Last Things

by Ralph McInerny

  “He wanted to talk to Mom first. And since Dad is better …”

  She thought of the page she had sent off to Thunder. How fair was it to write a novel that would be so clearly based on her brother? The fact is, Raymond was a stranger to her. When she grew up he was always away at school, studying for the priesthood. Summers he came home, but the difference in their ages made him seem an adult. And she was affected by her parents’ near awe of the son who would become a priest. In retrospect, it seemed to her that Raymond had condescended to them. She and Andrew were children to her parents, but Raymond was treated almost as their senior. After his novitiate year, his visits home were much briefer but all the more festive because of that. An occasion. Raymond, the soon-to-be Edmundite priest.

  Of course she had attended the college, and there was made aware of Father Raymond, already a big man in the Order, mover and shaker in the Edmundite part of the campus. He taught a course in the seminary, but his main task was supervising the training of the young men. She had felt a real if distant pride in him. From time to time, a professor would ask if she were any relation to Father Raymond Bernardo, and she benefited from his status. But in chemistry the Edmundites were less of a factor, and her teachers probably had only a vague notion of the relation of the college to the Order that had founded it. She loved the precision of lab work but from time to time would return to the sort of thing she had done in high school. Stories and poems came so easily she was sure they were no good. Andrew’s reaction indicated otherwise.

  “I didn’t know you were working on these.”

  “Work? I just wrote them.”

  “Oh sure.”

  He never did believe how easily writing came to her. She began her first novel in senior year, a conscious balance to her major. When she sent it off to a publisher, cold, she was ready for rejection, but she got a telephone call from the enthusiastic publisher.

  “Look, this is your first book. You need representation. Can I suggest an agent?”

  He suggested Thunder. “I wouldn’t change a thing,” Thunder said emphatically. “The book has freshness, naïveté, feeling.”

  “Are they really going to publish it?”

  “They are. And you are going to write another and another and another and become famous. What exactly do you do? For a living? Or are you independently wealthy?”

  “I work in a lab.”

  “A lab?”

  She had just been hired by Sorensen’s Lab but had not actually started. She wanted a little time after graduation to just vegetate. “A pathology lab.”

  “My God.” But he was delighted. It would make unusual dust-jacket copy. “Just don’t write any murder mysteries.”

  “I don’t think I could.”

  “Don’t even try. You have a real talent. I don’t often gush like this.”

  He gushed in very blasé tones, and she developed an image of him that was shattered at their eventual meeting. He was five and a half feet tall, bald, with his glasses propped atop his head.

  “Are you a mind reader?”

  It took a minute, then he laughed. “Use that.”

  “I just did.”

  “In a story, in a story. It only counts if you write it down.”

  The novel appeared and did well, in the phrase, very well locally. She was taken up by the Tribune, and Leonard Bosch asked her to lunch. He was full of unwelcome advice. Quit the lab, get a fellowship to a writer’s congress, start making the rounds of writers’ meetings. He arranged for her to talk at the public library and covered it, as he put it, as if she were from out of town. She had no intention of quitting Sorensen’s. What her first novel earned her would not have supported her for half a year, living lean. It was best to regard income from writing as a bonus.

  She had found a message from Thunder on her phone when she got back from the hospital last night, leaving a number she was to call no matter when.

  “Why isn’t he here?” the old man demanded when Jessica told him Raymond had arrived.

  “He wanted to be fresh.”

  “Ha.”

  “Daddy, it’s jet lag. He flew all day against the clock.”

  “Does he think I’m not going to die?”

  “Oh, don’t say that,” and Margaret tried to take him in her arms and he let her. Yesterday when her mother tried to do that he had pushed her back. He was still on IV, that was the excuse: She might dislodge the needle. Jessica found it cruel of him not to let her mother show her affection. Bernardos did not hold back but fought and cried and made up, living in the upper registers. At least that was true of her father. Was it true of her? She found that she did not want to see Raymond when her mother suggested she come to the house. Not yet. Was she reluctant to see the model of her proposed novel? She called the number Thunder had left. He sounded drunk.

  “Bingo, my dear. Not that I am surprised. I was about to tell him I would not take less than fifty when he offered eighty.”

  “Eighty thousand!”

  “Nonrefundable too, by God. A year ago he would have said who cares about a Catholic priest. Now it is hot.”

  The newspapers were full of clerical scandals, and Jessica did not know what to make of them. Whatever Raymond had done, he had not caused scandal of the sort that interested the media. The massive advance Thunder conveyed in tones of triumph seemed thirty pieces of silver. But she managed to sound delighted. He went on, congratulating himself for predicting this was her breakthrough novel. He didn’t need scandals to see the importance of her story.

  “When can you finish it?”

  “I haven’t really started it.”

  “Quit your job, write full time; there’s no risk now.”

  “How soon does he want it?”

  “He is begging me for a sample. No samples. Let him wait. You want to show me some early chapters, fine. I can use them to get started on foreign rights and the rest of it.”

  “Six months?”

  “Can you do that?”

  “If I can do it at all, I can do it in three months.”

