by Ray Russell
“I don’t know myself,” said Gregory.
“Are you sure you don’t know?”
“Well, anyway,” said Gregory, rising and thrusting his hands into his pockets and walking to the French windows, “I have a more important problem than the bottle to cope with right now.”
“Anything you want to talk about?”
Gregory’s back was to the Bishop. He shrugged. “Oh, I don’t know. It’s a long story.”
“I love long stories. Old men do, you know.”
Gregory turned from the windows. “Well . . .”
“Go ahead.”
Briefly, he told the Bishop of Susan Garth. Of her inability to enter the church, of the curse she laid on her father, of her coming to Gregory for help.
“When did she come to you?” asked the Bishop.
“Just last night, with her father. She had previously talked to Father Halloran, too. That’s the part I find most disturbing. Your Excellency—”
“Yes?”
“I don’t know exactly how to put it, but—well, did I inherit trouble with this parish? Was there something in Father Halloran’s leaving that perhaps I should know? Did he—I know this seems like prying, but—did he request to be removed from St. Michael’s?”
“Request?” The Bishop shook his head. “Why no. No, not at all. Father Halloran, you know, is an orphan—”
“I didn’t know.”
“—And it has long been his desire to take charge of an orphanage. It has long been my desire to put him in charge of one, because I have always felt he had special gifts in that direction. For a long while there was simply no opening of that kind in the diocese, and so he stayed on here. But just a few weeks ago, because of the death of Father Brenner—he was quite elderly, you know—there was a position at Guardian Angel that had to be filled immediately. Why do you ask?”
Gregory said, “The girl’s father had the idea that Father Halloran expressly requested a transfer because of Susan . . .”
“No, that’s not true. But why should he think that?”
“Because,” said Gregory, “of what happened when the girl came to see Father Halloran. . . .”
• • •
“Will you wait here in the living room, Mr. Garth?” asked Father Halloran. “Come, Susan, you and I will just step into my study and have a little talk. All right?”
“All right, Father,” said Susan.
The Father’s study was a nice place, thought Susan. One of the nicest rooms she had ever been in. Cool, and quiet, and such soft lights. And it smelled nice. Like leather, and pipe tobacco. There were books all over the walls. Susan liked books. When the door was closed, it was as if all the noisy, garish world had vanished. She felt she could have stayed in the room forever and never want to leave. Peaceful, that’s what it was.
Father Halloran talked to her gently, smiling. What seemed to be the trouble? Didn’t she like Mass any more? Did something frighten her? “You can tell me, dear. No matter what it is. You can tell me.”
“I . . .” She shrugged in confusion and dropped her eyes. “I don’t know why I do that, Father. It’s terrible, but I really don’t know why.” Her voice was deferential. “I wish I did know. It’s something like—”
“Yes?”
“Well, once I was sick. The flu, I think. And I couldn’t keep anything on my stomach. The very thought of food just—just made me sicker. You know how that is?”
The priest nodded. “I’ve had a touch of the flu once or twice. I know exactly what you mean.”
“I walked into the kitchen and saw a big bowl of stew on the table—chunks of meat and vegetables swimming in gravy, with steam rising from it—and just the sight of it made me so sick that I couldn’t walk a step closer. I had to turn right around and walk out of the room. Because I knew that if I stayed there another second, I’d—”
Father Halloran nodded.
“Well . . . going to Mass is something like that. It doesn’t frighten me exactly, but when I see the church, when I see the spire with the cross on top of it—” She swallowed and took a deep breath. “I can’t, I have to stop. I have to go away from it. Because I know that if I go any closer I just couldn’t stand it.” Her eyes teared. “Isn’t that terrible, Father?”
“Now, now. Don’t you worry. We’ll clear this up. Just don’t worry. Now tell me—”
The phone rang and Father Halloran turned away from her to answer it. An elderly female parishioner began to unfold a long, complex and numbingly trivial problem. Father Halloran, a man with deep reserves of patience, listened to her, but told her he would have to call her back because he was really quite busy. His eyes, as he talked, were fixed on the carpet.
Suddenly he found himself looking down at two small smooth feet, bare, the toenails lacquered a shrieking red.
He hastily terminated the conversation and replaced the phone in its cradle. Looking up, he saw that Susan was standing before him, completely naked.
He had never seen a naked woman before.
In the soft light of the study, Susan’s body glowed, and the scarlet toenails—her secret adornment—were out of tune with the unpainted fingernails and face. Father Halloran’s heart contracted. She was more in need of help than he had ever dreamed, much more. The poor girl was terribly sick. Evenly, without shock or anger, he said, “Put on your clothes, Susan.”
He looked up at her face. It was a mask of slyness.
