I had gone to the university and had been married in St. Basil’s Church so I called out, too, “Hello, Father Joe.” He smiled but it was the smile of a man who expected to be left alone. Sitting by myself at the bar I always sent him a drink, a Scotch and soda over ice.
“Cheers,” he said quietly.
One day I was feeling so alone at the bar that I couldn’t help myself. I went over and sat down beside him. He was surprised, but at ease. “You’re a fine-looking amiable old priest,” I said. I had been drinking since noon.
“You’re a fine-looking ruin of a man yourself,” he said.
“Perfidy’s upon us,” I said.
“Not likely,” he said. “Relax.”
I did. I told him that I’d been a student. He said that he’d been a teacher. I’d studied languages and literature, I said. He said he’d taught philosophy. I asked him how, after all these years, he liked being a priest. He said he liked it fine. I asked how he liked the new right-wing bishop, Father Ambrozie.
“I dunno,” he said.
“The mad Pole’s given us a stern Serb,” I said.
“Now, now, let’s be looking on the bright side. At least you know now exactly where you stand. You can thank the Pope for that.”
“Thank you, Pope,” I said.
“Have you been drinking?”
“A little,” I said.
“I drink a lot,” he said. Then he touched my hand. “Don’t worry,” he said. “It has nothing to do with any spiritual crisis. I don’t go in for that class of thing.”
“Where you from?” I asked.
“Pittsburgh. Many long years ago, when it was a tough town. My father was a tough man, a steelworker. How about you?”
“Here,” I said.
“You’re from here?”
“Here.”
“I haven’t met anybody from here for years,” he said.
“Well, you have now,” I said.
“Good. It’s good to be in touch with roots,” he said.
“I’ll tell you the truth, Father. As far as I’m concerned, that’s a shoe store nobody remembers.”
“Well, at least you’ve got your feet on the ground,” he said, trying to stifle a laugh. I wagged my finger at him and he winked at me and I waved at the bartender, telling her to bring us two more drinks.
“I’ve a weakness for cheap jokes,” he said.
“I’ve a weakness for cheap whisky,” I said.
“You might say that makes it even for us,” he said. “Myself, I lean to the good whisky, when I can get it.”
“Well, they don’t serve you slouch whisky in here,” I said.
“No, they do not.”
We smiled at each other.
“Well, now that we’ve got that settled,” he said, sipping his fresh Scotch and soda, “what’s your claim to fame?”
“Coming in third.”
“What’s that mean?”
“No matter what I’ve done in my life I’ve always come in third.”
“Yeah, so what are you currently third at?”
“Advertising. Consulting,” I said.
“Which is it?”
“Both,” I said. “When I’m not consulting I advertise that I do.”
“You do?”
“Yes.”
“And this is where literature gets you?”
“Like a patient etherized upon a table,” I said.
He laughed.
“I used to know some poems by heart,” he said.
“What happened?”
“My heart gave out,” and he laughed again, saying, “Forgive me, I can’t help it.”
“Neither can I.”
“Do you know what forgiveness is?” he asked.
“No,” I said.
“When you know that you have nothing left to lose and you pass it on.”
“Boy, I should’ve studied with you,” I said.
“Maybe not,” he said.
“Philosophy, right? What’d you teach?”
“For openers, Plato, Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas… It was wonderful, talking about how God’s mind worked, and then I used to leap right up to the twentieth century, to our own time, to Maritain…”
“What happened to what’s in between?” I asked.
“Nothing,” he said.
“Yeah, but where’d it go? Where’d Descartes go?”
“Nowhere. I left him right where he was.”
“You can’t do that,” I said.
“I did,” he said.
“Didn’t anybody say anything?”
“They did not. Anyway, I used to tell them, ‘We all know the trouble with Descartes. He put de cart before de horse!’”
“Oh, God, you didn’t!”
“I did,” he said. “And why not? It’s a corny joke, but it’s got me out of some tricky situations. Anyway, when you think about it, this business about ‘I think therefore I am’ is rather profoundly dumb. After all, God thought and therefore we are and since we are, we think. What else could we do but think – go bowling? And if we think too much we probably end up like your man Woody Allen, talking ourselves to death. It’s what the wise boys call ennui…”
“The wisdom of hell,” I said, laughing with him.
“I don’t know a lot about hell,” he said. “That’s why I drink. Any time I get anywhere close to hell I take a drink.”
“But you’re in here every day,” I said.
“Yes,” he said.
“Jesus.”
“Yes,” he said, lifting his glass, “and isn’t He a help, a wonderful fellow. Forgave us, and died for our sins.”
“You’re kidding,” I said.
“I don’t kid about Jesus,” he said.
“I don’t mean that, I mean the way you said it.”
“How’d I say it?”
“Like He was the guy next door.”
“You drink too much,” he said.
“Says who?” I said, drawing a circle with my finger in the dampness on the table.
“Never mind, I don’t want to ruin our nice talk. I don’t want to know why you think you drink.”
“No?” I asked, disappointed.
