Stained Glass
Page 23
“He doesn’t take advice,” Amos told Father Dowling afterward.
“It was good of you to give moral support.”
“Moral? To Tuttle.” A wintry smile. “I did it for Jane Devere.”
“Of course.”
Willie and Holloway followed the trial with interest. Pretty Boy, as they still thought of Charles, had a lazy arrogance throughout the proceedings of which Holloway approved.
“He doesn’t have a chance, so why not enjoy it?”
Willie shook his head. “Can you imagine going back to Joliet?” “Phyllis would never permit it.”
“Your parole officer?”
“Willie, have you ever wondered about the way we attract females?”
“No. You going to marry her?”
“If she proposes.”
When Father Dowling visited the upper floor of the Devere mansion, Jane seemed to have aged. “I don’t know which of them Margaret brought to me.”
“The grandsons of Angelo Menotti.”
A long silence. “I have never gone to confession to you, Father Dowling.”
“You told me you had a confessor.”
“I do. Sometimes I want to confess sins that were forgiven long, long ago. Sins whose effects don’t go away.”
“You and Angelo Menotti?”
“How did you know that?”
“You put a case to me once.”
She nodded. “It was a kind of oblique confession.”
Sun slanted into the room as she spoke. Father Dowling listened to her anguished story. A young wife having an affair with an artist on whom she’d had a crush as a student at Rosary College. She had persuaded her father-in-law to engage Menotti to do the stained glass windows for St. Hilary’s church. She had visited him in his studio in Peoria.
“What a seducer he was.”
“You became pregnant?”
She took a very deep breath. “You must have seen the Menotti traits in James.”
“Are you certain Angelo was the father?”
“Yes.” She nodded. “Oh, yes. In compensation, I developed an exaggerated pride in the Devere family. Dear God, how I have tainted it.”
“Your husband never guessed?”
“Father, he was so happy at the prospect of becoming a father. Dear God, how could I have done that to him?”
“I think you handled it well.”
“You do?”
“What was the alternative?”
“I could have told my husband!”
“You could have, yes. I think you were wise not to.”
She subsided into silence. Her eyes went to the Menotti Madonna above her prie-dieu. “Angelo would not have married me if he could have.”
Father Dowling could think of nothing to say to that.
“He was only a seducer. I knew that, and that made it easier for me to deceive my husband.”
Father Dowling had taken a little stole from his pocket and put it over his shoulders. “I’ll give you absolution now, Jane.”
“I confessed it long ago.”
“Think of this as a general confession.”
She bowed her head then, and he said the words of absolution, tracing the sign of the cross over her. He rose to go. “I’ll bring you communion next Tuesday.”
“Thank you.”
When he had reached the door, she called his name. He turned. “Father, Susan and Fulvio … I think they’re in love.” He waited.
“They can never marry.”
Consanguinity? No need to discuss that now.
“Let’s cross that bridge when we come to it.”
Part Five
1
Age is a mysterious thing, or so Amos Cadbury found it to be. Or perhaps the mystery lies in memory and its selective retention of the past. After the trial, the venerable lawyer had flown off to Florida and the condo on Longboat Key that a client had put at his disposal. It had been Amos’s practice over the years to discourage clients who wanted to buy rather than rent when they went south in the winter, but his advice was seldom taken. He did not understand this compulsion to multiply the nuisances of ownership—a home in Fox River, perhaps a condo in the Caribbean, boats both in a Lake Michigan marina and in the Gulf. The complications of taxes should be enough to make renters of us all. Now, though, he was glad that his advice in the matter was seldom followed. He sat on a patio under a pergola, smoking a pensive cigar and thinking of Jane Devere, trying to relax.
The old woman’s long-ago affair with Angelo Menotti preyed on his mind. Finally she had put aside indirection and discretion and told Amos of her conviction that her son, James, was the fruit of her affair with Menotti.
“Jane, he is his father’s son.”
