The eyes were not furtive, but she was uneasy. “Am I not allowed to come in here?” she said.
“Why not?” And trying to put her at ease, “We’ve no secrets.”
A little smile. She wore no makeup. But she was not as young as he had thought at first.
He waited before removing the white alb. “Do you want to talk? I’m afraid I have a wedding party out there for a practice run, but it won’t take long.”
“I’ll go,” she said, and put out her hand as though to guide her turn back to the door. Then she shoved the hand into the pocket of her skirt. “Just tell me, what was he like, the man you found?”
“Are you Mim?”
Her head shot up, the lips parted and the eyes grew even wider than before. The face froze in his memory, for almost the instant he said the name she whirled around and was gone. He went to the door after her and called out. But she was running between the sunlight and shadow down the long passageway with all her might. He went out, vestments and all, but by the time he reached the street she was nowhere in sight. The restless groom was pacing the church steps. McMahon did not question him, and he conducted the rehearsal as he was, the white alb billowing out as he strode up and down the aisle.
The visitation haunted him all day, the face as vivid as a Rouault saint—if Rouault had ever painted saints. Between the funeral and wedding Masses, he went to see Mrs. Morales and explained to her and the other women on the stoop that the funeral arrangement was not possible.
The women talked among themselves in Spanish too rapid for his limping understanding of it. Mrs. Morales conducted the council with her hairbrush with which she had been grooming her older daughter’s hair. Anita translated for him: “My mother will bake the cake and put out candles, Father. She wants to know, will you come tonight and say the prayers for the dead?”
“After nine,” he said. “After confessions.”
A woman in curlers—he remembered her from the stoop the day before—gave a toss of her head to the apartment windows alongside. “Father, he’s back.”
He knew she referred to Phelan, but why tell him? It was the same woman who had suggested to him that Carlos’ mother was not home very often. A purveyor of mischief, Mrs. Vargas, no doubt.
“Good,” he said and left quickly.
After the wedding Mass—he excused himself from the luncheon—he spent a half hour on the next month’s calendar of parish activities, then an hour on music, feeling all the while that it should have been the other way around. Then having a few minutes before religious instruction, he took the musical score to The Bells into the choir loft and tried it on the pipe organ. The old church fairly vibrated. He pulled out stops that set free voices in the organ that might never have been sounded before in all its years of muted trebling beneath a spinster’s hands. Then to the instructions: for baptized Protestants entering matrimony with Catholics, eager promises and runaway eyes. It was like stamping passports and letting the luggage go. On the subject of birth control, Father? No problem at all to celibates: the words went through his head even as he repeated the church doctrine as lately redefined by the Holy Father.
Miss Lalor made him a special tea and brought it up to his room on a tray, little sandwiches made up of the fish left from the supper he had not come home to the night before, and the pudding from lunch, but with fresh custard, all done daintily. The thing he was forever forgetting about Miss Lalor was that after her tempers, if you didn’t appease them, she came round on a courtship of her own.
“I sent your other suit to the cleaners, Father. You got something muckety on it.”
“Thank you.”
“It struck me afterwards, if you’d wore it yesterday maybe you were saving it for the police?”
“No.”
She lingered in the doorway, wanting to talk about the murder, but unsure of a safe way in. “Wasn’t it nice, them mentioning in the papers that you’re the director of the Girls’ Choir?”
“Nice?” he said, scowling.
“I suppose you’re right. There isn’t anything they wouldn’t turn to publicity nowadays. Eat something, Father. You’re losing too much weight.”
He said nothing, wanting her squat, corseted, lavender-scented presence removed from his doorway.
“Do you want the door closed, Father?”
“Please.”
