Prodigal Father

by Ralph McInerny

  “Serfs,” Michael had said, shocking his grandfather and getting a belt on the ear from his father.

  The sense that he and his family were part of the property persisted until he saw it all as Rita did, she of the dark flashing eyes and firm, trim body who had been unable to conceal her envy at the way Michael and his family lived.

  “We head the maintenance crew,” he said.

  “And you should thank God for it.” The lodge was mansion enough for her. Had she already formed the dream of living here? Michael had grown up scheming on how to escape his humbling heritage. At school, he had been identified with the estate. It was difficult to see their situation as demeaning, the way they were treated by Boniface and the other Athanasians. It was because of Boniface that he had passed three years following the course of the minor seminary, learning Latin and Greek and the great works of literature until he rebelled and was permitted to attend the local high school in his senior year. That was where he had met Rita. It was as if there was a plan laid down for his life and all he had to do was enact it. After years of language, he had put his mind to failing at Spanish.

  “I’ll tutor you,” Rita had said, in Spanish, a species of Spanish, one that had crossed the Rio Grande with her family and then traveled north to Illinois where they settled, sending money home to their extended family near Guadalajara. He nodded.

  “You understood me.”

  “You speak so clearly.” Small white teeth peeked out beneath the upper lip, resting between outbursts on the plush lower lip he longed to touch with his own.

  Rita had reminded his father of the immigrants who had always proved so undependable when he hired them onto the crew, but her deferential manner, her virginal composure, soon won over his parents.

  “She is a good girl,” his father said, and it might have been a warning.

  He saw the estate and his home with her eyes and, compared with the modest rented home in which her family lived, it did seem palatial. Her father called him hidalgo with a smile that showed his goldedged incisors.

  “And this is where you’ll live?” Rita mused.

  “Of course.”

  “I would live with you in a hut,” she said with more fervor now that it was clear that no hut awaited them if, as Michael insisted, they married.

  “Not for years,” his father said.

  “Now. After we graduate.”

  “You’re nineteen years old.”

  “Did you think I have to go to college in order to learn how to work with you?”

  The point was taken. Boniface had remained unenthusiastic.

  “I thought you might have a vocation.”

  “We’re not Catholics, Father.”

  “Greek Catholics.”

  “Orthodox.”

  Their priest had told them the difference, insistently, considering where they lived and who they worked for. He came to see Boniface, ready for war, but the result was a truce.

  “He is a good man,” Father Maximilian said.

  “They all are.”

  “I know only him. But you must be faithful to your own religion.”

  That would have been no problem if it hadn’t been for Rita. She came with him to his church one Sunday and was put with the other women, wearing her mantilla, following it all with wary curiosity.

  “When did the Mass part happen? I didn’t understand it at all.”

  Michael could not explain it to her. His own understanding of the Orthodox liturgy was imperfect. She insisted that they must marry before her priest.

  “If you’re serious,” she added.

  He would have repudiated his family for her sake, but he knew his family and the lodge was a large part of the attraction he held for her. He tried to resent this, but found he could not. She seemed to think he was heir to the estate because he could follow in his father’s footsteps, carrying the family tradition into a third generation.

  “You have the touch,” his father said, when he saw what Michael had done with the hibiscus bed. Were such things inherited, passed along like Original Sin from father to son? He instinctively understood the relation between the earth and growing things. It was not a theory, not knowledge in that sense. He had worked beside his father since he was a mere boy, an unconscious apprenticeship, one in which he felt a deep, wordless satisfaction when the various flowers bloomed in sequence from spring through early autumn.

  “Is it okay with your parents, Rita?” He meant their marrying. He had planted things around the Martinez house, the wisteria bringing delighted cries from Mrs. Martinez.

  “It is up to me.”

  “That’s good.”

  “You’re too sure of yourself.”

  Was it possible that he dissembled the fear he had that one day the bubble would burst and Rita would go off with one of the dark-haired young men with the premature mustaches and swaggers that swaggered over nothing?

  “I want to be sure of you.”

  “We’ll see,” she said teasingly.

  “You said yes.”

  “I wasn’t thinking clearly.”

  “Thinking clearly is for strangers. I don’t want you thinking clearly with me.”

  “There are months before graduation.”

  But now it was a week away and still she had not repeated her Yes as she had when her mind was unclear. When he held her she felt fragile, warm, nothing he dared press to himself with the urgency he felt. No talking then, no promises exacted or given, a mute understanding—that was what he had to settle for. He was mad with desire but told himself it was holy. He wanted her as his wife. When he imagined her naked beside him in bed, her warm brown body in his arms, his thoughts were not holy. But it could never happen unless they were married.

  The car was several years old but it was a convertible and the man behind the wheel looked out of place. He was fat and thirty at least and beckoned to Michael to come to the side of the parked car.

  “What do you want?”

  “To talk. You one of the Georges?”

  “Is that why you stopped?”

  “It is. It is. You work on the Corbett estate.”

  “It hasn’t been that for years.”

  “My grandfather built it.”

