The Cavanaugh Quest (22 page)

“Yes, so am I.”

“Well,” she said, “we’ll see. Maybe.” She got out of the car, motioning me to stay put. She stopped on my side, a safe distance away. “Good-bye. And thank you for dinner.” An almost smile glittered in the night and she clutched the sweater tight, making her shoulders seem narrow and her hips broader. “I enjoyed it. I think.”

I nodded but she didn’t see me. She’d turned and was gone. She didn’t look back.

I fell asleep with
My Little Chickadee,
watching W. C. Fields fight off the redskins with a slingshot which kept bouncing back and striking his forehead. Turning away from an argumentative Margaret Hamilton, he muttered, “I hope she doesn’t get any more violent … I haven’t the strength to knock her down.” I thought about Kim, sleepily, and chuckled happily, eyes lowering, feeling young again, a nipper once again … As he bathed, he said, “Reminds me of the old swimming hole, when I was a nipper … that was where I caught malaria, what a foul summer that was … the summer the Jones boys murdered their mother … I remember her well, carrying the wash on her head …”

I slept badly, just skirting the edges of consciousness all night, and woke early, yawning. There was a peculiar anticipation in the blood. After my grapefruit I trundled off in the Porsche, fancying I could smell her next to me. Romantic twaddle, I told myself.

The two cracked flights of stairs leading up to Father Boyle’s home seemed to be getting longer and steeper. There was a thick morning fog sitting on Prospect Park, obliterating the neighboring houses and the tower. He stared at me through the screen door, taken by surprise, his face veering between fright and surprise. He’d known Hubbard would warn me off; he hadn’t expected to see me again. His eyes squinted, the broken veins on his cheeks stretching.

“Good morning, Father,” I said. “I just wanted to stop by and apologize for the other night. Have you got a cup of coffee?”

Trustingly, believing me, he swung the screen door wide and let it slam behind us. I followed him to the kitchen, marveling at what a friendly word can do and how badly people want to hear one from time to time. Takes the sting out. Useful for a liar, too.

He was still shuffling about in baggy tweeds, thumping the knobbed blackthorn stick, and his stubbly white whiskers seemed to have gotten stuck at half an inch. The kitchen reeked of bacon grease and a crusted frying pan sat on the gas stove. He motioned me to a booth in the breakfast nook and I squeezed in behind the oilcloth-covered table. He brought mugs of coffee. The warm cream from a jug on the table separated the instant it hit the hot coffee, forming nasty little gray clots floating in all directions. He lumbered back, muttering, and laboriously got himself opposite me, wheezing. A plate of eggs with mushrooms and onions had cooled and hardened before him; he chipped at the remains with a fork. He slurped coffee and picked his binoculars off the oilcloth and peered out the window beside us.

“There’s a finch out there,” he growled, “in the patch of fog just beyond the birdbath. Don’t see him often, the wily finch.” I saw a flicker of movement in a looming bush. On the table next to his plate were several soiled, oily-looking copies of
Penthouse
and
Playboy,
a ceramic Hamm’s beer ashtray with a cigar ground out in the bear’s grinning face. “Harmless enterprise, bird-watching,” he said, “but I’m strictly the backyard variety. No field trips and hiking through brambles for this old specimen …” He put the binoculars down on the
Penthouse
and rubbed his eyes. When he took his hands away his eyes stared dully at me, slightly glazed, and I wondered if he’d been at the booze already or if the night’s painkillers were still working.

“I am sorry about the other night. I had no intention of upsetting you.”

“Ah, yes,” he remembered, “you’re the young philosopher, the Conrad man … Still chewing on the idea of evil, are you?”

“Not especially. I told you what I thought. What Conrad thought.”

“So you did. I was blaming the Devil for mischief, aha, and you believed that … let me get it right, you believed that ‘men alone are quite capable of every wickedness.’ Is that it? Have I got that?”

“You have.”

“Well,” he mused, slyly poking at the mushrooms, “I’ve been thinking about it and it’s quite possible that you’re in the right and I was … copping out, as my young university friends say. After, all, when you can blame the Devil, man’s load is substantially lightened. And if I can blame the Devil for my sins, all the better. It all comes down to the old question we’ve been debating since the year one, free will. Are you responsible for your acts or can you say, along with Mr. Flip Wilson, the devil made me do it?” He wheezed, staring at me, sucking in air, face turning florid, hand gently patting the table. “Perhaps men can be driven to any evil act … to survive, to protect themselves. Perhaps.”

