In the Still of the Night (6 page)

With the offertory of the mass finally upon him and with effort beyond what he had been equal to until that moment, he said the words of the consecration—This is my body … this is my blood—words he knew the Lord himself would keep pure.

As far as he could see, Kate was not among those who thronged to the sanctuary steps to receive communion. He would not have expected her to, but suddenly before him was José, his small hands fisted at his side when the priest offered him the wafer, his lips, too, tightly closed against it. The boy’s mother prodded and scolded him from behind. He had come to the table but he would not partake. His eyes were coals of defiance. Father Morrissey moved to the nearest server and changed places with him. There was only a small disruption until José’s mother grabbed her son’s arm and flung him away, crying out, “Perdido! Perdido!” Lost: it had the ring of a flamenco lament, and it carried through the church. José spat in the direction of the altar and ran from the steps.

Kate could not see what had happened at the altar steps, but those who had seen it were calling out condemnation after the fleeing youngster. She would have been willing to swear that José Mercado was not a bad boy. Troubled, yes, and obviously now in trouble. She left the church, trying to draw as little attention as possible. She was well known as Martin’s wife and for her own outreach as well. She squeezed the numerous hands extended to her, and made it to the vestibule before the mass was finished. She ought not to have come to this mass. Besides her own unease, it was not fair to Dan, and encountering the monsignor on the church steps, she tried to think of an excuse for being there at that hour.

The monsignor had something else on his mind. “Did you notice the youngster flying out of the church? I tried to lay hold of him. Slippery as an eel. Do you know what he did? He spat out the sacrament. They’re not being well taught, you know. That one should never have made his first communion.”

Kate, not about to debate the boy’s demeanor with the monsignor, gave a nod to indicate concern and escaped. Someone was following her. She knew an instant of fear before she realized it was José. She waited for him and they walked in silence for almost another block before Kate finally said, “Do you want to tell me what’s the matter?”

José shook his head and they walked on. He was wearing a fake leather jacket, frayed at the cuffs and at least two sizes too big for him; the T-shirt underneath was thin, the red apple on its front badly faded. His jeans were clean and his sneakers had been new at the start of the school year. His dark hair rose and fell as the wind tossed through it.

“Aren’t you cold?” Kate asked. She was wishing herself that she had worn a sweater beneath her coat.

Again he shook his head. He wiped his nose on the back of his hand. They walked on.

They had almost reached Kate’s building. She wondered if it was wise to let him know where she lived, and then decided, wise or not, it showed some respect for his fiery young person. Once in class she had boosted his ego by calling him a young Matisse and showing him pictures of the artist’s windows. He took everything he did in class home with him after that. Or said he did. He liked to please her. He spoke English as well as any of the children. His mother spoke Spanish. His older brother spoke both languages, but beat José if he did not speak English. José loved him, anyway.

Reaching the entryway to the townhouse where she and Martin lived, she told the boy that this was where she must leave him and proposed to shake his hand. “Where do you live, José?”

He jerked his head toward the north, and ignored the hand she offered him so that Kate quickly withdrew it. “You should go home now and not catch cold,” she said.

“Why you don’t go to communion this morning?” he blurted out, the first words he had spoken to her all the way home.

Kate was stunned. When she was his age, the lie would have been so simple: I broke my fast. That didn’t matter any more. Now all she could do was fall back on authority. “You don’t ask questions like that of older people, José. Go home now.” As though he were a stray dog. When she turned from him, she saw Martin watching from the window of his study. She waved. He nodded appreciatively, as though he took for granted she would be accompanied by a child or children. When she looked back from the vestibule, José had disappeared.

“I saw it with my own eyes,” the monsignor said, waiting in the vestry with Morrissey while he disrobed.

Morrissey removed the stole, touched it to his lips and laid it away in the drawer. “I’m sorry, monsignor, but the boy didn’t receive communion at all. From what I could tell, his mother was insisting that he do, and he was determined not to.”

The monsignor grunted. “Everybody wanted to stone him, as though the mass wasn’t half-circus already. Mind, I’m not criticizing the new liturgy.” He waited until Morrissey had pulled the amice over his head. “Was it you or the Almighty he was boycotting, do you think?”

