Sham Rock

by Ralph McInerny

  “Come on.”

  “Scout’s honor.”

  “She’s lost a lot of money lately. Thanks to me.”

  “She doesn’t act like it.” A boat went past the deck on which they sat and headed into the Gulf. “What a contrast to Beth Hanrahan?”

  “Her model is Dorothy Day.”

  Casey sipped his beer, thinking of his plot. “You and Mame are the only ones I’ve seen. Of course, I’m a kind of recluse, as Peaches keeps reminding me.”

  “You’ve got a good life. Not long ago, at a rental car counter, I noticed that the clerk was reading one of your books.”

  “Good for her. How about you? Have you ever visited Pat?”

  “Our Trappist classmate? I’ve been thinking about it.” He seemed to be thinking about it then. “He left me some money.”

  “Where does a monk get money?”

  “It was an inheritance. He left it all to me before he entered.”

  “Lucky you.”

  “But why me?”

  “Who else is there?”

  “You.”

  “Dave, I was never a member of the trinity, and he couldn’t very well leave it to Tim.”

  “How can anyone just disappear, Casey? One day he’s walking around campus like everyone else, and the next day, pfft. He’s gone.”

  “A dead body disappears in a relatively short time.”

  “Until it does, it has to be somewhere.”

  Both lakes on campus had been dragged, and even when the searches proved futile, it was thought the body would surface sooner or later. It never had. The river hadn’t delivered up a body either, but how can you drag a whole river? Those searches were based on the hunch that Tim had drowned himself. Committed suicide. Beth would have been the motive. He was sure that Dave was her choice. Pat had thought the same. The crack-up had begun. Wherever Tim went he must have walked. He hadn’t flown out of South Bend; he hadn’t taken the South Shore to Chicago, or the airport limousine.

  “Hitchhike,” Casey said. “Someone gives a kid a lift and never connects that to any stories about a missing Notre Dame student, if he even saw them. There are lots of ways.”

  “You think he’s still alive?”

  “It’s a helluva story, Dave. It would make a novel.”

  “You going to do that?”

  “I’ll change the names to protect the innocent.”

  “That’s ghoulish.”

  “Dave, that’s what stories do, make sense out of what in reality is mystifying.”

  “How’s your Western going?”

  “The way of all flesh.”

  “In a Western?”

  “You’d be surprised.”

  3

  WHEN BETH HANRAHAN HAD RENTED the studio on Franklin Avenue years ago, her parents and siblings had thought she was nuts, and they had a case. The area had been on the decline for years; it wasn’t a safe place for a young woman just out of college to live, but as soon as she saw the large area of the studio and the huge slanted windows giving her a more or less northern light, the die was cast. Days, she worked downtown in an advertising agency, one of half a dozen artists whose talents were turned to enticing consumers into buying more or less useless things. The pay was good, and Beth saved most of what she earned and consoled herself with the thought that the Anderson Agency was merely a means to support her dream of becoming an artist.

  Ever since graduation she had seemed to drift. Listening to the rhetoric of the commencement speaker, she realized that she didn’t feel at all on the threshold of an exciting future. There had been the disappearance of Timothy and her knowledge of what had precipitated it. She felt that her life had ended rather than that it was about to begin. Art had seemed a way out of the doldrums.

  Where had that dream come from? She had always drawn; she loved the feel of soft lead on thick paper seeming to move her hand along rather than vice versa. She had never had an art lesson. In her senior year at St. Mary’s she had gone once to an art class with Mame, caught up in one of her temporary enthusiasms, but Beth decided she did not need the spur of a class in order to train herself. It was the woodcuts in the Catholic Worker that intrigued her and anything by Ada Bethune, then a hot ticket in liturgical art. She had tried that for a while, designing cards for the Liturgical Press in Collegeville, but all her stuff was derivative, more of what already existed. She liked pastels and watercolors but dreaded working with oils. She was an apprentice, wondering what her medium would be, what her subjects.

