Son of the endless night, p.22
Son of the Endless Night, page 22
"He's faking? But— you'd know better. Wouldn't you?"
Conor shrugged his heavy shoulders. "I try to look at him that way, as something cunning, lying, inhuman. I just can't conceive of it. There's nothing much left to believe, except for the possibility of illness, a brain tumor; but sad and tragic as those things are it's what I want to believe. It'll take a psychiatrist, probably several of them, to arrive at a diagnosis. Adam's hired one. Rich is undergoing psychological evaluation tests later this week."
"That ought to prove something. Has he said any more to you about— being possessed?"
Conor had rehearsed the lie all day; it came out casually enough. "No."
The lie was for her own peace of mind; but virtue tasted gallish on his tongue.
"Thank God!" She looked momentarily stunned by relief. "But maybe it's something he doesn't want to talk about in front of the lawyer."
"I wouldn't worry. He's just a— a very sick kid." Conor put his glass of ale down and leaned forward to hold her for a few moments. "We'll all get through this. We'll get through it, babe."
"What about Rich? What are his chances?"
"I was hoping he wouldn't have to stand trial. Adam isn't so sure. There are periods of apparent stability. Rich is aware of his predicament; he knows why he's in jail, knows that Karyn is dead. But he clams up whenever she's mentioned. Is he capable of assisting in his own defense? Right now that's an open question."
Something stirred at the outside edge of his vision and Conor, turning his head slightly, saw his daughter appear in silhouette in the doorway, shoulders drooping. For a few moments she just watched them, uncertain of her welcome. Then she straightened and said jauntily, "Can anybody get in on this?"
Conor smiled and extended an arm to Hillary, who joined the communal embrace, scrunching up more to her father than to Gina. She was wearing a bulky sweater with a shawl collar over leotards, her favorite around-the-house costume. Conor's hand rested on a subtly outcurving hip. Hips were something new, and the beginning of a bustline. But Hillary's face retained the roundness of childhood— a glow of ethereal purity about the violet eyes, the skin lucent as tracing paper, untouched by makeup; Gina wouldn't permit it yet.
"Mom tell you about all the phone calls?" Hillary said to her father. She glanced at Gina. "I forgot, Uncle Vito called while you were in the bathroom. Said if it's money, not to worry. That's what he told me to tell you."
"Hillary," Gina said, softly exasperated, "you have a lot to learn about your uncle Vito. Let me take the phone calls, huh?"
As if avoiding a snub Hillary shot her gaze to the TV, taking in Archie Bunker's beetling asperity. "Is that bigot supposed to be funny?" she said. She stood sur la pointe and leaned on her father's shoulder, morally lofty.
"Laughter has always been the best antidote to bigotry."
"I just wish he wasn't so— so Irish." Hillary seemed to be saying, I wish I weren't. Conor released his casual hold on her. She came down on her heels and gave him a quick kiss on the forehead. "I said my rosary. I tried to pray for Rich." She paused for a couple of seconds, breath suspensefully held. "It was a wipeout. I couldn't."
"Hillary— " Conor began, looking, with a bellyful of remorse, at her, at his child about to emerge into a world of adults who killed— treacherously— those whom they were rumored to love. He saw her as enraged, and deeply frightened. Whom could she trust? He held out his hand; her slender fingers were lost as she grasped it, conciliatorily. But her strength told of deep panic. She broke free.
"Gotta run; gotta call Debbie." She skipped away from them and vanished, all legs and butt going out the door.
"She's okay," Gina said, but knocked wood; and they exchanged quick worried glances. Despite her absence their daughter's essential nature, her fragility, seemed to vibrate on the porch like crystal threatened ultrasonically.
"Up one minute, down the next."
"It's her age, mostly, Dr. Wersheba says. Any really bad sinking spells, well, they can treat it pharmacologically as long as we own up to the need for treatment."
Conor swallowed tensely, thinking of the possibility of his daughter being swept away by some of the same morbid currents that had engulfed Rich.
"She just can't take much stress," Gina reflected. "Some people are built that way."
"Not everybody's as tough as we are," Conor replied, with a smile he had almost to bite in half to keep from crying.
