Nobody's Fool

by Richard Russo

  Anyway, Rub was not sorry to see Peter depart, which meant he had Sully right where he wanted him. With the two sawhorses set up in the middle of the living room and surrounded by a mine field of dangerous holes in the flooring, they faced each other throughout the long afternoon, wrenching reluctant nails from boards so the hardwood could be reused. When they finished with the ones they’d piled along the west wall, Rub fetched the ones they’d piled out on the porch, hopping nimbly from stud to stud, his arms weighted down with lumber, while Sully remained on the more stable island of plywood, swearing at the soft nails.

  All afternoon they’d faced each other in that charmed circle, close enough to touch, though Rub wouldn’t have done that. He had a deep and abiding adolescent fear of being thought “queer,” a fear that was always coming into conflict with his equally powerful need to keep his best friend in the whole world as close by as possible, so he could share with Sully his deepest wishes and needs, as they occurred to him, every single one. Rub’s wishes didn’t travel well. They came out best when he didn’t have to raise his voice, when he was in a ditch, for instance, and Sully was there in the same ditch a few feet away and ready to receive them. He didn’t like to expel wishes forcefully but rather to release them gently, allow them to locate Sully of their own impetus, on their own struggling wings. Like recently hatched birds, Rub’s wishes were too new to the world and too clumsy to sustain extended flight. They liked the nest.

  So far this afternoon Rub had wished that Peter would quit calling him Sancho, because he hated that name; that they could turn on the heat here in the house, which was almost as cold indoors as out, so they wouldn’t have to wear gloves, which made the delicate task of pounding out the nails that much more difficult; that his wife, Bootsie, would quit stealing so much from the Woolworth’s where she worked before she got caught and they both got sent to jail; that the Sans Souci, one wing of which was visible through the northeast window beyond the grove of naked trees, would hire him and Sully to be handymen at about twenty dollars an hour when the spa opened in the summer. That he could be invisible for a day, so he could sneak in and watch ole Toby Roebuck in the shower.

  Sully only half listened. As always, he was amazed by the modesty of Rub’s fantasies. How like him it was to bestow upon himself the gift of invisibility and then imagine it would be his for only a single day. Often there was a curious wisdom about Rub’s imaginings, as if he’d learned about life that nothing ever comes to you clean but instead with caveats and provisos that could render the gifts worthless or leave you hungry for more. It was as if somewhere in the back of Rub’s mind he knew that he was better off without whatever it was he wished for. Which was certainly true in the case of invisibility. In most social situations, Rub was closer to invisibility than he knew, and to disappear completely would not be in his best interest.

  Though he only half listened, Sully was grateful for Rub’s litany, if only to keep the Bowdon Street ghosts at arm’s length. His father, full to the throat with cheap beer and moral indignation, the stench of both on his breath, seemed as if he might reel noisily through the front door once again, its frame barely wide enough to contain him in this condition. There too in the shadows Sully’s mother quietly awaited him, just as she had for years awaited the religious miracle the priest kept assuring her would come if only her faith were strong enough, his advice deepening her despair even as it gave her strength to face one more homecoming. A large, content man this priest had been, almost as large as Big Jim, in fact. Large enough, Sully had thought at the time, to perhaps prevent his father’s behavior if he chose to, but even more self-satisfied and inert than large. Even though Sully had been just a boy, he had understood that the priest would not help, that he was content that people’s lives should be studies in hurt and fear. He seemed not in the least surprised by anything Sully’s mother told him about her marriage, about what life was like in their home. The priest took none of it personally, nor did he seem at all discouraged by any sordidness. He himself had found a line of work he enjoyed, and offering spiritual counsel to the wretched was part of his job. And he seemed to understand that to wish people less wretched would be to put himself out of a job.

  “It’s a sin, Isobel,” Sully recalled the priest telling his mother in hushed, holy tones. She had not wanted to bring Sully with her to the church, but he’d been too small to leave alone in the house. She’d placed him in a pew midway up the center aisle, then gone to meet the priest near the altar rail and the confessional. He had wanted her to enter the confessional, to make a confession, but his mother had refused, claiming she was not sorry, that she was not asking for forgiveness. She made regular confessions, but this time she was adamant.

