Run (16 page)

She pulled up the corner of the sheet in her other hand, the hand that Sullivan was not holding, and she wiped her nose and eyes.

“The doctor said you’re going to have surgery this morning.” She nodded.

Teddy started over, as if every sentence he spoke was his opening line. “I wanted to tell you that Tip is okay. His ankle is hurt but he’s fine. He would be here with us but he needs to stay off his leg for now.”

“It’s sprained?” she asked. Her voice sounded so strange to her.

Teddy started to tell her but Sullivan looked up at him and said,

“It’s sprained.”

“Did you see my daughter?”

“She was still asleep when we left the house,” Teddy said. “We kept her up too late.”

And now Tennessee did open her eyes. She looked at Sullivan and then at Teddy, one of them on either side. Sullivan did not let go r u n

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of her hand even though she couldn’t imagine why he held it. Teddy was so close to her. She could hear him breathing. She could see the way his eyelashes curled up. He had the face of someone who had never been hurt before, never been disappointed. She felt certain that he didn’t lie to anyone, and yet in her mind she could see Kenya sleeping on a sofa in a bright waiting room, her long legs tucked beneath her, her coat over her shoulders, fast asleep. The picture was perfect in her mind. “She’s here,” Tennessee said. She must be here.

Why hadn’t she asked one of the nurses where her daughter was?

“We brought her home with us last night,” Teddy said. “We couldn’t leave her at the hospital. Da’s with her now, and Tip.” The Ghost of Christmas Future came back into the room. She did not care who was having a conversation. She had her schedule to keep to, and anyway, there was nothing in the world she hadn’t seen. “Miss Moser, are you in any pain?”

Tennessee nodded her head, and the nodding served to increase the pain.

“We’re going to have to say goodbye to your guests now and start thinking about getting you ready for surgery.”

“Give us one more minute,” Sullivan said.

The nurse shook her head but at the same time she turned away.

“One minute and then you go. Visiting hours don’t even start until nine.”

“Nobody asked us to leave,” Sullivan said. There was something sweet in his voice, as if he meant to charm her.

“Stick around much longer and somebody
will
ask you to leave,” the girl said, but with a lilt that matched his.

“She shouldn’t have gone off with you,” Tennessee said, hoping that by saying it enough she could change the outcome. “She was supposed to stay.”

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“They wouldn’t let her stay.” Maybe this wasn’t exactly the truth but Teddy thought it was close enough. “She argued with everybody. She wanted to sleep here.”

“I can’t ask you to keep Kenya.”

Sullivan stood up and touched Tennessee’s forehead as if he was checking for fever. “Given the circumstances, you could ask us to do anything.”

“She’s a nice girl,” Teddy said. He did not know the woman in the bed. He knew his mother, Bernadette, who smiled at him from a thousand photographs. He was glad they were being sent away. His hands were starting to shake and he stuffed them in his pockets.

Tennessee’s head was aching. She wanted whatever medication the nurse was going to bring her. Before they left she would remember to ask them to turn out the lights. “She’s a nice girl,” Tennessee said as a way of saying goodbye to them, as a way of saying thank you and I’m sorry, as a way of saying, I wish I had never let you go, and I wish we had never met. “Just be sure you take her out and let her run.”

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c h a p t e r 6
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F
ATHER
SULLIVAN
HAD
LOST
HIS
TALENT
FOR

S L E E P I N G .
I T
WA S
H I S
P R O B L E M
L O N G
B E F O R E
A N Y -

O N E
E V E R
S A I D
H E
H A D
T H E
A B I L I T Y
to take cancer from a thyroid with prayer, though certainly this persistent rumor didn’t help. It was the condition of his heart that kept him from sustainable rest. He still fell asleep, he fell asleep constantly, but the sleep was like a bean he managed to balance for a moment on his nose. He had no ability to hold it. There was a tide inside his chest now and whenever it crested and broke around his heart he tried to find a better position to lie in. Try sleeping in the ocean with the water rushing into your nose and mouth the second you cease to fl oat.

