The Cardinal

by Henry Morton Robinson

  “What’s the matter with you anyway, Mona?”

  Mona couldn’t have told him, because she didn’t precisely know. She only knew that the organ music and picture had twisted her up into a taut E string yearning for excitement and novelty. She wanted to be taken somewhere (not to Rappaciutti’s) in a rolling limousine; she wanted to sink back into upholstery, or perhaps into the arms of—well, certainly not Emmett Burke—and be helped out at a café where a canopy ran from the curb to the front door. She wanted to be led through a roomful of brilliant and beautiful evening creatures to the edge of a wide dancing floor by a Benny Rampell whom she could never stop loving, no matter how hard she tried.

  Actually she said: “You give me the heebie jeebies, asking all the time. ‘What’s the matter?’ Nothing’s the matter. Everything’s the mat—Oh, let’s get over to Rappaciutti’s. …”

  “Yes, we better go there. They got better banana splits than the Palace, too. That’s what you wanted, wasn’t it … a banana split?”

  Rappaciutti’s was a combined fruit store and ice-cream parlor, with little half booths in the rear. Mount Vesuvius erupted blotchily on your left, and gondolas plied traditionally on your right. As they entered, a player piano with a violin attachment whirled wirily through Dardanella. The booths were filled, so they took a table beside the mechanical violin. Privacy—try and get it, thought Mona. But suppose you did get it, what then? Meanwhile Emmett, luxuriating in the role of free spender, was sounding off to the waiter.

  “Bring us two of the biggest banana splits in the place. Vanilla and strawberry ice cream for me, with lots of goo. What kind’ll you have, Monny?”

  “The same, without the goo.”

  Dreading the silence of Mona’s face, Emmett gazed about the room, spotting acquaintances at every table. A red-haired blade in the furthest booth shouted, “How’d you like that last clinch?” and Emmett shot back, “Eva, burn my shoes!” A general laugh confirmed Emmett’s private opinion that he could be a riot if he set his mind to it. Only Mona’s rigid mouth troubled him. When the sticky sundaes were brought, he ate his hurriedly, scraped the dish, and said with openhanded largeness:

  “Guess I’ll try another. How ’bout you, Mona?”

  “No more for me. Let’s get out of here.”

  The walk home was not a success. Emmett tried hard, but the thing eluded him. Even a skillful, humorous, articulate man would have found Mona difficult, and Emmett Burke was none of these. Down the tree-shaded vista of Maple Street he spoke of the new pool table the K. of C.’s had just installed. Passing lilacs in bloom, he described a tenth-inning rally that the Red Sox had made last Saturday in Cleveland. The blue arc light at the corner of Highland Avenue blinked unpityingly down on a stocky young man trying to explain the bolt action of a Springfield rifle to a slender young woman who was thinking of someone else.

  Crunching up the gravelly walk to the Fermoyle back door, Emmett furtively popped a Sen-Sen into his mouth, in preparation for the goodnight kiss. Mona dreaded the stiff embrace, and yet she wanted to be kissed. Not by Emmett or anyone else in Medford, but by a splendid lover on a wide silk bed—a lover who would not take breathlets or talk eternally about firing pins and K. of C. politics. When he spoke, his conversation would come nearer to herself, the lovely center of romantic imaginings. It would flutter about her on soft wings, strokingly, caressingly, as fantasy lovers should. He would be a master of illusion, himself an illusion, lost now, relinquished forever by her promise to Stephen.

  In the shadow of the back porch, Emmett nerved himself for the climax of the evening. Expectant, long patient, he was about to claim his good-night kiss. As Mona reached down for the key under the doormat, his lavender-scented breath caught her full on the mouth. She took it passively. A fellow deserved something for the money he’d spent and the good time he’d been trying to give you. She heard Celia wheezing asthmatically at the window above them. Love’s young dream? Scarcely. With a strained good night Mona opened the back door and let herself into the kitchen. …

  She heard Emmett shuffling down the gravel walk in dejected perplexity.

  It isn’t his fault … altogether, she thought as she was climbing the back stairs. But it’s no use. I can’t stand it any longer. I can’t marry him.

