“Don’t look down,” she said. “In this part of the city, we always look up. That’s where the sky is.”
“A little bit of heaven,” he murmured, turning back to her.
She blew her nose violently. “What?”
“That’s one of the monsignor’s favorite songs. A non sequitur, but it ran through my mind. I’ll explain.” He found himself then telling her in almost a stream of consciousness about his parish life, then about the tenement where Muller had lived and the Phelans, not about Mrs. Phelan’s confidences of course, but of the police inquisition and then at the end, because it relieved him to tell it, of the way he had betrayed Phelan, identifying him in the Village bar.
“A homosexual bar?” Her intuition was quick. Or perhaps it was his own naïveté.
“Yes.” He went on to describe the memorial in the Morales apartment and its aftermath.
She was sitting on the floor still, but now with one arm propped on the daybed so that he saw her face in profile, the long straight nose, the strong chin. “Do you know what I think, Joe—I can’t call you ‘Father.’ You don’t mind, do you?”
“Please. I like to hear the name once in a while. The monsignor calls me Joseph. Otherwise…please do. What is it that you think?”
She sighed and then said it: “My boy was sleeping with the Phelan woman.”
McMahon did not say anything, and he looked quickly away when she surprised him with a flashing glance to his face.
“A man’s got to sleep with someone…I guess. And he wasn’t coming back.” She got up and paced the room, almost boyish, her pacing, and yet she was very feminine.
“You’re sure of that?”
“Oh, yes. That’s one thing I’ve learned: no marriage band, they don’t come back. Not that a marriage band brings them back either. I didn’t try to look for him. I tried to forget him until I read in the paper about your finding a man named Gustave Muller.”
“Mahler?” McMahon said.
“Exactly. The Song of Earth. I’ve got his records. You talk about the monsignor and his sentimental songs. Do you smoke?”
He shook his head.
She went to her jacket pocket and got a cigarette. He thought of taking the match from her and lighting the cigarette, but he didn’t do it. She lit it herself and then inhaled deeply before going on. “Dark and velvet-toned: me and Kathleen Ferrier.” She laughed self-consciously, having said it.
Again McMahon was tempted, this time to say that it was so. He said nothing.
“Gustave Muller. It sounds like a house painter, doesn’t it? Do you know what he did for a buck here?”
“Janitor for the church. For how much? Ten dollars a week?”
“Twelve. We got along. I have a job from twelve to four. I’m a pretty good secretary. Forty dollars a week, take home twenty-five. Taxes, old-age security. Security—it’s nice to think it can come out of a paycheck.” She glanced at him. “But then you’ve got it made, haven’t you? How did you know about the janitor work?” She spoke rapidly, nervously, as though she was afraid to stay on any one subject for very long.
“A man named Rosenberg: I got three things from him, janitor, the Orthodox Church and Nana Marie. He was a friend to whom Muller talked a great deal, a pawnbroker on Ninth Avenue. Nim, you said you didn’t try to find him. I think somebody did. I don’t think Phelan killed him. I feel as sure of that—a lot more sure than I am of salvation. My word for security.”
“I like it better. I hate security.”
Because you haven’t got it, McMahon thought, no more than I salvation. “What I’m trying to say is, I think somebody he didn’t expect to find him, did. He knew the man. That much I’m sure of.”
“I know what you’re saying. I don’t care.”
“That’s remarkable, if you mean it. He did not care either. There’s a philosophy at work here that I don’t understand.”
“If he had his reasons for not telling you, they’re enough for me,” she said. “I didn’t know him by the name Muller. It was just the feeling, and pure accident I picked up The Times at the office that day. I didn’t know his real name either. That was part of the way he chose to search himself—for himself. He wasn’t afraid of much. I have a lot of fears, but he didn’t. The only thing he was afraid of was becoming somebody that somebody else thought he ought to be. I’ve never seen his painting, do you know? And we lived together for over a year. But whatever’s good in my work, and I’m beginning to believe in it myself, is what he taught me. There’s a time to lie fallow, he would say. Come fallow with me. His puns were awful.”
