Prodigal Father

by Ralph McInerny

  “Do we have a visitor, Father Boniface?”

  “A man who wants to make a retreat.”

  “And you are letting him stay?”

  How could he tell Richard that he felt the same misgivings about the man as he did about him. “Yes.”

  “And you will lead the retreat?”

  “Now I have two penitents.”

  Richard looked startled, but then he subsided. It was well to remind him that he was still on probation. How quickly he had shaken off the years during which he had lived in the world, married, drifted from the faith as he had from the priesthood. And now, a few months back, he had become a dominant figure in the community. No doubt it spoke well of the community that they had not treated Richard like a pariah, but Boniface almost wished they had. A man should not spend much of life outside the life he had vowed to live and then return as if he had been out for a walk.

  “Where will he stay?”

  “The Georges are putting him up in the lodge.”

  “There are rooms in the mansion.”

  “He’s not a priest. I don’t think he would be comfortable with us.”

  “And maybe vice versa?”

  “Maybe.” Boniface paused. He was about to voice his uneasiness with Sullivan but then decided against it. What a gossip he was becoming. Maybe that was an effect of pastoral work. But he felt he should say more. “A tragic story. He lost his fiancée to cancer and then fell apart. I hope his stay here will help him.”

  The trouble with a bearded man is that it is difficult to know what he is thinking unless you read his eyes and Richard insisted on wearing sunglasses at all hours. A California habit, apparently.

  In the office Boniface noticed that the visitor had left his briefcase there. A handsome item, with initials embossed in gold: S. M. ODD. But it could not belong to anyone but the visitor.

  21

  They reel to and fro, and stagger like a drunken man.

  —Psalm 107

  “If it isn’t a legal matter, why do I need a lawyer?”

  “Do you want your dollar back?”

  Leo looked at him abjectly. “I’m sorry. I know you’ve gone to a great deal of trouble.”

  “Imagine what two dollars would get you.”

  Leo cheered up. Tuttle was inclined to take his side because Hazel thought so little of Leo.

  “Look, Leo. I had a very good session with Amos Cadbury. He is the lawyer that drew up your grandfather’s will.”

  “I know who Amos Cadbury is. I’d like to sue him. I think he’s the one who gave my grandfather all these ideas.”

  Whatever influence Cadbury had had, and no doubt it was a lot, old Corbett had been in a giving mood long before he became Amos Cadbury’s client.

  “I have a better idea.”

  “What?”

  “Meet me at the courthouse tomorrow at ten.”

  “But I have to go to work.”

  “What’s more important to you, having a chance to live like a Corbett or sell a few golf balls? Call in sick.”

  “I’m never sick.”

  “Don’t tell them that.”

  “That’s crazy,” Hazel said when he told her. He had promised himself not to, but how often did he have a stroke of genius?

  “I’m glad you like it.”

  “If your meeting with Cadbury was so successful why would you want to antagonize him like that?”

  “It’s the sort of thing he expects of me.”

  “Maybe you can work as a paralegal when you get disbarred.”

  “I only worry about what will happen to you.”

  Hazel’s expression was one he had never seen before. Her face went utterly blank. Then she burst into tears and ran into the outer office. Geez.

  The pressroom at the courthouse at ten in the morning had the look of an emergency ward, with representatives of the media trying to work off last night’s hangover. Tetzel was banging away at his computer the way some people hit themselves on the head with a hammer.

  “Get lost,” he growled when Tuttle tapped his shoulder. But he stopped typing.

  “Tetzel, this is Leo Corbett.” And Tuttle stepped aside like a magician to show that it was indeed so. Tetzel turned his tormented expression on Leo.

  “So?”

  “Corbett. Leo Corbett. As in filthy rich. The benefactor?”

  It would be too much to say that he had Tetzel’s interest, but the reporter’s disinterest diminished to a degree. The chair Tuttle pulled up made a scraping sound, and Tetzel’s hands went to his head.

  “Don’t do that!”

  “Sorry. Tetzel, you are about to become the toast of Fox River journalism. When you are through those two Watergate guys will be history.”

  “They already are.”

  “Sit down, Leo. And be careful with the chair.”

  Leo had been complaining since they met on the steps of the courthouse, saying that he should be at work. “Gasper, the pro, didn’t believe me, I know he didn’t. I never could lie.”

