Where the Dark Streets Go (18 page)

“I rented it today,” she said.

She did not want to talk with him, McMahon realized. She was living her own kind of fantasy. But he had promised Phelan. “I’ll come back a little later.” He asked Mrs. Morales if Pedrito was home. He was and so, a week to the day later, McMahon climbed the dim, ill-smelling stairway again.

Pedrito and his friends were at the kitchen table, also drinking beer. A deck of cards lay in an untidy heap where they had wearied of the game. One of the boys was on the phone trying to reach a girl named Felicita. McMahon declined a beer but took the chair that had been vacated by the boy on the telephone.

“So you’re going to bring Mr. Phelan home tomorrow, Pedrito. What time?”

Pedrito shrugged. “I got the car all morning.”

“Make it eleven and I’ll come with you.”

“If I was him I would not come home,” Pedrito said.

“Why?”

“She’s got a pig in the back room.”

McMahon was a few seconds figuring out what he meant. “A policeman?”

“That’s how we see him, Father.”

“How does Mrs. Phelan see him?”

“Ask her.” Pedrito kept his eyes down. He picked up one of the cards and flicked its edge with his thumb, a snapping sound. “We don’t like pigs in the house.”

The boy on the phone said, “Felicita! It’s me, Marcelo.” To the others he said, “I got her! Hey, I got her!”

“So. It ain’t television, ask her about the other girls. How many?” This from the boy at the end of the table.

“Shut up,” Pedrito said to him. But he got up from the table and jerked his head to the priest to follow him. They went into the next room where the effigy of Muller had been laid out. “See, Father, the poor bastard—the cops keep pushing him around, and
zook
! next time for real.” Pedrito pantomimed the thrust of a knife into his own heart.

McMahon glanced at the picture of the Sacred Heart, the shiny drops of blood. “How do you know he’s a cop?”

“It figures, that’s all. He looks like one.”

“Pedrito, maybe it’s none of our business. If Dan doesn’t have anything to hide, maybe he’d like the idea of someone living there. He didn’t kick Muller out, did he?”

Pedrito thought about it. “I think I get what you say, Father. But what if he’s got something to hide? Somebody? The cops know better, he don’t use a knife on Muller, not him.”

“That isn’t our business either, Pedrito.”

“My friend’s business, Father, that’s my business. I never liked him, but he got guts, and pride and honor. I don’t like to see him hurt any more.”

“Eleven at the hospital,” McMahon said.

“And I don’t like pigs no more than they like me,” the boy said over the banister.

McMahon went down the stairs, his head throbbing with weariness, with too much confinement in too small places, the smell of breaths, of bodies, of waste, and with almost the taste in his mouth of the little lusts of man. Every year he had gone home for a few days after the concert, but this year he would not go home. His mother had died and the house was sold. But he longed to breathe clean air and find God in the skies, to push out the walls of the tabernacle where men called priests had boxed their Savior in like a butterfly. And stifled him? The God-is-dead school was also dead. But Fair House of Joy, where was it? He tried to track the association, and it went straight back to Nim and the songs of Kathleen Ferrier, and how Muller had linked them in his mind. And tomorrow
The Bells
. And the next day, and the next?

Mrs. Phelan left the women and went out on the stoop with him. She sat on the parapet. “Look, Father, you’ve been very kind. But I think I can handle matters from here.”

Another mind your own business, McMahon thought. “I wanted to tell you about Dr. Connelly.”

“I know all about him.”

“Dan ought to keep on seeing him, even if it’s expensive.”

“For what?”

“He can help him with a lot of his problems.”

She lit a cigarette. “I thought you told me I could do that. All those sessions we had, Father?”

McMahon felt his temper rise under her sarcasm. “A priest can be wrong. I should have recommended a separation then, but I didn’t.”

“But now you do. Is that it, Father?”

“That’s up to Dr. Connelly.”

“No, Father. Dan doesn’t want him and neither do I. Dan’s my husband and I can take care of him.”

“All right…your husband, Mrs. Phelan, but not your child. Dan’s got to have a chance to stand on his own feet.”

“Father, I’ve never said this to a priest before. Thanks for everything, but go to hell.”

