“And what do you pine for, Father?”
“Just what you would expect, of course,” he said, the irony deliberate and thick now in his voice. “Wine, women, and song.”
He put his hand in the pocket of his cassock and pulled out a rosary. He stared down at it, watching his own fingers rub the ebony beads. “I might as well tell you then, since you'll learn of it soon enough. Father Pat and I had quite a noisy disagreement yesterday afternoon.”
“How noisy?”
Again that strange smile. “Holy water doesn't flow in our veins, you know. There was some shouting. Some name calling. A rectory is like a family and all families have their spats.”
“In my family, when there was a spat, somebody usually got the crap beat out of him.”
The priest's hand closed hard around the rosary's crucifix and his head snapped up. “Was Father Pat beaten?”
“What was your disagreement about?”
A few seconds of silence ticked by before he answered. “As a preacher, Father Pat had a style that was…unorthodox. It's hard to describe if you haven't heard it. It was joyful, exuberant, and loud. Really loud. It wasn't exactly like a holy roller prayer meeting, but it was close.”
“So what if he had 'em shouting hallelujahs, as long as he was packing them in? And filling up the collection basket.”
“Yeah, well, there was that. He probably got twice as many worshippers at his Masses as the rest of us did put together. But lately some of the stuff he was saying in his homilies was flat-out contrary to the teachings of the Catholic faith, and so I forbade him to preach. I told him he could celebrate the Mass for the sisters in the convent, but no longer for the laity. And no more preaching. I told him a priest calls people to holiness and challenges them to a better life, but he does not make the Church about himself. Father Pat took offense and we ended up hollering at each other like a couple of guys at a boxing match.”
“Do you think someone hated this style of his enough to kill him for it?”
The pastor blew out a hard breath, as if he'd just been punched. “Oh, God. I would have said until this moment that everybody loved Father Pat. And he was especially beloved in the eyes of our Lord, I do truly believe. Beloved and chosen.” He turned his head and his gaze lifted to the bronze crucifix above the altar, and Rourke thought he saw a painful light like a burning match in his eyes. Or it could have simply been sunlight from the window glancing off his thick glasses.
“When I was a kid,” Father Ghilotti said, “I had a favorite uncle who was also my parrain. He stood up for me at my baptism. He gave me expensive toys on my birthday and took me places, just the two of us together, like to West Park and the zoo. On the day of my confirmation, when I was twelve, my family had a big celebration and as my godfather he was there, of course. After the party was over, he left in a car with a couple of my old man's goons and he was never seen or heard from again.”
He stopped, closing his eyes, and he might have been praying, or he might only have been remembering. “I saw them looking at each other,” he went on, and his voice had taken on a street flatness. “My parrain and my daddy, before he got in the car. He knew what they were going to do to him and he knew why. They were brothers, but it was business.”
He looked down and saw that he still had the rosary in his fist and he thrust it back into his pocket. “Nobody's safe,” he said. “Not even a beloved priest.”
“Did you kill him?”
The face he showed Rourke was both tough and open. “No, I didn't kill him. When I took my vows, I stopped being my daddy's son.”
Rourke looked back out the window, where his brother still sat on the stone bench, curled in upon himself as if waiting for a reckoning that was sure to come, and sure to hurt.
It isn't true, Rourke thought. We are always and forever our father's sons.
The old priest, Father Delaney, was sitting at the kitchen table cradling a cup of coffee, a cigarette burning between yellowed, palsied fingers. He looked up as Rourke passed through on his way to the garden.
“You are the new assistant pastor,” the old man said. “Father Paul, is it?”
Rourke paused, his hand on the doorknob and turned back. Father Delaney tugged at that place in Rourke that wanted to save the world from all pain and folly. He couldn't imagine a worse horror than to grow old and go on living while your mind broke off of you in pieces and melted away.
“No, Father,” Rourke said. “Paul is my brother.”