  “Neither can sleeping dogs.”

  “Huh?”

  “Forget about the golf course. You know what George Eliot said about them. A thousand lost golf balls,” said Tuttle.

  “You mean T. S.”

  “Don’t be vulgar. And remember why we are here.”

  “You haven’t told me.”

  “Come on.”

  But Leo had worn his worried, petulant expression into the press room and it was clear that Tetzel did not find him prepossessing, as he would have put it. The first time he used the word Tuttle thought he was talking about insurance against having the finance company take your car.

  “What crazy idea you got this time, Tuttle?”

  Tetzel glanced at Leo as Tuttle spoke because the object of the conversation kept trying to break in and correct the account his lawyer was giving the reporter. Leo had a weak appreciation of the need to dramatize, select, emphasize, if so jaded a journalist as Tetzel was to show a spark of interest, let alone the enthusiasm with which Tuttle spoke.

  “Why didn’t his daddy leave him no money?”

  “Everything he got stopped when he died.”

  “Money his daddy gave him?”

  “Right. Did he ever work for a living, save anything?” He put this question to Leo, who took umbrage at it.

  “My father was a distinguished geologist.” This was the first time Tuttle had heard Leo speak well of any of his ancestors.

  “Aren’t they paid?”

  Leo made a moue and shut his eyes. When he opened them, he was looking over Tetzel’s head. “My father gave his life to science. The stone marking his grave is one that he himself—”

  “You hear the one about the guy who left his body to science and they refused it?”

  Tuttle got out of the way of the jab Tetzel aimed at his ribs; Hazel was keeping him in training.

  “Tetzel, this young man has been reduced to working at the country club, in the golf shop.”

  “That a year-round job?”

  “I’ve only been there since late March.”

  Tetzel was shaking his head. “It’s all wrong. Tuttle, you have to put him into a soup kitchen, into a shelter for the homeless.”

  He meant as a volunteer. What Tetzel thought the public wanted was the spectacle of an altruistic young man, robbed of his inheritance, devoting himself to helping those even less fortunate than himself.

  “I won’t do it,” Leo announced.

  Tetzel looked at him with interest for the first time. “You wearing contacts or something?”

  “I am not.”

  “Your eyes look glassy.”

  Suddenly the puffy, whining, disinherited creampuff was transformed. He rose and took Tetzel by the lapels and lifted him out of his chair and began to shake him as if he were a doll. The reporter spluttered and cursed and began to kick. Leo dropped him into his chair, Tetzel’s arm hit his keyboard and it clattered to the floor. The computer might have followed if Tuttle hadn�
��t steadied it. Then he turned and stared at his client.

  “Where do you work out?”

  “I run ten miles every morning.” Leo lied. He looked down in every sense at Tetzel. “I’ll take that as an apology.”

  “You’ll take what?” Tetzel had bent over, intending to retrieve his keyboard, but straightened with a great cry, his hand going to his head. He made as if to rise, but Tuttle had only to put a hand on his shoulder to subdue him.

  “Let’s continue.”

  “All right,” Tetzel said, glaring at Leo. “This lethal weapon takes a job in a soup kitchen. I discover him there, with my photographer.” He paused. “If I wrote like that I’d be fired. A photographer will happen to be with me, in search of human interest stories we come upon the grandson of Corbett, how did he end up here? We toy with the idea that he sold all he had and gave to the poor … I like it.”

  “It’s a great idea,” Tuttle agreed.

  So it was that Leo Corbett bade good-bye to the golf shop and the country club and found himself ladling soup into the bowls of shuffling men and women far worse off than himself. Such a spectacle of misfortune did not dull his own sense of the injustice that had been done him, which was just as well, since it was only the utilitarian aspect of his volunteer work that had induced him to take it up. He would wander for some time in this desert of poverty on the understanding that it would lead on to the promised land. His situation had the further advantage that those whom he served did not connect him with the object of the passionate series that soon commenced in the Fox River Tribune, nor did they wonder at the commotion involved in photographing the putative heir behind the food line. They were used to the equivocal concern of the wider society and had lost any egoism that might have objected to being photographed in the most heartrending of attitudes—a grizzled old man, wearing his baseball cap rakishly in reverse, daubing with a piece of bread the last drops from his bowl; a woman gnawing with the only teeth left her the resisting drumstick that had been put upon her tray; a little boy with a bowl who might have been Oliver Twist saying, “More.” It was to the credit of Tetzel’s photographer that these were not posed scenes, but authentically drawn from life as it was lived in and about the soup kitchen where Leo Corbett was depicted as the goodest of Samaritans.

