The Prudence of the Flesh (10 page)

Gloria shook two cigarettes free and offered one to Madeline. “Father Dowling wants to meet you.”

“What for?”

“Ned and I have been attending Mass at his parish. He's heard about your awful experience and wants to talk with you.”

“It's a trick.”

“I don't think so. No, I'm sure it isn't. Do you know what I think? He may be the only one who really gives a damn about you.”

“Why should he?”

“Maddie, he's a priest. The kind of priest we used to know.” That was a mistake, but Gloria hurried on. “A straight shooter.”

They talked about it for three cigarettes apiece. Gloria was about to light a fourth when Madeline said, “Where?”

“Here? At the rectory? Your place?”

Having a priest come to the library was out of the question. Madeline was ashamed of the dirty old men who spent the day calling up pornographic sites on the bank of computers. At home was Marvin, presumably continuing his education in the privacy of his own bedroom. That left the rectory.

“I could go with you,” Gloria offered.

Madeline found that tempting, but only momentarily.

“But I can tell him you're coming?” Gloria persisted.

“Gloria, I am perfectly capable of making arrangements myself.”

That seemed unkind given their close friendship. Who else would have helped Madeline elicit the memories of events that had scarred her soul?

“I don't want Marvin to know,” Madeline explained.

Madeline Murphy, occupation librarian, lived with her son, Marvin, in a small bungalow not far from Dirksen Boulevard in Fox River. Her day was spent chasing derelicts from the computers on which they called up pornographic sites. Unbathed, with open mouths, barnacles on the ship of decent society that provided gratis this opening into hell, they awaited their Dante. Her zeal often brought her on the carpet of the head librarian's office. Tetzel of the
Tribune
had written of the assault on the First Amendment in the branch library, ringing all the accepted changes on untrammeled liberty. He gave his reader to understand that wars had been fought to secure the right of derelicts to peruse pornography at public expense.

“They commandeer the computers. They sit there for hours,” Madeline complained to Pasquali.

“I know, I know.” He had once loved books and had become a librarian with the sense that the profession would connect him with the Bodleian, with the scriptoria of medieval monasteries, with the great library at Alexandria. Now he presided over a branch that contained few books even twenty-five years old, with
shelf upon shelf of the ephemeral fiction called romances, carrying on a brisk trade in videos and rock music on disks, as well as large-print mysteries.

“I did not become a librarian in order to run a sex shop,” Madeline said.

“Now, now. That is too strong.”

“Would you want your wife to patronize this library?”

It was for Marvin she really feared. He had dropped out of high school with the intent of joining the navy and failed to pass the physical. There had been some months of desultory employment in various fast-food franchises. Fast food! The phrase had false Lenten connotations. Twice he had walked away in disgust from the smell of grease, the aroma of hamburgers and french fries, the dumbos who came and stared at the pictured offerings in an agony of indecision. Who could blame him?

They had sat and plotted, mother and son, on how he could earn his high school diploma without going back to school. There were promissory ads in books of matches. Nothing came of them. Still, years later, he lolled around the apartment during the day, at the keyboard of his computer. Her experience at work stirred her motherly concerns. She was what is called a single mother, a category that aimed at rationalizing the irregular. Marvin had never had a father to model himself after. It was Madeline's shame that for years she had been in doubt as to who his father was. In the past into which for years she had been reluctant to peer, there had been a sorority party, the house full of men, soft lights, strong drink, and pulsating music that stirred the loins. In some haze of warmth and momentary pain she had given herself to someone. She had, in the old joke, taken a chance on a mattress and lost by winning.

The advice she was given at Student Health was lofty and moralizing. She could not responsibly bear the child. Nor need she. Relief was just an operation away. Whence came her resistance to this compelling counsel? Her whole being revolted at the idea. Mingled with her shame was the wonder that within her a new life was forming. She thought of going to the Newman Club, certain she would get different advice there, but she could not risk being seen there. So she went to a church several blocks from campus and talked with a young assistant, Father Barrett.

Had she expected threats of divine retribution? She had come like the woman taken in adultery, but her reception had been biblical. His compassion in her time of need was balm to her soul. He arranged for her to go off where she could have her child. She could give it up for adoption.

But, as she had resisted abortion, so she resisted adoption. The baby she bore was hers, and she resolved to raise it. Father Barrett had supported her decision. Her aging parents gave financial help, so she could continue school and earn her library degree. Did they believe her story that she had assumed the care of a child born of a straying sorority sister? In any case, they did not question it—but neither of her parents had ever seen Marvin.

She lied to her parents, and she lied to Marvin when inevitably he asked about his father. By then she had supplied herself with photographs from a garage sale: The young sailor smiling into the camera, his hat at a jaunty angle, was on her dresser for years, then transferred to a prominent place in the living room. She invented a heroic death for Marvin's putative father. Eventually he wanted to see the medals, the discharge papers, other photographs. Alas, she had given them into her parents' keeping, and in the confusion after their deaths—an accident on 101 near
Santa Barbara in which eight others had lost their lives—their effects were dispersed. The imaginary had become so vivid to her that she was almost surprised by Marvin's skepticism.

“Sometimes I think I was just left on your doorstep.”

Sometimes she wished she had settled for such a simple explanation.

The photograph of the unknown sailor was behind Marvin's attempt to enlist in the navy.

She met Gloria when Pasquali asked her to accommodate the local artist who was offering to lend some of her paintings for display in the library. They hit it off immediately.