“What happened with Goode and Crocker?” I asked. “I was called to account by Hubbard Anthony and it isn’t that I can’t take my medicine, but I wish I knew what it was that made everybody so angry.” I was innocent; I’d come to my priest for counsel.

“Goode and Crocker, we’re all old, time is running out …” He blinked, trying to focus the empty, glazed eyes on me. “They came to see me, with the wind up, telling me you’d been to see them talking about Carver Maxvill, that I’d told you about him.” He waved a white hand. “Yelled at me, told me to keep my mouth shut and not to talk to you anymore, I’d only make a mess of everything … Can you credit that,
I’d
make a mess of everything? Hail Mary, what next? Told me not to rake up the past—” He broke off, chuckling, shaking his head. “I told them it was bound to happen sooner or later but I got to wheezing and they outyelled me. Farcical, those dumb bastards yelling at
me
… well, maybe they’re right, maybe it will stir up a mess, but if it does, what difference does it make, what real difference? We’re all gonna die, even the young ones, everybody dies, so what difference does it make? What is there to be afraid of here? It’s afterward, then’s the time to be afraid, and keeping it quiet here isn’t gonna do any good afterward, anyway … Oh, yes, they’re fearful men, afraid of what’s long gone, dead and buried.” He swilled cold coffee and worked the binoculars again, sucking in breath. The fog was lifting very slowly and the finch was visible, considering a short flight to the birdbath.

“Am I fearful?” He grinned sourly, beneath the glasses. “What the hell would I be afraid of?”

“I don’t know,” I said, “and I wondered. You seemed frightened, not just upset, when I left the other night. What had I done?”

“I was tired. Looking at all those pictures from the old days, your father and Hub and all the rest, Carver and Rita, it made me remember the old days. Wait till you’re old, young man, and you’ll see, you’ll feel the terrible loneliness that comes with snapshots from long ago … The Dorian Gray effect, seeing yourself and your chums, young and alive, knowing full well that you’re old and half dead now or just plain dead …”

“Who’s dead? You guys all still know each other—”

“Tim,” he reminded me sourly, “Carver, Rita …”

“Rita?”

“The cook, housekeeper—”

“She’s dead? You know that?”

He looked startled for a moment, then the sluggishness returned, the malicious grin. I wondered if he were wholly sane; he seemed fine at first, then wandered off the road.

“What are you jumping on that for? She’s as dead for me as Carver is—who knows if either one of them is dead? I don’t see them, so as far as I’m concerned, they’re dead as the birdbath, you get me?” He smirked, working his mouth, shaking his head at my stupidity. “Don’t jump on me like that. You sound like General Goode at his most … military.”

I leaned forward on the oilcloth.

“What went on up there at the lodge?” I asked quietly, driven by my own Devil, curiosity, whatever name it went by. The inability to leave well enough alone. “You must have seen it or been informed—did it get a little rough? Ole said it got a little raw.”

He guffawed. “Ole. He knows nothing! He says it got a little raw …” He shook peculiarly, rumbling, wetness seeping like rheum in the eyes of an old dog.

“Well, forget Ole, then,” I pressed on. “But for you as a priest, wasn’t it difficult for you to see what was going on?”

“Are you—you, of all people, not even a Catholic! Are you presuming to tell me my responsibilities as a priest? Should I have turned my back on them and their pursuits, left them to it? Or was my responsibility to remain at hand, to act as a reminder, a governor? No simpleminded questions, please!” He took the cigar butt from out of the bear’s face and snapped a kitchen match on a ragged thumbnail, puffing until the flame burned through squashed ash to tobacco. It smelled like my worst fears.

“What was going on? Why did Carver’s name scare everybody?”

“I don’t know what you mean … what was
going on
?”

“The women, the gambling?”

“You lascivious fellow,” he said reprovingly, as if the misbehavior were mine. He was slipping away from me, candor evaporating with the fog.

“But I keep wondering why Maxvill gets to you guys the way he does … What could you feel so guilty about? You, a priest …”

He got out of the booth and beckoned me to follow him, out the back door onto his narrow patio, where the old lawn furniture was rusting beneath paint blisters. The finch was perched on the chipped birdbath. Everything about Father Boyle’s house and life seemed chipped, damaged, ready for the junk heap. He picked up a rake, poked at the long wet grass, a soggy brown paper bag.

