The Business of Naming Things (10 page)

Father Paul eyes the cooler. Acrobatically, he retrieves his socks from just under the night table and slips them on. So girded, he trods the cold planks and flips the red top up. He thanks the grace of luck that won the church this fine item at the Lucky 7 booth at the last picnic. Father Paul'd placed a dime on number 3 (“for the Trinity,” he told the booth worker, Checkie Farrell, and the assembled). Inside, a single can of Ballantine ale swims, green and gold, rim nosing above the surface. Save me; I'm drowning. The sign of the three rings, Mel Allen. Father lets it drip over the open maw before applying his very own church key, popping a triangular mouth in the top of the can. He licks the bitter foam, and then fairly much drains the can. “Crisp,” he intones. He wishes it were beer in the chalice, not being a man for the grape.

He begins to take a spiritual inventory, his examen, as he often did before breaking fast. Good Jesuit. Of late, it had been a grim duty, often as not a recounting of the previous day's iniquity, as now. He was grateful last evening that the innkeeper had room at the inn. There was indeed a retreat going on; he was late—and not registered, but who doesn't trust a priest, even if pulling in quite late in the old Packard with a nun in the backseat. He lied to Margaret, telling her he'd lied to the innkeeper, Clem Fessette, saying Sister had an illness. He pulled around to the back with her out of sight
of the office and knew which room to ask for. In darkness, they had slipped in. His satchel had sufficient things for them both. He always carried them, garments of his faith.

He could deal with this. He'd become hardened to his own sin. He remained in service to his parishioners, their small lives, their small joys, their heartbreaks, marriages, deaths, foibles, sins relayed to him through the screen. He dispensed their penance. They worked their faith and their doubt through him. No one else did this for them, and for the nonce, he wanted it no other way. He wanted Margaret.

She is not far away. Margaret is quite near, perhaps putting on her habit and scapular. Yes, he will see her, very shortly. The prospect makes his face warm and his groin stir, he is awake now, looking about. He finds his trousers and puts them up and on and yanks his belt.

The bathroom door has been closed for too long. He tries the knob. Locked. He thinks he hears her. Yes, he does; that's her. She is sitting on the Eljer toilet, her feet, with their delicate white toes and pale pearl nails, splayed across the soft nap of the floor mat that surrounds the throat of the bowl. Margaret, he thinks to say, but thinks better. Leave her be.

A
S HE TRAIPSES IN THE COLD DOWN BELOW
the car park to the dark woods near the lakefront, looking for a tree, he rues the fact that he is not the word artist he wanted to be. Sermons are not in his wheelhouse. He knows that. Wasn't
Portrait
the thing that near enlightened him to his calling? It worked on Merton.

Ah, there.

Last year,
The Moviegoer
. Won the big prize. Father Paul read it, but he was no Binx Bolling. He had no desire to hobo
around in search of faith or a good thrashing.
Not
Catholic! This year a book about priests (there on his nightstand). This, then, again, this, yes, his fallenness the stuff of art, religious art, depictions of the struggle for faith. Saint Augustine.

There is hardly any snow for late November, only little gray stoles of it flung in the gullies. He holds himself a long time at the base of a birch, his yellow cascading down in a steaming review. Himself there, but not himself. Painless anyway. Then a shiver of pleasure, and the vapors of life gently court him, not just his own smells, but also the dry tang of foliage, the cool musk of damp bark, and the wind up from the lake carrying a little of the water's residual summer warmth along with an odor of dead fish. He notes the sounds around him, too: tree branches creaking, turning in the wind, strengthening themselves; an odd cracking sound now and then; and, distantly, traffic, out on Route 9, approaching slowly, gears, then receding into a pinpoint of silence. Then he hears a cheap door click shut and he knows he is too late.

There he sees it: the right arm of Mike Seeney extended and his palm pressing down Margaret's head out of sight as Seeney's Rambler guns out of the Inn of the Nations parking lot. Father Paul listens to the gears shifting, first, and straining, second, more straining, third now and cruising, as things moving away from you will, out of earshot. Deafening.

