The Prudence of the Flesh

by Ralph McInerny

  From his car, he called Peanuts, and they met at a new all-you-can-eat self-serve Chinese place. There was a flat fee, and one could load up one’s plate as many times as one liked. Peanuts told this to Tuttle as they walked from their cars to the brightly painted storefront. The place was not crowded.

  “We’re early,” Peanuts explained.

  “For what? It’s going on noon.”

  Peanuts ignored him. Maybe part of the attraction of the place was the fact that there were not a lot of people Peanuts had to elbow out of the way as he moved along the hot table, taking something of everything. Tuttle took some shrimp fried rice and a bowl of wonton soup.

  Peanuts went back to the table three times before he acknowledged Tuttle’s companionship. “What’s wrong?” he asked.

  “Nothing’s wrong.”

  “Something’s wrong.”

  “Peanuts, if something was wrong I’d tell you.”

  “It’s her, isn’t it?”

  “Yes.”

  “Get rid of her.”

  Did Peanuts have any idea of the human wear and tear firing someone exacted? Of course not. It was wrong to feed Peanuts’s animosity against Hazel.

  “You want me to take care of it?”

  Good grief, what did Peanuts think they were talking about? Too late he remembered that, improbable as it was, Peanuts was a member of the locally famous Pianone family, for whom getting rid of someone might mean a one-way trip to the Fox River.

  “No! She’s really not that bad.”

  “You act like it.”

  “Just a bad day.”

  “Sure. Want some more?”

  And back for more food went Peanuts. In a way, what he had offered was a friendly gesture. To Tuttle, not to Hazel. Not for the first time, it occurred to Tuttle that Peanuts might be his best friend, and vice versa. Usually he thought Peanuts got the better of that deal, but not today.

  “Peanuts, I meant that about Hazel.”

  “Okay.”

  “I mean I don’t want to get rid of her.”

  “You don’t have to do nothing.”

  He ended by pleading for Hazel’s life, unsure how serious Peanuts was but not daring to find out. “You can do me a favor, though.”

  “Name it.”

  “I’ll tell you on the way downtown.”

  It was a long shot, but Tuttle wondered if there might be information on his client at police headquarters. Now that he knew who Gregory Barrett was, he was more than ever surprised at his coming to Tuttle for help. A man like that went to a lawyer like that, not to Tuttle. This suggested a concern of a kind that Barrett would not like to share with a more respectable attorney.

  They commandeered an office with a computer and began to check the database. Peanuts could barely read, but he was a whiz with the computer. His fat little fingers flew over the keyboard, and on the screen data were displayed.

  “Zilch.”

  “It was just a hunch.”

  “Wait.” Peanuts leaned toward the monitor, then tipped it toward Tuttle.

  “Gregory Barrett,” Tuttle read. “Well, well.”

  The name occurred in a list of local priests who had been accused of sexual misconduct. Priests? Barrett wasn’t a priest—but there his name was, and the name of the woman he had hired Tuttle to find all about: Madeline Murphy. He seemed to have found the reason Gregory Barrett had chosen Tuttle & Tuttle of all the other law firms around.

  9

  Gloria Daley had begun painting when she gave up on ever learning how to draw. Color was her strong point anyway. She dabbled a bit in watercolors but was always afraid to use plenty of water. Oils were all right, but acrylics became her medium. Eventually the problem of what to do with all her pictures arose. She gave a lot away; she rented a booth at the Fox River art fair every spring and had actually sold a picture once. Some of them were on display at the Benjamin Harrison branch of the public library, where her friend Madeline worked. Her house was full of them, and it was a big test when she first asked Ned Bunting to her place.

  “You’re an artist!” he cried.

  “Well, I paint a little.”

  “A little? My God.” When he turned to her, his expression was one she hadn’t seen before. Then he was gathering her into his arms.

  “Does paint do that to you? Maybe I should dab a little behind my ears.”

  “They’re abstract, aren’t they?”