Gina got up swiftly. "I'll have that sandwich done in a minute. Another ale?"
"Okay." Conor got up, too, glass in hand, not wanting to sit alone on the darkened porch. The storm windows rattled in spates of wind. Archie Bunker had given way to the Jeffersons. Movin' on up ... We finally got a piece of the pie. He turned the TV off.
"How many calls altogether?"
"I'm not sure; there's a list by the phone upstairs in the bedroom. Everybody said, well, if you have the chance, if you want to talk, da-da, da-da, da-da. Milt Kramer; Lou
Kopsinis you ought to give a ring to. Are you going back to work soon?"
Conor rubbed his semicauliflowered ear, the left one. "I'll call Dilworth. I think Chico and I are supposed to go nontitle against the Incredible Orlandos Thursday night in Pawtucket."
"Win or lose?"
"We'll stomp the liverwurst out of them. Until it's time to play dead." Conor yawned, already bored by the prospect.
After she fixed the jumbo sandwich, rare roast beef and half a tomato sliced thin on sourdough bread, Gina excused herself to take a shower and wash her hair. Conor took a couple of big bites, which he had trouble swallowing, then carried the sandwich plate and a bottle of ale upstairs. He looked in on the boys. Charley was slowly getting ready for bed and explaining to Dean, authoritatively, the merits of a wingman the Bruins had just acquired from Winnipeg. There were times when Charles, the tummyless athlete, seemed dominant in the relationship with his intense, bookish older brother. But sometimes he would dissolve in childish tears at some minor outrage, as when his brother and sister teamed up against him in a taunting contest; or sometimes he would go off to amuse himself blissfully in the tub with his collection of exotic starships and windup swimming porpoises.
In his own room Conor sat down at a desk in one corner and scanned the list of names and phone numbers Gina had prepared for him in her neat backhand. He pulled the phone toward him and took from a shirt pocket an address book bound in pigskin, which had been worn to a dark and buttery thinness. Some of the names in the book went back twenty years. The tattered pages were ascrawl with updates on the whereabouts of friends, mostly from seminary, whom he'd tried to keep in touch with. Conor already had made several credit card calls that afternoon, the most distant to Rome. There was a fresh notation in ink beside the number of the Institute of Religious Works which he had contacted in the Holy See. He pondered it red-eyed for many moments, listening to the gushing sounds of the shower in the next room and to Hillary down the hall laughing on another line— "Gross, just gross, Debbie— " heavily aware of the ball of venomous snakes he might be about to cast into the midst of all their lives. Then he made his last call of the day, half-wishing it would go unanswered.
41
"I had to call all the way to Rome to find out you were in Boston," Conor said.
Monsignor Paul Joseph Garen looked up from the airmail edition of Osservatore Romano he had been reading through granny specs and smiled in welcome and astonishment.
"Conor! What a pleasure after all these years." He rose to his full height, which brought the top of his head to the level of the knot in Conor's tie, to give Conor a double handclasp. In this sanctum of gustatory tradition, with English bucolic paintings on the paneled walls and antique crystal chandeliers, luncheon was a social ritual presided over by druids in cutaways. Several businessmen in dark suits had looked up in muted disbelief at Conor's passage to the cleric's table, which afforded an alcove view of the wide icebound Charles. With his size, his tangled pimento red beard, his houndstooth check jacket, he was like a cymbal clash introduced into a Bach fugue.
"You're even more imposing than I remember," Garen continued. "Of course I've only seen photos of you with the beard."
"Part of my brawling image," Conor said with a laugh that was too hearty. He was nervous and it showed.
"Oh, yes. You're still wrestling? I thought you had become a teacher and a coach."
"That too; but the job didn't last."
"Sit down, sit down. Well, we have some catching up to do."
"I've never been here before," Conor said lamely, taking an upholstered chair opposite Garen.
"Nor have I; but the archbishop is a member, and His
Eminence was kind enough to make arrangements. I believe he always enjoys this table." They both looked, as if on signal, out the wide window, blinking amiably in the mildly torrid light. Through a rent in stratified gray levels of cloud a golden radiance floated above the grim river like an incubating summer's day. Conor was stuck for words until the captain arrived to solicit drink orders.