N
OTHING BUT A FUNERAL ON
TV—what kind of nation kills its leader? Lying in state. On both channels, that's all. And there's Father Hartke, old Gil, the show-biz priest, greeting people. Father Paul remembers him—a weekend in Maryland (conveniently, he was down there for the Preakness, and
Hartke treated). He caught Hartke's Catholic U players the next afternoon. Helen Hayes was there.

What kind of faith kills its savior?

Father Paul Connolly, lying in state, room 11, should anyone care to view the deceased. Clem Fessette must've placed a call to the rectory and Mike Seeney was dispatched to rescue, for once (the word on Mike Seeney: He'll bury you). O my Jesus. The Mass must go on.

Margaret
had
been in the bathroom, then.

Father Paul sees that dear Margaret had had the kindness to make (quickly) the bed. There, hidden in the nightstand drawer behind Gideon, are their ankle belts. Exquisite shackles. Would not fit his neck.

Of course, it had to be Seeney. Margaret had a crush on Mike, like all the sisters. The safe man, celibate now, a widower, childless, devoted to the church and grounds. More pious than he. The man who hand-dug all the graves and buried the dead of the parish. He did his work softly and soundlessly, as if in a silent film, hardly disturbing the surface of the earth for his interments. Hadn't Father Paul seen Seeney blush at the church picnic in August, when a small dribble of Michigan sauce slipped down his chin and Margaret wiped it away with her finger. She smiled in such a warm way that Mike had to fetch something from the shed.

Not very hygienic, for an Ursuline, Sister, said her pastor.

Father, she whispered. He who is clean among us . . .

That kind of brash he both loved and feared. But now, of course, he had other things to fear. Seeney had spied the pastor's Packard, if not the strewn bedsheets in the room. Margaret's tears in the car (inevitable), her damp lashes and sniffles, could have as cover the death of the president, if she wished it to.
If
. Conversely, she could be destroying Father Paul right
now in Seeney's Rambler somewhere on Route 22. Right around Peru, the dead orchards.

Noon. And why had it come to this? Father Paul was sitting up in bed. No more Ballantines in the cooler. All of college football canceled or preempted, just like Father Paul—at this point, he was simply a test pattern—a big silent Indian chief, with no tribe. But it had come to this and Margaret had warned him, warned him that his lack of piety, his weakness, his harsh judgments of his fellow man, were fatiguing her, weakening her in faith and body, and he was slipping beyond her capacity to hold on to him. Especially in the face of her own “contradictions,” as she called them. Ah, but she'd never consign him to the fire.

She was leaving the Church herself, she said. He could not, and would not, and would she without him? And she would not! This is what he had wanted to talk about during the night, not the unimaginable events in Dallas—the horror of it. The sudden death of a prince. The weeping.

He sought a confessor.

“C
LEM
,”
HE SAYS, OPENING THE DOOR
next to the sign that said
OFFICE
. “Do you have anything I might eat?”

“Father, shouldn't you be getting back?” Father Paul can hear the solemn notes of the broadcast beneath Clem's counter somewhere, the click of shoes in the East Room of the White House, the sighing of veils and men.

“Clem, I should not. I am not well today. A curate from St. Alex's is covering,” he says, lying.

“Nothing for you to eat, Father. The missus isn't bringing over my dinner today. She's watching this and you can't talk to her. I should be home, but for this retreat going on.”

“It's an empty parking lot, Clem.”

Clem just looks at Father Paul, his only guest.

“You should be getting back. I can give you a drink,” says Clem. He produces a bottle of VO from beneath the counter. “There's 7 Up and Coke and Fanta in the machine. Ice-cold.”

Father Paul, surprising himself, declines, but does ring up a Coke bottle, which dropped out of the big red machine like ordnance. The bleakness of it—man and soda, November afternoon.

“Ice-cold all right,” he says, palming it. “Thanks, Clem. Bless you.”

Halfway through the door, Father Paul turns. “Clem, Inn of the Nations. What nations?” But Clem has retired to the back.

O
H, IT IS OVER
. Father Paul stands in his room and looks out the window. He can see nothing but sky, gray and featureless. Rampant, he thinks, as in spreading, unchecked. A good word, that. And the vacuum of his future—his rampant future, spreading, unchecked? Hardly. There's no one in it, out there only vanished souls—his mother's, his father's, and wherever Sarah's is. Now Margaret, off with Mike Seeney. And nowhere his faith, his Holy God, his service, his sanctity. The Coca-Cola revived him some.

