Ash Wednesday

by Ralph McInerny

  Over coffee and a doughnut she did not need, she got right to the point. “What kind of heretic are you?”

  “How many kinds are there?”

  Natalie had no idea. “You just meant you’re not Catholic, didn’t you? You’re really nothing at all, I mean religiously?”

  “What are you getting at?”

  They had wandered outside on this suddenly sunny day with their coffee and were sitting side by side on one of the benches along the walkway. Natalie hadn’t liked the way Phyllis Pilgrim had talked to Eugene in a saucy way, as if she had some kind of claim on him.

  “Perhaps you’ve already talked with Father Dowling.”

  “Of course I’ve talked with him.”

  Natalie looked away. Phyllis had come outside, and then she saw them. She didn’t look happy when she went back inside.

  “I think Phyllis is looking for you.”

  “You have to protect me,” he said, grasping her arm. If it hadn’t been for his devilish smile, she might have thought he was in danger. She said as much.

  “The predatory widow, Natalie. They’re the bane of my life.”

  “Poor you.”

  He nodded. “That, too.”

  It was difficult to get back to the subject that had led her to take him outside to this bench.

  “Now, if you were Phyllis, I wouldn’t be sitting here for a million dollars.”

  Whatever he said seemed to indicate that he considered her, well, unlike the other widows. As indeed she was.

  “Do you ever think of your soul, Eugene?”

  “I don’t think I have one.”

  “Of course you do. An immortal soul. Eugene, we’re no longer young. We have to be more serious about what it all means.”

  “What does it all mean?”

  “Father Dowling could explain that better than I could.”

  “I do have a heart. I’m sure of that.”

  He just couldn’t be serious a minute, and Natalie found she liked that. He was such fun to be with. After all those dreadful months watching television, being with Eugene was a tonic. Thank God she had decided to come to the senior center. Would she ever have imagined that coming here would mean meeting someone like Eugene? No, not someone like. Eugene himself.

  That afternoon Phyllis followed her into the restroom, and when they were washing up, their eyes met in the mirror.

  “Be careful, Natalie.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Don’t be misled by our Don Juan.”

  “I don’t think I’ve met him.”

  Phyllis dipped her head and looked at Natalie over her glasses. “A word to the wise.”

  Pooh. The word came from a woman who was jealous! Imagine. Did Phyllis think that life still lay before her? That she might meet someone she might want to marry? What silliness. Natalie had half a mind to tell Eugene what Phyllis had said. But she didn’t. It would have seemed, oh, she didn’t know what it would have seemed.

  The next day there was an excursion to the mall, and Eugene was at the wheel of the center shuttle bus, the kind one saw atairports taking passengers off to rental car lots. He drove in an almost reckless fashion, laughing while his passengers rocked back and forth as he changed lanes and sped along.

  “Why don’t you sing?” he suggested.

  The whole group burst into “Merrily we roll along,” Eugene’s beautiful tenor voice leading them. In a back seat, bracketed by Leon Bartlett with his chin on his chest and Lester Bernard, whose ears were plugged with the largest hearing aids Natalie had ever seen, Phyllis stared gloomily ahead. It was on that jaunt that Natalie was teased about stealing away Phyllis’s boyfriend.

  Then one day when they were again outside and sitting on a bench, Natalie noticed the man on a bench farther along on the walkway, reading a book.

  “Who is that?” Natalie asked.

  “Nathaniel Green.”

  “Really? He’s some sort of relative of mine.”

  “He is being shunned.”

  “What?”

  “Helen is his sister-in-law. She’s convinced the others that Nathaniel doesn’t belong here.”

  “What right does she have to do that?”

  “He did kill his wife.”

  Natalie almost wanted to deny it. The sight of that lonely man, reading a book, unwanted inside, filled her with pity. “The poor man.”

  “According to Herman, Green doesn’t really mind.”

  “Who is Herman, for heaven’s sake?”

  “Of course you haven’t met Herman. Come, I’ll introduce you.”

