Songs in Ordinary Time (85 page)

listen to me. We all make mistakes. Everyone does.” She pulled her hands away. “Alice? Alice, stop that! I said stop it right now!” She grabbed her and dug her fingers into Alice’s arms. “This
will
be over. Do you hear me?

It’s not going to change anything. Tomorrow morning you’ll get up, just the way I’ve gotten up every morning, every day of my life, and you’ll start all over again, do you hear me? Because this isn’t going to stop you. Nothing’s going to stop you. Nothing! Do you hear me? Do you? Do you? Goddamn it, answer me!”

The door burst open. It was Norm demanding that she leave her alone.

She was too upset. Couldn’t she see that?

“Upset? She’s laughing! Look at her! Look at her, laying there laughing!”

“You know she’s not laughing.” His voice broke. “Jesus Christ, Mom, she’s falling apart.”

“No!” Marie cried. “No! No, that’s too easy. You don’t just fall apart and leave everyone else to pick up the pieces.” She paced back and forth between Norm and Alice, who had pulled the pillow over her head.

“What you do is, you keep on going,” she panted, chopping the side of her hand into her palm. “You keep on going and going and going and going and going and going, goddamn it, until you just can’t do it anymore. Until you’re dead, goddamn it! That’s when you stop!” She leaned over the bed.

“When you’re dead! And not until then!”

T
he Monsignor hobbled from his bedroom to the bathroom, heaving sighs of pain and disgust that caused Mrs. Arkaday’s rag to scrub faster and faster. The rectory smelled of pine oil. For days Mrs. Arkaday had been scrubbing floors, woodwork, and walls with an exculpatory zeal. The Monsignor was barely speaking to her. If she had been here that night, the incident never would have happened.

Father Gannon crept into the office. He needed to talk to Alice. Every time he called, one of her brothers answered and said she didn’t want to talk to anyone. This time when he dialed, her mother answered. He closed his eyes, asking for her in a whisper.

“No,” Mrs. Fermoyle said. “You can’t.”

“I have to speak to her, Mrs. Fermoyle, you don’t understand,” he said.

“Oh I understand all right,” she said.

“No. No, you don’t. You see, I love Alice.”

“For God’s sake, you’re a priest!” she growled.

“But that doesn’t matter. I—”

“It matters to me.”

“What matters is Alice’s happiness!” he said.

“Then leave her alone.”

“I can’t.”

“Well, if you can’t, then I’m calling the Monsignor. And if that doesn’t work, I’ll call the police!”

“Mrs. Fermoyle! Mrs. Fermoyle, please!” he begged, but she’d hung up.

The office door swung open and the Monsignor limped in, holding his SONGS IN ORDINARY TIME / 415

side, his face pinched with pain and shock. “You’re forcing my hand, Father Gannon. I swear to you, if you have anything more to do with that, that girl, then I’m going to call the Bishop!”

“Call the Bishop! Call the police! Call my mother! Call everyone! Who gives a shit!” He couldn’t help laughing. They were trying to back him into a corner, that’s what they were doing here, hoping he’d flip out again, so this time they could wash their hands of him, but it wasn’t going to be so easy for them this time, because this time someone loved him and needed him. This time he’d
have
to fight back.

T
he Monsignor closed the door behind him and leaned on the desk facing the unshaven priest, whose hair was greasy and uncombed. His soiled clerical collar was limp and creased, and there was a disagreeable odor about him. Father Gannon was clearly out of control. For the past two nights the Monsignor had been sickened by the feeble sobbing from the curate’s room. Mrs. Arkaday had confirmed his lack of bathing, and this morning she said he wasn’t eating anything to speak of but coffee and sweets. When the phone rang he’d snatch it up on the first ring, then forget to pass on the messages to the Monsignor. And now he had violated the Monsignor’s direct order. It enraged him to see Father Gannon’s foolish grin as he twirled a pen between his fingers.

“How can you sit there? Don’t you have anything to say? You’ve disgraced your vocation and humiliated me. You have caused a scandal, and worse, you chose as your partner in sin the niece of one of my dearest parishioners.”

At this, Father Gannon’s head bobbed with some brief amusement. The Monsignor gripped the back of the chair. What disturbed him most was this pharisaical air, as if he thought his priestliness of a higher, purer order than the Monsignor’s, some divine aegis for which he was being so unjustly punished, so constantly tormented.

