Songs in Ordinary Time (44 page)

“I guess so,” Coughlin snickered.

The door opened, and he was grateful to see his cousin waddle into the messy room. “Here,” Anthology said, tossing a mangled Hershey bar onto the table. “Some sweets from your sweetie.”

H
oward Menka sat up in bed, blinking into the darkness. He had been dreaming the dream of the dead faces again. It was a warning, a sign of how much had changed. First the trips to see their cousin had ended.

Now Jozia had stopped cooking his dinners. Instead, she brought him the pigman’s leavings, mushy packets of carrots in waxed paper or cold gray slabs of ketchup-smeared meat loaf. They covered the refrigerator shelves, green beans speckled with congealed butter, a stiff pork chop, a shriveled baked potato. She didn’t care if he ate any of it or not. It only mattered that she brought them home for him. He was losing weight. His belt fastened on the last hole now. He was losing his life, and his sister didn’t care.

He got out of bed and tiptoed into their tiny parlor, which was little more than an alcove; its arched opening was just large enough for two easy chairs and the coffee table. On this narrow table was the statue of the pretty Infant of Prague in his yellow satin gown and high-necked white cape. The Infant’s delicate features glowed above the flickering red votive light. It saddened Howard to see Baby Jesus still wearing last month’s gown. Jozia used to change the Infant’s clothes weekly, choosing special outfits for the holy days of obligation and their favorite feast days. The last new gown she had bought from the store downstairs had been bright green for Saint Patrick’s Day.

The white cape had been dotted with tiny green shamrocks and there had been gold piping down the front. It seemed that years had passed since March.

Howard listened at Jozia’s door, but he couldn’t hear anything. Each night she got home later than the night before. In the morning he’d have to call her ten or twenty times before she finally answered, and then she could barely open her eyes. She was always too tired for early Mass, so he’d go alone. He’d sit in the last pew and cover his face, begging God to bring his sister to her senses and release her from the pigman’s spell.

He squinted through the keyhole now, and a stream of cool air hit his SONGS IN ORDINARY TIME / 213

eyeball. The bed was empty. It was three-thirty in the morning and she wasn’t home. “No!” he cried, hitting the door with his fist. His sister, the only human being he loved, had left him. “No! No! No!” Love had failed him. Prayers had failed. It was true, God did not listen to fools.

Behind him the apartment door opened and Jozia rushed through the darkness. “What are you doing?” she cried, shaking him. “What’s wrong?”

she demanded, one side of her hair straight up in the air, her puffy eyes wide and fearful.

He let her hold him. She smelled different. She smelled of fried fish and something else, something he knew but had no name for.

“It was a bad dream,” he said, and as he lay down, tears seeped from his eyes. Now he understood. The dreams of dying were about her. He began to tremble. Soon there would be a night when she did not come home at all.

The next morning he didn’t go to Mass. He made a pot of strong coffee and waited for her to wake up. When she finally dragged herself to the table, he tried to explain his nightmares.

“I tole you a million times, if I tole you once,” she said. “You wanna drink coffee all night long, then you gotta pay the sequences.”

“No, no, it ain’t got nothing to do with coffee,” he insisted. “I been having these dreams no matter what. And every time I been waking up, shaking and sweating, thinking it’s me that’s dying. But now I know. It ain’t me. It’s you, Jozia. You’re the one. You’re dying on me!”

She stood up and peered down at him. “Howard,” she said with chilling finality. “I’m thinking about moving.” For a moment she seemed about to cry. Instead she took a deep breath. “It’s time for us to be on our own now.”

She blinked. “Don’t you think?”

“No!”

F
ather Gannon would not be put off a moment longer. He would meet with the Bishop this Saturday. Saturday was best because it was the one day he had no hospital or nursing-home visits. He had arranged with Father Krystecki to have one of his visiting curates hear afternoon confes-sions.

The Monsignor poured more coffee into his cup. He picked up the paper and a faint smile parted his lips as he read the stock page. “Mrs. Arkaday!”

he called. She poked her head out from the kitchen, and he asked for a pen and paper. “Eight and five-eighths, up a quarter,” he murmured, scribbling on the pad the moment she set it down. “Times seventy-five…” His mouth hung open as his breathing quickened. “At three and a quarter…” Glancing up, he caught Father Gannon’s anxious stare. “What is it, Father?” he asked, pointing with the pen. “Jelly? Coffee? More toast? You seem to be lingering.”