  The dream of being an artist had suffered from those dreadful events in senior year, but slowly it had revived when she was back in Minneapolis.

  “Where did you go to art school?” she would be asked at Anderson’s when they had left their boards for a cup of coffee.

  “I didn’t.”

  “How on earth did you get a job here?”

  “I brought a portfolio of things.”

  “Who didn’t? I thought you had to have gone to Walker or wherever to get in here.”

  “It never came up.”

  That was Jane, who had become a friend. Unfortunately, Jane had taken on the myth that artists, even commercial artists, were not confined by the codes that kept the lower orders in line. When Jane saw Beth’s studio her first reaction was, “What a great place for a party!”

  Why not? Jane arranged it. Beth didn’t know a fraction of the people who crowded into her studio. There was music of a sort, far too loud, and lots to drink. Smoking, too, of several kinds.

  “Isn’t this wonderful?” Jane had cried, her eyes too bright, her blouse off one shoulder, but it was designed that way.

  “Who are all these people?”

  “Who do you want to know?” Jane’s eyes widened naughtily.

  Jane seemed to have put out an all points bulletin, pulling in every aspiring artist and writer on the South Side. It turned out that she and Jane were paying for the booze, hence the turnout. Her half of the bill staggered Beth.

  “Jane, I can’t afford to do this again.”

  “You won’t have to. Now you’ll be invited everywhere.”

  Invited wasn’t quite the word. Announcements of parties were posted on a bulletin board at Anderson’s, to whom it may concern, with the caveat that one should bring his own booze. For a time Beth got caught up in those parties that would begin on Friday night and sometimes continue into Sunday. Jane couldn’t hold her liquor and became amorous, disappearing for stretches and then returning to the gaiety. Beth asked no questions, but she had her ideas. At one party Beth had a devil of a time convincing a bearded Lothario that she did not want to adjourn with him to another room. Jane came to her help, joshing the guy, telling him Beth was a nun in disguise and only liked girls. Later, Beth saw Jane adjourn with the beard.

  So okay, was that what she wanted? The parties were fun, up to a point, and some of the artists were actually artists. Jane’s big revelation came one evening when she asked Beth if she could come home with her. To talk.

  “I’m pregnant.”

  “Oh, Jane.”

  “You’re Catholic, aren’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “So am I. A Catholic in disguise lately.”

  Beth dreaded where this conversation was headed. It took two hours, but finally it came. “I’m going to get an abortion.” Jane seemed to be asking Beth for permission.

  “Don’t.”

  So they had that whole conversation, both of them knowing what they knew, and Jane fighting it, certain that Beth would talk differently if she were in Jane’s predicament. Would she have? Maybe. God only knew. She was on the brink of telling Jane her own story but drew back. Jane could not bear to tell her parents; she was afraid that soon others at Anderson would notice.

  “Take a leave, Jane. You can come up with some excuse.”

  “You mean, go hide somewhere and have a baby? No thanks. What would I do with it?”

  “I’ll take it! I’ll adopt it.”

  It seemed to be the wors
t thing she could have said. Jane became furious. She stormed out of the studio and the following week missed a few days. When she came back she avoided Beth. They were never really friends again. She should have taken the occasion to confide in Jane, to let her know she understood the predicament she was in. How easily mindless passion, call it love, had the inevitable result that somehow came as a surprise. Beth brought her hands to her face, felt tears running between her fingers, and thought of her stillborn little baby of long ago.

  When Beth stopped going to those wild parties, she felt a little sorry for herself, all alone in her studio while elsewhere … She thought of elsewhere. She thought of all the parties she had gone to. She tried to think of them as fun, but she couldn’t. Suddenly it all seemed stupid. Her whole life seemed stupid. That Sunday, for the first time in weeks, she went to Mass, at Holy Rosary. Despite the usher, she managed to get a back pew. She sat during the Mass, considering the people around her, here to worship God. They seemed members of a race to which she had once belonged. She could not go to communion. When everyone went forward, pew after pew, she felt like an outcast.