The Monsignor’s stomach rumbled and his cheeks ballooned with a swallowed belch. In addition to gallstones he had an ulcer. The doctor had put him on such a restrictive diet that he couldn’t sleep through the night, so violent were his hunger pangs. These last few evenings he found himself hurrying up to bed earlier and earlier, his cassock pockets sagging with the dinner biscuits and cold chicken Mrs. Arkaday left so providentially transportable in waxed-paper bags.

It occurred to him that these stomach problems had begun last spring about the time of Father Gannon’s arrival. So it wasn’t intemperate eating habits, after all, but the tension and anxiety this disturbed curate had brought into his life. From the start all Father Gannon had to do was walk into the room and the Monsignor would feel his temperature rising, his throat swelling in his collar. The man was always touching, grasping, picking up things that were not his, reading the Monsignor’s mail, just because it was there, nervously sliding open drawers and cupboard doors while he spoke in that rush of words boiling over with some new cause or indignation. His most recent concern had been Howard, who would surely die of a broken 416 / MARY MCGARRY MORRIS

heart if his sister married Grondine Carson. Father Gannon had proposed moving the dim-witted caretaker into the rectory guest room. It was for guests, visiting clergy, the Monsignor had countered. A room over the garage, then; they could build it themselves, he and Howard, Father Gannon had declared, slashing his pen back and forth across the bottom of the sermon he had been working on. See, a bedroom, parlor, small bath. He had drawn a floor plan. No need for a kitchen. Howard could take his meals with them. No, no, no. He almost had to shout before Father Gannon understood.

The Monsignor had done his best. And this time no one could accuse of him of not trying. He had been through this years ago with one of his first curates, but that had been more delicate. Not only had the curate fondled the nephew of the Holy Name Society president, but the curate himself had been the nephew of Father Mulcahy, treasurer of the diocese. At least this should be fairly easy. Father Gannon was a nobody with a history of spiritual and mental instability. And Alice Fermoyle, well, knowing her kind, she was probably the cause of this whole mess.

“I’m going to ask the Bishop to transfer you, Father, and in the meantime, you’re not to have anything to do with anyone.”

Father Gannon looked up and smiled.

“Especially with that Fermoyle girl,” he added. All he needed now was Marie Fermoyle, that disagreeable woman, charging in here again.

The Bishop returned his call an hour later.

“Are you sure?” came the Bishop’s equable response to every allegation.

“Am I sure? Am I sure?” the Monsignor finally exploded. “Don’t you understand? There was a girl in his bed! And I was there! The three of us!

Naked! So of course I’m sure!”

“Slow down now, Tom, you’re confusing me. I’m just trying to get the picture here, that’s all,” said the Bishop.

“Well, it’s not a very pretty picture, let me tell you!” the Monsignor said, his mouth against the sweaty receiver.

There was a pause. “The thing I don’t understand, Tom, is why you were…undressed.”

“No!” he groaned. “Not me!”

When he had finally explained everything, the Bishop said, “This is a shame, a terrible shame. I had some real hope for that young man. There was something about him, you know what I mean, Tom, that old-fashioned zeal you just don’t get anymore. Aw, that’s too bad to hear it’s been so…so misdirected. I’m disappointed. I really, really am.”

Misdirected. The Monsignor’s jowls smarted as if he’d just been slapped.

The Bishop not only didn’t understand, but he thought it was the Monsignor’s fault. Suddenly he found himself telling the Bishop how sick he’d been, how bloated and constipated he was, how he couldn’t concentrate.

It was all the pressure. The convent was leaking again, and Sister William Theresa was demanding a new roof. Demanding! And when he told her SONGS IN ORDINARY TIME / 417

there were no funds for a new roof, she had the gall to ask him where the funds for next spring’s trip to Rome were coming from. That was his silver-anniversary trip, which, by the way—he wanted the Bishop to be sure and know, just in case Sister should try and raise a stink over this—his cousin Nora was paying for. He still couldn’t believe the way that nun had dared speak to him. The same with Father Gannon, who’d gone from calling him Tom to sleeping with women in his rectory. The old order was crumbling.

He hoped the Bishop knew how short a path it was from impudence to an-archy.