  “I’d rather talk to Nathaniel Green.”

  “Later. You must meet Herman first.”

  Tuttle heard of Nathaniel Green’s release from Joliet in the newsroom at the courthouse. Tetzel had an annoying habit of reading aloud, although to what audience it would be hard to say. The reporter had been alone when Tuttle came in, holding the printout of the wire service story a foot in front of his face as he read it. He turned to Tuttle.

  “Good work, Tuttle. How long did he serve?”

  When ignorant of the answer, silence is the best response. Tuttle took a chair next to the reporter and reached for the sheet. Tetzel moved it out of reach.

  “You didn’t answer my question,” Tetzel said.

  “Rephrase it.”

  Tetzel’s barking laughter might have been directed at the whole legal profession.

  “How did you spring Greenbeard out of Joliet so soon, Tuttle?”

  Tetzel spoke, if not with forked tongue, in a slurred voice. It was early afternoon, and he was either still sloshed from the night before or getting a head start on today’s sunset. Or both. Tuttle had trouble with crossword puzzles but not with Tetzel’s unimaginative reference to his former client Nathaniel Green.

  “I asked to have him released to your custody, Tetzel.”

  “I wouldn’t mind getting my hands on that SOB.”

  “Aren’t you a member of the Hemlock Society?”

  “He didn’t claim that his wife asked him to do it.”

  “No,” Tuttle said. “I did. Let me see that.”

  Tetzel yielded the news story, and Tuttle read it with feigned nonchalance. Nathaniel Green’s release from Joliet was news indeed to his former lawyer. He was not mentioned in the story. Perhaps Tetzel could be induced to correct that omission before it went into the Fox River Tribune. He made the suggestion, keeping urgency from his voice.

  “Tuttle, it would only be news if you ever got a client off.”

  “He might have rotted in prison if I hadn’t persuaded Jacuzzi to change the charge to manslaughter.”

  “Careful, careful.”

  Tuttle tipped back his Irish tweed hat, an interrogatory gesture.

  “Womanslaughter,” Tetzel suggested.

  “That would be language slaughter.”

  “That’s good!”

  “Use it.”

  Tuttle was adjusting his hat as he sought to make an exit on that high note when he ran into Rebecca Farmer in the doorway, toppling her to the floor.

  “Jesus Christ!” Rebecca cried.

  “I grant the resemblance. Here, let me help you up.”

  “Don’t you touch me!” She actually shuddered. Nonetheless, she needed help in getting to her feet. Tuttle also picked up the knitting that had spilled from the cloth bag that had been and still was on her arm. She sidled to a chair, looking warily at Tuttle as she did so.

  “Nathaniel Green has been released from Joliet,” Tuttle told her, before Tetzel could ruin the news with sarcasm.

  “Who in the hell is Nathaniel Green?” Rebecca asked.

  “You should read the paper you write for,” Tuttle advised.

  This time he got safely out the door and went briskly down the corridor. He was peeved. Peanuts Pianone, his friend on the Fox River Police Department, should have given him a heads-up on Green’s release. Tuttle eschewed the elevator and took the broad winding staircase beneath the building’s dome
to the lobby, where he moved across the checkered marble floor like the man who would be king and sailed through the revolving door. Standing in the weak March sunlight, he sought and found his cell phone and put through a call to his office.

  “Tuttle and Tuttle,” Hazel said. Her voice gave the impression that his was a thriving practice.

  “Is Mr. Tuttle there?” he said, disguising his voice.

  “Where are you?” Hazel asked.

  “I thought you should know that my client Nathaniel Green has been released from Joliet.”

  “Your former client. I know. He called.”

  “He did!” No need to feign nonchalance with Hazel.

  “He had to explain who he was. You lost that case before I was with you.” She might have been trying to explain the verdict.

  “Thank God for grateful clients,” Tuttle said.

  “Sure. Both of them.”

  “What did he say, Hazel?”

  “I made an appointment.”

  “For when?”