Alone, he conjured again the girl’s face. He was trying, he told himself, to compare it with his memory of the dead man’s, and there was not any comparison to be made except in his own sense of bereavement at losing both of them so soon. In all the city, and she had fled into the heart of Manhattan, where would you go to look for a dark-haired, dark-eyed girl named Mim? The Duminy Bar? He had thought of going there, but that was Priscilla Phelan’s territory and he did not want to tread on that. Besides, if the girl had known him there, she would not have needed to come to McMahon to inquire what the dead man looked like. She had lost track of him and she had known him by another name, McMahon felt sure. Muller—Mahler: was that the association that had brought her? He felt no incumbence to go to the police. She had not identified the victim, only to herself. Of one thing he was sure: he would not again be used as Brogan had used him, and if he never saw Brogan again, so much the better.
A half hour later he went back to see Rosenberg. The pawnbroker was glad to see him, but he shook his head. “Ach, Father, for me writing is like trying to take fleas from a dog. As soon as I think I have one it disappears into another part of the anatomy. But I will keep trying.”
“Perhaps we should talk,” McMahon said.
“Nothing would give me more pleasure, but on Saturday afternoon I am busy like no other day in the week. You know how the old song goes. Nobody who can raise a buck wants to be broke on Saturday night.”
Even as he spoke a well-dressed young man came into the shop, removing and winding his watch. Rosenberg asked the priest to wait. McMahon watched the transaction from the back of the shop, the gestures, the expressions. He did not hear the words, but the ceremony was as ancient as the charge of usury against the Jews. Another customer came in, this one in a Mexican serape. He reclaimed his guitar with a kind of shamefaced emotion, like someone getting his brother out of jail. Rosenberg, before handing it over to the boy, ran his own fingers over the strings. You see, he seemed to be saying, it had been in good hands.
He came back and entered both transactions in his ledger. He took off his glasses.
“Just one question today,” McMahon said. “Did he ever speak of a girl, Mim, Min, something like that?”
“Many girls but not often by name. Nana Marie. I remember that one. I liked that name, Nana Marie.”
Nim for short, McMahon thought. He wanted to be careful not to start the old man’s thoughts in flight from whatever his association might be. It was a pleasant memory, whatever it was. Then very quietly the priest started: “Where were they together? What kind of neighborhood—or what were they doing?”
“Making love, I should think. Excuse me, Father.”
“I’d think so too,” he encouraged, “but where?”
“There would be a Greek church and it would be a poor neighborhood, for he loved poverty as much as honor. To him poverty was the only honor. No, that is not right. It is the climate of honor. God protect me! If only I could write it down and get it straight.” He struck his temples with his fists.
“It will come, my friend. It will come. Perhaps we can help one another.”
“I will not do this for the police, Father. Honor will not be confused with justice, not by Abel Rosenberg. Where in this world is justice, will you tell me that? And if there is a world in which there is justice, tell me why there is none in this? God is just, you will say, and I will say that is because man is not.”
McMahon smiled. “I have said nothing, my friend. If I had, I’d have said, God is merciful, and that would have upset you even more.”
“Pah! Mercy. Excuse me again. But it was the police who spoke
of justice. They were here. I told them about the books. Now they will check the stores for their inventories. Let them. Nothing will be missing except the man himself.”
“The Greek church,” McMahon prompted gently.
“Very old—in a forgotten place, forgotten people: he said that. Beautiful old…” He made an elongated shape with his hands.
“Icons?” McMahon suggested.
He shook his head. “The delicate chains from the rafters to hold the candle bowls, beautiful in the dark of night. He was a janitor. There’s an old-fashioned word for you, a janitor. He would not call himself a building superintendent, not my friend Gust.”
“Not a man to pretend to greatness,” McMahon said.
“It is so, and it was to not pretend to anything, that was how he wanted to live.”
“You wonder what his talent was like,” the priest mused. “I have a feeling it was valuable.”
“Beware of feelings, Father. They are the biggest liars in us. They make truth what we want it to be.” He looked to the front of the shop as the door opened again, and flung his hands in a gesture of hopelessness. “Look what this one is bringing me. An accordion. He will want a fortune for it, ivory and mother-of-pearl. And if he cannot redeem it, where will I find a street singer?”
