“So it’s a scientific study,” Marilyn finally said, her black eyes with the heavy lids and long lashes narrowing slightly, “I’m only talking to you because Father Weston asked me to. You’re Jewish, what are you doing hanging out with a priest anyhow?”
“You’re a woman, and I could ask you the same,” Max answered, a little more sharply then he meant as he watched Marilyn pull away from the table, leaving her fork in the slaw, scooting to the edge of the booth as if she might just get up and run. “Sorry,” he quickly apologized, “I don’t primarily identify as Jewish. The Father and I like some of the same books.”
“Books, huh, and you don’t ‘primarily identify’… now you do sound like a professor.” But she relaxed and moved back into the booth, picking up her fork again. “Father W said you were in Chicago at some big research institute.”
“Priest or no priest, Frank Weston runs his mouth a lot. University of Chicago has - had,” he corrected himself, “ the beginnings of a pretty advanced think tank putting together collaborations between psychology, ancient religions, and pharmacology that no-one had ever thought of. The old fogeys hated it but the students, oh, man.” Max hunched his shoulders, the familiar pain creeping up the back of his neck as he tried to push down flashbacks of the last meeting in the dean’s office.
“What are you doing here then?” Marilyn asked simply.
Something happened to Max then. The booth seemed to both darken and lighten. The dark was at the edge and high sides but the light was where they were sitting and the front door and the man clicking on the adding machine might have been on the moon for as far away as they seemed. The words tumbled out of him as the images played across his mind. He felt as if something was drawing the most intimate truths out of him. He could see himself ten years younger in the early sixties with Carnaby Street striped pants on standing at a podium-- the paper he gave in London at King’s College to thunderous applause where he asserted that modern life had veiled the connections between the mind and soul. How he had experimented with mushrooms that night and wandered Kensington Garden feeling all the cells in his body and how they connected to all the cells in the plants, wandering in a full revel through a glowing moon garden planted in the middle of the city. That had been the turning point. He began to gradually move away from more traditional studies and plot his own course, taking advantage of his full professorship and tenure to protect him from his more conservative critics. He had some fans at the University as well, like Dr. Wendell, an archeologist who was a brilliant researcher, but the students, they were his biggest fans. The course at University of Chicago he taught on the mystic texts of the Kabala was always full to overflow as students flocked to his lectures. The earnest insistence of a brilliant baby-faced graduate student, Lawrence with the mop of curls, to let him be Max’s academic chronicler. Lawrence followed him breathlessly as he charted Max Rosenbaum’s meteoric rise as the boldest, most brilliant professor in the entire University, connecting the mysteries of the Kabala, where man is put into the world to repair the flaw that God made, and contemporary psychology, while gently advocating for careful experimentation of mind-altering substances as ancient priests and shamans would to reconnect with the Divine. His wife’s withdrawal to the ladies circle at the Temple and finally her sudden move back to her parent’s suburb of Lake Haven. The troubling automatic writing of his protégé Lawrence and then reviewing his incoherent thesis with the same phrase, “I have made the Connection and God will have Mercy,” repeated thousands of times. How he then botched it, alienating Lawrence, urging him to see a counselor. The graduate student’s parents standing at the back of the lecture hall, he in a fedora and double-breasted suit, she in gloves and a beige dress, looking like they had come to witness some shameful act. The grad student twitching and leaving through a side door of the lecture hall. The campus police banging on Max’s brownstone’s front door.
“Lawrence committed suicide by jumping out the twenty-third floor of his hi-rise dorm. There were tabs of LSD found along with the suicide note that repeated over and over ‘God will have Mercy’.” Max clenched his fists and lowered his head. Had he led the kid astray? Had his work poisoned a young mind? He knew he would never know and the not knowing haunted him. But he hadn’t told anyone this much ever about the journey that had brought him divorced and disgraced to Decatur, Illinois. “Technically I’m on leave. But make no mistake, I’m hiding out. A friend of mine is letting me teach psychology 101 this semester. I’m not sure how long Charlesworth can even let that continue. Nothing was proven of course and I never advocated for LSD to my graduate students but…”
“And you want me to be part of a study. I’ll have to remember to thank the Father when I see him. I should have never told him about going to the fortune tellers. He worries too much.”
