Relic of Time

by Ralph McInerny

  Judith Lynch lived with her family in Fishers, a little town just north of Indianapolis, a commuter town. The house she lived in was a slight variation on all the others in the development, aluminum siding that rippled beneath Neal’s fingers as he stood at the door after pushing the bell. He could see the swing set in the backyard, and there was a trike and wagon in the driveway, which was why he had parked the rental at the curb. The door opened and a woman looked at him through the mesh of the screen door.

  “Neal Admirari. I phoned.”

  “But I said I didn’t want to see you.”

  “An understandable reaction. Something like this is hard to explain on the phone.”

  She had all but hung up on him when he called from Connecticut. She wanted her father to rest in peace. The screen door burst open and two kids emerged. Neal held the door while they exited and then went inside.

  “I smell coffee.”

  She made a face and then suddenly she smiled. “My, you’re persistent.”

  “With an idea like this it would be a mortal sin not to be persistent.” He had seen the Madonna on a table and the sprig of palm behind one of the framed pictures. “Was that your parish church I passed?”

  It was like the secret handclasp. Judith and her family were obviously good Catholics. That was the hook on which Neal hung the version of his project he outlined for Judith in the kitchen, at the table, sipping coffee.

  “Tell me about your father.”

  She brought albums to the table and turned the pages slowly, a sad smile on her face.

  “That your mother?”

  “She preceded Father in death.”

  It sounded like a line from the obituary. Maybe it was.

  “When was that?”

  She thought. “Six years ago.”

  “And your dad never married again?”

  “No!”

  Neal was thinking of the woman Lloyd had apparently met at the Whitehall just before heading for Mexico City. Given Judith’s reaction, he wasn’t going to bring that up. Eventually they got around to her father’s funeral. Judith put the visiting book from the mortuary on the table. She also had a list of those who had made memorial donations. He sat back when he saw Catherine Dolan’s name on the list. He tapped it with his finger. Judith was smiling.

  “Now that’s a story,” she said.

  “How so?”

  “We talked on the phone afterward.”

  This woman had been a childhood friend of her father’s. They had started to correspond and then they agreed to meet in Chicago.

  “She came to the funeral! Isn’t that something?”

  “It certainly is.”

  “The stories she told me of how they had talked and talked about when they were kids. She was devastated by what had happened to Daddy in Mexico City.”

  Neal was memorizing the address that Catherine had added to her name on the list.

  “Think if they hadn’t gotten together. That was what bothered Catherine, I think. How easily they might never have had the chance to talk about when they were kids.”

  Neal just shook his head at the mystery of life.

  “I can’t let you have these albums,” Judith said.

  “Of course not. Do you have negatives of some of these pictures of him?”

  “There are videos of the funeral.”

  “I would like to see those.”

  She lowered the blinds in the living room and hooked the video up to the television set. Neal watched as one watches other people’s home videos.

  “That’s her,” Judith cried. “That’s Catherine.”

  “Beautiful woman.”

  “Isn’t she?”

  Catherine Dolan was a tangent, but one Neal found irresistible. Unless the concierge at the Whitehall was given to imaginings, Lloyd and Catherine had done a thing or two besides reminisce about their childhood. A flawed martyr, a penitential visit to Our Lady of Guadalupe after several days in the sack with Catherine? What poignancy that would add to the story. Judith would never forgive him, but it was the bane of his profession to create enemies while insuring the public’s right to know. Even so, when he flew off to Minneapolis, he didn’t let Lulu know where he was going. Her reaction would be the twin of Judith’s.

  Before going to the apartment in a building overlooking Lake Calhoun, Neal researched Catherine Dolan on the Inter-net, not expecting anything. That there were entries at all was a surprise, but the number was astounding, thousands upon thousands. When he went to call on Catherine he knew all about her academic career, the patents she held. Lloyd’s childhood friend turned out to be a distinguished woman.

  There was an elderly woman in the lobby of the building emptying a mailbox. She smiled vaguely at Neal when she opened the door to him.

  “Do you know which apartment is Catherine Dolan’s?”

  This was going to be tricky. He had considered calling her before he came, but he just couldn’t come up with a convincing lie, and the true reason for his calling did not sound like an open sesame. Let’s talk about your fling at the Whitehall with Lloyd Kaiser. The woman had stepped back but she was still smiling.

  “This is her mail. She wants the bills sent to her.”

  “Then she’s moved?”

  “She’s away.”

  “Well, this is a disappointment. Where do you send her bills?”

  The little woman became wary. “Why do you ask?”

  Neal gave her an account of his visit to Indianapolis, of Judith’s reaction to the appearance of her father’s childhood friend at the funeral. He told her he was a writer who was considering a piece on Lloyd.

  “He was killed in Mexico City, you know.”

  Her mouth opened in surprise. “No.”

  Neal nodded. “It’s a very romantic story.”

  Before he left he had the address to which the little old lady sent Catherine’s bills. Napa Valley! Care of Professor Jason Phelps. After he researched Phelps, Neal knew he was going to California.

  VII

  “Good bread.”

  George called Lowry, asking if it would be all right if he extended his vacation.

