impossible, you will just have to help us find someone else."

  Though his eyes looked uneasy behind the thick lenses, she sensed she had relaxed him a little and lessened his alarm. She vowed she would be more careful with him in the future. She wondered if it was that desolate little Alberta pushing him from behind, keeping him dissatisfied with his lot. If they'd had any kids, all that ambition could've been focused on them instead of on Walter.

  "It might be a good idea if John Tinker had a nice long rest," Walter said.

  She frowned at him, thinking this an uncharacteristic boldness.

  "What would make you say that?"

  "I would say, from observing him, that he no longer takes the great joy in his calling that he once did."

  "There is a lot of responsibility involved in running a multimillion-dollar enterprise. My brother has a lot to think about."

  "I'm sure he does. And I'm sure he wishes he could lead a more private life. They know his face in every city in the land. I get a little of that, of course. But not the way he does." He shrugged.

  "I look like too many other overweight middle-aged men."

  "Walter, you are a very distinguished-looking man, and we are all proud of you and the job you're doing. And if Tom Birdy agrees to join us, we will count on you to take him under your wing. Okay?"

  "Of course, Mary M. There's nothing you could ask me that I wouldn't try to do as well as I possibly can. When will I know?"

  "I hope by the time you get back here Sunday. Get in touch with me." She turned in the doorway and looked back at him.

  "If you heard it, you know that John Tinker preached beautifully on Sunday."

  "I heard it. It was very good. Very. It's too bad we don't often hear him do as well."

  She looked at him for a long moment, wondering if he should be brought to task for a minor impertinence, and then decided against it. Walter had always slipped his little knife into Johnny whenever he had a chance. She shrugged, smiled, waved her small pink hand and left.

  On that Friday he walked home with every intention of telling Alberta about this new development. But as he walked and thought, the closer he got to his house, the more unpleasant the idea became. She would take it the wrong way. And so he told her the morning had been uneventful.

  It had been a mistake mentioning to her his intention to talk to the magazine woman, but at least he'd had those second thoughts about mentioning the tapes and photographs Erskine had gotten for him, documenting John Tinker's wickedness with Molly Wintergarten. He shivered as he thought of how many times he had come close to telling her about the materials and how he had planned to use them. He had even thought at times of showing her one or two of the most explicit photographs just to see her stunned by the shock of it. They had always been open with each other. When you were writing a sermon and you suddenly thought of some interesting departure, you could go back to the first part of it and take out what did not conform to the new idea. But life was written day by day and hour by hour, with no way to go back and change any part of it. The moving finger writes. He decided that it would be a tactical error to try to tell the new woman from that magazine about the diversions enjoyed by John Tinker Meadows. There are times when you want to leave the moving finger with nothing at all to write.

  He looked across at his wife as she ate her lunch, reading from a book as she ate. He had never liked watching her chew.

  She moved her under jaw a little bit from side to side as well as up and down. A strand of mouse-gray hair hung down on her forehead. Without looking up from her book, she stuck her underlip out and blew the hair away. The sharp exhalation ejected a tiny green piece of chewed lettuce. He watched it throughout its arc and fall. It landed next to the salt, which she would use and he could not. He got up abruptly and told her he was going for a little walk around the area before heading for the office. She nodded absently and turned back to her book.

  Two blocks from his house a pair of Angels passed him, arms locked, giggling. Blue skirts, white blouses, sensible shoes, bright hair bobbing at the napes of their necks. He lengthened his stride to keep them in view longer, to watch the flex of their smooth calves, the pretty swing of their young hips. He thought of Joe Deets with hatred and a despa
iring envy. The beast was always there, just below the surface. That lust in the heart, which Jimmy Carter had admitted. The mind made its foul and secret images, leafing through them at such bewildering speed, it was as though it would be unbearable to dwell upon such grotesque perversions too clearly or at too great length.

  The mind could not be restrained from working its foul inventions involving a thousand mouths, a great wetness, the aching spasms. But in time, little by little, he could bring himself back from the edge of the pit. The Angels were out of sight, around a distant corner and beyond the tall hedge. The last of the fragrances of their bodies and hair had drifted away on the slow movement of the heated air, and he forced himself to think of gray stones, bones breaking, iron fists of images as far from the soft warmth of young flesh as possible reining himself in with a hard and steady pressure.