Collected Short Stories: Volume IV

by Barry Rachin

  Curtis’ cracked a dreamy, introspective smile. “Minoans were shrewd sea traders. Unlike the Romans, their success was based on trade not conquest. Their women had more rights than in most ancient civilizations.”

  Without warning, Becky lifted up on her toes, snaked an arm around his shoulders and kissed the boy deeply on the lips. “Liberated females – I like that.” Curtis’ jaw sagged open like a gate on rusty hinges. His thin lips fluttered spastically but no sounds emerged. Becky cradled her head on his chest. “What else?”

  Curtis’ eyes glazed over. He let all the air out of his lungs in a contented sigh. “Europa the beautiful daughter of the king of Phoenicia was gathering flowers, when she saw a bull quietly grazing with her father’s herd. The bull was actually Zeus, king of the gods, who had fallen in love with her. When Europa reached to place flowers on his horns, he suddenly bounded in the air and carried the weeping princess far off across the Mediterranean Sea to the island of Crete. Eventually Europa married the king of Crete and gave her name to a new continent.”

  Curtis bent down and caressed her neck with a flurry of kisses. “But, of course, it’s just a myth,” he added as an afterthought. The exceptionally bright boy had that queer, spaced out look that emerged when his well-ordered universe was spinning out of control. Behind his wire-framed glasses, the pale blue eyes held a limpid sheen such that Becky could see straight through to the core of his being.

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  Narcissus & Goldberg

  Beatrice Goldberg located her son lying on a single bed at the retreat center run by the missionaries of Our Lady of La Salette. The claustrophobically small room reeked of phisohex. A crucifix hung on the far wall alongside a framed picture of the Sacred Heart of Jesus. Pulling up a chair, the big boned woman sat beside the bed. In her forties, Beatrice was still a strikingly attractive woman with a mass of platinum hair tied back in a bun. The boy smiled and kissed his mother warmly when she bent down. "I don't understand what you're doing, Brett," she spoke petulantly, “and need you to explain what's going on in that uncharted territory between your ears."

  The young man’s ribs were bandaged and, on the left side of his head, a jagged row of nine stitches meandered across a shaven area of the scalp. "There are days when I ask the same question and come up blank," he quipped. The humor falling flat, the young man reached out and grabbed his mother's hand. "I got mugged. They stole my money and a cheap wristwatch. It’s not the end of the world."

  An hour later, wandering back out into the bright, New England sunlight, Beatrice located Father Nicolas seated on a wooden bench by the duck pond. A good third of the water had evaporated with the intense heat of the previous month, most of the waterfowl and fish having retreated to the middle of the shallow pond. A sooty brown mallard was bobbing for succulent water plants. The funny little bird would alternately tip vertically with its tail feathers jutting straight up to the heavens and beak buried in the muddy bottom then ease back to a floating position. The comical process repeated endlessly. "Father Nicholas?"

  Prematurely bald except few a few wisps of brown hair at the temples, the squat man rose to his feet. A brown cassock was gathered at the waist with a leather cord. Despite the doughy face and flabby physique, the middle-aged, Franciscan cleric greeted her with youthful exuberance. "How was your flight from California?"

  "Uneventful."

  Father Nicholas gestured with a pudgy finger at the throngs of people heading away from the chapel toward an open field. "You came on the busiest weekend of our summer calendar." Every year in mid-July, the shrine held a summer festival with amusement rides, carnival games and entertainment. Even as he spoke, a bus with Connecticut license plates pulled into the lower-level parking lot.

  A twenty-foot statue of Our Lady of LaSalette overlooked the entrance to the pond, which nestled just down from the new chapel. A small rock garden bordering the statue contained a scattering of tiger lilies and foxglove with pinkish centers fading away to porcelain white. "When you telephoned,” Beatrice said, “you mentioned that Brett has been living here since his mishap."

