by The Priest
Father Bryce had yet to play through Gerhardt’s latest tirade from beginning to end. It seemed to take up most of the tape on the answering machine and included a reading of the nuncio’s entire letter and of Gerhardt’s three obsequious replies. Gerhardt could test one’s patience even more than one’s charity.
Thinking of such matters was somehow cheering. It returned Father Bryce to his ordinary parish problems and gave him something to fix his mind on besides the larger bind he was in. For years he’d dealt with his guilty mornings-after by acting as though the night before hadn’t happened, by turning his thoughts to other matters, by trying to bring a kind of zeal to business-as-usual. He had often observed the same behavior in those who came to confession to him, which afforded a kind of sanction: He was dealing with his sins just as other sinners dealt with theirs. It was humbling to know that he was no better than the most peccant of his flock.
After Mass, he was thankful that there was no altar boy on hand and that he could remove his vestments without having to keep up a stoic front. He could wince and flinch and grimace as the different customary motions of disrobing provoked different uncustomary pains. The wadded gauze bandages taped to his chest and abdomen protected his raw flesh from the direct abrasion of his clothing as he lifted his arm, or bent over, or turned sideways, but the pain was now more than skindeep. He felt as though his flesh were being roasted, as though he were covered with Ben-Gay that had gone nuclear. He knew he was running a fever, but he didn’t want to take his temperature for fear of finding out he was dangerously feverish. It occurred to him, for the first time, that medical examinations would be problematical in the future, for he couldn’t let a doctor see his tattoo. He couldn’t go swimming (but then he hadn’t been swimming in several years) or go into saunas.
But his sex life might not actually change that much. It was not something he cared to think about right now (it was his sex life that had got him into this situation), but the thought offered some faint comfort even as he tried to fix his attention elsewhere.
He went to his office in the rectory, where there was a thermos of coffee waiting for him and a plate of four Oreos, as, thanks to Mrs. Daly, there was every morning after Mass. “Give us this day our Daly bread,” he would quip when he came upon the housekeeper in the act of putting the plate of cookies by his phone, and she would always pretend to be shocked, as though he’d told a racy story or been caught in a small blasphemy, a “goddamn” or “oh hell.”
Just as he’d poured his first cup of coffee and taken the first crisp bite of an Oreo, the phone rang. Not the rectory phone, his private line. He stared at the phone, counting the rings, and when it had rung ten times he answered with his most neutral “Hello.”
It was, as he’d known it would be, his tormentor.
“Hi there, Father, it’s Clay. How you feeling today? A little tender from the needlework?”
His throat had grown dry, and he was unable to swallow the bolus of thick, sugary paste that the Oreo had become. He moistened his tongue with the coffee and managed to say, “Hello, Clay.”
“Is that it? Hello? You didn’t answer my question, Father. Or it’s Damon now, isn’t it? Damon the Demon.”
He tried to form a simple statement that yes, he was sore, but it was not just the dryness of his throat that prevented him but a paralyzing constriction of his chest, as though he were in the grip of some huge clawed hand squeezing the breath from his lungs. He knew exactly what he was feeling: lust, intensified by fear. A feeling that Clay had roused in him almost from the moment they’d met at the after-hours club in Stillwater. Now just the sound of Clay’s vpice could have the same effect on him.
Clay chuckled, as though he’d confessed his thoughts aloud. “So, tell me, I’m dying to know—did you get off on it? Did you and Wolf have a scene?”
“I did just what I’d been told I had to do, Clay. No more, no less.”
“There’s no hurry. You take your time with Wolf. The two of you’ll be clocking a lot of hours together. And I realize he’s older than you generally get off on. By how much? About forty years?”
Father Bryce made no reply to the taunt. There was none he could have made. If the taunt had not been true, if Clay had not possessed the most damning and irrefutable evidence of its truth, Father Bryce would not have had to submit to his blackmail.
“To get serious for a moment, Father—I can’t seem to get over the habit of calling you Father—the organization isn’t doing this to punish you. I hope you understand that. It’s just the same as the kind of penance you deal out in the confessional. More drastic, but the same basic idea. Reformation. Maybe that’s a bad word for Catholics. But the idea is, you’ve got some flaws of character, and we’re going to help you reform so you won’t have those flaws.
You don’t want to be a pedophile, do you, Father?”
After a pause, Clay insisted: “Do you?”
“No,” said Father Bryce.
“Of course not. No one would. It’s a shameful and degrading vice. Also rather ridiculous in its way. It obviously represents some kind of arrested development, doesn’t it?”
When Father Bryce did not reply, Clay said, “These are not rhetorical questions, Father. When I ask you a question, I expect an answer.”
Father Bryce forced himself to take a deep breath. Then he said, “Yes, you’re right. All the psychology texts would agree—arrested development.”
“Psychology texts? That’s just another kind of bullshit, Father. Do you think there’d still be all these sexual perverts around preying on thirteen-year-olds if psychology or psychiatry or Sigmund fucking Freud knew shit about anything? That is how old the Kramer kid was, right?”
