Last Things

by Ralph McInerny

  4

  “Did she tell you about her second husband?” Marie Murkin asked Father Dowling some days later, out of the blue. Or so it might have seemed to him, but she had been brooding on Eleanor Wygant’s visit, all the more because Father Dowling ignored her leading questions.

  “She’s a widow.”

  “That’s the point.”

  He dipped his head and looked at her. But she was not to be put off that easily.

  “The Franciscans hushed it up, of course.”

  “All right, Marie, what is it?”

  “The way he died.”

  “And how was that?”

  “Suspiciously. He was healthy as a horse, and then he was dead, tumbling down the stairs in the middle of the night. She said he was walking in his sleep after taking an extra sleeping pill.”

  “She told you this?”

  “She told Placidus.” Father Dowling frowned. He did not like her referring to his predecessor as pastor in this casual way.

  “Who told you?”

  “He wasn’t as secretive as some people.”

  “So what is suspicious?”

  “Why was he walking in his sleep if he took an extra sleeping pill?”

  “You don’t believe it.”

  “McDivitt told me he was drunk.” McDivitt was the funeral director, a pink little man with snow white hair who was putty in Marie’s hands.

  “And you think she didn’t want that known?”

  “Within months she had sold her house and moved out of the parish.”

  “That is suspicious.”

  “And why didn’t she recognize me the other day?”

  “Ah, I understand. A housekeeper scorned.”

  Marie could have kicked herself for the clumsy way she had gone about it. How could he take her seriously if he thought that all it was was annoyance at being snubbed by Eleanor Wygant. No, not snubbed. Patronized. Practically ordering tea when Marie had given the pastor a way to get rid of her, taking up his afternoon with some nonsense about her niece’s new novel.

  “What’s it about?” she had asked at the time.

  “A nosy housekeeper. She wants to interview you.”

  Well, she had asked for it. Marie withdrew from the fray and brooded like Achilles in his tent. Not that she gave up.

  “Was there ever an investigation of Alfred Wygant’s death?” she asked the next time Phil Keegan joined the pastor for lunch after his noon Mass.

  “Who is Alfred Wygant?”

  “He was a very prominent man and you know it. His insurance business was one of the largest in Fox River.”

  “And he died. When was that?”

  Marie had looked it up. “Seven years ago.”

  “And you expect me to remember if there was an investigation?”

  “There was a coroner’s report.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I don’t forget things like that.”

  “Then there would be a record at the coroner’s office. Hire a lawyer and ask to see it.”

  “I was hoping you would look it up.”

  Phil turned to Father Dowling. “What is this all about?”

  “Marie is afraid someone is going to write a book about her.”

  “Well, if they ever do, I’ll read it.”

  But the seed had been planted. Phil Keegan might scoff like the pastor, but he was a policeman to the soles of his feet. Marie was sure he would take a look at the coroner’s report on the death of Alfred Wygant.

  The fact was that Marie had not recognized Eleanor when she came to the front door of the rectory. Of course, it had been many years since she had seen or even thought of the woman, and Eleanor had more reason to recognize Marie, having come to the rectory often. Marie remembered herself as having been an ombudsman between Eleanor and the flaky Placidus. You never knew what a Franciscan would do next, and your ordinary lay people had insufficient experience with priests to make allowances. It was when she called McDivitt to make sure Alfred Wygant got a proper send-off that the little undertaker, a faint scent of bourbon riding his breath, had confided in her about the condition of the deceased. How it all came back to her now. McDivitt had always preferred dealing with her rather than the Franciscans.

  “He had a snoot full, that’s for sure.” This was crude coming from the dapper little undertaker.

  “Drunk?”

  “Who’s to say what drunk means,” McDivitt said and slipped a peppermint into his mouth. On second thought, he offered Marie one. “These household accidents are always mysterious.”

  “In what way?”

  “Wygant never drank.”

  “The widow told you that?”

