Songs in Ordinary Time Page 43

  She pulled her hand away and looked at him. “So when’s the soap coming?”

  “Any day now,” he said, probing his ear dreamily with a toothpick as Bernadette began to eat her cherry cheesecake. Her nose was still running.

  GoldMine Enterprises had promised delivery sometime in the next two weeks. Nothing to worry about, they had assured him when he called. The soap would be a sure thing. Nothing like the lousy magazines, tramping all over New England with his sorry crew whining every second for hamburgs, cigarettes, hemorrhoid ointment, and rubbers. And then the kicker was the goddamn Bibles he thought he was getting such a deal on to use for a bonus if the pinch-faced little housewife would only buy three different subscriptions from the Negroes she let into her front hall and then didn’t know how the hell to get rid of without hurting their feelings, or worse, having them think she was prejudiced and that it had anything to do with the color of their skin. Half the pages were blank inside the goddamn Bibles, all bound up in different-color fake leather covers with raised gold lettering, so he had to go spend even more money on clear plastic sheeting and tape to seal each one so he’d be long gone before they were opened. The damn Negroes loved it, two whole days spent in a motel room covering them while they watched TV, drinking beer and eating pretzels, with Montague at him every minute trying to figure out what was going on, demanding to know why the others had to cover the Bibles. So they wouldn’t get soiled, so they wouldn’t get creased, to keep them like new, he explained over and over to the old man, who was almost totally blind, another of Fate’s lousy pitches. In a million years he wouldn’t have taken Montague Pease along had he known the old man was about blind as a bat. He had been eager to sign on Earlie, who was tall and well-spoken with a disarming boyish grin. But then Montague raised such a stink about the boy being his only living relative and it was the night before they were to leave, and Luther alone was useless to him, and he just got too tired and worn down to argue anymore, careless actually, thinking maybe they’d just lose him along the way or maybe he’d die. But then the opposite started to happen; the old man just got stronger with all the traveling, happier and more determined to keep up and do his part, which was to be led onto those icy porches so he could tell the scared little lady of the house how the profit from each subscription sale went to build rest homes for blind and infirm old colored folks down in the terrible boiling South, where no such homes were now available to them. Montague would start quoting from the Bible, his belief in the mission growing as real to him as his responsibility to it. The irony was that it came to be Montague who talked Earlie out of it every time he threatened to quit and head down home to Laydee Dwelley. The old man finally had a purpose. “One more week,” he’d coax his lovesick grandson. “Just this next town.”

  Omar’s mistake was, he started losing interest and then he kept getting more and more careless until it all turned on him, a bloodthirsty monster of his own creation. No, he told himself. What’s done is done. Damned if he’d ever get involved in anything like that again. No sir, this was surefire, this soap deal, just cash passing hand over hand, dealerships piling up, multiplying in some sort of unstoppable geometric progression of investments pushing him up to the top of the heap, where he belonged, where he would have been years ago, except for crazy things, snags, flukes like Montague and blank Bibles always tripping him up, getting in his way, holding him back.

  He’d always considered himself a religious man, a patriot, a man who believed in signs. Men were sent from their Creator to this scraggly earth with particular missions stamped indelibly upon their brains and souls. His he knew to be Success. Why else had the Lord sent him as a white man to America when He might just as well have dropped him down in India or Africa or Korea. Each time he stumbled the Lord picked him up and set him on a new road.

  And so he figured it was the Lord who had caused the magazine deal to fall through. The Lord had sent Montague and then the lot of damaged Bibles. And when the police brought them in for questioning, missing Omar, who had just stepped into the woods to take a leak, he knew the Lord was stirring the waters again, jiggling him off the hook because his name was not on a single contract and not on any of the doctored checks carried always between porch and bank in old Montague’s pocket. It was the Lord who had trawled him through the sudden spring heat onto that dead-end street into the voracious arms of Marie Fermoyle, who needed love and softening, solace and attention like no woman he had ever met. Yes sir, it was the Lord. The Lord had led him home.

  “You want to come back and see how I fixed up the place?” Bernadette asked as she wiggled out of the booth. She smoothed her skirt over her belly.

