Songs in Ordinary Time (59 page)

“I see,” Tuck said with a skeptical glance. Classic case of denial, he thought. He continued writing: “Benny and brother in car.” He looked up.

“Now, your mother says you’re so upset, so haunted by this tragedy that you won’t leave the house, that it’s all you think about.”

“It’s not all I think about. I try and think of other things.”

“Are you sublimating your grief, son?” he asked. He’d done some reading in his old textbooks last night.

“I don’t know what that word means.”

He tried to light the pipe again. “Of course you don’t.” He coughed. “This is your first encounter with psychiatry, isn’t it?” He waved away the smoke between them.

“I guess so.” The boy kept looking toward the door.

Tuck sensed that he was honing in on something here. Better not to seem too eager, though. Take it slow and easy. “What that means, Benny, do you mind if I call you Benny? Benjamin’s such a mouthful.”

“No sir, I don’t mind, if you want to.”

“What that word means is that you’re hiding your true feelings, that you are pretending the accident never happened.” He paused. “Is that what you’re doing, Benny?” he asked softly.

“I know it happened.” The boy shrugged. “I just try and make it seem different.” The cat purred loudly as he stroked it.

“How do you do that, son?” Maybe the cat would be a good idea after all. An innovative technique to relax his patients. The cat food would definitely be deductible. Grace would have to start saving the grocery slips.

“I just think about it like it was a program I saw or a movie or something.”

SONGS IN ORDINARY TIME / 287

“That’s sublimation, Benny,” he said, checking his notes. There was still the fear of water to cover. And no friends.

There was a tap on the door. Tuck looked up to see his daughter crossing her eyes and sticking out her tongue at his patient. He threw open the door.

“Don’t you ever do this again!” he said, grabbing her arm and shaking her.

“Mommy says it’s lunchtime and she’s not gonna wait around all day, so he has to go now, because Mommy said so!” his daughter screamed.

Tuck released her, and seeing the print of his grip red on her flesh, felt dizzy. He tried to pull her close to soothe her, but she ran off shrieking to her mother.

He closed the door quickly. He didn’t know what it was lately about his older child. Something about her was driving him to these frenzies. He felt the boy’s eyes on him, and he was ashamed. Last winter she’d spilled milk in his lap. In his anger he’d dislocated her shoulder. They told Dr. Lawson that she’d fallen down the cellar stairs. For months afterward she had had such terrible nightmares that Grace had to sleep with her. It was only two weeks ago that Grace had moved back into their bedroom. Since then she’d let him make love to her once, the whole time hushing him while she listened for her daughter’s cry.

He bent over the boy, speaking rapidly, to fit it all in before the explosion.

“Now, remember, Benny, don’t sublimate. What happened, happened. Talk about it to people.”

The door opened. Her mouth twisted. “You make me sick, you hypocrite.”

He hurried toward her with both hands raised in supplication. “Please, Grace, not now. Wait until he leaves. I beg you.”

“Tell him to get out now!” she demanded, shaking her fist. “I want him out now!”

Benjy jumped up with the clinging cat’s claws embedded in his chest as he headed for the door. Tuck wavered, glancing between his wife and his patient.

“Tell your mother that’ll be a dollar, Benny, and I’ll call her to set up the next session,” he called.

“No,” Mrs. Tuck was hollering. “There’ll be no more of your little sessions, you hypocrite, you monster.”

The door slammed and the cat leaped onto the porch, and then Benjy heard a sound like a woman crying, as if she was in pain, as if Mr. Tuck had punched her in the mouth or something. He ran down the steps and up the street.

T
he little room off the rectory parlor was a warm gray fizz of television static. Mrs. Arkaday dozed in the green leather chair, her feet on the hassock, arms crossed. Her head bobbed with a drooling smile as she dreamed of Howard waving at her through the glass.

“This is the end of our evening programming.”

