Ash Wednesday

by Ralph McInerny

  “Prominent local attorney!” she cried. “Do you realize how often you’re mentioned in this story?”

  Tuttle tipped back his hat and tried to repress the foolish grin that spread across his face. “I tried to be of help to Tetzel.”

  “He’s the man who was here in the office, isn’t he?”

  “The same.”

  “How on earth did he hear about the new will?”

  A small cloud on the horizon, that. “You know how thorough investigative reporters can be.”

  “You told him!”

  Hazel had once worked for a large firm in Chicago, where she must have picked up some rudiments of legal ethics.

  “Nathaniel Green insisted that I register the will. That made it more or less public.”

  Hazel thought about it. It was a delicate moment. Would she go back to her normal contemptuous attitude toward him? Apparently she found her earlier elation more attractive.

  “I am going to clip this,” she said. “For the files.”

  “Good idea.”

  Tuttle was left to enjoy his ambiguous pleasure. It was annoying that she had made such a point of Nathaniel Green’s new will.

  Jason was already at the Great Wall, sipping a Chinese beer, when Madeline arrived precisely at six. He pushed a copy of the Tribune toward her when she sat across from him.

  “What’s this?”

  “Read it.”

  It was a feature story on the return of Nathaniel Green written by Gearhart Tetzel. Madeline let her eye run through the story, her lips moving in disbelief.

  “Reopen the case?” she asked.

  Jason turned the page half toward himself and pointed at a paragraph.

  “Good Lord!” Madeline cried.

  According to Tetzel, Nathaniel had rewritten his will, leaving everything to Helen Burke.

  “Does he have anything to leave?”

  “Plenty.” Jason finished his beer. “You want one of these?”

  “I’ll have tea. Hot tea. How much is plenty?”

  “It’s not the amount.”

  “Have you talked to your mother?”

  Jason closed his eyes. “Not yet.”

  The waitress arrived, and Madeline folded the paper and set it aside. No need to consult the menu; she knew what she wanted. Jason took his time, considering the menu.

  “Could you bring the tea?” Madeline asked.

  “Another of these, too.” Jason flicked a finger at the empty bottle before him, his eye not leaving the menu. Madeline picked up the Tribune again, read a paragraph or two, then put it away.

  The waitress returned with the tea and another bottle of beer, and Jason ordered. Then he hunched toward Madeline.

  “Florence and my mother were the only beneficiaries of my grandfather’s will. Fifty-fifty.”

  “Of what?”

  Jason mouthed the amount, then said it aloud. “A couple of million. Apiece.”

  Madeline just stared.

  “Of course, a million now isn’t what it was then,” Jason said.

  Was Jason thinking of the mega-million-dollar lottery jackpots he dreamed of winning? Not only did he buy hundreds of dollars’ worth of lottery tickets, he was a member of Gamblers Anonymous. When Helen wasn’t financing Jason’s newest business venture, she was bailing him out of his gambling debts. He was always genuinely contrite when he had to take a maxed-out credit card to his mother. Madeline thought he found it easier to admit to his gambling than to his drinking. What is there about men like Jason? He brought out the mother in Madeline, too.

  Why should she be surprised to find that Helen was so well off? Jason had told her that his father’s money had increased exponentially under Carter interest rates and from that point had been coaxed to ever larger amounts. After all, Helen had always been able to rescue Jason from his losses; she had set him up in business time and again. She herself lived a simple life. How many women with that kind of money would spend their days at the St Hilary parish center?

  “Nathaniel can always change his will,” Jason said.

  “After making a public announcement?”

  “He didn’t make it. I know Tuttle, Madeline. What kind of lawyer would reveal work he had done for a client?”

  “Well, you’re certainly philosophical about it.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Whatever your mother has will go to you.”

  Jason thought a minute, then looked sad. “I’d just gamble it away.”

  “Jason, what in the world attracts you to gambling?”

  “I wish I knew. It ruined my marriage.”

  Madeline thought drink had been the major cause, but gambling had certainly played a role. “Do you ever see Carmela?”

