Songs in Ordinary Time (84 page)

He suggested coffee, but she didn’t want any. Just the smell of it was making her stomach feel funny. The phone rang. While he was gone, she braced her cheek on her fist and catnapped. He was back. She looked up, startled and trembling. He said it was someone from out of town wanting to know what time the early Mass was tomorrow. She watched him clear the table. He was telling her about a priest named Velecchi who had been in his first parish with him. Velecchi had called the other day to invite him up to his new parish, which was on a lake where they could go fishing. He paused and she was conscious of him looking at her, but she had been thinking of something else.

“So what’d that boy’s father think you did? The one you gave the jacket to. You never said,” she asked, peering at him.

“I don’t know. I guess he—” Joe stammered. He was annoyed with her.

The other night he had accused her of daydreaming while he was telling her about his most recent meeting with the Bishop. “I don’t know what he thought.”

“He thought you were queer.” She giggled. “He did, didn’t he? I know that’s what it was, so you might as well admit it,” she said smugly. She liked this honesty, this getting things out in the open, like a cool clear stream running straight through her, delivering her thoughts so smoothly she did not have to grope for or censor a word.

“I don’t know what he thought,” Joe said. He carried more dishes into the kitchen.

She blinked as the door swung in and out, its diminishing arc leaving her stranded and alone out here. “Joe?” she called, cringing with the thickness of her voice. “I’m sorry. I hurt your feelings, didn’t I? Joe?”

“I’m right here,” he said, backing through the door with a cup of milky coffee for her.

There was something she had to say, but he urged her to drink the coffee.

It was something no one ever talked about. Like the boy and the jacket, there was always a part left out. “You know what it is, don’t you?” she asked, bending low to sip from the edge of the dripping cup. “It’s…it’s…sex!

That’s what the problem is. That’s what’s so…so stupid!”

“Drink your coffee,” he said, gesturing for her to lift the cup.

“Well, it is! It just makes everything so complicated and so dirty.”

“No, Alice,” he said patiently. “It’s natural! It’s part of living. Like eating and sleeping.”

He didn’t understand, and now she was losing her train of thought. She looked at him and started to cry. “But sometimes I feel like some animal that gives off this smell. It makes me sick, and every time I say the same thing. I vow I’ll never ever do it again, it’s so wrong. And then every night 410 / MARY MCGARRY MORRIS

when I’m with you I can’t help it. I can’t stop myself. It feels like I’m out of control. And the harder I try not to, the better it feels. And then I’m so ashamed. Sometimes I even walk funny. I try to keep my legs close together.”

“Alice…”

“No, no, listen. I know this is a weird thing to say, but I don’t know who else to ask.”

“What?” He looked frightened.

She rubbed her eyes, then scratched the back of her head. “Well…Oh God,” she moaned, rolling he eyes. “I don’t know how to say this.”

“Then just say it. Whatever it is, say it.” He kept swallowing and taking deep breaths.

“Is there a smell? Do I smell? Is that what happens? Is that how men can tell? How could you tell?”

“Alice! Alice, what have I done to you?” He came around the table and sat close to her. “Men can’t tell anything. There’s no, no odor. It’s not like a dog in heat. It’s not dirty. It’s beautiful. You don’t smell. You’re the sweetest, purest, most wonderful person I know. Don’t cry, please don’t.

There’s nothing wrong with you, honey. Believe me. I love you, and love isn’t dirty, Alice. It’s not wrong.”

She looked up and wailed with this soreness in her chest. She had to tell him: the thing was, the terrible, terrible thing was that she didn’t love him.

She didn’t love anyone.

“Come here, baby. You’re upset. You’re tired, and you’ve had too much wine. Come here. Let me take care of you. Let me hold you,” he whispered as they climbed the stairs to his quiet room, to his dark bed with its cool bleached linen. He eased down beside her. Curled against him, she drifted in and out of sleep as he kissed her ear, her eyes, her mouth, her throat. He stroked the length of her arms to the damp tender skin between each finger.

He helped her unbutton her dress. She heard him move away and lay it neatly on the chair. He took off his own clothes, then pulled the sheet over them.

“I love you,” he whispered with every new place he touched and kissed.

“You taste like flowers.”

A wall rose around her and in here nothing hurt. In here she was safe, as long as someone loved her and did not demand it back.