  Tetzel reached deep into his rhetorical resources, the boy with the bowl inspired a Dickensian passion and there was danger, in the second story of his series, that he would go off on a tangent, making the plight of the homeless his theme. But there was art in this. The more undeserving to the suburban eye the objects of Leo’s compassion, the more surely would he engage that of his reader. Had it come to this that the grandchildren of yesterday’s plutocrats were to be found in shelters for the homeless, and who knew for how long Leo would remain on the right side of the food line?

  “If I didn’t know better, I’d think that young whelp was a saint.”

  “Hazel, you have no heart.”

  “Wanna bet?”

  With phase one of his plan well under way, Tuttle called Farniente to his office. His instructions were terse and clear. Tuttle wanted the private investigator to see if there was anything at all unsavory about the Lucases who directed the shelter where Leo was now covering himself with glory.

  “Unsavory?”

  “If I knew what I meant I wouldn’t need you.”

  “That’s true.”

  Call it instinct, call it luck. Glen Lucas and his wife Celia had previously run a day-care center that had come under a cloud. Children had come home with odd stories; Glen Lucas was accused of an excess of loving care to the little girls. He lay down with them at nap time, he held them on his lap until Celia tore his burden from him and cuffed him on the ear. She in her turn showed more than maternal interest in the genitalia of little boys. They were shut down. All this had been in Milwaukee. They migrated south, ingratiated themselves with the local United Fund, and lamented the absence of a homeless shelter in the otherwise progressive community.

  “No peculation?”

  “You mean sheep?” Farniente’s misunderstanding owed something to his residual knowledge of his parents’ native tongue.

  “I mean money. How close an accounting does United Way receive of the operation of the homeless shelter?”

  “Ah.”

  The results were ambiguous, but that was enough for Tetzel. Sometimes it suffices to raise questions. And then hints of improprieties in Milwaukee strengthened suspicion of the Lucases. The director of the United Way, the object of wrath from Planned Parenthood from whom he withheld public funding, acted with dispatch. The shutting down of the shelter added poignancy to the plight of the altruistic young man whose grandfather had shamelessly lavished his wealth on a religious order in decline while his should-be heir had lost even his volunteer position healing the needy and destitute. As to what would now happen to those who had daily come to the shelter, the many who had established all but permanent residence there, Tetzel’s series did not inquire. The victim was Leo Corbett and no other.

  Mention of the Athanasians was by no means a grace note in Tetzel’s account.

  “I’m going after them,” he told Tuttle.

  “Of course.”

  “I warn you, I’m not Catholic.”

  “In my Father’s house there are many mansions,” Tuttle said unctuously.

  “Well, those fathers live in a mansion. They have moved out of the buildings they put up and are all living in Corbett’s mansion!”

  But Tetzel saved his indignation for phase three of Tuttle’s plan. The beneficiaries of Corbett’s wealth were to be depicted as unworthy of it, men ostensibly vowed to poverty living in the lap of luxury because of the foolish sentimentality of an old man in his dotage. The bearded father who provided Tetzel with his most damning quotations was Nathaniel.

  22

  Unless the Lord builds the house, they labor in vain who build it.

  —Psalm 127

  Lars Anderson had started in cement, contracting to replace the sidewalks for which the residents of Fox River were personally responsible. And liable. Broken pavement and pocked surfaces making footing unsure opened the possibility of lawsuits of an annoying kind. Anderson had prospered. There had been a popular tune at the time whose recurrent line was, “Cement mixer, putsy putsy,” and it had become his theme song. A voice was not among the few gifts God had given him, but he sang nonetheless, repeating that line as if it were a mantra. He had been drafted into the Korean War, and ended up in the Sea Bees where construction in its various forms became known to him and suggested his postwar career. Throwing up overnight dozens of temporary dwellings for servicemen inspired him.