  “And the family. Of course they were interested in avoiding any talk.”

  “Of course.”

  “I suppose the autopsy would have measured the alcohol in his blood.”

  McDivitt had known he could tell Marie these things without fear they would go further. “I think he took a dive over the upstairs bannister.”

  “No.”

  “Sheer speculation of course. Based on a lifetime’s experience.

  Of people diving over upstairs bannisters? McDivitt was a gossip, no doubt of that, his character all twisted out of shape from simulating grief at the death of strangers. What were such people called in the gospel? They had laughed at Our Lord when He said the child was merely sleeping. She could imagine McDivitt in that derisive chorus.

  “If Jessica Bernardo calls I will see her,” Father Dowling said.

  Marie had already surmised that the niece was the cause of Eleanor’s visit. Jessica the novelist. Marie had tried to read one of Jessica’s novels, but it was not her sort of thing, and she told Father Dowling as much.

  “Her aunt is of the same opinion.”

  “Of course I’m no judge. I understand they were well received.”

  “Do the Bernados strike you as a promising topic for a novel?”

  Aha. Marie would have thought less of herself if she had not put two and two together. Eleanor had come to express concern about her niece Jessica. Jessica was a novelist. Now he wondered if the Bernardo family could inspire a novel. It was as plain as the nose on your face. Eleanor was worried that Jessica would stir up curiosity about the way Alfred Wygant had died.

  But the moment of triumph was brief. How could Marie not sympathize with Eleanor’s reluctance to think that her husband had ended his own life? A suicide presents the ultimate pastoral problem. Of course Placidus would have buried Judas Iscariot with a solemn high requiem Mass. What would Father Dowling have done? It was unnerving to think that in this he would have been indistinguishable from Placidus. But after all, what did anyone know for sure? The deceased deserves the benefit of the doubt if anyone does.

  When the call came from the hospital telling her that Fulvio Bernardo had been brought in, having suffered a stroke, Marie exercised similar latitude. No need to tell Father Dowling that Fulvio had not darkened the door of a church in living memory. The call came from the son, Andrew.

  “My father is in intensive care at St. Mark’s. My mother wants a priest to see him.”

  Marie brought the word to Father Dowling, and within ten minutes he was on his way to the hospital.

  5

  Andrew took Jessica in his arms in the waiting room of intensive care, and she assumed the worst had happened. Andrew began to weep. She rocked him in her arms and wanted to whisper in his ear “It is the fate man is born for, it is Margaret you mourn for,” but he might have thought she meant their mother.

  “Where’s Mom?”

  “With him.”

  With him? “Where is he?”

  He nodded at the open door. “But when did it happen?”

  He didn’t understand. “How is he?” Then she brushed past him and went into a room where her father dressed in a silly gown lay on the bed, her mother seated at his side, staring into nothingness. But Margaret’s lips moved mechanically in prayer. She held a rosary. She lo
oked up at Jessica as if surprised to see her. Jessica put a hand on her mother’s shoulder and looked for the first time at her father. A bag of fluid on a stand dripped slowly into his arm, and he was wired to a device beside him that monitored his vital signs, conveying them to the nurses’ station. His breathing was heavy and irregular. A nurse all in blue with a bag over her hair came in on little cat’s feet.

  “How is he?”

  An enigmatic look. “It’s serious.”

  Stupid question, stupid answer. Great vague thoughts invaded her mind. This was the hospital in which she had been born. Somewhere her father had been born, then lived into his eighth decade, and now he was dying. Birth, copulation, and death. Human duration seemed gathered in a point, the tenses that give life meaning gone. All flesh is grass. We have here no lasting city.

  “Has Raymond been called?” she asked her mother.

  “I think Andrew told him.”

