“What thin line is that?” he asked. “What’s more important than raising your children the best you can? What thin line?”
“The thin line between walking the thin line and jumping off of it.”
“But these people, these couples, have no idea what being really alone is like.”
Again she stared at him. “Trust me on this. Let’s not talk about it.”
Carol was standing in the doorway of the kitchen, staring off, trying to think of something different to discuss.
“Anyway,” Kelleher said, “well, okay. But do you think Wally felt alone? Do you try to think of reasons why this happened?”
She thought about it, but she didn’t like thinking about it. “Well, I just think Wally was mental,” she said. “That’s about it. He had secrets I’ll never know.”
“Yeah.”
“You feel what you feel and you do what you have to,” Carol told him. She hesitated a moment. “And you keep it a secret as long as you can. I cheated. A couple of years ago.” It came out easily, this shadow in her life, not as a full and accurate confession but more in the spirit of instruction. She was standing in the kitchen door wiping her hands. She glanced back toward the back door, making sure Stephen was outside. Maybe she’d been wanting to tell somebody this. She felt it literally lift off of her. “It was a guy I knew from high school. He taught at the University of Illinois and a few other places and suddenly he was teaching here. One night he called—I hadn’t seen him in many years, and in the meantime he’d been to Vietnam, of course. He was a little sad, maybe. A little crazy, too. And Wally and I were…”
“Were what?”
“Sideways. Flat as a pancake.” Carol thought of the long strange days that had made up those few short years. Getting letters in the mail—waiting for opportunities when no one was home to slip through the little wooden window into the dark of the crawlspace, a grown woman otherwise relatively dignified, crawling in dirt under her pipes and floorboards to hide the love letters in a bundle in the dark. She thought of how circumstances could evolve that would, for a while, make that behavior seem normal. She recalled the deliciousness of her secret love.
“And you made him happier?” the priest was asking.
“What?”
“You made this sad man happier?”
Carol had no answer for that. She doubted it, actually.
“It’s all over?” Kelleher asked after a few moments. Here again, the directness of the parish priest. She wasn’t about to tell him the full duration and impact of the affair. It was enough to mention it at all, to admit it existed.
“Yes, Father, it’s over,” she said. “Wally never knew about it. He had plenty going on. We hadn’t been married very long, but it was like we’d been married a lot longer. Deep in adult crap, numbing routine.” She deconstructed it all. There must have been some reason why the affair happened. Many reasons, probably, including her own flaws as a wife. She wasn’t sure she could even remember the numbing routine. She watched the priest’s face, to make sure he could handle something this big. “He had a thing about veterans, Wally did. A sort of in-between kind of thing. A kind of male rite-of-passage fantasy about having missed Vietnam—even though he ran from it feverishly back when he was eligible for the draft. Got somebody to testify in writing that he was colorblind.”
She felt Father Kelleher looking at her. Finally he said, “So. Carol Brown had an affair.”
There it was, the word. She looked down and waited for the priest to give her penance.
“Well,” Kelleher said after a moment, “does this man, your friend—does he know what’s happened to you? Has he come to you, since it happened? Since you were nearly murdered?” He coughed.
“He was pretty far away for the most part, and by then,” she lied, “we hadn’t seen each other for a year. Mostly we wrote letters. I talked to him on the phone once, after. I just don’t think he had the energy for my personal disaster. He was still working on his.” She flicked at her hair.
She looked at the old priest. Somehow she sensed that a priest couldn’t quite grasp the approach-avoidance aspect of things between men and women. On the other hand, maybe priests were masters at it.
“I guess I don’t really think you’d ever understand, Father. In a million years.”
Unexpectedly, Kelleher laughed.
“I mean,” she said, “I don’t think this is your world, this trafficking in relationships.”
“Trafficking. My God,” he said, still laughing.
“I mean—”
“For Chrissake, stop. I know what you mean,” he said. He was still laughing—maybe it was the scotch. “What a wonderful thing for you to say,” he said. “You really are my friend.”
