All the Lonely People

by Barry Callaghan

  “And the worst,” she said, laughing. “I’ll make love to you tonight, okay?”

  “We’ll see,” he said, and put his arms firmly around her shoulders as they hailed a taxi. At home, he started to take off his shirt. “No, no,” she said, “I want to be good to you. You can’t say no to a girl who wants to be good.” He was disappointed. He wanted to soothe her. “You want me up against the wall?” he said, laughing.

  “It’s nice, isn’t it?”

  “Yeah, except this time I want to watch.”

  “Whatever you want,” she said and knelt down.

  “How come you want to be so good to me?”

  “Maybe it’s in my nature,” she said, smiling, and held him firmly by the thighs.

  He could only see her hair over her hunched shoulders and the soles of her shoes, and his own unhappy look in the mirrored light.

  Two days later, she called and said she had found a superb pheasant pâté and for him to come over. He decided to bring her a single rose. “Well,” she said, taking the long thin box, “where will I put that?” She placed it into the umbrella stand and took him into the library where she showed him the photograph of himself he had given her. It was on a side table, scissored and fitted neatly into an oval upright silver frame. He was smiling in the photograph and looked very handsome.

  “Don’t you think it’s a beautiful frame?” she said. “I got it last time in Palm Springs.” She cut two little pieces of pâté and put them on delicate china plates. She was wearing a black dress buttoned to the throat, with puffed sleeves, and a handkerchief at her wrist, under the sleeve.

  “Don’t you like the frame?”

  “Yes, of course. It’s very fine. Not the look of a condemned man, either,” he said, smiling. She gave him his plate of pâté, paused, and went over to a carved oak cabinet.

  “I think we should have a little something from my father’s stock, Denis-Mounié. My father told me it’s the cognac of the diplomatic corps.”

  “To your heath,” he said. “We’ve never toasted you, and today you look very beautiful.”

  “Do you know,” she said, “with all the things we talk about, we’ve never talked about politics? Everybody talks about politics.”

  “That’s right,” he said. “And it’s only fair.”

  “What is?” she asked gaily.

  “That we should talk about politics.”

  They discussed the news in the papers, whether the mayor now looked better after a small operation to correct an overbite and whether there should be a citizens’ police review board, and then they walked to the vestibule. The rose was in its box, upright in the umbrella stand. She stood beside him at the open door, holding his hand. He kissed her lightly on the cheek. “Leave a little light in the window,” he said. She laughed and they said goodbye.

  He saw her again a month later out at the airport when he was coming in from a New York book fair. He would have called out to her but she was moving too quickly, and with all her composure, to catch a plane. It was the last time he saw her. But he had occasion to drive by her house one night. The house was in darkness. In spite of himself he stopped, waiting to see a light come on. Over the months, he often went out of his way to pass the big house, and one night the lawn sprinkler was on, but the house remained dark.

  DOG DAYS OF LOVE

  Father Vernon Wilson was an old priest who led a quiet life. He said Mass every morning at the side altar of his church, read a short detective novel, had a light lunch, and went out walking with his dog. He was retired but he always made a few house calls to talk to friends who weren’t bothered by the dog, and though he had a special devotion to the Blessed Virgin and the Holy Shroud of Turin, he didn’t talk much about faith.

  He was still spry for a man in his early eighties. He gladly let the dog, a three-year-old golden retriever, set a leisurely pace on a loosely held leash, sniffing at curbs and shrub roots and fence posts. He’d had the dog for a year, a local veterinarian having come around to the parish house of an afternoon to leave the dog as a gift, telling the housekeeper, “I’ve always wanted to give Father Wilson a little dog. I always felt so at ease with myself and the world whenever I’d gone to him to confession.”

  In all his years as a parish priest, Father Wilson had never imagined that he might want a dog, and he certainly did not know if he could, in accordance with diocesan rules, keep a dog in the parish home. The new young pastor, Father Kukic, had at first said, No, no, he wasn’t sure that it was a good idea at all, even if it was possible, but then the diocesan doctor had come by to give the priests their autumn flu shots and to check their blood pressure, and he had said, “No, no, it’s a wonderful idea. I urge you, Father Kukic, if it’s not usually done, to do it. It’s a proven fact, older people who have the constant company of a dog live longer, maybe five years longer, maybe because all a dog asks is that you let him love you, and we all want Father Wilson to live longer, don’t we.”

