Ash Wednesday

by Ralph McInerny

  “We don’t want to put you in too high an income bracket,” Father Dowling said.

  “Income tax. I’ve never paid income tax.”

  “Well, you’ll have to start now. But don’t worry about it. Amos Cadbury will take care of it.”

  Herman had his lunch at the parish center but came to the rectory for his evening meal, having it in the kitchen. Father Dowling had wanted Herman to join him in the dining room, and that was one time he appreciated the support of Marie Murkin. Not that she was doing him any favor. Imagine having to serve the janitor at the pastor’s table.

  “Come just after five,” Marie said. “So I can get you out of the way.”

  Poison? Actually, it was a good arrangement. Marie put his meal on the kitchen table and then disappeared, leaving him to himself. If he saw anyone then, it was Father Dowling.

  The rectory was fragrant with pipe smoke. Sometimes strains of music came from the pastor’s study, not Herman’s kind of music, but pleasant as background. Sometimes he thought that Father Dowling enjoyed solitude the way he did.

  The day Marie caught him snoozing in the basement behind the furnace, Father Dowling came into the kitchen while Herman was having his evening meal.

  “Do you mind?” he asked, pulling out a chair and sitting across the table from Herman.

  “Be my guest, said the guest.”

  “Would you like a beer?”

  “Do you have any?” Herman was surprised. His own drinking was a little secret between himself and Miss Solitude. Father Dowling turned without getting up, plucked a bottle of beer from the icebox, and handed it to Herman.

  “So how are you finding things, Herman?”

  Oh-oh. Was this going to be like one of his sessions with Jerome Paxon?

  “Can’t complain, Father.”

  “I suppose it takes a while to get used to the excitement around here.” Father Dowling smiled as he said it. A pause, and then, “You knew Nathaniel Green before, didn’t you?”

  “Only in the way you get to know someone there. I knew who he was. He was the guy who had the beautiful visitor once a month.”

  “Really?”

  Herman was going to go on about the way they all hung around on visiting day for the woman’s arrival, but then he remembered that Father Dowling was a priest. Herman busied himself opening the beer.

  “I suppose you knew the chaplain.”

  Father O’Connell. He was called Barney, after the character in The Flintstones. Herman nodded.

  Father Dowling said, “We were classmates.”

  “At Joliet?”

  Father Dowling had a sense of humor, all right. He tipped back his head and laughed.

  Marie Murkin bustled in the back door and stopped, looking at the pastor and Herman at her kitchen table.

  “Well, this looks cozy.” She was staring at Herman’s bottle of beer.

  Herman lifted it to her in a toast and took a long swig. Marie made a face and busied herself with the dinner she was preparing for the pastor. Father Dowling lit his pipe, and soon the room was a cloud of wonderful pipe smoke. Marie coughed and waved her hand, but if she wasn’t used to the pastor’s pipe she wouldn’t be here.

  Herman hurried up with his meal, chug-a-lugged what was left of the beer, and stood. Father Dowling did, too. He came out on the back porch with Herman. From inside, Marie called, “Now don’t go running off. Dinner’s in fifteen minutes.”

  Later that night, Phil Keegan stopped by. Once he and the pastor were settled in the study, Marie went up the back stairway to her apartment.

  Phil was scowling as he unwrapped a cigar. “You see the paper?”

  Father Dowling knew he was referring to Tetzel’s story on Nathaniel Green. “Tuttle must be pleased. I don’t know about Nathaniel.”

  “Helen Burke wants to sue him.”

  “Tetzel?”

  “No, Tuttle.” Phil got his cigar going, one of the cheap ones by the smell of it.

  “Whatever for?”

  “The new will. Tuttle made it out, and she claims he committed a breach of legal ethics by revealing it.”

  “How did you learn that?”

  “She came downtown, mad as a wet hen. She seemed to think I would hurry out and arrest Tuttle. I suggested she go have a talk with Amos Cadbury.”

  Father Dowling nodded in approval. “Amos will calm her down.”

  “Tuttle is just a target of opportunity.”

