by Ray Russell
“But when will you sleep?”
“I don’t sleep very much these days.”
Nor do I, thought Gregory, but what’s your trouble? Aloud, he asked, “Do you think you’ll like the orphanage?”
“I think I will be useful there. I am looking forward to it.”
“I can see that,” said Gregory. “One might even say you can hardly wait to get away from St. Michael’s.”
“No,” Father Halloran said quickly, “not at all. The people here are very good people, on the whole. Oh, there have been vexations, of course. A man named Talbot, a pamphleteering hate-monger, for instance . . .”
“But no parish is complete without one of those,” said Gregory.
“That’s right. I’ve made friends here. I’ve been happy. There have been only the usual problems.”
“Well,” drawled Gregory, “perhaps a few unusual ones, eh?”
Father Halloran looked up suddenly. “What do you mean?”
Gregory smiled. “That business executive we met today, what’s his name, Mr. Glencannon?”
“Yes.”
“I can see he, at least, is going to present a unique problem. Has he ever approached you with that idea of his—that he be allowed to mail in his confession on a dictation record and receive absolution by phone?”
Father Halloran nodded. “Once or twice. He is hard to discourage.”
“And the druggist—does he always expect you to deliver prescriptions if you’re ‘going that way’?”
“You mustn’t be hard on him. He only does that when he knows I’m going to visit an ailing parishioner who happens to be one of his customers. I don’t mind. This parish is something like a small town, you know.”
“Yes, I know.”
“That’s one of the pleasant things about it.”
“That very old gentleman,” Gregory continued, “Mr. Sowerby. I’m glad you prepared me for him. It must have been unnerving for you to administer last rites on three separate and distinct occasions, only for him to rally and live happily ever after, each time.”
“Yes, that has been extraordinary, I will admit.”
“What about this Barlow family? The husband seems nice enough, rather placid, but the wife’s personality struck me as being—well, distilled to triple-strength. Is she always so forceful, so domineering?”
“Mrs. Barlow is a very respected woman,” said Father Halloran, “and considered somewhat of a leader among the ladies of the parish. She is quite active socially. In a way, I suppose she is an attractive person.”
“I suppose.”
“The family I worry about,” said Father Halloran after a short pause, “is not the Barlows, but the Garths.”
“Isn’t that the family we just left? The man and his daughter?”
“Yes,” said Father Halloran. “It’s a difficult problem, and complex. The girl—she’s sixteen, mother dead—is very disturbed, mentally. She has—fits. She’s seen doctors, and I strongly urged her father to take her to a psychiatrist as well. . . .”
A sixteen-year-old girl with “fits.” Gregory smiled inwardly: it was such a quaint, old-fashioned word, “fits.” In young women, they were so often rooted in sexual hysteria. Sex, that great raw force that seethed and snarled for release, took strange forms.
Gregory had often thought of it as a wildly onrushing river terminating in a roaring waterfall. Two men, coming upon the tumult of that waterfall, might react to it in two different ways. One man might be unconsciously repelled by such a display of mindless ferocity, of nature unrestrained; his inner reaction, though he himself might not know it, tends toward a desire to somehow stop it, or, failing that, to block off the rushing river, make it go away so he won’t have to look at it. It is too big and unharnessed for him, it offends him.
The other man, of quite different stamp, says to himself: Ah! What a wonderful, wild, untamed force! But how wasted. This divine giant’s power can be channelled and used for good works. So he builds a dam that does not stop the raging water but makes it work for him, turning wheels, generating electric power, irrigating parched lands. That attitude toward the waterfall is the Catholic attitude toward sex, Gregory had always liked to think; the other attitude was Protestant. (“But then,” he was in the habit of shrugging, “I’m prejudiced.”)
Father Halloran was looking at his watch. “I’m afraid I must be going,” he said. “Daylight Saving or God’s Time, it’s getting late. I have quite a drive ahead of me.”
