Requiem for a Realtor (2 page)

“I am sure. Phyllis makes no bones about it. He's a dentist and she seems to think she's trading up.”

When in doubt, review what has already been said. Father Dowling had Collins go over and over what he had already told him, he himself added a number of irrelevancies about the marriage tribunal, got his pipe going again, and perhaps managed to conceal the surprise the mention of David Jameson had given him.

Jameson's dental practice had prospered, and he was a prominent parishioner and a frequent presence at the rectory. The last time they had talked, Jameson had inquired about the possibility of becoming a permanent deacon. He was to all appearances a pillar of the church.

“How far have things gone with your wife and Jameson?”

“All the way.”

No need to pursue that. The phrase left little doubt. Father Dowling had no inclination to ask Collins how he had come by his certainty.

“Will you talk to him, Father?” Collins asked.

“Would your wife come here?”

“Father, she says they plan to be married here.”

3

Marie kept her mouth shut when David Jameson was on the scene, literally. She always felt he was examining her teeth when she talked. Among her vanities was the conviction that no one could possibly tell that she wore dentures, but how could you fool a dentist? His manner toward her should have won her heart. He was deferential, flattering, attentive, the soul of courtesy. Yet Marie did not trust his sincerity. Besides, he was what her late and unlamented husband would have called a Holy Joe.

It was a bitter truth that Father Dowling seemed to like Jameson. He appeared happy to see the dentist whenever he dropped in, gave him all the time he wanted when he did, and accompanied him to the door when he left. Just before leaving, Jameson would ask for Father Dowling's blessing.

Watching the gangly dentist bow his head as Father Dowling murmured the formula and made the sign of the cross over him, Marie could have growled. The first time he had done that, he had been about to kneel, but Father Dowling stopped him. On this Wednesday afternoon, Father Dowling closed the door on Jameson and turned to see Marie before she could slip away. Or maybe she wanted him to see her.

“Did he just leave?”

“He?”

“You know who. I thought dentists had to work.”

“Not on Wednesdays. At least in his case. Did you want to make an appointment?”

She just looked at him. It was dangerous to think she could best him in banter.

“Why isn't he married?”

“Marie, I had no idea. Does he?”

“Idea of what?”

“Your secret passion, of course. Maybe making an appointment at his office would be a way to break the ice.”

A special place in heaven awaited the housekeeper who could take the teasing of a pastor in submissive silence. She waited him out for half a minute.

“Or I could ask him to come to lunch some Wednesday…”

“You know I can't stand him.”

“I'm told that is the form it sometimes takes.”

“How many visitors ask for your blessing every time they leave?”

“I know, I know. But we mustn't criticize. Perhaps Dr. Jameson's example will bring back the practice.”

“Maybe he has a vocation.”

“That
would
be an impediment,” he said, after a pause.

Marie gave up and stormed back to her kitchen where she made a pot of tea and sat, ready to polish it off unaided when Father Dowling pushed through the swinging door.

“Marie, I want to tap your formidable memory.”

She looked at him warily.

“Do you recall the Stanley Collins who was here on Monday?”

“What about him?”

“That is my question to you.”

He pulled out a chair and sat across the table from her. There was no point in offering him tea.

“I'll make coffee.”

“Let me have half a cup of tea.”

This was a surprise. He hated tea. She poured him a full cup and when she sat again pushed the plate of tollhouse cookies toward him.

“Stanley Collins,” she began.

Sometimes her memory frightened Marie. Things you had no idea you were picking up stuck in the mind, and when one came out, others followed, clinging to it the way paper clips cling to a magnet, one after the other, a whole chain, as if everything was connected with everything else.

The Collinses who would have been Stanley's parents had married late, he a childless widower, she a woman on the shady side of thirty who might have been ready to throw in her cards when Frederick Collins made a bid for her hand. She was a teller in the bank where he was a vice president, a terminal post but a respectable one. He wore a suit seven days a week and had no recreation other than feeding the ducks in the park. He was lonely, of course, but so was she. She taught him to play cribbage, and one thing led to another. She must have been in her mid-thirties when they married, and a year later she had Stanley. An only child, they spoiled him rotten; he went to a military high school and off to Marquette for college. Summers he had been in camp, first as a camper, then as a counselor. He wasn't much companionship for his parents, but perhaps they preferred it that way. And they could not have been exhilarating company for him.

“He must have inherited a good amount when they died.”

“When was that?”

Marie waved a hand. “I'd have to look it up. A long time ago. A tragic accident. One winter day, they were warming up the car in a closed garage and were asphyxiated.”

“Good heavens.”

“It's not what you think. They were on their way to Mass. Their missals were between them on the front seat.”

“I wonder if Stanley had married by then.”

Something clicked in Marie's mind. “Fifteen years ago. It was the last funeral Father Pacific ever conducted. A double.”

“Pacific?”

“I know. And his family name was Hug.”

“How do you remember all these things?”

“Some things are hard to forget.”

“Why did you say their son would have inherited a lot of money?”

“Mr. Cadbury could tell you about that. He was a trustee of the bank where Collins worked.”

“And he confided in you?”

“Of course not!” Why did he always have to spoil things, and just when they were having the kind of consultation Marie thought should be more frequent?

“Then how do you know?”

“It must have been in the paper.”

He tipped his head in disbelief.

“Father, some things you just know and you don't know where you got them.”

He accepted that. Good thing. She would never admit what she had just remembered. She had wheedled it out of Maud, Mr. Cadbury's jill of all trades at his law office. Since those days, Maud had become a bitter enemy who resented her employer's paeans of praise for Marie's culinary magic.