"Conor?"
"Beer, I think."
"Domestic, or— imported?" the captain inquired with a faintly sarcastic smile.
"Narragansett," Conor growled, and picked at a wart growing on the base knuckle of his left thumb.
"A Campari and soda for me," Garen added. He took off his little tricky folding glasses and slipped them into an inside jacket pocket beside a calculator. The jacket lining, Conor noted, was a majestic purple. Silk. The rest of the suit was comparably beautiful in the quality of its cloth, the distinctive tailoring that was the hallmark of Rome's House of Gammarelli. He felt a deep momentary yearning, like a man who has been off smokes for twenty years but still can't resist looking at the displays in a tobacconist's window. So Paul was a monsignor at thirty-seven, and still youthful, though his widow's peak was more pronounced and there was a sprinkling of gray in the neatly trimmed, wren-brown hair around his ears. His complexion was ruddy; he dwelled amid hotbeds of fiscal crisis. From a class of stumblebums and turnabouts Paul Joseph Garen had emerged an unqualified success.
In their days as seminarians in upstate New York, even if one had doubts, deeply concealed, about one's own adequacy and prospects, none of Paul's classmates had doubted that someday he would be, at the least, a bishop. Rome had always been his goal; he had been discovered by a Vatican talent scout early in his career and had just completed his tenth year at the Holy See. He led an astutely well-managed life within the labyrinth of curial bureaucracy. He was well-connected with other rising young administrators in various Vatican offices. He was skillful in nuance, as sensitive to critical tolerance as a high-wire artist, fiscally progressive without being considered a wheeler-dealer. His skills were needed at IRW; he was a financial genius, specializing in real estate, and already the ranking member of the bishop's staff. Following the Sindona frauds and embezzlements, Garen had proposed some ingenious maneuvers which substantially reduced the seventy-million-dollar loss the Church had suffered; his tax strategies involving Vatican properties in several countries had straightened out a serious cash flow problem. Had he been for hire, he could have started out at two hundred thousand a year at his choice of any of the prestigious investment banking houses of Europe and England.
"Are you here on vacation?" Conor asked.
"In Boston? In the merry month of January? No, I've been participating in some rather involved negotiations on behalf of the archdiocese." He rubbed a weary eye. "I dislike dealing with bankers; they're such high-minded whores. But we may go on for as long as another six weeks. Even that won't be time enough for all I'd like to do, everyone I'd like to see."
"I appreciate your taking time to have lunch with me," Conor said quickly.
"Not at all, Mousy."
The nickname they'd tagged him with at seminary, largely forgotten by Conor through the years, startled him. Garen grinned delightedly.
"That just popped into my head. Remarkable, the names we had for each other. Let's see, I was— "
"The Kingsnake."
Garen nodded, his ruddy color deepening. "Rather a wasteful extravagance on God's part, considering my vocation."
"I don't think there was one of us who didn't win a few bucks betting on you Saturday nights at Ed and Irma's."
"I have to admit, after all these years, that I rather relished my celebrity. Do you suppose they're still holding long-shlong contests there? Ed and Irma's Bar and Grill. Ah, shuffleboard. Those greasy onions and overdone hamburgers. Draft beer. I assume Ed and Irma are still going strong, even though Archangel Michael has closed its doors forever."
Garen looked at the table for a few moments, contemplative, wistful, perhaps saddened. Conor picked at his wart, which bled. The drinks came, restoring their mutual spirits.
"To your health, Conor. Let's see. You're living close by?"
"In Joshua. About eleven miles south of Lowell."
"How is that area? Still economically depressed?"
"No, the microchip revolution saved us. I guess I'd still be living in Dorchester, if the blacks don't have it all by now; both my wife and I grew up in Southie. But even the parochial schools are in trouble in this town; public schools, the worst. We have a good life in Joshua; we both keep our noses to the grindstone, but it's worth it."
"Four children?"
"No, three. Two boys and a girl." Conor reached immediately for the photos he kept next to his wallet, passed the folder to Garen.
