Irresistible Impulse (22 page)

ELEVEN

S
unday dawned, a dull day with yellowy-gray city clouds and a cold December wind. Karp the Infidel snored in bed, and Marlene got her daughter ready for church. Marlene and her husband had been walking on eggs since the shooting of Pruitt. Given the peculiarities of their respective personalities and professions, however, this did not bother them as much as it would have another couple. Shortly, Marlene knew, there would be the crisis—both of them would bellow, trample around like hippos, yolk-stained to the knees, and, still snarling, fall into bed.

Lucy was ready when Marlene came out of the bedroom, dressed in white tights and a deep purple velvet dress with a lace collar and little black buttons up the front. She had a round-brimmed hat in the same color held in her hands, and she had clearly tried hard with her hair. It shone, and the tangles were mainly at the back. Lucy liked church, as she liked all serious things, non-kid things—guns, for example. It was another aspect of her eight-going-on-thirty personality. Marlene sometimes feared that she was even a trifle too dour.

“Ow!” as Marlene plied her hairbrush.

“Be quiet, and think of the holy martyrs, as my mother used to say,” said Marlene. Finishing, she stood back.

“There! Gorgeous! Ready for church. In fact, in that outfit, you look like a tiny monsignor.”

Lucy was not amused by this remark. She put on her hat and her camel-hair coat, now somewhat too small, showing skinny wrist bones, and made for the door. They walked the dog, boarded the yellow car, which was nursed with many a prayer into fretful life, and drove to Old St. Patrick’s Cathedral on Mulberry Street off Prince. In the car, Lucy asked, “Do you think they’ll let girls be, like, priests while I’m alive?”

“I don’t know, Luce. John Paul and I are trying to work it out, but we’re still pretty far apart. Why? Feeling a vocation coming on?”

Shrug. “It would be neat to be, you know, holy.”

“You could be a nun,” suggested Marlene, shriveling.

“Yes,” said Lucy. “I could be the kind that parachutes over the jungle and saves people from bad soldiers. But … I don’t like the part where you can’t”—a faint blush and a wriggle—“have babies.”

Straight-faced, Marlene responded, “You want to have a family?”

“Only when I’m real old, like thirty-five or something. But maybe they’ll let nuns have babies.”

“Maybe,” said Marlene. “In which case you could found your own order. The Little Sisters of the Fruitful Womb (Airborne).”

Lucy looked at her mother sideways, decided that she had been made fun of, sniffed, and fell silent for the rest of the drive. Marlene sighed. Their relationship seemed to be transforming itself into a wisecracking rivalry rather than the warmly supportive figment of Marlene’s hopeful imagination.

That Marlene chose to go to Old St. Pat’s instead of to St. Anthony of Padua, where every other Italian in lower Manhattan went, or Transfiguration, which was closer, was part of the same contrarian spirit that (aside from her vow to raise her daughter in the faith) kept her going to church in the first place. It was not expected that someone of her education, politics, and behavior—Jew-wed and all—would continue to be a regular communicant of the nasty old patriarchal racket, and so therefore she was. St. Pat’s was also a venerable Gothic Revival pile, parts of it dating back to the War of 1812 (which antiquity she thought gave worship there an almost European style) and full of the ghosts of departed poor Irishmen and the present bodies of poor Latinos. For Marlene their déclassé presence took some of the sting out of doing something her mom approved.

They passed under the peculiar Gothic facade and into the echoing space, redolent of incense and damp stone. It was early, not much after seven, and they both joined the short waiting lines by the confessionals set out along a side aisle.

Lucy went in first. Marlene could not imagine what the child had to confess, not unless she
really
thought about it, and then she primly put the thought out of mind. In any case, Lucy had always been eager for that particular sacrament since she had taken first communion the previous year.

There were two boxes in operation. An old woman in shiny black emerged from the far one, and Marlene went in, wondering briefly whether it was manned by the pastor, Father Raymond, or one of his curates. In general, Marlene was not interested in the character of her priest, unlike many of her coreligionists, who were nearly Congregational in their concern with the style, character, and attitude of their pastors, and shopped around town for the one they considered most amenable to their own concept of Rome’s doctrine. She did not particularly care for Raymond, a sheep-faced man of dull and conventional views, but, she believed, either it was magic or it was bullshit, and since she was here, she had opted for the magic, which would work via an asshole as well as via a Thomas Merton.