  “My ears?” She punched him. “How much do you know about art?”

  “You are the first artist I’ve ever met.”

  “Well, you’re my first author. Come, let’s get a beer.” She had to practically drag him into the kitchen, plunk him in the booth in her kitchenette, and hand him his beer. “I painted this room, too.”

  He just looked at her, shaking his head back and forth, smiling. She figured at the most he was seven or eight years younger. At St. Bavo’s, when he was the usher, she had followed him up and down the aisle with her eyes, trying to figure him out. She liked a tall man, but only if he used his height and didn’t stoop, and Ned Bunting went back and forth like a sentinel.

  The reason she had asked him over was to meet Madeline. If she had guessed what her paintings would do to Ned, she would have postponed the meeting.

  “You have to be gentle with her, Ned. It will just come out. That’s how she told me.”

  Madeline Murphy was a woman of faded prettiness with blondish hair and a doelike wariness in her large brown eyes. She actually tipped her head back to look up at Ned when he held her hand in greeting.

  “Ned is the writer I was telling you about, Maddie. He’s writing a book about all these priests who, well, you know.”

  “Oh, yes, I know.”

  The first time was just a matter of getting acquainted. But later they got down to business. Ned plugged in his cassette recorder, so he wouldn’t have to recharge the batteries. Madeline looked at the machine he had put on the coffee table as if she were afraid of it. She looked away. “Is that new?” She was pointing at an unframed canvas propped against the fireplace tools.

  “Do you like it?” Gloria asked.

  “Oh, yes.”

  “Wow, is this my day. You can have it, if you like.”

  “Oh, I couldn’t.”

  Ned turned off the recorder; no need to waste tape on this. Maybe it wasn’t a good idea having Gloria here when he interviewed Madeline.

  “All you have to do is talk the way you did before when you told me all those things that happened so long ago,” Gloria said to her friend.

  “That I had forgotten. I repressed my memories.”

  Ned said, “How did they come back?”

  Gloria answered. “We were talking about an article on the priest scandal, and about how some women, and men, remembered after many, many years things that had been done to them. Psychological explanations were given, don’t ask me what. Anyway, suddenly Maddie just burst out crying.”

  “The floodgates opened, and I remembered. A little at first, then more and more.”

  It seemed to help that she could tell it all again to Gloria. Once she started, she didn’t need much prompting from anyone. She seemed reluctant to pause when he turned over the cassette, and then she was off again.

  Ned Bunting felt like Norman Mailer with all those tapes on which to base The Executioner’s Song. How could he miss? This story could literally write itself. What else was In Cold Blood, literary granddaddy of reality as fiction? Faction. Ned Bunting would be the amanuensis of the victims of priestly predators. Gloria squeezed his arm three times during that sentence and gave him a hug when he was done.

  “Logorrhea,” he said diffidently.

  “I always take paregoric.”

  When did he first see the personal connection with Gregory Barrett? Maybe he had tried to suppress that memory. The suggestion made Madeline Murphy’s story seem less implausible. Ned had sent Barrett one of his stories after a program on Malamud, advising that if he liked Malamud he would like
the enclosed. No response. Then there was a program on J. F. Powers. Ned had a story on parish bingo that owed a lot to St. Bavo’s. He was sure it was his best to date. From Barrett he got a printed slip: We are not a publisher; we do not read unsolicited manuscripts. A variation on the printed slips Ned had been collecting for years. It was the handwritten addendum that made this one different. “Pretty bad.” An enmity was born.

  Whereas previously Gregory Barrett had been a genial voice expressing a love of literature, now he was a pompous ass who seemed to think his shapeless thoughts on the things he read could be of interest to anyone other than his psychiatrist. Or words to that effect. Ned printed it out and sent it off to Barrett, then suppressed all memory of him. Who cared about Barrett’s opinion? Ned had been rejected by experts.