The monsignor held up each child's face to close scrutiny. "This one is most like you."
"That's Charley," Conor said. After a few cold swallows of beer he was finally beginning to feel at ease.
Garen turned to a Polaroid snap of Gina, taken after Mass the previous Easter.
"And your wife. A lovely signora."
"Thank you."
Garen handed back the photos and sipped his Campari, regarding Conor with the beamish distant fondness of a wealthy uncle preparing to turn aside a touch. A slender finger along his nose, gently tapping, was a forewarning of chastisement.
"I think married life agrees with you," Garen said.
"Yes, it does." Conor cleared his throat, fiddled with the knot of his tie. "I was wondering, Paul— you don't hold it against me? That I walked. I had to."
"I have no doubt of it." The finger was still, the clever gray eyes half closed. "We are not all meant to settle the questions of our identities in the service of our Lord Jesus Christ. You were wise, Conor. And lucky, it appears. Victor is continually on the outs with his archbishop. His drinking, if anything, is worse. James was murdered, for a few dollars, in a halfway house in New Orleans. He was a known consort of pubescent homosexuals. Andrew"— Garen frowned, striving to remember— "I've lost track of Andrew. You know about Glen."
"Killed himself."
"And Walter— he married, but I understand he was unable to have sex with his wife. They're now divorced. A heavy toll. More than thirteen thousand men left the priesthood in the six-year period following the Second Vatican Council."
"John Paul's taking a tougher stance."
"Yes. 'It is a matter of keeping one's word to Christ and the Church.' But the petitions for release from vows keep coming in, and every year fewer young men hear the call to the priesthood. Wojtyla is a brilliant man, a brave man, but the wrong man for these times. He dispenses dogma to the indifferent while the survival of the Church is in the balance. His acts of crushing Lefebvre and silencing the radical theologians perhaps only leaves us more defenseless in the sociopolitical tides that are rising above our heads. The future of the Church is being written in the blood of civil war in Latin America; in Wojtyla's Poland. I doubt that spiritual force alone is enough to resist these tides; nor is a childlike faith in eschatology. The Church lives through the will of its people, not through blind obedience to archaic orthodoxy. If this truth of a living Church is denied, the sun of the third millennia may well rise on a bleak landscape, a world in shambles, bereft of comfort or hope. Ah, well. I've made you squirm and I didn't mean to. I find you, Conor, after God knows what turmoil, a settled, useful, and devoted man. I'm delighted. Maybe you can tell me something I've wondered about all these years. Is all that dreadful punishment you wrestlers dish out to each other for real?"
Conor said with a slight smile, "Call your neighborhood book and try to get down on some action, even a well-promoted title fight, and they'll laugh at you. That says something about how the game is played. Basically we're in the amusement business, like Barnum and Bailey's clowns. On the other hand, I don't often have to exaggerate how I feel when somebody even bigger and nastier than I am is trying to twist my arm out of its socket. Showmanship exacts a price, if you're any good at it."
"It's a living?"
"It's a living."
"Splendid. So you're happy at home, well-adjusted on the job, you go to Mass regularly, your children are beautiful. They are. Quite beautiful. I can't suppress a slight tickle of curiosity as to why you went to so much trouble to look me up after all this time."
"A week ago my half brother, whose name is Richard, beat his girl friend to death in Chadbury, Vermont. It's been in the papers. Her funeral was on the TV news two nights ago. Rich used a tire iron and left very few bones in her head and body unbroken. On three separate occasions since he's been in jail he's told me that he is possessed by a demon from hell. And the demon made him kill Karyn."
Monsignor Garen looked Conor full in the face for nearly half a minute. His own face, so perfectly poised between dismay and disbelief, seemed in analysis to have no expression. The glass of Campari he had raised halfway to his lips was forgotten. A gull surged near the window, vanished with a luminous downbeat of wings that disturbed the pupils of the watcher's eyes like drops of rain on still water. He let out his breath and the bell of thin crystal in his hand took on a momentary pall, the bitter red liquid quivered delicately.
"What a pisser," he said.