Carol didn’t quite get it. Kelleher went into the kitchen, tore himself a paper towel, and wiped his face. His laugh went into a cough again. He poured a little scotch, tossed it down, rinsed the glass and filled it with water. “Mercy,” he said, still laughing a little, “that was a good one.” Carrying the glass, he went out of the kitchen then, lumbered to the front door of the house, still chuckling. Carol followed him. They looked out where Becky was playing. A cool breeze blew through the front screen door.
“You know, for years I was a pretty good pastor, in the St. Louis area. East St. Louis. Hard to imagine, I know.”
She was relieved to have him talking about himself.
“And then I thought about other things and went through—you know—one of these priestly crises.” He rubbed his eyes, wandered back into the den, sat down heavily in Wally’s chair. “Essentially, I went through the motions for a few years. And I’ll tell you, we have some motions in this church, if you just want to go through ‘em. You can look very busy and very holy with motions like these. Acquired over centuries, you know.”
Carol noticed how unnatural he seemed in the sunlight from the window, his eyes pale and squinting, his skin blotchy white.
“And then finally I went down on the ice, as we say in the profession. And the Bishop put me in Moline, and then Murdock, and then here. He’d like, what he’d really like, is to spiral me right out the bottom of the diocese.” He walked back into the kitchen for more water. “Things the Bishop could never tell you.”
“The Bishop figures you can get yourself together here?”
“Figures I’ll die, Mrs. Brown.” He put ice in his water glass. “You’re my friend. We’re just talking here. I’ve been robbed recently. I feel bad, so I’m running off at the mouth.” He laughed to himself. He wandered back to the front door, the fresh air breezing in. “You’ve told me a Carol Brown secret. Not to be trading stories, but the Bishop figures I’ll croak. Hopes so, I think. That’s that.” He was staring off.
Right then there was a yelp from outside, then another. The first one was Bliss, the second Becky. At the door Carol saw that the dog was leaning against the tug of the leash, staring down the street.
“What’s this white stuff on her?” Becky asked.
“Just dry skin, honey. You pet her real nice.”
“She’s got a big tongue!” Becky shouted. “Yuck!”
“You wash your hands before you eat that sandwich,” Carol called to her, her voice reminding her of her own mom. “You hear me?”
“Watch this, Mom,” Becky shouted after realizing the potential audience watching from the front screen door. She did her wellpracticed back-walkover, and Carol noticed yet again and proudly that Becky’s snappy cartwheel demonstrated some very real athletic ability even at her young age.
Father Kelleher was watching out the screen door. “Bravo!” he called when she perfectly executed her trick.
Carol watched with him. “Becky just started taking gymnastics.”
“She’s catching on pretty fast, it looks like.” He toasted her with the last of his water, and sighed. “Well, Mrs. Carol Brown. I’ve enjoyed our chat. And all I can say is, there’s a message in all this somewhere.”
Carol smiled. “Well, F
ather Randall M. Kelleher,” she said, “I’m sure there is.”
•
It was about a two-minute drive to the rectory from Carol’s. Stephen and Robby were enlisted to play with Becky and the dog in the backyard while Carol was gone. Later they would have to walk Bliss over to the rectory. Kelleher insisted on driving, although they went in Carol’s two-door, army green Chevy Monte Carlo. Carol hadn’t ridden in the passenger seat of her own car in long time.
They went by the rectory, but the fingerprint crew was still there—they could see that the window wasn’t repaired yet, and no one appeared to have arrived to do it, so they decided to drive up through town and through the park. The priest didn’t seem ready to go home just yet, and the drive seemed to hit the spot. He had a light sweat going—he was in direct afternoon sun, wearing all black, and Carol hadn’t put freon in the car since Wally—so the air conditioning wasn’t particularly cooling them. But Kelleher might have sweated anyway, in those clothes. He wasn’t all that accustomed to sunlight.
“Well, I’ll tell you, it’s lucky for them I wasn’t home,” the priest mused, feeling a little more robust on three scotches. “I do have a pistol, as you know, and I would use it, too. Shooting low, of course.”