  She flung her hat down and sat on the edge of her narrow bed. She had tried so hard to follow Stephen’s advice! “Pick out a fine young Catholic and go steady with him,” Stephen had counseled. For more than a year Mona had “gone steady” with Emmett Burke, and now she knew that she hated Emmett and everything else in Medford. Job, Church, family, life in general. “I’ve got to get away from here,” she said to the small oval face in her mirror.

  She rummaged in the top drawer of her bureau for a piece of paper and a pencil stub. Words did not come easily to Mona Fermoyle. She had so few of them. On the piece of paper she scrawled two lines: “Dear Mother and Father, I’m going away. Please don’t try to follow me. Mona.”

  She packed her bag, waited till the house was asleep, then stole down the front stairs, and took the last trolley into Boston.

  MONA’S DISAPPEARANCE was a mortal blow to Din and Celia. At first they put hopeful ads in the papers: “Mona, come home. We are all grieving.” At the end of three months Din took upon himself the shame of reporting her to the police as missing. Novenas were made for her return, but neither the police nor the loving prayers brought her back. Celia waited for the letter that never came; at every footstep in the front hall she would start up from her chair or turn expectantly from her tasks. In the evening Din’s voice and movements, subdued by grief, ended in silent staring at his aftersupper Globe. Even Bernie’s warblings took on a soft melancholy; night after night he rendered pianissimo the theme song of the household:

  The chairs in the parlor all miss you,

  The folks ask me why you don’t call,

  Our whole house is blue,

  They want you, only you,

  But I miss you mo-ost of all.

  “For God’s sake, Bernie, play something more cheerful. What is this, a morgue?” That would be Florrie, barging and nagging more shrewishly than ever. Secretly, she blamed herself for driving Mona from the house, but because open acknowledgment of guilt was impossible, Florrie scourged everyone else, especially Al McManus, with the whip of her own remorse.

  Though she and Al slept in the same bed, Florrie had not spoken to her husband for three months. In a flight of financial wizardry, Al had withdrawn eight hundred dollars from their joint savings account and given it to Ponzi for a quick profit. A week later, Ponzi’s paranoid mansion of finance crashed. But the more dreaded crash came when Florrie landed both physically and verbally on her husband. Locking him in their bedroom, she belabored his cowering body with her feet and fingernails, then let her tongue cut to ribbons all that was left of his manhood. All night long she raged; with morning came a cold, contemptuous silence that she had not broken since.

  As a filial chore Stephen went home on his nights off, but all joy had been squeezed from the visits. His only escape from the gloomy downstairs tensions was in the quiet refuge of Ellen’s room. Here, as if in a sanctuary, Ellen had fortified herself against the assault of illness and the still more harrowing knowledge of family unhappiness. Slowly her strength was coming back; for an hour or two every day she could sit by her window overlooking the fences and rhubarb patches in the back yards of Woodlawn Avenue. But her vision was not outward; prayer and contemplation made her life a sequence of ecstatic stillnesses. In her conversations with Stephen she was cheerful, even optimistic, as tubercular patients often are. She would make brave small plans for the future: visits to neighboring churches when she grew a bit stronger, some laundering of sacristy linens perhaps. No task was too humble if offered in His name.

  Ellen loved poetry and would sometimes read to her priest-brother from the small collection of volumes beside her bed. Donne, Crashaw, and Francis Thompson were her favorites; a flawless critical taste prevented
her from falling into the sentimental errors of “devotional” verse. One evening she stretched her hand across the coverlet and picked up a volume of George Herbert.

  “Do you know Herbert’s The Elixir?” she asked Stephen.

  “I think I do. But read it to me.”

  Ellen read the exquisitely simple poem until she came to these stanzas:

  All may of Thee partake:

  Nothing can be so mean

  Which with this tincture, “for Thy sake,”

  Will not grow bright and clean.

  A servant with this clause

  Makes drudgerie divine;

  Who sweeps a room as for Thy laws

  Makes that and th’ action fine.

  Ellen laid the book down; her eyes, lifted to Stephen’s, were like leaf-brown pools catching the reflection of cloudless skies. “Nothing can be truer than that,” she said.

  “Nothing is,” added Stephen.

