Ash Wednesday (11 page)

Dogs go willingly and with wagging tails into houses hardly larger than themselves. Herman had seen it with his own eyes when Paxon his parole officer took him home to dinner. The Paxon dog was big as a bear, and Herman tried to hide his fear. He hated dogs. Then Mrs. Paxon lifted the door on a wire cage right there in the kitchen, and the dog scooted inside. It kind of brought back the Place, as Herman did not tell Paxon. This invitation to the Paxon home was meant to be a glimpse of normalcy.

Well, maybe. Paxon himself was a bit of a nut, a nice nut, but still a nut. He seemed to think he was obliged to believe anything an ex-con told him. He leaned toward you while you talked, forehead wrinkled, eyes full of sympathy, feeling your pain. Mrs. Paxon, Kate, was tall and skinny and oozed a lot less, but she was a good cook. Afterward, while she cleaned up, Paxon and Herman watched hockey on TV. Herman was glad to leave and beat it back to St. Hilary’s and his little apartment in the basement of the school. When he shut the door behind him, he felt as happy as the Paxon dog in its cage.

He realized that he had learned to like being alone. Solitude. It was a word from an old song that, like the tune, stuck in his mind. It made enjoying his apartment even better to call it solitude.
Solitude, not solitary. Sometimes he thought of it as Command Central.

Scattering sweeping compound, pushing his broom around, Herman kept up on all the parish center news. It wasn’t that he was invisible, but his janitorial tasks made him anonymous; people didn’t feel they had to drop their voices until he went by. Of course, they thought he was a dumbo. He encouraged that. He always had. It was like a protective coat. He liked telling them of the way he had been sent up. The story had improved over time, of course. Talking with Nathaniel Green was different.

“The truth is I was left holding the bag,” Herman admitted.

“They just left you there?” Nathaniel asked.

“Inside the damned bank, with alarms going off. When I got to the door it was locked or jammed, I don’t know. Outside the car just took off, leaving me to take the rap.”

“Were the others caught?”

“Not for that. Remember Zappia, the big swarthy guy?”

“He was in for murder.”

“That was later.”

In the Place Herman had kept clear of Zappia. The guy would be a great-grandfather by the time he got out. Such a thought could mellow you, but not Zappia.

Nathaniel sat in silence. He always had a book with him. Herman had often promised himself that he would take up reading. He had even worked for a while in the library in Joliet, hoping to catch the bug. Maybe later.

“What are you reading?”

Herman had never heard of the book or author. He lit a cigarette and directed smoke at the ceiling. The seniors upstairs always stepped outside for a smoke. Life was getting as organized outside as it was inside.

“What’s she got against you?” Herman asked.

Nathaniel looked at him for a moment. “Helen Burke? She’s my wife’s sister.”

Herman’s head lifted as he raised his eyebrows. “Even so. Why do you take it?”

“I understand her.”

He could understand her at a distance. Why come to the center day after day and be treated that way? Did Nathaniel enjoy it? Herman decided that wasn’t it. Then the newspaper story appeared, and he began to wonder which of them, Helen or Nathaniel, was the torturer.

Neither Nathaniel nor Helen came to the parish center the day after the story appeared in the paper. It had been hard for Herman to get hold of a copy. The first several he grabbed brought shouts of protest.

“Just cleaning up,” Herman said in self-defense.

“That’s today’s paper.”

Finally he got one into the trash cart he wheeled around and retired to his apartment, where he settled down to see if the remarks he had been picking up all morning matched the story in the
Tribune
.

It was the amount of money that impressed Herman. You’d need a Brinks job to get that much. It was funny thinking that he’d had a multimillionaire sitting here in the apartment. A multimillionaire who wanted to give it all away to a woman who didn’t need it and had been giving him one helluva of a time since he showed up at the center.