  The priest began strolling slowly around the perimeter of the duck pond. "The boy was severely beaten and robbed. As hospital chaplain, I sat with your son until he regained consciousness." They emerged onto a central concourse leading to the main structure. Taped to a metal stanchion, a placard trumpeted a series of upcoming events:

  Portuguese Healing Service,

  Charismatic Mass for the Unborn,

  Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament,

  Hispanic Right to Life Vigil

  Extreme Youth Prayer meeting

  "Brett has been mending nicely, but I don't think he's going to be with us too much longer. They've decided to try their luck elsewhere and travel cross country in another week or so."

  "They?” Beatrice became mildly flustered. “He's traveling with someone?"

  "The Cambodian girl," Father Nicholas clarified. "A very serene, delicate creature." He shook his bald head thoughtfully. "The twosome are so devoted to one another. Reminds me of that lovely Chagall painting…the Kiss, I believe it’s called." Suddenly, the cleric turned a sharp angle and stared at the woman as though seeing her for the first time. "But you didn't travel three thousand miles to listen to my idle blather. Did you enjoy your visit?"

  "No, not especially." She had no intention of humoring the chatty cleric. "I’m trying to understand why a boy who graduated top of his class at Princeton was living in flop house on the south side of Providence."

  "It's complicated." Father Nicholas had reached the entrance to a building with a line of people stretching twenty feet from the entrance. "Have you seen our collection of crèches from all over the world? It's one of the most extensive displays in the country. There's artwork from Africa, all the South American countries, Europe, Russia… even the Inuit Eskimos sent an offering carved exclusively from walrus tusks and whalebone. As a testament to the faithful, it draws huge crowds from all over New England, especially during Christmas and festival week."

  "I’d rather hear," Beatrice dropped all pretense of trying to be civil, "what a nice, Jewish boy who studied at Princeton was doing in a rat-infested, three-decker tenement in South Providence, Rhode Island?"

  In an open field behind the duck pond the summer festival was in full swing. Carnival rides for the youngsters had been set up alongside games of chance and a mishmash of greasy food concessions. An adolescent with a wad of pink cotton candy protruding from her lips shuffled past. Only moments ago, they had watched an elderly woman with a shawl over her gray hair light a devotional candle, one of hundreds at the perpetual prayer shrine. From the outset, Beatrice had noticed that the parishioners huddled together near the chapel were more conservatively dressed and infinitely more respectable-looking than the scruffy types strolling about the carnival attractions. "You make it sound, Mrs. Goldberg," the monk responded, "as though somehow we are to blame."

  "Did they ever catch the hooligans who beat my son?"

  The priest shook his head from side to side. “No. The thugs knocked him unconscious, grabbed his wallet and ran off.” Several skinheads wearing combat boots trudged by. One youth with a chipped tooth and shaven head sported an Aryan tattoo on the side of his neck. He burped loudly and flung a lit cigarette butt on the pebbly ground. "Narcissus and Goldmund,” the priest said, shifting gears. “Does it mean anything to you?”

  “No, not at all.”

  “A novel by the German existentialist, Hermann Hesse, it was all the rage among hippy-dippy, college kids back in the psychedelic sixties. Brett read Hesse in his junior year at college and felt an affinity for the protagonist, who wandered through Medieval Europe during the Black Plague."

  Up ahead a group of fleshy Hispanic girls dressed in halter tops and gaudy jewelry approached. They were speaking loudly in Spanish. The bronze-skinned girl on the far right wore no bra, an exceedingly large derriere squeezed into cutoff jeans.

/>   "This Cambodian girl you mentioned," Beatrice had no interest in the priest’s musty esoterica, "where did Brett meet her?"

  They were standing next to the Ferris wheel which, grinding to a halt, was letting riders on and off. "There's a large Hmong population in South Providence. They came here after the fall of Saigon. You see their produce markets and nail salons up and down Cranston Street."

  "My husband's a lawyer. We thought our son might go on to law school and eventually join him in the family firm. Traipsing around South Providence with Hmong refugees in search of God-knows-what... it's not a life."

  "Brett has an inclination to savor new experiences…people, philosophies, religions. " Father Nicolas chuckled as though at some private joke. "There’s an elderly monk here at the cloister, a rather timid man, who’s afraid to switch shaving creams."

  "Very clever," Beatrice muttered sourly. "Clearly, you share my son’s fondness for reckless endangerment."