  “Everything’s under control. Relax, get some rest.”

  With George, that was like telling a model husband to go beat his wife. The kid was too intense. You can’t last at anything if you’re too intense. Lowry was getting a little R&R himself, a fifth of midway decent scotch, holed up in George’s office lest any of the guests decided to fall off the wagon with him. The one thing Lowry understood about his refound relation with God was that God is mercy. Feeding and shooting the bull with the vacant-eyed drunks and addicts who sat around the common room, avoiding the television screen, just breathing in and breathing out, waiting for the next meal to be dished out to them, Lowry told himself that they were what he looked like to God, if so good. This life was a life of penance to him, and the problem was it was easy. At first he thought it would be a temptation to feel superior to the guests, but that passed quickly. How many of them had a bottle of scotch stashed away and waited for nightfall and a serious session of solitary drinking?

  “How many guests do we have?” George asked.

  Lowry counted those sitting around. “All I could see from where I stood were three long mountains and a wood. . . .” He murmured the lines to George.

  “What’s that?”

  “Edna St. Vincent Millay.”

  “Don’t know her.”

  “She never answers my letters.”

  Careful, careful. He never knew if George suspected that he dropped back into his old habits from time to time, just to remember where he had been. Millay. He had read her life; a real dingbat but an almost perfect poet. Like most people who couldn’t stand themselves, she got into political agitation. Dorothy Parker was another. If you can’t change yourself, change the world. Lowry knew the feeling. Most of his life had been a long vacation from himself and now, more or less reac-quainted with the person he was and couldn’t abide,
he needed a little respite. The human race cannot stand very much reality. Sapienza understood that.

  The bishop of Santa Ana had a decade on him, more or less, and liked to grumble about the fact that he had to write a letter of resignation when he hit seventy-five.

  “When they accept it, I’m going to do what you do.”

  Well, maybe he would. The trouble was that Sapienza was a lot like George, a repressed optimist where good works were concerned. Both of them secretly believed that bums would seek a job, drunks dry out, and addicts go cold turkey and . . . And then what? Religion as the opium of nonaddicts? Lowry smiled and brought a match to his pipe. It gurgled like a water pipe. He should clean it out. But it would only get tarred up again. Besides, it tasted better this way.

  He had an hour before he had to begin fixing the evening meal. After he put down the phone, he relaxed in George’s desk chair. There was a pile of pages beside the typewriter. Lowry picked them up and began to read. He got halfway through a page and returned it to the pile. George was a romantic, no doubt about it.

  Later, when he got the stew going, causing a ripple of interest in the common room as its fragrance drifted out there, Lowry almost liked the thought that he was in charge. The truth was that he was happy enough to be George’s right arm or whatever, and he never felt that the fate of the house depended on him. Maybe that was what got to George. No, it was the girl, Clare Ibanez. Lowry could have told George that a girl like that would never settle into this kind of work. The trick was not to consider it a life sentence. George had been surprised when Lowry told him he hadn’t taken solemn vows to live this life forever and ever. He had a done a lot already and maybe that was all he was meant to do. Lowry remembered that when he was George’s age he was all afire for the coming revolution, enlisted for life, and look at him now.

  From the kitchen he saw the car come into the lot, a new car, probably someone come to make a donation, look around as if in envy at this noble work, and then get the hell out of here. But the big guy who got out of the car and stretched was Traeger. Lowry watched him come to the door, still agile as ever, taking everything in. Traeger came through the door and Lowry came around the hot table, wiping his hands on his apron.

  “Sorry, we’re all full up.”

  “I know what you’re full of.”

  They shook hands. “How long before you’re free?”

  “You want to talk? I can’t leave here. I’m in charge.”

  Traeger looked around. “Here will be fine.”

  “You can have some stew. Stew and bread.”

  “Did you make it?”

  “Of course I made it. I’m the chef.”

  After the guests went through the line, Lowry filled bowls for Traeger and himself and they sat at the end of one of the tables.

  “Good bread.”

  “Day old. Maybe more. We get it for nothing.”

  Afterward Traeger helped with the dishes. KP. When the kitchen was spick-and-span, everything put away, and most of the guests had drifted off to the residences, they went into George’s office and got comfortable.

  “How far would I have to go for a drink?”

  “How far can you reach?” He brought out the bottle.

  They had several drinks before they got around to Traeger’s reason for stopping by.

  “I’ve been hired to do something and I don’t know how to do it. I don’t even know if it’s still to be done.”

  Lowry waited. He could see how much that admission cost Traeger.

  “That picture that was stolen from the church in Mexico City.”

  “There are a million reproductions of it. Turn in one of those.”

  “The original is on the back of a cape that is five or six hundred years old.”

  “Theophilus Grady didn’t have it?”

  “That’s his story.”

  “Don’t you believe him?”

  Traeger thought about it. “Normally I wouldn’t. But if the point was just to raise a little hell, he’s done that. So why wouldn’t he turn it over?” A pause while he sipped. “I think that maybe he did.”

  “Maybe he never had it.”

  Traeger sighted at him over the rim of his glass. They were drinking out of jelly jars. “You sound as if you know something.”

