John D MacDonald - One More Sunday

by One More Sunday(Lit)

  As Rolf took out his pen to sign the approval sheet, Charley stood up and said, "I guess I'll take my dirty mouth out of these sanctified environs, guys. Someday, Reverend Wintergarten, I want you to tell me where you get your shirts stuffed. See you, Joseph."

  As soon as the door closed behind him, Wintergarten jumped up and said, "Why do they keep that man on? He's disgusting!"

  "You know the answer as well as I do."

  "What answer? He's coarse and irreverent."

  "All his life Charley has had the knack of making friends, good friends. He has good friends in county government, in the city council, in the state legislature, in both houses of Congress and in a lot of the executive branches. And regardless of what you think of him, Rolf, he is one of the most likable men I've ever known."

  "Not to me."

  "Let me give you some advice. Charley and Clyde have been with the old man for over twenty years. Whatever it is between you two, it's chemical. Too bad. You're both good men. If push comes to shove, you are the one they'll have to dump."

  Rolf stared at him.

  "You're serious?"

  "Absolutely. So try to like him."

  "I can't."

  "Lately you're not acting like yourself."

  "What is that supposed to mean?"

  "It's an observation, pure and simple. You seem irritable and edgy. If there's something you want to tell anybody about here I am, a certified man of the cloth."

  "There's nothing especially wrong, Joe. I keep getting involved in a lot of small idiotic problems. I could shed a lot of them if I could find an assistant good enough to take some of the load. Leases to renegotiate, key people off sick, and this damned weather, hot as furnaces, going on forever, it seems."

  "Summer can't go on forever. Nothing goes on forever. And if you stay patient, problems tend to go away in time."

  He saw a sudden wetness of tears in Wintergarten's eyes before the man turned away and walked across the office.

  "You're probably right," he said.

  "Don't try to force things. Just ride with the tide."

  Thanks, Joe. Thanks for the advice. I'll... try to make myself unwind, let down a little."

  Joe watched him. Wintergarten was moving slowly, shoulders slumped. Forgotten for the time being was his recent practice of moving quickly. Quick turns of the head. Macho swing of the shoulders. Rapid gestures. It was a contrived body language designed to match the blow-dried hair, the magic drugstore tint. Fifty years old aad into the second year of marriage to a twenty-six-year-old woman. Joe guessed that he had become suspicious of her. With cause. But too frightened of losing her to risk the sly investigations which would prove him cuckold.

  Joe Deets had predicted the problem halfway through the party given by the Meadows family in the main lounge of the Manse a week after Rolf Wintergarten had brought his bride into the community, some three years after his childless wife, Angela, had died of electrocution when a sudden southern thunderstorm had draped live wires across her Mustang. Joe had liked Angela. She had been a narrow-faced, narrow bodied woman with a wry perspective on the world, and a knack of making her somber husband seem almost lighthearted. Molly was quite different. Round face, big round breasts worn high, fatty little mouth, Boston accent and a direct and challenging look.

  Halfway through the party Joe Deets had found himself alone with her, over by the slate fireplace. They looked at each other and they carried on one of those prefabricated conversations. I think you will like it here... I certainly hope I will, everybody seems so nice... We do get a lot of hot weather...

  I don't mind it hot; I hate snow and ice... I think you'll like the people here... They have been wonderful to me; I can see why Rolf enjoys it so much...

  They made their mouths move, saying inanities, while they looked out of their caves, appraising each other, speculating two beasts on either slope of a deep ravine, lifting their muzzles to snuff all aromas, no matter how faint.

  Yes, he had decided at the time. I could manage it. We could manage it. With care and guile. Not now, but within a couple of months. But not worth it. Too much risk for too little reward. The eyes had looked up and out at him from under the black curl of the thick bangs, and the tiny pink tongue tip had moistened a corner of the small mouth. Someday, maybe.

  Depending.

  Now, well over a year later, Deets had been hearing rumors.

  Nothing really specific. Sly wink.

  "Rolf's got maybe a little more than he can handle there."

  As he walked back through the Mall, toward the exit where he had left his bicycle, he came face to face with a dark-haired young woman as she came hurrying out of a discount shoe store, carrying purse and shopping bag. She had an outsized mass of dark hair curled into small tight ringlets. She wore the white blouse, dark skirt and sensible shoes required of all female staff during duty hours at Administration, Communications and the University.

  As she gasped and jumped back in surprise, he cried, "Patsy!

  How great to see you! You're looking fantastic!"

  "Sure, Joe. Sure. I'm really, really great," she replied, sour and accusatory.

  "But I mean it!" he said, striving for conviction and almost but not quite succeeding. Patsy Knox had dark circles under her eyes and there were new lines bracketing her red mouth.

  "How are you doing, Patsy?"

  "How do you think I'm doing, you son of a bitch!"