McMahon wished she would slow down for a moment. He wanted to think about the phrase, becoming somebody that other people thought he ought to be. But she went on.
“Do you know how I met him? I was working in a gallery then on Tenth Street—secretary, messenger, a lot of things. Anyway, he came in out of the rain one night and I was there alone. It was a perfectly terrible night, the weather I mean. He crawled out from under what looked like a tarpaulin and dropped it by the door. He went from one painting to another—the artist is pretty bad, I think, but he’s got a Madison Avenue gallery now—and he didn’t say a word until he had looked at them all. The artist’s name—well, I’ll tell you, it’s Kenyon, but he signs his things just with the letter K. Finally Stu said: ‘K presumably knows K intimately. I know a painter who signs himself E—E for Ego, but for the opposite reason. Or is K for Kokomo?’” Nim reminded McMahon of the member of the monkey family written up for his art work.
“‘I’ll tell Mr. K you recognized his style.’ I said, something like that. He looked at me in that very intense way of his—like the person was a painting too. ‘And who are you?’” She mimicked a slightly clipped speech. “I’d had it for the day, I’d almost had it for life at that period. ‘I’m an aging hippie,’ I said. ‘Well, since I’m a dirty old man, let’s close up this zoo and have coffee together.’ We did and I talked a lot, mostly about me, and afterwards he walked me home here under that crazy tarpaulin of his and I remembered he did smell like a dirty old man, but I guess Sir Walter Raleigh did too, and I liked him quite a lot. I ought to say—maybe it doesn’t matter—but before we left the gallery I asked him to sign the visitor’s book, just to prove I’d been there after the boss went home. He thought about it for a couple of minutes before he signed. I think he was making up a name then, Stuart Robinson. I said I’d call him Stu, and he said it was appropriate since he was a reformed drunk, a member of AAA.” She smiled wryly, remembering.
“I said, ‘AA, you mean.’ And he said, ‘No, Alcoholics Anonymous Anonymous…’ And another time, I asked him what his own painting was like. Another of his lousy puns: Anonymous Bosch.” She pulled hard at her cigarette and sent the smoke to the ceiling. “Bosch and Tchelitchew. He said that was how nature hung him up too. He didn’t like nature. The outdoors, I mean, trees and sky and water. They hurt too much.”
McMahon thought of telling her about the art books, including Bosch, at Rosenberg’s, but it would wait. He said: “When did he go away from here, Nim?”
“Sixty-three days before the day he died. How’s that for remembering?”
“It’s been easier,” the priest said, “than it’s going to be to forget.”
She made a noise of ironic agreement. “Are you sure about that drink?”
“For now I am.” He wanted to think about her and Muller.
She squashed the cigarette out in the tray at her feet, grinding the butt into shreds. “Why don’t you ask me?”
“Why he left? I assume you would tell me if you wanted me to know.”
“It’s funny. I said something like that to you in the beginning. Didn’t I? And if you’d asked me, I was going to say I thought it was because he was ready to start painting again, and he had to find that place for himself, where he could be the self he was looking for. But I’m not sure of that any more. He didn’t say anything. He just went out one day with some of his books and he didn’t c
ome back. And that’s what I told myself was the reason. But the real reason—I think now—I’m a very conventional person underneath. I wanted something conventional of him.”
“Marriage?”
She shrugged. Daylight was beginning to fade. Her face was shadowed. “Security.”
“I thought you said you hated security,” McMahon said gently.
“I do. But that doesn’t make me not want it.”
He laughed. “I will have that drink you offered me.”
“It’s gin.”
“I can take it.”
She poured two glasses of gin over ice in the kitchen, McMahon watching from the doorway, and told of how Stu had taken out the walls and reinforced the beams with sewer-pipe rejects. McMahon rapped his knuckles against the striped pillars, and the sound was hollow. He told her of Carlos’ hut and the doorknobs. They touched their glasses and drank to him.
“Whoever,” Nim said.