  “I’m sure we do,” Father Wilson said.

  “Well,” Father Kukic said, trying to be amiably amusing, “there could be two sides to that argument.”

  “Father Kukic,” the old priest said, feigning surprise, “I’ve never known you to see two sides to an argument.” He clapped the young priest on the shoulder. “Good for you, good for you.”

  “I’m sure, too, that the dog will be good for you,” Father Kukic said.

  “I’m sure he will,” Father Wilson said, but he was not sure of the situation at all. On their first night walk together he kept the dog on a short leash, calling him simply, “You, dog…”

  Then, after ten or eleven days, Father Wilson not only let the dog sleep on the floor at the end of the bed in his room, but sometimes up on the end of his bed, and then one morning he announced over breakfast that he had decided to call the dog, Anselm. “After the great old saint,” he told Father Kukic, “Saint Anselm, who said the flesh is a dung hill, and this dog, I can tell you, has yet to meet doggy dung on a lawn he doesn’t like.”

  “Oh, really now,” Father Kukic said, and before he could add anything more, the old priest said, “But then, look at it this way. It’s all a matter of perspective. Most people get Saint Anselm all wrong. He was like the great hermit saints who went out into the desert. They renounced everything that gave off the smell of punishment and revenge, and so they renounced the flesh, but only so they could insist on the primacy of love over everything else in their spiritual lives…over knowledge, solitude, over prayer…love, in which all authoritarian brutality and condescension is absent, love, in which nothing is to be hidden in the flesh…”

  Father Kukic sat staring at him, breathing through his open mouth.

  “You should be keeping up on your spiritual reading, Father. That’s Thomas Merton I was giving you there. You should try him.”

  “Wasn’t he something of a mystic?”

  “My goodness,” the old priest said, “I think Anselm and I should go for a walk, get our morning feet on the ground.”

  They walked together every morning just before lunch, sometimes in the afternoon if it wasn’t too hot or too cold, and always at night, just before CNN at ten. “If you’re going to be in touch, if you’re going to keep up with your parishioners,” he told Father Kukic, “you’ve got to know what the trash talk is, too.”

  When he visited homes in the parish, leaving the dog leashed on a porch or sitting in a vestibule, he talked candidly about anything and everything, pleasing the parishioners, but more and more as he and Anselm walked together, and particularly when they stopped to rest for a moment in front of a building like the Robarts Research Library, he leaned down and patted Anselm’s neck and said quietly to him, “Good dog. Now you look at that. There’s real brutalism for you. That’s the bunker mentality of a bully.” He scowled at the massive slab-grey concrete windowless wall, the cramped doorway under a huge periscope projection of concrete into the sky. “This is the triumph of the architecture of condescension,” he
said, pleased that he’d found so apt a phrase for his thought, and amused and touched, too, by how Anselm, looking up at him, listened attentively, and how the dog, at the moment he had finished his thought, came up off his haunches and broke into a cantering walk, striding, the old priest thought, like a small blond horse.

  “Beautiful,” he said, “beautiful.”

  Parishioners and shopkeepers soon took for granted seeing them together.

  The only times that Anselm was not with him, the only time he left the dog alone in his bedroom, was when he said Mass at the side altar early in the morning or when he went to visit a parishioner sick at home.

  Once, while he was away on a sick call, Anselm had chewed the instep of a shoe he had left under the bed, and a week later he had swallowed a single black sock.

  That had caused an awkward moment, because the dog had not been able to entirely pass the sock and Father Wilson had had to stand out on the parish-house lawn behind a tree and slowly drag the slime and shit-laden sock out of the dog.

  “Anselm, my Anselm,” he had said, “you sure are a creature of the flesh.”

  But it was while he was at prayer that he felt the closest to Anselm.

