Ash Wednesday

by Ralph McInerny

  So Edna asked Helen to come by her office. She entered bright as a button, looked around with a nostalgic smile, and sat. “I remember being summoned here for a scolding when I was a student in the school.” She looked at Edna. “Is that what this is?”

  “Helen, you have to stop treating Nathaniel Green this way.”

  “What way is that? I avoid him entirely.”

  “That’s what I mean. Helen, whatever he did, he paid for it, and now he’s back. He is here at Father Dowling’s suggestion.”

  “It happened before Father Dowling was pastor. He doesn’t understand.”

  “Understand what?”

  “Edna, just look at the man. Woebegone, shuffling around like Oedipus, as if he were the victim. He adopted that role from the beginning, as if the tragedy were not one he had caused. He never once expressed the least bit of sorrow for what he had done. I was not impressed by his self-dramatization at the time, and am even less so now.”

  “What would you expect him to do?” Edna asked.

  “If he doesn’t know, my telling him wouldn’t help.”

  “Then tell me.”

  Helen fell silent, working her lips. Suddenly tears began to leak from her eyes. “I know what I sound like. Who am I not to forgive a sinner? Who am I to judge him? What I’m doing is a sin and I know it and I blame it on him.”

  “Have you talked with him, Helen?”

  “No!”

  “Helen, I can’t have this going on in the center. It is souring the atmosphere.”

  “Then tell him to stay away!”

  “I can’t do that.”

  “I understand.” Helen lifted her chin and stared over Edna’s head at the bookshelves behind her.

  “What do you mean?” She was referring to Earl, Edna was sure of it.

  “Is my scolding over?” Helen asked.

  Edna was on the verge of exploding at this insufferably smug woman, but she managed to control herself, barely. “Go back to the others.”

  For five minutes after Helen had gone, Edna sat seething at her desk. She stood, looked out her window, then went downstairs and through the former gym. Voices seemed to die down as she went by. Outside, she slowed her walk as she approached the bench where Nathaniel Green sat, his coat collar up, engrossed in a book.

  “What are you reading?” she asked, sitting beside him.

  “Shelby Foote. This is volume two.” He lifted the large volume, then let it drop on his lap.

  “Shelby Foote.”

  “His account of the Civil War,” Nathaniel Green explained.

  “We have a little civil war going on right here, Nathaniel.”

  “How so?”

  For a moment she felt something of Helen’s impatience with his martyred air.

  “You know what I mean, Nathaniel.”

  He sat silent for a while. “I don’t blame them. I don’t blame them at all.”

  What is more crushing than forgiveness? Nathaniel’s response to the shunning could only make it continue. She remembered Helen’s little bout of weeping. They had made him a pariah, and yet they all knew that what they were doing was wrong. Then, like Helen, they blamed that, too, on Nathaniel.

  “My husband was in Joliet,” Edna said.

  Nathaniel Green nodded.

  “Did you know him?”

  “Oh, I only knew who he was. Everybody liked him. Herman is an alumnus, too.”

  Herman. Herman was the latest in a series of ex-convicts Father Dowling had turned into what he called maintenance men. He was as useless as the others, but he was a cheerful incompetent, impossible not to like. His story of his arrest for breaking and entering was a hilarious tale of a plan gone wrong.

  “So you’ve met him,” Edna said.

  “He looked me up. He seems to think we’re part of a fraternity. He was the clown of the place.”

  “Now he’s the clown of this place,” Edna said.

  “He loves it here. That’s quite a little apartment he has in the basement.”

  It was sad to think that the only one who had welcomed Nathaniel to the center was Herman. Herman the German, as he styled himself, although his name was Wycinski. He explained that his family came from a part of Poland, Silesia, that had been taken over by Germany. “If it isn’t the Russians, it’s the Germans. Anyway, my family got out of there and came to America, where I became a criminal. Upward mobility.”

  Nathaniel seemed impatient to get back to his book.

  “It can’t go on forever,” she said.