  Leaving Ellen that night, he could not help comparing her with Lalage Menton. Both were teeming with dedicated love, but where La-lage’s physical strength enabled her to pour her love fearlessly over humanity, Ellen’s frailty was like a burning glass that focused the rays of divine energy with an intense inwardness. If Lalage reminded him of a glowing monstrance, Ellen was an alabaster vase lighted by an unex-tinguishable flame.

  At the memento of the Mass next morning, Stephen prayed that Ellen’s love might sometime pierce the walls of her room and bring its special illumination to the world of common men.

  GEORGE FERMOYLE’S RETURN from war somewhat lightened the gloom at 47 Woodlawn Avenue. He came out a good-looking Captain with a medal for valor at Château-Thierry, a shrapnel wound under his right collarbone, and some seventeen hundred dollars saved from his military pay. George’s viewpoint on the postwar world was moderately cynical; as he remarked to Stephen: “The brotherhood of man, like the fatherhood of God, is a notion too radical for our age.” Without wasting any time worrying about the future of the world, George took up his law courses again. No more drudgery on the Fish Pier; his savings would easily see him through law school. He spent a couple of hundred dollars fixing up the attic bedroom, bought himself a good armchair, and bent over the lawbooks that were meat and drink to his famished legal mind.

  Some of the best talks Stephen ever had were in George’s attic study. Other than law, politics were George’s main interest. To Wilson’s international idealism George added social and economic ideas quite in advance of the time. A wave of strikes was spreading across the country, and George interpreted them as the opening action in a long struggle between capital and labor.

  “Our national wealth must be more evenly distributed, Stuffy, with the workers getting an ever-increasing share in the form of higher wages. Imagine it! Steelworkers in Pittsburgh are getting only twenty dollars for a seventy-hour week. I don’t want to sound like a Socialist, but doesn’t it seem that America’s potentialities are being selfishly exploited for the benefit of a few rich men?”

  “You sound like Leo XIII’s social encyclicals,” said Stephen. “If you want to find chapter and verse for everything you’ve just said, read Leo’s Rerum novarum, written in 1891.”

  “Find me a copy in English,” said George. “The trouble with you churchly oysters is that your pearls are always in polished Latin.”

  Then George would puff at a bo’sun pipe, and urge his priest-brother to implement with action the social theories of the Church. The argument might go on till midnight, but always across the fascinating themes of law, religion, and social reconstruction fell shadows of the grief hovering over the Fermoyle household. Invariably the sessions ended with talk of Mona.

  “Are you satisfied that we’re doing all we can to find her?” asked Stephen one night.

  “I don’t quite know, Stuffy.” George tamped a fresh load of Burley into his pipe. “Sometimes I think we ought to take a more positive line of action. The police aren’t really interested in these missing-persons cases. Perhaps we should go after Mona with private detectives. They’re a rum-dum lot, but sometimes they get results.”

  “That would run into money, wouldn’t it?”

  “A minimum of twenty dollars a day, plus expenses. …”

  Stephen shook his head. “No one in this family could afford that kind of thing.”

  George fingered the buckram cover of Wharton’s Bills and Notes. “I could, Stuffy. You see, I saved most of my pay for three years. I’ve still got almost fifteen hundred dollars in cash.”

  “But that money must see you through law school.”

  “I could go back to my old job on the Fish Pier. And I’d do it in a minute, Stuff, if it would put the skip in Celia’s step and the roar in Din’s voice again.”

  All for love, thought Stephen. “We couldn’t ask you to spend your money that way, George. It might be as useless as throwing it out the window.”

  “I’ve got a hunch it wouldn’t be, Stuffy. I’ll look into it anyway.”

  At noon the next day, George Fermoyle was engaging the confidential ear of Lloyd C. Brumbaugh, proprietor of the Acme Detective Agency. The shell of Mr. Brumbaugh’s ear was as bloodless and hard as any clam dug in the flats of his native Cape Cod, but he was an experienced operator and knew exactly what questions to ask. Weight, height, color of hair, eyes, complexion, and the etceteras of Mona’s anatomy; her men friends, favorite forms of recreation, out-of-town acquaintances—the whole story was jotted down on Mr. Brumbaugh’s pad.

  “Acme investigators will begin looking for your sister at once, Mr. Fermoyle. Naturally, I can guarantee nothing—but we have our methods. The fee will be six hundred a month, payable in advance.”