  “Yeah?”

  “He’s the one who gave it away.”

  “My grandfather worked for him.”

  “There. See how much we have in common?”

  They had nothing in common, Michael saw that at a glance. Sweat stood out on the broad, pasty forehead, and the eyes were small and bloodshot.

  “You want to look around just go in the driveway. No one will stop you.”

  “I have your permission?” Spoken with a snarl, but then he tried to smile again.

  “Go to hell,” Michael said.

  That was the first time. In the following weeks, he saw the car several other times. Once the guy did come up the drive, but he kept the car moving, never stopped or got out. Michael was in the greenhouse where he could watch him without being seen. Why did such a fat, sweaty bastard seem a menace?

  12

  Restore us, O God of our salvation, and cause your anger toward us to cease.

  —Psalm 85

  Being snubbed by the son of the gardener on his grandfather’s estate was only the latest in a string of humiliations and disappointments that had defined Leo Corbett’s life. He was twenty-nine years old and did not amount to a damn as anyone with the right to say so was quick to tell him. He accepted the burden. But he had developed a theory to account for it. He had been robbed of the family patrimony. His idiot of a grandfather had handed over to a bunch of yo-yo priests the estate he had spent so much time building he never himself had the pleasure of enjoying it. His second wife, Leo’s grandmother, died two years after they moved into the house, with work on the west wing still going on. His grandfather developed the irrational conviction that it was the estate that killed her, that the whole vast ostentatious thing was a judgment on him. Leo’s dying grandmother had
told him what to do. The whole thing, kit and caboodle, was deeded over to the Order of St. Athanasius.

  “Who was the lawyer?” Tuttle asked Leo.

  “You wouldn’t know him.” Leo felt contempt for Tuttle as he did for anyone who took him seriously. He had met the little lawyer in a bar near the courthouse where Leo had been trying to get access to the transaction that had put his grandfather’s estate into the hands of the Athanasians. Tuttle had said he could help. Leo gave him a retainer.

  “Who was the lawyer?”

  “Amos Cadbury.”

  “Cadbury!” Tuttle cried, then dramatically clapped a hand over his mouth. His tweed hat was out of season and he wore it low over his eyes as if he feared recognition. Leo had asked him who the other Tuttle in Tuttle and Tuttle was and was told that he would meet him some day. When Leo learned that Tuttle’s partner was his deceased father who had never been a lawyer, he teased him mercilessly. Teasing was the only sure way he knew of establishing superiority, having been on the receiving end of the process often enough.

  “I suppose everyone knows Cadbury.”

  “Not the way I do,” Tuttle said. “I’ve been checking out the transfer. You should have known that only lawyers have access to such records.”

  “What about the Freedom of Information Act?”

  “Nothing’s free,” Tuttle said pointedly. “This is going to take time.”

  “I’m not a bottomless pit of money, Tuttle.”

  “Much depends on what you want to know. And what you intend to do about it.”

  “I just want to know—how much there was.” Leo’s voice broke. This was masochistic, wanting an exact account of the money that was not his. The trouble with dealing with Tuttle was that it was like looking into a mirror.

  His father had called himself an orphan. An annuity had been arranged for him and it supported him during his geological studies and he had been raised by an aunt. Leo’s father was fascinated with rocks, the strata of the earth.

  “It’s all there,” he would say with missionary fervor at table. Leo’s mother drank rosé by the bottle, and drifted through life without registering what was going on. She was provided all the comfort she needed and was impervious to Leo’s efforts to raise resentment in her.

  “Look at the way we live, Mom.”

  She looked around the room that had been furnished out of discount stores. Awful padded couch and matching chairs, a coffee table with a glass top that wore the rings of his mother’s wineglass for weeks before his father wiped them away. Leo left them so his father would know what she did all day. But his father seemed not to care. He had rocks in his head.

  “It’s all there beneath our feet, Leo. The history of the planet, the history of the solar system, more. I was never tempted by archeology. Man is too recent an arrival to matter much, digging up the residue of his past is to barely scrape the surface. Leo, the ages of the earth are still there, recorded in stone, all we have to do is dig it out and read it properly.”

  A man that interested in the zillions of years the earth had been around did not have much enthusiasm left for his own family. If the human race was insignificant, what were his wife and son in the scales of geological time?

  “Tell me about your father.”

  “I never knew him.”

  “Your Aunt Genevieve must have told you about him.”

  “She hated him. They all did. For turning Catholic. Which is odd. They were all Catholics when they came to this country, the Corbetts. I was baptized Catholic myself, but Genevieve wouldn’t let me near a church.”

  “We were married in the courthouse.” His mother’s voice seemed to emerge from one of those remote eras that so fascinated his father.

  “That’s right,” his father said, as if he had need of the reminder.

  One of his Leo’s failures was the effort to become a Catholic to spite his parents. He talked to a priest at the Newman Chapel at the University of Illinois at Fox River.

  “What are you now?”

  “What religion? None.”

  “Your name is Corbett.”

