“That sounds Talmudic,” McMahon said.
“My Jewish grandparents.”
McMahon did not say anything.
“You want to get out of here, don’t you?” she said after a moment. “Let’s walk. Let’s turn another table: I’ll walk you home.”
“That’s not a very good idea at this hour,” he said.
“For the love of God, don’t go fatherly on me. Let’s just walk.” She took up her red stole from the bed.
When they reached the street Nim paused on the stoop and breathed deeply. “I’m getting expert at holding my breath. But I don’t mind the smell so much, not really. And my place is nice, don’t you think?”
“I think it’s beautiful.”
“Then why wouldn’t you tell me until I asked you?”
McMahon shrugged. “I suppose because I never think such things are expected of me.”
“And don’t you ever do things that aren’t expected of you?”
“I try not to,” he said truculently.
“Forgive me. I’m a curious sort of person. I ask too many questions.”
They crossed the street. Nim paused at the gates of the Orthodox Church. “Are you willing? I’d love to show you. I sometimes come here alone at night.”
“Isn’t it locked?”
“I know where the key is. Stu was custodian, remember? And after he went away, I asked for the job. The old priest was shocked, but I think he’d have given it to me if it weren’t for his wife.”
“All right,” McMahon said. Waiting at the top of the steps while she groped the frame of the side door for the cutout where the key was concealed, he subconsciously reverted to the self he was at the moment of entry into the holiest of places.
Inside, the door closed behind them, they stood in silence in the presence of—what? Scented ghosts of ancient saints, their icons palely glittering in the light of glass-bound candles.
McMahon said the words aloud: “I will go unto the altar of God, to God who gives joy to my youth.”
“That’s lovely,” Nim said softly. “What is it?”
“It’s the opening of the old Mass. It’s been changed now. It’s not the same.”
“Why did they change it?”
“I don’t know. Nothing’s the same—for me.” He realized as he said it that it was true: he was as reactionary about the liturgy as the monsignor. And what was liturgy but form, and therefore was it the forms only that bound him in his faith? “I believe…” he said aloud but again speaking to himself. He held out his hands and turned them slowly in the flickering light; he shaped a crescent, with the consecrated fingers, the miracle-making hands in which the bread became the body of Christ. He gathered them into fists. “I do believe.”
“In God, in joy, in youth,” Nim said. “What else is there?”
“Love.”
“That’s what it’s all about, isn’t it?”
“I hope that is so,” he said. He would have liked to pray, but for that he needed a church of his own, and that he knew to be the answer to the question he had asked himself about the forms. He had expected, he admitted now, the flesh to be his greatest temptation, but it was not. How long he stood there, his fists tight against himself, he did not know. “I need to go home,” he said. “Wherever that is.”
“I understand. And you want to go alone.”
“Yes.”
“Then go,” she said quietly. “I’ll stay here for a while. I only wish I could take you where I think it is.”
“God bless you, Nim. You are a fine person.”
“I am blessed and I am damned,” she said. “Good-bye, Joe.”
“Good night. That’s all. Just good night.” He groped his way along the back wall until he found the door for himself.
The monsignor’s bedroom door was open at the top of the stairs, his light on. Everyone else had gone to bed. McMahon tapped at the door. It was expected of him, whether he had been to a wake or a concert, if the light was on. When he went in the old man was propped up in bed, his breviary in hand, his glasses halfway down his nose.
McMahon sat on the bedside chair and told him about the dinner which, in the perspective of what happened afterward, had lost its flavor. He was primed by his audience, however, and he took an almost wicked pleasure in coaxing the old man into the savoring of it.
“Did they open the oysters at the table? I’ve seen that done, you know.” Then later, marking his place in the book with the faded red ribbon and setting it aside, the old man said, “Joseph…” and hesitated as though not sure of how to get into a delicate subject.