In the dim familiar box, after the ritual acknowledgments, Marlene began her tour through such of the Seven Deadlies as had afflicted her in the past week. Wrath, as usual, was top of the charts.

“In my work—I run a security firm that offers protection to women against stalkers and abusive men—I get so angry at them,” she said, “the men, I mean. It frightens me. I want to hurt them and kill them. I sometimes do hurt them, in the line of duty, so to speak and … I get pleasure out of it.”

The voice said, “Do you hurt them
for
the pleasure, or as a means to an end?”

Startled, Marlene stared at the grille. It had not been Father Raymond’s voice, or that of any priest with whom she was familiar. The voice was low and husky, the diction precise with the flat accent of the outlands. New England? Not a New Yorker, at any rate. Marlene brought herself back to the question.

“I
think
it’s as a means to an end,” she replied hesitantly. “I want to frighten them away from the pattern of increasing violence. The law doesn’t seem able to do that. I want them to know that if they continue there will be consequences, horrible consequences, for them personally.”

“And does this work?”

“Sometimes. The shock works, I think. Like having blackouts works for a drunk sometimes. They have to choose between stopping drinking and losing their lives. But some drunks keep drinking and die, and some of these men keep after their women and kill them, and then they often kill themselves. Or I could kill them first.”

“But in providing this shock, you feel pleasure. What sort of pleasure?”

“Not physical. More like … I don’t know … moral satisfaction, the sense of meting out justice—now, you rat, you know what it feels like. Afterward, after one of these sessions, I feel depleted; sometimes, if it’s bad enough, I feel nauseous.”

A long pause. She could hear him breathing. She became aware of a growing interest in the priest, and a not entirely comfortable increase in that almost erotic feeling she always got in the confessional: sitting alone in the dark, telling your secrets to a man you knew, but who was professionally anonymous, a stranger, a stranger clothed in mystic powers, the best entertainment on earth, now closing in on its third millennium of continuous performance. Why all the churches were full of women.

“That’s a very good sign,” he said. “The sickness. I would be more concerned if you went out for a hearty meal afterward. It sounds as if you acted with good intention and when you caused pain it was to promote a greater mood. This is slippery moral ground, as I’m sure you know, but it seems as if so far you are keeping your feet. The rage is another matter. Please go on.”

She went on. Lust—stupid fantasies about men she’d met casually or seen on the street; sloth—a slight tendency toward
acedia
, the abandonment of hope; pride—yes, perhaps a serious problem there, more serious than Marlene was willing to recognize. Without quite knowing how she had started, Marlene found herself talking about her husband. This was another first, as the irregularity of the mixed marriage had always made her shy of bringing Karp and the church together in the same breath, and it came pouring. It was not complaint, precisely, but more like a spiritual confusion. Why did her life torment him? Why did his suspicions torment her? Where was the trust? Why did she feel stifled? Why did she feel compelled to lie to him—no, not exactly lie, as such; more a selective withholding of the truth?

“It sounds,” said the priest, “as if your marriage is far from perfect, and that you yourself have fallen far short of the perfection you have every right to expect from yourself.”

Marlene found herself nodding in agreement for a moment before it struck her that the priest’s tone had been ironic. Irony is not much met with in the confessional.

“I don’t understand,” she said, although she did.

“I think you do,” said the voice. It seemed to wait.

“You’re talking about pride, spiritual pride,” said Marlene.

“I’m not talking about anything. You’re confessing your sins.”

Who
was
this guy? Marlene took a deep breath. “Yes, right. I have been guilty of the sin of pride. I want to be perfect, and have a perfect marriage and perfect children and never make a mistake and save all the poor, poor women, every one of them. Yes, it’s true. What can I do!”

Marlene had to struggle to keep from raising her voice. She could feel sweat rolling down her sides and clammy on her forehead.

“You can sincerely repent and make a good act of contrition. For your penance, read the first four chapters of St. Theresa’s
The Way of Perfection
. Do you have it?”

In fact, she did and said so.

“I thought you might,” said the priest. “Now, is there anything more?”