  “Let me make a call,” he said. “An appointment I can reschedule.”

  And it was the Lord that had given him this mighty appetite.

  Samuel Fermoyle woke up with the drone of air-conditioning throbbing in his temples. The clammy sheets trussed his ankles as he tried to curl into a ball. He couldn’t stop shivering. He hadn’t left this room since Alice’s visit, which had depressed the hell out of him. The crumpled papers on the nightstand were all his attempted apologies. Dear Alice, I’m sorry you had to wait so long…Dear Alice, I’m sorry I kept you waiting so long…Dear Alice, I’m sorry…Dear Alice, As you must now realize, I don’t belong here…Dear Alice, Every day I get sicker and sicker…

  “Not sick now, Mr. Fermoyle,” the nurse had corrected him this morning, with a wag of her finger. “You’re just not well.” The difference being, according to Dr. Litchfield, an insidious fixity of negative attitude that overtakes and impairs a life. Therefore Sam Fermoyle was no alcoholic, but a man who needed to control his drinking. Not a shiftless, chronically unemployed parasite, just someone in need of a job. And this was not a fucking blinding migraine, but a mass of soft tissue that needed to redirect its energy surges. Pain gripped his skull like a spiked helmet. He groped for the buzzer.

  “Help,” he groaned when the nurse opened the door.

  “What seems to be the problem?” she asked, towering over him, arms bolted across her starched pleated chest.

  “No problem. I’m just having a little stroke here, that’s all. Just an exploding artery.”

  “I’ll get Dr. Litchfield. He’s on the floor.” She hurried off, and Sam waited, cringing.

  “Uh-huh—up…now down…. Look right…look left…” The light shining in his eyes had to be probing the roaring depths of hell. Sighing, Litchfield clipped the penlight into his jacket pocket. “Headache,” he said. The nurse left, then returned with tepid water in a paper cup.

  “I have to get out of here, Doc,” he said as the nurse handed him two pills. “Before I get really sick.”

  “You had a visitor the other day, Sam. Your first, right?” Litchfield toyed with his wedding band.

  “Right.”

  “Your daughter,” Litchfield said, nodding. “And how did it go?”

  “Just great, Doc.” He lay back and closed his eyes. “We laughed. We danced. We ran through the fields in slow motion. We even sang some hymns together.”

  “Why did it take you almost an hour to get downstairs to her?” Litchfield asked.

  “I was dressing.”

  “You were procrastinating. You didn’t really want to see her, did you?”

  “Maybe I didn’t want her to see me looking like one of the screwballs.” He knew where this was headed.

  “She made you nervous, didn’t she? She made you feel guilty and anxious.”

  “Whatever you say, Doc,” Sam sighed. “Look, I’m beat. I want to go to sleep. Like you said, it’s a headache, that’s all, not a fucking breakdown.”

  Litchfield smiled. “That’s why you’re not ready for release yet, Sam. That’s what I’ve been trying to get across to you. You’re treating this like a sentence, the way a prisoner would. You think if you just do your time, your thirty or sixty days, then it goes without saying that you’re automatically going to be released.” As Litchfield began to walk around t
he room, Sam forced himself to sit up a little. He lit a cigarette he didn’t want and tried to keep his squinting eyes on Litchfield, who paused to examine the painting over the table, the thermostat setting. He wet his finger and rubbed at a nick on the nightstand. “It doesn’t work that way, Sam. Rehabilitation, that’s the only way out of here.”

  He blew smoke down the length of the bed. At least he had stopped shivering. “Suicide,” he said, tapping the ash into his palm. “You forgot suicide.”

  “Dr. LaSalle tells me you’ve stopped going to group therapy,” Litchfield said, obviously trying not to lose his temper.

  “I couldn’t take the shit, Doc. I told you before, I’ll knock it around with a few drunks, but I’m not going to spend every afternoon with the crazies. It’s humiliating as hell, Doc.”

  “Miss Lanette feels she’s made quite an emotional investment in you, and now your absence is a personal affront to her, Sam.”