McMahon steeled himself. He had explained the dinner party as growing out of Nim’s feeling that Wallenstein might have known Muller. Now he expected to be questioned on Nim and his involvement in the whole affair. On the long walk home he had made up his mind and he was prepared now to say that he did not intend to see her again.
But the monsignor said, “Wallenstein…it’s an old name in New York finance. Is he part of the family?”
“I don’t know,” McMahon lied. He knew then what was coming, and he tried to stem the rise of his own anger.
“A dinner like that, Joseph?”
“There is money,” he said.
“I would think so—and a patron of the arts. Did you talk about music?”
“Yes, Monsignor.”
“Some of our greatest benefactors are Jewish, you know. It’s their way of making up.”
“For what?”
The old man looked at him over his glasses. “Joseph,” he said in a tone that warned of his temper’s rising.
But McMahon said, “I thought it was we who were trying to make up to them these days.”
“That was not my meaning and you know it, Joseph. If you had to deal night and day with the support of a parish as I do—yes, I’ll say it to you—if you lived up to the talents God gave you for directing a parish instead of diddling on that piano in there, if you left the highfalutin music to Carnegie Hall and taught the girls the songs of their own people that’d keep them singing at home and off the streets, then you’d be doing a priest’s work.”
“Yes, Monsignor,” McMahon said tightly.
“How much did you get pledged at the meeting for the renovation of the school?”
“Not very much. I’ll have the report on your desk in the morning.”
“You’ve the time to write me reports, but not to tell me what happened,” the old man said, revealing the true source of his wrath, McMahon’s remoteness.
“There’s a question on whether the school should be renovated, Monsignor.”
“Would they have it fall in on the children’s heads?”
“They recommended the referral of the matter to the archdiocese with the reminder that a new public school is about to be built within two blocks of the parish.”
“They’d close the school?” the old man said in slow disbelief. Then: “Over my dead body! I’ve put twenty years of my life into this parish, and by the glory of God, if I’ve seen it integrated, I won’t see it disintegrated.” His face was an apoplectic red. “For shame, Father McMahon. Will you sign the report?”
“It’s not my place, Monsignor.”
“I’m to sign my own death warrant, am I? Isn’t that what it amounts to?”
McMahon, his temper overcome by sympathy, said: “You’d be humiliated, Monsignor, having to go to the cardinal for three quarters of the money. There’s no hope of raising more than a quarter of it in the parish.”
“There’s always a way. It’s a matter of asking the right people when you know them.”
McMahon could say nothing except, “Good night, Monsignor.”
“Good night, good night…” But when McMahon reached the door, he said after him, “You don’t want to beg from a Jew. Is that it, Joseph?”
“Maybe that’s it,” he said to get out. “Or maybe it’s just that I don’t want to beg any more.” He closed the door after him.
In the hallw
ay he saw Miss Lalor bumping down from her end of the house in her tent of a bathrobe, her hair as wild as a bunch of heather.
“It’s all over,” he said. “Good night, Miss Lalor.”
But she had to say her piece too. “The two of you, shouting at the top of your voices. Isn’t there enough of that on the streets, Father?”
“Mind your own business,” McMahon said. “You are not my mother.”
In his room he took his collar from his pocket and looked at it and then put it away for another wearing.
13
PHELAN’S EYES WERE OPEN when McMahon visited him the next day. “Father, I’ll see that doctor of yours, if you’ll get rid of this bedside companion for me.” He jerked his thumb at the detective who lumbered to his feet as the priest came in.
“Listen, Mac. If you think this is my idea of paradise, you’re out of your ever-loving mind. You won’t talk and they won’t shut up.” He threw a mean glance at the family reunion around the other patient.
“Have a smoke,” McMahon said.
“I was off them for two weeks when I got this detail. Now I’m hooked again.”
While the detective was on his way to the door, Phelan, baiting him, said after him: “That’s right, man. You’re really hooked.” To McMahon he added, the man now out of hearing, “He’s got six kids and his father-in-law lives with them.”
