by Ray Russell
Gregory smiled at her. Garth was about as unright as a person could be, but it would accomplish nothing to say so now. “He certainly is right,” Gregory therefore said, “about this business of running away. With no money, all alone, it would be pretty silly, wouldn’t it?”
“But somebody has to help me, Father,” she said.
“That’s my job. If we talk this over, all three of us, maybe we can come to an understanding. My brother-in-law, for instance—”
“There’ll be none of that!” said Garth.
Gregory fought down an impulse to insult the man. Soothingly, he said, “Mr. Garth, I’m just trying to help . . .”
But Garth did not permit him to finish. He had gone crazy on the subject. “I tell you that’s the one thing she don’t need!” he said. “There’s been enough filth—” He caught himself and stopped cold.
But Gregory had heard the word. “Filth? What do you mean?”
“Never mind . . .”
“Dad,” Susan quietly said, “I think you’d better tell him. If you don’t, I will.”
“How can you?” Garth asked with astonishment. “How can you tell it yourself? I can’t even tell it, and I’m a man, a man fifty years old. How can you tell it—a little girl?”
“I’m not so little. Tell the Father.”
Garth’s face was flushed and glistening: he wiped it with a handkerchief. “Oh God,” he said, and then, in a toneless voice, he told the story.
He told of the whiteness of Father Halloran’s face—“People talk about faces turning white, but they don’t really mean white,” he said. “But that time in the rectory here, Father Halloran’s face was white. White as his collar.” He told of Father Halloran’s difficulty in speaking, of how he kept swallowing, of how his voice shook, of how his hands shook, of how he looked out the French windows of the parlor, looked at the walls, looked at the floor, looked at his fingernails, looked at Garth’s necktie, looked everywhere but at Garth’s face.
“And when he was through talking,” said Garth, “he just sort of stood there for a second, and then he walked out of the room. Just like that, no handshake, no good-bye, just out. A few weeks later, we heard he was going to be transferred. Something about an orphanage, and how he had always wanted to take charge of an orphanage, but I knew better. I told myself I’ll just bet he asked to be transferred. Because he thought he’d failed, I guess. ‘I cannot help her,’ is what he told me. ‘Only the grace of God can help her.’ But the way he said it was like he was saying, ‘Not even the grace of God can help her.’”
Gregory assured Garth Father Halloran couldn’t have meant that. Then he asked Susan, “But what kind of help? From what do you want to be saved, my dear?”
The blue eyes were clouded, the soft voice hollow. “From Hell. From being damned forever to Hell.”
“I read in a book once,” she went on, “that the fire of Hell is black and gives no light, and damned souls burn forever in darkness, heaped one on top of another so tight they can’t move even to brush away the worms that eat their eyes . . . and there’s nothing but terrible noise and pain and stench and darkness forever and ever and ever . . .”
“Don’t worry about Hell, my dear,” said Gregory. “Nobody has said you are damned to Hell.”
“I will be. For what I did. For what I do.”
“You see,” Garth continued, “I’d been having this trouble with her . . .”
The trouble concerned church. Apparently, Susan had been until recently a devout girl who attended Mass regularly. On an otherwise ordinary Sunday morning, she started out with her father, dressed in her Sunday best, a picture of purity with her starched cotton dress, old-fashioned pigtails and pretty, unpainted face. They lived within walking distance of the church, and when they turned a corner and came in sight of the spire, Susan stopped. She turned around and began to walk home. Garth asked her what was wrong, had she forgotten something? She said no, she just wanted to go home. Was she sick? No. Further questions yielded no further answers, so Garth wisely let her have her way. They returned home. The following Sunday, she again donned her Sunday dress, and again went out with her father. When they reached the crucial corner and saw the spire of the church, again she stopped.
This time her father became angry. “Don’t start anything funny with me, young lady!” he said. “You are going to church!” He took her arm and led her along. She pulled back. “Come on,” he ordered. And then she began to weep. But Garth, relentless, continued to drag her along the sidewalk, closer and closer to the church.