  What she had to say to the priest was not for Sully to hear, but their voices had carried in the cool, dark church, empty except for themselves. “It’s a black sin to imagine that God hasn’t the power to do good in His own world,” the priest told her. “To God all things are possible. It is only to us that things seem difficult. Blacker sinners than your husband have been brought to Him in a moment. Remember St. Paul, struck from his horse on the road to Damascus, the road to faith.”

  “It’s what I pray for,” his mother, one eye swollen shut, had wept, and the priest had smiled down at her until she continued. “I pray that he’ll be struck down,” she explained. “Struck down so that he’ll never get up again.”

  “Shush, Isobel,” the priest told her. “When such terrible things leave your tongue, they fly directly to God’s ear.”

  She had stood then and turned, peering into the darkness of the church for Sully, who had sunk down into his pew. “What difference?” she said. “God isn’t listening.”

  His mother had never spoken to the priest again. Nor did she attend his funeral later that year. Not that her absence was missed. People came from all over the state to both the viewing and the Requiem Mass. Sully’s father had gone and taken his sons with him. Sully could still remember how they’d dressed up for the occasion, his father and brother in dark, ill-fitting suits, himself in a white shirt that was too small for him, the collar so tight at the neck that his cheeks and forehead pulsed with warmth. The viewing was held not in a funeral home but rather at the rectory, and the line of the faithful come to pay respects extended down the steps and around the corner and up the street all the way to the church.

  The priest had choked to death on a bone. Had anyone been with him, he might have been saved, but he dined alone in the huge rectory dining room which three days later held his coffin. By the time his housekeeper, in the next room, had heard him thrashing in his chair it was too late. By the time she came to his aid, his eyes had already bugged out in stark terror, as if he’d been forced to bear witness to something so ugly that his reason had come unhinged and he had stopped breathing. So, almost, had the housekeeper, so terrifying was the sight.

  One must assume that the mortician, a member of the parish, had done his best, but the results were shockingly inadequate, for despite all efforts the dead priest’s expression retained much of the horror present when he was first discovered by the housekeeper. And so many of the faithful were given quite a turn when they saw the priest for the final time in his rich casket. The mortician had worked feverishly on the bugged eyes and contorted features and had managed to mute the expression of abject terror, but the priest still looked anything but confident about meeting his maker, and those who had for years followed his spiritual guidance did not stay long in his presence. The line past the casket moved swiftly, a bottleneck forming only once, when Sully’s father held things up by kneeling to say a prayer, though something about his posture suggested he might be whispering advice to an old friend. For the rest of the mourners, a single stunned glance was sufficient to send them packing into the next room.

  Only later, when those who had been at the front of the line compared nervous notes with those who had been nearer the rear, did it become clear that during the viewing, the dead man’s
mouth had gradually opened. At first his lips had been clamped tight, forming a white crease, but two hours later, when the last of the faithful had been led, like the blind, out of the dark rectory and into the afternoon sunlight, the mortician had had to go back to work, for the priest’s mouth had opened wide and the last unnerved mourners recalled vividly that the dead man had appeared to be begging them to reach into his throat and remove the bone that had choked him to death two days before.

  But what Sully recollected more vividly than the appearance of the dead priest was his own father. Even as a boy, Sully had understood about his father’s ingratiating charm, even about the way it worked. His father was the sort of man people hated to see coming. If they noticed him before he saw them, they’d turn away and their heads would come together to plot escape. Perhaps they’d seen him drunk and belligerent the night before, or maybe he’d actually been in a fight and been thrown out of a bar and they’d tried to help him off the sidewalk, and maybe he’d looked up at them then, bloody-chinned and bleary-eyed, and told them right where they could stuff it. Or maybe they’d just heard a grim story about him. Big Jim had a reputation as a hard man in his own home, this being the euphemism for wife beaters at the time. At any rate, it was frequently within the social context of some prejudice against him that Sully’s father deftly charmed his way into acceptance. Before he was finished, the very people who’d pretended not to see him when he entered the room were slapping him on the back, doubting the truth of the tale they’d heard about him or even the evidence of their own senses, the ones who’d seen his face turn black with rage and red with his own blood. Now they hated to see him go, he was such a good fellow, and their only reservations were that he was a trifle crude and laughed a little too loud.

