Where the Dark Streets Go

by Dorothy Salisbury Davis

  While the old man got a ragged address book from the bottom drawer of his desk and groped its pages, Nim said: “Was there anyone else, professor—anyone who might have known him later?”

  He wrote the address in a painfully neat, almost exquisite script, and writing it, seemed to ignore her question. He gave the card to McMahon. Then he said, “Is it that important to you, Miss Nim?”

  “Yes.”

  He drew a deep breath and let it out in a sigh. “The truth brings its own kind of pain—to teller and listener. Yes, my dear, there was someone else, a woman by the name of Andrea Robinson, and I ought to tell you, her husband was a trustee of the university, a connection not unimportant to my protégé—and myself.”

  Nim took it face on, not so much as flinching at the name, Robinson, by which she had known the man. “Mrs. what Robinson, professor?”

  “Mrs. Alexander Brewer Robinson, and I would think the address is still Park Avenue.”

  Afterwards they sat, Nim and McMahon, on a bench and looked down from Morningside Heights. Neither of them had anything to say for some time. “Well,” Nim said finally, “I do like that touch, Stuart Robinson—where his mind went when he made up a name to give me. It gives things a kind of continuity. This one I shall take on myself, Joe. Andrea Robinson, Park Avenue.” She looked at the sketch. “I’ve just realized: Miss Chase would probably pay five hundred dollars for this. Did you see The Times this morning?”

  “No.”

  “I must say the story brightened up the obituary page.”

  McMahon took the card Broglio had given him from his pocket. “I’ve got to get back,” he said, “but I’ll go down by way of Amsterdam Avenue.”

  “Confessions, visits to the sick, things like that?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then I’ll see you tomorrow,” Nim said, much too brightly for the way he knew she felt. “Good luck with the concert.”

  McMahon left her sitting on the stone bench. He looked back before he turned the corner, but she was not watching him. She was staring out over Harlem, her elbow on her knee, her chin in her hand, the framed drawing under her arm. He stood for a moment looking at her, and thought that this was how it was going to be, as though every parting might be the last.

  The address on Amsterdam Avenue had long since become a number in a vast red brick housing complex.

  17

  PHELAN, PROPPED UP ON pillows, the bed slightly elevated, his hands folded on the white sheet looked serene as a saint who had banished his demons, a picture, McMahon realized, out of romantic, holy-card lore. Neither saint nor sinner was free of demons so long as he was mortal. All of El Greco’s saints were tortured men, the fugue of the artist’s violence on himself.

  McMahon stood a moment, reluctant to waken the man, and thought of Broglio’s comments on Muller-Chase. He was wrong about him, however right he had made it sound. He had thought at the time, watching the painfully exquisite hand in which the professor had written the Amsterdam address, this old man has exhausted himself in perfectionism, but he has perfected the wrong things: he is half-blind, having never looked into the sun. Muller might have blinded himself, but he had looked it in the face.

  Phelan opened his eyes. “I wondered if you’d given me up to Dr. Connelly, Father.”

  “I’ve been busy,” McMahon said. It had taken an act of will for him to have come that afternoon at all.

  “Well, I’m going home tomorrow,” Phelan said without enthusiasm.

  “Good. What happened to your neighbor?” The other bed was empty, stripped, the fresh linens in a heap, yet to be spread.

  “They went out of here like an Easter procession. Father, if I was given my choice, I’d like to be like them. They came and kissed me good-bye, all of them, the children, the women, even the uncle. A lifetime couldn’t have made us closer, and you know, I started out hating every mortal one of them—noisy, busy, and so damned happy. About what? Life, I guess. And I said to myself, Dan, my boy, these are God’s children—the way he made them, and if you want to be God’s deputy, you’d better find out what they’re about.”

  McMahon, troubled at the ease with which he had allowed himself to be drawn into Phelan’s fantasy of the priestly life—using the situation to compensate the Lord for his own backsliding—wanted to break in on the reverie. But that, he felt, would also be a kind of wickedness. He listened him out.