  “I don’t mind.”

  “I can’t believe that, Nathaniel.”

  “I got used to solitude in Joliet. Ask your husband.”

  A fraternity. Edna hated the thought that Earl was part of a group with Nathaniel and Herman the German. She rose. She almost apologized for interrupting his solitude.

  Back in her office, the phone rang. It was Father Dowling asking about Nathaniel.

  “I want to talk to you about him, Father.”

  Jason Burke owned a shoe store—the Foot Doctor—in a mall north of town: a large rectangular room, one wall lined with boxes, rows of chairs, a little stool for the clerk to sit on when he helped the customer try on shoes, and a nice leathery smell that Madeline loved. She loved Jason, too, in the way you loved a cousin who hadn’t amounted to much. The shoe store was the latest attempt at a business of his own that Aunt Helen, Jason’s mother, had underwritten. He had one employee, a gangly young man named Eric, whose Adam’s apple was disconcertingly prominent. His smile, revealing massive but regular teeth, made up for that.

  “Is he in?” Madeline asked.

  Eric looked up with that wonderful smile from the stool on which he sat. A woman with three young boys was getting them shoed. Eric bobbed his head toward the back. In the back were a stockroom with more shoes, a break room, and Jason’s office. Dangling aslant from the knob of his door was a sign: DOCTOR IS IN. Inside, Jason sat, or lay, in a Barcalounger tipped back so as to be horizontal with the floor. His desk was clean; there was a computer on a stand beside it, one file cabinet along the wall, and Jason in his chair, sleeping.

  Madeline went up to him, grabbed his stockinged foot, and jiggled. He sputtered awake.

  “Geez,” Jason said. “You could have given me a heart attack.”

  The air was redolent of alcohol, but there was no sign of a glass or bottle. Jason drank with consummate furtiveness, most often alone, never observed. Never completely sober, either. He grabbed a lever and shot himself into an upright position. Even now, Jason retained a vestige of the debonair manner and good looks that had made him stand out as a young man.

  “What can I do you for?” he said.

  “Have you seen your Uncle Nathaniel since his release from prison?” Madeline asked.

  Jason jerked with alarm. “Shut that door, will you?”

  Madeline obliged.

  “Do you have anything to drink, Jason?”

  “Drink? What do you mean, coffee, Coke, what?”

  “Booze.”

  She had startled him. He seemed glad the door was closed so that the matron with her kiddies could not hear what his depraved visitor had said. “Booze,” he repeated.

  “Oh, a beer would do.”

  “A beer?” He adopted a thoughtful expression. “Let me look.”

  There was a little refrigerator in the break room, and he got out of his chair and pattered in his stockinged feet from the office. Madeline followed him, and he tried to block her view of its contents when he opened the refrigerator and cried, “By gosh, there is beer. Two! I’ll join you.”

  Madeline felt manipulative. She did not want a beer, she hated beer, but Jason would be far more at ease if he were topping off the alcohol content of his blood.

  “What do you think of the sign?” he asked proudly, adjusting it before he closed the door. In the store, Eric was waiting on more customers.

  “You should wear lab coats,” Madeline suggested.

  “Good idea! I
suppose stethoscopes would be too much?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. But it would be more convincing if you wore shoes.”

  He had put the cans of beer on his desk and now looked over his shoulder at her. “I’d go barefoot if I dared. I hate shoes.”

  “How is business?” Madeline asked.

  “We sell a lot of shoes.”

  “Good.”

  Jason snorted. “Do you know what the retail markup on a pair of children’s shoes is?”

  Madeline felt that she had led a charmed life, never having to worry about money. Once she had started teaching, she had a job that would last as long as she wanted it, and the retirement plan ensured a comfortable and modest afterward. Being single helped, of course, but then Jason had been single ever since Carmela left him and his whole life became one try after another at something that would become permanent. By contrast, her life, with its steady income, seemed one of ease and security.

  “Nathaniel is out of prison?” Jason was whispering.