  Father Dowling pondered that, drawing meditatively on his pipe. The new will, public or not, certainly put Helen Burke on the spot. The man whose conviction she had wanted, attending every session of the trial, the man whom, after his release from Joliet and appearance at the St. Hilary center, she had ostracized, enlisting the others in her campaign, now turned the other cheek and delivered over to her everything he had in the world.

  It is one of the paradoxes of Christianity that following its maxims can sometimes amount to the sweetest revenge rather than charity. There was a text in St. Paul suggesting that. Turn the other cheek, for another instance. Nathaniel had certainly done that, during the long shunning campaign, accepting it with a meekness that was edifying, unless, of course, his motive had been to infuriate his sister-in-law. Now this public news that he was making his chief tormentor the beneficiary of his will could be an instance of almost heroic virtue, or … It occurred to Father Dowling that the will was a kind of threat, a future rather than a present humiliation for Helen Burke. Still, how was it possible to think of it as the mild Nathaniel Green’s revenge?

  Phil wasn’t interested in such fancy speculation. “Cy is still looking into the death of Florence Green.”

  “What’s the point?”

  “That we don’t have a lot of work at the moment.”

  The idea that Cy Horvath would devote himself to a pointless task rather than loll around the detective division, catch up on paperwork, doing the dozen things daily officialdom called for, seemed out of character and quixotic.

  “Quick what?” Phil scowled. “We gonna watch the game?”

  Spring training had begun, and the Cubs were on in an inter-squad practice game. Sometimes it seemed that all the sports would overlap, football, basketball, hockey, baseball all in one season. The bread and circuses of modern man. Father Dowling was enough of a modern man to tell Phil to turn on the television.

  “Get yourself a beer, Phil.”

  “I’m giving it a rest.”

  “Oh.”

  “Last night I counted up the drinks I’ve had in the past week.” Phil shook his head. “I was drinking at the time. It’s the danger of living alone. I cleared everything out of the apartment. From now on, I only drink in the line of duty.”

  Father Dowling smiled. “I thought that’s when you don’t drink.”

  “That’s what I mean. Look, I’m not taking the pledge or anything.”

  It might have been an allusion to Father Dowling’s own onetime problem with drink. As a member of the archdiocesan marriage court, one of the bright young priests, a doctorate in canon law, apparently destined for higher things, he had become so weighed down with the futile appeals for annulment at a time when they were still more or less unthinkable that he had sought relief in drink. It was solitary drinking that was the real danger, Phil was right about that. Phil stood.

  “Maybe I will have a beer. You want anything?”

  “A Diet Pepsi.”

  Phil made a face and went off to the kitchen. Father Dowling doubted that Phil had any real problem, but he was wise to be careful. In any case, beer in the rectory while he watched television with the pastor was in line with Phil’s apparent resolution.

  “Has Cy come up with anything new?” he asked when Phil was back and settled.

  “He said he’d let me know.”

  That didn’t sound promising.

  The things that stick in your mind. The following day, Father Dowling found himself remembering Herman’s remark about the woman who had visited Nathaniel Green ev
ery month while he was in Joliet. Then he remembered that Madeline, the woman who was helping Edna at the center, was a distant relative of Nathaniel’s. He went down the path to the school, through the former gym, waving and acknowledging greetings, and up the stairs to Edna’s office. As he went up, he met Madeline coming down.

  “Hello, Father.”

  Father Dowling stopped, one hand on the stair railing. “Edna has nothing but good things to say of you, Madeline.”

  She grew flustered. “I wish I could think I deserved it. I do like being here.”

  “You should be on the payroll.”

  “Oh, there’s no need for that.”

  “I suppose that newspaper story has everyone talking.”

  Madeline lifted her eyes. “My Aunt Helen hasn’t been here for several days.”

  “And your uncle?”

  She seemed surprised. “Oh, you mean Nathaniel.”

  “I understood you were his niece.”

  “Oh, nothing so close. My mother married his cousin. I don’t really know what that makes me.”

