“I would.”
While the boy went into the shelter, Brogan said, “You’re doing fine, Father. We’ll put it together afterwards.”
Carlos hauled out a dogfood carton in which were a dozen or so doorknobs that had once been white but were now painted, some with faces, some like psychedelic Easter eggs.
“Oh, man,” McMahon said, “aren’t they something.”
“Beautiful,” Brogan said.
The boy grinned. “Every day when I come from school, he gives me one. If I say what I learned in school.”
“Carlos only goes to school in the morning,” McMahon explained to Brogan, which in no way explained why he was not in school that morning.
“This week I start afternoons, Father.”
“So you went early to see your friend?”
Brogan shook his head. He did not like the prompting.
The boy said, “Yes, Father. Only he did not come when I call. I call again. Then he call me. ‘I am hurt, Carlos,’ and he tell me to come in the basement. I want to run away, but he say, ‘Please, Carlos.’ So I go in. He was like this.” The boy humped over, hugging his hands to his chest. “He say, ‘Don’t be afraid,’ but I am afraid when I see the blood. And when he fall down and don’t talk any more I come for you.”
“Carlos, do you remember the first time you ever saw the man, the first time?”
“Sí, Father. He was painting Mrs. Phelan’s door. He let me paint too.”
Brogan asked his first question: “Did you see anyone else in the building where your friend was hurt?”
The boy glanced at the priest.
“Tell him,” McMahon said.
“No.”
“Not ever?”
The boy shook his head.
“You’re a good boy, Carlos,” the priest said. “Better put your doorknobs away now.”
About to go into the hut, the boy saw the crowd for the first time. He looked up at the priest.
“I’ll wait for you,” McMahon said. Then to Brogan: “I’ll have to tell him.”
“Thanks a lot, Father. It may not sit with Traynor, but if you’ll come round to the station this afternoon, we’ll try it on him. Do you know this Mrs. Phelan he mentioned?”
“She owns the buildings I pointed out to you. She lives on the first floor.” He knew Mrs. Phelan very well, but he was not going to say that to the detective.
“Is there a Mr. Phelan?”
“Yes,” the priest said tersely.
“Okay, Father,” Brogan said after waiting purposely for the priest to go on. “I guess I can find out for myself what that’s all about.”
McMahon watched the detective take a short cut across the field. “Come, Carlos,” he said. “I’ll walk you home.”
2
“JOSEPH? FATHER MCMAHON, YOU’RE late for luncheon.”
He had hoped to get by the dining-room door without being seen, but the old man was watching for him. He sat like a family scion at the head of his table, and although there were only the two of them present, Father Purdy, the youngest priest of the four attached to the parish, sat in his own place, two chairs down, on the monsignor’s left.
“I’ll be right in,” McMahon said. “I have to clean up a bit.”
Miss Lalor, the housekeeper, poked her head out of the kitchen. “Will I set your soup, Father?”
“Not till he’s at the table,” the monsignor answered for him. “There’s nothing worse than a slop of cold soup.”
“He’ll be in a hurry, Monsignor.”
McMahon left them to settle the service of his lunch between them. They had been bickering for over twenty years. Monsignor Casey had brought her from Ireland after the war. That too was a matter on which they contended: whether she should have come or stayed in Galway and married a man with a mule and a garden. She was, by Father McMahon’s lights, one of those women destined from the cradle to become a caretaker of priests. She was also one of the best cooks in the archdiocese—the hallway was sweet with the fragrance of her Friday pudding—but since St. Peter’s was becoming more and more a poor parish, it was the monsignor’s tart pleasure to end most of their arguments by saying it was time he gave her over to someone who could keep her in the style to which she was accustomed. Their relationship was something McMahon sometimes thought about: the naturalness of it, the unnatural made natural somewhere in Ireland generations ago.