  “Miss Lanette is a personal affront, Doc. And Miss Lanette can take a flying shit for herself.” He coughed hoarsely.

  Litchfield’s eyes narrowed. Miss Lanette, Sam knew, was a prize patient, a hospital pet, who had managed to turn instability into a calling. She knew all the jargon. She was a group leader. She was LaSalle’s right-hand loony.

  “Perhaps, Sam, these headaches are merely another manifestation of your frustration and hostility.” Litchfield lowered his voice. “Miss Lanette says you spit on her in leatherwork.”

  Sam began to laugh. Raging through his cells was this hysteria that threatened to turn what was a battle with the bottle into a battle for his own sanity.

  Litchfield’s face reddened. He swallowed hard. “Miss Lanette is one of our best group-therapy people. She’s been with our sessions for five years now and she’s topnotch at spotting hostility and frustration in a patient. But today she refused to come to therapy, and when Dr. LaSalle went looking for her, he found her hiding in her closet. She said she couldn’t stand being spit on by someone she was trying to help.”

  “I never spit at her,” Sam groaned, closing his eyes.

  “I’ve never known her to lie, Sam. At least not about another patient. She takes therapy very, very seriously.”

  “Then why the hell is she still here after five years of it?” he countered, disgusted with himself for continuing this bizarre debate. He knew why. It was all so seductive that here even conflict was safe.

  “Some patients take longer than others. Even Miss Lanette has a few problems left to resolve,” Litchfield conceded with a nod.

  “A few problems! One of which is imagining that I like to spit on her. Come on, Litchfield, cut the shit!”

  Litchfield stared at him. “Sam, what do you think Miss Lanette’s problems are?” He came closer. “Really, now. In your own opinion.”

  “Uh-uh.” He smiled wanly. “I can’t come out and play with you, Doc. Sorry.”

  “Think about her a minute, Sam, how she picks the skin off her calluses, how she squeezes that wart on her neck until it bleeds, how she’s always bumping into tables, knocking her elbows against the walls, tripping when there’s nothing to trip over. What does that tell you?” Litchfield’s eyes were dancing.

  “I don’t know. How the hell should I know.” He sighed.

  “Try, Sam. The first thing into your head, whatever it is.”

  “She hates herself because she knows what a beast she really is. Who cares?” he added hastily, seeing the eagerness flood Litchfield’s eyes.

  “Exactly, Sam. I knew it!” he cried. “At long last I’ve got a group member who can spot self-negation. You don’t know how very valuable you’re going to be to me from now on, Sam. You have no idea,” he said through clenched teeth. He patted Sam’s shoulder.

  “Shit,” he sighed.

  “Tomorrow afternoon we begin,” Litchfield cried. “You know I haven’t had a good self-negation sleuth in…ooooh…let me see, six or eight months, anyway. And it’s hurt the groups considerably.” He grinned. “We need you in there pitching strong, Samuel, so you get some sleep now.”

  After Litchfield left, Sam pulled the pillow over his face. Helen was going to pay for this. He was getting out of here.

  Alice rushed through her closing chores so she could leave work the minute Father Gannon drove into the lot. Tonight she’d finally get the ordeal of his apology over with. He’d called every morning this week offering her a ride home from work, until she had finally accepted.

  They were driving down Main Street now. She could tell he was nervous, though he hadn’t said a word yet about last Saturday. He was in the middle of some long, involved story about the Holy Name Society’s barbecue at the lake. There had been the horseshoe competition in which he had been pitching a close second until the Monsignor pulled him aside and confided that Jim Quillan had been champion for the last five years.

  “Which I take to mean Jim Quillan’s the man to beat.” He chuckled. “So thinking the Monsignor really wants this one, I bear down and start tossing them meaner and cleaner, and everyone’s clapping and cheering me on, and I win by six points. And all the way home I’m trying to figure out what’s wrong with the Monsignor. How come he’s not talking to me. How come every time I say anything he just grunts. And then right as we pull into the driveway, I happen to mention the rattle in the engine, and that’s when he tells me. ‘Better get used to it,’ he says. ‘Since it’s Quillan who provides the rectory with a new car every two years.’ Apparently the horseshoe event is the little man’s big claim to fame.” He looked over and grinned. “I seem to be the Monsignor’s worst fears come true—a fool in priest’s clothing.” His bitter laughter made her squirm. She forced a smile. Why couldn’t he just apologize and be done with it. Her neck ached with the long, strained silence.

