Last Things

by Ralph McInerny

  “I urged him to go in with Fulvio,” Eleanor explained. “The man has a Midas touch.”

  The interval between her marriages had created in Eleanor the illusion that she was a practical woman. Nearly a million dollars of Alfred’s money had been turned over to Fulvio over a period of several years. The record of outgo was clear. There was no record of earnings.

  “It was in the formative stages,” Eleanor said. “They both agreed to let their money ferment.”

  “Ferment.”

  “Taking money out prematurely would weaken the prospects.”

  The prospects of what? It was Bernardo’s chain that had received the money. In return, Alfred had been given receipts.

  “Was there a written agreement?”

  “Amos, they were practically relatives.”

  Never do business with relatives or the Church was an axiom to which Amos subscribed, at least in part. One did not do business with the Church in any case. His own services were always pro bono where the Church was concerned.

  Despite the fact that Eleanor seemed quite at ease with this odd arrangement, Amos took the liberty of speaking with Fulvio on behalf of his client.

  “It’s all right, Mr. Cadbury. Not that it is the sort of deal I would normally have made. Mine is a family business. But he wouldn’t let me say no. At least his wife wouldn’t.”

  “Eleanor?”

  “Eleanor.”

  “I am engaged in wrapping up his affairs, and I must confess I don’t see what Alfred received in return for a considerable amount of money.”

  “He became a partner. A silent partner.”

  “Sharing in the profits?”

  “What else does partner means?”

  “I can’t find any record of income from Bernardo Garden Stores.”

  “That surprises me. Alfred was a pretty astute businessman.”

  “I always thought so.”

  “And now it will go to his wife.”

  “Eleanor.”

  “Eleanor.”

  There are decisions a lawyer makes that do not give his mind rest even with the passage of years. He should have demanded an audit. When he mentioned it, Eleanor was horrified.

  “That would sound as if I think he cheated Alfred.”

  He told himself afterward that he had simply respected the wishes of his client, but Eleanor understood the arrangement between Alfred Wygant and Fulvio Bernardo even less than Amos did. But he had let it go. Nearly a million dollars! Did he think that Bernardo had cheated Alfred? In any case, there was still a handsome amount for Eleanor. But, ever since, Amos felt he had let down his old friend Alfred Wygant. Hadn’t the normally levelheaded Alfred ever raised the question to Fulvio Bernardo? One thing was clear: He would have had to do so without Eleanor’s support.

  Amos shook away such troubling thoughts and turned his mind to Father Dowling’s request that he look into the possibility of a parole for Earl Hospers. The strange events that had led to Hospers’s trial and conviction were easily recalled. The body of Sylvia Lowry was found in the freezer in her basement. There had been several suspects—the son, the son-in-law, and a charlatan from Chicago—but eventually evidence that Earl Hospers, a television repairman, had carted off the meat from the freezer and dumped it had led to his arrest. He denied killing Sylvia, but the only palpable evidence pointed to him. He had been tried for manslaughter and been in prison in Joliet ever since.

  Amos called in young Nordquist, who dealt in criminal law, not a busy sector in Cadbury & Associates. Nordquist, a tall and gangly fellow with stiff blond hair, entered the office uneasily, as if he feared a dressing down.

  “What do you know of paroles, Harry?”

  “Paroles?”

  Amos explained Father Dowling’s request and told Nordquist he wanted him to look into it.

  “Yes, sir. Was he a client of ours?”

  “Earl Hospers. No, Sylvia Lowry, his alleged victim, was.”

  “Alleged?”

  “Not legally of course. He was tried and convicted. But he has paid a great price already, and if there is any chance of getting him released, I would like us to bring it about.”

  Nordquist seemed delighted with the assignment. No doubt he was not overemployed in the firm, and this chance to try his skills was welcome.

  “Keep me posted.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  On Amos’s desk was a notice of a meeting of the trustees of St. Edmund’s for that afternoon. Here was a duty that had seemed only a duty in recent years. The newer appointees to the board had little conception of what the college had been, but then the president and provost seemed equally uninformed or perhaps simply disinterested. For them the college was a possibility without a past, something they were ushering into the wider academic world. The watchword was excellence, which seemed to mean being guided by received opinion. Once meetings had been presided over by an Edmundite, and the officers of the college were also members of the order. Trustees were there to help these good priests fulfill their mission. In that Amos had found satisfaction. Of late he felt that he was colluding in the abandonment of that mission.

  He thought of Raymond Bernardo, Father Raymond as he then was, addressing the board on a long ago occasion, insisting that the mission of the college would never change. An impressive young man, his manner more reassuring than his message, and yet he was within months of his personal defection. And now at last he had returned to be at his dying father’s bedside. What thoughts must come in such a setting? To them both?

  21

  “How’s it going?” Phyllis asked over the phone from Thousand Oaks.

  “As bad as I feared.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “My father used what might have been his dying breath to condemn me.”