  He filled two whole cassettes with Madeline’s memories of then-Father Gregory Barrett. Madeline spoke in a dreamy voice, with her eyelids half closed, and a little smile that alternated with the frown that brought her brows into a chevron over her cute little nose.

  “I spoke to his wife.”

  “Spoke to her?”

  “I wanted to warn her. Imagine, being married to a man with that kind of past.”

  “You don’t have to mess up his life, his family, just because of what he did to you.” Even as he said it, he wanted it refuted.

  “He denies anything happened.”

  Ned would have liked to feel more sympathy with Madeline. Even if you accepted the memory recovery stuff, didn’t that argue for the reverse as well, just shutting things out? Or was that the theory Madeline’s case was based on? Things suddenly came back after many years had passed. Remembering memories.

  “Well, what do you think?” Gloria asked when they were alone.

  “She must have been better-looking at sixteen.”

  “Oh, you.” A dig in the ribs. “You will write the book, won’t you?”

  He patted his tape recorder, as if in promise. What would she say if she knew he had never published a word?

  10

  How deceiving looks could be, Marie Murkin mused. Put a presentable man into well-tailored clothes and send him over to the St. Hilary rectory and Marie Murkin would praise him to the skies. A serial murderer? But he had such gentle eyes. Bah. She really wasn’t angry with herself. Of course she had known of men who left the priesthood, sometimes on the sly, sometimes with a certificate or whatever saying it was okay, and most of them got married, as often as not to a woman who had been a nun—but don’t get her started on nuns. At the moment, Marie wanted to concentrate on the duplicity of the male.

  Ned Bunting was another case. A fine figure of a man, always dressed to the nines, though what he did for a living not even Barbara had been able to find out. Her guess, and it was only a guess, was inherited money.

  “Any more on the floozie?”

  “Gloria Daley. Apparently a widow.”

  “Apparently?”

  “She never properly registered in the parish. People seldom do nowadays. They just keep shopping around. No collection envelopes, so who knows what they put in the basket? We get a lot of dollar bills at St. Bavo’s, all folded up so maybe the usher will think it’s more.”

  Marie knew all about such tricks. The empty envelope, or one filled with discount coupons. “I gather she lives alone.”

  “Very arty. Some of her paintings were on display in August at the parish picnic.”

  “Paintings of what?”

  “Oh, they’re not of anything. Art is about art.” Barbara’s voice had become a lazy drawl. “That’s how she talks. And that is exactly what she said when people asked about her pictures.”

  “Sounds like a flake.”

  “Oh? She’s home painting pictures and we’re working our fingers to the bone, so who’s nuts?”

  “Barbara, if you ever retired they’d have to close St. Bavo’s.”

  “Right after the funeral.”

  An hour later, there was a tap on the kitchen door and there was Ned Bunting, big as life. Marie banged her hip on the corner of the table in her haste to get to the door.

  “Ned Bunting!”

  “How on earth did you know my name?”

  Marie had the door open. “Come into my kitchen, said the spider to the fly.”

  “I came to the back door because I didn’t want to bother Father Dowling.”

  “You’re out of luck if you want to see him. This is the day of his monthly retreat.”

  “But I want to see you.”

  She got him seated; she made tea; she cut him a large slice of her pineapple upside-down cake and then sat across from him.

  “Why would you want to see me? No, go ahead, eat.”

  He had stopped a fork full of cake on its way to his mouth, and Marie wanted to see someone enjoy the food she prepared. God knows, Father Dowling would be content with graham crackers and milk. That was his idea of a treat. That and popcorn. Anyone can make popcorn.

  “Mmmm. Delicious.”

  “You can take some with you when you go.”

  “But I just got here.”

  This visit would have been easier to handle if Marie hadn’t had the persistent thought that Barbara was tuned in to the scene, monitoring her every move, listening to what she said. She remembered that imitation of Gloria Daley’s drawl.

  “I don’t suppose you know I’m a writer.”

  “A writer.”