She screamed. “Don’t make me go in there! Please, Daddy, don’t make me go in that place!”
Garth snarled, “This is just church! You’ve been here hundreds of times before! What’s the matter with you?”
Other parishioners, powdered and pressed for Sunday morning Mass, had begun to turn and look, frowning with disapproval at this sullying of the quiet. Garth, self-conscious, released her arm.
She broke into a run and ran all the way home. “So fast,” in Garth’s words, “I couldn’t catch up with her. I’m not a well man; I can’t run like that.”
“Listen, you,” he said, breathless and sweating, after they had gotten into the house, “I’m going to get on that phone and call a taxi. And we’re going to get in that taxi and go to church if I have to hogtie you!”
“I’m not going.”
Garth hit her. (“You know,” as he explained it to Gregory, “a slap, a little slap across the mouth, that’s all.”)
She held her hand to her stinging cheek and looked him straight in the eye. And in a voice not like her own—yet not angry and strident, but calm, weighing every word—she quietly said:
“I hope you rot in Hell for eternity, you lousy son of a bitch.”
• • •
Gregory got up and lit a cigarette.
Garth said, “You got to understand, Father—this is a girl who never talked like that before. Not once, ever, did I hear her say a thing like that. A very good girl, a clean-talking sweet little girl. So when she said that, I was stunned. Because they weren’t just empty cuss words. I could tell she meant every word.”
“You don’t know that,” said Gregory.
But the girl said, “I meant every word.”
And added, a moment later, “Well—when I said it, I meant it.”
“Why?” asked Gregory. “Because he hit you?”
“Yes . . . I think so . . . I don’t know . . . it was as if somebody else said that, somebody who meant it.”
Schizophrenia was, of course, a word that at once burst upon Gregory’s mind. And so it was the schizophrenia trail that Gregory followed for many minutes, with an image of Eve’s famous three faces—or was it four?—strong before him. Questions and answers followed each other rapidly, but the questions could never be of the sort that would start Garth off again with his cry of Filth!—and though schizophrenia seemed, at times, almost tracked to its lair, Gregory still could not be sure, was in fact very far from sure, and he had to conclude the inquiry with a lame, and rather worn, joke. “Look, I have a deal with the local psychiatrists. I promise not to treat patients if they promise not to say Mass.”
Some polite questions followed (“How long has your wife been dead, Mr. Garth?” “About six years; yes, six years. Susie was only ten when she died; she’s sixteen now”).
“Well,” Gregory said at last, “it’s awfully late and we should be getting our rest . . .” He did not look forward to the day ahead: in the evening, dinner with the Barlows; in the afternoon, a visit from Bishop Crimmings. A casual visit, His Excellency had implied, just dropping in for a few minutes on the way to other places in this area. But bishops are not in the habit of just dropping in—they are accustomed to having parish priests come to them—so Gregory was not anticipating a pleasant social afternoon. His Excellency, notwithstanding a thin venee
r of bonhomie, was a man forged plutonically under extreme pressure out of some igneous, molten magma of the spirit. His faith and his attitude toward dogma were both as strong and imperishable as rock. And as rigid. The old fellow would chuckle and talk about old times, drop one or two nuggets of epigrammatic wisdom, and then slowly circle around to the subject Gregory wanted desperately to avoid. It would be a trying day; he would need his sleep.
He began to create the atmosphere for dismissal. “We can talk more about this later in the week,” he said. Then he rose. “For tonight, Susan, I want you to promise me one thing.”
“What?”
“That you will not, absolutely will not try to run away again. Promise?”
“Yes, Father.”
“Fine!” He started ushering them toward the door, saying to Garth, “Suppose I call you later in the week when I’m free? This unfortunate business has been going on for some time now, so a day or two more shouldn’t make much difference. When was that, how long ago, the Sunday morning when Susan said that terrible thing to you?”
