Sham Rock

by Ralph McInerny

  “Thank you, Father.”

  She stood, and for a moment he thought she might ascend to the ceiling, so visible was her relief. He said nothing more while she left and closed the door behind her.

  A week later, she was back, bearing the same burden. Then two weeks went by, and again she came to confess the same sin.

  “This can’t go on, you know. Of course, you might marry.”

  The thought seemed never to have occurred to her. Well, she was young, a student, maybe only a year or two older than Carmody’s mother had been when she got married, but things had changed. If these impulses could be worked out in an appropriate way at the age when they were most difficult to resist, things would be better. As it was, temptation continued, and lapses. The main thing was not to let repetition bring on despair. God is merciful.

  The next time she came she was pregnant.

  As if released from being kept under decades of pressure, these memories came back to Father Carmody when Roger called to tell him that Beth Hanrahan wished to see him. “What brought her down?”

  “That’s what she wants to talk about.”

  “Did you have any luck in Minneapolis?”

  “You’ll be surprised.”

  “I hate surprises.”

  11

  MIKE BAXTER, WHO RAN THE COUNTERPART of Beth’s Minneapolis center in South Bend, offered to give Beth a lift to campus, but she availed herself of public transportation and got off the bus at the library. Coming onto campus with the Knight brothers didn’t count. She wanted to see it alone and let the sweet sad thoughts come. She headed for the powerhouse, then took a path around the lake to Holy Cross House, where she would meet Father Carmody.

  “I will fit you into my crowded schedule,” he had said on the phone.

  “Your voice hasn’t changed.”

  “I was a mere boy when it did.”

  Coming up to the building from the lake, it became clear to her that none of these doors was used as an entrance, so she went around the building and found Father Carmody seated by the door, smoking a cigarette. He looked up at her, the same gruff face, but welcoming nonetheless. When he stood, he hesitated. Would he embrace her? But that had not been the practice when he was young, and she had the comforting thought that the old priest was the same person who had been young. She took his hand in both of hers.

  He punched some number into a gadget beside the door, and it slid open. They went past a nursing station and down a long hallway to the end. His rooms overlooked the lake. They sat for a time in a comfortable silence, and then he said, “The last time we spoke you were pregnant.”

  “I lost the baby.”

  His brows lowered. “Lost it?”

  “Stillborn. I wanted to come tell you that, but I didn’t.”

  “God works in mysterious ways.”

  “It changed my life.”

  He nodded. “Tell me about your work in Minneapolis.”

  She did, downplaying the success of the center and her own role.

  “How long has Timothy Quinn been working there?” He had pried this out of Phil.

  She had to think. “Seven or eight years, off and on. He comes and goes.”

  “Did he ever consider what he had put others through by just disappearing like that?”

  “That was my fault.”

  “How?”

  “I told him I was pregnant.” Her expression was a stricken one. “I had to tell someone; I just blurted it out.”

  “Was he the father? You don’t have to answer that.”

  “No, he wasn’t.”

  “Pelligrino?”

  “No. Oh, no. Although he helped me bury the baby. I won’t call her a fetus.”

  “Bury it?”

  It was clear that Father Carmody had never wondered what happened when a woman miscarried. Did he think it was like changing your mind?

  “Yes. We buried it close to the back wall of the Log Chapel. I had baptized it—her—and it seemed as close as I could get her to consecrated ground.”

  “The back wall of the Log Chapel.”

  “The west end.”

  “My God.”

  “Surely that wasn’t wrong.”

  “No, of course not. Have you been told of the strange letter Brother Joachim wrote?”

  “Leaving money to David Williams?”

  “No, this was another letter. A confessional story.”

  “Yes, I’ve read it.”

  “Well?”

  “It’s fiction. For the most part.”

  “Pelligrino seemed to claim that Timothy Quinn had been killed and was buried near the chapel. The grave was marked by a boulder. When we dug there, we found a rotted box and a hatchet.” He looked away. “And some bones.”

  “He did want to kill Timothy,” she said, and he turned back to her.

  “Why?”

  She looked around the cluttered room, at the desk with books and papers piled on it, at the books on the floor beside his easy chair, one leaning against the stand that held his massive ashtray. How comfortable it seemed.

  “He thought Timothy was the father.”

  She could see that the old priest was thinking of that long-ago trinity of friends, two of whom she had excluded.

  “Because of Pat’s threat to kill Tim, I couldn’t tell him that it was David Williams.”

  “Did you tell David?”

  “No.”

  “You told Quinn. Pelligrino knew. Yet you didn’t tell the father.”

  “I told Pat in a moment of weakness. When I calmed down, I couldn’t think of a way to tell Dave that wouldn’t sound like a claim on him.”

  “You had a claim on him, as did the child.”

  “After I lost the baby …”

  Father Carmody lit a cigarette. Smoke from the one he had just ground out still rose from his ashtray.

  “Then why would Pelligrino, knowing the truth, write that incredible story?”

  “Perhaps he thinks I haven’t suffered enough,” she said quietly.

