And emptier. A fat bald man sat in the final pew at the back of the church. One woman knelt in the candlelight at the side altar. An old man in a white shirt leaned against the wall at the end of the confessional row, apparently waiting his turn.
Moon sat, stretched his legs before him, felt himself relax. The doors were closed at the confessional where Julian had been three nights before, and a little green light glowed above it. Julian was at work. The door to the cubicle where Moon had sat opened. Ayoung woman emerged, made the sign of the cross, genuflected, and walked past Moon. She was smiling. The waiting man disappeared inside, taking her place. Moon considered how he would describe this incident to Halsey, how Halsey would react to it.
“Why did you go in there?” Halsey would ask. And then he would, Halsey fashion, answer his own question. “Because you wanted to recapture your misspent youth, I think. No, you wanted him to forgive you for not being nice to your mother. So then why did you cut out before you got to that part of your story?” And Moon would find himself pulled into a discussion about why he, and why Halsey, behaved in the way they did. And what it all meant. And why they couldn’t seem to relate to the sort of women who appealed to them, and what life was all about in the first place.
The door of the other penitential cubicle opened and another woman emerged, this one elderly. She walked slowly toward the main altar and knelt. The door remained open, inviting another penitent. None appeared.
Moon’s thoughts drifted back to Halsey. In retrospect their rapport seemed odd. Conventional wisdom says opposites attract. But, except physically, he and Halsey were very much alike. They would not try to defeat the world but they would survive. Their cuts would heal. Halsey was no more ambitious than he was. The three stripes on Halsey’s sleeve were there by default. The same with Moon’s rank as sergeant. The army was all right with Halsey. It was stupid, senseless, inefficient, full of the absurdities that Halsey collected and treasured. He’d found a home in the armored division. And so had Moon. And both for the same reason: the draft board lottery came up with their number. Halsey could have qualified for a deferment. Why hadn’t he? A lot of trouble, he’d said. And he was curious. What else would he do? Fate had decreed it. The two of them had sat in the post exchange night after night drinking bad PX beer and discussing such questions. Going into town together in usually fruitless searches for women. Exchanging boyhood embarrassments, triumphs, and defeats, looking under it all for some hint of meaning.
The man in the white shirt emerged from the penitential doorway and departed, leaving it open. If the priest in the center cubicle was indeed Father Julian he would be idle now, looking out to see if another customer was waiting. Moon was aware that the priest was probably looking at him right now, wondering if he’d come in. Well, would he? Moon wasn’t sure. It was a long, long time since he had had a talk like the ones he and Halsey had shared. He hadn’t realized how he hungered for them. He glanced back, saw that now the center door was open too, and a small priest, his cassock hanging loosely on his skinny frame, was limping down the aisle toward him.
“I decided that you might not be coming in,” said Father Julian. “I decided I would bring you a personal invitation.”
“You recognized me,” Moon said, because he could think of nothing else.
Julian made a deprecatory gesture. “Biggest man in the cathedral,” he said. “I wouldn’t be surprised if you’re the biggest man in Manila.”
Moon laughed. “You exaggerate,” he said.
“How big are you?” Julian said. “Six and a half feet, I’d say. Maybe two hundred sixty pounds.”
“You’re still exaggerating.”
“But not by very much, I think. Anyway, I am happy to see you. I had hoped-” Julian paused, thinking.
“That I’d finish the story?”
“Oh, that. Yes. That would be interesting. But I had hoped, too, that you would tell me something that would jar my mind from its lethargy and I would somehow think of something wise to say to you. And you would say, ‘Yes! Yes! Of course! This dinky little priest is absolutely correct. I should forgive myself for this awful sin of which I am so proud. And then I will allow God to forgive me.”
Father Julian had seated himself in the pew beside Moon, and he looked at him sideways now, grinning.
“We priests sometimes entertain such grand delusions. It is something that happens to us when we receive the Holy Orders, when the bishop ordains us.”