  Jason shook his head, then looked at her. “Do you?”

  “Infrequently.”

  Jason sat forward. “When’s the last time you saw her?”

  Madeline found this an unwelcome turn in the conversation; she wasn’t sure why. The three of them had been in the same class at St. Hilary’s years ago, she, Jason, and Carmela. Jason had been sent off by his mother to a military school in Wisconsin, then to another in Indiana; next she managed to get him into Jesuit prep; after that, giving up, she let him finish at Fox River High. Madeline and Carmela had gone on to an all-girls Catholic high school in Chicago and then to Loyola. In those years, there were still school dances, and when Carmela broke up with the boy she had been going with just before the big spring dance, Madeline, asked if she knew a substitute, thought of Jason. Who would have thought it would be a fatal meeting?

  Jason’s hair was already thinning, and he was overweight, but he could dance like a dream. His checkered school career had lent him a certain devil-may-care dash, and an enlistment in the navy contributed an exotic veneer. Carmela was smitten by her former grade school classmate. Flattered, Jason had danced away the night with Carmela while Madeline looked on with foreboding. Should she tell Carmela about Jason?

  It wouldn’t have mattered. That was what she always told herself later. The attraction between the two—it was soon mutual—would have been impervious to cautious reasonableness. Fulton, the boy Madeline was with, thought he had a vocation, and that pretty well defined their relationship. Over Cokes, Fulton asked Jason what he did.

  “I’m getting acclimated to civilian life.”

  “Were you in the service?”

  That was when Jason talked about his time in the navy—he called it the Battle of California—and soon he had Carmela in stitches.

  “Then what?” Carmela asked.

  “I may rob banks.”

  Who would have seen an omen in his tales of payday card games in the barracks where a month’s pay could be lost in hours? He had a flask with which he bolstered his Coke. The others put their hands over their glasses. Alcohol was strictly forbidden at these interschool dances. Madeline found herself as fascinated by Jason as Carmela clearly was. Her cousin had been transformed into a dashing charmer.

  “Don’t you just love him?” Carmela had asked Madeline in the powder room.

  “I could, you know. We’re not first cousins.”

  A silly answer. How could you have a crush on a cousin, second, third, whatever Jason was? From then on Carmela treated Madeline as a rival rather than the friend who had come through in a fix with a date for the big dance.

  It was a month later when Madeline learned that, unbeknownst to her, Carmela was seeing a lot of Jason. Fulton had just told her that he would indeed be entering the Dominicans after graduation. Madeline felt abandoned, and now she found that Jason and Carmela had become inseparable.

  “Have you met his mother, Carmela?”

  “I don’t think she likes me.”

  Madeline was on the point of saying that Aunt Helen didn’t like anybody, but she let it go. Her aunt now seemed an insuperable obstacle to any further development.

  She was wrong. A week after graduation, Jason and Carmela eloped, returning from a weeklong foray into
Indiana man and wife. Madeline, as chance would have it, was there when they sauntered into the house and informed Aunt Helen.

  “Married! When? Where?”

  She seemed to drop into her chair from the ceiling as the grinning Jason told her. She looked pleadingly at her son, but for Carmela there was only an icy stare.

  “A civil ceremony? That doesn’t count.”

  Jason was angered by the remark. “What do you mean, it doesn’t count?”

  Aunt Helen explained patiently that they were Catholics, that Catholics got married in the Church. How could a son of hers have ever forgotten that? “Or did you?” she murmured.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  Somehow, without actually saying it, Aunt Helen conveyed the thought that such a pseudo-marriage could easily be dissolved. The suggestion had the opposite effect than the one she might have intended. That very day, Jason and Carmela were at the St. Hilary rectory petitioning the Franciscan who was then pastor to bless their marriage. They could not have been luckier in the priest they spoke to. He asked a few questions, smiling all the while, as Jason later described it to Madeline, and the next thing you knew they were in the sacristy having their marriage blessed. Now they were husband and wife enough even for Aunt Helen.