  “Let me tell you about my current plans. You know as well as I do the kind of pleasure the media have been taking in raking priests over the coals, all priests, because of a few bad apples.”

  Marie was nodding her head and tipping back and forth in her chair. She knew, she knew.

  “My idea is that this story deserves more serious treatment, one that will put it into perspective. Why have I come to you? I want to give a sense of what the day-to-day life of a good priest is, the work he does, the long hours, the whole picture.”

  Thank God he had come to St. Hilary’s. There were parishes where most of the work was farmed out to laypeople. What the priest did besides say Mass was hard to say. Marie had seen parish bulletins with rosters as long as the page, listing all the “ministers” of this and that. No wonder some priests got in trouble. Idle hands are the devil’s workshop.

  “You want a sketch of Father Dowling’s day?”

  “That’s right.”

  So Marie gave him a portrait of the Curé d’Ars moved to Fox River. The man must sleep, but when, that was the question. He was still up when she went to bed and as often as not was already up when she came down to prepare breakfast.

  “Not that he’ll eat anything special. That cake? I made it three days ago. He had maybe a sliver. For him, that’s pretty good.”

  “It’s delicious. Does he pray a lot?”

  “I don’t spy on him, Ned.”

  She mentioned the study, and he asked if he could see it, so she took him down the hall. He put just the upper half of his body in the door and looked around at the books.

  “Do I smell tobacco?”

  “His pipe.”

  “He smokes?”

  “Why not?”

  “Maybe I won’t mention that.”

  “No need to. It isn’t that he couldn’t stop in a minute. Is that a camera?”

  Standing next to him, she was at eye level with the case that hung from his shoulder.

  “A tape recorder.”

  “I hope it isn’t on.”

  “I usually plug it in.”

  * * *

  Two days later a photographer from the Fox River Tribune showed up at the rectory.

  “We need a few photos to go with the story.”

  Father Dowling emerged from his study and came down the hallway toward Marie and the visitor. Suddenly the hall was filled with flashing light. The man had taken two pictures.

  “What is this all about?”

  Marie would have liked to flee, but the question was directed to her.

  “He wants your
picture.”

  “For the Ned Bunting story about you,” the reporter explained. “ ‘Profile of a Faithful Priest.’ ”

  “How could he write a story about me? I’ve never met him.” The pastor turned slowly. “Marie?”

  “It’s a long story,” she murmured.

  “Not fifteen hundred words,” said the photographer.

  The photographer, Topolino, would have to settle for the shots he got of Father Dowling coming down the hall.

  “I’d like to check some things in the story, Father. It’s by a freelance . . .”

  “There won’t be any story if I can stop it.”

  “First Amendment, Father. First Amendment.”

  Father Dowling’s call to Quirk, the editor, had no effect. The story would be run. No, the priest said, he didn’t want to see it before it appeared.

  “I didn’t mean you could edit it, Father. Just a heads-up.”

  Listening on the kitchen extension, Marie knew she was in deep trouble. It was all Ned Bunting’s fault. She had been Eve to his snake in the grass. She waited for the wrath of Father Dowling to fall on her, but minutes passed, then half an hour. She crept to the kitchen door and listened. No sound. She pushed it open slightly to see that the study door was closed. The silent treatment? Back in her kitchen she groaned. She infinitely preferred a scolding to the silent treatment.

  11

  What the Tribune called a profile of a faithful priest by Ned Bunting shook the even tenor of Roger Dowling’s day. Since his assignment to St. Hilary’s he had receded from public view, no longer part of the archdiocesan aparatchik, able to give his all to the demands of his parish. To call him or anyone else just doing his job “faithful” was about as flattering as it would be for a husband to be called that, or perhaps “nonadulterous.” He didn’t blame Marie Murkin as much as she deserved to be blamed, and for a time he hoped that the sheer illiteracy of the piece would rob it of any power to disturb his life. Unfortunately, it was the very awfulness of it that attracted.