Herman knew that Edna Hospers knew about the treatment Nathaniel was getting. She had called Helen in, but nothing had changed. Herman knew that Edna didn’t want him getting too friendly. He understood. Earl was doing fine, running Flanagan Concrete. That made Herman a reminder of where Earl had spent some time. He understood. He even kept away from his own family,
now that his mother was dead. Mothers and parole officers will forgive anything.

But the main one for him to keep clear of was Marie Murkin, the rectory housekeeper. The problem was that he couldn’t always do that. It was his job to get the rectory trash out to the curb on Wednesdays and check the level of the salt in the water softener in the basement of the rectory. In the area behind the furnace was an old easy chair, one that tilted back. Herman tried it out, closing his eyes and listening to the hum of the water heater, the whir of the furnace. Once he had actually fallen asleep, and Marie woke him.

“You’re just like the others,” she said. “Do you think we pay you for sleeping?”

We? “You’re not my boss,” he said, getting out of the chair.

“When you’re in this house I am.”

“Thanks for the warning.”

He thought she was going to shoo him from the house with the broom she clutched in one hand. Or maybe take a little flight on it. Herman got out of there.

Paxon had told him that he had had predecessors in his job, other graduates from Joliet.

“How long did they stay, on the average?”

“Until they got fed up with the housekeeper.”

Maybe if it hadn’t been for Father Dowling, Herman would have been fed up already. Still, it was a good spot for him—the apartment, food, and what Father Dowling called a token salary that seemed enormous to Herman.

“We don’t want to put you in too high an income bracket,” Father Dowling said.

“Income tax. I’ve never paid income tax.”

“Well, you’ll have to start now. But don’t worry about it. Amos Cadbury will take care of it.”

Herman had his lunch at the parish center but came to the rectory
for his evening meal, having it in the kitchen. Father Dowling had wanted Herman to join him in the dining room, and that was one time he appreciated the support of Marie Murkin. Not that she was doing him any favor. Imagine having to serve the janitor at the pastor’s table.

“Come just after five,” Marie said. “So I can get you out of the way.”

Poison? Actually, it was a good arrangement. Marie put his meal on the kitchen table and then disappeared, leaving him to himself. If he saw anyone then, it was Father Dowling.

The rectory was fragrant with pipe smoke. Sometimes strains of music came from the pastor’s study, not Herman’s kind of music, but pleasant as background. Sometimes he thought that Father Dowling enjoyed solitude the way he did.

The day Marie caught him snoozing in the basement behind the furnace, Father Dowling came into the kitchen while Herman was having his evening meal.

“Do you mind?” he asked, pulling out a chair and sitting across the table from Herman.

“Be my guest, said the guest.”

“Would you like a beer?”

“Do you have any?” Herman was surprised. His own drinking was a little secret between himself and Miss Solitude. Father Dowling turned without getting up, plucked a bottle of beer from the icebox, and handed it to Herman.

“So how are you finding things, Herman?”

Oh-oh. Was this going to be like one of his sessions with Jerome Paxon?

“Can’t complain, Father.”

“I suppose it takes a while to get used to the excitement around here.” Father Dowling smiled as he said it. A pause, and then, “You knew Nathaniel Green before, didn’t you?”

“Only in the way you get to know someone there. I knew who he was. He was the guy who had the beautiful visitor once a month.”

“Really?”

Herman was going to go on about the way they all hung around on visiting day for the woman’s arrival, but then he remembered that Father Dowling was a priest. Herman busied himself opening the beer.

“I suppose you knew the chaplain.”

Father O’Connell. He was called Barney, after the character in
The Flintstones
. Herman nodded.

Father Dowling said, “We were classmates.”

“At Joliet?”

Father Dowling had a sense of humor, all right. He tipped back his head and laughed.

Marie Murkin bustled in the back door and stopped, looking at the pastor and Herman at her kitchen table.

“Well, this looks cozy.” She was staring at Herman’s bottle of beer.