“Let’s talk,” she said, and the voice was not hers. She was a ventriloquist’s dummy and somebody else was moving her lips and saying the words. “Let’s talk, Father.” She moved closer to him. “But not about church-going. Talk about the things you really want to talk about. Say what you really mean. Tell me what a pretty girl I am, and what a sweet little figure I’ve got. Tell me all the things that are running through your mind when you look at me. Tell me. I won’t mind. You’re a man, Father. All men think about those things.” She leaned closer and whispered in his ear. Her lips were wet, her breath was hot. She suggested a few specifics the like of which Father Halloran had not heard in all his years of receiving confession. His stomach jumped to hear them. She snickered; then she seized his hand and licked it, like a dog.
He jerked it away as if he had received an electric shock. She reached swiftly for his other hand and pressed it to her breast.
“No, Susan!” He stepped back, knocking over an ash tray.
She threw her arms around him—they were like steel springs—and covered his lips with hers, fluttering her tongue inside his mouth.
“Stop!” He pushed her away. She went stumbling backward.
“Hypocrite!” she said softly when she had gained her footing. “You don’t fool me! You want me—just as much as I want you! If you thought you could get away with it, if you thought nobody would ever find out, you’d grab me, wouldn’t you? You’d paw me. You’d throw me down here, right here,”—she stamped on the floor with her bare foot—“and do all those things you’re turning over in your mind. All of them. You’d glut yourself, glut yourself like a pig, like a pig you’d grunt and drool and sweat over me, empty yourself into me, cover me with your spit and slime—” Her voice rose higher, became coarser. “Hypocrite! Filthy lecher! Pig!”
On the last word she threw herself at the priest—“Help! God help me!” he croaked—as she sunk strong sharp fingers into his throat.
When Garth dragged her wild naked body off Father Halloran, the nails of her hands were stained as red as the nails of her feet—but with the blood of the celibate.
V
CROSS OF PAIN
The Bishop was sitting stunned at the grotesque story when there was a knock at the study door. Gregory answered it. Mrs. Farley, the housekeeper, murmured something to him and Gregory excused himself to the Bishop and walked into the living room.
Susan Garth was there, wa
iting for him.
“Hello, Susan.”
“Hello, Father.”
“What can I do for you?”
She shrugged. “I just thought . . . maybe you could help me . . . maybe we could just talk about it . . . or whatever you want to do . . .”
“Does your father know you’re here?”
“He knows.”
“Fine. Well, Susan, you come at a rather bad time. I have a visitor. Perhaps—”
Mrs. Farley entered the living room and put a note into Gregory’s hand. “His Excellency heard me tell you she was here,” she whispered in explanation.
The note read, simply: Let me see her.
Pocketing it, Gregory said to the girl, “Well, maybe this isn’t such a bad time, after all. As matter of fact, Susan, I’d like you to meet someone. His Excellency, Bishop Crimmings. Do you mind?”
“No, I—guess not.”
“Then come along.” He led her to the study and opened the door. The study looked to Susan about the same as it had the one and only time she had been in it. Perhaps the books were different; there was a typewriter that had not been there before; and seated in the leather chair Father Halloran had occupied was a big old man with white hair and a stern face.
Gregory asked the Bishop, “You’ll want me to stay, won’t you, Your Excellency?”
“No, Father,” said the Bishop crisply. “You may go.”
“Please stay, Father Sargent!” the girl pleaded. “I don’t want to be alone here with—” She looked down at her lean strong hands.
“You may go, Father,” the Bishop repeated.
Gregory left the study, closing the door.
It was very quiet in the room, but the quiet did not spell peace to Susan, as it had before. It seemed swollen with potential violence.
“Come here, miss.” The Bishop’s voice was clipped.
Susan walked reluctantly toward him.
“Sit down.”
She sat opposite him, in the same chair she had sat in before. But, before, everything had been cozy and friendly. There was nothing friendly about this unsmiling, unblinking old man.
“Your name is?” he asked.
“Susan Garth.”
“I,” he said coldly, “am by the grace of God a bishop of Holy Mother Church. Is that the way you address me?”
“No, Your—Excellency.”
“I am told you are a bad girl.”
“I—”
“Silence,” he said cuttingly. “A bad girl; a girl with a filthy tongue; a girl who cursed her own father; a girl with hideous, unclean thoughts. A dangerous person. A violent person. A person who attacked her own spiritual advisor and would have murdered him had she not been prevented by sheer force. A person so depraved she cannot come near the door of the church without drawing back as if it were the gate of Hell itself. Is all this true?”
“Yes,” she said almost in a whisper, “Your Excellency.”
“Is it true, then,” he went on relentlessly, “that you looked with lust upon a priest of God, and laid the hands of lust upon his body? That you accused him of harboring lustful thoughts toward you?”
She nodded.
“Is it true that you cursed this holy man in fearful terms?”
She nodded again.
“All these terrible things are true?”
Avoiding his eyes, she murmured, “Yes. They—”
“Look at me when you speak!”
With difficulty she raised her eyes and looked at the granite face.