“I might be interested to know why you think you love,” he said. “But that would take a couple more drinks and they’re not going to give me any more. Orders from on high, eye in the sky.”
“You really think I drink too much?” I asked.
“How do I know? I hardly know you.”
“Maybe it’s true,” I said.
“Maybe.”
“Maybe a lot of things are true.”
“Could be, you never know. Not until you know.”
“Not until the fat lady sings,” I said.
“The only fat lady I ever knew,” he said, “was my mother, and she lived to a ripe old age. Ninety-two. She had a fine philosophical bent.”
“I used to like talking philosophy,” I said.
He smiled, his mouth taking a little turn, wishing me well.
“You did, did you?” he said.
“Yep,” I said.
“If a tree falls in a forest when there’s no one there, does the tree make a sound?… That kind of thing?” he said.
“Yeah, that kind of stuff,” I said. “And poetry, the half-deserted streets, the muttering retreats of cheap one-nighters in sawdust hotels… Something like that.”
“I never went in much for poetry. Limericks were my speed,” he said.
“There was a priest who taught me, Dore or Dorey, something like that,” and Father Joe nodded as if he knew who I was talking about, “and he had the whole of ‘Prufrock’ off by heart. He’d stand up in front of us and roar that thing out. I never liked to admit it back then but I envied him. He had this light in his eyes like he was lifted right out of himself. And then he said something I’ve never forgotten. I mean he said about the end, where you feel like you’re a pair of ragged claws scuttling across the ocean floor – and I don’t know about you, Father, but
that’s exactly how I feel when I’ve drunk too much – he said, ‘Hell probably isn’t fire or anything like that, it’s probably being those claws inside your own head and hearing them…’”
“Don’t be so hard on yourself,” he said.
“Hard?” I asked.
“Yeah,” he said.
“My father always said I was too easy on myself.”
“Well, it’s a matter of perspective. The truth is tricky.”
“Do I dare to eat a peach?” I blurted out.
“There’s a time for everything,” he said.
“I guess there is.”
“Time for me to go,” he said, standing up, “I think.”
“…am not Hamlet, nor was meant to be,” I cried. “Am an attendant player—”
“Thanks for the drinks,” he said, straightening his shirt collar.
“Right. Any time,” I said.
“And the chat,” he said.
“Any time.”
I was wounded. I was sure that he had grown tired of me. Then he said gravely, “It’s a long time since you’ve been to confession. I can tell. A long time.”
“I suppose it is,” I said, startled.
“After a long, long time it’s harder,” he said, leaning close to me.
“I don’t know.”
“Listen, the time’ll come when you’ll want to go to confession…”
“I doubt it,” I said.
“Sure. It’ll come, but don’t worry about it. When the time comes, I’m your man.”
“You think so?”
“I know so.”
I stared at the circle I’d drawn on the table. “Yeah, well, do you want me to go to confession or do you prefer I tell you the truth?”
“Confession,” he said, laughing. “I told you, the truth is tricky.”
Over the next three or four months we saw each other almost every day. We got used to knowing that at the end of the afternoon, for about forty-five minutes, we were together in the same room. We said a word or two but we never had a long talk again. I never went to confession. I bought him drinks. He drank them. I consulted. I drank and told myself one or two small truths and turned down a free ticket to see the new Woody Allen film. “It’s got to do with Descartes,” I told my friends. “He and Woody…put de cart before de horse.” Nobody laughed. “Get off the bottle,” one of them said.
Then, Father Joe was not there. I asked the bartender if she knew where he was. She said, “Father Joe’s been sick. He died. The funeral’s tomorrow.” I went to the funeral at St. Basil’s Church. The bishop, Father Ambrozie, didn’t go. I didn’t mind. I knew where I stood. Third pew to the left.
THE HARDER THEY COME
Crede Doucet had his mother’s very pale blue eyes, but he was long in the jaw, lean and bony, and gaunt. She was plump. His father, Eldon Doucet, a well-known lawyer, who also was long in the jaw and lean said, “How come he never has a good word for me?”
“He envies you,” his wife, Madeleine, said, “the way you’re so satisfied with your own life.”
“A man gets what he deserves,” he said, unbuttoning his blue serge vest, as he always did at the end of the afternoon, sitting down in his wingback chair.
“Sometimes, Eldon,” she said, “you sound more like a judge than a lawyer.”
“Life,” he said, running his hand through thinning hair, “is like politics. Once you start explaining, you’re finished, and I’ve been trying to explain myself to that boy for years.”
“We don’t agree. And he’s not a boy. He’s twenty-seven.”
Because she turned away, Eldon thought he had upset her but she had only turned to admire the sitting room’s new pinstripe wallpaper, a paper she had picked out at Ye Olde Shoppe to mark their thirtieth wedding anniversary.
It has a quiet dignity, she thought. And even better, a necessary dignity.
“I never really knew my father either,” Eldon said. “He was a man who liked ballroom dancing and ties. That much I knew. He had hundreds of ties. Before he died – perhaps it was some kind of joke – he gave every last one of his ties to a charity drive for the homeless.”