Carol smiled at him. He turned into the park, and they paraded down the long, shaded one-lane drive. “It’s fifteen miles an hour in here,” Carol said. They were doing twenty-five, Kelleher engrossed in his fantasies of vengeance.
“If you introduce a gun, Father, they might shoot you.”
“Then I’d have to shoot back. You have to take chances. You have to,” he said. “Or maybe I’d just shoot a lot, and confuse them. Pop, pop, pop!”
“Confuse them into shooting you,” Carol said. “They’re probably just kids.”
“Well, sure. But think of your Vietnam friend,” Kelleher said. “Calling in bombs and rockets on his own men. You have to act sometimes. In certain situations. Take your chances. We forget that until we’re in a situation.”
Carol’s mind whirled. Something was odd here. They came out of the park and turned down Main Street, heading back to the rectory. She kept looking at him. Something was odd.
“How do you know about that, Father?” He kept his eyes straight ahead. “Father? How do you know about what my friend did in the army?”
They rumbled on the brick street, south. The priest was frozen in place.
Finally he said, “Let me tell you, a man has to take action. That’s my point. A man has to act. I’ve been robbed. There’s pride in this, the male way, standing up for himself.”
He was agitated. The sweat rolled down his face.
“Don’t change the subject,” Carol said.
“I’m a peaceful man,” he said, wiping his face with his sleeve. “Don’t people like me in this town?” He produced a dingy gray handkerchief and dabbed at his forehead. “Somebody should think about what the Jesuits are doing in Central America. They’re heroes down there—heroes of the poor.”
He looked at her, his eyes red.
“I think you might owe me an explanation, Father,” Carol said. She leaned back in the seat, looked away from him, out the opposite window. He turned onto Van Allen, nearly home.
They rolled to a stop in front of the rectory. Two men were bent over the basement window in the side bushes, and Morrell’s police car was in the back driveway. Father Kelleher turned off the car, handed her the keys and climbed out. He slumped around the front of the car and started up the front sidewalk. She rolled down the window.
“Father Kelleher,” Carol called. “I need to know everything you know. You know I do.” The priest kept walking toward his front door. “Look at my life,” she said.
Morrell came out of the rectory and met him halfway on the sidewalk. He had his notepad and was asking more questions, and together the two men went inside. Carol sat still, in the passenger seat of her old car. A cloud of blood-pounding, ear-ringing guilt set in on her. Wally knew.
BOTTOM
On a rainy Tuesday night in April, around nine-twenty by his running watch, Lowell left Carol Brown’s home by the back door, leaving her naked in her bed. Drunk, he shambled down the back steps, stumbled through her backyard gate into the dark yards across the alley, heading south to the next block where his Corolla was parked—but Gene Skolnick was on his screened back porch smoking reefer, and Lowell had to duck him by pausing behind a silver maple. Gene was one of his clients. After a while, Gene’s wife Mary came out, and they talked for a time, both staring out into the dark, both smoking. Lowell couldn’t hear what they were talking about. He resisted taking a peek around the tree. Then Mary and Gene receded back into their home, and Lowell saw their upstairs bedroom light click on. Then falling not once but twice over the same downed limb, he scrambled to his car, drove around a while on the quiet streets trying to settle himself down, and eventually parked in the alley behind Forty Martyrs Catholic Church. He parked in the shadows among bushes where the car wouldn’t likely be seen, hurried crookedly along the west side, out of sight of the rectory, careened up the steps in shadows, stumbling only once, tested and found the door unlocked, pulled it wide and went into the vestibule. Catholic churches were almost always open, inviting in anyone who needed quiet. Astonishing how few actually came. Up by the altar, candles flickered, and it was so quiet it was almost possible to hear them deaver flutter. It seemed there was a draft across the front of the church—a window open maybe. He moved to the front pew, slid in, pulled down the kneeler, sat for a moment. When Lowell was a kid, he came to this very altar from time to time, in some kind of peculiar mood or situation—at twelve he was the most neurotic kid he knew, though back then he wouldn’t have put it that way. Therefore on this night he couldn’t come here unselfconsciously. He turned out the way he turned out, and that was that. Dizzy, he kneeled down and drifted off his solemn prayer and stared emptily at the altar.