Father Bryce closed his eyes as a means of denying his tears. “He was fourteen.”
“Yeah, fourteen when he committed suicide, but thirteen when you got your first blow job from him. Right, Father?”
“I stand corrected.”
“You sure as hell do, Father. Correction’s going to be your middle name.
Now, let me ask you this: Have you been reading the literature?”
“Not thoroughly.”
“You’ve been too busy? You’ve had a fair while now, Father. And you keep saying, ‘Yes, I’m going to read it.’ Then the next time I call, you still haven’t got to it. It’s very important for you to become acquainted with the literature, Father.”
“I confess I have difficulties.”
“That’s an understatement, Father. But I guess you meant a different kind of difficulty. Like, you got a problem accepting some of the ideas, is that it?”
“That would sum it up pretty well.”
“But you believe in all that Catholic bullshit, right? The Virgin Birth.
Jesus coming back to life. Noah’s ark. All kinds of miracles. The devil.
You’ll buy all that, but you can’t believe in UFOs? You think we’re all there is in the whole universe?”
“Not necessarily. But I have to say that much of what I’ve read in Mr.
Boscage’s book strikes me as… invention.”
“Science fiction is what a lot of his enemies call it.”
“That is what he was known for initially, I gather.”
“That’s because at first he didn’t realize where his ideas were coming from. He explains that in chapter one of the Prolegomenon. Have you read that far?”
“Yes.”
“So, how much have you read?”
“Up to the point where he learns he was a Roman centurion in an earlier existence.”
“And there is proof of that, Father. There is a tape that you can listen to. There is a session where Boscage was regressed back to his identity as Gaius Lucius, and he talked in Latin, very clearly, for about ten minutes.
And what do you think he’s talking about? The Lupinids. So how do you explain that away? Boscage never studied Latin. He didn’t go to fucking high school.”
Father Bryce could think of no reply. Boscage’s
book, A Prolegomenon to Receptivist Science, was a virtual anthology of New Age absurdities and an obvious hoax by a rather unsophisticateçl hoaxer. To argue against it was as hopeless a task as bailing water out of a ruptured boat.
The problem was that he was a passenger in that boat and the boat was in deep water. Clay was a true-believing Receptivist, and he was determined that Father Bryce was to join him in his folly. If only his blackmailer had been motivated by simple greed, or even malice.
“So, I asked you a question, Father, and I’m waiting for an answer.”
He sighed. “There is no explanation that I can think of.”
“Hey, now we’re making some progress. You keep reading the book. And think about it. ‘Cause it is relevant to what is going on with you. These things don’t happen by chance. Your little hustler didn’t kill himself because you were abusing him sexually, Father. Somehow the Lupinids are involved in this. I don’t know how but somehow.”
Father Bryce said nothing.
Clay seemed satisfied. “I gotta go now, Father. I expect you got things to do, too. But I’ll be checking in same time next week to hear how the tattoo is progressing. Give my regards to old Wolf.”
“I’ll do that.”
The line went dead.
Father Bryce realized that there were tears in his eyes—and, at the same time, such rage in his heart that if Clay had been here in this room with him he would have bludgeoned him to death with the telephone receiver. He would have done it joyfully.
But Clay was not here, and Father Bryce had no idea where to begin to look for him. Murder was not a possibility open to him. And he hadn’t the strength for suicide.
He was trapped. There was nothing he could do, if he wished Clay not to send the incriminating videotape to the police and the media, except to submit to his demands, however lunatic, however grotesque.
7
It was a miracle that she was still alive.
For a while she just lay there on the bed blissfully unaware of anything but her gratitude at having been spared. By rights she should be dead. There was the empty pill bottle weighing down her suicide note on the table by the bed, the almost empty water glass beside it. If she were a painter she would have painted them as a still life, and it would have been more beautiful than any painting of a vase of flowers, for the sunlight seemed fairly to explode from them. They were chandeliers of sheer joy.
She was alive. Thank you, sweet Jesus.
She pulled herself out of the bed and knelt beside it and said a formal prayer of thanks, a Hail Mary to balance the Hail Mary she’d said in her last moments of consciousness after taking the pills. Then she had begged only Mary’s forgiveness for her terrible sin, and Mary had answered the prayer with the gift of her whole life.
Yet, in a way, hadn’t it also been the Virgin who had got her into the pickle she was in?
No sooner had she framed the ungrateful question than the light in the room seemed to dim, and the pill bottle and the water glass beside it shrank into their ordinary geometric shapes and ceased to transmit the message of redemption and hope that briefly had seemed to glow from them like the neon gas inside a bulb.
She knew that heaven worked like that, that you could see it only in glimpses, like a beam of sunlight darting out from clouds and then disappearing the moment you saw it. There was never time to point it out even to someone right beside you. It was there and then it was gone, but while it was there you knew that you were in touch with something out of the ordinary.
God had touched you.
Now it was gone, and she was in the same situation that had made her want to kill herself… how long ago? Her alarm clock said ninethirty, and she’d taken the pills at two in the morning, after Greg had hung up.
The marriage was off. Greg had said things that could never be forgiven.
