Great Day for the Deadly (4 page)

I wonder if the other nuns know what she’s doing, Sam thought. They’re crazy if they let her go into a place like that by herself. He had half a mind to pick up the phone again and call someone at the Motherhouse, to let them know what was going on. Then he told himself he was being nosy, and he hated nosy people. Nuns had to be trained to deal with all kinds of places and all kinds of people. They were supposed to help the poor. What he’d just seen could have been some kind of educational exercise.

He turned the telescope away from Diamond Place and tried to fix it on the library, where She worked. He couldn’t do it. The library was deep into the valley, on one of the lowest plots of land in town. The best he could do was catch a flash of the dark green border of its lawn. He folded the telescope up, sat back, and found his cigarette burned to a cylinder of ash in his ashtray.

Glinda Daniels. That was her name. Glinda Daniels. Sam wondered if her mother had been obsessed with the movie or the book, if she’d been named for the Good Witch of the North or of the South. He refused to believe that her mother had been obsessed with Billie Burke.

F
OR FATHER MICHAEL DOHERTY
, rain in February was the worst kind of news. It was bad enough for being impossible. It never got warm enough for rain up here in February. Even his most freshly arrived parishioner knew it. Even his old established stalwarts were beginning to revert. Father Michael knew what they were doing every time he turned his back: coming together in groups, speaking not so much in Spanish as in the jungle dialects most of them had been born into, talking about the evil eye. Michael Doherty knew something about the staying power of superstitions that had been given to you in childhood. “Michael,” his mother had always told him, “if you throw the bread away without kissing it, God will see. God will let you starve.” Michael Doherty had a degree in biology from Georgetown, a degree in theology from Notre Dame, and an M.D. from the Albert Einstein College of Medicine. He had been in Korea as a medic and come to the priesthood late, after a disastrous marriage that had ended in the death of his wife by drunk driving. He was a tall, spare, ruthlessly logical man of sixty-five—and he never threw bread away without kissing it first.

The other reason rain in February was such a bad idea was that it caused so much sickness. Michael hadn’t thought of that in advance—whatever for?—but now that it had happened he could see it made sense. St. Andrew’s Parish stretched itself across the dead end of Beckner Street, off Clare Avenue just above Diamond Place. On either side of it, marching back toward town, were four- and five-story tenements. Since Clare Avenue was now entirely commercial and Diamond Place was deserted, the people in the tenements on Beckner made up all of Michael’s parish. There were more of them than Michael would have thought, if he hadn’t lived here. They had a tendency to catch cold. Michael supposed that was perfectly natural. They were used to temperatures that grew very hot instead of very cold, and that changed gradually instead of on the spur of the moment. Their bodies were probably on circuit overload, trying to figure out how to deal with the change of planet.

It was now eleven thirty on the morning of Thursday, February 21, and the weather showed no signs of returning to normal. If anything, it looked about to get more strange. Michael hadn’t been in Maryville for the flood of 1953, but he’d seen enough flooding in his life. He knew the signs. All morning he had been pacing back and forth in his small office off of St. Andrew’s vestibule, trying to get a glimpse of the river or some sensible weather news on WKPZ. His view was blocked by the disintegrating brownstones on Diamond Place and WKPZ was having a Beach Boys bonanza. Downstairs in the basement, his clinic was open for business, as it was every morning except Sunday. On Sunday, it was open after twelve o’clock Mass, all afternoon.

There was a knock on his door—unnecessary, because the door was open; very necessary, because, as Michael had learned, these people were passionately polite—and Michael said “come in” to Hernandito Guerrez. Hernandito was the boy Michael was sponsoring for Georgetown, pre-med, in the hopes of seeing him go off to medical school in time. He should have been in school, but Michael had had sense enough not to tell him so today. Leonardo Evangelista, Michael’s prime candidate for the priesthood, was here now, too. They would both stay until they were sure their mothers and fathers and aunts and uncles and cousins and neighbors were no longer in any kind of immediate trouble. It was the kind of thing Michael made himself remember in the dark hours of Saturday night, when he had patched up four knife wounds to ship to the county hospital and fielded three calls from the medical examiner’s office, all asking him to do courtesy autopsies on possible drug ODs.