“Which is probably why he doesn’t have eight kids,” McMahon said.
Phelan grinned.
“You’re feeling better.”
Phelan said: “Did you get in touch with St. Victor’s?”
“Not yet. You told me you wanted to think about it. I did call a friend in the chancery council. There are other places besides St. Victor’s, if you’re serious, Dan.”
“If I wasn’t, I wouldn’t be seeing this doctor you talk about. Is he a Catholic?”
“Yes.”
“There aren’t many of them, are there—Catholic headshrinkers?”
“They don’t shrink heads. They open you up so that you can look for yourself.”
“That’s even worse.”
“What have you been doing these last few days lying here?”
“Trying to look. That’s the truth,” Phelan said after a moment.
“All he’ll do is throw a little light your way. It’s not like going to confession, Dan. It’s not that at all. It may turn out he’ll show you a lot of the things you’re feeling guilty about are not a matter for confession at all.”
Phelan looked up at him sharply. “Man, you’re the new church, aren’t you, Father?”
McMahon smiled. “Half and half.” He did not want to think about himself. He had spent too much of the night doing that, half on his knees and half on his back, fighting fantasies he could not elude. Even the scriptures fed them: Nim-Naomi—even that. And the whole Orthodox church in the darkness when he had supposed his temptation to be of the spirit and not the flesh, turning to it as a counter-temptation—fighting fire with fire—he had remembered how he came to the church in the first place, Rosenberg’s saying that Muller and the girl had probably made love there: a joke on the pawnbroker’s part, but the joker in McMahon’s house of cards which he had built, thinking it the house of God. He turned away from the bed and the thoughtful man lying in it and saw the family who waited the moment he would come to them. A chorus of responses to the merest of his attentions. “Look, Father!” A child wheeled the pulley supporting his father’s leg, sending it slowly up a few inches and then down again, proving to all the man’s improvement.
“Congratulations,” McMahon said. “I’ll come over in a minute.”
“Father,” Phelan said, “tell the police I have nothing to give them. I did not kill him. I’d have killed my wife first. Say that to them and they’ll understand it. I’ve got it all figured out, lying here—the way they think.”
“Dan, I’ll get Doctor Connelly here as soon as I can. That will impress them, that and another suspect if we can find one.”
“Do you think I should go to confession?”
“Do you think so yourself?” McMahon did not want to confess him: he wanted to hear no more now about the sexual problems of man or woman.
“Maybe I’d better wait and see what this doctor has to say.”
“Good man,” McMahon said, and brushed Phelan’s cheek with his knuckles. “Meanwhile, I’ll go round and speak to Traynor.”
He spent a few minutes with the Puerto Rican family, basking, refreshing himself in the warmth of their welcome.
As he was about to leave the room, Phelan said: “You won’t forget St. Victor’s?”
“No.”
“I want it a lot, Father.”
“I want it for you too.” Then he added: “If it’s what you want.” But he realized as he said it that he wanted it for himself: he was trying to provide the church with a substitute priest.
He used the hospital phone to call the psychiatrist, aware of the dime it saved him. Dr. Connelly, hearing as much of Phelan’s history as the priest could give him, agreed to stop at St. Jude’s sometime that afternoon. McMahon did not like himself for thinking it, but he suspected it was the police aspect of the case that made it more attractive to a man as busy as Connelly. But then McMahon did not like himself for anything just now.
He walked from the hospital to precinct headquarters: Brogan and Traynor were in a meeting, but when the sergeant phoned up that Father McMahon was at the desk, he was told to send him up.
“We’ve got a line on him, Father,” Brogan said as soon as he walked into the office. “No matter what kind of a copout he was trying to pull, you can’t fool the FBI.”
McMahon felt a sinking sense of disappointment, disillusionment, and he thought at once of Nim.
