Meanwhile, Hayden is not so easily won over by the young man at his bedside and gives him a cold stare that suggests he should state his business and get a move on.
But the priest-in-training only stands next to the bed and nervously fingers the Saint Christopher medal hanging from his key ring. And Hayden gives in to his natural instincts for breaking the ice and making potential clients comfortable.
“You’ve got the map of Ireland all over your name and face there,” says Hayden.
“Actually my mother’s people are Scottish—Moncreiffe.”
Hayden’s sparkling green eyes ignite with interest. But he quickly realizes that Rosamond must have tipped Hank off. After all, hadn’t Hayden confided in her that he used to snare his biggest customers by opening his sales pitches with a little Scottish lore? But Hayden can’t help himself. And he’s not about to fall for any sales pitch from God anyhow.
“That’s from the Gaelic Monadh Craoibhe, meanin’ ‘the hill of the sacred bough.’ ” Hayden begins talking clans and tartans and becomes very animated. “Joey,” Hayden calls into the living room, where the distinct high-pitched voices of cartoon characters can be heard coming from the television set. “Be a good lad and fetch my book o’ Scottish clans from the coffee table!”
But it’s Diana who comes through the archway and hands him the book. She’s stunning in a mint green suit with a purple scarf tied loosely around her neck, smoke-colored eyes and crushed cherry lips prettily accentuated with makeup. Her dream-dark hair streams down her back the way night spills across an open field. And in her wake rises the smooth but insistent scent of vanilla.
Rather than be curious as to why a stranger is talking to Hayden about Scottish history, Diana is more interested in who the very attractive stranger is. Hank is unquestionably handsome and looks professional in a black cotton shirt and neatly pressed pants that emphasize his athletic build. Hayden introduces the two as Diana proffers one of her more flirtatious hellos, where her wide-set eyes and broad smile serve to heighten the sharp arc of her cheekbones.
“Oh, I wasn’t expecting company.” Diana smoothes her hair and straightens her skirt as if she’s been caught in an old housedress.
“He’s studying to be a priest.” Hayden quickly clarifies the situation.
Diana reexamines the visitor’s outfit. “Oh.” She withdraws her hand in a businesslike manner. “Yes, of course. Well, have a wonderful time discussing religion with Dad. I’m going to be late for work if I don’t leave right this minute.” She kisses Hayden good-bye on the cheek and sneaks another glance at Hank while she’s bending over, only to catch him staring at her figure, as she thought he might be. He looks away, but it’s too late, his face flushes and his expression is that of a man who accidentally walked into the ladies’ bathroom and wants to get out in a hurry. With a delicate wave of her fingers at the two men Diana exits the room.
Hayden coughs and takes a sip of juice. But this only makes him grimace now that he realizes it’s been spiked with one of her vitamin concoctions. “Oh God, I need Rosie to make me a cup o’ coffee.” It’s obvious that Joey’s attempt was thwarted by The Nutrition Department. He turns to Hank. “I’m sorry but I’m a bit under the weather from last night.”
“Party?” asks Hank.
“Oh, good heavens no,” Hayden replies with the utmost sincerity. “Lips that touch wine shall never touch mine. Late night prayer vigil.”
“Of course.” Hank nods his head in understanding, as if the exhausting rigors of the supremely devoted are all too familiar.
After the small talk seems to come to a natural close, the younger man clears his throat and begins his prepared remarks in a serious voice that occasionally croaks with postadolescent uncertainty. “Mr. MacBride, Sister Rosamond tells me that you’ve lost your faith in God.”
“She did now, did she?” Hayden’s business instincts tell him that Rosamond may be trying to trick him with this rubbish about “the poor father-to-be not having the call” and that she’s actually sent this Sky Pilot to convert him, her final good work before departing this world. Well, he hadn’t dealt with sheep rustlers as a teenager and then been on the casualty and property side of the insurance industry for twenty years just to be conned by some wet-behind-the-ears Holy Joe. Two can play at the conversion game.
