Relic of Time (27 page)

“That's quite a tangent, isn't it?” Traeger said after Neal sketched out for him the book he was writing.

“All books are tangents. What do you think of this theory?”

And Neal outlined the complicated plot that had been forming in his mind. The turning point came when he questioned his initial assumption that Lloyd Kaiser had gone to Mexico City as a penitent. At first, his three nights of whoopee in Chicago had seemed to give the basis for repentance. Conscience stricken, hitherto straight arrow is off to a shrine of Our Lady to make amends.

Traeger was getting impatient.

“So who did he spend that time in Chicago with? Previous interpretation: childhood sweetheart, reunion after all these years, they fall into one another's arms and make up for all the lost time.”

“What kind of book are you writing?”

“A blockbuster. I thought I was doing a sidebar and it has brought me right back to the central story.”

“All books are tangents.”

“A diverting remark, that's all. Did you know Kaiser was an author?”

In the past few days, Neal had gone through the whole Kaiser oeuvre (which he pronounced “oover”). It had been a revelation.

“What has happened to books for kids, Traeger? You and I might think kids are reading later versions of
Treasure Island
and
Huckleberry Finn.
Not on your life. The whole genre has become liberal propaganda, slanted, warping young minds. Revisionism. Not true of Kaiser, however; his shtick was rewriting history for kids. You wouldn't recognize it.”

“Well, you said this was a tangent.”

“Wait, there's more.” He had put his hand on Traeger's arm, then thought better of it and took it away.

Traeger took out a cigarette and Neal eagerly lit it for him.

“You want one?”

“Yes.” Camaraderie, that was what was needed. Traeger was not responding as he had hoped. But now came the coup de grace. He made it sound like mowing the lawn. After the Chicago romp, Kaiser is off to Mexico City. (“I'll come back to that.”) So what does his beloved do? She flies out here and volunteers to work for Jason Phelps.

“Jason Phelps, Traeger! The great debunker, particularly of Marian apparitions.”

Neal sat back.

“Wow,” Traeger said. He was being sarcastic.

“So what was Kaiser's reason for going to Mexico City if he wasn't a penitent? He knew what was going to happen! He was there to take part in the Holy Heist.”

“Neal, he was shot dead.”

“Of course he was shot dead. He knew too much.”

Neal sat back, searching Traeger's face for some glimmer of sympathy.

“Stick to tobacco, Neal.”

“Traeger, have a check run on Kaiser. Have a check run on Catherine Dolan.”

“You want me to write your book for you, too?”

“You don't like it?”

“It's one helluva story. Have you ever thought of doing a novel?”

When Neal called Lulu to bring her up to date, he summarized his session with Traeger by saying he had put a bug in his ear.

“So what happens now?”

“The ball is in his court.”

Of course he didn't mean that. Expressing the complicated theory aloud had not made it seem more plausible to Neal Admirari. If things didn't work out, he would take Traeger's advice and turn it into a novel.

Jason Phelps felt like an Old Testament figure with Catherine in the house, and in his bed, too, a bit of a surprise that, but she seemed to regard his attentions as a patriarchal blessing. Of course she did not know the Bible. Bookstores overflowed with Bibles, new translations, new fancy bindings, passages highlighted, notes, companions, concordances. The Vulgate, the Greek Septuagint, and the Hebrew Bible were easily purchased. Online, there were Bible courses galore. On EWTN there was Mother Angelica with a big Bible before her, holding forth like an evangelical preacher. Biblical literacy should have been at an all-time high, but still
the
book was a closed book in most of modern America. Catherine was typical, not an anomaly. It wasn't just that she had been raised a Catholic and was untouched by bibliolatry. She was a scientist. A microbiologist. Who is narrower than a scientist? Whose eyes are more blinkered? When Jason had said to Catherine that evolution had less historical basis than the book of Genesis, she had taken it as a joke. For most of her adult life she had accepted as her faith the silly reductionism that served as explanation in the self-described hard sciences, that meant to distinguish them from such things as anthropology. If Catherine was experiencing a crisis in faith, it was of an unusual kind. It wasn't that she wanted to rid her mind of the conviction that science would eventually explain everything; she was tempted to return to the devotions of her youth.

“Science explains everything away, Catherine.”

“You don't mean that.”

“Why?”

“You are a scientist yourself.”

“My dear, I am an anthropologist.”

She was eager to hear him debunk the objects of popular devotion, Lourdes, all the rest. The shroud of Turin. He was suddenly weary of all that. Archeologists in Israel had recently unearthed a shroud as old as that at Turin was said to be and comparative tests were immediately suggested. Ah, the union of science and religion. Phelps had countered all the arguments for the authenticity of the shroud of Turin and it hadn't made a particle of difference. True believers were no more moved than a biologist would be when told of the flaws in evolutionary theory. Science and faith based on revelation were both religions. It was not science versus faith. Soon they would be combined into a single faith. Phelps had become bored with all the so-called hard sciences. They were the last thing criticism was directed on.

His neighbor Don Ibanez fascinated him. Phelps entertained the idea that the two of them, old men, beyond the enthusiasms of youth, were kindred spirits. Any suggestions he had made along those lines had been greeted with amusement by the descendant of the conquistadores.

