The Distant Echo of a Bright Sunny Day

by Patrick O'Brien

  Without another word, going down the hallway, Heidi turned and left the room.

  He sat on the bed a moment longer, then got up to use the bathroom. When he came back, he got into the empty bed and turned out the light.

  24

  Sister John of the Cross entered the oak-paneled vestibule, with its painting of Jan van Eyck’s Rolin Madonna on one wall, above an elegant settee covered with a navy blue Jacquard, and Fra Angelo’s The Annunciation on the opposite wall. With her hands folded together at her waist, she smiled graciously and told Jody that Father Mallory could see her now.

  “He’s been on the phone all morning with poor Mrs. Romano, the one whose son was involved in that murder case. You may have seen it in the paper. It was such a tragedy, the poor dear.”

  “I don’t think I saw it.”

  The two women walked down a hallway on the first floor of the rectory. A thick, blood-red Persian carpet, interwoven with scenes of lush green and yellow flower gardens, muted their footsteps. An elegant shaded lamp, resting on a Chippendale hallway table polished to a high sheen, created a subdued ambiance reminiscent of lit votary candles casting a soft glow in the side chapel of a large church. A glimmer of daylight shone beneath the handcrafted African mahogany door to Father Mallory’s office.

  Sister John knocked lightly.

  “Entrez vous, entrez!” Father Mallory called out from the other side

  Smiling, Sister John opened the door and allowed Jody to pass by.

  Father Mallory was sitting in a leather armchair behind a large, European-styled cherry-wood desk in a room with a high ceiling and oaken bookcases on either side. Behind him, situated between two curtained windows, an alabaster statue of the Virgin Mary, her arms spread in welcoming supplication, stood on an Italian marble pedestal. Lorenzo Lotto’s painting Christ and the Adulteress hung on the back wall, on one side of the room, and El Greco’s Holy Trinity on the other. A nine-by-twelve powder-blue Oriental rug, with a white border and gold flower petal designs, covered the floor.

  Father Mallory stood up. “Jody, this is indeed a nice surprise. Please sit down.”

  Jody took one of the two leather visitor chairs in front of the desk; Father Mallory resumed his seat.

  “So, what brings our young atheist friend into Our Lord’s humble abode?”

  “I need to talk, Father…”

  “A necessary urge that we all possess to a greater or lesser degree, and thankfully in some cases to a lesser degree. But I’m here to listen, Jody, as a friend and in any other capacity. What is on your mind?”

  “I’d like to make a confession, Father.”

  “Ooh—well, this is a surprise, indeed! But—”

  “Please don’t make it difficult for me, Father. It took a certain amount of courage for me to come here at all.”

  “I have no intention of making it difficult, Jody. On the contrary, I’m only wondering if you want to make this a formal confession or if you only want to unburden yourself. Either way, I’m here to listen, to counsel, and, if necessary, to administer God’s forgiveness. But, please, continue.”

  “I’m not really sure how to begin, Father. It’s been so long, you know, and I would like to skip the rote aspects of it. Nevertheless, I’d prefer you to regard it as an official confession.”

  “I can do that, Jody, of course. That, after all, is my primary role as a priest and as a servant of God. But why don’t you just begin by telling me what it is that’s bothering you?”

  The invitation to begin came from a man she trusted implicitly. Their relationship spanned the years since she had been a junior at St. Mary’s Academy for Girls. He had been a newly ordained priest at that time, young, full of enthusiasm, and eager to be of service to others. Intuitively, she had recognized his essential goodness, and responding to it had allowed him to become her confessor. In this capacity he had become privy, on more than one occasion, to her innermost thoughts, fears, and feelings. In a word, he had had the opportunity to look into her soul. Inevitably, and as such things happen, perforce of the comfort and consolation she derived from the sessions in the form of office visits, walks together through shaded gardens on sunny days, or from the more formal act of kneeling before him in the intimate darkness of the confessional, she had nurtured a bond that had survived the vicissitudes of the intervening years.