The old man's watery blue eyes, vague and trembling, creased with his smile. “Two priests in one family. Your mother must be proud.”
“No, I'm not…Yes,” Rourke said, smiling back at him. “She's proud.” He'd never thought of himself as being like Paulie, not in looks nor in any other way that mattered. He wondered what connection this old priest, in his dementia, was seeing.
The old priest pointed his cigarette at the appointment book in Rourke's hand. “So now you've come for it, then. Because Father Pat is dead.”
“Yes. I'm sorry.”
“He was a good man, and he was particularly blessed, but he was…” His voice trailed off and he looked down at the coffee and the cigarette as if he suddenly couldn't remember how he'd acquired them.
“What was Father Pat?” Rourke prompted. He wasn't really expecting a coherent answer, but the gaze the old priest turned back up at him had cleared some.
“Lonely,” he said, in a voice that was stronger as well. “Oh, we're all lonely in a way, because our hearts are restless until they rest in peace with God. But this priest, he had a loneliness of the soul.”
Rourke followed a flagstone path and the smell of the tea olive to the stone bench where his brother sat. The morning sun was almost full up now and so bright it struck his eyes like shards of a broken mirror, making them shudder.
Paulie looked up at him with eyes that were swollen and red, then looked away. Rourke sat next to him, saying nothing. The plaster Virgin was wearing a blue robe and she had her hands pressed together palm to palm and tucked beneath her chin. She had a sweet look on her face. Rourke could imagine praying to her and the thought disturbed him. It had been a long time since he'd been on speaking terms with the icons of his faith.
He studied his brother's averted face a moment, then leaned over, bracing his forearms on his spread knees. “Paulie—”
“So how was the party of the century?”
It was the last question he would ever have expected to hear coming out of his brother's mouth. The movie studio's big to-do had been in all the papers, true enough, but he wouldn't have thought his brother would be one to follow the high and low drama of the city's flapper set.
“Why, Father, it was all the excitement you could ask for,” Rourke said, drawling the words a little. “The booze was bountiful, the band was jazzy, and the mamas were hot.”
Paulie's eyes squinted half closed and one corner of his mouth deepened into a dimple—his version of a smile.
“What?” Rourke said, when his brother went on smiling and saying nothing.
“I was just wondering what it's like to make love with a sex goddess. I'm not asking for particulars, mind you,” he added quickly. “But apparently even the presence of the Virgin doesn't keep me from wondering.”
A laugh sprang from Rourke's chest, taking away with it some of the ache. “Jesus,” he said, shaking his head.
Paulie reached down and took Rourke's hand by the wrist, turning it over. An angry red burn marked his palm. “And what was that all about? Still shaking your fist in the face of God?”
Rourke pulled his hand free of his brother's grasp, curling his fingers over the burn. He saw where blood stained his cuff and yet he couldn't remember getting close enough to the body to have brushed against it. “I used to know a woman who hooked in a hot pillow joint,” he said. “She had this philosophy that the good Lord got bored on the seventh day and that's why He created sin.”
Paulie shook his head. “There wasn't any p
rostitute who said any such thing. I remember you trying out that blasphemous theory on Sister Mary Joseph in fourth grade. You got sent home, which was why you did it in the first place. There was some exhibition baseball game that day, out at City Park, and it spared you from having to suffer the consequences of playing hooky.”
“Hey, now, I suffered. She must've whacked me a good half dozen times on my hand with her ruler and she had a swing Babe Ruth himself could admire.”
Paulie smiled again, then the smile dissolved into a wincing twist of his mouth. “It was terrible, wasn't it? How Father Pat died. I can tell by your face.”
“Yes.”
