Ash Wednesday (12 page)

“A Diet Pepsi.”

Phil made a face and went off to the kitchen. Father Dowling doubted that Phil had any real problem, but he was wise to be careful. In any case, beer in the rectory while he watched television with the pastor was in line with Phil’s apparent resolution.

“Has Cy come up with anything new?” he asked when Phil was back and settled.

“He said he’d let me know.”

That didn’t sound promising.

The things that stick in your mind. The following day, Father Dowling found himself remembering Herman’s remark about the woman who had visited Nathaniel Green every month while he was in Joliet. Then he remembered that Madeline, the woman
who was helping Edna at the center, was a distant relative of Nathaniel’s. He went down the path to the school, through the former gym, waving and acknowledging greetings, and up the stairs to Edna’s office. As he went up, he met Madeline coming down.

“Hello, Father.”

Father Dowling stopped, one hand on the stair railing. “Edna has nothing but good things to say of you, Madeline.”

She grew flustered. “I wish I could think I deserved it. I do like being here.”

“You should be on the payroll.”

“Oh, there’s no need for that.”

“I suppose that newspaper story has everyone talking.”

Madeline lifted her eyes. “My Aunt Helen hasn’t been here for several days.”

“And your uncle?”

She seemed surprised. “Oh, you mean Nathaniel.”

“I understood you were his niece.”

“Oh, nothing so close. My mother married his cousin. I don’t really know what that makes me.”

“The daughter of Nathaniel’s cousin.”

“Does that make me his niece?”

“I have no idea.”

Madeline started down the stairs, and Father Dowling continued up. Madeline didn’t strike him as the femme fatale who had visited Nathaniel monthly at Joliet according to Herman, but then the pastor was celibate. And he’d never been cooped up in prison, not a thought flattering to Madeline.

Edna looked up from her desk, and her face broke into a smile. Father Dowling took a chair facing her.

“Madeline tells me Helen Burke isn’t here.”

“Not for several days.”

“And Nathaniel?”

“Wasn’t he at your noon Mass? He said he was going over there.”

Had he been? Father Dowling was not in the habit of checking the congregation while he said Mass. In any case, he was now saying Mass
ad orientem
, facing away from the people, in the way he had said Mass as a young priest. It had come as something of a surprise to see that the rubrics for saying the
Novus Ordo
assumed that the celebrant was facing away from the congregation, leading them in prayer, addressing God, rather than smiling out at them, seeking eye contact, and checking who was in the pews. Nathaniel had yet to come forward for communion, which was the only way Father Dowling would have known he was in the church.

“I didn’t notice. How do he and Madeline get along?”

The realization that two of those who came to the St. Hilary senior center were not just comfortable but well off, rich, caused mixed reaction. That Nathaniel Green, the man they had shunned, possessed the amount of money he was leaving to his sister-in-law Helen Burke brought on sheepish second thoughts from those who had fallen in with Helen’s treatment of her brother-in-law. Who could contest her reason? Nathaniel by his own
admission had killed his wife, Florence, Helen’s sister. Not only did he not deny it, he insisted that he was guilty; he was tried and convicted and had spent long years in Joliet. As long as he could be thought of, when he was thought of at all, as a wife killer, there had been little unease. And Nathaniel kept to himself, as often as not reading, either outside the building or in one of the classrooms that lined the main corridor of the school. Now all that had changed.

Nathaniel’s new will suggested an indifference to money, and that money added to what Helen already had made her a far less sympathetic creature.

“He hasn’t given it away yet,” Eugene said to Herman.

“It’s in his will.”

“He’s probably counting on her going first.”

Eugene found little sympathy for such cynicism, and he dropped it. Natalie was stunned to learn that her relatives were so wealthy.

“Your relatives?” Eugene asked.

“We have the same grandfather. On my mother’s side.”

Eugene figured that in the end everyone was related to everyone else, if Adam and Eve were indeed the parents of us all. Eugene, at Natalie’s urging, had been visiting Father Dowling, learning about the faith.

“What stumps me is the Trinity,” Eugene said.

Father Dowling took his pipe from his mouth. “The Trinity.”

“I just don’t get it. Three persons, one nature.” He shook his head.

“No one understands it, Eugene. It’s a mystery. We believe it, not because it makes sense to us, or as if we would have thought of it eventually anyway, but because it was revealed.” The pastor reviewed the scriptural texts that were at the basis of the belief.

“We acknowledge that mystery every time we make the sign of the cross. You know the words? ‘In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.’” The priest traced a cross on himself as he said the words. Eugene followed suit.

“Eugene, you don’t have to be a Catholic to come to the center, you know.”

“Oh, I know that.”

“What prompted your interest?”

Eugene dropped his eyes. “Natalie Armstrong.”

“Ah.” Father Dowling seemed to be waiting for more, but Eugene let it go at that. He wasn’t sure he had made the right choice with Natalie. But how was he supposed to know that Helen Burke was loaded? Relatives. Apparently money didn’t run in the family. From what Natalie had let him know, not really knowing she was, her life suggested a comfortable widowhood and not much more. Not that he was dropping her. That would have been difficult in any case, given how much time the two of them were spending together. It had all been at the center; Eugene had yet to carry his campaign farther afield.