“Since being declared a goner from The Cancer I can honestly say I no longer feel His blessing.” The truth of the matter is that Hayden stopped feeling the blessing of anyone he couldn’t see with his own two eyes after his brother, father, and sister died by the time he was sixteen, his mother praying up a storm all the while. Because it wasn’t God who eventually lent assistance to their plight, but the fact that after losing the farm he and his mother both worked long hard hours in order to get back on their feet. Hayden’s religion was simple: Get an education and find work. Or as he liked to tell the trainees when asked for the secret to his success: show up, buck up, suck it up, and don’t fuck it up.
And when your number is up, don’t moan about it, especially if you had a pretty good run—food on the table, healthy children and grandchildren, and of course the love of a good woman.
“Do you think it would help if we prayed together?” Hank asks in his earnest baritone.
“No, no. I have too many unanswered questions. Faith can be a sticky wicket. For instance, if I accidentally back over a pregnant woman with my station wagon do you think it’s God’s will? And if my grandson kills for his country will he go to hell?”
The priestling appears momentarily distressed. “Of course not!”
“Then let me ask you something else, do you think Adam and Eve had navels?”
“What?” Poor Padre Hank is still totally unaware he’s being strung along.
“You know, belly buttons, because that would imply birth, not divine creation.”
“No,” Hank muses. “No, they couldn’t possibly have.”
“But tha’ would mean they weren’t perfect human bein’s then!” Hayden declares triumphantly, his brogue swelling. “And what about war? How can we say God is on our side while the other side is sayin’ the exact same thing?”
Before Hank can attempt to answer, Rosamond reenters wearing a peach-colored sundress with white sandals, hands a glass of iced tea to Hank, and places a steaming mug on Hayden’s bedside. “It sounds as if you’re feeling better.”
Hayden looks at the hot liquid with suspicion and wrinkles his entire upper body as he inhales the lemony vapors.
“Diana said that you were to have this herbal tea instead of coffee because of your ulcer.”
“You realize that you’re forcing me to pour a shot o’ whiskey into this concoction?”
Rosamond ignores Hayden’s threat. “Are you two having a nice chat?”
“I don’t think there’s anything more to be said.” Hank looks down at the wedge of parquet flooring between his size thirteen shoes.
“Oh dear, I was afraid of that. Well, then, I have a proposal. Why don’t we all go to the Empire State Building today? We still haven’t gone there.”
“No New Yorker has ever been to the Empire State Building!” moans Hayden. “It’s a bloody rip-off for out-of-towners.”
“Come on. You promised to do all the things that we’ve never done before we . . . you know . . .”
“How about tomorrow?” Hayden bargains.
Rosamond holds up her charm bracelet with the silver Empire State Building dangling from it. For a woman who apparently didn’t want to act like a woman when it came to kissing, she’d certainly figured out how to run the guilt game. Then again, she was Catholic.
“Oh, all right,” a grumpy Hayden acquiesces.
Rosamond looks at the young priest. “Won’t you join us?”
“I have to do some marriage counseling. It’s part of my internship.”
“Oh, that’s rich,” says Hayden. “A single celibate twenty-year-old is counseling people on marriage!”
“I’m thirty-one,” t
he boyish-faced Hank remarks with visible irritation toward Hayden. Then he turns his pleasant smile on Rosamond. “But thank you for the invitation, Sister.”
“It’s just Rosamond now, Father,” she corrects him. Rosamond is somewhat shocked to hear the words as they come from her mouth, as if she’s considering taking them back.
“And it’s not Father . . . yet,” Hank tells her.
Hayden scowls at this overly polite ecclesiastical blather, turns to Hank and demands, “So when are you coming back? I hate to remind you but I do’an’ have all the time in the world.”
“But . . . but.” Hank is convinced that he has failed miserably in his mission to make Hayden a believer. “You want me to come back?”