  It was while he knelt at prayer before going to bed, kneeling under the length of linen cloth that hung on the wall, a replica of the Holy Shroud of Turin, that Anselm had sat down beside him and had nestled his body in under his elbow so that the old priest had embraced Anselm with his right arm as he had said the Apostles’ Creed, feeling deeply, through the image of the dead face on the Shroud, the Presence of the Living Christ in his life. And now, every night, they knelt and sat together for ten minutes, after which Father Wilson would cross himself, get into bed, and Anselm would leap up onto the bed and curl at his feet so that as he went to sleep, the old priest was comforted not just by the heat and weight of the animal in his bed but by the sound of his breathing.

  His devotion to the Shroud, however, had not been a comfort to his young pastor, Father Kukic, who had snorted dismissively, saying that when a seminarian in Paris he had travelled through the countryside one summer, and as a believer, about to be ordained, he had been embarrassed to come upon a church near Poitiers that had claimed to house “one of the two known heads of John the Baptist,” and another that had said they possessed “a vial of the unsoured milk of the Virgin.”

  “The unsoured milk…I like that,” the old priest had said, laughing.

  “Well, I don’t, and no one else does either,” Father Kukic said. “It’s embarrassing.”

  “Only a little.”

  “And as for your cloth, no one had ever heard of your Shroud ’til somewhere back in the 1500s.”

  “Not mine, Father. Our Lord’s.”

  “Oh please.”

  “The thing is this, Father, there are certain facts…” and Father Wilson had patiently tried to describe the two images on the Shroud – the front and back of a man’s wounded body and his bearded face, his staring eyes and skeletal crossed hands. And how all this, after experts had completed a microscopic examination of the linen, had revealed no paint or pigment that anyone knew of, nor did the image relate to any known style…and furthermore, “Somehow, the Shroud is a kind of photographic negative which becomes positive when reversed by a camera – the body of a man somehow embedded in the linen as only a camera can see him – a way of observing what no one could have known how to possibly paint.”

  “These all may be facts, Father, but they prove nothing.”

  “Exactly, my dear Father. But you see, I prefer facts that add up to a mystery that is true rather than facts that add up to an explanation that is true.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like the Virgin Birth.”

  “Nonsense. That’s a matter of faith.”

  “No, it’s a matter of temperament, Father.”

  They never spoke of the Shroud again.

  There were nights through the winter when the old priest, before going to sleep, felt, as he told Anselm, “nicely confused.” Kneeling under the Shroud, knowing how dark and freezing cold it was outside and staring up into the hollowed dead yet terrorized eyes of the Christ, he felt only warmth and unconditional love from the dog under his arm, and after saying his prayers he took to nestling his face into Anselm’s neck fur, laughing quietly and boyishly, as he hadn’t heard himself laugh in years, before falling into a very sound sleep.

  At the first smell of spring, he opened his bedroom window and aired out his dresser drawers and his closet, breathing in deeply, and pleased to be alive. He gave Anselm’s head a brisk rubbing and then, having borrowed the housekeeper’s feather duster, he took down the linen Shroud that had been brought to him as a gift by a friend all the way from Turin, dusted it off at the window, and then laid it out for airing over the sill as his mother had done years ago with the family bedsheets.

  In the early afternoon, leaving Anselm asleep, he went out alone to visit an elderly couple whose age and infirmness over the long winter had made them cranky and curt and finally cruel to each other, though they still loved each other very much. He hoped that they would let him, as an old friend, go around their flat and open their windows, too, and bring the feel of the promise of spring air into their lives again.

  When he returned to the parish house, he was exuberant, enormously pleased with himself, because his visit had ended with the elderly couple embracing him, saying, “We’re just two old codgers waiting to die,” laughing happily.

  Opening the door to his room, he let out a roar of disbelief, “Nooooo, God.” Anselm was on his belly on the bed and under him – gathered between his big web-toed paws – was the Shroud. He was thumping his tail as he snuffled and shoved his snout into the torn cloth. The old priest lunged, grabbing for the Shroud, yanking at it, the weight of the startled dog tearing it more, and when he saw, in disbelief, that the face, the Holy face and the Holy eyes of the Presence, were all gone, shredded and swallowed by the dog, he raised his fist – hurt and enraged – and Anselm, seeing that rage and that fist, leaped off the bed, hitting the floor, tail between his legs, skidding into a corner wall, where, cowering and trembling, trying to tuck his head into his shoulder, he looked up, waiting to be beaten.