On the second drink, McMahon proposed the toast, “To life.”
“It’s what we have, isn’t it?” Nim said. “Will you have supper with me? I can make it stretch. You know, instead of hamburger, spaghetti.”
He would have liked to stay, for he could feel the ache of her loneliness. Which must be his own, he thought. One does not feel another’s pain that keenly. But he declined. “We have a tyrannous housekeeper, and I have work I must do tonight.”
“Your father’s business—isn’t that what the boy Christ said when they found him in the temple?”
“Something like that,” McMahon said.
“I don’t think I’ve ever known a priest before, not to talk to like this.”
“Not many people do,” he said, which was his own truth at least. At the door, having thanked her, he said: “Nim, you could be wrong in why he left.”
“I know. It’s my way of beating myself, to think it.”
“Then stop it, because I think you were right the first time. What we’ve got to do is find his painting.”
Her eyes went moist as she thought about it. “It would almost be like finding his child—in me I mean, and that would be a miracle.”
“I believe in them,” McMahon said. “And I am convinced, he was not an anonymous man.”
“Neither are you,” she said.
Which meant, he supposed, going down the stairs, that to her all priests were just that. And if that had not been what she meant, he did not want to think about it.
9
“THE SIGNS ARE ALL go, Father,” the desk nurse said sportingly. “Except that he can’t talk. Or won’t. The detectives, I suppose. I shouldn’t say that. I don’t really know.”
“Do they question him?”
“Not that I know of. They just sit and take up space. So does he, Father. We need that bed for people who are dying in the wards because they can’t get the care we could give them.”
McMahon went into the ward, making his way around beds that could launch into space, so elaborate and delicate their equipment. On each of them lay miraculously live testimony to man’s violence on the ground, especially when he used the automobile like a weapon.
Priscilla Phelan was standing at her husband’s side, her hand on his taped wrist. A chair had been squeezed in the corner for the plainclothesman. A big man, he was doing his best to keep out of the way: the detail was not one of his own choice.
“It’s Father McMahon,” Mrs. Phelan said, bending close to her husband’s ear.
He did not open his eyes.
The nurse had been right: he had better color than his wife, McMahon thought. It was a good face. There was even strength in the mouth, something the haunted eyes distracted from when you confronted him face on. Mrs. Phelan brushed the hair back from his forehead. She made a gesture of hopelessness to McMahon.
He spoke to the officer. “I’ll be responsible while I’m here, detective.”
“Okay, Father. I’ll have a smoke.”
“I will too,” the wife said. “Danny, I’ll be right outside. Or maybe I’ll go home for a little while. I won’t be long.”
There was no response from Phelan.
McMahon waited, saying nothing, watching the face gradually, almost imperceptibly relax when the silence told him his constant companions were gone. He opened his eyes, screwed them up against the shock of light and then looked at the priest.
“I wish she would never come back,” he said.
“She will—until you make yourself better. You’re like her child right now.” Fleetingly he thought of Nim and her wish for Muller’s child.
“That’s what I’ve been for a long time, except…”
“I know.”
“Do you? Yes, I remember now.”
So did McMahon, the palmed hands, the portrait of betrayal. “Why don’t you talk to the police and get them off your back?”
“You too, Father?”
“All right, Dan.”
“I wish they’d go away.”
“They’re gone for now. Did you know him at all, the man Muller?”
“Just as the man in the back room. I didn’t want to know him.”
“Why?”
“I liked him, that’s why. Christ almighty, leave me alone.” Phelan tried to fling out the arm with the intravenal tube attached to it. The overhead bottle rocked in its cradle.
McMahon steadied it. “Easy, Dan, easy. I want to help you if I can, not torment you. You see, I don’t believe for a minute you could use that knife on anybody but yourself. But let’s get off the subject. Do you still want to die?”
“No. But I don’t want to live much either.”
“There’s a difference, a marvelous difference. What would make you want to live?”
Phelan thought about it, his eyes almost closed. McMahon was afraid for a minute that he had turned off again. But the V deepened between his eyebrows. “If I could be like him.”