“I always wanted to paint myself.”

“Don't.”

“Why not?”

“There are too many of us already.”

The paintings Gloria brought were certainly colorful. Madeline supposed they were abstract. After hours of indecision, they hung the paintings in various places, not wanting to group them. Seen side by side, they seemed to resemble one another too much.

“You certainly love yellow,”

“The color of cowardice.”

Gloria did not want her photograph displayed along with her paintings. Instead, she offered a self-portrait. Madeline studied it.

“I'm in there someplace. Let me take you to dinner.”

This was an unexpected pleasure. Madeline's life had become a parody of itself. Daytime in the library; after work, home to fuss over Marvin. When he was younger, there had been visits to museums, to the zoo, now and then a movie, but that was all behind them now. For Marvin, weekends meant hours and hours before the television watching sports—golf, basketball, football,
hockey, it didn't matter, any contest could mesmerize him. He drank beer as he watched. Meanwhile, she sat in her rocker in the kitchen reading the kind of book that had drawn her into the library work and listening to NPR and the delightful program called
End Notes.

That first time, she and Madeline had gone to a small trattoria where Gloria was obviously well known. Madeline let Gloria order for her. It was almost like a date. Madeline couldn't get enough of it when Gloria began talking about her husband.

“Gone to God, at least I hope so. He was killed in Iraq.”

“Then we have that in common.”

“You lost your husband?”

“He was in the navy.”

“What I think now is, what if I had gotten pregnant.”

“I did.”

“Really.”

So she told Gloria about Marvin, an account that bore as little resemblance to her son as Gloria's self-portrait did to her. It turned out that they had NPR in common.

“I have it on all day. Flaky liberals, most of them. It brings back my youth,” Gloria said.

“I suppose you listen to
End Notes
?”

“Oh, that voice!” Gloria shivered and squeezed her eyes shut.

“I know him.”

“You do!”

“Well, I did. A long time ago, when he was a priest.”

Gloria sat back. “I knew you were Catholic.”

“But I'm not. Not anymore.”

“Wait until you see my favorite usher.” Her brows danced. Honestly, she was so much fun to be with.

When Gloria came to the house and met Marvin, she flirted with him shamelessly. He loved it, his chest expanding like a pouter pigeon's under her flattery. How had Madeline's memories of Father Barrett fused with all the publicity about wayward priests?

“I lied about my sailor, Gloria.”

“You weren't married?”

“Priests can't marry.”

How easy it had been to say and how impossible to take back, particularly when Gloria was so excited about it. They talked for hours, and Madeline just nodded when Gloria attributed to her the business about suppressed memories. She agreed to write the letter to Mr. Barfield, the archdiocesan lawyer whose name figured in local stories about accused priests. The worst thing had been to telephone Barrett at home, but by then Madeline almost believed the story herself.

Madeline did go to church at St. Bavo's, where Gloria nudged her arm when the tall, imperious usher strutted up and down the aisle. Then she met Ned Bunting at Gloria's.

“I'm a writer,” he had told her.

“Art has brought us together,” Gloria simpered.

On that occasion, Madeline told herself that Gloria was just being flirty, as she had been with Marvin, but she found it hard not to resent Ned Bunting a little.

“So who's your squeeze, Madeline? The four of us could go out.”

“Oh, there's no one in particular.”

There had been no one all her life long. Once burned, twice shy.

“Just so it isn't Gregory Barrett.” Gloria's eyes widened.

“That bastard,” Ned said. “I sent him a story, and he sent it back with a nasty crack.” He seemed about to say more but didn't.

“Maybe he isn't all he's cracked up to be. Madeline knew him when he was a priest.”

“You did!”

“It's a long story.”

The story developed over several occasions. It seemed a dreamlike sequence, the movement from talking with Gloria to accusing the archdiocese of letting a predator like Gregory Barrett loose on innocent young women. Lawyers had come to her, suggesting that her grievances could be answered with money. Madeline affected shock. How could she have sustained the story without Gloria's support? Ned, it turned out, was writing a book on the clerical scandals that were rocking the Church. Madeline was impressed when his article on Father Dowling appeared, despite the terrible job of editing. It was to Gloria that she had first confided—obliquely, not quite saying it outright—that Gregory Barrett was Marvin's father.

“Good God. You have to tell Ned.”

Madeline panicked. After all, Ned was writing a book. With great reluctance she allowed herself to be interviewed by him, again and again, his tape recorder going. He seemed reassured, more than anything else, by the fuzziness of her memories. He explained the theory of repressed memory to her. It had become a commonplace. Under his urging, the past lost its vagueness. She told him how Father Barrett had arranged for her to have her child.

It angered Ned that when Barrett had left the priesthood he had not married Madeline. “Ran off with a nun, of course.”

“I didn't know that,” Madeline said.

Gloria told Ned about the photograph of the sailor in Madeline's living room and about the garage sale.

“I had to provide Marvin with a father,” Madeline explained.

“Oh, you poor thing.” Gloria took her in a plush embrace. How good it was after all these years to feel again the sympathy and compassion she had felt when she talked with Father Barrett.

Ned thought he was introducing her to the funny little lawyer in the tweed hat, Tuttle, describing him as his collaborator.

“You know him?” she asked.

Tuttle had looked Ned up, praised his account of Father Dowling, and given Ned his business card.

“I've told him everything, Madeline,” Ned said.