Late at night, Sister Claire pulled up the railing on the far side of the bed and lined it with pillows so that in those restless hours when she wasn’t nearby he could shuffle them around on his own. He stacked and unstacked and restacked, looking for the perfect angle at which to prop himself up, then finally got out of bed and sat in the chair by the window so that he could look out at the snow, the gorgeous sea of sugar-ice that he was no longer responsible for shoveling. His a n n p a t c h e t t ❆ 126

heart woke him up to remind him that in life there was never a limitless number of nights.

The floor was cold on his bare feet, but getting out of bed had been effort enough. He didn’t want to spend the little energy he had left walking over to the closet for his slippers. Let cold feet be the worst of it. Little Johnny Sullivan, the fastest Catholic boy the South End had ever seen, climber of trees and chain link fences, the ruler of ice hockey and hardball, now weighed out the benefits and per-ils of walking five feet across linoleum and wisely decided against it.

When he was a pirate boy of ten and twelve the apostle Paul himself could not have convinced him that this was where it would all wind up one day, and if he had been convinced he no doubt would have thrown himself into the Charles to drown. So sure was Johnny Sullivan’s belief in God’s impassioned love for him that he had felt certain he alone would never age.

Not that the misconceptions he held dear to his heart as an adult were any more advanced than the ones he had had as a child. There was a time when Father Sullivan would have thought this confi ne-ment was God’s retribution for the enormous restlessness that had driven his life, or for the cigarettes he managed on the sly. He believed in a carefully ordered universe: action and reaction. But now he could no longer picture a God who kept track of such minutiae or would think to punish anyone for it. Over the course of his lifetime, God and Father Sullivan had changed together. When he was a young priest teaching American and European history to Catholic boys and coaching basketball in the winter and baseball in the spring, God was made of sterner stuff. Those were the days of confession and penance, Lenten offerings and Friday fish. As a teacher he ran the boys after school in large loops around the playing fi eld and then out into the neighborhoods, over the broken sidewalks, past the dismal row houses with missing shingles. He kept pace be-r u n

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side sixteen-year-olds in the rain and the snow and the last scorching days of August. They ran in the name of athletics and in the silent understanding that what was in each of them needed to be exhausted, wound down like a clock. When Father Sullivan was a young man he kept up a crushing pace in every waking moment so that sleep was like falling down a mine shaft—straight to the bottom of something nameless and dreamless and dark. It wasn’t a specific desire within himself that he tried so hard to break. It was his thoughts of God, a God and a Church with which he might not be in peaceful accord.

Now, at the very moment when there should have been no distractions, when he should have had nothing but time to examine the very things that had kept him from a total communion with his faith, he had somehow become the star attraction in his own circus. His undoing had started out simply enough, as undoings so often will. Three months ago, a woman from his old parish had come to visit at Regina Cleri. Nena DeMatteo brought him some banana bread and a book of crossword puzzles and sat by his bed to talk. It was church gossip mostly, the battle over how to manage the capi-tal campaign for the new addition. In the course of their conversation she told him other things as well. She talked about her children (disappointments every one) and how she had developed a painful bursitis in her hip. She had given up her tennis game and then could no longer manage the stairs in her home. Cortisone shots and anti -

inflammatories had done nothing to help her and the doctor had run out of suggestions. Nena asked Father Sullivan to pray for her and he said of course he would. When she was leaving she stood for a moment beside the priest’s bed and he reached up and touched her hip, her left hip exactly where it had been hurting and the hurting stopped. The way she told it to the newspapers later on, it had startled her the way a sudden silencing of unendurable noise a n n p a t c h e t t ❆ 128

is startling. She shifted her weight from side to side, gently experimenting with the absence of pain, and then she thanked the priest and said goodbye. Nena passed the elevator in the hall. Sixty-eight years old and her legs carried her down the stairs and out to her car with the even clip of a girl. After a week spent without the slightest trace of discomfort she came back with her friend, Helen Cain, who had been diagnosed with thyroid cancer. They said nothing to him of Nena’s recovery. They brought another loaf of banana bread and a crossword -puzzle book by way of superstition.