Whatever stain it was he had picked up on the basement floor was not going to come out of his clothes with spot remover. He had to change into his other suit. Paint or tar or blood. He sniffed at it: the smell was not strong enough to overcome Miss Lalor’s sugar and spice. He was indeed late, he noticed by the clock on top of the piano. So he took another moment and gathered the music on which he had been working the night before, the score to Rachmaninoff’s The Bells. He had arranged it himself for female voices. It was something the high-school girls could really swing on.
He ran down the steps and laid his briefcase on the hall table. He remembered then the half-written sermon he had left on the study desk and went to the front of the house to get it. Do you believe what you wrote in that sermon? I try to write what I believe. Or is it the other way around? A devil’s advocate could not have attacked more succinctly. He wanted to think about that and about the dead man. Instead he sat down and made a note on brotherhood, the thought that had come into his mind when he recognized the running child. It no longer seemed very original.
Miss Lalor came to the study door. “Father, he’s getting into a temper.”
“I’m coming.” He would as soon have gone without lunch and gained himself a few minutes for thought, but he followed her down the hall and paused only long enough to stuff the sermon into his briefcase.
“Was he a hippie, do you think?” The monsignor loved the word for some reason although he had little use for its designate.
“An old one then,” McMahon said. “The police will soon know.”
“They’re the worst kind. It’s a short step from the East Village to the Bowery.”
“No, I don’t think he was that kind.”
“A pervert maybe?”
“What makes you say that?”
“The child, the child.” The old man was as impatient with the cream jug, pouring the cream with a splash over his pudding.
“It was a healthy relationship, I’m sure.”
“Healthy. Never mind was it healthy. Was it moral?”
“That’s what I meant,” McMahon said.
“Then why don’t you say it? I can’t stand these quibbling words you young fellows come up with nowadays.”
McMahon ate in silence. Father Purdy folded his napkin and asked if he might be excused.
“We haven’t upset you?” the monsignor said with an almost mocking tolerance he assumed toward the young priest. Purdy was earnest and easily put down. In his year among them he had not come to understand that the old man’s brusqueness was his style and a carefully cultivated one. Purdy flushed when anything harsh or intimate was said in his presence and McMahon suspected that his show of naïveté was a style with him also. His own lack of patience with the boy priest, as he called him, was sometimes close to contempt.
“I have a Christian Doctrine class at one, Monsignor,” Purdy said. Which, since the class was actually described as Ecumenism in the new curriculum, did not ingratiate him with McMahon, however the old-fashioned words might please the monsignor.
“Lieutenant Traynor asked to be remembered to you,” McMahon said when Purdy had left the table.
“Is that Mike Traynor’s son? A lieutenant? I thought he’d go up in a hurry, but not that much of a hurry.” The old man sat back in his chair and dabbed his whole face with his napkin. His normally pink complexion always went florid by the end of the meal. “I baptized him…No, I suppose not. It’s his confirmation I’m remembering. There was the question of the sponsor, one of the labor men his father wanted. I think he was a Communist. An ex-Communist, that was it
.” He laughed to himself then, remembering. “I can see Mike now, those shaggy brows of his going up.” He mimicked the brogue as though he had not a trace of one himself. “‘Father Casey, half our executive are ex-Communists. It was the mixed marriage of the ’thirties.’”
Miss Lalor brought McMahon his pudding.
“Would you put it aside for me and I’ll have it later, Miss Lalor. My singing girls will be waiting for me.”
She returned to the kitchen, throwing a shoulder block on the swinging door.
Monsignor Casey said: “Is there a tune to it, whatever you’re teaching them now, Joseph?”
“Oh, a lively tune, Monsignor,” he said and blessed himself and left the table. The question was rote as was his answer, but he never failed to rankle under it, which he supposed was a lack of humility in himself. That the monsignor was proud of the St. Peter’s Girls’ Choir, he knew. It had some little fame in the archdiocese. The girls had sung for the Holy Father during his visit to New York and every year they gave several interfaith benefit concerts. McMahon was fairly sure that it was his work with them that forestalled his transfer to a larger parish or to one of his own, the latter an assignment he truly did not want.