Worse than that, he’d forced her to say things she couldn’t believe she’d said. He’d tried to make her choose between the Church and marrying him. And it all had to do with what the old priest had said two nights ago at St.
Bernardine’s parish hall about the Virgin Mary and contraception. Greg had said all the Church’s teachings were just a way of getting people trapped into marriage and breeding lots of babies, so there’d be more and more Catholics.
He’d said he’d never wanted her to have the baby, that they were both too young to be saddled with being parents. And in a way she could agree. She was seventeen, he was twenty-four: They were too young, in some ways. It would have interfered with Greg’s continuing at the U, where he was getting a degree in business administration, and it would make it difficult if not impossible for Alison to graduate from high school.
But if they had really been too young, she wouldn’t have become pregnant. As Father Cogling had told her privately, in the confessional, the pregnancy was God’s way of showing her what He wanted. It had been just the same when the Angel had come to Mary to tell her she would bear the babyJesus.
Not exactly the same, of course, since Jesus had been conceived without sin—without even sex, according to the Church—while the baby inside of Alison was the result of a mortal sin. But it was the same in terms of her having to accept what God had shown he wanted: a new soul. And what Alison and Greg wanted for themselves didn’t matter that much by comparison.
At first Greg had gone along with that idea, but the night after the instruction class where he’d got so sarcastic with Father Cogling, he’d come around to the trailer after Alison’s mom had gone off to her night job at the hospital. He was already drunk at eight o’clock, and he had proceeded to get more drunk, and he’d insisted on arguing with her like they were having some kind of debate, and suddenly it was Alison’s job to defend every ridiculous thing the Church said you had to believe in, from Mary’s being a virgin even after Christmas to birth control being a sin that would send you to hell even if you had AIDS and were wearing a condom to protect your wife—an example that Greg had posed to Father Cogling, which at the time had made Alison wonder if Greg was worried he had AIDS. But he wasn’t; it was just his way of arguing. He always looked for the exception to every rule.
Finally, around ten o’clock, drunk and belligerent, he’d given Alison his ultimatum: Leave the Church or forget the wedding.
At that point she’d told him to get out of the trailer. “Does that mean good-bye?” he’d asked, and she’d said, “I can’t leave the Church.” “So that’s that,” he said. “Fuck it.”
That was the last thing he’d said, and when she tried to phone him at his home two hours later, after he’d had time to cool off, he hung up as soon as he heard her voice.
So that was the end of everything. Of the wedding. Of getting away from the trailer and her mom, whose drinking and drugging had been getting worse every day. The end, almost, of her life.
One good thing had come of it. She knew with absolute certainty that no matter what awful mess she might get into in the future, she would never, ever do such a dumb thing again as try to kill herself. She knew it the moment she’d come to, when her first thought was: I could have gone dogsledding.
All her life, ever since she’d read The Call of the Wild, she’d dreamt of going up to the area north of Duluth to go dogsledding. Greg actually had a friend in Boy River who took people on dogsledding trips, camping out overnight on frozen lakes and fishing through the ice. If she had killed herself, she would never have been able to realize that dream. Or anything else she’d ever wanted to do. She would never know how things worked out on General Hospital. She would never know what she might look like as a redhead, supposing she could ever get up the nerve to dye her hair. There were hundreds of things she’d never do or know about, and all because she’d had the imbecile idea of killing herself with her mom’s sleeping pills. Jesus, she was lucky.
The fact remained that she was also in deep trouble. Never mind the embarrassment of calling off the wedding. That would be no great loss. They hadn’t been able to afford anything especiall
y wonderful. No caterers, no reception, not even a bridal gown rental, since there wouldn’t be anyone to see her wear it. The ceremony wouldn’t have been in the main church, which was also awfully expensive, but in the chapel around to the side—the wedding equivalent to the kind of funeral they give to suicides or homeless people—and in a way Alison was relieved not to have to go through the motions of pretending to be the radiant bride. It would have been like one of her wretched birthdays, with little candles stuck in Hostess cupcakes and her mom woozy with booze and self-pity. Who needs that kind of celebration?
No, her real problem was the one located inside, and not inside her mind. Inside her uterus.
She did not want the baby. Not if it meant living here in the trailer with her mom, instead of marrying Greg and having her own place to live. Not if it meant dropping out of school and wasting all the time she’d clocked in, including the whole summer when she’d taken the makeup course in algebra.
Not if it meant becoming someone like her mom. Alison was grateful to her mom. She’d made real sacrifices in bringing up Alison all by herself. But it had taken a terrible toll. And it would do the same to Alison, because she wasn’t that different. After twenty years of unemployment or jobs waitressing or changing bedpans, with boyfriends and booze as the only antidotes to the drudgery, Alison would be another Lila. At thirty-seven, while other women still looked like movie stars, she’d be a fat, bitter, alcoholic failure with a child who couldn’t think about her without feeling ashamed.
Abortion? Could she really be thinking of an abortion? Pious Miss Sanders, who’d taken such shit from her classmates when she’d been seen on TV