“In what way?”
“Just in the way he had with people. And I don’t mean my wife. The kids, you know…just the way he was with them. I can’t explain it.”
“I know what you mean. I felt that quality in him even in the last minutes of his life. We’ll talk tomorrow if you want to, but only if you want to.”
“I guess I do. This is kind of wild, Father, when you think about some things, but there was a…a holiness about him. Crazy?” He looked up at the priest: a little zeal came into the hitherto fugitive eyes.
McMahon said: “You’re an idealist, Dan, and there aren’t many left. I want you to live.”
“So do the cops, but that’s not what they call me.”
McMahon leaned close to him. “Screw the cops,” he said under his breath.
Phelan parted his teeth in a soundless, almost motionless laugh, and McMahon thanked God for it.
He patted Phelan’s shoulder. “Get out of this ward. They need the bed for things you wouldn’t believe are human, the way they come in.”
“I know. I hear them all night long.”
“Tomorrow, Dan.”
In the hallway Brogan was waiting with the other detective and a third who was about to relieve his colleague at the bedside. It was the first time McMahon and Brogan had met since their night on the town.
Brogan offered his hand. “A lot of water under the bridge, eh, Father?”
“A lot.”
“He talked to you, didn’t he? I’m not asking what he said, Father. I mean he can talk if he wants to.”
“He can talk.”
“But will he? That’s the question. Don’t worry, Father. I’ll wait him out. Got time for coffee?”
“I don’t actually. I’ve got to make the rounds while I’m here.” He had taken over from Father Gonzales in this, and Gonzales would take his church history class that afternoon. He had fallen behind in his work with the chorus and the recital was a week off.
Brogan walked down the hall with him. “I was going over your statement again, that crazy conversation with Muller? And you know what I think, Father
? That part about taking the knife away from his killer—that could be pure Freud.”
“I suppose it could,” McMahon said with heavy solemnity.
“I made the mistake of trying it on Traynor. Oh, man. You know what they’re calling me now at the station house?”
“Doctor Freud.”
“I still think I’ve got something.” He jerked his head in the direction of the ward. “Why won’t he talk to us? You don’t spend twelve hours sleeping off a drunk someplace you can’t even find the next day. No, sir. When you wake up after a night out, you know where you are. Ask me.”
McMahon had no such intention. “Brogan, I agree. The man who wants to go home can generally find his way there. And the man who doesn’t want to go home needs help. That’s where I’d call on Doctor Freud if I were you.”
“Me?” Brogan said.
“I wasn’t thinking of you. That’s your connection.” McMahon walked on down the corridor.
He had scheduled an extra hour with the girls’ chorus after school that afternoon. He was now wishing that he had chosen a less ambitious program. The Bells just weren’t swinging: because he wasn’t, he knew that, and for that reason, he tried to be more patient than usual with the girls. It crossed his mind that Sister Justine could do as well with them as he was doing, and her programming would be more to the monsignor’s liking, and more to the tastes of most of his audience. His audience. His audience was not the majority. His was an audience of one, himself. That bit of self-scrutiny out of the way, he went after the beat he wanted. He illustrated at the piano, going through the crescendo passage, accenting with his own baritone voice the preciseness, the mounting excitement he wanted.
“You’ve seen it in the movies, on television,” he said, getting up from the piano. “The pioneers trapped in the stockade, the Indians creeping up on them, closer and closer, and then Voom! the soldiers, the United States cavalry racing to the rescue. Now, sopranos, you’re the pioneers, you’re scared, you feel it in the scalp of your head. Every note is a cry for help, urgent, more urgent. Mezzos, you’re the Indians. You move in softly, carefully, but you keep coming on. These people have taken your land, your buffalo, your way of life. And nobody, but nobody has to tell the United States cavalry what to do.” He motioned Sister Justine back to the piano and murmured, “May Rachmaninoff lie quiet in his grave.”
Where the Dark Streets Go Page 8