He sat at the piano improvising softly while the girls filed in, the long and the short, the skinny and the squat, the black and the white, the knock-kneed, the piano-legged. Though they sang with the voices of angels, they came in like a herd of elephants. When Sister Justine had them in their places, he warmed them up with a few minutes of folk rock. He enjoyed the anachronism it made of him in their eyes. He was a stern disciplinarian and his tastes in music were as severe. Yet he loved to shake them loose this way, to set their breasts and buttocks bobbing, all of them letting go. Or almost all of them. Some of them were pretending. There was the sadness, the pretense. To please him? To fit in? It was a kind of self-denial, the kind he did not like, and he caught an image of these pretenders marching into their futures, into marriage, motherhood, or into maidenhood, treading the heels of these very shadows they were casting now before them. He realized that beneath the musings he was thinking of Priscilla Phelan and the marriage he had been trying to mend although he deeply felt it should be dissolved.
He ended with a kind of Eulenspiegel fillip. The groans and laments were shut off by the staccato snaps of Sister Justine’s frog. The snapper was as familiar to her fingers as the beads of her rosary. He got up from the piano and gave over the bench to sister who would play such notes as he needed to structure the a cappella.
“The Bells,” he said, while the music was being passed. “We shall work only with sounds today. Forget the words. For most of you that won’t be any hardship. All the sopranos: Bell, bell, bell. First altos, bong, bong, bong. Second altos, boom, boom, boom…”
Throughout the rehearsal his mind kept going back to the man in the cellar and to the child, Carlos, who took the word of his death as philosophically as the going away of someone he had known, his own father, for example. Carlos’ sisters, Anita and Fran, were in the choir, and after practice McMahon detained them and spoke to the elder of the two.
“Did you go home to lunch today, Anita?”
“Yes, Father.”
“Was Carlos there?” He had told the boy to remain at home until his sisters came. His mother was away at work.
“Yes, Father. There were policemen. They came looking for Pedrito. Everywhere they looked like he was hiding and they asked us questions.”
“What questions?”
Anita looked to her sister for help, but Fran was shy. A homely, awkward girl, she never expected to be called upon, and he wished then that he had addressed her first.
“About where Pedrito worked. What time he went to work. My mother. And about Mr. Muller.”
“Mr. Muller,” McMahon repeated.
“He was killed with a knife. They asked did Pedrito have a knife. I would not tell them. Pedrito does not like the police. Nobody likes police in our house.”
“Did you know Mr. Muller?”
“Yes, Father. He was a very nice man. He came to Carlos’ saint’s day.”
“And he sings songs he makes up for Carlos, for my mother so she laugh, for everybody.” This was Fran. Muller had obviously been able to draw even her out.
“You both liked him, did you?”
The girls nodded.
Anita said, “The police, they want to know who did not like him. And Mrs. Vargas tell them, Mr. Phelan. She don’t like Mr. Phelan, you see, Father. Otherwise, she don’t tell anything.”
McMahon did not like gathering gossip from the girls. Nor did he want to make them late for their next class. “Did you take Carlos to school this afternoon?”
“Yes, Father. He don’t want to go, but we made him go. Otherwise…” Anita gave herself an uninhibited slap on the rump by way of illustration.