  “You’re wonderful!”

  She did not feel wonderful when she hung up. She had just received unimaginably good news, and it was almost a letdown. For a possible novel she was being offered the moon. There was no one she could tell, certainly not Andrew; it would kill him. She knew how equivocally he reacted to her writing success when everything he touched turned to lead. She didn’t want Raymond to know of the novel at all. Whatever happened with her father, he would go back to California and revert to his status as mythical presence in their lives.

  She called Walter, and he assured her that everything had gone well on her day off.

  “Oh good. It’s nice to feel indispensable.”

  He was full of apologies; he hadn’t meant that. She could have kicked herself for teasing him.

  “My father is slightly better.”

  “Jessica, if you want to take tomorrow off …”

  “No, no. There’s no need.”

  “I’ve said it before. I’d do anything for you.”

  She wanted to cry at the one-sidedness of it all. Why couldn’t she fall in love with good, old, dumb, smart Walter? She did not tell him of the good news Thunder had given her.

  At the hospital Dr. Rocco had looked in at her father, and Jessica went with him into the hall.

  “Is he out of danger?”

  “Well, I’m returning him to intensive care.”

  “Is that an answer?”

  He looked at her. How often did he have to give bad news? “I don’t think he will leave the hospital alive.”

  She gasped. “How long?”

  “I could give you a web site where you could look up prognoses. All predictions are averages in such cases. But take the best case, and it is bad.”

  “Does he know it?”

  “He seems to be looking forward to it. Your father is a strange man.” He looked down the hallway. Messages punctuated the air; there was the odor of medicine and of
the sick. “Is he a religious man?”

  “In a sense.”

  “Your mother is a saint.”

  “Yes, she is,” Jessica said, after a moment, knowing it was true. Her mother lived the life she had as well as she could, and what more was there than that? Now, in her apartment, staring at the summary she had sent off to Thunder, she felt that the mother’s part should be enlarged. Her mind began to work, and she switched screens and began to type.

  There had been another message on her machine, from Eleanor, but she had forgotten it in the excitement of Thunder’s news. Eleanor was someone else she could not tell her good news. Imagine, going to Father Dowling and asking him to stop her from writing a novel. Fortunately the pastor of St. Hilary’s was too sensible a man to do anything of the kind.

  She wrote for several hours with no sense of time, and afterward she was keyed up. She poured a glass of white wine, got into her pajamas, and turned on the television. Immediately she muted the sound; the schoolyard snickers of the late-night talk shows made her feel old. She searched the channels. No movies old enough to be called classics. She turned it off and sipped her wine.

  She was thirty-one years old. She could never quite believe the age she was. She still felt like a girl. On the other hand, she felt ancient. Writing involves a kind of omniscience about one’s characters that gives the illusion that one understands real people. Was there a single one of her friends or acquaintances she really knew? Does anyone understand anyone? If Raymond should try to explain to her why he had done what he had done, would he become intelligible to her? Only Andrew, in a long-distance call to California five years ago, had gotten anything like an explanation from Raymond:

  Do you know the history of the last Tsar and his family? They were groomed for roles that ceased to exist. That is what the priesthood seemed to me. You’ve seen all the changes. It isn’t the cruise I signed on for. And it will get worse. But the truly upsetting thing was that I ceased to believe in what I was doing when I said Mass.

  “He lost his faith?”

  “What else was he saying?”

  That was the first time Jessica had been shocked by what Raymond had done. When Dr. Rocco had asked if her father was religious the answer she almost gave was that all Bernardos are religious. If her father had really lost his faith he could not have reacted as he did to Raymond’s defection. He would have seen it as Raymond apparently did, as a shrewd career move. Now Raymond advised clients on a basis he could believe. As a priest he would have had to act as a hypocrite. That made running away with a pretty nun almost an imperative. But what Jessica found she could not comprehend was losing one’s religious faith.

  When she checked the messages on her phone—she had just let it ring while she worked—there was an angry call from Horst Cassirer. She erased it.

  14

  Eleanor could not find out whether Fulvio had prepared for death, arranged his papers, letters, burnt things. He just looked up at her from his bed when she asked.

  “Are you worried?”

  “Why should I worry?”

  “You wrote such beautiful letters.”

  “You didn’t keep them!”

  “Do you think I would just toss them in the wastebasket?”

  “You’re saying that to annoy me.”

  “And what are you doing, coming to my deathbed with annoying questions?”

  “You have to think of others.”

  “At the moment that is difficult.”

  “You’re not serious about the letters.”

  His smile was almost a leer. “Wait and see.”

  “I know you destroyed them.”

  “Then you have nothing to fear.”

  What an infuriating man he was. He always had been. And yet it was with Fulvio that she was in love when she had married Joseph, second best, a substitute. She wanted to be a member of the Bernardo family. They were everything she had always wanted: alive, always venting their emotions, fertile. All but Joseph as it turned out, but she had no children by Alfred either, so maybe the fault was hers. How different things would have been if she’d had children. She and Joe would have formed their own family circle and not been drawn into Fulvio’s like bit players.