The wily old fox, Morrissey thought. “It might have been me. We had an altercation of sorts when you sent me to sit in for Mrs. Knowles the other day.”

The monsignor took longer to respond than Morrissey could handle, uneasy as he was at having even mentioned Kate’s name. “I’ve never been very good with the children, as you know.”

“Were you never a child yourself, Dan?”

The use of his name eased Morrissey’s discomfort. “I spent most of my youth in fear of my father.”

“So you’ve said. A strapping fellow like you?”

“‘Mark my words, laddy,’ he’d say, ‘I’ll bring you down to my size one of these days.’ And God knows, he tried.”

The monsignor shook his head. “Well, I’m glad it’s you the youngster’s mad at and not the Lord. He’ll get over it without damaging his faith. But they do hold a grudge, don’t they?” he added, presumably of the Hispanic people.

Morrissey was holding a grudge himself against the youngster who, he felt, had deliberately intended to humiliate him. He had brought hate to the altar with him. It shone from his eyes. If he had said it aloud, it could not have been more clear. The priest could be grateful for one thing: if he had not been holding the sacrament in his hands, he’d have been hard put not to shake the boy till his teeth rattled. Even now it was hard for him to thank the Lord for getting in the way. But the monsignor left him, and before he went out of the church himself, he stepped into the sanctuary and said a prayer of contrition.

That afternoon he walked over to the Jesuit parish a few blocks from St. Ambrose. It had been some time since he had gone to confession. Sitting with his confessor, he named as the offense for which he was most deeply sorry his intense dislike for a child in the parish school. The Jesuit wanted to know if he had ever touched the boy. Morrissey told how close he had come to striking him.

“That’s not what I had in mind,” the other priest said.

“No,” Morrissey said, “it’s not like that.” He completed his confession without ever mentioning adultery or the breaking of his vow of celibacy.

Kate next met with the children the following Tuesday. She had put in for a bus to transport them now that the days were getting short. It would not be available until later in the week, so she decided to drive them home in her own car since she expected to use it later. Meanwhile, she chided them gently: they ought not to go off on their own as had happened on Friday.

“The padre say ‘Get out!’” José said.

“I don’t think that’s so, is it?” She looked from one child to the next.

A lot of little heads nodded that it was. Annabelle volunteered to explain. “José tore up my picture and Father Morrissey slapped him.”

“Right here,” José said, pointing to his cheek. “I tell my brother, and he say, ‘Next time you tell me, and I take care the
gringo
priest.’”

“He makes us all stand up and march around the room,” someone else volunteered.

“He say I don’t have to go to boys’ room. He makes me piss on floor,” José added.

“That’s enough,” Kate said. If she had been told at the moment that the children were possessed by demons, she’d have believed it. Or was it Dan of whom they’d taken possession? Something had happened in her ten- or fifteen-minute absence that day that had thrown them into chaos. She set them to making mobiles, having brought a model from her studio at home.

When she was helping José, she saw that he was looking at her, not at the supposed-to-be mobile. “The priest come today?” he asked finally.

“Not that I’m expecting, José. But then I didn’t expect him on Friday either. The monsignor sent him.”

“How come?”

“Because the monsignor wanted to see me. Now pay attention or you won’t be able to do this by yourself.”

José had one more question: “Why you teach us like this?”

“Now let me ask a question, José Mercado: Why are you asking me all these questions?”

He turned his sweetest smile on her. The shyness of it had always beguiled her. “I like you,” he said.

She was less than beguiled at the moment. More cunning than beguilement, she thought, and that was distressing. To what purpose? The phrase,
the gringo priest,
stayed with her. “If you really like me, you will make me a perfect mobile.”

And with the use of teeth and tongue as well as fingers, he made one that almost hung in balance.

Kate could not make up her mind whether or not to mention Morrissey’s misadventure with the children to him. The variation in their stories and his was troublesome. She did not like to ask him outright if he had struck the boy, even though she could not believe that he had done it.