“A
aargh,” the Monsignor groaned with every rut and bump in the road while his cousin Nora drove. He was doubled over with pain, his brow pressed against the dashboard. Nora kept insisting he go to the hospital.

“If I turn here, we could be there in five minutes,” she said, slowing down.

She wore a trench coat over her pajamas. He had come to her door at midnight.

“No! I just need to get in my own bed, and then I’ll be all right.” Damn, couldn’t she ever take no for an answer? This was all her fault, anyway. She knew he had no willpower when it came to food, and yet her cupboards SONGS IN ORDINARY TIME / 411

were stocked with all manner of things he couldn’t eat. At least Mrs. Arkaday had some sense. At least she took care of him. His own cousin didn’t seem to care.

“Maybe after a few days’ rest you’ll feel like coming back.” She looked over with a hopeful smile. “This is the first time all summer Bernard’s come down to eat with us. It was just so wonderful being able to have a normal conversation with him. In spite of all his suffering.”

He groaned, and with this for assent, she continued to babble about her son. Bernard, Bernard, the hell with Bernard. His head reeled with this pain knifing through his gut. Bernard had never had to endure anything like this. No one had. My God, what was this test, this latest trial?
Release me
from this misery, I implore you. Shrink the gallstone. Make it disappear. Take it
away. You can do this, Jesus, my sweet, sweet Jesus. Damn it, I know you can! I
know you can! So do it! Do it
!

“Tom?” she hit the brake, and he almost fainted with the car’s sudden lurch. “What is it, Tom?”

“Praying,” he grunted. “I’m praying.”

“Almost there,” she kept assuring him, jamming on the brake at every stop, then accelerating ahead as if to demonstrate her full awareness of his misery. “Almost there. Just a few more blocks.” The car swerved around another corner.

Damn, why hadn’t Cleve been there to drive him home? Nora said he was at the bank preparing for the annual audit, but the Monsignor knew what it was: the town’s most powerful Catholic found him boring.

“Here we go,” Nora said, pulling into the rectory driveway and braking so sharply he almost fainted. She hurried around the front of the car. She had to unfold him to get him out. Doubled over and listing to one side, he walked with his arms girding his belly. He grew dizzier with every step he climbed.

He was shocked when Nora switched on the kitchen light. A teetering pile of dirty dishes filled the sink. On the cutting board an empty wine bottle stood in a puddle of condensation that had puckered the familiar label: the precious Brechy-Cordell he’d been saving for the day he was named Bishop.

Limp tomato slices shriveled on a plate: the season’s first beefsteaks he’d been nurturing on the sunniest windowsill to full red ripeness. On the stove were a sludgy gravy pan and a pot of cold gray potato water clotted with white scum. A new pain rose in his chest.

“Something’s happened to Mrs. Arkaday,” he groaned, groping along the countertop to the door. They passed in wordless terror through the dining room. A long, brown slick of spilled coffee stained the crocheted cloth, the last his mother had made, the intricate pattern Donegal, home of his and Nora’s good and decent ancestors. On the table were a dirty ashtray and a pack of Camels. A thin white plastic purse hanging on the back of a chair by its cracked and brittle strap swayed as he and his cousin passed by. Something was terribly wrong.

412 / MARY MCGARRY MORRIS

“Just go to bed, Tom,” Nora whispered at the top of the stairs as he struggled toward Father Gannon’s bedroom.

“Not until I find out what happened to Mrs. Arkaday,” he said, turning the young priest’s doorknob. “Father Gannon!” he barked into the musky heat that now, as the hall light bled into the darkness, was a sudden muddied swirl of naked limbs, an angry curse, and then a sobbing hunched whiteness over which a thrown sheet was settling.

“No, no, no, no, no, no, no,” the woman bleated beneath the quivering sheet.

“Get out of here! Just get the hell out!” his bollocky curate roared, shoving him toward the hallway, where Nora stood staring, her hand over her mouth.

Staggering, the Monsignor clutched the doorframe. “No! In the name of Jesus, no, not now or ever!” he panted. “You! Out of here this minute, you terrible woman, you vile and disgusting…”

The two men struggled as Father Gannon pried his fingers from the wood, then pushed him away and shut the door.

“Tom!” Nora gasped as he tried to open it, and finding it locked, pounded on it with his fist, demanding to be let in.