  “Like a miraculous conversion, I was with them. Like a hand lifted a veil from my eyes. The hand of God?” He thought about it for a second or two. “Or was it just the police finally going away? Or me seeing Dr. Connelly…I don’t know whether I like him or not.”

  McMahon was glad to get on the subject of Dr. Connelly. “You’ve only seen him what—twice?”

  Phelan nodded. “It’s important that I do like him though, isn’t it?”

  “You have to get through to one another. It won’t be as easy as it was with your neighbors.” McMahon indicated the empty bed.

  “My neighbors,” Phelan repeated thoughtfully. “I’m going home a different man than I came. Another thing—Pedrito Morales came in to see me yesterday. He said it was his fault, what I did.” Phelan laughed. “A Puerto Rican heart—pride, temper, honor. You might say I am now an honorary Puerto Rican. And Lord, how I hated those people until this fiasco. He apologized for what happened that night in his house. And I’ve been thinking, Father—what it takes to gain respect. A knife or a gun. It isn’t right.”

  “We’ve all got violence in us, Dan. It depends on what we do with it.” And he told Phelan what Muller had said of the artist’s violence.

  Phelan grinned. “That’s great, you know. Really great. Remember one of the first things I said when you came to see me—I thought he was a holy man? I’m not as stupid as I thought I was. Or even as crooked inside.” He didn’t say anything for a minute. “They don’t know yet who killed him?”

  “No.”

  “Funny, young Morales coming here. Maybe they think I killed him—which, in a crazy way, is what I wanted them to think when I pulled out the knife upstairs. Priscilla knew it. How I’ve hated her for seeing through me all these years. No, I’ve hated myself for what she saw.”

  “For what you thought she saw,” McMahon suggested.

  “All right. For what I saw.”

  “Did you tell that to Dr. Connelly?”

  “Something like it. Understandable, he said. To him, everything is understandable. That’s what scares me. I’d rather go to confession.”

  “And tell as sins the things you don’t understand?”

  “That’s what you’re for, Father. Whose sin you shall forgive, they are forgiven. Whose sins you shall retain, they are retained.”

  “Dan, it’s not that simple being a priest today. Three Our Fathers and three Hail Marys and pray to the Holy Spirit just won’t do any more.”

  “I’m a Holy Ghost man myself,” Phelan said, again with a smile.

  “I’d like to be myself, sometimes. But that’s a copout. The young people want to know what is sin and why, and the answer that the Church says so is not enough. It’s not even enough for me in my own confession.”

  “It’s enough for me,” Phelan said.

  “Then you’d better do some more thinking about this change you want to make in your life.”

  “What I’d like you to do for me, Father—it’s asking a lot but I’m going to ask it: go and see Priscilla and tell her what we’ve been talking about, that you think maybe I have a vocation…something like that.”

  “I didn’t say I thought you had a religious vocation. I don’t know whether you do or not, and I don’t think you know it yourself.”

  “Tell her something!” Phelan’s agitation was sudden, and it revealed the instability, the fear beneath the dream of serenity. In a word, he was a desperate man.

  “Are you afraid to go home, Dan?”

  “Yes!”

  “You’re still a sick man. She won’t make any demands on you.”
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  “You know all about those demands, don’t you, Father? You could give her advice on how to get me into bed. One more expert on how to fix a marriage. I don’t want it fixed!”

  “Easy, Dan…there’s time, and there’s Dr. Connelly. I’ll tell her about him if you want me to.”

  “I’ll get out of here,” Phelan said, “and I’ll run, believe me, I’ll run, and the cops will bring me down then for sure. And there’ll be one nice clean thing about it that way—you can give me a Christian burial.”

  McMahon, heavy with helplessness, said, “I’ll go and see her tonight. What time do you go home tomorrow?”

  “By eleven-thirty. That’s check-out time. Or check-in time, whatever way you look at it.”

  “I’ll be here if I can and go home with you.”

  “Morales said he’d borrow a car.”

  “I’ll check up on the arrangements tonight, Dan. Just rest and make your plans the way you think you want them now. A few prayers may help.”

  “I know one thing I’ll pray for—just that they don’t make any goddamned fiesta over me coming home.”