“It happens to all males, I guess,” Moon said. “I used to enjoy some grand delusions.” But when had that been? As a child, of course. But not much after that. He had time enough to think about it because Father Julian seemed to be thinking about it too. At least he wasn’t talking. He sat, head slightly down, smiling slightly, a minuscule nod in agreement with whatever was passing though his mind. Relaxed. It skipped Moon back to post exchange evenings he and Halsey had spent.
“It’s not a séance,” Halsey had said after they’d finished a second beer without a word spoken, “because a séance requires some effort. And some outside interference from a spirit. I’d call it nonverbal communication-the ultimate in intellectual inertia.” And Moon had said, But we don’t communicate, and Halsey had said, “Sure we do. When the First Sarge came in a minute ago you raised an eyebrow. I looked. You smirked. I remembered how he tried to take the wrong gal home last time we were here. I nodded. We communicated.” And Moon had said, Just call it comfortable silence.
And the silence now was comfortable. Father Julian, having heard his quota of sins for the day, seemed to feel no hunger to hear more. Moon was in no hurry to provide them. They talked about why Julian had gone into the seminary, and why he’d returned to it after dropping out. They talked about American journalism, and Manila journalism, and, eventually, about what Moon was doing so far from Durance and the cold, clean air of the Colorado high country.
“That’s odd, don’t you think?” Julian said. “That your brother didn’t tell you he had a daughter? Didn’t he tell your mother either?”
“Maybe he did,” Moon said. The thought had hung at the edge of his consciousness for days, but it was the first time he’d allowed himself to really consider it. “if he did, she didn’t tell me.”
Julian seemed to notice how forlorn that sounded. He looked at Moon, expression sympathetic. “Maybe he thought you would disapprove. Big brother-little brother, you know. The infant born out of wedlock. Woman of a different race. All that. Maybe he told your mother to keep it a secret.”
“Possibly,” Moon said. “Who knows? Maybe she knew all the time. Maybe not telling me was her idea.”
“And why would that be?” Julian said, but he was asking himself more than Moon, and Moon had no comment.
A woman came in through the side door, lit another candle before the alcove altar, and knelt. From somewhere far out in Manila Bay came the sound of a tugboat hooting; from Quezon Boulevard the sound of a siren; from somewhere behind them, someone coughing. Silence.
Julian sighed. Chuckled. “This is going to sound Freudian, I think. What I’m about to say. But is there something between you and your mother? Some rift? Some-some problem?”
“Well, yes,” Moon said.
And as he said it he knew that this was what he had come for: to talk to another human being about how he had brought about the defeat of Victoria Mathias. To make this confession.
“Women have more trouble forgiving, you know. You told me that. Your experience from ten thousand weeks of hearing their confessions. I’ll tell you what I did to my mother.”
Julian held up his hand. “Wait. Think about it for a moment. I am curious. I would like to hear it. But do you really want to tell me?”
Moon thought about it. “Not exactly,” Moon said. “I don’t want to but I need to.”
Julian nodded.
“I have to go back a ways,” Moon said.
Julian nodded again. “Go back as far as you need,” he said. “Nothing awaits me but an emp
ty room.”
But where to begin? “She was a small woman. Still is, for that matter. But I was thinking of when I was a boy. Little. Very neat. Very pretty. Our house was neat too. We lived in Oklahoma. In Lawton. We owned a little printing shop. My dad was a great big guy, like me. People called him Marty. For Martin. Looking back on it, knowing what I know now, I know he drank too much. Like me. When I was twelve he got sick. Very sick. They put him in the hospital and the doctors decided he had pneumonia. They treated him for that. Turned out they were wrong.” Moon paused, tried to keep the bitterness out of his voice. “He got sicker and sicker, and finally they discovered he had tuberculosis and it had spread into his spinal column. They called it Pott’s disease, and whatever it was it killed him, and it took a long time doing it.”
Moon stopped. He could never talk about this without feeling a rage building up inside him.