I
T WAS A CLEAR
and sparkling day, that Sunday in New York, when even windows that were not washed looked as though they had been. The streets looked cleaner, and somehow there was more sky. Father McMahon did not go to the hospital: he could not, for the monsignor was not feeling well and asked McMahon to sing the high Mass at eleven-thirty. McMahon welcomed it as an act of God, lifting him out of the slough of despair. Afterwards he walked to the river and back and then fixed his own breakfast in the kitchen. He was hungrier than he had thought he would be, and felt unburdened, almost as though his failure with the Phelans had humbled him in a way that was pleasing to God. It remained now for some enlightenment to come upon him in the freshness of his spirit. And for that he offered up the afternoon’s concert.

The monsignor managed to rise from his sickbed and Miss Lalor wore her Easter hat. Half the parish turned out, and neighborhood people who, having been persuaded to buy tickets, used them. Considering the fact that he and his girls were playing opposite the first Met double-header of the season, McMahon accepted the number of men in the audience as a tribute—to the girls. He did not look for Nim; he avoided looking toward the reserved-seat section. The girls, dressed in white, convened in the back of the auditorium. He could hear the clack of Sister Justine’s frog over the murmur of conversation and shuffling of feet and creaking of seats. At three o’clock sharp he went onstage from the wings, and one hand on the piano from which he would conduct, he bowed, a curt, formal nod, and sat down before the keyboard. Both his hands and his knees were trembling and he wished profoundly that the whole thing was over. But that was not so either: he merely wished to be lost in the music, the self submerged, sublimated, and therefore exalted. He marched the chorus in to “Pomp and Circumstance” which he disliked but which they loved, and it was they who were going to make the music of the day.

And make music they did. To be sure, there was a mistake here and there, but only the trained ear caught it, and the joy of young voices singing burst over everyone like the soaring of spring itself. The audience clapped and stamped, and Father McMahon crossed the stage and led the soloists to the front. He shook hands with each of them, and then to both his delight and embarrassment, little Marietta Hernandez stood on tiptoe and kissed his cheek.

He went back to the piano and without a signal to anyone began to play “Bell Bottom Rock.” The girls caught on at once and went into their thing, that uninhibited rhythm, each her own, the jerk and the halt and the shoulder shakes, with the little buds of bosoms popping up like buttons. Over his shoulder, the back of his head to the audience, he said to Sister Justine where she stood in the wings, “Curtain!”

And on that wild improvisation, the curtains closed.

People flocked around him in the basketball court afterwards, so many people, good, warm people all. Only then did he allow himself to search the faces for Nim’s. The flash of her smile when he saw her gave him a stab of pleasure. He worked his way unhurriedly toward her, greeting, accepting the praise of everyone who stopped him on the way. Nim wore a green suit with an orange scarf at the throat.

“It was great,” she said, extending her hand, “really the most.”

He shook her hand briefly. Even gloves, he noticed. “It was a lot.” The words had become a kind of theme between them. He introduced her to the other people who came up, to Mrs. Morales who was so proud of her two girls.

“Where’s Carlos?” McMahon asked.

“Home. He wiggle…like the girls, you know at the end?” Mrs. Morales covered her good teeth in self-conscious laughter.

“You liked that part, did you?”

Mrs. Morales rolled her eyes and sidled away from them.

“Now I know what it’s all about,” Nim said.

“Did the piano come?”

“It certainly did. Now that
was
a lot. Doors came off hinges. People came out I’d never seen before. Words came out I’d never heard before.”

“Where did you put it?”

“In the icebox,” Nim said, and he laughed, the ridiculous image somehow appropriate. “Against the wall to the kitchen,” she said then. “In winter it’s warmer there and not so damp.”

People were leaving them alone now. “You ought to go,” Nim said.

“We’re merely talking.”

“I know, but they want you too.”

“What about the Robinson woman?”

“I called her. Very Park Avenue: ‘Oh, yes, darling. I knew him well. Do come and see me.’ Joe—Father,” she quickly amended, “I can’t go alone. I thought I could. She invited me for cocktails and I asked if I could bring a friend.”

“When?”

“Today—after five.”

“Let’s go then,” McMahon said. “Free drinks for artists and the clergy. Why not?”

“It was presumptuous of me,” Nim said.

McMahon said, “No games. Remember?”

Nim nodded.