  A shrill bell sounded and a row of contestants with water pistols commenced shooting a stream of pressurized water into the mouth of a plastic crown, filling balloons directly above. A few seconds passed and a balloon popped signaling the end of the game. "You're missing the point," Father Nicholas brought her up short. "Brett feels things at a much deeper level.”

  They had navigated the perimeter of the carnival and the monk veered away from the festivities back in the direction of the shrine, where he showed Mrs. Goldberg a grotto carved into the side of a hill. Nearby, terraced flagstones arranged in wide, stair-step fashion climbed to the summit of a shrine where the devout offered up their petitions. Several nuns near the base of the structure were inching forward on their knees, clutching rosary beads and intoning a singsong mantra of Hail Marys at each, designated Station of the Cross.

  A convoy of motorcyclists arrived, rumbling onto the parking lot in a convoy that stretched two hundred yards out onto the main highway. Many of the new arrivals were decked out in full Harley Davidson regalia with biker boots and studded leather trappings. Between the salacious Chicano girls, skinheads, elderly nuns crawling up the incline on their swollen knees, biker broads strutting about like dominatrix queens, somber, salt-of-the-earth, blue collar Catholics and Franciscan missionaries it was the American melting pot gone haywire, a parody of good taste and sensibility. “That book you mentioned earlier… whatever happened to Goldmund?”

  Father Nicolas crooked his thick neck to one side, considering the question. “By the end of the story, he was reunited with his friend Narcissus, now an abbot, and the two reflected upon the different paths their lives have taken - hedonistic mystic versus rational contemplative.” The priest waved his hand at the throng of religious zealots surging up the blue-black flagstones. “Your classic dichotomy of Apollonian versus Dionysian temperaments.”

  Beatrice cupped her hands over both eyes and began to cry noiselessly. Misconstruing her private grief as religious supplication, nobody paid the pretty Jewish woman any attention. "The bastard raked a pair of brass knuckles across my son's scalp!"

  "Yes, I know. The metal tore an ugly gash clear to the bone."

  After a while, Mrs. Goldberg pulled her emotions back under control. "These people frighten me… the nuns doing penance for negligible sins and skinheads who wouldn't seek salvation if this was their last day on earth."

  It took them a good five minutes to traverse the last few Stations of the Cross emptying out onto the lower landing."I thought I might take Brett out to supper tonight. Would you join us?" Father Nicolas blinked several times and stood pigeon-toed with his pendulous gut protruding from the robe. "You've been honest to a fault," Beatrice noted, anticipating his confusion, "and I'll need somebody to run interference when I feel the urge to say something thoroughly regrettable."

  The priest glanced at his watch. "What time were you planning to head out?"

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  Six Catholics and an Atheist

  Kirsten Hazelton, the discharge planner at Saint Elizabeth’s Hospital, was sitting alone in a rear pew of the prayer chapel, when Dr. Wong entered and slid down on the polyurethane oak next to her. “Strange place for a patient conference,” the osteopath noted. With his round, boyish face the stocky, middle-aged man was old enough to be her father.

  “The chapel was closer to the wards than my office.” She didn’t bother to state the obvious; except for a few diehard Catholics, hospital staff seldom ever visited the somber prayer room. "Mrs. Edwards is leaving us tomorrow." The elderly woman had tripped over a frayed rug two weeks earlier and fractured a hip. Surgery was uneventful, the patient already up and about with the aid of a walker.

  "She's being released to rehab for a few weeks before going home," the doctor confirmed.

  "Yes, that was the original plan." Kirsten was staring at a picture of the Holy Mother alongside a gold crucifix that adorned the altar. "Her son, Brandon, apparently wants her placed in a nursing home so he can put the house in the hands of a real estate broker."

  Dr. Wong listened impassively. “What does the patient want?"

  "To return home, naturally. Mrs. Edwards is quite upset."

  The osteopath rubbed his chin. "Have you thought about asking Father McNulty to intercede… plead her case with the family?"

  Kirsten's features cycled through a series of unflattering contortions. "Father McNulty would be my last choice."