“Well, let’s see,” mused Garth. “It was just a month or so before Father Halloran announced he was leaving. I remember because right after she said that I went to Father Halloran for some advice and he said he’d have a long talk with her. So the very next day we came here to the rectory to see him.”
“Then apparently,” Gregory said to Susan, “you don’t have as much difficulty entering the rectory as the church itself?”
“No, Father.”
“Thanks for small mercies, eh? Perhaps you and I can have a little private talk here sometime, just the two of us.” And he laid a hand on her shoulder.
She drew away quickly.
“Yeah,” said Garth, shaking his head sadly, “that’s what Father Halloran said when I brought her here to see him. Wanted to talk to her alone in his study, so I waited here in the parlor. I don’t mind telling you I was pretty nervous. The way she’d been behaving was beginning to get me down. I guess I’d been waiting here for about, oh, twenty, thirty minutes, maybe not so long, when all of a sudden I heard a noise in there in the study . . .”
“A noise?”
“Just a sort of a thump or something, like if something had been knocked over maybe. And then I heard a voice—for a second I didn’t recognize it, then I could tell it was Father Halloran. He seemed to be saying Stop or No or something like that. And then I got scared because he yelled out real loud . . .”
“Yelled what?”
“Just—Help! Like that. God help me!”
A fierce sob was ripped from Susan’s throat. Gregory wheeled around to find her placid face distorted with weeping. When his arms reached out to comfort her, she only sobbed louder and shook him off. He turned, puzzled and helpless, to Garth, and then all thought of ending the audience fled his mind. He sat down on a hard wooden chair.
“Please go on, Mr. Garth,” he said.
III
HE ATE HIS CHILDREN ALL BUT THREE
“Lies. Half truths. Propaganda. Censorship. Book burning. Thought control.” John Talbot paused over his coffee. The sounds of the little short-order restaurant clanked in the background. They were Saturday sounds, a touch forlorn and lonely after the rush of weekday business. Talbot’s eyes had not left Robert Garth’s face for the past five minutes. “What do those words remind you of?” he asked.
“Well . . .” Garth hesitated. “Russia? Communism?”
“That’s right. And the Church.”
Garth made a movement of scorn. “Come on now, Talbot, that’s pushing it kind of far, isn’t it? I mean, I don’t swallow everything the Church hands out, I got a mind of my own, but you can’t say the Church is like Communism! Why, they hate each other!”
“Of course they do,” said Talbot eagerly. “Because they’re so much alike! Exactly alike. They’re both totalitarian. You know what that means?”
Garth was not sure.
“Total, that’s what it means. Total power, total control. Control over everything—over the body, over the mind. The Communists tell you what books you should read and what books you shouldn’t. So does the Church. They write history to please themselves. So does the Church. Ideally, they’d rather you didn’t read at all. So does the Church—why, they not only have their own distorted version of the Bible, but they actually discourage laymen from reading it! It’s up to them to—‘interpret’ it for you! And the torture chambers of the Soviet secret police?” Talbot shrugged. “Remember the Inquisition?”
“Yeah, sure,” said Garth, “but that was way back in the old days. They don’t pull that sort of stuff now.”
“Of course they don’t. They’re more subtle now, more foxy. But underneath they’re the same, Garth. The same.” He sipped at his coffee. “That’s why I don’t understand you. I will never understand why you took your daughter to Halloran. And I’ll never understand why you’ve taken her to this new one, this Sargent.”
“I needed help, like I told you. I was afraid I’d lose her. Who could I go to? I don’t know anybody who could talk to her and make it stick. I didn’t want to get mixed up with priests, but damn it, Talbot, once a Catholic, always a Catholic, and—”
“And so you naturally went to the only source of authority and solace you knew. Yes. I understand—I guess. But it was dumb, Garth. She’ll be destroyed.”
Garth frowned into his cup. “Aw—you make too much out of it, Talbot. You got some good points, I’ll say that for you, but . . . What do you mean, destroyed? How?”