  College had come and gone, political activities had followed; agnostic, atheistic impulses had besieged her faith, casting into doubt all the precepts drummed into her by a small army of nuns and priests almost from the time of infancy; and then of course the wider world, with all its injustice, unfairness, and tribulation, had presented itself to her like a ripe piece of fruit about to fall from a tree. The cultural shock of discovering the chasm between what, for so many years, she had been taught to believe and the seemingly greater, more substantial reality of life beyond the sheltering confines of twelve years of religious indoctrination had brought about a profound change in who she was and how she regarded the world. Nonetheless, through it all, this middle-aged priest, with ironic but kindly eyes, had remained a fixture in her life—without a doubt, someone to whom she could always turn.

  Prior to coming, Jody had rehearsed all that she intended to say, and the script had been as clear in her mind as that memorized for a role in a stage play. The visit had a definite purpose and one that she had resolved to follow through with. But now she faltered.

  “Uh…it’s about something that…uh—well, I have to, uh…”

  Father Mallory saw that she needed prompting. “Go on, Jody, please. I’m here to listen and to help, and by no means to judge. What is it? Just say it out.”

  She took a deep breath and began again.

  “Uh, one of the members of our group died in an accident the other night, though it was not exactly an accident. It could have been avoided. I mean, it didn’t have to happen at all. And it only did happen because…”

  Her narration of the events of that night required as much time as she might have spent discussing a problem of some complexity in the sanctuary of the confessional. Briefly, she spoke of the group’s underlying rationale for the activity in the first place—a consciousness-raising tactic. She quickly told of how Carlos used the bulldozer to dislodge the framework of the condominium, then related how, acting on the spur of the moment, Whit had jumped onto the track, only to be tumbled onto his head. Only when she came to the last part did she again hesitate.

  “You see, Father—well, we just didn’t know how to handle it. It wasn’t like, uh, you know—like we could call the police and say there’s been an accident. We would’ve been, you know, incriminating ourselves. Do you see what I mean? Do you understand?”

  As so often before, when listening to the recitation of a human failing, he listened now. Through hundreds of hours, through years past, he had heard stories of incest, thievery, jealousy, greed, adultery, and so on; he had even been privy to one or two deathbed confessions of murder. He knew the gamut of human weakness, knew it so well that he had become a bit jaded. He no longer had the capacity to be surprised or shocked by whatever secret might be revealed in the privacy of the confessional. He had reached a point, he supposed, where he could sit quietly in the crepuscular darkness and listen to the earnest litany of another’s moral and ethical lapses without being fully engaged in a feeling of pastoral solicitude. His responses were not necessarily automatic and devoid of genuine sympathy and compassion, but they sometimes came with the practiced facility of a stage actor’s dialogue, and in his heart of hearts he sometimes discerned a creeping indifference.

  Still, for all that, though he comprehended the group’s predicament as outlined by Jody, he felt more than unusually distressed by this particular confession. “What you’re telling me, Jody, is that you just went off and left the poor fellow. Is that right?”

  “The fall crushed his skull, Father. There was no sign of life. He must have died instantly.”

  Father Mallory pursed his lips and br
ought his fingers together teepee-fashion. Turning in his chair, he looked out the window.

  Across the street, in the schoolyard playground, a group of school-children in their black and white uniforms played tether-ball, jumped rope, swung on crossbars, teeter-tottered, or, yelling and screaming, simply ran around in the fall sunshine. Sister Immaculata, a pretty, young novitiate, stood in attendance off to the side. Father Kennedy, a freshly ordained priest, had just joined her.

  Not intending to be cynical, Father Mallory wanted to dismiss the thought that had crossed his mind several times since Father Kennedy had taken up priestly duties at the diocesan headquarters. He did not want to prejudge the man and his behavior. But it seemed evident that the young priest’s attention to Sister Immaculata went beyond the call of friendly intercourse.