  Miss Lalor had all her priests home to supper that night, amiable as a hen with chicks even if she had never laid an egg. And McMahon had been wrong about the menu: he had forgotten it was Saturday night. By way of her pattern of association, Irish with Boston, and Boston with custom, and the custom of baked beans on Saturday night, she had made it her own tradition. Even the monsignor could not change it, and no longer tried, for it was no longer a matter that troubled him. But the other priests: what was more painful than sitting cramped with gas in the confessional box? McMahon ate bread and butter. Food no longer interested him anyway.

  Phelan had rightly anticipated the fiesta plans for his homecoming. The women were hanging balloons and pinning flowers of papier mâché to the curtains. The amplified guitar was going strong again, vibrating through the building. Happiness was a loud noise. McMahon had a glass of beer with the women, and then managed with no great grace to tell Priscilla Phelan that he wanted to talk with her. He suggested the room she had given Muller.

  “I rented it today,” she said.

  She did not want to talk with him, McMahon realized. She was living her own kind of fantasy. But he had promised Phelan. “I’ll come back a little later.” He asked Mrs. Morales if Pedrito was home. He was and so, a week to the day later, McMahon climbed the dim, ill-smelling stairway again.

  Pedrito and his friends were at the kitchen table, also drinking beer. A deck of cards lay in an untidy heap where they had wearied of the game. One of the boys was on the phone trying to reach a girl named Felicita. McMahon declined a beer but took the chair that had been vacated by the boy on the telephone.

  “So you’re going to bring Mr. Phelan home tomorrow, Pedrito. What time?”

  Pedrito shrugged. “I got the car all morning.”

  “Make it eleven and I’ll come with you.”

  “If I was him I would not come home,” Pedrito said.

  “Why?”

  “She’s got a pig in the back room.”

  McMahon was a few seconds figuring out what he meant. “A policeman?”

  “That’s how we see him, Father.”

  “How does Mrs. Phelan see him?”

  “Ask her.” Pedrito kept his eyes down. He picked up one of the cards and flicked its edge with his thumb, a snapping sound. “We don’t like pigs in the house.”

  The boy on the phone said, “Felicita! It’s me, Marcelo.” To the others he said, “I got her! Hey, I got her!”

  “So. It ain’t television, ask her about the other girls. How many?” This from the boy at the end of the table.

  “Shut up,” Pedrito said to him. But he got up from the table and jerked his head to the priest to follow him. They went into the next room where the effigy of Muller had been laid out. “See, Father, the poor bastard—the cops keep pushing him around, and zook! next time for real.” Pedrito pantomimed the thrust of a knife into his own heart.

  McMahon glanced at the picture of the Sacred Heart, the shiny drops of blood. “How do you know he’s a cop?”

  “It figures, that’s all. He looks like one.”

  “Pedrito, maybe it’s none of our business. If Dan doesn’t have anything to hide, maybe he’d like the idea of someone living there. He didn’t kick Muller out, did he?”

  Pedrito thought about it. “I think I get what you say, Father. But what if he’s got something to hide? Somebody? The cops know better, he don’t use a knife on Muller, not him.”

  “That isn’t our business either, Pedrito.”

  “My friend’s business, Father, that’s my business. I never liked him, but he got guts, and pride and honor. I don’t like to see him hurt any more.”

  “Eleven at the hospital,” McMahon said.

  “And I don’t like pigs no more than they like me,” the boy said over the banister.

  McMahon went down the stairs, his head throbbing with weariness, with too much confinement in too small places, the smell of breaths, of bodies, of waste, and with almost the taste in his mouth of the little lusts of man. Every year he had gone home for a few days after the concert, but this year he would not go home. His mother had died and the house was sold. But he longed to breathe clean air and find God in the skies, to push out the walls of the tabernacle where men called priests had boxed their Savior in like a butterfly. And stifled him? The God-is-dead school was also dead. But Fair House of Joy, where was it? He tried to track the association, and it went straight back to Nim and the songs of Kathleen Ferrier, and how Muller had linked them in his mind. And tomorrow The Bells. And the next day, and the next?