  “Oh, Raymond.”

  “My mother could not have been sweeter.”

  “Well, good for her.”

  “It’s not that she approves.”

  A sigh bounced off a satellite and settled warmly in his ear. “Have you seen anyone else?”

  “My brother and sister.”

  “Have you been to the college?”

  “Of course not.”

  “You should go there, talk to people. We can’t let them sit in judgment on us.”

  He had found this suggestion more alarming than the confrontation with his father. But the anticipation had been worse than the event, horrible as that had been. Judas. How that word had pierced his soul, as his father had meant it to do. Andrew had mentioned Father Bourke. Would his old mentor react in the same way?

  On Monday and Tuesday he made sure that his mother was in the room when he saw his father. The old man was neither better nor worse, but Dr. Rocco had no intention of moving him again from intensive care, not liking the less vigilant nursing his patient would receive in an ordinary room. So there continued to be the little winking digits registering his father’s condition, transmitting their readings to the nurses’ station. On Wednesday, he left his mother with his father, which is where she wanted to be, and got into the car and drove. The horse knows the way. Almost without thinking he drove to the college.

  Once he would have been able to go through the gate and simply drive around, but now there was a guard on duty, checking cars for the windshield sticker that authorized their entrance. A visitor’s parking lot had been created across the street from the entrance, and Raymond pulled in there and found a place. After he turned off the motor, he sat in indecision. He could have driven more or less anonymously around the campus, but to walk was to run the risk of recognition. He thought of Phyllis and what she would say if he expressed fear of walking onto the campus that had been the setting of their meeting and where he had so swiftly and easily exchanged the role of confidant for that of lover. And he thought of telling her casually that, yes, he had visited the campus, walked around, seen this and that. He got out of the car, crossed the street and walked through the gate.

  In early November the tr
ees were already stripped of leaves, and this made all the new buildings immediately visible. He walked purposively, as if he had a destination, feeling at once a stranger and back in familiar territory, however much the campus had changed. Students seemed to be going in all directions at once, almost all of them wearing backpacks. Once the main road he walked along had been a long avenue leading to the community buildings, the community residence, the seminary, the magnificent Gothic church. When the college was founded, its buildings were put on the land closer to the road. Now there were twice as many buildings as before, their architecture the bland functionalism that characterized the rapidly expanded campus. Everywhere there were signs with arrows pointing to this building or that, many of the names unknown to him. His fear of being recognized vanished. You can’t go home again because home has become unrecognizable. Unlike his parents’ house, which seemed frozen in time, the campus had altered beyond recognition. He was almost surprised when he saw a building that had been there in his time.

  Classroom buildings, faculty offices, a new library, a dining hall expanded out of recognition and residences for the fraction of students who lived on campus, a computing center. A student center was now the target at which the main road aimed and now as midday approached was the destination of many of the hurrying students. How bundled up and unimpressive they looked, students at a lesser college, wanting the credentials of a degree rather than any sentimental identification with the school. He walked around the student center, and suddenly he was in the past.

  In the tower, bells suddenly began to toll deliberately, their throaty sound a monotone save for slight variations, a two-bar staff without sharps or flats. But the sound of the bells seemed to emerge from deep within himself as well as from the tower. How many years had his life been measured by those sounds riding the air of the campus? He had not heard them for years, but they were as familiar as his own voice and seemed to fill up the interval of their absence from his life. He looked at his watch as the lights of the church began slowly to go up and the sanctuary became more brightly illumined. There were perhaps a dozen people scattered among the pews, but the significance of those bells had not changed. The midday Mass was about to begin.

  Flee? Slip away? Did he dare remain and watch the commemoration of Christ’s death on Calvary, the deed that had won us a victory over death, watch as someone spoke over bread and wine and then displayed the sacred species to the faithful? He could not have moved if he wanted to. Almost he believed that it was in order to be here, to visit the old haunts that he had refused to let haunt him, to neutralize them once and for all, that he had come. Phyllis. Dear God. He could see her reading the Scripture of the day from that pulpit as he sat in the celebrant’s chair, fighting the memories her voice evoked.

  The all too familiar banging of kneelers and the rustling of clothing filled the church when a little bell in the sacristy sounded and a vested priest emerged, walked swiftly to the center, and stopping at the steps leading up to the sanctuary bowed deeply. He then went rapidly up the stairs, kissed the altar, went to the celebrant’s chair, and smiled out at the sparse congregation. Who was he? Raymond felt he should know him, but he was young, after his time. And then another vested priest in a wheelchair came into view, his motorized vehicle taking him silently and swiftly to a place beside the celebrant. Father Bourke! A dread he had not known since adolescent confessions filled Raymond. Could the old man fail to be aware of the presence in the church of his faithless protégé?

  “Good morning,” the priest said brightly, flashing a toothy smile as he boxed the compass, for all the world as if he were surrounded by hundreds of worshipers. “And good afternoon as well.”