  Leo said yes eagerly, hoping the man would say something of the legendary Maurice Corbett who had made a fortune and become a benefactor of the Church he had joined.

  “That’s Irish, isn’t it?”

  “I guess so.”

  “You from Belfast or something?”

  Were the Corbetts kings in Belfast? “Why do you ask?”

  “With that name I assumed you were Catholic.”

  Here was a new line of thought. His grandfather had returned to the faith of his fathers. Was Catholicism too part of his lost patrimony? Leo found this confusing. As misfortune piled on misfortune, he had taught himself to point the accusing finger at a rapacious Church that had taken advantage of an old man in his hour of grief. The truth was that Leo was well on the way to seeing himself the victim of unknown forces before he developed any interest in his grandfather. His father, groveling in rocks and dust, of the earth earthy, never spoke of his father and Leo had learned almost by accident that he was the descendant of one of the wealthiest men in northern Illinois. The Corbett museum in Fox River was not just an odd coincidence of nomenclature. It had been endowed by his grandfather. Leo stood before the huge oil painting of the benefactor in the lobby of the museum and sought in it traces of his father and of himself. But it was impossible to see in the lineaments of that complacent Croesus any semblance of his father’s vague precision, the half-open mouth always ready to lecture his son on the formation of the planet. He had gained access, if not to rocks brought back to the moon, to everything written about it.

  “So it is true,” he had cried, as if Leo and his mother represented intransigent opposition to a theory of which they knew nothing. A meteor had sliced through the earth, sending a great chunk into orbit around it. “The moon! Daughter of the earth.”

  His father had trembled with enthusiasm. He had never shown similar pride in his personal pedigree. Leo could not begin to imagine his parents begetting him, but he was not tempted by the usual adolescent fantasy of having been left on their doorstep. That was no more probable than that he had been found under a cabbage leaf. In any case, his father would have stepped absentmindedly over the bundle on his way to the university museum. Approaching fifty, his father was still a candidate for the doctorate at the University of Chicago. He had so lost himself in the pursuit of truth that he had neglected the requisite exams. He was not even an ABD, one who had completed all requirements but the dissertation. His father remained enrolled as a part-time student, thirty years after matriculating, thus having access to the library and the student union.

  “How do we live?” a confused Leo had asked his mother.

  “On the annuity.” She emerged from vagueness to pronounce the word as if it were a verbal talisman.

  “What annuity?”

  “Your father’s inheritance.”

  “From whom?”

  She thought he was being irreverent. That her son should not share her memories, know what she knew, was incomprehensible to her. But somehow, Leo extracted the bare bones of the story from her. He was the grandson of the great Maurice Corbett, dead when Leo’s father, Matthew, was a child and anathema to the aunt who had taken him in as the daughter of pharaoh had rescued the Israelite baby from abandonment. Leo had acquired from his father an interest in the Bible; for his father it was an unwitting source book of clues about the past. The flood? Of course there had been a flood. How else could fossils be found thousands of feet above sea level, embedded in mountains? The ostensible purpose of the narrative of all those different books did not detain his father, but Leo pored over those accounts. He went into exile in Israel, leaving his father behind with Moses as he entered the promised land. He had fed on the manna of Scripture as a child, had been fascinated with David and Saul, had triumphed over Goliath, had read uncomprehendingly of the fragilities of the flesh. On the flyleaf of the Bible, unaccountably the King James ve
rsion, was written in narrow strokes his grandmother’s name. Priscilla Walsh Corbett. Leo passed his fingers lightly over the signature. He lowered his dry lips to it. He felt closer to the grandmother he had never seen, never heard tell of, than he did to his own parents.

  He and his father became fellow students at the University of Chicago, where Leo read widely, developed the mandatory arrogance of the Chicago undergraduate, became contemptuous of the uncultivated masses, and flunked out. He took a job in the university library, a menial who returned books to their appropriate locations on the shelves. But he could not get through a day without hearing his father in whispered argument with some librarian or professor, or seeing him huddled over his books in the great reading room, his mounting years as nothing compared to the ages of the earth. Leo quit, he took a job with a fraudulent enterprise dedicated to placing encyclopedias in the homes of the illiterate, bought on installment plans beyond the dreams of usury. He was now a clerk in the pro shop of the Fox River Country Club in whose dining room another portrait of Leo’s paternal grandparent was hung, smiling benevolently over the diners. And there was a plaque in the golf shop commemorating a hole in one by the great man, as a result of which he had settled a special fund on the golf shop in honor of the pro who had given him golfing instructions. Leo waited in vain for the current pro, Barfield, to notice the similarity of names.

  One thing became clear. His grandfather had early acquired the habit of scattering his wealth far and wide. The museum and the country club were among the beneficiaries of his munificence during his first marriage, a fruitless union that did not interest Leo. Grandfather Corbett’s penchant had merely been redirected when he married his Catholic wife, became a Catholic himself, begat a son, and, in his bereavement, signed over to the Order of St. Athanasius an estate that eclipsed the country club in acreage and natural beauty.