Julian sighed. “Tuberculosis,”, he said. “An old-fashioned disease. They could probably have saved him now. Since about 1960 they have a drug that works.”
“I guess he was a little too early or they were a little too stupid. The TB strewed up the vertebrae in the neck and upper back and caused abscesses and put pressure on the spinal column. We used to go visit him in the hospital, the three of us, and when Mother could finally bring him home he was paralyzed. Almost totally from the neck down. Just a little motion in one arm and hand.”
Moon inhaled a great breath and let it out. Father Julian sat motionless just down the pew, head slightly bent. Moon inhaled the smells of spring in the tropics, and of an old, old church, and sorted through the memories.
“It gave me a chance to understand what love is all about,” he said, and he described the way Victoria Mathias had cared for a husband who had become nothing more than a helpless talking head. How she kept the printing operation going to support them, working nights and Sundays on billing and the books, and, when she wasn’t working, being always with Martin. Taking him out to the park in his wheelchair, reading to him, bathing him. Cleaning him up before the doctor came, shaving him.
“She had to do absolutely everything. As if he were an infant.” Moon paused. He had come to the part he had never told to anyone except Halsey. Not even Ricky. Certainly not Ricky.
“You are describing perfect love,” Julian said. “Unselfish. And perfect tragedy.”
“And now the other half of the tragedy,” Moon said. “My father’s half.”
“Yes,” Julian said. “I was thinking about that.”
“He wanted to die. He wanted to set her free.”
“Yes. I would guess that. So would I.”
“I didn’t guess it. It didn’t even occur to me,” Moon said. “It got so I resented him. Ricky did too, probably. But we never talked about it. I’d think, Why don’t you just die? I’d wish it all the time. I’d even pray for it. Pray that when I woke up in the morning he’d be dead.”
“But you never said anything.”
“Of course not,” Moon said. “For God’s sake. No. It didn’t occur to me for a long time that my father was praying for it too.”
“But you figured it out.”
“I didn’t. I wasn’t that smart. Or that kind. I overheard them. Talking.”
Moon paused again. But he knew immediately he was going to tell it all. And he did. He’d come back from the shop early because the printing order he was supposed to wrap and deliver had been canceled. It was Saturday afternoon. Early summer. Ricky had left his bike beside the house, and he decided he’d put it in the garage. That meant a detour that took him across the grass right under the window where Martin Mathias spent his days. He’d heard his parents talking, and the anger in his father’s voice had stopped him. He’d never heard that tone before.
“I think, she’d been cleaning him up. After a bowel movement, probably. Doing one of those humiliating personal things. And something must have gone wrong and he was yelling at her. Or actually, I guess he was yelling at himself. He was calling her names. I remember he kept repeating ‘Stubborn as a damned mule.’ And he said he knew Mother wouldn’t put him out of his misery by killing him, easy as that would be. And he could understand that. He could understand the moral problem. But why wouldn’t she give him a divorce? Would that hurt her pride? Make her feel she’d been a failure? Or put him in a nursing home. Would the neighbors think that was selfish of her? If she didn’t want to have a life for herself, she should have one for Ricky and me. And then my mother said something too low for me to hear, and he said, ‘That’s not true. Dr. Morick is in love with you. He always has been. He could give you a decent life.’ And she said something like, ‘I’d be bored to death.’ And I didn’t hear any more of it.”
“You went away?” Julian asked.
“I went back to the shop and got the pistol my father had kept in a cabinet there. A little twenty-two-caliber revolver. I loaded it and put it in my pocket and went home again.”
“To kill your father?”
“When I had a chance. When my mother wasn’t there.”
Julian shifted in the pew, sighed. “The tragedy multiplies itself,” he said. “Love and pity can make a terrible blend if faith is left out of it.”
“Faith? Faith in what? Faith that God would mend a damaged spinal cord?”
“All right, then,” Julian said. “I hope you can tell me that, without faith, this story of yours had a happy ending. You didn’t kill him, did you?”