  From his wallet George drew six one-hundred-dollar bills, handed them to Mr. Brumbaugh. A month passed. No trace of Mona. George paid out another six hundred. He was back at his old job on the Fish Pier now, working all day, attending law classes at night. Toward the end of the second month he got a letter from the Acme Detective Agency, and rang Stephen at once.

  “News, Stuffy! Brumbaugh thinks he’s located her.”

  “Where?”

  “In Wilkes-Barre. Meet me in front of the B. U. Law School at ten tonight. I’ll give you the details.”

  Shortly after ten P.M. the brothers Fermoyle were sitting in a one-arm lunchroom on Boylston Street. Stephen read the typewritten report of the Acme Agency:

  Our operative has located a young woman who fits the description of Mona Fermoyle in all but one detail. Age twenty-one or thereabouts; height 5 ft. 6 in., weight approx. 118 pounds, dark blue eyes, fair complexion. The single point of difference is color of hair. This woman has blond hair, which could easily be caused by bleaching.

  Stephen remembered Mona’s desire for golden hair, wistfully expressed on the day of his return from Rome; Brumbaugh was probably right. Stephen raced on:

  The person located by us is traveling under name of Margo LaVarre, and is accompanied by a Spanish-type male, early thirties, known as Ramón Gongaro. Sometimes claims to be a medical doctor, but earns living as a professional dancer. Billed as Gongaro and LaVarre, this man and your sister gave exhibitions of ballroom dancing in small towns on the dime-a-dance circuit. Have worked recently in Newport News, Wilmington, Wheeling, Scranton, and Altoona. Appeared two nights last week in Wilkes-Barre. Present whereabouts uncertain, but will probably show up in New Jersey or New York.

  Please advise us as to course of action, and kindly remit check for $600 for development of further information.

  Sincerely yours,

  P. K. BRUMBAUGH

  P.S. If desired, charges might be brought against Gongaro for violation of Mann Act.

  The sheer ugliness of the business! Stephen looked across the table at George sipping his coffee. There was only one thing to be said, and George said it.

  “Just when we locate her, the money runs out.” He slid his bankbook across the table. “There’s only two hundred dollars left, Steve. Do you suppose Florrie would pitch in
with four hundred more?”

  Stephen stirred his coffee despondently. “I’d hate to ask her, George. There was always a bickering between Florrie and Mona. And after that Ponzi episode I don’t think Florrie’s in the mood to hand out any cash.”

  “She couldn’t do any worse than refuse.”

  “I wouldn’t want to put Florrie or anyone else in that position.”

  George understood the charity of Stephen’s attitude. “Corny Deegan might help us,” he suggested.

  “No doubt he would. He’d tear off a dozen blank checks and say, ‘Come back for more if you need it.’ But this is a family affair, George. We can’t ask Corny to shoulder the private troubles of the Fermoyles.”

  “What’ll we do? We can’t risk losing track of her now.”

  Calculations long as a column of ledger figures were going on in Stephen’s mind. “If we only dared wait.”

  “Wait for what?”

  Stephen’s finger was at the list of towns in the typewritten report. “Look, George, it’s as clear as a plotted graph. Mona’s heading north. Virginia, Delaware, Pennsylvania, New Jersey. Brumbaugh says she’ll probably turn up next in New York.” Stephen’s excitement mounted. “It’s the homing instinct. I bet she’ll be back in Boston within a month.”

  “We can’t hang around dance halls every night waiting for her to show up.”

  “We can’t,” said Stephen, “but Bernie can. From now on, Bernie’s going to be Operator Fifty-nine, attached to the dance-hall district. And with the help of a few well-directed prayers I’ll be surprised if we don’t catch up with Gongaro and LaVarre within the next few weeks.”

  STEPHEN’S PREDICTION came out with adding-machine precision. He was returning one night to the Cathedral rectory when the curate on duty said, “Your brother’s waiting for you in the reception hall.” There was Bernie, packed sausage-tight in a pinchback green suit, wearing an Ascot tie, narrow high-cuffed trousers, and suède-top shoes. The rig was a vaudevillian’s dream, but Bernie’s double chin was sunk to his Ascot.