Her eyes shot open and for a moment she couldn’t stop trembling as she stared at the sputtering test pattern on the screen. She was exhausted after 288 / MARY MCGARRY MORRIS

supervising Howard Menka’s window washing all day. Every time she tapped on the glass to point to a spot, he glared at her. One of these days he was going to haul off and hit someone. And what would the Monsignor do then? Whose responsibility would that be? Poor man, he certainly had his hands full, people always pestering him with their problems—now it was his cousins the Hindses and their dying son—when he had so much to run, rectory, church, school, and on top of it now, this strange new priest, prowling up and down the back stairway in his stocking feet all hours of the day and night on his way God knows where. He hadn’t worn his shoes inside since the polish fiasco. There were still streaks in the carpeting, and now every room smelled of his feet. “Father Gannon,” the Monsignor would shout, bearing down on her. “Where’s Father Gannon?” As if she should know, as if she had any say at all about what went on here. Good thing, too, because if she did, the first thing she’d do would be to fire Howard Menka, and then, next, she’d show Father Gannon these two red barrettes snagged with long brown hair that she’d been carrying like red-hot embers in her apron for days since first discovering them in his pants pocket.

Hearing a sound now, she tiptoed to the door, a little woozy with the turbulence of sweet cologne in the dim hallway. “Father Gannon!” she called as the back door opened.

He smiled as she hustled into the kitchen. He was freshly shaved, his cheeks high with color. His dark eyes glistened. “Kate, I didn’t want to disturb you, but would you make sure I’m up for the six?”

“Where are you going?” she snapped. Her chin quivered. In all her years here, not a single priest had ever called her Kathleen or Kathy, much less Kate. “If the Monsignor asks me, I don’t know what to say. Especially at this hour.”

“Oh, Kate, I’m sorry. That really puts you in the middle, doesn’t it?” He glanced past her to the dark stairs. “I haven’t wanted to say anything. You know how the Monsignor feels about politics. But I really like Jack Kennedy.

They meet over in Woodstock—his committee, that is—and there’s not much I can do to help during the day, so at night…”

“Of course,” she whispered, a finger sealing her lips. Of course, that handsome young Senator and his beautiful Jackie. Waving, she shooed him out the door. He had to say no more. Naturally, an energetic young priest would want to do all he could to help elect the first Catholic President, even if it meant dragging around dog-tired all the next day. She had to admit, it gave her a little thrill, the thought of him defying the Monsignor. Father Gannon was every bit as courageous and rugged as Senator Kennedy himself. She opened the trash basket and tossed in the barrettes. My Lord, all these days of worry, and they probably belonged to some child, and him like a child himself in so many ways. She stood by the window, smiling as she watched him go down the moonlit path. Must’ve broken a few hearts when he got the call. Her own heart stirred. It was a fine and noble life, this selfless giving to God. “Now what the devil’s he doing?” she muttered, SONGS IN ORDINARY TIME / 289

startled to see him kneel by Howard’s perennial bed and cut himself a bouquet of Shasta daisies and baby’s breath.

M
ooney finally had a job. He was driving a truck for J. C. Colter and Sons, which was the biggest tire distributor in the state. He was on the road four days out of five, hauling threadbares up to Burlington for retreading. It wasn’t just any zombie steering job, either, since he had to load the truck himself here in town, unload up at the plant, then reload the return shipment of retreads; plus he was responsible for all the paperwork, every invoice and bill of lading, each of which had to be date-stamped and signed at both ends of the run. He carried all the forms in a green plastic folder attached to a clipboard he’d bought himself. Getting into his truck in the morning, he could almost hear the drumroll, the chorused voices heralding another successful mission.

He smiled a lot more often. The old swagger was back. He wore his soft green collar up, and now, with his hair all grown out, he was cultivating just the slightest swell at the base of his sideburns. He bought himself brand-new hand-tooled cowboy boots and cigarettes by the carton, which he kept locked in his trunk along with every other possession—not that he was afraid Anthology would steal from him, so much as that it continued to make staying with his cousin seem like a temporary arrangement, one that could change at a moment’s notice. “Any calls?” was still his first question through the door. “No calls, no telegrams,” Anthology always answered back. In some illogical way it began to seem that this job was the special assignment, the lie becoming not only a force but a possibility for redemption.

Colter didn’t pay big money, but he’d assured Blue the job was his as long as he delivered on time and didn’t get in trouble with the law, which included any kind of traffic violation as far as Colter was concerned. Like every other prospective employer, Colter had questioned his brief stay in the Marines, but he was the only one who’d accepted Mooney’s explanation without question. All he asked was to be notified the minute Mooney received his assignment, its covert nature thrilling the old man, a former leatherneck himself.