  For one thing, he seldom failed to be outside during recess, when she was the prefect. And on two different occasions Father Mallory had come upon the two of them in the church vestibule, after the church had been locked up for the day. That they were alone together, when no one else was about, had been explained away as a coincidental meeting preceded by custodial attention to the church proper. With characteristic joviality, Father Kennedy had remarked both times that God had brought him and Sister Immaculata together to clear the pews of anything left behind by a parishioner, to refill the holy water fount, or to tidy up the restrooms as an object lesson in humility. “The mundane is as equally important as the spiritual,” he had quipped, “and we newcomers to God’s calling have to be reminded of that every so often. In that respect, Sister and I are part of the same support group, aren’t we, Sister?”

  But Father Mallory had wondered.

  He turned back to Jody. “But surely you’ve told someone by now, haven’t you?”

  “I think the police found him, Father…it was on the news a couple of days ago.”

  Father Mallory sighed. “Well, at least it’s been done. But what of his family? Did you happen to know them?”

  “By hearsay only. He was from Burns, I think, and the only time he ever talked about family was to say he’d been raised in a small-town environment. To put it bluntly, he was actually ashamed of where he was from, and that included his family.”

  “More’s the pity.” Father Mallory sighed again. “But it’s a real tragedy all around. It’s a tragedy that it happened and a tragedy that you have to live with it. And that’s not to mention that he was a man of some promise, is that right? A poet?”

  “He thought of himself that way, Father, and I suppose he managed to convince others. But I never saw it myself, except as a role he sort of adopted.”

  “Not the real McCoy, is that it?”

  “You could say that, yes.”

  “Well, be that as it may, there is a loss there, and I suppose that you might try to rectify it, in some small way, by at least notifying the family—anonymously, of course. Will you do that, Jody?”

  Jody nodded.

  “Good. Write a letter, perhaps, and try to say as many good things as you can about him. Not that you think he harbored unrealistic expectations about a chosen calling, of course.”

  Jody grinned. “I’ll leave that part out.”

  Father Mallory grinned likewise. “In fact,” he continued, “since it’s expiation and forgiveness that brought you here today, consider this your penance. All right?”

  Jody nodded. “I’ll take care of it.”

  “But promise me this, also, that you will reconsider this dubious course of activity that you’ve set for yourself. As you can plainly see from this unfortunate incident, it can only lead to tragedy. And whether you think so or not, there’s probably another accident out there waiting to happen.”

  “I promise I’ll write the letter, Father.”

  Father Mallory smiled. “That’s only half of the bargain, Jody. What about the other half?”

  Jody smiled. “I promise to give serious thought to reconsidering, Father.”

  Father Mallory tilted his head back and chuckled heartily. “I feel as though I’m sitting here trying to bargain with the devil. You can do better than that, can’t you?”

  “I give you my word that I will,” she replied, and they both laughed.

  Father Mallory stood up. “Well, my dear girl, I suppose I can’t do better than that. But, come, I’ll walk you out. I have a baptism to perform this afternoon at St. Gregory’s, and as it’s a long drive out there, I should be leaving about now. Perhaps if you are free this evening, you will do me the pleasure of joining Sister John and me at the pub?”

  “I think I can do that, Father. I’ll even treat you to a round of beer.”

  “A gesture that will be much appreciated, I’m sure.”

  25

  Charles Coleman sat in a lounge chair in the afternoon sunshine, listening to La Bohème on a portable radio and drinking a bottle of Alaskan Amber Ale. He had set up the chair and a collapsible table in the driveway so as to supervise Lope while he changed the oil in the three cars owned by the Coleman family, not counting Lisa’s Porsche. Mrs. Coleman ordinarily drove an older Mercedes roadster, while her husband drove a new Cadillac Seville. The third car was a 1956 Chrysler station wagon with real wood paneling on the sides and oversize whitewall tires; Mr. Coleman used it for bird hunting trips to eastern Oregon.