“You’re all packed?”
“My bags are in the car.” He stood up. “Good-bye, Father Sargent.”
“You’re sure you won’t stay the night?”
“I really can’t.”
Gregory accompanied the elder priest to the door. “Good-bye, then, Father Halloran. And thank you again for easing me into my new post here. I’m very grateful.”
At the door, Father Halloran turned and said, “Her name is Susan.”
“Whose name?”
“The Garth girl. The one with the fits.”
“Oh yes. Susan. I’ll remember.”
“I wish I had time to go into her problems in more detail. I’m afraid I wasn’t much help to her. But you’re a smart man, Father, you’re versed in psychology and such things. I’ve read some of those magazine articles of yours . . . I think you are more qualified than I to help the child. Be very kind to her. Please.”
“I will.”
As Father Halloran shook hands with Gregory for the last time, Gregory gently ribbed the more eccentric parishioners, and Father Halloran managed to summon a flinty smile. They parted on a key of ersatz joviality.
But when the door clicked shut, Gregory’s gay mood dropped from him like a cape. He tossed off the remainder of his brandy in a gulp, and fell into a chair, his face buried in his hands.
Then he raised his head and looked about with distaste at the parlor of his new rectory. He took in its scattering of vases and ash trays and doilies, its aggressively middle-class wallpaper, its bad holy pictures, its obtrusive pillars of dark wood. Sighing, he lifted himself from the chair and fetched his breviary from a nearby table. Before settling down to read his Office, he removed his jacket, for the weather was oppressively close.
He found it hard to concentrate on his Office. His mind kept drifting, his eyes wandering from the pages of the book. He found himself again taking in the crushingly bourgeois look of the rectory. He couldn’t help comparing it to the rectory of St. Francis, with its large, beautifully appointed rooms, its décor a tasteful balance between traditional and contemporary design. He remembered his friends of the other parish: men and women with lively minds, writers, architects, stage directors, actors, musicians, teachers. He remembered his select little rectory dinners and after-theatre suppers, the fine cuisine, the old wine, the hours of stimulating, satisfying talk. The plans to collaborate with a psychoanalyst friend on a book.
Gone, all gone.
He was starting from scratch again, in a small parish, among good gray people whose simplicity and warmth could not replace the vigor of the people he had known. Starting from scratch at forty-five.
Music, that might help. Gregory rose from his chair and snapped on the hi-fi set. He poked desultorily among his record collection. Respighi was not among his favorite composers—indeed, Gregory found him to his taste only in his arrangements of old Italian tunes—but now he pulled out a recording of the Vetrate di Chiesa. “Church Windows,” Gregory said drily, aloud. Perhaps it would be salutary, he told himself, slipping the record out of its liner and over the turntable spike.
He sat down and opened the book again. Respighi’s first movement, The Flight into Egypt, lulled him into a receptive state with its gentle, nocturnal blandishments. The strains were almost Gregorian, a kind of music which Gregory (not, he hoped, because of the accident of his name) found peacefu
l and from which he was able to draw profound serenity. The flight into Egypt. The little caravan proceeded through the desert, in the starry night, bearing the Treasure of the World. Gregory, his Office read, closed his eyes and let the tension seep slowly out of his body. He floated on the music and his mind was mercifully empty. The movement quietly ended.
A howling whirlwind smote him: a rising and falling whine of immense size. He frowned, jolted out of his calm. The second movement, St. Michael the Archangel, had begun with a surge. The spiral of sound—at once divine and infernal—reached high, plumbed low, dizzily spinning and twisting. And a great battle was made in the heavens: Michael and his Angels fought the dragon, and fought the dragon and his angels. But these did not prevail, and there was no more place for them in heaven.
No place in heaven. The battle music swirled around Gregory like a palpable thing, like Godwrath, like Hellfire. His moment of peace had been brief. His eyes grew wet and two words escaped his lips. “Dear God.”