  She spent the afternoon brooding. Her thoughts went back to South Bend. In those days, only a few years ago then, she had been the belle of the ball, the favorite of the trinity. She smiled, remembering. Dave, Pat, and Timothy. Timothy. What a dreadful thing it had been when he disappeared. It had filled them all with dread. At first it drew them all closer together, but then it had a centrifugal effect. It was months later, back in Minneapolis, when everything seemed over, that she got the card from Timothy. He hadn’t signed it, but she knew. Because of the message, some lines from John Donne. “Never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.” Donne had been their shared enthusiasm, hers and Tim’s, especially the Holy Sonnets. The card had been mailed in San Diego. It had seemed right to consider it a secret.

  The first effect of that Sunday of brooding was a resolution that she had to snap out of it.

  Then she had a telephone call from Mame. “I called your parents, and they gave me your number.”

  “Where are you?”

  “New York! Beth, I’m going to get married.”

  “Wonderful.”

  “I want you to be a bridesmaid.”

  How could she refuse? She didn’t want to refuse. Going to a classmate’s wedding seemed a return to normalcy, to the person she had been.

  She went east a few days before the wedding, to try on the dress, to talk with Mame. A hectic time, but they did have several late night tête-à-têtes, long sessions of remembering South Bend. Manhattan all but overwhelmed her, and she marveled at how settled into the city Mame was. Wilfrid Childers was a bit of a surprise; he seemed years older than Mame. So was the wedding. No priest, no Mass, a generic church. One afternoon Beth had gone, all alone, to the Catholic Worker House on Mott Street.

  Later, she would think that was the real reason for her trip to New York. She began to read Dorothy Day’s autobiography. When she finished, she read it right through again. Out of nowhere came the realization of what she wanted to do, what she wanted to be. In a stuffy little parlor at Holy Rosary she had her first talk with Father Justin. He was a Dominican; Holy Rosary was a Dominican parish. She tried to tell the priest what was on her mind.

  He was in his sixties, she supposed, scruffy, despite the white habit with its clicking brown beads, hair sprouting from his ears, a prominent nose on which halfway down his glasses sat.

  “Perhaps you have a vocation,” he said, after she had babbled for twenty minutes.

  “Not to be a nun!”

  He laughed at her horror. “There are nuns and nuns, you know.”

  “Father, do you know about Dorothy Day?”

  “Ah.”

  At first he treated it as simply a romantic impulse. He assigned spiritual readings. She began to go to Mass every day. She read the Little Hours from a book he gave her. Shorter Christian Prayer. “I have another edition for taller people,” he said when he handed it to her.

  She liked him. He was matter-of-fact.

  What she wanted was to become holy, he told her. He gave her more books to read. “Do you say the rosary, Beth?”

  She began to say the rosary every day. Working at Anderson’s became more and more difficult. She talked with her parents, at the kitchen table in their house out by Minnehaha Falls. Her mother just listened, wide-eyed. Her father said, “You’re nuts.”

  “Maybe it won’t work out, Dad.”

  He looked out the window to where squirrels scampered on the lawns. “How much are we talking about?”

  On the street floor of the building where she had her studio was an empty store. She would rent that. The kitchen was the big expense. The man who installed it had been recommended by Father Justin.

  “What do you have in mind, a restaurant?”

  “More like a soup kitchen.”

  “I can cook.”

  His name was Marvin, and he was her first volunteer. She scrounged around for furniture; Marvin put up shelves, and Beth filled them with books she got at Goodwill and St. Vincent de Paul. While the place was being prepared, men would shuffle by, slowing, stopping, looking in. Beth went out and told them when the grand opening would be. She designed the legend she put in the window. OUR LADY OF THE ROAD.

  That’s all it took. Father Justin came and blessed the place while the gentlemen of the road hung back. The aroma from the kitchen overcame any reluctance they might have felt at seeing a Dominican in full habit with a stole around his neck sprinkling holy water around.