McMahon said, “I must go. There will be a memorial tonight in the building where he lived. No funeral until the police are good and ready. I’ve promised to say a few prayers. You would be welcome, Mr. Rosenberg.” He wrote the address on a card the pawnbroker gave him.
“Will you play Bach and Mahler?”
“If there’s anything to play it on, I might.”
“He would like it better than the prayers. And to tell you the truth, Father, I would too.”
But Rosenberg did not go to the Morales apartment, and Father McMahon did not play Bach or Mahler. A visit to the stoop of 987 in the daytime was quite different from going up those steps at nine-thirty on a warm Saturday night. The sound of an electric guitar twanged through the building, and somewhere a Calypso singer was tuned in at top volume, and above it all, a cacophony of voices, one pitched higher than another.
A dim light shone in the windows of the Phelan apartment, but there was no light at all in the vestibule. He had to follow the voices. The ceiling bulbs in the hallway were caged in wire mesh. He began a slow, reluctant ascent. The smell of disinfectant was so strong it hurt his nostrils, yet it could not quite kill the undersmell of the communal bathroom on each floor. Behind a closed door a child was crying. He could just hear it through the raucous din, the loneliest of sounds, and one that angered him. A gang of teenagers thundered down the steps. He backed against the wall to let them pass, the girls rattling and sparkling with cheap jewelry, scented with heavy perfume, the boys with glossy hair and clattering, highly shined boots. He recognized Anita and called out after her.
“Upstairs, Father. Everybody.”
On the second flight of stairs a fat grandmother was lumbering up, one painful step at a time, and at every pause she shouted a gutter invective, not for what was going on, but because it was going on without her.
A man leaned over the banister and baited her.
“Bastard!” She shook her fist at him.
He and another came down the steps and between them hauled her up. On the last step he groped her fat buttocks and goosed her. She shrieked and swung her arm around on him, almost tumbling them all down the stairs.
And among these people in so short a time, McMahon thought, Muller had found a welcome. He was far less confident of his own and he had been in the parish for eleven years.
But the women made way for him, pushing their men to the side, black men and brown and sallow-white, almost as varied as the colors of their shirts. Mrs. Morales shouted the two crowded rooms into silence. Someone turned off the record player, the last few notes wilting away. The guitarist was in another part of the building and someone closed the door on him. It helped a little. As Mrs. Morales led McMahon toward the inner room, he noticed Dan Phelan sitting in a corner, a glass in both hands, his eyes on the glass and his face as taut as the fingers around the glass. His wife sat on the arm of his chair. She was made up with her old flair, defiance in every feature.
A sideboard was spread with food in the second room, but it was not toward it that Carlos’ mother drew him. It was toward a small round table where a candle burned alongside a shoebox. A chill ran down the priest’s back when he saw what was in the box: a waxen colored doll laid out as in a coffin, a doll clothed as a man and made from child to man by the crude gluing on of a black beard. When his first shock was spent, McMahon realized that it was probably Anita who had given a swatch of her hair to the making of the beard. The unpliable hands of the doll were crossed over a bunch of violets.
Out of the corner of his eye the priest saw Mrs. Morales make the sign of the cross and he sensed rather than saw the others who had pressed into the room after him do the same. He lifted his eyes to the picture which hung on the wall behind the table, the placid, bearded, long-haired Christ with his forefinger touching the flaming heart. It was a picture familiar to him from childhood on, but in that instant, as alien as the shrouded doll.
He bent his head and prayed silently, but for himself.
The people were waiting to hear his words, but when, after a moment, he raised his head, they assumed his silent prayer appropriate and said their amens.
“You like it, Father, sí?” Mrs. Morales said of the boxed figure, her gold teeth shining as she smiled.
“Beautiful,” he said, and turned away determined not to look again at the picture of the Sacred Heart. Yet the words ran through his mind: Most Sacred Heart of Jesus, I place my trust in thee.
“Please, Father, take something to eat. The stuffed crabs I make myself.”