Hayden also feels that he hasn’t succeeded in the challenge Rosie gave him of testing the young man’s resolve. But more than that, he’s taken a shine to the young man. “How do you expect to restore me faith if you do’an’ come back? Or am I that hopeless?” Hayden asks playfully.
But Hank regards his remarks with gravity. “How about Monday?”
“ ’Tis Monday then.”
“Go in peace,” Hank says as he walks toward the hallway.
“Not in pieces,” Hayden calls after him.
“Hayden!” says Rosamond.
He ignores her scolding. “Now why can’t Diana date a nice young man like that?”
“Because you’re too strong and her mother was too perfect,” Rosamond says as she hands him the tea and neatly arranges herself in the chair next to his bed. It is painfully obvious to Rosamond that Diana’s low self-esteem comes from idolizing her parents and being terrified that she can never live up to their example or expectations.
“What! What did you just say?”
“Hayden, I never knew your wife, but from all accounts she was beyond reproach.”
Hayden smiles, recalling Mary’s attributes. “She was a good woman, though she had a temper, indeed she did. Threw me out in the street one freezin’ winter night wearing only the clothes on my back, not even an overcoat.” He shakes his head at the memory, though without volunteering what he may have done to incur such wrath in the first place.
Rosamond doesn’t ask, but assumes it had something to do with whiskey and possibly the Greyfriars Gang. “I can tell that Diana greatly admired her mother. Believe it or not, many young women came to the convent in large part to escape their mothers.”
Aha, thinks Hayden, she never meant to be a nun in the first place. Her mother was probably trying to marry her off to someone she despised and fleeing to the convent offered the only escape. “Is that why you went in?” he asks hopefully. Hayden would love nothing more than for Rosamond to say that taking vows had all been a terrible mistake.
“My mother passed away a few hours after I was born. There were complications. And my father was a lobster boat captain up in Maine. When it was time for me to get an education he sent me to a convent school in western Massachusetts where his sister was a teacher.”
Hayden looks at Rosamond with a mixture of surprise and concern. “I’m sorry,” he finally manages to say, as if someone had just been declared dead.
“No, no. That’s just the point. It sounds much worse than it is. I’m sure it was difficult on my father, because he loved her ever so much. But he eventually remarried and I would spend vacations with him and my stepmother. And because I never knew my real mother, I can’t really miss her, except of course the idea of her. However, my aunt Kathy, my mother’s older sister, was perfectly lovely and I had a wonderful time at the school where she taught, even though it was strict.”
“So what you’re saying is that by trying to be everything to Diana we didn’t leave her room to be herself.”
Rosamond folds her hands in her lap and looks past him, out the window, where the sky is painted in Easter colors and birds poke in the grass for worms. “Not necessarily. I just think it might be a challenge to live up to the example that you and Mary set. And so it’s easier to go in the opposite direction, to not even try and come close in her work and relationships.”
“You know what you can do for me, Rosamond?” Hayden raises his voice and bangs the mug down on the bedside table so that the tea slops over the edge.
“What?” Rosamond is suddenly concerned that she’s offended him by speaking so boldly, but she knows no other way. They conversed very little at the convent, and when they did it was straightforward, constructive, and essential, such as when they reviewed their faults.
“Tell Joey to get dressed,” Hayden announces in his grouchiest voice, “so we can go to the blessed Empire State Building!”
chapter thirty-one
It’s a perfect summer day on the Isle of Manhattan, where the sun is an enormous gold disk glittering above the resplendent steel-and-glass skyline. The city appears to be a fortress of shiny windows with water towers placed high up on the rooftops, as if to prevent access by the enemy.
Atop the Empire State Building Rosamond peers with delight through the large coin-operated telescopes in an effort to find all the landmarks with which they’ve recently become familiar—the nearby Chrysler Building, with its gleaming art deco spire, the block-sized Museum of Natural History, and the great green expanse of Central Park. Who would have imagined that so many sober-looking gray apartment buildings were crowned by roof gardens with flowers, trees, and even swimming pools. Off in the distance it’s possible to see the domed Williamsburgh Savings Bank Tower with its enormous illuminated clock.