  So it had begun. Nearly twenty years ago. Father Justin had died, but one or another Dominican from Holy Rosary acted as chaplain of the center and as her spiritual director. People brought food and clothes, books. There were volunteers, most of them temporary, but some more or less permanent.

  Like Timothy, who showed up one day like Lazarus.

  4

  WHENEVER JAY’S FATHER CALLED, HE seemed to be in a different place, Manhattan, somewhere in Connecticut—“a friend’s place”—Florida, on campus. This time he was staying in the Inn at St. Mary’s.

  “Are you free for dinner, Jay?”

  “Just tell me when and where.”

  “Bring Amanda, if you’d like.”

  “If she’s free.”

  Of course his father had liked Amanda—how could he not—but things had not been going well with them since Jay had played his pranks on Roger Knight.

  “Anaximenes,” he had explained, showing her the poem.

  “That’s silly.”

  He looked at her. She looked away. “You’re right,” he said.

  “What was the point?”

  “I wanted to see how good a detective he is.”

  “Detective!”

  “I thought of hiring him.”

  She lowered her head and glared at him.

  “Amanda, I’m worried about my father.”

  He realized he really was worried about his father, but why? Belatedly it occurred to him that all the bad economic news must have affected his father’s business and made enemies of people like Larry Briggs. For so long he had been a wizard for his clients, but he had refused to take on the money Jay’s mother had left him.

  “Leave it where it is. Tax-free bonds are safe as houses.” He stopped. “Not a good simile anymore. Phelps thinks I’m a riverboat gambler. That’s okay. I only take on investors who can afford to lose as well as gain. You won’t make much, Jay, but then you won’t lose anything either. With me it could be a roller coaster.”

  Phelps, a lawyer, was in his seventies and spent most of his time now settling the estates of clients and looking after people like Jay who had inherited a claim on his time. Jay’s maternal grandfather had been a client of Phelps’s, and his mother had stayed with him. It was Phelps who had explained to Jay what his mother had left.

  “Where did she get that kind of money?”

  “From her father. I managed it for her.” Phelps
paused. “You might want your father to look after it now.”

  His father had refused. Phelps took this news phlegmatically. “Your only risk will be my age.”

  So the money had stayed with Phelps, in Philadelphia. At Phelps’s suggestion Jay had just left it alone. When he met his father for dinner, he brought along his most recent statement from Phelps.

  “Where’s Amanda?”

  “I wanted you all to myself.”

  His father punched his arm. Jay felt a surge of emotion and, as he had on other occasions, promised himself to be a better son. It occurred to him that his father was all alone, busy, lots of friends, certainly, and clients, but alone. They ordered drinks, and Jay handed his father the report from Phelps.

  He nodded as he read it. “In the present market these gains look pretty good.”

  “How are you doing, Dad?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “How would I be doing if you were handling this money?”

  “Not as well. At least during the past quarter.”

  “Would you want to take over?”

  “No!” His father seemed embarrassed by the quickness with which he had refused. “Stay with Phelps, Jay. These are rocky times.”

  It was indirect, but Jay could see that things were not going well with his father. All the excited television chatter about the economy no longer seemed reports from elsewhere.

  “How many clients like Briggs do you have?”

  His father smiled, or tried to. “Briggs is Briggs. I’m no longer representing him.”

  “Dad, anytime you need my money, just say so.”

  His father looked at him in silence, then put a hand on Jay’s. “It hasn’t come to that.”

  Then he told Jay about putting the place on Longboat on the market and selling the boat. It all sounded worse than Jay had imagined. He told him, too, about disgruntled clients.

  “Briggs.”

  “He was the worst. Some other clients didn’t believe me when I’d warn them that what went up could come down. I don’t think I believed that myself.”

  Jay remembered that Briggs had mentioned Mame Childers, but he hesitated to bring that up, not liking the uneasiness Briggs’s mention of her name had given him. “But you’re going to be all right?”