“They’re all true,” she said. “All those things.”
The Bishop rose from his chair, slowly, solemnly, towering above her. He walked away from her, his hands clasped behind his back. Without looking at her, he said, “Adjoining this house we are in, this rectory, is a church. It is your church, the Church of St. Michael. It is only one of many churches in a diocese of which I, as Bishop, am the head. Do you understand that?”
“Yes, Your Excellency.”
Still with his back to her, he continued: “Then you must understand that when I say something to you, it is not the same thing as if it were only your father speaking to you, or your priest, or the nuns in school. You are in the presence of your Bishop. Is this clear?”
She nodded. He could not, of course, see her.
“Is—this—clear! I want to hear your voice, girl!”
Near tears, her voice quavering, she said, “It’s all clear to me, Your Excellency.”
He turned around. “Very well. Then listen to me. I want you to stand up.” She did.
“I want you to walk over here to me.”
She did, but as if each step were bringing her close to death.
He put out his large hand. “I want you to take my hand.”
She drew back.
“Take my hand!!”
She did, her lips trembling. His hand, twice the size of hers, cold and rough, enfolded her hand completely and held it in a clamp-like grip.
“Now,” he said, “you see this door? No, not the one you just came through; this other door. Did you know it leads directly to the church?” He felt her freeze. “Directly to the church, with its altar and its candles and its crucifix?” She could not remove her eyes from the door. “You and I,” he said, “are going to walk hand in hand through that door and into the church.”
“No!” She pulled but he held her firm.
“As your Bishop, I order you!”
“No, no, I won’t, I can’t!” She made a mighty effort, broke away from him and sprang to the door by which she had entered the study. She twisted the knob, rattled it; the door was locked. She pounded on it. Finally, trembling, sobbing, her teeth chattering, she sank to the floor.
The Bishop sighed. The business about the door was sheer improvisation, of course; he wasn’t sure—it had been a long time since he had set foot inside this rectory—but he believed it led to the dining room. The rectory was not physically connected to the church at all. Rectories seldom are. But so blinding had been the girl’s terror that she had completely forgotten that.
He walked over to her, lifted her from the floor, led her to a chair. “Please sit down, my poor child,” he said gently. He sat down opposite her. “Now then. All those things were true, you said; all those awful things. But you are not a bad girl, are you? Not really.”
“I am. I am.”
“How can that be, dear? You are very disturbed by these things, very sorry. A bad person would not be sorry.”
She said nothing. She had not stopped trembling.
“My dear,” he asked, “why do you do these things?”
“I don’t know.”
“Can you—describe, can you tell me what it feels like when these things happen, when you do and say these terrible things?”
She tried. “It’s—like it isn’t me at all. Like it’s someone else, taking over.”
A ventriloquist’s dummy. Wasn’t that the term Gregory had used?
The Bishop patted her hand, and sat back in his chair. Suddenly, brightly, he said, “How would you like to play a little game?”
“A game?”
“With me.”
“All right . . .”
“Good.” He reached into his trousers pocket. “We will take a quarter . . . and a half dollar . . .” He selected these coins and put the rest back in his pocket. “You see?”
She nodded. Her eyes were red, but the tears had stopped.
“Now you must close your eyes,” he said, “and I will touch your arm with one or the other of these two coins several times and you must tell me which coin it is, the quarter or the half dollar. All right?”
She nodded, and almost smiled.
“Fine. Now close your eyes.” She did. The Bishop placed the quarter flat against her bare arm.
&n
bsp; “I think . . .” she said, uncertainly, “. . . is it the half dollar?”
“I mustn’t tell you until it’s all over. That’s part of the game.” He touched her arm again, this time with the half dollar.
“I don’t know,” she said. “The quarter? But it could be the half dollar again.”
Now the Bishop abandoned the quarter entirely. He pressed only the half dollar to her arm, several times. She said: “The half dollar . . . The quarter? . . . The quarter again, I think . . . The half dollar . . .”
While the girl went on guessing, the Bishop’s free hand was carefully, silently searching for something in another pocket.
“The quarter . . . I’ll say the half dollar . . . Still the half dollar . . . The quarter? . . .”
Again and again he placed the coin on her arm. “The half dollar . . . The quarter . . . The quarter . . .”
And then she yanked away her arm and yelped in pain. “You burned me!” she screamed, opening her eyes. “You burned me with something! What was it?” She moaned in agony and shattered trust, one hand clapped tightly over the hurt spot. The Bishop pried her hand away and looked—with fear and sadness but no surprise—at the burn, which had begun to glow a vicious pink.
It was precisely the size and shape of the crucifix dangling from his rosary.
VI
THE PRIEST’S WIFE HAS A BROKEN BACK
The breviary dropped from Gregory’s hands when he heard the scream of pain. He shot from his chair and ran from the parlor, quickly unlocked the study door and threw it open.