  And? And then Father Dowling arrived. Her mother scrambled to her feet, all deference, but the thin priest with the aquiline nose eased her back into her chair. He went around to the other side of the bed and laid a hand on her father’s forehead. A simple gesture, priestly. Immediately Jessica liked him. This was the pastor her mother gushed about. The priest leaned over the bed and spoke in her father’s ear, and incredibly her father’s eyes opened. He looked almost wildly at the priest and shook his head. A priestly nod. What had he asked him? Her mother stood and leaned over the bed.

  “Father Dowling is here, Fulvio.”

  He glared at her, and she looked imploringly at the priest. If her mother’s faith could have sufficed for two everything would have been well, but nothing had been the same for Fulvio since Raymond left. Her brother’s defection had shaken Jessica as well. Did nothing last anymore? Marriages fell apart, priests went over the wall, nuns deserted their convents. “All life death does end and each day dies with sleep.” Father Dowling went to her mother and led her into the corridor. Jessica took his place and reached for her father’s hand, but what she grasped was the tube that admitted the contents of the plastic bag to her father’s veins. She leaned over him.

  “I love you, Daddy.” Tears welled in her eyes. She felt ten years old, a little girl frightened at what was happening to her father. He nodded and made a kissing sound. She sobbed openly. She had never felt the equal of her brothers in his eyes—she was just a girl—but somehow she felt he loved her best. He was trying to say something.

  “What is it?” She leaned over him, ready for some great revelation, some message she had waited for all her life.

  “Raymond.”

  She laid her hand on his forehead as the priest had done. “Raymond’s coming.”

  Was he? What harm could it do to say so? The nurse was back with a doctor, and they shooed her from the room. She was almost relieved to go and hated herself for it. Andrew, dry eyed now, sat silently with their mother and Father Dowling in a little waiting room with pastel walls and inane pictures on the wall but over the door a crucifix. Jessica stared at it. Once the hospital had been staffed by the nuns whose order had founded it; now it was part of some national chain of nominally Catholic hospitals.

  Andrew asked, “Should I go in?”

  “A doctor and nurse are with him.”

  “They come and go.”

  Like Michelangelo. How professorial Andrew looked: blue sports jacket, open collar, chinos, and massive tennis shoes. She had stopped minding that he resented her success as a writer. His own stuff was impossibly self-indulgent, mannered, “look Ma I’m writing.” Is that what he taught his students? Jessica had avoided writing courses like sin and took the bare minimum of courses in English in which pompous young men treated fiction as grist for their critical mills. She had majored in chemistry and now worked in a pathologist’s lab, testing tissue like that they had taken from her father some years ago. Did she ever think her findings related to someone waiting here for the bad news?

  “He asked for Raymond.”

  “I left a message on his answering machine,” Andrew said.

  Her mother said to Father Dowling, “He hasn’t been to the sacraments for years.”

  Good God. But the priest only nodded. “I’ll talk to him again.”

  “It won’t do any good,” Andrew said. He might have been defending their father against what?

  “We’ll see. I’m Father Dowling.”

  She nodded. “Jessica.”

  “The novelist.”

  A little leap of pleasure. “How did you know?”

  “Your Aunt Eleanor told me.”

  “Eleanor?”

  He nodded. That was all. Why did she feel she could bare her soul to him? Because she was flattered he knew she had published novels? No, that wasn’t it. There was a serenity about him she liked. She looked at Andrew. “Did you call Eleanor?”

  He hadn’t. Should she? She wanted something to do. “I will.”

  “What for?”

  “Andrew, he’s her brother-in-law.”

  She went outside the waiting room and called Eleanor on her cell phone. “Daddy is in the hospital, in intensive care.”

  “Oh my God.”

  “He’s being looked after.” Intensively. “He’s awake.”

  “I’ll come.”

  “St. Mark’s?”

  “Of course.”

  Father Dowling had come out to talk to the doctor, nodding as the doctor spoke. He turned to Jessica, and she went to him as the doctor scampered away.

  “He has had cancer for years.”

  “Is this his first heart attack?”

  “Heart attack?”

