And then I heard it. A baby.
I saw Marbury peek under a red Indian blanket that the woman was holding and smile. The baby started to cry again. Not the crying of a hungry child or even one who was tired, for I’ve heard my brother’s kids, but a sick child. The woman was now frantic. I saw her hands moving, pleading, and I reached for my glasses. She was telling Marbury that her baby wasn’t right, I could see that, that the baby cried for hours on end often without consolation. And now she faced another fear, that the child was just like herself. Deaf. A neighbor tried pots and pans, she said, but no response. And now she was worried why God would do such a thing, whether God even cared. Worse, whether there even was a God to care.
I watched Marbury closely. He bent over the child, pulled back the blanket, and kissed its forehead. Nothing else. The woman cried and hugged him, and Marbury told her that everything was secure in God’s hands. That she shouldn’t worry. That everything would be the way that God intended. And then he said one other thing that haunts me even now.
He said, abandon yourself to God.
Marbury saw me watching him as he came back. He fell into the seat next to me, knowing full well that I had witnessed everything, and he said, “I didn’t know what else to say.”
“You should have told her to go to a doctor. That child might be sick.”
“Some folks don’t trust doctors.”
“And they trust you?”
“They trust God, Peter. I’m nothing.”
“This is exactly what I’m talking about. Do this and you won’t last.”
Marbury peered at me. “Are you telling me that a priest can’t pray?”
“I’m telling you that you can’t heal people.”
He smiled and gurgled some more. Laughter.
“Con men and road show preachers heal,” I said. “Not priests.”
I tossed the notes into my briefcase, punctuating my point. Marbury just sat there and stared at me, making me feel uncomfortable. He was right that a priest ought to be able to pray for healing, but I couldn’t admit that. Not now. Not under these circumstances.
“You set up false expectations, Marbury.”
“I don’t. I never said I could heal. I didn’t even suggest it.”
“Then why would anyone say it of you?”
Marbury just shrugged. “I guess because of Pennsylvania.”
I sat down again, for in my rush of anger I had stood up.
“What the hell happened to you out there anyway? Tell me.”
“I found God, Peter.”
“God?”
“It’s amazing what you can find in a blizzard.”
Marbury said that the snow was getting worse in Wheelersburg, now a full-fledged emergency. Everything was shut down. There were reports on the radio that the National Guard was being mobilized, though nobody could confirm that. When Marbury looked outside, he couldn’t see how anyone could mobilize in this kind of weather, military or otherwise. The snow was now well over a foot deep and still coming downward. The sky and the ground matched perfectly, absolute whiteout conditions, and nothing moved, except for the power lines that swayed in the wind and threatened only darkness.
Fears of losing power aside, the hospital readied its emergency procedures. Meals were brought out of storage. Electric generators and batteries were brought up to speed, should they be needed, and special operating rooms set up for any incoming. Somebody called over to the town hall about the snowplow but only got a recording. It was just sitting there anyway, stuck in the snow like every other vehicle, and the hopes of being cleared out anytime soon evaporated after that. They were stuck.
Marbury pitched in where he could. He spent the evening delivering coffee to the staff, and even did a bit of shoveling. Abigail, the night nurse, saw Marbury working on the loading bay, which had more snow falling from the concrete overhang. He was almost waist deep in it but he tried to shovel it anyway, intent on clearing a route for future emergency vehicles.
“Forget it,” said Abigail. “Folks are on their own in this weather. We couldn’t save anyone if we had to, Father. The roads are all closed.”
Marbury asked her if she heard any updates from the radio.
“It’s pretty grim. Another foot, maybe more.”
“I’ll never get out of here,” he said.
“You’ll get out. It just might take a while.”
Marbury stuffed the shovel into the nearest snowbank and kicked the ice from his feet. No boots. He was cold and it was almost morning, though the sky looked the same old puffy white, hardly brighter.
“How’s Lucy?”
“About time for my rounds if you want to come.”
“I’d like that,” he said. “What about Helen?”
“Still on the machines.”
Marbury took off the coat that he’d borrowed from an EMS worker and slipped it back in the fellow’s locker. He’d never know.
They walked down the hall to Abigail’s station, where she picked up her clipboard and the few things that she would need on her rounds. A blood-pressure cuff, for one, child’s size, and they went to Lucy’s room.
“Who’s Franklin?” asked Marbury. “You said her name was Franklin.”
“That was the mother’s name. I guess the stepfather wanted nothing to do with the child, since it wasn’t his.”
“And the birth father?”
“None. No records anyway. You see that a lot in hospitals. We get more immaculate conceptions than even you guys. Women without boyfriends or husbands. Hear them talk and you’d swear it was God.”
Abigail walked through the door first. She flipped on a light and went over to the bed where the child was sleeping. Marbury looked at Lucy closely. She had dark hair, which was shoulder length, that curled up around her neck and onto her pillow. Her nose was small, like that of a pug, and matched her face. Baby fat. She looked younger than her four years.
“I have to take your blood pressure, Lucy. Stay asleep if you want.”