  The day of the viewing, Sully’s father was the only one in the crowded rectory who appeared unfazed by the dead priest’s ghastly appearance, as if, to Big Jim, the priest had always looked this way. After holding up the line so he could pretend to say a prayer and then making his sons do the same at the ornate kneeler, he’d introduced himself and the two boys to the bishop, who had come up from Albany to say tomorrow’s high requiem Mass. Sully noticed that several of the parishioners had kissed the bishop’s ring and was grateful when neither he nor his brother nor his father was required to do so. Indeed, the robed man appeared to take in Sully’s father whole, in a single glance, and he stared a hole right through him.

  Before leaving the rectory, Big Jim told Sully and his brother to wait where they were, he’d be back in a minute. In the hallway they saw him lean toward the old woman who had been the dead priest’s housekeeper and ask her something. Flustered, she pointed down the hall. Sully and his brother watched their father start out in the direction the old woman pointed, then dart left unexpectedly and head up the big staircase that led to the rectory’s upper rooms. Sully’s brother grinned at him knowingly.

  When their father did not return for what seemed a long time, Sully, nervous, told his brother he had to go. “Bad,” he added, so there’d be no mistake. If it was okay for his father to pee in the dead priest’s house, maybe it would be okay if he did too. He needed to do it, in any case.

  Since there was no one to tell them they shouldn’t—indeed, no one seemed to notice—they followed their father upstairs. The upper story of the rectory contained five rooms so lavishly furnished that Sully and his brother were stunned, having never seen anything like it.

  They found their father in the priest’s study, just standing in the middle of the book-lined room, taking it all in—the plush leather sofa, the silver-framed pictures hanging from pristine white walls, the huge oak rolltop desk with its brass lamp, the gigantic free-standing globe, the leather-bound books from floor to ceiling, and pervading the room the smells of tobacco and what Sully would later identify as cologne and liqueurs. On the desk’s blotter there lay a gold pen and pencil set, along with a sleek gold letter opener.

  Their father seemed neither surprised nor angry to see them, despite the fact that on other occasions he’d been known to strap them for not obeying his orders to stay put. “Not a bad racket, huh?” he said with a sweeping gesture that included not just the priest’s study but the surrounding rooms upstairs and down. “Those nickels and dimes in the collection plate add up, don’t they? All those collections, seven days a week, three on Sundays. You can do all right. See all this? This is what they call a vow of poverty. I bet the bastard was as chaste as he was poor too, what do you think?”

  Sully didn’t know what the word chaste meant, but he knew he had to go to the bathroom. “In there,” his father pointed. “It don’t look like one, but that’s what it is just the same.”

  Truly, had it not been for the commode, Sully would not have recognized it for a bathroom. It was bigger than his and his brother’s bedroom. There was a sofa along one wall, velvet drapes concealing the tub and shower. The atmosphere was foul though, thanks to Big Jim’s visit. Sully himself finished his own business quickly and guiltily, washing his hands and drying them on his pants to avoid soiling the priest’s thick purple towels. “Some shitter, huh?” his father said when Sully emerged, and then they waited for Sully’s brother to go too, though the boy said he didn’t have to. “Try,” Sully’s father insisted. “You’ll be able to squeeze something out.”

  They stopped at a bar on the way home so Sully’s father could describe the rectory for the bartender. He remembered all the details Sully’d missed, and the more beer his father drank, the more vivid and angry his memory became. “You should see the shitter,” he told the man behind the bar, who, Sully could tell, was already tired of hearing about the rectory. “It’s bigger than your goddamn house.”

  “You never even seen my house, Sully,” the man said.

  “Yeah?” Sully’s father said. “Well, you never saw that shitter either, because you wouldn’t believe it. Not only that. You shoulda seen the getup the bishop was wearing. Cost more than all your clothes put together, just that one robe. All your clothes and your wife’s put together, I bet, and we’re just talking about what he had on.”

  “I ain’t even married, Sully,” the man said.