“Chaos, your Excellency, that’s what it’s come to. You asked me to be patient, but this man needs help!”

“Um, what kind of help do you mean?” There was a rustle of pages turning as if the Bishop had been reading a newspaper.

“He needs to be locked up, that’s what he needs!”

“Tom, he’s already spent a year in the hospital. And he came out with a clean bill of health. Maybe he just got a little overburdened.”

“A little overburdened!” His flesh burned with insult.

“You said you left him completely in charge. It was probably too much for him.”

“Too much for him!”

“Look, Tom. I’ll call his Provincial and get someone down there to talk to him. In the meantime maybe you could lighten the young fellow’s load a little.”

The Monsignor was stunned.

“And by the way, Tom,” the Bishop added. “We’re a little short of our goal statewide for the Bishop’s relief fund. Maybe you could pick up part of the slack with a special collection this Sunday.”

“But it’s Saint Mary’s first fuel collection this Sunday,” he said in a cold voice.

“Try to fit it in sometime soon, then,” the Bishop said airily, adding that he wished they could talk longer, but he was having a few people in for dinner and he really had to hurry.

The Monsignor slumped in the dark room’s early twilight. What did the Bishop care, with his handsome face and silver-streaked hair that belonged up on a movie screen and not beneath the jeweled satin mitre that would never be the Monsignor’s.

Overhead the floorboards creaked as Father Gannon paced back and forth in his room.

F
or two days now, the house had smelled of vinegary spices and steamed vegetables from his sister’s canning. Samuel Fermoyle felt good, stronger, healthier than he could ever remember. It was midafternoon and he was on his way to see his daughter. When he had called earlier to see if Alice would be home, Benjy would only say, “Probably.” The conversation had been so strained that he’d almost decided not to go. But it was time to see them. He was ready.

418 / MARY MCGARRY MORRIS

He braced his foot on the windowsill and tied his shoe. It was this easy, he thought, doubling the knot, leaving nothing to chance, not a moment untended. That had been the true lesson of Applegate. Not any of their psychological shit, but the order that had prevailed there.

As he headed out the door, he heard Helen’s voice rise sharply in the kitchen and then Jozia’s angry reply. They had been bickering for the past hour. Jozia wanted something, whether a raise or time off, he couldn’t tell from her muttered demands, but Helen was growing angrier in her refusals.

He felt himself borne by a great calm, an enlightenment, a contagion of wisdom and joy he would spread among his family, those doubters like his sister, who expected nothing more of him than the inevitable misstep, the lie, the omission.

He passed the rectory and smiled at Howard, who was dragging a garden hose down the church walkway. “Hello there!” he called, but Howard continued to tug at the hose and did not look up. It was then that he noticed the young curate sitting on the bottom rung of a ladder that leaned against the back of the Church. “Hello, Father. Lovely afternoon, isn’t it?” he called.

“Okay!” he muttered as Father Gannon looked quickly down into the bucket at his feet. Just keep going. Keep going, he told himself, determined to squelch the dread stirring in his brain. The Monsignor had probably warned the young priest not to get too friendly. A sudden image of himself shouting drunkenly at Father Gannon and careening through the polished rectory vestibule shot into his head. Jesus. Once again, he found himself adrift between the future’s terrifying void and the past, an even stranger emptiness, festering with so many of these amnesiac violations and humili-ations. It was like being stalked by his own maniacal twin.

He began to feel shaky. Maybe he wasn’t ready to see the kids. Maybe they didn’t want to see him. That’s why Benjy had sounded so funny. After all, not one of them had bothered to see how he was doing. Not even a phone call. Didn’t they care? Didn’t they know how hard he was trying?

At the corner, he turned toward the park. He was surprised to hear rock-and-roll music blasting. The bandstand was filled with musicians. Because they weren’t in uniform he thought they were only practicing. But then he realized no one was playing an instrument. They stared glumly up at the podium, where Jarden Greene was waving his arms and shouting over the raucous din that they were a sorry group of musicians who had lost their passion.

“Play it big!” he cried, raising his baton. “Play it so big and so full of yourself that you will forget the fool is there! Drown him out! Obliterate him!”

As they took up their instruments a few of the musicians glanced toward Joey Seldon, who sat on a stool in his lopsided stand where speakers amp-lified his radio songs. Two trash barrels were overflowing onto the ground.