“Have a drink, Father. We brought the whisky, and I’ll have one with you.” It was Phelan who spoke, having come up beside him, bottle in hand. He had a deep voice for so slight a man. McMahon tried to suppress the thought, but it came again, the wife’s telling, ‘Like a bull, Father.’
“Thank you,” McMahon said. “I will have a drink.”
Mrs. Morales gave him a glass, wiping it first with her apron.
When he held out his glass, two of the younger men present held theirs out to Phelan, too, and Pedrito Morales came up with his. Phelan poured without a word, generously, but with his lips clamped tight. He quarter-filled his own glass before setting the bottle on the table. Everyone held his glass, waiting. McMahon finally lifted his toward the effigy and said, “Peace be with him.”
The men all drank. Pedrito coughed and wiped his mouth on his sleeve. “Irish piss,” he said.
Phelan threw the contents of his glass in the boy’s face. It all happened with flashing instancy: Pedrito flung his own glass over his shoulder and started for Phelan; Phelan, with one step backward, drew a knife from his pocket and switched the blade. McMahon was a few seconds reacting, for the last person in the room he expected to carry a knife was Phelan. He leaped between the men and ordered Phelan in the name of God to put it away. Phelan stood his ground and made jerky little stabs with the knife, trying to motion the priest out of his way. Behind McMahon, the men were derisive, their mockery the filth of two languages, and the women more contemptuous than the men.
Priscilla Phelan came up behind her husband and locked her arms around his neck, pulling his head back. McMahon caught his arm and twisted it until he let go the knife. The priest put his foot on the blade. It was not necessary. No one wanted it. Muller had been killed with a knife. McMahon picked it up, flicked the blade closed and put the knife in his own pocket.
Phelan had gone limp. He stood in a slouch, his eyes wild with hatred. His wife gave him a push toward the door. He pulled himself up straight then and walked with the controlled, exaggerated dignity of the drunk which McMahon knew well. At the door he spat and went out.
Priscilla Phelan tossed her red hair back over her shoulders. �
��This is my house, you bastards! You tell the police about this and out you go, every mother-selling one of you.”
Mrs. Morales was scolding the instigators, the rilers among the crowd. The fat grandmother sat and rocked herself with pleasure. She clapped her hands. McMahon kept catching flashes of faces, of gestures, bare arms and laughing mouths, a girl draped over a chair, her legs fanning the air. And noise, noise, noise. Mrs. Phelan went out, her hips swaggering, and the men whistled and hooted, and one of them pranced a few steps as if to follow, stopped, and gave a roundhouse sweep of his arm, his thumb in the air. The Calypso music went on again. It was all over. And it wasn’t that the party resumed, the explosion was part of the party, the language a kind of vernacular, and the noise was a way of life. No one apologized to the priest. Someone brought him his drink where he had put it down on the table when Phelan drew the knife. Mrs. Morales brought him a plate with two stuffed crabs and some pastries.
“Where is Carlos?” he asked her.
“In bed,” she said. She indicated the door to a room off the parlor.
The boy could not have slept through that noise. “May I look in on him?”
She shrugged. It was up to him.
McMahon ate a few bites of the food and went to the bedroom door. He opened it, expecting to see the youngster wide-eyed and staring out at him as when he and Brogan had found him in the hut. Instead, he saw four bundled shapes beneath a blanket, children huddled together like puppies in a box, and all of them sound asleep.
The door to the Phelan apartment was open when he went down the stairs a few minutes later. She would be watching for him, and in any case, he wanted to get rid of the knife in his pocket. She called out to him to come in and then closed the door behind him.
Phelan stood, his back to them, and stared out the window. There was an Irish look to the apartment, which was merely to say McMahon felt a familiarity there not present for him in the rest of the building: it was the curtains, perhaps, just the curtains that made the difference, full, window-length, and white.
McMahon laid the knife on the side table on top of a copy of the Daily News.
Where the Dark Streets Go Page 6