  “Lucky you,” his father said. “This religion is some goddamn racket. We should all drop what we’re doing and start wearing gold crosses and passing collection plates.”

  The bartender had gone pale. “How about a little respect? It’s a dead priest you’re talking about. The guy just died. God’s priest he was, Sully.”

  “You oughta see the casket he’s gonna be buried in,” Sully’s father went on, undeterred. “I bet it cost more than this whole bar.”

  “Why don’t you go home, Sully,” the bartender said.

  “Why don’t you go fuck a rock, George, you dumb Pollack ass-kisser,” Sully’s father replied.

  They’d walked the rest of the way home then, Sully’s father getting angrier every step of the way, the beer churning in him, souring his vision. “You see the way that asshole bishop looked at me?” he nudged Sully’s brother, Patrick.

  “I don’t think he liked you, Pop,” Patrick admitted.

  “You figure out why?”

  Patrick wanted to know why.

  “ ’Cause I wouldn’t kiss his ring, is why,” their father explained proudly. “You see that big shiny ring he had on? You’re supposed to kiss it, because he’s the bishop and you’re nobody. But he’d kiss my ass before I’d kiss his ring, and he knew it, too. All those bastards can go straight to hell, is what I say.”

  “Me too,” Patrick agreed, and to prove he shared their father’s contempt, he took from his jacket pocket the sleek gold letter opener he’d clipped from the priest’s study.

  Seeing this, their father’s rage disappeared, and he howled appreciatively, slapping Patrick on the back. “Why the hell not?” he wanted to know. “He won’t be needing it anymore, will he? The bastard’s opened his last letter.”

  It was years later, long after his mother’s death, that Sully remem
bered what she’d said to the priest that afternoon in the dark church, how she’d wept and confessed her secret shame, that she’d prayed every day for her own husband to be struck down. How old had he been when he realized that his mother’s prayer had been answered, or half answered? She’d prayed for Sully’s father to be struck down—emphatically, decisively, unambiguously—so there would be no question about the message. The priest who reminded her of Paul’s conversion needn’t have. A direct hit with a lightning bolt, preferably to the center of the forehead, was precisely the sort of message she’d hoped God would deliver. She knew her husband, and she knew, even if God didn’t, that no glancing blow would suffice. But instead of sending a divine lightning bolt, God had sent an endless progression of ham-fisted bartenders and bouncers and cops to show her husband the way, as if, even in His infinite wisdom, He wasn’t quite savvy enough to realize that Big Jim Sullivan had a head of pure stone and that, in the end, all those bartenders and bouncers and cops would do was scrape their knuckles on such a skull. It was only the man’s intoxication that allowed them to do what little damage they did. They waited until he was stinking drunk before tossing him out into the rainy gutter, calling instructions after him. “Go home, Sully,” they advised. Advice he always followed with fists clenched.

  The night he and his sons went to the rectory, he’d finally delivered them back home in the early evening and then gone back out again, leaving the house quiet. In bed, in the dark of their room, the boys had discussed the day’s events until Sully’s brother, Patrick, fell asleep, still fingering the gold-plated letter opener he’d stolen from the rectory. Sully himself had lain awake, cruelly ashamed that he himself had stolen nothing, for of course he saw the wisdom of his father’s logic. The rich priest wasn’t going to need any of his wealth anymore, and what’s more, he didn’t have any children of his own to inherit his possessions. Sully thought he would have liked to have the big globe, the one that stood as tall as he was, with its vast blue oceans and tall mountains jutting out in relief, all contained inside the sickle of gleaming brass. He could see himself standing next to it, poring over the globe for hours, spinning it, even as the world it represented spun through space, and he would know that this world was his. He’d finally fallen asleep thinking about it, and somewhere in the middle of the night his father had come back home again, this time drunk beyond redemption, and he’d shaken Sully awake in his bed. Had the boy’s last happy waking thought been etched there on his sleeping face for his father to read in the dark? Was that why Big Jim had awakened him? Impossible, but that was the impression Sully had when his father, his breath boozy and sour, issued him a warning. “Don’t think you’re going to grow up and be somebody, ’cause you’re not. So you can get that shit right out of your head.”