The music was now so furious that he almost did not hear the doorbell ring.
II
BLACK FIRE
The housekeeper was asleep, so Gregory arose to answer the door himself. First, he turned off the eruptive, whirling music. As he walked to the door—passing into a vestibule cluttered with halltrees and umbrella stands—he could only think this late caller must be Father Halloran, who had perhaps forgotten something.
He unlatched and swung open the heavy door.
“It’s awful late I know, Father,” said the large man who stood before him, “but it’s about the girl here.”
The girl, of high school age, would not allow her blue eyes to meet Gregory’s.
“That’s all right,” Gregory found himself saying, “if it’s really important.”
“It is,” said the man. “Sort of an emergency.” Gregory led them into the parlor, offered them chairs—the girl would not sit down—and quickly struggled into his jacket again.
“Now then,” said Gregory. “Don’t tell me. You’re the Garths, aren’t you? Susan and—”
“Robert,” said the man.
“Of course. I’ll get all these names straight soon. You know, it’s odd, but Father Halloran—he just left—was speaking about you and your daughter only a moment ago.” The oddness of the coincidence was more of a conversational opener for Gregory than a true expression of personal bemusement. He had lived too long, and been on the receiving end of too many coincidences, to feel other than mere intellectual surprise. Emotionally, it was old stuff and he was used to it. He had but to ask himself “What ever became of Father John Doe?” in order to receive a letter or phone call from Father John Doe the following day; or to suddenly remember a long-forgotten Bible verse and then, beginning to search for it, have the Bible fall open to the exact page and the verse leap to his eyes. And yet Gregory was not so vain as to think himself unique in this: coincidence, he knew, occurred in the lives of everyone with such frequency that it seemed almost the norm, and was met by most people not with the blink of astonishment but with the half-smile and casual nod usually accorded a regular and welcome visitor. Gregory asked Garth, “What can I do for you?”
Garth told his daughter to sit down; she did; then he said, “We been walking up and down in front of the rectory. I could see Father Halloran was here. I didn’t want to bust in, so I thought we’d wait until he left. When Father Halloran introduced us to you today, Susie took a shine to you, and I sort of did too. And then later, something happened that—” He interrupted himself: “You say Father Halloran told you something about her?”
“Well, a little, yes,” said Gregory.
Nodding, Garth said, “See, Father Halloran he said she should go to a doctor. A specialist. He said she needed, you know, help, mental help. He said he didn’t know what to do for her. I guess he figured she was—well, crazy.” Quickly, he added, “Not that I’m blaming Father Halloran. I mean, he sure had plenty of reason to think she was—not right—after what happened.”
“What exactly did happen?” Gregory asked.
“Didn’t he tell you?”
“He only told me—” Gregory felt the girl’s eyes on him, and said, “Perhaps Susan would rather wait in another room while we talk.” And, saying this, he turned to find her eyes looking into his own, no longer evasive. Yet her voice—she spoke now for the first time—was soft and shy:
“No, Father. I want to stay here. You don’t have to keep things from me.”
A bit surprised by her directness, Gregory only said, “Fine, fine,” then turned again to the girl’s father. “Well, Mr. Garth, Father Halloran only told me that Susan was very—disturbed—and had these seizures every so often, and that he recommended she see a doctor.”
“A psychiatrist,” amplified Susan.
“Well, yes.”
“And that’s all he told you?” asked Garth.
“That’s all. Did you take her to a psychiatrist?”
Susan said, “No.”
“Oh, she wanted to go,” said Garth, “but—well, in the first place, Father, those guys cost an awful lot of money. I just don’t make that kind of money.” He frowned. “And in the second place—”
“Dad,” said Susan.