  "Hey!"

  "Hey what? You got me moved over to that rotten Student Affairs Office. You got me moved off the kind of work I really like. You wouldn't return a phone call or answer a letter or anything. You humiliated me, you rotten little bastard!"

  "Keep it down! Look, let's have a doughnut and coffee."

  "I've got to get back. We're working on the files."

  "What's ten minutes more? It's Sunday."

  She thought, shrugged, said, "Why not?"

  Where two corridors intersected there were small Formica tables behind a Chinese-red railing, and a self-service counter.

  It was like a small outdoor cafe indoors. He brought their tray back to the table where she waited.

  As soon as he was seated she said, "I only said yes to this because it gives me a chance to tell you how bad you hurt me."

  At least she was keeping her voice down. For that he was grateful. He shook his head sadly.

  "Patsy, Patsy, what kind of an attitude is that?"

  "What kind do you expect? At first I was so damn dumb I thought you were really too busy all of a sudden to have any time for me. Joe, you came after me and you seduced me, and when there wasn't any more novelty to it, you dropped me like a hot rock. I learned a lot from you, pal."

  The doughnut had given her a powdered-sugar mustache.

  He took her wrist and she yanked it away and said, "And then I heard about Doreen. Look, I was a little young for you. But that kid, my God, Joseph."

  He grabbed her wrist again and held tight as she tried to pull away.

  "Listen to me. What we had together was very beautiful, Patsy. It was beautiful and it was important to me. You came along at just the right time in my life. We were very special, so special that we burned it all out too quickly. When things are over, people sense that they are over. You knew it and I knew it. And I won't let you spoil it for us at this late date, cheapen it, turn it into something it wasn't."

  "My God, you're really good, aren't you?"

  "My memories of you are precious. I wish you wouldn't try to spoil all that for both of us. I hate what you are doing to yourself."

  "And I hate you!"

  "Hate is corrosive. It destroys. You can't carry that much hate around inside you, Patsy, without harming yourself. And you are such a wonderful person, I just don't want to see you like this..."

  "What you are is a lying sneak."

  "I did not have you transferred. When it happened I suddenly realized it would be the best solution for both of us, so we wouldn't keep running into each other a do
zen times a day.

  You have to believe me, Patsy darling. I know I hurt you, but it was done out of kindness, to keep from hurting you over a much longer period. I did love you, you know. Don't ever forget that."

  She looked back into his eyes and he saw the fat tears form and spill. He felt the tension go out of the muscles in her forearm and wrist. He slid his hand down to enfold her hand.

  She took a deep shuddering breath.

  "Joe, where did we go wrong?"

  "The flaw is in me, not in you. A failure of constancy, I guess.

  I can't seem to ever give myself completely to anyone. I tried with you. I really did."

  "I almost believe you, Joseph," she said.

  "Please try."

  She put her Styrofoam cup down on the tray and stared at him and then, to his astonishment, gave him a wide strange grin, a savage grimace behind the tears.

  She stood up and said, "No matter what, remember that I would never have done it if you hadn't cut me off so completely."

  "Done what?"

  "What I knew I had to do."

  And she fled, almost running, leaving him sitting alone, filled with alarm. He watched her, and even as he was telling himself there was nothing she could do to damage him in any way, another part of his mind was taking a cool measurement of her, comparing her to all the memories of the others, realizing that even though he now retained the most specific and detailed memories of her every contour, every elegance, every blemish, in time these uniquenesses would blend into the general memory of all the others, would be submerged into acres of breasts, fields of buttocks, thickets of lips, forests of hair, and the huge, mournful, chanting choir of all their random sounds of love.

  He dumped her half doughnut and the rest of the disposables into the hinged slot in the big orange bin. He felt suddenly weary, almost to the point of depression, and found himself half hoping that Doreen would not find it possible to sneak out this evening for their customary Sunday assignation.

  She was, as Patsy had pointed out, very, very young. She was so young she made him feel a foreigner in a strange country, having so little of the language that all he could talk about with her was the weather.

  Five

  The old man was in the worn tapes tried wing chair by the windows when the Reverend Sister Mary Margaret Meadows came to see him after lunch. He was facing away from the big television set. The sound was off. On the screen motorcycles leaped silently from sandy knolls and churned through dark puddles, spraying sheets of water into the air.

  He was a part of her life, an important and ineradicable piece of a lifelong past, now somehow washed ashore here on another planet a less happy place. Seeing him dozing she could imagine that he would awaken, look quickly at her, spring out of the chair and be Poppa again as in the olden days, vibrant and laughing and strong. Those had been the days of gold, luminous in memory. Just the three kids, John the eldest, Paul the youngest and she the beloved daughter in the middle.