“I don’t know how. Oh, I don’t imagine he’ll crush her feet in the Spanish boot,” he said, smiling grimly. “I didn’t mean that. But he’ll badger her with questions, frighten her with threats of eternal torment, fill her already confused mind with twisted, dangerous, useless ideas . . .” Talbot was an accomplished performer: his voice dropped to near-inaudibility and he said, quite simply, “He’ll drive her mad.”
“But why? What’ll he gain by driving a little girl nuts?”
“Look, my friend. What did they gain by burning Joan of Arc? The Church is afraid of the nonconformist, the renegade, afraid of anything it can’t understand. It’s afraid of your little girl. So she has to be hammered into shape. By fair means or foul. Most likely foul. Because, Garth: these priests play dirty.”
“I gotta go,” said Garth.
“Stick for a minute,” Talbot urged. “I’ll tell you something that will warm the cockles of your heart . . .”
“I need something to warm the cockles of my heart, all right. A drink. Want to drop across the street to the bar?”
“I don’t drink,” said Talbot flatly. “Listen, Garth. Before I opened my own print shop, I used to work as night clerk in a hotel. You learn a lot in a job like that. People come and go—good people and bad, most of them bad. And you get to know everything about them, every mean little nasty vice. The old sugar daddies come in with their eighteen-year-old girls. Eighteen? Seventeen, sixteen, younger! Mr. and Mrs. Smith. Ha! The faggots come in: the boys with pancake makeup on their faces, their hair dyed and marcelled. And the priests come in. Oh yes. With their coat collars turned up, thinking they’re fooling everybody. But they never fooled me. Yes, the priests come in, Garth. With their frightened little girls. And little boys.”
“I really gotta go,” said Garth.
“Listen to a joke first,” Talbot insisted, suddenly turning on the casual camaraderie. “It’s a good joke. This girl—of good family, you see—gets herself pregnant. Her parents are shocked, horrified. What can they do? They phone the family doctor and start hinting around. He says, ‘If you expect me to perform an abortion, you can stop right there. I won’t. But I’ll tell you what: you take the girl up to my country home and when the time comes, I’ll be on hand to deliver the child. Now, right near my country home is a sanatorium where I often perform surgery. There’s always some old girl who
needs a gall bladder removed. I’ll perform such an operation—then I’ll bring her your daughter’s child. I’ll tell her there’s been a mistake all along—she was pregnant, it wasn’t gall bladder at all. Simple.’ So: everything goes as planned, but after the doctor delivers the baby, he discovers there is no gall bladder patient in the sanatorium—except a priest. He’s thrown by this at first, of course, but he decides to stick to his guns. Takes the baby into the priest and says, ‘Father, the Lord has seen fit to make you the instrument of a miracle. You have just been delivered of a fine baby boy.’ The priest is overjoyed—what evidence of A Divine Hand! what an honor! and all that . . .”
“Look, Talbot, I gotta shove off.”
“All right, all right, I’ll wind it up. The kid is raised as a miracle child. Members of the parish contribute to his education, he goes to the finest schools, and so on and so on. When he’s in college, he gets word that his father, the priest, is dying. He rushes home to his bedside. Kid says, ‘You’ve been so good to me, Dad, how can I repay you?’ Priest says, ‘By forgiving me for a terrible deception. All these years I told you I was your father. But it’s not true’—and he tells him the whole story. ‘So you see, my son, I’m not your father at all. I’m your mother. The Archbishop is your father.’” Talbot laughed. “Get it?”
“Yeah,” said Garth, smiling weakly, “pretty funny.”
“It’s more than funny. There’s truth there. They’re dirty, all of them. Believe me. And if you want more proof—”
“I’m going.”
“Sure. But take this magazine with you.”
“I got it at home, I think. Got a subscription.”
“That’s all right. Take this copy. I’ve marked off a paragraph on page 34. Pretty sexy stuff. And pretty surprising—considering who the author is.”
Garth rolled up the fat issue of the popular magazine and put it under his arm. “So long, Talbot. See you around. Maybe you’ll be here tomorrow?”
“No, I’ll be working tomorrow.”