  “I see him every day at St. Hilary’s.”

  Jason’s eyebrows went up. “Every day?”

  She told him about the senior center then. Hadn’t his mother told him about it? He had poured their beer into clear plastic cups and sipped while Madeline told him how she was spending her day.

  “What’s it pay?” Jason asked.

  “Oh, I’m just a volunteer. Apparently the prison chaplain told Nathaniel to look up Father Dowling, and he did, and that’s why he comes to the center. Your mother is furious.”

  Jason lifted his eyes and then his cup. “What a battleaxe.” A smile broke out. “Battleaxe! That’s what Dad called her.”

  “Why is she so unforgiving, Jason?”

  “Guilt. She almost never visited Florence in the hospital, and when she did it was just in and out. She stood the whole time, kept her coat on. She can’t stand hospitals. I can’t say that I blame her.”

  Jason had been a nurse’s aide before opening a lawn service, his business before the Foot Doctor. Nursing had been a stopgap job between private enterprises.

  “Did Nathaniel ever complain about Helen?”

  “Why would he? He preferred being alone with Florence. When you looked in, it was difficult to tell which one of them was dying. Anyway, he and Helen hated one another.”

  Jason considered the ceiling. He took a long swallow from his plastic cup. “This is just speculation, you understand.”

  “Tell me!”

  “Well, as I piece it together, long ago when Nathaniel came calling at the house, Helen assumed it was to see her. It turned out it was Florence he was interested in. Helen was as willin’ as Barkis, but Florence had to be wooed. Eventually, Nathaniel was successful. Helen never forgave him that.”

  “She bore a grudge all those years?” Madeline asked.

  “I think it was refueled when Florence fell ill.” He finished his beer. “I don’t claim it makes sense.”

  “Did you ever visit Florence, Jason?”

  “My dear, I was on the staff in those days, delivering tasteless meals, swabbing the floors, resolving never to get sick. Working in a hospital squeezes the cheerfulness out of life. I understand my mother’s attitude. People step into a hospital out of normalcy and are confronted with the grim facts of fragility and terminal illness.”

  “That hardly explains Helen’s vendetta against Nathaniel.”

  “Vendetta?” Jason asked.

  “She has all the other old people shunning Nathaniel. A killer in our midst.”

  Jason rubbed his already messed-up hair. “That is bad,” he said.

  “Could you talk to her?”

  “Anybody can talk to her. Changing her mind is something else.”

  “Will you try?” Madeline put her hand on his arm.

  Jason shrugged. “It won’t do any good. How are you fixed for shoes?” He leaned forward and examined her ankle-high boots.

  “Not today.”

  She had a closet full of unwanted shoes, bought in a gesture of solidarity with Jason.

  “You might talk to Nathaniel, too, Jason.”

  “Madeline, you should have married. You have a compulsion to organize other people’s lives.”

  Sometimes Madeline imagined that, when they got a little older, she and Jason might share a house. She would like to bring order into his life. At the store he had Eric, but out of it he was on his disorganized own. He lived in one of the condos abandoned by public housing and sold dirt cheap to anyone foolish enough to buy them. Madeline got a glimpse of the chaos inside whenever she picked him up to take him to dinner.

  “Are you free tonight?” she asked.

  Jason brightened. “The Great Wall?”

  “If you like. Meet me there at six.”

  “Done.” He said it as if she had overcome his reluctance.

  He walked her through the store, his stockinged feet not seeming unusual there. He stood in the open door as she went through and squinted at the sky.

  “Looks like snow,” he said. “So wear shoes tonight.”

  Out she went to her car for the drive to St. Hilary’s. It did look like snow.

  The parking lot at St. Mary’s Hospital was chock-full of cars. Cy Horvath did not avail himself of one of the official spots by the emergency ward but parked in the main lot and threaded his way through the other cars in the slushy snow toward the main entrance. Business was good, meaning things were bad for a lot of people.