“In the second place, my daughter is not crazy. Why, there’s never been anything like that in my family. Or in her mother’s either, rest her soul. So how could she all of a sudden be crazy? Now, those fits of hers—that’s something else again. I thought maybe it might be this epilepsy? I had an uncle, on my mother’s side, my mother’s brother he was, he used to take fits like that. Epileptic fits. So I figured, well, could be it turned up again in Susie. So we went to a doctor—not a headshrinker, a regular doctor, went to two of ’em in fact—and they both examined her, put her through some kind of electro something or other—”
“Electroencephalograph,” said the girl, quietly.
“Yeah. And nothing.”
“Nothing?” asked Gregory.
“That’s right. She’s not an epileptic. Two different doctors said so.”
“I see. And did they say anything else?”
“No, that was about all.”
“They said,” Susan insisted, “that I should see a psychiatrist.”
Gregory had an idea. “Mr. Garth,” he said, “I realize the economic factor can be an obstacle . . . I mean, money doesn’t grow on trees and, as you say, psychiatrists do run pretty high. But what if that part of it were taken care of? You see, I have a very good friend—a brother-in-law, in fact—who is also a very good psychiatrist, and—”
“No,” Garth said flatly, “nothing doing.”
“But I’m sure I could persuade him to take the case for next to nothing.”
“The money is only part of it. Don’t you see, Father? How can I send my own daughter to a—to a nut doctor, someone who treats loonies? She’s not crazy!”
“It’s not a question of her being crazy. A psychiatrist can—”
But it was a sore point with Garth. His lips and eyes went tightly closed and he shook his head vehemently. “No. No. I know what they do in their offices, these head doctors. They drag everything out of you. They get you to talking and talking—about everything. They don’t have any sense of what’s decent or proper or . . . They just want you to talk about every nasty, filthy thing that ever passed through your mind. I sure wouldn’t allow a girl her age to go through something like that. I just won’t buy it. I don’t believe in it. And I’m surprised you do, Father. Isn’t the Church against all that stuff?”
“No,” Gregory said simply. “The Church doesn’t endorse it all, I must admit, but—”
“There, you see?”
“—but it does not dismiss or condemn it.” Gregory wanted to tell him about Father Devlin of Chicago, a Catholic priest who was also a practising analyst; he wanted to say that the Church does not ma
ke snap judgments, that it sifts and examines evidence for years, sometimes for centuries, before it accepts or rejects a thing; he wanted to tell Garth it took the Church four hundred years to recognize Joan of Arc as a saint and it was as recent as 1954 that it made the Assumption of the Virgin Mary a definite dogma. So it couldn’t be expected to come out for or against something as comparatively brand-new as psychiatry—but he knew these arguments would fall upon heedless ears, for Garth was shaking his head stubbornly again, his mouth and eyes closed. So, instead, he said: “What’s the difference, Mr. Garth, between the psychiatrist’s office and the confessional box?”
“Why—”
“A great deal of difference, to be sure—I’m not trying to pretend they’re one and the same or that psychiatry can replace the Church, but when you speak of—”
“Father,” Garth cut in, “I guess I should tell you why I brought Susie here.”
“Yes,” agreed Gregory, “I guess you should.”
Garth cleared his throat and began. “Tonight, soon after you and Father Halloran left our place, I walked into her room—and do you know what I caught her doing?”
“What?”
“Packing!” cried Garth. “Packing a suitcase! Getting ready to run off! ‘Where do you think you’re going,’ I says. ‘Anyplace,’ she says; ‘anyplace you can’t find me.’ ‘Why,’ I says. ‘Because I want to see a psychiatrist,’ she says, ‘and you won’t let me!’ How do you like that? No money, not a dime to her name, gonna run off and walk the streets I suppose to get enough money to pay some headshrinker—” Garth stopped for breath. “I finally got her to agree to come here and talk to you. I know it’s late, and I wouldn’t bother you like this if it wasn’t an emergency, but I think she’d listen to you.” Turning to his daughter, he said sternly, “Now you listen to the Father here. He’ll tell you I’m right.”
Those direct blue eyes again. “Is he right, Father?”