  “The daughter of Nathaniel’s cousin.”

  “Does that make me his niece?”

  “I have no idea.”

  Madeline started down the stairs, and Father Dowling continued up. Madeline didn’t strike him as the femme fatale who had visited Nathaniel monthly at Joliet according to Herman, but then the pastor was celibate. And he’d never been cooped up in prison, not a thought flattering to Madeline.

  Edna looked up from her desk, and her face broke into a smile. Father Dowling took a chair facing her.

  “Madeline tells me Helen Burke isn’t here.”

  “Not for several days.”

  “And Nathaniel?”

  “Wasn’t he at your noon Mass? He said he was going over there.”

  Had he been? Father Dowling was not in the habit of checking the congregation while he said Mass. In any case, he was now saying Mass ad orientem, facing away from the people, in the way he had said Mass as a young priest. It had come as something of a surprise to see that the rubrics for saying the Novus Ordo assumed that the celebrant was facing away from the congregation, leading them in prayer, addressing God, rather than smiling out at them, seeking eye contact, and checking who was in the pews. Nathaniel had yet to come forward for communion, which was the only way Father Dowling would have known he was in the church.

  “I didn’t notice. How do he and Madeline get along?”

  The realization that two of those who came to the St. Hilary senior center were not just comfortable but well off, rich, caused mixed reaction. That Nathaniel Green, the man they had shunned, possessed the amount of money he was leaving to his sister-in-law Helen Burke brought on sheepish second thoughts from those who had fallen in with Helen’s treatment of her brother-in-law. Who could contest her reason? Nathaniel by his own admission had killed his wife, Florence, Helen’s sister. Not only did he not deny it, he insisted that he was guilty; he was tried and convicted and had spent long years in Joliet. As long as he could be thought of, when he was thought of at all, as a wife killer, there had been little unease. And Nathaniel kept to himself, as often as not reading, either outside the building or in one of the classrooms that lined the main corridor of the school. Now all that had changed.

  Nathaniel’s new will suggested an indifference to money, and that money added to what Helen already had made her a far less sympathetic creature.

  “He hasn’t given it away yet,” Eugene said to Herman.

  “It’s in his will.”

  “He’s probably counting on her going first.”

  Eugene found little sympathy for such cynicism, and he dropped it. Natalie was stunned to learn that her relatives were so wealthy.

  “Your relatives?” Eugene asked.

  “We have the same grandfather. On my mother’s side.”

  Eugene figured that in the end everyone was related to everyone else, if Adam and Eve were indeed the parents of us all. Eugene, at Natalie’s urging, had been visiting Father Dowling, learning about the faith.

  “What stumps me is the Trinity,” Eugene said.

  Father Dowling took his pipe from his mouth. “The Trinity.”

  “I just don’t get it. Three persons, one nature.” He shook his head.

  “No one understands it, Eugene. It’s a mystery. We believe it, not because it makes sense to us, or as if we would have thought of it eventually anyway, but because it was revealed.” The pastor reviewed the scriptural texts that were at the basis of the belief.

  “We acknowledge that mystery every time we make the sign of the cross. You know the words? ‘In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.’” The priest traced a cross on himself as he said the words. Eugene followed suit.

  “Eugene, you don’t have to be a Catholic to come to the center, you know.”

  “Oh, I know that.”

  “What prompted your interest?”

  Eugene dropped his eyes. “Natalie Armstrong.”

  “Ah.” Father Dowling seemed to be waiting for more, but Eugene let it go at that. He wasn’t sure he had made the right choice with Natalie. But how was he supposed to know that Helen Burke was loaded? Relatives. Apparently money didn’t run in the family. From what Natalie had let him know, not really knowing she was, her life suggested a comfortable widowhood and not much more. Not that he was dropping her. That would have been difficult in any case, given how much time the two of them were spending together. It had all been at the center; Eugene had yet to carry his campaign farther afield.