“Please call me Joe,” he said.

“Is that why you’re still here? We have to go over that old ground again?”

The Monsignor sighed.

214 / MARY MCGARRY MORRIS

“I just want to remind you that this is the Saturday I’m going up to see the Bishop.”

The Monsignor leaned forward. “Why, Father Gannon? Why?”

“It’s personal, Tom,” Father Gannon said. There was no reason for two men living together to address each other by titles.

“Then I’m the one you should speak to,” the Monsignor said with reddening cheeks. “I’m your spiritual counselor, not Bishop O’Rourke, who, as I hardly have to tell you, is an extremely busy man.”

“This is something I have to talk to the Bishop about.” He would be firm.

The Monsignor laid down his pen. “Then it’s about me, isn’t it.”

“No!” Father Gannon insisted. “Not at all, Tom. It’s me. It’s something I need to get straight with him.”

There was a difficult silence before the Monsignor finally spoke. “Does it occur to you that while you’re devoting an entire day to yourself there are people here, people in this parish, who need you?”

“Well, actually, I’m doing some of that in the process.” Pleased with his foresight, he smiled as he told of his arrangement with Mrs. Fermoyle to bring one of her children to see their father in the hospital.

The blotches on the Monsignor’s cheeks deepened. “Why?” he asked in a guttural whisper that seemed to choke him. “What could possibly be the purpose?”

“I thought it would be good for the family.”

“For your information, Father Gannon, Marie and Sam Fermoyle are divorced. They are
not
a family,” the Monsignor said.

“Well, the children,” Father Gannon said, groping. “And their mother, they need—”

“This parish has plenty of good Catholic families that need your attention every bit as much. If not more,” the Monsignor added.

T
he afternoon grew cloudy, with sharp gusts of wind that kept snatching the water from the sprinkler and spraying it back at Howard as he weeded the flower beds. His wet shirt was plastered to his back. He knelt on the marble walk, weeding the snapdragons.

The Monsignor was in the rectory, meeting with the Sodality executive committee. Mrs. Squireman’s deep voice droned through the open window above him. “And so next year the four bake sales will be held after all five Sunday Masses….”

Across the street, Jozia had just hung bath mats and scatter rugs to dry on the Fermoyles’ porch railing. When he thought of her leaving him, his chest ached with this swallowed sob. The pigman was painting and wallpapering the guest room for her. They had already ordered her new bedroom

“sweet,” she’d said at breakfast this morning and almost made him cry then. She would be a rent-paying tenant, she’d said, adding cryptically,

“For now.” Whatever objection he’d raised, his sister had quelled it.

“But it’s a sin!” he’d said.

SONGS IN ORDINARY TIME / 215

“Then everybody that rents a place ever’where is committing sins, is that what you’re saying?”

“What about Mrs. LaChance?” he’d asked. “You even said you and her been like sisters.”

“I’ll still be working there!”

“But you can’t walk all that way to work.”

“I’ll be coming in with Grondine ever’ morning.”

“But what about me?”

“You’ll be fine. I tole you, we got our own lives to live now.”

“Maybe you got one to live, but I don’t,” he’d said, angry with her for the first time. He felt cheated, by the pigman mostly, but also in a way by Jozia.

“Grondine says you can get a room a lot cheaper. He says three places he hauls from got rooms to let,” she had said without so much as a glance back as she crossed the street to the Fermoyle house.

He looked up now, startled, as a shadow fell over him. It was Father Gannon, eating a large green apple. “Howard!” he called, gesturing with the apple. “You’re soaking wet.” Father Gannon ran over and turned off the sprinkler. “What’s that, some new gardening technique?” He laughed.

“You work better wet?” He stepped closer. “Howard? What’s wrong? Why are you crying?” He held out his hand. “Come here, Howard. Get up. Come on, now,” the priest said, helping him to his feet.

He would not look at him.

“What’s wrong?” the priest kept asking as he led him to the side of the rectory and sat him down on the steps. “Tell me what’s wrong. Maybe I can help. At least give me a chance. Tell me what’s wrong. Come on, now!”

“I’m gonna be alone,” he cried in a high stringy voice. “I’m gonna be all alone.”

“Maybe you’ll like it,” the priest said after Howard explained Jozia’s plan.

“No,” he groaned. “I won’t never like it. I won’t!”