  “If you hurry you can get here before him.”

  “Hazel, keep him there if he gets there first.”

  He skipped down the steps to the battered Toyota parked in a handicapped spot. The door sounded as if it would come off in his hand when he pulled it open. He eased himself onto the ringlike cushion on the driver’s seat. “I’m sitting on piles” was his answer to inquiries as to how business was. He started the car and entered traffic to the accompaniment of irate horns. Road rage was everywhere.

  He made his mind a blank slate as he drove. No great feat that, but thoughts of Nathaniel Green kept chalking themselves on the board. He tried unsuccessfully to keep hope from rising in him. The Green case had been a bonanza, even if he had lost. If he had won, his client might not have paid the exorbitant bill Tuttle had presented.

  Some scofflaw had parked in the spot behind the building clearly marked TUTTLE & TUTTLE. He had half a mind to let the air out of the tires. Then it occurred to him that the car might be Nathaniel Green’s. He put the Toyota in a space marked MANAGER and hurried into the building.

  It was at times like this that he wished the building’s elevator were still functional. Complaints about it had been useless. He had tried to turn the matter over to Hazel with the thought that she could intimidate Jenkins, the slack-jawed lout who spent the day napping in his basement office, but she shook her head. This motion did not disturb her tightly curled and hennaed hair.

  “It’s the only exercise I get,” she said.

  “You don’t need exercise.”

  Hazel had taken it as a compliment and smiled her sweet and predatory smile. Tuttle had darted into his office. Hazel was a force to be avoided when memories of romance were awakened in her massive bosom.

  Now, on the second landing, he stopped, huffing and puffing. If this was exercise, why was he overweight? When his breathing returned to something like normal, he continued up the stairs to his floor.

  Hazel was banging away at her computer when he came in, in profile, looking very efficient and busy. She turned in her chair.

  “Ah, Mr. Tuttle. This is Mr. Nathaniel Green. I was able to squeeze him in.”

  Tuttle noted that she had divested Green of his topcoat and hung it in the corner.

  “Mr. Green and I are old friends,” he said to Hazel, and to Green, “Unavoidably detained.” He shook Green’s hand. “Come into my office.” Before closing the door, he said over his shoulder, “No calls.”

  He hoped the chaos of his office gave the impression that he was swamped with work. He cleared a chair for Green, got him settled, and hung his own coat and hat on a stand that began to tip. He caught it and eased it toward the perpendicular. “The scales of justice,” he said when equilibrium had been restored. Then he settled at his desk and looked receptively at Nathaniel Green.

  The years had not been kind to Green. His Joliet pallor would persist if he did not get some sun. He still had the passive doomed air with which he had gone through the trial. When the verdict was read, he had stood with his chin on his chest. The only animation he had shown was earlier when Tuttle got the charge reduced to manslaughter.

  “I murdered her,” he had said to Tuttle.

  “Not unless the law says so.”

  “Which law?” Green asked.

  Tuttle had let it go. Never encourage religiosity in a client unless it could prove of use.

  Now here, years later, was Nathaniel Green sitting across the desk from him in his office.

  “So what can I do for you, Mr. Green?”

  “I was told to come here.”

  Tuttle smiled as if beneficent hordes were forever directing clients to his door. “By whom?”

  “Jerome Paxon.”

  Tuttle held his receptive smile. Who the hell was Jerome Paxon?

  “My parole officer,” Green said.

  “Of course, of course.” Paxon was a yo-yo who considered criminals innocent and the innocent criminals. Green was in good hands if he wanted to be treated like a victim of society and its benighted laws.

  Tuttle began to talk about the time when Green had been his client, but let it go, silenced by the man’s indifference.

  “So what are your plans?” he asked Green.

  Green seemed to have difficulty with the word. After a pause, he said, “I’ve been going to the senior center at St. Hilary’s. That was our parish.”

  “Ah. Father Dowling. Good man. Give him my best.”

  The hope that Green represented income was fading, but then Green took an envelope from his inner pocket and laid it on the desk.