  “Arroyo.”

  Lowry felt the way he had years before when Traeger had debriefed him about his radical days. Traeger considered the answer, filed it away, and they went back to drinking.

  “This is pretty bad scotch.”

  “Day old. Like our bread.”

  There was maybe a drink left in the bottle when they called it a night. Traeger just looked at Lowry when he told him he could give him a bed in the men’s residence. Lowry went outside into the parking lot with him. The lights of the rental blinked when Traeger pressed the key.

  “You sure you should drive?”

  “There’s a motel a mile up the road.” He pulled open the car door but before getting in, turned to Lowry.

  “Thanks.”

  For the scotch? For suggesting he get on to Miguel Arroyo? Maybe both.

  It was in the motel up the road that Traeger received the summons to return to Washington.

  VIII

  “I’ll make lunch.”

  The letter from Judith was forwarded from Minneapolis, which was something of a surprise since Catherine had asked only that her bills be sent on. When she left for California it had been late in the month, and she hated to have unpaid bills. It wasn’t that she realized then how extended her absence would be. There were photographs of Lloyd in the envelope, several memorial cards, and a letter telling Catherine about the very nice author who was planning a book on her father. “It’s where and how he died that fascinates him. He finds it symbolic or something. He can explain it to you when he talks with you.”

  Catherine threw down the letter angrily. When he talks with me?

  “Bad news?” Jason asked, looking up from his desk.

  “Not really. A letter from a woman in Indianapolis.”

  He shrugged and went back to his book. Well, why should he be interested in a letter from Judith? Why should she? It dawned on her that the only address Judith could have given the author was that of her Minneapolis apartment where she had sent her letter. She picked up the envelope and half slid the photographs of Lloyd from it. She tried to stir up memories of the Whitehall, but all that seemed centuries ago now. The cure she had come for was all but complete.

  But Judith’s letter haunted her day. The memories of Chicago began to come back, as sweet and sad as ever. It was her parting from Lloyd that was even more vivid than their lovemaking. How tender he had been. And in his eyes she thought she read the promise that those few days together were only a beginning. She could almost believe that he had gone off to the shrine in Mexico City to thank Our Lady of Guadalupe for bringing back his youthful love. That was so much more welcome a thought than that he had fled there out of remorse and shame.

  The kind of remorse and shame Catherine was beginning to feel about living with Jason. He was a very demanding person to work for, never commenting on what she did, certainly never thanking her or praising her. Of course he regarded it as an enormous privilege to work with so distinguished a scholar. No doubt that was why he showed so little curiosity about her career. Catherine had never read anthropology before, and if Jason was the best there was, she didn’t consider it a very demanding field. All this fuss and bother about the customs of primitive tribes. Of course, that seemed largely an excuse for the hidden allegory beneath it all. We are all primitives. But are we? Catherine considered herself a sophisticated modern woman. She was not mirrored in the stupid eyes of all those bare-breasted females. What do old women have between their breasts that young women don’t? A navel. She laughed aloud. How Lloyd had laughed. The joke had drawn from him an admiring comment about her own still firm, full breasts. Her hand rose dreamily, but she brought it to the beads she wore. If she closed her eyes she c
ould feel Lloyd’s hand on her breasts, recall his eagerness. Oh, God, those had been lovely days. She told herself that she would even have become a Catholic again for Lloyd if . . . if!

  When she went back inside, she sat at the table in Jason’s study that she used to work on his papers, but the task had suddenly lost its savor. Across the room, those huge gnarled hands at the sides of his head, Jason sniffled as he read. It was a habit; he didn’t have a cold. The sniffling was a kind of punctuation. How annoying it was. An old man reviewing the scholarly work of his lifetime. Would anyone else be as interested in it as he was? She stood.

  “I’ll make lunch.”

  She had to repeat it as she left the study. The old voice called after her, “It’s not yet eleven thirty.”

  She ignored him. She just had to get out of the study and away from him. What in hell was she doing here? The great skeptic would cure her of the attraction she had felt at Lloyd’s funeral, the liturgy measuring out her feelings, giving them direction, a direction she had been sure she had lost? That had been the reason behind her visit. And it had worked, more or less. She had slept with Jason out of gratitude. Now, in the kitchen, the thought of those great gnarled hands moving over her body as he sniffled in appreciation filled her with disgust. But it had seemed part of her cure.

  After lunch, he started toward his room. “Time for my nap.” He looked at her with those large, liquid eyes. He was asking her to join him, as she often did.

  “I’m going to visit Clare,” she lied.

  “Couldn’t it wait?”

  His eyes were almost pleading. She followed him up the stairs like a wife.

  Later, she surprised Clare by asking if she could see the church out back again.

  “Of course.”

  “It reminds me of him.”

  Clare nodded. “George is here.”

  “Oh, I’m keeping you from him.”

  “He’s with my father.”

  But when they entered the replica of that great round church in Mexico City, the two men were there, in the front, looking up at the image of Our Lady of Guadalupe. Don Ibanez turned and beckoned them forward. He took Catherine’s hand.