But the girl just rubbed her eyes. “Is that you, God?”
Abigail glanced at Marbury and smiled. “See what I mean?”
Marbury didn’t pay any attention to someone waking up, especially waking up in a room as gloomy as this one. Gray walls, no window. No pictures. Hardly even a bed. It looked like a room in a penitentiary.
“I remember you,” said Lucy, cracking her eyes. “Terrible accident.”
“This is Jim Marbury. He’s a priest.”
The sound of ripping Velcro. Her blood pressure was normal.
“How are you feeling?” asked Marbury.
“Bad boo-boo.” And she rubbed her head.
“Your head hurts?”
“My head, and Mommy’s head. She’s sleeping with the angels now.”
The nurse glanced at Marbury and frowned. Not far from the truth.
Marbury said, “You’re right. Your mommy’s very sick. Now you have to pray, Lucy. We’re all praying.”
“But I’m not allowed to pray.”
“Who says?”
“Jacob. Jacob’s mean to God, but God isn’t mean back.”
“Then we’ll keep it as our little secret. How’s that?”
“Secrets are fun as long as you don’t tell.”
Marbury watched me write, scribbling things down as fast as I could. I wasn’t going to take notes, but I did anyway, a habit of mine, and this time was no exception. While I scrambled to catch up, Marbury had left and brought us back a few beers that he had stashed somewhere, and he opened them up. I took a long swallow.
He said, “I heard Rinker’s burned down.”
Rinker’s. It was an old seminary bar where we sometimes snuck away to. Hardly more than a neighborhood hangout in Decorah, Rinker’s had a jukebox and that kept us sane. Plus talking or watching sports on the TV.
I said, “That place was a firetrap. Probably electrical, eh?”
“Not this time. A woman came in with a can of gasoline and torched the place.
She said her husband was spending too much time there with his girlfriend.”
“Good riddance then.”
Marbury smiled and worked his beer.
He thought for a moment, then said, “Do you ever miss it?”
“Rinker’s?”
“No, I mean out there. Do you ever miss it?”
Out there.
I set down my notes and looked at him. Marbury was using those words but he didn’t mean them. Those were just words behind the words. He was really talking about something else. Something we both knew but were afraid to acknowledge, that many priests were afraid to acknowledge.
He was talking about sex.
I thought about it too, and just like Marbury I often used another word to describe it, though in the end it was still sex. Creeping middle age hasn’t slowed these thoughts either—not that I’m sure I want them slowed. Like slowing up a part of life. Even celibate I could still feel. I had to feel, for it was only by feeling that I could fight off the very temptations that gnawed at me, that sent every other temptation running for cover. The temptation for peace. A home, a wife, a family.
Not that I was perfect. It was the sixties and I grew up like every other boy, stealing pictures of Marilyn Monroe and Anita Ekberg from my mother’s movie magazines, then taping them inside my locker at school. When I hit sixteen, I decided on the real thing. A girlfriend. And I found the perfect one. Her name was Molly. She was a sheepish-looking girl with great, thick bifocals. As far as I knew, Molly had few other friends, which only made her the more accessible to me. I tried with the other girls in school, the cheerleaders and musical types, but I never seemed to get anywhere with them, which only pushed me back to Molly. She gave of herself freely, ending my own adolescent torment one night in the back of my parents’ station wagon, a Country Squire. It was roomy and spacious, this car, especially constructed in Detroit—I was convinced of it—for exactly such encounters.
It’s strange, but even now I still think about her. The eyes that squinted when she took off her glasses like some cartoon caricature. The fumbling, nervous way that she undressed, cautious and fearful, for she had much to fear. A predator takes his carrion any way that he could get it, and I was no exception. I preyed on Molly for the worst of all possible reasons, because she was willing.
Marbury looked at me and grinned. “I’m human. I know I do—miss it.”
“Do you ever think about marriage?”
“Sometimes. But then I remember my vows. I’m pledged to God.”
“Pledged or just flirting?”
“No, it’s the old ball and chain with me now.”
Marbury’s humor I took in stride. In seminary I remember him as a man who walked around like he had the world by the tail. That he was once involved with women, probably a great number of women, nobody would deny. But he wasn’t the Lothario that we all expected. Marbury wasn’t the first one to talk to any woman who happened by, whether visiting family or friends, and he didn’t seem twinged with that same kind of desperation that affected many of us. Whether wrestling with our sexual identity as some did, or just wrestling with the notion that sex was a part of the world, Marbury never seemed touched by the struggle. He was comfortable with his celibacy, almost relieved by it, as though he was pleased to give it up.
I only saw him waver one time in those years. It was our last autumn together. Marbury was nowhere to be found, spending most of his time, I discovered later, volunteering at a hospice for the terminally ill in Des Moines. I didn’t consider this out of the ordinary for him. He was fascinated by death and dying, and he always wanted to work with people suffering what people had to suffer in life. But who he really wanted to work with, I think, at least I think this in retrospect, was the director of the hospice.