Not rampant. Contracting.

Sitting in a chair, TV off, he opens the curtains. Come on in, he says, inviting the cold scrutiny of midafternoon. He settles in with his book, the condemned man's last cigarette.

Ironic: a priest novel. He recalls that the book won the big award (lot's of to-do: The monsignor mentioned it in his bulletin), and Father Paul'd committed the sin of envy. Was
the author a priest? He was not, apparently, from the back flap—J.F. Powers, “raised in a devout family,” a CO in the war—good for him. But: Father Urban? What's that make him, Father Rural?

Made quite a stir, anyway. Beat out the Russian with the nymphet. Ha! A good time for the Catholics right now (till yesterday). But what to learn?

Father Paul, since falling ass over teakettle for Margaret three years ago, hadn't written a word in his “Soul Journey,” his work in progress, fashioned after
The Spiritual Exercises
, which instruction, he has thought more than once, was to find a kind of engagement with belief and discipline and spiritual cleansing that a small French girl had delivered in a single afternoon.

As a Jesuit, of course, Ignatius's
Exercises
, the four-week regimen of spiritual examen, was a rite of passage. All struggled with it, but Paul Connolly, self-trained in ardent visualization of the scriptural, shined. As he sat in the pale seepage of the one window to Room 11, he recited the Fifth Exercise, a meditation on hell: “The first Point will be to see with the sight of the imagination the great fires, and the souls as in bodies of fire. The second, to hear with the ears wailings, howlings, cries, blasphemies against Christ our Lord and against all His Saints. The third, to smell with the smell smoke, sulphur, dregs and putrid things. The fourth, to taste with the taste bitter things, like tears, sadness and the worm of conscience. The fifth, to touch with the touch—” But he could not go on.

Yes, he should be visualizing his own torment right now—Hell, his hell; wailings, howlings, cries, blasphemies against Christ our Lord, his rantings; smoke and dregs and putrid things, here in room 11; the awful taste of tears, the worm of
conscience—the worm! His. And the touch of fire—on his skin. But no, he is thumbing through a piece of fiction.

He could be visualizing the torment of a widow and a family and a nation right now—his vocation, look at Hartke—but he is not. This is a tragedy that
shall not be read
.

What is transpiring in his life is a tragedy, too—that
shall not be read
.

It won't even be written.

The Book of the Month people—it takes him a while to figure this out—are offering a short story by the author as a little appetizer.

As he begins the story—“The Presence of Grace”—he flinches at the
absence
of it, and of Margaret, and of his vocation, all fled. The presence of emptiness yawns around him in the silent landscape of a splattered world. He's got the TV on now, for atmosphere. Funerary art. He is remains. Of the dead. He has been cast adrift in another dimension, from which he can see the world spinning away into its intricately charged orbits, while he will tumble slowly through space alone.

Father Paul cannot write. He cannot even think . . . of . . . the empty rectory, the loneliness or anger of Margaret, perhaps hatred, perhaps pain of confusion. No. Mike Seeney ministering her—minister!—or the gaggle of sisters gossiping. He won't even merit a search party, will he? He matters not. He digs into the text—the consolations of prose. The oblivion of other people's words.

For the next two hours Father Paul follows one Father Fabre, a curate to a daft pastor who is stubbornly antisocial (likes to picnic by himself, go to the zoo, and count the collections in his room—by himself). Fabre tries to compensate, balancing out the parish presence by accepting invitations
to dinner from parishioners, only to make a grave mistake: He becomes coerced into offering his blessing to an unmarried older couple living together, in sin, of course, while the curate for the duration of the meal is paired with a young single woman, who tells him, “I know priests who are married.” Father Fabre escapes, but he understands what he has done. He bravely presents his dilemma to the pastor, who, it is immediately clear, will have to intervene with a council of outraged parishioners who want him to do something about his wayward curate and the sinning couple. But the old guy just refuses to accept their account that anything untoward has happened and manages to do it in a way that does not offend them, or accuse them of misrepresenting the facts. “ 'S not so,” he simply tells them, and nothing more. “ 'S not so.”