The floors were matrix marble in the aisles and wood beneath the pews, and everything creaked. He heard shifting and thumping, and it seemed almost certain someone was in the choir loft behind him, but he decided not to turn around and look, and anyway it was too dark up there to see. Shadows from the flickering candles gave life to the statues of Mary and Joseph right in front of him and to the giant Christ hanging on the cross centered above the glittering altar. The crucifix was an icon in the Roman Catholic Church. The cross wasn’t quite enough as a symbol of Christ’s martyrdom, so there had to be a dead body hanging from it. He stared at it a while. Before long, he was reliving the evening. He was very sorry that it happened, but she was as beautiful as he knew she would be.
He slumped, leaned back, his butt now against the seat of the pew, and he may have slept, head down on his arms. It was chilly in the church. Each time he awakened, he caught himself tipping over. At one point, he heard a commotion as Father Kelleher came in through the vestry. After some throat clearing and some clicking and clacking, the priest left by the same door, taking the short sidewalk back to the rectory; there was indeed a small window open next to his pew, and Lowell heard Kelleher working the locks. While the nave was open to anyone who might need to come there, the back doors were locked. The chalice, after all, was made of gold. Lowell watched the motion detection lights come on and go off through stained glass. He heard the shuffling footsteps of Kelleher. Lowell dozed again, deeply enough that when he woke someone had walked up the center aisle and kneeled behind him.
A hand clamped onto his shoulder and he turned to see who was there. It was Vasco Macon Whirly. “Hey, you okay?” Vasco whispered.
Lowell looked at him but said nothing because he knew he couldn’t talk well and his breath stank.
“You okay?” Vasco whispered, sitting back in the pew.
Lowell said nothing, turned back to the altar.
“Drunk?” Vasco waited for a reply. “Or even more trouble than that?” Vasco asked, almost as though he knew all the things he couldn’t possibly know. “Mind if I sit here a while
?” Vasco rattled his rosary. Lowell put his head back down on his arms. Vasco ran through the monotony of prayers in a low, vibrating rumble that hypnotized Lowell into a netherworld of almost sleep.
Next time he nodded awake, Vasco wasn’t behind him anymore. Instead he was back in the choir loft. “I’m still here,” he said. “I like it up here. Perspective.” He began to pray the rosary aloud again. A low hum, steady like the monks’ chants in prayer calls at the Trappist.
Around ten-thirty, not much more sober than when he arrived, Lowell got up and headed for the front of the church. It was quiet upstairs, and he thought maybe he would make it to the car without even having to break into a run. He wondered if he would remember this in the morning. There was a chance not. Upstairs, Vasco hopped up fast and clambered down the narrow wood stairs into the vestibule. He caught Lowell by the shirt. “You planning on driving home?”
Heading out the front doors, towing his friend, who still had a grip on his shirt sleeve, Lowell said nothing. It was a warm, muggy night after the rain. Skim of clouds rushing past a waning moon. Wind churning the tops of maples on the courthouse lawn across the street. It would be a beautiful spring. “Hey. I’ll drive ya. I can walk back.” Vasco lived two blocks from Forty Martyrs. Lowell lived ten blocks away, on the northwest side. Next thing he knew, Vasco was in the driver’s seat. Lowell handed him the keys.
Lowell imagined Veronica at the door of the carport, the car pulling in with Vasco at the wheel.
“Where have you been,” she’d ask.
“Found him in the church,” Vasco would say.
“Thanks,” she would reply. “Want some coffee?”
“Nah. But he needs aspirin and a tankard of water.”
“I know,” she’d say. “We do this a lot. But can’t you stay a bit?”
“I should go,” Vasco would say.
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