Max nodded, his eyes sad but full of empathy, without a trace of condescension or pity. Marilyn inhaled. As long as he didn’t pity her. “You still believe in your work?” she asked huskily.
“Yeah, I do. What happened to Lawrence… there’s a kind of solace in the work. It’s hard to explain,” Max said. “I think if you’ll let me, I might be able to help you, Marilyn. Father W thinks it’s worth a try too or you know he wouldn’t have introduced us. I know my methods may seem a little unconventional and my pedigree dinged, but there’s a new institute forming where I might be able to make a contribution -- if I have fresh research.”
“A new institute? On what?”
“Oh, it will be called something academic I’m sure, with an emphasis on alchemical history and ancient religious rites but it will be also focusing on conducting studies of the paranormal, its role in science and religion, that sort of thing. It’s terribly exciting that we’re finally able to get the academy or least some outpost of it to examine the entire nature of reality or realities. I think if I could just submit chapters for a new book, they might accept me. They’ll have a couple of branch centers in Europe and one here. My friend, Dr. Wendell, has been working getting the funding.” Max’s teeth hurt just thinking about it. He wanted to be part of the new center - there maybe he could start over or at least try starting over. Being accepted wouldn’t erase what happened but at least he could find his way out of the academic backwaters he was now confined to.
Marilyn paused, looking at the professor; he seemed so earnest and worried that she might not accept his proposal. “I won’t do drugs, not that I think that’s what you’re asking. And it’s hard for me to talk about this stuff. I don’t know how much help I can be.” Marilyn bit her lip. “I’ll call you when I want to talk.” She got up, taking their plates over to bus tray, and went back to the last booth where the ketchups were still lined up in the V-shape. Walt was just coming through the kitchen door with his wind-breaker on and Scott was bundling up the receipts. Closing time, thought Max, rising where he could see over to the booth where Marilyn was.
The ketchup bottle in the V between the two lines was vibrating oddly, it seemed like its own quake zone. Marilyn put her hands on it, as if to make it stop and then turned to look over her shoulder to Max.
“Sssh,” was all she said.
CHAPTER FIVE
The Price of Plush
There had been a learning curve in the beginning for Gar. And his first sojourns were messy affairs as he learned just how far he could go and what he was willing to do to lift the curse that haunted him. Now he rarely looked back and, in fact, had a hard time remembering many of the details of his travels over time—only fragments of memories remained like pottery shards from a broken ancient urn etched with warriors unearthed on a far-away island. He remembered floating in the sea for a long time, and coming to a new shore, and then the hunger beginning all over again. He was always welcome at the start. He would be welcome here too. As he stood at the basement steps leading up to the main floor of the parish house with bags of rose food and blood meal in both hands, he breathed in the damp air deeply. The old parish priest had touched the source and
so he would be touched.
No-one had ever seen a garden grown wild be tamed so quickly. The tramp hacked and trimmed at the roses, impervious to their thorns, feeding them and spreading blood meal around their roots, so that when they bloomed in June there was sure to be a riotous profusion of color. He hauled the left-over stones that had littered a dark corner of the church basement since anyone could remember and made neat pathways, shoveling the dirt aside, spreading sand, and pressing the stones into place. For two days Gar worked feverishly, only pausing for meals, which Mrs. Napoli would leave for him on the kitchen table while giving dark looks to Father Weston when he questioned how long they were going to keep “the itinerant gardener.” Gar said very little and stuck to his work determined to make a good impression on the parish household.
On the third day Monsignor Lowell rose from his bed and, looking through his bedroom window, saw his garden being restored and declared himself pleased. On that day Gar took communion in the church at the 8AM Mass from Father Troy and was shown by Mrs. Napoli with some satisfaction to a proper bedroom with a real bed on the attic floor of the parish house. From his window there Gar could look out over Eldorado Street and the plain little modern city belching its processed crop fumes fed by the endless flat fields of corn and soybeans just beyond the Decatur city limits. This view offered great comfort to Gar because he knew out there somewhere was the source, and the old priest offered him the first clue as to where to find it.