“Not me,” Moon said, and laughed. “Not likely. Mother went back to the shop after dinner. It was my night to take care of Dad, so Ricky was off somewhere. I went in his room and he said something normal to me, like what was new down at the shop or something like that, and I told him I had overheard him yelling at Mother and I asked him if he really wanted to die, and he said-”
Moon stopped. He was having trouble with this. Julian sat motionless beside him, waiting. Moon cleared his throat.
“And he said he was terribly sorry I had heard that. That sometimes one just loses control and says things he regrets. And I said, But do you really want to die? Would you if you could, if no one would suffer for it, if you could just force yourself to stop breathing, for example? He didn’t answer that for a while. Just studied me. And then he said, Yes, he would. It would be better for him and for Victoria and for all of us. Then I showed him the pistol. I told him I would do it for him.”
Moon stopped again, remembering that moment as he had remembered it a thousand times, remembering fumbling the pistol out of his pocket, its oily smell, showing his father that it was loaded. And his father’s expression. Every time he remembered it, it seemed that when the surprise had gone away it had been replaced by a kind of longing. And then by pride. That’s what it looked like. But how could it have been?
“Tell me why you didn’t,” Julian said. “You were-what? Thirteen or fourteen? Not wise enough yet to see why you shouldn’t.”
“Thirteen by then,” Moon said. “Well, we talked about it, the pros and cons. He said it would be better if he did it himself. Asked me to put the pistol in the hand he could move a little. He could hold it down in his lap, but he couldn’t raise it up to his head. Then he said nobody would believe it anyway. How could I explain his getting the pistol? Too many people would know he couldn’t have shot himself. He told me to take the pistol, and I did, and he asked if there was still that box of rat poison on the high shelf down at the plant. I told him that Mother had said it was too dangerous to have around and got rid of it.
“He said then he guessed we’d have to wait a little while, but not long. Dr. Morick had said his liver was failing fast and he wouldn’t live long anyway. Victoria would not have to put up with him much longer. But if I killed him, I would be her burden for the rest of her life. Her heart would break for me.”
“Indeed,” Julian said, “it would have. Your father was a wise man. So you put away the pistol?”
“Mother came in while we were talking. I must have been terribly upset. I didn’t he
ar the car.”
“And she heard you?”
“I was still holding the pistol. Dad saw her standing there in the doorway. And he said, ‘ Victoria. Malcolm overheard me yelling at you this afternoon and has offered to solve our problem for us. I think I’ve persuaded him it would just make a bad situation worse.’”
Moon took a huge shuddering breath.
“And she came in and took the pistol out of my hand and hugged me and started crying. We were all crying, all three of us.”
“Catharsis,” Julian said. “So you did have a happy ending. Sometimes love can be as effective as faith.”
Moon cleared his throat again. “Ah,” he said. “But that’s not the ending.”
“It couldn’t be,” Julian said. “Your story hasn’t come yet to the great sin you’ve teased me with. Did that involve your father?”
“He died the next year,” Moon said. “When I was fourteen. And my mother mourned for him.”
“And so did you,” Julian said.
“So ‘I had the example. A brave man and a brave woman and some notion of what you give up for love. So I didn’t have any excuse.”
“Excuse for what? Oh, for what you are about to tell me you did?”
“For what I did,” Moon said. “I had killed a man. I was driving drunk and driving an army vehicle off the post without authorization. We did it a lot, but the crime is being caught at it. So I was awaiting trial. Clearly guilty. The charge was homicide committed during the conduct of a felony. Drunk driving being the felony. I was assigned a first lieutenant as defense attorney. He advised me to plead guilty, saving the court time, and plead for leniency. The most I’d get was twenty years. I was terrified.”
“I can see why,” Julian said. “How old were you then, early twenties?”
“I don’t know why I was so frightened. Not for sure, anyway. I think maybe it was because I didn’t know myself very well yet. It seemed that a military prison was not the place I should be spending so much of my life. I felt like I was going to be buried alive.”
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