4

David Jameson's latest visit had been a trial. All the while they talked, Father Dowling was remembering Stanley Collins's accusation, and it was difficult not to try to imagine Jameson in the role of illicit lover. Whether or not the lady was married, ‘going all the way' with her was hardly the behavior one expected of someone asking how he might begin training for ordination as a permanent deacon. Permanent deacons were not celibate, but they were bound by the sixth and ninth commandments like everybody else.

“In high school I thought of the priesthood.”

“That's not unusual.”

“I don't mean daydreams. I wrote to any number of religious orders. I still have the materials they sent. Oh, I suppose there was fantasizing involved. I would moon over their brochures, study the schedule of their seminarians, imagine myself in the role.”

“It never went beyond that?”

“I familiarized myself with the curriculum of the major seminary later. I bought the textbooks for philosophy and theology and read them all. Canon law, too.”

“Why didn't you enter the seminary?”

“I was destined for dental school from birth.”

“Before your baby teeth?”

No point in jesting with David Jameson. His mind was literal and without humor. Another impediment to imagining him as illicit lover. “I was meant to fulfill my father's dream.”

“He wanted to be a dentist?”

“In the worst way. But he was a barber and that was that. When fluoride seemed to eradicate cavities, he wavered, but then he read an article about the boom in orthodontics.”

“Straightening teeth?”

“Improving your smile, is the way we put it.”

“So you're an orthodontist?”

“At first. I've moved into dental surgery. We used to send people to specialists for root canals. Now we can do them ourselves. That's my speciality.”

“Root canals?”

“You know what they are?”

“Sufficiently.”

“It is quite lucrative. The market economy reigns in dentistry. Up to a point. Many of my patients are on dental plans, and limits are set.”

“Ah.”

“Even so.” Jameson's eyes drifted away. “It is not a fulfilling life, Father.”

“Not many cavities?”

Careful, careful. But Jameson was pursuing his own thoughts.

“When I come here to talk to you I get a sense of what my life might have been. I have a recurrent bad dream that when I die I'll come before St. Peter and learn that I really did have a religious vocation. And I wasted my life doing root canals.”

“God is merciful.”

He knew that Marie Murkin regarded Jameson as a sanctimonious ass, and a case could be made for that judgment. But sanctimonious asses had souls, too.

“And it's not too late, David. How old are you?”

“I'll be forty my next birthday.”

“There are seminaries for delayed vocations. For that matter, most vocations are delayed nowadays.”

Jameson looked wistful. “You make me feel like those people in the parable who had an excuse for declining the invitation to the wedding.”

“You never married?”

“No.”

“Surely you must have thought of it.”

This was sailing close to the wind, but it seemed to emerge naturally from the conversation.

“Oh, I suppose everyone does.” He stopped. “I mean lay people.”

“It's the normal course of life.”

“Life gets into choppy waters sometimes.”

“So you have thought of it?”

“Some day I will tell you all about it, Father. Maybe sooner rather than later.”

“I look forward to that.”

Jameson hesitated, as if sooner had come sooner than he expected. But he remained silent.

“Of course permanent deacons can marry.”

Jameson brightened. “That's what got my mind going on it.” His smile dimmed. “But what if it is a temptation? What if I am turning away from what I ought to be?”

Father Dowling had not met many cases of true scrupulosity, and he doubted that David Jameson was one of them. However devoid in imagination and humor, the dentist obviously enjoyed agonizing over the road not taken. Maybe his vocation was imagining he had a vocation. The subject of the permanent diaconate seemed to have been sidelined, which was all right with Father Dowling. He was not a fan of permanent deacons. He had never met a bishop who was. Yet they kept ordaining them. Not as many as formerly, but what was the point? What was needed was more priests. Or housekeepers like Marie Murkin.

Two hours later there was a pastoral twinkle in Marie's eye when she stuck her head into the study and said, “Phyllis Collins to see you.”

5

Before closing the study door, Marie gave Phyllis Collins the once-over, and it was pretty clear that the visitor had failed some test.

“If tobacco smoke bothers you we can sit in the front parlor,” Father Dowling said, still standing.

“Oh, I'm used to it. My husband smokes.” She settled into her chair, began to cross her legs, then thought better of it.

She must be forty, but she dressed like a girl. A dangerously short skirt with corresponding decolletage and her hair, worn long, was of several colors, brunette streaked with blonde. She raked it with the painted fingers of one hand. “David Jameson suggested I talk with you.”

“I see.”

“He has been a great help to me of late.” Her voice quavered and she seemed about to cry. Father Dowling wished he had taken her to the front parlor, or that Marie had left the door open.

“My husband is unfaithful, Father. He has been running around for years.”

He adopted an appropriate expression, but, of course, her words confused him. Stanley Collins had sat in that same chair and accused his wife of having an affair with Jameson, but now Phyllis Collins was telling him that her husband was a womanizer.

“We weren't married in the Church, Father.”

“Why not?”

“Stanley talked me out of it. What a fool I was. Or, at least, that is what I've come to think.”

“You've changed your mind?”

“Is it true that a civil marriage doesn't count?”

“Of course it counts. But not in the way a sacramental marriage does.”

“But even they get dissolved, don't they?”

“You want to dissolve your marriage?”

She sat back in shock. “No! Stanley does. He has fallen in love with some tramp and wants to leave me for her.”

It was tempting to tell her of Stanley's visit, but doubtless she would counter with what she had already said. Had Stanley's visit been a preemptive strike?

“My big mistake was telling him what David told me.”

“Jameson?”

She nodded. “About Church law. He knows all about it.”

Father Dowling said nothing. There was no canon law against lay people reading the code of canon law, and they could talk about what they read, why not? But it sounded as if David Jameson was impersonating a canon lawyer.