She poured him a cup of strong green tea. No milk. No sugar.
He believed green tea was good for his bowels. He worried about his bowels.
He watched for a yellowing under his eyes.
He watched for blood in his stool. Liver spots on his skin. He said he wasn’t worried about being dead, it was whether dying would humiliate him, how he was going to die.
“I rather liked my father,” she said, holding a well-watered Scotch. As usual, she had been slow-sipping all evening. “He was a nice man, nice to every woman he met except my mother. Then I grew up and got over her disappointment. I discovered I had my own disappointments.”
“Growing up isn’t enough.”
“It helps.”
“Crede’s a grown man and you still encourage him, still think he’s going to be some kind of real singer, keeping all those scrapbook pictures of him. There is no second Tony Bennett. And singing Bennett songs in falsetto is ludicrous.”
“He has a wonderful voice,” she said. “I love his voice.”
“Even I know, only blacks can sing falsetto and get away with it.”
She surprised him. She slipped off her shoes and touched his thigh, saying, “I think he’ll be mostly like you when we’re dead?”
“Maybe. Maybe not. It’s all in the family, in the blood,” he said. “But calling him Crede, just like my father, was likely a mistake. I didn’t know how different he’d be. My father was a hard, practical man. It’s like Crede’s turned his back on who he is, hanging out at the racetrack. Nobody goes to the track every day, only layabouts.”
“And the owners,” she said wryly.
“He should own up to how he’s wasting his life.”
“Maybe so,” she said. “Maybe so.”
He said nothing.
There were times when saying nothing was best. He worried that he might have sounded petulant.
“You used to sing sometimes yourself,” she said.
“Never mind my singing. He has to take hold of himself.” “Anyway, come to bed.”
In bed, Eldon was puzzled by the quiet care she took to make love to him, as if she were gently amused, so that he was self-conscious and made no sound, afraid to sigh, watching and waiting as if something quite separate from their lives was going to happen, and he was so upset and softened by her agreeable smile as he drifted off to sleep that he wondered how he might get close to her again… He believed they had been wonderfully close… But the next morning, as she left for her swim at the Rosedale Ladies Club, she said, “Don’t you think it’s nice the way we can accommodate each other without too much emotion?”
That night he made love to her with a cold fury that frightened him. It was like the fury he felt at times in the courtroom as he closed in on some despicable lying cheat slouched on the stand, a fury that one day had caused him to say out loud, triumphantly, before the bench, “This is how we keep the low-life down,” eliciting a reprimand from the judge. He eased off her body in their bed and went to sleep staring straight up at the ceiling, feeling helpless after she said, “That was nice,” and kissed him lightly on the cheek. “Sleep tight,” she said.
It was a Saturday afternoon. She and Crede were sitting in the garden, under an apple tree. She planted the tree after he’d been born. It was her favourite corner of the garden, protected from the wind by the tree. Eldon stood alone at the back of the garden by the peony beds. He was looking to see if the blooms were heavy with black ants. Black ants brought peonies fully to bloom. Sitting at a wrought-iron table that had a glass top, Madeleine was playing double solitaire.
“When did you start wearing your bathrobe out to the garden?” she asked Crede.
“I dunno.”
“Naked underneath!”
“How’d you know?”
“A mother knows when her boy is naked.”
“Red eight on the black nine,” Crede said.
“I almost never beat this game,” she said.
“Why play? Nobody beats double solitaire.”
“That’s not the point. The point is you keep playing or else you just quit. You wake up in the morning, ‘So long, solitaire.’ Like someone says so long in the night. You wake up and say, ‘So long, too…’ And no one answers. You’re on your own.”
“I’m here.”
“And your father’s here. We’re all here.”
“King on the ace. Of clubs.”
Crede lowered his head and said quietly, “Long live the King.”
Then he laughed and she shushed him, saying, “We are being quite naughty about the man I love.”
“I know, I know.”
“The thing is, your father, when he wakes in the morning, he’s always afraid that something will have gone missing in the night, afraid everything won’t be exactly where he left it. Myself, I’m disappointed that a whole night has gone by and nothing has got lost, that everything’s where it was.”
“And still is,” he laughed as she raised her empty glass and said, “Your father plays life close to the vest. It’s his nature.”
“Red queen on a black king,” he said and reached under the table for the whisky thermos and poured her a drink.
“A well-watered Scotch does one right,” she said, as if explaining. “Thank you.”
“Think nothing of it.”
“In the old days, this,” she said, holding the glass high with an air of triumph, “would have been laudanum. All the respectable ladies of the time got blissful indeed on laudanum. Opium got a lady through the day.”
“Sometimes I think you’re happy being unhappy.”
“Who said I’m unhappy? It’s just that when I’m cold sober I hear the tock tock of the clock. Too loud, too clear. Tock. Tock. Tock. Drive you crazy. Tock. Tock. Tock. Tock. Tock…”
All the Lonely People Page 18