Paulie's head fell back and he stared unseeing through the branches of the mimosa tree. White clouds tumbling across a sky the smoky blue of oyster shells. “God help me, Day. Why did I become a priest when I can't—”
He cut himself off, pressing his lips together tightly in that way he'd always done whenever he was facing something distasteful, as if the taste of it was in his mouth. “I was jealous of him, of Father Pat, only not for any reasons you're thinking. It's possible he might have been a saint, a real saint, only I would never want such a burden for myself, because sainthood is an awful burden—don't you think it's not. And I didn't mind either that he was everybody's favorite priest. Even Father Frank's and the archbishop's, in spite of all the trouble he was always getting into for disobedience, but I didn't care about that because he was my favorite, too…”
The tears were running freely down Paulie's face again, and Rourke couldn't help feeling a tinge of shame for his brother's sake. A legacy from their daddy, he supposed, who when they were boys had always laughed at them and called them sissies whenever they cried.
“Only I think I hated him sometimes, Day,” Paulie was saying. “I was just so jealous of him. Jealous of his being so in love with God and with His world, and for always being so darn certain. Certain of what it meant to be a priest, of getting it right, when I can't even…”
He clasped his hands together and his head fell forward in such a way that Rourke thought he was praying until he began to talk to the ground between his spread feet. “The first time I was called upon to administer the last rites, a ten-year-old boy had pointed a shotgun at his daddy's face and pulled the trigger. Someone had covered the man with a sheet and I lifted it to anoint his forehead with the holy oil and there was no forehead there to anoint. There was no head at all, and that was when I knew I was always going to make a lousy priest. I couldn't forgive that boy for doing that to his own flesh and blood, and I couldn't forgive the father for what he must have been doing to that boy, and I couldn't forgive God for allowing any of it to happen.”
He looked up at Rourke again, and his soul's pain showed on his face. “A priest is supposed to be God's instrument of forgiveness, but I can't forgive, Day. I can't forgive.”
Rourke wanted to say something to make it right, but there were no words. His brother carried a grief against himself for what had been done to them when they were kids. Rourke knew it, for he shared it. Only for Paulie the grief had driven him into a life of celibacy and obedience and prayer, a life that had welcomed him, perhaps, but not saved him. For Rourke, whenever the craziness took hold of him, he had gone looking for those sweet, seductive paths of self-destruction. And sometimes—most of the time—he found them.
“Tell me what happened with you last night, Paulie.”
His brother was holding himself stiff now, as if he feared that he would fly into pieces. “I'm not going to tell you that priests don't commit sins,” he said. “Even the sin of murder. But no one at this rectory would ever have hurt Father Pat. We loved him.”
Rourke said nothing.
Paulie pressed his lips so tightly together that a muscle spasmed in his cheek. “I'm your brother,” he said.
“Tell me where you were last night.”
The taut silence stretched on between them, until it was filled with the chatter of the mockingbirds and, out on the street, the roar of a car with a hole in its muffler.
“I can't,” his brother finally said, so softly Rourke barely heard him.
“I'll find it out. Eventually.”
“God,” Paulie said with a torn laugh. “Do you have any idea what you look like when you smile like that? You'd scare the truth out of a body if there was any truth to be had.”
“I've always been able to scare you, Paulie. After a while it got to where it wasn't even fun anymore.”
“And you always have to win. Every game we ever played, you always won.”
Rourke searched his brother's face a moment longer and then he looked away, and the other man breathed a sigh as if he'd been given a reprieve. They sat together for a small while in silence, both lost in memories that were oddly comforting in spite of all their pain, perhaps because they were shared.
“Remember,” Paulie finally said, “how our daddy used to always say, ‘This is such a sad and sinful world’?”
“Yeah. And he sure enough contributed his share of both sadness and sin.”
“Did…” The word caught in his throat as if he'd swallowed a large bubble of air. “Did you hate him?”
“Sometimes.”
Rourke waited for the rest of it, waited for his brother to ask if he forgave their father. And their mother. Paulie had never even been able to speak aloud about their mother and what her leaving had done to them.
Rourke wasn't sure what his answer would be and it didn't matter anyway, because his brother didn't ask.