“Yes sir!” Mooney had answered, as he did now to all of Colter’s orders, which continued to mitigate Colter’s initial misgivings. It was not kin or rumor that gauged a man’s true worth, but performance, Colter had said, looking him straight in the eye.

BETTER DEAD THAN RED proclaimed the decal on every truck in Colter’s fleet, and every uniform had an American flag sewn on the sleeve. Mooney was proud of his new uniform, with his name scrolled on the pocket flap in orange thread. BLUE, plain and simple, like the dark-green pants and shirt, securing him in the ranks of like-minded men. Tonight before he picked up Anthology at the A+X he stood his collar straight up, turned his shirt cuffs back just one fold, and set the wave in his hair one more time before going inside.

290 / MARY MCGARRY MORRIS

He followed Alice from the storeroom into the kitchen. “I saw your school today, your college, that is,” he said.

“That’s good,” she said, hurrying back into the storeroom for straws.

Wisps of hair had slipped from her ponytail and lay on her collar. He blew a quick puff of air, grinning as the little hairs riffled up and down. She glanced back at him.

“I go right by it,” he said, returning quickly with her to the kitchen. “Hey!

Maybe I’ll stop in and see you when you’re going there.”

Her head shot up, and she opened her mouth, and her cheeks flared red, but she only took a deep breath.

“If I can, I mean. There’s no telling how busy I’ll be then. And you, too,”

he added quickly.

“Yah, I probably will be.” She sounded relieved. “Especially at first.”

“Yah, especially then.” A month, he thought. He’d give her a month, then he’d stop by and see her. Maybe take her out in the truck to eat someplace.

Someplace nice. By then he’d have plenty of money. He’d buy her a present, maybe a book or a megaphone or whatever it was college girls liked.

While she finished her chores, he sat on the counter, smoking a cigarette with Coughlin. A few minutes later a car pulled in at the back of the lot and doused its lights. Taking off her apron, Alice ran outside and climbed into the car. Mooney looked down as the car passed under the order window.

It was him again, the priest. Alice’s head was lowered to smell the flowers she was holding.

The priest’s car was in the distance as they pulled out of the lot. “Guess where they’re going!” Anthology called as he strained to see over the dashboard.

“Jesus, he’s a priest!” Mooney said.

“Yah? And what’s he picking her up this late for? To pray?”

Mooney shrugged. “They’re friends. He’s a priest.”

“Oh they’re friends. But the priest is plugging her, believe me. I can tell.”

He held his breath. Anthology was baiting him. They’d really been getting on each other’s nerves lately. His cousin liked it better when Mooney was completely dependent on him. “Need butts?” he asked, slowing as they came to the gas station, where Anthology usually got them from the machine.

“No, let’s follow them. Come on!” Anthology said.

Saying he needed cigarettes himself, he pulled next to the air pump. But he already had a full deck in his pocket, Anthology protested. “Come on!”

he squealed, pointing ahead. “Look! They went through the lights, right past the church.”

“He’s taking her home,” he said as he got out of the car. “Down to Edgewood Street.”

“Holy shit!” Anthology hooted out the window. “You even know her street!”

When he got back in, he closed the door hard, then backed up and shifted forward with a jerk to remind Anthology of his status here. “I get any calls SONGS IN ORDINARY TIME / 291

today?” he growled as they peeled down Main Street. If Anthology said one more word about Alice and the priest, he was afraid what he might do to him.

“Like always, no calls, no telegrams.” He laughed. “Hey, let’s stop for coffee!” he said as they came to the silver diner at the bottom of the hill.

They hadn’t stopped in since Blue had started work. Anthology loved coming here on their way home.

“I can’t. I’m tired.” He gave it just enough gas to race them by the diner.

His cousin looked back at the diner and then up at him. “You know something, Blue, you’re turning into a real prick. You don’t wanna do nothing anymore! Not with me, anyway!”

“Look, I been on the road all day, and tomorrow I gotta be up at five.” It felt so good saying it, he couldn’t help smiling.

“Hey, I wanna ask you something. How come you got a job if you’re still in the Marines?”