  When he couldn’t get away to Herman’s apartment, Eugene went off to the noon Mass with Natalie. Most of those who came to the center went. Sitting beside Natalie, who knelt and stood and rattled off the prayers, Eugene didn’t know what to make of it. The first time, he had started toward the front at communion time, but Natalie had put a hand on his arm and shaken her head. When she returned, she knelt and put her face in her hands and didn’t stir for minutes.

  The newspaper story made Eugene curious about Nathaniel, and he began to seek the man out, joining him on his bench, lighting a cigarette. It took a while to break the ice, but Eugene got around to telling Nathaniel that he was impressed by his generosity.

  “You can’t take it with you,” Nathaniel said.

  “I suppose you must have thought of spreading it around.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “Well, leaving everything to a woman who really doesn’t need it.”

  “She probably thinks it’s hers anyway.”

  “I would have left something to St. Hilary’s,” Eugene said. “Maybe I will.”

  “Oh, I’ve done that, and there are other relatives who will benefit, but the bulk will go to Helen.”

  “I suppose you’ve got a lot of relatives.”

  “You’d be surprised.”

  Well, Eugene had been surprised, pleasantly, by what Nathaniel had said. Would those other relatives include Natalie? Eugene rose. “I’d better get back to my beloved.”

  “Your beloved?”

  “A manner of speaking. Natalie Armstrong. Do you know her?”

  “Know her? I’m related to her.”

  It was all Eugene could do not to sit down again and ask Nathaniel directly if he had remembered Natalie in his will, but the whole conversation seemed to assure him that Nathaniel had indeed done that. Eugene went off down the path toward the school with a springy step.

  To the imagined strains of “Hail the Conquering Hero,” Tetzel strolled into the pressroom at the courthouse. He sat at his desk, he flicked on his computer, he lit a cigarette, he was ignored. Rebecca went on knitting, looking at him over the rims of her glasses. McGonagle, a storklike teenager from the Fox River High School paper, sat squeezing his pimples as he read the Sun-Times. On a Naugahyde couch, Peanuts Pianone, with a Styrofoam cup of coffee in his meaty hands, stared straight ahead. Tetzel felt his balloon slowly deflate before this indifference.

  H
is story on the return of Nathaniel Green was the talk of the town, certainly of the courthouse. On his way to the pressroom, Tetzel had heard the buzz, was certain he was the cynosure of every eye. He was on top of the world. He had just come from Menteur, his editor.

  “I hardly changed a word, Gerry.”

  This was high praise from Menteur.

  There was actually a ripple of applause when he left the city room. He could have floated to the courthouse, where his sense of having scored a ten-strike with his story was strengthened when Bennie, the blind man who ran the newstand off the lobby, told him he was all sold out.

  “They been buying them by the armfuls.”

  Did he imagine that room was made for him in the elevator, a special deference shown? A little lady in the back of the car was reading his story as they rose. So to the pressroom and this cold and churlish response. Rebecca seemed ready to pounce if he brought up his story. Tetzel was about to ask her if she’d had any responses to her ad in the personals when Tuttle arrived.

  The little lawyer came directly to Tetzel, genuflected, grabbed his hand, kissed it, then, struggling to his feet, swept off his tweed hat, and cried out.

  This story shall the good man teach his son

  And Crispin Crispian shall ne’er go by

  From this day to the ending of the world

  But we in it shall be remembered.

  We few, we happy few, we band of brothers.

  The paper from which he had been reading fluttered from his hand.

  McGonagle, openmouthed, had stood during the recitation.

  “What’s that from?” Rebecca asked.

  “The Internet,” Tuttle replied, not looking at her. “You look dry, Gerry. Do you have time to wet your whistle?”

  Tetzel was on his feet, glad for an excuse to get out of the pressroom.

  “Come on along, Peanuts,” Tuttle said as they left the room.

  To many, the Jury Room, the bar across the street, seemed an extension of the courthouse, integral to its effective operation. Tuttle stepped back, to let Tetzel enter first and be greeted by a standing ovation. Friends, acquaintances, strangers clapped, banged glasses on the table, whistled. Tetzel was all but overcome. By God, this was more like it.