  Indistinct murmurs from the scattered few. The celebrant blessed himself expansively and began. “As we prepare to celebrate these sacred mysteries …”

  Raymond’s lips formed the words with him. After all these years, he could have taken his place and carried it off without a hitch, the liturgy was so ingrained in him. Was it possible that he had not even thought of those words in years? “ … let us call to mind our sins.”

  Father Bourke seemed hunched over in his wheelchair. His stole lay across his bent body and seemed to weigh him down. Raymond had not known of the wheelchair, how could he, and the crumpled man in the wheelchair whom he had recognized immediately seemed a parody of the Father Bourke he had kept at the edges of his mind.

  “They’ll do anything to stop us,” Phyllis had said, her warm hand in his, when they were making their plans to go, and he had wondered if he shouldn’t tell Father Bourke at least.

  He had agreed not to see Bourke, agreed with relief, as if the decision were hers not his. He did not tell Phyllis of the letter he had left for Father Bourke, telling him what he meant to do and why. He had not mentioned Phyllis in his exculpating account.

  The Mass went on. The reader was an elderly woman in slacks who had difficulties with the passage from Sirac, mispronouncing with amplified vigor, her head bobbing up and down as she sought eye contact with an imaginary church full of people. When she was done and said “The word of the Lord!”, she turned and missed her step and nearly fell from the pulpit. But she steadied herself and made it back to her pew. And then the celebrant took her place, reading the gospel as if it were an account from the Fox River Tribune, matter-of-fact, no awed and altered tone to acknowledge that this was the good news. He preached his homily from the steps of the sanctuary, breezy, autobiographical, uninspiring.

  Raymond felt a deep need to criticize the liturgical performance. He took dark pleasure in the fact that there was only a handful of worshipers, most of them old, none of them faculty, he was sure, and no students. Yet this was the traditional midday Mass for students and doubtless had been going on in all the intervening years. How much worse things were than he would have imagined, a parody rather than a continuation of the past. The Order had left him; he hadn’t left the Order. It wasn’t for this skeletal performance that he had in that very sanctuary dedicated his life to God. Already he was imagining how he would tell Phyllis of this. They were vindicated! It was as if they had foreseen this decline. The chatty manner of the celebrant had been one of those innovations meant to renew, to pack the church rather than empty it. My God, what if he had stayed on into these dark days.

  At the altar, with Bourke in his wheelchair all but out of sight behind him, the celebrant offered the gifts, washed his hand—O Lord wash away my iniquity and cleanse me from my sins—and then the heart of the matter was reached. The priest took first the bread, then the wine, and said the ancient words in an altered and reverent voice: This is my body. This is my blood. The church had grown even more silent. From his wheelchair, concelebrating, Father Bourke lifted his hand and said the words with the priest. Like Dr. Strangelove, Raymond gripped his right wrist lest he too raise his hand. The words formed in his mind, but he pursed his lips lest he pronounce them. Immediately after the consecration, he got up and hurried to the door, pushing into the gray November day and the indifferent bustle of the campus. A passing figure stopped and stared at him.

  “Raymond?”

  There were jokes about husbands caught in flagrante delicto by their wives: “It’s not me, Tessie. I swear to God it’s not me.” Or “What are you going to believe, the evidence of your senses or your husband?”

  The man came toward him as Raymond froze on the church steps. The face was familiar, and then the name came to him.

  “Hello, John.”

  “You’re back.”

  The bald head might never have worn hair, but Raymond remembered the thinning red hair that had once covered it. John had been several classes below him, a convert, an enthusiast, good as gold.

  “My father’s ill.”

  “Come to lunch.”

  He meant in the community refectory. Would no one else accuse him as his father had?

  “John, I can’t. I have to get back to the hospital.”

  “That serious?”

&
nbsp; “He is dying.”

  The moonlike face clouded. “I will remember him in my Mass.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Come back later. Father Bourke would love to see you. Or have you already talked with him?”

  “He is concelebrating inside.”

  “Of course. It’s all he can do anymore, poor devil.”

  “What’s wrong?”

  “A heart attack. It’s left him very weak.”

  Raymond shook his head at the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.

  “Well.” He thrust out his hand and John took it.

  “I’ll tell him you’re back.”

  If he had felt furtive coming onto campus he had the sense of fleeing when he left. He should not have come here. He should not have entered the church. Now they would all know that he was in town and that he had been seen in church. John would assume he was there praying for his father. He stopped. It had never once occurred to him to do that. Didn’t that prove it was all dead to him?

  He half-noticed the approach of the cyclist, and then the man had swung in and braked. Great sneakered feet flat on the ground, the bike between his legs, he said, “You’re Raymond Bernardo.”

  “And who are you?”

  “Horst Cassirer. I teach here.”

  “And ride a bicycle.”

  “Your brother, Andrew, is in my department.”

  “English.”