A Graveyard for Lunatics (28 page)

He submerged, and was gone.

“Clothes off,” said Constance, still half asleep. “Everyone in!”

We swam. I followed Constance as far out in the surf as I could go, then the seals welcomed and swam her away.

“Lord,” said Henry, sitting hip deep in water. “First bath I had in years!”

We finished five bottles of champagne before two o’clock and were suddenly almost happy.

Then somehow I sat down, wrote
my
Sermon on the Mount, and read it aloud to the sound of the waves.

When I finished Constance said, quietly, “Where do I sign up for Sunday school?”

“Jesus,” said blind Henry, “would have been proud.”

“I dub thee,” Crumley poured champagne in my ear, “genius.”

“Hell,” I said modestly.

I went back in and for good measure rode Joseph and Mary into Bethlehem, lined up the wise men, positioned the Babe on a pallet of hay while the animals watched with incredulous eyes, and in the midst of midnight camel trains, strange stars, and miraculous births, I heard Crumley behind me say:

“Poor holy man sap.”

He dialed information.

“Hollywood?” he said. “St. Sebastian’s church?”

At three-thirty Crumley dropped me St. Sebastian’s.

He examined my face and saw not only my skull but what rattled inside.

“Stop it!” he ordered. “You got that dumb smug-ass look pasted on your mouth like a circus flier. Which means you trip, but
I
fall downstairs!”

“Crumley!”

“Well, Christ almighty, what about that mill race under the bones and through the wall last night, and Roy in permanent hiding, and Blind Henry cane-whipping the air, fighting off spooks, and Constance who might scare again tonight and show up to yank off my Band-aids. This was
my
idea to bring you here! but now you stand there like a high I.Q. clown about to jump off a cliff!”

“Poor holy man. Poor sap. Poor priest,” I replied.

“Oh, no you don’t!”

And Crumley drove off.

I wandered through a church that was small in dimension but burning bright with accoutrements. I stood looking at an altar that must have used up five million dollars’ worth of gold and silver. The Christ figure up front, if melted down, could have bought half of the U.S. Mint. It was while I was standing there stunned by the light coming off that cross that I heard Father Kelly behind me.

“Is that the screenwriter who telephoned with the problem?” he called quietly from across the pews.

I studied the incredibly bright altar. “You must have had many rich worshipers, father,” I said.

Arbuthnot, I thought.

“No, it’s an empty church in an empty time.” Father Kelly plowed down the aisle and stuck out a big paw. He was tall, six feet five and with the muscularity of an athlete. “We are lucky to have a few parishioners whose consciences make constant problems.
They force
their money on the church.”

“You tell the truth, father.”

“I’d damn well better or God will get me.” He laughed. “It’s rough taking money from ulcerating sinners, but it’s better than having them throw it at the horses. They’ve a better chance of winning here, for I
do
scare the Jesus into them. While the psychiatrists are busy talking, I give one hell of a yell, which knocks the pants off half my parish and makes the rest put theirs back on. Come sit. Do you like scotch? I often think, if Christ lived now, would he serve that and would we mind? That’s Irish logic. Come along.”

In his office, he poured two snifters.

“I can see by your eyes you hate the stuff,” observed the priest. “Leave it. Have you come about that fool’s film they’re just finishing at the studio over there? Is Fritz Wong as mad as some say?”

“And as fine.”

“It’s good to hear a writer praise his boss. I rarely did.”

“You!?” I exclaimed.

Father Kelly laughed. “As a young man I wrote nine screenplays, none ever shot, or
should
have been shot, at sunrise. Until age thirty-five I did my damnedest to sell, sell-out, get-in, get-on. Then I said to hell with it and joined the priesthood, late. It was hard. The church does not take such as me off the streets frivolously. But I sprinted through seminary in style, for I had worked on a mob of Christian documentary films. Now what of you?”

I sat laughing.

“What’s funny?” asked Father Kelly.

“I have this notion that half the writers at the studio, knowing about your years of writing, might just sneak over here not for confession but answers! How do you write
this
scene, how end
that
, how edit, how—”

“You’ve rammed the boat and sunk the crew!” The priest downed his whiskey and refilled, chortling, and then he and I rambled, like two old screen toughs, over movie-script country. I told him my Messiah, he told me his Christ.