She was a striking woman with dark eyes and hair, who was just a few years out of college herself. She radiated a youthful charm and ebullience that Marbury gravitated to, as she in turn gravitated to him. I saw them together only once, by accident, when I was visiting a friend’s mother who was dying of cancer. I saw Marbury there and he introduced us. She mentioned that she had heard all about me, that Marbury kept her up on the gossip and tidbits of our seminary and that she felt like we had already met. We had dinner together that night and I could see how they talked. Not the talk of ordinary people casting off words like trash, but the talk of two people in complete harmony with one another.
She struck me as Marbury’s perfect woman. Tough enough to handle him and what the world had to offer, yet tender. I myself would have carted them both off to the chapel, married them on the spot if I could have, had Marbury not been in seminary. In the end, though, it wasn’t meant to be. Despite the perfume wafting from Marbury’s clothes, he denied that he was interested in her. And when she walked down the aisle with another man less than a year later, Marbury viewed it as a vindication. But I knew better. I knew it was love renounced.
When I asked him if he remembered her, Marbury just smiled.
He said, “She got married. I should remember that.”
“That could have been you.”
“But it wasn’t. She wanted me to leave, you know.”
“Why didn’t you?”
“The priesthood was my home.”
“Do you still feel that way.”
“More than ever. I love my life here, Peter.”
I looked at Marbury and I envied him. He was given everything good that the world had to offer. Intelligence and charm, a beautiful woman who adored him, and he gave it all up because he loved what he was doing more.
I said, “I don’t know if you’re crazy or content, Marbury.”
“Some of both, like always.”
And with that Marbury walked me to the door and saw me out. He waved to me as I went to my car, the cool evening air wrapping itself around my body and urging me to go home.
But I didn’t listen.
A duplex on the north side of town.
Her voice. “Well, you know she was deaf too.”
I shut the door behind me. The lock clicked.
“A lot of my friends, the auxiliary mostly, they were all surprised. She didn’t act like it. I think she read lips. Just like on television, only you had to talk slower.”
My voice. “How long did she live here?”
“Almost three years.”
“And she just pulled up and left?”
“I just rent rooms. A mother I ain’t.”
The landlady, a short woman dressed in a bathrobe and pink slippers, led me past the foyer to the stairs. The smell of bratwurst cooking in the oven wafted by me and brought back memories of a place that I lived at in college. Another boardinghouse much like this one. Same kind of woman too. Old but feisty.
I looked at the stairs. They were steep.
“No, in here.”
She pointed to a door on my right. I opened it and we walked in. It was a simple room with a bed, nicely made with a fresh quilt, and a chest of drawers, plus a small writing desk. I examined a few of the drawers, pulling them out, hoping for something, an address or a letter, some indication of where the tenant might have gone, but they were all empty.
“What about her mail?” I asked.
“Don’t know. Never came here. Forget about kin either.”
Another loner. Marbury always seemed to heal only loners.
I ran my finger across the bed, just thinking.
“Did she have any problems getting in or out?”
“I don’t ask, they don’t tell. But she could move about fine.”
“What about the wheelchair?”
“She had a cane too, Father.”
“A cane? I thought she couldn’t walk. I was told—”
“Well, she walked right out of here. Vamoosed.”
“She actually walked?”
“Not very fast. Not that I can walk fast at my age.”
I couldn’t believe it. I didn’t believe it.
“Sounds like a miracle,” I said.
“A woman leaving her wheel-chair.”
But the landlady just huffed, skeptically.
She said, “The real miracle is that I got paid. She never paid up.”
“You don’t find this unusual?”
“Walking? Nah. Now heal this and you got yourself a real miracle.”
The landlady showed me her hands, both of which were horribly swollen. Broken veins popped out, all blue and distressed looking.
She said, “Hurts so bad I want to chop one off except that I might need it someday to chop off the other. They go in pairs, you know.”
“I’m sorry. I wish I could help.”
“You mean, you don’t heal?”
I shook my head.
“I thought that’s why you were here. To sign me up for Sunday.”
“What’s happening Sunday?”
“It’s Easter. Nobody feels pain on Easter.”
“Who said that?”
“Your man.”
I was beginning to feel stupid. “You mean Jesus?”
“No, the guy who heals. He’s having a special service, you know.”
And then I understood. Marbury.
She said, “Just hold a spot for me, Father. That’s all I ask. I simply can’t live with these hands anymore.”
MAUNDY THURSDAY.
The next morning I found myself sitting in the Bishop’s office, filling him in on what I already had. I told him more about the accident and the result of that, as well as the few personal revelations about Marbury’s father, which I spent the evening confirming. Everything checked out, exactly the way Marbury said. His father was in prison for several years in the late sixties, sentenced for manslaughter but he never made it to parole.
I also told the Bishop about my conversation with the landlady and the search for someone actually healed by Marbury. But I didn’t tell him about the baby. I couldn’t. Not without being absolutely certain about Marbury’s motives.
The Bishop sighed. “Is that it? Nothing else?”
I said that it was. He just peered at me as though he had X-ray vision.
The Unspeakable Page 5