  Father Gannon sighed. “So!” he said, then sighed again. He turned down the next street and pulled in front of a house that belonged to a girl in her class. She wished he’d say what he had to and be done with it.

  He turned off the motor. “So,” he said, taking a deep breath in the sudden silence.

  She tried to focus on the stars beyond the dark trees, because this was going to get really weird. There were millions of stars up there, and all the millions and millions of brilliant stars were dead and she didn’t understand any of it, and her stomach was growling, and he kept clearing his throat. Oh God, this was going to be even worse than she’d thought. As he began to speak he ran his hands over the steering wheel. He recentered the magnetic crucifix on the dashboard. “Anyway, what I really have to say…I mean, what I want to say…well, actually, you see I can’t stand the thought of you…that is, the possibility of you being in any way…damaged…no, that’s not the right word. Disillusioned, that’s it! Disillusioned by my poor judgment, and so I think it’s important that I explain things…well, myself, that is…I mean, about being a priest. Well, of course, you know about that, generally, but I mean about myself and what being a priest has been like. Not the whole vocation, I don’t mean that. I mean me.”

  “That’s okay. You don’t have to. Really.” The story of his vocation was the last thing on earth she wanted to hear.

  “No, you see I don’t want you thinking badly of all priests or being confused about your faith or the Church because of me, because of what I did. You know what I mean?”

  The more she assured him that none of this was necessary, the more determined he was to explain. He was telling her about his family. His father had been a janitor in their parish grammar school, working for little money all his life, drinking too much on weekends and holidays, shaming his mother and older sister, both devout churchgoers. All his life his mother had wanted him to be a priest.

  “From the day I was born, according to my father,” he said, making himself sound uniquely chosen, “she would tell me all she wanted in life was to see her son a priest. And I’ll tell you the truth. For a long time it wasn’t even near what I wanted. I loved sports and girls and hanging out and going to the mov
ies and playing cards. But I wanted to go to college and I really wanted to help people, you know, with their problems, with their lives. It was this thing, this real need I had. Nothing made me feel as good as when I was helping someone. And so at that point in my life, it all kind of came together, college, my mother wanting me to be a priest, me wanting her to be proud as much as I needed to be a good person and help people.” His head was back against the headrest, and she wondered if his eyes were closed. He was explaining that his desire to help people had always been a stronger motivation than any deep and mystical love of God. He sat up and looked at her. “Does that shock you?” he asked.

  It bewildered her—not only what he was saying, but that he was telling her. She didn’t know what to say. Like beating Mr. Quillan at horseshoes—this was a distant world. “Well, you could still be a good person and help people without being a priest,” she said.

  “I know. Of course you can. But I think a priest can do more. I mean, being a priest carries more weight. People listen to you.” He laughed. “That’s what I always thought, anyway. But you see, my point is, then something like the other day happens, which was wrong, which never should have happened, and that’s the terrible dilemma of making mistakes as a priest. It makes it all that much more confusing and burdensome for you. I mean my…my actions.” He shook his head with a futile sigh. “I’m afraid I’m not articulating this very well.”

  “No, I understand. I do,” she said, afraid he’d start explaining it all over again.

  He started to say something, then stopped with a rueful snort. “You’re a good kid and I appreciate your patience and your understanding.” He patted her shoulder and told her she was too fine a person and too vulnerable right now for anyone to mess up. “I’m sorry. I’m really sorry for what happened,” he said.

  “That’s okay,” she said. “Really.”

  “No,” he said sadly. He kept looking at her. “No, it’s not. Believe me.” He turned suddenly and started the car. He drove slowly, the silence awkward between them. When he pulled into the driveway she fumbled for the door handle and thanked him for the ride.