Hernandito came in, looked around pityingly—the office always looked like an explosion in a paper factory—and said, “I think you better come downstairs now, Father. Señora Diaz is very bad.”

“You mean Señora Diaz is getting hysterical,” Michael said. “I’ll come down, Hernandito, but you know as well as I do that she’s just scared to death. I can’t do anything about that.”

“Maybe the baby is coming early.”

“The baby isn’t due for two months and she isn’t contracting. I know. I checked not more than ten minutes ago. Is Sister with her?”

Hernandito’s lips pressed into a thin line. “Sister is perhaps not the best choice. Someone who is more competent might be a better idea. Someone like that might give Señora Diaz more confidence.”

There was a green enameled pen on Michael’s desk with “
MY BOSS IS A JEWISH CARPENTER
” written down the side of it in gold. Michael picked it up and resisted the urge to bite into it. “Sister” was Sister Mary Gabriel from the Sisters of Divine Grace up the hill, and she was perfectly competent. She was a first-rate obstetrical nurse and a qualified midwife. The problem was that she was also relatively young and very pretty. None of these people believed that young and pretty women could do much of anything besides have sex and tantrums.

“Look,” Michael said, “forget Señora Diaz for a moment. I’ve made a call into town about the rain.”

“Yes, Father?”

“Mostly it was like asking a politician for his position on the budget, but I did manage to get something done. We’re going to move this operation to higher ground for the moment. Up to Iggy Loy.”

Hernandito looked momentarily confused. Then the connections were made, and he smiled slightly. He would never have called St. Andrew’s “St. Andy’s.” He would have considered it insulting.

“If we’re going to move the clinic to higher ground, Father, maybe we should move everything. Everybody, I mean. Of course, most of the women are in our basement anyway—”

“Most of the children are down there, too. What’s left on the street? A few old men?”

“Also the Estevan family that owns the market.”

“All right. You could get some of the boys together and go door to door. We’ve got the van—bless Sam Harrigan—and we can get another one from St. Mary’s. I’ve talked to Reverend Mother General.”

“Reverend Mother General is a competent woman,” Hernandito said.

Reverend Mother General was seventy-eight years old and a cross between Queen Elizabeth I and Medusa. Michael had no idea what she looked like, because he’d never dared look her in the face. Like everybody else, he was afraid of her on principle.

“I got hold of somebody else,” he said. “Glinda.”

“Ah,” Hernandito said.

“It’s a good thing I did get hold of her. She’d overslept her alarm clock. Anyway, she has to go in to work, but she’ll meet us at Iggy Loy around three o’clock with blankets and food and a few other things. Sometimes I think I ought to get her together with Sam Harrigan and see what comes of it.”

Hernandito was offended. “Sam Harrigan is a television star,” he protested. “He would not want something so old as Miss Daniels.”

“No? Well, Hernandito, you’re very young.”

“I’m old enough,” Hernandito said. “You’re a priest, Father. There are things you don’t understand.”

“Trust me, Hernandito, they don’t let you enter the priesthood if you don’t understand
that
.” Michael stretched his legs and back, looked out the window again, shook his head. “It gets worse by the minute. I can’t understand it. Are you ready to brave the land of the green and the home of the shamrock up there?”

“Of course I am,” Hernandito said. “I like St. Patrick’s Day. I march with the Fife and Drum Corps.”

“That’s right, you do. I’d forgotten.”

“We’ve all made a decision about this, Father. All of us here. There were two ways we could go. We could ignore them all up there, or we could join the party. Joining the party had certain advantages.”

“Green beer?”

“A future. Someday there will be enough of us here, we will have a celebration for St. Rose of Lima. Since we have always helped them, they will have to help us. No?”

“It’s beyond me. All right, Hernandito, go find some friends and get going, door to door, don’t miss one. Father Fitzsimmons up at Iggy Loy doesn’t think there’s going to be a real problem, but we shouldn’t take any chances. The last thing we want to do is come back here in a day or two to find out some little old lady has drowned.”