“What have I been telling you?”
Amos had meant Jane’s husband, William, but her confidence soon had him seeing, or thinking he saw, Menotti traits in James. Suddenly the specter arose of the claims that might be made on the Devere fortune by Menotti or his descendants. What a scandalous case it would be if the whole Menotti menagerie felt that they had a plausible claim on the fortune begun by August Devere and subsequently considerably enlarged by James. Such thoughts robbed Amos’s stay of the relaxation he had sought, and after five days he flew back home.
His driver met him at O’Hare, and Amos immediately called Father Dowling.
“You’re in Florida, Amos?”
“I have just returned. I must see you, Father.”
“Of course.”
“Could I come to the rectory?”
“Now?”
“Yes.”
“I’ll have Marie set another place at table.”
“Will there be others?”
“Phil Keegan might stop by later.”
“Pot luck,” as Marie Murkin dismissively described the meal she prepared, consisted of veal, potatoes au gratin, and asparagus. The housekeeper came and went throughout the meal, muttering apologies, blaming Father Dowling for not telling her that Amos Cadbury was coming.
“Marie, I just landed. I telephoned Father Dowling on my way here. I would have come if only for this wonderful meal.”
An equivocal wave of the Murkin hand—was she trying to stop flattery or encourage it? After cherry cobbler, the two men adjourned to the pastor’s study.
“Jane Devere,” Amos said when they were settled. “You remember that I told you of the legal puzzles she liked to pose?”
“I remember.”
“They were hints, of course. Now she has made it clear.” Amos paused. “Of course, this is in the deepest confidence.”
At Father Dowling’s nod, he went on. The priest did not react as Amos had expected when he told him Jane’s conviction that her son, James, had Angelo Menotti for a father. “Has she told you this, Father?”
The priest looked away, and Amos immediately regretted the question. Jane’s confidence to him had been more one between old friends than between lawyer and client, but whatever Jane had told Father Dowling came under the most solemn of embargos.
“Let me just say what she has told me.”
Father Dowling nodded, almost with relief.
So at last Amos was able to lay out the potential complications—legal complications, to say nothing of emotional complications—that would follow if Jane was right.
“Surely she doesn’t intend to make an announcement, Amos.”
“She thinks she owes the truth to James.”
“Good Lord.”
“Indeed.”
“How can she be sure, Amos? I don’t understand these matters, but at the time she had a husband as well as a lover, did she not?”
Amos lifted his eyes.
“It could be decided, of course. Verified or falsified.”
Amos thought, sat back. “Ah.”
“We can put the matter to Phil Keegan when he comes.”
Phil listened, sipping beer. He began to nod before the story was complete.
“I can have the lab do it. A routine tes
t. I can tack it on to the Menotti case. That’s still open.”
Amos undertook the task Phil assigned hm with enthusiasm, taking strange pleasure from bringing the necessary samples to the police lab. While he was at it, he decided to be thorough. Jane’s DNA would be compared both with James’s and with Fulvio’s. While he was at it, he added Susan to the list.
“Uncle Amos, he hasn’t even proposed.”
“It’s just a matter of tying up loose ends, Susan.”
Some days later, Phil Keegan and Father Dowling came to Amos’s office, and the venerable lawyer tried to read their expressions to see what lay ahead.
“Adam and Eve, maybe,” Phil said when Amos had put the two men in chairs facing his desk.
“Adam and Eve?”
“There’s no later connection, Amos.”
Phil handed the lab reports to Amos, and he paged through them, waiting to feel a sense of relief that did not come.
Father Dowling understood. “I’ll talk to Jane, Amos.”
2
Father Dowling brought holy communion to the Devere home and was led upstairs to Jane’s apartment, where the old woman reverently received and then as usual spent some minutes at her prie-dieu while Father Dowling sipped coffee in the next room. When she joined him, she poured herself a cup of coffee, looking thoughtful. “I told Amos Cadbury my story, Father.”