Before Clare had come home to live with her father, he and Don Ibanez had almost become friends, exchanging visits, sitting over wine in the twilight, feeling no need to talk, let alone to argue. Phelps felt there was some odd parallel between Don Ibanez's incredible miniature basilica and his books and papers. Two monuments to seemingly opposed obsessions. But he himself had become bored with his own obsession with the pious beliefs and practices of others.

Far out behind his house, Phelps had had a patio constructed, a table and chairs under a half dozen palms. The object was to enjoy the valley spread out below, but when seated there, he also had, off to the left, an unimpeded view of Don Ibanez's basilica. Once or twice, he and Don Ibanez had sat out there together sipping their wine, but for the most part it was the locale of Jason Phelps's solitude. Sometimes he nodded off in the cool night air and would come awake with a start. He learned to bring a sweater, lest the arthritis in his shoulders flare up.

One night out there he had awakened to see something going on at Don Ibanez's basilica. The yard lights were on, and a truck had been backed across the lawn, its back doors open to the doors of the basilica. Voices came faintly to Jason on the night air. Listening, Jason smiled. Don Ibanez must be installing some new item. The work, whatever it was, went on for more than an hour, but Phelps sat on, seeing and hearing Don Ibanez directing the activity. Finally it was over. The truck doors were closed and it moved away across the lawn. Don Ibanez, alone, went inside his basilica and closed its doors. The windows of the little church glowed. Perhaps Don Ibanez was at his devotions. Jason lit a cigar and smoked with great pleasure. He might have been keeping a vigil with Don Ibanez.

He awoke with a start, the lighted cigar in his lap. He pushed it away and tamped out the burn in his sweater. The basilica was now dark. Jason Phelps rose slowly, his limbs stiff. He managed to bend over and retrieve his still lighted cigar. Its length could have told him how long he had been asleep. He didn't care. The point now was to get inside and into bed and sink into real sleep.

The following day his neighbor had asked if he might store something with him, a bulky foam package. Jason was surprised at the request, given the size of Don Ibanez's hacienda. But he agreed to the odd request. What else are neighbors for?

Now Jason looked back on that time as one of both solitude and peace. He missed the solitude, and peace was gone, not altogether unpleasantly. Clare had returned and he had induced her to come help him with his papers, curious to learn if she shared the untroubled outlook of her father. Apparently she did. His little jibes had amused rather than disturbed her. And such a lovely young woman, lovely and impervious to his indirect if unmistakable amorous advances. After sixty he had come to see that the usual wariness was no longer there, neither in young nor in older women. There had been a time when his life had been more riotous than a youth's. Students, of course, succumbed; the more independent they considered themselves, the more eager they were to be subservient to his demands. Attracting them was one thing; disencumbering himself of them was another. If only they had all been like dear Myrna.

And then, not long after the nocturnal comings and goings, the truck backing across Don Ibanez's lawn, Miguel Arroyo had stopped by. Jason had listened impatiently to all the young man's drivel about Justicia y Paz. Miguel was clean-shaven save for the mustache and might have been mistaken for an Anglo despite his efforts to appear the savior of illegal immigrants. He seemed to glory in the appellation “illegal.”

“It's not their fault.”

“That they were born in Mexico?”

“That California was stolen from us.”

When Jason had come to Berkeley years earlier, lured across the country from Yale by the enormous salary and promise of limitless research money, he was unprepared for this motley state. His first impression was that half the people were from Iowa. Latinos were a buried population, a subculture of no moment, but all that had changed and people like Miguel Arroyo emerged from under their rocks.

“No violence is necessary to attain your ends. All you need do is go on breeding as you do.”

“Centuries of oppression require an outlet.”

It was ludicrous that Miguel regarded his life as oppression. But what was the point of making the observation? Doubtless the young man had taken on the oppression of others as his own. The theft of the image of the Virgin of Guadalupe had come as a bonanza.

“Of course you believe all that,” Jason had said to Arroyo.

“I will not mock the faith of the simple.”

Meaning that he distinguished himself from the simple. Meaning no doubt that he did not share their faith. The man was an opportunist.

And then Catherine had come, sent on to him by Myrna.

“She is in danger of lapsing back into her faith, Jason.”

“And I am to forestall that?”

“Wait until you meet her.”

When Catherine arrived, Jason thought he understood Myrna's remark. Was his old student acting the role of procuress? And so it had developed. Their lovemaking was remedial, therapeutic, a means of weaning Catherine's soul from the allure of the faith her last lover had retained.

“I should have sensed that, Jason. He wore a medal.”

“Not one you conferred on him?”

She ran her hand over his chest.

“Do you know of Pascal's gamble, Catherine?”

“I didn't even know he went to casinos.”

He reviewed the argument for her, his tone almost bored. Either there is a God or there isn't. If you live as if He does not exist, then die and find that He does, an unpleasant fate awaits you. Live as if He does exist, and the gates of heaven swing open to you. And if, having lived as if God exists, and He doesn't, you'll die but there won't be any you to be disappointed. Belief is the best gamble, that is the idea.