Father Troy found himself humming snatches of “Peace Train” all that week. He hadn’t felt this good in a long time. At last he was engaged in the work that had led him into the priesthood - he was tending to God’s flock in an active way. Never mind that Father Weston bought him from Smith’s music store downtown the sheet music to “Fools Rush In”, he could keep his old school ways and snide remarks to himself. Gar was a lonely deep soul, a homeless vet in a cold uncaring world, and he needed help. Father Troy was answering the call and walking his talk.
Gar put his heart into everything he touched, thought Father Troy. It was spring carnival week at the parish, the biggest fundraising event all year for the school, and of course volunteers were short. All that week, Gar winked at the nuns as he bolted together the flimsy stalls made years ago by the Knights of Columbus. Picnic tables had to be unloaded and spread out over the asphalt playground and the rental tent set up for the school band and Pop’s Prairie Accordion Orchestra, a St. Pat’s spring carnival staple since the fifties, Father Weston said, overruling any new musical suggestions by Father Troy with a withering look. Father Troy lent Gar his bicycle that week so he could cycle all around town to make pick-ups of the borrowed Japanese lanterns and tablecloths which he would pile high in the wicker basket, looking almost like a happy overgrown teenager in his eagerness to help. But when the couple of hired carnies arrived with their two-bit games of chance and strength, Gar easily went from one to the other, smiling and lightly tapping their chests, laying down a kind of law. Even though the older bearded carnie was nearly the same size as Gar it was no contest as to who was the stronger. You could tell Gar had their number and wouldn’t be afraid to play it. Last year there had been some rumor of cheating: not any more. The carnival committee was glad for the help and while they viewed his vet status with the usual suspicions they were too short-handed to be anything but Midwestern nice.
That Saturday, the weather conspired to give St. Pat’s a perfect day for the fund-raiser and soon pick-up trucks, station wagons and sedans lined the streets around the church, parish house and grade school. Father Troy and Father Weston, both in long black frocks, milled around the crowds from their parish and the one across town, St. James’s. Father Troy kept his eye out for Gar, he didn’t want some insensitive soul to insult the parish guest but he needn’t have worried. Gar was in rare form, smiling widely as he strolled the carnival “grounds”. Father Troy was amazed how easily Gar won the classic “Ring the Bell, Win a Kewpie Doll” -- one swing and the bell rang like a five-alarm fire bell. And then Gar gave the doll to the first little girl he saw. The parishioners, wary at first of the big man, crowded around him as he tore through contests of strength and agility, putting something akin to respect even in the hardened hired small time carnies’ eyes. Everyone began calling him “Cigar” with easy familiarity as if they had all known each other for a long time and insisted he try the spicy mini hotdogs and chili that was the daring food feature of the ladies refreshment committee. Gar gamely downed three bowls to much admiration including a group of young married women, with their bright head-scarves and beads, Father Troy noted with the faintest tinge of jealousy. And when Gar carried the old Monsignor down the parish house steps and put him gently into a plastic lawn chair in his rose garden so he could visit with the old timers, Father Troy couldn’t help but think that the stranger was giving them far more than they were giving him.
The carnival was just beginning to wind down as the first pink streaks appeared like spun candy trails in the spring sky. Little Rhonda Cleary, the only daughter of Chris and Suzanne of Cleary’s Dry-Cleaning, had been sucking up to the young pony-tailed carnie with the orange and turquoise plush animals that were the prizes for the bull’s eye and bowling pin game all afternoon. Rhonda was used to getting her way, and the carnie’s deaf ears to her pleading for just one of the littlest aqua bears to take home drove her nearly insane. She had long naturally-blond platinum hair that everyone loved and at thirteen her body was as tight as a rosebud. When, exasperated, he finally whispered the going price in her shell-like ear, she didn’t even blink. Rhonda had figured out already that life was a series of exchanges, and if he wanted her to kiss him behind the booth for one of the medium sized blue bears, so be it.