He nodded.
“The question is what I must do now.”
“What does Amos advise?”
“Of course, he sees everything as a lawyer. It is your advice I want, Father Dowling.”
The tests, Phil’s mention of Adam and Eve, quoting the lab technician, brought on long thoughts on the vast concatenation of destinies that stretched back over the centuries, over millennia, the uncountable generations of human beings, succeeding one another, parents, children, grandchildren, on and on into ever more distant prefixes. The unity of the human race was a theological as well as a biological truth. In that sense, we are all blood relatives to one degree or another. Of course, Jane Devere had something far more specific in mind. It occurred to Father Dowling that the decision he faced was at least as complicated as hers.
“Do I have the right to withhold the truth, Father?”
That was akin to the question he put to himself. Did he have the right to keep from Jane what all the testing had brought to light? Or not brought to light. Throughout her long life, Jane had lived in the conviction that her affair with Angelo Menotti had wrought a permanent effect on her children and grandchildren. James and James’s children, Susan and Hugh, were, she thought, descendants of Angelo Menotti and not of her husband and thus not true Deveres.
“Imagine being told such a thing about yourself, Jane.”
“Doesn’t the truth set us free?”
After a silence, Father Dowling leaned toward her. “Jane, this is my advice. Keep your secret. Saying what you think would have most unwelcome consequences, and what would be gained?”
She looked at him, and gradually an expression of relief came over her face, seeming to smooth away the wrinkles. “I think I hoped you would say that.”
“It’s best.”
“The secret can go with me to the grave?”
They sat on for a time while Father Dowling considered the secret that would indeed be interred with her. The secret that there was no secret. On the drive back to the rectory, he told himself he had been right not to tell Jane her lifelong suspicion was unfounded. Would she even have believed him? The thought of bringing those lab reports to the old woman seemed grotesque. Let it remain one of the infinity of truths that will come to the light on the last day.
The letter from the chancery was lying on his desk when he returned to the rectory. Marie watched warily from the doorway as he picked it up. He looked at her.
“And the winner is …”
After he read it aloud, he let Marie’s joyful cry suffice for them both. Off she went then, to spread the good news. Father Dowling lit his pipe. Not my will, O Lord, but thine be done. Of course, it is easier when they coincide.
Also by Ralph McInerny
Father Dowling Mystery Series
Ash Wednesday
The Widow’s Mate
The Prudence of the Flesh
Blood Ties
Requiem for a Realtor
Last Things
Prodigal Father
Triple Pursuit
Grave Undertakings
The Tears of Things
A Cardinal Offense
Seed of Doubt
Desert Sinner
Judas Priest
Four on the Floor
Abracadaver
The Basket Case
Rest in Pieces
Getting a Way with Murder
The Grass Widow
A Loss of Patients
Thicker Than Water
Second Vespers
Lying Three
The Seventh Station
Her Death of Cold
Bishop as Pawn
Mysteries Set at the University of Notre Dame
The Green Revolution
Irish Alibi
The Letter Killeth
Irish Gilt
Green Thumb
Irish Coffee
Celt and Pepper
Emerald Aisle
Book of Kills
Irish Tenure
Lack of the Irish
On the Rockne
Andrew Broom Mystery Series
Heirs and Parents
Law and Ardor
Mom and Dead
Savings and Loam
Body and Soil
Cause and Effect
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
STAINED GLASS. Copyright © 2009 by Ralph McInerny. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.
www.minotaurbooks.com
eISBN 9781429987837
First eBook Edition : March 2012
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
McInerny, Ralph M.
Stained glass / Ralph McInerny.—1st ed.
p. cm.
ISBN 978-0-312-58264-7
1. Dowling, Father (Fictitious character)—Fiction. 2. Clergy—Fiction. 3. Catholics—Fiction. 4. Illinois—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3563.A31166S73 2009
813’.54—dc22 2009028430
First Edition: October 2009