  “Are you pregnant?” Fulvio would ask shamelessly in the first years of her marriage, and Eleanor’s blush was his answer. “Maybe you ought to buy a manual.”

  “Stop it.”

  “Stop wishing that my sister-in-law should have children? Maybe I should show you how.”

  Her indignation was feigned. His vulgarity fascinated her. No, she told herself, not vulgarity. Fulvio was alive, vital, full of animal spirits. Joseph, a pharmacist, seemed to wear a white coat even when he took it off, measuring out their lives in precise doses. She was awkward with him in bed because he was awkward. But he was supposed to lead. It was like dancing.

  “A vertical expression of a horizontal desire,” Fulvio said when he swept her around the dance floor at family gatherings. They were usually held at the Vesuvio, owned by some cousin or other, giving them the run of the place, all stucco and bright paint and checkered tablecloths with candles in lamps. And wine. The wine flowed and Eleanor felt giddy.

  “Are you pregnant?”

  “It’s this dress.”

  “You would have to prove that.”

  She was not herself when she was with him, or she was herself, which was probably truer. Joe didn’t dance and urged her to stand up whenever Fulvio asked. Margaret was equally complacent, content to be a matron, smiling at the good time her family was having. She sipped one little glass of wine all evening.

  “Maybe you’re not getting enough,” she said boldly to Fulvio.

  “A man never gets enough.” His expression warned her that Margaret was out of bounds in their kidding, if it was kidding. He held her so very tight when they danced, and she was aware of him against her, urgent, manly. A woman wants to be taken, swept off her feet, all the clichés. Joe drank mineral water and would give a lecture on its medicinal properties. When Fulvio brought her back to the table, he gripped her bottom as he stood there talking to his brother. What could she do, make a scene, accuse her brother-in-law? Everyone would think she was mad. Of course Fulvio was playful, and he was the head of the family.

  Summer, when they all went together to the lake, was the dangerous time: far too many for the bedrooms, bodies sprawled everywhere. And during the day, on the beach, she was conscious of Fulvio’s interest in her body. She had thought of him when she bought that bathing suit.

  “You’re not pregnant,” he said.

  He had a little boat and loved to sail. Joe never went near the water, reading on the porch, smoking his pipe, content to be by himself. Of course she should take up Fulvio’s offer to teach her how to sail.

  “He’s the best sailor in the family.”

  “You should see my dinghy,” he said, when she effused about the little boat. She knew she should not go out with him. There was an island, far out on the lake, that was his destination in the little boat. On their way there he was all business, tending to the sail, putting her at the tiller and expecting her to understand and execute his orders. It was silly to be concerned about so absorbing an occupation, and there was the family back there on the shore. What could happen?

  What could happen did happen, on the island, out of sight of the cabin, though it would have taken binoculars to see anything from that distance. As soon as they pulled the boat up on the sand of a little cove everything was predestined. This was an assignation, and it was far too late to protest. He laid a blanket on the sand, and then he laid her on the blanket and she closed her eyes, turned off her conscience, and knew what she had not known on her wedding night or any night since. He kissed her eyes afterward and patted her behind.

  “Don’t get pregnant.”

  “I thought that was the idea.”

  Years of deception began, years of humiliation. Once she had succumbed his manner changed; nothing overt, it was just t
hat he no longer wooed her and of course took her for granted. A woman who has been unfaithful once will do it again. If the woman was Eleanor, this was true. Why? Fulvio lost much of his magic once she had yielded to him, but what he gained was the elemental fact that with him she became fully a woman. But she did not become pregnant. She half hoped she would and lured a puzzled Joe off to bed several times as an insurance policy. Any child would look like a Bernardo and that was enough. But for all his joking about her getting pregnant before they had sailed to the island, she was unsure what Fulvio’s reaction would be. It was never put to the test. Eleanor attributed it to a psychological bloc on her part, however physically abandoned she was with him. And she wrote him letters.

  Stupid, girlish, long letters that she needed to write more than he needed to read, if he ever did read them all the way through. It was a compulsion, as if she wanted to have the case against herself down in blue ink on pink paper. How many letters had there been? Dozens. Eleanor froze in embarrassment now at the thought of anyone finding them. It was largely the thought of Jessica finding them that had taken her to Father Dowling. But she could not even learn if they were still in existence.

  “I worry about your mother,” she said to Jessica.

  “She’ll be all right.”

  “That’s easy to say. Remember, I’ve been there before. Twice. A widow is never ready for all the practical decisions she has to make. Your mother never took care of the checkbook, did she?”

  “No.”

  “Fulvio paid the bills.”

  “I guess so.”

  “And then there are insurance policies, burial plots, monuments …”

  “Eleanor, we will help her, Andrew and I.”

  “You have about as much experience as she does.”

  “So what’s the answer?”

  Eleanor paused. “Oh, you’re probably right. She’ll do just fine. She always has. But someone should find out if your father has all his affairs in order, to make it easier for her.”

  “I’ll ask him.”

  “If you’d like I could make an inventory.”