The priest stared down at him. “You probably won’t,” he sighed. “Do you think maybe your sister would take you with her?”

He shook his head. “She said we gotta have our own life.”

Father Gannon slapped his knee. “Well, then, you’re just gonna have to make the best of it, Howard. Look on the bright side, now. You’ve got a good job, people who like you. People who…who care about you.”

He had been shaking his head. His nose was running. Few people had ever heard him speak, but no one had ever seen him cry before. Ashamed as he was, he couldn’t control himself. “But nobody loves me,” he sobbed.

“Nobody. Not even Jozia now.”

“Howard! Howard! People love you. Of course they do!” the priest kept insisting as his fingers dug into his wet shoulders. “I love you! Do you hear me? I love you! Do you understand?” he shouted. “I love you, Howard!”

“Oh dear,” came a woman’s sigh from behind. The Sodality executive committee had left the rectory and were following Monsignor Burke down the flagstone walk to the driveway.

216 / MARY MCGARRY MORRIS

Howard hung his head in shame.

“Monsignor Burke loves you!” the priest cried, pointing. He darted toward the women. “And all these ladies, they love you.” He ran back and gripped Howard’s shoulder again. “We all do, Howard! We all love you!”

“Father Gannon!” commanded the Monsignor. “Mrs. Arkaday needs you inside.”

As if a spell had been broken, the young priest blinked, and his hand fell to his side. He started toward the rectory, then looked back at Howard with a trembling smile. “I’ll be right back,” he said.

“Howard’s going home now,” the Monsignor said. “He’s done for the day. Aren’t you, Howard?”

That night he threw the leftovers into the garbage. He would cook his own food. The macaroni boiled over and then the cheese slices burned in the fry pan, but he ate it anyway, feeling stronger with every mushy noodle.

After that he tried to watch television by himself. But it was a scary murder show, so he turned it off and sat staring at the sweet plaster face looking back at him from the coffee table. Poor Baby Jesus, Jozia had lost interest in them both. That’s when he got the idea of changing the Infant of Prague’s clothes. Maybe if he did, God might start paying a little closer attention to how bad things were going in Howard Menka’s life.

He looked through all the boxes in Jozia’s closet but he couldn’t decide which outfit to choose, so he worked up all his courage and went downstairs to the Holy Articles Shoppe to ask if there were any special holy days coming up. Miss Brastus, a shy woman with a faint mustache, whispered through the chained door. She and Howard weren’t used to each other. It was Jozia she always dealt with. “It’s ordinary time,” she said, looking down the hallway.

“I mean now. This month,” he tried to explain, glancing back to see what she was looking at.

“That’s what this is. The whole summer, it’s ordinary time. There aren’t any special feasts then.”

“Oh,” he said, and with her closing door, everything felt flat and hopeless again. It was ordinary time, and there was nothing to look forward to and no one to love. There wasn’t even a special outfit for the Infant to wear.

Howard’s eyes shot open. It was the middle of the night. One by one through the darkness, familiar shapes drifted to the surface, a plaster horse lamp, his Fort Ticonderoga mug, the nude Infant of Prague. Waiting for Jozia, he had fallen asleep in the chair. He felt his way to her room, where the white emptiness of her bed was all he could see.

He went outside and sat on the narrow porch, which was crowded with Jozia’s summering houseplants. He tried to think of happy times, people and places he liked, but not one good thought came to him. After a few minutes, he got up and walked to the corner, standing close by the streetlamp, looking first one way and then the other for his sister. Slowly he began SONGS IN ORDINARY TIME / 217

to walk up the hill. He headed south on Main Street, turning left at the church, past the rectory, past the Fermoyles’. He kept looking back over both shoulders, sometimes stopping and completely turning. Now that he was on Stratton Road he could hear dogs barking. Gravel crunched underfoot and roadside weeds snagged his ankles. The distance between houses increased until he was passing long wooded stretches that hummed with the dark rush of water and the steady beat of crickets, and now, the ghostly hoot of an owl. A branch snapped. His eyes widened and his mouth puckered with the parchedness of dry cotton.

He began to blink as his brain pinged with hundreds, thousands, millions of random words, thoughts, sounds, flashes of memory distant as stars—images of her hair, thin and grayly dry against her face; of her lost slipper found after its mate had finally been thrown out, and how sad that made them both feel, how frustrated, how stupid; of the quick scared way she’d call out his name through the dark: Howard! Howard!