There was not. Marlene said the ritual words with more fervor than was her wont—she
was
heartily sorry—received the absolution, and left the box.

“You were in there a long time, Mommy,” said Lucy, who was waiting for her on a stone bench.

“Yes, well, I’ve been a very wicked woman lately.”

“It doesn’t matter how wicked you are. If you’re really sorry, God will forgive you,” intoned Lucy in her most sacerdotal voice.

“Yes,” said Marlene, “that’s the catch.”

After church it was the tradition of the Catholic Karps to switch cultures and stop off at Samuel’s on East Houston to buy fresh bagels, lox, cream cheese, whitefish, and carp, this last from an early age Lucy’s special delight (That’s
us
, right, Mommy?). When they arrived home with their aromatic burdens, Karp (the man) was, as usual, sitting at the kitchen table with the fat
Times,
in his frowzy blue plaid robe, unwashed and unshaven. She plunked her shopping bag down on the table and kissed his ear.

“Euueh! Take a shower,” she said, and kissed him again, on the neck.

“How was church?” he asked surprised at the attention. He pulled at the bagel bag.

“The usual. God loves us all, and the pope knows what’s what. There’s a new priest I’d like to get to know.” Marlene continued her nuzzling and ran her hand inside his robe. Karp groped bagels.

“Would you rather have a bagel, or me?” she breathed into his ear.

“That depends on whether you’re covered with crunchy little bits of onion,” said Karp and held up an onion bagel to demonstrate. He got up and pulled a knife from the rack.

“It could be arranged,” said Marlene, as Lauren Bacall.

“That must have been quite a sermon,” said Karp dryly. “What was it on? Marital duty? The proper subjection of wife to husband?”

“The Immaculate Conception, if you must know. Jesus, Butch, how can you cut bagels like that!” It was an old argument.

“You mean, holding them in my hand against my chest with the razor-sharp knife cutting toward my heart? My mom always did it that way, and so did
her
mom. I always thought it bespoke an attractively cavalier disregard of death. Anyway, we are going back to being friends now?”

“I’m sorry,” said Marlene, seeing the possibility of an egg-free reconciliation. “It was my fault, I take full responsibility. I should have talked it out with you when it happened. The thing is, I think Tranh either whacked, or helped Carrie whack, the guy.”

“The noodle guy? He told you this?”

“He’s not a noodle guy; he’s a stone killer. And he didn’t tell me, and there’s no evidence—no, actually, Lucy saw some blood and a gun in his room. So he was probably involved, although I don’t see how you’d ever prove it in court.”

Karp took a deep breath. This was not the time to ask what the
fuck
his darling daughter was doing rummaging in the rooms of armed stone killers. He said, “Proving it in court is not the point.”

“No, you’re right. The point is, I need you to know I didn’t set it up. I didn’t hire a murder.”

Karp sighed, a noise that represented the myriad frustrations of his life with this woman, as well as recognition that he had asked for it, and that he was not about to make any waves. He put down the bagel and the knife and hugged her. Lucy came in, changed out of her church clothes into jeans and a long-sleeve T-shirt. She said, “Yuck! Mushing
again?
Where’s the food?”

Karp waited behind the prosecution table in Part 46 while the next panel of veniremen filed in. It was late in the eleventh day of what the Post had called in a big black headline, the jury selection from hell. Karp kept his expression neutral as he looked the new group over. They had gone through eighteen panels already and had agreed on but two jurors. Judge Peoples was being liberal with challenges for cause, and generous with the range of potentially disqualifying questions he allowed. Mr. Fair.

There are, generally speaking, two sorts of lawyers with respect to the voir dire: those who think that the selection of the right jury is tantamount to winning the case, and those who think that a properly constructed case will win with any but a blatantly prejudiced jury. Karp was of the latter persuasion; Lionel Waley was enthusiastically, famously, of the former: he had even written a little book on the subject, which Karp had, of course, read:
Choosing a Winning Jury
. It had not changed Karp’s mind, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t play Waley’s game, and right from the opening gun at that. It made him irritable, a mood he had to hide behind a mask of genial, bland interest (“Do you have any friends or relatives with emotional problems, Mrs., ah, Perkins? Your nephew? Could you tell us about him?”). That might, in fact, have been part of the reason why Waley did it.