After delivering the children that afternoon she drove around until she found a parking place on the street some distance east. She told Morrissey where the car was when he phoned. They planned to meet there after he had said the rosary at a wake a few blocks away. Martin was in Washington preparing for an early morning meeting. He was not due home until the next evening, but meetings could be canceled and the anxiety of having Morrissey in the house at night was too much. The phantom face, as it sometimes did now, reappeared in her mind’s eye after she had given a few minutes’ thought to the possible emergency measures if Martin should return to find Dan there. She could pretend, for example, sudden illness so that she had wanted a priest and phoned the rectory. Again she heard her own heartbeat and thought of pounding feet. She tried to stare through the image. It was too bright, featureless, but it would not go away. She finally escaped it by going into Martin’s study and re-reading a letter from her son that she had left on her husband’s desk. Her forehead was moist. If she could not control her own imagination, what chance had she of carrying off an emergency deception?

Morrissey lingered at the wake longer than he would have chosen to, but the family were longtime members of St. Ambrose, among the few, like the Knowleses, who were generations deep in the neighborhood. He knew his popularity among them. More than once he had been told that he was one of theirs. Their generosity and participation in causes he championed recommended him to certain archdiocesan committees and to the occasional chaplainship. Striding along the streets to where Kate was waiting for him, he thought of the jeopardy in which their affair was placing him, and put it out of mind instantly. Once. Once in his life, he told himself, he would know sexual joy, and be the better priest for its denial ever after.

The car was warm when he climbed in alongside her. Their embrace was long and deep. “Oh, my God,” he said, after a moment. “I needed that.” Then: “Where can we go?”

“I know a place,” Kate said.

She drove down and across town to the waterfront in the Twenties, where a few cars were parked, well-spaced apart.

“Isn’t this where the gays hang out?” he asked.

“Yes.”

He shuddered within his topcoat as he thought about what was going on in those other cars. “Let’s get the hell out of here.”

“Any suggestions?” Kate asked when they had driven in and around the Village in silence for a few minutes. She parked in front of a fire hydrant.

“Isn’t Martin in Washington?”

“He’s supposed to be,” she said.

“In other words, you’d rather risk us getting caught in a police raid on Sodom.”

“It is tacky, isn’t it?” Kate said in bitter sarcasm.

Things went from bad to worse as time ran ahead of them and frustration mounted. Morrissey accused her of flirting with the monsignor, something he had only vaguely thought about until now, as her way of diverting the old man from their interest in one another. It opened the opportunity for Kate to ask him just what had happened with the children the previous Friday. “
Did
you strike José?”

“He’s a dirty little liar if he says I did. Believe me, I wanted to, and he had it coming, but I caught myself in time. He’s a troublemaker, Kate, and you’ll be sorry if you coddle him. He’s got ideas about us right now—the way some kids his age catch on to people when their prurient little minds are waking up.”

“Prurient,” Kate repeated.

“You know what I mean.”

“Yes, Dan. I think I do. Now tell me what happened in church on Sunday.”

“You should know better than to come to that mass, Kate.”

“What happened?” she repeated.

“He refused to take communion from me. Made fists of his hands. His mouth was a steel trap. Kate, these Hispanic kids are so far ahead of us in sexual awareness, you’ve got to be careful with them.”

“I will,” she said.

But Morrissey was sure she’d take the youngster’s side against him. It was incredible that one little black-eyed peasant could destroy something as beautiful as what he and Kate had between them. In no way would he let it happen. He laid his hand on hers. “Kate, could you teach me how to love children the way you’ve taught me how to love?”

José turned up at art class on Friday showing signs of either having been in a fight or having been abused. The visible marks were a purpling bruise on his cheek and a cut in his lip that bled in his one attempt to smile. Kate’s inclination was to put an arm around him. She thought of Morrissey’s counsel not to coddle him, but that was not what restrained her. There was a watchfulness about the boy, and she felt that to show concern might put him to flight. The other children shied away from him. They gave him more work room at the table than he needed. In fact, he didn’t need work room at all. He simply sat there and did nothing except pluck at the edges of his drawing book with dirty fingernails, as though he could not wait for the class to end.