Father Paul Rourke watched his brother walk away with that hard, confident way of his. It had never struck him before this moment how much Day had grown up to be the image of their daddy. The sun-tipped hair, the startling dark blue eyes, the wide mouth with its promise of cruelty. Tall and lean, but not thin, with a boxer's shoulders and a boxer's way of carrying himself, on the balls of his feet, as if spoiling for a fight.
Always so sure of himself. Always so tough.
Mike Rourke had tried to raise both his sons to be tough, and then he'd worked hard at showing them that no matter how tough they ever got their old man would always be tougher. The toughest Rourke of them all. He had made his point easily with Paulie, who had always felt powerless before his father. Day, though, just wouldn't stay down. No matter how hard or often he was hit, he kept getting up and coming back for more.
Only two years separated them, but Paul Rourke had never understood his little brother, never known where Day got his snarling courage, although he'd always felt that one of life's great mysteries would be solved if he could. All those shared hours of their boyhood, they had fought and dreamed and sinned together, and he had never really known his brother.
But then, how well can you ever really know someone? he wondered now. How much can you ever know of that place deep inside a man's guts where he lives? Certainly, Paulie thought, he had never really known himself.
Above the door to the seminary that he had run away to as a boy were inscribed the words of Jesus Christ: Anyone who does not take up his cross and follow me cannot be my disciple. When he walked through that door he had thought he could lose all memory of where he had come from, and he had truly believed that all he had to do was take up the cross and joy would come. Only he had been wrong. He loved the Church, with all its holy mysteries and ceremonies, but he hadn't forgotten and the joy hadn't come, and he had hidden this shameful lack from himself and from the world like a sin concealed in the confessional.
And now, because of what had happened, because of what he had done, what he was doing, his sin would be found out.
He had heard the slam of the kitchen's screen door and footsteps on the flagstone path, and still he jumped when his pastor laid a heavy hand on his shoulder.
“What are we going to do now, Paul?” Father Ghilotti said.
Paulie wanted to laugh, but he was afraid that if he unclenched his throat he'd start to bawl like a child. “Pray?” he finally said, his voice breaking on the word.
“We're going to have those detectives snooping around us for a while, and we know what-all they could find. If something isn't done.”
Paulie shook his head, and this time he did laugh, although it was more of a gasping noise. “What something are you suggesting that we do, Father? One thing you ought to know about my little brother—our daddy used to beat on him with a bicycle chain and he could never break him. Day won't back down before anyone or anything.”
Father Ghilotti's words were nearly overcome by the rush of the wind through the mimosa branches above their heads. “We've got to trust, then,” he said, “that God will give us the grace for every possible circumstance. Foreseen or unforeseen.”
“With God's grace,” Paulie repeated obediently, but he didn't believe it. There would be no grace, no expiation for him now. No forgiveness.
Chapter Seven
The crack of billiard balls and the strum of a banjo leaked out the rotting shutters of the speakeasy on the corner as Daman Rourke passed by on his way home from the garage where he parked the Bearcat. He lived in a Creole cottage on Conti Street in the Faubourg Tremé, an old New Orleans neighborhood where white plantation owners had once kept their colored mistresses.
This early in the morning the street was cool beneath the scrolled iron colonnade, and the wet sheets hanging over the iron balcony of the brothel next door flapped in the wind. As Rourke walked along the brick banquette, he thought about his brother…His brother, who seemed more than happy to break bread with the families of his church, had never accepted any of Rourke's supper invitations.
Paulie had refused even to set a foot inside the cottage because it was the place where their mother had come to live after she had deserted them. Where she had come to live in sin for thirty years with her married lover. Their mother was gone now and the cottage was Rourke's, and he supposed that meant he must have found a way to forgive her. Not that she'd ever asked for his forgiveness. In one of the last conversations they'd had together, she told him she regretted nothing.
Wages of Sin Page 6