Joey runs from side to side trying to find the best place to take a picture. It also occurs to him that he should ask for a telescope for his birthday since he could then spy on Mrs. Trummel’s daughter Donna, who often comes home on weekends. Hayden briefly considers jumping from the observation deck when his time comes, but apparently insurance companies had already thought of that and carefully constructed barriers, making it impossible to leap to one’s death without employing a rope and grappling hook.
When they pull into the driveway back home Hayden is still reveling in playing the resident curmudgeon. “We get a better view o’ Manhattan from the Williamsburgh Savings Bank Tower right here in Brooklyn. And it do’an’ cost any ten dollars to stand on line for over an hour just to ride up in a crowded elevator.”
The three tourists enter the house and find Diana leaning over the lacquered maple table with sheaves of papers and envelopes haphazardly spread out in front of her. Hayden’s first thought is that after having left a copy of his will and insurance policy to review, for the twentieth time, she’s finally set out to get organized. However, her eyes are red from weeping and smeared mascara streaks her cheeks.
“Oh Dad! Joey!” She rushes to the entranceway and grabs all three of them. “I didn’t even hear the car pull into the driveway.” Her lips tremble and then her mouth draws tight. “Dominick died this morning! The scaffolding outside his dorm room collapsed—a freak accident.”
Dominick was her younger sister Linda’s eighteen-year-old stepson, who’d been attending college in Washington, D.C. But because he’d moved to Honolulu with his mom and her new husband when he was still in elementary school, they only vaguely knew of him.
Diana clutches Joey and Hayden and Rosamond in a group hug as if they are the ones who just barely escaped a fluke construction accident. Eventually she snuffles loudly, lets her arms drop to her sides, and searches for a tissue to blow her nose.
Hayden examines the jumble of papers she’s been sorting through—old car payment books, rent stubs, canceled checks, and death certificates.
“I’m trying to find a list of our funeral plots,” explains Diana between blowing her nose and wiping away the teardrops that are still forming in pools against her bottom lashes. “Linda said that she thought Grandpa Arthur owned some gravesites at Lakewood Cemetery.”
“But why would they want Dominick buried with our family?” asks Hayden. Not that he minds. It’s his view that death is a personal matter and people should do whateve
r they want.
“It sounds as if Dominick wasn’t very happy in Honolulu. His mother’s marriage is on the rocks again and she’s had another one of her breakdowns,” says Diana. “So they don’t really live anywhere right now.”
“I always thought it was Ted who drove his first wife mental by makin’ her put on those silly hats and gloves when he was campaigning,” inserts Hayden. “The big Jackie O. sunglasses she always wore I understood, what with those teeth of his—”
“Dad, not now,” Diana scolds through her tears. “Anyway, his grandparents, who still live here, are organizing the funeral. It seems that Ted and Dominick had some sort of falling out back when he was in high school. I guess that’s why we never met him.”
“Still, it’s his son,” says Hayden. “And Ted’s mattress is so loaded with money I’m surprised he can sleep at night.”
“Ted wants him to be cremated. Apparently there’s a big flap in New Jersey politics about the land that will be needed for cemeteries if the burial rate doesn’t go down. But the grandparents are Italian Catholic and they’re going crazy. So Linda thought that if we gave them a plot that we don’t need it would stop all the arguing.”
“Well, she’s right,” says Hayden. “I mean, she’s right that Mary’s dad did own half a dozen plots at Lakewood up in Westchester. But he sold them off to foot the bills for your grandma Phoebe’s nursing home. There’s only one left—mine.”
“Oh.” And although Diana releases an involuntary shudder at the mention of Hayden’s grave she also realizes that she can’t blame him for bringing it up, at least not this time. “Oh,” she repeats and begins gathering up the papers.
Last Call Page 16