  Mrs. Phelan left the women and went out on the stoop with him. She sat on the parapet. “Look, Father, you’ve been very kind. But I think I can handle matters from here.”

  Another mind your own business, McMahon thought. “I wanted to tell you about Dr. Connelly.”

  “I know all about him.”

  “Dan ought to keep on seeing him, even if it’s expensive.”

  “For what?”

  “He can help him with a lot of his problems.”

  She lit a cigarette. “I thought you told me I could do that. All those sessions we had, Father?”

  McMahon felt his temper rise under her sarcasm. “A priest can be wrong. I should have recommended a separation then, but I didn’t.”

  “But now you do. Is that it, Father?”

  “That’s up to Dr. Connelly.”

  “No, Father. Dan doesn’t want him and neither do I. Dan’s my husband and I can take care of him.”

  “All right…your husband, Mrs. Phelan, but not your child. Dan’s got to have a chance to stand on his own feet.”

  “Father, I’ve never said this to a priest before. Thanks for everything, but go to hell.”

  18

  IT WAS A CLEAR and sparkling day, that Sunday in New York, when even windows that were not washed looked as though they had been. The streets looked cleaner, and somehow there was more sky. Father McMahon did not go to the hospital: he could not, for the monsignor was not feeling well and asked McMahon to sing the high Mass at eleven-thirty. McMahon welcomed it as an act of God, lifting him out of the slough of despair. Afterwards he walked to the river and back and then fixed his own breakfast in the kitchen. He was hungrier than he had thought he would be, and felt unburdened, almost as though his failure with the Phelans had humbled him in a way that was pleasing to God. It remained now for some enlightenment to come upon him in the freshness of his spirit. And for that he offered up the afternoon’s concert.

  The monsignor managed to rise from his sickbed and Miss Lalor wore her Easter hat. Half the parish turned out, and neighborhood people who, having been persuaded to buy tickets, used them. Considering the fact that he and his girls were playing opposite the first Met double-header of the season, McMahon accepted the number of men in the audience as a tribute—to the girls. He did not look for Nim; he avoided looki
ng toward the reserved-seat section. The girls, dressed in white, convened in the back of the auditorium. He could hear the clack of Sister Justine’s frog over the murmur of conversation and shuffling of feet and creaking of seats. At three o’clock sharp he went onstage from the wings, and one hand on the piano from which he would conduct, he bowed, a curt, formal nod, and sat down before the keyboard. Both his hands and his knees were trembling and he wished profoundly that the whole thing was over. But that was not so either: he merely wished to be lost in the music, the self submerged, sublimated, and therefore exalted. He marched the chorus in to “Pomp and Circumstance” which he disliked but which they loved, and it was they who were going to make the music of the day.

  And make music they did. To be sure, there was a mistake here and there, but only the trained ear caught it, and the joy of young voices singing burst over everyone like the soaring of spring itself. The audience clapped and stamped, and Father McMahon crossed the stage and led the soloists to the front. He shook hands with each of them, and then to both his delight and embarrassment, little Marietta Hernandez stood on tiptoe and kissed his cheek.

  He went back to the piano and without a signal to anyone began to play “Bell Bottom Rock.” The girls caught on at once and went into their thing, that uninhibited rhythm, each her own, the jerk and the halt and the shoulder shakes, with the little buds of bosoms popping up like buttons. Over his shoulder, the back of his head to the audience, he said to Sister Justine where she stood in the wings, “Curtain!”

  And on that wild improvisation, the curtains closed.

  People flocked around him in the basketball court afterwards, so many people, good, warm people all. Only then did he allow himself to search the faces for Nim’s. The flash of her smile when he saw her gave him a stab of pleasure. He worked his way unhurriedly toward her, greeting, accepting the praise of everyone who stopped him on the way. Nim wore a green suit with an orange scarf at the throat.

  “It was great,” she said, extending her hand, “really the most.”

  He shook her hand briefly. Even gloves, he noticed. “It was a lot.” The words had become a kind of theme between them. He introduced her to the other people who came up, to Mrs. Morales who was so proud of her two girls.