Then he said: “Sounds like you’ve done well, patching the script. But then the old boys, two thousand years back, did patchwork too, if you remark the difference between Matthew and John.”

I stirred in my chair with a furious need to babble, but dared not throw boiling oil on a priest while he dispensed cool holy spring water.

I stood up. “Well, thanks, father.”

He looked at my outstretched hand. “You carry a gun,” he said, easily, “but you’ve not fired it. Put your behind back on that chair.”

“Do all priests talk like that?”

“In Ireland, yes. You’ve danced around the tree, but shaken no apples. Shake.”

“I think I
will
have a bit of this.” I picked up the snifter and sipped. “Well… Imagine that I were a Catholic—”

“I’m imagining.”

“In need of confession—”

“They always are.”

“And came here after midnight—”

“An odd hour.” But a candle was lit in each of his eyes.

“And knocked on the door—”

“Would you
do
that?” He leaned slightly toward me. “Go on.”

“Would you let me in?” I asked.

I might have shoved him back in his chair.

“Once, weren’t churches open all hours?” I pursued.

“Long ago,” he said, much too quickly.

“So, father, any night I came in dire need, you would
not
answer?”

“Why wouldn’t I?” The candlelight flared in his eyes, as if I had raised the wick to quicken the flare.

“For the worst sinner, maybe, in the history of the world, father?”

“There’s no such
creature
.” Too late, his tongue froze on this last dread noun. His eyes swiveled and batted. He revised his proclamation to give it a new go-round.

“No such
person
lives.”

“But,” I pursued, “what if damnation, Judas himself, came begging—” I stopped—”late?”

“Iscariot? I’d wake for him, yes.”

“And what if, father, this lost terrible man in need should knock not one night a week but most nights of the year? Would you wake, or ignore the knock?”

That did it. Father Kelly leaped up as if I had pulled the great cork. The color sank from his cheeks and the skin at the roots of his hair.

“You have need to be elsewhere. I will not keep you.”

“No, father.” I floundered to be brave. “You need me to be gone. There was a knock on your door—” I blundered on— “twenty years ago this week, late. Asleep, you heard the door banged—”

“No, no more of this! Get off!”

It was the terrified shout of Starbuck, decrying Ahab’s blasphemy and his final lowering for the great white flesh.

“Out!”

“Out? You
did
go out, father.” My heart jumped and almost slewed me in my chair. “And let in the crash and the din and the blood. Perhaps you heard the cars strike. Then the footsteps and then the bang and the voices yelling. Maybe the accident got out of hand, if accident it was. Maybe they needed a proper midnight witness, someone to see but not tell. You let in the truth and have kept it since.”

I rose to stand and almost fainted. My rise, as if we were on weights and pulleys, sank the priest back, all but boneless, in his chair.

“You were witness, father, were you not? For it’s just a few yards off and, on Halloween night, 1934, didn’t they bring the victims here?”

“God help me,” mourned the priest, “yes.”

One moment full of fiery air, Father Kelly now gave up his inflammatory ghost and sank, fold on fold, flesh on flesh, into himself.

“Were they all dead when the crowd carried them in?”

“Not all,” said the priest, in shocked recall.

“Thanks, father.”

“For what?” He had closed his eyes with the headache of remembrance and now sprang them wide in renewed pain. “Do you know what you’ve got into?!”

“I’m afraid to ask.”

“Then go home, wash your face and, sinful advice, get drunk!”

“It’s too late for that. Father Kelly, did you give the last rites to any or all?”

Father Kelly shook his head back and forth, wigwagging as if to sign away the ghosts.

“Suppose I did?!”

“The man named Sloane?”

“Was dead. I blessed him, in spite.”

“The other man—?”

“The big one, the famous one, the all powerful—?”

“Arbuthnot,” I finished.

“Him, I signed and spoke and touched with water. And then he died.”

“Cold and dead, stretched out forever,
really
dead?”

“Christ, the way you put it!” He sucked air and expelled it: “All that—yes!”

“And the woman?” I asked.