  Speaking of these things, she felt again the oddity of having been pursued by three friends, each of whom claimed to love her. What had happened with David had not, of course, been planned; it had surprised them both, and once done lowered her defenses. Although they had spoken of marriage, she had not told him when she became pregnant. Her condition seemed to turn her in upon herself, making her realize that this predicament was hers in a way that it could never be his. The odd thing was that she had told the other two of her condition, Timothy because he was there when she was in her first panic, Patrick after the miscarriage. She was overcome with sorrow and shame. Why had she chosen to tell Pat? Because he was the one she found when she went to their room, looking for David. She was carrying her burden wrapped in a towel. She had taken Patrick’s arm and led him outside. He stared at her in disbelief when she told him what they were going to do.

  “He dug the hole with a hatchet.”

  Even after all these years, she felt she could read Patrick’s mind, as she could read Timothy’s. Somehow it had occurred to him that the father of her dead baby was David Williams. First, though, he had accused Timothy. That was the night before he disappeared.

  “He wanted revenge?”

  “I can’t believe that could be his motive.”

  “What, then?”

  She sat in silence for a moment. She might have been inside Brother Joachim’s mind. When she spoke it was in a low but steady voice.

  “Maybe he thinks that what we did, burying the baby, was wrong.” There were tears in her eyes. “I know that’s what I think.”

  12

  AT THE OLD BASTARDS TABLE IN Leahy’s Lounge, the aged emeriti were happy to have a topic they could get their dentures into.

  “He didn’t disappear,” Potts protested. “He appeared somewhere else.”

  Armitage Shanks affected patience. “My dear fellow, you are giving the definition of ‘disappear.’ No longer appearing in one place. He is here. On camp
us. Pfft. He’s elsewhere.”

  Horvath was remembering the moving memorial service that had been held for the presumably dead student Timothy Quinn. “Everyone wept.”

  “Now there can be tears of joy. He who was lost has been found.”

  “He wasn’t lost,” Potts grumbled.

  The story had appeared in both the Observer and the alternative student paper, the Irish Rover, bumping wire service stories from the front page of the former and displacing the latter’s Obama Watch, a feature headed by a picture, two columns wide, of a Mickey Mouse wristwatch. The source of the story was Jay Williams, son of one of the students involved in that long-ago event. Both papers wrote of it as if it were some impossibly ancient happening, but then it had occurred before many of them were born.

  “There wasn’t this much fuss when he went away.”

  Once more they toasted Timothy Quinn. Thus fortified, Shanks suggested that the administration had manufactured this issue to draw attention away from the awful buildings that were sprouting up on campus in the midst of economic troubles. He had brought a clipping telling the story of suspension of work on a new skyscraper in Manhattan.

  “Harvard is cutting staff by twenty-five percent,” Bingham said with relish. “Their obscene endowment has decreased by nearly that fraction.”

  “How are we doing?”

  “We?” Three pairs of eyes regarded Potts.

  “The university’s endowment.”

  “We have nothing to do with that, Potts. Or perhaps you have been consulted about investments.”

  Potts said a vulgar word, and Shanks burst into song. “Where never is heard a cloacal word …”

  Murph the bartender came and tapped him on the shoulder. “This is a respectable place.”

  “In what respect?”

  “Anyone ready for another?”

  Everyone was ready for another. It seemed the least they could do to celebrate the finding of whatshisname, Timothy Quinn. Shanks repeated that he had had the boy in class, and yes, he had kept all his grade books.

  “For light reading?”

  “I have spent whole evenings with them.”

  “Armitage, sometimes I think you live solely for pleasure,” Bingham said.

  It was the Notre Dame alumnus now a Trappist monk in Kentucky that captured the secularized imaginations of the current crop of students. The Irish Rover was sending a reporter to interview Brother Joachim in his cell.

  “Isn’t it Irish Setter?”

  Potts said, as if continuing a thought,”Do you realize there isn’t a men’s room on this floor?”

  “Scandalous.” Relief was always a stairway away. The design of the Morris Inn could not be blamed on the current administration, though, so the topic drifted away. So did Potts, pursuing his thoughts.

  13

  “WHY DON’T YOU COME HERE?” MAME Childers said when David Williams called to say he wanted to see her.

  “This is business. Come to my office.”

  She spent the morning getting dolled up for the appointment. Peaches had called from Florida to say that the asking price for David’s place on Longboat Key had dropped to the level where she had said her interest would kick in.

  “Give me twenty-four hours.”

  “If that doesn’t go through, there are loads of other properties.”

  “That’s the only one I’m interested in.”

  It would be her trump card, telling David that he wouldn’t be losing the condo on Longboat Key. In recent days, she had been asking around, trying to find out just how badly David Williams LLC had been hit by the economic downturn.

  “Hard,” Pincus said.

  “Hard as in how much?”

  “Like many others, he is going to have to wait a long time for the market to bring him back.”

  “Are you among them?”

  Pincus dropped his chin. “Your statement should give you the answer to that.”

  “How do you do it?”

  “Bonds, and we are going into banks while bank stock is down.” He sat back, a picture of self-approval. “A recession that ruins some is the making of others.”