  “That is my will. I want it rewritten.”

  Redoing Green’s will might be a foot in the door. Tuttle reached for the envelope and took out the will. As his eyes went down the first page, he asked, “Who wrote this?”

  “Amos Cadbury.”

  “Good man.” Actually Fox River’s best. He remembered a scary moment during his first interview with Green when he had said Cadbury was his lawyer.

  “Why didn’t you go to him?” Tuttle had asked.

  Green had fallen silent, and Tuttle prepared for a reference to his own status in the local bar.

  “He said I shouldn’t plead guilty.”

  Tuttle had danced away from that. Of course Cadbury was right. It was then that he learned that his client had no wish to be exonerated.

  “You’ve come to the right man,” Tuttle said, then wanted to withdraw the equivocal remark.

  Green had shown no interest in his own defense; he wanted to be executed for what he had done. Tuttle explained the Illinois ban on capital punishment. The ban was sometimes cynically referred to as the Illinois Investment Statute. He had to explain the feeble joke to Green.

  His client’s fatalism had lightened Tuttle’s task. He could not lose by losing in this case.

  Now Tuttle drew a legal pad to him, unearthing it from the debris before him. “Tell me what changes you would like in your will, Mr. Green.”

  “I want most of my estate to go to Helen Burke. My sister-in-law.”

  Tuttle was surprised. Helen had demanded Green’s scalp for what he had done to her sister.

  “A magnanimous gesture,” Tuttle said.

  “She hates me.”

  “I remember.”

  “It’s mutual,” Green said.

  After the interview was over and Green was gone, Tuttle donned his tweed hat, pulled out a lower drawer, and put his feet in it. It’s mutual. He pondered the significance of the remark. Could generosity be a form of revenge?

  Edna Hospers attributed the treatment of Nathaniel Green by the others at the senior center to the fact that he was an ex-convict, and it was that, even if she might otherwise have been willing to ignore the shunning on the assumption that it would fade away, that enlisted her on Nathaniel’s side.

  “It’s Aunt Helen,” Madeline said. “Florence was her only sister.”

  “Florence?”

  “Nathaniel’s wife. He kil
led her, Edna.”

  Edna sank into the chair behind her desk. Most of the regulars at the center had known one another before coming here, some of them all their lives, and others were relatives of one sort or another, but it was an unwritten rule that newcomers unknown to the others must not be quizzed about themselves. Whatever they wanted to tell of their past lives—and few elderly people could be silent for long about that—okay, but there should be no pumping. In the case of Nathaniel Green, Edna seemed to be the only one unaware of his tragic history.

  “Killed her?” Edna managed to say.

  “His lawyer called it a mercy killing,” Madeline said. “The actual verdict was manslaughter. Aunt Helen attended every session of the trial, sitting there like Madame Defarge. If he had been found innocent, I think she might have strangled him in the courtroom.”

  Edna’s husband, Earl, had served a sentence in Joliet for what was called manslaughter, although how it could be seen as anything other than a bizarre accident had always baffled Edna. The trouble was that Earl had considered himself guilty of the death of Sylvia Lowry and almost longed to be punished for it. So it seemed to have been with Nathaniel Green.

  “He confessed,” Madeline recalled. “He wanted to plead guilty. His lawyer didn’t dare put him on the stand or he would have confessed again in court.”

  Now Nathaniel seemed almost to welcome the cold shoulder the other old people gave him. It broke Edna’s heart when the weather was fairly clement and she looked out her window to see him sitting solitary on a bench, reading.

  “How long will this go on, Madeline?”

  “Till hell freezes over. Helen is an avenging angel.”

  “She’ll drive him away.”

  “That’s her hope, Edna.”

  Still Nathaniel showed up almost every day. Edna made a point of talking with him, but she couldn’t spend the day with him. Madeline looked bleak when Edna suggested she take her turn in making Nathaniel feel welcome.

  “Helen would never forgive me.”