  “Oh my God, oh my God,” the old priest moaned, sitting on the edge of the bed, drawing the ruined Shroud across his knees.

  He could not believe the look of terror and, at the same time, the look of complete love in the dog’s eyes, and for a moment he thought that that must have been the real look in Christ’s eyes as He hung on the cross, His terror felt as a man, and His complete unconditional love as God. But before he could wonder if such a thought was blasphemous, he was struck by a fear that, having seen his rage and his fist, Anselm would always be afraid of him, would always cower and tremble at his coming. As a boy, he had seen dogs like that, dogs who had been beaten.

  He fell onto his knees beside the dog in the corner where, night after night, he had prayed – saying the Apostles’ Creed, affirming his faith – and Anselm had sat there, too, waiting to go onto the bed to sleep. He took Anselm’s head in his arms, feeling as he did his trouser leg become warm with an oily wetness – the dog, in the confusion of his fear and relief at being held, having peed. The old priest hugged him closer and laughed. Anselm came out of his cower and stopped trembling. Rocking Anselm in his arms, he was about to tell him he was a good dog and shouldn’t worry, that he loved him, but then he thought how ludicrous it would be for a grown man to talk out loud to a dog about something as serious as love, so he just sat in their wetness holding Anselm even tighter so that Anselm would understand and never doubt.

  DREI ALTER KOCKERS

  (THREE OLD FOGIES)

  1

  ZOL GOT, HORUKH HU, MIKH

  HITN FAR PAYN UN SHMARTSEN

  May God, blessed be He, protect

  me from anguish and pain

  • Yiddish prayer, said over the challah every Sabbath •

  Herschel Soibel, bor
n in the Jewish quarter of Lublin and brought up on the Street of Furriers, was from a pious family prominent among Hasidim in the trade for fur hats.

  At Herschel’s bris, when the rebbe cut his penis, the women were astounded to hear Herschel let out a deep sigh.

  His father rejoiced, saying he had heard in his son’s sigh the call of the tzaddik, he had heard Ezekiel, the righteous man: “He shall reap the fruit of his own righteousness…”

  At the age of three Herschel could read and write, by four he could cross-stitch, and at eight, he sat at a small desk on the weekends where he read the Torah. Using a porcelain inkwell, he wrote up bills of sale for heavily bearded men dressed in long greasy gabardines, men who spat into their palms before clasping hands on the price of a shtreimel, a broad-brimmed hat made from the tails of seven sables. Herschel handed any man leaving the shop a card that had printed on one side: Beware of the Wisdom of Fools…In Our Hearts We Know Our Hats and printed on the other side: EZEKIEL 18:20.

  In 1943, the Soibel family of nine, among the last Jews alive in the Lublin wartime ghetto, were driven out of their apartment by men with riding crops and bayonets and herded through the streets into cattle cars. They were transported to Auschwitz.

  Each Soibel packed and carried a small suitcase or a satchel; in Herschel’s suitcase, a silver menorah, and in his father’s satchel, silver Shabbat candlesticks. Paper money was sewn into the lining of dresses and suitcoats.

  “Wherever we’re going, we’ll negotiate,” Herschel’s father said. “Among the goyim there’s always a price.”

  The train came to a halt in the night, the cattle-car doors were unsealed, and an SS officer strode up the ramp to the doors, crying, “Aussteigen.”

  Stupefied men, women, youths, and children stumbled down the ramp under floodlamps to be met by two thin SS officers who said, “Gut gemacht, here are the men who will help you,” pointing to Jews wearing prisoners’ stripes. They belonged to a labour crew that was called Kanada by other prisoners in the camp because Kanada was a dream-country and to work in this crew meant that the men not only got their loaves of bread but fresh kosher sausage – and also they received a daily ration of vodka. From time to time they were allowed an uneasy sleep – five or ten minutes – in the grass on the embankment beside the train tracks.