  And lived happily ever after? The following years were a tale of woe. Belatedly Carmela came to see the character of the man she had married. What had once seemed charm was now revealed as irresponsibility. He couldn’t keep a job. Helen appealed to Amos Cadbury, the family lawyer, and he did what he could. If getting a new job was fairly easy at first, keeping it was something else. Madeline worked; Helen grudgingly subsidized the marriage. There were separations, then reunions. After a while, Madeline tried to know less and less about the doings of the star-crossed couple. It didn’t help that she felt responsible for their having met again after years of not so much as remembering one another.

  “It’s impossible,” a tearful Carmela had finally confided in Madeline. Dear God, no intimate revelations, please. No, the problem was more mundane, money.

  All Madeline could offer was sympathy, and what good was that?

  “His mother is urging him to get an annulment!” Carmela said. “Him! As if it’s all my fault.”

  “Oh, Jason wouldn’t do that.”

  “Maybe he would if he had thought of it first.”

  They reunited, there was another miscarriage, their second, and then—was it ten years ago?—Carmela had had enough.

  She didn’t want a divorce, she didn’t want an annulment, she just didn’t want anything more to do with Jason. Aunt Helen consulted Amos Cadbury and decided this was the best solution that could be hoped for. Money on which Carmela could draw was deposited with Amos Cadbury, and then she was gone from Jason’s life.

  They kept in touch, Madeline and Carmela. Carmela became a financial advisor, and it seemed obvious she was good at it. It was a little disturbing the way she spoke so fervently of money when they got together from time to time. They were the same age, but only Madeline looked middle-aged.

  At the time of Florence Green’s death, Carmela dismissed the idea that Nathaniel had killed his wife.

  “Do you know him, Madeline? He is the sweetest man, and they were like newlyweds. I could always go to Florence and Nathaniel with my troubles.”

  “She had cancer.”

  “And he was at her side during the whole ordeal. Would a man like that kill his wife?”

  Madeline didn’t want to say how easily it supposedly would have been. Just detach her from the life support system and let her drift into painless peace.

  “You know how Helen acted through it all, Madeline. If anyone killed Florence, Helen did.”

  The absurd accusation seemed excused by all the years Carmela had endured as the daughter-in-law of Helen Burke.

  Now all that was in the past. Florence was long since dead, Nathaniel had spent nearly a decade in prison, and now he was back. It pained Madeline to think that Helen’s intimidation had prevented her from making Nathaniel welcome at the St. Hilary center.

  “When was the last time you saw her?” Jason was asking now.

  His eagerness was almost pitiable. It seemed a time to lie.

  “I can’t remember when,” Madeline said.

  Dogs go willingly and with wagging tails into houses hardly larger than themselves. Herman had seen it with his own eyes when Paxon his parole officer took him home to dinner. The Paxon dog was big as a bear, and Herman tried to hide his fear. He hated dogs. Then Mrs. Paxon lifted the door on a wire cage right there in the kitchen, and the dog scooted inside. It kind of brought back the Place, as Herman did not tell Paxon. This invitation to the Paxon home was meant to be a glimpse of normalcy.

  Well, maybe. Paxon himself was a bit of a nut, a nice nut, but still a nut. He seemed to think he was obliged to believe anything an ex-con told him. He leaned toward you while you talked, forehead wrinkled, eyes full of sympathy, feeling your pain. Mrs. Paxon, Kate, was tall and skinny and oozed a lot less, but she was a good cook. Afterward, while she cleaned up, Paxon and Herman watched hockey on TV. Herman was glad to leave and beat it back to St. Hilary’s and his little apartment in the basement of the school. When he shut the door behind him, he felt as happy as the Paxon dog in its cage.

  He realized that he had learned to like being alone. Solitude. It was a word from an old song that, like the tune, stuck in his mind. It made enjoying his apartment even better to call it solitude. Solitude, not solitary. Sometimes he thought of it as Command Central.