  The idea to change the oil himself, rather than let a mechanic do it, had come to him as an inspiration and in concert with a Reader’s Digest article on the subject of self-sufficiency. According to the article, Americans had become too reliant on the service of others for tasks that could be easily performed at home: if they performed more of those tasks themselves, the effort would rekindle a spirit of independence that had, over time, atrophied because of soft living habits. The article did not specifically mention changing one’s oil as an example of how that spirit could be revived, but Charles Coleman decided that changing his oil would do as well as anything.

  Stretching his legs out and leaning his head back so as to allow the full effect of the sun on his face, he savored momentarily this new sense of himself as a man of virtue. So pleased, in fact, was he with this new image of himself that it occurred to him to have Lope do all the yard work from now on, rather than use the services of a landscaping company. Lope was an excellent worker, and letting him assume the task was almost the same as keeping it within the family. What could be more self-sufficient than that?

  The sound of Lisa’s Porsche leaving the street below caused him to open his eyes. Listening as it came up the long, winding drive to the house, he wondered if she, too, might like to be part of this new resolve to fend for oneself. As an only child, her opportunities to become self-sufficient had been blunted by parents who wanted their daughter to have everything. Even the summer camps they had sent her to, intended as they were to expose her to rigor and hardship, had made little impression on her character. As much as he loved her, he had to admit that the privileged life they had given her had not instilled the kind of self-reliant attitude he now deemed so apropos. He had yet to impart sacrificing convenience for the sake of developing inner strength as one of life’s enduring values. But, starting now, he would change all that.

  “Lope!”

  Lope slid out from under the Chrysler. “Si, señor?”

  “Cambia el petroleo por el carro de mi hija tambien, por favor. Comprende?”

  “Si, señor.”

  “Ella esta aqui ahora.”

  Lisa parked the Porsche next to the Chrysler. She had taken the top down, and Mitch was with her. “Hi, Daddy!” she called out, waving.

  She and Mitch got out of the car and, hand in hand, they walked up to Mr. Coleman.

  “Daddy, this is Mitch. He’s a writer. He’s going to write about the hardship encountered by so many Mexican workers living in the migrant camps. We’re all pretty excited.”

  Mr. Coleman rose partway out of his seat to shake hands with Lisa’s young man.

  “Delighted, my boy, I’m sure!” he said with a
n affable smile. “And a wonderful thing, that, being a writer. But, speaking of hardship, Lisa, starting today, we’re going to be changing our own oil. So, anytime you need your oil changed, I want you to bring your car up here and let Lope do it. I’ve decided I want to become more self-sufficient. And that’s only the beginning. I have other things in mind. Perhaps solar panels on the roof of the house. I may even have a well dug.”

  “Oh, Daddy, that’s a wonderful idea!” Lisa said and gave him a big kiss on the cheek. “Don’t you think so, Mitch?”

  “Oh, absolutely. Very much in keeping with the spirit of the times.”

  Encouraged by the response, Mr. Coleman continued: “Indeed, if I may be so bold as to expound a bit, I think what we have lost in this country is the pioneering spirit. Back in the old days, before the advent of modern life, people took a chance. They went off into the wilderness and carved out a little homestead for themselves. They set up shop and made do with what they had. And what they didn’t have, they either made themselves or they did without. There were no 7-Elevens or Home Depots they could run to every time they ran out of milk or needed to fix the roof. They had to learn to do it all on their own—they had to learn to be self-sufficient. And that’s what we have to do…starting right now.”

  He called out again to Lope: “Lope, empieza cambiar el petroleo por la señorita ahora, por favor.”

  “Daddy, I just had it changed last week. It’s too soon.”

  “You did?”

  “Yes. I had our mechanic do it.”

  “Oh—I see…Well, in that case—but that’s exactly my point…next time, bring it up here and we’ll do it ourselves.”

  “Lope, olvida lo que te diga. No cambia el petroleo por la señorita Lisa. La proxima vez.”

  “No, señor?”

  “Si, no.”

  “Okay.”

  “Wonderful man, that. So many of them come from peasant stock, you know. Hardworking and honest, totally reliable. I’m thinking about having him do all the gardening from now on…one more way to wean ourselves from letting others do things for us.”