Traynor, with his quick, appraising eye, saw the change of expression on the priest’s face. “What Brogan is saying, Father—we’ve been able to trace the victim through his fingerprints, an operation coordinated by the Federal Bureau of Investigation.”
“Oh,” McMahon said, his relief in his voice.
Traynor was not a man to be gratuitously kind. “It’s got through to you, hasn’t it, Father?—my enemy the cop, the FBI, the Establishment. That’s what we are now, the Establishment. Brogan, how does it feel to be part of the Establishment on eight thousand bucks a year?”
“I don’t get it,” Brogan said.
“I don’t either,” Traynor said, “a priest on the side of anarchy.”
From their first meeting, McMahon thought, he and Traynor had rubbed one another the wrong way: there was nothing reasonable in their reaction to one another; it was almost chemical, and what the lieutenant had just said came out of that polarization. He said now, “Lieutenant, we’ve got to live by communication. I believe that, and I don’t think that’s anarchy. For my part, I’m trying to communicate on both levels.” Then, hypocrite or pragmatist, he added: “Monsignor Casey sends you his warmest, by the way.”
“Thank you. Fill him in, Brogan. I’ll get in touch with Wisconsin. Maybe we’ll have a vacancy in the morgue if nothing else before the day’s over.”
At another desk in the office Brogan showed McMahon the teletype transcript of the information turned up through the fingerprint search. It had come through Selective Service records. The man they knew as Muller had been born in Madison, Wisconsin, August 13, 1925, Thomas Stuart Chase. He had served as a lieutenant during the occupation of Germany following World War II. Honorably discharged, he had returned to Europe on the G.I. Bill to study painting. His next of kin was listed as an aunt, Muriel Chase of Madison.
“Where do you go from here?” McMahon asked.
“Aunt Muriel, if she’s still alive,” Brogan said. “But with his real name to work on, we have several directions—Social Security records for one, if he ever worked for a living.”
McMahon refused himself the indulgence of any more arguments with the police. “What about Phelan?”
Brogan shrugged. “He still won�
��t talk. Ask the boss.”
A few minutes later McMahon did go over the Phelan situation with Traynor. Not his interest in the priesthood, but the fact that he would be under the care of Dr. Gerald Connelly. A premature statement, but he was himself satisfied in the likelihood of its happening.
“You don’t think he’ll make another attempt at suicide?”
“I do not.”
Traynor was more flexible than he had anticipated. “I’ll go along with your thinking, Father.” To Brogan he said, “Cancel the detail. But when he gets out of the hospital, put a tail on him. Maybe his feet will talk if his tongue won’t.”
“Thank you, lieutenant,” McMahon said.
“Thank you, Father.”
When McMahon got back to the rectory after classes that afternoon he found a note tacked to the door of his room to call Detective Brogan. Whenever Miss Lalor was miffed with him, she pinned his messages to the door. Otherwise, she delivered them in person, deciphering them from amongst her shopping notes. He called Brogan.
“There’s an Aunt Muriel all right,” Brogan said. “She’s on her way East now. I told her you wanted to arrange a funeral service and she said to go ahead. She’ll take the ashes back to Wisconsin with her.”
McMahon was stunned. The so-called memorial at the Morales house had been sufficient to the wishes of Muller’s neighbors, and certainly to his own involvement. But Brogan had not known that. “I’ll call Ferguson and Kelly,” he said mechanically.
“Let me know when. Call me right back on it, Father. The boss wants a notice in the papers. It might turn up some interesting people.”
And there he was, McMahon thought, being used again by the police. But that’s what a priest was for, to be used by those who needed him. Even the police. Humility, Joseph. Your name saint was a humble man. Remember that…and he was used if ever a man was. He thought about that: he could not stem the flow of cynicism now. It was as though he had opened the floodgates. He tried to remember what it was exactly that Martin Luther had said at the end of his life about being powerless to close them; and even in the wake of this thought came further skepticism: Luther had not wanted to close them, but sentimental Catholic historians had perpetuated the legend.
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