The pony-tailed carnie had tight blue jeans on and pointed black boots and his polyester shirt was open halfway down his hairless chest. He pulled little Rhonda out of sight of the thinning crowds behind the booths where the straw, packing carts, and thick electric cords plugged into a what looked like an oversized car battery made a messy backstage for this two-bit school carnival. The carnie impatiently pushed her to her knees onto the straw and, looking both ways, unzipped his fly. The brass zipper made a ripping sound, like another world opening up. Big blue and red bulbs were now lit overhead and little Rhonda could hear the other older bearded carnie yelling, “Don’t miss your Chance. Everybody Wins.” Rhonda felt dizzy suddenly as the pony-tailed man fished what looked like a thick pink eyeless snake out of his jeans and pointed, grinning. The straw was sticking uncomfortably into her knees and she wanted to get up but his hand was pressing the back of her head, pushing it down towards the blind upward-rising snake.
“You want the bear, dontcha? Well, this here kiss is called a blow job,” was all he said.
Her hair fell like a silky cream veil on either side of the snake, and Rhonda felt a moaning sound gurgling up from her throat as it came to her in a chaotic stream of playground misinformation what was going on even as her head was forced steadily downwards and onto the carnie’s penis. The words blow job flashed over and over in her mind as he pushed himself into her mouth and some picture of her first grade nun Sister Theresa crossing herself replaced blow job, and then without really meaning to little Rhonda with her tiny pearly teeth bit down, not hard really but in a warning sort of a way, like a pet might do when unhappy. In a flash and a muffled swearing scream, the carnie pulled back the snake, slapping Rhonda’s face away, his zipper whizzing up and kicking her away. Little Rhonda fell onto her side breathing hard. A large aqua plush bear was not worth this, was all she thought.
She sat on the stone steps leading up to a side entrance of the church for awhile, shaking and, well, she knew the word, pissed. Across the playground she could see her mother and father talking to Father Troy. It was almost dark and the big man she heard called Gar was helping the two carnies, the skinny awful one and the bearded brown-haired one, load their truck. They seemed in a hurry. Finally she got up and went over to her parents and
said in her clearest voice, “Daddy, ask that carnie with the pony-tail what he did to me. He called it a blow job.”
There was a pause then. Her father, a blond puffy man with no eyelashes and a fondness for loud flowered shirts, sputtered, “What are you talking about, Rhonda?” Her mother, quicker, she was always quicker, said in a high tight voice, “Father Troy, get them men to wait. Now!”
Father Troy felt the blood rush to his cheeks and he looked at Rhonda with a sense of horror. Where was Father Weston, it should be him calling out to the carnies, he was the senior priest, not him. Mrs. Cleary’s hand grabbed his forearm in a deathlike grip as he heard the doors slamming shut on the panel truck as it started up. “Gar!” Father Troy heard his voice shaking as he called out to him. Gar pivoted around on the balls of his feet to look at him as Little Rhonda Cleary broke into a tearful scream and the panel truck gunned it out onto Eldorado Street with the pony-tailed carnie at the wheel and running a red light with a turquoise stuffed bear upended on the dashboard. A horn blared as the truck barreled through and kept going.
Later in the parish office, with Father Weston and Father Troy both sitting behind the desk and the three Clearys in the chairs in front of them, they heard the story pretty much as it happened except for the part where Little Rhonda agreed to kiss the carnie in exchange for a plush stuffed animal. Father Weston looked grim as he thumbed through the rolodex for the archdiocese contact who had recommended the Big Top Entertainment from wouldn’t you know it Gary, Indiana, which had long since lost its Music Man reputation and had become a pretty terrible place with gangs moving in from the south side of Chicago. He said a prayer over the Clearys and reminded them that it probably wasn’t a good idea for anybody, least of all Rhonda, to blab about it. When Mrs. Cleary asked about the police Father Weston said that was one sure way of everyone knowing, what with the Decatur Herald having a direct line into the department. Father Troy was having a hard time concentrating as the Cat Stevens song “Oh, Baby Its a Wild World” was playing over and over in his mind. Father Weston hardly looked at him as he promised the Clearys that they would take the necessary steps to make sure that the pervert was no longer allowed to work any Catholic events in the entire country. Father Weston then congratulated Little Rhonda on keeping her purity intact, recommended five Hail Mary’s before bed as a tonic, and saw them out. It was then that Father Troy noticed Gar had been loitering outside the parish office.
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