  The money she had put with David had dropped 40 percent, a loss that was tolerable because of all the money she had with Pincus.

  “What about Wilfrid?”

  Pincus frowned. “Like you, he has money invested elsewhere as well.”

  Elsewhere and apparently unwisely. Recently they had had dinner at a once favorite restaurant of theirs and been welcomed as if nothing had changed. Well, theirs was a civilized Manhattan divorce.

  “Like old times,” Wilfred said, leaning toward her across the table. He lifted his glass. “To us.”

  What was this? She was right to be wary. He looked into her eyes, the look of a lover, and asked what in hell they had gained by splitting up. “You’re single, I’m single. All it did was double our costs. I miss the place in Connecticut.”

  “Will, you’re welcome to use it anytime. Just give me advance warning.”

  “Warning?”

  “A figure of speech.”

  “David Williams?”

  “You’ve been spying.”

  “People notice. How serious is it?”

  “Well, aren’t you nosy. We’re not engaged, if that’s what you’re after.”

  “Not engaged,” he repeated. “I never liked that sonofabitch.”

  “Oh, come on.”

  “There are Catholics and Catholics. Your kind I can understand.”

  “I’m not much of a one.”

  “You’re enough for me.” His hand came across the table and rested on hers. “Tell me you miss me.”

  “Of course I miss you.”

  “How much has he lost for you?”

  “Lots.”

  He grew serious. “I’ve been hit hard myself.”

  Aha. “Pincus will bring us through.”

  “I wish I had put everything with him.”

  She looked at the somber man who had been her husband, a man she once had loved. The thought that she and Will could come together again was not unpleasant. Call it a fallback position. Even so, she was determined not to let David Williams get away.

  David’s offices in the Chrysler Building gave no sense that he had fallen on hard times. The receptionist was bright and chipper, with a skirt scarcely reaching her knees. His administrative assistant, Della Portiere, was brisk and efficient in her pin-striped suit, whose skirt came almost to midcalf. She ushered Mame into David’s office. He was on the phone; he fluttered his hand apologetically, indicating that she should sit. She sat.

  “Thanks, Father. Thanks for letting me know.”

  He hung up and swung toward her, all business.

  “Father?”

  “Father Carmody. You won’t believe this. Timothy Quinn has turned up alive.”

  “I don’t believe it.”

  “Alive and well and working with Beth Hanrahan in Minneapolis.”

  The topic got them off on a comfortable footing, bringing back those wonderful years in South Bend. David seemed as relieved as she was to have this vast diverting topic to begin her appointment. They recalled the first days after Timothy’s disappearance, the sense of guilt that had gripped Patrick Pelligrino and David. Beth, too, of course.

  “It was never the same afterward. Mame, sometimes I think that I am the only one who came out of it to live a halfway normal life. Patrick down there in Kentucky as Brother Joachim; Beth running a soup kitchen in Minneapolis and taking in Tim Quinn when he surfaced.”

  “Where on earth was he?”

  “Much of the time in the army, as an enlisted man. All in all, he apparently put in twelve years.”

  “What a shock it must have been for Beth when he walked in the door.”

  “Father Carmody says she didn’t recognize him at first. He volunteered, she put him to work, and only gradually did she realize who he was.”

  “You have to tell Casey and Peaches.”

  He fro
wned. “I sold my boat.”

  “So I heard. Peaches showed me around the place on Longboat.”

  “I wish she’d sell it.” He shook his head. “No I don’t. How I’ll miss that place.”

  “You don’t have to.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I may put in a bid on it.”

  His reaction was not what she had hoped. He glared at her. “Why in hell would you do that?”

  “Because I don’t want you to lose it.”

  “Mame, even if you bought it—”

  “Don’t say it, Dave.”

  “The fact is, I may take it off the market. I’ve decided to accept the money Pat Pelligrino gave me. That’s the point of our meeting today. Mame, I want to make up what you’ve lost with me. I’ll buy you out entirely, if you want.”

  “I don’t want! I want to be with you.”

  “We’ve been through that.”

  “Dave, I’ve talked again with my monsignor. He will write a letter stating his opinion. He is miffed to have his expertise questioned. Dave, there is no obstacle!”

  He looked at her in silence. Obviously, this was not the conversation he had planned to have. “Mame, I can never marry again. It’s not just a legal matter with me. My son …”

  Patience, patience. “I understand. All right, we won’t get married.” She had surprised him. “We will just go back to the way we were.”

  She watched the thought settle in. Had it been the fear of marriage that had spoiled everything? Well, after all, he was a man. Tender memories seemed to come to him; she could read them on his face. For the first time since she had sat across his desk, he relaxed.

  “I have missed you.”

  “Have you now?”

  When she rose to go, they had agreed to meet for drinks at five.

  “Mame, I meant it about your money.”

  “What kind of woman do you take me for?”

  He came around his desk and took her in his arms before escorting her past Della Portiere.

  It was several hours after Mame left his office that Della told him that a Mr. Childers wished to see him.