  Scattering sweeping compound, pushing his broom around, Herman kept up on all the parish center news. It wasn’t that he was invisible, but his janitorial tasks made him anonymous; people didn’t feel they had to drop their voices until he went by. Of course, they thought he was a dumbo. He encouraged that. He always had. It was like a protective coat. He liked telling them of the way he had been sent up. The story had improved over time, of course. Talking with Nathaniel Green was different.

  “The truth is I was left holding the bag,” Herman admitted.

  “They just left you there?” Nathaniel asked.

  “Inside the damned bank, with alarms going off. When I got to the door it was locked or jammed, I don’t know. Outside the car just took off, leaving me to take the rap.”

  “Were the others caught?”

  “Not for that. Remember Zappia, the big swarthy guy?”

  “He was in for murder.”

  “That was later.”

  In the Place Herman had kept clear of Zappia. The guy would be a great-grandfather by the time he got out. Such a thought could mellow you, but not Zappia.

  Nathaniel sat in silence. He always had a book with him. Herman had often promised himself that he would take up reading. He had even worked for a while in the library in Joliet, hoping to catch the bug. Maybe later.

  “What are you reading?”

  Herman had never heard of the book or author. He lit a cigarette and directed smoke at the ceiling. The seniors upstairs always stepped outside for a smoke. Life was getting as organized outside as it was inside.

  “What’s she got against you?” Herman asked.

  Nathaniel looked at him for a moment. “Helen Burke? She’s my wife’s sister.”

  Herman’s head lifted as he raised his eyebrows. “Even so. Why do you take it?”

  “I understand her.”

  He could understand her at a distance. Why come to the center day after day and be treated that way? Did Nathaniel enjoy it? Herman decided that wasn’t it. Then the newspaper story appeared, and he began to wonder which of them, Helen or Nathaniel, was the torturer.

  Neither Nathaniel nor Helen came to the parish center the day after the story appeared in the paper. It had been hard for Herman to get hold of a copy. The first several he grabbed brought shouts of protest.

  “Just cleaning up,” Herman said in self-defense.

  “That’s today’s paper.”

  Fin
ally he got one into the trash cart he wheeled around and retired to his apartment, where he settled down to see if the remarks he had been picking up all morning matched the story in the Tribune.

  It was the amount of money that impressed Herman. You’d need a Brinks job to get that much. It was funny thinking that he’d had a multimillionaire sitting here in the apartment. A multimillionaire who wanted to give it all away to a woman who didn’t need it and had been giving him one helluva of a time since he showed up at the center.

  Herman knew that Edna Hospers knew about the treatment Nathaniel was getting. She had called Helen in, but nothing had changed. Herman knew that Edna didn’t want him getting too friendly. He understood. Earl was doing fine, running Flanagan Concrete. That made Herman a reminder of where Earl had spent some time. He understood. He even kept away from his own family, now that his mother was dead. Mothers and parole officers will forgive anything.

  But the main one for him to keep clear of was Marie Murkin, the rectory housekeeper. The problem was that he couldn’t always do that. It was his job to get the rectory trash out to the curb on Wednesdays and check the level of the salt in the water softener in the basement of the rectory. In the area behind the furnace was an old easy chair, one that tilted back. Herman tried it out, closing his eyes and listening to the hum of the water heater, the whir of the furnace. Once he had actually fallen asleep, and Marie woke him.

  “You’re just like the others,” she said. “Do you think we pay you for sleeping?”

  We? “You’re not my boss,” he said, getting out of the chair.

  “When you’re in this house I am.”

  “Thanks for the warning.”

  He thought she was going to shoo him from the house with the broom she clutched in one hand. Or maybe take a little flight on it. Herman got out of there.

  Paxon had told him that he had had predecessors in his job, other graduates from Joliet.

  “How long did they stay, on the average?”

  “Until they got fed up with the housekeeper.”

  Maybe if it hadn’t been for Father Dowling, Herman would have been fed up already. Still, it was a good spot for him—the apartment, food, and what Father Dowling called a token salary that seemed enormous to Herman.