3
MCMAHON FINISHED HIS SERMON when he got back to the rectory. He did not like it at all now: brotherhood and closeness, a sentimental myth. He found himself testing each phrase in the light of the dying man’s challenge, and he wanted to cross out more of what he had written than he wanted to retain. He was annoyed with himself. Or with the dead man? See here, he wanted to say, perfection is a luxury. But faith is a greater luxury. Where the latter thought had come from he did not know. He had provided his antagonist with dialogue. Perfection should be a goal, and to a priest faith was a necessity. The only marks he put on the paper in the end were the dashes with which he always marked his breathing places, and while he tested these, his mind slipped comfortably off to the parish priest of his childhood, upstate, who seemed not to take a breath from the first word to the last of his sermon. At the breakfast table after the eight o’clock Mass when Father Dunne had preached, the family would piece together what it was he had said. McMahon could remember now his father’s saying: “It may seem like a great joke, but stop and think about this: you’ll remember years from now some of the things we’ve figured out here at the table, and some of the mission priests with their fire and brimstone you’ll forget forever.” And it was true: many a sermon he had himself built on a few words caught from Father Dunne’s whirlwind.
Monsignor Casey came to the study door. “Mrs. Phelan is in the parlor asking to see you. She says it’s important.”
“She might have phoned first,” McMahon said. His eyes went to the windows as though in search of escape.
“Let me talk to her then. I’m an old man with some of my troubles past me, thank God.”
Which could only mean, McMahon thought, that he had taken the measure of Priscilla Phelan. “I’ll go, I’ll go,” he said.
He saw a difference in the woman the minute he walked into the room. Her red hair was drawn back and bound in a clasp behind her head where normally she let it go, a wild mane she tossed from around her face while she talked. Nor had she made up her face in the usual way, her eyes shadowed wells, her lips a wounded pucker. Now, wearing no makeup at all, she revealed herself a woman with good natural features, and he wondered which face she wore for Phelan, trying to coax him into her bed, for this was the problem about which she had been coming to him off and on for several weeks.
“You ought to have called before you came,” he said.
She made no apology. Nor did she bat her eyes or go through any of the phony posturing that had so put him off her. He had suspected from the beginning that she came to him because he was the best-looking priest she could find. There were times during their sessions when he thought she was getting sexual enjoyment out of describing to him her husband’s hangups. “Father, I’ve lied to you.”
“Well,” he said, looking down at her, his arms folded, “you’re not the first person who has lied to me, and I don’t suppose I’m the first person you have lied to.”
“That’s true, Father. I’ve also lied to Dan.”
“To your husband.” He said the words to curtail the intimacy implicit in the use of the name instead of the relationship, man and
wife.
“I’ve been with another man.”
“For how long?”
“Several times.”
“Over how long a period?”
“Two weeks or so. Please, Father, don’t keep looking at me. If I came to you in the confessional you wouldn’t.”
“It was your choice of where you came to me, Mrs. Phelan,” he said, but he went to the window. In their previous conversation it had taken an act of will on his part not to flee her eyes. “When were you here last?”
“Wednesday night.”
“Why did you come if you knew you were gong to lie to me?”
“I still wanted to help Dan…my husband.”
McMahon tried to remember how this conversation had gone on Wednesday night. He could not sort it out from their previous meetings. “I don’t quite understand that,” he said.
She got up and with a stride the very self-assurance of which he could feel disarming him, walked to the parlor door and closed it. She came and stood beside him. “It’s your fault I’m in this mess, Father McMahon. I don’t mean you did anything on purpose. God forbid! But the more we talked, it made me wild. Is that a sin? I can’t help it. It’s the way I’m made, that’s all.”
“You should not have come to me then,” he said. “There are other priests in the parish.” He retreated to the little table with the Donnegal shawl over it, angry with her, angrier with himself. He was sure she still was not telling the truth. But that she was trying to tell it now, he had to admit and to deal with. “Or better—most women in your position would have gone to someone in another parish entirely.”
“Most women wouldn’t go to the priest at all. They’d be ashamed. I like being a woman. I like what I feel.” The color had come into her cheeks, a color that made the eyes eloquent as no makeup could.
For the first time he felt a sincere compassion. Perversely, this enabled him to deal with her more severely. “Sit down here at the table and listen to me for a minute.” He waited and then seated himself opposite her. “Let’s try to be honest with one another. Why did you come to me? Let’s dispose of that first.”
Where the Dark Streets Go Page 2