  “Didn’t you know?”

  She looked at him. “I didn’t even ask. He has prostate cancer …”

  She had assumed the cancer was his reason for being here. “He is stabilizing, they tell me. Is Raymond the priest?”

  “The former priest. He’s why my father …”

  “Ah. Is he coming?”

  “Yes.” She said it firmly as if that committed her brother to come from California to be at their father’s bedside. “If he is in danger,” she added.

  “If he were younger, they would operate.”

  The priest knew more than any of them, made privy to it all in moments by the staff. Of course it would be easier for them to talk to a stranger. “Let’s go in.”

  She followed the priest into the cubicle where her father lay. Her father’s eyes tracked him to the side of the bed. In a slurred voice he said, “I don’t believe in God.”

  “Well, he believes in you.” Again the hand on her father’s forehead. His lips moved like her mother’s in prayer.

  “I want Raymond.”

  As a priest? Was that the condition of his faith, that his son should regain his?

  “I understand he’s coming,” Father Dowling said.

  Her father smiled.

  “You are not in immediate danger, but the prospects are not good.”

  The old man’s eyes were fixed on the priest.

  “I am dying?”

  No need to say it, the priest’s expression conveyed the answer. The old man’s eyes closed and then immediately opened as if he did not want to shut out the light.

  “There’s a chaplain on duty,” Father Dowling said when they were again outside the cubicle making way for the fussy nurse with the bag on her head. “I’ll make sure he knows.”

  “It wouldn’t matter.”

  “His name is Fulvio?”

  “Yes.”

  “Lei parla Italiano?”

  She shook her head. “Neither does my father anymore. He’s second generation. His father came from Palermo and wanted instant assimilation.”

  “Yet he named his son Fulvio.”

  “Bernardos aren’t very consistent.”

  “Almost no one is. That’s why we mustn’t give up hope for your father.”

  He assumed she shared her mother’s faith. Did she? Her life too had been changed when Raymond ran off t
o California with the nun he later married. The only thing worse would have been if her father deserted her mother.

  After the priest left she got out her phone and put through a call to California.

  6

  “Can you make the meeting this afternoon?” Anne Gogarty, the chair, asked when she heard that Andrew’s father was in the hospital. “Appointments and tenure.” Her tone was significant.

  “He’s improved.”

  “So you’ll be there.”

  “I wouldn’t miss it.”

  She took that for reassurance. “I need your vote.”

  There were five on the committee, the chair ex officio and four elected members. Andrew was the default member of every departmental committee, someone everyone trusted, or at least did not distrust. Everyone, that is, but Cassirer. And Cassirer was the main item of business at the afternoon meeting of the A&T. He had applied for early promotion to tenure after only four years on the faculty, his argument, scarcely disguised, that he was so manifestly superior to everyone else in the department that it was unjust that he should be untenured. All departmental committees were only advisory committees, their decisions going to the dean as recommendations. Holder, the provost, actually made the decisions, but as a matter of practice dean and provost merely endorsed the departmental committees. Alloy, the president, probably learned of promotions from the printed menu distributed at his annual dinner for the faculty. Cassirer had lobbied for votes like a candidate for the French Academy—minus the obsequiousness, of course—thereby solidifying the opposition. Anne wanted the slot for another woman, a reasonable enough objective in these days of affirmative action, not that Anne needed her gender for her position, and Mike Pistoia loathed Cassirer with all the passion of a lover of literature. Whenever Cassirer mentioned Foucault, Pistoia warned him not to speak like that in the presence of a lady. “With a name like his, he should talk,” Cassirer retorted, out of earshot of Pistoia. Lily St. Clair leaned toward Cassirer, in every sense of the term, but if he was aware of her décolletage he gave little evidence of it. Besides, she was inclined to take the opposed position to Anne Gogarty as a matter of habit. Zalinski had a weakness for critical nonsense and was firmly for Cassirer.