  The revolving doors were huge, to accommodate wheelchairs and the like, and they moved with glacial slowness. Cy came into the entrance hall and walked past the great circular reception desk, wondering if he would be challenged. He wasn’t. Some security—but a hospital was a place people wanted to get out of, not into. He continued, took a left, and found the elevators. A very wide nurse entered it with him.

  “What floor is cancer?” Cy asked her.

  “Oncology?”

  He nodded. She looked at her clipboard as if for directions. “Five.”

  He had thought it was four. At five, she bustled out before him and then went in the twinkle-footed way some overweight people have to the nurses’ station. Cy went on down the hallway and found the waiting room he remembered. A place for people to sweat it out while loved ones went through who knows what hell. On the wall hung a huge sylvan scene by some Sunday painter, chairs in a row beneath it, plastic seats, stainless steel arms, looking like an ad for the death penalty. He eased himself into one. It was here that he had done a lot of interviewing after the death of Florence Green.

  The chubby nurse looked in, sans clipboard. “Can I help you?”

  He showed her his badge, and she backed away. “Is something the matter?”

  “No.”

  He waited. He was used to the fact that his expressionless face prompted people into telling him whatever was on their minds. She said she had thought he was a funeral director. She nodded as if he had expressed surprise. “Ghouls. Do you know Dickens’s Christmas Carol? They can’t wait until it’s all over. Meanwhile they butter up the family.”

  “How long have you worked here?” Cy asked.

  “Going on seven years.”

  Not long enough. He nodded as if in approval of her longevity.

  “Anything I can get for you?” she asked.

  “How about some recent magazines?”

  She smiled when she decided it was a joke, then scampered away. Some of the tattered magazines in the room looked as if they could have been lying with curled corners on the table since the last time he was here.

  Cy had come to the hospital directly from a visit with Father Dowling, who had asked him to drop by and tell him about the investigation of Florence Green’s death. That had been almost ten years ago, but Cy only had to refresh his memory. Of course, his memory had been stirred by the release of Nathaniel Green from Joliet.

  What an enigma that guy had been, Cy remembered. Green had sat right here in this waiting room and said in a flat voice, “I ki
lled her.”

  “Wasn’t she dying?”

  “What difference does that make?” Green had asked.

  “Not a lot. How did you do it?”

  “She was on a life support system. All I had to do was pull the plug.”

  “And you did?”

  He looked pleadingly at Cy. “I couldn’t take it anymore. More important, she couldn’t. The loss of all hope is a terrible thing.”

  “I understand she was in a coma,” Cy said.

  “She might have come out of it. Now she won’t.”

  Green didn’t call it a mercy killing. That had to wait for the trial, when Tuttle brought it in as if it were an item from the Sermon on the Mount.

  “When did this happen?” Cy had asked Green.

  “When?”

  “What time? The nurse went into your wife’s room when she noticed the monitors on your wife were down. That was at 2:17.”

  “It was before that,” Green said.

  Cy observed a half minute of silence. “How long before?”

  “I didn’t look at my watch.”

  “How long had you been keeping vigil in your wife’s room?”

  “Ever since I had to bring her back here.”

  “I meant today.”

  “All day.”

  “There’s no bathroom in your wife’s room,” Cy said.

  Nathaniel Green had looked blankly at him.

  “Most people have to go once in a while. You must have left the room in order to go to the john.”

  “I was only gone a few minutes,” Green said.

  “How many times?”

  “What are you getting at?”

  “The way the nurse described it, you were practically on a liquid diet. Ice water, soup, juice. There were half a dozen plastic cups with sipping straws angling from them on the bedside table.”

  “I don’t see what this has to do with anything,” Green said impatiently.

  “Probably nothing. I’m just trying to establish a timeline.”

  “Officer, I confess. I did it. What’s the point of an investigation?”

  “Mr. Green, I want to determine when you pulled the plug.”

  Green gave it some thought. “The nurse said she came in at 2:17? It was after two.”