“Was the worst!” he cried, new paleness firing the old paleness in his cheeks. “Daft. Crazed and worse than crazed. Out of mind and body and not to be put back in. Trapped between the two. My God, it reminded me of plays I’d seen as a young man. Snow falling. Ophelia suddenly dressed in a terrible pale quiet as she steps into the water and does not so much drown as melt into a final madness, a silence so cold you could not cut it with a knife or sound it with a shout. Not even death could shake that woman’s newfound winter. You hear
that
? A psychiatrist said that once! The eternal winter. Snow country from which rare travelers return. The Sloane woman, caught between bodies, out there in the rectory, not knowing how to escape. So she just turned to drown herself. The bodies were taken out by the studio people who had brought them in for respite.”

He talked to the wall. Now he turned to gaze at me, stricken with alarms and growing hate. “The whole thing lasted, what? an hour? Yet it has haunted me these years.”

“Emily Sloane,
mad
—?”

“A woman led her away. An actress. I’ve forgotten the name. Emily Sloane did not know she was taken. She died the next week or the week after, I heard.”

“No,” I said. “There was a triple burial three days later. Arbuthnot alone. The Sloanes together, or so the story goes.”

The priest regrouped his tale. “No matter. She died.”

“It matters a great deal.” I leaned forward. “Where did she die?”

“All I know is she did not go to the morgue across the street.”

“To a hospital, then?”

“You’ve got all I know.”

“Not all, father, but
some
—”

I walked to the rectory window to peer out at the cobbled courtyard and the drive leading in.

“If I ever came back, would you tell the same story?”

“I should not have told you anything! I have breached my confessional vows!”

“No, none of what you’ve said was told in private. It simply happened. You saw it. And now it’s done you good to confess at last to me.”

“Go.” The priest sighed, poured another drink, slugged it back. It did nothing to color his cheeks. He only sagged more awry in his flesh. “I am very tired.”

I opened the door of the rectory and looked along the hall toward the altar bright with jewels and silver and gold.

“How is it such a small church has such rich interiors?” I said. “The baptistry alone could finance a cardinal and elect a pope.”

“Once,” Father Kelly gazed into his empty glass, “I might have gladly consigned you to the fires of hell.”

The glass fell from his fingers. He did not move to pick up the pieces. “Goodbye,” I said.

I stepped out into sunlight.

Across two empty lots and a third, heading north from the back of the church, there were weeds and long grass and wild clover and late sunflowers nodding in a warm wind. Just beyond was a two-story white frame house with the name in unlit neon above:
HOLLYHOCK HOUSE SANITARIUM
.

I saw two ghosts on the path through the weeds. One woman leading another, going away.

“An actress,” Father Kelly had said. “I forget the name.” The weeds blew down the path with a dry whisper. One ghost woman came back on the path alone, weeping. “Constance—?” I called out quietly.

I walked around down Gower and over to look in through the studio gate.

Hitler in his underground bunker in the last days of the Third Reich, I thought.

Rome burning and Nero in search of more torches.

Marcus Aurelius in his bath, slitting his wrists, letting his life drain.

Just because someone, somewhere, was yelling orders, hiring painters with too much paint, men with immense vacuum cleaners to snuff the suspicious dust.

Only one gate of the whole studio was open, with three guards standing alert to let the painters and cleaners in and out, checking the faces.

At which point Stanislau Groc roared up inside the gate in his bright red British Morgan, gunned the engine, and cried: “Out!”

“No, sir,” said the guard quietly. “Orders from upstairs. Nobody leaves the studio for the next two hours.”

“But I’m a citizen of the city of Los Angeles! not this damn duchy!”

“Does that mean,” I said through the grille, “if I come in, I can’t go out?”

The guard touched his cap visor and said my name. “You can come in,
and
out. Orders.”

“Strange,” I said. “Why me?”

“Dammit!” Groc started to get out of his car.

I stepped through the small door in the grille and opened the side door of Groc’s Morgan.

“Can you drop me at Maggie’s editing room? By the time you’re back they’ll probably let you out.”

“No. We’re trapped,” said Groc. “This ship’s been sinking all week, and no lifeboats. Run, before you drown, too!”