“I know every little old lady on the block.”

“Keep a list,” Michael said. “Oh, and when you get downstairs, send Sister Gabriel up. Old Señora Sanchez is going to need an insulin shot and she sure as hell isn’t going to give it to herself.”

“Should a priest say
hell,
Father?”

“It depends on where he is, who he’s with, and what he intends to accomplish. Go, Hernandito.”

“I’m going.”

He was, too. The next thing Michael saw was his retreating back, making the sharp turn that led down the rickety stairs to the basement. Michael looked down at the papers on his desk, decided that most of them were useless, incomprehensible and out of date, and ignored them. He sat down instead, swiveling so that he could stare out at the rain.

Years ago, during those long dark months just before he turned forty, when he had first begun to think he might be called to be a priest, he had imagined himself as a kind of clone of the priests he had known when he was growing up. Big men with big voices, they had ruled over little fiefdoms of good Catholic families. Irish-American and working class themselves, they had preached the Word of God in a world where Irish-American and working class was all there seemed to be. There were people now who said that parishes like that had disappeared, but Michael knew it wasn’t true. Iggy Loy was just like that, and Father Fitzsimmons, fifteen years Michael’s junior, always seemed to Michael to be an older man out of an unquiet past. Michael wondered sometimes if he was suppressing a wish to be posted to a place like that. In some ways he thought it would be nice: a place where he wouldn’t have to run a clinic every day, or, God help him, do autopsies as a “courtesy” to his people and the ME’s office; a place where violence would come down to bare fists after too much beer; a place where men would work too much and women would clean too much and everybody would eat too much until the day when a combination of bad habits and the genetic bad luck of the Irish produced the expected heart attacks. Oh, yes, there was something very pleasant in the thought of all that kind of thing, and in the thought of saying Mass for people who spoke his language and had lived his past: On the other hand, there was also something inestimably boring.

He got out of his chair, and stretched again, and looked out his window again. He had to get going. Fitzsimmons might be right. There might be no flood in the long run. Even Fitzsimmons didn’t think Michael ought to be taking chances. Michael leaned against the window glass, squinted out, and cursed to purgatory the idiot who had built an art deco replica of the St. George campanile right in his line of sight. What kind of neighborhood had this been all those years ago, when it was first put up?

He was about to give it all up when he saw it, what he would later think of as The Strange Thing. She was coming down Beckner Street from the direction of Clare Avenue, seemingly headed for the parish church. Michael had never seen her before, but he knew what she was. With the long black dress and that tight sided black head covering, there was only one thing she could be, a postulant from the Motherhouse up the hill. Michael found himself feeling caught, half-paralyzed. One of the things he had been intending to do was to call back Reverend Mother General and tell her he would need those vans after all. Now he wondered if he had to. Maybe she had misunderstood him and sent the vans as soon as they’d hung up earlier. On the other hand, maybe this postulant had nothing to do with vans. Postulants and novices from the Sisters of Divine Grace came down here every Wednesday to teach literacy classes and tutor high-school students who were having trouble with their work. Michael never saw them, because Wednesday was when he went out to visit the prison and then stopped in at the county hospital on his way back to town. Maybe this postulant was one of those, and she was here on some errand about books or writing supplies.

The idiocy of this idea—the stupidity of thinking that any of the nuns up there would send a child out into this storm just to check on something that could as easily have been checked on by phone—struck him at the same time that he lost sight of the girl. She had been walking rapidly, holding the umbrella stiffly, directly over her head, and she had passed out of his range. She was too close now to be seen unless he stood on the church’s front steps. He turned away from the window, left the office and strode out into the vestibule. All of a sudden he had taken a positive dislike to this entire situation. There was something about her being out there like that alone that made him cold. He wanted to get hold of her and give her a talking to.

The church’s front doors were great double oaken things with cast-iron handles instead of knobs. Michael grabbed both the handles at once and swung both the doors inward, feeling his biceps ache the way they had when he’d been twenty-odd and in boot camp. Then he stepped out into the rain, and stopped.