Herman lifted it to her in a toast and took a long swig. Marie made a face and busied herself with the dinner she was preparing for the pastor. Father Dowling lit his pipe, and soon the room was a cloud of wonderful pipe smoke. Marie coughed and waved her hand, but if she wasn’t used to the pastor’s pipe she wouldn’t be here.

Herman hurried up with his meal, chug-a-lugged what was left of the beer, and stood. Father Dowling did, too. He came out on the back porch with Herman. From inside, Marie called, “Now don’t go running off. Dinner’s in fifteen minutes.”

Later that night, Phil Keegan stopped by. Once he and the pastor were settled in the study, Marie went up the back stairway to her apartment.

Phil was scowling as he unwrapped a cigar. “You see the paper?”

Father Dowling knew he was referring to Tetzel’s story on Nathaniel Green. “Tuttle must be pleased. I don’t know about Nathaniel.”

“Helen Burke wants to sue him.”

“Tetzel?”

“No, Tuttle.” Phil got his cigar going, one of the cheap ones by the smell of it.

“Whatever for?”

“The new will. Tuttle made it out, and she claims he committed a breach of legal ethics by revealing it.”

“How did you learn that?”

“She came downtown, mad as a wet hen. She seemed to think I would hurry out and arrest Tuttle. I suggested she go have a talk with Amos Cadbury.”

Father Dowling nodded in approval. “Amos will calm her down.”

“Tuttle is just a target of opportunity.”

Father Dowling pondered that, drawing meditatively on his pipe. The new will, public or not, certainly put Helen Burke on the
spot. The man whose conviction she had wanted, attending every session of the trial, the man whom, after his release from Joliet and appearance at the St. Hilary center, she had ostracized, enlisting the others in her campaign, now turned the other cheek and delivered over to her everything he had in the world.

It is one of the paradoxes of Christianity that following its maxims can sometimes amount to the sweetest revenge rather than charity. There was a text in St. Paul suggesting that. Turn the other cheek, for another instance. Nathaniel had certainly done that, during the long shunning campaign, accepting it with a meekness that was edifying, unless, of course, his motive had been to infuriate his sister-in-law. Now this public news that he was making his chief tormentor the beneficiary of his will could be an instance of almost heroic virtue, or … It occurred to Father Dowling that the will was a kind of threat, a future rather than a present humiliation for Helen Burke. Still, how was it possible to think of it as the mild Nathaniel Green’s revenge?

Phil wasn’t interested in such fancy speculation. “Cy is still looking into the death of Florence Green.”

“What’s the point?”

“That we don’t have a lot of work at the moment.”

The idea that Cy Horvath would devote himself to a pointless task rather than loll around the detective division, catch up on paperwork, doing the dozen things daily officialdom called for, seemed out of character and quixotic.

“Quick what?” Phil scowled. “We gonna watch the game?”

Spring training had begun, and the Cubs were on in an inter-squad practice game. Sometimes it seemed that all the sports would overlap, football, basketball, hockey, baseball all in one season. The bread and circuses of modern man. Father Dowling was enough of a modern man to tell Phil to turn on the television.

“Get yourself a beer, Phil.”

“I’m giving it a rest.”

“Oh.”

“Last night I counted up the drinks I’ve had in the past week.” Phil shook his head. “I was drinking at the time. It’s the danger of living alone. I cleared everything out of the apartment. From now on, I only drink in the line of duty.”

Father Dowling smiled. “I thought that’s when you don’t drink.”

“That’s what I mean. Look, I’m not taking the pledge or anything.”

It might have been an allusion to Father Dowling’s own onetime problem with drink. As a member of the archdiocesan marriage court, one of the bright young priests, a doctorate in canon law, apparently destined for higher things, he had become so weighed down with the futile appeals for annulment at a time when they were still more or less unthinkable that he had sought relief in drink. It was solitary drinking that was the real danger, Phil was right about that. Phil stood.

“Maybe I will have a beer. You want anything?”