  They always sat with Momma in the far right of the first pew on the right as you faced the pulpit. That was where he wanted them to be. They were, he always said, a part of his strength, almost the most important part.

  There had been that strange certainty about it all, the total belief that everything would work out the way they wanted it.

  Poppa would be the pastor of the church that never stopped growing, and people would come long distances to hear the thunder and the sweetness of his voice. John Tinker and Paul would be his captains, the men at his right hand. Poor Paul.

  Poor Paul. She was to have become a missionary, famous for her strength and skill and faith, married to a man as strong as Poppa, bearing his children in primitive places of the world.

  But they were going to be healthy and strong. Then when Poppa and Momma were old, she would come back with her family and by then Paul and John Tinker would have families, and they would all be close together, and all take care of old Matthew and his wife.

  The world did not seem to break apart with any huge dramatic flash and bang. It was odd, she thought, the way it just seemed to wear down, or wear out, or grind slowly to a duller and more halting pace. And the things that went wrong went too far wrong for fixing.

  She moved quietly to a hassock and sat where she could look at his sleeping face. All the old strength was still there, in the bold bone structure, the heavy brow, the line of the jaw. But the face was like a castle where once a king had lived, a castle proud and impregnable. But the king had left, the pennons were rags, the gates open, moat dry, and an old wind sighed through the empty corridors.

  She saw movement out of the corner of her eye, and turned as Nurse Willa Minter appeared in the doorway to the bedroom corridor, eyebrows raised in question, nervous grin coming and going. Would that the damned woman could stop the smirky look. But she was a jewel, of course, an irreplaceable jewel, regardless of what John Tinker thought of her.

  Mary Margaret held a finger to her lips and Minter hesitated and then went away.

  In childhood it had seemed to Mary Margaret that Matthew Meadows' rise to ever greater importance had taken a long, long time. Looking back now, she knew the time span had been surprisingly short. He had been a country preacher, packing his small church, resisting affiliation with any other sect, preaching his particular fundamentalist faith, going back to those minor prophets seldom included in the standard editions of the Old Testament, those clumsy and mysterious names Habakkuk and Zephaniah Malachi and Nahum Obadiah and Amos. Then he was on the radio and the children in school began to treat Mary Margaret and her brothers with a new sharp focus of curiosity, mingled with a vague awe.

  Bigger churches, more staff, more money, more broadcasts, and at last this purchase of land at the end of nowhere, a huge parcel which even at the low cost per acre meant a great debt to pay off. Everybody thought Matthew Meadows had. too big a dream. But the people listened on radio and on television and in big amphitheaters in great cities. The people listened and joined and tithed, and the dream came true sooner than anyone could have guessed. All Momma ever got to see was the skeletal framework of the Tabernacle and the architect's renderings of the four towers against the blue southern sky.

  And before she died there was a rumor that the Interstate might come by quite close to the Meadows Center, and it was rumored that Matthew had some good friends and disciples in high places who were going to make certain it would come close, so the pilgrims from afar could more readily come and see the wonders.

  The very best times, she thought, were when she was young and she could look up at him preaching, and she could feel his voice and his presence and his gestures and his piercing eyes lifting the congregation, bringing them together up out of the pain and despair of their humdrum lives into the wonders of the spirit, the majesty of the soul, the promise of life everlasting. That feeling of being a part of something great and wonderful had always made her heart flutter and her breathing fast and shallow. She loved him. She loved his hands and his strength. She wanted him to be proud of her.

  And then at the peak of his strength and power and influence, it all began to go bad for him. He and John Tinker and the Winchester brothers had flown out to Los Angeles in one of the Gulfstreams, and somehow he had become separated from the others in the terminal. He became quite lost. He could not remember the name of the hotel where they were staying, or even what city he was in. The airport police took him to an office and checked his identification, phoned the Center, using his telephone credit card, and learned the name of the hotel.

  John Tinker Meadows and the Winchester brothers were in the big suite, and very worried and upset. Charley Winchester came out to the airport in a cab and took him back to the hotel.

  When Matthew Meadows started to tell all of them what happened, he tried to make a joke of it, and then began sobbing.

  But by then, of course, the family that was going to last practically forever was down to but the three of them. Paul had died far away and alone in a
strange place. The people there should have told us in time for us to get to him before he died.

  We thought it was best for him to be there, in that place. I was never ashamed of him, even after what he did to himself. I never could really find out if Poppa was ashamed of Paul. I know John Tinker was. I hope Poppa wasn't ashamed of him, because if he was, Paul knew it. Even when he was at his worst, far away from everything and everybody, he was still aware of things like that.

  We're just, none of us, at all like what we thought we would be, back there when the days were golden and long. The worst, I guess, was when Poppa began to fade on us. One moment his memory and his perception of time and place would be flawless, yet minutes later he would be totally confused about where he was, what day and year it was and who he was talking to.