  In his later sixties, Father Evan McNulty was a hellfire and brimstone ideologue with no social graces to speak of. The skinny cleric suffered from rosacea - the cheeks, nose, chin and eyelids mottled with spider-like blood vessels and chronic eruptions. The priest much preferred the challenge of defeating evil in the abstract to the mundane banalities of parish life.

  "Yes, I know what you mean." The doctor leaned back in the pew extending his legs beneath the velour kneeler. "Mrs. Edwards is only in her seventies. Once the bone mends, that woman's got another decade of active years ahead of her."

  "Which is just my point: she doesn't belong in some geriatric facility playing bingo and trying to make small talk with residents who can’t recall what day of the week it is."

  Dr. Wong smiled and patted her hand reassuringly. "I'll drop by Mrs. Edwards' room later today and make sure she doesn't get bullied into making a bad choice." The older man seemed momentarily lost in some private reverie. "You get solace from your faith?"

  "Yes, of course. Don't you?"

  "I'm an atheist."

  Kirsten burst into a fit of laughter, which quickly ebbed away to nothing when she realized that the physician was not responding in kind. "You're serious?" He shook his head. "But you work at a Catholic hospital."

  "What difference does that make? Doctor Shapiro is orthodox Jewish and the chief of oncology; Dr. Watanabe, is a practicing Buddhist. Being godless doesn't imply a lack of morals." He rose to his feet. "Maybe I better speak with Mrs. Edwards before the son badgers her into giving up her independence."

  The following day Kirsten ran into Dr. Wong eating lunch in the hospital cafeteria. No sooner had she sat down then the physician's cell phone twittered. He spoke briefly and hung up. "My daughters are coming home for the holidays, and my wife is already frantic about the preparations. What are you doing for Thanksgiving?"

  "Keeping my options open," Kirsten replied evasively. She had been dating an intern since the summer, but the relationship fell apart when the doctor was offered a position at hospital in Connecticut. Her parents didn't know about the breakup and the notion of going home alone was terribly unappealing.

  Her boyfriend used the bedroom to unwind, as a diversion from the strain of twelve-hour shifts and academic studies. For the young medic, romance was a novelty; away from the emergency room he displayed few hobbies or domestic interests. Kirsten somehow didn't see that ever changing and, truth be told, was relieved when Jason took the new job.

  What Kirsten needed was a younger version of Dr. Wong - not that she was the least bit attracted to the roly-poly physic
ian. But still, at least he golfed on weekends, took his youngest daughter to figure skating lessons at the Lynch Arena in Pawtucket and baked homemade breads. Perhaps a brief ad in the personals section of the local paper might jump-start a new romance, get Kirsten's pitiful social life back on track:

  Thirty-something female looking to meet devout Catholic with no major vices, social diseases, sexual aberrations, fetishes or incurable neurosis. Must be family-oriented, compassionate, love children and not be married to the workplace. Smokers need not apply.

  "I spoke with Brandon Edwards," Dr. Wong said, interrupting Kirsten's private reveries, "and informed him that ultimately his mother should choose what's in her best interest… even waved a Patient's-Bill-of-Rights form under his nose."

  A few years back, Kirsten used a similar ploy with another dysfunctional family. It was nothing more than a bluff, a hollow show of bravura. "And what was his response?"

  "He promised to honor his mother's wishes." Dr. Wong leaned across the table and tapped Kirsten's forearm. "Problem is, I don't trust that guy. He gives me the creeps."

  The discharge planner briefly met the son, who had only visited his mother twice while she was recuperating at the hospital. The day of his mother's surgery, Brandon never even made an appearance and didn't resurface until a week later. "And do you believe that malarkey about honoring his mother's wishes?"

  "No, not really, but there's only so much the hospital do."

  Kirsten agreed wholeheartedly with the doctor's tenuous assessment of Mr. Edwards. The fellow had a distracted, morose manner, responding to the discharge planner's light banter with monosyllables. Kirsten slit open a packet of creamy poppy seed dressing and drizzled it over her garden salad. "I've been researching atheism," she deflected the conversation.

  The doctor looked up with mild surprise then grinned good-naturedly. "And what have you discovered?"