  He began small, Roosevelt Heights, put up in a former cornfield two miles outside Aurora. The houses were built on slabs, had no attics, and might have been intended for the Army. But they were inexpensive, convenient, and sold like popcorn. Anderson became the darling of the banks. Loans were his for the asking. With success, he aimed higher. In his middle period, what might have been called the mansard roof phase, he had put up dwellings for dentists and rising young salesmen and teachers. The billboards announcing new sites, as well as the notices in the metropolitan newspapers, called them Bedrooms for Chicago. And white Chicagoans, fleeing the social engineering that was turning the cities of the nation into war zones, snapped up Lars Anderson’s houses. In this third and final phase, he catered to the affluent. He built great brick castles with four-car garages around artificial lakes. The earth was shaped and undulated by bulldozers and, when the carpenters and plumbers and electricians and all the other tradesmen who sang Anderson’s praises moved on to his next site, the bleak setting was transformed overnight—sod was laid, trees planted, ducks set afloat on the lake, and at the entrance to the development, in a castellated building that would house security and control entry, salesmen greeted the prospects, many of whom were moving up from another Anderson settlement.

  A lesser man would have rested on his laurels,
retired to his seaside place in Baja California and watched the waves come in, satisfied with a long and productive life. Anderson was now seventy-one years old. But the juices still flowed in his old veins. He had had open-heart surgery and though some joked that the purpose of the operation had been to see if he had one, he had emerged from it with the sense that his life was beginning anew. For he had acquired enemies as well as grateful (more or less) occupants of his homes. Environmentalists regarded him as a menace. They spoke of the wet lands he had despoiled, how flora and fauna once indigenous to the area had been ruthlessly extinguished by the greed and avarice of Lars Anderson. The great man took little notice of this. He longed to undertake the final and crowning phase of his career. And that required his getting possession of the land occupied by the Athanasians, the erstwhile estate of Maurice Corbett in whom Lars saw a prefiguring of himself.

  Anderson had himself flown by helicopter over the grounds, photographs in abundance had been taken, his architects had presented him with a multitude of plans, he had settled on one. The Corbett mansion would be left untouched. The architecture of this ultimate effort would be inspired by that of the Corbett mansion. Anderson himself intended to take possession of the mansion and thus seal the continuity of his career and Corbett’s. But the Athanasians had reacted to his overtures with horror. They had no intention of selling their property. The satisfaction with which Lars Anderson read the Tetzel series in the Fox River Tribune was immense! His one regret was that he had not thought of the idea himself. He instructed his administrative assistant, a disarmingly petite thirty-year-old named Charlotte, to locate Leo Corbett and bring him to headquarters. Charlotte all but saluted when she went on her mission.

  Charlotte Priebe had been a slattern as an undergraduate at Chicago, a woman of the left, a Green on every day but March 17 when the Chicago River was contaminated and turned into one of the lime drinks Walgreen’s had once been noted for. In an earlier day, she might have become a Communist. There was little left now but environmentalism and antiglobalism. In her senior year, Charlotte was mugged by reality when her father lost his job thanks to a successful campaign in which she had participated. She sat in Rockefeller Chapel one afternoon and reviewed her life. Were bugs and birds and plants and trees more important than her father? In any case, this was a false choice. It was that heretical realization that began her conversion. People were compatible with the environment. Industry was compatible with the environment. She gave her kindred spirits credit for having raised the consciousness of capital. For whatever motive, companies now considered themselves the custodians of the environment in which they located their plants. Of course there were laws and federal agencies. Too many laws, as Charlotte came to think, and agencies run by zealots such as she herself had been. She had her hair shampooed and cut. She began to wear skirts. She made a heroic effort in her senior year, changing her major to economics, fulfilling all the requirements in a marathon effort to retool herself for what she now saw to be the true crusade of the modern world. She began to listen to Rush Limbaugh, albeit with a headset, and laughed aloud to the surprise of fellow passengers on the bus when he spoke of wacko environmentalists. She read with interest and admiration of the career of Lars Anderson and, upon graduation, she presented herself to him and won his heart with a completely sincere recitation of her new creed. He put her in his office, within a year she was his private secretary, now she was his administrative assistant. Among her many assets was the fact that the register of her voice was perfectly audible to his hearing, which had long ago succumbed to the assault of cement mixer, putsy putsy. This was the emissary Lars Anderson sent to Leo Corbett.