“The priesthood,” he rumbled, gravelly in his chest, “two views of that calling. Either a priest, familiar with sin as he is, should be particularly prey to guilt, on intimate terms with all of his own sins however small … or, leading a good and moral and helpful life, he should be, in his saintly wisdom, impervious to it. The problem,” he wheezed, gasping, “the problem is that he this priest of ours, is human and vulnerable and frail. At best, not an easy position. In any case, what evidence do you have that I have a damn thing to be guilty about, anyway?” He stopped, puffing, and looked up the hill. “Fog’s going. There’s the Witches’ Tower.”

“What do you call it?”

“Witches’ Tower, that’s what everybody calls it. Please, don’t ask me, why, Mr. Cavanaugh. It’s just what they call it.”

“So you don’t feel guilty.”

“I don’t think about guilt any more than I have to. But you have to realize that the boys in the club were just getting away from it all, a little misbehavior’s no cause for lifelong guilt. They never got out of control …”

“Your presence was a restraining influence, I suppose?”

“You might say so.”

“Sort of the club chaplain, so to speak?”

“So to speak.”

“Which brings us back to Carver Maxvill, doesn’t it?”

“You, perhaps. Not me.”

“But what was it about him? What did he do?”

Boyle, beyond my reach now, laughed chummily. “Now, talking about Maxvill was what got me into trouble in the first place, wasn’t it?” He pushed the rake into a mat of grasses and trash along the bottom of the fence, pulled outward, fetching up a tin can. He wheezed with the effort.

“You mentioned Rita—your housekeeper. Was she the one Maxvill got entangled with? Maybe a little jealousy among the old lads?” My mind was overworked; for an instant it all seemed plausible.

“How should I remember? Really? Child’s play.” He poked with the rake and a bunny leaped from the mound of sweet, wet grass, ran across our path and under a bush. “How should I remember who might have made a pass at the cook, a thing like that? I think her morals were, perhaps, in question, but it was so long ago and what difference could it possibly make to anyone? It gives me a headache.”

“So it was a long time ago,” I said. “What’s thirty, forty years, in the scheme of things? A wink in the eye of time, right? Could he still be alive? Maxvill?”

“Could? What a word. Of course, he could … he could also be the Christ of the Bottomless Pit, the Wrath of the Lamb, or the Paraclete of Kavourka. But I don’t think so … I think he’s probably dead.”

“If he’s dead,” I said, “do you think he’s in Heaven, Father?”

He stopped his pacing and leaned on the rake, a grin spreading across his Irish face. He didn’t look as if he were absolutely all there: He wore the expression of a man who had opted out; he wore it like a new suit and he was getting used to the fit.

“No, I shouldn’t think he is,” he said calmly. “I sometimes wonder if anybody gets to Heaven, Mr. Cavanaugh.”

I never saw Father Boyle again.

T
HE HAZE BURNED OFF BY
noon and it was a warm day with a white glowing sky. The Porsche behaved itself admirably and the new tape deck played some tapes I’d put together myself; the result was that I listened to movie sound tracks all the way—
A Man and a Woman, Picnic, The Quiller Memorandum.
Wonderful driving music, the green fields swishing past, memories of Kim Novak dancing toward William Holden on that long-ago picnic evening from my youth. I could still see her, body rhythmically twisting, hands clapping slowly, beating out the passing of the years.

The wind whipped at me, the music was loud, and moving fast made time stand still. My mind flickered in and out among the shadows of my past, noding to my mother, to a young Archie, to Anne, and finally settling on Kim. I went over the previous evening as closely as I could, trying to see it all happening, remembering not so much what she said but exactly how she’d looked as she talked, the gestures and mannerisms and the sound of her voice. I felt a childish euphoria, as much the next day as when I’d been gone from her a matter of minutes; I knew it was childish. I’d always been one to rush in, taking more for granted then I ought, assuming incorrectly that others felt about me as I felt about them. I’d been hurt, of course, but like the Bourbon kings, I learned nothing from the wounds. I considered Kim on two levels, intuitively and rationally, and there was never the slightest doubt as to which would predominate. I tried to pretend there was. I tried to remember how convoluted her life had been, how others saw her; helplessly, I knew how I felt about her … or at least how I wanted to feel about her. I should have spent some time wondering how she felt about me. But that would have been out of character. One flaw among many was that I’d lived quite a long time and learned nothing about the bargains you strike with life. My dogged belief was that you could make it all turn out the way you wanted it.