“If you could touch her neck,” Nena said in what she hoped would be an offhanded manner, “and say a prayer for her health, it would mean a lot.”

Father Sullivan thought nothing of the request. He had been putting his hands on sick people since he was twenty-three years old. He believed in the comfort of human touch. He was sitting up in his chair by the window that day, and Helen Cain, who was barely forty with three small girls at home, leaned forward and he touched her neck and closed his eyes and prayed that she would have peace.

That was all he asked for. That was all he had ever asked for. Later Helen would say that she felt something at that moment, a small shock in her throat, and three days later when she went to the doctor the cancer was gone.

“How should I know where it went?” Father Sullivan said to the bishop when the bishop came to Regina Cleri. “It’s not as if I hid it in my chair.”

Awash in their health and good fortune the two women had talked: to each other, to their families, to the press. Soon the hallway outside his room was clogged with the suffering and the sick.

Women with colicky babies crying in their arms, a man with leu-kemia in a wheelchair, his young wife standing behind him looking sicker and more exhausted than he did. There was a ten-year-old r u n

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boy who had been blind from birth. Blind! What did they expect?

Sister Claire would let them in one at a time. Father Sullivan would explain over and over that there was nothing he could do, but of course the person would insist that he try. He was a priest after all. He could at least offer up a prayer. So Father Sullivan spent his days praying, trying and failing in a seamless continuum until finally Teddy would come and shoo everyone away. He had come by just this afternoon and driven them out, enduring all of their bitterness in stride. The sick were a ferocious lot. They’d walk right through you if they thought that health was on the other side. “He’s sick himself,” Father Sullivan heard Teddy say out in the hallway.

“You have to understand. It’s not going to do anyone any good if he dies trying to make you well.”

That’s telling them, Father Sullivan thought.

When every last one of them was gone the boy came in and sat down beside his bed. “Give me your hands,” the priest said.

“I can’t. They’re freezing. It’s freezing outside.”

“If I can give sight to the blind I should be able to at least warm up your hands. Anyway, mine are cold, too.” And so they sat there, the two of them alone, holding each other’s frozen hands.

“You should try and get some sleep,” Teddy said.

“Not when you’ve just gotten here.”

“I’ll stay and study. If I sit right here no one will bother you.

When they look in your door I’ll shake my head at them and they’ll go away.”

“Shake your head gravely.”

“I will shake my head so gravely they won’t even think of coming again for a week.”

“Oh,” Father Sullivan said, the very thought of rest sweeping over him in a warm wave. “That would be good. You would wake me if it’s something very important.”

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“If it’s life and death.”

He thanked him and then closed his eyes. “Now give me a speech. Something nice to send me off.”

Teddy asked him what he had in mind and Father Sullivan thought about it. “Something with a little conscience, shall we?

But nothing too stirring. I mean to rest.” There were so many good choices. He considered something perfectly classic, maybe the Get-tysburg Address, but then he thought of all the pleasure that came in being surprised. Teddy said he knew just the thing, simple and true, full of humility. All the qualities his uncle admired.

Teddy leaned forward and began, “ ‘Your honor, years ago I recognized my kinship with all living beings, and I made up my mind that I was not one bit better than the meanest on earth.’ ”

“Dorothy Day?” He liked to guess, though he never got them right.

“Eugene V. Debs.”

“Debs, of course. Day was hardly one for speeches.” Father Sullivan yawned. “What I wouldn’t give for a good American Socialist now.”

Teddy continued the speech meant for the judge about to hand down Debs’ prison sentence in his best bedtime story voice. “‘I said then, and I say now, that while there is a lower class, I am in it, while there is a criminal element, I am of it, and while there is a soul in prison, I am not free . . .’”

Night after day Father Sullivan was awake with his thoughts.

The visit of the two women and all of the subsequent visitors that followed had shaken him. It made him realize how helpless he was to do anything of substance for anyone. He tried to see what was ahead for each of them and he could see nothing at all. It would be incorrect in every sense to say that so near the end of his life he had r u n