“Stop it! Stop it,” she insisted. “You’re just going to hurt yourself.” She held on to his hand. “Let them get dressed,” she said at his ear in a low hard voice.

“This is more than a heinous sin,” he cried. “This is a violation, the worst betrayal I could imagine.” He looked at her, choking on his tears. His beefsteaks. His Brechy-Cordell. His mother’s cloth, his legacy, tainted and consumed by lust. “My curate and…and my housekeeper!”

“No, Tom, that’s a young girl. It’s Alice Fermoyle.”

He was relieved, then shocked and disgusted and angry all over again.

“I want her out of here this minute!” he thundered.

Father Gannon said they’d come out as soon as the hallway was empty.

The Monsignor made his way downstairs, with Nora holding his arm.

He went directly to the kitchen, where he removed the two sets of car keys from the brass hooks by the door. So now it all made sense, all the late nights, the odd stains on the upholstery, the greasy whorl on the door glass…

As Nora Hinds’s Lincoln floated through the night, Alice kept her face to the window, but her eyes were closed. It had come full circle, the bastard conception that had driven Nora Hinds away was now being delivered by Nora Hinds to her mother without any underpants on.

It had been a terrible scene. When the Monsignor refused to let Joe drive her home, Joe had smashed a wineglass on the wall, bellowing that he couldn’t take any more of it, that he was through, through, through, goddamn it, he was through. The Monsignor kept ordering him to his room while she sobbed in the foyer. The Monsignor staggered to the phone and said he’d call her mother to come and get her out of there. Joe grabbed his SONGS IN ORDINARY TIME / 413

arm and warned him not to. That’s when Nora Hinds, ashen-faced and trembling, said she’d drive Alice home.

Alice tried not to smile. Home. All the ugliness and discord, her breath stale with alcohol, her thighs sticky with lovemaking, and now they all knew. Well, good, it was about time. About time. About time.

“It’s a little after one,” Nora Hinds said.

Had she asked the time? Alice wondered. Nora Hinds sat so erectly behind the wheel that she towered over Alice.
Maybe I’ve shrunk. Maybe I can. Maybe
I can. If I stop breathing and try real hard
, but now they turned down the street, and here came her pathetic little house, light glaring through the cracked globe over the front door, which opened the minute they pulled into the driveway. “No, no, no,” she groaned, shaking her head as her grim-eyed mother waded around the front of the car through the shimmering headlights, with Norm at her heels, bending low a moment to see his fucked-up, dirty, crazy sister. She covered her face with her hands.

“It’ll be all right,” Nora Hinds said to Alice. “She’s very upset,” Nora Hinds told her mother, who was trying to pull her gently from the car, but with her arms and legs gone to stone, that was going to be impossible, because now she couldn’t move, didn’t know how anymore.

“I’ll lift her out,” Norm said, leaning in to get his arms under her, but for a grunting moment could not dislodge her.

“Alice!” her mother commanded.

“Poor thing’s terribly upset,” Nora Hinds said with her fingertips at her mouth as if she might cry.

“Come on, Alice,” Norm grunted as he managed to get her legs out and his arms around her shoulders. “Let’s just get in the house,” he kept whispering as he guided her up the walk. “Just get inside and everything’ll be okay.”

“No, it won’t,” she said as they climbed the front steps. “It’ll never be okay. Never, ever again.”

Norm brought her to her room, where she lay in her dress with her eyes closed. Her mother came in and sat on the edge of the bed for a long time without saying anything.

I have come full circle. Full circle into the darkness
.

“This is all my fault,” her mother said. “I should have known. Oh baby, I haven’t really seen you all summer. You were always such a good girl, I didn’t think I had to worry much about you. But it’s going to be all right.

You’ll see. I haven’t told the boys yet, honey. At first I wanted to wait until the soap came, and then your father’s been trying so hard with his new job, and I didn’t want him all upset, but Omar and I are engaged, Alice! He gave me this beautiful diamond…would you like to see it? I’ll turn on the light.

Well, you can see it in the morning, then. You sleep now, and in the morning everything will start to look better, I promise.”

The bed shook, and Alice covered her face with her hands. She couldn’t stop laughing.

“Don’t cry,” her mother whispered, leaning close now. “Please, Alice, 414 / MARY MCGARRY MORRIS