When he couldn’t get away to Herman’s apartment, Eugene went off to the noon Mass with Natalie. Most of those who came to the center went. Sitting beside Natalie, who knelt and stood and rattled off the prayers, Eugene didn’t know what to make of it. The first time, he had started toward the front at communion time, but Natalie had put a hand on his arm and shaken her head. When she returned, she knelt and put her face in her hands and didn’t stir for minutes.

The newspaper story made Eugene curious about Nathaniel, and he began to seek the man out, joining him on his bench, lighting a cigarette. It took a while to break the ice, but Eugene got around to telling Nathaniel that he was impressed by his generosity.

“You can’t take it with you,” Nathaniel said.

“I suppose you must have thought of spreading it around.”

“How do you mean?”

“Well, leaving everything to a woman who really doesn’t need it.”

“She probably thinks it’s hers anyway.”

“I would have left something to St. Hilary’s,” Eugene said. “Maybe I will.”

“Oh, I’ve done that, and there are other relatives who will benefit, but the bulk will go to Helen.”

“I suppose you’ve got a lot of relatives.”

“You’d be surprised.”

Well, Eugene had been surprised, pleasantly, by what Nathaniel had said. Would those other relatives include Natalie? Eugene rose. “I’d better get back to my beloved.”

“Your beloved?”

“A manner of speaking. Natalie Armstrong. Do you know her?”

“Know her? I’m related to her.”

It was all Eugene could do not to sit down again and ask Nathaniel directly if he had remembered Natalie in his will, but the whole conversation seemed to assure him that Nathaniel had indeed done that. Eugene went off down the path toward the school with a springy step.

To the imagined strains of “Hail the Conquering Hero,” Tetzel strolled into the pressroom at the courthouse. He sat at his desk, he flicked on his computer, he lit a cigarette, he was ignored. Rebecca went on knitting, looking at him over the rims of her glasses. McGonagle, a storklike teenager from the Fox River High School paper, sat squeezing his pimples as he read the
Sun-Times
. On a Naugahyde couch, Peanuts Pianone, with a Styrofoam cup of coffee in his meaty hands, stared straight ahead. Tetzel felt his balloon slowly deflate before this indifference.

His story on the return of Nathaniel Green was the talk of the town, certainly of the courthouse. On his way to the pressroom, Tetzel had heard the buzz, was certain he was the cynosure of every eye. He was on top of the world. He had just come from Menteur, his editor.

“I hardly changed a word, Gerry.”

This was high praise from Menteur.

There was actually a ripple of applause when he left the city room. He could have floated to the courthouse, where his sense of having scored a ten-strike with his story was strengthened when Bennie, the blind man who ran the newstand off the lobby, told him he was all sold out.

“They been buying them by the armfuls.”

Did he imagine that room was made for him in the elevator, a special deference shown? A little lady in the back of the car was reading his story as they rose. So to the pressroom and this cold and churlish response. Rebecca seemed ready to pounce if he brought up his story. Tetzel was about to ask her if she’d had any responses to her ad in the personals when Tuttle arrived.

The little lawyer came directly to Tetzel, genuflected, grabbed his hand, kissed it, then, struggling to his feet, swept off his tweed hat, and cried out.

The paper from which he had been reading fluttered from his hand.

McGonagle, openmouthed, had stood during the recitation.

“What’s that from?” Rebecca asked.

“The Internet,” Tuttle replied, not looking at her. “You look dry, Gerry. Do you have time to wet your whistle?”

Tetzel was on his feet, glad for an excuse to get out of the pressroom.

“Come on along, Peanuts,” Tuttle said as they left the room.

To many, the Jury Room, the bar across the street, seemed an extension of the courthouse, integral to its effective operation. Tuttle stepped back, to let Tetzel enter first and be greeted by a standing ovation. Friends, acquaintances, strangers clapped, banged glasses
on the table, whistled. Tetzel was all but overcome. By God, this was more like it.

“Order up,” Wiley, the smiling proprietor, cried, and soon waitresses were scooting about in response to eager calls. Wiley himself brought Tetzel’s usual, a triple bourbon with very little water. Tuttle and Peanuts had to wait for the waitress to come around.

“I don’t know what to say,” Tetzel said.

“You can afford it.”

It was then that Tetzel realized that this celebratory round was on him. The hell with it. It was worth it. He took a long salubrious pull on his drink. Over the next fifteen minutes happy drinkers came to congratulate Tetzel, and he held court with dignity. The waitress had trouble getting Tuttle’s root beer and Peanuts’s brown ale onto the table.

When the tumult and the shouting subsided, Tuttle said, “I hear Helen Burke wants to sue.”

“No kidding.” The prospect of further fallout from his story pleased Tetzel, and his pleasure did not diminish when Tuttle explained that he was the object of her wrath.

“Get a good lawyer,” Tetzel advised.

“Hey.”

A day begun like that had nowhere else to go but down. Tetzel remained when Tuttle and Peanuts took their leave. The thought of the tab he had already run up by that round for the house and what he added to it during the following hours filled him with an odd elation. The bar emptied, then filled again, over and over, and still Tetzel stayed on, his soggy whistle wetted to a fare-thee-well.

In midafternoon, the melancholy thought occurred that this could be the high point of his journalistic career. He had scored a coup, no doubt of that, but with familiarity the thought began to lose its power to lift his spirits. He lifted the spirits in his glass, but they no longer brought on a renewal of his sense of triumph. An
idea grew in him. He must follow up the Nathaniel Green story with another equally impressive. But what would it be?