He looked at his watch. “Five-thirty in front of the Metropolitan Museum.”

McMahon wore his sport jacket and slacks and his black sweater. He did not have much of a wardrobe altogether, and little need until now for more than he had. On impulse, he put on the beads the flower child had given him in the Village. He took them off again and put them in his pocket until he got out of the house.

“Have a good time,” the monsignor said as he went through the hall. “You’ve earned it, Joseph.” When he had almost reached the door, the old man called him back to the office. “Are you planning to go up home this spring?”

“I hadn’t thought much about it, Monsignor.”

“Well, let me know. There’s other places you could go. Mind, I’m not trying to get rid of you, but sometimes I have the feeling, Joseph, you’d like to be rid of us for a while.”

“It’s the spring, Monsignor, and I’m a little tired. That’s all.”

“Suit yourself, suit yourself.” The old man went back to the ledger open on the desk. It was auditing time and McMahon understood the pastor’s clinging to his bed that morning. He wished the vacation had not been mentioned, the fantasies it started in his mind: a few days’ freedom and three dollars and eighty cents in his pocket. But then the monsignor always gave him a generous gift out of the concert money.

Other guests were arriving at the Park Avenue address at the same time as Nim and McMahon, and within the building—what in the old days was called a town house—a very large party was in progress. The maid taking wraps suggested the elevator although a marble staircase ascended to where most of the people were: laughter and the cadence of many voices and the tinkling sound of expensive glass. Some of the guests wore evening clothes.

“What have you got us into?” McMahon said, steering Nim toward the staircase.

“I’ll say this for Stu: no rags to riches for him. No, man. Riches to rags. I’m scared. I don’t know why, but I’m scared.”

“That’s why I’m here,” McMahon said. “Hansel and Gretel.”

“Ugh,” Nim said.

“No. Humperdinck.”

Nim made a face, but they too were able to arrive smiling at the balcony beyond which was the great living room where, as Nim said, Mrs. Robinson was having a few friends in to cocktails. People were gathered in clusters in the soft, sparkling light of the chandeliers, all making the sounds of the very rich, McMahon thought. There was not a guffaw in the house. It was like walking onto a motion-picture set, not that he had ever done that either, but it was the unreality of the genuine thing, nature imitating art. A waiter came up to them with champagne.

Nim took a glass, but McMahon said, “I wonder if I might have Scotch instead?”

“Yes, sir.”

“
Savoir-faire
,” Nim murmured. “I wonder how we find our hostess.”

“We may never find her,” McMahon said, “and you know, it has just occurred to me, you could make a way of life out of this, just walking in on parties with the invited guests.”

“It’s been done,” Nim said. “Here comes somebody. Stay with me, Joe.”

The woman came, dark-haired and tall, with a kind of angular poise to her gait. She was sleek in black silk, shoulders bare and bare-V’d to the navel with bell-legged trousers that swished as she walked. She put her glass in the hand with the cigarette and offered Nim her free one. “I’m Andrea Robinson,” she said.

“Nim Lavery. And this is my friend, Joseph McMahon.”

“You are nice,” the woman said, giving him her hand as well as her long-lashed eyes. “Are you a painter? Do I know you?”

“Miss Lavery is the painter,” McMahon said.

“And you don’t know me either,” Nim said, almost belligerently. Then, in retreat: “I thought we could talk—when you said to come today. I didn’t know…”

“But we can talk, my dear. When you called it seemed like a voice from the dead. Which in a way it is, isn’t it? What I mean to say, I was always insisting that Tom come to things like this—my perversity, for he loathed them. I wanted the fact established that I had a world of my own, and he could not have cared less.”

McMahon was disconcerted at the ease with which she slipped into intimacy. As though it were a negligée. He was glad to see the waiter return with a bottle of Chivas Regal, a glass with ice and a bottle of soda on the tray.

“Just the ice,” McMahon said, and he let the man half-fill the glass with whisky.

“When was it that you and he were friends?” the Robinson woman asked Nim.

“Last year and the year before.”

“Were they good years for him?”

“I think so,” Nim said.

The woman smiled, showing the lines in her face that were concealed most of the time. “I’m sure they were.” She touched Nim’s arm with her fingertips, and McMahon for the first time could see Muller-Chase’s attraction to her. “And were they good years for you?”